R&D: Units and Context

An important part of our research and development process has been to break the play down into sizeable units, and to understand each unit alone in order to then bring them all together.

Shakespeare plays often have multiple bouts of action running in tandem with each other, and often a lot of characters too. In order to re-imagine these units, we must find the core in each that is relevant to our story. We developed fifteen units of action, referring back to the text at all times to understand character motivations and plot structures.

To see if these units worked structurally as a story, we played out the units in order, with anyone adopting any role at any time. There were lots of bits that needed ironing out the first time, but the more that we played with this and questioned our wording of the unit descriptions, the clearer our story became. We then were only allowed to look at each unit description to act out the play in under 15 minutes, to make sure that we really had got the core of the action that we needed.

As we are a relatively small cast, (especially for Shakespeare, who likes lots of characters!) we had to be ready to adopt any necessary character at any moment- quite an improvisation workout! We made sure that each character had a specific item of clothing to define them, which made this a bit less confusing, and by the end of the day we were sure that we had our story the way we wanted it to be.

We have also tried to immerse ourselves in contextual research of the era we want to set the Tempest in, finding pictures that help us to determine location and fashion. Location is particularly important to us because the island that our characters find themselves on must be between Milan and Tunis (where the boat is sailing to/from), yet we also needed to determine the place that our characters had come from, in order to place the island terrain in opposition to this.

The pictures have helped us to create the island with different props (more on that later!), and have always been something to refer to if we get a bit stuck. A rehearsal convention that is really useful to us is having images, writing and anything else of use up on the walls. That way, we are surrounded by the world we are creating, and can make sure we don’t miss anything out. Poems and photographs can also be very inspiring to improvisational work, and the units are a constant reminder of the story we want to tell.