All Blood Runs Red: From the Rehearsal Room
By Andrew Quick, co-Artistic Director of imitating the dog and co-creator of the show
Rehearsals are always exciting. It’s the moment when you move from the abstract to the tangible, when ideas shift from the page to the stage. This seems particularly pertinent when at the heart of this piece is the life story of a man called Eugene Bullard. And what a life he led. It’s quite a story, one that renders him almost as a super-hero. And this presents us with challenges in our dramatizing. How to make this story believable, how to give it three-dimensionality and to do it justice. Because a sense of justice lies at the heart of this tale: a person of colour who flees prejudice and strives to live the life he desires against many obstacles.
In pretty much all of our previous works we have sought to find devices to tease out the hidden stories that lie at the centre of the main narrative we are exploring. In this sense, our work has always staged a kind of encounter with the main object of our scrutiny. These objects are often well-known novels such as Heart of Darkness, Dracula, and Frankenstein and we have usually interrogated these texts through the lens of our performers. The performers’ interaction with the main story creates a kind of meta-text which comments and entwines around the central narrative that we are exploring.
Such an approach is daunting in a one man show. You need different perspectives, conflicting positions and contrasting voices to create the drama. I suppose this is why we have also focused on the life experience of Morgan Bailey in All Blood Runs Red, who is the sole actor on the stage. We always knew he was going to be in this show. Pete and I had met Morgan in Paris and had lunch together and Morgan told us about his experience of playing a major role in a French movie. We talked about Bullard, Pete had come across him in his research into the inter war period in France, as a foot-note in the larger historical narrative. I followed it up and sent Morgan a biography of Bullard. “What do think?”, I texted, “Is there a show here?”
The answer was yes. There were just too many coincidences, so many parallels.
Making theatre always opens us up to new experiences. People can’t help but reveal something of themselves in the rehearsal and writing process. And this has been so true in this process. Working with Morgan, as we have linked and pursued connections across histories and generations, has been a joy. I think as collaborators we have learned new things about each other, seen aspects of ourselves we have never revealed before, taken risks in our interactions. This has percolated into the text we have created and now it’s the first day of rehearsal and we watch it begin to take a life and direction of its own.
All Blood Runs Red coming to the Dukes on the 7th & 8th March.
