Globe Education Online

This is Edward's sixth blog entry for the 2005 production of The Tempest, where he talks primarily about moving the production onto the stage space, starting technical rehearsals and the audience.

Starting Technical Rehearsals

I’ve had a brilliant week – but today I’ve started to get really nervous. We’ve gone right back through the play and we did our first run. That was very scary because there are still moments when some of my lines just disappear – shwwt – and you can’t really improvise Shakespeare! But on the whole it went really well; we got through it without getting lost or taking a break (we weren’t sure if we’d manage the whole two hours). Now we’re starting to work out technical things like where the singers will come in and we’ve been working on stage with the dancers too; really we’re just waiting to get on stage and do it.

One of my problems with Shakespeare is my accent – I’m from Yorkshire but I think I try to do ‘Received Pronunciation’ a lot, although I don’t think that's necessarily the best way to speak Shakespeare. The language sounds beautiful in RP if you’re naturally an RP speaker, but it's just as beautiful spoken with an accent. What I’m finding difficult is speaking with an accent when everyone else is speaking RP (Mark [Rylance] and Alex [Hassell] are both naturally RP speakers). Sometimes I think the language sounds clumsy in my accent, which it doesn’t, but I’ve found myself slipping into RP… I keep telling myself ‘Stop it!’ Trinculo's got a very northern accent and the lines sound great, but Antonio and Miranda and Ariel tend to slip into RP.

Transfer from rehearsal room to stage

The shape of the stage is taped out on the floor of IJ3 [rehearsal room at the Globe] and two big pillars made out of wood, so we’re very familiar with the shape of the stage and we can use the pillars as part of the scenes. That should make the transfer from rehearsal room to the stage easier; in terms of movement, I don’t think it will be any different when we get onstage.

In terms of Voice, though, the Globe is a different kettle of fish. The rehearsal room is quite an intimate space; if you had volume levels 1 through 10, 1 being very quiet and 10 being very loud, you can speak at level 3 or 4 in the rehearsal room. That's the level you normally talk at, unless you get angry or shout. As soon as you get on stage, you have to start projecting: the Globe is open and big and there can be all kinds of noise from outside too, like planes and helicopters. Some of the little nuances at level 3 that you might have used in the rehearsal room don’t sound as convincing if you’re pushing the voice out. I don’t know… it's going to be difficult but part of the challenge of playing the space is moving the language onto that stage and finding a way of playing it that has truth in it, rather than just concentrating on being heard. That's quite easy to slip into – I know I do that sometimes; if I think I can’t be heard I JUST DO IT GENERALLY THIS LOUD AND CLIPPED SO THAT EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT I’M SAYING, but it has no thought or truth behind it. That's one of the things I’m really nervous about, but it's going to be fine – I’m sure it will be something that you learn to gauge with practice.

Audience

Tour groups come into the theatre whilst we’re rehearsing, so although I can’t imagine what it's going to be like full of people (apart from very nerve-wracking), I got a sense of what it's like just to have some people listening to you in that space. And it's amazing the way they do listen. In any other theatre – whatever the kind of stage – you can’t see the audience because they’re usually blacked out (unless it's a choice of the production to leave the auditorium lit up). But at the Globe, you can see everybody and they can see you: there isn’t stage lighting, just natural light and special lights that recreate that for the evening performances. It's everybody's space and the people who come to watch a play are much more a part of the production and a part of the words – I saw Twelfth Night here a couple of years ago and as a member of the audience, you really feel part of the company and part of the play. That's more exciting and challenging for an actor and it's far more exciting for an audience because they’re involved in such a direct way: you look up off the stage at people and you meet their eyes.

We had an open technical rehearsal too – it's the first time the Globe has done that. People bought tickets to come and watch a bit of the technical rehearsal from the upper gallery. It was great. I actually forgot they were there after a little bit, I was concentrating on getting through the scene! At first we were playing to the crowd and shaking our tails a bit, but things soon calmed down and it was lovely to have an appreciative audience. We did a scene with the Clowns, the Lovers’ scene where Ferdinand carries the logs (the dancers, in our production) [III.i] and then the Ariel-turning-into-a-harpy scene [III.iii] when I climb up the rope behind Prospero and hang there ‘You are three men of sin…’ whilst he runs around at the end of the rope. Actually he's stopped running around now, so you just get a really clear image of me hanging over him.

It's difficult to say how the audience found the scenes and the shifts between characters: they watched things out of context and I think it would be very confusing if you came into the play halfway through. I mean, they laughed at things that are obviously funny, like Trinculo and Caliban under the gabardine, but that's not dependent on character… we won’t really know what the audience reaction will be like until we do it.

Coming Together

Things seem to be coming together quite nicely. We’re going to do a dress rehearsal tonight; it's all there really, it just needs to come together a bit. I’m sure it will. For me, that really means Miranda and Ariel's entrances in Act one. I find Miranda's first entrance tricky – in opening scene she doesn’t do very much, although she's in a heightened state and having a bit of a wail about the shipwreck. Basically she stands there whilst Prospero tells her what happened twelve years ago; I have little one-line interjections (‘Alack’, ‘Alack’, ‘O the heavens!’) which are quite hard because this is a story where she's told that ‘You’re a princess’ and whilst she's got all these exclamations, it seems like she's not listening. Prospero keeps saying ‘Listen to me!’ – ‘Thou attend’st not!’, ‘Dost thou hear?’ [I.ii].

So Miranda's told she's a princess, huge news, and then her attention wanders?! In our production, Mark's done a very clever thing in the opening act, using the chess pieces on a chessboard to create the shipwreck [I.i] and he uses the same pieces to introduce each character to Miranda as they come up in his story – he uses a chess piece to introduce Antonio at the line ‘My brother and thy uncle, call’d Antonio’ [I.ii]. The way I’m playing it the moment, Miranda gets absorbed with the chesspieces: I’ve never seen anybody else in my life apart from my dad and Caliban, so I get very interested – I want to know who they are, but Prospero's trying to tell me about Antonio. That's how that works, but it's tricky to move between the interjections and an absorption in something else. We’ll just have to see how it goes…

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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