ABSTRACT
Shakespeare, and others, wrote for a theatre that had minimal sets and an audience that did not sit quietly watching – they reacted like a modern football crowd. (Conditions that they are attempting to recreate at The Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank.) He had no lighting beyond available daylight and the occasional flare or candle, no sophisticated special effects and no modern sound systems. There was some live music and the occasional drum, trumpet, comet, and so on, but the principle emphasis was on the power of the excitingly spoken word. And that’s what Shakespeare gave actors: a brilliant vehicle, his words, that can really help the auditioning actor – also without sets, lighting, and so on. He also had incredible insights into how people ‘tick’, in a way that wasn’t really generally understood until about a hundred years ago – famously through Freud and in the acting world through Stanislavski. There is a story about a man after seeing his first Shakespeare production: ‘Hey, this guy knew about Freud three-hundred years before Freud.’
