The comedian and actor on her favourite Bond film, revisiting the Death Star canteen and escaping the red carpet with Brad Pitt
When you started performing your one-woman Hamlet, how much did you labour over your delivery of the play’s most iconic lines, such as “To be or not to be”?
The first thing I found when I was rehearsing Hamlet was that I felt very at home. I thought, “That’s unusual – I should be quaking in my boots!” I just felt very at ease and happy to be there. But the first time I performed “to be or not to be” on stage, there was a sense of – aren’t bells supposed to ring here? Isn’t there supposed to be a klaxon?
I come to “to be” in a slightly different way each night so hopefully the audience haven’t seen it done that way before. I was a street performer for years, so I know how to talk to an audience, which is what they were doing in Shakespeare’s time; they were performing to the people, not at them. Actors got into this fourth-wall thing in the 1800s, it wasn’t there in Elizabethan times. Actors go, “oh, da da da da” and they look up to the skies – whereas I will talk to the audience and bring them in. They are part of my brain, they are part of Hamlet’s brain.
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