Juliet

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About Kananu Kirimi

This is Kananu's second season at Shakespeare's Globe. During the 2000 season, she played the Queen in Two Noble Kinsmen and Miranda in The Tempest. She also played Ariel in The Tempest, and Marina in Pericles, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2002 season. Her television credits include Waking the Dead, Cardiac Arrest, The Deal and Goodbye, Mr Steadman.

Rehearsal notes 1

  • Back at the Globe
  • Getting the news
  • First impressions of Juliet
  • First day of rehearsals
  • The read-through: cue-scripts
  • Interrupting the Nurse
  • First week
  • Voice work: water glasses & frogs

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

Back at the Globe

I played Miranda at the Globe in 2000, but that feels like a very long time ago. The Tempest was my first big job and I don’t think I had any method whatsoever – I don’t know if I do now [laughs] but I perhaps have different expectations of myself. I actually left drama school early to play Miranda and everything was so new: it's not that I made excuses for myself, but there was more leeway. I felt so lucky to get the part that I didn’t really step back to appreciate how big it was. Since then I’ve done some Shakespeare at other places; to return to the Globe feels good, especially in that there are lots of people in the team who were here last time, but the whole thing definitely feels BIG this time round. You would think after getting more experience you’d be less nervous, but I’m… well, no, not more nervous, but equally so!

Getting the news

Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director at Shakespeare's Globe]approached me about Juliet whilst I was playing Ariel with the RSC. I remember answering my phone in the middle of a busy street, and Mark saying ‘Can you talk now?’ I don’t know what I thought he was calling about, but I wasn’t expecting to be offered anything like the part of Juliet. I was stunned to have such a good part, and at the Globe too – to have the two things together was amazing. I think I went very silent on the phone: Mark asked whether the silence was a good thing and I managed to say ‘Yes, it's VERY good!’ Part of the excitement is the building itself. Sometimes when I go to other theatres with my friends or family, I get a bit apologetic if the plays are hard to understand or people get bored. I don't feel that here because the experience of the place itself is so interesting and special; the theatre gives something to the performance and helps engage people.

First impressions of Juliet

We’ve only just started rehearsals, but what's really struck me is how much I don’t know about her! Juliet is a young girl in a rich family. Her family seems quite strict (her father certainly doesn’t like being crossed). I’m not sure how we’re going to use the idea that her position is very restricted but that's interesting me at the moment. I’m finding that there are a lot of things I don’t know as Kananu approaching the character of Juliet, and there are lots of things she must not know as Juliet. That came up early this week, when Tom [Burke, Romeo], Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] and I talked about the feast scene (I.5). When Romeo takes Juliet's hand at their first meeting, you could assume that her reaction is ‘Oh, I love you’ straightaway because you know the story already – we anticipate they will fall in love and become the core of a tragedy. But if you’re at a party and someone grabs your hand, you're more likely to be taken aback. You might think they were a bit strange and your first reaction might be to tell them to ‘Get off!’ Juliet doesn’t know what's going to happen next, so I’ve been trying to avoid making assumptions because I know the story… I trying to unclog myself and approach it afresh.

First day of rehearsals

It has been fantastic to get started with rehearsals. I’ve obviously read through the play and I've been imagining the Nurse, Romeo, and Lady Capulet, as well as the characters I don’t have scenes with – like Benvolio and Lady Montague. Now I'm hanging out and drinking coffee with the people who have already started to fill in those imagined characters; that's great. Prior to the Meet and Greet, Mark sent everybody a letter suggesting some things we should aspire to during the season – I particularly liked the idea that eloquence was really a way of speaking that affected people emotionally and helped them to understand a message, because sometimes eloquence gets lumped together with a Received Pronunciation accent. Anyway, the letter and a talk at the Meet and Greet set out what the season will be about: this season is produced in association with the Samaritans, so there was some background emphasising the very modern relevance of Romeo and Juliet's situation. The Samaritans circulated an article about two young lovers who died recently in a suicide pact: a real Romeo and Juliet, which Mark read out to us. It impressed the importance of the issues we’ll be dealing with before we began rehearsals proper.

The read through: cue scripts

We got through act one on the first day of rehearsals. We’ve been using cue scripts or prompt copies, as they were supposed to have done in Shakespeare's time, which is something I’ve never done before. On my script, I had my own lines and then my cues, which are maybe two lines from the person who speaks before I do, but there's nothing else. Tim wanted to see what would happen spontaneously, so he set us off straightaway without any specific direction, saying ‘there's the stage’ (except we were in the rehearsal room, which has the stage taped out on the floor as well as wooden, moveable pillars). In retrospect I was probably quite worried about everyone else thinking ‘what's she going to be like?’ but getting immediately to the play meant I didn’t have time to feel to nervous.

The cue script was incredibly interesting because when you have an entire script you logically plan what you’ll do as a result of what someone else has said. When you only have your lines and cues, you can’t plan in the same way. You react more spontaneously and sometimes you interrupt other people because you’re not sure if they’ve actually finished speaking their part. Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] and I certainly found that in I.3; the Nurse is telling the long story about Juliet falling over as a toddler and hitting her head, and how the Nurse's husband joked about falling backwards when she got older. My cue was

Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit.
Wilt thou not, Jule?
(I.3)

Those lines are repeated several times in that speech and so I kept trying to speak, but Bette just carried on – I kept thinking ‘ooh – no, not me yet!’ It's as if you suddenly get the right motivation without planning it: as Kananu I was interrupting Bette because I thought it was my turn, but perhaps Juliet would have been trying to interrupt the Nurse's embarrassing baby-story. The exercise definitely highlighted that the repetition of cue lines is purposeful – it's not a case of the cue line being repeated three times and my simply missing it. Whereas before I might have thought ‘Oh I keep on forgetting my cue’, now I think there are repeated cues within that speech for a reason.

I also found myself looking down as if I was referring to a script that wasn’t there, as if I was following what the other person was saying on a blank piece of paper! Gradually I began to listen more carefully instead of relying on looking at the paper in front of me, and that sort of freed things up: I thought that whatever I do will just happen without my worrying about it. The cue scripts probably helped us become more spontaneous.

Interrupting the Nurse

Today Bette and I worked on II.5, when Juliet is trying to find out how the Nurse's meeting with Romeo went, and we developed the idea of interruption. Tim said we had to wait until we had heard as much of the other person's speech before our cue as would allow us to understand what they were saying, but as soon as we felt we had grasped their point, we were meant to interrupt and overlap without letting them finish – like in real life, when you anticipate in conversation ‘Yeah, I know what you mean…’. We got annoyed with each other because we never got to finish what we had to say; in that scene Juliet and the Nurse maybe ARE quite annoyed with each other, so all the expressive non-words and grunts we were using to express our frustration actually made the scene much more realistic. Tim mentioned that one of the things which highlights to the audience that what they’re seeing is not real is when you always wait your turn to speak onstage. I suppose we found that the interruptions made us less polite with each other, which is more realistic if the people speaking are in a close relationship – like Juliet and the Nurse.

The first week

Rehearsals for me have been quite easy so far – the work itself isn’t easy but the hours are good at the moment. I haven’t been doing nine till five days because Juliet isn’t many of the early scenes and having the afternoons to wander off is nice. Right now time is divided between rehearsals, going through the play in groups, and morning classes with the Masters of Voice, Word and Movement (they’re actually called ‘groups’ rather than classes). We had a useful group with Giles [Block, Master of Word] the other day: he talked about how the patterns in Shakespeare's verse change. In his early plays, Shakespeare (and Marlowe too) tried to capture speech within the five beat iambic pentameter – he matched characters’ lines and their thought processes very neatly, and the result sounded very grand and powerful and also quite smooth in a way, because of the clear pattern. Giles explained that this changed later on as Shakespeare perhaps saw that people change their minds halfway through what they’re saying, and sometimes their speech is disjointed rather than smooth, which captures more of the spontaneity of actually making a decision. All these things give you clues about your character, but we haven’t actually worked on lines from Romeo and Juliet in these sessions: it's good to give the play a bit of space. Although I didn’t go into my next rehearsal consciously thinking about line-endings and so on, it's good to have so many people feeding into what you do because it might resurface at a later point. At the moment, this work in relation to the play is just like having nice cutlery as part a really great meal: it helps you, though you’re consciously concentrating on the food! We’re really just getting started.

Group work with Master of Voice: water glasses and frogs

Today I’ve been working with Mark [Rylance, Master of Voice for Romeo and Juliet]. He was reminding us that when you make any sound it has a physical affect on your body and other peoples’ bodies, because the sound vibrates – like when you go for ultrasound after an injury; the vibrations that help to heal it. So we really tried to think not just about what we communicate when we say a word, but also how we say it. We had to physically fill it as much as possible and enjoy the sound for its own sake: like the word FFRRRRROOGGG, for instance. You wouldn’t go onstage and speak like that, but the work helps strengthen your voice in a way that will be really useful during performance.

We also imagined the words as people dressed in different kinds of clothes – we had to get to know them and make friends with them in order to be able to use them most effectively. Big words, short plosives, long vowels… they became little characters. Imagining a physicality for the sound helps you think about how the sound does affect your body, how you can best use the sound of that word. After working on this for a while, we sat in a circle and Mark put a glass of water in the centre – I kept thinking of the advert where the opera singer breaks a glass with her voice… we’re nowhere near that standard, but just imagining that whenever we spoke we were sending vibrations to the water in the glass helped to really fill the words. It’ll be good to see if we can send out the same vibrations within the architecture of a theatre full of people.

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Activities 1

Welcome to the Globe
Cue scripts
Frozen figures
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

Welcome to the Globe
Materials: classroom with internet access, paper, pencils
Time: 20 minutes
Type: Whole class activity

When Kananu talks about returning for her second season at the Globe, she mentions that the theatre is ‘interesting and special’. Whether they’ve played here before or are getting ready for their first season, all Company members are given a tour around the theatre on the day of their Meet and Greet session. It's essential that the actors get to know the space: over the next few weeks, Kananu will become very familiar with the challenges and peculiarities of the Globe stage. It's similarly important for you to be aware of the space that your adopted actors will be working in, so you can offer them the most useful advice.

1) Click here to take a virtual tour of the Globe Theatre. Make sure you look at the theatre from the perspective of audience members and actors.

Stand on stage: look out into the yard and up at the galleries. Imagine the theatre is packed with people. The Globe of 1599 had a capacity of about 3,000 – our Globe allows audience members slightly bigger seats (people have grown bigger since Elizabethan times) so on first night Kananu will come onstage to face up to 1,500 people. If you stand still, centre-stage, are there any audience members who will be unable to see you? Why?

Stand in the yard as a groundling in the yard, and sit in the lower and middle galleries: where do you get the best view? Who would be closest to the stage? On how many sides of the theatre does the audience sit or stand?

Compare the Globe to other modern theatres you might have visited: think about scenery, lighting, areas where the audience sit, the shape of the theatre, and special effects. List differences on one side of a piece of paper and similarities on the other.

2) Discuss how these differences and similarities might affect Kananu as an actor, and send in your advice to Kananu at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

For example:
Feature: the Globe stage has two large pillars and the audience sits all around the stage.
Advice: Kananu might have to move around more than on a modern stage so everyone gets a good view.

3) What do you think actors would find easier at the Globe and what do you think they would find more difficult? Original practices productions explore the costume, settings, dance and music available to the players in the Globe of 1599: what modern technology might our adopted actors miss, or be pleased to get rid of? Send in your suggestions to Kananu at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com so she can compare them to her own notes.

Activity 2

Cue scripts
Materials: Photocopies of II.5 excerpt (from line 20 ‘Peter, stay at the gate’ to line 66 ‘Here's such a coil! Come, what says Romeo?’) – 1 copy for each student. Scissors, paper, glue.
Time: 30 minutes
Type: Pairs.

In the first weeks of rehearsals, Kananu describes using cue scripts as Shakespeare's company is 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, Juliet's cue script would begin:

Peter, stay at the gate. (last line of the Nurse's speech)
Now, good sweet Nurse (first line of Juliet's speech)

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

1) Get into pairs and cast yourselves as Juliet and the Nurse.

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: you could push desks back and run the scene through ‘on its feet’ straightaway, as Kananu 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? How did the other character's speech make you feel? Why do you think Shakespeare's company used cue-scripts and not complete playtexts? Send your discoveries and suggestions to Kananu at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com to help her with the scene.

Activity 3

Frozen figures
Materials: a copy of III.5 for each student, paper, pencils
Time: 30 minutes (+10 minutes follow-up: Juliet's letter)
Type: Whole group/ pairs

Kananu has been thinking about Juliet's relationship with her father, Lord Capulet. When Juliet tries to tell him she will not marry Paris in act III, scene 5, he disowns her. You can explore their relationship using body language.

1) Stand in a circle and together read through III.5 from line 126 (‘When the sun sets…’) to line 168 (‘Out on her, hilding!’). Each student might like to take a line.

2) Still in a circle, ask everyone to think of one word to describe how Juliet feels in this scene, and another word to describe how Lord Capulet feels.

3) Get into pairs: decide who will be A (Juliet) and who will be B (Lord Capulet). B will take their ‘Juliet’ word and mould A like a plasticine figure into a stance that shows that feeling. For example, one word to describe how Juliet feels might be scared: how do scared people look? Are they tense? Are they curled up or standing tall? Would they make eye contact? How would they hold their hands? Look at the tableaux of ‘Juliet’ feelings as a class and compare these frozen figures. When all the class has had the chance to discuss their frozen ‘Juliet’ feelings, swap round: A takes their ‘Lord Capulet’ word and moulds B into a shape that shows this emotion. Look at the tableaux of Lord Capulet feelings and compare these frozen figures as before.

4) Talk about the different shapes and feelings as a class. Why did you decide on certain words (and which part of the scene inspired your choice?) Were there different views of the same character? How did you express those feelings with your physicality? Note down your ideas to send into Kananu at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

5) Get back into your pairs. Kananu will be using her physicality and words and voice to show how Juliet feels.
A will add the line: Hear me with patience but to speak a word.
B will add the line: Hang thee, young baggage! Disobedient wretch!

As they speak these lines, students can move into or out of their frozen shapes. What have you discovered about body language and communicating without words? How did speaking the lines affect your ability to express feeling?

6) Actors often imagine situations that are not related in the text to help them build up a life for their character. Juliet says ‘Hear me with patience but to speak a word’, but her father doesn’t give her the chance. Imagine Lord Capulet does decide to hear ‘a word’ – which word would you choose? Discuss your choices as a class. Try imagining another situation: Lord Capulet doesn’t allow Juliet to speak so she decides to write him a letter instead, explaining what has happened and how she feels. Spend 10 minutes writing Juliet's letter and send them into Kananu to help her build up a life for Juliet.

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Rehearsal notes 2

  • Lines
  • Games
  • The Tudor Group
  • Relevance
  • Etiquette
  • Clothing
  • Challenges
  • Jig

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.

Lines

I’m pleased that we’ve finished the first read-through of the play – now we’re familiar with the arc of the story, we can get on with learning our lines. I don’t tend to do that before I come into rehearsals; part of me thinks it would be sensible but too much preparation makes me nervous. I like being open to any ideas or suggestions come along. I don’t actually mind learning lines, although my method seems to change with each production. This afternoon I found the iambic pentameter beat helpful, because the words fitted into a pattern of stresses. Rote learning is much easier when you learn the stress pattern as well.

Games: stress

Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] is keen for us to explore the stresses in the lines and we’ve been doing lots of verse work in rehearsal. For instance, we did scenes in pairs: one person spoke their lines and the other person picked the words from those lines that stood out most… the words that had the greatest affect on their character. Tom [Burke, Romeo] might say ‘Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me’ [II.2] and I might choose ‘kinsmen’ as the most important word that causes Juliet's reaction: ‘If they do see thee, they will murder thee.’ Tom [Cornford], our Assistant Director, gave us the list of words we had chosen and when we did the speeches again, we had to pause before we said those words.

What surprised me was that the pauses made the lines sound more human. When we talk, we have to try and find the right words to match a feeling inside. It's not a mechanical or automatic match – sometimes you do have to pause or struggle for the right word. Taking a pause made me aware of what Juliet might be feeling inside when she says those lines; it gave me space to think about what's going on underneath the words rather than concentrating on which word comes next. Another useful game we played earlier in the week involved throwing a ball up in the air on the last stress of every line and catching it on the first stress of the next line. I’d like to do more of this – it gave me a physical sense of where lines ended without turning them into an intellectual worry; line endings are really important and people have suggestions about how you can make the most of them! The throwing and catching game helped me discover that in a simple way.

Tudor Group

The Tudor Group came in this week to talk to us about Elizabethan life – it's really useful background for original practices. I’d heard about this group of people who live as Tudors for two days a week, but I wasn’t sure what to expect: it sounds like a slightly odd thing to do! They turned out to be lovely and the amount of information they had about Tudor life was astounding. They know so much because, as far as is possible, they actually live that life and have lived it for over twenty years. They wear the clothes in the way the Tudors would have done (lots of layers and no underwear) and use Tudor etiquette. It made the period seem very human and immediate instead of a distant other world.

Relevance

Ruth [member of the Tudor Group] talked to us about all sorts of things relating to the period of the play: what I found really interesting was what she said about early modern suicide rates. Obviously suicide is a part of Romeo and Juliet, but it's easy to think of it as quite a modern problem, like drug abuse or technology. Ruth told us that death records from the Elizabethan period show that there was a very high suicide rate, I think it was somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of recorded deaths. Apparently death records are some of the most useful documents from that time because they were regularly filled out and they didn’t have an elite bias: in other records, the people writing about the nobility were members of that class, so their own interests might have coloured their accounts. Death records are different. It's weird to think that people struggled with the same issues. It's easy to think of that time in a simplistic way, like a film version of the ‘olde worlde’ – everyone is drinking ale and having a good time. To realise that the audiences who watched Romeo and Juliet for the first time were actual people who got depressed was a bit of a shock. For instance, being caught up in a religious crisis might seem quite a modern problem, but the Tudors were faced with similar difficulties as Protestantism evolved; people didn’t know what to believe in. When the Tudor Group talked about those things in such a human way, I realised that the emotional responses of the people in the play would have been similar to our own. There isn’t another kind of distant, historical kind of suicide and in one sense, that world is not too different from ours. That realisation will probably help me be more truthful: it was a good reminder that our own modern responses are still valid.

Etiquette

Whilst there are similarities, of course there are also big differences between the periods. Tudor etiquette, for one thing, was very complicated. They held themselves in a completely different way – their posture was very upright and their movements seem a lot more graceful than ours. Ruth showed me how women would have curtsied and the movement is really simple but I can’t get it right! You’re meant to keep a really straight back and bend like a ballet dancer when they do pile. I keep sticking my bottom out so my curtsey makes me look like a duck. I told Ruth that I didn’t feel very graceful doing the movements and she explained that was because modern posture encourages you to stick your chest out and sort of stick your bottom out, whereas the Elizabethans would have been in a better alignment. It's good to have something physical that I know I need to practice!

Correct etiquette was incredibly important for the Tudors – how you were treated signalled your place in the social hierarchy – so we did another exercise to familiarise ourselves with the different greetings appropriate to different the ranks of society. Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] gave us all a position within the social hierarchy and we had to walk around the room and greet each other. Women have an easy time of it because they just have to vary how much they bend their knees (how low the curtsey is), but for men it's more complicated. They have to kiss their hands, offer the hand with a kiss on it to the lady, then take a large step back. This is the Italian version: the English version involves taking your hat off and giving an elaborate flourish with your hand. The idea of the differences between English and Italian etiquette is interesting because obviously though Romeo and Juliet was written and performed in Britain, the action is set in Verona, Italy. It got me thinking about how setting and social ritual would influence Act I, scene 5… if we choose Italian forms of greeting in line with a Verona setting, then Romeo and Juliet's first touch is even more remarkable because in Italy you didn’t touch hands in greeting.

Costume

Another aspect of original practices which I’m really enjoying is the costume. I’ve had lots of fittings and the clothes are surprising comfortable. I expected the corset to be restrictive – the one I wore for Dangerous Liaisons came quite low down on my hips and that took a bit of getting used to – but this one is cut quite high in the waist and I can move my hips freely: moving around is much easier. It's also quite low cut across the chest, which was the fashion of the time. The colours are really gorgeous; bright red with orange underneath the corset and skirt, and the material is quite soft. Apparently, the fashion in England was for hard petticoats to hold the skirts out in a rigid shape, whilst in Italy they liked silk and flowing lines, so my costume is quite comfortable. The Tudor Group said that English audiences wouldn’t have known much about Italy but generally thought of it as an exotic, exciting place. The rich, bright colours and flowing silk will help create the setting. I won’t have any quick changes to negotiate. I know I’ve got another silver and white dress for my wedding/ death, but I haven’t seen that yet. I’m sure it will be beautiful because it's to be Juliet's best dress.

Challenges

At the moment the biggest challenge in rehearsal is trying to find a balance between reading lines from the book and thinking about Juliet's reactions and movements. You find out that your husband has just died and there's an uncomfortable feeling of not being quite sure which line comes next. Should I be crying or should I read the line? This will sort itself out as I start memorising the part. You just have to put up with the in-between stage and try not to panic. Mostly I’ve been doing things in a very simple, straightforward way. I expect I’ll try different things as I get more familiar with the character: already I’m starting to feel more at home with Juliet. Earlier on, there were some scenes that made me think ‘Oh, this is hard’ – especially the ones with a lot of crying, like Act III, scene 2, when Juliet thinks Romeo and Tybalt are dead – but the more I read the play, the more I get a sense of where those feelings are coming from. It's getting easier to put the wailing in context and I don’t know if that means the scene has gotten more complicated or more straightforward! In Act III, scene 2, for instance, Juliet isn’t just weeping. Even when something terrible happens, you still try to hold things together and take action to improve your situation… I don’t know what action that will turn out to be yet. We’ve only run through once, so I’m haven’t made many choices. It's great to see everyone getting into character – little details are starting to make a difference to the scenes and build up a world for the play. When we ran the feast scene [I.5] the other day, Cousin Capulet listened into Lord Capulet's argument with Tybalt – as though he was keeping an eye on things.

Jig

Other things this week… well, we’ve been doing more dancing for the feast scene [1.5], as well as practicing the jig at the end of the play. The dance at the feast is a pavane, quite slow, graceful and smooth. It took me a while to get co-ordinated because I haven’t really done any dancing since drama school, but Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] is a great teacher and she breaks all the steps down into chunks. You hardly realise you’re doing the dance until everything suddenly fits together, and you think ‘Hang on a minute… when did that happen?!’ The jig is very different; there's lots of clapping, stomping, and linking arms with each other. Everyone takes part in jig rehearsals which is fun: you think you’re the only person who can’t remember yesterday's step, then you mention it and everyone admits they can’t remember either! It takes the pressure off and is quite relaxing. Movement sessions are also great for relaxation. Sometimes it's important to stop thinking so intently about the part and the play; you need to give your unformed thoughts some space and just let your body relax. We do stretches and breathing exercises – I had a session yesterday and came out feeling ready to go again!

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Rehearsal notes 3

  • Group work
  • Reasons
  • Hysterics: III.2
  • Character
  • Relationship with the Nurse
  • Kisses
  • Cuts, groundlings & ideas on aeroplanes
  • Lord & Lady Capulet
  • Clothing
  • Jig news
  • Shift from comedy to tragedy?

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.

Group work

This week we’ve been doing more exercises all together as a group. My favourite was the one where everyone stood in a circle and each person in turn had to say their character's name, followed by their relationship to every other person in the circle and something that you wanted from them. For instance, I might say to Melanie [Jessop, Lady Capulet] ‘I am Juliet. I am your daughter. I want you to give me my space and let me make my own decisions.’ That helped us to understand the different relationships between characters and their motivations.

Reasons

We’ve also gone through the scenes with lots of people in them, like the opening scene and the party scene [I.1 and I.5]. Tim is keen to highlight that we always speak for a reason, we don’t just talk. He told us that before we were allowed to speak to another character, we had to add a fact about ourselves. When I said to Romeo ‘Good pilgrim you do wrong your hand too much’, my fact was ‘I am rich… ’ Putting that reminder of Juliet's high status before the ‘Good pilgrim’ lines helps to explain why she says what she does. ‘Good Pilgrim … palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss’ – maybe she's thinking a kiss would be improper for a young lady in her position. Touching hands would have been more appropriate.

The exercise encouraged us to find interesting reasons for speaking that we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Later on in the party scene I said ‘I am your employer's daughter’ to Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] before my lines ‘A rhyme I learnt even now/ Of one I danced withal.’ Adding that little fact made me concentrate on what's going on between Juliet and the Nurse; she's been nosy and asked what I’m saying to myself. Although Juliet is young, she has a certain power over the Nurse as Capulet's daughter and it's very human to say things that put people in their places. ‘A rhyme a learnt even now when I danced withal’ suddenly sounded more like ‘Mind your own business!’ than a quick response to shrug off the Nurse's question. We won’t necessarily play it that way, but it was useful to recognise the complexity of the power balance in their relationship. People often speak for reasons that are often quite subtle and that might sound like quite a basic fact but sometimes you can get so caught up in the arty stuff (you know, what your character's favourite colour would be [laughs]) that you forget those solid things. Juliet is fourteen. She is rich. She is in love... and so on. Also the group exercises are interesting to watch because we’ve been working on our own particular scenes for a little while now; it's nice to come back together as a company and see how the world of the play is coming together.

Hysterics

Today Bette and I have been doing Act three, scene two: the scene where the Nurse tells Juliet that Tybalt is dead and Romeo has been banished. I came in this morning and Bette said ‘we’re doing our weeping and wailing this morning, aren’t we?’ It's a very dramatic scene and we’ve been trying hard to figure out what's going on behind from the hysterics. It's surprisingly hard to just act ‘hysterical’. As Bette said after our rehearsal, its very useful having something to actually concentrate on doing, rather than just pouring out your grief (which you could do I suppose, that seems to be the way it was written). Instead of just going ‘Ay me, ay me’, Tim asked us to try and to think about what the Nurse is doing by expressing herself in this way: is there anything in addition to her grief? How does she want to affect me – what is it that she wants from Juliet? It might seem like wailing on the surface but maybe she wants to make me feel bad, or to change my mind and make me realise that marrying Romeo was a terrible decision. Perhaps she's thinking about the dangerous situation she's put herself in.

For Juliet, that scene may be a case of simply hearing the news and doing nothing but reacting with a denial: that's what I started out playing, as though I was just saying ‘No. NO. NOO.’ Then Tim suggested that when you get bad news, you don’t just deny it – instead you often try to change it, and make it better somehow: if you told me ‘Your whole family is dead’, I might say ‘What? You mean my mother, my father, my sister, my brother… ’ You try to undo or modify what the other person has said. If you confront the other person with what they have said, they might actually have to rephrase it: ‘Well, no, your whole family isn’t dead… ’ Thinking in this way helped me become more active and involved in the scene – it wouldn’t be very interesting if I simply thought ‘poor me, poor me’ from beginning to end!

Character

My ideas about Juliet are moving on pretty much as I expected. You start off thinking of Juliet as a little girl who's very sweet and unknowing. I suppose I’m remembering that at that age you’re quite into boys and that it's not such a big surprise for someone to like you because you’re a woman. Juliet might have imagined what a husband would be like; that's a fairly new thought for her. She's sweet but she also might be aware of desire. When her mother asks ‘How stands your disposition to be married?’ and Juliet responds ‘It is an honour that I dream not of’ [I.3.67-7], she might be holding back. When we’re confronted with a question and we’re not sure where it's going to lead, we’re often quite reserved. We fit our answer to suit the person who asked the question. You might say to me ‘You do love travelling, don’t you?’ and although I might love travelling, I’ll be cautious because I’m not sure where this is going: ‘Well, yes, travelling is great but I wouldn’t do it all the time’ – you might be planning for us to move to Spain or something like that… I don’t know what you’re thinking, but everyone says things for reasons. The lines aren’t necessarily true or based on genuine feelings, and it helps to remember that because although it seems obvious, when you read that scene you automatically think – well, that's what she means ‘It's an honour that I dream not of’. She hasn’t thought about getting married. But maybe she says that because that's what she thinks it's what her mum wants to hear or because she's not sure where this conversation is going.

Relationship with Nurse

The relationship with the Nurse, well, it's funny. We ran the first scene [I.3] in front of the company and everyone laughed so much at what Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] did that I had to really think to myself – ‘Right. Don’t pay attention. What are you’re meant to be doing now?’ It felt very right because that's what the Nurse's character is like – she's so big and loud that she seems to provoke a reaction as a matter of course. She just encompasses people and you have to try quite hard to figure out what you want while all of that is going on. The Nurse sort of hijacks that scene with her story ‘Thou wilt fall backward’ and that's almost what happened with Bette and the room full of people. It was as if the audience was already there. I’ve done more scenes with Bette than anyone else, apart from Tom [Burke, Romeo], so our relationship feels like it's developing well. It's important that Juliet does share a very close relationship with the Nurse; as Bette and I spend more time together on our scenes, our relationship will get closer.

Kissing

This afternoon Tom [Burke, Romeo] and I have been working on Act two, scene six, which involves some kissing so that's been pleasant! The scene is tiny: Juliet meets Romeo at the church to be married by Friar Lawrence but the actual wedding happens offstage. I suppose we’re finding out that although Romeo and Juliet is a famous story and both Tom and I know that the characters are in love all along the way, they would have moments of anxiety – it's okay for us to have moments where we’re unsure. Juliet arrives at the church and this is the first time she's seen Romeo in daylight. This is the first time she's been able to touch him properly. Everything is new to them. At first I thought ‘Oh no! We’re meant to be so passionate and to know what we’re doing, but I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing at all yet!’ Then Tim mentioned that, at this point in the play, Romeo and Juliet don’t really know what they’re doing either. That was very reassuring. The story might be well known but we’re discovering there's a lot of freedom there too.

Even the stage directions in the play are flexible… apparently a lot of the stage directions in various Shakespeare editions are interpretations from the editor rather than a definite instruction ‘this is how you do it’. In my text there's a direction in that little scene [II.6]: ‘She enters somewhat fast and embraces Romeo’ so when we came to rehearse it, I came running in and embracing Romeo. Tim asked why did I embrace Romeo just then? It doesn’t have to happen right there – the direction just gives a general description of what goes on. It's quite like the prologue in a way (that's going to be cut, I think) The prologue isn’t actually in the Folio of Romeo and Juliet but it's included in most editions so you think ‘that's the way the play should be’ – though maybe it would be more exciting if you didn’t give your audience the story in a nutshell just then. I’m realising there is the huge potential to be surprised: it's easy to forget because the characters are part of such a famous story, but really there's so much that's unknown and so many choices … when Tim says ‘Oh you don’t have to hug him just then’, you suddenly remember there's an awful lot of freedom in Shakespeare!

Cuts, groundlings and ideas on aeroplanes

There have been some cuts to Juliet's part: it's inevitable with the running time to think about. It's not that we’ve taken out the hard bits; a good indicator about whether something can be cut is to try and imagine how the words could come out of you and represent something that is truthful for us now… if the lines don’t read, even after a lot of work, then it's probably okay to for them to go. Ultimately that's the Master of Play's decision.

Juliet comes out with a huge string of oxymorons when the Nurse tells her Romeo has killed Tybalt [III.2, begins ‘O serpent heart hid with a flowering face’]: quite a few of those rhetorical figures have been cut and at first I thought ‘well, I could have come out with that and made it sound realistic if you gave me enough time!’ but now I’m quite relieved. I think the context of the time makes a difference: rhetoric was something that would have been part of a grammar school education for the Elizabethans and wordplay was really important. Perhaps a modern equivalent would rap culture. If you were around people who rapped all the time then you would treat words in a different way. What I find amazing is that most of the play does still read today.

I’ve been thinking about how I might do the ‘Gallop apace’ soliloquy in that scene too [III.2]: at the Globe you’re not ever really talking to yourself because you can see everybody right there. It's not something that I’ve explored a lot yet, but there is a bit where Juliet asks night to bring Romeo here and make it dark so that he can leap to these arms ‘untalked of and unseen’.

Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway's eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen.
[III.2.5-7]

I suddenly thought that you have the groundlings so close that they could almost leap up onto the stage – if they jumped onto the stage, they would be in your arms… perhaps I could stretch out my arms to the audience.

The closeness of people will have a huge affect on how I play things; I was on a plane going home for Easter and I was thinking of all these things I could do with different lines, but then I literally came back to earth and I realised ‘Oh my gosh, that's so contrived, I’ll forget all about that and see what actually happens!’ The things that you can use are so present – you can mention runaways [see above, line 6] and there are people there to point to. We rehearsed the balcony scene [I.5] on the Globe stage on Friday. When I went to say ‘How did you jump over these walls?’ I suddenly noticed that there ARE the walls of the theatre surrounding you – it seemed so obvious and perfect – how did you jump into the Globe?! All of a sudden, the impossibility of what's Romeo is supposed to have done just hit me.

Lord and Lady Capulet

Tomorrow we’re going to look at the scene where Lord Capulet disowns Juliet [III.4] and I expect that's going to be intense. Her father is strong figure in her life – I’m Capulet's only heir and there's probably a lot of responsibility tied up in that. When we went through the scene [III.4] for the first time, I was surprised to find that I’d already set myself up for a confrontation with Lord and Lady Capulet. I expected them to be against me as soon as they came in but of course Juliet doesn’t know that they’re going to say ‘marry Paris’ from the outset. There's no reason to suppose that I don’t love and get on with my parents. Tybalt is dead and Romeo is gone; perhaps I’d look to my parents for a cuddle and a bit of comfort. It's only when they tell me that I'm to marry Paris that I start to think ‘Oh lord…’ Juliet's relationship with her mother is probably the one that I’m finding really interesting just now. You can never hate your mother – even if she was to be terrible to you, deep down you would still want a loving relationship. I think Lady Capulet is often played as an unsympathetic character, but in Juliet's mind she can’t ever be a ‘baddie’. I think I probably did think of her like that before I started rehearsals, but since then I see that whatever Lady Capulet says, well, she will always be Juliet's mother.

I was telling Tim about the time I went on holiday on my own: I was fifteen and I didn’t tell my parents. I had a plan that meant my mum wouldn’t find out, but she did and when I got back off the train she went absolutely berserk. You don’t think ‘Bad person’ if your mum or dad shouts at you – instead you just think ‘Oh NO!’ It's complicated; often they react so strongly because they love you. Both Lord and Lady Capulet do have a really fiery streak in them – Lady Capulet has an incredibly violent reaction to Tybalt's death and Lord Capulet completely flies off the handle when Juliet refuses to marry Paris. I think that's something in Juliet too; she's got the same passionate strength of character. Perhaps if things had ended differently, Juliet's disobedience would have been something they reminisced over and laughed about together: ‘I was just the same when I was your age…’ I like imagining different ways it could have ended.

Clothing

We’ve been trying out wigs over the last week. Originally I was going to have a straight wig but I thought ‘I’ve got afro hair, I want an afro wig.’ I’m also thinking about whether or not I should put make-up on. I don’t know… I think Juliet will have some lipstick. Jenny [Tiramani, Master of Clothing] and I discuss these things: I’ve got a big fitting later on today, so lots will get decided then. Jenny picks out such gorgeous things and has done such meticulous research; it's quite a lovely feeling to know that something comes from such in-depth knowledge – it all fits together beautifully. She has lots of different pictures so there's space to say ‘I prefer that one rather than that one’. It's an amazing situation to be in! It doesn’t look like I’m going to have any quick costumes changes. I’ve got my red dress with an orangey-red corset and a petticoat – when Romeo's leaving in the morning I’ll probably just have my petticoat, so that's a kind of a change, but I don’t have a full change until I’m dead! Then I get to wear my best clothes – not that I’m in a fit state to appreciate it very much!

Jig news

Work on the jig with Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] is progressing. Actually I’m really enjoying it, which I wasn’t expecting because I’m not the most co-ordinated person in the world and when I saw everyone jigging in other Original Practices productions here, it always looked so complicated. Sian is a great teacher though – she breaks every step down into very small bits so you hardly realise you’re doing the dance and then you’re surprised when she says ‘We’re finished!’

Shift from comedy to tragedy?

We’re just getting to the shifting point where events take a turn for the worse. I’m noticing more and more that the tragedy starts mid-way through the play. I don’t think that's going to involve my taking a different approach to the second half as such, but I do get the sense that Juliet grows up very fast as she faces all these challenges: I know it's been said over and over again but it's true. She has to keep more secrets: maybe she learns how to be duplicitous – when the Nurse advises her to marry Paris, Juliet seems to accept that advice but really she's appalled. She has to manage a double life; that's the main difference in the second half. I know Bette was thinking this morning about whether the Nurse's advice to Juliet is actually a betrayal – he wanted to check that the Nurse was effectively advising Juliet into a bigamous marriage. It does seem too terrible, certainly much worse than her initial advice to marry Romeo, so Bette was trying to figure that out. I imagine the Nurse is trying to do the best she can for Juliet; maybe the Nurse has an inkling that the situation is going to get utterly out of control. Such momentous do things happen that you really start to feel that fate is the only explanation. Although the lines about 'fickle fortune' have been cut, feelings of precariousness and changeability pervade the whole of play. I think another big change for Juliet in the second half of the play is that she feels an impulse to ask ‘why is this happening to me?’ At least, that's what I want to ask. You don’t really question your circumstances until big things happen to you and lend a different perspective. We’ll have to see what next week brings.

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Rehearsal notes 4

  • More group work
  • Lines
  • Changing ideas
  • Balcony scenes
  • Musicians onstage
  • Final scenes
  • Jagged edges
  • Highlights

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.

More group work

We are still doing lots of exercises in groups. We’re concentrating on the second half of the play now, so we’re using exercises similar to the others over the past weeks. We’ve got to go through the same process to find out about the characters’ motivations, intentions and relationships in the later stages of the play. We’re also continuing to try and make the lines sound as natural and truthful as possible. Today we did an exercise where we had to interrupt each other as soon as we wanted to speak – you have to find ways to stop people speaking by interrupting them. Ideally that involves using the words in the lines, but as people got interrupted more and more, there was a fair bit of ‘SHUT UP!’ going on too! Anyone in the group can interrupt at any point in anybody else's speech: I found this especially useful in the monologues, when the people who were watching you were also jumping in with interruptions. It gave you a real impetus to say the lines instead of thinking ‘This is my big speech, I’ve got time’ – speaking in a slow, measured way is not very human really. The interruptions lent a bit of urgency to quite a few of my speeches: I found it helpful for the monologue before I drink the poison in the tomb [V.3.161-7] – I think I’ve been taking a long time about it. You feel time is a real pressure all the way through Romeo and Juliet but especially in that scene; the Friar has run away because the Watch is about to arrive. A greater urgency seems more fitting. Even with the ‘Gallop apace’ speech, I was taking a long time to plant images and so on, but with people interrupting you with questions, you just drive forward more – that's what Juliet wants in this speech too: in ‘Gallop apace , you fiery-footed steeds’ she urges time to go by faster so that she can be with Romeo. To speak the lines at a faster pace is better suited to her state of mind at that point. More generally, the exercise also made me realise which lines I didn’t know very well: as soon as someone is interrupts you, your planned, careful way through the lines is ruined!

Lines

A lot of different things help for remembering lines. Yesterday I was finding it hard; I thought so much about observing the lines of verse that I didn’t make any sense! Tim said it was really painful to watch because I looked like I was trying so hard! Looking at the line endings is also helpful. I’ve been focusing a lot on this in my sessions with Giles [Block, Master of the Word]. Giles has suggested that most of the stronger stresses come at the end of lines; it makes a lot of sense – Shakespeare seems to have written the lines so that they run until then, and then something important happens. When a character rhymes, for instance, that's not an accident or something Shakespeare added in to sound pretty. The word has been put in a prominent place at the end of the line for a reason. The bit that stood out during our session was in Act two, scene five:

But old folks, many feign as they were dead –
Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead.
[II.5.16-7]

I did it once and Giles just burst out laughing. It surprised me because I didn’t realise that those lines were funny. He was saying that both the rhyme and the stress together give you a sense of Juliet's patience and her wit at the same time. I didn’t even know I was doing that! Juliet rhymes a lot; I’m going to look out for them in future and think about why she might be doing it. I haven’t had chance to put it into practice yet. I also like the idea that rhymes comment or make a joke about this huge situation.

Changing ideas

As we’ve been working on the second half of the play, I’ve changed some of my ideas about the first two acts. Although we work on specific scenes and acts, everything has to fit together when we start to run the play as a whole. In the party scene [I.5] for instance, I went from one extreme. At first I thought Juliet and Romeo fell in love came straight away, then I thought actually, if a stranger in a mask grabbed my hand, my reaction would be ‘Get away from me, you weirdo!’ Now I’ve returned to thinking that their love is instantaneous: they find a very strong connection very quickly. It's like when you’re at a party and you think ‘Oh, who is that?’ You like them without being able to explain why.

Balcony scenes

My ideas about the second balcony scene [III.5] are changing too. Romeo is leaving Juliet after their first night together and at first I thought they would be very lovey-dovey, having just been reunited after the fight and the order of banishment. Then Tim got me thinking about the doubts that can creep in when you’re very close to someone in an intense relationship. You are always going back and forth between doubting whether they really mean it, wondering who loves the other the most, and worrying what the other person thinks of you. Even though Romeo and Juliet are totally in love, there are still power shifts going on. Whereas originally I simply thought ‘Oh I love you and morning has come,’ now I think the situation could be more confrontational and intense. They have so many questions. Are we going to see each other again? Do you love me enough to come back and see me? Was it just physical? Do you really want to stay? If Romeo stays and the Capulets find him, they will kill him. It's dangerous to ask him to stay and mean it. It's almost like a test. I’m not sure how we’ll play it yet, but I can’t imagine it will be a plain ‘I love you/ I love you too/ I love you too/ Goodbye’ which was how I originally saw it.

I remember doing the first balcony scene [II.2] at my audition and Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe] said something that I’ve been thinking about more recently. You think might think Romeo and Juliet are just two people talking quite poetically about how much they like each other, but there are so many obstacles. She can’t see him clearly because it's dark and he's so far below. They would have to struggle to reach each other. He could be killed any minute. Also, she has been talking to herself about very intimate feelings and for Romeo to break into that would be shock. There is more difficulty there than I thought at first. We’re rehearsing in IJ3 [‘Inigo Jones 3’, a workshop space at the Globe], and for the balcony scenes I’m just standing on a plastic chair whilst Tom [Burke, Romeo] stands on the floor; you have to keep reminding yourself that they couldn’t just reach out and touch each other. I’m looking forward to trying it out on the real balcony onstage and getting a better idea of the different levels.

As well as the difficulty and struggle, it also seems right for Act two, scene two, to be fun and exciting because Romeo and Juliet are young and in love. These are just the beginnings of things I have imagined, but in the week coming up we’re going to go through the scenes in more detail. So that is when these things should be… not fixed, but laid down rather than quickly tried and put to one side.

Musicians onstage

We were onstage with the musicians yesterday for the first time, which was great! In other theatres – if there is live music – musicians are often tucked away out of sight somewhere; to have them right there with you is fantastic. It also makes you realise how much you use your imagination to fill in the gaps during rehearsal. I’ve been trying to imagine musicians and an audience. To actually have real musicians there freed up some scenes, because there are points when we have to clap for musicians [I.5 for example], and it really fills out the world of the play when you clap for a reason rather than as a response to the pretend picture in your head. Just having more people in scene makes it easier to relax. It's wonderful meeting the musicians – they’re such specialists and the music is amazing. Tim said that hopefully our play and its story will be as good as their music: meeting the musicians was a good reminder of the special-ness that we’re a part of here.

Working on the end

We’ve done quite a lot of work on the final scenes. The ending is quite strange to play from Juliet's point of view. She tries to be with Romeo throughout the whole of the play but by the time she wakes up in the monument [V.3], there is no possibility of getting what she wants: Romeo is right there and he's dead. Even though the Prologue says that the lovers are ‘star-crossed’ and you know they’re doomed, there is always the possibility that things will work out until the very end. Friar Lawrence comes in just after Romeo has killed himself and he says ‘How oft tonight/ Have my old feet stumbled at graves!’ [V.3.121-2] If only he hadn’t tripped... there are lots of moments when you can go ‘if only…’ In a way, it's a tragedy of bad timing and I feel that especially strongly at the end.

I mentioned about trying a faster pace with Juliet's final speech. There isn’t time for her to weep and wail at the end because she finds out Romeo is dead and then she realises that everyone is coming. Living without him is unimaginable; she entire journey throughout the play has been about being with him, and if death is the only way that she can be with him then there is no other option. Juliet doesn’t have a dilemma to weep and wail about like she did earlier [III.2]: she's made her choice, and I think that resolution makes her calmer than in some of the earlier scenes. I read in the notes of one Romeo and Juliet edition that Juliet's dying speech might be short because the actor playing her wasn’t very good at holding tension! I thought that was very funny, the idea that Shakespeare had written Juliet's speech this way because he didn’t trust the guy not to mess up!

I’m asleep or dead for a lot of the final scene. It's quite easy to lie there and do nothing! One of the things we did to help us prepare for the tomb scene was to go down into the basement and turn off all the lights. Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] and Tom [Cornford, Assistant to Master of Play] hid me in a room and the other characters involved in the beginning of that scene [V.3] had to come and find me using only a candle. The monument would be very dark inside and you can’t dim the lights in the theatre, you have to use other ways to show – how you move, for instance. Afterwards Tim remarked on how carefully and slowly everyone had moved, feeling their way. That will probably feed into how they move onstage during the last scene.

On of the images which sticks in my mind from the last scene is in the Prince's final lines: ‘…heaven finds a means to kill your joys with love’ [V.3.292]. Romeo and Juliet are dead because of love yet that can’t be true because love doesn’t kill. I haven't unpicked that properly yet. The tension between those opposites does continue right until the very end. The families are blaming each other and asking ‘Whose fault is this?’ – I don’t know whether you can be sure of their reconciliation. There seems to be such a mixture of things going on there.

Jagged edges

I feel like the biggest challenges at the moment are to do with the jaggedness of the character. I want to move away from simply being nice because that's just not real. Juliet is strong and passionate. There are moments when she has doubts even though she is with the person that she loves. Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] said a few days ago that we always want the audience to like our character a lot. If we’re actually quite nervous about our characters being disliked, we play their goodness: it becomes especially important to be aware of a character's faults or unattractive moments. It's ok for characters to seem unattractive because sometimes people do make the wrong choices.

I’ve been trying to find a few jagged edges in Juliet. I think she's independent and she wants to be her own person, but she also desperately needs people. The difficulty is that you identify contradictions like this but suspect that you’re playing the middle ground. I suppose you can only look at the character's journey within the scenes and the play as a whole, and try to understand the shifts that create complexity. For instance, we just did the scene with the Nurse [III.5] – Juliet asks the Nurse for help after Capulet tells her she must marry Paris: ‘O Nurse, how shall this be prevented?’ [III.5.205] Things change when the Nurse tells Juliet to marry Paris: Juliet feels hatred and separation rather than close confidence. We can understand why she feels those things, but hate is still not really something you associate with ‘nice’ Juliet. I could do with a few more ideas about opposites!

Best bits of the week

The jigging is good; getting the jigging right is good! I’m also starting to get an overview of the whole play now we’ve run the second half a few times, so that's very helpful. You get to see where the play is going even if the details in the middle aren’t clear yet. I’m getting increasingly familiar with my family set-up too! The relationships between Juliet, her mother and father, and the Nurse are developing as we rehearse together more and more. When we did Act three, scene five, the other day, Bill's [Stewart, Lord Capulet] outburst was amazing… it really did scare me. The tirade seems to come out of nowhere. Both Lady Capulet and the Nurse try to intervene and fail to stop him. That makes his rage seem all the more excessive and uncontrollable – he just explodes!

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Rehearsal notes 5

  • Technical rehearsals
  • Lines alive
  • Weather

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

Technical rehearsals

We ran through the whole play for the second time on Saturday. Recently I’ve been concentrating on specific lines and smaller details which can make the overall arc of the story quite difficult to grasp, but I’m getting a broader perspective as we run the play. That's very useful. Now we’re in the middle of our tech week – it's good, despite wet weather. It's amazing just to be in the theatre and wear those clothes. It's amazing to see everyone appear in those clothes; it helps to build up the world of the play because suddenly you can see a serving man and my father and the Prince, rather than John Paul and Bill and Joel. You can see all their different positions within a society: the clothes give you that information, which I guess helps with characterisation in that the world of the play becomes visible. For instance, we’ll recognise the Prince's status in the way he behaves and how people behave towards him, but the gorgeous, regal clothes support the character too.

I’m getting used to wearing my corset. Melanie [Jessop, Lady Capulet] and Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] have been wearing their corsets during rehearsal, but I decided not to and I’ve discovered it really does take some getting used to! The fashion was for Elizabethan ladies to wear their corsets tight, to give them a tiny waist and emphasise their bosom, so we’ve been experimenting with how tightly my corset can be tied… too tight and I can’t breathe, too close and it won’t look right. Actually, the length of my skirt and train restrict my movement more than the corset – I’ve got to remember that, especially when I try to step backwards! You try to turn and you think, ‘Whoa!’ Suddenly you’re tangled up in lots of material. I’ve got to practise moving round in all that. I’m also surprised that I don’t need a hairpiece for most of the play. My hair is quite curly and it goes into an Elizabethan style quite easily. The tomb scene is the only bit when I need a hairpiece: when ladies back then got married, they apparently had gold thread in their hair, so I’ve got a long wig with little gold pieces in it (Juliet is buried her wedding attire, her best clothes).

The main difference between the stage and the rehearsal room is that you get the impression of a much bigger space when you’re on stage. Although our rehearsal room floor was marked up with the dimensions of the Globe stage, when you get out there, it feels much more open, much bigger somehow. There are so many more elements to notice in the space – you’re looking at the sky, you’re looking at the people in the bottom gallery, or the people in the top gallery, or person in the corner of the yard, you’re looking at pictures everywhere – on the ceiling (the canopy over the stage is called ‘the heavens’ and it's painted with stars and signs of the zodiac), on the gallery supports, on the tiring house façade. There are so many different sections of the theatre that you can address. The stage space feels like it has so many more dimensions than the rehearsal room, and that's obviously going to effect the way we play.

Lines alive

I’m discovering that some things, some lines and some scenes, do come alive on that stage. In the balcony scene [II.2], simply having a real distance between us makes a lot of difference. When we rehearsed it, I just stood on a plastic chair. Now we’re here, suddenly I can’t reach Romeo no matter how hard I try: he stretched right up and I practically lay on the balcony floor and stretched my arm down through the supports, but there was a tiny space between our fingertips. You don’t need to pretend that you’re high up or looking out because you are doing exactly that in the space: there is a high balcony in this theatre [Musician's Gallery, above the tiring house]. We’ve just run the wedding scene, when Romeo and Juliet meet in Friar Lawrence's cell to be married, and what struck me was how easily we come together – we meet and kiss just like that, which was impossible in the balcony scene. The contrast just stood out.

We haven’t done the ‘Gallop apace’ soliloquy [III.1] yet, but I’m already thinking about how I might use the space. When I say the line about ‘runaways’ eyes’, I can imagine all the eyes of the people in the theatre looking back at me. Tom [Burke, Romeo] has a nice bit with eyes too; he talks about the ‘white upturned eyes of mortals’ in the balcony scene [II.2] and when we were in the theatre, you suddenly realise, wow, we are surrounded by the white upturned eyes of mortals. That image really comes alive.

Weather

Another difference is that you’re more aware of the weather on stage than you are in rehearsal. The stage itself is covered and so are the galleries, but the yard is open to the elements. As we rehearsed the balcony scene, there was a terrific thunderstorm. It was spectacular – the best thing was happened as I was saying the lines

I have no joy of this contract tonight.
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say ‘It lightens’.
[II.2.117-20]

As I said ‘’It lightens’, there was a huge crash of thunder and lightning! It was just so strange. Imagine you started telling a story that started ‘Once upon a time, there was a chicken,’ and then suddenly a bird walked into the room and went ‘Awgh!’ You just don’t know what to do! I felt as though someone had come along to help me at that moment… it's as if there's another actor there, coming in right on cue. It was extraordinary!

In another place, you might have lots of scenery to build up the world of the play. Here it feels like most of the scenery, and quite a lot of the imagery, is built into the architecture of the theatre. The lightning was an amazing coincidence, but there are things about that environment that do illuminate different parts of the text – I suppose some will change (like the weather for each show) and others will stay the same (whilst we’re performing at the Globe, we’ll have two pillars). Elsewhere you might have a set with a tea cup and a television and a carpet… here you’ve got these two huge pillars, hangings, and other things which you can refer to in the lines and that helps you build up the world of the play. I think the decoration – the stars, zodiac, and the gods – is quite symbolic – perhaps that encourages you to think about concepts like love and fate as well as physical things. I’m not sure… I just know it does feel different.

At the end of this week we’ll have our dress rehearsal and our first performance. I think I’ll be quite nervous as we get nearer the time, but right now I’m mostly excited. I can’t wait!

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Rehearsal notes 6

  • First performance
  • Previews
  • Laughter in unexpected places
  • Continuing rehearsal

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

Before the performance I was nervous, very nervous! I think all the things that happened to my costume in the dress rehearsal were a sign of nerves; my bum-pads fell out onstage and my veil came off! The clothes are so strong and gorgeous and beautifully made – you have to take hold of them and wear them properly, even though all the tying and buttoning do make you a bit careful at first. It's only when you’re being wishy-washy that things go wrong!

It's funny; we’ve spent so long preparing, rehearsing and thinking things through that I thought I knew what to expect from the first performance. But then you come into this space and there are so many people – it's like nothing else. There are so many people and you can see them all. That's just amazing. I had forgotten what it feels like to have an audience on so many different levels. Words to describe it… I’d say mad, weird, and stunning! I think I spent the first few minutes just noticing, ‘Oh, there's someone hidden right at the corner, at the back’ or ‘Look, there's someone to my left, standing just an arm's length away.’ I found the range of distances most overwhelming; there are so many different people in so many different places and you have to try and reach them all at once. I think I have to work on reaching everyone with my voice, because sound is the only thing that will reach everyone. I know that when I get nervous, I start worrying about where everybody is and I look around, trying to find out exactly where they are. I suppose I should just relax: the more relaxed I am, the better I’ll be able to use my voice and hopefully I’ll reach more people. That doesn’t mean you have to shout; you just have to use your support – if your voice comes from somewhere quite strong, then there shouldn’t be a problem.

There's a really great energy when the theatre is full. We rehearsed on stage but I couldn’t really anticipate or imagine what the space would be like with over a thousand people in it. There's an echo when it's empty and you can see so much wood. The yard looks huge. It all changes when there are people – there's a focus on the middle of the stage because everybody in the audience is facing that way, into the centre of the circle. Before a show, we’ll look out of the grilles in the tiring house doors and you can see a world of people chatting, flirting, day-dreaming… that's a world we’re about to enter. I like seeing them before we go onstage. I don’t know whether it makes it more or less intense when you do step out into that circle. Is it more or less scary than another theatre? Perhaps at other places that take the lights down when the show starts, it's easier to ignore the audience until the end. Here, you’re always aware of the audience which does make performing more extreme. I feel things more intensely because I think about each feeling amplified – for instance, if I’m feeling hot, I’ll wonder if everyone else is hot too. There are so many people to whom you can relate about even the littlest things.

Previews: comedy

I’ve been quite surprised about how much people have been laughing, especially when the theatre is packed. People laughed a lot in the first balcony scene and that was good, because we were a bit worried about whether the humour would read. Romeo and Juliet are young and they’re in love, which is fun amongst other things. When they come to say goodbye, Romeo kisses his mask and throws it up to me on the balcony, then I kiss it and throw it back down to him. We do that a couple of times, but I leave as he throws it up one last time and the mask is stranded. That kind of thing means our balcony scene is quite funny. I didn’t feel like we had to do much work to make the scene seem young and fun, because the audience were quite ready to laugh. I think it was Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] who said before we started that the audience is another character in the play; the play is never fully rehearsed or planned because you’ve got to wait until that final character joins you. They are such a huge presence and you can’t imagine the reaction beforehand. The comedy is lovely – generally I don’t have too much of it in my scenes, but it's great to hear the response to the other scenes. Laughter is good, and it's such a contrast to what comes later.

Laughter in strange places

Although the response to the second half of the play generally seems quieter, there have been laughs at some odd moments. For instance, the last scene [V.3] is strange. Usually there is quiet and the tension is tangible – perhaps I get a stronger sense of the tension because I’m lying down and I can really feel the atmosphere. [V.3: Having killed Paris, Romeo descends through the trap as though into the tomb: the tomb is then wheeled on. Juliet is laid out on top, her feet pointing upstage. Romeo enters.] However, there have been a few performances where really people have laughed in odd places. The other night I stabbed myself and I heard someone go ‘huh-huh’. I immediately thought ‘Oh no, that was obviously a bad stab!’ but Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] reassured me. The stab was good, but sometimes people will laugh in response to tense situations, as a kind of release. A few days ago, Tom [Burke, Romeo] drank the poison and a small child in the front went ‘Ugghh!’ and everyone laughed. The boy knew it was something that Romeo shouldn’t be drinking and his response allowed laughter in an odd place. It can come in funny spats, but generally that doesn't worry me. It just reaffirms the fact that the connection with the audience here is very special and unique.

Continuing rehearsal

We’re still rehearsing bits and pieces when we haven’t got a performance on. The play is just settling in. I think I need to relax! Sometimes I find myself saying ‘I need to do this and this and this,’ but you can’t really drive on like that here because there are such a lot of unknowns. You just have to be quite flexible and try things out as they present themselves. The best thing about being here is that the more open you are to the unknowns around you – people, planes, weather, whatever – the better the play gets. Generally I’ve been ok with planes and other ‘outside’ distractions, although there was one helicopter a couple of days ago that hovered over us for about half an hour. Yes, I could have done without that!

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Rehearsal notes 7

  • Pre-performance preparation
  • Continuous change
  • Original pronunciation
  • Long run

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.

Pre-performance preparation

We’re well into the run now and the play has settled. For a while after we opened, I went onstage with specific ideas and I tried to focus on these during the performance – for example, it might be the fact that Juliet wants to escape from Verona, or those points in the play when she doesn’t know what's going to happen next. I was doing a lot of work in my head. Recently I’ve become more relaxed. Points of concentration are interesting in their own right, but they're also valuable because it somehow lets everything else come more naturally. That might sound strange, but it's quite like the games we played during rehearsals, in that you concentrate on a specific task or goal and because you’re focusing on that, other things grow without your searching for them too consciously. The focus of the game – interrupting someone, moving objects around the rehearsal room, or whatever – helps you to relax.

I don’t have a routine that I go through before each performance that helps me get into character. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have one by September. Right now my preparation varies from day to day, depending on whether I need to calm down or wake up a bit. It generally involves a physical and vocal warm-up. We play yard ball or badminton in the theatre, then I’ll do some vocal exercises. I’m not very good at yard ball, so it's usually badminton for me! We get into our costumes at particular times because there are lots of people whom the dressers to help - the clothes need a lot of tying and lacing and buttoning - so that it all has to be co-coordinated. There are also particular times when people get their wigs done. Normally I come in about an hour and a half before a performance starts.

Continuous change

The performance is continues to change during the run. I’m enjoying the first balcony scene [II.2] a lot at the moment. It seems to be shifting away from comedy towards something more serious. I think there's just so much in it, and it's nice that we’re continuing to uncover things during the run. The balcony scene is the first time Romeo and Juliet properly meet and talk to each other. She sees he's there and she has such strong feelings for him, but there is also the very real danger that he could be killed. In the last couple of days, I’ve remembered that they are in a dangerous position right from the beginning. Also, even when you’re very much in love with someone (maybe especially when you’re in love with someone), you worry about what they think of you… that might not necessarily be serious from the audience's point of view, but it's still something that Juliet would consider. So the scene has got more serious for me; the comedy feels a bit more balanced against Juliet's anxiety.

The death scene [V.3] is slightly different too. Until recently I played that I discovered Romeo dead, then I talk to him all the way through the speech ‘What's here? A cup, closed in my true love's hand?’ [V.3.161]. It didn’t feel quite right. I think that an actor's relationship with the audience at the Globe is like a relationship with another character… there's so much to investigate there, and my feeling that I had become a bit too private in the death scene was very much connected to that. Just recently I have been looking out to the audience at different moments in that speech, which seems right. That's the tricky thing: being intimate and heartfelt and yet open. That is hard sometimes but it seems to be what Shakespeare intended for that moment.

Another bit that has changed slightly is when Lady Capulet comes in just after Romeo has left and she thinks I’m upset about Tybalt [III.5]. I say of Romeo: ‘villain and he be many miles asunder.’ I used to address that to my mother or mutter it to myself, but I’ve decided to give that out to the audience, too. I’m not sure if that will stay or not, but I’ve tried a change. It seems Juliet is thinking so many different things at the same time and she wants to talk, to say the truth. She is unable to share the truth with her mother, so made sense for the audience to become her friends and allies at that point.

Overall, the play seems to be changing in lots of little ways; there have been any major changes. It's more to do with fine-tuning and finding something that feels right. The scene where Romeo leaves me [III.5] keeps changing and, once again, that's to do with trying to keep the right balance between light and dark. Sometimes it feels light, ‘Oh are you going? But it's not day yet!?’ I’m trying to keep things light and cheer him up by pretending that everything's fine. Then at other times I think, ‘Are you going? It's terrible!’ and I’m very upset. So it changes from day to day whether I’m trying to keep positive by ignoring the situation, or whether I just go with it and show that I’m very upset.

Ideally, relationships between characters in the play should be like relationships between people in normal life - especially the ways in which they react to each other. Everyone also feels very different day to day; the way I play a situation might change slightly according to my mood. That's an interesting question – do you think ‘Right, I feel like this, I’m going to do it this way’ and then go on and do that? Or do you just go out and see what happens. If you choose the latter, then your mood is going to affect the way you play. Personally, I think the outcome is best when you don’t know what's going to happen and you just respond to people, but sometimes something's will stick in your mind so strongly that you do take it with you. You realise ‘I’ve planned; I was planning just then.’ Sometimes I try not to think about anything, but my mind is quite full of things so that's harder than it sounds!

Original pronunciation

We’ve started rehearsals for the performances in original pronunciation, which is exciting and quite funny. The idea is that we’ll do three performances following the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time. David Crystal [Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor] has produced a phonetic script, with the spelling is altered to represent the sounds of the words as they would have been spoken in Early Modern England. He's also made us a tape of the entire play. We rehearse by listening to the tape, then working through the script with Charmian [Hoare], our dialect coach. She's encouraging us to think the way David said specific things – ‘Per-fec-shee-on’ for ‘per-fek-tion’ [II.2.45] and so on – but she wants us to keep our own accents so it doesn’t sound like we’re doing a completely different voice. I’m using my own Scottish accent and I really like saying ‘Mi only love sprung from mi only hate’ [I.5.138]! Some lines actually sound more natural than they do in RP [Received Pronunciation]. Other words just sound very strange! There wasn’t the same pressure to conform to a particular kind of accent then; we drop –g so I say ‘Tis almost mornin’ rather than ‘morning’ [II.2.176], but there weren’t class connotations attendant on that in Early Modern England. I also found it very interesting to hear about how David worked out the pronunciation: when I heard we wear doing OP performances, I just wondered ‘How do they know?’ Obviously, in an era before sound recordings, no one knows for certain how people spoke, so they have to make educated guesses based on the evidence that does exist. David explained that he looked at rhyme schemes, the rhythms of the lines, and wordplay in puns amongst other things. There are some contemporary accounts [e.g. John Hart's Orthographie, 1569] that explain how Elizabethan English sounded.

My original pronunciation accent

It's getting there, I think. It keeps on swaying from Northern Irish to an odd West Country lilt, and sometimes Geordie. It's a mixture of all sorts, actually; I’ve never heard anything like the OP accent on the tape before, so I find myself grabbing onto pieces of accents that I have heard. When you do that, things get a bit messed up because you’re trying to speak so many accents at once. There's a lot of Scottish in there too, because that's my own accent.

From what David Crystal has said about the quite casual way Elizabethans might have pronounced some words, the OP accent should make the play quicker. They dropped some letters (like I said about the –g) and elided other sounds together. They weren't as ‘proper’ about saying words, if you compare Early Modern English to a modern RP accent. I suppose that might change which words we stress in a line… it’ll be interesting to find out. In theory, the play could change a lot because everyone is talking in different voices... I don’t think it will change too drastically though. People will still get involved with the story, I hope. At the beginning, there might be some laughter at the strangeness of our voices, but the accents aren't going to turn us into caricatures and I don’t think people will respond to it as such.

At the moment I’m just trying to figure out what the differences are between my accent and this [OP] accent – I’m just trying to get a feeling for it. Perhaps the hardest thing will be communicating the meaning of the lines as well as concentrating on the special differences that make up an OP accent. I’ll have to think ‘What do I mean?’ and ‘How do I say it?’ That might be tricky. I'll have to keep working at it!

Long run

To be honest, May until September seems like a long run but time is going so fast. I can’t believe that the Original Pronunciation is at the end of June, and that's not too far off. I suppose there's the Original Pronunciation, then we’re going to Hampton Court Palace -it seems like we've got a lot of things to do. Also, we have a week off whilst Measure for Measure is opening, so it really does break it up. Also, every show feels different and perhaps that's to do with the kind of theatre this is... in amongst all that, I don't think getting stale or bored will be a problem!

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Rehearsal notes 8

  • Midnight performance
  • Original pronunciation
  • Audience response to OP

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.

Midnight performance

It's been a busy week. Last Saturday we had our midnight performance and we’ve just done our first performance in ‘Original Pronunciation’. The midnight performance started at 12.00 and we came off at about three in the morning! It was quite astounding to be at the Globe in the middle of the night, with one thousand six hundred people… the energy was different, probably because it seemed such a special thing to do. I got giggly during the warm-up; playing badminton in the yard at that time was very bizarre! When I stepped out into a theatre that was absolutely full, the fact that everyone had come to watch a story at midnight made me feel that we were doing something secret and anything could happen. I think the fact that the play was Romeo and Juliet made it extra-special, because so much of the play involves secrets and meetings that break the rules. The whole basis of the story is that two people get together when they shouldn’t have done. Having an audience there at midnight heightened that sense of something dangerous and illicit in the play.

There are so many different images and references in Romeo and Juliet that I think you could stage it anywhere at any time of day and lines would jump out at you. I found myself noticing all the different references to night and day, especially in Act three:

‘Tis very late, she’ll not come down tonight.
I promise you, but for your company,
I would have been abed an hour ago.
[III.4.5-7]

Afore me, it is so very late that we
May call it early by and by. Good night.
[III.4.34]

Is she not down so late, or up so early?
[III.5.67]

I suppose the same would be true of any play – the context emphasises specific aspects – but this was especially so for Romeo and Juliet, from my point of view at least. The scenes when my parents organise the wedding with Paris are set in the middle of the night/ early in the morning. Of course, at the beginning of Act three, scene five, Romeo and I are talking about whether it is late at night or early in the morning – is it the nightingale or the lark? Even in ‘Gallop apace’ [III.1], Juliet asks ‘Come, gentle night. Come, loving, black-browed night’ and the lines just had a different quality to them. When I got to ‘runaways’ in that speech, I looked around at the audience and I thought they seemed even more likely to be runaways at this time of night. What are you all doing here at midnight?! It was a lot of fun, and afterwards we had a very early champagne breakfast which was nice.

Original pronunciation

This has been fascinating. I think I mentioned last time that David [Crystal, Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor] used rhyme and rhythm and contemporary accounts to work out how might early modern English might have sounded. He also figured out which words would have been stressed in the iambic meter: he thinks stressed vowels might have been longer, so ‘me’ would become ‘meh’ and ‘be’ would become ‘beh’ whilst the unstressed vowels would have been very short. I enjoyed working with the phonetic script too, because it forced you to pay attention to where the stresses were without getting tied in knots about iambic pentameter or anything like that. It was great to concentrate on the way these words might have been spoken, and find that the rhythm seemed to fit.

Lots of lines seemed clearer. For instance, in Act two, scene four (when I’m saying to the Nurse, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me what he said!’), the words ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘you’ and ‘he’ are repeated so often that sometimes I found myself labouring over them. I was trying too hard to make every sound clear, which was slowed me down at a point when Juliet is nearly falling over herself to know what Romeo has said to the Nurse. It was much easier to elide or shorten sounds as you do when you’re having a normal conversation.

Response to OP

I found the accent a very useful way to get into the language of the play, because it helped me think about iambic pentameter without lots of theory. If I’m honest, iambic pentameter sometimes seems like an obstacle that gets in the way when I’m trying to be ‘real’ – I like thinking about what a character wants to say, not ‘Where's the fifth stress?’ If I’m thinking about a pattern of stresses, I don’t feel like I’m talking as a normal human being would talk. I do believe the theory that Shakespeare used this meter because it was closer to the natural patterns of human speech… it's just that when I think too much about the theory, I lose sight of the fact that he wrote it in this way to make things easier for the people to sound real when they spoke his lines. The OP accent gave me a kind of fresh approach; if you’re in a rush to say something, it's ok to pay less attention to some words. Also, though I want to sound like a normal human being, I’ve discovered that it is fun to play with words. Perhaps we iron that out in everyday life. When I came to words like ‘opposition’ and had to say ‘oppo-zi-shee-on’, I just thought about the reasons why Juliet might pronounce it in that way. They would have had old-fashioned and new-fangled ways of pronouncing words… maybe Juliet chooses a certain pronunciation because she's speaking to her father or trying to be very proper or because she's lying badly. I’m not sure… basically I enjoyed the freedom of a new way into the text.

I think the audience responded in a very positive way. Our audiences have been very good throughout the run, but they were particularly appreciative after the OP performance. Callum [Coates, Paris] mentioned that there was a better connection with the younger groups in the audience too – perhaps that's because, like me, they found another way into the language of the play. Our running time was slightly shorter. David mentioned the lines might speed up and I think they did. On one hand we wanted to go faster and faster, but on the other hand we were trying to get it right! If we had rehearsed in OP from the beginning, I’m sure we would have been much more confident about increasing the pace. I would definitely like to do more work on OP. We’ve actually got two more performances in OP then rehearsals for performances at Hampton Court Palace will begin…

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Rehearsal notes 9

  • Hampton Court Palace
  • Discoveries in a new space
  • Audience reaction
  • Highlights

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.

Hampton Court Palace

Time is flying by! I can’t believe that we’re halfway through our run at Hampton Court Palace. We’re here for a week to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's performances at the palace [during 1603 and 1604, Shakespeare's Company performed seven plays for their patron, King James I and his family]. The Great Hall is an amazing space; it's very grand, full of wood and stained glass. Performing there is very different from playing at the Globe. I didn’t expect such a big difference: we didn’t change very much during the brief rehearsals for Hampton Court, even in terms of blocking. The floor of the rehearsal room was marked up with an outline of the stage and we just went through the play, working out our entrances and exits. There was some re-positioning to do – for instance, there are no pillars at Hampton Court, so people have to sit or stand in different places. Also, the musicians would be unable to run down the little windy staircase from the minstrel's gallery to the stage, so they aren’t onstage with us as much. Those stairs are lovely but you can’t get down them very quickly! I can’t use the minstrel's gallery for the balcony scenes: I would need a slide to get me down fast enough in Act three, scene five! A scaffold has been built for Juliet's balcony, just underneath the minstrel's gallery.

There are three entrances to the Great Hall; one on either side of the stage, and a big walkway right down the middle of the Hall. It's as if you were to enter or exit through the yard at the Globe. Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] compared that walkway to the tunnel at Old Trafford… the stage does feel a long way away and there is a lot of running about! The other day I made my exit after the line ‘Hie to high fortune! Honest Nurse, farewell.’ [II.5.78] and I found myself tearing down the walkway: I was going the wrong way and it was too late to turn around, so I just kept going. That was a bit like running out of a stadium. Especially during the first show, I had to keep thinking ‘Where do I need to be?’ because of the different exits and entrances. Set has probably been the trickiest thing though. The bed and the tomb come down the long walkway and I feel a bit precarious lying there, holding tight!

Discoveries in a new space

I’m finding that Romeo and Juliet is like a pattern with lots of different colours in it, and as you set that pattern against different coloured backgrounds, then different colours stand out. Different lines come alive as the images connect to the new space; for instance, when I find out that Romeo has killed Tybalt, I say ‘O, that deceit should dwell/ In such a gorgeous palace!’ [III.2.84-5]. Standing in a gorgeous palace, that line became very clear. Also, I think about the Capulet vault (whilst I’m deciding whether to take the Friar's potion) and I refer to ‘an ancient receptacle/ Where for this many hundred years the bones/ Of all my ancestors are packed’ [IV.3.39-41]. To say that in a huge Hall with the pictures of so many old people in the stained glass is different somehow. Perhaps one becomes increasingly aware of ancestry and the passage of time in that environment. Generally I’ve found that there are lots of moments when the grandeur of the building seems to match the grandeur of the play perfectly.

There are lots of things which come from the space and inform the play. The grandeur made me think about Juliet in a slightly different way. I suddenly realised the wealth of the Capulets. When they throw the party [I.5], the Hall could well be a Hall in our house and the audience are our guests. That led me into a phase of thinking about Juliet as quite self-confident: she's got a gorgeous dress and she from a rich household and she's pretty. She might think she's really quite good! Then I thought ‘Oh, who does she have, really, to talk to?’ She might have beautiful things but she's very isolated; she doesn’t have any friends. Romeo is the only person she has… it is an unusual situation. Another thing that struck me (and it's really obvious, but it hit me again at Hampton Court) was that Romeo and Juliet do not know that their situation will end with suicide. Although she keeps on saying that she’ll kill herself, perhaps she's not really so sure, even when she first sees Romeo dead… of course, at that point she doesn’t have too many options. And at Hampton Court I just imagined people seeing the play for the first time and wondering what was going to happen, ‘What is she going to do? Is she going to marry Paris or what?’ Perhaps when you’re in a space that is so grand and so civilised, then you somehow expect that everything will turn out well in the end.

Audience reaction

The audience reaction at Hampton Court has been very different. They were rather quiet on the first night. I think that's because they had come to a huge castle and there are fewer people in an audience than there are at the Globe. The space is so beautiful, it's awe-inspiring. It's also unfamiliar – together, the strangeness and the beauty could be overwhelming. People don’t quite know whether to laugh. There's not the same energy you get at the Globe where everyone's eating and drinking and so many people are standing and everyone's familiar with the process because it happens every week. There's more hush. There are people standing, but not as many as at the Globe, and although the Hall is lit, you can’t really see the people right at the back. Yet some people are very close, practically sat onstage… it's an odd dynamic. At the Globe, you can turn your back on the audience and that's not such a big deal because you’ve got hundreds of people on either side. At Hampton Court, the majority of the audience is in a bank of formal seating straight in front of the stage so you would shut lots of people out if you turned your back. We’re still learning how to be clear, too. The ceiling is very high and, though you want to reach the people at the back, you don’t want to shout because that gets a bit of an echo. It's interesting to try and work these things out as you go along.

Highlights

There is a makeshift feeling about playing at Hampton Court and I love that. There are no dressing rooms so we’re all just making do, which is fun. You feel like a real player, coming into a space with your play and telling that story as best you can. Shakespeare's Company performed at different venues and it's nice for us to have a go! The people at Hampton Court are so friendly too. Yes, those are probably the best things… and getting the chance to see the play in a slightly different light. I’m looking forward to coming back to the Globe though; we've done so many performances there, it feels like home!

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