ABSTRACT
Gill rehearsed the production for two weeks, with the luxury of a real rehearsal room (the Old Vic rehearsal room in Aquinas Street) and some indication of an emerging directing style comes from Richard Butler, who
played Lambert, and Rosemary McHale, who played Nellie, his daughter. Butler recalls a good deal of improvisation and that Gill ‘wrote little scenes that might have concerned the characters in Collier’s Friday Night, and we used to act those as an exercise before we rehearsed. That was marvellous . . . a disciplined preparation’.3 Rosemary McHale was nearing the end of her final term at the Drama Centre when she was cast:4
It was a very happy initiation into the professional theatre because Peter Gill’s rehearsal procedures were very similar to those I was familiar with. He was keen that we should understand the unity of the family and what effect the pressures of the mining industry had on domestic life. We grew to realize how tiny the family’s house was compared with our own homes and how much sweated labour went into every penny earned and every morsel eaten. We played the game of throwing a ball in a circle which I remember some of the older members of the Company thought absurd, and of passing objects carefully to one another as if they were made of fine glass, or very heavy, or likely to blow away. This helped us not just to get to know one another, but to start on the journey of exploring the physical world which was an important part of Peter’s production.
