Following the success of last year’s production of The Malcontent, the Globe Young Players return to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to perform Dido, Queen of Carthage. The Globe Young Players are a talented company of 12 to 16-year olds specially selected and trained by the Globe’s resident experts in the performance of early modern drama.
We chat to Jasmine Jones who played Mercury in The Malcontent and is returning to play Dido in this year’s production.
What do you like about Dido, Queen of Carthage and the character you play?
I think I heard Tatty [the assistant director] say once that this is a play about different types of love and I think that is the thing that I enjoy about the play. I adore that this play has really brought me back to what those feelings of love and infatuation really are and how they can bring us happiness but also sadness.
I would describe Dido as being powerful, creative, intelligent but also deeply troubled. She has been through a lot and if you look at some of the details within the play there are clues to that. For example, in Act 2, Scene 1 when she meets Aeneas for the first time she asks him to wear her dead husband’s robe. The fact that she’s still in possession of this robe and has brought it with her from Tyre to Carthage shows how deeply connected she still is to grief for her husband.
How did you approach playing Dido?
One
of the first things we discussed in the first rehearsal was a modern equivalent
to Dido, not to come away from the time and setting of Marlowe’s writing but,
merely to understand the status and reverence that people would have had for
Dido. Nowadays although we still have royalty, I don’t think we view them in
the same way as people would have thought of them during the era of Carthage. I
think the cult of celebrity surrounding people like Beyoncé is much more
similar to the way people would have seen and got excited about Dido…
I’ve thought a lot about the inner psychology of Dido. To do this, and understand more about her I have been appraising the facts and trying to find as many things I know about her from the play first then, from that, starting to ask questions. And I think it’s important not to have answers to these questions immediately but to let them hang in the air for a while. It almost becomes like a puzzle because you are trying to make sense of all of these different parts of the character you have found and trying to understand how that makes up a whole.
Another source of inspiration, not only in terms of aesthetic is singer/songwriter FKA twigs. I was lucky enough to see her in concert and was rapt by the almost goddess-like energy she had on stage, it was mesmerising. I would really like to try and find this strength and entrancing, seductive energy in Dido.
You were a part of last year’s Globe Young Player’s Company who performed Marlowe’s The Malcontent. How has this year’s rehearsal process been different to last year?
I still feel quite early on in this rehearsal process, so I can’t completely compare the two but I see The Malcontent and Dido, Queen of Carthage as very different plays. I think both directors suited or are suiting their rehearsal processes to the particular demands of the play.
The Malcontent, although having moments of both tragedy and comedy, ended on a resolved, optimistic note and had many larger than life comic moments featuring a large majority of the cast. To cater to this, in rehearsals with Caitlin [the director] we placed emphasis on spatial dynamics and physical journeys across the stage. Working out the physical journeys for all the characters in some of the scenes was almost like a jigsaw puzzle! In general, the play seemed much more driven by a character’s physicality and the only way to make more sense of the play was to get it on its feet as quickly as possible after doing script analysis.
Dido, Queen of Carthage takes a much more tragic turn than the end of The Malcontent. To understand various climactic moments, we have spent a lot of time in rehearsals up to this point trying to understand character’s true motivations and objectives. Doing this in-depth analysis not only gives us clarity when we are acting but also works as a breeding ground for experimentation. If the action does not feel right it can be easily changed to suit our instincts and therefore give us a clearer idea of what Marlowe meant. We have spent a lot of time discussing what characters are trying to do to each other which I know will give the whole production clarity because we will be clear in our objectives are.
The theme of obsessive and crazy love in Dido, Queen of Carthage resonates with us a lot as teenagers and young adults. We’ve spent a lot of time discussing that feeling of love in whatever capacity it might be: romantic, sisterly, respectful. Hopefully that real connection and understanding of the themes will ground the performance in truth. As we approach staging all the scenes, I think the analysis will really help us stage it physically.
Dido, Queen of Carthage plays at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse from 9–18 April.
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