The world's biggest Shakespeare fraud
September 25, 2012
After getting to know each other as a cast through read-throughs and choral movement exercises, we moved on to looking at each scene individually, mining the text for the meaning of the words we would be saying.
Jamie (Rocha Allan, co-director) told us that a production of Shakespeare is only confusing when the actors themselves don't understand what they're saying, so to avoid losing our audience, it was important that we understood.
Over a week and a bit, we had rehearsals where we would just sit in a circle and read a scene in Shakespeare's words and then again in modern dialogue.
I've always thought myself adept at Shakespeare's imagery and language. From when I was first learning Shakespeare at school through to the productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night at university, I grasped the language and meaning and delivered my lines with the right intention. Or at least I thought I had.
This 'week of understanding' has completely found me out to be the world's biggest Shakespeare fraud!
There were so many instances where my understanding of a line and the correct one were going in completely different directions. I can only thank the directors for keeping me the straight and narrow.
I promptly appropriated the cast Arden copy of the play. Reading the essays at the front of it and the meanings of the words and phrases below the passages, as well as the rehearsals in the 'week of understanding' have helped to no end. My script is now littered with the correct thought processes and hopefully you'll be able to appreciate them more when you see the play.
Another important thing I've learned from this process is that sometimes, the meaning is the simplest thing it can be. Questions in Shakespeare aren't always loaded; sometimes it's more interesting to play the question exactly as it's written on the page. The same goes for a lot of lines in the canon. It's not always correct to look for a double meaning.
Vocal sorcery
On another note, Michael Corbidge is a wizard. I was fortunate enough to experience the effects of his vocal sorcery on a one-to-one basis.
For two hours, I worked through the opening two scenes of the play, making sure I was anchoring, forward placing and telling the story through the words. It was beyond words how useful it was to have individual tutoring, perfecting our speech. Through this session, we were able to identify my major drawbacks and Corbidge used his wealth of knowledge and exercises to help me to work on them. He seems to come up with them on the spot, which immediately made me think he was just making them up, but they're so effective.
Having not been to drama school or had any professional training, I really feel like I'm getting an insight into what we would be taught there. We are being given the skills we'll need to survive in theatre and its filling me with the confidence I need to perform to the best of my ability. However, seeing Jonathan Slinger, Stephen Hagan and Solomon Israel perform does make me think there is still a lot to learn!
The set
We met Georgia, our designer, who revealed to us what the set of Pericles on the Courtyard stage would look like.
Georgia told us that in designing Pericles, she had been inspired by ship-breaking yards all over the world and the people who work on them.
Showing us pictures that had inspired her, we could see clearly how this had formed the set and costume in her mind. The rusted innards of a ship forming our back drop and the matching costume of the Gower chorus really give you the shipwrecked feel of the play, tying in perfectly with the 'What Country Friends, is This?' season.
by Sope Dirisu
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