Richard Armitage in Conversation@the Old Vic2014/09/03 14:44




9月2日、The Crucibleが行われているロンドン、the Old Vic劇場で夕方の5:00~5:45にかけて行われた"Richard Armitage in Conversation"の様子をRA.netのAliさんが紹介して下さっています:

撮影も行われていたそうなので、そのうち動画がアップされるかもしれませんね。

さて、Old Vicの円形の舞台にむかって左手にインタビュアの演劇評論家マット・ウルフ氏が、右手にリチャードが座って、インタビュー形式で行われた模様です。
印象に残ったところをかいつまんでご紹介します。

Aliさん、リチャードのスーツや靴は詳細に観察したようですが(ちなみに黒のスーツに白いシャツ、ネクタイなしで、どこで着用していたものかまで観察したらしく感心)、ウルフさんの服装は覚えていないそうで!ま、分かりますが。

このジョン・プロクター役をやることになった経緯について:Urban and the Shed Crewの撮影中にYael Farberが訪ねてきて、一緒に作り上げて行こうと言ったようですが、リチャードは自分につとまるか不安だったみたいですね(いつもリチャードは謙虚(^_^;))

リチャードはこのジョン・プロクターという役、ドラマスクール時代にやったことがあって、自分の体の肉を燃やし尽くしたくなるような役だから、それが自分に出来るか分からないとYael Farberに言ったそうですが、彼女は、一緒に模索してみようと励ましたらしく、きっと本当にリチャードにこの役をやってもらいたかったんですね。

ジョン・プロクターの声をどう作り上げたかについては、10年前に舞台に戻ろうと思った時、Alexander Techniqueを試みたそうで、このアレクサンダー・テクニークについては、日本語のwikiページがありましたので、ご参照を。

舞台と観客席の近さについてですが、最初Yaelさん、前の二列を黒いカバーで覆う予定だったのだとか!(よかった、実行されなくて)。リチャードは観客の近さで気が散るということはなく(すごい!)かえって、観客の反応が身近に感じられて、それが刺激的な雰囲気を作っていたと思うとのこと。
(←まあちゃん、どうします?(^_-))

ちなみに、この写真でリチャードが座っているのが最前列のベンチシートです。リチャードのこの長〜い脚だと、キャストに邪魔になるほどの距離感:


上映中に携帯が鳴ったことが二度だけあると言っていましたが、私が9回観たうちでも3回ぐらいはあったような・・・でもキャストでそういう時どう反応するか話合っていたそうで、たしかに一度、大きな音で鳴った時、キャストにも聞こえたのでしょう、ダンフォース役のジャック・エリスさんが一瞬台詞をストップして鳴り止むのを待ったことがありました。
日本だと携帯を切れってしつこくアナウンスしますが、あえて言わないんですね、英国だと。でも言っても言わなくても鳴らす人はいるんだなあ。
それはともかく、リチャードはドラマスクール時代からこういう円形の劇場になれていて、観客が一体感が持てると言っていますが、本当にそうでした!


マチネと一日二公演の日についてですが、リチャード、エネルギーをセーブするなんてことは出来なかった、と言っていますが、まさにその通りだと思います!マチネで「うわ〜、こんなに熱演しちゃって、もう一公演あるのに声が、体力が持つの?」って思いましたもの。でもキャラクターとして燃え尽きるところまで毎回行ってしまうというのが、すごくよく分かりました。抑えきれないんでしょうね、きっと。
そして、毎回、公演ごとに新たな発見があると語るリチャード、すばらしい!

リチャードのジョン・プロクター役を演じるストレスは大変なものだったようで、リハーサルの時、Act 4(クライマックスです)では嘔吐したり失禁したりしてしまって、本当に毎日演じることが出来るだろうかと思ったほどだそうです。(@_@;)
食べると吐いてしまうから、あまり食べないようにして、とにかく肉体的にも感情的にもものすごく消耗するから、どこから演じ続けるエネルギーが生まれるのか分からないけれど、この戯曲がそれを可能にしてくれている・・・ええ〜、本当に身を削って演じてくれているんですね、リチャード。9/13が来たら倒れてしまわないかしらと心配になってきました。

この戯曲を演じるにあたって、リチャードは実際にマサチューセッツのセイラムを訪ね、その土地がもつ感覚記憶を自分の中に組み入れたそうです。このsense memoryってメソッド・アクティングの手法なんですね。リチャード、プロクターの家など、主要な場所を訪ねたそうです。レベッカ・ナースの家の片隅には、ベビーベッドが置いてあったそう・・・。(レベッカは悪霊を送って赤ん坊を殺したという告訴を否定して絞首刑になります)。

ジョン・プロクターを単なるシンボルではなく3Dのキャラクターにするために何をしたかという問には、当時の過酷な生活を追体験するために、マサチューセッツの農家に滞在して、斧を4時間(!)研ぎ続けたり、二日間、牛小屋や尿の掃除をしたのだそうです!!
え〜、これ初耳です!すばらしいわ、リチャードのプロ根性!
ほんとに斧が研げるようになった、なんて言っていますが、ジョンの農夫らしい肉体と雰囲気は、ちゃんとそういうリチャードの努力あってこそ出来上がったものだったのですね。脱帽!

このアーサー・ミラーの戯曲が赤狩り、マッカーシズムのアレゴリーであることはよく知られているけれど、リチャードはこの戯曲から何を感じ取ったかということについては、これが時代を超えて、現代にも共通するテーマだと感じていて、実際、現実に抑圧に直面している人からの手紙を受け取って(ベルリンの壁を経験した人、もっと最近のガザの住民からも)その手紙をパフォーマンスの前に読み返すのを、舞台の前の準備の一環に組み入れているのだそうです。

キャストはみなそれぞれが様々な思いを込めて演じているけれども(Yael Farberは南アフリカでアパルトヘイトを体験している)、リチャードは最近のUKの教育改革で、GCSEのシラバスからMichael Gove(日本でいうと文科相かな)が、To Kill a MockingbirdやOf Mice and Menを削除したりして、一種の国粋主義的なシラバスを推進した教育改革(改悪)、極右翼勢力による抑圧などを思うそうで、これには会場から拍手が湧いたそうです。ほんとに・・・全世界的なんですね、おそろしい右傾化。リチャード自身、そしてリチャードをサポートするファンがそれに立ち向かう立場でいてくれることに、勇気づけられます。

こんなに長くジョン・プロクターを演じていて、どうやって役から抜け出すのか?という質問には、まず血を洗い流すことから始めて・・・でも完全に抜け出しきれず、外で待っているファンと挨拶しても、すべてが霧の中みたいな感覚の時もあるそうです。う〜ん、そうかあ。まあ、ファンの方もみんなリチャードを前に頭真っ白ですけどね(少なくとも私はそうでした)。

さきほども、リチャードが舞台の前にベルリンの壁の体験者やガザの住民からの手紙を読み返すということ、触れましたが、リチャードは音楽を聴いたり、暗いところで一人集中するとのことで、これはトーリンを演じた時と同じなのかしらね。

集中力を高めるために聞く音楽として、デヴッド・ダーリングのチェロ組曲、アルヴォ・ペルト、クシシュトフ・ペンデレツキをあげています。ヴァイオリンが叫び声みたいな音をたてるホロコーストをテーマにした曲があって、それをかけていると、誰もリチャードのドアをノックしないのだとか(笑)。

次はミュージカルかコメディをやりたいか?という問には、ミュージカルはないけど、コメディはいいかもということで、やってほしいですね、是非!

シチューに入っていたニンジンが喉につまってしまって大変だったことがあるというエピソード、うわ、苦しかったでしょうね。

それから、好きな場面として、Act Twoのジョンとエリザベスがぎくしゃくした関係を修復しようとする静かな場面をあげていて、これは納得。リチャードの演技で一番私が心打たれたのも、妻と心を通わせようともがくジョンの姿、そして最後にはそれを成し遂げて死へ向かう姿だったから。

かいつまんで、なんてけっこう長くなってしまいました。(^_^;)
でも、こうしたインタビューを読むたび、リチャード・アーミティッジのファンでよかった、なんて素晴らしい人なのだろうと、愛が深まり、胸が一杯になります。

Oakentoon #91~932014/09/05 09:58

Oakentoonの#91~93、どれも長いですが、おもしろいです。(^o^)






Richard Armitage in Conversation <Part One>トランスクリプト+音声2014/09/07 09:54

Film and TV Nowに掲載されたthe Old VicでのThe Crucibleに関するリチャード・アーミティッジのインタビューのパート1のトランスクリプトと音声です
この間の記事は、RA.netのaliさんの記憶に基づく手記を私がかいつまんでご紹介したものでしたので、リチャードが実際にしゃべった言葉を確認いただくのは、この記事でどうぞ:



[Sat under the blaring, yellow spotlights, two red chairs and a single wooden table were placed strategically centre stage at the Old Vic in London.

The chattering audience was abuzz with excitement and sat patiently anticipating the arrival of the man they had all come to see – that man being Richard Armitage. To a rapturous and welcoming applause, he took his place stage left and smiled graciously at his spectators, ready for his potential grilling by theatre critic Matt Wolf to discuss all things The Crucible – the play he is currently starring in as John Proctor.] MW: Many thanks to Richard Armitage for speaking with us today. I saw the preview for this production and actually wrote the preview for this, 5 or 6 performances in. Now it’s in the last two weeks of the run, is it a very different production?

RA: It’s hard to know because we have been with it every single day it’s a bit like watching your child grow or trying to lose weight. It certainly has embedded in me deeper than that first exploration in front of the audience. The first time we performed it I was so shocked at the laughter of the play, the humour, the gasps, the shocks, the breathing of the audience and the emotion by the end of them. That has stayed with us throughout the run. I think we are just so much deeper into it so the descent of my character and the ascent, hopefully is higher.

MW: How did you end up in the production? It has been a dozen years of war since you last did a play in London…

RA: According to the Daily Mail it has been 13 years! My agent and I thought that… every year we talk about doing a play and in my head I thought it had only been five years since I had been on stage, so when I read that it had been 13 years, I was shocked and slightly ashamed. But it wasn’t for want of trying. What we were looking for is exactly what we had found at this moment in time. What I believe in really is that it’s about being in the right time and place. This particular play and this particular director, in this theatre, in this configuration, it just felt absolutely right. We talked about doing something that would be an event and certainly for me, it feels like it has been a real event and I’m sorry that we are in our final two weeks now.

MW: So, was there a sort of phone call? John Proctor, Old Vic, Yael Farber, yes or no?

RA: It was a ‘do you want to do The Crucible?’ I said ‘yes’ because it’s a play that I coveted since I was at drama school. When I was at drama school, there were four actors playing John Proctor in my first year and I tackled Act 4 of the play, so I had a tiny sample of what this character was and I was a 20-year-old actor who knew nothing about life, so coming back to it in rehearsals, or even the potential to come back to it, something had touched me and ignited me and my teachers. You know when you have done something significant because nobody says anything and everyone of my tutors looked at me and I knew that I had done something different. So the chance to come back and explore that, as a… 42-year-old… (giggles), it was kind of exciting and thrilling.

I was filming up in Leeds, I was on an independent movie and Yael travelled up. I think we had about an hour because she was about to go on to a plane to go back to Montreal. We met for breakfast and I was absolutely exhausted and so was she and she said ‘what scares you about this play?’ I said ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’ She said ‘why?’ and I said ‘the play makes me want to burn my own flesh off my body and I can’t do it.’ She said, ‘well I will take you there. I will take you to the edge. We will go there together.’ It’s something I have never forgotten – that meeting. I’m so glad that we did go to the edge together.

MW: So what was the experience of having 25% of the play already in your muscle memory like?

RA: The final quarter of the play are words that I still find them hard to say and hard 20 years ago, but I never had to revisit a kind of drill of learning the lines of that portion, it somehow stayed in my mind, or somewhere in my body. It was just a gentle reminder of what the words were and what they meant. Every night I get to Act 4 and think what a privilege it is to take a character to that place with those lines. Sometimes I think ‘ I don’t know if I can do this today. I don’t know if I can get there, but the play takes you there, the lines take you there and Miller absolutely takes the character from there to there. When he calls to God at the end and I sort of see a particular light and for some reason it just catches me in the eye and I feel an ascent. It’s amazing. With a great playwright like Arthur Miller, you know why when you are inside the character like that. 

MW: It’s been a pretty extraordinary year in London for American plays, was the American cannon a large part of your training when you were in LAMDA?

RA: We were very lucky. We had an opportunity to explore drama, which was largely based on classical theatre, so you start with Shakespeare, Greek, but we did tackle Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller… so I had a taste of everything and obviously The Crucible is on many curriculums in school…The whole point of theatre is being introduced to other cultures and find your introduction to other cultures.

MW: Was it interesting finding the voice for this role? Not just how he should sound, but also to get you across eight shows a week and across three months?

RA: Yeah, it was an ongoing experiment I suppose. Often when I tackle characters for TV or film, you have to decide what kind of voice you are going to produce and then go away and work on it. With this, I never made that decision. We decided on a certain vernacular, a dialect, which would be appropriate, so they felt like commoners. I also wanted a commanding voice. I felt like a man who worked out in the fields, calling to his animals. I wanted a certain tone, which commands authority. (Reads out a description of Proctor by Arthur Miller).

When I first met Proctor, I felt like a fool in his presence and I tried to figure out why. It is still something to do with that dignity, despite his grassroots. I think that the fact that he had the ability to make others feel foolish, he was singled out as someone who would be defended by others and that’s exactly what happened to him in the play. It resonates with others… sorry you’re talking about the voice aren’t you… (bursts of laughter) My voice is something, which has evolved throughout the play and I think I had one particular dodgy matinee where I got a bit of carrot stuck in my throat from Elizabeth Proctor’s stew and literally for the other half of Act 2, I am trying to choke my way through and then after that at the stage door everyday were pots of honey. I work with a teacher who is a brilliant woman and guided me through this. Ten years ago when I wanted to go back onstage, I got into contact with her and I said ‘I need a voice. I need to find that voice again.’ It (the voice) has been a constant maintenance.

MW: You said it was ten years ago when you wanted to go back on stage, so it has taken ten years…

RA: Well, I called her and went ‘do you remember that conversation…?’

MW: You were saying that one of the attractions of this was the configuration of course, what was it about being in the round that was important to you?

RA: It’s interesting because I was in a musical called ‘Cats’ years and years and years ago, and all of my favourite plays at drama school was in the round, so my experience of theatre at its best has been either in traverse or theatre in the round. I love that immediacy and the way as an audience member I like being in the round as well. It’s great because you get to see the audience across the space experiencing the same play. There’s something very particular about this play, as an audience we become a witness as to what is happening and we witness each other witnessing it. I think that has ignited every audience member who has come and seen this play. It will be sad to see the Old Vic go back to its familiar state, but it is a national monument so it should.

MW: Actually, I’d like to talk more about that sense of having the audience so present, do you feel it brings the audience in or do you feel distracted by what somebody is doing in the front row?

RA: The audience is as fascinating as the people on stage – not visually – I have 21 other faces that are compelling me in this space, but you have to sense the audience and we feel the audience acutely. As I said earlier on; breathing with the play, laughing with the play, crying with the play, gasping with shock and being outraged, sometimes you can really hear a vocalization of that, which actually feeds the play, it propels us forward, it makes us dig deeper. Obviously the mobile phones are… actually we have been very lucky, we have had one or two and we came to an agreement that we would stop and not make it an issue. I like the fact that the audience feel that they can be vocal and that they are as present in this world as we are. Sometimes you just blur your eyes slightly when you get too close to someone who is wearing a very bright outfit. I think Yael really wanted something to cover the first couple of rows with some black clothing, so that for other audience members there wasn’t any bright colour in this dark, somber world, but I think that is something which was too hard to achieve and at the same time I do think it’s quite good that we do see each other in the front row.

MW: I have seen a lot of productions of The Crucible, but I have never seen a production that has the atmosphere of this one, all the attributes that we associate with Yael. She seems to have such a particular directorial signature. How important was it to you that she was bringing all of these things to the play and what was it about her direction that has really helped the production and you?

RA: She has a very acute awareness of what she calls the ‘visceral’ – I had to Google it to find out what it meant! It’s a full-bodied matter that’s in your body. It’s where the emotions are kept that are in your body, not in the mind, so anything from the neck up is highly intelligent and has its equal place on stage, but she is interested in a full body experience. When Cheever comes in in Act 2 to take my wife, I don’t feel it in my head, I feel it in my stomach, in my knees and in my bowels and that’s exactly what she has programmed the play to be. She worked very closely with a fantastic movement director called Imogen Knight; both of them were inspired by so many different influences. We were listening to some similar music: Arvo Pärt…. And all of those things seem to marry at the same time and it was the first day of rehearsal that we were all in the right rehearsal room with the right people. It was almost accidental.

MW: It is such a detail or affect that must have been there when you were finally putting it all together and it must be in a sense quite startling for the cast to see what they have to do…

RA: I remember we never sat down at the table and read the play; we were always on our feet. We started working on Act 1 got that together and then we would work on Act 2, then we would go back to Act 1 and out Act 1 and 2 together. I remember the terror of getting through Act 1 and thinking, ‘God, that was pretty tough’ and then getting to the end of Act 2 and sort of being on my knees vomiting in a bucket, just from Act 1 and 2, then putting Act 3 on the end. Then, when we finally did all four acts and I was sat in corner shaking and Yael came over to me and said ‘are you ok?’ I said ‘yeah – and we have to do this twice on Wednesday’s and Saturday’s!’ (laughter from the audience).

It’s a bit like running the marathon where the landmarks help along the way, so you recognise; ok I am there in the journey. It’s where the play just sort of takes you and then suddenly you find yourself at the curtain call, but you don’t quite know how you got there… Was that your question..? (laughter).

リチャード・アーミティッジ写真 by Sarah Dunn +The Crucibleのストーリーボード2014/09/09 09:53

リチャードのお気に入りの写真家(ってツイートしていましたけど、その写真を見ると、彼女のお気に入りのリチャードじゃないの?↓)ですが


このサラ・ダンの撮ったリチャードの写真三点:



2013年の写真だと思いますが、The Crucibleのジョン・プロクターになりきったリチャードと全然印象が違うのでびっくりです!

さて、いよいよ9月9日、The Crucibleの収録日です!それに向けて、Digital Theatreのロバート・デラメアさんが、ストーリーボードをツイートしています。

第二幕のジョン・プロクターが帰宅して体を洗うシーンをわざと載せているところ、女性ファンの購買意欲をかき立てようとしているのかしら〜。(^_^;)
そんなシーンがなくたって、純粋にRAの演技のために買いますのにねえ!


ついでに、リチャードがツイートしていた、出待ちのファンの整理係のOlaさん。こうしてちゃんと御礼をするところ、リチャードってやっぱりいい人ですね。
はい、私とまあちゃんもお世話になりました。Olaさん、リチャードへのプレゼントを持ってくれていましたね。
リチャードのファン、Olaさんの指示通りにちゃんと一列に壁際におとなしく並んでいたし、とてもお行儀よかったと思いますが、それでも毎晩毎晩大変だったでしょう。Olaさん、お疲れさまでした!


リチャードがTweetしてくれるようになって、なんだか距離が縮まった感じがしてうれしいですよね!

The Crucible カーテンコール@2014.09.092014/09/14 20:37

Digital TheatreでのThe Crucibleのthe Old Vicでの収録の日のカーテンコールの様子です。
リチャードが脚本・演出のファーバー女史をぎゅ〜っと抱きしめています。感無量ですね。