Mark Antony

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In the Globe Theatre Company's production of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony was played by Mark Lewis Jones.

About Mark Lewis Jones

Mark has appeared in productions for the RSC, Royal National Theatre, Lyric, Hammersmith, and the Derby Playhouse. His television work includes roles in The Knock, Soldier, Soldier, This Life, Between the Lines, and Casualty. Mark also appeared in The Globe's opening season productions of The Winter's Tale and The Maid's Tragedy.

Click on the numbered links to follow Mark's journey as he creates and plays the character of Mark Antony in the Globe Theatre.

Mark Lewis Jones - Introduction

The rehearsals take place in rehearsal rooms about 5 minutes walk from the Globe theatre itself. Each rehearsal room is very large and has an outline of the Globe stage marked out in tape on the floor. This helps the actors to prepare for working on the Globe stage. The actors will have very few rehearsals on the Globe stage before production week.

Each day your actor will receive his/her ‘call’ which is the time s/he is expected to report for rehearsal. During the rehearsal period, an actor's day will vary considerably. Your actor may rehearse scenes, attend a class (voice and/or movement) or have a costume fitting with the wardrobe department. A typical day might begin at 10.00am and finish at 6.30pm – sometimes there are also evening calls.

During the rehearsal period (particularly at the beginning) your actor will research his/her character. To help the actors, the assistant director will find relevant books, pictures, etc. and bring these to rehearsal. Extracts from books and pictures are often stuck onto the rehearsal room walls. Actors will also experiment with using props in rehearsal; these will be rough versions of the final prop and will help the actors to build the prop into the scene. Similarly, some form of rehearsal costume will be worn e.g. long skirts for the women, this will help actors to get used to moving, sitting, etc. in their costume. In particular, actors will use the actual shoes they will wear in performance during rehearsal. This is to wear the shoes ‘in’, as they are made using Elizabethan techniques and most pairs have no specified ‘left’ and ‘right’ foot. Many actors also feel that wearing the correct shoes helps them to ‘get into’ character.

The companies have 5 weeks of rehearsal before the technical and dress rehearsals. Generally, the beginning of this period is spent improvising around the text and in development of character; towards the end of these 5 weeks, actors will rehearse scenes in detail and run parts of the play. The exact method of working in rehearsal is established and shaped by the director.

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Mark Lewis Jones - Character Notes

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process and begins to perform the play for an audience. They are simply his/her own reflections on the process of bringing a role to life. These ideas continue to change and evolve as the play is in performance.

It takes less than two months from the time the actors first meet together with the director to read through the script, until the opening performance. After six weeks of rehearsing in a rehearsal room, Mark and his company members moved to the Globe stage for a week of technical rehearsals. During the tech rehearsals at the Globe, the actors rehearse their blocking, or set movements, making changes if necessary to adjust to the Globe Stage. They also wear their costumes for the first time, practice any quick changes and use performance rather than rehearsal props. The actors may also assist with scenery changes, although most Globe productions use minimal scenery. This is a time for the director and the cast to work out all the technical aspects of the show so that it will run smoothly in performance.

The transition from the rehearsal room to the Globe Stage presents many new challenges for the actors. Once they begin rehearsing on the stage, the actors may have to readjust their blocking and the way they interact with one another. An actor might discover that a scene, which felt very intimate and truthful in a small rehearsal room, feels completely different once the actors are on stage.

Because of the way the Globe stage is designed, there are particular aspects of working in the space that Mark must also be mindful of e.g. the area between the pillars is a ‘dead’ area, but the corners of the stage are positions of strength. Mark has also been told that the ‘live’ areas of the stage are the long diagonals, which cross from one corner of the stage to the other.

Probably the most significant aspect of moving to the Globe stage for Mark is having an audience surrounding him on three levels during the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech in Act 3 Scene 2. For the first time he can address the audience in the Globe as the crowd in Rome whereas in the rehearsal room he had to ‘imagine their responses’. In this speech Mark finds that there is a fine line between ‘not letting the audience get ahead of him’, and yet not ‘plowing though it’ so quickly that the audience ‘feels excluded’. He is impressed by how intelligent the Globe audiences are and how they ‘pick up’ on the many ironies in the play. After the first performance of Mark and his fellow cast members realised that they were actually moving too slowly for the audience. Since that performance, Julius Caesar's running time has decreased by almost half an hour.

Another major challenge for the actors when they move to the stage is to integrate all the technical elements of the production into their acting.

During earlier rehearsals, Mark was able to immerse himself in exploring Mark Antony's needs and actions, but during the production week he has to be think about ‘business’ like: adjusting his blocking and voice, timing entrances and exits, and completing various costume changes (often quickly). When Mark moved to the stage he had to concentrate on projecting loudly enough for every member of the audience to hear him clearly, while still maintaining a ‘realistic’ vocal quality.

During the run of the play all the actors continue to take voice classes at the Globe and participate in a group physical and vocal warm-up before each performance. An actor warms up his/her voice much the same way an athlete will stretch his/her muscles before a game to get them ready to work and to prevent injury. Mark must take care of his voice especially because of the demands of an outdoor performance space like the Globe. If an actor does not properly warm-up he/she risks loosing his/her voice temporarily and doing permanent damage over time.

There are two fight scenes in Julius Caesar and Mark and his fellow actors rehearse the fights before each performance. The reason for this is so that they know their choreography ‘backwards and forwards’ and so no one gets hurt. Mark believes that the final performance is the ‘marriage’ of all the work an actor does on character and relationship in rehearsals, coupled with these technical aspects of acting on the stage.

Following the tech rehearsals are the dress rehearsals, during which the actors run the play in full costume, exactly as they would during a performance. Integrating the costumes in Julius Caesar was a significant stage in the rehearsal process. In this play, and in Antony and Cleopatra, Mark and his fellow actors wear traditional Elizabethan costumes. These costumes, especially the armour, can greatly affect the way the actors move. It takes the actors at least 25 minutes to get dressed before the show and often they need professional dressers to help them with quick changes and/or difficult costume pieces. Mark says that wearing the costume helps him get into his character and the world of the play. He believes that the costumes for this play subconsciously helped him to create a distinct way of moving and walking for Mark Antony. Mark considers beginning to rehearse in costume to be one of the later stages in his character development.

Before the play opens officially there are several preview performances. No reporters from the press are allowed to attend the preview performances. During the previews, the director still takes notes and makes sure the play works with the audience. The director may also return periodically throughout the performance to monitor the production, giving notes to the actors when necessary.

At this stage Mark feels he has a much better sense of the arch of his character, or the way his character changes during the journey of the play. He notes that Mark Antony begins the play living a rowdy and carefree lifestyle. Mark believes that the gravity of Caesar's death forces Mark Antony to ‘come into his own powers as a leader’ and mature into a true statesman. At the end of the play, Mark finds that Mark Antony's humanitarian side is brought out in the way he talks about Brutus after his death. In Act 5 Scene 5, Mark Antony says of Brutus:

"This was the noblest Roman of them all . . .
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed up in him that nature might stand up
And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’ "

Now that he is in performance, Mark is trying to continually make his characters actions, and ‘shifts in action’ as clear and precise as possible. However, Mark also leaves room for new ideas to arise in performance and tries to keep his acting fresh by ‘responding to his instincts’ in performance. For example, Mark might change the way he says a line or punctuates a movement from show-to-show, though the essential framework of his performance remains intact. The aspect of Mark Antony's personality that Mark has concentrated on in the last stage of rehearsal and the beginning stages of performance, is that of the ‘grieving friend’. Mark has come to realise that ‘Mark Antony's love of Caesar is the baseline that everything stems from’.

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Mark Lewis Jones - Activities

These activities are based on the notes above. They are suggestions only; please feel free to devise your own. Please select the activities that are relevant to your group. You can send students’ work and suggestions from any of these activities to GlobeLink and we will be delighted to forward them to your adopted actor.

These activities have been devised assuming the students know the story of the play.

Cuts

There have been no cuts made to the Globe's production of "Julius Caesar", which now runs for approximately 2hours 40 minutes. Many companies do cut the text in order to produce a shorter production.

Do you think the director should make cuts in the play, as he deems appropriate?

If you were directing Julius Caesar which scenes, or lines, would you cut and why?

Intimate moments

Many of the company have found that intimate moments between characters work better on the Globe stage if they are played with some distance between the actors.

Choose a moment from the play where two characters have an intense private discussion. Try reading the lines, firstly standing next to the person you are speaking to then again standing some distance away from them. What is the difference? How does it affect your understanding of the scene and the characters?

Power Points

Re read you actor's bulletin paying particular attention to their observations about the strong and weak places on the Globe stage.

Choose a scene or section of the play. Draw a diagram showing where you would like each character to stand and where s/he might move to during the scene. Write a covering explanation giving reasons for your positioning of characters.

Short Intervals

Director, Mark Rylance, chose to have four short intervals during the play rather than one longer interval.

Do you think this a good decision? Give reasons for your answer.

At what point in the play would you position each interval and why?

Playing with the audience

During this production of "Julius Caesar" the audience are used as the people of Rome during Brutus and Mark Antony's speeches. Actors who play plebeians are sometimes dressed in modern clothing and make entrances from the yard.

Do you think it is appropriate to work with the audience in this manner?

Do you agree with the decision to costume actors in both Elizabethan clothing and modern dress within the same production? Give reasons for your answer.

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