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Stagecraft
Interview with Michael Boyd | Behind the Scenes with the RSC
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Interview with Michael Boyd | Behind the Scenes with the RSC
The technical staff discuss their role in shaping these productions.
Gathered by Fiona Lindsay, RSC Education.
Sarah Esdaile, Associate Director
I’m very interested in
the ongoing situation around the world, of war and civil war and while
those situations, particularly in Ireland and Israel, still exist these
plays can never not be relevant. For me it’s more about human behaviour
than it is about history. I think it’s the kind of telescoping between
the personal and the political that’s so great about it."
Terry King, Stage Fight Direction
My job is making up a
choreography with weapons or fists or whatever the fight is supposed to
be, that is a) safe to perform so the actors aren’t going to hurt each
other and they can do it consistently over a long period, and b) hopefully
looks real and is effective and fulfills the reason that it was put there
in the first place: be that to add a splash of excitement and energy and
to move the story along a bit or be it to show the horrible reasons why
people fight and the gruesome results of that aggression. You are making
a fight that gives the audience a feeling of what it would have been like
to be in a fight like that. And I don’t think that is necessarily the
same as making a historical replica of what that would have been.
I became involved in these productions very early on, partly because there are so many fights; there are more fights in these shows than probably any other Shakespeare plays. Sword fights in particular take a little while for actors to assimilate, to literally remember the strokes, remember the way of moving. It’s like learning words really, you don’t just read them and then you know them, it takes a while for them to filter down and they don’t go down just in one sitting; you have to keep going back to them.
The broadsword is the dominant and traditional weapon we are using, and there’s a lot, a hell of a lot, of crashing of broadswords in this production. It’s difficult with broadsword, where there is this amount of violence, to find variety, to find a way of making each fight have its own distinct flavor, of making it different to the last, so that it doesn’t become repetitive. With broadsword that is particularly difficult because it is not a subtle weapon, it is just literally a crashing weapon.
In everything that is a story on the stage there has to be a balance and you can’t disrupt the balance of the overall piece by having too many fights or too big a fight or fights that go on too long. And you need to define how each fight relates to the other and how they all serve the story; that has been the challenge. There are flashes that are leaps of imagination, and indeed we have done a couple of the fights in that way, though they’re not what you would call standard.
If you find the basic core of the story, if you give the audience a flavor of what it feels like to be in the middle of a battle, you’ve done your job. Whether you do it by having people crashing their swords together and grunting and groaning and doing it very naturalistically or whether you do it by painting a picture which allows you to just focus on one person’s individual story and rendered the rest impressionistically. You’ve done the same job, you’ve just gone a different route to it."
I’m used to working on
plays that are obviously very physically based, so it’s a very close relationship
with the director. I suppose it’s fairly new for the RSC to go into an
expressionistic staging of the fighting and for me to work alongside Terry
King, the Fight Director. I am used to and do prefer being really closely
knit with the team, with the director and the designer. We pooled ideas
about a reference to circus imagery, the hanging bodies and ideas about
the use of the ladders. I’m really interested in design being interactive
with movement.
At the beginning, I led two workshops: one was on the notion of revenge driving the energy of the plays, driving people to want to run to a point of mutilation and inflicting pain more than any kind of sense of self-defense or heroism. The other workshop was around ritual, leading into court ritual and the sense of knighthood and coming from an almost primitive, pagan multi-sensory place.
We talk about the ‘set’ and ‘body’ as almost being one, a sense of the set almost disintegrating. We’re going to rip off part of the cloth that’s wrapping up the structure, in the fighting, and a lot of the fighting’s been going up ropes and ladders, a sense of disintegration of order that’s physical, literal, hierarchical, lost in terms of values."
As the composer and one
of the musicians for the cycle, my job is really like creating a soundscape,
rather than doing real music. I was involved right from day one and in
the rehearsal room it was just a question of leaving me to my own devices.
I just got a load of stuff together and started punctuating the text as
they rehearsed. I’m a percussionist and we use some traditional instruments,
but we are also using quite a lot of bits of scrap metal, just things
that we found in the stores and we explored by hitting various-shaped
bits of metal to see what kind of sounds they produced.
It’s an organic way of doing things where the musician is almost like another character in the play, so the music is commenting on what’s going on rather than an illustration of a mood. Commenting on the emotions of the various characters in the play, so it’s almost like another voice, a musical voice, rather than a real voice.
A lot of the rhythm is Brazilian samba music, which we use for the battles. Battles are usually dominated by percussion playing. But they’re usually very conventional things, with lots of drums, side drums and timpani, which are written in quite a militaristic way. I think very early on the Director, Michael Boyd, did not want anything conventional like that, so when we stumbled on this idea of Rio we thought it quite a nice thing to have this sort of carnaval dance music accompanying people, flailing swords around. We don’t just do the fast, we do the slow which is called samba reggae, which we use for a lot of background with the approaching armies and it is quite ominous, relentless, slow rhythm.
There are also one or two little folk tunes that are actually from Mexico. The Mexican folk music is used in the Jack Cade episode in Part 2. It combines a sort of innocence and a little penny whistle theme with the threatening quality of a deep drum called a bombo. It’s that juxtaposition of innocence and threat."
Gavin Marshall, aerial artist and actor, member of the ensemble
I was asked to train people
to do aerial work, climb ropes, work on trapezes and things, because that’s
my background. The director was interested in using physical language
in the productions.
I have a background in theatre and in circus, so I am always interested in things that combine the two, using the circus skills within a theatrical context. This was a nice opportunity to put those skills within a classical context, which is quite unusual.
I taught the actors rope class: I had the actors troop in, then I warmed them up and made them climb up and down ropes and hang by their feet. “The Torture Chamber,” I think they called it. It does involve a certain amount of strength. I know that the voice teacher was concerned that people were getting quite tense around the shoulders, because there is a lot of upper arm and upper body strength involved, and that can affect your voice. You can tighten up around the neck.
The Battle of Towton, although it’s not a very long sequence, is quite big physically and that was complete collaboration between Liz Rankin, the Movement Director, and myself and Terry King, the Fight Director. We’ve got people climbing up the ropes, and running around, and sword fights going through the middle of it so it was very much working together as a team.
It’s been quite an interesting combination of people from different areas of expertise coming in on the show, which is fantastic. It’s very rare that you get a theatre that has enough resources and works on a big enough scale to actually have those people around."
I think voice work is
very much text work at the RSC. Once actors leave drama school, very often
their work comes from television, so the style of text they are used to
is one of short lines, short thoughts as opposed to the prolonged thought,
the heightened language, the convoluted thinking of the classics. For
these productions, it has been very important to develop a muscularity
with the language and also a resilience and vocal staying power. There’s
a lot of real need for flexibility, dexterity and agility in order to
produce what these plays require in terms of language. The actors found
the length of lines sometimes enormously taxing on their breath, for example,
and that has actually been important, to build stamina in the actor.
Voice training means the actors will have the voice that allows them to convey the intricacies and details of the text as well as the elements of character that they feel are essential to an audience. These plays, for example, have a lot of rhetoric in them and a lot of argument and a lot of long, protracted speeches that deal with the narrative in a different way.
My job is to help the actors to explore the language and to give them space in which to really make it their own, to transfer it from the page into the mouth. You need to allow them the time to do that, to pace the language, find it physically within themselves, remove it from the cerebral, remove it from the page. There have been times when I have been able to work with more than one actor, to free the language between them.
Because these are political plays, the political speaking is very challenging and the sort of things we have had around us at this time—the American election and hearing the political talk going on there—and living in a time in which the politicians of the day have been reawakened to the need for precise and persuasive language. In a time of all the technology and e-mails, where all around us language is reducing and contracting, that the need for real persuasion still exists. I think that has been an interesting juxtaposition."
Heather Carson, Lighting Designer
In beginning work on the
plays, I first tried to define them in one sentence. I came up with “the
desire for power at any cost.” In Part 3, King Henry says, “Didst thou
never hear that things ill got had ever bad success?” So how do you express
that in light: the seductiveness of desire, contrasted with the harshness
of reality? The costumes are realistic, sumptuous and detailed, yet the
set is abstract, spare and hard. The lighting needs to bridge the space
between them—a kind of emotional realism and something not quite recognizable.
It needs to be lush and seductive as well as forensic and bleached out.
Thematically, the lighting had a certain emotional structure. First and foremost it was presided over by the innocence of Henry under the gaze of God: “My crown is in my heart, not on my head.” A large sun-like film light, often golden in color from up high prevailed in Henry’s scenes. For the English the lighting was clear and strong, for the French cold and fuzzy. The house of York was harsh and overhead and a little green around the gills. The language started to mix up a bit as the world gets more chaotic, with color bleaching out towards the end of Part 2 and the introduction of a more industrial language of light in Part 3 which escalates into Richard III.
The energy of the stage space with its seven entry points on the stage level is very much like a vortex that people spin into, collide, and spin out—like atoms splitting. I wanted the whole theatre to be the set and to eradicate the separation between the theatre and the stage. The audience is always somewhat lit, always right in the middle of things. If I’ve done my job right, the text, staging and lighting will all resonate together, rather than feeling as if there is a rigid, intellectual logic where everything is underlined by the light. I am always looking for the perverse response—an anti-intuitive one, if you will. Ideally something makes your brain ricochet around and look harder at what is in front of you. It is a dangerous tightrope to walk, and there are few collaborators willing to jump in the ring with me. Director Michael Boyd is one of them. I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much than I have from watching his work on this production."