Claire Moore was a performer in the verbatim musical London Road. She played several characters in the the original cast including Carol who she went on to play in the film production, premiering in June this year. I wanted to find out about her personal experience of performing in a verbatim show, especially because of the discoveries London Road revealed in verbatim performance, being the first ever verbatim musical. In true verbatim form, I have transcribed the interview word for word and left in all the stutters.
I'm interested in hearing what the auditions were like, because obviously, with verbatim, you can't just do your own thing. Can you tell me a bit about that?
"So that, um, everybody was asked to bring a simple song that wasn't showy at all, you know, because, none of us would take anything remotely appropriate because nobody knew what it was, and nothing in the world was remotely appropriate for London road, so I took a song, 'The water is wide', which is a sort of folk song, um and sand that, very simply. And then, the audition, um firstly, um, we sang our own song, and then we were given a sort of little iPod, mini disk player and some headphones to go off and have a practice of what we had to do was to listen to the recorded bits of speech that were put in the play and um, and then go off and have a little go at doing it. So we had a little practice with Alecky Blythe, who's the writer um the dialogue writer. Ur, this the and the dialogue audition, Adam Cork, the music director, he wasn't there, um and we had to, and you hear it, it's a really bizarre thing. Basically, if you hear something, you don't interpret it at all, you just repeat what you hear, but you can't, you're not allowed to memorize it so um, you're hearing it. You're sort of a second or two seconds after you've heard it. And what I didn't know was so, then we off we went and had a little practice and then came back which was bonkers and tried to do it, and I really enjoyed it. And um, what we found out afterwards was that anybody who made anything up, didn't go throughout to the next round. They tried to get themselves out of trouble by making something up and they didn't go through, whereas if I didn't get it right, or anybody else, I didn't really know, what their's was , but I just wen't 'i'm really sorry I didn't hear what that was' and um, so that's how we auditioned for the dialogue bit. It was really enjoyable. And then, um, I was given some music from the show um, then the composer, Adam Cork came in for the next audition, so we were sent away with a little bit about two pages worth, that's all and they said, learn a small amount correctly rather than u, trying to sort of wing it, so it was all about the precision of it really. And I, I'm a really good reader of music and I looked at that and thought, oh my god it made no sense. The sense of rhythm just looked so difficult. but actually once you hear how adam has written the music to rhythm, the um, the speech patterns and the, and and the um, I suppose the inflection really, he notated to match what he heard. Once you kind of realised that it started to make sense, but it was so difficult because every single syllable was notated. Not one single bit was guessed or improvised or anything. So the whole thing was an incredibly precise excersize, and yet sounded totally spontaneous. But the difference in the show, i think to any other play, certainly that Alecky's done with the technique that she uses, is that for the first time in performance we didn't use the ear pieces and the urm recordings, we had to learn everything, which is not the way it's done normally. Ordinarily, even in the performances, the performers go on with their um headphones and their machine. And that was decided it was impossible really because the music, you couldn't have done the music you see. It was hard enough to do it on the beat you were meant to. And so it was decided that it was not going to work and that we had to learn it but we used the recording techneque all the way through reheardals and no matter how we learnt it, we were constantly refering back. And Alecky uses this thing called a spectagraph. It's a bit like, you know when you record stuff on um logic or sybalious, You see the sound wave. Well it's a bit like that but for speech. And, and so, when we'd rehearse with her, we'd be saying our speeches and she'd be watching the spectograph and our speaches, um and our dialogue would be sort of on a seperate track and she's match it. So I mean it was absolutely crazy really. You get as close as we could with the, so the inflection, the um the absolute timing of the phrase, everything about it. I mean it was a brilliant thing to do. Terrifying and and wonderful all at the same time, and so, ordinarilly, they don't learn their lines because they have to remain acurate to the recordings the orriginal recordings, and they're not allowed to interpret anything or flick into their own spech patterns, and we were the same but we had to learn it. But that sets it apart from any other piecce of um, that kind of verbatim. Often, and regard to adam, I mean if you could hear the dialogue that was then notated you'd realise how astounding his you know um, well there is the bit on the soundtrack , the protitutes, the um 'we've all stopped now' and you um, you you hear a bit of that dialogue but generally speaking those bits aren't, aren't on, but that's what we had to do, so it was an, it's terrifying bit of learning to do. We learnt the last 8 bars of the hardest song in the show."
What were the rehearsals like?
"The reheasals were brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but um, all the way through, and bareing in mind we're at the National Theatre with Adam who was absolutely brilliant and everyone there, the director, um diddn't know if this work was able to be done. We didn't know if it was going to be able to be learnt, um because it had never been done before, and Alecky didn't know how to advise us to learn it because it had never been done before. So we had um a meeting about how best to learn it and it was decided that we would learn the proper script, sort of away from the recordings but constantly refer back to the recordings , and then when we were familiar with it um we'd abandon the recordings. But in the rehearsals we went from being a second behind to then trying to absolutely mirror it and say it exactly the same time which was, had not been done before either . That was to sort of see if we were starting to know it. So um, you there was one point when um the director Rufus Norris who was now runs the national theatre, um said look, stop worrying about it, if it can't be learnt we'll find a way of incorporating music stands on the stage. We'll make it work. We had no idea, it was a totally new type of theatre completely experimental, and all we wanted to do as a company, was to try and learn it and do the best we could for alecky and Adam. You know, to make the work the best it could be. We had no idea what, how it was going to be recieved. We just wanted to get from a to z you know. So it was a very ensamble um company, right from the word go and that included the composer, the writer, um the director, the choreographer, because nobody had ever done anything like that before so it was an absolute fist for everybody, which made it so special."
How long to it take to perfect your characterization?
"The characterization is funally enough, came, came quite quickly, it's amazing what you can learn just by using your ears and um we had a couple of photographs to see what our characters loked like. Um, but not really very much. the the chap who played my husband and I ur, we saw one photograph of our two characters holding hand um during the judging of the competition at the end. And we used that as a basis um for out relationship really. But it seemed like it just some of what was said and how it was said, they were a very loving couple. Infact, they haddn't been together all that long um so they werew still very lovy dovy. And howard and I used to sit on our sofa in a particular way and all we'd always be sortof quite touchy feely. And when we met our real people who, because they all cam eto see the show, and um when we met them it was really funny because June, who was the charactwer I played, one of the characters I played, said to me 'we sit on the sofa exactly like that. How did you know, how did you know to sit on the sofa like that?' So really bizar. And I sort of thought I think I thought she'd wear a pearlized nail varnish, and she did wear a pearlized nail varnish. I think, it it was really bizzar. You you'd hear things in the voice anf they were just amazed of cource that hearing what theyd said, said so accuratly and saying what they'd said set to music and it still sounded like them. So that was a real um sort of high praise indeed, you know."
So you only got to meet them at then end? You didn't get to meet them before?
"We met them half, we didn't get to meet them in rehearsal at all but we met them at the end. During the run rather, they came both to cotteslow and the olivie and they were also in the film. All of them, Ruffus Norris, brought everyone, all the london road people or had been involved, had their characters used in the play. They're all in the party scene at the end, as extras. So we had a whole day with them at the party. So that was absolutely brilliant. Loved that, so yeah that was that was quite incredible and they all really joined in. They really lovedthe project because they felt that it gave them a voice, you know, that they had lived on this street where all these awful things had happened, and um, just ordinarry people and the invasion of the media and and what this dreadful man had done, just made their lives just, it was just even worse. And they did something really remarkable. To create a community where the, where there had been none. And um, and they still do their, london road in bloom competition. Um so yeah that's still an annual event."
Which was your favourite character to play in London Road?
"My favourite character, oh thats a tough one, because we all played about oh a dozen different people I loved June, who was my proper Ipswitch Lady, but I absolutely adored my character Carol at the end who, the welsh lady who gave out the prizes. She's the councler, and that's the role I play in the film. And so I loved her. She was kind of, she comes in at the end and it's all, it's all about the joy of it, so I loved playiing her. And also because I had a really fantastic and tricky solo in the sort of speech of giving out the prizes, which was a real challenge, so I absolutely adored Carol. She was my favourite, really. But June, oh I don't know it's hard. She has to be my favourite because I played her in the film, but June was very special."
Do you know anything about the devising of the show? How did the writer and director take it from just interviews to a full piece of theatre?
"Yeah well its Aleky who does that, she gets all of the matterial. Oh god there's thousands and thousands and thousands of bits of recording. I have no idea how she collates it all. All I can imagine is that she must have folders of Terry, June, Julie, all the characters and they'll all be dated, because in the film, Ruffus had suddenly said we need a line here, and of course you can't just make it up, so she delved through all of her stuff and came up with something. But she is the lady, she did all the interviews and then she did all the editing to make it into the play, to get that kind of coherant line through it. And during rehearsals it changed, you know quite a bit, but the basic story and the basic journey for want of a better word, through the story was there and although it changed during rehearsals and orders were changed round and um lots of lines were taken away and some lines were put in. Aleky Blythe who constructed the whole thing, and she and Adam Cork didn';t know eachother at all they met, um, they both went along to some kind of workshop at the national theatre studio um because they try and develope new writing . And so they all got in this room, apparently, and Alecky and Adam went and paired up because she had a tape recorder and he had some other type of technical equipment. so they went 'oh should we pair up because we've both got sort of technical stuff' and they started, and alecky said 'I've go thtis idea that um, you know the murders that happened in Ipswich? and Adam's thinking 'oh my god she's mad' um but she said you know 'I've got an idea about that' and they started and then took it from there. And it was not comitioned for ages. They came up with a few things and then the um natiuonal theatre did a little workshop and then they developed it from there. So it was really by chance that they ended up together because they weren't put together, so they were, you know, they could have paired up with somebody else and it would never have happened."
Would you ever want to be involved in another verbatim show?
"Definitely, definitely. I absolutely love it. I found it really liberating. And I was so surprized because I thought that we'd all feel very sort of shackled because of the technique. And I absolutely loved it. And I'd love to do, um, something that involved performing with the ear pieces in, because I can't imagine what that must be like in a performing situation, and I would absolutely love to yeah, definitely."
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