For the RADA MA Theatre Lab 2024 Clown adaptation
of a classical play,
we chose The Winter's Tale. AKA Exit, Pursued By. 

You can find previous Clown Dramaturgy posts from previous Clown adaptations by searching in the Categories (see to the right).
All photographs in this post by @slycatempire

One thing I love about approaching Classical texts in Clown is the ability to reveal the absurdities of misused power (as well as the concurrent pathos of those on the receiving end of injustice). 

Also I love the ability to elevate the lowly characters, and the overlooked perspectives. We featured the sheep, the servants, the baby Perdita, Florizel, a tree (in Bohemia) and The Bear. The Bear's through line culminated in an Anger Management meeting  which Leontes attends.

Double up!
The large cast exigency of doubling characters doubles the fun of stage business as well as amplifying themes and emotions - for example: Hermione's pain; Leontes' Tyranny (and subsequent grief); and the Mama Bear ferocity and care of the plural Paulinas. 

​Set the theme
We began the play with a Country & Western song about a grieving man 'Statue of a Fool'  sung / spoken by the two kings. 

Set the scene
And then segued into an ensemble tableau of Leontes's court. See the image above. Enough time was spent here to enable to audience's eyes to take in the madness and clown genius of all the details. You'll see, on the right, a foreshadowing of The Bear. Missing from the photo above is a found prop (it was not in the room when the photos were taken). One person in the court tableau had chosen to mime fanning the King. 'Can we get a fan?', I asked? A large woven fan maybe? It needs to be big. Someone in the company indicated an electric standing fan in the room. The performer (who was one of the Hermiones) comes from India and she (as did we all) enjoyed the opportunity to depict injustice in an absurd way and, via the medium of clown, deliver an anti-colonial message. The Fan had a cord - 'can you put that over your shoulder'? And then Hermione #2 stepped forward and held it - 'oh, yes! can you plug it into your heart?' As she acted being drained/slightly electrocuted, a bit of Dark Clown suffering was added to the picture. 

Use humble magic
The titular concept of Winter was honoured at a few points during the 50 minute piece with tiny accents of tossed torn-paper snow provided by the framing ensemble - marking moments of weather, or emotion or magic. Our Rock-star Oracle sprinkled some over themselves to add pizzazz in their appearance in the courtroom scene. (In this image below, you get to see the fan!) 

Honour the through line of your props.
​'The fan needs a payoff', I said. At the end, for the miraculous transformation of the frozen Hermione, the fun was brought forward (now plugged in to electric supply) and handfuls of paper snow plumed towards the frozen statue of the double Hermiones. 

Find and love your Metaphors
Find your metaphors and honour them. The Statue of a Fool song presages and adds a bit more oomph to the statue(s) at the end, as well as serving a point on how patriarchy hurts men too. Both Leontes and Hermione endure a process of petrification.

Running Gags
​Running gags are a part of Clown Dramaturgy (they can either serve a function akin to that of symbolism in dramatic works, or simply assist the game of laughter nudges. Any time it was mentioned, the guards thumped their fists on their breastplates and chanted percussively: 'SI.CI.LY!' (later to be countered by Aloaha-shirt-clad guards from 'the seaside country of Bohemia. 'ALL. HAIL.BOHEMIA!')

Neglected perspectives
To continue the point of focusing on the neglected perspectives of the play. We enjoyed having a representation of Perdita as a baby - allowing us to highlight the anxiety over her abandonment. We used a baby body prop - made by the player who wore it - the likes of which used to appear in Vaudeville acts. I also used this prop device in Strange Forces. 
The actor played the baby with a sometimes sassy joie de vivre and sometimes a sweet innocent obliviousness (e.g. babbling a lullaby gently to herself as The Bear appears onstage). This created an effect that was memorable; ridiculous, hilarious, but palpable. Also slightly surreal and sad. It also allowed us to show the anguish of those who came in contact with her (adding a bit more Dark Clown flavour there also).

Double fun
​Doubling the characters brings double the impact (see the fierce four-armed Leontes below) and double the fun (the palace guards) plus a complexity of attitude and response to characters (see the two Hermiones here below). 

Make the pain palpable (and cathartically ridiculous)
​Other overlooked moments in the original Shakespeare text includes the fact that Hermione gives birth in a prison. Cue the Prison Birth Rap (imagine the beat underneath).
Prison birth - The bed was not comfortable
Prison birth - The equipment was not clean
Prison birth - No epidural
Prison birth - Nothing fit for a queen
Prison birth - No Pilates balls
Prison birth - No paddle pools
Prison birth - No whale music
Prison birth - It’s  just awfool

You can see here above the two Kings bearing witness to this (on the right, one sitting, one standing on a chair) - note their individual reactions to the moment.

Shared experience 
I love having all actors onstage throughout the piece (Shared Experience theatre company used to do this to wonderful focusing effect, albeit in drama, rather than clown). It requires a lot of focus from the ensemble during the devising and requires a lot of detailed focus from the directorial eye, but can add the power of choric moments (at one moment, the whole ensemble played Leontes' rage as a thrashing serpentine tail). It also certainly gives more playing opportunity to the clown players not in the centre space scene-play of the moment.

Ensemble means no small parts
Stanislavski said 'there are no small parts'. See the charisma and joy of this clown serving in the courtroom scene as 'Stenographer's desk'. 

Strategic Stupidity
And here, right, this clown serving in the role of 'Tree'. As well as evoking the country of Bohemia, the sole tree underscores the utter aloneness of the baby after the guard who delivered here there (yes we used a Guard, not Paulina's husband as in the original) makes an uncomfortable exit due to the arrival of - you guessed it - The Bear. The Tree character also keeps us invested in the thought that the clowns have decided to stage the play this way.

Follow through your stupid idea
​See here below left: the Shepherd, her stupid son and sheep. The shepherd and her son saved the baby and now we see (below right) the grown Perdita (alongside her baby-self for both fun and Clarity). 
​
The Shepherd's favourite sheep is beside her, although they are indoors. In this scene, after Perdita confides to her adoptive mother both her love for a 'very special boy' and the fact that he is - ta dah! - a Prince in disguise (as a sheep in our clown world) so as not to attract the displeasure of his father, King of Bohemia).

Beats and reactions
​Below - more joy of doubles, plus react, react, react. As Mamet said: 'Beat, beat, beat'. I don't think he ever said exactly that, but that is how the audience follows a story (this, then that, then that), and how the audience understands the stakes and follows the emotional arc of the story. Dramaturgy is built beat by beat. Is that true or does it just sound good because of the alliteration?

​Anyway it's worth saying because many new theatre makers can get trapped at the level of their ideas. How does your stage action play out over the duration of your stage time? What is the nub of your piece and how does that express itself into different threads? Keep us interested using variety and contrast from moment to moment. During the devising process, be sure to keep the mind in a state that's receptive and playful enough to pick up on the running threads. Is something bringing your process to a halt? ... do you need to incorporate something planted earlier? Or skip to another scene elsewhere in place and/or time, or just change mode (i.e. from tight action to a musical interlude?) 

The take on the story - Time, trouble and a moving tableau
Now that's timely (pun unintended but let it stand) - because there is a Time Out in The Winter's Tale that is about the passing of ... Time. 

Here we picked up on one of the statements that was harvested from the Clown Council process - one clown thought that Shakespeare must have been very depressed to write TWT. This Clown Council statement led me to research Country & Western music, famed for articulating heartbreak, which led to the fortuitous finding of the 'Statue of a Fool' song.

One clown states: 
We’re not here to tell you what to do …
We’re just researchers …
We’ve taken this disturbing artifact
And are trying to work with it, understand it 

(By the way, this drops a seed for the philosophical / quasi scientific investigation of the magical transformation at the culmination of our play.)
 
We see another (non-static) tableau of: time passing in abstract movement, the bear eating the dead guard. the KIngs in desolate torment, the Aloha-shirt-clad guards of Bohemia surviving their imprisonment, the growing and maturing Florizel and Perdita (placed edge of frame stage right and left)  transforming as if by time-lapse photography during the scene. Plus a few sheep living their sheep lives.
One actor almost broke my heart here as her sheep as she subtly but palpably moved through the seasons, shivering stoically in the winter because of the shearing (mentioned in TWT as well as our version of the play).

​Sung on a strummed guitar to the tube of Tom Wait's 'Time.' 

Well a king got a bee in his bonnet and his wife pays the price
And his dear son dies because of it all
And there's travel by sea to a landlocked country
Where a bear has a new arrival to maul
And the baby doesn’t cry ‘cos she’s known no other life
A fiancée’s growing up and they will meet
And the storm’s inside your mind and the rain is everywhere in life
And the king has nothing left
But a stack of regret.

​And it's time, time, time ...

Learning how to bear it 
Sadly on the photo shoot we got no images for the Bear Anger Management meeting scene, but here's a snippet of text:
​
Teddy: My name Teddy, I'm a bear.
Group: Rawr, Teddy …
Grizzly: My name is Grizzly
Group: Rawr, Grizzly …
Grizzly: I don’t know why I’m here – I’m not angry, I’m a bear.
Bear Facilitator:  It’s ok, this is a safe space. Remember our motto – anger is Bearable.
Group (nodding): Rawr ...
Leontes (seated): My name is Leontes
Teddy: You have to get up.
Leontes (gets up): ... Leontes, I’m a king ...

After Leontes gets in touch with his feelings and is given advice, someone else raises their hand: 
Bear Facilitator: And you, what’s your name?
Clown stands: Bozo the great. 
Group: Rawr, Bozo.

Funny haha
A funny thing (pun acknowledged) about playing Shakespeare - the clown speeches are not always laughter-provoking on the page. Humour does not age well. The antique phrasing, words and concepts don't easily split the ribs of a 21st Century audience. Speaking of words, in TWT, the Shepherd's stupid son is literally listed as 'Clown' in the Dramatis Personae.
We need to remember that the meaning of the word clown has changed since its inception. Wikipedia says: 
'c. 1560 (as clowne, cloyne) in the generic meaning rustic, boor, peasant. The origin of the word is uncertain, perhaps from a Scandinavian word cognate with clumsy.'
In the Clown Council process (this is the exercise where, the players, in clown state, reflect spontaneously on the original text and it's themes), a few of the clowns protested: '... 'and the 'Clown' isn't even funny!'

Bozo: I’m here to protest the level of un-funny of the character called "Clown" in 'The Winter’s Tale'.
Really he should just be called what he is – the shepherd’s son. It’s a crime, giving misrepresentation
to our trade.
(unfolds piece of paper)
Here are some of the "clown’s" 'jokes'. Which are really just – dialogue.
a/ Prithee bring him in; and let him approach singing.
b/ Comfort, good comfort! 
c/ Ay, by any means prove a tall fellow.
I don't even think that last one's grammatical.

In one rehearsal, The actor playing the Clown, seated at the edge, interrupted this scene by laughing in an inane high pitch after each of these underwhelming phrases. It was a nice follow through of the whole 'clowns approach the text' conceit so we plotted that contribution in.

Weaving themes through like a dance 
One more follow through was at the sheep-shearing party scene.  I asked the group for contributions for folk dance music. One person suggested Struttin', continuing the C&W reference at the very start of the piece and the upbeat rhythm of the track made it perfect for a line dance. See here below.

The full Pastoral
​In the image below this - note the shepherd's son's shears at the ready. 

Winding up
It was humbling bringing the piece to a close. These Clown adaptations (as part of the module I lead each year) are written/devised and rehearsed in about ten hours.

After playing fast and loose with certain aspects of the original play and story, I really got to appreciate at first hand how deftly Shakespeare would follow through and knit together all the threads.

We had to elegantly (while still stupidly), bring together all the parties and resolve all the problems and reconcile all the relationships and bring not only the plot, but the conceit of our piece to a satisfying close. 

​Conceit: Clowns encounter a play about rage and regret and loss and new gains, and in their playing of it, show the audience the role of humour and of wider imagination* in achieving it.

* The clowns have empathy for the bears and the sheep, as well as for the humans. Also the clown play holds the possibility for multiple views to co-exist. They can critique Shakespeare's poor or negligent grip on geography (Bohemia as a seaside country), as well as offering the perspective that those in power can absolutely be as stupid as they (the clowns) are seen to be by the 'sad normals'**.

** 'sad normals' is a teaching phrase I use (of course, there is, in life, no normal).

Addenda:

Metaphor and music 
Oh, one more thing - the storm. The harrowing event that causes the wreck of the ship aboard which was the guard bearing the baby. It's a metaphor for the storm in Leontes' mind (mentioned in the song 'Time' and both metaphor and reality of the wide-spread havoc his unschooled emotions have wrought. Imagine this photograph (below) in movement - not pictured is one clown who circled the group and made a leaping pantomime blanche crick-crick-crick crack of lightning on centre front each time.
We planned to use music here, but opted for the splish-splash/wind sound soundscape created by the clowns themselves.

The cohort was an international group and we used, at one player's suggestion, a brilliant Icelandic heavy metal track based on a folk song. This was used in the choric writhing serpentine tale created by the full ensemble that formed in the space at the peak of Leontes' jealousy.
Leontes:
I can see them in my mind’s eye
Making the beast of two backs – without me!
Emotions, feelings! What are they?! I don’t want them!
Ensemble form writhing Jealousy train covering whole stage
SFX: Icelandic rock music
Put her in prison!
Lock her up!
Ensemble chants: Lock her up!
Chant continues as ensemble forms prison scene.

Set pieces
The storm, like the courtroom is  a great set piece. Different to the original meaning of that word is the fact that the clowns use their own bodies to create the special effects. See also the image under the heading 'humble magic' where you'll see The Oracle appearing from behind the flipchart scroll, elevated on the shoulders of the tallest ensemble player. (I love that this player chooses to serve this function while simultaneously playing his role as the young son Mamillius). This seeming ridiculous, chaotic style allows for the richness of layers.
The prison was another such scene, with ensemble members providing physical support as well as restraint for the pregnant Hermiones.

Showing the usually un-shown - the pregnant Hermiones in prison. 

Prop check and quiet individual ​a l'italienne run before the invited audience sharing. 

When I teach the Clown & Dark Clown course it's most often a 2 day course. Occasionally I teach Clown & Dark Clown (this is the course where people learn Dark Clown at the entry level)* and Dark Clown Level 2 over 4 days. In the Level 2 days, we can cover as many of the Dark Clown scenarios as the energy and focus of the participants will allow.
 
I recently taught for the wonderful Escola Galega De Tempo Libre in northern Spain. The participants were courageous and full of fun. Many Scenarios were beautifully explored.

I have written before about the Consumer Guilt scenario. One participant was both adept with the mechanics of the tasks and also available to the emotion of the moment, that the exercise brought some sublime pleasure/catharsis to those of us watching. 
 
At the start, he registered high stakes of the predicament/dilemma (coming specifically clean about all the items one owns - the simultaneous needing to be comprehensive in direct conflict with the realising that each added item one also enlarges the possibility of punishment). He also accessed and conveyed the obscenity of possession. He accessed (released into) the shame and contrition, apologising to the metaphorical grandma. He opened to the upper space with weeping and regret. When prompted to say ‘oh god’ , he accessed a profound and spacious regret, conveying a dawning realisation of an irreversible life-long fault.

I then (in my alternating roles as controller / friendly coach) asked him to apologise to Mother Earth. He did this. Then I suggested he address all the resources used to make all the things he owned – and all the resources damaged in the process: ‘I’m sorry landscape disturbed by the excavation of coal’, ‘I’m sorry water used in the manufacture’, ‘I’m sorry air for the pollution of the vehicles that brought the goods to the store’… The audience's laughter was enriched.

After this, he turned to his own existence, his very being part of the horror of consumption. He regretted and apologised for the food he ate, for the cotton in the clothing he wore, for the litres and litres of water he had drunk, for the litres of sun screen he had used, for the carbon monoxide he had exhaled.
 
At the technical level, this is an example of how to build on laughter with the accumulation of detail, with the repetitive rhythm of lists, with the contrasting sobbing and moans of regret, with the escalation of stakes, with spatially employing the upper and lower performance space (in addition to the horizontal direct to audience space). And all of this done with the appropriate shifts in eye expression. And all of this interspersed with little adrenal surges and 
 
I now say at the beginning of teaching Clown & Dark Clown that the clown is an entity that has all the shifting emotions and fleeting thought processes that the ‘sad normals’**  would prefer to not have, or not to be seen having. I also point out how suffering is already part of the portrayal of Red Nose Clown. Dark Clown extends the palette of human expression on offer. 

Omg - what a highly technical blog post. I bet it made incredibly dry reading. But in the room, the scenario provided much Troubled Laughter, which is one of the key concepts of the work.

It is natural in the Clown & Dark Clown workshop that people are anxious about where the work is going. I fully acknowledge what a vulnerable place a workshop can be. People come with openness and are working with their psycho-physical being. Many return to review the C&DC workshop. Once the aim and ethos of the work has been assimilated (I speak about it on the workshop and write about it in the FAQ's and here on the blog, but people need to encounter the work in their own being), then people can really get to grips with the Dark Side Play. One of the sentences I now use is that a lot of the work needs the player to be 'a factory of noises'. At it's essence, the work takes a deep, and I always intend ultimately compassionate, look at humanity in extremis. But at a practical level, there is a lot that is mechanical and technical.

* To see the reasons for this – go here.
 
** I explain that ‘sad normals’ is my joke term (a teaching tool) for myself in the supermarket. There is no normal. I also explain that things I say are teaching statements, not overall truths. Sentences used in teaching serve as prompts – phrases and statements are collections of words that have proven useful in the teaching process to get a result or a shift.

Comedy and Tragedy
Tragedies are perfect to adapt for Clown – the contrast between the high and the low, the lofty and the stupid is so sweet. If you’re a fan of this blog, you’ll have read other Clown Dramaturgy posts. This year, we approached Shakespeare’s mighty tragedy Hamlet.
Hamlet is ‘clown ready’ - it’s a great big tragedy full of failure, clumsiness and lack of nobility: ‘I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room’.

Content warning – the tragic events of Hamlet: war, death etc - are mentioned in this post. 
​This blog post reflects on Clown Dramaturgy in the Spring 2023 production on the MA Theatre Lab at RADA, where a clown troupe play a classic text. It is devised and rehearsed in just 10 hours. A sharing/showing with no technical aspects.
 
Clown Council Process – to find key ideas and help casting
​
The Clown Council is an effective clown devising tool. It’s described in this blog post and mentioned in this one also. 

​The Clown Council not only brings out the themes the group are interested in, but the proclivities of individuals in the group; which makes it useful as a casting process.
 
With the group of 18 assembled in a seated circle, one clown stood and weighed her hands on either side and said ‘It’s all - should I do this, should I do that?’, conveying her exasperation with Hamlet’s inaction and equivocation. Another stood and raised a mime sword and said in a sweet high-pitched voice, ‘Conflict’ - the gesture was so innocently valiant. One of them mimed digging a grave. ‘Madness!’, said another. ‘Slutty mother’, said another clown. Another laments Ophelia as a victim of patriarchy: ‘Hashtag MeToo!’.
 
Key idea
 
We all liked the idea of Hamlet being therapized. One student suggested the show title ‘Fixing Hamlet’. Brilliant – the clowns have a mission and therefore the show has the possibility to be a machine for failure. Comedy (like Drama) is about things going wrong.
 
In our next session, I divided the group in two and asked each to construct an image of a therapist’s couch, using their bodies. We chose one version and detailed it. Then the second group made a throne-like therapist’s chair.

Self-casting
 
The Clown that had gestured with her hands became our Hamlet, lying down for a therapeutic session on a couch made of beleaguered fellow clowns.
 
The clown who had called out ‘Madness’ became the therapist. The ‘slutty mother’ clown was delighted to play Gertrude.

​A trip to the props store yielded a small golden breastplate for the valiant clown and an assortment of swords, including a small, wooden sword. We didn’t at first know who this character would be.  We began sketching out a couple of scenes - and in one moment it was clear: ‘You’re Horatio!’. He grabbed some masking tape and made a superhero-style H on his armour. Poor helpless Horatio, always at the ready to serve and support his friend and only rewarded by always having to helplessly watch.
 

Engagement and the Game (with the audience)
 
But why have the clowns gathered and what for? To further clarify our adaptation and to further engage, we discussed what the game with the audience might be.
 
The idea of Hamlet as a problematic, self-involved, dithering figure led to the idea of an Intervention. But not for Hamlet, for the audience. A Google search led to an article saying that part of the intervention process is the reading of a letter – handy template was provided, and adapted.
 
Intervention Clown: reading letter: “Dear Audience,
We love you … but not in a creepy way.
You may not think about us much, but we think about you … but not in a creepy way.
You have watched us, but we have also
watched you. Watched you as you sat in front of the theatre stage and cried.
We know that your lives are busy and that once the comedy and tragedy are over, you pack away your tissues and armour up your hearts.
knock knock (one clown knocks on Horatio’s breastplate.)
Because the life out there is hard. 
knock knock
The news is hard. 
knock knock 
And you are hooked
Clown chorus: soft gasp
on all the everyday Drama. Sorry, it had to be said.
Hooked on the reason and the rottenness and the murders and the mayhem.
And the politics and the petulance.
And the disasters and the desperation.
And you think it’s not about you at all.
 
Think of tonight as a rehab program for you.
You can call us fools, but we think that if we can take the biggest drama of them all …
Clown chorus: in a flat tone Hamlet
Intervention Clown: … and heal it, then maybe, just maybe … we can heal you. And heal the people you vote for. … The Trickle Up effect.
Tonight we present for you - ‘Fixing Hamlet’.”
 
‘Fixing Hamlet’ also sets up stakes. Beyond looking forward to the unfolding of the story, a part of the audience’s attention should be activated: ‘How is this going to come off?’

​​Putting the backstory centre stage

Carlo Boso once said that the three big themes of Commedia are ‘sex, money and death’. The inciting incident of Hamlet is the death of the old king.
 
One cast member contributed the idea of a chalk body outline. In the ‘prologue’ (spooky castle rampart scene). The audience see the dead Ghost King lay down and two clowns from the ensemble swiftly use masking tape to create the crime scene outline round ‘him’, which remains centre stage throughout the show.
 
The chorus make spooky soundscape during the taping round the King’s body.
Guard Clown 1 (plodding forward, big pose): What if again this apparition come?
Guard Clown 2 (steps over corpse, then big pose): Tush, tush, ’twill not appear.
Chorus Clown: (with wobbly arms) Spooky!
The Ghost King slowly rises up. All recoil, fixed point, faces snap to audience.
Guard Clowns together: It harrows me with fear and wonder!
The spooky parapet scene transforms into the therapist office.

Ensemble cast - multiple points of view

This show (like those in the previous blog posts mentioned earlier) are created for a cast of 18 – I set chairs either side of the stage in the manner of Mike Alfreds’ Shared Experience productions. The clowns at the edges create special effects and music and are encouraged to show their individual reactions to the stage action as well and serve as chorus when needed.
A conflict is added by one clown whose personal vision is that they are making a documentary. It’s stupid, but serves to add pressure to the Intervention Clown, which will be useful later when we tie together the Classic Play action and the Clown Play denouement.

Therapist office – the speaking clowns are part of the couch.
Documentary Presenter Clown: Action! slaps hands like a clapperboard
Intervention Clown: What are you doing?
DPC: I’m making a documentary.
IC: reaffirming the overall mission Intervention!
DPC: Shh – Action! slap!
Hamlet: But that’s the whole point. I just can’t seem to get into action –
I can’t get any clarity … weighing with her hands
Mother, aunt, uncle, father, nephew, son …
To go back to uni, not to go back to uni …
Goddammit. I’m a Prince! But I’m a Prisoner.

The elevation of the inanimate

Clowns are underdogs so it it’s a great way to include marginalised or surprising thematic points of view (think of the lowly Porter in Macbeth giving his humorous take on the consequences of bad life choices). Much fun can be had by allowing normally voiceless, inanimate objects to get their say. Having made concrete the murder of the previous King, it was serendipitous that one clown elected, with enthusiasm, to play ‘The Poison!’.
We established a motif of the clown chorus singing the pop hit Toxic at salient points of the action. One of the essential ingredients of comedy is Contrast - in this instance, a huge classic text gets punctured with popular culture.
With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride
You're toxic, I'm slippin' under
Taste of a poison paradise …
Repetition and running gags are a key part of Clown Dramaturgy – they are useful laughter nudges but can also underscore the issues of the clown play plot.

Enter Claudius and Gertrude from either side of the stage.
Claudius Clown: nice and slow I love your ears.
 
Gertrude Clown: These ears? show the audience, sexily
 
CC: heavily Ooooohhh look at the audience How I’d like to pour my words into your ears …
 
Poison Clown: Like you poured poison into her husband’s ears?
CC pushes her away with his hand on her face.
 
GC: Would you do it while I was lying down. taking a nap. in the garden? Each word slowly with pause, stepping in with each word, faster in the last three words.
 
PC: Oooh, like your husband was lying and taking a nap in the garden?
GC pushes her away, hand on face also.
 
CC: Oh , What a beautiful sister-in-law, I mean woman! you are!
 
PC: It’s because she points thumb to GC is the wife of your points thumb to CC dead brother.
CC does a threatening dab to PC and spins to evade her.
 
GC: And what a beautiful brother-in-law – I mean husband!
They feverishly approach.
CC: Wife
GC: Brother-in-law – man …
CC: Woman
GC: King
CC: Legal King
Poison Clown inserts herself and makes a weird noise.
They both put hands on PC’s face and push her away.
CC: I want to bury my big shovel in your grave.
GC: Aaaaaahhh, yes! Bury It, bury it, six foot deep!
 
Now the Ghost King (a clown covered in a milky transparent veil with the crown on the outside of it) comes in-between the lovers and they blindly kiss him, instead of each other. CC and GC ‘eeew’ and shudder and depart separately.
​
Back to Therapy set up
Therapist Clown: Writing. Interesting – your mother’s sexuality disturbs you.

One of the C-words: Concision
Concision helps in making a Hamlet adaptation that is dynamic.
Ophelia: Sweet Hamlet.
Hamlet: You’re a whore!
Ophelia: reacts I’m a virgin!
Hamlet: You’re spying for THEM!
You wear too much makeup!
Nunnery!
Ophelia sobs. Post hashtag Ophelia  runs in and hugs her.
PHTO: Toxic masculinity! To Hamlet: You’re toxic!
Clown chorus: With a taste of your lips, I'm on a ride
You're toxic, I'm slippin' under …

Incorporating skills and playing fast and loose with the text (yay, no living author, no copyright!)

As part of the preparation for devising, I gather a list of the group’s individual skills. One cast member could tap dance. We took lines from Polonius’s parting words to Laertes and used them to show his inadequate support of his daughter, Ophelia.
Ophelia: Daddy, something awful just happened. I need your advice!
Polonius: Of course! Act 1 Acene 3 – my big advice number!
He delivers the text with grace notes of tap dance. At one point, he finds himself inside the outline of the old King and worriedly steps out of it, flourishes and cartwheels off.

Other highlights include Clown elements of anachronism and moments of bathos.
​
The Therapist waxes lyrical about the delights of Denmark including the beer, the weed in Christiania and the statue of the Little Mermaid.
In the scene of the war with Norway, clowns are dotted about the stage engaged in inept hand to hand struggle (grunting) and lame sword fighting (ineffectual tap tap tap tapping).
The Therapist is driven mad by Hamlet’s constant prevaricating and lack of commitment and in a moment of high emotion, turns to the side of the performance space, pulls forward the seated Horatio’s hand and deliberately falls on the innocent, appalled Horatio’s tiny sword.
Documentary Presenter Clown: So much suffering.
 
The game of a scene
 
In the scene of Hamlet’s failed attempt to dispatch the praying Claudius, murderous intent is embodied by tiptoeing clowns (including, illogically, but poignantly, the Ghost King) wielding an arsenal of swords, axes and a plastic chainsaw. When Claudius spots them on their third Grandmother’s Footsteps attempt, they form into a crucifix statue (weapons radiating out like a halo from Christ’s head) and Claudius lamely leaves, apologising: ‘Sorry, Jesus.’
 
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the hapless friend/spies, enter with early Beatles-movie slapstick movements while the Benny Hill theme tune played on kazoos. Their text is a mix of Shakespeare and Stoppard.

Ros: You'd wake up dead for a start and then where would you be?
Dead in a box.

​A different Polonius-playing clown is dressed as Chaplin.
This Chaplin-Polonius pedantically mimes to an eye-rolling Gertrude that he will hide (which he does in full sight, in chameleon mode, in front of the black back drape). Hamlet and his mother have a rap battle and the subsequent stabbing generates a prolonged slapstick death scene.
(In our Clown Adaptation, the clowns are ’all hands on deck’ to step in to play any character needed in the moment. In clown logic, multiples are possible and in big casts, desirable).

Horatio is frequently accompanying Hamlet – a spare wheel, a helpless witness and a metaphor for unemployed valiant action. Although he’s not an official Dramatis Personnae in the text Act 3 Scene 4, the horrified Horatio is present to help drag the Chaplin/Polonius off. 

Amplifying the main Metaphor - Intervening the Intervention
​
The Post Hashtag Ophelia clown contributed the idea for a scene of multiple Ophelia’s, all seeing no hope and repeatedly killing themselves in various mimed ways (drowning, gas oven, pistol etc) while the ‘Post-Hashtag-MeToo’ PHT Ophelia tries desperately, attending to them all like so many spinning plates, to break the tragic pattern.
 
PHT Ophelia: I intervene! I am Ophelia.
The clowns are all seated on either side see an opportunity for a Spartacus moment.
Random Clown 1: I am Ophelia.
Random Clown 2: I am Ophelia.
Random Clown 3: I am Ophelia.
Random Clown 4: I am Ophelia.
Random Clown 5: I am Ophelia.
Horatio: holding high his tiny sword I’m Horatio!
 
PHTO: I am post-hashtag Ophelia. I smash the instruments of my imprisonment. I stand up for my rights. I defy my role as obedient daughter. I break free from the Lego-locked role of obedient daughter.*
 
Multiple Ophelia 1:  I am Ophelia. I drown in my own tears.  Cries and mimes water rising water and drowning.
PHTO: What? No! Don’t drown yourself!
 
Multiple Ophelia 2:  I am Ophelia – I put my head in the not-yet-invented gas oven. Mimes it and slumps to floor
PHTO: no!
 
Multiple Ophelia 3:  I am Ophelia cuts wrist and mimes fountaining blood.
PHTO: No. Don’t do that!
 
Multiple Ophelia 4:  I am Ophelia noose to neck, suspended, twisting.
PHTO: No don’t hang yourself. Snip! snips the mime rope and MO 4 falls Sorry.
 
Multiple Ophelia 5:  I am Ophelia mimes gun to head
PHTO: Give me that! to MO 1: Stop it! Learn to swim! to MO 2: Make a cake or something!

​
A change of scale



Transitions help concision and aid absurdity. And changing the scale and stage location of the action creates texture and depth. The Ophelias mime drowning in the rising tide of their own tears and swirl out to the chairs at the sides. Having established a body of water, a small folded boat appears. One clown begins to carry another on her back slowly across the stage.





​Sea Voyage Clown: Hamlet boards a boat to the UK. At first the weather was good and the sea calm. Then there was a storm (mime) lightning (mime) and rain (mime and boat rocks).
A whale (mime) spurt! Her face tilts either side of the paper boat’s tiny sails.
In a small voice: To be or not to be. Letters! The old switcheroo! ... Look, the white cliffs of Dover!
Boat moves, screeches to a halt like a car.
The King of England.
The Clown who plays Rosencrantz now sports a MacDonalds Happy Meal crown. He takes the boat, unfolds it and reads the letter.
King of UK: It shall be done.
Refolds and hands back. Sits.
Sea Voyage Clown: Goodbye Ros and Guil!
Ros and Gul Pop up and down like pistons on the mention of their own names, saying:
Ros: Dead
Guil: In a box. 

Weaving the metaphors together, serving the ensemble
 
There’s another intervention letter, this time read to Hamlet by Yorick. A couple of scenes later, when Laertes enters the Classic Play plot, the promise of violence rises. The clowns who, by nature, love play opportunities and picking up on the passionate voice of The Poison are enthusiastic about the idea of Revenge. Tensions arise between the majority and the original Intervention clown. The Documentary Presenter Clown pays lip service to ‘healing’ while callously standing in the middle of the crime scene body outline. ‘Oops.’
 
There was an ensemble member who had suggested that his clown could always be delivering lines from the wrong play. This was his moment, helping to accelerate and add chaos. It's a bit of silliness, but his text mistakes also echo the main characters' mistakes in judgement. 
 
Wrong Play Clown: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: the stages of grief:  shock, denial, anger ..
Ghost King: Vengeance!
Wrong Play Clown: Vengeance!
Documentary Clown: Action! …  clap
Intervention clown:  Nooooooooooo.
 
Wrong Play Clown: Blow winds … Clown Chorus: Wrong play!
What light through yonder … Clown Chorus: Wrong play!  
Hey nonny nonny …  Clown Chorus: Wrong play!
 
Wrong Play Clown is nonplussed.
Claudius (swiftly at his shoulder): Kill Hamlet.
A number of clowns in the spirit of ‘Yes, lets!’ shout in unison: KILL HAMLET!!
 
Wrong Play Clown: A sword, a sword my kingdom for a sword! **
Several assorted weapons (from the Claudius praying scene) come in.
Various Clowns: Here, here, here, here, here!
Clown with Final sword: For your consideration!
Intervention Clown appearing through Wrong Play Clown’s legs: No no no! It doesn’t have to end this way.
All weapon bearing clowns: It’s a play - it has to end!
We see a quick setting up of the sword fight. The Poison rubs herself on the weapons, and Hamlet and Laertes tap tap tap lamely at the back. We see Gertrude killed by poison. Hamlet kills Claudius.
 
Wrong Play Clown: Try again, fail again, fail better. Clown Chorus: Wrong play!!
Documentary Clown: … and cut!
All clowns surge forward saying: Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! as they, with weapons, attack Claudius and each other in slo-mo.
 
Documentary Presenter Clown: rising up from the pile of bodies It’s a wrap, everybody!
 
Curtain call as the Black Eyed Peas play, with the track starting at one minute in.

People killin', people dyin'
Children hurt, hear them cryin'
Can you practice what you preach
Or would you turn the other cheek?
Father, Father, Father, help us
Send some guidance from above
'Cause people got me, got me questionin'
Where is the love (love)
Where is the love? (The love)
Where is the love? (The love)
Where is the love? (The love)
Where is the love? (The love)
Where is the love? (The love)
Where is the love? (The love)
Where is the love, the love, the love?
 
END

Phew, that was a little long but then Hamlet is long – although our adaptation was a tight hour.
 
* Her text was inspired by Hamlet Machine, then edited back severely to serve the comic principle of Concision. Lego is mentioned because, hey, as well as being home to Hamlet, Denmark is also home to Lego.

** The chorused 'Wrong play!' omitted here so as to serve the immediacy of the rhythm of the five swords arriving - 1,2,3,4,5.
 
EXTRA NOTE:
A. I leaned on Hamlet in my 2002 show, Midriff. An excerpt:
“Will she say: Lately, I’ve been thinking about death. holding skull
Or will she say: Do you think I have good bone structure?
Isn’t this a great prop? look at skull
Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well ... a fellow of infinite jest.
Lately I have been thinking about death.
And Hamlet ... I’m almost obsessed with it -
Shakespeare’s story of Hamlet …
Possibly the acme of British literature -  
And it’s all about clumsiness and cowardice.
A noble tragedy with some very good black jokes.
It’s about someone who goes around acting like a trip idiot
while he tries to do the right thing
or cod actorly pose talks about doing the right thing.
It’s about the ability of actors to look at skull move their audience
And the uselessness of emotion
It’s about conscience and the courage of one’s convictions,
hesitation, procrastination, renunciation,
divided loyalty,
guilt and grief.
It’s a great big feat of language
which describes the failure of
words
words, words.”
 
B. The production described is Clown, but I discovered this quote is about Commedia dell’Arte. I find it relevant to ‘Fixing Hamlet’. 
 
'The irony is that humans are a disaster, but we can do nothing  about it, but there is a need at the end to 
forgive humanity ... Commedia is tragedy without catharsis. Somehow to me  Commedia is far more tragic than tragedy. In Classical Tragedy at  the end you have … the catharsis, you get purified… somehow you  get de‐responsibilised … all your sins are taken away … with  tragedy at the end you are purified, somehow, somehow … but for  me it is far more tragic admitting that humans are a disaster.'
(Iurressevitch, Appendix A, 2015: 91) – from Olly Crick’s PhD Thesis.

All images (except for the rehearsal snap) by Linda Carter.

​
'Point fixe!', Philippe Gaulier would call out to a room full of theatre practitioners hungry to open their mind to the expertise of a European Master and to the art of clowning and play.
He would be asking for the moment to be held - or rather, sustained.
 
What is Fixed Point?
This post is about Fixed Point as I learned it from Gaulier and Monika Pagneux in a church hall just north of the Talgarth Road many years ago.
Fixed Point is the capturing of the body/being in a physical attitude in space and the sustaining of that enlivened shape for theatrical and comedic impact.
 
Exercise
The Fixed Point is arrived at by getting the player engaged in full-bodied physical movement and then calling ‘stop’ or ‘halt’ at a random moment. The player is instructed to avoid responding to the ‘stop’ instruction by completely dropping what they were doing and assuming a standing position. The idea is rather to arrest the movement of the player, like a single frame in a piece of film.
 
Even better than just running in the space, it’s good to get the players engaged in a game, so they are released into lively, engaged, strategic movement, suffused with the joy of play but also fleeting states of shifting micro emotions (perhaps: aspiration, hope, frustration, determination, victory …).
The command ‘Fixed Point!’ is intended to capture a physical attitude and a moment in time. It involves the whole body. Most rewardingly, the torso will be inflected - arms and legs are more functional and gestural, while an inflected torso conveys more emotional quality. I’ll write a blog post about that one day.
 
On first trial, the exercise may mostly be a challenge to equilibrium. There may also be a tendency to create a ‘freeze’; by clamping with the muscles in a generalised way; so that an idea of shape supplants nuance of expression. It’s important that, on the stop, the player develop the ability to sustain the way their body is configured in this moment – fully, exactly, specifically, with all the various inner dynamics intact.
 
To remedy any generalised ‘freezing’ that might happen,  students can be invited to appreciate and sustain a living moment.
Move. Stop. Fixed Point.
Direct your attention to relish and ‘taste’ the energy in your body-being. Do a scan - you may have 65% tension in the muscle above your left knee, and 35% tension in your right wrist. Your chest should be informed by your position and so your breathing will be affected in a specific way. There should be a sense of possibility – of something just having happened and simultaneously, something just about to happen.
 
Troubleshoot
Avoid a tendency to sag. Fixed Point is a great way to train the stamina to sustain – to  keep the dynamics alive and to avoid drooping in shape or energy. Fixed Point is not about perfunctorily holding a shape - it is about feeling and relishing the life  in that captured moment.
 
Go again, stop again – new Fixed Point.
The student can hopefully notice how the body and being are engaged in a new, granularly specific configuration achieved by accident.
 
And if they don’t experience a different flavour in their next shape? This is part of the beauty and usefulness of the Fixed Point exercise – it shows up limitation caused by habitual tension or habitual body usage. A body in flow (agile and resourceful), together with a lively readiness to respond to the ‘stop’ command, can generate endless new postures/shapes – each with their own ‘character’ or ‘attitude’ or psychophysical flavour.
 
Keeping balance on a single leg may be a benefit of sustained practice, but it is not the immediate end aim of the exercise. If you are focused on keeping a leg off the floor, direct your attention to the torso. What is going on there? Is your chest inclined, pushed forward? rotated? Inclined? A combination of all these? If balance threatens a player who is caught on one leg, then instruct them to lightly place the foot down on the ground – but do that without changing the configuration of the torso, or its height off the floor.  Here is another benefit of the exercise – the ability to arrange for ease and poise within the sustain, and to know that a softness in the hip and knee can be available while other muscles are engaged in other parts of the body. Chi Gung and Tai Chi are great training for soft, available wrists, elbows, ankles knees and hip joints.
 
Fixed Point and Clown
We love to see the clown-player arrested in an in-between moment, keenly engaged but also off-guard. It is the clown’s job to present the human condition unguarded. In the context of a clown class, Fixed Point can help the clown student to appear as if ‘caught out’ (think of the Grandmother’s Footsteps game).
 
Fixed Point training is a great way to appreciate the richness of a body/being invested vividly in a moment. And also to calibrate the distribution of tension throughout the body.
 
Also, with practice, it’s a great way to encourage awareness even while engaged in demanding movement. The clown audience relationship needs this kind of awareness.
Did they laugh? Are they seeing something in that specific moment that amuses them?
 
Fixed Point and laughter generation
Clown work can have a wide range of flavours including solitary, sad clown and poetic clown - but many audiences appreciate the ability of the clown to reliably generate laughter.
What a generous gift - to risk in that endeavour: to give the audience that release from tension. To take the audience on the life-emulating journey of tension, release; tension, release; tension, release, with the benefit of engaging an audience’s breath and gifting them with the energetic release of laughter.  The license of laughter.
 
‘When you hear the audience laugh, chances are that just before the laugh you did something funny.’*
Stop. Fixed point. Check (clock), calibrate, connect. Then, working with the body-awareness that the FP can bring, you can replicate the physical and or vocal timbre of the moment before the laugh.
‘If the audience laughs, they should laugh again.’ – said Gaulier. (‘should’ meaning, if something made them laugh once, chances are that it will make them laugh again).
If you can re-deliver the moment, shape, rhythm and timber of the moment, there should be a laugh. If not, check (clock), calibrate, show your humanity (the emotion of the moment e.g. interest, confusion, inconvenience …) and re-connect (cast the net**).
 
Put another way - you hear the laugh - you stop at the exact moment (and in the exact shape – the audience is reading your shape and if you change it, it dissolves the previous moment, or comments on it – the audience has seen/experienced something in that moment – the clown’s eagerness, clumsiness, frustration, whatever expressed through their body, or the shape the clown and the angle of the prop they are using makes, perhaps. You stop, holding the FP and you can isolate the neck to clock the audience to a) notice b) connect c) maybe gain some information.
 
Why is it useful?
By training the ability to capture a Fixed Point, you avail yourself of an energetic attitude, a moment of what Monika Pagneaux called ‘life-full-ness’.
Working the Fixed Point has many benefits for the performer/actor: it trains integration of being and body; it grows charisma; it nourishes élan (French word for elastic, ready energy); it grows your ability to sense, capture and present a moment in performance.
 
We come to the theatre to see human expression. The human form moving with intention is compelling. Fixed Point is a beautiful thing. It is about capturing an energetic moment of body and being. It can add suspense to a moment of drama, or, in clown work, allow the audience to clearly see or relish a comedic moment.
 
Knowing how much there is in each second can inspire the performer to enjoy being infused by inner shifting dynamics, to develop a taste for radiating the different emotions or energy states of each successive moment.
 
Theatre is composed of moments of being, moments of movement, including both fleeting motion and suspended stillness. Audience's hearts can be moved by movement with its rhythm, phrasing, 'music' and timbre and spatial context constructed well with intentionality (dramaturgy) on stage.
 
As a student of laughter, I am fascinated by audience responses. At QEH in 2001, I saw Robert Lepage perform his solo show ‘The Far Side of the Moon’ I have been in many audiences where the audience laughs in unison at moments designed by the performer. Watching ‘TFSOTM’, I experienced an audience so engaged as to be moved to respond vocally in unison, in shared timbres, to moment after moment in the show: a short 'oh' of surprise; a nodding kind of 'ahhh!'; a gasp of surprise; a soft knowing laugh. Lepage’s performance (his script, stagecraft, physicality and dramaturgy) generated unison response after response after response – the entire audience innocently matching each other in both timing and timbre.
 
Kinestheology and Theatre
Studies on Kinestheology show how audiences can respond to the expressions of the bodies of the performers. Yves Marc of the iconic Corporeal  Mime company Théâtre du Movement now performs a show where he invites the audience to explore their own state of being. Are they in a psychophysical state of readiness? Or in a condition of stasis: apartness, sluggishness, resisting of affect.
 
Over the years, in stealth and slowly, our hearts have been wounded and hardened by many factors. Might we ever risk to lose the enlivening communion of live theatre? Risk to lose our ability to offer ourselves up to the feelings in the stories and dances taking place before us, and in that availability, to have our beings re-enlivened, widened and deepened by exposure to a wide spectrum of feeling, to enlarge our empathy by witnessing and (via kinestheology) to feel and embody the predicaments of others, to lose our normal boundaries, in the specially dedicated, dark (or otherwise designed) space of the theatre.

* I say this teaching clown. I think it's my words but it maybe one of my teachers.
** I learned this from Alison Skilbeck and refer to it in the blog post on 1/31 2015.

Many years ago, I was driving somewhere and feeling rushed. I was ahead of myself, wanting to get through the task I had been burdened with (in the days before I learned how to say no), so as to get back to things I really needed to do. I ran into a bollard. A powerful reminder of how mind and body work together and how being in synch with yourself and fully being in the present moment is optimal.
 
Every day I find fresh evidence that grounding in the body, breathing in the body, sensing in the body and using receptive seeing is key to clown work, and to all of theatre and performance work.
 
‘When you look, remember to see.’ 

One of my key teaching phrases for Clown (intended to be playful and memorable via it’s seeming tautology) is: ‘when you look, remember to see.’ This instruction (guidance) helps the clown player remain in the present moment, and to stay open to connection. If you look and see an audience are momentarily unenchanted, it is highly important to avoid ignoring it and to rush forward, hoping to achieve something in the future or (more likely) to escape the emotion that started to rise. 
If there’s been a failure* – even for a micro-beat, if you gloss over or avoid it, you are missing a connection beat. This is the clown’s job – to connect, to create community with and, ideally, within its audience.**
 
Once a clown teacher sets an exercise, they keenly look for the moment when the trainee clown is guarded, thinking ahead, or when they have suppressed an impulse – the pedagogical step then is to use the friendly coach voice or the ‘grumpy clown professor’ voice to guide or provoke the trainee clown into the moment, into their body, into their relation with the audience or into their relation to their scene partner (or all of the above).
 
I use the wonderful ‘casting the net’ exercise I learned from Alison Skilbeck. The first application is casting the net over your audience – but once learned, you can cast the net over yourself. The ‘net’ is a very efficient metaphor for where one’s attention is placed. When setting up clown pair work, I often say: Get with yourself, get with your ‘friend’ (playing partner), get with the audience (no specific order for the last two – obey the impulse / happenstance of the moment). 
 
Fay Simpson talks of the importance of being willing to encounter one’s own no-go areas (the emotions that choke us or prickle our skin or tense our shoulders or grip our guts). She advocates for exploring them (and offers a coherent methodology to do that in her book The Lucid Body). Whatever is suppressed takes effort, causes tension, blocks flow and diminishes presence. The more one has had the courage and humility to experience/ transform/integrate all they humanly are, the more they are ready to ‘portray the glory as well as the horror of life’, and the more they can bring to a scene with a co-player (and they can bring it more safely, without bringing in any tension caused by suppression) … and also, the more they can offer the audience. 
 
‘When you do, remember to be.’

A few years ago, impulse brought me another teaching phrase: ‘when you do, remember to be.’
 
I opened Viola Spolin’s book ‘Theatre Games for the Lone Actor’. When I read, on page 18: ‘Feel your skull with your skull!’ I entered an altered state. Sensing the body is an act of dedicating your awareness. It’s an act of imagination and an act of faith (‘but I can’t feel my skull!’) as well as a sensory practice. It’s an investment. An actor with dyspraxia recently shared that at the beginning of their journey of actor training, they had not believed that ‘feeling their body’ was possible, but through practice, they came to appreciate the abundant gifts that investment brought to them as a performer and as a person. 
 
You are doing the exercise - but are you doing it in your head and are you forgetting the body? Are you able to lower your centre of gravity (even when playing high excitement)? Are you viewing the world in a blur, or can you still see your scene partner and sense or see the audience? Are you in panic or over-excitable mode and unable to even notice that your breath is shallow and unresourced and that you need to ground and feel?

Opening up the no-go areas
 
Dina Glouberman offers a metholodogy for people to get present to blockages by inviting in a metaphor. The metaphor enables a psycho-physical state to become viewable, open to dialogue and it is truly amazing how you can gain perspective and transform it. Dina always encourages the new image to be danced – so that new state is now worked through the body and its energies.
 
Arnold Mindell has a process for working with a symptom. You identify a pain or niggle and allow it to choreograph you – you can discover it as a character or maybe a landscape or a song – as you shift through modalities, the symptom is allowed expression; you can get present to it, rather than ignoring, suppressing, sedating, resisting it. When I do this exercise in class most people report at least 50% reduction of the pain or discomfort.
 
Back when I was practicing Five Rhythms, I was, on many occasions, able to transform physical discomforts and unresourceful mental states during a 3 hour class. 
 
Warm up
​
For both theatre and clown, warming up is key. I am currently teaching an evening class. I set an exercise close to the start of class, aiming to build on ground gained the previous week. A class participant reported: ‘it’s hard to come in from the outer world and gain the open state’, so we switched to exercises and processes to re-gain and re-install the open state. My warmups (using the wisdom of many beautiful teachers I’ve been privileged to work with) are full of invitations to sense the body: ‘feel your feel on the floor’; ‘taste the moment’; ‘be on the hara’. I use Avner the Eccentric’s instruction - ‘put the weight on the undersides of the body’ (to which I add ‘include the interior of the body - the undersides of your heart, eyeballs, brain’). 
 
When the attention is on the body, the brain is less busy, more open and resourceful. When the attention is on (or with) sensation, the body gains in flexibility. 
 
I also use an exercise learned on my Sedona Method training of opening up the heart, then the head, then the gravitas zone. It’s a great way to help people access the undefended self in preparation for clown work. Fay Simpson quotes one of her teachers: ‘the more (you) reveal (your)self, the more the audience will be revealed.’
 
Be-ing while doing

In clown work embodiment is key because we are interested in impulses over ideas, and a body that is warm and inhabited and paid-attention-to, is more conducive to heeding and following up on impulses. Impulses are the moments when unexpected magic can happen – and when impulses are ‘swallowed’ everyone in the room feels it. Becoming able to work with impulses brings freshness and energy to your clown and/or your acting self, it allows everyone to experience the instinctual, our humanity, and it generates what Monika Pagneaux calls ‘life-fullness’.
 
Once you have been able to achieve a good level of embodiment, to tune into your own psycho-physical self, it should be able to support you while being in relation to your co-players and your audience, and, if you are a clown or improvisor, your imagination.  
 
There’s a further step to the story. For a professional clown, like Slava Polunin, doing the same act with set beats every night, they create the spirit of freshness, they have the experience and skill to generate (or re-create) the spark or surge of an impulse at will, and the result for the audience is a feeling of the ineffable, of something transporting or even sublime.
 
Early Clown work is a lot of fun but people often ask – how do I develop timing? How can I be in clown state and improvising and be in connection with the audience? Deepening the practice of embodiment means growing your awareness multidimensionally: the awareness of the interior of your body, of the state of the audience and of the space/potential between you and your co-players and the audience. I use Declan Donnellan’s wonderful exercise ‘There’s you, there’s me and there’s the space in between.’, co-opting it for clown work as: ‘There’s you, there’s me and there’s a world of possibility in between.’ And, further, ‘There’s you there’s me and there’s them! (the audience) - and there’s worlds of possibility in between.’

When you are in action onstage (or in the rehearsal room) are you with your breath, are you awake to impulses? Are you able to respond to your scene partner? If clowning - how much can you interest yourself in your audience?

Breath, body, and process.


NOTES:

* About that micro-beat of failure: when something non-optimal happens, allow that to register with you and share yourself with your audience. If you are not intent on closing down and rushing away from that moment, then your body will be available to react. Something non-optimal happens – and if your body is open and responsive and connected and undefended, something will be visible - there will be an expression, possibly even a micro-expression of eyebrow, skin surface tension, a change in your breath – if you take the micro-second of time or the metaphorical ‘space’ to allow this response to happen, the audience can see it and feel connected to you. The audience loves to see the clown fail. Don’t deprive them of your undefended self. This is the clown’s job - to show the ’sad normals’ their humanity. ​(Sad Normals is a playful phrase I use when teaching clowning. ‘It’s the clown’s job to show all the thought processes, failures and feelings the Sad Normals (i.e. me in the supermarket) would prefer to suppress and hide.’)

**A wonderful example of this was Jamie Wood's show about tennis champion Bjorn Borg 'Beating McEnroe'. Wordlessly and gently, he threw tennis balls into the audience and we had to work as a community to deliver them back onstage. His gentle demeanour communicated to us and we emulated it, helping each other find the fallen balls and admiring each other's throws.

What is embodiment? 
 
My movement colleagues use ‘embodiment’ regularly now to mean a performer (or student performer) awake to and inhabiting their physical presence.
 
​Some definitions:
​
oxfordselearnerdictionary.com says: 
embodiment /ɪmˈbɑdimənt/
[usually singular] embodiment of something (formal)
a person or thing that represents or is a typical example of an idea or a quality synonym epitome He is the embodiment of the young successful businessman.
 
Miriam Webster says:
1 : to give a body to (a spirit) : incarnate. 2a : to deprive of spirituality. b : to make concrete and perceptible. 3 : to cause to become a body or part of a body : incorporate. 4 : to represent in human or animal form : personify men who greatly embodied the idealism of American life— A. M. Schlesinger born 1917.
 
This paper expresses it nicely:
‘Embodiment or incarnation is defined as the giving of human form to a spirit – to make manifest or comprehensible an idea or concept, through a physical presentation. In the biblical definition, incarnation is the manifestation of the holy spirit in human form. Similarly, in performance, the body is the canvas or the medium for expressing and bringing to life a concept, emotion, story or idea, before an audience.’
'Embodiment in physical theatre practices and actor training methods refers to the eradication of a perceived separation between mind and body, allowing for a “pure” communication between dramatic impulses and bodily expression on stage.'
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/299025/498832

Just look at this face ... adjectives come firing at you.

Pompous, boastful, pushy, arrogant, none-too-bright, belligerent, but also capable of being charming (or smarmy). Can you also see his ultimate cowardice?

This is the Capitano - just one of a set of 11 Mask Types* made according to XVIIth-XVIIIth century Commedia dell'Arte tradition. It's a stunning collection of masks that never fail to release play in the wearer and provoke squeals of recognition and excitement from the viewers. 

I am incredibly privileged to work with this collection, which has multiples of each type - allowing for different flavours of interpretation and delightful encounters between Masks.
​
The collection was handmade by Alexander McPherson. Read more about Alexander on his website. 

Commedia dell'Arte was innovated and thrived during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was born in a specific context - for an intriguing and thorough history of the beginnings of Commedia, read Dr Peter Jordan's excellent book, 'The Venetian Origins of the Commedia dell'Arte'.  Far from being stuck in a specific historical setting, the form re-invents itself regularly. Earlier this year, I taught Commedia for the MA Theatre Lab at RADA. Each student dazzled the class with fresh, vigorous, relevant iterations of the Capitano, Il Dottore, Arlecchino, Brighella, The Lovers ... and more.

One performer showed the evils of Military power, evoking a dandified brute - by turns frightening and risible. Another took us to a shocking place of transgression, subjugation and revenge.* And we marvelled how the 'other-worldliness' of the sculptural nature of the mask allows us to encounter a rainbow of feelings while keeping full horror at bay. Another player created a demented, frantic, self-deluded Pantalone, with strong notes of vaudeville/panto/cartoon comedy business. Another did a chilling portrayal of Il Dottore, showing the petty authoritarian horror of impenetrable bureaucracy. Another did a resounding please against Climate Change in the guise of a poetry recital by Il Dottore. When I teach, students of any gender expression play any mask of their choosing, ready to critique, celebrate, own and subvert the enduringly familiar types. When we approached The Lovers, all students, including same-sex couples released exuberant, embodied portrayals of joy, longing, lust, folly and vanity. 

These performances gave us, the audience, an experience of witnessing humanity's flaws played out - emotional truth and ludicrous, flamboyant exaggeration in alternate moments; in simultaneous moments. And we the watchers were afforded the ability to  experience and name the fear and embody the aversion and also to experience catharsis via gasps, laughter and other emotional reaction sounds. 

A note about these times: yes, we must be careful to investigate everything at the moment. RADA is committed to de-colonising the curriculum. It's an ongoing process. Abuses of power are always present in history (including the history of theatre) but the joy of theatre is reinvention - reclaiming and bringing new, relevant life to theatre forms. I recently worked with Queer Jewish theatre practitioners, they requested specifically to work with Commedia characters and I suggested adaptations of the types for their consideration. I now teach the Paterfamilias, Pantalone as an expression of privilege. Pantalone de' Bisognosi (the needy) has privilege, but it's never enough (think of the man in the airport security queue who cries out in outrage:  'Don't you know who I AM?!' 

By portraying Comedia characters, we acknowledge the flaws within ourselves at the same time we critique power holders. Commedia is about community. Its meaning is in the meeting of a group of people with their various wants and desires - somehow in the playing through of all their clashes, affronts, plotting§ and subterfuge, a resolution of sorts is reached.

‘Commedia shows all the worst excesses of human stupidity and the conflicts that arise, and proposes nonetheless the possibility of democratic co-existence and harmony.’ - Carlo Boso

​I studied Commedia dell'Arte in the late 1980's, with Carl Boso - alongside other practitioners including Oliver Crick.
 
***

Oliver Crick is a highly accomplished Commedia dell’Arte exponent who has authored a wealth of publications on Commedia.
He has made an interesting proposal, to bring the invigorating joy of Commedia into the 21st Century – and into 21st century communities. This document gives examples based in the UK, but it could be employed in your own country. He’s entrusted me with this document and I am sharing it with you. – Peta Lily

The words, and the offer which follow are by Olly Crick:

COMMEDIA IN THE COMMUNITY – by Olly Crick

Olly Crick says: I am of the very strong opinion that what is needed, in the UK and in independent nearby republics, is more Commedia dell’Arte: specifically, a Commedia Company in every County and Region, responding to that region or county’s needs and issues. I can help you set up your very own local Commedia Company. This might be for you, students you care for (or not) , or for another string in the bow of your already existing theatre endeavours, and it might be an alfresco summer, festival or pub garden event, or an indoor autumn/winter community venue event…read on….

The Accepted Strengths of Commedia:

1. It is funny and has broad comic appeal, and highly capable of tragi-comedy.
2. It has a strong visual appeal, attractive to most audiences and appeals to a wide age range.
3. Its stock types are, with a bit of work, immediately recognisable to any audience.
4. It easily assimilates, song, dance, stage combat, acrobatics and other virtuoso displays of skill. 
5. (the masks, costumes, characters are all recyclable from show to show)

I have, I believe, a strong dramaturgic framework to support a potential county-based company and, as far as I can be sure of anything, lead it towards success, engagement and financial survival. This project has been developed out of my long and extensive interest in Commedia, both as a performer and enthusiast, and as an academic researcher. My proposal creates a framework or structure out of which each geographical zone can create bespoke and engaging comic theatre for the people within its territory. You may even want to deal with politics or issues!
​
Some Useful Observations:
1          The historical names and origins of the characters function as a barrier to contemporary audiences. From working with Old Spot Theatre (2004-14) an experiment to relocate the characters in Gloucestershire, complete with localised names and professions, proved successful.
2          That the historical masks all originated in adjacent regions, all of which had ‘attitude’ to the other regions. Each mask both represents for and caricatures people from that region, or area within that region. Commedia is ‘theatre of place’.
3          That one historical reason for the success of the genre was that each character occupied a single rung, with its own social class or gendered social class, so that the performance of a full troupe performatively shows the working of a complete society. Every member of the audience will have a representative of their social class on stage and sees how society works from that point of view. They will also, of course, have ‘attitude’ to the other social classes being performed in front of them. Commedia is a comic performance of a full societal spectrum from the Aristocracy or ruling classes, through the bourgeoisie to the working classes and precariat.
4          That though we remember the gags and laughter from a Commedia show best, it is a strong storyline that an audience engages with, that both keeps the audience’s attention for longer stretches than a series of good gags, and is the skeleton upon which the gags are based.
5          Politics is not something to back away from in a show. In my examination of current practice there are three models of commedia performance upon which to base your shows: entertainment, engagement and ideological. I strongly suggest that the ‘engagement’ model is the way forward for commedia. For those who are worried about being ‘political’, and alienating your audiences, I suggest that you actually mean ‘ideological’, because no one likes being preached to.  Politics can be seen as the discussion or negotiation over the availability of resources, and that, mainly, is the business of most drama. Another useful definition of politics is ‘ the performance of ethics’.
6          Commedia is not a masked form, it is a hybrid form of masked and unmasked performance. Each has a separate mode of reception which, when played to the strengths of each mode, creates a wide range of audience experiences, utilising different meta-theatrical conceits and reaching different parts of the brain. The audience experience of masks and unmasks is literally different.
7          Commedia dell’Arte characters are fixed social types (Tippo fissos) , not archetypes. Each one exists in an immediately recognizable position of power (social type) and a Jungian archetype is an inner state, experience by an actor, which they can employ, channel or interrogate to help perform their character.

Dramaturgy

1. Keep the hierarchical commedia system intact but transpose it your region. Who is the equivalent of Pantalone and Brighella, for example? What are their names? Where do they come from within your region? How do they speak, and in what dialect?
2. What are the characteristics and received ‘wisdom’ of each regionally based role, and who are their regional allies and enemies? What are their needs, wants, passions and fears?
3. What is the social hierarchy encompassing your regional based types? Have you created a hierarchy for your whole region, or just the bit you are interested in? Have you got power figures, middle classes and lower classes? Here below is an example chart of how Old Spot Theatre adapted their characters.

 
a.     There is an issue with the historical social types, in that the models 90% of commedia teaching is carried out through, and a 100% of the Masks commedia is performed with, are based on Renaissance and Baroque power structures and recreations of Renaissance and Baroque masks. These masks do not quite correspond with today’s types, so thought may be required to note what today’s societal hierarchy is (an examination of UK  census class divisions, for example, is useful here), what are its types, and which ones are masked (and whether we have to design new masks).

4.               Use a conventional 3 act neo-classical comic structure to build you story: Act 1 Introduction; Act 2, complication; Act 3, further complication and resolution.
5.              Each mask, based in a region, will have an immediate reaction to any change in the allocation of resources.
a.      For yourselves, how does each member in your hierarchy react to a particular stimulus that matters to your County?: the council offers the choice of a new leisure centre or a new railway station; a factory is being closed and relocated ; there is a lack of affordable housing etc. 
b.     Research the issues associated with your and map them onto the socially appropriate roles within your cast. 
6.               An unmasked role shows human ambition and the full range of human wants and needs, proposing the actions that start and develop a plot, and they exist in fictional dramatic time. A masked role is a fixed type and can only see things from their point of view, being locked into that position by the societal coding present with the mask-object’s design. A mask can simultaneously exist in dramatic time, and in the same time-flow as an audience. 
7.              As Commedia characters are social types only, their animation on stage is entirely dependent upon the actor portraying them. In rehearsal the question that should be foregrounded for each actor, is who is your ‘Pantalone’, ‘Doctor’, ‘Lover’ etc. Archetypal psychology from Jung indicates, perhaps, that the Masks’ drivers are basic human needs. Otherwise ‘archetype’ is an imprecise term and has been used spuriously to define ‘depth’ within a mask. A mask cannot be a stereotype because it is animated by the individuality of the actor performing them: they are simultaneously an individual representing the agency of their class, and a symbolic representation of that class.
8.             Other Things of Relevance
a.     Order of creation: Storyline, Storyline related gags, music, character related gags, surreal gags.
b.     You must have both masked and unmasked roles within your cast. With a small cast (of course) a workable approach is that each actor plays three roles: a major role, a supporting plot related role and a chorus role. Of the first two -  one should be masked, and one unmasked, to aid multi-roling.

Method
1.     Apply from your local Arts Council (or other funding bodies if outside the UK) for a grant to pilot a community Commedia dell’Arte company, reflecting through a comic framework the needs and wants of a community: three weeks of rehearsals and a week of shows, at a variety of traditional, community and non-traditional venues.
2.     I will run an introductory workshop with the aim of
a.     Meeting your cast
b.     Deciding on casting and local issues, and how best to map them onto which roles
c.      Negotiating a scenario.
3.     I will, under your advisement, write you a scenario or storyline
4.     I will loan masks, costumes etc for your pilot show
5.     I will act as mise-en-scene /director for your first show
6.     The above should be enough to get you on your way to establishing yourself locally.
 
Addenda
Obtaining good masks is an issue. There are various ways of solving this, from buying them, commissioning them, or running a mask making workshop with an established maker. I can recommend several.
Several of these approaches to Commedia are from original research, (see my PhD and extant papers), so you can always cite me or, if you use these in performance, credit the ideas in your program or publicity materials. 
Working with existing networks of community venues saves a lot of time in booking.
Never mention that what you do is Commedia, or mention masks, because bookers and the public all have very different views on what Commedia is, and some have ‘views’ about masks (“they’ll scare the children”). We adopted this strategy with Old Spot Theatre, calling ourselves” family friendly theatre from the merrie England that never was”, and it worked for us. No venue ever complained about mask use having seen them used.
Commedia may appear an esoteric and virtuosic theatre art form, but all its elements are aimed at clear immediate communication. It is an inclusive, non-elitist form, and you are there to entertain the public, and be their servants. Performing in a community venue means you are performing in someone else’s manor. Be respectful, be humble, and non-elitist.
 
A potential rationale - from the Old Spot Theatre website http://www.oldspottheatre.org.uk
…A long time ago, before DVD, VHS, PCs, Apple Macs and the steam wireless, entertainment was different, and watching it was done in larger groups than now. The skills of its practitioners were designed to entertain as wide an audience range as possible, both structurally and by each performer’s individual skills. The epitome of both skills and structure was the Italian Commedia dell’arte; in which highly refined specialists performed complex comic plots through a mixture of improvisation and rehearsal. Each performer played a role from a different social class and wore a stock mask and costume to make them easier to recognise.

The overall effect was of instantly recognisable character types that an audience could relate to viscerally and immediately, and hence dispense with large amount of comically redundant theatrical exposition, so beloved of psychological theatre. In other words, once the characters were onstage, you could cut to the chase immediately, get involved in complicated plots, multiple disguises and the like because the whole audience intuitively understood each character. Even better, the characters were recyclable, in that the same roles appeared in all the Commedia dell’Arte shows, but with different relationships, much in the same way the television series Blackadder or The Carry On films functioned.

Who were these characters then? Generally they fell into economic categories: Masters, Servants, Children, and Lovers, all with distinct Italian regional characteristics. Pantalone, the Venetian Miser, for us becomes Titus Dallymore, the Berkeley Vale farmer and Doctor Lombardi, the Bolognese lawyer, pedant and know-it-all becomes, Dr. Ignatius O’Reilly, the London trained expert in everything you need to know. Their children, Florence and Jack become anglicised and fight for their ever-growing love with both Italian passion and English embarrassment. They are the lovers, whose eventual consummation provides the drive for the plot. The servants of the commedia: Brighella, Colombina, Harlequin and Zanni become respectively landlords, waitresses, labourers and labour-migrants, all with their own desperate individual desires and difficulties.

So, in order to create a style of theatre that can survive for a wide a range of audience as possible, and all at the same time, we have borrowed the masks and comic relationships of these Italian antecedents and brought them to our own theatrical never-never land (the merry England that never existed), to tell parables about today, to remind us all that no one person is better than another, that we are all capable of good and evil, that we all live in Gloucestershire (or whatever your region), that Gloucestershire is as good a place as any, if not better to start, to celebrate farming, wild life, thrift, generosity, love, revenge, town, country, eels, sheep, our history and our future.

As living becomes faster, as car journeys become more and more necessary for the everyday graft of living, then at least once a year take the time to walk to your village hall, to see a show, with your family, with your neighbours, with the folk who live in your village and sit down and enjoy some truly excellent live theatre.
 
WE NEED COMIC THEATRE THAT PUTS ISSUES IN FRONT OF PEOPLE, AND MAKES THEM LAUGH AT POWER, ENCOURAGING THEM TO DEBATE ISSUES.
Go ON, I dare you….
Olly Crick 02/03/2020
Contact Olly Crick by email:  [email protected]

Books and publications by Olly Crick include:
 
·       Commedia Dell'Arte: A Handbook for Troupes by  Oliver Crick  (Author), John Rudlin  (Author)
·       The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell'Arte (Routledge Companions)  – Illustrated, 8 Dec. 2014
·       Commedia dell’Arte for the 21st Century: Practice and Performance in the Asia-Pacific (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)  2021 by  Corinna Di Niro  (Editor), Olly Crick  (Editor)
·       Commedia dell'Arte Scenarios Hardcover – 12 Nov. 2021 by  Sergio Costola  (Editor), Olly Crick  (Editor)
·       The Dramaturgy of Commedia dell'Arte  – 31 Dec. 2021 31 Dec. 2021 by  Olly Crick  (Author), Sergio Costola  (Author)
·       Olly Crick’s PhD dissertation: https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/approaching-aesthetic-positions-for-neocommedia-19462016-a-dramat

​Contact Olly Crick by email:  [email protected]

* Many MA Lab students are from abroad. One expressed excitement at the opportunities this enduring form offered to theatre being made under conditions of restriction of expression. Because the form is so absurd, you can create scenes which, while delivering a strong visceral punch of recognition and catharsis of emotion, are free from specifics which would make them overtly contentious.

Dark Clown Methodology 
If you know me, you know the old story about how, watching a particular scene in a play circa 1980, I was compelled by the particular quality of laughter I experienced.
 
I was compelled and wanted to recreate this experience of what I now call Troubled Laughter. I was already teaching Clown – and towards the end of the course I’d ask the participants whether they were interested to try an experiment and thankfully, they always said yes.
 
Early Exercises
And I’d try out various improvisations. Early provocations included: ‘do something extreme’ or ‘can you eat your own body?’ and ‘can you despair each time we laugh?’. One of the more successful exercises was ‘my body is full of holes’: a solo player explores the idea that they are horrified by owning a mouth, and nose holes – Where do those holes go? Why are they there? Am I hollow? What is this? Why? 
 
Over many years and workshops a step-by-step process is now in place. People’s bodies and minds are prepared for the work. 
The links to Red Nose Clown* are made overt and the differences articulated. You’ll see, for example, in the description below the principles of repetition, clocking, calibration and accumulation. 
 
We love to see the Clown think and feel. Clear body and eye movements indicate thinking and feeling processes. And breath of course. When you are devising Clown work and building a scene you create beats to tell the story.
 
There are a growing number of Dark Clown exercises and a growing number of Dark Clown Scenarios.
 
One of these is Body Horror.

N.B. Please note that the course is designed to lead up to the Scenarios. People's well-being is attended to along the way. There is an introductory talk on the aims and ethics of the work (perhaps one day I'll post that), so people are aware of where the work is leading. I have spent 30 years creating, devising and designing a teaching methodology for my Dark Clown work. As with many Dark Clown I describe the exercise so people can opt out if needed (no one has elected to opt out of this exercise - most people find it energising and fun to explore). Course participants in the audience have reported feeling the pain and pity, while still laughing heartily. Dark Clown represents Humanity in Extremis, so it can be witnessed. I always emphasise that the aim of the work is NOT to laugh at suffering, but to create laughter in a dark context. To implicate the audience with direct gaze (and other awarenesses and techniques). The aim of the work is to give the audience the experience of Troubled Laughter. The work is layered and needs to be done well to get the result. It's a rewarding, cathartic challenge and really boosts your awareness of the performer/audience relationship. 
 
It starts with players standing in the space. Players are invited to choose a body part. Use your intuition (Why did I choose my elbow?) – just go with it. 
 
Everyone tries in plenary.
Here are some suggested beats. Mapping beats is strategic. Well-plotted beats mean the play (the ‘game’)can go on for longer and the build and journey you talk the audience on are fully satisfying.
 
Start with sensing something is wrong. A feeling of dread and dawning horror. You must find the source of the unease.
You locate it! Maybe the aversion only lets you glimpse it. 
You want to look but are afraid.
Repeated attempts to see it.
You manage to look (body part permitting!) and are horrified.
You are repelled, lean or spiral away, maybe close eyes …
but you are compelled to see.
Is it still there? Exactly how horrific is it!
Does it make you gag? 
Do you touch with other hand? And now do you have the problem that that hand is infected? (Wipe the hand and now there are 3 spots of aversion! Ergh … ergh!  ERRRGH!)
Try to run away from it.
Try to shake it off.
 
Then two or three people can be chosen so the audience can learn by watching. Then one is selected to play further.
 
Once the body horror is established … the player becomes aware of the audience.
Take time to look and have all the unspoken questions – What is that? People on chairs? How did that happen? Why? Who are they? How long have they been there?
The shame of being seen (this can be vocalised).
Then - why are they not alarmed? Why are they not helping me? 
Look / show / calibrate understanding … 
What kind of world is this? 
Whether they have blank faces or are laughing – either way the player takes I to mean that they don’t understand.
So show them. Show them more clearly.
Then beg: help me help me 
Really look to see if audience are about to help.
Allow their inaction to affect you and add to your plight.
Why won’t you help me?
 
… then you can go the further step of begging them to chop it off.
Repeat the beat of horror and frustration that they do not do as you ask.
Sob in despair.
Look up and appeal to ‘God or the godless heavens’.
 
There’s more but that’s enough for this blog post!
 
* There are many kinds of clown but I use Red Nose Clown as a handy way to distinguish from Dark Clown (regardless of whether the little red nose mask is actually used).

The image below shows the power of costume. This is a creation of a then student designer in 2016. A woman wanting cosmetic surgery looks almost flayed.

Costume, Movement and Comedy workshop on Aristophanes' The Women of the Thesmaphoria, MA Costume Design for Performance at UAL:LCF. 
Performer: Ramona Metcalfe 
Concept and realisation by: Georgia Clark
Movement director: Peta Lily
Project leadership and photography by Donatella Barbieri for UAL: LCF

What makes a great story? 
Chorus lean in eagerly. 
All great stories must deal with blood, (le sang) sperm (sperm), and tears (des larmes).
- Gaspar Noé / The No Way Brothers

Content alert: knee-jerk violence and the ever-ongoing oppression by those in power. Mention of body fluids.
 
Summer 2022 - the latest ''Tis Pity She's A Whore' clown play adaptation. The third iteration of 'Tis Pity - but (because of Covid-19) the FIRST one to be seen before an audience.

This post is a tad long – apologies. The start looks at the process including useful communications and framing for the process.
You can scroll down to find more jokes!
 
Preproduction
As mentioned earlier I have a process for creating clown adaptations for a classical text. This is on RADA’s MA Theatre Lab – dedicated to develop theatre-makers. (When we worked The Revenger's Tragedy, the student cohort would be tasked with drawing a storyboard for the play (stickmen or geometric shapes for the characters are fine!). Also some years I asked them to draw a family tree to get fully acquainted with the complex relations in TRT. The text of ‘Tis Pity reads much more easily and the family tree is not so complex so we skipped this step)

Skills and Clown Council
Clowns bring their skills to create magic as well as laughter (the superb clown Tweedy has an astonishing level of horsemanship - among other skills). We set aside time to make a collection of people’s skills: Singing, Martial arts, the ability to crush a watermelon between one’s thighs (!) … all was noted down.
As described in a previous post, the clowns discuss the themes and give their responses to the play in the Clown Council process. This year one clown stood up and said: 'I wonder how they got the heart out of the body?'. The clown's direct, simple curiosity added a clarity of overlooked detail to an already shocking event. Now we can't help thinking - at what point did Giovanni prise his sister's ribcage apart?
 
Process questions
We had had one discussion of the play where it started to spin off into issues and ideas. Our work would be built beat by beat, so I like to help people think concretely. Ideas need to be grounded in detail – what are the audience actually going to see? Character is plot and plot is character. And Clown Dramaturgy is where jokes meet heart (I haven't fully articulated this as a theory, but it's intuitively sound and at least kinda pithy).

The cohort were set 4 homework questions: 
1/ What is your potential interest as a performer for our Clown adaptation of ‘Tis Pity?
For example: ‘I want to explore stillness’, ‘I would find a rewarding challenge in playing a tragic scene’. Are you interested in speaking classical text? Are there monologues from other plays that might make a point (e.g. a student in a previous year brought Wilde’s Salome’s love/hate speech for Hippolita). Or are you interested in Mime performance? What scene might you enact using Mime?
 
2/ Regardless of any gender expression, what is a character role you are interested in? And what character would be a stretch/challenge for you as performer? Feel free to include ‘lesser’ characters from the play. Clown world is open to the overlooked perspective. There is also the possibility of playing a character from the conceptual ‘world’ – see #3. Also there can be Clowns who play representational roles e.g. the clown who played Vengeance in one TRT production and who literally stopped the show for an entire minute, to great hilarity.
 
3/ Think about the possible ‘world’ for the adapted piece (or one of the chapters -might we have a different world for each ‘chapter’?
By this I mean what is the ‘game’ – i.e. why are the clowns doing the show for the Sad Normals*? What kind of troupe are they? Are they a troupe? Or are they strangers to each other (reflections of today’s algorithm-divided world) …
Depending on the world we agree upon (I will play a role as guide and arbiter in our process), there are potential roles of interrupter, stage manager, Footnote Clown, lecturer (e.g. on the subject of women’s anatomy, perhaps).
It could be 4 (or 5) distinct pieces focusing on different themes with a character/pair of clowns who link/s the presentation …?
 
4/ What scene or event from the play intuitively fascinates you – what is it about that which fascinates you?
 
The ‘game’ with the audience
Looking over the responses to these four questions enables me to see the commonalities. A number of students mentioned a film set as the location and game for the show. 
 
Brilliant – the situation is that this is a rare (unique?) event: a live-before-a-studio-audience making of a film. In the opening this would be clearly set up, so that the fourth wall was eradicated. Also because Clarity is one of the prime useful ingredients of comedy**.
 
A Cardboard Camera 
Props maketh the world – in any production, you need to ensure the materiality of the production supports your aesthetic/ concept. In any student production (or low-budget show), you need to know you can realise the concept. (e.g. Will the budget allow for a stunning red tapestry to lay before Agamemnon’s feet? No? Is that piece of red cloth really cutting it? Might the carpet be represented with lighting? Are there other moments in the piece can lighting play a graphic, non-naturalistic role? Can this be your aesthetic? No lighting? So can you use the ensemble to all draw apart with awe, like something stretching apart, like the Red Sea parting, with a music cue or a vocal sound of dread and awe?). A student made a cardboard camera and boom mike. These objects added exquisite focus in more than one scene. An actual clapperboard was provided, which was a godsend – a cardboard clapperboard would have fit the visual bill, but would not provide the iconic percussive sound needed to kickstart/frame a scene. I ask for students who enjoy make or who are willing to make props. An artistic student put herself forward and I asked for a large anatomical heart to be made. ‘Can’t it be like a cartoon heart?’, she asked. Yes, I said, but can you make it so that it has an anatomical feeling - have some arteries coming out of it – as this will better serve the visceral horror a the heart of the story. The final object was beautiful - a big, rounded heart, with the amputated toilet-roll arteries sticking out.
 
Happenstance
I had just listened to a podcast with maverick film maker Gaspar Noé. His extreme, eclectic style encompasses violence and sexuality in a way that is a lovely Contrast to the sweetness of the clown. At the core of the play is the physical love – the physical taboo love of the brother and sister and the high level of abandonment to risk-taking. I thought the spirit of the opening dance scene of Noé’s film Climax was a model for an expression of erotic energy/urgency, which we had visited in the studio in a danced improvisation on that subject (people ranged in two rows, no touching permitted – aim of the improv and consent to do the exploration checked and the possibility of anyone having the right to elect to leave the improv etc - all discussed in advance).
 
The skeleton and the heart 
As a group we check in and gather agreement. I then emailed the group saying:
 
We are now in agreement on the idea of the Film Set for our Clown adaptation of ‘Tis Pity. (Thank you for your flexibility and generosity, those whose concepts were not chosen). The Film Set allows for a possible switch back and forth of the timeline, should that be needed.
 
Commedia dell’Arte master Carlo Boso used to talk about having a ‘skeleton’ (i.e. a rough draft) for a show shape/plot. At this starting point, I can see where some of your suggestions might hang ... other suggestions and contributions are still waiting to find their place. Please may I have your willingness to be flexible and patient with me and the process. Please forgive me if I have mentioned some people more or less than others. I'll keep checking in with everyone, and please do let me know if you have any thoughts or concerns, or if you want to remind me of anything you think would be useful. Write your ideas down – I may say no to something first then later see possibility for it – it’s dependent on themes being woven / pieces falling into place.
 
I will be aiming for the piece to allow us to be invested in the heart of the story which is the weird plight of being human and the plight of the disempowered (as exemplified in Annabella’s difficult predicament).
 
Please know that this will be an ensemble piece and in my experience all performers will be well seen. All of you will be onstage throughout (sat at the sides when not in the central stage action – there are often little playing moments, details or choral action for those who are visible, in clown state, at the sides of the stage).
We need to make a show that is not over an hour (max 1 hour 10) – this is in order to
a/ allow it to work as a clown performance with taut energy and b/ also to allow us to prepare it rehearsal-wise in the tight time allotted to us.
 
I will aim for everyone to shine but cannot guarantee a meticulously equal distribution of roles / centre stage action. Please do help me with positive suggestions – in the past people have said things like: ‘actually I am doing this and that and perhaps someone else can take this part of what I was initially offered.’ Some roles may crystalize later than others.
 
Any making process will bring change and edits (things may be cut) – please be aware this may happen – again, please do offer me 
your suggestions 
and also
your flexibility, resourcefulness, and patience.
 
Any concerns - just come and speak to me or email me – forgive me if I don’t have an answer / solution straight away.
 
Those who mentioned Giovanni, please select and learn your favourite lines / stage directions / devised-physical-score-iteration-of-a-moment in Giovanni’s journey or inner life for the Big Giovanni Audition (which will be a scene in our show).
 
This process allows you to witness a making / assembling process. It is not the only process, but it is a process you can later examine as you define and refine your own methodologies. See the document attached – it is a ROUGH DRAFT.
I added columns to the right because I find it useful to think of the function of each scene, so you can get a suggestion of a thinking / planning process.
(Later, when working in the room, I find it useful to clarify the beats within the scenes, too).
 
Be aware and flexible - some moments of our process will include improvisation and then there will be moments of precise direction. (Often people get the hang of this building of beats and can start to work with it themselves). 
 
Regarding the attached rough draft, please know:
The first scenes are in place but the scenes that follow are ingredients, not yet ordered– the order will reveal itself (it may correlate to the chronology of the play or not). I will be looking to have changes in tone and energy from scene to scene.
Listed scenes that seem on the page like they might be solo pieces, may well have other performers involved.
Some scenes will need an introduction / framing / explanation - we have an appointed audience liason character, but it might not always be this clown that provides this – it might be a ‘make-up artist’ clown or the boom-holder clown or the clapperboard clown or another actor who does that in a given moment. Clowns may have multiple functions / roles – so long as that is not confusing. The reality of the film set needs to be preserved and followed through but not where it may hold up the action.
 
Hanging the flesh on the ‘skeleton’ (phrase from Carlo Boso)
The ingredients accumulate around the theme and concept .
As we worked the starting group scene, clowns found their film set activities: focus puller, social media person, stunt practitioners, waiting actors, production team. 

Jokes are the building blocks of Clown dramaturgy
There would be a kind of PSA on Incest. And there would be a moment where a clown dressed as cupid would outline (using martial arts) the seven different kinds of love (as defined by the Greeks). There were ingredients from previous years that were recyclable. The as-yet-unperformed Salome speech. A ‘splitscreen’ scene where marriage, love and death are juxtaposed and counterpointed. The as-yet-unperformed soliloquy by the unborn issue of Giovanni and Annabella.
Two clowns would play the enfant terrible film directors, the ‘No Way’ brothers: Gaspar and No Way. It's in part a nod to the Cohen Bros and the Watchowskis. Doubled roles are useful in ensemble productions to maximise access and to keep playing-time and featured events concise, but their siblinghood actually allowed for an added embarrassed amplification of the incest theme. In clown dramaturgy, running gags can uphold and underscore theme.

One student elected to play the ‘Great Actor’ and had a personal assistant.

Another brought the beautiful contribution of being an Intimacy Coach:
Hello, I’m Crysanthemum Garcia, Intimacy Coach with a speciality in Incest. 
And in case anyone in the audience here tonight is involved with their sibling – we welcome you!

One student added a beautiful Queer perspective as the Friar. Giovanni is tormented by his love for Annabella and the forbiddenness of it. The Friar experiences an equal or greater agony at counselling Giovanni to deny his love and desire  – tormented all the while by his own feelings for Giovanni. 
He delivers a poignant yet show-biz fragment of the Pet Shop Boys song It’s a Sin.
 
Two students who wanted to stretch themselves to play calm sweetness together portrayed Annabella, wearing blue pyjamas, and delivering a speech from Emilia:
 
‘My voice is too loud in here. I must try to whisper more.’ 
 
The role of Putana - a flawed but affectionate woman – was played with a hat-tip to a panto dame who delivers a rap on her entrance: 
Yo – my name is Putana, 
Here is my Katana, 
Nursemaid to Annabella in the beautiful city of Parma!
 
… and who later meets a disproportionately cruel punishment. 
 
One clown plays a kind of live-audience warm-up man – with incest jokes:
 
My sister hates it when I invade her privacy. hands together Jimmy-Carr-style in front of chest
It's written clearly right here in her diary.  open hands as book
 
Knock knock face right
Who’s there? jump face left
Your brother. face right
Come on in and lock the door behind you. centre
 
I used text lifted verbatim from an interview with Gaspar Noé as the No Way Brothers are being interviewed:
 
What makes a great story? 
The whole chorus lean in
All great stories must deal with blood, (le sang) sperm (sperm), and tears (et des larmes).
 
The interviewer clown hesitantly asks:
(bounce bounce, intake of breath) As brothers, what’s it like making a film about micropause incest?
 
The No Way Brothers look at each other for 4 beats, then stand and, hiding their unsettled feeling, ebulliently wave the suggestion off.
What? no. We are brothers, but no, no incest.
 
Following the rules of clown chaos, and emulating the spontaneity of the film auteur, there is an audition midway through.  The Brothers return from an absence on stage up the central aisle of the audience, announcing: ‘Giovanni, Giovanni.’ – they face the audience centre.
No Way: We have a very organic process, 
Gaspard: The camera is the lover. The camera is a murderer, it kisses, it kills.
No Way: Le tout c’est de créer dans une diagonale qui se positionne entre le submersif, le subversif, l’irreversible. You see ?
Et maintenant, on incarne Giovanni.
 
Three would-be Giovannis perform their monologues (one is delivered in Hindi). There is an intrusive amount of scrutiny by the No Way brothers and the carboard camera and the predatory, hanging boom. The brothers feverishly frame the shots – they lay on the floor between one actor’s legs – they climb on each others’ shoulders to tower over another. A visual depiction of the discomfort some actors experience in the world of film. This is the joy of clown work. In one way this scene is a celebration of the untrammelled creativity of the loveable No Way Brothers, but it’s also a metaphoric echo of the established regime’s control over people – Vasques forces the truth out of Putana and punishes her for not reporting the siblings.
 
A Binoche-like Hippolita storms onto the set and out-Diva’s the Great Actor with her Salome speech of lust and hatred doctored to deliver a socially responsible ecological message:
Thy hair is like the great cedars of Lebanon that give their shade to the lions - rawwrr! (claws on his back) - before they were poached and used as living room decoration. Thy black hair is as beautiful as the night, as black as the silence that dwells in the deep forest, before it was chopped down by IKEA ... Let me touch thy hair. 
 
The maiden Philotis speaks to the Brothers:
This film isn’t only about Giovanni and Annabella, and Soranzo and Hippolita. 
My character, Philotis – is about to marry and yet will remain forever unwed.
The machinations and violence of Annabel’s suitors rob me of my beloved Bergetto
Bergetto: Haha that’s me !
Philotis: … and so, I shall hereafter need 
to get me to a nunnery.
You see, 
there are other stories that have blood and tears, 
but which don’t have the luxury of sperm. 
The comic principle of re-incorporation allows also for a poignancy and a development of thematic thread of power and oppression.

Finally, we reach the scene of all the deaths (prefigured at the very start of the show).
 
The unborn child appears and delivers a speech ending with:
Murdered. Unborn.  
by my uncledad’s blade.
Was ever nephewson afflicted thus! 
 
The maidenly Philotis sits and places a watermelon between her thighs, shouts: Death to the Patriarchy!
It breaks into glorious wet red - like blood, like a birth or a gynaecological procedure gone wrong.
Brothers: What was that?
Philotis: A symbolic act. This is the melon in the plot that the Doctor says is the cause of Annabella’s stomach-ache – when really, she was pregnant … the melon is the TRUTH!
And the sad truth is that Annabella receives the title slur of the original play text – as if she were to blame for the bloodshed hotly meted out by other characters. 
 
The production assistant / audience greeting clown comes quickly (stepping over bodies):
Er, Gaspar? No Way?
No Way Bros: Oui. Yes?
Helen: The audience need to go home. 
No Way Bros: Oh. (look at audience) Did we cover everything?
Helen (flips though script): … Er … No.
No Way Bros: No. But it was beautiful!
Character is plot.
Plot is character and action. Blood is plot and Sperm is plot. Tears are plot. The extraneous is subcutaneous, the negligible is the indelible.
We put sound and images together that have never been put together before. 
It’s like a man jumping off the Pont Neuf and never reaching the water.***
It’s over. It’s not over. ... It’s perfect! 
It’s a wrap everybody!!
Bodies start to clear but Putana is still sightless centre back.
 
But, in the true manner of comedy, we added a song and a reconciliation, in the mood of a Wrap Party.

                                                                                          .....
 
 
* Sad Normals  - a phrase I use when teaching clowning. ‘It’s the clown’s job to show all the thought processes, failures and feelings the Sad Normals (me in the supermarket) would prefer to suppress and hide.’
** A handy guideline – as ever, I acknowledge ‘there is the rule and there is the breaking of the rule’.
*** at the beginning in the interview the Brothers quote Noé.

Interviewer clown leans in to the two clown brothers.
 
No Way: We are kind of unique, and kind of twisted.
 
Gaspar: Psychedelic, cerebral, chaotic, gut-wrenching, nihilistic – and fun.
 
No Way:  We were inspirated by experimental movies – Kenneth Anger …
 
Gaspar: …and witchcraft 
 
Both: When we were 16 we shot a Super 8 of our best friend jumping from the Pont Neuf bridge. 
 
No Way: It was our first psychological drama. (said with action of sitting)
 
No Way: You ask what makes a great film? Chorus moment When you meet images and sounds that you haven’t experienced before.
 
Gaspar: What makes a great story? Chorus moment All great stories must deal with blood ...

No Way: le sang

Gaspar: sperm

No Way: sperm

Gaspar: and tears

No Way: ... et des larmes.
 
Adapted from this interview.

​
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'Great Actress: 
Pity   verb:  3rd person present:
to feel sorrow for the misfortunes of – for example: "I could see from their faces that they pitied me."
Putana (blinded):    
I can’t see, I can’t see!' 
- 'Tis Pity 'Tis A Pity 2021


'… nice Philosophy may tolerate unlikely arguments,
but Heaven admits no jest’
 - ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore Act 1 scene i
 

​


There was no showing - but the e-poster might have looked like this.



2021
In Summer 2021, travelling to work by tube where most people's best efforts to socially distance contrasted with free-ranging groups of football enthusiasts chanting unmasked and beating on the sides of the trains, I was again approaching John Ford’s play 'Tis Pity She’s A Whore as a Clown Drama.
 
Risk Assessment & Laughter
I achieved a First Aid certification prior to beginning the module, as we were to be working isolated in a special offsite location. The student cast were ‘bubbling’, keeping to their small community each day, so we were able to work unmasked. It was unnerving doing the risk assessment for devising a Clown production.

Hazard: covid aerosol inhalation via the normally joyful and health-giving phenomena of laughter.
Precaution: social distancing.

But Clowns are unpredictable, and in one exercise, one clown inadvertently stuck his hand right into another clown’s mouth (you had to be there). A kind of spontaneous Lateral Flow Test, but with fingers instead of a swab. Luckily no harm was done.

Ingredients
Inspired by the timbre of Phil Collins' Something In The Air Tonight, the clown adaptation was to open with a chorus of clowns tasting and testing the air - sensing, some with fingers raised, some with tongues out. 
 
For a chorus clown, this sliver of text from Oedipus was repurposed and re-phrased.  

Oh Oh Oh Oh 
My soul is racked and shivers with fear. 
I wish no harm but beg ye (to audience]
drive 
From our land the plague, 
please hear us now and defend us! 

Ah me, what countless, countless woes! 
Hope on hope down-striken goes.

Coughing is forbidden and so are sighs
while the powerful spread the contagion of their lies  !
 
Clown Council
My clown dramaturgy process of the Clown Council yielded, among other themes, a voice for sex-positivity, realised within the character of the lovable, flawed Putana.
 
One student had discovered a high status clown. She developed the character of Great Actress.
She wanted to read the Frontispiece on the play – here it is, adapted for clown delivery:
 
‘TIS
PityShe’sAWhore
Not quite ‘as acted by the Queen’s Majesty’s Servants
AT The Phoenix in Drury Lane, LONDON' (words in caps meaninglessly shouted)
(she weeps) 
Printed by one Nicholas Okes for one Richard Collins and to be sold at the latter’s shop In Paul’s Churchyard, 
inthenookonthelefthandside under the sign of the 
Three Kings, 1633 (gesture of 3 crowns)
(dramatic) Dramatis  Personae (theatrically humble):
Bonaventure, A Friar - but no one calls him by his name
A Cardinal - Nuncio to the Pope
Soranzo - who’s a Nobleman
Florio - a mere citizen
Ditto Donado
Grimaldi - described as a Gentleman but quite frankly a thug
Giovanni, son to Florio
Bergetto nephew to Donado - are you keeping up?
Richardetto, Vasques, Poggio, Banditti, Annabella, Hippolita, Philotis and 
Putana

'The writing of this potent tome
Was done with safety from the author’s home
It tells of love in unlikely times
And portrays incest and other crimes.'
 
Empty cities
The drone shots of empty cities that sprouted up on YouTube inspired a section on the architecture of Parma, which one clown narrated as the clown chorus embodied:

The Strada Repubblica, once a Roman road built in 187 BC.
The Ponte di Mezzo (Middle Bridge), the Ponte Romano.
The Battistero di Parma (the city’s Baptistery), in the Gothic style. Oct-ag-onal. 
Pink Verona marble exterior 
And within: a highly frescoed cupola.  
Porticos, cupolas, churches  …. Cathedrals.
 
Losing our religion
We had a Godfather-style Pope.

Pope:
Kiss my ring.
Friar: 
Of course.
Pope:
Take The Gun, Leave The Cannoli.
Friar: What? What gun?
Pope:
I Don’t Like Violence, Tom. I’m A Businessman. Blood Is A Big Expense.
Friar: 
(confused) My name’s not Tom.

The powerful men of town
In the real world, Dominic Cummings was driving long distances to test his eyesight and spread the virus, and there were regular briefings from our PM - Text here filched and re-fashioned from Moliere.
 
The powerful men of town place rubber-gloved hands on Hippolita and Annabella while Putana assists. 
Soranzo:
There’s no shame in hypocrisy, nowadays; it’s
so fashionable, people think it’s a virtue.
So prevalent – it’s invisible! Like an air-bourne plague.
Hypocrisy has friends in the highest places;
with special privileges …
 
Something is rotten in the state
Putana (in a  costume made entirely of blue surgical masks) speaks:
 
Putana:
Hello everybody, Ciao bello! My name is Putana.
As I am a very woman, I am here to orally (tongue through slitted mask)
express my own truth.
Something is rotten in the state of Italy!
Can you taste it in the air?
(Chorus of clowns very briefly reprise tasting air)
This place is filled up with some rich and handsome fellas: Giovanni, Soranzo, Berghetto, Poggio, Florio, Vasquez and Donado …
 
The problem is that they are all so Pious!
I try my best, I offered ‘orizontal refreshment to them, jelly rolls, comfort, slap & tickle.
Even threesies. Nada. Niente.
The church has everyone in a tight grip
The town of Parma is afraid.
The people of Parma are paralysed,
Petrified. Afraid of their own bodies. Their own desires.
 
Pride
A little later, she announces:

Putana:
Happy Pride month everybody! It Is so lovely to see you all together.
Let the whole city of Parma hear us: LOVE IS LOVE! (get audience to say it)
I can’t hear you …. LOVE IS LOVE!  One more time LOVE IS LOVE!
Yes!!!
And this year, I am honoured to open the first ever INCEST PRIDE MARCH!
(Pairs of clowns parade: each wears a cardboard sign on blue rope.)
Dad / Nephew
Sister / Sister
Brother / Step-brother
Mum / Grandpa
Sib   /  Lings
 
Clown chorus sing:
We are family
Brother sister mother and me
We are family
Get up everybody and sing!
 
The problem with Parties
There was a frission around the gathering of the play’s wedding party. A clown appointed to count and recount, ineptly. 
Hippolita crashes the wedding party, reciting text from Pity Party. (Melanie Martinez's video shows a party where no one has shown up - a 2015 pre-figuring of covid isolation!).

Knee-jerk reactions
The knee-jerk reactions on social media each day made a mark:
 
Vasques: Tricking my master to buy a calzone pizza for a bride!
This calls for more random, knee-jerk and self-righteous vengeance –
Bandits: (they move quickly to appear at his side in in their huddle) At your service, sir!
Vasques points at Giovanni. Bandits surround him saying stab stabstab stab stabstab)
Bandits: stab stabstab stab stabstab
Giovanni: Whose hand gave me this wound?
(Bandits raise hands 1234 in staccato rhythm.)
Giovanni: Oh, I bleed fast.
Death, I …
… Annabella's face. (G says this as if seeing her in heaven, but the dead Annabella shows her face, eyes crossed and tongue out)
(Giovanni dies.)
Vasques: Let me use my random agency to compel you all to spit on the memory of Annabella. (the powerful characters make a raspy sound of preparing to spit – Vasques says, swiftly) Metaphorically!  They don’t call me Vasques the Socially Responsible for nothing.
(The Friar is appalled at the exhortation to spit, then nods at the social responsibility.)
 
(The Bandits - whose day job does not interfere with them being proudly ’woke’ and ethical - applaud ‘socially responsible’ and nod.)
 
Punishment
Unlike in the original play, in this ‘Tis Pity, Putana’s punishment takes centre stage;
 
Vasques: Grab the whore-mongering whore.
(Bandits appear quickly in their huddle)
Bandit 2: Do you mean the sex-worker?
Bandit 1: We prefer the term sex-worker.
Bandit 3: Word.
Vasques: Grab Annabella’s nurse, Putana!
 
Tis Pity There's No Pity
You could argue how well the pandemic was dealt with by the government – you could be forgiven for saying that there seemed to be a failure of compassion* among many of those in power.
 
The ‘Great Actress’ Clown) delivers a dictionary definition of Pity while poor Putana is tortured.
Great Actress: Pity  … pronunciation: /ˈpɪti/    noun.
The feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others.
Vasques: Take out her eyes!
Putana: What?! No No
(One arm, two arms to place hands on Putana’s eyes. If possible, the front 2 bandits have red makeup on their fingers [warmed in hands] to smear on Putana’s eyelids.)
Clown Chorus: Ooooh! (flinching)
Great Actress: For example:  "the sight of the maiming filled the onlookers with pity"
(Putana cries out.   Clown chorus look appalled / distraught.)
Great Actress: Synonyms:
compassion    ,    commiseration    ,     condolence
sorrow         ,       sympathy
distress    ,    regret
Antonyms:     Indifference, …
(Clown Chorus turn away with shame, not indifference while
The Powerful - Soranzo etc - check their fingernails, phones, or use antibacterial wipes.)

Great Actress:  … Cruelty.      (sobs from Putana)
Pity   verb:  3rd person present:
to feel sorrow for the misfortunes of – for example:
"I could see from their faces that they pitied me"
Putana:    I can’t see, I can’t see
(Vasques stabs her – Putana dies, but remains standing in crucifix position, but drooped.)
 
Great Actress: Pity, alternate meaning: a cause for regret or disappointment.
For example:
"it's a pity she got pregnant”
“it’s a pity a sweet idiot like Bergetto was killed. By ‘accident’”
“It’s a pity a brother and sister fell for one another”
“It’s a pity about the plight of the hard-working, disenfranchised bandits dehumanised by the capitalist structure”
Bandits: hear hear, right on, word. (and solidarity fists)

Ex-machina
The character known as ‘Pope/God thing’ arrives. In an ideal world, they would be suspended from on high, but in this student clown production, piggy-backed in by someone.
 
All: (inhale) it’s the pope / god / supreme being thing!!
 
God Pope Thing: Take up these slaughter'd bodies,
Clown chorus intone: shame
God Pope Thing: see them buried;
Clown chorus: crying shame
God Pope Thing: And all the gold and jewels,
Wallets, spare-change whatsoever,
Clown chorus: misfortune
God Pope Thing: Confiscate by the canons of the Church,
Clown chorus: crime (then feel a bit worried they said that)
God Pope Thing: We seize upon these goods - and divert them to the Pope's proper use.
All, including Friar, but not Putana: Of course.
(All leave the stage – some flouncing, some ashamed and compromised.)
 
Interruption
Along with contrast, clarity, pace, stupidity, alternate logic, micro-pauses, clocks, drops, rhythm, timing, representation of minor characters,
interruption
is a useful comic device.
 
Putana: The Parmesan people …
(Quick appearance by Poggio with a wedge of parmesan cheese.)
Daniel/Poggio: ‘My Master said that he loved her almost as well as he loved Parmesan.’

Interruption is Interruption
But IRL, interruption is interruption. Abruptly (as in 2020), our 2021 covid-themed ‘Tis Pity rehearsals stopped because an-extra mural workshop brought Covid into the group, so, as in 2020, this new iteration of Clownacy never had a sharing, not even to a small, covid-safely-distanced group of viewers.




* lack of compassion towards nurses, the disabled, the elderly ... and others