Guest Blog: Lynsey Beauchamp on the Challenges of Revisiting Anthony McCarten's THE TWO POPES

I had the great privilege of playing Sister Brigitta in the premiere of The Two Popes three years ago at Northampton's Royal and Derngate Theatre, and back in 2019 a further life for the production was always envisaged. However, Covid had other ideas, and it's taken three years for us to have the opportunity finally to return to this piece.

Strikingly, the issues discussed in the play have only become more relevant in the last three years, but what makes this process especially exciting is to have the director, the writer, and most of the original cast in the same room together (in person!) looking at this story and these characters afresh.

We have a familiarity with the world of the play, the narrative and character arcs which have been so brilliantly created by Anthony. We also have Jonathan Fensom's superb design and Anne Dudley's haunting music from the 2019 production. But coming back to the play after a three-year gap, and with everything we have gone through together during the pandemic, requires us to look at it again with a sharper lens.

Far from being a simple re-staging of the original production, we have started anew, re-examining every choice we made as a company three years ago. We've asked ourselves, does this bit still work? Does this scene, this page, this exchange, this moment, this breath, do what the story requires at this point in the play? Do these moments earn their keep in our reimagining of this piece?

To have this combination of familiarity and discovery is a joy. We have made exciting connections in the 2022 rehearsal room which were always there in the text but which weren't seen so clearly in 2019 as we forged the complex and demanding path towards opening night. We've discovered places we can trust the audience more by removing bits of text which were doing their work for them.

We are also so lucky to have Anthony in the room with us as we explore the piece on its feet. Our shared endeavour is to find ways to allow the huge ideas in this play to have the widest possible exploration in the two hours' traffic of our stage. The most generous of writers, he has not only unhesitatingly allowed us great latitude with the text he has originated, but has also been the most active participant in this process.

We've all had to be flexible, and as actors this has involved the painful but ultimately positive process of letting go of some of our favourite bits - the bits we loved to play and which in 2019 audiences enjoyed, in order to strengthen the overall offer we make to our audiences in 2022.

Our challenge is to persuade our audience to engage with these characters who are wrestling with some of the greatest questions in our world today, and to enter into their most personal and political dilemmas. Anthony's writing brilliantly enables this, and our job is to do it justice.

It feels even more of a privilege to be working on this text and offering it to audiences in 2022, with everything the world has been through, and I feel sure this play will continue to find unique relevance as it is performed in years to come in other countries by other actors in different circumstances, who will discover new meanings and resonances in the text.

The Two Popes is at the Rose Theatre Kingston from 9-23 September

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