For the first time in a decade, the theatre club’s main production will not come from the licensed catalogue. “The Understudies,” opening next month, was written by senior Callum Reid, scored by the music club, and is being staged by a crew that has never had to answer the question “but how did the original production do it?”
The play — a comedy about a disastrous school production in which every lead falls ill and the understudies must improvise — began as a scene Reid wrote for a drama workshop. “It was supposed to be five minutes,” he said. “The workshop kept asking what happens next. At some point that becomes a script.”
The case for original work
Director and club president Noor Al-Amin admits the licensed route would have been safer. “A known title sells itself. But we kept noticing that the most alive our rehearsals ever got was when something went wrong and people had to invent. So we chose a play about exactly that, that nobody can compare to a film.”
There is no correct version of this play. Whatever happens on opening night — that’s the correct version.
Noor Al-Amin, director
The production runs three nights in the main hall. Rehearsals observed by MU Student News suggest the meta-premise is doing real work: when a prop shelf collapsed mid-scene last week, the cast played through it so smoothly that the director has reportedly considered keeping it.
Tickets are free with student ID and bookable through the portal; the Friday performance will be followed by a talkback with the writer, director and cast.
Scoring a play that keeps changing
For the music club, composing for an unfinished, still-evolving script has been its own education. Composer Ravi Mehta’s solution was modular: short themes for each character that can be extended, cut or layered live depending on how a scene runs on the night — an approach borrowed, he cheerfully admits, from studying how theatre musicians handled improvised comedy. “The script is about improvising. The score had better be able to,” he said. Two musicians will perform live at every show rather than using recordings, for exactly that reason.
