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This is Kananu's fourth blog entry for the 2000 production of The Tempest, in which she talks aboutmoving from working on The Tempest to working on the next play in the season- The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

We have started to rehearse The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. I am playing 4 small parts. At college I always found small parts very interesting to play as you play with the character by inventing their history and have to explore ways of making each character different. I’m not out to ‘steal the show’ in The Two Noble Kinsmen, but I still have to find ways to make the parts interesting and challenging. Tim (Carroll Master Of Play) has come out with lots of ideas. For example, a scene with one of my characters, a country woman is set at a dance. We are going to play the scene with the schoolmaster organising the dance like a young teacher who gets very embarrassed when he has to speak to the country women. I have thought about using different accents for each of the characters that I play. I haven’t tried this out yet. I intend to today. I am very happy with my characters, as they are all so different. I play everything from a maid to a queen.

Some people say that The Two Noble Kinsmen is a difficult play to understand, but I found the story less confusing and easier to work with than I did during the first few weeks of rehearsal for The Tempest. I think this could be to do with the difference in the rehearsal process for The Two Noble Kinsmen. We are able to rehearse as a company, in a way that we weren’t able to do for The Tempest, because the characters are on the island in isolated groups. There are several large scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen, for which all the actors rehearse tomorrow.

The Tempest

As well as rehearsing for The Two Noble Kinsmen we are still performing The Tempest. Although we had done many performances now, I am still finding the show very ‘fresh’. I tend to go on stage every day with a different thought about Miranda, which I use to help me during the performance, in my head. It often tends to be a film I’ve just seen or a passage from a book or a poem that relates to something about Miranda. This makes every performance very different.

I had a bit of a scare yesterday as it was the first time I had really messed up my lines. It happened in Act 1 Scene 2 with Prospero. I had lost my concentration and wasn’t listening, so I replied with an incorrect line which effected Vanessa (Redgrave, Prospero) as her next speech was directly related to what I should have said. I went home and went over my lines and have been reminded about the importance of focusing on stage. It's funny though because the audience didn’t seem to notice.

I’m still unsure about talking to the audience so I am still experimenting. I can’t decide whether to treat the audience as a general mass or to pick out individual people. I find that my ability to talk directly to them changes with each performance. When I am horrible to Caliban in Act 1 Scene 2, I get one of two reactions from the audience. They either side with him or with me. If they take my side I find it a lot easier to talk to them later, as I feel I have a closer rapport with them.

I have also been rethinking some of my performance. In Act 5 I see lots of men for the first time and I go and give each one a hug. But I have recently been thinking about how I should be reacting to Prospero. I have been virtually ignoring him. But he is dressed in clothes that I have never seen him in before, and I wonder if I should react to that. I have decided to keep playing the scene the way I always have done because I think that Miranda would look at him but, being so excited, she would only see her father, and not his clothing.

Sometimes I find that scenes are feeling a little monotonous and so I try to surprise the other people on stage. This happens a lot with the log scene in Act 3 Scene 1. We try different ideas all the time. Just changing the intonation of one line can change the scene completely. When I started rehearsal I thought that I would know everything there is to know about The Tempest by now, but that just isn’t the case. I am still discovering new things everyday.

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

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