Saying the words
March 27, 2012
Great news today: Greg Doran is to be the new Artistic Director of the RSC. His appointment was dramatically ratified by rapturous applause when it was announced at a company meeting this morning.
Today we return to Twelfth Night. It seems somewhat distant now, so there will be a word run this afternoon.
The Comedy tech went on and on and on. Like Errorston. During previews we all gathered in the RST auditorium for the afternoons while various, largely technical, tweaks and changes are implemented.
The show manifestly improves each preview night as a consequence, getting tighter and also more fluid. The lighting also just gets better and better.
I hanker, though, for more text time rather than tech time to allow what I think is some of Shakespeare's best poetry to shine through, carry the story and convey the humour.
I guess you've got me down, now, as a bit of a purist, but can you wonder with me at how, through the medium of the formal poetic iambic pentameter (and, of course, the special licence he took with it), Shakespeare can convey with such economic efficiency the most complex and subtle thoughts and feelings that a playwright today will agonise over how to express in modern vernacular speech.
Yesterday I went to talk to a delightfully enthusiastic bunch of young people from the Concord Academy MA. They are having a full-on Shakespeare week with three RSC shows and a visit to Shakespeare's Globe in London.
Concord was the beginning of the end for the American colonies. I went there when my daughter was studying in Amherst. It's a lovely town of charming white clapboard houses with louvred shutters. The kids were every bit as charming as their town. I read somewhere that Northampton MA, which is nearby, is rated the best place in the world to bring up children. The students wanted to know about my approach to character and asked about any psychological preparation for playing Egeon.
We had an interesting conversation that ranged around some of the things I've been sharing with you in these blogs. Text is king, I told them, and I trust the text to guide the feeling. Cis Berry reminded us in notes this morning that it is the words that 'tell us how your mind is working" and that we must "always act through the words rather than between them.'
While that is essential advice to the Shakespearian actor, we all know that it isn't just the words. Saying them right with respect for the rhetorical and poetic figures does a lot of the job for us, but there is also a quality to be applied through the words in order that the audience recognise us as truthful and real. The words will help us find it, but there is a magic balance to be found. I'm still in a constant dilemma as to how to get that balance, just how much emotion to convey in the first scene. How much to lift the speech and how much to let it have the downbeat, stripped-of-emotion, quality that Nizar is urging me to have more of.
I do have to be in the right frame of mind for a performance. Egeon starts his journey oppressed and close to death. That means a quiet period for me before the show starts, nothing too specific, but just allowing a sense of despair to possess me. I find playing Egeon rather lonely and difficult and smiles don't come quite so easily this week. I could say that I do despair of getting it exactly right.
The picture today is of lovely Gill, my PSS (Personal Suspension Supervisor).
by Nick Day
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