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The Fool

The Fool

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Danny Lee Wynter plays The Fool

Danny recently graduated from LAMDA. Film includes Joe's Palace, Capturing Mary and Hot Fuzz. Television includes The Camden Project and Trial & Retribution XI. Theatre work includes Karamazoo and Fairytaleheart for the Old Vic at Trafalgar Studios.

Bulletin 1
Bulletin 2
Bulletin 3
Bulletin 4

Bulletin 1

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

Becoming an actor
I don’t come from an acting background. I come from a working class town in Essex. There were three things that happened, when I was a child, which made me want to become an actor. When I was very young, about 6, I was taken to see Cinderella by my mother. I was completely bored by it, until the ugly sisters came on. I nearly leapt out of my seat with joy, because what they were doing was so completely new, so spontaneous and witty, and I thought: ‘I want to do that.’ The second thing happened when I was about 10 or 11. I was travelling to see my grandmother on my own, and there were lots of people on the bus from the local mental health institution. I sat at the back and watched them. I found them fascinating; they seemed so different, while everyone else on the bus ignored them and pretended they weren’t there. When I got home I remember mimicking them, not out of malice, but in an unconscious way .It was an early attempt at acting, as I was observing them and pretending to be them. Thirdly, I remember watching Pat and Margaret with Julie Walters and Victoria Wood, and I fell in love with Julie Walters. I wanted to do what she was doing. I love the way she physically transforms herself, and I’m drawn to actors who change shape in some way.

I didn’t really know about drama school until I was 18, so I went to Middlesex to read drama, and that’s where I gained a basic knowledge of theatre. At the end of my degree I felt that although I knew all this stuff, but I hadn’t performed that much, as it had been so academic. At the time of writing my dissertation, on colour blind casting, I was working as an usher at the Royal Court and I managed to get an interview with Stephen Daldry to discuss it [then Artistic Director of the Royal Court]. He spent an afternoon with me talking about the industry, and I finally admitted to myself that I wanted to go to drama school. I realised that I wanted to perform classical theatre, and I needed to get a solid training. I was aware that being from an ethnic background makes it harder to be taken seriously as a contender for the classical roles, all the parts I was put up for had been drug dealers in The Bill, things like that, and I thought I want to show that there’s more to me than that. So I went to LAMDA. When I finished I got a job working with Stephen Poliakoff on two films for the BBC . It was my first job out of drama school and a baptism of fire. I was surrounded by great people, the best of the industry, on one side of me was Maggie Smith, on the other side Michael Gambon, and standing over there was a man directing me whose work I’d grown up watching. I was surrounded by everything I could want, and I soaked up everything I was given, but nobody spoke about the hard part, when you have to go back to reality, as it’s very rare that someone continues to work on that level. And then the Fool is my next role.

Shakespeare
This is my first professional Shakespeare job, so it is another baptism of fire! I’d always respected Shakespeare but it wasn’t until I went to LAMDA and performed it that I actually thought this bloke’s rather good. I played Macbeth at drama school, and I was completely riveted by his plight. I’d held Shakespeare to be this sacred thing that only a few people could appreciate, and after doing it I realised how immediate it is. I think this is partly because I’m dyslexic and I hate being asked to read a play, and I can only really get to grips with it if I read it out loud.

Auditions
Somehow I found out that Dominic was planning to do King Lear and I wrote a sycophantic fan letter to him before Christmas saying how much I loved the play and asking whether I could read for him. So I came in and read Edgar, which I knew quite well, but a while later he called me back to read the part of the Fool, which he then offered to me. At first I was intrigued by that request, as like many people I had this preconceived notion of the Fool as being played by actors towards the end of their careers, when they’re in their fifties or sixties. I was a bit bewildered by that, I thought it’s a brilliant part but where is he going with this?

Rehearsals
We had the read through of the play on the first day. That’s always a really difficult thing to do, as other actors can’t help but think ‘God, is that really how they’re going to do it?’ and everyone is very self-conscious. It’s interesting that in the read-through the actors playing the characters in the storm scenes (act three, scenes two to four) gravitated towards one another, and when we were reading the connection between us felt very strong, which made me very excited about what’s to come. I was sat one side of David [Calder, King Lear] and I found it really useful to be so physically close to him, almost like a parrot perched on his shoulder, as I see the fool as his conscience. When companies first meet the cast often seem to assume the hierarchy of the play, so you see spear-carriers meekly sitting at the back of the rehearsal room, while the actor cast as a queen confidently goes about her business. But I wanted to get to know David straight away. The rehearsal process is about taking risks, jumping right in and getting really dirty, and if you’re working with an iconic actor there’s often a tendency to hold back, but here I feel fine with jumping in with my own ideas.

The Fool
It’s an odd part as it’s non-linear, it’s detached, he’s an outsider but he’s not sorry for himself. He’s someone who’s observing everyone around him, and commenting on what they’re doing, asking questions and answering his own questions. Dominic told me that in the earliest productions of King Lear the actor playing the Fool would have also played Cordelia. It’s interesting that Lear has banished one person for speaking the truth, and the only other person whom he allows to speak the truth is the Fool, and they were both played by the same actor. I was really drawn to how the Fool lives between a rock and a hard place, he’s got to obey his master, he’s got to tell the truth, as he’s an ‘all-licensed fool’ (Goneril, 1.4.191) as he says to Lear ‘…they’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipped for lying…(1.4.174-5). I have also been thinking about how he has lost his best friend and playmate, Cordelia, and how their relationship might have influenced her. She seems so much more educated than her sisters, and they have such different moral codes. Perhaps it is the Fool who has reached out to her and taught her that it can be better to retain information rather than divulging it all, in the same way that he tries to advise Lear, although Lear is too far gone to make use of it.

I use the Stanislavski method to prepare for a part, which involves a lot of inquiry as to why the character behaves as he does. This meant I had actually learnt quite a lot of the Fool’s lines, and I was quite surprised to see how many of the lines had been cut when the rehearsals began. But there seems to be a clear reason for the cuts, as Dominic wanted it to be very to the point and punchy, so that the action would be moving forward all the time. I wouldn’t dare to question the cuts. The only thing I was unsure of is that there’s a song that the fool sings, and I think about 4 or 5 lines from it have been cut, and it didn’t quite make sense that Lear and Edgar pick him up for his singing, but Dominic pointed out that said we’ve said what we wanted to say in the two short lines before, and so I can see how it would make sense.

I’ve seen King Lear three times, but I’m quite safe from undue influence because I have a really terrible memory. From what I can remember every time I’ve seen the Fool the actor’s taken the audience on a psychological journey, but I think the space of the Globe lends itself to really explore his physicality. What really excites me is that the Fool is a role of invention, and there’s nothing you can’t do with it in this particular production. I never thought that this would be a role that I would be taking on for many years, if at all.

The Globe
I’ve been here many times as a groundling, so it is a shock to be on the stage. Last week we were doing a movement session, and it was all quite formal, and then the doors to the stage suddenly opened, it was the most beautiful thing to behold. As someone who’s never performed here before, I’m quite anxious about what’s to come, and all I could think was what this place must look like when it’s filled up. Up until then I’ve been musing about what the Fool’s going to be like, but from that moment I realised that I really need to think about the interaction with the audience, because the Fool is there as much for the audience as he is for Lear. This space allows you to talk to one person, or a crowd, or a specific group of people, and I really want to play around with it, but I think a lot of that isn’t really going to come to me until I’m actually out there with a belly full of butterflies on the preview night.

Bulletin 2

Week two
So that the company as a whole always felt that they were on top of the play, and that the play was never unmanageable, Dominic decided to put very crude shapes to every scene by roughly blocking it without too much detail . This helped us to arrive at the same point of what is required of us in terms of where we’re coming on, where we’re going to, exits, and entrances. Also it was a great opportunity to sit down and watch all the scenes that you’re not in, which I found extremely useful as you really do forget that the plays were written to be heard and not read. It was just lovely to hear fellow company members doing their bits, as I think once we’re up and running, and definitely when we’re in tech week, we won’t get to see the parts we’re not in, because we’ll probably be in our own world doing our own things backstage, or running around panicking. It was also useful in helping to develop my character, as I could watch how King Lear interacts with his daughters, his servants, and with Gloucester and Kent before the fool arrives, and then how he interacts with them after the fool has gone.

Dominic wants me to enter from the balcony, and to jump down onto the stage at the beginning, so that’s another technical thing that can’t really be looked at until tech week. It’s very high and that floor is the most unforgiving oak wood floor there is, it’s not sprung, it’s not soft, there’s no bounce to it and I think the last person who did that broke his legs! But if I can get down by some kind of rope then that would be great. I’ve never done any aerial stuff before so it will be interesting.

Off book
Everyone’s now off book, we found it useful to be off book pretty early on. Extraordinarily David [Calder, King Lear] who obviously has the most lines, was pretty much off book to begin with. But that’s another tap at trying to always feel that the play’s manageable I suppose, it means you can walk into the room and know that you’re free to play, and again that helps to make the play seem more manageable. So we’ve run the first Act from beginning to end, and worked in more detail on scenes 1 to 5.

Text work
We’ve worked with Giles [Block, text expert] personally in one-to-one capacity, which for me has been very useful. I’m trying to get more time with him than I’m allocated because he’s so good. I was having difficulties with 1.5, particularly the part that goes: ‘The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.’ The fool is talking to Lear and realising that he’s rapidly losing his mind, and the Fool’s trying to bring him back into the present. I was having problems with that scene in that when you read it it’s very funny , the Fool’s making these punchy remarks which always have a pay-off, he tells jokes, he’s moving from one thing to another so quickly. But it was only by working with Giles, and understanding how to drive through to the line have I arrived at something which I’m half pleased with. He’s helped me unearth that it really needs to be quick and light, like a little twittering robin, moving around quickly.

Physical presence
The Fool’s physicality isn’t like mine, I’ve found his centre is more flexible, I can be quite laconic whereas he’s lightning quick. I’ve found in terms of his physicality he gets very close to people and then recoils, he scurries round like a rat, coming right up to something to sniff it out and then he darts off to hide behind a pillar. His frame is a lot more malleable than mine. I think I’ve just found a wonderful example of how his physical movement is directed by rhythm of the text. It’s in Act 1 scene 4, for where he speaks and speaks and then Goneril arrives and suddenly he realises that she’s slowly but surely making the Fool’s role redundant, as she’s doing with Lear. She’s speaking, and Lear’s trying to rail against her, meanwhile the Fool is realising that he’s out of text, and at that point I’ve been scurrying off to the very corners of the stage almost trying to chuck myself off it to be with the audience. He’s moved into a position of an outsider, of someone looking in. And then he suddenly speaks again, and I dart back onto the stage, but as always nobody listens.

The storm
Last week we did the storm scene and for me it was an absolute technical nightmare. Because there’s so much noise going on which we haven’t had yet, and we probably won’t have until tech week. We’re going to be using polyphonic tubes and a wind machine to create the noise, and the logistics of that scene are going to be very, very demanding because there’s going to be so much noise and physically you’ll be contorted by the weather. It’s interesting to see how afflicted Lear and the Fool are by the storm. By 3.6 Lear has gone mentally, and the Fool has gone physically. I know the Fool’s hanged but I think he’s so afflicted by the cold and the storm that by the time he’s found and hanged he’s almost dead anyway. We’re not staging the hanging.

The Jig
We’ve been working on the jig, which is exciting but comical at times. Sian [Williams, choreographer] makes everything so accessible, but nevertheless people can get quite anxious because they are out of their comfort zones. Kellie [Bright, playing Regan] has danced before so she has a brilliant sense of co-ordination. In one rehearsal Sian stood me in front of Kellie, who we'd all been following. I stood there not knowing what on earth I was doing and then, of course, the whole company ended up following me and not knowing what they were doing either! It wasn't a pretty site. We're now okay though, i think.

My costume
I’m really pleased with my costume, one of the things you’re told never to do in the theatre is to aggravate the costume department, fortunately I had no reason to as I think the costume complements what’s being discovered in the rehearsal room with the Fool. It's a quietly elaborate outfit. The jacket is green, the britches are gold with a splash of silver in the thread, and the collar and stockings are woollen (they’re going to be interesting to work in if we have a warm summer!) It’s got puffy shoulders and a very tight waisted jacket. I’m also wearing make-up. I've been playing around with the idea in my head almost as soon as i was cast in the role. Whilst doing my research into make up of the period I started to feel that everything of the time seemed so fine and a little bit too clean. I wanted something a bit more crude. Johnathan Fensom [the Designer] and I came up with the idea that the Fool probably would wear make up as a mask when performing in Lear's Court, but at the time he enters the play after Cordelia's banishment he is so afflicted and hurt by the wrong that has been done to his play mate (Cordelia) that in obeying his masters command to come and entertain him he's literally gone to the egg white pot and smudged it all over his face in fury without any finite detail. I'd like to think its the Fool's own personal way of sticking two fingers up at the whole situation. Creating scenarios in your head like this may sound rather far fetched for some, but I need to see myself as the character and one of my ways into the character is through their dress and physicality. I know a lot of actors my age who are completely against starting from an outside source and tend to take a strictly naturalistic approach. I don't think there's any one 'right' way to get into a part, and i always find that very attractive in what we (actors) do. You can research and research, comb the text, keep journals or talk with your director until your blue in the face, and then suddenly one morning your standing at a bus stop or walking around the aisles of a supermarket and you meet the character. My primary concern seems to nearly always be what the character looks and sounds like, once i understand that half my panic is over. The other half of the panic is refining through repartition whatever it is i've stumbled upon in the rehearsal room and then attempting to convince both myself and the director that its working. That's the terrifying part!

Bulletin 3

The fool and other characters
I think Kent, Edgar and the Fool, all of Lear’s ‘merry band of brothers’, have this really interesting duality, this duality of the true self and the disguised self. It’s a really fascinating stance to play because, for the Fool in particular, there’s the performance level, and then there’s him personally. And ‘him’ is only presented to the audience when it’s just the fool and Lear, or when it’s him, Lear and Poor Tom. Poor Tom is threatening the fool’s position, making him redundant, which is why ultimately the fool disappears, because he has no function. I think it’s a joy to play the performance side of the fool, for example, when he first enters with the boys – the knights, and Lear – and they’re putting down Kent, angering Goneril; all of that’s fun at a level of play. I suppose the vulnerability, when you read the text, kicks in as soon as they’re on the heath. I don’t think he can stand it physically or mentally, so he tries to continually impart his wisdom in rhyming couplets and elaborate witty sayings and they soon sink, and as soon as they sink, and he lets go. By Act 3 Scene 4, which is the arrival of Poor Tom, he’s dropped everything in term of pretence or act and just all he wants is access to this man Lear and to bring him back to the person that he thought he was, to get love from him. It’s really sad.

Vocal work
I was incredibly lucky to have worked with Maggie Smith a year and a half ago, and one of the biggest pet hates for her, for myself, and for most people, is going to the theatre and not being able to hear what is being said. Voice had always been important to me at drama school, but it wasn’t until I heard it from the mouth of someone who I respect that alarm bells went off in my head. I worked with Jan [Haydn Rowles, the voice expert], but no more and no less than anyone else did. Jan was incredibly useful, a brilliant resource that the Globe is really fortunate to have. She’s not interested in saying something is wrong or right, but is interested in making you comfortable in your voice, and, more importantly, making the audience comfortable listening to your voice. Sometimes in acting you’re not always confident and comfortable with your voice, but Jan is great as she makes you alert to giving the audience the best and the most of what you’ve got. My voice is a bit of a mish-mash of accents; I’ve got an Italian mother and a Jamaican father and my family is from the East End of London and they all have very distinctive speaking voices. My voice unconsciously changed when I went to university. I’ve always been said to have been softly spoken, but it’s not something I’d ever stopped to think about until I went to drama school. A brilliant director there, called Steve Jameson, said to me after a run through of a work shop we were doing, ‘That’s great Danny, so truthful. Only one problem: no one can hear it’. I think that’s completely and utterly true, and this place reminds you that you’re doing it for someone else. My speaking voice and my stage voice are two different things. The fool’s voice is penetrating, it pings, and can be quite clipped, and I’d love to have said that I worked on that but it’s not true – I just came to it. I get an instinct for things and I grab onto it if it’s working; if not, then I don’t. When I read for Dominic originally, I said that I’d got two ideas about how the fool could be in my mind: one was very still, very precise, very clear and quite measured; and the other was a high-octane energy, Kenneth Williams-type. And he suggested I find somewhere in the middle, and I think ultimately that’s what I’ve done … though I don’t want to think about it too much.

Tech week
Tech week arrived and I found it rather glorious actually, because I think my character is there as much for the audience as for the play. As soon as we got in the theatre, I was really able to play around with what I was delivering to the other characters on the stage, with what I was delivering to the audience, and with what I was delivering to myself as an afterthought; the different asides would then be placed in the auditorium. Tech week was great fun in that sense. I actually really preferred being in the theatre, teching it, as opposed to working in the rehearsal room, even though lots of things go wrong in the tech. At the end of tech week, we had to go back to rework a couple of scenes in the rehearsal room as the stage wasn’t free, and that was very difficult. Even within those three or four days on the Globe stage, I’d become so into opening my performance out to that space, that suddenly being back in an office-like rehearsal room with a low ceiling meant I felt huge. But I loved tech week, especially as one of the things that the whole company felt was a sense of remembering who they’re doing the play for, and that we’re not doing the play for ourselves. Because you can be up there having the time of your life, but if it’s not for the audience, then what’s the point?

The impact of tour groups
I think a few people were thrown by members of the public coming into the space at first, because you’ll be in the middle of a scene on the heath or you’ll be in the middle of having your eyes gauged out and suddenly there’s forty people being ferried in to stand in the corner of the auditorium. But I found tech week absolutely imperative to building my performance, and I’m so thankful we had the tours coming in and out because I could play it to them and see what was right, and see what wasn’t. They were very kind and encouraging, because I was finding my feet – in fact I’m still finding my feet – and even laughed when I was doing things that were dire. They were really so supportive and I found it extremely useful throwing stuff out, seeing what works and didn’t work and chopping and changing things.

Costume
Getting the full costume changed things as well. The shoes were very important. I think a couple of the other actors were wearing their shoes in the rehearsal room that they would be wearing in performance. I didn’t do that, but as soon as I got on stage, I always had to wear my character’s shoes, even if we were only roughly running through something. I think they’re quite a good example of the character. They’re elf-like with pointy toes – they look like something a character from Narnia would wear – and I found them very useful to have on my feet as I was walking around the space. I had a few technical difficulties with the costume in tech week (which is what tech week’s for) but even up to the opening night, I had problems with it. What I have found in the character is so physical, and giving the performance I’ve giving, I need to roam and move about but buttons kept popping off the costume, my tunic kept flapping open, my stockings kept falling down and nothing would hold them up. In the end, we had to get a suspender belt to hold them up which looks quite comical on stage. I’ve been threatening Dominic [Dromgoole, Artistic Director of the Globe] that one day I’ll come onstage in just the suspender belt and a coxcomb! So tech week was quite tricksy with my costume and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the whole costume until towards the end of previews. It was very difficult for the costume department to actually rectify things that were going wrong with my costume; they could mend the garment as much as I asked them to, but every time I’m doing something ridiculous on stage, something else would go wrong. Everything’s now in place, but I think the costume is an ongoing battle.

The physicality of the fool
The fool is very energetic and I’m quite low energy, so it’s brilliant getting everything out of my system in the show: frustrations from the day, things that I wish I’d said, all the constraints that we experience in society or within ourselves that stop you from jumping around to your favourite song in the pub. One of the great releases is being an actor and dealing in make believe, so when you go on a stage, and at the Globe in particular, all of it comes out for me; it comes out in the character. The fool has the verbal dexterity that I wish I could have, so it’s good to be like that for a couple of hours everyday. There are lots of things you can’t do in a rehearsal room, like the aerial stuff with the ladders, which was completely left until the last minute because the ladder couldn’t be fixed until the last minute. It was going to be scrapped at one point, as I think Dominic was quite concerned about whether or not I was going to be able to do it every night without hurting myself, but so far so good. I think it’s a lovely entrance. I really didn’t want to scrap it, and just come on from the back door or the side door. When he enters the space, everyone knows that he’s entered the space. You know that with his character, if someone’s going to jump, he’ll jump higher, and I think the balcony is a perfect framing and setting for him to arrive on.

Bulletin 4

Initial impression of the audience
The great thing is that that as soon as the audience is in, even if you’re previewing, I feel that it’s begun; so on the opening night, where everyone’s kind of stressed, it didn’t affect me as much as I thought it would in terms of nerves, because we’d been running for a week, and to me it had already begun. The preview audience was very kind as well, so there were lots of people there already supportive of the first couple of previews. But getting that audience for the first time was absolutely terrifying, I’d never experienced being on a professional stage before, and listening to the tannoy and hearing the audience come in as I was sitting in my dressing room is one of the most fear evoking things I can think of. It was a very difficult performance for the first previews, I felt out of body, so much so that I could remember things and when I came off stage I kept giving myself notes on what worked or didn’t work.

The response of the audience
What’s been passed on to me from the experience of being an usher watching performances at the Royal Court is the sense that, when people really get the play, they feel free to verbally respond, and so I don’t mind when people are talking about the play in the performance. There was a baby crying yesterday, there’s been people fainting, there’s been people walking out, there’s been people standing at the side of the stage not understanding a word because they don’t know the language – you get all types coming to see the play, and I think to actually moan about that fact is ridiculous; it should be celebrated. This play was written around 1603 to 1606, and when it was performed, I’m sure the actors on stage were dealing with many more stressful things than helicopters, and while it can get you down as an actor when there’s a helicopter, it’s not the be all and end all, as people make it out to be.

Groups within the audience
The audience is continuously mixed. One of the main groups that the Globe gets is tourists; they want a good time, and I find playing to them is a lot easier than it is playing to our own. It’s very interesting, because Americans in particular are very responsive. I have people saying to me, ‘I didn’t quite get all of the play, but I thought it was just wonderful’, and they show their appreciation – sometimes in the middle of scenes – and I think that’s great. But our own audience, us Brits, are much more reticent, and that can keep you on your toes. I just find it fascinating the difference between the two. I was at a show in New York and the audience was so responsive that, at the end, their appreciation was tangible, and I’ve been sat in audiences here where people have equally enjoyed the performance and its been given a luke warm reception at the end. After that show, I was talking to someone and I asked if they liked it and they were like, ‘It was amazing, the most amazing beautiful and profound thing I’ve ever seen’, but they didn’t show it in the theatre. But the Globe’s a great place to perform because you do get that response which you don’t always get on Shaftesbury Avenue.

One of the most encouraging things is when you see children watching it attentively, (although when they’re watching it and talking about their iPods that can be distracting). But the encouraging thing is seeing kids there, because I think children, and particularly teenagers, are given quite a rough ride by society and by the media particularly. And when you look out into the yard, and you see them making these connections with things – whether they’ve actually been pierced by the plight of this man who has learnt through great tragedy to hold onto the things that mean something in life, or whether they want to ask me a really mundane question about where I got my coxcomb from (which I’ve had!) – it’s delightful, because it means a connection has been made.

After the previews
We’ve been running for over two weeks now, so we’ve done twenty-two performances. I don’t want to say I’ve found my fool, but I’ve found something which I seem to be giving at the moment. I don’t really delve too far into my own head thinking about what that something is, because the moment I do, it’s destroyed. The performance is fixed, in the sense that I know the general choreography of the part, and I suppose with voice it’s fixed, as I know where to pitch certain things to try to make things land. You settle into a routine.

Reviews
I haven’t read the reviews. I think the Globe has quite a tough time when it comes to that, and I’ve been quite angered in the past with people who give the Globe a tough time. I read one review in which a critic was actually reviewing the audience and talking about how his experience was spoilt by the people in front of him. I just think it’s sad that critics like that can’t use their imagination. It’s interesting, because in the western world, we go to the theatre, sit down in the dark facing the Proscenium arch in silence, regimented – everything’s planned out – whereas here, anything can happen.