Hermia

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Pippa Nixon plays Hermia

Pippa’s theatre credits include Days of Significance for the RSC, Joe Guy at the Soho Theatre, The Merchant of Venice at the Shakespeare’s Globe, Project D: I’m Mediocre at the Battersea Arts Centre, The Method at Oval House. On television she has appeared in Wannabes, Dream Team, Holby City, The Bill and 24 Seven. She has also taken part in many rehearsed readings for Shakespeare’s Globe, and has played Minnie in The Girl Who Was Going to Die on Radio 3.

Read about Pippa's experiences last year playing Jessica in The Merchant of Venice.

Bulletin 1

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as she goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Catch up

I left the Globe last October, and about a month previous to that I’d already got a job at the Soho theatre doing a play called Joe Guy, written by Roy Williams. So I was rehearsing that for three weeks while still performing The Merchant of Venice and Holding Fire. Joe Guy went into production from October until the end of November, and then I had a couple of months off, went snowboarding and went to America. Then in February I went to work for the RSC in another play by Roy Williams, Days of Significance, which was based on Much Ado About Nothing, and I was playing the Beatrice character, Trish. We got transferred to the Tricycle theatre, and that finished the week before we started rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve had a pretty continuous run of work, and I feel lucky, though sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a break.

First week

We started off by doing a read-through. But Jonathan (Munby, the Director) didn’t want us to read our own parts, he got us to read different parts for each scene. He wanted us to hear the play properly, and make us take into account the other characters. Read-throughs can be quite a nerve wracking experience, as it is the first time you’ve met a lot of people, and you want to sound good and show them that you know what you’re talking about. So you probably don’t listen to anyone else as you’re so focused on what you’re doing. But Jonathan’s approach helped us to get right inside the play, and although we were sight reading it made us really listen to it as a whole, and not think only about the character we’re cast as.

The audition

I know A Midsummer Night’s Dream well, I know Helena and Hermia and the lovers and I had done scenes from it at drama school. When I came for the audition I had the choice of reading Helena or Hermia, and instinctively I went for Hermia, because I’m naturally dark and although not really short, I’m very petite. I’d played Hermia before, but a long time ago, and what I liked about Jonathan was the fact that he recognised that we all know the play, many of us have done it before, and he was keen for us to come to it with a fresh head and approach it as if we’ve never done it before. So I’m just trying to come to it at the age I am now, in the context of the Globe, and working with Jonathan who will have a completely different vision from the other directors I have worked with.

First impressions

I’m still exploring them. I know Hermia’s part of the Athens community, she’s fallen madly in love with Lysander, and it’s reciprocated. Demetrius is madly in love with her, and the possibilities of what she was like with Demetrius before Lysander came along is something we’re still exploring. Perhaps she was very flirtatious with him, or perhaps he just read too much into a single glance. I know her relationship with her father is very damaged because she’s disobeyed him, and there’s lots of arguments because she’s fallen in love with someone he doesn’t want her to be in love with. I know there is a very strong spirit within her, and that when we first meet her she’s in the process of finding her voice, which we can see from the way she is speaking to Theseus. She is very brave to run away into the wood, but she isn’t completely rebellious as Lysander desperately wants to sleep with her in the woods and she wants to keep her virginity until she’s married, so she still lives her life to the moral standards of the court. Helena calls her shrewish at one point, so I know that there must be a feistiness and fieriness within her.

Hermia and Helena

We were talking about Helena’s parenting, and Laura [Rogers, playing Helena] thinks that Helena’s father has died, and that she’s come to live with me and my father, which explains why we are such bosom buddies. There are so many references to how close they are, Helena she describes them as ‘like to a double cherry...two lovely berries moulded on one stem’(3.2.209-211). I think it’s a really sad story for Helena, not only does her best friend run away and she might never see her again and the guy she’s in love with is in love with her best friend. So I’m sure there’s other emotions going on for her, but as far as I’m concerned she’s my best friend, that is until my lover falls for her!

Hermia compared to Jessica (The Merchant of Venice)

I feel a lot more confident coming back to the Globe. I think that the relationship between Jessica and Lorenzo is a serious and sincere part of The Merchant of Venice, and acted as the darker sub-plot to the more comic side of the play that Rebecca [Gatward, the Director of The Merchant of Venice] wanted to emphasise. So it’s nice in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to get a chance to play comedy, and it’s fantastic to have a bigger part. I feel lucky that I’ve played in this space before, as I’m a lot more familiar with it and it won’t feel as daunting going on stage as it did before. Jonathan has a very different rehearsal technique from Rebecca, as with The Merchant of Venice we spent the whole of the first week together as a company exploring the play. But Jonathan has split us into different groups, I’m probably in half a day at a time with the lovers, and then he’ll see the mechanicals, and then the fairies, and then once or twice a week we meet up as a company to do dance or voice. It’s early days to compare the two experiences, but as an actress I feel in a different place. I feel lucky having more to do, playing a character who has a lot at stake but is fun to play. It’s a great part and an emotional part, as she could lose everything. She’s really central to the play, it kicks off with her dilemma, and when they go into the woods she loses everything, and it’s not until she gets put to sleep that it all gets given back. There’s a lot going on for her, for all the lovers, but she’s definitely got her own journey.

The play text

Giles [Block] who works with us on the text, describes himself as an ‘extra ear’ within the company. I can choose what I want to go over with him, and I’ll read to him a chunk of verse and he’ll listen for where I’m putting the stress, and correct me if he thinks it should be different. My instinct might be to put the stress on this word, and he’ll look at the whole structure of the line and decide that Shakespeare’s intention would have been to put the stress in a different place. And then you try it out his way, and suddenly you go ‘oh, so that’s what the line means.’ He also explains some of the trickier lines, for example when Hermia is talking about how Lysander would never leave her (3.2.51-55), it is so complicated that I really needed the time with Giles to help me make sense of what it means. And once we’ve talked it through and spoken it through again it makes sense, and it really saves time in the rehearsal room to have sorted out those problems at an earlier stage.

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Bulletin 2

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as she goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Week three
We haven’t run through any of the acts yet. We’ve been rehearsing our scenes individually and slowly bringing in other elements that will join the scenes together. This week we’ve been doing a lot of group work which is great but there are still some people in the cast who I haven’t had proper conversations with. At first we thought it was weird but I think it’s created a very tight bond between all the mechanicals, all the fairies and all the lovers. I think perhaps Jonathon’s [Munby, the director] trying to keep us separate so we all have our own energy and entity, so that when it all comes together we will be in distinct groups.

We’ve been rehearsing scene 6, known to us as ‘the lover’s marathon’ everyday, so it becomes completely organic. We’ve choreographed it with Sian [choreographer] and we’ve done a lot of work with Jan [voice] and Giles [text] so that the physicality and text and voice all very much come together. So it’s not just like a choreographed dance but it’s earthed within the text. Today we’ve been doing what we call scene 7, but which is actually Act 4 scene 1. Jonathon has edited the play into a series of scenes. Bottom wakes up and the lovers are still asleep, then Titania and Oberon come together and do their dance. Then there’s this fairy dance, and they bless the grass. It was the first time we’d ever seen that.

I think we’ll be doing our first run through next week, it can feel a bit scary but in this case it feels really right, as though we’ll have come to the end of our journeys. Next week we’ll feel in a place to start running and linking scenes. Right now it feels a few more details need to happen in individual scenes.

Costumes
In the first section of the play, when we’re in Athens, we’re all dressed in black. Jonathon’s making it quite draconian. It’s very much a man’s world, a post-war world. When we move into the forest the set completely changes, and becomes very colourful. We shed our clothes as we go through the forest. Underneath our black, tight, high-necked costumes are these beautiful corsets and undergarments, mine is green with embroidered flowers in lilac, that represent us discovering our sexuality, physicality and personality. There isn’t any physical touching between the lovers in the first section. When we come to the forest, as we shed our clothes, we shed our old natures; we become more physical, earthy and flowered. In the final section the costumes are transformed into white and gold as we’re married. I’m not really wearing a wedding dress, it’s very much our first costume transformed from black to white. The dress and bodice is embroidered with flowers to represent our inner flowering, there’s a mirroring of costume to connect the two worlds. It’s been incredibly well thought out. I think the fairies have got the best costumes though, they’re amazing, a sort of punky Elizabethan style.

Jig
We started the jig rehearsals this week, which is very late, because they didn’t know how they wanted to do the jig. The fairies dance all the time, because they’ve got their own physicality now, which is somewhere between human and animal. They’ve got this amazing dance which is quite balletic but also animalistic. And Bottom and Titania do a Tango together.

At the end Oberon, Titania, Puck and all the fairies come in and bless the house. In the text there are three speeches, Titania’s Oberon’s and Puck’s. Oberon’s speech is now a song, and throughout this song there’s a blessing of the house. All the lovers come on as if we’re sleeping and dreaming but dancing, as if the fairies have come into our bedrooms and blessed our union. The mechanicals also come on in a dreamlike sleepy state. After Puck does his final speech we all come up and do the jig. Dancing can be a bit of a struggle for some people, some of the fairies had to do a dance as part of their audition. But Sian’s so clever in making it seem the dance so lifelike, she manages to choreograph to people’s own abilities. People can always manage to do it.

Improvisation
We did this session with Sian where we tried to get the Elizabethan period into our bodies. We worked on ‘touch’. We learned a dance, which we’re not going to use in the production, and we had to dance as if we wanted to touch our partner, but you couldn’t because of the restrictions of the time. It was a very formal dance that masked our desires. Then we did this other one which is quite physical. She put music on and gave us the task that we all had to walk around the room and if you wanted to stop someone, you put your hand on them and then you could release them. We then introduced these different ways of the boys beginning to lift us and catch us, so every time we wanted to be caught we’d say ‘catch me’ and do a particular dance movement, and then get them to release us by saying ‘drop me’. We tried it blind folded as well, though without the catching and dropping. Then we played with the dynamic of Helena and Hermia, and the two boys wanting me and then wanting her. We have been doing that since the first week, and it’s really come into our journeys. Then we tried it blindfolded as well, without the jumping and catching, to get that sense of disorientation you feel when you are being led somewhere by someone, and then left by them. We’re playing that experience in the play for real, how the boys lead us into the woods in the dark and we can’t see anything. Improvising like that, without the text, really helps us to get the sense of the play in our bodies. I think Jonathon’s a very creative director, and it’s going to be a really exciting production because he’s taking risks.

Language
There is a language specific to the lovers. All of us speak in rhyme until things really go to pot, when we start speaking in verse. A lot of our language is to do with eyes and seeing, which reflects how the love juice is put in the boys’ eyes. Our whole language is about what we see so we all share a common language in that sense. The change within my character is that as she moves deeper into the forest, more of what she really thinks is revealed. She has just found her voice within the court, and then in the forest this anger and resentment comes out, this hatred towards her best friend, and she starts to use a lot of violent language. The way we’re playing it is that we all become shocked and amazed at our own damage, and the realisations we are all making. There’s a real difference in tone between Hermia and Helena, and it is funny because Laura is playing Helena as quite feisty, which is a bit of a battle for her because her language is more cowardly. Helena’s definitely got a big chip on her shoulder. My feistiness definitely comes out more through-out the play, but it’s a bit harder than I thought it was going to be. Sometimes you can look at the lovers and think it’s going to be easy, but Jonathan’s definitely taking us on a journey with our language and physicality, which I think is really interesting. He’s challenging us to go further and deeper. I’ve come across a lot of brick walls, there’s a lot of fragmented and broken language, particularly when Hermia’s lost Lysander, and Demetrius comes along, and she’s saying: ‘where is he? Have you murdered him? Oh, please tell me where he is.’ I’m trying to find how she makes the leap between these mad thoughts. I’m still not there yet at all.

The reconcilements
We’ve been thinking about how the lovers reconcile themselves to the ending, because Demetrius spends the rest of his life under a spell. We think that if the love juice stirs desire in within a person, because they fall completely in lust with whom they see, it is different with Demetrius because he loved Helena before Hermia. The love juice makes him return to his natural first love. Whereas with Lysander, it’s the other way round, he’s in love with Hermia and the love juice makes him fall in love with Helena and then when he has the antidote, it returns him to his original love. That’s how we’ve looked at it.

Space and voice
We went into the performance space yesterday with Jan for an hour and worked on our voices. We’re looking at what she calls finding our ‘natural speaking note’ and speaking from there, so that we’re not speaking above or below our natural pitch. This will make speaking less of an effort, as once you’ve found you’re optimum note it becomes easier. We were exploring that together, and we haven’t gone on the stage individually yet. I feel lucky to have had some experience of the space before, the only thing that feels daunting is that there’s so much for me to do in this piece. There are a lot of emotional scenes where we are literally screaming at each other, as the text suggests. Being on that stage for three months, with no understudy, means that you’ve got to find a way of doing it that is not going to damage your voice. That is a challenge, but it feels less daunting because I was here last year. It’s exciting.

I’m really enjoying rehearsing the big argument scene. It’s an amazing scene and it is incredibly famous, everybody knows it. The stage directions are embedded in the scene, so nothing we do is invented, it all makes complete sense.

I think the play is so much about what it is that we see, or don’t see. With Puck’s last speech ‘If we shadows have offended’ (5.1. 409) it’s not just about him or the fairy world, but it’s about us as actors, a plea to forgive us if we have in any way done a disservice in portraying these characters.

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Bulletin 3

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as she goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

This week
This week has been a lot of full company calls. We started rehearsing as a full company towards the end of last week. On Monday and Tuesday we worked on Act I, then we ran it yesterday. Today we’ve been running Act II so we’ll be running Act III tonight. Tomorrow we’ll be working with the musicians for the first time and we’re running the whole play. We’re gathering the scenes together, combining the fairies, the mechanicals and the lovers into the play. It feels like we were keeping all the pieces apart and now we’re putting them together, like a jigsaw puzzle. Any gaps have been filled in, and we’re finding moments where all of us can be on the stage and cross at the same time, maybe even colliding, to show how we’re all in the woods together. The mechanicals are absolutely hilarious, the fairies are so distinct and interesting and creative it knocked my confidence a bit seeing them. But I’m sure that’s just the novelty of it. Maybe the others felt the same when they watch us. It makes you feel that this is going to be a really exciting show. Jonathan really goes for the truth of the situation. He really wants us to play the truth, as if it was for real, and so much comedy comes out of the way the mechanicals totally believe in what they are doing. The fairies have definitely got their own world. They sing and dance and have very particular movements, it’s really magical to see.

I’m still working through ideas about Hermia. I think by running the whole play it will help me to work out what’s going on in her head, because we’ve been doing all the scenes in isolation and it’s made it quite disjointed. We were talking about the woods being like the woods in The Blair Witch Project, to help us emphasise the fear that the lovers feel as these strange things happen to them. In some ways their characters explode. It’s difficult to get to that stage when you haven’t had a run up to it. I feel like I know where I want to go but I‘m not quite there yet. At the same time maybe that’s OK because we’ve got a week and a half until we open and we’ve got previews until press night. So there’s lots of time and I think the penny will start dropping a lot more when we’re in that space, and we’ve got costumes on. So I’m happy to still be working a few things out.

Scenery and music
In Athens all the scenery is black and when we go into the forest the fairies take away the black and reveal the blue stage and then put these poppies out, so it becomes a poppy field.
The fairies drink and get high on the poppies, and when you come to Titania’s bower you actually go into a large poppy so the fairies become either human size or ant size. So you get that spectacle on the stage. We’ve heard the music for the show on CD, but we’ve got our first band call tomorrow. The lovers don’t have that much to do with the music. We don’t have any singing, which is a shame but we’ve heard the fairies sing and it sounds beautiful.

Costume
I had my wig tryout today, it’s very cool. It’s just an extension of my hair I have a hair-piece as well that comes down to my waist. It will be pinned up when I am in Athens, and when I come into the forest, it’s slowly comes down and becomes more and more bedraggled. We only get to work with the full costume in tech week. We don’t have any time to work with them in rehearsals. They’ve got practice skirts and corsets for us, but to be honest it’s completely different from when you get on the stage with your real one. In rehearsals we work in skirts rather than wear tracksuit bottoms or jeans and that’s supposed to remind us that physically we’re in the Elizabethan period rather than in 2008.

Another thing that challenges us is touch. In our culture it’s so easy to be tactile whereas in Elizabethan England, particularly between a man and a woman it costs a lot more to be like that. So we’ve been exploring that as well. The great thing is that Shakespeare puts the movement and the physicality in the text for you. And I am still finding Hermia’s physicality. It’s getting the balance in the beginning of being a traditional lover and then making the transition to heartbreak. She thinks her world is falling apart. Losing her lover, becoming frantic and mad, then thinking that her best friend has stolen her lover from her. Physically it would be going from something quite light, then to something incredibly earthy and very connected to her emotions. I’m still finding that. Within the big lovers’ fight there’s lots of jumping and climbing over people.

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Bulletin 4

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as she goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Tech week
Tech week was fine. Moving from the rehearsal room to the stage wasn’t so much of a shock to me, because I’d acted here before, but for some of the other actors it was quite overwhelming. One of the good things, though, is that you’ve got tour groups coming in quite a lot, so there are always people to play a scene to. Laura [Rogers, Helena] and I hadn’t rehearsed with the corsets on and getting into the space was a challenge; with the lovers there are lots of physical movements and you don’t want to compromise what you’ve done in the rehearsal room. In rehearsals, I was always in jogging-pants and loose t-shirts, so to be in this beautiful costume really helps me to inhabit the character within the time period. These girls are fighting against their Elizabethan upbringing, and the constrictive costumes reflect the emotional journey of their fight. And Mike the designer was there, so if the costume really didn’t feel right, it could be loosened or adjusted. Jan [Hayden-Rolls, Voice Coach], Giles [Block, Text Advisor] and Glynn [MacDonald, Movement] were also around to help us get vocally and physically in the right place. We’ve got ramps, and if we had any problems getting up and down the stage, they were there to sort it out. So it was a technical rehearsal for us as actors, as we were working our way around the space and using the text in a very different way. But the musicians had the biggest changes in tech week. The music is quite complicated and they hadn’t had huge amounts of time to rehearse. This meant there was a delay working around that, as all the music was teched into the show for the first time.

First night
There’s nothing quite like the first night, and even though I’ve acted here before, I was still surprised by what it feels like when you walk out there initially. There’s literally a sea of faces all around you and there’s nowhere to hide on that space, so you have to embrace it. I didn’t find it daunting at all; it’s been exciting, and the rest of the company feels the same way. And it feels like everything comes together and takes your character onto another level. Hermia has a significant emotional journey to go through and in the rehearsal room I’d struggled a bit with that, but I feel like being on stage in front of an audience has improved my performance. Being out in the open where you can actually see the moon and the stars, it’s easier to think outside your world. It is tiring, because there are rehearsals in between the previews as well, but I think the play’s getting tighter and tighter. Jonathan wanted to make the play about two and a half hours long, but in preview it was running over this, so he needed to take off about fifteen minutes. Unfortunately some really beautiful moments had to go. He cut some of the songs that had been written especially for this show, and a lot of the dances were shortened. It’s hard, because you can’t be precious about the things you like; for the sake of making the play shorter, they have to go.

Press night
Last night was press night. I was nervous; I had a lot of friends in and lots of people from the business in, but it was good adrenalin. I don’t think anything went wrong and in terms of technical stuff. I think everything went OK, but I’m sure a few people didn’t feel happy with their scenes. We had press in for the matinee as well today, as there was a clash last night with another show opening. That was quite hard, as we wanted to let our hair down last night but couldn’t really. I think a lot of us are looking forward to having the weekend off!

Developing in performance
Now that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is into the run, I think the real challenge is trusting what Jonathan has created – what we’ve all created – and I think the play will naturally deepen as we inhabit the language even more. I want to be really careful about not losing the truthfulness of the play that we have found in rehearsals; sometimes the audience laughs in the same places and you end up asking for laughs or playing for a response. I think this will be a challenge because we’ve got three months, and when one person gets carried away other people can do as well. I think Jonathan’s aware of that and is going to come back every so often to keep an eye on the show. But I still want to go deeper, and to continue to discover more about my character. I’m glad I’ve got the time to do that.

Evening performances
It’s always a pleasure doing evening performances, because as the sky gets darker and darker, we go further into the woods and the storyline gets darker for the lovers. I think there’s something really brilliant about that, and something magical about the way the fairies come out at night. The light changes the way you see the audience; as it gets darker, the house lights come on and everything just looks so much prettier. That’s not taken away in the afternoon, but when it’s really bright, you can’t really see the audience so I suppose you have to invest more of your imagination (and also battle a lot with the planes flying overhead!). So, I think I prefer the play in the evening because there’s something really magical about it and I’m really looking forward to doing the midnight matinee. I think that’ll be quite special.

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