Words Into Action
Page 7
Actors often say, ‘My character wouldn’t do that,’ when, in fact, the excitement may come from the unexpectedness, the unpreparedness of the action. When Hedda shoots herself, Judge Brack says, ‘But people don’t do that sort of thing.’ But she has; she is the exception which has exploded the rule. The action without apparent preparation is best seen in the martial arts. The fighters face each other and then the action happens. There is an emptying of the mind, the action and then nothing. I am told that in Japanese music one sound has to be completed before the next is made. It has to disappear into nothingness and come from nothingness.
I understood this most clearly when working on a production of Hamlet. I had decided to do the play in a bastardised version of modern dress, which is so usual today, and I was facing the problem of the swearing on the sword after the scene with the Ghost, which is so specific in the text. A sword strapped onto a modern suit looks ridiculous. My assistant on the production was the Japanese actress Noriko Barter, and I had the idea that she could be like the attendants in the kabuki theatre who, silently and without expression, change the actor’s costume and hand him his props. Noriko would glide onto the stage, veiled in black, and hand Hamlet his sword. It worked, but it only worked because Noriko had no identity at all as she performed the action. She did not exist. It would have been much more difficult for most Western actors because the sense of ‘this is me doing it’ would have intruded.
The question all actors have to answer, though most of them don’t know it, is, ‘How willing am I to let the action of the play flow through me and how much do I want my ego, my personality to be felt?’ The answer will always be different with each individual actor.
British actors, unlike American and some European actors, are inclined not to identify, not to commit themselves to the passion of a part. This may sometimes stem from a too great awareness of the writing. The revolution in acting started by the influence of Marlon Brando depends on a non-rhetorical sense; to live in the present and be unconscious of where the play is going. There is a breakdown of language as a formal expression. We are left with the immediate unshaped spurts of emotion. Brando faced huge problems when tackling the essentially rhetorical part of Antony in the film of Julius Caesar (though he is impressive and makes Gielgud, an excellent Cassius on the stage, seem very two-dimensional).
I am constantly dissatisfied with actors who are too near their text, who cannot hear the resonances of the writing, as if their words were only some form of emotional expression and did not relate to ideas—political, moral, religious, philosophical, poetic—which exist beyond the personal predicament of the character. I constantly ask actors not only ‘What do you think? What do you feel?’ but also ‘What do you think about what you feel? What do you feel about what you think?’
It is tempting to think of a play as a piece of music. All you have to do is follow the composer’s instructions and it will work. But it is never quite like that. However meticulously the writer lays out stage directions, pauses, tempo indications, there is always the moment when it has to be made flesh. In the beginning was the word and the word was with Sam Beckett, but it has to dwell amongst us. Beckett made the theatre of the second half of the twentieth century, but he was not part of it. In his later years he took to directing his own plays but he never saw a performance. He controlled every moment of his play but was not interested in the response of the live audience. Nor to a large extent are his actors. If you are the mouth in Not I, you are not going to play it differently if there are five hundred people in the audience or none. You won’t know. I doubt that the Noh actor knows whether he has a good or bad house—the kabuki actor certainly does. It is interesting to see the audience at a performance of the Noh theatre in Japan; it is full of women in traditional kimonos who have studied the texts and follow it in their books while mouthing along with the actors, rather like cultists at The Sound of Music. There are no young people. It is still for me one of the great the-atregoing experiences but only because my professional education has led me to appreciate it.
But I do believe that language, certainly in earlier periods, had a freedom that we have lost, and that it provided a richer and more complex experience. The movement towards greater realism, naturalism even, has brought the text physically nearer to the actor, sometimes disappearing down his throat in the mumbling of the Method. As a result it has become less open and universal. The increasing insistence on actual physical contact in all forms of acting, the use of microphones in the theatre, together with the experience of acting for camera, mean that is not necessary for the actor to open his or her throat and release the music. Some essential sensation of acting is lost.
9
Movement and Stillness—the Noh Theatre
I was rehearsing Kinuta (The Fulling Block), one of the Noh plays by the great fourteenth-century dramatist Zeami, at RADA in 1998. My co-director Henk Schut was teaching the actors the basis of the walk used in the Noh theatre, which he had learnt from a Noh actor. The walk consists of sliding first one foot and then the other along the floor without lifting either. The top part of the body is erect, the arms are held curved in front of the body, the knees are bent, the body is centred over the heels, eyes straight ahead. The feet are parallel and the transference of weight is imperceptible. The movement is endlessly sustained and forward. You have to wear socks and the floor has to be smooth. The actor moves heel to toe, and the toes lift a little off the ground as the foot reaches its forward position, but the movement is continuous. When performed correctly the walk creates energy and concentration but should appear effortless and light.
What does the walk express? That there is no beginning and no end; the actor is moving when we first see him, and he disappears moving. For a time he will live out the passion on the square we call the stage so we can see it and then he will leave. Most of the action will be in the mind. There will be no dead bodies to clear away as in the Elizabethan theatre, and no curtain to bring down. We, the audience, are outside time too. There is no exploration of motivation. Usually the first half of a Noh play is an action in the past involving living beings, the second is the consequence of the action, often a revisiting by a ghost of the main character.
The square wooden stage of the Noh theatre sits in the corner of the building; the audience sits on two sides of the square. Audience and performers are in the same space and the same lighting. The actors’ approach to the stage is diagonally along a long walkway from the left at the back. The walkway is longer than the width of the stage itself, built of the same wood and fully visible to the audience. Strips of brightly coloured silk on bamboo are lifted to allow the actor to enter. He approaches the stage, fully masked in a heavy silk costume, with the sustained, even walk. It takes up to five minutes, but it can’t be called slow. It is timeless. He is preceded by three musicians who play an important part in the play. They have a sung and chanted dialogue with the actors as well as establishing rhythms and sound with their instruments. The chorus who sit at the side enter from a lifted panel on the right-hand side and sit on the right in two rows. They do not use the sustained walk.
The stories of the plays are usually very simple. In Kinuta a government official leaves his wife to work in a distant city. The wife imagines she communicates with him by beating a fulling block (used for softening cloth), with her maid. The physical actions are minimally sketched by the movement of their fans; there is no sound. Eventually the wife dies of grief. In the second part her tormented ghost is finally calmed by the prayers of her husband. There is almost no narrative action and very little physical action of any kind. The actor is still for long periods, and when gesture is used it is very powerful. Most of the play is a Buddhist reflection on the torment of ‘clinging’: of being attached to desires that create pain, and the need to free oneself from desire. This is expressed by the intensity of the poetic and musical dialogue between the participants. The chorus and the musicians sometimes speak for the protagonist, sometimes
he speaks for himself. Sometimes he performs a slow dance, again with minimal gesture, while the musicians and chorus chant. The sense of being rooted to the stage is a metaphor for the human imprisonment in its own karma. It can be very powerful or very boring, depending on whether you want to enter the world of a different theatre, a different philosophy and a different awareness of time.
If the audience does want to, its perceptions are sharpened. Everything that happens on the stage becomes important and meaningful. In Japan the actors are trained for years by older actors until they are ready to play the part. We rehearsed the play for five weeks with a group of untrained students. There was a small combined chorus of musicians and singers at the side using our own invented instruments—only percussion, no wind, no strings. It should have been laughable. In fact the concentration we shared in the process did communicate something in performance. Our anchor was the walk itself, which was rehearsed religiously before every performance, followed by a period of meditation in which the actor faces the wall in the same position, arms curved, knees lightly bent and the heels lifted just off the ground. Very demanding but focusing. The concentration on the minimalisation of the theatre event is a great head-clearer. I felt I had understood it in some form all my life but I was now experiencing it.
I have always been fascinated by the idea of stillness in the theatre, or nearly always. My first student productions were very ‘busy’, that is, full of stage business (movements and gestures not directly indicated by the text) and with a lot of movement; very influenced by the work of Tyrone Guthrie, the director my generation most admired. We wanted our work to be like ballet, a form of theatre which we took very seriously. I had actors performing ronds de jambes as they spoke the rhyming couplets of Molière’s Le Misanthrope. The costumes were camp abstract, and the audience as well as the actors were in black and white. Later I came under the influence of Étienne Decroux, the Grand Old Man of Mime, the teacher of Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau. One of Decroux’s dicta was a quotation from Victor Hugo that nothing is more powerful than a statue that represents movement. My productions started to become more simple and more static. I stayed with Molière and did George Dandin in French, without set or period costumes, the actors sitting in a semicircle in full view of the audience, standing to mark their entrances and sitting for their exits. Even the different levels of the Dandin house were indicated by mime.
At this time everything stylish, elegant, seemed to come from Paris. In the search for a kind of purity, a true classicism, I went to Paris and watched the entire repertoire of the Comédie-Française, the simpler, more immediate productions of Jean Vilar at his Théâtre Nationale Populaire and the multi-stylish work of Barrault at the Marigny. This was 1952 and Godot was about to burst upon the world with its single tree designed by Giacometti. The idea of stillness and simplicity was already inherent in the French classical tradition. Barrault had his forays into total theatre but was constantly returning to the classical tradition—perhaps partly to please his wife, the wonderful Madeleine Renaud, whose training and whole career had been at the Comédie-Française. When Michael Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft ran on the stage at the beginning of Antony and Cleopatra (RSC, 1953) at the Comédie-Française, the audience laughed. When the actors asked why they were told, ‘In tragedy one never runs.’ A fast entrance for Phèdre is unthinkable.
I was already disenchanted with French classicism when I first saw the work of Bertolt Brecht and his Berliner Ensemble in London in 1956, which altered my basic feelings and beliefs about theatre work. I had already seen Mother Courage at Vilar’s theatre in Paris and Vilar’s bare stage had some of the simple but aesthetically rich stage pictures of Brecht’s work. Both used the focus of limited movement in the stage space. Vilar, being French, kept his actors still but their stillness never had the political intention of Brecht’s own productions. Brecht was very influenced by his experience of oriental theatre: the controlled, detached technique of its actors, and the Noh theatre’s extreme reduction of the principle of stillness in relation to action. I came to the plays of Zeami, the fourteenth-century dramatist, very late in my own work but I feel the underlying principles of the Noh theatre have always been there: a confirmation of the past and an opening to the future.
The American theatre artist Robert Wilson says that the two things not taught to actors in drama school are how to stand still and how to walk. His work is a reconsideration of movement on the stage and its effect. He will slow down a movement or an action to a point at which its nature is changed. This is not difficult to achieve but can become a cliché. Sometimes I set a group of actors an exercise in which they have to cross the width of the stage or the rehearsal room in exactly five minutes, monitoring their progress with a stopwatch. The walk, like the Noh walk, has to be even and regular, not speeded up or slowed down. The initial assessment of the space-time ratio is vital; the first step commits you to the overall pace. Some actors lose the sense of time to the extent that they take more than five minutes, some get there far too soon, and some have an uncanny sense of the right pace. They have to be alert but not involved. You mustn’t dream and you mustn’t panic. It is a form of meditation which is also an action. There is a movement from one point to another, a physical action which has taken place, but the lack of apparent dynamic, of the initial motivational impulse, and the absence of stress (in all its meanings—accent, anxiety) means it is not conventionally theatrical. It is opposed to the ‘What do I need, what is my objective?’ of the Stanislavsky school. It means that the action itself can be looked at by actor and audience in a detached manner, which is why the techniques of the oriental theatre suited Brecht’s purpose.
At its simplest it is no more than the old trick of going into slow motion in moments of violence—a technique pioneered in film and since used very successfully in the theatre. (Apart from anything else, it stops the actors getting hurt.) Wilson has taken it to an extreme where it has become a mannerism and lost much of its value, but as a basis for an actor to be aware of his action and his identity as the performer, it is formidable. So much acting takes place at a tempo that is neither quick nor slow; a boring, inexpressive jog along, occasionally whipped up to create a false excitement. When in doubt keep still.
This is from a letter of John Gielgud’s in 1976:
The effect of rapid movement does greatly fascinate me both in the case of E.T. and H.I. [Ellen Terry and Henry Irving]. Have you noticed how Edith Evans never moves if she can help it? I never remember her entrances, and in Millamant’s she was foiled by a stupid great gate, and had to enter through a narrow side archway. But she hardly ever moved in that part. She was like a Venetian glass figure in a vitrine, turning slowly now and then with slow deliberate movements of her neck and arms, never using her fan except as a kind of weapon! And whenever I have directed her—Bracknell, Chalk Garden, and the Nurse—she always wanted to stay still and let the voice do everything.
10
Sentences and Rhetoric—Wilde, Webster and Winston Churchill
In a speech, when you follow one sentence with another you make a structure. If the structure has an active function we call it rhetoric. Rhetoric was originally the art of persuasion through speaking—words used to influence people. It uses repetition with variation to make its effect. Think of Antony talking to the mob with his ‘honourable men’, which starts apparently sincerely but ends up in savage irony.
A sentence is a completed thought which is expressed as a unit (though, as I said earlier, not necessarily a unit of action). When you get to a full stop, something has been said, something has changed, something has moved forward. When speaking, you must not lose the thread of the development. That does not mean you cannot pause or interrupt the thought, but your audience must know that you haven’t got to the end. The timing within the sentence is personal to the speaker.
Here are some sentences in a speech: Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest is talking to his friend, Jack.
Wilde creates the wit by the piling up of short, simple sentences, each complete in itself but with an expectation of comic development over the whole speech. The firmness of the full stops provides the audience with a moment in which they may laugh. When you read the passage you can see that there are various moments in which the audience might laugh—after ‘accepted’, after ‘believe’ and certainly after ‘the fact’. The actor will only find this out with the audience and he may then have to decide to kill an early laugh in order to get a bigger one later. This requires skill and experience. It is as difficult to kill a laugh as get one.
Wilde’s use of simple sentences without subordinate clauses is a kind of comic rhetoric. He is also the master of the long sentence. This is Lady Bracknell, from the same play: