Shakespeare in Action

30 Theatre Makers on their Practice

Jaq Bessell

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474229753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

- How do actors prepare a script of a Shakespeare play for performance?
- Where do directors begin?
- What do Shakespeare's plays offer a designer or choreographer?
- How do the cast and creative team work together in rehearsals? With Shakespeare in Action, Jaq Bessell presents thirty interviews with theatre practitioners from some of the larger producing theatres in the UK and the US, exploring the various processes which bring Shakespeare's plays to the stage. Actors, designers, directors and choreographers, including Eve Best, Bunny Christie, Gregory Doran and Lindsay Kemp, share their collective wisdom and experience, and reveal how training and practice informs productions of Shakespeare plays. These first-hand accounts provide students of Shakespeare in performance and practitioners with a critical toolkit with which to study the plays in performance.

The Interviews

Cast

JADE ANOUKA, ACTOR

Text work

I begin by getting to know the play purely from my character’s point of view: first I read the scenes that my character is in, to get a sense of the character and their story. Then I look at how my character relates to other characters, what I say to and about others and then work out who those people are. I very much read the play from my own character’s perspective. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever read a Shakespeare play without (unintentionally) casting myself! I’m always reading the play from someone’s point of view.

Every director works very differently. I was very lucky to be cast by Tim Carroll in The Merchant of Venice at the RSC soon after drama school, and from him I learned a great exercise when speaking blank verse: the company were given a ball, to be held by whoever was speaking at the time in a given scene. As the speaker reached the last stressed syllable of their last verse line, they had to throw the ball up in the air; whoever spoke next had to either snatch it out of the air or catch it on the first stressed syllable of their first verse line. This exercise helps you to make sure your energy at the end of a line goes up, rather than dropping off the vocal energy at the end, which often happens. And, instead of becoming intimidated by the rules of speaking iambic pentameter, this exercise really showed me that, in fact, line endings were my friend! It was probably Tim who encouraged me to learn the rhythm of iambic pentameter as a kind of base rhythm, so you know it’s there, and from that point on to treat the verse more like jazz, so that you don’t sound robotic or repetitive, and (hopefully) you can improvise, you can ‘sing’ on top of that supporting rhythm.

Actioning the text

I’ve been working more recently with Phyllida [Lloyd], who is really big on actioning the text. She asks us to identify a specific action for each thought, using the punctuation marks in the text to help define the length of each thought. You are identifying exactly what you are trying to do to your scene partner with each particular thought. I work much better with image-based actions, ones which I can picture physically, for example, ‘to crown someone’ or ‘to hug someone’.

Shakespeare’s poetic language is potentially a bit overwhelming, and I find the most useful approach for me is to take these very big, rich ideas and to try to boil them down to the simplest, strongest action I can, even to the point of physicalizing the action with a gesture. That can help keep you focused on what you are trying to do to the other person … your character is saying all of this, but it helps to ask: ‘what am I actually trying to achieve?’

Actioning the text is really helpful for those bits of text that I might struggle with, so it is something I do even when I’m not working with someone like Phyllida who works that way. In fact, the two approaches I’ve just described are both really helpful. If I don’t understand something, first I will go back to iambic pentameter, because finding out which words are stressed will help me to better understand the meaning of the line. If I’m not sure what to play on a line, I’ll make sure that I give it a strong action first: choosing a strong action will tell you quickly whether you’re generally in the right area, or not.

Phyllida likes us to mark in the actions in our text before rehearsals begin, because that way actors come in with very clear choices. Then, as you start working with your scene partner, you realize that some of your choices don’t work, because they don’t connect to those of your scene partner. But that forces you to adapt, and to make another strong choice, so because you weren’t allowed to come in with any lines that you are ‘just saying’ … those lines don’t exist!

Playing male roles

Playing Hotspur was a big thing for me. He’s quite a ‘bloke’, a warrior, full of bravado, he’s full of these traits that, as a woman, you hardly ever get to play, especially not in a Shakespeare play! A lot of Shakespeare’s female characters are either domestic or romantic, so, being able to take up space physically, and take up space with your words … I’m sure that was helpful in all sorts of ways. Getting a chance to not apologize … it was nice to be on stage and only have ‘my’ story to worry about; for my story to be a story in its own right, not just one in relation to a man’s story … in relation to someone else’s story … that was great!

Playing Mark Antony, you have to not think about Marlon Brando, and all the other famous actors who’ve played the role! That tradition carries so much weight, you have to let it go, and strip it all back to: what am I saying? why am I saying it? who am I talking to? how do I want to change them with this line? Then, when you add in more detail by actioning the text, it all makes sense. It’s also how we get so much variety: it is so interesting to see different people play the same part, because they will have chosen such different actions. You can’t play a role the same way as anyone else, because even though your objectives may be the same as another actor in the same role, you will have chosen different actions on the way to pursue those objectives. So that’s why each performance is unique.

ANKUR BAHL, ACTOR/DANCER

Auditions

I trained and worked as a dancer, and had never performed Shakespeare before my RSC audition in the autumn of 2011.

The call to audition was for actors with strong physical abilities and so the first audition was to test movement – no text. I went along and was in my comfort zone, responding to physical tasks among other dancers. The real challenge began when I was called back for a second round of auditions and was asked to prepare speeches from two roles that I would understudy in the upcoming rep of Twelfth Night, The Tempest and The Comedy of Errors.

My prior experience of Shakespeare was my high-school English class; I had very little idea how to work with verse and was pretty sure reciting ‘dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum’ to myself wasn’t going to land me the job. So, I called all my experienced actor friends who had worked with Shakespeare, and set up one-to-one working sessions with them. In those conversations, a couple pieces of advice really resonated with me:

1.If you don’t understand it, you’ll never be able to play it.

2.Shakespearean verse might feel like a challenge, but playing the text should not start as a technical exercise – start with an honest investigation of the human emotions and relationships of the play.

3.Trust your ability as a physical storyteller.

So I started by demystifying the text; going word for word, ‘What does this mean? What is this a metaphor for? What is this a reference to?’ I read all the notes in the various editions that I had, and tested my understanding by explaining the text to friends in laymen’s terms: ‘This means I love you this much’ or ‘This means I just want to shag you’. This understanding of the text enabled me to think about the characters in a deep, heartfelt way.

Once I’d got the text under my belt and really understood how I wanted to play it, another revelation came when actor Shiv Grewal recommended I rehearse the speeches outdoors. Having to produce the sound and play the character against the elements allowed me to be less inhibited about my physicality, got my lungs and voice working in a fully embodied way and gave me confidence and enjoyment with the text for the first time.

A dancer’s approach to Shakespeare

A dancer’s life is extremely regimented and disciplined; a dancer starts every day of his or her working life with an hour to an hour and a half of training. Whether that’s a ballet class, a yoga class, any sort of technique – you’re in class every day and you’re constantly fine-tuning your craft.

Being in rep at the RSC proved the perfect place to apply a dancer’s approach to continuous development. Vocal coaches, accent coaches, people who wanted to talk about rhetoric, people who wanted to look at the text and break it down, other actors who had done it tons of times before and were more than willing to help, all formed a catalogue of resources available to learn and develop as an actor, a performer and a Shakespearean.

To be a Shakespearean actor (to be any kind of actor, I would argue) you have to be aware of your physicality. The notion of being on breath and being front-footed were skills that I had developed as a performer at DV8 physical theatre, skills that have proved incredibly important at the RSC. Head of Movement Struan Leslie and Michael Corbidge from the Voice Department have encouraged me to tap in to that knowledge, saying, ‘Okay you know how to use your body, you know how to be on breath, you know how to initiate movement and breath and voice at the same time; now let’s apply that to what we’re doing with the verse.’ This has allowed me to approach working on Shakespeare in my own way; perhaps starting from a more physical place than other actors, but in the end, heading to the same goal as everyone else in the company: a performance that resonates with the audience.

Physical approaches to text

The language in Shakespeare’s plays is very muscular and physical in its use of verbs and action. Furthermore, each character comes with his or her own ticks and nuances that can be brought to bear in the body of the performer. For example, the way Andrew Aguecheek holds himself and uses his limbs (I imagine them to be extremely lanky) is completely different to the assuredness of Ferdinand, even when he finds himself in an unknown land after a shipwreck. In rehearsing the Dromios, I found it exciting to play with different physical approaches. Sometimes it was mimicry, doing exactly what the text or the stage directions indicate. Sometimes (and more interestingly) I chose a concrete physicality to either contradict or highlight what the audience was hearing against what they were seeing, abstracting the physical and textual connections to add to the confusion of the situation.

As trained bodies, we dancers are very aware of every little movement we make. This can be a really powerful tool. At DV8, Lloyd Newson spoke a lot about audiences watching a piece of dance and thinking, ‘I can’t do that’ but hearing text and thinking, ‘I can do that’, because we all speak. In working with Shakespeare, I have found the opposite can be true. Oftentimes an audience member will feel: ‘I may or may not understand that text, I most certainly wouldn’t speak that way in my day-to-day life, however, when I see that person move like that I know that person, I’ve seen that’. So, the physicality that the characters inhabit is often the most immediately tangible aspect of a Shakespeare play for an audience member. If you as an actor can tap into that physicality knowingly, then you can give audiences something they can immediately latch on to, which can help them find their way into the beauty of the text.

Language

In dance, if you’ve done – for lack of a better example – your tendus and your pliés in the morning, when you get on stage you can perform the choreography to its fullest without worrying about your knees bending or your feet pointing, because you know they will. Working Shakespeare’s text has proven to be similar. If I’ve worked the muscularity of the text, the line endings, the punctuation, if I’ve really thought about the pronouns and worked the verbs in the learning and the rehearsing and the thinking about the text, then when I come to perform it, I don’t have to hit the audience over the head with all of that. I can trust that work has embedded itself, and can just come out and tell the story, which makes being a dancer and a Shakespearean actor very similar.

EVE BEST, ACTOR

The initial work I do on a project varies from play to play. For a Chekhov play I might do a lot of detailed background work. For Shakespeare I would work on the words. For Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, I did no background work at all. My character, Ruth, had hardly anything to say – everything that goes on with her is in the realms of the physical and the instinctual. It felt right not to have done work with my head before I arrived at rehearsals so that I could keep my instincts clear.

In my second year at Oxford University, Ian McKellen was the resident professor of drama and I was in his group of students while he worked with us on Uncle Vanya. The system he taught us was a technique Mike Alfreds uses, of going through the text several times, asking different questions and making a list of direct quotations from the play that answer each question. These include: What does my character say about herself? What do I say about each of the other characters? What do the other characters say about me? What do I say about the world? What do I say about the weather? By the time you have done that work you’ve gone through the play several times and you are not only very familiar with it, you’ve also been very precise. You haven’t made anything up or made any assumptions about a character before you start exploring it. It’s an almost forensic approach that I find very useful and have used often ever since.

Learning Shakespeare

Learning Shakespeare is just like learning French or any other language. When you’re fluent in a language it is in your body, your blood and your bones. You’re not using your brain to speak the words – they’re an extension of your body. I’ve found the most useful thing to do as soon as possible is to get the words into my body. I want to be so familiar with them that they are not frightening or foreign, they’re part of me and I’m used to saying them. Before rehearsals start I’ll go for walks with the script in my pocket, stomping up country lanes saying the words out loud, getting them into my body.

Working on verse

When you’re working on verse, there are often gifts that you can get through just being very specific with the text and understanding what it’s telling you. Opinions vary widely on the best way to approach Shakespeare … and of course, each to his own. I like to pay attention to the verse because there’s so much information in it. You are being directed very clearly, by the greatest writer of all time, how to say something, so it seems sensible to listen to his instructions. The mind of a genius is showing us where he wants emphasis, and where sense comes, and where breath comes. The text guides us to speak in an incredibly natural way; and following it, driving through to the ends of lines, paying attention to the iambic pentameter and breathing at the ends of lines, you find something that often sounds as if it had been written yesterday.

I was once doing an exercise on Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy (Hamlet, 3.1.55–87). We discovered that everyone wanted to pause, naturalistically, in the middle of the line:

‘And by opposing end them; to die: to sleep –’ (59)

so that the line would be:

‘And by opposing end them (PAUSE …) to die: to sleep –’

But something about introducing that pause midline made it less exciting. It made it safe. It gave everyone – the character, the actor, the audience – time to think, it was literally a breathing space, and the speech became somehow measured and analytical. However, driving the line on, as it seems Shakespeare is instructing us to do – because it is all one line – this thought comes at you like a tidal wave. It’s exhilarating and much more interesting to hear and to experience. It’s more raw, more unexpected, more visceral. Instead of reasoned logic, it has the blurted energy of a young man in crisis, with thoughts tumbling out of his mouth, grappling to find sense in his fractured world. It’s jagged, not measured, much more like real speech and real life.

SANDY GRIERSON, ACTOR

Preparation

How you begin your process depends, I think, on where you are in life at that point. Sometimes you are out of work and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Interviews
• Conclusions
• References
• Suggested Further Reading
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright Page