Standing on your head

Dominic Dromgoole

pp. 191-193

in: Scott T. Cummings, Erica Stevens Abbitt (eds), The theatre of Naomi Wallace, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

When we did In the Heart of America at the Bush in 1994, there was a wonderful actor in the cast named Richard Dormer who played Craver, the white soldier from Kentucky. We were all floundering a bit as to how to play it because the dialogue has this lilt and rhythm to it, and if you go overstiff and rhetorical on it, it sounds daft, and if you try to naturalize and mumble it, it gets equally daft. We were doing the scene where Craver is standing on his head, and Richard came down from that in an acrobatic maneuver, down and up and then straight into the next line with a certain degree of poise that unlocked a whole way of playing for us.