From the King (Blog #6)October 10th 2007 |
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POGUE HAMLET BLOG #6
October 9, 2007
Well…yesterday started out with my scaring Tewkesbury and Mosby the Grey Ghost, our dog and cat respectively, by cursing loudly and repeatedly at myself. The reason: I continued to muff my words and just generally screw up as Julieanne ran lines with me. Because I like to do lines in the living room where the voice can really resonate against the vaulted ceiling, my imprecations against my stupidity thundered like the Voice of Doom and sent the critters cowering.
An early afternoon rehearsal with Gertrude and Hamlet didn’t fare much better as we started off with Claudius’ opening speech—a rather convoluted affair of long sentences and lots of exposition. I stumbled through it several times, making the same mistakes each time (and different ones) and wondering whether Olivier was about my age when he had his famous bout of stage fright.
Fortunately, when we moved into the scene where Claudius interrogates Hamlet about Polonius’ body and then packs him off to England, things began to gell. Though we are major adversaries in the play, Adam and I actually only have a couple of scenes where we go head to head…one early in play where I admonish him for his excessive grief, but there the characters’ mutual antipathy is veiled and only bubbling beneath the surface, and this one where we more or less come at each other with the gloves off. Gertrude’s not around to keep us on our good behaviour.
The lines were pretty much there, Adam’s great fun to play off, and the scene just seemed to crackle.
This momentum maintained itself through the evening rehearsal with the whole cast and we ran through Act Two twice. Lines were coming, relationships solidifying, and I felt, for the first time, I might actually have a chance of not embarrassing myself.
The key now is not to relax and let up on oneself. To keep cracking the whip. After all, there’s still that opening speech…And Rick has informed that as I’m saying it, it will be projected on screens all over the stage…so I’ll be watching myself perform it. There’s something to unnerve an actor…having one’s illusion of performance confronted by the reality…as it’s happening! Lord help me!
Charles Edward Pogue
“Claudius”
Mr. Pogue appears courtesy of Actor's Equity Association
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