20

TIME

Nature shifts by itself and Time is indestructible.

Time is out of our control. It is the actor’s friend because it powers the third rule that the target exists before you need it. Time works for Irina.

Time plays many tricks: Time is not just a wise old man with a scythe, Time is also the Joker, who brings in his revenges with the broadest of grins.

The rule of Time

As the stakes increase, so the time available appears to decrease. In other words the more there is to be lost or won, the less time there seems to be.

The actor in the invisible work should always have enough time. The character in the visible work should never have enough time. The actor needs to keep a firm wall between these two rhythms. The patient actor takes time with the invisible work, but the galloping stakes whip the reins of Time from the character’s hands. The character is always trying and failing to keep up with the situation. Even Winnie, buried in sand in Happy Days, can barely keep up with the thoughts that hurtle through her mind; her limbs are stuck, but her imagination tears free. The story her limbs tell pales beside the dazzling sequences of memories and discoveries that she sees. Hamlet may appear motionless on the stage. But the story he tells us hurtles on, his eyes full of desperate outcomes as the future strafes him like a warplane:

‘To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub.’

But let us investigate a sequence where Juliet seems to suffer from too much time:

‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phoebus’ lodging. Such a waggoner

As Phaeton would whip you to the west

And bring in cloudy night immediately.

Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,

That runaways’ eyes may wink, and Romeo

Leap to these arms untalk’d-of and unseen.

Lovers can see to do their amorous rites

By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,

It best agrees with night. Come, civil night

Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match

Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.

Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle, till strange love grown bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.

Come gentle night, come loving black-brow’d night,

Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

O, I have bought the mansion of a love

But not possess’d it, and though I am sold,

Not yet enjoy’d. So tedious is this day

As is the night before some festival

To an impatient child that hath new robes

And may not wear them. O, here comes my Nurse . . .’

Is this an exception? Surely here the character has too much time? The situation seems clear: Juliet is impatient. But let’s go back to basics. We now know that any adjective is utterly useless for Irina. So trying to be impatient will block Irina. What then is Irina playing? Passion? Frustration? No, emotions, like adjectives, cannot be played, for they are expressed without targets.

It will release Irina more to ask: ‘What do I stand to lose and win at this specific moment?’ To see what Juliet may win or lose, Irina prises open the targets to glimpse some of their duality. So what could Juliet see first? Let Irina examine the specific detail of the text:

‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,

Towards Phoebus’ lodging.’

So Juliet must be addressing the ‘fiery-footed steeds’. Juliet scolds these horses of the sun. What is a bad thing they can do and a good thing they can do? Perhaps ‘Will you hurry up, finish your job and end the day? Or will you, horses, go on dawdling and keep me from Romeo?’

Juliet wants night to come, and an image tumbles conveniently into view. Any image? Phoebus is the sun god who drives his chariot across the sky from east to west where he sleeps and thus causes night. She wants the day to end and so begs the horses to hurry. Fair enough. But Juliet mentions not only Phoebus, the only ‘waggoner’ who had the right to drive the horses of the sun. And that other person is his son Phaeton who seized control of his father’s sun-chariot one fateful dawn the earth will never forget. For against his father’s wishes, Phaeton insisted on steering the sun-chariot himself. But he was inexperienced, the horses bolted, tumbled from the sky, and the fireball scorched vast tracts of the planet. Phaeton himself was killed and the ecological catastrophe burned forests into deserts, which would never again bear fruit. It is highly unlikely that Juliet remembers every nuance and resonance of her image before she utters it. It tumbles out as a slip. For not only has the chariot careered out of control, so also has Juliet’s image. By chance she conjures another disobeying child who was destroyed by rashness.

‘But why say this now exactly?’ is often a shrewd question. Why does Juliet mention Phaeton now? His chaotic, accidental suicide implies that somewhere Juliet suspects her night of love with Romeo is still ‘too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden’. Perhaps Juliet knows she is also careering hectically towards chaos, death and sterility. And she wants not to see these things. She is tired of knowing and seeing things that hurt her head. She wants to un-know and un-see. Juliet wants to sleep with Romeo and to hell with the consequences.

Juliet, like many characters in Shakespeare, talks too much for her own good. Dashing Phaeton was supposed to cheer her up but, as an image, he turned out to be a disaster; anything more depressing and coincidental for Juliet than Phaeton’s fiery fall would be hard to find. Before her resolve can weaken, Juliet drops Phaeton fast, and turns to that cosy aunt, Night.

Night should be far safer; Night is sober-suited and thoroughly respectable. Older and wiser, Night wouldn’t do anything impulsive and destructive. Night wouldn’t do anything horrible, or would she? Night will keep my imagination calm and cool and safe, won’t she?

To begin with, Night is pleasantly vague, or ‘cloudy’. But when Night arrives she turns up in a more definite colour – black. Juliet mentions this twice. So who is Night mourning? Juliet tries to lighten the unfortunate reference and bring in shining, living Romeo:

‘Come night, come Romeo, come thou day in night,

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.’

Romeo sprawls on the wings of Night, not as warm flesh but as refrigerated snow. If Romeo is white, he is naked. If Romeo is white, he is a corpse. Sex doesn’t come alone; Death turns up too, and makes a grim threesome between the sheets. Even Matron Night has metamorphosed; now she beats around as the raven, the harbinger of evil, who will croak himself hoarse for Lady Macbeth.

Juliet may appear to have time to kill, but Time takes its revenge. Time is in control and not Juliet. However much time Juliet may have to kill, high stakes always chase the imagination. Juliet may think she is digging up one image after another to fill the boring hours. But the more time she has to think, the more she understands the danger of her situation and the more her resolve weakens. And the more her resolve weakens, the more time she needs to strengthen her resolve. She runs out of time trying to find new images to plug her leaking self-confidence.

Images are targets: they live independently of us. So all images, from dazzling Phaeton, to dowdy Night in mourning black, take on a life of their own. Like it or not, Juliet has to deal with the ambivalence of the images she has released. Are they on her side or not? Juliet thought she could control the Phaeton image. However, the remembered image did not come alone. The Phaeton story, like all stories, is ambivalent. It can mean many things. The images once released are independent, like words we regret having used. Here, however much Juliet stresses her longing for sex, love and life, her images also imply chaos, destruction and death.

Description never happens

‘Come gentle night, come loving black-brow’d night’

‘Gentle’, ‘loving’ and ‘black-brow’d’ are all descriptions. But a useful principle for the actor is that there is no such thing as a description. Pure description simply doesn’t exist. What may claim to be a passive description is in fact always an active attempt to change a perception. So Juliet appears to be describing how Night is. Night has three qualities, Juliet asserts. Night is gentle, loving and black-browed. So how can these be an attempt to change a perception? As always, Irina needs to find a target. Presumably, Night herself. So what change is Juliet trying to make in Night? Is she saying: ‘I know you are black-browed, but can you also try to be gentle and loving too, please?’ For Juliet is not at all sure how Night will behave. What is at stake for Juliet, then, must be either that Night will be gentle or that Night will be ferocious . . . that Night will be loving . . . or the reverse. What could Night be about to say or do that she needs to be appeased and propitiated as being gentle and loving?

Then Juliet makes a slip in pleading:

‘Give me my Romeo; and when I shall die

Take him and cut him out in little stars’

It would have made more sense to say ‘When I die, take me and cut me out’, or ‘When he dies take him and cut him out’, but Juliet is confused between where she ends and where Romeo begins. She says: ‘When I die, take him and cut him out.’ He will metamorphose on her death, which breaks the rhythm of the Ovid stories she knows so well. Juliet can’t quite lock death out of tonight’s festivities. She wants Romeo to come not only to make love to him but also to distract her from complex, darkening thoughts. If he doesn’t come soon they will engulf her. She fights her own imaginings by arguing that she only wants one simple thing: to consummate her love for Romeo. Juliet tries to simplify the situation, to blind herself to the ambivalence of what is really happening.

‘ . . . though I am sold,

Not yet enjoy’d. So tedious is this day

As is the night before some festival

To an impatient child that hath new robes

And may not wear them.’

The bravado of her desire does not quite match the tender and nostalgic image of the child. Perhaps Juliet also sees ‘the future in the instant’ and already regrets the passing of her innocence. She is fourteen and impatient for new and adult clothes. Sinister old Night creeps once more into her imagery and shows her a wide-awake child, alone in the dark, unable to sleep.

Juliet talks about the stakes

‘ . . . learn me how to lose a winning match

Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.’

The ‘winning match’ directly refers to the stakes. Not just one maidenhood, but two, her own and Romeo’s (is her assumption about Romeo a rare attack of naïveté?). So the prize, the best possible outcome, is that someone will win two ‘stainless’ virginities. But if there is so much to be won, what then could be lost? Juliet, we notice, only mentions what is to be won. Winning is the only possibility. So although it is a match, losing is impossible, because she implies that she wants to lose. So for Juliet to lose her virginity is also to win? She is trying to do something in a ‘one’. Juliet thinks she can only play a match that wins. But there are no win/win situations. The other side that the actor knows very well, the ‘or not’, is cut out. What she stands to lose is quickly slammed in the dark with Phaeton. Juliet argues with all the confidence of a doubter.

She may have begun the speech begging the horses to ‘gallop apace’ as if resolved and bored with waiting, but this is not all she feels and sees and needs.

Juliet is not only passing the time, praying for Romeo to get there soon. Time is breeding dreadful pictures. Juliet must run to outstrip and rein in each of these subversive images before they escape. And Juliet does not have enough time to scoop them all up. Juliet needs more time.

Shakespeare’s brilliant words make it clear that Time incites Juliet’s thoughts to mutiny and escape and she has to race to catch them and lock them up. Of course Juliet does want to make love to Romeo, but it is equally true that she does not. Juliet may only speak of her desire, but her fear is also implicit.

A dreadful rewrite

But what would happen if Irina did not have the brilliant matrix of Shakespeare’s imagery to lead her to the hidden side of Juliet? What if Irina were acting in a rewritten version of Shakespeare’s play with all the darkness censored? Irina would still be able to guess the existence of Juliet’s hidden feelings. Even if the script were rewritten and poor Irina had to say

‘I want to sleep with him. I want to sleep with him.

I want to sleep with him. I want to sleep with him’,

Irina could still infer the opposing side. For the more we stress something, the more we imply its co-existing opposite. Even this banal text must be a reaction. It must imply somewhere that also: ‘I don’t want to sleep with him. I don’t want to sleep with him. I don’t want to sleep with him.’

Juliet wants opposites. As Zerlina sings to Don Giovanni: ‘Vorrei e non vorrei!’ or ‘I want to, and don’t want to!’ Conflicting emotions tear Juliet; she does not feel only one thing at once.

A digression: Time and change

Juliet is never satisfied with Time. Sometimes she thinks she wants it to speed up . . . ‘Gallop apace . . . ’ sometimes she wants it to stop . . . ‘Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. It was the nightingale and not the lark . . . ’ It is useful for Irina that Time never seems to be Juliet’s friend. But Irina needs to see that if she does not obey Time, Irina too will become Time’s victim. Irina acknowledges the mastery of Time by refusing to let Fear escort her to the past and future. Juliet’s Fear, on the other hand, often drags her in both these directions.

Time is the actor’s friend but the character’s enemy; it is as well to accept this even in the briefest rehearsal. The present shakes us awake. When a road accident summons us into presence, time appears to slow down. But when depression tightens its grip, Time seems to stand still. Time dies. This is only a delusion; Time cannot stop. For us, time will never die.

Irina needs to make friends with Time. Time is an immense wave that can be surfed, or ignored at peril.

The more we can accept the mastery of Time and resolve to live exclusively in the present, the less we block ourselves. However, the more we declare our independence of Time and shelter in the past or the future, the more we become blocked. And we remain frozen until the moment we decide to obey the command of Time and admit that we only exist in the now.