Globe Education Online

This is Philip's penultimate rehearsal diary entry, in which he talks about tech week, his costume and how the play has changed over the course of the rehearsals.

Tech Week

After five weeks of being in the rehearsal room, we’ve finally got to go on the stage. While we were rehearsing, we were in a room only just a little bigger than the size of the actual performance space. Occasionally we had sessions on the stage, but it’s so busy with other shows and with tours and other things, we don’t get on to it much.

We went into the theatre on Monday of tech week and the first show wasn’t until the Saturday night, whereas in most theatres a tech rehearsal would probably only be a day, or a day and a half and then you’re on! Also, in most other theatres the technical is to do with lighting and sound cues, but here in the Globe the technical rehearsal is sound cues in terms of keying in the musicians. That was a very big element of our tech – timing when the musicians play; they’ve seen the play a couple of times, been to a couple of run-throughs, but now they’re up there on the balcony taking visual cues from the actors, so all that has to be incorporated.

Mainly it’s an opportunity for us to get a radar or sonar in the performance space over five days, and Thea [Sharrock, director] was very open to moves not being particularly set in the rehearsal room because she knew they’d change once we got onto the stage. She’d really prepared for things to change and of course they did; suddenly you realise what was a good place in the room is not a good place to stand, or sit onstage.

Another change to get used to is the long walkways. There wasn’t room for them in rehearsals, so only in tech week did we realise you can really stretch some of these distances. Funnily enough, (you wouldn’t think this in the Globe,) with a two-handed scene, it is more effective with a good distance between two people, because of the scale of their emotion, in that big closed space. It lets the audience into that gap between them. The minute you get very close to each other, the scene gets smaller, but you can be big if you are further apart, which you wouldn’t necessarily have thought.

At this point, we’ve got to do a run by Friday afternoon, then a dress on Saturday afternoon before the first performance on Saturday night.

Previous Performance

I’ve performed here quite a lot, so even in rehearsals I’m in the space already in my head. There were occasions where I might be standing in quite odd places in the rehearsal room and someone might be looking at me strangely, but I do try to say “Don’t panic – I think this might be alright once we get out there in the space!” I can anticipate it slightly because I’ve been in a number of plays here, but I think people who are new have found it an interesting surprise. Particularly looking up of course, and round, and behind you, at about 270 degrees of audience, whereas in a rehearsal room you tend to just face one way.

Costume

A few years ago now I did The Winter’s Tale here, and we decided on the costume during quite a chilly April - it seemed like a great idea for my character Camillo to be disguised with Polixenes in thick woolen pilgrim cloaks, but when it came to August I got heat stroke! So this year I looked at this fantastic Duke’s costume which had an ermine cloak, and I said to Dick Bird [designer] that I was worried I could see myself passing out. Obviously, he said he’d make sure I had a thermal vest as well, to be really nice and warm come high summer…! I’m joking – actually what he did was very clever; the Duke has been in the forest for a while, so although he might have been smart back in the court, he certainly isn’t now. Therefore as part of the design, my costume has gaps where it’s come loose and hasn’t been repaired, and then the cloak only comes on for the wedding at the end.

I love the costume, I love the idea of it; it’s not smart so I don’t have to keep it beautiful, it’s really comfortable and easy to wear, you don’t feel constricted. Some costumes have to look really nice but this one just looks like what it is. You couldn’t wear that and not feel like the Duke in Arden, the designer’s got it bang on for me.

The Whole Play

We did run-throughs in the rehearsal room so I’d seen the other scenes but I hadn’t seen it in the space. We hadn’t seen the full scale set either, only the model, but to see these trees on stage is amazing. Sometimes you aren’t needed in the tech, so what I tend to do is stay in the auditorium and watch other scenes from different locations – higher, low down, one side, the other side, in the yard, wherever – to see what the angles and sight-lines are like. For this production we’ve got extra trees and pillars on stage. I thought I had my radar sorted on the stage with two pillars, but when there are nine, you’ve got to work out where the good places are to stand, so that everyone can see you and you can try to contact everyone on the way round. People who have seen it have said the visibility is pretty good, they could see actors' faces and people around them.

Changes

Even from the beginning of tech week into preview week, Thea [Sharrock, director] was still changing things. In particular, placing the epilogue has been quite difficult. Do you put it after the audience clap? Will they ever stop clapping? Do you nip in before they even can? So it moved around in the first four or five shows, we tried it in different places, but now it has settled down and it’s in the right place. People who don’t know the play don’t quite know what’s about to happen – I think they think Naomi [Frederick, Rosalind] is about to make a speech on behalf of Amnesty International or something! But it is solved now and works really well.

The other thing that Thea wanted to do was to get the end of one scene going into the beginning of the next, to be as fluid and fluent as possible. To have people leaving the stage as someone else is coming in talking, and trusting that people aren’t going to think you’re in the same space, so we have been tidying it up. We have to make sure it never goes dead. Given that you’ve not got lights that come down or a moody spotlight, if nothing is happening, then no one knows where to look until some sort of sound or movement happens.

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

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