Balance for Buckingham

I was mistaken in a pretty big way in my last entry. For last night, we did indeed spend some time on my first scene in the play, wherein Buckingham interacts with Queen Margaret. We ran it twice, and had time permitted the director would have run it again.

It felt better this time than the previous times I ran it. What I am trying to do is establish a balance in Buckingham between fear, repulsion, and fascination with Queen Margaret. An insane, intense, and potentially dangerous woman, Margaret enters the scene as a queen deposed, and desperate woman who nonetheless sees herself still as queen. Buckingham for his part, had no particular hand in her deposition, or in the killing of her family, at least. (So say Margaret herself in the scene.) She seeks to be "in league an amity" with Buckingham in fact. The plot doesn't allow Buckingham to embrace this, of course, but as I am playing him I am hoping for a moment or two or internal doubt here, before Richard, in later scenes, enlists Buckingham into his plots.

The scene is a tense one, and I can feel the tension physically my my neck and head when I play it. I don't want to give myself a headache at the start of every performance, so I need to find a way to convey what I am conveying without tensing so many muscles. (Even if those are in fact that muscles that would be tensed in real life scenarios such as these.)

I must not let Buckingham appear a coward in this seen. Exhausted, wary, perhaps a bit creeped out, but not a coward. If the audience sees him as a coward this early, the will think of him as such throughout the play. This is the most important thing I will do as I work on this scene, for I can't imagine anything more deleterious to my presentation of the character than for him to be labels a coward from the start. It is among my top three concerns heading into the final two weeks of rehearsal.

In addition to this scene, we ran all scenes wherein Rivers appears, to accommodate our latest cast member. I am in some of those scenes, but not many, and we didn't even run all of those scenes from beginning to end. So while I had things to do for the first half of rehearsal, my activity was limited for the second half.

Richard, though still ill, was able to attend last night, which is good news.

Initially we were going to run the ghost scene, but two of the actors were missing, so the director opted to experiment with some of the choreography of same. A major inspiration struck in regards to placement and blocking of one of the characters in the scene, but could not be tested, as the performer was absent. We may run the scene tonight, even though it is not on the docket, just to see if the director's new idea will be doable.

The initial agenda for this week has been thrown off somewhat, so despite checking the calendar, I am not sure what awaits us tonight. We my try stumbling through all of the first half. I thought I heard mention of that at some point, but I am not sure. In any case, the rehearsals from here on out will be longer, more intense, and more important than they have been up until now. But also, hopefully, more satisfying.