Ask Me The Question Again

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm highly impressed by Vicky, our Scene and Text tutor at the Actors Centre. If I were (a) heterosexual and (b) single, I'd consider marrying her, but since neither of these conditions apply, she's safe from my predatory charms.

After two sessions on modern texts, yesterday she led us into Hamlet and The One And Only To Be Or Not To Be Monologue. I've read it before, but never devoted much time to it; in fact if I've had any opinion about it, it's that it's too long and convoluted. Now, thanks to Ms V, I'm still of the opinion that it's too long, but it's also straightforward.

Unlike previous texts, where she took us through the scene line by line, she skipped through it, pausing only to translate difficult words. The next step was to have a volunteer read-act it. A fan of Shakespeare, my hand shot up and I was sent out of the room for five minutes to prepare. When I came back, I found myself pouring out my Danish soul and the agonising question as to whether or not to top myself to eleven jeering so-called friends who basically informed me that my opinions were rubbish.

Surprised, I ploughed on, knowing that I had to convince them to take me seriously. To do so, I adopted various strategies, including addressing the whole group and going down on one knee to try and persuade at least one person that suicide was a viable option.  The experience was both frustrating and invigorating, both showing me the limits of my acting (I couldn't persuade them) and the strenghs (my speech gained considerably in passion).

Vicky then had each of us take the piece and make it our own; we had decide how our invisible audience was going to react, and present our speech accordingly. Thus the key lesson of the day - in any soliloquy, Shakespearean or otherwise, imagine your audience's response and respond to that response.

The results were impressive. As expected, the twins - as I have mentally christened our Scouser and her new found Kent girl-friend - came up with pure soap, in scenes that were both gripping and amusing. Our Polish model, whose grasp of English is tenuous, started with a series of syllables that I could barely understand, but by the end of the class had moved towards sentences that were still thick with accent, but which clearly reflected the sense, if not yet the emotion, of Hamlet's speech. Of the others, all the native speakers managed to convey some emotion, some point of interest that held our attention, while all the foreigners, if they could not give the words nuance, at least demonstrated that they clearly understood what a poet, 400 years ago, had written.

As for my own encore, I started with an open question, reacted with surprise and pleading to my imaginary, jeering audience, then turned to anger and finally resignation as I realised that I could not convince them. It wasn't a performance to win a Tony; it probably wasn't even a performance to convince a director, but it was a performance that carried on the process of teaching me how to get into a text and how to make it so much bigger and better than I had thought possible.

So what's next? The first act of the Cherry Orchard, to take us over Saturday and Sunday, interrupted only by another audition, for a student film where I would be the only performer....