Clare Higgins decided Gertrude was a liar several months before we started rehearsals, when a group of us—including Clare, Rory, Vicki and Peter Holland—spent a week reading through the play as part of the long and gripping journey towards understanding it and deciding how to do it. Clare was baffled by Gertrude’s famous description to Laertes of his sister Ophelia’s suicide.
There is a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
It’s a famous set-piece, lush and picturesque, completely unlike anything else in the play and a fantastically inappropriate way of telling a brother his sister has just killed herself. Clare had already started to run with the idea that Gertrude lies about the ghost. Maybe, we thought, she’s also lying about Ophelia’s suicide. She’s sweetening the pill, pretending it was an accident (though that doesn’t wash with the priest who buries her), to spare Laertes the full horror. There is nothing pretty about Shakespeare’s other suicides: Othello, Cassius, Antony, Lady Macbeth, even Romeo and Juliet are spared nothing. But Gertrude claims that Ophelia died after she fell in the weeping brook while trying to hang a garland on the branch of a tree.
Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and endued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
There’s a much-reproduced painting by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais in Tate Britain which in its serene voluptuousness is both a precise illustration of what Gertrude says, and total garbage. It certainly isn’t Shakespearean: it’s as far from elbow-deep in the real world as it’s possible to be. It can’t be true.
Which is where we left it until we came to rehearse it, by which time we were groping towards a more complete idea of Gertrude’s complicity in the assassination of her first husband. “Gertrude’s lying because Ophelia was murdered,” I shouted one day. “Claudius had her killed: in her madness, she was capable of saying anything! She knew Hamlet had killed her father. She might have known all sorts of things about her father’s work as spymaster. She had to go!” And that’s what we did: she was abducted by two of Claudius’s men, and dragged offstage. In a regime so tainted by murder and betrayal, it seemed to make perfect sense. When my father, a retired barrister, saw the production, he said that Gertrude wouldn’t have lasted a second in the witness box. “You say that after she fell into the brook, her clothes bore her up awhile. Can you perhaps tell the court why you didn’t call for help? Or try to rescue her before her garments pulled her down to muddy death?”
My most mind-expanding insights into Shakespeare have come from actors in the rehearsal room, without the long preamble with which directors usually preface even the most banal of suggestions. As a tribe, we can barely ask an actor to move to the left without writing an essay about it, but actors get on with it. One day, without warning, David Calder, who played Polonius, approached the end of his speech of advice to Laertes and flinched. He seemed to dry. And then, under the heavy weight of what felt like deep personal shame, he said:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it will follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
From the heart, like many, or even most, fathers, he wants his son not to make his own mistakes. Mired in a corrupt court, he, like everyone else, is incapable of dealing truthfully with others, and of being true to himself. And David Calder’s Polonius knew it.
It would be just as plausible to present the Polonius of tradition, a man incapable of self-knowledge, puffed up with self-regard. But David remade three lines worn thin by their relentless repetition, out of context, often by public liars. And suddenly, we knew that Polonius had helped Claudius assassinate the old king, and was tortured by his own treachery.
Here was the real Shakespeare: an actor who provides for other actors myriad ways of telling his stories and of being his characters. His intuitive openness to interpretation is sometimes mistaken for unfathomable complexity. His relish for ambiguity is taken as a challenge to those who would pin him down. But they are consequences of his calling: he writes plays.
No actor is more open to contradiction than Rory, or more capable of the wild mood swings that are a function of Hamlet’s infirmity. “What is your cause of distemper?” asks his unreliable friend Rosencrantz, in the way you might ask a friend why he’s so depressed. Neither Rory nor I were keen to attempt a diagnosis. There is nothing to be gained by deciding that Hamlet suffers from bipolarity or clinical depression or anything else that, if only the right medication was available, would spare him the trouble of being in the play. To present Hamlet as a case study is to reduce him. Rory, like the best Shakespeareans, subsumed himself into the role, and allowed himself to be surprised by what happened to him.
When Hamlet comes back to Denmark after Claudius’s abortive attempt to have him exiled to England and murdered, he has changed in a way he never tries to explain. He’s been forced into action, sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spitefully to their doom, rescued by pirates, but he seems, finally, to have discovered an inner peace. He stops soliloquising: whatever it is that he’s found is impervious to his customary self-analysis. Horatio tries to stop him from the reckless folly of duelling with Laertes, but Hamlet will have none of it.
Not a whit. We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
The most profound change to his inner life has happened offstage, where the observed of all observers was not available for observation. “Let be,” he says, as if he’s finally relinquishing control, content to leave his fate to a special providence.
And yet, when he’s dying, what seems to possess him is the need to control the story that gets told after his death. Three separate times he urges Horatio to tell it right:
report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied…
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story…
So tell him [Fortinbras], with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited—the rest is silence.
He’s preoccupied by his posthumous reputation even at the moment of his death. It seems less like letting be than a desperate struggle with what he’s learned about truth: that it’s relative, that everyone in Elsinore has their own version of it, that in the end “to be” is to be immersed in oneself alone. When Horatio tries to tell Hamlet’s story to Fortinbras, he barely scratches the surface: he was his best friend, but he has no real idea what his story really was. And Fortinbras couldn’t care less, because it suits him to cast Hamlet in his own conqueror’s story, giving him a soldier’s burial with “soldiers’ music and the rites of war.” In 2010, Fortinbras organised it for the cameras: a cliché of contemporary Shakespeare but an unavoidable truth about contemporary power. Hamlet’s funeral will be nothing to do with Hamlet. The man who had “that within that passeth show” is now part of someone else’s show, someone else’s truth.
“Were you not worried that by setting the play in a paranoid modern surveillance state you would rob it of grandeur? If Hamlet is no longer a prince, where’s his nobility?”
Here again, at a pre-show Q & A, was the atavistic desire of the Shakespeare audience for magnificence, nobility, transcendence. But I cannot believe there is anything inherently magnificent these days in royalty. Its currency is debased, and contemporary dramatists are more likely to look to it for titillation than for tragedy. There is magnificence in Hamlet, but it is less in his position at court than in his mind. There is heroism in the way he thinks about himself and his place in the world. There is elation in the experience of his brutal honesty with himself, grandeur in his direct communion with the audience, and nobility in his determination never to say “love me” but “understand me.”
The paranoid surveillance state is nothing new, but the particular world we created for Hamlet was undreamed of when Shakespeare wrote it. Among the reasons to do the classical repertoire are both the discovery that things never change and the discovery that things change completely. The staging of the classics always involves walking the tightrope between now and then. It is one of the many marks of Shakespeare’s dominance that, in his plays, then seems so much closer to now than it does in much of the repertoire that has been written over the four centuries since he died.
8
The Original Production
STAGING THE CLASSICS
Three weeks into rehearsals for Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in the West End, Maggie Smith suggested I might like to come with her to Sir John Gielgud’s house for lunch. “He did the original production,” said Maggie, “so he may be able to tell us where we’re going wrong.” Although she was right that I’d like to have lunch with Sir John, the original production was directed in 1895, before he was born, by the actor-manager George Alexander, who also played Jack Worthing. But in February 1993, I was past caring about that: I was fumbling the funniest play in the English language, it was refusing to take wing, and I’d have taken help from the theatre cat.
Sir John lived with his Hungarian partner, Martin Hensler, in an exquisite eighteenth-century house in Buckinghamshire with ornamental gardens, an aviary and an ornate rococo interior. He greeted us at the door, delighted to see Maggie, whom he obviously adored.
“I can’t imagine why you’re wasting your time with Lady Bracknell,” he said to her, “it’s a supporting role.”
She howled with laughter, which pleased him, though he wasn’t joking. He was still livid with Dame Edith Evans for stealing the show when he made the mistake of casting her as Lady Bracknell opposite his own Jack Worthing in his famous 1939 production.
“Jack Worthing is the leading part,” he continued over lunch. “Alexander played Jack Worthing. He commissioned the play for himself. The first Lady Bracknell was Rose Leclercq. She wasn’t a commanding actress.” I thought it wasn’t a good idea to ask Maggie to be less commanding.
“I first played Jack Worthing in 1930, directed by Nigel Playfair,” said Gielgud. “Lady Bracknell was my aunt, Mabel Terry-Lewis. She had no sense of humour, so she was surprised the audience found her lines so funny, but she knew the play wasn’t about her. Then in 1939, I directed it myself and cast Edith. My production was better than Playfair’s, but Edith distorted it. We played it on and off right through the war. In 1940 Jack Hawkins played Algernon, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies played Gwendolen, Peggy Ashcroft played Cecily, Margaret Rutherford played Prism. But all the audience cared about was Edith. The king and queen came to see it in 1946. Still Edith.”
I asked why his production was better than Playfair’s.
“It balanced the real and the artificial,” said Gielgud. “Playfair’s production was like a revue. You need to base the fantasy in reality, act it with deadly seriousness, be aware only inwardly of the fun. You need to know where to breathe, of course.”
Sir John quoted Jack Worthing from memory. Every phrase was perfectly poised, every breath like music.
“John has just done an episode of Inspector Morse,” said Martin to Maggie. “We found out what John Thaw gets paid for playing Morse. I mean, it’s unbelievable. John didn’t get half as much. I was furious with his agent. What do they pay you for a film these days?”
Sir John seemed uninterested in money, so he left Martin to interrogate Maggie. He smiled at me benignly, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask him whether he’d known George Alexander.
“He died when I was quite young, maybe fourteen,” said Sir John, “but I met him several times. My great-aunt Ellen Terry knew him well. We all thought very poorly of him because of the disgraceful way he treated poor Wilde when he came out of jail. And I knew Lord Alfred Douglas. He came to see me in my dressing room after my opening night in 1939. He was an old man by then. I asked him about the first opening night in 1895. All he claimed to remember was that he’d written most of the best lines himself.”
We were prevented from hearing about the original production only by the Terry family’s disdain for George Alexander and by the delusional vanity of the ancient Bosie. Otherwise, I thought as I sat at John Gielgud’s lunch table, I’m two degrees of separation from Oscar Wilde, I’m eating lunch with someone who knew his lover, his director, his actors, and when he quoted Jack Worthing to me, he was almost certainly saying the lines the way Oscar wanted them said. The Importance of Being Earnest “must originally have been thought funny because it tilted so brilliantly at contemporary society. The people who laughed at it were, many of them, laughing at themselves,” Gielgud wrote in his book Stage Directions. “Today we laugh at the very idea that such types could ever have existed.” So for Sir John, the tightrope between now and then had to be walked back towards the past.
And perhaps Wilde’s hermetically sealed world is impervious to the negotiations with contemporary sensibility that old plays normally require. What The Importance of Being Earnest needs most of all is actors who know how to land every line. So perhaps what it asks of a director is nothing more than a sure hand in casting, and meticulous attention to phrasing, timing and the arrangement of the furniture. If directors don’t know where best to put the door to Algernon’s flat in Half Moon Street so as to deliver Lady Bracknell’s first entrance with maximum sizzle (and that, at least, I got right), their sensitivity to the play’s gay subtext is surplus to requirements.
Maggie was sceptical about anything that hindered the real work, which was to bring life to the play from moment to moment. She’d worked with Sir John, she knew how to play Wilde, and she saw off the shade of wicked old Dame Edith by playing Lady Bracknell as if nobody had ever played her before. She barely gave voice to the handbag. She didn’t need to: she merely mouthed it, and before the audience had realised what it had missed, she’d moved them into the cloakroom at Victoria Station, onto the Brighton line, and stopped the show with “The line is immaterial.” Lady Bracknell was still the main event.
Wilde may be a special case. Much of the canon of Anglo-Irish comedy of manners grows more remote by the year, and needs mediation, though the prerequisites are always the same. An actor must think, breathe and feel through long, sinuous paragraphs. You have to reconcile this with the ever-evolving demand to be real and natural, knowing that what seemed real ten years ago seems stagey today and what seemed natural a hundred years ago now seems ridiculous. And all this as you let them see who you are, see the workings of your heart, your world and the part you play in it. The job is the same whether you’re Mrs. Lintott in The History Boys in 2004:
I’m reluctant at this stage in the game to expose you to new ideas, but having taught you all history on a strictly non-gender-orientated basis I just wonder whether it occurs to any of you how dispiriting this can be?
Or Lady Bracknell in 1895:
Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?
Or Dorimant in The
Man of Mode in 1676:
She means insensibly to insinuate a discourse of me, and artificially raise her jealousy to such a height, that transported with the first motions of her passion, she shall fly upon me with all the fury imaginable as soon as ever I enter; the quarrel being thus happily begun, I am to play my part, confess and justify all my roguery, swear her impertinence and ill humour makes her intolerable, tax her with the next fop that comes into my head, and in a huff march away.
None of these people speak the way people spoke, even then. The actor’s job is to make the audience believe they did, but the whole pack of cards comes tumbling down if you do that by trying to speak the way people speak now.
Balancing Acts Page 19