Monday morning 9am standing on a grey wet Edinburgh street prepared for the start of it all. Got the bus up last night – late, slept fairly badly – then had to sort my bank account out – whilst I was enjoying Pink Floyd in Hyde Park on sat someone was helping themself to money from my account, but finally made it to Roslin and the rehearsal room.
Met everyone, including several people I didn’t know. Have decided not to mention names here, cos I don’t want to talk about other people unless they can post blogs about me too. But people are nice, interesting and talented. Should be a fun, provocative, developing process.
It was a great start. We spent 7 hours agreeing on punctuation. The reasoning being if we determined a consensus on that, we’d unlock the character thought processes and all be singing from the same hymn sheet. We got 9 pages in. It was amazing. Refined the definitions on colon, semi-colon, comma etc. How to play them is a different matter… Then an exercise which demonstrated this – sitting in chairs, speaking lines and moving on the punctuation. It made the story easy to follow, and the physical energy used simply in speaking was immense. A great lesson. Could happily spend weeks unlocking this but we’re pushed for time.
Interesting how so many editors differ in spelling, puncuation and grammer from one another. People treat these plays as literature (indeed make careers out of it) – they’re not – they’re meant to be spoken and acted, not to sit on the page. Thats what makes the First Folio so interesting – its mostly made from prompt copies so the spelling and grammer are geared towards telling the actor what to do. Originally, trained and skilled orators spoke these lines, ones who were familiar with rhetoric, classical mythology and entertaining crowds of unruly drunken poor people (how times have changed) and needed only a few clues, or anchors in the text to help them deliver them. When we unlock these now hidden meanings and jokes and allusions, we discover new worlds and better ways to make sense of this wonderful language and it makes our stories better told.
