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Assistant Director Gemma Fairlie asked the director and actors of the 2004 productions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Julius Caesar what it was like to work with Shakespeare's language.

Click on the links below to read their responses.


'If you’re going to talk about the language and the lines you have to talk about one of the last lines in the play, which for Valentine is the challenge, one of the reasons you take the part...'



'My attitude toward the language is that if you can see the pictures of what you’re saying, then the audience will see it. If you are living it, we will live it...'


'Looking at Proteus, what I love about him is that he is a dark character and he doesn’t shy away from doing some things that other people wouldn’t like to think they would do...'



'The main problem with him in the language, is that there’s a lot of double and treble meaning of words. To an Elizabethan audience it would have been very clear. We had to cut quite a lot of it...'



'That’s why he’s a genius, isn’t it? He has the most incredible ways of saying things that I couldn’t even begin to express in words...'