Blog

Exploring Shakespeare: Performance

'Seeing soliloquy as an interior event in which a character is overheard talking to themselves constructs an unnecessary barrier between speaker and receiver.'

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This is the penultimate blog in our Associate Director Bill Alexander's current series on Rehearsing Shakespeare. But don't worry Part Two will be close on the heels of this series! Here Bill explains with his astute insight and expertise the importance of always keeping focus on the performance and the experience of the audience. 

Associate

Collette Parker 

Exploring Shakespeare: Elizabethans

"we have to feel the rawness of life as Elizabethans did without the cotton wool of modern comfort"

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Understanding the Elizabethans, their fears and beliefs, is essential in the rehearsal room our Associate Director Bill Alexander argues here - the latest in his current series of blogs on Rehearsing Shakespeare. He writes that throughout Shakespeare's 20-year career the theatres were closed roughly every two years for some weeks or months because of the plague. Everyone in the audience was afraid of the plague, everyone knew the authorities closed theatres because the tightly packed gatherings there were known to be one of the principal ways in which it spread. The cold was colder, the dark darker, journeys that now take hours would take days or weeks. Medicine was random, unimaginably inadequate by our standards, death frequent and constantly anticipated at any age.They are on the front foot all the time the Elizabethans, and we should not dampen their passion with a wink. They were physical, they thought their feelings were in their blood not their brains.

Exploring Shakespeare: Time

"In the Globe, dramatic Time expanded and created a form of drama that put the whole world on the stage as best it could."

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Continuing his brilliant series of blogs on Rehearsing Shakespeare, our Associate Director explores the question of Time in the plays. #actors #acting #actorslife #performingarts #theatre #rehearsalroom #ShareYourShakespeare @RSC

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