Some Images of the upcoming Hall for Cornwall production, Barabas

The Great Globe itself; yes, all which we inherit...

I’ve spent a large part of this week squashed (or standing) on the train to and from London, where I’ve been to see Dominic Dromgoole’s KING LEAR, in which Joseph is playing Gloucester, over at Shakespeare’s Globe.Unlike Cornwall, which has been wet and windy, London was basking in sunshine – and with a bare 20 minutes to dump my laptop and overnight things, I raced off to The South Bank to meet Colin and see the show.I love The Globe. Dominic’s doing a great job to widen the creative vision of this significant theatre, and it’s always good to be there. I always stand in the Yard – the only way to experience the work, really – and it never ceases to amaze that the original Globe, which Marlowe must have been familiar with, would have been half the size, with twice the capacity audience.It would have been hot, smelly, noisy and dangerous. The structure is so imposing that it is not really a designer’s theatre, but the arena, the connection between audience and performers is close. Vivid memories of emails from Joe describing his first experiences, in preview for LEAR, of playing that great stage, of the epic feel to the playhouse, of the danger and the magic.I have read accounts of Marlowe’s sometime lover, the playwright Thomas Kyd, who, whilst appearing as an actor in Tamburlaine the 1590s, witnessed death from the stage. The historian Robin Chapman, in his novel Christoferus or Tom Kyd’s Revenge, writes in Kyd’s voice: ‘...the day I played the governor of Babylon was that very day our auxiliary soldiers overshot and killed a woman suckling her child. At first no one could believe it. Minds in a theatre are seldom ready for real hurt. Were these screechings part of the action? Was this another attempt to provide spectacular horror? Her breasts were real and spouting blood. In the pandemonium that followed I was quite forgotten, left to hang on my mock-marble pillar. As they carried the dying woman outside I had time to realise my own good fortune. Why, I could have been her! We never discovered who placed the real bullets in our carbines...’Real death in a theatre where these play-makers played out death and destruction on a regular basis. A rawness.Not so tonight, where the audience are gripped and where standing for over three hours hardly seems to matter. LEAR, at its end, is a catalogue of deaths – putting the ten fatalities in BARABAS into perspective. The gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes make me want to vomit. I fear for Colin; it’s his first visit to The Globe, he’s not great with gore, and he’s so tall and thin that standing for long periods of time makes me worry (has he had enough to eat...?). But when I look round he’s relishing the scene.Joe started working on KING LEAR a week or two after we met, and his first reaction on playing that great stage was the importance of having a close relationship with the audience. Tonight, it is easy to see how readily the audience warm to Gloucester, and I to start to feel excited about the potential to take that kind of playing much, much further.By the end of the show I had started to feel pretty ropey. It’s been a long couple of weeks – only one day off in the last fourteen –a hectic journey to London, and to cap it all, I’ve come down with an ear infection which means I have no hearing at all in my ‘good’ ear and only patchy hearing in the other. Joseph has also forgotten his contact lenses, so it really is a case of the deaf and the blind!Even so, we have a great discussion after the show, into the small hours. We talk, in particular, about the opening speeches of the play, and start to patch together our impressions of how we first want to present Barabas to the audience. There is much talk – inspired by that first speech – of Marlowe’s attitude to money. He never had enough, and suffered throughout his life from the sense of having a chip on his shoulder, the wrong clothes, feeling out of place, feeling ‘other’. BARABAS in many ways is his fantasy about what it is like to amass and lose wealth. The attention to detail that he pays in that opening speech to types of commerce is impressive in its illustration of how well he understood (and coveted) different money-making schemes across the world.On my way back to Paddington the next day, on the bus from south east London, I was struck by the many powerful images of commercial desperation, which are also prevalent in the play. Shops closing down. Sales. Special offers. People feeling the pinch. And this jostling, as the bus moves into SW1, with the glossy richness of Belgravia. A sharp contrast, just as we have in Act One of BARABAS.Am I the only person this summer to see the possible artistic benefits of an economic recession? Transferring this modern resonance on to the stage suddenly feels very exciting...and relevant.

He did esteem St Paul to be a juggler…

A few weeks back I have a surprising phone conversation with somebody who wanted to question the moral nature of BARABAS. The caller hadn’t heard of Marlowe, so I suggested that DOCTOR FAUSTUS might be a useful starting point (a bit naughty) and the caller expostulated about the way that Jerry Springer – The Opera had alienated and offended the majority of the general public (quite frankly, not true).Actually, I think it is great that people are ringing up to ask about this controversial production. It is great that it is actually starting to touch nerves. We have since had more calls and emails. You are welcome to ask any questions that you like about the nature of this play. I’ll do my best to answer them.I can see why a project like this might make the hackles rise. Hall for Cornwall is a high profile organisation, and theatre is the most ephemeral of the live performance forms. Whilst theatre gives people of all kinds the chance to understand the world they live in better, it also gives people an opportunity to experience, awful, difficult things that they might prefer to hide away from. And because it is live you don’t always know what you are getting in to.But good theatre asks questions, rather than making judgements. This play asks huge questions. There is no getting away from the fact that BARABAS is ambitious in its thinking, in its questioning of the world, and in its many messages. Rather than deliberately courting controversy our production aims to open doors rather than make blatant and one-sided statements about religion, commerce or human nature.Whilst there is no getting away from the fact that the play is controversial, it also has a serious and pertinent message for modern audiences. It is violent and extreme, but BARABAS is also a celebration of life. It provides a spectacular meeting point for all of us to find out new things about the world.BARABAS asks difficult questions. It exposes society’s cruel potential to transform individuals for better or worse. And no, it is not a morality play. Nor is it a religious decree. The play is both anti-Christian and anti-Semitic, and it is also neither of these things. None of its three main religious representatives (a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew) ever acknowledge the existence of a God. There is no clear moral stance – it simply exposes endless uncertainty about who is right and who is wrong. It is up to the audience, to you - decide. If you are brave enough, and generous enough.It is a play about the frailty of humans. Marlowe shows us a messy world where love, death, fighting and war are unremittingly regular events just as they are today. He rightly believed that that the world was a confusing and disorderly place but he also believed it to be a place where there was much to celebrate. These two things go hand in hand in BARABAS. Through this work we aim to give all of you the chance to ask why this is so. Why, on the one hand, we are so ready to judge and why, on the other, so ready to turn a blind eye to the doings of the world.The nature of the play, its themes, and subject matter may cause offence in some quarters, and we hope to tackle this with as much sensitivity as is possible. But it is through plays such as this one that we have an opportunity to change attitudes, and broaden minds. This is why we are doing it now.During my first job, at the ripe old age of 18, as an assistant director at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, I remember a leading actor of the time saying ‘...if you want to be a theatre director, remember that there is no right or wrong. There is only not quite right’. In the same vein, what we are doing is neither right, nor wrong – but the best we can do for Cornwall. I hope you’ll be part of that. I also hope that you are all open-minded enough not to say that what we are doing is ‘wrong’.

Units, Units, Units….

The worst day of rehearsals for me is always the first day and this is often because the ice is not fully broken between the different members of the group. It’s often when all the actors meet for the first time (if possible, that’s a situation best avoided).

As a director you’re the conduit for every aspect of their work; you are the person who helps to channel all their hopes and fears into productive, workable material. The sense of responsibility can be crippling and often it is possible to cut the nervous atmosphere with a knife.

My favourite way of dealing with it is to work as closely as I can with each cast member on an individual basis – often for several months before full time rehearsals start. It necessitates a degree of tenacity but means we go into that month with a basic shared understanding of who we are and what we are like, rather than starting from scratch.

If you have a cast of 12 then you are in effect directing 12 different plays, and it is in those first few days of rehearsals that the director must establish the tools which give actors a good start. But starting can be a torturous process – and hard to plan or get right. Flexibility can be everything. Will this idea work? Will that technique fall flat or be a raging success? And then there’s all the preparation too…

So let’s get to the point. A few months ago a director I greatly respect was talking about ‘units of action’. What, you may want to know, is a ‘unit of action’? Well they are some times also called ‘beats’ and were first suggested by Konstantin Stanislavski as a means of helping actors determine the through line of a role.

I found this in a dictionary: ‘A unit is a discrete piece of action in a play-text, marked by a significant change in action.’

Units are also used by writers and dramaturges as a means of analyzing text for editing purposes. Dividing text into units makes it more manageable and easier to edit. They also make it easier to understand!

None of Marlowe’s plays are divided into acts or scenes – any scenes or acts that you see in published editions today are at the editor’s discretion. This means it is important to go through and define the action very clearly – and in lots of different ways.

Everybody has a different view about ‘the unit’. And each character will have a different set of ‘units’. For me, a unit of action is a way of identifying the ‘wants’ of each character, and then identifying the different actions that they undergo to achieve what they want. So it might be that Barabas does certain things to get what he wants…and Selim-Calymath does other things. What, for example, are the units of action that lead up to the murder of his daughter, Abigail?

Acting is about ‘doing’ more than it is about ‘feeling’. Using this technique is a great way of making ideas specific, and in this case, making the huge vista of ideas in the play manageable.

With a play like this one, there are also a million ways to work the principle of the ‘unit’ to advantage. It’s a bit like being let loose in a sweetshop (or in a bookshop – much better). So be prepared – I think this blog is a theme on which there will inevitably be variations…

There’s a certain person who’s been encouraging me for some time to get to grips with the Unit (you know who you are). I hope you’ll finally be glad that I‘ve started to get the message!