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This is the second bulletin from Jaques (Tim McMullan), in which he shares what he did during the first week of rehearsals and his thoughts on Jaques' key relationships.

First Day of Rehearsals

On the first day we did a read through in the morning, which I found really unnerving, because I didn’t feel I knew what Jaques is about. Also, you don’t know half the people in the room and it feels like you need to impress everybody, to justify that you’re in the play. But I think we all felt that, so you’ve just got to get the read-through out of the way.

In the afternoon we looked at the set and talked to Giles Block [text expert] about the. And then we also immediately started doing movement as well for the dance at the end.

Discussing our Thoughts

We had some talks and discussions about the play and aspects of our characters; it was quite an academic kind of approach. Then we did a complete run-through of the play, as fast as we could, not at break-neck speed, but just trying to get it all on its feet in one go. We played some games and then we started going through the play scene by scene, blocking it out. Going through each line, each word, so that there was no doubt about any of it. Although actually a lot of As You Like It seems to be quite straightforward I think.

Research

The lecture was interesting. It’s all helpful but you learn to leave out the things that aren’t going to be of any use and make notes of the things that you can use. You can’t take on everything you hear because some information is not performable. You look at your lines thinking “How am I going to make this clear to an audience, how am I going to fill this difficult space with this material? How can I connect with an audience and make them follow my story and understand what I’m saying?”

Sometimes the material that you’re given is actually quite academic, information about ways of thinking and so forth. You have to try and absorb them and make them part of your background knowledge, but they aren’t necessarily going to be apparent. No one watching this is going to go “Oh, now I really understand about that melancholy and the four humours!” You can’t perform that, but it is really interesting and you can try to find tokens and nuances that stem from all that.

Key Relationships

I think Jaques’ key relationship is with himself. This probably goes without saying, but he is very self-obsessed. He is very comfortable being on his own, quite happy wandering off, but when he comes back, he wants to be the centre of attention. He likes to be listened to and he takes himself quite seriously. I think that’s what he looks for in other people too.

Now this is early days, so I’m still thinking about all this stuff, but it strikes me that he is looking for people he can play off. He plays off Duke Senior because they bounce off each other and the Duke gives him a kind of status.

I think maybe when he meets Rosalind that even though he thinks she’s a boy, he finds her kind of attractive, and starts talking about himself in the way that sometimes you do with people that you find attractive. He sort of rejects Orlando because there is nothing to play off with him; because Orlando is self-obsessed and chasing Rosalind, he is not a potential audience.

There are parallels between Touchstone and Jaques, but it seems to me that it’s quite a quizzical relationship from Jaques’ point of view. I think Jaques finds him very funny but keeps making the point that he’s a fool at the same time because Touchstone mangles everything up. Jaques is laughs at him as well as with him, but he knows that the clown is very funny, so there is something quite complicated going on there.

Dancing: the jig

There is the jig at the end which we’re all doing, and then there’s the nuptial dance at the end, but Jaques makes it quite clear that he is "not for dancing", so he slopes off. But the jig is going well, it’s really good fun. I think it’s going to be a kind of Bollywood style, a bit like at the end of Slumdog Millionaire, with everyone doing all those moves together. It should be quite good.

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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