KNOT HEART - Almeida Theatre

Sophie Stanton in rehearsalPhoto: Matt HumphreyI’ve seen a thousand girls likeyou in my time here. Feelinglike the world is coming toan end. And it’s hard but –But when they’ve thedetermination to effect achange in their life and gofor it they do Lucy.MarinaScene 8scene 2 on its feet. It involves the entire family of womenaround the kitchen table, each of them struggling forpower, each of them trying to protect something, orsomeone, and it’s fascinating to watch. A bulk of thework on this scene seems to be about blocking- whogoes where, who moves, who sits, who stands etc but itis not choreography. Things need to be specific becauseof this huge table as a centre piece, but what becomesgreat is how all these physical choices around it,highlight just how each woman fights to be heard. At onepoint Lucy thrusts her entire body over the table to taunther sister. She is childlike in her action but underneath, ithas a deliberate and manipulative intention.This week also brought Kate McKenzie to our rehearsalroom, a woman whose young daughter has been battlingwith heroin addiction for over 7 years. Before her arrivalwe had watched her in a cutting-edge documentary calledMum, Heroin and Me. Not unlike Barbara in the play,Kate is a middle-class woman who has two daughtersand so her presence must have been particularlyinvaluable and probably somewhat overwhelming toMargot who plays Barbara. Kate enters the room andthere are the usual smiles of strangers meeting for thefirst time. But as she tells us of how her life hascontinued since we saw her story on the documentary,there is candidness and the veil of a woman who is allcried out. Her humour is black and we hear some hardthings about the degradation drugs bring to her life. Mystomach turns and I feel irritated that I want to cry andrefuse to do so when this woman who has experiencedher own story first hand is a rock. Her being there reallybrought the reality of this play to the surface for me.We are also visited by a force of nature called Maria whois the manager in a crisis intervention centre called CityRoads. It is about a ten minute walk from the AlmeidaTheatre and it is the actual centre that character Lucygoes to in the play. Maria talks without any bitterness orcynicism of how she sees addicts come and go, many ofwhom continue in the cycle of addiction. She talks ofthose nuances and the dulling of the senses that causethe addict to appear sluggish. By the end of the week Iam seeing this sluggishness begin to manifest itself inLisa’s performance. At one point she stood probablyunaware in the room, her arms practically stuck to hersides, and I saw these glazed-over eyes. It was likelooking at some of the addicts we had seen indocumentaries in the first week and to be honest it waschilling.In the Rehearsal RoomBy the end of the week I hear one cast member state itperfectly: ‘Last week it was our minds being unzipped,this week it’s our hearts.’ I wonder if next week there willbe anything left to unzip!Resource Pack: The Knot of the Heart 26