Hamlet’s only other major soliloquy is at the end of the scene with the captain when he is on his way to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge.
This is by far the most coherent, reasoned and purposeful of all the solo speeches. It is not printed in the Folio and must have been dropped, possibly for reasons of length, but the play is overlong anyway and there are many much less interesting passages left intact. The speech feels almost as if Shakespeare is trying to get the play back on course by giving Hamlet a clear sense of purpose, even if no plan of action. But it is peculiarly placed. He has had his chance after the play scene and completely blown it. Now he is under armed guard and on his way to exile, which makes nonsense of his saying:
I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do’,
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means to do’t
when he so patently doesn’t have the means. He leaves the stage saying:
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!
In fact we don’t see him again until the graveyard scene. In the interim he has disposed of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his most practical, prepared and coolly executed action in the whole play, but one we only hear about from his own mouth. When he comes back from England he is a different man. Apart from the outburst over Ophelia’s grave he is resigned, detached and purposeful. He has arrived at action offstage.
When I was preparing the RADA production of the play I was scribbling away using words and sketches to make sense of the play’s progression, not a storyboard of stick men and women acting out incidents, but a visual diagram of the forward movement of the play. I found I had made three columns down the page something like this:
Act One, Scene One
Act One, Scene Two
Act One, Scene Three
The Battlements
The Court
Polonius’s Home
Soldiers and the Ghost
King and Queen
Polonius’s Family
Hamlet
Hamlet
(Supernatural/Political)
(Political/Domestic)
(Domestic/Social)
Hamlet and Horatio
Act One, Scene Four
The Battlements
Hamlet, the Soldiers and the Ghost
End of first movement
Some things were already clear. The action was far from linear like the action of Oedipus or Rosmersholm. Their narratives could be shown in one column in straight progression (apart from the choruses in Oedipus). In a classic play, the revelations of Horatio to Hamlet in Scene 2 should drive on to the scene on the battlements. Instead we have the leisurely scene of Polonius’s precepts to his son and the commands to Ophelia to return her letters to Hamlet. We have to focus on another set of characters and wait to see what happens when Hamlet meets the Ghost. Like a second subject in sonata form, the Polonius household has to make its statement before the first can be developed.
By the end of Act 1 the themes of the play are already in place: Hamlet’s reaction to his father’s death and mother’s remarriage, Ophelia’s love for and forced separation from Hamlet, the country on the brink of war. The Ghost comes crashing in with his revenge theme and jolts the action forwards (or not, as it turns out). Looked at visually, the three-way lateral spread of the play pulls against and slows down the linear progression of incidents. The tension between them is part of the action. There are thematic parallels between the columns of which the most immediate is the child/parent relationship: Hamlet with his surrogate father and real mother, Ophelia with her father, Hamlet with his real but ghostly father. I was reminded of King Lear, where the double plot is more obviously part of the structure of the play: two old men with their children; Lear with his daughters and Gloucester with his sons.
I went on with the analysis, which was nowhere near as neat as the above layout suggests. My diagram was full of squiggles and arrows and sketches of people in corridors. Hamlet appeared in the interstices between the columns, peering round corners. When I came to work on the set with my co-director Henk Schut, the three columns became translated into physical terms. The play was set in three separate mini-auditoriums, side by side, in the same room, two audiences facing one way and one the other. Each audience faced a different small stage, which was a box with three sides in which the more intimate domestic scenes were played. Each was only completely visible to one-third of the audience, but the action of each stage was monitored by cameras and transmitted on screens to the other two. There was a large central area, visible to the whole audience, in which all the major ensemble scenes were played. Sometimes scenes would expand into this central area. This was not a scheme rigidly followed through, but it did create the peculiar atmosphere of the play, which is private and domestic on one hand and political and universal on the other. The exclusion of direct vision and the monitoring of the scenes on camera sustained the image of surveillance which is so relevant to the play and our own overlooked society.
Did it work? Yes, some of the time, but like any production of Hamlet no conceptual idea will work if it cannot be dominated by the actor playing the part. You cannot reduce the Prince of Denmark to a figure in a concept, and it was asking too much of the student actor to rise above it. But I liked the way the play’s structure had been mirrored in its physical realisation.
5
Talking to the Audience
In a play how do you show those thoughts and feelings that a character cannot express to the other characters? The Elizabethans used soliloquy and in the hands of Shakespeare it became a major element of the play. But how did they do it at the Globe? Did the actor talk directly to the audience? Did he acknowledge their existence all the time?
In the case of Richard III and Iago, comedy villains who are letting us in on their wicked schemes, the answer is, clearly, ‘Yes’. The characters demand a complicity from the spectators, so that the audience will enjoy the fruition of the schemes. The actors have the direct contact of the stand-up comedian. But what about speeches of introversion, where the character meditates on his situation? Like the ‘Upon the king…’ soliloquy in Henry V. Olivier in the film version attempted to make the convention acceptable to a modern audience by putting his voice on the soundtrack but not moving his lips. He tried to think the lines into the camera, which made for very boring cinema and very bad theatre. We felt cheated, not by the lack of contact but by a lack of sensual fulfilment. We needed to see the actor speaking in order to feel the emotion; to feel his words travel to us. The art of opera is based on this premiss. (Singers look ridiculous in close-up on television because their voice is geared to travel the distances of a theatre.)
This need is one of the basic givens of the theatrical experience. It does not necessarily mean that the character is in direct communication with us or that he acknowledges the audience as he speaks.
Peter Hall is quite clear about what he thinks:
Every soliloquy is a public debate with the audience. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ is a challenge to the audience. Three thousand people in daylight would never have their attention held by an actor privately communing with himself. The argument, shape and vocabulary of every soliloquy demands the direct participation of the audience.
(Exposed by the Mask)
And what is meant by direct participation? Does the audience heckle Hamlet in the middle of his speech or argue points with him? ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ ‘No, it isn’t, mate, why don’t you just do something?’ It would be fun… once. Does the actor make individual eye contact with members of the audience, inviting them to answer back? If he is looking at one person he is excluding everyone else. Even when I am giving a lecture I will speak to a generalised unit, a group with whom I want to communicate, not to individuals. And in a lecture I am in the same space and time as the audience. An actor in a play cr
eates a situation in another time and space; he knows the audience is watching him but this makes the imaginative leap more bold. If he admits he is in the here and now of his audience, he ceases to be in the there and then of Elsinore. Sometimes there are moments, as in the Chorus in Henry V, where the actor is in the same time and space as the audience:
There is the playhouse now, there must you sit.
But he is very soon demanding that we work on our imaginary forces. Being drawn in to another time, another place is surely one of the basic elements of theatre. So is the entering of the mind of another person, to understand their struggles and their innermost thoughts. Does anyone really believe that ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt’ is delivered in the same way as ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’?
The advocates of the ‘in yer face’ soliloquy are those whose fantasy of Elizabethan theatre is one of orange-wenches selling their wares, and actors bellowing at the groundlings in crude and robust plays. Brecht wondered why Olivier in his film of Henry V presented the acting of Shakespeare’s company as more vulgar than his own. Brecht himself was to suffer under directors and actors who thought ‘Brechtian’ was another term for English pantomime, with the actors constantly dropping out of character and acknowledging the audience. Anyone who saw his production of Mother Courage will know this is nonsense. Nothing could have been more concentrated and serious, nor further from traditional popular entertainment. (Perhaps that’s why Joan Littlewood had so little sympathy with his theatre.)
The altering of the awareness of time is the first step to the understanding of an action. If we are all chugging along in the same boring workaday world why are we in the theatre at all? We need to believe in the otherness of time and space to be able to enlarge the perception of our own lives. Brecht would have seen this as a typically bourgeois concept: the need to escape to another world to avoid looking at our own world and changing it. But all Brecht’s plays are parables using the past. He insists by projected titles that we are very precisely in the Thirty Years War or Galileo’s Rome in 1633, and by looking at those societies come to understand our own. We always know we are in a theatre but our degrees of empathy, of character involvement, will vary. I have always thought that the lessons of Brecht were rather wasted in Britain where the tendency of audiences is to stand outside the action and see the comic side of even the most pitiable situation. I first became aware of this when I went to a matinee of A Streetcar Named Desire in Manchester, when Stanley’s treatment of Blanche provoked gales of ribald mirth.
This may be another example of ‘No sex, please, we’re British’. Ever since the Puritan Revolution, British drama has been concerned with the concealment rather than the expression of emotion, at least in those plays that are good enough to have survived—mainly comedies. This progressive interiorisation of emotion has lasted to Coward and Pinter. The aside in Restoration Comedy is more complex because the connection with the audience is brief, but is never introvert. In a recent production of The Man of Mode by George Etherege I foolishly cut the asides, until I found that they carried the emotional life of the characters. The play is principally concerned with the obsession of a monied class with social behaviour, the displaying of wit and the clothes they wear. If and when they feel something stronger it is concealed from the other characters and they tell us in asides: the open expresssion of emotion was thought unstylish and courted ridicule.
With the coming of the proscenium stage, the soliloquy dwindled into the aside and it has gone on dying ever since. The semi-illusory nature of the late-nineteenth-century realistic theatre and the completely illusory nature of the cinema, where we sit privately in the darkness and identify with the characters, made audiences expect a more naturalistic presentation of private thoughts. The soliloquies in Chekhov’s The Seagull now sound artificial and are sometimes, mistakenly, cut. In the twentieth century the device was resurrected in O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, where the characters speak not only their dialogue but their thoughts as well, which makes for a very long and boring evening. It was wonderfully mocked by Groucho Marx in Duck Soup.
I once did a promenade production of Macbeth (RADA, 1996) in a small space. The audience were pressed up against the actors even in the most violent and intimate scenes. If anything, the actors’ concentration on maintaining their situation, their space and time, against the palpable existence of the spectators was even stronger. At no point did they make eye contact or communicate with actual members of the public. There was a strange sense of existing in double space and time. Perhaps that is always true even in the darkened auditorium of the proscenium theatre, but it is just more strongly felt in the round and even more so in a promenade production.
There was an unusual variant of this in The Speakers, a version of Heathcote Williams’s book about Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, which Max Stafford-Clark and I directed for the Joint Stock Theatre Group in 1974. At the opening of the play we are in a recreation of Hyde Park, with speakers on soapboxes in different corners of the space, competing for our attention. The audience is free to wander between them. The light over the whole area is even, there is no illusion. The act of imagination has already taken place. The audience have tacitly agreed to be the listeners at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park; they are already in the imagined world of the actors, who look at them and speak to them directly but as people in the speakers’ world. As the play progresses we move into the private lives of the individual speakers, controlled by the lighting which ceases to be general and shrinks down to smaller and smaller areas, even to a solo spot on an actor’s face. And then it opens out again and we are back in the park. The audience moves between the psychology of the individual to the social situation and back again, controlled in our time by the lighting operator, in Shakespeare’s time by the movement of the writing. ‘Now I am alone…’ Hamlet says and the spotlight narrows, we are in his mind. Horatio and Bernardo appear and it opens out.
Another variation on the question of audience address was in my adaptation of Raymond Carver’s story Cathedral. The story is told in the first person by an unnamed man. He tells how his wife brought home a blind man with whom she had worked and had a special relationship. The blind man arrives and after the wife has gone to bed the two sit listening to the television together. There is a programme about cathedrals and the storyteller tries and fails to communicate to the blind man what a cathedral is. The blind man persuades him to draw a cathedral, which the man does first with his eyes open and then with his eyes shut.
In the adaptation the actor tells the story directly to the audience and two other actors play the wife and the blind man. The story is played out with dialogue but the storyteller continues the narrative throughout, interspersed with his own thoughts. Although the story is in the past tense the action is in the present, and so, in a sense, is the narration. There is no sense of memory, of something recollected; it is all here and now. The man, without knowing it, describes his own voyage of discovery. By his own admission he has no feeling for poetry and when questioned admits he has no religious belief. By the end of the story he has experienced something akin to both, but he never tells us this. The writing is spare and unemotional, yet we understand everything. The actor maintains the inner life of the character while communicating with an audience. He is not inviting comment or even sharing an attitude; he is just telling us a story.
A story is something that has already happened and is told in the past tense. A play is something that has the pretence of happening here and now, but we know we are watching a story that has already been completed in the writer’s mind, and that the ritual will be repeated the following night. In the theatre we live in the present and the past. The actor should be in charge of the audience’s experience and must make decisions as to how far he wants them to enter his inner state and how far to remain detached. There is no simple answer.
6
Stage Directions
How far does a dramatist visualise his
work on the stage as he writes it? Does he see his characters existing and moving in a stage space as they speak the dialogue? Did Shakespeare imagine the actor in the inn yard or on the platform at the Globe or at Blackfriars? The idea of a fixed physical shape for a theatre was new. Shakespeare was an actor and a shareholder in the company, and he knew he was bound by physical and economic restrictions. He had to be flexible, and he specifies little. His plays need practically nothing—a balcony in Romeo and Juliet, a grave in Hamlet, and that’s about it. His stage directions are few but very specific. ‘The Ghost of Banquo enters and sits in Macbeth’s seat.’ You don’t get much more specific than that. In his last plays he was lured or pressured into scenic effects. When I directed Cymbeline at Stratford in 1962 I fulfilled to the letter the stage direction ‘Jupiter descends on an eagle.’ An actor descended from the flies on an eagle whose wings covered the stage. It had never been done like that in recent memory (as with all spectacle, people liked it for the wrong reasons). There are also many directions embedded in the text itself. The Ghost in Hamlet should be in full armour with his visor raised, moving ‘slow and stately’, and may have a field marshal’s baton. All that is indicated in the speeches of the play as precisely as any stage direction. When did you last see them fulfilled in a production of Hamlet?
Even when plays moved back behind the proscenium arch there was no attempt to represent the detailed reality of everyday life. There was no furniture to speak of—look at the print of Molière sitting on one solitary chair centre stage in Le Malade imaginaire. Plays were still basically made up of dialogue spoken on a platform. Only by the end of the nineteenth century was there an attempt to put real rooms on the stage. In Three Sisters thirteen people sit down to a meal. In Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance a large fully set dining table dominates much of the action. Sometimes Barker got carried away, as if he were writing a novel; at the end of the first act of The Madras House he sends the characters offstage to a Sunday lunch which he describes in detail but which obviously was never meant to be seen. But Barker was directing his own play and knew what he was doing. This move towards detailed realism reached its fullest statement in the work of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Art Theatre. Chekhov was not a man of the theatre and depended on his directors for the productions of his plays, however much he disagreed with them. His dislike of Stanislavsky’s sound effects is well known. This division between actor and director has been a strong element in theatre since that time.
Words Into Action Page 4