� In Conversation Giles Block - Master of Verse "Julius Caesar" / Master of Play "Antony & Cleopatra"

What attracted you to direct "Antony and Cleopatra" at the Globe?

That’s a very big question! I have been interested in Shakespeare for years and years now, it’s been a kind of obsession. I’ve always felt a bit guilty about the amount of time it has taken up, now at last I’m able to pursue my interest and get paid to do it!

For the last fifteen years I’ve worked mostly in Japan – directing some Shakespeare there, in Japanese.

My interests coincide largely with those of the Globe, because I’ve been fascinated for years in Shakespeare’s verse and the way he wrote for actors to speak his lines. I’ve also been fascinated with the mechanics of Elizabethan plays and Elizabethan playhouses. I think, we’ve got a lot to discover about how they used the theatre to convey the action of the plays. We’ve got a huge problem in Antony and Cleopatra – we’ve got to haul the dying Antony up to wherever Cleopatra is aloft. There are lots of fascinating puzzles to work out, I couldn’t have been given anything more wonderful to do than this. My days are thrilling at the moment.

What do you anticipate will be the biggest challenge?

I don’t know really, if you want an honest answer. You never know what the biggest challenge is going to be, because some things you think are going to be really hard turn out to be really easy and what you feel is going to really easy and obvious gives you headaches. I suppose all the plays have special problems in a way. In Antony and Cleopatra the language of the play is quite extraordinary. It is a bit of a truism to say the language is important in Shakespeare, but in Antony and Cleopatra it’s more so. The language creates a world – I know that comment is often made about Shakespeare’s plays and I wouldn’t say it about many of the others. In lots of other plays the language is just wonderful and it captures the essence of what people are feeling. In Antony and Cleopatra it does something more, it creates the world in which the play takes place - and it takes place over the whole of the classical world. The action moves from Egypt to Rome to Athens to Parthia and there are battles everywhere. The battles are going to be fascinating as they rely on sound. You want to try and give the audience the feel that they are in the middle of some of these great events and the use of sound is vital to create this effect. I’m hoping to have some explosions - there should be shouts around the theatre, trumpets, drums and explosions.

The battles actually happen off stage. It will be a challenge, as we will largely have to create the idea and sounds of the battle using music and actors’ voices.

You are also Master of Verse for "Julius Caesar"? Can you explain what that entails?

For me, the role will entail working with actors on my approach to the text. I think we’ve got confused about verse - it is not poetry. Everyday speech is closer to verse that the written word. If I write you a letter I have to compose my sentences, I have to punctuate it in a certain way so that when you read it off the page the sense of what is being said comes across. When people speak to each other

they get their meaning across by lots of devices, which are to do with colour and emphasis and gesture. Although we don’t realise it we speak in patterns which in no way approximate to punctuated, grammatical writing. We do the opposite in fact, for example, we run one sentence into another and we pause when we want to emphasise something. I think Shakespeare heard the patterns in speech and was able to harness them in the structure of his verse.

Hopefully, what you will hear, if we can get it right, is verse spoken in a way which is immediate, of the moment, very real - that sounds like the characters are creating it as they go along. It will be faster, because when thought and word go together you don’t have those dead areas where people stop at full-stops. The verse should be clearer. There should be a measure of greater clarity and spontaneity so that the verse is easier to understand. Often actors break up the verse in an effort to make it understandable, but in fact if you listen to people when they are passionate about something they do the reverse – there is rush of words.

Do you think the playing conditions in the Globe will effect the way you approach the verse?

I think the great challenge at the Globe is how much we involve the audience. The audience should actually feel that they are witnessing these great events, in so far that they should feel that they have a role to play - that they are part of this army, or crowd. There’s a scene in Richard III, where both Richard and Richmond have a speech to the army basically saying ‘fight on my side’, and there is a similar situation in the Forum scene of Julius Caesar when both Brutus and Mark Anthony address the crowd. Ideally I would want the audience to be caught in the drama, because that’s what understanding drama is, it’s not being a witness to it, it’s being torn this way and that. This building has the potential to involve the audience in this manner.

The company for "Julius Caesar" and "Antony and Cleopatra" will be all male. Is this a situation that you’ve ever encountered before as a director? How do you think this casting will affect your production of "Antony and Cleopatra"?

At school! I went to an all boys school. One of my first parts was Antigone, when I was about fourteen. I don’t know how this casting will affect the play, I don’t actually see any problem. Of course the audience will view it in a slightly different way. I want to say it may be easier, but that’s not to say I don’t want to work with actresses, because I do. But working in this way will be a very interesting experience. One of the last things I did in Japan was a Hamlet with a woman playing Hamlet. The actress concerned became famous in Japan for being the star of a group call Takoraska, which is an all female troupe formed in response to Kabuki theatre – an all male tradition. As soon as rehearsals started everyone forgot about the sex of the person, she was like any other performer, playing Hamlet. I imagine it will be the same when Mark (Rylance) plays Cleopatra.

Of course the reason we are experimenting with all male companies is because Shakespeare’s company would have been exclusively male. Boys played the women in the plays. We have so little record of how old the actors were who played these parts - we don’t really know how long the boys went on playing female roles. I think there is a record of an actor called Nathaniel Field who was twenty-one when he played a female role. I feel that it must have been older members of the company who played the older women, like the witches in Macbeth.

Cleopatra is one of those parts where it is difficult to satisfy everyone. Audiences tend to have their own idea of how Cleopatra should be played. So it may be easier in this production as when you know you’ve got someone who is the wrong sex playing the character you can focus on the soul, the essence of Cleopatra, rather than focussing on externals in someway. But you can certainly argue this point!