Gratiano

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Mark Rice-Oxley plays Gratiano

Theatre includes The Office Project at the Young Vic, Pool (No Water) for Frantic Assembly, The Romans In Britain at the Crucible, The Life of Galileo at the Birmingham Rep, David Copperfield at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, The Entertainer at Liverpool Playhouse, The Comedy of Errors at Bristol Old Vic, Cuckoos at the Barbican, The Dwarfs at the Tricycle, Workers Writes at the Royal Court Theatre, The Danny Crowe Show at the Bush Theatre and Cressida for the Almeida. On TV Mark has appeared in Holby City, The Dwarfs, Mersey Beat, Judge John Deed, In Deep, In His Life: The John Lennon Story, and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.

Bulletin 1

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.

Becoming An Actor
I have always wanted to be an actor. When I was young I was in a youth theatre and I spent the whole time in school wanting to be an actor. After school I went to the University of Birmingham. I spent the entire time doing plays and acting. I went to drama school after that and did three training years at Webber Douglas.

I left drama school seven years ago now. When I left I thought I would be doing lots of Shakespeare as my training was very much a ‘classical training’ That didn’t really happen! I did a lot of TV, playing dodgy scousers, as I am from Liverpool so I can do the accent. I was in Mersey Beat, Judge John Deed and In Deep.

I’ve done a lot of new plays, which is really liberating. Doing a play that no one has seen before means that there are no preconceptions of it. You tend not to get criticised by the critics, because they don’t really know what you are supposed to be doing. If you have a limp and a silly voice then they think that’s what the character’s supposed to be like.

It is very different when you do Shakespeare. People may have seen the play a few times already. The audience are thinking about what you are doing with this particular production. They may have a strong idea of your character.

Performing Shakespeare
I have only done one other professional Shakespeare production before, The Comedy of Errors at the Bristol Old Vic. I was one of the Dromios. I find Shakespeare quite difficult It is so different from modern plays. It is easy to feel that the language controls you, rather than you controlling it; so the process of rehearsal is different.

You have all these ideas about your character and your role within the play, but then you find that you have got so few lines, or in terms of the amount of ideas that you have got your lines are so much fewer, and you think: ‘I don’t know if I crammed all that I thought of, about the character, in!’

Before I went to drama school I thought that how good your part was depended on how many lines you had. I soon learnt that your time on stage was the measure of how good your part was. You may not be speaking but if you are on stage you are telling a story and you are interacting. I was taught that acting was about listening and responding. You can listen and respond without any lines. For example, I was in The Entertainer by John Osbourne, and my character didn’t have lots of lines, but was on stage for long periods and you think: ‘yeah this is amazing!’ Having all those reactions and feeling and responding to what’s going on, it doesn’t matter if you are speaking.

Not having done loads of Shakespeare I feel you can slightly lose that when performing in his plays. The person who is speaking is very important. Maybe it is because there are longer speeches, but you feel like if you do too much when you are not speaking then you risk Shakespearean overacting.

The Merchant of Venice
I am familiar with The Merchant of Venice because I played Lorenzo at Drama School. It wasn’t a part I got on with very well. I felt like Lorenzo was a romantic part and I wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying to achieve. I found it difficult. I like to see if there are any darker parts of a character or contradictions in a character to explore. When you are first thinking about playing a character you worry about consistency, over two or three or how ever many scenes. You want the audience to believe that you are the same person you were in the first scene. Once you realise that the audience want to believe in you, you realise it is actually much more interesting to show a different side of the character, when they loose their temper or when they are under dramatic circumstances (which of course is the whole point of a play.) I didn’t find those things in Lorenzo, but I did see them in Gratiano. He is so dark in the trial scene, when he is shouting at Shylock, he goes on and on and on, even when it has all been resolved. Everyone’s forgiving Shylock and saying: ‘oh we won’t kill you, we will let you off’ and he’s still going: ‘oh well I would have killed you and I would send you to the gallows!’ It is that kind of thing, that added to being a cheeky chappy, that makes you think: ‘yeah that’s the sort of part I want to be doing, because that contrast and that journey is really exciting.’

The First Week of Rehearsals
We have mainly been sitting round a table going through the text, and paraphrasing it line by line. With Shakespeare, you think you know what you are saying, but when you try and say it in modern English, you think: no, well hang on, this idea’s a bit more complicated than I thought! It is useful because sometimes in trying to explain what is in the script you realise that Shakespeare has written it so well, with so few words. It is also useful to get a sense of how to say lines. For example I have lines where I simple say: ‘Senior Antonio’. The whole line is just greeting him. You might think there is nothing in that, but then you find that actually, in the situation, what you are actually doing is: ‘alright mate’ or a ‘horray’ greeting. It reveals a character trait. It also tells me something about how I feel about Antonio.

Performing at the Globe
I think I feel excited and scared. We have had a little tour of the stage and that was very exciting. If you are going to do Shakespeare then where else do you want to be doing it? If I am good and it is going well then it will be amazing! Conversely, it could be terrifying. The fact that the audience aren’t in the dark, sitting quietly and behaving themselves, will be a new experience. In some theatres the audience can be quite far away, and you feel that your world of the stage is safe, and you are sort of cocooned away from the audience. To have them right there, and to be able to see them and really have an idea of how much they are enjoying themselves. You will be able to tell if they are bored!

Voice
I am a little bit concerned about my vocal style, but we are having voice work sessions. I am worried about getting the volume right, but there are also seventy five performances so keeping my voice throughout the run is a concern. I am also in the Jack Shepherd play Holding Fire, so there will certainly be a show everyday and sometimes two, and so it will be quite a vocal strain. Sometimes I have a tendency to shout and not use my voice in the best way, so that will be an issue. But I am seeing the vocal coach so hopefully it should be ok.

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Bulletin 2

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.

Rehearsals
We are still going through the play and paraphrasing the lines. Although we are starting to incorporate some singing and dancing sessions. There is going to be a big masque section in the play. I think the director feels that we talk about having a masque and prepare for a masque with costumes and torch bearers and this that and the other. You never actually see this masque in the show. So in this production you will see the masque! It’s in a particularly interesting place for my character because it’s just at the end of the scene where Antonio comes in and says to me: ‘Oh they are all waiting for you at the dock to go to Belmont.’ We are going to do the masque - dancing around and I’ll be getting more and more drunk and into it and more and more out of control. At the end of it I will be vomiting and I will have reached a complete low and be on my own on the stage! Then Antonio will come in, and we want to play it as a sad or thoughtful ending to the scene. You will see Antonio, who is a very lonely character, and you will hopefully also see that Gratiano is quite a lonely and sad character as well. That will emphasis how important it is for me to go to Belmont and stay with Bassanio.

Gratanio, Lorenzo and Bassanio
We are a group of really close friends and again that’s why I feel I have to go to Belmont because I feel like I am losing my friends. They all want to go off and get together with girls and I see that maybe I am gong to be left on my own and I need to do something about it. That is an argument for the cynical version of why I get together with Nerissa, but I don’t see why it can’t be both. You are more likely to fall in love with someone at first sight if you are particularly looking to. That’s a whole world of this idea that in Shakespeare’s time that the understanding of psychology would be different. We are used to talking about our feelings and being open about our feelings and people. Maybe they had a different relationship to that kind of thing, knowing what motivated people - the convention of marriage being something that you did for social status and for money. How important love was at that time. It’s a whole other sort of discussion.

Gratiano and Nerissa
I talked with Kirsty (Besterman) who is playing Nerissa about this, and we thought maybe they have seen each other before. It is indicated that Bassanio has seen Portia before. However the way this production seems to be going is that Bassanio is forgetting Portia’s name when he is telling Antonio about her and I think the director is quite keen that we are opportunistic young guys and that I go with Bassianio to Belmont - see an opportunity and take it. I do some quick work! I like to think that it is love at first sight. I think that is what Shakespeare writes about, big events. Everything, I feel, that happens in Shakespeare is a big event and the fact the Gratiano is not the sort of person you imagine falling in love at first sight, is even more interesting because then he will be surprised by it himself. He would be thinking: ‘I never thought this would happen to me but it has!’ and all that gives us an excuse for more energy and passion and anything like that is useful.

We are thinking that maybe their relationship will be quite a good one, fun and a bit cheeky and naughty. We are thinking about how to show that chemistry and attraction. There’s not very much time for us to get that in, but then equally, when it comes to the final scene, if we are not that into each other, then her teasing me about the ring that I have lost, and us having an argument, wouldn’t really matter. The stakes are very low, but if he does care and if he does want to be married to her then that keeps the stakes high.

Mocking Religion
With Gratiano being quite anti-Jewish, especially in the trial scene, I don’t know whether it will be interesting for audiences to see that he is quite naughty when it comes to Christianity too. Gratiano mocks Christianity quite a lot. It seems to occur to him quite a lot, especially at the beginning where he is mocking people who behave very well. I say ‘why should we be like statues?’ and when I am saying ‘like statues’ I am imagining the religious statues with people in religious poses and I am mocking them. It is maybe a fine line to tread, this idea of being not very Christian when it suits me, and also being anti-Jewish when it suits me and then being like ‘Oh I am a real Christian now and I am very anti-Jewish’. People may think ‘it doesn’t make sense that you are so anti-Jewish if you are not very Christian’. We are talking about how to get this whole world idea of it not being a PC world where we all really feel superior to Jewish people –whereby our anti-Jewish behaviour is natural, we don’t even think about it. It is not a secret thing ‘we are better than Jewish people’ everybody knows that, that is just the way it is.

I am in a lot of the scenes with Jessica, and towards the end of one of them I say to Nerissa, ‘oh welcome Jessica’ and it seems that we are going to go for an interpretation where it is quite uncomfortable for her to be there, her coming to Belmont. You could argue that I am quite sympathetic towards her at this point, but I am not really sure yet.
Because we are really emphasising that the guys are only after money, Gratanio thinks it is great that she has stolen all this money from Shylock and that is the reason that he likes her. So I am really unsure whether Gratanio sees her as someone exotic and different or is she someone a bit embarrassing and we don’t really want to talk her.

Problems Overcome
The main thing is that you can have so many ideas about a scene and a character but then they seem to pass by so quickly. You start a scene and you feel like you are shouting and running around and suddenly it’s over and gone and you’ve maybe only had time for one or perhaps two of your ideas and all the other things you have though of are gone. You think ‘oh no, how am I going to get this in?’ Because of the nature of Shakespeare, of one scene going into another, it doesn’t really give you the time to play things after the speaking has happened. You almost have to run off stage on your final line every time. Sometimes I would like to say the final line and then be able to have a reaction to that or act after that, but you can’t really do that because the next scene has got to start and you have to keep the energy up because you can’t drop it for the people in the next scene. You feel like you have to work the language. It is so easy to feel like you are shouting.

Voice Work
I have had lots of interesting meetings with the vocal coach and she has introduced me to a lot of new exercises. I have always hated my voice and thought it wasn’t very good. She has done a whole new diagnosis of how it can be better and how I can change and develop it and how I can be more ‘full’ in the space. I am trying to get on with doing those exercises, so I think that will help, but then again it comes down to this time because you think ‘oh there isn’t even the time to breathe’. Once you start analysing the words, especially this sitting down and going really really into it you feel like eventually you are going to be wanting to stress every single word in a sentence and then you will just be shouting whole sentences. It seems you have to work or pummel the language almost. But then you do get this sense that if you can use it, like there is a bit where I am talking about how certain people put on these faces and they are ‘sour faced’ people I am talking about and what the vocal coach pointed out to me is that I say the words ‘cream’ and ‘mantle’ and if I really say the m’s in the words and I go: ‘creammmm’ and ‘mmmmantle’ - if I really go for them then that actually happens on my face. If I exaggerate the M’s, the ideas of what I want to show can happen at the same time as speaking.

The Stage
In the rehearsal room, when you are at the front of the stage then that’s the wall and you are thinking in the real theatre that will be a huge space. That’s going to make a huge difference. I am quite impatient to get moving. It is quite exposing, and with the concentration on the language, you don’t feel that you can sit about or be doing too many actions so you are quite physically exposed. You have to stand strong and tall.

Movement Sessions
They have been great. They have been scary. The difference that I can feel after a session that I think ‘what am I doing half the time, closing off my body and not feeling’ I feel so much better after a session.

Costume
I have had a costume fitting and it took quite a long time. It was hard to tell what the costume will be like because they were trying different types of sleeves and trying different colours. The theme is renaissance with a kind of modern twist, so I have got these breeches / trousers but they have got a kind of twisted seam - like Levis twisted jeans. At the moment my costume is completely black. This is good in helping to emphasis the dark side of my character because it is very easy to see Gratiano as a very light character. Liz [Cooke the designer] was saying that she was worried that it is too dark and that it is over emphasising the darkness of the character, but I think that will be useful.

I will probably be dressed up as a monk in the Masque scene, so I will probably have a cassock on for that bit.

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Bulletin 3

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 Trial Scene
We were talking about Elizabethan society and how it just was racist towards Jewish people and it is a mind set of this play. However, in The Merchant of Venice the story of the play is that it is particularly Shylock who is doing this particular vengeful thing.

In the trial scene, the director is encouraging us to interject and to vocalise reactions, to shout how enraged we are by what Shylock is saying, but if I don’t have any lines then anything that I might say feels weak in terms of what Shakespeare would have come up with. If you are only saying a couple of words that you are making up it is really hard to do, beyond going: ‘Aye Aye’ or ‘Nay!’ It feels like we need to insult Shylock and it is hard to improvise that. And it feels wrong, improvising Shakespeare, it feels like shouting out in church.

Gratiano is a bit like a football supporter, especially in the trial scene when he taunts Shylock. I wanted to show that in more than one scene. In an earlier scene, when Bassanio chooses the right casket to win Portia, I was naturally responding by going: ‘GET IN!’ I did it a couple of times before I got told off, not for making the interjection, but because it had to be more Shakespearean.

So I went on a website that creates Shakespearean insults for you, but they were a little bit too comedic. They were all like: ‘Thou hornswaggling baum bat’, or something silly. I think in the trial the outbursts need to be more menacing. I was looking at Romeo and Juliet, to see if there is anything I could pinch. The characters are young and the fighty types, like Gratiano, and there is all that: ‘do you bite your thumb at me?’ but I haven’t found anything I am confident about using.

Shakespeare is so specific that if you start just kind of hurling kind of general abuse of something it doesn’t feel like you’ve really nailed it. Especially when I do have the chance to say: ‘O be thou damn’d, inexecrable dog!’ (Act IV, Scene i, L.128) That is a very specific insult. I got on to describe this image of how a wolf spirit has entered him and that is making him behave inhumanly.

So we have been working on making these interjections and yesterday when we did a run, and basically nobody did any at all! We are at the stage where we are feeling if we don’t have any lines then that is deliberate. Shakespeare didn’t want me to make a reaction at this stage. The danger is that you get that kind of terrible Shakespearean thing of big gestures without vocal which feels so eggy and generalised.

You do feel that Shakespeare is like Opera or music, pulling around the lines, or certainly breaking them up, is forbidden; even if it is not actually forbidden by the director.

Text Work
I have never felt before, in any other job, so rushed. I don’t know why I feel that. There is so much work to do with the language. You feel like you want to emphasise so many of the words. Text work is good but you can end up confused. For example in my first scene Antonio says:

I hold the world but as the world Gratiano,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one. [1.1.77-79]

To which I reply:

Let me play the fool [1.1.79]

When you start doing text work and analysing that one line, you think, right well, he said: ‘mine is a sad one’, so you thing well, ‘let ME’ (as opposed to you) ‘play the fool’. So the emphasis is on ME. And then you start talking to Giles [Block, the text master] and he says: ‘well Antonio is saying he’s going to play a sad part and what Gratiano is saying is, what I want to play, if different parts in this play of life are up for grabs, then the part that I want to play is the FOOL.’ So you think, right ok I will emphasis ‘FOOL’. So then the line should be said:

Let ME play the FOOL

And then you’ll notice that Gratiano says ‘Let’ quite a few times in the first few lines:

With mirth and laughter LET old wrinkles come
And LET my liver rather heat with wine

So Gratiano frequently says: ‘please allow me to do these things’. This suggests the idea that maybe Gratiano’s back story is that he had a strict father and the reason that he wants to be big and wild and loud, is because his strict father didn’t let him do anything. So Gratiano is saying: ‘LET me do this, LET me do that’. So then you think ‘let’ is an important word and so you start saying:

LET ME play the FOOL

And then you read on and the whole of Gratiano’s speech is about not being about rigid and constrained. It’s about playfulness. So then you start thinking, ok, right, so it is:

LET ME PLAY the FOOL

Then you realise you are emphasising every single syllable. You feel like that you are shouting every word in every line because you are trying to get all this colour and emphasis in it.

If you think about something too much, the danger is, you turn off from really listening to what Antonio’s saying. But I have to also be aware that the line is a half line which finishes Antonio’s half line, so you have to come in immediately in the right rhythm, and not having a pause.

On top of all that I have to be aware of how I say things. I talked with Jan (the vocal coach) about how I don’t raise my soft pallet when I speak, which creates a nasal sound, and that is my natural speaking voice. It is particularly a problem on words that begin and end with an ‘M’ and ‘N’, which are closed sounds. The second word of my line is ‘me’ and ‘me’ is a narrow sounding word anyway, so I have to work on raising my soft palette.

I haven’t chosen yet how to say that line yet!

There seems to be a lot to get in, in a short space of time, and it seems to be very easy for it to kind of run away from you.

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Bulletin 4

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.

Blocking
The blocking is fairly loose. The director is not overly worried about blocking the action. Sometimes we form nasty clumps or end up in unhelpful lines and she’ll point that out. The size of the stage and where the audience are means that the blocking can’t really be naturalistic. The audience is on almost more than three sides, you could say four fifths of a circle, and the playing space is so wide that you have to stand un-naturalistically far away from people you are talking to. The two pillars are also a problem, sometimes they get in the way of seeing people. So there are some blocking issues but we are also still fairly free.

Learning Lines
We are all off book. We didn’t discuss it, but as soon as we stood up to rehearse we were all pretty much off book. It was almost like an unspoken thing we particularly for the first few scenes. I don’t like to rehearse with a script in my hand. I always try and learn my lines. If you have your script in your hand then there is always a time when you have to put it down and then suddenly you wonder what to do I do with your hands and often your whole focus has to change.

Actually what I find helpful is to learn my lines and do the thing that apparently they did in Shakespeare’s day, which was only to learn the three or four words before your cue. If nothing else it helps you to listen to everyone else because you don’t quite know when your line is coming and it also helps you to know why you are saying what you are saying.

Costume
We’ve been having some costume fittings. I had one this morning. I’ve been given some funny boots and they asked if it was what I imagined wearing. I wasn’t sure if I had really thought about it. They are quite pointy boots and they look a bit girly to me, but then I don’t really know much about fashion. The design is Renaissance with a modern twist. The modern twist is in details like the trousers have twisted seams or double stripes, or a modern fabric. We’ve been trying these hats from Top Man. The servant parts will perhaps be costumed from stores, but most of the character’s costumes are being made and with this contemporary flavour. It is sort of doublet and hose, but I think the idea is that it’s doublet and hose that you might see on the catwalk in Milan. Of course it is not for all the characters I mean, the Doge of Venice has to have his hat. Things are being observed. In the fittings we have been discussing: where is the line between modern and historical?

Jig
We are having a big jig at the end. It’s good fun. We have been rehearsing that for a while. The jig is quite choreographed. It is very much a couples dance. There are bits where the couples do their own thing, and most of the couples have made up little bits of choreography themselves, but it is very much within a format. There is even a bit of singing in the jig. We all sing a chorus. Shylock comes in to the jig, well I say Shylock, and it’s more like John McEnery playing Shylock comes into the jig. It’s like we say: ‘You are not Shylock anymore, you are John, an actor, and all the being horrible to you in the play that’s over and we are all friends again. This is just a play.’

Music
There is quite a lot of music in the show. We did a big music rehearsal a couple of days ago with the band. There’s quite a lot of singing. We’ve got partly to emphasis the Christian world and we’ve got bits of music for the entrances of the suitors.

I’ve got this big Gondola song in the scene before we steal Jessica. Myself and Solereo are going to enter in a Gondola and everyone will be singing. That’s quite a big entrance. And then we’ve got a song in a masque scene and a big dance.

The music is entirely period. We’ve got bagpipes, which are mentioned in the text. Shylock mentions bagpipes a couple of times. We’ve got quite a lot of drums and a dedicated singer, Vivienne who is going to lead some of the singing and do solo bits. She has a song in the casket scene.

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Bulletin 5

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.

Journey and Transformation
There is a real journey and transformation for Gratiano in the play. Up until the masque scene Gratiano is wild and loud. After the masque I realise that I want to go to Belmont and perhaps I need to grow up. The next time you see me I am getting married. So after this big moment, at the end of the masque, I have these three scenes where I say I want to get married to Nerissa. I am quite keen to play it that it really is love at first sight. Maybe I am surprised by the fact that it has happened, but it is kind of amazing and I like it.

The director is trying to emphasise the fact that Bassiano and Gratiano are quite unreliable and the girls should be quite wary of us. We are not perhaps, certainly not initially, going to be very good husbands. But when the whole trick with the rings, we give the rings away and then Portia and Nerissa shame us and show us up, is perhaps where we learn another lesson about being faithful.

In the trial scene I am quite nasty. My instinct is that even when everyone else is forgiving Shylock, I carry on being nasty. I think my intention is that it should be a bit uncomfortable. That maybe people will think: ‘Why is he still being nasty?’

At the moment I feel that Gratiano thinks that his behaviour is fine. From his point of view, at the end of the day, Shylock has tried to kill one of his mates. It’s logical he would think that is the worst thing ever, and just because Shylock’s been caught out by the law, Gratiano is not entirely sure why he should forgive him. I wonder if Gratiano doesn’t buy into the whole ‘mercy’ concept. I am hoping that it is richer if some people do, and Antonio is very forgiving and very Christian about it, and if I am not, that says more.

Because it is quite hard to recover from, at the moment the end of the trial scene does feel a bit funny to me, I don’t have any lines for a start, I mean basically the last thing I say in the scene, is I say to Shylock, ‘If I was the judge I would have had you hanged!’. And then that’s it and then they all make up and there’s this comedy with Portia getting the ring from Bassanio and I just kind of stand there. Everyone else either talks or goes off. But I stand there and he says we off with the ring, so there is that moment there where I haven’t really solved whether I … I mean when I have played it and tried to really get in to the emotion of the trial scene I am still quite pumped up and pissed off and even though it has worked out well I am still kind of … it seems quite hard to then go, Oh hooray everything’s funny. And I not quite sure what the right thing is to do, whether I can shake it off quickly.

Act five is kind of a funny thing, because although it is a joke and although we discover that the girls are teasing us, they do actually say that they have gone off and slept with other men, when we’ve just got married to them. We were initially playing that quite jokey and quite a bit sit com, but actually the reality of that is quite upsetting. The temptation often in a lot of acting is to under, because something isn’t real, or like if you are lying, or a character is lying to you, to kind of undersell it, so for a while we were kind of , we were almost doing this comedy crying, when they were saying they had going with these men, we were going ‘oh NO its Sooooo terrible’, and actually I think that we were kind of underselling it and at the moment I think it could be better to genuinely play upset. The audience will be laughing because they know it’s not true, but we should take it quite seriously. And that will help us to learn a lesson. I mean it slightly makes a problem because then we’ve got to forget it quite quickly .. and be kind of up again at the end.

My instinct is to try and go to these extremes to try and get it incredibly nasty and then come back with some gags and try and get upset and then come back and you know not smooth out those reactions. Whether it works, we’ll see!

Using the Yard
We are making a lot of use of the Yard space. We’ve got a bridge, a Venetian bridge that starts in the yard and comes up onto the stage. That’s being used quite a lot, people are entering over that, but I also think in the first half there are some scenes that will happen entirely on that bridge in order to allow the caskets to stay on the stage. There are three casket choosing scenes and I think the little scenes in between them are going to happen on the bridge, so almost entirely in the yard.

The Gondola song will happen in the yard, it will dock on the stage. We are still working out how it will happen. The last idea is that the Gondolier is on stilts. So he’ll have a big pole and he’ll be high and the two of us Gratiano and S in the gondolier are on the shoulders of two stage management guys and then Vivienne, I mentioned, the singer is carrying the prow of the boat, so you don’t maybe see her so much, because she is on ground level. That might be too dangerous so there is now talk that we could be on a trolley, singing with flaming torches, so that will be interesting in the tech!

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Bulletin 6

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

Getting Used to Costume
The technical rehearsals have been quite fraught because there are a lot of costume changes. Everybody has their own things to worry about – it breaks up the unity of the company a little bit with every body focussing on their own thing. I haven’t got my full costume yet and am performing in my jeans! I don’t really mind for myself, but everybody comments on it – everybody comments on each others costumes and things like that. Also I have this moment where I have to jump on a barrel at the beginning and they’re worried that my trousers have to be cut in a certain way – that why I’m not rehearsing in them yet - so its all a bit frustrating. Then the wardrobe department are worrying about what shoes I’m going to have – my current shoes are really just too big. I’ve tried to wear them but they just aren’t working. I know it sounds silly, but shoes really do feel important! I’m also getting used to my hat. You have to start thinking about things that you’ve never thought of before. You have to think about keeping your head up and engaging with the upper gallery. Even more difficult is the fact that you’ve got this brim which means you can’t do certain things that you’ve worked out like touching your hair at certain points!

Technical Rehearsals
Getting used to lots of things has been difficult, especially the pillars where you have to work out and re-think where you’re standing. The tech is a funny thing where if you’re in the middle of a scene you’ll do it really quickly and that will be it - it’s probably the only time you’ll do it in the whole week. If you’re at the beginning or the end of a scene then you’ll do at least twelve times! So it gives the show a very uneven feeing. All the intricate work you’ve done in rehearsals goes out of the window at this stage. I just want to have a run of the show. You loose the shape and the structure of the play in tech week. You also have to get used to the planes in this theatre - there seem to be a lot more of them in the day.

Music
There are a lot of music things that have taken up a lot of the time as well. There are over 40 music cues. In this production there will be underscoring as well as transition music. Some of the cues keep changing, so you never quite know what’s going to happen! At some moments there are sound effects - like when Portia pulls out her ring – you hear these bells. When you have unfamiliar things like this – its not that they distract you -you just need to know what and where they are.

Voice
At the beginning I was really worried about my voice and now I’m pleased about it. However, it is much easier maintaining your voice in tech week because you’re doing the show in chunks – you can relax and drink lots of water in between scenes. We’ll have to see how it goes after a few runs.

Preparing for the First Performance
I’ve got some friends coming to put on extra pressure! I am hoping we’ll get a dress rehearsal in on Friday and one on Saturday, the afternoon before we open. I think it needs an audience, certainly from the point of view of jokes and seeing if people are going to laugh and what they’re going to laugh at.

The Audience
Throughout the day, there are many tours in the theatre with the general public. I thought they would be more distracting but they’re not really. It’s a little chance to think and try a few things out to see if they’ll react. Sometimes the tour groups will applaud after some bits. Sometimes its much harder to get a reaction because groups will see a scene completely out of context and it doesn’t stand alone. That’s what we hope is happening when they’re not reacting! I think the tours are actually very useful because the performances will be haphazard like that with people moving about, doors opening and closing etc. The wind is interesting as well – you don’t expect the wind to enter the theatre. There is one bit where we’re doing the trial scene and we’re supposed to be next to the river, or by a dock, and the theatre became windy, which I thought that was rather poignant

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Bulletin 7

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 First Performance
The very first night was slightly terrifying because we’d only had one dress rehearsal and then it was straight into the first performance. It was all going well and then in Act 5 we got an enormous response from the audience with the whole ring business. They were laughing so much that we were really thrown by it. It felt like we had to fight to get the stuff out and the words heard. That was a real shock but also really exciting.

Audience Reaction
We’ve pretty much had the same response at most performances. It’s especially surprising – maybe it’s got something to do with it coming after the trial scene – like a release. After the end of the trial scene (Act 4 Scene 1), there is quite big shift. The Duke says “Sir, I entreat you home with me to dinner”. It feels funny, this sudden shift into comedy. When Portia tries to get Bassanio’s ring the audience seem to love it straight away and totally accept this big shift in tone. I guess in rehearsal you don’t think all that misunderstanding is funny. The biggest laugh, of many big laughs, is when Bassanio says ‘‘were you the doctor?’ in Act 5.

Timing the Laughter
There is a lot more laughter than I expected, for example – and its party because its an aside - when Portia and Nerissa are berating me about giving my ring away, Bassanio has slipped off to the side and says:

Why, I were best to cut my left hand off
And swear I lost the ring defending it. (Act 5 Scene 1)

My line is next where I say:

My Lord Bassanio gave his ring away

So I have to wait for that aside and then wait for the audience to stop laughing at that – some times it feels like I’m waiting for an eternity. I’ve talked before about having vocal worries – we talked about how to maintain my voice in the trial scene when I feel that I want to be very forceful. In actual fact, Act 5 has been the hardest to pitch over. You can’t wait for it all to die down as the energy will drop, but you have to pitch over the entire audience laughing.

It has changed the way I deliver my lines. It has also made me feel a little insecure about them; with all the audience laughing I wasn’t really enjoying doing this scene at first because it was so unexpected. Now I’m learning to control and time my lines better so that the audience still hear what’s going on.

The Trial
Even more surprising is the fact that people have been laughing at Gratiano’s anti-Semitic comments in the trial. I feel that the harder I try to be nasty, genuinely nasty, the more they seem to laugh! And I’ve been thinking is this the right thing? I was hoping to chill them with the force of my hatred. It’s quite a long time before Gratiano speaks and I was using that time to get more and more irate and frustrated with them by not speaking. When I finally do speak I felt that all this emotion had built up. The way we’re playing it – that Portia realises how to get out of it only at the last minute – there is a real sense that Antonio is going to die and so this bile that comes out from Gratiano. But the more hatred I play – the more they laugh which is very very odd. I think its good, but its one of those areas where you think about the reaction. Maybe it’s like an original Shakespearian audience reaction. I imagine Shakespeare’s audience may really have laughed, but to have that from a modern audience is really bizarre.

The same thing happens when I say “But who comes here? Lorenzo and his infidel’ (Act 3 Scene 2). There’s always a big laugh there. It’s actually quite useful there though because what I play is big and excited like ‘Ah hooray it’s Lorenzo and his infidel’ and in the time that they’re laughing I see Solerio and think ‘oh it’s not good that he’s here’. The laugh is good to signify the shift in tone because then it turns to ‘oh God what’s going on?’ So the laughing helps the action. So I started thinking about when they laugh in the trial scene. I want to see how far I can push it because if they’re still laughing at the end that doesn’t seem right to me because they’re not engaging with the seriousness of the situation.

Changing Nerissa
The preview period has been longer and more hectic because the actress playing Portia was indisposed and left the production at the end of the first week. It was all very strange because Kirsty Besterman, who had been playing Nerissa, is now playing Portia. It was weird because having someone who on stage I’d been having to fall in love with – love at first site - suddenly seeing her being with this other guy was strange. At that time Pippa Nixon, who plays Jessica, was playing Nerissa in performances in the evening and a new company member Jennifer Kidd was rehearsing Nerissa in the day. By the time Act 5 came I realised that all three of the girls I’d kissed in the last twenty four hours! I got very confused because I’d be on stage looking around and thinking ‘who is Nerissa now?!’ That was really strange.

It shows you the power of pretending. Even if you’re pretending that you have these feelings, the fact that you get used to attaching them to people – or not even to people – there’s this time when Kirsty was wearing her Nerissa costume when she was playing Portia and even that was strange because I got used to that costume being on my wife! Now Jennifer has the same costume Kirsty had and Kirsty wears a new costume as Portia. It sounds a bit naff that it was a bit odd but it’s settling down now, although we are still having rehearsals with Jennifer.

Different Interpretations
Jennifer did her first performance after four days of rehearsing and I started to think do you really need six weeks of rehearsals to set something up? And then I thought ‘no you do’ because the relationship that I’d built up with Kirsty as Nerissa has been an extremely gradual one of making tiny little steps up towards finding something. Also, in that time, we’d been agreeing it together. I can’t say to ‘this is how we found it and this is what it is’ to Jennifer because it’s not fair. Certainly the first few days we tried to cram all these ideas into her head. That doesn’t work - you have to discover it rather than describe it. Even if we’re encouraging her to come to the same discoveries, she still has to find them for herself. And of course she wants to interpret the role as her own and not to copy what Kirsty did.

It’s all been much stranger than I thought it would be. The power of the things that you’re saying like ‘you loved….I loved’- I sort of felt it undermines all that in a way because you build up this thing where you think it’s alright to say and express these big emotions to someone. Saying them to someone new and different is odd at first.

Holding Fire!
We have also started to rehearse another play. It’s a new play called Holding Fire! by Jack Shepherd and it’s about a nineteenth century political party called the chartists. There are five more actors who are new to the company. They have more specific and bigger parts than the rest of us in general. I thought I was playing a certain character which I’d done some research on, particularly accent research because it was a person with a particular accent, but literally a couple of days after we started the director told me I’m playing another part! Because it’s a brand new play scenes are being re-written all the time and on some days a totally new scene will appear. It’s a shame that we’ve still had to keep rehearsing Merchant because there is not time to do the same amount of preparation and research that you would normally do. By its very nature, the play is something you need to do a lot of research for to understand the background of and to be honest I haven’t had much time. But I have got a couple of nice parts, but with the whole re-casting of Nerissa and everything, it has put us back and it will all have to be a lot quicker. Because I’m playing two characters in Holding Fire! I rehearsed three different characters today so it’s all really confusing at the moment!

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