Lady Capulet

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About Melanie Jessop

This is Melanie's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Her previous roles include Rosa in David Copperfield, Julia in The Duchess of Malfi, and Mrs Chope in Hangover Square. She has performed at the Sienna Festival, the Royal Festival Hall and the Cambridge Theatre. She has also worked with Howard Barker and The Wrestling School. Television credits include Absolutely Fabulous, A Touch of Frost, Between the Lines, Harry Enfield's TV Show and Poirot.

Rehearsal Notes 1

  • Getting the part
  • Playing BIG & playing small
  • Sparky ideas
  • Lady Capulet: getting the balance right
  • Lady Capulet: first impressions
  • Invisible work

Hopes for the Season

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.

Getting the part

I was actually rather surprised to be offered the part of Lady Capulet because I stopped acting a while ago. I’ve been working with students since then, and I’ve also worked a lot with a dramatist called Howard Barker; he's very interested in heightened language and has written things for me in the past, which was wonderful. So although I hadn’t completely gone away, I hadn’t done things on stage for a while.

I’d always wanted to be an actress; since school that's just what I’d been doing. I took a break because I felt I needed to go and do something completely different, but then I met Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] at Florida University during a workshop in the summer. We chatted and that's sort of why I’m here: one day I suddenly got a call from Tim who said ‘Do you want to come and do this?’ I couldn’t think of anything nicer, though there was a moment when I thought ‘Should I be doing this?’ because the offer really came out of nowhere. But I’d worked so much with my students on Shakespeare and with Howard Barker's Company on heightened language that it made sense to say yes. I couldn’t have wished for a better way back into theatre. There's also a real emphasis on continuing your work as an actor at the Globe, whether that's work on voice or movement or whatever – it's a great opportunity to take another look at the way I work. I suppose the road has been long and winding, but I’m very excited to be here.

Playing BIG and playing small

We had a very over-the-top rehearsal on the Friday at the end of our first week. It was so funny – everyone was playing ‘big’ and exaggerating things about their characters. I told Tim not to worry ‘I will get smaller’ – I’ll make it more realistic. He said ‘Oh I don’t want you to be smaller; you can’t be small with this kind of stuff’. I think he's right: the language is very grand and there's so much you can get out of it. But that's slightly different to acting over-the-top. Some people think that because the Globe stage is so vast and open, you have to grab the attention of the people who are watching with big movements and so on. I don’t think this is true: having a big imagination is what matters. As long as you can imagine big on that stage, then you don’t have to act in an over-the-top way.

The stage at the Globe is quite bare – the world of the play is not meant to present a picture exactly like real-life, and Shakespeare's characters do talk in an extraordinary way: they are more articulate than anybody could really be. It's a gift to speak so powerfully and so beautifully; they discover they can use words in ways they never expected. Sometimes they use brand new words that no one had ever used before to express what they feel – Shakespeare had a great imagination and invented his own words if the right one didn’t already exist. His characters communicate in an empowered way: they could be talking quietly or using small actions, but that ‘big’ capacity to use words and language is still there. So in one way the heightened language won’t let you act small with Shakespeare. In another way, this means you can use small movements because the big language underpins everything.

Sparky ideas

I’m not sure what Lady Capulet will be like yet: I’m exploring the character through rehearsal. I really enjoy Tim's approach to rehearsals. What we normally do is rehearse a scene and then talk about it afterwards, so new ideas keep sparking off ‘Try this, or try this’. He keeps throwing different suggestions in. When I got home last night, I thought ‘Good, an early night’, but my mind was racing with all the ideas that had been filtering through all week. It's very exciting, although a bit nerve-wracking too because anything and everything could change.

Lady Capulet: getting the balance right

I know there's one way I could play Lady Capulet without too much effort, but that would bore me and the audience too. You have to find a balance between the things you naturally bring to a part (the casting director chose you rather than someone else for a reason, after all) and the things you have to work on and discover about a character. I think there's a lot of contradiction in Lady Capulet, for example. She seems quite erratic, especially in her relations with other characters, and I’m interested in exploring that.

Lady Capulet: first impressions

The ‘fashionable’ view of Lady Capulet seems to be someone who is quite distant and unsympathetic, but I’m interested her as someone more likable. There's a lot of complexity in the part and it would be a mistake to say she is any one thing… that she's mean or that she will be likeable. One of the mistakes in rehearsal is to pursue the consistencies in a character: people are not consistent. You can feel happy and sad at the same time – in just the same way, Lady Capulet doesn’t have to feel or to be just one thing. She doesn’t always have to be mean or horrible in a certain scene; she might be unhappy or uncertain. I haven’t found anything in the text which suggests that she doesn’t love her daughter. I think she does love Juliet. You have to clear away all the other ideas about the character that you might have picked up from watching other productions and go back to what Shakespeare wrote.

Invisible work

The film version of Romeo and Juliet by Baz Luhrmann hints at an improper relationship between Lady Capulet and Tybalt, but there's nothing in the text to support that. I’m very happy to reject that idea. Sometimes ideas that aren’t supported by the text are useful though: an actor builds up ideas about a character and although they might not communicate all this to an audience when they go onstage, the ideas help them to build up a life for their character. Building up background in this way is sometimes called ‘invisible work’: it makes a difference, but the audience might not see it.

Lady Capulet responds to Tybalt's death in a very violent way. Within two lines, she moves from the shock of seeing him dead to the desire for revenge (III.1) and it's important to try and imagine why she reacts like this. She's not just upset, she quickly demands revenge. I think a good explanation is that Tybalt is the only son of Lady Capulet's brother. We know Lady Capulet herself only has a daughter, Juliet, so Tybalt is the last of the Capulet line. Perhaps at that moment, Tybalt represents something else to Lady Capulet: he's not just her nephew – he's also a symbol of her family line, which has now been lost.

Hopes for the next five weeks

Over the next few weeks of rehearsals, I’m hoping that I continue to be open and receptive to new ideas, and that my decisions about the character come from an instinctive sense of rightness rather than reasoning everything out. You know when it's right. Also I hope that my corset won’t be too tight! I’ve got a costume fitting in a minute; when we were practising the jig that will end the performance earlier today, all I could think was ‘Oh my goodness, I’ll have to do this in a corset!’ But I’m an old hand at corset fittings: you go ‘phew’ and blow yourself out like a sumo-wrestler to give yourself a couple of extra inches! I’m also hoping that I get to grips with the space at the Globe, which is so different to anywhere else I’ve performed at. I’ll be able to see the audience, there’ll be pillars to move around, and being in the open air will mean I have to do lots of voice work – it's going to be a very exciting move forward.

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Activities 1

  • Welcome to the Globe
  • Invisible work
  • Playing big and playing small

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

Melanie describes how she came to be at the Globe this season: this will the first time she has performed here. 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. Over the next few weeks, Melanie will become very familiar with the challenges and peculiarities of the Globe stage. It's similarly important for you to be aware that the space your adopted actor 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) so on first night Melanie 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 the differences on one side of a piece of paper and the similarities on the other.

2) Discuss how these differences and similarities might affect Melanie as an actor; you might like to send her your advice at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com For example:

Feature: the Globe stage has two large pillars and the audience sit all around the stage.
Advice: Melanie 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 Melanie at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com so she can add them to her notes.

Activity 2

Invisible work
Materials: paper, pencils
Time: 20 minutes
Type: whole class activity

Melanie talks about doing ‘invisible work’ and ‘building up a life for a character’. This is when an actor builds up a picture of their character's life, often thinking about what might have happened to the character before the play started. These choices might not be obvious to an audience, but they affect how an actor plays the character. Try doing your own ‘invisible work’ for Lady Capulet.

1) We never find out Lady Capulet's first name. Ask the students to chose a first name for Lady Capulet. Ask them to imagine they are Lady Capulet on her tenth birthday (or however old the students are). We know that she lives in Italy and we know she has a brother. What might she have done on her birthday – did she have a party or go out for the day? Does she get on with her brother? Does she have many friends? Imagine the day in as much detail as possible and then write an entry in Lady Capulet's diary. Send your diary entries in to help Melanie with her own ‘invisible work’.

2) You might like to extend this first activity to cover other key moments in Lady Capulet's life – perhaps her wedding day, the day Juliet was born, or the moment she decided to hold the party we see in Act I, scene 5. Ask the students to get into groups and use their bodies to make frozen tableaux of the key moments they have imagined. Talk about each frozen picture/ key event as a class, then ask students to write up their ideas about how Lady Capulet's character changes from one picture to the next. What sort of things might be affecting her at these key moments? You might like to ask students to write up their ideas in the form of diary entries for these key moments too. Send you ideas to Melanie at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

Activity 3

Playing big and playing small
Materials: none
Time: 15 minutes
Type: Pairs

Melanie talks about ‘playing big’ and ‘playing small’. Explore playing in these different ways and decide which you think would be best for the Globe stage!

1) Ask the students to get into pairs. They should decide who will be A and B. A is going to be Lady Capulet and B is going to be Juliet. If boys complain about playing a girl, remind them that in Shakespeare's day all the female characters would have been played by boys as there were no actresses! Explain that Romeo has just been banished for killing Juliet's cousin, Tybalt, and Juliet is very upset. To try and cheer her up, Lady Capulet has told her that the date is set for her wedding to Paris. Lady Capulet does not know that Juliet has already married Romeo in secret. Juliet knows she cannot marry Paris.

2) Lady Capulet must try and persuade Juliet to marry Paris. The students should face each other with their hands behind their backs. Juliet can only say ‘No’ and Lady Capulet can only say ‘Yes’. Neither of them are allowed to move; they can only use their voices and must keep their hands behind their backs. Agree with the students that a certain signal will mean stop – perhaps when you put your hand up in the air, they will put their hands in the air and stop. Expect lots of shouting!

3) Ask the students to do the same thing again: except this time they can move as much as they like, but they cannot make a sound. They must mouth the words ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Perhaps set a no fighting rule: Lady Capulet did not persuade Juliet to marry Paris by wrestling with her! Explain that when you shout ‘Freeze’ they must freeze like statues. After a minute or two, shout ‘Freeze!’

4) When they are frozen, explain to them that there are different types of acting. On a scale of 1 – 10, 1 is very small acting (including tiny movements you might see in close-up on television or at the cinema) and 10 is very big acting (like you sometimes see at a large theatre or the opera). Tell them where their acting is now on a scale of 1 – 10. Perhaps they are at number 3. Tell them to have another go, still without speaking, but try acting at number 5 on the scale. Shout ‘Freeze!’ and tell them to try number 7. Shout ‘Freeze!’ and tell them to try number 10 but to use their voices as well as their bodies. Encourage them to experiment with different levels of vocal expression.

5) Shakespeare used much more interesting language than just ‘yes’ and ‘no’ when he wrote his plays! Ask the students to have the same argument: instead of saying ‘no’, Juliet will say ‘I will not marry yet’ and Lady Capulet will say ‘What, are you mad?’ instead of ‘yes’. Ask them to do it twice – once acting at number 2 and then once acting at number 10. Explain that this is what Melanie means when she talks about ‘playing big and playing small’. She doesn’t think that you need to act in an over-the-top way on the Globe stage. What do the students think? Which number do they think would be most suitable for their school hall? Which number would be most suitable for the Globe stage? Give reasons for your answers (remember that although the Globe is a large theatre, the audience is very close to the stage) and email your ideas to Melanie at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

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Rehearsal Notes 2

  • Clothing
  • Decisions
  • Presence
  • Lady Capulet & the Nurse
  • Tensions in the Capulet household
  • Tybalt is dead: Lady Capulet's reaction

Colour

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.

Clothing

I’ve got a three-quarter wig which I’m very pleased about – it's brilliant. It sits towards the back of my head and what's wonderful about a three quarter wig is that there isn’t any wig lace, because you’re using the natural hair line. They look completely natural and it's almost impossible to see the join with your own hair. It will be pinned in with pin-curls, not sat on top of my head like a hat. It's designed to look like Lady Capulet's real hair, not Lady Capulet wearing a wig! I’ve had lots of costume fittings, I feel like I’ve had hundreds! It's very exciting; my costume has a fantastic under-structure and there's a huge amount of material. I’m going to be very well padded. There are two big silk taffeta petticoats underneath the gown and I’ve got two bum rolls to get the right shape: the gown is designed on a very dramatic diagonal line. It starts off very high at the back, way above my natural waist-line and then sweeps down in a great ‘V’ shape to a point just above my navel, so it will look very dramatic. The farthingale comes right out around the top of my pelvis. It's stunning. There's no split down the front so you can’t see the petticoat. Instead there's lots of black and silver embroidery. It was going to be black and gold, but when Jenny came to talk to us about what gold and silver represented, I felt Lady Capulet would be more likely to wear silver and pearl … she's more like the moon than the sun. I’m going to move across the stage like a ship – hopefully a galleon under full sail, but at the moment there's the possibility that I’ll be more like a tug: I’ll need to practice moving about the stage in full costume. I’ve been getting used to my corset by wearing that in rehearsals.

I’ve got an extraordinary stand-up ruff to wear: it stands out at the back of my neck and looks very huge and impressive. There's a seven foot long train, too. Actually, it can’t be that long on the ground because it hangs right down my back; there's probably five feet of material trailing behind me. I’m keen to get a ‘practice train’ that I can wear in rehearsals, because the sheer length and weight of my costume will have quite an affect on the way Lady Capulet moves, especially in the public scenes. I’ll need to get familiar with that before we open. I've been told a story about an actress in the Globe production of King Lear – she had to flick her long dress up with her foot so she could move easily but when she got downstage she flicked it over the head of a groundling and didn’t notice until she had to turn around - the lady was too polite to fight her way out of the dress! I’ll have to be careful with my train. I’m not sure how it’ll work in the jig, though; we’re not at the stage were we can incorporate ‘flicking’ into the steps yet.

Decisions

Rehearsals are great at the moment. I’m staving off making any decisions. The more we’ve worked and the more exercises we’ve done, the more possibilities open up for the character. I feel much more in the dark than I did ten days ago, much more at sea. I know I’m hovering and there's always the impulse to demand answers ‘What am I going to do with this?’, but it is much more exciting and useful to explore Lady Capulet's function in the play than to rush into quick solutions. What does her presence do for the play?

Presence

I think that Lady Capulet's function is to complicate our understanding of Juliet. The relationship between Lady Capulet and Juliet encourages us to question parent/child relationships more generally: what is the role of the parent in child development? What are the tensions between the generations? All that is interesting to think about, but in terms of actually acting, I’m still finding my character. I love that the way we’re working allows that discovery to creep up on you. Yesterday we did a run of the play and no-one really noticed what we were doing until we’d done it – that felt very relaxed and natural, whereas sometimes the run looms up and everyone piles in, making a conscious effort to achieve things. I really respond to the confidence Tim [Carroll, Master of Play, Romeo and Juliet] has in us. The fact that no one's being pushed into making decisions shows he has a great trust in our ability. In turn, that makes the rehearsal room feel like a very safe place to experiment. I guess I think it's about time to start nailing things down, but there's no hurry. A lot is still up for grabs.

Lady Capulet and the Nurse

There doesn’t seem to be a definite ‘shape’ to the play yet. There's a healthy kind of competition in the rehearsal room, like the competition you get within a very strong, solid football team. I suppose each character wants to make the play and the story their own. The idea of competitiveness between Lady Capulet and the Nurse is particularly interesting. I think it's a competition the Nurse wins hands down – clearly, Lady Capulet has been involved in an ongoing battle to dominate this member of her household and she has never won. Lady Capulet simply cannot dominate the Nurse and why that is, I don’t know. It's something I’m still confused about. I think we’ll find a balance in the fullness of time – Lady Capulet is head of the household and she does hold some authority. But then the Nurse does speak with great familiarity to Capulet in Act III, scene 5:

You are to blame, my lord, to rate her so.
(III.5)

Again, when Capulet refuses to let the wedding preparations alone, the Nurse has no qualms about saying her bit

Go, you cot-quean, go.
Get you to bed! Faith, you’ll be sick tomorrow
For this night's watching
(IV.4)

She has a comfortable status within the household which suggests that she can actually go over Lady Capulet's head. Bette [Bourne, The Nurse] talked about the possibility that Lord Capulet rather than Lady Capulet brought the Nurse into his household. Lady Capulet was a young wife; maybe she was actually too young to take on the serious responsibility of hiring on domestic employees. Perhaps she was presented with this fait accompli which she has been struggling to live with ever since. I think that thought is quite useful. There's a lot of tension in the way Act I, scene 3 is written.

Tensions in the Capulet household

I’ve read Harley Granville-Barker's essay on Romeo and Juliet and he doesn’t pick up on any tensions in Act I, scene 3 at all. He reads the scene in terms of comfortable, conventional household relationships: the first scene with Lady Capulet, the Nurse and Juliet [I.3] is just about three women sitting down together and having a laugh, so when Lady Capulet says

Marry, that 'marry' is the very theme
I came to talk of.
(I.3)

Granville-Barker thinks she has actually forgotten that she came to talk to Juliet about marriage because she's been having such a jolly time. That seems to be a very sexist reading to me – the idea that these three women can just be taken at face-value … they’re chatting and having a laugh because, well, that's what they seem to be doing. Granville-Barker shores his argument up with references to the fun the household seems to be having on the eve of Juliet's wedding. I don’t think things are that straightforward. However it's tricky, because the household does seem happy during the scene where everyone prepares for the wedding [IV.4]. If you see Lady Capulet having a really good time in this scene, you might ask ‘So why was she so upset by Tybalt's death less than twelve hours ago?’ As I said, I’ve got a great many more questions than answers: the questions about Lady Capulet are coming thick and fast, and the answers are evading me right now.

It struck me that men of Granville-Barker's [Edwardian] generation never competed with their wives in domestic situations. They had very defined roles in the house. I think that Lady Capulet must feel that she is very much challenged by the Nurse in a way that Harley Granville-Barker just wouldn’t recognise because the idea of complexity in the domestic sphere was completely alien to him. His view takes the easy way out: the Nurse and Lady Capulet are simply women having fun – that reduces them to very shallow characters. This reductive sort of reading isn’t very useful!

Tybalt is dead: Lady Capulet's reaction

I keep coming back to the moment in Act III, scene 1, when Lady Capulet's desire for revenge is overwhelmingly powerful. It seems to be the key to her character. She is a woman of great strength and stature – a woman who is capable of such a response in that situation is neither shallow nor diffident nor vacillating. I’d love to find some humour in this scene too; I think Lady Capulet is incredibly self-absorbed – she's a tragic heroine in miniature – and some humour might provide an interesting counterbalance to her tragic side.

At some profound level, she's without an occupation. If she has been pushed out of her domestic role by the Nurse, then she is probably quite bored. In that sense she's quite similar to Mercutio and Tybalt. What do they actually do? I’ve just been on holiday and we did lots of sight-seeing and shopping, but I did wonder how Elizabethan women filled their time! I thought ‘What would they have done with the six hours I’ve just spent here?’ You don’t get the sense that Lady Capulet is exactly ‘hands on’ in the household. I suppose there's the reference to her role as hostess: a servant tells her ‘The guests are come’ [I.3] and part of her position as the Lady of the house would be to organise entertainments and give the servants their orders, but I don’t get the feeling that she's engaged in this role or that she enjoys it particularly. It's hard to make decisions about how I’m going to play her character and that's partly because defining her place in the world of the play is difficult.

Colour

It helps me to bring in a colour when I’m thinking about a character's function. Each character has a particular colour that balances with the colours of other characters at certain points in the play – almost like an aura. For instance, when Mercutio comes onstage, there's a very bright, dazzling colour about him whereas the Friar might have a more natural palette of muted colours. It's there in the imagery of the language: the Friar speaks of the natural world while Mercutio's lines have an energy that's almost electric. Lady Capulet's colour in Tybalt's death scene is red – a very bright, vivid, primary colour. I just respond to her feelings in a visual way – at that point, she is like a splash of vocalised grief and rage and red reflects that best.

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Rehearsal Notes 3

  • First run
  • Rehearsal
  • Reaction
  • Silence
  • Interaction & chaos
  • Looking ahead

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

First run

I’m very aware that in just under an hour and a half we’re going to do our first run of the play and so it's quite a big day. I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking ‘What do I want to try and get out of it and what is it important that I do with it?’ When I woke up this morning, I thought ‘I haven’t got a clue’. It's a crucial moment, it really is, the first time you get to connect all the scenes in a run – to go boom boom boom, A B C D… and actually find your way through to the end of the play. When you get caught up in the journey of a scene you can forget about the journey of the play, and when you’re reminded of the journey of the play, hopefully things will start to balance out. You realise that you don’t have to hit a particular moment quite so hard at such and such a point because actually it's more important that it comes from this point over here instead. We’ll start fine-tuning. Basically, I’m looking forward to seeing it and being reminded of what it's all about, to just get a chance to see the whole play again.

Rehearsal

We’ve been running acts until recently. We’ve done quite a lot of that, but in the last week or so we’ve been working specific scenes; it feels like quite a while since there's been any kind of run. I think a run-through is an opportunity to look at the play from further away, to get a sense of the broader perspective, so to run the whole thing will be very useful. It's difficult at the moment – it's difficult stuff and I’m at the stage in rehearsals where I’m feeling that every choice I’ve made is wrong and all of it is false, which is rather ghastly. In a way that feeling might be productive during this afternoon's run; I don’t feel like I have much to lose, so I might try to experiment with a few things. I’ve been thinking especially about the way Lady Capulet might just look at people. But I’m always interested to push something to the extreme, and I’m not afraid to risk an element of the grotesque as part of that. I’ve been trying to push it in rehearsal, but putting the play together is a different matter. If you find something that's quite extreme, how do you retain the essence whilst tempering the actual performance so that single extreme moment becomes part of the whole play? If you work from the outside in, one of the pitfalls is that you could end up demonstrating extremity without the essence. Watching how other people get a truthful performance is always one of the interesting things in rehearsal. Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] and I were talking yesterday morning about authenticity and I think doubts about that are just something that you just have to go through.

Reaction

Yesterday we worked on Act three, scene one. We haven’t done that scene for a little while but I’m so sick of what I do at that point. I recover from the shock of Tybalt's death and become very dominating and aggressive; Bill [Stewart, Lord Capulet] has to restrain me when I challenge the Prince's decision to banish Romeo. I am bored of doing it this way. It's a phase... I’ll probably decide to do it like this, but it comes very easily. I suppose I’ve gotten frustrated with my inability. Everyone can get comfortable doing a particular bit of the play and I know that the audience won’t have seen me do that scene before... in one sense, the fact that the scene is coming easily could be taken as a good thing, but I’m only interested in pushing this woman's life into an ever-expanding area. One interesting thing that did come up yesterday was the Prince's reaction to Lady Capulet's demands that ‘Romeo must not live’ [III.1.181]. Joel [Trill, Prince Escalus] came back at me when I challenged him. Metaphorically speaking, he punched his own weight and my response was to completely concede. I felt ‘I must be quiet’, which I’d never felt in the Prince's presence before. As soon as he’d gone offstage, I felt an absolute need to get the Montagues: I wanted to fly at them. After that, I thought it would be great for Lady Capulet to have a different kind of control in the scene. Instead of dominating it with an extreme emotional energy, perhaps she could be more suppressed and contained… I would like to play around with that. It's difficult because there's a very limited amount of text to work on and for the first couple of lines she's in shock.

Silence

In a way, parts with fewer lines are more difficult. I spoke with a somebody last night who mentioned that Lady Capulet was not a very good part, but I don’t understand that point of view at all. I think he must have meant that she doesn’t have as many lines as some of the other characters. Of course, a part doesn’t need to involve a lot of text to be challenging; Lady Capulet is onstage a lot without any lines so I have to make her silence truthful. I’m constantly trying to extend the life of this character. I want her to have a variety of response but I don’t want to over-invest the text that I do have – this is where you can get stuck if a character doesn’t have much text – and the lightness of touch that achieves a perfect balance is a real skill.

I always try to answer the question: ‘Why am I not speaking?’ I think you have to have trust that a writer with Shakespeare's incredible skill is informing the characters with life and response even in their silences (he might not always do so consciously…). We are in trouble if we mistake silence for passivity. Then you’re faced with the problem: how do you activate the junctures between speeches? How do you allow all of that character's response and action to arrive without appearing premeditated?

It will be easier to judge the emotional scale of things after this afternoon. You feel very alive as an actor when you’re emoting, it's terribly seductive. Also, emoting can be quite safe, although I’ve had some moments where I’ve not felt safe, and I’ve not been quite sure where it's going to end up. Letting your intention guide you can feel quite precarious. It's indulging the feeling at the expense of the thought. Funny as it is, for first time in my life I’m not at all pre-occupied with whether what I’m doing is good or not, I’m just pre-occupied with getting on, with working, with keeping working at it. It's hard to let those questions be, but I can’t know so what's the point? All I can do is try to serve this rather under-written woman and try to give her a place in the play that she deserves to have. Using her silences effectively will be integral to that goal. I really hope this frame of mind continues for the next couple of weeks and beyond!

Interaction and chaos

I’ve been told that Act three, scene one looks chaotic. Perhaps it looks that way from the outside, as the households clash over the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, but I’m not aware of any chaos at all. I’m aware of a simple fact... In that scene I take in Benvolio, I take in that the Prince is there, I take in Bill [Stewart, Lord Capulet], and I take in Tybalt, obviously... My interest in the Montagues is really contemptuous. It's weird that I’m not aware of chaos at all. Actually, the scene I have most difficulty with is the death of Juliet, the discovery of the body [V.3]. It's a pivotal scene in which there's conflict between the play's focus and the focus for me within that scene. After Juliet's death, I only have one line in the rest of the play: from the character's point of view, the death of Juliet represents death for Lady Capulet too. Her role as a mother is cancelled out and her function in the narrative is gone. She says

O me! This sight of death is as a bell
That warns my old age to a sepulchre
[V.3.206-7]

Then she stops talking. She sees her death in the death of Juliet.

What I hope to achieve in the worst four or five days of this woman's life is a progression: she starts out as a rattled society hostess who's got more on her plate than she knows how to deal with and a situation which will need to be taken care of – Paris's suit – but there's no rush, it's not a big deal. There's been a brawl, but it's not a big deal. Then there's the shock of the murder of Tybalt and I’m finding the different tones and different colours in her response because it would be very easy to play Lady Capulet as a kind of walking cry of grief. It would be very easy to fall into that trap, and the discovery of Juliet is not a scene we’ve cracked yet – it's a mess. It's a difficult scene because there's an awful lot going on. The tone is very difficult and the specifics of it are so enormous for each character. It's almost as if we have to sit down and plot through beat by beat exactly what's happening. You know, I find the bottle [of poison], and the enormity of that is overwhelming. There is a huge difference in scale between the rattled society hostess and mother who realises she has lost her child.

I think there is a tendency in scenes like that [V.3], which can feel so generalised, to light upon something that feels like it makes sense and then just do it. We’re all doing it. And I think we need to resolve the bottle as a moment, because the implications of that moment are enormous. Juliet's death was suicide. She wouldn’t be able to be taken to church and given a proper burial, but that point won’t come across unless it's a focused moment. We just have to decide whether that realisation is important enough to warrant such focus.

Looking ahead

Getting this run out of the way is the first thing to do, then we’ll concentrate on working very hard on different bits and pieces. I’m assuming that we’ll have a notes session after this run, so that will be helpful. We’ve been onstage a bit over the last week and that was good, but quite scary. I realised that there really is nowhere to hide. Lady Capulet doesn’t speak directly to the audience; I need to make sure that I don’t alienate them – that connection is something which I very much look forward to exploring.

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Rehearsal Notes 4

  • Technical rehearsal
  • First preview: movement
  • Still
  • Different spaces
  • Feedback
  • Audience reaction

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 rehearsal

It's been difficult catching up with you over the last couple of weeks because my back was bad and then I had sinus trouble. I’ve been on antibiotics and vocally I haven’t been feeling on top form. Over these last two performances my voice felt right for the first time since about the third preview – feeling under the weather for the second half of the previews and Press Night was a nightmare. Anyway, we did the run I talked about last time and then we had our technical rehearsal. On the first day I put Lady Capulet's dress on and I thought ‘This is never going to happen. I’ll never be able to move in this!’ I never imagined it would be as comfortable as it is now. We also went for white make-up which was quite a strong character choice. I look quite severe if I expose my forehead – especially as we’re used to floppy fringes – but that look is exactly right for her, I think. It was a real shock to sit in front of a mirror and have the make-up put on for the first time: I watched this creature appear! She really does emerge before your eyes as the layers of clothing and the hair and make-up get sorted out.

I was quite surprised at how complicated the technical rehearsal was, and how tiring. You would think because there's less technology in terms of lighting, sound equipment, and set that the process would be simplified. Instead there are complex costume changes. Nothing prepares you for the sheer amount of work it takes to get you into a costume – the lacing and pointing and stitching and pinning. At that point I was so badly regretting that I had suggested Lady Capulet should have a costume change! [Melanie changes for IV.2 and changes back for V.3] Some other things changed during the tech as well; for instance, I decided that Lady Capulet's response to the bodies in the tomb [V.3] should be hysterical laughter that becomes a cry. The implications of that discovery are so huge that her reaction should communicate shock and disbelief as well as grief.

First preview: movement

The thing that I was most frightened of was that I would be frightened, but I wasn’t nervous – I haven’t been nervous. I went out onstage and it was like hitting a warm wall; it was incredibly exciting. Since then, it's been a case of getting to know the space and playing across it, which has been great because I love playing distances. I think we’ve generally opened up in terms of movement. Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] gave me a fantastic note after the first preview actually: it just said ‘Remember the small steps: the Queen’. When you first get out onto the stage, it seems so big and in the first preview I really strode around. Of course, that's to do with finding a comfort zone – striding around helps you to feel rooted and grounded onstage when you feel like you’re in danger of being swept up to the top of the building! Now I take much smaller, quicker steps. When you do that, your weight is in a different place – around your belly-button rather than your legs. If you let all your weight go down into your legs, you get a swinging movement which looks off-balance; that would be wrong for Lady Capulet. She has to respond rapidly to situations which are constantly changing and her movement should reflect that. I’m much happier with the way she moves now. Glynn nailed exactly what was the matter. So that was something good that came out of the first preview.

First preview: still

Vocally, I was very happy in the space at first. I felt like my voice was there to draw on but then this cold screwed up my support: I became aware that I was taking breaths where I wasn’t taking breaths before, which makes everything more of an effort. I hate not being able to draw on every note in the range.

One of the most interesting things for me during the previews has been discovering how still you can be. This space encourages you to animate and that's a danger – at least it's a danger for an actor like me who tends to animate. The answer is not to play ‘small’ but to be brave enough to be still: to be completely still, and also to turn your back. At the Globe, you feel like you’re being drawn out all the time – I was talking about this to Yolanda [Vazquez, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing] the other day and she felt the same way. By being still and occasionally turning your back, you can pull the focus back rather than get drawn out into the space and the audience. For instance, there's a bit in Act IV, scene 2, when Juliet comes back from Friar Lawrence and she says she's learnt to repent the sin of disobedience [IV.2.17-8]: that's a very complicated moment for Lady Capulet because she's feeling so many conflicting things just then. What I do now is to take that moment away; I turn my back on Juliet and Capulet because I don’t want them to see my reaction. That's a very exciting thing to do at the Globe because all of a sudden you’re playing to a very small number of people in the audience who are suddenly quite intimately connected with you in a way that nobody else can see. It's lovely to find out things like that about the space.

Bill [Stewart, Lord Capulet] does something with stillness in Act three, scene five, which I think is just fantastic: he takes Kananu [Kirimi, Juliet] downstage when he warns her not to cross him ‘Look to’t, think on’t. I do not use to jest’ [III.5.190] – he embraces her and he stops the show. There is a moment of complete stillness and it's amazing because there are the four of us just held there, and he doesn’t hold it for a nanosecond too long. The timing is perfect. Sound and fury are all well and good: easy, exhilarating and enjoyable to play on this stage, but stillness is something else. I mean, I can say this when I’ve got relatively few lines, so I can be as still as I like when everyone else is talking! I don’t really have enough text to play around with it a great deal, but stillness and silence are things I need to keep thinking about.

Different spaces

I think this space is very conscious of its own theatricality and I love that – I love theatrical. That's probably something to do with personal taste, but it would be pretty useless if you tried to play completely naturalistically at the Globe: it's a space that suits hyper-reality. I like to think about the play as a work in progress; as we learn more about what suits the space, it will develop. The thing that I’m really looking forward to is the move from here [the Globe] to Hampton Court Palace, a hall that seats three hundred people. That's going to be a real challenge. I think there will be a screen at one end and a long narrow thrust stage, narrower than we’re used to here. There will be fewer people seated along the sides. Also the audience won’t be sat on so many different levels. The different space will force us to take another look at what we’ve been doing: we’ll have to be inventive then we’ll come back to the Globe and see how much of that is transferable. The change of venue is smack in the middle of the whole run and that's perfect. At the Globe, there's a tension between the theatricality of the language, the theatricality of the tragedy and theatricality of the space; we’ll have to distil that for a smaller space and then move back out again when we come back here. Technically, in terms of voice and movement as much as anything else, that move to (and from) Hampton Court Palace is going to be enormously challenging.

The change in venue might mean we have to project less, vocally. I know when I’m too quiet but I’m not as good at judging when I’m doing more than I need to with my voice. That's to do with finding a comfort zone again. You err on the side of caution. It's very good to feel your support going like a bellows and you’re producing a good sound – also, because there's no roof at the Globe, you think ‘Well, I can’t really over-project…’ but it will be good to have another look at things like that in light of Hampton Court Palace.

Feedback

Some of my friends have come to see the play but I don’t go out and seek people's thoughts. There are a small number of people who I’ve worked with and who know me very well whose opinions I might ask – ‘Did you notice in that scene I was trying for such-and-such, did it read?’ and they’ll perhaps say ‘No, I didn’t get that actually, but perhaps if you did that…’ They don’t give unsolicited notes – there's a kind of etiquette about that sort of thing. If somebody asks you ‘Is there anything you want to say?’ then okay, there's an opportunity… but I think the point is that you yourself know if something is or isn’t working. If you’re worried about what you’re doing then you go round soliciting and that just makes it worse. I haven’t been worried: I’m saying ‘This is what I’m doing, hope you like it.’

Audience reaction

The feedback we’ve been getting from the audience hasn’t really varied at all. On the one hand, that's good – it's so positive – but on the other hand that could become a problem. It sounds strange, but if the audience is so supportive every single night and we always go out to great cheers, then there's the danger that we’ll forget that the play is a work in progress. You have to constantly try and make the performance better, otherwise there's no point and things would get dull! A very, very supportive audience can take the edge off your drive to push things further. I suppose the danger is to mine the comedy at the expense of the complexity. I’m a great believer in offering audiences something that they have to make their minds up about; ‘I thought she was a kind person but maybe she's not…’ Contradictions are most interesting because they make you think. Every night I monitor how long the show runs because I think that's a measure of what's been going on: if we hit the right time, then things have gone well. We’ve pushed on and given the play the attack it needs. Mostly we’ve been very good: it [the play] seems to come in between two hours twenty-five minutes and two hours twenty-nine. There was one show where we put on seven minutes; I don’t know what was going on there – I think it was at the end of a run of performances and everyone was just shattered. We’re back on time now, I’m pleased to say. Everyone had a bit of a break whilst Measure for Measure opened.

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Rehearsal Notes 5

  • Current status
  • Performance at midnight
  • Original pronunciation
  • Hampton Court Palace
  • Rehearsals

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.

Current status

We’ve done lots of shows and we’ve done Original Pronunciation [OP] and now we’re rehearsing for the performances at Hampton Court Palace. It all feels quite busy which is good. I’m looking forward to Hampton Court. Our rehearsals for that space are bringing the company back together. Generally, we have stuck together very well as a Company, and going back into the rehearsal room reinforces that closeness.

Performing at Midnight

I have to say, the romance of the midnight matinee was lost on me! I only woke up at three o’clock, after it was all over – that meant I enjoyed afterwards very much but I found the performance quite a trial, simply because it's difficult to be at your best at that hour of the night. The show was fine, but it did feel a bit stodgy. We put time on, inevitably, but I don’t think people came to the midnight matinee to see the best performance they could possibly see. I think they came for the atmosphere, and the experience of doing something quite special.

The audience was very attentive, very on the ball, but I didn’t find performing easy... It was quite weird getting in to the building at quarter past ten at night, and throughout the first half I thought ‘I’ve just got to go to sleep.’ I’d slept at the wrong time – late in the afternoon rather than early in the afternoon. I think it would be rather fantastic for the show to go up at two in the morning so that we finished at dawn instead of three in the morning. That would be quite an amazing experience, but there's no way people are going to come to something that starts at two. Playing twelve to three, we were playing in the dark for three hours. I just think it would be wonderful to have the line “A glooming peace this morning with it brings...” [V.3.305] at quarter to five in the morning, as dawn breaks.

Original Pronunciation

We got through Friday's performance [first OP performance] on adrenaline – it felt quite like a first night and we had no idea how the audience would react. The fact that they enjoyed it as much as they did was great, and it gave the whole show an energetic buzz. Saturday wasn't so good, though [second OP performance]: we had rain and helicopters, then OP on top of that. The accent was all over the place. Generally though, I enjoyed the OP work more than I thought I would. I was very struck by the number of voices that it freed up. One heard voices that were much more ‘owned’, but, in the final instance, I didn't rehearse the character in OP and, in terms of building up a character, the way that a person sounds and speaks is as important as any of their other aspects. In that sense, Original Pronunciation was something of an imposition on top of work we’d already done.

I talked to Charmian [Hoare, Dialect Coach] about the class connotations of the accent and, from the point of view of Lady Capulet, I didn’t think it presented me with any problems or status issues. She just sounded different. The accent works more successfully with some characters than others. I think John [McEnery – Friar Lawrence] really enjoyed it. Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] got much more out of it than he thought he would. Everybody did. The accent reminded me to keep my vowels open and to use the sounds that we’re given.

I felt Original Pronunciation helped me focus on the rhythm of the text – the fact that one breaks up that rhythm at your peril. I think the rhythm should only be disrupted if one intends to do something very cheeky! You have to make an interpretive point with that disruption. There's a scene with Juliet where I have the line “What are you busy, ho? Need you my help?” [IV.3.6] We thought that it would be fun if we anticipated that entrance a little bit and I heard her saying that she had need of many orisons, so that the ‘what’ became “What?!” That completely breaks the line up and it's naughty, but it makes a little point. You should only break up the text if you’ve got a really good reason.

Whilst we were concentrating on original pronunciation, we seemed to cut back on superfluities and that took time off the performances. The fact that this was the case let us know where the problems lie when we do put time on. Distracted by the need to think about the accent, I found it was easier to 'stop acting'. There wasn’t time to worry about superfluous things, so we just cracked on with it, and less is definitely more. Of course, we should be doing that anyway. I just thought ‘Oh great, why is it always the way that, distracted by a practical problem that needs to be solved, it suddenly becomes so much easier to just get on with it?’ Having said that, I’m glad we’re not doing OP for the whole run because we didn’t rehearse it enough for that. We only had twenty-eight days to rehearse. In the time available, Charmian could only fit in two or three hours’ work with each of us individually. We also had a recording produced by David Crystal [Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor] – he read out our phonetic script on tape, which was very helpful – but we only went through the whole play three times as a Company before the performances themselves. The pressure of time meant that learning the OP accent was similar to learning material for television work: one learns it at a certain level of one's brain then two days later you can’t remember a word of it!

Hampton Court Palace

That space is so much smaller and the logic of the stage traffic is very different. I looked at the layout today and I realised there's no way we can replicate what we’ve been playing at the Globe in this space. It would be pointless to try. We need to be quite radical and start doing some very different things, but somehow there's an unwillingness to do that. The atmosphere in rehearsals has been quite unsettled as we’re literally getting a measure of the space. There are also issues that arise from the fact that now we’re effectively playing front-on now. There are people seated at the sides of the stage and of course I’ll be aware of them, but there are so few people sat here that you can’t ‘play the circle’ in the same way that you can at the Globe. It just wouldn’t happen. The back row of the rake at Hampton Court is a long way away too… we’ll need to address that sort of thing over the next few days. We’ll obviously deal with issues like that when we arrive at Hampton Court on Tuesday (for our technical rehearsal and our first performance). I think Tuesday's going to be a very stressful day and it would be nice to have more time. During the tech, we’ll have to re-shuffle quick changes and so on. The dressers have only got an hour to become completely familiar with a brand new set up; it's their skill and familiarity that enables us to change quickly. I imagine that it will be tricky to get the technical things right in that space of time.

Rehearsals: challenge for the week

In terms of these re-rehearsals, we’ve got to think about performances that are smaller, subtler and more intense, with more energy. I’ve been thinking about the audience-relationship. This is something that affects me less than quite a lot of other characters but there is one moment where I come right down centre stage at the Globe, after the fight [‘I beg for justice, which thou Prince must give’ III.1] and that's not going to work at Hampton Court at all. All of these challenges are really opportunities; halfway through the run, we get to muck around and experiment with the show but we’re not going know what the result will be until we arrive at Hampton Court. It's a shame that we don’t have another day to rehearse… what will probably happen is we’ll get the measure of the space by the end of the week and then we’ll go home! But I’ve toured enough to know that's just the way things happen.

I think it will be good for it when the show returns to the Globe. Playing at Hampton Court should connect us afresh within the playing of the scenes, but I do think there's a logic to this new space which we haven’t cracked yet. I did Act one, scene three, with Kananu [Kirimi, Juliet] and Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] today and I don’t think we connected up to the space. The big difference is that this space is a domestic one. We are now inside [the stage at Hampton Court Palace is in the Great Hall]. I was struck by how little of the space we utilised. It's not a case of moving around more in a smaller space: you still have to place things. Perhaps in a smaller space, you can be more fluid…

Over the next few days, we will have a chance to run properly and review some of the set-pieces we’ve been looking at. I keep returning to the fact that these performances will be indoors, and the impact that will have. I expect I’ll do some things quite differently, whilst keeping the same essence. That will be tricky; Lady Capulet demonstrates a lot with relatively few words because she's in an environment where she has been shut down vocally. You know, she's become one of those women who communicate a lot in what seems to be a suppressed way - actually there's a whole floor-show going on. And then at the end of the play she just shuts down: that's it, no more floor-show, because there's no reason to have a floor-show any more. The difficulty will be finding those different levels in a smaller space. That is my challenge for the week.

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'Ask Your Actor' Bulletin

This bulletin was composed with questions sent in by the schools that adopted Melanie Jessop.

How do you manage to bring out your emotions when playing Lady Capulet?

When you’re acting, the most important thing is to completely believe in what's happening. Then the emotions that you need to feel will be there naturally. We’ve just done our 50th performance and we’re very familiar with what happens in each scene so sometimes you have to make sure that you’re really concentrating and listening and it feels fresh.

Do you think that you are like Lady Capulet in any way?

It's always important to find some things you have in common with the character you’re playing. I think Lady Capulet has a good sense of humour (not that we see it much in the play!) and she's quite dry. She's very passionate about the things that matter to her. She's quite unhappy and doesn’t have any freedom and I think she’d be more like me if she had all the freedom to do things that I have.

Would you change the director's instructions vis-à-vis your role in the play?

I worked with the director on my interpretation of the character and we didn’t have any major disagreements. Sometimes you have to fight, though, especially when you feel very strongly that you’re not being steered in the right direction.

What is your favourite Shakespeare play and why?

King Lear – I think it's about very important things and it's got wonderful characters and is very exciting.

What is the best thing about being in Romeo and Juliet?

The best thing about being in Romeo and Juliet is getting to speak Shakespeare's language. There are always new things to discover so you don’t ever get bored!

Do you get nervous onstage?

I don’t tend to get nervous but sometimes if I have a friend in I get butterflies. Usually there's too much else to think about!

Have you ever dried onstage?

Yes, and it's pretty frightening! I’ve never dried so completely that I couldn’t go on but you do feel a bit sick afterwards! I did a play written for one woman – so it was just me talking for over an hour. Drying in that would have been really horrid because there’d be no-one else to help get me out of it!

How long does it take to get into your costume?

It takes about 45 minutes to get into costume and wig/make-up - but I have a lot of help.

How long have you been an actress?

I’ve been an actress for 20 years

Do you ever get stage fright? If so, how do you deal with it?

I’ve never had stage fright and I think it would be really awful. All actors are frightened of developing stage fright. It's like an illness – you just can’t get on the stage. I have one friend who doesn’t do theatre any more because he got so scared.

Do you have a favourite character? Have you played this character?

I don’t really have a favourite character. It's always the character I’m playing!

Thanks to Rainbow Montessori School, La Jolla Country Day School, and Parkgate House School.

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