One of the director’s jobs is to create a stage world where dialogue written in the high style seems inevitable and spontaneous. Alan Bennett’s world is easy enough. The world of Restoration comedy has grown more remote during my theatregoing lifetime. As a teenager with little more experience of the theatre than what I’d seen at the Manchester Library Theatre, nothing was more alive to me than a man in a full-bottomed wig or a woman with a fan. Restoration comedy was rarely off the stages of the repertory theatres, guaranteed to pull the crowds. The First Churchills was big on television, Charles II was as familiar as Elizabeth I, the contrived syntax of Etherege and William Wycherley was as easy as Oscar Wilde, and the only thing funnier than a fop was a cuckold.
Even by 1986, when I was an associate director of the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, the plays seemed to have grown stranger, the streets of Restoration London less ordinary, the rules of Restoration theatre no longer part of shared theatrical experience. But Ian McDiarmid, a fellow associate director of the Exchange, suggested to me that we could do Wycherley’s The Country Wife together, with Ian as the cuckold Pinchwife. It’s the funniest of the Restoration comedies, and the saddest, and I charged headlong into the obvious common ground between the materialistic, hedonistic 1670s and the loadsamoney excess of the 1980s. Gary Oldman was the rake, Horner, who puts it around that he’s been castrated after contracting the pox in France, so that the husbands trust him with their wives. Gary has since made a career in American movies by pushing into dark corners, and asking the kind of questions he asked about Horner: what kind of man is so driven to fuck everything that moves that he’s prepared to tell the town he’s a eunuch? It was one of the most single-minded performances I’ve ever seen, relentlessly sexy, almost psychotic. It was also very funny, and it worked because Gary was in total control of Wycherley’s convoluted syntax. He devoured the text. Offstage, he could quote most of Hamlet by heart.
When I did The Man of Mode at the National in 2007, I still thought that I could bring an audience closer to Etherege’s world by linking it to our own. But in the intervening years, the Restoration had slipped even further from the collective grasp. There is nothing remote about the fierce cynicism of the dramatists, nor their satirical relish for towns they excoriate. But the texture of their world, their ruthless celebration of the pursuit of pleasure after the privations of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, their indulgence of the viciousness of the dominant male, and the complexity of their language: these become ever weirder. And I had lost some of the operatic extravagance, the easy flamboyance that kept The Country Wife airborne. On the Olivier stage, London felt too much like London, and the audience sat there wondering why they were all speaking funny.
I’d done better the previous year with The Alchemist, which might have been made for modern London. Written in 1610, sixty-six years before The Man of Mode, Ben Jonson’s English may be harder to grasp; but it’s easier to spend time with chancers parting fools from their money than with rakes parting women from their self-respect. Spectacularly well plotted, The Alchemist is about a scam: three con artists take up residence in a house in Blackfriars and persuade a procession of marks that they can turn base metal into gold. Like all the most enjoyable satirists, Jonson simultaneously occupies the moral high ground and wallows gleefully with the pigs in the trough. His three swindlers—Subtle, Face and Doll Common—are virtuoso performers: they switch costume and character as often as a burlesque drag queen. Alex Jennings, Simon Russell Beale and Lesley Manville ran dizzying rings around the suckers who arrived at the house hoping to get rich or get laid: Doll has a sideline in the sex trade. The suckers included Ian Richardson as Sir Epicure Mammon, who needs money to pay for his weakness for fine dining.
I myself will have
The beards of barbels served instead of salads;
Oiled mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps
Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,
Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce.
In rehearsal with Shakespeare, you feel spiritually enlarged. You flatter yourself that through the intimacy of your contact with his plays, you are better equipped to know yourself and to understand the world around you. There is nothing in The Alchemist to feed your self-regard. The mysteries of the human heart are not on its agenda. But if you gather actors as inventive as its central trio of hustlers, you’re delighted to roll in the mud with them. I’d been watching Ian Richardson since I was a small child. On tour in Manchester as Master Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor in the late 1960s, listening to Falstaff promise to bed his wife, he turned pink with shock, purple with rage, green with jealousy, then white with horror, a whole rainbow of emotion, and I have been hooked on Shakespeare ever since. He took an almost debauched pleasure in Sir Epicure’s grotesque fantasies, and equal delight in the profligate skills of Alex, Simon and Lesley.
Ben Jonson was even pricklier than Harold Pinter. He once murdered an actor, which Harold would have thought a bridge too far, and got himself off on a technicality. When he finally went to jail, it was for having a go at the way James I sold knighthoods, in a play called Eastward Ho! Despite the warmth of his tribute to Shakespeare in the First Folio, he found much of what Shakespeare wrote ridiculous. He sneered at his Latin, his Greek, his geography and his stupid plots: there is nothing in Shakespeare to compare with the perfection of Jonson’s plotting in The Alchemist. But it is through Shakespeare that generations of audiences have learned what they want from an evening in the theatre. And because the way they hear the English language has been conditioned by Shakespeare, they’re often left floundering by Jonson’s obscurities.
When Face threatens to blow the whistle on Subtle, he tells him he’s going to:
Write thee up bawd in Paul’s; have all thy tricks
Of coz’ning with a hollow coal, dust, scrapings,
Searching for things lost, with a sieve and shears,
Erecting figures in your row of houses,
And taking in of shadows with a glass,
Told in red letters; and a face cut for thee
Worse than Gamaliel Ratsey’s.
All this within the first five minutes of the play. “Hang on in there,” I told the audience at a pre-show talk one evening. “It gets easier. Even with Shakespeare, the first five minutes are always a problem. I sit there thinking that I have no idea what these people are talking about and I’m supposed to be the director of the National Theatre. But you’ll tune into The Alchemist eventually. So don’t give up!”
But you’re forced to ask yourself what kind of classical theatre is so hitched to the text that someone has to stand up before the show and tell the audience not to worry if they don’t get it. And by the way, who the hell is Gamaliel Ratsey?
He was a highwayman, hanged in 1605, and the delight of imagining the laugh he’d have got at the Globe in 1610 can be left to anyone with the time to read the footnotes, so you cut him. If you read through the rest of the speech slowly it’s actually not too difficult, but there’s no chance the audience is going to grasp it spoken at full speed in the heat of an argument, even if it’s spoken by Simon Russell Beale. So you cut that too: the play is much too long anyway. But there’s no getting around its many difficulties, so you’re forced to ask yourself whether you should bite the bullet and translate Ben Jonson.
Ten years on, I wish we’d gone further. We untangled some of the worst knots, and replaced words that had disappeared, like “slops,” with words that meant the same thing, like “trousers.” “The first recorded use of the word trousers was in 1603 so we’re fine!” I cried in triumph, after looking it up. But in the end, trousers are funny, slops aren’t, and authenticity is for the academy. Jonson’s English is going the same way as Chaucer’s: a pleasure to read, but not performable in the original. At some point in the future, the same will start to be true of Shakespeare.
Those who had the patience to tune into it loved The Alchemist as much as I did, but some didn’t, and several
complaints about the inaudibility of the actors landed on my desk. They may not have been perfectly comprehensible, but they were audible enough. Most of the complaints were signed in spidery handwriting and compared the shortcomings of modern actors to the splendid clarity of the stars of their youth. I always apologised, and occasionally added that in the National’s archive there were letters of complaint to Sir Laurence Olivier from older patrons of the Old Vic about the very generation of actors my correspondents remembered with such admiration.
Only now, released from the shackles of leadership, do I feel able to suggest that one’s hearing deteriorates with age. If actors shout loud enough to be heard by the hardest of hearing, they will inevitably compromise the truthfulness of their performances. There’s a balance to be struck between absolute honesty and absolute audibility, and a version of the truth that includes a thousand people every night but stops short of deafening the majority who aren’t deaf. The induction hearing loops provided in nearly every theatre in the country are very good, though I learned never to mention them in my letters of apology, as if I did there’d usually be an explosion of rage by return of post.
“We can always do Arms and the Man,” I said, whenever the weekly planning meeting threatened to run out of ideas. Nobody could think of anything they’d less like to see, so the ideas started to flow. George Bernard Shaw was a useful symbol of the self-satisfied West End, his plays advertised by roguish photographic vignettes of beloved stars of yesteryear. But by the time we started to plan 2007, I knew that the audience for the Travelex £10 Season was up for anything, and that it was my unfortunate responsibility to give them Shaw. I recognised his importance, even if I dreaded having to sit through endless performances. I sat down to read him for the first time in decades and started what I thought would be a long slog through Saint Joan. “You should read this. I promise you’ll want to do it,” I said to Marianne Elliott afterwards. She’d just joined the National as an associate director and wondered why I was trying to press on her something from the collected works of the perpetrator of Arms and the Man.
But she read Saint Joan, and her production of it was a great event, voted favourite Travelex show in an audience poll. Anne-Marie Duff played Joan: slight and vulnerable, she swept before her the French army, and the Olivier audience, with her incandescent self-belief. With a spasm of guilt, I started to feel the lure of Shaw. You can’t tell which side he’s on: Joan burns with the unquenchable flame of conscience, while the authorities defend the wider community from the dangerous anarchy of the unfettered individual. “What will it be when every girl thinks herself a Joan, and every man a Mahomet?” There are women who think they are Joan, and men who take instructions from Mahomet, all over the world now. Marianne did not address them directly, nor the authorities who struggle to contain them, but Shaw’s play from 1923 saw them as clearly as we do who live with them, and with greater insight.
“You should read Major Barbara next,” suggested Philip Pullman, who after His Dark Materials had joined the National’s board. Hayden Phillips, Chris Hogg’s shrewd successor as chair, levitated with excitement. After a distinguished career as a Civil Service mandarin, Hayden could never quite conceal his desire to start over as an actor. Theatre boards aren’t supposed to get involved in what they call the art, but it was hard to resist Philip’s advocacy or Hayden’s enthusiasm. I read Major Barbara.
“Maybe you should play Andrew Undershaft,” I said the next day to Simon Russell Beale, who was as sceptical about Shaw as I was. “Maybe I should direct it. It will do us good. We’ll find out how much we can make ourselves like Shaw.”
Simon read the play. “I never play alpha males,” he said. “Are you sure?”
Andrew Undershaft is certainly alpha: a successful arms manufacturer who returns to his estranged family and discovers that his daughter Barbara is a major in the Salvation Army. He challenges her to visit his factory, and in exchange visits her shelter. He rips the veil of hypocrisy off the business of saving souls: Barbara’s mission is dependent on those it despises, the whisky distillers and arms dealers whose money it solicits. For Undershaft, the only real crime is poverty, and the Salvation Army cons the poor with dreams of heaven.
From Saint Joan we had learned how little credence to give the old charge that Shaw was without passion. His people throb with the visceral excitement of argument. If an actor commits to it body and soul, argument becomes as passionate as a declaration of love. We still cut a third of it: Shaw is so entranced by the sound of his own voice that he can’t get enough of it. For a modern audience, enough is more than enough. But what remains has the kind of muscularity that makes it a dream to play in the Olivier, which is more hospitable to fiery rhetoric than to delicate restraint. Plays conceived by Shaw for performance behind a small Victorian proscenium arch turn out to be ideally suited to a big public arena. “Do you call poverty a crime?” asks Barbara’s fiancé, and Undershaft replies:
The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then; what do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people.
Even this is pruned, and it continues for at least as long again. But in performance it’s thrilling. And Simon never minded how long it went on for. “I love long speeches,” he said.
Another of the charges against Shaw is harder to dismiss: that though his plays may be passionate in argument, they avoid emotion, rather as he ran away from emotional turbulence in his life. On the page, it’s often hard to point to any deep level of engagement with the characters he creates. But as soon as you get his plays into rehearsal, you realise how pregnant with emotion are the situations he creates. In Major Barbara, a man returns to his family after an absence of twenty-five years and his daughter meets her father for the first time in her life.
In the dialogue he writes for them, Shaw couldn’t care less about how either of them feels. He’s much more interested in their conflicting beliefs. But the text, of course, is only half the story. The relationship between Undershaft and Hayley Atwell as Barbara grew from what they didn’t say to each other far more than from what they actually said. Simon was moved beyond words by his first sight of his daughter. Hayley tried to convert him because she felt his unhappiness not in what he said but in what he couldn’t say, in the fact that he couldn’t even bring himself to touch her. Much of the best acting springs from need. “I want!” screams the actor, often inwardly. With Shaw, it is necessarily inward, because he rarely writes emotional need into what his characters say.
Less defensible than his readiness to leave his actors to do the emotional heavy lifting is that Shaw can never resist undercutting them if he can see an opening for a lame wisecrack. You can spend a morning building an emotional life around a scene only for it to collapse under the weight of his humour. “Take us seriously, you facetious prick!” I yelled at him one day, but he was too busy moving on to the next insufferable one-liner:
Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.
“Cut!” we all cried. But we had to admit that he almost single-handedly reintroduced serious theatre to London after more than a century of sentimental melodrama and trivial comedy, and he knew that his late-Victorian audience would have rejected his plays if he hadn’t sugared the pill with jokes.
Shaw’s glib dishonesty was the dark underbelly of what makes his plays crackle with energy. He was an apologist for Stalin and, briefly, for Hitler, but his intellectual terrorism now, as then, is a challenge to the complacency of the bien pensants who come to the theatre.
When you vote, you only change the names of the Cabinet. When yo
u shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new…NOTHING IS EVER DONE IN THIS WORLD UNTIL MEN ARE PREPARED TO KILL ONE ANOTHER IF IT IS NOT DONE.
In 2008, I couldn’t ask the crowd in the Olivier to pretend that it was watching the original production and knew nothing of where the world’s Undershafts had led us since 1905. Shaw asks for his final act to take place in the yard of the munitions factory with an idyllic view of the model town it sustains, which loads the dice far too heavily in Undershaft’s favour. So we pulled it inside a surreal warehouse, packed with row upon row of enormous missiles, and underscored it with a constant ostinato of distant explosions. The wicked eloquence of the arms dealer still gave the disasters of the twentieth century a run for their money.
Simon and I finished up as Shaw’s grudging admirers and the National produced two more of his plays before I finished. From being my bête noire, he virtually became my house dramatist. The Doctor’s Dilemma in 2012 and Man and Superman in 2015 were as packed out as Saint Joan and Major Barbara had been. Man and Superman was lit up by Ralph Fiennes as John Tanner, some of whose ideas about sexual politics are now as offensive as Undershaft’s about peacekeeping; but Ralph’s mind worked at such seductive speed that he landed them as persuasively as if they’d been the work of Gloria Steinem.
Ralph Fiennes’s charisma is unique, and has sustained a brilliant career on stage and screen, but he is not alone in his speed of thought, his vocal penetration and his ability to work through the text to an underlying emotional truth. They are the necessary equipment of any actor who wants to communicate the great body of classical theatre written in English. Those of us who direct it are indebted to the continuing excellence of British drama schools. Despite big changes to the profession for which they prepare their students, the great drama schools remain committed to the classical tradition. Their graduates, who saddle themselves with vast debts to finance their training, will never make a living in the theatre substantial enough to pay them off. They must be equipped to act in front of the camera, where if they’re lucky they can earn enough to raise a family and subsidise a theatre career. Film and television put a premium on the kind of naturalism that won’t get an actor very far with George Bernard Shaw, let alone George Etherege. Fifty years ago, when Restoration comedy was still a rep staple, it was worth taking the trouble to devote whole courses to it, and to send actors into the world with special expertise in snapping open a fan. It would be hard to argue for that now, but young actors still enter the profession ready not just for film, but also for the highly wrought artifice of a complex text. The best of them never stop learning to reconcile their desire to be real with the demand made by the great playwrights of the past to be articulate. The young ones sit quietly in rehearsal and watch Ian Richardson and Maggie Smith, who watched Ralph Richardson and Edith Evans.
Balancing Acts Page 20