Rachael Stirling emerges from behind the stage, joins her colleagues in the stands, and then immediately bursts into tears. “I’m tired,” he explains. Stirling is playing the great 18th-century actor Sarah Siddons in The Divine Mrs S at London’s Hampstead theatre, and we chat midway through the preview. It’s an anxious time.
“We still haven’t figured it out,” Stirling says ruefully. “There is!” exclaims director Anna Mackmin. “You hurt me so much.” “I love what you do,” adds playwright April De Angelis. “I’ve been sending you messages all night long,” Mackmin continues. “Breathing. That’s it baby, you’re worth the price of the ticket.” “Here I go again,” Stirling says, crying and laughing. Mackmin looks at me and says: “That’s what previews are like.”
In Siddons’ time, plays lived or died by their first performances. The town’s decision could kill the production stone, as in De Angelis’ play. The same is true of ballet and opera: no matter how technically complex, the first public performance is usually also the press night.
West End and Broadway shows were opening out of town, with fine-tuning being done in Brighton or Boston. But when the 1952 musical Wish You Were Here and the onstage swimming pool proved too large to travel through, it played on Broadway for nearly four weeks before opening night. In 1966, Cabaret was the first show to offer lower-priced preview tickets. Nowadays, shows often have a few previews that are in the works and are not in the public eye (though social media means that what was in previews no longer remains in previews).
The Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark had 182 previews before its official opening in 2011: The score was rewritten, the cast was injured, and director Julie Taymor was abruptly fired. Big changes are still afoot: This year, The Enfield Haunting reportedly lost more than 30 minutes in previews (but didn’t escape a critical crush). Opening Night, starring Sheridan Smith, also shortened its running time; Ironically, this is a musical about a tumultuous preview period on Broadway.
More generally, previews are welcome. “The two important learning moments for a playwright are when you first hear the actors read the script and when the play meets the audience,” says author David Eldridge. In British theatre, we are incredibly meticulous about the rehearsal process. But somehow when you put this in front of the audience, unnecessary overwriting emerges. Even after all the rehearsals, the cuts only become completely clear in the preview.”
The 2017 relationship drama Beginning “had a truly stunning first preview – but was a classic case of working with utmost rigor for five weeks and then suddenly discovering we could cut a page and a half towards the end.”
Audiences are meticulously observed as to how a play will unfold. De Angelis agrees: “You watch them like beads.” “You get a huge explosion of objectivity because they have no skin in the game. You read the play through the audience and this helps reinforce the play. We had some good cuts yesterday; “I thought, ‘Yeah, it was just nonsense.'”
I saw the first preview of The Divine Mrs S. The theater was quite busy and the atmosphere was almost raucous, surprising the actors with laughter. “It was a fun and very welcoming audience,” says Mackmin. “It was wilder than I thought it would be. Now we’re trying to give it a little less concert-like energy, trying to work on the highlights and clean story. It’s been a slalom ride; getting the rock ‘n’ roll energy back but being a little more responsible with it.”
Returning to Stirling. “In some places you have to do a very small percentage less. This is the smallest adjustment, it really is. Please do not spoil your performance.” Sharing a play with its audience is a test; previews tell you where to bend and where to hold your nerve. “There are never enough previews for a new game,” says Mackmin. “The danger is that you will lose your love for him, so a big part of my job is to weave all the threads into one magnificent thread. “Don’t pay attention to the press either.”
De Angelis remains stoic during this heated period. “What can you do? You have to stick to why you wrote this in the first place. Some people will like it, some people won’t. You have to grow up on this.” But Eldridge admits he was “incredibly stressed at the first preview.” It scares me so much that the game can finally be watched by real people. There was always some alcoholic nerve stabilization going on. When Beginning opened at the National Theatre, his best friend took him for a beer or three beforehand. “It was definitely great not being close to the theater.”
Actors still have to deliver a performance while other creators watch from the dark. “You let the main character, the audience, in,” says Stirling. “I was gagging at the audience; especially since this is a comedy. I was hungry to have people to play with. Although you always wonder: Who’s coming to the first preview? Hampstead’s crowd enjoyed the odd line or costume malfunction, such as Stirling’s skirt dragging. “I like things to go wrong,” she says. “That’s why you come to a live show.”
It is rare for an actor to be both in the cast and in the audience. Last year, Rilwan Abiola Owokoniran was cast in the lead role in Jonathan Harvey’s gay coming-of-age classic Beautiful Thing just three days before previews after the original actor withdrew. Still soaking in the role, he watched his understudy in previews. “I had no choice but to treat the first few performances as a sort of open rehearsal. “It was nice to see the way I was performing and where I needed to put my energy.”
Filled with both laughter and tears, Harvey’s play invites a powerful response. “It was absolutely tangible,” Owokoniran says. “I love this education from the audience. With The Beautiful Thing, I didn’t realize it was a comedy because of my anxiety and fear of everything. It is such a heavy story that I approached the subject with the seriousness it deserved; “So it was very reassuring to hear their laughter during the first line.”
Eldridge says previews can be annoying to players. “Audiences make judgments about characters and their actions,” he says. His 2012 play In Basildon, about an Essex family, features a “dashing young playwright” and actor Max Bennett was “totally surprised at how much the audience didn’t like his character. In rehearsal, the actors try to live their characters and empathize with them. So I guess Max is “He felt quite shocked at how opposed the audience was to him.”
Eldridge saw that backlash coming — but was surprised when Middle’s first audience from 2022 judged a woman deciding to leave her struggling marriage as “a little harsher than we intended.” “I got kicked out, so I made some cuts for later previews.”
Critical judgment is another matter; The Hampstead team admit they can feel the pressure coming. Sometimes previews don’t reflect the reaction of critics. “The most surprising one was Private Lives , which I just did,” says Stirling. This was at the Donmar in London. “The reception at the previews was amazing. We made it sexier, naughtier and dirtier, just as Noël Coward would want. And on press night, it was like we had shit on a national treasure.”
Eldridge recalls the grueling previews for the large-scale Market Boy (“two scenes completely cut”) and Under the Blue Sky, which were invaded by tabloid reporters hoping to catch Catherine Tate naked. But most of his memories are warm, as in the hit adaptation of the Danish film Festen. “In rehearsal, we lost everything we had, so it was really exciting. “I remember this woman came up to me, hugged me, kissed me on the lips, and said, ‘This was probably the best night I’ve ever had in the theater.'” People responded to The Knot of the Heart’s theme of addiction with similar sincerity. , they share their own stories. “As soon as the audience gets there, they tell you what’s important to them.”
Following his baptism of fire in Beautiful Thing, Owokoniran now plays Ferdinand in Love’s Labour’s Lost at the RSC. What does he expect from these previews? “I would like to find the rhythms of comedy. Ferdinand is making the first speech, so it will be useful to feel the audience’s reaction. Things can go wrong in previews, but there is freedom if you accept that; I could almost be bolder in the preview. “Oh, applause at the end would be nice.”
There is plenty of applause when I return to The Divine Mrs S after the opening. The critical consensus is that Stirling in particular has achieved this; Her skirt is still on, everything looks stylish and meaningful. With the excitement of being the first to see this brand new play, would it be rude to miss the boisterous energy of the first screening? “It’s a privilege,” Stirling admits. “When he came out and told the story for the first time. When you get that first proper laugh, you want to laugh with them. “It’s delicious and it never happens again.”
• The Divine Mrs S runs at the Hampstead Theater in London until 27 April. The Loss of Love’s Labor is at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon until 18 May.
David Eldridge’s adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold runs at the Minerva theater in Chichester from 23 August to 21 September.