Sicinius Velutus

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Frank McCusker

This is Frank McCusker's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Other Shakespearean roles include playing the title role in Hamlet, Edgar in King Lear and Romeo in Romeo & Juliet. He appears regularly at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland's national theatre. Frank also appears regularly on television, most recently in the series Bad Girls.

Bulletin 1

Becoming an actor
I’m not really sure why I became an actor. I suppose when I realised it was a job that you could do, I thought it looked attractive because it looked easy – or at least I thought it was easy! I didn’t really do much acting when I was a young kid at school. In my last two years of high school I did do some acting but it wasn’t attached to the school, it was attached to the regional youth theatre, so that's when I started to muck around with acting.

I applied to do a degree in English Literature and then I got offered a place in a theatre at home in Ireland where they wanted to see if they could do in-house training for actors, for young people wanting to become actors. It was initially a six month trial but it ended up lasting for two years. By the time I’d finished that I didn’t go to drama school or college and I just came out and got a job. It sounds very easy but it actually did happen like that! I was 21 when I finished. I got a role in a production in Dublin for the Dublin Theatre festival. That went very well and I was taken on for a year at the Amphitheatre in Dublin, and then I just pottered along the way you do.

First encounters with Shakespeare
The first Shakespeare play I ever saw was when I was about 15 at school and we saw a touring production of The Merchant of Venice. That was the first thing I saw but the first time I performed Shakespeare it was as Romeo in Romeo & Juliet when I was just 19 – still a boy really! Now this might sound odd but I actually thought Juliet is a much more interesting character. I remember thinking, Romeo's a bit of a wet. I don’t believe that now, but at the time I thought he was just a little bit too sweet. I thought she had guts and I didn’t think he did.

Performing Shakespeare
Studying Shakespeare and performing Shakespeare are two very different things. For me, performing the plays makes Shakespeare much clearer. It's very, very, very difficult! I remember the first Shakespeare I studied was Othello which is a straight forward story but it seemed oblique, the language seemed remote and inaccessible and a torture to have to do. I used to think ‘Gosh why don’t they just speak properly like everyone else? It's just boring me!’ But when I saw it performed, it all started to make a bit more sense. I remember watching the play and thinking ‘Oh, that's funny’. Humour is always a great access to anything really, isn’t it? I found it accessible then, or rather it was beginning to seem accessible.

Then when I played Romeo in Romeo & Juliet, it just made sense. But Romeo & Juliet makes sense even when you’re young because it's two young people dying to get into bed with each other really. At that age you relate to it. So that was successful and now of course I love it all.

Coriolanus
Coriolanus will be my fifth Shakespeare play. I did Romeo & Juliet and then the next time was when I was a bit more experienced as an actor - I was 26 - and I played Hamlet. I’ve also I played Edgar in King Lear and Sebastian in The Tempest.

I’ve actually never seen a production of Coriolanus. I knew the play because as a point of professional pride I thought I should really read all of Shakespeare's plays, and I have. Some of them I know better than others and some I’ve seen lots of productions of but I’ve not seen a production of Coriolanus. I actually think this is a good thing because it just means you’ve got no preconceived ideas and you can just take it on your own terms. I think that's the best way to approach anything really.

Before I came in I had been doing a lot of studying - lots of looking at the play and looking at the shape of the character - even before I committed to doing the job. You kind of think, well this is an interesting job and a great place to work but I’ve got a be sure that I might be able to do something with the character before I throw myself in to a four and half month commitment. So I’d done quite a bit of looking at the character and seeing if I could do something hopefully dynamic, and I convinced myself that I could. Then you start rehearsing and you think ‘Oh no I can’t do this, I’m going to be terrible!’ That's what I feel now.

First impressions of Sicinius Velutus
Well, it's only the beginning of rehearsals but I don’t think Sicinius is the most decent man in the world. He's very self-serving and ambitious. Both he and Brutus appear to be working for the people - and there may be grain of truth in that they have a sort of political conviction that things should be equal in the state and people should have their voices - but if you read between the lines I think it suits them that Coriolanus is arrogant and that he says the things he does.

Perhaps I could change my mind, but for me the play seems to be about personal ambition within a political world. Ambition is explored in different ways with each character - what people value, what they are aiming towards. With Volumnia, it's the pride of the mother, she's almost living her life vicariously through Coriolanus and his achievements. The two tribunes, Sicinius and Brutus, within the world of Rome basically don’t have the muscle or the brawn that is admired of Coriolanus - his physical strength and warrior-like abilities are things they don’t have. I suspect if they’d gone to school everybody would have wanted to grow up and be a warrior like Coriolanus did but Sicinius and Brutus were the two weedy swots at the back of the class who, now they’ve got some power, are thinking ‘If I ever get to be an alpha male it won’t be through wielding a sword but I might be clever and I’ve got a pen and a very astute political mind and I’ll machinate in that way in order to achieve my goals and sate my ego’, which is what I think they’re about. That's what I think they’re about at the moment but I could discover other things as the weeks progress.

Bulletin 2

So far in rehearsals
On the first day, we sat down and read the play. With Shakespeare, even though we’re familiar with the language, you do need to say ‘yes that is what's being said here, here, here and here’. So we did that from the off. We all had an individual meeting with Dominic, the director, before we came into rehearsals proper and went through our part and identified each shift and movement in it and the meaning of what's being said from sentence to sentence, speech to speech.

We’ve had a linguist, Giles Block, who works with us to describe some of the finer points of the language and the words and he's been very informative. Then we’ve talked about voice and movement because of the demands of this stage. This particular theatre is very different to anything I’ve ever worked in (which I think is true of most actors in this company) because it's open air, it's in the round and that means it's a different request. There's no set or lighting as such that you would have in a conventional proscenium arch theatre. So we did some movement around that idea and then started Act 1 Scene 1. At the moment we are just going through it bit by bit, step by step each day.

Learning my lines
In rehearsals, each actor has a different approach. Some people carry their scripts, some don’t. I don’t like to let the script go even if I know the lines but certainly by the end of next week I will let it go. Even if you do know your lines, it's helpful to have the script because you need to explore how you will move and holding the script is saying ‘I’m not committing to this yet so don’t assume that what I’m doing is what I think is right’. It's kind of a little insurance policy that you can wave to the director and say ‘I’m not committed to that yet’! Well that's the way I work anyway. Some people actually are off book and some are not. For myself, there are particular scenes where I think I like the flow of this, I understand it, I feel comfortable with it so I’ll let the book go, and sometimes you find you’re in the middle of a scene and you just put it down and you stop using it.

I’ve found that that's how I realise I’ve learnt the lines. I don’t sit down like you do at school and go ‘de-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum’ and put it against your chest and try and memorize it. I think most actors look and study the script, but it kind of goes into the head the more you speak of it, the more you talk and move it and think about the character. The words actually just start to fall in to place.

The lines are then in your head all of the time! Most actors would admit to having been caught in the street looking like they’re insane. You may have seen somebody walking down the street who seems to be talking to somebody (and they’re not talking in to one of those remote mobile phones) and you just see somebody looking quite vicious or angry or sad and mumbling to themselves - they might not be mad, it could just be an actor in rehearsal. Avoid them though!

Looking at the context of the play
We’ve had two talks with a professor of English who works here [Farah Karim-Cooper] and she gave us a context of Rome in the time the play is set but also Elizabethan England at the time it was written, or rather Jacobean because I think Elizabeth had croaked it by then! We were told about England in the time of Shakespeare and the time he was writing the play because obviously that will be present in the play as well, the politics of the time. It was quite a heated and scary time and there was a lot of paranoia going around with plotting and counter plotting and all of that because of the Catholic/ Protestant thing that was going on in Britain at the time, so we looked in to that.

Coriolanus is a highly political play and it is about the halls of power and what goes on and the voters and the politicians and the spin doctors and all of that, so in that sense you can see all of that as a parallel of today is you want to but we’re not going to be pushing it. If you did a modern dress production of this with mobile phones and CNN type news things - and you could do that with this play, you could put cameras on it and set it outside Westminster or Capitol Hill and it would read exactly the same as George Bush coming out to make a speech, or George Galloway talking to his constituency or whatever.

You can see all those issues going on within the play. My character in particular has the ability to spin; he's manipulating and spinning in the same way that you see these politicians come out to speak publicly and they’re very, very nice but really what they’re saying is ‘vote for me and get rid of this guy’. The stakes are a lot higher here in this play but I think you can see all of that. But I don’t know that we’re specifically doing that with this production, we’re not being specific about it, we’re inviting the audience to think for themselves. Hopefully an audience, a discerning audience, will see the parallels, recognise the politicians, recognise the soldiers, recognise the people, the plebs and how easily manipulated people are. <

Bulletin 3

Rehearsals so far
We’ve been going through the play scene by scene and ‘putting it on the floor’ so it's called. We’re just looking at the physical shape of the play. The next stage will be to discuss what's going on not just in the lines but to take it out of the written word and to really look at what's happening in each scene. By doing so, we’ll give each scene an arch, a shape, and not just look at what's happening on the line but also beneath, below and around the line; people's relationships and people's intention within the scenes.

What's been the best moment of this week? The worst one would be easier! I think the worst is the feeling when you’ve finished rehearsals. Yesterday, Margot [Leicester who plays Volumnia] and I both went and had a glass of wine and both started pulling our hair out and saying ‘What are we doing? Do we know what we’re doing?’ Actors give that comfort to each other when we have self-doubt, when we’re wondering if we are ever going to put any shape into a production. Of course you do eventually, but at the moment we’re going through that period when there's been a lot of demands made, a lot of decisions made very quickly which may be undone next week and we’re sort of wondering what the shape of it will be – how it will spin out. And along the way there's always good moments - there's always fun, there's always a laugh.

Text work
I had a session with Giles Block this week and it was great since he is so precise and very clear about the beats and the pentameter. It really reveals stuff to you about things that you’re not too sure about.

There's the scene where the two tribunes, Sicinius and Brutus, are manipulating the crowd. It's Act 2 Scene 3 and Sicinius and Brutus aren’t too happy because it looks as if Coriolanus has gained the support of the citizens but they know that the game is not up because all they have to do is ‘put into colour’ – if they can make Coriolanus angry then it will expose his pomposity and his disdain of the citizens.

There's one moment in the scene – and here we have a slight edit which may not appear in all versions of the play – when we’re talking to the citizens and basically saying ‘You have made a mistake. If you’re telling us that he patronised and scorned you then what are you doing? This is crazy. You must stop this’ and then Sicinius says:

Say you chose him
More after our commandment than as guided
By your own true affections; and that your minds
Pre-occupied with what you must rather do,
Than what you should, made you against the grain
To voice him consul. Lay the fault on us.

Then Brutus goes onto say:

We read lectures to you
How youngly he began to serve his country,
How long continued, and what stock he springs of
The noble house o’th’ Martians: from whence came
That Ancus Martius, Numa's daughter's son “

He's basically giving the whole family lineage and telling them about all the great things these people have done. We’ve cut out everything Brutus says next and then I come in – “One thus descended”. Giles helped me with this line because I say:

One thus descended
That hath beside well in his person wrought,
To be set high in place, we did commend
To your remembrances

Now I find that line difficult. I understood ‘One thus descended’: he's a posh person. But this line – ‘That hath beside well in person wrought/ To be set high in place we did commend/ To your remembrances’ – I just wasn’t getting it. The meaning is that as well as being descended from these wonderful people, he also, in his own person, in his own right , deserves to be put in a high place: so as well have having a high lineage, he also earned the right himself for all that he has done.

I knew what it meant, but I didn’t quite know where to put the stress to bring the meaning across. Giles helped by saying to me that the word ‘person’ must be hit. By emphasising ‘hath’ you eventually find that ‘person’ is where the hit is. Just little things like that - you find it suddenly becomes clear. So that's an example of how Giles helped me this week – one of many. Every time I come to say that line I think ‘Oooh here it comes’ – but I’m kind of over it now!

Working with the actor who plays Brutus
I’ll let you into a secret; the best work we’ve done this week was in the pub last night! After rehearsals, we went to the pub for a drink and we talked and talked. We’ve actually discovered some things. You know, you’re working with another actor in rehearsal but you’re working from the text and you’re working towards learning lines. You are trying to sort of be aware of each other's rhythms and beats and nuances whatever and last night we discovered where we want to go together because Sicinius and Brutus are kind of a double act - as anybody studying this text will know. They are individuals but they operate as a double act so it's important that we both feel as actors that we’re heading towards the same goal.

Differences between Sicinius and Brutus
We’ve yet really to discover exactly what they are. We’re jabbing at it. At times, it seems that Sicinius is more politic, more cautious and meticulous and so on, and then at other times it's Brutus. I suppose it's up to the actor to decide what the nature of the person is. We’re very much playing them as people from the political world. They’re both politicians and they’re both heading towards the same goal. They do consider the interests of the people but more crucially there's a lot of personal ego so it's possible to discover in the text and in the performance moments when they sometimes even try to outdo each other in very subtle ways. In some ways, they’re like Gordon Brown and Tony Blair in this country. We only get to see Brutus and Sicinius in public most of the time and in private they kind of shift about each other and it's possible to show some conflict but neither of them exposes any personal ambition or anything like that yet.

For example, when news comes that Aufidius and Coriolanus are coming to sack Rome, we rehearsed that scene this morning and how each of them responds. There's only one line. They don’t speak. Cominius comes in and Menenius is already there and they’re saying to us ‘This is up to you. You’ve done this. This is your fault’ and they keep on going on and on about it and we are obviously very scared because we know we have effectively brought this about ourselves. Two minutes previously Sicinius and Brutus have been boasting and feeling quite smug that everything's going so nicely. So now they’re both terrified.

There's only one line we say from all the haranguing that we’re getting from Cominius and Menenius and this one line we both say is ‘Say not we brought it’. Interestingly John [Dougall who plays Brutus] said it very quietly whereas I barked it, really defensive. Those are things that come out as much from your own personality or your own choice of what you feel you might do if you were in that situation, they just come from your own instincts and sometimes they’re right and sometimes the director will suggest ways of developing it. It's part of our challenge to make Sicinius and Brutus seem like they’re dynamic in themselves. That's part of the challenge and we’ll see how that goes.

Bulletin 4

Rehearsing Act 3 Scene 1
In this scene, I’m kind of the ringmaster – myself and John [who plays Brutus] really keep it moving along, making sure that we’re purporting to give Coriolanus a fair hearing. Coriolanus is going to have to be as modest as he can and all we’ve got to do is drop one little word and the word I drop is ‘traitor’ delivered very calmly. It just makes him explode – so therein lies the manipulation and disingenuousness of it because the tribunes are pretending that we’re trying to have this really fair trial but in actual fact we are goading and provoking Coriolanus and consequently provoking the crowd. That's what's wonderful about the scene – it's a very exciting scene I love it.

The tribunes
We’re going to have a few individual sessions focussing on Sicinius and Brutus we’re having an hour-long session with Dominic [the director] just talking specifically about that relationship. We need to thrash out the sort of questions that we’re asking about the two characters. What are their differences? What are their motivations, individually and together?

They’re not classic Shakespearean villains. We’ve got to be quite careful about what we’re aiming for because they’re not Iago or Richard III, there’re not villains in that sense. They’re very regular–what makes the play quite sophisticated is that they’re not evil but at the same time they’re very self motivated and egotistical, albeit as voices for the common man. You can smell of them that their evils are very present. We need to get together to find out and define where it happens in the play and show that and make it as dynamic as we can.

Costume fittings
I did I had a fitting after my session with Giles and my costume has got stitches everywhere! You can see the shape of it and you can see the fabric – it looks a bit of a hotchpotch at the moment but I know that they know what they’re doing!

Bulletin 5

Technical rehearsal
In some ways, technical rehearsals at the Globe are easier than most techs because there isn’t a huge or specific lighting design as there would be in other theatres. Similarly, due to the nature of the Globe, there wasn’t much to speak of in terms of a set due to the nature of the globe. So with those two things gone, and virtually no props, the tech was rendered quite simple in terms of just getting through it. We were able to explore the space without interruption, because normally in a tech you’d get five lines in and somebody would shout “Stop, stop, stop!” and it all becomes about the technical aspect, whereas here –unusually so- this was very much centred on the performance.

The technical rehearsal lasted for four days and the whole thing was done in full costume. This was necessary because we were given our togas for the first time, and togas are bizarre. If you are wearing suits you have a reference to modern life; it's easy. But then suddenly you get this big piece of fabric wrapped around you and it falls and droops and does all sorts of things so you sort of have to learn how to present it, to make it seem like you are used to wearing it.

Costume and character
I tend to use my toga quite a lot on stage. I think that Sicinius is the sort of character who would do a lot of adjusting of his tie were he wearing a suit, so if he is wearing a toga I reckon he's got that sort of officiousness about him where he would be quite sort of aware of how he looks and how he is presenting himself. The putting on of the costume reveals stuff, it always does, because a costume designer has looked at the character and has made decisions on that, so when you put it on it kind of informs you a little bit. Sometimes you disagree with the costume, you think it is wrong, and there can be a process of negotiation, but very often it's a revelatory thing.

My costume is more colourful than Brutus’ costume. I think what is being subliminally presented by our costumes is that we are both political ‘machinators’ and we are both very ambitious. In the text, it seems to me that Sicinius is just slightly more ambitious and slightly more driven. To present that visually in terms of the costume, he's more of an arriviste or more of a ‘new money’ type character, so in today's terms Brutus would be in a nice simple black suit with a good shirt and tie, whereas I would have something a bit more flashy.

There is a line in the play that says ‘your beards’ meaning both of our beards but I just have a tiny little bit of light stubble and initially I didn’t have anything at all. I don’t really think it's that specific. If Dominic came along and said ‘You know, I really think you ought to have a beard’ then I would have grown one, much to my disappointment because I don’t really like having a beard. But John [who plays Brutus] decided he would have one and so grew it for the part. It's just a bit of dynamism visually and adds a contrast to me as well.

Brutus and Sicinius
I think that Brutus is certainly less pro-active, although he does give Sicinius advice. But I am the person who opens the gambit and I’m the character who says the first line, which is an invitation to think about what we are going to do about this guy, Caius Martius; he's not right for this society, and he is arrogant, and he is a figurehead that needs to be taken away. So I open that debate with Brutus and I have a ready accomplice. We have just been elected as tribunes really so we have to decide whether we are going to take this post as just a titular thing or whether we are actually going to do something with it. I think Sicinius is ambitious and if he gets a small bit of power he is going to do something with it, and he does.

First entrance

When Brutus and Sicinius first enter the stage, we are standing far away from the others. We are scrutinising, we are watching what's going on. And we are very definitely presenting the fact that, although we have been newly elected tribunes, we’re not going to be on side with the patricians and on side with the nobles. Straight away when we come out, we’re not part of the fray, we’re not shaking hands with everybody, we’re just watching from the sidelines and then we emerge to do our business.

Movement
I think if you do something subtle with your movement, it kind of underpins what's happening in the language or illustrates maybe a little bit. The language is dense and difficult for some people to engage with straight away, hopefully not overly so but maybe just a little bit. So my movements are there in case you, the audience, are in any doubt, I’m throwing something at you which will make you think hmmmm there's something up here.

If you ever watch Question Time [ a British political programme] or similar shows it's really interesting to look at their body language. You can always tell what might be going on with them. Very often, just unnecessarily adjusting a tie or repositioning yourself on a seat when something is said, it's telling. It's not specific, you can’t specifically say what it is, but you know that there is something going on. There is something ticking over in somebody's mind. It should look un-self-conscious. It's not ‘Dr. Evil,’ it's ‘I’m preoccupied’ and that preoccupation in the silences and then when you speak is kind of joined together in a weird kind of way.

First night
On the first night, I felt was bizarrely calm. The good thing about not being the very first person on stage is that you get to listen to the audience and the unfortunate actor who actually has to speak the first line of the play. In Coriolanus it's a good ten minutes before I come on, so I can sit in the tiring house and listen to how it's going. And because I can hear the warmth of the audience straight away, and the first people on stage have got a dynamic going with the audience, I just thought that this audience are receptive and relaxed. Of course you are always nervous – it's only natural. But knowing it is a friendly house, an open and welcoming house, I just tried to keep calm and do what I’ve been rehearsing.

Every night I go out I find that, because of the nature of the space and the impact of the weather, light, cold, chill, wind, hot sunshine and all of that, there are adjustments in every performance. The weather adjusts an audience's concentration, and consequently it can sort of adjust yours if you don’t concoct ways of keeping yourself locked in the play and refreshing it for yourself without distracting another actor. I wouldn’t say that I move from point A to B to C every night; particularly when it is me and John on stage we move around one another quite fluidly, almost in an improvisation style. We kind of float, and if he floats one way I’ll float another. It keeps it all nice and organic and alive, which is good because I love that.

Connecting with the audience
I do find myself looking into the eyes of people in the audience, particularly when I am delivering speeches to the citizens, giving them our thoughts and trying to stir them up. Both John and I use the audience. It depends who is there really but we do sometimes get distracted by them; once I looked at somebody who had this look of complete terror as I was looking at them because that fourth wall was coming down, the fourth wall was falling for them and they just looked away immediately in terror and panic, as if I was going to jump on them or something!

I was doing a matinee show on Saturday and there was an actor I know from Ireland just standing in the audience looking up at me, and that was really, really distracting, because he was so there! I did catch his eyes but then very briskly moved away, trying to stay in the world of the play, trying not to think about what he's doing here and that I haven’t seen him in years! It is possible to get quite distracted by that. You do get back but you just have to start concentrating again, start listening to what you are saying, and more importantly listening to the other actors, which is something I’m doing more and more of now that I am comfortable in my own role. It's very important in acting to listen to what other characters are saying, not just to act listening but to genuinely listen so that you enhance your performance. Because I’m getting to the point where I listen properly to the other actors, I’m beginning to understand the rest of the world of the play. I still haven’t made my mind up about what Shakespeare was trying to say with this play.

Bulletin 6

The tribunes and their role
I think the tribunes do have a good cause to fight for although Sicinius takes it on a touch opportunistically. The cause the tribunes are championing is that of the people, the plebeians. Sicinius feels anger against the lifestyle of the patricians [the ruling elite] but he is a man of wealth himself so therefore he cannot really feel the heart of the people. However, he does fulfil the task of representing the people with a certain degree of integrity but that integrity is erodes because of his own ego and ambition.

Shakespeare isn’t kind to anyone in this play, in my opinion, and I think if you look at the tribunes, the ‘speakers for the people’, unfortunately there is something disingenuous about them. In this production, Dominic is very specifically saying that Sicinius and Brutus are of the ruling class, maybe not quite as high up the social ladder but definitely upper middle class as opposed to aristocratic. But they are none the less attached to the upper echelons of society. You could do another version of this play and have a tribune who comes from the people, a type of trade unionist or something, a person who really passionately feels their voice as representative of the people and it might alter the play. But in this production the tribunes are of the ruling class themselves, and their agenda is as much to do with their own social sphere as with any concerns for the people. If the rule of the Coriolanuses of the society is diminished or eroded, if the role of the nobles is eroded, then they as the representatives of the people effectively take the leadership of the country, and that is what I believe they are about.

What is the city but the people?
There are some lines which I feel that Sicinius genuinely means when he says them. For example, in Act 3, scene 1, when he cries, ‘What is the city but the people?’(3.1.197) I do think in that moment Sicinius believes that it is true, that in that moment he does have a passion for that idea, but it soon goes. Really, it's all just a personal, alpha male one-up-man-ship. Here is a man that is not as well built as some, doesn’t have the physical prowess, isn’t a fighter like Coriolanus. In this production, Jonathan [who plays Coriolanus] has a rugged warrior look whereas I am physically much finer. And I think my character's anger at Coriolanus is at his aloofness and at his arrogance and his ability to do whatever he wants. So in shouting that line, it's almost as if Sicinius is saying to Coriolanus, ‘I’m as passionate as you are, I’m as good a man as you are. Get off my stage and out of my country’. Sicinius is just as hubristic and self serving underneath, probably even more so than Coriolanus. Coriolanus really genuinely believes his political convictions. I’m not so sure about Sicinius. I don’t know whether there is a play on ‘cynicism’ and Sicinius.

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