Leonato

A flash banner.

About Penelope Beaumont

This is Penny's second season at Shakespeare's Globe. Last year she was a member of the Globe's first all-female company; she played Vincentio in The Taming of the Shrew and Lord Stanley in Richard III. She has also performed in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Richard III as Queen Elizabeth. Penny has appeared in several television dramas including The Bill, Prime Suspect, Midsomer Murders, and Murder Without Motive.

Rehearsal notes 1

  • Back at the Globe
  • Globe differences
  • Pre-rehearsal preparation
  • First day & first rehearsal
  • All-female Company
  • Challenge
  • Timetable
  • Original practices
  • Biggest questions

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

Last year I joined the all-female company to play Lord Stanley in Richard III and Vincentio in The Taming of Shrew. I was really scared at first; I’d taken a break from acting when I became a mother so it had been a while since I had been onstage, but when I came back here it felt like I’d never been away. This year I was in the very happy position of being asked if I would like to come back. I was told Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] wanted me to play Leonato… I didn’t know Much Ado About Nothing very well, so I went away and read it, and I fell in love with Leonato immediately. He's such a good man and so dignified – having said that, I’ll also need to investigate his darker side and try to understand the harshness of his response to Hero when she has just been denounced at the alter. I think his reaction in this scene is related to the importance of female honour and chastity in the context of Shakespeare's time, but that doesn’t fully explain the violence of his response… it's early days yet and the jury's still out. Anyhow, I saw he was a great character. He's funny, he obviously adores his daughter and even his darker side is interesting. I just liked him a lot; once I’d read the play, I couldn’t say ‘yes’ to Siobhan [Bracke, Casting Director] and Tamara quickly enough!

Globe differences

I’m very excited to be returning to the Globe – it's a stunning space. The first time I went out onstage and saw the audience all around me, I remember thinking ‘Oh no. I’m going to faint!’ [laughs] but after the initial wave of fear, it was wonderful. There are grilles in the tiring house doors and we watched people assembling in the yard and taking their seats; you get to see your audience before you go out onstage, which I think allows a rare kind of connection. You feel a little more secure stepping into that space and the audience reception is so warm when you get there that nerves quickly disappear. You can really focus on the relationships and situations in the play and in both plays last season, I found the level of communication with the audience just amazing. They’re unlike any audiences I’ve ever known, in that they’re extraordinarily willing to enjoy themselves: it's as though they come here to have a good time and they’re ready to actively seek that by engaging with the play. They don’t just sit back and wait.

Pre-rehearsal preparation

Before rehearsals begin, I always like to map the journey of my character. I find the top of the hill or the peak of the part, so I don’t get there too soon. Most characters have their own arc within the larger journey of the play, so I go through each of my scenes and pinpoint the most important moments. Next I do the same thing to get a sense of my part within the arc of the play. Charting the character alongside the play like this helps me to get an idea of where the moment of greatest emotional intensity comes for me in the greater scheme of things. Once you’ve identified the peak, you can start to work out how you’re going to arrive at that point. Leonato's peak is probably in the wedding scene. After Hero has been denounced he seems to break up inside – but the peak and the journey become clearer as you explore the character during rehearsals. It's like when you decide you want to go on a long hike; the map is just a starting point for the journey, but you might take detours along the way or find some parts of the terrain smoother than others.

As far as learning lines goes, I don’t do that before rehearsals start. I just find it very difficult. Once I’ve rehearsed the lines for the first time it's easier because you can use the rhythms and put the lines in the context of the action, but Leonato's quite a big part… I know I’ve just got to plough on with learning it. There are several big speeches and my memory isn’t as nimble as it used to be! I don’t like learning lines really, but I’m going to have to make a start soon.

First day and first rehearsal

It was wonderful to arrive at the Meet and Greet and see so many old friends as well as lots of new faces – both in the cast and in the building. One of the really nice things about all the introductions is that you meet everybody who helps make this building work… from the theatre department and the other departments too. It makes you feel at home. The day is about bonding in a very easy relaxed way; we spent some time with Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] and Tamara and the rest of the cast. We also had a small ceremony at the end of the day which sort of blessed what we were about to embark on. After that, the first day of rehearsals is great: you’re just dying to get on with it. We began by playing some games that helped us to relax and understand the play with a bit more clarity. The first exercise involved trigger-words. Everyone went through the play together and we had to listen for the words that triggered our speech in the lines spoken by the character directly before us. So for example, I might decide that Leonato's response is triggered by ‘lady’ in the Friar's speech:

Friar: Have comfort, lady.
Leonato: Dost thou look up?
(IV.1)

Usually there's something pretty pertinent that spurs us to speak; the characters have reasons for speaking, as we do in real life. Once or twice I found my thinking ‘what on earth am I going to pick from that line?’ [laughs] Most of the time the trigger-word is clear and it gives you a good indication of the driving force behind a line.

We also did an exercise which involved coming in with your lines before the person before you had finished speaking. This means that everyone's speech overlaps and no one gets the chance to finish what they have to say, but the game is a good one because it makes you realise that in real-life people do often anticipate and don’t just stand silently waiting their turn. Some parts of the play sounded really good when we ran them this way, especially as we tried to speak at faster and faster speeds. Of course it won’t be right for every speech, but the idea that you can speak Shakespeare's lines in a ‘realistic’ way is very useful to bear in mind.

One of the things that I’m curious about is how much movement work we’ll do in rehearsals to explore ‘male’ physicality. We didn’t do much of that last year, although a specialist in commedia dell'Arte came in during rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew and gave us some ideas along those lines. The question of whether a ‘male’ physicality as such even exists is an interesting one: there are certainly stereotypes, but I’m not sure how useful they are when you’re trying to get at the truth of a character. Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] is very good at helping you to explore how you can express the different sides of yourself physically, but… I don’t know … I don’t think that complexity can be reduced to an opposition between male and female. We’ll see…

All-female Company

This year I feel there's a wonderful confidence about the company ‘We’re all women – so what?’ There's also a feeling that we don’t have to justify ourselves as a company any more than an all-male company; what matters is that we put on a fantastic play. Last year, the fact that we were all women did contribute something towards The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III – especially The Taming of the Shrew. I don’t think the additions were in terms of an explicit commentary on gender; instead it felt as though we offered a new angle that helped you watch the play with fresh eyes. As far as my approach was concerned, however, I never consciously thought to myself ‘I’m a woman playing a man’. I loved Lord Stanley's character, his political manoeuvring. I approached him as I would any other character regardless of their sex and the fact I was a woman really didn’t make any difference to me. I suppose part of that was making a conscious effort not to be overly feminine, but there's a difference between this and trying to be ‘masculine’, whatever that means.

Challenge

Last year my greatest challenge in terms of a male role was the expression of Stanley's emotional state. In the banquet scene of Richard III, King Richard informed us that Hastings was going to be put to death. I decided Stanley was really quite upset at that point, but I had to think very hard about how I should show that as a man. How should it be different? The response inside me as a woman would not necessarily be different, but I think I would express it in a different way. This is a lot subtler than questions like ‘Oh, am I walking in a ‘male’ way?’ How much of your inner devastation do you allow the world to see? I can see a similar question recurring in Much Ado About Nothing: Leonato is clearly devastated on several levels when Hero is denounced in the wedding scene. He's devastated because she's his little girl, perhaps also because his position as Governor has been undermined by her loose behaviour, and because of the sheer weight of the betrayal. Yes… I think my response to that as a mother would show itself in a different way. It's only day three and no doubt things will become clearer as we start to work on the actual scenes.

Timetable

Three times a week we’ll have a session with the Master of Voice, the Master of Movement or the Master of the Words; they help us to explore ways in which we can use the text to its best advantage – be that through our voices, bodies, or a better understanding of the form of the language. In rehearsal, what you’re doing is investigating situations and relationships. In a session with Giles [Master of the Words], we’ll look at how the lines themselves are structured. We don’t work on Much Ado About Nothing during these sessions because that gives you a sort of freedom to look at the structure of the words without getting sidetracked into thoughts about your character.

The way Much Ado About Nothing has been written really interests me. Over seventy percent of it is written in prose and I’ve been noticing that when Shakespeare does shift into verse, characters often seem to speak about themselves or their own feelings. Verse invites you to ask so many questions: which word did Shakespeare choose to place at the end of a line? Where does the emphasis fall? Why do some lines break in odd places? All these details can give you clues about what's going on with a character. It's very helpful stuff.

This year we’re asking to have a bit more ‘stage time’ before we go into tech week, so hopefully voice and movement work onstage will play a bigger part in the rehearsal process. It's a very strange and physical experience just to stand on that stage without the pressure of anyone judging you, and I think it's important we become familiar with the space in this way. I know I want to be absolutely sure of how much or how little voice I need to use to reach people whilst staying within a vocal range that's comfortable for me. I suppose this largely to do with security. When you finally get out there to do the performance, that understanding of the space gives you real confidence. Estimating how much voice you will need is hard to judge when the theatre is empty because the acoustics change when the space is packed with people. I’m lucky in that I’ve had a season's worth of experience playing to a full theatre here, but I’m not entirely happy with my voice work. I mean, in one sense, you’re never going to be entirely happy as you always want to push yourself further and get better and better… that's what I want to do this year.

Original practices

I’ve started to have costume fittings; Luca [Costigliolo, Master of Clothing] has designed a wonderful new gown for Leonato and I’ll wear that over my trusty doublet and hose from last season. They were made for me and when I put them on it almost feels like home! I’ve also been looking at pictures of hats, and of course I’m going to have a beard because it gets referred to at some point in the play. I’m seen some pictures and I’m really looking forward to trying it on when it does materialise! I think 'original practices' solves an awful lot of problems that vex productions with modern settings. Particular references to items of clothing, for instance; it makes sense to refer to the style of someone's dress if they’re actually wearing those clothes. Also, original practices means scenery is kept to a minimum: you don’t have endless scene changes that interrupt the flow of the play. When you need to know where a scene is set, Shakespeare tells you in the language: Leonato is first to speak in act one scene one:

I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.
(I.1.1)

Then a messenger says: ‘He was very near by this’ and straightaway everyone knows we’re in a place called Messina and someone is about to arrive. I don’t think you do need to know where exactly a scene is set all the time and excessive scenery just gets in the way.

Other things I love about original practices productions - the live music that's part of original practices and the fact that the musicians are onstage with you… what else? The fact that the auditorium isn’t darkened, because it means everyone can see each other and that special relationship between the actor and audience develops. Things like having to rely on daylight (or electric lights designed to seem like daylight for evening performances) might seem like restrictions at first. Occasionally you do think ‘Oh wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have such-and-such… wouldn’t it help the scene?’ but usually you find a way around the restrictions and, because you’ve had to be more inventive, that different way often turns out to be more successful. The only downside is – and all of us will say this – that you can’t nip to the toilet during the play when you’ve got a costume with forty-four buttons! A few pages have been turned by the time you’ve finished undoing and doing that lot up again. It's pretty desperate!

Biggest questions

Even though we’ve just started rehearsals, I’ve certainly got some questions about the back-history of the play. I want to try to understand the war that Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick have been fighting: I’ll need to do some research on that. I need to make some decisions about why Don Pedro's come to Messina – you know, you’d think if he's been involved in a long and terrible war, well, surely you’d want to go home afterwards? Well at least that's what I would want to do, so there's the question of what brings them to Messina? There's also Leonato's response to Hero's denunciation in the wedding scene and I’ll have to start thinking about just how nasty that is going to be… is it because he's upset or is he cruel? I don’t know what direction I’m going to take in that scene yet. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few weeks.

Back to top

Rehearsal notes 2

  • Run through
  • Claudio
  • Brothers
  • Hero
  • Parent's point of view
  • Governor/ parent
  • Sword?
  • Beatrice
  • Other rehearsals
  • Verse & prose
  • Word work
  • Next 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.

Run Through

We’ve been through the play two or three times now, each time with different objectives. It has been really useful to go through the play that many times and familiarize yourself with everything everybody does, not just concentrating on your themes. You become informed by your character and by what other people do and say in the play. On the other hand, it has delayed getting down to the scenes. I love really investigating the part, making the decisions about what you are doing and who you are, as well as resolving any bits of the play that you don’t understand.

For instance, we have been talking about Sicily – where Messina actually is – and the fact that Don Pedro of Arragon is Spanish… we’re thinking about which wars the soldiers might have actually been fighting. I don’t think that there is documentary evidence specifying where they have been fighting or how long the war was, so we will make decisions about that. It's a learning process. Obviously, a lot of the action takes place in Leonardo's house and his garden. And it is very tempting to think that it takes place in the country side, but it doesn’t. It takes place very definitely in Messina, so that makes a difference. Leonato is governor of Messina. I expect this would be an appointed position not a heredity position but none the less I expect those positions were given to people of noble birth, so he is probably pretty rich. He has a nice house big enough to accommodate all those people who arrive in Act I, scene 1: dignitaries and their entourages. I think of his house almost as an embassy – it might be his own house, but it is definitely a place where visiting dignitaries like the Prince would stay. That's the sort of environment I imagine Beatrice and Hero growing up in. Don Pedro and the soldiers might have passed through on other occasions when Hero would have seen Claudio.

Claudio

That train of thought led me to think about Leonato's relationship with Claudio's uncle: I have decided that he and I are really good friends, along with Antonio. We all know each other very well. Perhaps if Claudio was orphaned, he would be the one who stepped into the parental role. I don’t know when his parents died – they don’t have to have died, that's what I’m thinking at the moment. I would have talked about Claudio many times with his uncle and had really good chats about him – how he's getting along, what he's been up to – so although Claudio doesn’t know me really well, I know an awful lot about him. Maybe Claudio visited his uncle a lot because the first thing that we hear in the play from the messenger is that he has already been to the uncle, told the uncle, and the uncle has cried with joy on hearing about Claudio's ennoblement. It's a possibility that Claudio has only just been made a Count as the result of his success in battle – perhaps he didn’t inherit his title. I’m not sure; it is not for me to say because it's not my part, but these are the possibilities that occurred to me looking at the situation from Leonato's point of view.

Brothers

This morning Penny [Diamond, Antonio] and I discussed the relationship between Leonato and his brother. It is early days but we think perhaps Antonio might be a widower. Leonato is a widower too; Shakespeare did start to write him a wife called Imogen but he thought better of it and she disappeared. That's quite interesting because it makes me think about Hero as a motherless child; Shakespeare perhaps didn’t set out to write that in the way he set out to write Beatrice as a motherless child. Beatrice status as an orphan is important to the story, but we assume that the fact that Hero's mother is dead is unimportant because Shakespeare was going to give her one, then he decided she was surplus to requirements… I suspect there are so many motherless children in Shakespeare because women were so much more difficult for male actors to portray on the stage, so why have one you didn’t need? You only had so many actors at your disposal, and it didn’t make sense to take one up with a character you really weren’t going to use. So I’m inclined to think that the reasons for this cut are practical; Imogen's absence doesn’t shift the direction of the play's story. It's just like the boy Leonato calls on in Act I, scene 2

How now, brother, where is my cousin, your son? Hath he provided this music?
[I.2.1]

Antonio's son is brought in when he's needed and then he's suddenly disinherited when Leonato tells Claudio he must marry Antonio's daughter instead of ‘dead’ Hero

To-morrow morning come you to my house,
And since you could not be my son-in-law,
Be yet my nephew. My brother hath a daughter,
Almost the copy of my child that's dead,
And she alone is heir to both of us.
[V.1.286-90]

Of course, that could all be part of the fiction surrounding Hero's pretend death. I’ve got lots of thoughts and lots of questions!

Penny [Diamond, Antonio] and I have been working on the little scene [I.2] quite a bit over the last couple of days. We’ve done it several ways – today we did an exercise where we had to identify exactly what was being said and assign a word to each ‘section’ of text. So for the line

How now, brother, where is my cousin, your son? Hath he provided this music?
[I.2.1]

We identified three sections of text [underlined, bold, and italicised]. I thought that Leonato was basically saying ‘For goodness sake, where is your son? He's in charge of this music – where on earth is he and why hasn’t he done it yet?’ We assigned the word ‘assail’ to the section ‘How now, brother’ [underlined] because I wanted to get that sense of catching someone's attention in a very determined way: there he is, quick, catch him!’ For the next section [bold], we chose the word ‘integrate’ and the final section [italics] was assigned ‘prodding’. It's not so much the words themselves that are important, but the affect: they remind me that what I’m doing is trying to have an affect on the other character. Instead of just coming on and saying ‘Hello, where's your son? Has he arranged for the music?’ I have to communicate the intention behind the words. You come on and you say ‘Come here, I need to talk to you! Whereon earth is he?! Has he done it yet?’ There has to be a clear reason for saying each line onstage and the reason ‘because they’re in the text’ isn’t good enough if you want to bring the words to life. You’re always reacting to what other characters are doing or saying. It's very easy to go and sit at home alone with your script and basically decide what you are going to do in isolation. If that happened, we’d all just be doing our own separate things in the same space when we onstage together. I learn my lines early on, because I can never wait to get started, but I think this means I have to be particularly careful not to decide too much in isolation. The exercises help you keep all the ideas you bring into the rehearsal room very flexible.

Hero

When Hero has been denounced during the wedding scene, she says very little and that reminds me a bit of Cordelia in King Lear… there's something very stubborn about the silence of Lear's youngest daughter. Hero is a bit different but I think Shakespeare uses the same device: like Cordelia, she doesn’t really say much to defend herself at first and her silence is then misinterpreted. She questions what is happening but she doesn’t actually stand up and say ‘I didn’t do it’ until the Friar asks her directly. Her father is left to say ‘Well, she hasn’t denied it therefore I guess she is guilty.’ Leonato says he wishes that he had never had any children and that's a sentiment shared by Brabantio in Othello, when he regrets having Desdemona, and King Lear actually says something like that about his children: I wish I never had any. It's an incredibly powerful statement, breaking the bond between parent and child.

I think what Leonato says at the wedding is extraordinary. He has a wonderful speech that's often cut, but you must need your head examined if you cut it. I’m not saying that just because I am playing Leonato; it is a seriously beautiful speech. Basically he says that he wants Hero to die. He asks her ‘why are you living? If I thought you were going to live – if I thought your spirit was stronger than your shame – I would kill you myself.’ Then I tell her that I wish I had taken up a beggar's child at my gate instead of having one of my own so I could say this dreadful shame wasn’t my blood: ‘It is sad but it has nothing to do with me, this issue is from unknown loins’. Imagine what he must be feeling to say that to his daughter who has just been through the horrendous experience of being jilted at the Alter.

The lines that just break me up are near the end of this speech:

But mine and mine I loved and mine I praised
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her – why, she, O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink…
[IV.1.134-8]

I think the way Shakespeare's written the line is very clever… I don’t know how much of the punctuation is original but clearly the line breaks up ‘Valuing of her – why, she, O, she is fallen’ and it sounds as though Leonato himself is breaking up inside. Most of Shakespeare's lines gather momentum, but they do flow. When you get a little line like that, well, for me, that's the pinnacle of that piece. I said last time that I like to look at the whole play and get an idea of the arc of the story. Each scene and each speech has peaks too, so once you’ve got an idea of the overall arc of the story, you need to identify those other pinnacles along the way. I think in that speech, the emotional peak comes at the line ‘Valuing of her… ’ Maybe peak is the wrong word: I mean the point at which something breaks.

Impact of being a parent

We were chatting today about how interesting it is to play Much Ado About Nothing with an all-female company because when your character is a dad, you’re both a father and a mother. Like Leonato, I have one child and I can’t imagine ever saying anything like the alter-speech to him, no matter what he did. Life was different back then. I don’t think we can really begin to understand what a woman's honour meant in that society. A woman's marriage prospects were dependent on her honour and men made decisions about marriage for her. Look at the bit of the scene we did this morning [I.2], where Antonio tells me that his man overheard the Prince and Claudio talking and that the Prince is going to propose to Hero and marry her straight away. I don't think that Leonato really believes it. Later on he says to Hero ‘If the prince does propose to you – you know what your answer is.’ If the prince wants to marry you, you’ll marry him. He is the best catch around. That was what life was like. That doesn’t mean Leonato is a horrid dad – it means they lived at a different time with different rules. I think being a parent does have an affect on you when you are playing a part like that, because your own rules are different and you would have reacted in a different way, but the fact that I’m playing a father rather than a mother at the moment makes no difference to me. I think human beings feel pain whatever sex they are, just as Shakespeare's characters felt the same pain that we feel now, despite the four-hundred year gap. And that's one of the reasons why I think Leonato is so wonderful. He speaks to our hearts now.

Governor/ parent

I also realised how good Leonato is at his job as the Governor of Messina. The way he talks to everybody is very courteous, even when he is getting a bit tired of people like Dogberry. He is very generous – he treats people very well, and I think that is also part of his job.

To see this man of stature reduced to tears in the wedding scene makes it even more crushing. Normally he is so calm and balanced. At first of all he is just disbelieving anything like this could happen. He just can’t understand it. And then the prince says he has seen it with his own eyes. There's the shift: the prince has proof and he wouldn’t lie – and that is the crux… the prince wouldn’t lie so Leonato believes it, and he's vile to poor Hero. He interprets the lack of a direct denial as an affirmation of her guilt, but the Friar says ‘Look, tell us straight, did you do it?’ When Hero responds ‘No, I didn’t do it’ I am sure she would look to her father. Leonato doesn’t say immediately that he believes her because he doesn’t really know what to say. He is in such a state. However by the time you see him challenging Claudio and Don Pedro, he is pretty certain of his ground. Another shift; he's not having any of their accusations. Leonato might not understand why they lied about Hero but as far as he is concerned, Claudio and the Prince are to blame.

Sword?

When Leonato challenges Don Pedro and Claudio in Act V, scene 1, I think he believes that he presents a real threat to those young men. Antonio [Penny Diamond] and I were asked if we wanted swords to wear. It's too early for me to decide for sure, but I’m going to try to see if the scene works without a sword. I want to give Leonato's verbal threat some real force. We may change our minds, but that's the way I thinking at the moment. There's a tricky moment in that scene when Claudio goes for his sword and I say

- Nay, never lay thy hand upon thy sword;
I fear thee not.
[V.1.54-5]

Leonato is not frightened by this young man, and Claudio responds ‘In faith, my hand meant nothing to my sword’ [V.1.57] – I wasn’t going for my sword, honest! I’m not sure how those lines will work if Leonato doesn’t have a sword; old man didn’t wear swords as a matter of course (as young men did)… it's a choice we’ll have to make once we’ve seen how the lines work verbally.

Beatrice

I’ve thought a lot about the relationship between Beatrice and Leonato over the last week. I’ve decided it will be more interesting if I play that he is really concerned about getting her married, because he's getting older and he wants to see her settled. That's difficult because she puts up obstacles all the time and makes it difficult for any suitor to get close. You could play it rather fondly by laughing at all her quips as though he's accepting the situation ‘Oh, you’re just awful to these men and you’ve always been this way’. But I think he really wants Beatrice to get married and really means it when he says

By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get thee a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue
[II.1.17]

He is worried that she will never get married is she carries on like this and that will make her vulnerable when he's no longer around to make sure she's provided for. I was thinking it might be nice if we played that Beatrice's mother was the sister of Leonato and Antonio: we have a very close relationship with Beatrice and it would make sense for her to be our niece, though I don’t know what Yolanda [Vazquez, Beatrice] has decided yet. For now, I’m pursuing the line that her mother was our sister, who possibly died giving birth to Beatrice – there's that reference in Act II, scene 1 to the star that danced at her birth whilst her mother cried [ll.309-10]. It's interesting that after Beatrice says that, Leonato gives her an excuse to leave ‘Niece, will you look to those things I told you of?’ [IV.1.311]. It feels quite tactful, as though he's letting her leave the stage because references to the circumstances of her birth have upset her. Perhaps I let her go because she's upset about her mother.

Other rehearsals

We have started to learn the steps to the pavane in our dance sessions, which I think we may use during the revels scene [II.1]. I am not quite sure what I will be doing in that scene – I probably will be having a little dance somewhere! We have also been working on the jig which is always a highlight, I think. I love the jigs but I do find it very difficult learning the steps. Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] breaks all the dances right down into steps – she introduces you to one step and you think ‘All right, I can manage this’. Then she makes it a little more complex so you think ‘Alright, this is the step we’ll be doing’. You are just getting your head around that when she says, ‘Okay, now we are going to do it twice as fast!’ I always think I am never going to get it right and I have to keep telling myself that's ok, it is only a small part of what I have to do in the play. But last year I managed most of it in the end. My feet will probably get there eventually! And even if you don’t get it all right every single time, well, they probably didn’t all the time in Shakespeare's day either! I shall do my best.

Verse and prose

A lot of Much Ado About Nothing is prose – I think Giles [Block, Master of the Words] says that less than thirty percent of it is written in verse. I think the parts that are written in verse inform what's written in prose.

In verse you find lots of words like personal pronouns are almost never stressed. Also the word ‘not’ is very seldom stressed although it is sometimes (there are no hard and fast rules!) So you learn from that and you find that the same guidelines often apply for the prose as well: very often the same the pronouns are not stressed. Pronouns can lead you up the garden path. It is very tempting to stress them – we would in modern speech. We would say “you did this to me” where Shakespeare would say “you did this to me” and actually it is more powerful his way. I think of prose in terms of meaning rather than rhythm. Rhythm isn’t set in concrete. You still have to find the right words to stress. People often think prose is easier than verse but actually I think it's the other way around because so much of the work is done for you in verse. For instance, in the half-line

Friar, it cannot be.
Thou seest that all the grace that she hath left
Is that she will not add to her damnation
A sin of perjury…
[IV.1.168-71]

You’re tempted to say ‘Friar, it cannot be’ but I don’t think that's as good as ‘Friar, it cannot be…’ – the speech is about the impossibility of Hero's grace and emphasising ‘be’ rather than ‘Friar’ helps communicate that.

Word work

We work on verse and prose with Giles [Block, Master of the Words]; five of us at a time, once a week for the six weeks of rehearsal. We don’t use Much Ado About Nothing as a text in these sessions because he doesn’t want to interfere with what's going on in rehearsal. We want to learn about how to serve the text best. For instance, Giles often says that is the second half of the verse line is usually more important than the first part. What that means is that you will ‘set up’ what you want to say then you will go through it, getting to the point very often at the end of the line. I always like to do an exercise for myself that I am only allowed two words in a verse line. I’m not allowed to say anything else, and those are the words I’ll emphasise, otherwise you can fall into the trap of stressing everything in the line! When you keep to the stresses it really helps with you with the meaning of a line.

We just try different things out. Giles will point things out to do with stress and colour. I’ve noticed that Leonato's got one speech that uses the word ‘words’. I am talking to Antonio after the wedding scene; I tell him to stop trying to console me ‘I pray thee, cease thy counsel’ [V.1.4] because there is no point telling a sufferer not to suffer. When Benedick comes into the play earlier on and he has the tooth ache, Leonato says ‘oh for goodness sake that's not worth bothering about.’ He comes to understand later on when he says

Give me not counsel,
Nor let no comforter delight mine ear
But such a one whose wrongs do suit with mine […]

Then he gives a list of things and starts to make his conclusion:

But there is no such man; for, brother, men
Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,
Their counsel turns to passion, which before
Would give preceptial medicine to rage,
Fetter strong madness with a silken thread,
Charm ache with air and agony with words.
[V.1.1-5, 20-7]

You have the word ‘words’ and you can colour that.

Next week

We are going to meet with the Tudor Group this afternoon. They are extraordinary people that know a huge amount about Shakespearean life because that is what they do for short periods of time. They do spend time living just exactly like a Tudor family. They dress and eat as the Tudors would have done, and they’re going to come and share their experiences with us. I’m expecting this to be very helpful in terms of original practices; how to bow properly, the correct etiquette for handling swords, and how and when to wear your hat, for instance. I know from last year's session with the Tudor Group that the Tudors would have worn hats all the time. You took them off when you were in front of the king but apart from that you kept them on. I’ve got more costume fittings coming up too, and I’m looking forward to seeing how things have moved on. I’ve seen a picture of what my hat will look like but I never know exactly what it will look like until it appears on my head.

Back to top

Rehearsal notes 3

  • The Tudor Group
  • Scene work: process
  • Gulling scene: II.3
  • Song & dance
  • Emphasis on character
  • Set
  • Singing
  • Clothing
  • Text work
  • Movement & voice
  • Next 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.

The Tudor Group

We’ve just had a very useful visit from the Tudor Group – they live as the Tudors would have done for certain periods of time, and they told us lots of interesting things about the period. I asked them about Perfumers because Borachio says he was in a room ‘being entertained for a perfumer’ [I.3.54] before someone came in and he nipped behind the arras – that was how he came to overhear the conversation between the Prince and Claudio. I wondered what being ‘entertained as a perfumer’ really meant and why Borachio was doing this job. There is a scene quite early on with Antonio [I.2], and at the end of that scene somebody comes into the room: I say to them ‘Come with me and I will use your skills.’ [I.2.22-3]. I think we have decided that that person will be Borachio, who has arrived as one of the men with Don Pedro. I see him and say ‘Come with me and I will employ your skills,’ and I get him to go and fumigate this room. Well, a perfumer's job isn’t exactly to fumigate a room; he has to come and perfume a musty room that has been closed off, he freshens it up so that it can be used. So we have decided that is what we are going to do in order to explain why Borachio, who isn’t a servant, is in this situation. We hope that all makes sense.

The girls playing girls [Mariah Gale - Hero, Yolanda Vazquez - Beatrice, Lucy Campbell - Ursula, Joy Richardson - Margaret] talked about what their relationship would have been like and what sort of status gentlewomen held. They talked about how very, very close they would have been – they would have probably shared a bed and spent all their time together. Ursula and Margaret would not have been like servants but more like Ladies-in-Waiting/ companions. I think that is quite interesting. We also learnt a lot about hats. I know that you always wear your hat unless you are greeting someone. The point they made is that you can’t take a hat off to show how polite you are if you haven’t got it on in the first place! That means everyone wears hats all the time. The rule was you always took your hat off if the king was there, and kept if off until he told you to put it back on again. We haven’t got a king – we have got some counts and princes, but not quite kings. Status is also reflected in the way you bow to a person. We all stood in line in order of our character's status, highest – or those who thought they had the highest status, which was sometimes quite a different thing – to lowest, and then we practised bowing to each other. We used deeper bows for the more important people. That was quite an interesting exercise because Dogberry thinks he is terribly important but that isn’t necessarily so. Don John's status as an illegitimate royal was tricky. I think I would welcome him in the opening scene with a bow (at the Prince's discretion), but how Don John would return that courtesy is up for grabs. He's sort of outside the order that dictates this etiquette.

The information about swords was quite helpful too. It was illegal to wear a sword, they told us, unless you were a gentleman or a soldier. Gentlemen would always wear swords; they were to do with status thing as well as practical need. I am not going to wear a sword because of my great age. The Tudor Group said something like ‘it is the right of a gentleman and the mark of the soldier’. Their facts about Tudor law interested me especially. If there was an incident and somebody got killed, perhaps a stabbing, they said that if the perpetrator stuck around after the incident and was there when the constable came, then the chances were you wouldn’t actually get hung for it. That prompted me to think about the end of the play and the punishments that await Don John. He scarpers after the wedding scene [IV.1]. I don’t know how important that is but it adds another dimension to know that this man has just left his crime behind him and he is in real trouble.

There is also a nice bit of context that explained Dogberry's reference to his ‘two gowns’ [IV.2.82]. The Tudor Group said that when you had social pretensions, what you did was to invest in a gown or two. Then when you fell on hard times, they would end up in the pawnshop, so it was full of second hand gowns. Dogberry's gowns link into ideas about his status and self-importance. Another thing about clothes: you would have your sword and belt made to go with an outfit. You wouldn’t just have one that you would put on – like buying matching handbags and shoes. All these details were very useful, very informative. They helped to explain some particular references and contextualise the action of the play.

Scene work: process

It has been quite slow. This afternoon we are going to start on my first Dogberry scene [III.5]. I feel like it is taking a long time to get through the play, but we are working in a very detailed way. I am a bit nervous about how much I have got to learn and ideally I would like to rehearse each scene several times before I have to stand up on the stage or in a rehearsal room and do a run of it. I see the time go by and I am thinking ‘How many times are we going to be able to go through it?’ So I have really got to get on with learning the scenes we haven’t actually rehearsed yet. I have tried really, really hard! I’ve never done it before but I think I’ll feel more comfortable if I just get on and do that. I am doing quite well with the lines, but only in isolation, which is very different from doing it with the other actors.

As I said, the work we’re doing at the moment is quite detailed: we look at each scene and check out any words we don’t understand. It isn’t just words that you don’t understand sometimes. Even if you understand all the words, there can be differences of opinion about why you are saying it. We had a talk about the word 'passing' in the line ‘Cousin, you apprehend passing shrewdly’ [II.1.72]. I actually think that what that means is you understand very well, very shrewdly. You apprehend passing shrewdly: you are very, very smart, you understand that absolutely. Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] was saying that the word ‘passing’ could refer to the passing of life or the passing of time: you understand what has been happening very shrewdly. In the end, I don’t think that's it. I looked it up in the Concordance. Shakespeare so often uses ‘passing’ with the meaning ‘very’. I’ll talk to Tamara about it some more. We also look at different things in the Folio [1623] and Quarto [1600] because modern editors put in all their own punctuation. This is only to be helpful but sometimes you might disagree with their version and when that happens it's good to look at the alternatives. Similarly, there are words that have changed between the Quarto, Folio and Modern editions so we are in the position to choose what would be most useful for our production.

Gulling scene

When we’ve had a good look at the text and we are sure that we know what we are talking about, we get up and have a go at it. The other day we put Act two, scene three, on its feet. The gulling scene is great; Benedick hides and Leonato, Don Pedro, and Claudio come on. They know he is there and talk about how much Beatrice loves him, to trick him into falling in love with her. There is a little boy on just before the gulling begins – it doesn’t have to be a boy, but there is a page or a young servant. Benedick asks this page to go and fetch a book and bring it back to the orchard. What I think happens is that we have ask the page as he's on his way to fetch this book ‘Have you seen Benedick?’ and the page says ‘Yep, he's in the orchard,’ so off we all go to the orchard and we can see is Benedick's feet beneath the arbor or something like that, so we know that he is hiding. We start to talk about how Beatrice loves him and how he's not a very good catch and it is best if she doesn’t say anything – that's the gist. I’ve decided that Leonato, Don Pedro and Claudio have had a meeting offstage and decided more or less exactly what they are going to say. We tried out a bit where Leonato obviously forgets what he should be doing or saying and the others prompt him – they say ‘Tell us how you know Beatrice is in love’ (‘What effects of passion shows she?’ II.3.109), and because I can’t remember what I’m meant to be saying, I say

What effects, my lord? She will sit you – you heard my daughter tell you how.
[II.3.112-3]

I decided that once Leonato does remember what he is going to say he won’t let anyone else talk: he sort of takes over. That was quite fun to rehearse and to just see what happens in the scene. I think that scene is a good indication that Leonato can enter into the spirit of this game. You just have to work out why you say anything onstage: why do you say it, why do you open your mouth? Leonato says what he says at that point because he forgot then remembered.

Song and dance

We have done some singing. We have started to learn the song for the tomb and I think perhaps we are going to learn a song for the wedding too, but I am not sure about that. We are doing lots of jigging too: I’m keeping up so far! The jig is a very sort of traditional thing at the end of a Shakespeare play. They would have had this dance at the end of each play and we are certainly going to end with that too. The Globe nearly always has a jig at the end and it rounds off the play in the most wonderful way. I’ve watched lots of jigs here and all of them have been really terrific, but it is quite a lot of rehearsal time to take out from working on the scenes. We get six weeks rehearsal which seems quite a lot on the face of it – most of my life I have been doing Shakespeare plays in three weeks – but it isn’t long when you take out all the time for the jig rehearsals, then singing rehearsals, and we also do classes three days a week for an hour per class. Voice an hour, Movement an hour, Text an hour: the time just disappears. We’re starting to rehearse evenings this week from now on so we will have a bit more time.

Emphasis on character

If it was up to me, I’d like to play the part just as I am until the tech then put all the stuff on and be somebody else in half an hour. That is what I’d really like to do! But that's a bit too risky; you’ve got to think about it more carefully. The first time you wear a doublet and hose is certainly interesting because they are what we call ‘pointed’ all around the joints. Imagine your jacket and trousers were tied together; that's what it's like wearing pointed doublet and hose. It is more like being in a rather tight, hot boiler suit, and it means that you can’t bend over like you would in a normal jacket and trousers because the ties hold you at the back and it isn’t stretchy fabric. Last year people had to do up my shoelaces for me! You’ve got to think about that. You’ve got to think about how you sit because you do have to sit up, you can’t slouch. It is much more comfortable if you support yourself properly. I’m already trying to build up my back muscles so that sitting becomes a comfortable thing to do rather than a chore. If you are on stage and you’re tense because it is something you are not used to, it shows. I am trying to practice my posture at home as well.

Set

We learnt this week that we might get a fountain onstage, which is quite surprising. Tamara is thinking about having a fountain in the middle of the stage. A working fountain, though it won’t have water trickling about all the time because that would be too noisy. We are going to try to mock something up on the stage (at the moment we are in the rehearsal room) to see just what the ramifications of that would be. It would be very useful for all sorts of things, like how you move about onstage. You could move around it or sit on the edges… having said that, it would be plunk in the middle of the best possible position onstage. Although there would be room for one person in front of it in a prime position, you couldn’t have a scene with two or three people in that position so we need a mock-up to see how the scenes would work.

The fountain would only be there for the first half of the play which takes place pretty much in and around Leonato's house, in the gardens and orchard. The second half, though, has the wedding in the church and we meet in the street – it is set in different places. I think it would be disastrous to have a fountain in that central position during the wedding scene – you just couldn’t do it. The Globe stage has two large pillars that dictate where you stand in order to be seen by the largest proportion of people. If you look at the pillars, they line up with the doors to the left and right of the central doors: if you stand upstage in line with the pillars, no one in the yard or lower balcony can see you. You need the central space that the fountain would occupy, especially if there are a lot of people who need to be seen, like in the wedding scene. That is a very good spot. You have to balance up whether you gain more than you lose.

Singing

The singing is a bit of a highlight. I like the singing. I am not very good at it but I enjoy doing it. It is very accessible singing for people like me – untrained singers, enthusiastic but untrained. Everyone is learning the songs but who actually ends up singing them depends on who is in the scene and available, and if it is appropriate, I suppose. I suspect most people will sing in the tomb scene. I don’t know whether Hero will sing: she is supposed to be dead of course, but I suspect some people will sing off stage. It is very much in the same sort of tradition as the songs that the women's company sang last year: calling songs which are very open. I think that style comes from Eastern Europe, but not the songs themselves. It is very open, not as precise English like church music.

Clothing

I haven’t had any more fittings, but I have put in a secret request for eyebrows! I am going to have a beard and a moustache and I thought ‘What about some eyebrows?’ It is a bit of a dodgy point. I think we have to veer away from the original practice thing in order to equip ourselves with facial hair because the sort of things that would have been available then are not going to work today, I am afraid. I think we will have spirit gum and beards on gauze. I certainly loved it last year. I haven’t talked to Luca [Costigliolo, Master of Clothing] yet about the eyebrows – I just sent a message – so he might say no. I don’t want them to be too big; just to be a little bit extra over my little plucked eyebrows. So I’m looking forward to hearing what Luca will say about that. I have asked for a cloak too, a long cloak to wear in the rehearsal room, because although the rest of the outfit doesn’t bother me too much, there will be moments when I’ll need to grapple with a long cloak. That is the only physical thing I will be thinking about in the rehearsals particularly.

Text work

We had a great session this morning with Giles doing text work. We don’t do anything with Much Ado About Nothing because that might interfere with rehearsals, but there is a wonderful speech in As You Like It that we’ve been looking at in Act one, scene 1. Orlando talks to Adam, his faithful retainer, about how his brother was charged on his father's deathbed to look after his education and so on. The brother, Oliver, hasn’t been doing this and the first thing the audience hears when they come in is Orlando's chunk of speech explaining the situation. We looked at ways to make that sound fresh and real. It is very similar to a lot of the stuff Leonato has. You know, when you start speaking and something else comes into your mind and so you have to say the next thing, and then there is another thing you have to say. That was very useful, and I hope to take it on in my Much Ado rehearsals.

Movement and Voice

My movement sessions – oh, I creak and creak. I creak through the movement sessions, but they are very good. Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] has some wonderful things she does with royalty. She says that there are four stock characters: the King, the Magician, the Lover, and the Warrior. We try to walk around being these characters. She does very good things: making you stand up straight without being stressed. Adopting kingship, you have this heavy crown on your head and this heavy cloak on your shoulders, so you have to stand up. You have to carry the weight of kingship, the responsibility of kingship. She has another one about the Magician who weaves and ducks and dives through life. And the Lover, and the Warrior have their own qualities too. Then you think about how they might combine in a person. Okay, you might be playing a king, but he will probably be a lover at some point in his life. He will need to be a magician, ducking and diving a bit. So that was a good for our characters’ physicality. We also try to be a bit more masculine – or rather, we try not to be too ‘girly’ in our movements. I’m trying especially hard with my hands; men and women seem to use their hands in different ways and I don’t think I’ve got that quite right yet.

We also had a lovely voice session with Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe and Master of Voice for the Red Company] – Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice for White and Rose Companies] was unable to take the last session so we had a session with Mark. I have watched Mark many times on this stage and I have acted with him before, but I just know that he uses this stage so brilliantly so anything he has to tell me is bound to be an absolute gem. First of all, he played us a piece of music which has the beat of iambic pentameter, ten beats. And we looked a little bit at John Donne's poetry and just tried to keep the beat, the pulse, because it is written in iambic pentameter. It was lovely to find the beat then do some work on intention: you speak to communicate and we have to find the reasons for each word that we say. The verse thing is endlessly fascinating… how you can keep the pulse, which is the life-blood of the verse, going without making it sound boring… you have to keep it alive.

Next Week

More rehearsals, more jig calls, more rehearsals. I just want to get on with it! I want to do this lovely play and say the words lots of times so that they become so familiar to me. I’m raring to rehearse the second half now.

Back to top

Rehearsal notes 4

  • This week
  • 'I pray thee, cease thy counsel’
  • Speaking from the heart
  • Confrontation in the street: V.1
  • Sympathy for Claudio
  • Relationship with Claudio

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

I have been trying to learn the jig. We learn it in stages, but when we get up there, I think ‘I have never done this in my life before and I don’t remember anything – nothing at all.’ Then it slowly comes back, and thankfully other people remember, so gradually I start remembering the steps too. I just hang on to the fact that last year I did get it, so we will see. Otherwise we have been ploughing forward with the text; doing a lot of close examination of the text and making sure we know it all. So this week has been very similar to last week in terms of the type of work we've been doing: we’re ploughing on through the play so the shape of thing is becoming clearer.

‘I pray thee, cease thy counsel’

Yesterday we tackled the big speech I have in Act five, scene one, which is the scene with Antonio, after the dreadful wedding. That's a big speech and it's great to go through. The danger is that you think you’ve reached the end of a thought, but the thoughts are really quite long and often they carry right on. Once I get the sequence of a character's thoughts right in a scene, then I can remember it. If the thoughts aren’t right, it is very, very difficult: I just get lost - I stop and I think ‘I don’t know what happens next.’ It's hard to explain how you find the thread of the thoughts; it is very detailed work. We also did an exercise with the meter, stressing it very obviously all the way through from the beginning:

I pray thee, cease thy counsel,
Which falls into mine ears as profitless
As water in a sieve. Give not me counsel […]
[V.1.4-6...]

That threw up the odd occasion where I chose the wrong word to stress. Mostly, I am pleased to say, I think I got it pretty much right, but it is very interesting when you do get the wrong stress – you ask yourself 'Why did I choose that alternative?'

We did another exercise where we clicked our fingers at the end of each line of verse. I am less certain how useful this was for me personally, because I feel the danger is to pause at the end of each line. The last word in the line is usually (not all the time, but usually) the key word which you have to find a reason for saying, but I wouldn’t say you have to pause after it. In ‘I pray thee cease thou counsel’ it is ‘counsel’ that is important and it's repeated at teh end of the third line too: ‘that falls into my ears as profitless/ as water in a sieve give not me counsel.’ So it really is a key idea in Leonato's speech - repetition is a good clue for things like that.

I also noticed that ‘mine’ is repeated a lot:

Nor let no comforter delight mine ear
But such a one whose wrongs do suit with mine.
Bring me a father that so loved his child,
Whose joy of her is overwhelm'd like mine […]
[V.1.6-9]

There are echoes of Leonato's beautiful lines in the wedding scene, spoken in response to Hero's supposed treachery:

Who smirch'd thus and mired with infamy,
I might have said 'No part of it is mine;
This shame derives itself from unknown loins'?
But mine and mine I loved and mine I praised
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I myself was to myself not mine,
Valuing of her […]
[IV.1.131-7]

Mine, mine, mine again. I think the word works: it shows how personal and close the relationship is between father and daughter. Even in disowning her, he repeats their connection. It is really, really personal and I suppose it is ‘me, me, me,’ but not in a selfish way: each repetition stresses how deeply he feels her betrayal. The words come from his soul.

Speaking from the heart

Verse form is often linked to the idea that a character is speaking from the heart. A lot of Leonato's lines are in verse and he is the sort of guy who is incredibly true to himself. You can see that right from the beginning of the play: there's his friendship with the Prince, his relationship with Beatrice (he wants to get her married, he wants her to be happy), he adores his daughter, and he has a good relationship with the constables – he's very straight with them – he's not patronising. We haven’t rehearsed that Act five, scene one, with the Watch yet… but the way I’m thinking about it at the moment is that Leonato is in a situation where he's got Don Pedro and Claudio at his side, along with Borachio (now known to be a villain), and the Constable and Verges (of the Watch) are there too. Leonato says of Don Pedro and Claudio:

Here stand a pair of honourable men,
A third has fled, that had a hand in it.
I thank you, Princes, for my daughter's death;
Record it with your high and worldly deeds.
’Twas bravely done, if you bethink you of it.
[V.1.253-257]

‘Honourable’ is used with a twist – killing Hero was not honourably done so Leonato's courtesy ‘I thank you’ is rather pointed. Just a few minutes later, he says to the Watch ‘Go I discharge thee of thy prisoner, and I thank thee’ [V.1.305-6]. He sincerely thanks the Watch for their care and pains in front of the smarter folk. So you have the smart, high status people on one side and people of lower status on the other; there's a real contrast. I think Leonato is fundamentally a fair man and a true man. When he challenges Claudio in Act five, scene one, he doesn’t really challenge Don Pedro. Antonio does: Antonio goes for it and includes the Prince in his tirade, but Leonato doesn’t. He very much challenges Claudio because the deed that has been done by Claudio. We have been doing that part of the scene this morning so it is fresh in my mind; I was struck by the fact Leonato only stopped the Prince defending Claudio – he doesn't really include the Prince in his accusations.

Confrontation in the street [V.1]

I find the scene where Leonato and Antonio approach Don Pedro and Claudio really interesting because I have to get lots of things straight there which are not immediately obvious in the text. There are some tricky questions about who knows what exactly. The Friar has told me ‘this is the plan: you go and tell everyone Hero is dead, go and do a bit of obvious mourning, and they will all be really sorry.’ Therefore, in this confrontation (which I suppose is probably a chance meeting), Leonato decides that this is the moment that he's going to tell them she is dead… or do Antonio and I think that Don Pedro and Claudio already know about Hero? That's a possibility, as the Sexton seems to know about Hero's death and Don John's flight in Act four, scene one. We have to make a decision whether Don Pedro and Claudio know that Hero is ‘dead’ and whether I know that they know! All Shakespeare has given us in that scene is a throw away line – well, it's not exactly ‘throw away’... Leonato says:

I say thou hast belied mine innocent child.
Thy slander hath gone through and through her heart,
And she lies buried with her ancestors –
O, in a tomb where never scandal slept,
Save this of hers, framed by thy villainy!
[V.1.67-71]

That isn’t, in the great course of Shakespeare, the way to tell somebody about an important death! It's quite an indirect mention, but I think that this will be the first Don Pedro and Claudio hear of it. If I was an audience member, I would want to see the look on Don Pedro and Claudio's faces when they hear the news – in effect, you’re seeing the upshot of the Friar's plan. I hope that is what Shakespeare intended, and I think that is what we are going to play. That was the first decision we had to make.

We also had to decide when Act five, scene one, takes place; on the same day as the wedding scene, or the next day, or the following week? I don’t think Don Pedro and Claudio would hang around for very long after the wedding disaster. They could be waiting on news about Don John, who's fled, but I don’t think everyone necessarily knows that he's gone. At the moment, it makes sense to stage it later on the same day when Don Pedro and Claudio have moved out of my house. After the prisoners have been brought out and the plot revealed, I tell the Don Pedro and Claudio to come and meet me ‘tomorrow at my house.’ That suggests that they have moved out… so perhaps we met in the street at the beginning [of V.1]. That would be awkward for them, but I’m raring to speak to them because I am so angry. I tell Antonio that I will be flesh and blood, and I am going to get upset about this. What's more, I am going to tell the prince. Unfortunately for the Prince and Claudio, they arrive at just this moment. They say good evening in a very polite way because that was what you had to do in that society – no matter what happened, be careful of your manners. Anyway, they say ‘good evening’ and I demand they stay and talk to me. We have a confrontation; from being very polite at the beginning, everyone crumbles into name-calling, with ‘boy’ and ‘old man.’

Sympathy for Claudio

I feel sorry for Claudio. Leonato doesn’t, but I do. Claudio honestly thinks that he has been completely reasonable. He is going to marry a beautiful girl, he is deliriously happy, and then he sees her with someone else. Hero has been dishonoured, and who would marry her in those circumstances? Claudio has seen it with his own eyes and so has the Prince. His honour is at stake and, as the Prince brokered the marriage in the first place, his royal honour has been tarnished too. You can’t judge Claudio too harshly. He's horrible in the church scene but he truly believes that is justified. When he's confronted by this old man in the street who calls him a villain, he's going to protest. His hand definitely goes to his sword – whether it is instinctive or a mistake that I misinterpret, I am not entirely certain, but his hand does go to his sword. I say ‘Look, don’t go for your sword, I am not frightened of you,’ and then Claudio makes his big mistake. He says ‘Oh, you’re an old man. I wouldn’t give you any cause to be frightened.’ Leonato just overwhelms him: ‘Don’t patronize me. Don’t talk to me like I’m an old fool; I’m not an old fool. I’m not taking cover under my age – because of what you’ve done to my daughter, I’m going to cast aside my age. I challenge you to see if I am a match for you.’

Poor Claudio has nowhere to go in the face of that response. I am an old man and he won’t fight me, but that's exactly what Leonato is pushing for. What can Claudio do? Does he say ‘Alright I’ll fight you’? That's instance death for Leonato because Claudio is a successful soldier who has undertaken courageous feats in battle – Leonato wouldn’t stand a chance. Leonato, however, thinks that right is absolutely on his side, and it's a bit like the oracle at Delphi in Winter's Tale: if you were right or innocent and you challenged somebody to a duel, then you would win regardless of physical strength. Despite how young and virile Claudio is, Leonato will win because right is on his side. But of course Claudio thinks he's right too, so either he's got to do a terrible thing and fight an old man who's going to lose, or stand and be further dishonoured. Leonato won’t be brushed off: I’m thinking, ‘You brush me off like that? You think you can brush me off like that? You killed my child. This is grown up stuff. You pick on a man, and I’ll give you what for.’ Antonio and Leonato have to back down when the Prince won’t listen, but I make Don Pedro and Claudio they know that they haven’t heard the last of this.

Relationship with Hero

Hero's lovely, not at all soppy. I think Mariah [Gale] is going to play it nice and feisty! It's a tricky part because she doesn’t say a lot to begin with, and she doesn’t leap in straightaway to defend herself in the wedding scene. When she does say to her father ‘I just didn’t do it’, he absolutely believes her, I’m sure of it. That's the moment that provokes the next scene for me [V.1, confrontation with Claudio and Don Pedro]. At the beginning of the wedding scene, Leonato cannot believe that Hero would be capable of such a thing. When the Prince says, ‘But I saw with my own eyes,’ Leonato is like any parent with a child that they think can do no wrong: one day the police are at the door saying, ‘Hello, hello, hello? Small problem here.’ Think about how many parents we see on television saying, ‘I just didn’t think he’d ever do it; I couldn’t believe she’d do that…’ You remember that, well, we’re all capable of all sorts of things. I suppose Leonato at that point has to say to himself, ‘The Prince wouldn’t lie. These people aren’t lying; they must have seen this or she must have done it.’ That's when he goes ballistic with her, because it's an enormous betrayal. He's given this girl everything. Yes, he's awful to her, but when she really, really denies the accusations, I think the bond between them is strong enough for him to put his faith in her. Especially when Benedick reminds everyone that Don John is a pretty dodgy guy who could easily be involved in some miserable scheme. Then the Friar backs up her defence when he remarks that Hero is not acting like a guilty person. I think all of that means that, by the end of the scene [IV.1], he believes her absolutely. Also, I have a need for Hero's forgiveness in that scene. This isn’t in the text; it's just what I feel. He's come to trust her, but the moments of doubt in the interim are traumatic for both of them. I feel that there has to be some sort of reconciliation because it's so hard. I’m not sure how we’ll do that yet.

Back to top

Rehearsal notes 5

  • Overview
  • Lines
  • Fooling Benedick
  • Household scene (II.1) & improvisation
  • Dealing with obscure lines
  • Clothing
  • Looking ahead

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.

Overview

This week we went through the entire play, beginning to end, and we had lots of jig rehearsals and some singing rehearsals too. I love those, though I do find the dancing a little more challenging than I used to. In my youth I starred in a musical, but I find steps much more difficult to learn nowadays. I plod along with my dancing, doing my best. It's starting to come together. I’m starting to get sections of it right; once if I get enough sections right, then I’ve just got to put them all together like a jigsaw, so I’m hopeful that will work out. The singing is lovely, though I’m not quite sure if the audience will notice that Leonato turns into a soprano! My speaking voice is relatively low when I’m playing a man, so I don’t know how that change will go down. I suppose they will hear the song and the tune rather than who is singing which individual part.

Lines

We have started going through the scenes more quickly. We’re taking it for granted that we know what we’re saying at any given point, what each of our characters wants from other people, what our intentions and needs are, and basically what's happening in each scene. Now it's a case of working out how we go about accomplishing those things as actors and characters. We have to start making choices. In a way this is the bit of rehearsal that I like best, when you get down to the nitty-gritty and try to make things work. That also means trying to remember your lines! I feel I’ve learned my lines quite thoroughly and I've certainly spent a lot of time on them, but learning them at home is very different from standing up onstage, where you have to think about other things like your position and the way you interact with other characters, as well as which words come next. I find that the most useful thing to do as you are learning lines is listen to what other characters say to you. It's very easy for your mind to go completely blank and to freeze when you’re confronted with actors saying their lines, but that is a sure way not to know what you’re going to say next. I just try to be brave enough to really concentrate and be right in the scene i.e. listen and react to other characters speaking, instead of just going through a set words and motions. You hope that what you have to say will come out, and you won't be stranded there thinking ‘What's my next line?’ or ‘Oh yes, I’ve got to say this next, I’ve got to say this next’ to the extent that you block everything else out until you hear something that you recognize! It's much better to concentrate on what the other characters say to prompt your lines.

Fooling Benedick

This morning we’ve working on the scene that is proving the most difficult scene for me at the moment: it's the gulling of Benedick [II.3]. Leonato, Claudio, and Don Pedro know that Benedick is hiding, and they set about pretending that Beatrice is completely in love with him. That's a tricky scene because you have to work out what they’ve planned in advance, and until you work out what they have planned, none of it makes very much sense. You could say the lines and get through the scene, but the jokes don’t work unless you know what's going on. We decided this morning – of course, it may change – that perhaps Beatrice is most likely to talk to Hero about her feelings for Benedick (of course, this is not taken from the actual text). Hero might relate some of that to her father. We decided that would be most believable for Benedick, at least. The story for the gulling scene is that Hero has witnessed Beatrice writing love letters to Benedick and generally being in a terrible state about him – Hero tells Leonato and Claudio and we recount it all to Don Pedro. It becomes a bit of a show-off battle between Claudio and Leonato as to who knows most and who is allowed to do most acting in this little charade. There's a little bit of one-upmanship going on between Claudio and Leonato, so we hope that's going to be very funny.

Leonato's basically not too good at this game and he can’t remember what he's supposed to do next. For instance, when Don Pedro suggests Beatrice might be pretending, Leonato gets a bit carried away with his denial and that lands him in difficulty:

Don Pedro
May be she doth but counterfeit. Claudio
Faith, like enough. Leonato
O God! Counterfeit? There was never counterfeit passion came so near the life of passion as she discovers it. Don Pedro
Why, what effects of passion shows she? Claudio (to Don Pedro and Leonato)
Bait the hook well; this fish will bite. Leonato
What effects, my lord? She will sit you – you heard my daughter tell you how. Claudio
She did, indeed.
[II.3.105-114]

Leonato can’t remember the effects of love that Beatrice has supposedly shown. He's absolutely put on the spot and can’t think of anything to say. We’ve interpreted that bit as though he's dried; he's forgotten his lines and Claudio has to come to the rescue. Each of us tried to find a little thread through, a story that we’re telling, and of course Benedick hears it all and there are little interjections from him that should be funny for the audience. We’ve got a bit of trellis work at the back on either side of the central doors – it's like a hedge, and you can just see Benedick's feet at the bottom. Occasionally he pulls the leaves apart so he can speak to the audience. When he first hears that Beatrice loves him, he makes an exclamation that he turns into a dog barking, but, of course, Leonato, Claudio and Don Pedro can hardly keep their faces straight. Another thing we tried out this morning was a line up along the trellis with our feet in a row – so four pairs of feet but only three bodies – and we’ll look at his feet at the end. We hope that that's going to be hysterical!

We spent a long time on that scene, starting at ten in the morning and finishing at one in the afternoon, because it is a very difficult scene. Balthazar came in towards the end of that rehearsal, and we did the beginning of the scene again with song ‘Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more’. So we did the ending of the scene first, then we did the bit where Balthazar came in, and then we put it all together. Balthazar has a great bit of word-play with Don Pedro: they play with the different meanings of ‘note.’ Obviously, that's an important word for the rest of the play too: is it Much Ado About Nothing or Much Ado About Noting? Apparently in Elizabethan pronunciation, the two words might have sounded more similar than they do today.

Household scene and improvisation

Yesterday evening we did the scene after supper that starts with Leonato asking ‘Where was Count John at supper?’ [II.1.1]. I think of this as a household scene, a family scene for us. It's a lovely – there are a couple more scenes a bit like it, where you just have the household: the girls (Beatrice, Hero, Margaret, and Ursula), dad (me) and uncle (Antonio). I feel we can be ourselves at these points, without the guests, without having to put on a polite show for anybody else. I think something similar happens in the first half of the first scene, though the Messenger comes into that scene with me. Anyway, Act two, scene one, is a domestic scene, where I’m free to say ‘Count John is a bit rude – he never even turned up for supper.’ So we worked through that and did an improvisation to discover how Hero feels about the possibility of being married off to the Prince, because we’ve got just a little inkling that she might have a fancy for Claudio. We set the improvisation between Act one and Act two: Antonio has told me what his man overheard in the orchard (that the Prince intends to marry Hero) and although I’m sceptical, it's a possibility that has to be provided for so I go and have a talk with Hero. The improvisation threw up lots of very good things. For instance, I found that I couldn’t ask Hero what she wanted, because it's unthinkable that the Prince should be refused. That really just is not an option for Leonato. I’ve brought her up to be obedient and to know her duty and all those sorts of things, but on the other hand, we’ve got a very good relationship, and we’re very close. She hasn’t got a mother, remember. The only way that I could avoid saying ‘You will do what I tell you to do’ is not to ask her what she actually wants. However, even if I did ask her, I think she would say ‘I want what you want for me.’ That's the type of close relationship they have.

Since the scene before our household scene is Don John, Borachio, and Conrade in the garden [I.3], Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] had an idea that we start our scene [II.1] by coming out into the garden and Don John walking rather rudely past us. That's good because it prompts us to be unkind about him – ‘Was not Don John here at supper?’ Beatrice then says ‘He is a tart gentleman’ and we have a little banter about that. In that scene, my great objective is to get Beatrice married off. There's just this terrible anxiety that she mocks anyone who wants to come and marry her, and they won’t have anything to do with her. We have a long banter about that idea. There are lots of jokes in amongst that. We’ve also done a bit of work on when the revellers come in. When we rehearsed it, I realised that I didn’t have anything to say. All the couples have a little banter together in the dance, but I don’t. I just got the feeling that to begin with I would want to know very much what the Prince and Hero were talking about, because that's the big question for me: is he really going to ask her to marry him? So I listen to their talk. Then the next bit of talk is Margaret and Balthazar, so my attention's taken up, and I found myself wandering around the dancers. It reminded me a bit of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol – when he's being shown the future or the past. I think I probably will continue to do that, and on the Globe stage I suspect that will help with the focus because we don’t have any lighting. People don’t walk into a good light that draws the audience's attention to them, so that might be quite useful for me to do. At the moment, that's how we’re going.

Dealing with obscure lines

That's tricky. The last thing you should ever do is explain the line. That's a real pitfall, I think, because if you try to explain a joke (it's usually jokes in a witty play like Much Ado About Nothing), then it just stops being funny and you’re lost, done for. I think once you’ve understood a line or a joke, you just play it really. If there's anything esoteric, Giles [Block, Master of the Word] and Tamara are the people I go to, and there's things like CT Onions’ glossary, which is this wonderful little book that tells you what a lot of the words mean. The Shakespeare Concordance is also great: if you don’t know what a particular word means, then you look it up in your concordance, which will give you every instance in which that word has appeared in Shakespeare's plays. That often gives you clues about the sense of a particular word – the word ‘passing’ for example. There were several possible alternatives for the line ‘Cousin, you apprehend passing shrewdly,’ [II.1.72] but, having gone to the concordance, I feel that he mostly uses it with the meaning ‘very’. So that's helpful to clarify the sense of difficult lines too.

Clothing

I’ve got a very beautiful, very long (floor-length) gown with very short sleeves, tiny little sleeves. It's black and the fabric is very beautiful, a reproduction of an original pattern that has been woven. It's got a little stand-up collar and lots of buttons down the front. My doublet and hose from last season (which I’m wearing again this season) has forty-five buttons to undo if I want to go to the toilet! This year, I’ve probably got another thirty buttons on top of that, so whether I’ll ever get there, I really don’t know! I certainly won’t get there any time but the interval. You have to remember that going to the toilet is not simply a case of taking one's trousers down: you’ve got to take everything off. But the gown is great – I love it. I’m all in black which I didn’t expect – I thought I was going to have a wine-coloured gown. I’ve got to go into mourning, though, and the gowns are very expensive and take a long time to make. You can’t just suddenly whip up another gown for an original practice production. As I’m going to have a black gown anyway, the mourning won’t be a problem. Luca [Costigliolo, Master of Clothing] has said that I might have worn some rosemary about me for a funeral. I think they used rosemary on all sorts of occasions, because in last year's The Taming of the Shrew, I seem to remember that we had some on the wedding table. The symbolism is interesting.

I wanted something to make me look a bit more festive for the wedding, because when I go to Dogberry I say ‘…you see it is a busy time with me.’ [III.5.94] Now, I could say ‘You see it is a busy time with me,’ without referring specifically to my clothes but because I’m so proud and happy that my daughter's getting married on this wonderful day, I wanted to give that line a more specific reference: ‘You see [referring to appearance], it is a busy time for me – my daughter's getting married!’ I think I’m going to wear my Chain of Office for that, which will hopefully make me look a more festive for the wedding.

I’m getting my eyebrows, as well – I had a fitting! I’ve got the same beard and moustache that I had as Vincentio [The Taming of the Shrew] last year, which I love, and I’ve got a very delicate pair of eyebrows, which I think will just do the trick without drawing the eye. They’ll just finish the picture without being obvious. They’re not comic eyebrows; they’re just very naturalistic, certainly those of an old gentleman.

Looking ahead

I’m anticipating that we go on working through the scenes and pinning down more firmly where we’re going to be on the stage. That's not so much blocking as finding out which positions work best for us. I anticipate learning the jig and getting it right. Also I’m looking forward to a bit more singing. The main thing though is to just keep ploughing on with the play, and then of course at some point we’ll do a run-through. That can be very, very scary and sometimes it can be a bit depressing because the things you achieved in rehearsals sometimes get lost. The first run-through points out the bits that aren’t working, I think. There are some scenes where I’m still having trouble remembering the lines – I know the lines, it's just a matter of remembering precisely where they come. In terms of specific scenes, the gulling scene is quite hard, but that’ll come. We’ll just go on making it trip off our tongues because until those words come automatically, you spend your time thinking about the words rather than the thoughts behind the lines. The thoughts are the important things that you have to have at your disposal. I’m sure we’ll be great!

Back to top

Rehearsal notes 6

  • Run through
  • Fixing small bits
  • Building the scene
  • The Prince: status
  • Onwards & uphill

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.

Run-through

We did our first run-through yesterday. Various people came to watch, including Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] and Claire [Van Kampen, Master of Theatre Music]. I went into tense 'panic' mode a bit but I just about got through it… we made fewer mistakes than we might have done. I wasn’t listening or reacting to people very well in my panic, but that's okay because now I’ve learned what happens when I do get frightened, I’ll able to calm myself down and concentrate on listening a little more. I especially enjoyed feeling my way out of one scene and into the next, and also trying to remember when I need to take on props and things. For instance, I have to take the letter on in the first scene, I need a couple of money bags to give people in another scene, and there's a certain scene where I don’t have my hat – Balthazar brings it on. I’m just putting those very technical things in my head which is quite satisfying.

The other day I came into the theatre early, before the tours started, so that I could get down onto the stage by myself without being watched. I don’t mind going down there with somebody else, but I feel a bit silly down there on my own when the tours groups watching. I went through some of my big speeches and I thought about how I might be able to use the stage to play to different parts of the house. If you’re used to playing in a proscenium theatre, this thrust stage is very different, and you have to do everything to include all areas of the stage. I had forgotten how good the back corners of the stage are; they’re really good spots because everyone can see you. There are pillars blocking you, of course, which is why you have to keep moving up to a certain extent. It was a really useful morning actually – it was good just to feel my voice in the space. There were some people there doing things with props, so I was a bit self-conscious about delivering the lines, but I did it. I had planned on working with the lines, and I did try some things, but it's never the same working on your own because there's no one to whom you can listen and react. Working on your own is second best. At least the session gave me a picture in my head that I can use to prepare my other bits of speech.

Fixing the small bits

Another good thing about the run was that it pinpointed certain places that I feel I need to look at again. They’re little technical things, really. For example, there's a moment I have with the messenger right at the beginning [I.1]. I ask him how many people have died in the war, and he tells me that practically nobody died. I say ‘A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers.’ [I.1.8-9]. Then I refer to something in the messenger's letter about Claudio, ‘I find here that Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine...’ I had been finding that transition difficult. I think I scuppered myself by moving over to Antonio on the line, because we made the decision that I really like this uncle of Claudio's who lives in Messina. He's a very good friend of mine and Antonio’s. He doesn’t actually get mentioned again but there's a lovely little image of him crying at the good news in the letters the messenger has already delivered. Leonato asks the messenger whether this Uncle burst into tears, as though he always does that, as though we know he weeps at the drop of a hat. It's great to have this image of an old man that Antonio and I really like, but it meant I moved away over to Antonio at that point. The transition was very tricky. I think the answer to it today is to stay with the Messenger and refer to the letter, and then move over on the next bit. So I say to Antonio ‘I find here that Don Pedro…’ and then go over to him. That might seem like a tiny thing but it's all those small bits that make up the play in the end, isn’t it?

Building the scene

We’ll go through a scene and I will think ‘Oh, I need to look at that little bit.’ Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] is there to field everybody's little wishes, and she has many of her own. She’ll have a clearer overall picture of what needs to happen, but I might mention to her that I’m not sure what to do with this bit or what to do with that bit, and she’ll help me with that. I do go back, and if something's not working, I’ll try and look at it in a completely different way. There's a scene with Antonio after the wedding scene when I come on and he says ‘You mustn’t go on like this, you’ll make yourself ill,’ and I say, ‘Don’t give me counsel’ – ‘Leave me alone,’ basically [V.1]. It's a long speech, and I’ve been coming on in a quite angry way – you know, ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t give me any council.’ That wasn’t quite working for me, so what I’m trying to do now is to come on in a much more depressed way: that gives the scene somewhere to go. It's quite a long speech, and it builds up as I stop being depressed and start being angry. Towards the end of that little bit, Antonio goes, ‘If you’re gonna be like that, be like that, but you should be taking it out on the people that caused this and not yourself.’ That's what stirs Leonato up, and then the Prince and Claudio come on, so I’m ready for them. What I’m trying to do is build up to that rather than starting up there and having nowhere to go. I’m not certain that's the level we’ll play it at, but hopefully things will become clearer soon.

It was wonderful to watch the other scenes during the run. That's one of the best bits, to see things you haven’t seen before. I think some of it is very funny; watching people being inventive and doing things together is great. That was a joy, and it actually helps take the pressure off you because you’re enjoying watching other people, so you don’t get quite so nervous. Yes, that was the best bit of the run-through for me.

The Prince: status

We’ve worked this morning on Don Pedro's status as Prince. We did a lot of work about making him the person to whom everybody bows – he doesn’t do bowing. I don’t know if it’ll stay like that, but it certainly worked very well this morning. You’re only important if people treat you as being important. If nobody's going to take any notice of you, you’re just not important. If you’re the Prince, the only way the audience know you’re the Prince – I mean, physically – is how other people treat you, so we did a bit of work on treating him in a very princely manner.

Onwards and uphill

From here we go steadily uphill! We will rehearse a bit more this afternoon, then we will rehearse tomorrow morning and do another run. I’m looking forward to that because you’ve got the confidence of having just got through it the last time, so maybe this time I’ll be able to play it a bit more and keep the thoughts going. On Sunday we’ll do another run, I suppose, and Tuesday we’ll start technical rehearsals. That will involve the clothing and scenery and all that sort of thing, and we’ll see the fountain for the first time! I went to look at the benches while they were being painted. They’re very clever – there's someone painting the benches to look like marble; it's wonderful. I’m so impressed.

The technical is the first time we’ll be put the whole play on the stage. It's the first time we get into all our costumes since the fittings and see everybody's hats and so on, and then we go onstage and start doing it. I’m sure we’ll rework a lot of our positioning because being on that stage is very different to walking around a floor plan. We’ll sort out exits and entrances, and music cues… we also need to do more work on the songs, but they are good fun. A bit high for me, but I expect I’ll manage.

Back to top

Rehearsal notes 7

  • Technical rehearsals: set
  • Clothing
  • The Tech
  • Long gown
  • Resolving a problem
  • Overall

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 rehearsal: the set

During the technical we got to see the fountain for the first time. It sits in the middle of the stage and has a little octagonal bench all the way around it, and there's a statue in it of a person holding two trumpets. The water comes out of the trumpets, but the trick is for the water to come out at the exactly right pressure so it doesn’t come out too much and splash the bench on the other side. That would be disastrous because we sit on the bench, and the costumes are all made of silk – some are wool, but most are silk – and you can’t get them wet because it ruins them. You can’t sit in a puddle, nor can you be near something that's splashing. That was fun and games, getting that sorted out. I think it is sorted, though, and I’m just worried now about what will happen when we get a gale [laughs]. In very windy weather, something will have to be done about that. That's also true of the benches. We have two benches, one on either side, downstage right and downstage left. A lot of people sit on them at various points in the play – or indeed stand on them – so if it rains, as it will do at some point, they will be very dodgy places. The rain comes in just on the sides of the stage, and it makes the stage very, very slippery. I’ve seen people slip and fall out there when it's wet – it's like a skating rink. I’m not sure what will happen about that, but I suppose at some point we’ll have to have a wet weather contingency plan. The benches are angled on the sides so that they’re not completely curved. They’re very useful, but they won’t be so useful to sit on if it's raining. Indeed, it's raining now, so when we start the tech this afternoon, a solution will probably become apparent. I’m not sure what plans we’ve got for rain at the moment.

Clothing

We’ve been teching all week, so it's been very busy. On the first morning of the tech, we were called for half past nine and we weren’t even planning to start, I don’t think, before half past eleven because so many of us need help to get into our costumes. There are four girls (playing girls), and they’re all wearing corsets, then their dresses are laced as well. A lot of man power going into that lacing up, because you can’t do that yourself, it's just not possible. I have been wearing a corset, but I’m not sure if I’ll go on doing so. I like a corset because I like having something to breathe against, but I think my costume is padded and it's sturdy, so I think it might do on its own. I’ll have to check with our designer, Luca [Costigliolo, Master of Clothing], to make sure that's alright. It just makes everything so much easier, and it also means that the Wardrobe department doesn’t have to worry about me getting into and out of a corset. I’m quite good at getting myself out of it, actually, but that would just make everything easier. Every time we have a lunch break we need another quarter of an hour to get out of our costumes and another quarter of an hour getting back into them. There isn’t really enough time, so the girls stay in their corsets all through their lunch break. You have to be very careful – you have to wear a calico gown if you want to eat or drink, just to make sure that nothing damages the costumes because they are so expensive to make and very precious.

It's been good fun seeing everyone in their beards and various hairpieces. Penny Diamond plays my brother [Antonio], and she's got a very long beard, which was wonderful. I’ve of course got my beard and moustache and my eyebrows. We’re still fiddling about with the eyebrows, but on the whole it just makes such a difference to your face. It's just how I imagined myself through rehearsals. I might not have looked like that, but in my head that's how I’ve been. I’ve had a mental picture of my appearance, especially because it's the same beard I wore last year, so I knew how it would be somehow. The costumes are terrific. I think Luca has done an amazing job because they all look like clothes that people wear; there isn’t some sort of colour theme going through it. I really like that: they look like proper individuals in proper clothes, and that's great. The clothes and facial hair don’t really change the way you react to the other actors, though, because you’ve sort of got their appearance in your head in a way, though you don’t know what they’re going to look like exactly. You don’t react to what you see in those terms – I don’t anyway.

The Tech

The tradition with technical rehearsals is to make sure you’re happy with where you’re standing onstage at all times, and that you can hear. The difficulty at the Globe – which is very different to other theatres – is that it's much more difficult to hear what's going on onstage. We don’t have a relay system and we don’t have anybody in the corner with headphones or hearing the show over a loudspeaker system to give you a cue if you can’t hear it. You just have to find a way to hear what's going on, and in this show the two side doors are open the whole time. There are little grills in the door, so normally you’d press your ear to the grill, hear your cue, open the door and go on, but if the door is open, you have to stand back and it's quite difficult to hear, quite difficult. In those circumstances you also can’t see your cue, so if it's possible a member of stage management will perhaps look through the centre doors and give you a visual cue. All the problems are fixable; they just need a bit of imagination sometimes. We’ve got one quick entrance that we’ve just done where we’re all on the balcony – I always call it the Juliet balcony – watching the tomb scene. Then there are only a couple of lines before the Friar, the girls, and I, and I suppose, Antonio, have to be at the down centre doors and straight on for the last scene. So that's quite quick.

There's a quick way down from the balcony to the tiring house, though it wasn’t there last year. Romeo and Juliet must use it too. There's a very steep set of treads that has got a vertical rope next to it, so I hang onto the rope and come down that way. The Friar goes round the stairs, but I’m coming down there because I think I’ll be quicker doing that, and I think I can just about manage it. I think that's what I’ll be happiest doing. I’ll leave my hat down on the prop table since I don’t need it for the tomb scene, because it's like we’re in a church. So I’ve taken my hat off and then I pick it up when I get downstairs on the props table, so I’ve got a hand free for the rope (I’ve got a long gown on so I’ve got to hold that up). But that's alright, that's fine.

The long gown

It is quite hard manoeuvring because the gown is very long. The lovely Linda, who made my gown, is quite right that you need to have the gown long enough to touch the ground because you’ve got the audience at your foot level. The groundlings are very low, not too much taller than the stage, so they’re at a different level than you’d normally expect – it's a high stage. I think clothes do look funny at the Globe if they’re not long enough, so she's made the gown very long. Also, when you’re having a fitting, you do tend to stand up rather well, and then when you come to do your acting, I realise ‘I’ve just got to stand up.’ That's good, though, it's very good because Leonato is an important man – he's Governor of Messina – and I have to jolly well stand up properly. So the long gown has made me do that, but I suppose the difficult time is in the jig. The gown's longer at the back so it trails a bit and if I go backwards in the jig, I have to remember to hike it up. The girls will have a strap on their trains and they will be able to hold their trains up all the way through, but it's a bit girly so I can’t do that; I just have to find a way of dealing with that. I’ll do it; it's just a matter of practice. After the wedding scene [IV.1] when Leonato is so broken by what's happened to Hero, that's a time when I am not making a great effort to stand up really strongly. You just have to be aware that you don’t want to trip over your gown, because it’ll make you look really silly.

Resolving a problem

There have been a couple of places where I’ve known that I haven’t solved all the problems that I need to solve. I’ve asked Tamara [Harvey, Master of Play] if she’ll just help me work out little moments, like the scene where I come on after the wedding scene with Antonio [V.1]. I’ve got a long speech which essentially says ‘Don’t give me counsel, don’t try and comfort me and tell me what to do, cause I don’t want you to.’ That's quite a long speech and I’ve found where to be and how to do it quite tricky. We’ve decided that at that point in the play, we’ll just use the front and the sides of the stage as a street as it were. That convention means that I don’t use the middle of the stage, which at one time is what I thought I would do. It would break that convention, so we’re not doing that, but I’ve needed to find a way of feeling comfortable with the conventions and limitations of using that area of the stage, and I think we’ve sorted that out today so the scene is much, much better. I found coming on to that scene very difficult because I had this terrible wedding scene, and then there's the scene with the Watch [IV.2] where they arrest Borachio and Conrad. Then I come on in act five, scene one, and Antonio tells me, ‘Oh look, don’t go on moping, don’t go on torturing yourself,’ and I say ‘Leave me alone, I don’t want this. Just show me someone else who's been through this and who is not moping.’ I found coming on very difficult – I didn’t want to come on and just be depressed, but then I had the idea of using the petals on the stage from the wedding, which were a reminder of the sadness of what's happened. I’d use those to tell the story of why I’m upset, just to remind the audience of what happened at the wedding. Picking them up and let them fall through my fingers. I use them just at the beginning, and it helps me into that scene. That's quite good, and there have been other bits too – it is different coming onstage from the rehearsal room and I find it very useful to find moments where I can to just go down to the stage and talk myself through bits.

Overall

It's lovely having the live music in the tech, because the band's all there. The nice thing is that the technical has gone really smoothly, really good-humouredly. We’ve got through it quite fast – we haven’t quite finished it, but we will finish it soon. We’ll get two dress rehearsals in. I’ve had a not-very-busy morning and I’ve been able to have a bit of a laugh with my friends, which I’ve enjoyed. I think I’ve just loved being on the stage, just loved getting on the stage and just feeling my voice in the space, watching other people do their stuff, listening to them, and just seeing how good they are. That's the nice thing, seeing that stage filled and coming alive, that's been the best bit this week.

Back to top

Rehearsal notes 8

  • After Press Night
  • Concentration
  • Missed line
  • The fountain
  • No more rehearsals
  • Long run
  • Control
  • Beautiful construction
  • Audience reactions

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.

After Press Night

I’m just relieved that we’ve got the Press Night over with. I think it will be lovely now to go on and play it with an audience, and be alive and spontaneous without feeling pressured. Now we’re settling in to perform it as freshly and as well as we can every night or afternoon. All in all, I think it's gone quite well so far. I mostly remember what I have to say in the right order!

Concentration

The first scene is quite tricky. It's not a difficult scene for me in terms of character, but I was a bit fluffy last night, and I just tripped over the words. There are lots of little cues, and there are just one or two moments in there where I know that in rehearsals I haven’t been absolutely on cue. So those moments worry me and I go a bit nervous in the first scene. The concentration required is phenomenal. I don’t know if it's my age or what, but I have to go into the play with a certain level of concentration and keep it at that level for three hours. I bag a little break in the middle, but the level of concentration is pretty acute and consistent. You have to be on the ball in any play all the time, but it is a matter of maintaining that level. Mind you, the time goes very fast. I can’t believe it when it's my break for the interval already.

Missed line

I jumped a line in act five, scene one, last night which I’d done once before – it meant that Don Pedro and Claudio haven’t got the right exit, and I felt terrible. It's the scene where Don Pedro and Claudio come face to face with me after they’ve heard from Borachio that it was all a plot and what was said about Hero wasn’t true; I say to Claudio, ‘If you both tell everybody it wasn’t true, and if you will hang an epitaph on her tomb, etcetera, come tomorrow to my house and marry this child of my brother's unseen.’ He agrees and I say ‘Tomorrow then I will expect your coming; / Tonight I take my leave.’ [V.1.283-4], then I go on to have a bit more chat and I’m supposed to say ‘Goodbye’ again [‘Until tomorrow morning, lords, farewell’ [V.1.313]. In my head, though, I suppose I feel like I’ve already said goodbye to them, so to my mind they should be gone. I forgot to say good bye to them again and I went straight to saying ‘Bring you these fellows on’ [the Prisoners]. We all went offstage, so poor Claudio and the Prince were left without their final lines and without an exit.

They just left with us. We all went off at the same time, though they left by a different exit. That's an awkward position to put your friends in and I felt terrible, but of course I didn’t do it on purpose. I think that's the only major mistake I’ve made. I got my words mixed up a little bit on the press night. When a word doesn’t come into your head and you know what you’ve got to say but you can’t find the right word to say it, it's quite hard. My brain goes into overdrive and I search and in that split second so many choices present themselves. I don’t know how it happens – it's as though my brain is saying ‘Okay, you’ve gone wrong, so what do you do now?’ Should you cut to the next bit that you know, should you try and make up what you’re going say? It's extraordinary what your brain does in a split second. I think I just said some gobbledy gook and then went on to the next bit. I think it made sense! But it is scary when there's that word that you’ve said a hundred times before and suddenly it just isn’t there. I expect it’ll stop happening soon!

The fountain

The fountain has been quite fun. The technical people have been working very hard to get the fountain to spout its water at the right moments without splashing on the seats – the costumes are all made of the most beautiful fabrics, a great deal of silk, so it can’t get wet because it will stain it and ruin it. Great care is taken that we don’t get the costumes wet. The fountain had been splashing a little on the seat, so precautionary measures have been taken that the seats get wiped at one point before people sit on them. That has to be done, and just make sure that people keep away from the splashing water when it's splashing. All these little problems are fixable, it just takes time, and now we’ve sorted it.

No more rehearsals

In a way, it's better without rehearsals because, although I enjoy them, I feel there's another stage you get to when you’re brain is involved with other things during the day. You come to the show in the evening, and you do your warm-up, your jig rehearsal, and there are a couple of speeches that I just do before the show at six o’clock, but then it's like you come to the show completely fresh. For the most part, you’re saying those words for the first time that day, and it feels as though you’re coming to them sideways – you’ve got the solid security of the rehearsals and the other performances, and you can just look at the words afresh every night. I quite like that your perspective is broadened somehow.

Long run?

I don’t think about the fact that we’ll be running until September. Every day a whole new set of people are watching the play, and I’ve got a whole new chance to work on the little bits that don’t feel quite right. There's one move I’ve got, one little bit I’ve got that I’m still trying to improve. I haven’t quite got a solution yet, but I’m working away at it. It's the bit in the wedding scene when Hero says to me ‘I really, really, really didn’t do it.’ [IV.1] I am so moved by her that I am absolutely prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. I don’t understand how the situation has come about or why she's been accused if she didn’t do it – especially that the prince has said it – but she's my daughter. The way she protests her innocence is very touching, and I think Leonato is swayed by her plea for him to believe her. On our stage, I’m right down in the downstage left corner and Hero comes and kneels to me, by the pillar.

I’ve tried lots of ways of doing the speech that comes next ‘I know not. If they speak but truth of her…’ but none of them have completely worked for me, and then I decided that what I’d like to do is I’d like to move out of the corner and just walk into the stage, saying it directly to the other people on the stage, and then take it out to the audience, who we’ve set up as the people of Messina. The audience have been to the wedding, they’re like guests, townsfolk at the wedding, and it makes sense to take that speech out to them as well. This leaves me with a bit of a predicament, though, because then I end up just stage right of Hero and the way we’ve rehearsed it, it's necessary for me to end up on the other side of her.

I made this decision very late in our rehearsals, so we never really had a chance to rehearse that small change as a company. It's just something that I just rehearsed on my own more or less and told people I’m going to do it. I haven’t found the right moment or the right way to get back to the other side of Hero because the Friar has a long, very important speech when he's giving advice to Leonato about what to do next, and I don’t want to cause a distraction by moving during the Friar's speech. Jules [Melvin, the Friar] does it very delicately, very truthfully and simply, and it's quite easy to lose focus when someone else's moving on the Globe stage. I’m worried that in my need to get to the other side of Hero, I’m going to be distracting. It's just finding the right moment to do it, so that's the little problem I’m trying to solve at the moment. I don’t expect anyone else will notice, but for me it's important.

Control

I’m working away particularly at the speeches in the wedding scene [IV.1] because I want to make sure that I’m in complete control of what I’m doing and not just shouting away. And that everything I say in the wedding scene is pertinent, directed, and there's a purpose behind it; that it's not just a rant. That requires continual fine-tuning.

Again, I want to concentrate on making sure that I’ve got the level right all the way through that street scene with Don Pedro and Claudio [V.1], just making sure that I don’t peak too soon, that I don’t get too far too soon. I need to keep absolutely in control of what I’m doing all the way through. I’m working towards making sure that it's powerful and real, but in control. Even though Leonato may appear to be out of control, as an actor I should always in control. It isn’t a rant, and just sometimes I just tip over the edge - it's a matter of constantly working away at it and trying to build it up in the right way. That's my challenge at the moment.

Beautiful construction

As I’m running it more and more, I find that Leonato's part is beautifully constructed because you start very gently with the first scene and then the prince arrives [I.1]. Next there's revelling, a little bit more banter with Beatrice, then the engagement and the gulling, and then the payoff of the gulling scene, and then it's the interval. So there's a lovely first half from my point of view: a few jokes, a bit of banter, a bit of tetchiness with Beatrice for being so difficult about getting married… it's very nicely constructed. Then there's the interval – I’d better sit down, maybe a cup of tea. After that, there's a great scene with Dogberry [III.5] and then into the wedding, which starts off as the happiest day of my life. My beautiful daughter is getting married to this wonderful Count and the Prince is going to be at the wedding, and it's going to be heaven… but then it goes completely pear-shaped. The big wedding scene is followed by another long-ish speech for me in the next scene with Antonio [V.1], which is quite a philosophical speech really, so again that takes the temperature down. That builds again to the bit where I challenge Claudio, and then it starts to be resolved in the next scene. So it's a beautifully constructed part I think. The same tone is never repeated from scene to scene. Each scene has its own character and you just move through them. The wedding scene is the most emotional part of the play, really, and then the scene that follows is quite emotional at the end, I suppose. Then it moves into pure comedy. It's such a clever play; there are so many different shades to it.

Audience reactions

One of the nicest things about the Globe is that you can see the audiences react. There are times when you can look around. The Prince, Claudio and I enter in act two, scene three (just before the gulling of Benedick) and we go to the front of the stage for the lines ‘How still the evening is, / As hushed on purpose to grace harmony!’ [II.3.36-7]. Those lines give you a chance to look up at all the people in the balconies, as though you are admiring the lovely evening, and to see these beaming faces is just delightful. It's a joy and you don’t get it in most theatres.

Other highlights this week? I do have one other highlight. I got the most lovely good luck card from my adoptees in Florida. That was wonderful. Generally, from my point of view, everything's going really well with Much Ado About Nothing and it's a joy to think I’ve got till September to explore it more. The job is never done!

Rehearsal notes 9

  • Matinees & evenings
  • Wind & rain
  • Voice control
  • Fine-tuning

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.

Matinees and evenings

Matinees and evenings: the audiences differ up to a point. I suppose there are probably more school parties in the afternoon than the evening, though there are a lot of school parties in the evenings too. On a good matinee, I suppose, you have lots of children who have studied the play. Perhaps they come with more information than the adults. I don’t know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, though, because I feel very strongly that you should be able to go to a Shakespeare play just as you would go to any other play and get the whole thing. I don’t think you should have had to study it beforehand, though studying it beforehand will give you a greater depth of understanding and you’ll pick more things up. I’ve been in plays like King Lear, for instance, where every night, every night, I’ve stood and listened and picked things up that I’d not seen before. So a greater knowledge of the play has to inform… it's like art, about which I know nothing: a person who knows about art can see more in pictures than I do when I see pictures. I think ‘It's lovely’ and I like it or I don’t like it, but I know that if I studied art, then I would get a lot more out of the pictures. So I think if you’re studying a play then maybe you do get more out of it, but that shouldn’t mean that you couldn’t get a lot of enjoyment by just going to see it. I think that you should understand a Shakespeare play, in a good production, without having studied it.

I quite like the atmosphere in the evening, when it starts to get dark. There's a point in the play where it gets dark, and you become more aware of the artificial light – we don’t have stage lighting, but the whole auditorium is lit with lamps and that creates a sort of intimacy which is quite nice. I always like going to Regent's Park, and as the dusk settles and the lights come on, they have lots of atmospheric lighting there. I always love that moment, finishing in the dark on a nice summer's evening. So there are subtle differences between matinees and evening performances, I suppose.

We’ve only had one day this year with both a matinee and an evening show. It was last Sunday, and it was good. I enjoyed it but I had to be very conscious not to overuse my voice on the first show. That's something I’ve always tried to do because I have a tendency to overuse my voice, but I knew that it was very important that I didn’t overuse it in the first show. In the second show, I felt very well warmed up, very alert. I liked that actually. We’re going to do that twice when we’re at Hampton Court – we’re going to do eight shows that week. All my life, that's what I’ve done: eight shows a week. The Globe is extraordinary in that usually we do six shows, but it does require a bigger voice; it is a more demanding space in that respect.

Wind and rain

Last night it rained, and that always makes a performance more difficult. The audience was just wonderful, actually; they were just extraordinary and they never lost their enthusiasm for the play. The only difficult time is when they all have to put their raincoats on, and it's hard to be heard over the rustling. It's quite hard to concentrate over the rustling, but you can’t avoid that: they need to put their macs on, that's just a fact of life. I just keep hoping that it doesn’t come at a point in the play when vital information is being related.

The sound of the rain on the macs and on the concrete in the yard makes it hard to be heard. You do have to raise the level of your voice to fight that. Rain is not as bad as the helicopters, though, and somehow it does something to the soun