For the cast and crew
Your calls and your lines, on the phone in your pocket
Somebody in your company has put the production into The Half Call. You did not ask for another app and you are right to be suspicious of one. Here is the whole of what it asks of you, and the whole of what it gives back.
What you get
When you are called — and when you are not
Your own calls, not the whole company’s. The date, the time, the hall, the units being worked and who else is in the room. If Tuesday is not yours, Tuesday is not on your screen.
Your side, with the cue line above every speech
Your lines and the line immediately before each one, so you know when to come in. When the director cuts something your side changes with it and tells you what moved — including when the cut was the line you were coming in on, so your cue is now a different speech.
Waiting on your licensor
Learning your lines, privately
Hide your lines and tap to reveal them, unit by unit. What you reveal is yours. The stage manager sees how far through the play you have worked, never which speech you keep losing — there is no column in the database for it, which is a stronger promise than a setting.
Waiting on your licensor
Why two of those say “waiting on your licensor”
Your side and the line-learning mode are finished and tested. They are switched off until the company that licensed your play tells us in writing that we may put its words on your phone.
That is not caution for its own sake. A performance licence buys the right to perform a play; it does not buy the right to reproduce it. Most publishers sell copies separately, per cast member, and several sell a digital permission too. We ask for that permission rather than assume it — which is why everything on this page that is about your production works today, and only the parts carrying the playwright's actual words wait.
Notes meant for you
A note the director leaves against one of your speeches appears on your side, next to the speech. Not in a group email that thirty-three other people also have to read.
The hall has no signal. We know.
Church halls, scout huts, school drama studios and the back rooms of pubs are where this country rehearses, and almost none of them have usable mobile data. A rehearsal tool that needs a connection to show you your own lines is useless in exactly the room it was built for.
So anything you use in a rehearsal is designed to work from a copy already on your phone: your calls, your side, your notes. You open it in the car park where there are two bars, and it keeps working when you walk inside.
What it asks of you
Two fields, and one of them is optional.
No password
You get a link in an email and it signs you in. If you would rather have a password for the evening you cannot reach your inbox, you can set one later — most people never do.
Nothing to install
It is a website. No app store, no update to approve, nothing taking up space on a phone that is already full of photographs of the set.
You are never charged
The company pays for the production. You are never asked for a card, and there is no version of this where being in the cast costs you money.
One sign-in, every company
In two societies? The same email address gets you into both, and you pick which one you are here for when you land.
What stays yours
You are in a small group where everybody knows everybody, which is precisely why the boundaries have to be drawn on purpose.
- Why you are unavailable is yours. If you mark the 14th as no, your company sees that you cannot make the 14th. It does not see that the other society has a dress rehearsal, or that it is your daughter’s birthday.
- Your line learning is yours. The stage manager sees progress by unit across the cast, so she knows which scenes need another run. She does not see your reveals.
- Your mobile number is optional and is there for the night a rehearsal moves at short notice. Leave it out and nothing else changes.
- Nothing about the production is public. There is no shareable link and no page anyone outside the company can open.
Waiting for an invitation? It comes from your stage manager, and it will have your part and your first call in it.