Helicanus - Siminides - Bolt

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About Marcello Magni

Marcello trained in Paris (with Lecoq), London, Bologna, Milan and Padua. He is a founder member of Theatre de Complicite and has appeared with them in many productions in London and around the world. He has also worked in film, television and as a director for the RSC. This is Marcello's third season at the Globe; in 1998 he played Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and in 1999 he played Dromio of Syracuse/ Dromio of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors.

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.

Coming back to the Globe

I did two seasons here at the Globe; The Merchant in Venice in 1998 and The Comedy of Errors in 1999. I loved my time there so much that since then I’ve been waiting to come back! Mark Rylance [Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe] felt that Kathryn Hunter was the right director for Pericles because of the physicality that she had brought to the Globe on stage, and he thought I was a good complementary presence for the Company that Kathryn needed. In my previous seasons at the Globe, I explored how stories could be told using physical as well as verbal eloquence on that stage, and that was work I wanted to continue.

So Mark invited me to be an actor in the production and also to help the Company with theatrical solutions in terms of physical imagery. Glynn MacDonald is Master of Movement at the Globe and she prepares our bodies for natural movement in the first instance. I’ll build on that work and physicalise a theatrical solution – how to we might express the imagery of the play and the personality of the characters with our bodies. Of course, Kathryn will do a great deal of this work; my role will be to complement her.

I read the Pericles and found I’d been offered some wonderful parts: Helicanus, Simonides and Bolt – a minister, a good king, and a pimp – there was a good spectrum of life there, so I accepted. At the same time, Mark thought that my skills in commedia dell’ Arte and masks would be helpful for Man Falling Down (that's the other play the White Company are doing this season). So I was brought in as an actor for both Pericles and Man Falling Down and as a physical expert and performer whose experience would complement the work.

First thoughts on Pericles

Well, it's a wonderful story. It's a journey, an odyssey, like Dante's journey into the Inferno, through Purgatory, and then out into Paradise. It's complicated too because there are so many stages in the journey: in some the productions of Pericles that I’ve seen, everybody got lost in the descriptions of these countries.

Kathryn wants to explore the emotional impact of Pericles’ experiences in Antioch, where he goes to purchase a bride – a strange concept – but discovers the King of Antioch's dark secret instead. His mind and his emotions are disturbed as a result and he has to go through a journey of healing in order to become a balanced, eloquent, wise and very human king. Pericles was actually a fantastic leader during the Golden Age of Athens at the time when democracy was invented; he was known to the Elizabethans as a figure of great wisdom. In Pericles, Shakespeare tells the story of a king who is dominated by his emotions, so in the beginning he's not at all like his ancient predecessor. The journey becomes a realization of your own real responsibilities and emotions. I think it's a journey of growth through loss in order to gain wisdom.

First day

We had a fantastic first day. Meeting everybody at the ‘Meet and Greet’ made us feel that we were part of a Company of actors, but also part of the building. Lots of people from different departments at the Globe spoke about their work with a very clear sense of aim and focus. We found out more about how the ‘acting’ Theatre part of the Globe sits alongside the Exhibition and Education departments: they are fundamental in developing contact with audiences and people of all ages who want to explore Shakespeare's plays. That contact is really important: one of the pleasures of performing at the Globe is the direct relationship you have with the people who come to see the plays. As actors onstage, we see people in the audience and sometimes we fall in love or we have an aggressor or someone shouts out to us… the theatre participates with you in what's happening onstage. The audiences are totally involved: they cheer, they boo, they gasp, and they hold their breath when we hold our breath. Onstage we’re very much aware of their eyes and their feelings; you can tell if they’re tired because they move around, or when they get wet with the rain. Very often we use the audience as part of our cast, as a large court or the people of Athens, and they become people within the story instead of people watching a play.

Creating the sea

The sea is very important in Pericles. It can be at once a very calming element and a very powerful, dangerous element. There are two storms that progressively strip Pericles of all his possessions; he loses material things in the first storm – a boat and all his property – whilst in the second storm he loses his beloved ones. He loses his wife, Thaisa, at sea then leaves his new-born daughter Marina in the custody of a nurse. The sea is like an agent in the play and Kathryn's idea is to create the sea using six aerialsts as well as the performers onstage. The aerialists’ actions in the air all around the balconies will almost lead them amongst the audience: our wish is to make the Globe move as the sea. That's one aim. Another aim is that we’ll be able to represent each different society that Pericles travels through by using different physicalities. Pericles goes through many, many countries – Antioch, Tharsus, Tyre, Pentapolis, Ephesus and Mytilene – so we’ll try to use our bodies to become politicians or bodyguards or starving people in a famine or stall holders.

Rehearsals

On the first day we began exploring how we could create a country and how to move between the different groups of people in the play. We are going quite slowly. We want to integrate Gower into the story as a fundamental character. Gower was a poet like Dante, and a very moral writer. He brings the story of Pericles to us to show us how to be good, how to be responsible, how to act wisely. What Kathryn wants to do is to introduce the cast as puppets or the animated people of this story whom the storyteller Gower will call upon. If he calls upon you as Antioch, then you will become Antioch, and you will need a daughter and a court… so everyone drops into a role. So we’ve spent the first week exploring the first four or five scenes of the play and how the language makes clear that Gower is telling a story to heal Pericles. The story starts, for Kathryn, with Pericles on the tomb of his daughter [IV.iv]. Then she wants to jump back, so that the story teller shows this elder Pericles what happened and the mistakes he made, for him to go through it again as if in a dream in order to come out healed at the end.

We have done wonderful Voice work with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice] and we also had a session with Giles [Block, Master of the Words]. With Giles, we looked at how Shakespeare's verse had changed and developed during his life. He gave us examples of verse that was rigid in a funny way; every thought was completed at the end of each line, so somehow in the reading of it you feel that it's self-contained and quite square. Shakespeare started to break up the lines and you can hear that the speech becomes livelier, like when you interject in a normal conversation. Although the line of verse isn’t finished, you enter and the other person speaks. That creates an extraordinary excitement, because the people aren’t speaking as archetypal figures anymore; they’re speaking with more natural patterns of speech.

Then Giles helped us understand the distribution of thoughts in a speech: the way the thought builds in the entire speech was very dynamic. We used an example from The Merchant of Venice which was very beautiful:

Gentle lady,
When I did first impart my love to you,
I freely told you, all the wealth I had
Ran in my veins, I was a gentleman;
And then I told you true: and yet, dear lady,
Rating myself at nothing, you shall see
How much I was a braggart. When I told you
My state was nothing, I should then have told you
That I was worse than nothing; for, indeed,
I have engaged myself to a dear friend,
Engaged my friend to his mere enemy,
To feed my means.
[III.ii]

It's like the entire thought leads up to that point. And then Bassanio continues:

Here is a letter, lady;
The paper as the body of my friend,
And every word in it a gaping wound,
Issuing life-blood.

The entire speech is an emotional build-up for an emotional release. Other dramatists wrote speeches that related the death but without the same sense of a character discussing their inner trouble – from the beginning to the end of the play a character might not change the way they speak regardless of their situation. There was a kind of composed regularity in the verse. Shakespeare's verse became much more something that people were living in a sense: what's going to happen next? It's like a very dynamic quarrel as opposed to a very formal interview: in the latter, you ask me ‘What do you think?’ And I answer ‘So and so’, and I have so much time! But imagine when someone starts to argue like in television talk-shows ‘I think, no, you shouldn’t…’ They interrupt each other and start talking before the other person has finished: ‘I want to tell you how much I need. No you shouldn’t say that!’ We feel that difference between formal composure and dynamic urgency in very practical situations such as live television programmes, and Shakespeare was bringing that variation into his verse structure.

Modern contexts & improvisations

Kathryn has been working with us very much in situations that liberate our characters in a modern context. She always creates a parallel between a situation in the play and something very direct and immediate. She asks us to work on liberating a true situation between people because she wants us to speak truly to each other, with energy and rhythm. Improvisations help create that kind of parallel.

We did some improvisation to make us feel the dark landscape to Antioch, the first place Pericles arrives at on his journey. During the improvisation, we as a group bullied Jude [Akuwudike], who plays King Antiochus. We shouted awful abuse at him. Then a new situation was set up in which the power balance shifted: Jude suddenly had complete power over the group that had ridiculed him. He was the ruler of our country and could make us do whatever he wanted. He made us abuse each other and, because we were scared for own lives, we almost became even more violent than he was; we knew that was the twisted game that he wanted to play. When the king has so much power that no moral code can be imposed, even within his own family relationships, then he can take anything he wants, even his own daughter. He needs to make me sure that there is no question about who is in control here, so at that point the group became as violent as the King himself. That exercise gave Jude things to draw on as Antiochus and it helped us create the landscape of Antioch: a violent place full of fear.

In another improvisation, Kathryn helped us explore a very formal situation in a post-war country where we were all political advisors about to discuss matters of government with our Prime Minister. Everyone expected our PM to come out and give a certain type of speech and we really felt that we were part of an enormous team waiting in the wings to help him make important decisions. When we presented our plans to the PM during the improvisation, we had the expectation that he would behave like a modern political leader, but Robert [Lucksay, Young Pericles] sung a Hungarian song instead of giving a speech, and he had a little toy rabbit, and kept saying ‘Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky, naughty rabbit; cheeky, cheeky, cheeky, naughty rabbit!’ He misbehaved totally.

When that situation occurs in the play and Prince Pericles comes out to meet his advisors [I.ii], he doesn’t give a speech as the Lords probably expect. After returning from Antioch, he actually sends everyone away ‘Let none disturb us’. It's like he doesn’t want to rule – he doesn’t do the appropriate things (as if in today's world, he hadn’t appeared defending seals or planting new trees). So Kathryn helped us to understand the truth of the situation and how we behave in that context before we start to act the Shakespearian situation. We know now that, as ministers, we expect and deserve a certain social decorum, a certain formality; we don’t approach the scene from the point of view that we’re a king or a knight, instead it's situated in a modern context, and I find that very useful.

Characters

I play three characters: Helicanus, Simonides, and Boult. I’ve just started to touch on Helicanus this week. Kathryn asked us all to fill out questionnaires as our characters – there were questions about age, parentage, schools, skills, our moral status, our religious beliefs, our ethical and social standards. The questionnaire asked us to describe our relationships to water, food, sex, drink; what was our life motto; what was our deepest need or desire. We did it for every character that we played so I answered one for Helicanus, one for Boult and one for Simonides. Every time we came on stage, she put us on the spot with a little five minute interview and we discussed the character in that character's voice; that all helps to liberate a picture of the person. Ideally we should draw the person too.

I took my motto for Helicanus from the text:

To bear with patience
Such griefs as you yourself do lay upon yourself.
[I.ii]

And I put down another one too:

‘To stir our country and find that our leader could be happy and healthy in his own spirit’

As Helicanus, I find all the time that my leader is troubled; at the beginning because he's both very shocked by the incest and he's shocked by his own desires (which seem to mirror those of King Antiochus), then later in the play he's in total despair after the death of his wife and has vowed never to speak again. So I’m dealing with a person who has not handled responsibility and challenges; he collapses and falls on himself. I want the best for our country and I love Pericles, so the motto is really about protecting him. My answer for the ‘greatest need’ question was to help Pericles, to advise him and to protect him, the king of Tyre, and to bring peace to the world. Helicanus wants Pericles to be remembered as the best leader ever, like Pericles the Greek King.

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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.

It's been a very intense week and we’ve done a lot of work. Time was allowed for me to do some movement work with the Chorus vis-à-vis the storms; I’ve had some group sessions where everyone tried to build boats onstage using ropes and bamboo sticks, in order to create the moment in which Pericles loses all of his sailors and all his possessions before he's thrown up on the shores of Pentapolis. We’re trying to integrate what the aerialists have created with the physical language that I have developed on the ground. Linking that work is complicated because there are so many safety issues to be considered. Our co-ordination has to be perfect.

Good King Simonides

Today I worked on Simonides; he is a good king and he also turns out to be a good actor as well as a good father. His daughter Thaisa doesn’t want to choose a husband for herself. Maybe it's because she's shy or she doesn’t want to decide until I’ve said ‘Now, this is the time,’ but as Simonides, I take the reins of the situation when I see a spark between her and Pericles. I make up this act in which I pretend to be very upset that they’ve got together without asking my permission. I look furious and in that way I force them to take a position. Then I somehow make them man and wife and very forcefully I cheer them; I pretend to be cross whilst I’m actually giving them my blessing. It's a lovely moment to play.

Improvisation: the palace

Hilary [Tones, Thiasa] and I did a wonderful improvisation in which we took the director and the assistant director – Kathryn and Yann – through our palace. We described all the rooms that we had. At first, they thought that we were living in a palace that only had one floor, and we said ‘No no, you’re on the second floor but you didn’t realise; you came up the staircase, and from here you can look at everything for miles around – the sea, the desert and the palm trees. You look through windows surrounded by marble carved with Arabic decoration, and the floor is covered with beautiful mosaics. From the window you can see lots of pools and fountains inside the palace.’ I imagined it like the Alhambra palace in Granada. Also I’ve been to Agra in India where there are beautiful influences of the Muslim culture. Pentapolis is on the coast of Africa and I think Simonides being a traveller has seen many countries, and he built this palace with the Arabic world in his mind. Both my daughter and I had rooms with domes and there were little star-shaped holes in them so you could look through and see the sky; the stars let this delicate light and breeze through.

Simonides and Thaisa

Then we improvised the relationship between father and daughter, and it seems like Simonides isn’t so worried about politics - instead he wants to enjoy life and to be with people. He's late starting the tournament because he's busy greeting all the people arriving; Thaisa has to remind him to get on with it! But also he likes to take over. At one moment in the tournament he asks his daughter and Pericles to dance together, but because they are shy or waiting for each other to make the first move, Simonides decides to push her physically on a chair to come forward in the party. Then he physically lifts Pericles, like in an embrace, and sits him next to her: ‘Dance! Come, Sir, here's a lady that wants breathing too!’ She wants to sweat and have fun, but he has to actively push them together. Then in the second half of the improvisation, Simonides pretends to be totally enraged with Pericles and Thaisa: ‘How dare you choose a husband without my consent?’ Then suddenly he gives his consent and wishes them joy! He's a playful king.

At the moment I think I’m not royal enough, but what I’ve found is that as a father I really look at Thaisa from a distance and I can spot everything she does; I notice the friend that she walks with, I spot how she dresses. I am in admiration of her. So it's as if I have an enormous pride as a father. She is the reflection of what was my wife to me, and I think I’ve probably always told her that she reminds me of her mother. I’m a widower and I’m didn’t remarry because I didn’t want to create a conflict: I want Thaisa to have a sense of love as something very deep and full and constant. What is amazing is that in his kingdom, everyone says what a good King he is: the peaceful and generous kingdom of Simonides, the good Simonides. It's very strange to play someone like that because you can become a bit too soft. Simonides… I imagine him to be quite round and positive and jovial, but maybe that is too soft. I don’t know yet what to give to him in terms of my physicality to get that. Helicanus, on the other hand, is a straight person – like a flag or a strong point of reference.

Tournament

Another improvisation was on the tournament of athletes. Everyone came to these games with a gift from their country and they also brought a love song in their own language which was translated to the Princess. They carried flags and did a kind of martial display – everyone used the flags in different ways. Some people threw them and other people used it in a sort of pelvic thrust – that challenge of love was very sexual. Some people sang beautiful romantic songs and someone brought dry reindeer meat in a box! It was very funny. We laughed a lot and it made us want to come off the text for the actual performance at the Globe! The athlete from Finland cried and cried, then offered the princess a small box, saying ‘Love is this…’ She cried some more as she opened the box: ‘Love is… dried reindeer meat.’ We couldn’t stop laughing, it was fantastic. But then she told us a poem in Finnish and we could feel that she was so serious. We could tell that this present was actually a very precious present. So the improvisation was about display and competition, but at the same time everyone brought something very specific to show what love is. Love can be so many things. One person from France brought a French saying which translates literally as ‘Can I fart in your bed?’, but the translation for the princess was ‘Love is: never having to say I’m sorry.’ It was brilliant – everyone came out with fantastic proposition. That gives us an impression of what's going on in the tournament without being real knights in armour. It's much more to do with wanting to bring our personal sense of love instead of a display of military pride.

Ephesus

Earlier in the week, we did a wonderful improvisation on Ephesus: that's where Cerimon the healer lives. Cerimon saves Thaisa [III.ii], who has been found dead in the coffin that Pericles threw overboard during the storm. She's revived by his persistence – he makes her come back to life. We thought the storm and the way the coffin arrived on this beach – perhaps it's like a Tsunami or an earthquake has happened, and everything has been washed up on the beach including Thaisa's coffin. Kathryn set up the idea of a beach: it's a holiday destination and there are quite a lot of English and American and French tourists. We all built up the situation: people are putting suntan lotion on and there are deckchairs and coastguards and sunbathers. Then we improvise that this earthquake happens: there's a storm that affects the entire coastline, as the tsunami did. People panic and there are some wounded people in the landscape. Immediately the doctor (Cerimon) arrives with first aid and he tries to save the wounded, so there's not only this coffin; there are more things, more distractions. He comes across Thaisa as another person who has to be saved in the midst of a catastrophe and we don’t know that she's a queen.

Everyone stayed in the improvisation for forty minutes to get a sense of what the situation might feel like: what does it mean to see a body come to the shore? What you do? The curiosity, the morbid sense of looking, and then the doctor went to work in a very practical way. After a while, he started to pray and cry out. It was interesting to see how the doctor thought of the lines; it was very human, as though he was asking ‘How do I fight for the life of this person?’ It was a very long improvisation and it worked very well.

At the moment we are in a very creative process. Everyone works together when we improvise to give us a flavour of each land. Kathryn is leading us in a very light and open way, with lots of encouragement. She helps us to understand that these situations are real and not just something that Shakespeare wrote about long ago: these things happen. Very often people fall into doing Shakespeare without the parallel to our own situations and experiences today. Kathryn is great because she brings you back.

Work at the Globe

We came again to the Globe and did different work with the Master of Voice and Movement and Text. Giles [Block, Master of Words] helped us explore how Shakespeare shifts between prose and verse in the wrestling scene of As You Like It [I.ii]. The prose was much more formal than the verse and hid what was happening in the heart of people; Duke Ferdinand begins to speak in prose as he asks Rosalind to persuade Orlando not to fight. It's as though he's pretending to be cool about the fighting: he says formally ‘Please, don’t fight!’ But perhaps he says this in prose not verse to hide his emotion – he really doesn’t want Orlando to get hurt. Then we looked at the second part of the scene. The Duke speaks in verse after the wrestling match and perhaps that's because his feelings have been released. So we analysed what was said and how it was said.

Then we worked on stage with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice]. We played with the volume on stage and tried speaking from different places in our body (the head, the throat, the chest, the pelvis). When we spoke from lower down, our voices lowered too. We spoke from a certain spot on the front edge of the stage which is precisely at the centre of the Globe. When you speak there, you can really feel the theatre resonate. Stewart asked us to see how far we could move away from this point and still keep that resonance within that entire theatre. The Globe is made of wood, so it's really able to vibrate with sound.

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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.

Boult and the brothel scenes

We’re moving faster through the play now. Recently we’ve been working on Mytilene [IV.ii] and that's the land where my third character, Boult, lives. He lives in a brothel with his master and mistress, the Pandar and the Bawd; I’m the go-between, the one that arranges the liaisons for our clients.

In our production, Antioch's daughter is very young and Marina is meant to be about sixteen years old – I think that makes their abuse all the more shocking. The transformation that Marina works viz-a-viz the men who try to abuse her will be all the more strongly felt because it comes from someone who's so vulnerable and innocent. Her powers to halt the attempt are almost magical. It's like the power of a child. An example that came up in rehearsals today was when a child says to his father ‘Where do people go when they die?’ The father gives the child an image and the child finds a beautiful solution in that image. Young children have their own particular wisdom and there's something of that in Marina: she has the wisdom or capacity to put a mirror in front of my face when I try to follow the Bawd's orders:

Boult, take her away, use her at thy pleasure. Crack the glass of her virginity and make the rest malleable.
[IV.vi]

The Bawd and the Pandar are annoyed because Marina has just converted Lysimachus – the Governor of Mytilene and one of their most valued customers – from his debauched ways. She's bad for business. Boult sets out to abuse her, and she holds a mirror in front of my face. That makes me pause and then she offers me the money Lysimachus gave her; I think that's what really changes Boult's mind. These people have a very narrow consciousness; as far as they’re concerned, the sex industry is fine, it's their daily bread. All they care about is a profit and that's what Boult sniffs in Marina's plan to become a tutor.

Mytilene market improvisation

We did some improvisation around the bit where Boult announces Marina's arrival to the brothel's clients… the Bawd tells Boult

Take you the marks of her, the colour of her hair, complexion, height, her age, with warrant of her virginity, and cry, ‘He that will give most shall have her first.’ Such a maidenhead were no cheap thing, if men were as they have been. Get this done as I command you.

And Boult says:

Performance shall follow.
[IV.ii]

Later the Bawd asks Boult ‘hast thou cried her through the market?’ so we improvised Boult's announcement in the marketplace in a village on the Greek island called Mytilene (where the pirates brought Marina, where the brothel is).

I went into the village – all the other actors became old men playing backgammon and drinking coffee or listening to music. There were beggars too. All that gave us a sense of the life of this little community. I started to tell them about Marina: ‘Listen! There is a virgin!’ and they all pricked up their ears: ‘What?!’ Everyone was curious – it was a horrible, lecherous reaction, as though all these people in the market were the ‘swearers’ that Boult talks about as the brothel's clientele [IV.iv.12]. In my text ‘swearers’ are glossed as ‘lewdly inclined’ and these men were definitely ready to flock to the brothel. That improvisation helped me when I came to describe the different reactions in Act four, scene two – ‘There was a Spaniard's mouth wat’red’ and so on.

When we tried the scene [IV.ii] again, I imagined that our brothel has a balcony that opens out onto the groundlings, so I refer to our clients as though they’re out there too. I advertise Marina to them like I’m selling her… that's my job. I also discovered that Boult strikes a deal with the pirates i.e. he tries doing a double deal, taking money from the Bawd and the Pandar, and making a deal with the Pirates: he gets money from everyone. That's Boult's aim in life, to make money.

Lysimachus arrives

Boult must also tap into quite a rich clientele of knights and lords. Even the governor of the town, Lysimachus, comes to us. Today in rehearsals we welcomed him into our brothel. Improvising around Act four, scene six, we imagined what the whole place would be like. Our brothel is very, very tacky and horrible: we have a toilet next to the little altar of the house, we have coffee that's boiled on a dirty gas stove, and we have a bed that doesn’t yet have sheets. Everything is jumbled together – the reception and the counter where we take the money and the toilet are all in the same little room, and that's where we invite our clients. Our brothel is very local, very cheap, and very nasty.

We welcomed the governor to this place. He comes to us in disguise so we don’t say he's governor – we just call him ‘Your honour’ and ‘My Lord.’ The Bawd explains to Marina about his position, but she does that aside. As part of the welcome, we offered him drinks, Champagne, cigarettes, a dressing gown… we perfumed him, we imagined that we almost bathed him; generally we lavished all our resources on him because he's good for business.

Thoughts on Boult

I’m finding the Brothel scene [IV.ii] quite difficult. I thought it would be easy to play, in a way, but his brutality is difficult. I’m not sure about his age: he might be quite young, in his mid-twenties, or 35 or 40, and he's local to the island. Kathryn [Hunter, master of Play] imagines the Pandar and the Bawd as two foreigners who come to the island and get involved in the local sex trade. As a local, Boult gets involved with these two characters and becomes their runner, the guardian of their brothel door – their Bolt.

I imagine him wearing a baseball hat back to front and a tight t-shirt. He tries to wear leather and has dark spectacles and maybe Bermuda shorts: it's all a bit mismatched. He tries to be cool but he isn’t really: he makes the deals but not very well. He's always on the move too; he's a lightning bolt, dashing from place to place, and at the same time he's the door bolt, the doorkeeper. His name relates to his functions as a guardian and as a runner. I thought he would be easy to play as a flighty spirit, but there's very abusive behaviour in those scenes too, and that has to be explored as well. Laura [Rees, Marina] is very slightly built… it's difficult to be rough with Marina – how can you be rough, but avoid breaking the precious crystal of the character's identity? Marina's worth an enormous amount of money for the Bawd and Pandar. She's our fortune, and we’ll become rich with her. So I have to balance out the roughness with an awareness of her value.

We went back to do the two storms scenes at the Globe on Friday. The second storm has a big sail that's translucent so the audience can see the aerialists through it. We all move as a boat on stage whilst they do amazing things with ropes, swinging from the middle gallery as though they’re sailors trying to hold the boat together in the storm. I think it's fantastic how the second storm takes over the entire space. At the moment in rehearsals, we’re putting our feet in many shoes at once. We step forwards and back and sideways through scenes in the play, and then there are jigs to work on, and the storm sequences and the Knights’ tournament too (which also involves the aerialists). So we’re switching from one pair of shoes to the next, and the process isn’t as linear. There are lots to think about!

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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.

Running Acts

We put the first half of the show together at the beginning of the week, and then we ran the second half towards the end of the week, so now we’ve run both halves of the show. I felt I was no good; I didn’t feel the story at all. That's partly because, being such a complicated story, we have lots of changes with costume and props; they were not very smooth so the show became extremely long and we lost the sense of the play's story. Yesterday we did a run of the entire show which went much more smoothly. I was reassured by comments from other members of the cast: people told me how Boult's innocent voice became very disturbing in the brothel scenes, and they liked the eccentricity of King Simonides. I felt much more rooted in the story – I felt I had a place, I had a rhythm, and I had something to say. I find Helicanus’ journey more difficult because it's very split up. He has a short appearance at the beginning and another short appearance at the end of the story. So the maturity of that journey is not yet there.

Transfer from rehearsal room

We have the dimensions of the Globe stage marked out in the rehearsal room at Three Mills Studios, but we don’t have enough space at the back (where the Tiring House would be) to store all the objects we need for the scenes. That means it's difficult to be ready to enter on time. Also, we’re missing the actual feeling of the building, the shape of the Globe itself: we are still playing a lot of the action out front, as you might in a proscenium arch theatre. Of course, the Globe is not proscenium arch – it is a theatre in the round – but as performers we can’t feel the ‘round’ in the rehearsal room because we have walls very close to the columns; we’re performing in a space that throws us forward, whereas we should be using diagonals… the diagonals that form a figure of eight around the pillars are very strong positions on the Globe stage. We will see. There's going to be a lot to do in our week of technical rehearsals at the Globe.

My job is a bit tricky at the moment, because I have a double focus: I’m Master of Physical Play and an actor playing Simonides, Helicanus and Boult. Today we did a run of Act two and there were times when I stepped out of character to look at the physical images on stage. A double concentration that is not very good because you have to have an eye on these things, the ‘big picture’ on stage, and that doesn’t help my character work – it's a juggling act, although I’d prefer to think about my three characters at the moment! There are so many things to do, you can’t waste a second – this needs to be put in place, now decisions become fundamental, so if you miss out your timing with aerialists.

What makes Boult tick?

We had an enormous discussion last week about Boult. If Helicanus has loyalty and responsibility and protectiveness at his core, and Simonides is a person of extraordinary generosity and hospitality who loves honour, then what is Boult? What makes him tick? I feel he's very lost and beaten up, a young person just out of his teens. He doesn’t know what is right and what is wrong. He's on the lowest rung of the social order and at the bottom of the food chain; he works on the door in a brothel, simply opening and closing the bolt in a mechanical way. How does Marina convert Boult? There are three conversions, but I think the way she converts Boult in Act four, scene six stands out strangely. Her words convert the two gentlemen [IV.v] and Lysimachus [IV.vi] to more virtuous lives, but I think it's money that converts Boult – Marina offers Boult the gold that Lysimachus gave her and that seems to be what tilts the balance, changing his mind.

Marina and Boult: conversions

I suggested that when Boult sees that Marina has refused Lysimachus, who is the Governor of Mytilene and an enormous chance for us to make money, he sees thousands and thousands of pounds disappear. That money will never come in; we wasted our chance. Boult thinks that another course must be taken with her (she can’t be allowed to continue to turn away customers), so he wants to make love to her but he's caught by the Bawd and Pandar. He feels guilty, but when he finally manages to argue that she has driven Lysimachus from the brothel, and the lord is gone away saying his prayers, the bawd is convinced that Marina is a difficult nut to crack. Therefore the bawd says ‘Crack the glass of her virginity.’ In rehearsals, I went and collected instruments from the kitchen and the toilets – anything to get rid of this obstacle to our fortunes. Boult thinks that when Marina has lost her virginity, it will be easier to force her to do it again. He doesn’t understand that she is a special person. Only when he sees another way to make money by her does he change his mind.

Marina is very clever. I pointed out in rehearsals that she notices he's being mistreated by the Bawd and the Pandar:

Marina. What canst thou wish thine enemy to be?
Boult. Why, I could wish him to be my master, or rather, my mistress.
Marina. Neither of these are so bad as thou art,
Since they do better thee in their command.
[IV.vi]

She asks him ‘What wickedness would you wish on your enemy?’ and he replies ‘the wickedness of my master, or mistress.’ Marina says that Boult is worse than the Bawd and Pandar because, as his employers, they can make him do things they wouldn’t do themselves. He's their slave, and they can hit him, abuse him, they are better than you because they are in command. It's like he feels she is tapping into his weak points, holding up a mirror to him and asking ‘How can you accept this maltreatment? You are doing what you’re doing because you are being badly treated.’ So she's very clever about how she taps into people, but Boult has sort of closed off to that and will not listen.

Refusal to listen: an answer?

I saw a film called City of God and I felt that those young people listened very little to anybody. They’re driven by what they do, guns and drugs, and their refusal to listen is almost a way of answering in itself. Trying to answer the many questions about what happens to Boult's head, I kept thinking of that film and young people who did not want to listen. It's like when a young person goes and locks themselves in their room – Boult does the same thing in his head. He doesn’t want to listen to Marina telling him what he is. That's what I thought I’d take into the play, that not listening is an inexperienced way of answering, something you resort to when you are not so clever about coming back with arguments. At first I thought that Boult was clever and sharp – he comes back with the comment about losing a leg in the wars* – but that impression of him has changed a bit.

  • What would you have me do? Go to the wars, would you? Where a man may serve seven years for the loss of a leg, and have not money enough in the end to buy him a wooden one?
    [IV.iv]

Boult's relationships

He's known the Bawd and the Pandar a long time. We think these people came from England and wanted to open a brothel, and they picked up Boult as a runner – someone to mind the door, collect the tips and do odd jobs. It's not a great way of living, although Boult thinks he's great and that his ‘profession’ is the greatest thing he could do. He gets really indignant at Marina ‘She makes our profession as it were to stink afore the face of the gods’ [Iv.vi] – it's like her slander is a crime. As far as he's concerned, people come to the brothel to have a good time, the clients leave happy and the brothel owners make money. He probably knows deep down that he's not so wonderful, but the conviction he's wonderful is very, very hard to crack. He wears tight jeans, modern trainers and a leather jacket with a backwards baseball cap. I’ve also been carrying a bolt to the brothel door in rehearsals and whenever he enters or leaves a room, he opens and closes the bolt (there are no ‘set’ doors on stage). We’ll see what he can do…

Looking forward to Technical rehearsal

Tomorrow we’ll run the play again before coming to the theatre for our five days of technical rehearsal. I know already that a lot has to change. We’ll focus on the vital work of linking the scenes so the story keeps its momentum and doesn’t die at the end of every scene – that needs smooth changes and good timing. We’ll also carry on adding the music to the play (that's something else we’ve been doing this week – the music is fantastic and really helps to create different atmospheres).

We’re not really improvising or exploring the text anymore – most of that work has been done. I feel that now we have to believe in our story. We need to start putting scenes and situations together; the jigsaw is all about locking everything together so that the scenes run smoothly from one to the next. That's the challenge for next week.

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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.

First performance

The first show seems a long time ago! I think we were not as open to the laughter and to the space as we could have been. The rehearsal process was very organic and then in the fifth week we had to put everything together. The work continued through our tech week – we concentrated on finding the pattern and structure of the play within the scenes, and making sure that the different elements of the scenes flowed together… the aerial work, the dances, the music, the physical images, entrances, exits – so many things! The energy we put into those two weeks was enormous and time flew by. Suddenly after four days of tech, we had to play. We arrived at first night like a tornado, so perhaps that's why we were a bit tense. The theatre can be quite scary if you’ve never played here before and this was the first time for quite a few of our cast. Our second show had a different sprit; suddenly there was a lot of playfulness. We allowed laughter and pleasure into the performance, and the characters blossomed because we were open. We went from being very good students to inhabiting the story.

What I love about the Globe is that people in the audience really become part of the plays. The stories matter to them. A few nights ago, after the tournament when Thaisa put the medal on Pericles’ chest, this wonderful applause burst out of nothing. Why did they clap? For love – they lived the love story and it matters to them. It's as if they’re part of this royal event and there's a wonderful feeling that we’re telling the story together. Doing it together is important – as Patrice (our Gower) reminds everyone at the beginning of the second half of the play. Another wonderful thing is the way the audience celebrate the world of the aerialists as part of the play; they really love that dimension. In the first storm, the aerial work is integrated with the boat built by the chorus. It's quite sculptural. For the knights’ tournament, the aerialists put on an Olympian display and it's wonderful to see how they inhabit those characters.

A lot of us feel more and more that the story has become our own. The journey of Pericles feels especially poignant now because of Corin's illness. He had to be taken to hospital and is away from us. In a way, the play has become the journey of Corin. Mark [Rylance] is playing Pericles at the moment and when he lies asleep on the bed after being reunited with Marina, it's very emotional. It's all pertinent, a part of the journey. Somehow the play has been liberated by the events – it has become our own.

Simonides

During the tech I discovered a new dimension to Simonides when I put a wig on my head! The hair is curly and almost white-blonde, very long and wavy with sort of floppy quiff that falls across the right side of my face. At first it was difficult when it covered my face entirely, but I learned to play with it and now it's a feature! I’m learning to play with Simonides’ sense of responsibility as an honourable host. He's very much the honourable gentleman who wants to invite the entire Globe to his party. I’ve not yet achieved that confidence that everyone is there at my party… some nights I have it and it's a wonderful feeling. That's Simonides’ journey and his challenge; to invite the entire Globe to his party and entertain them.

Simonides has a fight with Pericles when he's pretending to be angry about his daughter's choice of husband. As a father from the South, he thinks honour is very important, especially where my daughter is concerned. The stakes are very high and sometimes the challenges of young men have to be settled in a duel. We improvised on that idea in rehearsals and everybody laughed, so we thought we would keep it. Little by little Robbie [young Pericles] and I have been developing the routine. At the moment we also include Patrice [Gower] who becomes like our referee, counting the seconds that we hold each other, or the number of punches landed. It's wonderful because it shows you their situation: an upset father and his young would-be son-in-law have to fight for the girl. Simonides is fighting to give her to Pericles, who is fighting to take her away. Simonides loves his daughter and although the fight is fun, it is hard for him to give her away. I try to show that in the moment when they’re dancing at the wedding. I hold onto her scarf and I’m trying to say, ‘She's going to go, she's going to live in another house, she's going to go abroad and I don’t know I will never see her again.’ She's my daughter and I love her so much that at the same time I’m pleased that she will go and start a new life with a family. It's a mix of joy and pain.

Audience connection

Boult has quite a wild, interactive relationship with the audience. In the Globe, that kind of involvement is immediately received with pleasure. When the fishermen start to fish a groundling from the audience, that person becomes part of the play – they become an actor, a fish, and it's a joy. Today when Patrice (our Gower) asked the audience where we left the ‘woeful queen’ [Chorus, Act four], a lady sitting far back in the lower gallery said ‘Ephesus’ in a very clear voice. She was the only one in the auditorium that knew where the queen had been left and Patrice invited her on stage. So I ran down and guided her up onto our jetty [forestage]. She came on stage, gave an extraordinary bow and said the line ‘His woeful queen we leave at Ephesus.’ The audience gave her a huge cheer and she was over the moon; the story became all-embracing.

Boult does a bit of that interaction all the time. He tries to sell prostitutes and buy new girls… straightaway there's a dialogue with the yard. Kathryn [Master of Play] is encouraging us to play with the audience. I’m convinced the play is there in the lines, then of course the brothel scenes get darker and we threaten Marina: I feel the audience somehow step back. From being the naughty, anarchic servant doorkeeper, Boult becomes ugly and horrible. The audience go ‘Well, we don’t know if we like him.’ But now we are developing the contract between Marina and Boult, I feel that the audience swings back to my character. It's not just the money that convinces him to help Marina; he recognises her special quality. From being charming and naughty, he's threatening and then sees a bit of light in his neutral life. There's a nice moment when Marina thanks him for promising to help; I pat her shoulder in an awkward, embarrassed way and she gives me a kiss – he's surprised and embarrassed, but in a good way. That's an interesting journey.

As Boult, I try to stir up the lewdly inclined in the audience! Kathryn has built a lovely bit of play into the beginning of the brothel scene [IV.ii] which gives Boult the chance to have a great dialogue with them. We arrive in Mytilene as part of a funeral procession (it's the funeral of the Transylvanian who died of a disease he caught at the brothel) and as the burial service goes on, I try to sell prostitutes to the groundlings. I’m bartering with them, stopping now and again to join in with the ‘Amens’! He's trying to sell the prostitute. He's trying to find the girl for the brothel. He's trying to find business… at the end of the service I say ‘Come on, sir don’t be shy! Don’t be shy – any price any price. Come on, any buyer? Meet me outside on the piazza!’ It's very much part of the Globe.

Adlib

In a way, adlibbing is more dangerous because you know that's not part of Shakespeare, but new lines ‘grow up’ in many productions. We’re treating the text as an evolution. I worked a lot with Theatre d’Complicite and of course we devised our shows; when we did text, instead of thinking ‘This is a text,’ we thought ‘This is a story. How can we tell it so that it's clear and present?’ Often you have to add something. As Kathryn chose to have a young Pericles and an old Pericles, we really needed to make that journey as clear as possible and the ad-libbing is part of that. It's not to destroy Shakespeare. Some people get very uptight ‘This is not Shakespeare!’ but I think we have the right as artists to express new angles on the text. We shouldn’t be scared of change. Shakespeare was writing his plays at a time when adlibbing would have been quite normal, and I bet one night's performance was always different from the next. He borrowed the material from plays and poems and then elaborated on it. We’re taking another little step.

Helicanus

The last of my three characters is Helicanus. Since Mark has started playing Pericles, Helicanus has become funny in a way that I didn’t expect. There's a strange sense of Pericles being very naughty and anarchic, therefore Helicanus almost shares in that ... it's like two clowns. At one moment, my character seems to doubt that Pericles can hear music. I’m trying to listen to the music that Pericles says he can hear, but I don’t hear it so I’m perplexed. Pericles hears it and looks at me – seeing that I can’t hear anything, he says ‘O Helicanus that still seems to doubt.’ Mark whacked me on the forehead just then and made everyone laugh! That cheekiness is wonderful.

Wide awake

Before a performance, I almost have to make myself nervous. And by nervous, I mean that I have to feel how important it is to tell this story. We sometimes have to change from one character to another in the time it takes to change costume, so it's very important to be wide awake and ready to go. My nervousness is more like alertness. If you are not totally geared up in your head, things can go wrong: like today, I said ‘But shall I go and search the market?’ and left the stage… suddenly there is the Pandar saying ‘Oh the poor Transylvanian, is dead that lay with the little baggage.’ I was off stage and realised ‘Oh!’ then ran on to say ‘Ay, she quickly poop’d him, she made him roast meat for worms!’ [IV.ii] So I think nervousness happens when you haven’t rehearsed enough. But there is a good nervous energy that's to do with being geared up and ready, being alert like a cat. I like to be in that state.

Warm-up

To get ready for a show, I run for 40 minutes and do stretching exercises. Then I do all the text with my tongue stuck out and make certain sounds to warm up the voice. We all play a kind of volleyball together in the theatre yard; we use our feet and the aim is to try to keep the ball up, passing to each other as many times as we can. You really have to concentrate so it helps to wake up your mind as well as your body. I do lots of vocal exercises because my articulation is Italian. I repeat sounds ‘the the the tha tha tha thee thee thee they they they thu thu thu’ and say tongue twisters so I can articulate words quickly and clearly. One Italian tongue-twister I use is: ‘tigre contro tigre, tigre contro tigre.’ [Tiger against tiger] I use some English ones too: ‘She sells seashells on the sea shore, she sells seashells on the seashore’ and ‘Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather’ (then ‘Red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow leather, red lorry, yellow leather’!) It also helps to massage the muscle between the cheek bone and the jaw; this is one of the strongest muscles that we have, and it's important to relax it. Saying the text with your tongue stuck out means you have to make a real effort to make as every single word as clear as possible. To end the warm-up, we all go through the dance, the jig at the end of the play. It's like when you get ready to play a football match: you warm up and there's suddenly a different kind of energy.

Previews

The show was far too long when we opened so we had to make a lot of adjustments during the previews. We rehearsed in the day and performed in the evening – I think we cut something about 25 minutes off the running time. Certain sections were lost, some passages came quicker (the speeches at the beginning of the first Tharsus scene, for example). The show got very fast – running at three hours. Now we’re getting a bit long again… we need to keep it short. That process keeps us on our toes; the text is clearer after rehearsing during the day. You gather your energy and really concentrate on the show. It's like training for a sports event; if you train often, your body can react faster, jump higher, run quicker. After a rest period, muscles go dormant. So I like to rehearse in the day – in a funny way, you are reminded of your task. Another element that's very important is that it's not you by yourself: we’re in a collective and this show is very much about working as a collective. As a team we have to work with the same pulse – if we don’t warm-up together before the show, how can you find the communal pulse? When we run through scenes before the show, it's easier to remember, ah, this is how I fit into the rhythm of the scene and the rhythm of the other actors.

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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.

We’re much freer in our movements now so the dance on stage is sometimes very wonderful – I call the show a dance because it is for me a dance. We have to be very aware of each other's movements otherwise there are collisions… awareness is even more important because we’ve got aerial choreography too. Yesterday the choreography went slightly askew. Suddenly I was swinging on a rope with Tilly coming towards me and I missed her by an inch! So the dance could be dangerous if we don’t get it right. Nothing has happened yet (touch wood).

We’ve now had a few performances with John McEnery as Old Pericles. After Corin became ill, Mark stood in before John took on the part. Mark was totally different from Corin and John's totally different again. It was very interesting for us as actors to play with three different interpretations because our performances have changed in relation to the propositions of each actor. We go from a very honest, earnest John to Mark who is quite bold and comic but also very heartfelt. Corin has a totally different control over the verse, saying the lines almost without breaking them, whilst Mark has a skill whereby he makes the verse sound natural by almost breaking it up, stuttering to a point. Sometimes with Mark I feel Old Pericles is like a brother to Helicanus. With John, I become more like a friend who has great responsibility, whereas with Corin I felt more like a junior statesman with a different level responsibility.

Corin, John and Mark all went through different rehearsal processes – Mark had one day of rehearsal and then read the text on stage (the Globe doesn’t have understudies). John went through five days of rehearsals and little by little learnt the part. Corin had six weeks of rehearsals. Staging-wise, the different information each actor physically conveys is very interesting because for me the text is one thing, then there is a whole physical language too. Gower makes a proposition and Pericles reacts with his body as well as the words. If he physically turns away or resists what Gower has said instead of going along with it, then that tells a different story. So we have to be very aware of those changes when we perform – movements might happen with a different timing or intensity or direction. Sometimes the story might not be as clear because of that, so you have to pay special attention to how they do it and adapt your own movements.

Each actor enters as Old Pericles with a totally different rhythm in the last scene, when Helicanus introduces him. When Mark enters, I feel like he's mad so I almost try to whisper ‘Behold him. This was a goodly person…’ I don’t want to make his disaster too public and I get very upset. Yesterday there was a beautiful moment when Jude [Lysimachus] asked Mark ‘And I have another suit…’ Mark had just seen Diana and he was still caught up in that vision so he didn’t seem to understand Lysimachus – as Helicanus, I wonder what has happened to him.

John enters at a quicker pace, as though he's been hardened by everything that he's suffered. He's angry and closed off. As Helicanus, I feel I can be more robust because there is a different kind of vulnerability there. It's like the difference between a child that's been shocked and a person full of tension and conflict. John's Pericles is decisive after the dream-vision of Diana: ‘We have to go to Ephesus. I thought we were going to go to Tharsus but we’re not and I’ll tell you why later.’ He catches on to Lysimachus’ request straightaway: ‘It will be wonderful – you with my daughter, that's good!’ He's very practical with great energy. It's very interesting to learn from the performances how much scope Shakespeare gives for different interpretations. I like that very much.

I also like noticing how people emphasise different words or images in the text, and how that's coupled to physical language. When Marina tells Pericles ‘I am Marina,’ Mark runs around and says:

O, I am mock’d,
And thou by some incensed god sent hither
To make the world laugh at me.
[Act 5, scene 1]

He decided the reason why he says this line is because her answer made him do a stupid run (he runs away from her around the pillars) that causes the audience to laugh. I thought what a brilliant freedom, to say the text and physicalise that reaction. Why should the world laugh at me? Because I’ve done something slightly foolish. If it's something foolish, how can I react to Marina's name?

Another very simple difference in the scene where Pericles introduces Marina to Helicanus is that John orders ‘O Helicanus, down on thy knees’ and Mark asks ‘O Helicanus, kneel down.’ Although the line is the same, I react in a totally different way. With John, Helicanus doesn’t kneel down straightaway because I almost say ‘Why should I? Who is she?’ When I’m asked, I pause for a different reason ‘Why is he so troubled, why is he asking me?’ And that introduction affects my relationship with Marina. If I’m ordered to kneel, perhaps I don’t trust her quite so readily. We tend to assume we can become intimate very quickly but it's not easy. When you know someone very well, you know how they’re going to react to something. That doesn’t come quickly, that comes from spending time with a person.

Another thing I found over the last couple of weeks is that I tend to shout too much as Simonides! There is always the problem of sending up an emotion, whether you pretend to be upset or really go for being very furious and let the audience wonder whether you mean it… I’m trying to find a tone that is truthful but not quite so angry. It's hard because I’m not like that naturally – when I shout, I shout!

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