‘It’s great that Matt delivered “Speak the speech” straight at you, because it’s quite a lesson in oratory. . .’
‘Yes, indeed, there were a few tips I could take from that,’ he conceded.
‘Well, let’s face it, you certainly need them,’ I deadpanned.
There was a spilt-second of glint in his eye, a flash of ‘who the hell is this guy?’, and then a big laugh. Whatever admiration we felt – off the scale already – flipped into overdrive. The President could take a tease.
* * *
These words, Hamlet’s celebrated advice to the Players, delivered before they perform his lamentable play, are, of course, lessons in acting rather than oratory. They are the prayer offered up by every playwright on the eve of each first night since. They can be brutally compressed into ‘Oh, please, stop acting and just say the fucking lines.’ Ever since first spoken on the Globe stage by Richard Burbage in 1601, they have been the ultimate rule book, which generation after generation of actors since, have done their level best to ignore. These words imprinted on their minds, they have walked off in the opposite direction and carried on mouthing, sawing, whirlwinding, o’erstepping and overdoing as if their lives depended on it. People treat these injunctions as if they were specific to the sins of Elizabethan actors. They are not; they are a perennial. Rehearsals for the last four centuries have often been simply a matter of returning and returning to their wisdom.
At the heart of the speech is a cri de coeur for respect for the ‘modesty of nature’. The world is not full of people trembling or gnashing their teeth; it is full of people being. Nor of people muttering and mumbling either, sitting on the back foot and undercutting the energy of others. It is naturalness that is wanted – the same apportioned and appropriate energy we give to life is what we want to see on stage. Holding ‘the mirror up to nature’ is often quoted as if it means being studiedly contemporary, reporting on the world and trying to emulate what newspapers do; it is not. It is about being judicious and true in the playing of people and relationships; it is about being unforced and unaffected in the speaking of language. If that is played true to humans in the world, the form and pressure of the time will naturally make itself felt.
How do you create a rehearsal room so these things can happen? First, you make the room sharp: not clever, not necessarily wise, but certainly sharp. A room that is dull of wit will lead to a dull show. The wit, the insight, the spark of thought and imagination that is in the room will appear on the stage. This does not mean casting people who have university degrees. Nothing wrong with them, but they are not a necessity. It means casting people with emotional intelligence, with street-smart wit, and with an understanding of how language works in the space between people. Fill a room up with smart people and the play gets smart. Fill it with dullards – even if they’ve all got firsts from top universities – and you’re stuffed.
Before anything else, you read the play, sit round a table and make sure of one thing: that everyone understands every single word of each scene they are in. There is nothing more depressing than a stage of actors who have no idea what is coming out of other people’s mouths, nor even sometimes their own. This happens not infrequently. The earliest stage of rehearsals is the moment to sort this out. As you go through the play, no one is allowed to say the overall meaning of this, or the gist of that; you precisely drill down on every line, every phrase and every word, and make sure they know its exact meaning. If we are to have any theatre of meaning, we do not need to learn how to mime bottles into babies, how to monocycle, or how to scream and shout; we need to be precise and clear about language. Language is what is remarkable about us, language is what makes us and our world, not our ability to wave our arms around in the air. Dancing is a joy, singing takes us to places we could not otherwise reach, but language and being human are an intertwined genetic code creating us and our world. When we start hearing that theatre is not about language, we are often dealing with people who secretly hate it.
To keep the room sharp, there are a few rules. First, everyone is allowed to be a fool, and no question is too stupid. If something is mysterious or unknown, no one should be frightened to admit it. We all have black holes of ignorance, and we should be open about them. But just as important, everyone should be allowed to be smart. No one should be frightened of being informative and generous with knowledge. We are plagued in our contemporary theatre with a fetishising of childishness and simplicity, a worshipping of ignorance. If someone has something of interest or value to say, all should want to hear it. Most important of all, the room needs to be relaxed, and not proud. It always helps if you have a few people who have worked together before, and their relaxed manner with each other can help others worry less about being formal. If I can call one of my old colleagues something unspeakably rude on day one, it usually relaxes the air. If they can call me the same, even better. You want a room to be kind, and to be respectful of each other’s feelings, but never, never formal.
The moment when people get up from the table can be awkward. There is no solution beyond getting on with it. If the room has the right atmosphere, and if everyone feels free to try stuff out, to make mistakes and be brave, then the awkwardness passes. Making the room feel right is axiomatic. People have to allow each other space to be human and honest and foolish. Many things can help with this: a few daft stories to start the day, an attentiveness to listening, a little clowning about. Nothing relaxes the air more than laughter, and a room full of laughter is a healthy room. Tears should be able to flow freely but not indulgently. And a room needs a powerful communal bullshit detector. This starts with how people treat each other, and extends out into the work. If people start acting untruthfully, or phonily, or ostentatiously, you want the room rather than the director to let them know that it is wrong.
There was a unique technical problem with rehearsing this Hamlet. It ended up making it one of the most exciting times I have spent in a rehearsal room.
Our challenge was to rehearse not a team but a squad. To ensure that we always had cover, we had created a system where everyone was learning two, three, four, five, six or seven parts. This was in the full expectation that not everyone would last the full two years (it is still impossible to imagine the same sixteen people that left returned). We had two people to play Hamlet at the start (three by the end), three Ophelias, three Gertrudes, three Claudiuses, three Poloniuses, and by the conclusion of the tour six people who could play Horatio. We could do the play with eight, nine, ten, eleven or twelve actors. We set this up to provide cover and to spread the load of playing, and we soon realised it would be another way of keeping the play fresh. Not only would every venue be new, but also the combination of roles would surprise. In the first year of performance, the company only performed the same combination twice.
We created a carousel system, where we would rehearse a scene with one group of people, then at the end of one iteration, ask one actor to step out to be replaced by another; at the end of the next, a different actor would step out and be replaced, and so on. The scene would spin around the room, and people would jump on and off the bobbing horses. From the first, I said that everyone should be generous and selfish. If they saw someone making a choice on a line or thought that they liked, they should steal it; if they did something new, they should be prepared to give it away. Similarly, if they wanted to do something different, everyone working with them should accommodate it. The broad structure, clean and simple and driven by storytelling, was set by its directors; the details were very much up to the cast.
The work in the room became a fertile mix of imaginative commitment and critical judgement. In the moment they were in the scene, they were in it, alive to its feelings and imaginatively responding to its possibilities. The moment they were out, they were watching the same scene and assessing the truth or life of what their colleagues offered up. There were drawbacks: it was hard for the actors to gain the sheer grinding consistency which ceaseless repetition works into their bones. But the rewards were immense: it gave them an in-depth knowledge of the whole play, it gave them
