Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  Miller is a rationalist and opposed to magic. He sees Alice in Wonderland as a critique of Victorian society—which in part it is, but it is still about a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole and meets strange creatures and live playing cards. It may be ‘about’ social repressions, but we have to experience that through the story and the fantastic nature of the characters. The Magic Flute may be a metaphor of the Age of Enlightenment, but if you set it in an eighteenth-century library, as Miller did, the magic disappears. All fairy stories strike at things deep in the unconscious, but the moment you bring their meaning to the surface or rationalise them in terms of society, they lose their power. Which may be all right for psychotherapy but it is death in the theatre.

  Plays, even plays like The Tempest, are not just fairy stories. Characters exist in social relationships which are recognisable. Their conversations reveal philosophies which are part of the culture and the beliefs of their time. They make jokes about contemporary events that are incomprehensible to future generations—at least, they do in Shakespeare, whose plays are full of verbal material of all kinds that is capable of a political slant. But when seen on the stage today they must create their own world. It is up to an audience to make the connection with our world as it watches the play.

  The Tempest is interesting structurally. It obeys the unities: the action takes place on the island in just one day. Shakespeare keeps reminding us of the passage of time. It’s now or never for Prospero. The form of the play and its stated themes are unusually clear: the renunciation of magic and the forgiveness of enemies. They are embedded in the narrative structure. An idea like colonialism may be sparked by particular scenes or particular lines but does not grow organically. It is a concept brought from the outside which distorts the whole.

  It’s my job as a director to make sense of the structure of words and actions we call a play. Like any reader or member of an audience I have some sense of what its overall meaning is, what it all adds up to, and I try to be honest and not make it mean only what I would like it to mean. My lifeline and my discipline is the narrative, the story—not just the basic elements of the plot but also how much of the play each part of the action takes up. In the process of rehearsal I may get absorbed in the detail, noting the character of the language, the repetition of the imagery, but above all, I am involved in the actors’ creative process and it is my job to keep their focus on what is happening in the scene and what is happening in the play. I may stress one side of the narrative to clarify or intensify the play’s meaning, but this is not the same thing as imposing a concept.

  One of the first productions in which I was aware of the interpretation of the play through the action, rather than as a clever visual presentation, was Tyrone Guthrie’s Henry VIII (Stratford, 1949/50 and Old Vic, 1953). Guthrie was the first British director to establish himself as being as important a figure as the leading actor. Henry VIII is, for the most part, a pedestrian piece, which Shakespeare was dragged back from retirement to touch up, at least half of it the work of Fletcher. It suited the taste of the time with its opportunities for spectacle in the coronation procession and the dream of Queen Katherine, both described in great detail in the stage directions in a most un-Shakespearean way. It has fine things in it, though, particularly in the writing of the scenes for Katherine and Wolsey, and the casting of those parts with leading actors like Ellen Terry and Henry Irving was the usual justification for the revival of the play. This unbalances the play and loses what narrative structure there is. Guthrie took a different approach. He built the play round the King, which is a rather underwritten part, and, although he had good actors in all the parts, there was no indulgence of the death scenes of Katherine and Wolsey. There was a permanent set with an off-centre staircase, as was Guthrie’s custom; the lighting throughout was bright, even in the night scenes when darkness was indicated by lit torches. This was my first experience of what was later called Brechtian lighting. The action hurtled across the stage, characters were literally swept out of the way by the movement of history and the ruthlessness of Henry. Buckingham, Wolsey and Katherine had to make way for the violent imperative of the Protestant Reformation. The first half ended with what in the original is usually a minor moment, in which Cranmer is summoned to be Henry’s frontman. In Guthrie’s production, on the King’s line ‘My learned and well-belovèd servant Cranmer’, a little man crept out of a group of clerics, and Anthony Quayle as Henry put his arm round Cranmer’s shoulder and started to whisper in his ear—words which we could not hear, never written by Shakespeare or Fletcher. Back and forth they walked as the house lights came up for the interval. The audience saw history in the making. The drive of the play was not individuals but political necessity. Interestingly, Guthrie avoided the obvious opportunities for spectacle in the coronation, which was described through the eyes of bystanders, or in Katherine’s dream, which was seen through the eyes of the actress. The whole play became a build-up to the outrageous royal flattery of the last scene, when a glorious future is promised for the infant Elizabeth; bells sounded and banners were waved. This was made doubly significant by the identification of the baby with the approaching accession of our present Queen—indeed, by the time of the Old Vic production she was being crowned.

  Guthrie had given a shapeless play what Stanislavsky called the ‘through-line’, the spine which would keep the whole play together. Did he distort the original? Well, perhaps, but it did not contradict the basic action of the play. (Terence Gray—an early, irreverent director of the 1930s—showed his contempt for the last scene by throwing the baby into the audience.) Guthrie made the play state more clearly what the authors wanted it to mean.

  19

  Words and Music

  Strauss’s opera Capriccio is based on a charming conceit. It concerns a countess who has two lovers, a poet and a composer, and cannot choose between them. It is a metaphor for opera itself. Which is more important, words or music? Strauss had worked with distinguished writers like Hugo von Hofmannsthal and knew how complex and difficult the relationship was between composer and poet. But in opera is there really any contest? Don’t most people go to the opera for the music, or more precisely the music with the drama—and the more emotional the better? They don’t go for the words and the music. In this country, at any rate, the words are usually in a foreign language, and even when they are in English you can’t hear them. This is now admitted by the use of surtitles above the proscenium, a device invented for simultaneous translation of foreign opera, which is now used to tell us what the words are in our own language.

  Words carry intellectual ideas, social commentary, complex imagery which cannot be expressed in music. Music enters our senses and stirs our emotions directly. You can listen to music without thinking. Words more easily explore irony and ambiguity, those staples of English poetry. The marriage of words and music is a risky business. Most of the best operas are based on second-rate plays like Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias (La Traviata), Sardou’s melodrama Tosca or Belasco’s Madame Butterfly. Verdi got away with Otello because Shakespeare’s play is nearly an opera in the emotional melodrama of its plot, but even then the character of Iago is less complex, less interesting than the original. Falstaff, a great opera, is based on the most boring of all Shakespeare’s plays. One huge exception has to be The Marriage of Figaro. Beaumarchais’ play is a great comedy, but Mozart’s opera is even greater. Da Ponte’s libretto is a masterly editing of the text; the flow of the narrative never seems held up by the music. The arias are just the right length for their dramatic content and catch the very essence of the original. The moment at the end of Act 2 when eight characters express their reaction to the same situation at the same time is something that no dramatist can ever achieve.

  Sometimes original works are made by writer and composer working together. Rodgers and Hart, Brecht and Weill in The Threepenny Opera, Strauss and Hofmannsthal. The taking of words which already exist to be spoken in a play, and setting them to mus
ic, whether in opera or musical, or the interspersing of songs into an original play, is more questionable. I can’t swallow it when a tenor starts to sing ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows’, a beautiful speech when spoken, but cumbersome when sung. I want to cry out, ‘It’s not meant to be sung!’ The play is perfect anyway and has enough music of its own. You could argue that Pygmalion and My Fair Lady are separate works, just as West Side Story is not Romeo and Juliet. It’s true that very few of Shaw’s actual words are set to music, and then usually odd phrases, but the Lerner and Loewe musical does include chunks of the original play between the numbers. There is always a jolt when the play’s dialogue has to shift into the musical form, though in performance the fact that Rex Harrison spoke rather than sang his numbers concealed this. The pace at which the action of a play unfolds through the dialogue is an essential part of its nature.

  This is even more true of a poem. When you first read this poem by Blake:

  O Rose thou art sick!

  The invisible worm

  That flies in the night,

  In the howling storm,

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  —you experience it as an action, something you live through without pause. Who will ever forget it? It is a living thing. When Britten sets it to music in his Serenade you get his commentary on the poem but not the original work. It may be beautiful, but it can never introduce you to the poem’s meaning. The musical action doesn’t carry you through the experience. All short poems have an action; a sonnet, for instance, has an unmistakable development with a conclusion. To set them to music always weakens their dynamic movement. There are some glorious exceptions: Schubert in Erlkönig carries us along in the narrative without a break, the accompaniment of the horse’s hooves heightening the tension. In Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel he takes the scene from Goethe’s Faust in which Gretchen expresses her feelings in a poem of the utmost simplicity with a refrain. Using the sound of the whirring wheel as the musical background, he takes us through the dilemma of the girl, her anguish mixed with pleasure, which climaxes in ‘and O, his kiss’. It has a cyclic movement that never loses the drive of the original. Most Schubert songs are shaped as a single developing action. You start at the beginning, go through an emotional experience which is resolved, and then come to rest. They are miniature plays. Both the songs I cite use a repetitive rhythmic accompaniment to maintain the movement and the dramatic tension.

  Shakespeare always knew how to use music in his plays sparingly, sometimes placing songs at key moments to create a shift of mood, and most significantly as part of the action: to work Prospero’s magic in The Tempest, and to bring the statue to life in The Winter’s Tale. Music is nearly always used in the later plays to signify resolution and reconciliation, the return to harmony and order. In Twelfth Night the three wonderful songs set the play’s unusual melancholy character. If you add more music to these plays you lessen the impact of the music that is already there. The cinema has conditioned us to expect a usually continuous musical accompaniment to the most banal scenes. The word ‘melodrama’ originally meant drama with music. The music supplies the emotions that the writer cannot write or the actors cannot act—or, worse, overstates what is already there. Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls had music nearly all the way through it, a kind of muzak for the theatre.

  Brecht was very clear about what he felt when he wrote:

  Mark off clearly the songs from the rest.

  Make it clear that this is where

  The sister art enters the play.

  Announce it by some emblem summoning music,

  By a shift of lighting

  By a caption

  By a picture.

  —and in his production of Mother Courage an emblem of drums and flags was flown in at the beginning of each song and out at the end. During the play it became more and more ragged.

  I know I am in a minority. Opera is the most admired form. The rich can wallow in a good night out and get their culture without pain. You can see them night after night at Covent Garden, together with the politicians, lapping up High Art in a Centre of Excellence. Shakespeare plus Verdi must be better than Shakespeare neat. Most people think music the greater art, and the more of it the better. Musicals dominate the West End theatre, and there has been a knock-on effect in the production of classic plays which are treated as a kind of poor man’s musical, often directed by the same director who made his fortune directing musicals in the commercial theatre. It has led to a flattening out of the experience of what theatre can be.

  20

  State of Play

  Looking back over what I have written I see that the only actors I cite as models were already established stars when I was still at school. As a boy I saw Gielgud in his last Hamlet on the stage, Olivier in the film of Henry V, and heard Evans as Rosalind on the radio. They set standards of delivery which I still respect. I think probably no actor today is accepted as a similar authority by a younger generation. This is not because the older actors were better but because they had the status of their experience.

  A leading actor had his or her name above the title. On the posters there were two, three and even four sizes of billing to indicate the relative importance, and usually salary, of all the actors. A play without a name over the title was unthinkable. The right to star billing was related in some way to the actor’s talent, experience and attractiveness to the public. When the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre all began with a resident company it was agreed that actors should be listed alphabetically with equal billing. All three theatres subsequently gave up the idea of a permanent ensemble but equality of billing continued (though there are other ways of conveying who is playing the leading part). But on publicity material the director, the designer, the lighting designer—and now even the sound designer—have precedence over the actors. On television, the cast lists whizz past so quickly that you cannot read the names of the actors and the characters they played.

  Even more humiliating, the list is now squeezed to the side, while some forthcoming programme is trailed. When you watch a rerun of television drama of an earlier decade, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the credits roll majestically by with time to read the names of the actors and the parts they played. Indeed, the tempo of the editing, and the pace of the playing of the whole piece, is quite different from today. Guinness’s performance is almost as slow as the Noh theatre and just as wonderful.

  This is not just nostalgia for a vanished age. The devaluing of the actor has certainly affected the work. After the death of Irving in 1905, the advent of the cinema and later of televison meant that actors would work in more than one medium. Very few actors today have developed their craft only on the stage. Films and television do not require the same projection of voice or personality. The new media often demand a greater naturalism than expected in the theatre. (Interestingly, the theatre was becoming more naturalistic at the point the cinema was invented.) It is still possible to be known as a film star by your own name, but on the television you are more likely to be known by the name of the part you play. Many young actors do not aspire to play Hamlet or Hedda Gabler. They think themself lucky to be in EastEnders.

  Most of the essays in this book are concerned with how the written word is brought to life on the stage. The use of language requires sensitivity not only in the actor’s craft but in the ear of the audience, and the former is worthless without the latter. Plays are still performed on stages for the most part, without amplification (but for how much longer?). A long speech or a long sentence requires the same control of delivery as when there was no cinema or television. The tunes the actor’s voice makes may use fewer variations of pitch to be acceptable to the modern ear, but the writing must have the same shape and flow and dynamic in relation to the text that they always had. And it’s not only speaki
ng a classic text but also exploring the range and discipline of a contemporary play through the voice. Many actors no longer live through the voice as a prime means of expression. It is not a question of speaking beautifully or of speaking ‘RP’ (Irving was considered to have an ugly voice with idiosyncratic vowels), but of being capable of communicating as much through speech as through the body.

  Do we have to be content to admit that dramatic writing can never have the power it did? An audience’s vocabulary is shrinking all the time and the need for visual stimulus grows daily. But the range of new plays to be seen is greater than ever. We have a National Theatre whose repertoire is made up of more than fifty per cent new and contemporary work, unlike the state theatres of any other country. This must be in large measure due to the stimulus to new writing given by George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre more than fifty years ago. Now it is unusual for a play by a young writer of talent not to find a home. Writing has changed and developed with the changes in the spoken language, and makes new demands on the actor. No good writer thinks of his or her play as literature to be preserved for the stages of future generations but is writing to express something he or she wants to say now. In fact, I would suggest that writers today are less concerned with literary quality than their fellow novelists are. Not enough of them write only for the theatre and their plays would be equally at home on television. But theatre language must have its own life, the best words and actions, if it is to survive. Writers must fight the tendency to think that speaking is just a continuation of everyday conversation rather than something over which they have charge. The first scene of Hamlet may sound like people talking in colloquial language, but Claudius at prayer certainly does not. Writing may no longer be in verse but it can still be poetic if we accept that the sequence of the actions may be as much part of the poetry of theatre as the language.