Macbeth

What demands does the Globe put on an actor's voice?

The Globe stage places different demands on an actor than a conventional space. Since the beginning of the Globe in 1997, actors became very bewildered by this space because they’re seen by their audience: it’s a space of revelation, and they’re used to working in darkened theatres, where they don’t really see their audience. That’s the first thing.

The second thing of course is that it’s open air, so it has this huge volubility about it, the energy’s very broad so it’s very difficult to control it. In a black box theatre, you can see the size of the theatre and its limits, whereas here you just have the heavens.

The thing that I’ve always introduced to the actor is not to become bewildered and so to start "pushing" with the voice, but to really feel a weight and be grounded, so that the audience is drawn into the story. It’s something that I’ve developed here which is called the ‘magnetic voice’. So I’ve always worked on these very grounded, earthy, weightier notions of allowing the actor to feel his or her body really earthed in the geometry of the architecture and very earthed within the geometry of the verse, and then within the ‘feeling state’ that’s conjured.