Lavinia

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Laura Rees

This is Laura's second season at Shakespeare's Globe. Last year, Laura played Marina in Pericles and Eve in Man Falling Down. Laura trained at the Welsh College of Music and Drama; since graduating in 2001, her Shakespearean roles have included Ophelia in Hamlet and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Laura also played Cecily Cardew in The Importance of Being Earnest and Esther in Strange Orchestra. You will spot her in the film Love Actually. Television credits include Holby City, Murder in Mind and Trust.

Bulletin 1

Becoming an actor
First I wanted to be a dancer, and gradually I started enjoying the other bits - the smiling and things I did with my face - as much as the dancing. I was in a pantomime when I was 9, in Northampton where I grew up. Then, when I was about 10, I was in a youth theatre production of Bugsy Malone. My sister was in the youth theatre, and she didn’t really want me to join, but they didn’t have enough people, so I joined. When I was about 14 I started having acting lessons with a professional actress, and she was ever so important to me. In some ways I wanted to be like her. That was the moment really. I had planned to go to dance school when I was 16, but I started to think Drama school would be better, so I stayed on at school for another two years because you don’t go to drama school until you are 18.

Shakespeare
I have done quite a bit of Shakespeare in the five years since I left drama school, including playing Ophelia and Juliet. I was in a production of The Tempest that only had two actors so I played Miranda and Ariel and Trinculo and others in that all at the same time. I was Marina in Pericles at the Globe last year. Quite a lot of the work that I’ve done has been classical.

Working at the Globe
Working at the Globe last year was special. In other theatres you don’t get wet when it rains! Seriously, having people all around you and being able to see them is a big thing. When I did a play in an ordinary theatre afterwards I felt something was missing with this big dark space. You get so much feedback from the audience, and you can share special moments with them. Of course sometimes you notice the person who is looking really bored, or who is searching through their bag. You always notice the people who faint and you have to decide whether to acknowledge it or just to carry on and leave the stewards doing their job. You have to be quite disciplined. There are really powerful moments when everyone is utterly quiet and still. Last year playing Marina at an evening performance in one of those still moments I said:

O, that the gods
Would set me free from this unhallow'd place,
Though they did change me to the meanest bird
That flies i' the purer air!

And just as I’d said it this really big dirty pigeon flew right across the stage. It was special, and shared with everybody, and unique.

The first day of rehearsals
The first day of rehearsals is always really scary like your first day at a new school. There are all these people you don’t know. All these men – though that wasn’t too bad for me! We started with the Meet and Greet which is really good. At the Globe everybody is involved so you meet everybody, all the education people, the catering manager, as well as the rest of the cast. You all introduce yourselves. Dominic spoke to us all about the Globe and the season. Then we got straight into it and did the read through. Everybody is really nervous, but you think you are the only one who is. You are worried that you’ll be poor. Then we went on the Globe stage. That was great. Both for those of us who’ve been here before, and for the people who were there for the first time.

Researching the part
Before the audition I did a lot of thinking. Then when I got the part I stopped – that was the time for telling my mates I’d got this great job. About two weeks before rehearsals started I read the play again, and found a really useful book with an article about Lavinia. That was really helpful. I underlined lots of ideas. If I can’t think of anything to say in rehearsals I can always pretend I thought of them! On Tuesday we had a great lecture by Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper who works in Globe Education, there was so much information given to us about Rome and their ideas at the time. You can look loads of stuff up on the internet, but I tend to focus on thinking about my character, using my imagination.

Bulletin 2

Exploring ideas about my character
I’m getting a much better picture of Lavinia. She doesn’t speak very much at all even when she can speak but people say things about her at crucial moments – when Bassianus claims her as his wife, when she is given away to Saturninus by her father – she doesn’t have any lines to say. Not even ‘no’ or ‘OK’. Later, when Saturninus is humiliating her in front of everybody,and flirting with Tamora, he asks her if this troubles her and she just says no, since you will only be doing this out of politeness. [Ii, 275-6]. She chooses the words very carefully. So I’ve found that what people say about her is very important.

I always have trouble with the pure, chaste, virginal characters. How do you play those qualities? I’ve been hearing all the time about how wonderful she is – ‘Rome's rich ornament’. How do you ‘be’ Rome's rich ornament? Rome's rich ornament really sticks in my mind. That and things that Titus says to her. Another thing that sticks in my mind, especially now because we’ve just been doing it in rehearsal, is the scene after Bassianus and Lavinia have run off and got married and they then return to Rome. Lavinia needs to appeal to her father because she's shamed him in public, they both have. The guilt would be overwhelming. And she doesn’t say anything again.

Shakespeare and women
At this point in rehearsals, I don’t think Shakespeare liked women. He just left them to whine and they’re either raped or they’re bad. He underwrites women….perhaps he doesn’t really, it just feels like that from where I am now. I don’t just want to be the one who whines, I want to have an opinion here. It has to mean something. For instance, Titus rejects Bassianus's help and says he doesn’t need help from ‘thou and those that have dishonoured me’ [1i,430]. That sticks in my head because my relationship with my father has to be all consuming love, and at this moment we still haven’t had a reconciliation and I don’t know when that comes. I think maybe it doesn’t come until he sees me after the attack. It's love and duty, but mainly love. It's a funny relationship because he's been away at war for 15 years so I haven’t been brought up by him. I’m seventeen, he's been away for most of my life. Marcus, who is Titus's brother, has probably been a father figure to me. But it has to be love, it can’t be based on ‘I don’t know you, now look what's happened to me’, it has to be a wrench from the heart.

The rape of Lavinia
I’ve been ignoring the idea of rehearsing the rape scene, knowing it's horrific. I’ve been nervous, thinking I’m going to have to play this convincingly. I need the audience to see a woman raped. I think that's the main thing and the mutilation is secondary. I was reading about women in Sierra Leone, in so many different places, who are raped and mutilated. That's what happens. They are just forgotten. On one web site, people have written their stories of being raped – sometimes children of fourteen or thirteen. I’m just trying to get under the skin of it. It's horrible. I’m trying to take it on board. Once I get underneath it and I’m playing it again and again and as an actor on stage there will come a point when it becomes second nature. The audience will be seeing it for the first time, but I will be used to performing the sensory feelings – but when you are first trying to access those emotions in the rehearsal room it has to be raw, and you have to really go there. That's the only way I can pretend. We’re going to rehearse that scene tomorrow. We’re at that point now. I’m just nervous because you have to open yourself and your heart out. Once I do it, it will be such a relief. You know that it's in you to go to those extreme places, but I haven’t gone there yet.

Last year in Pericles, I played a character called Marina and she has almost the same scene when she's in the brothel. It comes out differently because she manages to convince everybody not to rape her. She has this amazing gift of making everybody see the good I themselves. But for Marina, if I’d played those moments thinking I have changed people's mind before, and so it's going to be alright this time, it wouldn’t work. I had to play those moments thinking I’m going to be raped. She thinks she's going to be raped and die – it's the same as for Lavinia, she thinks she's going to be raped and die. She sees in Tamora another woman who must surely have the one quality that all the men in Titus Andronicus don’t have – pity. She keeps using the word pity. In that whole pleading scene she's imploring, asking for pity, needing Tamora to find that pity in herself and she doesn’t. The battle is lost. So it's awful.

Lowpoint
The lowpoint of the week has been looking on the internet last night to research rape and cutting out tongues, and thinking about it. But I mustn’t get too depressed about it. I do know that on the other side of Lavinia's journey there is something quite wonderful. She transcends. All she wants is to die. She would rather die than have these men touch her. Then that right is taken away from her. I was reading last night about rape victims who say they want to die. It could be that awful. For a woman in those times, it's as if everything is taken away from her. In a twisted way, Titus takes rights away from her, he puts words in her mouth which is almost another rape in itself – he's claiming he understands what she is saying. After the rape they concentrate on her, they try to read her signs and the books, but once Titus knows that Chiron and Demetrius raped her, Lavinia disappears. She's no longer important - only revenge is – and they’ve got what they need from her. Her purpose in being alive, to communicate, is now taken away as well. It's horrible. Then it's as if she's able to fly away, and she does. Titus allows her to in the end.

Highpoint of the week
It was a short week! We had Monday off [a holiday in the UK]. I really like playing handball every day in rehearsal which allows you to just free your body up. Today we played a game where we all had a number – you throw the ball and say a number and that person has to catch it, and then if they get out you have to remember who's still in. We’re doing a lot of sitting around and talking, which after a while I get fed up with. At this point we need to do those things, it does help to understand, but you are eager to be playing the scene and to be in the moments rather than analysing them. We’re not really living it yet. We’re doing the scenes for the first time so it's broad brush strokes and more questions keep coming up. When you finish each scene you think that there's so much more to do! The more you do each scene, the more you see how much more there is in the language, characters, plot - because the text is so rich.

Bulletin 3

Rehearsing Act 2 Scene 2
Last time we talked was the day before we first worked on the scene where Lavinia gets raped and mutilated. It's good to have actually done the scene in rehearsal - to have taken the plunge. We’ve made the scene before the rape quite graphic. It's a very physical scene, with Chiron and Demetrius grabbing at me, ripping open clothes. The bit where you really have to take the plunge is after the rape, because the rape takes place off stage. Afterwards, I came on stage, with Chiron and Demetrius, and I thought, right, now it has happened. We’re using netting. In the first scene they net me and Bassianus, so I spend most of the scene under a net. So the netting will be mangled into the stumps. The first time I was walking forward Lucy [the director] described an image she thought would be good, with me holding the stumps outwards in a Virgin Mary-like image.

They’re prodding me with spears in my bum, and taunting me. I just started walking round the room – nothing was really clicking. At one point I fell to the floor…I think it has to be incredibly raw, I have to find a switch to take me somewhere deep. The actor part of me said jump. So, on the floor, I just started screaming as much as I could, to release something in me – the horror of what this is. Then I started to sob. There was a point where Lucy must have said to start the scene again. Once I’ve found that place, it is easier to go back to it. I felt that I had started from the place I want to start from. I was exhausted afterwards – the first time you do it you don’t know what is going to happen.

After that scene, in all the things I’ve done, I’m always returning to that state. I have to switch off everything around me, and get myself into a state where nothing is logical anymore. It's trauma, deep shock, and in rehearsal I just have to try to physically put myself in that place. I don’t understand enough about it at the moment. I need to do more work on it. It's an out of control place. I’ve been doing it all week now, and I feel really tired, but also, grotesquely, as an actor, I also feel really energised. Now I know I’ve found the place, it's easier to get back to it. Last year we had six weeks rehearsal and then a week's technical rehearsal and this year we have five weeks and a week's technical rehearsal. It's making a big difference – this is such a big play. We are at that point that you get to with most plays where there doesn’t seem to be enough time left and we are all feeling that we don’t know enough about what we are doing. We haven’t even gone through everything once yet. Also, there are the complicated questions such as how we deal with the blood. If somebody has chopped off your hands, there's going to be a lot of blood about. What do you do? There's a woman, she's been raped, she's had her hands cut off – what would your reaction be?

an actor, you always want to know how you are going to get through the play. I can see that now, even though there are some bits we haven’t done. We’re at Act Four Scene One. Until that point, it's as if Lavinia's system is shut down, but it is only with the picture in the book that she can start to communicate. She becomes a weird creature. Everything that can happen to a woman in a play has happened to her – she's virgin, daughter, wife, widow, then she's used almost like a whore. You can’t be all of those things, yet she is. She almost becomes an animal, lost completely, into the wilderness.

Costume
I’ve seen designs for my costume. I start off classically Roman, and pure, white. After it all happens, it goes to a ripped under dress so Lavinia's almost naked with blood everywhere. Marcus is ripping my dress even more for bandages. They won’t make fifty dresses – just tack a bit on to be torn off for each performance. Later there is a binding effect, she's almost mummified there are so many bandages. Finally her dress has lots of material with big sleeves. Though she's so young, she's seems even younger after and not in control so I don’t think she will be able to hide her stumps. It's a really interesting thing about wanting to hide, or to be hidden, so it is that image – women who can’t be seen.

Now
We are going for a company meal tonight, and we are doing a full run of where we’ve got to tomorrow morning. I feel very tired, so I’d like to rest, but it will be good to relax together as well. In rehearsal you do take it home with you at the end of the day. When you’re actually doing the show you get used to it, so you’re able to get away from it. After we start the performances, within a couple of weeks, we start rehearsing A Comedy of Errors. I don’t know how I’m going to do the mood change. At the moment I’m so bound up in Titus Andronicus I don’t even want to think about it!

Bulletin 4

Progress
It has been a frustrating week this week after having a good week last week: last week I had a lot of breakthroughs. This week we have been on the second half of the play and it has been the first time we have touched on these scenes. I’ve been getting frustrated with the scene with Young Lucius and the books [IV i]. We had the boy playing Lucius a little while ago, and we talked about it, and worked on it, but he has had his SAT exams this week, which are obviously important for him, so he hasn’t been in. That is a key turnaround scene, and we’ve had to work on it without Young Lucius.

The scene before [Act 3 Scene 2] we are setting in a safe house – because there are all these riots going on. We are hiding out. We are having food, and what we have discovered is that Lavinia is in deep trauma. She is a wounded deer with everything flapping and completely unable to focus. She is in a deep catatonic state. It is about a week after her rape, so the pain is still severe. I’ve been talking to a lot of people this week, a psychiatrist and another doctor, about what it would be like. Eating, a week later would be so difficult. She can’t do anything. She has got no hands, no tongue. She is so stricken that, even though somebody is talking to her, she seems to have let go of her soul. There is no spark. After the rape it is as if she is dead. But then in the book scene she suddenly gets one last lease of life – her soul comes back for a moment. Then after that she is gone, for ever I think. Because we haven’t been able to do the book scene properly, I haven’t been able to find where she is. Then we have had to go on to the rest of the play and I haven’t been able to make any sense out of it, because I haven’t got the book scene sorted out. It is such a key moment. I know she is very upset, but I haven’t found it in my heart.

Highlights of the week
I had a costume fitting on Saturday. That was wonderful, especially the second costume after she has been raped. It is a shroud-like thing which covers all of her head and body.

Another important moment this week was speaking to a psychiatrist. I realised I knew somebody who had just the right background. I did some work for the Foreign Office, doing role-plays and worked with a military psychiatrist, who works for the Royal Navy. All through rehearsals we have been wondering is it possible she will have had such deep trauma she will completely shut down? Is that psychologically possible? There are other questions as well for other people, like the effect of fifteen years at war and then coming back to Rome. How will that affect different men? Suddenly, after four weeks of rehearsal, we realised we needed to get someone in to be able to talk to us about this. I phoned him up and he was a great help. He told me about things like peritraumatic dissociation, when there is complete shut down. We also talked about the wrists. Really if that happened, you would be dead. We talked about the pain, and the extent of the pain. He is coming in to talk further to me and Lucy [the director], Doug [Titus] and a few other people later today.

Thoughts about Lavinia
It is a difficult play. We have just been working on the book scene again, and you do look at some of the lines and think that this was one of his first plays. I’m trying to communicate. I’ve got books. It takes so long for them to get it. When I eventually get them to understand it was Chiron and Demetrius they are so surprised, but it is obvious, they are the bad people who have infiltrated our society. How could they not suspect them?

It takes a lot of energy to play Lavinia. It started off with my worrying about this big thing that I had to find, and now I know it is there. When you play something you experience it in a way. It has been like a release, like crying. Doing it isn’t as bad as the expectation. I was depressed about the part when I was reading about all the bad things that have happened to all those young girls. While that will always be there, I can’t carry it in the front of my mind, I play the situation.

Doug Hodge, who is playing Titus, has been wonderful. I feel very relaxed working with him. He makes everybody laugh all the time. He told me about his first TV job, years ago, he was working with Judy Dench. They were playing lovers, and he was very nervous. You are like that when you are a young actor – you just want to get it right. You are so tense. She would make him laugh just before a take, he’d have everything prepared, then he’d be laughing, and he find himself doing something he hadn’t planned. He does that sort of thing for me. He knows I’m desperate to get it right, and I’m playing this really dark role, so just as I’m getting into character he does something, pretends to fart or something, and it lightens things. It makes such a difference when the lead actor in the company shows it is alright to relax. He does that with everybody. Today in the feeding scene, when I’m trying to eat and he is feeding me, I’m choking and being sick. He is catching the sick. We are doing it with digestive biscuits at the moment, and he has to catch it. When I cry my nose runs a lot, so he's got this mess of chewed up digestive, tears and snot, he is catching and wiping from my face. He says you’d only do that for your child. I can’t go back to being the sophisticated young actress with him! It's all out!

Bulletin 5

It has been a big week. You can tell from the bruises all over me that I’ve been acting a lot. [Laura's forearms and shins are covered in bruises, with a plaster covering a graze on one elbow.] I do so much on my arms and knees after the rape, and this is from working on carpet. I know from last year that anything kneeling on the Globe stage is especially hard. I don’t think I’ll be able to wear knee pads under my costume, because, after the rape, when she is first revealed to Titus, we have this image of a wounded deer, flapping limbs. It is so frantic. I’m like a wounded bird that needs to be held.

The run of the first half is relentless. I’ve hurt my neck from the shaking in the first half. Physically and emotionally so much has happened to me, I’ve got so much tension in my body. I need to find a way of playing it without putting this much tension in my body, or I’ll be hospitalised by June. It is my fault. When you do stage combat you don’t actually hurt the other person, but I don’t seem to be able to do that for myself. When I’m caught in the net I don’t just pretend, I actually try to fight my way out of it. Then when I come out of it somebody says, ‘What have you done?’ because it is real blood from a cut or a graze.

Putting everything together
I’m really looking forward to doing the full run. Now that we have done a bit more work on the first half I have a better idea of the overall journey. I feel a lot more concrete about what is happening. Seeing all the other bits is important too – because I haven’t been in rehearsals for the scenes I’m not involved in.

It is a really exciting play, and the way we are doing it is really good – it is going to work. At the end of the first half I’ve played a curve going from completely pure and fresh and expectant to this mutilated woman, going off in this strange procession, with my father's hand in my mouth, while he is carrying two severed heads. That's just the first half of the play. Everybody else's characters have as big or bigger journeys.

Watershed moments
Hearing the music for the first time has been a big thing. It is quite off the wall! Django Bates has composed the music, he is a jazz composer, he is using Elizabethan instruments, but it's not what you would expect. We have weird horns – about 12 feet long, which we’ve had made especially – which produce the most amazing sounds.

Last Saturday, I had my second costume fitting, for the ‘shroud’. To feel what it is like to be enclosed in that way helps me take another step towards what I feel on the inside. Some actors work that way – from the outside in – and the right pair of shoes or the right hat is the key to becoming that character. Other actors are more in to out. I’m probably more in-out than out-in, but it is another layer which helps.

I’ve also been looking at pictures of Roman women while I was over in the costume department having the costume fitting. That helped. The way they held themselves in these beautiful paintings was interesting. I hadn’t looked at anything like that before and when I did I thought, there she is, and there she is again.

Does Lavinia present special problems because for so much of the play she doesn’t have any lines?
I don’t think so. It feels like a gift. The way the play is written, so much of what Lavinia is saying is written in what other people are saying around her. For example in the book scene [Act Four, Scene 1]

[LAVINIA turns over with her stumps the books which Young Lucius has let fall]

TITUS. How now, Lavinia! Marcus, what means this?
Some book there is that she desires to see.
Which is it, girl, of these?- Open them, boy.-
But thou art deeper read and better skill'd;
Come and take choice of all my library,
And so beguile thy sorrow, till the heavens
Reveal the damn'd contriver of this deed.
Why lifts she up her arms in sequence thus? [IV,i, 30-7]

It is clear from this what I’m doing. Even if I had lines, the most important thing we do as actors is to react. When I’m a character in a situation then I’m reacting to that situation. In the original Elizabethan production actors were usually just given their lines, with their cue for each speech. That must have been very hard for the boy playing Lavinia. We rehearse for six weeks and we feel we don’t have enough time. Back then, people didn’t have very long at all – perhaps a day or so. I wonder how good it was. They must have been like stories that were told. They must have been reacting a lot – being in the moment. In a scene like the book scene when Lavinia is driving the action, she would have to know what they say before they say it, because it is their actions which make them say what they say. The boy must have known what they were going to say.

Specialist help
We had a good session with the psychologist. I was nervous because I was the person who found him and I was suddenly worried that it would be a waste of people's time. It felt like my responsibility. But he was wonderful. He knew examples from so many different modern wars. He was able to give us firm evidence about different conditions. Doug asked lots of questions about when he kills Mutius – could it be Titus is such a trained warrior that it is like a reflex. He talked to me about different disassociations after trauma. I’m still texting him most days with extra questions.

I’ve had a movement session with Glynn MacDonald – I need more time with her. She is helping me with relaxation. The movement I do is excessive in this play. Giles [Block, who does text work at the Globe] is wonderful. I say the line and then he has all these ideas. ‘What if you just…’. He hears so clearly how a line works. A good example is in the first scene. I say:

Not I, my lord, sith true nobility
Warrants these words in princely courtesy. [I,i,275-6]

I was breaking it up and he pointed out I didn’t need to. Then he got me to pick out the ‘t’ in nobility a bit more, and link the Ws in warrants and words. Lavinia is choosing her words very carefully at the time, and very articulately. It is strange how it works, but he seems to be able to open a door without actually doing anything. He helps you make it happen through the words without labouring and putting things on top. Once we start previewing, Giles works with a book with all your lines – he makes a script for you. After each show he gives you a copy of the script, marked up in different colours, with a glossary of what his marks mean. It might be that you missed that word out, or he didn’t hear it clearly, or you mispronounced it. He also marks emphasis. He has listened to every word you say and he can give you these notes. Then you can argue with him. I can get a line into my head with the wrong emphasis, he’ll ask if it wouldn’t work better with another emphasis, then we will argue. I get very attached to things. He is normally right, which is annoying but useful.

Bulletin 6

Technical rehearsals
This week we spend all our time doing everything technically. How do we make the blood work in this bit? How do we move the towers? It starts to feel like we haven’t done the play, just the technical stuff and then all of a sudden it will be the first show. It is also very exciting. You get your costumes to wear for the first time. We move into the theatre – and after all, the reason for being an actor is to dress up and prance about on stage! It is a very important transition time. The discoveries of the rehearsal room change with new discoveries in the theatre. Working in the rehearsal room can be quite small and you are trying to discover things for yourself, but moving on to the stage things usually get bigger because you are trying to discover them for other people.

This is a technically complex show for the Globe, although the Globe itself isn’t usually a technically complex theatre. There aren’t any lighting cues, and lighting is usually one of the main things for the tech process. We don’t have a lighting board. We don’t have any electronic sound cues, but we do have music. We have wonderful musicians who come onto the stage and become part of the action. We have all of our entrances and exits including some complicated ones; we have moveable towers in the yard and people are carried in on a palanquin [a chair carried between two poles at shoulder height.] and they can be quite heavy and difficult to manoeuvre.

Once it all fits together I think it will look like quite an impressive show technically. It certainly has taken a lot of time this week, and it has felt like it has gone quite slowly. We have come up with a lot of problems but so far we have solved them all. The Globe isn’t like a conventional modern theatre and so it makes things a bit harder. For example, there isn’t somebody sat prompt corner with a board controlling everything so you can wander off to get a cup of tea because they can’t just call you on the tannoy. There aren’t many people backstage either, but that is great. It is like we are a small family, and we are all up against it, but we pull together.

Working with the music has been a big part of this week. I love it. It adds to the performance rather than changes it; you learn something new about the tone of the scene. Often the music is the opposite to what you are playing. So when I have a very sad scene the music is quite up. It's the opposite of that patronising music you can get in films where the music at a sad moment is telling you to feel sad, and you feel annoyed because it is over the top and so sentimental.

There's one moment just after I’ve been raped and my hands have been chopped off when Marcus comes on and calls for me to come back because I’m running away. There's a big pause, I walk forward, the music comes in and blossom falls from the roof. I just stand there, I’m not really doing anything. It is like a frozen moment. The first time I did that scene with all the blood and my bloody costume on, I literally didn’t do anything, I just stood there. People came up to me afterwards and said it was incredible, but I wasn’t doing anything, the music was doing everything.

Sometimes to do less is a lot more. That is what I’ve learnt especially since moving into the theatre. There is a sense of energy in this space, and if you do too much, you fight against that energy. All the shaking I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks is too much. When somebody is in pain they try not to show their pain; they try to hold on to their dignity. I spend a lot of time being in pain, so that has been a big change for me this week. I have spent a lot of time thinking about Lavinia as an animal, that she is in complete chaos, with a breakdown of any sense of humanity that she had. But I can’t let go of who Lavinia is, so I’ve been trying to get that back. What I was doing was feral and very physical. That is still there, but there is something about the sadness that I need to keep. If she turns into something else the audience will be repulsed it rather than see her pain. And they need to see her pain to understand Titus.

This isn’t what usually happens when you move from the rehearsal room to the theatre. Often you have been playing it too small and you have to move up a notch, but what I’ve found this time is I’ve needed to pare it down. The rehearsal room we were in was a modern office building and a lot of the physical heavy work I was doing was trying to make it work in that dead space, whereas now I’m in a space which has a sense of energy. This theatre feels so intimate that to just see somebody walk a couple of paces on stage is so incredibly magnified. If you do too much, it can go the other way. Also, for this production we have the tiring house draped in black and it creates a greater focus on the actors – usually the colour of our costumes blends more with painted background, almost like camouflage.

I’m not liking the blood at all, and I get covered in it. I need a shower in the interval, because in the second half I’m not so bloody, and I’m in a different costume. I have to hold a lot in my mouth. When I’m first revealed after the rape I come on and it's not until Marcus says to me, about five minutes after I come on stage, ‘Why dost not speak to me’, I vomit out all the blood. So I have to hold this sugary, disgusting stuff in my mouth. It's like eating too many sweets when you are a child – times a million. I’m in danger of a sugar rush at a very serious moment.

We have been thinking about the audience reaction a bit, particularly after I’ve been raped. I’m doing a lot of grotesque movement and initially the reaction might be to laugh, which is the wrong reaction. It is a reaction you are more likely to get at the Globe because people get very excited and involved. Any reaction is good, and reactions at the Globe are incredible.

Bulletin 7

Audience reaction to Lavinia
I feel that audiences have been sympathetic to Lavinia - even last night when the audience were really bloodthirsty. It started last night when Douglas [Hodge, playing Titus] gets on stage after his procession and he shouts, ‘Hail, Rome’. The audience all shouted back, ‘Hail, Titus’ and then Douglas couldn’t get on with the speech because they were all shouting and clapping and stomping. They were really bloodthirsty. During the banquet scene [Act 5 Scene 3] they were going mad and I was worried it might trip over into the wrong reaction when Titus kills Lavinia, that they might laugh. Usually the audience go really quiet at that point and I take that as showing how the audience have been feeling with Lavinia. Even last night it was so quiet. I’m so glad that even an animalistic audience can stop and react like that. I think Lavinia has to affect the heart of people. I think it is what Lavinia wants, it is the only release that she can have.

Just after the reviews came out, discussion around the play was about how Quentin Tarantino-esque this production is. I could really feel the expectation of the audience, wanting the spectacle and the blood. I felt very self-conscious about it. I felt people weren’t following the story, they were just waiting for the next big thing to happen. Now that seems to have gone away again. I think the audience needs to be asked questions such as, ‘Is this how I should feel about all this abuse?’ Even with an audience like last night’s, who were really hungry for the humour of it, I still feel that there is something serious getting through.

I did a couple of press interviews about people fainting, but it was getting ridiculous, so I stopped. Usually I don’t notice, peripherally I’m aware of movement and that's all. I’m surprised when I come off if Doug or someone says somebody fainted. Sometimes I think people can be affected by seeing somebody else faint as well. In a moment like Lavinia's trauma, because I’m being quite physical at that point, people are shocked by what they see and they are drawn into it because it's quite a visual thing and the shock can come after that.

Reviews
I read the reviews and I was pleased with them. When I read reviews, I feel exposed by them - are they going to say something nice or something bad? As an actor you are massively concerned abut the production, but also as an actor there is this weird thing where you are concerned about yourself. Your name. What are people going to say about you? People pretend it's not like that, but I think somewhere it is. Acting is a self obsessed profession.

Even when a review says something really great, there is a bit of a let down once you've read it. It is horrible, but that is what acting is. You are putting yourself out there for applause every night. There is so much weakness and vulnerability in actors because of the nature of what we do. It is about our emotions, we are opening our hearts. It is weird for every actor to ask themselves why do I do this? It is not just about giving something, it is about what it is to actually live this life. It is like a drug, which is why actors are so often miserable when they are not working. Adrenaline is a drug.

Lavinia
There have been some shows where the way I approach things has changed but my view of Lavinia hasn't really changed. Some nights after the rape scene I do the rest of the play almost in automatic. Because it is very physical, it is almost like a dance and about hitting the right points.

We did Titus last night and we haven't done it for five nights, and I was really nervous before the show. The energy and the emotion was really raw again. Towards the end of last week, when we had done four weeks with loads of shows, I was really miserable. On Friday night, after the show, it hit me. Sometimes the play really gets under your skin, because it is so unforgiving, there is no hope in it. On Friday, after Doug killed me, after he says;

Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee,
And with thy shame thy father's sorrow die. [5iii 45-6]

I let it in. I felt really low after the show. I sat on the stage and had a glass of wine and just felt depressed. That night I had the worst, the most violent, dreams, mainly mages from the show because we have been doing this show so often. On some level, every night being taken off stage and being raped and being mutilated, and then walking forward downstage, especially in the Globe space, you get a sense of the reality of it. You can't really push it away, which I try to do a lot, I have to go through those emotions every night.

With repetition, any scene can become less real to an actor. Because you’re doing it again and again, you start to do it the way you did it the night before, which isn't experiencing, it is just repeating something that worked. You know it will work for the audience, because they are seeing it for the first time. Last night, because we hadn't done it for four nights, I was really getting into it and focussing on it. It is horrible what it leaves you with, especially after the rape scene with Tamora and Chiron and Demetrius. I can be so nasty when I come off stage and I'm getting all bloodied up. Last night Louise Ricci, who puts the blood on me, just held me in the wrong place when she was applying the blood and I was foul. I was really angry and upset. It took me about an hour just to be able to let it go, and to calm down. It is horrible. There is also a lot of release in playing the deep grief, but it is hard. So it is lovely to be doing The Comedy of Errors.

Bulletin 8

Playing Lavinia and Luciana
It is great fun to be doing something which is so different from Titus. It took me a long time to let go of Titus enough to want to do a comedy but we have a three week gap in Titus performances which started this week, and I’ve felt relieved to be able to just concentrate on The Comedy of Errors. I want to be able to give everything to Comedy and not be sidetracked by having to do Titus performances because that would stop me throwing myself into Luciana's world completely. When we start doing Titus again we only do about one a week, which will be hard.

Lavinia has left me with more of a wound than I thought she would. It's something I don’t really want to think about. The more I’ve done it, the more the horror has embedded itself. It does become routine, but the routine is unhealthy subconsciously. The play is so dark, there is no hope at all.

Playing the two roles in the same season is a great challenge. I’m not sure I like the idea of the audience coming along and thinking, I wonder how the woman who was Lavinia will be in a comedy, or the other way round. I just want them to think of me as the role I’m playing, not of me as an actor.

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