Domini Blythe on Fanny Kemble
Stratford veteran on Peter Hinton's 19th century monodrama
Domini Blythe has a formal routine of preparation for all of her shows and warmed up in many ways physically and vocally to become five main characters in Fanny Kemble.
Blythe's regime for Fanny Kemble included aquatics four times a week, big stretching in a steam room and massage. For a solo show of this magnitude, voice work was also essential.
Blythe - "I'd start very, very gently in the morning and the day before. On the day of the show, I'd do one part of my show and spend an hour and 40 minutes. I'd find a place on my own and I’d do all the lines very,very gently, very, very, quickly without all the thoughts involved and I'd very gradually warm up my voice in that way."
How many characters do you play and when you are talking to (characters) Pierce and Psyche do you see them standing in front of you?
"Psyche (one of Butler’s plantation slaves) is completely real but I don’t see her standing in front of me because I am her. I have no idea. They may be 10 but there are only four or five main ones and I had a lot of help with this through Peter Hinton."
"I’ve had four people, two of whom have nothing to do with theatre, come to see the show. They are professors at a university and the other two were actors. The profs were women who came to see the show and I met with them later. We spent a few hours together and they told me independently of each other at the end of the show they told each other that for a few instances, they had thought that I was black. One of them told me that she took her glasses off because she thought there was something wrong with her glasses – because she couldn’t believe she was seeing me as someone black. Someone else I know told me that she actually saw my features change and that was the level of their imagination. For me it’s not quite like that. All I can say is there are several characters that I play and obviously the main one is Psyche. Then there’s my father and then there’s Pierce Butler and my aunt Sarah Siddons and Mr. Oden the overseer who comes into it briefly. There’s Pastor London who isn’t called that but that’s who he is. I see all those people but it’s not like I see them as if I am talking to them. I am those people."
"I just know what they look like. I have a face for Psyche. We have lots and lots of wonderful pictures all over our rehearsal hall and I was given all of those at the end and I had long, long ago chosen my Psyche. I know exactly what she looks like and I know exactly what she sounds like and she’s real to me."
This is like two plays in one….
"The first half demands nothing of you other than your complete attention. The second half allows you an emotional release like in a real play. My biggest job before I went into rehearsal was to roughly know it because I did not want rehearsal to be about me remembering my lines. So I tried to learn it roughly which I never normally do with a script. When it felt overwhelming it was like a huge Mount Everest. One of my friends at the theatre - a colleague of mine is dyslexic - and he always has to learn his lines before he goes into rehearsal. He said ‘you know Dom, scripts always shrink, the more you know them.’ That is absolutely true and this script gradually shrunk and shrunk for me until it is now inside my body and I can access it very easily."
"I don’t have any fears about forgetting my lines. That’s the least of it. I know the lines. It’s inside me so the hard bit was psychological – overcoming the thought of this as a mountain. On my first couple of run-throughs Peter asked me how I was feeling and I said I feel as if I’ve got hold of a thread and I am just pulling on it, I’m reeling it in like a fish… and he laughed and said ‘Well, we’ll have to make it a rope’. Now it’s a rope. I pull that rope in when I go on stage."
(Authors note *** Though Domini Blythe was not sure she wanted to do another one woman show so soon after 2006’s Fanny Kemble, she actually did do Lynn Redgrave"s Shakespeare for my Father earlier this year for Montreal's High Lights Festival instead of the originally scheduled Amanda Plummer***)
