Much Ado About Fear

Okay, so this blog was late already. I said once a week and I meant it, but I had Giggle Loop shit to take care of, okay! God! And I had to prepare to go on holiday to the south of France. Ugh… you have no idea how hard my life is right now…

Jokes aside, we had our first rehearsal on a clement Sunday afternoon (about a week and a half ago at this point) and I was actually pretty terrified about it. With improv, not having a script to go on is a surprisingly comfortable safety net in terms of excuses. By this point, we had all had the script with enough time to make a few choices and we had to live or die by them… or at least that’s how it felt… And it stressed me out a bit to not have had ample time to learn the lines. It’s difficult to get a sense of community (as Stanislavsky would have put it, I guess) with the other characters when you constantly breaking eye contact to check your lines, or unable to interact with your surroundings due to having a script in your hand.

Of course, everyone was really nice. And of course, the rehearsal actually went really well. We dealt with some of the key scenes regarding Shakespeare’s relationships with the other three leads (Burbage, Bacon and Kemp) as well as Rice, a smaller yet very important character, particularly to Shakespeare. And it was an absolute pleasure to work with the guys playing the other parts. I’m starting to get an idea of how these characters are going to be played, which is a relief as I’ll take any direction, feedback and guidance I can at the minute.

I think the tension that I’m feeling largely just boils down to having other people to answer to and none at the same time. There is a wide breath of interpretations I can give the part at this point and I need to make my choices, but they also need to gel with the play as a whole, so I need to know that this is what the director wants, what the other actors think the scene is “about” and basically make sure we are all pulling in the same direction. But I’ve not received correction or validation at this point, so I’m largely thinking for myself.

The way I could describe it is that it kind of feels like a small yacht trying to navigate a vast ocean without a map. Why should this be any different to improv? Well, you’re a team in improv. You make the decisions together and in the moment. That would be the equivalent to being a yacht sailing without a map, but part of a fleet. Sticking together, covering more ground and with more resources to share ship-to-ship. It’s a convoluted analogy, but I’m sticking with it. It boils down to this: I’m still nervous about doing this for the first time in ten years.

And that’s not to say that the cast is not a team. We will be, but at this point we’ve barely shared a room more than twice, so the whole getting-to-know-you thing is in its early stages. We did go to the pub afterward and that certainly helped. I’m already fascinated by my other cast members. Richard, the gentleman playing Burbage, is a huge cricket fan and spent some years as a nurse in the middle east. He had more than a few fun stories to share. And I got to meet Leigh (playing Bacon) for the first time. We dived right in to our first scene together and that felt appropriate as an introduction, feeling each other out as characters and actors simultaneously.

And the above is also not to say that I am not receiving direction. I definitely am. And important direction, too! Remember in my last blog when I made the list of what Shakespeare and other characters say about Shakespeare and what that dictated as to how to play him? At first I thought that with all the talk of Shakespeare being “morose” or needing to beware of his “bite” would suggest that the character, on the whole, was angry, fed up, tired or in other ways defensive. And this seemed to play alright toward the end of the play when Shakespeare and Burbage are at odds with one another, but at the start of the play is another matter.

When we were rehearsing Bacon’s first appearance in the Act 1, I played the part pretty defensively, even aggressively. But then Steve made the very astute observation regarding the status at play (Bacon being of higher social status than Shakespeare), and he suggested that there should be some sort of veil of propriety. This proved difficult with my interpretation of him as being angry, because the veil slips as the scene progresses, but it would have felt out-of-place if Shakespeare suddenly became aggressive. We played the scene and with Steve’s note in the mind, the scene played totally differently once Shakespeare was forced to back off a bit.

It occurred to me that if anger is not what drives Shakespeare, as Steve says, then it is perhaps fear. Upon reflection afterward, that is exactly Kemp’s observation of Shakespeare in the third act. And in fact, anger is a difficult emotion to relate to if it happens at the very start. Not everyone gets angry, but everyone gets afraid. Truth be told, I struggled at first to see how to play Shakespeare as “afeared of success” as Kemp says. How is one afeared of success? How does one play fear of success?

I think I’m getting the hang of it when considering two factors. Firstly, that fear dictates his emotions as a whole. He is not angry so much as he is insecure, always afraid that what he has is about to drop out from under him, making him as jealous, petty and competitive as he demonstrates in the play. The other factor is simply something I’ll be drawing upon from personal experience, namely, the stress of big projects.

When I was worked in the media full-time, I was the co-director of a very small production company for a while. We had lots of productions, often small, some might have even described as “guerrilla” had we been producing our content in the late-90s/early-00s (shout out to Chris Jones and the Guerrilla Filmmakers Handbook), but whenever we landed a large-scale production, my heart would simultaneously leap at the opportunity to do something big and “with a budget”, but it would simultaneously sink at the thought of all the bureaucracy that productions like that would create.

In one advertising campaign for a major confectionery product, the chain of approval for any idea/change/result was six companies long, of which we were only the fifth in the train, meaning that any action we took would bounce back along the chain at any point if so much as one person in that chain thought ambivalently about something. This is not unusual. It’s actually inherent to the process, hence the stress that goes with the idea of big productions and a large reason why I don’t do it any more.

That kind of “fear of success” is exactly what i think Shakespeare is starting to fear. He gives a lesson to Rice in the second act regarding what a play being “worth his time” means to him. I get that feels, Shakes. I know what you mean. It’s a bloody mare, putting on a play, or advertising a chocolate bar in my case. There are times when you honestly wonder if it is really worth it. After all “plays are nothing but a product of their times, likely to wane with the fashion of the day”, according to Shakespeare in Act 1. He sounds quite fed up, doesn’t he?

So the interpretation has shifted already! And even though I am on holiday in Cannes at the moment, the research continues. I’m learning my lines on the beach and reciting them with my always supportive girlfriend. Indeed, she even gave me a copy of the Shakespeare biography Soul Of The Age by Jonathan Bate, and for our anniversary, no less!

My hope is that by the time we are meeting for rehearsals again on 16th August, I will have learned my lines and hopefully a thing or two about the man himself. It’s funny to think a bunch of zombies turn up in the middle of all of this. Maybe I’m thinking about all this too sincerely? I was interested to note that at the end of the first rehearsal, everybody poured over a DVD library, not of Shakespeare, but of zombie movies! Brilliant! More research required there as well!

William Shakespeare’s Land Of The Dead is being performed at The Bedford in Balham from 28th-31st October. Tickets available now!