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Romeo

About Tom Burke

This is Tom's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Tom trained at RADA: since graduating in 2002, he has played Hamlet in Gertrude the Cry and has also performed the BBC & Endor production of Syd, State of Play. Film credits include All the King's Men and Dragonheart: A New Beginning.

• Rehearsal Notes 1
• Rehearsal Notes 2
• Rehearsal Notes 3
• Rehearsal Notes 4
• Rehearsal Notes 5
• Rehearsal Notes 6
• Activities 1
• 'Ask Your Actor' bulletin

Rehearsal Notes 1

• Auditions
• Experience of Shakespeare
• Romeo: preparation & first impressions
• First rehearsal
• Working with text
• Repetitions
• Clothing – original practices
• Actor/ audience

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

Auditions

I auditioned for last season and didn’t get in, so when I came back for Romeo and Juliet, last year suddenly seemed like a preliminary audition! I came in feeling more confident because I’d already met Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] and I knew he liked what I did. Altogether there were four auditions; in the first set I was quite nervous, but in the second set I read the balcony scene with Mark [Rylance, Artisitic Director] playing Juliet and it was just such fun that I almost forgot it was an audition. Tim, Siobhan [Bracke, Casting Director] and Mark's wife Claire [Van Kampen, Master of Music and Artistic Advisor] were also there. I just remember coming out of it feeling so happy! The same thing happened in the last audition with Kananu [Kirimi, Juliet]. I think I had a stupid grin on my face the whole time which I just couldn’t get rid of. Partly that was because they said ‘Really do the speech to us’, which you’re not always asked to do in a audition, and it suddenly felt like I wasn’t trying to say ‘This is how good I am’ – I was just in a room telling a bit of a story for some people.

Experiences of Shakespeare

I remember going to see Mark Rylance in Much Ado About Nothing whilst I was at school: I got so caught up in it that I persuaded my school to pick Much Ado About Nothing as our Shakespeare play for that year. We studied it, but I really didn’t start to think about Shakespeare in performance until drama school when I played Caliban in The Tempest. This is the first professional Shakespeare play I’ve done; I can’t quite believe it.

Romeo: preparation, first impressions

I was incredibly excited when I heard I got the part; I’ve wanted to play Romeo for a long time, which I think is quite unusual – I know a lot of guys my age who would rather play Mercutio, Benvolio, or Tybalt. Some people feel that Romeo's a bit soft, but I don’t believe that. Although I was thrilled at getting the part, there were a couple of weeks where I didn’t want to look at the script; I knew it would make me nervous rather than excited. I gradually began to take it piece by piece, though there were certain bits which I just thought, ‘there's no way I’m looking at that’ because they were just too big to tackle in advance – mostly in the second half of the play.

The speech I chose to do at the first audition was the ‘banished’ speech [III.3 ‘There is no word without Verona walls’] and it fundamentally summed up why I wanted to play Romeo. He's a person who is extremely prone to falling in love; you could say that at the beginning of the play, he's in love with the idea of being in love, but then this fiery, angry young man emerges who would rather face death than life without the person he loves. That was a side of it that really made it interesting for me as a character. I found that was the side that came to the forefront in the second half of the play which I avoided thinking about in depth before rehearsals. I read through the whole play, and obviously I’ve looked at the second half several times, but I haven’t actually started working it through in my head as much as the other bits. The second half of the play is when the tragedy really starts.

I didn’t learn my lines before we started; I find that when you’ve rehearsed a scene a few times, they’re so much easier to learn than if you just try and learn them straight off the script. You learn them as responses to the other people more easily than you can if you learn them alone by rote.

First rehearsal

We were given prompt copies of the script, which means you only have your lines and a cue, which is usually the last few lines from the character who speaks before you. It made me really listen to what other people were saying because you couldn’t just look for your cue and go ‘Okay, it's me now.’ We got up it up on it's feet straightaway and walked through the first act with these prompt copies. It was completely chaotic, and half the time the person you were talking to had forgotten to come on or you had missed your cue. But it was fun. We’ve spent the first few days laying foundations, and Tim has an approach which I really enjoy as an actor: he stays open to different possibilities and different ways to do something, which allows you a greater freedom to feed ideas into the process. The last thing he wants to do is set things on the first day by saying ‘This will be played like this…’ In one sense, that freedom can be intimidating, but then I think that it's more fun as well.

Working with the text

We’ve also begun to do some rhythm work with the text, which is new to me – I don’t know how I’ve managed without it! I’d always imagined that working closely with the iambic pentameter would feel a bit restrictive, but it has actually had the opposite effect and opened up more possibilities. We did this thing where you beat out the iambic rhythm as you’re doing it. Half the time, you’re thinking ‘This sounds so unreal,’ and then suddenly it will release one sentence: you put the stress or emphasis in a certain place and the line makes sense. It's surprising that if you don’t pay attention to the rhythm, you can instinctively place stress in exactly the wrong place, where Shakespeare didn’t want it, and then spend ages not knowing why the line isn’t working. I was saying

Tis torture and not mercy. Heaven is here
Where Juliet is…
(III.3.29-30)

and then you suddenly realise, oh, but the iambic rhythm means it's ‘Tis torture…’ and the line suddenly sounds better and you just go, ‘Well, why didn’t I think of that?’

Repetitions

I was doing the first Friar scene [II.3] with John McEnery and we did an exercise where we repeated whichever word in the line had inspired our reaction. It's what happens in real life – you hear a certain word and that's what goes in. And it really makes you think about where the line's coming from in relation to the other character, not just in relation to your own journey.

Thinking about Romeo

When I was reading the play before we started rehearsal, I kept on thinking that the first scene where he parries Benvolio's questions is really very witty, and he is a very witty person. He's one of those people who, although they’re upset, still manages to make fun of it – even if it doesn’t make him feel better, just to ease the conversation he's having. I suppose it must be to make themselves feel better as well. He would be very annoying if he came on and just moaned.

I saw the Baz Luhrmann film [1996], and I remember coming out of the cinema feeling wired and thinking ‘Wow!’ I don’t know if it moved me exactly, but it was a great film in terms of pace: one of the reasons it worked on an entertainment level was because it was so fast. I’m very pleased that the only other times I’ve seen the play have been some rather bad productions. I found myself watching and thinking ‘How would you do that scene?’ But then you read it and realise that actually it can work in a very simple way. For instance, in one production Romeo came on in the first scene and he was just so miserable that after five minutes you wanted him to shut up. I’m quite glad I’ve seen those productions, because it makes me feel more confident about what I want to do.

Costumes: original practices

I’ve also been having costume fittings. They’re amazing actually; the production is original practices so I’ll be wearing really fitted doublets and they do something to the way you stand. Most of time I’m a terrible sloucher and I sit in the most awful positions, so I’ve always got a sort of tightness in the top of my chest. After I’ve worn one of the doublets for an hour or two, I feel like I’ve had an Alexander session or been to the osteopath. It's really weird. I can almost feel little bones clicking into the right place.

Another thing about original practices is the sense is makes of certain lines. Whenever you’re doing a modern dress production, there are certain lines you have to fudge a bit because they don’t make sense: if Lord Montague calls for his long sword and he is presented with a gun, there's a discrepancy and you have to work hard to get round it. Similarly, there are so many references to what people are wearing in Shakespeare's plays; with original practices productions you suddenly don’t have to worry about that because you can say a line about French slops and point to somebody's hose instead of either cutting it or sort of going ‘Uh… French slops,’ and pretending it's not there. It's one less thing to worry about and the costumes themselves are looking great.

Actor/ audience

This will be my first time at the Globe and I’m expecting a different relationship with the audience simply because here everybody can see each other. I’m looking forward to it a lot because I think it will really help the scenes, particularly with this play. When I’ve seen this play performed and it hasn’t worked, it's been because the audience was in complete darkness. The balcony scene, for instance: I feel that scene [II.2] really needs to start with Romeo sharing something with the audience ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound’ – and whenever I’ve seen it before in a theatre, it's been somebody staring into space, pretending that they’re really on their own. It doesn’t engage the audience so that they follow the scene where it goes. I’m actually feeling extremely empowered by the idea that I can see people, though I can imagine it’ll make first night more nerve-wrecking.

All in all, I've had a great week. I just had a movement session with Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] and I feel that I’ve stretched for the first time in ages; my body just feels so much better. Maybe that sounds pathetic but I must have been really tense all week; now I feel ready to go again.

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Activities 1

Words and reactions
Finding the rhythm
Cue scripts
These activities are designed to be incorporated by teachers into their individual schemes of work. The activities reflect key challenges faced by the adopted actors during the rehearsal period; they cover a range of different ability levels and focus on different areas of the curriculum. We advise that teachers select the activities which are appropriate for their students and adapt them where necessary. We hope that teachers will develop their own activities based on the material in the bulletins: we would love to hear about them and share them with other members – please send them to globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

Activity 1

Words and reactions
Materials: excerpt of the Friar's speech (see below): one copy between two students
Time: 15 minutes
Activity type: pairs

Tom describes an exercise that helped him to identify the key words in Friar Lawrence's speech at II.3. John (who plays the Friar) went through the speech line by line. After each of Friar Lawrence's lines, Tom repeated the word made the biggest impression on him – the word that would cause Romeo to react. Finding key words and repeating them in different ways helps us explore the feelings behind the lines and the affect they might have on other people.

Friar:
Holy Saint Francis! What a change is here!
Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear,
So soon forsaken? Young men's love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.
Jesu Maria! What a deal of brine
Hath washed thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline!
How much salt water thrown away in waste
To season love, that of it doth not taste!

1) Read through the Friar's speech as a group; each student takes a line.

2) Get into pairs; decide who will be A and who will be B.

3) A reads out the Friar's speech; B listens, and after each line repeats the word that makes the biggest impression (whichever word in the line ‘jumps out’ at you).

4) A and B swap roles: now B reads out the speech and A repeats the words that seem most important, or that stick in your mind.

5) Talk about why you each chose the words you repeated. Did you pick the same words as your partner or different ones? What effect does stressing these words have? What tone might the Friar say these words in, and how do you think Romeo should react? Email the words you chose along with your explanations to Tom at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com so he can compare them with his own.

Activity 2

Finding the rhythm
Materials: playtext or print-out of excerpts below, pencil
Time: 10 mins
Type: whole class activity

Tom found certain lines made a lot more sense when he placed emphasis on a particular word. He worked on the line in act III scene 3 (when Romeo tells the Friar that the Prince's decision to banish him is not merciful – death is better than a life without Juliet).

Tis torture and not mercy

Initially Tom stressed the first syllable ‘Tis’ but discovered the line made more sense when he stressed the second syllable ‘torture’ – spoken this way, the line emphasises how Romeo feels. Tom found the iambic pattern of non-stressed and stressed syllables or beats to be very helpful. Shakespeare often uses this rhythm (or ‘metre’) and noticing which words are emphasised in the pattern often gives us clues about the meaning of a line.

1) Say the following aloud as a class, stressing the words in bold. Make the stresses heavier each time you repeat the line, until you’re almost chanting (try adding some clapping and stamping; remember that the last repetition must have the heaviest stresses of all)

We stress the words we want the world to hear (x3)

2) Speak the lines again, but instead of making the stresses heavier each time, make them as subtle as possible – try to get quieter and quieter without losing the emphasis. At the same time, try to speak each line a little faster with each repetition.

We stress the words we want the world to hear (x3)

3) Shakespeare gives us lines that are much more interesting: try saying these lines from III.1. Keep the iambic rhythm in mind, but don’t feel the need to chant or rush: speak as normally as you can. Tybalt has just challenged Romeo to a dual but Romeo (who has just married Juliet in secret) will not fight…

I do protest I never injured thee,
But love thee better than thou canst devise
Till thou shalt know the reason of my love.

Talk as a group about which syllables you stressed using this pattern: did they all fit into the pattern? Do you think they were the right syllables to stress? How close was the iambic rhythm to ‘normal’ speech? Do you think this rhythm is very similar or very different to the way we stress words in normal speech?

4) Shakespeare often used the iambic rhythm but he wasn’t restricted by it: he could and did alter the pattern of stresses or the number of syllables in a line of blank verse (see glossary). The rhythms of Shakespeare's verse are flexible, so you can decide how to say the lines in a way that best conveys the meaning that you think most important.

Take another look at some lines from the speech in III.3 that Tom worked on:

Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here,
Where Juliet lives. And every cat and dog
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven and may look on her.

Speak them aloud in as ‘normally’ as you can whilst keeping the iambic rhythm in mind. If you were Romeo, which words in these lines would you want the world to hear? Underline these words without worrying about whether they ‘fit’ with an iambic pattern.

5) Now see if all the lines fit into the iambic metre – if they do not, what reason do you think there might be for this? What have you found out by experimenting with the lines in this way? Send your discoveries into Tom at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com so he can compare them with his own.

Activity 3

Cue scripts
Materials: Photocopies of I.4 excerpt (from line 1 to line 43 ‘Come, we burn daylight, ho!’) – 1 copy for each student. Scissors, paper, glue.
Time: 30 minutes
Type: Groups of three.

In the first weeks of rehearsals, Tom describes using cue scripts as Shakespeare's company are thought to have done. Each actor's script only has the lines that their character speaks and their cues – the last line from the character who speaks immediately before them. For example, Benvolio's cue script would begin:

Or shall we go on without apology? (last line of Romeo's speech)
The date is out of such prolixity… (first line of Benvolio's speech)

Tom found the cue scripts helped him to listen and react more naturally during the first run-through of the play.

1) Get into groups of three and cast yourselves in the parts of Benvolio, Mercutio and Romeo.

2) Cut out the lines your character speaks, along with your cue lines – the last line from the character who speaks directly before you.

3) Glue these excerpts onto a separate piece of paper – make sure you keep lines in the right order!

4) Try playing the scene using your cue scripts: if you have space, you could run the scene through ‘on its feet’ straightaway, as Tom did.

5) As a class, discuss your scenes. What is difficult about using cue scripts? Did you find out anything about the character by using cue scripts? E.g. were a lot of your character's lines funny? Did you find yourself interrupting other characters? Why do you think Shakespeare's company used cue-scripts and not complete playtexts? Send your discoveries and suggestions to Tom at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

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Rehearsal Notes 2

• Confidence
• Games
• Moving fast
• Fray
• Clothing
• Dance
• Romeo's strength
• Romeo & Benvolio
• Cuts
• Verse
• Looking ahead

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

Confidence

This week I’ve started to feel confident enough to experiment with Romeo – at the beginning of rehearsals I was rather nervous about what people would think and that made me tighten up, but I really enjoyed my individual sessions with Giles [Block, Master of Words] and Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] at the end of last week and that has helped me to relax. We talked about character in both sessions, working through the first scene [I.I] and the balcony scene [II.2]. The humour of the first scene just hit me. It could easily turn into one long moan for Romeo, but that's not how it's written if you look closely. Lines like ‘Ay me! Sad hours seem long…’ quickly become part of a very witty repartee full of jokes and wordplay. Focusing on the humour in that scene is going to be the best way to prevent Romeo's speeches sounding whiny. The same sense of discovering fun in the verse cropped up again during the balcony scene. Romeo's speeches give you a picture of somebody who is poetic, but at the same time he's clever and using humour in a gentle way. We’ve been working on that scene as a group too. I’ve been struggling through it, but now I think I’ve found the rhythm; I’ve got a better idea of where the scene starts and finishes and where Romeo has to get to in that scene. At the moment, during rehearsals we’ll work through a scene then do a few games followed by another scene, so you often finish a session on a particular scene and think ‘Can’t we try that again?’ That's certainly how I felt after working on Act II, scene 2. It's good because it leaves you wanting to do more work on the scenes rather than feeling that you’ve bashed the hell out of them.

Games

One of the things Tim did was to ask us to run the scene very quickly: ‘You’ve got to do this in two minutes and we’ll keep doing it until we’ve done it in two minutes’. I don’t think we’ve ever managed it yet, actually. It's funny - when you do something really fast, you almost stop monitoring your thought; you find yourself using your body more freely. Another exercise we did involved only saying one word from each of the lines, so you got a sort of haiku of the scene. All these exercises help though you don’t always know how they’ve helped immediately afterwards. They do plant the seeds of ideas in your head. I often leave rehearsal feeling kind of confused, but actually, when you look back on it, you realise that the exercise has led you to discovery new things or approach a scene in a different way.

Moving fast

Now we’re working on about six scenes a day. Though we’re moving very quickly through the play, nothing is left just papered over. There's no chance of cutting corners with quick-fix definitions ‘that means that’ or ‘that means that’. I like that Tim leaves things unresolved and acknowledges them as such. You don’t start to con yourself into believing you’ve understood something when you haven’t. Whilst I hate the feeling that I haven’t understood a line, the uncertainty is ultimately more productive. Sometimes during rehearsal you can convince yourself that you know what a line means, just because of the momentum that the whole process takes on, but when you step back it's not so clear... it would be awful to get to first night and suddenly realise onstage ‘I never found out what that meant’. Leaving small moments 'open' gives you a lot of freedom, but it can also be quite intimidating when you feel you haven't understood a line. A line that's causing difficulties like that for me right now is in the first scene, when Romeo says to Benvolio ‘Is the day so young?’ [I.1] I don’t think that line is really about feeling – it's more to do with surprise: ‘Hang on, you’re telling me I’ve not been walking round for five hours?’ As soon as you make those kinds of decisions it becomes more believable, but I’m having problems getting that across. I can appreciate Romeo's surprise because I’m dyslexic and that sort of affects my feeling of time, but communicating that emphasis is difficult.

Fray

Another small moment that I perhaps thought would be nailed down is when Romeo says to Benvolio

…Oh me, what fray was here?
Yet tell me not for I have heard it all.
Here's much to-do with hate, but more with love.
Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O everything of nothing first create!
(I.1.173-7)

It goes on… I know one could say, well, he's talking about love and the contradictory feelings it involves; you can almost hate the person you are in love with, because how dare they make you feel like this? There's the same blurriness about feeling hate for people. But I’ve still got to work out whether he's talking about the brawl between the Montagues and the Capulets, or his own emotional state, or both. We tried playing it all three ways but nothing had a clear chime of ‘Oh, that's right!’ So those lines have been left open – it's a bit frustrating because you know you’ve got to get something sorted out, but you can’t force it. Sometimes you can work at something for hours and it won’t click, but when you look at it the next day, everything makes much more sense.

Fight

We’ve had about three fight sessions now. We’re working on these sequences apart from the text because the lines don’t really overlap with the fight, although I’ve seen it staged like that before. I think it's better not to intersperse the fight sequence with dialogue, because swordsmanship is an art-form in itself. Everything has to be precisely choreographed and the legwork for the duellists is very complex… I’m concentrating on putting my feet in exactly the right place. At the moment I’m shuffling a bit too much – my back foot follows the front foot into the lunges – but my last session with Rodney helped that a lot. Having said that, the movements of the fight are separated from the lines, but the dialogue that frames those movements will of course feed into the way we move. The character still has motivations and intentions that are deeply embedded in the rest of the play. I mean, just knowing that you’re entering into a fight with the intention of killing somebody gives you a very clear idea to where you have to get to emotionally in the scene. It's such a big action and I enjoy that there is a very clear journey here. There are so many ‘big’ actions in Romeo and Juliet and innumerable ways of playing those actions, so the clarity of Romeo's desire to avenge Mercutio's death is quite attractive!

Clothing

Jenny [Tiramani, Master of Clothing] and I have been talking a bit about costume recently. Before we started rehearsal, Jenny's idea was that my costume was going to be black or blue – dark colours – which I like because it suggests someone who's very serious, almost stupidly so. And I think Kananu's costume is going to be red, so the contrast will look great. I’m having a fitting later today so we’ll see how the costume's coming. We rehearse in our normal clothes but it’ll be helpful to get used to the shoes that I’m going to be wearing onstage, or something similar. I tried on loads of shoes and none of them fitted so I think a pair is being made for me. Another thing about costume: I can’t wait to do the dances wearing hose! The masquers come in and dance during the feast scene [I.5] and I think this will be a lot easier in hose, because the amount of times we have to land on our backsides and roll around on the ground is astonishing – I’m hoping there's some nice cushioning in there! The rolling around may be cut a bit, because our costumes will take some serious punishment during the dance as it stands at the moment.

Dance

Actually there are two dances and we’ve been practicing for both of them– a jig to end the play and the pavane which we perform in the party scene [I.5]. We decided the other day that it's not actually a ball we’re going to in Act I scene 5. We’re going to gatecrash a supper that Capulet is holding, and we bring the musicians with us. The rule in Elizabethan times was that you were allowed to invite yourself if you brought along some musicians – gate-crashing with a crate of beer is probably the modern equivalent – so the musicians mean we’re allowed into supper and we do a kind of dance by way of an introduction. There's four of us involved in that: Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio and a friend of theirs whom we’ve yet to find a name for. I don’t find learning the steps too difficult – right now it's easier than the legwork for the fight, but that's probably because so far we’ve spent more time on the dance, and dancing the more familiar skill in a modern context!

Strength

One of the things I’m discovering about Romeo is his strength of character: he's authoritative, which initially seems to clash with the idea of a very young character but sometimes it is children command the most authority. Marcus's character in About a Boy, for instance, is strange and quiet and he commands an odd kind of authority. I think it's partly to do with being completely caught up in your own world, and that has resonance for Romeo's character too. I suddenly realised that he's very much his own person. He's gets persuaded to go to the ball, but if he really hadn’t wanted to go, he wouldn’t have gone. He doesn’t have any qualms about standing apart from the group, which is interesting. I know I never just flatly refuse to go out with friends when I don’t feel like it. Instead I always come up with what I think is a good reason, but Romeo just tells them straight ‘No, sorry, I’m sad. I don’t want to.’ That shows some strength of character.

Romeo and Benvolio

We’ve done a lot of work on the first scene with Benvolio, and Romeo's relationship with him has become much closer. They’re very much like family. The first scene reminds me of brothers or cousins together. When family come to stay, you have a great time together but often you can feel the need for a bit of space – without ignoring each other, you can just touch base every day with strange little conversations that don’t involve an exchange of information: ‘Are you alright?’ / ‘Yeah, no, I’m fine.’ It's a kind of social ritual and maybe a similar thing happens in the conversation between Romeo and Benvolio. Their talk keeps to the surface and that's alright because they are so close. Of course, they do talk about things but essentially the pattern is the same: ‘Are you alright?’ and so on. I’ve started to think about Romeo's relationship with Mercutio as well, but that's still wide open right now. There are so many different ways one could go. I know James has lots of ideas, some of which he’ll share and some of which he probably won’t, which will make the dynamic more interesting.

Cuts

Since we began rehearsals, more cuts have been added. I’m always a bit surprised when one of my lines goes but I completely understand the need for it. Tim has to get the running time right and you can say in the defence of almost any line in Shakespeare ‘Oh, but it's interesting... ’ Relationships and characters in Shakespeare are constantly evolving so there is the tendency to feel that if you take lines away, you’re missing out on a little bit of that journey. But when you put it in perspective, you see that the journey can happen without those lines. For instance, there's a line of mine that's gone. Benvolio says ‘Tell me in sadness, who is it that you love?’ and Romeo responds:

What, shall I groan and tell thee?
(I.1. 199)

I liked that line; it made me laugh when I read it. I had started thinking about how Romeo might say it, and once you’ve started that it's quite difficult to let a line go. I was surprised it went but obviously cuts are a necessary part of the process.

Verse

What's surprising me most is that it's harder than I expected. Sometimes with Shakespeare you get into this wonderful place where it feels like the verse is doing all the work for you. You find your own personal rhythm and that complements the rhythm of the verse. I was explaining to Giles the other day that it's like riding a horse – when you first start riding, you can’t find the rhythm of the horse's paces so keep bouncing around in the saddle. Eventually you find you can sit in time to the rhythm of the horse and it's suddenly very easy. The same is true for verse: I feel like I’m getting to the stage where I can enjoy the rhythm. The individual sessions with Tim and Giles have been useful as reminders that there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ thoughts about a line – just think about whatever each bit of verse means to you personally. The initial reaction to a piece of verse might be ‘Oh God, how do I do that?’ but then you find your own way into it. Suddenly Shakespeare becomes a very accessible writer because you see bits of your own experience in the issues he deals with and that is very exciting. Talking to Giles and Tim, it's easy to get into that frame of mind.

Looking ahead

We’ll probably start running the play right through over the next couple of weeks. I’m telling myself that is going to be like the first performance because I’ll get most out of it that way. If you expect the first run to be appalling, well, you don’t approach it in a negative way exactly, but you are cautious. If I’m cautious I probably won’t learn as much from the run – even if that means learning from mistakes – so I’m going to check myself before I start each scene and think ‘What do you want to try now?’ It's good to just go into it very open and see what happens, to relax a bit.

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Rehearsal Notes 3

• Rehearsal games: I.2
• Difficulty
• Character
• Fights & clothing

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

Rehearsal room

We ran the first act at the beginning of this week but this time we had to use non-verbal sounds at the start of each line. Benvolio would say ‘oh good morrow, cousin’ and I’d reply ‘huh is the day so young?’ then he would say ‘hmm but new struck nine.’ [I.2.159-61] I don’t know what that exercise released, but it did release something. You spend a long time searching for the right noise and it's more like how one searches for the right words in everyday conversation. You always know which lines are coming next, but having to articulate the right noise before each line brought a certain energy of frustration to the verse. The words sounded more like natural speech. Benvolio and I worked on Act one, scene two again after lunch, and this time we tried it lots of different ways: during the first run we had to move as many objects as we could from one side of the rehearsal room to the other, and the second time round we had to complete three set tasks at some point during the scene. They could be completed in any order… the three tasks I was given were: take your shoes off, turn all the lights out, and threaten the other person with a fire extinguisher. Benvolio was given three different things. It might sound odd but inevitably the tasks feed into the way you play the scene. I don’t know if it gives one ideas or if it takes one's attention away from trying to have ideas, but once you have activities to perform so it's almost like you’ve just let the scene happen by itself whilst your concentration is immediately occupied elsewhere. That was all very helpful.

Later in the week we did a group exercise where we all stood in a circle and talked about ourselves and each character in the play: for each person in turn, I’d say: ‘I’m Romeo’ and they might say ‘I’m Lady Capulet’ or whoever, and you state your relationship to that person at a certain point in the play: ‘I am your enemy's son’ or ‘I am your daughter's husband’ and they do a similar thing as well. Then you say ‘I want you to… ’ It has to be something that you can play in the scene, so it's harder to do with some characters than others because you’re not onstage with some people, let alone talking to them. You have to think ‘Yes, but do I try and affect that character through somebody else who I do speak to'. I want the way I speak to the Nurse in Act two, scene four, to have an affect on Juliet, for instance. Mercutio makes fun of the Nurse [in II.4] but I'm quite polite and I tip her for carrying the message; I need to stay in her good graces if I'm to meet Juliet and I want her to speak well of me. Even if you don’t speak directly to somebody onstage in a specific scene, there are still things you want from them which influences the way you play that scene. All that information about each other's intentions will be really useful as we continue working on specific scenes – our relationship with a person obviously affects how we go about getting what we want from them, whether we coax or command, so it was great to clarify where everyone stood in relation to everybody else.

Today we’ve been interrupting each other. The idea is that you can’t let the person who speaks before you finish their lines, and the person who speaks after you won’t let you finish what you’ve got to say either. That gave the lines some of the energy of natural speech: you have to try to finish your lines in order to make yourself understood, as opposed to just politely taking turns. It's also quite frustrating when you are cut off. Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] likened it to being inside a washing machine and it does feel rather chaotic, but it also stops you consciously ‘acting’ or trying to convey certain emotions or moods. Your task is to get your words in and the rest just happens whilst you’re pursuing that.

Difficult

We’ve been doing these wonderful exercises, which are there to be exploited for what they can feed into the text and the play… there's so much information and you take as much of it on board as you can. But it's hard to get stuff out of it if you’re not clear on the text. I would say I’ve got a good grasp of my lines now, and I feel secure about that, but there's one or two passages that I don’t feel so fluent in, probably just because we haven’t run them as many times. They’re not rolling out without my thinking about it and so my concentration's on that; I don’t feel one can fully commit to the exercise when you’re anxious about the text. I’m looking forward to some more work with Giles [Block, Master of the Words] to get to the bottom of these passages.

I’m also finding the scene in the middle of the dance [I.5] a bit difficult at the moment. It's when I speak to Juliet for the first time and because it's written like a sonnet and it's such a famous scene, it's very hard to get out of this harmonious rhythm ‘Thus from my lips by thine my sin is purged.’ It can seem rather smug and we’ve really trying to find the inner desperation one feels when you’re trying to impress somebody, to chat them up and the awkwardness of that, even if they are speaking this wonderful language… probably if one could say those things and be calm, one would impress anybody. I suppose it's a matter of finding the inner difficulty of saying all those things, because they’re young and in love and it seems more truthful that it should be a little awkward.

Character

I’m starting to find the humour in Romeo. During that non-verbal sounds run, it felt like there was something wild in him which just gave me a real key in. It was a slightly anarchic quality which felt very right and I don’t know where that will be up yet. It's just something I wasn’t really expecting. I suppose it connects to the more playful aspect I’ve found just recently in Romeo's relationship with the Friar. I’d always thought of that as a very serious relationship because they talk about serious things but actually a serious subject doesn’t always go with a serious tone. There was just a little bit of mischief there today which I liked. John [McEnery, Friar Lawrence] was talking to me, asking ‘Have you been up late? What have you been up to?’ [II.3] and I was just enjoying the fact that he doesn’t know where I’ve been and the mystery that gives me. Also I enjoyed the fact that I have something to tell him; he knows that I have something to tell him and wouldn't I just tell him straightaway? I don’t tell him very clearly – I say

I have been feasting with mine enemy,
Where on a sudden one hath wounded me
That's by me wounded.
[II.3.45-7]

He says ‘Just please be plain.’

Unexpected

The more I put myself into this, the more it seems to work. There's always a tendency to take the edges off one's own personality and any personal behaviour patterns because you don’t want to impose anything on a part. I didn’t want to impose anything on it for the first two weeks, but actually you kind of have to allow all those little strange parts of yourself out, and a lot of them are right and work. You realise ‘Oh yes, well that's not just part of Tom; that's part of lots of people. Why shouldn’t that be part of Romeo?’ For instance, sometimes when people are talking to me, whatever they want me to do or be I’ll get this perverse urge to do the opposite. A sort of rebellious thing, I suppose: if somebody starts saying ‘Now Tom, we need to talk seriously,’ I immediately want to do something silly. I didn’t think that was right for Romeo, but I’m beginning to think maybe it is right for my physical life onstage.

Fight
I’m starting to think about the fight in different ways. I think that's what you have to do: find your own way into something. When you think of a fight you always tend to think of it in very staccato terms, at least I do. I always think of violence as coming in short, sharp bursts but if you can find the flow of the movements, how one goes from one position into another then that will help the whole sequence. Little things like the way I stand can make a big difference in that respect: earlier in rehearsals it seemed we had to stand in a very angular way, but just this morning I tried imagining a big circle between my legs, and suddenly lunging was easier. The fight's getting better but there's still a lot of work to be done.

Clothing

As far as costume is concerned, I want to wear clothes like that in real life! They feel so right on your body; it's alarming how much you’re supported. I’m sure it has a bit to do with the fact that it's completely tailored to my measurements, but truth be told I think there are other clothes that probably look more flattering on me that aren’t tailored. I think it's more to do with the way the doublet holds me up. Normally I find it quite hard to stand up straight without overdoing it. I find it quite hard to just stand in a position that's neutral but at the same time is good posture. These clothes seem to do it for you. Also, I’ve finally got some shoes. They haven’t got grips on yet, and that's one of the main problems I’ve been having with the fight. I can’t stop my back foot sliding around: it should be planted in a lunge, but it sort of drifts off after the first one. Obviously wearing shoes with no grips is not going to help that at all.

Highlight

One of the best things about the last week was probably the run with non-verbal sounds, but this morning's movement session was also fantastic. That's what got me thinking about the fight, the lunges. We just did a series of things to help the spine elongate. Funny how, when you’ve done a movement session, you feel you can cross the stage just like that – you can walk very quickly and very effortlessly when your body is doing the right things. Generally I’m feeling very positive about things at this point. I think I need a bit of fruit, though. I’ve been eating a lot of fruit to keep my energy levels up, and today I’ve just had coffee and chocolate and lunch...

Next

I’m honestly not sure what comes next. Tim tends to keep us guessing and I like that. If somebody told me we would be doing a run at the end of this week, one's first impulse is to go ‘Oh well it's going to be terrible,’ so before you’ve even done it you’ve decided how it will turn out. It's wrong to think that - you never know what might happen. It could be the best run you ever do, so it's important to commit to things as they arise, and I think that's it's easier if someone just says we’re going to do a run now.

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Rehearsal Notes 4

• Fights
• Balcony scene: III.5
• ‘Taking the measure of an unmade grave’
• Basement exercise: V.1
• Audience

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

Fight

Last week I hurt my hand somehow. I picked up a book in the Green Room and felt something pull, but fortunately it seems to be much better now. It can’t have happened during the fight because I hold my rapier [a type of Elizabethan sword] in the other hand: Tybalt uses a cloak as well as a rapier, but as I just fight with a rapier, I don’t have to use my other hand.

Romeo, Mercutio and Tybalt each have a dagger and a rapier, but Mercutio's fight [III.1] is very different from my fight with Tybalt [III.1]. The first fight is polished: swordsmanship is a craft for Tybalt and Mercutio. They have finesse whereas Romeo is simply proficient – he's not in the same league as those guys. My fight is much rougher: it's meant to look quite ragged because it's driven by rage rather than style. Basically I win because I’m furious; I kill Tybalt with a violent thrust. There's not the same sense of showmanship. My legwork still has to be precise though; Romeo's level of skill has to be that of a typical young Sixteenth Century gentleman. It can’t look like this is the first time he's picked up a sword. I suppose the difference between Romeo and Tybalt is that Romeo has been trained, whereas Tybalt gets up every morning and practices. I don’t think Romeo does that… he gets up and goes for long walks instead. Anyway, the skill is evident in the first fight; Mercutio is almost playing. He mocks Tybalt by skipping around as though it's a game. For someone to get fatally wounded in this context is a real shock: Benvolio and I actually think Mercutio is joking before we realise that things have gone horribly wrong.

My initial difficulties with legwork in the fight have been ironed out and I’m really enjoying the scene now. I spent the whole of the Bank Holiday weekend stepping and lunging, stepping and lunging, and I think that sorted it – my back foot doesn’t drift after my front foot in the lunge anymore. Obviously, your confidence increases as you practice. I’ve suddenly started lunging a bit further and I’ve found it's much easier this way, though it feels less controlled at first. The key seems to be getting your knee over your foot: that way you can keep your weight on the back leg and easily lift the front one.

Today we put the fight scene together for the first time with all the words and actions, and everyone seemed to think it was looking good. I find the movements easier when you put them in the context; they make sense because they’re informed by the scene and the characters themselves. You realise that you’re thrusting in that way because you’re very angry, not because that's the way it's been choreographed. I think Rodney [Cottier, Master of Combat] has placed it very well in the story. I’m finding that you can act through the fight.

Balcony scene: III.5

We’re concentrating on the second half of the play now. We did the second balcony scene [III.5] the other day. I’ve seen productions where that scene has just been very flirty and coy, but I think that underplays a lot of the other things that are going on there. We tried playing ‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark’ [III.5.2] as a genuine misunderstanding and the scene became a lot more serious and more confrontational. If I do what Juliet asks and stay with her, then there's a good chance I’ll be killed: ‘I must be gone and live, or die and stay’ [III.5.11] – I’m offering her an ultimatum, practically saying ‘Do you want to kill me?’ They’re testing each other, asking ‘How much do you love me?’ It's rather like when a couple argues and they push each other to find out who will leave first. Of course Romeo has to be the one who walks away in this scene.

When Juliet has persuaded me to stay a bit longer [III.5.17-25], the tables turn completely. The power balance seems to change: she tells me to go and I say ‘Farewell, farewell! One kiss, and I’ll descend’ [III.5.42] which became something like ‘Well, I’m not going until you kiss me’. That was quite forceful yesterday. The play has been done so many times that it can be difficult not to anticipate what's coming next: as far as Romeo and Juliet are concerned, they could be found at any moment and extra force suits that urgency. The beginning of Act three, scene five isn’t just small talk. For me, the tension made it feel more realistic – you would probably test each other in that situation. They don’t know when they’ll see each other again.

‘Taking the measure of an unmade grave’

The banishment scene has also become more forceful. It's been causing me a few problems until recently. The exercises we play with Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] help you to relax with the verse and lots of ideas come out of that, but because you’re concentrating on the game, you don’t consciously attempt to bring anything else in. Somehow the exercises didn’t help with the scene when Romeo reacts to his banishment [III.3], so we did a run where I just felt it in terms of emotion and let that guide me. Tim couldn’t hear what I was saying but I think he understood that I needed to do that once; even if somebody is very in control of a scene and has planned what they will do in a very particular way, which words they will stress and so on, sometimes it helps to dig for what's going on under the surface. That needed to happen; hopefully now I can combine the emotional stuff with the thought-out aspects of the scene and the balance will work.

One moment that has been especially tricky is when Romeo throws himself on the ground before the Friar:

Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel.
Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,
An hour but married, Tybalt murdered,
Doting like me, and like me banished,
Then mightst thou speak; then mightst thou tear thy hair,
And fall upon the ground, as I do now,
Taking the measure of an unmade grave.
[III.3.65-71]

There's a pretty good description of what the actor should be doing whilst he says these lines; it's like a stage direction embedded into the text. In one sense that's useful, but I’ve seen productions where one is almost waiting for the actor to decide ‘Right, now I’m going to fall down.’ I think ‘as I do now’ turns the gesture [throwing oneself on the ground] into a statement that is defiant as well as despairing – it's not just a tantrum. By acknowledging that there is a self-consciousness in the way Romeo draws attention to himself, I think it actually becomes more realistic… at least, that's what I’m hoping!

Another thing I noticed whilst we were working on the banishment scene was that some lines are physically very difficult to articulate. For instance:

There is no world without Verona walls
[III.3.17]

I find it so hard to say ‘world’ in that line – somehow it feels very odd. That's probably deliberate on Shakespeare's part: ‘world’ has such huge implications just there that it shouldn’t slip easily off the tongue. The muscles in your face have to work very hard to get around all those ‘W's – even when you let all the tension out of your jaw, you can’t say it quickly. One of the most brilliant things about working on Shakespeare is that you come across a difficult phrase which makes you stop and think ‘How do I say that?’ then you realise that he means it to be a struggle. He wants you to say it with difficulty. The sound of the words is crucial to the meaning.

Basement exercise [V.3]

Yesterday we went down into the basement underneath the Globe and turned all the lights off before we ran through the scene set in the graveyard [V.3]. We only had lanterns and Tim had put something down as a grave that we had to find. It was really interesting – it gave you a good idea, practically, about what you could and couldn’t see. Our movements became a lot more tentative and much slower than they were in a well-lit rehearsal room. We were feeling our way around and you can imagine how, if you were looking for one grave in a graveyard, you would take quite a long time to find it. Those things will inform how we move onstage during the scene. You can’t just turn down the lights here so you have to find other ways to communicate to the audience that the scene is set in the dark; movement is one of the ways you can do that.

Audience

As we begin to rehearse more onstage, I’m starting to realise what a huge difference an audience will make. The moment you have an audience, there are people with whom you can connect. I’ve noticed that connection just with tour groups that are always moving in and out of the theatre. They’re taken into the theatre during the rehearsals and watch for a few minutes in silence, so suddenly you have an audience. The other day we were running the first act and when we got to the bit where I see Juliet for the first time, I said ‘It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night/ As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear’ [I.5.45-6] straight to a tour group in one of the lower bays. They seemed to respond well. Someone said later that each person in that group felt I had been talking to them, so the connection can be quite personal, quite individual.

Upcoming

The next big thing on the horizon will be a run of the entire play. It’ll be useful to see how everything fits together, but I’m sure there will be lots of moments that need work as result. What seems right for one scene might not fit with what you thought was right for another scene. I also feel the need to do a run in costume, just to find out how much that will restrict my movement and so on. I tried it all on yesterday and it felt a little tight so they loosened it off slightly and that feels much better. I couldn’t quite take a deep breath before and now I can. It's odd – actresses are taught how to deal with corsets in drama school, but there aren’t sessions that teach you how to deal with doublets! I don’t think I’d be able to breathe if I slouched in it. My movements will probably become more precise though, which is obviously a good thing.

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Rehearsal Notes 5

• Last week
• Technical rehearsal
• Rehearsal room to stage
• Clothing
• Mercutio & Romeo
• Romeo & Juliet

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

Last week

We’ve been talking a lot about honesty over the last week. As we run different bits, I’m realising more and more that in that space you just have to open up and not be afraid that people won’t like you. Everyone can see each other, so if someone just pretends then the audience will pick up on that. You have to be very honest with yourself and play the truth of each moment. Actually I don’t think it's hard to find the truth. The problem is that it's so easy to perform actions onstage in an imitative way. You see somebody else in love, you say ‘That's what somebody in love looks like’ and then you try to copy that. You should really think ‘Hang on – what's my experience of this feeling? What do I do when I’m in love?’ The answers will be different for everyone, and however odd they seem, that's the truth. If you question yourself in that way, I don’t think the truth isn’t hard to find.

Technical rehearsal

We’re in tech week now. It's going well but it's taking a lot longer than I imagined, considering there's just two lights (which are on permanently), no recorded sound and no big of bits scenery being moved around. On the other hand, as Mark Rylance [Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe] pointed out the other day, Romeo and Juliet is a very technical play, and we all need to be on top of that. A lot of the scenes are very quick. There are the fight scenes, the climbing up and down from the balcony, props (bottles, apothecary herbs, etc.) and lots of exits and entrances that have to be worked through. You’ve got three basic exits [doors in the centre of the tiring house façade, flanked by doors on the left and right] whereas one usually has lots of choice: you can exit upstage left, downstage left, upstage right, downstage right, middle right, middle left. That means we’ve had to be very careful here about which exits and entrances that people use. It takes time to work out how to get people in and out of the space: we go through a process, running a little bit of the play and then discussing it, running and discussing … and Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] is giving acting notes as well. I always quite enjoy technical rehearsals – the more effort you put into them, the more beneficial they are to your performance. The tech isn’t simply to do with sorting out technology in the theatre; it's also to do with the technical aspects acting in that space.

Run

This is the first time we’ve run the whole show onstage, but a lot of our dancing has been rehearsed on the stage, so it doesn’t feel too strange to be out there. We had our second ever run at the weekend. There was a lot wrong, but I knew why it was wrong and I knew what I needed to do, or rather I knew where I needed to be for it to feel right – even if I didn’t know quite how to get there. It didn’t go terribly well, but no one felt lost afterwards. We all came away with things to work on… the big note for us all was to ‘jump in’ more completely! When I say jump in, I just mean just letting go, letting things happen. That's exactly what I felt – I couldn’t quite jump in because I was concentrating so much on the technical side of it, like where I needed to be at different points. That's a huge distraction – you really need to get that under your belt to feel free. Similarly, to feel confident onstage, you need to feel confident with the objects around you, which is why it's really helpful to have the real props in as early as you can. Knowing the weight of a wineglass so you can put it on a table without it smashing or wobbling, for instance – that sort of thing is important because it gives you the confidence to be spontaneous when you act with and around those objects. We rehearsed with props, but we only got our proper swords about ten days ago. The new sword is longer and heavier than the one I used in rehearsal so it really threw me the first time we ran through a fight scene.

Rehearsal room to stage: changes

In the rehearsal room, there were some lines which always felt awkward when I pitched them out front – ‘It is the east and Juliet is the sun’, for instance. Now we’re in the theatre, they seem much more natural, even when the space completely empty. It feels odd not to pitch them out in that space.

Mark brought up an interesting point after the run: ‘Remember that Romeo loves to fantasise about things. He finds life easier to deal with in terms of fantasies.’ That's the case with Rosaline; she doesn’t love him back but he's perfectly happy with the situation – well, not perfectly happy... but you could say he's decided to just indulge this unrequited love and that almost brings it's own pleasure. He's hardly even met her. A similar thing happens with Juliet. In Act two, scene two, his attention seems to move away from the balcony, which is the real world, and into a fantasy: ‘Oh, it could be Juliet’. Previously I tried to play that scene very much to the balcony because I’m talking about the balcony, but it is actually a complete fantasy… once you realise that, it doesn’t really matter where he's looking. I discovered it feels a lot more natural to look out front.

Clothing

The costume demands a certain concentration. I realised that, although the costume hold you up, you can stoop if you’re not careful. When you’re tired, you fold into it. Slumping looks even worse in those costumes than it normally does, so I have to be very aware about that. Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] has just given me an exercise to help me open out around the collarbone, which should be very useful.

I wasn’t really part of the discussions about the colour of my doublet and hose, but I was very happy it turned out black. Word came back to me that it was going to be black with bits of pink, which I was pleased about. I like the pink – I just don’t want any more of it! There has been talk of ribbon and various things, and I asked about black ribbons. They had been thinking about cream, and in the end we compromised with ivory… I thought that would have a slight echo of death to it, which is appropriate in the circumstances.

Mercutio and Romeo

I’ve been thinking more about the relationship between Mercutio and Romeo. I always thought that Mercutio was older than Romeo, but Claire van Kampen [Master of Music] recently suggested that Romeo wants to grow up while Mercutio doesn’t want to grow up at all. Maybe that's just Romeo's view – Mercutio might see things differently – but it is an interesting idea. That approach makes their relationship more complex. Questions about maturity and control become more blurred. Whereas before I thought that Mercutio was basically telling Romeo to grow up, now I think that's what Romeo is saying to his friend. Mercutio advises Romeo ‘Grow up, go out with lots of girls and you’ll get over this’ but Romeo has a more mature approach. He wants to find the right person.

Juliet and Romeo

Romeo and Juliet's relationship is really coming alive in the Globe space. Kananu [Kirimi, Juliet] and I really trust each other, and that's the most important thing. That's where chemistry comes from, rather than angst or anything else. My scenes with Juliet feel quite varied now, a joy to play. What strikes me about Romeo and Juliet is that they mean absolutely everything to each other: their relationship is the equivalent of putting all the eggs in one basket. They choose to define themselves in terms of that relationship; it's their meaning and their purpose. When that's gone, that's it. Everything collapses and nothing has meaning. It's not very healthy thing, really. Normally, if a relationship doesn’t work out you can fall back on friends or work or whatever, but they only have each other; there's nothing else beyond that. They are obsessive.

Final scene

We’ve also done some work on the final scene [V.3] and found a calmer side to it, particularly in terms of Romeo's actions. Once he's in the tomb, he does become strangely calm. It's not easy (to kill himself, that is) and he's got to brace himself to do it, but there is a real determination there which I think gives a sense of calm. I’m going to kiss Juliet and once I’ve kissed her, I can’t go back – it's ‘a dateless bargain to engrossing death.’ [V.3.115]. He has to urge himself on, but there's a weird kind of calmness in the tomb, a rest.

Still to go…

I need to do some more work on the scene with the apothecary [V.1]. When we get to that scene, there seems to be a change in pace… I’m still not quite sure what I’m doing with him at the moment. That's the one I feel I really need to focus on. That's coming gradually though, and I’m looking forward to our first performance. If it was tonight, I wouldn’t be happy. If it was tomorrow or Thursday, I wouldn’t be too comfortable, but I think by Friday we’ll be ready.

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Rehearsal Notes 6

• First performance
• Second half of the play
• Development
• Continued rehearsal
• Original pronunciation

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: Preview

The first performance was amazing; the atmosphere in the theatre was incredible. The first half went very well, although we have made changes during the preview period. There were lots of little gags in the first half that have been cut – well, gag isn’t really the right word: it was a case of there being moments when I think we got the wrong the sort of laugh. For instance, in the first balcony scene [II.2], I try to climb up a vine to reach Juliet. The vine falls down and I land back on the floor. That went down very well on the first night and got a big laugh, but it was cut after the third preview. I think Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] is right to make those changes, because if the laughs are too big then you can come to rely on them to carry you through a scene rather than playing your intentions properly. Also, it seems a bit unnecessary to go all the trouble of setting up a vine every night just so I can fall off it in one scene!

Second half

Although I thought the first half went well, I was rather unhappy with what I did in the second half [the interval in this production is between III.1 and III.2]. I got anxious about being truthful and honest, which is counter-productive. If I think too much about that word whilst I’m acting, I end up using my truth, which is very different from Romeo's truth because, like most people, I have lots of defence mechanisms, whereas Romeo hardly seems to have any. Deep down, I think Romeo and I are quite similar, but if I start thinking along the lines ‘How would I react to that?’ then I get stuck in something which isn’t particularly helpful. I found it very liberating to think of the surface differences between us rather than the similarities: I’ve starting to make more conscious attempts to change my physicality. One example would be my strides. Normally, as Tom, I take quite small steps. I don’t really stride about, but I’ve been trying to walk like that as Romeo. I just take bigger steps onstage because I think he would. He's a young man in Italy in a particular period, and there's a certain physicality that all young men would have had then – it has a lot to do with bravura. Tim's been very reluctant to try behaving in any sort of stereotypical ‘Italian’ way, but there's an element of that which needs to be acknowledged. That's the main thing I’ve been concentrating on this week.

Development

The show has been growing a lot each night since our first performance. Different things are getting better, though inevitably there will be some days when you feel that you’ve taken a step back in one or two places. That just happens with each moment in the play. On one night you have to re-think a particular moment: ‘Hang on, how can I make this work?’ but on another day, a certain part of the play will just feel great. Then we had the opening, our First Night. I never read reviews but, in my experience, what people have said inevitably filters back. Actually, I did read one review this time: I think the person identified a point where there's room for improvement. He suggested I needed to go further emotionally, in terms of the grief, and that's something I had been thinking about. I’m going to try and work on that.

Basically the first half is fine and I’m still finding the second half problematic. Some people think that's the nature of the play, but I don’t think this is necessarily true. Although the pace of the play is fast and time is a constant pressure for Romeo and Juliet, that shouldn't collapse into a rush. I feel I’ve been rushing the second half a lot. Tim said ‘Let those moments hit you.’ That essentially means you have take time to register what's just happened before you speak your next lines. Allow yourself time to feel. I’ve been a bit reluctant to wait because I worry that nothing's going to come!

In the last act, I get to that moment where I walk on in Mantua and it really feels like twenty seconds later I’m downing poison. It goes so fast. There's no ‘To be or not to be’ speech; it's a case of 'I’m going to kill myself and I’m going to do it like this'. I feel that I’m missing something big at that point and I don’t know what it is. Maybe this is because I’m only playing one intention which is a very clear, strong desire to die… perhaps I need to explore the possibility that Romeo is also afraid of death. I'd like to find something that creates tension in the moment, pulling it in any other way. I suppose the tension could also come from external sources like the Apothecary, or Paris, or Balthazar. At the moment I’m a bit confused, but I’m excited by the play and I’m learning a lot. We've got a long run so there is time to make changes and play around until it feels right.

Period of rehearsals and performance

After the first night, we came in and did an exercise where Tim clapped out the beat and we made sure we’re saying lines in rhythm. It was very different, re-rehearsing each day and then performing. We concentrated on different things in rehearsals. The physicality of the balcony scene, for instance; if you’re far away from somebody you love and you can’t get any nearer to them, how does that affect the way you gesture and the way you use your voice? That's been a big thing: we didn’t have the same sense of physical division in the rehearsal room because Kananu [Kirimi] was stood on a chair and I could have reached her if I tried. Things changed when we played the scene in a space that actually puts physical obstacles between us, and that's something we’ve been exploring further. We also looked at my first entrance [I.1]. We’re trying to pull away from playing ‘I’m sad’. I think we’ve come back to the fact that Romeo is basically unafraid of any emotion, to the extent that he's excited by every emotion he feels – even sadness.

Continuing work…

Now that there aren’t any more rehearsals, you just have to do the work yourself and then dare to try things out onstage. I probably should have started working by myself earlier on in the process but sometimes you don’t want to take on that responsibility straight away, and it's much easier for the work to be a continuous, as part of a group working with the director. Apart from everything else, I was exhausted each night, so going home and sleeping was about all I wanted to do. I think it's important to have time outside rehearsals to think about things – I’m doing that now, and I’m finding that it can actually be a fun and interesting way to work.

One scene I’ve been thinking about is Act three, scene three: the banished scene. It's very emotional. I had a little block about the emotion in it so I went away and just thought about it in physical terms; at each point, at each moment, how much tension is in my body and how much tension is in my voice? Of course, how much tension there is in your body informs the movements you make. That's given me a good map of the scene and that map has helped me work through the block – I know where I need to get to at each stage. Breaking it down makes it more manageable in a way. I might do that with all my scenes.

Original pronunciation

The next big thing will be our performances in ‘original pronunciation’. We’ll do three performances in what is believed to be a Tudor accent – we'll speak as Shakespeare's actors might have spoken. We’re going to start work with linguist David Crystal very soon, which will be good. In my heart of hearts, I hope that the experience will unlock meanings that have hitherto gone unnoticed, but right now I suspect it could be hilarious. There will probably be moments of enlightenment and other moments when I’ll want to laugh! I really don’t know how the accent will affect the play because we haven't been told exactly what that accent will be – somebody said that it's a bit like Southern American accent, somebody said Birmingham, and somebody else said Swedish.

Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about how different accents might influence the play. Will the accent that they come up with make the characters more familiar or will it make the play harder to understand? Initially I wanted to walk on stage and have the audience think ‘I know blokes like that.’ Now I don’t know if that should be one's first impression of Romeo. Maybe one's first impression of him should be ‘I don’t know anyone like that’. You start to wonder why people come to the theatre; I don’t know if it's to see life as we recognise it or to see life as it might be lived… perhaps this type of expectation will affect an audience's reaction to the accent. OP [Original Pronunciation] performances also raise questions about the associations attendant on accents in today's society – I was wondering whether different accents would make the characters seem more domestic, rustic or exotic. It will be interesting to find out over the next couple of weeks.

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'Ask Your Actor' bulletin
This bulletin was composed with questions sent in by the schools that adopted Tom Burke.

What do you think are the most difficult aspects of Romeo?

I think his speed is the most difficult aspect of his character – the speed at which he reaches decisions is just amazing. He makes decisions very, very quickly compared to somebody like Hamlet. It's funny that in some ways the audience are one step ahead of him, because they know when he's making mistakes, but in some ways he's ahead of them – his decisiveness has a thrust that carries people along. Well, that's what I think… I don’t really know how people view the play. My friend came to see it the other day – she's a very good director – and she said there are two ways you could do the play: either everything seems rational or everything seems irrational. The audience either goes ‘Don’t do that; that's going to mess everything up’ or they agree ‘That's what I’d do.’ Similarly, the audience could either see Romeo as being slightly silly and immature in that he doesn’t think enough, or they agree that his actions are driven by the strength of his feeling: ‘Yes, that's what people do when they’re in love.’ I think that choice is also quite difficult to negotiate.

What have you enjoyed most about this production?

There's an amazing atmosphere in this theatre; that's something that I enjoy very much. But it's also a very strong atmosphere that you have to be able to control, to a certain extent. For a while it was like the atmosphere was turning clockwise, and what the play is trying to do, the inner voice of the play, was almost spinning the other way. The audiences here seemed ready to enjoy the comedy of the scenes and at first I wasn’t sure how comfortably that sat with the more tragic aspects of the play. Now I feel we’ve really got a harness on the place, which we didn’t have at first. It was very hard to pull in focus at the end when it needed to be pulled in. Now we can enjoy the strength of the connection with the audience in relation to both the comedy and the tragedy of the play. I feel that the atmosphere of the place and the play are, if not spinning in the same way, then spinning in different ways with a kind of harmony. Reaching that point has been great: once you get there the Globe is a wonderful place to play.

What first interested you in acting?

When I was younger, I wanted to do lots of different jobs. Every job I came across looked interesting, each one was a different world… what would life be like for somebody owning a shop, or for a writer? I was interested in people just doing this or that. I wanted to see what all those different things were like and I suppose I felt that acting was a great way to try out lots of different options.

What is it like to act on the Globe Stage?

The atmosphere is wonderful, but it's really important to get used to the space and for a while I wasn’t able to do that. It is just so different from any other theatre I’ve worked in previously. Everyone can see each other and the audience are so close. I feel I’m getting used to it now. What's hard is to know quite how to interact with the audience. I’ve realised that it's not really about acknowledging that they are there, it's more to do with not pretending that they’re not there. At first I tried really playing lines directly to them then I tried not playing stuff to them at all. Now I’ve found a point I’m happy with that's just between the extremes! It's like saying ‘Okay, you’re there.’ That's playing the complete truth: we are in a theatre and there is an audience, but this action is still happening.

Do you always enjoy the parts you play?

I always forget the hard bits. I always arrive on the first day of rehearsal thinking, ‘Wow, this is going to be fantastic!’ Then I remember ‘Well, last rehearsal I did was hellish’ … one usually has to go through a pretty hard patch to come out on top. I think it's important that you only remember the good bits though – otherwise you probably wouldn’t do it again. I do usually enjoy most parts I play in the end.

How do you get into character?

I think the first thing one has to do is to identify the differences between the character and your own personality. For me, the differences with myself and Romeo were that I have lots of defence mechanisms, which most people have nowadays, and he's very open. He's not afraid of any emotion. To get into that character, I have to sort of dig underneath my own defence mechanisms and think, ‘How do I really want to react to a given situation? What do I stop happening when I try to look unconcerned about things?’ I also think that you have to find the character's tempo, and Romeo's is faster than mine. Before I go onstage, when I’m walking around backstage, I often find myself walking faster. The way I move is faster and I turn my head faster than I usually do it. I don’t really think about it in such conscious terms though: ‘I’m going to do this and this and this to get into character.’ Emotionally speaking, I don’t want to pin myself down and say ‘He is feeling this now’ because when you’re onstage you can feel many different things at any one particular point in the play.

Did you go to drama school, and if so, which one?

I did. I went to RADA. [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]

What other productions have you done other than Romeo and Juliet?

I did a play at Hampstead called Fragile Land, and I was in a version of Hamlet which was written by Howard Barker, where I played Hamlet. It was called Gertrude, so it's more about Gertrude, but it was an amazing play and we actually opened in Elsinore Castle! I really didn’t ‘do’ Shakespeare until drama school when I played Caliban in The Tempest. That was two years ago – since then I’ve done Henry VI with a cast of actors and prisoners in Pentonville Prison, which was an extraordinary experience. This is the first professional Shakespeare play I’ve done, though: I can’t quite believe it.

What made you want to play Romeo?

I wanted to play somebody whose life was entirely focused on one thing. I think that sort of intense focus is quite rare – which is probably a good thing because it can have disastrous consequences. People usually have lots of different things going on in their lives, so if one falls away, there are other things to support you. Romeo doesn’t have that balance that often acts as a safety-catch. That interested me a lot.

If you weren’t Romeo, what other character would you like to play?

I’ve been offered the part of Mercutio in other productions of Romeo and Juliet and I didn’t do it – it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time. I remember thinking then that I would love to play Mercutio one day. Having said that, I think I’d now find it very hard to play Mercutio now – maybe that's because I can’t really imagine playing another part whilst I’m still playing Romeo. I’ve gotten very fond of this part.

Have you forgotten your lines in this production and how do you cope if you do forget?

I nearly forget the other night. I got a big laugh in the first balcony scene when Juliet went out as I threw up the mask for another kiss. I turned around and smiled then I thought ‘I really don’t know what I’m going to say next.’ Normally when that happens, I find if I just take a ‘breath of faith’ then the words come: you say to yourself ‘I’m going to breathe in, and it's going to come to me as I breathe out.’ And usually it does. The other night the lines did come, but even when the pause has only been a couple of seconds, it feels like a lifetime.

Was it a conscious decision to emphasise Romeo's immaturity and adolescence at the beginning?

No. A lot of people have said that, but I’m not really trying to play it that way, and it certainly wasn’t something Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] was looking for. He didn’t want a teen-angst Romeo, but then again, it was his idea about the dagger in the first scene [Romeo comes on in a very negative frame of mind I.1], so I don’t know… I’m aware that the part has that aspect, but I’m not really pushing it. I don’t think we’re doing it any more than is in the text.

Is it intimidating knowing that the very best is expected at the Globe?

The fact that we’re at the Globe doesn’t make the part intimidating; it's intimidating because it's a great play and because people have paid money to see it! It's no more intimidating than doing a show at a little pub theatre. At the end of the day, people have paid money and you want them to get something out of it. You want them to get a lot out of it, so you push yourself: I’m probably my own harshest critic. Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] understands that it's a journey: it's not as if rehearsals end then you’re expected to deliver up the finished thing. Mark has played Romeo, and he told me that he used to bang his head against the wall trying to get it right. The people who run the Globe don’t pressure you: they understand that these are huge plays and huge characters, and that you can’t rush the process that results in a good performance.

How does it feel to be acting at the Globe as one of your first jobs, and to be acting with some of the best actors in the theatre scene?

I feel immensely privileged: this is my first job here and I’m playing a main part with a great cast. It's great.

How did you feel when you got the part of Romeo at the Globe?

I was just incredibly excited when I heard I got the part; I’ve wanted to play Romeo for a long time. I couldn’t quite believe that this was going to be my first professional Shakespeare production.

Does performing in the original setting help you develop the character more?

For me personally, no, not really – that's probably because I don’t know as much about the Tudor world as my own modern context. That's my main frame of reference. However, the more research one does, the better. There are lots of points in the play where I’ve instinctively wanted to try something and I’ve had to take the Tudor setting into account: for example, in my first scene with the Friar, I wanted to start dancing with him when he's telling me just before I get married to take things slowly and calmly. I did that about a week ago, and I knew I was dancing in a very modern way – it was quite a modern waltz step – and I had to go away and talk to the choreographer and ask ‘What was the Elizabethan version of that?’ To have that information at your fingertips is useful. I suppose original practices has helped develop character, in that it's made me more aware of Romeo's physicality. You have to move in a certain way in those costumes; that's probably how Romeo should move. He would take big strides, and so on. If I had been able to wear jeans and a t-shirt, I wouldn’t have had to vet my own mannerisms to the same extent. If I use too much of my own physicality in that costume, it looks wrong.

How did you become involved with the Globe?

I auditioned for last season and didn’t get in. When I came back for Romeo and Juliet, last year suddenly seemed like a preliminary audition, and I came in feeling more confident because I’d already met Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] and I knew he liked what I did. Altogether there were four auditions; in the first set I was quite nervous, but in the second set I read the balcony scene with Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] playing Juliet and it was just such fun that I almost forgot it was an audition. I just remember coming out of it feeling so happy! The same thing happened in the last audition with Kananu [Kirimi, Juliet] – I think I had a stupid grin on my face the whole time. Partly that was because they said ‘really do the speech to us’, which you’re not always asked to do in an audition. It suddenly felt like I wasn’t trying to say ‘This is how good I am’ – I was just in a room telling a bit of a story for some people.

Do you find the costumes embarrassing or uncomfortable to wear?

Not at all; I want to wear clothes like that in real life! They just feel so right on your body. I think there are other clothes that probably look more flattering on me but I like the support it gives me and the way it holds me up. Normally I’m a terrible sloucher and when I do stand up straight I get a sort of tightness in the top of my chest, but after I’ve had one of these doublets on for a couple of hours, I feel like I’ve had an Alexander session or been to the osteopath. It's wonderful.

How do you prepare before going onstage at the Globe?

There is a fight call before every performance – we go through it for safety's sake as much as anything else - so I always rehearse the fight. I also rehearse the dance, and after that my preparation will depend on the day. On different days one needs to do different things to get ready. Some days your body feels very awake –maybe you’ve had to rush to get here and you need to do something to calm down a bit: you might lie on the floor and do some slow stretches. On other days you feel like you need to wake yourself up, so you would do some more aerobic exercise - like badminton for instance. You have to make sure that your body and your voice are warmed-up properly before each performance so that you last the run!

What advice would you give anyone who might want to act?

Once you say ‘I want to act,’ the next thing to ask yourself is ‘What sort of work do I want to do?’ The more specific your ideas about what you want to do and what makes you happy, the better. You need to have an aim and a direction. But having said that, you shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to specialise: try and see as many sides of the business as you can, then be prepared to work hard at getting to where you want to be!

What do you hope to do next?

I’m not going out for anything specific. I did a film called The Libertine that's coming out at some point in the future, but I did that before Romeo and Juliet opened. I’m thinking about doing some further training at drama school actually, because I don’t think I was really ready for this. In terms of the part, I feel quite happy where I'm at now, but I think I need to develop a stronger process: it's taken me too long to get to that place. I need a more concrete way of working that I can just go back to each time. I know I’ve gone on stage and had some bad days; that's the stuff that I should have done in rehearsal. It has been hard to find that single focus and not be repetitive. This job has been very, very fulfilling and very, very hard. It's made me think about all the things I want to develop as an actor rather than given me a specific goal in terms of the next job.

Thanks to Highams Park School, King Edward VI School, Rhydfelen School, and St. Catherine's School

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Resource Centre

• A Midsummer Night's Dream 2002
• Antony and Cleopatra 2006
• As You Like It 1998
• Comedy Of Errors 1999
• Comedy of Errors 2006
• Coriolanus 2006
• Cymbeline 2001
• Hamlet 2000
• Julius Caesar 1999
• King Lear 2001
• Macbeth 2001
• Measure for Measure 2005
• Richard II
• Much Ado About Nothing 2004
• Richard III
• Pericles 2005
• Romeo and Juliet
  • The Nurse
  • Romeo
  • Mercutio
  • Lady Capulet
  • Juliet
  • Interview with Bette Bourne / The Nurse
  • Interview with James Garnon / Mercutio
  • Interview with Melanie Jessop / Lady Capulet
  • Interview with Kananu Kirimi / Juliet
• The Merchant of Venice
• The Taming of the Shrew
• The Tempest
• The Tempest (2005)
• The Winter's Tale
• Troilus and Cressida
• Titus Andronicus
• Twelfth Night

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