Queen Elizabeth

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About Yolanda Vazquez

This is Yolanda's third season at Shakespeare's Globe. In 1999, she played Adriana in Comedy of Errors and Bertha in Augustine's Oak, and in 2000 she played Hippolyta in Two Noble Kinsmen. Other roles include Queen Isabella in Richard II and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet Yolanda has appeared with the RSC, for whom she recently played Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Television includes Midsummer Murders, Peak Practice and A Touch of Frost. Film includes Notting Hill, Morvern Caller and The Other Boleyn Girl.

Character 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.

I'm very excited about being in Richard III and playing Queen Elizabeth in the theatre's first all female company. This is my third season at the Globe and as usual on the first day of rehearsals we focused on games and exercises that would allow the group to get to know each other. Most of the cast (15 in total) hadn't met each other before so it was really important for us all to get to know each others names and learn a little bit about each other. One exercise that I find particularly effective in breaking the ice is to work with a partner and talk for 3 minutes about yourself to your partner, then the other person introduces you to the group. This exercise is useful in two ways; it helps the group get to know each other and it shows how good our memories are. Also, it's really interesting to see what people choose to reveal about themselves!

As the first week progressed we worked on a variety of games and exercises that were focused on helping us begin to understand our characters such as writing a biography of your character. I also found 'hot-seating' our characters a very useful exercise; this is essentially when each of us takes turns to be asked questions about our character by the rest of the cast and answer their questions in character. When I took the 'hot seat', the questions ranged from what is my character's favourite music to what is my character's biggest secret. As the questions got harder and harder I realised that I didn't know enough about my character- I hadn't done much research into my character before rehearsals so my responses were based entirely on my knowledge of the play and my instinct.

It's the Master of Play's [Barry Kyle] intention for the whole cast to produce the image of a horse on stage during the battle scenes and so we've also been working on being horses in rehearsals. We all 'produced' different horses; some worked very well, others seemed a little bit like hobby-horses which were good, but not necessarily right for the image of a battle horse. In addition to this we've been working on a 'men-on-horse' (improvising riding a horse) movement, which again had to be very strong and powerful. We've done lots and lots of work like this, although we have been looking at the script as well. We've gone through the play scene-by-scene; looking at the words and the verse and working on our character's intentions and motivations (what we want and why), and the history behind the play. We have also been talking through our characters relationships with other characters in the play, and every now and then we've got up and worked tentatively through a scene.

I'm very excited about playing Queen Elizabeth. There is a lot of doubling (actors playing more than one part) of characters in our company but I'm very glad to be playing just one role because it's quite an emotional role. Elizabeth goes on a very powerful emotional journey during the play. I think that the role is going to be quite emotionally demanding and that slightly scares me; I'm not scared about getting up and doing it, but the knowledge that I'm going to be weeping and wailing quite a lot of the time means that it takes a lot for me to walk into the rehearsal room!. Although normally I get very excited about coming into the dressing room before a performance, I did a play last year where my character spent most of the time weeping and I would only arrive in the dressing room five minutes before my call; I realised that because the performance was so emotionally exhausting I couldn't bring myself to spend any more time then necessary in the dressing room. However, I was fine when I eventually got on stage. I'm having the same emotion with this role- once it starts it's fantastic and I really want to do it but I find the idea of it quite exhausting.

The biggest challenge for me in playing Queen Elizabeth is maintaining clarity of emotion throughout the play, and a directness and understanding of what her intentions are at any moment. For example, in act iv scene 4, Elizabeth has to try and contain her emotions whilst she confronts Richard. When the audience saw her last (act iv scene 1), she was in a very emotional state, but in scene 4, she has seemingly become more thoughtful, more controlled. Having said that, I think there are moments in that scene when her emotions almost get the better of her and she doesn't manage to hold back all her tears and pain. The challenge is to identify these moments and ensure clarity in the scene so that the audience can see her pain without it clouding what she is trying to do, i.e. confront Richard.

I'm really excited about being part of the Globe's first all female company. When I met Barry Kyle (Master of Play) a few years ago he asked me what character I would most like to play in Richard III and my response was all the male characters; Mark Rylance [Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe] and I giggled about this and he said that he really wanted to have an all female company perform at the Globe. So when I heard that it was actually happening I was very, very keen to be part of it- I think it's really exciting and I think that we're going to prove that it can be done; it's a challenge but I think we're going to do it!

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Character 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.

We’ve been really busy this week trying to refine and work through the battle scene (Act V Scene 3) as we found that it was very slow and simply not working. We have also managed to incorporate the scene into our first staggered run of the play (a run of the play where we stop for a short time after every scene). When we did the staggered run of the play we saw for the first time ever what the play looked like, whereas before we had only ran the first or second half of the play and became excited, I noticed that when we ran the whole play the excitement had gone and it was very flat. However, people who watched the run said it went really well and the lack of energy was something that we were noticing rather than the audience. Also during the staggered run we used all the music and wore our costumes and make-up first time; this gave all the back-stage crew the opportunity to make specific notes on where costume changes need to happen and so on. This is particularly important to the play as there lots of actors playing both men and women. As the male characters need less make-up, a staggered run lets the costume team know when make-up changes need to happen. This has been our main focus this week, because as of Monday, we enter production week; this means that for the majority of the company, next week will be their first time performing on the Globe stage.

My personal focus this week has been to try to get to grips with the scenes which I feel are not working so well and make mental notes of them as we go through the play so I can bring them up when the time is right; sometimes one wants to be very selfish and bring up concerns as and when they appear, but you have to stop yourself and say: ‘No, I’ll have to wait until next time.’ There are a couple of scenes that I am having difficulty getting to grips with and one is the scene after the king has died (Act II Scene 2). In this scene Queen Elizabeth is with her family and the Duchess of York- she tries to kill herself and I think that this is because she knows that from this point in the play life is going to be incredibly difficult for her and her family and she would rather not be part of it. Logistically, Elizabeth starts off in this scene very strong but weakens very quickly and it is finding those changes in her character that is quite tricky for me (e.g. in one scene she comes in with a knife and the intention of killing herself, yet ends the scene agreeing to go to London to see her son crowned king).

Now that we have started to run the play I am finding new dimensions to my character; I feel that Elizabeth can sometimes appear to be quite silly and I think that this is because she is bullied and pressurised by the house of York. When the play begins Elizabeth hasn’t got a lot of substance really, she appears to me as someone who quickly loses her temper or very quickly becomes over emotional, yet after the princes’ death she changes and then there is immense strength in her. Her strength seems to appear very quickly after the princes’ murder and it is a strength that takes Richard by surprise. In (Act III Scene 4) Richard thinks that Elizabeth is going to be a push over and that he can easily get anything that he wants from her, however it is interesting to see that he has met his match and he is bowled over by this. All the way through the play the audience can see little snippets of strength but then all of a sudden they can see what she is really made of.

My approach to characterisation is to read the whole play concentrating on my character and what my character says, and then I look at what everybody else says about my character and what information in the text there is to suggest who I am and where my character comes from. When I am playing a character from one of Shakespeare's plays I look closely at the language that my character uses and the language other characters use when talking about me. Once I am on stage I begin to look at the inner-characteristics of a character; what I think is going on inside my character's head and how a character portrays that on the outside. A character may be insecure on the inside but appear to be very arrogant on the outside and I think that this is the case with Elizabeth- I think that she is insecure because she is not born into royalty and so she takes an arrogant exterior to mask this and attack this.

Another aspect of characterisation is to think about animal study- if Queen Elizabeth was an animal what would she be? I have decided that if Elizabeth was an animal she would be a swan and this helps me in the way that I might walk or move around the stage. I chose a swan because I think that she works very hard in looking right and being very elegant but when swans try to fly they look very awkward and this to me is what Elizabeth is like. When she is attacked by everyone in the court; she tries to fly back at them but ends up looking very awkward. Also, swans can look very pretty and attractive but up-close they can be quite vicious especially if somebody tries to go near their children. Animal study really helps me to interpret my character's world of movement and feelings.

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Character Notes 3

I found the week of our technical rehearsals really hard work. The play was much too long and so we had to cut quite a lot of lines. We all offered different cuts of lines we thought could go and suggested parts which we thought could be speeded up. There were lots of things that I personally felt could go: I don’t mean the text as such but rather the moving of unnecessary stage furniture and excessive properties. There are certain benches and tables that come on and are not really used and I really felt that if we got rid of them it would move the action along more quickly and smoothly. And so, as well as offering up textual cuts for myself, I suggested prop cuts and other ideas such as speaking on top of the music cues. However we just kept the text cuts. Some we thought worked instantly, some clearly didn’t work, and some came back over time. We all made a definite decision to come in very quickly on our cues: once you’re speaking you can speak and take your time, but to come in quickly on the cues is important to keep it going and to keep the kettle boiling.

Apart from the length of the play, for me the most difficult part of the technical rehearsal was bringing something that we had done in a rehearsal room into the playing space. It is always hard, but it is particularly hard here at the Globe because you then realise that you are playing in the round. In the rehearsal room you have the Master of Play in front of you and you just tend to play to him because he is your audience and you want to make sure that everything is coming through to him. It becomes more like a proscenium arch theatre as you’re playing it out front all the time. I have worked here at the Globe before but when we started rehearsing on the stage I suddenly thought ‘Oh my goodness, I have to open this out!’ I started to realise ‘The people on the left have to see this’ and ‘The people on the right have got to see that’. I became very aware that I was trying to focus on playing the space and at the same time struggling to think about all of the work that I’d done in rehearsal. Of course, it was even harder for the people who had not worked at the Globe before. Fantastically, however, after the tech and the first few previews, people just opened out to the space. Instinctively, as performers, we realised that we had to give it out to the full circle of audience. I’ve found that it is possible to make every audience member feel involved – personally as an audience member in the Globe space if an actor just turns around at some point in the play and gives a look in my direction it makes me feel included, and if every actor does that at some point or another then as an audience member I will be continually stimulated throughout the play. As an actor therefore, just by occasionally bringing my focussed attention to a certain part of the theatre I am including those people. Even those people in the Lord's Rooms above the stage are hearing the play and they’re seeing bits of it which are directed personally to them. That makes me think you can sit anywhere in this theatre, even where there is a restricted view of the stage, and it is fine. Everyone in this theatre is included and that's really good.

The play is going fine. I love it! I love performing and I love being in this play. I get a real buzz when I finish the part of Queen Elizabeth and I come on again as a ghost; that's become my favourite moment as it's just hysterical! I’m doing it with Buckingham and Queen Margaret - we’re the three ghosts and we all feel the same. We all come into the tiring house and go ‘My favourite bit now’ because it's such a long personal journey for all of us and so when we get to that part we can just enjoy it. Sometimes in other plays you come out at the end of a show energized and excitable, but with this one I don’t – I actually need a bit of a break afterwards before I can even think about doing anything else. Goodness knows how Katherine [Hunter] must feel at the end – she must be exhausted. They are such big issues that we’re dealing with and whatever type of actor you are I think those issues stay with you. You need a little bit of a break after because they’re major emotions and they do affect you.

Since the start of the run I have realised the crucial role of the women in this play. I mean rather the female characters - we’re all actually women! I believe that the role of the female characters in Richard III is to bring the audience back down to earth and to show them the reality of what is happening. It is particularly the case in this space, because maybe if you see the play in a modern theatre space you don’t respond as much and maybe don’t see it as funny. At the Globe it's actually quite humorous a lot of the time. The audience go over to Richard's side because he seems like a fun king, and Buckingham and Richard are so naughty and creative that in a sense it becomes a bit like ‘Ooh look, what are they going to do next?’ for the audience as they follow their journey. And yet what they’re doing are really, really awful things. The women then come on and say to the audience ‘Yes, you’ve had a good time but this is the depth and the reality of what's just happened’. And it's a difficult task to get the audience to realise they have been involved in the events. When the three mourning queens come on, the audience need to be shown that they have been complicit in putting the princes in the tower and making Richard King. The audience do become the citizens in the play and their attitude is almost “Long live Richard, England's rightful king” - they are complicit in bringing him to power. And so once he's there they should be made to realise that. It is fantastical that they chant that line in every performance knowing full well that he's killed all these other people beforehand and knowing that he's just been horrible to the princes and sent them to the tower.

It is the job of the female characters to come in and say ‘Yes, this is what you’ve helped to do as citizens and this is the reality of it’; we have to really bring it down and say ‘This is not funny. This is real. There have been murders committed and you have allowed the murder of children’. And then as an actor you feel the audience pained at the realization of it all. It's fascinating listening to the audience's reaction during my last scene with Richard as Queen Elizabeth – Act 4, Scene 4. The type of laughter that we get is a very different one by that point: it's like the audience are ahead slightly and you think ‘Now they understand’. You can feel it and you can hear it. Sometimes, the audience aren’t as complicit in the events. Yesterday, for example, we had an audience who weren’t on Richard's side. They stopped being on his side quite early on, and when he was crowned they stopped rooting for him altogether. It was fascinating to find that in places where Katherine [Hunter – Richard III] normally gets huge laughs, she didn’t – they clearly didn’t agree. We’ve had that reaction a couple of times now and it is really rewarding for us as actors to encounter such different audiences.

Queen's Elizabeth's relationship with Richard has developed in performance. I come to it afresh every day and there are undulating little nuances that I’ve noticed - different strokes and different colourings. For example after the King has died and Queen Elizabeth is distraught. When Richard comes in and she's talking to him I used to think ‘Well, I hate this man, so therefore I can’t go anywhere near this man’. During performance, however, my attitude has changed. I began to realise that sometimes in a situation where you’re so distraught and you desperately need someone, if someone comes up to you and says ‘I’m going to comfort you’, in that period of disbelief you will believe that person whoever they are. Richard then completely throws me aside and it becomes even more painful. Because he's very cutting and cruel afterwards in performances now, I can think ‘At least I’m going to get even with you - I’m going to get some comfort’. Different colours are coming into our relationship within the playing of our roles. He's become much nastier and I think I can see more of his evil side now in the last scene than I could originally.

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Character Notes 4

Everything's so busy. We started rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew two weeks ago – just reading through the text and finding out what it means, what everybody thought, what we’d like to do with different bits, etc. We’re trying to figure out what sort of a comedy it is going to be. And we’re so used to each other now [after Richard III] that at times we can almost read each other's minds; if someone says in rehearsal ‘I think you should be doing this’, you know exactly where they’re coming from. Not that one is defensive when it's a new company, but with friends you’re more open to different ideas. Although The Taming of the Shrew is a completely different play, the rehearsal process is quicker than for Richard III as we understand each other better.

The rehearsal process at the moment is really tiring – I can’t remember if it was like this when I worked here in 1999. We’ve been working hard; yesterday I came in at eleven in the morning, did a matinee [Richard III], half an hour off then straight to the rehearsal room until ten-thirty in the evening! It gets a little difficult to find that energy one needs to go through another play – a comedy. The language in Richard and Shrew is completely different – they’re both Shakespearean but I found that's been really helpful keeping them separate for me. Hortensio [Yolanda's character in The Taming of the Shrew] speaks in a mixture of verse and prose. I have to figure out why these changes happen: why is he speaking in verse here and prose here? The shifts are very different from Queen Elizabeth's language. I hadn’t realized that when you speak in prose it's much more difficult than speaking in verse. The commas are in weird places – I had to do one speech ten times before I understood what I was saying. It's easier to see the progression of thought in verse, but prose is really, really hard! I’m getting used to it now. My personal focus at the moment is playing a man – all the others are used to it because they’ve been playing men in Richard III but it's new for me. I’ve also been trying to discover whether I can be funny!

I think Hortensio is a mixture of lover and fool – a romantic, but he's not very good at it. Things affect him deeply: he falls in love with someone who falls in love with somebody else and that destroys him in a very funny way: he ends up marrying a widow that's been besotted with him for ages! At one point I have to disguise myself as a music teacher in order to try and win my love's hand, so we’ve spent a day exploring disguise in rehearsal. We had to come into the theatre in disguise without anybody noticing! I was going to disguise myself as a Spanish Flamenco guitar player but the director told me he was going to send me outside to do some games and exercises around the Globe, and he expected me to get away with it! So instead I came dressed as a very elegant foreign woman with a long wig, high heels, and sunglasses. I was going to be an Italian but when I came in I suddenly thought ‘no I’m not – I’m from Saudi Arabia, and I’m studying in this country.’ A whole history just developed for her – and four people that know me really well went straight past me without batting an eyelid. Next we improvised a little: my foreign woman had an interview with one of the other characters, as though she was trying to get a job as a steward at the Globe. The main thing I found was that the exercise worked best when the actors involved adjusted the balance: the disguised people were larger than life, and the others had to make an effort to be much more normal and serene – the right balance meant though you looked just that little bit stranger, you were accepted. That difference is important for comedy. I realised how much comedy that difference could generate when Meredith NcNiel's hysterical character (a very eccentric young man she called Marcus) met some completely different characters: three of us came in as very sober ladies – one was dressed in a complete bourka and another (Amanda Harris) was a very modest, bookish librarian. Although Marcus was outrageous, as a combination it worked and we accepted his character. It’ll be really interesting to see how we eventually use this work in The Taming of the Shrew.

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Character Notes 5

There was a bit of a blip in rehearsals when we changed the Master of Play. After our work with Barry [Kyle], we started over again with Phyllida [Lloyd, Master of Play]. The work we’d done up until that point hadn’t been very defined so in a way we were in a good position to go forward from there and try something completely new. One thing was decided very early on – The Taming of the Shrew would deal with the gender issues raised by an all-female company that Richard III had side-lined in favour of character. We decided to create a patriarchal society of misogynists! We would parody men without being vicious. The Friends of the Theatre talked with us the other night actually, and they saw that it was a very affectionate parody, which was pleasing. Anyway, we started work on our ‘male’ physicality and it was exhausting – having your shoulders back all the time and taking everything on the chest! It makes me very glad to be a woman! In my head Hortensio was a gentle person, but I realised that if I played him the way I had him in my head, being a woman, I would have looked much too feminine for the alpha male stereotype we wanted. I had to work against that – I’m trying to think double alpha male! When you’re a woman playing a man there's the danger of being too sweet, so you really have to concentrate on letting the words and actions show what he's like as a man.

We decided that we would work back to front with Katherine's famous speech ‘Fie, fie, unknit that threat’ning, unkind brow’ (V.2.141). Kathryn Hunter wanted to know what each of us would like to say with it, all being women. What she was going to do would be hers but all sixteen of us could feed into that, so we did a workshop based on the speech and came in with our ideas, using however many people we wanted. Three ideas in particular were fantastic – Petruccio was the defendant in a courtroom in one version, and Ann Healy had the idea of a heckler: Ann Ogbomo shouted from the yard as we played the speech and her interruptions brought the modern female into the scene. She was brilliant and for a long time we were thinking ‘this is how we’re going to do it.’ Then Ann [Healy] came up with another version that really hit home. She wanted us to do it as though we were in the film ‘The Godfather’, part of the ultimate patriarchy. This is the idea that's had most influence on how we play the scene now. The ideas in rehearsal feed into our performance and give us some alternatives to think about. Sometimes it's good to keep away from comedy and work very hard at making it seem real.

I think everybody in the company would agree that if you’re doing a comedy, sometimes it's funnier if you take it really seriously. There might be more laughs during rehearsals for a tragedy than for a comedy. Taking comedy to weird extremes was also useful, especially with The Taming of the Shrew which definitely has a darker side in terms of the Taming School and all that. We had to find the right amount of cruelty to be able to realise both the ugly and the lighter aspects of the play. Maybe the more seriously you take it, the better because if you look at the needs of the character and make them very urgent and obsessive, very real, then they become funny. That's how I worked on Hortensio. At first I thought ‘I’ve no idea where this is going go’ but as I found that as long as I focussed on his extraordinarily competitive need for Bianca, then my questions about how to play the character became clearer. It's not so much that he loves the woman, it's almost like she's already part of a bet: he sees her as a matter of winning or losing, just as Lucentio does at the end. In that desperation you get the humour of comedy. The rhythm of the text is a useful guide too; you think ‘those inflections should be up because if they’re not then they won’t be heard and the punch line won’t have enough impact.’ You look to the text to feed you ideas and then see how the audience react. I’ve got three or four jokes in there that I added which are too cheesy for words, but when I asked about cutting them I was told ‘no, no, don’t cut them!’ They make the audience cringe and then they laugh. When the play starts to bounce along like that I can almost see how you might get yourself into a ludicrous situation, and I’ve found that lots of times it's very normal things that become very funny when they’ve been heightened just a bit. There are no big comic turns as such in this production – it seems to be the story that carries people away rather than any one individual.

We carried on rehearsing after we’d previewed, and over and over again we found ourselves returning to the tailor scene (IV.3). We wanted to deconstruct it so that instead of an actual tailor and haberdasher, Petruccio had met two of his mates in the pub and because I’d brought a nice dress for his new wife from Padua we would pretend to be a tailor and haberdasher. It became a game, a big drunken male show where they completely terrorised Katherine. We did it twice in previews but kept coming back to it saying ‘this doesn’t work. Come on, let's do the tailor scene.’ We cut it into lots of bits and felt that the most important thing was the effect this scene had on the relationship between Katherine and Petruccio, so perhaps we’d try and get through it as quickly as possible. We tried so many different things – the tailor and haberdasher weren’t friends after all, they weren’t pretending to be a tailor and a haberdasher… it went on until we came out in cold sweats whenever anybody mentioned the scene. We even got a letter from an audience member who analysed the scene academically and made suggestions. I’m really looking forward to the shows and giving the scenes we’ve been focussing on a bit of breathing space, then we’ll get more settled and keep working at it. Today we’re doing our first Richard III in a long time so that's going to be a change. The line run went well. We’ll see how it goes.

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Character 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.

Kathryn [Hunter, Katherina] being away is quite extraordinary. In other theatres when an understudy goes on there's usually a slight sense of panic – will everything be alright? Do they know their lines? Yet at the Globe where there are no understudies, it doesn’t seem to cause the same tension. I feel bad that Kathryn isn’t here, but the performances went well. Amanda [Harris] as Tranio had been onstage a lot with Katherina so she was aware of what was going on with the character, and she's played that part before, so when she picked up the book she almost remembered the lines from last time. By the fifth performance she was actually not looking at the book, which was amazing. I feel safe enough, as I knew she was familiar with the part, but at the same time we have a completely different person as Katherina so you are going to see new choices made about certain lines or gestures which I find very exciting. She was experimenting and I enjoyed playing off that. Likewise when Jules plays Tranio she does lots of things in a different ways. When you feel someone might be thinking “oh, where are we going?” you can help direct them without the audience ever noticing or breaking the flow of the play. I think it's a fascinating experience.

Hortensio's character is one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in The Taming of the Shrew. I read it through and thought “What can I do with him? How can I take this?” I’ve had to get beyond that initial uncertainty, working out the needs and wishes of the character little by little, and imaginatively casting him in everyday life by asking questions – what sort of person is he? If this person was a film star what sort of film star would he be? How is he going to be funny? Then I went back to my first impressions about the character and wrote that down, adding that to the background I developed. It's fantastic to hear the audience's response to Hortensio, when they do laugh and it is funny and I know it's worked, it's worked!

We’ve only got a week left now and I’ve mixed feelings about the end of the run. Obviously it will be sad. We’ve developed a close knit group and we’ll go our separate ways, like a little family that's going to disperse. It also makes me wonder whether there will be another female company now we’ve shown how well that can work. I hope people will be more enthusiastic about the possibilities there. On the other hand, I’ll be able to rest… keeping the energy levels high takes some stamina. We’ve got a couple of ways of keeping the play fresh – I play a game where I try and hear every line as if for the first time. Also we’ll play for different people in the audience. After seeing everybody outside we think “Right, OK, who are we doing to do it for tonight?” and pick somebody out. Of course you’re playing for everybody but a more specific focus helps to concentrate the performance. We also get notes from Phyllida [Lloyd, Master of Play] which revisit specific details; even with only a week of the run left, the performance is still changing, still developing. Today I had a note about the moment when Hortensio gets kicked in the groin by Katherina, then pushed into the pillar, where he bumps his head. We’re going to try playing it faster to get more cartoon-like effect. At the same time The Taming of the Shrew definitely has its own momentum and gallops along at a fast pace that's part of the play's design. Of course, there's the nervous excitement before you go onstage, and that keeps me alert too. Occasionally, if we feel the pace slacken, we can whip up the action and move it forward again. Yes, it's going to be odd finishing. I’ll be able to rest, but after a week or two I know I’ll wish it hadn’t ended.

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