A few days have gone by now since the first Chilled Shakespeare reading at the Red Lion, Old Colwyn.

I was pretty nervous on my way to the pub, not knowing how many people to expect or what the reaction would be. Although I’ve been doing organising play readings for a while now, there have only been a few “first” times.

At the beginning, it looked like the numbers were going to be quite low, just 4 or 5, but by the end there were 12 people. That’s a healthy number. I think everyone enjoyed themselves and I hope that next time we can build on that promising start. The really encouraging part was that the vast majority of folks had no previous experience of Shakespeare, and I feel like they came away with a positive experience.

In my preparation for the night, I’d thought that act 2 scene 1 would be the most difficult, but I was completely wrong. That scene is the first time we get properly introduced to the Italian courtiers. Alonso (the King) and Gonzalo (an honest councillor) talk together, while Sebastian and Anthonio make sarcastic comments aside. There are plenty of jokes here, but to modern audiences they’re quite obscure. I was expecting this to be a difficult bit, but it actually worked pretty well – even though most of us had no idea what was going on.

It gets off to a good start, Gonzalo’s opening speech is fairly straight forward, and then Sebastian’s line “He takes his comfort like cold porridge” gets a laugh. From then on, the text is short lines back and forward, and that creates a fast-paced interchange which kept people’s interest. After Ariel arrives and starts playing tricks, I thought that would be the interesting bit, but actually, that’s where people started getting bored. I think, you’ve got to interrupt the scene and tell people what’s happened, what’s happening, and what’s going to happen. That way it breaks up the text a bit, provides a bit of relief from following the words, and people understand more. In Bognor, the group is a bit different. We’ve got more teachers, there are folks there who really know their stuff. Here, it’s people looking at it for the first time – and that’s fantastic but it presents a different challenge.

The most difficult part was act 1 scene 2, where Prospero tells his back story. Here Prospero has quite a lot to say with only short interjections from Miranda to break it up. That sort of scene, where someone gives a long back story, can work but It needs some energy going in to it otherwise it quickly becomes boring. You can see when people are losing interest because they start flicking through the book, looking ahead to see what’s coming next. We had a good reader who articulated well and didn’t stumble over the words, but that’s not quite enough to bring it alive. It needs a bit of prior knowledge and preparation to deliver it in an interesting way. I should have known that from when I read the opening to the Spanish Tragedy in Bognor – people thought that was going to be a drag, but where I’d practiced it, it worked quite well. The situation is almost exactly the same, a long opening speech delivered by a single character.

In an entirely new group, you’re down to pure luck to find a reader who can speak the lines and bring them to life. The options to fix a situation like that are to either find a good reader in advance and ask them to practice (not likely), take the part myself (runs the risk of people thinking i’m giving myself all the best bits), or switch readers halfway through (which looks pointed and risks upsetting the original reader).

Now I think about it, the best option might be to take that sort of part myself (practice it at home) and then halfway through pass it over to someone else. That way, I can make it a bit more entertaining, then hand it over before it becomes “the Richard Baldwin Show”. In future, that’s what I’ll do.

All things considered, It was quite successful. The opening scene of the shipwreck worked very well, the Caliban scenes are great and the courtiers scene also were very good. It was a promising start and I feel like I’ve learnt something in how to manage the group and organise the more difficult parts.