{"id":2276,"date":"2026-01-21T22:05:05","date_gmt":"2026-01-22T03:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/?p=2276"},"modified":"2026-01-21T22:05:05","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T03:05:05","slug":"spring-2026-as-you-like-it-entry-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/spring-2026-as-you-like-it-entry-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Spring 2026 “As You Like It” Entry #3"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


\u201cSir, I am a true labourer.\u201d <\/em>We have just finished our first run of the whole thing and my brain feels like it may melt out of my ears. I\u2019m brimming with adrenaline and residual anxiety, my carefully styled hair is a distant memory, I\u2019m sweating more than I\u2019m willing to admit to, and the rehearsal room is a bomb site of purple drapes, fake fir tree branches, and tartan scarves. It\u2019s utter carnage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have A Play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I hope it isn\u2019t bragging to tell you how hard we\u2019ve worked the last week or so to get ourselves to this point; the process of going back over the scenes we sketched out and digging for the detail has been intense but so worthwhile, and it\u2019s paying off in how emotionally wrung out I feel by the time we get to the end. The five of us are properly in our rhythm now, and for all we\u2019re working hard it certainly isn\u2019t all blood, sweat, and tears; there have been plenty of times where we\u2019ve busted up laughing because someone\u2019s found an innuendo in a line, or it gets to the end of the day and we\u2019re all so delirious there\u2019s nothing else to do but descend into manic giggles. We have to be colleagues – we get no say in that matter – but to be friends and to look out for each other in the way that we are is something you hope for on every job as an actor, and it\u2019s an utter gem when you\u2019re fortunate enough to get it. One of our Saturday rehearsals fell on my birthday, and I walked in to balloons, a banner, a card, and a birthday cake – I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s an American equivalent to a Colin the Caterpillar, but if there isn\u2019t I beg you to Google it and try and imagine my joy when my gorgeous team presented me with one. January is a miserable time of year to have a birthday – my mother apologises to me around this time every year – but with these lovely folks in our little room in Brixton, it was a joyous way to kick off the big 2-7. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That supportive energy between us is invaluable to fall back on when we\u2019re building the world of the play – our characters are lovers, enemies, families, best friends, and it can be a strange thing to be crafting a relationship like that with a person you\u2019ve known a little over a month. Our deep-dive proper into Act III Scene iii felt like a pivotal moment in that exploration this week; it\u2019s the scene wherein Orlando meets \u2018Ganymede\u2019 (Rosalind\u2019s male alter-ego) in the forest for the first time, and the lack of court pressure or gender oppositions means that Rosalind has a chance to see if he\u2019s really as in love with her as he claims to be in the poems he\u2019s been sticking up everywhere. It\u2019s one of my favourite scenes in the whole play, but a daunting one – there are so many dynamics at play as the two are sizing each other up, dominating each other, and figuring out for themselves what they might be feeling towards the other. It\u2019s also, dare I say it, kind of sexy, and that can be a rather formidable thing to tackle if you don\u2019t trust yourself and the people you\u2019re working with. Luckily, that wasn\u2019t something we had to worry about. Sam is, to put it simply, brilliant – it\u2019s his third go-round with AFTLS and, as a first-timer, to be approaching these scenes with someone as intelligent, generous, and insightful as he is takes a significant amount of fear out of it all. But it\u2019s a room with five directors, and even if one of us isn\u2019t in scene we certainly aren\u2019t resting on our laurels. We had Benjy putting us through our paces, extracting every nuance from all of the layers going on – what is Orlando feeling towards this stranger? How good is Rosalind at the \u2018Ganymede\u2019 character? Why do either of them stay in the conversation, and what do they want from the other? Al keeps us in check with our verse speaking and loyalty to every minute piece of punctuation, and Jo even pauses the scene as Celia to build in our given circumstances and really challenge us to hold the tension and stakes of who these people are to each other. It\u2019s a challenge, but one we sure as hell give our all to, and a scene that may have been perfectly serviceable when we first revisited it is now enriched with a subtext that keeps us playful, cautious, flirtatious, and alive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The thing with Shakespeare is, you can read and analyse and research and talk about it all until the cows (or in the case of this play, the sheep) come home, but you don\u2019t know until you get up on your feet with your fellow actors and have a swing at it. It\u2019s the only way to own it, and to have fun whilst you\u2019re doing so. We\u2019ve found games within the scenes, things to focus our objectives and remind us of what the characters are trying to affect in each other; a game of tag between Phebe, Silvius, \u2018Ganymede\u2019, and Orlando was a particular standout, but one-on-one pick-up basketball to work our way through Rosalind and Orlando\u2019s power-flirting definitely gets an honourable mention. That being said, perhaps the biggest game of all this week was all five of us trying to figure out the best way to cut the fabric we have for our boundary into three equal strips – not as easy as it sounds when you\u2019re trying to wrangle 20 feet of purple satin and keep fraying to an absolute minimum. That last part was, of course, a fool\u2019s errand, and triggered a manhunt through Brixton to try and find someone who\u2019d be willing and able to hem that much material for us. LoLo, wherever you are, you\u2019re a God among men, as we ended the week victorious and with our idea for the transition between court and country firmly cementing itself as (thank goodness) possible. With a little more rehearsal and tightening, we may very well get our magic there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s an intimidating thing, getting down to the wire in the way that we are. We\u2019re only a few days out from our final sharing, where we perform the show in its current iteration to AFTLS company members who are tasked with finding ways we can streamline the chaos of the thing and make scene and character transitions as efficient and seamless as possible. We got an email the other day with our full schedule, itinerary, and travel information, and I had to hide under my duvet for a little while because it all felt suddenly incredibly real. It sounds silly, but I haven\u2019t processed the \u2018America\u2019 part of this job – I\u2019ve toured before, and I know that the next phase of this whole journey is getting to perform the show we\u2019ve built together, but the travel and the adventure of it still feels slightly far away and unreal. I\u2019m hearing so much about the near-mythical things we\u2019re going to do and see and experience – the pretzel bites at O\u2019Rourke\u2019s, Super Bowl watch parties, the Chicago architecture boat tour, hyper-specific Texan dive bars – and it all feels a bit abstract. I think what it boils down to is I still can\u2019t believe that someone\u2019s paying me to do this amazing thing. I\u2019ve been warned about the extreme cold of Indiana, the madness of early wake-ups and class planning and internal flights, and for all I\u2019m a little nervous there\u2019s this overriding sense of heading into the unknown that I\u2019m so excited by. It even felt this week like London tried its best to give us a little taste of what\u2019s to come, when we had to pause the scene we were working on to rush to the window like kids to look at the snow that was falling over the city. It won\u2019t be a patch on the cold of South Bend, but it\u2019s enough to make it all feel a little more immediate. Bring on the showing, bring on the bittersweet stresses of plane travel, bring on Indiana in all its icy glory. We can take it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cSir, I am a true labourer.\u201d We have just finished our first run of the whole thing and my brain feels like it may melt out of my ears. I\u2019m brimming with adrenaline and residual anxiety, my carefully styled hair … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5137,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47487],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shakespeare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5137"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2280,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions\/2280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}