...i'll find a day to massacre them all...
the jew of malta
by christopher marlowe
titus andronicus
by william shakespeare
volpone
or
the fox
by ben jonson
Wednesday 8 August - Saturday 1 September, 2001
Third Floor, Wakefield Markets, Wellington
More commonly known as just The Trilogy,
this mammoth feat
saw 14 actors playing 70 roles in 3 different Renaissance plays.
The plays were performed individually on weeknights and then all
together in one nine-hour long performance beginning at 3pm each
Saturday and ending nigh on midnight. Audience members could see
individual performances or endure the same mammoth journey as the
actors on the Saturday 'trilogy day'.
cast:
Alex Greig, Andrea Molloy, Carey Smith,
David Lawrence,
David Prendergast, Erica Lowe, Eve Middleton, Heather O'Carroll,
James Stewart, Jocelyn Christian, John Porter, Kate Soper,
Mark Cleary, Tina Helm
Production Manager Eve Middleton;
Publicist Hannah Deans;
Posters designed by Judith Wayers;
Directed by David Lawrence
If there's one event that The Bacchanals will always be remembered
for, it's the Trilogy. Even people who've never been to a Bacchanals
show know about the trilogy and invariably when I'm introduced to
theatre folk by other theatre folk it's always an introduction that
goes along the lines of, "This is David, he runs a company who once
did this crazy season where they did three Renaissance plays in a
row..."
The origins of the trilogy are complex and difficult to coherently
explain. First: I have always wanted to do
Titus Andronicus.
I first read the play in 1994 and was astounded that I'd never been
told about this play beforehand. In the years since then time and
again I've watched jaws drop when I describe the plot of this play
to students (it's always been a good "get their attention back"
classroom ploy -
tell them about "Titus Andronicus"!). I
planned a lavish production of the play, requiring a cast of 80,
huge battle scenes and ending with Aaron buried up to his neck in
the ground in the Botanic Gardens and applied to do it as a Summer
Shakespeare when I was 19. I didn't get the job but still had the
20-page treatment with drawings, diagrams, multiple ideas for staging
the limb-severing and so on. In 1996 my old high school did a
production which, to my knowledge, is only the second time the play
had ever been performed in New Zealand. I was very impressed at how
well a lot of the violence played (especially in terms of stage
trickery like the onstage hand-chopping), although the audience were
in unnecessary hysterics when a stagehand came on to mop the floor
after Chiron and Demetrius' throats had been slit. The play was
always high up on my list of ones I wanted to do, but one I knew
would always have a very limited audience appeal. When Julie
Taymor's film Titus,
based largely on her New York stage
production, was released in NZ in 2000, I was disappointed - not
by the film, which in many cases is one of the best screen
Shakespeares, but by the knowledge that surely the release of a
film version would kill any market for a stage production dead,
in the same way that after the Branagh
Much Ado About Nothing
or Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet
those two plays became
unstageable, the films were so firmly etched into the public
consciousness. But to my surprise - at least as far as The
Bacchanals were concerned - the film made everyone eager to do a
production of the play.
Jonson's Volpone is more
frequently revived in the UK than
a good third of the Shakespearean canon. When studying the play
on a post-grad course in 2000, our small honours class had great
fun debating just how you would stage sections of it - chiefly
the incredibly long scene in which Volpone disguises himself as a
mountebank, which goes on for pages and pages in prose. And also
the role of what the class referred to as the 'zanies', 'exquisites'
or (for the more un-PC of us) 'freaks' in a stage performance would
be. We had a great evening where, instead of watching a film version
of the play in question (which was what we were doing with the other
Renaissance plays on the course), we combined a pot-luck dinner
with a read-through of the entire play. As with seeing
Titus
staged, I was impressed by how swift and entertaining
Volpone
sounded when read aloud, having experienced what a dense read it
can be. Somewhere in the proceedings, I found myself saying "I am
going to stage an uncut Volpone,
leaving the songs, the freaks
and the mountebank scene intact!" The programme notes for
Othello
declared that Volpone would be
somewhere on the future agenda.
I had a Renaissance play on the agenda for 2001 but couldn't decide
which one. I loved Volpone, but
it felt disloyal to my real
passion to not do a Shakespeare. Jean Betts had suggested
post-Othello that rehearsed
readings of some of these
obscure but wonderful texts might be the way to go, especially
with plays we knew would have too limited an audience appeal to
sustain a season of any length. And then I read reviews of Michael
Boyd's productions of the three parts of
Henry VI for the
Royal Shakespeare Company. In the midst of a season in which the
RSC eventually staged the entire run of History plays, Boyd's
productions of the Henry VI
trilogy enjoyed a run where, on
Saturdays, they could be viewed in one nine-hour long marathon.
I was hugely excited by Michael Billington's review in the
Guardian, where he made a
few observations I found very
attractive about such a project. The first was that they were
undertaking such a feat was far more important than how well it
was done - that any insufficiencies in certain moments could be
excused by the sheer effort of the project. And the second, more
important one to my mind, was that the audience and actors shared
the same journey together - they got fatigued at the same points,
and got their second wind at the same points. In short, it
sounded like exactly the kind of show I wanted to do.
So on January 21st 2001, at the first rehearsal for
Wealth and
Hellbeing, I suggested an idea to Carey, James and Tina: a
season of three Renaissance plays - each one a play that might be
popular but in NZ would be unable to sustain a full-length season
on its own - performed by the same company of 15 actors, with the
plays rotated on weeknights and then performed all on the same day
each weekend. The idea was that each actor would have a lead role
in one play, a supporting role in another, and then in the final
play would play the walk-ons and spear carriers. Audience could
see the plays individually but would be encouraged, for a reduced
ticket price, to see the 'marathon'. To enhance the joint journey,
the actors and audience would share meals and refreshments together
between the plays. Far from thinking the idea was insane, Carey,
James and Tina thought it sounded great, beginning a policy that
has always been very important for The Bacchanals - thinking
straight away about all the
good reasons for
doing something before considering potential obstacles. We all
agreed that it would be the ultimate challenge for actors -
rehearsing and performing three plays in repertory (something
actors in NZ never
get to do). For me it provided the added challenge of finding a
uniform style between the three to make the plays easy to rehearse
but also making them different enough to make seeing all three
plays worthwhile. Titus Andronicus
and Volpone were
done deals and for the third play it made sense to have something
that tied into their moods somewhat. It was a toss-up between a
Marlowe or a Webster but I quickly decided that, in light of Webster's
The Duchess of Malfi having
already had professional
productions in NZ, Marlowe was more deserving of a lucky break,
and The Jew of Malta tied
nicely into the two already-chosen
plays in terms of villainy, deceit and treachery.
Over the next few months I sounded numerous people out about the
idea and not a single person I spoke to thought the idea was a bad
one. It was exhilarating seeing the excitement everyone had at the
idea (even though, ultimately, a very tiny percentage of the people
who were enthused at the sound of the project actually came to see
it) and during the run of
Wealth and Hellbeing we started
making definite plans. Laurie Atkinson's review of
Wealth
actually devoted its final paragraph to talking about the planned
trilogy. We weren't sure whether he thought we were being serious
or not. I had drawn up casting charts and the three plays were
very complimentary in terms of minimum cast sizes - all three could
be done comfortably with 15 actors and everyone would have at least
one decent opportunity to shine. Ultimately as the cast was
assembled and shuffled about, the charts kept changing. Rather
than firmly cast things, I wanted the performers to volunteer
themselves for parts - but as
Titus was the only play most
people had read, their decisions were made entirely on that play.
Eve took the plunge and said, "If it's first in, first served,
then can I have Tamora?" Carey and James wanted to play the
rapists Chiron and Demetrius. Charlie, who had also been in the
Wellington High School
Titus Andronicus (and had played
Demetrius) wanted a go at Saturninus. Taika liked the sound of
Mosca in Volpone but I
was keener on seeing him play
Titus or Aaron in Titus Andronicus, neither of which matched
up role-wise with Mosca. Pretty soon it became apparent that,
if we'd be working with a lot of first-time Bacchanals, it
would be problematic to try and be democratic and fair on all,
especially as it meant that some of the charts I'd worked out
meant that actors like Carey and James would have their 'lead'
roles as Chiron and Demetrius and then be wasted on insignificant
roles in the other two plays. They were capable of much more and
I wanted them both to play a title role. Thus it made sense to put
my trust in actors I knew wouldn't let me down, so structured a new
chart in which people I had absolute confidence in carried the shows -
The Jew of Malta would be
led by Carey as Barabas, Taika as
Ithamore and Tina as Abigail;
Titus Andronicus would have
Taika as Titus, Eve as Tamora and Charlie as Saturninus; and
Volpone would feature James
and Tina, whose comic
double-acts in Wealth had been
hysterical, as Volpone and Mosca.
The charts underwent further revision before the shows opened, as
did the casting. Mark, Alex and John signed on, while Michael and
Judith had to pass due to other commitments. I had been very
impressed by Erica Lowe's performance as Pisanio in the Summer
Shakespeare production of
Cymbeline - she was hands down
the best actor in the show by a long way - and she was eager to
be involved. Ultimately some of the casting choices for the
trilogy were not ideal ones, but I was determined to have a
company who were all passionate about the project, and this
meant going with people whose abilities and temperaments were
not always compatible. Adding to that was the fact that, as
organized as I tried to be, I had never rehearsed three plays
at the same time before and, even with three months of every
Sunday and random weekday rehearsals scheduled, if we were
lucky we'd get to work on each individual scene twice before
opening night. The Sundays involved the full cast, and each
Sunday we focused on a different play - which meant each play
got three Sundays, followed by a Sunday on which we ran all
three plays. We rehearsed at Jean Betts' place and most of
those Sundays were, for me, torturous and miserable. Dealing
with that many actors and being the go-between for everybody's
problems with everybody else meant I spent the whole time just
trying to get to the end of the day in one piece. Furthermore,
there was always at least one absentee, be it because of other
work, hangovers, illness, whatever, so I always seemed to be on
the floor reading in for absent actors. Two major obstacles came
up in the weeks before opening night. The first was that Charlie,
who had attended few rehearsals anyway, got Creative New Zealand
funding to make the short film he'd been planning for years. The
dates for the shoot conflicted with the scheduled dates for the
Trilogy (and John, Alex and Erica had roles in the film also), and
it became swiftly apparent, with six weeks until opening night,
that Charlie couldn't do both. Another actor offered himself in
Charlie's place and that problem was supposedly solved. The more
troublesome problem was Taika's commitment - he had been unsure
from the outset and committed to other work at the start of the
rehearsal schedule. Having gone through a similar wooing process
doing Othello, and working in
a similar manner involving
much discussion and meetings but little actual rehearsal, I assumed
he would make up his mind in our favour - after all, he loved
Titus as a play and
a role (the idea of Chiron and
Demetrius wearing school uniforms was his). However the
deadline for him making a firm decision had been and gone
but I was so hopeful of swaying him that I did nothing to solve
the problem until the rest of the company pointed out that, with
five weeks remaining before the show opened, the chances of him
learning one
role, let alone three,
were nigh on impossible. Having played Titus through all the
rehearsals, I already knew the entire role, but the cast were
extremely unhappy at the thought of me playing the part in
addition to trying to direct the plays, so John Porter, who'd been
playing Bassianus, volunteered to undertake a crash-course in
learning large roles (all of John's parts were moderate), with
Alex stepping up to Bassianus (Alex was largely mute in
Titus).
Carey realized he could double Peregrine and Bonario in
Volpone
without us needing an extra actor, and it was conceded that I would
appear in The Jew of Malta as
Ithamore - Erica in particular
was concerned at having to re-rehearse the scenes with another actor,
having become used to the scenes with me in them. Problems were
apparently solved but then, two weeks later, Charlie's replacement
bailed...fearful of what would happen to morale, I moved swiftly to
solve the next crisis but every actor I phoned said, "You want me to
learn three verse roles in
three weeks?" The
easiest solution, I realized with a sinking heart, was that I would
have to appear in all three plays...Ithamore was fun and easy, but
Saturninus and the dreaded Sir Politic Would-Be? I realized it
would make directorial duties easier to promote Alex (again!) and
relieve him of Bassianus in
Titus (a part I now knew very
well, having rehearsed two different actors in it). Sir Politic
was agony to learn and rehearse but at the eleventh hour I had
some breakthroughs and, although I was on the book right up until
the dress rehearsal, he ended up being great fun.
Finding a venue for the shows was not without its difficulties
either. The wealth of spaces that had seemed like they might be
ideal when we first planned the project were suddenly all unavailable.
We needed a space big enough to seat about 40 people and to allow
us to build an upper level and a trapdoor. The physical space we
needed for the plays would be equivalent to a Renaissance playhouse
and the plays were staged bearing those simple requirements in mind.
I was doing research in my post-grad work at university into the
entrance and exit systems employed in Renaissance playhouses and
used The Jew of Malta to
test a few practical theories,
the most important being the use of an in-door and an out-door - the
theory being that in companies with such a vast repertory of plays,
they must have had some very simple staging rules to cope with
the practicalities of their working lives. If you're performing
a play only once a month and in repertory with 20 other shows,
you have more important things to focus on than what door you're
coming through. So the system we employed for
The Jew of Malta
(and later Twelfth Night in 2003)
was that, unless explicitly
stated otherwise in stage directions, any character entering the
stage did so through the stage left door, regardless of the logic
of the plot, and any character leaving the stage did so through
the stage right door. This meant the stage "traffic" was very
easy to manage. The Jew of Malta
is a play with little
spatial or temporal logic, so it wasn't much more of a suspension
of disbelief to allow such an un-realism-based entrance/exit
system.
We looked at performing in the hall at 225 Aro Street, at the
Red Brick Hall on Cambridge Terrace, in the basement of the
Embassy cinema, at Thistle Hall on Cuba Street, in an old building
owned by the railway station, at the Drama Christi studio and a
thousand other halls and rooms around Wellington. In virtually
every case the venue fell through on the eve of it seeming like a
sure thing. This, I am sure, added to the doubt and reluctance
that had crept into certain corners of the cast, no matter how
firmly the likes of Eve and Carey assured them that the only
attitude required to make these shows happen was a positive one.
One of the students in a series of evening classes on Shakespeare
I was teaching at the Wellington Performing Arts Centre, Kate Soper,
had joined the show at a fairly late stage. I had been struck by
her enthusiasm and energy in the classes and in the space of two
evenings we had already become great friends and I knew her
overwhelmingly enthusiastic attitude would work wonders in the
generally stressful rehearsal room. She volunteered a vacant
shop her mother had in the Left Bank off Cuba Mall as a possible
venue. The shop had an upper level but was ultimately far too
small, however keen I was on it. If we'd gone with it, we would
have only been able to fit in 10 audience members a night - although
in retrospect this would not have been any great handicap - but
too much of the staging would have had to have been rethought. At
the same time, Hannah Deans, Carey and Eve's flatmate at Boston
Terrace, negotiated a deal for us to perform on the third floor
of the old Wakefield Markets building. The empty space was the
perfect size and there was no problem with us building an upper
level or a trap door. We secured the venue three weeks before
the first performance.
With two weeks to go I had already realized that there just
would not be enough time and my energy went into making sure the
plays happened, as opposed to making them as strong and fast and
powerful as I wanted them to be.
The Jew of Malta was
driven by the strong ensemble feel - virtually everyone bar
Carey had multiple roles throughout the play and it was going
like the clappers.
Titus Andronicus was the play that
every cast member was behind, regardless of their role, and
the play that from day one had looked like it had, regardless
of all the casting nightmares, the makings of something special.
John got to grips with the role in an incredibly short space of
time and, not having the time to analyse and ponder, was acting
entirely on instinct.
Volpone was the most rehearsed of
the three plays but this was ultimately to its disadvantage -
because everyone had seen so much of it in rehearsal, it never
had that feeling comedy needs of the whole cast waiting in the
wings watching every night, feeding off the energy of the other
performers and the audience. I found myself that, once the
show was up and running, I just could not bear to sit through
some of those long sequences again once I was offstage.
The week before production week we ran each play one final
time in Kate's mother's empty shop and Volpone really peaked
that week - the performance was intensified by the intimate
size of the shop and James and Tina's energies as Volpone and
Mosca were off the planet. What is normally over four hours
long uncut ran at two hours and fifty minutes that night -
twenty minutes shorter than it normally was in actual
performance in the weeks to come (that I was playing Voltore
that night due to Heather being ill probably contributed to
the speed also!) The Jew of Malta
was running, incredibly,
at a mere hour and three quarters, and we decided to play it
without an interval. Titus
was the play I'd allowed the
most liberties in terms of dramatic pauses and changes in tempo,
and while on paper Titus
is only 100 lines longer than
The Jew of Malta, the
performance came in at the same
length as our Othello.
Time was running out but, over the course of a week, we packed
into the space and managed to run all three plays on the Saturday
before we would perform the first trilogy. Trying to start on
time was impossible, and allowing decent dinner breaks and so on
meant that the run of Volpone
didn't begin 'til nearly
midnight. The lateness of confirming a venue meant a delay with
the posters, so our publicity was virtually non-existent. We had
small audiences for the dress rehearsals of
Titus and
Volpone and it was an
encouraging sign when one of my
evening class students had to leave partway through the first
half of Titus - we staged
Marcus' discovery of the raped
and mutilated Lavinia almost entirely in the dark and decided not
to hold back on the blood. I was amazed that the student left
before we'd even reached the onstage hand-chopping moment. She
came back at the interval but upon having the rest of the plot
described decided she'd give the second half a miss. This left
me partially pleased - after all, the play has a reputation in
modern productions to incite fainting and vomiting, so I felt
that I'd be letting the side down if people
didn't walk out
of my Titus Andronicus.
The first performances of each individual play were to about ten
people each and the bookings were dire. We'd played
Othello
to tiny houses, but as the first trilogy day loomed with virtually
no bookings, things were not looking good. We'd had to return our
borrowed seating to Zeal for the weekend and replaced it all with
sofas, so at least whatever audience there might be would be
comfortable. On the first trilogy day we played
The Jew of
Malta to four people - my mum, Kate's mum, Timothy O'Brien
(the Dominion's theatre critic) and one of my ex-wife's SPCA
colleagues. Titus was
played to three people - Tim and
the two mothers - and Kate's mum was unable to stay for
Volpone.
Tim was exhausted and decided he'd come back and see
Volpone
during the week, meaning only my mum was left for the last play.
"Will you still do it?" Tim asked, and we replied that it was
really up to James and Tina as they had to carry the show.
Titus had finished
with only fifteen minutes to go before
Volpone was scheduled to
kick off, so there was still a
slim chance we might get some door sales for the final play - but
in all honestly it looked pretty bloody unlikely. My mother was
happy to stay but quite prepared for the eventuality that we would
flag Volpone that night
and all go to bed instead. Five
minutes after he'd left, Tim O'Brien was back. "If you're mad
enough to perform," he said, "then I'm mad enough to stay."
Most of the cast had already decided we weren't performing the
final play, but I felt a wave of craziness wash over me and
looked at Tina. "I'm doing it," she said adamantly, in spite
of resistance from the others, which meant James had the deciding
vote. I went into the communal dressing room to see how James
felt about the idea of performing for just my mother and a reviewer;
James was already in costume and setting his props. I have never
had a night quite as insane as that in my life. Tim's review in
the Dominion was fantastic, and we were flabbergasted when he paid
to see Volpone again
the following week.
The social life of the group during the trilogy cannot go
unmentioned. We became regulars at the Courtenay Arms, which
suited us because of its quietness and cosiness (and the amount
of posters they allowed James to put up) and were there every
night of the week during the run, except for Saturdays. After
all four of the Saturday trilogies we were still up when the sun
rose the next day - the logic being, I guess, that if you need
a few hours' wind-down time after a performance, then three plays
means three times the wind-down time.
Audiences over the month-long season were erratic and unusual.
The Jew of Malta started
out slowly but was getting good
crowds towards the end, whereas
Volpone had a good start
but dwindled as the run went on.
Titus was consistently
popular and the only play of the three to play to full houses.
The trilogy days were never as popular as we'd hoped they'd be
and often proved too long to endure - often people who'd paid to
do the all-dayer would leave after
Titus and come to
Volpone the next week.
But the people who lasted the
distance usually always had that same mix of exhaustion and
elation as we had when they finally emerged from
Volpone
close to midnight.
The Jew of Malta was the
least popular critically but
was my favourite of the three shows. I loved the rapid-fire
pace and the hilarity that accompanied so much of the villainy
in the play. Marlowe just doesn't seem to know when to stop
and each evil deed is followed by another of even more extremity.
The middle two acts of the play, with the poisoning of the nuns
and the murder of Friar Barnadine, and then the gulling of
Ithamore by Bellamira and Pilia-Borza, were great fun for
Carey and I. Carey's performance as Barabas was exactly the
right mixture of moral superiority and outrageous hypocrisy
and comedy. He always got huge laughs on his explosion of
"What? Abigail become a nun - AGAIN???" and I loved his
playing of the end of Act One scene two when he publicly
denounces his daughter while secretly giving her instructions
to find all their hidden treasure as soon as she's inside
their old home, which has been repossessed by the state and
turned into a nunnery. Mark made a meal of his role as Friar
Barnadine, dragging me all over the stage during the scene
where Ithamore and Barabas strangle him to death. Why he
opted to play the priest with a Sean Connery accent (or at
least, what Mark thinks is a Sean Connery accent) remains a
mystery to this day.
My lasting memory of
The Jew of Malta will always be
the second to last performance - Carey had a haircut during the
last week of the season and the shorter hair length meant that
the two locks of hair he wore (as an Hassidic Jew) on the sides
of his head caused him trouble all night, coming unattached
every time he was about to come onstage for a scene. For the
scene in the fourth act when Barabas, disguised as a French
musician, visits Ithamore, Bellamira and Pilia-Borza, he had
trouble with the locks of hair which meant when he came onstage,
he hadn't noticed that the posies he wore in his beret (which
are poisoned and soon cause the deaths of the other three
characters onstage) had fallen out - so when Erica ordered
Alex to "Bid the fiddler give me the posy in his hat there,"
all Carey could give Alex was the hat itself. While we
sniggered, Alex and Carey tried to no avail to locate the
missing posies, so instead of saying "How sweet, my Ithamore,
the flowers smell!" Erica had to sniff Carey's hat, as did
myself and then Alex, making no sense of Carey's aside, "The
scent thereof was death - I poisoned it!" The knock-on
effect was that, in the next scene, when Ithamore, Bellamira
and Pilia-Borza all denounce Barabas before the state, Barabas'
immortal line "I hope the poisoned flowers will work anon!" as
everyone is dragged off to prison became "I hope the poisoned
hat will work anon!" The entire cast collapsed into hysterics
to the point where Andrea forgot to go on stage to announce that
we were all dead a moment later, she was laughing so hard. In
the final performance I amended Ithamore's line "That hat he
wears Judas himself left under the elder-tree when he hung
himself" to "That poisoned hat he wears..." partly as homage
to the incident but also as my vengeance for another
mishap ... but I'll detail that later on.
As I'd said, Titus was the
play everyone was behind.
At the very first rehearsal I just let it run on when I
should have stopped to clarify things and, once we got into
the second act, magical things occurred. Mark and Andrea never
played the scene in which Marcus discovers Lavinia as well as
they did at that first rehearsal. On the nights that
Titus
ran well, it was great. From the beginning of the second Act
we dimmed the lights slowly until, by the Marcus/Lavinia scene,
the stage was pitch black. I used to love sneaking into the
back of the audience (often still caked in blood from my death
as Bassianus) to see the looks on people's faces once the light
came back on. With the action played so close to the audience,
the detail of some of the violence was sometimes hard for the
audience. At the first trilogy day, I looked at the three
audience members (Tim O'Brien, my mum and Kate's mum) at one
point during Act Three Scene One to see that all three of them
were looking elsewhere rather than take in the spectacle in front
of them. And over the eight performances I learnt so much about
why certain things are there - for instance, the moment when
Lavinia takes the severed hand in her mouth. We worked so hard
to not get a laugh on that line only to realize that the audience is
meant to laugh -
it's the light at the end of the tunnel. After 15 minutes of
emotional harrowing, Shakespeare's saying "Don't worry, it'll
all be redeemed." We had a few unfortunate performances where
people decided it was a comedy and each new atrocity was greeted
with even more laughter, but generally we found that if you treat
it seriously, then so do the audience. Act three Scene One was a
powerful, moving scene from the outset and I often used to sit
through it holding back tears in rehearsal. Tina as Lucius let the
tears flow, and on opening night even Mark succumbed. We began
the second half of the show in absolute silence - a rehearsal
technique I'd used on Chekhov and also applied to
Titus,
it worked so well (letting the emotion overwhelm you before you
speak) that we kept it in the finished production. Generally I
would have liked another month to work on the second half - it's
a much harder part of the play, especially as the first half has
so much action, and we never really cracked a lot of it. But on
the other hand, you know that something special is happening when
you can't stand still on stage for fear of sticking to the floor -
there was a LOT of blood in that show. On some nights people
sitting in the front were splattered by the spray when Chiron
and Demetrius' throats were slit.
Volpone ended up
evolving into a relatively farcical style -
we found early on that trying to treat it with any psychological
realism was not going to work. The idea of finishing with a
comedy was so that, after hours of tragedy, we'd just be able
to have a big laugh. James and Tina never stopped working and,
much as one reviewer who'd always fancied himself as Mosca hated
Tina's performance, the two of them had me in hysterics the whole
way through. The costuming on
Volpone took on a bizarre
life of its own. Mark decided he was playing Nano as an Irish
football hooligan and, seeing as I'd already cast him as a dwarf,
there seemed no reason to prevent him kicking a soccer ball
around the stage. I don't remember why we allowed Bonario to
ride a scooter but I'm sure it was supposed to be topical.
Mosca's fluffy slippers were a result of many rehearsals at
Tina's in which, as well as providing everyone with tea and
coffee, she bounced around the house wearing animal slippers,
and it seemed to change her whole physicality. Lady Politic
Would-Be's costume was simply the most ghastly, loud thing we
could find - and oddly enough, it fitted perfectly with the Coca
Cola motif we had running through the play. The "oil" Volpone
was selling as an elixir of life when disguised as a mountebank
became a bottle of Coke, and elsewhere we kept slipping in Coke
references and props. It took someone else to point out that
Lady Would-Be's red and white costume was yet another Coke
reference point.
The scene James and I had the greatest fears about, the mountebank
scene, actually turned out to be one of the highlights of every show.
I suppose it's that adage you often find; that these plays are
written to be performed, not read - get it on stage and play it and
suddenly what bewilders scholars and academics makes perfect sense.
I was equally fascinated by how well the scene in which Sir Politic
hides in a tortoise-shell and is beaten by merchants plays.
The last trilogy day was joyous and celebratory and very much the
end of a very long journey. And because we had a big crowd of
all-dayers, all the resonances I hoped would be in place were
picked up on. During The Jew of Malta, Alex forgot to bring on
a pen as Pilia-Borza, so when I demanded "pen and ink!" to demand
extortion money from Barabas, he had no pen to give me. We
fluffed about and I ended up writing the note in blood (left on
the stage floor from Mathias and Lodowick's deaths) with a knife.
As Alex left the stage I yelled "And bring a pen back with you!"
to the audience's delight. They laughed too when Alex gave me
a pen in the next scene and I made a point of holding it up to
show the audience. Two hours later, as the Clown in
Titus
Andronicus, I got a very big laugh when Titus asked, "Give
me pen and ink" in the arrows scene, and I gave the audience
a wink as I brought a pen out of my coat for him - the people
who'd been in the audience for the previous show got that it
was a call-back to
The Jew of Malta. Thinking quickly,
I then engineered a gag in
Volpone so that at the start
of the second half of that play I had as many pens as I could
find in my satchel. When Sir Politic looks for his diary to
show Peregrine, I took pen after pen out of my bag while the
audience laughed. Never one to keep a straight face, I ended
up giggling and Carey and I had to stop the scene to laugh it
all out. Upon resuming, my next line was "My papers are not
with me!" and the audience, having seen all the pen jokes,
thought that in setting up a silly gag for their benefit,
I'd actually forgotten to set a genuine prop, so we all
laughed some more.
With all three plays, there was never enough time and so many
wonderful ideas fell by the wayside because we had neither the
resources nor the energy to make them happen - but the point of
the project was always that we were doing it, not how well we did
it. And I'm still convinced there was value in doing it, even
though I couldn't tell you exactly why. What
was a valuable
lesson was realizing exactly how a company dynamic had to work
to get the best results, and there were many mistakes I was not
going to repeat again as we moved into planning
Hamlet.
- David
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