Emma Stuart is the Assistant Director to Bill Alexander, director of the 2004 production of King Lear.
The role of assistant director depends to an extent on the directing they’re assisting. In part they have to make sure things run smoothly from a practical viewpoint and sometimes they’re asked to do research or act as a third eye. But they can also be asked to take parallel calls and go over things with the actors, making sure everyone is clear about everything covered in earlier rehearsals. That means they really do have to understand the director’s vision for the production. At the RSC, assistant directors also work with the understudies. Our role is slightly different this season because, as well as the usual understudy run, the understudies give a public performance and it’s our job to prepare them for that.
It’s been terrific working with directors whose working methods are very different. Bill Alexander has taught me a great deal, for example about good old-fashioned stagecraft and the importance of being 110% prepared before rehearsals begin- you can’t just turn up and wing it. He has the blocking in place very early, which on allows actors a framework in which to explore their characters and know where to move. At the start of the season, though, I worked with Dominic Cooke whose approach is far more exploratory. Dominic tends to work from the inside out. Together with the actors and designers, he explores character and motivation and that tends to give rise to the look of the production.
To an extent, understudies have to mirror the work in main rehearsals exactly but sometimes that’s not possible. For example, John Normington is playing the Fool as a northern comic but his understudy is Leo Wringer, whose performance is going to be completely different. We’ve already decided that he won’t be northern but, like John, he’ll go back to his roots and find his voice there, which means he’s essentially Afro-Caribbean rather than from the north of England. We’ve been discussing the possibility that Leo’s Fool entered Lear’s household as a child, as a slave child. His voice, his physicality, his backstory then are all totally different to John’s. Michael G. Jones understudies Lear and his performance too will be very different to Corin’s. It’s good, because it means there isn’t the pressure to replicate exactly what’s going on in the main production but they have to do the same sort of thing. It is also making me work harder and consider what I think the play’s really about.
King Lear was written towards the end of Shakespeare’s career. His imagination was getting bigger and broader, perhaps even more troubled. He found life less easy to explain and less easy to categorise. When you look at Romeo and Juliet, for instance, everything’s easier, even the verse. The language in King Lear is amazingly beautiful but so densely packed. For me, this is a play about mortality, about facing death and realising we all will die. It’s also a play about realising things too late: for example, Cordelia realises too late that she should have handled her father differently in the first scene and Gloucester realises too late that Edgar was the true son. As he is dying Edmund tries to do some good but he too is too late and Cordelia is hanged.
Before I started working on the play I thought I would immediately relate more to the daughters than to Lear or Gloucester and I imagined it might be hard for me, as a young woman, to work on a play that’s about coming to terms with being old. I’ve realised though that what is so brilliant about the play, is that everything in it is so recognisable. It’s a play about being human. When I’m working with the understudies, I’m encouraging them to play their scenes and characters on a domestic level, not least of all because you can’t play the universal, the catastrophic effects. What happens to Lear’s family is what’s happening to the state. You don’t ignore the greater things in it, but you have to start from the core, the basics, the small, personal details. One thing I love about this play is that it teases you, right up until the last minute. Lear finds Cordelia and you think all’s going to be well - and suddenly it isn’t but you’ve been kept guessing right up to the very end.
This morning I was rehearsing Act 1 scene 2 with the understudies. When Gloucester walks in he says Lear’s done this and that ‘and all upon the gad’. And then he does exactly that - he reacts very quickly, without thinking, to Edmund’s letter. Suddenly he’s after his son’s life - his dear son Edgar’s life. It all happens within a page and a half - I think we’re supposed to enjoy the irony of that. Everything is disintegrating. We’re often asked throughout the play to consider the stars and the planets. Is there something in the air that suddenly is affecting everyone? The director, Bill Alexander, has asked everyone to have an opinion about the questions asked in the play relating to the planets, stars, astronomy, fate and human responsibility and to know whether they believe in fate or not. If you don’t consider such questions I think you’re missing something very important in the play.
Louise Bangay understudies Gonerill, Regan and Cordelia. At the start of the rehearsal period, she talks about play from the perspective of all three daughters.
Lear has three daughters but we haven’t yet decided whether Gonerill, Regan and Cordelia are of the same mother. When you look at the three sisters, Gonerill and Regan, whilst very different characters, are of a particular strain. Their journey through the play is very different to Cordelia’s. Right from the beginning, Cordelia’s intention is to be honest, to love and be loving to her father, but Gonerill and Regan are out for themselves. They’re not witch-like monsters - something has happened to make them like that, something that makes them take revenge on their father.
Cordelia has a great strain of honesty, but she is very obstinate too. Even though she’s the most loving and honest of the sisters, there’s a lot of Lear in he too. She’s young and inflexible: her obstinacy at the beginning indicates that she is a chip off the old block. Ten years down the line she would probably have said “Oh Dad, you know I love you” – she’d have said what he wanted to hear. But at the beginning of the play she’s not prepared to do that. The differences between the sisters are clear from the beginning: Gonerill and Regan only tell their father what he wants to hear but Cordelia, who still has the innocence and the impetuousness of youth, cannot, or rather will not, lie. In the course of the play, she learns what her obstinacy will lead to in the same way that Lear learns what his faults will lead to. At the end, Cordelia realises that she didn't handle her father very well over the division of the kingdom and she regrets her stubborness. Both Lear and Cordelia are redeemed at the end of the play but Gonerill and Regan prove themselves to be beyond redemption.
Nowadays girls can be very grown up as young as ten but in Jacobean times, they were perhaps considered children for much longer. Because I’m not eighteen I’m not going to think about whether Cordelia is twenty-five or thirty or to try to play an eighteen-year-old. I’m going to focus instead on her wants and needs. For me she still has that impetuous, passionate, ‘I’m going to do it my way’ air about her, an almost teenage determination to be her own person. She hasn’t learnt what Gonerill and Regan have learnt. The difference then between them is not just their age, it’s more about experience or the lack of it.
Gonerill and Regan seem to be the result of their father’s upbringing. Cordelia is, possibly, the child of another mother or of the same mother but she died in childbirth. If that was the case, Lear might have loved the child more, having just lost his wife. If Cordelia was born years after Gonerill and Regan, the father might have mellowed slightly by the time she was born. Men in their twenties or early thirties are so power-driven to succeed and can be rough – their work takes precedence. A lot of people say there’s a mellowing in old age. Older fathers have a different perspective and so can be more lenient with their children. With Gonerill and Regan one gets the feeling that they are the children of a bully. I think the term Bill Alexander used was ‘shared abuse’: they share the history of abuse. It’s an over-used word really, ‘abuse’, but I think you understand what he means by it. Right at the beginning of the play Lear forces them to display their love for him, in public, in order to win a chunk of the kingdom. That’s an insensitive way of dealing with an issue.
Lear is an emotionally demanding man. He forces his daughters to tell him how much they love him. You get the feeling he’s always behaved like that. So, instead of asking each of his daughters to come and have a chat about which man she’d like, or have them all in a little room, he sticks in another public display for Cordelia: ‘Right, here you go – here are two husbands. Which of you two want her?’ He’s inconsiderate, a humiliating bully. Gonerill suggests he’s always been like that and that as he grows older, he’s getting worse. We talked about Lear improperly exposing his daughters to the savage manner in which punishment was meted out, showing them how criminals or traitors were dealt with, so that Regan was brought up with the mindset that it’s perfectly all right to poke someone’s eyes out if they’ve gone against your wishes.
Apparently Saddam Hussein used to take his eldest son to torture and killings, to make a man of him. Maybe Lear did the same sort of thing with his daughters – perhaps it was a way of toughening them up, making them more like the sons he never had. Most men at that time would have wanted a son and Lear has three daughters. Perhaps that’s even more significant given he’s a monarch. My dad wanted a son and he got five daughters. He was a very loving dad but we were made to fight and compete all the time.
Lear’s elder daughters are terrified of him. Suddenly in the first scene, Lear has not only banished his faithful friend, Kent, but his favourite daughter, Cordelia, so the elder two are perhaps left thinking, “Well if that’s the way he treats those he
I have to understudy all 3 daughters, so I was looking at the sisters, trying to see what their differences are, what the function is of each. She strikes me as being a tortured person who lives in her head – she is head-centred, very cerebral. When she starts to speak, she does so in long, convoluted sentences but actually she’s not very articulate - she says hundreds of words, where a couple of lines would probably do. She has the added pressure of being the eldest child and perhaps of being the first disappointment, because she wasn’t a boy. I think she carries the weight of his disappointment combined with a strong sense of duty, of doing the right thing and of having to perform for her father – but she’s no great intellect. Her main thrust is to act, to do – ‘We must do something, and i’th’heat’ [1.1.306]. Her downfall comes when she allows her emotions totake over.
If you were listening to Gonerill with your eyes shut, you would never think ‘That’s Regan’. Where Gonerill is head, Regan is senses. She’s very precise – there’s a real economy in the way she speaks. But I think her whole connection is – I think she’s probably an SM person. I don’t think she’s very natural somehow. I think she’s all sort of senses.
I have the feeling that she operates at this level of ‘we shall further think on it’. It’s all sensed and sensory with her. And I’ve tried to do that with her voice. So that you’ve got Goneril who is ‘we must act on it’. She (Regan) very much more feels her way through it. And that to me is very much the second eldest as well. They don’t have to fight the battles, be in the forefront. I’m second eldest, so I understand her. But I used to sort of whip in behind and I could be more funny, more entertaining. I could be more – I didn’t have to find where we were going or look at the map. I could just mess about, really. And I think she just doesn’t have that weight on her shoulders, Regan.
Cordelia is centred in the heart. She represents truth and honesty And then Cordelia to me is absolutely centred here – she is the truth. She is honesty.