Rutter’s approach is not about what lies beneath the language, the sub-text, but instead it is the texture and feel of the words themselves that matter to him, he wants his actors to joy in relishing the beauty and muscularity of the language itself. He constantly urges them to “speak in oils”, in other words to use Shakespeare’s English as a medium that, unlike watercolour with its delicate pastel shades and washes, is thick, dense and lasting and which requires energy and a degree of bravery to boldly lay onto the canvas.
Rutter focuses on the words, which he wants spoken as if they were physical tactile objects to be enjoyed for their texture, rhythm, and energy. From time to time he will stop the action urging the actors (frequently) to “make it bigger” to “be generous” and to think of the energy needed to speak this language effectively as “piston energy, not conveyor belt”. This concentration on the spoken text includes scepticism about punctuation, especially
commas, employed by modern editors of Shakespeare. In his own edition of these three plays he claims to have removed most of the commas because he feels they encourage actors to slow the text unnecessarily. He also warns of falling inflections, especially at the end of a line, as what this invariably means is that the actor has, as he puts it, to then “crank it up again” at the start of the next line. “Always
climb upstairs in narrative ” he advises. He warns his actors too against what he calls “
adjectival acting” and “pronoun smacking” in other words the unnecessary emphasis on certain words. He claims the text of these three history plays never really asks questions (and even if there are questions they are rhetorical); instead it makes statements.