Globe Education Online

This bulletin was composed with questions sent in by schools who adopted Alex.

How do you prepare for performance and the play, and how long does this take you?

Well, we have a seven week rehearsal period and all that time is spent preparing for the play. I found out I’d got the part about a month before we started rehearsing; I had a TV job, so I read the play loads and loads between takes while I was on set. Then I had a week clear so I just read the play again and again and again. I didn’t really read around the subject too much because I didn’t know how we were going to do the production with three actors; I didn’t really know what the idea was or where it was going to be set so I didn’t have much research to do. I don’t always like reading about what other actors have done with a particular part or play because I like to have a clear head when I go in and come up with stuff by myself.

I come in usually about two hours before a performance. I do about half an hour of vocal warm up: stretching my ribs out so my breath sits in the right place, ‘ummming’ and ‘ahhhing’ – there's a whole routine of vocal stuff I do to get the resonances going. I work on my consonants and my lips and my tongue so I can enunciate clearly. Next I do about half an hour of yoga with the dancers because my part is very physical and I don’t hurt myself or strain anything; also I want to get more supple so I can do more physical stuff. Then we play half an hour of yard ball; that's me, Mark and Ed and sometimes one of the crew members. Yard ball is a kind of cross between volleyball and football that we play in the yard of the theatre, it's fun but it also warms us up and gets us working together. Also it gets me really angry because I’m not very good at it, and that's quite good preparation for Caliban!

What is the rope in the middle of the stage for?

The rope that hangs down from the Heavens in the centre of the stage is in some ways a physical manifestation of the line ‘make the rope of his destiny our cable’ [I.i]. The ‘rope of destiny’ ties into the idea of the Fates as mythological figures who spin out the threads of people's lives. The three dancers represent the Fates who administer equal portions of good and evil to the characters in the play; they worked with us to devise a language of physicality based on the image of an ascending rope – a very simple metaphor related to the Fates who hold the thread of life and determine when that thread should be cut. So for me, the rope suggests the way that Fate toys with people, and also the things that Fate has cast upon us; as Caliban, the rope is often a noose around my neck which denotes my status as a slave. I like the way Ferdinand has noose moments which mirror Caliban's restriction.

At other times, the rope is used to suggest different locations – it becomes a vine hanging in the forest that Caliban swings on. And the movements that you can produce using the rope (swinging or spinning, say) are signifiers of the emotion inside a person; when Alonso is in despair about having lost Ferdinand, Mark tried swinging round and onto the floor. That produced a strong image of despair which I think also looks quite like the movement of tides; Alonso is washed in the seas like Ferdinand (whom he thinks has drowned). It looks like the ‘sea change’ that Ariel sings about. So in terms of meaning, the rope is very flexible. I think it's helped us develop some really beautiful physical images.

Was there any special training for speaking Elizabethan English?

In terms of speaking Shakespeare's lines, we had lots of sessions with Giles Block (Master of Words) on the verse structure, rhythm and so on. Shakespeare made up lots of words and changed words to use them in new ways (he was writing at a time when the English language was particularly flexible), so we spent a lot of time working on the text in order to understand what we were saying. Tim Carroll (Master of Play) helped us to explore the language. But our production of The Tempest isn’t what we call ‘Original Pronunciation’ – we don’t try to recreate the accents that Shakespeare's actors might have spoken in. The Red Company [performing The Winter's Tale] have started rehearsals for an Original Pronunciation production of Troilus and Cressida that will be on later in the season, and they’ll speak in what experts think is as close as we can get to Elizabethan English. Last season, the company performing Romeo and Juliet did three shows in Original Pronunciation and it's very exciting that the Red Company get to carry on with the experiment.

What is it like being so many characters?

It's brilliant, especially because we change characters in such a way that there's no pretence that we’re different people. We’re changing costumes; everyone knows that I’m the same actor I was a moment ago. You get to be really inventive with the ways that you differentiate characters – you can decide how much you want to differentiate between characters. I’m finding that the characters come out of the situation; each of the three characters I play is different from the others because of what happens to them. They go through very different experiences and they react in very different ways. It's interesting to become a different person so quickly – physically and mentally flipping from one to the next without necessarily letting what has just happened to the other character affect you. Also, it's wonderful for an actor to get to play that range of emotions in one play: I play an old politician, a young lover, a kind of beastly, sensuous character... The characters are so different, there's almost everything I could want somewhere in there!

How hard is it to learn lines?

It wasn’t very hard – I just read the play loads and loads and loads. The more I read it, the more I thought ‘This is absolutely brilliant,’ the more I wanted to read it. As I read it, the lines just sunk in; I didn’t ever really try to learn them. What I did try to learn was the rhythm of the lines, the iambic pentameter without any inflections or intentions. That was quite difficult because sometimes the lines don’t sit alongside the rhythm in the way that you think they will, but it really helped in the end. It makes it harder to forget lines if the rhythm drives them on.

Do you find it difficult changing between characters?

In rehearsals it was confusing, perhaps because I didn’t know what each character was. I hadn’t created these three characters in my mind, so I was going from one quarter-formed amoebic version of a character to another, and often they’d bleed into each other. But now, while we’re doing the show, I feel that I know who the characters are and that I’m within them to the extent that although I might do a similar physical gesture for two characters, it would come across that the gesture was from a different place. At least, I hope so! I would feel like someone else anyway. So I don’t find it difficult – I find it a pleasure. Those changes are really good fun, just to let one character drop and quickly put another one on… it's great!

What is it like being on the Globe stage?

Amazing, absolutely amazing. It's very exposing because there are no lights or scenery to hide behind, and you can’t turn upstage to hide because the audience is all round you on three levels! The audience can also see every miniscule thing and are very, very quick so you can’t get away with it if you don’t concentrate. It's an amazing feeling though – it's a huge buzz to see everybody in the audience and really talk to them. There's a real sense of communication, as though you’re sharing the play together. To have everyone respond and to see that and feel that so clearly… it's like nowhere else!

How did you come to work at the Globe?

John [Dove, Master of Play] and I worked together on Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman up in Edinburgh, at the Royal Lyceum. John said afterwards that he thought I might be right for the part of Claudio in Measure for Measure. I came in to audition for John, Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] and Siobhan [Bracke, Casting Director] and they offered me the part. I loved doing Measure for Measure last season and I loved the experience of playing on the Globe stage: when I got a phone call to audition for The Tempest this season I was very pleased. Actually I was called to audition for the other line of parts: Ariel, Trinculo and Antonio. At that time they weren’t sure if Miranda would be included there as well. The audition for Tim [Carroll, Master of Play] and Mark [Rylance, Artistic Director] went well and a while later they phoned saying they wanted me either for The Tempest or a different play… when they called again and offered me the Caliban/ Ferdinand/ Gonzalo line of parts, I was amazed – I thought it would be someone with much more experience than me! I was absolutely over the moon.

What do you think about slavery and The Tempest?

It's an interesting theme. Almost all the characters are slaves in some way – slaves to another person or regime, even to their own history (something they’ve done or something that's happened to them that they would like to escape). Obviously Caliban is a slave and Ferdinand is enslaved by Prospero as well, though willingly. Some people read The Tempest as a comment on colonisation… a Western power colonises a land which they suppose to be less well developed, and try to impose their own views and values on a native population, suppressing people in the process. That happens over and over again in history, and people have played the relationship between Caliban and Prospero from that point of view. But in this production we’re focussing on the psychology of what happens to Prospero, and in that context I’ve been thinking of Caliban as an aspect of Prospero's psyche – what does Prospero hate so much about Caliban that he has to keep him tied down and hidden? I think it's a rage and a wildness and a lust and a hunger… basically a very present and sensual connection to things which Prospero can’t handle at all. So I was interested in what a person enslaves within themselves, within their own personality. I think everyone does that to some extent – everyone has parts of their personality that they repress or enslave. In our production, I try to play those aspects of Prospero.

At the beginning of rehearsals, I assumed that Caliban wants freedom. But that makes his offer to serve Stephano very awkward. It makes more sense if he wants to serve someone on particular terms; perhaps he thinks that Stephano represents an opportunity to serve someone who loves him, as he says Prospero did. At first, Prospero stroked Caliban and gave him water with berries and taught him language. Caliban says in the same speech ‘and then I showed thee all the qualities of the isle, I showed you the brine pits and the barren place infertile’ – it's as if he's explaining the importance of give-and-take. His being appreciated is extremely important. Stephano immediately gives Caliban something to drink and asks him how he is – a revelation for someone who's been an abhorred monster for twelve years. Caliban responds by offering to show Stephano exactly the same things that he showed Prospero: ‘I’ll show thee springs, I’ll pluck thee berries’ [II.ii]. Of course, that relationship goes wrong and Caliban realises that Stephano is just a selfish, drunken fool, but I think his offer to serve Stephano emphasizes that issues of freedom and slavery in the play are pretty complex!

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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