Chris Hogben: Romeo bits and bobs

So...yesterday at Merton Abbey Mills I feel I went to a new level with my character. On our week off, I went gone back to the original, unabridged Shakespeare. I knew Calarco had needed to heavily cut from it, and I wanted to pick up clues I felt were missing.

I went through it and noted down everything Romeo says about himself, everything Romeo says about other people, and everything other people say about Romeo, I uncovered a few useful things that kept repeating themselves.

1) A state of mind that I'll call 'Romeo's Centrelessness'

• 'Tut, I have lost myself, I am not here. This is not Romeo, he's some other where.'
• 'Can I go forward when my heart is there? Turn back, dull earth, and find thy centre out'
• 'But he that hath the steerage of my course, direct my sail!'
• 'How is't, my soul?' (Juliet)
• 'It is my soul that calls upon my name!' (Juliet)
• 'Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the rocks thy seasick weary bark.'

All of these Romeo quotes add up to something quite bizarre: it's as if Romeo is sort of disowning his soul. Like he's some kind of negative electron desperately seeking a positive. But it's not just the magnetic image I find interesting, it's the willingness to place his soul into another's hands - and never to take responsibility for it himself. He is constantly placing his life at the mercy of the forces around - he literally IS 'fortunes fool'. Romeo is not a man to master his own affairs (unless you count the end, where he finally starts to take charge, gives orders and make a plan - even if it is to kill himself)


Romeo really is a lost soul, out of control. A wanderer, with no home (despite his famous family - but he 'doffs' them anyway), no cause (Baz Luhrman called him 'the original Rebel Without a Cause) and no brakes. When he falls in love with Juliet, she becomes almost MORE than the centre of his world (the star to ev'ry wandering bark) - he seems to pour his life INTO her, as if she is an iron lung machine that he lives through. Very odd. But no wonder that, when he hears she is dead, the only logical conclusion is (perhaps quite calmly reached) that he must die too. This is no normal love, by any stretch of the imagination.

2) Romeo's sense of 'boundness' at the beginning:

• I have a soul of lead so stakes (or fixes) me to the ground I cannot move.
• I am...so bound I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe.
• Under loves heavy burden do I sink.
• Being but heavy, I will bear the light.
• Not mad, but bound more than a madman is - Shut up in prison, kept without my food, whipped and tormented.
• Heavy lightness, feather of lead, bright smoke, still waking sleep.

All this happens in the short scenes prior to meeting Juliet and if a character says that much about what could amount to a physical description, I felt I should put it into Romeo's physicality.


There's a difference between the way old people and young people move. My movement teacher taught me that it is about 'free energy' and 'bound energy'. When young people move or dance, it is fresh, vital, it seems to explode beyond their bodies, they freely inhabit the space around them and it seems to come out of their pores. When young people get older, whether they like it or not, their energy is not as able to freely penetrate the air around them. It's not about the difference between fully extending or not fully extending a movement - but the vital, affecting energy goes. Even old rockers, like Rod Stewart or Mick Jagger, are not able to recapture that electric physical force they once had on stage. It has changed into a more profound, more inward-looking quality.


Anyway, to transfer this into Armstrong/Romeo, I wanted to start the play trying to grasp this quality. Instead of straining to feel miserable, using convulsive jerks, or thrashing motions, touching other characters or using force to reason or convince, I feel that Romeo should be much more resigned, much more devoid of energy, with prematurely old bound energy. As if his youthful testosterone vibrance has been utterly stamped on my Rosaline's rejection of him - there is a suggestion of this in: 'from love's WEAK, CHILDISH bow she lives uncharm'd' as if his youthful exuberance (hinted at in the Friar scene and in the Romeo/Mercutio wit battle in Act 2 Scene 4) has been CALLED weak and childish - and that comment has killed it, and made him old, without energy and powerless to move.


So I tried to work both of these in, and found a much greater NEED to be with Juliet, found that she mattered much more to me, found that finding her was more than being in love - it was being freed of this boundness, it was being accepted for who he is, it was finding a reason to live. I found that news of her death was much more crippling, with a fear of returning to my former wandering life and found that the through-line of my character's journey was much stronger.


In future performances, I'm going to try and outwork this a bit more, and also play with other theories I'm piecing together to do with Romeo's wit/senses getting in the way of reality, about a sense of Romeo's low self-opinion and feeling he is cursed, about Romeo's primary sense being what he sees with his eyes, about Romeo and masculinity, Romeo and his family and what they expect of him, and a theory I have about Romeo's emotional naivety - what if he was really strait-laced before, really studious and conservative, not wild at all - and the Rosaline affair has absolutely rocked his world and changed his personality - how else can we explain his absolute inexperience and immaturity when it comes to his own feelings?