Making sense of the text, and other Shakespeare inspired thoughts...

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“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,
 trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our 
players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.” Hamlet

At the moment the Black Company are getting their heads around Shakespeare, namely Comedy of Errors…it’s a big undertaking as not only have we set ourselves the challenge of producing our first full length Shakespeare, we have also decided to perform it in the round…but then we like a challenge…

We are at that point in rehearsals where we have looked at the whole play.   Actors are getting a sense of their characters: where they fit within the story, the relationships between characters and the environments the events of the play take place in.  We are also getting a sense of the size and scale of the undertaking…

What I love about Comedy of Errors is it’s unpretentious admittance of simplicity.  It’s a farce, a gambol, a comic adventure.  It’s full of humour and farfetched happenstance.  It’s genuinely fun and in order for it to work the cast have to have fun with it.  Like all things however, it’s more complicated than that…in amongst the fun there has to be characters that the audience believe in and in some ways the text doesn’t help with this.  The character’s situations are often ridiculous, their reactions to events often far fetched, the coincidences hard to believe.  The actors have to make sense of them, first for themselves and then for the audience…they have to make the audience want to invest their time and energy into following the story…they have to invite them into the world of the play and enable them to enjoy the time they spend there…

On the upside though the actors have the language of the play on their side…rich, playful and full of possibilities.  It asks a lot of the performers intellectually, verbally and physically but it gives back threefold.  Not without a lot of hard work though…each scene, each interaction, each moment requires us, as a company, to ask questions, solve puzzles, accept opportunities.  By harnessing the language we have the key to telling the story and that’s what the next few weeks are going to be all about…wish us luck and come and see the results on the 20th and 21st of June!

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