Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  The case of Beckett is interesting: a writer who came late to playwriting after a series of novels, with no knowledge of theatre, and writing in French, which was not his own language. To begin with he was content to let Roger Blin direct his plays in Paris. Later he directed all his own plays in Germany, though not their first production. The physical settings of Beckett’s plays are never in doubt. The tree in Godot is bare in the first act, in the second it has a leaf; Winnie is buried up to her waist in Act 1 of Happy Days and up to her neck in Act 2; the three characters in Play are in urns up to their necks; Not I is just a mouth talking, spotlit in darkness. The existence of the characters in their imprisonment intensifies their verbal presence. In his later plays his stage directions became more precise and more demanding on the skills of the actor. There are famous stories of him debating the number of steps to be taken in Footfalls. In the plays he has left a straitjacket for the director which it is difficult to break out of without losing the experience of the play.

  Sometimes in my obsession with honouring a writer’s text, and perhaps because I was scared to commit myself to interpretation, I have based my production too closely on an existing model. Brecht had all his own productions recorded photographically, moment by moment, and kept in a model book as a guide for future revivals. When I came to direct Mother Courage at the Old Vic in 1965 I followed the model book very closely. I admired the Berliner Ensemble production more than anything I had seen in the theatre—and still do—and I could not see how it could be improved on. I argued that every moment of the grouping on the stage had been looked at and altered many times until the right dialectical statement had been arrived at. Which may have been true, but, when we tried to reproduce it, it made for a lifeless show. We had not made our own search. It is said that Brecht’s actors were not really part of the process either. Observers describe how Brecht would sit in the stalls with his designers and large numbers of assistants who discussed each moment, making sketches and moving the actors like chessmen. If you have very tough and talented actors who will accept such a method, it can work. But it is not the British way.

  Brecht was directing a play which he had written many years before. It was premiered in Zurich during the war, not directed by Brecht. After the war, Brecht returned to Berlin and chose Courage to inaugurate his new company in 1949. He directed the play from the point of view of his theory, which he had developed over the years, but which, in exile, he had little opportunity to put into practice, apart from the Galileo with Charles Laughton, which Brecht and Jo Losey directed in New York. Beckett’s plays were performed soon after they were written; the physical elements of the production were not involved during rehearsal but are embedded in the text. Brecht may always have imagined Courage pulling her wagon against the movement of the revolving stage and so staying in the same place (an idea he had pinched from his contemporary, Erwin Piscator) but there are other ways of doing it: for instance, when you don’t have a revolving stage. In Happy Days Winnie is buried up to her waist in Act 1 and to her neck in Act 2. If, as a director, you can’t accept that, you can’t do the play. Every line in the plays is based on those given circumstances. They limit the director and the actors but there is nothing you can do about it. Recently Peter Brook directed an evening of short plays by Beckett, including Rockaby. In Rockaby a woman sits in a rocking chair, rocking to and fro as she talks. In Brook’s production, Kathryn Hunter stood behind the chair and tilted it backwards and forwards with her hands. I found this perverse and wilful. If she is not in the chair there is no play. I believe that Brook starts by giving the actor—or himself—a complete freedom to start from scratch. It’s an approach that can produce interesting work, but does not necessarily end up where the author wanted, or make as powerful a statement as it could. The actor’s work has been arrived at by chance or impulse. The writer has formulated something very strong, already completed. In Brecht’s case, a political statement; in Beckett’s, a poetic/musical image. With both writers, the actor has to find his own freedom, his own dynamic life, within a prescribed form. It’s a director’s job to help him. It may well be that Beckett had too strict an idea of the form of his plays, both physical and temporal, and this may affect their future life—though not I think that of Godot or Endgame. The terrible example of the productions of the D’Oyly Carte Opera, which went on presenting the Gilbert and Sullivan operas exactly as Gilbert had directed them, long after the poor man was dead, is a warning against all over-reverent reconstructions of the past. But I doubt that Beckett can survive a radical rethink without ceasing to exist, and cosmetic tinkering by jazzing the plays up with red noses and banging drums is just crass.

  I am like any other director or actor. I want elbow room, space in which my imagination can work, or at least my craft. Directing Beckett is stimulating as a discipline, and can be more, but I wouldn’t want to do it all the time. Recently I have turned to adaptations of non-dramatic work, where I can feel that I am truthful to the spirit of the writer but can create my own theatrical form. I hope this is more honest than taking a play whose theatrical life is already articulated and laying my alternative on top.

  How far writers of our own time visualise the physical realisation of their work became clear in some work at RADA. I was directing a selection of scenes with second-year students, not for public showing and with token staging, in 2007. The scenes were by Beckett, Pinter, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill and Peter Gill, all writers with some elements in common: spare, sometimes cryptic, dialogue; simple staging demands; and concealed rather than exposed emotion. They represent a cross-section of the last fifty years or so of drama. Apart from Beckett all the writers were British and, at that time, still alive. Some of them were my personal friends (Pinter, Churchill and Gill), although I had not directed their work professionally. Bond was the writer closest to me: I had directed the first productions of his early work. The plays were Beckett’s All That Fall, Pinter’s Old Times, Bond’s Saved, Churchill’s A Number, and Gill’s Small Change.

  All That Fall is a radio play and was written to be heard only, as dialogue and sound effects. Beckett was very strict about not allowing it to be staged, though many tried to persuade him, including Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. Which is a pity because the play is more accessible, more naturalistic and funnier than most of the plays he wrote for the stage. The excerpt we worked on involved the return journey of the Rooneys from the railway station, Mrs Rooney leading her blind husband. Most of the physical stage images are created by the sound effects—the train, the donkey braying, the snatch of Schubert, and the dragging footsteps which seem to prefigure Footfalls. It’s a relatively easy job to give it a physical life, though it may not have had the presence that Beckett would have wanted. In our adaptation the stillness of the Rooneys when they stop and the old man looks in the ditch, had as much presence as the stage plays. Will they get home, reach the end of their journey, or will they die on the way? Death we shall not see nor hear, only the sound of the dragging footsteps fading away. Beckett shows us a man and woman on the journey of life, a section of which we are allowed to see, that started before the play began and will go on after it is finished. Time may be an illusion, but we experience the action as happening in time. The past and the future and the world outside are ambiguous but the onstage life has a reality.

  A year later I managed to persuade the Beckett estate to let me do a full stage production of All That Fall (RADA, 2008). The staging demands were the cart and the hinny pulling it, the bicycle, the car, the steps at the station, the train and the journey of the two old people. I was fortunate to have the collaboration of Toby Sedgwick, the inspired movement creator. The cart was made by four actors with a bridle, a plank and two skeleton wheels, the bike was just the handlebars, the car was four plain kitchen chairs, the steps were mimed. The arrival of the train was created by the lighting designer, Neal Fraser, and the sound department. Their work had all the charm of improvisation though it was very carefully chore
ographed, and in no way detracted from the intensity of the writing. I can’t believe that Beckett would not have liked it. It worked partly because the audience took great pleasure in the make-believe, that particular ability of the theatre to show you how things are done at the same time as you accept what they are meant to be. This never attracted Beckett. I think his process of imagining was more that of a poet or a visual artist. Theatre, in the sense of communicating and adapting to a live audience, did not interest him. But I did not think any of the physical realisation of the sounds detracted from the intensity of the words or the atmosphere of a radio play. I felt we had been completely faithful to the text with enough freedom to feel creative in our own contribution.

  Pinter’s characters in Old Times have conflicting stories of their past lives but, unlike Beckett’s, are imprisoned by their relationship rather than dictated to by forces outside themselves. The physical demands of furniture and properties (coffee, brandy, cigarettes) are those of any play of the Noël Coward era, the essentials of any repertory production in the 1950s, when Pinter first worked as an actor. He imagines a recognisable physical environment but pared down to essentials; the demands on a designer are minimal. The action is as continuous in each act as in any traditional play. The characters are working through their relationships in present time by recounting a conflicting and ambiguous past. The reality of the play exists in the present emotional conflicts of which the dialogue is the guard, the concealment. This too may stem from Coward’s Private Lives where Elyot and Amanda talk about Norfolk, the Taj Mahal, and the Duke of Westminster’s yacht to conceal the reawakening of their emotional life. In Pinter’s Old Times the sexual relationship of the man and the two women is presented through conflicting stories of a visit to the cinema to see Odd Man Out.

  Peter Gill’s Small Change is about two Welsh working-class Catholic boys struggling to define their relationship. Nothing is resolved, and the narrative, though often violent, has little sense of forward motion. It is kaleidoscopic, shifting backwards and forwards in time and place, sometimes in the same scene, but I do not feel that the physical life on the stage is inherent in the text. There are too many areas of ambiguity. The tension varies without apparent cause. The specific location of any one scene is not important. It is difficult to feel the presence or the action. Gill’s later play The York Realist takes place in a totally realistic environment (a farm kitchen) and, for me, is a more successful piece of work. Gill gives no stage direction in his early plays but he usually directs the first production himself and appears to know exactly how he will stage them. He uses a few identical plain wooden chairs in space, and explores their potential to the limit. But I feel the stage image that he creates with such certainty as a director is not apparent in the words on the page.

  Caryl Churchill sets her later plays in recognisable environments but does not describe them. It does not seem important to her how they are realised in physical terms. She is, to me, the least sensual of the writers and I feel that some of her later plays like A Number are not imagined for the stage. A Number could be staged realistically and would lose little in the process; in fact it might gain. Plain chairs on a bare wooden floor have become one of the clichés of contemporary theatre, and they are now a convenience rather than an essential visual element. They save the designer from having to define the social background. If the play is very powerful we don’t mind too much, but it can conceal a kind of laziness. Many writers—and Churchill is certainly not one of them—write plays as if for television, moving the location with every short scene and ignoring the responsibility of the physical restrictions of theatre. In the process, directors have evolved more and more ingenious presentation of scene changes. With Churchill’s plays the problem is not one of solving difficult questions of staging but finding a setting and a physical life which are right for the play without distorting it. Her next play after A Number (Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?) was staged in a black void; the two characters sat on a sofa which levitated off the floor as the play progressed. I found this an irritating idea, but it was not inherent in the play. It was an idea of the director, James Macdonald, which the writer had gone along with. A future production may well do the play differently. Interestingly, Macdonald had very successfully directed Sarah Kane’s last play, 4.48 Psychosis, which is more of a poem than a play. There are no stage directions and no indication of characters in the script she delivered a week before she killed herself. Macdonald had to make all the decisions about staging. He divided the text between three actors and, with his designer, evolved the idea of the action played on the floor reflected in a huge mirror over the stage. It was an effective realisation of a play that had no stage life in its text.

  Edward Bond in his early plays has a very clear sense of where his scenes take place, and what the minimum essentials are to represent them. The second scene of Saved is set on a boating lake in South London. Len, who has picked up Pam and now lives in her parents’ house, is rowing her on the lake. They speak of their future. It is the only scene in the play when the characters have a chance of happiness. The boatman calls them in and makes a play for Pam. The scene demands a full-size rowing boat, with oars, and nothing else. It is a real object but set without illusion in the stage space. If the scene were filmed realistically it would lose everything. When I first worked with Bond on the play he was quite specific as to how he saw objects on the stage down to the minutest detail, even the colour of a balloon. His stage may be minimally furnished, but it is a real world not an imaginary one. A world which has the possibility of change.

  I directed Saved twice, once in its first production in 1965 and again in 1969 after we had succeeded in getting rid of the censor. It can be read as a perfectly naturalistic play about a family in South London. It is written in mainly one-line dialogue, but it has none of the mannered repetitions and patterning that characterise Pinter’s work, and the narrative is not at all puzzling or cryptic. The structure, which is highly original, moves in a straightforward progression though the thirteen scenes, though there are time gaps in which there are considerable leaps in the action. The stage directions are spare, with an overall direction that ‘The stage is as bare as possible—sometimes completely bare ’. Bond had absorbed the pattern of the staging based on Brecht that we used at the Royal Court and made his own version of it. Three of the scenes are in a park, one is in the prison, one in a café, the rest take place in the living room or the bedroom. It was Bond’s idea that there should be only one door upstage set in a couple of angled flats which would serve as both living room and bedroom. The living-room furniture consisted of a table and two chairs, right, an armchair, centre, and a sofa, left, more or less in a line and facing front. There was no attempt visually to give it an atmospheric life. All the props and when they are to be used are indicated in the text.

  The father and mother of Pam, have not spoken to each other for many years. In one scene the mother gets Len to mend her stocking while she is still wearing it, a scene both erotic and innocent. The father sees this and in a later scene the parents speak to each other in a violent and childish row, during which a chair leg accidentally comes loose. In the very last scene of the play the house has returned to its normal pattern of silent, loveless coexistence. There is no dialogue for the whole scene, which lasts several minutes, except one line from Len, who has decided to stay in the house though there is no reason why he should. He brings the broken chair on stage and says, ‘Fetch me ’ammer,’ but nobody moves. He mends the chair by himself. The action of each of the characters is described and has to be performed separately like a piece of music. The father is sitting at the table doing his pools, Pam and her mother sit on the couch facing front. In a series of precisely described movements Len fixes the chair leg and tests the stability. The last section of the scene reads like this:

  LEN slips his left arm round the back of the chair. His chest rests against the side edge of the seat. The fingers of the right hand touch the floor.
His head lies sideways on the seat.

  MARY sits. PAM sits.

  HARRY licks the flap on the envelope and closes it quietly.

  The curtain falls quickly.

  Bond claims it as an image of optimism: Len has mended the chair. The play is unique in using all the materials of naturalism but ordering the actions and controlling the timing so exactly that the statement is large and classic.

  How far must a writer know what his plays will look like on the stage? Chekhov is a great writer for the theatre but knew little of stage practice—and yet the plays belong on the stage and translate with difficulty into other media. In film the director controls the focus, telling you what to look at. In a Chekhov play the spectator is free to decide where he looks among the people on stage. This sense of an equality among a group of characters, all of them interesting, is surely one of Chekhov’s most revolutionary achievements and belongs essentially to the theatre. That he may not have known it was quite so original in no way detracts from his achievement.