by Robert Brustein
[Twenty-four years ago, I read this column by Robert Brustein, an almost-legendary man of the theater for my generation. I’ve found it endlessly provocative and useful and I’ve drawn on it many, many times in the ensuing years. I’ve published a commentary on classic theater based on Brustein’s analysis (see “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage,” ROT, 18 September 2009); now I find it appropriate to republish Brustein’s original essay, which appeared in the New York Times on 6 November 1988 (sec. 2 ["Arts and Leisure"]: 5, 16).]
The most controversial issue in the theater today continues to be the reinterpretation or “deconstruction” of celebrated classical plays. There is no theatrical activity that more inflames purist sensibilities in criticism and the academy—nothing that stimulates as many caustic generalizations about the debasements of modern culture. Perhaps because “deconstruction” as an assonant noun if not as a method, is so perilously close to “destruction” and “desecration,” the standard purist posture is like that of Switzers before the gates of the Vatican, defending sacred texts against the barbarians. The paradox is that both sides are really devoted to the same esthetic purpose, which is the deeper penetration of significant dramatic literature. The difference is in the attitude. Is classical reinterpretation a reinforcing or a defiling act—a benign or a malignant development in the history of modern theater?
My own position is a qualified vote of support for conceptual directing. I have long believed that if dramatic classics are not seen with fresh eyes they grow fossilized—candidates for taxidermy. Even the most harebrained textual reworking may open up new corridors into a play, while the more “faithful” version is often a listless recycling of stilted conventions. That is why I continue to echo Artaud’s call for “No More Masterpieces”—great plays can be “desecrated” by excessive piety as much as by excessive irreverence. Although I champion a radical auteurism in directing, however, not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose. One can support the idea of classical reinterpretation without defending all its forms or ignoring the fact that what passes for originality is sometimes merely another kind of ego-tripping.
Let me refine my position by distinguishing between two common methods of reworking the classics—one that depends largely on external physical changes and another that changes our whole notion of the play. It is a distinction that can be illustrated through analogies with figures of speech—the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor. Directors who are fond of similes assume that because a play’s action is like something from a later period, its environment can be changed accordingly. Directors with a feeling for metaphor are more interested in generating provocative theatrical images—visually expressed through physical production, histrionically through character and relationships—that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.
Simile directing is a prose technique. Its innovations are basically analogical—providing at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks. Metaphorical directing attempts to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent—a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks, since the director “authors” the production much as the author writes the text. Naturally, this process is controversial: critics—though somewhat more tolerant of simile directors, who only change the period—often accuse metaphorical directors of arrogance and distortion. Nevertheless, it is the metaphorical approach, I believe, that has the greater potential for rediscovering the original impulses and energies of the material. Which is not to say that all simile directing is without value, or that metaphorical directing doesn’t have its meretricious side.
The simile approach is the more familiar, at least to New Yorkers, because it is often used by visiting British companies and over the years in Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare productions. But the tradition extends back at least as far as the 30’s. Orson Welles’s celebrated “Julius Caesar” was an early example, being the transformation of Shakespeare’s tragedy of assassination and retribution into an indictment of totalitarianism. Welles accomplished this by updating the text—always the hallmark of simile theater—exchanging Roman togas for Italian black shirts and turning Caesar into a Fascist leader. Tyrone Guthrie was also a proponent of simile directing long before he inaugurated the Guthrie Theater with a Victorian “Hamlet.” I still have vivid memories of his Old Vic production of “Troilus and Cressida,” set in the American Civil War with Helen reinterpreted as a seductive torch singer and Thersites as a Brady-like photographer of the battlefield. The Old Vic also staged an updated “Much Ado About Nothing” (directed by Franco Zefferilli), complete with peanut vendors, carabinieri and Italian accents, while the R.S.C. and the National Theater produced a variety of modernized classics, including “Taming of the Shrew” on motorcycles. Perhaps the most consistent updating was done at the now defunct American Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut: a “Much Ado” set in Spanish Texas during the time of the Alamo, a “Measure for Measure” in 19th-century Vienna, and a “Twelfth Night” in Brighton at the time of Horatio Hornblower.
All these productions were known inside the trade as “jollying Shakespeare up,” a practice much admired by directors who (overdosed on the Bard) streamlined their assignments with decorative environments as an antidote to creative fatigue. But it was rarely more than a novelty of surfaces, skin-deep, and marred by traces of voguishness; critics were right to carp. Recently, A. J. Antoon staged an attractive example of the genre with a “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the New York Public Theater set in the Bahia province of Brazil and featuring priests and priestesses of the Umbanda cult. And this summer Gerald Freedman jollied up the much jollied-up “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park by updating it to the Napoleonic wars. Freedman’s “Much Ado” had the advantage of a fine cast, including Kevin Kline and Blythe Danner as a ripening Benedick and Beatrice; but its novel setting lent nothing especially original to the interpretation, apart from a few cannon blasts, Empire clothes, and Kline’s grenadier mustaches.
Directors found operas as convenient to modernize as plays. Peter Sellars, for example, has often used the metaphorical approach in his theater work, but his productions of Handel and Mozart were clear-cut examples of simile directing. Setting “Orlando” in Cape Canaveral and “Julius Caesar” near the Nile Hilton, transporting “Cosi Fan Tutte” to a modern diner (his trump Tower “Marriage of Figaro” I didn’t see), Sellars managed to coat the original libretti with a visual varnish that created more flash than clarity. Sellars’s operatic work is usually spirited and impish, but what he tends to substitute for any deep probing of the material is technical dazzle and anachronistic high jinks—inventions that distract attention from the composer and librettist while attracting it to the director. (Sellars’s work with contemporary opera—“Nixon in China,” for example—is, by contrast, considerably more forthright and simple).
Updating is a shorthand way of showing how the material of a classical play has topical meaning for contemporary audiences. And when directors use this approach for thematic rather than ornamental purposes, it can be valuable and illuminating. But simile productions are rarely as powerful as those that try to capture the imaginative life of a classic through radical leaps into its hidden, sometimes invisible, depths. And while updating is sometimes a component of metaphorical theater, it is rarely the basic device. It may be that what I am trying to describe is a difference in national temperament. Whereas simile theater originally comes from England, metaphorical directing—which originated with the Russian Meyerhold—is usually associated with continental Europe. It is true that the English-born Peter Brook devised at least two fine examples of metaphorical theater with his Beckettian “King Lear” and his circus-oriented “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But Brook’s chief influences in those days were Brecht, Beckett and Artaud, and his subsequent work was largely prepared in Paris. Brecht himself, though celebrated as playwright, was also a metaphorical auteur director as daring as any who today raises purist hackles. His work is virtually a pastiche of plundered literature (“In literature as in life,” he admitted, “I do not recognize the concept of private property”). These thefts, paradoxically, were authorized by Shakespeare, a writer also notable less for originality of plot than of conception. And just as “Hamlet” was a reworking of an earlier play, probably by Kyd, so the great bulk of Brecht’s dramas were conceptual revisions of classical material—“The Threepenny Opera,” to take just the most famous example, being an adaptation of John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera.”
Brecht revised these plays in order to make them conform to a political purpose: he even began an adaptation of “Coriolanus” in which the emphasis was shifted from a story of human fallibility to a study of the economic problems caused by the price of corn. The completed “Coriolan” at the Berliner Ensemble was a brilliant example of metaphorical theater where Marcius and Audifidus stalked each other like Kabuki warriors and Menenius visibly aged before our eyes.
Partly under the influence of Brecht, partly under the influence of Meyerhold, a horde of metaphorical directors soon arose in Rumania—among them Liviu Ciulei and Andrei Serban (both of whom later had associations with my own theater) and Lucian Pintilie. Each of these men turned to the great classical tradition in their efforts to reinvent the modern theater, each doing much of his work in the United States. Ciulei’s reworking of Shakespeare, Buechner, Ibsen and Wedekind—Serban’s of the Greeks, Molière, Beaumarchais, Gozzi, Chekhov and Brecht—Pintilie’s of Molière, lbsen and Chekhov—are among the most powerful and controversial classical productions of our time. And it is possible to argue that, for all their liberties with texts and deviations from received notions, they come closest to the spiritual core of the plays.
Lucian Pintilie’s recent “Cherry Orchard” at the Arena Stage in Washington, for example, dispensed entirely with orthodox Stanislavski furniture and canvas flats, taking place in an environment that brought this familiar play to vibrant new life. The design was basically a bare, painted floor and ramps, with an armoire at one corner that served as bookcase, storage area and crèche. In the second act, sheaves of golden wheat appeared through the floor, presided over by an ominous scarecrow. After the family’s departure in the final scene, as stage tremors rattled the glass of Lopahin’s champagne, the ghost of Ranevsky’s child Grisha materialized to hover over the house as a rebuke to his mother’s irresponsibility. At Firs’s death, the glass rattled more violently, and wheat rose again to gather his body into the artifice of eternity. Thus the metaphysical quality that is always implicit in Chekhov’s work became tangible and manifest through spiritual presences.
Rumanian productions invariably impress us with vivid memories of similar tableaux: Serban’s “Cherry Orchard” with its circular images of confusion and disorder, and his maze-like “Uncle Vanya” with its sense of mechanization and imprisonment; Ciulei’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with its themes of sexual strife and contention emotionally reinforced by an angry Chinese-red surround; Pintilie’s “Wild Duck” with its climactic scene of eggs falling from the loft above, followed by Hedwig’s body smashing to the floor—each provided suggestive visual stimulations in order to generate strong new visions of the play.
Not all metaphorical productions offer equal satisfactions. Lee Breuer’s rendering of Sophocles’ “Oedipus at Colonus”—located in a pentacostal black church and retitled “The Gospel at Colonus” (perhaps more a simile than a metaphor)—featured some rousing gospel music by Bob Telson but vitiated the power of the original by adapting a Greek dramatic myth to Christian sacraments and Afro-American rituals. Similarly, Peter Brooks’s [sic] celebrated production of “The Cherry Orchard” done last season at Brooklyn’s beautiful Majestic Theater was the first Chekhov without walls, being located in an abstract space furnished with lovely Persian carpets, bleached and aged is if by Clorox. But the atmosphere was too penumbral, the interpretation too denatured, to capture Checkhov’s [sic] unheard music, and the acting (with notable exceptions—Erland Josephson’s Gaev, Roberts Blossom’s Firs, Linda Hunt’s Charlotta) alternated between British staginess and American clumsiness. In fact, if there is a generic weakness in metaphorical production, it is usually found in the acting performances, which are sometimes neglected in the directorial concern with visual elements.
For me, the most brilliant recent expression of metaphorical reinterpretation was Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish-language “Hamlet” during its brief run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this summer. Rethinking every character, every scene, every moment of the text Bergman managed to invent not just a fresh approach to the title role reflecting the current style of a generation (the actor-oriented pattern of English Hamlets), but rather a comprehensive and original reading of the entire work that prophesied the nightmare of the future. Performed on a bare stage decorated only with an arc of lights, the action followed the disintegration of a completely depraved, in which even Hamlet— sulky, sullen, entirely self-absorbed—was part of the brutalization process. Only Ophelia preserved her innocence. A witness to every vicious action, including Hamlet’s premeditated murder of her father, she fell into a degenerative psychosis—mutilating her hair with a dangerous pair shears and distributing heavy iron nails as if they were flowers. She ultimately appeared as an angelic presence at her own funeral.
The final scene, a stunning coup de théâtre, superimposed a simile coda on an essentially metaphorical conception. Up to that point, the action had occurred in an unknown European country during an indeterminate period. With the entrance of Fortinbras, accompanied by the earsplitting sounds of rock music from a ghetto blaster, the setting became site specific. Outfitted as a Central American military leader in beret and jackboots, and leading soldiers wearing Korean riot helmets and brandishing machine guns, Fortinbras ordered his men to throw all the stage corpses into a pit and take Horatio off and shoot him. His speech over Hamlet’s body—lying on a crude platform—became a photo opportunity in front of Kleig lights, a microphone, a hand-held video camera. The final line of the play—“Go bid the soldiers shoot”—was punctuated by deafening machine gun blasts.
It was a scene of ferocious intensity that penetrated the audience’s soul like a stab wound. It also managed to reinvent the meaning of catharsis for our time. It is true that Bergman’s “Hamlet” evoked more terror than pity, but then so does our century. By reconceiving Shakespeare’s tragedy as a bleak prophecy of the totalitarian future, Bergman managed to shake his audience to its very being while preserving the basic outline of the play.
One cannot argue that such interpolations are faithful to Shakespeare’s original intentions—and it is glib to use the familiar defense that we don’t have the playwright’s telephone number. Still, charges of “desecration” are meaningful only if you subscribe to the idea of a “definitive” production. I don’t. The specialness of theater—alas, the poignance of the theater, too—is its impermanence. Culture is a series of echoes and responses, and a “desecrated” classical text can always be reproduced again on stage in versions closer to the purist’s heart. Texts develop fullness of being only through continuing intervention of collective minds. They are not frozen in time but rather subject to discovery, and each new production generates others in response. It is the proper role of theater to let us look at plays through a variety of perspectives rather than in a single authorized form. It is also the function of criticism. Both act as prisms through which to view the limitless facets of great works of art.
Obviously, metaphorical reinterpretation is a process more appropriate for classics than for new plays, and living playwrights—Beckett, for example, who was outraged when JoAnne Akalaitis set his “Endgame” in an abandoned subway station—are often resentful of the director’s growing privileges. Still, it was a playwright, Luigi Pirandello, who put the matter best: “The Theater is not archeology,” he wrote. “Unwillingness to take up old works, to modernize and streamline them for fresh production, betrays indifference, not praiseworthy caution. The Theater welcomes such modernization and has profited by it throughout the ages when it was most alive.” If our own theater is once again showing signs of life, it is partly because of such bold investigation and daring interpretation.
[Robert Brustein was the founding artistic director of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remains Creative Consultant, and the Yale Repertory Theatre; he is the long-time drama critic of the New Republic. His most recent books are The Tainted Muse (2009), Millennial Stages (2006), Letters to a Young Actor (2005), and The Siege of the Arts (2001).]
Showing posts with label classical play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classical play. Show all posts
10 March 2011
21 September 2009
Staging Shakespeare
Having looked at Shakespearean acting not long ago, I’d like to reinforce and clarify some points I made regarding classical directing. Like actors, many directors, it seems, are frightened by the prospect of mounting a classic play. Some are intimidated by the language and poetry, others by the weight and heft of a play that’s come down through the centuries. The great German director Peter Stein has even admitted, “It was not easy for me to approach Shakespeare . . . because I’m simply afraid. For me he’s just a giant . . . .” And Ariane Mnouchkine, whose work I’ve admired immensely, says quite frankly, “Shakespeare’s such a mystery . . . . For me both Aeschylus and Shakespeare are gods.” Other artists apparently feel that plays as old as Shakespeare’s are no longer relevant or accessible to modern audiences. Over the years, I’ve seen productions of Shakespeare that suggest all of these feelings.
Many famous and successful directors have faced Shakespeare and recognize his power and complexity. A number have recorded their thoughts on directing Shakespeare plays. Though some couch their ideas in prescriptive terms, telling directors what they “should” or “must” do, their remarks are still worth noting. (Many quotations and concepts mentioned here are drawn from Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, eds., “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current Problems and Opinions,” Directors on Directing [Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953], 403-440. They’re a tad old, but some things just don’t go out of style. Other sources are also quoted.)
Margaret Webster, author of Shakespeare without Tears, points out first of all that “The principles on which a director must base his approach to a Shakespearean play are, after all, no different from those which govern his approach in any other play.” Peter Brook provides no-holds-barred counsel in this regard: “To communicate any one of Shakespeare’s plays to a present day audience, the producer must be prepared to set every resource of modern theatre at the disposal of his text.” (‘Producer’ used to be the British locution for what we Americans call the director. ‘To produce,’ as you’ll hear below, was to direct a play. The American usage has overtaken the British distinction.) As with any other script, the director must learn “the mood of the play, its material and spiritual atmosphere, its structural pattern, the wholeness of its effect,” adds Webster. Polish director and teacher Kazimierz Braun, a friend for over 20 years, writes for instance, that whether you’re directing Shakespeare or anyone else, the first problem is “to integrate speech with action.” While Braun acknowledges that this is harder for verse plays than those with contemporary dialogue, the key for the former is to infuse the speech with passion. Of an early encounter with directing Shakespeare, Braun says:
I had the feeling that I was faced with an impossibly difficult challenge, and, at the same time, that the author was taking me by the hand, like a little child, and leading me safely through the labyrinth of the play. Trusting him was the best way to go. Unmistakably, he permeates the dialogues with the energy of action.
One aspect of plays that seems too often missing in Shakespearean productions is humanity. Literary scholar Harold Bloom establishes in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that the Bard was the first dramatist to portray men and women as characters who could grow and change and drew psychologically-based portraits of his characters (even though Shakespeare didn’t know that was what he was accomplishing). Peter Brook points out that all of Shakespeare’s characters are “fully resolved human beings,” even the “shortest character in Shakespeare,” James Gurney (King John, I.1). Plays are written for people about people, and, as director Stuart Vaughn insists, “The real task we have, those of us who try to produce Shakespeare for modern audiences, is to reach those audiences with the essence of Shakespeare’s human meaning. . . . We must try to find what he intended his audience to receive and transmit the same effect and intention to our own.” This does not necessarily mean that the plays must be modernized “because the director lacks faith in Shakespeare’s longevity,” for, as John Gielgud points out, “Great plays do not date except through the occasional obscurity of archaic jokes and unfamiliar wording.” Margaret Webster reminds us that “The truth of the plays is a timeless truth, and similarity of external circumstances no more than a fortuitous, though sometimes poignant, reminder that the returning paths of history have been trodden by many feet.”
“The challenge for the director therefore,” asserts Joseph Papp, “is to achieve . . . modernity without sacrificing the form and poetry of Shakespeare . . . .” For Franco Zeffirelli, this means that “[w]hat matters is modernity of feeling, modernity inside.” This is what the late Jan Kott wrote in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in which the critic and teacher points out that Shakespeare anticipated not only the circumstances of our world, but the modern dramas of the likes of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genêt. In Kott’s view, Shakespeare doesn’t need to be modernized because he’s already dealing with modern problems and notions within his own plays. Harold Clurman, commenting on Kott’s analysis, writes that the greatness of Shakespeare and other classical playwrights “transcends the limits of time and many cultural differences.” The director and critic continues:
In the theatre they reveal their contemporaneity only when they are felt and projected in response to our innermost needs. This is not to be construed to mean that they must be made “topical,” e.g., Julius Caesar as Mussolini, Shylock as an East Side peddler or King Lear as an example of latter-day nihilism.
The theatre is not a museum, a treasure house to commemorate ancient wonders; it is a vehicle for the manifestation of the joys and travail of our existence. The greater the scope and profundity of its revelations, the more universal it becomes. But it always begins with the now.
Though Papp’s and Zeffirelli’s exhortations may sound as if they’re calling for psychological Realism, there is a difference between Realism, the imitation of life on stage, and reality, putting truth on stage. “Shakespeare,” as Tyrone Guthrie cautions, “is only intermittently concerned with realism. In the main, he is not writing realistic dialogue or dealing with realistic characters or situations. Most of his characters have great reality but this effect is not, as a rule, achieved by literal imitation of life.” In director Michael Langham’s terms, the director must not be “so preoccupied with this truth in his small domestic terms that he overlooks and belittles his author’s vaster intentions” and have the courage to recognize that “important theater, almost invariably, can only hope to convey its widest implications by eschewing naturalness . . . .”
Ignoring this admonition, Langham thinks, leads to productions in which “[i]nsignificant, domestic themes are . . . made to take the place of the play’s major timeless issues.” Langham faults directors “inhibited by an overabundance of naturalism” who avoid the vastness of Shakespeare’s works “through shapeless underplaying” or “with a loud, empty rhetorical flourish.” Both cheat the audience of the full impact of a classic. Often-controversial director Peter Sellars insists, in fact, that we do Shakespeare specifically because we don’t “want to be so literal about the world, and the reason we apply poetry to these questions is because in the end it’s more interesting than journalism.”
Brook, who has no objection, he says, to “rewriting Shakespeare,” admonishes directors to look for “Shakespeare’s meaning” in the plays by going beyond the words to find “the essential living heart of the play--the poetic inner dream” and translating that into theatrical vocabulary. Now, I don’t go along with Brook’s advocacy of changing Shakespeare’s words unless you’re doing a true adaptation (though I do agree with Brook when he points out that “the texts do not get burned,” so it’s not like you’ve drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa), but going beyond the words, not cleaving to a slavish literalism, should be part of the director’s prep: not just ‘What did Shakespeare mean?’ but ‘What is Shakespeare saying to us now?’ (This is akin to the dramaturg’s basic inquiry: Why this play, why here, why now?) The director (and, of course, the actors) must figure out what the play is saying to the current audience, then put that into Shakespeare’s words by all the arts of acting and playmaking. That’s what Brook means, I think, by using “every resource” at the contemporary director’s command. Not long ago I saw a brilliant Merchant of Venice that made use of computers, cell phones (and cell phone cams), and PDA’s on a generally high-tech set to make the point the director wanted. Not a word of Shakespeare was altered and it worked like gangbusters for me.
What Brook expects, I think (and since he’s done this himself, I’m probably right), is, if setting Merchant on Wall Street, or Midsummer in a circus, or Richard III or Julius Caesar in a 1930s fascist state makes the point you think Shakespeare’s making, then do it. That’s not the same as putting Hamlet on rollerskates just because you think no one else has done it. But if it says something about the play to your audience to paint a nearly-naked Achilles in black and gold psychedelic swirls--go for it. As a teacher of mine, Aaron Frankel, would say, paraphrasing Harold Clurman: “We don’t have Shakespeare’s phone number.” (He might have added, too, that the Bard doesn’t have ours, either.)
What seems to be operating in so many contemporary productions is a distrust of the audience. Director William Ball deplored that “very little has been done in drama to utilize the willingness of the audience to extend its vision beyond what it is looking at, and to help it to see with a larger vision--that is, to see with its imagination.” “The audience’s imagined spectacle can be counted on as more vital and real,” he insists, “because it arises from the creative participation of each individual.” Psychologists know this to be true from tests with children who overwhelmingly prefer toys that do nothing themselves--dolls that don’t talk, instruments that don’t make their own music--and so force the child to do the playing. Hiding safely in tradition for its own sake or exploiting the current faddish concepts disserve your audience. As a current promo for the Syfy channel says: “Imagine greater.”
This is no argument for producing “museum classics.” Gielgud says, “The classics, it seems to me, have to be rediscovered every ten years or so.” I disagree only with his time lapse; I think they should be rediscovered continuously. Change may occasionally be necessary, but it helps to remember that, as writer and critic Alphonse Karr said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” But, as the great actor-director remarks, this does require “approaching the play with real spontaneity and joy so that it has an absolutely topical effect.” More lessons from Peter Brook’s work include finding inspiration from any quarter, even the unexpected and unlikely, and eschewing old ideas and traditionalist approaches. He revived the playability of a reviled play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, by finding visual stimulation in the paintings of Jean Antoine Watteau. And when his prepared staging ideas didn’t work, he began to experiment, becoming famous for saying, “I don’t know.” Don’t be afraid, he’d say, to try and fail. “No matter,” says Samuel Beckett, one of the great dramatists of all time. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Many famous and successful directors have faced Shakespeare and recognize his power and complexity. A number have recorded their thoughts on directing Shakespeare plays. Though some couch their ideas in prescriptive terms, telling directors what they “should” or “must” do, their remarks are still worth noting. (Many quotations and concepts mentioned here are drawn from Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, eds., “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current Problems and Opinions,” Directors on Directing [Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953], 403-440. They’re a tad old, but some things just don’t go out of style. Other sources are also quoted.)
Margaret Webster, author of Shakespeare without Tears, points out first of all that “The principles on which a director must base his approach to a Shakespearean play are, after all, no different from those which govern his approach in any other play.” Peter Brook provides no-holds-barred counsel in this regard: “To communicate any one of Shakespeare’s plays to a present day audience, the producer must be prepared to set every resource of modern theatre at the disposal of his text.” (‘Producer’ used to be the British locution for what we Americans call the director. ‘To produce,’ as you’ll hear below, was to direct a play. The American usage has overtaken the British distinction.) As with any other script, the director must learn “the mood of the play, its material and spiritual atmosphere, its structural pattern, the wholeness of its effect,” adds Webster. Polish director and teacher Kazimierz Braun, a friend for over 20 years, writes for instance, that whether you’re directing Shakespeare or anyone else, the first problem is “to integrate speech with action.” While Braun acknowledges that this is harder for verse plays than those with contemporary dialogue, the key for the former is to infuse the speech with passion. Of an early encounter with directing Shakespeare, Braun says:
I had the feeling that I was faced with an impossibly difficult challenge, and, at the same time, that the author was taking me by the hand, like a little child, and leading me safely through the labyrinth of the play. Trusting him was the best way to go. Unmistakably, he permeates the dialogues with the energy of action.
One aspect of plays that seems too often missing in Shakespearean productions is humanity. Literary scholar Harold Bloom establishes in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that the Bard was the first dramatist to portray men and women as characters who could grow and change and drew psychologically-based portraits of his characters (even though Shakespeare didn’t know that was what he was accomplishing). Peter Brook points out that all of Shakespeare’s characters are “fully resolved human beings,” even the “shortest character in Shakespeare,” James Gurney (King John, I.1). Plays are written for people about people, and, as director Stuart Vaughn insists, “The real task we have, those of us who try to produce Shakespeare for modern audiences, is to reach those audiences with the essence of Shakespeare’s human meaning. . . . We must try to find what he intended his audience to receive and transmit the same effect and intention to our own.” This does not necessarily mean that the plays must be modernized “because the director lacks faith in Shakespeare’s longevity,” for, as John Gielgud points out, “Great plays do not date except through the occasional obscurity of archaic jokes and unfamiliar wording.” Margaret Webster reminds us that “The truth of the plays is a timeless truth, and similarity of external circumstances no more than a fortuitous, though sometimes poignant, reminder that the returning paths of history have been trodden by many feet.”
“The challenge for the director therefore,” asserts Joseph Papp, “is to achieve . . . modernity without sacrificing the form and poetry of Shakespeare . . . .” For Franco Zeffirelli, this means that “[w]hat matters is modernity of feeling, modernity inside.” This is what the late Jan Kott wrote in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in which the critic and teacher points out that Shakespeare anticipated not only the circumstances of our world, but the modern dramas of the likes of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genêt. In Kott’s view, Shakespeare doesn’t need to be modernized because he’s already dealing with modern problems and notions within his own plays. Harold Clurman, commenting on Kott’s analysis, writes that the greatness of Shakespeare and other classical playwrights “transcends the limits of time and many cultural differences.” The director and critic continues:
In the theatre they reveal their contemporaneity only when they are felt and projected in response to our innermost needs. This is not to be construed to mean that they must be made “topical,” e.g., Julius Caesar as Mussolini, Shylock as an East Side peddler or King Lear as an example of latter-day nihilism.
The theatre is not a museum, a treasure house to commemorate ancient wonders; it is a vehicle for the manifestation of the joys and travail of our existence. The greater the scope and profundity of its revelations, the more universal it becomes. But it always begins with the now.
Though Papp’s and Zeffirelli’s exhortations may sound as if they’re calling for psychological Realism, there is a difference between Realism, the imitation of life on stage, and reality, putting truth on stage. “Shakespeare,” as Tyrone Guthrie cautions, “is only intermittently concerned with realism. In the main, he is not writing realistic dialogue or dealing with realistic characters or situations. Most of his characters have great reality but this effect is not, as a rule, achieved by literal imitation of life.” In director Michael Langham’s terms, the director must not be “so preoccupied with this truth in his small domestic terms that he overlooks and belittles his author’s vaster intentions” and have the courage to recognize that “important theater, almost invariably, can only hope to convey its widest implications by eschewing naturalness . . . .”
Ignoring this admonition, Langham thinks, leads to productions in which “[i]nsignificant, domestic themes are . . . made to take the place of the play’s major timeless issues.” Langham faults directors “inhibited by an overabundance of naturalism” who avoid the vastness of Shakespeare’s works “through shapeless underplaying” or “with a loud, empty rhetorical flourish.” Both cheat the audience of the full impact of a classic. Often-controversial director Peter Sellars insists, in fact, that we do Shakespeare specifically because we don’t “want to be so literal about the world, and the reason we apply poetry to these questions is because in the end it’s more interesting than journalism.”
Brook, who has no objection, he says, to “rewriting Shakespeare,” admonishes directors to look for “Shakespeare’s meaning” in the plays by going beyond the words to find “the essential living heart of the play--the poetic inner dream” and translating that into theatrical vocabulary. Now, I don’t go along with Brook’s advocacy of changing Shakespeare’s words unless you’re doing a true adaptation (though I do agree with Brook when he points out that “the texts do not get burned,” so it’s not like you’ve drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa), but going beyond the words, not cleaving to a slavish literalism, should be part of the director’s prep: not just ‘What did Shakespeare mean?’ but ‘What is Shakespeare saying to us now?’ (This is akin to the dramaturg’s basic inquiry: Why this play, why here, why now?) The director (and, of course, the actors) must figure out what the play is saying to the current audience, then put that into Shakespeare’s words by all the arts of acting and playmaking. That’s what Brook means, I think, by using “every resource” at the contemporary director’s command. Not long ago I saw a brilliant Merchant of Venice that made use of computers, cell phones (and cell phone cams), and PDA’s on a generally high-tech set to make the point the director wanted. Not a word of Shakespeare was altered and it worked like gangbusters for me.
What Brook expects, I think (and since he’s done this himself, I’m probably right), is, if setting Merchant on Wall Street, or Midsummer in a circus, or Richard III or Julius Caesar in a 1930s fascist state makes the point you think Shakespeare’s making, then do it. That’s not the same as putting Hamlet on rollerskates just because you think no one else has done it. But if it says something about the play to your audience to paint a nearly-naked Achilles in black and gold psychedelic swirls--go for it. As a teacher of mine, Aaron Frankel, would say, paraphrasing Harold Clurman: “We don’t have Shakespeare’s phone number.” (He might have added, too, that the Bard doesn’t have ours, either.)
What seems to be operating in so many contemporary productions is a distrust of the audience. Director William Ball deplored that “very little has been done in drama to utilize the willingness of the audience to extend its vision beyond what it is looking at, and to help it to see with a larger vision--that is, to see with its imagination.” “The audience’s imagined spectacle can be counted on as more vital and real,” he insists, “because it arises from the creative participation of each individual.” Psychologists know this to be true from tests with children who overwhelmingly prefer toys that do nothing themselves--dolls that don’t talk, instruments that don’t make their own music--and so force the child to do the playing. Hiding safely in tradition for its own sake or exploiting the current faddish concepts disserve your audience. As a current promo for the Syfy channel says: “Imagine greater.”
This is no argument for producing “museum classics.” Gielgud says, “The classics, it seems to me, have to be rediscovered every ten years or so.” I disagree only with his time lapse; I think they should be rediscovered continuously. Change may occasionally be necessary, but it helps to remember that, as writer and critic Alphonse Karr said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” But, as the great actor-director remarks, this does require “approaching the play with real spontaneity and joy so that it has an absolutely topical effect.” More lessons from Peter Brook’s work include finding inspiration from any quarter, even the unexpected and unlikely, and eschewing old ideas and traditionalist approaches. He revived the playability of a reviled play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, by finding visual stimulation in the paintings of Jean Antoine Watteau. And when his prepared staging ideas didn’t work, he began to experiment, becoming famous for saying, “I don’t know.” Don’t be afraid, he’d say, to try and fail. “No matter,” says Samuel Beckett, one of the great dramatists of all time. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
18 September 2009
Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage
In a New York Times essay about two decades ago, Robert Brustein took on the issue of “the reinterpretation . . . of celebrated classical plays” (“Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” New York Times 6 Nov. 1988, sec. 2 [“Arts and Leisure”]: 5, 16). Brustein divided this “deconstruction” into two categories: “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.” A simile production, he asserted, simply shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own, while a metaphorical one examines the play from the inside, “generating provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”
Brustein cited world-famous examples of both types, like Orson Welles’s totalitarian Julius Caesar, a simile, and Peter Brook’s circus-oriented Midsummer Night’s Dream, a metaphor. I’ve recently seen prominent examples of what Brustein was describing: the Théâtre du Soleil’s 1992 Kathakali revisioning of Greek cycle of plays which recount the story of the House of Atreus, Les Atrides, a metaphor; this year’s resetting by the Katona József Theatre of Chekhov’s Ivanov to mid-20th-century Hungary, a simile; Nora, an up-dated Doll House by Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (2004), a simile; and John Jesurun's FAUST/How I Rose, a 2004 deconstruction of Goethe’s classic, a metaphor. As you might expect, some were more successful (Les Atrides, Ivanov) than others (Nora, FAUST). Do the more modest and lesser-known productions avail themselves of these tactics, and are the results similar? I think so, and some Off-Off-Broadway productions I saw some time back, when I made a concerted effort to see a broad sampling of Shakespeare productions on New York City stages, indicate that I may be right.
In two of the similes I saw, there were no profound reinterpretations, and, in a third, one given only lip-service. The first two--an Italian-American Romeo and Juliet with Paris as a Mafia godfather and the servants as musical-comedy gunsels, and a yuppie Midsummer Night’s Dream with the lovers romping through the forest in designer shorts and warm-ups--carried their reworking through mostly by costuming. In fact, the company seemed to have fallen into a trap they laid themselves (however unwittingly): by giving the play a soap-opera setting and look, the actors all exhibited soap-opera acting, the superficial, shallow, and hollow performance style necessitated by the fast-moving production process of a daytime drama. The R&J included several “dese and dose” accents among the servants, but for the rest, nothing was reinterpreted to further a new approach or shift my attention from the traditional focus. The director didn’t seem to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play.
A second R&J, which I discussed not long ago, did assert a new interpretation. The director’s program note explained that he saw Friar Laurence as the witting catalyst of the tragedy, and ascribed to him an un-Christian reliance on the occult. The note provided some evidence from the text for this notion, and it might well have worked theatrically, not to say intellectually, if he’d followed through with it in his production. Alas, he went no further than giving the friar the prologue and the epilogue, having him do two parlor-magic tricks, and using a violet light when the Nurse describes the natural phenomena on the night Juliet was weaned. Beyond the program note, the production, tricked up as middle-class American suburbia, showed me nothing new about this play. While Brustein notes that this kind of simile directing is “at best a platform for ideas,” with the Capulet party a backyard barbecue and the Tybalt-Mercutio duel fought with aluminum bats on a baseball diamond, this R&J was nothing more than “an occasion for pranks.”
Though a comparison of the two kinds of reworkings will have to wait until after we take a look at metaphorical directing, on the basis of this small sampling, it’s fair to draw a few simple conclusions. First, simile directors seem to strive for familiarity, all three of these choosing contemporary America for their settings or costuming. (Nora and the Hungarian Ivanov, too, were transferred to locales and times that would have been immediately familiar to their original audiences.) Second, there was a similar approach to acting, with all three casts treating Shakespeare’s language as conversational Realism. Third, either because of this or along with it, all the actors endowed their characters with a minimal emotional life. (This was not true of the two international examples.) Fourth, these directors seemed to believe that modern American playgoers can’t understand productions remote from us in time or place; that the common, human problems the classics treat can’t be communicated unless they are portrayed by people just like us.
The simile production, which Brustein saw as an update, “depends largely on external physical changes.” On the other hand, the metaphorical production “changes our whole notion of the play” by probing “the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent--a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks, since the director ‘authors’ the production much as the author writes the text.” While acknowledging that “not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose,” Brustein nonetheless “champion[s] a more radical auteurism in directing.” Having examined the simile, let’s look at two metaphors.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw (and discussed recently in another context) promised to explore the violence and animalism in all of us. Attired in tights and tee-shirts or leotards overlain with identifying character accessories--red shorts, a studded wristband--the mortals entered in pairs with martial-arts shouts and struck combat poses. During their opening lines, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta rolled on the ground in rough sex. “Tough guy” Demetrius, who, like Lysander, wore leather costume pieces over his tights, later rapes Helena to punish her for following him into the forest and dissuade her from interfering further. In the face of this, however, the acting was flat and unengaged.
The animal imagery was invoked by the fairy characters, all but one of whom had costume additions of pelts and skins and, for the men, went bare-chested. Except for one fairy, however, none exhibited any animal-like behavior.
Now humans with bestial characteristics and spirits with animal traits make a likely combination, and to explore human brutishness through the medium of a fantasy-comedy could be a very effective tactic. Theatrically, at least, it has promise. The director and actors, however, merely let the visual imagery of their costumes and blocking carry the whole exploration without developing any deeper performative aspects. The director conceived the idea but was either unwilling or unable to carry it over into performance.
Finally, in a metaphorical Macbeth, the cast and director made some decisions and ran with them. Determining, for instance, that Macbeth was in the hold of evil forces, not just swayed by the power of suggestion or caught up in a tide of action--other possible approaches--this company tripled the the witches’ appearances on stage. By acting as servants, messengers, and others and standing silently on stage during all the portentous scenes, the witches, symbols of evil, seemed to control events and guide Macbeth’s and his wife’s fates. There were three levels on which this scheme worked. First, as the messengers, the witches seeded and nurtured the plot. The second level was less directly involved in the events of the play: as the various servants, the witches’ presence suggested their control over Macbeth’s life and fate; they were always there, keeping an eye on things. In the third level, the director put the witches invisibly on stage in momentous scenes. They didn’t enter into the action, though they might echo lines or make sound effects such as the knocking that unnerves Macbeth just as he’s about to murder his king.
Further, the costumes were selected elements of modern dress draped with rough fabric to camouflage their silhouettes and allude to “ancientness” and “Scottishness.” The basic costume for the mortal males--the witches were far more fanciful--was a foundation of modern attire draped with rough, wool- or burlap-like tunics or sashes. The colors were muted, mostly charcoals, browns, or blacks, except for the almost blood-red royal sash worn first by King Duncan, then by Macbeth and finally by Malcolm. The modern under-costume suggested general character: the more soldierly wore combat boots and bloused trousers; the more administrative, including Duncan, wore civvies. Other modern accouterments included contemporary haircuts, military field jackets, bayonets, turtlenecks, eyeglasses, and flashlights. The lack of period specificity asserted that this play is not just about an 11th-century Scottish king; it is relevant to today, not lost in some past era, and to all cultures, not only ancient Scotland or modern America.
As Brustein suggests, directors who have an attraction for similes settle for an updated environment and may load their productions with tricks and gimmicks. Metaphorical directors, however, try to “capture the imaginative life of a classic.” A simile staging can be effective and even thought-provoking (the Hungarian Ivanov, which I have described in another post, was extremely compelling, for instance), but even when it misses, the metaphor production can be more powerful and exciting, particularly when the simile is used merely for “ornamental” purposes.
[Much of my discussion above was based on the Robert Brustein essay cited in the first paragraph. After publishing this article on ROT, I’ve decided to reprint Brustein’s original New York Times column; see “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” 10 March 2011.]
Brustein cited world-famous examples of both types, like Orson Welles’s totalitarian Julius Caesar, a simile, and Peter Brook’s circus-oriented Midsummer Night’s Dream, a metaphor. I’ve recently seen prominent examples of what Brustein was describing: the Théâtre du Soleil’s 1992 Kathakali revisioning of Greek cycle of plays which recount the story of the House of Atreus, Les Atrides, a metaphor; this year’s resetting by the Katona József Theatre of Chekhov’s Ivanov to mid-20th-century Hungary, a simile; Nora, an up-dated Doll House by Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (2004), a simile; and John Jesurun's FAUST/How I Rose, a 2004 deconstruction of Goethe’s classic, a metaphor. As you might expect, some were more successful (Les Atrides, Ivanov) than others (Nora, FAUST). Do the more modest and lesser-known productions avail themselves of these tactics, and are the results similar? I think so, and some Off-Off-Broadway productions I saw some time back, when I made a concerted effort to see a broad sampling of Shakespeare productions on New York City stages, indicate that I may be right.
In two of the similes I saw, there were no profound reinterpretations, and, in a third, one given only lip-service. The first two--an Italian-American Romeo and Juliet with Paris as a Mafia godfather and the servants as musical-comedy gunsels, and a yuppie Midsummer Night’s Dream with the lovers romping through the forest in designer shorts and warm-ups--carried their reworking through mostly by costuming. In fact, the company seemed to have fallen into a trap they laid themselves (however unwittingly): by giving the play a soap-opera setting and look, the actors all exhibited soap-opera acting, the superficial, shallow, and hollow performance style necessitated by the fast-moving production process of a daytime drama. The R&J included several “dese and dose” accents among the servants, but for the rest, nothing was reinterpreted to further a new approach or shift my attention from the traditional focus. The director didn’t seem to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play.
A second R&J, which I discussed not long ago, did assert a new interpretation. The director’s program note explained that he saw Friar Laurence as the witting catalyst of the tragedy, and ascribed to him an un-Christian reliance on the occult. The note provided some evidence from the text for this notion, and it might well have worked theatrically, not to say intellectually, if he’d followed through with it in his production. Alas, he went no further than giving the friar the prologue and the epilogue, having him do two parlor-magic tricks, and using a violet light when the Nurse describes the natural phenomena on the night Juliet was weaned. Beyond the program note, the production, tricked up as middle-class American suburbia, showed me nothing new about this play. While Brustein notes that this kind of simile directing is “at best a platform for ideas,” with the Capulet party a backyard barbecue and the Tybalt-Mercutio duel fought with aluminum bats on a baseball diamond, this R&J was nothing more than “an occasion for pranks.”
Though a comparison of the two kinds of reworkings will have to wait until after we take a look at metaphorical directing, on the basis of this small sampling, it’s fair to draw a few simple conclusions. First, simile directors seem to strive for familiarity, all three of these choosing contemporary America for their settings or costuming. (Nora and the Hungarian Ivanov, too, were transferred to locales and times that would have been immediately familiar to their original audiences.) Second, there was a similar approach to acting, with all three casts treating Shakespeare’s language as conversational Realism. Third, either because of this or along with it, all the actors endowed their characters with a minimal emotional life. (This was not true of the two international examples.) Fourth, these directors seemed to believe that modern American playgoers can’t understand productions remote from us in time or place; that the common, human problems the classics treat can’t be communicated unless they are portrayed by people just like us.
The simile production, which Brustein saw as an update, “depends largely on external physical changes.” On the other hand, the metaphorical production “changes our whole notion of the play” by probing “the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent--a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks, since the director ‘authors’ the production much as the author writes the text.” While acknowledging that “not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose,” Brustein nonetheless “champion[s] a more radical auteurism in directing.” Having examined the simile, let’s look at two metaphors.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw (and discussed recently in another context) promised to explore the violence and animalism in all of us. Attired in tights and tee-shirts or leotards overlain with identifying character accessories--red shorts, a studded wristband--the mortals entered in pairs with martial-arts shouts and struck combat poses. During their opening lines, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta rolled on the ground in rough sex. “Tough guy” Demetrius, who, like Lysander, wore leather costume pieces over his tights, later rapes Helena to punish her for following him into the forest and dissuade her from interfering further. In the face of this, however, the acting was flat and unengaged.
The animal imagery was invoked by the fairy characters, all but one of whom had costume additions of pelts and skins and, for the men, went bare-chested. Except for one fairy, however, none exhibited any animal-like behavior.
Now humans with bestial characteristics and spirits with animal traits make a likely combination, and to explore human brutishness through the medium of a fantasy-comedy could be a very effective tactic. Theatrically, at least, it has promise. The director and actors, however, merely let the visual imagery of their costumes and blocking carry the whole exploration without developing any deeper performative aspects. The director conceived the idea but was either unwilling or unable to carry it over into performance.
Finally, in a metaphorical Macbeth, the cast and director made some decisions and ran with them. Determining, for instance, that Macbeth was in the hold of evil forces, not just swayed by the power of suggestion or caught up in a tide of action--other possible approaches--this company tripled the the witches’ appearances on stage. By acting as servants, messengers, and others and standing silently on stage during all the portentous scenes, the witches, symbols of evil, seemed to control events and guide Macbeth’s and his wife’s fates. There were three levels on which this scheme worked. First, as the messengers, the witches seeded and nurtured the plot. The second level was less directly involved in the events of the play: as the various servants, the witches’ presence suggested their control over Macbeth’s life and fate; they were always there, keeping an eye on things. In the third level, the director put the witches invisibly on stage in momentous scenes. They didn’t enter into the action, though they might echo lines or make sound effects such as the knocking that unnerves Macbeth just as he’s about to murder his king.
Further, the costumes were selected elements of modern dress draped with rough fabric to camouflage their silhouettes and allude to “ancientness” and “Scottishness.” The basic costume for the mortal males--the witches were far more fanciful--was a foundation of modern attire draped with rough, wool- or burlap-like tunics or sashes. The colors were muted, mostly charcoals, browns, or blacks, except for the almost blood-red royal sash worn first by King Duncan, then by Macbeth and finally by Malcolm. The modern under-costume suggested general character: the more soldierly wore combat boots and bloused trousers; the more administrative, including Duncan, wore civvies. Other modern accouterments included contemporary haircuts, military field jackets, bayonets, turtlenecks, eyeglasses, and flashlights. The lack of period specificity asserted that this play is not just about an 11th-century Scottish king; it is relevant to today, not lost in some past era, and to all cultures, not only ancient Scotland or modern America.
As Brustein suggests, directors who have an attraction for similes settle for an updated environment and may load their productions with tricks and gimmicks. Metaphorical directors, however, try to “capture the imaginative life of a classic.” A simile staging can be effective and even thought-provoking (the Hungarian Ivanov, which I have described in another post, was extremely compelling, for instance), but even when it misses, the metaphor production can be more powerful and exciting, particularly when the simile is used merely for “ornamental” purposes.
[Much of my discussion above was based on the Robert Brustein essay cited in the first paragraph. After publishing this article on ROT, I’ve decided to reprint Brustein’s original New York Times column; see “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” 10 March 2011.]
05 September 2009
Acting Shakespeare
I’d like to look at Shakespearean acting, particularly since I have criticized some actors (and, by implication, directors as well) over the years. In an excerpt from Soliloquy! The Shakespeare Monologues, edited by Michael Earley and Philippa Keil, Earley makes several points that I believe many actors overlook when cast in a classical play. (The excerpt appeared in “On Acting Shakespeare,” Back Stage 7 Oct. 1988.)
There are certainly many ways to get into Shakespeare effectively, and every actor and acting teacher has her or his techniques, but Earley approaches acting Shakespeare by using the text for clues. He passes over the context for the most part, however, and I see the trouble starting at this point. As Earley remarks, “all actors, especially young ones, approach Shakespeare’s [lines] with awe, fear, and trepidation,” afraid, it seems, to consider them anything but Poetry with a capital ‘P.’ As renowned acting teacher Uta Hagen says in Respect for Acting, this gives us “all the Hamlets [and] Gertrudes . . . who never ate or slept or even breathed like human beings . . . .” She advises actors to make a modern, line-by-line translation so that they know the meaning of a speech before approaching any other acting task.
Once the actor understands the lines, it’s time to attack the character’s intention. Earley reminds us that Shakespeare was himself an actor writing for an actor-dominated theater. It’s easy, therefore, to conceive that he put acting hints all through his scripts. Of course the plays contain lots of information, such as social status and age, circumstances of the scene, and environmental conditions, but Earley directs the actor to something unique to verse plays: the poetry. He wants us to consider the rhymes, rhythms, and juxtapositions of the words. Earley says that Shakespeare “really gives the actor a score.” Obviously, none of these clues, all open to the actor’s interpretation, are available if the actor doesn’t do the homework. From past and recent shows, I conclude that some actors don’t understand how important this work can be.
Scanning the poetry, Earley notes, provides important guides for the actor. The stressed syllables, he believes, highlight the line’s import. In Hamlet’s remark to Ophelia, “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,” the stressed words thou, chaste, ice, pure, and snow show where Hamlet’s attention is. Earley also demonstrates that extra stressed syllables in irregular lines are also important, especially because they are irregular. In Hal’s response to Falstaff in 2H4, the king says, “I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers” (V.5). There are several possible readings of this line, but all of them include extra stressed syllables; one such reading puts emphasis on the words know, not, old, man, fall, and prayers; this pattern of stressed words imparts a threatening intent to the lines, Earley suggests. (It isn’t important that anyone agrees with Earley’s interpretation of the clues; it’s identifying the clues for your own interp that’s valuable.)
Since most of Shakespeare is blank verse, lines that rhyme stand out, indicating that they’re probably important. That doesn’t mean the actor has to punch the rhyme, but if Shakespeare decided the character thinks these words are important, then the actor ought to think they’re important, too. Sing-song monotony, however, is not the goal, either, so Earley makes a case for the punctuation and the broken line. Semi-colons and colons should be seen as breathing spaces, and the broken line as a pause for thought. Just because Shakespeare wrote in a specific rhythm--ten syllables alternatingly stressed and unstressed--doesn’t mean he didn’t expect his characters, and therefore his actors, to pause, stop, and wait occasionally.
The sounds and tempo the words make are also meaningful. William Butler Yeats, another poet of the theater, explained when he read some of his works that he was going to do it “with great emphasis upon the rhythm” because he’d worked so hard to get it in the poem. With a vocabulary of over 30,000 words, Shakespeare wasn’t limited to one or two words for each meaning; certainly, as a poet, he selected words for both meaning and sound. And not just the sound of individual words, but the rhythms they create together is also significant.
These aren’t answers, but hints too often ignored by actors who want to make the poetry sound like common prose speech. As Yeats insisted concerning his verses, “I will not read them as if they were prose.” This is one aspect where context comes into importance. One of the most damaging decisions an actor or director can make is to treat Shakespeare’s characters as if they were ordinary, modern folks, say out of an afternoon soap opera. Ordinary folks don’t talk poetry, but, possibly more importantly, they seldom get as passionate as Shakespeare’s characters do.
Can you imagine a Romeo without a consuming passion for Juliet?
A Tybalt whose hatred for Romeo is all macho posturing?
A Lysander who feels nothing more than puppy-love for Hermia?
A Helena with a teenage crush on her Demetrius?
Shakespeare’s characters are rarely cool or dispassionate. What seems to be missing in cases when a production of Shakespeare goes wan is the ability to come to grips with the poetry on any level other than ordinary speech. Flattening out the poetic rhythms inevitably flattens the poetic content, too. Portraying such loves and hates requires much more than volume and poses. Or merely handling the poetry with aplomb. There must be a belief that convinces us that the lovers literally cannot live without one another; that the enemies would go to any lengths to defeat each other. If an actor’s unable to handle heightened language, he’ll likely be equally unable to raise the stakes for his character above the quotidian concerns of everyday people. It’s this lack of high-stakes acting that strips the characters in those productions that fail to soar of their grand passions and ultimately renders them unbelievable and unsatisfying. Remember here one of Shakespeare’s clearest acting lessons: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” (Don’t forget, either, that the dramatist, while warning against overacting, added: “Be not too tame neither.”)
The upshot, missed apparently by many actors encountering Shakespeare, is that “the actor must give the words their due recognition in the act of performing them,” as Earley writes. “There are no easy and simple rules to follow except obeying Shakespeare’s sound score. . . . Shakespeare traffics his words through their vocal colors. And he gives you paths and byways that lead you through a speech until you begin to act him with your own kind of courage and authority.” It wouldn’t be inappropriate to say of Shakespeare, “It’s in the words!”
There are certainly many ways to get into Shakespeare effectively, and every actor and acting teacher has her or his techniques, but Earley approaches acting Shakespeare by using the text for clues. He passes over the context for the most part, however, and I see the trouble starting at this point. As Earley remarks, “all actors, especially young ones, approach Shakespeare’s [lines] with awe, fear, and trepidation,” afraid, it seems, to consider them anything but Poetry with a capital ‘P.’ As renowned acting teacher Uta Hagen says in Respect for Acting, this gives us “all the Hamlets [and] Gertrudes . . . who never ate or slept or even breathed like human beings . . . .” She advises actors to make a modern, line-by-line translation so that they know the meaning of a speech before approaching any other acting task.
Once the actor understands the lines, it’s time to attack the character’s intention. Earley reminds us that Shakespeare was himself an actor writing for an actor-dominated theater. It’s easy, therefore, to conceive that he put acting hints all through his scripts. Of course the plays contain lots of information, such as social status and age, circumstances of the scene, and environmental conditions, but Earley directs the actor to something unique to verse plays: the poetry. He wants us to consider the rhymes, rhythms, and juxtapositions of the words. Earley says that Shakespeare “really gives the actor a score.” Obviously, none of these clues, all open to the actor’s interpretation, are available if the actor doesn’t do the homework. From past and recent shows, I conclude that some actors don’t understand how important this work can be.
Scanning the poetry, Earley notes, provides important guides for the actor. The stressed syllables, he believes, highlight the line’s import. In Hamlet’s remark to Ophelia, “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,” the stressed words thou, chaste, ice, pure, and snow show where Hamlet’s attention is. Earley also demonstrates that extra stressed syllables in irregular lines are also important, especially because they are irregular. In Hal’s response to Falstaff in 2H4, the king says, “I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers” (V.5). There are several possible readings of this line, but all of them include extra stressed syllables; one such reading puts emphasis on the words know, not, old, man, fall, and prayers; this pattern of stressed words imparts a threatening intent to the lines, Earley suggests. (It isn’t important that anyone agrees with Earley’s interpretation of the clues; it’s identifying the clues for your own interp that’s valuable.)
Since most of Shakespeare is blank verse, lines that rhyme stand out, indicating that they’re probably important. That doesn’t mean the actor has to punch the rhyme, but if Shakespeare decided the character thinks these words are important, then the actor ought to think they’re important, too. Sing-song monotony, however, is not the goal, either, so Earley makes a case for the punctuation and the broken line. Semi-colons and colons should be seen as breathing spaces, and the broken line as a pause for thought. Just because Shakespeare wrote in a specific rhythm--ten syllables alternatingly stressed and unstressed--doesn’t mean he didn’t expect his characters, and therefore his actors, to pause, stop, and wait occasionally.
The sounds and tempo the words make are also meaningful. William Butler Yeats, another poet of the theater, explained when he read some of his works that he was going to do it “with great emphasis upon the rhythm” because he’d worked so hard to get it in the poem. With a vocabulary of over 30,000 words, Shakespeare wasn’t limited to one or two words for each meaning; certainly, as a poet, he selected words for both meaning and sound. And not just the sound of individual words, but the rhythms they create together is also significant.
These aren’t answers, but hints too often ignored by actors who want to make the poetry sound like common prose speech. As Yeats insisted concerning his verses, “I will not read them as if they were prose.” This is one aspect where context comes into importance. One of the most damaging decisions an actor or director can make is to treat Shakespeare’s characters as if they were ordinary, modern folks, say out of an afternoon soap opera. Ordinary folks don’t talk poetry, but, possibly more importantly, they seldom get as passionate as Shakespeare’s characters do.
Can you imagine a Romeo without a consuming passion for Juliet?
A Tybalt whose hatred for Romeo is all macho posturing?
A Lysander who feels nothing more than puppy-love for Hermia?
A Helena with a teenage crush on her Demetrius?
Shakespeare’s characters are rarely cool or dispassionate. What seems to be missing in cases when a production of Shakespeare goes wan is the ability to come to grips with the poetry on any level other than ordinary speech. Flattening out the poetic rhythms inevitably flattens the poetic content, too. Portraying such loves and hates requires much more than volume and poses. Or merely handling the poetry with aplomb. There must be a belief that convinces us that the lovers literally cannot live without one another; that the enemies would go to any lengths to defeat each other. If an actor’s unable to handle heightened language, he’ll likely be equally unable to raise the stakes for his character above the quotidian concerns of everyday people. It’s this lack of high-stakes acting that strips the characters in those productions that fail to soar of their grand passions and ultimately renders them unbelievable and unsatisfying. Remember here one of Shakespeare’s clearest acting lessons: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” (Don’t forget, either, that the dramatist, while warning against overacting, added: “Be not too tame neither.”)
The upshot, missed apparently by many actors encountering Shakespeare, is that “the actor must give the words their due recognition in the act of performing them,” as Earley writes. “There are no easy and simple rules to follow except obeying Shakespeare’s sound score. . . . Shakespeare traffics his words through their vocal colors. And he gives you paths and byways that lead you through a speech until you begin to act him with your own kind of courage and authority.” It wouldn’t be inappropriate to say of Shakespeare, “It’s in the words!”
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