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This is Alex's fifth blog entry for the 2005 production of The Tempest, where he talks about working with the Master of the Words, the use of a rope in the production, and the ending of the play amongst other things.

Nerves

I’m starting to get nervous now, and I don’t usually get nervous! But it's just starting to dawn on me that we’ve only got a week left in rehearsal! We’ve finished going through the play and this morning we started going through it again in more detail, just trying to link everything together.

Session with Giles

I’ve just had a session with Giles [Block, Master of Words] whilst Ed and Mark work on the first scene of the play where I don’t really speak. In rehearsals we’ve been through every scene, tapping out the iambic pentameter, and now it really does feel like we’ve absorbed it. Now we are concentrating on working with the thoughts in the speeches. Instead of taking a pause at the end of each line, you can focus on where the thought ends and push through that. I’m getting down to the nitty-gritty of the way the text is pieced together – why it's useful to think about a particular word in a line because that will link to the next phrase, for example. The reason for doing this is to make the lines sound more like speech and less as if it's been written on the page, so we concentrate on making it sound spontaneous: ‘Oh! I’ve just thought of this, so I’m going to say this!’ Perhaps the main thing your character is trying to say is actually in several lines into a speech, so you might give the lines leading up to that point less emphasis just to get through them and then make your point. When you do that, it just does just sound like talking!

Giles and I looked at the bit where Ferdinand first sees Miranda and is amazed that she speaks his language. Prospero comes out and says ‘What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee?’ – basically ‘Who are you?’ – and I say:

A single thing, as I am now, that wonders
To hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me,
And that he does I weep. Myself am Naples,
Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld
The king my father wreck’d.
[I.ii]

This is very broken up, which I think is to do with Ferdinand's state of mind; he's amazed, and not thinking very clearly. The difficult thing is to make the connections between those thoughts so that it's understandable as a sequence. Giles helped me to focus in on particular words: the word ‘does’, for example. Prospero says: ‘What would you do if the king of Naples heard thee?’ My first, main point in the speech is that I’m answering his question: the King of Naples does hear me – ‘And that he does, I weep. Myself am Naples’. It just makes you realise, of course I’m not just talking, I’m answering a question! I’ve been reading that line for months and didn’t quite realise the significance of it.

Often the stresses in the iambic pentameter lead you towards significant words, but sometimes they don’t. Then it's interesting to ask why what seems to be an important word is not in a stressed place within the line. This word ‘does’ is important for the sense of the speech, but it isn’t in a stressed place. That doesn’t mean that you can’t give it emphasis by raising the pitch of your voice, so where the iambic rhythm gives you ‘he does hear me’, if I went, ‘he does hear me’ – I’m exaggerating obviously – but you can still give it stress whilst keeping the iambic rhythm. That's all rather technical but it actually makes it sound still more like speech.

Harpy

We worked on the Harpy scene earlier in the week. We weren’t sure who would say what in it; at the moment as Gonzalo I’m completely unaware of what is happening to the other lords, as suggested in the script:

I’th name of something holy, sir, why stand you
In this strange stare?
[III.iii]

We thought it would be useful to have a kind of anchor in this person who is not one of the ‘men of sin’, although he carried out Antonio's plan for the killing of Prospero. Ed says most of the lines as Ariel, although we’re keeping it quite free at the moment. We also work a lot with the Fates at that point, using the rope in exciting ways (the rope is used a lot all the way through; it's a play about a rope at the moment!). Ariel climbs up the rope and Alonso is caught in a sort of noose at the bottom that partly strangles him, and he's spinning around upside down – it's crazy. I think it will look wonderful on stage.

Rope

The rope will hang down from the Heavens in the centre of the stage. It's a physical manifestation of the line ‘make the rope of his destiny our cable’ [I.i], which ties into the idea of Fates as mythological figures who spin out the threads of people's lives. So it's to do with the way Fate toys with people, but it also suggests the things that Fate has cast upon us; as Caliban, it's often a noose around my neck which denotes that I’m a slave. Ferdinand also has noose moments that mirror Caliban, which is pleasing!

At other times, the rope is used to suggest different locations – something hanging in the forest that I was swing on as Caliban. 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 around 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 as Ferdinand is. It looks like the ‘sea change’ that Ariel sings about. So those parallels and echoes are beautiful. I’m looking forward to working with the rope on stage. It will be longer so we’ll have that much more scope and distance.

Ending

We spent days working solidly on the end of the play. It's weird, because although I speak, I don’t speak very much and I’m in this mid-ground between the characters which feels quite confusing at the moment. There is supposed to be a crowd of people on stage and there are only three of us, so we’re working out how to get through that. So far we’ve come up with interesting ways involving Fates who might dance parts of it to make clear who's talking.

I think the need at the end of the play is very much that Caliban is acknowledged and accepted by Prospero and so we’ve been playing with that. Prospero accepts Gonzalo very early on in the scene and that's great (from my character's point of view, of course he should be accepted), and then Prospero accepts Ferdinand which is a bit more difficult, but the play can’t finish until he accepts Caliban and frees Ariel. We tried playing it so that at that moment Ariel kind of encourages and presses Prospero to pay attention to Caliban or rather the ‘Ariel’ side of Prospero is pressing for recognition of the dark ‘Caliban’ side of the psyche. Often the Comedies finish with a dance and it feels as if our play could finish with the masque and dance, but obviously it continues… it's almost like some kind of false ending and things keep popping up as you realise that you haven’t dealt with this and you haven’t dealt with that and you haven’t dealt with Caliban… Prospero does eventually free Ariel and accept Caliban, so there's definitely a sense of harmony at the end. He speaks the Epilogue by himself – he's become whole and the Fates are gone. We all jig at the end too (we’ve been learning the steps this week) so that should give a sense of harmony too.

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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