Acting Shakespeare.

If you are currently attending a secondary school in Britain and (although less extensively so) in America you will be familiar with Shakespeare. Somewhere along the lines in everyone’s acting experience we have had to do it. Very often as a young child we are forced into the role of Peaseblossom or Mustard Seed whilst grappling hopelessly as a 10 year old with the language. Considering this and the fact Shakespeare only wrote a handful of plays we should have plenty of experience.

However I recently saw a production of Alls Well That Ends Well and the acting shocked me. It shocked me to my core. The actress playing the lead, in this instance Helena, spoke all the lines in a strange high sing song voice that floated up and down unnaturally and went completely against the iambic line of the speech. Bertram too imitated this strange ascent and descent of the voice and at times he also spoke in a flat monotone. You must not think me snobbish or pretentious. I have grown up surrounded by Shakespeare, and I still have yet to see a very good performance. This excludes of course actors in the highly acclaimed role of Hamlet which has taken its place as the gold medal of the acting business. It is too treasured to be thrown around without care. Also Pete Postlewaite’s Prospero was exceptionally good.

Overall however most actors, mainly in the smaller plays like Alls Well or A Winter’s Tale allow the performance to be mechanical and do not convey the words effectively. My mother’s Open University course had an RSC performance of Macbeth on one of their DVDs. We were both mutually knocked aback by the extensive corpsing and shifting in and out of character. This is not uncommon.

On the other hand I have been rather impressed with our cousins over the Atlantic, the Americans who although mostly can’t contemplate our accent (there are some bad youtube videos) have done a surprisingly good job. They have more of the energy that in recent years we brits have been lacking.

I think I have found some helpful tricks to acting Shakespeare.

·         Act the words natrualistally like they actually mean something. Act like you would act something modern. Don’t give way to over exaggerated expression and fake emotion.

·         Avoid clique as much as possible

·         Vary your expression. Treat the words like the dynamics in a piece of music, look at every consonant and vowel and think about what you want to emphasise etc. 

·         Just because it’s Shakespeare don’t abandon your skills: e.g. if you use the method or if you have a specific process you normally work through.