Day 103: Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare (BBC 1982 film adaptation)

I'm revisiting Cymbeline as the date for my Shakespeare Certificate exam approaches, since my monologue is one of Imogen's speeches. I was hoping to see if someone else's approach to the lines might help me get over the block I've been experiencing - Sod's Law being all-knowing, the entire speech was omitted from this particular version. It did give me an interesting perspective on the character though (played by a very young Helen Mirrin) as almost entirely opposite to how I initially read her. I suspect part of the difference comes from the style of the production - the whole thing felt very melodramatically Shakespeare, rather than the naturalistic approach that seems to be more common in recent play adaptations. But more specifically, Imogen looked a lot less like the wayward heir type on screen as on paper, less angry and stubborn and more hurt and broken.

This has led me to think more about the character type I see in Imogen based on my reading, and I think possibly looking up the "Kate/Bob" episodes of Blackadder might be closer to what I had been hoping to do. It's all valuable research though - seeing it done in a way I hadn't considered and that doesn't feel right for me still means engaging and understanding why it doesn't fit. (I should add, I'm not saying it's a bad performance or even the wrong decision for the production, it's just different and not how I want to do it, and I'm in a position to make that decision for myself.)

Day 60: Rehearsal Day for EAS audition

Under the new plan of five days of play-reading a week, taking the day before my audition "off" to focus on refining my speech seemed like a good idea. It took rather a lot of focus and coaxing to really get started, a slightly worrying trend I recognise all too well from my school and university days: I have a tendency to start new projects at a run, hit a lull where I'm ahead of the game and think I can relax, and then all but grid to a halt until I can see the looming deadline, and then cram whatever's left into the smallest possible amount of time. Mercifully I have an understanding friend willing to sit patiently providing tea and a sounding board to get all the other things on my mind out until I can actually start working, and then put me up for the night when we suddenly realise it's well after 11 and my outdoor gear is still wet from walking over in the rain.

There's a game we used to play as a warm up in my drama group at university which we called Directors from Hell (after the Hollywood Director sketches from Who's Line Is It Anyway) and after establishing that I knew the lines but was still playing very close to my chest, this was the obvious fix. I'd commented that I felt like I was working in a milk-crate (my friend has a VERY small lounge, and various clutter was giving me an unnecessarily small amount of floor space) which led to the first suggestion of doing the scene as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. As I tend to use my hands a lot in normal speech, anything that restricts my arm motion tends to very noticeably affect my recall. (Friends have occasionally found it hilarious to watch me, sitting on my hands and attempting any themed variation on "A is for Apple"... generally if I get further than C someone puts a stop to the "cruel torture", and I'm usually tapping a foot or similar just to get that far). This was followed up with Care Bears, which proved that I was aware of the moments of change of pace and emotion and got very silly and overdone rather quickly, and finally as Loki, which really didn't fit the script all that well but helped with finding some conviction and fire in what is very easy to read as a nervy and internalised speech.

I certainly still have a little bit of work to do in the morning once I've slept on it, but I feel like I've got a bit more control over what I'm doing, and have found my way back to some of the little tricks and instincts I had started to gather through school and uni performances.

Day 49: Saturday is Skills Day is BACK!

..and this time, it's rehearsing a monologue. Oh yes.

I have finally got some information out of Edinburgh Acting School as to what would be required to audition for the adult Performance class, and was told "a monologue of your choice". No indication of length, period etc but I figured it should be something I can refine and reuse for degree course auditions next year. Since I had already started looking through Cymbeline for material, I've chosen one of Imogen's speeches and started working on it.

I was sent a set of ten questions by an actor friend which act as a starting point to get into the head of the character, particularly for single speech/scene settings. I've gone through the list and found that as much as I felt that I liked Imogen as a character to start with, I have a lot more in common than I first thought, or at least have found a way to interpret how she's got to where she is in a way that's familiar (albeit on a different scale) to my own experience. I've also started to realise that there's a huge amount of conflicting emotion going on, and a lot of head-chatter, for Imogen during this particular section, and it's also the only time during the entire play that she doesn't directly have somoene looking out for her. That's a pretty scary position and one she clearly doesn't really want to admit scares her. She comments at one point in the speech that "Plenty and Peace breeds cowards: hardness ever of hardiness is mother"... as a way to psych herself up to explore a potentially scary and/or dangerous cave, but her demeanour and actions through the whole play show the reverse of this. She fancies herself as independent, even a little rebellious, but always with a safety net knowing she'll never really have to face "hardness". Her self-assured "hardiness", which is there from the outset, starts to crack just a little in the absence of that "peace and plenty". She complains about the conditions she's now found herself in, blames everyone she can think of for being lost and alone, and eventually spends 10 lines trying to get up the courage to explore the cave.

Day 19: Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare.

As the one apparently often cited as the most overlooked for forgotten of Shakespeare's works, this was high on my list of plays to come to early in the year. I really enjoyed the story, and it's a refreshing change to have a happy ending and comparatively few deaths (though as I've half-joked about before, they are of course by duel and suicide respectively). The sudden divine cameo was a bit of a surprise, and thanks to my affinity for nerdy films I can only imagine Jupiter being played by Patrick Stewart or Anthony Hopkins (probably actually in the Odin costume).

I also find myself needing to re-evaluate my theory that Shakespeare doesn't write women I like. Imogen seems to very much know what she wants, and is willing to go to any length to get it. This is, as usual, in persuit of a man - and that has been part of my complaint, that Shakespeare's women tend to only be defined in relation to their suitors - but in this case she is also for most of the play in that misbehaving-heir position. The difference is in this case, brothers thought lost or dead are revealed right at the end thus freeing her up to go back to the man she loves and not be bound to the throne, something which would be almost impossible to explore as a storyline for a male counterpart. Imogen has some wonderful lines (and plenty of chunky speeches) making this a good play to earmark for further study and possible monologue selection.

A brief online search showed up a film adaptation due out in the new year sometime with Cymbeline (apparently in the original text/language) set as a gangland thriller. Not my usual fare in cinema (and I remember really disliking Romeo + Juliet taken in a similar vein) but I will probably see it once purely for being a Shakespeare adaptation. I'm not entirely convinced by hyper-modern settings of Shakespeare's plays when the language isn't accordingly updated. There is a happy medium - the sort of timelessly-modern setting such as Tennant's Hamlet (reviewed in an earlier post here) seems to work without the need for guns and car chases. Perhaps the deeply interwoven threads of story and layers of deception and revenge present in this one will stand up to the treatment better than Romeo + Juliet did. I can but hope.