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    Alan Rickman on Jaques (Shakespeare On Stage)
    Alan Rickman on Jaques (Shakespeare On Stage)
    Alan Rickman on Jaques (Shakespeare On Stage)
    Ebook46 pages26 minutes

    Alan Rickman on Jaques (Shakespeare On Stage)

    By Alan Rickman and Julian Curry

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    About this ebook

    Alan Rickman discusses playing Jaques in Shakespeare's As You Like It, in this ebook taken from Shakespeare On Stage: Volume 2 - Twelve Leading Actors on Twelve Key Roles.

    In each volume of the Shakespeare On Stage series, a leading actor takes us behind the scenes of a landmark Shakespearean production, recreating in detail their memorable performance in a major role. They leads us through the choices they made in rehearsal, and how the character works in performance, shedding new light on some of the most challenging roles in the canon. The result is a series of individual masterclasses that will be invaluable for other actors and directors, as well as students of Shakespeare – and fascinating for audiences of the plays.

    In this volume, Alan Rickman re-evaluates the melancholic Jaques, a role he played in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1985 production of As You Like It directed by Adrian Noble.

    This interview, together with the others in the series (with actors such as Ian McKellen, Simon Russell Beale, Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter), is also available in the collection Shakespeare On Stage: Volume 2 - Twelve Leading Actors on Twelve Key Roles by Julian Curry, with a foreword by Nicholas Hytner.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Hern Books
    Release dateApr 27, 2017
    ISBN9781780018935
    Alan Rickman on Jaques (Shakespeare On Stage)
    Author

    Alan Rickman

    Alan Rickman was born in West London. Rickman studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, the Royal College of Art, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He started in theater and later expanded to films with Die Hard. Rickman played a wide variety of characters in iconic films across many genres, including Truly, Madly, Deeply; Sense and Sensibility; Galaxy Quest; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Love Actually; and every movie in the Harry Potter series. He passed away in 2016.

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      Book preview

      Alan Rickman on Jaques (Shakespeare On Stage) - Alan Rickman

      Cover-image

      Alan Rickman

      on

      Jaques

      Taken from

      SHAKESPEARE ON STAGE

      Volume 2

      Twelve Leading Actors on Twelve Key Roles

      by Julian Curry

      NICK HERN BOOKS

      London

      www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

      Contents

      Dedication

      Introduction

      Acknowledgements

      Alan Rickman on Jaques

      Synopsis of the Play

      About the Author

      Other Titles in the Series

      Copyright Information

      For Alex and Torren

      hoping their lives will be enriched by Shakespeare as mine is

      Introduction

      Julian Curry

      Much of the brilliance of Shakespeare lies in the openness, or ambiguity, of his texts. Whereas a novelist will often describe a character, an action or a scene in the most minute detail, Shakespeare knew that his scenarios would only be fully fleshed out when actors perform them. He was the first writer to create character out of language. Falstaff has an idiosyncratic way of speaking that is quite distinct from Juliet, as she does from Shylock, and he from Lady Macbeth. An actor receives subliminal clues about their character, merely by the way they express themselves.

      George Bernard Shaw wrote long prefaces and elaborate stage directions; his texts are littered with instructions to actors and directors as to how his plays should be done. This can be helpful, but as often as not it’s limiting, even annoying. Shakespeare, conversely, wrote hardly any stage directions. The best known is ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ in The Winter’s Tale – which incidentally is far from proscriptive: is some unfortunate actor bundled into a bear costume? Or is the bear surreal, an effect of sound and lighting? Directors have carte blanche. The only solution rarely adopted is to put a live bear on stage. On occasion Shakespeare does give a precise indication of stage business. In the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano says: ‘Not on thy sole but on thy soul, harsh Jew, / Thou mak’st thy knife keen’ [4.1]. Then the actor playing Shylock understands that he should take out his knife and sharpen it on the sole of his shoe. Other stage directions take the form of implicit but less precise suggestions. When Hamlet says to Osric, ‘Put your bonnet to his right use; ’tis for the head’ [5.2], the actor playing Osric knows one thing for sure: his hat is not on his head. How else he is using it is up to him.

      There are times when the actor may decide to do the opposite of what the text seems to indicate. For instance, when King Lear exits saying to Goneril and Regan, ‘You think I’ll weep? No, I’ll not weep... this heart / Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / Or ere I’ll weep’ [2.4], the suggestion appears to

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