Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  Beckett wants to change the audience’s perception by altering the received idea of theatre time. Sometimes everything is unbearably slow, like Clov’s ritual of looking through the windows and moving the stepladder in the opening of Endgame, sometimes everything hurtles along like the three damned souls in their urns in Play. But all the characters are equally imprisoned.

  CLOV. What is there to keep me here?

  HAMM. The dialogue.

  (Endgame)

  12

  Masks and Action—Ben Jonson

  The Gower Street entrance to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is flanked by the figures of Comedy and Tragedy wearing their masks. The masks look as if they are huge concrete crash helmets that the figures are trying to prise off, rather like Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves in the Accademia in Florence. The two masks are the abiding symbol of the actor’s art, but, in spite of the reverent persistence of Peter Hall, the very word ‘mask’ fills most theatre practitioners with dread or contempt, as does the phrase Commedia dell’Arte. Peter Brook doesn’t use masks.

  I was excited by acting in masks, which was taught me by my master, George Devine, the first director of the Royal Court, who had it from his mentor Michel Saint-Denis, who had it from Jacques Copeau. Saint-Denis always differentiated between, on the one hand, the Comic or Character mask as used in the Italian comedy, a half-mask with the chin and mouth revealed, and, on the other, the Classic mask, a full mask with a closed mouthpiece and used in short, serious scenarios, which has some affinities with the Neutral mask used in mime. Neither has anything to do with the Japanese Noh mask, of which I have little experience; I only worked in the comic mask.

  The way of working is strikingly simple. Various masks are laid out on a table, with a medium-sized mirror so that you can see yourself from the waist upward, without bending. There are also hats, sticks and small accessories available. You put on the mask, look in the mirror and see a completely new being. You respond immediately to what you see, leave the mirror, maybe choose a hat to complete the new personality and possibly a simple prop like a stick. In the moment you are transformed, or should be, and become the new person. With a successful assumption the character of the mask is seen to take over your body, from the neck through the shoulders to the feet. It is always clear when this is done truthfully. If you consciously try to create the kind of movement you think the mask ought to do, it is immediately seen to be false. Your mind wishes to remain in control. Those watching can see the actor under the mask and not the new being you should have become. You have to believe that you have been taken over. The assumption of the new persona doesn’t last long and you must not keep the mask on if you feel the character slipping. Later you repeat the exercise in pairs and eventually the masks learn to speak—a difficult process. For brief moments you will see theatre at its most intense and basic. You feel as if you are tapping into the religious roots of drama. And perhaps you are. The only thing is that it doesn’t last and it is difficult to shape the work into the requirements of a play, written or otherwise.

  I made various attempts to marry the mask to written texts—in John Arden’s The Happy Haven (Royal Court, 1960), a Jonsonian comedy written to be performed in masks, and in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (RSC, 1962), where their use had been sanctioned by Brecht—but it never worked. The characters created by the masks resented having to speak lines not their own. They are wilful, selfish creatures governed by obsessive needs and feel no responsibility to the writer and the narrative. Above all they are not interested in the movement of the play. The acting process demands a transition from the intuitive beginning to the conscious application of skill. (Commedia dell’Arte means ‘comedy of skill’ and the nearest translation of the Japanese word Noh is ‘skill’). Even when successful, a mask will lead to clowning or stand-up comedy rather than a written character. It will create the comedian’s persona. You can actually see Chaplin at work at it in his early films, searching for the physical statement of his comic persona, till he finds the hat, the stick, the boots that make up the tramp image we all know. Olivier hated the whole idea of masks but his use of externals was the starting point of his work—straight nose for Oedipus, eyebrows and blacked-out tooth as Archie Rice, buck teeth for Shylock—and constituted a kind of mask acting. But the whole idea of acting as transformation through externals has almost disappeared. Look at the photographs of Stanislavsky in all the parts he played; look at Ralph Richardson’s drawings of his make-up as Caliban; think of a young actor being allowed to play Fagin now as Guinness was in the 1948 film of Oliver Twist. Or Orson Welles as the ageing Kane.

  I made one attempt to create a play which would satisfy the masks by letting them improvise in performance. This was An Optimistic Thrust (Joint Stock, 1979), created entirely by the actors, without a writer. The rehearsals sometimes seemed like a dream world in which strange creations from literature and the actors’ imagination would meet in improvisation. We had sessions in which we created our own ‘ghosts’, the personification of those influences on our lives that still haunted us. Predictably, most people created versions of their parents, usually fathers for the men and mothers for the women, and the work moved close to a kind of drama therapy, though anarchy and humour would break through. But in the end we started to feel the lack of a writer to shape the material and we had to structure the show ourselves. We had faithfully taped our improvisations and transcribed them, but on the page they seemed dead. In performance it was impossible to keep the spontaneity of the original moment. But it was an exciting period of work.

  It is impossible to be totally improvisatory every night. Many comedians approach their work as if they were going to improvise and perhaps vary their material in some details, which will refire their creativity or even recycle material from previous performances. They feel free. What we call timing is this ability to vary the time element sufficiently for the actor to feel as if it is new and for the audience to share this sensation.

  I have an exercise for actors, not in masks, which is very like mask work. You are asked to describe someone you know in the third person and, as you describe them, to become the character, imitating the externals of voice, movement, etc. (It’s better if the person is not known to the rest of the group.) You then have to speak a speech or poem, which you already know by heart but which is completely unconnected to the character you have created. The imagination works intuitively to connect the two. (Guaranteed to create gales of mirth!) It is a good exercise and demonstrates to the actor that he, not the writer, can be in charge of the play. But it is basically an extension of impersonation, a training for Rory Bremners rather than actors. Everything is presented from the outside. There is no identification with the inner life of the character or the movement of the scene. In fact there is no scene to move. Stanislavsky would stress an identification with the character and his needs as preceding the externals of voice and movement, but in his later years he thought that the essence of acting was to find the right physical action and to be able to justify it.

  The analogy with music is tempting but can be misleading. The musician is detached from his instrument: he picks it up and plays the music in the rhythm and tempo in which it is written. He cannot impose his timing (unless he is playing the cadenza in a concerto). It has to be worked and lived through. Drama is not like that, though sometimes I wish it were. The actor is his own instrument. He not only has to play the written score of the text, he has to embody a character who does not exist, and that must to some extent mean creating his own timing. A play has to be seen as well as heard. The actor must feel the phrasing and make observance of the markings of pace and rhythm as his own. I believe this is ultimately true even in the strictest productions of Brecht or Beckett. Very few plays are as finely structured as a Mozart symphony; most productions of Shakespeare will have some cuts and there are alternative versions of the text. The theatre has never been a pure art.

  Jonson and Shakespeare

  The mask is the
symbol of the actor’s work, his assumption of character. Aristotle thought character was not the most important element in drama, being always subservient to action. Comic, masked characters are obsessive and static, and can only express their needs: greed, lust, self-importance are common examples. They resent action unless it fulfils their needs and have to be moved by the narrative rather than motivate it. The ‘humour’ characters in Jonson are the written equivalent of mask acting. In The Alchemist the characters are either manipulators or their dupes. They all need money to satisfy their desires. Sir Epicure Mammon, in a wonderful speech, tells us what he will do with the money:

  Then my glasses,

  Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse

  And multiply the figures as I walk

  Naked between my succubae. My mists

  I’ll have of perfume, vapoured ’bout the room

  To lose ourselves in; and my baths, like pits

  To fall into: from whence we will come forth,

  And roll us dry in gossamer and roses.

  (The Alchemist 2.2)

  The picture becomes richer and more extravagant as it goes on, a dream of the refinement of the senses, but at the end of the speech we are no further forward in the action. Nothing has changed. Mammon is left with his dreams and never realises them. The speech is a piece of comic rhetoric, built on a list of sensual images. It depends on the virtuosity of the actor to carry it. But it does create a ‘nowness’ of physical sensation. Jonson’s poem ‘Her Triumph’ does the same thing:

  Have you seen but a bright lily grow

  Before rude hands have touched it?

  Ha’ you marked but the fall o’ the snow

  Before the soil hath smutched it?

  Ha’ you felt the wool o’ the beaver

  Or swan’s down ever?

  Or ha’ smelt o’ the bud o’ the brier?

  Or the nard in the fire?

  Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

  O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!

  For my money this is more directly sensual than anything by the Stratford writer, but it is created in stillness. From the beginning we have the physical sensation of the woman, and we go on experiencing her sensually. She never becomes something else or stands for something else. There is no metamorphosis, no metaphor. The sight, touch, smell and taste of the woman are compared with the sight, touch, smell and taste of objects in nature. The physical in terms of the physical. When Shakespeare says:

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  he is only vaguely conveying the physical sensation of the loved one. The boy he is addressing in the sonnet is beautiful, but what he felt, tasted, smelt like we shall never know. Presumably Shakespeare didn’t either or, if he did, didn’t choose to tell us. The boy is not like a summer’s day, he is more lovely and more temperate. There is no direct correspondence between the boy and nature. He is an idealised form and cannot be described—or bedded. The writer is only concerned with what the writer can see—the beauty of the boy; and feel—his love for him and the endurance of his poetry. Time is devouring insistently, as it always is in Shakespeare, but the abstractions will remain. Shakespeare’s violets ‘corrupt with virtuous season’, his lilies ‘fester’, while Jonson’s stay ever fresh as long as rude hands don’t touch them. Time is not a factor for him; his writing remains of the earth, in a fixed moment and place, in the bodies and physical desires of his characters. With Shakespeare we are here and everywhere, hic et ubique, restlessly seeking and philosophising, taking us away from this too, too solid flesh. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero rejects not only the brute body of Caliban but the spirit of Ariel as well. Perhaps it is a mind only that sails back to Milan.

  13

  Language as Subject Matter

  In the theatre the uneducated ear of a modern audience finds most Shakespeare artificial and, with the shrinking of the average person’s vocabulary, obscure. They cannot tell whether it is good poetry, only that it doesn’t sound like everyday speech. Does it matter whether it is good poetry (or prose)? Just ask, ‘Is it an imaginative and accurate use of words by this character in this situation?’ And for the actor, ‘What do we know of the character at this moment in the play from the way it is written?’ You should be able to tell from the language whether the character is sincere, fulsome, heartfelt, pedantic, devious, hysterical, bombastic or honest. It may even be meant to be boring. How long are the sentences, are there many subordinate clauses, how many adjectives are used, have the words one syllable or more, is the syntax fluid and shaped or jerky and awkward? (I leave aside the whole question of imagery.) A scrutiny of the style may provide answers to characterisation, as significant as analysis of motivation and circumstances.

  Sometimes language itself becomes the subject matter. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, he is obsessed with the way people speak, how language conceals pretension and evasion. Costard, the country clown, realises that the five-syllable word ‘remuneration’ is the way the impoverished aristocrat Don Adriano de Armado conceals the pitifully small tip he gives him. Words are used to create social status and establish superiority, or, like a Masonic code, to identify equality. In the following dialogue there is a bit of both. Armado is talking to Holofernes, the schoolmaster:

  ARMADO. Arts man, preambulate. We will be singled from the barbarous. Do you not educate youth at the charge house on the top of the mountain?

  HOLOFERNES. Or mons, the hill.

  ARMADO. At your sweet pleasure, for the mountain.

  HOLOFERNES. I do, sans question.

  ARMADO. Sir, it is the King’s most sweet pleasure and affection to congratulate the Princess at her pavilion in the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon.

  HOLOFERNES. The posterior of the day, most generous sir, is liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon. The word is well culled, chose, sweet and apt, I do assure you, sir, I do assure.

  (Love’s Labour’s Lost 5.1)

  And so they go on. They are happy to indulge each other’s pedantry while affirming their own. Holofernes uses more Latin and foreign languages, otherwise their language is similar. Later we see Armado with the serving girl, Jacquenetta, when, through their relationship, he becomes a more rounded character. Unlike Dickens, Shakespeare never stereotypes the language of his characters so firmly that they cannot have an emotional life, nor are they as circumscribed as Jonson’s characters. The puritanism of Malvolio is not the puritanism of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy or Tribulation Wholesome in Jonson’s plays. Malvolio is a comic figure but he rejects the idea of reincarnation and thinks ‘nobly of the soul’. Shakespeare’s Shylock is more three-dimensional than Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Think of the wonderful passage of poetry that is given to Caliban, the monster, ‘The isle is full of noises’. Every stereotype has the possibility of a more imaginative life.

  The first Polonius I saw was that of Miles Malleson, the actor of wobbling chins and goggle eyes. He played him as was usual at that time (1944) as a comic buffoon. In the new orthodoxy, Polonius is a shrewd and cunning politician. (The new orthodoxy includes such insights as: Goneril and Regan are abused girls, Ophelia is well balanced and highly sexed, Prospero is a colonial exploiter, etc., etc.) To arrive at a true assessment of a character, look at what they do (and the way they do it) and what they say (and the way they say it). What does Polonius do? Are his actions those of a shrewd and cunning man? He completely misreads the cause of Hamlet’s madness and refuses to be convinced of any alternative; he fails to see that he is being made fun of by Hamlet; he hides behind the arras, panics and gets himself killed. How does he talk? At length and with tiresome repetition and circumlocution and some pedantry (‘More matter with less art,’ the Queen says, but it doesn’t stop him). And what does he say? Well, that’s different. Many conventional and trite things, but interspersed with some pure gold:

  This above all: to thine own self be true,

  And
it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

  We have a man who cannot be dismissed as a buffoon but nor is he a clever political operator. All you have to do is read the text. The characterisation in the writing is so exact that it is difficult for the actor to go wrong. (When did you see a bad Polonius?) The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet is another flawless piece of character writing. It’s almost impossible for it to miss in performance. With the Nurse, the unexpected character element is her advice to Juliet to conceal her marriage to Romeo and marry Paris—when the jolly, warm-hearted woman is shown to be corrupt and cynical.

  Literary style does not only define character. In Shakespeare character is seldom divorced from situation and the writing reflects this. Sometimes it is used as part of the movement of the play, sometimes it marks emotional changes in the character (if these two can ever be separated). In Twelfth Night Viola starts her prepared speech to Olivia:

  Most radiant, exquisite and unmatchable beauty…

  Olivia and her ladies laugh, and Viola justifies herself:

  Alas, I took great pains to study it, and ’tis poetical.

  So we know what ‘poetical’ means—three adjectives where one would do. The first part of the scene in Twelfth Night is in prose, sophisticated banter, until Viola is left alone with Olivia and speaks from the heart in verse. The language becomes simpler with a new depth of feeling:

  Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

  And call upon my soul within the house…

  By the time Viola leaves, Olivia has fallen in love and is committed to verse.