Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  Courage, who pulls her wagon in the wake of the Thirty Years War and in the process loses her three children, was played by Brecht’s widow Helene Weigel. Weigel was a tiny woman with skin stretched tightly over her cheekbones like a Japanese mask. She had hardly acted since leaving Germany in the 1930s until her return in 1949. As Courage, she was unparalleled. In one scene her second son, Swiss Cheese, has been caught and is about to be shot. Courage bargains through an intermediary, the whore Yvette, for her son’s life. The final price is the wagon and all its contents, her livelihood. She hesitates and Yvette goes running off. Courage says, ‘I have bargained too long,’ and there is the sound of the firing squad offstage as Swiss Cheese is shot. When she heard the shot, Weigel arched her back, lifted her head and opened her mouth in a soundless cry. An unforgettable image. The scene that follows was remarkable. The son’s body is brought onto the stage and we know it is essential that Courage must appear to have no connection with him. The soldiers ask her to look at the body. The body is on a stretcher downstage-right and Courage is sitting on a stool at the extreme left. Weigel gets up with her face fixed in a terrible rictus, supposed to be a smile, and crosses the great empty stage very, very slowly. She keeps the smile as she looks down at the body of her son and shakes her head, denying that she recognises him, but as she turns from the soldiers all the muscles of her face drop. Nothing could have been more technically controlled or more wonderful.

  Brecht’s actors were intensely serious in their detachment from their characters and in the focus on their actions. At no point were they concerned with identifying with the inner life of the people they played, but they cared about the decisions they took in their lives. At the same time their playing was as Brecht would have wished: light, almost casual, never portentous or aggressive.

  The whole of Brecht’s philosophy of theatre is contained in a series of wonderful poems. In one he describes how Weigel chose her props:

  According to age

  Uses

  And beauty

  By knowing eyes and her

  Net making, bread baking

  Soup cooking hands

  At home with reality

  (John Berger’s translation)

  In a story called The Old Hat, Brecht tells how he watched the actor playing Filch in The Threepenny Opera choose a hat for his part. He selects a possible two but is satisfied with neither of them. He considers them carefully.

  Had Filch’s hat once been good or at least better than the other? How could it be exactly right? Did Filch take care of it when he took it off, if he was in a position to take care of it? Or was it a hat that he definitely didn’t wear in his prosperous days?

  In the end the actor makes a choice but is not happy.

  At the next rehearsal he showed me an old toothbrush sticking out of his jacket pocket, which demonstrated that Filch, even underneath the arches, still maintained the properties of civilised life. The toothbrush showed me that he was not at all satisfied with the best hat he could find. This, I thought happily, is an actor of the scientific age.

  The impact of the Ensemble was immediate. This was what theatre should be. The simple but beautiful staging, the realistic acting, the clear lighting. All these could be copied but we could not copy the conditions that had produced the work or the unifying purpose of the people involved in it. Brecht had returned to Berlin with a sackful of plays written in his exile, with actors he had worked with in the 1920s and ’30s like Weigel and Ernst Busch, and with his original designer Caspar Neher. He was the main writer and also the director of the company who had evolved his approach to the theatre and was ready to put it into practice. And the company was held together by a shared political attitude.

  We tried to absorb some of Brecht’s approach to theatre in our work in the early years at the Royal Court, but his theatre style came from his writing. Our writers were all writing in different styles and exploring new theatre forms. Osborne used the device of the music hall to open up The Entertainer, but he is essentially an enclosed writer and his canvas is the small family unit, however fractured. The anarchic satire of Simpson was also centred on the family. Wesker’s plays were political but soft-centred. Only John Arden easily fitted into an idea of ‘Epic Theatre’ with his songs and broad social picture, but even he was too much of a free spirit to conform to a rigid political programme. The most lasting influence of the Ensemble was on design and staging. Jocelyn Herbert, the designer, more than anyone else absorbed the Brechtian idea of essential elements on an otherwise bare stage and blended it with a kind of English romanticism so that it became the Royal Court house-style, which could include the naturalism of Wesker’s trilogy and Storey’s plays of workers and rugby players, as well as the larger canvas of Arden. Her designs for Brecht’s Baal and Saint Joan of the Stockyards were poetic but never sentimental. She also became the chosen designer for the plays of Samuel Beckett.

  While we younger directors were trying to balance the experience of the undoubted rightness of Brecht’s work with the kind of plays that were being written, Beckett had arrived on the scene. Waiting for Godot was first directed in English by Peter Hall at the Arts Theatre in 1955, but in 1957 George Devine managed to arrange that the world premiere of the French production of Fin de partie should take place at the Royal Court. A production of the English translation, Endgame, was scheduled for the following year and, after a ridiculous spat with the censor, went ahead. Devine was directing and also playing Hamm, the amazing Jackie Mac-Gowran was playing Clov. Beckett came over to watch rehearsals. Devine was very nervous and stumbled all over the place but very gently Beckett calmed him down, and to all intents and purposes took over the production. Beckett had not yet fully acquired the taste for directing his own plays, but he was more dominant in the rehearsals of Happy Days in 1962. We would watch him from the upper circle and though we had a great respect for him we were not in awe and certainly had no sense of the cult figure he subsequently became. In those early days ‘avant-garde’ was a dirty word in Sloane Square. We were for a positive Socialist theatre made by British writers and, for us younger directors, Beckett was classed with Ionesco as the Paris-based ‘High Art’ we were trying to get away from. They even wrote in French. Our tastes were probably more catholic than that, but battle lines had been drawn. Ken Tynan had a public debate with Ionesco, and one of his last notices for the Observer, before becoming Literary Manager of the National Theatre, was a damning notice of Krapp’s Last Tape, entitled ‘Slamm’s Last Knock’.

  In the first season at the National Theatre I was directing a production of Sophocles’ Philoctetes which was to share a double bill with the British premiere of Beckett’s Play, directed by Devine. Play is about a man, his wife and his mistress, all presumably dead, each buried up to the neck in an urn. They are forced by a probing light to recount endlessly the story of their past relationship, as if they were in some Dantesque version of Hell. At the end of the piece they start all over again. The actors—Robert Stephens, Billie Whitelaw and Rosemary Harris—were directed to speak the lines in a monotone at a breakneck pace. This was what Beckett wanted. The first run was watched by Olivier, Tynan and myself. Olivier and Tynan were horrified by the pace; they couldn’t grasp the sense as the words flew by and they tried to persuade Beckett and Devine to slow it down. I agreed with them. Devine stood firmly by his writer and nothing was changed. He was proved right in performance when the relentless pace became an experience in itself. In fact it was so much more exciting than Philoctetes that their position in the double bill was reversed and the Sophocles became the curtain-raiser to the Beckett. (I have a feeling that when you know what the characters are saying it is even more exciting but the decision on the speed was the right one.)

  Beckett never theorised about what theatre should be or what it was for. He knew how his plays should be done and that was enough. He wasn’t really interested in their effect on an audience and never watched his plays once they had opened. But if we try and for
mulate the aesthetic principles of his theatre practice it might not end up a million miles from Bertolt Brecht:

  Only have on the stage what is essential to the action.

  Don’t move the actors unless it means something.

  Every property and every costume has meaning.

  There is one area in which they would have differed. Brecht believed in a clear, diffused light:

  Electrician

  Give us light on our stage.

  How can we disclose

  We playwright and actors

  Images to the world in semi-darkness?

  The sleepy darkness sends to sleep

  (John Berger’s translation)

  Beckett’s world—at least after Godot—is a world of darkness, in his later plays a darkness only stabbed by spotlights. It’s an enclosed world of the poet’s imagination, and a metaphor, if not for our own time, of the future that will come. Brecht’s world is for political examination with a hope of positive change.

  We theatre workers adopted the aesthetics of Brecht but not for the same political ends. In my production of Macbeth at the Royal Court in 1966, I flooded the stage with bright white light. My idea was that the atmosphere was all in the text and needed no artificial help, that the essential meaning of the play would be clear: that there is a darkness of the mind as well of the sky. It was a bold idea but it demanded too much of an audience and the actors. Shakespeare may have written the play for the open-air Globe, but even in the open air the sun does not shine all the time. Soon after writing the play his company began using a second, indoor theatre at Blackfriars, where they would have played Macbeth lit by candles. They probably loved hiding in the darkness. On a proscenium stage you cannot create the equivalent of outdoor lighting. Even at the Berliner Ensemble, the full blast of open white light was only used in key moments. When I did Macbeth many years later at RADA in a promenade production, it was more like Beckett. The lighting was dynamic rather than atmospheric, light coming out of darkness to lead the audience round the space. It worked much better.

  It is interesting that it is Beckett, writing puzzling plays set in unspecific locations, in an enclosed world, who has been accepted as creating the stage metaphors for our own time; Brecht, who so specifically wrote narratives which would be meaningful for our political situation, now fails to connect, at least in this country.

  Both writers were poets, though Beckett is more often thought of as a novelist. People who know German think Brecht was a better poet than playwright. I am not qualified to say. But it is Beckett who is the more original poet of theatre.

  3

  What is an Action?—Ibsen and Chekhov

  What is an action? Something performed, completed, done, but also a movement forward. In the theatre it can mean many things. For Aristotle it meant the succession of events, in his theory the most important element of theatre. It can mean the physical things that are done by the actor on the stage which we used to call ‘business’. In a method used by Max Stafford-Clark and other directors it is an analysis of what an actor is doing by saying each line of the text. I want to look at all of these and particularly how each speech moves the action of the play forward and what that means to the actor.

  The overall action, the movement of a play, is a primary experience of an audience. Watching Anthony Page’s production of Rosmersholm at the Almeida Theatre (2008) I found myself gripped like a child by the development of the plot. I know the play well but I was as excited by what would happen next as when I first heard it on the radio as a boy. There is no spare fat in the writing. Everything moves the action forward, and we can feel it move. I was riveted by Rebecca West’s final confession that she is responsible for the first wife’s suicide, which leads to the denouement. The ending has been signalled from the very first pages of the play. In the opening scene, Rebecca is crocheting a white shawl. She and the housekeeper watch through the window to see whether Rosmer will cross the bridge over the mill race, where his wife committed suicide. At the end the housekeeper watches as Rebecca, now wearing the white shawl, and Rosmer throw themselves off the footbridge. The doom of the House of Rosmer is fulfilled. But is it not all just too pat? Is there no more positive outcome for the characters’ dilemma? Then I thought of the ending of Little Eyolf, when Allmers and Rita try to put the past behind them and take up social work, which doesn’t feel any more satisfactory, either morally or theatrically. All plays have to get somewhere and our sense of the rightness of the ending will change over the years. Today the idea that a moral dilemma can be stated in terms of the lives of individuals, let alone be resolved, is unacceptable. The double suicide in Rosmersholm or the avalanche on the mountain in When We Dead Awaken seem to us a cop-out, just as we can no longer accept the arrival of Fortinbras to take over Denmark or Malcolm’s victory in Scotland as satisfactory conclusions to the tragedies that precede them. We prefer the desolate ending of King Lear, or the cynical ending of Troilus and Cressida, when Pandarus bequeaths us his diseases.

  The most radical change in the nature of concluding a play came with Chekhov. He brought the quality of short-story writing to the theatre, and, though he used some of the elements of melodrama, he rooted his plays firmly in the day-to-day existence of people. It is true that at the end of his first major play, The Seagull, Konstantin commits suicide but it happens almost casually. He has already failed to kill himself earlier in the play, and when he does—offstage—it is not felt to be an inevitable ending. Nor does his story, his action, occupy the entire centre of the play. It is shared with that of Nina, the girl who has suffered and learned to endure. Together with Arkadina and Trigorin they present four variations on the theme of artistic creativity. Indeed each character seems central to the action while they are in focus. None of them has heroic status: their suffering, their struggles are of the same kind as ours watching. This lack of heroism is a significant shift in drama. Chekhov called his plays comedies because there was no alternative. He looks at the strivings and aspirations of human beings and shows how hopeless they are. Whether you find them funny or not is up to you, but they are certainly not tragic. Ibsen tried desperately to cut his characters down to size by exposing their weaknesses, but Solness and Borkman, however flawed, still retain heroic and tragic stature.

  Chekhov also changed the nature of action. Instead of the inexorable progression of events he made an action that feels like a part of a continuous existence. Instead of the dramatic full stop of the final curtain you have life going on. In The Cherry Orchard, Firs is left to die in the empty house and we hear the breaking string we heard earlier, but the orchard is being chopped down for a purpose, and there will be a new, if different, life ahead. It’s better than the mill race. In Ibsen the narrative is manipulated to make a statement; in Chekhov we have the feeling of life as it is. But in any play we still seek something akin to what Aristotle called action, a succession of events during the time we have been in the theatre, which we think must be meaningful, even if negative.

  Even in the most experimental play you know when it’s over. Plays with little obvious narrative are held together by some sense of movement. In pre-twentieth-century plays action moved forwards through time in a straight line. Beckett takes us through cycles. We think we are moving forward but find ourselves back at the beginning. In Waiting for Godot the second act finishes exactly like the first, with the two tramps motionless. We imagine another day in which they may wait again without success, but having watched them wait twice we have seen enough to get the writer’s point. Or think we have. In Play the protagonists tell and retell their stories through all eternity. Mother Courage in Brecht’s play goes through the history of the Thirty Years War, losing her children, but at the end is still pulling her wagon against the revolving stage and getting nowhere. The years have moved on but the action is the same.

  When I first worked in a weekly repertory company, actors spent much of the rehearsal time adding ‘business’, small actions undescribed in the text,
to give credibility or reality to their character—or just to keep their hands busy. The most usual was lighting a cigarette. Every piece of furniture on the set had an ashtray with a little water in it to make sure the cigarette went out after it had been put down. As we became more serious about our work we started to see that every physical action done on the stage must mean something and that even the smallest of actions like pouring a cup of tea will be significant if it is focused on or played more slowly. You can ritualise anything by the way that you do it. A simple action like serving bread and wine becomes ritualised in the Eucharist. Hoc est corpus… the body and blood of Christ. With the elevation of the Host in church it is no longer important to stress the ritual manner because the audience/congregation has agreed to accept its symbolic meaning, it can be done automatically. In the theatre the actor and director have to create the ritualisation, to show the physical action as expressive of something more. Peter Gill in his productions of D.H. Lawrence’s plays understood that the daily washing of a miner’s back is sacramental. In the last scene of The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, the washing of the dead miner is a repeat of the ritual of the living man, but it is also the preparation of the corpse for burial.