�鶹Լ��

NANCY MECKLER:What is your want during that speech? What do you want to achieve?

PIPPA NIXON:I want to awaken him.

NANCY MECKLER:Mmm.

PIPPA NIXON:I want to shake him.

NANCY MECKLER:Which is why you show him all those images?

PIPPA NIXON:Yeah. Somehow it feels like the world, the worlds,

PIPPA NIXON:are centred around Titania and Oberon. 'So when nature is happy 'that's because there is peace between them, 'and when they are at war, 'the effect and consequence of that is world disaster.' Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, as in revenge, have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs.

PIPPA NIXON:She says that the wind, it's the winds that are angry so they have caused these contagious fogs that then have poisoned the land and therefore the crows are now eating the dead animals and again, there's poison within their own body. The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain.

PIPPA NIXON:The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.

NANCY MECKLER:I mean, it's interesting that Shakespeare does that thing of making them into people. So, for example, the young corn is rotted in the field before his youth has attained a beard.

PIPPA NIXON:Before he's aged.

NANCY MECKLERSo there's the interesting idea that you get through to him by making him think of the seasons and the corn as human beings who are being damaged rather than trying to get people to care about corn.

JO STONE-FEWINGS:Titania personalises it for him on this sort of epic scale.

PIPPA NIXON:We see the seasons alter, hoary-headed frosts fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, and on old Hiems' thin and icy crown, an odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds.

NANCY MECKLER:There's lovely images of things like…

PIPPA NIXON:Yeah–

NANCY MECKLER:What is it? The hoary-headed frost–

PIPPA NIXON:The hoary-headed frost falls in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.

NANCY MECKLER:The idea that the rose is full of frost.

PIPPA NIXON:Yeah.

NANCY MECKLER:And, of course, what's so astonishing is, now we all really can connect with that because of climate change.

PIPPA NIXON:Yeah.

NANCY MECKLER:The idea that you're going to get ice during the summer or-- Then the next one is about old Hiem's winter.

PIPPA NIXON:Old Hiem's winter, and so on his thin and icy crown that I see, like, a patch of snow, and from that snow all of a sudden there are these beautiful summer flowers that have budded.

NANCY MECKLER:So winter is an old man who has this crown of roses and so it's mocking his winteriness.

PIPPA NIXON:Yeah. It's a mockery on our seasons and particularly like, you know, living in England we get to see the seasons so clearly, and it's like they have been fiddled with, altered.

NANCY MECKLER:Altered.

PIPPA NIXON:Because of our arguments.

JO STONE-FEWINGS:These are gods, and the fact that they have these kind of human foibles means that they fall out and then it affects the seasons. It affects everybody in the universe.

PIPPA NIXON:The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter, change their wonted liveries, and the mazed world by their increase now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension.

NANCY MECKLER:By the end of the speech she actually says they're our progeny, our children. What if we said that these were your children?

PIPPA NIXON:Yeah.

NANCY MECKLER:And let's say that it's like a couple who are divorcing, are arguing a lot and their children are now becoming quite ill.

PIPPA NIXON:But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, as in revenge, have sucked up from the sea contagious fogs, which falling in the land hath every pelting river made so proud that they have overborne their continents.

PIPPA NIXON:The ox hath, therefore, ploughed his field in vain, the ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.

NANCY MECKLER:Did it feel any different or was it just an interesting–

PIPPA NIXON:It did feel different, I wanted to go into more of the details. Things, like, I can imagine their teeth would probably be falling out. You know, their stomachs were rumbling with hunger.

NANCY MECKLER:…terrible images of famine, doesn't it?

PIPPA NIXON:Yeah. Yes, exactly. Famine and disease. The fold stands empty in the drowned field, and crows are fatted with the murrion flock. The nine men's morris is filled up with mud, and the quaint mazes in the wanton green for lack of tread are undistinguishable.

PIPPA NIXON:I remember studying it at school and for me, probably, that speech went for nothing, because you read it and you sort of don't understand it so then having a physicality to it and being able to see each of those images as the children of them, because I think that, in some ways, Titania and Oberon are mother and father Earth.

PIPPA NIXON:Mother and father nature.

JO STONE-FEWINGS:Yeah.

PIPPA NIXON:And to be able to have that association with each of those images allows you to unlock that speech.

NANCY MECKLER:If you do an improvisation like that, it means that the actors, they've experienced it together. So when they talk about those things later when they're doing the play, they have such strong visual and physical and central memories of what it feels like to feel that these things are their children.

NANCY MECKLER:We've tasted it, we've touched it, we've lived it.

PIPPA NIXON:I still think that when people do hear it in performance, they probably don't understand everything that's being said, but hopefully, they'll have a feel and go, "My goodness, you know, this person really cares about all of these images and it's having an effect on this person."

PIPPA NIXON:And, actually, at the end of going, "All of this disaster has come because of us," hopefully then people will go, "Oh, yes. I understand.