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Polixenes

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About Peter Forbes

This is Peter's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. Previous Shakespearean roles include Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, Buckingham in Richard III and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Peter has worked at many theatres – the Royal National Theatre, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre and Sadler's Wells amongst them. He has also performed in the West End musical Mama Mia. You will spot him in the television dramas Casualty and Berkeley Square.

Rehearsal Notes 1
Rehearsal Notes 2
Rehearsal Notes 3
Rehearsal Notes 4
Rehearsal Notes 5
Rehearsal Notes 6
Rehearsal Notes 7
Rehearsal Notes 8
Rehearsal Notes 9
Rehearsal Notes 10
Ask Your Actor Bulletin

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

I was working with Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] at the end of last year on a film called The Government Inspector which was about the David Kelly affair. Mark played the UN weapons inspector who committed suicide and I played a colleague of his. Towards the end of filming, he mentioned that he was going to recommend me to Siobhan Bracke [Casting Director]. I was delighted when I got a call from my agent to say they wanted to see me for The Winter's Tale. I came in to meet John Dove, the director or Master of Play, and Siobhan; we got on very well, and they asked me to join the Company. Initially they weren’t sure whether they wanted me to play Polixenes or Camillo. In the final event they decided on Polixenes, so that's how I came to be here.

Although I haven’t ever actually seen a play at the Globe, I used to come on the tour quite regularly when they first started building work here. I was intrigued by the structure. I also came to some of the open workshops and staged readings. So I’ve always had an interest in the Globe, but work commitments meant that I haven’t managed to see a show here: I’ve done a few seasons at the open air theatre in Regent's Park, which runs throughout a summer season as well.

First impressions of the space

One of the lovely things about the first day of rehearsals was that we didn’t really rehearse! We came in and had a very nice, welcoming day. Mark introduced us to everybody and we were introduced to the space as well; that was very exciting. I think most actors who are interested in Shakespeare are excited at the prospect of playing in this theatre, because it opens up a whole new understanding of the way Shakespeare relates to his audience. Also there's just something thrilling about the shape and feel of the architecture when you’re standing on the stage. The fact that the building is made of oak and natural materials is fantastic, because they give the theatre a great warmth and resonance. On the first day and in our classes with Stewart Pearce [Master of Voice], we talked a lot about the different resonances in different parts of the body (which represent different parts of the psyche). Those resonances are enhanced by the theatre space because it's wooden; speaking on the Globe stage is like playing inside a musical instrument, really. You feel that you are part of the whole structure. I’ve certainly been thinking a lot about to play that space… it's rather like being handed a cello or a double bass, and thinking ‘Ok, I know it has this inbuilt acoustic and I know that it's possible to make wonderful music, but I’m not quite sure how!’

Polixenes – ideas on character

The main preparation I did prior to rehearsals was just to read the play. I always like to start from there. I’m not clear about how I’m going to play Polixenes, to be honest. He's a foil to Leontes in some ways; they were very close as boys, and when they meet at the beginning of the play you get the feeling that they haven’t seen each other in years and years. Polixenes uses the image of twinned lambs – ‘We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk I’th’ sun’ [I.ii] – and there's that image of twins coming together in a lot of Shakespeare, as though these people aren’t fully realised unless they’re together. I think that leads you to think of Leontes and Polixenes as two halves of the same coin. Having said that, in other ways they’re quite different. I get the feeling (just intuition at the moment, from beginning to look at the scenes in context) that Leontes is the jokier of the two at the beginning. In fact the Queen says ‘Was not my lord/ The verier wag o’th’ two?’ [I.ii] when they were boys together and Polixenes protests ‘No, no, we were like each other,’ but I think Polixenes does worry a lot about what's going on in Bohemia whilst he's away.

I see him as one of those people who is quick to cry through joy or pain – his emotions are there on the surface all the time and it's very easy for him to spin off into one extreme or another. That's interesting because when he talks about influence his son Florizel has on his state of mind

He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.
[I.ii]

The weight of responsibility that Polixenes feels as a King of Bohemia is alleviated by his son's playfulness, but I’m beginning to think that maybe those melancholic thoughts are also part of his character. He's easily drawn into emotions that pull him down, and perhaps what he sees in Leontes is another aspect which allows him to be more jovial; I think that's the joy of their coming together. Certainly he's completely lost when Camillo tells him that the king has ordered him to be poisoned and thinks he's having an affair with the Queen. Polixenes has to leave Sicilia and it's as if everything has been taken away from him.

Extreme reactions

In the Sheep-shearing scene later on in the play [Iv.iv], Polixenes loses his temper with his son because his son wants to marry the shepherdess Perdita. He goes very quickly into that rage, which he then obviously regrets. That's where I got the idea that he's quite volatile emotionally. I feel that Leontes’ passionate jealously, although instantaneous, is slightly different and that's what I’m trying to discover at the moment; what's different about them, because otherwise I think there's a danger of writing Polixenes off as a pale imitation of Leontes (that's obviously much less interesting to play as a role). Basically, I feel that Polixenes develops strong emotional dependencies: he's strongly tied to his son, he's strongly tied to Leontes, and he becomes strongly tied to Camillo and that feeds into his extreme reactions.

Work in rehearsals

We did a read-through on the first day of proper rehearsal to get a sense of the shape of the story. John [Dove, Master of Play] is very quick as a director. He's full of ideas, so he's been very keen to get it up on its feet as quickly as possible. After the read-through, we’ve been working through the play scene by scene: we sit down and read through a particular scene, discuss it a little and then we’re up and working on our feet pretty much straight away. We do each scene over and over again, with lots of different ideas flying around the room – it's great. Today we’ve been working on the scene where the plot has moved sixteen years on and Polixenes is trying to persuade Camillo to stay in Bohemia [IV.ii]. Camillo is desperate to go back to Sicilia; he's had contact with Leontes in Sicilia, and Leontes has asked him to return. We think there are two things that are going on there – Polixenes is trying to keep Camillo with him, and the way he tries to hook him into staying is to bring up the question of Florizel (Polixenes’ son), who has been absent from Court. The rumour is that Florizel has become involved with the daughter of a shepherd, so Polixenes and Camillo decide to disguise themselves in order to find out more about that.

Polixenes has a very strong need for Camillo to stay; it's not just that Camillo is useful to him – it's more like an emotional dependency. We talked about the close relationship between Camillo and Mamillius (Leontes’ son) at the very beginning of the play. It's almost as if Camillo is Mamillius’ tutor, and we thought maybe this kind of closeness could be mirrored in his relationship with Florizel. So when we looked at how much Camillo knows about Florizel and these shepherdess rumours, we found it's more interesting to play that he does actually know, but doesn’t let on to the king – at least, until the king tells him some of the story and then Camillo can be more open. We identified different points in the scene where one person has a fuller knowledge than the other, and I really think that's lovely – the idea that they both have an agenda – because it brings the scene alive. Camillo wants to get back to Sicilia, but is now emotionally tied to Polixenes and Florizel in the way he was tied to Leontes and Mamillius, and the king plays on that.

Prose and verse

We also talked a little bit about why that scene [IV.ii] was in prose. Most of The Winter's Tale is in verse. Camillo and Polixenes go back into verse after this scene and up until that point, all my scenes have been in verse, so the shift into prose is interesting. We’re still not sure why that happens – I don’t think anybody is! Giles Block [Master of the Words] tends to think that when characters speak in prose, they’re often speaking rationally, from the head. That can take all sorts of forms: it can be political speech, formal speech, or witty speech. The verse – because of its rhythm and because it has a strong pulse – tends to be much more emotional. It comes from the gut. But the trouble with Shakespeare (and the great thing about him too) is that you can never quite pin him down in that way, so you’ll find elements of prose that are more like verse and vice-versa. In terms of the Polixenes/ Camillo scene, I think that Shakespeare uses prose in contrast to Time's speech in rhyming couplets. Most of the play in blank verse, then there's Time's speech in rhyming couplets, then a prose scene [IV.ii] and the main bit of the Bohemia section is a mixture but a lot of it is in verse. I feel those shifts are probably intended to work subliminally: no doubt Shakespeare shifted easily from one form to another when he was writing, without consciously about why. The Polixenes/ Camillo scene is quite intimate, quite domestic in some ways, and a lot of it is about catching up on plot, so perhaps you could relate the form to the consolidation of plot, or the domesticity or the fact that they’re in disguise when they speak in verse at the sheep-shearing… you can’t make clear rules about it, otherwise you’ll end up shooting yourself in the foot!

Shape of the play

We looked at how the scene between Camillo and Polixenes fits into the overall shape of the play. Directors often place that scene [IV.ii] after the interval, so at the beginning of the second half, Time comes on and moves the story forward sixteen years, and then you see Polixenes and Camillo having their scene. John has decided that all that will happen before the interval, so the world of the second half of the play ties into the world of the first half. Otherwise the danger is that you have all the scenes in Sicilia then there's a huge jump in the interval: Time comes along and says ‘We’ve moved on sixteen years’, then there's all the Bohemia scenes. The placing of Time's chorus can help us tie the worlds of Sicily and Bohemia together. It's also interesting for the character of Polixenes, because he's in two scenes in Act one and then doesn’t appear again until Act four. I think it's quite nice to see him again before the interval, to be reminded of who he is, and what's happened to him.

We’ve actually been looking at ways of dovetailing the scene [IV.ii] into Time's chorus. The idea at the moment is that Time will come on with Polixenes and Camillo, and he’ll do the first part of his speech as the Old Shepherd and the Clown are just going off, so you’ve got two character just going off and two characters just coming on. Time sort of freezes that moment and talks about the change in time; when he gets to the part about Florizel, we see the beginning of the Polixenes/ Camillo scene and just before the end of that scene, Time steps in and finishes the Chorus by talking about Perdita (which is what the story is moving onto), and then you have the last line of the Polixenes/ Camillo scene ‘My best Camillo! We must disguise ourselves.’ That seems to interweave the two halves of the play very well.

Group sessions

Group sessions are part of our rehearsal process too. We go off in groups to work with specialist ‘Masters’ on their area of expertise: Stewart Pearce is the Master of Voice, Glynn MacDonald is the Master of Movement, and Giles Block is the Master of the Words or Text. Working in small groups, we’re able to take an hour three times a week to explore things other than our play – the way Shakespeare writes in terms of prose and verse, for instance, or how we use our voices, or how we use our physicality – and hopefully all that all feeds back into the rehearsal process. It's a bit like being back at drama school; you rehearse some of the day and some of the day you have classes. It's nice to have all that bubbling away alongside rehearsals, especially when you come to do a Shakespeare play in a space with such specific demands. It's great to feel that you have a support network there to help you can go the distance. It's rather like having an M.O.T and a service before you go on a long journey in a car!

Rehearsal Notes 2

Telling the story

This week we’ve carried on working through the play, concentrating on storytelling and the extent to which you reveal what's going on at each point in the story, really. When we did the read-through, John Dove (our Director or Master of Play) spoke about how important it was to treat the play like a thriller; you keep the audience on the edge of their seats (or on their toes if they’re standing in the yard), by telling the story in a series of zig-zags rather than straight line. The audience shouldn’t get ahead of you at every point in the story; instead they should think you’re going one way and then be surprised when you go the other. That happens all the time to a lot of the characters in The Winter's Tale: as a result of Leontes’ wild jealousy or Polixenes’ rage at Florizel and Perdita, lots of characters often find themselves in positions where they could take one of two options and we don’t know which option they’re going to take. So we’re concentrating on keeping that suspense going, which then lends the whole play a terrific amount of pace and energy. As we rehearse, John constantly asks ‘Now what if this happens? What if that happens?’ That gets us to think about the situation rather than trying to follow the character's psychology through the scene. Everything has to be led by events rather than psychology: as John says ‘If you are being led by the event, you are playing Shakespeare, if you’re led by the psychology, you’re playing Chekov.’ I think that's quite an interesting distinction.

Events take those unexpected turns in the scene where Polixenes and Camillo are at the sheep-shearing [IV.iv]. Polixenes unmasks himself and turns on Florizel and Perdita and the Old Shepherd, so people are thrown into completely alien situations. It happens to Camillo twice: in the first half of the play, he's thrown into turmoil by Leontes’ jealousy over Hermione and Polixenes, and then sixteen years later, he finds himself in a similar situation with another king… he finds himself having to make split second decisions about how best to act in everybody's interest. That's what we’ve been looking at today.

Sheep-shearing

The Sheep-shearing is a very long and busy scene. I think of it almost as film sequence: you can imagine a steady-cam moving in amongst the action, focusing in on one thing and then zooming away to another… you go over to Autolycus and the ballad scene, and then you go back and turn around and there's Polixenes and Camillo trying to work out what's happening with Florizel and Perdita, then on to something else. It's a whirlwind of a scene and very highly charged in terms of plot and emotion and comedy. It's important to be clear with the story with so much going on but you can be too logical and clear with the story; that's not necessarily the best way of telling it, it seems to me, and the scene isn’t written in that way. It doesn’t easily meander from one thing to the next; it jumps and lurches very deliberately, which eventually unsettles all the characters when the whole thing blows up and releases the next bit of the story (i.e. how is Camillo going to get Florizel and Perdita safely to Sicilia and reconcile them with Leontes and then Polixenes?). So although the sheep-shearing is a joyous occasion, it's not really a happy little pastoral scene – it's the springboard into the end of the play.

Disguise

There isn’t much time to establish a relationship between Polixenes and Florizel because most of the time I’m on stage with him, my son thinks that I’m somebody else because I’m in disguise. I’ve been thinking a lot about the levels of disguise at the sheep-shearing. Although Florizel is disguised as Doricles the shepherd, I obviously recognize him as soon as I walk in, so he's not disguised to the point of being physically unrecognizable. Of course, he doesn’t need to be unrecognizable as he's not amongst people who know him as Florizel, whereas Camillo and I are disguised in a way that means that even my son doesn’t recognise me. Autolycus is in disguise in the scene as well, and to some extent so is Perdita – because she's a princess living the life of a shepherdess dressed as a goddess! All these different layers made me wonder about the implications of disguise: whether characters express themselves more freely in disguise, or is it when they remove their disguises that they become their true selves? Florizel says

Why look you so upon me?
I am but sorry, not afeard; delay’d,
But nothing alt’red. What I was, I am
[IV.iv.462-4]

Basically he says ‘Just because I was pretending to be somebody else doesn’t mean I didn’t mean what I was saying’. It opens up a lot of questions.

Polixenes and Camillo are disguised in the normal sense of the word, to find out something more about what's going on. There comes a point at which the marriage of Florizel and Perdita is about to be contracted, with Polixenes and Camillo in disguise as the witnesses, when Polixenes reveals his identity. We haven’t quite worked out how to do that yet, but we all feel it has to be something very simple – in other words, the audience has to buy into the fact that because I’m wearing a different hat and a cloak, that makes me completely unrecognizable to Florizel. It's like the pair of glasses that make Superman unrecognizable as Clark Kent. I don’t think that's a problem for the audience because the events make it clear what's actually happening, the fact that Florizel doesn’t say ‘Oh dad, why are you here dressed like that?’

Shakespeare does most of the work for you. He tells you in one scene that Polixenes and Camillo will be disguised in the next scene, so when they appear again and nobody says ‘Oh, aren’t you the king?’ it's natural for the audience to go along with the idea that they’re in disguise and that nobody knows who they are. But of course the audience knows and that puts them in a very powerful position, because they think they can see what's going on, but in John's vision things don’t go quite the way they thought it might. So we’ve been playing with the different layers of illusion.

Ways of working

We’re not really at the stage in rehearsals where we use props and actual disguises. We’re just trying to work through the movement of each scene in terms of story; how we get from one place to the next, emotionally rather than physically speaking. As John said, most of the time in Shakespeare, that journey is driven by events. It's a good rule of thumb, I think. Once we’ve done that, I’m sure we’ll get more involved with the detail of props and so on. Certainly the disguise will be something that John and Jenny [Tiramani, Master of Clothing] and I have some kind of say in. I had the idea that Polixenes and Camillo might be dressed as pilgrims because that would just mean a big cape with a hat, and Jenny has some shells (apparently that's what pilgrims used to wear as a badge of their pilgrimage). I thought that disguise had nice connotations of redemption and penitence too, so there's kind of a dramatic irony about it that ties in with the themes of the overall story.

Clothing

I tried on a calico version of my costume this week and I’ve seen the fabric too; the hose will be made of beautiful black silk with gold embroidery (I always thought hose were stockings but they’re not, they’re like the trousers which are very big and puffed out) and the doublet is cream and gold, with golden ribbon tying the sleeves and the body together. It instantly says ‘This is the King’, which is marvellous because we can cover that up with something reasonably plain, then reveal all in the middle of the sheep-sheering where everybody's dressed in peasant clothes… that should make a huge statement about Polixenes’ status. There are lots of props in that scene too – apparently there's lots of food and wooden plates that get thrown around. A fantastic routine is being developed by two members of the company, to do with wooden plates and juggling, so I can’t wait to see that. There's also Autolycus with all his ballads… it's a very busy scene in terms of props: the sheep shearing is a very rich environment in the sense that it's a time of feasting and celebration.

Weekly sessions

We had a very good Voice class with Stewart [Pearce, Master of Voice] about finding your ‘note’, in other words finding the natural pitch at which your voice works in a relaxed and authoritative way. We lay on the floor of the attic above the stage and hummed a lot. The attic is a nice room; like the rest of the theatre, it's made of oak so it has a great warmth and resonance to it – very good for Voice. We also had a class with Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] where she talked about Movement in terms of physical archetypes and elements. The elements are Earth, Air, Water and Fire and the archetypes are the King, the Warrior, the Lover and the Magician which are all reference points that tie in with the Elizabethan word view as well. They’re quite useful in terms of rooting your character at a particular moment. After that we rushed off for the launch of David Crystal's book Pronouncing Shakespeare because it's is all about the experience of performing Romeo and Juliet last year in Original Pronunciation. The cast of The Winter's Tale will be performing Troilus and Cressida in Original Pronunciation later on in the season, so I bought a copy of the book and I’ve been reading it avidly.

Original Pronunciation

I think it's fantastic that we’re continuing the exploration of Original Pronunciation! I’m really looking forward to it. That was the other event of the week; we discovered what parts we’re going to play in Troilus and Cressida. I’m playing Pandarus, which I’m very, very excited about. Giles Block [Master of Play: Troilus and Cressida] had individual meetings with all of us and asked ‘What would you be interested in playing?’ I felt that I wanted to play something very different from Polixenes. There's an interesting contrast between the two because Pandarus speaks all in prose for a start (apart from a couple of points when he sings, which is quite nice), and also it's a very comic role. But it's a very interesting role too because he operates in that morally ambiguous heart of the play – I’m really looking forward to exploring all of that, particularly in ‘Original Pronunciation’ or ‘OP’ as we shall be henceforth calling it.

David Crystal's book is fantastic and he gave a talk on the day of the launch which actually answered a lot of questions that I had about the whole notion of trying to recreate something called ‘Original Pronunciation’ and whether that meant there was one kind of way in which we felt Shakespeareans spoke. David acknowledges that's probably not true; London then, as now, would have been a huge melting pot, and there would have been people from all over the British Isles and from further afield living there. That mix of accents and dialects would inform the way each of them spoke as well as other factors like their environment, and their age. Then, just as now, words change their pronunciation from one generation to next as a result of outside influences: the example David gives is that he would say ‘Shed-ule’ whereas his children would say ‘Sked-jule,’ which is an Americanism. But when David's talking to them, he will use ‘Sked-jule’ because we naturally find a common way of understanding each other – we adjust our pronunciation all the time and I think OP will be a fantastic way to explore that further.

I haven’t really heard OP yet, although David did a bit in his speech the other night. Actually it was quite comforting, because I thought it would be like learning a whole new language and but when he spoke it I realized ‘Oh, it's just like learning another accent or dialect’ as you would if you were doing a play set in Newcastle or Cornwall. OP is based on all sorts of evidence from spellings and rhymes in the texts to people's descriptions of the language of period (Ben Jonson, for example, was apparently was a great scholar of language and dialect). When you piece that all together, you end up with something that's obviously the ancestor of all the accents and dialects that we hear today, but you might hear something that you recognise from Geordie next to something you recognise from Cornwall. If you just listen to the Cornish sounds it would lead you to talk ‘like that, you know down West Country way’ [Zummerzet] – I think the challenge will be to listen more closely and hear the differences more accurately. Also, some of the vowel sounds in OP don’t really exist any more, whilst other sounds which exist today probably didn’t exist then: we’ll have to add some things and get rid of others. You can’t just follow the tune of it – you have to be a bit more precise. I can’t wait to get started.

Value of OP exploration

I think this experiment makes you realise how precious we’ve become over speaking Shakespeare. That's another thing David writes about in the book – the way that, for generations, we’ve been very strict about pronouncing very syllable: you must end consonants and all that. It's very important to recognize that Shakespeare was writing in what was everyday speech, so presumably people were less precious about it – it was just a heightened version of the way they spoke.

We don’t know how social class affected the way people spoke back then. It may be that there were as many distinctions then as now. Perhaps outside the great metropolis of London, the Lord of the Manor would speak with an accent that was identifiably similar to the peasants that worked on his land but because of his education and so on, he may not have spoken with such a broad accent… but we don’t know for sure. Presumably there would have been a Court accent, and in the time of James I suppose that would have been Scottish rather than English because he was a Scottish King. So you’ve got all those influences affecting Shakespearean speech – there wasn’t a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ way to do it.

Rehearsal Notes 3

‘Go for what is simplest’

Last week we reached the end of the play and now we’re back at the beginning again – this time we’ll go through and layer in more detail as people become more confident and become more familiar with their scenes. John [Dove, Master of Play] keeps reminding us to ‘go for what is simplest.’ The aim is that what the audience will watch the characters in the story and never know what's going to happen next. They won’t be able to remember what happened five minutes ago, because they’ll be caught up in a story that's very much in the present and full of suspense.

We’ve also been careful not to fall into the trap of ‘Shakespearean’ acting (or ‘churchy’ Shakespeare, as John calls it), meaning the reverential tone people fall into with Shakespeare when they generalise what they’re playing. Sometimes it's difficult not to take a formal, stately tone: I play a King and my first lines in the play are:

Nine changes of the wat’ry star hath been
The shepherd's note since we have left our throne
Without a burthen. Time as long again
Would be fill’d up, my brother, with our thanks […]
[I.i]

It does sounds very formal and very kingly. John has been urging me to play against that because the lines are spoken in the context of Leontes’ court at the beginning of the play: Polixenes and Leontes have rediscovered their youth and friendship, and there's a very playful element in that first scene [I.i]. It's a very relaxed and happy atmosphere, which means that it's a complete shock to the audience when Leontes turns out of the scene and says ‘Too hot, too hot!’ that suspicion comes out of absolutely nowhere. If you play that Polixenes might be involved with Hermione, then somehow the power of Leontes’ madness is lost - and Hermione must be beyond all doubt for the miracle at the end to work. By establishing the Sicilian Court as a place full of light and love and fun at the very beginning, we set up an atmosphere that the audience and characters alike can fall in love with. Hopefully that means they’ll experience a greater sense of loss when Leontes’ jealousy destroys it.

Something else that struck me in that scene was the danger of nostalgia when Polixenes talks about his boyhood with Leontes – I think John's right when he says that needs to be about the present rather the past. Although Polixenes is recollecting the past, the important thing is what that means in a present context now, rather than a sort of nostalgic longing for days gone by. That emphasis keeps the scene very active and present; the thrust always ‘What happens next?’

Polixenes and Hermione

It's very difficult to establish what triggers Leontes’ ‘Too hot, too hot!’ There's not much there to go on in the text. Leontes says all that stuff about leaning cheek to cheek, whispering, stopping the career of laughter with a sigh, kissing with inside lip, paddling palms [II.i] – so you really have to decide whether you think that's all in his imagination or whether there is something about the closeness between Hermione and Polixenes that opens a little crack where Leontes’ jealousy can get a foothold.

The last time we rehearsed the scene, we tried taking Hermione and Polixenes off stage whilst Leontes talks about them, then bringing them back on before taking them away again… they were present for specific moments but not throughout the whole section, because we found that if they are present throughout the whole thing, it seems very much as if Leontes is describing what they’re actually doing. I think it's more likely that he's projecting his own interpretation onto their behaviour and that's a behaviour Leontes himself has encouraged:

Hermione,
How thou lov’st us, show in our brother's welcome;
Let what is dear in Sicily be cheap.
[I.ii]

As jealous people do, Leontes forces his partner into a situation where they are friendly to somebody, and then he twists everything so that the situation he created in the first place provides evidence to condemn his partner. ‘You were friendly to him and that means that you must be having an affair.’

Hermione is quite bewitching in the sense that she's very witty and has a relaxed manner with Polixenes. She seems to be gently teasing as she persuades him to stay. Her argument cleverly plays on all the key points of Polixenes’ argument: she identifies that he's longing to see his son (‘To tell he longs to see his son were strong’) and that he feels duty-bound to go back to his kingdom. I think it's very human that Polixenes would find Hermione attractive on some level: Polixenes and Leontes are old, good friends who are very alike and haven’t seen each other in a long time – when they get together, I’m sure Polixenes sees some of the things in Hermione that Leontes does. I think the closeness that has developed between Polixenes and Hermione during his nine months’ visit is very much to do with their mutual love for Leontes; he connects them. Obviously, Leontes misinterprets the nature of the closeness and he has a kind of mental breakdown. It's a madness that infects him, and it's only with Paulina's help that he recovers. That's what we’ve latched on to in rehearsals.

Tactile?

In the same scenes, we experimented with how tactile Polixenes and Hermione are with each other. At the moment, we’re doing a lot of hand-holding and there's the body language of two people who are intimate friends, without it being at all suggestive. For example, one person will quite happily grab the other person's hand and say ‘Come on, lets go in the garden’ [I.ii.178]. We wanted there to be enough there for Leontes to misinterpret on some level, and that misinterpretation then spirals out of control. That might change, of course. I think it's a really difficult scene [I.ii] because there's so much to establish at the beginning of the play: who everybody is, what their relationships are, and what the atmosphere in the Sicilian court is like. We’ve started to bring those characters on and into a dance, so there's a sort of party atmosphere… the dance is all about trying to keep Polixenes at Court – don’t let him go home. It starts quite formally, but that's disrupted when Leontes brings on a bagpiper and takes things up a gear: they do a slightly more Bohemian dance for Polixenes’ benefit – as if to say ‘Look how much fun we’re having! You can’t possibly go – this is a home from home!’ That helps to establish an atmosphere and relationships very quickly in the opening scenes. As I said, it also creates a festive feel that everyone will be sad to lose (hopefully, depending on how good our dancing is!)

Tudor Group

We had two hours with two people from the Tudor Group, who spend part of the year living a Tudor lifestyle, as far as possible. They told us all about the social etiquette of the time – how people bowed and so on – and that will feed into our work as an ‘original practices’ company. At the same time, John has been urging us not to be hide-bound by that formality; we’ve tried to free up the relationships at the beginning of the play so that they’re really very informal. He's also encouraged the lords at Court to be part of the game of trying to keep Polixenes there, so everybody's involved and you get the sense that while there is a hierarchy (Leontes and Hermione are obviously the king and queen and there are various different levels of courtiers), that they’re all part of the one world. Whilst the king is happy and friendly, then everyone else can be happy and friendly and informal too… but the minute he changes the mood, then everybody has to behave in a different way. That's what happens when you get into the next act. One of the things we found out in the fascinating session with the people from the Tudor Group was to do with wearing swords: when you wore a sword and when you didn’t. As a gentleman, you would have been entitled to wear a sword. We discussed it and all agreed that in the first court scene, they’re probably not wearing swords because it's a happy and relaxed place, but maybe as soon as Camillo and Polixenes leave and Leontes thinks that somebody's out to get him, then he might wear a sword. His trusted people might also wear swords but perhaps others would not be allowed to carry a weapon. So we’ve been exploring that whole language in the clothing and weaponry that reflects the changes in atmosphere.

Hermione comes back to life: final scene

Last week we did the scene where Hermione comes back to life for the first time [V.iii]. That was extraordinary… it's a big set piece scene, so I expected our first time through would be all about finding our places on stage and working out the shape of it. What was remarkable was that, although we were really shuffling through the scene and reading the lines, it was extraordinarily moving. Several people cried at various points in the rehearsal. That made me realise how powerful those words are and the power of those themes of redemption, reunion and forgiveness. It's a huge scene in that sense, but that was brought out by the simplicity of the reading and the staging. I think that's something that we need to hang onto, a very simple resolution of the whole story.

Laban Efforts

We had an interesting session with Glynn [MacDonald, Master of Movement] on Laban Efforts for actors – a system of archetypal movement in acting to do with types of movement and types of characters. The system sets out a series of ‘Efforts’ which are like physical traits that delineate character – ‘flicking’, ‘dabbing’ and ‘floating’ are some of the lighter movements – and you can combine them to have a ‘floating flicker’ or a ‘dabbing floater’. I suppose the idea is that it's a kind of aide memoire as you try to work out what the energy of a character and how they operate – so a ‘floater’ could be a very dreamy and romantic character if the rhythm of the floating is slow, but if the rhythm of the floating is fast then they would be slightly scattier. We ended with little improvisations where people took on different characteristics, so you’d have a ‘glider’ and ‘floater’ and a ‘flicker’ together in a situation. Once you start thinking about moving in that way, it's easier to think about doing similar things with the words – you might ‘dab’ or ‘flick’ someone with a line. It was great fun. We also had a text class on Cymbeline with Giles [Block, Master of the Words] this week, looking at how punctuation informs emphasis and clarity of communication … we looked at the opening scene of Cymbeline where one gentleman explains the situation at King Cymbeline's court to another person. There's a lot of information in the scene, and we looked at how you can use the punctuation to emphasise the preceding thought, instead of thinking ‘This is a break or a breath.’ That helps convey thoughts as a sequence which gives a clearer structure to the information that's being communicated.

Jig

The jig is really coming along now: we’ve been doing a lot of jigging! I think it's going to be fantastic. It's great fun learning the steps – Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] is a brilliant teacher and makes it seem as if it's all a variation on walking! I quite like dancing, although I’m not a dancer. I find it really uplifting. I went to see The Tempest last week; when they did the jig at the end, I just thought ‘What a great way to lift people out of the story.’ The cast did it with a great sense of joie de vive and the cheering from the audience was incredible… I’m looking forward to doing that, especially for our very first performance - I should've got over the nerves and be enjoying myself by the time we get to the jig!

Rehearsal Notes 4

Reports and reunions

This week we put some scenes together and worked through larger sections of the play; we’re getting a real sense of the arc of the story. We’ve done lots of work on the last scene too, when Hermione's statue comes back to life. That scene [V.iii] has everybody in it, so the stage suddenly feels very crowded! It's quite tricky to do when we’re all stumbling over our lines, but it's a lovely end to the play.

I realised how much ‘tying up’ of the story is done off stage. It's extraordinary. Three gentlemen report the reunion of Perdita and Leontes, and the reconciliation of Leontes, Polixenes and Florizel in the penultimate scene. Although the third gentleman starts off by saying that the sight was ‘to be seen, cannot be spoken of’, he continues to tell how everyone cried and hugged each other in such great detail that it's easy to imagine that you have seen what he's describing.

Maybe Shakespeare uses reportage because staging those reunions would make the play far too long… it's a deliberate choice to report certain events and Shakespeare uses the technique more than once in The Winter's Tale: in the very first scene, the conversation between Camillo and Archidamus fills us in on the relationship between Polixenes and Leontes, and in the scene where the old shepherd finds baby Perdita, the Clown tells him all about the storm, the shipwreck, the nobleman being eaten by a bear! Staging the death of Antigonus would be difficult to say the least, but audiences can use the reports to imagine it: they almost stage the scene themselves.

To a large extent the story and the relationships have been tied up – the last scene focuses on Hermione and Perdita and Leontes. In our production, it starts with a festive atmosphere because they’ve been celebrating all the reunions and now they’ve come to see the statue. Polixenes is very much part of that because he has so much invested in Florizel and Perdita, and in his relationship with Leontes.

Also, Polixenes hasn’t seen Hermione since he ran away from court because the king suspected them of infidelity. So there's a lot at stake for everybody in the final resolution, when Hermione comes back to life. Without actually creating an extra moment, I want it to be clear to the audience that Polixenes and Florizel have reached some kind of resolution. The last thing I say to Perdita before the final scene is ‘I will devise a death as cruel to thee as thou art tender to it’ and the next time you see us, suddenly it's all ‘happy families’: there's a huge journey there that we don’t get to play, so we just need to imply it in a way that informs the relationships in the last scene.

You have to bear in mind that all the problems have been resolved and your relationships have moved on a long way in a very short space of time, just as they do at the beginning of the play. The speed of the action struck me when we ran the first two scenes of the play earlier today; they take you from the joyful reunion of Leontes and Polixenes, right through to Polixenes’ flight from court because the King has ordered his murder in a jealous fit. The whole situation is turned on its head very quickly. It's like the image of Time turning over the hour glass in the Chorus [IV.i]. Although the third gentleman starts off by saying that the sight was ‘to be seen, cannot be spoken of’, he continues to tell how everyone cried and hugged each other in such great detail that it's easy to imagine that you have seen what he's describing. Time says: ‘I turn my glass’ and sixteen years passes. Those huge shifts give the play a phenomenal momentum.

Sheep shearing

The other big scene we worked on this week was the sheep-shearing [IV.iv]. It feels like we’re jigging every five minutes, because as well as the dance at the end of the play, there are all sorts of extra dances going on at the Shepherd's feast. There's juggling with plates and fruit. Sam and Tom are doing that (the young shepherd and his servant) and it's very impressive, I have to say. Actually it's amazing what people learn in order to do a play – Colin is playing Autolycus and he's never played a guitar or a stringed instrument before. He's learning how to play a seventeenth century cithern, and doing a great job. I feel quite boring because I just come on and talk!

John [Dove, Master of Play] is gradually feeding in ideas which help inform the situation and the story for each group of characters in the scene. One of the brilliant things about the sheep-shearing is there are several stories going on at once. There's the Florizel/ Perdita romance and the fact that he's disguised as a shepherd. There's Autolycus who picked the young Shepherd's pocket, and turns up at the sheep shearing to try his luck again. Autolycus becomes the focus for the rivalry between Mopsa and Dorcas (who are both in love with the young shepherd). Then you’ve got Polixenes and Camillo who arrive in the middle of all this, to try and find out what's going on as far as the rumours about Florizel and a shepherdess are concerned. There are lots of layers and the elements we’re adding (like the dances and the juggling) enhance the story. The juggling, for instance, is the young shepherd's way of encouraging Perdita to get involved; she's meant to be mistress of the feast but she's a bit shy. Like the dances, it's part of an attempt to get the party going and to get Perdita involved. Even the plate throwing helps to set up the idea of a community: these people are part of the family unit with relationships and rivalries. It fleshes the situation out and makes it all the more human.

The fun also brings out the contrast with what's gone before – from the moment Leontes says ‘Too hot, too hot,’ the atmosphere in Sicilia becomes increasingly dark and nightmarish. It's only after the action moves to Bohemia and Perdita is discovered that the sun comes out: there's a huge contrast between the storms and darkness in the first half of the play, and the bright sunshine of the sheep-shearing. Of course that's undercut when Polixenes reveals his identity in the middle of the feast and threatens to bar Florizel from succession, to have the old Shepherd hung and to have Perdita tormented. At that point, the atmosphere turns again. These zig-zags are really important to the story telling: you think the story's heading one way, and then it turns on a sixpence.

Voice session on stage

We had a good voice session last night. We were in the theatre and looked at different levels of sound – experimenting with how far the voice reaches at different pitches and volumes. We tried speaking some lines whilst standing on the ‘god spot’ which is a point right in the middle of the stage at the downstage edge. That's the centre of the Globe circle and your voice gains a fantastic resonance when you speak there because the sound ripples out and bounces back to you from every surface. It's a wonderfully powerful position on the stage. I’d like to do more voice work in the theatre, to just keep exploring… coming to a new space is a bit like learning to drive a new car; you know the basics remain the same, but everything's in a slightly different place, so you have to make adjustments. Actually, the session was very encouraging because the space didn’t feel daunting at all.

Work on stage

I’ve performed in the open air before (at Regent's Park) so I’m not too worried about being heard outdoors. The Globe is different in that the theatre focuses attention in such a way that you’re not as aware of what's going on outside as you might be if you played in an open space. For example, if an aeroplane goes over the Globe, you’re not really aware of it until it's right over the theatre: it's really, really loud for a moment and then it's gone. Regent's Park is a much more open space and we could almost hear the planes as they took off from Heathrow! I remember playing Antipholus of Ephesus in Comedy of Errors and every night when I got to his long speech at the end, I could hear the roar of engines getting louder and louder as Concorde came in over London! I would hear it in the distance as I was getting to my speech, and always thought ‘Do I rush through it or do I get louder and louder to compete with it?’ Things are slightly different here because the theatre focuses energy and sound. As you’ve got the groundlings so close and the audience on three levels almost coming in on top of you, I think we’ll be more aware of distractions within the theatre – everyone moving all the time. We’ll see when we get to our week of technical rehearsals…

Rehearsal Notes 5

Finding a thread

Where are we now? We’re running bigger bits of the play together: the first two scenes (pretty much the whole of Act one), Act two, and also the end of the first half and the beginning of the second half. Just this afternoon we did Act four, scene four, again – the sheep-shearing is like four scenes in one really – and tomorrow we’re going on to Act five. We’ve started tying up threads through each act and the play as a whole. The challenge for me is that we leave Polixenes at the end of Act one, scene two, when his world has been completely turned upside down by Leonte's accusations, and the next time you see him is sixteen years later… when he reappears in Act four, scene two, he tries to prevent Camillo returning to Sicilia and brings up the idea that Florizel has fallen in love with a shepherdess. That conversation is a kind of ‘catch-up’ on what's happened during the sixteen year interim, and it also moves the story into the next phase with Florizel and Perdita's romance – there's a lot to do in a short space of time! I need to tie up those stages in Polixenes’ journey.

Cuts

There's an even shorter space of time to do that now because we’ve cut a lot of the scene [IV.ii]. The speech that begins ‘As thou lov’st me, Camillo’ is twenty-odd lines on the page and now it's down to three! Rather than saying ‘I feel awful about Leontes and the situation in Sicilia – it's all to be afresh lamented,’ I basically tell Camillo ‘Don’t go back to Sicilia and don’t talk about Sicilia.’ That tells the same story but in a different way. Instead of ‘filling in the gaps’, I think it shows that Polixenes has been hardened by what he suffered sixteen years ago. His abrupt manner speaks volumes without having to retell the story. Of course, that assumes people remember who Polixenes and Camillo are after two acts where they haven’t appeared. It's a bit of a gamble and we won’t really know whether it works until we see it in the context of a run of the whole play.

If it does work, it will really speed up the storytelling and that's fantastic. It does mean that I’ve got to take a slightly different angle on how I play Polixenes and what I think of the character overall. It makes him much fierier and quick-tempered, much more powerful in a way. He's much stronger with Camillo; instead of pleading with him, Polixenes simply tells him ‘Don’t go.’ The cuts change his character in that moment quite a lot, but that's good because it's a useful springboard into Act four, scene four – you can see where his fury comes from when he explodes at Florizel. We’ll see whether that particular thread works…

Storytelling

John [Dove, Master of Play] had an instinct about the cut in terms of the storytelling. Sometimes characters don’t have to spell everything out; playing the emotion of a situation tells the story in a more succinct way. At the beginning of rehearsals, John said that modern audiences understand storytelling in a different way. I think that, because of film as much as anything else, we do understand narrative differently – not necessarily any better than they did 400 years ago, but perhaps in a way that allows us to fill in the gaps.

In a film you can remove all the dialogue from a scene and tell the story in pictures. It's slightly different with a play that lasts three hours in flat light. Shakespeare changes atmosphere and setting with words; if a scene is set in the dark, he tells you when it's dark. Somebody will come on and say ‘The clock strikes one’ so you assume it's dark. It's interesting – in Shakespeare's time people came to ‘hear’ rather than ‘see’ a play but we can’t wipe out the last 400 years in terms of the way people receive stories, so we try to marry the two ideas together and hope that we don’t lose anything vital. As an actor, it's hard to give up lines you’ve learnt and started to own, but I’m not a purist; I don’t think we should necessarily speak every single word as Shakespeare wrote it. At the same time I do jealously guard some lines, because although storytelling is a hugely important aspect of the plays, there are other things going on there too.

Sixteen years older

I’ve been thinking about how we might age sixteen years in the interval. Somebody pointed out in rehearsals ‘Well, they’re only aging from 30 to 46’ – it's quite a way, but it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly geriatric. The physical changes are subtler than that! I think we’ll probably change hair and beard colour – a bit more grey. For Polixenes, it's his outlook on life that has changed: early on in the play he's quite a party animal, but when we meet him sixteen years later, he's hardened a bit and he's less jolly. He's accumulated layers of armour to cope with what's happened to him. Having said that, there's a very funny bit in the final scene when Leontes comments on how wrinkled the statue of Hermione looks, whilst she's standing there listening! The words do the work for you at that point, like verbal make-up.

Off stage reunions

I’ve been thinking more about why the final reunions between Perdita and Leontes and Polixenes and Florizel take place off stage. In some ways perhaps it's more moving or exciting to be told about an event and imagine it rather than see the thing itself. Maybe Shakespeare thought it would be better to see this through the eyes of other people in the court… to put the main family back into context and show what an effect they had on everybody who is part of that society. One of the things I really like about the scenes after Leontes accuses Hermione of adultery is that you see all these people around him saying ‘This is ridiculous, you can’t really believe this?’ You actually see his actions having an effect on the people around him: there's a real community in the court. In all his plays, Shakespeare likes looking at the same event through lots of different eyes: people involved, people at one remove, people from a different social class. I think that's one of the reasons they’re so universal. So there's something very human about the reporting of the reunions. And at the same time, the report allows Autolycus’ story to wind up: he's left feeling hard done by whilst the old shepherd is made a nobleman. That's a nice pay-off which would have been difficult to stage in parallel with the reunions themselves.

Big changes

I’m really looking forward to the first run-through of the play and I’m itching to get on the stage now! Philip [Camillo] and I talked to Tim Carroll [Master of Play, The Tempest] about how much The Tempest has changed since it opened. He said it had changed hugely: after six weeks of rehearsing, you get into the theatre for tech week and think ‘Why did we bother with the last six weeks?!’ because the theatre itself requires something very different. Then you meet your first audience and the play changes again because things have moved on. I suppose that's always the way, moving on to the next level as different things become challenging and require more focus. The play really only begins to mean anything once an audience is there. It's as if we’re waiting for the other 1500 characters in the play to arrive!

Rehearsal Notes 6

Technical rehearsal

We’re into our tech week now and it's going very well. Just getting on stage is lovely; it all begins to make sense there. It's fantastic to see everybody in their costumes too. I’m wearing a doublet and hose in black, cream and gold, some black silk stockings, velvet shoes with gold embroidery and little gold spangles, a couple of rings, lace cuffs and a ruff, and a splendid hat with a egret's feather on it!

We’re working through the show very slowly, going back over sections again and again to work out things like entrances, exits and cues. It's great to hear the music and sound effects for the storm. There's much excitement about the famous bear too [‘Exit pursued by a bear’ IV.i]. You only ever see the bear's paws; one claw comes up through the trapdoor and grabs at Antigonus’ leg, then he backs away off stage. As he reaches the tiring house doors, more claws grab him! Yolanda [Hermione] and Paul [Leontes] are our bears, and Yolanda also does a very realistic baby cry when the old shepherd discovers Perdita. So it's full of joys. After we’ve put all the cues in place, we’ll start running the play again – it becomes a question of developing a familiarity with the stage and finding your through-line within the arc of the play.

Stage dynamics with Mark

We had a very interesting talk with Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] about the dynamics of the stage from an actor's point of view. He shared some of the things he's discovered during ten years of playing here, which actually reinforced a lot of my instincts about the space. I’ve worked a lot in theatre in the round and the Globe reminds me very much of that. You really do have to think of audience all around you – the ‘back’ view of a scene has to be as interesting and expressive as the front. Normal rules about upstaging and down-staging don’t really apply; if you imagine a figure of eight drawn around the pillars, the long diagonals across the stage are very powerful lines to play.

Good positions help the other players around you too. For example, upstage centre is a very strong place to be, as it allows people to play to you in a variety of ways. Downstage centre is good because you can be very intimate with the audience and then just turn your back to direct focus towards entrances. Downstage corners are very strong as well, although Mark said that if we go down into that area, we should go right down and not hover around the pillars, because you can get stuck in what they call the ‘valley of death’ – an area between the pillars where actors ‘disappear’ from the majority of the audience. Draw a line from one pillar to the other, and you’ll have marked out the valley. Of course you can use that area but you mustn’t stay there too long. During the tech there's a lot of jockeying for position as we find our feet on stage!

I’ve been thinking about what Glynn [Macdonald, Master of Movement] said to me earlier in rehearsals: ‘It's not so much how far you move on stage as how you move in relation to each other.’ That might be moving off one foot rather than the other or a slight turn of the shoulders which opens up the action to another section of the audience. You’re constantly ‘opening up’ to as much of the audience as you can.

There will be times when an audience member at the Globe might only be able to see the face of one actor in a scene with six or seven people. Because of where they’re sitting or standing, that member of the audience has to read the whole scene off one face. It might be the face of a character who's hardly involved in the scene in terms of lines, so it's really important that every character is immersed in every scene. Through your facial reactions, the audience read what's happening to the protagonists – you’re a filter. You can’t relax and go ‘I’m just playing a courtier in this scene.’ That's the excitement of playing at the Globe: everybody has a slightly different perspective on the action depending on who they can see.

Globe tennis

Watching a play at the Globe is a bit like watching a tennis match – not everybody sits on the same side to watch the action. If you interviewed people as they came out of a Wimbledon final, they’d all have slightly different impressions of the game's key points depending on where they were in the arena. That helps to make plays at the Globe a very ‘live’ experience; you feel that you’re actually witnessing rather than watching in a passive way. When I’m not rehearsing scenes on stage, I’ve been watching the play from different positions in the theatre to find out how your perspective changes as an audience member. Watching from the back of the yard, you’re not as aware of depth on the stage. The middle gallery feels like a very royal position because you have a privileged view of everything and there's also a lot of intimacy with the actors. Watching from the upper gallery is a bit like being a bird sitting on top of a tree! Every part of the theatre has a very different feel for an audience member and that's really exciting to explore.

The nearer you get to the edges of the stage, the closer you are to the groundlings – you can play off them and develop a really close relationship, but if you focus on them too much then you exclude the vast majority of the house. Your head goes down and most of the audience can’t see your face. Polixenes doesn’t have any soliloquies to the audience; I’m going to try to allow the audience in on the scenes without ‘playing out’ to them. I need to draw them into the situation, whereas if you have a soliloquy you can take the situation out to them.

Fourth wall with lots of windows

Mark talked a lot about the fourth wall, which is the idea that the set forms three walls on a proscenium stage and then the fourth wall is the wall between you and the audience. In naturalistic drama, you’re effectively pretending that the audience are not there. The agreement between actors and the audience is that the audience don’t exist; it's as if they’re watching through a see-through wall in the set. The fourth wall isn’t so sharply defined at the Globe. Mark said that if there is a fourth wall here, it's full of windows and doors. You can open those and play out, or you can close them and turn the scene back in to focus completely on the characters.

Very little things can open and close the windows and doors in the wall. You can share your thoughts just by looking out into the audience and you can close off by turning your back, making them focus elsewhere. There's no stage lighting at the Globe so the actors become the lighting in terms of focus: you highlight each other. That means playing here is very much a team activity; it's like watching a football team adapt a set piece to score a goal or touchdown. Every member of the team has a part to play in that manoeuvre to achieve the end result. It's the same when you’re playing a scene.

We’ll continue to work out those patterns of movement during the tech. John [Dove, master of Play] hasn’t blocked the play. Instead of giving us set moves, we’ve experimented with different moves every time we’ve rehearsed scenes. That makes the action very flexible, very fluid. Obviously there are some set-piece scenes like the Trial scene [III.ii] and the Statue scene [V.iii] when everybody's on stage because you need certain patterns just to get everybody on and off and make sure nobody's blocking anyone else. But within those patterns there's still some freedom for the protagonists.

Set

From an actor's point of view, a lot of the tech rehearsal is about working out exits and entrances and props… we don’t have to worry about lighting cues at the Globe and there isn’t much of a set. Our production is ‘original practices’ so we basically have the theatre as it is, with some hangings and drapes. In the tiring house doorways, we’ve got some hangings that look like big tapestries but they’re actually beautiful trompe l’oeil paintings. They act as doors; Stage Management just pulls the curtain across to let you through and then closes it again. It's actually quicker than coming through the normal tiring house doors which are so huge that it takes a while to get them opened and closed. The advantage of the hangings is they can be whipped back very quickly.

There's also a big drape that comes down to suggest a court for the trial scene. And we’ve got a snow effect which we are experimenting with at the moment! That involves lots of bits of paper but they blow off to one side depending on the direction of the wind so they’re looking at alternatives. But there's very little in the way of set; tables and props and punch bowls and silver cups are more like stage dressing. I find that very liberating because every time a group of characters comes on stage, they create their own environment, their own set: they are the set. The fantastic costumes and music are really important in terms of setting the scene and suggesting atmosphere.

Feels like home

I think I’ll probably be very nervous for our first few shows. The Globe is quite exposing – because we’re dependent on natural light (or special light that recreates daylight for our evening performances), we can see everybody in the audience and they can see us. Hopefully what will happen is that the Globe will start to feel like home as we settle in. Once it becomes your home, the audience are the guests in a way. At the moment it feels as if we’re in somebody else's home and there are very big shoes to fill… not just because the Globe is a fantastic place to work but because there are 400 years’ worth of history feeding into the space. I sat up in the upper gallery to watch some of the other scenes; there were three actors just sitting round in costume having a chat on stage and I had to pinch myself because it felt like I had been taken back 400 years. I thought ‘My goodness, this is what it really might have looked like.’ It's very moving actually… a little daunting, and very exciting too.

Rehearsal Notes 7

First performance

We’ve done it – our first preview was on Saturday. It was good, a bit scary. I knew playing at the Globe would be different from an ordinary theatre, but I was surprised by just how different it was. The fact that the audience share the same bright light as the actors rather than being in a darkened auditorium is the main difference, but the effect that has can be quite surprising: some things get a reaction that you wouldn’t have predicted, whilst other things don’t get a reaction. What seems to be happening during the preview period is that we’re being drawn into greater interaction with the audience – I don’t mean that in terms of ‘audience participation’ but just that we’re sharing our thoughts with the audience more frequently. All sorts of opportunities present themselves apart from asides and soliloquies, and that's something we’re exploring now.

We’ve had a wonderful reaction from the audience, which is very exciting. To begin with, being surrounded by such a presence makes you feel a bit exposed but you become more comfortable as you settle in. Gradually I’m starting to feel more at home in the space; instead of emphasising certain words and moments, it's actually better just to flow through the scene connecting up the thoughts and sometimes sharing them with the audience.

Formality and intimacy

Whilst there's a special kind of intimacy with the audience at the Globe, I’m always aware that I’m playing a king. An awareness of status is even more important when you’re doing an original practices production because it's so clearly defined by our Jacobean clothing. We worked hard in rehearsals to take the edge off the formality in the court scenes, though, because we wanted to give the impression that everyone who surrounds the king and queen are part of a household. There is a distinction in terms of status between courtiers and the royal family, but the courtiers are also the people in whom royalty confides; quite often in staging a scene, John would say to the courtiers ‘Don’t be too far away.’ As an integral part of the royal household, it's important that they’re connected to the argument and emotional content of the scene.

Leontes’ household is status-conscious but the people are very much interconnected. Mark Rylance [Artistic Director] saw a performance and chatted to us afterwards; he got a real sense of what it would be like to eavesdrop on a court. You do feel like a fly on the wall because these people are convincing as a community. That helps put Leontes’ asides and soliloquies into context; he's turning from one set of courtiers to another set of witnesses in the audience, if you like. In the trial scene, he can turn out to the audience as if he's asking them ‘What do you think? Am I mad? This is what's happening.’ There's the sense that the audience being very much a part of that world. That's great – if it believable, then the audience couldn’t make an imaginative investment in the story.

Exploring the stage: Previews

One of the best things about previews has been the chance to get used to the stage and exploring its dynamics. In a theatre with a proscenium arch, virtually every person in the audience has roughly the same point of view. Audience perspectives at the Globe are much more varied; they sit or stand on three sides of the stage and go up three levels (in the lower, middle and upper galleries). That means your relationship to the audience is different, but also the way you use the playing area is very different – you can use long diagonals really effectively without the sense of upstaging each other. If one person's upstage and the other person's downstage in a proscenium arch theatre with the fourth wall, then the scene favours the person upstage. At the Globe you’ve got people all around so the person who is ‘downstage’ actually has as much of the house to play to as the person ‘upstage.’

In the round, you have to think in three dimensions. You’re surrounded by people and anyone who's sat behind you has to read the scene off the person whom you’re playing opposite. Pillars and other actors mean a member of the audience might only see one face in a big important scene – it might be the face of the one person who doesn’t have any lines, so they have to ‘read’ what's going on in the scene off the reactions of that person. I think that leads to a kind of ‘all-round’ acting; there isn’t anywhere to hide and it's important that everybody on stage is involved in the scene.

During tech week, Mark said to us that one thing which had occurred to him over ten years working here was that we’re not in a theatre with theatre lighting: it sounds obvious but it means that lighting is not responsible for changes of mood and focus, so actors have to become each other's follow-spots. You have to give and receive focus, passing the baton physically. You can do that in all sorts of subtle ways; for instance, moving up around the outside of a pillar from a downstage position can seem like a difficult move to make because you’re turning your back on most of the audience and almost hiding behind a pillar – but actually that gives focus and if you really commit to it, you end up in an incredibly strong position upstage left or right… you can come down on the long diagonal. That's something Philip [Camillo] and I have been playing with a lot.

In the early scenes with two or three characters, we can play around with blocking quite a lot in performance as well. We don’t have any set blocking in those scenes; we’ve got movements that we like and other things we’re not sure about so we try something else. For example I have two scenes with Camillo: one where he tells me Leontes has asked him to kill me [I.ii], and another one in act four after the sheep-shearing. In both those scenes, our movements is a bit like playing tennis: we know each other's usual game-plan and we can vary that as we choose: ‘Normally I’d lob here to the baseline but actually I’m just going to play a little drop volley and see what happens’ and the other actor has to react to those changes. Obviously we stick with certain things that seem to work really well, but sometimes repetition can get a bit stale so you find different angles and movements to keep the scenes fresh and spontaneous. Moving your body in a slightly different direction can give a character a completely different attitude at a particular moment. Rehearsals are not so much about practising to get something right and keep it like that – instead we’re working out the parameters of the stage: where are the baselines, the tramlines and the net? Then playing is actually playing: it's a game!

In the sheep-shearing scene, for example, I’ve got a dialogue with Perdita about nature and art. Yesterday Juliet [Perdita] said to me ‘Let's play with the idea of trying to steal focus from each other during that speech’ – so we did. You find yourself centre stage for a minute before the other person somehow manages to knock you off that position steals your focus – it's up to you to get it back again! It's like a status game where you have to win each point in a different way, and perfect for the back-and-forth dialogue between Perdita and Polixenes. Everyone in the company seems very keen to experiment: ‘What happens if I do this?’ That's fantastic and hopefully it will continue through the season. Also it will give us a kind of shorthand for working on Troilus and Cressida because rehearsals for our second production of the season start soon. Although we don’t have much stage time in rehearsals, we’ll have used the stage a lot and be on the same wavelength as each other. I’m sure rehearsals will fly by!

Rehearsal Notes 8

Previews & changes

We’ve done all our Previews now. The show's running time is down to two hours, 40 minutes (including a 20 minute interval) – very quick. John was keen to get it down under three hours and he's done that comfortably. Having had a day off, today's performance went like a train! It's good that the story gallops along and our audiences seem to stick with it. As far as changes during previews go... I mentioned last time that we had a chat with Mark [Rylance] after our first preview. One thing he talked about was the need (because of where we placed the interval) for the audience not to feel overloaded with new information at the end of the first half. As an audience member, I know when I’ve stood for a while I’m not always as receptive – you start thinking about having a drink or using the rest rooms. It's better if the audience feel as if they’re coming to the end of a movement as they reach the interval, like in a symphony, whilst being given enough new information to anticipate the second half.

One way John tried to get that balance was to overlap scenes: one scene comes hard on the heels of another. You get the feeling that Antigonus’ arrival in Bohemia [3.3] comes straight out of the trial scene in Sicilia [3.2] because Edward [Antigonus] speaks sharp on the end of Paul's [Leontes] last line - rather than everybody going off stage after the trial, more characters coming on and then the first line of Act 3, scene 3. Often people think The Winter's Tale feels like two different plays because the sections in Bohemia and Sicilia can seem quite separate; those overlaps lace the story together and move the action along quickly. We worked in more of that crossover during the previews. We’ve now got one between Antigonus’ death (with the bear) and the Old Shepherd's discovery of Perdita. Originally Antigonus was grabbed by the bear, then the curtain closes, then a door opens and the Old Shepherd comes on… John said ‘Why not just be brave about it?’ Now the Old Shepherd arrives on stage as Antigonus disappears in the arms of the bear.

More sound cues have gone in to underline the thread of the story. The clamour of the storm that Antigonus speaks about in Act 3, scene 3 starts way back in the Trial scene [3.2], when the Messenger comes on and tells Leontes that Mamillius is dead. There's a rumble of thunder and Leontes says ‘This is Apollo's anger’, then the thunder rumbles through until you’ve got a full-blown storm (loudest when Perdita is left and Antigonus is eaten by the bear). Obviously the scenes are set in different countries, but it gives a sense of the thunder as Apollo's anger at these events, the chaos Leontes’ jealousy is causing. The thunder dies away through the shepherd's scene… but it also ties in with the snow effect in Time's speech; the weather actually has become quite a major feature in that part of the show. I think it helps to tie all those bits of plot, old and the new, together. As the Old Shepherd says to his son ‘Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new born’ – there's the sense of something having finished and something else beginning.

We’ve tweaked lots of other little things – music cues, entrances, exits… it's all to make sure that the story continues to move all the time and you never feel dead air on stage. I think that's more important at the Globe than anywhere else; in an indoor theatre with lighting effects, a character can come on at the beginning of a scene into a new lighting state and have a moment of silence. Here you can’t do that. If somebody comes on and doesn’t speak, the audience don’t know what's going on. The words do so much work – they tell the audience ‘I can’t sleep’ or ‘These young people are running around causing trouble and hunting bears in ridiculous weather’. Unless you speak as you hit the stage, nobody knows why you are coming on and you don’t grab focus.

Relationship with the audience

I’ve been hissed and booed a couple of times when I storm out of the sheep-shearing scene [4.4], after I’ve threatened Perdita and the Old Shepherd. Not from the yard; it sounded like it came from the middle gallery, which is interesting. The first time it happened I nearly jumped up and down with excitement. Although I’m a bit ambivalent about it too, because hopefully I’m playing Polixenes in a way that reveals his deep hurt at Florizel's betrayal. That's become much cleaner to me in performance; I kept thinking ‘Why is he so angry with Perdita?’ He calls her ‘a piece of excellent witchcraft’ and ‘enchantment’ because of the effect she has on Florizel… but I think also because of the effect she's had on him. She's snuck in under Polixenes’ guard and won him over. Then he realizes that Florizel is going to marry her come hell or high water, without even consulting his father, and I think the betrayal thing kicks in. Before he leaves the sheep-shearing, Polixenes warns Perdita:

If ever, henceforth, thou These rural latches open, Or hoop his body more with thy embraces, I will devise a death as cruel for thee As thou art tender to’t. [4.4]

It's that ‘hoop his body with thy embraces’ … a hug is a very specific, loving gesture, and a kind of intimacy that Polixenes probably hasn’t had with Florizel since he was much smaller. As a dad, I dread the day when my kids don’t want to hug me, and I suddenly realised that he's desperate because he thinks he's lost his boy. We never meet Mrs. Polixenes. I think that maybe she died in childbirth; I get a very strong feeling that Polixenes is somebody who's alone in the world. He's lost his friend Leontes and he's terrified that Camillo will go back to Sicilia. When he realizes that he's lost Florizel to Perdita, she becomes the enemy. I think it's the hurt of it. He says to Florizel, ‘we’ll bar thee from succession/ Not hold thee of our blood’ and then repeats ‘no, not our kin’. I think at that point he realises what he's saying in the heat of the moment. He's disowned his son. It's a horrendous thing for a father to say, regardless of what the son has done. Barring a prince from succession is one thing, but disowning Florizel as his son is much more personal and primal. It's taken me eight weeks to realize the importance of it being gut-wrenching. Otherwise why would he be so furious? He could just say ‘Right, that's enough. Come with me. It's time you grew up and realized your responsibilities’ (a bit like Hal in Henry IV). That's been fantastic to discover in performance.

When I arrive at the sheep-shearing, I don’t want the audience to think ‘Oh, here's a hooded crow, a vulture circling.’ We’ve made Camillo much more enthusiastic than Polixenes about the dancing and feasting, so Polixenes does seem a bit more distant and reserved. He wants his friend to back him up, but when Florizel asks Perdita to marry him, Camillo says ‘This shows a sound affection.’ Polixenes must be thinking ‘What are you talking about?! You of all people should know that you shouldn’t be doing this!’ So there's a kind of riff there which helps feed the anger as well. I’m very aware of the audience, keeping an eye on focus; I don’t want what I’m doing to distract from the main focus in the scene, but I want the audience to register what's happening to Polixenes. It seems to work, because people laugh when Florizel refers to me as ‘ancient sir’ and at things like that, so they’re very aware of the dramatic irony of us both being in disguise, me knowing who he is and him not knowing who I am.

Once we get to the point in the sheep-shearing where I start accusing Perdita, I’m not so aware of the audience, but I am aware of a change in the atmosphere. Until that point, it's been jolly and fun, but then it does change and the hissing is one aspect of that. The audience also seem to grow very quiet: they realize the game's up for the lovers. And things get worse when the Old Shepherd turns to Perdita: ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this to me, you knew he was the prince.’ Parents and children… those situations really touch everybody because everybody is either a parent or a child or both and we’ve all had experiences that relate on some level. Actually for me, the parent-child rifts in the sheep-shearing scene make the last scene of the play even more moving: when I see Perdita kneeling at the feet of her statue-mother and saying ‘Let me kiss your hand,’ I’m really touched every night and I think the audience are too. The reconciliations are amazingly moving.

Press night

We’ve got our Press night soon. I actually quite like reading what the press have to say. I’ve always taken the view in the past that if you’re going to read reviews, you ought to read them all, then get angry if you want to get angry, get upset if you want to get upset, be joyous for 5 minutes (it only really lasts 5 minutes, or a day maybe) and then you’re back to doing a show. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. We seem to be playing to very big houses and they seem to love it; that's the most important thing. I get a bit nervous on Press nights because there tends to be a bit of build-up; people are excited and cards and presents are handed out so there's a buzz that can put an edge on it – the danger is that those pressures can build up and distort the show, but I don’t think that's going to be a problem for us!

Rehearsal Notes 9

David who plays Florizel has been off recently with a virus. He fell ill during a last performance last week; as there are no understudies at the Globe, various people took the lords’ lines in the first half, and then David himself did the second half but he looked pretty green by the end of the play. Tom Padden stepped in as Florizel for the next performance and did an incredible job: he managed to learn some of Florizel's lines in a couple of hours around Troilus rehearsals (normally people just go on with the book, which is scary enough). He went on stage and barely looked at the book! We had to cut the odd line because Tom can’t really be Florizel and come on as the Servant, for instance, to say that Autolycus is at the door. But he's done such a brilliant job that we haven’t had to make many changes. He seems terribly calm about it all – I’m sure he's like jelly inside! David's on the mend and will be back soon.

We also started rehearsing in Original Pronunciation last week. David Crystal came in to talk to us about OP and gave us transcripts of the play which has been cleverly done so there's the actual script on one page and on the facing page there are lines with phonetic symbols in them to indicate the OP differences. David ran through the main differences with us and enthused us all, really. He's such an enthusiast that you can’t help but be swept along by him. I was excited about Troilus before, but now I’m really excited and, having had a go at OP, it doesn’t feel as daunting...

You can come unstuck if you just treat it as another accent because when you first learn an accent what you tend to pick up is the tune, the melody. If you’re doing an Irish accent, for example, you try to find a lilt in your voice. That tune is the thing you recognize first of all and then you get a bit more specific: ‘Well, actually it's a Dublin accent or a Belfast accent.’ But with OP, the tune is the one thing that nobody knows, because obviously there are no native speakers of early modern English! It's like trying to reconstruct a dead language in that sense.

What we do have is a lot of evidence about how specific sounds would have been pronounced. Most of the evidence comes from the plays themselves and poetry where you can see a rhyme was intended. Previously you might have thought well, Shakespeare only wanted a half-rhyme. Or he couldn’t quite find that exact rhyme so he made do – which makes him look like a bit of a klutz. In fact when you examine those sounds, you realize that they should sound the same. Although that doesn’t necessarily tell you what they should sound like, it means that they’re similar and you can cross reference that with other instances of those words elsewhere. Gradually you put together a picture for the sound.

Apparently there was also a huge amount written by Shakespeare's contemporaries about how language was spoken in the 16th and 17th centuries because it was a time when people were becoming interested in that area. Printing was really taking off and more books were being produced and circulated, so there was an increased interest in the written language. Literacy had increased tenfold since Chaucer's time: by now 10% of the population could read (a relatively substantial proportion of the population). Of course most of those people were people in positions of power and influence. Mastery of the language began to emerge as a class weapon – ‘The way we speak is the right way and the way we write is the right way: anybody who can’t do that is plainly not one of us’ – although it wasn’t really until the 18th century that it became a class indicator. In fact, David reckons that in Shakespeare's time there would have been very little difference in the way a lord and a peasant spoke. The accent might be stronger in a peasant, but at the same time Sir Walter Raleigh was at Queen Elizabeth's court and spoke with a very thick Devonshire accent (apparently so thick that people sometimes couldn’t understand what he was saying). So you had knights of the realm who spoke very broadly.

There was a huge variety of ways in which people spoke and lots of Shakespeare's contemporaries wrote about this. The playwright Ben Jonson wrote a Grammar of English including a description of how certain sounds were pronounced. For example, the ‘r’ sound: where you would say ‘here’ or ‘there’ in Standard English today, in early modern English you’d say, ‘heerre’ or ‘theerre.’ Jonson actually describes it as the ‘doggie’ sound… it's ‘err, err’, quite far back in your throat like a dog growling. So the articulation moves a bit further back in the throat and mouth, the opposite of what we’re told to do as actors in terms of projection (which is to bring everything forward into the mask of the face).

Shakespeare makes fun of the way certain people use language in his plays. One of those people is Holofernes who has a speech in Love's Labour's Lost [5.1]* about how appalled he is that people don’t pronounce each sound as it is spelt in a word… the punch line is basically the pronunciation of the word ‘neighbour’, which is spelt ‘n-e-i-g-h-b-o-u-r’ and if you try to pronounce every single letter as a distinct sound it would come out as nonsense: ‘neeyguhurbouurr’ or something that. Holofernes is pedantic about pronouncing English as its written; Shakespeare is obviously making fun of him and his views, which suggests that he's modelled on people who actually were like that and were ridiculously particular about the way words were spoken. In a lot of documents from Shakespeare's time, the same word (even Shakespeare's name) is spelt in lots of different ways. The English language was hugely flexible – people were just beginning to say ‘Well, maybe we should actually put the ‘b’ in ‘debt’ because that shows it comes from the Latin route ‘debit’. It's a way of displaying their learning – the fact that they were educated in the classics and understood Latin. Then people who came along and suggested maybe the ‘b’ in ‘debt’ should be pronounced too… there was no standardisation as such and lots of debate about the way language was used. It makes it easier to see how Shakespeare was able to be so inventive, making up new words and pushing words together in rather the same way that Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins did. They all use words in a way that makes the language incredibly exciting. It's like a box of fireworks going off in your head when you hear it. I think that's the joy of the Original Pronunciation experiment as well; you suddenly hear rhymes and meanings that you didn’t realise were there.

OP reveals elaborate word play on several levels that just doesn’t work unless two words sound exactly the same. We were looking at a great one today in Troilus and Cressida, when Pandarus is trying to persuade Cressida to take Troilus as her lover: ‘You are such a woman! One knows not at what ward you lie’ [1.2]. Now, ‘ward’ is a defensive position in fencing; Pandarus is saying ‘I don’t know what style of defence you’re putting up.’ But in OP ‘ward’ would be pronounced exactly like ‘word,’ so he's also saying ‘I don’t know at what ‘word’ you lie.’ She's lying with words… creating a defence with wards/ words. In turn that opens up a huge conceit about ‘lying’ – Cressida responds by listing her defences and ends up by saying ‘I lie all these wards,’ in other words ‘I’m lying to you now and you don’t even know it.’ The words and their meanings are flexible, slippery… it leads to fantastic banter. Footnotes in a lot of modern Shakespeare editions are based on readings in modern English; I think the great value of the OP experiment is that we get to rediscover the some of the fireworks in the language. Now I use something verging on OP in the sheep-shearing scene for The Winter's Tale. Perdita's dancing with Florizel, and I’m the king in disguise; I say to her supposed father the Old Shepherd ‘she dances featly.’ ‘Featly’ means prettily or daintily or well. In OP, ‘featly’ would be pronounced ‘fate-lie’ which sounds like ‘fatally’: it's a pun on ‘featly.’ She's dancing fatally because she's dancing with a disguised Prince and in a minute that's going to cause Polixenes to sentence her father to death, have her whipped and bar her lover from succession. So ‘featly’ is Polixenes’ grim joke… the Old Shepherd underlines it when he says ‘so she does everything.’ I never used to understand why that line was there: ‘She dances featly,’ why would Polixenes say just then ‘Well, she dances very well’? There's no dramatic point in it. But there is a huge dramatic point in him saying it if he means ‘Well she dances fatally as well as featly’ – it is portentous. Because ‘featly’ is a word that doesn’t exist in the language anymore and the audience probably wouldn’t know what it meant, I now say ‘She dances fate-ly’. On the ear it sounds like ‘fatal’. So going back to original pronunciation can bring different elements of the play to life. It's revitalising.

OP also removes the idea that developed between the 18th and early 20th century that there was a ‘right’ way to speak Shakespeare. We look back at actors who in turn have been influenced by previous generations – right back to Garrick in the 18th century – and the mode of speech that has been deemed to be the ‘correct’ one for doing Shakespeare is RP [Received Pronunciation] Standard English, which in itself is a class dialect. It associates Shakespeare and the experience of Shakespeare with something that is appropriate to people who are highly educated from a particular socio-economic class: it alienates the vast majority of the population. When they began the OP experiment last year with Romeo and Juliet, David said he spoke to some young students in the audience and asked them what they thought of it - they said it was fantastic. When he asked them ‘Why?’ they said ‘Well, they’re talking like us, they’re not talking posh’. If that can make a difference to the kind of people who come to hear Shakespeare, than that's revolutionary to me. I’m already so excited about it that I might explode, but as we continue the work with Troilus and Cressida, I think more and more that I’m going to find it very difficult to move back out of OP the next time I do a Shakespeare play. I’m already hearing my lines from The Winter's Tale in OP. There's such a richness to it.

Pandarus

I think OP both opens up possibilities in characters that you didn’t know were there. I had a discussion with the costume designer before we started Troilus rehearsals and before I really looked at the OP… we’re doing the production in a more modern kind of dress and I had a mental image of Pandarus as somebody who takes great vicarious delight in all the filth of life but who is himself distanced from it. He's immaculate, smells gorgeous and loves exquisite things, very like Oscar Wilde. He takes great pleasure in other people's sensuality and the sensuality of their lives. It makes sense of his enjoyment of the moment when he succeeds in bringing Troilus and Cressida together: he's a voyeur. At one point he says of Cressida ‘Oh that my heart were in her body’ – she wouldn’t refuse Troilus if she was inclined to the flesh like Pandarus is. But he doesn’t actually partake.

By the end of the play Pandarus is obviously suffering from some awful degenerative disease (he talks about an ache in his bones and I think that's meant to imply syphilis). I have a theory that he contracted a sexually-transmitted disease in his youth, and he's forsworn sexual activity ever since. The disease is rotting him from within, so the only way he can enjoy the sensuality of life is through somebody else: he’ll woo Cressida for Troilus and enjoy the consummation of their affair from afar. It's a slightly tragic image, like the image at the end of the play when he's left on the battlefield and tells the audience ‘Some two months hence my will shall be made’ – I’m going to die and I bequeath to you my gifts of disease and sexual depravity.

That was my image of Pandarus to begin with and I associated that with a particular way of talking. If we weren’t doing the play in OP, I’d probably develop a very clear-cut, crystal diction and then use that to play against. But when you actually start talking in OP and strip away that class context, you find yourself speaking in an accent that, to our ear, sounds very earthy. There are lots of ‘rural’ sounds and, because there's much more elision, it's a more colloquial kind of speech as well. You can be less careful about articulating each sound. Instead of saying ‘she is my lady, she is my love’ [Romeo and Juliet], you would say ‘she's mi lady, she's mi love’. It's faster and much more direct. Within that earthier style, I’m finding that Shakespeare gives Pandarus his own vocal tricks and mannerisms – like repetition of certain things, for example. In a scene with Helen and Paris, I keep repeating ‘oh swuet quen, most swuet quen, mi honey swuet quen’ (which is ‘sweet queen’). There's something about the sound of ‘swuet quen’ that lends it a lushness and brings a different character to it as well. Acting is about putting yourself inside somebody else's skin – part of the process is taking on the physicality and that can come with what you wear, but it can also come with the way you speak.

The more I think about the play, the more I think it's a brilliant piece of work. Stories and characters from the Iliad and the fall of Troy would have been more familiar to Shakespeare's audience. Watching Troilus and Cressida, they would have seen famous heroes placed totally amoral framework. I think that's fascinating – almost as if Shakespeare is saying ‘Ok, what happens if you take away the rules?’ What you get is terribly modern: the idea that warfare is not a glorious thing at all. Actually it's a corrupting influence on all of life (particularly the Trojan War which was basically brought about in the name of lust). Shakespeare ridicules the inflated grandeur of the characters and opens up the underbelly of what's going on, especially with the character of Thersites. I think he shows us the guts; ‘this is what it's really all about’.

Modern production

Although our Troilus and Cressida is OP, it won’t be ‘original practices’. Romeo and Juliet was an original practices production initially spoken in a modern style which they then replaced with OP. I expected the next step would be an original practices production rehearsed in OP from the start, because then you’d get to see what happens when actors take on the language before the costumes – using the previous year as a kind of ‘control’ experiment for comparison. With Troilus we’ve changed two elements of the control: we’re rehearsing in OP from the start, so we can’t make comparisons in the same way, and the production has a modern twist which will presumably inform the movement and characterization in a different way. It may be that it supports OP… Shakespeare's audience would have seen people speaking like them and dressed like them. What our audience will see is a group of people speaking, not like them but not like they’d expect Shakespearean actors to speak either. And they’ll see them dressed in a way that is more recognizably modern than they would expect to see on that stage. So maybe a modern practices production will actually marry up the language with the look and the physicality of the play.

I really don’t know what it will be like. To some extent I think the pronunciation will just become another part of painting this other world that isn’t quite like ours but at the same time is like ours. That's what Shakespeare did; he brought people into a theatre and told them stories in a language that was like theirs but also slightly different. We’re doing that too: we’re going to bake the same cake, but with slightly different ingredients, so it will rise in a slightly different way.

Love's Labour's Lost
Act 5, scene 1: Holofernes on Don Armado's speech:

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fantatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-devise companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak “dout,” fine, when he should say “doubt”: “det,” when he should pronounce “debt” – d,e,b,t, not, d,e,t: he clepeth a calf, “cauf”: half, “hauf”; neighbour vocatur nebor”; neigh abbreviated “ne.” This is abhominable – which he would call “abominable”; it insinuateth me of insanie: ne intelligis, domine? To make frantic, lunatic.

Ask Your Actor Bulletin

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

When did you decide to become an actor and why?

I decided to become an actor when I was at university. I’d always been interested in performing; I had done some singing and some acting at school but it wasn’t until university that I started doing plays more seriously. I was playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night. When Malvolio reads the postscript of the letter ‘If thou entertain’st my love, let it appear in thy smiling, thy smiles become thee well’ I turned and smiled at the audience, and they made a noise I’d never heard before – a shriek of laughter so huge it nearly knocked me over! I got to the end of the scene and when I came off I was shaking. I realised that I didn’t know what to do when I went back on. That was very exciting and very frightening, but it confirmed that I wanted to be an actor. It also confirmed that I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I thought I should go to drama school and find out. I’m still trying to find out!

Did you go to college or drama school to learn to act?

I went to Edinburgh University and did an MA in English Language and Literature before going to Bristol Old Vic drama school, which is a wonderful place.

What got you interested in Shakespeare?

When I was a young, we went to the theatre as a big treat. When I was about nine or ten, we came to London and we went to see my first Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice starring Sir Lawrence Olivier as Shylock. Jim Dale played Launcelot Gobbo and I remember almost falling off my seat with laughter – apparently I said to my mother ‘I didn’t realise Shakespeare was meant to be funny.’ I don’t know what Jim Dale did, but he really captivated me. After that I said to my teacher that I wanted to do a production of The Merchant of Venice; I wanted to play Shylock and direct it! I never did, but that was what got me into Shakespeare. Then I discovered A Midsummer Night's Dream, and after that I just couldn’t get enough of it.

Do you prefer comedies or tragedies?

Well, I’ve probably done more comedy than tragedy (although I’ve done a bit of everything – I don’t think anybody likes to pigeon-hole themselves too much). I like each job to be different from the last, so this season's nice because I’ve got Polixenes in The Winter's Tale (his story is not a comic one), followed by Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida (a great part with lots of comedy). As I’ve done more comedy than tragedy, I probably feel more at home with that, but that's all the more reason to do more of something else! Some of my favourite Shakespeare plays are tragedies.

What is your favourite Shakespeare play?

Of the tragedies, I think my favourite is King Lear. I love Twelfth Night – I think that's my favourite comedy – and A Midsummer Night's Dream I suppose, although I’ve seen it too many times… the trouble is you lose the element of surprise. That's the danger of having favourites generally – you lose the element of surprise when you’re watching the plays. Last year when I went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at Regent's Park, I knew every line as it came up (having been in it the year before and toured it around American universities). I swore that I wouldn’t go and see it again for a very long time.

What's your favourite part?

There are a couple of Shakespeare parts so far that have been real favourites: one is Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the other is Toby Belch in Twelfth Night – two comedies, although my Toby Belch was a fairly dark character. I played Macbeth a while ago and I loved doing that… other favourite parts? Lophakin in The Cherry Orchard was wonderful.

Have you done a show in Original Practices before?

No I haven’t, and the experience is really fascinating. I suppose our process in the rehearsal room doesn’t really reflect ‘original practices’ but when we go for costume fittings and when we’re introduced to all the props, that's all ‘original practices’. The Tudor Group came into rehearsals to teach us about social etiquette and clothing in Elizabethan society so that's providing background information for the rehearsal process too. It's just fantastic to be doing OP at the Globe where so much research has gone in to finding out how these things were done – there's always somebody to ask if you don’t know.

Do you like your costume?

I love my costume! It's being made as we speak – to have a costume built on you is just amazing, particularly something like this… it's hand-stitched, and made of beautiful silk fabric. I’ve got a cream and gold doublet with black and gold braid, and black and gold trunk hose, black or cream stockings and a ruff… I’ll have a disguise as well for the sheep-shearing scene. I’m amazed at the skill of the makers and Jenny Tiramani (the designer for our production). It's a privilege to wear these clothes.

What is the best method to memorize your lines?

If you’ve got a good method I’d be grateful to hear it! The best method I’ve found is to understand what you’re saying and to know why you’re saying it, and then listen to the other characters.

How many days or weeks does it take you to learn your lines?

Well, it depends on the size of your part, the length of the rehearsal period and how the play is being rehearsed. I like to be off book when we work through a scene for the second time, because otherwise it becomes a bit of a millstone around your neck.

There were a few scenes that looked like they would have been hard to do on stage. Like the queen turning into a statue and her coming back to life. How would you stage that scene?

Well, thankfully I don’t have to stage it! It almost seems to stage itself in a way. In rehearsals we found that the scene is remarkably powerful without doing anything other than just having everyone on stage watch the statue. All the characters are in on the story to varying degrees – Paulina obviously knows exactly what's going on, and the audience probably have a fair idea, but other members of the Court haven’t got a clue… it's difficult to explain, but there's something magical about everybody watching the statue come alive and their reactions to that miracle.

Do you think your character really did have an affair with the Queen?

In rehearsals we joke that the real twist at end should be that everyone goes off after Act 5 scene 3, leaving Polixenes and Hermione alone together and they go into a passionate embrace! The audience would fall over with shock – ‘It's true after all!’ But that's not the case. I really don’t think they’re having an affair.

I think what happens in The Winter's Tale is actually very human: Leontes and Polixenes haven’t seen each other since they were children, when they were incredibly close (Polixenes describes them as ‘twinned lambs’). Twenty years later, they meet again and Polixenes meets the woman with whom Leontes has fallen in love with and married. It seems very human that Polixenes would be attracted to that person on some level: she's a very witty, lively character, and I think he would be enchanted by her. There are situations where you can become close to a friend's partner because you see the same things in them that your friend does – and some of the intimacy of your friendship gets projected onto the new friendship with the partner. At the same time, if you said to Polixenes, as Camillo does, ‘The King think that you ‘have touch’d his wife forbiddenly’ – he would be (and he is) appalled. With Shakespeare, I think you have to believe what characters say a lot of the time and when Camillo tells Polixenes what Leontes thinks, he's genuinely horrified: ‘O then, my best blood turn to an infected jelly, and my name be yok’d with his that did betray the Best’ (in other words, Judas). Basically he's saying ‘If that were the case, then let that be my fate, because nothing could be further from the truth.’ He tells Camillo and the audience in no uncertain terms: ‘No way have I done that’ – nor would it ever have occurred to him.

Whilst you might look at Hermione and Polixenes and see a level of intimacy (the ‘holy looks’ Leontes mentions at the end), it's not at all sexual. I think there's a huge danger in the temptation to say ‘Wouldn’t it be more interesting for an audience to think that there's something going on?’ I’m not sure it is more interesting; that suspicion casts doubt on Hermione which is unhelpful. If the final sscene is to work in that magical way that it does, there can be no doubt about the innocence of Polixenes and Hermione. Doubt about that seems to undermine the whole play and I don’t think there is any evidence that they have had an affair. It's more important that Leontes’ jealousy is seen as a sickness, a madness from which he recovers – but for which a huge price must be paid.

What do you do to ensure a performance goes well?

The main thing is to learn the lines! I don’t have any pre-performance ritual really; I’m a creature of habit and I tend to get into a routine that's different for every show – it might be something as simple as which shoe I put on first, but once I’ve done it, I like to do that particular thing in the same way before every performance. I don’t know why that is – I suppose it's because you want to the lead up for each show to be the same.

During rehearsals, did everything working out as planned?

In a way you don’t set out with a plan – it's more about discovering things as you go along.

Does each performance have a different feeling for you, or do you tend to get into the same ‘mode’ every time?

Every performance does feel different because you’ve got a different audience and it's live – things happen slightly differently. If you’re listening to each other and open to the little changes that happen naturally, then the performance will alter slightly each time.

In order to prepare for your role as Polixenes, have you developed characteristics that your role portrays?

I suppose I have, but they tend to happen naturally as a result of playing the situation. One of the great things about Shakespeare is that if you play what's on the page rather than trying to dig down into some kind of subtext, then all sorts of things happen quite naturally, in terms of the way you are as the character. Hopefully that's enhanced by costume which will set its own parameters in terms of posture and the way you move. As we’re an ‘Original Practices’ production, some of our responses and reactions to other people are influenced by Elizabethan forms of etiquette. In that respect, playing a king is very freeing because you don’t have to worry about bowing to anybody! You don’t have to take your hat off, you don’t have to bow… but on the other hand, you have to be recognisably ‘kingly’ which naturally gives you a certain confidence and assertiveness as a character.

Rehearsal Notes 10

Having spent the first few rehearsals for Troilus and Cressida trying to get to grips with the language and OP, we’re now starting to work on scenes. Jo Philips, our composer, has given me two songs to learn. One is in what we call the Party scene [III.1] with Paris and Helen – ‘Love love nothing but love’ – and the other one is at the end. I have learnt one but I’m struggling with ‘Love, love…’ It's difficult finding the time between rehearsals and performances to work on singing!

Pandarus

I’ve gone back to the beginning of the play and now it's a question of finding different aspects in the character. It's quite difficult to fit characters in Troilus and Cressida into a moral framework but I think Pandarus is a shady type. He's very manipulative, very secretive. I think he's used to being in control of situations and people. He plays Troilus and Cressida like fish on lines in order to bring them together. I thought a lot about why he does it and I’m not clear yet, but we discussed how he seems to have very much groomed Cressida for such a meeting. Cressida is a traitor's daughter; she's in Troy on her own without protection from anyone apart from her uncle, and he seems to have groomed her up in order to find a good match that will offer her some security… but there's something sinister about that too.

Pandarus is comic in many ways but there's a dark streak in him and a dark side to the play. For me the scene where that really comes out it is the morning after Troilus and Cressida meet. Aeneas turns up and says Cressida must be exchanged for Antenor; she has to go to the Greeks. You would expect Pandarus to be deeply concerned about his niece but all his empathy is for Troilus. When Cressida asks her uncle what's going on, he tells her very bluntly:

Thou must be gone, wench, thou must be gone; thou art changed for Antenor; thou must to thy father, and be gone from Troilus. ’Twill be his death; ’twill be his bane; he cannot bear it.
[IV.2]

It gets very nasty – he's very cold towards her.

You could say that Pandarus is in love with Troilus and that he is vicariously consummating his relationship with Troilus through Cressida. I think there might be an element of that. He does say some extraordinary things about Troilus: ‘I could live and die i’ the eyes of Troilus’ and of Cressida he says ‘I would my heart were in her body’ i.e. if Cressida felt as Pandarus did, Troilus would soon achieve his desire. The sense that he is living through Cressida but that he feels no real concern or warmth towards her is very odd.

At other times you see shades of what could be a very playful avuncular relationship between Cressida and Pandarus. The more I look at the play, the more I think it's hundreds of years ahead of its time in terms of its moral framework. It discusses the rules by which we live our moral lives: what's good behaviour and what's bad behaviour. Hector and Troilus talk about what is honourable in war: if somebody falls do you let them get up and carry on fighting? Hector says this is fair play but Troilus says that war is not fair play – it is about defeating and killing your enemy. It is about vengeance. It is almost as if these characters are caught in a very grey area between these two moral codes: one is very honourable and the other is amoral. Pandarus and Thersites are the characters who seem to thrive in that world.

I think each generation becomes very aware that if you send people to war and put them in situations where they might be killed at any moment then that puts any moral framework under huge pressure. I think that is what the play is about really. Shakespeare draws the parallel between war and love; how lust or sexual passion can compromise the moral order as well. Ulysses has a speech about how important it is to keep everything balanced in its rightful place: there is a real sense that the nature of this war is jeopardising world order. Pandarus inhabits the moral vacuum that opens up between love and lust.

Other things I’m noticing about Pandarus are his voyeuristic tendencies and his desire to listen. There is an extraordinary moment where Troilus and Cressida embrace before they part and Pandarus says ‘What a pair of spectacles is here! Let me embrace too.’ And he embraces the two of them. It's almost like he wants to get in between them in some way: very strange behaviour but great fun to play. He is quite playful. He has a kind of arch camp quality.

I also think he buys in to the whole notion of love. Troilus and Cressida are about to go to the bed chamber. They hesitate a couple of times because Cressida feels uncomfortable about the way this is all happening and a scene where Pandarus has manufactured a union suddenly turns into something purer – Troilus and Cressida confess their love and promise to be faithful. Pandarus leaves the scene at the point where they are about to go to bed and returns to find them talking: ‘What, blushing still? Have you not done talking yet?’ He watches the scene change (it switches from prose in to verse too) and says very little apart from a ‘Pretty, i’faith.’ When I’m playing it, I think ‘Oh, this is interesting. This is real love? Oh well, I will listen for a while and see where this takes us…Oh, its going to take us where I wanted it to take us, so that's another way of doing it.’ That's just part of the spectrum.

Thinking in the space

One of the nice things about being in a company where you move from one play to another is that you develop a sort of shorthand with each other, as well as a better understanding of the space you will be working in. Giles is keeping rehearsals very playful. For example, we might be working on a scene and he’ll ask us to do it again but this time you have to make some sort of noise three times during someone else's speech. That keeps you engaged when you are not talking and it vocalises your response instead of just waiting to respond with the next line. In everyday conversations, it's actually while the other person is talking you vocalise either agreement or disagreement or whatever you feel is the appropriate response. Those sounds clarify your response and also feed into how the speaker articulates their next thought. For example, this morning we - David [Troilus] and I - were doing Act one, scene one; the first scene between Pandarus and Troilus. Troilus is bemoaning his luck: he can’t get Cressida out of his mind and Pandarus has put her there and he feels he can’t fight…. I think my non-verbal responses helped him to recreate those thoughts more spontaneously. You’re not just manufacturing thoughts and feelings yourself; what your partner is contributing actually gives you a springboard into the next thought. It makes for a more continuous dialogue rather than you speak/ I speak/ you speak and actually you can then use it in performance. There are actually more interjections (like ‘Good god’ or ‘how now’) in the ‘Bad Quarto’ of Hamlet than in the folio. The ‘Bad Quarto’ is probably a reported text which was written down from memory, so it is entirely possible that four hundred years ago they did interject when they felt like it. It just makes it feel more like spontaneous dialogue than rehearsed lines.

Playing The Winter's Tale, we’re much more aware of the difference between the rehearsal room and the stage, so we’re using the rehearsal room more like the stage now. There are lots of opportunities for Pandarus to consult the audience or confide in them. Pandarus has something of the showman and trickster about him; there's more of that kind of interaction with the audience than there is with Polixenes. I think that will be very exciting to explore through performance. The audience knows what Pandarus is up to and at the beginning I think he's the kind of character that audiences feel very on-side with, in a slightly wicked way. They know he's not a pleasant man but they enjoy his character and his scheming. In his final speech Pandarus bequeaths his diseases to the audience. He sees them en masse as traders in the flesh, brothers and sisters of the hold-door trade and galled geese of Winchester (the Elizabethan name for prostitutes who hung around Southwark brothels which were under the Bishop of Winchester's jurisdiction). It's a very odd ending. By the time he turns against the audience in his final speech, I don’t think they feel all that easy about him. He's a much darker character who's literally rotting from the inside out.

GlobeLink - Globe Education's Online Resource Centre

Polixenes

About Peter Forbes

Rehearsal Notes 1

Coming to the Globe

First impressions of the space

Polixenes – ideas on character

Extreme reactions

Work in rehearsals

Prose and verse

Shape of the play

Group sessions

Rehearsal Notes 2

Telling the story

Sheep-shearing

Disguise

Ways of working

Clothing

Weekly sessions

Original Pronunciation

Value of OP exploration

Rehearsal Notes 3

‘Go for what is simplest’

Polixenes and Hermione

Tactile?

Hermione comes back to life: final scene

Laban Efforts

Jig

Rehearsal Notes 4

Reports and reunions

Sheep shearing

Voice session on stage

Work on stage

Rehearsal Notes 5

Finding a thread

Cuts

Storytelling

Sixteen years older

Off stage reunions

Big changes

Rehearsal Notes 6

Technical rehearsal

Stage dynamics with Mark

Globe tennis

Fourth wall with lots of windows

Set

Feels like home

Rehearsal Notes 7

First performance

Formality and intimacy

Exploring the stage: Previews

Rehearsal Notes 8

Previews & changes

Relationship with the audience

Press night

Rehearsal Notes 9

Pandarus

Modern production

Ask Your Actor Bulletin

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

When did you decide to become an actor and why?

Did you go to college or drama school to learn to act?

What got you interested in Shakespeare?

Do you prefer comedies or tragedies?

What is your favourite Shakespeare play?

What's your favourite part?

Have you done a show in Original Practices before?

Do you like your costume?

What is the best method to memorize your lines?

How many days or weeks does it take you to learn your lines?

There were a few scenes that looked like they would have been hard to do on stage. Like the queen turning into a statue and her coming back to life. How would you stage that scene?

Do you think your character really did have an affair with the Queen?

What do you do to ensure a performance goes well?

During rehearsals, did everything working out as planned?

Does each performance have a different feeling for you, or do you tend to get into the same ‘mode’ every time?

In order to prepare for your role as Polixenes, have you developed characteristics that your role portrays?

Rehearsal Notes 10

Pandarus

It gets very nasty – he's very cold towards her.

Thinking in the space