Hermione

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About Yolanda Vazquez

This is Yolanda's fifth season at Shakespeare's Globe. Last season she played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. In 2003, she was a member of the Globe's first all-female company and played parts in both The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III. In 1999, she played Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and Bertha in Augustine's Oak, and in 2000 she played Hippolyta in Two Noble Kinsmen. Other roles include Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Her television credits include Midsomer Murders, Peak Practice and A Touch of Frost. Films include Notting Hill and The Other Boleyn Girl.

Rehearsal Notes 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.

What's the story?

Well, it's great to be back! This is my fifth season here, so the Globe feels a bit like my second home. I love the space – here we are in the rehearsal room and I’m already looking forward to getting on stage. We’ve been rehearsing for a week now. Working with John [Dove, Master of Play] is quite wonderful – he focuses on peeling layer after layer after layer from the story until we’re left with the bare facts of a character or a situation. That avoids imposing anything on to the text; everything seems very natural. Finding that truth involves asking lots of questions: ‘Where is this character? Where have they just come from? What is it like to be them at this very moment? What's their relationship with this person?’ We’ve been trying to answer the question ‘What's the story?’ behind the characters: how have they reached this particular situation?

In last year's rehearsals for Much Ado About Nothing, we played lots of games to get into the text and the fun of the play. The Winter's Tale is a very different play and John has a very different process: we’ll start on a section of a scene and sometimes just do two or three lines, then go back and start again and again – John will throw in little bits of an idea or he’ll say ‘Even simpler – just be daring, be even simpler.’ It's interesting that he uses the word ‘daring’, because you might not immediately associate that with simplicity and ‘doing less’. But it is quite hard to really get down to the bare bones of a character's situation… you feel there has to be a certain emotion there, but if you dare to leave the moment quite simply, then you have something that you can start to build on.

Preparation

I didn’t really do a huge amount of preparation for rehearsals – this happens to me every year. I read the play and get familiar with the story and the characters, but I can’t really start work until I get into the rehearsal room and establish relationships with the other performers and with the director – it's now that my work really starts in earnest. Up until rehearsals began, I just made sure that I knew the story and the relationships between the characters. Once you start work in rehearsals, you realise how much you miss out when you’re working through the play on your own! I mean, you try to go back to the text over and over and over again, but other actors or the director always bring up ideas which make you go ‘Ohh, I missed that out of the story, I didn’t realise that!’ That's what's interesting about the process.

Read-through

We did a read-through on the first day of rehearsals (apparently that's quite rare nowadays) but it was lovely to hear everybody reading their part – the different voices and the words. Then we started working; we work in sections, so we picked one little section of the play and read through it, then discussed it (what we think a character might want from this situation, for example) and then we got up on our feet and started trying out some of those ideas. Then we go back over it again and again until new things grow out of the characters and the situation; eventually you find there are lots of different layers to the story, and you bring those thoughts to the next day's rehearsal – then you move onto the next section. So there's a lot to think about and that's what we’ve been doing.

Sometimes directors split the play up into units and give each unit a title, to help everyone get orientated and to break the play down, but we decided not to do that this time because of the nature of the play – we thought it would be better just to work through it and see what happens!

Jig

We’ve started work on the jig already. Plays at the Globe often end with a dance or a jig, which is a brilliant way to lift everyone out of the world of the story. Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] is working with us and the music is just stupendous; the rhythms sound very Eastern, Turkish almost. Sian brings in lots of different steps which we learn as a group, then we start to make formations or patterns with them, and with her help we begin to mix and match… if something doesn’t quite fit with the music or the rest of the group, then we work together to find ways of changing it: ‘What if I do one extra turn – would it work if we did this?’ This morning, after we did all our choreography work, she said ‘I’d like you all to make up the last bit!’ Our improvisations were really chaotic and very funny, but it worked – some of our improvisations will give her ideas and she’ll come back with something set for us. So inspiration works both ways!

First impressions

When I first read the play, I kept thinking of a Spanish fairytale called Mamita. It's about a little girl who is left out in the forest. She grows up with peasants and brings up their children, and eventually it turned out that she is the king's daughter. So that was what struck me at first, the idea of abandoned children who were left to the elements but somehow survived – Perdita's story. I also found the patience and dignity of Hermione extraordinary; sixteen years in hiding is a long time. She keeps on living because she knows that the Oracle has said her child is alive somewhere. That's what keeps her going – the desire to see her child again.

Leontes’ extraordinary love also struck me: that a love can be so deep and passionate that it turns to a jealousy which is almost hatred. There's a very fine line. It's very evident that he has an immense passion for her which mutates into something much darker. But there's such a mixture of things in there… it's a very odd play. I found the way the story starts in one Court, then goes off to the country for the sheep-shearing, and then returns to Sicilia quite strange. I realised I haven’t seen a performance of this play before – or if I have, I don’t remember much of it. I have visions of Autolycus in my head and I can’t think where I’ve seen him! Lots of people have a strong reaction to The Winter's Tale, especially Hermione as the statue who comes back to life at the end. Lots of people said to me ‘Oh, The Winter's Tale, fantastic! That's one of my favourite plays.’ I find that very interesting because I wouldn’t have been able to say that about the play before we started rehearsals. I’m certainly finding it exciting to explore the story; I think it's too early yet to say anything else!

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Rehearsal Notes 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.

Pregnant pause

I’ve been looking at pictures of pregnant women from the seventeenth century because I had a really interesting costume fitting this week. At the beginning of the play Hermione is pregnant and then I go into prison and have the child, so I’m not pregnant anymore in the trial scene. Being an original practices production, we’ve been thinking about what would happen costume-wise. Jenny told me that what women used to do was wear their skirts on back to front to cover pregnant bumps; cloth was valuable so they had to make the best use of it. When Hermione is pregnant and I’ve got a bump, I wear my skirt back to front. It's slightly open at the back but that would have been pinned and there's a big cloak that means you never see the back of the skirt. After the birth, the skirt would be worn normally again and that's what Hermione will do.

Jenny gave me this book of portraits so I could see what pregnant women would have worn in Tudor and Stuart times. Although many women seemed to spend most of their adult lives in a state of pregnancy, apparently there aren’t many 17th Century portraits of pregnant women – some of the women in the book hardly look pregnant at all because the clothes emphasise a narrow shape rather than a bump! Pregnancy was not regarded as an attractive state to be in, so it was hidden as far as possible – it was thought to be ‘indecorous.’ There's one beautiful portrait shows a woman who is obviously extremely big with child and you can see that her clothes are covered in pearls. I wondered why her dress was so ornate and then I read that the number of pearls shows her high status, and that pearls were emblems of purity. They were also the associated with the virgin martyr St. Margaret of Antioch who was the patron saint of childbirth.

It's been proposed that wearing pearls during pregnancy was a way of invoking St. Margaret's beneficent influence. While it's estimated that only one woman in 100 died in childbirth in early modern Britain, the contemporary perception was that the risk involved for mother and child was extremely high: they thought they would need all the help they could get. Pregnancy then was actually quite morbid; pregnant women would often prepare for the worst and ask for cloth and things to be buried in because they never knew what was going to happen. Although it's a joyful time because of the pregnancy and the idea of a child, it was also a time to reflect: what would happen if you weren’t around anymore?

Another picture shows a woman with her family; you can just see she's just a little bit pregnant and she's got six children with another one on the way. Seven children… I don’t know when children were considered to be past the ‘danger age’ but infant mortality was very high too and even if you survived pregnancy, you never knew exactly what would happen to the child afterwards.

Hermione's family

Hermione has one child, Mamillius, and she's pregnant with another. Mamillius is meant to be about seven, so during that time in between she could have possibly miscarried? They don’t mention. There aren’t any other children so half way through the play Leontes is left without an heir. What's happened to his mother causes Mamillius to die of heartbreak. He's ill, but they say he dies heartbroken. Perdita is abandoned in another country. The Oracle says that unless the child is found, Leontes will not have an heir. I think that's why Hermione stays in hiding for sixteen years. She pretends to be dead because she's waiting for the day that her daughter comes back. She tells Perdita that she preserved herself to see the issue, to see her child again:

[…] For thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv’d
Myself to see the issue.
[V.iii]

That's the only reason she's stayed alive. I’ve been thinking about two things. I thought she couldn’t live with her husband if she came out of hiding before Perdita's return. Obviously she loves her husband and eventually forgives him, but the only reason I can play that is because the child has been found. There would be so much resentment otherwise: because of the stupid things you did, my son died and my daughter is lost forever. How can you go back and love someone with that history? The other thing is that she knows Leontes is repentant: every single day for 16 years he's gone to a tomb to pray and beg for her forgiveness. She knows that he's sincerely repentant. Even so, I feel that unless that child is found or there's news of her, there's no way she can go back to him. It just wouldn’t work. The only time when she can come back is when she does come back; when Perdita reappears. Then the family is together and she can return and forgive.

Forgiveness

We’ve done some work on the final scene when the family is reunited. It's a very difficult scene – it's also one of those scenes which everybody finds very moving. Just watching it as the statue, I think they find the whole idea of this statue being observed and then coming to life very beautiful and they can’t quite believe that it's happened. When Hermione does speak, she doesn’t speak to Leontes; she only gestures to him and then hugs him. There are no words for him. The only person she speaks to is her daughter.

We worked on that just briefly, finding out just how close you can get to a person who's pretending to be a statue. Another question was how quickly you can believe that person is a statue? I think it would be interesting to go to Covent Garden and talk to one of the performers who stand there as living statues – just to find out how they do it, because they stand very, very still. I’ve been given a fantastic poem all about how I have to do it! It's written but someone called Edwin Morgan and he's pretending to be Shakespeare giving instructions to the boy actor who is going to play the statue. The instructions are very funny… basically I must be VERY, VERY STILL!*

I imagine that Shakespeare used the discovery space at the back of the stage for the statue, just within the tiring house doors. Maybe that where they would have seen her – there are references to a curtain being drawn and you could have a curtain across the front of the discovery space. The way we’re doing it, that's where I’m found but then I’m brought forward to the centre of the stage on a plinth. They’ve made a pedestal with something for me to lean on. I’ve looked at pictures of actresses throughout history who’ve played the part and what they have used and they’re very funny. Some, like Ellen Terry for instance, had very simple poses, which is what I’m trying to go for. You look at other poses and think ‘How did they manage to stay still like that?!’ They must have been doing it for the painting as they couldn’t possibly have acted like that on stage – with hands up in the air, holding their veils out! Stage Management tested the logistics of our plinth, so we know it won’t make me wobble!

Another thing to help me look still as a statue is that I’ve got quite a heavy cut velvet costume which hangs stiffly. As the Globe is open air, any breeze will make cloth shake and move. I’ve chosen to hold one hand in the centre of my chest with a very ornate lace handkerchief that looks as though it's been chiselled. The lace comes from Ravello in Italy which is north of Genoa; the ladies of Ravello have made this lace in the handkerchief. Then I shall have some more lace on my costume at some point which is made by ladies of Essex who won a lace-making competition and we have got their lace. It's great because it's all been handmade and it has a history.

Tudor Group

The Tudor Group visited us and they were as fantastic as always – they spend part of the year living a Tudor lifestyle (as far as possible) and they told us many, many wonderful things that will be useful for original practices. We learnt all about the social etiquette; when to bow or take your hat off, how flamboyant you can be. We also learnt what would have been considered disrespectful. Manners were considered such an important part of good breeding that if you were disrespectful of a person and refused to bow, actually that said more about you than the other person – so if you didn’t like someone you would sometimes go to the other extreme and to be really particular with proper etiquette.

We are always told that people at that time didn’t wash and that Queen Elizabeth had a bath twice a year ‘whether she needed them or not.’ Therefore we think that people at that time were really dirty. I found out from the Tudor Group that Elizabethans would have washed but they didn’t immerse themselves in water and they didn’t wash their clothes because their clothes would have shrunk. They had a ‘head to toe’ wash as we do when we can't have a bath or a shower… hands, face, neck, feet, so they would have been cleaner than we think. And also they did something called ‘dry washing’ which is when you exfoliate with a cloth: in fact you can keep clean just by doing that.

We talked about hair washing too. After women got married they didn’t show their hair and long hair was a sign of virginity; you only wore your hair completely down the day you got married or if you were a young girl. Otherwise hair was kept under caps but nonetheless they have recipes for the early modern equivalent of shampoo! They would put lots of different herbs and juices in water in order to keep hair shiny. It's interesting to think that Elizabethans connected bad smells with disease; if you smelt badly, you were connected with disease and people would keep away. Therefore Elizabethans did their best to smell sweetly whereas we assume they would have stunk. Apparently the Elizabethan nickname for the groundlings – ‘penny stinkards’ – is a bit misleading!

*Edwin Morgan – ‘Instructions to an Actor’

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Rehearsal Notes 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.

Dancing queen

The news of the week: we’ve been concentrating on dancing. We’ve been going through scenes and fine tuning as it were, but we’ve done a lot of dancing. We’re going to have a dance at the beginning (towards the end of the first scene) and then there's the dance that the shepherds do in the sheep shearing scene and the final jig which original practices productions always have at the Globe.

We decided to have a dance in the scene when we first see Leontes and Hermione and Polixenes together because we wanted to emphasize what a happy place the Sicilian court is before jealousy strikes. At the very beginning Archidamus speaks about how generous the Sicilians are; he's already getting worried that when the Sicilians come over to Bohemia, his court won’t be able to entertain them in a similar way:

We cannot with such magnificence – in so rare – I know not what to say – We will give you sleepy drinks, that your senses (unintelligent of our insufficience) may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us.
[I.i]

The Bohemians feel completely overwhelmed by the kindness of their hosts – he's saying ‘We’ll put you to sleep, so when you wake up you can’t accuse us of not having given you a good time!’ That gives us the impression that the Sicilian court is a joyful place to be; Leontes is very generous and there's all sorts of things going on to entertain the Bohemians.

We thought it would be a good idea to meet the characters in a really happy time. Everybody gets on well, whilst the king is happy there's a very democratic feel and the queen is allowed to be herself… she gets along with everybody and she's asked by her husband to pay special attention to Polixenes. She does that and is accused of having an affair with him. So we decided to have a dance in that scene to help build up a festive atmosphere that we can really knock down later on.

The dance starts off with the queen trying to teach Polixenes a very slow courtly dance and then Leontes comes in with bag pipes. That brings it into a really big Bohemian dance which is much more like Cossack dancing. Everybody joins in so it's boisterous, and the rest of the scene is about Polixenes trying to come out of that: ‘No I’ve got to leave.’ The steps for that are quite complicated but we’re getting there slowly.

Leontes’ jealousy

Leontes talks about Hermione and Polixenes ‘paddling palms and pinching fingers’ [I.ii], What I believe and what we’ve discussed is that he's seeing what he wants to see. In the same way, he picks out only the words he wants to hear in the next scene with Camillo, after his jealousy has struck. Camillo tells Leontes that Polixenes has agreed to stay in Sicilia ‘To satisfy your Highness and the entreaties/ Of our most gracious mistress.’ Leontes chooses the word ‘satisfy’ and does not hear what Camillo is saying:

Leontes:
Satisfy?
Th’ entreaties of your mistress? Satisfy?
Let that suffice.
[I.ii]

Then Leontes says that Hermione and Polixenes have been leaning cheek to cheek and pinching fingers, holding hands and kissing… at that time, people were much more tactile than perhaps we would give them credit for today. There's an account from an Italian visitor in the 17th Century who commented that the British were extraordinarily mercurial and apparently the French used to say that the English kissed too much! So what was considered proper behaviour within a society was very changeable.

Hermione gets on very well with Polixenes; he's a nice man, but she's with him because he's Leontes’ best friend. She adores her husband and what she's trying to do is to make his best friend feel comfortable. When Polixenes says the time has come for him to return to his family and responsibilities in Bohemia, Leontes begs him to stay for one more week. Then Leontes asks Hermione to help out, and she does exactly what he wants her to do. Immediately she succeeds, but he takes it the wrong way and makes a mountain out of a mole hill. Polixenes says right at the beginning that he's been there nine months, which just gives enough time for a baby if Polixenes and Hermione had an affair straight away but of course they haven’t had an affair – Leontes adds up four and five and ends up with fifty-six.

Instead of showing exactly what Leontes describes between Hermione and Polixenes, we’ve opted to behave as normal: we’re holding hands, I might go and kiss him sometimes, and grab him by the hand to lead him and I’m always smiling and having a good time with him, but I’m not doing anything that would look suspicious to an outside eye. That means Leontes chooses to see evil in innocence. I know some productions highlight Polixenes and Hermione doing these things in order to show you what's happening in Leontes’ mind but the fact is that it's not happening at all. That's just what he thinks they’re doing, and his mind is warped by jealousy. I think if you see if Polixenes and Hermione doing those things, even if it's to show you Leonte's viewpoint, then everybody in the audience will think that they are having an affair. They’re not, and I think that's clear if they behave normally in the first Act.

Ending

I find it very interesting that at the end Hermione will not look at Polixenes. She doesn’t know whether it's going to cause another rumpus! Will I have to go back to prison or be killed? Also there's embarrassment because Hermione and Polixenes share that little history so the friendship loses the innocence that it had before. When Leontes says to her ‘look on my brother’ [V.iii.147] I think she does look, although she doesn’t say anything to either of them. Then Leontes apologizes to both of them. Now I think that they’ve both had time – sixteen years – for forgiveness to be possible. All the time that she's been in hiding and waiting for her daughter to appear, he's been going to her shrine every single day to pray and apologize for what he's done. Sixteen years is a long time, enough time for him to think about his actions.

It's very strange that nobody in the plays says ‘oh you know he's given to these rash fits.’ His jealousy comes out of too much love for Hermione, I think, but it's a real oddity. It seems that he hasn’t been jealous before. As it's the first time, I don’t know whether his character has changed by the end of the play, but he certainly is repentant. When I first read the play, I wondered 'How can she even look at him after what he's done?' Now I think the only reason she can do that is because she's heard him repent every night for the last 16 years; she knows that he's repentant and her daughter has returned.

She says ‘I have preserved myself to see the issue.’ If Perdita had not been found, then Hermione would not have come out of hiding. We discussed this in rehearsal and from my personal point of view, the question is how can you go back to a man who has given your daughter away because of his feelings at a particular moment? She could be dead: the Oracle's prophesy is the only reason Hermione knows she isn’t dead. There would be too much resentment for her to return to Leontes if the child had not been found.

As it is, she's got a family again so she's able to return. Her son is dead, possibly from heartbreak. But Mamillius must have died before the Oracle's news for it to be announced just at the moment Leontes calls the prophesy ‘falsehood’. So perhaps her son would have died come what may. That's a tiny little thing that just makes playing the scene slightly easier for me. Those are the details you look at to find ways of playing it.

Voice: Sylvia the Fair

In our Voice sessions with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice], we’ve been looking at opening up the vowels and how the consonants work. It sounds bizarre but Stewart says that the vowels are the ‘inside’ of the picture and the consonants are the frame. And its true because the vowels are open and you can actually make the sound of the vowels – just with the breath, whereas you have to stop or ‘intrude’ on the breath to form consonants. For example, you can make the sound ‘ahhh’ just by breathing out. Whereas you can’t make a ‘b’ sound with just a breath can you? It's a bilabial plosive: the breath explodes from your lips to make that sound. We looked at different poems and read them through with really exaggerated vowel sounds. Then we read them again with really exaggerated consonants. One of the poems was a little bit naughty – ‘Sylvia the Fair, In the Bloom of Fifteen’ by John Dryden. Try saying it with exaggerating vowels then consonants!

Apollo is painted on the back of the stage, by the Musicians’ Gallery. If you’re facing the audience, behind you to the right is Apollo and behind you to the left is Mercury. Apollo is for inspiration and Mercury is for eloquence. People came to hear a play in Shakespeare's time, so the sound of the words is very important. Elizabethans felt that when people spoke well, it was like nectar coming out of their mouths – it was a good and beautiful thing, which required inspiration and eloquence. Shakespeare uses sound in so many ways – assonance, onomatopoeia, rhymes – in order to get a very definite feeling across to the audience using words themselves. The way that you place certain vowels and particular consonants will give you a very definite feeling. For instance, if we start exaggerating the vowel sounds at the beginning of that little poem ‘Sylvia the Fair’: Syl-viiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaa, the faaaaaaaaaa-iiiiiiiiiir, iiiiiiiiiiin theeee blooooooooooom of fiiiiiiifteeeeeeeeen… okay, it sounds ridiculous but if you really exaggerate the whole thing like that, you get a really nice feeling of a lazy summer afternoon with bees buzzing around. The sounds immediately give you a setting for what's happening. If you concentrate on the consonants instead, you get a very different feeling. I’ll take a couple of lines from further down:

By their praying and whining,
And clasping and twining,
And panting and wishing,
And sighing and kissing,
And sighing and kissing so close.

It sounds much more penetrating and aggressive, just concentrating on the ‘k’ and ‘s’ sounds. The sounds can take you to the meaning of the poem; without even hearing the words, you know exactly what it's about!

Feminine and masculine sounds

Stewart also said that if we looked at sounds in terms of archetypes, then the vowels are considered more feminine while the consonants are considered more masculine. We did an exercise where we split the group in to ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ sides; the girls stressed the vowel sounds in the poem and the boys stressed the consonants. Stewart explained that the vowels are very open whilst consonants are more thrusting, and that contrast really came across when we heard both sides read the poem. It's so clever, the way that sounds give you the sense!

Against the norm

Generally I’m feeling good about things – not stressed or nervous or anything like that. I’ve realised that I always go through a bit of a panic stage during rehearsals; I haven’t got there yet but I’m sure that it will come! At the moment I’m enjoying experimenting with the part and sometimes that means going against my norm. The language for Hermione is very powerful, very strong. But Leontes says of her that she never chided, she never blamed him. As the language is so powerful, it's easy to use it to attack but I’m trying to go against that instinct and to find ways that Hermione can say what she needs to say without chiding. I mean, she's also a very fiery woman so occasionally that passion comes out but I don’t want to be directed at him as an attack. One tiny example is the speech that begins ‘Sir, spare your threats’ in the Trial scene [III.ii]. I basically say ‘You’ve prevented me from seeing my son. You have thrown my daughter out and at this moment she could be dead. You called me a whore. You’ve taken me out of bed and into the open air when I’ve just given birth, which you wouldn’t do to the lowest of the low.’ At the end of all this, I say:

Now, my liege,
Tell me what blessings I have here alive,
That I should fear to die? Therefore proceed.
But yet hear this – mistake me not; no life
(I prize it not a straw), but for mine honor,
Which I would free – if I shall be condemn’d
Upon surmises (all proofs sleeping else
But what your jealousies awake), I tell you
’Tis rigor and not law.
[V.iii]

I find that it's easy to say those lines aggressively; ‘yet hear this – mistake me not.’ But I don’t think she is doing that. It's quite strong: ‘Don’t get me the wrong way, listen to what I have to say.’ But I think what's she's actually saying is ‘Please hear me, don’t get me wrong – just listen to what I’ve got to say.’ The language gives you the strength. Hermione is a strong woman but I don’t think that's where she's coming from at this precise moment. So what I’m trying to do is find a way of approaching those lines that doesn’t feel like an attack or command. She really wants to be understood, so perhaps her response would be measured rather than violent? So that's my challenge right now.

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Rehearsal Notes 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.

First performance

All in all the first show went very well. The theatre was very full and the audience seemed to love it. All the people who hadn’t worked on the Globe stage before were really relaxed – obviously they had nerves, it being their first time, but they didn’t show it. Now, for me, everything was fine until we got to the statue. When I played the statue in the rehearsal room, I could stand very, very still and hardly blink. In fact I kept myself still even whilst John directed people so I could find out just how long I could keep still for – I thought that would be good training for the stage. But I came out on the stage and of course one thing that I hadn’t taken into account was the fact that there's loads of fluff and flies that come straight at you because we’re in the open air. So not only was I trying not to move but I was trying really hard not to sneeze. I was just thinking ‘Oh please don’t move!’ because I saw bees and all sorts of things coming up to me. And then I think I had an allergic reaction: it was like a tap had been turned on in my head and my eyes and nose just started to stream. There was water coming out of both my eyes and my nostrils and there was nothing I could do! Once I came to life, I went to over to hug Leontes: the wet turned my white makeup into a paste so I left white all over his face. Then I tried really hard when I hugged him to wipe myself with my hands… and on his collar! I didn’t think I’d be able to speak to Perdita if I didn’t. So then I was aware of Paul [Leontes] having white all over his face and that I had been the culprit but I did manage to talk to Perdita. I haven’t had the reaction again, thank goodness – the scene's fine now. I always to make sure that my eyes are completely dry before I go on stage!

I mentioned last time that Jacobean ladies would have worn their normal skirts pinned back to front during pregnancy and the gap at the back was hidden with long shawls or cloaks. We decided that I would wear a skirt like that for the pregnancy, then the same skirt the right way around for the trial and sixteen years later, I put on the same skirt on but with a different farthingale. I wear a bum roll for the trial scene and then a farthingale because the fashion had changed in those 16 years so I have a smaller farthingale. My skirt is really, really long and it's pinned to create flounces: its pinned over the pregnant belly and then its pinned over the bum roll and then its pinned over the farthingale. So whenever I come off, there are three people backstage who pin and unpin and pin again. It's a very busy show backstage in terms of costume.

Velvet and lace

I wanted to tell you about my statue costume too. When I become a statue, I have a costume made entirely of ‘branch’ cut velvet; ‘branch’ is the pattern on it which apparently belongs to that specific era and its made by hand by a man called Giuseppe in Genoa and he lives in Via Velutto which is Velvet Street and he's still making velvet as they would have done hundreds of years ago. At one time there were many velvet makers who lived on the street, but now there are very few. A very small piece takes three days and I’ve got like volumes of it – it's amazing. Another fantastic thing about my costume is that the lace I wear was made by the ladies of Kent; they learnt how to make lace as part of an Adult Education class and then won a competition for lace-making. So Jenny [Tiramani, Master of Clothing] commissioned some lace from them: 30 ladies passed the piece from one to another and followed the same pattern to make the lace on my supporter (like a collar that stands up at the back). It's fantastic that the materials have their own stories.

Tech week

For me, technical rehearsals mostly involved changes in my costume. It was quite hairy because I didn’t actually get to time the changes during the tech week, because we kept going backward and forwards in the play and you can’t start taking pins out and then go on again, half pinned up. We did it within time but we didn’t have an idea of just how fast we would need to go once the show was playing. It was only when we did the first dress rehearsal that I got an idea of what it was going to be like. From the dressers’ point of view, it must have been insane – during the dress rehearsal and the first performances, I had about four people pinning and unpinning me because they weren’t quite sure how long it was going to take. Now we’ve got used to it, two people can do it quite quickly. Also I know now what I can do to help. I stand completely still when they’re doing things that I can’t get involved in, but I start taking the pins out as soon as I come off stage. I know how to undo the laces on my tops as well, so that helps a bit. I can even get into the bear costume, because I do the bear underneath the stage (bear arms come up to grab Antigonus from the trapdoor). I’m the bear! I’m also the baby… I make a noise like a baby crying when Perdita is left in the storm. I was messing about in rehearsals one day and I did a baby noise and John decided we would use it!

The funny thing is that I can only do the bear if I make bear noises; although nobody can see anything apart from my arm, I have to growl. And I can only do the baby by pretending to look like the baby, so I’m behind the tiring house door with my face screwed up… I told this to somebody the other day and I realised how mad it sounded, but it's true. Anyone standing by the trapdoor just laughs because they hear me growling and snarling!

We also practiced with the plinth and the statue over and over and over again, because it has to be dragged on and the stage is not completely flat; if the plinth rolled over a big bump then the statue suddenly would fall off! Or I might put my arms out if I felt I was about to fall – the reaction is to steady yourself. But we got the plinth rolling very smoothly and now it just goes on… although every night I get on the plinth and think ‘Here we go, here we go!’

Previews

We’re almost at the end of our preview period – the press comes tomorrow night. During previews we rehearse in the day, tweaking small things, and then perform in the evening. After that we’ll work more independently to keep it fresh and alive. Hopefully it will continue to change throughout the run. Quite a lot has changed since we opened. The beginning is slightly different – it's quietened down a bit. At first we all came on and into a big dance, which was very jolly and created a party atmosphere but was a bit too much like a chorus line so now the Kings and Mamillius do a little show piece for the rest of the court who watch and applaud. It still shows the jollity and the easy nature of the Sicilian court, but in a subtler way.

Notes from the Master of Words

Throughout the previews we’ve been working with Giles Block who helps us with a lot of the words. He makes sure that not only that we say the words that were written (you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to make up bits and pieces and it makes so much more sense when you say the right word). Also if he thinks that perhaps the sentence is not as clear as it could be then he passes notes to us. What he does is he makes everybody a copy of the script with their own scenes or just a part of the scene that has their lines. He uses different symbols on the script as a shorthand for his notes – there's a little key like a map so we know what each one means. Every time he comes to see us he uses a different coloured pen so we can keep track of what we’re doing. That's really helpful.

I’ll give you some little examples. I say:

Not your jailer then
But your kind hostess. Come, I’ll question you
Of my lord's tricks and yours when you were boys.
[I.ii]

Giles circled ‘of’ with the little note ‘you keep saying ‘on’ rather than ‘of’. Another symbol here tells me that I’ve been adding a word in: the line is ‘Or I mistake you. O, would her name were Grace!’ [I.ii] and because if the rhythm I sometimes say ‘O I would her name were Grace.’

Most of my notes are little things like that. There's another one here about Hermione's speech at the beginning of the trial scene. Her first lines are:

Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say ‘Not guilty.’ Mine integrity
Being counted falsehood, shall (as I express it)
Be so receiv’d. But thus, if pow’rs divine
Behold our human actions (as they do),
I doubt not then but innocence shall make
False accusation blush, and tyranny
Tremble at patience. You, my lord, best know
(Who least will seem to do so) my past life
Hath been as continent, as chaste, as true
As I am now unhappy; which is more
Than history can pattern, though devis’d
And play’d to spectators. For behold me,
A fellow of the royal bed, which owe
A moi’ty of the throne, a great king's daughter,
The mother to a hopeful prince, here standing
To prate and talk for life and honor ‘fore
Who please to come and hear.
[III.ii]

Now it's the first time I come out and see everybody (we’re taking the audience to be people at the trial), so I take my time over that introduction. I believe that Hermione is sort of presenting herself- ‘this is what I’m here to do.’ Then she goes on to talk about the ‘powers divine’ and how the gods don’t miss a trick: they know that I’m innocent and all this will be heard. The gods will see me right. So she's saying ‘All of you be careful, if you say otherwise’ – not in a threatening way though. Then she turns to Leontes to try and make him see there's no way she could be guilty. What I do is I take my time over the first bit, right up until I start to talk to Leontes really, and then when I say ‘You, my lord best know who least will seem to do so’ – as I talk to him, I start to rush.

I got a little note from Giles, just as something to think about, that says perhaps the highlighted thought [see italics above] could be a kind of a preamble and the ‘real’ beginning of the speech is ‘But thus’ – so the thought in the box could be packaged a bit more, although the fragmented line endings suggest some turmoil. For me, the fact that it's fragmented – you know, the line doesn’t end the thought: the thoughts end mid-line – suggests that she doesn’t quite know how to approach it, because it's the beginning of the speech. But he suggests that the bit before ‘But thus’ could be stronger. Now I’m not sure about that. I’ll have a talk with him about it,

I think when he says ‘packaged,’ he means that I come out and that is what I’ve come out to say. I don’t think it is. I think I come out and I see everybody and think ‘Okay, I’m going to have to address all these people. Alright, well this is what I’m going to have to say.’ She knows what she's going to say because she's been thinking about it, but she's just had a child who has been taken away and her son is seriously ill. She knows she's innocent and wants to tell that to all these people; you just have to take your time to choose your words. When she gets to ‘But thus,’ there's complete certainty: this is her certainty. The first bit is not so certain; when I start talking to a room full of people I often start slowly ‘Oh I’m going to… hello, I’ve just come here today to talk to you about so-and-so, my names Yolanda…’ Then you find your thread: ‘Ok this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to do this, this, this, this, this, this’ – and that's how I see Hermione's speech. So I’ll go and discuss that with Giles and it’ll be fine.

It's amazing how closely you have to look at the words. Giles brings up so many things which are really interesting and I think they’re very right. For instance, in that same little bit that he thinks I should package, you can see the line endings are very fragmented and he's given me little symbols to help make that clearer: for instance, between ‘accusation’ and ‘and’ on the second line of the speech, he's given me a little symbol which means ‘bring them together, don’t leave a gap’ and he's done the same thing in the fifth line ‘to say not guilty’, bring them together. What I’ve been saying is ‘It should scarce boot me to say [pause] not guilty.’ In order to give the word some weight. What he's saying is that in a way I’ve fragmented that too much. I’ve taken that on board, so now I say: It should scarce boot me to say not guilty. [Pause] My integrity being counted falsehood shall as I express it be so received. But thus…’ There's the pause of the caesura at the end of ‘not guilty’ which you can use if you want to. If you carry the thought all the way through to the end of the line, even though it's fragmented, then you take a breath at the beginning of the next line, it just gives words extra weight. For example: ‘what contradicts my accusation, and / The testimony of my part.’ That gives more weight to ‘testimony.’ That's the kind of thing we’re looking at now, going through the lines with a fine-tooth comb.

Movement and Voice

Glynn [Macdonald, Master of Movement] watches performances to check our movement; although we’re telling the story in a modern way, we need to move in a way that works with the costumes… Glynn makes sure we don’t do anything that might look bizarre in original practices clothing. She also helps keep our bodies healthy; wearing such tight corsets, it's good to have someone keeping an eye on our backs. Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice] does Voice calls with us and also comes back with notes on pronunciation and things like that. For example, if we say ‘isshue’ [issue], a modern way of saying ‘iss-ue.’ Funnily enough in the theatre that's not to do with snobbery; it's the fact that ‘isshue’ in the theatre it sounds like ‘atishoo’, like a sneeze. If you say ‘iss-ue’ then the audience can hear the word more clearly and know what you’re talking about. So Stewart's got his ear out there just to make sure that we’re pronouncing the words correctly and that they’re heard and that the sense comes through, as well as making sure that the volume is correct and that we’re not going either too high or too loud. People stop listening if you’re too loud, and they can’t hear what's said if you’re too soft, so Stewart helps us to find the happy medium. Using the ‘supported voice’ as he calls it, you don’t have to shout or project to be heard.

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Rehearsal Notes 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.

Now we’re working on our second play, Troilus and Cressida. It's going to be in what's called ‘Original Pronunciation’. What I’ll do is say a few lines in Received Pronunciation then I’ll say them in Original Pronunciation…

Click here for audio clip

Princes, what grief hath set this jaundice on your cheeks?
The ample proposition that hope makes
In all designs began on earth below
Fails in the promised largeness. Checks and disasters
Grow in the veins of actions highest reared,
Nor, princes, is it matter new to us
That we come short of our suppose so far,
That after seven years’ siege yet Troy walls stand.
[Act 1, scene 3]

Can you understand it? It's very strange. What everybody said last season (when they did Romeo and Juliet in Original Pronunciation) and what we’ve found this year is that you feel more grounded when you speak in OP. What I find really interesting is that every character speaks with the same OP accent: there's no class differentiation. Supposedly at that time class didn’t affect the way people spoke, which is the same for many countries today. I know that in Spain, in Andalusia for instance, we all speak with the same accent and the only way that you would know if somebody's from a particular social strata is through their use of language; that might show lack of education, and therefore you might suppose that the person is of a lower social class – but it's not about accent. Here in Britain there's the association between Received Pronunciation and the middle to upper classes, and other accents are associated with a lower class. That developed in the 1700s; in Shakespeare's time accent didn’t have the same class associations. You can make a character's status clear in other ways: after all, status is something that somebody else gives you. It's not something you give yourself. I’m playing Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army, and the way other characters treat him tells you a lot about how powerful he is!

Shakespeare makes Agamemnon a bit of a buffoon. He's not respected by anyone around him – so much so that nobody recognises him! The way I play him, he's always a bit bewildered by the fact that nobody seems to know who he is when he's meant to be head of the Greek army! I think what Shakespeare's trying to do in Troilus and Cressida is to bring extraordinary characters from mythology right down to earth. These heroes are foolish and human. Achilles is a lazy so-and-so who spends all his time in bed. Helen – the face that launched a thousand ships – is just a bit of a tart. Ulysses (famous for being a clever trickster and hero of The Odyssey) turns out to be a windbag! He goes on and on and on and on! Everyone's desperate for him to shut up but he's explaining what he thinks are great ideas to stop Achilles being so proud. They’re stuck in the middle of this war and Ulysses is thinking up schemes to get back at someone on his own side.

They’re all shown to be fools or worse and I think Shakespeare does this very much on purpose, to show the futility of the Trojan War and war generally. The siege of Troy has gone on far too long. Everyone's bored. Nobody knows who's who. It's all because of a woman! So the play is a mixture of tragedy and comedy and we’ve tried to put that across. Maybe Shakespeare's audience would have had a close connection to these stories and characters, and seeing well-known heroes cut down to size must have been funny and shocking. But I think our audiences will understand that too.

Rehearsals

As Troilus and Cressida is one of the Persephone Projects, we don’t have long to rehearse. It's quite a difficult play so what we’ve been trying to do during rehearsal is to understand the scenes, then understand what we’re saying in Original Pronunciation. Now we can understand each other, but there was a point at the beginning when I found I had to wait until people stopped talking to now that it was my turn! I don’t think that will be a problem for our audience: it's much easier to understand what's going on now we’ve got to grips with the OP and people have made choices about their characters.

After experimenting with different ideas, we’re at a point in rehearsals where we’re making decisions: ‘This is what we’re doing to do – let's move over here, it would be better if I answered at this point.’ We’ve only got a week before our first performance so we’re trying to get it to a certain level and once it's onstage we can carry on playing with it.

Part of me that thinks it might be a better to do the play in RP and then change it to OP, but I think the whole point of this project is to rehearse a play in OP from the very beginning. What I do now, to see whether the OP is getting ingrained, is to say my lines from The Winter's Tale in the Original Pronunciation accent. Sometimes other people join in with their lines, or we’ll practice in normal conversations – when we bump into each other: ‘Hello, where are you going?’ One of the things that made me laugh about OP was that the ‘r’ sound used to be called the ‘doggy’ sound: ‘rrrrrr!’ I really cottoned on to that and went ‘rrrrr!’ every time we got to an ‘r’. So we’ve got a lot of people going round saying ‘rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’ too!

English is my second language (Spanish is my first language); if I work very hard with good phonetics, I can do regional accents but I’m not someone who picks them up straight off. So for OP I’m strictly following the phonetics David Crystal gave us as part of the script. We can be pretty sure that the vowels and consonants of the phonetics are correct but what we obviously don’t have is the intonation of the accent, the musicality of it. That's why we connect it to different regional accents. David said to us ‘Just use your own accent’ – I said to him ‘What if your accent is south of Gibraltar going on for Africa?’ And he said ‘Ah. Well, in that case your OP might be purer because you’ll be going straight from the phonetics.’ It's funny that even when I’m following the phonetics people will say ‘Oh, you sound Cornish or Irish.’ In one rehearsal somebody said I sounded Jamaican and in fact they weren’t too far wrong; there was a programme called Mary Seacole on television and Charmian Hoare (our dialect coach who helps us with Original Pronunciation) said that if we watched that and listened to those Jamaican accents, then we wouldn’t be far wrong. That made me laugh: I was right!

Sometimes you come across very difficult lines. I had a very difficult line the other day which is ‘What wouldst thou of us, Trojan? Make demand.’ [Act 3, scene 3].

Click here for audio clip

In RP you’d say ‘What wouldst’ and pause there – but you don’t do that in OP because you don’t have the ‘st’ at the end of ‘wouldst’. If I say it slowly it's ok, but if I do it fast, it's like a tongue twister.

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