I missed the first week of rehearsals, so the first part of what follows is not a bow-by-blow report but a personal appraisal of what I found when I arrived. Later, I give more of a detailed summary of the various exercises in which I have participated. All opinions, factual errors etc. are mine and mine alone etc etc etc

The first thing I noticed about starting last Monday, was that by the mere fact that the rehearsals for a show have started, there is a company, not just a group of various but like-minded folk trying out something on a Wednesday evening. But all those evenings have done their job: I don’t think anyone sat down at the beginning of this four-week period and tried to explain what everyone was there for and what the point was. I think the gathering knew that and just wanted to get on with it. One of the signs of its being a company is that all the actors are settled to their roles and are accepting of the tasks ahead. This is not as blandly habitual as it sounds - in most productions, the business of company-chemistry takes up a lot of time early on, with all that ‘bonding’ stuff - because we don’t need bonding, Hah! The chemistry is there and everyone is ‘on board’. My guess then, is that on the 13th of August, training commenced without much preamble.

Fortunately, I was at the session in January when Louis Scheeder set about the task of clearing the air of the smog of received opinion, so it was no surprise that his tenets, enunciated then and in his excellent article "Neo-Classical Training", had carried the day with everyone who put forward an opinion. There was complete agreement, for example, that describing the action just past was detrimental to the play, his analogy being that one drives by looking through the windscreen and not through the rear-view mirror. Everything we do as actors must move the action forwards, and even when a character seems to be playing for a negative result in the story - such as something destructive or morally bad - in order to get what he or she wants, a positive action is mandatory. In these terms, the opposite of ‘positive’ is not ‘negative’ but ‘descriptive’.

‘Play to win’ is another Scheeder phrase, by which he means that every character goes on stage to make things better for him or herself; to sort out the mess; to work for a positive outcome. It was clear from what members of the company said that after a week of Louis, they were very wary of such terms as ‘the arc of the play’ or the ‘umbrella’ of a speech. In simple terms this means that, rather than play a ‘mood’ or calculate in advance a ‘state’, what we are required to do is to play a series of actions as they are written into the script. The ‘arc’ of the play is between the writer and his audience, and while the audience might well ascribe a ‘state’ to a particular character, that is none of our business to show them what that might be.

On the subject of verse - Scheeder is a self-confessed verse fascist - I noticed that, whereas in January there were a few grumblings about iambic pentameter and such terms being rather stuffy and academic, the idea that the success of our Hamlet will be hugely dependent on our speaking the verse well and effortlessly was, by the time of my arrival, a Factory principle universally accepted.

This rehearsal period is about training, not ‘staging’, ‘production’ or ‘interpretation’. The question before us is “What skills do we need in order to carry out our tasks as actors in this play?” That’s it. All I have done this week, as a member of this extraordinary company, is to train and reflect upon that training. The nature of this process, as it is led by Tim and Tamara, is largely that of dealing with obstacles. By way of example, to practise verse, we use a tool that is both visual and dynamic: a tennis ball. On the last foot of a line or speech, the ball is thrown up, and caught in time for the next foot, whether the speaker is the same or has changed. We have done many hours of this this week, and there will be many more. TC says that until we can do the whole play fluently like this, we are not ready to do it in any way at all.

Other obstacles have included physical ones, like not being allowed within 6 feet of a character; pointing continuously at someone or something on whom our intention is directed; keeping eye contact with a partner; keeping eye contact with a partner while maintaining physical contact with other actors; doing both these things while speaking the play; being made to pause and pick up again; speaking quickly without pausing; doing seemingly silly things because this can throw up unexpected benefits. I could cite more, and I hope that other colleagues will post up exercises that made a particular impact on them.

I must mention a particularly silly game which threw up all sorts of useful stuff. This was the gibberish game, in which characters are given different languages to imitate, such as Albanian, Swahili, Anglo-Saxon and Welsh and so on. The company has its share of comedians, and this exercise gave them full rein. One slipped in words like ‘coal mine’ and ‘cardigan’ into his welsh (whilst apologising to a colleague, who is, I believe, a welsh speaker); another was so convincing in "Albanian" that I was convinced he’d mugged up a real translation; the ghost saying the word ‘Swear’ in Anglo-Saxon - swörë is the nearest I can get to a spelling - brought the house down.

Before I end, I should mention what we did on Friday afternoon, the last session of the week. This gave an idea of where we are in the process, and TC and Tamara, who had become firmer and more picky as the week had gone on, got very demanding (arsey) indeed. We started with the eye-contact/touching game I mentioned earlier (with sight and touch fully engaged, we had to listen very hard), went on to the ‘fight-fans’ version, where two speakers are egged on by a gang of heckling supporters (some of the ladies were really rather abusive, I thought, and one of the Hamlets was openly mocked for his wheat intolerance); then the mood changed with a Japanese tea-ceremony, which was notable for what we might call “the three phases of a silly game”. Phase One is when there is giggling and pranks; Phase Two is when giggling and pranks run out of steam; Phase Three is what happens next, which is always interesting.

There were four other versions of subsequent scenes of the play: dancing to the verse; stereotypical Italian; vowels only; “Do you believe me?”

For this last exercise, one of the Hamlets was asked to remain in the middle of the circle made up of the entire company, and direct each unit of speech to a different person. This person had simply to say whether he or she believed what Hamlet had said or not. If the answer was “yes”, the speech carried on: if the answer was “no”, the unit had to be repeated until the answer changed to “yes”. This was hard enough on those of us in the circle: for the Hamlet, it must have been an ordeal.

Nothing valuable was ever achieved when the task was easy. We know that; we can take more; we will fly.


James Oxley