Some notes and quotes and thoughts from the second week:

'I want to hear people say 'why did they say it like that?' I want them to hear differently' - Louis

By the second half of week two it seemed like we were being challenged to start putting everything together. Working the iambic pentameter, the line endings, the antithesis and playing different actions. The main effect this seemed to have when the play was really being worked by the actors in this way - rather than performed - was that it made each thing really specific to right that moment, every new line, every word almost, became an unfolding thing, pass the parcel, suprising the speaker as much as the listener.

Everything matters. Do something with every bit. From the first moment. You can play anything but you have to commit to playing SOMETHING.

Some other things that were noticed or brought to attention by Louis:

Claudius is never named in the play at all. The audience never know his name unless they have a programme. A King With No Name is an unusual thing...like the Queen in Cymbeline, what could it indicate or confuse in/to the imagination, what archetype might it bring into play? There was some discussion around symbols, and the way memory has developed - Louis recommends the book 'The Art of Memory' which explores the Renaissance way of remembering things. He challenged our assumption that the Elizabethans were essentially pretty much the same as us - maybe they actually thought, saw and heard very differently. I was really interested to discover too that the name 'Hamlet' comes from 'Amlothi' or 'Amleth' which means Idiot or Fool. I wonder if it relates to 'Amulet' as well....i think it's interesting on both counts given that there is no other Fool figure in Hamlet, no one else telling the King the truth, walking a fine line between order and chaos, sanity and madness, as you would expect Feste or Touchstone or Lear's Fool to do. The Fool in the Tarot is traditionally the zero card, the chap on the cliff about to obliviously walk off the edge, with only a Dick Whittington bag on a stick and a little dog yapping at his heels for company. Not that I'm talking about 'character' here - I only wonder what might happen if you tried playing the Hamlet with a different title in your head - what might you allow yourself to do in terms of allowing leaps from one different extreme action to another? I still find that one of the trickiest things to do because I still havn't totally got rid of little-trained-actor-voice that says i should be smoothing things out, making sense of things for the audience and telling them exactly what is going on every second. It's why the exercises where other people give you actions are so brilliant, because you can't censor them the way you censor yourself - or at least there's someone else to take the blame if it all goes horribly wrong....

Anyway I just wonder if the Elizabethan audience were so super sophisticated in symbol/image/sound reading, in a way that we as page-trained people are not, that they really would have heard the play differently...that when Hamlet starts quoting Pyhrrus covered in coagulate gore, black as night, that they might have really seen that....I suppose I wonder if their imaginations were better trained, if only because they were so surrounded and pelted with images of heaven and hell and purgatory in a way we can hardly imagine. Images of hell and heaven for most people now being via advertising for Hell Pizza, or variations on a blank white room in Hollywood acompanied by an old man or a beautiful woman, probably with wings. And I suppose I think the more we challenge our imaginations to go even further, the better the play will be, because more of ourselves will be in play....

Louis said that as soon as we touch each other physically it's not that it's a bad thing but it limits the possibilities. And it's possibly more interesting to resist the thing that you want to do - the harder thing being keeping the space open and vulnerable and unknown. Maz talked about closing off the space from the audience being akin to inviting a friend to a party and then not talking to them. Again, the challenge to stretch out the body and stretch out the space - get rid of the thinking time - find one bit of the antithesis then LET IT GO - let the body and the voice be the and, the conduit. Touch each other with the text - the text is very physical anyway - Gertude in the closet scene has 3 massive physical thing happen to her - her eyes get turned into her soul, daggers into her ears, and her heart cleft in twain. Massive. Do more with the words as they come out of you.

Leila did 'O what a rogue and peasant slave am I'. Room consensus that it was really powerful to hear it from a woman.

It's always better to give a solution. Don't play the problem.

Answer positively in the negative. Never let a crisis pass by. An accident is a golden opportunity.

Argue more. Don't be afraid to interrupt each other. It's fun to watch people argue.

Let the good moments as well as the bad moments go. Believe there will be another one.

Score you script with active verbs. Things to do. Train yourself to think actively. FIND YOUR OWN VERBS. Muller pointed out he's just been working with two rap artists and they came up with hundreds....does it come back to a need for language? A need for the power that it gives you? Maybe in an age and a country where very very little is censored and lots of us are content with the power and status we have it's very easy to forget how dangerous language can be in a place where very few people are allowed to speak...you have to need the language - make up your own words if neccessary, beg, borrow, steal from other languages, but find them, the exact right ones...maybe good actions are like sharp tools that you are both using to shape the thing you're making between you - the words are the materials but the actions are the tools, and if you don't have any at all you're just left with a big lump of stuff with no carving or definition to it at all....

Work the antithesis in the prose just as much or even more than in the verse. You have to work just as hard in prose as you do in verse (on line endings, iambic tensions etc,) but differently - find what is repeated, hit the verbs, really find the argument.

Asides - let them be in the room. Let the audience and the other actors decide who can hear or not.

'When we make it difficult for each other we have more fun in the scene' - Louis

We don't have to like each other but we do have to want to engage with each other. Stop getting along. Stop treating each other with respect! (on stage that is).

The similarities between Claudius and Hamlet, Hamlet and Laertes, and Cain and Abel was brought up. Yorick was Michael Jackson on the cover of Vanity Fair. Elena sang directly to the audience as the Gravedigger. Hilarious and sad as each line revealed itself even more apt than the last:

...Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour must she come. Make her laugh at that.

Brilliant.

Katie did a brilliant job of having Laertes really try and just solve the problem in the funeral scene - to make a ceremony where there was none. It's so interesting isn't it - the repetion of the subversion of ritual in the play - King Hamlet's funeral getting mixed in to Gertrude's wedding - Polonius hiding away, Ophelia's making of a funeral for him instead - and then her own being made up by her brother....it's funny, growing up in NZ you never sit on tables and quite often take your shoes off at the front door because certain things are tapu (sacred) - you just get used to the ceremonies that have mingled in with pakeha (white) culture over the years - there's usually a powhiri (welcome) when someone new or important arrives at any marae (meeting house) or institution - I still get tingles over here when someone sits on a table or there's no welcome ceremony where there would be one usually....but for Shakespeare's audience who were so used to ritual and ceremony and so close to all the superstitions of the time, who still believed in witches and fairies just as much as God and the Devil - how huge a tingling impact it must have made to experience this world unfolding before them where 'the Spirit' (of the true King/the land's link to God) is being turned upside-down on every possible level - even in the most basic physical and vocal rituals and actions that are supposed to accompany it...even to the point of it bing called a 'thing'. No wonder Claudius needs to get the hell out of The Mousetrap.

Just noticed that the Duel in Hamlet takes place in about the same moment in the play as the Game happens in act 4 of The Seagull....

Don't be a noodge - Louis



Maddy