First Rehearsal

15.7.08

Last night, we had the first rehearsal for Winter's Tale. And I have to say we have a great cast and a fantastic script! The script is just dripping with juicy sexual innuendo - some of which I never realised when I was editing the script! I think we are in for a really fun rehearsal period and even more exciting show.

I have previously - for this production and other assessments based on Winter's Tale - utilised the New Cambridge edition of the script for its prefatory material. Last night in rehearsal, Barbara Walsh (our Hermione) stumbled on a way of playing Hermione that seems to run counter to the New Cambridge scholarly material. You see Snyder and Curren-Aquino, the Cambridge editors, focus greatly on a feminist reading of the play. In this reading, Hermione is always a strong, powerful woman with great agency. I agree that Hermione should be strong and powerful but we have to balance this with upholding the heteronormative values that a feminist reading can invoke. For instance, if Hermione is flirty - which her speech usually is and sometimes verges on the overtly sexual - the feminist reading will disclaim her for upholding the traditional view of women as sexually loose. However, I think a flirty Hermione works in the realms of sexuality - and here I use the term in a queer theoretical framework which focuses on sexual acts rather than identity since identity is not a fixed "essential" but rather a fluid construction that is liable to constant change.

Indeed, focusing on sexual acts also helps reading Leontes's jealousy. There is absolutely no reason why having sex with someone who is not your "love" mitigates that loving relationship; the two need not necessarily have any intersection at all. Further, you need not have a sexual relationship with the person you love at all. Of course, I concede that Leontes and Hermione must have had sex at some stage to create Perdita - since she is the true daughter of the two - but this sex may have had no emotional bond attached.

We also realised that the play's contemporary - to when the play was written - world and our are interestingly counterpointed in our production. There are some things in the text that are just plain foreign to contemporary audiences: breeching, the way royals act, and social conventions generally. There are others that do not seem to fit with our world: the need to have a male heir, the need for a male to deposit his sperm directly into a woman to get said heir, and the fact that a woman's infidelity can cause her husband to react with such a violent panegyric against women in general - "inch-thick, knee-deep..." is a fantastic piece of masculine, women-hating, drivel. Moreover, there were things which would have been out of place to Shakespeare's contemporary audience: that "rustics" seem to have a court-like society, and that the play swings from high tragedy to high comedy. All these points seem to allow me to pick and choose which aspects of time we utilise in our production.

It seems ridiculous that we would stage a Shakespeare production as Shakespeare would have - using the so-called Original Practices. All but few of today's audience would find it a boring endeavour indeed. Not to mention that it is a futile practice since we can never know exactly how Shakespeare productions were staged. Similarly, it would be silly to stage his productions as pieces of naturalism - naturalism is an acting style best done on film, which does it so well, so why present such a powerful, fantastic script in a weak way? Having said this however, these modes of acting can offer us options if we selectively choose which ones to use. For example, most of the play is a series of duologues - even if they are said with many people in the background. It seems helpful to think of the original practice, if it is an original practice, of having the two speakers come downstage from the melee to have their time in the spot-light and then drift back to allow the next speakers to have the stage.

Now, that is some grist for the mill no?