Sense/memory/sense-memory: Reading narratives of Shakespearian rehearsals

Summary

‘I WANT TO SMELL THAT FEAR’

Rehearsals for a Christmas Eve pick-up production of Shakespeare's Hamlet have just begun in an insufficiently heated provincial village church in Kenneth Branagh's 1995 film, In the Bleak Midwinter (released in the United States as A Midwinter's Tale). Joe (Michael Maloney), a semi-employed actor who is directing, co-producing and starring in the production, is rehearsing his small ensemble of actors in the first scene. Carnforth (Gerald Horan), a bit-part character actor in provincial rep who routinely hides behind putty noses and crepe hair, is having trouble conveying Barnardo's fear in the play's first line, 'Who's there?' Joe instantly sees that Carnforth has no emotional connection to the material or the situation, and tells him, 'I want to see that fear - I want to smell that fear.' The actor repeats the line the same way. 'Let's take a little time out, here,' Joe then suggests, 'to ground this in some sort of reality. You tell me, Carnforth, when was the last time you were really terrified[?] Can you remember when that was or if there was such a time[?]'(p. 45). Carnforth remembers that his hands shook when he once tried to change a punctured tyre on the motorway on hisway to a birthday brunch for his mum. Joe asks him to try to recapture that fear, expecting him to bring the fear to the scene's given circumstances. But Carnforth misunderstands the exercise. He speaks the lines of the play, not as though he were on the battlements of Elsinore, but miming changing a tyre, as if he were on the shoulder of the motorway (illustration 56).