Tag Archives: Shakespeare at Notre Dame

Fall 2026 “Much Ado About Nothing” Entry #2

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Hello esteemed readers! I am currently sat, nestled into a metal case of a chair at Logan International Airport, heading for Philadelphia! We are about to enter stop 3 of our US tour, so let me give you a recap!

Stop 1 – Notre Dame, Indiana, 29th August – 11th September

13-hour travel day, 6 regrettable naps, 2 chicken and waffles, and one bad back later and we arrive at Notre Dame, the home of AFTLS!

We of course had a much needed freshen up and then stumbled into the lobby where we were warmly welcomed and rejuvenated by the legend that is Cate (General Manager of Shakespeare at Notre Dame). Essential information passed on, we donned our newly acquired merch and strutted (or crawled, depends on who you ask) over to O’Rourkes, which would become our regular stop point over the next two weeks. Thus, it began.

We had our final week of rehearsals, working with the wonderful Scott to fine tune our piece and add in our character line up, the opening of the piece and within what felt like minutes, we were ready to do our preview at Westville Correctional Facility. This experience is one that I’m sure we all will carry for the rest of our lives. Personally, as a woman, there was something incredibly terrifying and beautiful about playing Leonato and speaking about grief, men, and loss to an audience of male inmates. Regardless of what preconceived ideas I had in my head, I was so moved and honoured to see that they were so incredibly generous within the space, their curiosity, their emotional investment, openness, and just the excitement to watch some Shakespeare. The Moreau College Initiative that they are running in the prison is so incredibly important and a brilliant step towards rehabilitation through the arts, everybody deserves access to spaces that they can express, create, and learn safely, regardless of the past.

After our preview, we found ourselves at the AC/DC concert in the esteemed ND stadium and never in my life have I seen that many people in one place, my mouth was agape throughout!! What a day, we travelled between worlds in a matter of hours. I truly feel so blessed to have come from my tiny seaside town in Margate, to share something that I love with wonderful people in a country so far away. What is this life!

The second half of this stop saw us delivering workshops across campus and having the opportunity to work with the incredible Not So Royal Shakespeare Company – a collective of students that are so brilliantly talented and passionate about Shakespeare. I’m sure we learned as much from them as they did from us, what a wonderful group of humans.

We rounded up our time in ND by heading to the Windy City (am I local now? Maybe) of Chicago! Hayden fell in love with the city and wants to move there one day. We ate a whole load of deep dish pizza, did a river tour, went to Second City, saw a bunch of weddings, went to the Green Mill and sat in Al Capone’s seat, saw some art, got a hair cut from a local, and wrote our name on the wall! In short, a joyous, touristic whirlwind.

THE CheEATS FOOD HALL OF FAME AWARD:

The wonderful Deb is our recipient this week! She hosted us in her home and ensured we had the best Taco Night of our lives. The birria beef was unlike anything I’ve encountered before, especially once combined with the fresh salsa, lettuce, and generous amounts of coriander. Sublime. Special shoutout to the corn. I have consumed many a corn on the cob in my time but none quite like that. Buttery, salty, and the perfect crunch, it traveled well in my takeaway bag (how could I not?!) and sustained me beautifully throughout the week. Fab food, company, and televised sport. 5 stars all round.

Deb standing in front of her taco bar

Stop 2 – Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 14-20th September

Wellesley College, what a welcome we had!! We were met at the airport by the lovely Sarah who greeted us with a big smile and a fab outfit (a recurring theme with Sarah throughout the week, excellent work). We were then taken to ‘The Cottage’ for dinner, where we got to meet Marta, David, the Faculty, and some society members. Joyous, joyous, joyous.

The week was full of workshops with a range of students, a favourite of mine was ‘Critical Interpretation’ in which we read some poetry and explored our voices, something that can be quite scary to do but everyone came with a gentle curiosity which made this session so wholesome and fun. Grace has said; “I enjoyed my ‘Women, Literature, and Music in the Age of Shakespeare’ Workshop because they were working towards performance but it was also rooted traditionally in its methods and Elizabethan performance style. It was great to see that there was still an enthusiasm and interest in that style, the passion in the room was palpable.”

We also got to meet the Wellesley Shakespeare Society and have a tour around their beautiful Tudor-style house, play some games, and just talk about life and acting over an array of snacks. What more could you want from an evening?

After having 4 shows under our belt, we had been able to start gauging what is working with the audience and how we might shift some things to make moments land better. Alex offered that we could explore ways that the Tomb scene could hold more weight and have a more haunting feel. We explored with some vocal and musical choices and are quite open that this may be one of that shifts as our play grows and settles. A scene that we have been finding challenging is the Beatrice Gulling scene, it’s such a difficult one as the dialogue completely contrasts the comedic nature of the Benedick gulling, which makes it harder as an immediate follow on. We’ve explored more by leaning into the darkness of the scene and that in fact, Hero may be speaking with more hoensty than she has been able to do previously. Currently, we’re enjoying the new direction we’ve taken and are excited to keep testing this in front of an audience. Reblocking and reworking during the run is perhaps a new found thrill about not having a sole director, we can constantly have ownership over our piece and the way that we want to tell the story.

Outside of workshops, Alex very ecstatically spotted some chipmunks in the woods, Pamela, a turtle, and us all, a RACOON! Stunning work all round Attenborough Team. Thank you so much to the Wellesley community, we felt so welcomed and looked after, it’s been a wonderful week.

The ChenEATS FOOD HALL OF FAME AWARD:

It was a tough one this week but I’m feeling grateful that I’m struggling to choose. This week’s winner is ‘The Cheesecake Factory‘. In particular, the Oreo Cheesecake. Now, I’ll be honest, usually I would slander those that choose Oreo as a ‘basic’ choice but I am converted, the decadent mouthful of fudgy heaven had me skipping around the mall. The win was solidified when I accounted for the experience, the wide array of options, and the amount I reminisced afterwards. The close second has to be Dunkin’ Donuts, I had the Coffee Roll heated up and I’m literally drooling at the thought of it, sticky, fluffy, and sweet-pastry like clouds of joy. The hold back for this was that the others I sampled were somewhat bland in comparison and the same cannot be said for the winner. My hunt for more Cheesecake Factory joy continues.

Thus, this blog release has come to an end. I hope you enjoyed the insights into our first two stops as much as I did recounting them. Well, I’ve just seen that our flight is delayed and a different one, cancelled. Fingers crossed we make it to Pennsylvania folks!!

Karaoke and other “dark entertainments” | AFTLS at Valpo

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Venue No.3 on our tour is back in Indiana, at Valparaiso University —about an hour west of Notre Dame. The vagaries of the timeline system here means that we are now six hours behind the UK, not five. Valparaiso, in Porter County, is a town of about 30,000 people and about 4,000 students (3,000 of them undergraduates) and the name apparently means “Vale of Paradise” in Spanish, so named after David Porter (founder of Porter County), who fought in the 1812 Battle of Valparaiso in Chile. It’s not where the overture comes from, but it obviously meant enough to Mr. Porter. To my mind, it has more echoes of Milton Keynes: it has a roundabout (a great rarity so far on our travels and one that bemused the locals when it was first put in); it has a stillness to it.

Borders, an acclaimed sculpture installation by the noted contemporary Icelandic artist Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir

The university has a number of statues around the campus, Antony Gormley-like silver and bronze figures that remind me of Milton Keynes’ finest cows as you enter the town. Learn more about the installation at Valparaiso University’s Brauer Museum of Art.

Valparaiso is a regular stop for AFTLS tours, so you can imagine the welcome we got. They were ready for us too, having 35 classes lined up, on subjects ranging from macro-economics to the parables (I knew that hotel Gideon Bible would come in useful one day), from Antigone to community workshops, from nursing to the theological imagination. And yet, to be honest, it’s often the unusual subjects like these that produce surprisingly rewarding results. Jack gave a class to economics students and, immediately realizing that his lesson plan would be difficult to make work in the circumstances, he cleverly came up with a whole new idea on the spot, getting the students to work together to put forward a pitch for their own theatre company, how they would make it work financially and what would be its USP (unique selling proposition), etc.

“…this practical approach to stories and to text often helps the students to look at these works in a new and enlightening way, and it highlights the value of drama and play that goes way beyond only the interests of a theatre major.” — Roger May

When I did my class on the parables, acting out our version of The Prodigal Son, we improvised the story and set it on a present-day ranch. When the younger son left the ranch, taking his share of the family money, his first temptation was, apparently, to head straight for Disney World. Then Epcot. Then, when he was lured to some bars by people interested only in his money, I tried to lead the students to ‘darker entertainments.’ “What could they be?” I asked them. A small group shouted back “Karaoke”! Not exactly what I meant…

By the time we got to the end of the story, we had put flesh on the bare bones of the story in the Bible (albeit with some slight twists) and taken time to examine the characters’ feelings and motivations. And, at the end of the class, a theology major came up to me and said “You know, I’d never stopped to think about how the son felt when he returned home. And it’s made me look at this parable and other parables, in a new way today. Thank you for that.” I say this not to blow my own trumpet (or those in Jericho) but to blow the trumpet of this company; this practical approach to stories and to text often helps the students to look at these works in a new and enlightening way, and it highlights the value of drama and play that goes way beyond only the interests of a theatre major. Funny, though, how often these improvisations seem to lead to Disney, or to Jedi Knights, or to the Kardashians…

There remains, on our travels, a feeling that we are definitely Brits abroad. I am still struggling with the restrooms here. For a start, I was dumbfounded the other day to find a TV in the restroom – previously the only safe haven, pretty much, that I had managed to find in public spaces in America. And then, of course, those automatic flushing toilets. The other night I was sitting down in my cubicle when my phone slid out of my trousers onto the floor. I leant forward to pick it up and, no sooner had I done so than the toilet assumed I had vanished and flushed away. Well, that’s the closest I’ve come to a bidet on my travels, that’s for sure…

The British accent, too, still leads to odd situations. The other day, no sooner had we opened our mouths but the taxi driver said “So, you met the Queen?” And I swear Will was presented with a take-away cup of coffee with a curtsey the other day…

Everywhere we go, we are greeted with “How’s it going?” It took me a while to realise that Americans don’t want an answer to this – it’s really just another way of saying “Hi.” I, of course, take a perverse pleasure in answering as if they genuinely want to know how my life is going. When a hotel desk clerk in Valpo, already in the middle of a conversation with another guest, greeted my return at the front door with “How’s it going?”, I couldn’t resist taking the perverse pleasure of replying. “Not bad, thanks. I’ve just given a class on theological imagination with particular reference to the dead letter. How about you?”. There followed a confused stand-off as nobody quite knew with which conversation to resume.

By the way, for those of you who read last week’s blog, I’m convinced that Timmy has followed us. Not only did I fall through my bed as all the slats fell out but decided against changing rooms when I discovered that Jack’s tap water ran red and Jas and Sarah were sharing their rooms with stink bugs. Thanks Timmy.

The Romeo and Juliet cast with Danny, Valparaiso University Stage Manager

And so to the show. The theatre was very well-equipped and the tech was led by Eric and Danny. Danny, an acting student new to his stage management duties, could not have been more helpful and worked hard to look after us. And the audience were very appreciative—apparently they get professional productions here only rarely and the show was very well-attended.

And it’s a treat to meet some of the audience afterwards. They often come up with the most specific thoughts; on Saturday someone came up and said “I liked the way you paused in the middle of Mercutio’s ‘love was blind’ line; I’ve not seen that before”. It’s impressive when they pick up on details like that. Of course, I’m fully aware that, by talking about it, that moment is now never going to work again. It’s rather like when someone says how well the timing works with a funny line in a play; once thought about, it’s never quite the same…!

Roger May, Sarah Finigan, Jasmeen James, and Jack Whitam catch some sun on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Sorry to be very British here, but we’ve been so lucky with the mild weather, and our day off after Valpo was no different. (I don’t think Punxsutawney Phil knew what he was talking about a couple of weeks back when he predicted another six weeks of winter.) We headed for the Indiana Dunes on the edge of Lake Michigan and stood by the endlessly impressive lake, skimming stones and soaking in the sheer expanse of it all – the northern end of the lake is over 300 miles away. Our skimmers didn’t quite get to the other side.

Next up, Nashville and Vanderbilt University. (Timmy, you’re not invited.)

—Roger May (Wednesday, February 22, 2017)

 

Welcome to America | Bubbles, Bowling, and Buñuel

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The Lab Theatre in the University of Notre Dame’s Washington Hall

So. Two weeks done in the US of A. We spent most of week one on the second floor of a campus building, a ‘theater lab’ that acts as our rehearsal space. Occasionally we would wander out to ‘The Huddle,’ a building opposite that houses various eateries and drinkeries that cater for our lunchtime needs. And in the evening, we would wander out to a local bar and chew the cud. But truthfully, we were in a kind of bubble, an other-world consisting of five British actors, a suitcase of props and costumes, and lots of bottles of water. And yet we are still not immune to the spiraling tornado that is emanating from the White House. The TV is awash with experts and questions and rants and fears. And honestly, I’m scared of where this all may lead. Arrests made at JFK Airport, protests, executive orders, closing borders. Strange times.

One of the classes I was asked to teach on was on the subject of rhetoric and great speeches, so I thought I’d work with them on the Mark Antony “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech. Reading over it, this section hit me between the eyes:

“O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.”

Even in our iambic bubble, you can never hide away too far…

Ground transportation is Will Donaldson approved.

In fact, to highlight the surreal in all this we were greeted at Chicago airport, when we landed, with a stretch limousine. “Why?” my daughter demanded jealously when I told her. Well, apparently it was the cheaper option. All I know is that, since Chicago is an hour behind South Bend, Indiana, there was a time when I, sitting at the front and Jack, sitting right at the back, were in different time zones.

Indiana is southeast from Chicago and Lake Michigan. South Bend, the local town, is a low sprawl of highways and chain stores, much like many an American town – with so much space to play with, the architecture is generally low and wide. It’s also pretty featureless.

The University of Notre Dame, meanwhile, is a mix of impressive buildings that seem to be, in a uniformly sand-blasted way, gothic-influenced and money-influenced. For the 8,500 students here, the facilities are palatial. Apparently, many students get scholarships, which is a good job as the annual fee is apparently $61,000. The mind boggles. (You sure you want to take away the cap on the £9,000 annual fee in the UK?) The university has its own fire station, its own police force, its own zip code, and even its own power plant.

We also boggle at adverts and billboards that are so wonderfully unenglish. So far we’ve been enticed by various stores and messages: “Let’s Spoon,” “Femme Fatale” (a gun store), “Don’t Get Caught Dirty,” and a TV advert that promises to “lubricate itself right in the package.” As you can imagine, we play up the stereotype and react in a suitably Downton Abbey manner.

One big highlight this week has been to watch a live ice hockey match – a first for me. At the beginning, Will, Sarah, and I stared incomprehensibly at the high-speed mayhem but, with the help of some hockey moms cheering on their high school kids, by the end of it we were cheering and nodding knowingly at the two-minute penalties and the nuances of stick and puck. Great fun. For the record, Newtrier beat St.Joseph’s 8-2.

The boys have also ventured out to the local bowling alley. It seemed such an unprepossessing place as we drove up to Chippewa Bowl. But inside, an astonishing tardis of striking and unsparing proportions (see what I did there?). Seventy lanes. SEVENTY lanes. I ask you. Probably a good thing, as it meant no-one noticed the spirited but average fare from lane 52…

It’s surprisingly mild for the time of year but finally, in the last few days, the snow has come in. Not a staggering amount, but enough to impress five Brits and give us an excuse to finally unpack those extra Michelin-sponsored layers. Jas’ roller blades will have to wait though. In the meantime, we get our exercise in the hotel gym. I think we all know it won’t last, but we’re pretty keen cyclists, runners, and cross-trainers for this week at least.

Looking out from the stage of Washington Hall.

In the meantime, we rehearsed. Getting into the theatre was a good shock to the system; the space is a lovely two-tiered and quite intimate space (about 500 seats), but it requires a fair amount of work vocally – especially on the consonants – and is quite wide too and a challenge to play to all areas. For English readers, it’s rather like the Rose Theatre, Kingston, or Chichester (before the make-over).

Over the last few weeks, I’ve learnt two things about how to work with a company of five and no director. The first is that you have to try everything. Not only that, but you have to have time to work through each idea. It’s quite time-consuming, but even bad ideas are useful to explore, not only to be sure they don’t work, but also because they often lead to good ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of. And the second thing is that you need to be as sensitive as the most sensitive person in the room. Which is not always the same person. Again, this demands a patience and awareness, but that is a useful mindset to get into for an eight-week tour. And it’s turned us into a close-knit group.

The Romeo and Juliet cast (pictured L-R): Jasmeen James, Jack Whitam, Scott Jackson (Shakespeare at Notre Dame Executive Director), Sarah Finigan, Roger May, and William Donaldson.

And so to the show. Finally playing to an audience was just what we needed, and the reception was lovely. There really is a lot of humour in the first half, despite the family feud, and the audience was quick to pick up on that. The biggest challenge is to keep the freshness of a story that everyone knows and the ending that the prologue has forewarned you of (spoiler alert). Over the coming weeks that, I suspect, will be our biggest test.

Apart from taking a class on the acting styles used in the Buñuel film Los Olvidados, possibly. That was a challenge I wasn’t expecting on this tour. In the event, we had great fun with it, storyboarding the opening of Romeo and Juliet in the style of a Buñuel film. It’s important to understand that the students we teach are often not drama students (in this case they were studying Spanish), but their willingness to dive in and participate is both surprising and wonderful. Other classes covered in this first week of teaching have included Henry VIII, the speeches of Lady Macbeth, gang violence and poetry reading.

In my warm-up for a class on rhetoric the other day, I asked the students to face a wall and give only the volume needed for that distance, and then got them to increase tat distance bit by bit. “Do any speech you like”, I said, “or, if you don’t know one, then a poem or lyrics or anything you can repeat a few times”. “Anything?”, one student asked. “Yes, anything”, I confirmed. I think it was a great compliment to the establishment that, on walking round the classroom, I heard three “Hail Marys” and four or five “Lord’s Prayers”…

After the final sold-out show tonight, we head off to Chicago for the weekend, before our next stop at Berea College in Kentucky. I have to say that the hospitality and the generosity we’ve encountered has been terrific. Long may that last on this journey.

— Roger May (2/3/17)

 

[Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Shakespeare at Notre Dame or the University of Notre Dame.]

‘Trevor Nunn’ is a Verb | Romeo and Juliet in Rehearsal

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Whatever your political take, it feels like a strangely apt time to be doing a tour of Romeo and Juliet, a play about divisiveness and intolerance.

With that said, it’s time to pack. We line up our props of flowers and sticks and torches and bowls and curtains and sheets and, looking over them, we can see a representation of the collective maelstrom of our ideas that have bounced off these rehearsal room walls over the last few weeks. To be honest, this way of working (without a director) is an exhausting but invigorating process – if those are not too contradictory words.

William Donaldson (dead) and Jack Whitam fail to ‘Trevor Nunn’ while rehearsing Romeo and Juliet.

We have built up a strange company linguistic shorthand over the last few weeks. For some reason we ‘concur’ a lot, rather than agreeing (think Catch Me If You Can), and ‘Trevor Nunn’ (the name of a prominent theatre director in the UK) seems to be another form of agreement we use – not sure of the derivation of that! But it’s a relief that we ‘concur’ and ‘Trevor Nunn’ pretty frequently through our working day.

We still have some more rehearsal time in Indiana, but yesterday we showed our work (in the form of a run of the whole play) to some of the Associate Directors of the Company. Their feedback was very positive and also gave us some pointers to work on next week.

It’s only by doing a run of the play that you start to get an idea of each actor’s ‘track’ through the play. I think of the term ‘track’ as being from the musicals world, really, (I guess stemming from the fact that, in that world, you often have to understudy a number of other parts to cover for sickness etc, and so you need to learn the track of each one – in other words, the various entrances and exits, as well as your offstage journey to each one, and where you might be in a dancing formation etc. Anyway, it seems an apt word for us here, where we are playing many parts and needing to find out when we enter where, with what prop and as which character. As you can imagine, it’s a confusing route for all of us. This is made harder by the fact that no actor ever exits the stage; if you do leave the scene, you sit on the chairs upstage, as you may (and often will) be needed to contribute sounds or voices to scenes you are not otherwise involved in.

The five member Romeo and Juliet cast walks their tracks.

At the moment, this all seems insurmountable – so far I have 36 different items on my track list – but I’m sure that running the play a few times will make things clearer. So, it’s time to print up travel details, weigh bags, and hopefully all meet on Sunday at Heathrow airport. The journey begins.

Roger May (January 20, 2017 | Brixton)

[Update: our Actors From The London Stage are safe and sound at their American home, Shakespeare at Notre Dame. Their first public performances will be February 1-3. Click HERE for tickets.]