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- Week 1 - to Cut Or Not to Cut?
- Week 2 - Round The Table
- Week 3 - Breaking Down The Play
- Week 4 - on Our Feet
- Week 5 - The Mad Scene
- Week 6 - Back to The Top of The Play
- Week 7 - Run-Through
- Tech Week
Hamlet is perhaps the most revered play in the canon, perhaps the most familiar. But there's no such thing as a definitive production, perhaps because there's no such thing as a definitive text. The first published edition we have of the play, the First Quarto, has lines like 'To be or not to be. Aye, there's the point' and is usually referred to a...
For a second week, we are sitting around a table exploring the text word-by-word, line-by-line. The whole company read the play in turns, scene-by-scene, and then put each line into their own words. This may sound laborious, but it reveals how easy it is to assume you know what the words mean, and how hard it is to be really specific. Sometimes it ...
This week we work through the play slowly, scene-by-scene. It gives everyone the chance to investigate their relationships with each other and to challenge lines that have been cut, or argue for others to go. As a result of this process we reassess the impact of the new king, Claudius, on Denmark. Unlike his belligerent predecessor, Hamlet's father...
This week we are finally on our feet sketching out the whole play. With a little simple stage geography applied, the scenes begin to move themselves. To keep the play fluid and fast-moving, we've allowed very little furniture. Movement director Michael Ashcroft begins work on the dumbshow and we try to work out the difference between it and the pla...
In 1579 a girl called Katharine Hamlet was drowned in the Avon at Tiddington, just upstream from Stratford. Shakespeare was fifteen. Mariah Gale, who plays Ophelia, and I visit the spot where it was meant to have happened, as recorded in the Court records of the time. Then we walk along the Avon, past willows growing aslant the river. In one spot t...
Lots of questions have emerged, which now need answering. The text may allow ambiguity, but actors can't act it. We need to make choices. That's the difference between reading a play and acting it. When did Claudius and Gertrude begin their affair? Was it before Old Hamlet's death? Is that why the Ghost accuses them of adultery? Why does Hamlet ado...
We start to run sections together. Pace is clarity of thought. If our thinking is right, the pace of the play should be swift and deadly. As we start to run sections, the five distinct days over which the play occurs (allowing for the various time shifts) emerge with clarity. After one run, Cicely Berry, shaking her head, says, 'it is all so human'...
Next week we move from the security of our rehearsal room into The Courtyard Theatre for the technical week. Suddenly there will be a huge set, and lights, and sound effects, and costumes, and dressers and wig girls, and the whole stage crew and props staff, and a band and music cues, and flymen on hand for the automation, and the aerial work, and ...
People also ask
Does hamlet have a diary?
Who is Sir Gregory Doran?
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How does hamlet end in a rehearsal scrapbook?
Sir Gregory Doran (born 24 November 1958) [1] is an English director known for his Shakespearean work. The Sunday Times called him 'one of the great Shakespearians of his generation'. [2] Doran was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), succeeding Michael Boyd in September 2012. In an interview, announcing his appointment ...
YearProductionPlaywrightVenue20222019based on the novel by David Walliams, ...20182018Gregory Doran was more explicit in one of his notes headed “A Rehearsal Scrapbook” in the program to his 2008 RSC production: Working through Act Three we reach the most famous soliloquy of all: “To be or not to be.”
2021. Teaching the Structure of Hamlet: The "To Be or Not to Be" Soliloquy Repositioned in Recent Film Adaptations. Joanne E. Gates. Jacksonville State University, jgates@jsu.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.jsu.edu/fac_pres.
