Back in June, we gave a live performance of John Balshaw’s Jigge at the Community Hall in Brindle where it was written in the seventeenth century. Having cast the performers, they were left to learn their parts for several weeks until we had two intensive days of rehearsal at the beginning of June – these were dictated by the days that the director was available – he arrived the night before and we had a short production meeting to discuss the set and the staging.

The first rehearsal began with a sing through in the Management School on campus, while Anne and I went up to select the costumes from Alison Findlay’s costume store. Alison took the costumes off to be dry cleaned, and Anne and I arrived back at the rehearsal just in time to hear the last couple of verses of the final scene!

After a break for lunch, we began to set the piece beginning at scene 1. Anne sang in the part of Justice Trueman, as Richard was unable to be there for the first day of the rehearsals. We made it through three of the four scenes that afternoon, and I was really pleased that it was beginning to come together – I went home knowing that it was going to work, for the first time! The students were great – they knew most of their lines and were up for everything that they were asked to do. I really enjoyed watching them perform, and it was really, really funny in places especially with the staging.

Day two of the rehearsals took place at the Old Stables in Lancaster, where we could make as much noise as we pleased – on campus it was still exam season so there are rules about how much noise we could make! The venue was fabulous – really beautiful – and the weather was superb so we were able to lunch outside with the chickens! Richard joined us, and it made a huge difference to the students to have someone there who had performed in the genre before, even if not this particular script. It seemed to give them the confidence to play with the script much more freely, and it took the performance to another level.

We ended the Tuesday tired but happy – it had been a very intense couple of days but we all, I think, felt like we had made a lot of progress and we left on Tuesday afternoon confident that we had a performance, and knowing which bits needed most work. It was also at this point that I began to wonder whether the plot hole in the jigge was caused by a missing verse, because one of the last few verses states that someone has been told something that in fact never takes place. Chris the director and I decided that for the sake of the audience, we would write an extra verse in order to make the jigge make more sense.

After the initial two days of rehearsal, we had a couple of weeks to continue to work on the play ourselves. We reconvened on the Friday afternoon, the day before the performance in Brindle, without our director or Richard but with the instrumentalists, Tamsin and Robin, and the costumes for the students to try on. We also had a visit from Harvey, the intern for the Regional Heritage Centre at Lancaster University who were hosting the performance – Harvey had agreed to video the performance, so he came along on the Friday afternoon to see what he was in for.

It was another beautiful day – if anything a bit too hot to be rehearsing but at least we only had to try the costumes on, not actually rehearse in them. It was fantastic to have Tamsin and Robin with us, and we ran through the whole jigge so that we could see where extra music was needed to allow for entrances, exits and anything else that was going on on stage between verses. Tamsin and Robin brought a whole new set of ideas to the piece – including changing the tune for one of the verses of the final scene to ‘The King Enjoys His Own Again’.

I also had to try on all the students’ costumes on the Friday afternoon so that I could work out what alterations were needed overnight – cue a long evening for me and Anne hemming up skirts and putting tucks in trousers and shirts…

We ran the whole performance in the morning in costume with all the props, and spent the afternoon working on particular sections that needed more work. For example, in one section of the script, Samwell is forced to court Juviana. Because Samwell is not really interested in Juviana, Aison sang his part with large gaps between the lines – it worked really well in the initial rehearsals, but once we had the instrumentalists there it became difficult for them to follow where he was. While I was out of the room going over my introductory talk, someone had the idea to bring Robin on stage with Aison so that they could follow each other more easily. As far as the audience was concerned, Samwell had brought an instrumentalist with him to court the girl, and the whole thing worked much better on every level! Another change we made was to bring everyone back on stage to repeat the final verse of the jigge as a ‘big finish’, and to use the ‘King Enjoys His Own Again’ tune for this section. In the end, we think this worked much better for the audience as well as the cast because a single voice on stage to finish the piece was something of an anticlimax.

Special thanks must go to Dr Sam Riches of the Regional Heritage Centre for making everything on the Saturday go so smoothly – and particularly for the food that she provided for lunch and tea, as everyone agreed that they had never worked on a production that had been so well catered!