The artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London is Mark Rylance, one of the most acclaimed classical actors of his generation; but Rylance doesn't keep all the best roles for himself. He is keen to promote others, and in a recent interview said to me, "I don't want to deny some of the great actors who are coming forward here, like Jasper Britton and Paul Higgins, the chance to play the big parts." So while Rylance is this season's Olivia in "Twelfth Night" (in an all-male staging), Oberon in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is being played by Higgins, a rising young star whose career has embraced both classical and new plays, from Ibsen and Shakespeare to David Hare and (earlier this year at the Royal Court) Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse's controversial "Nightsongs," not to mention Peter Oswald's upcoming "The Golden Ass" at the Globe.
Hailing from Wishaw, a small town near Glasgow in Scotland, he trained at London's Central School of Speech and Drama from 1983 to 1986, but almost hadn't become an actor at all. He was originally going to be a priest, but then was about to go to university to read English and philosophy when he changed his mind again after attending a summer drama camp just before he was due to start his degree. "I didn't think about becoming an actor until the very last minute—but doing the summer course I discovered I liked it and was good at it. So I took a year out to audition from the drama schools, and was accepted by Central."
He came to London, and admits, "I was pretty lazy—I took up smoking and drinking and I don't think I did as much as I could have done." Looking back on the teaching he received, he goes on, "I wish it had been more rigorous—and I wish I had been rigorous, too." Central doesn't apply a single philosophy to its actor training: "It prides itself on having no specific approach, but being able to pick and mix from various ones. But I wish there had been a more systematic approach." He discovered the potential benefits of one only last year, when Mike Alfreds (who is now directing him in "A Midsummer Night's Dream") directed him in a new play by Philip Osment, "Buried Alive." "Working with Mike has been the biggest education for me I've yet had. He adheres to Stanislavski techniques, and doing 'Buried Alive' was like a drama school education. Over the five-week rehearsal period, I learnt things that I had no idea about and wish I had been taught. I know that if I had, I would have latched onto it."
As Alfreds has now gone on to direct him in a Shakespeare play, can he discern any differences in the ways to use those methods to approach classical and contemporary roles at all? "The approach is slightly different; it's possibly less rigorous with Shakespeare, because Shakespeare doesn't respond so well to some of Stanislavski's routines and exercises. So it was slightly more conventional than the way we worked on 'Buried Alive.' But my own approach between a new play and a classical one is not all that different, though there are more technicalities to master with a classical role, like dealing with verse and volume. With a verse play, you have to acknowledge the verse but not let it take over, so that you don't become a slave to the rhythm or a slave to the structure. You have to learn to be alive within those technicalities: to avoid being so free that you mess the verse up, but also to avoid being so pernickety with the verse that your performance is dead. In the end, the verse does carry you along if you let go and give in to it; but you need to know it inside out so that you can relax about it, rather than thinking about it all the time. Then you can do your main job as an actor, which is about none of that stuff, but rather to be the person you are playing, to know the objectives that the person is trying to achieve, and always trying to change the person you're talking to—to always be active within a scene."
That's required regardless of whether the play is classical or contemporary—and the label is irrelevant anyway. "A good play is a good play," says the versatile Higgins, who hankers most to play the Scottish Thane again: "I played Macbeth for English Touring Theatre at the same time that Mark Rylance was doing it here, and that was nerve-wracking. But I now feel I've learnt so much at the Globe and from watching Mark, who really knows how to play Shakespeare, that I would love to take what I've learnt now to go back to the play and start from that."
—Mark Shenton