Aaron

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Shaun Parkes

This is Shaun's first season at the Globe. Recent theatre appearances include Elmina's Kitchen and Chips With Everything at the Royal National Theatre as well as performing in several productions at the Royal Court Theatre. You may have seen Shaun in various films, including Mummy Returns and Human Traffic. He also appears regularly on television, most recently in the BBC's adaptation of Elmina's Kitchen.

Bulletin 1

Becoming an actor
That's quite a long story. I’ve been acting since I was about seven but I didn’t really decide I wanted to become an actor until 2 or 3 years after drama college. It was my drama teachers at 16 who asked me what I was doing and I said ‘I have no idea but I’m not going to go to college with all the other mugs to do 2 or 3 years of subjects that I really don’t want to be doing’. They said ‘Fair enough, why don’t you do a drama foundation course?’ and I said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about but it sounds good!’ It's a bit of a charmed story really - I’m very lucky. They got the applications forms for me, helped me fill them out and rehearsed my speeches with me and then I got into this drama foundation course. So I never really made the decision, I never said ‘Ooh this is what I want to do’ it was actually just the only thing I enjoyed doing at school. Then I got into drama college, went to RADA, came out when I was 21 but it was only about three years after drama college that I said to myself ‘Actually this is what I want to do so I better do it properly’.

Getting serious about acting
I think it was when a particular job went wrong that I thought that I had to make a living out of this for the rest of my life, like my dad who was a builder for all of his life and put a lot of work into it and is to this day still doing what he's doing, I just have to put the work in if I want to have any sort of longevity.

If we’re working on the premise of potential, of my potential, then the premise is I’ve got to reach my potential before I die! I wasn’t in any way going to be reaching my potential the way that I was going. So I realised that I have to care a little bit more. I coasted a lot, I didn’t really work as hard as I could, didn’t really concentrate that much. As a result I could see that watching myself sometimes or having people comment on things they’d seen was different. I was very aware that I wasn’t doing as well as I actually could. That became boring to me.

Since then, I’ve done everything that I could. For someone like me, for the longevity of my career it pays to have fingers in pies. I didn’t do theatre for 5 years because I was aware that there would always be a bit of theatre for me to do, but there wouldn’t necessarily always be the TV work there and I hadn’t done a lot of TV work at a certain point in my career way back then. So I decided to take some time out of theatre while I concentrated on film and TV. Now I’ve gone back to a play a year almost.

Differences between television and theatre
What I’m realising is that a lot of people used to say that acting for television and theatre is different and technically they are different because for television you don’t have to find that man who is 15-20 rows back, up in the Gods. That person in the theatre has to hear you, whereas there is no one like that on TV or film, you don’t have to be concentrating on that or those elements. I think the preparation that you put in, the way you work on your character, the questions you ask your character and the way in which you perform is pretty much the same.

Preparation for my role
Well I’m not very good at Shakespeare so I’ve had to go and work on this play myself. I had some help as well from my ex-RADA drama teacher, helping the sense of what you’re saying because Shakespeare is not in any way shape or form close to anything that I grew up with. So I need help.

I’ve only done Shakespeare twice, professionally. At RADA we were doing it almost every day. The first time was 12 years ago and this is the second. The first time I did Shakespeare I played Romeo, in Romeo and Juliet. The way I prepared for that was very different to the way I’m preparing for this. That was in the days that I hadn’t quite worked out if I really wanted to be an actor or not, and so I didn’t work as hard, didn’t prepare as much, didn’t really care as much. I worked enough to know the lines, but as far as the deep preparation that we are putting in here is concerned I couldn’t really compare it. The Globe is very different, it's luxury here for the actors. You get the experts who are just around at your beck and call to help you with the sense of the text or the voice or the movement and Alexander technique and things like that. You can do the work yourself but you can also have someone sit you down and say ‘that's what that means’. That is luxury for me.

Bulletin 2

Looking at the text
There are all kinds of exercises you can do when looking at the text. I suppose you do start with the iambic pentameter. If you’re like me you read two or three lines of Shakespeare and you cannot understand what they’re saying at all! Some people can read Shakespeare and get a sense of it, some people will read it and know exactly what it's saying, even if they didn’t know it before. They can look at it and say ‘Well, that must mean this and this must mean that, so I think this means this.’ I’ve never been able to do that. So the iambic helps because at least you’ve got to go ‘de dum de dum…’ and that helps you pick out some important words.

It helps if you know the state of mind your character is in because if you don’t know their state of mind you’ve got no chance, just forget it! If you know that this character is fuming, is really upset, is crying, is happy, is whatever then some of the words that Shakespeare uses make sense. So if you know that your character is furious with something and you’re reading these lines and you’re reading the iambic, all of a sudden you will just hear things and you will begin to understand.

Cultural references
Sometimes, however, Shakespeare uses references that we don’t know. Nowadays, someone could a mention a line in a Tarantino film and we understand what he's talking about, and Shakespeare uses cultural references that I haven’t got a clue what he's talking about, so you do have to do some research because he rarely puts anything in these lines that mean nothing. He's always using these cultural references in relation to what you’re talking about. So sometimes when you read up on the cultural reference that also helps you with your speech as well.

The specifics of the actual exercises that you can use with Shakespeare are literally reading from full stop to full stop, comma to comma and getting a sense of the thoughts and the specifics of the actual words. It is very difficult. I’ve had help with this one, I’ve literally had someone saying ‘that means that and that means that’. It's very difficult, Shakespeare in this day and age. It's like if I haven’t read a novel for three years and I sit down every night and try and read one I’m knackered by half a page, because I’m not used to reading a novel. You’ve got to get the muscles working again, and with Shakespeare you’ve just got to keep reading.

Rehearsals so far
So far, we’ve done lots of games in rehearsals: bonding games, lots of tag, a couple of ball games just to get in the mood. We’ve had some movement classes where we’ve had to pretend we’re Roman soldiers. We’ve had shields and we’ve been taught an understanding of how these guys would stand and how they would fight. It makes you think about the very basic fact that these guys didn’t have guns, they had shields and swords and therefore it's a very different kind of combat. Even though we’ve seen it on films and stuff like that, it's still very, very rare that we see anyone fighting with a shield and a sword these days.

Another thing we did to get us into our roles was an activity about the Romans and the Goths. I’m part of the Goths, although I’m not a Goth, and then there are the Romans. We had to pretend that we were going to do our first battle charge. So the Romans went off and worked out how would they charge the Goths, and then we had to go away and work out, as Goths, how we would charge the Romans. The reason why that was specifically interesting was because when you work it out and break it down the Romans were very pragmatic and obvious in the way that they march, they’re not very cunning, whereas all that the Goths have is guile and cunning and the ability of using our instinct and nature.

So we had to go away and think of the way we might do things compared to the way the Romans might do it. That was interesting in itself, beginning to think like a Goth, to be thinking like these people who are more of the land, I guess, more of the tribes and villages as opposed to the conquering Romans. Obviously the Goths would rape and pillage as well, but there seems to be something a little bit more instinctive and cohesive, coherent, consistent and together with the Goths, than the Romans in this play.. Our strategy was to be more like animals - we thought if we’re talking about being more instinctive then let's be like animals. So we tried out our strategy and we got killed - we got mauled! But there were only four of us and there were loads of Romans!

Discussions about the play
I think this week has just been about bonding and talking around the play. We’ve talked about what's happening around the Court and the Palace politically at this time, and what happens when we, as the prisoners, arrive. Talking around the psychology of that and trying to break down what Shakespeare is trying to do is helpful because this play is very difficult and isn’t as straight forward as some of the others. It actually leaks, there are holes in it, there's bits in it that don’t make sense, little bits.

For example, I’m a moor, I’m a slave but I’m brought into this court and I’m kept alive. I’m given my own offices it would seem. There are a lot of odd choices that we’re finding in the beginning of Titus Andronicus that the characters make, that are, if not alarming, then difficult to comprehend. For me, practically, I have to understand where these people are coming from and why before I can get into the speech.

First impressions of Aaron
My first impressions were that his character was clearer than most other characters in the play and in Shakespeare's plays. It just seemed clear tome because from the every beginning he has intent and he carries that through from beginning to end and doesn’t get swayed. There is nothing that happens that knocks him off his balance until his baby comes along. What I love about this character is that you can be very, very clear with him and strong and be confident with that.

Going through Act One
All we did with Act One is sketch out where we might be on stage when we say these lines and that's pretty much it. The start of this play is like the end of some plays. It's a big court scene and someone comes home, someone gets killed and the biggest prisoner - it's quite amazing, it's like Saddam Hussein - gets captured and then not only gets freed but gets made into this kind of royalty. Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, who the Romans have been fighting for ten years, has been captured and she is the prize and is paraded in the streets and within ten minutes she's made the Queen and Empress of Rome. Again, a very odd choice for the Roman man to marry the nemesis, the enemy, but that's what happens. I imagine if it was a man – the king of the Goths - that he’d be killed but she's a very beautiful, charming lady.

So we’ve been mapping out the blocking for Act One because a lot of people go off stage, come back on stage, go back off stage and for the story of the play we need to know where we are and what we’re thinking at the very beginning, and we’re not too sure what we’re thinking yet. We’re not sure if we see that person being killed, we’re not sure if we see that person say something to that person, which is quite important but not that important to us. It's very difficult the beginning, so today we’ve just been plotting through where we’re likely to be.

Bulletin 3

Learning the script
When I’m learning my lines, it helps having a room to myself but I don’t always have the same method for every play I do. With this play, I feel I have to just learn the lines. Usually in a play you rehearse it and the lines go in as you rehearse it, but I am having to learn the lines. Sometimes I just go home because you never know how much time you’ll have in the day to do work by yourself. So every time I go home I try to give at least half an hour to getting something in my head.

I find it more difficult to understand Shakespeare than most other plays so the understanding is important. If you understand what this character is saying it will go in a little quicker. You have to kind of paraphrase. Don’t even try learning it if you don’t know what they’re saying. Sometimes you do learn it and you don’t really know what you’re saying but a lot of the time that's when you’re kind of dry on stage because you just haven’t got the thoughts to connect it. So I’ll learn it all kinds of ways: using a Dictaphone or looking at the script. Not that I’ve got a photographic memory but sometimes remembering what the speech looks like on the page as you’re learning it also helps as well.

I have a special way of getting those lines in so I’m not thinking about being scared that that line's coming up. I don’t want to be doing that on stage, so more often than not there won’t be anything now that I’m struggling with because I’ll make sure before I learn it that I know what I’m saying. All of it I struggled with when I first started reading it, all of it, all the lines, most of them I did! But now if there's a line I’m unsure about then I’ll set speed and make sure I know what it means before I try and learn it.

Understanding other characters
In rehearsals we read through the scene and then Lucy [the director] will say initiate a discussion about each speech. We’ll go over the scene and everyone who's in that scene with speaking parts will say their line then say what that line means and if they are not quite sure, Lucy will help out or someone else might chip in and suggest something and then it's opened to debate for a minute…or 25! So we’ve been doing that in this production but it isn’t always the way.

It can be really beneficial to know what other characters are saying. Shakespeare did a lot of things with balancing. He puts some words in one character's mouth in a situation but sometimes it mirrors or informs what someone else is doing. So more often than not, it really does help to know what other people are saying. Sometimes in Shakespeare, as an acting exercise, you are asked to find out what all the other characters in the play say about your character. Sometimes two or three people will talk about your character and sometimes those lines very revealing, both about the character who's saying it and also the personality of your character, which will inform how you’re going to play it.

Aaron
I don’t think there is a character that is particularly linked to Aaron. I suppose Tamora is for obvious reasons. There is no other character like Aaron in the play. He's a slave who's is now being treated like a lord. There's no precedent set for that, he's the only person. I don’t even think I know any other Shakespeare plays in which that happens. He's also a moor. The only thing he has in common with Tamora is the fact that they’re scheming, and they’re very, very good at that and I think he admires that in her. I think he likes, if not loves, her for that. It's like she's his soul mate in a way.

Rehearsals so far
We’ve been getting it up on its feet, although we did do that last week too. I think Lucy's trying to get the moves and the speech united for us in our brains which I think is probably quite good. A lot of the time with performances of Shakespeare, you see people stood on stage and they don’t really know what they’re doing, they don’t know why they’re standing there and they look uncomfortable - it just shows, you can tell. The way we’re approaching the play means that the cast is going to know what they’re doing and what their purpose is. They know who everybody else is and they know what they feel about the other people.

Sometimes on stage you can see people just not reacting to anything and that's frustrating to watch. If your character hates another character, you talk to him showing your hatred - even if you’re not spitting venom, you hate that guy and you need to remember that. Sometimes you can forget these things because it's Shakespeare so you deliver your line very well but then you stop acting. I think what we’re doing with this is delivering our line and knowing where your place is on stage and why you are there so you know what to do when you’re not saying anything.

Bulletin 4

The first scene
There's a good reason for us dedicating so much time to rehearsing the first scene because so much happens during it and the whole rest of the play is a reaction to the first scene; it is the catalyst for pretty much everything that happens in the play, with the exception of historical bad seeds like Aaron, who has his own stuff from the past so he would want to bring Titus down anyway. When you think of all of the characters involved in the first scene, it's an amazing kind of melting pot of trouble and this then carries on for the rest of the two hours. So, in a way, if you get that right, you’re going to be doing OK by the end!

The pattern of rehearsals
Recently we have been doing many of the big scenes in Titus that involve a lot of people and there's a lot going on within those scenes. This means that lately our rehearsals have needed to be a lot more technical work than those scenes where there are only two people.

In the time that we’ve had in rehearsals we have worked on creating the general shape of the scene because at the Globe we won’t be using sets full of furniture or things. It's essentially just us speaking to each other on a stage, so as long as you get the shape of a scene and the shape of what you are trying to do then if we get some time in the tech [the technical rehearsal] we’ll just do a few more runs and iron out any problems.

Reflections on Titus Andronicus
At the moment, I find that I’m walking around and seeing lots of things that remind me of Titus. For example, going to see Spurs [a football team] play the other day, and the blood lust and being around crowds of people in the stadium baying for whatever they’re baying for - for their team to win or the other team to lose, or for that guy to fall over.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is that we’re looking at this play and saying how horrible the events are as if we couldn’t believe this ever happened over here. The play is set in Roman times but some of the events portrayed in the play are happening all over the world and happening now. There are public beheadings around the world and on the internet. Also, what we think is terrible and awful was actually seen as entertainment for our ancestors. We’re not that far removed from public hangings when people went along to see criminals swing from the gallows and we’re not very far at all from things like capital punishment. In living memory that stuff's been happening. You’d have to be about hundred years old but there are people in this country who may have seen a hanging and that's quite weird.

Rehearsing the jig We’ve been doing parts of the play that come before my scenes and the Goths scenes, so essentially I’ve not had much to do. We’ve been rehearsing the dance, the ‘jig’ that will happen at the end of the play and I can only describe it as ‘jazz soldier’! What I mean by that is a series of dance moves in which we are all soldiers. It's not like we’re soldiers dancing, we’re soldiers fighting but Sian [Williams, the choreographer on Titus Andronicus] has choreographed some fight moves to beats.

I’m not sure if it will be used in the final production. It might just be part of the process but people are saying it's great, so it's quite possible we might have it in. It was good to do. Everything we’ve done has been helpful and aided the idea of who we are; the two factions the Romans and the Goths and never the twain shall meet!

Costume
I’m not entirely sure what my costume is going to be like but then I’m not one of these actors who needs to have their costume in rehearsal to find out about my character or things. Unless I know it's going to be a costume that is going to restrict my movement or restrict me and is going to be really hard to just be, because of this thing, then I’d like to have it sooner rather than later but I’ve not been told that's going to happen, so I’m sure it's going to be fine. I do know that I get a sword - a dagger - and I’m supposed to have a scimitar, although I don’t know quite what that is! I don’t have to have sword fights but I do kill someone so we’ll be working on the choreography a bit more next week.

Bulletin 5

First night
First night was weird for so many reasons it's kind of hard to describe. What I do remember is that I don’t actually look up at the audience to see who's there for ages when I’m walking around. I literally get on stage and for 10 minutes I just don’t look around. I could just feel this buzz in the air which was really mad. If you ever go to football matches, or any big game that is really important or just that little bit more important than a normal game, then that is what this was like. It was like feeling that buzz around the stadium that something special was just about to happen. That is above and beyond the biggest feeling I get about that night. I was just walking around, not looking up but just feeling this atmosphere.

For the first 20 minutes on stage, all I was working out was how I was going to say my first line! I’m not usually worried about things like that and I’m fine with it now but the first few nights I was really thinking ‘Right, there are some noisy people over here’ and working with things like that. I’ve done stuff where you can look at the audience before so you get used to the things that could put you off. Things like having someone yawn in your face or looking at someone just as they are putting their phone off. They aren’t even looking at you or they are chatting to their mate, whatever they are doing it can put you off when you are looking at them and trying to talk to them. You are always trying to affect the audience, and every audience is different. Some have more tourists in, others need the play explained more to them. So you are scoping out the audience as well and trying to work out what is best for them.

What is your first line?
And now climbeth Tamora Olympus’ top…

I hadn’t talked to anyone about which words I could emphasise, I’d just done it myself. I worked out what I wanted to say – one of the things I did was think about how I would have said it in my own words. I put different meanings on it and said it different ways. So for example with ‘There is Tamora, climbing to the top of that mountain’, you can say it in a way that means ‘I can’t believe she is doing that, she is afraid of heights’ or it can be that actually she loves heights but doesn’t have any legs so I would sound astounded ! So there are always various ways of saying the same line and you’ve just got to say it the way that you feel about it.

Aaron and Tamora
From being prisoners at the beginning of the play to being higher in status to the people who caught us within the space of five minutes is, for me, just unbelievable. One moment you are a prisoner, the next the people who caught you have to bow down at your feet! So I think Aaron is very pleased with his situation. I think he is pleased for Tamora too because it is just as though your best mate has won the lottery, even if you secretly don’t like them that much, because if you are close to them then you’ll be thinking I might get a piece of something here! I’m pretty sure that is how he is feeling.

Coping with problems
In the last week there have been a couple of things that have gone wrong but it's like there was a massive gaping hole and we have all just closed it off collectively as a company. First, Simon [who plays Bassianus] was ill so someone had to fill in for him. After that, another actor was injured during a production – he dislocated his shoulder – so we’ve had to work around that with people covering other people's roles. He's fine now and back in the production. It's actually quite scary how well everyone has seemed to deal with it. I mean it didn’t really affect me because I am not with those characters for a start, so there were no rehearsals for me to have to come in and change stuff. But everything is going so swimmingly now!

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