Morning Thoughts

In my last post, I alluded to our having found all sorts of new detail in our re-rehearsals of Yellow Moon. Of course, it’s worth remembering that the reason we have the opportunity to find all this new detail, is because it’s all there in David’s script already, waiting to be discovered. That’s the pleasure of working on a script this good- there are always new things to find in it, and, hopefully, bring on to the stage.

This morning, having woken early, and lying in bed wondering whether to just get up, I was thinking vaguely about the play, and suddenly had one of these realisations that has you hitting your forehead, and thinking, how did I miss something so obvious?
I’d always assumed, without particularly reflecting on it, that when Frank is left on his own with Leila and puts on a record, his choice of song isn’t immediately significant to him. On the contrary, it now occurs to me, it’s the most evocative and personal song he could choose, and so it must be a conscious choice to put it on in the first place. Seeing Leila and Lee together reminds him of the start of his own relationship of twenty years ago, and he puts on the record because he already wants to talk to Leila about it. (He doesn’t manage to.)

This scene has one of my favourite lines in the play:
“And the girl looked at him in the dark of a bedsit somewhere just off the Great Western Road sometime in 1985 and she says:
Well you’re not lost any more.
I’ve found you.”

The image of this dark bedsit just off the Great Western Road sharply evokes a time and place I remember. For me, as for Frank, 1985 is a distant country that I once lived in, to which I’ll never return, and the memories of which can, on occasion, elicit sudden nostalgia.