Globe Education Online

In her final blog post, Penny discusses rehearsing and performing in The Antipodes and her character in it, Diana.

Performing The Antipodes

The performances of The Antipodes have gone really well and I am having fun playing Diana. During rehearsal, I had been unsure how audiences at the Globe would respond to this light skittish comedy, but they have loved it. I was particularly worried about how an audience in this day and age might respond to the obvious sexism in the play. However, it doesn’t seem to take anything away from their enjoyment. I think that The Antipodes is a play that really needs an audience. We perform it better when we can hear a response to the jokes. The audiences seem to have a fabulous time.

Diana

I find playing Diana quite hard as for a long while I just didn’t know who she was. She isn’t very clear cut. Each of the other characters that I have scenes with is described as representing madness, jealousy or melancholy. This meant that they were given a definition of their character’s personality and purpose in the play from the start. Diana did not have a definition, but by process of elimination, towards the end of rehearsal, it was decided that she must represent folly. For a long time I couldn’t find anything in the text to suggest that she was supposed to represent folly. Eventually I began to look for ways to make her appear silly - it is getting easier to play the role.

Rehearsing The Antipodes

When we first started to rehearse The Antipodes, I thought that it would be really easy to perform as it is such a farcical comedy. I thought that playing Diana would be light relief from Ophelia. Once I begun to work with the script I began to see that I was on stage for most of the play. I had thought that I had been doing much less. In some ways The Antipodes has proved to be more challenging for me than Hamlet was. This is probably because I had expected it to be so much easier.

The season is almost over. It has gone so quickly. I can sit back and enjoy it all now. It is really good not having to spend so much time rehearsing as both plays are now in production.

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 rehearsal process progresses.

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