Perdita

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About Juliet Rylance

This is Juliet's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Juliet trained at RADA and graduated in 2002. Previous Shakespearean roles include Gertrude in Hamlet and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. She also played the Governess in The Beau Defeated and Jolenta in The Devil's Law Case. Film credits include Animal and Incident.

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.

Coming to the Globe

Well, I actually came in to audition for the part of Marina [Pericles]. John [Dove, Master of Play for The Winter's Tale] sat in on the audition, and afterwards I wrote a letter saying how much I’d love to be in The Winter's Tale. He called me back and we had a very informal audition where we chatted about how he was going to do the play; he talked about it being a thriller and I was fascinated by that idea. When I got a call inviting me to play Perdita I was completely over the moon! Since then, we’ve plunged straight into rehearsals – after a read-through on the first day, we’ve been taking the story in chronological sections and exploring the world of the play. I think the first half does feel like a Greek melodrama played out as a thriller, and then the story falls into Bohemia where you find a kind of parallel world, in which people are experiencing similar situations and feelings. It's extraordinary.

I haven’t worked at the Globe before, though I can’t remember how many plays I’ve seen in this building. I can’t describe what it's like to walk out into that space – it's incredible, almost like walking out into another world or a temple (it reminds me of sacred architecture). We had a Voice class with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice] earlier in the week and each of us had prepared a few lines to say; I realised that if you speak from a grounded place, you can be heard very easily. Even though the yard is open and the space is huge, it feels very intimate and you don’t have to shout – you can almost whisper and, if you’re using your voice properly, you’ll still be heard.

Preparation

Before rehearsals started, I prepared in the way I was taught at RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] which basically means that I take everything from the script: I write down everything my character says about myself and everyone else, and from that I build up a picture of how my character thinks about herself and everyone around her. I did quite a lot of Stanislavski work on Perdita, using all the clues in the text to build up a picture of the world she grew up in, what her childhood might have been like, what sort of relationships she has with other people. That work has continued into rehearsals: David [Sturzaker, Florizel] and I sat down together and mapped out the entire relationship between Florizel and Perdita – how did they meet and what happened? The key thing with Stanislavski is that everything comes from the text; Florizel says at the beginning of Act four, scene four:

I bless the time
When my good falcon made her flight across
Thy father's ground.
[IV.iv.14-16]

Those lines provide a clue as to where and how they met. We imagined that it was dusk and I had probably just finished bringing in the sheep when his hunting falcon flew over the ground near the Old Shepherd's cottage. They probably had a little interchange and we think they’ve known each other for about a month by the time of the sheep-shearing. Time-wise, it's a very fleeting romance but they’ve already sworn to each other that they’re going to get married. That work gave us a sense of what's happened by the time we get to the scene [IV.iv]. I’ve had similar talks with quite a few of the other actors who are playing characters that Perdita has relationships with – like my friends Mopsa and Dorcas and my foster father, Old Shepherd. In a way, it's very internal work that helps you find a way into the character. It's also good because the minute you get on stage, the relationships between characters are full of life.

Ways of working

Improvisation can sometimes feel like a scary word – ‘let's just improvise!’ John doesn’t work like that. He’ll say ‘Let's just stand it on its feet’ and we’ll play around with a section of the play for a while. Then he’ll make a suggestion that gives you a new idea; for example, yesterday we did the scene where Perdita is very nervous about being the hostess in the sheep-shearing scene. David [Sturzaker, Florizel] and I came on and stood like robots in the middle of the stage – we didn’t know what to do. John suggested ‘Why don’t you try coming in with big wreaths that you have to hang on the two pillars before everyone else comes in? Florizel is trying to stop you and tell you that it's all going to be ok.’ Suddenly we’re playing two different objectives and we immediately have a situation with its own story. John works very organically and truthfully so it doesn’t feel like we have to do very much at all! Everything is being allowed to breathe at this stage – nothing is ‘set’ as such.

One of the things that struck me about Perdita is that she's born of royal blood but has been brought up by shepherds. How much do I show of each of those aspects? I think the biggest challenge will be to find the fine line between shepherdess and princess, so that she could be both. How much do I disguise myself as a shepherd? Should my accent as Perdita have a slight rural twang? That's something to think about.

Clothing

Jenny [Tiramani, Master of Clothing] and I have been talking about my costume (although we call it clothing rather than costume, because our outfits are clothes that people would have actually worn). I’ve even had a fitting. As Perdita has grown up in the shepherds’ rural community, I come on in Act four, scene four dressed my shepherd's outfit. It's got lots of bright reds and yellows, and it quite a simple outfit. At the end, when I come back as a princess, I have a huge silver dress which I don’t know how I’ll be able to dance in! The transformation should be spectacular, and really underlines Perdita's shift between the world of the Court and the countryside. It's been amazing watching Luca [Costigliolo, Wardrobe Department] at work: he's doing my costume-fittings and he's had to make a ‘body block’ because he's making my own corsets. I can’t wait to try it all on! All in all, the last week has been a bit of a blur – an incredible blur!

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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.

Rehearsals continue…

This week we’ve continued working through the play. We’ve been all the way through once and now we’ve started to go back over the scenes in more depth, really looking at the relationships between characters on the stage. For example, we stopped in the middle of Act four, scene four to discuss the relationship between Perdita, Mopsa and Dorcas (they’re my two best friends), and also her relationship with the young shepherd and the old shepherd, my brother and my father.

My relationship with the old shepherd is a key one, because he's brought me up from birth. But we worked out that Perdita has never quite fitted into his world, so although I absolutely adore him and he loves me very much, I’ve never fulfilled his idea of what he’d like his daughter to be. I’m not like his wife was – at the sheep-shearing, he describes her as being able to dance and sing in the thick of the gathering and do all these other things that just don’t come naturally to me:

Fie, daughter, when my old wife liv’d, upon
This day she was both pantler, butler, cook,
Both dame and servant; welcom’d all, serv’d all;
Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here,
At upper end o’th’ table, now i’th’ middle;
On his shoulder, and his; her face o’ fire
With labor, and the thing she took to quench it
She would to each one sip. You are retired,
As if you were a feasted one and not
The hostess of the meeting.
[IV.iv]

We delved into that relationship quite a bit. And then we talked about ways of showing that Perdita is Leontes’ daughter, in terms of the similarities between us as characters – how I can portray that in Act four, scene four so it's clear that I’m his daughter at the end of the play? At the sheep-shearing, everyone is full of compliments for Perdita; ‘she dances fleatly’, she's full of grace, she sings well and everything about her seems to have innate nobility. Somehow, by birth rather than instruction, Perdita has a courtly awareness that none of the shepherd folk have and that sets her apart a little. I’ve been trying to portray that and explore her similarities with Leontes. Obviously, as a King, Leontes has a particular way of being and talking in Court… suddenly in the middle of the sheep-shearing, it's as if Perdita is holding Court without even knowing it. She speaks in a way that echoes Leontes: suddenly, despite herself, her true nature comes out. I think that's the clearest way to think about.

Sheep-shearing

I think act four, scene four is the longest scene I’ve ever been in! It's incredible because there are so many different things going on at the same time: there's the relationship between Perdita and Florizel, then Autolycus and his ballads, there's the young Shepherd with Mopsa and Dorcas, there's the arrival of Polixenes and Camillo in disguise. It's really picking up speed now and I’m noticing how quickly it moves through these situations. I’m also discovering how many complex changes the scene involves for Perdita. At beginning of the scene I’m terrified that Florizel will be found out; I’m scared that my father will find out that my boyfriend is actually a prince in disguise! And Florizel begins by persuading me that it will all be okay… we’re going to get married. Then everybody in the community arrives and the sheep-shearing festival begins. Suddenly in the middle of the festival, Florizel turns around and says we’re going to get married right here! So we’re about to get married when King Polixenes reveals himself and ruins everything with his wild rage. I think Perdita's journey will become clearer when we do a complete run-through of the scene.

Tudor Group

Two people from the Tudor Group came into rehearsals yesterday, which was just brilliant. They spend part of the year living as Tudors would have done (at least, as far as possible). They taught us all about etiquette and status: as we’re an ‘original practices’ production, we’re learning how to bow and who would carry a sword. If you’re a servant, for example, you would do a very quick bow, whereas if you’re a lord you might take a very long, gracious bow. It was really interesting for Perdita because she's been brought up as a peasant but is royalty by birth. There's a lot of room to play around with questions about how much I know; when I get to the Sicilian court at the end of the play, would I have been taught very quickly how to do all of that, or would I have no idea? So there are so many things to play around with as Perdita because of the fact that she moves between the two worlds – the court and the countryside, Sicily and Bohemia. The Tudor Group also told me about sheep-shearing, which was fantastic!

I also found out that Elizabethans stood for far longer than we do today – they wouldn’t have sat down every five minutes. We’re trying to get used to that a little bit in rehearsals by standing up more in breaks, and sitting down as Elizabethans would: no crossing the legs, keeping a rigidity in the back. The corsets meant that you wouldn’t have been able to slouch like we do today; you have to sit up straight. In fact, we have to try and keep our backs straight no matter what we do! It was tricky to remember at the beginning of the week because we’re so used to modern mannerisms. You just have to re-train yourself and say, for instance: ‘I’m an Elizabethan, I’ve been working since dawn in the country, and I’ve been standing and looking after a flock of sheep.’ If you change your mindset, your body soon adapts. If you can get it right in your head your body will follow.

Wardrobe

I had a wig fitting yesterday and we discussed how my hair might have been worn. I didn’t know that all Elizabethan women would have had their hair up and capped from the minute they got married; it was never shown in public again. I had no idea – I had imagined Perdita wearing a cap, but obviously I’m not married yet, so I think I’m going to have my hair down. I play the 2nd Gentlewoman (in Act two, scene one) as well, so maybe she’ll have some kind of headgear. The costumes are incredible. Apparently as a shepherdess, I would wear the same outfit throughout winter and summer; I would wear the same outer garment all year round and never wash it, which is quite shocking! My skirt is made from coarse wool. That would have been quite standard, I think. As shepherds, we would have access to lots of wool so the fabric would have been something that we can make quite easily, and we wouldn’t have the money to employ a tailor so the design would have been quite simple.

Accent

I’ve worked on my accent a lot this week. In the beginning, we were going for something quite ‘Mumerset’, but John [Dove, Master of Play] quickly moved us away from that because he wanted something subtler that didn’t signpost ‘Now you’re in the country’ so obviously. We tried a kind of Hertfordshire accent, but there wasn’t enough differentiation with my accent so now I think we’re going to put in some rounded ‘r’ sounds and alter a couple of the vowel sounds to get a greater differentiation. I found that easier and it sounds more rural without being obvious. I’m changing three sounds for Perdita in the country; hopefully I’ll be able to drop them when I get to Court without anyone noticing.

A closer look at verse

I’ve been working with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice], and Giles [Block, Master of Words] too. They’re just incredible! I had a session with Giles this week and he taught me all about finding the ‘real thought’ in verse. In everyday speech, we normally have an idea of what we’re going to say, but we don’t know how to say it and that's exactly how Shakespeare wrote his verse. So we’re trying to get away from speaking in a regulated way and find out where the thought is, in what might be a long passage of speech. The thought may be right in the middle of it, and the whole of the beginning of the speech may be a preamble to get to it. You suddenly realise that you don’t have to emphasise every word in every line just because it's Shakespeare; in everyday life, people sometimes rush to get to their point and that can happen with Shakespeare too. For example, there's a speech that I have when I first come on:

Sir, my gracious lord,
To chide at your extremes it not becomes me:
O, pardon, that I name them! Your high self,
The gracious mark o' the land, you have obscured
With a swain's wearing […]
[IV.iv]

Now, all of that beginning speech, I don’t have to say any of it; my main point is ‘Look! You’re a prince, and you’ve put yourself in a shepherd's costume, that's ridiculous, you can’t do that, you’re a prince.’ That's all I’m trying to say, but because I don’t know quite how to say it to Florizel, I’m putting in all of this ‘Sir, my gracious lord etc.’ at the beginning as a way of getting into the thoughts themselves. So actually all of that can be far more ‘throw-away’ – when you say it like that, the lines sound much more like everyday speech.

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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.

Playing the situation

What have we been doing? We’ve started to run acts of the play together, and we’re getting a sense of the through-line through sections of the play. I realised how quickly my character needs to shift from one emotional state to another.

Before the sheep-shearing begins [IV.iv], Florizel and Perdita come on and talk together. David [Florizel] and I had been playing that as lovers, in the state of lovers, but when we put the whole scene together we realised it became much stronger if we focussed on playing the actual situation. No one knows Florizel is a prince (apart from Perdita) and if they’re found out, the consequences will be devastating. So that dialogue isn’t just about love, there's anxiety and reluctance there too; Perdita doesn’t want to be the hostess, at the centre of attention. That makes the moment when Polixenes unveils himself much more powerful: Florizel and Perdita have been discovered, and all her worst fears have been realised.

‘Playing the situation’ sounds obvious but you realise how many tiny character shifts are involved when you run whole sections together. And characters or people respond to situations on different levels: there's always something going on at a gut-level and at heart level and at a head level – there are lots of different layers. We don’t think everything through in a rational, intellectual way and we don’t always react on gut-instinct. Once you’ve found those three different levels within a situation, you can play one more strongly than the other. I think I’ve been playing Perdita ‘all heart’ or ‘all head’ and this week I’ve started to find a better balance.

Glynn [Macdonald, Master of Movement] does a lot of work on the elements (earth, fire, air, water). You can embody each of those in your physicality; ‘Earth’ is a very grounded way of moving, for example, whilst ‘Water’ is much more fluid. Those physical states reflect qualities in a person or character. I’ve been playing Perdita as a really earthy character, but I’ve realised there's a lot of fire in her too – her reaction to Polixenes’ outburst has that kind of energy:

I was not much afeard; for once or twice
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly
The self-same sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike.
[IV.iv]

So I’m trying to bring that in right from the beginning, rather than it suddenly coming up out of nowhere.

Perdita

My ideas about Perdita have changed quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. I found it difficult to place her; it's easy to fall into the trap of ‘young, ingénue-type heroine’ with Shakespeare but I’ve actually got quite a strong characterization of Perdita now. I’m basing her a lot on the young Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, because Perdita has this innate sense of nobility. Underlying everything, she's a princess. From what I’ve read of Princess Elizabeth, she and Perdita seem to share a similar sense of honesty and a belief in the importance of being true to yourself. Both characters are opinionated and fiery, hot-tempered and quick-witted. I was also looking at all the references to flowers in the sheep-shearing scene… I pieced together that my Perdita doesn’t spend as much time in the fields with the sheep as her dad would like! She's fascinated by nature and I imagine that she grows all sorts of different flowers and herbs in a small allotment by the Old Shepherd's house. I think she spends a lot of time there – so she's very earthy from that point of view.

Bohemia

I’ve built up my own picture of what our part of Bohemia looks like. I imagine it's very near Heidelberg castle. That still exists today – I looked it up on the internet and found some amazing pictures of how it would have looked when Shakespeare was writing The Winter's Tale, in around 1611. There's a wonderful picture with two big hills on either side of the castle; I think Perdita would have wondered off a lot to sit on the top of those hills and look down on this castle. There was a lot going on in Bohemia at the beginning of the seventeenth century: Frederick V, King of Bohemia, married Princess Elizabeth (eldest daughter of James I of England) in 1613. It became known as ‘The Chemical Wedding’ after a pamphlet published in 1616. Frederick is actually called the ‘Winter King’ and the play is called The Winter's Tale… perhaps everyone knew he was making preparations to marry someone? That's one of the great things about this play – little things keep clicking into place. It would certainly have been a very lively time in Bohemia. On top of that, the old shepherd in our story has a quite prominent position in the village (he's holding the sheep-shearing after all), so I think Perdita's world would have been very rich and full.

Really, that's what this week has been about for me: I suddenly realised that if I’m going to play this character for five months, I’d like to really know where I come from and what my world is like to the extent that it will support me throughout the time. This week I leapt into research, staying till 10pm every night searching the internet!

Other parts

Perdita comes in half way through the play. Before the interval I play two more characters; Hermione's second lady-in-waiting and the king's messenger. In the beginning I thought it would be easy ‘I just go on, say a few lines and then come off!’ But of course that's not the case; I’ve got to make these characters real as well. So my messenger's a bit of a suck-up! He likes to think of himself as top-dog but he's not at all – he's very young and eager to please. I come on as the lady-in-waiting in Act Two, scene one, and we’re developing a nice story there as well; I’m very close to the young prince Mamillius and we all go ice-skating together. When I next come on, I’m this messenger who is completely ready to do anything the king wants at any given moment. After that I come on as Perdita: it will be lovely to get to the interval when I can concentrate on Perdita but it's also great to have the messenger and the lady-in-waiting to help get me into the story and become present in the world of the play.

We’re now waiting for ice-skates to arrive! A man is making us ice-skates with a double edge that we can fit onto the bottom of our shoes so we’ll be able to mime skating. I’ll probably end up sliding off the stage on my first entrance! Hopefully we’ll be able to practise tomorrow. John [Dove, Master of Play] has set our scene on ice – it's very cold in Sicily, winter time – and I think that's brilliant. It gives Sicily a very different feel; we’re all having fun on ice-skates and then the accusation of Hermione takes place on the ice too. It's a great metaphor for the accusations and the situation at court; unstable, precarious, literally ‘resting on thin ice.’ Things could break up at any moment. On the other hand, when we arrive in Bohemia it's the middle of summer – everything is in blossom and the world is full of love and life and festivities. I love the fact that the worlds of Sicily and Bohemia are so different, but they mirror each other so closely. The same sequence of events occurs: another child is disowned. Polixenes feels that Florizel has betrayed him and so he's banished. Leontes casts off Perdita (and in a way, Hermione). There's a great symmetry in the play's structure.

Movement

In our Movement sessions with Glynn, we explored Laban Efforts. There are a number of different ‘States’ of movement – floating, slashing, flicking and dabbing, for example – and we’ve been thinking about that in terms of our bodies. What might it be like to ‘float’ through a particular scene? Once you think about it in terms of movement, it becomes really simple to start use the same ‘States’ in the lines; suddenly you can flick or dab or slash somebody with a word. It gives you such a good tool to carry out your objectives. I’m also using it to help me make Perdita fierier, so that's been fantastic.

And for Voice, I’ve been working with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice] on the four different centres of voice: the head, the throat, the heart and the gut. The different centres relate to a character's motivation for speaking: if you’re trying to soothe somebody, you might speak from the throat whereas if something hits you hard emotionally then you might use the ‘Gut’ voice. It's got very complicated this week, trying to marry all the work on Voice and Movement into the character: my head feels like it's going to explode!

We had a Voice session on the stage as a company, but I had a costume fitting so I missed it. I am feeling quite… not apprehensive, but keen to get on stage soon. That's one of the things I’m looking forward to next week. I’m also looking forward to running the whole play, because that will help the through-line of the play slot together. At least I’m hoping that's what will happen!

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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.

Technical rehearsals

This week has been fantastic; our tech has gone very smoothly. The biggest changes we’ve made since moving from the rehearsal room to stage involve blocking. Coming into the tech, we suddenly realised that we’ve got very ‘proscenium’ theatre: everything is rather pushed down to the front, so this week it's been a case of reorganising ourselves so that we use the rest of the stage (the full depth, the sides, the downstage corners). I think those changes are normal for tech week; John [Dove, Master of Play] said that a similar thing happened with Measure for Measure last season. So nothing to worry about!

I’m trying to become more aware of the audience all around me. They stand on three sides in the yard and sit on three levels all the way around in the galleries; to engage different parts of the house in the action, I need to get upstage and use the pillars – to go behind the pillars rather than get stuck in the ‘valley of death’… that's what the area in the middle of the pillars is called, because if you’re standing in line with the pillars, you disappear from view for a lot of people. We also changed the dances. Yesterday we reworked most of the jig because it felt too long. The live music really makes a difference; once the musicians came on stage with us, we felt we needed to pick up the pace. We also realised that we needed to get off stage faster and incorporate how the musicians get off the stage too, so we did some reblocking which was quite intense. Those are kind of the adjustments that I’ve noticed, alongside work with exits, entrances, cues and the music. And seeing everybody in their costumes obviously makes a huge difference; we’re beginning to see the world of the play.

Right now I’m wearing the most enormous princess dress ever seen! It incredible; when you put it on it makes you feel so different. You hold yourself differently, for one thing: the corset doesn’t let you slouch and you bend in different places! I think the most exciting thing for me today is the fact that we practised the eleven-minute costume change from Perdita as a peasant shepherdess to Perdita as a princess. Eleven minutes might not sound like a very quick change, but it is for such an elaborate original practices dress! I come off stage before the end of Act four and straightaway four dressers help me get out of one costume and into the next. I don’t know how they managed it: I literally just stood there whilst everything went crazy around me. There's somebody doing your stockings and shoes, someone unlacing your corset and getting you out, somebody else doing your cuffs, somebody else doing your hair… it's just incredible. The cuffs are actually pinned on although funnily enough the pins don’t get in the way at all. When I put this ‘princess’ dress on, a lot of the bottom of the dress needs to be pinned up too, to create a beautiful tucks and folds of the right length. That's done when the dress has been put on: once you’ve got into the corset, you put on the outer dress which is then pinned all the way around. My skirt has beautiful flowers embroidered all the way around the hem too, and I love the way that brings in the earthy, natural side of Perdita. It really does feel like my dress! It's red and white to reflect the marriage of the heart and the mind.

First run

The first run felt good. It was the first time we saw the whole play all together; we were all in the same room at the same time and there was quite a buzz of excitement. Seeing the whole thing helped make the journey of the play clearer – how each scene fits into the story – and a through-line for Perdita started to emerge within that. But then the second run felt so static; I felt like I was standing throughout the whole thing thinking ‘I really don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing next!’ That was quite scary so I came in over the weekend with David [Florizel] and we worked all Sunday evening on the stage after the performance of The Tempest. We re-blocked a lot of our scene [IV.iv] and continued to work with John on that this week too. What was so wonderful about Sunday was to be on stage in the evening, when the theatre was completely empty and it had a magical kind of energy that lingered after the performance. We found a new lease of life after that, so I feel much more positive now. I feel that we’re getting there!

Perdita

I talk about the changes of objectives that I play as ‘turns’ and what I’m finding difficult at the moment is making ‘turns’ in each scene quick enough. For example, at the beginning of Act four, scene four, I’m starting with the fact that Perdita does not want to host the sheep-shearing because she knows that there's a prince hiding in the midst of it and that's just utterly wrong in her mind. At the beginning there's such a reluctance to go through with it whilst Florizel is there, but when her father says ‘Come on, you know you’ve got to do it,’ there's sort of a turn: she decides ‘Ok, I’m going to go for this!’ So I put on a garland of flowers and enter into the sheep-shearing. Then Perdita is thrown off guard during the offering of the flowers – two very odd figures in incredible black gowns appear (Polixenes and Camillo in disguise) and there's another ‘turn’ when she's faced with a huge debate about nature and art. She responds to Polixenes’ argument and for the first time clicks into a very courtly style of debate. The ‘turns’ get faster and faster as the marriage is agreed and Polixenes reveals himself… all the way through the scene there are these sharp zig-zags. When you read it on the page, the story in the scene can seem quite linear – this happens, then this happens, then this happens – but really there are all sorts of turns and twists. The characters don’t know what's going to happen next and neither should the audience! I’ve got to try to find the different turns in Perdita's journey and play them fast enough. And there are different levels of response within each of those turns. For example, the subconscious level: of course I can slip into this courtly form of debate because it's in my blood as the daughter of a king and of course I’d know about the flowers. But I think Perdita feels so out of place for most of that scene, so how might that come through? It's a bit like a roller coaster; you step on and the sheep-shearing twists and turns are so fast that you just have to keep rolling with it. I feel like I’m on a roller-coaster and in the sheep-shearing Perdita must be feeling like that too, so at least that's quite useful!

Open tech

For the first time people have been able to sit and watch some of our technical rehearsal, which is lovely, because it reminds you of what an audience might be like. During rehearsals I didn’t really give any lines out to the audience because it feels silly to turn out to the four walls in IJ3! [Globe rehearsal studio] But when you get into the theatre, it suddenly feels very natural to turn lines out and you realise there are all sorts of opportunities for that. There's a point when Perdita says ‘Oh Lady Fortune, / Stand you auspicious!’ [IV.iv.52-3]. I always said that upstage with my back to the audience, waiting for guests to come in for the sheep-shearing. When I got to that line in the theatre, I suddenly realised that I could turn it out – there's even a picture of Lady Fortune painted on the panels of the canopy over the stage. Lady Fortune could be somewhere up in the sky… there are so many choices to be made about who or where I can direct those lines, and actually having people sitting there watching really made me think about that. It's really exciting: suddenly there are so many different ways of playing lines or words: I kept thinking ‘Oh, of course that can go out!’ And the people in the galleries responded as well, which was great. We’ve got another open tech today, then a dress rehearsal tomorrow before the first preview. In the dress rehearsal we’ll make sure that everything has been pieced together properly and can run at the speed we want.

I’m not really nervous yet – just very, very excited! I’d like to be able to play as truthfully as I can and stick in the world of the play for the entire time. I think the hardest thing is to focus on the world of the play when you’re fretting about the bit that's coming next or whether you’ll be able to do a quick costume change… I just need to think ‘This is my world; I’m in it this minute and I have no idea what's going to happen next.’ Those are my aims for our first preview on Saturday!

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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.

First performance

What was it like? It was the most incredible thing I have ever experienced! Just the fact that we’ve been rehearsing this play for six weeks – trying out different things with Movement and Voice, putting the show together in the rehearsal room – then suddenly you get into the theatre and you have that audience… 1600 people become characters in the play. You can see them and they can see you and they’re completely involved in the story. At one point I went over to the corner of the stage and I was crying (at the end of the sheep-shearing scene). A lady put her hand on my foot and said ‘Oh no, don’t cry.’ You can’t ignore it; you have to respond, as you would in normal life. I turned around and took her hand, just held her hand.

I was pretty nervous before I went on stage, very nervous. But I do a little preparation where I take my character out of its box and put it on (at the end of the show I do the same thing and put it back in the box). I was nervous until I put Perdita on in the tiring house and then it was fine. It felt really organic and alive. The lovely thing about that space is that you’re really able to be in the moment and inhabit the world of the play; that gave me so many things to think about that I didn’t have much room to be nervous on stage. Although we did the same show that we rehearsed, it immediately took on a completely different aspect. For example, I realized that the audience have already created their Perdita by the time they meet her in the second half of the play (perhaps that's true of the Globe more than a theatre where everybody sits in the dark). They’ve seen Perdita as a baby in the first half and they’ve imagined her living with the shepherds. That gives a background to what I bring to the character; in a sense, they’ve already decided what I’m going to be like and they can almost help me through; you can turn around to look at someone in the audience and ask them ‘What should I do? What should I do here? They look back at you and it's like a conversation: you think ‘Oh well, I’ll do this’. It's an incredible feeling. You’re not isolated from the audience – in a normal theatre you could go on, do your Perdita and then leave whereas here you listen and respond to the audience. They’re different every night so the play is slightly different every night. We did a matinee last week for an elderly audience. They were so warm and utterly involved, so quiet and attentive. If you had dropped a pin on the front of the stage, they would have heard it. The play took on a slightly different edge: it was a little bit more it was more thoughtful and profound pace (whereas sometimes when we have lots of very young people in the crowd it can become a bit of a riot!). I think the audience really does have an effect on the play. You never know what's going to happen!

Previews

To have as many previews as we had was fantastic. Suddenly having the audience there meant the play took on quite a different shape after about a week. It got a lot faster and we adapted to the space… I think everyone started to try to embody the story more fully. We re-blocked whole pieces too; Florizel and Perdita's entrance at the beginning of Act 4, Scene 4 felt like very kind of stylized when we first tried it on stage. John, David and I all felt that it should be more organic. It worked in the rehearsal room but the second we put it on the stage it felt awkward. Now we’re using diagonals and curved lines or ‘bow lines’ for that entrance; never walk in a straight line unless you really want to make a point of it. We looked at the stage and thought a sort of figure of eight pattern might work - we sort of go around one pillar then the other and keep crossing each other. That seems to work much better.

I don’t know what it is about space but when you walk across it in a straight line it feels like you’re trying to ‘act’, making a very conscious statement, whilst a curved line feels more natural… for example, when Polixenes throws Perdita off her guard by saying ‘Well you fit our ages with flow’rs of winter’ [IV.iv]. Perdita turns around and says

Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flow’rs o’th’ season
Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors
[IV.iv]

She's trying to think up an answer as she goes along – she doesn’t start off knowing exactly what she's going to say. If you try saying that and walking along a straight line, it doesn’t work… she's not so sure of her direction. But if you use curved lines and take it away, it's almost as if you’re thinking up a response on the spur of the moment. Those movements also allow you to take in more of the audience. I hadn’t really thought about that before – it started to come to light in the first week of previews. Another discovery was the fact that you can turn out to the audience without it looking like a pantomime: there's a more intimate, subtle connection between actors and the audience which is never the same. Sometimes the audience protests at Polixenes’ tirade near the end of the sheep-shearing, and at other times I notice people nodding as if to say ‘Yes, I understand why he's angry.’ The space does have that edge: if the audience are of a certain type, then they will jump in and take sides. I like never being quite sure whether I’ll be supported that night!

Another thing I’ve learnt this week is that the work never stops! I stepped on stage the other night and felt that I had got a bit used to everybody being there. I felt that I hardly looked at the old shepherd until the very end of Act 4, scene 4. So I need to keep focussed; look people in the eye and react to what they’re doing because we each do slightly different things each night. We have to keep working on the relationships between characters to keep them fresh. What's lovely is that those relationships are there, definitely there; when I see Sam [Young Shepherd], my brother, you know he's my brother.

Troilus & Cressida begins

We’ve just started rehearsals for our second play, Troilus and Cressida in Original Pronunciation. It feels like we haven’t quite caught up with opening The Winters Tale (we only had a Press Night last week) and yesterday we met for our first Troilus rehearsal. I’m playing Cressida, Andromache and a figure in armour! David Crystal spent a whole day with us, going through the differences between Original Pronunciation and Received Pronunciation. The scripts for OP are incredible - we have all the lines on one side and the phonetics for the lines on the opposite page. I haven’t done phonetics for years so I can’t remember the sounds for half of the symbols! I didn’t see the Original Pronunciation performances of Romeo and Juliet last season - I wasn’t in the country at the time. I’m going to watch the video in the archive. I have heard the audio recording and it does seem to ground everybody's voices in a way that RP doesn’t. It's quite daunting – the play in itself is such a wordy play – but Giles [Block, Master of Play] is marvellous so I’m sure it’ll all be fine. My biggest fear is I’m going to walk on in The Winters Tale and start doing OP in the middle of the flower scene! Yes, I’m excited but there are butterflies in my stomach…

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Rehearsal Notes 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.

The Winters Tale is going well. We’re still finding different laughs and different ways of pacing scenes – we try to change moments to keep them fresh – but we’re really concentrating on Troilus and Cressida now. It's become a mammoth beast! We’re rehearsing around performances of The Winter's Tale, in afternoons or evenings, and I’ve actually been surprised that original pronunciation is the thing that I’m finding least hard! I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do OP but it feels very natural. I wouldn’t mind if I never had to do Shakespeare in RP again! Sounds feel raw and guttural in OP, meaty somehow. They open up the characters, as though the sounds are coming from the heart and the belly rather than the head. Actually that makes sense when you think that RP was developed by the aristocracy in the 1700s. So OP is fine - what I am really struggling with is Cressida!

Cressida

Cressida starts off so sure and quick-witted at the beginning of the play. Her three main characteristics seem to be wit, sex and control. I thought my super-objective should be to be in love and keep control of my life in a man's world; to get Troilus without losing myself. That seems clear in her first scene with Pandarus [I.ii]: Cressida is confident and runs rings around him, but the minute he goes off stage she has a soliloquy that reveals another side. Her opinions that a woman shouldn’t let anyone win her love because that will ruin it – ‘Men prize the thing ungained more than it is’ – and that she’ll be controlled by the man seem so jaded and twisted. I feel that on the outside she is very assured and strong. She knows how to control or manipulate people in order to keep her strength. But underneath she is someone who, as both a traitor's daughter and a woman, is very isolated and vulnerable, and she's unsure that if she gives herself to somebody the relationship will last. I am struggling with those different sides.

Cressida's journey through the play is so odd and at the end she just disappears. I think it's interesting that Shakespeare didn’t write a mad scene at the end where she's shown to have completely lost the plot or another scene that gives her the chance to explain why she gave up Troilus for Diomedes. Troilus tears her letter up in Act five – perhaps that was an explanation. The more I look at the play, the more I think it's not really about love; it's about how people are forced to make bad decisions because of war. The love story disappears. I think Troilus loses the fight with Diomedes because of his anger at Cressida's betrayal. And Cressida makes the awful choice to be with Diomedes in order to survive; she has to save her own skin. I think Shakespeare focuses on the fact that war brings out the worst in everybody. It corrupts the whole society.

The play is very dark, though it didn’t feel like that when I read it. I remember thinking ‘This is fantastic – lively and full of kind of exciting things.’ The second we started to get up and play the scenes, a much darker story came through. There isn’t any let up, any bright side. Cressida's last word in the play is ‘turpitude’. Depravity – a horrible word to leave on, but it fits with the play's vision of war.

Watching other scenes in rehearsal, I realised how the women are bartered in the world of the play. Greeks and Trojans fight over who owns Helen. Cressida is suddenly bartered to the Greeks in exchange for Antenor. And the Kissing scene [IV.5] (where the Greek commanders kiss Cressida, passing her from one to the next) is really abusive. Basically Cressida is their trophy, as Helen is a Trojan trophy. We’re playing the scene as a kind of competition as to who can degrade Cressida the most. After that, it's enjoyable to play Andromache because I think she's a very strong woman. I read quite a lot about Andromache in Greek mythology and she is said to have been very formidable; I think to be with someone like Hector you would have to be pretty tough.

Relationship with Pandarus

Giles was keen to look at the idea that Pandarus has been grooming Cressida from birth to be ready to give herself to Troilus. Their relationship would help Pandarus’ position because I would eventually be queen or mistress to a king. The wordplay in the first scene is all about defending myself against pregnancy and him looking after me; it's very sexual and how we are reading it is that Pandarus has groomed me so that I’ll be ready to mate with Troilus. It is quite bestial and fits with an animal imagery that runs all the way through the play.

We talked about the seven deadly sins in rehearsal, and how four main feelings spring out of war: fear, low self-worth, guilt and resentment. Other feelings like pride, lust, greed and anger spring from these. Those feelings are prominent in a society where, as the result of going to war every day for seven years, killing has become the norm. ‘Where are you going?’ – ‘Oh, I am just going to kill a few people on the battlefield’. It's a society that has been brutalised by war.

OP meets modernity

Although we’re doing Original Pronunciation, our production won’t be in Original Practices. I don’t think one follows the other. If the design was neutral, say Greeks in white and Trojans in green, then we would use OP to express everything. What we’re trying to do is to broaden out the whole experience by using lots of different references to war in the design. Some of us are in First World War outfits and some of us are in Second World War outfits (I’ve got a gas mask on at the end). We use both guns and cutlasses. I think it's very brave to go for a design that draws in several different periods; we’re speaking in OP so there's a sense of 1500s –1600s, our costumes suggest WW1 and WW2 which bring in the 1900s and the story of the siege of Troy is from ancient times. If the amalgamation works and we manage to bring the different worlds together, I think it will be a really strong analogy for war through the ages. These things happened in Homer's time and Shakespeare's time and they’re happening in our time. People behave in the same way. Troilus and Cressida is really a very modern play.

It is quite clear that Cressida is a very modern woman and she's very complex. She's not a Juliet; she makes a pragmatic choice in a way that someone like Juliet or Cordelia never could. They would have said ‘I would rather die than go off with Diomedes’ but Cressida makes a very modern choice: ‘Well, this is where I am. Either I will be passed around the Greeks or I find a guardian who will keep me safe’. Adapting in that way and making that choice is something that most other Shakespearian heroines would not have done.

Troilus doesn’t understand that survival aspect of her decision. I feel that when Troilus and Cressida meet, they both have an idealised view of what love is, yet neither of them has experienced anything approaching love. Troilus has been a warrior for seven years so he's has grown in that capacity, but is probably very naïve in terms of building relationships. In the same way, Pandarus has been priming Cressida for all this time and she seems to know an awful lot about women and sex, but actually she is a virgin. So they idealise each other but there is no real meeting of minds. When Cressida falls from the pedestal, Troilus can’t possibly see anything other than that fact that she is false.

Troilus and Cressida are a real contrast to Perdita and Florizel in The Winter's Tale. I think if Florizel met Cressida, she would eat him alive and if Troilus met Perdita he would eat her alive! It makes it quite hard to move between plays. Troilus and Cressida have such a bleak journey; they’re ripped apart after spending one night together. Talking of crossovers between plays… today in The Winters Tale I managed to drop Perdita's West Country accent going into the final scene but then right at the end an OP ‘r’ slipped in really loudly! There was no way of disguising it in the line just as I was about to meet my mother! I turned around to Sam who plays the young Shepherd; normally we have a little moment where we say ‘Oh isn’t my mother beautiful?’ and we chat for a bit. But this time I turned around and said ‘Did you just hear that?’ and he went ‘Yup!’ I am finding it quite difficult to switch off and not bring any of one into the other.

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Ask Your Actor Bulletin

This bulletin was composed with questions sent in by schools who adopted Juliet.

How did you become involved in acting; who or what inspired you?

Apparently when I was little somebody asked me ‘What do you want to be when you’re older?’ I’d been saying that I wanted to be a nurse or a lawyer but this time I said ‘I have decided I’m going to be an actress!’ I don’t know where that came from; I think I’d done ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’ at nursery school! I continued being interested in acting through school. Then I met my stepfather, Mark; I think he inspired me more than anything or anyone else. I did my training at RADA.

Who do you admire most in the public eye and why?

My parents. The way my mother [Claire Van Kampen] works on five shows at the same time and writes the music that she does is incredible! Another person I really admire is Vanessa Redgrave; she is a wonderful actress and does so much work campaigning for humanitarian rights. She uses her talent for good causes.

What hobbies and interests do you have apart from acting?

I love painting – I went to art school for three weeks before I decided that I had to go to drama school. I still paint a lot. I also like skiing and swimming and reading and dancing.

Would you like to be in a ‘blockbuster’ film?

The simple answer is yes, I would! I’d like to be in a film version of Shakespeare, perhaps As You Like It. Or in a scary film, a lawyer chasing a serial killer would be good!

What are your goals and ambitions for the next five years?

I would love to come back to the Globe and play more Shakespearian characters before I get into the age bracket where that becomes difficult. I would like to do more film. I’ve done some producing and would like to do more of that too – short films, maybe some plays. I’d like to work on Iphigenia, a play by a fourteen year old girl called Jane Lumley, who translated it during the 1500s. It's an amazingly well written.

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