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Rav Casley Gera

 

RAV on the Edinburgh Fringe

in The Importance of Being Turbann'd

Interview by John Couzens

 

The story begins, only about maybe a week after the auditions for Julius Caesar .

And I, when I first moved to London last November, I blagged my way on to the mailing list of the UCL drama society. Well it wasn't really blag - I just emailed them and said, “ do you ever cast non - students ? ” and they said “oh yes, yes our productions often have non students, especially our Edinburgh shows, so yea of course you can be on the mailing list”. So I thought about auditing for various things but they have a nasty habit of having their auditions in a midweek midday afternoon, that doesn't make it any easier for them to cast, one assumes.

But this was an Edinburgh show and it was looking for Asian actors and it was advertising auditions on that Saturday, so I was like, “that sounds good” but it was into students, so I emailed them and so I said “are you interested in non student amateurs who have the summer free?” Because the job I was doing was due to end at the end of June and I knew this would be July and August and it fitted very, very well. And they said “yes, come along to an audition”. And I went to an audition. And they'd already had one audition in Oxford because that's where the script writer is based, and then this was the London audition. And there were various people there, and there were quite a few people and it was odd. We played improv games in the morning mostly and then some general messing around and then in the afternoon we got down to some serious reading. They started off with me reading somebody call ‘the colonel' who is the sort of patriarch of the family who plays about and that required a strong Indian accent and they kept asking me “ try the Indian accent, Indian accent and my Indian accent is very, very poor and at the time you're listening to this it is still poor, but it was very, very poor.” And they just kept saying, ‘Can you give us a bit more accent, a bit more?' I gave it my best shot, but I could tell it wasn't working out, cause they started getting other people to read. You know how you can read an audition? So I quickly skimmed through and I thought, ‘Who else have I got a chance of getting?' The two main male characters were brothers Julian and Sandip…We didn't know why they were called Julian and Sandip for a while and then it dawned on me it was a hilariously witty reference to Round the Horne which of course the two main characters are called Julian and Sandy. Julian was very camp and I would have loved to play him, and I think I could have done the flamboyance, blah, blah, blah, but he was the younger of the two brothers, and I know I tend to get cast in roles older than I am, so I thought I would let that go and concentrate on Sandip. So I asked to read that bit and they wound up getting me to read it repeatedly because they were trying other people in the part, as you know they do, and I just did everything I could with it. I really focused on it. I probably did it to a higher level in that audition than I ever did it on stage. Just that one scene… And I left feeling pretty good about it, thinking I'm going to wait and see what happens. And then I really randomly bumped into the director and the producer at the bus stop cause they were waiting to get the whatever it is home, after the audition. And I said, well, you know, thanks a lot, I'll hear from you soon. And I was about 20 metres down the street and they called me back, and they went, ‘Come, come, come and gestured ‘Yeah, we'd definitely like you to be in it. We're not totally sure yet what, it'll be one of two. It's between you and another guy for Sandip and we're gonna decide something, but you're definitely going to be in it. And I was like, ‘Yay, jumping up and down. Because I didn't know anything about the production or the people doing it, it might not have been the greatest production ever, but I really, really wanted to do Edinburgh , and I was just very, very excited about the possibility. Seeing as my job was ending in June, it seemed like fate or something. So that was fine…And I rang them a few days later and asked them ‘have you decided which part'? It took them a little while to confirm what I suspected, it was going to be Sandip. And then, that all happened first week of starting Julius Caesar rehearsals, and it was very nice. And then, flash forward, they sent the script, and I read thorough it. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was perfectly alright. Then really, we jump forward to July – start of rehearsals.

The play was rehearsed in Brixton in a rented art space, which was a really good space. You know, it had mirrors, and air conditioning, and props and a kitchen we could use all the time, pretty much everything you need. I'd be quite happy to recommend it to people as a fairly sensible space. I think it's just called the Brixton Art Centre. And I think they paid something like £1,000 to have it every day for a month, which is actually very cheap. And that was what - 10 till 5:30. I was horribly late on the first day, half an hour late on the first day, cause I couldn't find it. And I was apologising profusely, and they said, ‘Oh, that's alright on the first day.' And the next day, I was early, and everyone else was late, so that was nice and even.

We started rehearsing quite quickly, we started rehearsing in a fairly sort of low-key way, we just ran an act, and then another act. I personally don't like working that way very much. I prefer to split the play up as closely as possible into scenes, decided by who's on stage, and if they don't necessarily match the scenes on the page, I'm not too bothered about that. But the director wanted to run things in the acts they were written in, it was deeply pretentiously written in five acts, and each act was one scene, and sometimes, three acts could be one scene, cause the whole thing takes place in one place. So really, it just flows in one long hour, as fringe shows often do. And it had already been heavily cut, cause it was originally two and a half hours long. They were cutting it more, cutting out some of the drafts, cause although it had some good jokes in it, there was a lot of padding around them, and often it made the punch line have a couple of extra lines after, which didn't really have anything. So the director did some fairly evil cuts in the first week, and really, it was the kind of (repitition?) approach to rehearsing, and doing it again, and again, and again, and occasionally, picking up on something. We were directed less than I would direct that kind of play. But that's not necessarily criticism, it's the way Nadia, the director chose to go about it. And I think, you know, the end results worked.

And we had what, a week? Basically, we had a week of just blocking, where we still had the scripts, and then we had that awful week where you're supposed to be off book and you're not quite, and you never really get it done. And then you had two weeks where everyone suddenly realises there's hardly any time, and the panic sets in. And then we had the last week, where it was basically about getting it so we didn't mess up. And, for my money, on the last day of rehearsal, you know, you should be well into the habit of trying it, of running it without any stopping or errors and you know, if you do mess up, dealing with it, and really, you shouldn't be messing up at all. We weren't quite at that stage. We were kind of in the last couple of days, starting thinking ‘Right, from now on, if you mess up, you just have to carry on like – imagine there's an audience there.' So, you know, by the end of rehearsal, I wasn't sure if we were completely ready, but, we were as ready as we were going to get, I suppose.

Now the joy of Edinburgh , or the misery of Edinburgh depending how you look at it, is that you get very little time in the space. We got one tech rehearsal and one dress rehearsal in the space before we opened. We arrived in Edinburgh on a Sunday, before I left, I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , and it was very good, had a technical that evening, which we mostly spent practicing how to get in, and get out, cause the other joy of Edinburgh is that your total slot will be say the play is an hour and ten minutes, you'll have a slot of an hour and a half, which means you have ten minutes to get all of your props, costumes, whatever into the space, lay it out on the stage, sets, as they need to be, and ten minutes at the end, to get them all out again. You can put your main items of set into the wings, but everything else – props, costumes, have to be taken home. So you get used to seeing in Edinburgh , these people wandering around in quite outlandish costumes, which is quite nice. So that's good.

So we had the tech, and it was fine, and we had the dress rehearsal which was actually quite good, we were basically pleased. There were no mess-ups we were very, very pleased at the dress rehearsal. And everybody said, ‘God, if you have a shit dress, you have a great first night.' And of course, everything was, the first few performances were previews, technically the fringe is three weeks long, but the week before the official opening, Wednesday to Sunday, most shows tend to open, and have previews, so officially, we were in preview the first few nights, so we were, you know, allowed to cock it up. But we weren't charging any less for the preview tickets, then we were for the full fringe tickets, so really, we couldn't consider them previews at all. They had to be to a standard. So, by the beginning of the first night, I was feeling, not massively confident. We were enjoying ourselves, and there wasn't anything desperately wrong with the play, I thought there were little things we could have put in, and we hadn't put quite as much depth as we might do. I thought some people's performances were more consistent than others. I like to think mine was fairly consistent, a few obviously weren't. We had a few people that were quite erratic, obviously not enough time to spend getting them really tight. But most of all, I was worried that the play wasn't actually funny. Everyone else seemed to think it was. I'm not generally a big fan of farce, and it was farce, so maybe that was just that. But I had this horrible feeling that we'd go on, we'd do it really well, and people still wouldn't laugh. So the first night was, I would say the first night I was fairly nervous, as you do.

Well, on the opening night, I was nervous. I think I thought not so much that it would be a disaster… I was pretty confident that I wouldn't fuck anything up. But, I, if I was brutally honest, I wasn't totally confident that nobody in the cast would. And in actual fact, there were a couple of little line wibbles on the first night. But it, was more, I think I said this last time, I was simply worried that it might turn out that actually, it wasn't funny. And, we were expected to play to two or three people. The festival hadn't begun yet, this was the Wednesday before the festival opened on Sunday, and half the shows weren't even opened, and there was nobody around, and we just didn't think anybody would come. And then, there were about forty people, which was just a complete shock. We were all absolutely astonished. And that, I think buoyed us through, and though it wasn't magnificent, it was fine, and we got through it. There were no disasters. It wasn't as good as the dress rehearsal, but it was fine. It was reasonably high energy and so on, and we just couldn't believe how many people there were. That was all good.

I do remember the mood after the first night being quite down beat. We weren't thrilled, although I remember the producer and the director trying to say ‘congratulations', but I think we knew it wasn't really and truly as good as the director and producer kept saying it was. But we still went out – good time in the bar. And then we just kept going. And by the opening weekend, we'd really hit a rhythm, and we really started to do well. And I had friends visiting, and I think they saw it then, on the official opening night, and they really enjoyed it. By then, we'd really hit the rhythm, and I kind of hoped, that would be that, and we'd have a really good run. And for a couple of days we did, and then, I forget exactly when, I got a feeling it was Tuesday, after the festival opened properly, a week after we opened, that we'd had our first, off, real off, night. And I think what happened was maybe that the Monday was slightly off, low energy or slightly over the top - I can't think now. I think maybe some of us knew it wasn't brilliant, but we didn't sort of acknowledge it, or do anything about it, and the following night, it went right downhill, I forget exactly now, I think it was just kind of sloppy, and there were a couple of little problems, and also, I think probably it was just a little low energy, and unfortunately that was the night the Scotsman were reviewing.

The Scotsman – that's of course, the Scottish newspaper, and it, along with The Guardian, is seen as the big thing for Edinburgh reviews. The Guardian had come in previews week, but they hadn't published, and the Scotsmen didn't publish either, but they put it on the website, and in the end, it was a two star review – I was surprised. A bollocking from the director and the producer, who just said, ‘Well, we can't afford that review, we've got to get on'. And the standard immediately went back up. And then, I think the following week, there was a sort of delayed second night slump, and then we kept going, and then it was fine again. The following Monday again, we had a slightly mediocre night. What happened again was that we'd started getting quietly over the top, and then nobody really paid attention to it, and people went out, and got pissed till five o'clock in the morning as usual, and then, the following night again we had a slightly off night. It was sloppy, it wasn't bad, but it was sloppy. Unfortunately, that was the night the director had people in from RADA where she was applying to a directing course, so she got thoroughly fucked off with us, and just walked out half-way through, which we didn't notice. And that was the assistant producer's birthday, so we went back to the director's flat for a morbid party cause it was the assistant producer's birthday. But not to worry…And then we fell into a kind of rhythm, where we had three or four good nights and one slightly iffy night, and then, a bad night. Towards the end tho, we kind of hit a level, which I think we were quite happy with, and held that level right through to the end. Except the last night, where we were all joking around. I felt quite sorry for the people in the audience that night!

And when I wasn't doing the show, I saw shows, as many as I could. I saw around fiftyish shows in thirty days, which is an awful lot. Only a couple of days went by when I didn't see a different show, and I felt quite guilty about it. Cause I really didn't go to the theatre for a couple of years, and I didn't go as often as I should go in London. And I really saw this as my chance to make up for that, educating myself. So I saw as many different types of theatre as I could. I saw physical, I saw abstract, I saw traditional, I saw a couple of musicals, I saw some dub, I saw some Vaudeville, as well as, engaging my own sort of personal interests, you know, Americana and politics, and various little things, as well as seeing the best things, I was also trying to educate myself, and I did, I learned to find out what's possible in theatre, not just with playwrights – it was a very mind-broadening experience, you know, being able to see this huge range.

Whichever venue you perform with, you'll get to see all that venues stuff for free. I was lucky enough to perform in C Venue, which is kind of the ‘Kwik-Save' of Edinburgh, in that it's cheap and there's a few of them, although it has some very good shows, of course. And although it has advantages and disadvantages, as far as it being the place to perform, it does mean you get to see a lot of free shows, because all the C shows are free to you, so out of the fifty I saw, I paid to get in to see about twenty, which is pretty remarkable, when you think about it. And although I went to see some shows, just because they were ‘C', most of them were shows I would have gone to see anyway, and some of them were very, very good shows. I was very lucky.

I did also try to see some of the rest of Edinburgh, and it's a beautiful, beautiful city. But there wasn't much time. You know, when you're flyering every day from twelve till three, called everyday at seven, effectively, you only have from three to six every day to do everything, and that isn't enough time for tourism. So I didn't get to see as much of the city as I would have liked to really, in sort of, the long run. But then, you know, at least I was there. And I think the ideal answer to that is to just go sometime when you're not in the festival, cause really, there no point going to the festival and wasting time seeing other things.

The atmosphere is very friendly, and whenever I chatted to someone from another show…it was lovely really, cause you all have something in common, and whenever you see someone from another show, you'd say, ‘Oh, I saw your show,' and you'd just be chatting for twenty minutes, there was so much, you know, you all had in common. That was really nice. It's like another world – it's like people going on holiday. And you're not really aware there's a world outside of the fringe. It's a crazy, wonderful, but bizarre bubble, where literally, the city is just taken over by performers for a month, and you do forget the rest of the world exists. You stop reading newspapers, you stop watching TV, and this just becomes your universe, which is wonderful, if you just want to immerse yourself in theatre, but it's also very odd . And I think the last couple of weeks have a slightly odd quality, when shows start to go. The last week in general has an odd quality, because Edinburgh doesn't build to a climax. You think it will, but in actual fact, the second full week of the festival – it opens on the second Sunday of August, in this case, the, sort of next weekend, the 13 th and 14 th are the first big weekend, is really the peak of the festival.

But it's a wonderful experience, and I was thoroughly exhausted, but happy, at the end of it all!