Getting Directions E-Book

Russ Hope

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 338

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The theatre rehearsal room is a sacred place. What goes on there is mysterious, alchemical and closely guarded. So how are aspiring theatre directors supposed to learn their craft? In Getting Directions, Russ Hope gives us the benefit of unprecedented, fly-on-the-wall access to eight rehearsal rooms. He has shadowed some of the UK's most exciting young directors at each step of the way, on productions as diverse as Shakespeare at the Globe, Greek tragedy at the Gate, Tennessee Williams at the Young Vic, panto at the Lyric Hammersmith, and a touring Dickens dramatisation. Describing each of these rehearsal periods from first concept to first night in revealing and often remarkable detail, Hope gets under the skin of the professional director, and reveals the decisions they must make on a daily basis: How best to arrive at a concept and communicate this to a design team? Which games and exercises really help to unlock the text for actors? And what should you do if everything is falling apart during the tech? Getting Directions will equip emerging directors with a practical handbook, not bogged down with theories or precepts, that lifts the lid on what it means to be a director. The result is both a portrait and a masterclass from a generation of theatre practitioners, essential reading for anyone who wants to follow in their footsteps, or to understand what directing really entails. 'An incisive kaleidoscope of rehearsal-room practice which is a useful tool for directors to borrow from and a fascinating insight for the curious.' Dominic Cooke, from his Foreword

Leseprobe

A Fly-on-the-Wall Guide for Emerging Theatre Directors

Russ Hope

Foreword by Dominic Cooke

Contents

Epigraph

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: On a Lighting Gantry

1. Matthew Dunster

Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare

2. Steve Marmion

Dick Whittington and his Cat

by Joel Horwood, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Steve Marmion

3. Natalie Abrahami

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

by William Shakespeare

4. Nikolai Foster

Great Expectations

by Tanika Gupta after Charles Dickens

5. Carrie Cracknell

Electra by Nick Payne after Sophocles

6. Joe Hill-Gibbins

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

7. OperaUpClose

Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte

8. Action Hero

Frontman

by Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse

Epilogue: Asking Better Questions

‘You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet)

‘I hold that the opposite is true.’

Russ Hope

Foreword

Dominic Cooke

Of all theatre arts, directing is the most mysterious. Rehearsal rooms are, by necessity, private places. Privacy is essential to allow directors and actors to take risks, free from the self-consciousness that creeps in when an audience is present. What takes place between actor and director in the rehearsal process is informed as much by the particulars of their relationship as it is by the text and experience they bring to their work. Much of the process is unconscious and therefore hard to explain to a third party. Some of the success of a production is down to alchemy – the magic that can happen when a group of individuals gather around a particular play at a particular time. This is one of the reasons why directing practice is so hard to communicate.

Books have been written by directors about their craft. Some of these are articulate and persuasive. Recently, Katie Mitchell and Mike Alfreds have anatomised their practices in two fascinating books, and I have heard young directors referring to these as influences on their own working methods.

However, no matter how structured a director’s process may seem, when it comes to the meeting between actor and director in the rehearsal room, the skilful director will adapt their approach to meet the particular needs of the actor and scene they are working on. Pragmatism is an essential tool for any director and the way that a process is applied is as significant as the process itself. The personality, passion and obsessions of each director play a crucial role in bringing a text to life. Therefore, there are as many directing processes as there are directors, and each director’s experience of a particular production is unique. This is one of the reasons that theatre flourishes – there is no ‘correct’ way of doing it. Directing is an art not a science.

This book reveals some of the diverse approaches to directing being used by young directors today. Russ Hope gives us unprecedented access to the rehearsal rooms and thinking of some of our most interesting young directors. Each director has a unique approach to their work, a particular set of values and a singular challenge in the play and space they are animating. Getting Directions documents this with a judicious mix of cold objectivity, sympathy and wit. The result is an incisive kaleidoscope of rehearsal-room practice which is a useful tool for directors to borrow from and a fascinating insight for the curious. I hope it interests and informs you as much as it did me.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted first and foremost to every director, artistic director, actor, stage manager, company manager, designer, marketer, usher and intern who let me into their rehearsal rooms and into the unfinished thoughts in their heads; their untidy first versions and ground plans not yet beautiful successes or heroic failures.

I am especially grateful for the freedom each director gave me to write and to prod as I saw fit. I remain amazed that they could be so engaged and interested in something peripheral to the sizeable task of making a theatre production.

Thanks also to Mark Shenton for the pep talk; to Andy Dickson at the Guardian for posting me a padded envelope stuffed with studies and raw interview tapes; to Rob Icke, Caroline Steinbeis and Steven Atkinson, whose interviews added to the general swirl; Louis Theroux, whose interview persona (the buffoonish Machiavelli) I stole wholesale; to my editor Matt for his guidance and his patience; to my partner Louise for guidance and patience of a different kind; and finally to the actor who hugged me, high on endorphins, having survived her first preview performance. ‘Thank you for all you did,’ she said, and I looked down at the bottle of complimentary beer in my hand then at my laptop, which lay sapping the theatre’s Wi-Fi as it beamed the day’s notes into cyberspace, and felt acutely aware that, whilst the company proved itself each day in rehearsals and now onstage, I had yet to show my hand.

‘I’m not sure I did anything,’ I said.

‘Yes you did,’ she said. ‘You were here.’

Introduction

On a Lighting Gantry

It is 2005 and I am crouching in a lighting gantry, hoping I cannot be heard, hoping to remain unnoticed. I am in the studio theatre at the university I attend where, twenty feet below, the director Peter Brook is rehearsing with the actor Bruce Myers ahead of a workshop performance of a new piece.

I was looking for my phone, which I had misplaced during rehearsals for a student play, and as I walked across the lighting gantry, I realised that something was going on below. The piece is The Grand Inquisitor, from the chapter in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus finds himself in the Spanish Inquisition. Myers, as the high priest, interrogates an empty chair. ‘If you are God, turn these stones into bread.’ I realise that, if I can stay quiet enough, I might stow away with them to Seville.

What I didn’t know is that Peter Brook rehearses in French. It doesn’t matter that the actor and the director are English, nor that the performance will be in English. I don’t speak French. Not a word.

Brook says something to Myers. He speaks, unbroken and calm, for maybe five seconds, and Myers nods and speaks the line again: ‘If you are God, turn these stones into bread.’ Before, it was a threat. Now, there is compassion within, and almost a longing for God to return. The actor appears to hold two contradictory ideas in his mind at once, and the poetry of that struggle reaches all the way up to the lighting gantry.

To this day, I do not know what Brook said that could have had such a transformative effect.

This book reinvestigates that moment, broadcasting the feed from the security camera in that often sacred place, the rehearsal room.

Each chapter documents the creative process for a production by a theatremaker at the forefront of a generation of British theatre. The account is part rehearsal diary, part essay and contains the most candid interviews you will read on the challenges of working as a professional theatremaker. Each account follows a production from its inception through pre-rehearsal meetings, rehearsals, the tech process and preview performances to press night. The productions are: a new version of a Greek play, two different approaches to Shakespeare plays, a Great American Play, an adaptation of a British novel, a pantomime, a plotless live performance by a devising company and an opera. At the end, there is a short section that offers a collection of principles to help the emerging director find focus, decide which projects to pursue, and create work that excites them.

Getting Directions is a book about creative relationships, approaching problems, and learning good judgement. It is a book about a day job as much as a vocation, and craft as much as art. It aims to help you ask better questions (of yourself, of texts, of companies) and develop your own theories and process. What it does not promise is quick fixes, for all silver bullets turn out to be quicksilver. This is to say nothing of the crime that it would be to rob you of the bittersweetness of making your own mistakes, those frustrating, exhilarating steps on the path towards developing your own voice, with its own attendant quirks and tactics.

I can’t drive. When people ask why, I tell them I took lessons (which is true) and was doing well (which is not true). Then, one day I convinced myself that, living in London, I would have no need of a car and, in any case, wouldn’t be able to afford one (true, not true, true). Since then, I maintain, I have had no desire to drive – buses and trains are just fine, thanks (definitely not true).

The truth is: driving scared me. A car weighs a ton and can move at eighty miles an hour, yet we’ve decided to let almost anyone drive one. For all I know, someone might drive his car into something fragile and valuable like someone else. Or me. Unable to compartmentalise that fear, London’s roads – even the quiet back roads near my parents’ house – transformed into Spaghetti Junctions and mountains. The fact that I had paid attention in my lessons and knew the Highway Code meant nothing. I would have been crazy to ask my teacher to put me up for the exam, and he would have been crazy to consider it.

Driving, like any activity, requires a balance of knowledge, skill and behaviour: in this case that means knowledge of the Highway Code, the dexterity to point the car where you want it to go, and a temperament that’s neither hesitant nor gung-ho. Anything less than three out of three and you’ll be sitting at the bus stop, bursting with knowledge but utterly ineffective.

You could be reading this book for any number of reasons. Perhaps you have strong instincts but want to revisit first principles. Perhaps you excel in the abstract theory of directing but find yourself clamming up every time you’re forced to communicate your ideas. Perhaps you want to know how to get a leg up in a saturated industry. Or perhaps you are simply beginning to think about plays as more than simply ‘staged literature’, and what the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann once called ‘the staggering possibilities of light, vibration and time’.

A Few Ground Rules

1. The chapters snip and pinch time. As most rehearsal processes share a common ancestor, I have focused on the elements of each process that seemed most remarkable or instructive. For example, one chapter might emphasise casting, or the tech period, whilst another passes quickly over those sections or omits them entirely. This is not to say that a conversation in one chapter did not happen in some version in another, or that each director did not have something to say about each part of the process.

2. When we are searching for answers, it can be tempting to focus on craft to the extent that we create a depersonalised system. The reality is that any work that is of value will be personal and idiosyncratic to its maker.

3. Part of the director’s job is to tailor process to purpose. With that in mind, this book does not claim to give the definitive account of a director’s mind or imply an unchanging process. It merely captures a particular process that worked for a particular production at a particular point in time.

4. Any comparisons I draw between individuals or processes are mine alone.

5. The gendered pronoun for a director will reflect the gender of the director in that chapter.

6. Because our focus is on directors, the protagonist of each chapter is more fleshed-out than the company. To refer to a director by name, then to ‘an actor’, ‘the actors’ or ‘the company’ could be interpreted as suggesting two sides of a conflict or a lone-wolf auteur against a crowd, but nothing could be further from the truth. I cannot overstate the contribution of actors, as individuals and as a group, to each production.

Matthew Dunster directs, writes, teaches and acts – and probably in that order. He has directed new work (Mogadishu, Royal Exchange, Manchester; Love the Sinner, National Theatre; The Frontline, Shakespeare’s Globe), large-scale Elizabethan productions (Macbeth, Royal Exchange; Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Globe) and worked on adaptations that push notions of theatricality (Saturday Night Sunday Morning and 1984, Royal Exchange; The Farenheit Twins, Barbican). As a writer, his plays include Children’s Children (Almeida Theatre) and You Can See the Hills (Young Vic). He teaches drama to many different groups of people, and is an associate artist of the Young Vic.

‘Directing isn’t about playing loads of games... it’s about detail, and detail is about craft. It’s taken me a long time to get to a place where I’m comfortable in my process, and where the cast are respectful but we can have fun. Getting there takes guile, graft and the help and guidance of others.’

Matthew Dunster

Paul Stocker (Troilus), Matthew Kelly (Pandarus) and Laura Pyper (Cressida)

Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare

Opened at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, on 22 July 2009.

Creative

Director Matthew Dunster

Designer Anna Fleischle

Composer Olly Fox

Choreographer Aline David

Cast

Ulysses Jamie Ballard

Paris Ben Bishop

Andromache Olivia Chaney

Hector Christopher Colquhoun

Agamemnon Matthew Flynn

Achilles Trystan Gravelle

Menelaus/Alexander Richard Hansell

Thersites Paul Hunter

Aeneas Fraser James

Pandarus Matthew Kelly

Priam/Calchas Séamus O’Neill

Cressida Laura Pyper

Helen/Cassandra Ania Sowinski

Nestor John Stahl

Troilus Paul Stocker

Diomedes/Helenus Jay Taylor

Patroclus Beru Tessema

Ajax Chinna Wodu

Musicians Joe Townsend, Jon Banks, Ian East, Phil Hopkins and Genevieve Wilkins

To: the cast of Troilus and Cressida

Date: 23 May 2009

Subject: Welcome

▶ 1 Attachment [Troilus_rehearsal_draft.doc]

Hello Cast,

I just wanted to send a note with the rehearsal script (see attached).

I have worked with some of you before, and I think the work

I have done editing the script will feel pretty tame to you guys.

To those new to the way I work – don't worry about any ideas contained in the stage directions: they are first ideas and not prescriptive. Your ideas will always be better than mine and I look forward to hearing them.

My rules on approaching anything are simple: CLARITY – STORY – DRAMATIC EFFECTIVENESS. I want it to be clear and exciting.

In getting the play down from its massive 28,500 words to around 21,000, sometimes the iambic has been ruptured. Ruptured, but never disregarded. I know how it works and have only made sacrifices where I felt it would improve the chances of a modern audience understanding the text. Where I have chopped things around, the original is always there for us to go back to. Likewise, let’s keep looking for cuts and places where our modern understanding of dramatic language can help us tell his brilliant story. Let’s collaborate with Shakespeare. He was a populist – he would want people to get it and be excited by it.

Having spent so long getting inside the play, I am convinced of its brilliance. I can't wait to take you all inside its dark heart. Every character wriggles with complexity.

Rehearsals are simple. From day two we'll do circuit training and stretches for the first 45 mins (you'll all be dicking around in togas and sandals so it's in your best interest!) and for most of the first two weeks we will read and read and read.

Everything points to a strong Homeric show full of anachronistic surprises. I can't wait.

I'm off to Croatia in about five hours so I for one will be tanned and beautiful when we meet!

Looking forward to it.

Matthew

Shakespeare’s Globe

It is an uncharacteristically warm morning on the South Bank of the Thames. An ice-cream van is parked outside the entrance to Shakespeare’s Globe, its queue snaking towards the Millennium Bridge. In front of the theatre gates, a tourist photographs her son as he gives his best ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, a Flake ’99 standing in for the skull. As the ice cream melts down his wrist, the kid accelerates his half-remembered speech: something about ‘I knew him well...’

I am at the corner of New Globe Walk and Bankside, looking at Shakespeare’s Globe, an oddity of wood and thatch sandwiched between the chrome and glass of twenty-first-century restaurants and bars. A blue plaque on the wall in front of me reminds passers-by that this institution, so quintessentially English, was the vision of an American, Sam Wanamaker, who founded the Globe Theatre Trust in 1970 and pursued the project until his death in 1993, four years before the theatre presented its first season.

In 2008, Dominic Dromgoole became the second artistic director of the Globe following Mark Rylance, an actor known for his shape-shifting, mercurial performances. Like Rylance, Dromgoole combines a classical appreciation of Shakespeare’s work with a love of the raucous; the bearpit on which the new Globe is modelled. Earlier in his career, Droomgoole served as artistic director of the Bush in West London, a prolific new-writing theatre, where he premiered work by writers including David Harrower and Conor McPherson.

As part of his first season, Droomgoole commissioned a piece from the playwright Ché Walker. The Frontline was a head-on, high-speed collision of the Globe’s legacy with the present. Set in modern-day Camden, a company of hoodies, asylum seekers and lap dancers took to the Elizabethan stage with sneakers and boom boxes to celebrate and dissect all that London is and could be.

To direct The Frontline, Dromgoole hired Matthew Dunster.

Matthew Dunster

I first meet Matthew at the Young Vic, after a matinee performance of his play You Can See the Hills, which he also directs. It is midweek and the theatre is two-thirds full. Matthew sits on the back row, his arms spread across the empty seats either side. As the house lights go down, he kicks his feet up on the seat in front. He reacts as if he doesn’t know how the story ends, laughing at the jokes and leaning in to the tension.

After The Frontline, Dominic Dromgoole invited Matthew to return to the Globe, this time to direct a play by Shakespeare. Dominic suggested Troilus and Cressida, one of the few in the canon that the theatre had yet to produce in a full-scale production, and which Matthew hadn’t read, either when Dominic suggested it or when he agreed to the job. He tells me this and he registers my surprise:

People tend not to believe me when I say that, but I wanted to do a Shakespeare play I didn’t even have a sense of. I’ve acted in some of the others or I’ve read them, but I don’t know anything about Troilus and Cressida so I can treat it as a new play, and that’s exciting. Of course, once I read it, I realised how difficult it’s going to be. I had to read the script twice before I understood a word of it.

I leave thinking this is bluster; the boasts of a director who wants the first notes I make to be that I have just met a ‘maverick’. At home, I pull my Complete Works from the shelf and flick past nine hundred pages to Troilus and Cressida.

Damn.

I have to read it twice too before I understand much of what’s going on.

A Quick History Lesson

The story of Troilus and Cressida is ancient, and has passed through many tellers. It begins seven years into the siege of Troy, when the war has reached a stalemate. The demigods of Greek mythology – Agamemnon, Ajax, Achilles, Hector, Menelaus, Paris and Helen – are siloed in their camps, breaking the monotony with skirmishes. A Trojan prince, Troilus, falls in love with a young woman, Cressida, whose father defected to the Greeks, but their love is short-lived: the Trojan generals agree to trade Cressida for one of their own, a soldier languishing in a Greek prisoner-of-war camp.

Shakespeare probably knew the story through the versions by Chaucer and Homer. But where Chaucer treats his subjects with wry humour and sympathy, Shakespeare hunts them for vanity; where Homer sees heroes, Shakespeare sees a boil to be lanced. In Shakespeare’s version, the war is a chaos fought over a ‘whore and cuckold’ from which no one will learn a damned thing. Thersites, the knowing fool, says it best: ‘Nothing [but lechery] holds fashion.’

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida has long confounded critics, audiences and theatremakers alike. Without a protagonist, veering between comedy and tragedy, and with an ending that raises more questions than it answers, it was consigned to that drawer marked ‘problem play’ where it gathered dust for best part of three hundred years. There is some suggestion that it may not even have been performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the late sixteenth century, the dramatist John Dryden tried to make sense of the play, only he didn’t ‘make sense’ of it so much as edit out the bits he didn’t understand, reordering scenes, adding and removing dialogue and killing Cressida in the play’s final third to allow Troilus to rise as a traditional revenge hero. Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida remained the favoured text until the play went out of fashion, remaining unperformed until the horrors of the First World War prompted society at large to reinvestigate the gulf between the ancient warriors they’d read about in books, and the unprecedented horror they now read about in the newspapers, or witnessed first-hand.

It could also be argued that modern audiences, schooled in the fractured narratives of contemporary cinema and the slow-burning ensemble stories of television, are simply better primed to respond to the play’s structure. Either way, Matthew isn’t interested in critical baggage. ‘People obsess over whether it’s a tragedy or a history play or a comedy,’ he says. ‘The answer seems obvious: it’s all of them. If we celebrate those complications, I think the audience will accept them.’

The Text and the Space

The Globe has an imposing character of its own. Half the audience stands, and performances happen in the open air without amplified sound. In the daytime, actor and audience share the sunlight – every face is visible – and the quality this creates is difficult to pin down, even to those who have worked in it. A magnetic field hums between the play and the space that Matthew would be ‘a fool’, he says, to ignore. A production at the Globe requires a bespoke response.

Conceiving a production, a director has two main sources of inspiration:

• The Text

• The Performance Space

Directing a production for the Globe can be a disarming experience as it robs the director of two of the main tools of contemporary theatre: recorded sound and focused light. The reason for this is an artistic policy that the theatre calls ‘original practice’. Enforced to varying degrees depending on the production, original practice ensures that the audience’s experience of the production reflects the aesthetics of Elizabethan theatre. Yes, the auditorium is fitted with a sprinkler system (after all, the original Globe burned down!), and yes, there may be video monitors backstage, but these are usually hidden from the audience.

Then there is the space, which is infamously exposing, large and open on three sides. Complicated sets tend to obscure many in the audience’s view, and are cumbersome to set up and strike from the stage. The Globe’s immune system seems to reject them as a body might reject a transplanted organ.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2009, Dominic Dromgoole explained how the ‘well-fashioned miniature’ doesn’t work at the Globe: ‘You have to tell big stories here... big lungs, big action, big thought.’ Whilst Matthew favours stillness generally – ‘I don’t think an actor should move unless the character needs to’ – his experience directing The Frontline taught him that a production at the Globe needs to keep moving, lest it exclude some section of the audience.

Does this mean that a production at the Globe must be more theatrical? Matthew grimaces at the question. He asks me if I just used ‘theatrical’ as a synonym for ‘big’. I nod, and I think I may have stepped into a bear trap. ‘West End musicals tend to be larger than performances in studios,’ he says. ‘Would you say that either is necessarily more theatrical?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’ The trap closes around my ankle. ‘A theatrical experience doesn’t mean a diversion from something naturalistic or truthful,’ Matthew says. ‘It simply means one group of people presenting something to another.’

Defiant, I run through the list of potential spanners in the works of creating some idealised production: the daylight, the exposing stage, the combination of seated and standing audience members. Does Matthew feel on any level that there is a compromise in being asked to develop a production with so many outside considerations? ‘No,’ he says. The bear trap twists my leg off. ‘It’s my job!’

The Creative Team

Matthew’s close collaborators on Troilus and Cressida are the designer Anna Fleischle, choreographer Aline David and composer Olly Fox. As a unit, their job is to find and then deliver a vocabulary that is dramatically effective and helps the audience understand the play.

Before he makes any decisions about the production, Matthew meets the team to discuss the play. He does this as early as possible into the process. The team meets regularly to share research and for Matthew to explain any fundamental shifts in his thinking.

I meet the team a week before rehearsals begin, in a large room at the Globe. By now, the production has a rough shape, but many ‘what ifs’ remain. Matthew chairs the meeting, and describes successive ideas – images, character insights – preceding many with the disclaimer that they ‘might be shit’, although this is not an apology. Whilst over half of the ideas discussed today will not survive to the production (some won’t make it as far as the rehearsal room), every fragment is a step towards a more elegant solution, and merits discussion.

To ‘drag the experience of the play closer to home’, Matthew frames the characters of the play in terms of modern events. The Myrmidons, Achilles’ private army, will be child soldiers, and Helen of Troy will be modelled on ‘vacuous, coked-up’ footballers’ wives (after all, what is Helen, if not the first trophy wife?). The Greek camp will be informed by trench warfare: like the soldiers of 1914, whose generals expected the war to be over by Christmas, the Greeks live in a ‘ramshackle city’ that has sprawled with each year of the war from the original temporary camp. A trench will be dug into the stage and, if the theatre allows it, actors will ferry baskets of chickens through bustling crowd scenes. ‘And goats,’ Matthew adds. ‘I asked for goats. I won’t get them, but you can always ask.’

After an hour, Matthew has to leave for a meeting elsewhere in the building. Before he goes, he encourages the team to swap phone numbers. ‘Feel free to meet if you want to talk about things,’ he says. ‘I don’t need to be there.’

The Script

The script for the production cuts Shakespeare’s text by roughly twenty-five per cent. Matthew cuts instances of ‘poetic digression’ along with particularly archaic sentence constructions and words (‘fraughtage’ becomes ‘freightage’, for example) and references that presuppose a detailed knowledge of mythology. For example, Nestor’s command:

Let the ruffin Boreas once enrage / The gentle Thetis

is redrawn as:

Let the north wind once enrage / The gentle ocean

To help the audience keep up with so many characters, some of the pronouns – he/she – are replaced with the characters’ names.

For some directors – not to mention critics and audience members – to change one word of a text is to commit an unforgivable transgression. Once a writer has died, they argue, the script should be left alone. ‘Yeah, I don’t understand that attitude,’ Matthew says when I put the argument to him. He continues:

A director would think nothing of asking a living writer to, say, move a line four lines up because the actor who says it has been stood around for ten minutes doing nothing and his story is dying. Why should it be any different if the writer is dead?

The First Day of Rehearsals

The entire staff of the Globe is present and, when the room settles, Dominic Dromgoole makes an introductory speech. He welcomes the company as guests in his home and recalls his production of Troilus and Cressida for the Oxford Stage Company nine years before, and how elements of the play ‘outfoxed’ him. They still do, he says.

The room clears of all but the company. The designer, Anna Fleischle, places the set model on a table at the front of the room. Floor-to-ceiling, the stage is covered in what resembles marble and dust sheets. The playing area is mostly sparse: a map of Troy hangs over the stage to represent the Greek camp; Priam’s palace is represented only by his throne.

The armies will be colour-coded: the Greeks in purple; the Trojans in blue. Celtic body art will tell the story of warriors whose scars are celebrated, for whom each victory is etched into the skin. Matthew warns that ‘the white boys are going to get spray tans’. A few of the white boys laugh until they realise he’s not joking.

Creating the Prologue

Rehearsals begin proper with a session from the production’s fight director, Kevin McCurdy. The physical language of the play is battle and so, for two hours, Kevin teaches the baby-steps of using swords onstage. He starts slow with choreographed steps, each actor in their own space. Time and again he tells them to ‘go slower, slower; slower is better’.

When the basics have seeped into the actors’ musculature, Matthew moves the company on to the production’s opening sequence, which will be a physical sequence that introduces both sides of the conflict and shows how seven years of conflict, which began in fury, fizzled into cold war.

A solitary drum beats a rhythm, slow and steady. The Greek army enters first and advances towards the audience, stabbing the air in a ritualised incantation of battle. Matthew and Kevin work as a team, developing the sequence in an ongoing cycle of revision. The director knows the effect he wants, and relies on the fight director’s expertise to translate his ideas into choreography and refine them with the actors. Matthew will ask for a change of intention or intensity, or for a moment to be punctuated, and Kevin will find a solution. Matthew will suggest a tweak to that solution, and so on.

Paul Hunter is to speak the Prologue. He will do so as Thersites, rather than as the character Shakespeare names ‘The Prologue’, and this imbues Thersites with an otherworldly quality that the production will go on to explore. Paul speaks the text at first with the patter of a TV reporter, oblivious to the war going on around him. The scene resets and he tries the opposite, weaving among the fighters and ducking their swords, trying not to get killed.

The Trojans enter next, stalking the Greeks, who turn and attack. The battle is fierce. Men bite and claw if it means survival. Gradually, the soldiers tire and stop fighting altogether. A stalemate takes hold. This is the condition in which the play begins.

When the first day ends, at six p.m., the company understands how Troilus and Cressida will look and feel, and what the production intends to achieve. An evening beer earned, everyone retires to the pub.

Circuit Training

For the first two weeks, the cast works as a unit. The hours are not always long, but they are well-used. ‘We’ll work until I’ve had enough,’ Matthew says. ‘That might be four o’clock; it might be six.’

The cast assembles each morning at nine, an hour earlier than most productions start work, to run through forty-five minutes of physical exercise, including jogging, yoga, and a training circuit borrowed from the British Army. The play is grounded in war, and physical exercise is, for its characters, ‘a means of expression,’ Matthew says:

Working out is a curious way into the physicality of soldiers. It also helps us, as a company, generate momentum to carry us through the day. By ten o’clock, we’ve already achieved something as a unit.

Reading the Text

Each morning, after circuit training, the company sits to read and analyse the text, decoding each archaic word and unpacking each image. The process is thorough, progressing scene by scene for the better part of two weeks, which amounts to forty hours of discussion for two-and-a-half hours of story.

Poetry, Matthew believes, takes care of itself when its meaning is clear to the speaker, and so he questions the text relentlessly, and he encourages others to do the same. Any answers to a play will lie in its text, Matthew says; not in secondary research nor in details of the playwright’s life. ‘To go into a text, you have to grapple first with its surface.’ He announces this one morning to the company, and I am suddenly aware of how many in the cast have copies of Chaucer’s or Homer’s versions of the story stashed under their chairs, or unedited copies of the Shakespeare, or academic works about Ancient Greece. All that sits under Matthew’s chair is a bottle of water.

‘This is our text,’ he says, pressing his fingers against his copy of the rehearsal script one day when conversation wanders for the third time towards versions of the story that Shakespeare didn’t write. The issue is whether Helen left Greece by choice, or whether Paris kidnapped her, a question that Shakespeare does not address. When someone suggests using Homer’s Iliad to ‘fill in the blanks’, Matthew cuts the discussion short:

Any information that’s of use to us will be in our text, which is not the Iliad. I agree it’s an interesting book and that makes it tempting to use, but that doesn’t mean that it will help us understand what Shakespeare is asking of us. His characters might share the same names as Homer’s, but they’re different people.

In the room, he is calm and teacherly. After hours, he is more blunt on the point:

Our job is to tell stories written by playwrights, so I question the value of anything that takes us further from those words. I find it immensely tiring when actors keep going back to the Iliad. Troilus and Cressida is a fiction based on a fiction based on a fiction, so it’s nonsense to want to keep referring to anything other than what’s in our hands. But, for some actors, things can never be complicated enough. I have even encountered actors who, when you ask them to do something that is written in the script, get out a history book, point at a page and say, ‘My character wouldn’t do that.’ I say: ‘Why do you think that book is of any use to you?’

For similar reasons, Matthew places little value in improvisation as a means of developing character. Rehearsals for Troilus and Cressida are conducted ‘in the present tense’, which is to say that the principal vehicle for understanding characters is present action: the things they say and the things they do. As an actor, Matthew has participated in rehearsal processes grounded in improvisation, such as devising lengthy backstories. Whilst he found some of the tasks intellectually stimulating, the weight of creating memories and amassing research ‘burdened’ him in performance.

It sounds simple: to deliver a compelling performance, an actor needs to know who her character is, and understand the words her character says. But skilled actors can use their craft to try to paper over the gaps in their understanding. Audiences can ‘sniff out that kind of fuzziness,’ Matthew says. When he suspects that an actor doesn’t understand what they are saying, he will ask them to prove that they do by paraphrasing the offending section of the text.

One day, having read the same scene three times, Chris Colquhoun, who plays Hector, is no clearer on why his character makes a detailed and impassioned argument for Helen to be returned to the Greeks, only to reverse himself a few lines later and ask Priam to keep Helen in Troy. Chris shakes his head and turns the script over in his hands as though the answer might be written small in a margin or on the reverse side of the paper. ‘Hector just flips. It’s inconsistent and I don’t think he’d do it.’ Matthew nods sympathetically. ‘But he does do it. The words are right there on the page, so let’s try again to find the reason.’

Within two days, a few actors are twitching in their seats. Frustrated with talk, they want to find a way into the play that uses not only their intellects, but their bodies. Matthew has some sympathy for this. He felt the same way years ago, when the director Richard Wilson introduced him, as an actor, to a reading process similar to the one he now uses. One day, Matthew found the courage to ask his director if the cast could get on their feet. Richard Wilson replied, ‘How can you move until you know who you are?’ ‘That blew my mind,’ Matthew says. ‘It helped me realise that directing isn’t about playing loads of games or doing lots of improvisations, which don’t necessarily help actors. Directing is about detail, and detail is about craft.’

The process can be tiring. Matthew brings acute concentration to the room and demands it in return. Some actors feel cross-examined. One says that some days he feels as though he is back at school, drying up for fear of giving a wrong answer. But the results are tangible. Each day, the performances gain clarity and feel less ‘acted’. The play’s better-known passages, which, being Shakespeare, can so easily feel like self-contained ‘greatest hits’, grow sharp edges and begin to resonate as immediate thoughts.

Week Two

During the second week, Matthew starts to break up the reading process with exercises designed to help the company assemble the world in which the story takes place.

Three words on theme

The actors write down three separate words that to them sum up the play’s themes. The words are then read aloud.

No two answers are the same. For some, the play is about love and honour; for others, betrayal and disorder. The company discusses its differences of opinion and negotiates towards a shared understanding.

Trust

The actors ascribe every other character a number between one and ten that stands for how well their character knows and trusts them.

The disparity tells us a lot about allegiances. Soldier A sees Soldier B as a confidant, but Soldier B sees A as a hanger-on; Soldier C would seek out Soldier D on the battlefield for support, but Soldier D considers C a liability. Most of the numbers are under five: it becomes clear how few allies the actors feel their characters enjoy.

Character ages

The actors ascribe their characters’ ages and line up in age order.

As with the exercise above, asking the actors to articulate their instincts helps put everyone on the same page.

Modern items

The actors think of one modern item that their character might carry with them. They are not to censor or reject their instincts unless they are thinking of an object that would dilute the sense of an isolated world, such as a mobile phone.

The answers suggest how the actors are thinking of their characters at this early stage. Fraser James, playing Aeneas, imagines his character going into battle with dance music pumping into his ears from an iPod; John Stahl’s Nestor carries a steady supply of beta blockers to calm his nerves; Jay Taylor cannot imagine his character Diomedes leaving home without his toothbrush; Matthew Flynn envisages Agamemnon whiling away the evenings with the board game, Risk; Seamus O’Neill believes that Priam would carry a peace treaty with him in the hope that the war might end today; Paul Hunter describes a pack of butter that Thersites might carry around to eat and to rub on his sores.

Hector’s armour