Cleon - the Pander - the Fisherman

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About Harry Gostelow

Harry returns to Shakespeare's Globe this season – in 1999 he played Dr Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and in 2000, he played Guildenstern in Hamlet. Harry has appeared in productions for the Nottingham Playhouse, Theatre Royal Windsor, and Mill at Sonning, including productions of Measure for Measure and Richard III. You will also spot him in the films Shakespeare in Love and Shooting Fish. His television credits include Silent Witness, The Bill and Julia Jekyll & Harriet Hyde.

Rehearsal Notes 1

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 to the Globe: a workshop in December

I was lucky to be offered the parts straightaway! I’d worked with Kathryn Hunter [Master of Play] on The Comedy of Errors at the Globe in 1999. At the beginning of December she invited me to a workshop on Pericles where she tested the idea of having both an old Pericles and a young Pericles – just to see if it made sense to have the older Pericles watching his younger self go through the play. We worked with a script that Kathryn had adapted by cutting and pasting together bits of pieces: some of the younger Pericles’ speeches in the first half of the play were given to the older Pericles, so he could talk whilst he's watching the actions of his younger self. I’m not sure that Old Pericles will speak those lines now (it's all being discussed), but we have got an Old and a Young Pericles.

In our production, we meet Pericles when he's old and depressed and grief-stricken, having realised that his daughter Marina has died [IV.iv]. By looking at his past life, we can try to understand his grief: maybe he should have made some better choices, maybe he can learn from his mistakes then to be a better person, father, man. We see his past life in the actions of Young Pericles, and then finally catch up with the present as it were: we again reach that point in the story where he's in long hair after fourteen years of trying to come to terms with his wife's death, and then he finds out his daughter's death and then we pick up the story with Old Pericles again. Anyway, I enjoyed the workshop and then two days before Christmas I got a call from my agent who said that Kathryn would like me to be in the project and play the parts of Cleon, the Pandar, and the Fisherman. I have to say that was one of the best Christmas presents I’ve ever had!

Preparation

I’ve been very busy working in the months between getting the part and starting rehearsals, so I haven’t given it as much consideration as I should have. I’ve been reading the play a lot, looking at Kathryn's adapted text and the Oxford edition to compare and see which lines have been changed or cut out or reassigned to different characters. Mostly I’ve just been imagining the world of these characters because it's such as fantastic fairytale of a story, and there are so many different worlds – from Tharsus, a city where everyone is starving, to the world of the Pandar which is the most liberal society ever. Even the governor turns up at the brothel; it's a world where anything goes, really, so we’ll have to explore that. I started to learn my lines this week. I used to think that you shouldn’t really learn lines until you were a couple of weeks into rehearsal (this is if you have the luxury of six weeks’ rehearsal period) because it's nice to learn lines as you’re going along; you understand them better, and they seem to go in more easily. But I’ve just finished playing Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest and I learnt that part before we turned up to rehearsal, because it's so much easier to rehearse without the book in your hand and you also have the confidence that comes with knowing the lines. You can still be versatile and develop them and say them in different ways. I’ve half-learned the lines from the bit in Tharsus which I think we’re doing next, so I won’t have to look at the book.

Rehearsals: physical work

We’ve done a lot of physical work this week. There's going to be a lot of imagery connected with the sea and storms and boats, because they’re recurring motifs in the play and all our wonderful aerialists have been off to practice swinging around the Globe! They’ll create images of people being thrashed about on a storm or being on a boat holding onto the rigging, whilst we’ve been working on the more land-based effects of the sea. Yesterday nine of us in a group used our bodies together to become the sea. We moved forward slowly, then back, and then a bit further forward as the waves built up. Slowly we got a sense of that motion of the sea within our bodies and that picture of us moving back and forth on the stage will hopefully give the audience an image that informs the action – whilst, say, another character is speaking or when people are pretending to be on the boat.

Improvisations

We also worked a bit of the first scene, in Antioch. I missed out on that because I had to do a matinee of The Importance of Being Earnest, but I gather it was quite lewd; a pretend situation was set up where everyone verbally and physically abused the King of Antioch and as a result of the abuse that he receives, he becomes an abuser himself (even of his own daughter). That improvisation in rehearsal tried to help the actor playing the part of King Antiochus to get a sense of that circle of abuse so that even though he doesn’t actually abuse anybody on stage, he's got it inside him; he carries those feelings with him when he's on stage, and it makes the situation in the first scene all the more dangerous, because we know that though he's being nice to his daughter and even offering her up for marriage, what he really wants is to keep her for himself.

Next we worked on the scene in Tyre, when Pericles has returned from Antioch. We improvised a little scene where we were all senior politicians and statesmen trying to advise Pericles, our new prince, on how to behave. We said things like ‘look, this is what your father was famous for’, and we had pictures of the father being very regal – pictures of him eating lots of food, and surrounded by servants, and hunting, and being a great conquering warrior. We created frozen tableaux, like photographs of those images, and realised that our pictures were a bit too old fashioned for Pericles. We told him ‘You need to be a man of the people, more like Tony Blair!’ and then we created another set of images of him preparing healthy food for his children, and there was an image of him saving the seals in Canada instead of hunting (standing between the club and the little seal a bit like a superhero!) Next all the advisors worked out a speech that Pericles should give to reassure his people that although his adventures in Antioch were slightly misplaced, he will be a great leader; he promises all sorts of tax-cuts and reforms and great things for the people. The second half of the improvisation was that we were all waiting at a big luncheon for Pericles to give this speech, but he turns up singing as though he's drunk. As his advisors, we realised how immature he is; he's not ready to rule yet, he's just a wayward prince. Both of those first scenes were to improvise because it helped us get to the feeling of the scenes before we come to the dialogue of Shakespeare. I think we are going to go on to Tharsus today so heaven knows what Kathryn has got lined up!

First ideas on character

I haven’t thought too much about what I’m going to do with my characters yet. I think Kathryn's idea is that Cleon is a First World political leader whose country is suddenly devastated, perhaps by famine or a nuclear bomb. It's as if a Blair or a Chirac is trying to keep his State from falling apart: for heaven's sake this is a first world country and it can’t just fall to pieces. So those are some ideas we’ll follow through.

At the beginning of the play, Cleon has two big speeches about the awful situation in his country. I don’t want them to be one long note of misery; I’m sure Kathryn has ideas about how we can make them active speeches. There is a lot of self-reproach in his speeches which must be touched upon, but they must be contrasted with an active desire to make things better.

For the fisherman, we’ll see what we create out of that as a collective. It's difficult to make one decision about a character in isolation when there are three of us involved (there are three fishermen in those scenes). Then the Pandar: we’ve talked about him a little in rehearsals, and we’ve also done little biographies of our characters, including information about our age, our parentage, and our education. You have to make up most of that, although you get as much as you can from the text. The Pandar is married to the Bawd and I imagine that he ran away from home; he probably was quite well-educated and had quite religious parents, but he ran away and has just been enjoying sex for the last forty years. He's probably done everything under the sun, but is reaching the end of that wild period of his life. Now he just needs money to set himself up for retirement and also to atone in some way; he always talks about conscience, and that you should always do things properly. I think that must come from some sort of religious sensibility that he's pushed aside for forty-odd years, but when we meet him, he's at a point in his life where he's going to try to reclaim it a bit and have a nice settled retirement.

Voice session

We had a Voice session with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice] this morning. We were up in the Globe attic [above the stage] because it was bitterly cold down in the theatre and that wouldn’t have been very conducive to opening up the vocal chords. I think we’ll do more work at the Globe as rehearsals continue (at the moment we’re rehearsing in Bow, about 45 minutes away from Bankside). I feel more confident about the stage because I’ve worked there before, but as a Company we’re blessed with Marcello [Magni] and Kathryn because they have a very good knowledge of space. They have a great sense of how important physical imagery is in terms of telling a story; they know that the whole image on stage is very important to the Globe audience and that it has to be seen from all over the place – so they use strong diagonal moves and often keep a distance between actors so that there's lots of space for the audience to enter in. As an audience member, you can feel excluded if you see two actors standing close together, talking to each other. Standing close together can be effective but it has to be used effectively. At the Globe, effective use of space is the key thing: that's why everyone in the audience feels so connected to the characters.

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Rehearsal Notes 2

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.

Making a storm

We had a day off on Sunday which was nice after five very full days of rehearsal. Mainly we’ve been looking at each scene in the first two Acts, but there's also been a lot of physical work as we’re creating images for the storm scenes. We have aerialists in our cast who are able to climb up ropes and produce some quite stunning effects. As if they were waves, for example; rising up and holding onto the ropes, then swinging out – not off the stage – and getting up some height before they come swinging down and crash into the boat that we make on stage in the second storm scene. For the boat, we hold two bamboo poles to make the sides and there's a sail hanging down in the middle. At first we’re inside the pole bow, but we get moved from side to side by ‘waves’ of people who push us all across the stage. That's quite a good effect.

The aerialists become the drowning sailors in the first storm scene. They’re able to go about ten feet up in the air, with the rope twined around them in such a way that it supports them whilst their legs and arms are waving, and they gently lower themselves down the ropes as if they are floating to a watery grave. That's a really striking image. In second storm scene, a few of the aerialists will bounce off the walls of the first gallery of the Globe theatre, as though they’re sailors hanging on to the rigging, and they’ll chant down instructions to Pericles: he needs to get rid of his dead wife's body, because it's bad luck to have a dead body on the ship, and will make the storm even worse.

Second Fisherman scene [II.i]

We’ve also done some textual work on the scenes, just working out what on earth some of these lines mean! That involves a discussion and then we try to put the scene on its feet. We worked through the Fishermen scene like that earlier in the week. Having been in the storm where Pericles lost all his possessions, the three fishermen have just landed their boat. We’re mending our nets and counting the fish and generally sorting everything out on the shore when Pericles comes across us. At first we assume he's a beggar and ignore him. We’re all quite jokey until Pericles actually collapses – then we realise that he's suffering and we need to help him. That was a nice progression from looking at the text to building up the characters as real people: we might even try to play that the third fisherman (Matilda Leyser) is actually my wife rather than another fisherman, and see if there's another relationship there. Kathryn [Hunter, Master of Play] has lots of images in the rehearsal room of men and women out fishing in boats. There's one picture of a mother feeding her baby in a fishing boat, or another picture of women helping pull the fishing boats onto the shore, so it seems likely that the second fisherman's family would get involved. There's a very Mediterranean feel about the whole scene – I imagine they’re from a Mediterranean Greek village that has lots of small boats, getting enough of a catch to survive. I think the tone of the Fishermen scene gives us the sense of what Pentapolis is like; it's a much happier community than any of the others Pericles has visited, where people can joke and talk about things sensibly.

Word work

Giles Block led a good verse workshop that helped us to clarify the differences between verse and prose. Giles has the idea that characters speak in verse when they’re able to communicate emotions freely, whereas there's a slightly limiting intellectual quality that comes into play with prose – as though you’re speaking from the head rather than the heart. It could be witty word play or perhaps you’re trying to conceal something; there's something overlaying the emotion of the words which comes more freely out of verse. Those transitions are good to watch out for throughout the play. The Fishermen speak in prose, and that's because they’re playing a mental game half the time, trying to top each other with the jokes really, and then Pericles comes and suddenly speaks in verse – he's on the brink of death and needs comfort, so his emotions pour out without careful consideration.

Cleon speaks pretty much in verse, really, because he feels such remorse for leading his city into a starving hunger. He's in quite a state in Act one, scene four, and we decided to make his speeches as active as possible: at the moment, he's not starving and listless and he doesn’t speak slowly as very hungry people can do. His hunger has been gnawing away at him and has given him a passion to tell people the story of how things have gone wrong for his city.

The speech is quite segmented, with about four or five images which each begin by focusing the audience's attention on the people of Tharsus: ‘These mouths’, ‘Those palates’, ‘Those mothers’. Each time he's trying to make his audience, the Globe audience, understand just how awful this is – as though they’re not listening with enough attention, so he thinks up another example to re-emphasise his point: ‘Now, think of it this way…’ until he gives them a dire warning

O, let those cities that of plenty's cup
And her prosperities so largely taste,
With their superfluous riots, hear these tears!
The misery of Tharsus may be theirs.
[I.iv]

He reaches an almost prophetic moment. Things change suddenly when he hears that a ship has come into the harbour; he feels that neighbouring nations have come to beat Tarsus down and takes it very personally, very selfishly. The tragedy is that his reign will be over – these nations will ‘make a conquest of unhappy me’ [I.iv]. I’m trying not to reveal the self-pity that I initially found in the character until this point.

He starts talking about other people and then it all comes down to him. That development is more interesting to play than one note of self-pity or remorse. And the idea is that I’ll have a very physical image to accompany that; Pericles brings a wonderful sack of corn like those brought by aid agencies and when the bag is ripped, out pours this corn (probably into the trapdoor of the stage so it can be collected easily). I think that will be a wonderful image connected with food and salvation – from the corn they can make bread which will save them.

At the Globe

We rehearse the Storm sequences on the Globe stage, with the aerialists bobbing up and down as we hold onto ropes or the sail of the boat. We also have sessions with Stewart Pearce, our voice coach, here [at the Globe]. In our last session, Stewart got us to recite lines at different points on the stage and we found the places where you can speak to people very intimately, but still be heard in the galleries. If your voice is nice and supported, you can still have what seems like an intimate conversation with somebody just across the stage from you, but you’ll still be picked up by people in the audience who are far away. Any sort of breathy whispers aren’t going to be heard because they don’t carry the supported voice.

Stewart showed us the ‘Golden Spot’ which is right in the centre of the stage, at the very front, which is actually the centre-point of the wooden ‘O’. When I spoke from there, I could really feel the whole theatre vibrating around me. That's where you have the best acoustic resonance, because you’re standing right in the middle of this wooden circle and wood is a very good fabric for bouncing words off (rather than metal or hardened concrete or the soft upholstery of seats where the sound sinks in and you lose the voice). In this central position and most way around the edge of the stage, you get a wonderful acoustic. The further back you go, the more you feel you’re losing it, and vocally you’ve got to give a bit of extra just to make sure your voice can carry. Stewart has also been explaining how we can use different resonances within our bodies to give the lines different qualities: you can speak from the head, the throat, the chest and the stomach. The ‘head’ resonance is useful for giving information and imparting facts. You might use a more soothing voice from the throat that can caress people and persuade them to do things, and when you tell people to do things, you might use a more powerful voice that resonates in the pit of the stomach. I think all the characters should use all the different resonances. If you have enough lines, you should be able to find enough of a range within that character. Cleon has a nice mixture in his speeches – in Act one, scene four, he informs and persuades people how awful the situation in Tharsus is, whilst he himself is feeling this.

Clothing

Our production is modern dress, so really I could be wearing anything! I haven’t had any costume fittings yet, although there are lots of props and costumes in the rehearsal room so we’re just throwing on hats and garments as we go along. I think the idea is that we’ll have very simple base costumes over which you suddenly put on a jacket for the court of Antioch, then you take that off and roll up the jacket into a little bundle which becomes the wrappings around a dead baby in the Tharsus scene, where we’re all burying children for an image of the starving city. Simple, versatile things like that would set each scene quickly: rather than changing into a whole new wardrobe each time we change location, the action will be very fluid and quick. The important thing is the story: we’re there to tell a story for old Pericles.

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Rehearsal Notes 3

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.

Revisiting Antioch

We’re just ploughing on through the play, really! We got to Act five today, so we’ve been through the play once after three weeks (which is halfway through rehearsals). We’ve also gone back over a couple of scenes and made them much more precise. Early on, we did the scene in Antioch as a kind of gameshow where Pericles had to work out the king's riddle; if he fails in the gameshow, he dies, but he has the chance to win the big prize of Antiochus’ daughter. There was lots of singing and dancing and the king used a microphone like a compere, very loud and big. It was great fun, but we came back to the scene this week and it felt like the story had got lost, so we pared the gameshow right back. The stakes are still as high and we’re keeping some of the arrangements of people on stage, but we’ve taken out a lot of the distracting noise and hullabaloo so the story comes through clearly.

Coming back to scenes like that is important because, after a couple of days of letting things sink in, you realise what doesn’t work or what stands out like a sore thumb in the context of a run of three or four scenes. A particular detail in a scene might not be helpful or a scene as a whole might outweigh the other scenes, so things need balancing out. If somebody's actions or a scene don’t seem to be part of the same play, it's always good to make changes. Playing the Antioch riddle as a gameshow highlighted the stakes involved in that situation – there is this fantastic prize, it is the life or death situation – so it was useful to explore those things, and we’ve taken forward what's useful for the story.

Brothel scenes

I enjoyed rehearsing the brothel scenes with my Pandar and the Bawd. Kathryn [Hunter, Master of Play] is keen to set it in Mytilene, which is a little Mediterranean fishing village with lots of tourists, and it starts off with the funeral of the Transylvanian who we refer to as having been a customer of the brothel but who has died because of illness he had caught there:

The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage.
[IV.ii]

He lay with the ‘little baggage’, the prostitute, and he's now dead. So we all came in with a funeral march, led by a priest who chanted away endlessly. We went around the stage with the funeral coffin, around these little cafes (like in Greek market places) and hopefully that will help to build the idea that we’re a community. After the funeral, we start our scene as the Pandar and the Bawd: they’re desperate for money – that's our raison d’etre, not sex but money through sex. For my character, I think it's all about making enough money to retire.

First of all, we spent a good couple of rehearsal periods working through all the difficult words and Elizabethan puns that our characters have – working out what they meant, and paraphrasing them in modern English to make sure we know what it is we’re saying. Then we tried to carry over the sense of flow (how your voice goes up and down when you say the lines in modern English) back into the Shakespearean English.

My Pandar is very lecherous, although he's a sort of a spent force and keen for retirement. Kathryn asked us to walk around the rehearsal room as our characters and think about how they might be led physically. We tried that my character was led by the groin; I suppose that's where his focus of life is, although now he's diseased and on the way out. It gives me a rather loping sort of walk with a tiny pelvic thrust every other step: you know where this character is coming from the moment you see him. And when he sees Marina, even though he's trying to talk business (he doesn’t want to pay the high price that the pirates are asking for her), he can’t resist lusting after her. He tries being a gentleman and kissing her by the hand, but he can’t resist imagining how good it would be to lie with her.

For the Bawd and the Pander, it's fantastic news that Marina is a virgin because it means they can sell her maidenhead for a lot of money. When we did that scene, the Bawd and I were so excited at the news that we ran around the stage in our hobbling, lecherous way, celebrating how much money she's going to bring in – it's as if all our prayers have been answered. That was fun to do, but having gone to the extreme, I think we’ll tone it down like we did for the scene in Antioch. We brought that scene back within the realms of realism after pushing the situation as far possible – I’m sure we’ll be doing something similar with the Pandar scenes during the next few rehearsals. We’ve got through half the difficult bits, but we haven’t got to the tricky bits with Lysimachus and Boult, who each attempt to take her virginity, but she outwits them and out-talks them. They’re even trickier scenes I think, but we laid the groundwork for them this week.

Storm on stage

We have sessions on the Globe stage on Friday mornings. This week was good because the aerialists have been working on some new sequences for the storm scenes, and when we put that together with our movement sequences on stage, the whole thing seemed much more fluid. We came in as a boat; Pericles and I hold the sail in the middle and other members of the Chorus hold two long bamboo poles to form the sides of the boat. It's coming along smoothly, but we found that the sail of our boat masks a lot of what the Aerialists are doing, unless they’re quite high up, so some of the lower actions might have to cut out if we keep the sail. We also discussed the possibility of getting a much bigger sail that's positioned in the yard and is translucent so people could see through it to the action on stage. We’ll see how that works. It's quite tricky putting the different elements of the storm scene together: the aerialists rehearse their bits, and then they come to put these with our bits and if it doesn’t quite work, we just need more time together to get it right. We’ve got three weeks to go, and then a technical week so that should be plenty of time. During the tech it will become clearer who's holding what rope and where each person can go – you might find that you can’t stand where you did in rehearsal because you’re blocking somebody watching, for example – so we’ll have to modify it and make decisions quite quickly about setting our movement.

Cups and saucers

I had a nice one-to-one session with Kathryn on my first speeches as Cleon. That was very valuable because it helped me get to the clarity of the thoughts. I have two big speeches in Act one, scene four, which are really out to the audience. I tell them what Tharsus was like; how beautiful it was, how rich it was, and what a great life we had. The second speech goes on to explain how that's altered; how everyone is begging for bread and are so hungry they could eat their own children. We’re trying to be specific with each image in the language in order to bring out that contrast. Kathryn had various exercises to help me with that: one involved laying out some rather exquisite cups and saucers! I laid them out very carefully, just as I carefully described how beautiful the country of Tharsus was. I laid them out very, very nicely and used my words to explain how wonderful life was in Tharsus before the famine, and then in the second speech I put all the cups and saucers very carefully back in a box like I was burying them. I did that with great care because they’re beloved things that are now dead. That helped me be very precise about the images in the speeches; there were about five or six images in each speech that I painted very precisely and saw very accurately, matching my careful movements with the cups and saucers.

That exercise also helped me realise that Cleon has a great love for the past, even though pride ultimately came before a fall and he was probably responsible for governing his country into famine. There's a note of regret in his speeches, but in order to avoid just being regretful all the time, I have to paint a picture of how fantastic life was and then how awful it's become. The development brings out the contrast – so that was very valuable work, it was a precious hour with the director!

All change: clothing

It looks as if I’ll have one change of costume between the Pandar and Cleon in the second half, but I have a couple of pages’ time which will be plenty – I’ve been in productions where you’ve only got about 10 seconds! I think as the Chorus we’ll have some kind of base costume consisting of trousers and shirts and we’ll put on and take off a few items in addition to that – it's not like an Elizabethan ‘Original Practices’ production where you’ve got to change everything and need 2 minutes off stage to do that. There's another change from the Fisherman back to Cleon which we haven’t really marked out yet – it probably means I’ll have to duck out of a storm sequence before the storm actually finishes so I can come back in as Cleon. That shouldn’t be too tricky.

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Rehearsal Notes 4

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.

Three weeks to go, and we’ve got very physical; there's been lots of work on the storm sequences and also a lot of the chorus work on linking the scenes together (when we transform one city into another). Often the transitions are the last bits you piece together – in technical rehearsals you might find yourself thinking ‘Oh my goodness, how do we get from this well rehearsed scene to that well rehearsed scene?’ – but in fact we’ve worked out a lot of the transitions already, because it's important that story flows even whilst the action is jumping from place to place. The storm sequences have a very definite shape now; they need to be polished, but I think they’ve got the right momentums and changes of pace. We’re ready to settle ourselves on the actual text of the scenes now, because we’ve only touched on them once or twice. I think we’re heading towards that.

Music and dance

There's also been a lot of work on the choreography for our dances; we’ve got the jig at the end of the play sorted out which is nice. Kathryn also wants a very celebratory Greek dance at the end of the games in Pentapolis, which is where Thaisa and Pericles meet for the first time: we’re all going to do the dance in the background (holding arms in a sort of chain, lots of crossing steps and little flicks of the heels) whilst they dance more closely downstage. That's going on madly whilst Pericles and Thaisa fall in love, and when we stop at the end of the dance, they carry on dancing by themselves until her father Simonides tells them to stop. That should be a nice moment but we haven’t quite got the pace of those dances yet – they’re a bit too slow – so Eva [Magyar, Master of Dance] will help us get those up to speed.

Our music has been composed especially for us by Stephen Warbeck, with the same Greek influences in mind. The instruments in themselves are quite amazing – some of them have been specially built. Amongst other things, there's a damnoni (an instrument with a large mouthpiece attached to a tube, first developed in Southern Crete), a bowed brass lyre, a strung instrument, hanging steel plates cut by Wills [Paul Williams, Tiring House Manager], an adapted violin that is tuned an octave lower than normal violins and a Turkish G clarinet! There are also several drums and other percussion.

We created a ceremony to begin the scene at Diana's temple. It was based on some video that Kathryn and Marcello had taken of a fire ceremony whilst they were in India; there were five priests who rhythmically waved incense and had lots of small bells that rang. Kathryn asked us to use that movement as part of the ceremony at Diana's temple in Ephesus; the idea is that the five women in the company, led by Thaisa, will enact a ceremony as Diana's priestesses, and Pericles will appear in the middle of it to declare his story (as the goddess Diana instructed him). When we made up some music to accompany the ceremony, we used whatever came to hand to create a beat. Stephen was drumming an up-turned water cooler and I had a bucket and spade. Somebody else was using a big banner. The music there really developed alongside the action. Music plays an important part in the storytelling from the beginning of the production. Patrice [Naiambana] who plays Gower (the narrator of the play) uses lots of African chants and rhythms to set various scenes. He's drawing on the tradition of ‘griot’ storytelling; the griot is an oral historian, story-teller and musician in West African culture, who keeps the history of communities and great families alive by sharing stories. His chants summon the Chorus together as storytellers, and summon the audience to listen. I think Stephen [Warbeck] might incorporate some of the melodies from those songs as well. There's a real mix of influences and a sense of collaboration.

Brothel scenes

As a group we’ve started to make sense of the brothel scenes in Mytilene. I’m realising how much of the second half of the play does takes place there, and there are some great set pieces where Marina has to convince everybody to reform their ways in order to protect her virginity. Whether it's the gentlemen in Act four, scene five, or Lysimachus or Boult, she manages to find a key to lock up their passions (or to divert them) and make them better people as a result whilst saving her honour. So we’ve been working on that, talking through those ‘conversions.’ My character is happily lecherous throughout, and desperate to get the money, really. He's desperate to get a good price for Marina, and then he's very angry when the plan doesn’t work – he becomes very threatening. So there are lots of different things to play. We’re going to have a session this afternoon with the Chorus as village people, just to make sure the scenes flow smoothly and to help put the brothel in the context of the little community on Mytilene. The improvisations we did in the first three weeks got us into the scenes and now we’re focussing on the scenes themselves.

Voice

As we’ve been focussing on the Mytilene scenes this week, I’ve been speaking more prose than verse. That means making sure you’ve got enough breath; whether it's three lines of Shakespeare or just one line, you’ve got to have enough breath to get straight through without going too fast. I like to have enough breath for each thought – sometimes there are several thoughts in one sentence so you can’t get through them all in one breath, but if there's one overriding thought, then it's good to have enough breath to see you through that. My maximum is about three lines in the Globe space and two lines feels very comfortable. At the Globe, you really have to speak out – sometimes over planes and weather, or groundlings moving around the yard – so you can’t run out of breath! I had a sore throat at the end of last week, because we shouted a lot in some improvisations and the studio has quite an echo. I ended up pushing my voice a bit, so I’ve concentrated on fully supporting my voice and that's helped.

Clothing

We had costume fittings this week and decided on a basic black suit with a white shirt (open neck, no tie) for the Chorus. We can add things to that basic outfit when we become specific characters, so I can add a jacket for Cleon – or perhaps a dressing gown, because it's as if Cleon and his wife are woken up in the middle of the night when Pericles arrives to gives us baby Marina [III.iii]. I think if I come on doing up a dressing gown and looking a bit dishevelled, then that would suggest it's the middle of the night and it would be a good image that I could carry through into the final scene when we’re getting ready for the mock funeral and Dionysia tells me that she arranged Marina's murder [IV.iii]. If he's wearing the dressing gown there, that would help people recognise the character and get straight into the scene as they hear those first words.

I don’t know what Liz [Cooke, Master of Design] is going to come up with for the Fisherman's costume – something rough and ready, I think: heavy waterproof trousers and a hat perhaps. We had the idea that the Pandar is trying to be an English gentleman abroad, so he's got a panama hat, a little cravat, a jacket… a failed attempt at dressing as though he's ‘old school’. I think the trousers will be elasticated and light beige in colour, so they’re a bit tight and you can see all these stains on them.

I find that being in costume really helps with a character. We have a lot of rehearsal costumes that you can just throw on during a scene; you can become somebody else immediately. Simply by putting on a jacket or a hat, you hold yourself differently and you can find things that are useful in that: ‘Oh yes, that way of moving feels right for this character.’ So I’m pleased to find out what I’m going to be wearing.

Also, I’m wondering whether to grow my beard. I think that might help me look gaunt and dishevelled as Cleon – as if he hasn’t had time to shave or maybe he hasn’t got the shaving equipment. A beard also makes me look older, and that suits the Pandar because he's between fifty and fifty-five years old and I’m in my forties… that it might be good for adding to his old lecherousness. As for the fisherman – well, fisherman always can have beards, I feel!

Next…

I hope we’ll do a full run by the end of next week, because there's so much to remember in all the different sequences. When we put them together, it's got to be as smooth as ice; the way you do that is by practising again and again and again.

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Rehearsal Notes 5

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

Technical rehearsals

We’re now in tech week and we seem to have got through the whole play in two and a half days. That's good because it means we can stop the play during a run if we hit any major mishaps… if the bed (for the brothel scenes) doesn’t get pulled off stage in time, or if we all run on the wrong way. We’ve got time to stop and amend bits and pieces. For the most part, we know where we should be entering from, what costume we should be wearing and where we should be standing on stage.

So far we’ve spent a lot of time setting our positions; where we stood on stage was fairly indeterminate during rehearsals. But now we’ve got to mark out the action because when you play in the round, you’re always obscuring some of the audience from the main action. At the Globe, there are also two pillars to watch out for. If you’re not important to the story in a particular scene, you have to make sure you’re not obscuring anybody else who is important - and if you are important, then you have to make sure you can be seen. You really have to find the good places to stand on the stage.

It's good to work with the music cues too. People who give musical cues at the end of their lines have to make sure that they give that line loud and clear so the musicians in the gallery above the stage can hear the cue. Or if you’re speaking after loud music, you know that as soon as the music dies down at a certain point, you’ve got to come in with your line. A nice sense of certainty comes out of that.

Clothing and design

All the costumes are fantastic… it's great to see what other people are wearing. You know what your own costumes are going to be like (and it's nice to see other people's reactions), but seeing other people's costumes and wigs gives you a sense of the look of the whole show. Marcello [Magni] has a great wig, like Harpo Marx when he was in his fifties! That's for King Simonides and it fits his flamboyant character perfectly.

And for my Pandar, we’ve gone for very tight trousers with slip-on shoes; very lecherous, very lounge-lizard. On top, I’ve got a very unpleasant shirt that keeps revealing my midriff, as if my coat's not quite big enough to cover me properly. An awful orange panama hat finishes off his sleazy look! Jules’ outfit for the bawd is similarly over-the-top, loud and lavish. She had a very big wig in rehearsal, but she's decided that isn’t helpful anymore; it pushes her towards pantomime, towards something totally unreal.

As the characters in the brothel are slightly fantastic, they have to be earthed in the real world – very menacing and unpleasant – otherwise you don’t really believe the predicament in which Marina finds herself.

Old and new

Liz [Cooke, Master of Clothing] hasn’t held back from using broad colours; the world of the play is extreme and I think that will work well on the Globe stage. Apart from the actors and some props, the stage itself is actually quite bare – I don’t think there’ll be a mismatch between Elizabethan decoration inside the space and the modern look of our production. Elizabethan clothing (including costumes worn by actors on stage) was all about catching the eye: that's just what our costumes do. The Elizabethan decoration is also quite gaudy; the wooden pillars are painted to look like marble, and there's clever trompe l’oeil painting everywhere… it's a space that can take people wearing loud, extravagant colours. I don’t think you stand out if you wear neutral colours – of course, that may be a good thing if you don’t want to stand out!

And as the Chorus, we wear white shirts and black trousers. Little groups of us can be quite statuesque whilst wearing that: it helps you to blend into the background if you keep still, and so focus moves to the important figures on stage. But the same outfit can also be very striking when we move as a group. For example, when we become the starving mothers of Tharsus, and offer up our dead babies for burial. The ‘babies’ are actually the suit jackets worn by the politicians of Tyre; the Chorus set a new scene by taking off our jackets and rolling them up, holding them like children. If there's ten people on stage all dressed exactly the same and repeating the same ritualized movement, it can be very powerful. Clothing really helps with those transformations between places and characters. A jacket and tie mark out the lords of Tyre; when I take those off and put on a naval commander's cap, that's a sign that I’ve become Cleon.

Clothing: Diana's temple [V.iii]

At some points in the play, people do change whole costumes. Yesterday we discussed whether the language of the piece is actually that you put on one thing and you’re somebody else, even though underneath you’ve got the black and the white. The production begins like that but whole new costumes appear more frequently later in the play. In the last scene at Ephesus [V.iii], we wear the basic black and white Chorus outfit with an orange sarong to be the temple guardians. We’re not quite sure what that looks like. We thought about trying a new costume, a sarong with a white t-shirt perhaps, because it felt a bit strange at the end to go back to black and white with a sarong – having built up the basic outfit to the point where we lost the black and white (unless you’re a Chorus member listening to Gower the story-teller). It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Funny business

There a few moves in the brothel scenes that I’m keen to work on; we’re not quite sure where we should be standing. We need a little rehearsal time to set things really, until all four of us (the Bawd, the Pandar, Boult and Marina) know exactly what we’re doing. It's hopeless if three of us do one thing and the fourth person does something else. We can improvise something, but it's much better if we all know what we’re doing so that we can be very clear. The overall idea is to keep the lines flowing as we do these bits of business; the business isn’t a distraction, it's placed in between the lines as punctuation. We don’t hold up the lines to do huge amounts of comedy business… sometimes the story does slow for physical images, but in terms of the little things in the brothel scenes, it's nice if they always complement the lines and allow the story to drive on. If the story didn’t push on, the play would run forever! We’re running at three hours now, and hopefully we’ll take off at least another twenty minutes after our first week of previews. By then, we’ll have a better idea about what's essential and what can just be cut away.

Tricky balance

In the brothel scenes, we’ve got to strike a tricky balance between comedy and the reality of Marina's situation. Marcello Magni [Boult] is on the groundlings’ wavelength and they’ll pick up anything he is doing, which is great. We need to balance that by making sure that comes at the right time as regards telling the story and hearing the text. The Pandar, for instance, is very lascivious and you should be able to read from his behaviour that he's completely debauched. I have to play those bits of business (like itching because of his venereal disease) on my lines. If the audience laugh within your line, then you can control it – you can say the next bit and pass the baton on to the next person: the focus shifts. Lighting often gives and takes focus in modern theatres, but everyone shares the same natural light at the Globe so it's really up to the actors to make those handovers work. I think that's the key to the balance in those scenes: you’ve got the focus and you provide the laugh or the emotion then pass it on to somebody else – they grab it and take it forward like a relay race.

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Rehearsal Notes 6

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

First performance

We’ve done our first preview; there was a very nice response and lots of things fell into place as the audience told us what they liked and what needs more work. The storm sequences and the tournament have gone down fantastically every night – it's wonderful to see that after all the hard work that's been put into them. The aerial work really elevates the show and lifts up all the human drama along with it. Although I wasn’t too nervous for our first Preview, I felt my heart racing, really pumping away on the Press night. Of course, the Press were there, but my parents, my wife and some family friends also came to see that performance. Once I got through the first Cleon scene, the nerves disappeared – after that the rest of my lines are relatively conversational and I can enjoy that (touch wood!) We did a strong show and that was very pleasing; the reviews have been very positive.

The first show lasted three and a half hours which was far too long, but at least we got through it! When Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] talked to us the following day, he said how much he enjoyed it. He liked the elements of the story where Gower and Old Pericles talk to each other in modern English outside the text. He thought that cuts in the first half would increase the focus on Pericles’ journey. After two shows, we cut the first three scenes so they took only half the time; showing Antioch and Tyre as brief episodes seen through the eyes of Old Pericles rather than ‘worlds’ in their own right meant that the storyline became much clearer. The point of the scene is really what it means to Pericles. The cuts meant we arrived at the first storm scene much more quickly. In the first Act we see Pericles with everything, then he's reduced to nothing in the storms – the drama begins when he's washed up half-dead on the beach after the first storm, having lost all his men and possessions. Now the play runs at about three hours including the interval, which is a much better length.

Character work continues…

After the first preview, we had a week of rehearsals during the day and performances in the evening. I think we all improved our characters; playing for an audience helps you realise where you need to make sure you get the story crystal clear… that's what Kathryn [Hunter, Master of Play] is very keen on. Instead of playing all the moments in a scene, we concentrate on our overall objectives, so some of the verse can be spoken in a way that's very heartfelt but also quite light and fast. That makes it easier to listen to, because it's more like natural speech.

I think Cleon's story has become clearer. We cut a lot of his lines: in Act one, scene four, I now give the essence of the trouble that Tarsus is in and then Pericles suddenly arrives with a sack of corn. In the text, there's another page of verse where Cleon learns that a ship has landed and worries whether it's a threat before Pericles’ entrance. The fisherman's scene is fun and that's changed quite a bit too. Instead of being jokey all the time, we’ve gone back to some of the anti-beggar issues raised by the text. Clearly, these hard working fishermen don’t like people who have a free ride (whether they’re beggars or kings), so when they first see Pericles in such a dishevelled state they think he's another beggar. When we realise that he's at death's door, we rush to help him. We keep it jokey, but we’ve been trying to explore some other things alongside the humour.

The Pander is the most difficult character. The menace of those scenes comes across without huge laughs – I think that's the way it's written. My parents came to see it on Press night and enjoyed it, but they thought the brothel scenes were quite grotesque. It's difficult to strike a balance between the jokes and the real threat these men present to Marina. You’ve got to believe that these men would do all the nasty things they want to do to Marina. She has to have that reality otherwise there's no sense of her being saved and she needs that real unpleasantness for her goodness to shine through. We’re still trying different ways to make the conversation between the Bawd and the Pander more natural. We keep changing the way we treat Marina, depending on what we want from her, and we’re very sycophantic with Lysimachus because we want his money.

The brothel scenes are challenging, but I think the Pander is the most fun to play out of my three parts. In those scenes I can use the audience or refer to them – just eye-balling them as if they’re citizens in the Mytilene marketplace. They become actors in the scene. Boult has some fantastic conversations with them as well, because his character's got a licence to do that. He goes into the yard to advertise Marina to potential customers in the yard and gets a great response. I think audiences at the Globe are freer to express and share their feelings: they say what they’re feeling or laugh or get shocked and they can talk to their neighbours and move from one place to another (if they’re groundlings). That buzz comes across: on stage you can see and hear whatever's in their minds or their bodies or their hearts. That's the great advantage of the Globe; the audience is lit up. Their responses are very palpable and this affects our playing to an extent that you don’t find in other theatres. It's definitely a two-way relationship.

Wicked Cleon?

Gower calls Cleon ‘wicked’ at the end of the play, and Marina calls him ‘cruel’ [V.i]. I think he is culpable, even though he didn’t actually plot Marina's murder. He has the chance to go and find her, or at least tell Pericles what has happened. He has a chance to stand up to his wife, but he doesn’t – instead he chooses the safer course of action (not to rock the boat and to keep his government going) and I’m sure he dies spiritually as a result.

In our production, we have a moment where he tries to argue with his wife and make her realise that what she's said and done is awful, but Dionysia has the last word when she says ‘But yet I know you’ll do as I advise.’ [V.iii] She knows that I’ll go along with her. After that line I walk across the stage and put on my jacket, ready for the funeral scene – I’ve agreed to be silent really, to be jacketed – or strait-jacketed – by her. In the last couple of shows, we’ve introduced the idea that our daughter Philoten returns into our scene at that point. It's not written into the scene, but if she appears just as Dionysia says the line ‘But yet I know you’ll do as I advise’, then I can’t protest anymore even if I wanted to. Obviously we can’t let our daughter know the truth. Again, Cleon is constrained by circumstances, but ultimately he chooses not to stand up for Marina so he's guilty. He's given in to evil, so it's justifiable to be called ‘wicked’ and ‘cruel’.

Domestic setting: V.iii

We chose to give the scene between Cleon and Dionysia a domestic setting. In practical terms, it means that we don’t have to move the bed off stage; the scene with Cleon and Dionysia is sandwiched between two brothel scenes, and the main piece of ‘set’ in the brothel is a large double bed with a brass bedstead. Another alternative would have been to leave the bed on and do the scene around the edges of the stage – but that's not a very neat solution. Instead we throw a new cover over the bed and the scene shifts to Tharsus.

The scene works well in a domestic setting because it's between husband and wife, and is very much rooted in family relations – maternal envy spurs Dionysia to get rid of Marina. Kathryn [Hunter, Master of Play] wanted it to be in bathroom or a bedroom, where Dionysia can suddenly tell her husband that she murdered Marina. Cleon is completely stunned: I’m in the middle of getting ready for the big state funeral or memorial service that we’re about to hold for Marina, tie not fully done up and holding one sock, and I have to try and take in what my wife is telling me. Cleon continues to try and get dressed as normal, although his mind is racing about death and the fact that his wife is a killer. The ordinary routine of getting dressed turns into a series of displacement gestures. It's a very nice setting to play.

Forestage

Cleon and Dionysia take the urn with Marina's ashes right down along the forestage at the end of that scene [IV.iii]. Technically, the extended stage gives you a very powerful position because you can go right into the midst of the audience, where you become a focus for everyone on stage as well: they can look at you and still face out into the audience rather than across the stage. That means even if someone on stage is just talking to someone on the forestage, they are still giving the lines out to the audience. It helps stretch the scenes out length-ways into the yard. In our production, the end of the forestage is also a place of loss and desolation – it can feel very exposed and isolated there under the sky. When old Pericles is alone with absolutely nothing, he moves into that area.

Pre-performance preparation

Evening performances start at 7.30pm, so we do a group warm-up at 6.15pm, usually a run-through of the jig or the storm sequences. That takes about 10 minutes but it's nice to do something communal, to get you thinking and working as a team. All the aerialists have to warm up for half an hour, stretching their muscles really carefully, and we have that time to do our own vocal and physical warm-up in the theatre.

As part of my vocal warm-up, I go through some of my lines. Then I shower and change into my costume. (I usually eat at about 5.30pm, two hours before the show – I need to have something to eat!) I drink lots of water during the show because I lost a lot of weight in the first week of previews: you sweat buckets in the fisherman's outfit, and that week was particularly hot! We’re called at 7.25pm to go down to the tiring house, ready for the start of the show.

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Ask Your Actor Bulletin

This bulletin was composed with questions sent in by schools who adopted Harry.

How long have you been an actor? What inspired you?

My parents are actors so it was always in my background. I did a lot of acting at university but after that I spent two years doing other things to find out what I really wanted to do. I worked in a hospice as an auxiliary nurse for a while and travelled to Australia and New Zealand. When I came back, I went to drama school (Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art) for two years, from 1991 to 1993. It's been 12 years now since I left and I’ve worked pretty consistently since then.

What's been your favourite performance?

My favourite performances would be in The Antipodes, which is an obscure play about the world turning upside down. I played a character called Peregrine – that was at the Globe theatre in 2000. My favourite Shakespeare plays are probably The Tempest and The Comedy of Errors.

Why do you play three parts in Pericles?

I need to play three parts in Pericles because the play has about 40 parts and our company only has fifteen actors. One or two actors play parts that go all the way through the play but the rest of us keep changing our clothes and perform lots of parts. I think it's more fun to see an actor play one part and suddenly come back on stage in different clothes as somebody else. The audience seem very happy to see that too.

Which of the three parts in Pericles do you like the best?

Probably Cleon, because comedy is one of my strengths and Cleon isn’t a comedy part: I find him more difficult to play and therefore more rewarding.

Is it easy to learn your lines?

Yes, I find it easy when I’ve got enough time. I go through them again and again and then with the people I’m saying the lines to, so I can relate what I’m saying to a particular person and to my character's intentions (why I’m saying what I’m saying), so there's a personal relationship there; you’re not just repeating the lines for no reason.

Have you ever played girls’ parts in theatre shows?

No, I haven’t, funnily enough – being 6ft 4 and gangly, with a beard, they haven’t cast me to play female characters!

Have you been in TV shows and films?

Yes, I played a TV reporter in a small scene of The Bill and a zookeeper who lost his gorilla in Julia Jekyll and Harriet Hyde. I did a tiny scene in Shakespeare in Love – you hear my voice when several people audition for Romeo and Juliet and recite Christopher Marlowe's famous lines about Helen of Troy: ‘the face that launched a thousand ships.’ You hear my voice speaking the lines, but you see at Shakespeare's horrified face as he hears yet another speech by his rival Christopher Marlowe.

Do you prefer theatre or television work?

I feel very comfortable with theatre. But I’d love to do more television – it's quicker in a way, and usually pays more. I’d like to be in a soap opera for a couple of months and get to feel as comfortable in front of the camera as I do on stage.

Is it hard for actors to imagine scenery at the Globe?

After a while it's not very hard at all, because there's very little scenery to imagine. You’re really playing out towards the audience – you can directly address audience members with lots of the lines and bring them into the scene as if they were actors in the play. We have the odd chair and table so we don’t have to imagine that kind of furniture. But you don’t need to imagine walls and decorations because they’re not important: people and how they communicate are what's important at the Globe theatre and in Shakespeare's plays.

What's special about being a member of the audience at the Globe?

It's that you’re so close to the actors – you can see what they’re doing – and, because you’re not in the dark as audiences normally are in an enclosed theatre, actors talk directly to you and draw you into the play. You’re part of the acting.

How many Shakespeare plays have you performed at the Globe?

I’ve done The Comedy of Errors, King Lear, Hamlet and Pericles, so that would be four over four years.

Does your agent arrange auditions for parts in plays?

Yes. All the people who hire me go through my agent. Even if I’ve worked with a person before, they don’t contact me directly; they always go through the agent because that's the proper way to do it. The agent has contacts and sees all the possible auditions coming up, then puts my name forward for some of them.

How did you get the part for this play?

I was very lucky. I’d worked with Kathryn Hunter before (the Master of Play for Pericles) and she asked me to come along to a workshop: she wanted to see if her idea of splitting the character of Pericles into two parts for an older actor and a younger actor worked. She had a read-through with some of her friends to practice that for a day. A few weeks after the workshop, I was asked if I’d like to be in the play. Of course I said yes!

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