Author Archives: Shakespeare

How I learned to drive in Valparaiso?

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BLOG 5: Valparaiso

So, back in Indiana – snow storms and now drizzle and a tropical 44 degrees farenheit. A day or two’s acclimatization post Texas, hovering between longjohns and bare legs, snow boots and clogs.

A full-up week of classes with students from assorted majors, some far removed from theatre, and many of whom, quite apart from valiantly turning their hands to Shakespeare’s text with us, are in the midst of the busiest time of their semester. As we’ve packed up our workshop notes and trudged back home to hit the hay (via a line-run of Hamlet from the pillow), they’ve been trotting off to ‘flying’ rehearsals for the Dance Ensemble performance, which we watched on Friday night; or they’ve gone on to rehearse – late into the evening – their upcoming production of Paula Vogel’s How I learned to Drive. They’re a busy bunch and have still managed to find the energy to throw great enthusiasm at our classes and pack out the auditorium for the Saturday evening performance of Hamlet only hours after their own matinee dance extravaganza and having turned up in force to attend our morning workshops.

We’ve enjoyed a rather sparkling social life this week thanks to the university faculty – Lee, Alan, Andy, Ann and Arran – providing us with warm hospitality and our first step across an American threshold. Mr and Mrs Orchard did us proud with fine wine, an assortment of Bourbons that Pete and Andrew sifted through at some length, and a wonderful spread of food in their open-plan wood-raftered living room. Last night, after Hamlet, and having safely stowed the so-called ‘Showbag’ at the hotel (this is the large, battered, sworn at old wheelie suitcase that’s scuffs along at a limping trundle and contains the entire Old Curiosity Shop of our production), we descended on our hosts again, at a downtown bar and proceeded – flushed with the relief of having mounted Hamlet safely after a week’s interval – on getting the right side of a fair few glasses; Beers, bourbons, vodka martinis and wine landed with considerable frequency. Blue-cheese-stuffed olives were taken dripping from Arran’s martini and handed across the table for sampling. More martinis followed as a result and, to cut a long story short, this morning’s planned trip to Amish country was completely abandoned. Nevermind, we’ll approach the Amish towns next week, from South Bend instead.

After a morning – and early afternoon – of deathly quiet at the hotel, Pete, Andrew, Charlie and Shuna managed to put one foot in front of the other by about 5pm and assembled at our favourite American restaurant so far – Pikk’s Tavern in downtown Valparaiso. Here they do fantastic gumbo, lots of delicious giant shrimp and seafood dishes and good steaks. Terry was last seen at Pikk’s cavorting through a San Franciscan seafood stew. He’s left us today, to join friends up in Michigan in Grand Haven for some bracing walks by the lake.

Charlie and Shuna drove up to the lakeshore (Lake Michigan) a couple of days ago and were suitably astounded by the grandeur of the crashing waves and the devastating wind. We had to walk up over the sandy dunes in order to see the lake because between the shoreline and the water were great banks of snow drifts that looked a bit like a strip of glacier and when you stood at sea-level at the edge of the shore you couldn’t see the lake, only the few hundred feet worth of snow drift and the spray against the sky as the lake buffeted against it, blocked from view. We learned from a signpost, that there was a battle here in late 1780 in which a British general got wind of a band of men who had plundered a whole lot of trade fur and chased them through the dunes until they surrendered. Charlie was very taken with the general’s (very un-British) name, and is thinking of changing his stage name in honour of Lieutenant Dagreaux du Quindre.

Terry had his own adventure in downtown Valparaiso where he discovered the town’s museum full of an eclectic array of exhibits including mammoth tusks and some very helpful, whilst eccentric, members of staff. Downtown Valparaiso is a quiet, pleasant place of brick terraced houses and some interesting independent shops. Terry, for instance, found a specialist cake shop and made off with an extremely large, pink box of mega cupcakes for his friends up in Grand Haven.

Andrew has spent a certain amount of time avidly cruising the aisles of Walmart in search of various provisions – it’s the first Walmart we’ve visited in the US and sells everything known to man. Andrew was, however, amongst the breakaway group of three who decided to renounce Walmart one sunny afternoon and head for Sunset Hill Farm County Park, a few miles north of the town. Sun glinting on snow along dappled woodland trails; we talked about cross-country skiing, though not enough snow to do it, and decided not to walk across the frozen pond and fulfill the deathwish. The Park has a few old farm buildings – it used to be a dairy and chicken farm in the 1930’s – and still has some vintage agricultural machinery sitting about in open barns. We fancied ourselves as Country singers modeling for our newest album cover as we posed for photos on the tractors and swathed ourselves on threshing machines. See pictures below.

Pete has been involved in a sort of solitary expressionist maelstrom by dead of night: on leaving the foyer for the walk across to campus one morning, he announced ‘ The Valparaiso sky is the colour of MURDER!’. We all wondered what on earth he was talking about – was playing Hamlet getting to the lusty youth at last? – Pete had been up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and discovered that ‘the sky is mauve and grey and swirly’ and had actually been moved to do a piece to camera on his phone about the phenomenon as it struck him. I overheard some of the footage and it’s a dramatic broadcast of a man grappling with the wonders of the universe. On a more worldly note, Pete is coming to the end of his tether regarding the American mohito. He says he’s giving up and not having another until he returns to the UK or if he went to New York he might attempt one but only if he could talk to the barman first.

Back at the coal face, we’ve had a very satisfying week of classes including a few welcome departures from Shakespeare as we dropped in on evening rehearsals for ‘Learning to Drive’. One session involved so-called ‘hot-seating’ the students in character (asking a character questions about him/herself beyond the play to which they make up the answers) – they were three weeks into rehearsals and well placed to have a go at this exercise. In fact, so completely did they commit themselves imaginatively to the improvisation that their characters blossomed before us and the interviews became too compelling to cut short and we spent a full two hours between the five characters.

It was liberating, too, to spend Saturday morning’s two-hour workshops on fresh ground away from Hamlet. Charlie actually overran his session on Audition techniques by half an hour and Lee came in next door to tell us, ‘ We just can’t stop Charles from teaching!’. Andrew did a session on rhetoric using the Gettysburg Address, Pete and Shuna shared a productive session on physicality and voice which culminated in a detailed Terry masterclass on iambic pentameter which the students appeared to lap up, even towards the end of a long workshop. We all felt pleased and enjoyed a pre-show lunch in the campus canteen, followed by a few hours’ rest and then back to the theatre to mount

.

We made it through and did a good show, though a week’s break inevitably blunts the wherewithal in certain ways, and you just have to hang on tight. Student and teacher response was very positive, “Good job!’ and Andrew is accumulating a significant fan-club, amongst the young women in particular it seems, for Rozencrantz and Guildenstern. Charlie and Pete had a bit of an entanglement during Claudius’ death, which normally takes place relatively neatly with Charlie swallowing the poison lying across the couple of chairs and silk cloth that make the throne. Last night, Charlie’s demise was more violent still: Pete’s body weight and both the chairs ended up on top of Charlie, whose corpse lay covered messily in the silk cloth and not as visible as usual. Pete then had to feel about in search of the goblet of poison which had got caught in Charlie’s jacket before he could possibly continue with the next bit in which he comes downstage and grapples with Horatio over ‘the cup!’

Back to our old friends in Notre Dame tomorrow for the next part of the adventure. For one thing, we’re very much looking forward to the theatre in Washington Hall. – Shuna

A Texas-size Standing Ovation!

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HAMLET BLOG NUMBER 4

All sorts of developments in the last few days, on and off the AFTLS beaten track: not least is that we’ve opened Hamlet at last and, by God, we’ve done it in the sultry February heat of the Lone Star State, the strange and exotic planet that’s Texas.

We had an audience pushing 600 on opening night in the Rudder Theatre and a healthy standing ovation. It pushed 700 the second night and a flurry of students that we’d taught during the week came up onto stage for autographs, chats and all smiling – we felt relieved and that the show had been appreciated – enjoyed even! – and over a slap-up dinner in Café Eccel thanks to Kirstin, our Texas A&M producer, she admitted that on the back of the show and audience turnout she’ll be inviting AFTLS back to the university next year. “Only 3 walkouts, I’m telling ya’ that’s a triumph!”

Some smaller classes this week, thrown in with the crowd-management variety in the lecture halls, but they were all satisfying. We tried getting the students doing some physical tableaus alongside Gertrude’s ‘willow’ speech: one person speaks the speech, one molds and one is the clay, and by the end of the class, when prompted, ‘So, what can you remember now that we’ve taken back the scripts?’ there was a flood of recall and Gertrude’s speech almost entirely reconstituted itself from all the corners of the room! Terry used his ‘good/bad angel’ technique for cracking open ‘To be or not to be’, we had them cantering about with iambic pentameter and had some fun with the Ghost scene as the students experimented with the spatial relationship between Hamlet and the old ghoul to make the scene as dramatic as possible.

What is hairy, and also very exciting, about this tour is the amount of time we have between shows and hence the job of keeping what’s a very substantial play in performable shape. We worked our way into a crescendo at Notre Dame – our ‘final’ week’s rehearsal culminating in the run in front of the faculty. The following day was a tech in Washington Hall and then, tantalizingly, just as you would normally expect to kick off into an opening night, and just as we’d fallen in love with that stage – we fly off, land and spend several days out of a theatre space and limited to going through the lines in our hotel rooms. Then as opening night suddenly arrives, we have to urgently lift the thing back into the shape it was in when we left off in the course of a single tech session. It’s a most irregular way of performing a play as big as this one – I think if we’d had a chance to ‘run it in’, it would be slightly less hairy – but, hey ho, this way of working brings positive possibilities, too: even as our hair stands on end at the thought of another show the other side of 6 days off (gulp!), we’ll certainly be able to keep it ‘in the moment’ and, um, as you might say, ‘fresh’.

But back to Texas: We like the big sky here and the evening light. We’ve enjoyed floating about in our Mo Fo white tank of a car, our first dally into the massive HEB supermarket, nodding donkeys, Stetsons, the accent, the temperature, some excellent TexMex, hanging out in Austin, driving through the landscape, surviving our first two shows, the military cadet uniforms, their gun-spinning skills on the campus greens, grackles making a right racket in the Austin trees, the Capitol building’s State rooms and staircases, Lone Star beer, horses, cattle….here’s wishin’ we could head on out to Hill Country, meet some cowboys, head right off the beaten track.

Highlights and lowlights from the team in an attempt to scour every nook and cranny of the adventure:

Andrew: Highlight – 1. spotting small, horse-herding boy in a field by the freeway en route to Austin. The little boy waved his small white Stetson round and round, got the horses into a gallop then stopped, put it back on and walked back in the other direction. 2. Finding excellent croissants in the Whole Food emporium, Austin. (he bought ‘em back for his grateful colleagues).

I should mention at this point – four of us , let’s call us Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet and Rozencrantz – we shot off to Austin our day off. Andrew managed to find us a so-called ‘Air B & B’ – which turned out to be long, blond haired Aaron’s comfortable free-spirited bungalow on the outskirts of Austin – we had a porch which gave onto a slope with a trampoline, a swing and a hammock – all be it overlooking what the freeway. Traffic noise aside, we all landed here and stared happily at the sky. It was a relief to sit on a stoop – there was a rocking chair – and relax and let Hamlet slide out of our veins for a day and a night.

Andrew’s lowlight: swallowing the prong of a plastic fork and thereby risking multiple internal ruptures. (By Sunday brunch in Austin we had all but eliminated this worst-case scenario and his pizza seemed to slide down uninterrupted).

A visit to Austin’s Capitol building. On the eve of our departure back up to Indiana and freezing temperatures, we loafed about the park in Spring-like sunshine, a terrific statue of a cowboy and his horse in full bucking throes, and into the building – the House of Representatives and the House of Congress – two bright and majestic rooms, none of the pomposity of the English Parliament – comfortable and democratic and elegant were words we found. Huge oil paiting of the surrender of Santa Anna in all its full-blown propaganda glory.

Terry, meanwhile, had a gentle and different sort of meditative weekend, walking the local-to-College-Station Lick Creek Country Park. He spotted Scarlet Tanagers and heard bullfrogs. Cardinals, too, of course. His highlight was Washington-on-Braxos and this airey house where the ladies once sat out on the porch sewing detailed cotton embroidered bonnets and all sorts of pretty things.

Terry’s lowlight was launching a Cajun chicken mistakenly across the floor of HEB supermarket. It slid several yards across the floor after he upended it, apparently. The good news is that, chickens akimbo, he nevertheless bumped into a parent of one of the students at Texas A & M who told him, “ You’ve turned my 12 year old onto Shakespeare!”.

Charlie’s highlight was the Austin hammock and swing. I attach a photo. Therein you see a man relaxing. He also enjoyed our Irish coffee in Austin’s Driskill Hotel. We couldn’t help ourselves. It was wonderfully grand, all marble pillars and high ceilings and shining stone floors and magnificent architectural comfort, mind you we marched through the grand hall and into the bar at the back to find a full-blown country concert with fiddle and Stetsons – and luxuriant, generous American leather furnishings, paintings and bison’s horns and decided we’d never find anywhere in England so welcoming and relaxed.

Charlie’s lowlight was getting pulled over by the police because our hire car didn’t have a front license plate. (Actually, he admits it was rather fun). The policeman was very friendly, explained that State rules in Texas are different to elsewhere regarding license plates and didn’t book us. We nodded, said we were ‘terribly sorry’ and were absolutely thrilled.

Pete, alas, is still searching for a decent Mohito but admits to getting nearer. His highlight was setting off from our freeway bound bungalow – for a morning run – along the Townlake trail to Austin and merging with crowds of likeminded Texan joggers along the way.

Shuna’s got a few things to add to our AFTLS Nature Notes:

Grackles we all discovered shrieking in the trees of Austin. Also she noticed bright orange and yellow butterflies flitting about when we went up a rocky outcrop by the Colorado River and surveyed the view of the city. Also, she’s been looking at all the beautiful, gnarled species of Oak Trees that cover the Texas landscape. Various big hawks with white heads – we need Terry to tell us.

Meanwhile, we’re newly landed in Valparaiso and a lovely welcome – a so-called ‘coloquium’ with the students this evening, a kind of Q & A about the acting profession and our own particular trails into it. Snow and longjohns again. All sorts of classes ahead this week, we’ll be pulled away from Shakespeare to eg. Paula Vogel’s ‘ How I learned to Drive’ and some scene work with students who are already some way into their rehearsal process.

Thanks to Jessica and Mike for seeing us off at Houston – and to Jessica for all her hard work in accommodating us in College Station.

Lee, Andy, Alan and Betsy have given us a warm landing in Valpo and are as keen as we are for a fulfilling week ahead.

Pretty, brick buildings downtown here where we spent the evening chewing the fat with this close-knit and passionate Theatre Faculty over Guinness, Merlot and Jameson and a really good Gumbo. Brave driving from Lee in getting us out of a snow drift earlier to hit the pub. The Dance Ensemble and Bach’s Mass in B Minor are all abroad in the theatres so Hamlet has been valiantly slotted into a height of semester hive of activity. We look forward to working amongst it all. – Shuna

The stars at night – are big and bright –

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HAMLET hits Texas

Being from London, (where the temperature varies but a very few miserable degrees in late January) I am unable to help myself referring avidly and endlessly to the weather conditions in this mighty country, the latest excitement being the warm balmy air that greeted us in Houston. More British murmurs of delighted approval and a joyous scrunching up of gloves and kicking off of snow boots at the airport. Wow – at 73 degrees it’s HOT! An extremely respectable height-of-summer’s day for us – Roll on Texas.

And our second insight into a stretch of American countryside along the journey to College Station. Our first was the drive from South Bend to Chicago’s airport, but there was thick fog, though I spotted a deer in a field as the snow cover subsided. We’re still very excited when we catch sight of an old wooden house and porch. We have no such thing in England where it’s mostly bricks and being still relatively new to the US these houses strike us with the utmost charm whenever we spy them through the great strips of malls and billboards.

Texas on a sunny day, the rolling stretches of grassland were a revelation. I think I’d anticipated oil fields back to back.

It has taken us a little time to surrender our natural British bent to walk down the street by way of exploring a place. Our eyes comb the freeways for what we call ‘pavements’ but you call sidewalks. There just ain’t none, this neck of the woods and we’re beginning to appreciate that what you do is you get in your large car and you  float along the straight roads and float off them again when you reach your particular destination. What you cannot do is stop and ‘nip’ out to investigate on a whim.

We’ve hit the classrooms. The students are all very friendly and willing and some very capable indeed. A young lad called Caesar comes immediately to mind. A Science student, he shyly took the floor as Polonius to interrogate Ophelia and turns out, unassuming and polite though he was, he simply couldn’t hide the fact that he had the voice of a Roman emperor, resounded like a great bell, really terrific.

We’ve served up a few sessions on ‘ To Be Or Not to Be’, exploring the rhythm of the verse and pushing through the whole of the speech – hopefully – giving the students some kind of insight into the twists and turns of Hamlet’s thought processes. Get up on your feet and change direction at each new thought – the mind has mountains!  A big challenge was what on earth to do with 135 students all stuck on chairs behind rows of desks in a large lecture hall. Mercifully, the hall had two levels and we were able to convince ourselves – loosely and via an urgent plea to 135 imaginations – that this could constitute the battlements of Elsinore’s precipitous castle. We had one brave volunteer, right up the back at the top, cry out the first line of the play, ” Who’s there?” and, some way off and below, a brave colleague cry back, ” Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself!”. Throw in a stormy soundscape created by several creaking desks, hums, hollers, bird screeches and whatnot and we had the makings of a far grander production than our own 5-man version!

A class tomorrow with some students who’ve studied the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Ophelia’s ‘romantic’ death. I shall certainly mention that the poor model who sat for the most famous of all by Millais perished in real life from so many hours in a cold bath. The image of the girl floating rather beautifully downstream with her fingers  clutching soaked flowers has its one and entire Hamlet reference in Gertrude’s speech, “There is a willow grows aslant a brook”. Only 17 and a half lines of verse have given way to a cult of romantic images.  Did Gertrude paint a beautiful lie? Surely if she’d really caught Ophelia at it and seen the branch crack she’d have waded in pronto to give the poor girl a hand?

We made the welcome discovery of downtown Bryan today. A delicious lunch, too and an hour’s interlude in which we forgot about Hamlet and came across the heart of the old town with its very pretty high street lined with old buildings including the Carnegie Library, red brick and white pillars and another red-brick, gracious warehouse building labelled ‘Corn Exchange’. Lunch was homemade and inside the old market hall; we even heard the melancholy moan of a train passing through as it would have done when this place was simply a pit stop between Houston and Dallas.

We open tomorrow. Lord knows what Texas’s A&M students will make of Hamlet. It’s been a long journey to our first audience and probably for many of them an extremely unlikely way of spending a Friday evening. We shall all have to be set our chins to the wind and hope for the best! – Shuna Snow

Editor: Tickets for this week’s performances at Texas A & M may be purchased here.