Globe Education Online

This is Edward's fourth blog entry for the 2005 production of The Tempest, where he talks about running through scenes, finding real-life parallels to the play's characters, and the relationship between Ariel and Antonio.

Running scenes

We ran almost half of the play yesterday. That's the most we’ve put together so far and the result was very confusing. Starting with the first Lords’ scene [II.i], we went into the first full Clown scene [II.i], through the Lovers’ scene [III.i] then into the second Clown scene [III.ii] and finished with the Harpy scene [III.iii]. Mark [Rylance, Prospero] calls that section ‘the Valley’ because of the symmetry in the structure: Lords/ Clowns/ Miranda/ Clowns/ Lords. The quick transitions between characters meant we got lost a few times – but even that's useful at this stage, because it helps you discover what doesn’t work in the wider context of the play. You might think of a certain set of moves looks great when you work on a scene in isolation, but when you run scenes together, the same moves don’t look right.

We’ve been trying different ways of working with the dancers in the scene where the clowns get very drunk. It worked really well when the dancers (as the Fates) manipulated us; we let our bodies go floppy and the dancers moved our arms and heads like puppets. That meant our words and movements came out all uncoordinated; the dancers weren’t familiar with the lines in the scene, so the gestures followed our lines after a slight delay. That came about quite naturally and gave the scene a very drunken feel. We kept banging into each other and flailing around as we tried to talk (I’m doing the actions right now but no one can see!).

The exciting thing we found during the run of scenes was that we could switch from the drunken clowns to the Lords [III.ii to III.iii] just by standing up independently. Character changes were apparent simply because the dancers were no longer controlling our movements. The same thing works in that drunken clowns’ scene [III.ii] when Ariel speaks for Trinculo. Ariel says ‘Thou liest’ in Trinculo's voice and gets him into trouble with Stephano; I have to shift between Trinculo and Ariel then back again several times. I found that I could just stand up on my own for Ariel's lines and immediately flop back into Trinculo. That gave a very clear indication that you’ve swapped characters without having to put on a hunchback or speak in a different voice. So that was great. Mark's very good at changing characters with simple things like that: for instance, when he goes to sleep as King Alonso, he rolls as he lies down and keeps on going to roll over his back, then back onto his feet and he carries on speaking as Sebastian. It's simple but really, really effective.

One of the questions came up as we worked on the drunken clowns’ scene was why does Ariel put Trinculo in a tizz and play around with him like that? The way we’re going with the play, Ariel isn’t really someone who makes trouble for the sake of it. He's not concerned about wasting time playing tricks on people; he just does these things at Prospero's command in order to get his freedom. I haven’t found an answer to that one yet.

Finding Parallels

We had some discussions about whether the characters in the play remind us of anybody – people we know, or friends that we have, or characters in films that we’ve seen, or people who are in the public eye. For Antonio, we had someone like Saddam Hussein. I thought Miranda was quite like the blind girl in M. Night Shyamalan's film The Village. I chose that because of the setting of the film is a bit like The Tempest, in that the characters close themselves off and make their own island. It was harder to find parallels for Ariel and Caliban because they aren’t real people. I didn’t want to make Ariel a real person so my suggestions were George Orwell's Big Brother from the book 1984 because he's all-seeing and has a sort of limitless influence, and the internet because that has an enormous effect on people's lives without any emotional involvement. Like Ariel, it has influence without making judgements. But even so, it's difficult to pin Ariel down because he's not like any human, is he? Unless you make him like a superhero or a fairy. Anyway, those comparisons with real people or things really helped bring the characters to life for us; it made the characters much more real, rather than just being people on the page.

Antonio

As we’re playing characters that are somehow connected on a psychological level, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Ariel and Antonio. Perhaps it's Ariel's responsibility to make Prospero face up to his own shortcomings and he uses or creates the character of Antonio to do that. Prospero needs to recognise that two wrongs don’t make a right. In order to be better than his brother Antonio, Prospero has to face and forgive his brother. It's like a festering wound; unless you deal with the wound, it won’t heal – it’ll just fester. You need to clean the wound and take out whatever's caused it, and although that's painful, the wound will be able to heal over and you can move on with your life.

Antonio's difficult because we only ever hear the story from Prospero's point of view – he basically tells Miranda in the first scene that his brother did a terrible thing and pushed them out to sea. But of course that's what you do when you tell somebody about an argument; if I came to you and said ‘I had an argument with so and so’, I’d tell you that I was super-calm and really nice and they were having a right go at me… That's all you ever hear from Prospero: ‘I really loved my brother and he was great, but he turned out to be an awful person.’ You never actually get to hear Antonio's side. Admittedly Antonio tries to convince Sebastian to kill his brother Alonso, but again, you could look at the reasons why he might be doing that… it might be in the best interests of Naples, or it might be in his own best interests. I don’t think he's straight-down-the-middle evil.

When Prospero describes what happened with Antonio, he makes his brother out to be a villain, but he describes his own retreat as well ‘I gave him over my estate whilst I went and read my books.’ I thought, well, you’re meant to be the Duke, why are you making your brother do all the hard work so you can just go and read your books? Prospero learnt about high works and art, but that's not his job. In my opinion, his job is to be the Duke of Milan and he's almost abdicated from that responsibility. I really don’t know yet how he fits into Prospero's consciousness – he's obviously a dark side but I think most of the characters are quite dark (the exceptions are probably Gonzalo and Miranda, and Ferdinand to a certain extent). Caliban and Ariel and Prospero himself – they all have sides which aren’t very nice. You can see that they’re little bits of someone's consciousness, little bits of someone's personality all splayed out. Antonio is part of that; he's something that Prospero has to deal with, some kind of problem.

What Next

Everyone's learnt most of their lines now, which is great. You can play around a lot more if you don’t have to keep looking at your text. That's when rehearsals become really exciting; they’re never really exciting when someone's holding a script. Tim's going to let us go a bit early this afternoon so we can go and learn the final bits of our lines for Acts four and five.

I’m still struggling with Miranda; I keep worrying that I’m not acting anything like a girl! I’m either like a boy or a drag-queen. At the moment, when I try to do ‘feminine’, I feel go to crazy extremes… all of a sudden I’m some sexual predator fluttering her eyelids – not very Miranda really! But it's getting better slowly. Now I know the lines, it's much easier and as of next week I’ll actually be rehearsing in quite a lot of costume. I think that will help.

These comments are the actor's thoughts or ideas about the part as s/he goes through the rehearsal process – they are simply his/her own interpretations and frequently change as the rehearsal process progresses.

Back to Ariel, Miranda, Antonio and Trinculo