For each segment Barton calls upon his actors to attempt various ways of doing the same scene in order to illustrate the point he's trying to make. For example, in the segment on soliloquies one of the points under discussion is whether it's better for the actor to directly address the audience or to conduct the speech as an interior monologue. Which way, Barton wants to know, will hold an audience's attention more? He has the actors first try the speech in the latter way, and then he stops them and has them address the audience directly. The difference is immediately noticeable, for when the actor speaks his or her speech directly to us we hang on to their words and are pulled into the story far more deeply than when he or she directed the speech inwards.
If there is one element that Barton constantly comes back to throughout the whole series, it's the importance of maintaining the audience's interest in the proceedings. While that might sound so obvious to be laughable, with something like Shakespeare, where it so easy for an actor or an audience to get caught up in the language and get lost, it's not as easily accomplished as you might think. Here again Barton has his actors experiment with performing the pieces in two ways. First to latch onto the overall emotion of a scene or speech and simply play that while ignoring any individual nuances that might be found in the text. Then they reverse the process and break the scene or speech down into its component parts so we hear more than just the one emotion, but all the little bits and pieces of thoughts that have gone into creating that emotion.
It turned out that neither extreme was completely satisfying. For although the latter was more interesting to listen to, and would pull the audience more into the story, it lacked the passion and excitement of the former. In there is the key that Barton thinks leads to creating a Shakespearean production for a modern audience — balance. A contemporary actor must balance the needs of a script that was written to be played in the open air in a highly stylized manner with the modern day audience's need for realism on stage. He or she must be able to transmit the heightened emotions called for by the language while at the same time ensuring the meanings of individual lines aren't swept away in a sea of passion.
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