Staging the Soliloquy
Bringing a Shakespearean Convention to the Modern Theatre
Shakespeare's soliloquies, like "To be or not to be", can be daunting to produce, but there are ways to bring this Shakespearean technique to life.
Performing a Shakespeare soliloquy should be one of the high point of a role. The actor is given a chance to engage with the audience directly, speaking straight to them and exploring the character’s feelings and thoughts – vindicating the character’s subjectivity. It can be quite an opportunity for the kind of slavish attention and admiration which, though obviously unsought, comes as a nice bonus.
However, actors often find soliloquies difficult when actually staging Shakespeare. It can feel extremely false to simply turn to an audience and begin unburdening – even how to pitch the voice can be an issue – confidential aside or emotional outburst? There are several ways to stage a soliloquy, in order to avoid ending up stranded like a beached whale in the middle of the stage, caught between the cast and the audience.
Lighting
Some directors approach the soliloquy by visually separating the actor speaking from the rest of the cast via lighting. This makes some sense, as on the stage of The Globe and the Curtain (or even some of the later Restoration playhouses), an actor could step forward onto the “apron” and address the audience whilst closer to them than to the actors behind him. Modern lighting (unavailable at The Globe, where performances were carried out in daylight) is already used to focus attention, by lowering the house-lights, which almost cuts the audience off from each other, and places them in a new relationship with the lighted stage.
Focusing that attention further by isolating an individual actor can help create an intimate relationship between speaker and listeners. The upside of this is that it goes some way towards reproducing the link between actor and audience via modern techniques which the audience are familiar with. The downside is that it can slow down the play, disrupt the fluid relationship in Shakespeare’s plays between asides and main dialogue, and help cut off the speeches from the main action, encouraging the audience to hear them as “selections from the beauty of Shakespeare.”
Freeze-frame
An actor speaking a soliloquy can also be separated by making the rest of the cast “freeze” during the speech, or move in slow-motion When deployed well, this can be extremely effective, though it risks toppling over in humour: it’s easy to lose dignity whilst frozen in an unnatural attitude, or moving like the opening to Chariots of Fire. A production of Ford’s Tis Pity She’s A Whore used it for one of the last scenes, and the biting, satirical tone of that play suited it perfectly – it would be interesting to see a sarcastic, malcontented Hamlet delivering his lines in front of slow-motion cast.
Open stage
Of course, the soliloquy can be performed without any “special effects” whatsoever. The actor can simply detach themselves slightly from any other characters on stage and deliver their lines out at the audience. In Shakespeare, this is made easier by the verse – it is not completely dissimilar to reciting a poem in public, which also involves the adopting of a persona to express emotion directly to an audience. Another useful comparison is stand-up comedy. Comics often tell stories about themselves that aren’t literally true, or expound false ideas for effect – try watching a few stand-up videos to see how they develop a relationship with their audience. Michael French took this approach in Trevor Nunn’s 2001 TV production of The Merchant of Venice, using a microphone and jacket to turn Lancelot Gobbo’s soliloquy at Act 2 Scene ii into a stand-up sequence.
