Mercutio

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About James Garnon

This is James' second season at Shakespeare's Globe. During the 2003 season, he played several parts in Dido, Queen of Carthage including Jupiter, Achates and Ganymede. He also played Fabian and the Sea Captain in the Globe production ofTwelfth Night. James worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002, when he performed in Pericles, The Tempest and A Winter's Tale. This is not the first time he has performed in Romeo and Juliet: in 1996, he played Mercutio in a production by Rough Magic. Television credits include the television drama Without Motive.

Rehearsal Notes 1

  • Different approaches
  • First week
  • Character & clothing: original practices
  • Other Mercutios
  • Looking forward

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.

Different approaches

At other theatres, I’ve played quite small parts in large productions with quite heavy lighting effects and so forth. As so many things were prescribed, there wasn't as much creative freedom. Maybe that's partly because an environment that involves a lot of technology fosters a more prescriptive approach; people have to be in the right place at the right time for lighting cues, for instance. My experience at the Globe has been different. I’ve only ever worked with Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] here and he's fabulous at getting things from his actors – which isn’t to say that he doesn’t have a strong idea of what he wants to get, but he's very, very good at pushing actors to give him things, ideas that he can take forward. He's quite happy to be led by what the actors present to him and it's very rewarding to feel you can come up with ideas that he will then seize on. You are constantly encouraged to surprise yourself or surprise him or do something unusual. That means that he's effectively also somebody who encourages you to screw up, on the grounds that you sometimes discover things that are useful even when you’re doing things that on the face of it seem to be wrong. So even if you come up with something that's turns out to be inappropriate, it doesn’t matter because we can move on. There isn’t the pressure always to do something exactly as you would do it on stage.

The first week

We concentrated on the verse initially. We started by doing an exercise where we ran through the first half of the play and Tim really didn’t tie it down with conditions – he didn’t tell us exactly what he wanted; he didn’t tell us how much he wanted us to move, or things like that. You sort of make it up as you go along and I came away thinking ‘Oh, I might have overstepped the mark; I messed around a little bit too much’. But at the same time, messing around is quite useful; it actually frees everything up. The exercises we’ve been doing subsequently are obviously designed to bed in the verse, to make sure that we are respecting that side of things as we move on, which I really like. The most important thing for me is to get on top of the verse as soon as possible, because it's your bedrock. You can play around as much as you like on top of that, especially in an original practices production… well, in any Shakespeare production really. I think that the verse is a very important thing to observe and I like the fact that Tim's quite fascistic about it. Although you’re given enormous amounts of freedom in other areas, he doesn’t tend to give you much freedom there, and I guess that's a good analogy with the whole of the original practices approach: Twelfth Night showed me that it was possible to be incredibly innovative, different and amusing by adhering to what seems like the restrictions of original practices. In a similar way, if you respect the verse rigorously, you create a lot more freedom. By restricting yourself in one way, you are more creative in other ways and discover things that you might have otherwise overlooked.

Character and clothing: original practices

In original practices productions, you’re restricted to the clothes they might have worn in Shakespeare's time and you’re restricted to the sets they could have used. I suppose, as an actor, you’re trying to restrict yourself to only bring those things imaginatively to the part that you think might be appropriate. In terms of costume, Jenny [Tiramani, Master of Clothing] is very good at asking you ‘what do you think? What would you like to bring to this?’ I personally didn’t want to say anything really, not because I don’t have ideas of who Mercutio is, but because I didn’t want to bring those ideas which are based on both my personal and my modern prejudices. I don’t know enough about costume or about period clothes and she's the expert, so I’m much more interested to see what they have come up with that they think is suitable for him. I’ll then try and make myself fit to those clothes and find the character that might inhabit those clothes, rather than vice versa. That's a conscious choice that I’m making at the moment, led by the fact that Jenny's said ‘Maybe you could grow a bit of facial hair’. That's going to change my appearance – she wants my hair slightly longer because men of the period had slightly longer hair and these sorts of things will then start feeding in others: facial hair is going to alter my perception of how I want to play him, I suppose, because you appear slightly differently. It isn’t being driven by my thinking ‘I think Mercutio needs to have a beard’, it's just being led by the need to find the character.

Similarly, going through the verse very carefully, you are trying to find the character there rather than going to the outside world and asking ‘Who might Mercutio be?’ I may later on want to start thinking about that, but at the present moment I don’t think it's appropriate. I’ve looked up the commedia dell’ arte on the internet because I’d read something that mentioned a connection between Mercutio and Harlequin. I went deeply down there, because that seemed to be something that was connected with the period and might offer ideas of what an English actor of the period playing an Italian character might use – if he was even pretending to be Italian, and that's up for grabs too. I’ve taken none of that too seriously, but that's the sort of thing that I’ve been looking at to get a broader view of theatre styles of the period.

Preparing for rehearsals

I learnt all my lines before I came in. It's something I like to do because I find I can just get more from rehearsal if I'm not concentrating on whether I can remember my lines. I know some people like to learn them once they’ve actually talked about things; people tend to have a feeling that if you’ve learnt the lines before you go in, you’ll have set things before you can make a discovery in the rehearsal room which I don’t think is true at all. If you’ve got it all underneath your belt of course you can change it as you go along, and it actually gets you up to speed faster. It means that you can react more quickly to the ideas being thrown at you. So, I’ve learnt all of my lines and tried to determine as far as I can what the lines mean – in terms of what the words are saying. I spent an entire week just typing ‘Mercutio’ or Romeo and Juliet into the internet then read everything that I could see; even the stuff that I thought was completely irrelevant. It just seemed that if I saturated my head with it... I watched three films of Romeo and Juliet – again, something some people don’t think you should do, because you’re going to ape the performances that you see, but I don’t think that's necessarily true. I think you spend more time identifying what you don’t like in people's performances, and that tells you what you think, in effect.

Other Mercutios

For me, it's funny to have John McEnery in the company – he's Mercutio in Franco Zeffirelli's film [Romeo and Juliet, 1968]. It's a curious position to find yourself in, and I hope to talk to John at some point because he's brilliant in it, absolutely brilliant. He defined Mercutio for a lot of people, so to do certain things that John did as Mercutio might seem slightly clichéd now. He's so free and louche, if that's the right word. One wants to just move somewhere away from that – I guess partly out of perverseness but mostly because, while John defined many people's attitudes towards Mercutio, I feel there are other valid interpretations. I don’t want to break with tradition for the sake of being contrary because I think that would be a very perverse and stupid way of going about things. I’m just trying to find, between myself and the text, who my Mercutio is.

The way editors tend to read Mercutio's eloquence, constantly saying his lines involve a “bawdy quibble”, pushes you through a sense of personal connection: it makes him a slightly sort of scurrilous type of person, but he doesn’t necessarily need to be. I mean there's a high level of sophistication in his speech and there certainly are double meanings ... but it seems glosses like this are only telling part of the story. I don’t know – we’ll discover how far one wants to go.

I heard somebody talking about the Peter Brook production of Romeo and Juliet where they played Mercutio as a lout, and he evidently didn’t have that Puckish* quality that people bring to Mercutio, that sense of zow. Now I don’t know if that is a good thing: I didn’t see the production, but it seems to me there's a good deal of sense in not living up to the audience's expectation of the character.

Earlier this week, Tim said there might be a possibility for some of the “open-arse”, “medlar” kind of references for him to be quite unpleasant: when he's mocking Romeo's love-sickness, he says

If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.
O Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open-arse and thou a poperin pear!
(II.1. 33-8)

Instead of emphasising the humour, you could play it quite nasty. We know that Mercutio is often bracketed as a ‘sympathetic’ character and clearly he's very attractive to an audience; in the midst of this charm, one could almost forget about the other possibilities, namely that he is also very offensive. You could just slip into assumption that he is going to be charming throughout, regardless. I think it's important not to ignore the contradictions and variations within a character. In the moments when Mercutio is going to be properly offensive, we should let him be properly offensive in order to confound those expectations of a character who is falsely consistent, attractive and with whom you can sympathise easily. Having said that, I really don’t have preconceptions about what I’m going to do at all. I don’t want to have any; I don’t necessarily want to think too deeply at this stage.

Looking forward: the rehearsal period

The best thing for me over the next few weeks would be to surprise myself – to find myself doing things that I didn’t expect. I also like feeling slightly out of control of what's gong on. You know, you do the work – a lot of work – in order to allow yourself to be so spontaneous that you haven’t got much control, which might sound bizarre but actually you’re supported by the work that you’ve done, and that allows you more freedom. I suppose the worst thing would be to find myself doing things at the end of five weeks that I could have done when I walked into rehearsals at the beginning. I guess that's true of any rehearsal process – that you want to find yourself somewhere that you weren’t expecting to be, and to have learnt something about yourself and about the play that you couldn’t have known at the start. That sounds very sanctimonious. [laughs]

  • Puck – a mischievous goblin (see A Midsummer Night's Dream)

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Activities 1

  • Character building
  • Comparing spaces

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

Character building
Materials: Internet access, paper, pencils, magazines/ newspapers, video
Time: 30 minutes (not including time to watch video clips)
Type: whole class activity

James describes the character research he did as part of his preparation for the role of Mercutio. You have been cast as Mercutio in an original practices production (one that explores the costume, setting, music and dance possible in the original Globe of 1599). There have been many different productions of the play Romeo and Juliet; the interpretative choices an actor makes about his character are subjective so there is the potential for as many different versions of Mercutio as there are productions. James talks about finding ‘his’ Mercutio. Use some of his research methods to find ‘your’ Mercutio.

1) James gathers as much information about the play and his character as he can. Like James, you could try searching the internet for the terms ‘Mercutio’ or ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Make notes of information that you think will be useful for your characterisation. Some actors start with the facts about their character in the play text: you could try organising your findings into a resume. Ask yourself questions about the character and try to support your answers with evidence from the text where possible. You might like to use some questions from the questionnaire that your group filled in as an introduction to other GlobeLink members – what are Mercutio's top three likes and dislikes? What would be an interesting bit of information about the city he lives in? Send in your ideas to James at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com along with the URLs for any helpful websites, explaining why you found them useful. Keep adding information to your Mercutio resume as you read through the play.

2) James watches other productions of Romeo and Juliet. Have you ever seen a performance of the play, or watched a film version? Talk about the different versions you’ve seen as a class. Have a go at comparing different versions of Mercutio – e.g. how did Harold Perrineau, Jr.'s Mercutio in the Baz Luhrmann film differ from the Mercutio in the Zeffirelli film? Think about costume, physicality and voice. (It may be useful to watch clips from some productions to help you compare different ways of staging or filming a particular scene with Mercutio). Remember you are preparing to play the role of Mercutio: do you think it's useful for you as an actor to see how other people have played your character? Why might some actors avoid seeing other interpretations of the character they’re preparing to play?

3) Master of Clothing Jenny Tiramani's decisions about Mercutio's costume and appearance have influenced James’ ideas about the character. Romeo and Juliet will be an original practices production that explores costume possible in the original Globe of 1599; James says he will try to imagine the sort of person who would wear the clothes that Jenny has researched and designed. As you build up your character of Mercutio, remember to think about how he will look. Draw out your own designs. Do you, like Jenny, think Mercutio should have a beard? Jenny must make sure her designs use fashions and styles that were possible in the Globe of 1599 - search on the internet or in books for pictures of Elizabethan clothing so your design will be in keeping with ‘original practices’. Send your drawings and questions about Mercutio's costume design to Jenny at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

3b) Take some magazines and newspapers: cut out pictures of anyone whom you think looks similar to your idea of Mercutio – you can choose anybody, as long as you give reasons for each of your choices. Try combining several pictures of people and other things that say ‘Mercutio’ to you (perhaps a certain type of animal or a particular colour) in a collage or ‘design sheet’ – send them into globelink@shakespearesglobe.com for Jenny and James to discuss.

4) When James describes the process of beginning to create Mercutio's character, he says he will work from external features (appearance) towards an idea of the character's inner life. In a way, this could be called working ‘from the outside in’. Do you agree that this is a good way to create a character? To what extent does a person's appearance someone affect their behaviour? What would be the advantages of James’ approach to Mercutio? Remember that Romeo and Juliet is an original practices production. Are there any disadvantages to this approach? Send your views and advice into James at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

4b) Following on from your ideas about ‘working from the outside in’, you might like to consider how far it is possible for James to change is appearance and behaviour to help him form the character? What part does casting play in a production?

Activity 2

Comparing spaces
Materials: classroom with internet access, paper, pencils
Time: 20 minutes
Type: Whole class activity

When James talks about returning for his second season at the Globe, he mentions that unique features of the space might lead to actors and directors to approach the plays in a different way. Over the next few weeks, James will become very familiar with the unique features of the Globe stage. It's similarly important for you to be aware that the space your adopted actors will be working in, so you can offer them the most useful advice.

1) 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. Click here to take your (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 James 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 James as an actor, and send in your advice to him at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com For example:

Feature: the Globe stage has two large pillars and the audience sits all around the stage.
Advice: James 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? James mentions he feels he has more freedom on the Globe stage because scenes tend not to be blocked as rigidly as some modern theatres (see glossary for definition of ‘blocking’): are there any unique features of the Globe theatre that foster more loosely blocked scenes? Send in your suggestions to James at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com so he can add them to his notes.

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Rehearsal Notes 2

  • Taking the character home
  • Preparation
  • Modern
  • Destructive?
  • Bow
  • Fights: speed, character
  • Mercutio & Romeo
  • Problems & resources
  • Next stage

Taking the character home

Some actors don’t leave their characters at work. A friend of mine heard David Suchet talk at LAMDA: he was playing Salieri in Amadeus at the time and he said that the character crept up on him during the day - as though Salieri possessed him like a monster from a horror-movie. I’m not having problems leaving Mercutio at work. I do find that I become rather introverted. Friends will be talking to me and suddenly I’ll have a thought about the part and become absorbed in that without realising that I’ve completely disengaged with the conversation. That's happening a lot at the moment but the character never takes me over as a possessive presence. Sometimes I can be onstage and it's still just me … I don’t feel as like I become Mercutio when I’m onstage yet. That might come later on.

Proportion

There was a long discussion in rehearsal about who Mercutio actually is: we decided that the size of the character is completely disproportionate to the number of lines he actually speaks. You can see how, if you were that way inclined, he could become an overwhelming presence because that's the influence he sometimes has over the rest of the play. I’ve heard a few people will say Mercutio is their favourite part and that when he dies the whole thing tails off, which is a myth, but actually that impression of Mercutio as a large presence is generated without many lines. The same idea applies for Tybalt: someone mentioned in rehearsals the other day that people will always remember who played Tybalt, and they’ll think of Tybalt as quite a large character. When you actually look at the part, it's about thirty-five lines. There are two sword fights and I think that energy does heighten the stage presence of the characters involved, but ultimately Tybalt and Mercutio take on a significance way beyond the size of the parts. Paris always sticks in my mind too. That's something about this play that I’ve been noticing in the last week: so many of the characters in Romeo and Juliet really do seem to live. Maybe that's because so many of the issues that they’re concerned with have a very modern relevance.

Modern

In a sense, Mercutio is a very modern character and I think that's why he lives for audiences. He's accessible to us: he's openly bawdy and sexual in a way that we’re used to now but we don’t somehow expect that from earlier ages… there's no Victorian prudishness here. He does seem like a breath of fresh air. He's also very funny, and humour can make people seem larger than life. There's a mystery about him, too – he doesn’t tell us anything about himself and other characters say very little about him: that mystery is like a vacuum that things rush into, so an audience might do a lot of imaginative work filling in the gaps and sort of expand the part. The only person who really talks about him is Benvolio, but that's only after the fight sequences when Benvolio is trying to convince the Prince that Mercutio and Romeo are blameless: Mercutio gets described as ‘brave’, ‘bold’, ‘stout’ and ‘gallant’ [III.1] but that's about it.

Destructive?

Actually there's another line that I’ve been thinking about. When Mercutio has rattled the Nurse, Romeo pacifies her

Nurse:
Out upon you! What a man are you!
Romeo:
One, gentlewoman, that God hath made for himself to mar.
(II.4)

I think that's a characteristic we all recognise. There are innumerable examples of extraordinarily talented people who had everything to live for, but manage to screw things up single-handedly. Peter Cook and George Best stick in my mind. Mercutio has that about him: there's the feeling that he wasted huge potential. I've known people whom I thought would do extraordinary things but it hasn't worked out. There are similarities with Mercutio – he has a tendency to rant and get terribly excited. It's very difficult to follow his train of thought because his mind moves far too quickly. A lot of the time Mercutio is talking to himself, working things through audibly but not necessarily communicating with characters onstage … the Queen Mab speech feels very much like that [I.4] – Romeo has stop him after about forty lines:

Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talkest of nothing.
(I.4.96-7)

I’m not certain it's correct to say that Mercutio runs away with Shakespeare or that Shakespeare has allowed him to take up a disproportionate amount of space in the play. He serves a definite function; his views on love and relationships provide a counter-argument to Romeo and the Nurse. I see him as a foil that emphasises other characters’ views through contrast. Having said that, this definite sense of a function is balanced against the idea of characters ‘living’ in Romeo and Juliet more than any of Shakespeare's other plays … the character has a function and a life. It's a strange combination, especially when you’re playing a part that is small in terms of lines but expands because the part seems to take on a life of its own.

Bow

The Tudor Group came in earlier this week; they spend so many months in the year living as Tudors so it was useful to hear them talk about what that was like and how things might have been in the Elizabethan period. I found the stuff about etiquette very interesting. There were several different ways you could bow, and each style has its own associations. The Italian bow is terribly overdone – very elaborate and precise. We decided this is the sort of thing Tybalt might do. The French bow is simpler and the English bow is very simple. We decided that Mercutio might use a very simple English bow, because it seemed to fit with his manner as well as the idea that he should contrast with Tybalt. So that was a nice little find. I’m sure there’ll be other things that come to the surface again as we go along.

Fights

We’ve been doing a lot of work on the fight scenes recently. Mercutio has a great fight with Tybalt and it's very precisely choreographed. Time pressures mean that you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to develop ideas about how your character would fight … ideally I’d love to approach the fight from an actor's point of view, which would involve thinking about Mercutio's individual style as well as the sequence of moves that you learn.

I’m finding the original practices aspect of the fight a bit frustrating. The Elizabethans used heavy swords so that's what we’re using too, but I’m not sure whether there's evidence for actors using these heavy swords onstage. Elizabethan actors would have been familiar with swordsmanship as a necessary skill, and maybe that meant they handled a variety of weapons. I don’t know … I’m just feeling quite clumsy and slow in my movements right now. I haven’t done this in a while. The whole sequence of the fight is broken down into moves and we go through these moves in slow motion, then speed them up and put it together. I suppose we’ll get faster with practice. It's tempting to try and go too fast too soon.

Fights: speed

The temptation to speed things up won’t be curtailed because we’re using heavy swords. I remember at drama school we had an event called ‘Prize Fights’ where we had to present fight scenes. My partner and I decided to do several very, very short scenes spread throughout the evening. We used all sorts of weapons. When we rehearsed, we went straight from one fight to the next, and fighting with the broadsword always felt so slow that I found myself pushing up the speed… it almost becomes more dangerous because with fast weapons you’re very aware of the speed and you slow things down to keep it safe. My vague worry is that with these weapons, you can feel a bit overwhelmed by the pace. I’m sure it will be fine.

Fighting in character

I’m entirely obsessed with the acting of the fight scenes – the intention behind the move rather than the move itself. That's one way out of the pace issues: provided the audience can read what's going on, the pace can be quite slow. If you see where something's going and why it's dangerous, then that adds an exciting tension to the move. I’ve watched very slick fights that moved incredibly fast, and while that's impressive, after a while it isn’t very interesting to watch because it didn’t look real. The choreography rather than a sense of dramatic excitement was what made you think ‘Wow…’ You never felt the character was in danger. Ultimately, it is the intention that's exciting – you have to believe that people can kill each other. I was thinking yesterday: there's such a temptation to cheat with sword fights. As an actor, you learn the fight and then try to convince everybody how good you are with a sword. Whereas in a real fight, where death is a real possibility, no matter who you are or how skilled a swordsman, you are scared when you stand and fight. Given the choice, you wouldn’t do it and while you’re doing it, you want it to stop. Although Mercutio starts the fight with Tybalt, he doesn’t want to be doing it. To see that people are quite unhappy about having a sword-fight helps you believe that this is very scary and that people will get hurt; that tension makes it very exciting, dramatically. I think this is more exciting than people rushing at each other and executing fantastic moves without any sense of the motivation behind those movements. It's like when heavy-weight boxers go into the ring and you know they’ve been trained for the fight, but their spontaneity and tension lends it a special quality.

Mercutio and Romeo

The nature of the schedule has meant it's been a relatively quiet week for me. I had an incredibly useful individual session with Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] earlier in the week and that made me realise that I’d approached the part in quite a closed way. For instance, I hadn’t wanted to pay any attention to the argument that Mercutio is homosexual because I thought that interpretation was unhelpful. Now I think that important things got thrown out with that dismissal. Mercutio may well be in some sort of love with Romeo. It seems that there is an awful lot of use in that – what I’ve find really impressive is the scale and intensity of his love. If people choose to read it as homosexual, that's fine. I don’t know whether it is or not; even the indecision is interesting because in the early modern period there wasn’t the same sexual demarcation that there is today. Mercutio can be very confused and maybe slightly worried by the scale of his infatuation. Read in that way, all these references to women's genitals at II.1 and so on … well, at certain points they feel like a knee-jerk reaction, as though he's reminding himself of where his sexual interest lies. He sort of switches back and forth – after talking about Romeo, these references often become prevalent in his speech. At the moment, I think it might be quite useful to play Mercutio as someone who is not entirely certain about his sexual orientation. Uncertainty is more interesting, especially with Mercutio. Most of the time he seems so certain and confidant, as though he's somebody who knows what's going on. He's got a very knowing wit but I think that changes in relation to Romeo. There's actually an enormous amount of internal dialogue going on. He's someone who is very confused inside, although that's not what he presents to the rest of the world.

Problems and resources

Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] said the other day that a character's problems are your resources. A very simple thing which I’ve found helpful is just to go away and look at the lines, noticing whether there are any contradictions for the character in those lines: what could I be objecting to at this point? You suddenly find so many different ways of saying lines which might have got stuck down as you learn them with a certain intonation … I just realised odd words could be very different. For example, in Mercutio's first line:

Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance.
(I.4.13)

What does that ‘must’ mean? Why must we have Romeo dance? It's very easy to say that line as though it's an announcement ‘here I am and this is my first line and I’m impressing upon you that I can give commands or be amusing … ’ but really it's much more interesting if you think about why Mercutio might be saying that. Shakespeare quite often gets a scene moving by giving someone a line that protests against something ‘No, actually’ – the contradiction raises questions which make you go ‘Well, okay but why are you saying that?’ I can see that Mercutio might be trying to enliven Romeo if Romeo is being dull, but the manner in which he chooses to do this is fascinating.

Next stage

I’m not sure what the next stage will be. I suppose there's the temptation when you’re playing someone who is very quick-witted to exhibit that in their movements and to be jumpy and swift all the time. I think I’m going to try and be more relaxed about things. That would be good to bear in mind more generally. It's always funny when you first come into the rehearsal room and you’ve learnt your lines and you want to be impressive, or rather you want to demonstrate your capability. I was reading about Gareth Thomas actually, who got into trouble with the Welsh rugby team a few years ago because he was so keen to appear capable that he trained on his own. He got so caught up in it that he often turned up late for squad training sessions and eventually he got dropped because they thought he wasn’t committed whereas that couldn’t be further from the truth! There certainly comes a point when relaxing would be the most useful thing.

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Rehearsal Notes 3

  • Mercutio's death
  • Reactions
  • Queen Mab
  • Appearance
  • Next stage

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.

Mercutio's death

I’ve just been working on the death scene with Tim [Carroll, Master of Play]. That scene [III.1] is very difficult. Or rather, it's one of the points in the play where it's easy to become quite clichéd: the line ‘A plague on both your houses’ leads you into anger very easily. There is also that wittiness to the lines which could make Mercutio's death seem languid. I don’t feel that either of those options – extreme anger or extreme languor – are necessarily right. I’m trying to find the truth underneath these things. In a ‘Queen Mab’ sort of way, Mercutio's death scene can seem like another opportunity to show off and I really don’t want to do that. You have to find the reasons for saying those things from the character's perspective, but without letting anybody see the work. Tim and I actually talked about the idea that, given what we know about Mercutio, he would probably find the prospect of being cast in a tragic role intensely boring and slightly vulgar – he's probably thinking ‘Oh lord, everyone's going to mourn for me at my funeral. This will be terribly tiresome – I rather expected to die and be mourned in a blaze of glory rather than this sort of accidental hideous death.’

We haven’t fixed anything as such. Tim and I just talked through the scene and… we didn’t block it per se, but we tried to plot where we thought the changes of mood might be. The ‘Plague on both your houses’ speech and the jokes have to be put into a context. I think Mercutio does a lot of those ‘showing off’ things partially as an attempt to deflect attention from his situation. Perhaps that's why the speech is written in a way that almost invites showing off in an actor. Mercutio jokes to make light of the situation as he dies, not in order to make people laugh, but to stop them fussing in such unbearable way. Maybe he's trying to stop the inevitable happening by behaving in a way that produces a different reaction.

Reactions

Recently I’ve gotten rather excited about running around instead of lying still during the death scene [III.1]. It seems a bit clichéd to just lie on the floor and die, allowing everybody to gather round while you deliver the lines in a kind of ‘I am Valmont at the end of Dangerous Liaisons’ way. I don’t think that fits with Mercutio, so I’ve been up on my feet and moving round. It feels more exciting and unpredictable. The ideal is probably somewhere between the two extremes, but I think frantic movement is a more realistic reaction to pain – if you’re in a lot of pain, you often find yourself doing a kind of dance. We have an attic conversion at home and there's a trapdoor that comes down from the ceiling with stairs that lead up to my wife's office. Unfortunately the trap comes down at exactly head-height. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve smacked my head on the thing and every time I do it, it drives me insane with fury. I just go berserk. At the same time I know that if I really make a row, my wife will come down and ask me where it hurts and so on … you get caught between a feeling of extreme fury and the urge to belittle it because otherwise people try to make you feel better. Sometimes you don’t want that, especially if you’ve just done something stupid, and the only way you can stop people coming near you is to keep moving. Mercutio's situation is a bit similar: he doesn’t want anyone offering healing hands. Running round is like saying ‘Will you all just give me some air?’ I think Mercutio is also concerned that if he falls down to the ground then he might not get back up.

I remember doing Titus Andronicus in my first year at drama school; another actor got carried away in the heat of the moment and actually stabbed me in the leg with his wooden dagger. I was so angry that I bellowed something like ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ The surprise of getting hurt when I didn’t expect it was extraordinary. I was so cross. I was thinking about that today: Mercutio's anger doesn’t have to be righteous moral indignation at the pettiness of the feud that's taking his life. It might be shock. When you hit your head, you scream. There's an odd feeling that if you make a lot of noise then you can get the pain out – that screaming will make it feel better. You realise it doesn’t help and you go quiet again. All this stuff, the difficulty in Mercutio's reaction, makes you realise how good Shakespeare was at observing life.

Queen Mab

I haven’t been in rehearsals a great deal because Mercutio is dead during the second half of the play. I did have a long session with Giles [Block, Master of the Words] on the Queen Mab speech [I.4] though, which was fascinating. Giles is like a key-master with a range of different techniques to unlock the sense behind what you’re saying. He's especially good with the technical aspects of verse, so it was very, very useful to go through the bits that are proving difficult and he suggested different ways into them. For instance, he talked about the importance of the final words in the lines: he asked me to use the final word as a cue into the next line, so you get a sense of where that line comes from. In the middle of the Mab speech, Mercutio says

Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier's neck;
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscades, Spanish blades,
[…]
(I.4.82-4)

‘Neck’ prompts ‘foreign throats’ – blades cut throats so ‘throats’ leads to ‘blades’. One of the most helpful things I realised during the session was that speaking verse is all about having enough courage to ignore the fact that you know exactly what's coming next, and find each thought as it was written. Shakespeare was improvising just like Mercutio is improvising and you find the thread as you troll along. That idea was very encouraging. It makes the lines sound more natural.

Giles also brought up something that hadn’t occurred to me before – almost everything that Mercutio uses in his description of Queen Mab can be found in an English country garden. It felt rather like the end of the film The Usual Suspects when you realise that Kevin Spacey's character has made everything up and he's taken his cue from the wall in front of him. When you look at Mercutio's speech, you find him talking about crickets, spider webs, gnats, grass-hoppers and ‘moonshine's watery beams… all these things are actually found in a garden and the scene is presumably taking place outside, at dusk, in an English country garden. All the things Mercutio uses to describe Mab are things that he could literally see in the context of that scene. In fact, Giles told me that he’d been in the theatre at dusk a couple of nights ago and the air was full of gnats. There probably spiders’ webs there too. It's amazing to have that connection: I’d been talking to Tim about the Mab speech as a very conscious improvisation but it's good to be able to take your cues from the things around you. As an actor, one always wants to be able to picture the images as they are evoked in the lines. For this speech, instead of seeing Queen Mab first and then imagining her traces as the smallest spider webs, I see the spider web which cues Mercutio's comparison with Queen Mab. Mercutio wants Romeo to see Queen Mab's carriage but he's inventing it, so I find it more helpful to imagine a setting where I can go ‘Oh look, a hazelnut’ … “Her chariot is an empty hazelnut”. Then 'Oh, there's a squirrel … “Made by the joiner squirrel and …” hmm, woodworm in that tree the squirrel's on… “the old grub.”

Some of the things like gnats and spider webs will actually be in there in the theatre. I think this way round is more interesting than my having to construct Mab's carriage and then draw comparisons – much more interesting – and, hopefully, it will somehow distract the audience. He talks about Queen Mab in great detail but behind that he remains quite mysterious. That's the thing about Mercutio: he keeps secrets from the audience which makes him an intriguing figure. What the secrets actually are is almost irrelevant; what's important is that he's withholding something. I think that's why people are fond of portrayals of Mercutio as a homosexual, but I think it's a mistake to make the hidden thing terribly obvious. The hidden thing should be entirely hidden. The audience should always want to know what is going on, and they shouldn’t always be able to. You offer and withhold something at the same time. Like Mercutio says, ‘A visor for a visor…’ [I.4]

Appearance

I haven’t seen how my costume is coming along but I’m never particularly anxious about that. I don’t find it enormously helpful to have early on nor do I get thrown when it turns up and you have to move in a different way. Those clothes very much define the way you move. You have to hold yourself straight. One good thing that I discovered this week is that I’ll be allowed to shave! Mercutio was going to have facial hair but I look like Private Walker [from Dad's Army] with a moustache, which I think is wrong for the character! [laughs] For a while, I was to have a moustache but Tom and Stef [Romeo and Benvolio] were allowed to shave – I thought that was good because it suggested Mercutio was slightly older than the others. Perhaps it also made me look like I’m more involved in this world, which might add something when Mercutio dies and they carry on. There's value in the characters looking different, but I don’t want Mercutio to seem vain… of course, he is vain to some extent but not in the same way that someone like Tybalt is vain. There's a kind of vigorous unpretension about Mercutio. He may be vain in the sense that he dresses well and he's quite flashy, but he's not pretentious. Facial hair would be difficult on Mercutio because I think that nowadays we live in a society where most people are clean-shaven and it's a conscious decision to grow facial hair. One imagines the reverse would be true in the Elizabethan era; you just let the stuff grow unless you decided otherwise– if you were trying to look young and boyish. I suppose by that rationale Mercutio should have facial hair, a big full beard that's kept in trim without being over the top. But nowadays, for a modern audience, that doesn’t necessarily work… the fact is my facial hair looked preposterous and I’m really pleased to be shaving it all off!

Next step

We’ll start to run the play soon. I’m very nervous about this at the moment, though I don’t know why… there always comes a point in the rehearsal process when you’ve probed every scene and, like Pandora's box, everything has spilt out. Now I’ve got all these different ideas about every single scene and I want to try and pull them together so they can actually feed into the play. Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] works in a way that actively discourages actors from making those decisions too early in the rehearsal process: he constantly gives you new exercises to do instead of letting you get things bedded in. The exercises help you explore new possibilities for a character, but you can feel a bit discombobulated, a bit nervous that things are not settled. I’m not a really a nervy actor. Obviously, going on stage in front of a lot of people makes you nervous because you want to get it right – it's like any situation where you’ve done a lot of preparation and you want to live up to that preparation - but I don’t get nervous before every show. I know some actors who do and it never leaves them, but I’m a very cold fish!

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Rehearsal Notes 4

  • Current thoughts
  • Getting used to original practices clothing
  • Technical rehearsals
  • Audiences
  • Fight
  • First night
  • Now

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 thoughts

I got very lost at the end of rehearsals. I was getting very unhappy and very confused. That's something that hasn’t necessarily sorted itself out and I don’t know why. I think that when one works on individual scenes, one thinks about the character as a whole, but as you start running things together, you suddenly realise that the sum of the parts that you’ve been working on doesn’t necessarily add up to the performance that you expect it will. In one sense, that's a good thing because the people's personalities are not always unified: we all exhibit enormously different sides of ourselves in different circumstances. One doesn’t necessarily need to be overly worried about the level of consistency in one's characterisation. Having said that, I realised I was getting very aggressive and, more often than not, Mercutio was slightly violent. I don’t quite know why. You don’t necessarily want to lose the specific things you’re doing that may give such an aggressive impression, but I did want him to be a little more kind. You get on the stage and with the Globe audience it's easy to get swept up and away: I feel rather out of control.

Getting used to clothing

The principal thing is to get used to the costume as soon as possible, because it is so restrictive in terms of how you move. That's quite handy in a way; it informs your movement a lot and I found it made me more aristocratic all of a sudden. You’re standing in such an erect fashion that it feels like you’re back at school – I found myself talking in the way I might have done when I was at public school. I found myself becoming much more refined, and obviously because Mercutio is related to the Prince, that's not necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, you want to appeal to the audience too so I’ve been consciously pulling that back out again.

The costume completely alters your physicality and sword fighting is nigh-on impossible. The clothing has also influenced me in other ways that I wasn’t really expecting. I think I’ve got slightly more camp as a result of the costume because inevitably you have to stand as an Elizabethan gentleman would have done, with his hand on his hip. I have a very large pouffe or whatever you call it around the hips, which means I actually have to put my hand on the bottom of my ribs and that becomes very fey. You can’t put your other hand down, so it remains up. In the Elizabethan period, there's no reason why this would look effeminate or camp, but I think it does look that way to a contemporary eye. Even though you’ve got your cards out and you’re going to fight with swords, you’re standing in a terribly refined and delicate way. In your own contemporary mind you feel this is a bit fey and you worry that a contemporary eye will see it in the same way. That's something I have to sort of push to the back of my mind.

I think my costume is very impressive. I quite like the fact that the audience don’t see my hat or cape in the first scene [I.4]. I’m very conscious that I must cut a more impressive figure in the scene when I do come on fully regaled [II.4] and the hat and cape help with that, especially after the second scene [II.1] when I’m semi-drunk and out of control, slightly crazed. There's a sudden shift to a much more self-contained and impressive character.

Technical rehearsal

Having worked here before, I was conscious of the fact that things change a little bit in the transition from the rehearsal room to the stage, because you realise that you have more space than you think you did. The shape of the stage is marked out on the rehearsal room floor, but the ceiling in IJ3 [rehearsal room] is lower and that restricts you. It makes you smaller in a peculiar way, so when you get onto the stage you suddenly feel able to move about more freely although you have exactly the same amount of floor space. Changes like that are inevitable and not necessarily that interesting. It's nice to have people in during the technical process – there are tours coming through the theatre during the tech. You can start to get an idea about how audiences might react and how you will talk to them, but really it's nothing like having seven hundred Groundlings standing in the yard and people all around.

I think the tech is almost more meaningless for an actor here than it is in any other theatre, because in other modern theatres, the tech is when you start to realise where the lighting is and how the thing is going to look in terms of costume and design. At the Globe, there are no special lighting effects and there is no elaborate set that you need to work around. It's the audience that are really going to change everything and you don’t get them until the first night. I spent my entire time trying to imagine people being there but obviously you have no conception of how they will actually behave.

Audiences

We’re three performances in now and people react differently every time, but I’m starting to notice trends that you never could have predicted: the peculiar points that they find amusing or the peculiar points at which they go quiet. Earlier we were talking about the fact that ‘There's a French salutation to your French slop’ [II.4.43-4] has consistently got a laugh and I don’t know why. There's no way I could have predicted that would be one of the big lines. I don’t think the majority of people know that ‘slop’ was an Elizabethan word for loose trousers, though you get the general sense through gesture and tone. Maybe the sound of the word ‘slop’ is also funny. You couldn’t possibly expect to land all of Mercutio's jokes because of the different frame of reference; a lot of the puns aren’t readily accessible today, so a lot of his jokes or witticisms just go flat, as one expects them to. It's curious which ones do land. For instance, when Mercutio says

Why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. [III.1.16-20]

The audience seems to like ‘Hazel eyes’ but not the joke in the line before. I don’t think it's the way I’m saying them, although of course there's an element of timing. Personally I find beards quite amusing and so I thought the ‘beards’ line was more interesting than the bad pun on ‘hazel eyes’! We don’t tend to laugh at puns anymore. Normally we groan, so I found the reaction to that line quite surprising. At the moment I’m just playing against that laugh as hard as I can!

Fight

The fighting is intensely difficult in the costume, but in a good way I think. Initially I was rather worried and annoyed by the costumes because you just couldn’t move. Since then a) the costumes have loosened up, b) we’ve got used to them and c) you realise that you’re as inhibited as your opponent which makes it slightly better. I was most irritated when I was in full costume but Simon [Muller, Tybalt] was not; he was thus able to move more easily and he was going faster than me. I couldn’t move and I just thought ‘I can’t do this,’ but the moment he was trussed up in the same way, we realised we were constricted at the same points. The discrepancies in speed and so on evaporated because we were both fighting the costumes to the same degree. The fight has slowed down a lot and in that sense it's less athletic, but in another sense it's actually more athletic: your movements have to be much clearer and more precise to clarify the intention and the points of attack. You have to work harder to get the sword there.

The audiences have been responding well to the fight scenes. I’m always funny about stage-fighting because I don’t think I’ve seen a play yet in which I’ve been impressed with the sword-fighting. Maybe that is the result of my being an appalling audience-member and knowing a bit about sword-fighting, but generally I watch the fights and I never believe them. So the minute I have to do a stage-fight, I think ‘They [the audience] aren’t going to be impressed by this.’ But they seem to be, so that's good.

The first night (Preview)

I was so relaxed. I was completely, completely relaxed. I’m not a particularly nervy actor, but normally on a first night I’ve got a slight frisson of something; I can feel the adrenaline kicking around. This time I was just ice-cold and I think Stef [Rhys Meredith, Benvolio] was too… he's an actor I’ve worked with before and I think he does usually get nervous, but he just seemed completely calm. Tom [Burke, Romeo] seemed remarkably calm for somebody who was going on for his first night as Romeo. Some people might have been nervous but I didn’t notice it. Everything felt very relaxed and healthy in that respect. And walking out as Mercutio: I barely thought about it, I just went… the only thing that surprised me about the performance was how relaxed I was, and I felt slightly confused by that. You come offstage and the scene's just happened and you go ‘Oh well, that happened.’ It's very difficult to judge what you’re doing – you lack that keen, critical appreciation if you’re quite relaxed, I think, so after the first night I didn’t really know how things had gone. I noted that the audience didn’t laugh as much as I might have hoped, but they laughed as much as I expected – especially given that I’m not doing a kind of ‘comedic performance’ as such. Also, I was very conscious that I didn’t have an angle on what the audience were thinking. Normally I know – or delude myself that I know – what they’re thinking and what they’re attitude is towards my character, but this time I couldn’t put my finger on it. In a way that's good because I don’t want to be playing a particular thing that would prompt a generalised reaction: I don’t want to attempt to make people like me instead of trusting to the fact that Mercutio is a relatively likeable character. I want him to be somebody who is quite confusing and probably quite dislikeable at certain points, but he's missed when he's dead because he was interesting.

Feedback

My wife came to see the play but, as she says, she's sort of nervous coming and seeing it for the first time: she's checking up on all the things I’ve talked about and being slightly nervous for me, hoping that I don’t screw up, so she doesn’t really see the show for the first time. I think she enjoyed it, though she didn’t like my doing Queen Mab with the mask on [ready for Capulet's feast in the next scene, I.5]. Most of the audience at a first preview are hoping that the thing doesn’t fall apart, but most of the actors are just trying to get through it, so you’re not really seeing a performance in any sense. She’ll come and watch it when the show's bedded in and then she can actually concentrate on the play.

Now

I think the show has moved on a long way since then, but I don’t think I have particularly. I’m still scrabbling about a bit and trying to decide what I’m doing. I play about with things quite a lot; I like to find things in the moment. There were a couple of small things I found in the last two shows which I might think about using again. For instance, in the fight scene [III.1], Tybalt draws a very flashy three-pronged dagger and I laugh at it then mimic it with my hand. That worked quite well – don’t know where it came from. I’m still not happy with everything overall. I saw Johnny Depp's latest film yesterday, Secret Window. The film is boring but he's quite interesting because there's always something that he doesn’t show you. There's an unfathomable quality about him, a coolness. Part of me thinks I haven’t got that yet with Mercutio. One could be tempted to play lots of jokes and laugh a lot with this part, but in a sense that makes you sort of irritating and bumptious. As Tim [Carroll, master of Play] said at one point, Mercutio probably doesn’t know that he's being clever and witty – he just happens to be clever and witty. I’ve been laughing at the three-pronged knife and it feels rather false. The audience is laughing for a start, so I don’t need to. I’ll stop doing that from now on.

There are other bits where I’m laughing or making lots of noise and I’m thinking maybe that's unnecessary; it's better to find other points where I can be surprising or show his irreverence. It seems to work well when I pull cups out of my trousers [at the end of the party scene, I.5: Mercutio has managed to steal goblets from Capulet's house during the party by hiding them in his hose: the audience don’t see him steal them, but as the masquers leave, he takes them out of his trousers]. I think it would work better if I hadn’t been so noisy during the party scene. The more you draw attention to yourself ‘Oo-hoo look, exciting character’, the harder it is to actually surprise people, and I think Mercutio should be constantly surprising rather than constantly amusing. The things I’m playing around with are mostly things like that. Not to go ‘Ooh yes, that got a good laugh: must keep that’ but to think carefully about each of those choices. For example, I slid off the side of the stage yesterday and that went down well (as it often does when an actor does something peculiar and looks like they’ve almost fallen apart whilst doing it). I’d like to keep that in, though I’m not sure if I will: it seems a bit too exuberant… the audience like it, but I don’t know how exuberant I want Mercutio to be. The challenge now is balancing the exuberance out and thinking ‘Have I done that anywhere else?’ If I have done it somewhere else, don’t do it again or else it will become predictable. Mercutio can’t become predictable because then he becomes boring. Halfway through this week I’ll mentally go through the performance and start cutting things out. That should create some space for new ideas to grow.

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Rehearsal Notes 5

  • Original pronunciation
  • Advantages
  • Sounds like...
  • Pace
  • Run continues
  • Hampton Court Palace

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.

Preparing for performances in Original Pronunciation

David Crystal [Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor] produced a phonetic script of Romeo and Juliet in Early Modern English, then our voice coach – Charmian Hoare – held our hands as we went through it. Initially I found this a very difficult exercise because so many of the vowel sounds and the heavy ‘r’ are similar to accents that one knows from elsewhere – there's bits of Northern Irish in it, bits of Southern Irish (which I find particularly difficult to avoid) and bits of West Country. One gets led down blind alleys. Normally when you’re learning an accent, one of the most important things is cracking the rhythm of the accent, whereas with the original pronunciation we don’t have a rhythm. As we don’t have the rhythm and there are vowel sounds which remind you of modern accents, you suddenly get into an Irish rhythm and feel that's successful; you aren’t consciously listening to yourself, and you think that you’re doing rather well until somebody tells you that you’re being Irish as opposed to Elizabethan. That evaporated during the rehearsals with Charmian. There is actually an element of freedom in the pronunciation too, because David Crystal said there would have been variants; he's quite happy to base OP on our own accents. For some reason, Bette [Bourne, the Nurse] is speaking with a kind of Geordie accent, and as John Paul [Connolly, Peter] comes from Northern Ireland, he has a very Irish sound. I can almost hear the northern accent in Simon Muller [Tybalt], and the RP [Received Pronunciation] accent is still there for those of us who are RP speakers.

Advantages

I’ve found the performances in OP a really good exercise, for the same reasons Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] said he occasionally likes to do run-throughs in a different accent (especially once a play's up and going): it re-awakens your ear to the words that you’re saying. I’ve suddenly found words that maybe I’ve been neglecting. In this dialect ‘by’ and ‘my’ are shortened to ‘bi’ and ‘mi’ which means the word after them gains an added importance. That's a good reminder not to hit personal pronouns, but on occasion it suddenly changes a line. The ‘bi's suddenly re-awakened that for me, and I hope to keep that when we’ve finished OP.

Bizarrely, the Queen Mab speech is so much easier in this dialect than it is in RP. The West County ‘r’ makes it sound more rustic – that's probably a mistake, but it makes talking about things in the countryside like spider webs and fairy-tales much more believable. I feel believable saying this: it seems part of that world.

Sounds like…

It's hard to explain what OP sounds like. Take my lines in Act three, scene one, for example:

Nay, and we had two such, we should have none shortly, for one would kill the other. Thou? Why thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou will quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes.

In OP, they sound something like this:

Nay, an’ we ‘ad two such, we shd ‘av nown shortly fo’ the own’d kill the ourr. Thou, why thou wilt koral with a man that ‘ath a hair more or a hair less in’is beard ‘an thou ‘ast, thou’lt karol with a man for crackin’ nuts ‘avin no thoer reason than baceasue thou ‘ast ‘azel eyes...

I think I forgot there's no ‘qu’ there: it should be Karellin’, karellin’... It's quite hard. The real difficulty – especially given that we haven’t had a huge amount of time to practice – is that, in order to make it sound natural, you have to speak at the same sort of pace that you would with a normal accent. I find that when we’re running at pace and I’m thinking about the sense of what I’m saying, the problem is less the accent than the words that are pronounced differently like ‘own’ [one], ‘nown’ [none], ‘karellin’ [quarrelling]. There's a whole raft of peculiar exceptions to rules which we have to bear in mind – for instance, ‘another’ is never ‘another’, it's ‘anourr’ – and they’re very easy to drop by the way whilst one concentrates on the sense.

Pace

Apparently the Elizabethans dropped lots of consonants as well, so actually the accent encourages you to go quite quickly. It's very interesting listening to David Crystal speak; though he drops a lot of consonants, he hits all of the consonants he chooses to use. I find that fascinating. I suppose his ear is very well attuned, and he's reading it off a phonetic script. Just listening to him on the tape I realised how many consonants he was using. He's much easier to understand than a lot of us are at the moment. I think sometimes you can get sloppy when you try to be natural. You shouldn’t be trying to be natural; you should be natural.

I’m not nervous about the actual performances in OP; I think it's going to be very amusing and very interesting. I suppose it's rather like when Bette comes on stage first dressed as a woman; there's always this kind of laughter as people adjust to the fact that there is a man dressed as a woman. That subsides very quickly, though, and they just accept him as a character. At the start of the OP performances, I think there’ll be people who are not really listening to what we’re saying, so much as how we’re saying it. I’m lucky to that extent – it's Stef [Rhys Meredith, Benvolio] that’ll suffer most I expect. That part of the scene [I.1], with Montague and then Romeo, is the first time we really get to listen to someone talking, as opposed to the fighting earlier on.

Normal performances

Generally, the show's fine. It has been slowing down enormously, which is very annoying. I don’t really know where the extra time is coming from. Tim gave a company note that we should generally pick up our entrances and exits, and speak entrance lines right on the back of other people… hopefully that will help. One of the funny things about the Globe is that it's possible find things in your relationship with the audience which you then try to repeat; the attempt to repeat a moment slows you down a bit. The first time, whatever happened was the result of focus: you had the focus and you did something with it. The second time, you have to get the same focus to repeat what you did, which slows you down. That's why it never works the second time. I hope I don’t do that too much. I’m fairly confident in my relationship with the audience now, so I like to stamp on their laughs quite a lot and like to have as prickly a relationship with them as I have with all the other characters.

As a whole the audiences seem to be enjoying it. They seem focused. I’m slightly frustrated at the moment (as I always am in this theatre) because there's always so much more to find; you’re always trying to find more, rather than slipping back into the habit of doing something fairly similar to what the things you’ve done before. It's easy to come off after a scene and realise that you were sailing along. Tom [Burke, Romeo] changed something the other night, he tried something very different at the end of the Mab speech and I was fairly slow that night… I didn’t react to him in any useful way, which was FEEBLE. I was very cross with myself.

Next: Hampton Court Palace

Rehearsing again for Original Pronunciation performances kind of brought the company back together, and the move to Hampton Court Palace should shake things up. We’re going to perform in the Great Hall for a week or so, and the whole play will have to be effectively re-blocked for that. I know from touring Twelfth Night in America that everything becomes more fleet as a result of playing it in different shapes. Actors tend not to like it, but I think we should do it much more often because it forces you to be the character in your head to a greater extent. It also makes you react to the other actors to work out what you’re going to do. I think it's good to go and do it in a different theatre, because if you go and do something similar as an exercise, often people will play in exactly the same way; it's ‘just an exercise’ and it doesn’t impinge upon the way they’re playing their part. We’ll have to change things for Hampton Court though, because the space is completely different.

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'Ask Your Actor' Bulletin

This bulletin was composed with questions sent in by the schools that adopted James Garnon.

How do you cope with warm weather in costume?

It has been very, very warm in costume. The only way to cope is to sweat. A lot. And drink lots of water. We also have a bucket with cold flannels backstage which we slap on the back of our necks when we come off.

Do you think it is vital to go to Drama School if you want to be an actor?

It is not vital to go to Drama School; I know working actors who didn’t, but I think I’m right in saying that all of them wish they had. It is invaluable to have so long to really concentrate on developing your own skills. You also learn so much about how the industry works that is difficult to learn otherwise and can help you to get a good agent when you leave. Having a good agent really is vital.

What are your goals for the next twelve months?

I try not to set myself goals. As an actor one has so little power you are more likely to become frustrated than achieve specific ambitions. I have been offered Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream in February, however, and hope to do some TV before that and then I’d like nothing better than to return to The Globe next Spring/Summer. Here's hoping.

Would you like to play Romeo or do you think Mercutio is more interesting?

Romeo is a very much harder part to play than Mercutio. Not only is it longer and requires many more emotional states to be played, but the writing often makes Romeo less attractive than people think he should be, so audiences can be disappointed with the actor even if he plays it well. I also don’t think of myself as a leading young actor, more as a character actor. This may change but that is where I think I am now.

Do you have any special tips for learning lines?

All I do to learn lines is start with the first one, learn it, say it, move on to the next, learn it, say the first and second lines, move on to the next, learn it, say the first, second and third lines and so on and so on until I can say the whole thing. I have no tricks or tips. It is long and slow and painful and there it is (of course the longer you’ve been doing it the easier things go in). Oh! One tip with Shakespeare is to learn your lines beating out the poetry stress (called the iambic pentameter) which goes di-dum / di-dum / di-dum / di-dum / di-dum. That way you always know when you forget a word because it won’t scan.

We are putting on a production of ‘Grease’ at school in July – did you take part in any school productions when you were at school?

I did act at secondary school, yes, though never in a musical – not having the sweetest voice. I didn’t act much then but played Edward IV in Richard III by Shakespeare, and the Judge in a play called Whose Life is it Anyway? as well as lots of sketch/comedy shows we wrote. I didn’t act much at school because I think I was kind of put off by all the “theatrical types” that did. I was always quite shy at school. It took me a while to discover I had no need to be.

How do you deal with critic's reviews?

A critic is only one person in an audience of many. As an actor, you work for weeks on a play and have to tell yourself you know it better than anyone. If the critic says unkind things, you just read them and decide if they are right or not. If they are right you try and change it, and if they’re wrong, you ignore them. The key though is whether or not you think the audience as a whole is happy.

How did you become an actor?

When I left University and sat down and thought “What do I do well?”, “What could I do for the rest of my life?” I thought of journalism, and the Law and things like that, but all of them seemed to me to involve making people unhappy somehow. Hopefully an actor only makes people unhappy in plays and cannot hurt anyone. Besides, acting is fun, so I applied to Drama School and I was lucky and got accepted. That's all there is to it.

Which scenes do you find hardest to act?

For me, the hardest scenes to act are always changing. Just when you think you’re getting something right, you see something else that could be better. All scenes are the same like that. The hardest scenes to rehearse, however, are the ones you die in or kiss in or do something else that makes you feel embarrassed or silly. You just have to screw your courage up and forget about it.

Where did you train, and for how long?

I trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London for three years. It was fantastic. I was lucky and got an agent when I left, and have worked more or less ever since.

What's the difference between playing Mercutio at the Globe and in a more modern space?

Playing in the Globe is different mainly because you get to talk directly to the audience members. We have no stage lights so we can see them all and use them as people you talk about. The audience is always the biggest character in the play at the Globe. Mercutio is especially good fun to play here because I get to talk and play so much with that biggest of characters.

Thanks to Twyford C of E School and Esher High School.

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