Beatrice

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About Yolanda Vazquez

This is Yolanda's fourth season at Shakespeare's Globe. Last year she was a member of the Globe's first all-female company and played parts in both The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III. In 1999, she played Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and Bertha in Augustine's Oak, and in 2000 she played Hippolyta in Two Noble Kinsmen. Other roles include Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and Titania in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2002 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her television credits include Midsomer Murders, Peak Practice and A Touch of Frost. Films include Notting Hill, The Other Boleyn Girl and Morvern Callar.

Rehearsal notes 1

  • Back at the Globe
  • First thoughts about Beatrice
  • First days
  • Word work
  • Voice
  • Point
  • Interruption

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.

Back at the Globe

This time round I was asked very early on if I’d like to play Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, so I didn’t go through the process of auditioning. I was just offered the part and I really wanted to play it so I said ‘yes.’ It's great to be back – it's a very special place and I loved being a part of the first female company last season. I’m excited to see how we’ll move forward as an all-female company this year. We’ve only been in rehearsal a few days, but I think it does feel more natural this time round… having said that, I never found myself thinking ‘Where are the men?’ so last season can’t have been too odd! When we were doing our first read-through, the fact that we were all women never struck me ‘Ooh, look a whole bunch of women’. It does just feel absolutely natural. It's a fantastic company and I’m thrilled to be part of it.

First thoughts about Beatrice

It's such a famous part; everybody seems to have their favourite line and strong opinions and their favourite Beatrice moments - ‘Isn’t it wonderful when… Isn’t it extraordinary when …’ - which is lovely but it can also be quite daunting. When I first read the play, I realised I was reading it with all those people's thoughts in my head and I didn’t actually have a pure core of what I thought she was like, of my own first impressions about this person. Obviously I did have certain ideas, but through the games we did yesterday I found that she is a very, very lively person. Some people say that she's a feminist or that she's like a spinster- my idea is that she's full of joy. They do say of her that she's a very merry woman but it's not just her wit, it's not just the use of her words, it's also the way she conveys them – that's what I became aware of yesterday. We did exercises that involved going through the lines quickly and cue jumping and I found out that her mind works very quickly – somehow it made me think ‘What's she trying to hide?’ So now I’m thinking that her exterior involves playfulness and sharpness – but immediately I feel that there's something hidden and my task is to uncover this.

First days

This is our third day and everything is going well. We had our Meet and Greet on the first day, so actually this is only the second day of proper rehearsals, but so far so good! We’ve mostly been going through different aspects of the rehearsal process here, for people who are new to the Globe. The process here is a bit different because you have sessions with the Masters of Voice, Movement, Dance, and Words, as well as rehearsals were you look at the play, so it's good to get an overview of all those different elements at the beginning. We’ve had our first group sessions with Giles [Block, master of Words] and Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice].

Word work

I found comparing verse and prose with Giles very helpful, because a huge amount of Much Ado About Nothing is written in prose – I can’t remember whether it's only twenty or thirty percent verse – and we’ll need to be aware of the differences. We looked at the reasons why characters suddenly start to speak in different ways … if someone switches from verse to prose or from prose to verse, there's always a reason. We talked about the idea that Shakespeare often uses prose for scheming and plotting while verse seems to come from the heart and express a character's inner feelings. The few times that people do speak verse in Much Ado About Nothing, is when they talk about love or themselves. Beatrice speaks in prose until she decides to love Benedick, and then I’ve got a short piece of verse that's almost a sonnet:

What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, Adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind out loves up in a holy band.
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.
(III.1.107-16)

I think Beatrice realises she's got to change and therefore I will love Benedick; her feelings change and so the way she speaks changes too.

Voice

We looked at individual responses to voice work during our session with Stewart this morning. The people who had played at the Globe in previous seasons shared their experiences of that stage and what had worked for them, in terms of voice. Something new came up: Belinda [Davidson, Don Pedro] was in the first season and she said that women's voices on this particular stage can be quite difficult to hear sometimes. I think she mentioned it was something to do with the general quality of the sound, which is interesting because the original Globe theatre was made for a company of male actors. Belinda's idea really set me off thinking: what is the different quality in a woman's voice within the structure of this theatre that makes a male resonance work better? Is it something we’re not doing, or are there acoustic features of the building that mean a male voice is more resonant? Is a male voice really more resonant?

Having said that, Sarah [Woodward, Dogberry] commented on a performance of The Taming of the Shrew that she had seen last season – she had been able to hear the female company perfectly. The possibility of difference is something to bear in mind. I’ve also just started individual voice work with Stewart (as well as group work, we all have individual sessions with the Masters). Right now I’m trying to find my personal note; where ‘home’ is for my voice and where I feel comfortable.

Point

We didn’t have a normal read-through in rehearsals yesterday. Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] decided that we should sit in a big circle and the centre of the circle became the stage. We went through the play and when it was your turn to speak, you got up into the middle of the circle. Every time you referred to another character, you had to point at them: it wasn’t just names that you had to point out, but other referential terms of address like ‘he’, ‘thee’, ‘thou’ and ‘them’ … each time, you had to point at who you were talking about. Sometimes ‘them’ referred to characters that weren’t in the play and we had to invent them: we had to decide who ‘they’ were and you pick them out of the group. Whenever you pointed to someone to make them a character, they had to stand up and then sit down again. This was a really good game because it meant that we got to go through the whole play and really understood not only who the people in our lines were, but also that there are different characters like Cupid and Hercules that we had to invent.

It took a while to go through the whole play, but doing it in this way meant that there wasn’t the pressure of having to make a performance out of our first read-through: we were trying to bring a greater clarity to the play instead of ‘performing’ it. One thing which we all discovered is that in this particular play, people onstage are always talking about people offstage; they’re not just talking to each other but always talking about somebody else- almost as if they’re always gossiping about other people. We very rarely found ourselves pointing at people in the centre of the circle. I’m interested in how this gossiping and eavesdropping links to the work we’ve been doing with Giles on prose and verse: as I said, Much Ado About Nothing is largely written in prose and perhaps that's because, in Shakespeare, verse is often spoken directly from the heart. Very few people seem to be speaking directly to each other in the play.

Interruption

We did another great exercise when we went through the whole play again. This time we moved all the chairs out of the way and stood touching the wall. Whenever we got to one of our lines, we had to run to the centre of the space to speak. We also had to interrupt each other and speak the lines very, very quickly … we were never allowed to have a pause. You had to jump in and start speaking just as the person before you got to the last two words of their speech. This meant we got through the play very, very fast – I thought this was interesting because sometimes with the speed and interruptions it seemed incredibly natural. Perhaps this is because saying the lines in this way brought them closer to natural pattern of speech. I think we’re going to be playing games for a while, until the end of the week when we’ll start to look at individual scenes. I can’t wait to start on Beatrice's scenes.

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Rehearsal notes 2

  • Last week
  • Beatrice's background
  • Thoughts outside Rehearsal
  • Relationship with Benedick

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.

Last week

We got Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off – three days seems like a lot! Then I had a morning, an evening, and an afternoon off because other people were in working on their scenes, so it really feels like I haven’t been here for a long, long time. I started back on it properly today. In the meantime what we have been doing is lots of dancing – now we know what we’re doing with the jig. We know the music - and the singing too. We’re going to do a Calling song which involves us all calling out together; it's very exciting, very moving. The jigging has really wonderful music that Balcony Bill [William Lyons, Master of Historical Music] has arranged. It comes from original pieces of music that he's rearranged and brought together to make our jig music. It's mostly Italian in origin but I find that there's also a lot of Spanish flamenco influence there too – apparently Messina was under Spanish control for most of the Sixteenth Century, so the mixture realy reflects the setting of the play. That's what we’ve been up to recently. We’re getting up on our feet now with the play, looking at different ways of getting into it. We’re still playing games, but trying to get deeper into the rise and fall. So that's where we’re at right now.

Beatrice's background

I’ve been thinking about character on my own, obviously, but not too much within the rehearsal room – yet. What we tend to do is sit down first and we read the scenes and then have a little discussion about what we understand and don’t understand, what exactly is it we’re trying to say, why we think this person is saying or doing that, or what we think has happened beforehand. So, for instance, one of the questions that came up today was why did I live with Leonato in his household – where were my parents? I came up with the idea that my mother died in childbirth and that I lived with my father for a while, but after a certain age I was sent to Leonato's house (he's my uncle), because in those times it was usual for girls to be sent away in order for them to learn their manners and how to be useful in a well-to-do household. It was considered to be an education. I think that my father would have done that for me. Not that my father was less wealthy than Leonato… I don’t mean that it was the lower echelons that went away to another household. If members of the gentry thought that it would be advantageous in one way or another for their children to live as part of another household, then they would send them.

Thoughts outside rehearsal

In terms of preparation outside the rehearsal room, I just do anything that might fire my imagination. For instance, I looked at the script and I’ve looked at everything everyone says about Beatrice in order to find out what people think of her. Then I found everything that Benedick says about her, which is quite interesting because he actually says very different things – on one hand he puts her down all the time, but he also says some quite nice things about her. Then I looked at what all the other characters say about her and what she says about herself. I did that for Benedick too. I did that for everything I say about Benedick, everything everybody else says about Benedick, and what he says about himself; I wanted to see if there was a connection between Beatrice and Benedick in terms of the way people see them and how they see themselves. So I’ve done that, and that gave me an idea of Beatrice's characteristics, her persona – what she gives out to the world. And then I can look at that and say, ‘Well, that's what I think she's like inside, but this is what Beatrice is like on the outside.’ I’ve also been trying to give her a little biography of where she's come from, what she's been through, and what's happened between her and Benedict in the past because it's mentioned quite a lot in the text. They’ve obviously met each other before, and been in love before, or at least there's some sort of history between them. She hints more than once that she's been in love with him and he was unfaithful, or he's been in love with her and she was unfaithful. So I’m trying to figure out what I think might have happened.

I’ve also been making a collage, which is something new for me. I’ve never done that before and I suddenly thought – that’d be nice, because I needed a bit of imaginative help. So I did a small one at the beginning of the book that I keep all my ideas and notes in, and I’ll do another one later. I couldn’t get the images that I particularly wanted but it all started off because I saw this picture of a green and purple forest and I thought, ‘Eoi!’ and then I came across an image of a woman in a dance position. She was very liberated, very free – just sort of going backwards. I thought, ‘Oh, I like these images’ and I put them together – and that started me off on the collage.

Developing a relationship with Benedick

The relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is one thing that we haven't started doing yet, and I think everyone's starting to get quite itchy feet about it now. We have been working on the text, but we’ve been looking at it in many, many different ways. What we haven’t been doing really is rehearsing the characters and looking at the relationship between them – but I think that that's going to happen organically as we work on the other things through the text. We’ve got a long session on Saturday and tomorrow I’ve got a solo session with Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play], so I think there will be a lot of discussion and talk about that. I quite like getting up and going in at the deep end, mucking about with the character and then seeing what works and what doesn’t work. It's something that I don’t feel I’m very good at, that type of improvisation, and so I’m a little bit frightened of it – when we start off, I always think ‘Oh lord, I’m rubbish at this.’ Even if improvisations go badly though, they’re still very, very good and beneficial. Sometimes a lot of very good things can emerge from a session that seems to have gone badly. So hopefully we’ll get to do a bit of that. We’ve got four weeks left, so there's plenty of time.

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Rehearsal notes 3

  • Rehearsals
  • Blocking
  • Two routes
  • Working with Benedick
  • 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.

Rehearsals

We’ve done an immense amount of music, dancing, and rehearsing over the past week. The singing that we’ve been doing is Balkan-style calling songs, which involves a lot of discordance rather than harmonies. It's very similar to what we did last year with Richard III, so they’re quite earthy sounds. The dancing is very flamenco-based – obviously it is Elizabethan dancing, but there are Flamenco influences thrown in as well which makes for a really interesting mixture. They fit really well together. In rehearsals we’ve continued to play games to help us get to the bottom of what's going on in the scenes, and in the last rehearsal we played a game where we point to the person who we are trying to affect. That means that you may be talking to a person but that person's not necessarily the person that you are trying to reach; the person that you’re trying to reach might be behind you. That's what we do in life; we might have a little quip at someone, but we say it to another person whilst meaning to affect somebody else. It's indirect. We also played a similar game with balls where you throw a ball to the person you are trying to affect, whether you are speaking or not. So generally we’ve carried on playing about – we aren’t blocking. The whole thing has remained very free and we’re now, this week, beginning to go back to the beginning of the play and look in really minute detail at what's going on in all the scenes.

Blocking

There won’t be any blocking for the production, and I quite like that because I think that one naturally blocks oneself anyway once you start to get the feel of the scene. You might do things slightly different, but it's never hugely different. There's a scene with a masked ball [II.1] and within that there's a dance as part of that which is choreographed. Interestingly enough, we sent the couples off by themselves and told them to find a slow-motion movement or dance, and then we put our dialogue over it, so when other people are talking in the dance we have a sequence of slow movements that keep the action going. We’re dancing together or gesturing and talking at the same time. We’re listening and pretending to be talking whilst the audience listens to the couples who really are talking out loud downstage. Each couple takes their turn talking out loud as the focus of the audience's attention: one couple, then the next, then the next. You can see that there are lots of things taking place, but only one couple speaking at a time. So Josie [Lawrence, Benedick] and I came up with some movements, and later on we were helped by Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] and Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] to make it fit exactly into our dialogue. We all did that and that was great fun seeing how it would work. I really enjoyed working on a choreographed piece. It brought out a lot of interesting things in the dialogue. The highly choreographed dance and the flexible choreography throughout the rest of the play work well together.

Two routes

My biggest challenge at the moment is the scene between the four women just before the wedding [III.4]. It's the scene where Beatrice comes in and says she's ill. She's obviously not ill; she's love-sick. It could go two ways, both quite funny. There's love-sickness or she could be hiding something else too, and I haven’t quite found out what. Both ways she's hiding something: she's hiding her love-sickness or she's hiding something else. Both ways I’m trying to find out how to play it, and I’m finding that very, very hard at the moment. I understand it in my head but I haven’t quite understood how to play it yet. It’ll come, I suppose.

Working with Benedick

We’ve had rehearsals with just both of us on our own, and that's been really nice. Josie [Lawrence, Benedick] and I work together very well, I think. We’ve done lots of games to get us into the text, but we haven’t done any improvisations or anything like that. We’ve talked about their relationship, and we’ve talked about what may have happened in the past. I’ve had lots of solo sessions, also, where I’ve talked about what I think Beatrice has gone through and what I think Benedick has gone through in the past. It's useful just to talk through what I think our situation has been and get that clear in my head.

Clothing

My costume is divine, it's gorgeous. I’m going to have an under-dress and an overdress. The under-dress is stripy and the overdress is plain, and it's all made of silk. It's a greeny-blue colour, and it's just divine. I haven’t seen the finished dress – I’ve just seen the colour and the toile, which is what they make first of all. It's what the cutter first cuts out of calico; they put that on you and pin it around you, and if it's exactly right and it's perfect, then she’ll cut the real material. So I’ve only seen the material and worn the toile, but I’m very excited about it. Generally though, I would say ‘petrified’ sums up my current feelings. Yes, petrified is a very good word.

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Rehearsal notes 4

  • Beatrice
  • Getting into character
  • Lines
  • Gender issues
  • This week

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.

Beatrice

I don’t believe now that she's trying to hide something; it's just that she's not showing everything about herself. Rather than hiding, she's not showing the full extent of who she is. She's a bit of clown; she's the person who entertains the household, I think. She is very entertaining and very funny and quick-witted, but underneath all that there is someone who is quite lonely, who possibly misses her parents. She's in a household that is not her own – she lives with her uncle, Leonato. My take on it is that I think her mother died when she was born and her father died when she was in her mid-teens. Then she went to live with her uncle, so she's been living there since she was maybe fifteen, sixteen. But they’re not her real family. Her comedy, her lightness – it's her survival tactic. I have to say that there's absolutely no textual evidence of that – this is just me reading between the lines and looking at her reactions to what happens in the play. Initially I was trying very hard to show the different layers of what she might be going through or what might be happening, but I’ve come to the conclusion that one actually can’t do that. What you have to do is fill up your imagination with the life of the person that this character is, and play whatever the scene is asking you to play: then all the undercurrents will take care of themselves.

Getting into character

I have used character props in the past, for instance when we did The Taming of the Shrew last year and I played Hortensio; I really wanted to figure out this character, this person, and who he was. I couldn’t quite get to it, and eventually I realised that he might be a bit of a dandy but he was not very good with women. I started to bring in things like cowboy boots and tight trousers – because I was playing a man, I brought in things that made me feel quite manly and a bit like a male Spanish dancer or a male bullfighter, things that had a certain amount of restrictiveness within them. So my props were a pair of cowboy boots, a pair of trousers and a shirt, and that helped in rehearsal. For Beatrice, however, I don’t have anything in particular in terms of character props. I don’t have anything physical that I have worked on for her.

Whenever I think of things one could do outside the rehearsal room, I never know what I’m actually going to do until it takes my fancy! I have written a biography of the character, and I tried to take it back to the beginning, answering questions about where she was born, what she did in her childhood, when exactly her mother died, when her father died, how did she get to Leonato's house, how long has she been there, and what does she discover about Hero? I just work imaginatively on all that to give myself some kind of background note on the character. None of this is going to be of any use to an audience, it's just going to be of use to me in my feelings for the other characters onstage with me. Nobody needs to know about it, it's absolutely for me and my imagination.

Lines

At the moment I’m working on lines, and I’m working with a ball, which I throw up against a wall whenever I think an operative word in a line comes up. It's good to work with the ball because it comes back at you straightaway and you can use it quite quickly again – there might be more than one operative word within a sentence. I’m doing that to give emphasis because Beatrice is a character who is quite ‘in her head’ – that's where wit comes from. She's all prose rather than blank verse because all the time she's using her intellect to try and get a jab back. It's not meant to be connected to her heart; it's just witty words and repartee. Of course within that, there will be a lot that's heartfelt, but the challenge is how to show that in a way that comes out as a joke in order to actually disguise what's going on underneath. When I’m working with something like that, I tend to go up a chord voice-wise, so I’m working on keeping my voice centred and supported, as well as fast and fluid.

Gender issues

You know what? I haven’t thought about playing opposite a female Benedick. As far as I’m concerned, I’m playing against a male. I don’t look at Josie [Lawrence, who plays Benedick] and think ‘She's a female, how in the world am I going to do that?’ I just play the character and the scene.

This week

We’ve been working on the scene just before the masked ball and the scene with all the females just before the wedding. The females’ scene [III.4] I find really, really hard. And I don’t think that we’ve quite caught the essence of it yet, so I really look forward to getting back to that quite quickly and trying all the different ideas I have at the moment for Beatrice in that scene. She says that she is ill, but I don’t understand why she should be ill, so I think she's love-sick. She's either love-sick or hiding something, or both those things at once. The way I want to play it at moment is that she's made herself look very, very feminine with make-up and she's hiding that from the rest of the women, perhaps with a handkerchief, by pretending to be ill. Then they find out. That's what I want to work on, but I don’t know if it’ll work. It's what I’m trying at the moment, and it sort-of works, but we still have to get it to gel to together. If we don’t, there are other areas to go with. It's tricky.

I’ve done the play so little that, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t say which bit is my favourite. We’re still working through it. When I first read Much Ado About Nothing, I really liked the scene in the church between Beatrice and Benedick after Hero has been wronged. And I quite like all the scenes where she's having a bit of a go at some poor, unsuspecting person, like the first scene with the messenger [I.1]. She really has a go at the messenger, and the poor man doesn’t know where it's coming from or what to do with it! She does it just out of badness.

We have another week in the rehearsal room, so altogether we’ve got a week and a half before we go on the stage. I’m very scared: nervous, scared, unprepared! I don’t know all my lines yet. Well, yes I do, but they haven’t really sunk in yet, so it is scary.

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Rehearsal notes 5

  • Run
  • Technical rehearsals
  • Organic approach
  • Audience

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.

Running the play

Over the last week and a bit, we’ve been finishing off rehearsing the play. Yesterday we started technical rehearsals. We’re doing well; the play has been running very quickly, which is good. We spent our last week in the rehearsal room running the play. What we did first of all was to ‘stagger’ it through, which just means going through it very slowly, first the first half of the play, then the second. After that, we worked on the bits that were still not quite right, that needed more work to be done on them, and then we ran the play at normal speed. So we did three runs in the rehearsal room before we started the tech. run. They went very well, apart from the last one. The last one, for me, was dreadful. I don’t know why, but it just wasn’t very good: I suddenly didn’t know what was going on, which is quite confusing if you’re in the play. All my lines went, which was very strange. It was a new experience for me, which is why I mention it. Just a very, very strange experience. But it's okay.

Technical rehearsals

Next we started teching. Yesterday we did the first scene in the theatre, and it was great to be in there. It suddenly made sense. What happened was almost as if, by our third run, I’d lost confidence in the play and myself, and then when I got into the theatre, I found that actually this makes sense! It makes sense in this space, so maybe the blip was a good thing to have happened. We’re going very slowly through the play now, and we’re looking at all the music cues, all the dancing cues, and any extra things that we haven’t done with the musicians before. We’re using all the props and the costumes and all the stuff that we’ve never used before, getting used to all of that. We’re also timing our entrances and our exits, and learning exactly which door we’re going to use to come in and which way we’re going out.

The rehearsal room is very well equipped to look like the stage, with wooden pillars and so on, so we do get used to working in the round. I can’t speak for other members of the cast, but I see them opening out on stage, and I love the transition from one space to the other. The play just makes complete sense here, and I start to really get involved. I feel more involved in the little bit that I’ve done, even during the tech, on this stage than I have in the rehearsal room where we’ve been working it through. I don’t know why that is, maybe because it's out there for the audience, and you can see that more clearly in the Globe than in the rehearsal room.

Organic approach

The process of getting the play up and on its feet seemed to have happened very quickly. We were looking minutely at certain bits of the play, and working out what we were going to do at those points. Now that we’re out of the rehearsal room, I’ve realised that the way that we’ve been working with Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] is that she's been playing lots of games with us and getting us to really know the play. Rather than blocking it and telling us where to stand and how to speak our lines, she's been doing it organically. We played lots and lots and lots, and tried to get the language organically.

At one point it felt like we were never in the same place or doing the same thing in any one run of a scene, because we had been doing so many different things in the games. Now, that's very, very good in one respect. In another respect it's a bit confusing because you’re unsure about which bits work and which bits don’t. You’ve done them in so many different ways and you haven’t actually pinpointed and said, ‘Ooh, that worked quite well, let's go for that. Let's do that a few times and see what happens and then play within that.’ That pinpointing is exactly what we did right in the last couple of weeks of rehearsal. We did a run of the play very slowly through, and once we had got that how we wanted it and out of the way, we concentrated on looking through the scenes again. We really pinpointed the things that were working for us and that gives you a kind of anchor on them. Now we’re starting to get an anchor for the play as a whole; we can play with new ideas, but we know that we have something solid and we play around within that. I think that's what we’ve been doing in the last week; we’ve been playing it all the way through and anchoring it. And we’re still anchoring it. Last night we had a rehearsal, just Beatrice and Benedick. The scenes worked very well, but we just wanted to try and get more detail into them, to get at those little bits and pieces. Now we’ve gone so far that we can actually look for detail and refine bits and pieces. It's constantly evolving. That's the way we’ll work through the play, and it will carry on changing until the last performance in September! At least, hopefully it will.

Audience

I watched Romeo and Juliet during their tech, and I know they were teching, but it seemed to me as if there was a certain low-in-energy feeling to it, because they were working slowly through it. Then I saw a run of it – not all of it, but just bits of a run. It looked great. I thought it looked fantastic in the space, et cetera, but I still thought it lacked an energy. That's not a comment on the actors – they’re all doing their job brilliantly – that's just what happens within the space when it's empty. Then I saw the play during a performance (on the screen upstairs in the Green Room) and the theatre was absolutely full of people hanging from the balconies. It was as if the energy from that stage and those actors was pulling at the people. It was just extraordinary, and it made me think that the first star at the Globe is the Globe itself, the architecture. The second leading star is the audience. Those two things buoy up the stage and the actors, giving them an injection of adrenaline that just shoots a play's energy up three or four levels. It needs to give you that boost, because if you don’t have that energy, I don’t think you would survive on the stage. It's subconscious, though – it's not something you do consciously, it's just something that happens. By that, I don’t mean that the actors might be nervous... I can’t describe it, but I know I’ve seen it, and I know that it will happen to Much Ado, too.

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