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Observership on Tim Crouch's I, Cinna
Observership on Tim Crouch's I, Cinna
January, 2020, Unicorn Theatre, London
Tim Crouch is a UK theatre artist based in Brighton. He writes plays, performs in them and takes responsibility for their production. He started to make his own work in 2003. Before then he was an actor. His play I, Cinna was recently performed at The Unicorn Theatre in London.
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I, Cinna is a play focused around a minor character in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In the original, Cinna the poet has the misfortune to share a name with one of the conspirators who killed Caesar and is therefore killed in a misunderstanding. But more than being just a retelling of Julius Caesar this play looks at the power of words and invites the audience to help Cinna write his next poem. The observership took place over three rehearsals in the second half of January, roughly covering the beginning, middle, and end of the rehearsal period.
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Production shot from I, Cinna (Unicorn Theatre, London).
Rehearsal #1 (Jan. 17, 2020)
Observations
The first rehearsal we attended started with recapping what had been done earlier that week. The discussion then evolved into framing the opening of the piece — the start is almost accidental, capturing a moment in the middle of it happening; it’s an internal monologue (Georgieva, 2019-2020). The majority of that rehearsal was spent on the first half of the script, looking at all design elements such as projections and sound design that are featured quite heavily in the piece. Even though this was only the second or third rehearsal altogether, a lot of work had been done in those areas and they were all starting to come together with the focus being on matching the projections to the music that had been composed and selecting the appropriate footage (note: the piece features some imagery from contemporary riots and protests which are meant to draw a parallel to the riots that were going on in Rome at the time just outside of Cinna’s home).
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One of the things that stood out to me during this rehearsal was the question of “what is the subject and what is the object of the play” — that is, what is the play and what is the play about (Georgieva, 2019-2020). In the case of I, Cinna, the object is a play reframes the events of Julius Caesar from the perspective of a minor character in the original, while its subject is the power of words and political engagement.
Reflections
In the first rehearsal, after only having read the script, I was mostly focusing on the structure of the piece, which was coming through even more vividly in performance. There is a sense of repetition in the work with the main character falling asleep and having portentous dreams, which mark the passage of time. There is also a very tangible sense of the world that exists beyond this space here and now. There is a rising tension and a sense of danger from the events taking place just outside the doors of Cinna’s home, which are portrayed through the projections.
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The dramaturgy of the projections is one of the main things that I took away from observing this first rehearsal. What purpose do projections serve? What is the logic behind them? What narrative do they tell? How do they evolve and where do they sit in the text? Prior to this we had been thinking about incorporating projections in ECHO, but the example of I, Cinna really solidified that decision.
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This rehearsal further sparked some creative conversations about the focus of our work — its object and its subject — and what we wanted it to communicate.
Rehearsal #2 (Jan. 24, 2020)
In the second rehearsal we observed a week after the first, the areas of the design were already much more solidified, which allowed the piece to run a lot more smoothly in rehearsal. Sound and projections complemented each other and even if some small tweaks were still being made that allowed the focus of the rehearsal to shift to really the performance. A key question was the role of the audience and how to activate them more effectively, as the piece features a fair amount of audience interaction where the audience write in little notebooks along with Cinna.
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There was an interesting parallel that began to emerge in the performance of I, Cinna between the characters of Cinna and Mark Antony; they are essentially each other’s alter egos. One has what the other doesn’t: Cinna “live[s] quietly in the shadows of these great events” while Mark Antony takes center stage (Crouch, 2020). Cinna who is a poet struggles to write, while Mark Antony, moved by Caesar’s death, delivers a poetic speech.
Observations
This second rehearsal sparked conversations about the framing of ECHO. We were asking ourselves who is Ophelia in this version that we are creating. Is she a poet, a performer, a thinker just like Hamlet? ECHO follows a similar approach in changing the perspective away from the title character and onto another character. Even if Ophelia isn’t as minor of a character as Cinna, she still has relatively few lines in comparison and is featured only in a handful of scenes in the original. In the reframing, Ophelia challenges the way she is remembered and goes on to take ownership over the narrative as the storyteller.
The doubling of Cinna and Mark Antony however subtle brought about the idea of Hamlet and Ophelia being each other’s doubles in ECHO. At this point the parallel between Hamlet and the myth of Narcissus was already a feature in our script, but the idea of doubling and reflections furthered that connection as well as the connection between Hamlet and Ophelia, which solidified the new direction in which we took the second half of the play.
Reflections
Rehearsal #3 (Jan. 28, 2020)
Observations
In the last rehearsal we observed a few days before the show opened, the majority of the time was spent on doing a full run with all of its design components in place. One thing that stood out to me was that the piece is rarely quiet — there is always a soundscape even if faintly in the background that aids the storytelling. Although the tone we wanted to go for was quite different from I, Cinna, the way the design worked in practice was hugely influential to our piece.
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The rehearsal was followed by a brief conversation with Tim Crouch about the project we were developing in which he advised us to consider the form of the piece and how it will engage with the audience. Who is the audience conceived as? Why should they listen? Are they in antagonistic relationship with Ophelia? Furthermore, when it comes to content he recommended to stick with what’s in the source, in this case with notions of mental health, abuse, family, fathers, mothers, absent mothers (Georgieva, 2019-2020).
Reflections
One way in which the design of I, Cinna almost directly influenced our piece was in its use of a “crackle” sound effect as a trigger of transitional moments and projections. We similarly opted for a “glitch” as a signifier of jumps in memory or moments when Ophelia is at once in the past and in the present moment. Later on these glitches guided the way we reframed the function of the Elizabethan language of the original, the loose logic behind which was that it is featured alongside these “glitches” as glimpses of the past Ophelia is attempting to rewrite.
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Finally, our conversation with Tim Crouch guided some of the content that we ended up including in future drafts of the piece. The focus on Ophelia’s story was at that point in time a relatively new direction, so by grounding ourselves a little more firmly in the world of the piece and looking for the alternative interpretations at key points we ended up formulating the hook and meta-theatrical framing of the piece of “whose story are you going to remember” (Georgieva, 2019-2020).