Reviews
Review
of the 2007 Bucharest National Theatre Festival, Plays International,
Winter 2008
Review
of Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today:
The Actor’s Perspective, in Shakespeare Yearbook, 2007
Review
of the 2007 Bucharest National Theatre Festival, Plays International,
Winter 2008
Robert
Cohen
in Bucharest
With
its profusion of radical directorial innovation in recent years,
Romania has become known as the world capital of postmodern
theatrical avant-gardism in this first decade of the 21st century,
and the Romanian National Theatre Festival mounted (primarily)
in Bucharest this fall presented a staggering array of radical
theatrical creativity which, in almost every case, sought to
re-invent the very notion of what theatre is and can be.
I
missed the sole production presented outside of town (in Sibiu):
this was Silviu Purarete’s Faust, about which I heard
marvelous reports. But I did manage to catch eight astonishing
productions – six directed by Romanian superstars Andrei
Serban, Mihai Maniutiu and Gabor Tompa, plus others by foreign
directors from Germany (Thomas Ostermeier), France (Josef Nadj),
Ireland, Belgium, Moldova and the United States. Together with
lectures, book launches and theatre soirées, it was a
thrilling week of high-voltage theatrical experiment.
The first two productions I saw were of classic dramas; they
provided a baseline to the more sui generis works that followed.
Laszlo Bocsardi’s Hungarian-language King Lear, from the
Tamasi Aron Theatre in the Transylvanian town of Sf. Gheorghe,
was in many ways a straightforward production of Shakespeare’s
tragedy - until Lear, going into the storm, encounters the heath’s
“poor naked wretches” with their “looped and
windowed raggedness.” In Bocsardi’s setting (designed
by Bartha Jósef), Lear finds himself surrounded by eight
near-naked young men, each crouching in an individual glass
cage which, standing in front of a stage-wide, black-and-white
checkerboard backdrop, had been elevated on waist-high stilts
and framed in bright brass struts. “Windowed” indeed!
When I asked a leading Romanian scholar/dramaturg what she thought
about the production, she sighed that it was “pretty conventional”;
when I all but gaped at her description, she quickly rephrased
her assessment: “I mean, of course, conventionally avant-garde.”
By the end of the festival, I too looked back at Bocsardi’s
glass cages as pretty conventional stuff.
Apart
from the cages, Bocsardi’s innovations were more interpretive
tropes than performative renovations, but they were certainly
striking. His King (a tall and generously-proportioned Nemes
Levente) was far more ferocious than any I’ve ever seen
or even imagined. Terrorizing his daughters from the play’s
beginning (even Regan and Goneril are trembling when he marches
through the audience and climbs up to the stage), Levente’s
face flushes crimson as he roars at the stubborn Kent, then
savagely hurls his once-favored daughter Cordelia to the floor.
Even at play’s end, Levente is every inch the king, boldly
hoisting Cordelia’s dead body up against a tree, sullenly
watching it crumple spasmodically to the ground, then heaving
open his own grave (an immense trap door) and, leaping shoulder-deep
into it, dragging his dead daughter in on top of him and slamming
the grave door shut atop them both.
Other
unforgettable images in Bocsardi’s production were Cordelia’s
desperate, full-body lunge at the handsome but faithless Duke
of Burgundy, madly kissing him on the lips before the Duke dumps
her into the kind but senile hands of a white-headed King of
France, and Lear’s return from the hunt with four bloody
boar heads (real ones, I’m sure), which remained center
stage for the next five scenes, their dead eyes staring defiantly
at the audience.
The
other classic I caught was Serban’s lively and sometimes
farcical Seagull, brought in from the Radu Stanca National Theatre
in Sibiu. Half the population of Bucharest, it seemed, had struggled
to get their hands on one of the 120 seats the theatre had made
available for this one-night stand, and to reach the theatre
door I had to fight my way through at least a hundred hopefuls
seeking last-minute ticket returns.
This
production’s publicized novelty was not so much its staging
but its casting: Madame Arkadina was played by the nationally-renowned
film star Maia Morgenstern (Mary in The Passion of the Christ),
while Arkadina’s son, Kostya, was played by Mogenstern’s
son, Tudor Istodor. So when Kostya tells Arkadina how impossible
it is to live in the shadow of a famous actress-mother, real
life is not imitating but inhabiting art.
Serban’s
staging, though, was anything but conventional. Most of the
audience sits on three sides of the stage, with the main action
occurring in a long rectangle within their midst. Translucent
fabric walls enclose the two long sides of the audience, providing
silhouette renditions of characters as they walk, run, and cavort
to and from Sorin’s estate. A minimalist furniture schema
– large table, small writing/typing desk, armchair and
some sloped-back beach chairs - provides most of the hard scenery
of the changing locales, and the more rambunctious physical
action centers mainly on the dining table, where Arkadina leaps,
in what I’d describe as a full-frontal swan dive, atop
the recumbent Trigorin (the very handsome Adrian Matioc) with
full Dionysian bravado.
While
Serban clearly approaches Seagull as a comedy – notably
breaking with Romanian tradition – the play’s underlying
sadness still permeates his production. The great third act,
with Arkadina’s conflicted relationships with both son
and lover reaching their famous exploding points one after the
other, was breathtakingly performed, as was the heartrending
fourth act when the no-longer-lovely Nina (Christina Flutur)
climbs through a miniature window and falls directly into Kostya’s
lap as he types, only to clamber away and dismiss him all over
again.
The
most exciting festival works I saw, however, were the uniquely
original presentations of Mihai Maniutiu and Gabor Tompa. Maniutiu
was represented by no less than five one-hour productions -
three being part of a “Jewish Trilogy” which, for
technical reasons, had to be presented on separate nights and
in different venues. I was able to see two of these, The Job
Experiment and Ecclesiastes, both employing texts from the Hebrew
Bible.
The
Job Experiment was not so much a retelling of the Old Testament
tale but a response to it, what Maniutiu called in a press release
“a sacral entertainment,” whose intention is “not
to bring old rites to life but to create a ritual fiction.”
It is that indeed. Maniutiu’s hugely inventive staging
(co-designed by the director and Cristian Rusu) was played in
the same theatre that housed Seagull, but the stage had been
radically transformed. All seating areas had been sealed off,
and on the stage a solid, circular fence - opaque except for
fifty-some small windows - had been erected, its windows allocated
one to each spectator. Inside the fence, God’s well-known
“experiment” occurs; outside, we watch it - and
watch each other watching it. The fence conveys a Biblical metaphor,
for as Satan asks God (at Job 1:6): “Does Job fear God
for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house
and all that he has, on every side?”
As
we take our seats and peer through the windows, Job (a middle-aged,
balding Marian Ralea) and his wife (a pert and peppy Diana Lazar)
are wading through an ankle-deep “earth” composed
of several thousand sponge-like, pumpkin-colored shards (Job
“sits among the ashes,” at Job 2:8). This spongy-ashy-earth
is covered by a hundred-odd inflated yellow balloons, representing,
we presume, Job’s children and kine (cattle), and perhaps
the ova of future civilizations. Music throbs incessantly. On
the chassis of a wheel-less, stationary bicycle, Satan sits
and pedals, swishy and indolent, while God’s Angel (a
blond, wild-eyed Ofelia Popii, breathing through a scuba tube)
wields a fluorescent flashlight in one hand and a cattle prod
in the other; with the latter, when her mood (or her God?) prompts
her, she pops the balloons - killing both kids and kine. Meanwhile,
Job’s three “friends” - Eliffaz, Bildal and
Zofar, each in matching red vests – alternately chant,
play air-accordions and warm themselves by a devilish fire.
The enclosed fence has become a one-ring circus, with Satan
its ring-master.
God,
however, seems to have vacated the scene and abandoned his experiment.
His Hebrew names, Yarweh and Adonai, are cried out in vain;
having accepted Satan’s cruel challenge, the Supreme Being
has made himself deaf to Job’s lamentations and is blind
to his agony. In the play’s final moments, the Angel hangs
a wire across the stage and guides, along it, a small, ceremonial
fish. Presenting the fish to Job, she also hands him her breathing
tube – and, gasping, asphyxiates. A Christian parable?
Perhaps - but with Satan still slowly pedaling his stationary
bike, and smilingly eying the survivors, it is not a comforting
one. As we watch Job through our windows, we become increasingly
aware of the fifty-odd other spectators watching him too –
and watching us. A sacral entertainment of a very special order:
never have I felt quite so isolated, so Job-like, in a packed,
public theatre.
Ecclesiastes,
Maniutiu’s second work at the festival, is based on another
Biblical text, but unlike Job, it is a book with no dramatic
action and without even a character – except Ecclesiastes,
or “The Teacher,” whose poetic adages constitute
the book’s narrative. For this production Maniutiu and
his designer (Valentin Codoiu) employ a rectangular glassed-in
isolation chamber (as one might imagine created on a space ship),
in which the white-garbed Ecclesiastes (played, as Job was,
by Marian Ralea) paces and mutters before an equally white backdrop
that bears a text translated for me as “What more does
a wise man have than an idiot?” (as in Eccl. 2:15: “What
happens to the fool will happen to me also; why then have I
been so very wise?”). The chamber is lightly furnished;
there’s an armchair, wrapped in white linen, piles of
apparently discarded books on the floor (“of making many
books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the
flesh,” Eccl. 12:12), and something that looks like a
Javanese shadow puppet on the back wall. A microphone stands
in front of the chamber, and before the microphone are the theatre’s
five audience rows, sharply raked upward, the three center seats
in each row having, by the time we arrive, already been taken
up by a fifteen-man chorus (some played by women), each sporting
identical uniforms: black suit, white shirt and dark glasses.
As the play begins, with Ecclesiastes still muttering incomprehensibly
in the background, a series of inept “performers”
stride up to the microphone and, accompanying themselves on
identically ovoid CD players, display their “talents”
to the seated chorus. The chorus applauds - in strict rhythmic
unison, maniacally if sarcastically - and “scores”
the performers on ballots, displaying their votes as they might
on a TV talent show. Then, by twos and threes, the choral members
take their own turns at the mike, gasping, hissing, gargling,
and compulsively chattering nonsense syllables to the continuing
rhythmic applause of their fellows.
In
a second phase of the work, the chorus has settled back into
its seats as a “Mama Ecclesiastes” – also
dressed in white (“Let your garments always be white,”
Eccl. 9:7) but with her head enclosed in a plastic space helmet
(as we might imagine from a 1950s space-fiction movie) joins
her mate in the chamber, which she enters through one of its
two airlock-style rear doors; not long after, they are joined
by Baby Ecclesiastes, seen earlier as a puppet. By the end of
this sequence, Ecclesiastes, Candide-like, plants a garden of
colored glass “flowers” on the chamber floor as
his family watches on. In the play’s final phase, Ecclesiastes
has taken a place in the audience, the chorus has moved into
the glass cell (now planted with colored-glass flowers), and,
in the (literally) smashing finale, the chorus’s now-vacated
wooden chairs suddenly come hurtling down all but on top of
the audience.
As
there was no simultaneous translation to this work, and no biblical
storyline to give it a perceivable dramatic structure, I was
unable to tie the actions to the text (with which I am familiar)
and am unable to make much sense of what I saw - and I’m
afraid, dear reader, that I must leave you in the same position.
But, as the ancient text warns us, “Do not act too wise,”
(Eccl. 7:17), and “The days of darkness will be many”
(11:10). Perhaps that’s as much as we really need to find
in a work that is, after all, dedicated to Ecclesiastes’
famous Biblical opening: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”
Yet
another glass box – indeed, ten of them – appeared
in Long Friday, an adaptation (by dramaturg Visky András)
of Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertész’s Kaddish For
An Unborn Child, directed by Gabor Tompa, the artistic director
of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania where
this production initially premiered (it has since been performed
at the Union of European Theatres festival in Torino).
Kertész’s
novel is neo-Beckettian in style; a solo monologue, it includes
at least one paragraph that runs fifty-seven pages. Both novel
and adaptation treat Kertész’s autobiographical
hero – named simply “B” and self-described
as a “Budapest (i.e. citified, non-practicing) Jew”
- as he relives his broken marriage, disappointing career as
a writer/translator, and his failure to father a child in the
aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, during which he (and Kertész
himself) had been sent to concentration camps.
Tompa’s
setting (designed by Carmencita Brojboiu) centers on a glassed-in
telephone booth – containing a computer instead of a telephone
– where B alternately pounds out his story on the keyboard
and, once outside the booth, engages with a nine man chorus
(some played by women) - each of whom (once again) appears in
a black suit and white shirt. Along with B, the chorus makes
up the ten-man minyan required for Jewish prayer; chanting simultaneously
in Hebrew, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Italian, French, English,
Spanish and German, they are accompanied by the mournful strains
of an ancient Jewish threnody from Northern Transylvania (among
other beautifully-selected pieces), and their chanted prayers
comprise a haunting Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for B’s
unborn, and indeed never-conceived, children.
But
Tompa’s chorus more than prays. They sing, wistfully,
the ineffably moving (and deeply conflicted) military love ballad,
“Lili Marlene.” They fall repeatedly onto the stage
floor, then bounce back with astounding athleticism. They leap
into and out of each others’ arms with alarming speed
and force. At one particularly memorable point, they place their
heads into individual plexiglass cubes, parade about the stage,
and eventually arrange their glass-caged heads into a three-foot
wall of frozen faces, echoing the shelves of bleached sculls
and hanging white shrouds behind them. And they become increasingly
individualized: one sports a bright red wig, another is mummified
from the hips down in white bandages, three others are realized
as B’s ex-wife, unborn boy and unborn girl, who enact
a family odyssey of despair.
Eventually
the core of a story emerges – somewhat as Michelangelo’s
Captive Slave is seen to emerge from its roughcut marble - and
for anyone with memorial associations to the particular horrors
of these times, Long Friday will be a deeply moving experience.
“Children were born in Auschwitz” is B’s repeated
plaint (Long Friday was presented with helpful earphone translations),
and it provokes an intense query each time we hear it: Why have
we repressed, or at least ignored, this ghastly little fact?
The play’s non-conclusion - “There is no explanation
of Auschwitz” – perhaps gives rise to the play’s
dramaturgy – and, probably, much of modern Romanian (and
Eastern European) scenography as well: There simply is no explanation.
This
returns us to Kertesz’s novelistic style as well: each
of his Kaddish paragraphs begin with the same one-word sentence:
“No!” And we may recall that this is also the one-word
title of Romanian-born playwright Eugene Ionesco’s first
published book - No! - which was Ionesco’s initial theatrical/literary
manifesto of what he was later to term “anti-theatre.”
It is perhaps not inappropriate to consider this revolutionary
contrariness – this “no-ness” – as fundamental
to the Eastern European literary/theatrical aesthetic, even
today.
Reviewing
the 2006 Sibiu Theatre Festival, American Theatre Senior Editor
Randy Gener wrote, “in the field of directing, it is not
Romania but America that needs to catch up.” America has
indeed been catching up, with Romanian directors Serban and
Liviu Ciulei living in the U.S. for decades (Serban now teaches
at Columbia University and has directed frequently there as
well as at the American Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts;
Ciulei also taught at Columbia and ran the Guthrie Theatre in
Minneapolis for five years), and Tompa has recently joined the
faculty at the University of California, San Diego. Critics
in the U.K. have occasionally been less impressed than I am
with the Romanian advances: Michael Billington, in reviewing
the 2003 Bucharest Festival, announced that two of the productions
he saw there symbolized “a disturbing European trend that
Britain has largely escaped: one where the director is an unassailable
monarch and classic texts are pieces of clay to be shaped to
his often infantile needs.” Nothing I saw here this year
was juvenile, however, much less infantile, and biblical books
and neo-Beckettian novels have never, I suspect, been given
such vivid theatrical life as evidenced this month in Bucharest.
Meanwhile the “standard” classics of Shakespeare
and Chekhov, as reviewed above, were clear and powerful, and
provided with refreshing audacity and exuberance – and
at several points issued a wake-up call to our needs to resolve
or at least come to better terms with the social, religious,
and political problems besetting Europe and America today.
It
is clear that Romanian theatre critic Marina Constantinescu,
in this her third year as Festival Director, has managed to
bring together a full complement of her country’s theatrical
luminaries, pair them with a few celebrated outsiders, and give
international audiences an amazing array of provocative contemporary
dramaturgy and stageography. Does this constitute a new conventionality?
It’s hard to say: I’ve already mentioned that three
productions featured super-sized glass boxes, and three others
(Ecclesiastes, Friday and Nadj’s also remarkable, mixed-media
Les Philosophes) employed choral characters in identical black
suits and white shirts; these and other repeated imagistic motifs
may indicate some redundancy in this year’s iconographic
visualizations. In acting, too, I would have to say that a generalized
declamatory speaking tone, with repeated downward-inflected
sentences propelled with machine-gun speed and intensity, seemed
at times to so abjure both character interaction and inquiry
that I felt the polemical far overreaching the personal –
though, lacking both Romanian and Hungarian, I cannot pronounce
myself a truly qualified observer of this apparent imbalance.
What I can say with complete assurance, however, is that these
works should be staged and seen far beyond the borders of Eastern
Europe. The world – and not just the theatre world - will
greatly benefit.
Review
of Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today:
The Actor’s Perspective, in Shakespeare Yearbook, 2007
Performing
Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective,
Edited by Michael Dobson: NY: Cambridge, 2007.
What
is particularly gratifying about Michael Dobson’s collection
of ten essays by distinguished classical actors on their recent
performances in four Shakespearean tragedies is to be reminded
how utterly human Shakespeare’s drama is—at least
when it is performed by thinking, feeling, artistically ambitious
actors.
Dobson has chosen his performances from the “Bradley four”
—Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear—as performed
in England since 2001; six were in productions mounted by the
Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, and four were in separate
productions at the Old Vic, Cheek by Jowl, the Almeida, and
the Minerva Theatre at the Chichester Festival. All ten actor-essays
are thoughtful; all make keen observations on the acting process;
some make provocative apercus of Shakespearean themes or dramaturgy.
Dobson’s
introduction explains that “it should not be surprising…
to find that these assorted tragedians have often been consciously
engaged in trying out in theatrical practice some of the ideas
currently exercising Shakespeare studies in the seminar room”
(p. 2). I, however, found practically nothing indicating this.
Yes, there is a reference to a modern scholar (Stephen Greenblatt),
and another to a forty-year-old study by Wilbur Sanders, but
the other intellectual luminaries mentioned by the actors—Coleridge,
Hazlitt, and G. Wilson Knight—are hardly seminar fodder
today, and the critical issues mentioned are hoary indeed: Hamlet’s
“Oedipus Complex” (Jones, 1910), Iago’s “motiveless
malignity” (Coleridge, 1819), and the mocking question
of “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (L.C. Knights,
1933 – Knights’s answer, of course, being that the
question is totally irrelevant to a fictional character). These
issues, moreover, are raised only to be instantly dismissed
by the actors. “The thing about the Oedipal interpretation…
is that it is, by and large, nonsense,” says Samuel West,
reporting on his 2001 RSC Hamlet. “I’m angry with
Samuel Coleridge. His analysis of Iago as a villain possessed
by ‘motiveless malignity’ [is] complete nonsense,”
says Anthony Sher, reviewing his performance of the ancient
(which he changed to “ensign”) in Gregory Doran’s
2004 RSC Othello. And the question of whether Macbeth and his
Lady have children—and if so, how many—is anything
but irrelevant to the here-cited actors who perform them. “Performers
do actually have to answer [that question] for themselves and
their audiences,” says Sian Thomas, who played Lady M
in Dominic Cook’s 2004 RSC production. “It is a
subject that simply cannot be avoided or left unresolved by
the two actors playing husband and wife,” says Simon Russell
Beale, who played opposite Emma Fielding in John Caird’s
2005 Almeida production.
What
we mainly find from these actors, then, are not theories from
the seminar but observations from life. Many incorporate their
own lives. “I have children myself,” Imogen Stubbs
tells us, describing her development of Gertrude in Trevor Nunn’s
2004 Old Vic production, “and I could recognize that side
of the part: that not wanting the son to grow up,… not
being able to deal with all the teenage weirdness, is very true
to some women’s lives.” Sher remarks that “the
fact that Sello [Sello-Maake ka Ncube, playing opposite him
as Othello] and I are both South African …became an enormous
plus. …In playing Iago’s racism, I drew on the attitudes
of the ruling Nationalist Party in the old South Africa.”
Cheshire-born John Normington was encouraged by director Bill
Alexander, in his 2004 RSC King Lear, to “use your own
background in developing the role of the Fool, so the actor
went “all the way back to where I started,” to find
“the voice, the core of my character,” which he
modeled on Northern comic Jimmy Edmundson whom he had seen perform
as a boy and acted with in his teens.
But most of the actors’ life-observations come directly
from the rehearsal process itself, not only in discussions with
their directors but through exercises, workshops, improvisations
and collaborations, not only with their fellow actors and directors,
but frequently with sound and costume designers and in one case
with a composer. Such improvisational exercises, it turns out,
are not only common in academic theatre programs and experimental
theatres but in rehearsals for mainstream, classical, professional
productions. Thomas reports that her Cooke “spent a lot
of rehearsal time doing improvisations …and all sorts
of other exercises” for their RSC Macbeth. Sher speaks
of a fortnight’s workshop preceding the Othello rehearsals,
which “turned out to be a godsend” as it gave him
a new notion of Emilia which allowed him to “fully investigate
[Iago’s] marriage in rehearsals.” West describes
an improvisation his director conducted in which the Danish
courtiers met to elect their new King after King Hamlet’s
death, and then questioned “each member of the cast to
decide which… had voted for Claudius and which for Hamlet,
and hence which were applauding all the louder to convince the
new president-king of their complete loyalty to him.”
The exercise guided West to what he called his and the director’s
“central point: to treat [Hamlet] throughout as a new
play.” Nonso Anozie tells of an entire week of “improvisation
and concentration… games” that director Declan Donellan
employed at the start-up of his 2004 Cheek by Jowl Othello,
which, the young actor explains, “put us into a much better
place to start work on the play.”
Almost
all the essays describe profound real-life connections with
fellow performers. As the Fool, Normington describes his “bonding
between Corin Redgrave,” as Lear, which among other things
permitted Normington to improvise his opening scene with the
King on a preview night when he “dried” (forgot
his lines). Amanda Harris describes how the “the bond
between” her, as Emilia, and Lisa Dillon as Desdemona,
and “the ordinariness and matter-of-factness of this intimacy”
made their Willow scene one she “intensely enjoyed playing”—in
good measure because she had become “very friendly”
with her younger co-actor who was “a delight to work with.”
And Imogen Stubbs found Ben Whishaw, her Hamlet, “incredibly
exciting to act with, surprising me night after night….
Playing those scenes with him, as Gertrude, was, well, as exciting
as playing Gertrude is ever likely to be.” Very often
the actors reported an admiration for each other just this side
of idolatry: a particularly grateful Sher recalls in Sello’s
“remarkable performance” of Othello that “the
part flowed through him as naturally as blood or breath,”
and that in getting Amanda Harris to play Emilia, “we
had the casting of our dreams.”
Other
comments portray a real-life connection between actor and audience.
Two brilliant pages by Samuel West describes his playing Hamlet’s
soliloquies directly to the house, “holding the mirror
up to nature,” he suggests. West reports a moment when,
as Hamlet, he asked the Stratford audience “Am I a coward”
and someone hollered “Yes” from the audience. West
considered this “perfect: I could play the next lines,
‘Who calls me villain?… while scanning that part
of the house looking for him… in real time, in genuine
dialogue. If I had been pretending just to be thinking loudly
to myself, it would have been dead.” About “To be
or not to be,” West comments, “I walked directly
downstage, and… what I played was that I couldn’t
go on with the play until I’d worked out this thing…
whether to be or not to be. That is the question… let’s
sort [it] out. And it’s not just my question, it’s
not just my problem, it’s your problem.” When performing
his Iago soliloquies, Sher reports being “intrigued by
a distinctive expression I saw on faces in the front few rows:
a peculiar smile, a peculiar kind of excitement. In listening
to me, in sharing my dangerous secrets, they were doing something
very immoral, very naughty, and they liked it.” Sher’s
final staged moment – silent, of course (“From this
time forth I never will speak word”)--was to jerk his
head up suddenly and stare out at the audience, during which
time his director had asked him to be “enigmatic,”
with his thoughts “open to… interpretation.”
Sher took a different tack: “In my head this question
always rang out: You saw what was happening—didn’t
you stop it?”
What
most intrigues me about Dobson’s compilation is how many
actors analyze not simply what happens in their role but what
doesn’t happen, and what their characters don’t
know. As Amanda Harris says, regarding her preparation of Emilia,
“you need to be able to see from one moment to the next
that the plot could still turn out differently.” Simon
Russell Beale’s Macbeth avoids “being Machiavellian”
by continually “redefining himself” in a “process
of self-exploration” in which he weighs the multiple possibilities
and engages in what prove to be false leads: including the possibility
of “achieving his ends with a minimum of destruction,
the possibilities of the one murder being the ‘be-all
and the end-all.’” Sher is similarly urged by his
director “to find moments where Iago is surprised by developments,
excited or confounded by them,” so that he becomes “the
Great Improviser” rather than a scheming plotter; Sher
consequently “sought every opportunity to almost trip
up Iago,” so that, as an actor, he retained a state of
confusion in actual performance – exactly what most young
actors will go to extreme lengths to prevent. Nonso Anozie follows
Donellan’s advice “to really see what our characters
had to win or lose in every scene and indeed on every line,”
rather than to work out in advance exactly which course his
character would take – and thus how each line “should”
be performed. Imogene Stubbs fantasizes her Gertrude becoming
a “Yummy Mummy… almost in Princess Diana’s
social niche,” when of course Hamlet leaves her “lost…,
collapsed, …desolate.” “Playing the opposite”—a
technique by which actors are urged to actively pursue goals
quite opposite to those they eventually accept—is a familiar
actor axiom that seems in full employment in these essays, helping
its users create characters that seem genuinely shocked when
encountering what Shakespeare has in store for them. Maintaining
this fundamental and very human state of confusion—of
seeming unaware just how the play comes out—is the underlying
brilliance of current British acting—–particularly
when it is expressed together with the technical virtuosity
we have long come to expect from English and English-trained
performers.
The
exercises and improvisations may help this, although they often
come at a price. Sian Thomas complained that director Cooke’s
exercises went on “until long after the point at which
most of the cast, especially Greg [Hicks, as Macbeth], were
desperate to just get on with doing the play …which I
think was a mistake.” And Nonso Anozie, although he liked
Donellan’s exercises in the Othello rehearsals, acknowledged
that “at first there was a lack of interest in these games,
as everyone involved was very keen to get to grips with the
text.” And certainly, getting to grips with the text is
never far from any actor’s mind, and virtually all the
actors make individually fresh analyses of certain lines, moments,
or character relationships.
I
have not yet mentioned the two actors that bookend Dobson’s
collection—mainly because they represent generally contrarian
views to the rest. Greg Hicks’ Ghost (and also the Player
and the Gravedigger) in Michael Boyd’s 2004 RSC Hamlet
is the first of these, and David Warner, in Stephan Pimlott’s
2005 King Lear at the Minerva, is the final one.
Hicks—the
only one to cite a contemporary critic (Stephen Greenblatt and
his Hamlet in Purgatory)—makes a conscious effort to create
a “Catholic ghost confronting a Protestant Prince”
and thus researched the afterlife more than living humanity,
drawing on his long experience with Greek tragedy, Japanese
butoh dance, and Brazilian martial art known as capoeira —all
in order to “bring on a sense of metaphysical extremity
completely beyond this life.” And it was towards this
end that Hicks, two days into rehearsal, told Boyd of his plan
to “be completely white, skeletal, sinewy, silently screaming,
…and walking incredibly slowly, destroying normal time
boundaries.” Most of the rest of his essay describes his
collaborations with the composer and lighting, scenic, costume,
prop, sound and special effects designers to achieve these effects,
possibly even co-staging his own return to the grave (“I
can’t remember whose idea it was – probably Michael’s,”
he says) by leaping into a open trapdoor…with a terrible
moaning shout of ‘Remember Me!’” Acting his
characters’ feelings was something he consciously avoided:
“What I didn’t want to do was make [the Player’s
Priam speech] about an actorish actor weeping and wailing –
though, of course, that’s part of what it requires,”
he reports, and he acknowledges that he is not sure his performance
truly “served the scene” and that “Michael
kept saying he wanted me to be ‘in bits’ …and
I never was, the way I played it, nor was likely to be.”
And
the sixty-six year-old Warner, as Lear, seems to go out of his
way to reject what would otherwise be a consensus view. Whereas
Sian Thomas says, regarding Lady Macbeth, “The only way
I can play a part is not just to like or understand the character
but to love them,” Warner proudly acknowledges, “I’m
not an actor who feels obliged to love every character he plays.”
And while Simon Russell Beale “felt the need to invent
a precise back-story” for his Macbeth and his Lady, Warner
rejects the term altogether: “God forbid that I should
ever use the term back-story,” he remembers saying to
Pimlott, explaining later that he and his director “just
got on with working out how to perform what happens in the play.”
Warner’s
major connection seems to be his predecessors in the role: the
“Great Lears”—Wolfit, Gielgud, Ian Holm”—that
he had seen, plus those of Paul Scofield, Eric Porter, Robert
Stephens and Corin Redgrave. And his essay is mainly a list
of his search for “illuminating pieces of business”,
making “intelligent use of props,” and above all,
“clarity: to make the argument of the play, both its narrative
and its ideas, completely clear to an audience.”
Nobody
can really object to either Hicks’s and Warner’s
approaches if the actors deliver the goods, and the rave reviews
that both received make it abundantly clear that they did. Which
goes to prove—or at least to demonstrate—that while
there may be one or more acting fashions in any given decade,
the actor’s art is finally subject to the special talent,
ethos and genius of each individual practitioner.
That
I have quoted extensively from the ten actors should make it
clear that I found this collection invaluable. There have been
at least two dozen “actors on acting” surveys published
in the past twenty years, but these essays, for the most part,
are unusually informative. Some of the perceptions, indeed,
are highly illuminating. West’s argument that soliloquies
are meant to be interactions with the audience (that Hamlet’s
“To be or not to be” doesn’t include the word
“I” was something that had never occurred to me),
and Sher’s notion that we should take Iago’s protestation
that Emilia had cuckolded him as his true belief, not merely
a cover-up for other motives (or motiveless malignity), are
very persuasively argued—and lead to impressive performances.
I’m not sure that Dobson succeeds in identifying what
his subtitle promises, namely identifying what he calls the
actor’s perspective (as if there were but one), and I
don’t think his introduction—if read before the
essays, as the reader would be expected to do—satisfactorily
contextualizes the collective achievement of his book. It may
have been better, in my view, for him to have introduced each
essay separately—which is how I expect most readers will
actually read the book. And it’s almost a given (particularly
inasmuch as their authors are not—at least primarily—professional
writers) that some essays are better than others. Normington’s
essay works too hard at being entertaining to be very useful,
and the young (twenty-five at the time of casting) Anozie is
still a bit star-struck. My favorite single piece was by Imogen
Stubbs (whose Gertrude is also the only one of the roles I personally
saw performed); her account is filled with exuberance and refreshing
candor—particularly as she takes Shakespeare on at full
tilt for writing such “awful” stuff as Gertrude’s
willow speech. “It as though Shakespeare had had a row
with someone in his acting company who said they would not play
Gertrude unless they got a big speech, and so for a joke he
gave them a completely impossible one,” she says. Put
that in a seminar!
