1
Shakespearian production has for long been in a state of confusion. Now we have also to take into account the recent challenges from the open and arena stages.
My own practice, as opposed to theory, has been simplified by my having been forced to use simple methods. I have tended to rely, as my pictures (e.g., 7, 17, 21) show, on a central platform between two pillars or flats; and even had I had greater resources I should have striven, so far as possible, for a unity of tone. Perhaps the most serious complaint that might be levelled against my approach, both here and in my more academic studies, would be the charge that, by trying to reduce tumult to tidiness, I have been forcing Shakespeare into a classic mould. And yet the will to unity appears inevitable.
William Poel’s insistence that the Elizabethan play-house was architecturally stately and its productions sumptuous has been often repeated. Mr. Speaight observes that Miss Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s set for the Histories at Stratford-on-Avon in 19 51 ‘had the sovereign merit of being architecture rather than décor’ (William Poel etc., 82–3). But if an ‘architecture’ is deliberately made for the occasion rather than being an accepted part of the building used, it inevitably says something, and must accordingly be devised for the occasion, too; and that means devised for the particular performance and play under consideration; and we are at once involved in some kind of ‘décor’. There will certainly be danger in any too elaborated a permanency unless it accords with the whole action, like the blazonings of the two houses for Romeo and Juliet or our figure of Apollo for The Winter’s Tale (pp. 144 above). The trouble is that a Shakespearian play may shift its locality and even vary in tone, as when the poetry of King Lear touches the pastoral and idyllic towards the close. On this however we can agree: what we want is a colourful performance without reliance on painted scenery or any too striking changes—unless such seem quite unavoidable, as in Timon of Athens—of background. Modern techniques can certainly, by the use of soft blackouts and significant emblems, suggest simple changes with a minimum of elaboration; but too much of it detracts from the permanency, the solids being continually melted before our eyes. One of the most effective examples in my experience of reliance on words and action against a simple and dark, and mainly architectural, background was given by Douglas Seale’s production of the three parts of Henry VI with the Birmingham Repertory Company at the Old Vic in 1953. The three plays were given in sequence, and at the conclusion of the third night the applause, though I would not suggest that applause is our final criterion, was perhaps the most extravagant that I can recall.
My own breaking of continuity by a fairly frequent use of front curtains might today be called if not out-of-date at least out-of-fashion. Mr. Richard Southern strongly disapproves of such alternations of full set and ‘apron’, being at pains to distinguish the latter from the true ‘open stage’ (The Open Stage, 65–7). But Masefield accepts a scheme similar to mine (A Macbeth Production, 1945; 18–19), and the use of a ‘traverse’ while properties on the main stage-area are being rearranged has always appeared to me to derive authority of some kind, though of what precise kind I am not sure, from the mechanics of Shakespeare’s composition, since the alternations come too regularly for it to be altogether a matter of chance.1 Many of our short scenes not only lend themselves to a frontal performance against a formal curtain, but actually seem (p. 67) to demand such a projection if their full, often semi-choric, quality is to be brought out. Sometimes, when we have scenes of length which are yet subsidiary to our main background, an intermediate expedient may be used, as in our half-stage use of curtains in Timon of Athens. A similar method may be helpful in Antony and Cleopatra. Here it is reasonable to use a permanent setting of Egyptian suggestion. Egypt exists in the poetry as a stabilized and enclosing reality overarching the flux of temporal, which here means of Roman, affairs (The Imperial Theme, 323–4). But what of the many Roman scenes? If they are done within the main set, this, whatever our theories, does not in practice work, since we cannot accept them as Roman. If we use modern techniques to make one set melt into another, our Egyptian permanence suffers from our watching its solidity being dissolved. It would seem that nothing conceivable—barring the extreme of an open stage technique—attains so satisfying a result as the use of a plain curtain or some equivalent such as the pushing in of a screen; though I myself would prefer a curtain provided that it moves noiselessly, since there is a definite break, which needs underlining. The shift from Egyptian realism to conventional formality will be accepted as an honest if unoriginal expedient—it is always better to be unoriginal where possible—and all goes smoothly. Even were we able to use a grand Roman setting it would usurp a disproportionate importance. Naturally these Roman scenes can be built up visually by attendants, standards and other properties: it is wonderful how much can be done by these alone.
Much depends on what play is being done. The Birmingham Repertory Company scored heavily with Henry VI by simple means. The trilogy is however made of a sequence of unusually violent scenes: there was more than enough to hold our attention. We must preserve honesty in our approach, and if we find that such a treatment does not do all that is required for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Macbeth, the storm-scenes of King Lear or the second half of Timon of Athens, we must be ready to admit it. Such plays as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest trace their descent from Court entertainments; and that such entertainments, culminating in the Masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, employed an elaborate machinery, is well known. Shakespeare’s imagination could certainly function in such terms. If it were charged against me that in my Timon of Athens I departed from my ‘principles’ by rejecting a permanent setting for a rocky background in the second movement, my defence would be that the play’s principle of unity itself changes, demanding a corresponding change of set and style; that the atmosphere of the later action must be preserved and emphasized; and that I was accordingly thinking less of my own principles than of Shakespeare’s conception.
Though still averse from any primary reliance on lights, especially when coloured, I have since my first productions grown more sympathetic to the electrician, provided that he does not assert himself at the expense of the human figures and the spoken words. Especially when an unclothed body is used, light-variations help to awake the deeper meanings. My Stowe Macbeth used them effectively for the second and third Apparitions (pp. 143–4 above). The wild scenes of my Timon of Athens relied quite heavily on lighting; a physical effect predominated and the scenes in question, composed on a wave-length more Romantic than Elizabethan, demand an atmospheric treatment. We are concerned less with a community and more with a lonely individual, and for a dramatic movement composed largely of an individual’s communing with spiritual or natural forces a play of light is helpful. For A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest a too ascetic approach might be dangerous. We had light-effects for our figure of Apollo in The Winter’s Tale (pp. 144–7 above).
We have already discussed Tree’s production of The Tempest. What we have to ask ourselves is, Can we by our methods do equal justice to the more supernatural or cosmic properties of Shakespearian drama? When in Toronto I wanted to play Caliban it was arranged that another producer, Miss Josephine Koenig, should undertake the production. There were many reasons, some of which I forget; but it certainly looks as though I was not inspired, using the simple methods to which my own principles at that time committed me, to attack The Tempest.
Strangely, in view of my own predispositions, one of my main complaints on professional productions today is concerned not with their lack of symbolic or atmospheric profundity, though this may be serious, but with their lack of realism where realism is demanded; ‘realism’, that is, in the most obvious sense.
I have already (p. 168 above) observed how absurd it would be to show Timon throwing off his grand robes to reveal a rough loin-cloth, as though he had prepared this passionate gesture beforehand; and I have seen this happen, in a production of status. Once in a high-class production of Richard III I have seen Richmond go to sleep on the ground in front of a tent which had been carefully pitched before our eyes instead of inside it. Such errors give the impression that Shakespeare is such an abracadabra of nonsense that no sort of convincing reality need be expected. They derive from a failure to understand what can and what cannot be accepted in terms of theatrical convention. Failure to use an audience’s willing suspension of disbelief in the right way will end up by shattering illusion in the wrong. The truth is, we are un-at-home in Shakespeare’s world.
2
Our inadequacies derive from a failure to understand Shakespeare’s interweaving of human realism and expansive apprehension. The Shakespearian grandeur is always rooted in the soil, and rhetoric related to the colloquial. On the relation existent between these two categories his art depends.1
My youthful introduction to stage excitement and much of my training in Shakespearian sensibility came from attendances at Tree’s productions (pp. 205, 210 above); and when I first started performing the big parts in Toronto, my guide and mentor was the late Leslie Harris, formerly of Tree’s company and a life-long disciple of his art.2 How subtle was his advice on speaking—‘Don’t act it’ he would say, countering, at a chosen moment, one of my own ill-placed extravagances. Tree’s acting was subtle; his speaking was in general quiet; but he had grandeur, in both speech and gesture. I have already narrated how, when in 1949 I was given a record of Tree’s speaking of Antony’s lines in Julius Caesar—and Tree’s Julius Caesar was my first experience, in 1911, of professional Shakespearian production—I detected in it both the spiritualized note and structural build-up which I had for long regarded as the most important qualities to be looked for in Shakespearian speaking and to which I then realized that I must have been attuned by Tree’s example.
Throughout my own stage adventures it would seem that two strains have been active: the strains of what people call ‘grand-style’ acting, though I never consciously aimed at it, merely trying despite many incompetences and continual failures to act well; and, second, the acceptance of certain modernistic advances in production, especially the need for solidity, which derived from having witnessed Granville Barker’s three productions at the Savoy in 1912 and 1914. In commenting on my Timon of Athens at Leeds a critic in the Journal of the National Union of Students Arts Festival (The Festival Review, 8 January 1949) remarked that I ‘achieved the remarkable duality of producing sensitively in the modern style, but yet acting in the way of the old school’. That may hold some truth, though I was myself unaware of the discrepancy, which was perhaps caused by my directing others to do what pleased myself as a Shakespearian who needed little interpretation, while my own performance was levelled at a non-specialist audience; for we are not normally performing to an audience of specialists.
Both realism and grandeur have their rights; more—in their mutual interaction lies the key to all our problems. In speaking Shakespearian verse failure to get the right vocal artistry for a subtle gradation and interplay of colloquialism and poetic rhapsody will lead sooner or later to displays of raw emotion and rant. What is sometimes called the ‘grand style’ in speaking is the adoption of a manner which can compass variations without strain. It is not afraid to pause on a glowing phrase; it enjoys a climax, though the climax may on occasion be quiet rather than noisy; it will never shout—unless, of course, a shout is part of the story being enacted—gaining power and intensity instead through an increase of spoken volume, whereas a shout is hollow and without significance; and it is as much at home with colloquial accents as with poetic depth. All this it can do because it enjoys a sense of spiritual purpose in the birth of grandeur from realism, and works from that. It is the eternal enemy of rant. All this applies too, mutatis mutandis, to gesture.
The easiest way to define my ‘key’ to Shakespearian acting and production is to repeat once again my old contention regarding the principle of active growth, or unfurling, in Shakespeare’s dramatic artistry. This I have already discussed (pp. 31–3, 122); and it is illustrated again and again in my various descriptions. This growth or blossoming may sometimes be seen as a gradual untangling of conflicts and confusions to disclose some simple truth or beauty. Single speeches reveal it. A surface is broken to reveal some splendour.
One such example, already (on p. 256) discussed, is Henry V’s ‘Crispin’ speech, wherein the King is shown searching for a direction, getting the key-word ‘Crispin’ and thereafter rising to a victorious rhetoric, where we have a good example of a quiet climax on ‘we band of brothers’, spoken softly as a crowning thought. Richard III’s soliloquy after seeing the ghosts starts with the ego and conscience in baffling self-conflict until the battling gives way to the simple and compelling truth of condemnation. Another fine example is John of Gaunt’s speech on England in Richard II. It must be spoken with the quavering accents of age which alone justify its repetitions and the involved and drawn-out syntax. The speech should accumulate energy, growing with victorious effort from a death-bed struggle to a powerful climax: therein is its structural and dramatic meaning, its conjuring up, through close poetic characterization, of a mysterious power, its soul. It is an indefinable essence, a presence behind, or thrown up by, the lines or events of Shakespearian drama that I am trying to indicate and to which it too often seems that our generation, through its leading exponents, is insensitive.
More subtle is the King’s sleep-speech (pp. 31–2 above) in the second part of Henry IV, beginning
How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep.
(III. i. 4)
Its start holds a poignant realism; the King is almost in tears; a catch in the voice may be allowed to suggest them at ‘press mine eyelids down’ and the cry for ‘forgetfulness’. He moves on to a more resonantly poetic realization of kingly state, the generalized thought dominating psychology and character as ‘the perfumed chambers of the great’ rise before us; and then the speech—it is hardly the King now, but the speech—takes wing as it calls up the image of the ship-boy sleeping at the mast-head in a storm wild enough to awaken ‘death’; sleep, already called a ‘god’, being established as a great cosmic power, twin to death. All this, from tears to thunder, from pathos to apocalypse, must be reflected in the speaking. The conclusion curving down to the final couplet is, in Shakespeare’s usual manner, quiet.1
In Macbeth’s ‘If it were done when ’tis done …’ (I. vii) we move from mental confusion to the disclosure of angels ‘trumpet-tongued’, Pity like a child, and heavenly ‘cherubin’ horsed in air. When Antony in Antony and Cleopatra hears of Cleopatra’s supposed death (IV. xii), he is caught between his calling as statesman-soldier and his love.
Unarm, Eros; the long day’s task is done, And we must sleep …
His following words are disjointed. He speaks in turn to Mardian who brought the message, to Eros, and to his dead love; seesawing between life and death. As he throws off his armour he is aware of a spiritual ‘strength’ with which the ‘force’ of his earthly existence is being ‘entangled’, until the final revelation springs new-born from these alternations and confusions:
Stay for me:
Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze;
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.
We end for once in excitement at ‘Come, Eros! Eros!’ The normal procedure is to start quietly, perhaps colloquially, and then, smoothly taking off like an aeroplane, to become poetically airborne, and finally return to earth. The most difficult moments are at the transitions, from earth to air and then back, which if too sudden may ruin the effect. A good example lending itself to a smooth take-off and return is Hamlet’s ‘Look here, upon this picture and on this …’ (p. 50 above). Another, embedded before and after in old-man colloquialism, is Prospero’s ‘cloud-capp’d towers’.1
Even were it advisable to speak a long speech in one unvaried gush success would be impossible. I have heard Clarence in a major production of Richard III start his long dream-speech like this with the inevitable result. This is an extreme example; but few actors today know quite what is demanded. It is extraordinary that such blunders should be condoned.
Not only speeches but scenes and whole plays show this kind of development and disclosure: we have already (p. 32) discussed the Deposition scene in Richard II and emphasized the access of power and dignity attained by both Romeo and Othello before their stories close.
These advances are advances in poetic stature, and as they assume form they must be accorded a newly expanded emphasis not only in the acting but in the type of acting used. I offer a couple of examples easy to describe, both of which have already been touched on (pp. 52–3, 57 above).
The dramatic pivot of Romeo’s upward progress is his scene of abandoned emotion with Friar Laurence. Here for the first time he becomes a dramatic power, and the acting should become broader, suiting the power. Romeo in distraction speaks to the Friar:
Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,
An hour but married, Tybalt murdered,
Doting like me, and like me banished,
Then might’st thou speak, then might’st thou tear thy hair,
And fall upon the ground, as I do now,
Taking the measure of an unmade grave.
(Romeo and Juliet, III. iii. 64)
The voice is at first high and querulous. At ‘tear thy hair’ the hands clutch the head; at ‘fall upon the ground’ the body is falling while the vocal note is simultaneously deepening; at the last line, the voice is at its deepest, and the body still. The acting has lived the poetry.
King Lear is, as we have noted (pp. 121–2), at first a realistic character-study in petulant old age, but from Lear’s ‘No, I’ll not weep’ onwards the drama becomes air-borne, allowing and demanding new resources of technique in voice, action, and probably setting too. Lear’s address to the elements demands care. He should be given a dominating position, raised as on some craggy eminence, one arm up and pointing. We must observe, as does the verse, the correct sequence of wind, lightning and thunder in this order; we must interspace flashes, sounds and speech correctly, sounds dying as the words crest up, in alternate waves;1 and Lear can act the poetry, his hand for a moment flickering, zig-zagging, for the ‘thought-executing fires’; then drawn back as in self-defence, with a salute-like action, at ‘vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts’, leaving a perfect position for the back of the hand to be drawn swiftly across the forehead at ‘singe my white head’. These expansions should in due course graduate down again to realism and old age pathos; Lear descends; then, at the dictate of the poetry, his actions again up-flower. At
Close, pent-up guilts,
Rive your concealing continents, and cry
These dreadful summoners grace …
the hands may be cupped in front for ‘close’, break apart, palms down, for ‘rive’, and be raised high for the rest. Though the literary expert may feel no intellectual need for such explanatory gestures, yet for most of the audience, who could not translate ‘close’, ‘rive’, ‘pent-up’ or ‘continents’ with facility and exactitude, the gestures serve to make the speech live and wing it through the auditorium as a living entity; on an open stage, where the actor might be turned from the spectator, they would help greatly. And yet it is not simply a question of giving expression to the words. Exciting gestures have, during this cosmic movement, rights of their own, however well we know the text. Grand movements or postures may often be regarded as our aim, the text their excuse. ‘Drama’ means action; ‘theatre’ means seeing; we want more, in such a scene, than words and reasoning, though words and reasoning may have given us our cue. The poetry is to be expanded and embodied in physical and material terms: that is what staging is for, to embody the poetry.
We shall not, of course, be so excitingly engaged all the time; much of our performance will be on a more pedestrian level. It is too often supposed that there is some single right-and-wrong applicable to every moment of a performance, whereas there should be continual changes of tempo, method and appeal. The intellect is enriched, the eye riveted, the ear delighted, in turn; only rarely should all work together at full pressure; but when such moments occur, we must be prepared for them.
Some disturbing ethical problems face both producer and actor in Macbeth. Countering the surface of crime and retribution we have in our tragic hero a steady advance in poetic stature. We move from the neurotic stammering of
Cannot be ill, cannot be good; if ill …
(I. iii. 130)
and
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly …
(I. vii. 1)
through the resonance of
Then, prophet-like
They hail’d him father to a line of kings …
(III. i. 59)
and all its following reverberations of royalty, to the spiritualized passages at the close: ‘My way of life …’, ‘Can’st thou not minister to a mind diseas’d …’, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …’ (v. iii. 22; v. iii. 40; v. v. 19.) The poetry, which is the soul, of Macbeth has somehow matured, more than fulfilling the early pointer
Though his bark cannot be lost
Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d.
(I. iii. 24)
Macbeth appears somehow to have gained in stature through the bravely-borne horrors of crime and guilt. We have already (p. 136) emphasized Macbeth’s bravery in face of the supernatural.
Lady Macbeth shares, differently, in this mysterious assurance. Directly after the appalling news of the slaughter of Macduff’s family we are, as of set purpose, switched to the sleep-walking scene where, within the mysterious dimension of sleep, the soul of Lady Macbeth is felt as overarching her actions in such a way as to leave her, that is her greater, immortal self, in essence clean. The mystery is more easily experienced, in this almost foolproof scene, than explained. It is, like Ophelia’s mad-scene in Hamlet, ‘fool-proof’ because, while the actor’s normal task is to make us aware of the soul-reality through ordinary speech and actions, here words and behaviour are merest flotsam and jetsam whose very inconsequence serves to suggest the otherness which in the more normal scenes we so arduously labour to establish. Explanation is difficult, but we are certainly more aware of mystery than of censure. In his Defence of Poetry Shelley, probably thinking of this scene, has a helpful comment: ‘Even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature.’ The one comment that is not wholly irrelevant is that made by the Doctor: ‘God, God, forgive us all.’ The soul-reality is not, in such a scene, stated; but its presence is implied. Much the same happens when young Malcolm refers glibly at the play’s conclusion to ‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’. The line simultaneously serves to preclude any facile sentimentalising while arousing in us, who have shared in the protagonists’ experience, an immediate, if indefinable, reservation.
These considerations react on production and performance. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ may be spoken in abandoned misery, wistful despair, or fierce rejection. We elect the more dignified and choose the third. Macbeth stands near the fountain-head of a long semi-Faustian and semi-Satanic tradition, of which Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost and Byron’s Manfred are outstanding later examples. In the fifth act Macbeth must be played not ‘like a hangman who has taken to drink, but like an angel who has fallen’ (Masefield, A Macbeth Production, 31). The easiest way to focus what is being done is to note that redemption within the greater works of this tradition subsequent to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus comes not through penitence but through recognition; not through self-abasement but through self-condemnation, the centre of consciousness being on the higher level, not in the self but in the soul.1 It is precisely this recognition that Shakespeare emphasizes, in Macbeth, in other tragedies, and most clearly of all in Wolsey’s attainment in Henry VIII to ‘a peace above all earthly dignities’ and ‘a still and quiet conscience’ (III. ii. 380) not through his own penitence but simply through exposure and acceptance. Macbeth attains honesty before the community and before himself; without ceasing to be what he is he yet knows what he is, and what must follow; and he accepts bravely, in terms of combat, his death.2
My reading is, in general, supported by Gordon Craig in his essay ‘On the Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’ (On the Art of the Theatre 1911, edn. of 1957, 264–80), where, after a plea for an adequate realization of the supernatural powers in Macbeth, he writes also of the final scenes as follows:
In the last act Macbeth awakes. It almost seems to be a new rôle … He is not the man some actors show him to be, the trapped, cowardly villain; nor yet is he to my mind the bold, courageous villain as other actors play him. He is as a doomed man who has been suddenly awakened on the morning of his execution …
(269)
This may not be exactly my reading, but we both see the concluding scenes as an advance. Not that Craig regards the ghostly elements as unreal: his whole essay is, as we have seen, a plea, never more needed than today, for a proper atmospheric realization of them, even to the adding of more than Shakespeare explicitly demands.1
This, then, is the Shakespearian revelation: a sense of human soul-integrity beneath appearances of good and evil; and in all tragic issues, a sense of some mysterious positive beyond, or within, disaster. The best comment on Shakespeare’s total statement is given in Bottom’s doggerel lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates:
And Phibbus’ car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish Fates.
(I. ii. 34)
An opacity, a ‘prison’, is broken, to reveal distant (‘far’) sunsplendours.
We are here close to the essence of great drama and good acting. A good actor identifies himself with his part, and attuning his own ‘I’ to that other ‘I’ accords it to the full that royal worth and dignity which we each attribute to ourselves. The insistent rise under tragic stress on which we have laid so great an emphasis is itself but an exploitation of what is in any event a law of good stage writing and good performance. I refer to the prime necessity, provided that due place is given also to the cadences and downward curves of voice, for a continual lifting of speech or scene with rising intonations; for without those—though we can of course have too much of them—the most exquisite cadences become soporific. Closely related is the need for an actor in poetic drama to preserve an upright and firm torso, which is the location of spiritual power, leaving mental distraction and physical weakness to be reflected by face, hands and legs. Shakespeare’s humanism is a humanism drawn directly from his profession.
In writing of King Lear (p. 122 above) I used the image of an egg broken to make way for new life. The image is helpful, for without that ‘new life’ which they exist to bring to birth Shakespearian presentations remain dead. Often have I watched an able actor, or some finely appointed production, labouring throughout the evening to break the Shakespearian egg, and not a crack in it appears; or, worse, an axe is wielded, some mighty crack is made, the shell splits open—and there is nothing inside. On this matter there is no room for compromise since it is precisely this ‘new life’ felt through tragedy that is Shakespeare’s central contribution and the main cause, even when inadequately projected and only semi-consciously received, of his enduring appeal across the globe.
Shakespeare’s reading of human affairs is, to this extent, both royal and spiritual; his genius is aware of far more than the superficies of evil and tragedy, instinctively writing from or within a dimension in which their significance is altered. This being so, we must give exact attention to works where fantasy seems to reign; for in such a poet, it is more than fantasy; it is a rendering explicit of what is elsewhere implicit. I am thinking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the more cosmic scenes of the tragedies, of the resurrection of Hermione, of the Vision of Jupiter in Cymbeline, and The Tempest.
3
We have now to consider the bearing of our discussion on the ‘open’ stages so much discussed today.
It appears that the new Festival Theatre at Stratford, Ontario, follows a simple lighting scheme of the kind counselled in my text, using whitish lights, as did Granville Barker, and a non-pictorial background. I quote from an article on the methods of Miss Tanya Moiseiwitsch by Mr. Robin Sanborn in the Stratford Beacon-Herald (Stratford, Ontario) of 17 June 1961:1
Unlike conventional stages no flats or scenic back-drops of any kind are used on Stratford’s open platform stage. This, combined with the fact that only white lights are used to illuminate actors playing against a dark, neutral background, makes the use of colour extremely important.
The ‘colour’ is provided by the design of ‘costumes and props’; on these falls the responsibility of making the play’s ‘mood’ visually apparent. The method is in attunement with my own suggestions regarding the power of a darkish background to throw up colourful costumes (pp. 66–7 above), though I have never produced on an ‘open’ stage. Colour is, beyond all question, a necessary constituent, if only as a visual correlative to the colourful emotions being deployed.
I have as yet no wide experience of recent developments on the open stage and what I have to say must remain tentative. There is clearly something unsatisfactory from the actor’s standpoint in being placed on a proscenium stage, set apart from the audience and pretending to talk to one’s companions while simultaneously striving to project every accent and nuance of facial expression to the gallery. The test is severe, though there is a corresponding thrill to be gained from moments of success. But open stages too have their disadvantages.
The viewing of the actors from so many different angles seems to preclude the kind of reliance on significant grouping that I have hitherto regarded as important, a group, as a group, being essentially pictorial. There is also the danger of the blurring of words. Stage hearing is not merely a mechanical recording of separate words; it is far more the mental reception of phrase and emphasis—good phrasing may be more important for understanding and audibility than good diction—together with the accompaniment of eye and gesture; if this whole is lost through the actor being turned away from the hearer, words may be lost too. According to Gordon Craig the pointing of his words by actions was a main key to Irving’s art (p. 235 above). Even if the words are heard, the hearing may have needed a concentrated attention that should never have been demanded, since for every quantum of psychic power given to that concentration there is so much lost from emotional or spiritual experience. Apart from the kind of stage being used, disregard of these simple truths is the cause of much muffled acting among professionals and amateurs alike.1
Can our contemporary adventures in open and arena2 stages solve our problems? They have no strong precedent in the theatres of ancient Greece, where the audience seems to have encircled no more than the chorus, the actors speaking frontally. There was certainly a freer use of the open stage in Medieval and Shakespearian times, though many details remain obscure and we must not forget the indoor stages and the Court masques. In the public theatres we may suppose that by means of a stage projecting into the auditorium there was achieved an intimacy between audience and actors which has since been lost. Even so we must remember that those audiences enjoyed a sense of spirit, royalty and magic in actual persons and events which we do not. Afterwards there was a split; poetry could only survive on a stage demarked firmly from the audience and supported by the visual magic of scene and illumination. Century by century the stage became more and more of a mysterious box of tricks until in the nineteenth the house-lights were gone to make the auditorium an apt symbol of a darkened society while the stage assumed by contrast a yet greater brilliance to fuel through the visual imagination the parched cravings of the spirit.
This split has remained; it is with us still, and even widening. In the theatre we have grown to expect a ‘magical’ area; with Shakespeare we are never far from the mystique of royalty. May there not be some danger in our return to a stage-conception which presupposes a spirituality and a royalism which we of the twentieth century cannot claim? If actors come too freely within the audience, there is, and it is sometimes claimed, though Mr. Richard Southern avoids the error, as a good too obvious to need defending, a new sense of intimacy. But is there not a danger that in stage-affairs intimacy may be bought, as it has on occasion been bought in other spheres of life, at the cost of mystery and magic? For those who love the theatre the thought is terrifying.1
The problem converges, more than ever before, on the actor. Of Craig’s three dramatic constituents, sight (including lights and colour), sounds (including music and words), and motion (including actions), the first was emphasized by the traditionalists, Irving and Tree; the second by the innovators, Poel and Barker; and the third will be emphasized by the open stage. Much will be lost; facial expression and words must often suffer; long set-speeches cannot be spoken effectively for every member of the audience; but the actor’s figure will be newly possessed by the eye, as a living statue rather than as a picture, and his physique and actions will and must be made to speak from whatever angle we view him.
But action without significance is useless; if the producer moves his actors about simply in order to give his audience varied views, irritation will result. There must be action however; and it must be significant action. Intimacy and realism will be used; but also there will be needed a new expansion, such as I have already described (pp. 279–80), of poetically impregnated poise and gesture. Without scenic support a heavy responsibility will fall on the lighting to provide the atmosphere for what is being done. The acting will, at high moments, have to master the kind of expansion for which Salvini appeared to be asking when of Mounet Sully he said, according to Craig’s account:
He and Irving, and most of the foreign actors, while able to imitate Nature up to a certain point, can go no further. Beyond that point their imitation ceases to be Nature and becomes conventional, with exaggerated gestures and mannerisms.
(Craig, The Theatre Advancing, 243)
It is towards that indefinable ‘further’ already hinted (pp. 219, 224, 226 above) by Craig and Barker that my own acting has with all its deficiencies and ineffectualities been instinctively aiming; and in the process I have composed a book, as yet unpublished, illustrated with photographs and containing spiritual analyses on the principles laid down by François Delsarte. This new acting will not appear ‘stylized’; it will mature from an expansion, but never from a distortion, of the human organism and its instinctive expressions. In Salvini’s terms it will have ‘nature’ without the mannerisms of convention. It is not easy. Salvini himself, whom Poel rated as the greatest tragedian of his day (Monthly Letters, 1929; ‘A Great Tragedian’, 1–8), at his best moments appears to have approached the ideal. Of his delivery of one of Othello’s speeches George Henry Lewes wrote:
‘I remember nothing so musically perfect in its tempo and intonation, so emotionally perfect in expression, as his delivery of this passage—the fury visibly growing with every word, his whole being vibrating, his face aflame, the voice becoming more and more terrible, and yet so completely under musical control that it never approached a scream.’
(On Actors and the Art of Acting, 1875; 269)
This emphasis on vocal control must be taken to apply similarly to gesture and action so that the ‘whole being’ of the actor makes one passionate harmony.1
Production, given the resources, should hold no insuperable difficulties; speaking can be mastered; but the problems raised by acting, real acting, are endless.2
If magic is sacrificed, our open stage and arena theatres will fail; if it can be preserved, then all may be well. It is only because Shakespeare’s art is so richly spiritualized that we have to aim so insistently at solidity of projection; for nothing is so easy, and yet nothing wrongs it so much, as to reduce the soul-reality to cloudy abstractions. The quest is difficult; and we may respect both the labours of William Poel and Granville Barker in the causes of solidity and simplicity and also Tree’s and Craig’s attempts, each after his own fashion, to realize the greater life in terms of scenic art and atmospheric colourings. All are variations of the one drive towards a just revivification of the Shakespearian poetry. But on the open stage a greater responsibility than ever will converge on the actor. A new dimension of poetic acting must be awakened. And here it seems that the use of symbolic objects such as I have suggested for my ‘ideal’ production (pp. 144, 147) might make an unsuspected contribution. They would help to give the open stage that dimension of metaphysical meaning which it otherwise lacks.
It is part of Shakespeare’s fascination that the problem should be one calling for new, and ever new, solutions, according to time, place, and the particular play, actors and audiences concerned. For a drama written in classic form there are few such problems: do it on a Victorian stage, in a small hall, in a church or garden, through a proscenium frame or on an open stage, the form dominates, its essential nature unaltered and at home. This may be an argument in favour of classic form; ‘classic’ plays are, apart from the chorus, almost fool-proof for the producer, though not for the actor. But Shakespeare did not write in classic form.
And yet throughout Shakespeare’s humanism there is nevertheless a golden thread of unity which may be designated ‘spiritual’ and ‘royal’. Whether in speech, person, scene, or play, that will be our key. If our actors and producers work from this, making us feel the inward spirit-sap and rising power, then it may not so very much matter whether they follow nineteenth century methods at one extreme or work on an open stage at the other; or choose, as most today will, one of the many intermediate methods open to us. Externals may be allowed to vary according to the occasion and the play concerned. For The Tempest a style not too far removed from Tree’s may have its value; most of the Histories, if rich with royal ensignia and appointments, should do well on an open stage such as that of the Festival Theatre at Stratford, Ontario; and Timon of Athens demands such a treatment as we have described. For the rest, if the producer has insight and in-feeling into the spiritual organs of Shakespeare’s art, the worst errors will be avoided. The actor-manager or modern producer who adapts Shakespeare for his purpose is to be justified in so far as he remains true to the spirit of what he is handling. The letter can often safely be transgressed; it is too frequent an error to compound for spiritual inadequacy by a meticulous attention to Shakespeare’s text, the surface of which asks no deep commitment or creative collaboration. The good production will be one which piles up detail on detail in exact attunement to the play’s deeper meanings, which are its soul. Such a production may not superficially appear ‘original’—it should indeed hope not to—but it will possess the only originality worth having.
What we want is a combination of solidity, grandeur and atmosphere, the last term covering magical and spiritual apprehensions. But to attain such a composite is not easy. Barker touched it at the Savoy, making solidity and buoyancy one (p. 224), the high end of all art, though in terms mainly of pastoral and comedy, of charm rather than grandeur. Were tragedy so mastered we should deserve renown. Meanwhile, might not the Royal Shakespeare Company, or our new National Theatre, do joint honour to our Poet Laureate and to itself by putting its resources to an exact following out of those simple yet masterly instructions which Masefield in A Macbeth Production has laid down?
The terms ‘magical’ and ‘spiritual’ are apposite, since it is the business of the Shakespearian stage to explore the interpenetration of human affairs and spiritual power. In doing this it is not enough that our productions should remain content with verbal accuracy and an intellectual response; rather they should enlist every legitimate resource of eye and ear and action to awake the imagination and thence expand our consciousness beyond the terms of twentieth century belief. That even half-heartedly or blunderingly aimed at, much of the rest will follow. If advice must be given regarding the outside, the suits and trappings, of production, it will follow Polonius’ advice to his son:
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy …
(Hamlet, I. iii. 70)
That might seem to be our last word. But not quite. It must be completed by Polonius’ conclusion:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou can’st not then be false to any man.
(Hamlet, I. iii. 78)
‘True’ and ‘false’ have in Shakespeare wide connotations. So understood they may be applied to both acting and production; for truth to the inner reality or soul, which is one with the Shakespearian royalty, will alone give weight and lustre to the externals.
1 On the Elizabethan ‘traverse’ see Robert Speaight, William Poel etc., 84, 97, 107–8; also Masefield, as above, 18.
1 An interweaving of the colloquial and the rhetorical was found useful when I produced the Agamemnon in Louis MacNeice’s translation for the Leeds University Union Theatre Group in 1946. See Appendix A.
2 Leslie Harris must have been with Tree about the years 1902 and 1903, perhaps playing under the stage-name ‘Eric Leslie’, which appears in the programmes.
1 Many years ago I heard this speech beautifully delivered by Mr. George Skillan in a Stratford production on tour at Cheltenham.
1 I gave examples of Shakespeare’s speech-structure on the Third Programme of the British Broadcasting Corporation on 17 December 1963. Other recordings are in the British Institute of Recorded Sound, and at Birmingham (p. 14). I now (1968) have tapes marketed by Sound Seminars, 50 East Hollister, Cincinnati and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York and Maidenhead, England.
1 My methods here can claim an honourable support, since Professor Moelwyn Merchant tells me that Garrick’s prompt-book for this scene contains careful directions for the interspacings of thunder.
1 We here draw near to Mr. C. B. Purdom’s thesis in What Happens in Shakespeare (1963), and in particular to his brilliant commentary on Macbeth.
2 For this reading of Macbeth see also my ‘Additional Note (1947)’ to ‘Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil’ in The Wheel of Fire (enlarged edition); The Sovereign Flower, 248–52; and Christ and Nietzsche, 85–6.
1 For my opportunity of gaining an acting experience of the part of Macbeth, as also of Macduff, Brutus and Cassius, I am indebted to the various productions of Mr. Brownlow Card of Toronto. See p. 134, note.
1 For my knowledge of this article my thanks are due to Mr. and Mrs. Stafford Johnston of Stratford, Ontario.
1 The advantages have been discussed and defended by Mr. Richard Southern in The Open Stage, 1953. Some of the dangers, including the threat to facial expression and the actor’s eyes, have been surveyed by Mr. Laurence Kitchin with reference to the Chichester stage in The Listener of 23 August 1962. An interesting correspondence, to which Mr. C. B. Purdom was a main contributor, lasted until 22 November 1962.
2 Granville Barker thought that the arena stage would distract attention from the play towards the audience on the other side. Max Reinhardt’s production of The Miracle was ‘largely spoilt by being played under these conditions’ (The Exemplary Theatre, 217).
1 For some valuable remarks on the modern theatre’s use of visual magic as correlatives to spiritual perception see Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, Appendix III
1 For my own attempts in this kind see in my ‘Dramatic Papers’ (p. 14 above) Mr. Roy Walker’s letter of 12 December 1948 (on Timon).
2 William Poel recounts that his teacher in acting said that he could get his voice right in two years, but that it would take seven for his movements. Poel did not underrate the importance of action, though he wanted it to be sparingly used. He refers to ‘notes for an illustrated lecture’ (William Poel, Monthly Letters, 1929; 11–12; 11, note).