The Nurse

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About Bette Bourne

This is Bette's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Last year, Bette played Gower in the Lyric Theatre's production of Pericles. He has performed in London, New York and Edinburgh as Quentin Crisp of Resident Alien, and has directed work with the Bloolips theatre company. His television credits include Storm in a Teacup, Caught Looking, A Little Bit of Lippy and Aristophanes.

Rehearsal notes 1

  • The Globe
  • Shakespeare experience
  • Casting
  • The Nurse: first thoughts
  • Playing a female character

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.

The Globe

I’ve been to about four plays here, I think: The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, the Scottish Play*, Julius Caesar, that's four isn’t it? At first I think I was rather sneering about the Globe, thinking it was a tourist attraction. Then I came to see a play here ... particularly when I saw The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, I switched onto it as a place. People aren’t coming to see some old dead relics in the British Museum, they’re coming to see something that's living and so that's why I’m pleased to be here. I think from what I hear about the audience movement, particularly the groundlings, it's a little unnerving to have them so close and shifting about on three sides, but we’ll see. I mean, I’ve done a lot of cabaret and direct audience stuff, so we’ll see how that works out. I’m kind of looking forward to it and kind of terrified.

Shakespeare Experience

The first big Shakespearean role I played was in Southwark here at The George Inn (that's a very old pub which has a courtyard and a loading platform); I was sixteen and we played Romeo and Juliet on the platform. I did a lot of Shakespearean work in the South East London music festival in my teens and then I finally got into the Central School and did A Winter's Tale and various things there. More recently, I played Jaques in Regent's Park [As You Like It ]. I’ve been in the Scottish Play three times in three different theatres, played Hamlet when I was seventeen in London. More lately... I need to look at the list of plays: I’ve done loads of them...

Casting

Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] saw me in Neil Bartlett's production of Pericles last year and liked what I did, so that's why I’m here. And also Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] and I have been talking about me working here over the last five or six years, but nothing suitable came up: there was something in 2000 which I didn’t feel right for, and so four years later we found something.

The Nurse: first thoughts

What draws me to it? It's a marvellous part! I’ve seen a couple of wonderful nurses when I was young and then I got into playing more women's parts like Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. I’m very drawn to it; the Nurse is quite a complicated woman: she's sort of shockingly delicate at certain points and madly crude in others. I used to think she was stupid and I don’t think that's quite true, I think she sort of suddenly realises that Romeo and Juliet are absolutely serious to the point of death. I think she realises that there's something extraordinarily powerful here that she hasn’t thought about before. She also likes to get her say in and wants to be part of everything in a sense.

As was pointed out this morning by Tim Carroll, the Nurse actually risks her life by carrying the cords, by knowing about this marriage that is not totally illegal, but is completely against the parents’ wishes. Both houses loathe each other and it's a very dangerous situation for the nurse: there's no pension in those days, she's got to watch out for herself. When push comes to shove in Act three and she realises Juliet's got to marry Paris, she says ‘Well, go on be Mrs. Paris’. I’m revising my opinions as we go along. I don’t know who this woman is, and there's all sorts things in there that need to be dug out. There's also this thing about how it changes - not in any silly way, but with the subtle dynamic that is the relationship between the actor and the audience. That's going to govern a lot of how it's played eventually and interestingly and obviously and thank God, it’ll be different each time.

Playing a female character

Playing female parts is something I’ve been exploring ... in fact it's only quite recently that I’ve come to play women onstage. It's very different. I’ve played women characters with my own company ‘Bloolips’ for twenty years but I never tried to convince the audience that I was a woman: always I wore high heels but certainly no false breasts or false hips or anything like that, because at that point in the 1970s and 1980s there was so much heavy drag around that seemed very sexist, and I wanted to get away from that. Playing a woman makes me feel very strong; you’re chipping away at the edifice of gender as a stereotype. There were no actresses on the Elizabethan stage so men played all the female parts: it's interesting that early modern constructions of gender were probably different and perhaps had more flexibility.

Playing a woman on the stage has great power in a curious way, but you have to be careful not to get too larky with the groundlings, which is very easily done. I’ve seen it done here and not approved of it really, but it was going on in Elizabethan times: Hamlet warns the troupe that come to Elsinore about playing to the crowd:

...let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
(III.2, Hamlet)

then he says “go make you ready.” I do have to watch my ‘pitiful ambition’, which is overwhelming. No, I think I’m probably not a particularly ambitious person, but I am ambitious to get it right. I spend a lot of time trying to make it truthful, so that I eventually feel the life in the part, that's what I’m looking for, the life in the part, and I think the nurse is a very complete picture, and I’ve got to find all that.

*Traditionally it is bad luck to say ‘Macbeth’ inside a theatre, so actors often call it ‘the Scottish play’.

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Activities 1

  • Digging for character
  • Comparing spaces
  • Playing a woman

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

Digging for character
Materials: play text, paper, pen (spade not essential)
Time: 30 minutes
Type: whole class activity

Bette says there's a lot that needs to be ‘dug out’ of the Nurse's character. The metaphor suggests that there is more to the Nurse than first meets the eye; we have to dig deeper into the text to find a complete picture of her character.

1) Bette describes the Nurse as a combination of apparent opposites: she is both ‘shockingly delicate and madly crude’. Write down your first impressions of the Nurse then take another look at scenes where she ‘gets her say in’ – how does she behave at the end of the feast (I.5), on Juliet's embassy to Romeo (II.4), or when she encounters Lord Capulet (III.5)? Add any unexpected discoveries about her character to your notes, with examples from the text to support your ideas. You might like to look back over Bette's first impressions for ideas. Why do you think Shakespeare decided to write the Nurse's character in such a way? Do you agree with Bette's statement about the shocking delicacy of the Nurse? Email Bette your notes at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com so he can compare them with his own interpretation.

1b) One of Shakespeare's main sources for Romeo and Juliet was Arthur Brooke's poem ‘The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet’ (1562)*. If you want to dig deeper into the character of Shakespeare's Nurse, you could try looking at the Nurse in Brooke's poem: comparing Shakespeare's plays with his sources often provides useful clues about his characters and the story he wanted to tell. In Brooke's poem, does the Nurse advise Juliet to marry Paris at the equivalent of III.5? Is the Nurse present when Lord Capulet rages at his daughter? How does Shakespeare's Nurse differ from Brooke's Nurse at these points? How do the adaptations affect your perception of the Nurse as a character?

  • You can find ’The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet’ in the Appendix to the Arden Romeo and Juliet (London, 1980) ed. Brian Gibbons.

Activity 2

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

Bette talks about the unique features of the Globe space he will have to take into account during his preparation. Over the next few weeks, Bette 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 and expect a different level of comfort) so on first night Bette 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, 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 do the audience sit or stand?

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

2) Discuss how these differences and similarities might affect Bette as an actor, and send in your advice to him at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com You might like to refer back to Bette's ideas as a starting point: how might the ‘pitiful ambition’ that Hamlet talks about at II.2 be accentuated by the close proximity of the actor and the audience in the Globe theatre? You could also read II.2 in Hamlet; does Shakespeare's prince give the players any other advice? How does this relate to a) the Elizabethan playhouses in which Hamlet was performed, and b) today's Globe Theatre and the contemporary actors and audience that inhabit it?

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 Bette at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com so he can add them to his notes.

Activity 3

Playing a woman
Materials: play text, paper, pen
Time: 30 minutes
Type: whole class activity

Bette is playing a female character in Romeo and Juliet. He mentions that on the Elizabethan stage there were no actresses so all of Shakespeare's women would have been played by men or boys.

1) Explore the modern context for Bette's Nurse: how does our perception of Bette as a man dressed as a woman inform our perceptions of the Nurse's character today? What set of social assumptions do we bring to the character when she is played by a man? Do these differ from the set of social assumptions we would bring to the production if the Nurse was played by a woman? How might these modern ‘readings’ of the Nurse affect our reading of the production?

2) Bette plays a female part in Romeo and Juliet although the Red Company is mixed: women have been cast in all the other female roles. Discuss and/or write a critique of these casting decisions. How does the casting of actresses relate to an ‘original practices’ style of production? There were no actresses on Shakespeare's stage and his audience accepted that men would play female roles. Today we expect actresses onstage: this is one of our theatrical conventions. Do you think it is more or less ‘authentic’ to have a mixed cast at the Globe? Send in your ideas to Bette at globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

3) We have looked at modern contexts for Bette's Nurse: now try looking at possible Elizabethan contexts. What, as far as we know, would have been the Elizabethan response to the character of the Nurse? Remember to consider a range of opinion from the groundlings that had a special relationship with comic figures (see bulletin) to Puritan detractors like Phillip Stubbes who thought theatre and especially cross-dressing was devilish work. You might like to look up Stubbes’ book ‘The Anatomie of Abuses’ (1583). Email your responses to globelink@shakespearesglobe.com

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Rehearsal notes 2

  • Learning lines
  • Finding out about the Nurse

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.

Learning lines

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nurse, and it's now getting down to the scrubbing the floor part... learning lines. There's no easy way; it's like scrubbing floors. It's because I’m over sixty. When you’re seventeen, you can memorise long poems by Horace in a weekend. I did memorise these giant classic poems because I loved my ability to memorise: it was one thing that I could do. I came from a situation where I was very much told: ‘Acting? no, no, not for you... you go work in the post office, a telegraph boy’. I actually started in the printing trade, as an apprentice, but I realised it wasn’t quite my scene. After three months we had to commit to the whole seven years apprenticeship and I thought, ‘Forget this – I’m off to the theatre, where I’ll find a job that I want to do.’ Eventually I got a job as an electrician backstage at the Garrick Theatre, then I got into the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Anyway, that's slightly veering off the subject. Getting back to the slog of memorising: it's not really about getting older, it's about seeing more possibilities, and knowing that all your tricks and all your clever subtle games have got to be dropped eventually. You’ve got to get down to it, you’ve got to get to the bone. I admire truthful acting – people like Michael Gambon do it, and Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, and Vanessa Redgrave. Vanessa Redgrave is particularly fearless. Her Prospero here didn’t work for me personally but she's a great actress; I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do any thing apart from that that didn’t work wonderfully well. She can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Shaw, you name it: she can just do it.

One of the things I do when I start working on a part is I look at who's done it well, people whom I really admire. When I was young I listened to tapes of John Gielgud endlessly. All that stuff had been a great help; of course you do an impersonation of someone like that and it's never going to be anything other than you. You can learn about the orchestration, the map, the geography of the part, and that can give your confidence a sort of springboard. It's purely phrasing – where to breathe, which is really crucial because it's all about breathing, all of it. If you don’t have the breath, you don’t have the truth. If you start a phrase and you haven’t got enough breath, the second part of the phrase will not have the same ring of authenticity. I teach my students this all the time and they’re sick to death of hearing it. I’m sick to death of saying it, but it's there: authenticity is governed by breath, the tone is controlled by the breath, and the tone must be on the breath for authenticity. Again and again you forget, and again and again, like the waves of the sea, you keep coming back to the fact.

Finding out about the Nurse

I feel at the moment with the nurse I know nothing – it's a genuine feeling, I’m not faking it and I’m not saying it because it sounds good. Every time you come to a new part, you feel… well, you just go to the loo a lot; the terror pitch is so high, with me anyway. You can do this wonderful speech

Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.
Susan and she – God rest all Christian souls! –
Were of an age.
(I.3)

You can make it sound acceptable, and then suddenly you’re looking out into the audience and you see someone stifling a yawn or just a look in their eye admiring the general scene, but not really listening. Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director and Master of Words for the Red Company] compared it to a tape that you can pause: everyone moves and then suddenly they’re all still because they’re all drawn at the same moment. I’ve got a bit of a chest problem at the moment – a cough – and so I can’t really do much of this as I’d like, but one of the things I’m working on is the laughter in the nurse. It's very much coming from her soul. I think she is actually utterly selfish in relation to Juliet. She has no choice; there were no pensions. If that kid gets into trouble, the nurse could be in serious legal trouble. I found all that stuff with Ruth [a member of the Tudor Group] yesterday very helpful. She explained that it would have been very difficult for the Nurse to get her job. The Nurse just happened to be lactating at the right moment; her daughter Susan had just died, and Juliet had just been born. The Nurse would have also had to be somebody of impeccable moral standards to be acceptable; by and large she is, by the standards of the time I think she certainly would have high moral standards. There are deeper moral standards which Romeo and Juliet hold to irrespective of other pressures and it costs them their lives, but the nurse is a survivor. I’m much more like the nurse, I’m a survivor: if it's me or you, I’m afraid it's going be me. I think that's a difficult thing to find in yourself. Eventually it becomes clear in the text that she says to the girl: ‘You’ve got this guy with loads of money, not bad looking... He's got money, you’ll have to have a couple of children...’ Of course, to any young person seeing the play, that scene is absolutely horrendous – it's horrific. However I think we all have the potential to be very charming on the outside and as hard as nails underneath, when it comes to self-survival. That's what the nurse is like, I think.

When the Tudor Group first came in to talk to us during rehearsal, I thought they were crazy. They live for part of the year as Tudors would have actually lived and when they came in the room I thought ‘Oh lord.’ And then I thought, ‘No, hang on. There's something about them’ and I realised they are utterly authentic. I thought it was great. I was sorry I couldn’t stay for the swordsmanship, which I’m not at all interested in doing, but I’m very interested to see. I loved all the information she had. I was rather relieved that the nurse wouldn’t have to do enormously elaborate bows of greeting. I thought the Tudor Group were genuine scholars; there was something completely authentic about their clothes, and they had such conviction.

The next thing to do is learn the lines. For me, that doesn’t happen until I learn who the Nurse is, and that's a question of combing it through again and again and again until you want to hurl the script at the wall. It gets really vexing: you’re looking for this part and then you go through what I call the ‘Slough of Despond’, which we’ll meet next week, I expect. When you come out the other side and find what Edith Evans called ‘the life in the part’ – which sounds a very simple thing, but actually it's a very long road – suddenly you think ‘What was all the fuss about? This is a doddle.’ But you have to go through that nightmare... It’ll come... You just feel sometimes you’re never going to get it. When you open in front of a crowd, that's when the work really begins, for me. When you get out in front of a crowd, you’re in the tub, and hopefully it's a nice warm bath rather than ice-cubes...

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Rehearsal notes 3

  • About the Nurse: ‘as hard as nails’
  • Authenticity
  • Directions & revelation
  • The Nurse: femininity

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.

About the Nurse: 'as hard as nails'

This morning we did a run of the second half of the play, and all the time we had to point at the person (on or offstage) whom we were trying to effect with our words or movements. It was exhausting: you have to really concentrate all the time, trying to remember who it is that you’re playing and who you are trying to effect. I found it very strenuous. Sometimes I found myself pointing in quite the wrong direction, and at other times you find you’re pointing at yourself – the Nurse is persuading herself a lot of the time; I’ve discovered that today. She's got lots of jolly business in the first half of the play but when it comes to the crunch, she abandons Romeo and Juliet and would abandon anyone else to save herself. She could be hung for what she's done – she's encouraging a child of thirteen and however many months to commit bigamy in Fifteenth or Sixteenth Century Verona. That's truly shocking. The Prince of Verona has the power of life and death and she’d certainly be hung. She's stupidly romantic about setting up the marriage between Romeo and Juliet – I think a parallel today would be someone who wants the Hollywood fantasy wedding rather than the marriage itself – but at the same time she's as hard as nails. It sounds like a contradiction, but that's the way life is – people aren’t simplified or straightforward.

Romeo and Juliet is a great love story and the Nurse is a marvellous part, but it's more complex than I ever dreamed. A lot of that's to do with her harsher side. She's much slyer and crueller than I expected. She's rather banal, rather casual in her cruelty; she's not a Machiavel like Richard III, who thinks all his plans out then executes them. I can identify with that – I’m sure everyone has been thoughtlessly cruel at some stage in their lives. Actually I’m finding that I know the Nurse very well because there is a lot of me in her; those are the things that you discover and those are the things that are hard to reveal onstage.

Authenticity

Other things that I’ve been looking at more closely are the male and female aspects of the part – the issues raised when a man plays a female character. I’m thinking ‘Oh, to play a female I’ve got to do certain things’ and at the same time, you’ve got to be truthful and reveal yourself: I am a man. That's what makes it interesting; the question of how you go about being authentic. Boys that played females roles in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and some older man would have probably played the Nurse, so it's not necessary to ‘put on’ as much femininity as you think at first. For example my masculine voice – which I used this morning in rehearsal – is quite different from my feminine voice, and it's much more real and it's much more authentic because it's me. But it takes a lot of effort to get to the stage where I can use that real voice… I’m surrounded by defensive layers which are like great tractor tyres and it takes a clever director to get through! I think acting is most interesting when the person opens up and reveals something of themselves in their character, but that's the hard part and it's scary. I don’t want audiences to know this, that, and the other about me. However, any play (but especially Shakespeare) goes flat if you’re not prepared to take the risk.

Direction & revelations

I trained very early on and that's got its downside because you develop tricks, some of which are quite subtle but they’re still just tricks and a good director cuts through all of that and says ‘Hey, what's behind that one?’ He keeps pushing aside those curtains. During Pericles, the director kept saying to me ‘No acting, no acting’ – every day – which nearly drove me frantic but it's good to insist on getting to the root. You need a lot of trust to do that: it might seem like a director is dismissing your suggestions or ideas but that makes you work harder. The results when you do get to the core can be astonishing.

Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] doesn’t take any nonsense. The other day I was sitting in the Green Room with Kananu [Kirimi, Juliet] before we started work on the cords scene [III.2] and I said ‘Oh, I suppose we’ve got a lot of weeping and wailing on this morning, haven’t we?’ Tim was behind me – I didn’t see him – and he came down on me like a ton of bricks [bangs on the table]: ‘So you’ve decided what this scene is going to be all about?’ I was quite defensive at first and he just nodded and grinned. We all went upstairs to the rehearsal room and got on with some work, and of course, the scene wasn’t about weeping and wailing – it was about the very different things going on behind the noise. The Nurse is afraid for her own skin; in the first instance, she probably wants to change Juliet's mind and make her see that marrying Romeo was incredibly dangerous. Yet she ends up promising to bring the young couple together again… there's a lot going on beneath the surface there.

A wonderful revelation during that session on Act three, scene two was that I could be myself. I felt that my personality fused with the character. However, Tim still calls you by your own name rather than the character's name – I’m ‘Bette’ rather than ‘the Nurse’. At the beginning of rehearsals I found this quite annoying because I like to be called by my character name, but Tim has his reasons: by using your own name quite a lot, I think he's bringing you to the character somehow. The character is more than a name to be assumed just like that. So Tim's choice is quite a subtle thing. At the same time he does refer to me as ‘her’, which I quite like. In no way am I pretending to be a woman in my real life, but ‘she’ fits with the part and it also raises interesting questions about our gender roles, onstage and in everyday life. I’m not an effeminate person, though I can switch femininity on and off which is great fun. The Nurse is quite butch – it's not a greatly feminine role. She can be quite butch and I was brought up to be quite butch too. As I said, I’m discovering similarities…

The Nurse: femininity

I think the maternal ‘mumsy’ aspects of the Nurse are rather fake. She's completely sentimental – that line about Tybalt being ‘the best friend I ever had’ is utter nonsense. I doubt if Tybalt even knew her name ... he might have tipped her once or introduced her to the boss, something like that which would have been a big deal to her, but that he wouldn’t have given a second thought. This ‘best friend’ rubbish is all in the Nurse's mind. It's not in Tybalt's mind. He's a fiery young man who feels he's going to defend the Capulet's honour against Romeo's outrageous insult, and who then gets into all sorts of trouble. Tybalt has things other than the Nurse on his mind. But no, the Nurse isn’t particularly feminine. I think women are often more masculine than representations allow. We were talking about this idea of a more ambiguous gender in rehearsal last week; how you sometimes can’t tell with some older couples which is the man and which is the woman – they both look similar. Since the 1970s, the male/female gender divide has become less important and more flexible. From my point of view, the important thing is the character and their motives; what you want from other characters, who you’re trying to effect, like in the pointing game. Those exercises are very useful, very interesting. I think the paramount thing is making the verse come alive and these are stepping-stones towards that. I’ve never done them before and I’m finding them a great help. Making the text work is the ultimate goal and we’re all battling towards that at the moment.

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Rehearsal notes 4

  • Difficult
  • Breakthrough

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.

Difficult

I’m in what Winston Churchill called ‘the black dog’, which is the worst part of the process. It's the part where you feel you don’t know the character at all and that you’ve done it all wrong. It happens every time and it always feels like it's too late to do anything about it. There are so many choices but there's so little time. Only one right choice will have an authenticity about it – when you’ve found that you begin to feel things rather than pretending. At the moment, I’m faking every feeling and reaction for the Nurse and panic is beginning to emerge – it's quite scary to think we’re so far through the rehearsal period. ‘Faking it’ is like neatly papering over the cracks in a wall: when it comes to the crunch, you have to take all of the wallpaper off and get back to the structure underneath so you can fix those cracks. If the bricks and girders are not secure then your house will fall down. The same is true of a character.

Dame Edith Evans was working with Sir Tyrone Guthrie and he said to her in one rehearsal, ‘You’re honking Edith, you’re honking’. She knew exactly what he meant: she was putting on a very good show, but it didn’t actually mean anything because she could do that any time she liked. It was the effects. She said ‘No, I’m kneading’ – she was a woman who liked to cook, and she said ‘I’m kneading’. That's a better image for the Nurse than the building image: until you’ve kneaded the dough, the pastry or the bread you’re making won’t come out right. Kneading is a process you have to go through to get to the truth. That involves revealing something of yourself, which is the hardest bit: there are bits of the Nurse that you can know and bits that you can’t know – those are the bits you stumble over. I feel like I’ve gone over the text a million times…

Breakthrough

One bit started to glimmer to life this morning as I was talking to Tim [Carroll, Master of Play]. I’m telling Juliet that Paris is “a lovely gentleman” [III.5.219] and that's completely fake; the Nurse doesn’t care what Paris is like and at that point she doesn’t care about Juliet. She's saving her skin; it's almost lethal and extremely exciting to play. I’m putting one over on this child – Juliet is only thirteen and a half or fourteen – and I’m advising her to go for this guy who seems like a nice boy in everything he says, but he's not the one. Romeo is the one she wants in every respect and neither she nor Romeo has any sense of compromise whatsoever. The whole play smells of passion, extraordinary passion; the Nurse is a survivor in the midst of this. Something about her advice to Juliet at that point [III.5.214-26] clicked with me. The Nurse is acting in this scene [III.5] and because I know about that, it's easier. That is one of the few moments that does feel right.

There's added pressure when people expect you to be funny. I’ve done comedy things before and I’ve been booked for the Nurse, so they want it funny as well. Funny is harder – and there's pressure because it's a famously funny part (and it is; it's glorious) – but it's got to seem utterly effortless, as if I’ve made up all the ideas and the dialogue and it's me. What I’m doing is pulling this thing to me and I’m going towards it and it's got to fit like a glove.

I’m aware I’ve got some famous precedents in this role but I’ve got to make the part mine; I can’t act another famous actor acting it. However I think you can use other people's performances as a springboard: I agree with Vanessa Redgrave when she says ‘Well, I always copy other people.’ Of course, the idea of Vanessa Redgrave being like anybody else is completely absurd; she's always Vanessa Redgrave, but she quite rightly says it's a good springboard. Actually there's another great thing she says about trust and finding your character: it's like taking all these little dogs out on a lead – I think she calls them her poodles – and they stretch and stretch and stretch, and they pull in different ways, and then suddenly they all understand the pace and they all start to go forward together. It's just another image of the struggle. The problem is that there are no shortcuts. That's what's wonderful about these texts, their richness and strangeness... I’ve got this longish speech at the beginning [I.3.17-49] – I’m trying not to think of it as a long speech – but I’ve looked at it hundreds of times and I’m still finding the shape of it. Take a sculpting image: you can sculpt and sculpt and sculpt and sculpt, and you look at it and look at it, and it's still stone; it's still dead. Then you go and see Brancusi next door [at Tate Modern Gallery] and there's a child's head on the side: it's alive, it's asleep, it's made of stone, it's a miracle...

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Rehearsal notes 5

  • Press Night
  • Laughs
  • Technical rehearsal
  • Audiences
  • Feedback

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.

Press Night

I’m surrounded by floral tributes! We had our opening last night, which everyone pretended to ignore. That's harder when people come round and mention that they’ll be there watching. ‘We’re in tonight’ – it's always well meant and some people do like to know when their friends or associates are in, but I’m neurotic about it. You can’t shake the feeling that people are coming to judge you. Far from being bullet-proof, I’m more terrified by the prospect of going out onstage as I get older: experience doesn’t make you less nervous. Now, I’m over sixty but in about an hour I shall still feel a slight sickness in the stomach, I’ll be scrambling through my script, wondering if I know the lines. That is a challenge in itself, to get all the lines in the right order every night.

Laughs

I’ve been finding the comedy in Act two, scene four, a bit difficult because Tom [Burke, Romeo] walks away from me as I’m trying to explain to him what Juliet said: 'I desire some confidence with you' [II.4.124]. I had a chat to Tim about it and we decided to keep things as they were. Although the Nurse is a comic character to a certain extent, it is more important that the story of the play goes forward and I think Romeo's movement away from the Nurse just there does help to keep pace up. In one sense, it's a relief that you don’t have to be funny all the time: you don’t have to go for every laugh. If you’re known for doing comedy then there's the expectation of laughs somehow, but of course you can go and do things that aren’t necessarily comic. In fact, the nurse is quite a frightening character. She's like the Friar in that respect: I think they both let Romeo and Juliet down respectively. The Nurse lets Juliet down in terms of real values and the Friar lets Romeo down and then leaves Juliet in the tomb in this stupid, cowardly way because like the Nurse, he's basically self-seeking.

Technical rehearsal

The tech was much more complicated than I expected, largely from a staging point of view. Mark Rylance [Artistic Director, Shakespeare's Globe] did go over the stage with us when we first came, but when you get to point of doing technical runs, everything has to change a bit. For example, the centre bit of the stage [upstage of the two pillars, between the pillars and the central doors] is probably one of the strongest positions because everybody in the audience can see you all the way round in the circle. Positioning on that stage was something I hadn’t thought very much about until we started the tech; that was something that Tim went over that with us the other day. You’ve also got learn how to make your frock work – your costume, or clothes as they’re called here. They’re based on designs from the 1590s, so the breathing becomes rather interesting! I wore corsets throughout rehearsals to get used to the restriction, but wearing them every night all evening for the entire play is a rather different matter: it's very difficult to reserve breath effortlessly. The thing about breathing is that if you don’t take enough breath for a sentence, the second or third part of the sentence gets thinner because you don’t have enough breath to see it through. The result of that is a lack of vitality, which means that the audience doesn’t listen as intently to the last part of the sentence as they do to the first part of the sentence. Say you have a speech with a sentence of say 8 lines of blank verse. You’ve got to get more interesting, not less, because often the point is towards the end of the sentence. It's like in Oscar Wilde where one says ‘Well, aim for the end of the lines,’ and you can’t do that if you don’t have enough breath.

For me, the Tech is quite technical. I never accept that technical rehearsal is just for the technicians: I’m an actor and I want my tech too, my time in the tech (as I pointed out when we were being encouraged to get on with it!). I always think it would be a good idea to have a run-through just for the actors – not for the director, the assistant director, stage manager, technicians, the musicians, or photographers. That is – to my mind – essential. The other thing is that I like a production to be left alone for the last four/five days; I like it when directors don’t give any notes in that period, just let it cook and see what happens. Lots of amazing things cook, especially during the preview period and here we had seven or eight previews: it was a wonderful luxury to have so many previews because they’re like public rehearsals.

Audiences

They’ve been thunderously wonderful. Here there's a feeling that there's a built-in enthusiasm; that's very different from any other theatre I’ve worked in. They’re very much here for you. They’re very much on the side of the performers, and I think it's to do with everybody being able to see everyone else – in the house and on the stage – there aren’t any divisions. It's all in daylight – or early evening light – so even in evening shows the focus is still all around. It's not just on the stage, so people come and there's a slightly jamboree atmosphere. People come and it's like going to a pop-concert: there's this incredible expectancy in the air, which is quite unique – especially in Shakespeare. People usually sit there in the dark and they think ‘I’ve paid rather a lot for this seat, you’d better be good!’

In most respects, the proximity between the actors and the audience is great, but there have been a couple of shows where I’ve found it rather distracting to have people talking to each other or explaining what's going on right next to me – especially in the scene where Capulet berates Juliet [III.5] when I’m standing on the side of the stage and Lady Capulet is over on the other side and by my left heel there is someone happily chatting away! It makes the difficult scenes even tougher. If the action is electrifying then quiet does descend, but there are some things that can't be helped: if someone's translating the show for somebody else then there is nothing you can do to get an absolute hush.

Press

I pretend that I don’t read the critics’ reviews - I think that's fairly normal for actors. What I do instead is I wait to hear on the grapevine around the theatre whether a reviewer has been very kind about me and then I read the review. No one tells each other if someone's said something poisonous about you. Unless you ask, then you’re in really deep trouble. I don’t think critics feature in the same way here as they do at other theatres because people come to the Globe for the event. It's not like going to a play anywhere else; it's going to an event. That's the strongest feeling I get here. It's open-air, everyone can see each other, and people are standing with their drinks or their ice creams. I got quite a shock when I saw the litter on the floor after one show.

Feedback

Instead of looking at reviews, I look to my partner for constructive criticism and feedback. Otherwise, friends and other actors don’t usually say anything unless you ask ‘Do you have any notes for me?’ You might ring them up the next day if they’re experienced, if you like them and rely on them and you know that they’re not going to lie to you. They’re going to say something like ‘Well, I didn’t understand why you did that,’ and you’re going to explain and discuss it and ignore the advice. It's your choice up to a point: of course, when you go into a production you agree to be directed by that director.

Tim's open to suggestions, though: I ask him ‘Are you very attached to this idea?’ and he always says ‘No, not particularly, if you want to try something else.’ He's keen on keeping the air coming into the production. He watches the actors do it and things grow from that, like seedlings. I prefer to be left alone for the last four days of rehearsal unless something's really wrong – unless you’ve completely changed the character and it's totally screwing up the production. It's especially nice to be left alone a bit when you’ve had a seven-week rehearsal process as we’ve had – then you can begin taking notes again during the previews

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