Words Into Action
Page 9
Punctuation varies from writer to writer and from century to century. Here is some of Hamlet’s first soliloquy as it appears in the First Folio:
That it should come to this:
But two months dead: Nay, not so much; not two,
So excellent a King, that was to this
Hiperion to a Satyre: so loving to my Mother,
That he might not beteene the windes of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and Earth
Must I remember: why she would hang on him,
As if encrease of Appetite had growne
By what it fed on; and yet within a month?
Let me not thinke on’t: Frailty thy name is woman.
How does it differ from the Oxford editors’ version (see page 79)? There are no dashes before ‘not so much’; this and the other interjections are marked by colons. There are the capital letters on certain key nouns. There is no question mark after ‘must I remember’ and a rather odd one after ‘within a month’. It looks more staid than the modern edition. Does it make much difference for the actor? The exclamations still interrupt the flow of the speech, there are still the insistent repetitions of ‘within a month’ intensifying but holding up the articulation of the main clause. The character of the speech is the same and will be found by the actor whatever the punctuation.
Dashes are rare in Shakespeare (no doubt the purists frowned upon them as they do today), but they are a very convenient shorthand to convey instability. Sometimes an entire comic character can be built on the dash. This is Jingle in The Pickwick Papers, talking about a cricket match in India:
Warm!—red hot—scorching—glowing. Played a match once—single wicket—friend the Colonel—Sir Thomas Blazo—who should get the greatest number of runs.— Won the toss—first innings—seven o’clock A.M.—six natives to look out—went in; kept in—heat intense—natives all fainted—taken away—fresh half-dozen ordered—fainted also—Blazo bowling—supported by two natives—couldn’t bowl me out—fainted too—cleared away the Colonel—wouldn’t give in—faithful attendant—Quanko Samba—last man left—sun so hot, bat in blisters, ball scorched brown—five hundred and seventy runs—rather exhausted—Quanko mustered up last remaining strength—bowled me out—had a bath, and went out to dinner.
This is great fun but it can have no dramatic development. The character doesn’t change with changing situations. It is as fixed as a comedian’s catchphrases. In Congreve’s The Way of the World the dash is used more subtly. This is the ageing Lady Wishfort, preparing to receive her supposed admirer, Sir Rowland, talking to her maid, Foible:
But art thou sure Sir Rowland will not fail to come? Or will a’ not fail when he does come? Will he be importunate, Foible, and push? For if he should not be importunate—I shall never break decorums—I shall die with confusion, if I am forced to advance—Oh no, I can never advance—I shall swoon if he should expect advances—No, I hope Sir Rowland is better bred than to put a lady to the necessity of breaking her forms. I won’t be too coy neither—I won’t give him despair—but a little disdain is not amiss—a little scorn is alluring.
Notice how the repetition of words holds the speech together through the character’s comic uncertainty and excitement, expressed by the dashes. Foible, the maid, reassures her, and the dashes disappear.
FOIBLE. By storm, madam. Sir Rowland’s a brisk man.
LADY WISHFORT. Is he? Oh, then he’ll importune, if he’s a brisk man. I shall save decorums if Sir Rowland importunes. I have a mortal terror at the apprehension of offending against decorums.
Nothing but importunity can surmount decorums.
Oh, I’m glad he’s a brisk man.
The very word ‘brisk’ has calmed the punctuation down but the repetition of words carries on.
In the same play the admired, but impossible Mrs Millamant is explaining why she is late. She turns to her maid:
MILLAMANT. Ay, that’s true. Oh, but then I had—Mincing, what had I? Why was I so long?
MINCING. Oh, mem, your la’ship stayed to peruse a pecket of letters.
MILLAMANT. Oh, ay, letters! I had letters. I am persecuted with letters—I hate letters—Nobody knows how to write letters, and yet one has ’em, one does not know why—They serve one to pin up one’s hair.
The short sentences, the repetitions, provide the rhythm of the character or the comic rhythm of the scene, as far as they can be separated. All the actor needs to do is to observe the musical markings. Comic rhetoric, unlike the political rhetoric we looked at in the last chapter, does not advance by inexorable repetitions to a climax, like Antony’s with his ‘honourable men’. Instead, the repetitions hover round the situation and sometimes come to rest, like a butterfly.
When I directed the play in 1984 Maggie Smith played Millamant. She was as brilliant as Edith Evans, who famously played it sixty years earlier, and who, to judge from the recordings, was completely different. Evans had a kind of serene mockery, Smith a nervous high spirits. I took issue with Maggie over her phrasing of the following:
Beauty the lover’s gift! Lord, what is a lover that it can give? Why, one makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and then, if one pleases one makes more.
Maggie would stress only one pair of antithetical words—‘and they live as long as one pleases and they die as soon as one pleases…’—when to get the balance right (and to the Augustan mind balance was everything) you have to stress both pairs of contrasting words—‘they live as long as one pleases, and they die as soon as one pleases; and then…’ A succession of pairs of contrasting words is typical of the Restoration period. Antithesis is not quite the right word because the compared words may be parallel rather than opposed. In speaking, the compared word should be marked by variations of pitch rather than weight. The repetition of ‘pleases’ keeps the idea on the ground, stops the writing taking off either into poetry or passion. Antithesis had been used by Shakespeare, but the use of it to express the desired balance of society reached its fulfilment in the eighteenth century. Milton wrote two poems on contrasting themes, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. When Handel set them to music a third alternative had to be found, a middle way: Il Moderato. Reason had to find the balance. Sometimes the search for a balance through the tightly controlled sentence becomes pompous. Earlier in Congreve’s play Millamant’s lover Mirabell says to her:
I say that a man may as soon make a friend by his wit, or a fortune by his honesty, as win a woman with plain dealing and sincerity.
On one hand ‘friend’, ‘fortune’, ‘woman’, on the other ‘wit’, ‘honesty’, and ‘plain dealing and sincerity’. Doesn’t it sound rather smug? Millamant rightly replies, ‘Sententious Mirabell’—and his is a rather thankless part. Millamant and Lady Wishfort are the more vivid characters and the ones that appeal most to the audience. (No actor ever made his name playing Mirabell.) This is partly because Congreve created Millamant and Wishfort with some of the exuberance, almost Jonsonian, of an earlier period.
This use of the balanced phrase persisted through the nineteenth century. Wilde’s Lady Bracknell uses it all the time:
What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.
Again the repetition of ‘duties’ ballasts the sentence and highlights the antithetical words. And the long sentence is followed by the short to create the anticlimax and the laugh. It is mock rhetoric. It also conveys a character entirely sure of herself. By her broken phrases Millamant might seem unsure of herself—but, in fact, her stops and starts are part of her armoury.
Peter Gill, who is both writer and director, has an interesting exercise for actors. He gives an actor a passage of text completely unpunctuated. After study the actor has to speak the speech to the rest
of the group to make the sense as he or she understands it. The group may question the clarity of the delivery and the actor has to rethink it until the auditors fully understand the passage. This is a much better way than working from the punctuation. Gill’s exercise concentrates on communication through speaking. The small pauses that an actor makes are personal to him or her, but provided the sense is clear and the speech keeps moving there are no fixed rules.
The last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses (written between 1914 and 1921) is a completely unpunctuated monologue spoken by Molly Bloom:
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit…
And so she goes on for thirty-six pages. It is interesting that, in spite of the absence of punctuation, the sense is rarely in doubt. It is no more difficult than the rest of the novel. If you read it aloud you automatically add commas to make it clearer. It is the supreme example of what is called ‘stream of consciousness’. It represents the unbroken, life-affirming, female principle as opposed to the rational, ordered, punctuated death of the male sentence.
Death, damnation and hellfire are the underlying themes of Lucky’s unpunctuated monologue in Waiting for Godot :
…but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara…
This is not unlike some of Beckett’s poems where the repetition of words or phrases with variations represents a search for the words that will unlock the meaning of life, or death. A search which, by its nature, can never be fulfilled.
In Beckett’s Play each character speaks in neat phrases a narrative of his or her own, written in the clichés of a pulp magazine. Note, no dashes. Short sentences with full stops.
W2. She came again. Just strolled in. All honey. Licking her lips. Poor thing. I was doing my nails, by the open window. He has told me all about it, she said. Who he, I said, filing away, and what it? I know what torture you must be going through, she said, and I have dropped in to say I bear you no ill-feeling. I rang for Erskine.
It’s almost Noël Coward. But it is spoken by a decaying body in an urn; the narrative is continually interrupted by the stories of the other two corpses and it is spoken very fast in a monotone, without expression, in short, stabbing phrases. The speed of the delivery was dictated by Beckett as director but the phrasing is in the text. It is not quite Dalek speech, in which there is an equal pause between one syllable and the next, or the automated phone voice Directory Enquiries which gives you a number where each digit has been recorded separately and at a different pitch.
An actor can learn the musical form of what he says even before he knows why he is saying it. But it is more common for an actor to make decisions about the emotion of a speech before he has fully explored its formal and rhythmic structure. This denies the text its full expressiveness. Conversely there are actors who intuitively hear the music of the writing and can make sense of something they do not fully understand. An actor must feel the shape of the phrase or the sentence and try to inhabit it. It is impossible to do this without some basic awareness of character and situation and the direction of the scene, but it is equally impossible to act without the ability to feel the phrasing. Though the punctuation may be in doubt, the actor must still search for the right phrasing, the dramatic music. The structural makeup of a sentence can be analysed by reading, but the true process is by the ear or, more precisely, by the eye, the ear and the tongue.
Pauses
Two comedians are discussing how to interest an audience:
FIRST COMEDIAN. If they don’t want to amuse themselves they can make do with silence.
SECOND COMEDIAN. They’ll never stand for it.
FIRST COMEDIAN. We can break it up with dialogue from time to time if it would make you any easier. And silence isn’t so easy to come by as all that, either, if it comes to that.
SECOND COMEDIAN. It’s not what you go to a theatre for. You go to other places for silence. Not a theatre. They’ll feel cheated.
(N.F. Simpson, A Resounding Tinkle)
In Shakespeare’s day they would certainly have felt cheated. There is only one marked pause in the whole of Shakespeare. In Coriolanus, after Volumnia’s long speech to her son, pleading with him to spare Rome, the stage direction is:
He holds her hand, silent.
before Coriolanus says:
O, mother, mother!
What have you done?
(Coriolanus 5.3)
How did the Elizabethans manage without pauses and, more pertinently, why do we need them now? Plays by aspiring writers today are peppered with the meaningless direction ‘Beat’. For an Elizabethan writer one speech followed another without pause, and the text must have been spoken quickly or ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’ is nonsense. The emotion of the characters was never hidden, except where it was kept for soliloquy. It pours out in the richest imagery. The play does not need pauses because the character listening absorbs the emotional content of the speaker’s words as they are spoken, and so is ready to respond immediately. This is conveyed by a shift in key between the two voices. No musician would have difficulty understanding this, but actors of today feel they need time to react before they reply. They make an intellectual rather than a musical response. It is only in the twentieth century that the writer chose to write pauses as part of the printed text.
How did this come about? There was the move towards naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century with the plays of Chekhov and the new approach of the Moscow Art Theatre. There was the arrival of the cinema where the visual demands parity with, and finally supremacy over, the spoken word. The power and the poetry of the imagined image was replaced by that of the visible picture. Listen to the soundtrack of most films with your eyes shut and you soon realise how few words there are and how little potency they have without the picture. The image of an actor in close-up, responding to a situation, replaces the need for words. (I said earlier that the remembered great moments of the old theatre were ones of reacting, and so they were; but they were at key moments and there were few of them and often in indifferent plays.) This still does not explain why dramatists should have started to use pauses. For a long time they resisted. There are no pauses to speak of in Shaw. But there are a plethora of stage directions, including adverbs to describe the character’s tone, which actors dislike because it pre-empts their interpretation of the part. With Shaw they are mainly decorative, but for other writers the stage directions start to have a temporal life and affect the rhythm of the playing. This is combined with the shortening of sentences.
With Waiting for Godot the whole framework changes. I think of it as the original play of pauses, and so it probably is, but when I look at the first few pages of the play I find few pauses, but an enormous number of stage directions—both adverbs dictating the emotional tone of the playing, and elaborate descriptions of physical business, which are as much part of the play as the spoken words. The business is precisely described and is surely meant to happen separately from the words. This, more than anything, alters the rhythm of the play. Instead of business being an addition to the text, it is part of it, and so, when they happen, are the pauses.
VLADIMIR. There’s a man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. (He takes off his hat again, looks inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) Th
is is getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It’s a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.
ESTRAGON. What?
VLADIMIR. Suppose we repented.
ESTRAGON. Repented what?
VLADIMIR. Oh… (He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
ESTRAGON. Our being born?
I think a Renaissance writer saw life as full of opportunity and as a continuous excitement. Every moment was full and there was no time to pause; even meditation was voiced. For Shakespeare, time was the enemy to be fought. For Beckett, time had ceased to exist, except as a void to be filled momentarily by phrases of philosophy, religion or trivial gossip. The talk of the two tramps in Godot resembles the patter of comedians. But true comedians make their own timing which is tested by the audience’s response—or lack of it. Beckett actually writes pauses into the text. Sometimes the lines get laughs, sometimes they don’t. The life of the play does not depend on them. The silences are part of the play’s structure.
There are no tips to be given to actors about timing. Beckett and Pinter, by their exact instructions, wanted a greater control of the actor. Pinter insisted on the difference between five and six dots, and between ‘Pause’ and ‘Silence’; Beckett debated the number of steps in Footfall, and actors, being by nature willing, have gone along with them. But in performance an actor will always vary his timing infinitesimally. It is the intuitive awareness of exactly how long to pause that gets the biggest laugh. Ralph Lynn, the great farceur of the 1920s, used to whisper under his breath to the younger actors he was working with, ‘Don’t say it yet, don’t say it yet. Say it… now,’ and he was always right.