Cuttings

Rarely will you perform a full-length version of a Shakespeare play.  Sometimes whole scenes, subplots, or characters are removed, but more often the script is "thinned" or "pruned" by slicing out lines within scenes.

There are two schools of thought on how to approach this.

One is to accept the new script as-is, which can be very useful. Sure, in the original perhaps you laid out three arguments for your action, and in this cutting you only give one.  OK, now your character has only one reason, forget about the others.  Accept the script as whole. (This is particularly useful if your character is a composite of several original characters, you must create this person as he is in this cutting.)

Another is to read the original and (paying particular attention to the scansion), see what clues you get on interpretation, and then play the new cut with the old intentions.  For example, your character might share a line in the scene, meaning he is interrupting and/or chiming in quickly. But because of the cut, the first half of the line is gone. Or it's there, but because of bad layout on the page, it appears that this is two short lines with pauses, giving an entirely new feeling. If the script has been thinned, it's likely that the person who cut it did not mean to change the scene, but just shorten it.  I go back to the original, see how it plays there, and play that interpretation around the cut. (In my example, I'd jump right in with my half-line with the rushed feeling of the shared line, even though technically it isn't anymore.)

Use your judgement about the cutting.  Who cut it and what was their goal?  An intricate adaptation might require you to accept the script as-is. A thinned scene might require you to look at the original scansion.