Six more films in the Guardian’s Shakespeare Solos series have been released online. The videos feature outstanding actors performing speeches from Shakespeare’s plays. Joanna Lumley stars as Twelfth Night’s Viola, David Threlfall performs Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” from The Tempest, Samuel West is Henry V, Daniel Mays is Macbeth, Camille O’Sullivan portrays Constance from King John and Sacha Dhawan plays Parolles from All’s Well That Ends Well.
For Mays, who is about to appear in a revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker at the Old Vic in London, his solo marks his first Shakespearean performance since leaving drama school. “I saw it as a great exercise in getting the monkey off my back,” he said. “I left Rada in 2000. The Macbeth speech [“Is this a dagger which I see before me?”] was something I did in the second year, when you give a Shakespearean speech to a panel and they dissect it.” He said: “I love how dynamic the speech is, how packed full of tension. There is a great journey from the beginning to the end of it ... Macbeth is in such a state of panic that he is hallucinating. His mind is playing horrendous tricks on him. As the speech unfolds he goes through this process of psyching himself up [for the murder of Duncan]. There’s an amazing sense of foreboding.”
The solos, directed by Dan Susman, were mostly filmed in the multimedia studios at the Guardian’s London offices. “I didn’t fancy taking a carving knife with me round London on the way to the studio,” said Mays. “I walked in and said, ‘I sincerely hope that someone here has got a dagger.’ They had a selection of kitchen knives. I picked the biggest one.”
For his solo, Shameless star David Threlfall was cast as Prospero in Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest. Threlfall, who kicked off his stage career with Shakespearean roles at the RSC in the late 1970s, arrived at the Guardian’s studio with a flowing beard grown for his current role as Don Quixote in the RSC’s adaptation of Cervantes’ comic novel. For her solo, Joanna Lumley chose Viola’s monologue “I left no ring with her” from the comedy Twelfth Night. “I love Viola, and all Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines,” said Lumley. “There is something bold and sly about them, able to think like a man and swoon like a woman.”
Two of the films were shot on location. Sacha Dhawan, star of Channel 4’s comedy Not Safe for Work and one of Alan Bennett’s original History Boys at the National Theatre, filmed his speech in a bar in King’s Cross. A version of Parolles’s lines about virginity from All’s Well That Ends Well, the solo marks Dhawan’s Shakespearean debut on screen. Samuel West, Dhawan’s co-star in the TV series Mr Selfridge, gave Henry V’s “Upon the king” soliloquy while walking along the South Bank. West, who will appear in the upcoming second series of the BBC’s Shakespearean adaptation The Hollow Crown, said he picked his speech because “it’s a much more layered and complex portrayal of kingship than we see elsewhere in Henry V. A lot of the time, Henry has to be the man people need him to be ... a lot of the time he is producing rousing rhetoric or propaganda. This soliloquy is a rather modern view of kingship. It’s basically about a man who can’t sleep the night before a big battle, a big test. I like that we shot it outside parliament, because nowadays that’s where the decision to go to war is made.”
West continued: “I’m a republican and I play quite a lot of kings. I like the moments when they go, ‘You’ve put me in a throne but it’s basically just a chair and you’ve covered me in this oil that makes me semi-divine but basically it’s just olive oil. Then you give me all your problems and I have to carry them. What have I got that you haven’t, except this frock, this fur? It’s a peculiarly modern and rather human way of looking at majesty. I think that’s a good antidote to what we get of Henry V usually, which is all bluster and violence.”
Some of the actors chose their own solo speeches, while others were cast in certain roles by the Guardian. The singer Camille O’Sullivan, who plays Constance in King John for her solo, took her cue from Elizabeth Freestone, who directed O’Sullivan when she performed Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece for the RSC in 2012. “I reached out to Elizabeth, who has such an incredible mind when it comes to his work. She came back swiftly and said this is a fantastic speech and is kind of unknown. It’s a play and a character I didn’t know much about, which allowed me to come at the speech completely new. That’s how I felt with Lucrece. You can come with your own instinct.”
“With Shakespeare’s female characters you get the clever, the jovial, the dark, the evil. You get the measure of many of them quite quickly,” said O’Sullivan. In comparison, Constance’s speech “Thou art not holy” shows several different colours of the character. It also proves Shakespeare’s skill at getting into the mindset of someone who is suffering. “Constance is trying to explain the grief she has gone through and the loss of her son. Probably everybody she is addressing thinks she is crazy, but she explains very succinctly the reasons why she is not.”
The films feature a sound design by Pascal Wyse that gives them what he calls “a sense of space and place”. For Mays’s performance as Macbeth, Wyse stretched the sound of a church bell, “effectively making one strike of the bell last minutes rather than seconds. I laid that underneath as a kind of drone, like the ghost of a bell.”
The Shakespeare Solos project marks the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death. The first six films, released last month, star Adrian Lester, David Morrissey, Joanna Vanderham, Ayesha Dharker, Roger Allam and Eileen Atkins.
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