The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  He proceeds to tell a kind of showbizzy story about a supposedly fateful “intervention” by Olivier that was a turning point in Berkoff’s theatrical career. How Olivier’s death, in effect, handed “the sword” to him.

  “Olivier died in ’89 I think it was, and his wife Joan Plowright was about to do a play. And she canceled. They rang around everywhere, you know, ‘We’ve got a space to fill for two months.’ So I received a call because I had a production which I had been touring of Salome [the Oscar Wilde play] and would I go in that spot? And I went there and that was the most successful production I’ve ever done. It was at the National Theatre and it was virtually the first time Salome had ever been seen on stage. And that came from Olivier, damn it! Through his death. So I thought that was a kind of sign. I took it as a sign in my kind of like fantasy. That he gave me more than any other human being in terms of my profession. And he even gave me—even when he died, he gave me more than any of these other people gave me by living. Even as he died he passed the baton to me somehow … I was only there doing it because of Olivier. Kind of a weird story. And then Salome was successful, I always thought it had to be, and we were sold out. It was the most successful production they’ve had there in years.”

  Despite that acclaim, he’s still at odds with the theatrical establishment. I’d asked him if he had a critique of current Shakespearean productions in England, establishment Shakespeare. At first he tried to sound dispassionate.

  “I don’t really give a—I don’t really think too much about them, because I do my own thing. So I mean, I don’t regard them in any particular way.”

  And then slowly, well, not that slowly, he segues into a rage.

  “I think they are traditional and they are still working with the same telescope—the same microscope that Pasteur used. They have not yet invented the electron microscope, so they are still looking at things in a very simplistic way.

  “They’re looking at things through a milk bottle lens. They’re not allowing the insight of the unconscious or its physical manifestations. No shortcuts of using modern techniques that we use in film of fast forward or flashback. It’s pedestrian, simplistic and eventually damaging. Deeply damaging to Shakespeare because the human mind is now so sophisticated through the kind of swift-moving inventive shortcuts you find in literature, television, movies, even video.

  “But to go back to pedestrianism, they’re asking us to accept it in the name of fundamentalism, the name of THEE-AY-TER, in the name of culture. And it is appalling what they’re doing. They are taking, dragging Shakespeare to his knees. They’re not taking advantage of making it valid for twentieth-century man. All they’re doing is fulfilling a guilt trip for the older people who go and say, ‘Oh very, very nice.’ They rely on one or two stars and surround it with a tepid, insipid, ridiculous, dull, placid, old-fashioned, decayed, pedestrian production.”

  “But do you have a critique?” I asked (jokingly). Not pausing, he continued to rage on.

  “It’s awful, I mean it’s so awful, not only is it awful, it’s awful because they consciously resist anyone like myself or any innovator saying, ‘Let us have a go.’ But they persist in doing the same old crap. Bring on the dry ice machines. If I see another ice machine and steam, I think I’m going to kill somebody.”

  THE NIGHT EVERYONE CHANGED

  I asked him whether his critique extended to Shakespeare at Trevor Nunn’s then-new Royal National Theater Company.

  “I’ve never seen any Shakespeare done well in the last thirty years, not one. The only thing I’ve ever seen that was thrilling was a German production of Macbeth which knocked me sideways. It was in Düsseldorf, I was directing there—it’s a translation by the German writer Heiner Müller. It was done very quietly and I thought, here is something exciting.

  “But,” he says, if one goes a bit further back than thirty years there was the defining Shakespearean performance of his lifetime: “There was Olivier as Othello. I saw him at Chichester, which is a three-sided theater, but he’d played it at the Old Vic, for a season, maybe thirty performances, forty performances. Big theater, the Vic, those days. Unlike today, they didn’t use mikes. So your voice got quite big. His voice was stretched. So when he was in Chichester, he had the voice which had been expanded for the Old Vic.

  “I was very excited, of course, seeing my idol. And he came on and the whole audience froze. I mean really frightened, frozen awestruck. Because he’s kind of like—this is an acting machine, this is, you know, the Rocky of the classical theater. And he came on with the robe and he had this white costume and his black makeup that took three hours to put on, and he’d polished his face, even the eyelids and under the eyelids and inside the eye, the white and everything, and pink palms, everything worked, so it was beautiful. And you have this voice, really deep, wonderful voice: [quoting Olivier as Othello] ‘Keep up your bright swords …’

  “And I was thrilled of course. We’re watching him like he’s taking us to another world, the world of the super-actor. Something thrilling about that, quite thrilling, like seeing Kean. As he got into it, as Iago put the poison in and he [Olivier] starts getting into second gear, you know, he starts to do things vocally and physically which are strange and bizarre. And with his hands and fingers and teeth. And he gets excited and starts going into the furore, the fit: ‘Be sure of proof, the occular proof …’ And he grabs himself and suddenly he becomes—his hips are moving and there’s excitement and he comes! Fantastic!

  “It’s the end of the first act, you know, and the curtain comes down, the audience can’t clap, because it seemed silly. You couldn’t clap. Clapping was not enough. It seemed like you’ve seen a human sacrifice, and you could not clap that. You couldn’t even live anymore.”

  He laughs. “You felt having seen this, how can you go to the bar? How can you say, ‘Do you have a gin and tonic?’ It seemed absurd. You felt, just get on the floor. Howl, scream, do something. But you can’t go, ‘Shall we have a drink, dear?’ And so nobody spoke to each other.

  “That was a fantastic night. Everybody changed that night. Nobody remained ever the same. And then gradually people shifted in their seats and got up. Nobody spoke. People could barely speak to their partners. Their voices sounded thin, empty. You couldn’t speak, you were like awestruck. You couldn’t say—you know, ‘What did you think?’ to your lady friend. It was fantastic. So that was something I never ever witnessed. An audience that was stunned into fright. Stunned. And then that night, everybody changed. People who had never made love to their wives in thirty years fucked like pokers.”

  “Like pokers?”

  “You know, when you stoke the fire? Suddenly everybody was—he attacked something in you. I mean it was hideous to watch, it was frightening, unbelievable.” Berkoff, it occurred to me, was conjuring up once again a variety of the unbearable, not exactly unbearable pleasure (this was a tragedy after all), but pleasure of some kind in the unbearable suffering or the unbearable accuracy. The fidelity with which Olivier depicts murderously unbearable suffering.

  “Was it his charisma or was it, did he have some vision of Othello that was different from—?”

  “It was charisma, power, it was a daring movement, strange absurd mannerisms, howls, screams, crying. I mean, heaving, you know, weeping. And crazy gestures. Like when he had the fit: cross-eyed, smelling his hands and all kind of things he’d worked out or had read about, epilepsy when the smell comes and the—you know, it was the beauty of the gesture …”

  THE GARRICK GESTURE

  The beauty of the gesture, yes. While Berkoff likes to style himself an innovator, a rebel, a modernizer, an electron microscope guy, what seems to me to be the source of his power and distinction as an actor is the way it is a return to the grand histrionic gestural language of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Shakespeareans like Garrick and Kean. It’s what he admires most in contemporary actors such as Christopher Plummer.

  “I thought he was very much in the Olivier mode
. I worked with him when they did a Hamlet at Elsinore for the BBC. And I thought this actor can wipe the floor with any English actor. He had a purity and he had this voice. He influenced me. Watching him, I had to keep switching between Olivier and Plummer, who was best? Especially in the Hamlet. What Plummer was doing in the Hamlet was a tremendous, vivacious, electrifying vocal delivery. Plus almost balletic and perfect use of gesture. And utter madness and brilliance and daring to push the envelope of madness—of Hamlet’s madness. A completely satanic, revelatory performance. And his voice was like nothing else. It was beautiful. When he hit a note it was—the whole room at the rehearsal all shriveled. Fantastic! So I was watching, I thought this guy was genius. Genius! And I watched his gestures and I learned. Then after that I did a play in London, Zoo Story, which is actually quite different. But having absorbed Plummer, I was released in gestural expression and I got the most fantastic reviews I ever had.”

  It’s this gestural power I believe that makes Berkoff’s Shakespeare so distinctive, links it to the era of Garrick and Kean. Makes it a theory not just about playing Shakespeare, but a theory about what the “Shakespearean” is. An implicit assumption that Shakespeare wouldn’t have written plays and passages that had the potential to drive people to fainting and frenzy if he hadn’t wanted that kind of frenzy unleashed by actors in the theater.

  It’s what makes Berkoff’s brief embodiment of Richard III in the “Villains” piece such a tour de force. Again Berkoff’s intellectual analysis of Richard’s evil didn’t seem to do justice to the depths of Richard’s wickedness the way his acting emphatically does. He appears to buy into Richard’s self-exculpation: the way the hunchback schemer blames his wicked nature on his deformity, on his hump. Virtually asks for our pity. Do we really think Richard III wants our pity, cares what we think except to deceive us as he dissembles with all?

  As someone wrote recently, it may be a mistake to take literally Richard’s “victim defense” of himself, rather than looking at it as “a transparently cynical parody of the victim defense by someone whose predilection for evil is far deeper and more complex than some all too easily understandable compensation for his conspicuous hump.” Okay, that was me, in Explaining Hitler, comparing the “victim” explanations of Hitler—the attempt to blame his malevolence on some deformity—with Richard III’s disingenuous rationale for his “motiveless malignancy” (Coleridge on Iago). A level of evil for the sake of evil, evil for the art of evil, that defies easy explanation.

  But when Berkoff becomes Richard rather than explains him, when he embodies Richard not just verbally, but gesturally, emotionally, primally, the effect is sensational.

  You can see it in one particular speech—Richard’s first soliloquy—in the predecessor history play that introduces his character, Henry VI, Part 3. It’s not merely Richard’s first soliloquy, it’s sometimes regarded as Shakespeare’s first soliloquy, the first extended instance of villainous introspection by the character who first made Shakespeare the rage. A character who has continued to fascinate and terrify for centuries afterward.

  It’s one of the longest soliloquies in Shakespeare in addition to being one of the first. It’s one of those moments in which you can virtually watch Shakespeare’s genius unfold before your eyes, watch Shakespeare becoming Shakespearean, as he shows us a man becoming a monster before our eyes.

  It’s the one that begins with Richard contemplating all the obstacles—all the intervening successors to the throne he must murder before he can become king.

  “Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard …” he jests bitterly, “I’ll make my heaven in a lady’s lap.”

  A thought that devolves into an ecstasy of self-loathing (if you believe he’s “sincere”):

  Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb;

  And for I should not deal in her soft laws,

  She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,

  To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub,

  To make an envious mountain on my back,

  Where sits deformity to mock my body;

  To shape my legs of an unequal size,

  To disproportion me in every part,

  Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp …

  Watching Berkoff play this on a bare stage, watching him as he twists his body into a writhing serpentine corkscrew of malice, watching him as he becomes possessed by the beat and power of the pentameter is, well … Once in Haiti I was driven far into the backwoods beyond Port-au-Prince to attend a voodoo ceremony. Watching Berkoff was like watching the hougan, the voodoo priest, being seized by the loa, the serpentine spirit of darkness. With Richard it’s an evil spirit within that causes the metaphysical deformity, not the physical deformity that gives rise to the evil.

  And then, in the concluding lines he becomes all gesture, clawing the air as he describes himself fighting to find his way to the throne:

  … like one lost in a thorny wood,

  That rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns,

  Seeking a way, and straying from the way,

  Not knowing how to find the open air,

  But toiling desperately to find it out—

  Torment myself to catch the English crown;

  And from that torment I will free myself,

  Or hew my way out with a bloody axe.

  Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile …

  Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

  And set the murtherous Machevil to school.

  Can I do this, and can not get a crown?

  Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.

  It becomes like the birth pangs of a demon child struggling to escape the womb, to be born into the full flowering of his wickedness. It’s excessive, but it’s beautifully, theatrically excessive. Not designed for subtlety. Climaxing with the murderously ecstatic boast that he “can smile, and murther whiles I smile …/Can I do this, and can not get a crown?/Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.”

  Suddenly, shockingly flourishing thorn-rent hands to the audience, Berkoff opens his fists to display the sticky stigmata of evil: hands dripping with blood. Stage blood, yes, an actor’s trick, it too is way over the top, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. It felt like the appropriately bloody climax to a black mass.

  Behind the melodrama is an attempt—in that line about someone who can “smile, and murther,” an image Hamlet reprises (Claudius “can smile and smile and be a villain”)—to capture some higher consciousness of evil, to capture the delight—the deep pleasure—in evil for the sake of evil. Not ordinary evil, not crippled-inner-child, low-self-esteem psychological evil, but a radical, smiling evil that is chillingly modern.

  Most scholars date Richard III at or before 1593, before Shakespeare turned thirty. Some six or seven years later, as we’ve seen, his Hamlet would advise the Players who arrive at Elsinore, “do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus … for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”

  But what we also see is that while Shakespeare was capable of a temperance, he never lost, even in Hamlet, an affection for the “torrent, tempest, and … whirlwind” of passion. Whatever lip service he gives to temperance, Hamlet seems to admire acting that amazes, goes beyond the natural to the supernatural.

  Berkoff does a number of thought-provoking riffs from Hamlet in his “Villains” piece. He has an interesting notion that in certain respects, Hamlet should be seen not as a blameless or tragic hero, but as a callous villain. He singles out the moment after Hamlet kills Polonius, for instance, thinking it’s the king hiding “behind the arras” in Gertrude’s chamber.

  Berkoff seizes on what he characterizes as Hamlet’s boastful indifference to the killing. The way Hamlet virtually sneers at Polonius’s corpse. The way he tells the dead body: “I took thee for thy better.…/Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger.�
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  Berkoff repeats the line like an incantation: “Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger,” sneering at Hamlet’s sneering. Contemptuous of this casual indifference, all the more reprehensible for its offhandedness. It’s a good point. (Berkoff once told me in all seriousness that he believed Polonius’s precepts—“To thine own self be true,” etc.—can, indeed should, be taken non-ironically despite the comic sententiousness with which they are most often delivered. And it turns out there’s a long tradition of scholarly dispute on just this question, in which one faction maintains it is Shakespeare’s challenge to us—a test—to see if we can get beyond the comic messenger to the substantive message.) But the most fascinating moment in Berkoff’s riff on Hamlet was, to me, the Garrick gesture.

  I might not have noticed it for what it was if I hadn’t recently read about it, but there it was, when Berkoff was doing a bit from the scene when Hamlet first sees the ghost of his father.

  The Ghost catches Hamlet by surprise. It’s midnight on the battlements of Elsinore, where Hamlet’s come with Horatio to seek to glimpse the specter he’s heard about. As he waits, he delivers (in the Folio version) a long meditation on the origin of evil—the “vicious mole of nature” speech—when suddenly Horatio interrupts:

  “Look, my lord, it comes!”

  It’s the moment when the supernatural suddenly breaks into Hamlet’s previously naturalistic world (in which he sees evil as merely psychological, its source some “vicious mole of nature”).

  It’s at this moment—at first glimpsing the Ghost—Berkoff, as Hamlet, slowly turns on stage and then gives a sudden, exaggerated gesture: one hand flies up to his face as if to hide from the dread sight, the other shoots out and up as if to seek to forfend—or to touch—the specter. I’d just seen a drawing of that very gesture, one of the most famous in theatrical history. The gesture made by the legendary eighteenth-century Shakespearean David Garrick, when he played Hamlet in Drury Lane. Hamlet suddenly thrust onto the threshold of apprehension.