The Peanut Gallery

From the rehearsal hall for Macbeth, on talking to the audience.

First off, I think that in Shakespeare there ought to be a lot more talking to the audience done, that it ought not to be limited to the soliloquies, and that lights should be up on the audience. I picked up this opinion from Salina Cadell and others at the Globe while I was studying in London, and I’ve never shaken it. But that is for another thought.

Scott Kaiser, from OSF, has a great book: Mastering Shakespeare - buy it. Hands down the most practical handbook on acting Shakespeare I’ve ever come across, and I owe much of what I’m saying here to him.

The deal with speaking to the audience is this. You gotta talk to the people in the room (if you’re lucky enough to be able to see them past the glare of the lights), but you can’t rehearse with them.

So pick people to talk to in the audience at various focal points. A scholar, a fool, a lord, a drunk, a doctor, a policeman, a child, a lunatic. Scott doesn’t, but I call these ideapeople - to distinguish them from real people. The idea is that each person you talk to will provide you with a different point of view and tactic.

But don’t just pick ideapeople based on which tactic illuminates only one parcel of text - pick ideapeople which illuminate the important guideposts of your character’s identity: what she needs and fears, what she tries and tries not to do. (Perhaps they are other characters in the play?) These are the characters inhabiting your character’s unconscious. As Jung says of all people and things in dreams - they’re all you. But this, this is an active relationship with Jung’s peanut gallery, where you can need real things from them. Now: stick with those ideapeople throughout the play.

(This, for the record, is where I have an Idea that isn’t Scott’s. Necessarily.)

Make a map for reference. By returning again and again to the same ideapeople focal points, you develop a relationship with each section of the audience which evolves as the play goes on, and you also engage actively with the ideas and themes that tell us who the character is. Maybe your character starts off with no respect for the law, but gains it; starts out asking questions of the scholar, ends up berating her.

Rehearse that way, and you’ll build a character whose relationship to the audience is important. Perform with that in your bones and orchestration. And if you’re lucky enough to be able to see not just supposed ideapeople, but real people who paid for tickets, then talk to them, and use your orchestration as a base from which to improvise. Maybe the murderer to your left doesn’t seem so hardened after all. How does that affect you?

If you’ve chosen your ideapeople well, and if you talk to the real people in the room, your audiences ought to keep you honest and play an important and interactive role in the story they came to hear.

Come see me in Macbeth, (failing at?) implementing this idea. Opens the 30th of March, runs through the 29th of April.