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This is Edward's fifth blog entry for the 2005 production of The Tempest, where he talks about rehearsals this week, the jig and 'targeting' the verse, amongst other things.

This week

We’ve gone all the way through the play and everyone seems to be off book or off book-ish. I think it gets better every time we do it! I tried my costume on this week too – it's fabulous, a Jacobean man's undershirt which basically looks like a woman's nightgown: very long and white with beautiful black embroidery on it. Then I’ve got a ruff around my neck and silk stockings and shoes. We’ve worked out a whole routine for Trinculo and Caliban underneath the gabardine [II.ii] – heads pop out from places and arms flail and heads are pushed into parts where they shouldn’t be – and it's really funny to do but the ruff might get in the way a bit. We’ll see how it goes in technical rehearsals.

I was bothered about being too manly as Miranda, but the costume is so feminine and so beautiful that I feel as if I can just sit the language on top of that image; I don’t need to do anything with my physicality, I can just be. Characters like Trinculo are so big and camp and over-the-top that being very simple as Miranda seems to make the character so much more feminine.

I’d also worried about playing Antonio as a kind of generic ‘evil man’. Obviously he's not like that, but I’ve stopped worrying because I think people will endow us with any character they want to: at some points there are so many shifts between characters that there's no way an audience can pinpoint us. I just need to play the thoughts and lines for the truth rather than thinking ‘Antonio's posh’ or ‘Antonio is big and strong.’ Ultimately, Antonio is me: if I’m playing Antonio then he's me. So I’ve stopped worrying about that too!

The play has started to feel really short – it's very weird. The part of Ariel/ Trinculo/ Antonio/ Miranda feels massive because there's so much to learn, but each character within that only has a couple of scenes really: Ariel only has a couple of scenes, although he pops up in other people's scenes (‘Ooh, hello’) and then disappears again. Miranda has a couple of scenes… Trinculo's probably my biggest character, which I wouldn’t have expected at the beginning. As far as parts go, it feels like Trinculo and Antonio are bigger than Ariel and Miranda, but Ariel and Miranda are more constant characters because you’re reminded of them throughout the play.

Character Traits

We’re finding out more about the differences between Ariel and Caliban. Ariel just wants to be free. He doesn’t really have emotions or feelings about what he does for Prospero: in our production, he just does it to get freedom. That doesn’t mean he has feelings about being free – being free won’t make him happy. He keeps asking when Prospero will free him because Prospero has said ‘I’m going to free you’ and then it doesn’t happen… it keeps getting pushed back, Prospero keeps saying ‘I just need you for a few more hours,’ and Ariel thinks that's strange. On the other hand, Caliban doesn’t want freedom (the way we’re playing it): he wants to serve someone and to be appreciated for serving someone. Stephano gives Caliban drink [II.ii] and then Caliban offers to serve him – there's a kind of give and take there. Later Caliban offers to show Stephano the best springs and to get him fish and berries and wood:

I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries;
I’ll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
[II.ii]

It's just like the way he served Prospero in the beginning: Prospero was kind to him and in return Caliban showed him all the qualities of the island:

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
[I.ii]

Character alignment with the dancers and singers is also becoming clearer. The dancers are part of Caliban's world, and the singers are really part of Ariel's world. In this production, we’ve got six trained opera singers who are just brilliant, and they sing all of Ariel's songs. They’re really part of Ariel world and they sit in a pyramid formation on the Musician's balcony above the stage. In terms of the theatre, they’re near the heavens, and in terms of the human body, the singers are up where the brain or the imagination would be: as the dancers come from the pit at the beginning and are linked with Caliban and the earth, the singers are part of the imagination which is what Ariel is, really.

The singers are also great because they can add atmosphere or underscore the text in a way that makes the lines sound even more beautiful. Those six voices can basically make anything exciting; like the dancers, the singers can give scenes a special quality. It's as if all of a sudden something different is happening.

Targeting the Verse

Mark [Rylance, Prospero] was at the Meet and Greet for another Company early this week, so we did some individual work with Giles [Block, Master of the Words]. We did a thing called ‘targeting’ the play, where you take each thought in a speech and give it a verb; the verb is what you’re trying to do to the person you’re speaking to – how you’re trying to make that person feel – with that particular thought. So for example if you were angry with them, you might try to ‘hit’ them with a particular thought or if you’re comforting them the verb might be to ‘stroke’ or ‘massage’ them. It's really useful because it makes you focus on why you’re speaking: people always speak for a reason, to affect someone or something. We worked on Miranda's opening bits with Prospero, when she's just seen the ship sink in the tempest [I.i], and then we did the Ferdinand and Miranda love scene where he carries the logs. My first lines in that scene are:

Alas, now pray you
Work not so hard! I would the lightning had
Burnt up those logs that you are enjoined to pile!
[III.i]

So for that first thought [highlighted], she's obviously saying ‘Don’t work so hard’, and the verb we chose was ‘seduces’ or ‘befriends’, because that's what she's trying to do to Ferdinand. The verb for the next thought [underlined] was ‘Chastises’, so that particular thought was aimed at the logs. And that's what you do for each section. Give it a word, it's good.

Harpy

We’ve done some bits of the Harpy scene today with the singers, as they underscore most of the Harpy speech [III.iii]. It's one of the more exciting bits, and one of the bits that I really enjoy doing. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but the fourth member of our cast is a rope which hangs down from the heavens in middle of the stage – Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] came up with this image of the thread of life as manipulated by the Fates – and it gets used a lot in different parts of the show. In the Harpy scene, there's a sort of noose tied at the end that Mark puts over his head and then I climb the rope behind him and hang at the top whilst he spins around the stage. It looks like I’m spinning him on the end of the rope. Visually, I think it will be fabulous on stage.

Another brilliant idea, Tim's brilliant idea actually, was for the vanishing banquet in the Harpy scene. In IV.iv, there's this odd stage direction ‘with a quaint device the banquet vanishes’ and the idea is that the dancers will come through the pit dressed as the people who sell chocolate and drinks and lay the ‘banquet’ trays on the edge of the stage then disappear into the crowd with the trays again. That's another very simple idea that we’re hoping the audience will really enjoy.

Jig

Today we’re looking at the end of the play and learning the jig, the dance that ends the play. We’ve been learning the dance with Sian [Williams, Master of Dance] who breaks down the steps into manageable bits and teaches us that way, but I’m still pretty bad at it and the other two are amazing. My excuse is that they’ve done it before! Mark showed me a clever trick whereby you step to one side and motion to the other person so it looks like they’re doing a solo – if you forget your steps, you can just do that and then the other person is left in the middle of the stage jigging on their own. I’ll be using that quite a lot! The dance is fantastic though – it ties in with the masque, when Ferdinand and Miranda are blessed by the three goddesses. We do the same dance with them that we do at the end, so it ties in nicely with the wedding.

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.

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