The rehearsal room

Source: an original fiction extract.

“Leah arrived at the town hall at four with the script she had been revising all week. The youth theatre rehearsal was due to begin in fifteen minutes. She had written a scene about two sisters clearing their grandmother's house, and she already knew how every pause should sound. In the empty room she arranged three chairs in a line and placed a chipped cup on the middle one. When the actors came in, she asked them not to move anything.

The room amplified every small noise. A chair leg scraped like a match being struck; the clock's second hand chopped the silence into equal pieces. Leah's pages were warm and soft at the corners where she had held them on the bus. Around her, the actors shrugged off coats, laughed and tested their voices, filling the careful emptiness she had made with loose, untidy life.

They began. The first sister spoke too quickly. The second looked at the cup instead of the window Leah had imagined. Leah stopped them and explained the scene again. They tried once more. This time every pause was exactly where she had asked for it, and the words sounded as though they were waiting for permission to mean something. The director, sitting at the back, said nothing. Leah could feel him not speaking.

One actor asked whether she could hold the cup. Leah started to say no, then saw the woman's thumb resting on its chipped edge. In the next run, the actor turned the cup slowly while she spoke. The other sister reached to take it, stopped and let her keep it. Neither movement was in the script. Leah looked down at the line she had written: You can have the rest. It sounded different now, less like an instruction and more like something that cost a person effort.

At the break, the director asked what she wanted to change. Leah turned to the first page, where she had underlined KEEP STILL twice. She crossed it out. Then she wrote a question in the margin instead of an instruction. The cup stood on the floor beside the chairs. Someone had put a spoon inside it, and when the actors returned the spoon rang against the pottery. Leah let them begin.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the contrast between Leah’s control and the actors’ activity. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.