Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl

Peter Kirwan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781474223287
• eBook ISBN: 9781474223300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama

Cheek by Jowl, founded by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod in 1981, is one of the world's most critically acclaimed classical theatre companies. Across seventeen productions of Shakespeare (as well as several by his contemporaries and other European dramatists), Cheek by Jowl's experiments with text, space, light and bodies have produced bold reinventions of canonical and lesser-explored plays. Despite the pre-eminence of the company, its multiple awards and central place in the European repertory, this is the first substantive study of the company's body of work. This book situates Cheek by Jowl's work within the key institutions and traditions that have shaped the company's development from low-budget beginnings at the Edinburgh Festival to international celebration, while also focusing specifically on the company's use of Shakespeare to drive forward its practice. Drawing on the company's work in English, Russian and French, the book uses key productions as case studies to interrogate the company's unique style and build an argument for the distinctive insights offered by Cheek by Jowl's approach. The book draws on new interviews with creative and administrative company members from the full span of Cheek by Jowl's history as well as a full appraisal of the Cheek by Jowl archives, offering the first scholarly overview of the company's work.

1

Shakespeare of Roscommon: tracing a Cheek by Jowl production

The Winter’s Tale (2016–17) and Lady Betty (1989)

The gap of time

14 January 2016. As the audience shuffled into Les Geméaux in Sceaux, Paris, they were met by an anoraked, hooded figure sitting on a low white box, facing upstage away from the audience. This figure (Grace Andrews) was revealed later to be Time, pulling off her hood to reveal flowing blonde hair; at the start of the play she was merely an anonymous figure who was, or had been, waiting. The premiere of this production came some eighteen years after Donnellan and Ormerod’s previous production of The Winter’s Tale opened at the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg; the time-jump is poetically close to the play’s own ‘gap of time’ (5.3.154). I begin with The Winter’s Tale as the company’s most recent English-language production and as one whose strong creative, interpretive and personal ties to the company’s past makes it a fitting place to enter Cheek by Jowl’s process.

The company’s past was evoked both onstage and off. The 2016 production’s opening echoed that of their Russian production, in which a shawled babushka figure (Tatyana Rasskazova) appeared onstage first before sweeping her way through the celebrating nobility.¹ In another link with the company’s past, it reunited several of the company’s longest-serving collaborators, with Paddy Cunneen returning as musical director for the first time since Homebody/Kabul (2001–2), along with Judith Greenwood (lighting designer) and Jane Gibson (associate and movement director).² Finally, this was the first Cheek by Jowl production set (partly) in Ireland since Donnellan’s self-penned play Lady Betty (1989), set in the Roscommon of Donnellan’s own childhood. As Lady Betty had cast former Irish dancing champions (Reade 1991: 36), so too did The Winter’s Tale feature several Irish actors, lending local specificity to the production’s depiction of Bohemia.

But while the production looked back, The Winter’s Tale was also indicative of the company’s ongoing innovation. This was one of the first Cheek by Jowl productions to have a specific set constructed prior to the start of rehearsals – a large white box with opening panels on all sides – building on the company’s recent explorations of detailed visual design in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Ubu Roi (see Chapter 5). It was the first English-language production to include the option of a live-streamed performance in the company’s contracts (Lang 2017). And it also trialled a new touring model for the UK company based on experiences with the Russian and French companies: the run began with a three-month tour of Europe before going on hiatus for several months, allowing the cast to pursue other projects, after which the company reformed to complete the tour.³ The production’s first dates in the UK took place well over a year after the first performance.

I sat in on a week of rehearsals, meaning that this chapter will focus primarily on the development of a Cheek by Jowl production before opening.⁴ In tracing some of the production’s ideas from initial inception to public performance, I place a greater emphasis than in other chapters on rejected decisions and rehearsal room processes, insights rarely available to me for other productions. I then turn to another pre-performance record: the script for Lady Betty, the story of the notorious hangwoman of Roscommon and the only self-penned play and narrative designed explicitly for Cheek by Jowl. In pairing The Winter’s Tale with Lady Betty, I am wary of creating misleading or overly neat narratives. However, the explicit references to Roscommon in The Winter’s Tale rehearsal room and the reuse of incidental music to inform the tone of the scenes do suggest at least an external tonal connection. By linking these two productions, this chapter will consider some of Cheek by Jowl’s core processes as the work begins to emerge.

Rehearsing The Winter’s Tale

Donnellan does not teach people how to act. As Owen Horsley says, ‘the coach doesn’t doubt that his footballers can play football – that’s something that’s a given. But there are rules within the pitch that the coach’s job is to teach them … It’s about how to react to the play, how to respond to the world that we’re creating’ (2016). The rehearsal period is a genuine process of discovery for all concerned, and is built from the start around the bodies of the actors.

Cheek by Jowl rehearsals never start with a table read. Donnellan begins the rehearsal process with movement: As You Like It (1991) began with a tango, while Cymbeline (2007) started with step dancing (Sierz 2010: 155). Such work serves multiple functions. The tango, for instance, is ‘a very political dance about who is in control, which is a key question in the play’ (Donnellan 1999: 20), but the work also ‘strengthened backs, brought the company together, focused us, and was not wasted’ (Sierz 2010: 155). Horsley notes that ‘when you teach a dance to a bunch of actors, they’re all at the same level – unless someone’s an expert Flamenco dancer [the dance used for The Changeling (2006)]. Whereas if you sit around a table with Shakespeare, you instantly make a hierarchical shift between the abilities of people in the room’ (2016). A process such as this furthers the development of the ensemble ethos, prioritizing collaborative interaction. The morning warm-ups at the start of each rehearsal are led by a different actor each day, organizing games that get the actors’ bodies moving before the directors arrive, and at the rehearsals I observed (relatively late in the process) the actors then went on to movement work with Jane Gibson before Donnellan took over to address specific scenes.

Cheek by Jowl’s work is rooted in text. The company does not devise work in the sense that might characterize contemporaries such as Complicité, and The Actor and the Target devotes a long closing section to interpreting verse (Donnellan 2005: 245–72). A well-thumbed Arden 2 edition of The Winter’s Tale sat on the production table throughout rehearsal, and the actors understood every word; Donnellan requires that actors are off-book by the time rehearsals begin, a demand he recognizes as unusual (Donnellan 1999: 19). But the text is only a strand of the rehearsal room experience, and Peter Moreton suggests that ‘they don’t let you think about it for a long period at the beginning of rehearsal. It’s kind of barred from the room … It’s the approach of the text being abstract in terms of being vowels and syllables instead of words and poetry – it takes it to its core level of the human, emotional element of it’ (2016). The process privileges feeling over form, and the text itself is negotiable. If lines distract from the spirit of the play, they are removed; if sense can be clarified by the substitution of a word (provided it preserves the metre), that decision will be made without fear.⁵ What the company seeks isn’t an ever-more-rarefied textual exegesis but an experience of aliveness, of humans relating to one another in space, which the text must serve.

During the rehearsals I observed, Donnellan sat on a chair with nothing separating him from the actors. Ormerod was to his immediate right, Gibson to his left and the assistant director (Marcus Roche) an arm’s reach away on the other side of Gibson. Gibson is not present for the whole run of rehearsals, describing herself to me as ‘on call’ throughout the run (Gibson 2016); Donnellan describes her as ‘one of the great unsung heroes/heroines of British theatre … I really depend on Jane in Britain. She helps the actors’ bodies to move and to experience things in their bodies’ (Donnellan 2009: 86). Ormerod and Donnellan work with trusted collaborators, and the physical positioning of the team rendered them a striking single unit. The close clustering of the creative team’s bodies and their proximity to the performance space allowed Donnellan to launch Gibson or himself physically into the scene whenever they needed to illustrate a point physically. But for the most part, Donnellan was a watcher and commentator with undivided focus on the actors; Adrian Lester reports Donnellan telling him in rehearsal, ‘I only open my mouth if I don’t believe it, and as I take a breath in to speak I have to understand why I don’t believe it, and that’s my only job’ (Lester 2016). The actors (at least by this stage of rehearsal) were trusted to run the scene, and Donnellan intervened when necessary. Natalie Radmall-Quirke remembers Donnellan telling her early in the process, ‘I’m not an acting teacher, I’m a coach’ (2016). In his own writings, Donnellan repeatedly characterizes his role as responsive: ‘Normally the acting starts off rather dull; then, after a while, it gets more interesting, and I spend my time waiting and watching for the actors’ inventiveness’ (Sierz 2010: 154). The impression to the external observer is of Donnellan as an acute observer of human interaction, who shapes the production by offering feedback on what is and is not working.

Donnellan’s book The Actor and the Target offers the fullest published account of his approach to acting and is best read in full rather than summary. The purpose of the book is not to explain how he directs a production or interprets Shakespeare, but to address one of the fundamental problems of the actor’s experience – when fear blocks the ability to act. His much-discussed ‘target’ is not a focus or an objective (Donnellan 2005: 27), but a practical method of rearticulating where the energy of the scene lies, which is always external to the actor ‘so that we can then bounce off it, react to it and live off it’ (24). Donnellan understands his role as being to remove the blocks that prevent actors responding organically to the predicament of the space (his currently preferred terms), rather than to tell them what to do. For Donnellan, this is as fundamental as breathing:

All we can be ‘taught’ about acting are double negatives. For example, we can be taught how not to block our natural instinct to act, just as we can be taught how not to block our natural instinct to breathe … this is not a book about how to act; this is a book that may help when you feel blocked in your acting. (2005: 2–3)

This is why there is relatively little direct instruction in the rehearsal room. The positions of actors relative to one another change substantially from run to run, according to where the scene takes the actors, and Declan asks for several runs in order to allow the actors to try out different ideas. ‘Declan’s concept,’ suggests Orlando James, ‘is freedom for the actors’ (2016). He notes when things are not working and when something interesting has happened, but when something interesting happens, the actors are not then required to replicate that precise sequence. This results in a fast-paced rehearsal, with many different versions of a scene generated within a short space of time and a great many ideas rejected. The assistant director and deputy stage manager annotate their copies constantly, but the principle here is not that the actors should remember which of these worked most effectively and then reproduce it; the point is that the most interesting, the most live performances emerge from the actors being free. This does not mean that there are not rules specific to particular productions; for example, Cécile Leterme recalls that when working on Andromaque, ‘the stage was something that had to be balanced … The movements were free as long as the stage was balanced always’ (2016). But the shared experience is of the actors generating performance that Donnellan watches and shapes.

Two of his most important practical tools are the anecdote and the étude. The étude is an approach that recurs in conversation with actors who have worked in English, French or Russian with Cheek by Jowl. Deriving from Stanislavski’s techniques of active analysis and ‘acting with the body’ (Innes and Shevtsova 2013: 74), études are improvisations that the actors prepare away from Donnellan and Ormerod.

We will discuss a scene – say the convent – and ask the actors to present a scene from life in the convent. These normally occur ‘in the woods’ when we might be staying in some interesting wreck of a house. The actors normally find some site-specific corner to show some aspect of the play. Preferably there are no words and little unexpected incident. The best outcome is that the actors surprise us. (Donnellan 2018)

Sometimes études help establish backstories and relationships. Joy Richardson (Paulina) describes a two-hour improvisation with Radmall-Quirke (Hermione) imagining the years of Hermione’s seclusion:

It starts with me trying to get her to move, get her to want to live, get her out of this state of being comatose out of shock. One thing that came to mind in the moment was a little bird that hopped into my place. And I draw her attention to it, and she keeps this bird as a pet, and she has to feed the bird … it gives her a purpose to nurture, to come back. And little treats and laughter come back – and laughter’s part of the cure for her. (Richardson 2016)

Work such as this regularly takes place away from the rehearsal room, as part of the actors’ ‘homework’, developing character relationships that then feed into the main explorations. At other times, though, études were worked through in the rehearsal room as a way of boiling down the scene to its core essence, before being integrated as implicit emotional reference points into the main scene. Two examples I observed will illustrate.

Key to the exploration of Bohemia was the discovery made concerning this passage, spoken by the Old Shepherd.

Fie, daughter! when my old wife lived, upon

This day she was both pantler, butler, cook,

Both dame and servant; welcomed all, served all;

Would sing her song and dance her turn; now here,

At upper end o’ the table, now i’ the middle;

On his shoulder, and his; her face o’ fire

With labour and the thing she took to quench it,

She would to each one sip. You are retired,

As if you were a feasted one and not

The hostess of the meeting.

(4.4.55–64)

The Shepherd’s speech berates his (adopted) daughter for not managing to fully live up to the detailed picture he paints of his dead wife’s idealized performance of hospitality. The company imagined that ‘when my old wife lived’ might refer to the previous year’s feast, suggesting that the speech was inspired by the rawness of the memory for all of the bereaved family.

For the étude, Donnellan asked Joy Richardson to play the Shepherd’s wife, joining Peter Moreton (Shepherd), Eleanor McLoughlin (Perdita) and Sam McArdle (Clown) to go through the motions of preparing for the previous year’s festival. Using the same spatial restrictions already established for the scene, the mother ran the preparations and, as the étude progressed, Donnellan invited the actors to effectively ignore one another, implying the quiet familiarity of a close family that meant preparations ran like clockwork, with the family barely needing to look at or speak to one another. The actors fell into easy rhythms of passing objects from one to another, putting small tasks aside to assist with larger items and becoming easy with one another’s company. Then, Richardson was removed from the scene. Suddenly, the remaining family members had to go through the process for the first time without the mother, turning the mother into a present absence that led to awkwardness, discomfort and heightened emotions as the characters attempted to reorganize their accustomed tasks.

When the company returned to the text, the Shepherd’s outburst against Perdita had become one of the most important speeches of the Bohemia scenes, putting the undercurrent of sadness into words. As soon as the Shepherd mentioned ‘my old wife’, both son and daughter ran quickly to their father, hushing and comforting him out of care and embarrassment; it was clear that this was not the first time the Shepherd had opened up about his grief, but perhaps the first time he had done so in front of non-family members. Moreton remembers that ‘suddenly “lived” has a different meaning … we’d normally say “my wife before she died”. Joy is one of the most alive people on the planet, and it carries in. I don’t think I’d have landed on that observat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Figures
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Shakespeare of Roscommon: tracing a Cheek by Jowl production
• 2. Touching the void: bodies and space
• 3. ‘If I were a woman’: the all-male ensemble
• 4. Cutting and cross-cutting: filmic space and the text
• 5. Conceptual rooms: designing not-Shakespeare
• 6. Empathy and loneliness
• Conclusion: evolutions
• Appendix: Cheek by Jowl productions
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint