Globe Education Online

This is Joanna's fourth blog post. This week she discusses the cast's rehearsal weekend at Otley and bringing the play to the Globe stage.

Otley

We went away to Otley for a rehearsal weekend, which was extremely valuable. We improvised all the scenes that you don’t see in the play – Old Hamlet's murder, finding his body, the election of Claudius, Hamlet asking Gertrude why she backed Claudius for king and not him, telling Hamlet that Gertrude is to marry his uncle. We did all this in real time and it gave me a wonderful sense of really being Gertrude. With many of these scenes I didn’t know what was going to happen. Mark (Rylance) would just turn up at my bedroom door and begin a scene. This made it feel very realistic. I didn’t know that Hamlet was going to arrive, and therefore wasn’t prepared to speak to him at that moment. It just happened. One scene just progressed into the next. It was tremendously useful. I’m not sure how much of it will translate onto the stage. A lot of it will just be used in our own ‘mind’s eye’. It was great fun though. We didn’t just improvise, we also rehearsed they play. I found that having been informed by the improvisations, I felt very differently about things. By the time we got to Opheilia’s death, I found that I had discovered that I didn’t want to stand next to Claudius. I think that I learnt that Gertrude goes through a huge circle and ends up, like she began, feeling close to her son. The last thing she does in life is to wipe Hamlet’s face.

The Stage

We have begun to rehearse on the stage. We had tours coming in, which was great because it gave us an audience to work with. We also began to get a better idea of the dimensions of the Globe stage. It is vast and you have to learn how to really fill it. We have spent all of our rehearsals inside and there is a very different feel to doing the indoor scenes, outside. We need to try and create the same sort of the feeling of closeness that we had inside and make that happen outside.

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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