First week of rehearsal down. Our director for Taming took the week off so I was able to focus more on Henry V. We got a lot done in three days of rehearsal, including doing Harfleur, Bardolph's death scene AND St. Crispin's day all in two hours. Once more into the breach, indeed.
General thoughts? I'm gonna need a lot of water, but I'm not sure when I'll get to drink it. Also, it's FUN. Lots of fun. The general idea of the St. Crispin's Day speech is to act like you're jazzed about winning the upcoming battle and to joyously exhort the men, but truthfully, there's not much acting required. It's a bunch of fun to jump up on the platform and see all those expectant faces looking super jazzed already. It's gonna be great if I can avoid...
Yellitis. [ye·li·tis] :when a young, inexperienced (usually male) actor mistakes vocal volume for gravitas or intense emotion. see Jonathan Rhys Meyers in "The Tudors", Hayden Christiansen in Episode III, or Kenneth Branagh in any frickin' scene of Hamlet. Yellitis is a stone killer and it's out there. Sure, your character is upset. Sure, it's outdoor theatre. But yelling at the top of your lungs isn't acting; it's brachiating. There are other ways to convey emotional intensity. Look at Anthony Hopkins. How much yelling does Hannibal Lecter do? Those at highest risk for Yellitis are 20-30 year old male actors who are taking on more responsibility than they think they can handle. I'm watching plenty of "The Tudors" in an effort to inoculate myself against Yellitis, "the Noisy Killer".
I like the rehearsal process, so far; as previously mentioned, our director is extremely familiar with the play and is bringing some great ideas to rehearsal, but encouragingly, he is also open to other people's ideas and things that spontaneously happen during the work. I mean, we were only BLOCKING last week and we've already had a few "Holy Crap! let's do this! moments.
I need to amend a bit some of my earlier statements about the Falstaff Gang. The great thing about getting older is that you're supposed to get smarter, although for myself (and Congress) that curve seems to be irregular sometimes. I've been reading an old book of Shakespeare commentary recently for ideas. How old? It was one of my mother's English Lit textbooks when she was an undergrad, written back when Harold Bloom was deconstructing his high school prom. One of the things the book points out is how the action "in the trenches" (i.e. in the Boar's Head, on the battlefield) provides important contrast and commentary on the actions of the king and court. This is easy to forget, mainly because any stage or film production that wants to tell the story in 90 minutes usually cuts the counterpoint scenes first. I mean, people would rather see Henry yelling up on a platform than hear Gower complain about how they had to kill all the prisoners, right? We've cut those scenes as well, but we can hardly be blamed as our show length is as much about astrophysics as it is about audience interest; we only have so much daylight. Still, Shakespeare planted obvious parallels in both the action and dialogue of the "courtly" scenes and the "common" ones, even down to having characters echo each other literally. The best example I can think of is when Henry is reading the sentence of the conspirators and either honestly or politically invokes God in his God-like judgment of them:
"God quit you in his mercy!"
"...the taste whereof God of his mercy give you patience..."
"Since God so graciously hath brougth to light.."
"Let us deliver our puissance into the hand of God..."
Henry is both speaking for God and essentially holding up the idea that his war is approved by God. In the next scene, Mistress Quickly is describing Falstaff's last moments and remarks "So 'a cried out 'God, God, God' three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet." It's a strange parallel between Henry and the men he's rejecting and the man he has already rejected, Falstaff, and between what "God" means to a conquering king and what He means to a dying rogue.
Henry V is (or at its best, should be) about the nature of leadership and how a leader relates to his constituency, and vice-versa. It's not about a guy who doesn't like tennis balls and wants to kick Frenchy butt. In fact, I wish that there had been similar commentary embedded in the French court's dialogue and possibly even the French rank-and-file, detailing their opinions of their king and the situation their country finds itself in. Instead, it's mostly about their horses and how bad-ass they are. If Shakespeare had made his examination of wartime politics dipolar by seriously examining the French viewpoint, this might've been a truly great play instead just an okay, rah-rah English one. Speaking of opposite viewpoints, is there a French-authored tragedy contemporary with Henry V that deals with the terrible loss at Agincourt and how the French dealt with it? Like "The Madness of King Charles VI"? Just curious; might be a good one to do in rep with Henry...
"My lord? The upstairs neighbors are complaining about the yelling again..."
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