It's not a problem
December 15, 2011
The opening scene of Comedy. I have 129 lines of expository back story to deliver in huge chunks of blank verse.
It's not a problem. I don't (as it seems so many directors in the past have done) see it as a problem. I really don't want this to be a problem, see. Then it would be hard.
'Oh, you've got that opening speech!', everybody says when I tell them what I'm playing. Egeon, you see, has to set up the whole separated twins story about how they were tragically parted eighteen years ago in a shipwreck.
I met an actor friend of mine at a wedding the other day (usually it's funerals nowadays) and he said of the current NT production - which has a splitting ship on stage as Egeon is describing it, 'If I was playing that part, I would have walked off saying, you obviously don't need me in this scene then.'
Well, Nizar is is going to trust me, I think.
We have to see this speech as part of the story, not just a precursor to it that we have to get out of the way. It is very much part of the theme of longing and loss that runs as a vital thread through the story. (In Arabic and in Hebrew, apparently, there is a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have 'widow' and 'orphan' but no actual word for that.)
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that modern audiences are used to high concept productions where the settings are at least as complex and sophisticated as were created in the minds of Shakespeare's most imaginative audiences. So people coming to see us next year may be just slightly less content to just listen to me... so I've cut 25% of the lines! No mean feat in blank verse!
Now all I have to do is learn it all before we rehearse it again.
(The What Country Friends is This? plays are; The Tempest, Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, and are part of the RSC's World Shakespeare Festival)
by Nick Day
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