John Gabriel Borkman Artist Talk
Here's my account of the artist talk for John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre:
The Abbey talk was less than an hour and no questions were allowed from the audience. The moderator kept it strictly to questions about John Gabriel Borkman, and he evenly distributed questions to the cast. Cast in attendance were Cathy Belton, Joan Sheehy, Lindsay Duncan, and Alan Rickman. John Kavanaugh and Fiona Shaw came in late because they'd been working on a Shakespeare workshop at another venue with Amy Molloy and Marty Rhea, who did not attend the talk. The first question was directed to Alan about whether the play was timely or not. He looked annoyed and said it wasn't his place to say. The moderator then tried to rephrase the question. Again, Alan looked annoyed, looked at the audience and said, "I don't know. Is it timely?" The audience shouted, "Yes!" He turned around to the moderator and said, "There. It's timely."
Later he was asked about the set. He said the set was difficult to work with, and he wished that the actors and the set people worked directly together during the preparation for the play because it was very difficult to come in and start working with a difficult set and find things that had to be sorted out in the technical rehearsal two days before previews started.
Throughout the entire talk, Alan and Lindsay looked utterly bored, and at one point, Alan looked like he was asleep. Cathy Belton and Joan Sheehy looked like they were just happy to be asked questions. They answered questions about their characters as best they could, with the moderator seeming to want more explanation about the characters than was possible to give. When Fiona and John came in they were very engaged. They were asked about "inappropriate laughter," and Fiona said Irish audiences tended to want to laugh, and always looked for a reason to, even if it wasn't in their best interest. She said American audineces got very excited about anything involving blood or murder, because it was so much a part of their regular lives, and London audiences were so diverse they almost never laugh at anything. John went on for a bit about how he wanted to string up people with mobile phones.
Aside from Alan possibly being asleep, it was well done, as a talk. As there were no questions from the audience, there was no opportunity for a queue to form of misguided acting students trying to ask Alan for advice or mega franchise geeks asking how he felt about playing Snape.
It was a fairly small crowd, the Abbey seats around 450 people and only about 200-ish people were there. It would have been rather obvious if someone had pulled out a camera and snapped a shot, and by that point the Abbey staff were prowling around the aisles on the lookout for cameras.