It is hard to make someone bad. Especially in this rehearsal process – we keep gingerly edging towards full-on badness. But things are flowing better now because we’re starting to look at the craft of the words on the page, how they’re shaped towards the story as a whole, and looking less at what we have developed internally, as if the characters are ships that have been built and now their voyage is being charted.
The script becomes a contract – what is written down is a license for the actors, for the director, to push themselves that much further – “We didn’t come up with that, that isn’t me any longer, this is another, darker person, who does other, darker things. You cannot judge this person, you can only observe them.”