Appreciations
From a Notice of
THIS SCEPTRED ISLE
(Westminster Theatre, London)
in The Times of 23 July 1941
In the second, and most ambitious, part of his programme Mr. Knight has the assistance of Mr. Henry Ainley, who speaks in that magnificent voice of his the commentaries before and after the scenes.1
The competition is indeed severe, and it says much for Mr. Knight’s delivery and the persuasion of his acting that he can immediately follow Mr. Ainley and avoid a sense of anti-climax. His methods are simple and illuminating. He appears before the curtain, gives an informal, yet informative, lecture on the speech he is about to deliver and then, rather as if a magic lantern lecturer should turn himself into one of his own slides, launches into the speech itself.
In the opening part Mr. Knight contents himself with putting Richard and Henry into modern uniform and dispensing with scenery and make-up, but in the three scenes from Timon of Athens he has the paraphernalia of a full production. In gesture and movement he may not be the complete actor, but he has the voice and the range of one, and there was no trace of the platform manner in his expression of emotion. He shows his scholarship in his attack on character—his Timon and his Hamlet are specially good—as well as in his comments, and, indeed, the whole unusual production firmly establishes his conception of Shakespeare as the poet and prophet of a free and virile people united under a benevolent monarchy and determined to fight in themselves the evils of greed and corruption and to take up arms against tyranny and the lust for power in others.
A facsimile of the programme appears on page 314.
Mr. Roy Walker
on the three productions of
TIMON OF ATHENS
in New Theatre, February 1949 (V, 8)2
In 1940, when Wilson Knight was Chancellors’ Professor of English at Trinity College, Toronto, he produced and acted in a performance of Timon of Athens that was described by the Canadian critics as ‘a phenomenal triumph of scholarship, dramatics, and audacity’. A year later he was back in England where he was already famous, if not notorious, for a series of brilliantly imaginative critical studies of Shakespeare and other poets, beginning with The Wheel of Fire. At the Westminster Theatre in July, 1941, he staged his own Shakespearean symposium, This Sceptred Isle, and The Times noted that ‘his Timon and his Hamlet are specially good … the whole unusual production firmly establishes his conception’.
A more experimental theatre than ours in London—credit for recent revivals of the rarer Shakespeare plays goes to Stratford, Birmingham, the B.B.C, and Mr. Wolfit’s touring repertory, not to the Old Vic or any other London company—might have taken the hint long ago. But Timon is generally considered to be a work of divided authorship, and is certainly uneven. On a hasty reading, its theme and treatment seem unlikely to ‘take’. A not unfair plot-summary would be: Act I—prodigal good fellowship, Act II—coffers empty, Act III—would-be borrower repulsed, Act IV—he renounces mankind, Act V—death in the wilderness.
What star would see himself in that? What producer would be sanguine about a run, or even reasonable notices? ‘All too bitter and gloomy, and we’ve quite enough of that outside the theatre today. People want to be cheered up’—a view-point that overlooks, as our theatre too often does, that the whole function of serious drama is, as Hamlet defines it, to hold the mirror up to nature, to interpret our condition not run away from it.
Yorkshire was as sceptical beforehand as Toronto or London. ‘Is this play good enough for the University?’ demanded the Yorkshire Post, and took leave to doubt that it was. Wilson Knight, now in the English Department of Leeds University, was repeating his Canadian adventure. With the same result. After his critic’s first night report of ‘notable success’, the Editor came himself, and then reprinted his mournful caption, ‘Is this play good enough for the University?’ and answered, ‘Last night I saw the performance. It changed my mind.’ The question now is, ‘Is this play good enough for London?’ If the Old Vic is going to return to its fine tradition of courageous experiment, there is only one answer. If not, here is opportunity indeed for the Mercury, the Arts Theatre or the Embassy to add to their laurels.
Wilson Knight’s strength lies in his being as much a man of the theatre as of the study. There must be times when both scholars and actors fear, despite all good intentions, that never the twain shall meet. The scholar follows literary and historical associations past the bounds of dramatic effect, the actor seizes dramatic opportunities with little regard for underlying meanings and the total poetic design. As Tennyson wrote of Macready, ‘Our Shakespeare’s bland and universal eye dwells pleased’ on the marriage of scholarship and stage as glimpsed at Leeds. Here at last was a theatre for the poets ‘who made a nation purer through their art’.
An earlier work, Principles of Shakespearian Production, which records some personal experience in acting and producing the major tragedies, is to be republished (Penguins) with a further discussion of the performer’s task in poetic drama. Judging by the Leeds production of Timon, it should be of first-class importance. When the storm breaks in Stratford and London (as it must sooner or later) over the ‘modernized’ delivery of great poetry that blunts and obscures the essential imaginative significances in the supposed interests of ‘the facts’, or of realism, credibility, characterization or pace, such a synthesis of eye and tongue as Wilson Knight offers will be desperately needed.
From Mr. Robin Skelton’s
commentary on Wilson Knight’s work at Leeds
in The Yorkshire Post, 24 May 1962
The grip upon the texture and pattern of each play was sure; the understanding of the characters was subtle; but, above all, the productions and the portrayals1 were heroically theatrical. Poetry remained poetry and enlarged itself with gesture. Action was always significant. The plays, one felt, had been given their own shapes at last.
Acknowledgment
For permission to reprint the material of this appendix
gratitude is expressed to The Times, Mr. Roy Walker,
Mr. Robin Skelton, and The Yorkshire Post.
1 Henry Ainley also spoke the introductory lines from King John and the concluding prayer (which should have been further to the left in my programme).
My acknowledgment to Miss Margot Davies has already (pp. 14–15) been recorded. I here add the name of Miss Antoinette Pratt-Barlow, who was our stage-manager. Henry Ainley’s kindness remains a treasured memory.
A notice by Mr. Ivor Brown, based on a rehearsal, appeared in The Observer, 20 July 1941.
2 See also my reference on p. 288 above, note.
1 ‘Production’ refers to the Agamemnon, Athalie and Timon of Athens; ‘portrayals’ to Timon, Lear, Othello and Shylock. For these, which had been noted by Mr. Skelton earlier in the article, see p. 15 above.
