Workshops

Powerful day today with a Shakespeare workshop. Amy was leading, this is a new company for me. She showed up in a branded tracksuit with a Frantic Assembly workshop and it was brilliant to see what she brings. I’m still building my workshop for this company. It’s not a high paid gig, it’s something for the gaps. Being part of her workshop today was very revealing.

I first met Amy when she was still at Guildhall and she thought I was German. She’s Irish. I had been drafted in to replace an actor in her year that had a breakdown and didn’t show up for the third year. I played the German juror in 12 Angry Men. She’s brilliantly reactive and her mind was blown when she discovered I wasn’t German. I wasn’t being method, she just wasn’t in the same play as me and assumed. My years in the German part of Switzerland likely helped my accent. I’ve occasionally had amdrammers query my German accent on stage because it is correct and not demonstrative. I’ve spent a long time with people who are German speakers but are using English to the best of their abilities. The key is about exploring the bits they’re good at and the bits they aren’t thinking of. Observation is better than generalisation. Ja ich bin Cherman is only gonna be spoken by people who aren’t trying, and the majority of Germans speak English better than the idea of them do. Bad emphasis, unusual sentence structure and lack of nuance is much more honest than any of that WW2 crap, but ignorance is pervasive in audiences as well as performers.

Amy ran a strong workshop and I’m very happy to have been included. Maybe a few minutes beforehand to work out what we were gonna do would have been good as maybe I could have run a voice workshop as part of it. But frankly, they got a cracking time of it from Amy. She’s very much about physical theatre, and brought in Frantic Assembly stuff. She hasn’t made the connection between Shakespeare and modern theatre, so is looking at the themes in isolation without yet noticing how these dusty iambs are extremely redolent as soon as you’ve cracked the initial language barrier. But for a devising workshop, she ran it super strong. I guess I would have liked to have got a tiny bit of the actual language in. But she quite rightly calls out to have more accessible new writing available in this industry. It’s true. We need a big melting pot for that. Maybe it’s time to drive one.