Question marks

Monday 10 December 2007

We are at Lakeside in an empty space. We arrive late and there is nothing here. An industrial heater and a couple of chairs. Mole says ‘I’m sorry. I’m not in the right space.’ We sit on the floor and read through the script in the red glow of the heater. Mole says it’s like the old days with Station House Opera huddled around a fire in an old building. The weird thing about the read through is that it’s impossible to work out when they are reading and when they are making mistakes. The breakdowns in the text seem so real. When Mole says ‘I don’t know what to say?’ It sounds like he genuinely doesn’t know. Then he says ‘Can you put a question mark in red after ‘I don’t know what to say.’ And you realise it’s a part of the script. He says to Tim ‘If there’s some gaps in the text, some holes which we’re not filling, then I think that’s what we’re doing with the question marks. We're trying to fill in the gaps.'