“Richard’s huge”: A few bullet points from Anna Madeley’s interview on Digital Theatre Plus

Anna Madeley describes one of the exercises she did with Richard Armitage to build intimacy and understand relational power while rehearsing The Crucible. Screencap.

[Edited for syntax]

This was an extremely interesting interview (more informative and provocative than the one with Yael Farber, in my opinion). Anna Madeley is tremendously lively and sweet (nothing at all like the character she played), and she’s definitely a hand-talker. At times the camera pulls away from her during the interview, I think because it gets distracting.

The interview starts with some general comments on who Elizabeth Proctor is, how she sees the world, and what motivates her. Madeley hits the point of the very heavy physical labor all the characters engage in. (She also says that the society of the play is much more accustomed to violence than ours; I found this a kind of questionable point; she seems to mean that the Proctors are afraid of Indians, have a gun and a whip in their house, and hit their kids. I guess “more” is always a matter of perspective.) She also thinks of Elizabeth as someone to whom integrity is crucial, someone who observes the world around her closely and in an “open hearted” way. Madeley uses the expression “open hearted” at least three times in the interview and at the end she sees this as the takeaway from the play. Madeley sees Elizabeth’s faith (both in the narrow, literal sense and in the larger, metaphorical sense of “hope,” I think) as the central motivating core for how she acts and reacts and sees the world.  Possibly the most interesting point she articulates that I hadn’t contemplated: that Elizabeth is very socially isolated out on the farm and that her children and husband (and her relationship with her hired woman, whoever that ends up being) are more important to her because of that.

Madeley also comments in some detail on Act Two, in Farber’s sense of seeing the most important pieces of that scene as the subtext, the things that are not said, as both Elizabeth and Proctor are trying extremely hard to recreate the pleasant, intimate moments of their family life even as the basis for that has been shaken — they need to move into the future rather than recreating the past but what they know how to do is to try to repeat their old patterns. She thinks Elizabeth is also conscious (and Madeley seems to smile at it when she recounts it) that Proctor has the potential to be led astray, that he has a tendency to want to “sweep things under the rug,” that he needs to be led, in a way, despite his innate power and social position, to realize what he has to do.

Potentially most interesting for fans of Richard Armitage will be Madeley’s comments on the rehearsal room and the exercises she and Armitage used to build their stage relationship. Much of their time was spent on exercises that were supposed to build intimacy. Here she mentions (as Farber did) pressing up against walls. They needed to create intimacy between the characters because they had to build up a past history for the relationship — the characters need to be acting in ways that reflect not only their current estrangement or distance, but also that reveal that in the past the marriage has worked. So they had to explore in exercises and in rehearsal not just the actual state of affairs, but consider what their normal level affection with each other would have been, to “try to be at one with one another.” They also had to look at the sexual level of their relationship — as she notes, she’s pregnant, so they are still having sex, but as she notes, “it’s not a happy one.”

Anna Madeley gestures to explain that “Richard’s huge.” Screencap.

They had to consider Proctor’s discomfort with being looked at by her and maintaining eye contact. Madeley describes Elizabeth as such a clear observer that she can tell when he is lying. So they did the exercise of each holding one end of a single pencil and moving it around to see who is leading and who is following, and what it does to each of the characters to make eye contact in that situation. They also did exercises (unspecified) that tested out his tendency toward violence and his power over her. As she says, “Richard’s huge, so he has that as an actor anyway” and that you wonder what would happen if he decided to use it, or you decided to contest it, “there’s only one way that would end.” Finally, they had to explore in exercises their responses to her situation of not wanting to be affectionate in the ways that she had been before his adultery and how that would affect their interactions with each other.

Then she turned to the hair coverings as a question of vanity, gender borders, and who is in / outside of one’s intimate circle. Madeley would not want to veil all the time, but the experience helped her see that she needed not to judge that society from a feminist perspective. Covering and uncovering her hair was interesting and useful for her in joining the world of the play. She also grew to find it “exciting” when the girls uncovered their hair.

Two other observations that interested me:

First, Madeley feels that it’s Elizabeth’s lie (saying that he did not sleep with Abigail) that makes Proctor realize that she really does love him, because he never thought she would do it, and she’s willing to sacrifice the thing that is most important to her: “for that woman to lie for him, he must matter.”

Secondly, and this I found interesting because it’s a sort of midrash on what’s going through Elizabeth’s mind in Act Four (something many of us have puzzled about), and it’s not something I’d considered: Madeley’s reading is a bit of a Gift of the Magi kind of ending: Elizabeth lets go her iron grasp on the narrow version of her principles, and Proctor finds his. She feels that Elizabeth pushes even harder to “have an open heart,” and she gives this gift to Proctor, “to have peace in your being and know that you’ve behaved in a way that you’re really fine with.” What will stay with her most from the job (Yael was an amazing director, a lot will stay with her) is, “yeah, the open-heartedness.”

~ by Servetus on April 11, 2015.