Nat's Much Ado Blog

I love Shakespeare. I've loved his work since I was given a children’s edition set of his plays for my 10th birthday, what every 10-year-old dreams of I know, turns out I loved them. So, of course, when the possibility of black company performing a full-length Shakespeare came up, I was more excited than I care to admit. 

 

Unfortunately, I had to miss a lot of the decision-making process due to illness, so I can't really tell you how that went. The first stage of the rehearsal process for Much Ado was auditions. The reason I was so excited that we had chosen Much About Nothing is because Benedick is an absolute dream role of mine, simply because I think it's just so fun to get up on stage and be a complete, well, clue’s in the name. I enjoyed the audition session, it was fun to see everyone's different take on the character they were auditioning for, me and Olli had vastly different interpretations of Benedick for example. In this session, we also talked about where and when the play would be set. A lot of suggestions were thrown around, such as post-WW2 1940s, a sort of otherworldly royal aesthetic piece, renaissance Italy, but by far the most popular and the suggestion we ended up choosing was an open-air performance set in the 1970s. I was sceptical at first about this but ended up loving it and now I basically live in 70s fashion.

 I was over the moon when the casting came through and saw I had been double cast with Connor as Benedick. That was until I scrolled down the page and saw I had also been cast as Balthazar. For those of you who don't know who Balthazar is the musician, and for those of you who don't know me, I am (or at least was) terrified of singing in front of people. So that filled me with a small amount of dread. 

 

I struggled with the first few rehearsals if I'm being honest. It took me a while to get the confidence in myself and the script to be able to pull off the character, especially with some of Benedick’s more over-the-top moments. I think what really helped me with this was watching other productions and using a translator for parts of the text, this really helped when it came to facial expressions, gestures, etc… turns out it really helps with acting when you actually know what you’re saying, who knew? As we staged the play, I found that there were many different sides to Benedick’s character: the over-the-top class clown type, seen throughout the play, the serious soldier, primarily seen in acts 4&5, and the romantic, who falls madly in love rapidly despite his so-called hatred of romance at the end of act 2. I wouldn’t say I found it difficult to strike the right balance between these without it being jarring for the audience, but it certainly wasn’t one of the easier things to do with the play; the character goes from acting like a complete child pretty much all the time, to a very serious grown man at the end of the play, so plotting his character journey was very helpful to me. Something I was asked pretty much every rehearsal by one person, or another was if I was going to change the pronouns of Benedick to female ones, I replied ‘no’ every time to this and was left with some fairly confused looks. My thinking was that if we changed the pronouns, making Benedick female, that would change the whole dynamic of the show, especially in terms of the comedy, a lot of which revolves around gender, the way I saw it, was that if my casting left the audience pondering the role gender plays in society both then and now with a very androgenous Benedick, good for them, if they didn’t notice or didn’t really care, also good for them. In general, I am really happy with my characterisation of Benedick and so pleased I was able to pull it off in the end. 

 

Given that we had chosen to do a full-length, two-and-a-half-hour Shakespeare play, it’s no surprise that it took a while to stage, a concerning amount of time if I’m being honest. I only say concerning as it felt we went over the same acts a fair amount, but some were still left unstaged. There also came a point where it seemed that each cast was rehearsing the same scenes despite trying to split it evenly, for example around the performance dates, it had felt like me and Chloe had barely done act 4 scene 1, which is perhaps the most crucial scene for these characters, so, concerning. There were also weaker scenes for the whole cast, the party scene in act 2 being one, as we could never quite get the staging to work or the right party vibe. The whole rehearsal process was so much more stressful than I thought it would be, though I don’t why I had expected it to be, not necessarily easy but, certainly not as hard as we all found it. One thing that definitely made things much harder was never seeming to have a full cast, like ever. Right up until the performance dates we didn’t have everyone, it made it feel impossible to get the scene right with at least one but up to what could be like 4 or 5 people standing in, it sucked. The last month before the performance seemed to just be one thing going wrong after another, from losing Callum and the venue (both sorted though), Sarah being away and those two rehearsals going less than well, it was all just a bit of an extremely stressful mess.

 This is not to say the rehearsal process didn’t have any highlights, I realise I’ve been pretty down on the whole thing, but I genuinely had a lot of fun, bringing to life one of my favourite plays was amazing. There were some absolute highs of the process, like staging act 2 scene 3 for the first-time watching Connor throwing himself around the room, or adding little tweaks to scenes after going over them multiple times that just make them that little bit better, act 5 scene 5 and the love letter bit, and simply watching everyone grow in confidence with their characters every week; when I look back and think about all of this it really does bring a smile to my face. 

When the performance week arrived, I’ve got to admit I was bricking it. I felt completely underprepared and overwhelmed with everything that needed to be done. Lines were the main thing, despite all the effort I had put into learning them I just couldn’t get some of them to stick, especially in scenes that I hadn’t rehearsed as much; I think this was an issue that most people had, many were still using scripts in the dress rehearsal, myself included, which was worrying, to say the least, but I’m happy to report that it all came together in the end. Chloe and I had agreed to meet an hour early on the first performance day, which was our cast's performance, to go over our scenes, just to have that little bit more security. Then we had a couple of hours to rehearse before the audience started to arrive. I felt so much more confident after these, it was the first time I felt like I truly knew what I was doing, I was confident and really felt ready to perform. The show went better than I could have hoped for, there were, of course, some mistakes but I don’t think anyone outside of the cast noticed. I was genuinely so proud of myself and Black Company and went home feeling on cloud nine.

The next performance where I was playing Balthazar was something I had been dreading as not only do I hate singing in front of people but also, I had only rehearsed that scene as that character once, so yeah wasn’t feeling great. But honestly, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting and gave me a lot more confidence for the Brexit performances a couple of days later. And, of course, the rest of the cast did amazing, it has been so wonderful to get to work with such an incredible company with such talented actors. 

 

This past year has been so incredibly difficult for me personally, I had to miss the Christmas performance, struggled through college and connections (don’t get me wrong Connections was such a great experience, I was just not at all well) but getting to do both this and Brexit has been an absolute highlight of my year, they have helped me feel like myself again, gain my confidence back and, have just been one of the best experiences I have had. 

 

Thank you so much Sarah and the rest of Black Company, I’ll miss you all x