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A
Distant, Fabled Place
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Bolton
School for Boys encouraged drama with the same enthusiasm as it trained us
for sport and self sufficiency. To play Henry V (my best part) or Hamlet
(which I never did, but Irving Wardle had done it before my time) was as
prestigious as leading the first eleven or being a Queen's Scout. There were
annual school camps to the Lake District, the Dales, the Peaks, to the
Highlands and to Wales - hearty expeditions for hikers and mountaineers. The
Stratford camp was of another sort. We
were mocked by the school scouts as cissy amateurs. The school janitor (an
ex-Army sergeant) came with us to cook al fresco on a coke-fed stove. Our
bell tents were scattered across a meadow 11/2 miles upstream from
Stratford. After early morning, cold water ablutions and some
incomprehensible loosening (when it wasn't tautening) of guy-ropes, we
were free each June day to punt up and down the Avon, or to cycle out to Charlecote Park, Shottery and the Cotswolds beyond. In the evenings we saw
the plays. Frequently,
gladly, we queued through the night for half-crown standing places at the
back of the stalls. If I lavished 7s 6d on a comfortable seat just in front,
I often nodded off sometime after the interval. Blame the fresh air, the
theatre's poor ventilation or the strength of Flower's ale. Thus
inattentively, I saw some now famous performances. Of
these, high moments are memorable insomuch as they captured the overall
interpretation. Thus, Alan Badel seductively throwing a rose to a girl in
the audience after Berowne's soliloquy, all romanticism and narcissism. Olivier's Macbeth stalking upstage between the two murderers, hands clasped
behind him, an efficient businessman plotting his next slaughter on the
stock market. His dangerous fall from the height of the set at the climax of
Coriolanus was as flamboyant, defiant and over-reaching as the whole
characterization. Max Adrian's Feste appealed to the audience, cynical,
ingratiating, weary, his limp arms outstretched to us, as the spotlight
faded on the last note of Twelfth Night. Gielgud's shimmering blue gown was
Renaissance pride incarnate, celebrating Prospero's return to civilization. But
at the time, these seemed no more special than other less acclaimed
achievements. I was ignorant of the stars' status - everyone was great. As
they changed costumes and characters play by play, the actors were
staggering in their versatility. I watched The Taming of the Shrew through
opera glasses, wondering at the diligence of the non-speaking extras on the
fringe of the stage as they focused on, and reacted to, the central action
more attentively than I. At
the final moments of this production, the whole heavy, intricate setting of
wood, thatch and stairways slid silently backwards, away from us into the
dark and depth of the cavernous stage. Such elaborate magic was incomparable
after our school productions and amateur Shakespeare in Bolton. But
on returning to Stratford through the late 1950s, I grew increasingly and
churlishly critical. When the house cheered Robeson's lumbering elephant of
an Othello, I could not share such lack of taste. I dismissed all of Byam
Shaw's Romeo and Juliet because so much of it was inaudible and over-dressed
to kill. Charity has grown with age. But to a teenager the maturity of the
juveniles at Stratford was upsetting. Romeos,
Juliets, Hamlets, Malcolms, Olivias always seemed more like parents, uncles
and aunts than youthful heroes and heroines.
One
glorious exception was a performance which still thrills my memory, partly
because for the first time I appreciated an actor's technical triumph over
the odds of age, freeing an inner spirit. Peggy Ashcroft was old enough to
be my mother - she had walked past the ticket queue one morning. On August
4, 1957, she played Imogen twice: I saw both the matinee and that evening's shows. Her
Imogen was essential youth, warm, generous, noble, witty and beautiful. Her
voice soaring and controlled, the hands floating almost, the back erect - I
recognized her again years later when Fonteyn danced Juliet. "Accessible
is none but Milford way", she said, and I fell in love. It was what we
have to call, for lack of a more exact definition of an overwhelming effect,
Great Acting. There was a rare match of playwright's creation with actor's
insight and technique. From the back of the stalls, I had provided the rest
- a devoted attention, receptive as photographic paper to the rays of light
flooding me from the stage. My own stumblings about the amateur stages of
Bolton were blasphemous compared with this divinity at Stratford. |
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Yet
here I am, in the same theatre, playing Romeo - too old for the boy by 15
years? I haven't aspired to Ashcroft's rejuvenation but was relieved by the
following exchange with a teenage girl at the stage-door one night this
summer. SHE: "Romeo was fantastic." ME: "Didn't you think I
was a bit old?" SHE: "How do you mean? Isn't he supposed to be
about 18?" ME: "Well, I'm not 18!" SHE (with more charity
than I at her age): "No, but it's-a play isn't it? I had been invited before now to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. Each year there had seemed good reason to refuse. After five years working on tour and in provincial companies (as actor and director) I was convinced by, say, 1970, that I wanted to continue as part of the experimenting and thriving theatre which challenged the main establishment of London and the big subsidized companies. I thought of theatre-people as traditional rogues, peasant slaves and vagabonds, travelling whence their audiences live and work.
In
the West End, audiences are an amorphous lot, half of them foreign, all
strangers to each other, unresponsive and unexcitable after local
theatregoers at Nottingham Playhouse or the
touring dates at Newcastle,
Leeds and Southampton. Stratford's packed houses, too, were hybrids. Pernickety
aficionados, who had collected every Hamlet since Burbage, sat side by side
with uncritical innocents viewing with the detachment of tourists snapping
another landmark, for the album back home. See a comedy at Stratford, then
the same transferred to the Aldwych, and its regular RSC home audience. In
London - the laughs are bigger, more free; the actors are more relaxed,
assured. Daunting,
too, was the sheer size of the RSC. After two and a half years with the
contained democracy of the Actors'
Company, a family almost, the RSC (with
its ventures worldwide) seems from the outside to embody as much homely
friendliness as the BBC or ICI. Anyway, I had romanticized myself as a
maverick and as a wanderer, not a stay-at-home. In November last year the
offer was finalized - Romeo,
Macbeth and Leontes in The Winter's
Tale; start
rehearsing in January, to play at Stratford from April Fool's Day through
the year. The wanderer had a new range to traverse, three of Shakespeare's
more intractable peaks, with Trevor Nunn and John Barton as my guides. When
Nunn and I were studying English at Cambridge, 16 years ago, Barton was a
don and the doyen of undergraduate theatre. He directed me as a 150-year-old
Justice Shallow in Henry IV and as a coltish Tuzenbach in The Three Sisters
(Margaret Drabble was Masha). Soon after, he abandoned Cambridge to help his
old friend Peter Hall as a director at Stratford. And in 1960, Trevor Nunn
and I made our debut there, in the theatre's riverside gardens. In
the open air, we gallantly challenged the gnats and the jeers of punters,
behind us, for the attention of a sparse audience who unable, perhaps, to
get in to see Peter O'Toole's Shylock, had reluctantly settled for the
Marlowe Society's Doctor Faustus, with McKellen as an epicene, ancient Pope
and Nunn as his cheeky, adoring acolyte.
This
year, I'm living in a large flat, owned by the theatre, which overlooks
those same gardens where we pranced as confident undergraduates, close by
Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare is buried. The Avon is a pretty river.
Warwickshire's agriculture has left the countryside unspoilt. The plays are
the greatest, the audiences the largest. Stratford is alluring to actors. We
are as impressed as the public by the RSC's international reputation and a
season with such a classy, classical company is prestigious with future
employers. But then, there isn't much work of any sort about - for much of
the time three quarters of Equity members are unemployed-and a 12-month
stint of steady money can revive confidence and the bank balance. The pay,
though, is not spectacular, certainly less than the National Theatre's in
London, nor is there a living allowance. No hardship: no luxury, either. Working
away from home, depressions challenge the excitement. Families are reunited
only at weekends - rehearsal schedule willing. The telephone is otherwise
the link with normality. The rest is work from 10.30 am through to 5.30 pm,
with an hour for lunch at the canteen, leaving two hours to shop (when the
shops are shut) and to prepare for tile evening's show. By now 1976 seems
eternal. One actor has bought a cottage nearby. How will that suit when he's
back working in London? Perhaps 1977 will never come!
I
need not have worried about Stratford audiences. From the stage they seem
remarkably homogeneous. British phlegm and politeness are the envy of
International Equity - perhaps the foreign visitors find it infectious. When
I played Hamlet in Rome, only for the soliloquies were the houses rapt
(discounting the flashbulbs and applause): for the rest of the play it was
bellowing actors versus chattering audiences and both lost. In Stratford we
have now only the occasional flashbulb during the balcony scene. One season,
it is said, a couple who spoke no English shared the same ticket, the wife
seeing the first half of the play, her husband the second. Both had done
Shakespeare at Stratford as they no doubt went on to do Blenheim, Warwick
and Christchurch Meadows. These
tourists seem happy to pay the new top price of £5. The cheaper seats, 300
aloft in the balcony and 100 others scattered around the perimeters of the
auditorium are mainly taken by children, so that the audience is divided up
by age rather than social class. School parties are bussed across country. A
theatre visit is an exciting supplement to GCE studies (Romeo and Juliet is
a perpetual "0" level set text). Unlike adults, children are
unrestrained by convention and make no allowances. They will laugh, for
instance, whenever an actor's high emotion is only partially realized.
Private jokes race along the rows, mocking (one can only guess), Romeo's
codpiece, Juliet's cleavage, or Capulet's eyebrows, any of them,
reminiscent, perhaps, of the English teacher. At one early performance of Romeo, there was trouble at the tricky double suicide. I
had misjudged the triumphant strength of Romeo's last line "Thus, with
a kiss, I die" and too graphically tried to convey the Elizabethan pun
- of making love - on the final word. My just reward was a short volley of
hilarity, echoed on Juliet's similar line three minutes later. But there are
authenticated nightmares of other lovers, star-crossed in rep, dying midst a
scornful pelter of sweet wrappings, crisp bags and bottle tops-all
obligingly on sale in the foyer raising a supplement to a meagre Arts
Council grant. Romeo
opens with an anonymous Chorus (this year, John Bown in his own shirt and
jeans) asking the audience's attention, indulgence and (rather regrettably)
giving away the end of the story. He has the infamous and, therefore,
uncuttable, reference to "the two hours traffic of our stage"
relic of an age when actors played shortened texts at breakneck speed? We
take three-and-a-quarter hours to play nearly all the words at a pace
befitting the awkward acoustics of a large theatre. But the device of Chorus
is salutary. Constantly full houses underline the point that no play lives
until it has an audience. Nor does an actor exist. His discipline,
sentimentalized into "the show must go on"; his ego, caricatured
as "exhibitionism" or "camp"; his control and technique,
underestimated as "he's a born actor", all combine not for his own
gratification but for that of the audience.
The
pain and labour of rehearsals can be indulgently self-satisfying. One's
developing achievement will be remarked by appreciative friends, family,
directors, by critics even - But the true judges are those anonymous
strangers, 1,500 a night, never encountered afterwards except through the
congratulatory letter or on the steps of the Dirty Duck pub along from the
stage-door. For them, night after night, the performance must live,
uniquely. At
the RSC we are blessedly sheltered from the hit/flop inevitability of the
commercial theatre. And I
fancy, should the Dutch Elm Disease which plagues Warwickshire, ever turn
its blight on the coach trade, we actors would still be here, fulfilling our
contracts. But we are not automata exactly reproducing a set pattern of
finalized instructions and fixed decisions. At best each performance is a
re-creation, not a repetition, of ideas developed in rehearsal and since
amended through the experience of varying audience response. Any
performance is, therefore, a step along the never-ending journey toward
definition, clarity, unambiguity of expression. Shakespeare's mind is
unfathomable. There is no centre to his maze. And my Romeo (to me) is a
multiple of all the 100 separate performances given throughout the year.
Romeo (to my audiences) is a multiple of all the other Romeos they have ever
seen. The
incentive to persist cannot be just an audience's approval or acclaim. It
springs, most of all, from a personal devotion to Shakespeare's words. And
that devotion, I now appreciate, is at the heart of the RSC's endeavours. It
was initially impressive in Trevor Nunn's introductory talk to his new
company last January in the rehearsal room above Covent Garden. He analysed
his own enthusiasm for the relevance of Shakespeare's expansive humanity
which outlives all political and social change. The RSC must declare no
policy, no classification or attitude, which might try to categorize and
thereby limit Shakespeare's works. In rehearsing Romeo and Macbeth with him
and The Winter's Tale with John Barton, I have been introduced to their
disciplined examination of the poetry, its precision of feeling and its
subtlety of device, which, make demands on acting equivalent to those which
Leavis, who taught Nunn at Cambridge, urges upon literary criticism. The
danger could be that in overstressing an appreciation of Shakespeare as the
most brilliant exponent of Elizabethan "antithesis", imagery and
puns, etc, the RSC's actors might shrivel into what Peter Hall recently
chastized as "talking heads". And
the academic influence of nearby Oxford and the Birmingham University's
Shakespeare Institute are ever-present in Stratford. But if the company is
not to revert to the pre-Hall days of an over-glamourized, festivalized
theatre the risk should be run. If the RSC does not take the most demanding
road, who will?
The
devotion, however, is not academic alone. Take Cicely Berry. She rushes
between Stratford and the Aldwych, helping actors realize their
individuality of expression by freeing the technicalities of voice
production. To define and explain her simple method she has rather
shamefacedly published two textbooks. But in the daily working situation,
her personal approach is almost that of a confidante, relaxing the mind and
the body, or of a healer soothing tensions, rooting emotions in reality. She
prepares the actor to be a tuned instrument, which may clearly, resonantly,
play Shakespeare's subtlest and grandest notes. For
me, she has lengthened the range of my voice and encouraged a new
confidence. She and Nunn share the same language of approach. She is at the
heart of the company's devotion. So too, those "associate actors"
who return again and again to the plays which define them most as
interpretative artists.
An
organization devoted to Shakespeare cannot concentrate only on his words and
the sort of acting they demand. It will also constantly re-examine the sort
of staging which can most urgently grab the audience's attention of eye and
ear. The experimenting that has developed in Stratford's tin hut via Michel
St Denis, Theatregoround and most potently, Buzz Goodbody, is now acclaimed
in the newly named The Other Place. It contains a repertoire of small-cast
modern plays interspersed with Shakespeare. The
audience of 150 at £1 a time sit around the acting area, on top of the
action. There, the actors indulge none of the rhetoric of gesture or design
which can be appropriate to their work in the main theatre. Shakespeare at
The Other Place is chamber music; not grand opera. With production costs
budgeted at £250, this is where we are playing Macbeth. No wigs, no
make-up, no costume changes, no scenery, fourteen actors sharing all the
parts and a freedom to speak the verse rapidly at conversational level, to
whisper even. We charge through Shakespeare's shortest play in just over two
hours without an interval. Rehearsals, too, were concentrated. Five weeks, while all the cast were busy with their other matinee and evening shows. But Trevor Nunn was reexamining his own production of less than two years ago. Much time was saved. It is up to others to judge whether we have improved on his previous achievement. But I found no limits to my own contribution. This sort of genuine revival (or revitalization) of past successes, is a challenge to the assumptions of the commercial long-run or the sort of museum theatre which confuses longevity with immortality. The experiences of the infant Other Place, have affected
the new stage and decoration of the parent theatre itself. This year a few
of the audience can sit behind that stage too. Within the near-intractable
limits of a 1920s proscenium house, a triumph of intimacy now links the gallery with the stage. Theatre houses (like our own
homes) should not be eternal in structure. We heed forever to adapt,
reorganize and redecorate them. No wonder this company began to find its
identity at the same time as it stopped calling itself "Memorial".
I'm
not sentimental about theatres and have never see their ghosts. But to work
at Stratford is rather like squatting in Buckingham Palace. I keep expecting
the rightful occupants to return from some long-distance tour — the
Oliviers, the Dames, the glorious protean troupers of my childhood. But no,
the girls ask for my autograph now - if, that is, Robin Ellis, in his
Poldark whiskers, isn't about. Vivien Leigh is remembered by a stunted
willow in the theatre gardens. In the Dirty Duck, among the hundred signed
photographs by the bar, it is shocking to see Paul Robeson, Patrick Wymark
and Max Adrian, miniature headstones side by side, glossy, youthful, smiling
and dead. Backstage,
on a side wall three feet higher than one could reach, there was in April
another smaller, gallery of similar mementoes, sepia and dusty, glass and
frames broken by some spear passing along from stage to scenery dock.
I clambered up and stole Alec Clunes's photo. In 1957 I had begged
his autograph when he was playing Caliban. He shrugged off my enthusiasm for
his performance with an oath against the monstrous sweaty rubber suit Peter
Brook had designed for him. In 1976, the auditorium is air conditioned for
the first time and despite its spotlights was a cool refuge from the
July-baked canteen. I
had spotted Clunes at a company cricket match. The men batted left-handed
and the actresses bowled underarm. Dame Peggy, my beloved Imogen, was caught
three times but refused to be out. Byam Shaw (the other captain) fielded
imperturbably in the slips, in a deck chair. This year, a less larky
team from the company slaughtered local Sunday sides. Sir Frank Benson
installed the sporting tradition when he ran his annual Shakespeare Festival
in Stratford across the turn of the century. Reputedly he was as likely to
cast his actors for their cricketing as for their histrionic prowess.
“Wanted one stalwart to assay Ferdinand, Orsino and open the
batting".
Before
Benson and his gentlemen players, there was David Garrick who opened the
first Shakespeare celebrations in 1764 with odes, songs and dances, in His
praise, though precious little of the plays themselves. Before him,
Stratford was its market, centre of the Vale of Evesham farmlands, its one
bridge over the Avon linking with London and the south. Across this bridge
returned Shakespeare about 1610 to buy New Place for his family and his
retirement. The house is now collapsed into a garden of ruins. There The
Winter's Tale must have been written and a 100 yards down Chapel Street
we now perform it. That association means little to me. But before Shakespeare left Stratford to become a man of the theatre in London, players had strolled into his home town for one-night stands during the plague months when public assemblies were banned in the capital. Edward Alleyn (the first Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus) toured here as a young actor. Richard Tarleton played the fool here. Before he wrote a line Shakespeare could have seen the most celebrated entertainers of his age. For that alone, there should always be actors in Stratford.
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