Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences 9781474257930, 9781474257954, 9781474274005

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

RELATED TITLES Creative Shakespeare, Fiona Banks Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre, edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods Shakespeare’s Theatre and the Effects of Performance, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Will Tosh

Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences Edited by Fiona Banks

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Fiona Banks and contributors, 2019 Fiona Banks and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvii–xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Twelfth Night, Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank, Cesare de Giglio © Shakespeare’s Globe All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5793-0 PB: 978-1-3501-6453-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-7400-5 eBook: 978-1-4742-5794-7 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  vii List of Contributors  ix Foreword  Sarah Frankcom  xiii Acknowledgements  xvii

Introduction  Fiona Banks

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Part One  Actor and Audience: A Theoretical Framework  15 1 Who Are We Talking About When We Talk About ‘the Audience’?  17 Stephen Purcell 2 Shakespeare’s Audiences  Charles Whitney

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3 ‘Do it, England!’: The Actor and the Audience in Hamlet  59 Jeremy Lopez 4 Audiences: The Architecture of Engagement  Susan Bennett

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CONTENTS

5 What Makes a Theatregoer? Habitus, Identity and Interest Development in Adolescent Audiences to Shakespeare  97 Matthew Reason 6 ‘All Eyes’: Experience, Spectacle and the Inclusive Audience in Flute Theatre’s The Tempest  119 Robert Shaughnessy

Part Two  Actors and Audiences: In Their Own Words  139 Introduced by Fiona Banks 7 Hamlet 

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8 A Midsummer Night’s Dream  9 Twelfth Night  Index  263

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ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1.1 4.1 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 8.1 9.1

The Jig, Hamlet 2002, with Mark Rylance The Complete Walk map ‘The boy behind us laughing’ ‘Not enough leg room’ The Flute Theatre, The Tempest: The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, October 2016 Gabriel’s review Globe to Globe Hamlet, Kourion Theatre, Cyprus, 2014 Hamlet 2017: The Almeida Theatre A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Globe 2016 Twelfth Night: The Royal Exchange Theatre, 2017

30 86 108 110 124 135 142 168 195 252

Table 5.1 Participating schools

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CONTRIBUTORS Part One: Actor and Audience: A Theoretical Framework Fiona Banks is a producer, arts educator and writer. She specializes in making theatre that seeks to engage diverse audiences, recognizing their role as co-­creators of the art form; working with leading regional and national theatres to create work that builds new relationships between actors, creatives and audiences. She began her career as a stage manager and agent before training and working as a teacher in London secondary schools. Fiona created and led the learning department at Shakespeare’s Globe, pioneering the training of arts educators, and the development of community theatre and theatre for young people. As an educator Fiona focuses on the use and development of creative approaches to learning, developing and leading postgraduate courses for King’s College London and Cambridge University. She has acted as an adviser to the Department for Education’s National Strategies and the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCA), creating with QCA the first creative assessment tasks for Shakespeare. Fiona is a general and series editor for the Globe Education Shakespeare play editions and author of Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare (2013). She is also currently undertaking PhD research into why audiences engage with Shakespeare in performance. Susan Bennett is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, Canada. She is widely published across a variety of theatre and performance studies topics, with a

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particular interest in the contemporary production and reception of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare Beyond English, a volume co-­edited with Christie Carson, is a critical archive of the Globe to Globe Festival at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2012 (2013). Her latest book, co-­edited with Sonia Massai, addresses the work of director Ivo van Hove including his Shakespeare adaptations Roman Tragedies and Kings of War (Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, 2018). Jeremy Lopez is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. He is General Editor of The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (forthcoming, 2019) and the author of Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (2003), Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama (2014), and numerous essays on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Stephen Purcell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Warwick, UK. His research focuses on the performance of the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the modern stage and screen, and his publications include the books Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage (2009), Shakespeare and Audience in Practice (2013) and Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe (2017). He directs for open-­air theatre company The Pantaloons. Matthew Reason is Professor of Theatre and Performance at York St John University, UK. Publications include Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance (2006), The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre (2010), Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (co-­ edited with Dee Reynolds, 2012), Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (co-­edited with Anja Mølle Lindelof, 2016) and Applied Practice: Evidence and Impact Across Theatre, Music and Art (co-­edited with Nick Rowe, 2017).

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Robert Shaughnessy is Professor of Theatre at the University of Surrey, UK. His books include The Shakespeare Effect: A History of Twentieth-Century Performance (2002), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture (2007), The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare (2011) and Shakespeare in Performance: As You Like It (2017). Charles Whitney is Professor of English Literature and Barrick Distinguished Scholar at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA. He wrote the Introduction to the section ‘Shakespeare’s Early Reception’ for the Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare (ed. Bruce R. Smith, 2016), and Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (2006), which won the 2008 Elizabeth Dietz Award as Best Book in Early Modern Studies. He has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Journal of the History of Ideas, Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England and English Literary Renaissance, and he edited Thomas Lodge, an anthology of notable scholarship past and present. His earlier Francis Bacon and Modernity (1986) also appeared in a German edition (1989). His more recent ecocritical publications include articles on Dekker’s and Middleton’s plague pamphlets, the economics of climate change, and ‘Green Economics and the English Renaissance’ for the anthology Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now (ed. Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady, 2013). He has held Folger Library, Huntington Library and A.W. Mellon fellowships.

Part Two: Actors and Audiences: In Their Own Words Ankur Bahl Maggie Ann Bain Bill Buckhurst Anthony Calf

Tim Carroll Paul Chahidi Mercy Chikoti Miranda Coates

CONTRIBUTORS

Malcolm Cocks Luke Crookes Bethan Cullinane Beth Darlington Jen Davey Fleur Elkerton Sally Elkerton Grainne Flynn Sarah Gooch Michael Gould David Hall Lorna Hartwell Jenny Hewett Lori Hopkins Emily Humphries Jama Musse Jama Jane Langley Rona Kelly Shiela MacLean Natasha Magigi Claire Malyon Kelley Moncrief Alex Mugnaioni Chris Nayak James Newberry

Kate O’Donnell Chu Omambala Theo Parker-Banks Imogen Pethick Lisa Pethick Steve Pethick Will Pethick Bethany Punnett Stuart Rathe Emma Rice Susan Robinson Keith Rogers Matthew Romain Alison Sear Jane Shuter Paul Shuter Juliet Stevenson Jim Stewart Tessa Taylor Ella Veugelers Ian Wainwright Alan Waldock James Wallace Stuart Watson Mo Whittle

FOREWORD Sarah Frankcom

Artistic Director, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

In 2014, Sarah Frankcom launched ‘You, the Audience’, an innovative commitment to creative conversations with audiences at the Royal Exchange Theatre. Since then over 2,150 people have contributed to the creation of the theatre’s Audience Manifesto and the voice of the audience has become fully integrated into the creative and strategic management of the theatre. She talks here about the actor–audience relationship that is central to her work. This same relationship is the focus of Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences. ‘Just because we haven’t said anything doesn’t mean that we haven’t felt anything.’ A member of the audience told me that during one of the discussion sessions we regularly hold with our audiences at the Royal Exchange. She went on to explain that theatre can give us the space and freedom to experience events and emotions in a way that we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to think or feel in other parts of our life. She told me, ‘I feel I’m allowed to feel those things because I can see other people feeling them as well’. We discussed how much as an audience member we watch the audience – how much audience members connect with the responses of other audience members. At the Royal Exchange you can see the audience. That’s a key reason

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why a lot of people love seeing theatre at the Royal Exchange, they love seeing the action of the play, but equally seeing the effect of that on the audience. There is a three-­way relationship between actor, audience as spectator, and audience as performer, that lies at the heart of how we experience theatre. The Royal Exchange is a theatre in the round so you can never forget that the audience are in the room. The theatre you make there is a communal collective act and there is a very clear contract between the audience and the actor. When we started talking with and listening to our audiences we began to understand that there existed a very real depth of feeling about the theatre they were part of making. They felt that they had a relationship with the actors, that they were held by, and part of, an actor’s work, yet they had never previously had the opportunity to talk about this relationship. In some of our conversation groups we heard audiences talk about moments of performance that had stayed with them for thirty or forty years. It was very moving. One gentleman described a moment he had seen many years earlier, yet the memory of it could still make the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, just as they did when he first saw it in performance. That feeling had stayed with him throughout his life. I find that astonishing. I’ve been surprised by how deep the relationship between actor and audience can become. Theatre is becoming an increasingly urgent art form. In a digital world being in the live moment with other people is increasingly rare. That sense of people coming together with a collective focus on one particular thing is an important experience in our culture now. We need to understand what happens between actors and audiences in the live moment – to help us explore how we can become more alive, more relevant and to consider what kinds of question we need to be asking, and what kind of provocation we need to be creating for audiences. There needs to be an equitable relationship between audience and theatre managements. These are some of the questions and issues explored in Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences. How can we understand and empower the audiences? Audiences are the future of theatre,

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simultaneously its co-­creators and best advocates. All of the actors and artists that I’ve questioned about their relationship with the audience have told me that they started as audience, not as artist. That’s really important to register, the audience is where our art form begins; it is nothing without the audience.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank everyone at Bloomsbury and The Arden Shakespeare who has worked on this book, in particular Margaret Bartley for supporting this idea and her patience and guidance throughout this process, and Susan Furber for all of her work throughout the stages of this book’s development. I am extraordinarily grateful to all of the contributors: to Sarah Frankcom, to all of those who have contributed such insightful and thought-provoking essays to Part One and to all of the audience members, actors and directors who gave their time to speak to me for Part Two. Their passion for theatre is truly inspiring and it has been a privilege to spend the past eighteen months exploring with them what lies at the heart of the actor–audience relationship. Part Two of this book required the assistance of a great many people. I would like to thank: the Almeida Theatre, Jane Arnold-Forster, Rebecca Austin, Monica Bakir, Doug Buist, Lucy Butterworth, Neil Constable, June Cooper, Robin Craig, Amanda Dalton, Tony Diggle, Jennifer Edwards, Fluellen Theatre Company, Jo Furber, Globe Research, Imogen Greenburg, Nick Harris, Anthony Hewitt, Michelle Hickman, Joanne Luck, Sandra Lynes, Marion Marrs, Jo Mathews, Anneka Morley, Susie Newberry, Lottie Newton, Savitri Patel, Jo Philpotts, Questors Theatre, Peter Richards, Nick Robbins, Nina Romancikova, the Royal Exchange Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, Paul Shuter, Patrick Spottiswoode, Amanda Veugelers, Bastian Veugelers, Ella Veugelers, Harry Veugelers, Jenny Ward and Beryl Whiting. Particular thanks are due to Will Tosh for all of his practical and moral support and to the wonderful Farah Karim-Cooper for all of her suggestions, insight and friendship. I’m indebted

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to Adam Coleman, Louise Domoney-Ward, Kate Jamie, Kate Richards and Chris Stafford for their love and friendship throughout this process. My very special thanks to Julia Blades, who is simply amazing, and to John Parker, the kindest and wisest writer I know. This book is dedicated to John and Theo, with all my love and gratitude. Fiona Banks

Introduction Fiona Banks

This book was inspired by Carol Rutter and Faith Evans’ Clamorous Voices. Published in 1988, it comprised interviews with Sinead Cusack, Paola Dionisotti, Fiona Shaw, Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter, focusing on their work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the roles they played there. I read it at that time as a student and was struck by the power of their voices. Reading their words offered a window into the world of making theatre that seemed clearer because of the directness of the actresses’ testimony. The book stayed with me in a way that I doubt a more heavily mediated account of their work would. This book too is a book about voices: the voices of scholars, currently conducting and publishing audience research, the voices of theatre makers and actors, and the voice of the audience. The purpose of this volume is to bring these voices, often disparate and in the case of the audience usually unheard, together in one place at one time as we journey beyond the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death into the next 400 years of our relationship with his plays in performance. All of the voices in this book are ‘clamorous’ too: strong, powerful and, above all, richly varied voices. They reflect a diversity of

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viewpoints and approaches to audience scholarship and the ‘infinite variety’ of actor and audience response to each other in performance. One of the key challenges of audience research is this variety; there exist as many different responses and ideas as there are members of an audience. An audience can be, and act as, a collective but equally it is a group of distinct people each with an individual response to each moment of a play in performance. That response in turn is contingent upon multiple factors such as that individual’s previous life experience, theatre-­going experience and the experience of his or her day prior to the point at which he or she stepped into a theatre auditorium. There are no simple one-­size-fits-­all deductions or conclusions to be drawn from audience research, but rather a growing portfolio of understanding of how the complex act of co-­creation that takes place between actor and audience works. This complexity is, possibly, why audience research has begun to grow as a field of study only in the last thirty years. Practically it is not unproblematic to capture varied and detailed audience response to plays in production. It was indeed one of the main challenges of creating this book. Yet it is this challenge and complexity that makes the study of audiences such a fascinating and worthwhile field of research. The essays from scholars in Part One of this book have been chosen to represent this diversity of audience studies and to highlight different methodologies for interrogating audience response. They have been selected to take the reader on a journey designed to build knowledge and understanding of current thought and approaches in the field of audience research; to challenge our conceptions of what an audience is, or might be; and to illustrate the different ways in which we might begin to process and interrogate audience response. They draw on a wide range of sources: literary texts; secondary history; archives; audience interviews or questionnaires; and personal experience, reflecting the rich diversity of audience research in the late 2010s. The presence and idea of an audience lies at the centre of any description of theatre, yet theatre audience research (in the

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non-­marketing sense of the term) remains a fairly new area of focus. In Theatre and Audience (2009), Helen Freshwater gives a brilliant overview of the development of audience research and the history of our understanding of audience. Those readers seeking a literature review of critical work in this area should refer to Freshwater’s comprehensive review in that book. One of the early books to be published in the field of audience research was Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. First published in 1990, it has become a central text and point of reference. Since 1990 a growing number of academics have gone on to develop work on theatre audiences. The contributors to Part One of this book represent the best of that practice; their ongoing studies have led to a deeper understanding of the complex nature of the relationship between actor and audience. Susan Bennett contributes a chapter to this volume; her voice is at the heart of how we now understand and interpret the audience. In a book of voices there could be no better place to begin than with the voice of Bennett, a formative scholar in the field. I interviewed her about the changing landscape of theatre audience research and on the changes that have taken place in the arts that have influenced that research, since Theatre Audiences was first published. Our conversation follows. Theatre Audiences came about, in part, as a way to seek to address the fact that theatre studies in general and Shakespeare studies in particular had been largely focused on plays as texts. The book came out of my PhD thesis and at the time was considered quite revolutionary. The early 1990s was a buoyant time in the university sector, universities were hiring new staff and as a result there were suddenly a lot of scholars of my generation engaged in work within the field of cultural materialism. Theatre Audiences belonged as part of this movement and was positioned alongside other field-­changing texts such as The Feminist Spectator as Critic by Jill Dolan [University of Michigan Press, 1988].

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  In 1990, then, very little focus was given to performance. That is now no longer the case. This change is exemplified by the Shakespeare Association of America conference schedule. Back then it would perhaps feature one session on Shakespeare in performance, now it is not unusual to see as many as half of the seminars related to some question of performance. Today there is a growing body of scholars conducting very interesting research in the field, whether it be concerned with mainstream theatre production, amateur companies or Shakespeare in prisons; there are so many areas of inquiry that have only come into focus in the years since Theatre Audiences was written.   This expansion of interests came about partly because of the demands of funding agencies such as the Arts Council in the UK for increased access and diversity, but also more generally because of the financial climate for theatres over the last several decades. Theatres began to focus on their audiences, working to create an ‘experience’ for them, a more relaxed environment. Today people interact more easily, take their drinks into the auditorium, etc. The ‘rules’ for audience behaviour do not feel as strict as they were twenty-­eight years ago.   The model in Theatre Audiences has proved sufficiently flexible to respond to the new types of theatre and theatrical approach that have emerged since its publication: theatres such as the Globe Theatre (which did not exist at the time when the book was written), or the work of companies such as Tara Arts or Two Gents Productions have changed attitudes to Shakespeare’s plays and attracted new and diverse audiences for the work. The period since the book’s first publication has also seen developments in cultural policy. This is exemplified by work on audience building spearheaded by UK and Australian arts councils and by organizations such as the Wallace Foundation in the US. Theatre audience research during this period hasn’t so much changed, as built to a point where it’s now quite unusual to see work on Shakespeare in performance without a consideration of audiences.

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  Often now there is a researcher embedded within a theatre company who works quite closely with audiences. The embedded researcher has become an important phenomenon. Some of the newest generation of scholars, in particular, are choosing to work very closely with their local theatre producers. This is a really positive development. It’s encouraging and exciting to see academic and theatre producers working in this manner. Historically sometimes this relationship has not been as easy as it might be, with suspicion on both sides. But now it does feel that there is a real understanding of the mutual benefits to both theatre and scholarship of such work. Higher education institutions do a great deal to build theatre audiences. We take our students to the theatre and know that a great many of them will go again and take friends and family. The courses themselves build students’ knowledge of and commitment to theatre, so it’s the way a great many people begin to identify themselves as part of a theatre audience.   Theatre is going through a period where it is very robust and I hope this continues. There is so much exciting Shakespeare everywhere around the world and we need to study Shakespeare in performance in all its diversity. Shakespeare studies cannot only reflect the experiences of people who live in London or New York. This diversity of work is a real strength and key to our growing understanding of the plays and their production in the twenty-­first century. I’m reminded by Jen Harvie’s work, though, that we need to be wary of theatre audiences becoming just one more consumer demographic. The rise of cultural consumerism is good when it is expanding the audience, but the conditions under which this has happened need examining. Although some theatre companies like the Globe and the National Theatre in London offer some reduced-­price tickets, a great many seats remain expensive. For a great many, going to the theatre is still out of financial reach.   Partnerships between scholarship and cultural institutions are so important to the continued development of our

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understanding of audience. Symposia such as the ones held by the Globe play an important role in forging conversations between academics and theatre professionals. The audience for any kind of cultural engagement only begins to grow because cultural organizations go out to meet that audience, without an expectation that the audiences will find them. This book sits in the cultural landscape described by Bennett, part of a growing body of work that brings together scholars and theatre makers. The audience, too, are theatre makers, for without them there would be no performance. In this context the time seemed right for this volume – to bring together the voices, the players, that together shape our understanding of the role of the theatre audience. Theatregoer Luke Crookes, whom I interviewed for Chapter  9: Twelfth Night, reflected that the actor–audience dynamic is a ‘messy business’. This perfectly articulates for me the challenge and the joy of any audience research. My own interest began as a teacher in the secondary school classroom: no one understands the fragile, exciting, challenging nature of engagement with an audience more, I suspect, than a teacher; it was nurtured by over nineteen years working at Shakespeare’s Globe where I created and led the Globe’s work for young people and communities. The Globe taught all of us so much about the nature of the actor–audience relationship and how in turn our knowledge of that relationship could lead to a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s plays (an area explored by Jeremy Lopez in Chapter  3). I also observed during that period that actors, almost without exception, talk a great deal about the audience (Juliet Stevenson explores this phenomenon in Chapter 7). But very rarely, with the exception of post-­show talks, do actors and audience meet outside of the act of performance. At these talks the discussion is usually heavily mediated and the actors tend to be in a position where they are imparting information, rather than part of a knowledge exchange. It is unusual for audiences to share their thoughts and response to a play in any

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detail: they are out of the door, or in the theatre bar, where ironically many of the actors are too. There exist few opportunities for any meaningful dialogue to take place, or for us to learn from each party’s experience of the theatre they have just made together. As Bennett notes, in recent years theatre organizations have begun to think in greater depth about their relationship with their audiences. Shakespeare’s Globe, Globe Research and the Royal Exchange Theatre are most notable in this respect. This work is evident in the interviews from the actors and audiences in Chapters 7 and 9. April 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Few could have imagined in 1616 that 400 years later Shakespeare’s name would be universally known and that he would be regarded as the most sucessful playwright of all time, his plays performed daily around the world. The key to understanding this enduring popularity must lie with audiences. It is the audiences and their continuing appetite for Shakespeare’s plays that give him his extraordinary international profile and cultural status. Through their continued patronage of Shakespeare in performance audiences have kept Shakespeare’s work alive through four centuries – to be reimagined and rediscovered by each new generation of actors and directors. So why do audiences appear to enjoy Shakespeare’s plays so much that they keep coming back for more? Ironically while we know much about Shakespeare’s work and the history of his plays in performance we know relatively little about the response of audiences to his plays. The time seems right to shine a spotlight on the role of our contemporary audience and to explore the actor–audience relationship. It would be regrettable if any theatregoers, scholars and theatre makers looking back in 2416 knew as little about Shakespeare’s audience of the early twenty-­first century as we do of the audience of Shakespeare’s time. This book seeks to capture the response of the audience; to give the audience a voice, and place that voice alongside those of actors and scholars to give us an insight into the dynamic at the heart of Shakespeare in performance – to capture and record this moment in time.

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Part One:  Actor and audience: a theoretical framework This part provides a critical framework through which to interrogate the audience and actor interviews in Part Two. It is a critical journey within which the reader can explore and interrogate notions of audience. Each chapter builds upon the other and provides a different perspective from which to consider the role of the audience.

Chapter 1:  Who are we talking about when we talk about ‘the audience’? Stephen Purcell begins by exploring what we mean when we talk about the audience, giving an overview of some of the ways in which our understanding of audience is constructed. He explores how the audience can become considered as a unified whole, when in fact an audience comprises individuals, who may not be of one thought at all. Purcell highlights the ways in which there is an audience anticipated in all of Shakespeare’s plays, created, he argues, with more than one type of audience in mind. Importantly Purcell reminds us that any audience imagined in Shakespeare’s texts is not ‘us’, but an audience that existed over 400 years ago, product of a different time. Purcell goes on to explore the relationship between text, audience and performance and the power of the audience to create and shape the cultural context in which future productions of a play are received and understood.

Chapter 2:  Shakespeare’s audiences Charles Whitney focuses on the audiences of Shakespeare’s own time and examines the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays were shaped by those audiences’ expectations, interests and ‘practices of response’. The chapter provides an overview of

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the historical context in which the plays were written, played and received. It provides us with an understanding of Shakespeare’s original audiences, providing an illuminating insight into theatre companies and playing conditions of the period, providing comparisons with theatre-­going audiences today.

Chapter 3:  ‘Do it, England!’: the actor and the audience in Hamlet Jeremy Lopez takes the ideas explored by Purcell and Whitney and applies them to a particular text – Hamlet – exploring how audience engagement is constructed from within the text itself. Hamlet, asserts Lopez, belongs to a group of characters who are aware of their ‘own fictional, theatrical status’. This awareness makes the play an ideal vehicle through which to explore and apply knowledge of Shakespeare’s audiences and to begin to consider how they can shape our understanding of modern audience reception and response. Through close textual analysis Lopez considers how the audience’s role is constructed in text and performance, exploring how such an understanding of the role of the audience can facilitate a deeper understanding of the play.

Chapter 4:  Audience: the architecture of engagement Susan Bennett builds on the notions of audience highlighted in the first three chapters, putting the focus onto architecture as a ‘meaning-­making system’ and a ‘meaning-­making site’. She considers the relationship between architecture and audience through two specific events: the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival, at Shakespeare’s Globe, and The Complete Walk as part of the Globe’s celebrations for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, exploring how ‘the ways in which the meaning of

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performances for audiences are bound up with the meaning already associated with the places of their production’. The first four chapters of this volume provide an overview of the key considerations for any exploration of audience; focusing in turn on audience, historical context, text and architecture. The final two chapters in Part One consider the audience of the future and question the nature of audience and the boundaries between performer and spectator.

Chapter 5:  What makes a theatregoer? Habitus, identity and interest development in adolescent audiences to Shakespeare Matthew Reason asks how a theatregoer is made and examines the ways in which interest in theatre is formed in adolescent spectators. He explores the relationship between identity and theatre-­going and encourages us to think about the next generation of audiences, analysing what makes young people engage with Shakespeare in performance, focusing on a school trip to see Othello. The chapter examines the interaction between social context, theatrical experience and the cultural experience of the play. It calls for theatres to consider, and if necessary change, their relationships with adolescent audiences if they wish theatre-­going to become part of a young person’s habitus and self-­identity.

Chapter 6:  ‘All eyes’: experience, spectacle and the inclusive audience in Flute Theatre’s The Tempest In this moving personal account Robert Shaughnessy challenges us to re-­examine notions of audience, analysing the experience of Flute Theatre’s The Tempest for its spectators and

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participants, highlighting the right of all to access Shakespeare’s plays. Shaughnessy explores the interface between experience, spectacle and art form, asking: What is Shakespeare in performance? Who has access to Shakespeare in performance and ownership of it?

Part Two:  Actors and audiences: in their own words . . . is just that – a series of extracts of actors and audiences talking about their experience of engaging with Shakespeare in performance and the role each other play in creating that engagement. This part is divided into three chapters – Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night – and each chapter features several productions of that play that either began or ended their performance life during the period 1 January 2016–23 April 2017. Each chapter is structured to give a view of the play in production throughout that period. The only exception to this is Shakespeare’s Globe production of Twelfth Night that was performed in 2002 and 2012. The reasons for this are explored in Chapter 9. It was clear from discussions with audience interviewees who were regular theatregoers that their experience of that production shaped their responses to future productions of the play. All of our responses as an audience are contingent on our previous experience. This is a useful example, and reminder of that phenomenon, hence its inclusion. I carried out a great many interviews with audience members from a wide range of Shakespeare productions, so only a selection of those conversations is represented here. When editing and selecting the final chapters I looked for plays for which I had compiled a range of interviews from diverse productions and audiences. My choices were, of course, also governed by what was in production at that time. It was important that each chapter had a clear arc and represented a

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range of the Shakespeare in performance in my given time period. Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night emerged as clear editorial choices. Each provided a broad spectrum of examples of actor and audience response. All of the productions featured are UK-based. A comprehensive study of the amazing wealth of Shakespeare in production around the world would have been a fascinating and worthwhile undertaking, but it was outside the scope of this volume. It was important that there was space in each chapter for audience members to reflect at length about their experience, rather than for me to provide heavily edited excerpts. Equally it was essential that the reflections of spectator and spectated were juxtaposed in each chapter and that the reader was given enough information to draw their own connections from the testimony of both. In order to allow space in the volume to achieve this I made the decision to focus on three plays rather than provide less information on a wider range of texts. All extracts in these chapters come from an interview with the person concerned. I have sought to be more curator than editor and have presented these interviews as I recorded them with as little as possible editorial interference. The purpose of this book is not to interpret these comments but to capture and, most importantly, to share them. They are offered for the reader to interpret and to connect with other comments and the essays in this book. It’s worth noting that this book seeks to consider why audiences engage with theatre; its remit is not to explore why audiences might disengage: that purpose is reflected in all extracts. My purpose with these chapters is to explore simply why the audience appetite for Shakespeare remains, 400 years after his death. Those aspects of a production that alienated audiences are therefore not the focus of this work. Some of the audience members interviewed for this book were over seventy years old and had been seeing Shakespeare all their lives. Others were in their late teens and just beginning to go to the theatre without being taken by a parent. The

Introduction

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youngest interviewee was ten and spoke with his family and friends about his experience of watching Twelfth Night (the Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank production) at Shakespeare’s Globe. I have largely resisted providing biographical information about the interviewee unless it is relevant to the interview. Their voices speak clearly without embellishment. Practically this would also have been impossible, as their rich and wonderful life stories could be another book. They were identified through theatre networks or by simply approaching people who had made comments about the productions on social media. Theatre networks such as ‘friends’ organizations naturally provided interviewees who felt a strong connection with a particular theatre (although many were members of several theatres’ ‘friends’ schemes). It also gave interviewees a framework and security that enabled them to confidently engage with a previously unknown editor. In contrast social media offered a method of accessing audience members that was open to all. I messaged people who had commented on a production on the theatre’s social media pages. I was surprised by the number of positive responses I received. Those contacted invariably agreed to an interview. Actors were approached through existing contacts or theatre managements, who were enormously helpful in putting me in touch with actors and audience members. Some people feature in one-­off extracts, others return to talk about several plays in performance. When I started interviewing it became clear that some interviewees had tickets for multiple productions throughout the year. These people were kind and generous, allowing me to talk to them after each production, thus providing consistency at the core of these chapters. These interviews sit alongside those with interviewees who attended only one production, providing a broad spectrum of response. The recurrent audience interviewees are almost like tour guides through the book, giving us a valuable insight into their theatre-­going experience over an eighteen-­month period. I was truly humbled by the passion I found amongst regular theatregoers. Their commitment and enthusiasm for

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

Shakespeare in performance could rival any fan base in the sporting world. Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences provides a snapshot of audience scholarship and the views of actors and audiences at the moment in time in which we begin the next 400 years of our relationship with Shakespeare in performance, a picture taken of the period between 1 January 2016 and 23 April 2017. It is, I hope, a form of base-­camp marker from which we can move forward into the next 400 years and explore new dimensons of audience research.

PART ONE

Actor and Audience: A Theoretical Framework

1 Who Are We Talking About When We Talk About ‘the Audience’? Stephen Purcell

Reflecting on the reconstructed Globe’s Prologue Season in 1996, the theatre’s then-­new artistic director Mark Rylance recounted a story of the final scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which he had played Proteus: When Valentine asked Julia to forgive me and take me back, the audience shouted out – ‘Don’t do it, Julia!’ And I’m thinking – ‘My God, if she doesn’t have me back, this is what it feels like to have a mob around you who might take justice into their own hands!’ So my pleading as a character was greatly motivated! And she took me back as she never had before, in defiance of their merciless justice. In that way the audience is shaping the narrative.1 Indeed, one of the discoveries Rylance and his company made during this and subsequent seasons at the Globe was the tremendous power the audience had in an open-­air playhouse

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of this sort. But who, precisely, was Rylance talking about here? When he claimed that ‘the audience’ called out ‘Don’t do it, Julia!’, he was of course exaggerating; in Globe research fellow Pauline Kiernan’s account of the same performance, she recalls a single ‘loud, clear, heartfelt voice’ from the gallery shouting the phrase. She, too, records this as a moment at which the playing of this scene was altered ‘by public demand – literally’.2 According to Kiernan, actress Stephanie Roth, who played Julia, ‘changed the way she played the scene’ after this, acknowledging ‘the pain and guilt, the humiliation and remorse that had gone before’, and developing ‘a complex, poignant moment, rather than a simplistic, comic one’.3 In Rylance’s anecdote, the audience response prompted a live counter-­response from the actors, shifting the meaning of the scene in the moment of playing it; in Kiernan’s, it provoked reflection on the part of the actors and a permanent alteration to the production. Given the evident significance of this particular audience interjection, it is fascinating to read a third account of it, in which another observer heard the outburst differently: in David Nathan’s review for the Jewish Chronicle, ‘a groundling shouts, “Go to it Julia,” as Stephanie Roth’s innocent heroine is urged to forgive’, and Nathan wonders whether this response had been ‘sought by director Jack Shepherd’.4 In Nathan’s account, the interjection comes not only from a different part of the theatre (the yard rather than the gallery), but carries almost the opposite meaning: ‘Go to it’ suggests encouragement rather than the hostility to Proteus sensed by Rylance. This chapter aims to give an overview of some of the ways in which notions of ‘the audience’ are constructed by Shakespearean plays in performance. I begin with this story because it indicates some of the slipperiness that inevitably surrounds discussions of ‘the audience’. We have the elision of a single voice with a collective identity (‘a mob’), in which the response of a lone spectator comes to stand for that of the whole crowd (which may, of course, have actually contained spectators with all kinds of different feelings about Proteus

Who Are ‘the Audience’?

19

and Julia’s reunion). We have a sense of the ways in which audience response can provide a very influential kind of feedback to performers, both in the moment of performance and for the duration of a whole run. We have the idea that particular audience reactions can deliberately be ‘sought’ by a production. We have the notion that audience activity can go beyond mere ‘response’ and become an active part of the performance. We have an example of an audience reaction that in turn provoked other spectator responses. And, finally, we have an illustration of the ultimate unreadability of audience response, which in both the moment of performance and in subsequent accounts can be interpreted in different, even polarized ways. There is, or rather was, an audience anticipated within the text of each of Shakespeare’s plays. This audience was historical and more or less specific. The plays were probably composed with more than one type of audience in mind: Shakespeare must have written some of them with the reasonable expectation that they might be performed before relatively diverse popular audiences at open-­air ‘public’ theatres like the Globe, regional audiences on tour, more exclusive audiences at indoor ‘private’ theatres like the Blackfriars, and elite audiences at the court.5 These audiences are, of course, lost to time: when a modern audience of Twelfth Night hears that Malvolio ‘does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’ (3.2.74–6), for example, they may get an impression of the grotesque sight being described, but are unlikely to spot what an Elizabethan audience would probably have recognized as a reference to Edward Wright’s 1600 Map of the World.6 Likewise, when the same character is described as ‘a kind of Puritan’ (2.3.136), modern spectators may understand what is meant, but we cannot share in the currency this kind of charge must have had for a group of people watching a play in a society in which theatre and Puritanism were so fundamentally at odds. It is important to remember, then, that the audiences imagined by the texts may be broad and loosely defined, but they are certainly not us.

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

But texts are not merely reactive to an existing audience. In some ways, they also create the audience – or at least they shape it, through the way in which they address the imagined group. The most obvious moments in which Shakespeare’s plays do this are the prologues, epilogues and chorus speeches where an audience is directly and unambiguously addressed. Six of Shakespeare’s plays are bookended with speeches of this sort;7 a further four have epilogues only, and four feature a chorus figure who speaks to the audience during the play itself.8 Shakespeare (or possibly, in some cases, his co-­author) tends to use such speeches to emphasize the agency of the audience in determining the success, or otherwise, of the performance. They are often directly instructional, full of imperatives: the Prologue to Henry VIII, for example, requests its audience to ‘Think ye see / The very persons of our noble story / As they were living’ (25–7), while the Chorus to Henry V asks spectators to ‘let us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work’ (P.17–18). Some are direct demands for attention: to ‘Open your ears’ (2H4, I.1), or to ‘Be attent’ (Per, 3.0.11). The audience figured in Shakespeare’s texts, then, has an ambiguous status. Its members are there to be guided and instructed, often insistently: ‘Work, work your thoughts,’ says Henry V’s Chorus, almost like an impatient schoolteacher (3.0.25). But the stage figures who deliver these speeches are also acutely aware of the audience’s power to make or break the play’s fortunes. Throughout Shakespeare’s prologues, epilogues and chorus speeches, spectators are flattered and deferred to; they are described as ‘gentle’ in eight different plays,9 and begged for their ‘patience’ in six.10 Frequently, the tone is that of an offender pleading for forgiveness: the spectators of Henry V are thus asked to ‘pardon’ the presentation of so great a subject as the battle of Agincourt ‘On this unworthy scaffold’ (P.8–10), those of Pericles to forgive the use of ‘one language in each several clime / Where our scene seems to live’ (4.4.6–7), and those of The Winter’s Tale to ‘Impute it not a crime’ that that play skips sixteen years between its third and fourth acts (4.1.4).11

Who Are ‘the Audience’?

21

There was a very good reason for this anxiety. As Tiffany Stern explains, speeches of this sort – which she calls ‘stage-­ orations’ – were not necessarily a permanent part of the plays to which they are attached, but often composed especially (and exclusively) for the play’s first performances. Spectators, she notes, would have paid double to attend the highly popular first-­day performances of new plays, and this higher fee would have given them the privilege of deciding a play’s fortunes: ‘[T]he spectators’ “judgement”, solicited at the end of the first performance, would shape what was to be altered or cut from the play – and, more than that, would determine whether or not the play would “survive” to be performed again.’12 No wonder then, the anxiety of the Epilogue to Henry VIII that ‘ten to one this play can never please / All that are here’ (1–2). Several of Shakespeare’s stage-­orations express a fear that the play will be hissed.13 The figure who speaks the epilogue in Shakespeare often makes abject pleas for applause, positioning himself as a powerless beggar and throwing himself upon the audience’s mercy.14 The audience constructed in these texts, then, is a potentially capricious benefactor, both a friend and a disruptive force. It is worth observing, though, that if Stern is correct, the audience projected by such speeches may have been a one-­time phenomenon, and is not a vital component of the enduring texts. With the exception of the few stage-­ orations that provide important narrative details (such as those of Henry V, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale), such speeches can easily be cut – indeed, in modern performances, they often are. These speeches aside, then, do Shakespeare’s plays project a particular identity for their audiences? The theatre semiotician Marco De Marinis finds it helpful to think of the ‘model spectator’ implied in a play’s text, a spectator ‘who recognizes all the codes of the performance text in question, reconstructing the entire structure of the performance text in the way that is textually proposed by the sender’.15 The ‘model spectator’, he explains, is not an actual spectator, but a feature of the play: the ‘strategy of interpretive cooperation foreseen by, and

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

variously inscribed in, the performance text’.16 The implication of De Marinis’s argument is that the author of a text (or the director of a production) is a ‘sender’, transmitting a complex code to an audience who are modelled as ‘receivers’; thus, despite the vagaries of audience response, of conflicting interpretations and different emotional reactions, there is a particular response that is desired by the text and is in some way coded into it. But in fact De Marinis recognizes that not all texts work in this way: he distinguishes between ‘closed’ performances, which ‘predict [a] specific addressee’, and ‘open’ ones, which are ‘intended to reach a fairly nonspecific addressee’ and ‘do not foresee a rigidly predetermined interpretive process as a requirement for their success, but allow the audience a variable margin of freedom deciding up to what point they can control the cooperation’.17 The extent to which Shakespeare’s plays are ‘open’ or ‘closed’, in De Marinis’s terminology, is a key debate. For some critics, such as E.A.J. Honigmann, Shakespeare ‘leaves as little as possible to chance: he adjusts his plotting, and much else besides, to ensure that the audience will respond as he wants’.18 In his book Seven Tragedies (and its later reissue Seven Tragedies Revisited), Honigmann discusses certain characters such as Lear’s Fool as ‘response-­regulators’, textual figures who prompt the audience to interpret the events of the narrative in much the same way that they do themselves; he calls Henry V’s Chorus ‘probably the most important response regulator in the canon’.19 Honigmann’s book aims to show how Shakespeare ‘nudged or dictated the audience-­response’, so that, for example, when Lear enters ‘fantastically dressed with weeds’, Edgar’s line ‘O thou side-­piercing sight!’ ‘guides the audience to the correct response’.20 Thus, though Honigmann recognizes that in some of Shakespeare’s plays ‘the response may pull simultaneously in different directions’, there are particular responses that are simply either ‘correct’ or ‘wrong’.21 In a similar vein, Robert Hapgood, motivated by a self-­confessed ‘neo-­conservative desire . . . to reassert the primacy of the writer’s creative presence’, argues in Shakespeare

Who Are ‘the Audience’?

23

the Theatre-Poet that Shakespeare ‘often drives with loose reins yet he does move his playgoers and players along in definite directions, with a firm yet supple hand’.22 For Hapgood, then, Shakespeare’s alternating presentation of Macbeth’s ‘public and private selves’ ensures that even those spectators most inclined to identify with the character ‘will not – if they are responsive to Shakespeare’s pointers – be able to do so altogether’.23 Implicit in both Honigmann’s and Hapgood’s arguments is a recognition that spectators do not always respond to Shakespeare’s plays along the lines they argue are inherent in the plays. This suggests to me that it is audiences, not texts, who make meaning, and that attempts to identify ready-­made responses in the texts occlude both historical difference and the texts’ own receptivity to variant interpretations. I am inclined to think of Shakespeare’s plays as rather more ‘open’, their meanings dependent on the ‘play’ of actors and spectators rather than pre-­programmed in the texts themselves. I am reminded of Roland Barthes’s famous argument that the process of making meaning from a text is best understood ‘as play, activity, production, practice’:24 ‘text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multi-­dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.’25 Nonetheless, it would be reckless not to recognize that this ‘play’ takes place within a scope marked out by the text. It is a simple fact of the texts, for example, that some characters are granted more speech than others; that some characters, such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Falstaff or Iago, are given multiple soliloquies and asides in which they explain their inner thoughts, while other characters get none at all. Precisely what these patterns of soliloquies and asides mean for the positioning of the audience is, however, a matter of taste and convention. The word ‘soliloquy’, from the Latin solus (alone) and loqui (to speak), literally means a speech to oneself, but it is not a term that Shakespeare ever used himself, and it is by no means certain that characters who ‘soliloquize’

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

in Shakespeare are merely addressing themselves.26 Indeed, certain Shakespearean ‘soliloquies’ refer quite explicitly to the presence of the audience. For example, Aaron begins 2.2 of Titus Andronicus alone onstage, hiding a bag of gold, as he makes the observation, He that had wit would think that I had none, To bury so much gold under a tree And never after to inherit it. (2.2.1–3) He immediately makes it clear that he imagines such sceptics to be watching him as he speaks, explaining the rationale for his seemingly inexplicable actions: Let him that thinks of me so abjectly Know that this gold must coin a stratagem Which, cunningly effected, will beget A very excellent piece of villainy. (2.2.4–7) In a similar moment in The Taming of the Shrew, Petruccio explains his plans for ‘taming’ Katherine while he is alone onstage at the end of 4.1. His final couplet indicates not only that he is aware of the presence of the audience, but that he imagines himself as actively in dialogue with them: He that knows better how to tame a shrew, Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show. (4.1.199–200) Other examples are less clear-­cut, but can be seen to invite direct address, especially when played in a shared-­light space in which the audience is visible. When Iago asks ‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’ (Othello, 2.3.331), it may simply be a rhetorical flourish as he speaks to himself, but is

Who Are ‘the Audience’?

25

probably more naturally played as a direct question to the audience. When Leontes suggests that ‘many a man there is even at this present, / Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th’arm, / That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence’ (WT, 1.2.191–3), he could be making a general observation about the world, but ‘at this present’ implies that he is referring to the playhouse audience. Some soliloquies, on the other hand, are harder to play as direct address. Lady Macbeth, for example, directs the majority of her first two soliloquies to absent figures: first to Macbeth (1.5.15–30), then to the ‘Spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts’ (1.5.40–50) and ‘thick Night’ (1.5.50–4). Enobarbus’s death speech in Antony and Cleopatra is likewise spoken mostly to the moon (4.9.9–21) and the absent Antony (4.9.21–6). This is not to say that members of the audience cannot be cast as these addressees here – merely that these speeches do not allow so much scope for the audience to be addressed as a theatre audience. For some critics and practitioners, direct audience address is the exclusive province of clowns and villains. Bert O. States argues that whereas characters ‘like Aaron, Edmund, and Iago talk easily to the pit’, it would be ‘unthinkable for a character like Lear or Macbeth – or even Hamlet, who is brother to the clown – to peer familiarly into the pit because there is something in the abridgement of aesthetic distance that gives the lie to tragic character and pathos’.27 Some actors have felt that even Iago cannot speak directly to the audience without risking the integrity of the tragedy; the nineteenth-­century actor Edwin Booth, for example, felt that it was best ‘always to ignore the audience’ when playing the role, since ‘if you can forget that you are a “shew” you will be natural’.28 When James Earl Jones played Othello in 1981–2, he found himself frustrated by the laughter generated by his Iago, Christopher Plummer. Reflecting on the play afterwards, Jones concluded: ‘Iago needs to soliloquize – to leave us alone and do his job. The director needs to be quite clear that a soliloquy is not a wink at the audience, but a character’s conversation with his own psyche, his own conscience or godhead.’29

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

But these perspectives may be rooted more in the conventions of modern realism than they are in the texts themselves. Indeed, Bridget Escolme has pointed out that States’s language of ‘peering’ into the ‘pit’ indicates his assumption ‘that the tragedies he mentions are being performed in the proscenium arch theatre with its footlights and darkened auditorium’.30 She argues that direct address is far from incompatible with serious drama, and that in fact Shakespeare’s texts ‘are dependent for their effects of subjectivity upon the potential for direct encounter between performer and spectator’.31 For Escolme, Shakespeare’s stage figures can want things from the audience. While characters in naturalistic plays are separated from the audience by an imaginary fourth wall, she argues, Shakespeare’s stage figures can have designs upon the audience: ‘They want the audience to listen to them, notice them, approve their performance, ignore others on stage for their sake.’32 Thus, for example, when David Warner played Hamlet in 1965, he spoke his soliloquies to the audience as if the character had needs that only the audience could satisfy: as the critic Ronald Bryden explained, ‘This is a Hamlet desperately in need of counsel, help, experience, and he actually seeks it from the audience in his soliloquies’.33 Director Tim Carroll explained to me that when he worked on soliloquies at Shakespeare’s Globe, he would encourage his actors to think about their objectives towards the audience: ‘It would either be, “Your objective is to persuade the audience of something, and therefore you have to cast them” – and that casting, of course, can change from moment to moment – or it was, “Your objective is to work out a problem, and you need the audience’s help” ’.34 Such a strategy helps to position the audience in much the same way that a ‘stage-­oration’ does, making implicit assertions about who it is that is watching and what they may be prepared to sympathize with. When he played Iago for the RSC in 1989, Ian McKellen found that confiding directly in the audience made them ‘privy to his deceit and the gulling of Roderigo, Cassio, Desdemona and Othello himself’: ‘It is an unfair

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27

advantage and early on Willard [White, playing Othello] accused me of trying to get the audience on my side against him. I explained that I didn’t need to try – Shakespeare had organised it that the villain’s part should be the audience’s portal into the action.’35 Understood in this way, Shakespeare’s soliloquies can become dynamic exchanges in which stage figures attempt to co-­opt the audience into their perspectives on the action. Oliver Ford Davies recalls the advice he gave to actor James Frain on playing Edmund for the Almeida Theatre in 2002: ‘[A]ssume that the audience not only understand your position but are sympathetic to it. In other words, don’t defy, or wheedle the audience; talk as if they’re on your side.’36 As they rehearsed Richard III in 1983, director Bill Alexander likewise suggested to Antony Sher, playing the title role, that he should think of the audience ‘as a convention of trainee Richard the Thirds’.37 In the cases of characters like Iago, Edmund and Richard, the complicity forged during such moments of direct address can have a powerful payoff as the effects of the characters’ villainies become clear. During performances of Richard III, Sher found that his close relationship with the audience over the play’s first half allowed for a tragic arc in the second, in which the audience, ‘dying to enjoy themselves like they did in Part One,’ were confronted with a sense of ‘regret that it’s not as much fun as before’.38 Just as a written text does, a theatre production also presupposes a particular audience, and, in doing so, partially creates it. Audiences might be ‘cast’ in particular roles not only during soliloquies, but also during scenes in which a fictional crowd is addressed: it is not unusual to see productions of Henry V that co-­opt their audiences as the soldiers whom the king exhorts to return to the breach, or productions of Julius Caesar in which theatre spectators stand in as the people of Rome during the funeral orations. Some productions include direct invitations to their audiences to break the usual rules of theatrical decorum: audiences at Filter Theatre’s Twelfth Night (2008), for example, were encouraged to drink tequila and

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

play ball games with the clowns before being scolded by Malvolio, while spectators of Vesturport’s Romeo and Juliet (2003) were issued with bubble-­blowing kits during the title characters’ wedding scene. Design choices and the configuration of the theatre building also make particular suggestions to spectators about the roles they are expected to play. Audiences in shared light at Shakespeare’s Globe, for example, may feel more empowered to join in vocally than their counterparts in a darkened proscenium-­arch theatre.39 Spectators at immersive productions like Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies (a conflation of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra) or Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (an adaptation of Macbeth) are actively encouraged to move around the set, becoming part of the stage picture in the case of the former, and masked, semi-­ invisible ghosts in the latter. Susan Bennett’s influential study Theatre Audiences introduces a useful theoretical model for the process of constructing the audience, suggesting that audience experience is governed by two ‘frames’: the ‘inner frame’ of the performance itself, particularly ‘the spectator’s experience of a fictional stage world’, and the ‘outer frame’, which comprises ‘all those cultural elements which create and inform the theatrical event’.40 The ‘outer frame’ includes ‘the selection of material for production, and the audience’s definitions and expectations of a performance’;41 factors like the location of the theatre, its funding structures, ticket prices, marketing materials, press coverage, the reputations of the creative team, and practical considerations like public transport options and wheelchair accessibility, will go a long way towards defining who will attend a production, what they might expect from it, and what it is able to do with them when they get there. Reasons for attending a performance will differ widely from spectator to spectator, and this too can have a marked effect upon the process of reception: when John Tulloch surveyed audience members of English Touring Theatre’s The Cherry Orchard in 2000, for example, he found that spectators who had ‘very clear expectations of the kind of artistic and symbolic conventions

Who Are ‘the Audience’?

29

for which they “love Chekhov” ’ were much less likely to enjoy the production than those who were attending to celebrate a special occasion or in order to see a star performer.42 However much a production tries to position its audience in a particular way, that audience will always exceed its control. Indeed, spectators can themselves shape performances. The widespread practice of reduced-­price preview performances indicates the power that audiences can have over a production, suggesting that creative teams are generally aware of the need to become attuned to likely responses before opening the ‘finished’ production. Playing Caliban in The Tempest and Palamon in The Two Noble Kinsmen at the Globe in 2000, Jasper Britton explained that: ‘I’m always very tuned-­in to the mood of the audience. I’m listening to them all the time. I’m listening for coughs, I’m watching for fidgeting – laughs obviously – because they’re so instructive, and they teach me where I’m right and where I’m wrong.’43 His fellow Globe actor Liam Brennan explained something similar a few seasons later: I think the audience can give you crucial notes on your performance if you are sensitive enough to pick up on them; for example, an audience can tell you when you should get a move on and when perhaps you should take things a little slower. They can tell you when they completely understand and you can sense when you’ve lost them a bit.44 In fact there is a strong sense that at theatres like the Globe, even after the preview period has ended, a production is never ‘finished’. Just as some texts are more ‘open’ than others, in De Marinis’s sense of the word, so some productions leave more space than others for the contingencies of audience response. When Mark Rylance played Hamlet at the Globe in 2000, his delivery of the ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ soliloquy was described by Michael Coveney as ‘a masterpiece of introspection, audience-­baiting and sudden impulse’.45 Halfway through the speech, Hamlet asks a series of questions:

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Shakespeare: Actors and Audiences

Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face? Tweaks me by th’ nose? Gives me the lie i’th’ throat, As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this? Ha? Why, I should take it. (2.2.565–70) Rylance played these directly to the audience, genuinely inviting a response. Over the course of the run, spectators answered the first of these questions in all kinds of different ways: sometimes a ‘yes’, sometimes a ‘no’; sometimes confidently, sometimes hesitantly; sometimes merely with silence. Rylance would respond to whatever came at him, making as if to pick a fight with a spectator who answered in the affirmative, or searching for someone with the bravery to tell him the truth when met with a ‘no’ or a silence.46 Indeed, on one occasion when no reply was forthcoming, he added an

FIGURE 1.1  The Jig, Hamlet 2002, with Mark Rylance. Photography by John Tramper. With kind permission of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Who Are ‘the Audience’?

31

irritated ‘Well, am I?’47 Sometimes he would attempt to account for the variety of response within a single audience, as he explained in his book Play: ‘I remember a boy, no more than 12, only just able to look over the front of the stage from the yard, nodding his head when I asked, “Am I a coward?” I had to separate him from the rest as I proceeded to castigate them all for not calling me a coward.’48 As Tim Carroll later reflected, ‘There was no doubt that he was really asking the audience. . . . Even without explicit intervention, the audience’s presence lent the situation an electric charge’.49 As we saw in the anecdote that opened this chapter, audience response can have a profound effect upon the meanings generated by a performance. In 2011, I observed a number of performances at different theatres of Tim Crouch’s one-­man play I, Malvolio, and on two occasions – at the Egg Theatre, Bath, and the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh – I was able to survey the audiences immediately afterwards about their responses to the performance. The audience at the Egg was dominated by a large secondary school group, many of whom joined in a loud, sympathetic ‘Aah!’ as Crouch’s Malvolio complained, softly, that ‘Nobody loves me’.50 My subsequent survey found that 31 per cent of this audience referred, in their feedback, to the character’s unrequited love for Olivia or to his loneliness, while only 4 per cent of respondents at the Traverse performance did the same.51 While all kinds of factors may have conditioned this difference in audience interpretation – the Traverse audience, for example, had a considerably higher average age – it does not seem too much of a stretch to suggest that this moment of communal response played an influential role in shaping the meaning of the play for the audience at the Egg on that particular occasion. Indeed, at least three of the respondents concerned referred to Malvolio’s line directly.52 My survey of I, Malvolio’s spectators revealed a variety of responses among both audiences, but was also able to identify particular trends specific to each group. The ‘outer frame’ of each performance event certainly created particular

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expectations: the Traverse is a powerhouse of new writing with an international reputation and a strong history of winning awards, and its publicity material underemphasized the fact that Crouch intended the play to be aimed at ‘younger audiences’, while the Egg describes itself as a theatre ‘especially for children, young people and their families’. It was possible for me to make particular generalizations about each audience: the Traverse audience were much quieter than their counterparts at the Egg, but tended to laugh at lines that referred explicitly to the play’s Shakespearean source, while the Egg audience seemed to relish engaging in the misbehaviour tacitly licensed by the production and answered back loudly to Malvolio’s provocations. But to characterize these audiences as groups in this way is to risk writing out the diversity of responses within them: both audiences, for example, were split over the extent to which they felt any sympathy for Malvolio, and while a good proportion of each audience described some sort of increase in sympathy over the course of the show (44 per cent at the Traverse and 64 per cent at the Egg), a minority of spectators at both shows had the opposite response.53 Who, then, are we talking about when we talk about ‘the audience’? As this brief overview has shown, the term ‘the audience’ comprises a number of different identities, all of them overlapping but none of them quite identical. There may be an audience anticipated in, and projected by, the written text, but this audience was never stable or clearly defined to begin with, and as critical and aesthetic contexts change, so does the way in which that textual construction is interpreted. Actors and directors make choices, as they play the text, about how to use it in order to position the audience in particular ways, and those choices are determined as much by aesthetic preference and artistic context as they are by the text itself. Artists are, of course, under no obligation to enact the models of spectatorship they do find implicit in the text: it is not unusual to see soliloquies or stage-­orations cut, reassigned or recontextualized. Production teams make their own choices about the audiences they anticipate, inviting them both

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explicitly and implicitly to behave and respond in particular ways. An audience is implied and, in part, created by the ‘outer frame’ of a production too, a bundle of demographic trends, social and cultural pressures, economics and advertising. But if there is a ‘model spectator’ implied by the text, the production or its ‘outer frame’, this imaginary identity will never be fully realized by actual spectators, who behave in idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways. ‘The audience’ is in some ways a convenient fiction, an illusion of homogeneity that belies the actual diversity of the assembled group. Nonetheless, the group identity enacted by that diverse crowd at moments of collective response, however partial, has tremendous signifying power. ‘The audience’, as nebulous and unstable as it is, unfolds itself in real time as the play progresses, influencing the course of the performance, the interpretations and further responses of its constituent playgoers, and future performances of the production itself, becoming in turn part of the cultural context in which the idea of ‘the audience’ in the text is understood.

Notes 1 Barry Day, This Wooden ‘O’: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn (London: Oberon Books, 1996), 318. 2 Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 33. 3 Ibid., 33–4. 4 David Nathan, review of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Jewish Chronicle, 30 August 1996. 5 See Charles Whitney’s chapter in this volume for a fuller discussion of Shakespeare’s first audiences. 6 Keir Elam, ‘Introduction’, Twelfth Night, or What You Will (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2008), 73–4. All references to the works of Shakespeare are to the Arden Third Series edition where this exists, and otherwise to The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, edited by Richard Proudfoot, Ann

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Thompson and David Scott Kastan (revised edition, London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011). 7 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. 8 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well and The Tempest have epilogues; Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale feature chorus speeches during the play. 9 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.415, 2 Henry IV E.12, Henry V P.8, 2.0.35, All’s Well That Ends Well E.6, The Winter’s Tale 4.1.20, The Tempest E.11, Henry VIII P.17 and The Two Noble Kinsmen E.18. 10 Romeo and Juliet P.13, 2 Henry IV E.9, Henry V P.33, 2.0.31, All’s Well That Ends Well E.5, Pericles 4.4.50 and E.17, and The Winter’s Tale 4.1.15. 11 Further requests for ‘pardon’ are made in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.416, 2 Henry IV E.3, Pericles 2.0.40 and The Tempest E.19. 12 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 86. 13 The Two Noble Kinsmen P.16, E.8, Troilus and Cressida 5.11.53–4, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.419. 14 See, for example, the epilogues to 2 Henry IV, All’s Well That Ends Well and The Tempest. 15 Marco De Marinis, The Semiotics of Performance, trans. Áine O’Healy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 167. 16 Ibid., 166–7. 17 Ibid., 168–9. 18 E.A.J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1. 19 Ibid., 28, vii. 20 Ibid., 3, 102. 21 Ibid., 136, 102. 22 Robert Hapgood, Shakespeare the Theatre-Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), vii, 260. 23 Ibid., 228.

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24 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 162. 25 Ibid., 146. 26 ‘Aside’ is also used by modern editors in a very different way to Shakespeare’s use of the term. Shakespeare almost always used it to indicate characters who were speaking to one another out of the hearing of other characters onstage. Only twice, in a single scene of Pericles (2.5.74 and 78), did he use it to indicate a character who was confiding something to the audience. This is not to argue that characters are not speaking to the audience in speeches that modern editors mark as ‘asides’ – merely that Shakespeare’s characters may have been so frequently in dialogue with the audience throughout their time on stage that to mark only some speeches out as a privileged kind of direct address is to underemphasize the potential for direct address everywhere else in the texts. 27 Bert O. States, ‘The Actor’s Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes’, Theatre Journal 35, no. 3 (1983): 366. 28 Edward Pechter, Othello and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 57. 29 James Earl Jones, Actors on Shakespeare: Othello (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), 108. 30 Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 71. 31 Ibid., 8. 32 Ibid., 16. 33 Ronald Bryden, review of Hamlet, New Statesman, 27 August 1965. 34 Stephen Purcell, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017), 123. 35 Ian McKellen, ‘Othello’, http://www.mckellen.com/stage/othello/ (May 2003, accessed 24 January 2017). 36 Oliver Ford Davies, Playing Lear (London: Nick Hern, 2003), 126. 37 Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook (London: Methuen, 1985), 177. 38 Ibid., 226.

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39 See Susan Bennett’s chapter in this volume for a fuller discussion of the relationship between architecture and audience response at the Globe. 40 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1997), 2, 139. 41 Ibid., 2. 42 John Tulloch, Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 207. 43 Jaq Bessell, ‘Actor Interviews 2000: Red and White Companies’, Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 18 (2001), 16. Available at: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/files/2015/02/ actor_interviews_2000.pdf (accessed 15 November 2016). 44 Liam Brennan, ‘Production Notes 1’, Adopt an Actor, Shakespeare’s Globe, 1 May 2003. Available at: http://www. shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-­space/adopt-­an-actor/archive/ bolingbroke-­played-by-­liam-brennan/production-­notes-1 (accessed 15 November 2016). 45 Michael Coveney, review of Hamlet, Daily Mail, 23 June 2000. 46 Purcell, Shakespeare in the Theatre, 149–50. 47 Lois Potter, ‘This Distracted Globe: Summer 2000’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2001), 128. 48 Mark Rylance, Play: A Recollection in Pictures and Words of the First Five Years of Play at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2003), 134. 49 Tim Carroll, ‘Practising Behaviour to His Own Shadow’, in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 40. 50 Tim Crouch, I, Shakespeare: I, Malvolio, I, Banquo, I, Caliban, I, Peaseblossom (London: Oberon Books, 2011), 27. 51 Stephen Purcell, Shakespeare and Audience in Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 19. 52 Ibid., 19. 53 Ibid., 18–19.

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Select bibliography Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 1997. Bessell, Jaq. ‘Actor Interviews 2000: Red and White Companies’. Shakespeare’s Globe Research Bulletin 18, 2001. Available at: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/uploads/files/2015/02/actor_ interviews_2000.pdf (accessed 15 November 2016). Brennan, Liam. ‘Production Notes 1’, Adopt an Actor, Shakespeare’s Globe, 1 May 2003. Available at: http://www.shakespearesglobe. com/discovery-­space/adopt-­an-actor/archive/bolingbroke-­playedby-­liam-brennan/production-­notes-1 (accessed 15 November 2016). Carroll, Tim. ‘Practising Behaviour to His Own Shadow’. In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, 37–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Crouch, Tim. I, Shakespeare: I, Malvolio, I, Banquo, I, Caliban, I, Peaseblossom. London: Oberon Books, 2001. Davies, Oliver Ford. Playing Lear. London: Nick Hern, 2003. Day, Barry. This Wooden ‘O’: Shakespeare’s Globe Reborn. London: Oberon Books, 1996. De Marinis, Marco. The Semiotics of Performance, translated by Áine O’Healy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. Elam, Keir, ed. ‘Introduction’. In Twelfth Night, or What You Will, by William Shakespeare, 1–154. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2008. Escolme, Bridget. Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Hapgood, Robert. Shakespeare the Theatre-Poet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Honigmann, E.A.J. Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Jones, James Earl. Actors on Shakespeare: Othello. London: Faber & Faber, 2003. Kiernan, Pauline. Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.

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McKellen, Ian. ‘Othello’, May 2003. Available at: http://www. mckellen.com/stage/othello/ (accessed 24 January 2017). Pechter, Edward. Othello and Interpretive Traditions. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. Potter, Lois. ‘This Distracted Globe: Summer 2000’. Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (2001): 124–32. Purcell, Stephen. Shakespeare and Audience in Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Purcell, Stephen. Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017. Rylance, Mark. Play: A Recollection in Pictures and Words of the First Five Years of Play at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. London: Shakespeare’s Globe, 2003. Sher, Antony. Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook. London: Methuen, 1985. States, Bert O. ‘The Actor’s Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes’. Theatre Journal 35, no. 3 (1983): 359–75. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tulloch, John. Shakespeare and Chekhov in Production and Reception: Theatrical Events and Their Audiences. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.

2 Shakespeare’s Audiences Charles Whitney

Shakespeare wrote for the audiences of his own time. As Stephen Purcell suggests in the preceding chapter, the audience being considered in the texts of Shakespeare’s plays is not ‘us’. Shakespeare’s art and the ways it was understood and appreciated by his audience depended on one another for their effect. Even as he enriched his audiences’ lives through their theatrical and reading experiences, his creations were shaped by their diverse expectations, interests, tastes and practices of response. During Shakespeare’s career beginning in the early 1590s, the powers of those reception practices were developing and evolving in the several venues where his plays could be accessed: London’s play-­hosting inns, the royal court during the Christmas holidays, the new market for playbooks and, most of all, the several large amphitheatres just outside the city. Those theatres and the phenomenal flourishing of drama they made possible were first erected only within Shakespeare’s lifetime. Many of the shaping forces of response practised then correspond to what audiences seek today, but some of the most important ones do not. It is these that can provide a fresh

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perspective on Shakespeare’s work and the culture of his theatre. The fragmentary record of response shows that reception practices had less to do with interpretation and more with various kinds of imitation, reperformance and application, for many playgoers in the boisterous theatres of Shakespeare’s time resisted the very distinction between performer and audience: they wanted to participate in the creation of theatre. Shakespeare’s work encouraged them to direct some of that creative energy to processes of reception developed after live performance, ones that often turned out to involve applications of dramatic material to personal situations. Fruitful relationships between dramatists and audience were enabled and fostered by the new theatre industry and must be understood in that theatre-­historical context. For instance, the theatre and the market for playbooks provided the means for the relationship between producers and consumers of plays to become a powerful factor that helped produce the modern public sphere. So first let us consider some of the shaping conditions under which Shakespeare and his audiences collaborated. The big, open-­roofed amphitheatres could hold 2,000 or more closely packed playgoers in the afternoon, and charged as little as a penny for admission, roughly the price of a first-­run movie ticket today in North America or Europe. Their erection near the capital, beginning in 1567 and continuing in a more sustained manner in 1576, coincided with the completion of the Protestant authorities’ suppression of the mystery-­play cycles in towns around England, which for over 200 years had provided the most notable dramatic experience in the realm. Considered in that context, the imposing new structures registered a transition from the medieval to the early modern historical period, to a mode of theatre that was centralized in the London area rather than locally dispersed, that was private and commercial rather than public and non-­profit, that was innovative rather than traditional and ritualistic, that was secular rather than religious, and that was performed by professionals rather than by townsfolk participating in community service.

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Early modern playgoers and play readers, however, developed their own significant forms of participation, in the sense of agency in the production of dramatic meaning. That agency inevitably registered the challenges of a disorienting historical transition that had altered more than religion. Both Shakespeare the dramatist and his audiences had to navigate economic, social and cultural developments that challenged traditional assumptions about, for instance, social hierarchy, gender roles and the economy, which was transitioning towards commercial capitalism with its big winners and losers. New possibilities for individual fulfilment also brought new responsibilities and anxieties. By our standards, London at this time offered limited choices for public entertainment. Partly for that reason, the amphitheatres were able to convene a wider range of society than any form of art or entertainment does today, offering different plays daily to meet the demand for variety. Persons of means took higher-­priced seats, yet occasionally some of them, like poet and penmanship master John Davies of Hereford, preferred to join the groundlings standing in the playhouse yard,1 which was pitched about five feet below the level of the stage. If only two of the four London amphitheatres in the 1590s were open and were only filled to half-capacity, the weekly visits would total 15,000, and more in the following decades as more theatres were built. Never before in England had so many people regularly gathered to witness secular, non-­ violent events, and they did so despite continual moral and religious denunciations from pulpit and printing-­press that discouraged potential patrons, and despite various government restrictions and periodic closings to prevent the spread of bubonic plague. It is no coincidence that the years of Shakespeare’s triumphant career as a dramatist coincided with the period in English theatre history when audience diversity was at its height. For though the privileged tenth of the population had disproportionate representation at and influence on dramatic fare,2 the heterogeneous amphitheatre audiences of the day

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challenged playwrights and players to address issues of wide interest and importance while at the same time including material designed to engage particular audience segments.3 They successfully combined elite and popular culture – high-­ flown poetry and genteel dialogue with carnivalesque humour, everyday slang and slapstick. That melange earned the disparagement of some of the learned, along with playwrights of a later generation in the Caroline period who, like Thomas Nabbes, wrote for a narrower clientele and professed a narrower sensibility, one of ‘plaine words’ and ‘the rule of Art’.4 According to observers, the early modern English amphitheatre from its beginning up to the closing of the theatres in 1642 assembled in one space, among other groups, the following: married and courting couples, families of high and low degree, groups of women, merchants and tradesmen great and small, craftsmen, apprentices, craft servants, household servants from secretaries and kitchen maids to footmen and grooms, hawkers, watermen, soldiers, sailors, assorted labourers, cutpurses, pickpockets, prostitutes, lords, ladies, knights, gentry of all sorts, visitors from the countryside, foreign visitors and officials resident in London, merchants great and small, lawyers and a great many law students.5 The theatre was itself a unique spectacle, offering reasons for going besides hearing a play. Playwright Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Hornbook (1609) reveals a good deal of social-­ rank hostility in the playhouse between, for instance, gentlemen and ‘groundlings’, also referred to as ‘stinkards’, both disparaging terms used to describe those who stood in the yard of the theatre. But for over twenty years previously the theatre’s public space had accommodated powerful collective experiences in which audience members sometimes were, as John Astington puts it, ‘supporting one another in immediate and spontaneous reaction to the surprises and delights the performers are producing on the stage’.6 Shakespeare’s predecessors Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd had developed individualized characters like Tamburlaine, Faustus

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and Hieronymo who spoke powerful verse laden with feeling and enjoyed wide appeal.7 But possibly their characters were fascinating partly because they aroused conflicting emotions that both attracted and repelled, diversifying audience response.8 It is also possible to hypothesize that the sense of fellow-­feeling in the diverse crowds might not have extended to women to the same degree given the military emphasis of drama in the late 1580s and early 1590s. But from a wider view of the whole early modern period it provided dramatists a context for exploring fundamental commonalities of living, including those related to the topical issues and events that many plays addressed, at least indirectly. Particularly as a triumph over the divisiveness also evident in the theatre, it would have helped make the theatre important in the gradual development of a modern public sphere of discussion and debate on political and social issues. England was to help lead that development in Europe.9 Shakespeare seized the opportunity to embrace this ‘drama of a nation’.10 The theatrical landscape became more diverse when the theatre’s success helped encourage the organization of boys’ choirs into several child acting companies starting in the 1570s. The boys’ companies performed at indoor ‘private’ theatres – smaller, higher-­priced venues patronized mostly by the well-­todo and the gentry, attracting some of the top writers like Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, and specializing in satires with somewhat narrower appeal. But as the different venues came to specialize more on particular social ranks of the play-­ going public, the broad appeal of Shakespeare’s plays made them the mainstays in all the venues where his companies played – the Theatre, Curtain and Globe amphitheatres, the Blackfriars indoor theatre during the winter (from 1609), as well as in summer touring out of town. His plays were also performed at the Inns of Court, and, far more often than those of any other playwright, at the royal court during the holiday season. With audience segmentation increasing in the first decades of the seventeenth century, however, the emphases of the

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different acting companies also diverged accordingly. As the leading company attracting more of the elite, the King’s Men focus in those years was ‘the court, gentlemanly conduct, and the morality of government’ as Andrew Gurr puts it, along with a relatively strong and sympathetic emphasis on female characters.11 Late plays of Shakespeare like Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale and many plays of John Fletcher illustrated those emphases. Eventually the fare at the amphitheatres, including the Globe, came to be typecast as old-­fashioned, as sensibilities like Nabbes’s were more widely adopted. Yet up until the 1642 closings, Shakespeare’s plays remained a King’s Men mainstay as the Blackfriars became the place to go, even for the play-­loving Queen Henrietta Maria. The range of dramatic genres popular among playgoers during Shakespeare’s career was wide, and his plays were among those that popularized them. Astington lists ‘contemporary news, scandal, and crime; romance both chivalric and amatory; the exciting and half-­believed realm of magic, conjuration, and supernatural beings; the history and legends of England, Greece and Rome, and other places; satirical and romantic comedies, with both exotic and local settings; and tragedies of revenge, pride, and desire’.12 Audiences were excited by ‘inspiring and moving characters’ novel stories, unusual events, ‘fine phrasing thrillingly delivered’, and, as much as anything, humour.13 Professional clowns were central to the very development of the early modern English theatre, and the jig, a skit clowns performed with song and dance after the play, remained a major attraction until it was banned in 1612. At a more sophisticated level, Leonard Digges pointed to the popularity of Beatrice and Benedick’s hilarious scenes in Much Ado about Nothing.14 The architecture of the early modern amphitheatres shaped the relationship between players and audiences. In this respect the modern Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in today’s Southwark, London (a triumphant alliance of vision, charity, scholarship, commerce and dedication), affords valuable insights on early modern play-­going experience that differentiate it from current

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norms. Today at most theatres audiences sit in darkness and silence unless laughing at comic material. They occupy one side of an invisible ‘fourth wall’ demarcating the world represented on the stage set from their world and thereby enabling the sense of dramatic illusion or suspension of disbelief, which allows actors to inhabit their roles as fully as possible. Because Globe playgoers sit or stand in daylight, sharing the same light as the players and other playgoers, because they surround the stage on three sides as well as above and below, and because there is little set on the stage, that sense of dramatic illusion cannot be sustained for long. Rather, players acknowledge the presence of the audience positioned around them as they move about the large Globe stage and occasionally seem to address the audience as well as their interlocutors on stage; their soliloquies are sometimes spoken to the audience. For its part, the audience is a more active element in the theatre space, sometimes calling out with affirmations or interacting with or interrupting the players, whose style of performance acknowledges to a greater or lesser degree that they are in fact pretending to be people they are not. The motto which it is believed may have been used by the original Globe announced a philosophical insight prompted by this theatre design and the performance traditions that complement it: Totus mundus agit histrionem – ‘all the world turns the actor’ it declared in Latin: there is no fourth wall because players and audiences are in the same, one world, and both play their parts in life as well as in the theatre. Jaques’s ‘all the world’s a stage’ speech in As You Like It on the seven ages of man expresses that view (2.7), and underpins the character of much early modern audience response:15 it is a matter less of interpretation and more of various kinds of performative response that repeats or applies aspects of the play, as if taking its cue from the actual conduct of playgoers within the playhouse. The theatre provided material for benefit and use, and response itself was productive.

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Audience disruption as demand for participation Not that today’s Globe Theatre closely approximates the experience of attending a play at its early modern counterpart 400 or more years earlier. The amphitheatres were not allowed within London city walls, thriving along with brothels and bear-­baiting pits in the ‘liberties’ beyond, places of relative licence and intrigue, unlike today’s Southwark. And twenty-­ first century visitors from London and around the world who visit this major British heritage site do not behave or respond like their early modern counterparts, the careful attention to authentic architecture and production notwithstanding. Like those of its original, the players at the new Globe respond to their contemporary audiences’ characters and interests. Playgoers of Shakespeare’s time were much rowdier and more expressive than they are now. Richard Preiss offers lists of examples mentioned by contemporary observers: ‘uncontrollable sexual excitement, confession, tears, laughter, empathy, clamor, murmur, repetition [of players’ lines], vocalic interlocution [?], continuous applause . . . booing, hissing, clapping, laughing, roaring, humming, whistling, stamping, crying, repeating, requesting, talking back to the actors, talking to each other, exiting early, entering late, “try[ing],” “search[ing],” judging, quarreling, food-­throwing, “pressing” the stage, “drowning” the stage, physically taking the stage’.16 Much of early modern audiences’ reported volubility and aggressiveness expressed displeasure that could hound plays off the stage as with Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, The New Inne and Catiline. But in at least one way players could capitalize on the bold expressiveness of their audiences even when they may have detested their judgements and the manner in which they expressed them, as Dekker did in The Gull’s Hornbook. The first time a play was performed for the public was its special ‘trial’, and the audience had the power to approve or reject it. A player might actually withhold his pledge to perform in a play ‘unlesse

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hee be heartned on by the multitude’ at first performance, according to contemporary observer John Stephens.17 The first day’s performance was therefore a real opportunity for playgoers to collaborate with the players. The first night would also provide directions for revision, but potentially so would every night: ‘plays never ceased to be in production; indeed, texts that continued to be performed were regularly revised to keep them current’.18 A criterion for being ‘current’ would include the audiences’ pleasure, shown not just by daily revenues but by the audiences’ playhouse endorsement. But endorsement could also be voluble though perhaps sometimes also distracting for performers. It could take the form of constant plaudits, affirmations and exclamations that register an audience’s moment-­by-moment engagement and approval of a well-­made play.19 Such an audience is expressing an active faculty of considered judgement that keeps audibly reaffirming again and again that the play’s terms and the current performance of it are worthy. Perhaps this is what Digges meant when he commented admiringly that when Falstaff was on stage, ‘all is so pestered’.20 To render one’s attention and affections up for moment-­by-moment direction would amount to what Jean E. Howard calls the ability of Shakespeare delightfully to guide the thoughts and feelings of audience members even moment by moment: ‘the art of orchestration’.21 To do that while exclaiming approval would show a determination to perform and participate. I.M.S.’s commendatory poem in the Second Folio describes such orchestration: . . . the Plebeian Impe, from lofty throne [i.e. Shakespeare], Creates and rules a world, and workes upon Mankind by secret engines; Now to move A chilling pitty, then a rigorous love: To strike up and stroake down, both joy and ire; To steere th’affections; and by heavenly fire Mould us anew.22 Another Second Folio commendatory poem, young John Milton’s, actually imagines an enraptured and silent audience of

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Shakespeare ‘made marble with too much conceiving’ – motionless because their minds are busy thinking so many things. But that stillness is the ‘wonder and astonishment’ of readers of Shakespeare for whom exclamations would have little point.23 But the list of contemporary characterizations of audience deportment listed above clearly indicates that such orchestration was not necessarily what many playgoers were looking for in the first place. Theatrical experience does not necessarily concern participating by submitting oneself to the terms of a given play and performance. It may also concern kinds of what might be called ‘counter-­performances’, interventions that engage with the play and the players on audience members’ own terms, and that define a third kind of disruption in the early modern theatre, one that might actually underlie the other two. The most familiar though comparatively tame examples of this sort of aggressive, participation-­seeking audience involvement are the exchanges between audiences and stage clowns, notably the original one, Richard Tarlton. His impromptu wit hilariously fielded impertinent questions and insults from the audience, to everyone’s delight. Here was a true participatory collaboration of audience and player, though antagonistic on the surface. Who needs playwrights anyway? Tarlton’s ‘audience-­centred’ rather than ‘playwright-­ centred’ theatre, in Preiss’s terminology, was more important to Tarlton’s acting companies than any of their playwrights. Such counter-­performances would include sympathetic and perhaps involuntary, though excessively voluble, responses to stage action like bawling, bellowing and writhing (collective or individual). Related responses of this type could stem from one’s own immediate, personal application of stage action. Preiss cites the woman described in Thomas Heywood’s An Apology for Actors (1612) who spontaneously confessed to murdering her husband when she saw a similar murder onstage (shades of Hamlet’s ‘the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King’ [2.2.606–7]).24 In such cases of overflowing emotional release, performance of the play is temporarily disabled (‘Give me some light’, cries King Claudius

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in Hamlet at 3.2.271), as if orchestration has paradoxically been too successful, or as if it has penetrated one or more individual psyches to unearth unresolved personal feelings that demand present expression. That kind of counter-­performance broadens the theatrical experience memorably for all present. But voluntary counter-­performances are motivated by a deliberate challenge to the terms of the theatrical fare, not to destroy it but to remake it in a kind of collaboration, more directly than confining oneself to approving and encouraging noises. Sometimes commenting on the action, talking back to players, questioning them, even throwing projectiles, does not intend to upset the play and drive players from the stage. An anecdote about the Red Bull theatre identifies the motive for pelting the curtain (not a theatrical curtain as we understand it today, but probably a curtain or arras over the frons scenae) with fruit as impatience that the players have not appeared on time. For the idea is to seek a ‘generative dialogue with the stage’, ‘to strip the veil of propriety that segregates producers from consumers’.25 Such practices could enhance the total theatrical experience for many playgoers even though they would reduce the portion of that experience directly involving the play being performed. They would make audiences more central to the theatrical experience as a whole and comprise an important condition that playwrights had to address. Those first-­performance trials of new plays might have drawn counter-­ performers eager to be helpful. Counter-­performance prevents the play’s script from becoming the one and only play, because live performance is always collaborative, dialogic and social.26

Audience reception as counter-­performance The audience’s theatre resists the playwright’s theatre, but on the early modern stage the increasing respectability of the theatre generally and the growing importance of printed

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playbooks were among the factors that advanced the playwright’s theatre, though of course it could never triumph completely. Another was the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s replacement around 1600 of their improvisational clown, William Kemp, with one willing to go by the script, Robert Armin.27 Shakespeare must have been sympathetic to Hamlet’s instruction that clowns should not ad lib. If it is reasonable to assume that performances of Shakespeare’s plays experienced a higher proportion of orchestration relative to counter-­ performance than most others, some of that desire for active participation in the making of theatrical excitement and meaning could well have been channelled into distinctive kinds of audience response brought to final form sometime after leaving the playhouse. Perhaps especially with Shakespeare the audience’s theatre is in the record of audience reception. The endings of Shakespeare’s plays, Robert Weimann shows, often prefigure their own reception with tacit invitations to audiences to sort out the stories and themes of the plays by talking about them to others. At the end of Othello, Lodovico will return to Venice and ‘this heavy act with heavy heart relate’ (5.2.369),28 and with heartfelt sympathy playgoers and their interlocutors will also probe the nuances and meanings of it all, by telling and discussing the story. These invitations are marketing tools, but also express a valid sense that the plays are worthy subjects to ponder, and that they still need completion or further attention through discourses of audience reception in spaces other than the playhouse. Simply as ways of making sense of plays, these discussions would aim to orchestrate plots, feelings and themes according to the senses of the play that the different participants have. But should they ponder the relevance of the play’s contents to their own lives, frame moral or prudential maxims on its basis or apply the play to actual persons or situations, their responses take initiatives that uproot aspects of the play and apply them to the playgoer’s world in an audience-­reception version of counter-­performance. Of course, sometimes writers want to draw in matters of current interest to make their plays more

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intriguing and to address problems and abuses, inviting such application. In politically repressive early modern England they must try to glance at those matters without sacrificing deniability, but audience members who catch on do take initiative, and set about framing the analogies on their own. We see the beginnings of that process in the commonplace book of a note-­taking playgoer at a performance of 1 Henry 4. The notes concern Act 3, Scene 2, where the title character recalls his strategy for appealing to the people’s favour as part of his campaign to depose the previous King, Richard II. The writer’s intention was to apply that strategy to current affairs, where the people’s favour had become a yet more important aspect of politics.29 A full post-­theatre discussion of the kind Weimann imagines could hardly avoid discourse of orchestration or of application. But the most significant examples of reception in the record do like the above example parallel the latter, quite the opposite of what we would expect today. One pearl from sermons of Nicholas Richardson of Magdalen College, Oxford includes both an application and a tragically ironic sequel about twenty years after that. Yet to my knowledge no one has ever commented on it before. College students admired Shakespeare’s early love poetry and Romeo and Juliet. They responded immediately to the play’s sublime depiction of love passion (as well as to its satire of that passion). One recent graduate called Shakespeare’s lovers ‘saints’ because so many people paid homage to their passionate and moving devotion to one another.30 (Richardson focused on another aspect of that resemblance to saints, connecting the play’s love-­death theme to martyrdom.) Romeo and Juliet was still on the minds of students at Oxford twenty-­five years after its debut. In at least two sermons (1620, 1621), Richardson showed his deep appreciation of Shakespeare’s poetry and his understanding of Oxford students, quoting six of Juliet’s lines from the balcony scene and connecting the affection she expresses there for Romeo ‘to God’s love to His saints, either hurt with sin or adversity, never

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forsaking them’.31 That was a frankly allegorical reading that discharged Richardson’s ministerial duty to interpret God’s word, here by affirming the possible relationship between divine and romantic love and specifically the ‘sin or adversity’ that may accompany mortals in both cases. In that context the lines Richardson quotes suggest that God allows ‘saints’, apparently in the sense of members of the elect who experience unusual suffering, to undergo that suffering in life so they will die all the sooner and return to Him. The most salient historical examples at this time were the religious martyrs interrogated under torture and then executed under Catholic Queen Mary and under Protestant monarchs Henry VIII, Edward VII and Elizabeth. juliet

’Tis almost morning, I would have thee gone, And yet no farther than a wanton’s bird, That lets it hop a little from his hand Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves, Then with a silken thread plucks it back again, So jealous-­loving of his liberty. (RJ 2.2.176–81) Dripping with the foreshadowing of the love-­death, those lines and their application turned out later to apply to Richardson himself during the Civil War, when Oxford was a Royalist stronghold. They apply in a way congruent with his specific allegorical interpretation of them. ‘Nicholas Richardson another Magdalen Fellow, was taken to Gloucester gaol and vigorously interrogated [i.e. tortured] by the Parliamentarians on suspicion of communicating with Prince Rupert. He died immediately on returning to the Slimbridge Rectory, which with the church was then garrisoned by the Roundheads.’32 To speak by the card, meaning in this case to speak allegorically: here was another victim of Verona’s feud, and his reunion with God involved a worse ordeal than that of Juliet’s figurative bird – Romeo – whom she wished she could capture

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in ‘silken threads’ and ‘twisted gyves’ to pet, with a love that could risk smothering. One hopes the preacher, whether or not he knew about Prince Rupert’s military strategy, was able to experience his terrible death affirmatively as a sign of God’s un-­forsaking love. In the fragmentary record of early response, Shakespeare’s comic character Falstaff, who appeared in three different plays (1 and 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor), is by far the most popular.33 The first edition of 1 Henry IV (1598) sold out within months and was literally read to death – not a single copy survives. In Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s pamphlet A Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary (1604), Falstaff’s tavern world of fellowship and stories had the power to soothe devastated plague survivors returning to London. Falstaff’s famous lines on honourable battlefield conduct (the honour ‘catechism’, 5.1.129–39) are cowardly in context, yet memorable because they put violent solutions in the context of due respect for human life. One of the many early allusions to the catechism is that of Jane Owen in a book exhorting Catholics (still a persecuted group then) to more active and resolved faith.34 Owen’s striking reading of the honour catechism draws on the character Falstaff’s relationship to a historical figure, the religious dissenter Sir John Oldcastle, and reinterprets the pursuit of honour as pursuit of worldly success and esteem, contrasting that lesser pursuit with a greater one, piety. Whether or not Jane Owen had ever attended a play, women comprised an increasingly substantial proportion of playgoers and play readers, though their responses are even less well represented in the record than those of men. Surviving ones indicate that women could also find the theatre useful for advancing their interests. Blackfriars playgoer Joan Drake, a troubled wife and mother, reportedly made fun of the clergyman paid by her husband to try to restore her to her old self. She kept comparing him to Ben Jonson’s over-­the-top caricature of a puritan divine in The Alchemist.35 Women were often pressured to marry suitors they found undesirable.

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Dorothy Osborne was secretly engaged to William Temple, a man of little means who shared her admiration for Shakespeare and much else. The parents of Dorothy and her older brother being deceased, the two siblings fought over Dorothy’s resistance to all the suitors he arranged to court her. In a letter to William she boasted of her resistance to one tirade in which her brother sternly recounted episodes featuring each separate suitor she had rejected. Hilariously, she likened herself there to Richard III and her rejected suitors to the ghosts of those Richard had murdered, who at night horrified him by presenting themselves one after another (R3, 5.3.71– 160).36 The theatre offered resourceful material for other groups as well, such as household servants who suffered from the decline of the traditional paternalistic model in which they might be able to enjoy some of the security and esteem that family members did. A book celebrating that model and deploring its decline alluded to the small and the generous tips given the servant Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Costard remarked on the tiny ‘remuneration’ and the welcome ‘guerdon’ (3.1.147, 148).37 The single most famous record of early response is that of Simon Forman’s manuscript, ‘The Booke of Playes . . . for Common Pollicie’, especially his account of Macbeth. The manuscript described performances of Macbeth and three other plays (two by Shakespeare) that Forman had seen at the Globe in 1610. Forman’s explicit intention was to glean useful insights from these experiences (‘Common Pollicie’), yet his focus remains mostly on description. The descriptions, however, reflect particular concerns in Forman’s life and extensive writings. Forman used astrology and magic in his pseudo-­ medical practice, and presented himself as one who could wield occult powers. He was a mostly self-­taught commoner and expressed resentment towards the greed of the nobility, though some nobles were his patients. He also felt abused by the London College of Physicians, which had long withheld accreditation from him. His account of Macbeth savours three uncanny moments when the Macbeths are confronted with

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their crimes and feel their guilt: first, Macbeth’s horror after he murders Duncan and cannot seem to wash the blood off his hands; second, his horror after he has ordered the murder of Banquo and then sees Banquo’s ghost seated at the banquet table; third, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and sleep-­talking that reveal her guilt and desperation.38 It seems that on stage at least, the public can see great ones who are actually human enough to suffer in the anguish of their well-­deserved guilt as they are confronted with their crimes, sometimes through the supernatural means Forman claimed to access. In keeping with the character of the amphitheatres as theatres of the world, many of the most pregnant early responses to Shakespeare seek forms of application that appropriate material for what could be called not so much interpretations as creative counter-­performances.

Notes 1 Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 42. 2 See Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 3 Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941) developed the argument for this thesis. Martin Butler modified it in Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Appendix 2. 4 Quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 258. 5 Most of this list is compiled from Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, passim. 6 John H. Astington, ‘Audiences and Playgoers’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1: 98. 7 Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 165–7. 8 Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 17–69.

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9 Jeffrey S. Doty, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, “Popularity”, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2010): 183–205. 10 See Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 11 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 139–40. 12 John H. Astington, ‘Audiences and Playgoing’, in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, 1: 95. 13 Ibid., 1: 98. 14 Leonard Digges, ‘Upon Master William Shakespeare, The Deceased Authour, and His Poems’, William Shakespeare, Poems, 1640, quoted in Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 280. 15 See also Thomas Heywood, ‘The Author to his Booke’, An Apology for Actors, ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1941): The world’s a Theater, the earth a Stage, Which God, and nature doth with Actors fill, Kings have their entrance in due equipage, And some their parts play well and others ill . . . All men haue parts, and each man acts his owne (ll. 1–4, 12) 16 Richard Preiss, Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 35, 47. See also Matteo A. Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 17 Tiffany Stern, ‘Production Processes’, in The Cambridge Guide to the World of Shakespeare, 1: 126. 18 Ibid., 1: 127. 19 This model is developed by Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in the Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 20 Digges, ‘Upon Master William Shakespeare, The Deceased Authour, and His Poems’, quoted in Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 280.

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21 Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 22 I.M.S., ‘On Worthy Master Shakespeare and His Poems’, ‘Poems About Shakespeare’, I Love Shakespeare: A Commonplace Blog (no date), http://www.iloveshakespeare.com/blog/poems-­aboutshakespeare/ (accessed 29 May 2017). 23 John Milton, ‘On Shakespeare’, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: The Modern Library, 2007), 34. 24 Preiss, Clowning and Authorship, 31. 25 Ibid., 40. 26 Ibid., 48. 27 Ibid., 181–4, 159. 28 Quoted in Robert Weimann, ‘Thresholds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare’s Endings’, Representations 53 (Winter 1996): 9. 29 Doty, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, “Popularity”, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, 183, passim. 30 John Weever, ‘Ad Gulielmum Shakspear’, Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion (1599), quoted in Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 133–4. 31 William Dunn Macray, A Register of the Members of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford: From the Foundation of the College, New Series (London: Henry Frowde, 1901), 3: 141 (Richardson’s comments on the play were originally recorded in Bodleian Library, Eng. Misc. d. 28, p. 359, col. 705). 32 E.W. Carpenter, ‘Slimbridge and an American Connection’, Regional Historian 9 (Summer 2002), 4. 33 Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 70–112. 34 Jane Owen, ‘An Antidote Against Purgatory’ [1634], in Printed Writings 1500–1640, Series 1, Part 2, Volume 9: Jane Owen, ed. Dorothy L. Latz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 35 John Hart, Trodden Down Strength, by the God of Strength, Or, Mrs. Drake Revived (London, 1647), 26. See Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 215–23.

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36 The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, ed. G.C. Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 56; see also Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 233–40. 37 I.M., A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Seruingmen or, the Seruingmans Comfort (London, 1598), 11r–v. 38 Simon Forman, ‘The Bocke of Plaies and Notes Thereof’, in The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016), A14–A15. See also Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 147–60.

3 ‘Do it, England!’: The Actor and the Audience in Hamlet Jeremy Lopez

Hamlet is a member of that small class of Shakespearean characters who seem to be aware of their own fictional, theatrical status; the others are Falstaff and Iago. It is not only the frequency with which these characters address the audience (though that is certainly a large part of it) that makes them seem to leap across the boundary of the stage and share in our experience of witnessing their own behaviour; it is also their willingness to change direction (in phrase, thought or action) in response to exigent experience, and, at the same time, their resignation to a fate beyond their control. Like real people living in the real world, they seem to be making things up as they go along; like real people watching a play, they seem to accept, with equanimity and with interest, the fact that a life – their own lives, as it happens – can be written out in advance. Other, partial, members of this class of character include Macbeth and Cleopatra; Macbeth, however, is in the end too much a victim of irony to share equally in our

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experience of what happens to him, and Cleopatra is too busy performing for her own benefit to be much concerned with what we might think of her. Hamlet, Iago and Falstaff, however self-­involved, obtuse or coercive they might sometimes be, nevertheless seem possessed of the playwright’s consciousness that a little self-­ingratiation is appropriate to the theatrical occasion that has brought us together with them. Theirs is a complex double-­consciousness that makes them almost more than lifelike; we long to get inside their heads, and so they quickly take up residence in ours. For the first half of Hamlet, Hamlet’s exact opposite is Claudius, a character who, as I shall argue, veritably repels audience engagement, even in quite theatrical moments. A turning point for the character, and the audience’s relationship with him, is the end of 4.3. The king has told Hamlet that he will be sent to England and, once Hamlet has left, he orders his men to see that the prince is got ‘with speed aboard’ the ship. Then, alone, he delivers this speech. king

And, England, if my love thou hold’st at aught – As my great power thereof may give thee sense, Since yet thy cicatrice looks raw and red After the Danish sword, and thy free awe Pays homage to us – thou mayst not coldly set Our sovereign process, which imports at full By letters congruing to that effect The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England, For like the hectic in my blood he rages, And thou must cure me. (4.3.56–65)1 This is one of the most surprising moments in Hamlet. The play is, famously, full of soliloquies, but I don’t think any demands quite so explicitly that the actor address the audience as directly and forcefully as the king does here. Besides giving us a nakedly aggressive Claudius, one whose language is clear rather

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than opaque, the speech provides relatively precise historical coordinates for a play that is usually content to operate at a fairy-­ tale-like level of generality. Although readers might know him from a stage-­direction as ‘Claudius’, the king is never actually named in the play; here, however, he turns out to be a historically accurate, if nevertheless fictional, eleventh-­century Danish monarch overseeing the colonial administration of England (the Danes ruled England from around 1015 until the middle of the eleventh century, but there was no Danish King Claudius). He speaks, almost as though via satellite, to his English subjects, now embodied in the captive audience at the Globe. ‘Do it, England’ (4.3.63): kill Hamlet because I tell you to, because I must be obeyed, because you have been conquered by the Danes. It’s one of the few really unequivocal moments in the play.2 Characteristically, Shakespeare has both prepared for this moment very carefully and given us more than we need, or might have expected, in its fulfilment. England is first mentioned in 3.1, immediately after the ‘nunnery’ scene: Claudius decides that Hamlet must be sent there ‘For the demand of our neglected tribute’ (3.1.169). The plan expressed in 4.3 is here already half-­formed. At the beginning of 3.3 Claudius has given the ‘commission’ of collecting the tribute to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and is preparing them to take Hamlet along with them (3.3.1–4) – a plan about which Hamlet is informed at some point before he mentions it to his mother near the end of the next scene (3.4.198). It is, therefore, no great surprise to hear that ‘everything is bent / For England’ at 4.3.44–5, but it is somewhat surprising to be, in the audience, the recipients of the Danish king’s personal appeal. The more expository, third-­ person approach the king takes in the Q1 version of this speech is, I think, more what we might have expected: To England is he gone, ne’er to return. Our letters are unto the King of England – That, on the sight of them, on his allegiance, He presently, without demanding why – That Hamlet lose his head, for he must die.

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There’s more in him than shallow eyes can see; He once being dead, why then our state is free.3 (11.160–6) Clearly, by comparison, the Q2/F version of the speech seeks a more direct emotional response from the audience. But while Anglo-Danish relations might have become a matter of national interest a few years later when James I and his wife Anna of Denmark arrived in London, it seems unlikely that the first – or indeed any – audiences of Hamlet were moved even to artificial patriotic fury (as they might have been by the herald Montjoy in Henry V) by Claudius’s taunting. What, then, is the nature of the emotional response demanded by Claudius’s speech, and why is it – as well as the mechanics of the play’s denouement – tied so specifically to the actual historical relationship between Denmark and England? In the pages that follow I try to answer this question by putting Claudius’s speech in 4.3 in the context of his other speeches in the play, especially those in the first three acts, and describing the peculiar relationship the character has with the audience, and how it changes over the course of the play. At the end of 4.3, I argue, Claudius briefly becomes, or at least tries to become, the kind of character Hamlet is, and this has important ramifications for how we experience the play’s final scene. *  *  * Virtually everything Claudius says in his first two scenes, 1.2 and 2.2, is impenetrable. This is his first sentence: Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death The memory be green, and that it us befitted To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom To be contracted in one brow of woe, Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature That we with wisest sorrow think on him Together with remembrance of ourselves. (1.2.1–7)

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The king favours a dilatory style replete with inversion (‘of . . . our dear brother’s death / The memory be’), grammatically disparate parallel phrases (‘Though yet . . .’ ‘and that . . .’, ‘and our whole kingdom / To be’), and the liberal, often ambiguous use of the royal first-­person plural. He seems not to know where his sentences will end before he begins them. Lines 8 and 9 introduce the woman standing next to Claudius. Since she appears at the beginning of the sentence, and since line 9 is entirely devoted to an appositive phrase, ‘Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state’, it is reasonable to assume that the queen will be the sentence’s grammatical subject. But at the beginning of line 10, Claudius introduces another inversion, ‘Have we’, which makes him the subject of the sentence. The verb to be introduced by ‘Have’ is now withheld for four lines (with line 13’s ‘In equal scale’ falling out of grammatical parallel with the four preceding with phrases), and when it finally arrives – ‘Taken to wife’, 14 – it is redundant: it was clear in line 8, when he said that his ‘sometime sister’ was ‘now our Queen’, that Claudius had married Gertrude. This verbal style extends beyond formal occasions such as the announcement of his marriage and into more intimate conversation, such as this pleasantry with Laertes:          What wouldst thou beg, Laertes, That shall not be my offer, not thy asking? (1.2.45–6) The phrase ‘not thy asking’ is redundant with ‘beg’: the sentence could, and indeed should, have ended with ‘my offer’. The extraneous duplication of ‘not’ is confusing, especially in the context of the next two lines, where a ‘not’ is introduced in one phrase and then left out in its parallel: The head is not more native to the heart, The hand more instrumental to the mouth (1.2.47–8)

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I am not suggesting that Claudius’s goodwill towards Laertes is in doubt, only that the minute shifts in the language require more energy in the comprehension than the banality of the sentiment would seem to demand. Later, in 2.2, the king will thank Voltemand for the letter he brings from Norway with these words: At our more considered time we’ll read, Answer, and think upon this business. (2.2.81–2) Surely it is more likely that Claudius will ‘read’ and ‘think upon’ the business before making an ‘Answer’ to the letter. Even with minor functionaries and in the course of very particular state business, the king labours to put words and phrases together in a graceful manner. Thus his greeting of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz at the beginning of 2.2 seems to have the same declamatory ponderousness as his speech before an assembly of councillors and courtiers in 1.2. It begins with an awkwardly grandiose adverbial phrase (‘Moreover that . . .’, 2), proceeds to a protracted inversion (‘What it should be . . . I cannot dream of’, 7–10), a dilatory and redundant parallelism (‘I entreat you both / That, being of so young days brought up with him /  . . . That you vouchsafe . . .’, 10–13), and then two more inversions made all the more difficult to parse by the royal first-­person plural (‘Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus / That opened lies within our remedy’, 17–18). I imagine that it is as challenging for an actor to speak Claudius’s lines as it is for a spectator in the theatre – or even a careful reader – to understand them. What is the purpose behind the challenges of the king’s speech in 1.2 and 2.2? It is tempting to interpret Claudius’s syntactic dilations and changes of direction as evidence of duplicity: an attempt (in 1.1) to conceal or mitigate the unseemliness of his hasty marriage for his own as well as his audience’s sake; or (in 1.2) to disguise, before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his malicious designs upon Hamlet. Alternatively,

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we might be tempted to think that Claudius’s verbal self-­ indulgence is a sign that he is foolish, or overly ingratiating. There are, after all, some parallels between his style of speaking and Polonius’s style of speaking: note, in particular, the king’s advice on mourning at 1.2.87–106. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the king in these first two scenes is meant to seem foolish and ingratiating, or that he is attempting to hide behind a dense mesh of language. There is no particular sense that he loves the sound of his own words in all their excess. Audiences do not laugh at Claudius’s speeches in 1.2; they strain to understand the bare content behind all the parallelism, apposition and inversion. And when the king wants to use language as a screen (as I shall discuss further, with regard to his manipulation of Laertes in 4.7), he is chillingly efficient and clear, even if he is speaking ornately. In 1.2 and 2.2 Claudius is as uncertain about – even oblivious to – what he has to fear from Hamlet as Hamlet, and the audience, is uncertain about Claudius’s actual role in the death of old Hamlet. It would be almost impossible for an audience unfamiliar with the plot of the play to hear or read the king’s speeches in these scenes ironically precisely because they are so difficult to understand in the first place. And I don’t think that Shakespeare meant Claudius to be perceived ironically in these scenes. Rather, I think that he wanted Claudius to be perceived as an absolute king, one who is so certain of what he wants to say that he doesn’t even listen to the words as they come out of his mouth. In his first two scenes, the king is fully ensconced in the royal echo chamber. His theatrical power in these scenes comes from speaking fully, and merely, like a king: grandiloquently and self-­referentially, never imagining that he might be imperfectly understood. He is exactly what he seems to be. There is a precise moment at which the king’s speech starts to be more interesting, more direct and more immediately intelligible. This is in 3.1, where he speaks aside after hearing Polonius remind Ophelia that mere ‘pious action’ can too easily be used to create the appearance of devotion where there is none. ‘O, ’tis too true’, Claudius says:

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How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience! The harlot’s cheek, beautified with plastering art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it Than is my deed to my most painted word. O heavy burden! (3.1.49–53) It is perhaps in keeping with his stilted, banal way of speaking in his first two scenes that Claudius’s crisis of conscience is precipitated by Polonius’s easy platitude – especially because that platitude is at cross purposes to itself (that is, Polonius is warning Ophelia against observing mere forms of devotion while insisting that she do just that). The depth of sentiment in these lines comes not so much from their relatively conventional content as from the fact that Claudius speaks them at all. It is as though he has for the first time become conscious of the sound of his own ‘painted word[s]’, and this consciousness causes a rupture in the fabric of the play. He is not yet conscious of his identity as a character in a play, but his startling turn aside (the direction is not marked in the early texts, but it is certainly implicit) makes him seem suddenly like a real person, not least because his analogy of the ‘harlot’s cheek’ echoes Hamlet’s earlier invocation of a ‘whore’ to express his own frustration about the vexed relation between word and deed (2.2.518–22). This is the first moment in the play where we can be certain that Claudius, like Hamlet, has a secret to conceal: he is more than what he seems to be. Between his speech about the harlot’s cheek in 3.1 and his confessional soliloquy in 3.3, the king speaks just under thirty lines, and almost all of them are about sending Hamlet to England. His characteristic habits of awkward inversion, halting parallelism and redundancy vie with a new sense of urgency and dispatch. Love! His affections do not that way tend. Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, Was not like madness. (3.1.161–3)

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If these lines, spoken after Hamlet’s confrontation with Ophelia, just barely hang together, they are on their way to firmer ground a little further along in the speech, in an anticipation of the soliloquy at the end of 4.3: Thus set it down. He shall with speed to England For the demand of our neglected tribute. (168–9) In 3.3, ‘I your commission will forthwith dispatch’ (3) wobbles a little, but Claudius then has no response to Guildenstern’s, and especially Rosencrantz’s, dilations upon the plight of the sovereign (they seem to have been listening very carefully to their host) except to send them hastily offstage: ‘Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage’ (24). The inversion ‘Arm you’ is part of the line’s rhetorical force. Our sense of Claudius as a person – as something more (or less) than a king – is, then, closely connected to his feeling that Hamlet is a threat. The threat seems to arise, in the elliptical logic that governs the play (or, indeed, any Shakespeare play), from the possibility that Hamlet will discover a secret Claudius conceals. If we know the play already, it seems obvious that this secret must be the murder of old Hamlet, but in fact the events preceding Claudius’s soliloquy in 3.3 do not really point in that direction. The king’s aside in 3.1 uses a sexual metaphor and is precipitated by the essentially sexual ruse Polonius prepares to draw Hamlet out. Hamlet’s verbal assault on Ophelia, so concerned as it is with sexual ‘honesty’, with bawdry, and with the morality of ‘painting’, echoes the literal concerns and metaphorical language of both Polonius and Claudius immediately before Hamlet’s entrance. The coded message the king seems to hear in Hamlet’s speech is more likely to have to do with venery than with regicide: what is being revealed, to the king himself as well as to the audience, to lurk beneath the ‘painted’ words of his first two scenes is a sense of the impropriety of having taken his ‘sometime sister’ to be his queen – and of her having allowed herself to be taken.

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This reading obtains as well even for the final moments of the Mousetrap performance: the last thing Hamlet says before the king leaves the play is ‘You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife’ (3.2.256–7). Here the threat of a regicide nephew (Lucianus might stand in for Hamlet) coincides with an accusation of wife-­stealing and the intimation of incest. I am not sure that Hamlet is ever given quite enough credit for the success of his theatrical ploy, but on one level – at least, again, in the elliptical logic of the play – it does what he hopes it will. No sooner has Claudius left the theatre than he is down on his knees hoping to pray for forgiveness. What is surprising about that scene is not only how unequivocal the king is in speaking his crime aloud (‘A brother’s murder’, 3.3.38; ‘brother’s blood’, 44; ‘my foul murder’, 52) but also how little concern there is with the sexual dimension of this crime which seems to have been driving the action heretofore. Gertrude is mentioned as only one (and the last) of the ‘effects’ for which Claudius committed the murder: ‘My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen’ (55). For comparison, we might turn to Q1, which, as so frequently, puts the matter more plainly: . . . the murder of a brother and a king And the adulterous fault I have committed. Oh, these are sins that are unpardonable! 10.5–7 Like his aside in 3.1, the king’s soliloquy in 3.3 of the Q2/F text is unexpected and to some degree unnecessary; it gives us more of the king’s character than we might have expected to see, and it does so with a different emphasis from what the events of the play, and in particular Hamlet’s preoccupations, have prepared us for. If Claudius seems to be a more complex character by the end of 3.3 (and I think he does), it is because his way of speaking (like Hamlet’s) now comprises multiple, contradictory layers. The king’s soliloquy in 3.3 evinces some of the syntactic perversity of his first two scenes: ‘Pray can I not’, he says,

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invertedly, at line 38 (even ‘Pray I cannot’ would have been less awkward); and in his list of the ‘effects for which I did the murder’, ‘ambition’ is a cause, not an effect, and ‘My crown’ (rather than ‘The crown’, or ‘A crown’) suggests that Claudius possessed it before he got it by murder. But these moments are subordinate to the general vigour and clarity of his language throughout the speech: the series of rhetorical questions and despairing answers; the clipped, urgent parallelisms of 65–9; and the use of words – ‘rank’ (36), ‘fault’ (51), ‘corrupted’ (57), and ‘shuffling’ (61) – that are particularly expressive because they have already been used by Hamlet. Claudius’s inversions and disjunctive parallelisms do not any longer register as an externally imposed form meant to represent the voice of a king; they have been assimilated into the character so that they now register as actual habits of speech. As is clear from his final line in 3.3 (‘Words without thoughts never to heaven go’, 98), the king is now acutely aware of how his words might be understood, and it is an extravagant irony of the scene that this development occurs just as Hamlet enters – too late to overhear the king’s soliloquy, unable to hear his prayer, and wrong about what the gesture of prayer signifies. As the king learns to hear his own words, he also begins to listen to what others are saying. ‘[W]hat he spake . . . / Was not like madness’, he said of Hamlet towards the end of 3.1, and 4.1 begins with him trying to discover what is on Gertrude’s mind: There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves. You must translate; ’tis fit we understand them. (4.1.1–2) Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, which Claudius reasonably (and correctly) sees as a failed attempt on his own life, allows the king, and the audience, to focus once again on the secrets Hamlet conceals. But these secrets, remarkably, are now conceived in terms that suggest the king and Hamlet share them, or share responsibility for them.

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Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered? It will be laid to us whose providence Should have kept short, restrained and out of haunt This mad young man. But so much was our love, We would not understand what was most fit, But like the owner of a foul disease, To keep it from divulging, let it feed Even on the pith of life. (4.1.16–23) Claudius’s claim that he acted out of ‘so much . . . love’ may come across as disingenuous, but the passage amounts to much the same thing whether or not the king is sincere. He will be exposed by what Hamlet conceals because he tried to conceal rather than expose the disease of Hamlet’s mind. The metaphor of disease anticipates and will be elaborated in Claudius’s language in 4.3, the scene where, for a brief and powerful moment, he seems to attain a Hamlet-­like awareness of his own identity as a theatrical character. Seeking to pluck out the heart of Hamlet’s mystery, the king will turn the play inside out. The medical metaphor with which 4.3 begins arises from what has been the king’s constant preoccupation since 3.1: sending Hamlet away. It is a task whose carrying out must be ‘smooth and even’, seeming like ‘[d]eliberate pause’ rather than a hasty decision, because of Hamlet’s popularity: Yet we must not put the strong law on him: He’s loved of the distracted multitude, Who like not in their judgement but their eyes, And where ’tis so, th’ offender’s scourge is weighed But never the offence. (4.3.3–7) Two, and possibly three, kinds of ‘distraction’ come together in this opening speech: Hamlet’s apparent madness (see OED 5), the Danish citizens’ confusion (see OED 1, 4), and possibly the

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increasing panic of Claudius which he attempts to keep under control as he speaks to the ‘two or three’ directed to enter with him. Representing Hamlet’s activity chiefly as a political problem, the king imagines him as a sickness in the Danish body politic which must be purged or cut out.          diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all. (4.3.8–10) In the scene’s final speech, however, when Claudius is alone, Hamlet becomes a disease in the king’s own blood and, moreover, one that seems to remind Claudius of his guilt for his brother’s murder: the ‘hectic’ is a wasting fever whose symptoms (according to the OED) include ‘flushed cheeks and hot dry skin’. Tormented by his vengeful, possibly mad, nephew as well as, perhaps, his own feelings of guilt, Claudius seems to suffer something like what his brother (at least, according to the ghost) suffered under the effects of a poison ‘whose effect / Holds such an enmity with blood of man’ that it causes a ‘vile and loathsome crust’ to cover the victim’s ‘smooth body’ (1.5.64–73). Another, related transformation occurs in this speech as well, effected by the speech’s surprisingly forceful directness: the distracted multitude that loves Hamlet with its eyes, not its judgement, is no longer only the notional citizens of Denmark, but has become the actual theatregoers of London. ‘Do it, England!’: it is an order but also a plea; Claudius is asking for the first time that the spectators accept him as a king. If Claudius is to succeed with the audience at this point, as I think he well might, it must be through the actor who plays him demonstrating that the character has suddenly realized what Hamlet has known all along: that he is a character in a play. For the first time in the play, I think, the actor can really enjoy speaking the king’s speech, and can represent the king as waking up to the possibilities theatricality itself provides for

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identity formation and retributive action. The play’s the thing! What precipitates this change in Claudius is, I think, his watching and listening to Hamlet in this exchange: king

. . . everything is bent For England. hamlet king

     For England?

            Ay, Hamlet.

hamlet                 Good. king

So is it, if thou knewst our purposes. hamlet

I see a cherub that sees them. (4.3.44–7) I think that, in the final line of this quoted passage, Hamlet singles out a spectator in the theatre and speaks to him or her, and then proceeds with clownish self-­awareness, drawing out audience laughter, through his lines about the king being his ‘dear mother’ (48–50). It takes Claudius a few lines after Hamlet’s exit to recognize his opportunity.          Follow him at foot. Tempt him with speed aboard. Delay it not – I’ll have him hence tonight. Away, for everything is sealed and done That else leans on th’ affair. Pray you make haste. (51–5) The scene could end here, with these four lines that give us more of the same kind of speech we’ve been hearing from

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Claudius since Act 3: urgent, comparatively lapidary sentences about how Hamlet must be removed from Denmark. Instead, the king pauses, perhaps in mid-­stride, and speaks to the audience, introduces historical-­contextual information that might seem to make the death of Hamlet inevitable, and, above all, finally acknowledges that he knows we are watching him – that he acts because we are watching him. He has become a worthy opponent for Hamlet, a character who has seized the occasion of the theatrical moment to invite us inside his head. Thus, in the play’s final scenes, the king becomes as deliberate and cunning as Hamlet – his idea to use a recreational duel as the ruse by which to kill Hamlet is, of course, an echo of Hamlet’s Mousetrap – and the way he talks, especially to Laertes in 4.7, allows an actor to revel in his command of language and his performance of duplicity.             That we would do We should do when we would, for this ‘would’ changes, And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents, And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift’s sigh That hurts by easing. (4.7.116–21) Claudius here anticipates and is as persuasive as Lady Macbeth; the parallelisms are quite precise, and amid all of its repetitions there is not one word wasted. (Shakespeare drew from at least one other compelling moment in Claudius’s speech for some of Lady Macbeth’s speech; see 3.3.43–6.4) Like Hamlet when he speaks to the king, the king when he speaks to Laertes is not only listening to himself speak, but also imagining what his listener hears and understands. In the end, Claudius fails, too, as Hamlet fails: for all their elaborate stage-­management of events, the king must watch as his sometime sister poisons herself with the cup intended for Hamlet, and Hamlet kills Claudius without really accusing him (because he cannot yet with certainty) of killing his father.

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When Hamlet calls the king an ‘incestuous, damned Dane’ (5.2.309) he is not revealing a secret so much as describing what everyone knows and can see: that Claudius married his sister-­in-law and caused the deaths of Laertes and young Hamlet. Hamlet’s putative victory, at least, lies in his relationship with the audience and the Danish (perhaps the eleventh-­century English as well) citizens for whom they are sometimes a double: we know Hamlet’s ‘story’ (333) and can imagine it being retold, drawing others into the mind of Hamlet, inspiring the sympathy it has inspired in us. The king, I think, aspires to a victory like this as well. His last line is in some sense as hopeful as Hamlet’s last line. king

O, yet defend me, friends, I am but hurt. (308) Encouraged, perhaps, by the courtiers’ cry of ‘Treason, treason!’ (307) Claudius seems to have forgotten how potent was the poison Laertes put on the swords (see 4.7.138–46 and 5.2.298–302). Or, perhaps, his call for the defence of his ‘friends’ is simply the desire for reassurance that he is, even in the moment of death, still the king. If I were directing a production of Hamlet I would ask the Claudius-­actor not to speak and gesture, at this moment, to the anonymous representatives of ‘all the state’ of Denmark (5.2.203 SD) who have come to watch the duel, but rather to the spectators in the theatre.

Notes 1 All references to Hamlet are from the revised Arden Third Series edition, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). In their note on the quoted passage, Thompson and Taylor say that: ‘Although England must mean “the King of England”, it is conceivable that

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the reiteration of England (56, 63) might encourage the actor to speak these lines as a direct address to the audience’ (395). As will become clear, my argument treats the sense ‘King of England’ as, at most, subordinate. 2 I doubt that, in Shakespeare’s time, anyone shouted back at Claudius (‘Do it yourself!’ perhaps), and I have never heard of a modern production in which such a thing happened; but the speech, especially since it is so different from the King’s other speeches, seems designed to create or harness the kind of unpredictable, participatory energy that Stephen Purcell, in Chapter 1 of this volume, finds modern audiences and practitioners to associate with direct address. 3 All quotations from Q1 are from Thompson and Taylor’s Arden edition (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). 4 For the parallel passages in Macbeth, see 1.7.41–4 and 5.1.50–1 in the Arden Third Series edition, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015).

4 Audiences: The Architecture of Engagement Susan Bennett

Shakespeare’s Globe started – and continues – as a project, in Franklin Hildy’s words, ‘intended to advance our knowledge about the theatre of Shakespeare’s day’.1 Since opening in 1997, the building has established itself as a significant landmark on the south bank of the Thames; indeed, its construction can be credited as a crucial element in the redevelopment of the riverfront. The architecture of Shakespeare’s Globe, then, serves to link the remote past (early modern London and its drama) with contemporary experience (theatrically as well as of the city). Of course, the presence of the Globe in the urban landscape is long familiar from those extraordinary seventeenth-­century panoramas of London by Claes Visscher in 1616 and by Wenceslas Hollar in 1647. So iconic is representation of the Globe in these historical vistas that when artist Robin Reynolds was commissioned to update the Visscher drawing as part of the Shakespeare 400 celebrations in 2016, he not only (obviously) included

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Shakespeare’s Globe but also embedded in his drawing visual references to the thirty-­seven plays, three poems and the sonnets that visitors to the Guildhall Art Gallery exhibition of Reynolds’ panorama were challenged to identify.2 And it is this dual function of the replica theatre – as performance space and as London landmark – which this chapter seeks to explore: how do audiences at Shakespeare’s Globe encounter its architecture as a meaning-­making system within the performance of a play and as a meaning-­making site that contributes to its audiences’ experience of the city? Tiffany Stern has described the spaces that Shakespeare wrote for ‘as visually charged theatrical environments’ and she looks at the stage as flexibly architectural, describing its pillars, for example, as simultaneously ‘necessary structural features, points of reference and stage props’.3 Hers is a compelling argument, that Shakespeare wrote for the specificities of a building and deployed the stage structure both literally and figuratively in order to engage his audiences. And productions at Shakespeare’s Globe (a theatre that has as its foundational principle an accurate material replication of the original 1599 building) have almost always exploited the architectural arrangement of stage and audience. Paul Chahidi, for example, has said that ‘the building itself is to some extent the star of any show’4 and Christie Carson has argued that the architecture ‘inverts the accepted relationship between ticket price and proximity to the stage’.5 The consensus has been that the arrangement of spectators and performers fostered by the building itself created new experiences of engagement. Carson makes the point that first-­time visitors must be introduced to ‘performing conventions and rules of social engagement’ that she suggests ‘allows for a negotiated audience/actor relationship rather than a space that reaffirms traditional behaviours’ (by which she means those required in our modern fourth-­wallremoved indoor theatres).6 In the context of Original Practices performances at Shakespeare’s Globe, this revised audience/actor relationship might suggest for the spectator the experience of a kind of

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time-­travel to the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century to see the playwright’s work as their early modern predecessors would have – a possibility that garnered many of the first criticisms of the replica building. Dennis Kennedy reported on the ‘flurry’ of articles in the British press prior to the Globe’s opening, arguing that the media had been co-­opted to make the case that ‘the Globe is not a Disneyland, that its Artistic Director, Mark Rylance, is a serious artist and will not let it become one, that 35,000 people have enrolled in various classes and workshops through the education department’.7 But, across the two decades since Shakespeare’s Globe first invited audiences into its space, the reference point of the stage–audience relationship in proscenium-­arch theatres seems to have become much less important as an imagined default position (although not, as one example in this chapter will illustrate, entirely forgotten). Performance, after all, saturates twenty-­first-century life, staged in a multitude of venues other than theatre buildings, ranging from themed environments in the shopping mall to site-­specific art installations in public places that require viewer participation to produce their effects. For this reason, the Globe now competes as but one option on an overcrowded menu of entertainment opportunities. Equally, as one of London’s best-­known theatres and, yes, a tourist attraction, the Globe has rightly promoted and encouraged the distinctive pleasure that audiences standing in the yard generally take from their proximity to, and interactions with, the actors on stage. To address the relationships between architecture and audience that Shakespeare’s Globe both inspires and depends upon, I will look at two specific, if exceptional, occasions in the theatre’s performance history. The first of these is the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival (21 April to 9 June), organized as a flagship event within the World Shakespeare Festival, itself part of the Cultural Olympiad that accompanied London’s hosting of the Summer Olympic Games.8 The second is ‘The Complete Walk’, staged on 23 and 24 April as part of the celebrations in 2016 for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s

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death. By way of examples from these two celebratory events, I suggest (as I have, with co-­author Mary Polito, argued elsewhere) how ‘the ways in which the meaning of performances for audiences are bound up with the meaning already associated with the places of their production’.9 The Globe to Globe Festival in 2012, because of its duration (six weeks) and scope (thirty-­eight performances ‘beyond’ the English language10), allowed for an explicitly different purposing of the theatre space. Rather than its usual imbrication in a mandate to explore Shakespeare’s plays in the context for which the playwright wrote, the building here was more simply a host site. Its role was to invite the world, just as an Olympic Games does, to a single place in celebration of the accomplishments of its participants. Ticket buyers for the Festival were also very different from the Globe’s typical audience demographic. Of the more than 85,000 tickets sold during the six weeks of performances, ‘80 per cent of bookings were made by first-­time visitors to the theatre’.11 This is a remarkable statistic that reflects the stellar job done by the marketing team at the Globe in bringing to the Festival ‘the many diasporic populations that make up contemporary London’12 to see the versions of Shakespeare’s plays produced by companies from their homelands. Thus, different productions drew in different language communities, with English-­speakers and Shakespeare enthusiasts (professional and amateur alike) most often a small and occasionally resistant minority within the overall audience. What was surprising – and, for this spectator at least, exhilarating – was how these newcomer audiences made visible the role of the theatre’s architecture in the meaning-­ making exchange between actors and spectators and sometimes, too, showed its limitations. Theatre space was constantly in flux, often reformulated by the performance languages (both spoken and aesthetic) that the companies created for their worlds of Shakespeare and the interactions they required between their actors and the audience. Opening and concluding a performance of Troilus and Cressida with a

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haka (the Ma¯ori ceremonial dance best known to British audiences via the New Zealand rugby team), the mingling of cast and audience members in joyous Greek dancing onstage and off- at the end of Pericles, wonderful Bollywood-­style numbers in a Hindi Twelfth Night, exuberant folkloric characters from Korean culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and an almost-­silent standing ovation of waving hands at the end of Deafinitely Theatre’s British Sign Language Love’s Labour’s Lost were among the many Festival moments that shattered the by-­now-established conventions of watching a play at Shakespeare’s Globe. Stephen Purcell, reviewing Nga¯kau Toa’s Ma¯ori-­language Troilus, described the opening haka as ‘ferocious’ and ‘trembling’ and its return at the end of the play, when a group of New Zealanders standing in the yard joined in its performance, as ‘a form of cultural exchange that was quite new to me’.13 He continued: I found it hard to tell whether the cast was performing a famous haka which was already known to the yard participants, or whether they were engaging in some kind of reciprocal call-­and-response. Either way, the meaning was clear – the playgoers were honouring the performance, and celebrating their shared culture. As an assertion of cultural identity, it was a powerful display.14 This repurposing of the theatre space as Ma¯ori space not only laid bare (as so many of the Festival’s productions did) the iconic presence and power of the Globe’s architecture in conjuring a sense of English national identity, historically and today, but the energy and form of the haka temporarily suspended normative patterns of engagement where the actors seek and then enjoy the audience’s applause directed towards them. Rather the play’s ending became an affirmation and creation, all at once, of community, outsiders made insiders to that space, bringing to the theatre in their dramatic display new possibilities of meaning.

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If most of the productions in the Globe to Globe Festival, in a dazzling variety of ways, wrought some kind of refashioning in the relationship between building and audience, two productions were memorable in how they made explicitly visible the impact of the theatre’s architecture on spectatorial reception. The first of these was Andrea Baracco and Vincenzo Manna’s Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar). This was one of only nine plays booked that were not new commissions by the Globe specifically for the Festival, but which had been performed previously elsewhere. In the case of Giulio Cesare, it been performed at Teatro della Cometa in 2011 and then at the Teatro di Roma earlier in 2012; the company brought to Shakespeare’s Globe a production unchanged from the version designed for the black box spaces of prior performances in Italy. In Emily Oliver’s assessment of the show, ‘The actors showed great physical and vocal commitment to their parts, but apart from a few poignant moments the intensity of the action remained confined to the stage, with the fourth wall resolutely in place’.15 Indeed, Giulio Cesare was a singularly front-­facing performance, leaving the audience at the two sides of the yard and galleries more or less unable to see much of what was happening on stage and, thus, at a physical and psychological remove from the emotional power of the play. Of course, any actor who has performed in a Globe season will speak about the necessity to address the audience across the architectural space of the theatre – in fact, Tim Carroll (director of several productions there between 1999 and 2005) has argued that social divisions within the architecture (the yard with its groundlings, the lower and middle galleries with the top-­price tickets, and the upper gallery with its many restricted-­view seats) open up particular opportunities so that ‘the actor can decide to address him or herself to a different part of the audience, depending on what kind of person he thinks he is appealing to’.16 But the actors of this Giulio Cesare addressed not the audience dispersed among the various locations of the Globe’s space, but instead performed to the audiences of its previous theatrical performances. What this

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palpably illustrated was not just the very different practices of contemporary European theatre production, but how much the Globe’s own productions have effectively and consistently exploited stage–audience spatial relations. In her analysis of Giulio Cesare, Sonia Massai points out ‘that the performance space offered by the Globe is not neutral and . . . it clashes with the aesthetic and more generally artistic principles that inform the theatrical language and approach shared by directors like Baracco’.17 Massai identified a ‘visceral sense of dislocation’ created in the audience derived from the fact that the production’s theatrical language ‘had originated in a very different type of theatre, where light and sound thoroughly inform the artistic vision of those who work within it, [and] clashed with the performance space offered by the Globe stage’.18 In effect, Giulio Cesare enacted a defamiliarization of the Globe’s architecture by behaving as if it were a black box and, as such, confirming the needs of the space for broad stage–audience engagement. In other words, Giulio Cesare was not just Italian in the language spoken by the actors, but also Italian in the sense of its own architecture of production, erasing, if only temporarily, the Globe’s history in favour of its own. If Giulio Cesare’s aesthetic concept refused the Globe’s connection to a past history of Shakespearean performance and London theatres in favour of European modernism and its black-­box theatres, my second example from the Festival serves not just as a particular example of the changed audience– stage dynamics that came to characterize the Globe to Globe Festival, but also, paradoxically, to elaborate assumptions historians have made about stage–audience proxemics in the theatres of early modern London. I turn here to the Festival’s production of The Winter’s Tale by Renegade Theatre of Lagos, Nigeria. In her review for The Year of Shakespeare, Sarah Olive describes the experience of seeing the afternoon performance of the play among an audience largely comprising ‘school groups from the Globe’s surrounding boroughs’, the presence of whom created ‘a buzz in the air’.19 She continued:

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Many students, teachers and accompanying parents had decided to don bright and busy Yoruban dress for the occasion, which interestingly blurred the boundaries between the actors (also wearing traditional costume) and the audience. Who was dressing up for whom? Who was there to see and who to be seen?20 Olive’s questions are important ones for this particular example as I am interested in how another of Renegade’s performances of the play, one in the evening, exposed how architecturally produced sight lines and acts of listening inflected production and reception both. In many ways, the blurring of boundaries that Olive observed was, by week five of the Festival, becoming something of a commonplace, even if the visibility – and audibility – of the language-­community audience for The Winter’s Tale was more vivid than most. Julie Sanders, who attended the same evening performance that I did, has argued that Renegade’s production not only remade the printed text of the play as they received it but brought something fresh and challenging to the roofs and spaces of Bankside, and that it was through the medium of audience participation that the active claiming of space could be most clearly registered. As the Yoruba-­speaking section of the audience warmed to their task on a pleasantly breezy London evening (south-­east London has the largest Yoruba population outside Nigeria), the call-­and-response rhythm of the production hit its stride. . . . Members of the audience began to ‘talk back’ to the production; spectators endorsed, questioned or quite openly dismissed some of the suggestions the actors were throwing out to them in lines that were frequently delivered as direct address.21 Rather than the kind of interactivity that is so often hailed by the actors in a Globe production,22 this audience, quite literally, called the shots and were, as much as the actors, the engine of the performance.

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But the evening performance of The Winter’s Tale also delivered a much more complex and revealing shift in the relationships between audience and stage that are conventional to Shakespeare’s Globe. As Sanders observed of her experience, I found myself standing in the yard that night and wanting to have eyes in the back of my head and be able to watch the audience at the same time as what was unfolding on stage, it was about call-­and-response. Amid the generous applause afforded the company at the close, they caught sight of a notable dignatory [sic] in the gallery (an interesting throwback to 1611, when actors might well have acknowledged the presence of significant individual spectators, and perhaps patrons and commercial supporters, in this way) and began to offer a praise song to their watching patron, Wole Soyinka. This was a theatrical ‘event,’ then, in the broadest sense of the term.23 While Sanders watched the production from the yard, I was seated in the middle galleries and was aware throughout the production not only of Soyinka’s presence in a Lords’ Room seat, but of how often the Yoruban audience in the yard would look for his response to what was happening on stage as affirmation of their own interventions and responses, and especially so in the scenes where Ikokò, a Yoruban trickster figure written into this interpretation of Shakespeare’s play, was causing mischief. At one level, this serves as another example of space remade – the Globe overwritten by Yoruban cultural practices, temporarily belonging to an entirely different history. But, as Sanders suggests, the effect of Soyinka’s place, architecturally speaking, was to recall the objectives embedded into the sixteenth-­century design of this theatre. It was a potent exposure of power dynamics within the early modern theatrical experience. In this context, consider Bruce Smith’s observation about the original Globe: ‘In terms of both vision and hearing, the Lords’ Room offered an optimal situation: one could not

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only see and be seen but hear and be heard’.24 Until that night, I could not have imagined quite how powerful a presence a patron could have and how significantly the reception of a play might be if not changed, at least filtered, through looking at and hearing the responses of the most important theatregoer at the performance. An unexpected moment, for me at least, that a Nigerian adaptation of The Winter’s Tale proved a learning experience about the audiences of early modern London. But the international scope of the Globe to Globe Festival had the effect, more generally, of making the Globe’s architecture, from time to time, quite foreign. As the various performances inhabited the theatre building in new and unusual ways, they also revealed how the architecture usually works – ‘not neutral’, as Sonia Massai suggested, either in the history evoked or the social relationships between stage and spectator. It was interesting, then, to return to these social relationships in 2016. This was, of course, a year that was to be all about Shakespeare – an explosion of events, exhibitions and performances worldwide that celebrated and memorialized the quatercentenary of the playwright’s death. On the anniversary weekend (23 and 24 April) Shakespeare’s Globe returned to its home stage ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’, a production that had toured to 197 countries (covering, according to the website, 310,647 km) with President Obama in the house for selected scenes from the show on the morning of 23 April and the final public performance on 24 April. In a sense, then, the play made a triumphant return home just in time to celebrate Shakespeare as a London dramatist and as the cultural heavyweight he has become in those four centuries since he died, at the same time as professing the Globe theatre as an authentic site for such memorialization. But I am more interested to think about the Globe’s more accessible entertainment that weekend (particularly since the performances of Hamlet were sold out long in advance), ‘The Complete Walk’. This installation was set up ‘along the iconic 2.5 mile stretch [of the banks of the Thames] between

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FIGURE 4.1  The Complete Walk map. With kind permission of Shakespeare’s Globe.

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Westminster Bridge and Tower Bridge’25 and invited audiences to experience the thirty-­seven plays as thirty-­seven commissioned short (ten-­minute) films projected on screens dotted along the South Bank, often located adjacent to other ‘iconic’ buildings and spaces (see Figure 4.1).26 Each film drew on previous screen versions of Shakespeare’s plays: the British Film Institute’s Silent Shakespeare27 series along with Globe on Screen filmed productions including those of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival (the latter, then, adding non-English-­language content) as well as new scenes ‘shot in the locations Shakespeare imagined when he wrote them’.28 Shakespeare’s Globe asked the reader of the webpage promotion for their installation to ‘[p]icture Cleopatra in front of the Pyramids, Shylock in Venice’s former Jewish Ghetto, Hamlet on the rocks of Elsinore and much more’ – places that ‘The Complete Walk’ audiences, of course, may have experienced first-­hand, unlike the author of the plays. The BBC’s coverage of ‘The Complete Walk’ promised: ‘To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, Shakespeare’s Globe has assembled an all-­star cast to make 37 short films – one for each play – and here’s the twist: each lavish 10 minute vignette is made on location in the real setting of each plot’.29 Despite the use of a profoundly twentieth-­century medium of film, viewers were promised an encounter with Shakespeare’s imagination and plotting. Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole, in his preview to ‘The Complete Walk’ published in the Telegraph, asserted that ‘networks of association and resonance . . . mean a place is still, sometimes, uniquely a place, even in an increasingly bland, homogenised world. . . . [A]dmittedly a lot of the world does now look the same, identikit streets of Starbucks and Gaps snaking through towns and cities on almost every continent. But some places remain special.’30 Here Dromgoole justifies his decision to film a scene from each of the plays in their ‘real settings’ as offering the viewer a unique, ‘special’ and apparently value-­added experience (‘We should always be able to imagine Cleopatra framed by pyramids, but it is, just the once, quite a thrill to see her in front of one’31). But, in the

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realities of contemporary London, the staging for ‘The Complete Walk’ was just such an ‘identikit’ locale, replete with Starbucks and very many other national and global brands providing the scenic backdrop: this is the postmodern, neo-­ liberal architecture of the Thames’s South Bank, an exemplary site of urban regeneration that got its start, as I suggested earlier, in the building of Shakespeare’s Globe. Tim Cresswell has written: ‘The purpose of culturally inflected city sites, animated by both local populations and tourists, is . . . consumption; this requires the conversion of strategic areas within the larger city into locales where entertainment incites spending’.32 Notwithstanding chilly and often rainy weather over the weekend of 23 and 24 April, as well as technical problems on the Saturday that meant that far fewer than thirty-­seven plays were actually available to be watched by increasingly grumpy spectators, ‘The Complete Walk’ was well attended and the ten-­minute versions of the plays offered not just glorious scenery and strong acting (performances by Jonathan Pryce, Gemma Arterton, Dominic West and Peter Capaldi, among others), but mapped a promenade that encouraged participants to walk some or all of the 2.5-mile route peppered with spending opportunities even if viewing the films themselves did not cost anything. Thus, ‘The Complete Walk’, albeit temporarily, constructed new entertainment content that served to refresh and extend a well-­known public pathway defined by built cultural infrastructure. The act of audience engagement demanded of this extra-­ theatrical event recalls Paul Connerton’s observation that ‘people build in a certain way because they think in a certain way, and they think in a particular way because they build in a particular way. Produced spaces and cultural rules interconnect because both indicate who permissibly communicates with whom, how, when, where, and under what conditions.’33 The value of ‘The Complete Walk’ for Shakespeare’s Globe is, then, not only a reminder of the signature role of its building in the act of remembering the Bard for London and English cultural

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authority, but also in delivering value to a wide array of consumer brands in place along the river’s southern edge. ‘The Complete Walk’ was, in this way, an instrument to communicate much more than individual scenes from the thirty-­seven plays to its public audience. It was, of course, an extended series of advertisements for the Shakespeare’s Globe repertoire (both to promote the theatre’s backlist, filmed and available via their Globe Player,34 and for the upcoming season of performances), but it also acted to remake the diverse architectural landmarks along this stretch of the Thames and the ‘authentic’ places where scenes had been filmed as ‘pop-­up’ Shakespearean sites. The ‘pop-­up’ phenomenon has already become an archetype of twenty-­first-century populist performance. Temporary entertainment venues have quickly succeeded in attracting big crowds for their novelty contributions to particular, typically gentrifying, neighbourhoods: the shipping-­container shopping mall of Boxpark in Shoreditch claims to have been the first, opening in 2011 and regularly the site of mini-­festivals; Pop Brixton, a collection of food venues that also hosts regular cultural and community events; and, closer to Shakespeare’s Globe, the National Theatre’s The Shed (open from 2013 to 2016) was described by Oliver Wainwright as ‘an alternative model for how the South Bank’s unwieldy structures can be adapted with light-­footed architecture’.35 That many pop-­up performances last only a day or two emphasizes to audiences the now-­or-never terms of the promised experience. The engagement proposed by ‘The Complete Walk’, a pop-­up and dispersed Shakespeare’s Globe, was very much in line, then, with this twenty-­first-century performance paradigm, invoking a transformation of early modern London theatre into contemporary urban immersive experience. Thus, ‘The Complete Walk’ ought to be evaluated as an event contextualized by its pop-­up architectural style and antithetical to the historical fidelity of the ‘home’ theatre building. On the other side of the world, the pop-­up Globe in Auckland – built in 2016 as that city’s celebration of the 400th

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anniversary and constructed from shipping containers to resemble the second Globe Theatre of 1614 – was such a popular success that it has been reassembled for a second season in 2017.36 Another pop-­up container Globe project is under development at the time of this writing, and a recent exhibition about it at the Ora Gallery in New York City suggested it might first be constructed in Detroit, Michigan.37 The examples in this chapter, both inside and outside Shakespeare’s Globe, suggest how architecture can affirm, test and contradict what we understand about how today’s theatregoers engage with Shakespeare’s plays. In this way, surely, the Globe continues as an important site for research on audience behaviour; by now, though, this research need not only be directed at a playwright and a city in the historical past, but as an expression of both very much in the present.

Notes 1 Franklin J. Hildy, ‘The “Essence of Globeness”: Authenticity, and the Search for Shakespeare’s Stagecraft’, in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15. 2 ‘Visscher Redrawn: 1616–2016’ ran from 20 February to 20 November at the Guildhall Art Gallery. More information about the pen and ink 2016 version can be found on Reynolds’s website: www.robinreynolds.co.uk/currentprojects.html (accessed 16 May 2018). 3 Tiffany Stern, ‘ “This Wide and Universal Theatre”: The Theatre as Prop in Shakespeare’s Metadrama’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 13, 21. 4 Mark Rylance, Yolanda Vazquez and Paul Chahidi, ‘Discoveries from the Globe Stage’, in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 209.

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5 Christie Carson, ‘Democratising the Audience?’, in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 118. 6 Ibid., 124. 7 Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism’, Theatre Journal 50, no. 2 (1998): 183. 8 For a detailed discussion of the Globe to Globe Festival’s relationship to the World Shakespeare Festival and the larger Cultural Olympiad, see Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare Beyond English’, in Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, ed. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–12. 9 Susan Bennett and Mary Polito, ‘Thinking Site: An Introduction’, in Performing Environments: Site-Specificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, ed. Susan Bennett and Mary Polito (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 11. 10 It was a complete works festival: the thirty-­seven plays plus a dramatic version of Venus and Adonis. 11 Bennett and Carson, ‘Introduction: Shakespeare Beyond English’, 3. 12 Ibid., 4. 13 Stephen Purcell, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, in A Year of Shakespeare: Re-­living the World Shakespeare Festival, ed. Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013). 212. 14 Ibid. 15 Emily Oliver, ‘Julius Caesar’, in A Year of Shakespeare: Re-­living the World Shakespeare Festival, ed. Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 89–90. 16 Tim Carroll, ‘ “Practising Behaviour to His Own Shadow” ’, in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 41–2. 17 Sonia Massai, ‘Art of Darkness: Staging Giulio Cesare at the Globe Theatre’, in Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global

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Experiment, ed. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 97. 18 Ibid. 19 Sarah Olive, ‘The Winter’s Tale’, in A Year of Shakespeare: Re-­living the World Shakespeare Festival, ed. Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013), 230. 20 Ibid. 21 Julie Sanders, ‘Creative Exploitation and Talking Back: Renegade Theatre’s The Winter’s Tale or Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn (‘Winter’s Tales’)’, in Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, ed. Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 247–8. 22 Carroll’s essay “ ‘Practising Behaviour to His Own Shadow’ ” (37–44) offers a number of useful illustrations of this stage– audience interaction. 23 Sanders, ‘Creative Exploitation’, 248. 24 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 214. 25 Shakespeare’s Globe, ‘The Complete Walk’, 2016. Available at: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-­on-archive/ special-­events/the-­complete-walk (accessed 16 May 2018). 26 The Globe’s webpage suggests that the films were also seen by audiences in Liverpool, Gdansk (at the Shakespeare Theatre), Alexandria and a variety of cities in Spain. The comments on the webpage concern the failures of technology on the first day of screening, 23 April, which meant many of the screens were blank – undercutting the value on display! The films have also had an afterlife through Globe on Screen as well as on tour – for example, see the British Council’s listing of venues in India between October 2016 and January 2017: www.britishcouncil. in/complete-­walks-shakespeares-­globe (accessed 16 May 2018). 27 Silent Shakespeare is a DVD collection of seven early Shakespeare film adaptations made between 1899 and 1911. 28 Shakespeare’s Globe, ‘The Complete Walk’. 29 BBC, ‘Shakespeare Lives 2016’. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/articles/4fl7pfYZ3p4qWjnZnNgsXGN/the-­

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complete-walk-­celebrates-exotic-­shakespeare (accessed 30 January 2017). 30 Dominic Dromgoole, ‘Dominic Dromgoole on the Extraordinary Power of Shakespeare’s Exotic Locations’, Telegraph, 12 April 2016. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ theatre/playwrights/globe-­trotting-adventures-­with-shakespeare/ (accessed 16 May 2018). 31 Ibid. 32 Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (London: Blackwell, 2004), 175. 33 Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 31. 34 See https://globeplayer.tv/ (accessed 16 May 2018) for more information about which productions are available (most of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival plays are in the archive) and the costs for renting or owning individual productions. 35 Oliver Wainwright, ‘The National Theatre’s Pop-Up Shed Is a Model for the South Bank’s Future’, Guardian, 16 April 2013. Available at: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-­ design-blog/2013/apr/16/national-­theatre-shed-­south-bank (accessed 15 March 2017). 36 Information about the construction of the Auckland theatre can be found at: https://web.archive.org/web/20161101083407/http:// www.popupglobe.co.nz/about/your-­experience (accessed 16 May 2018). 37 Information about the Container Globe can be found at www.thecontainerglobe.com/#about (accessed 16 May 2018).

Select bibliography BBC. ‘Shakespeare Lives 2016’. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/articles/4fl7pfYZ3p4qWjnZnNgsXGN/the-­ complete-walk-­celebrates-exotic-­shakespeare (accessed 30 January 2017). Bennett, Susan and Christie Carson. ‘Introduction: Shakespeare Beyond English’. In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global

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Experiment, edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bennett, Susan and Mary Polito. ‘Thinking Site: An Introduction’. In Performing Environments: Site-Specificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, edited by Susan Bennett and Mary Polito, 1–13. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Carroll, Tim. ‘  “Practising Behaviour to His Own Shadow” ’. In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, 37–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Carson, Christie. ‘Democratising the Audience?’ In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, 115–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Connerton, Paul. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. London: Blackwell, 2004. Dromgoole, Dominic. ‘Dominic Dromgoole on the Extraordinary Power of Shakespeare’s Exotic Locations’, Telegraph, 12 April 2016. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/ playwrights/globe-­trotting-adventures-­with-shakespeare/ (accessed 16 May 2018). Hildy, Franklin J. ‘The “Essence of Globeness”: Authenticity, and the Search for Shakespeare’s Stagecraft’. In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kennedy, Dennis. ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism’. Theatre Journal 50, no. 2 (1998): 175–88. Massai, Sonia. ‘Art of Darkness: Staging Giulio Cesare at the Globe Theatre’. In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, 92–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Olive, Sarah. ‘The Winter’s Tale’. In A Year of Shakespeare: Re-­living the World Shakespeare Festival, edited by Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, 229–32. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013. Oliver, Emily. ‘Julius Caesar’. In A Year of Shakespeare: Re-­living the World Shakespeare Festival, edited by Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, 88–91. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013.

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Purcell, Stephen. ‘Troilus and Cressida’. In A Year of Shakespeare: Re-­living the World Shakespeare Festival, edited by Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, 210–12. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013. Rylance, Mark, Yolanda Vazquez and Paul Chahidi. ‘Discoveries from the Globe Stage’. In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, edited by Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, 194–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Sanders, Julie. ‘Creative Exploitation and Talking Back: Renegade Theatre’s The Winter’s Tale or Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn (‘Winter’s Tales’)’. In Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment, edited by Susan Bennett and Christie Carson, 241–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Shakespeare’s Globe. ‘The Complete Walk’, 2016. Available at: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-­on-archive/ special-­events/the-­complete-walk (accessed 16 May 2018). Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Stern, Tiffany. ‘ “This Wide and Universal Theatre”: The Theatre as Prop in Shakespeare’s Metadrama’. In Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern, 11–32. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013. Wainwright, Oliver. ‘The National Theatre’s Pop-Up Shed Is a Model for the South Bank’s Future’, Guardian, 16 April 2013. Available at: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-­designblog/2013/apr/16/national-­theatre-shed-­south-bank (accessed 15 March 2017).

5 What Makes a Theatregoer? Habitus, Identity and Interest Development in Adolescent Audiences to Shakespeare Matthew Reason

Pierre Bourdieu describes theoretical concepts as ‘thinking tools’ that enable us to interrogate empirical work.1 As such they are not static or absolute but rather malleable to our purpose and of value to the extent they are useful. With this chapter I use a set of overlapping concepts – Bourdieu’s own term habitus; ideas of identity formation; and research around interest development – as thinking tools to explore the impact of the school theatre trip and arts education in the formulation – or otherwise – of a theatre-­going interest amongst adolescent spectators

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The chapter will begin by outlining these three conceptual areas, looking at how they enable us to think about engagement with arts participation such as theatre-­going. This will then be placed into the context of the school theatre trip and its multipurpose function as both an educational and audience development activity. To test these ideas empirically, the chapter will present the perspectives of adolescent spectators collected through participatory audience research. This material will provide an evidential and affective account of how groups of teenagers remembered, reflected upon and articulated their experience of a school theatre trip and the manner in which this was framed in relation to their sense of habitus, cultural identity and interest development.

Habitus Habitus, defined broadly, invites us to think about how cultural activities are integrated into an individual’s larger social behaviour as engrained depositions. Habitus is thus an embodied phenomenon, with our dispositions written into and enacted through the body. As Matthew Adams writes, habitus is an ‘unconscious formation. The various characteristics of the habitus are enacted unthinkingly; that is partly what defines them as habitual.’2 A ‘theatre habitus’ might therefore describe an engrained disposition to seek out and engage with theatre experiences. The origins of these dispositions, by their nature, are often also unconscious, determining habits that we have forgotten we ever had to acquire. In Distinction, Bourdieu describes the formulation of our cultural habitus as resting primarily on two factors, namely family inheritance and arts education, writing that: ‘acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition’.3 Within research into arts engagement there is a recurring body of material that confirms this suggestion that the

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development of an arts habitus – an engrained disposition to seek out and engage with arts experiences – is produced through a kind of family inheritance. It is present, for example, in descriptions of how levels of child arts participation and attendance tend to match that of the parents.4 Not least because of this sense of inheritance, habitus can also be formulated as ‘class habitus’ and as implying an unconscious internalizing of structures that maintain class and other social distinctions. Bourdieu writes that the experience of limits or boundaries to behaviour become perceived and internalized as absolute limits or boundaries to behaviour, producing ‘a “sense of one’s place” which leads one to exclude oneself from the goods, persons, place and so forth from which one is excluded’.5 There is in this a powerful sense of self-­socialization, of fitting into expected behaviours, patterns and interests as determined by family and class. This conceptualization of habitus, however, can be criticized for being overly deterministic,6 positioning people as ‘helplessly gripped by the forces of history and society’.7 Jenkins, for example, asks where to place conscious deliberation and self-­ awareness within concepts of habitus and objects on the grounds that ‘actors must know more about their situation, and that knowledge must be more valid, than Bourdieu proposes’.8 Nonetheless, the usefulness of habitus as a thinking tool is vast, and perhaps by shifting ground slightly to ideas of identity it is also malleable enough to address concerns about over-­determinacy.

Identity Identity is of course a multivarious concept, with intersecting emphasis and significance in different disciplines, embracing the psychological, interpersonal and cultural. An individual’s self-­identity is formed from the nexus of these factors, partly a matter of willed self-­expression, partly a matter of socialization, partly the result of cultural forces. Identity is also formed

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through our behaviours, preferences, tastes, habits. What we elect to do both emerges from our identity and begins to define that identity. In his exploration of this field, Adams describes – and then problematizes – how reflexivity ‘increasingly constitutes self-­ identity in late modern societies’.9 In other words, identity as a concept envelops ideas of identity construction, or identity work, in which the individual has a strong degree of self-­ determinacy over their sense of self. Contemporary life becomes a project of identity assertion, and as illustration Adams cites absolutist statements to this effect, such as Heelas (‘people have to turn to their own resources to decide what they value’) and Giddens (‘the self today is for everyone a reflexive project’).10 What we already know is that the relationship between self-­ identity and arts engagement is a recurring theme within research. For example, a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts report on barriers to arts attendance suggests that ‘attending the arts presents individuals with opportunities to define their own sense of identity’.11 How an individual perceives themselves in relation to the arts – as simple as that internalized feeling of being the kind of person who goes to the theatre – obviously feeds into patterns of behaviour. There is here a kind of implied reflexivity, scope perhaps for Jenkins’s description of conscious deliberation and self-­awareness, which begins to push the boundaries of simple social determinism. However, there is not yet engagement with how this develops, nor how it relates to an individual’s circumstances and opportunities or lack of opportunities. In another example, research commissioned by New Direction for the Arts reports that ‘one of the significant explanations as to why [young people] don’t engage in cultural activities include “it’s not part of who I am” ’.12 The figures provided for young people giving this answer (28 per cent) are strikingly similar to those in a Scottish Arts Council report published over ten years earlier, which suggests that the feeling of being ‘out of place’ in an art gallery, museum or

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theatre, or that such culture is ‘not for me’, is the experience for 29 per cent of people aged between 16 and 24.13 Once again there is the sense of identity being a personal construction, but equally the necessity to question the extent to which this is: reflexive and made with agency and choice (which we might term self-­identity building); or prescriptive and confined (which we might term habitus forming). The New Direction for the Arts report, for example, notes that amongst young people from poor backgrounds (defined as being in receipt of the free school meal allowance) ‘self-­exclusion’ was a significant factor in non-­attendance at cultural activities.14 Nonetheless, crucial to ideas of identity – as distinct from habitus – is some degree of self-­representation. Holland and colleagues describe identity as a process of accumulation, as a ‘history in person’, through which ‘People tell others who they are, but even more importantly, they tell themselves, and they try to act as though they are who they say they are’.15 The balance between reflexivity (or agency) and determinacy within this process is complex and a matter of context and conjecture. Certainly it is not just one or the other. Adams proposes that contemporary identity lies somewhere between these poles of deterministic habitus and absolute reflexivity. In particular he stresses the need to consider the opportunities, or lack of opportunities, that enable individuals to shift from states of determinacy to partial autonomous self-­ identity.16

Interest development Connected to these debates is an increasing and diverse body of literature on the interrelationship between identity and interest development – that is the growth of a sustained interest in an activity, subject or career to the extent that the interest becomes part of an individual’s reflexive identity. In particular this has included investigations of the development of a ‘learning identity’ or ‘science identity’ to

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describe processes whereby an interest in an activity morphs into a self-­identification with that activity. Bell and colleagues, for example, describe a science identity as the way individuals ‘think about themselves as science learners and develop an identity as someone who knows about, uses, and sometimes contributes to science’.17 Similarly, in a paper titled ‘Is Science Me?’, Aschbacher et al. describe how a science identity involves how a young person ‘sees oneself’ in relation to science as a culturally based activity.18 Within the arts, Stephanie Pitts utilizes ideas of interest development to explore lifelong engagement with classical music,19 while Lo-Yun Chung applies the concept to gallery and museum visitors, writing that ‘the development of artistic interest can be interpreted as a process through which individuals perceive themselves in relation to the arts’.20 Research into interest development focuses upon how such identities do not come from nowhere but are formed through opportunities, or lack of opportunities, to engage in the particular interest. Crucially, once formulated as a self-­identity, individuals are then likely to actively pursue further opportunities to maintain and stabilize that interest. As Brigid Barron puts it, in the context of education, ‘adolescents often pursue learning opportunities both in and outside school once they become interested in a topic’.21 Here a degree of self-­ reflexivity and agency can be seen in identity formation, but only through the prism of opportunity. Through this nexus of ideas it is possible to see how interest development occurs in the space between deterministic habitus and self-­reflexive identity formation. Our interests and identity are constructed in parallel and in oscillation with each other; our habitus represents our stabilized, internalized and embodied interests. But none of this occurs outside of contexts of opportunity, expectations and environment. The next sections place these concepts within the context of an empirical example, using habitus, identity and interest development as terms that invite us to think about adolescent spectators’ developing relationship with theatre.

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The school theatre trip and audience development The following analysis draws on data originally gathered in 2004 from a series of research workshops set up with five secondary schools from Edinburgh and central Scotland. Part of a project titled ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre’, these workshops were organized in coordination with the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, and designed to explore the experiences and perceptions that teenage audiences have of live theatre. Groups from five schools attended workshops shortly after having seen the Lyceum’s production of Shakespeare’s Othello, with the research grounded around this recent experience – a specific and concrete backdrop that could then be widened out to explore perceptions of theatre more generally.22 The first context to consider is the school theatre trip, that familiar cultural activity which is most immediately justified in terms of its educational value, frequently employed to support the study of a play-­text for literature students or to enhance appreciation of the workings of the theatre for drama students. This was an argument made by all the teachers from the schools involved in the Othello audience research, with one typical remark being that ‘Theatre brings alive a text in a way that television cannot and, for those who find reading inaccessible, a visit to the theatre can help bring a good deal of sense to something that may otherwise have remained a distant “blur” ’ (teacher interview 2005). More broadly, teachers and educators articulate the desire to develop pupils’ ‘critical faculties’ and help make them more discerning or sophisticated audience members.23 School theatre trips are also described as fulfilling broader educational objectives, such as promoting creativity, providing pupils with an understanding of their cultural heritage or encouraging lifelong learning after school. Again remarks from teachers affirm this position, one stating that ‘I am not just a teacher of English but a teacher of children and I know

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that a visit to the theatre can be something that pupils will remember for the rest of their lives, it’s a real privilege to be able to experience that sense of joy and wonder that kids get’ (teacher interview 2005). Comments such as this indicate the vocational dedication and personal investment that many teachers have towards organizing school theatre visits and other arts activities. Beyond such educational contexts, school theatre trips are also valued and justified within the cultural sector for the role they play in audience development. In a relationship often presented as common sense, theatres hope that in engaging young audiences today they are also engaging their adult audiences of the future. For example, the introduction to the first ever omnibus survey of arts participation amongst secondary school children states that ‘It goes without saying that young people form the pool of audiences, participants and arts practitioners of the future’.24 In general terms this is the position echoed across the industry; indeed, in commissioning an Education and Audience Development Audit the Scottish Arts Council gave the specific remit that it was interested in finding case studies of good practice ‘which demonstrate successful links between education and audience development, in that they lead directly to attendance and visits’.25 Finally, the school theatre trip plays a role in ensuring the broad cultural accessibility of Shakespeare, hopefully beyond limits defined by family or class. As Robert Shaughnessy argues in the next chapter, there is widely perceived to be an ethical drive ‘to make Shakespeare’s work available to those who are otherwise excluded from it’. As this brief summary suggests, there are extremely deep-­ rooted understandings motivating school theatre trips – and the development of young audiences more generally – with institutional investment from both the education and cultural industries, along with significant personal and emotional investment from the teachers and other individuals concerned. Here I want to turn to the material gathered in the research into teenage Othello audiences. In particular I will explore

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whether and how the school theatre trip, and arts education more broadly, connect to the young spectators’ cultural habitus; how it connected to or sparked interest development; and whether theatre-­going was an activity to which they are attracted and invited and which formed part of their sense of self-­identity.

Researching the audience experience: it’s not just the play The role and motivations for the school theatre trip are much discussed in relation to its educational impact and audience development potential. Yet exactly what young people themselves make of the experience, which often forms a significant factor in their first encounters with live theatre, is far from evident and rarely explored.26 In order to explore adolescent spectators’ affective experiences of theatre, the research utilized methodologies that drew their inspiration and ethos from approaches of participatory enquiry, which sees meaning as ‘constructed by human beings as they engage with the world they are interpreting’.27 Specifically, the project aimed to involve the young audience members as active researchers in an open investigation into their own perceptions and recollections of Othello. In designing the research a conscious attempt was made to enable consideration of questions of class and education – and therefore also habitus, identity and interest development – through the selection of participating schools. As indicated by Table  5.1, this included a mixture of state and independent schools, of drama and English class groups, and included two schools from areas identified by government agencies as needing investment to combat social and economic deprivation. Inevitably these school profiles only present a proxy indication of the participants’ socio-­economic background, with the young people in the workshops not necessarily being a

Midlothian

City of Edinburgh

Lasswade High State School secondary

Independent secondary

State secondary

Mary Erskine School (girls)

Trinity Academy

City of Edinburgh

English

Drama

Drama

English

English

Class Subject

13.4%

N/A

8.8%

33.8%

20.6%

School FME**

Total

16%

16%

11.4%

16%

17.6%

FME Area Average

0

N/A

2

3

6

Boys

37

5

5

5

8

3

Girls

Participants

14–15

16–17

14–15

15–16

13–14

Age

** Free Meal Entitlement, provides an imperfect but useful indication of the socio-­economic characteristic of school intakes.

* Indicates school located in Social Inclusion Partnership area.

Notes:

City of Edinburgh

State secondary

Gracemount High School*

Clackmannanshire

State secondary

Alloa Academy*

School Location

School Type

School

TABLE 5.1  Participating schools

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representative sample of the school intake as a whole. Accepting such caveats, however, an understanding of school backgrounds makes it possible to explore how different responses may have emerged as the result of different kinds of class backgrounds and arts education experiences. One of the most striking insights of the research was the extent to which in discussing their experience of Othello the participants talked not only about the play but the theatre-­ going experience as a whole. Indeed, when asked to reflect on the kinds of discussions they had been having, the young people themselves recognized how often their memories were about the other people in the theatre: Fiona:  It’s the audience and that, and not just the play. And noticing people/ Rebecca:  Aye, not just concentrating on the play, but everything else as well. In one workshop exercise the participants were asked to develop a detailed memory of one element of their experience in the form of a spider diagram, filling out and adding circles as needed. Figure  5.1 represents one of several diagrams that focused on distractions caused by other people in the audience, here a boy behind laughing. In the diagram this distraction is immediately placed with a specific moment in the production – a particularly dramatic moment, attracting gasps from the audience but also struggling for attention amongst the other distractions and activities in the auditorium. Communicated in this instance through a specific memory, this level of annoyance, continual awareness and a kind of fascination with other people in the audience emerged as a prominent theme in the workshops. With responses such as these it is possible to begin to pull together insights into the kinds of experiences and sensations that were articulated by the adolescent spectators. We might, for example, follow the participants themselves and note how their dominant memories revolved around the social experience and

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FIGURE 5.1  ‘The boy behind us laughing’.

act of theatre-­going, as much as around the cultural experience of the play. This was in part the product of a strong sense of peers within the school group and also of others, of non-­peers, within the audience as a whole. There is also a clear perception of codes of proper and improper behaviour within the theatre auditorium, and of legitimate and illegitimate responses to the performance. This is a crucial reminder that when considering the theatrical experience it is vital to widen focus out from the performance itself to consider all the elements – expectations, peers, other audience members, the physical building and so forth – that surround the event. Everything is part of the experience, and everything impacts upon the experience. On one level it was the case that for all the participants their attention was split between the performance itself and various distractions and interactions within the auditorium. However, it was also noticeable how variations in theatre-­going experience and art-­form knowledge dictated the kinds of discussion produced. Those groups who went to the theatre

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more regularly talked more about the actual performance; while those who went less frequently (or, on occasion, never) were much more firmly rooted in their responses to the broader social experience of being in the theatre. For example, the young people from Lasswade High School consciously identified as being a ‘drama class’, talked readily about other Shakespeare performances they had seen on stage or screen and assessed the performance against the qualities and ideas that they had been studying. One boy commented, ‘You watch it differently when you’ve learned sort of just the basic drama stuff . . . Then you go and watch the play and think, oh well I wouldn’t have done it that way, that’s not how we learned to do it.’ This was also the case with the girls from the independent school, who discussed previous trips to the Lyceum, noticed an actor they had seen in another performance and talked dismissively about how non-­drama students were just there because they had been made to go. As one girl said, ‘obviously they didn’t want to be there because there was a lot of talking’. Both these groups talked comfortably around the subject of theatre as a cultural form, indicating possession of a knowledge, familiarity and interest in the experience which they had begun to integrate into their own lives and their own sense of identity. Both groups, in other words, had begun a process of interest development that reflected back into their sense of self, telling stories in which going to and knowing about theatre was part of their identity, part of what they were interested in and who they were. For the participants from the other schools, and particularly Gracemount High and Alloa Academy, their sense of identity in relation to theatre-­going was very different. One example of this was the level of physical and social self-­consciousness reported by many of the participants, including numerous references to receiving ‘dirty looks’ from other people in the audience – as in recollections of ‘The wee old woman who kept turning round and moanin’ at people whispering’ or ‘How people give you the dirtiest looks if you make the slightest noise’. To an extent these simply represent the older people in

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the audience expressing their desire for the younger people to shut up and behave. However, in this very idea that there is a right way to behave there is also a hint of something deeper concerning who ‘owns’ the theatre auditorium as a public space. For some respondents this prompted the feeling that they ‘shouldn’t be there’. Figure 5.2 presents some of the memories of a participant from Alloa Academy, who as a group were the least experienced theatregoers, none having previously been to the Lyceum Theatre. Members of this group talked about their initial enthusiasm at walking in the ‘classy’ front entrance of the theatre and their general excitement about the experience as a whole. This excitement turned more negative for a whole range of reasons, but significant among them was a sense of self-­consciousness and social awkwardness. In this spider diagram it is noticeable how physical discomfort is linked to social discomfort and the experience as a whole starkly described in terms of feeling ‘unwelcome’. For this group simply being in the auditorium was by far the most powerful aspect of the experience.

FIGURE 5.2  ‘Not enough leg room’.

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As noted earlier, this perception that, outside the formalized context of the school trip, such culture is not ‘for them’ is a frequent comment found in research into young audiences. Such responses, articulated in terms of feeling not able to be themselves – as one pupil said ‘You felt like you were in a place where you couldnae speak’ – can be seen as a reflection of the participants’ lack of a sense of entitlement: a lack of a sense of identification with the theatre as a physical entity, of theatre-­going as an activity and of the specific cultural product in question. To an extent all the teenaged audiences of Othello were excluded from theatre-­going as an activity by their age. For others the informality and familiarity of cinemas and other less grand public spaces was always going to be desired. Meanwhile several suggested that for social and practical reasons theatre-­ going was not something they engaged in ‘as themselves’, but only through school or with their parents (an insight confirmed by Tulloch, who notes that ‘the students rarely come away from the formal performance of the play separate, as it were, from their “A-level” [or school] reading of it’28). As various teachers’ comments suggest, ‘there can be a perception that theatre is only for “snobs” ’ (teacher interview 2005). In these terms, the rejection of the experience by some of the participants (articulated in terms of feeling unwelcome, feeling uncomfortable or feeling it was not for them) can be seen as a form of self-­ socialization, affirming and accepting expected class habitus and cultural boundaries. As Harland also suggests in his research, such perceptions are a strong factor in determining that in secondary schools ‘the rhetoric of the “arts as accessible to all” [is] not always borne out in reality’.29 However, for some of the participants there was demonstrably a greater sense of entitlement and ownership of the culture on offer. This was particularly the case with the girls from the independent, fee-­paying, school that participated in the project, whose teacher remarked: ‘I am lucky in that the pupils are generally from backgrounds where middle-­class parents welcome the idea of their children experiencing theatre and the arts’ (teacher interview 2005). However – crucially –

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this was also the case with the pupils studying drama as a subject, who had internalized a sense of themselves as experts in their own right and had therefore begun to assert the validity of their own experience in a manner separate from its educational context. They had been given opportunities to develop an interest and begun the process of internalizing this interest within their identity.

Conclusions To utilize another concept from Bourdieu, those young people with less cultural capital were less able to invest themselves into the experience and consequently less likely to identify with the experience. To the extent that this confirms previous research, such findings are perhaps unsurprising. It is, however, valuable to see this process in operation and to return to Jenkins’s question about the scope for conscious deliberation and self-­awareness with ideas of habitus. With this in mind, I would assert that in their conversations the young spectators were actively negotiating their relationship with theatre in terms of interest and ultimately their sense of self. As active processes of negotiation, the conversations exhibited a sense of reflexivity in consideration of the participants’ relationships to theatre. This was not deterministically fixed, nor entirely a matter of equal opportunity, but open to a degree of flex in relation to interest and identity. This is most explicitly the case where the participants drew upon their sense of specialist knowledge about drama as a subject and theatre as an art form. In these cases the young people had been given the opportunity to develop an interest in theatre-­going that had already begun to impact upon their identity – it is possible to see these young people actively seeking further opportunities to continue this interest and integrate theatre-­going into their own social habitus and self-­identity. In other cases there was a different outcome, in the form of a conscious rejection of the theatre-­going experience, the origins

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of which could be examined across the conceptual spectrum of habitus, identity or interest development. It might represent the almost inevitable imposition of a pre-­existing class habitus; be the result of a reflexive assertion of identity in the face of an uninviting experience; or, framed within ideas of interest development, describe how a failure of opportunities resulted in the failure to develop that spark of interest. The role of the school theatre trip within this process can be conceived as an almost conscious attempt to construct a theatre-­ going habitus, to mould theatre-­going as a lifelong habit through early exposure. This is explicitly asserted in the statements of audience development explored earlier in this chapter. At the same time the theatre trip is structurally contradictory to the process of habitus formation, being a singular, non-­integrated moment of quasi-­compulsion. It is fleeting and of relative insignificance in comparison to factors such as ‘family inheritance’ and sustained arts education. Moreover, in the context of this performance of Othello, there was so much about this experience that almost actively worked against the potential to stimulate an ongoing interest: from the formality of the venue to the attitude of other audience members and the sense of exclusion based upon age and knowledge. As thinking tools, concepts of habitus, identity and interest development do not change the circumstances on the ground. A combination of the marginalization of arts education within the curricula, and minimal arts programming specifically for adolescents, means that we will continue to be unsurprised when research discovers how large numbers of young people describe theatre and the arts as ‘not for me’. However, they do enable us to understand how this process occurs, to recognize how seemingly deterministic class habitus obscures a tangle of issues relating to identity and opportunity within which there is a strong degree of reflexivity and self-­awareness. The ambition should be to change the outcomes of such conversations, to make the outcomes less surprising, and enable young people from diverse backgrounds to develop an interest in theatre that means it becomes part of their self-­identity. For

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this to happen, theatre needs to change its relationship to its adolescent audiences.

Notes 1 Cited in Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 67. 2 Matthew Adams, ‘Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity: Towards an Understanding of Contemporary Identity?’ Sociology 40, no. 3 (2006): 514. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 1. 4 For instance: John Harland, Kay Kinder and Kate Hartley, Arts in Their View: A Study of Youth Participation in the Arts (Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research, 1995); John Harland, Kay Kinder, Pippa Lord, Richard White, Alison Stott, Ian Schagen and Jo Haynes with Linda Cusworth, Richard White and Riana Paola, Arts Education in Secondary Schools: Effects and Effectiveness (Slough: National Federation for Education Research, 2000); William G. Morrison and Edwin G. West, ‘Child Exposure to the Performing Arts: The Implications for Adult Demand’, Journal of Cultural Economics 10, no. 1 (1986): 17–24; National Endowment for the Arts, ‘Effects of Arts Education on Participation in the Arts’, NEA Research Division Report no. 36 (Santa Ana, CA: NEA, 1992). Available at: https:// www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-Research-Report–36.pdf (accessed December 2016); Jane O’Brien, Secondary School Pupils and the Arts: Report of a MORI Research Study (London: Arts Council of England, 1996); and James S. Catterall, Richard Chapleau and John Iwanaga, ‘Involvement in the Arts and Human Development: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement in Music and Theatre Arts’, in Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning, ed. E.B. Fiske (Washington, DC: Arts Education Partnership, 1999). 5 Bourdieu, Distinction, 471. 6 Adams, ‘Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity’, 515.

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7 John Richardson, ‘Live Theatre in the Age of Digital Technology: “Digital habitus” and the Youth Live Theatre Audience’, Participations 12, no. 1 (2015): 208. 8 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 61. 9 Adams, ‘Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity’, 512. 10 Cited in ibid., 513. 11 National Endowment for the Arts, ‘When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance’, NEA Research Report no. 59, January (Washington, DC: NEA, 2015). Available at: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/ when-­going-gets-­tough-revised2.pdf (accessed December 2016). 12 Sarah Davies, ‘Cultural Capital’ (London: A New Direction for Arts, 2014), 5. Available at: https://www.anewdirection.org.uk/ asset/1687/download (accessed December 2016). 13 NFO System Three. Attendance At Participation In and Attitudes Towards the Arts in Scotland, 50. 14 Davies, ‘Cultural Capital’, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, 5–6. 15 Dorothy Holland, William S. Lachicotte Jr, Debra Skinner and Carole Cain, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3. 16 Adams, ‘Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity’, 525. 17 Philip Bell, Bruce Lewenstein, Andrew W. Shouse and Michael A. Feder, eds, Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2009), 295. 18 Pamela R. Aschbacher, Erika Li and Ellen J. Roth, ‘Is Science Me? High School Students’ Identities, Participation and Aspirations in Science, Engineering, and Medicine’, Journal of Research in Science Teaching 47, no. 5 (2010): 566. 19 Stephanie Pitts, ‘Roots and Routes in Adult Music Participation: Investigating the Impact of Home and School on Lifelong Musical Interest and Involvement’, British Journal of Music Education 26, no. 3 (2009): 241–56. 20 Lo-Yun Chung, ‘The Development of Artistic Interest: Case Studies of Gallery Visitors in Taipei and London’, unpublished

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PhD thesis (Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2016), 79. 21 Brigid Barron, ‘Interest and Self-Sustained Learning as Catalysts of Development: A Learning Ecology Perspective’, Human Development 49 (2006): 193. 22 For a detailed discussion of the methodology see Matthew Reason, ‘Young Audience and Live Theatre, Part 1: Methods, Participation and Memory in Audience Research’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 26, no. 2 (2006): 129–45. 23 Similar comments from teachers are reported in Harland et al., Arts Education in Secondary Schools, 40–2; and Dick Downing, Mary Ashworth and Alison Stott, Acting with Intent: Theatre Companies and Their Education Programmes (Slough: National Foundation for Education Research, 2002), 16–17. 24 O’Brien, Secondary School Pupils and the Arts, 1. 25 Morag Ballantyne Arts Management, Education and Audience Development Audit (Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 2001), 4. 26 Exceptions include John Tulloch, ‘Approaching Theatre Audiences: Active School Students and Commoditised High Culture’, Contemporary Theatre Review 10, no. 2 (2000): 85–104; and Jan Wozniak, The Politics of Performing Shakespeare for Young People: Standing up to Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). 27 John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 9. 28 Tulloch, ‘Approaching Theatre Audiences’, 98. 29 Harland et al., Arts Education in Secondary Schools, 567.

Select bibliography Adams, Matthew. ‘Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity: Towards an Understanding of Contemporary Identity?’ Sociology 40, no. 3 (2006): 511–28. Aschbacher, Pamela R., Erika Li and Ellen J. Roth. ‘Is Science Me? High School Students’ Identities, Participation and Aspirations in

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Science, Engineering, and Medicine’. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 47, no. 5 (2010): 564–82. Barron, Brigid. ‘Interest and Self-Sustained Learning as Catalysts of Development: A Learning Ecology Perspective’. Human Development 49 (2006): 193–224. Bell, Philip, Bruce Lewenstein, Andrew W. Shouse and Michael A. Feder, eds. Learning Science in Informal Environments: People, Places, and Pursuits. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2009. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Catterall, James S., Richard Chapleau and John Iwanaga. ‘Involvement in the Arts and Human Development: General Involvement and Intensive Involvement in Music and Theatre Arts’. In Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning, edited by E.B. Fiske. Washington, DC: Arts Education Partnership, 1999. Chung, Lo-Yun. ‘The Development of Artistic Interest: Case Studies of Gallery Visitors in Taipei and London’. Unpublished PhD thesis. Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2016. Creswell, John W. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. Davies, Sarah. ‘Cultural Capital’. London: A New Direction for Arts, 2014. Available at: https://www.anewdirection.org.uk/asset/1687/ download (accessed December 2016). Downing, Dick, Mary Ashworth and Alison Stott. Acting with Intent: Theatre Companies and Their Education Programmes. Slough: National Foundation for Education Research, 2002. Harland, John, Kay Kinder and Kate Hartley. Arts in Their View: A Study of Youth Participation in the Arts. Slough: National Foundation for Educational Research, 1995. Harland, John, Kay Kinder, Pippa Lord, Richard White, Alison Stott, Ian Schagen and Jo Haynes with Linda Cusworth, Richard White and Riana Paola. Arts Education in Secondary Schools: Effects and Effectiveness. Slough: National Federation for Education Research, 2000. Holland, Dorothy, William S. Lachicotte Jr, Debra Skinner and Carole Cain. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

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Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge, 1992. Morag Ballantyne Arts Management. Education and Audience Development Audit. Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 2001. Morrison, William G. and Edwin G. West. ‘Child Exposure to the Performing Arts: The Implications for Adult Demand’. Journal of Cultural Economics 10, no. 1 (1986): 17–24. National Endowment for the Arts. ‘Effects of Arts Education on Participation in the Arts’. NEA Research Division Report no. 36, Santa Ana, CA, 1992. Available at: https://www.arts.gov/sites/ default/files/NEA-Research-Report–36.pdf (accessed December 2016). National Endowment for the Arts. ‘When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance’. NEA Research Report no. 59, Washington, DC, January 2015. Available at: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/when-­goinggets-­tough-revised2.pdf (accessed December 2016). NFO System Three. Attendance At, Participation In and Attitudes Towards the Arts in Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council, 2002. O’Brien, Jane. Secondary School Pupils and the Arts: Report of a MORI Research Study. London: Arts Council of England, 1996. Pitts, Stephanie. ‘Roots and Routes in Adult Music Participation: Investigating the Impact of Home and School on Lifelong Musical Interest and Involvement’. British Journal of Music Education 26, no. 3 (2009): 241–56. Reason, Matthew. ‘Young Audience and Live Theatre, Part 1: Methods, Participation and Memory in Audience Research’. Studies in Theatre and Performance 26, no. 2 (2006): 129–45. Richardson, John. ‘Live Theatre in the Age of Digital Technology: “Digital habitus” and the Youth Live Theatre Audience’. Participations 12, no. 1 (2015): 206–21. Tulloch, John. ‘Approaching Theatre Audiences: Active School Students and Commoditised High Culture’. Contemporary Theatre Review 10, no. 2 (2000): 85–104. Wozniak, Jan. The Politics of Performing Shakespeare for Young People: Standing up to Shakespeare. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016.

6 ‘All Eyes’: Experience, Spectacle and the Inclusive Audience in Flute Theatre’s Tempest Robert Shaughnessy

It begins, as it will end, in a circle. Seated on the floor of the arena stage of the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, around a large cloth coloured with concentric swirls of blue, gold and white that suggest clear waters, tropical sands and wispy white clouds, are about a dozen young people, alongside them the six actors who play Prospero, Caliban, Ariel, Ferdinand (doubled with Stephano), Miranda and Trinculo. To the side, equipped with a small drum, sits Kelly Hunter, the show’s director and the originator of the methods from which it was devised, and also, as the action unfolds, its Prospero-­like facilitator and orchestrator. Surrounding this circle of actors and those whom, for the purposes of this chapter, I shall call players, seated on four sides on tiered benches, are the watchers: the parents and carers of this mostly teenaged group. All of the young persons gathered here are autistic; among their number is my own son,

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Gabriel, who on the day of the performance (26 October 2016) is three months shy of his seventeenth birthday. Autism is a condition that currently affects about 700,000 (or around 1 per cent of the population) in the United Kingdom,1 and is characterized by what has until quite recently been officially defined as the ‘triad of impairments’: that is, difficulties with communication, imagination and social interaction.2 It is a spectrum condition that presents in a wide variety of ways, ranging from the non-­verbal, self-­harming child in need of constant supervision for their own safety to the savant capabilities of high-­functioning individuals capable of exceptional levels of creative and intellectual achievement. In common with most autistic children, Gabriel showed all the signs of normal development until the age of two; after that, regression was rapid and profound, plunging us, his parents and his siblings, into a life that we could never have imagined, and for which we were totally unprepared. For Gabriel, autism is a mix of ability and deficit that includes a preference for routines, ritualized and repetitive behaviours, a vocabulary restricted to single, functional words, short phrases and surreal personal catchphrases, a slyly unique sense of humour, and a taste for both the Mr Men books and the music of Johnny Cash. It also involves, as it does for many autistic individuals, an extraordinary level of musicality, reflecting what Francesca Happé, commenting on the work of music and autism specialist Adam Ockelford, calls ‘the natural synergy between the structure inherent in music and the cognitive style of the ASC (Autism Spectrum Condition) mind’,3 which for Gabriel is manifested in unerringly accurate pitch processing, an immediate grasp of melody and technically perfect piano playing. This is the third time in the space of a year that I have brought Gabriel to this show, and given that Shakespearean spectatorship, as Penelope Woods suggests, generally demands a triad of aptitudes, of ‘cognitive dexterity, social awareness, and emotional versatility’,4 the question of how Gabriel will connect with The Tempest, if at all, remains a very real one. Granted, his older brother and older and younger sisters all had Shakespeare inflicted on them at

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various points in their youth, so I see no reason for Gabriel to emerge unscathed. This is a play, moreover, with particular and haunting resonances in this context, not least in its Asperger-­ type scholar-­father protagonist, so immersed in his books that he fails to spot the theft of a dukedom, its concern with the agony of speechlessness and the power of language, its themes of entrapment, imprisonment and liberty, and its preoccupation with the interplay between vision and sound, and with music: Where should this music be? I’th’ air, or th’earth? (1.2.388) Enter ARIEL with music and song. (2.1.298 sd) This is the tune of our catch, played by the picture of  Nobody. (3.2.126–7) Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises. (3.2.135) But still, I wonder as I sit, watching: how much of this is about Gabriel, and how much about me? What unfolds over the course of the next hour or so is not a production of The Tempest in the conventional sense, but a distillation of key episodes which are approached as a series of interactive games, the ground rules of which are set down in the opening moments. Introducing the show to the players and audience, Hunter explains how the players will be taken through a sequence of activities, in which they are free to participate – or not – to whatever degree they find comfortable. Into the first game, which is key to establishing the rules; Hunter holds her hand to her heart, beats twice to the incantatory tune of ‘Hel-­lo’, and bids the players, assisted by the actors and the surrounding audience, to follow suit and to

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look around the circle and make eye contact. After a minute or so the collective pulse is stilled, then started, this time combined with names, and one-­by-one ‘hellos’, to each player. Some of the players engage more readily than others, and some need more prompting, but there is a lot of eye contact and some laughter; co-­opted into the game, those of us watching also find ourselves eased into the show. Next is the game Hunter calls ‘Throwing the face’, where the players are given a series of emotional states (happy face, angry face, disgusted face), asked to show it facially in as extreme a form as they can, and then to ‘throw’ it, with a flick of the head, to another player across the circle, ‘as if a mask is being flung . . . requiring some physical effort’,5 who ‘catches’ the face, and passes it on in turn. It is a good warm-­up, and it also has a bearing on character and narrative later on, as these are the faces that the lovers, Caliban and Stephano, will adopt. The sequence ends with a round of applause – literally, with Hunter modelling the gesture of applauding while also describing a circle in the air, and hands placed on the floor. The ‘Heartbeat Circle’ is the foundation of the performance, as it is of a body of work that has been in development for the best part of three decades, beginning with Hunter’s initial outreach work for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1990s. Initially conceived as a set of workshop activities, the Hunter Heartbeat Method (HHM) starts from the idea that the simple di-­dum rhythm that opens and closes every session matches that of iambic pentameter, ‘the rhythm of the heartbeat’, in Hunter’s words, which reveals ‘the ever-­changing specificity’ of ‘how it feels to be alive’: ‘the rhythm is the life of the feeling.’6 The regularity of the beat, Hunter found, had a soothing effect even on the most unsettled children, and works to address the ‘dissociation of body and mind’7 in autism. Hunter’s observation is confirmed by social cognition research, which has seen problems of communication and social interaction as in part the consequence of disordered patterns of synchrony. In that interpersonal synchronization, whether in theatre making or in real life, is a matter of ‘social

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communication activities and constructs including joint attention, imitation, turn-­taking, non-­verbal social communicative exchanges, affect sharing and engagement’,8 it has been found that ‘synchronized bodily coordination was disturbed in social pathologies generally and in particular in children with ASD’ (Autism Spectrum Disorder), that ‘the ability of adolescents with autism to synchronize the timing of their speech to that of a conversational partner was poor’; and that ‘adolescents with ASD do not synchronize gestures with speech’.9 Autistic individuals have ‘a tendency to focus attention inward on their own bodily states even when engaged in tasks that require interaction with the environment’,10 and experience particular difficulties synchronizing eye contact, impacting upon not only their capacities for communication and social interaction but also their ability to recognize or infer the mental states of others (so-­called ‘theory of mind’).11 Concomitantly, experimental attempts to cultivate synchronized action and movement, such as through dance or music therapy, have shown that these have demonstrably generated, in the words of one study, ‘improvement in body awareness, psychological well-­being, and social skills’ for their autistic participants.12 The Heartbeat Circle, similarly, offers a regular and, importantly, repetitive and predictable structure within which synchronized behaviour, and thus the beginnings of communication and interaction, can take place. The Circle thus creates the space for the phenomenon known to the cognitive sciences as entrainment, the fundamental mechanism whereby the coordinated actions of individuals create a sense of group identity, purpose and mutual well-­being; what William H. McNeill characterized as ‘a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming larger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual’.13 It will already be apparent that, as a work that straddles the domains of Shakespearean theatre making and applied performance, there is more at stake in this Tempest than the usual questions of engagement and effectiveness. Across the broad spectrum of practices that fall under the definition of

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FIGURE 6.1  The Flute Theatre’s The Tempest, The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, October 2016. L–R: Gabriel, Chris, Alfred, Finlay, Lowri and a player. With kind permission of Robert Shaughnessy.

the latter, as Helen Nicholson (quoting Judith Ackroyd) puts it, there is a shared conviction that ‘theatre has the potential to “address something beyond the form itself” ’, and that ‘applied theatre is primarily concerned with developing new possibilities for everyday living rather than separating theatre-­going from other aspects of life’.14 In this spirit, the production to some extent owes its existence to a formal recognition that HHM might work to alleviate aspects of their condition for the autistic players participating in it. In 2011, Hunter began a three-­year collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Psychology Department, Nisonger Center and Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University, consisting of an ongoing programme of workshops that led, in July 2014, to the premiere of The Tempest at the RSC’s Other Place in Stratford.15 The first phase of the work was a pilot study, through which was conducted a systematic evaluation of the efficacy of the method, as implemented through a twelve-­week

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programme of workshops. Fourteen young persons, ranging in age from ten to fourteen, were selected for the study, and, using established developmental disability measures, were tested before and after the programme on the basis of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale (VABS). Both evaluate communication skills, reciprocal social interaction, and restricted and repetitive behaviours. The results, according to Margaret Mehling, Marc Tassé and Robin Root, leaders of the project team and authors of the first paper to emerge from the study, indicated that ‘participants’ scores increased across time on measures of social skills, communication and pragmatic language’, and that HHM ‘appears to have the potential to impact core features of autism spectrum disorder’.16 Throughout the paper, HHM is referred to as an ‘intervention’, on the tacit understanding that the goal is to bring about an improvement in the lives of its players, improvements of the kind that can be identified and measured on the terms of ADOS and VABS. Since two of the authors (Mehling and Tassé) are psychologists making a case in a journal read by other psychologists for the efficacy of a programme of activities that was partly funded by the United States Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, this emphasis is understandable. Indeed, it scientifically validates Hunter’s own position, which is that ‘[e]xpressing feelings, making eye contact, accessing their mind’s eye and their dreams, keeping a steady heartbeat and recognizing faces are all part of the autism dilemma’, and that the aim is to embed ‘these unattainable skills within games derived from moments of Shakespeare, which the children could play and thereby benefit from’.17 But the researchers’ outcome-­oriented approach to the method also needs to be set alongside Hunter’s insistence that ‘Shakespeare is used not for educational means, but rather to wake the children up to their own lives’, her speculation that it would be ‘interesting to see how important the art of playfulness is within the findings of the research and whether in fact playfulness is deemed measurable at all’, and her recognition that the route to autism

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is a two-­way street, involving ‘having the faith to believe that a child with autism would “throw me Bottom’s donkey face” is truly playful’, and knowing that ‘it’s only now . . . that I would name it so.’18 Moreover, despite the claim to offer an ‘evaluation’ of HHM, however, Mehling, Tassé and Root give no indication of what it is about the specifically Shakespearean components of HHM that deserve scrutiny: summarizing the Tempest workshop series as a set of games which ‘target skills including eye contact, turn-­taking, facial emotion recognition, imitation, improvisation, humour, and communication’, they position the practice within the broad field of ‘drama-­based interventions’ that ‘offer opportunities for children with autism spectrum disorder to develop social skills including awareness of others; empathy; perspective taking; turn-­taking; balance between listening and responding; gaining, maintaining, and directing the attention of others; adopting different roles appropriate to the setting; recognising rules and conventions of different groups; and recognising the facial expression of emotion’.19 In a follow-­up essay, Post (an actor and theatre professor, and the drama lead for the project) documents the workshop activities in more detail, and emphasizes the core feature of ‘the children’s attention to their own heartbeats helping to ground their use of Shakespeare’s verse in their own organic rhythms’, but likewise stresses the beneficial potential of the method, claiming that the children involved ‘are able to develop and strengthen their communicative and interactive skills . . . within a supportive context for developing greater possibilities for engagement and interaction’.20 These considerations are more pertinent to the workshop programme than to a show that may well be experienced as a one-­off, but both may be considered in the light of Nicola Shaughnessy’s reconsideration of the relationship between instrumentality and artistry in applied performance practice. Proposing that an artificial divide has been promulgated between socially engaged or applied performance and work that pursues disinterestedly ‘artistic’ objectives, she argues that

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this has caused the aesthetic component of the former to be undervalued, even sidelined: bringing ‘cognitive theory into dialogue with conceptualizations of relational, community and socially situated aesthetics’, she calls for an approach that finds ‘the extraordinary in the ordinary and in value systems which challenge or differ from the individualist and materialist, in favour of community and in which co-­operation and awareness of others is part of the performance experience of encounter’.21 For HHM, this implies less of concern with whether it does good (as measured by ADOS scores and the like) and more with whether it is good, or, to use Shaughnessy’s term, ‘extraordinary’, and this is the interest that I pursue in what follows. Shakespeare, as usual, is there already: The Tempest, it hardly needs saying, is a work very much preoccupied with the transformative – and also coercive – power of art, and of performance, and with the ethical ramifications of the exercise of that power: ‘graves at my command’, admits Prospero, ‘Have waked their sleepers . . . By my so potent art’ (5.1.48– 50), and his release from the island is conditional upon its surrender: ‘this rough magic / I here abjure’ (5.1.50–1); ‘Let your indulgence set me free’ (Epilogue, 20). Whatever calculable benefits they have for the participants, the games are both an end in themselves and components in a larger design; Flute’s The Tempest offers both the experience and the spectacle of play. The performance proper begins with neither the storm nor its aftermath but cuts straight to the confrontation between Prospero and Caliban. This consists of three short lines of dialogue (all episodes are distilled down to a handful of keywords) and accompanying actions, modelled by the actors: Joshua Jackson, playing Caliban, drops to a low squat, makes a circular sweep of the floor with his arm, and growls, angry-­faced, ‘This island’s mine’ (1.2.332); Sifiso Mazibuko, as Prospero, holds the moment, then points: ‘Cramps!’ (1.2.326). Jackson pantomimes writhing pain for a few moments, and then Mazibuko peremptorily releases him with a handclap: ‘Better!’ The first player is led into the circle and steered through the moves by his partner-­actor, they play

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through the sequence, and then swap roles (an important rule, adhered to throughout). The players revel in their tasks, acting up the agonized gyrations, teasingly extending the wait for release. Already, the show’s thematics of ownership, power and subjugation are in play; and already, thanks to the unpredictable disposition of the players, the architecture of the show is subject to stress-­testing. The first pairing proceeds as scripted, but when another player steps in as Prospero he sees an opportunity for comic sabotage. Jackson feeds him his cue, but he is not having it: This island’s mine. No, it’s mine. This island’s mine. Well, it isn’t anymore. This island’s mine. Face reality. As Stephen Purcell remarks elsewhere in this volume, despite a production’s best efforts, its audience will ‘always exceed its control’ (p. 29), a point echoed by Charles Whitney, who labels such interventions ‘counter-­performances’ (p. 48). A wave of laughter surges around the room, and as I scan the faces of my companions on the benches, I see rapt attention, surprised delight and, here and there, a touch of trepidation (will my child join in as expected? will she have a meltdown?). As those who know better than anyone how our children respond to the rules in social situations, we will them and the show on, hoping that our indulgence will, just for a while, set them free. Gabriel, for his part, prefers observing to joining; as ever, he demands visual validation of his doings by breaking frame (for he knows not ‘seems’) and calling across the space, ‘Dad, take a picture’. I demur; the story moves on: with a drum-­roll and a guitar note, Ariel springs to his feet (Finlay Cormack, in a faded Superman T-Shirt, briefly channelling Puck), ‘I go, I go, I go . . .’ (4.1.187), and executes a hop and a skip that Gabriel spontaneously mimics. Forward to the cartoon-­style first

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encounter between Ferdinand and Miranda. Taking the lead from Prospero’s ‘At the first sight / They have changed eyes’ (1.2.441–2), this has Chris Macdonald’s Ferdinand and Lowri Izzard’s Miranda pacing the circle, each avoiding the other’s eye until, suddenly, their gazes lock; crying, together, ‘O, you wonder!’ (1.2.427), they make a thumb-­and-forefinger circle before both eyes and, gesturing the classic Tex Avery image of love at first sight, shoot them forward with a ‘Do-­yo-­yo-­ing!’ I love this moment, not least because it is one that Gabriel and I have taken home from our family’s last encounter with this show and occasionally replayed as a shared joke; and it is one in which he happily participates. Before we know it, the floor is filled with Mirandas and Ferdinands, a field of eyes on stalks (‘Do-yo-yo-­ing!’), while Gabriel offers his variant, ‘O you wonderful’; the game plays and replays until Hunter senses that it is time to move on, and with a gentle ping of finger-­ cymbals, we move to the next episode. The percussive score is a crucial component of the show that is structured and performed like a jazz symphony, one that accommodates space for extended riffing and creative improvisation within its storytelling, which in this version incorporates some of the prehistory of the play. Caliban’s memory of being taught ‘how / To name the bigger light and how the less’ (1.2.335–6) generates a sequence in which Miranda points first this way and verbalizes (‘sun’), then that (‘moon’), which he with enormous effort repeats, and a call-­and-response: My name’s Miranda. Your name’s Ca-­li-ban. Ca-­mmm-haaa-­ca-­ca . . . Ca-­li-ban. Ca-ca-­ca-ca- . . . Ca-­li-ban. Ca-­li-ban, Ca-­li-ban . . . This gradually builds, with a drumbeat and clapping rhythm, to a whole-­group chant (which Gabriel joins in), eventually stilled by another quiet ping of cymbals. Trinculo’s (Tricia Gannons) encounter with Stephano (Macdonald) summons the ‘sad face’ and the ‘disgusted face’ of the Heartbeat

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Hello; Caliban marches the whole group round the space, laughing, leaping and squatting to the tune of ‘toads, beetles, bats’ (1.2.341); Ferdinand and Miranda take each other’s hands, and Gabriel, having had enough of doing for now, lies down to listen. And as the ebb and flow of repetition continues, something happens to my sense of time and I surrender to the hypnotic rhythm of the show; I feel that I could be here for hours, even days, and I am not in the least bothered when it will end. Looking round the room I sense a web of looks, supportive and sustaining; an invisible safety net, attentive faces willing the piece to work. I began by posing the question of how much this show was to do with me, and how much with Gabriel. For some, the question might also be: how much is this to do with Shakespeare? This can be read in a number of ways. Perhaps there a few diehards who would regard whittling the play down to seven characters, a handful of scenes and some choice words and passages as sufficient evidence for it no longer to qualify, but given that, in the eclectic field of contemporary Shakespearean performance, what Dennis Kennedy once labelled ‘Shakespeare without his language’22 is increasingly the norm rather than the exception, they can be safely ignored. Judged by the standards of the past few decades the Flute Tempest is no less ‘Shakespeare’ than Derek Jarman’s, Peter Brook’s or Greg Doran’s.23 Worth taking more seriously is the suggestion (which is perhaps latent in Mehling, Tassé and Post’s account of the Ohio State University pilot) that it is the drama game element, rather than something intrinsic and unique to Shakespeare, that does the real work. In this account, Shakespeare and The Tempest are useful placeholders which may mean very little to the participants, a means of legitimating, perhaps even ascribing cultural authority to, a repertoire of techniques that might work just as well (some might argue better) without them.24 In the absence of a control group playing non-Shakespearean analogues of the HHM activities, it is impossible to know either way; but in response it can be said that there is a wide range of levels and points of access to the work and that Shakespeare, in Nicola Shaughnessy’s

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terms, is a relational phenomenon, wherein cultural presence interacts with the textual resources of language, character, situation and narrative, which are a means of orientation (and an opportunity for buy-­in) as much for the actors and audience as for the players. However, the key component that clearly differentiates HHM from a variety of similar, nonShakespearean drama-­centred programmes is, of course, the emphasis on shared rhythmic activity, the ‘heartbeat’ that pulses throughout all of its activities. As I noted above, there are compelling reasons why, in cognitive, embodied terms, this works with persons with autism, but I am also aware that it risks falling foul of what readers of this volume will recognize as decades-­old arguments within Shakespearean performance criticism about false universals. Hunter is quite clear that her project is ‘a self-­ imposed investigation into Shakespeare’s validity today’,25 and that HHM is a means of intimately grounding that validity in bodily experience. The way that the heartbeat metaphor works in Hunter’s work is unique, but it has been mobilized elsewhere in modern verse-­speaking training. For leading voice coach and author of a number of widely used acting manuals, Patsy Rodenburg, the ‘fundamental rhythm’ of the iambic is the ‘life-­ giving beat’, ‘the first and last we hear – that of our heart. It releases the physical pace and momentum of the verse, and illuminates the meaning through the stress. It also charts the heartbeat – including the stoppages or skips – of the character’.26 In this understanding, there is a deep organic connection between meter, the body, physical and mental equilibrium, and healthy performance, but also, pragmatically, a definition of verse from that seems immediately tangible, and intuitive. Such thinking has not gone unchallenged. W.B. Worthen, notably, has argued that attempts to frame Shakespearean textuality in terms of contemporary corporeality is an ideological manoeuvre whereby Shakespeare ‘becomes a naturalizing metaphor on the order of the body itself, representing the universal, transcendent, and natural in ways that both legitimate and tender unquestionable the dominant discourse

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of the stage’. In Worthen’s terms, HHM would be one of the means whereby Shakespeare ‘appears to enable the body to recapture itself’.27 Worthen does not think this is a good thing, but I beg to differ: this is demonstrably what Flute’s work does. Tempting as it is to dismiss the concerns of performance scholarship with the thought that few people in the room (other than myself) would have known or cared about them, let me propose instead that work such as this raises more fundamental political questions not only about what ‘Shakespeare’, ‘performance’ and the relationship between them might be, but also about who has access to and ownership of these, and how. If the practical response to the charge that actors think about Shakespearean textuality in terms of transhistorical bodily metaphors is that this is because it works, and the philosophical one, following Lakoff and Johnson, is that it is hard-­wired into the ways we think,28 the ethical one, surely, is that if this is what it takes to make Shakespeare’s work available to those who are otherwise excluded from it, then that is all the justification it needs. Taking a cue from the declaration in Article  30 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that ‘participation in the arts is a right, not a privilege’, Blythe A. Corbett has argued that making theatre accessible to autistic persons is not just a matter of adjusting normative performance conditions and conventions to make it temporarily, ‘specially’, available, but, more radically, of transforming our understanding of what mainstream practice is: ‘perhaps the most important question is: why is such access exceptional?’29 As Matthew Reason puts it in the preceding chapter, our ‘ambition’ should be to ‘enable young people from diverse backgrounds to develop an interest in theatre that means it becomes part of their self-­ identity’ (p. 113). The Tempest provides an example of one way Corbett’s question might be answered and Reason’s ambition realized, not (or, at least, not for Gabriel) because it will bring about any change or improvement in the condition of those who participate in it, but because the experience of a work of theatre art is in itself worthwhile.

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Unusually for a show of this kind, the Flute Tempest was afforded a review in the Guardian, and its author, Lyn Gardner, seemed to agree. Awarding the production a rare four (out of five) stars, Gardner described it as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘innovative’, and as ‘a unique theatrical experience – part performance and part workshop – which genuinely puts the sense of play back into Shakespeare’s late work’. In particular, Gardner felt, ‘it would be impossible for anyone witnessing the final scene, in which Ariel is set free, not to feel a tingle of real joy’.30 The phrasing seems exactly right, and the liberation is, indeed, exquisitely handled: ‘I set thee free’ says Prospero to Ariel, who responds, ‘I go, I go’; ‘I’ll miss you so’, chimes his former captor, then both together, ‘So, so, so . . .’. This segues, quite naturally, into the final round, the Goodbye Heartbeat, and it ends, as it began, in a circle: ‘Good-­bye . . . good-­bye . . . good-­bye . . .’. I carry another memory away with me. Before this ending, there is a moment of calm beauty in an isle full of noises. At the height of the rough-­and-tumble cacophony of Caliban’s second scene with Trinculo and Stephano (3.3), a Marx Brothers routine of slaps, pratfalls, slide whistle and parping horns, a stillness descends for Jackson’s softly spoken occupancy of Caliban’s big moment: Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds, methought, would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again. (3.2.135–43) If the first half of this passage, in this setting, pictures the synaesthetic acoustic world of autism, what Ockelford defines as its ‘Exceptional Early Cognitive Environment’, in which the

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child’s experience of music is ‘likely to be very different from that of the majority; more vivid, more intense, more exciting, more exhausting’ and where ‘each pitch may be like a familiar friend in an otherwise confusing world; each with the capacity to evoke a strong emotional response’,31 its second touches on a loss felt closer to home. Watching, as a parent, our profoundly autistic son engaging in one of the many activities – happy playing Shakespeare, after his fashion – that, after diagnosis we never dreamed he would access, the clouds part to offer a glimpse of a somewhere where things are otherwise; the place where we lived before we knew he was autistic, before everything changed. Reflecting brilliantly and movingly about his autistic son’s love of music, Nick Hornby muses that this love is ‘the best part of us . . . probably the richest and strangest part’.32 I do not know whether the Tempest-echoes are deliberate . . . Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-­change Into something rich and strange. (1.2.397–402) . . . but the resonances of a song in which a grieving son is conjured to imagine the fantastic metamorphosis in death, of a father still very much alive, are strange and rich indeed. For Hornby, living with his son’s condition, as for any parent of a child with a disability, meant learning to ‘let go of the ambitions you once had for him very quickly (and you learn too that many of those ambitions were worthless anyway, beside the point, precious, silly, indulgent, intimidatingly restrictive)’.33 Hornby writes well of the journey through grief to mourning to acceptance that many undergo, but for some there is sadness for what might have been still that lingers on, beneath the joy for what is, and that from time to time resurfaces. Adrift in this

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realm of Shakespearean late romance, I am in deeper waters than I thought. Some fifteen years ago, a child was lost; briefly, that child was here again, along with what we imagined to be a very different life ahead of him. It was, of course, just a dream, but for a moment only, I cried to dream again. How much of this is about me, and how much about Gabriel? The feeling passes, what is, is. On the train home I sound Gabriel out: ‘How was The Tempest?’; ‘Was it good’, he replies (it is a statement, not a question). On impulse, I slide a sheet of paper across the table: ‘Draw The Tempest.’ Gabriel frowns for a second, and writes one word at the centre of the page: ‘island’. He pauses, then twice adds two names, above and below: ‘kelly’ and ‘rownana’. The first, readers, you know; the second is Rowan Mackenzie, someone who is also researching Flute’s work, whom we met in the theatre café before the show.

FIGURE 6.2  Gabriel’s review. With kind permission of Gabriel Shaughnessy.

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Two columns on the right, and one to the left, complete the picture. The ‘hat’ is Trinculo’s, which Gabriel was invited to try on after it ended, the drum, trumpet and cymbals the ones he played while wearing the hat. As a piece of performance criticism, this pretty well nails it: an imaginary island, floating in space, dressing up, words and music, a venue, a journey, a reunion and a new encounter. For a shared memory of Shakespeare, it is, perfectly, just enough.

Acknowledgements My thanks to Kelly Hunter, Jane Ingram, and Nickie, Caitlin, Nathaniel and Erina Shaughnessy for their invaluable input. And most of all, to Gabriel, to whom this essay is dedicated.

Notes 1 The National Autistic Society, ‘About autism’, www.autism.org. uk/about.aspx (accessed 22 February 2017). 2 Lorna Wing, The Triad of Impairments of Social Interaction: An Aid to Diagnosis (London: National Autistic Society, 1992). 3 Francesca Happé, ‘Foreword’ to Adam Ockelford, Music, Language and Autism: Exceptional Strategies for Exceptional Minds (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2013), 9–10. 4 Penelope Woods, ‘Skilful Spectatorship? Doing (or Being) Audience at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre’, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015): 99–113, at 99. 5 Kelly Hunter, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat: Drama Games for Children with Autism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 20. 6 Ibid., 5. 7 Ibid., 4. 8 Tony Charman, ‘Commentary: Glass Half Full or Half Empty? Testing Social Communication Interventions for Young Children with Autism’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 52, no. 1 (2011): 22–3.

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9 Paula Fitzpatrick, Jean A. Frazier, David M. Cochran, Teresa Mitchell, Caitlin Coleman and R.C. Schmidt, ‘Impairments of Social Motor Synchrony Evident in Autism Spectrum Disorder’, Frontiers in Psychology 7, art. 1323 (2016): 1–13, at 1. 10 Ibid., 9. 11 See Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (London: MIT Press, 1997). 12 Sabine C. Koch, L. Mehl, E. Sobanski, M. Sieber and T. Fuchs, ‘Fixing the Mirrors: A Feasibility Study of the Effects of Dance Movement Therapy on Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder’, Autism 19 (2015): 338–50, at 350. 13 William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For the Shakespearean ramifications, see Robert Shaughnessy, ‘Connecting the Globe: Actors, Audience and Entrainment’, Shakespeare Survey 68 (2015): 294–305. 14 Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, Second Edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 4. Nicholson quotes Judith Ackroyd, ‘Applied Theatre: Problems and Possibilities’, Applied Theatre Researcher Journal 1, art. 1 (2000). 15 The original cast was Greg Hicks (Caliban), Chris Macdonald (Ferdinand and Stephano), Kevin McClatchy (Prospero), Mahmoud Osman (Ariel), Robin Post (Trinculo) and Eva Lily Tausig (Miranda). 16 Margaret H. Mehling, Marc J. Tassé and Robin Root, ‘Shakespeare and Autism: An Exploratory Evaluation of the Hunter Heartbeat Method’, Research and Practice in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 18 (2016), 1, 12. 17 Hunter, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat, 4–5. 18 Ibid., 1, 238, 239. 19 Mehling et al., ‘Shakespeare and Autism’, 2–3. 20 Robin Post, ‘Shakespeare and Autism: Reenvisioning Expression, Communication, and Inclusive Communities’, in Creativity and Community Among Autism-Spectrum Youth: Creating Positive Social Updrafts Through Play and Performance, ed. Peter Smagorinsky (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 105.

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21 Nicola Shaughnessy, ‘Dancing With Difference: Moving Towards a New Aesthetics’, in Applied Theatre: Aesthetics, ed. Gareth White (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 111. 22 Dennis Kennedy, Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 23 Derek Jarman’s film of The Tempest was released in 1980; Peter Brook’s La tempête premiered at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris, in 1990; Greg Doran’s RSC The Tempest opened in Stratford-­upon-Avon in 2016. 24 Examples are too numerous to list here, but include the Social Competence Intervention Program, devised by Laura A. Guli, Alison D. Wilkinson and Margaret Semrud-Clikeman in the United States, and the Sesame Approach in the United Kingdom. 25 Hunter, Shakespeare’s Heartbeat, 230. 26 Patsy Rodenburg, Speaking Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2005), 97. 27 W.B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 99. 28 In the new afterword to their groundbreaking work Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write: ‘metaphor is a natural phenomenon . . . which metaphors we have and what they mean depend on the nature of our bodies, our interactions in the physical environment, and our social and cultural practices’ (247). 29 Blythe A. Corbett, ‘Images of Healing and Learning: Autism, Art, and Accessibility to Theater’, AMA Journal of Ethics 18 (2016): 1232–40, at 1234–6. 30 Lyn Gardner, ‘The Tempest Review – Groundbreaking Shakespeare for Autistic Audiences’, Guardian, 31 October 2016. 31 Ockelford, Music, Language and Autism, 226. 32 Nick Hornby, 31 Songs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 127. 33 Ibid. 126–7.

PART TWO

Actors and Audiences: In Their Own Words

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The chapters that follow consist of interviews with theatre audiences for productions of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night set alongside the actors and directors who played in and made those productions. The purpose is to make the direct testimony of audiences and actors central to this book and in a wider context to the way in which we seek to understand the actor–audience relationship at the heart of theatre production. I interviewed all of the respondents for these chapters, some in person, some by telephone or Skype. The interviews are produced here with minimal editorial interpretation, cut or ordered only for clarity. It is for the reader to draw his or her own comparisons, interpretation, analysis and eventual conclusions. The voices in the section offer a valuable insight into the actor–audience relationship, they are powerful and diverse and provide us with a framework through which to begin to reflect on the dynamic that is central to the way in which we experience theatre production. It is fitting that the voices of actors and audiences have the last word in this book. As Sarah Frankcom states in her Foreword, ‘Audiences are the future of theatre’; by listening to their voices we begin to understand the complex act of co-­ creation that exists at the heart of Shakespeare in performance. This understanding has the potential to enrich and deepen our connection with the plays and to move us forward into the next 400 years of Shakespeare in performance, and beyond. Fiona Banks

7 Hamlet

Of the feigned madness of Hamlet there appears no adequate cause, for he does nothing which he might not have done with the reputation of sanity. He plays the madman most, when he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton cruelty. ‘Preliminary Remarks to Hamlet’, in Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, Accurately Printed from the Text of the Corrected Copies Left by Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, Isaac Reed, and Edmond Malone (Leipzic [sic], published by ERNEST FLEISCHER, 1833), p. 37

Hamlet’s speech upon seeing the King at prayers has always given me great offence. There is something so very bloody in it, so inhuman, so unworthy of a hero, that I wish our poet had omitted it. To desire to destroy a man’s soul, to make him eternally miserable, by cutting him off from all hopes of repentance: this, surely, in a Christian prince is such a piece of revenge as no tenderness for any parent can justify. ANON, possibly THOMAS HAMMER, Some Remarks on the Tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (London: printed for W. WILKINS in Lombard Street, 1736), p. 41

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The ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’ 23 April 2014–24 April 2016 On 23 April 2014 a company of twelve actors and four stage managers embarked on a two-­year global tour of Hamlet to every country in the world. The ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’, directed by the Globe Theatre’s then artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, with co-­director Bill Buckhurst, was described by the Globe as ‘a completely unprecedented theatrical adventure’ – the first truly world tour. By the time the company returned home for their final performances in the Globe Theatre on 23 and 24 April 2016 they had travelled 310,647 km around the world, visiting 197 countries, playing to more than 255,000 people in 202 diverse venues.

FIGURE 7.1  ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’, Kourion Theatre, Cyprus, 2014. With kind permission of Shakespeare’s Globe.

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Jama Musse Jama, Director of the Redsea Cultural Foundation Hargeysa, Somaliland was in the audience at the Ambassador Hotel, Hargeysa on 29 January 2015, as his organization hosted the production; the first full play staged in Somaliland by a foreign organization for twenty-­three years:

Jama Musse Jama Hamlet in Somaliland in 2014, for the first time: I remember this sort of vivid, unexpected capturing emotion with the actors and actions. From time to time I was observing the audience’s eyes and was fascinated by how a society with not that good English language proficiency, been able to sit down there and follow almost four hours of Shakespeare language (expressions that are difficult even to the English native speakers of today). It was simply fascinating. Actor Matthew Romain was a member of the company. He played ‘all the young men’ in rotation throughout the tour. In order to ensure that no one in the company played the same role for two years and that rest days could be factored into the actors’ schedules a ‘track’ system was created in which actors would play a range of characters throughout a performance. They would then change track and play a new set of characters. The tracks were: (1) Laertes, Guildenstern, Barnardo, Lucianus; (2) Fortinbras, Rosencrantz, Marcellus, Osric; (3) Horatio, Reynaldo, Captain; (4) Hamlet. In the course of a week Matthew could play all of these ‘tracks’ in the production. In the final weekend of performances at the Globe he played all four tracks in two days. In addition all of the company would be musicians, players and courtiers.

Matthew Romain The production for us was all about sharing an experience with the audience so it couldn’t just be about you and your

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character. It encouraged all the company to develop an open approach to performance, which is useful when you are playing in such different venues, to such varied audiences. During some weeks of the tour I played four tracks in four days. The wonderful thing about that was that you really knew the play from every angle and didn’t get tunnel vision, only seeing the play in a particular way. It was a wonderful learning experience about theatre in general. It was also a wonderful learning experience about generosity, because when you played a character one night you might think, ‘I wish the actor playing “X” had given me a little more focus during my speech’. So next time I played ‘X’ I knew how helpful it would be to give focus to the character with that speech. It quickly unlocked each character’s function in the overall arc of the scene. It also stopped you being passive onstage. It gave you real focus for every moment of performance. My perceptions of audience could change according to which character I was playing, partly because different characters have different relationships with the audience. Hamlet has so much direct address, that for him, particularly, the audience is another character, like Horatio, another person to confide in. The other young men in the play don’t soliloquize in this way, so they have a different relationship with the audience. I was always very aware of who the audience was and the nature of the country or region in which we were performing. I played Fortinbras in Afghanistan, in a heavily fortified embassy compound, performing to a mixed audience of Afghan students and British armed forces. We performed just after a Taliban rocket attack had taken place in a nearby area. There was a heavy sense of that military engagement hanging in the air. When I was on stage as Fortinbras talking about my army I was aware that I wasn’t just talking about the army behind me in the play, but that I was talking about the army in front of me as well. Throughout the tour I always tried to be careful not to project what I might think or feel onto the audience; but I did feel there was a palpable sense of awareness of the military, and the nature of conflict in that performance. In Cambodia we

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spent the day before the performance visiting the killing fields. When, as Hamlet, I held a skull up in the evening, it seemed to me like a very different thing, than it would be if I held it up to an audience in the UK at the Globe. It may be that’s what the audience felt as well, but it could equally be a projection of my experiences and thoughts onto the audience. Certainly on several occasions I had a clear sense that audience responses were brought about by different cultures, or particular circumstances. We were in Kiev shortly after the events in Maidan Square and the revolution. We performed on the eve of the election to Petro Poroshenko and Vitali Klitschko who would go on to be elected the President of Ukraine and the Mayor of Kiev, respectively. The performance was broadcast throughout Ukraine. The play that night was all about a political situation and regime change. There were moments where, in the context, those interpretations were unavoidable. Sometimes we would get a palpable feeling, or response from the audience but it was more difficult to interpret why. When we performed in Sudan every time the word revenge or vengeance was mentioned there was a ripple of excitement, or a roar of approval from the audience. For whatever reason it was there and that theme really pinged out for that audience. It was great having audience researchers with us (Malcolm Cocks and Penelope Woods) because quite often audiences are nice and just tell you how great you were. That’s always lovely, but it’s good to find out in more depth about the different things audiences talk about. In Uganda after the performance a woman said that the play was about women’s rights and a woman’s right to remarry. I did a workshop with drama students in Liberia and that theme also came up for them: whether Gertrude should have remarried, whether she had to remarry, was it right that she did? To a Western audience this is often less of a concern – we have a different perspective on these issues. That was one of the wonderful things about the play – it took on different flavours everywhere we went. We are all very familiar with the idea that Shakespeare is universal, but I think I learnt about halfway through the tour that it’s

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not simply the case that all of the themes explored in Hamlet are fully applicable around the world. But rather that there are so many different themes and ideas, of such a rich variety, that any culture, anywhere in the world can draw something from the play, something totally different. That was a beautiful discovery, and wonderful to witness. The nature and level of the way an audience responded with laughter to the production changed in different places as well. The extent of laughter would vary, as would the points in the play where people laughed. The audience’s response changed the nature of the performance. The extent to which the play was a comedy, tragedy, melodrama etc. varied from country to country, region to region. Sometimes the response you received could be disarming. I was, as were many of us, always keen to really ground myself in the country we were visiting in the best way I could before performing. That might be by reading about the history or current affairs particular to the area, or by talking to people. The company liked to step out on stage knowing where we were and why, otherwise it could be easy to get a bit lost. This could mean that we might have certain ideas about how a particular audience could respond, but they could always take you by surprise. When we were in Rwanda we performed in a city that was itself the site of a massacre in the genocide; there were mass graves nearby. These events were within living memory of the audience and we were very aware of that when we produced Ophelia’s body on stage. The performance in Rwanda was extraordinary anyway. Halfway through the lights failed and we moved the set outside and continued with the performance in the open air. When we came to Ophelia’s funeral and lowered the body into the grave the audience laughed. We asked people afterwards why this was (you tend to assume it’s because your acting it bad!); they said there was something about the banality of it. A dead body was not such an unusual sight to them as it would be to many other audiences. I’m still not sure why they laughed but there was something about the sight of an English theatre company enacting this scene that provoked laughter.

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Audience behaviour generally also varied from place to place. In Eastern Europe there was a real, ‘hear a pin drop’, respectful silence while when we went to the Caribbean audiences would talk along with the show and comment on what was happening on stage. This could catch you off guard at first, but might be more akin to how Shakespeare would have experienced his plays. When we were in Belize during the closet scene, where Hamlet is raging at Gertrude, someone called out ‘that’s no way to treat your mother’. Such immediate responses helped us know to what extent we were connecting with the audience, they were really useful. Audience response could change the way I chose to control the pace of a scene. If it was quiet I could play faster or in a more controlled way than if people were talking. In Mexico we performed to over 2,000 people in a town square and people were climbing trees to get the best view. I remember the bustle, the sound of the traffic, the passers-­by, the birds at the back of the stage. That soundscape became part of the performance. It gave it a wonderful new life, but meant that you couldn’t pause too long, self-­indulge or work with silences; because there were no silences. That kind of environment pushes you to adopt a front-­footed energy with the audience. In contrast, in the Market Theatre in Johannesburg (which is a black box) you could play more intimately with the audience. Sensing audience energy is an individual process for each actor. Our company, though, were an ensemble, we had rehearsed together, travelled together, lived together, so we knew each other very well and could sense and respond to that energy collectively, as well as individually, on stage. Our ability to respond to audiences in the moment also came from our directors instilling in us the need to play with a front-­footed energy, to engage with the audience. In the Globe the groundlings are a brilliant barometer of audience response, you can feel if they are not engaged. We tried to bring a sense of playing in the Globe to the tour. Where we had lights we would leave the house lights on, so we had that shared light and connection. We didn’t respond to the audience in a planned way. Theatre is all

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about responding in the moment. During one performance a dog wandered on stage during one of Hamlet’s speeches and Ladi (Emeruwa), playing Hamlet at the time, did all that he could do, which was to pat the dog and reference it in his speech. Whether it’s an incident like that, or someone calling out, you need to incorporate it, to include what is happening in that moment with the audience. We saw an audience connect with the play in so many different ways during the course of the tour. When we were in Romania (playing in a town square as part of a festival) we were doing our fight call and jig call before the matinee performance and a group of gypsy children started watching us. They stayed to watch the show, totally engaged. Then they stayed for our next show, watching until they were taken home. I remember a small boy handing back a ball to me, mid-­scene, that had rolled off the stage. That had nothing to do with the story, but was a moment of connection in the purest sense, with the theatrical event and spectacle of performance. Performing the show over two years we were constantly doing things in a new way within each new context. In Iran all the family ties between Laertes and Ophelia came to the fore, particularly as we were not allowed to touch each other, which to the company felt strange if you are playing brother and sister. The company had new favourite lines every week, but one line that pinged out, particularly in war-­torn countries, was the captain who tells Hamlet: ‘We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name’ (4.4.17–18). It highlighted the futility, waste and hopelessness of conflict. Those lines started to gather more and more weight as we travelled around. Sometimes we played using surtitles, sometimes scene summaries, sometimes nothing. Sometimes I felt the most profound connection with audiences that I knew linguistically could follow very little. Moments such as the one where as Laertes I cradled my dead sister in my arms had more of an impact in these performances because they are so recognizable. I played Laertes when we performed at a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. I had a keen sense that we were playing things that some

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of these people had gone through: loss and death, displacement, the desire for revenge, to forget, to remember. I was in touching distance of people that had seen all of that. That changes the dynamic of the relationship between actor and audience. It also changes what you hope the audience will get from the performance. Sometimes there’s catharsis, sometimes it’s a night out at the theatre. In Chicago, for example, we were one of many Hamlets, and we talked with audiences about the acting and the directing and the way we did this or that. But we also played in countries where they had never had a Hamlet, Shakespeare or piece of Western theatre before. Then you get audiences who respond simply to the story, which is very special. They might say ‘I can’t believe Ophelia drowned’ or ‘Laertes did that’ etc. When you have audiences that don’t know how the play is going to end it changes the nature of what you are doing. We played the Calais Jungle (the Calais Jungle was a refugee and migrant encampment in the vicinity of Calais, France in use from January 2015 to October 2016). There were comments made in the media along the lines of ‘the last thing these people need is Shakespeare’. Talking to the volunteers in The Jungle they said the biggest challenge, after refugees have the essentials such as food and clothing (which of course are of primary importance), is boredom. Too often we reduce people in a desperate situation to a collection of basic needs, which can dehumanize them. These are people who in ‘normal’ life might be going to the theatre. We can ‘hold a mirror up to nature’, or just give them something else to look at for a couple of hours. My experiences there, and on the rest of the tour, really confirmed for me the place and value of theatre in society. Playing in Somaliland we took a trip to a newly opened cultural centre, the only one of its kind there. I remember being struck by a piece of graffiti on the walls. It said ‘culture is a basic human right’. Of course it is, but it is one that we take for granted. Dr Malcolm Cocks toured with the company in the capacity of postdoctoral research fellow in Shakespeare and global

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audiences. Malcolm was commissioned to conduct audience research by Globe Research. He was joined for part of the tour by Dr Penelope Woods, with whom he is co-­authoring a study of its audiences entitled Guilty Creatures: The International Audiences for the Globe-­to-Globe Hamlet Tour. Malcolm and Penelope spoke to over 1,200 audience members from across the globe. Here Malcolm shares some of his experiences with Hamlet audiences in East and West Africa.

Malcolm Cocks I have three standout memories of audience response to the ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’:

National University of Rwanda, Butare, Rwanda About twenty-­five minutes into the production there was a power failure so I helped the company to take down the set and move it outside into the university gardens. The performance had started in a lecture hall that many of the audience attended for academic lectures and so they were quite reserved. Many of them expected to see a recorded performance. There was a formality about the energy in the room and moving the set outside to the gardens provided a startling contrast. While we moved the set outside the audience stayed and were patient. The break and move outside meant that passers-­by joined the audience – the show was free in any case. There was also an HIV conference at the university and delegates abandoned the conference and came to see the play instead. When the performance began again (fairly quickly) there was much more of a festival atmosphere than at the beginning. It was more interactive, much more informal and relaxed. There was audience sitting on tiers around the garden as well as the core audience in the centre of the space. So this was one reason this performance was special. There’s a morbidity and black humour about Hamlet, but there are also moments of solemnity around death and silence. This audience’s laughter in response to the performance was

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quite different, both in terms of the frequency and in the places it occurred, to that of all other audiences. The response was so marked that at the interval one of the company asked whether I would find out what was going on. The company had been using a dummy at one point to represent Ophelia’s corpse and it had got rather out of shape with use and some people wondered if that was why the audience found the scene so comic. Were they responding to this battered dummy that we had been interring and disinterring for some time on tour? When I spoke to audience members several things emerged. First someone told me that we were about 200–300 yards from a mass gravesite and if we had dug up the earth we would have found actual human skulls. She interpreted the laughter as being a reaction to the scene being ‘so close to the bone’, an inherent layer of irony that the audience was relishing. Another audience member said (almost verbatim) that in Rwanda we are not afraid of death because we have been through it with the genocide. The laughter was a kind of recognition of that familiarity. The play’s exploration of death and burial practices were particularly poignant for an audience in this context. Public spectacles, such as our performance, were unusual and tacitly forbidden in the region so part of the reaction was also possibly a sense of people watching themselves, watching a play, being present at a communal spectacle.

Mandjou, Cameroon The company had hoped to perform in the Central African Republic in December 2015, but were not able to do so due to escalating conflict there. Instead, the CAR show took place in Mandjou in north-­east Cameroon, to a mixed audience made up of displaced people from the Central African Republic, who were being looked after by the Red Cross, and locals from Mandjou. There was not an easy and free relationship between the two; they were largely kept in separate areas. We had permission to perform from the mayor, but found securing a venue in which to perform difficult. Eventually a local barkeeper

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was persuaded to lend us his bar to perform in for three hours. The company took out their instruments and began playing to let people know that a performance would take place. It was a totally ad hoc audience, with no prior warning or advertising. The Red Cross invited the displaced Central African Republicans to come along as well. Most of the audience were French-­speaking and some people I spoke to didn’t know who Shakespeare was (this was unusual), or the story of Hamlet, but they were up for the spectacle of the performance and were curious about who this troupe of people were. Some people requested a performance in French and the company did what they could to throw in a few French words when possible. The play was stopped five times by the police or the army, every time they came through the area, because they were wary of public disturbance. Each time they wanted to inspect our papers. You could see the people in the audience felt fairly afraid of the army so would disperse. Once we had shown our papers we were allowed to continue with the play and the audience would reassemble. There was lots of interactivity. Every time the ghost came on stage there was loud applause. When I asked people why they said they were applauding because he had come for justice. The ghost’s status as an outsider trying to be heard and get justice clearly resonated with this audience.

Cotonou, Benin They performed in a field again to a largely French-­speaking audience. By this point in the tour I had begun to think about audiences and ideas concerning the transmission of emotion. Do audiences respond on a physiological level to the performance of emotion? Could fake emotions from the actors on stage produce real emotions in the audience? There was a lady in the audience that I interviewed who wept when I asked her if she understood the play. She said the actors transmitted their emotions to her. She explained that for her the play was about survival. Some of the characters survive, while others don’t. I’m very wary of making generalizations about different

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regions as you never know what audience research will turn up, but it had become clear that in areas that were politically or economically fraught where you could not take survival for granted, survival became a real issue.

The effect of the audience on the company Audiences had a sort of cumulative effect on how the company understood what they are doing and their relationship with the audience – regionally, during the course of a leg, and also over the trajectory of the tour as a whole. Actors would respond to the mood of audiences in the venue and the kind of energy they brought with them to the performance, as any company would at any performance. After performances the Hamlet company were always interested to know what the audience were saying and always incredibly ready to engage with their audiences. They were a very porous company when it came to ideas. Sometimes audience comments would lead to the company talking through the way they played a certain moment. When they travelled through the Balkans, or through Greece and Turkey, for example, where the impact of global migration and conflict was being felt more intensely, they refocused their work. The new pressure on questions surrounding borders in these places brought a fresh dramatic focus to the opening scene on the battlements and the questions posed by the threat of invasion from Norway. The company had a great awareness of cultural context and how that knowledge might help them explore a range of meanings for audiences. As the play progressed the range of possible meanings that audiences could tap into were thickened by the company’s experience. They were also continuing to change the combination of roles an actor would play on stage. This growing understanding changed the nature of performances. In a Q and A session in Nigeria one girl asked how much does Gertrude know and how complicit is she? It was a really helpful question for the company. Everyone who played Gertrude reflected on and clarified how they had been playing it as a result and there was a new self-­consciousness around

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the Gertrude. Is she wilfully ignorant? Does she have a shrewd grasp of the situation, or is she completely hapless? What does she know or figure out by the ambiguous moment when she drinks from the chalice poisoned by Claudius? In West Africa, in fact, there was a great deal of interest in Gertrude and Ophelia. In Accra, Ghana, there was laughter at moments that might render other audiences silent. The violence of the nunnery scene for example, the whole auditorium erupted with laughter. I had an interesting conversation with a schoolteacher who had brought a group to the performance. He said that the performance provided an interesting opportunity to reflect on cultural circumstances and that there was currently lots of discussion around the issue of domestic violence. But there were other factors too. I spoke to some women in that audience who told me that for them the laughter was contingent, because that week there had been debate in the papers about the wearing of make-­up. The debate had questioned whether women wearing make-­up was a reflection of Western cultures and asked whether it was eroding traditional values of femininity. This debate illustrated for me the extent to which audience response is always defined by the particular contexts of a given community – so the laughter was to do with debate that they had just seen erupting on stage in a Western play. Their laughter in this context was laughter of recognition, of the serendipity of that moment, but also of the issue itself. Bill Buckhurst was co-­director of the ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’ with Dominic Dromgoole. He recalls the challenge of creating a production that could travel around the world and play for such diverse audiences. Bill and Dominic between them regularly made visits to see the production as it made its way around the globe.

Bill Buckhurst As a director I try to place myself in the position of an audience member. During the rehearsal process I think a great deal

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about the clarity of the story the actors are telling. When you know you are going to be taking a play to countries where English is not a spoken language you are particularly conscious of this. We had learnt a great deal from the ‘Globe to Globe’ festival that played at the Globe during the summer of 2012. Some of these performances used surtitles. We learnt that when the storytelling in a production is good it is absolutely possible to understand and connect with a play in a language that you do not understand. The ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’ came out of this experience and most importantly the playing space of the Globe Theatre itself. The idea of playing in shared light was central to the rehearsal process and to the type of production we sought to create. At the Globe you are always thinking about how the audience will receive what is happening on stage. So much of what the character of Hamlet does is share and discover his thoughts with the audience. Our learning from playing in the Globe helped us to create a show that would connect with audiences around the world. Hamlet did not have an assistant director on tour with it, so Dominic and I would drop in from time to time. He saw many more performances than I did, but each time I saw the show I was always thrilled by the audience reaction. The first time I saw the production on tour was in Hungary in an outdoor space that held around 1,200 to 2,000, it was vast, like a stadium. The show was designed to work anywhere: large space, beach, studio space etc. I thought this was a great test of the production’s versatility. My seat was near the back. The venue had given the actors body mikes and had cameras catching close-­ups on big screens; there were subtitles. It was reassuring to see how well the show worked even in these circumstances that were not so intimate. I and the other audience members were enthralled by the evening. I think this is because the story of Hamlet is universal and we had done everything we could to tell that story and bring it to the audience. I then saw the production in a c.400-seat theatre in Belgium with a very polite, what we would call ‘listening’ audience. They didn’t make much noise during the show but then were really appreciative at the end.

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A performance I really remember was at Teatro Solis in Uruguay. The venue was a large, 1,100-seater opera house; a stunning environment with an exquisite acoustic. It was a really exciting night, with a standing ovation at the end. The audiences in South America really responded to the darkness of the situation and to the humour of the play. They particularly seemed to connect with the character of Hamlet. Dominic Dromgoole always described the play as a play about a genius. Hamlet is so advanced in his brain, but unable to act, trying to explore his dilemma and sound his ideas out with an audience. The audience that night in Uruguay really seemed to respond to this aspect of the play, I remember feeling a palpable connection, particularly in the ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ (2.2.485) soliloquy. As the tour warmed up the company would learn to really sit in those moments and allow the audience in. I remember feeling ruffles of reaction, wherever I saw the play, in the scenes where Hamlet speaks with the audience. It didn’t seem to matter if the audience didn’t literally understand the language in which the words were spoken. If the actors opened a moment to them, and sat with them in that moment, the audience would respond and form a connection with what was happening on stage. Jim Stewart and Jen Davey were in the audience at the Globe Theatre for the very last performance of the ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’. The performance also marked the end of Dominic Dromgoole’s time as the theatre’s artistic director.

Jim Stewart I saw the very last performance of the ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’ and my experience is mediated through the prism of understanding what an important cultural event it was. Being in the audience watching it felt like being part of something really, really special. The tour was something that had never been done before. The fact that the actors had changed parts

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for each performance over a two-­year period had a profound effect on the performance I saw. It was like having an experience in the hands of people who knew what they were performing more than anything else I’ve witnessed. They were able to relax and take you along. There was no sign of fatigue, quite the opposite, despite what they had been through. The audience were very attentive and appreciative. You can see this in the Globe in a way you can’t in any other theatre. You have a more intimate relationship with your fellow audience members. It’s not a conscious process, but it’s hard not to look around. The overall experience was very powerful. It felt like being part of something really significant.

Jen Davey The final performance of the ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’ was such a special event because I knew that the company was coming home after two years and it was their last show together. It was also Dominic Dromgoole’s last day as artistic director. I remember there being an incredible atmosphere and being aware that this was something very special and celebratory. Almost all the audience knew the performance was a homecoming and that it was a special moment. We just all wanted to give them a good send-­off I suppose. A key moment for me was when Hamlet came forward and started saying ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.55). I never really understood why there is a fuss about that speech until that moment. The actor playing Hamlet (Naeem Hayat) just walked downstage and started speaking. You could literally hear a pin drop. Everyone knows the speech and there’s an expectation. But this time it just happened, and it was the most beautiful organic thing. It hit me out of nowhere. He did a beautiful job of playing the audience, but not playing them. He gave the speech to everybody, but it felt like he was giving it to you personally. He made us all feel that it was for us personally, not just for a theatre full of people.

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Hamlet: Royal Shakespeare Company 12 March–13 August 2016 Simon Godwin directed Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet in this production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-­uponAvon. Paul and Jane Shuter are husband and wife and have been regular theatregoers together for over 40 years.

Paul and Jane Shuter Jane: We talked about this Hamlet for the entire journey home (Stratford-­upon-Avon to Oxford). We were so affected by it that when we got in, even though it was past midnight, I went online and bought tickets to see the play again when there was an after-­show talk, to hear what the actors had to say about the production. It was simply a fabulous production; the set was amazing, everyone in it was so good. Paul: It was fabulous because of a combination of standout performances, it’s a play that I know well and there was a sense that they had tied it all up. The setting was very effective (Simon Godwin in a RSC press release described the design concept as ‘Denmark reconceived as a modern state influenced by the ritual, traditions and beauty of West Africa’). There was a red carpet rolled out for Claudius and every time someone got too near the carpet a flunky would come and wave them away. This setting and casting helped me to see and connect with the sixteenth-­century story. The actors playing Hamlet (Paapa Essiedu) and Claudius (Clarence Smith) were extraordinary. Jane: At one point Ophelia started pulling her hair out, obviously she wasn’t really pulling her hair out, but I absolutely believed she was. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to hug her, or to keep a safe distance, in case she tried to hurt me.

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Paul: None of it looked like a performance. Jane: Obviously when you go to the theatre you do so with a willing suspension of disbelief, but in this production the actors were those people, they were absolutely convincing. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were played as tourists and it was clear that they had got themselves into a situation where they were really quite uncomfortable. The little movements they made, nothing big, made you feel their embarrassment. They and everybody on stage were totally believable. They were clearly Hamlet’s friends. There was a slight sexual tension between the three of them. Paul: When I go to theatre I want to be told a story, I know it’s not real. I know no one’s really mad, really getting stabbed, I might suspect real passion in a kiss, but normally there isn’t. I can effortlessly lose myself in the world of the play. I’m transported from what’s normally going on in my head. I’m not thinking about what is going on at work, or how the boiler’s going to get fixed, I will be in the moment with the story. The moment where I really became connected with this production was the moment when the action shifted to the court (1.2). A throne and red carpet were brought onto the stage, then Claudius walked on in kingly regalia, I was hooked. That’s not about the text; it’s about the world that is being created resonating with the play, which of course I know already, before the actors even speak the words. Of all the plays Hamlet is the one I know most, have read most. I’m also historically very aware of the time it was written, Elizabeth I was dying and refusing to name a successor. That context is in my head. At that moment the court the world of the play created on stage started to connect and resonate with everything in my head. I was hooked from that moment onwards. Jane: I think almost everyone in the audience was captivated. For me it was a production where so many elements were working. The point where Paul became captivated was exactly

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the same point that I did. Before that scene the action of the play is quite fragmented and no one gets a good long run at the language, but in that scene you meet all the characters, see the actors’ portrayal of them, and understand the context chosen for the production. The whole thing really starts working. At the end huge chunks of the audience stood. I know standing ovations are more common now but throughout the performance I could see large sections of the audience and they were all attentive. The atmosphere in the auditorium throughout was very focused. I felt that most keenly in the moments immediately before the interval. Hamlet was standing behind Claudius deciding whether to kill him. I think there were a lot of us in the interval worried that we would come back for the second half to find that he had actually done it. I felt this even though I know what happens, and I felt many of the other audience members did as well. Paapa wasn’t just an actor putting in a good performance; he was a young lad who had promised his dad something that he didn’t know how to do: he was tense, he was shaking, he made you believe all of those things. Susan Robinson, Jim Stewart, Miranda Coates and Stuart Rathe, all regular theatregoers, similarly felt a strong connection with Paapa Essiedu’s performance.

Susan Robinson It was an incredibly fine cast. Paapa Essiedu was a relatively young Hamlet. I liked his youth. He was beautifully spoken, very clear, his Hamlet made sense. I felt his youth and immaturity; he really was scared to act. I really felt he was asking me: Am I doing the right thing? Can I do this? I felt his relationship with his father very clearly, that he was missing his father, very unsure about his uncle and distressed by his mother’s marriage. The friendship between Hamlet and Horatio and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was also very real, I believed that they had been at university together.

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I didn’t analyse the production while I was watching it. I simply felt that I liked this young man and I wanted to know how the story would go. When a production really draws you in you don’t analyse it until afterwards. I didn’t analyse a young Mark Rylance, for instance, standing in his pyjamas, I was just blown away by the whole thing. I always know if a production is not working for me if I’m sitting there during the performance thinking about what the actors are wearing or how the set works. This production was very refreshing; I was emotionally drawn in throughout. The immediacy of Paapa Essiedu’s performance also reminded me of Matthew Romain’s Hamlet in the ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’, when I saw one of the last performances in the Globe Theatre. He too really pulled me in and moved me, a young man asking, Can I do this? Can I actually kill this man? Both Matthew and Paapa really made me feel their situation.

Jim Stewart I have a very powerful visual memory of Paapa Essiedu performing the first soliloquy: ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’ (1.2.129). I was in the front row and I remember the intensity with which he was performing it, he was possessed by Hamlet. He was exposed, every part of him Hamlet. It was very powerful watching him do that speech; it felt like a ‘light the touch paper and retire to a safe distance’ moment because you just felt that this guy was going to explode. The speech had such intensity and I was hooked. Paapa Essiedu was possibly the best Hamlet I have seen and I’ve seen about thirty-­five. He’s definitely in the top few. It made me feel really excited and thrilled with anticipation. I’ve played in several bands and know that when you get one player who is really strong they lift you to another level in your own playing. I wonder if it was like that for the rest of the company in this production. It was a thrilling, fast-­paced, high-­octane, production. I felt in very safe hands throughout. The production placed the audience in a highly chaotic environment, but the cast got us through that – it was exhilarating.

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Miranda Coates I was drawn in by the first soliloquy; I remember the stage as quite dark. Paapa was so good, speaking the verse as if it was just occurring to him and the lines hadn’t been said a million times before. When I feel that words are coming out of an actor because that’s what they are feeling in that moment, that’s when I really connect with a performance. If the verse is being spoken beautifully, but I am conscious that it is still verse, it does not have the same effect. I enjoyed this Hamlet and Andrew Scott’s [discussed later in this chapter] most of all the ones I’ve seen to date. I’d seen Paapa Essiedu playing smaller roles before and thought he deserved a bigger part. I love it when you think an actor you have followed should get a bigger role and s/he does, it’s amazing to watch them develop. In Hamlet there are so many points that could be ambiguous, but with Paapa’s performance you always knew where he was, what he was playing, and he took you along with him.

Stuart Rathe This was an incredibly vibrant production, I think because of the setting. It was very colourful with a very striking lead performance. Where Paapa was particularly strong was in the ‘antic disposition’ moments of the play, his pretence of madness superb. A lot of Hamlet’s behaviour appeared really bonkers to the audience, for example putting ladies and gents toilet signs on the throne for Gertrude and Claudius. There was a real kind of pathos about this mania and as an audience member I felt that we were in on the joke. Somehow I felt like we were in on his plan because his behaviour was so extravagant. He communicated exceptionally well with the audience. He let us into his world and we were part of a secret plan, becoming co-­conspirators with Hamlet. Bethan Cullinane played Guildenstern in the production, as part of a season with the RSC in which she also appeared in King Lear and played Imogen in Cymbeline.

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Bethan Cullinane Simon Godwin is fantastic in rehearsal at making sure the actors understand the play. In the first week of rehearsal we were not allowed to read our own part, but changed parts constantly. We would also read around the group, taking a speech rather than a character each. We would translate everything into contemporary language, so everyone was absolutely sure what we were talking about. By the end of this process everyone knew what everyone else was saying. I think that’s key to communicating the play to the audience. If the company understands every word the audience will too. We were quite shocked by how funny people found our Hamlet. We had a lot of fun in the rehearsal room but when we got it on stage we were amazed by how much the audience were laughing. They weren’t just laughing at physical gags but things in the text that they found funny. People didn’t feel they had to be quiet like they often do in Shakespeare. I think that possibly had something to do with the play being set in a modern context and the work we had done to understand the language. The audience were much more vocal than I had experienced in many other shows. We developed the characters so much during the run because of the way the audience reacted. In rehearsal we didn’t play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for laughs. We created a whole backstory about how we had been at boarding school together and imagined a potential love triangle with Hamlet. When we started performing we realized that the audience were reacting to certain things really well and that they liked certain moments. We were then able to play with those moments more in performance. If you had filmed the first and last show of the run they would have looked very different. That is the effect of the audience. In the scene where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive at court and meet Hamlet for the first time (2.2) there’s an awkward exchange where he finds them out very quickly. When we started playing the scene we were doing so very truthfully and awkward moments emerged between the characters. The audience really responded to those moments and we thought we

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could make them even more awkward. For example when Hamlet looked away from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern we would look at each other – we noted that was a bit that the audience really enjoyed. The part of the scene where Hamlet asked us why we have come to Elsinore became quite a big moment. We would gesture and articulate our awkwardness in the situation. Paapa never knew whether we would play that moment in a particular way, whatever way we chose he would respond accordingly. A real playfulness developed around these moments that the audience really enjoyed and the scene became bigger because of the audience response. We realized what humour there was in awkward looks and silences, in the situation of the characters. One of us could also share a look with the audience at a key moment that Hamlet couldn’t see. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s first scene is also a good example of how audience engagement shaped the performance. We arrived at the court with a London telephone box-shaped teapot and some shortbread as a gift. That always got a response from the audience. There was a character in the scene, a servant, who doesn’t have a name or lines (we called him Percy). He was played by an actor called Byron Mondahl. One show he was off sick and it was as if a major character had been cut from the play. We had developed lots of little moments with Percy in rehearsal but when we went into performance the character developed massively. This was because the audience’s eyes would be on him for much of the scene and Byron was able to further develop his character. When we gave him the teapot he used to get a massive laugh. We didn’t know why until we realized that he would turn out to the audience and look absolutely disgusted with the gift, sharing that moment with them. When you get a real vocal response like this from an audience you know they are engaged with the performance. I suppose this is the most obvious way you know that you have a connection. I think one of the reasons audiences responded so positively to the show was because they recognized people and human situations that they knew. When something went wrong it became powerful and more painful because of that human

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connection. There is light and dark in everything and the production really showed that. You can feel a charge from the audience when you are on stage. It’s so hard to explain, but it’s as if you can physically feel people’s emotions. After the players have performed their play and Claudius runs out (3.2) Hamlet is excited and playful. Then suddenly he turns, right on Guildenstern, in a way that is really uncomfortable. Every night I could feel the audience respond to that moment. I was downstage left with my back to one side of the audience, but I could just feel it, as if everyone was holding their breath for a moment. Paapa had an amazing ability as Hamlet to be witty, charming and funny and then to change so quickly that you almost felt like a fool for laughing at him. At times he did that to the audience, cutting them down, for example when he asks them ‘Who calls me villain?’ (2.2.507). I think that drew the audience in closer to Hamlet because he is so human and realistic in the way he speaks and feels. If you walk into a room in everyday life and something difficult has happened, you can feel that. Imagine doing that in a room with 1,000 people, you can really feel it. The energy is huge and palpable. That’s one of the reasons I love theatre because it gives you the opportunity to feel the audience’s energy. That energy then feeds into my emotion playing the moment. Sometimes in the scene where Hamlet turned on me (3.2) I’d cry because I felt so ashamed to be shamed by him in front of so many people. I could feel the audience’s sympathy, but the sympathy wasn’t really with Guildenstern because Hamlet is going through a lot more at that moment. It almost made it more awkward and embarrassing for everyone if I cried. When I played Ophelia in Dreamthinkspeak’s Hamletinspired The Rest is Silence we performed behind two-­way glass that when lit from one side became a mirror. When the audience came in I could see them, but when the lights came up for the start of the performance the glass turned into a mirror and all I could see was my reflection. We could not see the audience for the whole performance. That felt more like acting for television or like being part of an installation. If that glass

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wall came down it would have been a very different show. It was an incredible experience in which you could really forget that you were being watched and develop lots of small idiosyncrasies of character. It was wonderful to play Ophelia in that production because it meant I could explore her madness in an interesting way without worrying about sharing that. On stage you might want to have an emotional moment but it still needs to be loud enough to be heard, whereas we wore microphones in The Rest is Silence. It felt for the audience as if they were watching someone who didn’t know they were being watched and it allowed the actors to go to some of the darkest, most painful places. Sometimes it’s easier to do that when you switch off your awareness of the audience. It’s like children when they are playing in their bedrooms. There’s something very raw about that form of playing make believe. The Rest is Silence felt very voyeuristic in this sense. I pretended my reflection was from a mirrored wall in my bedroom. When I’m performing in a theatre like the Royal Shakespeare Theatre I constantly have a ‘third eye’ on the audience. I’m running through all the emotions of the moment on stage, but I’m also aware if someone’s asleep in the third row. It’s important on stage not to close down. If I block the audience out and don’t include them then I’m being self-­indulgent. The best shows are when an actor is in conversation with the audience.

Hamlet: Almeida Theatre 17 February–15 April 2017 Robert Icke directed Andrew Scott as Hamlet in this production at the Almeida Theatre. It later transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End for a run from 9 June–2 September 2017. Stuart Rathe, Jenny Hewett, Beth Darlington and Miranda Coates saw the production in the first phase of its run at the Almeida Theatre.

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Stuart Rathe I’ve seen Hamlet many times. I think the first production I saw was with Mark Rylance when I was a teenager. In this production, it felt as if I was hearing the lines spoken for the first time. When Andrew Scott was speaking it felt as if he was truly searching for meaning, that he was going through an emotional crisis, rather than he was an actor saying words I knew very well. When I got home I took out my copy of Hamlet and had a look through, because there were words I had heard in the performance that I was not sure were in the script, they felt so modern. Of course they were in the text – that was the most striking thing about the production for me. The Almeida Theatre is such an intimate space and Andrew Scott developed a very intimate relationship with the audience. In the soliloquies he was talking to us. It enabled you to empathize with the character. He drew you in by directly addressing the audience. The relationships in this production were very clear and very real. The ghost was a physical entity. Hamlet spent a lot of time embracing the ghost, he would hug him and that was really quite moving. You could see the relationship between them. Polonius’s relationship with his son and daughter was also really tender. A scene from the first folio (in which Horatio tells Gertrude what happened to Hamlet while he was at sea and warns her not to trust the King) was inserted into the play. This was one of the clearest tellings of Gertrude’s story that I’ve seen. There was a very clear moment in this production where she made a decision that she was going to knowingly drink from the cup that Claudius has poisoned. Technology was used very effectively to explore the idea of surveillance and spying in the play. Fortinbras appeared by press conference in the final scene, which worked well. The play within a play was filmed. While it was performed on stage the cast sat in the front of the audience, becoming audience members with us. A cameraman filmed them and the footage was shown on a screen. This meant that members of the audience

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FIGURE 7.2  Hamlet 2017, The Almeida Theatre. L–R: Elliot BarnesWorrall, Calum Finlay, Amaka Okafor, Juliet Stevenson, Andrew Scott. Photograph Manuel Harlon. With kind permission of The Almeida Theatre.

were filmed as well and that they were on the screen. There was some dismay and some excitement when people saw themselves. This filming created a conspiratorial feeling in the audience. The audience are privy to all of Hamlet’s plans and to the reasons for his procrastination. The idea of the audience being included on screen as part of the play within the play fitted well with that. It was as if you were part of the action. The production really helped you engage as an audience. Hamlet was such an emotional and volatile character. After we had witnessed his encounter with the ghost we were ‘in on’ who he really was. When I was watching Paapa Essiedu’s Hamlet I felt like the audience were spectators at a show, but at a show where we had backstage knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes. In the Andrew Scott production it was more like we were being invited into someone’s private world.

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Jenny Hewett I’ve seen approximately 30 Hamlets. David Warner was my first Hamlet. I can remember it well. He was wearing a long ‘Doctor Who’ scarf. It’s been my favourite play ever since. It was a profound experience because I was seventeen and he was a young student Hamlet too, with his long scarf and long coat. It’s a play you can identify with when you’re young particularly well. In the same way I loved this Almeida Theatre production so much that after I had seen it I made sure my husband and my granddaughter queued up for returns to see the show as well. Andrew Scott was a particularly emotional and physical Hamlet. He went to the front of the stage and really talked with the audience in the soliloquies. I really felt for him because of this emotion, sometimes he was crying, sometimes he was angry, but he could also be very funny. I was sitting very near the front and Hamlet was standing so near to me. It was very powerful. It was as if he was looking at me and speaking directly to me. During these moments you forget the rest of the audience are there, it is a very intimate feeling. Gertrude, who was played by Juliet Stevenson, was fantastic. Claudius, interestingly, was quite a sympathetic character. I understood why Gertrude could have fallen in love with him. Polonius, too, was very good indeed, he was a really kindly father, but he would also become very anxious. The relationships with his family were very clear and because of that his behaviour made sense. During the play within the play all of the characters that were watching it came and sat in the audience, so we were watching the play with them. They became part of the audience with us. This made me feel very involved indeed. I felt completely drawn into the world of the play. In the scene where Claudius is praying (3.3) he was not kneeling or sitting in front of an altar, as he has been in every other production I’ve seen, he was lounging around in a chair. Hamlet was waving a gun. I’ve never

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seen it done like that before. It was quite sinister really because it changed the scene somehow. Claudius was being so annoying it was hard to believe that Hamlet couldn’t shoot him. I’ve taken my daughter and my granddaughter to see Hamlet as they were growing up. In a way the David Warner Hamlet set me on a course in my life, with all sorts of decisions, for example deciding to become a teacher. I wanted to give my daughter and granddaughter the same experience. I remember taking my daughter to see Kenneth Branagh play Hamlet in her early teens. Afterwards she said, ‘Why weren’t they speaking in Shakespeare’s language?’ They were of course, but he was so clear. Andrew Scott was the same, speaking the language so clearly in his lovely Irish accent. When I saw David Warner play Hamlet I was studying the play for A-level. I’d never been to the theatre to see Shakespeare before. I already loved the play. I remember going to Stratford and to the theatre. I hadn’t really experienced anything like that. It was magical. Since then I have taught the play for A-level myself and have taken many students to see the play. I would like to think that perhaps their lives were changed in some way as mine was.

Beth Darlington This production was an experience, rather than a viewing. I felt the play. The soliloquies were particularly immersive. Andrew Scott made me feel that he was talking directly to me, which was no mean feat as I was in the middle of the circle. He was something else. He breathed all those beautiful words rather than performed them. Four hours and thousands of words later I didn’t want it to end.

Miranda Coates The use of surveillance worked well for me in this production. Claudius’s face was filmed as he watched the play. Normally you are looking at him because you have been told earlier by

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Hamlet that you should be, but in this production you could see every glimmer in his face. When he stormed off the screen froze on a shot of his face and you were not sure if it was part of the production, or if something had really gone wrong. The interval was announced. It was so clever because I had a sense that I was having the same feelings as the characters watching the play. I was part of that and felt really discombobulated. It took a moment before you realized that it was all planned as part of the show. The cast were right in the front row with the audience. Their faces were on the massive screen so we were all watching what was happening together. I’d never seen Gertrude played before in a way that made it clear that she is really in love with Claudius, she was really excited to be married to him. In this production you saw the closet scene through her, it was real and intense, it was the best version of that I’ve ever seen. (I’ve seen about ten productions of Hamlet.) ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.55) was unlike I’ve ever heard it before. I was quite surprised by it. I heard it in a very different way and it made me cry. Often I just experience a soliloquy as beautiful poetry. There was something in the way that Andrew Scott delivered the line ‘To grunt and sweat under a weary life’ (76) that moved me. He genuinely sounded like someone who was having a miserable time and was trying to work out why he hadn’t killed himself. I’ve never experienced that before with that speech. It was as though we were having a conversation, although it clearly wasn’t a conversation, I wasn’t talking. He was talking to my brain and to my heart, talking to me about something he felt and it was a talk rather than an actor giving a speech. I felt I could see directly into him, there wasn’t a screen. Juliet Stevenson played Gertrude in the production.

Juliet Stevenson The level of the audience’s concentration throughout each performance of this production was extraordinary for a

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Shakespeare play. It had a real quality of attention. I’ve seen many Shakespeare plays and I know that it is difficult to sustain that level of attention for four hours. I expected, therefore, to see the audience’s concentration coming and going during a performance, yet I never had a sense of this during Hamlet. It felt as if the audience were on the edge of their seats, which for a play that is so reflective and discursive is pretty extraordinary. That was a great tribute to Robert Icke, Andrew Scott and the whole company really. The relationship between actors and audience is extraordinary. It’s so magical and so weird and so difficult to pin down. Actors can assess the quality of an audience’s attention like a mother in the night, sleeping in another room, instinctively knows that her child is awake. That’s maybe not a good analogy, but it is the most instinctive, sensual relationship. At the Almeida you are in a room with the audience and they are very, very close to you, so much so that you can even know the quality of their silence. In the same way that I can know if my husband’s or children’s silences are sad, contemplative, contented etc. It’s just silence but I know what kind of silence it is. When I perform I’m in a room full of strangers but I can tell the difference between one kind of silence and another. It’s difficult to describe and yet I know it. It’s important to keep listening on stage. As an actor it can be easy to stop listening because you always know what’s coming. The job in hand is to not know, to hear everything afresh. To do that you have to be completely in the moment, not a split second ahead, or a split second behind, but completely in the moment, like you are in life. That’s what it’s got to be like on stage. The job is to convince yourself that it is all happening for the first time, even though you may have already performed the play once already on that day (if it’s a matinee day). If you stop listening, and just pretend to be listening, the quality of the audience’s attention will change. It’s absolutely guaranteed. That is a most miraculous truth; the audience can tell if you are really listening and playing in the moment or not. When actors are really listening to each other

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there is an energy charge on stage between them and this is where the scene is taking place. It’s that dynamic between people that turns an audience’s attention on or off and makes a performance interesting, compulsive, edge of seat etc. or none of those things. It’s about listening and being open. When one actor is genuinely open to another listening and responding to what has just been said and the way in which it has been said, as we do in life, when that’s happening on stage, it’s electric. In our production of Hamlet the company worked in that way. Andrew (Scott) is one of the most open actors I’ve ever worked with on stage. Every night the performance was ‘new’. Sometimes in the closet scene there were quite big changes because we were both working in that open way. If, for example, Andrew played Hamlet as particularly angry in that scene I would just go with that. I would handle him in that state, as a mother would, rather than the way I did yesterday, when his performance was sadder, more melancholy – then I appeased him a bit more. In that way the performance is fresh and the audience knows that they are watching a live event. They will not necessarily know why but they will know that they are having an experience that is good. If you stop listening and your mind wanders in the middle of a scene you will hear people start coughing. If you start listening again they will go quiet, it really is alchemical. The quality of the audience’s attention marks the quality of your own attention, in a way. We made the decision in rehearsal to build all of the relationships in the play on a basis of love, wherever possible. Robert Icke wanted every relationship to be palpable. So I decided that Gertrude really adores Hamlet and that he really loves her. Similarly the relationship between Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes was founded on love. Clearly these relationships are not without their problems, but they are not casual, they are big and complicated. I was really moved by the Polonius and Ophelia relationship in this production because I’d never seen it played like that before. When we first see Gertrude and Hamlet she’s saying ‘Thou knowst ’tis common all that lives

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must die’ (1.2.72) but I’m playing: ‘I’m devastated, I don’t like seeing you like this, I love you to pieces’. What I say and what I’m feeling are different things. Suddenly then you can create a really interesting human dynamic between the characters and it is this humanity that I think audiences respond to in the play. They respond because they care about the characters. The first time you put the play in front of an audience you learn such a lot about it. You have six weeks in the rehearsal room learning about a play, but you learn almost as much in one evening playing for an audience. Audiences are essential; they are part of the event. They are not just spectators; they are players. We were shocked by how much the audience laughed during the first preview of Hamlet. This was particularly noticeable in the closet scene. It is a really difficult scene to play, as Gertrude has to make some massive leaps and changes with very little text with which to express herself. The audience roared with laughter when Andrew (Scott) dragged Polonius’s body offstage, but Gertrude is left onstage in a terrible state. The next day in rehearsal we looked at the scene to see how we could play it without opening it up for so much laughter. The next time we played the scene we found that those changes worked in performance and that the laughter stopped. Every audience is different from the one before. Actors talk about the audience every night. We ask each other what they are like and make comments such as ‘they are a bit sleepy’, ‘they are a bit lively’, ‘they are really, really serious tonight’, ‘they want a laugh’ etc. We constantly talk about the audience but we tend to talk about them as if they are one person with one set of characteristics. We never say some of them are laughing but some of them are quiet, for example. I think actors tend to feel them as one. Which is odd because when I am in the audience at a play I’m aware that I have different responses from the person next to me; I don’t, for example, necessarily laugh at the same things others laugh at. The audience are not all having the same experience, yet when actors discuss an audience we tend to discuss them as one entity.

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Andrew (Scott) and I shaped our choices onstage, moment by moment, according to audience response. If the audience felt very prone to laughter we played to control that, or if the audience seemed very serious and were really listening we might play a bit wilder, crazier. We made adjustments all the time. I don’t think audiences realize how far their response can affect our choices. Audiences sometimes view the show as a product, but in fact if you see it one night it will be different to the next, because actors will make different choices dependent on the response from the audience. The show is never a product. It’s a process. I came to playing Gertrude just after Mary Stuart at the Almeida Theatre, in which Lia Williams and I played both central roles (Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart) on different performances, alternating on the outcome of a coin toss before the performance. These characters were both very articulate queens with lots of text. In contrast Gertrude has so little text, she says so little. I had avoided playing the role in the past because she is so gagged, largely because of the historical conditions under which Shakespeare’s plays were written. Robert Icke and I agreed that we would try to frame her silence. In life if someone is silent around a dinner table and five people are speaking you will wonder why that person is silent. The silence will speak. With women’s parts in Shakespeare the silences should speak too, as they do in life. Gertrude is the mother of the hero; we are told she loves him, adores him. Massive amounts happen to her, but she says very little; so we need her narrative to be told in her silences as much, if not more, as in the words she speaks. Rob (Icke) gave me space during rehearsal to develop moments off-­text. For example the private moment near the beginning of the play (1.2) when Gertrude sees Hamlet sitting on his suitcase, not joining in the wedding party. I leave the party to go and look for my son as if to say, ‘please can’t you join in for one day?’ Then the scene starts, but already in that moment part of that story has been told. The audience have an idea of the relationship between mother and son. Although Gertrude may

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not speak at certain moments she can look at someone, react to what’s been said, appeal to a character silently. All those things show the audience what she is feeling and thinking. It’s a role that requires me to put enormous trust in the audience. I play lots of roles where I have a great deal of text but with Gertrude I didn’t, so I’ve had to learn to trust that the audience understand Gertrude’s story without it.

8 A Midsummer Night’s Dream

We saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure. SAMUEL PEPYS, 1662, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by HENRY B. WHEATLEY (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1946), Vol. 2, p. 326

There is a kind of writing, wherein the poet quite loses sight of nature, and entertains his reader’s imagination with the characters and actions of such persons as have many of them no existence, but what he bestows on them. Such are fairies, witches, magicians, demons, and departed spirits . . . There is a very odd turn of thought required for this sort of writing . . . Among English, Shakespeare has incomparably excelled others. JOSEPH ADDISON, 1712, Essays, Moral and Humorous: Also Essays on Imagination and Taste (Edinburgh: published by WILLIAM and ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1839), p. 120

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play for the Nation: A co-­production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and amateur theatre companies across the UK 1 March–16 July 2016 Directed by Erica Whyman and known as Dream 16 this production set out to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death by creating a UK-wide theatrical collaboration between amateur theatre companies and the RSC. The production toured to twelve different venues around the UK as far afield as Glasgow and Cornwall. In each venue the mechanicals were played by local amateur companies who joined the eighteen-­strong RSC professional cast. Titania’s fairies were played by local schoolchildren. Ian Wainwright is Producer: Open Stages at the RSC. Open Stages is a national participatory project engaging with community, grass-­roots and amateur theatre makers. It was the inspiration for this production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Ian Wainwright We weren’t quite prepared for the warmth of the reaction we received from audiences for this production. There was a clear sense from them of ‘we are with you all the way’. Before each show with a new amateur company you could also feel a kind of nervousness, a concern that all would go well, followed by a kind of relief and exhilaration when the strength of that company’s performance became apparent. Everywhere we went we had a really partisan audience, that felt like they were with us.

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This tide of warm feeling had a really positive effect on the relationship between the amateur and professional companies – in bringing their own audiences, who cared about the production, the amateurs brought something special to the show, something that the professionals wouldn’t have otherwise experienced. The professionals really appreciated this. It’s a difficult experience to quantify. When we opened the show in Stratford we thought that audiences responded so warmly because it was the beginning of the project, but then we found and played to that warmth wherever we went, it stayed with us. I think this was because we made a play with Blackpool, we made a play with Canterbury. That idea of making plays with people was very important to us when we were creating and planning the project, but ultimately the response was stronger than we had ever envisaged. This response didn’t just come from the friends and family of the companies or the local children in the production. It also came from the communities, who were saying in effect, ‘those are recognizably our people on stage’. It was in this way a kind of theatre for the people, by the people. In this show the community could see themselves on stage. Our audiences really took to the mechanicals; it often felt like this group were their representatives on stage, and there were almost little cheers as the ‘players’ came on. There was an interesting moment in rehearsals each time the amateur company performed their Pyramus and Thisbe for the first time to the professional company. Suddenly that moment in the play became real. There’s often a sense in productions that A Midsummer Night’s Dream really ends with the lovers in the forest, and that the last leg of the play is almost like the end of a relay race; there’s a danger that the audience will think, ‘Oh, well, it’s finished now, time to go home’. In this production, wherever we performed, Pyramus and Thisbe was always a showstopper. The professional actors felt like the amateur company carried them over the finish line at the end. The production was Lucy Ellinson’s first Shakespeare as an actor. Her background is in very physical, outward-­looking

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theatre and in her performance Lucy was constantly reaching out to the audience and engaging them in the play. This was particularly true of the young people in the audience. She’s a very physical actor, but developed the ability to perform as gymnastically with the text as with her body. She was our host and translator at various moments, and the bridge between the world of the play and the audience. Lucy played with the audience; whenever she went into a theatre and saw a barrier between audience and actors she sought to breach it. I enjoy watching amateur and professional theatre equally. Part of our pleasure as an audience is not about the technical quality of what appears on stage but our relationship with the performers. We are interested in whom we are watching as much as in what we are watching. This connection is what makes the experience enjoyable, and/or meaningful. An important aspect of this tour was that we really got to know the places we performed in, the theatres as well as the towns in which they were situated. The theatres were not simply venues but partners in making those shows, and people could and did say, ‘that’s our show’. We feel we know those places now, and that they’ve taught us some great things about how we can make authentic theatrical connections. The Canterbury Players performed as the mechanicals in the production at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury and at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-­upon-Avon. One of their performances took place on 23 April 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Tessa Taylor and Fleur Elkerton, regular Canterbury Players theatregoers, were in the audience at the Marlowe Theatre.

Tessa Taylor I’ve being seeing Shakespeare productions for most of my life (I’m in my seventies now) and I don’t think there is one production that is the same as the other. I’ve never stopped

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going to see Shakespeare because it’s always different. It’s not like seeing a different play because you know what’s going to happen, but different directors bring different things out of the text. Shakespeare speaks to me, in fact it yells to me. I’m chaplain at the Marlowe Theatre so I often go into the dressing rooms and meet the cast, particularly if the play has a long run. I knew the Canterbury Players company well, and met the RSC cast – so I felt like I had a personal connection with the people on stage. I was particularly drawn into the scenes with the Canterbury Players, possibly because of that personal connection. However, I took a friend one night who thinks she hates Shakespeare and she was equally drawn into the production; her reactions where instantaneous. When Helena said ‘I’m as ugly as a bear’ she said ‘no, you’re not’. She just kept reacting. When Puck dropped the potion on the wrong lover she said ‘ha – he’s got the wrong one’; she became really involved in the performance. We were only in row B of the stalls so I’m sure the cast heard her! It was so refreshing to go with her and watch her seeing the play for the first time. It made me see it with new eyes. She’s now totally committed to Shakespeare and wants to go to the Richard III that the Canterbury Players are producing. Each time I saw the show the audiences were very different. The first night I saw it was Tuesday, the opening night. It was an excellent performance. But by the time I saw it later in the week it felt like a different play. The energy was extraordinary and the play was flying. It was joyous to see actors from the Canterbury Players really respond to the audience in performance. Adam (Summers) who played Thisbe truly seemed to find something extra. He was very aware of the audience and visibly affected by them. Similarly in the professional company Puck really connected with the audience. I’ve never seen the character played by a woman before. She was so agile and lithe and moved so well around the stage, she completely inhabited the role and I felt so confident with her. Egeus was dressed as an RAF officer and I felt that really helped me to connect with that character and to understand

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the relationship between him and his daughter (Hermia). I had a real sense that he had just been through the (Second World) War and that he just needed to make everything all right. He thought that his daughter could only be OK with Demetrius. It made me see him anew; it did humanize him. I felt really involved when the mechanicals were putting on Pyramus and Thisbe to the court. The interplay between the court and the play really drew me in; even the musicians were involved, laughing at the performance. The relationship between the different groups on stage was really clear and the audience were just another group watching the play; we felt part of it. I felt included in that moment. Where I sit makes a big difference to me as an audience member. I want to be as close to the stage as possible. I’m like that everywhere; in concerts, in church, I always go straight to the front row. I like to feel involved. It’s about connecting with the actors and their humanity almost feeling their warmth and their breath. There was a real buzz in Canterbury the week of the performances: in the shops, church and cinema people were talking about it. It made Canterbury feel alive.

Fleur Elkerton I’ve seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream several times. I’m always interested to see how different productions change the telling of the story and the portrayal of the characters; so that the play seems different, even though it’s the same story with the same lines. In this production I was really struck by the impact of having a female Bottom, it was such a different dynamic from other productions I have seen. This was especially evident the first time that the audience sees Bottom with Titania. It seemed less complicated somehow – a female friendship. Puck had an androgynous mischief about her. I like the way she came into the audience. In contrast Oberon was so calm and melodic. The scenes between him and Puck were my

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favourites. The two of them worked so well together. When Puck walked through the audience there was a big reaction. When an actor comes into the audience you feel even more included in the performance; you feel that the fourth wall has been broken and that you are interacting with the characters. The actors are interacting with you in character and you are responding. On a subconscious level I think you feel quite special. It’s a physical reaction that goes past enjoying the play. The other members of the audience are looking at you being part of that moment of performance. The play was performed at the Marlowe Theatre on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It was a lovely thing to do on the anniversary. The bringing together of the amateur and professional companies was quite radical and very special. It worked brilliantly in performance. If you didn’t know which actors were from each company I don’t think you would guess. Ultimately though I think it’s the relationships in the play that really speak to me: the love triangle and the trials and tribulations of being in love. It feels very modern, many of the issues the lovers encounter still happen today. Society can change but humans don’t. Emily Humphries, Lori Hopkins and Miranda Coates were in the audience in Stratford.

Emily Humphries I wanted to see this production when I read that the mechanicals would be played by companies of amateur actors. I like productions that try to experiment. I always read a lot about a production before I go to see it and I had found out about the amateur players. Because of this I think I automatically felt drawn to them, as if I had had an alliance with those actors. When you were watching the production you felt like a supporter rather than just an audience member. I felt particularly drawn to the moment when the curtains broke apart and the characters went into the forest for the first

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time, it was really effective. I also really enjoyed the relationship between Bottom and Peter Quince, it’s so relatable to the modern workplace. I connect most with moments in theatre when I’m watching something and I think ‘I know that feeling’, or ‘I know that person’, or ‘I know that situation’.

Lori Hopkins Visual moments are usually what draw me into a production and keep me interested. When the visual look of a scene is dominant, like the moment where Titania is in her bower (a piano in this production), I can’t switch off or get distracted as easily as I could if someone was talking. Images are the most powerful part of a production. I like to be surprised by a play even when I know what is going to happen. I’m enjoying it the most when I stop thinking about what I know and just enjoy the moment and the storytelling. The scene where the lovers went into the forest, moving through the doorways of the set into another world, did that for me in this production. The performance was so energetic that you were caught in that moment. I noticed the laughter of everyone around me. I saw the play in Stratford and in the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. In Stratford I was aware of some of the audience laughing at the puns and jokes that were in the language. In Canterbury you could see that some of the audience members knew some of the amateur actors; there was a kind of warm applause. It was lovely because you felt that everyone was on the side of these actors and wanted them to do really well. I really enjoyed Puck. Lucy Ellinson played her as if she was quite insecure. At first I thought that’s not what I think about that character, but as the play went on I enjoyed that more and more – we saw the vulnerability of Puck. She managed to confront my expectation of what the story should be like and do something different with it. It made you feel that this is not just a cheeky character doing Oberon’s bidding, but that there was another side to Puck’s actions.

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Miranda Coates I thought Lucy Ellinson’s Puck was the best Puck I’d ever seen – she was a fully rounded character, not just a plot device. She was totally in love with Oberon but knew that it was never going anywhere. She was very funny, but also had a sort of melancholy. I loved Titania and was astonished by the fact that the actor had to play those scenes with a different Bottom every few nights. Bottom’s donkey’s head was very open so she would have clearly seen each different person. When I heard about the concept for the production I thought that you would really be able to see the difference between the amateur and professional company, but it wasn’t like that. Sally Elkerton directed the mechanicals scenes for the Canterbury Players.

Sally Elkerton I think about the audience all the time when I’m directing. My primary aim is to make a piece of work that communicates with the audience. I map out all the key visual images that the audience will see. The audience at the first performance in the Marlowe Theatre surpassed all my thinking and expectations, even though I had been thinking about them throughout the rehearsal process. It’s the audience that gives life to the production. There was real warmth. I think this was in part because there were so many friends and family of The Canterbury Players cast, but it was more than that, it felt as if the whole audience were supporting the production. Lots of the audience at the Marlowe Theatre were first-­time theatregoers; they were discovering the play for the first time and responded really vocally to what was happening on stage. In contrast the audience at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was made up of more regular theatregoers. They were thinking ‘how are they going to play that scene?’ rather than ‘what’s coming next?’ You could really feel the difference.

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I had known from the outset that I wanted to cast a woman as Bottom. Lisa Nightingale, who played the character, chose a pair of red shoes as a key part of her costume. She wore them in the first scene where the audience meet Bottom for the first time. I think the shoes made a big difference to the way the audience connected with her character – they could see Bottom straight away as a real woman – it was a kind of character shorthand, particularly for the women in the audience. The Marlowe Theatre is built like a concert hall but at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-­upon-Avon there is a thrust stage. This made a significant difference to the way the actors could engage with the audience. We spent Friday morning rehearsing on the stage in Stratford before we performed in the evening. The audience was much closer than at the Marlowe Theatre and the company loved the intimacy with the audience that playing in that space allowed. Lisa (Nightingale, Bottom) came off stage and said that her neck was aching from playing out to the whole audience – they were so close. Lisa could connect with the audience so much more. She could make eye contact with individuals; connect with one person and make them feel quite special. The part is written for that kind of audience engagement. In the Marlowe Theatre actors had to be downstage to connect in that way with the audience, but wherever you stand on the Stratford stage you can do that. The actors didn’t have to work as hard to include the audience in their performance. Sarah Gooch from the Canterbury Players played Quince.

Sarah Gooch I was always aware of the audience. Erica (Whyman) told us to share everything with the audience. The space to do so is in Shakespeare’s writing. One of Quince’s key scenes is 5.1.108– 17 where she gives the prologue to the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. I had found it difficult to rehearse the prologue,

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but in performance the audience made all the difference and the scene made sense, it just needed their response. Pyramus and Thisbe is acted for an audience on stage: Theseus, Hippolyta, the lovers and all of the other characters attending the wedding. So in rehearsal we were missing two audiences: the fictional audience and the theatre audience. This made rehearsing the scene doubly difficult; it’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who is not there. The court audience in the scene are not silent. The theatre audience may not have lines but they are still part of a three-­way dialogue. Being able to make direct eye contact with the actors in the court scene helped enormously. Getting their response to what we were doing and saying just made it work. We had been briefed to treat the theatre audience as guests at the wedding. This brought them into the action in a more active way. The audience always laughed at the prologue. Not just because of what I was doing but because of what the other actors on stage were doing as well. By the end of the run I felt really in control of the audience. I could make them start and stop laughing. Before the first performance I was very nervous. Lisa (Nightingale, Bottom) and I held hands before we went on stage and we both promised to both look out for each other! When we came off, after the first scene, we both said ‘we enjoyed that’! The difference, of course, was the audience. That’s why we were performing the play, to tell the audience a story. Each audience was different. For the first performance we were focused on playing the show for the first time. We shared the story better with the audience in subsequent shows. The Thursday schools audience helped us relax. Everyone enjoyed the show more with young people in the audience – in a way, they liberated the adults. Young people react so spontaneously to the story. That evening we had a home crowd, lots of early laughs that rippled through the whole performance. It’s a hard thing to articulate but you get a sense if the audience is with you and you time things better, which in turn leads to a better audience response. Friday was a listening audience, not laughing

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so much. Saturday was wonderful because it was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and a lot of people had chosen to come to the production on that day for a reason. They were there to enjoy it. It just felt like a party for Shakespeare. It was a real privilege to perform Shakespeare on that day. The performance felt like an event. Lucy (Ellinson, Puck) made an announcement from the stage and the actors and audience cheered for Shakespeare. It was a magical moment. James Newberry from the Canterbury Players played Flute.

James Newberry We had been rehearsing the play for a long time so it was wonderful to finally perform it for an audience. It was odd and brilliant to hear the audience respond. They would laugh at things I never thought they would laugh at, such as the moment when Bottom mispronounces ‘blood’ (5.1.276). When I was trying to explain ‘This lanthorn doth the horned moon present’ (5.1.234) I felt particularly connected to the audience. They responded to Flute getting more and more distraught in his attempt to explain – to him trying to do the best he could, but failing desperately. Some audiences seemed to be more reticent than others. Some people had seen quite a lot of Shakespeare, but others were along for the first time. Sometimes people would laugh early on in the performance and that would lead to a greater audience response. When the performance was working well the audience took on their own dynamic. There was a sense that some audiences needed permission to laugh at certain parts. If you have never seen the play before which bits do you laugh at? When it goes well you can feel it – you can hear the audience’s response. You can hear individual as well as group laughter, and sense the speed that they pick up on something and the length of time for which they then hang on it. Throughout the performance you can hear and sense a reaction from people, but it was always wonderful at the end, when you

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could fully see the audience, to see them smiling as well as clapping. Chu Omambala was part of the RSC professional company. He played Oberon.

Chu Omambala Touring this production around the country meant that we played on very different stages. These varied from playing on a thrust stage at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) to proscenium-­arch stages, like the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury. The nature of the stage and theatre space affects your relationship with the audience and the way you might play a scene. Oberon and Puck engage directly with the audience. If that audience is on three sides there can be more fluidity in the way you play a scene. In proscenium-­arch theatres I found that there were certain places that you had to be on stage in order to connect with the audience, especially if you were giving a soliloquy. On a thrust stage you could be almost anywhere. In proscenium-­arch theatres I found myself either downstage left or right. I’d be watching something and commenting on it but then felt pulled forward to the front of the stage. When I performed at the RST there was less movement in some ways. I could go wherever I wanted on the stage. You had to be aware that your back was going to be to some of the audience, so you would share the scene more. It was easy to deliver lines to particular members of the audience in the various tiers of the theatre. There is an obligation to take the audience with you in that kind of space, that is not so easy to do when the audience are a black mass in front of you. It’s hard to pick single people out; in some ways the proscenium arch creates a space that’s less democratic than one with a thrust stage. You can feel if you are connecting with an audience. In the same way as in everyday life: when you talk to people, you know whether they are engaged in your conversation. I always picked an audience member to speak to whatever type of

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theatre space we played. It’s about revelling in the enjoyment of the situation and wanting to share it with the audience; sometimes I might think of them as fellow fairies, or as confidants with whom you share your thoughts and ideas. I quite often think of the audience in role as a character. That stems from working at the Globe earlier in my career, in particular with Mark Rylance who always told us to think of the audience as another character in the play. You have to know why you are speaking – I am always sharing my true thoughts and feelings, as the character, with the audience. They are not just audience members, they become my best friends, my confidants, and I have a need to speak with them. Sometimes the audience gives more than a visual connection; sometimes they make audible noises, such as gasps and laughter. The one time I allowed myself to pause in a speech was the moment before the beginning of ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows’ (2.1.249). The play was set in a bombed-­ out theatre after the Second World War. I imagined myself as the character in The Dresser, just being indulgent, luxuriating in the language of the speech. Sometimes people would begin laughing at the first line in recognition that it is ‘the big speech’. I did get a sense of ‘all together now’ from some members of the audience. Many of the audience know what’s coming in the speech and I felt it was important to acknowledge that, in character. It became a collective experience, the audience colluding with Oberon. I’d already developed a connection with the audience in my earlier scenes, so we could share that moment. Puck had a very strong relationship with the audience and because many of Oberon’s scenes were with Puck that gave me another way to connect with the audience early in the play. Oberon could develop quite an intimate relationship with the audience, in part, through his proximity to Puck. Touring the production around the country, working with a different amateur group in each venue, meant that we effectively played to a ‘home’ crowd every night. The audience was full of friends, family members etc. Sometimes we had to be disciplined, not to get too carried away by their energy. All

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of the audiences were very generous. There were brilliant amateur groups, and fantastic actors playing all the characters. One of the biggest audience reactions came during one of the first previews in Stratford. There was a fantastic Bottom who had really connected with the audience, so they were totally on side. They were a preview audience. These audiences are usually very generous as they come knowing that they are going to see a show that has not had time to mature into performance. Halfway through the actor who played Flute had to leave because his wife went into labour. There was an announcement, and an understudy was found. The audience was totally on our side throughout; they were there not just to watch, but to support. I’ve never experienced anything quite like that, before or since. I got confused at the Barbican Theatre, and backstage waiting to go on I found myself walking upstairs when I should have been walking downstairs to get to the stage. It was May so I was about three months into the run and even though the spaces are different, and it takes longer to get to some entrances in some spaces than others, I know that if so and so is talking it’s time for me to go to the stage. I was very relaxed and it wasn’t until I had gone upstairs in the theatre that I realized I should be downstairs and on stage. I ran downstairs and made it onto the stage full of mad energy and suddenly new things came out! I said ‘I wonder if Titania be awaked’ (3.2.1) bounding on, my eyes gleaming! It gave a new slant to the scene, an excited Oberon running through the night to see Titania. Oberon doesn’t say much for the rest of the scene but I had to keep the energy up, listening intently with lots of focus – like I’d taken a drug – over-­animated. It kind of suited the scene. Lucy (Ellinson, Puck) had to respond to what I was giving out and that affected her connection with the audience. Energy from actor to audience does not always travel in a direct line. Actors affect each other in the way they play a scene and the cumulative nature of that in turn might affect one character’s relationship with the audience – it’s a knock-­on effect. The audience feels the effect of me rushing to the stage, they feel something interesting, but they don’t necessarily know what it is. You can never seek to create or recreate a moment like that.

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Working with different amateur companies also affected the performance. I would not usually have had much time to rehearse some scenes with each company. So would discover the dynamic between myself, and those actors, in performance. An example is 4.1 when Bottom is in the bower with Titania. I had an idea of how Oberon was going to react to seeing Titania with Bottom, transformed, but in reality my reaction always varied because my response to each Bottom varied. Sometimes you would get someone playing the role so sweetly that my response could only be jealousy. On other occasions I might play pity etc. The particular performance of each actor would affect me and determine my response. Oberon is onstage a lot without speaking, watching the action. In these scenes he effectively becomes an audience member. I never became bored watching the lovers fight (3.2) which I saw around 140 times. This was partly because it was so well done and partly because of the energy of the audience. I ate sweets and pretended to be an audience member. Sometimes I really would just be watching the scene, revelling in the fight, the audience’s energy and the laughter. I was simultaneously aware of the audience while forgetting that I wasn’t really an audience member. By the time we were fifty shows into the run I was very relaxed and could lose myself in their performance. I was outside of the scene, enjoying it, when I was actually in the scene, enjoying it – a strange but fascinating relationship with the players and audience. Sharing an experience like this with the audience can give you a profound connection. Sometimes I would walk down the stairs after that scene towards Puck and the audience would be laughing or clapping, because we had just watched the lovers together, and they knew, just from my body language, that Puck was in trouble. They anticipated what would happen. That’s when you know that you have a connection with the audience – that they are with you. Chris Nayak was part of the RSC professional company. He played Demetrius.

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Chris Nayak The first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream establishes a very serious situation. The audience, if they do not know the play, would have no sense that they are watching a comedy. Obviously Demetrius doesn’t come across very well in that scene. He’s asking Hermia to accept a marriage that she is not comfortable with. I felt a real frisson of disapproval from the audience at that moment. I really liked that because it made me feel that we were doing our job, telling the story of the play. I thought that it was very important that the audience did want Demetrius and Helena to be together at the end of the play. To make this possible it was key, for me, that Helena ‘won’ the first scene in the forest (2.2). If the audience disliked Demetrius too much they would not go on the journey with the characters. The first scene is quite dark, but we made it physically clear in the staging that whatever Demetrius is saying he is drawn back to Helena. He cannot escape the force of her love. The idea was that the staging, along with Helena’s soliloquy, in which she reiterates her love for Demetrius, would enable the audience to think – yes, we do want them to get together, but only if that man bucks up his ideas. When we played the lovers’ quarrel in the forest (3.2) it was clear that the audience enjoyed how ridiculous the situation was. The play had a long run and by the time we were five months in we had developed our performance in response to the reactions of the audience. Jack (Holden, Lysander) and I were doing the most ridiculous things because the audience enjoyed seeing how foolish these characters had become. I felt that the lovers’ scenes changed massively throughout the run because of this. If something got a response we would develop it further, and further! We saw Erica (Whyman) and her team throughout the run, because we were working with so many different amateur companies; fortunately they were able to make sure that we did not go too far! An example of this was the physical protestations of manliness that developed around the line ‘I say, I love thee

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more than he can do’ (3.2.254). We started the run just saying the line but the audience reaction encouraged us to make the moment bigger and bigger. Erica told us because we were under the influence of Oberon’s drug we could afford to be larger than life as long as it didn’t detract from the scene. So first there was a knee slide, then a lunge, then Jack started doing things with his rucksack – the moment became a bit of a ‘man off’. It would not have evolved in that way without the audience’s response. During a preview the wife of one of the amateur actors went into labour and he had to leave. Erica went on stage and explained that another amateur actor was going to cover the part. At that moment the mood of the audience changed. They had been supportive but from then on they were our cheerleaders, right behind us, especially that amateur actor who had stepped up and was suddenly playing his first night a night early on the RST stage. In the same way that you might have fans rooting for a sports team I felt that they were rooting for us. It meant that the second half of the performance became different in a wonderful way that I really can’t explain. It wasn’t a case of us saying to the audience ‘let us tell you a story’ – it was more a case that there was a collective feeling of ‘we can get through this together’. It was an unforgettable second half.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Globe, London 30 April–11 September 2016 This production was directed by Emma Rice, her first play as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Miranda Coates, Shiela MacLean, Alison Sear, David Hall, Jen Davey, Keith Rogers, Lorna Hartwell and Kelley Moncrief were in the audience.

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FIGURE 8.1  A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Globe 2016. Photograph by Steve Tanner. With kind permission of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Miranda Coates I really enjoyed Helena being played as Helenus. I’ve always found the Helena/Demetrius relationship hard to accept at the end of the play, but this interpretation made it work for me. I was surprised how easily the regendering just fitted the story. A moment I’ll remember is Meow Meow as Titania taking her tights off – during her first encounter with the transformed Bottom. It was so funny I thought I was going to pass out. Anyone in the audience, who has ever tried to take off tights unsuccessfully in the throes of attraction, could totally relate to that. It was interesting that came from a female director. I loved Rita Quince. I think in all of Shakespeare that character probably comes closest to me as a person. I’ve seen a lot of theatre at the Globe and the references to the Globe’s past in the pre-­show, e.g. ‘Mark Rylance gave me that tambourine’, and to Emma Rice’s background – ‘it’s a visual concept’ – really

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made me laugh and contextualized the production, Emma Rice’s first in the theatre. People who don’t see a lot of Shakespeare sometimes ask me, ‘Why do you go again and again? It’s the same play’. But it’s never the same play. The writing is so amazing that you can interpret the play in multiple ways. A Midsummer Night’s Dream for me primarily hangs on how well a production interprets the mechanicals and fairies. I saw this production with friends: one of them is tiny, I’m not. I loved it that in the fairies there was a fairy that looked like her and there was a fairy that looked like me. When they were doing their ridiculous dance we were in hysterics. My friend was saying ‘Look, it’s you’ and I was saying ‘Look, it’s you’! The idea that someone who looks like you is dancing, twirling nipple tassels inappropriately, is wonderful. We were still giggling through the interval. It felt amazing that we were watching ourselves on stage. That is unusual, particularly for me because I’m tall and large, there’s not many actresses on stage that look anything like me. I don’t go to the theatre expecting to see anyone that looks like me on stage. The production had a hysterical energy. It never stopped being funny. If you get enough groundlings in the yard, enjoying the performance, emotion spreads on a kind of unstoppable wave. My abiding memory is of feeling involved: of tights, and of fairies like me; of feeling included in the world of the play.

Shiela MacLean The sitar music was a hypnotic running sound to the play. I found it took me along, like a river flowing. Usually music is not important to me in theatre, except for the extraordinary ‘Original Practices’ music at the Globe. This production was aimed both at the young and the young at heart. When Hermia and Helenus went into a dance routine the young audience (I’m in my seventies now) were on fire. It was nothing to do with Shakespeare but it just fitted in rather sweetly. A younger person explained to me that it was Beyoncé.

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It was lovely to see the whole place erupt with the response of young people.

Alison Sear It was sumptuous, entertaining. I loved the modern references. Helena as a gay man made total sense to me. The characters told the story really well and you could clearly see the relationship between them. That was the centre of it, the effects dramatized the story, but for me the production worked around the central relationships, which were all much clearer to me than before. The fairies were earthy, anarchic, grounded, in-­your-face characters. That really stood out. They were naughty and wicked and fun. It grabbed your attention. It wasn’t an introspective production, but reached out and connected with the audience. The Beyoncé dance and the Bowie references were fun. Shakespeare can be everything we think of as traditional; this type of interpretation jolts you a little bit. The production was appealing because it felt as if it was of our time. Time seemed to pass really quickly. There were so many wonderful moments. I walked out and I was happy.

David Hall The audience is another character in any theatre – at the Globe particularly so: we share the space with the actors, breathe the same air, we’re under the same sky, just as visible – and we’re free to look and even stand wherever we wish (which isn’t possible when watching a screen). This production encompassed everything: celebration and fun (the balloons and floating columns added to this), fear, drama, rage, tenderness, everything – and each character evolved. Every ingredient worked, added to and resonated with the play and the final Oberon and Titania song, swinging gently over Puck’s

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closing speech, brought all the night’s adventures to a perfect, magical and richly restful end. We were together: a community, bonded by this crazy, magical and shared experience.

Jen Davey The company were brilliant at performing the play for everybody. They had us all more or less from the first moment. They were so inclusive of the whole theatre but especially the groundlings: playing and letting us play back. It felt like there was a real exchange of energy between actor and audience. If an actor spoke to you, you could engage with them. You could dance with them, sing along, and nobody batted an eyelid. The cast had so much energy going into the audience that you couldn’t help but give it back. I was dancing along to the music before I realized. If Puck gave you a little look, you couldn’t help but give Puck a little look back. It was so easy that everybody felt included from the beginning, the actors allowed that to happen. If you wanted to dance along to the music, they would dance with you. I didn’t feel I needed to be given permission to engage with the company and the action on stage. You knew you could be yourself and have a good time. I think the mechanicals’ pre-­show at the beginning of the performance helped create an atmosphere that was built on for the rest of the production. The theatre felt like a really open, giving space from the moment you walked in; there was a real festival atmosphere.

Keith Rogers and Lorna Hartwell Keith: We particularly liked the production because it was different – we really liked the way they used the space and played to different parts of the audience throughout a scene. It was our first time at the Globe – we sat in the lower gallery behind the groundlings.

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Lorna: You feel part of the play. Keith: Puck came out into the audience a lot and interacted with us. Whenever she did this you wondered what she was going to do next. She was so alive, so in the moment. Lorna: The characters looked at you, kind of sizing you up, looking to see if you would do what they expected. There was a feel that the performance was on the edge. That anything could happen. I think that’s what good theatre does. When the actors came through the audience it felt that we were part of the play. Puck was jumping from table to table looking around and you got the impression that she would have loved it if you were doing something naughty. Keith: When Oberon was watching the lovers fight he took out a picnic hamper, he was showing us what was going on but also watching the action with us, feeling the same as us. Lorna: During the lovers’ quarrel there was very clever use of movement across the stage. It didn’t look like a play. It felt like you were watching something happening in real life. When the actors looked at the audience, then referred back to the other characters you felt like you were part of the deal. You know something the other characters don’t know. That’s the joke. Oberon is being nasty and he’s taking you with him, drawing you into his nastiness. Keith: I love to be drawn along by a story. What I like the most is to have a perspective opened up to me that I haven’t considered before. I’ve seen several productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I want to be told something different. I felt that this production highlighted how manipulative the fairies are. The humans had, for me, much more dignity than is often the case. Lorna: It felt like Shakespeare could have been beside us watching the performance and thoroughly enjoying it. I was

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making mental notes about what he might have thought. It was a great play for our first Globe experience.

Kelley Moncrief I’ve seen lots of theatre, and this is my favourite production so far. I felt very touched by it: the music, the casting, the energy. I liked that there were interracial relationships, homosexual relationships, there were contemporary references, e.g. to Hoxton hipsters and Beyoncé. It felt like the first time a Shakespeare play belonged to my generation. I liked bouncing off the reactions of other audience members. I felt like a lot of younger people went into the theatre feeling they were not going to enjoy the play, but came out having got the jokes and what was being said, thinking this is our Shakespeare. It’s nice to feel like you can belong. There was one theatre steward at the beginning of the play, on stage reading that day’s newspaper. I liked that, it showed that the play belongs to today, to now. I think the pre-­show, with mechanicals as stewards, helped set the audience up for the whole performance: it said this is a comedy, it’s not going to be a highbrow play. I always think the opening scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is quite hard and complex and it was good not to start with this. Putting stewards on stage blurred the line between stage and audience. It suggested that we were all in it together. When actors walk through the audience it helps you to connect. People want to feel special when they go to the theatre; when you are in a dark proscenium-­arch theatre you can see the actors but they are not acting for anyone in particular. At the Globe you can see everyone; you feel special because the actors might react based on your individual response to the show. Everyone is reacting with one another. You never know what’s going to happen when an actor goes through the audience. Actors must enjoy it because it provides the opportunity for things to change daily. It’s a good simpatico

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relationship. In this production the audience were aware of each other and into what each other were doing. The audience knows that it is theatre, that they are watching a play; they are able to acknowledge this, share jokes with one another and share the experience. Ankur Bahl played Helenus.

Ankur Bahl Emma Rice’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe was innovative in a number of ways, but the one that affected me most directly was her decision to make Helena a gay man – Helenus. Not only did this give me the opportunity to play one of the most exciting and heartfelt romantic leads in all Shakespeare, but it also allowed us to present gay characters (Helenus and Demetrius) front and centre at the Globe, in a time when Western societies were still deciding how they would respond to LGBTQ movements for equality. What will always stay with me about performing Dream at the Globe is the complicity the audience had with every single show. To be able to do a season of seventy-­five performances and feel that each performance connected with the audience in a different way was very special. That’s testimony to the innovative and joyous production Emma Rice created, but also to the Globe theatre space and how much it invites the audience to be part of the performance. Acknowledging the Globe’s specific dynamic, especially with hundreds of audience members standing in the yard, it was critical for the lovers (Helenus, Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander) to make connections to and develop deep relationships with the audience. One way we did this was through modern dress; another was by spending a lot of time in the yard before the show, chatting to strangers. We struck up conversations, without letting on that we were in the production. Our new friends were often shocked to see us leap on to stage and take part in the action.

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Emma placed Helenus in the opening scene of the play; Shakespeare doesn’t include Helena(us) in this scene, but many productions include the character in the action. For me, doing so really worked, because the audience could see who I was, they could see my closeness to Hermia, they could see my longing for Demetrius, and they could see how powerless and voiceless I was in that scene. This meant that when I came on for Helenus’s first speech to say ‘Call you me fair? That fair again unsay. / Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair’ (1.1.181–2), I already had a relationship with the audience, and they were on my side. Another key moment early in the play was when Helenus and Hermia did a rendition of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies to celebrate the announcement of Hermia and Lysander’s engagement. We used this to replace a later discussion the two characters have: ‘We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, / Have with our needles created both one flower’ (3.2.203–4). Discussing embroidery didn’t feel true to the modern relationship we were playing. However, it did feel right that Hermia and Helenus had grown up watching MTV together, and that they had learned all the dance moves to their favourite music videos. In one seven-­second insert we were able to tell the audience a great deal about the characters, and bring the audience into our world. I’d like to think Shakespeare (as a great populist) would have approved. Shakespeare’s writing requires you to reach out to the audience. Nowhere is this more true than in the soliloquys, and the asides. For example, Helenus’s line ‘Now I perceive, they have conjoined all three / To fashion this false sport in spite of me’ (3.2.193–4) is a revelation to Helenus, that he has been duped by those closest to him. I experimented with this line, sometimes playing it as an out-­loud thought to myself, and sometimes delivering it directly to the audience. It always worked better delivered to the audience, making them recipients of my pain, complicit in the treachery, rather than voyeurs to my thoughts. One of my most intimate moments with the audience came in Helenus’s soliloquy at the beginning of the play (1.1.226–51).

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In rehearsal Emma and I talked about speaking it in a way that was very stripped back. She said, ‘I want you to be sat on the front of the stage just talking to the audience, and I would love it if you offered your hand to them and they would take it.’ That’s an incredibly vulnerable place to be as an actor: you have nowhere to hide, you have to lay yourself bare to the audience and hope they accept you. But it’s also an incredibly powerful position to be in. During this speech, I could see every single face in the audience, and could deliver the soliloquy looking directly into the eyes of a different person for each line. I followed Emma’s advice and during the soliloquy there was a point where I invited the audience to comfort me and hold my hand. We went with a simple gesture, just the intention of an open palm on the end of the line: ‘Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity’ (1.1.232–3). There was never a performance when an audience member didn’t take my hand. On one occasion a gentleman took my hand and the audience chuckled. I then took a breath and before I could say my next line he rubbed my shoulder endearingly, as if to say ‘It’s OK, love’, which got another, bigger laugh. In that moment this audience member had taken charge of what happened in the production and I had to let that moment live in the space before I could proceed with the next bit of text. My next line in the soliloquy was ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind’ (1.1.234), which I think is some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful writing about love. In that performance the audience was so excited about what had just taken place – by how much control they had in the space and the unique moment that we (1,500 of us) had shared – I had to use the line in a very different way than I did in any other performance. Rather than delivering it as a reflective musing on love (how I normally played it), I delivered the line as a sobering warning, which brought the audience back in to the tension of the moment, to feel the significance of the confidence I was sharing with them. That kind of

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push-­and-pull relationship that Dream, Shakespeare and the Globe have with the audience is really exciting, it’s a gift to the actor. One of the main reasons we continue to perform any of Shakespeare (including Dream) is because the plays and the characters within them resonate with contemporary audiences. Audiences empathized with Helenus more than any other Shakespearean character I’ve ever played. The Globe didn’t make casting announcements until two weeks before previews, because Emma didn’t want audiences to come in with a preconceived notion about a gay, male Helena; she really wanted audiences to experience the character choice in the moment. We felt the full impact of this decision each performance when Lysander essentially ‘outs’ Demetrius and Helenus by saying: ‘Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head, / made love to Nedar’s [son] Helen[us]’ (1.1.106–7). Many nights there was a loud, audible gasp when ‘Helenus’ was said for the first time and I popped up out of the audience in the yard; it was a light-­bulb moment for the audience when they realized the character choice the production was making. Without fail, audiences bought into our telling of the story. I think that was because we didn’t make it a play about gay love; it remained a play about love in which gay love was showcased alongside all other types as an inexorable part of the fabric of the humanity. Apart from the gender pronouns, we didn’t have to change the text to make the Helenus choice work. Our diverse audience at the Globe proved that they are ready (and excited) for us to represent them on stage, in all their diversity. Throughout the run I received tweets and met audience members all of whom had such a positive response to the production, and were surprised they hadn’t seen the story told this way before. Just before one of our performances we heard news of the nightclub shooting targeting the LGBT community in Orlando, Florida. We went on that night, recognizing that these horrible acts of hatred are not a thing of the past. At a moment where we were seeing homophobic violence carried out in a public

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place, it was important that Helenus and Demetrius’s love story could be celebrated in a public way. There was not one night in the jig where I did not think the audience were giving the company (especially Helenus and Demetrius) an enormous amount of love. Maggie Ann Bain played Philostrate, Flute and a fairy.

Maggie Ann Bain I could see the audience and their faces so clearly. I had never experienced that before: to be able to see whether people were enjoying the play and to have an individual rather than a general sense of audience response. It was wonderful, but scary as well. You can always tell if someone is engaged with what’s happening, even if it’s not with what you are doing. You can see what their level of focus is, even from their feet as they shift, or in the way they are standing. It’s an intimate relationship. Just as they can see when two actors on stage are really connected while performing, you can tell if the audience are connected to what is happening at that moment. It’s an invigorating feature of the Globe. There is no hiding. At times you might be interacting with an audience member who is unable to observe the action elsewhere on stage at that particular moment. For example when playing a fairy the audience on my side of the stage might not be in sight of a key speech being delivered on the opposite side, but they can engage with me, and my job then is to tell them that part of the story. Connection with the audience gives you the confidence to take a given moment a bit further than you might otherwise feel able. It’s amazing playing to 1,500 people and having such an intimate connection with them, but you also need to keep your mind on what is happening on stage. It’s a kind of split personality, that’s exciting and keeps you on your toes. You have to inhabit the role at all times. I was surprised by how involved the audience became. You cannot allow a surprise response to throw you or shock you, but you have to react very

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much in the moment. That’s the beauty of live theatre, but it’s even more potent at the Globe. You need to have a strong sense of focus and make sure that at all times you are furthering the story and that the audience is following you. I was aware of this relationship with the audience when I was changing into Thisbe for the first time at the rehearsal in the forest. Bottom is setting up with Peter Quince at the front of the stage. A table is in the middle. None of the audience on my side of the stage can really see what’s happening there, so my job is to make really clear Flute’s feelings, towards Peter Quince, and her part in the play. At that point I’m getting into a costume that Flute doesn’t particularly want to wear. I need to make sure that the audience near me is set up to enjoy the play in the same way as those members of the audience who can see Bottom are. This makes what we are doing a real ensemble piece – as a company we each have to be aware of how we are creating the scene together. During Pyramus and Thisbe I gave my last ‘death’ line to whoever was occupying a certain seat in my eyeline. I felt if I gave the line to that one person then the rest of the audience would get it as well. Some people loved ‘getting’ the line, while on another day the person seated in that position might seem less comfortable. People on the periphery sometimes thought I was addressing them, and I was aware of having to keep focus. It was so heartening to hear the audience erupt with laughter, because it’s a team effort to create that kind of moment in the Globe. I felt in that moment I had a connection with the audience; by the end people were smiling. Eye contact is one of the most intimate communications human beings have with one another. That’s probably why we tend not to look at each other when travelling on the train; we keep a private bubble around ourselves. As an actor, when you feel the connection you are offering is being willingly returned, it’s like a kind of electricity wiring you directly to the audience. It’s like the first time you lock eyes with someone you might be attracted to, there’s a moment of something flying between the two of you, something unspoken but unmistakable. You can get a sense of

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how the other person is feeling, even if it’s just that they are nervous. I never felt such a connection closed down by a member of the audience. Whatever I was offering was returned, in one way or another. That is an from an audience to an actor, and the audience at the Globe is phenomenal. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to feeling like a rock star. I’m forever grateful for that experience. The pre-­show, featuring the mechanicals as stewards giving a pre-­show briefing, was a lovely way of introducing the audience to the way that Emma Rice works. The idea that they came from the audience, creating a level playing field, putting people that would normally be in the audience on stage. Different nights of the week had a different feel at the start of the show. On a Friday evening people were often more relaxed, they might have had a drink etc., although their reaction could depend on whether they felt that the play was actually beginning at that point – with the ‘stewards’ announcements’. At that moment I would be backstage with Katy (Owen, Egeus) and Meow Meow (Hippolyta) and we would listen to the audience and the level of applause that Rita and Bottom were getting. We would say ‘OK, today the energy of the audiences feels like a 4’, or ‘about a 6’ etc. We would then think about how we played our first scenes accordingly. We had to take that audience along with us; you cannot leave them behind, particularly in a comedy like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Sometimes that meant going out and matching the energy they were giving us and other times it meant that we had to go out with more energy and take them on the journey with us. Whatever energy an audience brought to the performance we wanted to give every one of them the very best experience. Emma Rice directed the production.

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Emma Rice In rehearsal, my main focus is my relationship with the story. My focus then shifts to the text, the actors and my creative team. I try to work quite generously and freely with the company, and when we are working on scenes in rehearsal we all try to entertain each other. By the time we meet an audience (usually at the first performance), we are all very used to sharing the play and the world we have created. I would immediately flounder if I thought about the audience at the beginning of the process. It would throw me off my own instincts. I have a profound belief that all human beings respond to similar fundamental ideas and emotions and this helps me stay simple and strong. I travelled the world with Kneehigh and have learnt that shows are received in essentially the same way the world over. That knowledge is liberating because I know that the audience are essentially like me, and the company. There is nothing to be scared of. They are not ‘other’. I do a lot of work at the beginning of the rehearsal process exploring the world of the play, feeding our collective imagination. I play a lot of games. I love comedy and fun and I try to encourage the actors to show off; to delight me. In the process of doing so they start getting playful and creative. In a way, I’m the audience, right from the start. I’m also very keen on bringing people to watch rehearsals. This is valuable because the actors immediately begin to learn how to delight an audience, whoever they are and wherever they are. We look outwards, we open up, we share. It’s also worth saying that all the actors are called for rehearsal all day, every day. When they are not in a scene they are watching the others, they respond and have ideas. In this way, the company become the audience in the rehearsal room. I’ve yet to direct a tragedy though, so I’m not sure how this process would work! I actually don’t know how to put a fourth wall into a rehearsal room because I’ve never worked with one. The profound joy of theatre is that it changes every day, not in spite of, but because of the audience. The company would

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regularly discuss audience responses. In the Globe even something minor, like a pigeon landing, can cause a response in a pocket of the audience, and that can, in turn, affect the dynamic of the performance as a whole. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was magic, it landed the minute it met an audience. I didn’t have to worry about it. My biggest revelation during the run was not about the audience. My revelation was Shakespeare. He really knew what he was doing! This was the first time that I had put Shakespeare on stage as I had only previously directed an adaptation. I believed 100 per cent in the production, but watching it take off, like someone had lit the touch paper, was amazing. I thought this is where I kneel at the altar of Shakespeare that everyone has been telling me about! This is when I see it, feel it, know it. In contrast the audience is known to me; we have a connection, a kinship. I feel like every man, every woman – perhaps this is my superpower as a director! When casting I choose to work with people that chime with me; they tend to be truthful, a bit naughty, maverick and at ease with themselves. I love actors that want to be out there, who make me laugh, who look outwards at the world, who twinkle! In this production, I cast people who you might see on the bus. I cast women in unusual parts; comic roles. This delighted people. They saw a group of women, who looked and sounded like their mates, messing about on stage. It’s still unusual to see women depicted in this way in theatre; working women, funny women, busy women. The cast created a chemistry that just opened the play out to the audience. They were all chosen for their spirit and that became intoxicating in performance. The idea of playing Helena as a gay man, Helenus, happened at the same time as I decided to direct the play (I originally thought that I would direct The Taming of the Shrew so I didn’t have a master plan). It astonished me that it hadn’t been done before because everything about the character suddenly made sense. I did not change the text apart from changing the references to Helena as ‘lady’ to ‘lover’. It took no

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engineering; the actors just played the characters. Simple, bold production decisions will just work (if they are right) and they meet the audience unapologetically and truthfully. It would be arrogant of me to think about what I want to make an audience think or feel. I just think about what a decision or moment makes me and the actors think or feel. Then we share it. The audience are a temporary community and communities have many different flavours. Some might be made up of people who have been to the bar, others might include lots of school parties etc. All of these mini communities have to find a way of bonding for the duration of the play. If I tried to create work to appeal to an idea of one type of audience it wouldn’t work because each audience is so different. An audience that seems fractured can sometimes be a gift. I encourage actors to find pockets in the audience that they can connect with, and work outwards from there. The Globe is brilliant for enabling actors to do that, to nurture sections of the audience and then glue them together, like a host at a party. Then actors are not just being actors – they are the hosts and the storytellers at an event. The audience are the final piece of the jigsaw. In this production, they enabled us to find the comedy of the play. Playing comedy to an empty room is so hard. It was a surprise to see how the comedy whooshed through the audience, with such joy. Only the audience can give a company that. The actors need the audience and their collective response. The show just got funnier and funnier and I would look at it and think, wow! I replaced the line ‘Away, you Ethiop!’ (3.2.257) with ‘Away, you ugly bitch’. The audience response to this line was extreme. I thought that was amazing, to have built an audience to a point where they could have such a collective vocalized response (of ‘not OK’) to that moment. There is great cruelty in the play and in that moment the audience absolutely bonded against one of the characters. I loved it. I had made the change because I did not want to use a phrase that was a racial slur. I

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wanted to replace it with something that had the same metre but was as equally cruel and vicious as Shakespeare’s original words. I felt that the audience came together in this moment, they were like an army with a moral input into the performance and they never separated as a temporary chorus until the end of the play. My intention was that the beginning of the show should be like a meeting, a date, between me and the Globe. It’s a little painful to remember that now in the light of what happened. I had been spending time during the previous year getting to know the Globe and I wanted to acknowledge and honour all that I had observed; particularly the work of the volunteers. The design was also created to reflect both Elizabethan and modern-­day influences. In the opening sequence one of the actors, dressed as a Globe steward, was listening to Radio 2, reading that day’s Metro. That was important for me, to frame the performance as something taking place today – in that particular moment and time. ‘Today’ would have meant something different to everyone in the audience so I decided not to editorialize; that was why I chose live radio. Before one matinee the news broke on the radio of the terrible nightclub shooting in Orlando. Naturally the audience were reacting to it and we took the show up a minute late to give everyone that space. It was a meeting of the ‘now’ and the performance. The production was about to take the audience through a story that begins with hatred, moves through a process of confusion, followed by healing, understanding and eventually to tolerance – something the world needs now more than at any time in recent memory. I remain incredibly excited by this bold choice. The Globe demands a speed of thought that actors can’t resist, so I could see the dramatic scenes of the play tighten naturally as the run progressed. Sometimes I had to slow them down because the actors became so used to the text that they forgot that others were hearing it for the first time. The mechanicals’ play grew longer and longer every time I saw it. They were a brilliant group of clowns and I

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did have to do some pruning! It’s my job to be the headmistress and rein in the excesses, but I secretly delighted in the creativity of that scene as it had developed in performance. I only ever want to make work that’s relevant to my own experience. For this reason, my work is always set in a fairly contemporary world. I can only reach back as far as the people in my life, and that, for me, means my grandparents. I have reached back as far as the War in my work, but rarely earlier. One of the key cultural signifiers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the reference to the Beyoncé song ‘Single Ladies’. It was discovered when the actors were improvising and having fun in rehearsal. I’m sure that’s what would have happened in Shakespeare’s time – he often used songs of the day to illustrate scenes. ‘Single Ladies’ was a bit transgressive, but the audience could understand that and enjoy it on those terms. The music overall gave the production a modern feel, it made audiences want to dance. If you are dancing you feel like you are at a gig rather than theatre and that has a domino effect in the audience. I could see them thinking I’m enjoying this; I want to dance, I want to get on stage, I want to have fun – I want to participate. It all came together to make something that I’m incredibly proud of. Perhaps proud is the wrong word because that sounds as if I have ownership of it, which I do not feel is the case. It was a very special moment in my life, it was the meeting of my own practice and process with Shakespeare’s. My own life and loves, with his. I will never forget the first open dress. It was intoxicating. We all felt like we were on drugs! The Globe has a unique ‘mirror’ effect; the audience are uninhibited, almost leaning into the performance and the actors. Their faces shine out, saying ‘find me’. The actors naturally connect with those faces, trying to find ‘friends’ and allies in the audience and a rare connection happens. It happens in front of your eyes. It is absolutely magic. I’m feeling it very strongly at the moment and I’m mourning it, because I have already opened the last show I will ever direct at the Globe Theatre. I mourn it already.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Young Vic Theatre, London 16 February–1 April 2017 The production was directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins. Bethany Punnett, Rona Kelly and Jen Davey were in the audience.

Bethany Punnett I was sitting right at the front of the theatre. There was a mirror across the back of the stage and I could see myself clearly. It was like the setting and environment of the play was being reflected on us, literally and metaphorically. It was nice to be able to see myself; it felt as though I was there with the characters. The mirror meant that all the audience could all see each other and we all felt part of the show. I could see the other audience members responding in the mirror. It made you feel a bit self-­conscious at times. The stage was covered in mud. I could have leant over and put my hand in it. The mud and the mirror made me feel as if I was in the world of the play because it created this unique sensory experience. I go to the theatre to escape, to go into another world. At this production it felt like you were in a box of magic. The cast sang a song in Latin at the beginning; this set the tone of the play. It was unexpected and made me feel as if I was being drawn into old folk tale or fairy story. The first scene with Hermia and Lysander in the woods, where she asks him to ‘Lie further off’ (2.2.48), was really effective, but it troubled me. It became quite forced and Hermia had to be very dismissive. It made me feel really uncomfortable because I could feel she was afraid. At the same time I could see Lysander’s burning desire. He wanted her, but he backed away. It was interesting that they then went to sleep and before they spoke to each other again Lysander was treated with the love potion. It presented an interesting way of viewing their

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relationship. It was such a small moment but it was very powerful and as a young woman it really made my skin crawl.

Rona Kelly I was in the front row – I got muddy. I had gone to see the production expecting a Glastonbury vibe, but by the end of the performance the mud really made sense. It highlighted how muddy the play is and the murky nature of the relationships between characters. The set provided a foundation for many of the directorial choices in the production, like the dark undertones around sexual consent in Lysander and Hermia’s relationship. The mirror at the back of the stage was an interesting device. You could see the actors looking into the mirror and through it out into the audience – so even when their backs were turned you were watching them and they were watching you. This brought a voyeuristic element to the play. The cast was all onstage for the entire performance and when not in a scene would often look in the mirror. Sometimes you looked to see what the actors were looking at and realized that they were looking at you. Then you dashed your eyes back to the action on stage. This did take your eyes away from the main performance a bit, but that was not necessarily a bad thing. You could see how all the cast were reacting to the story. It felt as if the production was in many ways trying to alienate the audience; to make you feel guilty for what you were watching. The first scene in the forest between Hermia and Lysander (2.2) was a key example. In this production the scene was very much about consent, Lysander was very much forcing himself on Hermia. Similarly at the end of the play, when Bottom was running around for a long time in the mud, I felt a sense of discomfort. I felt sympathetic to all of the characters: connected but alienated, responsible, but guilt-­free. I went away thinking about the points in the play where things had gone wrong, how the characters could have behaved differently. It felt very dreamlike.

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Jen Davey I really identified with Helena in this production. The performance upset me at points; it felt so real. She appeared so very exposed and for me that led to a real moment of connection. You could feel along with her when she spoke to you in the soliloquies, her thoughts seemed to be spilling out. In the forest Helena was very vulnerable. The modernity of the production made her situation so relatable. The first few rows were lit up and she could see us, I think that’s why it affected me so much. The storytelling was strong; the word I keep coming back to is ‘real’. Of course I knew the performance wasn’t real but it felt like a situation I could see in modern life or in television drama. It wasn’t a fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Young Vic is an intimate space and that helped with the immediacy of the storytelling. The audience were all so close together. It was a real group experience. I could see other members of the audience in the mirror at the back of the stage. At the end of the play all the characters went to the mirror. It was at a point in the play where they had completely lost themselves, but they were looking directly at themselves. It was a lovely moment of reflection. For the last ten minutes of the play we watched the characters try to find a way back from that moment, where they were most lost. I’ve always liked very traditional productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but this one was so fluid and made so much sense. It was literally about the words and the storytelling. It has become my favourite. Michael Gould played Theseus and Oberon.

Michael Gould In rehearsal we focused on trying to establish the truth of the character and telling the story of the play. We worked on a lot of quite abstract exercises; adopting physical rules that

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governed the movement of a scene. Joe Hill-Gibbins was watching and obviously he was taking the role of the audience, picking out what was interesting. In that way we started to create the scene. After dress rehearsals we spent a day looking at how to share the play: how to turn it out and communicate with the audience. Shakespeare plays lend themselves to talking to, or sharing moments with, the audience, for example to try to get them on your side. This proved particularly useful for characters like Helena and Hermia. The first scene of the play was played as if we were in a senate, so the audience were very much part of the scene. As Theseus I felt the pressure of the audience, in my imagination they were the senate. I like to characterize the audience in this way, to some extent. In the last scene I thought of the audience as guests at Theseus’ wedding, so I took care of the audience, making sure they could see during Pyramus and Thisbe and that they were enjoying themselves. There was a moment in the scene where I (as Theseus) realized that a member of the audience couldn’t see so I gestured an apology and moved out of her way. In contrast to Theseus, Oberon’s energy was not so much directed towards the audience but to Puck and Titania. The audience in my mind became almost fairy-­like, or elements of the forest. Oberon is king of the fairies so he doesn’t feel he has to reach out, he’s quite wilful and he can do what he wants. Laughter, and the reverse, total silence, are key ways of knowing if the audience are engaged. It’s very difficult to always know from an audience member’s face what they are thinking or feeling and sometimes I think that you can project onto the audience’s mostly neutral faces, feelings of boredom for example, which may be totally incorrect. Audience response does affect the way you perform as an actor. There are times when you can intuit certain feelings in the audience; you just have to be alert to it, be aware of it and savour it. Not over-­ interpret, but just try and play your character’s truth and allow the audience into your world. Sometimes during a performance

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I might start to feel that it is not working as I would wish and I try to sense what is happening to cause that: Is it something I am doing/not doing, or is it an energy in the audience? All these thoughts can go on in my head during a scene. If that happens I try to do things differently. We were on stage for the duration of the whole play for this production and sometimes I could hear a scene that I was not directly a part of not working so well, and at other times I was playing in a scene and felt the same way. When that happens I try to find a way to recalibrate the performance: to reboot, change the playing, the intensity. It’s like a football match, sometimes the intensity of play is not there in the team and you have to bring something into it that creates that intensity in the performance: pace, volume or physical energy. Sometimes it’s about inviting the audience in a bit more; maybe you open your body to them a bit and let them in that way. But you have to be very careful and subtle with that because you need to keep playing truthfully as your character. I’m trying to put into words something that happens very quickly in performance. Theseus speaks first in the play. We performed a song just before that which was a kind of Latin victory song; in a way it collected the energy of the audience for the opening scene. All the company was onstage for a while before the performance began, we were instructed to look at the audience and look round the theatre. There was, in those moments, a kind of mutual bewilderment between actors and audience, each of us asking, ‘Who are you?’ Some of the company felt comfortable looking to see who was in the audience: their mates, or celebrities etc. If I look at them in that way though I can feel very self-­conscious – I might spot where the director is, if he’s in, for example. If I think there is someone there who is going to judge me I can start to feel quite inhibited. If I feel there is someone in the audience who might help me, or instruct me or enjoy my company I can work with that but, in general, I prefer to remain in the heart and head of the character rather than my own. The audience for me needs to be part of the

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fabric of the world of the play. That’s how I like to think of the audience. Having said that, actors, as themselves rather than as the character, do notice the audience. There was a boy once of about eleven on the front row who I thought was going to be so bored (he was below the age advisory for this particular production), but he was so into it. Forward, engaged, eyes bright – I wanted to high five him at the end. That was a moment that I really loved.

9 Twelfth Night

At our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night or What you Will, much like The Comedy of Errors or Menechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that Italian called Inganni. A good practice in it to make the steward believe his Lady Widow was in love with him by counterfeiting a letter from his Lady in general terms, telling him what she liked best in him and prescribing his gesture in smiling his apparel etc., and then when he came to practice making him believe they took him to be mad. JOHN MANNINGHAM, 1601. Quoted in The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, edited by H. Cole, Vol. 3 (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1875), p. 277

After dinner [I went] to the Duke’s house, and there saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play, and not related at all to the name or day. SAMUEL PEPYS, 1663, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by HENRY B. WHEATLEY (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1946), Vol. 3, p. 6

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Twelfth Night: a Shakespeare’s Globe production 2002–12 This is the only production to be featured in this book that did not start or end its life in the period 2016–17, that marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. When audiences began to talk about their responses to productions of Twelfth Night during that period they often did so through the prism of this production. This was particularly true of regular, lifelong theatregoers, who described the performance with extraordinary clarity; describing it as ‘definitive’ and ‘magical’. Many of them discussed the same moment, each recalling it with real joy and an intensity more normally associated with a production they had seen last week, rather than five years ago. For this reason it appears at the start of this chapter. This production of Twelfth Night was first performed in Middle Temple Hall, London in February 2002 and transferred to the Globe that season. In 2012 the production, after some recasting, returned to the Globe Theatre, before a transfer to the Apollo Theatre in London’s West End and the Belasco Theatre on Broadway, New York. Directed by Tim Carroll, it was an all-­ male ‘Original Practices’ production that explored clothing, music, dance and settings possible in and around 1601. Jim Stewart, Miranda Coates, Paul and Jane Shuter, Susan Robinson and Shiela MacLean were in the audience at various points during the run of this production.

Jim Stewart I remember Cesario and Orsino sitting together on a bench. They came within half a millimetre of kissing and the tension in that moment was palpable; it was an electric atmosphere. The audience were watching with bated breath: ‘My father had a daughter loved a man’ (2.4.107) – I remember that as if it were yesterday. I think one of the most powerful experiences

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at the theatre is when you are with an audience of 1,500 other people and it is completely silent. The only silence I can compare it with is being at the top of a mountain in the Lake District or Scotland; you realize how few times there are in life when there is utter silence. That type of silence in a performance is very powerful in a number of different ways and is one of the most transcendent experiences that it’s possible to have in a theatre. I’ve experienced it a number of times, but this was the most powerful manifestation.

Miranda Coates I have a very rosy memory of this production. I remember particularly vividly the scene between Cesario and Orsino when they were seated on a bench downstage (2.4). Orsino is falling in love, but is not allowing himself to do so. I was laughing with them and remembering being in comparable situations myself, where I was thinking, ‘Shall I kiss him? I’m not sure.’ You had the sense that the whole audience was hanging on the character’s words. You were looking over at people’s faces and they were making the same face as your face was making, having the same reaction to the play. Something happened on stage and the response to it would come to you across the audience, like a wave almost, coming towards you, that you in turn would become part of: 1,500 people in the same space, all experiencing similar emotions. I also remember the moment where Orsino realizes there are identical twins (5.1.212). The delivery was so fresh and I really believed it was the first time he had made this discovery. Olivia’s reaction to Sebastian when he agreed to marry her (4.1.65) felt so contemporary, even though I was watching an all-­male, ‘Original Practices’ production in a reconstruction of a 400-year-­old playhouse, it felt really modern, like something that could be said tomorrow on Bankside. The production featured superb ensemble playing. All the company seemed to be having a good time on stage. You also had a sense of the work they had put in to get to that point. At

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the Globe in the lower gallery, where I always sit, you have a beautiful view over the groundlings to the stage. It’s so lovely to see all the faces of the audience; you can enjoy their enjoyment of the play. I have this production on download from the Globe Player. If ever I need properly cheering up, I play it.

Paul and Jane Shuter Paul: This was a definitive production of Twelfth Night for us, one we measure all the others against. In a lifetime of theatre-­ going I can think of only three or four productions of any play that I would term ‘definitive’. To be definitive everything has to be just right. Jane: It’s interesting because when we talked about our definitive Hamlet, Paapa Essiedu’s at the RSC (see Chapter 7), one of the reasons we said it felt so special was because the characters felt like real people. In this production I never thought Mark Rylance was Olivia; I thought that he was performing a beautiful interpretation of Olivia. It worked because all the company worked in the same way – they all gave a very good interpretation of the person they were playing. It was really perfect, but for different reasons to Hamlet. Paul: I remember clearly the audience in the yard: about half an hour into the show the groundlings seemed to catch fire and affect the rest of the audience. I don’t think I was ever not aware of the audience and the effect they had on how I experienced the production. From the middle gallery the audience in the yard appeared like a character in the play. Seeing people in the yard enjoying themselves so much relaxes the inhibitions of the people in the galleries – that’s why the Globe works better than the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, because there the people nearest the stage have the most expensive seats and tend to be more inhibited.

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Susan Robinson I saw the dress rehearsal of the first incarnation of this production at Middle Temple Hall. It was quite stunning. I’d seen the play many times before and can remember sitting in the audience at one point thinking Cesario shouldn’t enter there. Then I realized that it was Sebastian, not Cesario. To me the twins seemed identical – I was genuinely confused. I went on to see the production everywhere it played, even in New York. Always at its heart was the amazing performance from Mark Rylance. I’ve never seen a better Olivia. Sorry ladies! You just believed him. You wondered if he was on wheels! The comedy was funny. The touching scenes were touching. Claire van Kampen’s music was lovely. I saw the production at Middle Temple Hall 400 years to the day on which we know that it was first performed. I felt a real frisson knowing that, while simultaneously realizing that 400 years can mean nothing. The production was played in traverse and was hugely fluid. It just all worked so well; it was magical. I particularly remember the scene in which Orsino realizes that he has feelings for Cesario (2.4). They were sitting on a bench downstage with their backs to a large part of the audience, but of course visible to others at the sides of the Globe. They were sitting slightly askew looking slightly at each other and their body language was very powerful. You knew the audience was hugely engaged in what was going on. The quality of the silence: you could sense people really listening. I am a volunteer theatre steward at the Globe Theatre and I worked on this production many times. I have a lovely memory of Mark (Rylance) in Middle Temple Hall waiting to make his entrance. He was speaking softly and I thought he was going over his lines. But instead, entirely as Olivia, he was discussing her feelings about what had just happened. He was being Olivia. Watching Mark do that helped me understand why his performance was so extraordinary – he was absolutely inhabiting that character, he wasn’t Mark Rylance, he was Olivia.

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I can feel genuinely privileged to see someone perform that well, to be able to convince you so completely that they take you way beyond the fact that you have bought a ticket for a show and seen them maybe in other things. They have you there in that moment. They haven’t learnt lines; they are saying those words now. When a production all comes together, like it did for Twelfth Night, you inhabit the same moment in time and space as the characters on stage. You are where they are.

Shiela MacLean I remember Orsino and Cesario sitting on a bench: Orsino’s in possession of a feeling but he doesn’t know what’s possessing him – he’s attracted to Cesario and yet he isn’t and yet he is. The moment was so perfectly nuanced; absolutely electric. Playing it with two men really brought out the subtleties of the scene. The bench was at the front of the stage and they had their backs towards much of the audience. It made the scene even more forbidden in a way because we could see them in profile, but they were facing away from us. Feste could see them but we could not and we could see on Feste’s face what he was seeing. A little moment that resonated with me came in the final scene when Olivia is told that Maria was the author of the letter to trick Malvolio and that Sir Toby has married her (5.1.356). Paul Chahidi playing Maria was standing at the back of the stage looking really shamefaced, not knowing where to put her eyes. Then she raised her hand and uttered ‘hooray’. That was absolutely gorgeous. It was not in the text, but it was so quietly uttered that it captured her sense of ‘oh my goodness what have I done?’ It was all captured in that ‘hooray’. Paul Chahidi played Maria in both the 2002 and 2012 productions.

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Paul Chahidi As an actor you can sense the temperature of an audience. At the Globe everything that happens on stage is exposed and challenged to twice the level experienced in a conventional theatre – the writing, the acting, the direction. Yet the Globe is also a very enabling space. Tim (Carroll) talked about Twelfth Night as a thoroughbred stallion – it can do anything you want but you have to know how to ride it. You have to bend or use the language effectively. I was lucky because when I was cast in Twelfth Night it was my fourth season at the Globe, and my fellow actors and I had already learned that an audience’s laughter is capable of hijacking a play if you let it. So we realized that performing was not about being seduced by that laughter, but about following the text and finding a balance that incorporates audience response. I would always try to find the comedy in the dark moments and dark moments in the comedy of the play. It’s very easy for Twelfth Night to become an unbalanced play. It’s such an ensemble piece – all the parts are wonderful but it takes a really great director to let those parts shine and a generous company to commit to that ensemble playing. We were lucky that we had both in this production. We rehearsed in a spirit of trying things out and pushing boundaries, being cheeky as actors, and then Tim (Carroll) would tell us what worked! An example of this is the moment that we created for Maria at the end of the play. It’s not clear if Maria is in the final scene; often the stage directions just read ‘Enter Olivia and attendants’, but my thought was that she has been the driving force of the whole subplot, it comes from her need to revenge herself on Malvolio. She comes up with the plan, instigates it and drives it forward. Then she gets married to Sir Toby Belch. I wanted Maria to have some presence at the end, and to be able to have some response to the character’s whole story. I feel fortunate that Tim and the company allowed this, otherwise Maria’s story would not have made sense to me. I think it was a successful aspect of the production that all of the characters

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were key; this is inherent in the play, every character is a fascinating jewel in their own right. We rehearsed with an awareness of the audience, of the need not to play too much for laughs, but to find the darker moments in the play. Yet even with this awareness some of the funniest stuff passed us by in rehearsal. The moments the audience respond to can be those you haven’t tried to work too much, while others are more apparent right from the beginning, very funny lines, which if you serve them well will get a response. Largely though I’ve found it’s better to play everything straight, you will soon find out what the audience finds funny. The challenge then is not to make it bigger and bigger, feeding off that response. We had discussions regularly with each other about such moments as they emerged during the run, and talked about whether or not we were extending our own response to the audience excessively. Tim would remind us all not to go too far! When Malvolio appears in his yellow stockings and tries to woo Olivia (3.4) Maria watches her plan come to fruition. For a large part of the scene much of the audience saw only my back. I was playing suppressed laughter. My shoulders were shaking, as they do when you are trying not to laugh. This became very visible to the audience, because they were so in the scene. They were observing Mark (Rylance) and Stephen (Fry), but the audience at the Globe is not told where to look, and people were also observing Maria’s reactions. Her suppressed laughter got the audience laughing too, and though most of them could not see my face they were imagining its expression. When I eventually turned round I would have a very straight face, which was even funnier because the audience knew full well what Maria was really feeling. It’s sometimes surprising what people pick up on, but audiences are very clever. If you have been telling the story clearly, they will get it. At the beginning of this scene Maria had just had one line: ‘He’s coming, madam, but in very strange manner’ (3.4.8). Giles Block suggested I really point up ‘He’s coming, madam’. I delivered the line in a very arch manner and it got a huge

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laugh. You have to judge that kind of thing. When the audience is with you in that space, they are so highly attuned to what you are doing that you have to choose what you do carefully. It’s like using something that’s expensive – to do something for a laugh – you have to use it sparingly and wisely. It’s wonderful to be able to play a moment like that, something that is surprising, but which the audience will pick up on, because they are so with you in the story. The audience response was like that all the way through the play; even in places that I didn’t expect. For example, when Maria explains the plan to gull Malvolio. The reason the audience loved that I think was because they recognized that behind the details of the plan lay a real hurt, steming from the emotional wounding Maria had received in the moments before, when Malvolio rounds on her for the noise that Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Feste are making. Her feeling of injustice (she had been trying to shush them and shut them up) then drives everything. If you get those moments right and root them in emotional truth then you can go quite far with the comedy because it will come back to that truth. If you haven’t rooted the character in something truthful then you will struggle when you want the audience to believe in the emotional heart of the character. I believe it’s best to always go for something serious and truthful before you start exploring comedy. The audience will decide what’s funny. There is a delicacy in working this way. You can either grab an audience by the scruff of the neck to get them to go with you on a story or you can beckon them in. I think it is very important to have both those things going on. Mark (Rylance) was the master of that and we learnt from watching him. I think a lot of people were doing that in this production. There is a quality of listening that comes when you say to the audience: I know this is funny but we are not going to indulge in that now, come with me in this direction. It suddenly falls deadly silent; you can hear a pin drop and you know that the audience are with you. Then laughter is all the richer when it does come. By the end of the play you have gone on a proper journey together that is truly about the story of the play. The

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Globe makes the relationship with the audience electric and very palpable. You can see it in people’s faces. They do not have to behave and if they are restless you will know it, you will hear it and you will see it. What was amazing was those moments of utter stillness. Playing for an audience is a bit like playing an instrument: you get better as you go along. Your audience antennae are working in any theatre but that is especially the case at the Globe. You have to embrace your knowledge and awareness of the audience because they are there and that is the great joy of performing on that Globe stage. One of the core elements that makes the Globe revolutionary is the relationship with the audience. Soliloquies become a conversation between you and the audience, you can find people to talk to and that makes everyone feel involved. It’s a space that demands that you acknowledge the audience in some way and yet remain in character. I think that is the essence of telling a story. The relationship between you and the audience is very visceral. At points it can be more like performing at a rock concert than in a play. The challenge is to up your game – use your vocal technique, sense of your position on the stage, your relationship with the other actors – to an extent that you have never been asked to do until you step on the Globe stage. I’m a much better and more confident actor from working there than I would have been otherwise. We played Twelfth Night in four different theatres. Each time we moved to a different venue with the play, we were mourning something. We began in Middle Temple Hall, candlelit. It’s hard to convey how magical that was performing in the place where Twelfth Night was first performed. One performance even fell on the same day in the calendar, 400 years ago. When we moved on to the Globe some of the company were concerned that we would lose subtlety, but the play just developed in a different mode, as I imagine it might have been in Shakespeare’s day. The Globe demanded muscularity from the actors and a generosity of spirit to share that with everyone – by the end of the run we were in love with

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performing the play at the Globe. Then in the West End and on Broadway we were apprehensive as we thought we would not have that broad connection with the audience. It was a less febrile atmosphere but changing into the costumes on stage (mirroring the experience at Middle Temple Hall where the audience filed through the actor’s dressing area) helped the audience to embark on an imaginative journey with you; before you even said a word of the play they were ready for something special, something that would require them to use their imaginations and not be too literal. We did lose some of the direct contact of the Globe, but still retained so much of what we had in the original production, because the performances were all very much rooted in emotional truth. If you have done that an audience in any sort of space will relate to the play. Wherever we took the production the response was amazing. In the West End the audience would come down to the front of the stalls, lean on the stage and watch us getting into costume. Occasionally we would have a brief conversation with audience members. In New York the audience would do the same, but might also call out their comments on the costumes etc. It was valuable because it allowed us to enter the world of the play together. By the end of the run, we felt we could perform the play in any theatre space. Tim Carroll directed the production.

Tim Carroll I always want the actors I work with to be set to ‘receive’ as well as ‘transmit’. The Globe taught me, from my earliest encounters with it, that actors who think about ‘their’ performance, and who pre-­cook what they will present to a passive audience, do not thrive in the space. And I believe that theatre of any kind does not thrive with that attitude, even though it is often the most self-­regarding and self-­absorbed acting that wins awards and suchlike. So a lot of my exercises

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in rehearsal are about listening, smelling the room, being able to respond to the unexpected. Every performance of Twelfth Night had moments where an unusual audience reaction, be it a laugh in a surprising place, or just a snort of derision, would be picked up. Sometimes these moments were reliable enough that they would, themselves, come to be in danger of getting stale: Mark (Rylance) would sometimes look at the audience, when they laughed at how much he was revealing himself to Viola, with a kind of ‘Don’t give me away’ reproach. It was important for him to be sure that he was not doing it in response to the way they had reacted the night before, but to this case. For the entire cast, though, the presence of visible watchers and listeners, be it in the Globe, the West End or wherever, ensured a sense of complicity and two-­way energy that was always crucial to the event. The moment in 2.4, when Orsino and Cesario played the scene on a bench downstage, was always a favourite with audiences. I think people often respond to the least verbal moments, especially in Shakespeare, where the language is a bit intimidating. In effect, here, the story was moving forward in dumb show. There is something very levelling about this: you don’t need to know who Quinapalus was (or wasn’t) to appreciate the rich complexity of the feelings, hopes and fears of the two people on the bench in front of us. Having said that, you don’t get that moment if people have not understood the text up to that point; so I still think the work to make the text play clearly and in a lively way set up that chance for a goal to be scored. The only audience that felt to me really different over the four venues we played was that at Middle Temple Hall. I think there, because they had spent a lot of money for their seats, and there was a clear feeling that it was a ‘posh’ event, the vibe was less Shakespearean than in the Globe. What thrilled me in the West End and on Broadway was how Globe-­like the audience felt. Partly it was the onstage seating, I think; and partly it was the fact that we always had a lot of affordable tickets. Whatever it was, we always felt that we were able

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to have the same kind of party in those venues as the ones we had at the Globe. The only thing you can’t reproduce is the particular ‘winning goal’ roar that the yard makes at the end of the jig.

Twelfth Night: Questors Theatre, Ealing, London 22–30 April 2016 Questors is an amateur theatre group that stage full seasons of high quality productions in the 350-seat Judi Dench Playhouse (where Twelfth Night played) or their 90-seat studio theatre. Claire Malyon and Jane Langley were in the audience for the production, for which Claire had also designed the costumes.

Claire Malyon Audiences really varied according to the day of the week. The Tuesday night audience was quite slow to warm up. In contrast on Saturday night there were some real belly laughs when Malvolio appeared in his yellow stockings – a yellow kilt in this production. That audience was far more bouncy. You can sense the atmosphere in the audience. At the end of the play when Feste was singing his song there was a moment in the audience of hushed concentration when you could feel everybody recognize that the play had come back to its beginning. You could feel the audience thinking. A scene that I particularly connected with was the one in which Cesario and Orsino were discussing the way that women love (2.4) and trying to explore their feelings for one another. You go from light to sorrowful, comic to thoughtful in that scene. Shakespeare is saying something to audiences of his own era about what he thinks human relationships are. Feste also plays a key part in the scene. The audience connected with Feste because he’s the outsider looking in. Because he’s

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classified as a fool he’s allowed to say what the audience are thinking, he can represent the audience.

Jane Langley The final moments of the play were very powerful. The play had started with the shipwreck, it was in modern dress and reminiscent of the images of Syrian refugees that have become all too familiar. Viola and Sebastian were separated. At the end Viola was back on the beach from where she began looking for Sebastian. I thought for an awful moment that she would not find him; I know that’s the tragic reality for too many people in that situation but in the world of the play, in the theatre I wanted it to be OK. Thankfully it was. I could feel the relief in the audience. This contemporary framing helped me to engage with the production. At times the language sounded so very modern. When Olivia was asking Sebastian to marry her (4.3) it sounded like something we would say now. There was lots of laughter from the audience at this moment. I think that was because we all recognized this and shared a kind of collective joke, recognizing our surprise that words that were written over 400 years ago could sound as if they could be spoken now. Alan Waldock played Sir Toby Belch.

Alan Waldock For me, the audience becomes a factor on the first night of a production. I find the first performances enormously helpful as you get to know how the play works with an audience, whereas in rehearsal you can only guess. You find some moments work better than others, so you slant them and play them in slightly different ways. As Sir Toby I had some asides to the audience, bringing them in on gags and his opinion that Sir Andrew is a fool. I

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wanted to find some moments of truth in him. I highlighted a slowly blossoming romance between him and Maria, which you sometimes do not see on stage. I think the audience liked being in on that romance, because nobody else knows about it. I was always surprised at how much people laughed at the Cesario and Andrew Aguecheek fight. I never thought our version was particularly funny but the audiences loved it. There were tiny little moments where I found I could connect with the audience. When the officers arrived I gave the sword back to Andrew Aguecheek and sat down at a distance pretending I had nothing to do with it. This came about almost by accident, but audiences really responded so I developed it and kept it in. Those kinds of discoveries are what keep a production alive. With a thrust stage the audiences are at the front and to the sides of you, so you need to use the whole stage to make sure you connect with everyone. The last night of the run brought the biggest and most responsive audience. Being a Saturday people were not rushing from work, so could have a drink at the bar beforehand. They certainly laughed more. We had a few people chuckle quite early on, which gave the rest of the audience permission to laugh. I think people don’t want to be the first to laugh. Laughter and silence are the great pointers for me to how an audience is feeling. You can feel palpably the audience tensing, or weeping, you sense their changes of mood. There was such a moment in this production during the party scene where Malvolio comes in to stop the drunken noise. Sir Toby very noticeably changes as he comes out of his drunken state and is contemptuous of Malvolio. I was very conscious, in that moment, of the audience’s response to the alteration in atmosphere. Stuart Watson directed the production.

Stuart Watson I’m very conscious of trying to appeal as a director to a broad audience. At Questors with Twelfth Night this could be the

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young people coming in school parties as well as those considering themselves Shakespeare cognoscenti! I tried not to make the production too long and cut around 30 per cent of the text. I also added a refugee ‘framing’ device. I hoped this would connect with a younger theatre audience, giving them a contemporary lens through which to view Viola’s situation and story. The production began and ended on the beach after the shipwreck with Viola in contemporary costume. It’s not always easy to be certain about audience reactions. Observing people when the show had been up for a while, I tried to gauge how engaged the audience were. Sometimes there was the ‘you can hear a pin drop’ mood when you can feel the tension; often the biggest laughs came after those moments as the tension was released. In rehearsal all you can go on is what you feel – if a moment is creating that feeling in you as a person. I try to be as emotionally open as I can as a director and try to respond with as much empathy as I can because I’m trying to pick up what will be happening for the audience. During the performances I did have a tear in my eye a couple of times at the end, when Viola and Sebastian were reunited. Orsino’s line ‘I shall have share in this most happy wreck’ (5.1.262) got a laugh every night. I can only think this was because Orsino and Viola are the last two characters to pair up and the audience is pleased that the structure is now complete. There was also a reaction if the language sounded suddenly modern: Olivia’s line, ‘What do you say?’ (4.3.31) was delivered in a very contemporary way and that always got a big reaction from the audience. I encouraged all the actors to share as much as they could with the audience. Shakespeare’s plays are not written with a fourth wall in mind and there are certain lines that only make sense when they are played to the audience. Victor (Mellors) as Sebastian really engaged with people personally, especially in his soliloquy. Feste had a very strong ability to manipulate the audience. During the Malvolio prison scene he is basically on his own with the audience and can play with them. Malvolio

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has masses of lines to the audience early in the play and takes them into his confidence. He is the key to all the comedy in Twelfth Night; Shakespeare gives him the opportunity to bare his soul to the audience in a way that other characters do not do quite so much. In the prison scene we took him out of the audience’s sight and the audience experienced the scene through Feste; we tried it with him in view in rehearsal, but to keep him hidden seemed stronger dramatically as the audience could imagine his suffering. Having been so close to the audience, removing him from view makes the point that things have gone too far. Now he is in prison they feel uncomfortable about what has gone before and question whether it was appropriate to have laughed at Malvolio. Questors is a large theatre and quite hard for an amateur company to fill. When the audience is more spread out and can see empty seats they have less confidence to laugh out loud. On the final night we had a full house and definitely a larger response and more belly laughs. The production had also matured and actors had settled in and were able to play with the audience. Performing in the round helps because people watch each other laughing and enjoying themselves and this feeling spreads. All the best Shakespeare I’ve seen has involved the actors reaching out to the audience and really connecting with them.

Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Globe, a ‘Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank’ production for young people and families 22 February–25 March 2016 Directed by Bill Buckhurst, this ninety-­minute production was created especially for young people and their families. Tickets were given to schools in London and Birmingham free of

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charge. It was the first experience of Shakespeare in performance for many of the young people who attended the production. The Pethick family – Mum and Dad (Lisa and Steve) and their children Imogen and Will – were in the audience with friends Ella Veugelers and Theo Parker-Banks.

Lisa, Steve, Imogen, Will, Ella and Theo Imogen: The beginning scene was very memorable. The actors were on the boat, all on top of a cargo container, in a storm. Lisa: The actors were bobbing up and down in the storm, coming out of different doors in the container. Imogen: It was really interesting. Lots of different things were going on at once, but not too much. Steve: They used the space really well. Imogen:  It made me feel excited because it was the beginning scene, it made a big impact that stayed with me for the rest of the play. If the beginning is boring or starts off in a way that’s not very interesting you don’t want to watch the rest of the play, because you think that it is going to be boring as well. When it’s interesting you start thinking, what’s going to happen now? Will: I liked the girl dressing up as the boy. I thought she changed her voice well; it got rougher when she was a boy. Lisa: I was waiting for the yellow-­stocking scene. It’s such a pivotal moment in the play. I’ve seen Twelfth Night several times and it’s one of my favourite scenes. Theo: It was my first time seeing Twelfth Night. I was trying to piece together what was happening: because you see the twins

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get separated on the boat at the beginning and then when you see the characters later you have to figure out who is the same person but dressed differently. They made it clear but not too obvious, which really added to the drama because you had to guess and it made you think. I enjoyed thinking about it and piecing the story together. Will: Toby was a favourite character. Imogen: Yeah but, he’s not great, he’s not evil, evil, but a bit naughty. Lisa: Lots of the characters are a bit sad and dissolute, even Malvolio. Theo: I felt quite sorry for Malvolio because they basically locked him in a cupboard, in the dark. Steve: The characters are more rotten than bad. They are not trying to do evil. They are comic and the plot against Malvolio is the main source of comedy in the play. Theo: In a pantomime the audience would tell Malvolio the other characters are there, hiding, when they are watching him find the letter, but it’s Shakespeare, which is considered advanced and more serious. It’s considered a higher art form than pantomime and that stops you telling him. Imogen: Shakespeare’s plays are really important, they’re such a big part of history. It’s fun seeing it. You can read the script, but when you watch the play at the theatre it really brings it to life – it’s really interesting. Lisa: The productions for young people at the Globe try to capture the kids’ imagination. The actors eating crisps as their character on stage is an example of this. It’s a small thing but it was one of the ways they tried to make it accessible and relevant.

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Will: The line ‘Thrust upon us’ sticks in my mind. I remember that moment, what the actress was doing. (He acts it out.) Will: Good theatre makes you feel that you are in it: when it’s scary you feel scared. When people are happy, then you are happy that they are happy. Imogen: It’s like going to a much more real cinema. Theatre makes you feel much more involved in the story. Theatre and cinema are obviously connected but somehow plays seem more real. Ella: If it’s a play you enjoy you feel like you are there, that’s it’s not just a play but that it is happening in real life; you feel like you are with the characters. Lisa: I think that’s why Shakespeare resonates now – you can feel part of the character’s experiences. Steve: In live performance if something does not work I feel embarrassed and awkward, which I would not at the cinema. That’s interesting because the opposite is also true: if something works well I can experience it with an intensity that I would not at the cinema. In theatre there is a trust between the actors and the audience, it’s amazing; we are seeing something magic created in front of us. If it goes wrong it’s embarrassing, but when it goes right, it’s incredible; transformative, immersive, realer than real. This phenomenon is much easier to identify in the mistake. In theatre there is a relationship between the actor and the audience. They can see you and when you look you realize there is a point where you are not looking at the actor, but the character. It’s real, a kind of hyperreality. Ella: Every time there was something funny I was aware of everyone in the audience laughing. It made me feel like I was part of something. In the cinema you laugh at a film but here we were laughing with the people on the stage and the rest of the audience.

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Imogen: I felt happy for Viola at the end, that she was reunited with Sebastian and married Orsino. Just before that it was quite confusing, so much was happening all at once – ‘that’s not Cesario, it’s Sebastian’. I love that it worked out well in the end. Will: I was upset that not everybody got a happy ending. Ella: Shakespeare added the sad bit to make you think about the other characters that didn’t get a happy ending. Imogen: If everybody had a happy ending that wouldn’t feel right. Malvolio had bad things happen to him throughout the play so to make his ending happy would feel forced. Theo: Not everything can work out for everyone. Some people are happy but others can’t be and we take away (the idea) that not everything can always go as we want it to. Lisa: It’s about balance. Steve: The play is so much about fortune and serendipity, that everyone can’t be a winner, because it would take away from what gives the play its focus. Lisa: We talked about the play as a family for a long time: immediately after the performance, but also for weeks afterwards. Jane Shuter, for whom this was her eleventh Twelfth Night, was also in the audience.

Jane Shuter I watched this production largely through the experiences of the young people in the audience, who may have been seeing Shakespeare for the first time. You could see them really engage

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with the character of Malvolio. To begin with they really didn’t like him, but by the end they felt for him. The play’s beginning with the characters clinging to a shipping container in the storm, brought out moving parallels with refugees. I think that really anchored the production and drew the audience into the story. I think for families it became an all-­embracing experience, they got lost in the play. At the end I could see people bouncing with energy, talking about what they had just seen. Alex Mugnaioni played Malvolio.

Alex Mugnaioni The audience was one of our main focuses in rehearsal. Bill (Buckhurst) had directed six ‘Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank’ young people’s productions previously and was very aware of what creating a performance for an audience of eleven- to sixteen-­year-olds involved. Malvolio seemed at the heart of the production for this type of audience – young people at school exploring issues of self and identity, who may have experienced bullying. We hoped that the character could really speak to their experiences. We thought a lot about the best way to tell Malvolio’s story for them in terms of performance. We didn’t want to patronize, so we never underplayed the severity of his journey, while highlighting that no matter how different someone is from you, and how much their world view might differ from your own, it is never OK to treat them as Malvolio is treated in the play. We didn’t want to shy away from the brutality of what Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria and Feste do to Malvolio. The comedy was obviously still important but we also wanted the audience to be complicit in the plan to trick him. We found that by the end of the play the audience had been on a journey and that they did on some level recognize their complicity, that they may have been laughing along with the trio, been a party to the trickery. When Malvolio appears in the final scene I could feel the change in the audience’s

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response – he has gone from a character that made the whole audience be quiet during the party and was on the receiving end of their judgement, to a person who has been bullied and receives no justice in the play. The audience would be silent when I said: ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ (5.1.371). There is no more immediate space than the Globe, which has a sense of community during a performance, as all of the audience can see one another, generating the feeling that they are all in it together. Whatever their response at any given moment you get it immediately, and sometimes as an actor you can start craving that response and do something that is not true to the story, just because it gets a laugh. This is a trap that actors can fall into. Then there is the silence of the audience. There are also different kinds of silence. You feel all of these things on an instinctive level. Actors say ‘you can hear a pin drop’ and those moments are as important as laughter or cheering. The silence at the end of the play, in a Globe full of 1,500 teenagers, was quite an amazing thing. That silence was as audible as any of the noise they had made at other points during the show, a clear indication of how the story had affected them. I was surprised by how attentive and responsive the audience was – how enthralled by the party and by our rendition of Silentó’s Watch Me, and how quickly that turned around when I came out and told everybody to ‘shut up’. Throughout rehearsal I had been really worried about that. I thought: I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to stop 1,500 teenagers singing and dancing! When it came to the first performance though I was really surprised that they did stop, and listen. It was the same throughout the run. I think it was because they wanted to hear the story. The audience had also become part of the performance – just as I was telling the characters on stage to stop the party, I was also telling them – the audience is a character. That’s a lot to do with Shakespeare’s writing – there is always a dialogue between the characters and the audience, and the show doesn’t really come alive until the

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audience is there. This is true of all productions but particularly so at the Globe, as you have that eye contact and can speak to the people watching you. There is no way a speech will be the same every night because you are talking to a different audience, different people. You connect with them each time you gather and express a thought. Without the audience the play would be completely different. There is etiquette among adults who come to the theatre. You sometimes get a group with a very clear way of showing their appreciation, and audiences will also listen politely even if they are not enjoying what’s going on. Young audiences don’t necessarily have that etiquette, and many may not have seen theatre before. Having no fixed idea of how to respond, they do so very spontaneously and in the moment. They are less afraid to vocalize and their response is less predictable. It’s so varied because they might not be intellectualizing things in the same way that a seasoned theatre audience would, but instead are experiencing it in the moment with their peers. If they don’t like it they will start talking amongst themselves, so you know very quickly if they are not engaged. There are so many other things they could be interested in, and you have to work to get their attention. I really enjoy this, as it is so immediate. When rehearsing and being directed you have to have the audience in mind all the time, thinking about how you’re going to tell the story. You have to be so specific and know your audience so well. Malvolio’s ‘yellow stockings’ were teamed with a type of lederhosen which were revealed in a ‘striptease’ moment (they were under my suit trousers). That moment worked really well. The audience was screaming and shouting and we just had to drive through it. There were maybe a few lines they might miss, but I had learnt that this was the best way, because the audience started listening again very quickly. They wanted to hear the story. Walking around talking to the audience before the show was really helpful. You can tell them they can respond and cheer, and then whenever you come on they know you. It means when you ask for their attention they are more

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likely to respond. The company worked together to support each other as an ensemble; if something important is happening on stage you have to make sure you connect with the audience near you as your character, even if you are not speaking in the scene, encouraging them to listen together with you to what is happening. Working with a young audience who might be seeing a piece of theatre for the first time is a very special opportunity as an actor. Natasha Magigi played Maria.

Natasha Magigi The most memorable thing about the audience for me when I was playing Maria in Twelfth Night was how willing they were to engage with her naughtiness, to believe that her point was justified and that she was completely correct. I think you can sense audience response. It was easier to assess in this production because it was specifically geared to, and played for, a youth audience and they are the most vocal with their responses. Particularly in a space like the Globe it’s easy to know if the audience are on your side or not. I felt like they were egging me on, willing my plot to work. There is no hiding as an actor from a young audience. Kids don’t know or care about the rules – they are just there to be entertained and to hear a story. They are also not there to assess your ability as an actor, which is sometimes the sense with adults, who might be judging your choices as an actor. Shakespeare made Malvolio such an easy character to dislike – we all know people in our lives like Malvolio. This makes playing Maria easier, because everyone can relate to her. We have all been in a situation where we would like to react to a person who has wronged us, but we don’t – because it’s not right or because of the repercussions. So we like seeing Maria act out the type of things we can’t do. I didn’t feel the audience turned against Maria at the end of the play. She strategically disappears, Feste says it’s not her fault – it felt like she was

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forgiven. She wrote the letter but did not really get involved in the imprisonment of Malvolio. Maria is like that person on a Friday night that might provoke or start a fight but never takes part in the fight. The one that never gets into trouble. She’s fun and cheeky – it’s all a big joke. I think it’s a surprise to both the audience and Maria how far the trick against Malvolio goes. It’s sticky, because what she is involved in is horrible, but I never felt blamed by the audience. The scene that stands out, where I felt the audience most on side with Maria, was the scene where we tricked Malvolio, and the Watch Me party scene. I could feel the audience’s ‘yes’ and their excitement that we were performing the song, or that our plot was working as intended. The audience is part of the party started by Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, enjoying singing and dancing. They loved it that Maria wants to take revenge on Malvolio for spoiling their fun. I also particularly remember the scene with the yellow stockings – I would catch the audience’s eye while Malvolio was talking to Olivia. I could see the audience looking at me for my response. I couldn’t laugh – at least not in sight of Olivia – because obviously neither she nor Malvolio are aware of Maria’s involvement. But I was aware of the audience wanting to see Maria enjoying it. It was as if at that moment she is one of them – also watching what’s happening and with as much shock. Only Maria and the audience know the truth of why Malvolio is behaving so strangely, so it’s as if they watch the joke evolve together. We are on the same side and we are both asking ourselves what is going to happen next. The audience enjoyed seeing me struggling to keep a straight face. It’s a bit like school when someone is getting told off while the rest of the class are trying not to giggle – you look sneakily at each other to share the laugh without being caught. At that moment in the play I would address the sides, the middle and the upper gallery audiences, share the joke with them, then turn with an innocent-­looking face back to Olivia. I remember in one show I fluffed my lines. I had to run on to announce that Malvolio was about to appear in his

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yellow stockings, and the word yellow came out like ‘lella’. Everyone on stage looked at me and the audience was obviously thinking, what did she say? Later in the scene I had to reference Malvolio’s yellow stockings again. This time I exaggerated the pronunciation: ‘Y.E.L.L.O.W.’. That was me, Tasha, saying to the audience, ‘yes I know I got it wrong just now’. If there was a fourth wall I could pretend it hadn’t happened, but because the audience had reacted and I had a relationship as Maria with them, I felt it would be wrong not to acknowledge it. Audiences love it when actors acknowledge they have messed something up and everybody can laugh at it, recognizing that we are all human and we make mistakes. I love being allowed to make a gag like that, and have that shared experience with the audience. Bill Buckhurst directed the production.

Bill Buckhurst The demographic of eleven- to sixteen-­year-olds can be a tough one to play Shakespeare to. Trying to cast my mind back to what I was like in my early teens I have to confess that watching a Shakespeare play wasn’t high on my list of priorities. Audiences can to come into the theatre with fairly low expectations and a lot of energy. I’ve worked on a number of ‘Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank’ shows now, and the worst thing you can do with young audiences is dumb down and not trust them. We just have to work really hard to make the story come alive. It’s always really surprising and delightful to discover how relevant and resonant Shakespeare’s stories are in a modern world – the story of a young woman and her twin brother trying to escape a difficult situation in their country and being shipwrecked on the way. It doesn’t take long to see contemporary parallels. I find this exciting that the play has something to say about the world we live in. What is there not to connect with in the story of someone falling in love with someone who does not see or return their love?

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We try to give the audience hooks throughout the play to engage them in the performance. Music is very useful for that. We replaced the ‘catch’ (2.3.70) with a contemporary song, Silentó’s ‘Watch Me’, a YouTube sensation at the time. When I saw it I thought, this is exactly what Shakespeare did – he chose a song that his audience would know and love. The audience begins to sing and dance, and soon you have 1,500 young people all enjoying themselves. Then Malvolio comes down to stop the party and the shock is palpable. I’m sure that’s how that moment would have been 400 years ago. It makes the audience feel like they have ownership of the play and it is relevant to them. They are complicit in the party and are told off by Malvolio, just as the characters are on stage. They hated Malvolio in that moment. Yet by the time we had reached the ‘yellow stocking’ moment (3.4) you could sense the audience beginning to feel sorry for him and begin to understand why Malvolio might behave as he does. In the whole prison scene the audience saw Malvolio’s pain and when he came on for the final scene you could have heard a pin drop on the stage – this wretched guy who had been bullied and abused trying to hold on to his dignity. The audience had switched their allegiance.

Twelfth Night: The National Theatre, London 15 February–13 May 2017 Directed by Simon Godwin, this production starred Tamsin Greig as Malvolia. Jim Stewart, Paul and Jane Shuter, Miranda Coates, Rona Kelly and Bethany Punnett were in the audience.

Jim Stewart A massive auditorium, like the Olivier Theatre, full of people makes for a compelling atmosphere. The most striking moment

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of the production for me was the image of Malvolia, in her reduced state, in a posture reminiscent of crucifixion, at the top of the staircase. Her layers of affectation were stripped away and what was revealed was very lonely and very desperate. It was extremely powerful and it brought into relief all of the people in the play for whom it is not a happy ending.

Paul and Jane Shuter Jane: The things that make me engage with a production are the things that make me think differently. The casting decisions were an obvious way that this production did that. It was also interesting to see Olivia played as a feistier character. Viola seemed to quite enjoy her disguise. She seemed to deal with the situation much better than other Violas I’ve seen. On a more basic level the set was magical, it was like the pages of a book. Paul: They used the drum revolve to reveal different settings e.g. a penthouse flat with a jacuzzi. During Cesario’s second visit Olivia pulled her into it fully dressed. That caused a great deal of laughter. Jane: The production wasn’t as ‘laugh out loud’ for me as it was for the man a few seats down from me, who spent most of the show in a laughing, crumpled heap. Paul: If the audience laughs a lot early in a performance everyone tends to have a better time. It’s cumulative. Jane: Once an audience decide something is funny they are unlikely to change their minds even if it gets worse. It would have to be really bad for people to change their minds. It’s a herd reaction. Paul: It’s easier to get an audience to ‘jump’, to respond to a moment together, earlier in comedy than in tragedy. If an

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audience does not have a collective moment of response until later in the performance it affects the way they view the play. If I feel I have shared and enjoyed a moment as an audience early on it opens up my responses and affects the way I react to the rest of the play.

Miranda Coates I really enjoyed Tamsin Greig’s characterization as this person who has killed every bit of joy in her life. There was a small moment where she was adjusting some potted shrubbery because it wasn’t quite in line; it beautifully captured her entire character. The design was amazing, with the revolve, and a massive central staircase. I don’t know how the actors got up and down it wearing heels. The Olivier is a massive theatre yet you still saw little nuances in the characters. It was clear that Malvolia was in love with Olivia before she even said anything. There were just little changes in the way that she was standing or how she behaved when being spoken to by Olivia. I really connected with the scene where Olivia is chasing Sebastian (4.1). There was much laughter from the audience. For me it was because I recognized the humanity of the situation. Olivia was throwing herself at Sebastian to the point where she was a bit scary. It’s something we have all experienced on some level. It was clear from the beginning that Olivia was using mourning as somewhere to hide, as a convenient shield from Orsino and the rest of the world.

Rona Kelly The production was visually stunning. The final scene with the rain coming down was beautiful. I particularly appreciated the way in which the final moments of the production ‘checked in’ on what happened to characters afterwards; giving the audience a quick visual reference. Sir Andrew Aguecheek

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sitting on a suitcase, for example. I like to think that the story of the play exists outside the world of the performance. I often think about what happens to the characters after the play ends. This ending resonated with me and highlighted the fact that the end of a comedy is not always so funny for all of the protagonists. You go to the theatre to escape from the world for a little bit, into another world. If a production is good I can’t help but imagine what has come before the play and what is going to come after it – the idea that the story isn’t confined to the stage. It brings it from the dramatic world, to life.

Bethany Punnett The character Tamsin Greig formed for Malvolia was so raw: you could really connect with her, particularly at the end of the play when she walked up the stairs. The rain was falling, she took her wig off; it was a really beautiful image. I think I connected to her predicament, her unrequited love more because she was a woman. She was ostracized from everyone else. That was poignant for me. When Feste was tormenting Malvolia in prison the fact that both characters were played by women heightened the situation – it seemed more real and relevant to my personal experiences. I wanted to reach out to Malvolia. I was sitting in the back row of the circle but I still felt at one with the whole audience. They reached out to me in the party scene even though I was sitting far back. The setting they created was easy for me to recognize. It was a party I could see myself at, so I felt at home. It’s important to have your own particular response to a play but an audience can also be one machine that’s got to keep running. We are all looking to feel something from this one performance, whether that is love or hate or sorrow. When you get a similar reaction to those around you it’s very empowering. James Wallace played Captain and Priest in the production.

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James Wallace The director encouraged us from the start to be aware of the audience and to play scenes out, to share them. This awareness developed as the play went along and we learnt from the audience in performance. The Olivier Theatre feels quite like a Greek amphitheatre, the audience wraps around the stage. When you are on the stage the auditorium looks smaller than you might think and you feel the proximity of the audience. Because this was a play that the audience found really funny they had a very clear audible presence; you couldn’t ignore them even if you wanted to. If the audience thought something was funny you would really hear it. We kept playing scenes throughout the run as we developed a growing awareness of how they worked in performance. The level of audience reaction, and therefore the ways in which scenes were played, would be different every night. When you go into the auditorium in technical rehearsals you become aware of the huge space that will be filled with people. A lot of thinking about playing out really happened in the technical rehearsals and the previews, in response to the audience’s reaction. Simon (Godwin) would keep working the scenes during the preview period. These changes were also quite often to do with blocking and making sure we could make the most of opportunities for sharing small scenes with the audience between the textual scenes in the play. There were several roles regendered in this production: it wasn’t just Malvolia but Fabia and Feste. The only thing that stood out about those gender swaps was really how unnoticeable they were. The characters were who they were, and the audience just accepted the casting because it worked within the fabric of the play, and in the particular world created for our Twelfth Night. A key moment in each performance was when Tamsin (Greig) turned the line ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ (5.1.371) out to the whole audience. One of my friends who saw the show said she cried at that point. She felt guilty because she had been laughing

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along, with and at Malvolia, and at that particular point she felt complicit. The scene between Feste and Malvolia (4.2), where Feste torments her, was played as a particularly dark scene. Malvolia was on a little stall, blindfolded. She was very, very vulnerable, it was quite a dark place for the play to go to. You could sense the audience’s journey with Malvolia. Whatever they felt about her at the beginning they had sympathy for her by the end. When I was in the dressing room between the scenes I could really hear the laughs every night. You hear the audience really joining in – sometimes you hear them laughing more than normal and you want to know why. The company were always trying new ideas and you could tell how well the actors were playing with each other by the quality of the audience response. In contrast to this the silence you could feel on stage at the end of the play, when Malvolia took off her wig, was extraordinary. The Olivier is a huge space and it was absolutely silent. There were moments of silence throughout the play, but this silence was especially concentrated. Sometimes there would be a few gasps, a ripple through the audience, but then silence. That’s one of my key memories of playing in the production.

Twelfth Night: Royal Exchange Theatre 13 April–20 May 2017 This production was directed by Jo Davies. Grainne Flynn, Mo Whittle, Luke Crookes, Mercy Chikoti and Jim Stewart were in the audience.

Grainne Flynn The Royal Exchange Theatre is such an intimate space, you feel so close to the characters. I was in a banquette front row and a metre away from the actors; we were so close to them. This made me feel more involved in the play. I felt this

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particularly during the scene in which Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Feste and Maria trick Malvolio (2.5). During the scene, Maria and Sir Andrew Aguecheek were on the first gallery of the theatre. Malvolio was set centre stage and the characters were shouting over the audience to each other, then hiding when they thought Malvolio might see them. It involved the whole theatre because we felt that we had to hide the characters. It brought audience and actors together: watching Malvolio get excited by the letter in the middle of the stage, while the other characters in the scene were with the audience. We felt part of the plan. I didn’t want to read the play before seeing the production. It was good that I didn’t have any knowledge of the story because as I watched the plan unfold I had no idea what would happen next. A few scenes later when Malvolio came on stage in a mass of tight gold Lycra gear (the yellow stockings) it was

FIGURE 9.1  Twelfth Night: The Royal Exchange Theatre, 2017. Kate O’Donnell as Feste and Harry Atwell as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Photograph Jonathan Keenan. With kind permission of The Royal Exchange Theatre.

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a complete surprise. I’ve never seen an audience react like that before. There was so much laughter, it felt like the actors couldn’t carry on for about five minutes. After that I was waiting to see how Malvolio would crumble. Every time his name was mentioned there would be fits of laughter from the audience, remembering what had happened in the earlier scenes. Feste spoke in character with the audience in the interval. She came and sat next to us and started having a conversation. I think this broke down the barrier between audience and actors because you felt involved within the piece. You felt completely immersed in the play. The audience at the Royal Exchange is so diverse. There are people who have seen lots of Shakespeare and there are people who have never seen Shakespeare before, particularly young people. It’s really funny to watch audience reactions and to see moments that you wouldn’t pick up on get a response from other audience members. Because the theatre is so intimate you share their response, you feel that audience’s humour, even though it is not something you would have responded to yourself. In some comic moments, the audience would laugh and then the laughter would die down, but there would be one audience member that would carry on laughing. Their continued laughter got a response from other people and the laughter carried on again. It brought more humour and joy to the play. There was a kiss between Viola and Orsino and an audience member clapped. I think that person was so immersed in the play that they didn’t even realize they were clapping. It’s really nice when characters talk directly to the audience because it feels like there is a friendship and connection there. It felt like we were joining in with a joke together and that we had the right to do that. Sometimes you are not sure how you should react. The actors in this production really acknowledged the audience and the audience felt that they could react as they wished. At the end of the play all of the characters were on stage, in confusion as they were trying to work out what was happening. The audience were laughing because we knew what was going

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on. There was such a contrast between the confusion of the characters and the audience’s reaction. The scene was made even funnier by the characters’ seriousness. I felt really involved in that. The audience had the power because they knew what was happening before the characters onstage.

Mo Whittle The staging of the play was so brilliant. My eyes were all over the place, watching people coming and going. Seeing a play at the Royal Exchange is not a linear experience. I really liked the actor playing Feste, she was amazing the way she was able to communicate with the audience with such a wry humour. I love that she incorporated herself into the audience and spoke to us during the interval. It made me feel more included. I really felt for Olivia. When the actors are so close you can feel and see their emotions and that makes the lines clearer. When a character exchanges a look with someone across the stage the intimate shape of the theatre means you can see both actor and audience reactions and that intensifies the way you receive it. You almost feel like you are a conspirator; that you are in on the conversation. That sense of inclusion I really love. I had a panoramic view of everybody and had a sense of what was happening across the audience, it was a three-­dimensional experience. When asides were being made it felt like it was just for me, that’s a skill for actors to make everybody feel that. When an actor talks to me I feel more absorbed in the story; I feel a bit more than a spectator, more like a participant.

Luke Crookes Orsino’s delivery was wonderful. He has some of the more poignant speeches in the play and I felt very connected to that. I like the closeness of the Royal Exchange Theatre: it’s like a living room. It also feels like a cocoon from which you can watch the

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play. I’m a working-­class Manchester lad and when I was growing up I didn’t go to see Shakespeare. For a working-­class person there can be a lot of fear associated with Shakespeare and theatre-­going. I don’t feel that now because I’m in my forties. I just go in with no expectations and take what comes from the production. But the nature of that environment, the cocoon, at the Royal Exchange is very helpful for safely inviting audiences to engage with the performance. There is less threshold fear. I felt Malvolio’s journey was interesting; the character resonated with me. I didn’t like him or dislike, but I liked the complexity of his character. There were a lot of faces to him. He was so complicated because he was looking for self-­worth. The character of Malvolio reminded me of commedia dell’arte. Yet the performance of the actor playing him (Anthony Calf) felt convincing, like he wasn’t an actor: he didn’t ‘pop’ the character out, he didn’t overact it and yet the complexity was there somehow.

Mercy Chikoti I had my education in Zambia where I went to a girls boarding school. We studied O levels and Twelfth Night was my set book for English. The teachers used to make us act out the play we were studying to the whole school. We played all the parts: a group of African girls, acting something that was so very English. The teachers believed that the experience would help us do better in the exam. The lines stuck in my mind so I went towards this production knowing the play and with many memories. I really enjoyed seeing it as again, the memories were made very clear even though my school experience is now around forty years ago. I particularly enjoyed the scene where Sir Toby, Maria and Sir Andrew trick Malvolio. The fact that it was in modern dress somehow made it funnier. The scene could have been something that happens in life: it’s about how people take revenge. They want to teach him a lesson. I don’t like people

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who look down on others, so that scene caught me. Seeing Malvolio so gullible made me laugh. But at the same time I felt sorry for him. The actors would come from everywhere in that scene. I felt like I was participating as well; part of the play. A lot of the performance felt very outward-­facing, like the actors were talking to me. I feel quite shy if an actor talks to me. I don’t want to be the focus of their attention.

Jim Stewart The Royal Exchange Theatre is a glorious space, there is no demarcation between the seating area and the playing area. The closeness of relationship you get between the audience and cast is not quite like anywhere else. It was a very thoughtful production that took the play’s subtitle and put it into practice – ‘what you will’. It had the confidence as a production not to force itself onto you or to try to grab your attention. Anthony Calf was a wonderful understated Malvolio. When he took Olivia’s ring to Cesario he did so on a fold-­up bike. The way he folded the bike was so prissy and precise; he completely inhabited every part of that character. Feste came to talk with members of the audience during the interval. She talked to the audience in role, telling us, for example, that she couldn’t even earn the national minimum wage as a fool. This worked very well because it seemed to grow organically out of the text. It was so thoughtful. I spoke to members of the front-­of-house team in the interval and they too were enthused by the performance. The production had an energy, life and pleasure to it that was not just on the stage but in the theatre staff as well. Anthony Calf played Malvolio.

Anthony Calf The Royal Exchange Theatre is built in the round and the audience are very much part of your performance. You are

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within them the whole time and use them throughout the play; they must be part of your experience, and you a part of theirs. They are especially useful for sharing plans at certain points in the plot, and they worked with me in this way, particularly when I was trying to find some kind of reality in the brutal way that Malvolio is treated. I’ve always believed that the real baddy in Twelfth Night is Toby Belch – a man with all the potential, all the life opportunities who just throws it all away and ridicules anyone trying their best and taking their life seriously. The audience was complicit in Toby’s brutality and therefore at the end of the play understood what a journey they, too, have put Malvolio through. They remembered enjoying watching Maria lay the letter as a trap, they remembered seeing Malvolio being fooled by their plan and they remembered laughing when he was dressed in his yellow stockings in front of Olivia. They were also aware of their enjoyment of this as a group, being in the round they could see and enjoy each other’s laughter and recognition. On stage, you are so aware that the audience is part of the plan, they are one moment your ally and the next your enemy. The culmination of Malvolio’s relationship with the audience is when he finally speaks, directly to the audience, his line: ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ (5.1.371). It was this response that I searched for from the start of the play; if the line got an ashamed silence it meant I had got his journey within the whole play right that night. Our director (Jo Davies) suggested that if we wanted to engage directly with the audience we should select a particular person to address, then perhaps move on to another, and so on. In other words what she didn’t want us to do was to ‘scattergun’ our words, but focus the line of communication. Her theory was that the person selected would feel special and everyone else jealous that you had not spoken to them, thereby drawing the whole audience in. With ‘scattergunning’ nobody in particular gets spoken to, so nobody feels included. The architecture of the Royal Exchange helps you with this, you feel wrapped within the audience and there is a sense of there

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being no division. As you grow more confident in performing the play you discover opportunities to connect with people. I felt this particularly at the end of the letter scene. It was great fun to see the audience enjoying my gulling. It’s like telling children a story – you want them to love it and to feel them engaging. It’s not necessarily the more obvious reactions like laughter that you are looking for, I just hope to see people leaning forward in their seat. If I feel an audience is not engaged, I’ve found the best thing to do technically is to slow down and speak softer, change the dynamic of my voice, try less hard. Surprise them. Think how, if we fall asleep with the radio on, an unexpected change in the music or speech pattern often wakes us up. This modern-­dress production was full of energy, impact and vitality. We definitely connected with the younger audience members. In a word it was mad; and younger audiences don’t just forgive your madness, they relish it! Kate O’Donnell played Feste.

Kate O’Donnell It was really special to be cast in this production. I am a transgender woman and this was the first time (that we know of) that Feste had been played as a trans woman by an out transgender actress. Much of Twelfth Night explores gender and identity and a lot of the casting in this production played with ‘norms’. For example Olivia was played by an actress (Kate Kennedy) who was six foot three, wearing heels. A lot of the men were shorter and the women taller. This is often the case for trans performers – but it is not so common in a Shakespeare theatre production! Someone in the audience told me: ‘I’ve never really remembered the fool in Twelfth Night before, but we’ll remember you’. That was my favourite comment! I think audiences really enjoyed Jo’s (Davies) vision for the production. Notions of gender and identity were explored alongside the themes of love and loss.

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My background is not in Shakespeare. I didn’t have a history of acting in Shakespeare plays before this production, so I possibly brought a more conversational element to the lines. I did a lot of work on speaking Shakespeare’s language before the show, but I think I probably also brought the relaxed approach that I developed in my own one-­woman shows to my portrayal of the role. My shows are quite autobiographical. I do play with words. Like Feste I am a ‘corrupter of words’ (3.1.35) and rely on my wits; so the part really resonated with me. Audiences have told me that the fact that I was not an experienced performer of Shakespeare added to my character. I felt quite free. I felt Feste as a character was quite like how I am in my life. Because of my ‘outsideness’ I’m quite free to not play by the rules. At the end of the interval I chatted to the audience, in character, before the beginning of the second half. This section grew and grew during the run. I could see that some people were quite shocked. The first scene after the interval began out of these conversations. My first line, ‘No, sir, I live by the church’ (3.1.3), got the biggest laugh. I think this was something to do with the audience getting to know Feste in those conversations. The cast and some of the audience told me that the energy of the show seemed to bounce along a bit more in the second half. I think that was because those improvised interval conversations somehow gave the audience permission to laugh. Sometimes people can be unsure whether they are allowed to laugh, particularly at a Shakespeare play. I would sit next to people and chat with them in a relaxed, cheeky way and respond to what they said. It was very live. For example I referred to being a fool as a minimum wage job. It felt really contemporary. I tried to keep it organic; the gags would come. I claimed to be hungover after the party in the earlier scene and wanting to chill out. I asked people how they liked to relax. At one performance someone said ‘we like to go to the theatre’. When I was talking to someone else I said ‘somebody over there said that they liked to go to the theatre, well that must be nice, to go to the theatre’. That got a big response. The audience

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all collectively enjoyed the idea of joking about being able to go to the theatre, knowing that we were all in the theatre. I’m glad that it worked. I hadn’t thought about this section much in rehearsal and on the first night I found it terrifying. There might have been some people that didn’t like it. It was the moment I felt most exposed in the play, because I didn’t have my Shakespeare lines, I didn’t have the other people on stage. I was literally putting myself out there as this blue-­quiffed trans woman. What was lovely was I felt I had reached a whole new demographic. After the matinees people would really want to chat to me and they weren’t the demographic who usually come to see my shows. I think it worked for audiences because the quality of the production was so good. If something is well done people respond positively – it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit cheeky. In rehearsal we talked a lot about taking risks and pushing boundaries in performance. Audiences want to feel ‘held’ by the company during the performance, but I think that they also want to feel pushed. Feste’s last song, which closed the play, was a good example. The song changed the mood in the theatre; it was a palpable feeling. The audience have had a lot of fun watching Maria’s plot unfold, then it’s all gone a bit sour because Malvolio has been treated badly and the audience feel sorry for him. Finally all is resolved for everyone, except for Malvolio. Jo (Davies) asked me to try to find the place where the song was risky and exposing. The first line, ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy’ (5.1.382), really resonated with me. We decided to repeat the line at the end of the song, so that it became the last line of the play. Some days on stage it would really overwhelm me, singing those lines. Jo asked me to imagine being a little boy playing in the sand. Some days I could and some days I couldn’t. The audience had been with me throughout the show but I always felt a bit unsure if they would go with me on that last bit of the journey. The song reflects the melancholy of ‘now’ in the play: it is about anger and gender and some of the pain of life, ‘the wind and the rain’. I found that audiences responded really positively to it, and

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that I didn’t need to worry. I think people warmed to it because we have all, in some way, experienced the ‘wind and the rain’ in our lives. I found that singing helped me make a deeper connection with an audience. When you perform people meet you, but when you sing you connect with their heart, the rhythm of the heart. If I had had to say those lines I think I would have found it more difficult. The first verse I sang with no accompaniment and I really felt that people were with me. There’s an imperceptible movement, people come and meet you. I learned to trust that people are happy to experience a bit of melancholy and reflection when they are being entertained. Because I’m a comedian I often feel more comfortable with jokes but I’ve learnt that audiences like a chance to stop laughing and to ask what have we just seen? When I sang the first line of the song I always used to think of Viola, having to play a boy to get by. I thought, I’ve had to play a little boy in my life to get by; I felt that it connected us. I felt more connected with the audience in the second half. People were laughing, responding. I got booed at one point when I was a bit horrible to Viola: ‘I don’t care much for you’. I loved it. We talked a lot about the energy of an audience. Some audiences are clappers and will clap at a line. Some are really raucous belly laughers, so much so that you kind of had to brace yourself before you said a line. You need the audience’s energy to get you through a show. Sometimes you could feel them listening. We relied on the audience’s wit and intelligence and confidence. Sometimes you could feel they were not confident. It could shift in the second half, after they had a drink or talked with me. Other times it would stay the same and the energy they brought in stayed. The challenge is then to work with that. At the beginning I say some quite challenging things to Olivia – like I know your brother’s soul is in hell (1.5.64). That for me was a bit of a litmus test for the audience – I did that whole scene once and didn’t get any response. I liked that, I thought that’s a really interesting audience, they don’t know what to do with me, I’ve kind of stunned them into silence. I would just work with and enjoy whatever was there.

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Sometimes I would say that line and they would laugh their heads off – I’d think that’s a really risky audience. Others were more nervous and there would be a sharp intake of breath. I would try not to change my approach – for example not to try too hard if audiences did not laugh. I would try to enjoy the show myself. If I felt thrown by a reaction I would just focus back on stage. I learnt to relax with an audience. It’s interesting to chat to other members of the company and we would sometimes experience the audience in different ways. I felt I gained a new vocabulary about audiences. When you take risks I think audiences like it – it let me in to their world and it let them a bit in to my world. I got to play in their world and they got to play in mine. I liked working in the round and being surrounded by people. It’s the nicest thing because when you turn around everyone’s there. Like life – when you chat to your friend in the street there are people all around you, they are not only on one side. I really enjoyed that.

Index

accessibility of arts 111 of Shakespeare 104, 132 acting companies, and audience segmentation 44 actors actor–audience relationship xiii–xiv, 6, 44–5, 77–8, 172, 206–7, 228, 229–30, 238, 241, 243–5 child actors 43 energy of the performance 147 open 173 transgender 258 Adams, Matthew 98, 100, 101 Addison, Joseph 177 adolescents (see also young people) adolescent spectators 10 affective experiences of theatre 105–12 with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) 122–3 and interest development 102 the school theatre trip 82–3, 103–5, 113, 187 self-­consciousness/social awkwardness of 110 agency, of audiences 20, 41 Alexander, Bill 27 Almeida Theatre 167, 172

amateur theatre companies Questors 231–5 and the Royal Shakespeare Company 178–94 amphitheatres, in Shakespeare’s time 40, 41–2, 44, 46 (see also theatre(s)) An Apology for Actors 48 Antony and Cleopatra 25 architecture of amphitheatres 44–5 and audience 78, 81–2 Globe Theatre (modern) 76, 77, 85, 201, 205, 210 and meaning-­making 79–80 pop-­up venues 90–1 Royal Exchange Theatre xiii–xiv, 251, 253, 254–5, 256, 257 Armin, Robert 50 artistry, and instrumentality 126–7 arts accessibility of 111 arts education experiences and class 107, 109–11 arts engagement and self-­identity 100 arts habitus 99 barriers to attendance 100–1, 109–11 marginalization of arts education 113

264

Index

participation in as a right 132 research into arts engagement 98–9 Arts Council, UK 4 Aschbacher, Pamela R. 102 asides 23, 35n.26, 202 Astington, John 42, 44 Auckland, pop-­up Globe 90–1 Audience Manifesto, Royal Exchange Theatre xiii audiences (see also spectators) actor–audience relationship xiii–xiv, 6, 44–5, 77–8, 172, 206–7, 228, 229–30, 238, 241, 243–5 actor’s perceptions of 144 age of 31, 32, 187 (see also adolescents; young people) agency of 20, 41 and architecture 78, 81–2 are not ‘other’ 208 attention of 172–3 audience building 4, 5 audience demographics, Globe to Globe Festival 2012 79 audience development and the school theatre trip 103–5 audience experience 105–12, 174 audience reactions 19 audience reception as counter-­performance 48–55, 83–4, 128 audience responses. See responses, audience audience segmentation 43–4

behaviour of 4, 46, 147 blurring of boundaries between actors/audience 187, 190, 192, 197–8, 199, 200, 202–3, 203–4, 206, 212, 222, 253, 254 communication with 163, 185, 234–5, 257 complicity of 240–1, 251, 257 connecting with. See connecting with audiences contemporary 19, 204 in different countries 143–9, 150–4 directly addressing 20–7, 30–1, 45, 60–1, 81–2, 144, 156, 167, 242, 253, 257, 259 disruption by as demand for participation 46–9 diversity of 41–3, 132, 204, 210, 253 effect of on the Hamlet company 153–4 energy of 147, 165, 207, 217, 261 engagement of 9–10, 163–4, 167–8, 180, 186, 195–8, 199, 216, 220–1, 239–40, 246, 247, 258 included on screen 167–8 including in the performance 27–8, 183, 213, 241, 244 ‘inner frame’/‘outer frame’ of 28, 31, 33 involvement of 252 learning from 19, 174 making meaning 23

Index

the nature of 2 newcomer 79 the next generation of 10 participation of 45, 46–9 power of 20, 29 school groups 82–3, 103–5, 113, 187 (see also young people) of Shakespeare’s own time 8–9, 19, 39, 46–8 shaping the narrative 17–18 transmission of emotion 152, 165 who are they? 8, 32 (see also diversity of) young people 100–1, 103, 242, 243, 245–6 (see also school groups) Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) 125 Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) 119–20, 122–3, 125–30, 133–6 Bahl, Ankur 201–5 Bain, Maggie Ann 205–7 Banks, Fiona 140 Baracco, Andrea 81 Barbican Theatre 191 barriers, to arts attendance 100–1, 109–11 Barron, Brigid 102 Barthes, Roland 23 behaviour, of audiences 4, 46, 147 Bell, Philip 102 Bennett, Susan 3, 7, 9–10, 28 Blackfriars 44 Block, Giles 226

265

‘Booke of Playes . . . for Common Pollicie, The’ 54 Booth, Edwin 25 Bourdieu, Pierre 97, 98, 99, 112 Boxpark, Shoreditch 90 Branagh, Kenneth 170 Brennan, Liam 29 British Film Institute’s Silent Shakespeare 88 Britton, Jasper 29 Bryden, Ronald 26 Buckhurst, Bill 142, 154–6, 235, 240, 245–6 Calf, Anthony 255, 256–8 call-­and-response, The Winter’s Tale 83–4 Canterbury Players 180–1, 185 capital, cultural 112 capitalism 41 Caroline period 42 Carroll, Tim 26, 31, 81, 220, 225–6, 229–31 Carson, Christie 77 casting 209 catechism, early allusions to 53 Chahidi, Paul 77, 224–9 characters addressing the audience 20–7, 30–1, 45, 144, 156, 167, 253, 257, 259 character development 163, 164 female 44 gay 201, 204 ‘response-­regulators’ 22 Cherry Orchard, The 28–9 Chikoti, Mercy 255–6 choirs, boys’ 43

266

Index

Chung, Lo-Yun 102 cinema, and theatre 238 Civil War, English 52 Clamorous Voices 1 class (see also elites) and arts education experiences 107, 109–11 class habitus 99, 113 social-­rank hostility 42 and theatre-­going 255 clowns 44, 48, 50 Coates, Miranda 162, 170–1, 185, 195–6, 221–2, 248 Cocks, Malcolm 145, 149–54 collaboration, of audience and player 48 comedy 210, 226–7 communication, with audiences 163, 185, 234–5, 257 Complete Walk, The 9–10, 78–9, 85–90 connecting with audiences and the actor/audience relationship 180, 186, 188, 189–91, 193–4, 231–2 allowing the audience in 156 and audience response 163–5 and the confidence of the actor 258 connecting to the characters predicament 249 finding pockets in the audience to connect with 210, 212, 242–3 and the production/actors 167–71 and the setting and casting 158–62 and shared light 147–8 and singing 261

and the theatre 238 and the venue 189, 200–1, 205–7, 233 Connerton, Paul 89 consumerism, cultural 5 context, and audience response 154 Corbett, Blythe A. 132 Cormack, Finlay 128 counter-­performances 48–55, 83–4, 128 Coveney, Michael 29 Cresswell, Tim 89 Crookes, Luke 6, 254–5 Crouch, Tim 31, 32 Cullinane, Bethan 162–6 Cultural Olympiad, Olympic Games 78 culture(s) and audience response 145, 146 cultural accessibility of Shakespeare 104 cultural capital 112 cultural consumerism 5 cultural context of performance 153 cultural exchange and performance 80 cultural experience of theatre-­going 108–9 cultural habitus 98 cultural policy 4 elite and popular 42 as a human right 149 self-­exclusion from cultural activities 101 current affairs, in Shakespeare’s plays 50–1 (see also ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’)

Index

Darlington, Beth 170 Davey, Jen 157, 198, 215 Davies, Jo 251, 257, 258, 260 Davies, John 41 Davies, Oliver Ford 27 De Marinis, Marco 21–2, 29 Deafinitely Theatre 80 Dekker, Thomas 42, 46, 53 design choices, and the roles spectators play 28 Digges, Leonard 44, 47 disbelief, suspension of 45, 159 disruption, in early modern theatre 47, 48, 49 Distinction 98 diversity audience 41–3, 132, 204, 210, 253 of Shakespeare in performance 5 Drake, Joan 53 drama-­based interventions 126 drama, military emphasis of in 1580s and 1590s 43 dramatic illusion 45 dramatists, and audiences 40 Dream 16 178–94 Chris Nayak’s account of 193–4 Chu Omambala’s account of 189–92 Emily Humphries’s account of 183–4 Fleur Elkerton’s account of 182–3 Ian Wainwright’s account of 178–80 James Newberry’s account of 188–9

267

Lori Hopkins’s account of 184 Miranda Coates’s account of 185 Sally Elkerton’s account of 185–6 Sarah Gooch’s account of 186–8 Tessa Taylor’s account of 180–2 Dromgoole, Dominic 88, 142, 154, 155 early modern period 40–3 Education and Audience Development Audit 104 education, maginalization of arts education 80 educational objectives, of the school theatre trip 103–4 Egg Theatre, Bath 31, 32 elites (see also class) acting companies serving 44 in Shakespeare’s time 41–2 Elkerton, Fleur 182–3 Elkerton, Sally 185–6 Ellinson, Lucy 179–80, 184, 185, 188 emotion, transmission of 152, 165 energy of the actors performance 147 of audiences 147, 165, 207, 217, 261 of the performance 181, 184, 190–1, 196 engagement arts 100

268

Index

audience 9–10, 163–4, 167–8, 180, 186, 195–8, 199, 216, 220–1, 239–40, 246, 247, 258 of young audiences 103 English Touring Theatre 28 entitlement, to the culture on offer 111–12 entrainment 123 Escolme, Bridget 26 Essiedu, Paapa 158, 160–2, 164, 165, 168 Evans, Faith 1 exclusion, from theatre-­going 111, 113 female characters 44 Filter Theatre 27–8 financial climate, for theatres 4 first-­day performances 21 Fletcher, John 44 Flute Theatre 10–11, 119–36 Flynn, Grainne 251–4 Forman, Simon 54–5 fourth wall 26, 45, 81, 183, 234, 245 Frain, James 27 Frankcom, Sarah xiii Freshwater, Helen 3 funding agencies 4 Gannons, Tricia 129 Gardner, Lyn 133 gay characters 201, 204 genres, popular in Shakespeare’s time 44 Giulio Cesare 81–2 Globe on Screen 88 Globe Theatre (modern)

and the actor/audience relationship 6, 228, 229–30, 241, 243–5 addressing the audience in 81–2, 242 architecture of 76, 77, 85, 201, 205, 210 and attitudes to Shakespeare’s plays 4 and audience response 29 criticisms of 78 dual function of 77 and early modern play-­going 44–5 Lords’ Room 84–5 Original Practices performances 77–8 performance space of 81–2 Prologue Season (1996) 17–18 responding to contemporary audiences 46 shattering conventions of watching a play at 79–80 Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s artistic representations of 76 audience behaviour at that time 46 dramatic genres at that time 44 Globe to Globe Festival 2012 9–10, 78, 79–85 ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’ 142–57 Bill Buckhurst’s accounts of 154–6 effect of the audience on the company 153–4 Jen Davey’s account of 157 Jim Stewart’s account of 156–7

Index

Malcolm Cocks’s accounts of 150–4 Matthew Romain’s accounts of 143–9 returning to its home stage 85 Godwin, Simon 158, 163, 246, 250 Gooch, Sarah 186–8 Gould, Michael 215–18 Greig, Tamsin 248, 249, 250 Guardian 132 Guilty Creatures: The International Audiences for the Globe-­to-Globe Hamlet Tour 150 Gull’s Hornbook, The 42, 46 Gurr, Andrew 44 habitus 98–9, 112, 113 Hall, David 197–8 Hamlet in Afghanistan 144 audience engagement 9, 29–30 in Belgium 155 in Belize 147 in Benin 152–3 in the Calais Jungle 149 in Cambodia 144–5 in Cameroon 151–2 in the Caribbean 147 in Chicago 149 in East and West Africa 150–4 in Eastern Europe 147 in Ghana 154 ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’. See ‘Globe to Globe Hamlet’ in Hungary 155

269

identity formation in 72 in Iran 148 jig 30 in Johannesburg 147 in Jordan 148–9 in Liberia 145 in Mexico 147 in Romania 148 in Rwanda 146, 150–1 soliloquies 29–30, 60, 144, 161, 162, 169, 170, 171 in Somaliland 143, 149 in Sudan 145 themes explored in 144–6, 148–9, 151 in Uganda 145 in the Ukraine 145 in Uruguay 156 Hamlet: Almeida Theatre (17 February–15 April 2017) 166–76 Beth Darlington’s account of 170 Jenny Hewett’s account of 169–70 Juliet Stevenson’s account of 171–6 Miranda Coates’s account of 170–1 Stuart Rathe’s account of 167–8 Hamlet: Royal Shakespeare Company (12 March–13 August 2016) 158–66 Bethan Cullinane’s account of 163–6 Jim Stewart’s account of 161 Miranda Coates’s account of 162

270

Index

Paul and Jane Shuter’s account of 158–60 Stuart Rathe’s account of 162 Susan Robinson’s account of 160–1 Hapgood, Robert 22–3 Happé, Francesca 120 Harland, John 111 Harold Pinter Theatre 166 Hartwell, Lorna 198–200 Harvie, Jen 5 Hayat, Naeem 157 ‘Heartbeat Circle’ 122, 123, 131 Henry IV, Part 1 53 Henry V 20, 22, 27 Henry VIII 20, 21 Hewett, Jenny 169–70 Heywood, Thomas 48 higher education institutions, building audiences 5 Hildy, Franklin 76 Hill-Gibbins, Joe 213, 216 historical transition 41 Holland, Dorothy 101 Hollar, Wenceslas 76 Honigmann, E.A.J. 22, 23 Hopkins, Lori 184 Hornby, Nick 134 Hove, Ivo van 28 Howard, Jean E. 47 Humphries, Emily 183–4 Hunter Heartbeat Method (HHM) 122, 124–32 Hunter, Kelly 119, 121, 122, 129 I, Malvolio 31–2 Icke, Robert 166, 172, 173, 175

identity(ies) concept of 99–101 English and the Globe theatre 80 identity formation in Hamlet 72 and interest development 101–2, 109, 112 self-­identity 99, 100, 101, 102 and theatre-­going 10, 109–11 ‘inner frame’/‘outer frame’, of audiences 28, 31, 33 instrumentality, and artistry 126–7 interest development, and identity 101–2, 109, 112 intimacy in productions 168, 169 of venues 186, 215, 251, 253, 254–5, 256–7 ‘Is Science Me?’ 102 Izzard, Lowri 129 Jackson, Joshua 127, 128, 133 Jama, Jama Musse 143 Jenkins, Henry 99, 100, 112 Jewish Chronicle 18 Jones, James Earl 25 Jonson, Ben 43 Judi Dench Playhouse 231 Julius Caesar 27, 81–2 Kelly, Rona 214, 248–9 Kemp, William 50 Kennedy, Dennis 78, 130 Kiernan, Pauline 18 King’s Men 44 Kyd, Thomas 42–3

Index

Langley, Jane 232 language and performing Shakespeare to non-English speakers 152, 155 as a screen 65 of Shakespeare 143 learning from audiences 19, 174 learning identity 101–2 listening on stage, importance of 172, 173 London Boxpark, Shoreditch/Pop Brixton 90 in Shakespeare’s time 41 South Bank 89–90 Lopez, Jeremy 9 Lord Chamberlain’s Men 50 Love’s Labour’s Lost 54, 80 Macbeth 24–5, 54–5 Macdonald, Chris 129 Mackenzie, Rowan 135 MacLean, Shiela 196–7, 224 Magigi, Natasha 243–5 Malyon, Claire 231–2 Manna, Vincenzo 81 Manningham, John 219 Map of the World 19 marketing tools, and audience participation 50 Marlowe, Christopher 42–3 Marlowe Theatre 183, 184, 185, 186 Mary Stuart 175 Massai, Sonia 82, 85 Mazibuko, Sifiso 127 McKellen, Ian 26–7 McNeill, William H. 123

271

meaning and contemporary and Elizabethan audiences 19 and the cultural context of performance 153 the making of 23, 77 and the modern Globe Theatre 77 new possibilities of 80 and places of their production 79 production of 41 Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary, A 53 Mehling, Margaret 125, 126, 130 Middle Temple Hall 223, 228, 230 Middleton, Thomas 43, 53 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 80, 202–3, 215 (see also Dream 16) Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s Globe (30 April–11 September 2016) 194–212 Alison Sear’s account of 197 Ankur Bahl’s account of 201–5 David Hall’s account of 197–8 Emma Rice’s account of 208–12 Jen Davey’s account of 198 Keith Rogers and Lorna Hartwell’s account of 198–200 Kelley Moncrief’s account of 200–1 Maggie Ann Bain’s account of 205–7 Miranda Coates’s account of 195–6 pre-­show briefing 207

272

Index

Shiela MacLean’s account of 196–7 Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Young Vic Theatre, London (16 February–1 April 2017) 213–18 Bethany Punnett’s account of 213–14 Jen Davey’s account of 215 Michael Gould’s account of 215–18 Rona Kelly’s account of 214 Milton, John 47–8 model spectator 21–2 Moncrief, Kelley 200–1 Mondahl, Byron 164 Much Ado about Nothing 44 Mugnaioni, Alex 240–3 music and autism 120, 134 as a hook 246 and theatre 196 mystery-­play cycles 40

Ockelford, Adam 120, 133 O’Donnell, Kate 258–62 Oldcastle, John 53 Olive, Sarah 82–3 Oliver, Emily 81 Olivier Theatre 246, 250, 251 Olympic Games, Cultural Olympiad 78 Omambala, Chu 189–92 open-­air playhouses 17 Open Stages at the RSC 178 Ora Gallery, New York 91 Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond 119, 124 organizations, relationship with their audiences 7 Osborne, Dorothy 54 Othello 24–5, 50, 103, 107–12 Other Place, Stratford 124 outreach work, Royal Shakespeare Company 122 Owen, Jane 53 ownership, of the culture on offer 111–12

Nabbes, Thomas 42 Nathan, David 18 National Endowment for the Arts 100 National Theatre Olivier Theatre 246, 250, 251 The Shed 90 Nayak, Chris 193–4 New Direction for the Arts 100, 101 Newberry, James 188–9 Nga¯ kau Toa 80 Nicholson, Helen 124 Nightingale, Lisa 186, 187

participation, of audiences 45, 46–9 participatory enquiry 105 Pepys, Samuel 177, 219 performance(s) audience responses 31, 32, 39–40, 187, 194 audiences as part of 241 contemporary Shakespearean 130 counter-­performances 48–9, 49–55, 128 cultural context of 153 cultural exchange and 80 development of 163–4

Index

effect of the venue 150, 155, 189, 201, 205, 210, 222, 250 energy of 181, 184, 190–1, 196 first-­day performances 21, 46–7 fourth wall 26, 45, 81, 183, 234, 245 inclusiveness of 196, 198, 254 intensity of 217 involvement in the 169 maintaining freshness in 173 open/closed 22, 144 ‘pop-­up’ phenomenon 90 pre-­show briefing 242 reasons for attending 28 reduced-­price preview performances 29 Shakespeare in 4 soundscapes as part of 147 spectators shaping 29 in twenty-­first-century life 78 Pericles 20, 35n.26, 80 Pethick family 236–9 physical discomfort, and social discomfort 110 Pitts, Stephanie 102 plague 41, 53 Play 31 playbooks 1 Henry IV (1598) 53 growing importance of 49–50 market for 40 playfulness 125 playgoers/play readers 41, 53–4 (see also theatre-­going)

273

plays, first performance of 21, 46–7 Plummer, Christopher 25 policy, cultural 4 politics, in Shakespeare’s plays 50–1 Pop Brixton 90 ‘pop-­up’ venues 90–1 Post, Robin 126, 130 post-­show talks 6–7 power of audiences 20, 29 power dynamics, early modern theatre 84 theatrical 65 pre-­show briefing 207 Preiss, Richard 46, 48 producers, and consumers 40 productions intimacy in 168, 169 as a process 175 relationships within 167 tailoring to the audience 240 visually stunning 248, 249 prologues, epilogues and chorus speeches 20–1 public sphere, of discussion and debate 43 Punnett, Bethany 213–14, 249 Purcell, Stephen 8, 80, 128 Questors theatre company 231–5 Rathe, Stuart 162, 167–8 Reason, Matthew 10, 132 reception practices 40 Red Bull theatre 49 Redsea Cultural Foundation Hargeysa, Somaliland 143

274

Index

reflexivity and class habitus 113 and self-­identity 100 rehearsal process 208 relationships amateur and professional companies 179, 182 audience/actor xiii–xiv, 6, 44–5, 77–8, 172, 206–7, 228, 229–30, 238, 241, 243–5 of characters based on love 173–4 dramatists and audience 40 producers and consumers of plays 40 social between stage/ spectator 85 within productions 167 religion, and theatre 40, 41 religious martyrs 52 Renegade Theatre of Lagos, Nigeria 82–5 research into arts engagement 98–9 audience 2–3, 5, 105–12, 145, 149–50 embedded researchers 5 The Globe as an important site for 91 into interest development 102 research methodology 12–14 social cognition 122 respectability, of early modern theatre 49 responses, audience actors sharing the responses 253

to an alteration in atmosphere 233 change in the 240–1 and choices actors make 175 and comedy/emotional truth 226–7 and context 154 contributing to the performance 31, 39–40, 187, 194 and culture(s) 145, 146 discussing 209 early modern 39–40 gauging 234 and the pace of a scene 147 requesting a response 243 Shakespeare’s nudging or dictating of 22 shaping forces of 39–40 silences 241, 251 unusual 230 and venues 229 young people 242 Rest is Silence, The 165–6 Reynolds, Robin 76–7 Rice, Emma 194, 195–6, 201, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208–12 Richard III 27 Richardson, Nicholas 51–3 risk taking 260, 262 Robinson, Susan 160–1, 223–4 Rodenburg, Patsy 131 Rogers, Keith 198–200 Romain, Matthew 143–9, 161 Roman Tragedies 28 Romeo and Juliet 28, 51–3 Root, Robin 125, 126 Roth, Stephanie 18

Index

Royal Exchange Theatre xiii–xiv, 251, 253, 254–5, 256, 257 Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 103 Royal Shakespeare Company and amateur theatre companies 178–94 Other Place, Stratford 124 outreach work 122 Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-­upon-Avon 186, 189 Rutter, Carol 1 Rylance, Mark 17–18, 29–31, 78, 190, 222, 223, 227, 230 Sanders, Julie 83, 84 satires 43 school theatre trips 82–3, 103–5, 113, 187 (see also adolescents; young people) science identity 101–2 Scott, Andrew 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175 Scottish Arts Council 100, 104 Sear, Alison 197 Second Folio commendatory poems 47–8 self-­awareness and habitus 112, 113 Hamlet 72 self-­exclusion, from cultural activities 101 self-­identity 99, 100, 101, 102 self-­representation, and identity 101 self-­socialization 99, 111 servants, household 54 Seven Tragedies 22

275

Shakespeare, William anticipated audiences of 19 audiences of his time 8–9, 19, 39, 46–8 broad appeal of 43 and contemporary audiences 204 and counter-­performance 50 cultural accessibility of 104 dialogue between characters/ audience 241–2 early responses to 51–5 enduring popularity of 7 400th anniversary of his death 7 language of 143 in performances 4 politics/current affairs in his plays 50–1 skill of 209 writing for the specificities of a building 77 Shakespeare 400 celebrations 76–7, 78–9 Shakespeare Association of America 4 Shakespeare studies 5 Shakespeare the Theatre-Poet 22–3 Shaughnessy, Nicola 126–7, 130–1 Shaughnessy, Robert 10–11, 104 Shed, The 90 Sher, Antony 27 Shuter, Paul and Jane 158–60, 222, 239–40, 247–8 silences 175–6, 241, 251 singing, and connecting with the audience 261 Sleep No More 28

276

Index

Smith, Bruce 84–5 social determinism 100 social discomfort, and physical discomfort 110 social engagement, performing conventions and rules of 77 social relationships, between stage/spectator 85 soliloquies 23–7 Hamlet 29–30, 60, 144, 161, 162, 169, 170, 171 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 202–3, 215 soundscapes, as part of the performance 147 Soyinka, Wole 84 spatial relations, stage–audience 81–2 spectators (see also audiences) adolescent 10 model spectator 21–2 shaping performances 29 stage-­orations 21, 26 States, Bert O. 25, 26 Stephens, John 47 Stern, Tiffany 21, 77 Stevenson, Juliet 169, 171–6 Stewart, Jim 156–7, 161, 220–1, 256 Summers, Adam 181 surveillance, use of 167–8, 170–1 Taming of the Shrew, The 24 Tara Arts 4 Tarlton, Richard 48 Tassé, Marc 125, 126, 130 Taylor, Tessa 180–2 technology, use of 167 Tempest, The 10–11, 29

texts, creating/shaping the audience 20 Theatre and Audience 3 Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception 3–4, 28 theatre-­going (see also playgoers/play readers) and class 255 conscious rejection of 112–13 cultural experience of 108–9 exclusion from 111, 113 and identity 10, 109–11 theatre(s) (see also individual theatres) amphitheatres in Shakespeare’s time 40, 41–2, 44, 46 audience-­centred 48 and cinema 238 design of 44–5 disruption in early modern theatre 47, 48, 49 financial climate for 4 fourth wall in 26, 45, 81, 183, 234, 245 fourth-­wall-removed 77 open-­air playhouses 17 place and value of in society 149 proscenium-­arch 189 and religion 40, 41 repurposing/remaking of theatre space 80, 84 in Shakespeare’s time 40–1, 43 thrust stage 189, 233 ticket prices 5 Titus Andronicus 23

Index

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 31, 32 Troilus and Cressida 80 trust, in the audience 176 Tulloch, John 28, 111 Twelfth Night 19, 27–8, 80 Twelfth Night: a Shakespeare’s Globe production (2002–12) 220–31 Jim Stewart’s account of 220–1 Miranda Coates’s account of 221–2 Paul and Jane Shuter’s account of 222 Paul Chahidi’s account of 225–9 Shiela MacLean’s account of 224 Susan Robinson’s account of 223–4 Tim Carroll’s account of 229–31 Twelfth Night: Questors Theatre, Ealing (22–30 April 2016) 231–5 Alan Waldock’s account of 232–3 Claire Malyon’s account of 231–2 Jane Langley’s account of 232 Stuart Watson’s account of 233–5 Twelfth Night: Royal Exchange Theatre (13 April–20 May 2017) 251–62 Anthony Calf’s account of 256–8 Grainne Flynn’s account of 251–4

277

Jim Stewart’s account of 256 Kate O’Donnell’s account of 258–62 Luke Crookes’s account of 254–5 Mercy Chikoti’s account of 255–6 Mo Whittle’s account of 254 Twelfth Night: Shakespeare’s Globe, a ‘Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank’ production for young people/families (22 February–25 March 2016) 235–46 Alex Mugnaioni’s account of 240–3 Bill Buckhurst’s account of 245–6 Jane Shuter’s account of 239–40 Natasha Magigi’s account of 243–5 Pethick family’s account of 236–9 Twelfth Night: The National Theatre, London (15 February–13 May 2017) 246–51 Bethany Punnett’s account of 249 James Wallace’s account of 250–1 Jim Stewart’s account of 246–7 Miranda Coates’s account of 248

278

Index

Paul and Jane Shuter’s account of 247–8 Rona Kelly’s account of 248–9 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 17–18 Two Gents Productions 4 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 29 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 132 United States Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 125 van Kampen, Claire 223 venues intimacy of 186, 215, 251, 253, 254–5, 256–7 open-­air playhouses 17 and the performance 150, 155, 189, 201, 205, 210, 222, 250 ‘pop-­up’ phenomenon 90–1 in Shakespeare’s time 39 where Shakespeare’s companies played 43, 77 Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale (VABS) 125

Visscher, Claes 76 Wainwright, Ian 178–80 Wainwright, Oliver 90 Waldock, Alan 232–3 Wallace, James 249–51 Warner, David 26, 169, 170 Watch Me 241, 244, 246 Watson, Stuart 233–5 Weimann, Robert 50 White, Willard 26–7 Whitney, Charles 8–9, 128 Whittle, Mo 254 Whyman, Erica 178, 186, 193–4 Williams, Lia 175 Winter’s Tale, The 20, 82–5 women, playgoers/play readers 53–4 Woods, Penelope 120, 145 World Shakespeare Festival 78 Worthen, W.B. 131–2 Wright, Edward 19 Year of Shakespeare, The 82 ‘You, the Audience’ xiii ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre’ 103 young people 100–1, 103, 242, 243, 245–6 (see also adolescents) Young Vic 215