Essay published in The Routledge Companion to Actor’s Shakespeare (2011).

Jonathan Slinger: Actor’s Shakespeare

The British theatre critic Quentin Letts wrote in the Daily Mail that “Mr. Slinger … [Looks] like a cross between Bill Gates and the BBC reporter Nicholas Witchell, yet he strides and swaggers like the sexiest dude in town”. Although writing about his performance in Dennis Kelly’s new play The God’s Weep for the RSC at the Hampstead Theatre in 2010, this by-line touches on something at the heart of Jonathan Slinger’s acting. It identifies a playful and unabashed eclecticism; an ability to inhabit two seemingly diametrically opposed ideas simultaneously and revel in the uncomfortable distance between the two. It references a sensuality, a sexual ambiguity, a carnality even, that he brings to the most unlikely characters, at the most unlikely moments. It hints at an actor who is comfortable in his own skin, who likes who he is, but craves an exploration of the ‘other’, the ‘flip-side’ his own and his character’s. On the outside it’s a young Bill Gates on the inside it’s Ziggy Stardust. “Why do you have to be young and good looking to fall in love?” he questioned in one of our interview sessions. It’s deliciously Shakespearean.

This article is an account of a four-year period of Slinger’s work with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). From his 2005 debut as Puck in Gregory Doran’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, through his Syracusian Dromio in Nancy Meckler’s The Comedy of Errors, to his Richard III and Richard II (among other parts) in Michael Boyd’s complete Histories cycle of 2006 to 2009. The article aims to explore Slinger’s processes as a Shakespearean actor, the unique influences that were brought to bear on him through participation in the Histories and how he developed over those four years. I was assistant director to Meckler and Doran for the 2005/06 season and saw at first hand the creation of Puck and Dromio. I was an enthusiastic regular at the Histories at Stratford throughout their run and have interviewed Michael Boyd for his thoughts on Slinger’s work.

It’s worth noting the context in which this work took place. In autumn 2010 the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre will open, the large 1300 seat proscenium arch theatre was demolished in 2007 to be replaced by a new large thrust auditorium, in which no audience member will be more than five metres from the action. The Courtyard, an exact replica of the new theatre was erected on the site of the old Other Place and this was to be a test drive for the new permanent home for the company. Boyd chose the Histories as his first production in the new space as artistic director.

The work that is referenced in this article took place in an atmosphere of risk. The change in the playing space was central to Boyd’s artistic vision for the RSC and particularly it’s actors. He would talk regularly of the need for actor and audience to ‘be in the same room’, the need, as he saw it, for mainstream theatre to engage with its audience with ‘honesty and directness’. One of the things that attracted Boyd to Slinger was his ‘appalling directness as an actor’, a quality that was deemed essential for the new space. Boyd was also drawn to Slinger’s ‘dreadfully anarchic’ work, which had a ‘farcical franticness and a mad over inventiveness’, work which was ‘very gloomy, madly, sort of grotesquely serious’.

As well as opening the new theatre building there was a parallel risk of engaging an acting company for three years, a long period even in RSC terms (it was double the length of the Comedies contracts). Contemporary British actors have a myriad of opportunities in theatre, film and television. Three years in Stratford-upon-Avon playing assorted roles represented a big risk for some; quite apart from what could happen when over forty actors work cheek-by-jowl every day for three years. Boyd certainly felt that risk keenly. ‘Had it not worked’, he said ‘I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d do next’. Underpinning Slinger’s work during this period was a sense of a lot being staked by the company, but with a sense of artistic freedom and a quiet iconoclasm. A spirit that played to the strengths of the two collaborators.

When we started working together in January 2005, I was struck by someone for whom theatre and in particular Shakespeare was something exciting and dangerous. The first day of rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was a microcosm of his approach to Shakespeare for good and ill. This heavy-set, ginger fellow with a Manchester accent had decided (in consultation with Gregory Doran) that his Puck ‘would not run’. He had asked for a pair of Heelys; sport shoes with wheels in the heels, popular with twelve-year-old boys. Boyd would later talk about Slinger’s routines in The Comedies season as evidence of ‘Jonathan’s unhealthy love affair with properties’. But this was the first example I saw of how he began preparing for a role. It was a strong choice that made a clear line with a character vividly manifest.

The choice was rooted in Slinger’s fascination with exploring the exact opposite of what the text appears to be suggesting. In this case, a slow trudging Puck. Slinger refers to this technique as ‘flipping the script’, exploring the opposite instincts to see where it leads the interpretation of the role. Many actors undertake this sort of work as an interesting academic exercise and use elements in performance, but I was struck by how central this technique is to Slinger’s work. The exploration of the opposite was a well from which he drew most of his inspiration and was a source of great creative energy. By ‘flipping’ the script he was able to consistently shed interesting light on the psychology of his characters as well as finding much comic inspiration. Through this his exploration of all of his characters started from a locus that was avowedly off-centre. I’m not sure that even he realised the extent to which it coloured his work throughout this period.

Like most people, Slinger had seen many more ‘received’ renderings of the role of Puck. He’d seen many slight young actors

“Running everywhere as a human desperately trying to be a fairy”.

Slinger’s instinct and his own athletic abilities suggested that this was something he didn’t want to do. He had never been drawn to the part and had never understood what the sexless sprite had brought to this play about love. During the audition he and Doran, (neither of whom had strong feelings about the role hitherto) hit upon a kernel of an idea that became central to the production. It was rooted in Slinger’s desire to explore the psychological motivations of the character. Slinger recalled

“Puck’s position as Oberon’s right-hand man has been usurped by the little changeling boy, who at the opening of the play has Oberon’s full affection and attention. Puck has been sidelined. He begins the play in emotional turmoil about this and spends the rest of the play trying to win Oberon back”.

Doran’s production foregrounded the changeling boy. Steve Tiplady of the Little Angel Theatre Company (with whom Doran had an unlikely hit with a puppet show version of Venus and Adonis) made an exquisite Japanese bunraku doll to play the role of the boy. The eighteen inch high puppet was brought in by Titania’s train and was a literal point of focus for the dissention between the fairy King and Queen. It’s exotic appearance and grace of movement was a stark contrast to Slinger’s stolid, pale-skinned, grungy, rather shopworn Puck. There was a sense of the new toy contrasting with the old toy. Slinger’s Puck watched on damp-eyed, the rejected child in the man’s body.

This idea made the precise nature of the royal argument clear. The boy was the reason why “The nine-man’s-morris is fill’d up with mud” and the cause for the high stakes civil war that had led to the apocalyptic ruination of the seasons. The elemental emotions of parenthood had been unleashed. Oberon and Titania were indeed the “parents and original” of this bleak new reality in the fairy world. All of Oberon’s meddling was clearly in order to win back his “Lovely boy”.

In this new world Slinger’s Puck felt like yesterday’s man. He was discovered, vagrant-like, sweeping the streets of Athens (using the same broom that he uses in Act Five to “sweep the dust behind the door” of the royal palace). The split role of First Fairy approached him with a degree of awe and bewilderment as if they were teenage autograph hunters. Puck was a washed up pop singer fallen on hard times. The line “Thou speakest aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night” was played with shamed reluctance and a resonant bass, rather than the conventional piping tenor. After the First Fairies had finished their first speech in the quick anapestic dimeter, Slinger deliberately played against the tempo by taking the speech very slowly and deliberately on the pulse of the line. This had a comically unsettling effect rather like the Tortoise movement from Saint Saens Carnival of the Animals, where Saint Saens has the orchestra play the can-can at a maddeningly slow tempo. The slower tempo and the sarcastic ironising of the first half of the speech prepared the ground for what was to come.

“A lovely boy”, “So sweet a changeling” and “the loved boy” were almost spat at the First Fairy; and “Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild” was played with a self-lacerating, wounded melancholy. Slinger had the make-up department apply the scars of the self-harmer to his wrists. The teenage dirt-bag, sk8ter-boi Puck in the body of the thirty something Slinger, was at once darkly ironic, heartfelt and daft. Having consciously thrown out the rulebook with his treatment of Puck’s text, there was an opportunity for much delicious, comic subversion. Slinger trudged truculently, slowly off stage left, tired at trying to win Oberon’s attention by acidly declaring “I go, I go look how I go, swifter than arrow from the tartare’s bow”. There was a sizable pause as we heard his sneakers squeak slowly to the wings; a moment that consistently brought the house down. What allowed him to treat the text in this way without appearing cloyingly self-conscious was the fact that the emotional world of the character was sincerely explored and deeply felt.

The Kurt Cobain quality of the character was not just expressed in melancholy introversion and adolescent sarcasm. Slinger also released a primal, diabolical rage and lust for chaos, as he disrupted the mechanicals rehearsal in the wood in act three. With the help of wires he literally flew above the scene releasing hellish jets of fire as he climbed ecstatically through “A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire, / And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, / Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire at every turn”. Here there was the sense of personal release too, through every savoured verb, as this Puck was palpably on his way back to the top of his profession.

At Slinger’s instigation Puck’s appearance reflected his increasing sense of self worth as the production progressed. His dull ginger hair morphed scene-by-scene in to a glittery flame red and his lugubrious mien transformed in to something more vital accompanied by a sweet smile behind which lurked Slinger’s prominent incisors. His journey back to Oberon’s affections was complete. There was a sense of touching rapprochement when Oberon called him “gentle Puck” at the top of act four; his first kind words towards him the play. After Oberon and Titania’s reunion dance there was a renewed sense of complicity between friends as, almost holding back tears, in a soft tenor voice he said “Fairy King attend and mark; / I do hear the morning lark”. There was a very strong sense of nature returning to harmony. Puck or Robin Goodfellow, the personification of land spirits in English folklore, after the war, was now well.

This Puck provided a genuine streak of off-beat irreverence in a production that was self consciously aware of its place in the production history of the play. It used the opening chords of the Mendelssohn suite at the top of act one and visually quoted Peter Brook’s ‘white box’ in Theseus’ court among other references. But this production managed to consistently subvert its audience’s expectations. Slinger gave a long pause before his final couplet, making the lines “Give me your hands, if we be friends…” a direct challenge to the house lulled in to reverie by Oberon’s candle-lit benediction of the Athenian palace. This was indicative of a production that kept the audience from ever thinking that they knew what was coming next. The game of setting up expectations then subverting them was played with great skill by Doran and his company for the theatre literate Stratford audiences. Of course there was an added poignancy in referencing some of the great RSC ‘Dreams as this was the final production of the play to take place on the old RST stage. The blessing of the “house” in act five, the celebration of regeneration and new life was therefore given added significance.

This Puck was part grown-up, part adolescent, part angel, part devil, part benign, part malignant. The performance was in places a highly wrought construction and in places naked. But crucially Slinger was comfortable with not ‘solving’ the part, in a play whose fairy characters are often heavily ‘interpreted’. He was constantly surprising and evolving, but always true to the text. This is typical of Slinger’s approach to acting. First ideas arrive fully formed and vivid, but in rehearsals they change and morph to suit the tenor of the production. He’s good at throwing out his favourite ideas too when they become too cumbersome (the Heelys only lasted a fortnight before they were returned to the props store).

As a starting point for the role Slinger decided to actively look for the opposites throughout the text, with a role he had trouble engaging with initially. He said

“I like flipping the script as an excersise, but this time it worked throughout, it was more than just a rehearsal game, it gave us an interesting idea which we pursued. It worked from a comedic standpoint if nothing else.”

His exercise of ‘flipping’ the text, gave Nancy Meckler’s 2005 production of The Comedy of Errors one of it’s defining moments. Rather than a teary reunion between the Syracusian and Ephesian Dromios in act five, Slinger (Syracuse) and Forbes Masson (Ephesus) were left alone on stage to regard one another suspiciously. It added an edge to Ephesian Dromio’s line “Methinks you are my glass and not my brother” and their exchange was flinty and testy, neither sure that they were happy to no longer be unique in their respective worlds. Masson’s borderline sarcastic playing of the final couplet “We came in to the world like brother and brother / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other” was followed by a subtle jostling for position, the offer of a hand of friendship, then, just when their hands met, they gave each other the bird. They exited in the knowledge that they were happy to keep a distance from one another.

The craggy twelve and fourteen beat final lines of the play contrast with the harmonious iambic at the reuinion of the Antipholi. By embracing the awkward rhythm, the audience were given an unsettling minor-key ending to an early comedy, (perhaps a sketch of the emotionally complex and ambiguous finale to comedies like Twelfth Night and Much Ado). Masson and Slinger ensured that this Comedy was concluded without sentiment. This gave a depth to the Dromios and an irreverent comic ‘button’ to the end of the production. “The least interesting thing that [the reunion] could be” Slinger said “is a joyful, tearful reunion while we trace each others faces and do ‘mirror acting’”

Dromio’s text too, was subject to the same rigorous psychological analysis. Slinger remarked that

“Dromio is interesting as you have no father or mother to work with, so it becomes all about his relationship with Antipholus. The Syracusian Antipholus is the only one who is aware that he has a brother and is searching for him, the Ephesian Antipholus doesn’t. The Syracusian Antipholus has a relationship with his father, the Ephesian Antipholus doesn’t. The Ephesian twins thus seem to be less secure within themselves, they hit each other, they have a much more fractious relationship. It was important for me that the Syracusian relationship was solid and secure, so when Antipholus started hitting and punching me there was a real sense of betrayal, it was more deeply upsetting”.

It was also much funnier and laced with pathos as a result.

Slinger’s process for this part was therefore, like Puck, driven by a desire to win his friend back (interestingly the same actor, Joe Dixon, played both Oberon and Antipholus of Syracuse). With this warm relationship well established and cruelly broken by Antipholus, the famous duologue about the fat maid in act three scene two was played for high emotional stakes. It worked beautifully as a comic routine, but it was also shot through with relief and a touchingly childish joy that his friend was laughing at him again. It was both comic and poignant. Slinger’s Dromio visibly grew in confidence and enjoyment throughout the scene. By the end, he too was laughing and giggling at his own quips as the scene descends in to bum jokes and casual racism

S. ANTIPHOLUS: In what part of her body stands Ireland?
S. DROMIO: Marry sir in her buttocks, I found it out by the bogs.

Each new exchange gave Dromio a new security in the central relationship in his life. Slinger relished the naughtiness of this most famous comic scene and using his full vocal range relished inventing every disgusting image and lingered over every word. Without an indicative gesture, using only the text, Slinger managed to elicit waves of laughter and expressions of revulsion from the audience. With a pronounced Manchester accent he slid up and down the ‘Rs’ and the vowels of “O sir upon her nose, all o’er embellish’d with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain”. This sensuality also provided an intriguing note of sublimated eroticism.

When discussing his approach to comedy Slinger said

“I don’t approach these plays as either comedies or tragedies. I approach them as stories to be told with truth. If you play Malvolio as a man who is deeply concerned with his own personal advancement, it will be funny, dark and sad. If you only approach it as a buffoon, you may end up getting a few laughs, but you won’t even be scratching the surface. I’d love to play Macbeth and find where the laughs are. Macbeth is full of accidents and that’s very funny”.

He also referenced a piece of direction he was once given by Deborah Warner, which seems to be a guiding principal to his work.

“Deborah used to talk about how interesting discomfort is. If you accurately depict discomfort that is riveting. That is the truth of every person. No matter how polished an image people may have, nobody goes through life without that slipping. It’s actually really important when you’re putting characters together that you include those moments. Shakespeare has huge discomfort in his writing.”

2005 was a good time for an actor who understood and actively sought the comedy of discomfort and awkwardness. While it has as always been something of a staple of the best comedy, shows like The Royle Family and The Office, in the UK and Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development in the United States, made a high art form of discomfort and were enjoying huge mainstream popularity. Their performance style is avowedly underplayed, laughs are not solicited from the audience, punch lines eschewed, in favour of gimlet-eyed observation and truthfulness to the situation, allowing for real emotional investment in the protagonists and depth of characterisation. Audiences (particularly young DVD box set buying audiences) were perhaps more ready than ever to go on profound and complicated emotional journeys with Shakespeare’s comic characters, while still laughing heartily. They were ready for a more multi-faceted approach to comedy and perhaps a little more distrustful of actors and directors that served up laughs; that told them when it was funny. Through performances like Slinger’s audiences are able to experience Shakespeare as a master comedian, able to write lots of subtly shaded types of laugh. Here was a contrast to the bald, one-dimensional, gesture heavy treatment of Shakespearean comedy that seems to offer an apology for the archaic language. The sort of thinking that leads to little finger gestures accompanying a dick joke; a playing style borne out of the broader British comic traditions of music hall and pantomime. There are a generation of actors who make the case that Shakespeare’s comedies might have more in common with ‘The Office’ than with ‘Dick Whittington’. To come at a character form the perspective of a David Brent or a Tobias Funke rather than Widow Twankey or Aladdin is a marked and revelatory shift in perspective, which offers up the possibility of fascinating re-appraisals of Shakespeare’s comedic roles.

Puck and Dromio were fecund territory for an actor with Slinger’s hostility to received Shakespearean wisdom. I asked him whether this ‘punk’ approach to his work was something self conscious and he replied

“I was more ‘acid house’ myself, but I do think I feel the need to stick two fingers up as an artist and say fuck you”.

This love of ‘acid house’ is not an irrelevant part of Slinger’s process as an actor within a company. There is a home-made quality and an inclusiveness about the acid house scene, it doesn’t require you to dress or dance in a certain way, just to be there and move to its trancy, repetitive rhythms. Part of the attraction is to subjugate oneself to the rhythm of the whole. The drug of choice is ecstasy; you go to enjoy yourself and throw off inhibitions. This is how Slinger approaches his acting. He claims “not to be particularly musical”, but his feel for rhythm, in terms of the text, story telling and the broader framework of the production is notable. Acid-house eschews melody in favour of rhythm and uses spoken lines rather than sung lyrics. His Duke of Gloucester picked up on the percussive, martial, musical score of Boyd’s Henry VIs and found an excited, perpetual rocking movement which propelled him through the final battle scenes and gave him an elemental connection with the heart of the productions.

Making the journey from Puck to Richard Duke of Gloucester was something that had been undertaken by Aiden McArdle in the late nineties, in Boyd’s first celebrated RSC productions of the first tetralogy. For many it was an obvious next step for Slinger, an actor growing in authority and temperamentally suited to working within a large ensemble. But few would have anticipated his casting as Richard II. When reflecting on this time, while he would have “regretted” turning down Richard III. Due to events in his private life he very nearly did just that, but the added carrot of Richard II encouraged him make the three year leap in to the unknown. Michael Boyd felt that Slinger “needed to be scared to commit”.

Despite McArdle’s journey, the casting of Jonathan had taken Boyd by surprise too. When he saw Slinger as Puck he was going along to see an early preview of a performance that Gregory Doran wanted a second opinion on; he was not looking for a Richard III. But Boyd was struck by

“Jonathan’s ability to just hoover up an entire auditorium in to his space, to suck in a house, hold it in his lungs and blow it all out again. There have been times when I’ve thought “a little less hoovering” Jonathan. But if you can do it, my God, it’s special.”

I think the ‘hoovering’ that Boyd refers to is Slinger’s ability to hold a moment, to stop the play in its tracks to allow the audience to see the play through the idiosyncratic prism of his character for a brief moment and then pass on the baton. This quality is difficult to define, in Slinger’s case I’d put it down to total clarity of thought and execution in the moment, synthesised with an instinctive understanding of the play’s rhythms, combined with an infectious enjoyment of being centre stage. A good example of this was at the end of Henry VI Pt. III. After Edward’s final lines “Sound drums and trumpets! / Farewell sour annoy! / For here I hope begins our lasting joy” as the drums built, with a half smile indicating the fomenting mutiny in his mind, Slinger was able to bring the whole attention of the house to him as he watched the royal court depart leaving him alone on stage. Many of the audience began to smile too, absolutely on Richard’s wavelength as Slinger held the pause and eyeballed members of the audience before delivering the heart stopping first word of Richard III “Now” before a snap blackout. I have never seen a theatrical cliff-hanger better executed.

Yet at the time of casting it remained to be seen whether Slinger’s restless iconoclasm could move from being a rogue element in a production dominated by other actors to the galvanising performance of a larger ensemble in Richard II and Richard III. But the close trusting relationship between the two and their shared sensibility, ensured that Boyd was able to coax the best of Slinger’s talent by giving him a larger canvas on which to work. When recalling rehearsals Boyd said “Jonathan adored it. It was like he’d found a room big enough to play in. And he just instinctively loved the democracy of it.” But it was also important that Slinger totally trusted Boyd to edit his work when it became too much. In the foothills of this daunting undertaking, that feeling of safety was terribly important to him. He commented that “when Michael said it wasn’t working I knew it wasn’t working”.

But the canvas was vast. Slinger started and ended the eight-play history cycle. As an actor he not only had to think in terms of the plays he was in, but through a line of other parts in the cycle, (such as the antagonists Fluellen in Henry V and the Bastard of Orleans in Henry VI Pt. One) and the resonances they all had with one another. An early idea that was rejected by the two was that at the end of Richard III, there would be a quick change to transform Slinger in to Richard II; thus having the tail of the cycle bite the head. This sort of thinking was right at the centre of the life of the octology. Another example was that the actress playing Joan of Arc in Henry VI Pt. One, on Joan’s death, was immediately reincarnated as something more dangerous in the form of Margaret. The presence of ghosts and a palpable sprit realm gave a rich dimension to all eight plays and one that had to be considered by the actors. By creating this palpable sense of afterlife, in the form of thematically driven doubling, Boyd had found a driving force for the octology and found a literal form for the cycle of dynastic revenge. It also enabled the audience to think, in cosmological terms, like Elizabethans. So preparing the two roles simultaneously, (the only actor in the history of the RSC to do so), provided some fascinating perspectives on both.

Once more, in order for Slinger to freely experiment in the rehearsal room he had to have a strong line through both roles at the start of rehearsals. He was looking for “truthful resonances” through eight plays and even more roles, forward and back through history and into heaven, hell and purgatory. But as always his preparation was text first and psychological motivation second coupled with a good deal of gut instinct. On beginning his preparation of the full octology Slinger said

“In this extraordinary web of interwoven stories and brilliant double casting much of the work was done for you. Many relationships and resonances were already found. But Shakespeare is endlessly three dimensional, web-like and mathematical. It’s like pure maths or Jazz, where everything free-forms brilliantly around a core that never alters. This brilliant virtuosic free-forming is there in the writing and you can find strands as with maths that take you on extraordinary tangents, but which ultimately take you back to the same place. So we were constantly finding things, which fitted perfectly with what we were doing already. Other brilliant bits of doubling would just shoot out of that structure without any of us having thought about it. So in amongst the chaos, in order for those extraordinary co-incidences that were not co-incidences to occur, you had to be true to it somewhere. Shakespeare’s writing is incredibly malleable, but you can only bend it so far, you have to stay within the parameters of what he was writing, which is always the truth”.

In preparation for Richard II and Richard III Slinger saw inherent similarities between the two characters as well as their vast differences, quite early on in his process.

“I thought that for Richard III, Richard II was like a physical ideal. At one stage I even thought that Richard III should keep a portrait of Richard II hanging in his study. Physically I wanted to make them as antithetical as I could. But then I began to consider that they were actually very similar in terms of their psychology”.

When talking about Richard III Slinger felt that his deformity was the least damaging factor in the formation of his psychology. He became fascinated by the absence of his mother in the three plays in which he exists,

“Until she appears half-way through Richard III and utterly goes for him [the long duologue in act four, scene four]. The lines in Henry VI Pt. Three about his birth that are the last thing that Henry VI says before he is killed by Richard have an impact too [“Thy mother felt more than a mother’s pain / And, yet brought forth less than a mother’s hope / To wit an indigested and deformed lump…Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born”]. I started to get the image of a mother for whom the deformity is repulsive; that the way in which he thought about his deformity was created by the way she thought about it. She rejects and abandons him. Its a well worn path, what that sort of thing does to somebody. How much love and attention you get in those early years creates your self esteem. If you are made to feel repulsive and you put that in the mix with the fact of the deformity and add to it a strong, ambitious, martial father who he adores and looks up to, you have the volatile psychological mix of Richard III”

The respective King’s relationships with their fathers was the root of their similarities in Slinger’s mind

“Richard II is the son of the Black Prince, who pre-Henry V is the ultimate kingly role model. Richard isn’t like that, he’s a more sensitive aesthete, not some ‘Mr. Big Dick’ alpha male. He likes painting, he likes music, he’s an actor. I can see what the effect would be of being found out to be a complete and utter nancy-boy and rejected by a father who is the most complete manifestation of maleness ever. For him this would be horrific”.

With this in mind Slinger began to construct some clear lines through the two parts. In the first instance, working with the drums through Boyd’s Henry VIs, he had decided that Richard III was all about drums and martial rhythms. From this came the repetitive rhythmic movements mentioned earlier, which manifested itself in him heightening the martial rhythms in the text particularly in the section before he becomes King. The combination of pulsing rhythmic text and movement became darkly mesmeric in the duologue with Lady Anne and gave his Gloucester a manifest sense of momentum, almost like some grotesque metronome. There was a heightened sense of attack on the iambic pulse using the lower register of his voice.

If Richard III was about rhythm, in the first instance Richard II was about melody. Slinger chose to experiment with a higher more melodious tone in his voice, using his tenor register.

“It was quite interesting, but after a while it stopped me being able to control or connect with his power. So keeping the idea of melody in my mind I dropped it down to my more natural, lower register, so that authority was more accessible”.

In the only moment during our interviews in which Slinger referred to extra-textual research, he talked about the image of Richard II going to the head of the mob and quelling the peasants revolt at the age of fourteen; a striking image of natural authority. He felt he had to embrace that tension between the fey, aesthetically interested, musical and very creative man and the forceful and engaging public figure. A clear, strong line was emerging and the result was an extraordinary confection.

Slinger’s Richard was a Quentin Crisp-esque figure, both strongly male and strongly female. It was Richard II as Elizabeth I. Tom Piper’s design had him sporting auburn ringlets, an earring, white face make up, lipsitick, a ruff, with extraordinarily delicate pearl trimmed ivory breeches and cape. It was a vision of glorious Elizabethan England (it was also another prompt for the Histories audience to think like Elizabethans). This image was in contrast to Slinger’s resonant, manly voice and his very manly frame. From the moment he entered through the auditorium, there was a strong sense of the emotional and political territory that we were in. The link to Elizabeth I was enlightening. This monarch was simultaneously male and female, a troubling mix of vulnerable and predatory, innocent and wise, beautiful and ugly, attractive and repulsive. The look was part artistic creation, part trap. It was clear how, by retreating in to every sort of ambiguity that this Richard controlled his court and how the court of the Black Prince was threatened by their new monarch. The tension was palpable in act one scene one he watched the squabbles of Norfolk and Bolingbroke from behind his gilded mask with an inscrutable half-smile. At the beginning of the octology strong elemental conflicts had been released and these conflicts, political, personal, psychical and sexual were embodied by Slinger’s Richard. Indeed it set the tone for the multi-dimensional exploration of power in all eight plays.

Michael Boyd remarked, when talking about Richard III that “Jonathan revels in the way that he repulses people and sells it as part of his charm”. The same could be said of his Richard II. It was fascinating to watch Richard II grow from the soil of Richard III. Boyd recalled that

“Richard II emerged after Richard III’s terrible dream at the battle of Bosworth, where he realised that he didn’t love himself, he was sort of reborn as the image that he would never allow anyone to see himself desiring, which is elegant, beautiful, fragile, safe in the company of men. There was something very queenly, very refined, very intelligent, very high strategy. This was taken from him by Bolingbroke, a very craggy, heterosexual testosterone fuelled man coming once more to condemn him”.

By having his gilded persona literally and metaphorically stripped away from him in this production, Slinger didn’t move in to monstrous self obsession, but in to a sort of ascetic, monastic enlightenment. Boyd commented that

“There was a genuine sense of grace within him. It was a good achievement to see this fantastically inventive actor, who I would criticise for being too in love with props, to be so happy with nothing as an actor. I think he just instinctively knew that he should be alone in letting his thoughts in”.

For Richard III, there was a sense that both collaborators were going to let their imaginations run wild. This was a role that was expected to play to Slinger’s strength as an actor and as a creative force within the company. For Boyd this was an opportunity to do the Richard III he had been unable to do in the 1990s in his original productions of the first tetralogy. Due to personal reasons Boyd felt that he couldn’t do the production that leapt out of the broadly period aesthetic of the Henry VIs to have a more contemporary feel for Richard III. But this time Boyd and Piper had decided to go for it.

Slinger playing Richard III in the new thrust space with the audience surrounding him on three sides was something that excited Boyd. He felt that there was a directness that had to be embraced in that configuration

“and Jonathan is appallingly direct”. Certainly there was a sense that in this new theatre, there was nowhere to hide. Theatricality had to be embraced because of the shared nature of the space. It is a space naturally more hostile to sets and conventional theatrical spectacle, but more friendly to fearless actors.

In Boyd’s modern dress Richard III, Slinger gave a simpler more touching Richard than many expected. There were moments of mad comic invention on the way. Until late on in rehearsals the opening scene of Richard III was to be set at a children’s party and Slinger had decided to inhale some helium for parts of the opening soliloquy. Boyd cut this in favour of a starker, simpler opening. This Richard, perhaps reflecting his Richard II, was a journey towards heartbreaking self-knowledge. Boyd felt that Slinger

“Put the devil on stage and set about telling you very directly that he’s right, which is very alarming and challenging. He has the ability to play an appalling egotism, which is free to be charming and to defend his position utterly. But as Richard he conquered the other side of the role, which appears after the dream, where he is skinless and naked. So that ability to suck us in becomes very important. He can draw us to him, even though we are appalled and repelled”

The dream sequence in Richard III encapsulated so much of Slinger’s processes and tastes as an actor. He stripped down to his slightly soiled y-fronts by the end of the sequence showing plenty of cleavage to the audience sat all around him. He once more eyeballed the audience sat a metre away from his feet. This time the connection with the audience was not one of dark, playful complicity; but one that seemed to simply say ‘help me’. This moment was at once amusing, vulnerable, sad, disgusting and strangely sensual. But most importantly he allowed the text to sit beautifully and simply on top of this maelstrom of contradiction.

KING RICHARD: What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is I am I
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay wherefore should they, - since that I myself
Find in myself no pity in myself.

Slinger remarked that he didn’t know how his ideas for the part would impact on the production

“But when we had done the dream scene it all made sense. It became a complete unraveling of how he felt about the deformity and everything”.

The psychoses of Richard II and Richard III came from the place of the divided self and made manifest the idea of how the self becomes warped in pursuit of power. This profound understanding of the corrosive impact of the political on the personal seemed to be at the centre of Boyd’s extraordinary productions. Slinger’s troubled monarchs, both monsters in their own right, tackled the idea of the public performance of monarchy but also let the audience in to a very private place.

So it’s interesting to note one of Slinger’s more general thoughts about acting that underpin his approach to Shakespeare, the following was laced through with some self aware laughter as has repeated the words ‘me’ and ‘myself’

“I think it’s about exploring me, actually. Not about being somebody else, or being more comfortable in another character. It’s a liberating experience, exploring things about myself through another character. I love exploring things about myself that I never get to explore whilst being me. Acting’s about using as much of me as I can and using my own experience and my own imagination to make it real for me. Making it real to an audience is about making it real for me, the moment there’s a truthful resonance within me, then I know it’s working for me and by extension it’s working for everybody else. That’s what acting’s about for me, it’s a very self-obsessed, very selfish thing, purely about my enjoyment. If I’m enjoying myself, which is about connecting with something truthful within myself, then they [the audience] are”.

In my experience it’s rare to hear an actor talk about ‘enjoying’ himself. But it’s at the centre of Slinger’s appeal on stage. As is his ability to take himself just seriously enough, but never too seriously. To bring just enough of himself to proceedings, but not too much. To be totally absorbed in his character, but like many fine comedians always preserving enough of himself to be able to look the audience in the eye as if to say ‘isn’t this ridiculous?’.

In his brilliant ‘Note on Shakespeare’, Harold Pinter says that the plays are “a wound that Shakespeare does not attempt to sew up or re-shape, whose pain he does not attempt to deaden”. For Slinger there is a conscious attempt to keep the wound open not to caurterise it, to revel in ambiguity, to never fully be known. The metaphor of theatre is central to Shakespeare’s exploration of the human condition; the sad truth that we are often poorly cast for the roles that life demands of us. By seeking to not to bridge that gap but to celebrate and enjoy it in his acting, at his best Slinger taps in to an elemental energy in Shakespeare. At times his acting is not always comfortable for either performer or audience, and his experiments are not always successful, but they are rooted in a knack to be unfailingly real and vividly, messily human.

Chronology

JANUARY 2005 A Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsals commence in London.
APRIL 2005 A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. A Comedy of Errors rehearses in Stratford-upon- Avon.
JULY 2005 A Comedy of Errors opens at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
FEBRUARY 2006 Henry VIs start rehearsing in London.
JULY / AUGUST 2006 Henry VIs open at Courtyard Theatre, Stratford- upon-Avon
SEPTEMBER 2006 Richard III rehearses in London.
DECEMBER 2006 Richard III opens, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford- upon-Avon.
JANUARY 2007 First tetralogy plays in its entirety, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
FEBRUARY 2007 Second tetralogy starts rehearsing in London.
JULY / AUGUST 2007 Second tetralogy opens, Courtyard Theatre Stratford-upon-Avon
SEPTEMBER 2007 Re-rehearse Henry VIs in London
NOVEMBER 2007 Henry VIs go back in to the Repertoire in Stratford
JANUARY 2008 Re-rehearse all eight plays in London.
MARCH 2008 All eight plays play in repertoire at the Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon.
APRIL 2008 The full eight play cycle opens at the Roundhouse, Theatre, London.
JUNE 2008 The final ‘Glorious Moment’ in which all eight histories play in historical sequence from Richard II finishing with the final performance of Richard III.

Biography
JONATHAN SLINGER – Trained at RADA. Theatre for the RSC includes The Histories Cycle, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, The American Pilot (by David Greig), The Gods Weep (by Dennis Kelly). Other Theatre includes Yes, Prime Minister (Chichester), Power, The Duchess of Malfi, The Coast of Utopia, Richard II, The Machine Wreckers (National Theatre) Uncle Vanya (Young Vic), As You Like It, Dreaming (Manchester Royal Exchange) The Winter’s Tale, The Maid’s Tragedy (Shakespeare’s Globe), along with numerous television and film credits.


© Phillip Breen