Conrad Nelson on Othello
January 27, 2009
“I think Othello will probably be a favourite by the time I’ve finished,” Conrad Nelson predicts. “You get more satisfaction from any play when you perform it, but obviously Shakespeare in particular because the language is so rich. But with every play that you read, you discover things once you get into performances, and it’s a constant joy.”
Nelson ought to know. A frequent performer in and composer for, and occasional director of, the Halifax-based company’s work, he is one of the mainstays of the Northern Broadsides brotherhood. Its new version of Othello is a joint production with the West Yorkshire Playhouse, with Broadsides’ artistic director Barrie Rutter at the helm, that will debut at the WYP in mid-February for which he has composed the music. He is to play the Moor’s scheming adversary Iago opposite Lenny Henry, whose own experience of Shakespeare, as Nelson observes, has brought him a similar sense of revelation, albeit in grander proportions. “The problem for Lenny with doing this piece in the first place came from the fact that, when he was at school, he had a morbid fear and dislike of Shakespeare,” he says. “As he’s got older he’s rediscovered Shakespeare and the depths of Shakespeare’s plays, and now he’s performing in one, so it’s a real sort of passage for him.”
Known best as the company that performs Shakespeare in northern accents (although by no means all its work falls into this category), Broadsides also embodies northern values and qualities. For example, one tenet is that, without simplifying them, it aims to make Shakespeare’s plays easier to understand, and therefore to enjoy. “We like to give it clarity and alacrity of delivery,” explains Nelson, “and that is hopefully engaging to audiences. In the past, people have asked us who does our re-writes, and we tell them that there are no re-writes. Hopefully that goes some way towards indicating the determination of the company to achieve clarity and produce a highway down which a text can be passed from actors to audience. If that’s what audiences say – ‘You bring clarity’, ‘You bring simplicity’, using that word guardedly – then that’s delightful.”
Nelson characterises the verbal process of presenting Shakespeare’s texts an “art”, but his description of it suggests that “discipline” might be an equally applicable term. “There’s a formality of delivery that gives it clarity and form rather than loose naturalism,” he says, “except that, often, the dialogue is very natural and human in its intentions so, as long as you don’t confuse it with acting, ironically, you get real clarity. As long as you say ‘I’m going to stab you through the heart’, or whatever the line is, and you say it clearly and get the intention right, there’s not really anything else. For example, if it’s a very emotional scene, you don’t want someone blubbing through the lines.”
Despite his attentiveness to enunciation and expression in Shakespearian dialogue, Nelson is refreshingly open about the modicum of unpredictability that performing live entails. In fact, he sees it as something to be embraced, and discusses it animatedly. “Because it’s live theatre, it’ll be different because the actors had a curry the night before, or the audience isn’t feeling too good, or it’s a great atmosphere, or there’s been a presidential election,” he argues. “The pots of subconscious things that you bring make it different every night. We aren’t automata and we don’t play it the same every night – it’s not possible. Hopefully we get close, but I quite like the idea that there’s a sort of currency of intention; that you want to try to get from A to B but, within those guidelines, there’s a little bit of creative flexibility that just keeps it alive. Rehearsal gives you that sort of security, but there’s a little bit of jumping into the unknown each time you go on stage, ‘cause no-one knows exactly what’s going to happen. It’s an organised free-fall, really. When the parachute opens you hope that you won’t break a leg on the way down. It’s exciting.”
-Conrad Nelson was talking to Simon Walker
Comments
Got something to say?