Fills him with faults; makes him run through all the sins. — Proteus, Two Gentlemen of Verona 5-4
[ACTING TIPS]
There is a Japanese proverb; Ichi-ji ga Ban-ji, meaning: one thing leads to all. Proteus realizes the same.
To play the words, I would say Proteus must be filled with remorse.
I am not yet quite sure what, for Proteus, is the first “that one error”.
When I don’t yet know the answer, I try acting all the possibilities.
Was the first error to leave Verona? Or to obey his father? Remember the first lines of Act 2, Scene 6, when he counterbalanced the weight of the sins he was about to commit.
“O sweet-suggesting Love, if thou hast sinned, Teach me, thy tempted subject, to excuse it!”
This Act 5, Scene 4 is really not understandable for reasonable people.
Listening to Valentine, Proteus apologized.
And what happens? Valentine gives Silvia for thanks to his apology.
Whaaaaaat???!!!
And Julia says this. And she swoons.
Swoon means one faints out of extreme emotion. That’s what we have to act.
But how?
How are we going to go through extreme emotion safely on stage?
Part of us must be really take control over the character. By doing so, let the character go.
Very very difficult.
There are many safe ways to make extreme emotions. If you do not know the safe way, you and the people around you would be in danger (mentally, physically, socially).
So, have a proper acting coach during the rehearsal of this kind of scene.
🎭 The private wound is deepest: O time most accurst, ‘Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!
— Valentine, Two Gentlemen of Verona 5-4
[ACTING TIPS]
Valentine, hiding in the woods to see Silvia is about to be raped by his best-friend Proteus, jumped out to stop him.
He means that this is the most hideous time to know his friend is in fact the very enemy.
There are so many ways to play this scene. He speaks some lines before saying this, which means he cannot shout all the time. He appears with shouting, maybe. But after this, I would try “how am I to tell what I feel”.
It is not just cascading his awful feeling.
It is a way to make Proteus understand and see things more clearly so that he could gain his proper mind back.
In fact, after this line, Proteus says sorry, and it feels too easy for me to grasp the change in his mind.
If I make the audience feel the same, the play is not successful.
That’s why I think I need much more time and varied skills to make Proteus really feel sorry, right after Valentine speaks the whole lines.
However, another way of acting and directing is to make Proteus really a villain and he never feel truly sorry and just give a “sorry” word as if it is a true word for Valentine. Yes, a type of LOKI.
Valentine, the true Love of Silvia, who has been bannished from Milan by Silvia’s father the Duke of Milan, is now the big boss of vagabonds in the woods.
We have the same kind of proverb in Japanese: Where you live becomes your ideal place.
I will play this either with sadness, or with contempt, but never forget my Love, and terribly missing her.