THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH ADRIAN NOBLE, BARBARA GAINES, and DOMINIC COOKE
Adrian Noble, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His Henry V on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh's film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were Hamlet, again with Branagh in the title role; The Plantagenets, based on the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy, and the two parts of Henry IV, with Robert Stephens as Falstaff. Stephens returned in 1993 to play Lear in Noble's second production of the tragedy for the company. Noble's 1994 Midsummer Night's Dream was made into a film. He was Artistic Director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas and balloons), and fluid scenic structure. He talks here about his 1984 small-scale touring production and, in more detail, his 1992 main stage production of The Winter's Tale, with John Nettles as Leontes and Samantha Bond as Hermione.
Barbara Gaines grew up outside New York City. She fell in love with Shakespeare's sonnets as a youngster and gained her first dramatic experience working for her father, a film director, during summer breaks. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1968 and had a successful career as an actress in New York and theater educator in Chicago. In 1986, she founded her Shakespeare Repertory Theater, later renamed the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. From modest beginnings it has grown to become one of the largest producing theaters in Chicago. Gaines has directed many of the plays herself, often having particular successes with less frequently performed works, such as Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida. Here she talks about her 2003 production of The Winter's Tale.
Dominic Cooke, born in 1966, was educated at the University of Warwick. As an Associate Director at the RSC he undertook a number of highly successful productions, notably in the genres of comedy and romance. They combined theatrical energy with lucidity of storytelling. He also developed new theater writing for the company and directed an acclaimed production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, shortly after the dramatist's death. In 2007 he became Artistic Director of the Royal Court, the British theater's leading house for contemporary drama. He talks here about his "promenade" production of The Winter's Tale, performed in the Swan during the RSC's Complete Works Festival of 2006-07.
How did you and your designer set about creating the distinctive worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia? The contrast between them is very important, isn't it?
Noble: I've done the play twice and didn't create contrasting worlds for either production. The first occasion was for a tour, mostly of cathedrals. It was the first promenade production [in which the audience are standing and become involved in the scenes] ever done by the RSC and its provenance is quite relevant. Back in the eighties I'd been to Lincoln to see John Caird's touring production of Romeo and Juliet. I missed the train on the way back so I went to visit Lincoln Cathedral. It struck me smack between the eyes that this was where we should be playing. It was at the center of the community, and so it was both a sacred and a profane space. For the first time I wanted to do the tour! The space was crucial because I could see in it the possibility of doing something that was both sacred--i.e. that told the underlying story of The Winter's Tale very clearly--but also profane, in the sense that it could reveal all of the wonderful contradictions of the human flesh in a marvelous way, and all very close up in a promenade production. The sacred aspect is as follows. It strikes me that underpinning the play is a very traditional medieval morality story: of the Fall, of somebody almost unknowingly falling from grace, then repentance and finally redemption. A very simple story, but one of the most important stories one could ever possibly tell about human beings, because we are all seriously flawed. I took that experience forward when I did the play with John Nettles in 1992. Anthony Ward designed it and as I said to him, it's not two worlds. It happens in one world. It's one story. To create totally different scenery for one and the other is just rubbish. We used the same scenery for both. We didn't use much but it was very beautiful. There was a box which created an inner world and an outer world, which seemed to me to be a very useful tool for this play.
Gaines: Creating a sense of place and, yes, contrast, is essential in staging this story. I wanted to feel an icy chill in Sicilia and, by contrast, a warmth within Bohemia. One of my first visual inspirations was a Russian doll box, those brilliantly painted wooden dolls that fit one inside of another. The story of The Winter's Tale is multiple stories, one fitting inside another, inside another, compacted by the collapsing of time.
It was winter in that chilly court of jealousy, all in tones of black, white, and grays--and it was snowing. (In Chicago, every dog owner who walks along the lakefront has a visceral knowledge of that crystal clear, midwinter cold!) In Bohemia, I saw a Russian peasant-inspired world, soaked in warmth and unabashed color. I imagined these two polar worlds both set against a black, reflective surface. A simple back wall and floor of reflective black seemed to push the essential emotional elements of Sicilia and Bohemia to their extremes. The reflectivity of a nonliteral, nonspecific set felt right because this play for me is a reflection of life and all its changes and colors and reverberations. Those mirror images reflected upon the set suggested the repetition of time--within the wide borders of this play, and within all of our lives and our stories. Our search for love and the vortex of jealousy are universal: human life on this planet has existed tens of thousands of years--as have love and jealousy. Boxes within boxes within boxes--the ripple of time passing through all of our stories.
The contrast between those two places symbolizes interiorly the antithesis within all of us, our lighter and darker elements. As life goes on, we face that darkness, and search for more light: that is the search within this play. Shakespeare understood that years, and lifetimes, are encompassed by it. The play emerges emotionally from the recesses of the dark sides of our souls, where our fears, jealousies, and self-doubts dwell. Like Leontes, we are afraid. We're afraid to till that interior landscape, yet we must: crises force us to. Life, with its wheel of fortune, also gives us Bohemia--a landscape of light, warmth, companionship, community, love, and color. Then in Act 5 we find ourselves in yet another place of human existence--a place of the spirit and of transcendence.
Cooke: We started with two key principles. The first was to do with time periods. It seemed to me to be very important to get the audience to have a direct and emotional response to the sixteen years' passage of time in the play, and the change that symbolizes. We thought about what period in our living memory had seen the most significant change, particularly in terms of the relationship between generations. We came up with the idea that if we started the play in the mid-fifties, with that kind of post-Cold War McCarthyist paranoia and formality, then in Act 4 you would get this extraordinary transformation to the world of the late sixties: Woodstock, hippies, and flower power. The late sixties would resonate with the pastoral imagery in that part of the play and also the feeling of a melting of barriers and boundaries, a move toward a more informal world. It gave Autolycus the feel of roving hippie and crook, a beatnik outsider, and it allowed an atmosphere at the sheep-shearing of a new generation coming through who were freer and more ready to follow their instinct. That connected with another theme of the play, the danger to the state of Florizel, a young person in a position of political power, following his instinct. These two eras just seemed emotionally right. We didn't labor the point or make a massive issue out of the differences between the two periods, it was mainly done with costume; more of a reference to the period rather than a literal setting.
The second principle was to perform the play promenade, which meant that the audience were on their feet and actually physically involved in the scenes. This idea came from noticing that the structure of the play is built around communal events: the trial scene, the sheep-shear
ing, and the unveiling of the statue. These were events that the audience could be directly involved in. We also turned the opening scenes into another communal event, a New Year's Eve party. This again referred to the idea of time passing; the cyclicality of time, the idea that, like the country, the court has its seasonal rituals. As the play progressed we moved from midwinter through spring into summer and ended back in winter. The way we staged the play was that the audience were part of these communal events but there were other scenes that they were watching from outside. You were both implicated as an active witness in the communal events, and then watching the consequences of those events and choices being played out privately in rooms around the palace. We played those two dynamics.
7. The involved, promenading audience: the trial scene in Dominic Cooke's 2006 production in the Swan Theatre.
What is your view of what causes Leontes' sudden explosion of suspicion, and did that come about or develop during rehearsal?
Noble: Shakespeare requires us to be almost unprepared for it--it's written that way. We see a tiny crack and then suddenly a fissure a thousand miles deep. It struck me that we had got to start from what is written, rather than easing our way in in a comfortable fashion. In other words, not work out in advance a whole series of neuroses that would eventually lead to that explosion. If there were a series of neuroses they have to be hidden from the audience. You start from the objective, i.e. the way the words are written on the page, so it has to be sudden, it has to be instantaneous, it has to be violent, it has to be Old Testament. Then John Nettles and I worked out a psychological pattern and a series of choreographic patterns on stage that would allow that to be expressed. Exactly what John thought you'd have to ask him; in a way that's not my business, that's his mystery. I did certain things like freezing the action; I used that method from the beginning of the play. There's a feeling about the beginning of the play whereby people are clinging on to joy, clinging on to memories, whether of the nine months they've all been having this marvelous time hanging out in Sicily or of their childhood--they're hanging on to something. I dramatized that by using a lot of freeze-frames, allowing Antigonus and Camillo to walk around and look at beautiful things frozen in time, which allowed me dramatically to use the same device when Leontes starts to go. We froze on Polixenes and Hermione, so Leontes could get within literally inches and look into her eyes, examine in a scientific way how she positioned her hand, whether it was ambiguous, all of those things. If you look through Shakespeare's canon, I think the most violent emotion he explores is sexual jealousy. It's corrosive, it's lethal, it's obscene. Whether it's Othello, whether it's the father to the daughter in Romeo and Juliet, whether it's The Winter's Tale, it's an obscene, uncontrollable emotion. It's also completely irrational: the handkerchief?! The handkerchief is as absurd as the palm paddling in The Winter's Tale. They're tiny things but they are the matter upon which these catastrophes rest.
8. Court celebrations (with balloons) suspended in the freeze-frame moment of jealousy, Leontes isolated as Hermione paddles Polixenes' palm: Adrian Noble's 1992 production.
Gaines: I came to rehearsal knowing it because I have felt it, been hit by it, as many people have--you turn a corner and see something you don't expect. The suddenness is completely realistic. Yes, Leontes goes further than most people: he goes mad, he is insane with jealousy. I went into rehearsal trusting Shakespeare--and in this play and in this passage in particular, he gives the actor everything he needs in the punctuation alone, forcing us to a place of teetering, breath-knocked-out-of-you imbalance: "Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a forked one!-- Go, play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I Play too." Thoughts spill one into the other, with three mid-stop lines within one verse line. You can hardly take a breath, you can hardly think because this fit comes upon you as if you're struck by lightning. The thoughts are heaped one upon another--Shakespeare's writing at this moment is like a cyclone and it whirls you around. Meeting Leontes in rehearsal is like meeting that part of ourselves that we don't want to remember, that we hope never to meet again, but whom we do know. And there was no one in rehearsal who hadn't been there. It was overwhelming working that scene, overwhelming and ultimately thrilling--because it is life itself. There's no mask. When played well, there's no actor performing in it. It is life, it is shocking and cataclysmic, a terrifying journey into the abyss of the soul.
"I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances, / But not for joy, not joy." I don't in any way see this as a fairytale moment. Perhaps it happens because he is a king, because he has only himself to answer to. But more important than being a king is being a frightened man. Because there's also terror that lives in jealousy, the terror of being a cuckold, of the shame and the humiliation of it. Something inside Leontes, some dark place that's always been there, is triggered in that moment, [thinking] "When I lose love, there is no world for me to hold on to. If I lose the people I trust, then my life is a sham, my kingdom is a sham, my child must be a bastard." I think that's the key: when he believes himself betrayed by the people closest to him, his first instinct is to destroy. None of us are that far away from being Leontes, at least in our imaginations.
Cooke: I guess I wasn't really interested in the "why" but the "what." It seems to me that the play is not really about why Leontes has become the way he has. It's about irrational behavior and the disastrous consequences of that behavior, especially in powerful people. So, for me, backstory was really only important inasmuch as it supported the actor in playing the present moment action. I'd read a lot in preparation and we had a psychoanalyst come into rehearsal to talk about Leontes' jealousy--both jealousy of Polixenes taking his wife away but also a homoerotic jealousy; that in some ways his wife was taking his potential lover away. These notions are really interesting but I don't know how relevant they are. The cause of Leontes' breakdown is not fully explored by Shakespeare and in some ways, I believe, it is as random as the appearance of the bear in the play. These events have a spiritual logic--they bring about a journey that the characters need to go on. Their cause is almost divine, rather than rooted in a literal world.
How important for you was the pagan, classical setting--the consultation of the oracle, the thunderbolt that seems to come from Jupiter?
Noble: I wouldn't say it was pagan. I would say that was part of the mystery of it. I would absolutely say it is sacred. It's numinous; it's the acceptance that there is mystery in our lives. If you have a faith then there is the possibility of some sort of invisible but ubiquitous force for good. It is interesting that Paulina says at the end, "It is required / You do awake your faith." I've done the play twice and, actually, I've done it all over the world--the tour went all over England and then to Warsaw and Krakw; my other Winter's Tale went all over Europe, the Far East, and to New York and Washington--and I've seen this extraordinary thing happen every single night. The audience know that there's a trick to it, but they remain profoundly moved by the transformation of the statue. One could say that Christianity is a metaphor; the fallen man, the crucifixion of Christ, the twelve disciples. But metaphor works on the human imagination in a very particular way. That scene is a metaphor, and we know it's a metaphor, but it touches us in a very mysterious and very potent way. It almost never fails to work. Shakespeare has set us up in using means that are in a way purely man-made, but there are visions that are sacred and things that happen beyond the material. They are of the numinous variety. It's not just a pagan play, it's a secular play, and it has another dimension, a holy dimension.
Gaines: There is a deep and abiding spirituality in this play but, no, the pagan, classical setting did not influence our production in any literal sense. These pagan gods certainly have more power than this king because, ultimately, it's in the spirit world that judges him, and Leontes loses sight of that. In rejecting the spirit world, his hubris must be tamed, he must be brought to his knees. His dear son dies, his queen dies, and his life is left in a pile of rubble. Consulting the oracle is
a metaphor for making contact with our universal conscience. Spirituality for me exists beyond a single religion. I think these last plays dwell in this other realm. Spiritual guidance and influence run throughout them--here in The Winter's Tale, in Pericles, certainly in Cymbeline, and in The Tempest. These stories are elevated beyond the rules or the traditions of any single religion. They embody a reverence for life.
Cooke: It's important in that the play is mythic. It's not a literal world. It's full of psychological and emotional truth but it is conscious of itself, like the other late Shakespeare plays, as a story. It's truthful but not literal. Its connection with the classical world is that the play is concerned with an idea of spiritual laws--that there are certain spiritual laws that, if broken, will be paid for. This seems to be a very Ancient Greek notion. What we did was create a world where a divine presence existed. This, for me, is in the play--when Apollo's judgment is disobeyed, disaster strikes. We accentuated this in the trial scene by using the sound of approaching thunder as Apollo's oracle was read out. So we respected the epic, classical gesture of the play without getting caught up in a kitsch world of men in skirts!
How did you stage the moment when Antigonus exits "pursued by a bear"?
Noble: It seemed to me that it's one of those things you shouldn't duck as a director. I tried to make it as amazing, fabulous, and extraordinary as possible. I had a huge bear and staged it quite vividly. It seemed to be the thing to do. When we were on the road we had this huge sheet that the whole audience held and rippled, so they were literally creating the stage upon which Antigonus was walking. They created this strange link with death. Then literally from among the audience we had the bear coming out. You can't short change things like that. It's like people who say there shouldn't be a good fight at the end of Hamlet. It's just a swizz for the audience!
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