Lucius

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David Sturzaker

This is David's second season at the Globe. Last year, David played Florizel in The Winter's Tale and Troilus in Troilus & Cressida. He also played Claudio in the Globe's 2005 production of Measure for Measure. Other Shakespeare roles include Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing, Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo in Romeo & Juliet. Other theatre work includes playing Stanhope in Journey's End and Oedipus in Oedipus Rex.

Bulletin 1

Becoming an actor
It was when I was about 14. For quite a while I’d wanted to be a vet, but after one school parents’ evening my parents came home and told me that the teachers said I didn’t have any chance of becoming a vet because I was so bad at science. So at the age of 14, I thought what can I do? I was a member of a youth theatre and I really enjoyed it, so I thought about it for a career. So it was from really quite a young age that I wanted to be an actor. I continued at the youth theatre I was in, which happened to be very good, in Dulwich in south London, and I did lots of plays with them until I was about 19. In the meantime I joined a couple of other ones as well. Really it was the youth theatre route that got me into acting.

Shakespeare
Professionally it's almost all I’ve done. I left Drama School five years ago and my only employer in the first couple of years was Argos [a retail chain] where I did a series of short plays as a training aid for the Argos management and staff to watch. I did an all male version of Romeo and Juliet set in a public school, called Shakespeare's R&J, then Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V, both in Arundel. And then last year at the Globe I did three shows, Winter's Tale, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure. The only exception to that is Journey's End, a World War One play, but other than that, just Shakespeare.

Working at the Globe
The building itself. It is the most incredible place I’ve ever performed in. The first night of the Winter's Tale was my first time. Coming out and seeing a sea of faces, at your foot level, staring up at you expectantly, happy, without judgement, eager – it was just incredible, the most wonderful atmosphere. Then there's the shared light. I love the shared light. Not only can we see the audience at the beginning of the play, but we can see their reactions – that's wonderful. Obviously we can hear their laughter, and very occasionally there will be the odd comment, not often, but a comment might be shouted out, and I don’t think that's a bad thing, it's just an indication of the feeling the space induces.

You don’t have to use your voice differently. Last year I remember being very scared before my first voice lesson on the stage. I really was petrified, I completely forgot about any voice training and technique, I just shouted and pushed, it sounded awful. That was purely out of panic I think. The voice tutor assured us all we didn’t need to do that. Actually it's a very good space vocally, even though it's open air, because the galleries are stacked one on top of another. Even if you are in the top gallery you’re still not that far from the stage. So it's a surprisingly intimate theatre for the fifteen hundred or so who get in there. It's a very intimate space.

The first day of rehearsals
The first day we turn up here is a ‘meet and greet’ day and it's quite relaxed. It's the first time everyone meets each other. – the first hour is spent introducing ourselves to the company, then Dominic [Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe] addressed us and welcomed us to the theatre. Then we read through the play and then we saw the inside of the theatre. It think for anyone who hadn’t played here before it was wonderful and for two or three of us who had it was really great to get back on the stage with all the hopes that a new season will bring. The first day of rehearsals proper on Tuesday was fantastic, it seems like a really lovely company. Because it's a company which will also work on Comedy of Errors it's quite a jovial company – there are some very good comic actors in the company. So even though what we are rehearsing at the moment is a very dark, bloody, gruesome play, which itself has moments of comedy, it is a lovely atmosphere in the room.

Researching my part
I’d read Titus Andronicus a few years ago just out of interest, but it's only since I’ve been considered for a part in the play that I’ve got to know it well. I’ve read it a few times and it's fantastic. It's come in for a lot of stick over the years, but it was the hit of Shakespeare's early career in the 1590s at the Rose – which is only about 40 metres away from where we’re rehearsing. To know that the first people who ever spoke these lines walked along this street is pretty special. As a spectacle, I can’t think of another play that I’ve done that can equal it. We’ve just gone through the first act, and it is extraordinary. I think it's going to be very exciting for the audience and for us.

I found out I was going to be playing Lucius a month before rehearsals so I had that time to read the play very carefully and I’ve used the internet quite a lot. The amount of material that there is on line on Roman life and military history is incredible. I’ve also looked at some books on classical mythology because the play has some classical roots, so I’m getting my head round where the play comes from and what Shakespeare had in his mind when he was writing it and what his influences and his resources were. There is an awful lot of research that can be done, and I think that's going to continue for the rest of the season.

How do you feel about your character?
Lucius is the eldest living son of Titus Andronicus but he may not have always been the oldest. He may have had older brothers who died in the wars. We know that Titus had 25 sons and that 21 of them are dead, but we don’t know which ones. I don’t think he was the original eldest, but I think he was one of the early ones. That's the sort of thing we can make up, because we’re not told, and when we do it's got to be in line with what we do know, and it's good to make up something you can use. Because he's the oldest, next to Titus he's the senior figure in that family. I know that it's a very important family in Rome at that time. So Lucius is a pretty powerful figure. At the start of the play Titus is weakened because of the fighting that he's done, not just this war which has lasted ten years but through forty years of being a soldier. There may be something to play with in there being a shift of power, or Lucius asserting his own identity. He's a pretty straight down the line sort of guy. There's a lot of deception in the play and Lucius doesn’t go down that route. He's tough but fair.

The highlight of the week
The moment when we all sat down as a company on the first day to read through it. At that moment there was a real feeling of excitement. Starting something new with a new bunch of people - eighteen member of the cast and I’d only met three of them before, and that's exciting.

Bulletin 2

Opinion of Lucius
I’m really trying to avoid falling into the trap of stereotyping. When I first came into rehearsals I was seeing Lucius as the son of a great, great general and thinking of Lucius as a fighter. He gets referred to in the play as ‘warlike’. He's been fighting for years and years – he's probably been on the battlefield since he was about 14 so for half his life he's been fighting. I didn’t want to fall into a stereotype of him being a big hulking brute warrior and fighting machine. Undoubtedly he is when he's on the battlefield, where he is an efficient killer like the rest of them, but none of the play is set on a battlefield. In fact, the majority of the play is dealing with political or familial situations.

I’ve had to work quite hard not to fall into any stereotype traps, and to try to make him a fully rounded person. I’m exploring that more. I’m not necessarily changing, but evolving as I find out more about him. There's only so much you can take off the page, until you actually get up and do it in rehearsal. It's impossible to say for certain how that character will react to a certain situation. You have to stay true to the text and I can only go by what's written. All we’ve got as a starting point is Shakespeare's text, so I get as much as I can from that, and everything else I have to add. Anything I do add to that has to stay true to the original source – the play.

This week I’ve just taken to being very simple, and really focussing on listening – Lucius does a lot of listening in this play. I’ve been listening to what everyone else is saying and not thinking at all about how I’m going to say my line. That should never come into it. It's more important that I know what the relationships are between my character and everyone else. I know what he's just been through and now he's having to listen to what these other people are saying and therefore he says what he says. It's important to remember that he doesn’t say anything else at that point.

High point of the week
The best bit of this week has been wrapping up Act One – psychologically it was a good thing to get to the end of Act One although obviously we’ll go back over it at some point later in the rehearsal period. It felt very good because, as I mentioned last week, it's a very complicated act and so far we have lain some good foundations, not only for the rehearsal period but also to sustain us through four and a half months of performance – it's quite a long run. To have really done such detailed and specific work will stand us in good stead. There's nothing generic about what Lucy [the Director] is doing, or indeed what any of the actors is doing, and there's nothing obvious about it either – which makes it all very real and very specific. It's more of a process than a moment, but that has been very much a highpoint.

Low point of the week
I don’t know. There hasn’t really been one. One thing I’ve got over, towards the end of last week and the beginning of this week, is trying to force or impose something on the character that I’m playing – trying to impose the way that he does things, the way he holds himself. That was a bit tricky but one of the good things that's come out of the last couple of days is that I’ve stopped doing that and I’m taking a much simpler approach and things can be layered on as the process continues. ‘Lucius evolves’ could the subheading for one of our scenes.

Key moment
This week we’ve been rehearsing quite a few scenes and there was a little bit of a turning point, a very evocative moment, and something that's quite insightful for the rest of the play. Just after Titus kills Mutius [Titus's son and Lucius's brother], Lucius comes back in and says:

‘My Lord, you are unjust, and more than so:
In wrongful quarrel you have slain your son.’ [Ii 297-8]

Even though you could look at it and say that line is just a statement, it's more than that. Titus then replies, and finishes his reply by telling Lucius to return Lavinia [his sister] to the Emperor, to which Lucius says:

‘Dead if you will, but not to be his wife
That is another's lawful promised love.’ [Ii, 302-3]

I think the section, and it's a very short section - Mutius is killed, Lucius runs on, there is this very brief exchange and then Lucius runs off again - is a real insight into the relationship between Titus and Lucius. You get the impression that ten years ago, or even maybe a few years ago, nothing Titus did would have been questioned by Lucius, even if it was murdering his own son, but now maybe there's a transfer of power. I wouldn’t want to say that for definite at this stage in rehearsals, but maybe Lucius feels he is able to say no to his father, that he won’t just do what Titus is asking him to do. That's an important moment. It's a great deal to do with his feeling for his brother, but the lines about Lavinia would come out anyway, even if Mutius had survived. Already at that point, they have taken Lavinia out to safeguard the relationship between Lavinia and Bassianus so even that is defying Titus's wishes. It's about upholding Lavinia's honour, and indeed his own honour and the honour of the other sons. That's why they reacted as they did.

Understanding my lines
I’ve been quite lucky so far in that although it's very specific and the relationships are quite complicated, the meaning behind lines that I’ve got as an actor is quite clear… But ask me again in a few weeks time…

So far, I know Act One. I haven’t got huge chunks of speech in Act One – so learning it was quite easy. I’ve been quite lucky in that I haven’t had the script in hand at all so far. There's not a great deal for me to say in Act One and I don’t think I say anything in Act Two, so while we are working on Act Two I should be able to spend some time learning Acts Three and Five – I’m not sure I’m in Act Four an awful lot either. Hopefully I’ll be able to get through without having the book in my hand at all.

Bulletin 3

A typical rehearsal
Of course there is no such thing as a typical rehearsal session, but there are some things which are common to most of them. We don’t usually start with warm-up exercises, but we do have a handball court marked out in the rehearsal room, and we often play before we start, each person takes a square and you bat the ball to each other, trying to get each other out. I’d love to say that it has some sort of resonance with anything dramatic, but not at all. It's just a bit of fun, and it gets us warm. Once or twice we’ve done a couple of warm up games, but generally it's been straight into the text. Some directors use them more, and some less. Either way is valid.

When we come to a scene for the first time, we’ll sit round in a circle with our scripts, and we’ll read through the scene. We’re not really trying to act it particularly, just to read through so that we’ve all heard it. Then we’ll talk in a fair bit of detail about what happens in the scene until we’re all clear about what each of our characters actions and intentions in the scene. We might paraphrase in modern English what each of the characters says.

We discuss any textual problems, and language we don’t understand. It's quite useful that we’ve got people with the Arden Shakespeare, and people with the Penguin Shakespeare, and we’ve also got a copy of the First Folio on hand to refer to. We were all issued with a copy of the Penguin at the start of rehearsals, but some people by then had already started using the Arden. There are different things in each edition, and even though it can be tricky when the line references are different, which they are a few times, it's also quite useful because you get two sets of notes.

We figure out exactly what everything means and where everyone is meant to be, and what they are thinking and feeling and then we’ll get the play up on its feet. Most people have been off book [not needing to use the script] for most of what we’ve rehearsed so far, which has been great. People have done the work beforehand so there's not too much flapping around for lines, which has saved quite a bit of time. Then we just plod through it. Lucy [the director] will stop us very regularly, to discuss relationships or intentions in more detail or even just technical things like where we come on, what we are carrying and things like that. Then towards the end of the rehearsal we’ll run everything we’ve been working on.

Developing ideas about Lucius
I’ve had a bit of a tough week with Lucius. I had a day of doubts on Monday. It was just one line that got stuck in my head. I just thought that I didn’t know how to say it or what to do with it. It was all because I was approaching it the wrong way. I got home and it's amazing how quickly you can go from just doubting one little line to thinking maybe my whole approach is wrong. Within ten minutes you are doubting what on earth you are doing with your life! You spiral down very quickly. Without wishing to get too deep and heavy about it, part of the nature of acting is that you do have to question things like that, in order that it can come out well. You have got to be a little bit vulnerable. You have got to ask yourself questions all the time.

So I spent Monday night but just thinking about how I was approaching Lucius. I got up very early on Tuesday morning and went and had a coffee somewhere and thought further. I think I’ve said in previous interviews that I wanted to avoid imposing anything on Lucius and I don’t think I was working hard enough at that. I was imposing quite a lot. This is a learning process, and that's fine. So I really, really, went back to basics on Tuesday and Wednesday. Very much back to basics. I didn’t try to do anything – I concentrated on what happens if I just stand up and say the lines.

Tuesday and Wednesday I had much better days. I’m not hugely experienced, but I guess I’ve done this a fair number of times now. However, I don’t think there is one set process that I’ve yet found. Other actors have their set ways, and that is great for them, but I’m still finding different ways. It's happened before, in each of the parts I’ve played, this moment of great doubt. Knowing it has happened before lessens the doubt; but only a little bit. There's still the feeling that I’ve actually got to get up and do this in front of fifteen hundred people in a few week's time. If you jump at something, if you really commit to it fearlessly, one hundred per cent, then you might make it. As soon as you start doubting that jump, wondering if you are going to make it, then you tense up, you get inhibited, and you fall short. That's not unique to acting; people experience that everyday in all walks of life, but that was my experience of it earlier in the week. It about trust really, trusting yourself. But there was on time on Monday night when I thought, this is a really strange profession, a strange way to spend your life.

Out of this doubt came the knowledge that I really need to prepare very well. I was very happy with my preparation before rehearsals started but last week I didn’t work as hard outside of the rehearsal room as I should have done. That is part of where these doubts came from as well. If I stand up in the rehearsal room without a really strong foundation of preparation for that particular scene, then of course I’m going to start questioning what on earth I’m doing.

There needs to be a relationship between the time spent in the rehearsal room and the time working outside it. It is different for the different parts. I don’t think there are any rules; it's a very personal thing and there are some actors who can just learn the lines and get up and do it, but I think they are few and far between. It is common in the British theatre for directors to like actors to thoroughly research, and indeed actors like to thoroughly research for their own peace of mind. An iceberg is a good analogy: the tip is what you see on stage in performance and below that is an awful lot of work, most of which won’t come out directly. So what if I know how a Roman centurion would line up his troops? I doubt an audience member is going to look at me and think, ‘he knows proper troop formations’. Of course that's not going to come out directly, but the more information I can take on board that's relevant to what I’m doing, then the more comfortable and confident I’ll feel on stage. Effectively we are pretending, and you can pretend better if you have something to back that up.

Key Moment
Yesterday we worked on Act 3 Scene 1 which, for Lucius is the most difficult scene in the play. An awful lot happens: Lucius sees his father talking to stones and thinking he's talking to Tribunes; Lavinia comes on and it is the first time he sees Lavinia since she's been raped and mutilated; Aaron comes on with the offer of ‘one of you cut off your hand and I’ll free the two brothers who have been condemned’; Titus cuts off his hand; the sons’ heads arrive; and at the end I’ve been banished. So that's a huge scene.

There are a couple of key lines, one to do with Lucius's relationship with Titus, and one about his own journey. When Lucius enters that scene he's quite cold towards his father, who he just sees talking to the ground, and he says:

My gracious Lord, no Tribune hears you speak.

Even though he calls him gracious, and he also refers to him as ‘noble father’, he is quite stark. He is saying, who are you talking to? You are talking to the stones, there's no one around. That's quite cold. Then, through the course of the scene and as a result of all the tragedy that happens, they become united again as a family. There are increasingly few of them, Titus, Marcus, Lucius and Lavinia, but it's a really tight family unit at the end; brought together by the tragedy that occurs. So I think Lucius experiences a turn around in his feelings for his father, so in his final speech he says, ‘My noble father’, but you feel he means it more. I think that the first time he says noble, Lucius is thinking about what Titus had been in the past, but feeling Titus is waning slightly. Right at the end of the scene he says:

Farewell, Andronicus, my noble father

And you really feel that Lucius still feels his father is a noble man. That is really quite lovely. Then Lucius really invests in the revenge idea, he exits the scene saying:

Now will I to the Goths and raise a power,
To be revenged on Rome and Saturnine.

That starts his journey for the rest of the play.

Costume
The designer is Bill Dudley, who is concerned with the total look as well as just the costume. He and the costume department have the ideas which are fairly well set, and the wheels are in motion before we even go and have a costume fitting. I had my first costume fitting on Tuesday. You go in and they dress you in what they have come up with so far. They encourage us to give them feedback on how it feels, what it looks like, if it seems right for the character. If any actor had really strong objections then I’m sure some notice would be taken of it. It was exciting – it's a pretty cool costume, heavily armoured with a cape or cloak. I’d like to sound more mature about that but I can’t: it's great!

Bulletin 4

Lucius develops
We’ve got through the whole play which is great. It's good to have said all the words. This first time I feel as if I said them with a lot of anger and now I can go back and start doing further work. I’ve done one layer and now I can go back and do another layer on top of it.

Having done the last scenes seems to now be influencing the earlier work. For example, yesterday, when I was saying my final couple of speeches, it did strike me there are certain things that happen at the end of the play that I can highlight, which will resonate against things at the beginning. These things that I’ve discovered create more of a journey. Yesterday we had the supernumeraries in [members of the cast who take part in crowd scenes, they have very limited rehearsal time, are paid less than the regular cast, and are often drama students]. They help out at various times and because we only have them in for certain rehearsals, when they are in we tend to concentrate on the bits they are in. So yesterday afternoon, when they were in, we didn’t run in any kind or order, just worked on their bits.

We found ourselves doing the very beginning and the very end of the play, which was very useful. At the end of the play the last five or six lines are about Tamora. It is devoid of pity, Lucius describes her as devoid of pity and he treats her corpse without pity. I thought that was a very personal reaction, he doesn’t just treat her as Queen of the Goths. The we went back and did the beginning of the play where Lucius and Tamora are on stage at the same time, and there are a couple of lines I could direct at her, but I thought it wasn’t very interesting if I did that. At the start of the play she is a high ranking prisoner, Queen of the Goths but I don’t have any enmity against her except as a Goth. Then that changes, it becomes very personal. That's one element which has become clearer, the development of Lucius's feelings towards individuals like Tamora, because of the things she and Aaron have orchestrated against my family. That is a way in which work on the later scenes is influencing the earlier ones.

In the final few scenes, Lucius comes back from banishment. I’ve had to piece together what happened in that banishment. We’ve worked out that the period of time Lucius is away from Rome is eight or nine months because during that time Tamora has a baby. His meeting the Goths would have been quite an event in itself – last time they saw him he was dragging away prisoners and their queen. He had just killed many of them and reduced their nation and land to a fraction of what it was. Then here Lucius is, knocking on their door, saying please let me in. We thought that would have been nasty, he probably wouldn’t have been treated very well, and he would have been absolutely on his own – no slave or servant or anything. Then when he comes back to Rome one of the first people he sees is Aaron, which is interesting. What I’ve got out of this week is that Lucius, as a result of everything that has happened, will be very guarded as an Emperor. He's just seen that if you give someone an inch they’ll take a mile – and the consequences for the Andronicus family were huge. There are only three of them left - Lucius, Marcus and Young Lucius - so all trust has been broken. I think it will be a tough regime under Lucius. The line I’d pick out is the one he says in his speech to the auditory, when he says:

I am the turnéd-forth, ..

In the Folio it is slightly different, but in both the meaning is similar: I am the turned out, I am the castaway, I am the rejected. I think that really hurts Lucius. He spends a line talking about Lavinia, a line talking about his brothers, a couple of lines talking about Titus, and half a dozen lines talking about himself:

Lastly myself, unkindly banishéd,
The gates shut on me, and turned weeping out
To beg relief among Rome's enemies,
Who drowned their enmity in my true tears
And oped their arms to embrace me as a friend.

I think he is really hurt by that – it's feeding his toughness at the end. It is a wonderful speech – well it is on paper, we’ll see how it turns out. To have the gates shut on you, the oldest surviving son of the Andronicus family, one of the premier families of Rome. To be thrown out. These are proud, proud people. That has been the key section this week. The speech is also about persuasion. He has got to persuade all the people who are listening to him that he was forced into this. On the face of it, Lucius has disappeared for a while and he has come back with an army made up from the enemy. He has to persuade them why he did it – that he was forced into it. It is an interesting parallel with Coriolanus. We have talked about that in rehearsals a bit, and the editor of the Arden edition makes quite a lot of it. This was a template if you like for that aspect of Coriolanus. People who see both at the Globe this summer will be able to compare.

This isn’t the end of my journey with Lucius. I had a very good session with Giles Block yesterday, who does text work at the Globe. He has spent many, many years trying to find clues in the text to help actors. I went through all my lines with him yesterday. It is very good just to string all my lines together. I’d say each section of speech and he’d make comments, suggest tweaks or start a discussion. All the suggestions he makes come from the text, they aren’t directorial. They are the result of his textual study, not just of the play, but of Shakespeare in general. That session has highlighted to me that there are a few areas where I’m not quite clear of the thought behind the line.

Next week we will begin to run sections of the play, then run it in its entirety. That will give Lucy [the Director] the opportunity to see the play from the outside, to see the journeys people are making, so she will be able to comment further on what we are all doing. We have got all the building blocks now, it is just a matter of putting them all together. So I expect Lucius will change quite a bit over the next couple of weeks, and get cemented.

Cuts
We toyed with cutting half a line the other day – about Aaron. I say:

A halter, soldiers! Hang him on this tree
And by his side his fruit of bastardy.

And we toyed with cutting, ‘on this tree’. We did that once or twice - only because we don’t have a tree. But then I thought we lost the rhyming couplet, so we put it back in. We thought that people accept that there isn’t a tree – they are more accepting of that in Shakespeare than in other plays. If you walk into a Pinter play and someone says, ‘Put that on the sideboard’, and there is no sideboard, it looks a bit odd. But in Shakespeare people just accept it – I suppose because in Pinter there aren’t twenty locations in two hours, but there are in Shakespeare. It is an accepted device when you do Shakespeare.

Is there a defining moment for the audience's view of Lucius?

There's a speech were placing just before the interval, Lucius's soliloquy, [III,I, 289-301] where his father says, if you love me, which I think you do, go and get an army of Goths. That leaves me on stage saying, alright, goodbye Rome, goodbye father, goodbye sister, and I’ll go and get an army of Goths and I’ll be revenged on Saturnine. That is a good moment. It comes neatly in the middle of the play, and it refers to what has happened before, it indicates what he's feeling about it at the moment, and states what he is going to do in the future. It also has the word revenge in it – ‘to be revenged on Rome and Saturnine.’ It brings up one of the main themes. I think that is a moment when the audience will understand what Lucius is about – they’ll know what he feels about what has happened and what he is going to do.

Lucius as Emperor
This is an unusual Shakespeare play in that most of the audience probably won’t know the story, so they won’t see Lucius at the start of the play as the man who is going to become the Emperor. Why is it Lucius who survives? That's an important question for me. I’m playing him. I’ve got to make it believable that this guy is wanted to be the Emperor. The audience must not be asking themselves why the Roman people want Lucius and not Saturnine. Based on the portrayal I give, I want them to understand why the common people of Rome want Lucius as Emperor. That is where the exercise concentrating on what other people in the play say about your character is very useful.

Bulletin 5

How has Lucius developed this week?
Over the last few days we have been running whole sections of the play. It is very useful when you first put everything together and stop doing the scenes in isolation. I feel that I have put Lucius’ journey into practice, rather than just having it in my mind – that experience has been invaluable.

It has helped to see the whole story. There is one scene which we haven’t rehearsed for a while that's at the end of Act Two. I haven’t got any lines in it. Titus and Lucius enter and are confronted by Saturninus saying Lucius's brothers, Martius and Quintus, have killed Bassianus [II,ii, 259-306]. Doing that scene again now, especially the way Titus deals with the situation, really informs what happens in Act Three.

Revenge
One of the most useful insights for understanding Lucius is the importance of family loyalty. It is out of family loyalty that revenge springs. The sacrificial killing of Alarbus happens because they feel they cannot bury their dead brothers until they have sacrificed one of the Goths. Even though it is quite a big play, it is a very intimate play in terms of family relationships. Lucius's actions during his banishment – raising an army from the Goths – is just reacting to what has happened to his family. It is quite simple in this way, all these terrible things have happened to his family and his revenge is in response to that.

Do you think Lucius is aware of the importance of sacrificing Alarbus – that this action sets the revenge plots in motion?
Purely from a literary point of view, I don’t think it could be said that Lucius starts it. It is a very dutiful society. Lucius says ‘Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths’, but that could just be seen as a reminder. One way you could play that is that Titus is just about to bury his sons and he has forgotten that he has to sacrifice someone first. It is a duty that is going to be performed. You could say it falls to the oldest son but equally any of the other three sons, or all four, could have said it. I don’t think it is a choice that Lucius makes.

When Lucius says no to his father it is during the rescue of Lavinia. Lucius only does it after Titus has allowed Lavinia to be given to Saturninus and after Saturninus has made the extraordinary decision to release the prisoners. From that moment on the status quo has been disrupted. Up until that point it has all gone according to plan then a couple of events happen which turn things on their head, which is why the customs start to get undermined.

Fathers and sons
Research has been important for me during the rehearsal process, especially reading about the importance of the father son relationship in Ancient Rome. Sons, well into adulthood, looked up to and respected their fathers. It is good to have real life precedents in the literature to know that this was the case. Watching films like the Godfather has been interesting. There are bits of Michael, Al Pacino's character, in Lucius. There are only a couple of moments where there is a real parallel, but it is interesting. There are even moments when James Caan's character, Sonny, has bits of Lucius. Obviously I can’t base Lucius on either of them, but it's interesting to think about.

Watershed moments
The run of the first half last night was one. I wasn’t really looking forward to the run, or expecting anything from it, because I still felt there was a lot more work for me to do on the first half, in my work on the role. So I went into it quite downbeat, but it went well, the thoughts all came clearly. So that was a lesson in trusting that the work has gone in – that the work you have done during the rehearsal period has seeped in and when it comes to getting up and doing it you need to relax and not think about the process behind it – you need to trust that it is ingrained in you.

Another important insight was the realisation early on that I didn’t have to layer things on top of it, but ask some simple questions:

Where have I been?
What have I just been doing?
What is my relationship with the other people on stage?

I didn’t need to impose a character on Lucius; the character is in the text.

The original production of Titus
In the original Elizabethan production of Titus Andronicus the actor playing Lucius would have been in a different play every afternoon, and would have been in another new play a few days later. The actors then were just given the text for their particular part, they weren’t given the whole play. For me, that would feel scary but for them that was the way it worked. All they could have done was trust the text, and all the clues should be there. It can’t have been that fifteen people just learnt their parts and turned up and did it, because surely in a play like Titus even an Elizabethan actor would surely have needed to practise some of it. There are some special effects that you would have to have an idea how you were going to do. If I was an Elizabethan actor and this was a new play, and I was given my part in the tavern, it would be exciting. When I first read it, I thought Lucius was an important figure, though in terms of line count it isn’t that big a part. It is only when you get to running the whole play that you can see exactly what part Lucius plays in the play. It would be enormously exciting if you did just have your lines, and then go on and do it. That must be a real thrill to find the real function of your part.

Bulletin 6

Technical rehearsal
This week has been the technical rehearsal. The purpose of this week is to put into the show all the things we can’t do in the rehearsal room, like the music, and any technical things which involve stage machinery, like the trap. There is a point in the show where a couple of people get hung upside down so we’ve been working on that. At the Globe there is no lighting or recorded sound effects (they are all created live by the musicians), so getting the music cues sorted out is very important. It also clarifies entries and exits. It has become quite a complicated show technically. There are various things which happen on stage which are quite difficult to achieve – cutting off a hand and various murders. They require quite a lot of technical work to make them believable on stage.

There are a couple of times when we perform burials on stage which is quite tricky for me. In one it is a couple of coffins and the other a lifeless body. It is quite tricky to get them down into the trap. There is a trap door in the stage – it isn’t enormous and when you are trying to lift an actor playing dead down into a space, the floor of which is some five or six foot below the level of the stage, it is difficult. We don’t want to drop him.

Having the music really enhances what we have been doing in rehearsal. The music is there to support and to create further atmosphere. Personally it has been useful when there are entrances and exits preceding or following heightened scenes, and when you come on or go off accompanied by big rousing drums and trumpets it helps me as an actor, as well as helping the audience.

Techs are a funny time for the development of the performance. During the previous five weeks we have built up a lot of knowledge, and we have been working very closely with the play and the text. Then tech week is more about the technical aspects so you leave the acting and the text side of it behind a bit. You can almost feel as if you are going further away from the play, while in some respects – the music and the technical side – you are really approaching it for the first time. It does give you time to put what you have been doing in the rehearsal room into the context of the theatre. It clarifies a lot of what you have been doing in the rehearsal room. A lot of the things you have been doing in the rehearsal room won’t work in the theatre, and you can’t anticipate those things. You can just do your best in rehearsal and hope it will work – if it doesn’t, you adjust for the space you find yourself in. That has happened with Lucius's dynamism. I have to bring that out because of the nature of the space and the design of the theatre. I hope there will be big developments when we move into dress rehearsal and the previews.

It would be wrong to try to second guess an audience reaction, but I have thought about the possible audience reactions a little bit. I’ve wondered how the audience will react to the number of killings and the gruesome goings on. I think a lot more humour will come out of the play when we get it in front of an audience. I think that the Globe itself, as a space, brings humour out. Because of the shared light people feel more able to react. If you turn the light out on somebody it has a psychological effect – they aren’t going to be as expressive as they would be.

Bulletin 7

First performances of Titus Andronicus
It has been a really hard three weeks. The technical rehearsal was a tough week and the first week of shows was also hard. They have been very long weeks! Normally we work 40 hour weeks, but for two weeks in a season the management can use you for 48 hours. For us, those two weeks were consecutive. I know there are people all round the world who work double that, but two 48 hour weeks has been quite tiring. We continued rehearsing through the first eight or nine performances, going over bits in the afternoon before the evening show, and figuring out technical things which hadn’t worked in the previous night's performance.

While it has been hard, it has also been wonderful. Doing the shows has been really wonderful. We didn’t know what kind of beast we had when we opened. It is such a complex production. It was tricky for us as a company to know whether we had a really good show or not. The first night audience response was really incredible. By the end of that first Saturday night we knew they enjoyed it, but then we were wondering whether the next day's audience would enjoy it. It is only now after ten performances that I’m starting to believe that we have got a really popular show, which is great. When we do have a really big audience the response is quite amazing – the cheering and the applause.

Nobody really has a happy journey in Titus, so to get to the end and do a jig (which is a very surreal experience, dancing through the audience in a line) and then to get back on stage and to have lots of people cheer and clap and shout is incredible. Apart from the odd laugh, during the performance the audience have been fainting and gasping in horror or shock or disgust. To have them all come together to cheer at the end it is quite a relief. Personally it is a relief because, as Lucius, I have spent the last three hours going through all this family trauma, and larger scale trauma.

Audience reactions
I have been surprised that people very specifically react to the action on stage when fainting. They faint as a reaction to something that happens on stage. An example was two nights ago during a scene where Titus, Lavinia, Marcus and Lucius are right downstage centre, when Lavinia has just been mutilated and come back on [III,i, 59-150]. She is sat downstage centre with her stumps, and we are all sat round her – we are about two feet from the front row of the audience. I was focusing on Lavinia, but in my peripheral vision I could just see a person with dark hair and a green top fall and then I heard a clunk, which I thought was their head hitting the stage. There was a reaction in the people immediately around her.We had to just carry on, and then, as I continued to focus on Lavinia, I saw this green topped figure being walked out so I knew they were fine and being looked after. Later, I went round to the sick bay to see her. She was fine, surprised and embarrassed. There was another woman in the sick bay who had been sick – she had gone quite an extraordinary colour.

It shows how much some people must invest in what is happening. Yesterday there were some kids, six or seven years old, who were standing right at the front. They were wide eyed through the whole performance. Just the look on their faces suggested they had entered into the realm of the fantasy that the Globe is. Older people, who have lived longer and experienced things themselves even if not the same as what is happening on stage, can relate. Your ability to empathise probably grows as you get become an adult.

Acting in the yard
[The production uses two moveable towers which are pushed round the yard at various points in the action.]

I have one major speech on one of the towers, which is about as in-the-round as you can get theatre-wise [V,iii,95-117]. For that particular speech it is quite useful to feel that you are surrounded by the citizens of Rome who need, and I feel deserve, to hear the truth. So in that respect it works. Equally if that had been staged in the gallery as would have been traditional, that also would have worked because you are addressing the people of Rome.

Lucius
The need for Lucius’ confidence is more apparent. The way the events of the play really affect him has become clearer. He comes back from his banishment quite uncompromising. When he comes back he is a doubt-free figure. At the beginning of the play he is a military boy – he doesn’t know a lot else, though he has compassion and love for his family. It is that which gets torn apart. I think as a result of that he sees how he is not infallible; how he can be hurt. At the start he is the eldest son of the leader of the greatest family in Rome, and he is heralded as being the greatest fighter on the battlefield. That stands for a lot when you are the eldest son in a military family. When he comes back he knows that he has been in a lofty position, and that position has been completely disrupted. He is not going to let that happen again. We never get to it, but I think the army of Goths he brings into Rome will be a fearless and remorseless bunch. It is a good thing for Rome they don’t have to attack it. In our play there is a peaceful resolution on a grand scale, while on an intimate scale there are four murders in the last 90 seconds.

Even though Lucius gets made Emperor at the end, what has he got left in his life? He has got an uncle and a son – not taking anything away from them – but he has lost a father, a sister and three brothers in the course of the last nine months. We talked about his wife in rehearsals and decided she was probably dead before the play starts. He hasn’t got an awful lot left in his life. He is a young Emperor who has probably lost a lot of trust in humanity, perhaps all trust in humanity. So to come out of all that and for people to clap and cheer is really quite a relief. I think few would have very few people who were close to him as an Emperor, very few advisors and confidents. Anyone who got too close or who didn’t seem entirely trustworthy would soon be pushed out.

The jig
The jig is something that was traditional in Elizabethan times and there is evidence that there was a jig at the end of tragedies as well as comedies. It is something that Mark [Rylance, the Globe's previous Artistic Director] explored here in his time, very successfully. Siân Williams, who is the choreographer here, choreographed all the jigs last year and she has done this one for Titus. We have taken something from the jig and seen it as a bit of closure for us and for the audience, together. Most of the jig happens in the yard, and as part of it I have no idea of how it works in reality. I’m a person in a line being led in and out between four or five hundred people. Along the way, we get members of the audience to join the line.

For those in the yard I imagine it is a similar experience to the one I’m having – I imagine they are just standing there and every so often they are just being jostled or being asked to join in. We have devised something at the bottom of the ramp where we very politely and ask them to return to the yard, otherwise we could have filled the stage with the audience. Hopefully it finishes the performance on a buzz for the audience, and the audience reaction that we have had after the jig has been great so it can’t be a problem. I do wonder if it would be more inclusive if the jig was on the stage, so everyone can see it clearly, even though they can’t take part in a physical sense. The jigs always bring everybody in that space together in quite an extraordinary way. For us, it is a couple of minutes of release.

Reviews
I try to avoid the reviews. I may read them when the show is over. That being said you can’t ignore Press Night. A lot of people regard it as a big deal, and in terms of future ticket sales it can be a big deal. Artistically and creatively, I don’t like that a show should be considered a success because of what half a dozen people think.

Bulletin 8

Lucius
I am still seeing new things in Lucius. I think we will look back fondly on this four week period of intensive Titus performances and we may even grow to miss it as we end up doing two or three a week. It is lovely to feel you can explore things night after night. I feel there are more colours – more shades – to Lucius. There are moments where I now feel I am being more specific with some of the lines and some of the speeches I have. He has become a more rounded person. The last big speech I have is an example [5iii 95-117]. It takes place on top of a tower. [The Globe production uses two towers which are moved round the yard and usually used when the stage directions indicate ‘aloft’.] For a long time, that speech was really ‘shouty’ throughout, and it never seemed to sit quite right. Gradually, through the last few shows, the beginning has become more ‘talky’, because really all Lucius is doing is setting the record straight, and imparting information to the masses. He has his feeling about what has happened, but the key thing is informing them, not expressing his feelings. So I’ve made the first few lines quieter, hopefully still with the relevant emotional back-up. It is a very slight change but that is the sort of thing that is developing.

Preparing for a performance
Normally for a part I would get in early, have a shower, do a vocal and physical warm up and just think about a few key things that get me into the world of the play and the character I’m trying to portray. I haven’t done that very rigorously for Titus. I don’t mean this in an arrogant way, but I haven’t felt like I’ve needed to. That's not a comment on what I think of my performance, that's more a comment on how I feel on stage and the very compete way in which we explored the world of the play in rehearsals.

Also, the entrance of the Andronici at the beginning, accompanied as it is with rousing drum beats, and with Titus carried on in a palanquin, while we are carrying coffins, and there is incense and smoke, sets you up, regardless of whatever mood you are in.

[Titus's first entrance is a spectacular moment in the Globe production. First the audience hear the drums and horns, then the procession enters, lead by the musicians, then Titus carried by soldiers, followed by his four remaining sons, each pair carrying a coffin, then more soldiers and then the Goth prisoners in chains, with an executioner with an axe bringing up the rear. The procession enters through one of the public entrances into the yard, goes right round the outside of the yard, then, still in the yard, back across the front of the stage. Titus alights from his palanquin when he reaches the centre of the stage.]

It is a wonderful piece of spectacle, and it makes it very easy for me to get into the mood of the play.

The vocal preparation I do is lots of humming. Humming is very good because it gets the vocal chords vibrating very quickly. Also lots of breathing work because there is a lot of the part that is very high octane. If you are playing a different character, or in a different situation, it might be quite easy to get out four or six lines on one breath, but I find it harder for Lucius. For just a couple of lines I may feel that I need a full lungful, so it is important to get the lungs and the ribs working.

Patrick Moy [who plays Saturninus] and I practice the moment when I break his neck each night. It is quite a difficult one, and has to be very precise. It changed a bit as well from what we first worked on in rehearsals, when we had all the costume on.

Rehearsing The Comedy of Errors while performing Titus Andronicus
Equity [the British Actors’ Union] regulations state we only have 40 hours contact time, but there is an agreement that we can have some weeks nominated as 46 or 48 hours by the management, and these will be balanced out by 32 or 34 hour weeks later on in the season. Within those constraints we can rehearse whenever we are not on stage provided that we have at least an eleven and a half hour break between finishing a show and starting a rehearsal – so if we finish at half past ten the rehearsal can’t start until ten the next morning. We are also only allowed ten hour days, so if we were to start at ten o’clock on the morning we have to be finished by eight o’clock that evening. So logistically it is very, very hard. So next week with only three Titus performances it will be much easier.

It has all been full company work so far. For the last two weeks we have been sat round the table, going through the play line by line, clarifying any bits which aren’t immediately obvious. This is a bit unusual, but I think Chris [Luscombe, the director of The Comedy of Errors] saw that we had two weeks with a lot of Titus shows and thought the best way to use the two weeks was to be sedentary. We aren’t up on our feet at all, we are sat round the table, it isn’t energetic, quite relaxed. Because of the nature of the play – it is a farce – it is quite useful that everybody knows what happens at all times. So it is unusual, but I think it has been a perfect use of the last two weeks.

Another good thing about the last two weeks is that because we have just been sat round talking about the play an awful lot, come Monday when we actually get up on our feet, we are going to be raring to go. We are embracing the fact that it is a comedy, and a wonderful, self-contained play. This business of rehearsing one play and performing another doesn’t happen much these days. There are a couple of company members who did their time in the old provincial rep system, when that was the way you usually worked, and it has been good hearing their stories about it. Those of us of my generation, who haven’t grown up with that system, lament the loss of it.

At the moment I’m just playing the Duke, but that might change. There are a couple of scenes which Chris wants to populate with townsfolk. I can see that it might be tricky for the Duke to be one of those people, but I’m sure there will be ways of getting round that if another body is required.

You could think that these two plays are unusual plays to pair together for one company, but the more we go on I think the more you see that we couldn’t have a better group of actors to do the two plays – ying and yang or whatever way you want to look at it, they really do balance perfectly. I think we are all just thrilled after Titus, which we have all really invested in, to be tackling something so different.

Bulletin 9

An injury
Probably the most demanding event this week was one of our company got injured. The injury happened the night before press night. Everything was fine until the moment when Mutius was killed by Titus. In our staging only Mutius and Titus are on stage at the time - so it is just Doug [Titus] and Jake [Harders, who plays Mutius]. The fight had been directed so that they come together and clash, and Titus uses Mutius's own dagger to kill Mutius. It is a very sharp, very short, very brief killing. The idea is that Jake falls to the floor and dies. He has a blood bag, but he doesn't really make much sound. I'm off stage right, waiting for my cue to go in and discover Mutius's dead body.

Sometimes I peep through the curtain to time my entrance properly. I was watching thorough the curtains. There was something a bit unusual about the scuffle, but not too odd. I did see that were in a different place than they normally are. Normally, Jake lies just right of centre, where the right hand ramp we use in this production comes level with the stage. This time he was towards left of centre stage, and he let out this scream. Obviously, things can be slightly different each night, so I just thought he had added a scream, which was fine. I ran on up the stage right ramp, normally he is there, this time he was all the way over, and he had landed with his head pointing downwards on the stage left ramp. I thought that was odd, but you don't really have time to think about it, you just have to get on with it.

I went over to him, and normally by the time I get to him, he is playing fully dead and he has blood coming out of his mouth from the blood capsule. This time, when I got to him his eyes were open and he was still moving and holding his right hand in the centre of his chest and very slightly convulsing - perhaps that is an emotive word - but shaking. I thought he was doing some 'in the throes of death' acting. I did wonder if everything was quite right, but I didn't think it was serious, so I carried on with my line, 'My Lord you are unjust.' Then Jake said, ‘No, David we have got to stop’.

I put my hand up to the audience and said 'Sorry, we are going to have to stop.' At that point Doug came over, and Thom [Padden, Martius] and Eliot [Giuralarocca, Quintus] who are due to come on anyway, came on. We gathered round Jake. I can't remember exactly what he said, but he told us his shoulder had come out of its socket. We asked the stewards to get a paramedic. Tariq Rifaat, the Stage Manager, who is normally in the Tiring House, come on stage. We got Jake on to his feet - he was just apologising profusely. He was in a considerable amount of pain but he was able to walk off with some help. The audience applauded when he got up.

So we were left with Doug and Tom and Eliot and myself on stage. It was almost comical. We were all there in full view of the audience, and they could see that we weren't exactly sure what to do next. Then Doug said to the audience, 'Well I guess we'll carry on. Just imagine there is a dead body there.' It got a laugh, though that wasn't why he said it. So we did. We mimed the burial of him.

Jake was a good few hours at the hospital before he had his arm put back into his socket. The ambulance was slow to arrive and then there had been a bad road traffic accident, so he had to wait a while at the hospital too. He was shaken by the whole thing. For us on stage, it was quite remarkable. It broke down all barriers between audience and actors for most of the rest of the show. Something real had happened. It is what you always strive for, although hopefully not through someone getting injured! There was a prickly kind of energy. It is a shame that can be rarely achieved.

Jake does come on again as one of Titus's servants, and he has one line. They just went on one short and Thom said his line. Jake missed the next few shows and the Assistant Director, Rick, moved into Ben's slot as Alarbus, Ben moved in to play Mutius. We don't have understudies at the Globe. In previous years Mark [Rylance, the Globe's previous Artistic Director] would come on and cover. I don't know what we would do now if somebody with a big part couldn't go on, but we would find a way.

Crowd control
The Titus highlight was last night's show. The crowd were incredible. They were mental. They were cheering and booing right from Titus's first entrance on the palanquin [1i 73] - we were cheered as soon as we came in, going round the outskirts of the yard. They really responded. Doug took that on board. When he got on stage, and the drums stopped, and he came forward and said, ‘Hail, Rome,’ he very definitely gave it an extra beat. Nothing happened for a moment, then there was a 'Hi' and a 'Hail', and that set them all off again, and they all cheered. Right until the end when I get crowned Emperor, and Marcus says, ‘Lucius, all hail, Rome's Royal Emperor!’ and all the crowd started cheering as well. When Aaron came on to be sentenced, and I sentenced him, they were booing him. I felt like saying at least let him get his final words out. So they were a really raucous lot, but that was great. That was wonderful.

It feels weird not to have done Titus for almost a week, then to come in and do it once. I think at the moment it is quite beneficial, we were fresh, and we were listening to each other a lot. When it comes to the last five or six weeks of the season, when we are just doing one or two a week, it will be quite odd. I experienced that a bit last year when I was in Troilus and Cressida, which just played every Wednesday. When we get to that point in the season with Titus we will have done over forty shows and it will be interesting to see what that is like. I think we will be able to sustain it, and I think we will be very glad about the first four weeks. Even though at the time we were moaning about the heavy schedule, I think we will have benefited from having a very intense period of performance before we go into heavy repertory with other plays. Those three or four weeks will really benefit us for the rest of the season.

Bulletin 10

Midnight matinee of Titus Andronicus
It was a wonderful and a surreal experience. Maybe it would have been less surreal if we hadn’t had a normal evening show before it. We had a 7.30 show, came down at 10.30, and then we had an hour and a half before we went back up for the midnight performance. Normally, we have a longer gap between a matinee and an evening show, about two and a half hours. It was a strange because during the course of the first performance we knew that wasn’t it for the night, that we then an hour and a half break and then another performance. We couldn’t do anything useful in that hour and a half and we had to get back in costume after an hour.

The show itself was really great. It was a fairly full house and it was quiet as far as external noise is concerned – between midnight and three in the morning there isn’t too much going on. They were a good crowd. We were worried that they might all be drunk, and some of them were well-refreshed, but they were attentive. They gave the show a great reception, particularly at the end.

Our voices were all very tired. Partly that's because by the time you get to two in the morning your body is tired, and if your body gets tired then your voice does. At the end, after we had all got changed, we came down onto the piazza level overlooking St. Paul's and we had breakfast cooked for us by some of the Globe staff and stewards. There were a lot of us; most of the cast and their friends, and various other staff members. We sat and watched the sun come up, had breakfast, until about quarter past five in the morning. It was a really mild night, I didn’t need to put a jumper on. Then I strolled home at about half past five in the morning. It was a great experience, although it left me feeling exhausted for the next couple of days.

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