Hello again. Welcome to part two of this weird open-diary production journal/blog thing. And to update… well there’s not a huge amount to update with at this point. Steve Tanner, our lovely director, his brother and I took a few photos in a churchyard for an article to appear in September. They’re pretty goofy but it was a lot of fun.
Apart from that, what’s there to update?… Oh yeah! We had the first bloody read-through! That is to say, we all met up in a small nursery in Balham and sat in remarkably small chairs and read through the script page by page. And I got to meet most of the cast in the process! Everyone is very very nice and I was very excited to be in that room with those people.
And I got surprisingly nervous. Like, tight feeling in the throat, heart-racing nervous. It occurred to me as I looked around that room talking to people that had been a part of the Southside Players for years, acting all the time. I’m not used to learning scripts and doing this stuff. I’m a duff comedian that makes things up on the spot. Fortunately, I had already bought a copy of the play online and had already made a few key choices regarding how to deliver a few lines; otherwise, I might honestly have choked.
The preparations that I made were just fundamentals from my memory of drama classes and a few improv exercises. The first thing I did was read through the entire script and note what all the characters say about Shakespeare. I think I first heard of doing this in Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. It sounds pretentious, but it’s actually a very useful exercise. From these notes, I derived not only character details but also some direction as to how certain lines should be delivered, which really helped during the reading. There are currently 
written behind the back cover of my script for my reference. From here it paints a picture of Shakespeare as a strangely depressive character, even rash and petty at times. I think it would be a mistake though to play the role entirely sincerely though. He plays straight man a lot, which helps, but when he needs to be funny, he’ll just have to be funny. He’s a talented guy.
The other thing I did, which also helped me hugely during the audition, is take note of the status at play in each scene. It’s something done in improv to help create characters and “game” in a scene. Is your character high status or low status? How high/low? Are they higher or lower than the other characters on stage and how is that reflected in the way they act, the way they stand and the way they speak. It can also change during the scene as it develops. In the audition, I literally gave each line a numerical value on the script to guide the performance, 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. I didn’t do it during the reading, but I kept it at the forefront of my mind.
And as soon as we got going, I felt better, but I started getting nervous as soon as someone asked me what kind of “acting experience” I had. I didn’t honestly have the guts to just say, “Outside of improv? None.” And I have a few minor credits to my name consisting of extra work on film and TV as part of my previous and underwhelming filmmaking career, but those surely don’t count when it comes to stuff like this, where we are constructing characters and relationships.
Which is also why I also breathed a huge sigh of relief when, during the read-through, it became clear to me more than ever how much of an ensemble piece William Shakespeare’s Land of the Dead is. Shakespeare is on stage for virtually the whole play (apart from the first 3 pages and half a page at the end of Act II), but there are whole stints where the burden of the narrative and the heavy lifting of the dialogue is carried by the other characters, most notably by the characters of Richard Burbage (star actor and manager of The Globe), Will Kemp (attention-seeking clown) and Francis Bacon (bastard lawyer). And the actors playing these characters are all great! I actually auditioned with the actor playing Burbage (also called Richard). Rory, playing Kemp, is also an improviser with a group called Music Box. They improvise musicals. They’re amazing. And the chap playing Bacon is called Leigh, and I’ve yet to meet him, but everyone at Southside seems buzzed that he’s in the cast. He’s a regular.
And what’s really nice is that all of the characters, even some of the smaller ones, have their moment to shine. I would even say that every actor on this cast has something to look forward to, as even those without lines are going to get some awesome prosthetic make-up that is making me more than a little envious.
It’s also really exciting that Shakespeare gets to have a great scene with virtually everyone. Burbage and Kemp have friendships with Shakespeare that ebb and flow throughout the play, and I’m really excited to dig in to the meat of those scenes. And then there’s the relationships he has with Kate and Rice as well, which will be really fun to play with. Kate is the costumer who might be the only one that can reign in Shakespeare, outside of Queen Elizabeth herself.
And as for John Rice, well, John Rice is an apprentice at The Globe at a time shortly after Shakespeare will have lost his son, Hamnet (to a sickness of some sort, I think), and it seems Rice is a kind of surrogate son to him. Shakespeare is certainly eager to protect him above all others. And I’m not going to spoil the ending, but it gets interesting.
By the way, I also had the pleasure of meeting the actor playing Rice, who is none other than the young Alfie Simmons, son of director Steve. I have only exchanged a few words with the young man but what I can say is that he is polite, helpful and completely taking in to stride the fact that he is going to spend the entire play wearing a dress. Not a single complaint, when I spoke to him. Good man.
So where does that leave us now? I happened to have Jury Service this week, so I took the long hours of waiting as golden opportunity to research Shakespeare, (which the content of the play is completely true to right up until the zombies arrive), learn some lines as best I could and prepare myself for our first rehearsal, which is happening this Sunday. I get butterflies every time I think of it.
William Shakespeare’s Land Of The Dead is being performed at The Bedford in Balham from 28th-31st October. Tickets available now!
I Am Zombie Shakespeare 