The start of February already? January was an eventful month, getting back to Affectable sessions with the Regulars and setting up the camera practise and showreel group. There’ll be exciting news about our next production soon, so keep watching… In the meantime, I’m resuming my musings on useful things for actors.

Something that came up at today’s Affectable session was the question of how much background knowledge an actor needs when doing a period piece. In the past I’ve heard people argue that research is overrated and unnecessary. I disagree. I completely and wholeheartedly disagree. Not everything you need to know is made explicit in a play’s text.

Do you know who the Prime Minister is? Do you know what you and your contemporaries were taught at school? Do you know how much stigma your family and friends would attach to a particular sexual orientation? Do you know whether it’s acceptable to address your boss by their first name, or which are the rich/poor parts of town, or whether going to church regularly would be out of the ordinary or just what everyone in your community does, or what would be a normal price to pay for bread?

The chances are that you know all of these things, and that if you were writing a play you wouldn’t put all that information in because it’s all part of the context of your life and too obvious to spell out. I’m not saying that you need to know the answers to these exact questions for every character you play, but a good grounding in history will allow you to spot anything in the text that might be particularly significant to your character or to fill in the blanks in your given circumstances. Socio-economic circumstances are unlikely to be spelled out in the text if they were self-evident to the original audience, but it’s important that we don’t assume that it’s safe to impose our own values and circumstances on an old text.

The example we used in today’s session was the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. She’s often simply played for laughs, which makes some of her actions look rather strange. First she takes a massive risk by facilitating Juliet’s clandestine marriage, then when things get a bit difficult she simply changes her mind and suggests Juliet should just forget him and marry Paris instead? It’s just not plausible. Her actions only make sense if you stop and think about her world:

• In the context of her profession, the Nurse is getting old. Her exact age is never stated, but we know she was Juliet’s wet nurse nearly 14 years ago. She is likely to have been dry for some time. Even if the Capulets have more children or Juliet gets busy as soon as she’s married, the Nurse is really surplus to requirements. Women of that class need wet nurses for their babies, not older women who can’t take over breastfeeding.  The Nurse has to stay in the Capulets’ good books, since she’ll be depending on them to keep her on as a mark of gratitude rather than because they actually need her. Her employment prospects outside of this family are non-existent.
• There are no unions or unfair dismissal procedures. If the Capulets are displeased with the Nurse they can fire her and kick her out of the house immediately. The fact that she has probably got nowhere to go is not their problem.
• There is no welfare state. If she gets fired the Nurse will get no unemployment benefit, no roof over her head, nothing. The best she can hope for is some church-based charity or that prostitution will be less miserable for her than it was for most women of the time.
• If the Capulets find out about Juliet’s marriage and the Nurse’s role in it, she’ll probably end up in prison rather than on the streets. The fact that prisons often have a roof will probably not be a comfort.
• It’s a Catholic country. What the Nurse is suggesting is that Juliet should face eternal damnation by marrying Paris. To do so would require her to do many things you’re not allowed to do. Her vows would be a lie, which means taking the sacrament while she’s not in a state of grace. She would be committing adultery. She would be living as Paris’ concubine. We know that the Nurse loves Juliet and loves her enough to take risks for her. I think it’s safe to assume that she wouldn’t suggest something as sinful as marrying Paris lightly. There’s got to be something she’s terrified of in this life to push Juliet into damnation in the next.

What I have written above is probably riddled with historical inaccuracies. I have a smattering of information about the period and am extrapolating a great deal from the facts that I have. However, when it comes to shaping a performance you are more concerned with the sense of the character’s world than the exact detail, so the important thing is to come up with a coherent rationale that fits with the facts that you do have.

I am also not suggesting that during that scene, the Nurse consciously thinks of all of these things. I doubt she does, and nor should you try to as an actor. The point is to have thought about them beforehand, during early character work. Once you’ve worked through a character’s Given Circumstances and reasoned through the behaviour that didn’t immediately make sense to you, you can leave that information alone. Trust that it’s in your brain and will make its presence felt when it needs to, when something specifically triggers it.

Having a basic grasp on history means not having to start your research from scratch on every role you do. If you’ve got a rough mental timeline that lets you place your character in history, you’ll find it helps you to give a better informed, better rounded performance. There’s a danger in assuming that any period in history was the same for everyone who lived through it (the simple fact that your character lived during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment doesn’t necessarily mean they were particularly forward thinking, nor does being a Victorian necessarily that you’ll swoon at the sight of a table leg), but there are things that you can figure out about how your character is likely to have been educated, brought up, what expectations their society would have had of them and what the consequences would have been for any transgressions. The latter is particularly important, because that’s what gives you your stakes, and it’s the thing I see neglected most frequently. Don’t be one of those actors.

I have plans for a series of articles about some important events and how they affect the characters from major plays of the era. Stay tuned…