Isabella

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About Sophie Thompson

This is Sophie's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Her previous Shakespearean roles include Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, Rosalind in As You Like It and Ophelia in Hamlet. Sophie has also performed in the musicals Company, Wildest Dreams and Into the Woods – she received an Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance as the Baker's Wife (Into the Woods). You can also see Sophie in the films Four Weddings and a Funeral, Emma, Relative Values, Gosford Park, Nicholas Nickleby and Young Visitors. Her television credits include Jonathon Creek, Persuasion and Railway Children.

Rehearsal notes 1

  • At the Globe
  • Chopping veg
  • Isabella
  • Playing a nun
  • First week of rehearsals
  • Voice
  • Lucky with verse

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

At the Globe

The casting director for Measure for Measure is Siobhan Bracke, who funnily enough cast me in one of the first Shakespeare plays I did with the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] quite a few years ago. So perhaps she put my name forward into a suggestion box. A meeting with Mark Rylance [Artistic Director] ensued and we talked about Shakespeare and Measure for Measure along with other bits and pieces. One of the things we talked about was acting out of doors. I had only done it once before; we did Hamlet in Elsinore, by the walls of a castle, which I found most challenging. I was a bit afraid about playing outside so Mark took me out onto the Globe stage, and I must say, I was arrested. I thought ‘Oh, it's not like the castle at Elsinore at all, it's really round and rather magical’. I was very taken by it and all those fears and trepidations dissolved – I thought to myself ‘I’d love to have a go if he would have me.’ We spoke again later on, when I had started to read the play, and I remember saying ‘I can’t understand a word, so I’m going to need a lot of help because I’ve forgotten how difficult it is to understand.’ But the more I read it, the more I realised there is a very clear story somehow. I felt a connection with Isabella and felt that I liked the part and the play. I met with John [Dove, Master of Play] and he agreed to let me have a go. When I arrived here on the first day I realised that I’d got a job at the Globe, where everyone is very passionate about the building – I feel humbled by the fact that I’m surrounded by people who are connected with and have a passion for this building. I haven’t got a connection with it yet, but I hope I will have.

Chopping veg

The period before rehearsals start is a funny time because you haven’t met everybody, so you don’t really know your environment, the lie of the land as far as your fellow actors are concerned. That means that the preparation you do is very personal and it feels a bit like chopping veg – you’re getting ready to cook something but you don’t quite know what it will be exactly, or what will go into the mix. It might taste awful! All I do is read the play over and over again, and I keep looking at it and thinking about it – not necessarily consciously, because I think a part of you plugs into an idea or notion the minute you know that you’re going to be working on something. It's hard to know what that notion is; you just start to find yourself thinking as your character, looking through their eyes and feeling with their heart. I carry the play about everywhere and keep having a look. I don’t do anything fancy – sounds quite dull, doesn’t it? [Laughs.] So I chop veg, but I don’t quite know what the recipe is or what the results are going to be. You get things ready: you might not need any carrots to begin with, but the more you think about it, you might decide that maybe you will need them after all. Suddenly you think ‘Oh, I’m going to need some leeks.’

Isabella

She's about to become a nun. That gives you a lot of clues about her commitment, focus and belief to start off with – there are all sorts of bits and pieces there – and then the story takes a turn: Lucio comes rushing in and says ‘Hang on a minute, don’t get your hair cut off yet. You need to come quickly and persuade this rather tricky customer that he doesn’t need to kill your brother.’ So Isabella's on the threshold of becoming a nun. I think there are quite a few thresholds and moments of birth and rebirth (as John [Dove, Master of Play] says) in Measure for Measure. Suddenly characters on the cusp of doing something that they thought made sense go ‘Oh, I’ve got to do this now – help!’ Then they have to make it up as they go along. Isabella is faced with the prospect of persuading Angelo not to kill her brother: she has never been in a situation like this before and, rather hideously, she's in it now. She says to Lucio ‘I’ll see what I can do’ [to persuade Angelo, 1.4.84]: she seems to be thinking ‘Oh, what can I do?’ and feeling that she hasn’t got the tools for the job. What ensues – and I think this happens to quite a few characters – is a voyage through extreme circumstances. The characters must quickly get to grips with things inside themselves that they didn’t even know were there, and how that adjustment is handled is always very revealing about somebody's real self.

Playing a nun

As I said, Isabella is about to take orders. In all honesty, I can only begin to imagine what that kind of commitment and belief is about. It's something that's always fascinated me, not adhering to a particular religion myself. Feeling that I’m not entirely without religion, but not adhering to one in particular, I’ve always found the belief system of individual religions fascinating and also frightening. When people say ‘I believe’ and they believe to the extent that they’re capable of doing something quite extreme – for me, that conviction is pertinent to this play and obviously pertinent to the world at large, at this moment in time. Usually one finds, doing a Shakespeare play, that it does all start to marry in like this because it's all about humanity and our deep flaws: about how difficult it is to be human and flawed. People try to find a way through, a way to cope with the world. At the beginning of the play, Isabella is just about to make a choice which will decide her way through the world, then suddenly her situation changes and that same route isn’t going to be her way through. Her belief and that aspect of the play generally just grabbed me, particularly in the context of a world with so much conflict rooted in extremist belief. When I read the play, wonderful little moments jumped out and were imbued with such feeling already – they connected to one's individual thoughts about everyday life in the world at the moment. I thought ‘Wow, there's a lot in here we need to listen to.’ That's Shakespeare for you!

First week of rehearsals

The Globe is run with fantastically deep passion and commitment – that's how Sam Wanamaker started things and it has continued. You arrive at this place as a new actor and, to begin with, you’re met by this amazing building. It's by the river which I find quite exciting, and you’re right in the midst of London at the very centre of the city. This week has been an introduction to that building for some of us – though lots of people have worked here before and are returning to the Globe. Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] has a very unique way of involving you immediately in the building: you’re shown around the entire thing, not just the theatre, and introduced to everybody which feels as though you’re being welcomed in. You also get your little identity tag that tells everyone that they can let you in, and you get a discount at the shop [laughs] – all these things have to be taken into account!

So you get your pass with a horrible photo that you’ve done in the booth. Then we had a wonderful talk with Giles Block [Master of the Word], who I had in fact worked with years ago at the RSC. He was working with the director Peter Hall, who I worked with there on All's Well That Ends Well. It was lovely to hear him in his own right – I hadn’t the pleasure of his whole take on things, which was really enlightening actually, because you start to concentrate on the verse as a very exciting form of language. It is an enabling form and I find that a bit thrilling, particularly in a world of buzz-words and sound-bites, which is something we touched on today with Stuart [Pearce, Master of Voice]. The voice work is another area I find fascinating because you’ve got so many different voices within you, and you forget that on a day-to-day basis. It's fascinating to have the opportunity to be a room with people bothering to think and talk about these things which go deeper than superficial appearances, and which are connected with your heart and soul. So we’ve had introductions and our first sessions. Of course, we’ve also had talks with John [Dove, Master of Play] but I haven’t stood up and uttered a word as Isabella yet. I might do that this afternoon.

Voice

As I said, Voice is fascinating, though when I was at college I used to think ‘It's such a silly class, you just have to talk loudly’. My favourite definition of an actor is actually someone who shouts at night! Obviously, that's not all there is to it; there are other aspects too! Stuart [Pearce, Master of Voice] is the man for the job because not only has he got a wonderful voice and it is lovely to hear him speak, but he talks about Voice in a way that is very important. You wish that the importance was more widely recognised: your voice is the sound you make in the world. One fascinating thing he said today was that ‘persona’, the word describing your self, means ‘through sound’. I hadn’t thought of that before. I suspect I would have if I had done Latin, but I didn’t because I’m not a scholar of any shape or form. I think when one does speak in the outside world, often a myriad of emotions can ensue, and these are things within a context that you have the chance to explore, which is wonderful. Thinking about your sound and where your sound sits is so connected to who you are and how you will connect with other people. There are various places a voice sits and these are connected with different elements, going up from your groin (which is Earth), moving up to your chest (Water) then around your throat (Air) and up around your head (which is Fire). Stuart said that all these images are mirrored in the Globe; there are areas in the building where all the elements are depicted in some shape or form. I find it really fascinating, a wonderful connection to oneself and to the outside world, to see how things link together. There's somehow a beautiful symmetry to it.

Lucky with verse

We’ve got lots of verse in this play, which I think makes us really lucky because it cuts to the chase in terms of emotion. Giles knows all the percentages of verse and prose in the plays: in Much Ado About Nothing they’ve got about eighty percent prose and twenty percent verse and we’ve got about the opposite, about eighty percent verse and twenty percent prose. Verse and prose are wonderful in completely different ways, but I think that prose is somehow more consciously constructed than verse. Giles believes that verse is spoken when the feelings are released and you get to the heart of the matter, whereas prose has more to do with wordplay, social mores and wit, people making jokes, thinking about what they are saying and perhaps being a bit clever. I’d never thought about it that way before – I’d always thought that verse was the slightly mathematical, restricted area – but it really does make sense.

All the talk about ‘iambic pentameter’ and ‘feminine endings’ … you can get a bit stuck in that and go ‘Oh, dear, we’ve hit the verse now’ whereas actually you can think of verse as a liberation, particularly if you’re working on a text and get a bit stuck. That's when people really start to say what they mean; they start to connect to the string that holds the balloon, and they start to tell a few more truths. Prick your ears up if you hear anyone speaking verse. If you think about language and just listen to how people talk when they’re trying to get something across, you hear verse rhythms. The minute Giles [Block, Master of the Word] drew our attention to the rhythmic similarity, I listened to everything more attentively and thought ‘Oh, he could start talking in verse any moment now.’ Iambic pentameter is actually a really natural rhythm – it relates to the pulse and the heart beat, and the beats in a line are usually enough space for a full thought. That enables you to come out with poetic things because, when you’re chatting, you don’t often articulate a full thought. So all of that is part of the feeling of everything being linked together here, which is fascinating for a newcomer like me.

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Rehearsal notes 2

  • The Tudor Group
  • Clothing

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

The Tudor Group

At first I found them extraordinary. I know it sounds mad when you’re an actor and you dress up all the time to do things, but I’ve always found groups that do this kind of historical interpretation fascinating. I’ve always thought ‘what a funny thing to do.’ I dress up for a living so it does seem silly to think that. I suppose they have a different take on the idea of playing a part because they’re living something in a very particular way – they live as Tudors would have done for so many days of the year. That is what I find hard to understand. Ruth [member of the Tudor Group] explained what the Group endeavoured to do – how they hoped to gain a deeper understanding of life by living in this way – and that helped me to understand them a bit better.

Ruth was so open and lovely. She was obviously very passionate about social history, and that was the side of things that I found most interesting in History at school, so it was great to feel her enthusiasm for the subject. She talked about how people in the Tudor period would have lived, and how that reflects upon how we live now. Also, she spoke about change: how little has changed, how much has changed and on what levels or areas of our lives that change is. On many levels, life has changed much less than we may think, but on other levels it has changed a great deal. For instance, religion was obviously a very powerful force in the Sixteenth Century but we can also see how powerful it is in the world today. One of the fascinating things I found out about was how women would cover their heads then, and how similar that is to Islamic belief today. I thought those parallels were really useful – I had no idea about those points of connection. In my costume fitting, I knew from talking to Jenny [Tiramani, Director of Theatre Design, Master of Clothing] that Isabella will have to have something on her head, but I didn’t connect that to religion – Ruth's information gave that detail an extra dimension that reflects back on the world today.

It's fascinating to look at our own social mores and realise we don’t know from whence they came – we simply think that what we do is normal, but actually it's quite odd when you start to ask questions like ‘Why do I stand in that way?’ or ‘Why do I walk like this?’ Take ladies in high heels for example: when I’m dressing up, I put funny shoes on and I can’t walk and I feel uncomfortable – I think ‘Well, what the chickens am I doing? This is really silly; my feet are hurting.’ It was interesting to get a new perspective on modern life by looking at the differences and similarities with the Tudor period. We also did some bowing and curtseying. I know I should have concentrated harder because I’m already panicking about the little curtseys that I have to do.

Costume

Usually you’ll be shown a drawing of your character's costume which a designer has done, and you discuss things from that point. What's lovely about Jenny is that she doesn’t work from drawings; you work together right from the beginning so you’re not presented with a designer's idea about what the character should wear. The process is collaborative from the word ‘go’.

We’ve taken quite a while trying to find a colour. That sounds a bit bonkers, but if you’re not going for black (which perhaps you might expect though Isabella's not a nun yet), it is hard to try and find a line between what would have been a well dressed woman wearing good clothes and a woman who is going to become a nun. When you entered a nunnery you weren’t given an outfit straight away, so Jenny and I have come to it through the journey of the play: you would hand over your worldly goods when you entered the Order, and they’d be able to get something for them (to buy necessaries like candles and things), I suppose. Then Isabella perhaps would have had the simplest thing made for her. The colour blue is associated with servility and serving others, so at the moment we’re going for a very pale, blue-grey colour, which has a lot of light in it rather than it being dreary. I’m wearing a corset and all the rest of it too; the shapes we’re going for are obviously very traditional Elizabethan garb, but the dress is the simplest possible under the circumstances. It's as simple as she can go whilst keeping her dress appropriate to her class.

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Rehearsal notes 3

  • Ending
  • Word work
  • Prison Scene: Act III, scene 1
  • Perspectives

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

Ending

This last week we’ve broached Act five for the first time. That is really helpful. Getting towards the end somehow makes you want to go back to the beginning again and take the journey through from start to finish. You have to go back over things at the beginning in order to find out where you are at the end. In rehearsals you often focus in on one scene here and another scene there, so it can help to go back to the start and see the whole journey through, because it gives you a better idea of the shape of the play. At first, I thought Act five was impossible because it's one of those typical last acts in Shakespeare where all the ingredients come together, and separate stories collide and reach their conclusion. That's very exciting, but it can be also a bit overwhelming because you think ‘How do I respond to that without chatting?’ [laughs] Claudio suddenly appears alive when I thought he had been executed… that's something I haven’t got to grips with at all. One doesn’t want to generalise anything, you endeavour to be so specific about all these moments. It's been lovely to broach Act five, but it still remains a mystery at this juncture.

I like that Isabella doesn’t say anything at the end when the Duke offer her his hand [V.1.489-99]. I think that's good. The Duke keeps saying ‘Give me your hand’, and there's not really any opportunity to do that. You also wonder whether she goes with him – well, I think she does go with him, actually, but it's beautifully unresolved.

Word work

I had some great sessions with Giles [Block, Master of the Words]. We talk about the rhythms in poetry and prose and how that connects to the human breath. I find that really helpful, more helpful than I would have thought. I’ll do work on my own and write little things down for Giles, where I’ve got stuck or have questions. For instance, Isabella doesn’t really speak much prose. The only scene with prose that she has is when she meets the Duke (as the Friar) for the first time in the prison [III.1]. Little things like that are like treasure along the way – it's as though you’re on a paper chase. You find a bit of paper at one point, and you say to yourself ‘Ok, I don’t know where I am, but I might find another piece of paper to show me the way in a minute.’ I find it fascinating that when she meets the Duke, she suddenly starts talking in prose. In my opinion, Isabella in this scene is so thrown and doesn’t know where she is that she speaks in a different way, but when I talked with Giles about prose and verse, we didn’t work on any specific lines from Measure for Measure. What we did instead was work on a piece of prose from As You Like It – Orlando's lines that open the play. Giles has a theory that verse is spoken from the heart whilst prose is more to do with the intellect. We looked at Orlando's speech and suddenly thought, ‘Why isn’t he talking in verse? He's talking about something that is very close to his heart’ and Giles felt it was to do with the fact that Orlando doesn’t quite know where he is or who he is at that point; he hasn’t found his own voice yet. That's helpful for me at this point. I think Isabella's problems are a bit different, but at the same time this [III.1] is a point in the play where she's really lost and is desperately trying to find a way out. Then the Friar appears and comes up with the most extraordinary idea and she goes with him, which is amazing and very spirited under the circumstances.

Prison scene: Act three, scene one

At the end of Act two, scene four, Isabella thinks 'Right, I’m going to have to go and tell my brother.' I don’t think she's resolved in her heart at all, but is resolved somewhere in her head, in terms of her ideas about honour, the structures that she's lived her life by – or at least tried to – and the reasons that she's entered the nunnery. She thinks ‘Okay, I’m going to go and tell Claudio the situation. I know he's fantastically honourable, and that’ll solve it: he’ll die honourably, and I’ll keep my chastity.’ Although this is quite a shocking equation, having thought it through from where Isabella is at this point in the play, I think I’m beginning to grasp that that is a feasible alternative, for them both actually. To die honourably in those times was actually rather marvellous. I think that she feels, or at least persuades herself, that will actually be a very positive thing. Claudio is going to die honourably because he's committed a sin after all, and she's going to maintain her chastity, which is paramount. She's worked that all out in her head, but I don’t think things are so clear in her heart. She is faced with her brother in the prison and she has to tell him that he must die. That comes as an awful shock to him, because, as we learnt from Ruth [Goodman, Tudor Group], being clapped into irons for a while and thinking that you might die was actually fairly common, but more often than not people got off without such severe punishment. The way Alex [Hassell, Claudio] is playing his journey at the moment, Claudio feels quite hopeful that he’ll avoid the death penalty, but when I do come in and say to him “No, you really have got to die,” that's a hideous shock to his system. As I’m playing it at the moment, the realisation that he is going to die is also a shock to my system as well. It's all very well having theories, but carrying them out is painful. You know, it's easy to have a certain theory or philosophy in the comfort of your cloister, but to carry it through and face the implications of that theory can be very disturbing.

In the Folio, the line where Isabella expresses that she's actually going to carry that out is in inverted commas, as a quote:

“More than our brother is our chastity.
I’ll tell him yet of Angelo's request,
And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest.
[II.4.185-7]

I think perhaps at St. Clare's [the nunnery Isabella is about to enter, I.4] a similar saying was one of the things written in their handbook – one of those things that you say to yourself to firm your resolve. Of course, faced with the real flesh-and-blood brother, the scene becomes very painful. He starts to really think about what it means to die; not just in terms of something that's written on emblems when you’re a gentleman and all that, but how frightening that is ‘to die, and go we know not where’ [III.1.117]. So in the prison scene, you see them both really struggling: he struggles to face death in a gentlemanlike way, and she sees Angelo in her mind's eye and thinks ‘My brother has got to die because of this devilish wicked fellow.’ It's not at all clear-cut and she's really struggling with that. The first few times we went through the scene, it ended up in a brother-sister scrap, almost. I don’t think it is that anymore. I think there's a sense that they are both being confounded by the circumstance. Isabella is still desperately holding on to the fact that she must be doing the right thing, and then the Friar pops up from behind the pillar like Rumpelstiltskin.

Perspectives

It's really tricky for people in our day and age to make that leap and say ‘Actually it makes more sense that your brother dies.’ That's really tricky for the modern ear. So I’m hoping to find a way of making it true, because I think it's rather unhelpful for Isabel to be viewed as a monstrous woman at that moment. She's trying to adhere to a moral structure which runs through the characters very deeply; that's another thing that might be hard for us to understand, the reality of that struggle. It's so wonderful that, in Measure for Measure, the human flipside of the fish comes up at so many points. You see a person struggling with a religious notion or a belief, realising that actually it's almost impossible and very painful to put into practice, and that we’re all fantastically flawed. Claudio saying ‘I don’t want to die honourably; I’m scared,’ and Isabella going ‘Well, I don’t want to sleep with that monster, I don’t want to be forever damned’ – it's all just terribly human. Everyone's trying to hold on to something. Claudio, of course, is desperately trying to hold on to life itself, and I think Isabella feels that she’d be completely damned, so she's doing almost the same thing, but on a different track. They’re completely confounded, at which point Rumpelstiltskin goes ‘Hello, I’ve overheard your plight and I’ve got a few suggestions.’

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Rehearsal notes 4

  • This week
  • On the stage
  • Rehearsals
  • Inspiration

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

This week

We started doing a few scenes together. It's lovely to start doing that. It's also quite alarming! It's a mixture between lovely and alarming, because instead of working in quite an isolated way, as though your scenes were little islands, everything in the play begins to link together. It's very inspiring to see what other people have been working on. Somehow it helps to “irrigate” what you’ve been doing, to use a John Dove word [Master of Play]. The other scenes inform your work to a degree, although, as a character, I obviously wouldn’t know about the scenes that I’m not in. As an actor it's a very fruitful time in rehearsals; I’m starting to get a sense of the rhythm of the whole piece, which helps to put the particular scenes that I have been concentrating on into context. That's quite comforting.

On the stage

This production is the last one to open so we’re not having a lot of rehearsal time on stage. We have to work around all the performances of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing. I had an hour on stage with Mark [Rylance, Artistic director] this week, which was really interesting. Quite a few times, I’ve worked in spaces where the audience is on three sides, but every theatre is so different. The Globe is incomparable; three-sided things are always a challenge, but here it somehow feels more natural. I don’t know why yet. We haven’t really got onstage, so I’ve still to find out why the space is different in practical terms. During the session, I watched some of the actors on the stage from different points in the theatre, and I just realised how visually dynamic it is in different ways.

It's also very exciting to be able to turn upstage. I can turn away from someone completely, and still give out the story right there at the side, really helping that section of the audience in. I found that very helpful because part of me was thinking, ‘How different is it from another stage?’ I haven’t been on tour for a long time, but I remember from when I was on tour was that every theatre has its own character – like houses, or any kind of building – and theatres can feel particularly potent just because they’re gathering places, so much goes on there. To watch other people moving around the stage helped me see how movement onstage impacts on different sections of the audience, and so I started to find out about the differences at the Globe. I found that most helpful in my head, in rehearsals, since that day. It's just an extra layer. It's also because you’ve got people up in those little boxes sometimes [the Lords rooms], so there's no getting away from it. You really feel that you’re surrounded by people. I’ve really been aware of that aspect of it. I found the session very helpful in that it liberated the way that I move in my scenes. It opened them up for me, I think.

Rehearsals

We’re still really teasing out Act five. The last act of Measure for Measure is like a very dense ball of wool and we have to tease out the threads. I feel that more so with act five, scene one, than with any other scene, as most of the characters involved have to respond to all the threads of the story coming together very quickly. There are so many different things coming together at once and it's tricky to keep up. The real challenge is to keep those threads alive by using the text, and not doing too much awful ‘End of Shakespeare’ play acting, which I find I could so easily do! So we’re still trying to plumb the depths of that one. But maybe time will help as much as anything else. As we spend more time working on it, the scene will seem more familiar and less dense!

I like the unresolved quality of the final scene, although having a few lines would be quite good, quite helpful! I’ve got to be really clear about what I’m thinking if I’m not saying anything, and I suppose at the moment I’m not as clear as I need to be. Every time we do that scene, I stand there trying to work it out as we go along. I think I’m getting a little bit clearer, but it's hard because the character is quite confused. It's like when you’re playing someone that's meant to be boring: hopefully you don’t play it in a boring way – you want to remain interesting – but you know from the story that that person is quite dull. In Isabella's case, I’ve got to be able to be confused as a character, but I can’t be horribly confused as an actor because that means I’ll be unable to put her confusion across. I’m trying to be clear about what my confusion is, and at the moment I’m just confused! I think the feelings in the story are very mixed, and when your feelings are mixed, you do go blank; something in you shuts down and you can’t cope at all. I also think that people often portion down very large, powerful feelings because they’re too much to take all at once. I have to find the balance in what I show as well; when you’re surprised, you don’t necessarily stand back in amazement with your jaw dropped. I just want to make sure I’m not just making faces that are meaningless – that's got to be avoided at all costs.

Inspiration

I’ve seen a bit of Romeo and Juliet and I loved it. I haven’t seen a complete show yet, because we have such long rehearsal days and I have to get home to my children. The bit of the first half that I did see was very inspiring because they were using the space so beautifully. I thought the pace of it was exciting too, and the way they related to the audience. I saw the street scene with Tybalt and Mercutio and Benvolio so it was very action-packed, with brilliant fights. They had lots of opportunities to talk to the audience as well, and they did it so effortlessly: I was full of admiration. I know our story's different and I’m not involved in any action-packed street scenes, but I’m going to work on the opportunities I do have to make a special connection. I’ve got a soliloquy and I’m hopefully going to enjoy sharing that with the audience in the very particular way that you can here…

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Rehearsal notes 5

  • Technical rehearsals
  • Looking forward to the first preview

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

Technical rehearsals

It's lovely to get on the stage. Obviously, it feels very different from the rehearsal room. To feel all the different elements of the space around you is quite thrilling. I think, at the moment, I'm moving about the stage for the sake of movement. In one sense that's not a very helpful thing to be doing, but then again, I'm discovering where I can move to and each movement could mean for the audience. However, I do feel like I’m just ranging about - hopefully it will calm down soon! I'm pleased we're on the stage now. I think we needed to get out of the rehearsal room – it was like we’d swollen up a bit too much in there and the play needed to get out. The move was very timely. It felt very right coming on to the stage.

I find it quite useful to address the tour groups who come in and out of the theatre during technical rehearsals. You can’t get upset about the fact that they come in to watch, then get up and wander away. That's to do with their schedule rather than your performance! In a funny way, it takes the pressure off. We can start to get used to people moving about as they will during a performance, and as that movement is not something I’m used to, it's good to have a chance to familiarise myself before the previews. I’ve found that having people there also helps to focus my concentration because I’ve got to listen even harder to what the other characters say. This morning I practised my soliloquy at the end of Act two, scene four, and I really enjoyed it – I found that the fact there were people watching brought me out, rather than becoming too reflective and thoughtful.

I wore a corset all through the rehearsals to get used to the feel of it, and I’m glad I did because now we’re wearing full costume and I haven’t been too taken aback. I also wore my clippy-cloppy rehearsal shoes, which don’t feel very different from what I’m wearing as Isabella. So that aspect of the technical rehearsal has not been too difficult.

We’ve been doing run-throughs in rehearsal. It's always good to get to the point where you can see the play being put together. It's a bit of a shock at first, but exciting and interesting too. I learn such a lot from the different perspective that lends. It's as though the play moves into another phase, and shifts into another gear. The first run-through was very nerve-racking: I got through it just hoping that everything held together.

First Preview

I think plays get to the point where they need the crucial ingredient: people watching, an audience. Hopefully by Friday [first Preview], we’ll be ready to welcome that ingredient in. We’ll see all the differences that ingredient makes, and what adjustments we’ll need to make as a result. I think John [Dove, Master of Play] has brought the ingredients together brilliantly. Producing a play is like serving a dinner: you cook it all up, and you just hope that you’ve chopped all the veg and really prepared well. You serve it up and then see how people respond. The first audience is always exciting. They really are the vital, final ingredient.

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Rehearsal notes 6

  • First preview
  • Audience response
  • Focus
  • Pigeons
  • Press night

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

First Preview

The very first show was like being on a magic roundabout – everything was a bit of a blur, and I couldn’t look out at all! It was a liberating experience in many ways, because we were finally performing the play with all the people there. That's always a relief. It's like breaking through some sort of membrane, and afterwards I thought ‘Right, we’ve got it out there and people have seen it.’ Now we’ve had lots of previews, and bits and pieces have changed. For instance, in my first scene with Angelo, I’m trying to persuade him not to kill Claudio and I say

He's not prepared for death. Even for our kitchens
We kill the fowl of season.
[II.2.84-5]

Since the first preview, that pleading has become increasingly desperate. I want the audience to see that this is serious and I’m clutching at straws, so I try to say those lines as though I’m really not sure what on earth I’m going to say next. In the second scene with Angelo, we’ve been looking at the shifts between comedy and something much more serious. At the beginning of Act two, scene four, I say to Angelo ‘I come to know your pleasure.’ [II.4.31] and in the first previews that was received as a joke. Now, later on, there's still the comedy of the words but we’ve tried to balance it a little with the threat Isabella is facing. Small changes like that help keep the thriller-aspect of the play alongside the comedy aspect, and they result from getting the feel of the space with an audience in it. So it's a case of getting that experience and then practising!

Audience response

I find the speed with which the groundlings react amazing; they respond very quickly which is both exciting and nerve-wrecking. They’re almost a part of the play. Of course, the audience is always a part of the play, but here they’re practically on the stage and everyone can see each other, so they’re much more involved than they would be in an ordinary auditorium. They were very attentive and laughed much more than I expected. I think the whole cast was surprised at some of the bits they laughed at and other bits which they didn’t find funny. Here [at the Globe] they feel that they can laugh more, which opens up the show in a completely different way… in many respects Measure for Measure is a comedy. The way they do hairpin changes between hysterical laughter and serious attention is great. I think it's normal to get a mixture of reactions. In the scenes with Isabella and Angelo, I expect quite a lot of nervous laughter because the scenes are quite extreme. We got all varieties of laughter, which surprised me.

For example, when Angelo grabs Isabella's crotch [II.4], there was not only a reaction of shock – there was also some laughter and it was the kind you can't really categorise. That is the sort of moment when I do expect people to laugh a bit, though, because it's such a difficult moment to cope with. Most people don’t have a bracket to put that in, and they have to manage the shock of what they’re seeing, which makes them slightly hysterical and you get nervous laughter. But yes, we did get more laughter than Liam [Brennan, Angelo] and I expected. Well, Liam's played the Globe before, so perhaps he was more prepared for the immediacy and the openness of the audiences here.

Focus

During the first previews, we focused on the shifts that we'll have to make in order to accommodate what happens out there, in a theatre full of people. We have to get used to adapting the play in such a way that it doesn't lose the pace or certain rhythms in the scenes. The real challenge is to find a way of accommodating ‘out there’ whilst keeping your concentration. The Globe is very open and people move around quite a lot (particularly at the matinees), which is a new experience for me. Also, sometimes people in the audience pipe up and say things because they feel they can – well, they can, but I found that quite tricky to manage. I have to focus like mad to avoid being distracted. In the daytime with all the light, the audience almost makes you feel light-headed, because they are quite dazzling, especially when the sun is on them. So I’ve found it difficult to keep my focus in amongst all these elements.

When I’m up there onstage, I mostly notice what the groundlings are doing rather than the people in the galleries. The groundlings are like the sea, they’re moving all the time and the people sitting down are like some sort of coastline. The groundlings are definitely the people that make the most marked difference from one performance to the next, and they can be very different – it's quite alarming. That's part of what the Globe is all about, though. It's a matter of experiencing that difference and finding a way that makes it work for you – and with you.

Pigeons

I also noticed that the pigeons are much more active in the daytime than they are at night! In one of the previews, Angelo and I were circling around each other [II.4] and two pigeons on the stage were doing exactly the same thing! That was hard, because we can’t really react to them in that scene; as our characters, it's impossible to ‘incorporate’ the pigeons at that point! I thought ‘Oh, no, those pigeons now!’ You just have to deal with it as best you can, and say to yourself ‘I can cope with the pigeons.’ I do find the ‘outdoor’ aspects of the Globe rather difficult sometimes.

Press Night

We didn’t have a different type of audience, I don’t think. The difference on Press Night was not as marked as it usually is, perhaps because the Press actually came in on three nights (due to the Tube strike). I try to forget Press Night's happening. I just want to play the play as best I can - as you always want to do - and that's easier without extra nerves. I suppose I was hoping that we didn’t have too many helicopters, pigeons, rain and extra challenges that night. I’d love to say that I didn’t mind about it at all, but it is harder, it's a hurdle.

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Rehearsal notes 7

  • Hampton Court Palace
  • Comparing spaces
  • Getting ready
  • Audience response to Hampton Court Palace
  • Return to the Globe

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

Hampton Court Palace

I found the whole experience rather bizarre. I was starting to get used to the Globe, with all its weird and wonderful energy, then we went into a very much smaller space with a roof and a steeply raked audience. I think the move was good for us all in a way, because it brought the play back to basics. We had to play the story as clearly as we possibly could, because the space was a bit tricksy, in terms of voice. The high-vaulted ceiling ate up all the sound. Our running time was a lot longer in the end, but we had really good audiences. Nothing compares to the response at the Globe, particularly because of the groundlings, but the audiences at Hampton Court Palace were really attentive; I felt like they were focussing down a telescope. I had to pull in that telescope, because the distance between us and them was completely different to the distances at the Globe. The seats at the back of the rake felt a long way away.

As I say, that focus was good for us all because it took us back to basics. Sometimes the audience can get a bit hysterical at the Globe, and in a funny way that can distract you from the story. You’ve got make sure you’re not being seduced by the laughter. I felt the play became a much simpler thing at Hampton Court Palace. We realised that we didn’t have to cope with helicopters or people fainting because of the heat, so the play came to a completely different settling place. We realised that we could do certain things that wouldn't have worked so well at the Globe - leaving a bit of space around moments and holding pauses, for instance. That did lengthen the play somewhat. Physically, the Great Hall was quite odd because we were acting on such a small stage… in one sense that felt comparatively ordinary, but, after the Globe Theatre, it also felt very odd and naked space. It was a good challenge…

Comparing spaces

There are both advantages and disadvantages performing in a space like the Great Hall. I did miss the extraordinary responsiveness that you find at the Globe. The acting space at Hampton Court Palace was only half as wide as the Globe's stage, so physically I had to draw things in. Most of us have done that kind of thing on a tour – you turn up at the next theatre and it's a different shape and size… adaptation isn't too problematic, except for dances and fights. I would have thought the transfer was a lot harder for Romeo and Juliet because they’ve got big fight scenes. I’m only in the final jig, so adjusting to the smaller space wasn’t particularly difficult for me.

There were two rows of people seated down the sides of the acting space and that helped keep a sense of being ‘in the round’; the Hall felt more like the Globe than it might have done. We had to deliver out a lot more though, just because of the acoustics. I suspect those rows down the side kept us in ‘Globe style’ to a degree, in terms of our delivery. At the same time we were trying to remember that, whilst some audience members were terribly close, others were fantastically far away. That difference was a great challenge: at first I thought ‘Some people may not hear this and some people may feel that their ears are going to bleed!’

Getting ready

The dressing rooms were in the King's anteroom, which the audience went through before the show. I found chatting to the audience a bit tricky because I was about to escape into this imaginary world and tell them a story. I suppose I feel that a theatre play is somehow a mysterious thing, and I don’t really want to talk to the audience as myself. I want to be doing my pretending and tell the audience things in that way. So I stood and had my costume put on and I smiled and said “Hello”, but I felt a bit silly… Had the run at Hampton Court Palace been longer, I would have sorted that out and probably quite got into it, but we were only there for four shows. As it was, I realised I wasn't the best woman for that job. A lot of the others in the company were really brilliant at it, though, and I think chatting really helped to put the audience at their ease.

Audience response at Hampton Court Palace

They were lovely. There were people who wanted to shout aloud at the end of the play, and at the Globe they would have done. Here, I’d look out and they’d whisper ‘Bravo’ back. I think that response was something to do with the space – it is a Great Hall – and the fact that the tickets were more expensive. Perhaps as a result of these things, the audience are more reverent to the moment: maybe they thought shouting out wasn’t appropriate. Audience response is influenced by so many factors: the context of the Palace, the ticket prices, the space, the Great Hall and what that means... It's fascinating.

Perhaps this was similar to Courtly responses in Shakespeare's time - the people at Court are appreciative and the audience at the Globe are more ecstatic. I did feel old-fashioned in a way, as we went to play at Hampton Court Palace - it felt like the players were coming to the Court. We were the scruffy old actors turning up at the Court to entertain the folk there! I think the place itself and the occasion of that place made the play a completely different experience at Hampton Court Palace.

Return to the Globe

Quite a few of us found different things in our parts during the time at Hampton Court Palace - just little bits and pieces - and we’ve brought them back here. Some of the fine details that came easily with a roof and an indoor stage might not last long after the transfer back to the Globe – but other finds will last. For instance, I’m beginning to adjust to the fact that you can bring things down here [at the Globe] too. I think I yelled quite a lot to begin with, but I’m getting to grips with the space now. I’m exploring which Hampton Court details can stay – how small I can be. Generally, I think it's good for a play to be jiggled about, and several weeks into the run was probably a pertinent point for Measure for Measure to change venue. I heard another more sombre level of the play and re-focused on the intense ‘thriller’ aspects of it, which can be easy to forget amongst the laughter at the Globe. It felt like coming back to the core of the story.

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