Interviewed by Steve Rowland

Giandomenico Cupaiuolo, Brutus in I Termini Company’ Julius Caesar, at the Shakespeare’s Globe.  Part of the Globe to Globe International Shakespeare Festival.

Interview conducted with simultaneous translation between English (Rowland) and Italian (Cupaiuolo)

London, May 2^nd, 2012.

Rowland:  Do you recommend acting as a profession for young people?

Cupaiuolo:

It’s a really hard question.

Well honestly, it’s particularly difficult to do this job. You have to absolutely be motivated.

You have to be driven by a strong passion and you also must know what you don’t want to do even before knowing what you want to do. And most importantly, you don’t have to give yourself an illusion. Yes, there is a poetic side of being an actor but you also have to eat and make ends meet at the end of the month. So, there’s also a practical side of the job that you have to take in to consideration.

Rowland:  What are the aspects of humanity that you explore doing this production?

Cupaiuolo:                    

In my opinion, Brutus is a wonderful and very beautiful character. As I already mentioned is the last interview, there is the political aspect of his character but also the human side of Brutus. I like to develop this character through the various revivals and explore thoroughly his character and in particular his fear and his intimacy. For example, there are some parts in the play where he talks to Lucius and most of his decisive moments are taken while he speaks to him. Both politically and also life changing decisions.

While I work, something that I like to do is look to a character from outside and when I see Brutus from outside, especially towards the end of the play, I think I see his eyes as cracked eyes, destroyed eyes because he spent last few days not sleeping. So I tried to work on that.

So, Brutus actually never sleeps; neither before taking the decision of killing Julius Caesar but also after killing Julius Caesar. He can see, he has lucidity to understand that he’s losing the battle and he is going to die very soon. So, he doesn’t manage to sleep anymore.

Rowland:  Were you surprised at the level of understanding of the audience?

Cupaiuolo:                              

Yes. I was really impressed and most of all I was really taken aback by the applause of at the end. I wasn’t expecting that.

The applause was the greatest moment absolutely because, well, actually I’m not a person that get easily teary eyes but yesterday I did and for various reasons. It’s actually maybe the fact that you can actually see the people that I have in front of me and you can see them stomping with their fists on the stage. You can see them cheering you and you can see every movement and that’s really something that I wasn’t used to.

Yeah. And I remember the two seconds of silence right after that. Brutus dies, there was those two seconds of complete last silence and then the applause started, that’s something that I really would remember.

Rowland: This is a festival of language, 37 languages coming. Can you talk a little about performing Shakespeare in Italian?

Cupaiuolo:                              

Well, I had an experience to be at the audience only for the Chinese company. So when I think about performing this play, not only as an actor but also as part of the audience, I think that performing it in my own language is an incredible way to represent the text going while also going beyond the single meaning of the words.      

I think it’s also very relevant that they are not simultaneous translations to what we say. They are just general subtitles. So, it’s very important for me to represent the text in my language and get through the audience without then being specifically led by words. I also presume that the people in the audience already know a little bit about the text, already know the main, the basic thought.

Rowland: I think, for many of us watching these plays in different languages, we’re learning that there’s a lot that comes from and the action, not just the words. Do you think that you learn something or you take something home about that?

Cupaiuolo:                              

So our own way of working is starting from the text and from the text we like to create the entire scenes; entire situations and completely replacing the words in the text with some images and scenes. That’s one of the qualities of our work.

Well, I will definitely bring something home, something very important in home from this experience. I can’t really put my finger on specifically what because still everything still so fresh but something from the audience, from the staff, from theater, from the city, something definitely is coming back with me. Maybe in a few months or years I will understand what it is.

Rowland: How much does the audience’s enthusiasm affect the performance?

Cupaiuolo:

So, in my opinion, it’s not only the actors that do the performance. It’s actors with the audience together that actually make the performance, in Italy the audience is not really used to this kind of attention. The audience in Italy is more used to a more passive attention that is more associated with the TV but every time that we go abroad, whether it’s in England or in any other country outside Italy, I realized that the audience changes a lot my performance on the stage. Or at least this is the feeling that we have when we’re on the stage.

So, the audience must have this awareness of the importance of its role and the feeling that I have here is that here, this kind of audience knows that. He knows that it is part of the show and I perceive it here at the Globe that the people actually know their role here and what they’re doing and why they’re coming to see this festival.

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