Dominic Cooke is the director of Cymbeline and an Associate Director of the RSC.


'Shakespeare's late romances are such extreme plays - I love the way they take human beings to their worst and darkest fears, to the most extreme edges of experiences and yet have a redemptive quality. What also appealed to me about the play was its bold, imaginative theatricality of Cymbeline could only have been written by a mature writer with a passion for theatre who wanted to explore how far he could push an audience. In choosing this play I hoped to be able to explore ways in which the stage can be an imagined world rather than a place of realism or literalism.


I wanted to direct a play people didn't know very well. With Shakespeare, audiences have an extraordinary level of ownership and a strong sense of how the plays should be performed but I am hoping that that will be less the case with Cymbeline.


Another thing I wanted to explore in the play was the notion of growing up and facing mortality. Growing up is something that doesn't just happen to young people in the play - it also happens to Cymbeline and to the country as it faces its responsibilities.


We did have a kind of read-through of the play but I asked the actors to read other parts, not their own. So for example the actor playing Posthumus might read the Queen or Second Gentleman, but never Posthumus. Then we spent 2 weeks exploring the play as a group. The designer Rae Smith and I had come up with a lot of ides and made quite a few decisions but we wanted to hold back on final decisions until we were at least 2 weeks into our 7 week rehearsal period because we wanted to be able to test our ideas out with the actors. Rather than imposing our ideas on them, we wanted the show to be collaborative.


We asked the company to write down on pieces of paper a one word response to encapsulate their perceptions of:

Britishness

Tribal culture

Italy

Renaissance Italy

The Roman Empire

They had to write the first word that came into their head because I wanted imaginative responses, not literal ones. Next they called out their words and made a tableau for each one using the props and costumes with which we'd filled the room. These tableaux really informed the designs, which were continually evolving and changing. The set we have now is very different from the one we first envisaged. They also informed later improvisations. What I wanted to do was to get the actors to think in a non-literal way, to feel imaginative and free and to explore and find the play themselves.


In the next phase of rehearsals, the company sat down as one big group and worked through the whole play, paraphrasing the scenes and giving each scene a title using a transitive verb, i.e., "so and so does this to someone else". The idea is to try to get the actors to think about what they are doing to each other, rather than what they are feeling. It's good to keep it very simple, so for example, the titles we came up with might have been "Cymbeline greets Caius Lucius" or "The Queen persuades X". I find it a useful exercise because it helps you to find away of encompassing the whole play without limiting choices. It also provides a sound, playable foundation for the actors. The choices are not set in stone - they can always be changed. [For more about the titles given to scenes, visit Scene titles in For Teachers]


Next the company improvised most of the scenes, with the text, using props and costume. They came up with brilliant ideas, many of which we use in the production. In fact, the style of the production as a whole was heavily influenced by tableaux and improvisation. The two weeks we spent improvising went incredibly quickly but I do think it's really helpful to underpin this very fragmented play for the actors. The company got to know each other before breaking off to work on their separate worlds of Britain, Rome and Wales.


What appealed to me was exploring the idea of Britain being colonised by a Super Power. We're usually the coloniser, so it's rare for us to be put in that position. I wanted to explore Britain as a kind of backward country, the less advanced nation in the world being threatened by the superior power and sophistication of the Roman Empire.


In the play Wales is not a literal place. It's rather like the Forest of Arden in As You Like It - it has a poetic relevance rather that a literal one. Wales is an unconquered place, a wilderness that stands, in a sense, at the edge of the world. So whilst in Rome you meet Romans and in Britain you meet the British, in Wales you only meet exiles.


Journeys are important in the play - both spiritual journeys and journeys into the unknown. The play seems to start with a group of people who are trapped in certainties of who they are and what they want. No one else really exists for them - their universe is the universe. It seems to me that as the play goes on, so they are forced to accept that there are other versions of the universe co-existing with theirs. They are forced to accept that they are subject to outside forces. The journeys, like the physical journeys into the wilderness, are also spiritual rites of passage. We used improvisation to explore this idea and worked with the movement director Liz Rankin, which helped to free them, physically. That's how pieces like Imogen's journey to Milford Haven evolved.


As well as Liz Rankin, the composer Gary Yershon spent a lot of time with us in early rehearsals and we explored an idea that Britain was a world of dance and ritual and music. Rome, we decided, was much more held, more upright and sophisticated. We also talked a lot about Shamanism, Shamanistic societies and rituals. In the end, many of the rituals we devised for Britain we didn't use. For examples, we had one to welcome Caius Lucius but it seemed so aggressive that in the end we cut it. We were also going to have a ritual for marriage and some for war. In the end we only used the Hakkas (Maori war dances intended to scare off the enemy, now used by the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team at the start of international matches) because they seemed the most powerful.


Various visitors to come to talk to us during rehearsals, one of whom is a grief counsellor: much of the play is concerned with facing death. The characters only really progress when they face their own or somebody else's mortality. Imogen's epiphany, for example, is when she wakes up next to Cloten's headless body which she mistakes for Posthumus. Imogen gives up at the point in which some kind of divine power or force sets in, in this case, Caius Lucius, who arrives at exactly the right moment and helps her. The grief counsellor talked about the stages of grieving and also the effect death has on people who survive. She also talked about how death effects all those people who have never thought about their own mortality, who behave as though they are immortal.


An historian came and talked about ancient British History and the Romans in Britain. Although we didn't interpret what he told us in a literal way, what we learnt about military strategies did influence the way we staged battles. The Roman Army, for example, were high-tech, very organised had standardised equipment. The Britons didn't wear uniforms and fought using tactics more akin to guerrilla warfare. He also talked about the real King Cymbeline and we were able to get a sense of where Shakespeare had borrowed from Holinshed's bastardised version of ancient British history.


A survivalist came in to talk to the actors playing Belarius, Guiderius and Arviragus about what it would be like to live in the wild and how you would survive, what a typical day might be like, what the chief problems are and so on. It was really interesting and helped them to create a world they could inhabit. He talked about hunting and how to hunt and about the kinds of foods you'd need. He said the hardest thing when living in the wild is to get carbohydrates: meat is easy to find but if you just eat protein, you die. He also talked about how people in the wild can get carbohydrates by making bread from different types of flour. I always think it is useful for actors, even if you're working in a non-literal world, to have some kind of reality. The Welsh world in the play seems much more based in a reality - their lives seem to be very rooted in the reality of a day-to-day living, centred around rituals and food.


There were three points I kept in mind when making cuts:

I have made a few cuts but in a sense the play is a great sprawling mess and trying to tidy it up doesn't work.

The play is an unwieldy beast and we should celebrate that - it is an epic, so we've done it like an epic.

Cymbeline is a great compendium of different styles which we've decided to embrace and present in a very eclectic style.'