Video transcript
Drama Company 2023 - The Wasps - 03. Direction

[intro music]

GENEVIEVE DE SOUZA: Hi. I'm Genevieve. I'm the director of 'The Wasps'. Our starting point for this development, this devised work, was obviously the original play titled 'The Wasps' by Aristophanes, which is an ancient Greek play written in 422 BC, so obviously a long time ago, completely different context. But I picked up this play and started to read through and was immediately struck by how much this play is a modern story or can be related to modern day.

So in the original text, Procleon-- and Cleon was the ruler of Athens at the time, so Procleon, the lover of Cleon-- he was a satirical character really that was designed to poke fun at the social system that he was upholding. And he is a juror and is obsessed with passing judgments. And so I started to think about this obsession with judgments and how that fits within a social context and how that might be corruptible. And that was kind of the starting point for our development of 'The Wasps'.

And where we took that, we started to think about how might this exist in a modern day setting? And at the time, as most of us do, I was spending quite a bit of time on social media and started to observe the way that people comment, the way that people pass judgement, especially for some of our really rapid forms of social media where lots of information is kind of just swiping through. How are some of those stories about other people being told, and how are we passing judgement on those stories without having necessarily all the information to make a fair judgement?

So that was the starting point that we started with. And then we thought, OK, maybe this is a show that is about cancel culture. Maybe it's about how we make really rapid judgments online and how we feel not only free to do that, but it becomes almost like an obsession, like we need to pass judgement in order to know our own position. I then walked into a room with 20 students from all different public schools, and we started to work with this provocation. This was the little germ of an idea, how might this original script fit within a modern context?

So we started off first off by really intentionally setting the ensemble culture of the show. This is not a show where we have parts that we allocate and we learn lines, and then we come in and we finesse it in the room. This is really a show that's been built from the ground up. So we really needed to set a culture in the room where people were free to experiment, where people felt comfortable to bring forward ideas, because this show really has been collaborative from the very beginning.

Everything you see in this production has been built by all of us. So many people involved, right from the laying down of characters to finessing of the script to then adding in the design elements-- at every point, there's been multiple people offering ideas. And it's created, I think, a really rich environment for us to find the best way to tell this story.

So we started off with a lot of improvisation, a lot of quick little exercises. We would do a little bit of a warm-up exercise, laying down that ensemble connection, building that ensemble connection, and then saying, OK, let's do a little bit of improv around this particular idea. Then let's go back and spend a few minutes refining that. What comes out of that? And then we built and found and discovered things along that process of really improvising, showing, going back, finessing, improvising again, and developing lots of our ideas that way.

The first image that we started with was the central image of the wasp. What did a wasp look like? What's the feeling of that? And we did a lot of work early on around not only the movement, but then what does that feel like if we make the wasps-- almost that flowing of comments, what does it look like to reinterpret social media commentary as a living, breathing swarm of things?

The other thing that was really integral as a starting point was I had seen a film when I was around 14, where a character has their eyeballs in their hand and then chases a young girl around with these terrifying eyeballs in the hand. And I came back to that image when I was thinking about the nature of Greek theatre and the use of Greek mask.

We very early on said we didn't want to use masks because we really wanted the actors to have the ability not only to be identified as owners of this work and feel like they could create connections with the audience, but also because it's a more modern form of acting to be able to use our whole face expressively and that we didn't really have the time to lay down the skills to work with mask.

But what we ended up doing was thinking about this idea of the eyes and the hands becoming the mask, especially with all of this internet things being seeing without actually seeing. And so we started really early on layering that into our chorus work. What would it look like if we had moments when we're online, where that mask comes up? And that kind of represents this seeing without seeing or seeing without understanding, which became obviously a really central through line of our narrative.

Some of the main challenges was how do we keep the structure and the, I guess, character through lines of the original text but through this new lens? It was quite a messy project that we just-- it was little pieces here and there, building, creating scenes together. What does this look like? What does this-- how does this sound?

And then I would go away, and I would write it down from our filmed rehearsals. We filmed a lot of material, which was very useful going back and then hearing, OK, what was that line? We'll put that there. And then we started to mould it together.

Even within that moulding process, though, it was it was highly collaborative in that I would bring in a bit of script then, and then the actors would offer revisions. They would also offer staging suggestions. And we found a lot of those moments, especially the comedic moments, were really through just playing. How do we play this out? How do we-- dropped our scripts and see what does it look like if we just improvise around this piece of text?

So it was a very dynamic process. And over a short amount of time, we had a lot of material. The other challenge then is how do you cut that material down? How do you make sure that you are telling a story that's clear? And one of the big challenges for us is a story that's coherent. Especially with a show that has so many layers so many voices at any one time, how do we make sure our central throughline is really clear?

So the character of Doggy Woof-Woof actually really wasn't developed. It was mentioned in the social media scene. But it wasn't until really late in the process, and it was through getting feedback from Jane, who came in and said, oh, actually we're not connecting with this enough. And then Doggy Woof-Woof came out of that piece of feedback, and we started to develop, well, for us to care about this character being cancelled, we kind of need to lay in the groundwork of who this character is and how we can connect with that character.

And of course then, our wonderful Ryan had a lot of fun with bringing our dog to life. It's also good to note that the dog actually came out of the original text as well. So the original text, the dog actually comes from the fake law case that they run in order to show that corruption. And so the dog is put on trial for stealing some cheese. And we took that and then obviously reimagined that into what if they ate the wrong cheese?

So once we had all of that material and we had started to finesse it, we then got into the venue and had to rechoreograph moments with the set. So our wonderful set design by Tom Bannerman had lots of openings, lots of trapdoors, places, entrances, and exits which we really wanted for that feeling of this moving, swarming, integrated thing. But that was also a challenge for the actors then to really work with, OK, what is the precision that I have to move through this space, and how do we maintain the flow of the storytelling with some of these logistical challenges?

So a lot of what we did in the space ended up being doing it again. Do it again. Do it again. It was drilling a lot of those things. So walking through it first, then doing it at speed, and making sure we were polishing those moments to get that really tight choreography.

A lot of the choreography in this show is not necessarily choreography that we've come in and said, OK, 5, 6, 7, 8, we're going to teach it to you. It's actually choreography that was developed as part of those improvisations that then we finessed and then created into these images. But they're almost like moving images. So a lot of that also came down to specifics as well.

Where do you have to hold your eyes to make sure that we can see this image really clearly? How do we make sure with the guards? How do we make sure that chase is really dynamic, but also keeping everyone safe? So a lot of that was just repeat, repeat, repeat and making sure that everybody has room to play and be present, but also can keep each other safe in the space. And, again, that comes back to that impro training, where each of these cast members know that at any point if something happens unexpectedly, someone else will be there to pick up the slack because it's that 'yes, and' culture that really, really helps with chorus work.