The State We’re In (Part One)
If you are spirited away, eyes closed, to a theatre performing Hamlet and open them to witness three actors playing the title role, a woman playing Polonius, Ophelia in the nude and the set a rusty bedstead – then you are probably in Germany. If Hamlet is over forty – it’s probably France, if Ophelia is over forty – it’s probably Russia, and if you are unsure what play you are actually watching – it’s probably America, the land of ‘the concept’. And if Fortinbras is wearing a Bosnian, Georgian, Iraqi, or Afghan uniform – then of course it is England.
Terry Hands, director, in conversation with the author, 2007
How Paul Rogers and Ann Todd actually sounded as the Macbeths on the night I was dragged to the Old Vic in 1955 is beyond recovery. However, a rough idea of how things stood at that time can be caught from John Gielgud’s contemporary recording of Hamlet with the Old Vic Company, many of whom were also in the Macbeth. Gielgud himself was quite another matter, but what can be heard from most of the cast is a manner very typical of the decade or so after the Second World War: a brisk and genteel prettiness in the women, as if they weren’t quite speaking with their own voices (think of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter), whereas the men undoubtedly were, with a sound that was generally staunch, officer-class and heterosexually sensible (think of Cyril Raymond as her husband in the same film). Working-class characters were generally patronised.
Gielgud of course, like all originals, stood outside fashion. A miracle of speed and feeling, his is the only performance which sounds as if it comes from a deep place within him and that he will perish if he doesn’t let it out. His secret was less the fabled beauty of his sound than the visceral force that made its beauty possible. He seems to be in a state of rapture, the language harrowing him like fire: for all his breeding and fastidiousness, I have never known a performer put so much passion into the act of speech as Gielgud did. I say that even though I was startled once to be told by Princess Margaret after a charity concert that Gielgud was quite the worst verse-speaker she had ever heard. Well, there we are. For a good half-century he seemed to many people Shakespeare’s personal representative on earth, releasing a quite new sensibility into the sturdy world of classical acting.
And forever loved for his foibles: as reactive as a highly strung thoroughbred, Gielgud seemed to think and speak at the same rate, and offstage, his ability to give offence because of a more or less complete inability to reflect before he opened his mouth is the stuff of legend. Of all his legacies, this impetuosity as actor and man may well be the greatest. Appropriately it was a quality reminiscent of Shakespeare himself, in whom, according to his colleagues and editors Heminges and Condell:
mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarcely received from him a blot on his papers.
There is a story (and there is a special category for Gielgud stories, one that invisibly blends the apocryphal and the real) that he was once directing Laurence Olivier and things weren’t going well. Then Gielgud had an inspiration: beaming with his new idea, he advised him to play the part ‘like a second-rate Hamlet’ – which would have been fine except that Gielgud suddenly looked aghast, and apologised for his tactlessness. So you could say he even dropped bricks when he didn’t.
I am one of the diminishing band of witnesses not only to his fire and impetuosity but to the very different appeal of Olivier, live and in full flood; the volcanic power, the courage, the delicate intuition, the ability to spring any number of physical surprises – a talent that a live audience elicited from him far more readily than a camera. Witnesses to them as men too. On my first afternoon with Gielgud, he courteously enquired what parts I was playing at Stratford that year, before declaring that each and every one of them was unplayable, quoting the most outrageous examples of failure he could remember. It was his version of noblesse oblige. I encountered Olivier’s variant on this when, at the very moment we first set eyes on each other, he noted by way of greeting that I had highlights in my hair for the Hamlet I was then playing, just as he had had in his 1948 film. In the face of such pleasant making of common cause it would have been graceless of me to observe how much more subtle mine were than his had been.
As a teenager I had seen Olivier as Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, and left feeling relief that I had managed to train-spot what were clearly historic events – not least because of the famous Coriolanus death fall, in which he swung upside down from a bridge, held by his ankles. That moment was really what I was waiting for: in that sense he infantilised us all. I was mightily impressed by both performances, not without a sense of remoteness: I felt a little uninvolved, just a bit had. Though only fifteen, this seemed to me very unlike the Hamlet of Michael Redgrave, who even at fifty touched the heart with his scathing, tender intelligence, or the essential modesty of Ralph Richardson’s enormous talent, or the idiosyncrasy of that great text-prospector Paul Scofield, able to make the imagination fly with some apparently random cadence, not even, perhaps, to be repeated the next night. I felt there was something tyrannical and unyielding in Olivier’s supremacy over his audience. Perhaps significantly, though he was unmatched as Shakespeare’s self-confident heroes – Henry V, Richard III – he avowedly disliked the ‘complainers’: the inner collapse of a Lear or Hamlet tended to evade him, and his best studies of failure lay outside Shakespeare, as Archie Rice or Chekhov’s Doctor Astrov.
These two great figures stand in interesting contrast. Gielgud inherited from William Poel and Harley Granville Barker at the turn of the century a belief in speed and clarity of speech, as well as an odd cross-influence from the witty, naturalistic ease in commercial comedy of Seymour Hicks and Gerald du Maurier. His Shakespearian passion was temperamental – he was a Slav, Polish on his father’s side, and a great-nephew of Ellen Terry. Olivier on the other hand seemed to come from nowhere, and his innovations were artistically bolder. In 1938, having read the work of Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer, he decided that Iago nursed a repressed sexual desire for Othello; this horrified and disgusted Ralph Richardson, who was playing the Moor – and no doubt made Gielgud giggle when he heard about it. Olivier, however, was in this well ahead of his time, expressing what most of us now see as perfectly feasible. Gielgud, though a star actor-manager, insisted on having strong ensembles around him, while Olivier, jealous of his reputation, didn’t often care to share the stage with his peers, and for a long time wouldn’t play Othello in case Iago stole the play from him. Olivier continues to glow because of his films, but Gielgud is a mystery to many young actors, and I doubt if Gielgudian, an epithet still potent when I started working, would still be seen as a compliment. The wisdom of the time was that Gielgud gave you the music of Shakespeare, and Olivier, recklessly, the reality. I’m not so sure. There were times when Olivier’s brazen tenor seemed the voice of Shakespeare himself; and others when Gielgud, mercurial and generous, seemed closer to the emotional source.
As for the map that they were redrawing, there is a CD of ‘Historical Shakespeare Performances’ now on the market. Both actors are included, relative newcomers surrounded by the real old-timers – Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Sarah Bernhardt. Gielgud’s early Hamlet sounds like a Gielgud imitation, which at least shows he wasn’t brilliant right from the start; Olivier’s on the other hand is vulgar but terrific – as is John Barrymore, an American who puts most of the English actors to shame as Macbeth. This may have something to do with the cinema: both he and Olivier had swiftly grasped how to confide in the camera – or microphone – and applied it to Shakespearian soliloquy, so they suddenly seem way ahead of the game. Listening to these partly remastered cylinder recordings sounds fun, but it’s quite hard work, particularly if you find hearing Shakespeare done badly not so much entertaining as depressing. You must first get over the fact that the men sound like country squires and the women like questionable duchesses. Some of this is to do with the phonetic manners of the time:
Who calls m’ villin, breaks m’ pate across…
– but it’s more than that. Sybil Thorndike is great when reading Lady Macbeth’s letter but tiresomely histrionic when she imprecates. Even Ellen Terry, whom one so wants to be good, is a bit disappointing: recorded in 1911, you can hear the sensibility of a modern actress struggling to escape a traditional deliberateness of speech and, for us, excessive vibrato. Excessive not only to us in fact, since Caruso had done much to kill the fashion in opera some years before. Johnston Forbes Robertson is among the most natural performers, but as Hamlet he seems to view his dilemmas as a curiously amusing business and no more; still, he was the actor who drew from Bernard Shaw a view of how Shakespeare should be played – ‘on the line and to the line, with the uttering and acting simultaneous, inseparable and in fact identical’ – which is as good as it gets.
Tree is said to have been better at make-up than speaking, and he’s certainly laborious at the latter. And slow. And loud. Irving, as determined as Garrick before him to make the theatre socially respectable, sounds ridiculous and pontifical as a result: I’d far rather have heard the great rogue and vagabond Edmund Kean half a century earlier than these sanctimonious vowels. All of them play very fast and loose with the text – as Henry V, Frank Benson tells his troops not to dishonour their fathers rather than their mothers in the speech that he starts as
Once more unto the breach, once more, dear friends
Or [pause] fill the walls up with your English dead
and carelessly ends with
God for England, Harry and St George.
Every time he is about to depart like this from the familiar text there is a little hesitation that I know well comes from momentarily losing your lines. It’s a pity that there are, as far as I know, no recordings of Eleanora Duse or of the young Edith Evans – though the latter did tape a good performance of her younger self playing Millamant in The Way of the World some thirty years after the event.
As you strain to hear the voices through the dustbowl of mechanical noise you begin to think about a society irredeemably class-bound, in which the actors seem in no sense asked to reflect real life but to make some kind of daft oratorio out of it. What, you wonder, did people go to the theatre for? No mirror was being held up to nature that I can glimpse. I’d like to say the reason is simple, that the orotund style was inevitably created by the size of the auditoria; but that’s only partly true. Irving enthusiastically expanded the Lyceum to 1,700 seats and Tree’s Her Majesty’s held 1,400; but I suspect the expansive gestures and broad vocal strokes were a cultural expectation, like the extravagant stagings to which audiences also looked forward, as some do these days to a new operatic mise en scène.
Both Gielgud and Olivier had more or less finished with live Shakespeare by the mid-1970s: and since then, despite moments of nostalgia, audiences and performers have changed a good deal. I suppose as young actors the two of them may have encountered the occasional bore who remembered Irving effortlessly filling the huge Lyceum, implying that they couldn’t; likewise a couple of later generations, including mine, have patiently suffered comparisons with the Mount Rushmore figures that they became. Now, the great bells are sounding less loudly at last and the anecdotes are less pervasive, even the tellers finding them a bit beside the point. It may even be coming to light, though there is some spluttering about it from the over-eighties, that today’s leading actors are as good as Gielgud and Olivier were, and the range of talent and standard of ensemble playing infinitely better.
As in all things, fashion slithers this way and that, and it’s sometimes hard to say whether the industry leads the audience or the other way round. In some ways audiences never change any more than does the structure of the human heart: but there are circumstantial differences all the same. Even those who haven’t grown up with television look to stage actors not just for some emotional top-up – beautiful speaking or physical daring – but for an accuracy to ordinary life that matches what they can now see every night in ruthless close-up on the screen. The current taste is to eavesdrop, spotting motive or change of heart in the flick of an eyebrow or a moment’s hesitation in speech. Any self-respecting classical actor knows how to do this, and most nowadays are as at home in front of a camera as on a stage.
It follows that bespoke new playing spaces have appeared to serve a closely scrutinising audience – sometimes on a scale less than a tenth that of Irving’s Lyceum. (Gielgud, who had a streak of self-consciousness even at his best, wouldn’t have liked this at all.) The contraction of theatre into pubs and rooms during the late 1960s and early 1970s was rapid and exciting. These venues were initially intended for new and experimental work, but the question of whether you could cram a neglected epic or a Shakespeare into them soon arose. I joined the Royal Shakespeare Company just in time for this. In these days of barter and opportunism, it is hard to imagine the idealism that flowed through the debate: we were like a not very unworldly monastic order, bent over points of doctrine, preparing a new version of the Bible.
Stratford-upon-Avon does encourage this kind of concentration. It stands at an odd convergence of three influences: the spirit of Shakespeare, which can be quietly felt by the river and the church where he is buried; an intensive production line for the plays with the best resources he could hope for in a town in which many people have spent their working lives in such specialities as medieval armour or the stitching of Elizabethan shoes; and finally, the worst excesses of tourism. It is thus both hallowed ground and a circus. The occasional crassnesses thrown up by this are well known; but it remains the place where you most aptly combine watching the swans with debating how best to do Shakespeare.
The question by the Seventies was: were King Lear or A Midsummer Night’s Dream best served by traditional houses such as the old Royal Shakespeare Theatre, built in 1932, with its tricky perspectives and its 1,300 seats (a bit optimistic in these days of television), some of them a long way from the stage? More and more actors – and by no means the least experienced ones – were saying it was difficult to act subtly or to speak quietly in such a space. Well, the RST certainly had its problems and was beginning to decay physically, but several generations had learned to overcome its difficulties: I started my own story there as a supernumerary, watching Ian Holm as Richard III control his audience with a whisper or silence them with a look in his eye, eagerly working out how it was done.
Stratford’s alternative theatre, The Other Place, opened at the end of 1973, with seating for 150. It was really a prefabricated shed, formerly a rehearsal room and storage space. Not nearly as well appointed as it later became, it had a corrugated iron roof that expanded noisily in the sun and effectively passed on the winter’s cold, its audience wrapped around a stage you sometimes had to approach through the customers’ toilets. Referred to as The Tin Hut (while the RST was known a little less affectionately as The Jam Factory), its original purpose was for intimate work, but the Shakespeare question soon arose. Many miracles then took place – Buzz Goodbody’s Lear and Hamlet, Macbeth directed by Trevor Nunn. As the latter worked here he was already, as Artistic Director, imagining a third possibility, a small-scale touring operation which would travel to gymnasiums, arts centres and schools round the country with Chekhov and Shakespeare. And a fourth, which was to become the Swan Theatre, a Jacobean-style thrust stage loosely based on Shakespeare’s Blackfriars, its audience on three sides, on which it was proposed to explore the less familiar Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Both ideas have flourished; the Swan has proved triumphantly successful, and is now used for every kind of play. In the middle of this the National Theatre in London opened its doors, asking the old question again by offering the epic Olivier stage (1,160 seats) or the intimate Cottesloe (400) as alternatives for the classics, not forgetting the Lyttelton (890), which is now the only surviving proscenium stage in the portfolio of our two national companies. Everybody wanted to work in the Cottesloe, fewer in the Olivier. Peter Hall as Artistic Director found that he was always having to do productions in the two big houses himself because most of the directors he invited in only wanted to work in the smallest: on the other hand when he directed three late Shakespeares he himself insisted on the Cottesloe.
His preference was logical enough: he knew that by now audiences were as likely to be caught by the sinewy arguments and subversive ironies of the writing as by the ring of a beautiful line. They want to be part of the argument, and sometimes find the body politic as engrossing a subject as the hero: indeed there are passages in the history plays so shockingly topical – often on the subject of foreign policy – that they laugh bitterly aloud. Instinctively democratic, they specially enjoy seeing an eloquent hero capsized by a Player, a Gravedigger or a Fool. They will still go to one of the tragedies for the sake of some incandescent performer – just about – but will come out of Lear feeling short-changed if, as well as the suffering of the perplexed old man, they haven’t felt more than a twinge of sympathy for Goneril and Regan, driven to an insane revenge by his paternal bullying. In Hamlet, they may also reflect that, guilty or not, Claudius is a better proposition for Denmark than either the belligerent old King Hamlet or his over-complicated son – who will leave his country stripped and ready for annexation by Fortinbras of Norway, whose approaching drums threaten to drown his famously beautiful death speech. Alert to comedy’s darker seams, they will appreciate A Midsummer Night’s Dream all the more because it starts with such an unnerving premise – the possibility that her father Egeus will have Hermia killed for disobedience. Preferred actors are classless; in fact the trace of a regional accent is welcome, some tough grain pushing through the polish. By the same token, the idea of Great Acting by a theatre aristocracy is sceptically viewed, since many unsung heroes can be great for a moment, in one part, on one night of the run; audiences well understand that it may take ten actors, not one, to expose the breathing heart of the play.
All of this is easier to achieve at close quarters, and does something to make up for the downsides of contemporary theatre – the suspicion felt towards it by many young people and its voyeuristic obsession with celebrity. And the distractions, many to do with the fear of exchanging one kind of connectivity for another. The call of the mobile phone has become irritably tolerated even in small auditoriums, whereas a mere dozen years ago it was greeted with general horror and the ushers would come charging down the aisles (doubling the disturbance) to apprehend the offender. Now the little tune goes more or less ignored by everyone except the owner, who may even take the call. Occasionally actors protest from the stage when this happens, but less and less so, and we most of us have developed some kind of technique – and there are several – for dealing with it without breaking up the play or ourselves. Perhaps these techniques will soon be taught in drama schools. And in the small theatres, the front row may put plastic mugs and sometimes their feet on the edge of the stage: what would John Gielgud have made of that? Much the same I suppose as a senior actor of my acquaintance who used to tell the young spectators slumped in the front row of the stalls in the Gielgud Theatre in the West End to sit up straight. A little unfairly, as looking steeply upwards at the stage from there made it quite a natural thing to do; tough on me too as, onstage beside him, I had to decide whether my character had heard that part of his speech or not. It may be that at such times the rough and tumble of Elizabethan theatre, which we so earnestly seek, is closer at hand than we think.
This argument about scale underlines the fact that Shakespearian acting has largely become a matter of finding out how real you can be without screwing up the poetry. We are obsessed with the intricacies of character, those lumpy protrusions and paradoxes with which we face the world, even though Shakespeare would barely have understood the word beyond its meaning of handwriting:
CLAUDIUS [reading]: ’Tis Hamlet’s character…
The problem is that Shakespeare’s methods are very anomalous: he sometimes feels slap bang up to date, and sometimes very remote indeed, the other side of a great gap in time. In a way that we might condemn in a modern playwright, quite commonly everyone in a Shakespeare play sounds like Shakespeare, speaking with his wit, beauty or style even when this is ‘out of character’. Gertrude’s famous description of the drowning of Ophelia – ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook’ – is lovelier than anything else she says in the play, and there has been no previous evidence that she could ever come up with such a thing. The fact is that this is probably writer’s opportunism: she is, for the sake of pathetic effect, being visited with Shakespeare’s gift of tongues, and it would not have occurred to him to justify it in any other terms. However, our conditioning makes us wonder what he’s trying to tell us. Is Gertrude calling up unsuspected talents to construct a tremendous gloss on an event she has watched happen but has been content not to stop? Has she perhaps pushed Ophelia in, even? You may laugh, but I’ve been at those discussions. In As You Like It, the repentance of the usurping Duke is the most enormous improbability: on his way to the forest with an army to kill his brother, he meets an unseen ‘old religious man’ and ‘after some question with him’ abandons his plan, gives back the dukedom and becomes a hermit himself. In character terms one would have to conclude that he was bipolar, but even if the actor played that convincingly, we would still notice how snugly his change of heart comes moments before the harmonious ending.
In these cases Shakespeare is very unlike a modern writer. He seems to regard ‘character’ as fluid or even non-existent until the moment of speech – few people make much impact in Shakespeare unless they’re voluble – and even then as expendable if some more poetic purpose can be served. But sometimes he does just the opposite, leaving idiosyncrasies embedded in the language as strikingly as Chekhov and his successors – Mistress Quickly and Falstaff are full of them, she with her verbal repetitions and he with his particular style of elaboration. The characters’ linguistic choices in these cases are a clue both to their fundamental nature and what is happening to them at that moment. In the second scene of Hamlet, the lights flare and Claudius explains to his court how it is that he has taken over both crown and queen two months after his brother King Hamlet has died. The effect on the audience is to chase away the doubts the jumpy opening scene on the battlements has created: there are no mysteries and the note is no-nonsense, practical, the goods without fuss if also without much nuance. There have been problems, yes, but Denmark must pull together and get behind him – and never mind that young man in ostentatious black over there. We watch him with eyes attuned by the television interview to how swiftly a politician can call up his data and override interruptions: Claudius’s trick throughout is to forestall opposition by the simple expedient of rarely finishing a sentence at the end of a line of verse. There’s simply no space for anyone to interrupt or even think: dazzled by an operator on this form, we can’t quite get at the reality but we certainly respect his talent.
You can see something of the same technique at the beginning of Measure for Measure, but used to create uncertainty rather than confidence. The Duke of Vienna’s name is Vincentio, though oddly enough, like Claudius, he is never given it in Shakespeare’s text, only in the list of characters. Dispensing with introductions, Shakespeare gives him the staccato first word:
And whereas Claudius glides affably through warm antithetical waters, the Duke wades through mud, his horizons austere and foreshortened:
Of government the properties to unfold
Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse
Since I am put to know that your own science
Exceeds in that the lists of all advice
My strength can give you; then no more remains
But that, to your sufficiency, as your worth is able,
And let them work.
Only one metaphor (‘the lists of all advice’), and a strange bump in the metre – ‘But that to your sufficiency, as your worth is able’ – which might be significant. Its momentary clumsiness may be saying something about the Duke’s difficulties in coming to the point – or perhaps that, mentally congested, he would have been happier speaking in prose. This is not an orator like Claudius, more an exhausted chairman delegating power – or, if you like, an obfuscating fixer getting off the hook. On the other hand you might decide that Shakespeare intended nothing of the sort and that this odd line is an editor’s slip: but in front of an audience there’s not much point blaming the editor. You choose what’s useful to you, what might give you the ‘character’.
Shakespeare sometimes expresses psychological depth in very formal writing. On the walls of Flint Castle, King Richard II realises he’s losing the crown he thought was his by divine right, and imagines his future:
I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figur’d goblets for a dish of wood,
My sceptre for a palmer’s walking staff,
My subjects for a pair of carved saints,
And my large kingdom for a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscure grave.
Or I’ll be buried in the king’s highway,
Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head;
For on my heart they tread now whilst I live,
And buried once, why not upon my head?
Nothing complicated about the verse: almost every line starts a new thought and ends by completing it, and the emotion Richard feels is obvious to the audience. The actor’s first danger is using too thick a wash: sorrow, sorrow, sorrow. Shakespeare never does that – if he wants someone to be completely overcome, he makes language collapse altogether. Generally, suffering makes his characters more eloquent (as it doesn’t always in life), just as falling in love speeds up their brains (as it always does in life) and makes them wittier than before.
What the audience is finding out is that Richard’s nature is to exchange one fantasy, the illusion of divinity, for another, the life of the anchorite. They are moved by his peculiar courage, his willingness to invent while his heart is sinking. Without a vocation till now, Richard has suddenly found it, and his grief has a desperate painterliness, the pain measured not by luxuriance but precision. His talent, and comfort, is to make those objects as visible as Macbeth’s yellow leaf once was to me. So the actor has to match Richard’s skill with his own. Within the word ‘wood’ is a nucleus waiting to be cracked open like a germ of wheat: the idea has to be sent on its way so that in a flash we see the grain of the dish, its uneven colour, its lopsidedness perhaps – just as we have to see the thirteen other common nouns in the seven lines of verse. On the nights the actor fails, it will be in not hitting the plumb centre of the word, allowing emotion to twist it into an exclamation, not a fact. By any standard it’s quite difficult, and if I could absolutely say how the balancing act of passion, cadence and accuracy is done, my own success rate would be 100 per cent. Like serving well at tennis, a very complicated process of coordination leads to a simple, rapid result. It is difficult for a performer to get bored in a long run with Shakespeare: you never can be sure from one night to the next, and you’re qualified for nothing but starting again the next day – in the words of Samuel Beckett, Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better.
I see I’ve found more examples of character revealed by language than subsidiary to it. Of course: these are the best moments in Shakespeare, when he convinces you that these dazzling images could only have come from the mouth they have. For the falling King Richard, the props of devoutness and poverty – rosary beads, a walking stick, two quaint medieval carvings – are so vividly realised that you too feel them in your hand. When, in Troilus and Cressida, Achilles admits:
My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr’d,
And I myself see not the bottom of it
we certainly couldn’t have put it better ourselves: this dark swirling of his mind – his uncertainty about himself, in fact – is exactly what is intriguing about him. Later, with Hector’s blood on his hands, he realises that the impact on the Trojan War of what he has done will not be seen till the morning:
The dragon wing of night o’erspreads the earth,
And, stickler-like, the armies separates.
We can hear the crackle of disengagement in the falling dark and see Achilles brooding on Hector till dawn. After his shaming threat of revenge on Titania, the amazing beauty of Oberon’s conjuration of the wind riffling the wild thyme on a bank he knows reasserts his fairy dignity; the horrible squeaking of the ‘shadow like an angel in bright hair dabbled in blood’ is – obviously – the jolt that would make Clarence start up time after time in a night sweat; Juliet’s vision of Tybalt all green with mould in his tomb is partly that of a child. Shakespeare is a puzzle: if he can do psychological subtlety in such blazing language, why does he at other times not bother with it at all?
To be called a Shakespearian actor might seem an archaic compliment these days, but perhaps it still means something. Stamina, suppleness, imagination and a relish for argument; a sharp ear for a key-change or the sudden thump of a monosyllable in the verse; an instinct for the antithetical structures of the prose. And perhaps a certain slyness. In 1974, in the midst of President Nixon’s lying on television, I was at the RSC playing Angelo in the politically satirical Measure for Measure – the play was done a lot around that time. As deputy Duke of Vienna, Angelo attempts to seduce Isabella, a highly religious young woman, in return for a reprieve for her imprisoned brother, sentenced to death for sexual intercourse with his fiancée. In this difficult undertaking Angelo tacks about, hoping that Isabella will take his point without his having to say anything too gross:
Admit no other way to save his life –
As I subscribe not that, nor any other,
But in the loss of question – that you, his sister,
Finding yourself desir’d of such a person,
Whose credit with the judge, or own great place,
Could fetch your brother from the manacles
Of the all-building law; and that there were
No earthly mean to save him, but that either
You must lay down the treasures of your body
To this suppos’d, or else to let him suffer…
She continues to look enquiringly at him. Then he runs out of legalistic hypotheses and blurts out:
What would you do?
Given the enormity of what he’s suggesting, I found this funny: Angelo is a man trained to present a case in court but in no way to talk to a woman. I did the last line as slangily as I dared, edging towards ‘What wouldja do?’ The gaucheness got – I still think – a legitimate, tense laugh. However, if it were now, I probably wouldn’t make quite such a point of it, and I might even up the rhythm a bit – just a bit. It was a little too flip perhaps, though in a way right for the time, a time when a certain brutal practicality was assumed to underlie an efficient political speech.
On the other hand, not long ago I saw an actress playing Lady Macbeth in Chicago dealing with
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking place
And we’ll not fail.
All my life I’ve heard these lines grandly declaimed, full of dark foreboding and perverse heroism. But this time it was as if she were arguing with her infuriating husband about whether the car would break down – not in the sense of trivialising her feelings, but because for the moment her annoyance was the same. It was the first time the lines had really made sense to me: Lady Macbeth has only one voice to speak with, and you don’t have special inflections for killing a king. And she had done no harm to the verse, that resilient, flexible thing. What made her choice right, and mine in 1974 – on balance – wrong?
Maybe no more than my own changing taste. When Puck declares
Now the hungry lion roars
And the wolf behowls the moon
should the actor use the animal sounds onomatopoeically, allowing a bit of roar into the first phrase and a keening note into the second? I don’t like it, though I’ve seen good actors do such things, and have probably done them myself. On the other hand when Romeo says in his distress that Juliet will think him ‘an old murderer’ the cuteness of it seems to me delightful, as if Romeo is imagining his lover intimately ticking him off. Likewise when Macbeth declares that he has
bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people
the slangy swing the last phrase nowadays has seems to me entirely worth using.
A little shamefacedly, an actor in Shakespeare will be drawn to anachronistic moments like these to test the limits of how up-to-date the material can sound. The answer is, invariably, more up-to-date than you’d think. If he or she can find as conversational a form as possible for all the tension and release, the lightness and weight in the verse, without betraying the soft, heavy beat, the way the melodic line sometimes strains against the rhythm (not to mention the equally taxing architecture of the prose) – and then find a way of doing all of it in a very wide range of theatre acoustics… well, I’d say the job was done.
Hamlet asks a lot of us:
The purpose of playing… was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
In a slightly odd series of images (‘scorn’?) the last is the most seductive, with its hint of deep cultural applicability. When Paul Rogers played Claudius in Gielgud’s recording of Hamlet it was 1956. What the young man in black (actually over fifty years old, but never mind) would object to in him would have been his very self-confidence, the lack of healthy doubt; what might be attracting Queen Gertrude meanwhile would be the oddly potent male mixture, like a strong tobacco, of aggression and homeliness. Claudius’s kind had won a war only a decade ago and were uninterested in the moral anxiety of a young intellectual who might soon turn into John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or go on CND marches.
A decade or so later, this antagonism came to a head in the Paris événements and the American student uprisings. In leafy Warwickshire, I had, as very small beer indeed, joined the RSC and was watching Brewster Mason’s Claudius dealing with David Warner’s red-scarfed student Hamlet. He was like the sports coach reproaching a young intellectual to whom he’d had to give a place on the team because of parental pressure, and who might let him down. What Warner’s Hamlet objected to in this was the meretricious role-playing – Claudius is far from being a sporting man – and spun rationale, typical of his parents’ generation. Its personal habits too: this Hamlet was clearly teetotal while Claudius’s chicaneries were lubricated by a deal of hard drinking and sexual oeillades. Whereas Rogers had bluffed Hamlet out by force of pseudo-common sense and fair play – urging him to get over himself, in fact – Mason understood his prey well enough, but was implicitly appealing to the rest of the court to agree that the job now was to take up the reins of government firmly, even if that involved a little blurring of scruples.
In the 1990s I came to play Claudius myself under the same director as Mason, Peter Hall. By now the issue was barely political at all (as it would once have been with him) but musical – it was a matter of whether you could avoid breathing within a blank verse line, but always did so, if only for a nanosecond, at its end. Everything else – character, political nuance, relationship – could be trusted to follow from this discipline, and whatever Shakespeare meant would be out there for all to see, unedited. In a move worthy of Claudius himself Hall turned to me on the first morning’s rehearsal and asked me as an old friend for a demonstration of his methods with the King’s opening speech. This presented a bit of a problem to me, as I wasn’t sure I agreed with him. Then I remembered the dictum of another, earlier teacher, the director Tyrone Guthrie, that a man can’t call himself a man until he can do half a dozen lines of verse on a single breath. And so I did it, seven lines in fact. Hall was jubilant, but the Cheshire Cat performance actually allowed everyone to draw whatever moral they pleased. What with his pre-emptive strike and my studied neutrality, we had, in effect, played Claudius with each other.
There’s a truth underneath such anecdotes: for one thing, directors change their minds over time, and so do actors. In my case two things had happened. First I now had enough technique not to show if I was breathing at all and so could accommodate the director in front of his cast; and as it happened I had also (as Hall had in the 1960s) been drawn into a specifically political – sometimes heretical – approach of my own to the plays, one which I still largely have. Accidentally concurring with Margaret Thatcher about the nobility of small businesses, I had in 1986 got my hands on the means of production and founded with Michael Bogdanov the English Shakespeare Company – a rather grand name and, considering that Bogdanov and I are both Celts, a misleading one. Our modest proposal, which rapidly became quite a big business, arose from frustration with what we saw as the lack of small-p politics in the Shakespeare work around us. Having lived through the free-for-all of the Seventies – by turns doctrinaire and formless, wilful and puritanical – I for one was offended by the new 1980s bombast issuing from Shake-spearian addresses that should have known better; and since bombast reflects uncertainty, this said something about the loss of nerve afflicting every branch of the arts during Thatcher’s period of disabling. One can’t blame the Iron Lady for everything, but hers was a prime example, worthy of the citizens in Coriolanus, of banishing the thing you don’t understand (and therefore fear); the theatre community responded with a loss of self-esteem expressed as contempt, like the patricians in the same play.
The ESC’s work was based on a conviction that everything in Shakespeare, however beautiful, is full of argumentation, and every line a point of view in a transfixing debate. So Romeo and Juliet is not just a beautiful love story but a bold question about whether love can change the world. Is it better to have a bad man who’s a good king, like Claudius, or vice versa, as Hamlet, with his tendency to be paralysed by the opposing sides of an argument, would perhaps have been? Is Othello a victim or a fool? What is to be done? Do the ends justify the means? Like the first Elizabethans crammed into their playhouses, looking at a platform suspended between heaven and hell, audiences want to take part in an urgent conversation which they can perhaps only get in the theatre, one in which they’re encouraged to change sides as often as they like, but find it impossible to sit on the fence for long.
John Gielgud was one of the ESC’s Patrons for a while, but politely resigned at the sight of the modern dress that we became famous for: on the other hand he insisted that he was deeply impressed by the standard of the verse speaking. The modern dress notoriety was all right since everyone needs a trademark, but really it was only a small part of the point. As far as possible, we were trying to provoke a political debate through Shakespeare’s language without, I hope, losing any of its beauty. Picking up whatever iron filings were in the air, we presented Henry V’s invasion of France like the Falklands campaign; Richard III was played out in a series of boardrooms with IBM computers and dispatch cases, into one of which Hastings’s head fitted surprisingly well and shockingly. Later on in our trajectory, Coriolanus found himself in 1989 Bucharest, in the smoky committee rooms and excited alleyways of revolutionary politics. The people’s repeated chant of ‘Demokratie!’ was both inspiring and inane; the set was dominated by a huge fallen statue of Coriolanus’s head, suggesting that of Stalin or Dzerzhinsky and emphasising everyone’s tendency in the play to see him as an icon, not a man.
I shall be forever glad of the style we achieved at our best, something between heroism and hectic argument. There was very little Received Pronunciation: wherever possible our actors worked in their natural accents, so that a Geordie or a Scot were, unless the casting absolutely forbade it, encouraged to use the voice they thought and felt in. (I in any case have a belief that Celts make the best Shakespearian actors – something to do with an unforced poetic sense, ancient passion, an attraction to the very heart of a word.) In this we were, after all, mimicking Shakespeare’s own company, who must have sounded like a Tower of Babel – actors drawn from all over the country at a time when people from one village might hardly understand those from another.
The ESC was an enterprise both progressive and nostalgic. In his book Will and Me Dominic Dromgoole flatteringly describes us as the rock ’n’ roll company of the time, carousing and breaking hearts across five continents, and indeed we were in one sense old-fashioned rogues and vagabonds of the road. But I’m proudest of a more subtle thing from those years; the sight of young actors, not trained for the classics and with all the compressed diction of television acting, moving into a new 1,500-seat theatre every Monday, checking out the acoustic for a couple of minutes like roadies at a microphone, before going on in the evening with, as well as their colloquial instincts, the open throats and full vowels of opera. At this point we seemed to be looking back into the best of our traditions and forward into something quite new.
In due course the ESC ran out of steam, as perhaps it was always going to after a spectacular start in which we toured the Shakespeare History cycle from Richard II to Richard III. This was a sequence that hadn’t been seen since the groundbreaking RSC version of 1964: even since then, no one has had the temerity to tour it, week in and week out, through the UK and all round the world, occasionally doing marathon weekends of all the plays in the fifty-two hours between Friday and Sunday nights. Winding up six years later, we left the debate about the rights and wrongs of the playing of Shakespeare – forever changing and subjective, forever echoing the political moment – to be conducted by bigger organisations with more money to do it with. We did good work still, but our political bite had softened. We had always been better at argument than at states of mind – though oddly enough the pastoral energies of the Bohemia scenes in The Winter’s Tale suited us well, as did the tenderness of Lady Mortimer singing in Welsh to a husband who can’t understand her in Henry IV Part One. Certainly our aims were more important than the production details which scandalised a few – I’ve lost count of the number of times we riposted that productions of Shakespeare were all in modern dress till the middle of the nineteenth century. Critics of this ignored our use of costume from earlier periods as well, sometimes within the same scene, and a choice of music that ranged from Gregorian Chant and Byrd, Handel and Monteverdi, through to Philip Glass, Louis Armstrong and Status Quo. And if nothing else, we had the wit, at the moment in Richard III when King Edward IV dies, to have a newspaper seller yelling ‘Ed’s dead – King shuffles off mortal coil’. You could hardly object to that when, as Gielgud said, we were also speaking the verse so well.