Our Blog
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03
May
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26
April
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15
March
Nicholas Asbury's Guardian Blog: Once more unto the hospital
Read Nicholas Asbury's blogs as Propeller tour the UK and the world with Henry V and The Winter's Tale. Click here to find out more.
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22
February
Diary of a Gossip: What is this thing called culture anyway?
Week One, Part Two: Perth February 2012
A blog by Propeller company member Tony Bell
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16
February
Diary of a Gossip:
Week One - February 2012 Perth, Australia
A blog by Propeller company member Tony Bell
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14
February
Nicholas Asbury's Guardian Blog: Laughter saves the Day
Read Nicholas Asbury's blogs as Propeller tour the UK and the world with Henry V and The Winter's Tale. Click here to find out more.
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10
January
Nicholas Asbury's Guardian Blog: Henry V Conquers Spain
Read Nicholas Asbury's blogs as Propeller tour the UK and the world with Henry V and The Winter's Tale. Click here to find out more.
A red and white flag of St. George hangs limply on its pole, as we seek to explore some of the themes of English nationalism in Henry V. The thin red stripe is the only dash of colour in an otherwise monochrome set, until the green camouflage of our costumes, and the blood from England’s passage through France seeps inexorably through our play.
Yes, the English abroad have always had a somewhat chequered history, but this week Propellor have come to the Festival of Girona, in Catalonia, to give our account of one particularly famous sortie from Blighty.
The guy greeting us at Barcelona airport had a sign that said simply ‘Henry V.’ I’m not sure that would have happened had we just arrived in France. Still, the lovely frisson of expectation and nervousness - just like doing a show - that thrills you on arriving in a foreign country was in full flow as we sped past the palm trees on the motorway to this old city of Girona.
The theatre is as beautiful as any I have ever seen. Built as an opera house, the stalls spread back to a perfect tongue of boxes, five stories high, that circle the seats below. On the ceiling, gilded paintings shimmer in the lights which frame the stage in perfect symmetry. It is an epic stage, fit for an epic play.
We did a Dress Rehearsal, so that the Spanish subtitle guy could learn the timing of the lines, and then we roared through the sold out show in the evening- it made a bit of a change from having been in a half empty theatre in Milton Keynes the week before. There were people queuing round the block for this one. Here, with the exchange of languages, the slightest physical gesture stills the theatre or makes it erupt into laughter. Each speech or set piece is listened to intently – you can almost hear the audience paying attention. Because of the simultaneous translation, the jokes are very often received in silence, but then get a laugh about 5 seconds later. Here in the land of Rafa Nadal, they loved the whole tennis balls thing that happens in the play, and when we sang to them in the foyer during the interval (we don’t stop in this play), they joined in enthusiastically. But it was the curtain call that floored most of us, as we were called back on to the stage to take a bow no less than seven times. On the last three calls, they stood as one and roared.
As English actors we are utterly unused to such adulation. A quick reserved bit of applause, prolonged to a couple of curtain calls if they liked it, will usually do for the English. It keeps you on your toes – stops you getting lazy and all that. Here in Girona, they must have been clapping for at least five minutes – standing, cheering, roaring. It was very humbling, heartwarming and absolutely bloody marvellous.
Apart from nearly getting arrested, the following show went very well. I was standing outside the theatre dressed in camouflage trousers, wearing a balaclava as I normally do before the show. It’s a provocative start, but gives a balance of menace and anonymity that we want to bring as a group of ‘soldiers’ performing Henry V. The night before, a policeman had been on guard to watch the queue entering the theatre, and he had smiled at me, knowing it was part of the show. This time however it was a different guy. I nodded and smiled as before. Next thing I knew he had walled me up, torn my balaclava from my head, and started to frisk me, ignoring my protestations of innocence (“I’m an actor – not the face”). Between the Company Manager and myself, we managed to persuade him not to throw me in the cells, and he turned his back on us saying in very obvious disdain that actors should be in the theatre, not outside. So much for breaking the fourth wall.Talking of walls, Girona has some of the finest medieval ones in the world and before the show I went for a walk on them as they tower over the city. From there, you can see the billowing mountains of the Montseny Massif leading to the snow-tipped Pyrenees in the distance. The sun began to dip below them, and the white stone of the Cathedral which peers over the old streets and alleyways turned blood red, mirroring the flag of St. George that hangs so limply on our stage.
In the land of Catalonia that has seen so much bloodshed in a struggle with oppression, had its own balaclava’d terrorism, it was clear to see that a play imbued ostensibly with so much English nationalistic fervour could translate and speak to so many. The language of red and white, blood and bone, sadly spans the world.
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03
January
Nicholas Asbury's Guardian Blog
Read Nicholas Asbury's blogs as Propeller tour the UK and the world with Henry V and The Winter's Tale. Click here to find out more.
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15
December
The Winter's Tale
By Roger Warren
TIME AND TRUTH IN THE WINTER’S TALE
THE WINTER’S TALE is one of a group of plays (Cymbeline and The Tempest are the others) written close together at the end of Shakespeare’s career, probably in 1610–11, with Pericles (1607–8) as a forerunner. They are often called "romances" because they contain unlikely events and interventions by pagan gods; and "winter’s tale" was proverbial for a story to pass a winter’s night: the play itself draws attention to the way in which its events seem ‘like an old tale’, that is, an old wives’ tale. But neither "romance" nor "old tale" should imply that these late plays are escapist fantasies. Myths and folk-tales embody truths which remain relevant because they focus the deepest instincts, joys and fears, of human beings; and these plays contrast the extremes of human experience, setting betrayal, jealousy, and lust for power against integrity, forgiveness, and reconciliation. The language has a corresponding range, from quasi-tragic intensity to lyrical beauty. At the end of his career, Shakespeare was vigorously experimenting with his dramatic technique and renewing it, using the extremes of incident and language to create new imaginative worlds.
The story of The Winter’s Tale derives from Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, a prose narrative by Robert Greene, published some twenty years earlier, in 1588. What attracted Shakespeare to this "old tale"? Surely the topic that it announces uncompromisingly in its opening lines:
Among all the passions wherewith human minds are perplexed, there is none that so galleth with restless despite as that infectious sore of jealousy. … Whoso is pained with this restless torment doubteth all, distrusteth himself, is always frozen with fear and fired with suspicion.
Here is the germ of Shakespeare’s play. Sexual jealousy was an enduring preoccupation for Shakespeare from the slight but virulent case of Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing via Othello to Posthumus in Cymbeline and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. But whereas in the other plays Shakespeare goes to some lengths to "motivate" the jealousy, that of Leontes is wholly self-conceived. In him, Shakespeare dramatizes the essentially irrational nature of jealousy: his fevered imagination distorts what he sees.
The Winter’s Tale begins in a witty, elegant court society. At its centre is a relaxed and intimate family circle: Leontes, his pregnant wife Hermione, his lifelong friend Polixenes, and his young son Mamillius. All seems right with the world; then, suddenly, in the first of the play’s extreme contrasts, Leontes misinterprets the warmth and affection surrounding him as sexual betrayal. His mind is seized by a destructive disease which burns ferociously through the first half of the play: he treats his pregnant wife in particular with a savagery that borders on sadism, what Hermione rightly calls his ‘immodest hatred’. The root of Leontes’ jealousy is simple: he doesn’t trust his wife. By the end of the trial scene, he appears to have destroyed everything that was once precious to him: his wife, his children, his relationship with his best friend. From these depths he, and the play, must rise.
It starts to do so with another extreme contrast. Abandoning Hermione’s baby daughter Perdita in the wilds of Bohemia, Antigonus is killed by a bear; but the baby is rescued by a kindly, humorous Old Shepherd, who summarizes the technique of the play when he tells his son: ‘thou met’st with things dying, I with things new born.’ During the next sixteen years, Perdita grows up in rural surroundings: and her dawning love for Polixenes’ son Florizel is dramatized during the sheep-shearing celebrations in the play’s second half. But Shakespeare does not idealise this rural world. It is preyed upon by the con-man Autolycus, whose name means ‘the wolf himself’. More seriously, Polixenes destroys the rural festivities when he tries to part Florizel and Perdita with a savagery that echoes Leontes’ earlier violence. Time can heal, but it can also recycle.
The sixteen-year gap in the middle of the play is bridged by Time himself. This might seem merely another device of an "old tale"; but in fact that gap of time has specific dramatic functions. Here again, Shakespeare took a hint from his source. The motto on the title-page of Greene’s Pandosto is ‘Temporis filia veritas’ (‘Truth is the daughter of Time’). Greene’s title-page continues: ‘although by the means of sinister fortune truth may be concealed, yet by time, in spite of fortune, it is most manifestly revealed.’ This truth is two-fold: while new life, in the person of Leontes’ daughter, flourishes in Bohemia, there is a corresponding renewal back in Sicilia, where Leontes himself is undergoing a process of repentance and psychological ‘re-creation’. It is easy to destroy; healing takes much longer. His earlier behaviour was so extreme that a correspondingly extreme period of repentance is needed to expiate what he has done.
This process is supervised by Paulina, who embodies several roles: as she herself tells Leontes, she is ‘your loyal servant, your physician, / Your most obedient counsellor’ — priestess and psychiatrist in one. But compassionate though she is, she has directed his ‘re-creation‘ by keeping his wounds open. When they reappear after the sixteen-year gap, she reminds Leontes that he ‘killed’ Hermione. He replies:
Killed?
She I killed? I did so; but thou strik’st me
Sorely to say I did. It is as bitter
Upon thy tongue as in my thought. Now, good now,
Say so but seldom.He fully admits what he has done, but asks Paulina not to remind him of it too often. He is learning, that is, the moderation he disastrously lacked earlier in the play; and so he is ready for the reunion with his daughter — magically expressed in the language she herself uses in the rural scenes: "Welcome hither, / As is the spring to the earth!" — and for the revelations of the Statue scene where, Paulina reminds him, ‘It is required / You do awake your faith’ — that trust in his wife that he so signally lacked earlier. But the reunion and reconciliation at the end of The Winter’s Tale are hard-won. The play reminds us of the cost: Leontes’ son Mamillius and Paulina’s husband Antigonus remain dead. Like Greene’s Pandosto, the play may dramatize ‘the Triumph of Time’, but in doing so it does not sentimentalize the toughness of the ‘Truth’ that Time can reveal.
ROGER WARREN
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November
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October
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May
Richard Dempsey: Pocket Dream is back!
Richard on the pleasure of revisiting the Dream this summer.
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23
March
Tony Bell: Diary of a Gossip Week Seven: A Big Plane to the Big Apple
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light"
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03
March
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28
February
Tony Bell: Diary of a Gossip: Week Six Coventry (with a bit of Norwich)
"The truth about Chris Myles and the best legs in showbiz"
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18
February
Tony Bell Diary of a Gossip week Five: Sheffield
How to be Northenr and Influence People
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13
February
Tony Bell Diary of a Gossip Week Four Newcastle (actually Week Twelve but I've had writer's block)
“A sparkler up the bum”
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13
December
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09
December
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09
December
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22
November
Richard III: Tony Bell - Diary of a Gossip. Week One Coventry
"How Richard gave me back my mojo"
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16
November
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09
November
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25
October
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22
September
Jonathan Livingstone on POCKET DREAM
Jonathan Livingstone tells the company's latest news of the tour
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07
July
Richard Dempsey on the Pocket Dream
Richard Dempsey introduces the Pocket Dream company and offers a few reflections from the tour...
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02
July
Pocket Dream - On The Road
We are in the middle of our first week of the Pocket Dream tour which will continue in September. The wonderful company are all Propeller company members: Richard Dempsey, Jonathan Livingstone, Chris Myles, David Newman, Thomas Padden & Tam Williams. Nick Chesterfield is at the helm again as our cool and brilliant Company Manager, with Bridget Fell on getting us into costumes (again) and Eleanor Randall looking after us on the text.
So far, we have played Benenden and Oakland Schools with the audiences really coming back to us with good and interesting questions and at Coutts & Co., our sponsors, who gave us a tremendous evening. On Saturday we head for the Kent Youth Festival in Maidstone for a full on day of workshops and performances. We are travelling between venues in a people carrier and a transit van listening to Wimbledon!