by Alison Lurie
Theatrical Magic
Dramatic theatrical experiences have a strange effect on many people. In the intermission at an Oscar Wilde play I and my friends seem to speak in epigrams, and on the way home from a suspense film the streets are full of sticky shadows and suspicious delivery vans. And this occurs after only an hour or two. The same thing can happen to those who must speak the lines we have only heard, day after day in rehearsal, and then night after night.
Already, just a few weeks into rehearsal, there are moments when the mood of Hamlet appears to dominate the company. Even the “sickness imagery” noted by the scholar Caroline Spurgeon seems to affect them, so that presently not only Peter but also many of the other actors are or have been ill, and there is much talk of symptoms and remedies. The rehearsal hall also begins to look like one of the spare ballrooms of a rundown Scandinavian castle; the actors lounging round it like disaffected courtiers who most of the time have no occupation, but dare not leave for fear of the king’s displeasure.
When I silently question something Jonathan has told them to do (as when he tells Peter to deliver a soliloquy lying flat on his back), he begins to look like Claudius—an upstart who has usurped the throne of the dead ruler (Shakespeare). At other moments, when I approve of his direction and feel that the actors are wrong to object to it, Jonathan looks like Hamlet, a noble mind driven half-mad by the ignorant stubbornness or self-seeking hypocrisy of the people about him.
On the cast, the effect of the play is even stronger. Infection of an actor by the personality he assumes is a traditional occupational hazard of the theater. It isn’t supposed to happen in a repertory season, where Petruchio cancels out Macbeth and vice versa. But this season is different. In each of the three Family Romances, Irene Worth plays a dramatic and dominating woman with some secret in her past; Robert Stephens her lover, revealed in the course of the play as a phony if not a villain. Peter Eyre is her brilliant, sensitive, neurotic son; and Nicola Pagett, in each case, is an intense young girl, baffled in her love for Peter, who is superior to her in rank. And Antony Brown, as Nicola’s father, provides homely wisdom and comic relief.
Of all this lot, only Robert Stephens seems to have escaped infection, and have nothing in common with Claudius, Manders, and Trigorin except his worldly success and sexual energy. Others, off stage, appear at times to merge into their roles. Irene’s need to be stage center, Peter’s illnesses and subtle wit, the jokes and theatrical anecdotes Antony tells at tense moments, come to seem quite natural—and I am not really surprised to observe that Nicola, as she kneels at prayer during the rehearsal of Act II Scene I, is simultaneously mending the lining of Peter’s overcoat.
The Play Scene
In other productions it has always seemed to me slightly pointless and contrived. Now it begins to have many meanings. The Player King is not imitating only the bombastic actors of Shakespeare’s time, but also, and quite deliberately, those of the recent British theater. “You’ve got to understand that there was a complete change after the last war,” Jonathan explains to me. “The source of it was in the universities, especially Leavis at Cambridge. Before his students took over the British classic theater, it was all historical pomp and pageantry, trumpets and banners, with very little serious attention to the meaning of a play or its patterns of metaphor.”
But beyond this, as Jonathan stages the play scene, it becomes clear that it is not just a theatrical in-joke, but a way of drawing us in. He has Claudius and the other members of the court turn their backs on us to watch the Player King and Queen, so that we become part of the real audience.
The implicit suggestion is that the audience at Greenwich will also be “struck … to the soul by the cunning of the scene” and recognize our own past misdeeds in it. What we are watching, of course, is a murder, but a very peculiar one. The Player King, like Hamlet’s father, is killed by having poison poured into his ear—as if Shakespeare were making a bitter and ambivalent joke about the power of words, his words—or our own—for good or ill.
Opening Night
Jonathan has tried to get round the usual anxiety by having a preview the day before, and putting the critics off until next week. It works only up to a point. By seven o’clock everyone backstage is highly keyed up. The dressing rooms are full of flowers and telegrams, and the actors, some in partial costume, are running back and forth between them. Irene, in the star dressing room below the stage, stays put, but Nicola, who is also solitary, finds it lonely, and keeps going into the large room shared by nine of the actors, where there is a lot of clowning and general high spirits.
Up the stairs at the back, where Robert, Peter, Jonathan, Cecil, and George Wood share a smaller room, things are more tense. Peter has been ill for twenty-four hours with food poisoning and is even paler than usual; as he crosses the room, he seems to tilt slightly sideways. He has twice as many flowers and telegrams as anyone else, but the telegrams are all unopened and the roses and irises and freesias still in their cellophane. (“I regard it as bad luck to read my telegrams until after the performance. Anyhow, tonight I can’t spare the effort.” He laughs rapidly.)
As the audience begins to file in, they can be heard in every dressing room over the sound system. The remarks of those nearest to the stage come through clearly above the general murmur (holders of front-row tickets please note). “Oh, darling, lovely to see you!” “Tell me, who is that strange man over there with Diana Melly?”
When the play begins, the actors stop talking among themselves and listen intently. They know where trouble is likely to occur, where a laugh may be expected. Halfway through the first court scene, when it is clear things are going fairly well, they relax, begin to speak of other things, read a newspaper, or play cards. But nothing holds their interest for long—they keep breaking off to listen to the resonant, emotional voices coming over the loudspeaker, which are interrupted at intervals by the calm, even, Scottish voice of Jeannie, the pretty girl who is assistant stage manager: “This is your call, Miss Pagett, Mr. Henson.”
At intermission Jonathan comes into the dressing rooms to praise and hearten all the actors individually and report favorable comments he has heard in the bar. They seem encouraged, but not yet at ease. Nicola shuts herself in her room to practice feeling mad, and Graham Seed is frantically changing from one of his three costumes and makeups into another.
There is some relaxation, but not much, during the second act, and even more rushing about from room to room. Only at the end, when everyone in the cast is either on stage or waiting in the wings for their curtain call, is there finally silence in all the dressing rooms, broken only by a roar of long-awaited and long-continued applause.
The First-Night Party
It is held at the house of Lady Antonia Fraser, the well-known London beauty and biographer (Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell) who is an old friend of Peter’s, and much admired in the company. There is a midnight supper of Edwardian lavishness prepared by Antonia’s Scottish cook, Mrs. Hepburn—roast ham, turkey, duck, smoked salmon, etc. The actors, most of whom haven’t eaten for twelve hours due to first-night nerves, crowd round the table hungrily. It is a motley gathering, which Antonia, in a long golden caftan, presides over like Titania at her feast. Besides the cast, there are rich and titled persons (what Jonathan calls “Peter’s aristos”), journalists, drama students, star-crossed lovers, several elves and fairies, the Frasers’ beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter Flora (barefoot in Pre-Raphaelite silks), and a genuine rag-and-bone man whom somebody found in a pub on their way to Campden Hill Square. I wander among them, feeling as if I had walked into a classic English novel of the sort I read long before, almost invisible but completely happy. The party goes on until dawn, long after I have left. The last guest is found asleep on a sofa at eleven the next morning, by the men from the caterers who have come to collect the rented champagne glasses and gilt chairs.
The Reviews
These are mixed, as usual with Jonathan’s productions, and cause the cast those sensations of delight, indigestion, and indignation one might have after a lengthy dinner combining rich spiced dishes with cold tinned slops. The play as a whole is described by the daily papers as “superlative,” “eccentric,” “bleak,” “fascinating,” and “enjoyable.” Peter’s performance is “exciting,” “arbitrary,” “neurotic,” and “somberly intelligent.” Similar contradictory adjectives are applied to most of the company. Robert and Irene are generally praised, but here, too, there is contradiction: one reviewer sees Claudius as “self-tortured and conscious-stricken” while another speaks of his “cold, matter-of-fact defensiveness.”
It doesn’t matter, really, because Hamlet, and indeed the whole Greenwich season, is already sold out. Still, everyone feels better on the weekend, when the Sunday Times comes out with a long brilliant rave review by Harold Hobson, who calls the production “extraordinary… . an absolute revelation of the meaning of a play that we wearily thought we knew backwards and forwards.”
Afterword
The play goes on at Greenwich, but Jonathan Miller’s part in it is over, and he is not sorry. “It’s been by far the most difficult production I’ve ever done,” he tells me the next day. “And not only because Hamlet is such an important play.”
One reason it has been difficult, perhaps, is that it is the sort of play that cannot help but reflect and stir up private feelings. Jonathan’s original interpretation set the intellectual world of Hamlet and his friends against one of practical action and power represented by Claudius and Gertrude and the court, and it is not hard to find parallels. You begin with a group of university classmates, young single men writing or appearing in Beyond the Fringe. But as Jonathan says of Ophelia, “Not to grow up is madness.” It is necessary to move on, to enter the real world—but this world is guilty, corrupt, and destructive. To act is to kill, since whatever you do will destroy the existing pattern.
I remember a day in Earl’s Court when they were rehearsing the scene in which Hamlet and the Captain (in this production, Fortinbras) watch the Norwegian army pass. Jonathan got up and stood beside Peter and Lionel where the edge of the stage was marked on the floor with masking tape, and looked down as if into a deep valley. “You see them going by, twenty thousand men. The horses, the loaded carts, the guns on their carriages, the flags looped back over their standards. Twenty thousand men. Some are walking, some sitting on provision wagons—think of Mother Courage. You watch them passing, and you say to yourself, Why am I not acting, who have cause, when these men who have no cause are on their way to do something? Of course, the action they are going to do is murder.”
However, there is a third way. You can engage the world indirectly, without guilt (or with less guilt) by interpreting it—by painting pictures or taking photographs—or, like me, writing articles in which, by a cleverly biased selection of details, you try to alter history so that people afterwards will remember a production of Hamlet as you have described it.
Or, more seriously, and with greater risk and reward, you can direct a play. At Greenwich, Jonathan gives orders and moves people around, but he does so in the service of an idea. “Directing is a mid-point between the world of the mind and the world of action. It’s a narrow point—one is always balancing on a thin edge. But when it works right, for me, there’s nothing like it.
The Language of
Deconstruction
Innovations in language are always interesting metaphorically. When the words used for familiar things change, or new words are introduced, they are usually not composed of nonsense syllables, but borrowed or adapted from stock. Assuming new roles, they drag their old meanings along behind them like shredded shadows. To the amateur observer this seems especially true of the language of the contemporary school of literary criticism that now prefers to describe itself simply and rather magisterially as “theory” but was at first popularly referred to as “poststructuralism” or “deconstruction.”
Many of the terms current in the field, like its ideas, originated in France, and their translation into English sometimes subtly altered their meaning. The earliest neologisms of the movement, Saussure’s “significant” and “signifie,” became signifier and signified, now employed to distinguish words (signifiers) from their meanings (the signified) and emphasize the arbitrariness of the terms we chose. The use of these particular terms (rather than, say, word and thing) underlined the seriousness of the process and its claim on our attention. Since in English to signify can also mean “to announce or portend,” as in “the siren signified that a raid was coming,” it was also possibly suggested that words predicted coming events—as indeed they did in this case.
With deconstruction we move into another and more complex realm of implication. The most common use of the terms “construction” and “deconstruction” in English is in the building trades, and their borrowing by literary theorists for a new type of criticism cannot help but have certain overtones. First, it suggests that the creation and interpretation of literature are not organic but mechanical processes; that the author of a piece of writing or “text” (see below) is not an inspired, intuitive artist or interpreter, but merely a workman who cobbles existing materials (words or signifiers) into more or less conventional structures.
The term “deconstruction” implies not only that the text has been put together like a building or a piece of machinery, but also that it is in need of being taken apart again, not so much in order to repair it as to demonstrate its underlying inadequacies, false assumptions, and inherent contradictions. This process can be repeated many times and by many literary hard hats; it is expected that each deconstruction will reveal additional flaws.
The preference for the term “deconstruction” rather than “criticism” is also interesting etymologically. Criticism and critic derive from the Greek kritikos, “skilled in judging, decisive.” Deconstruction (Latin constructus, “piled or put together”), on the other hand, has no overtones of skill or wisdom; it merely suggests the demolition of an existing building. In popular usage criticism suggests censure but not change. If we criticize someone or something, we may condemn them but we do not carry out the sentence ourselves. The contemporary theorist, by implication, is both judge and executioner. When he or she is finished with a text, it will have been totally dismantled, if not reduced to a pile of rubble.
More recently, many literary theorists have made their position even clearer. Instead of the term “deconstruct” they use “interrogate.” Of course, when you “interrogate” anything, the implication is that it is under police custody. It is probably guilty of something (often racism, sexism, or fascism). It needs to be questioned and examined, perhaps with the kind of “enhanced interrogation techniques” now recognized as an euphemism for torture. Occasionally, a text may be “recuperated,” suggesting that it was perhaps not technically guilty, but merely ill, and that its crimes may be partially excused by a plea of temporary insanity.
Central to the new language of theory, and rich in association, is the word “text, which now appears even in the discourse of critics who fear and detest the new theories. The notion of using a single word to designate every sort of written message was innovative and practical; what gives a neutral observer pause is the term (or, if you prefer, signifier) “chosen.” In the past, critics spoke of stories, tales, novels, and poems: words that etymologically evoke a world of human lives and human creation. Story derives from the Greek and Latin historia (“narrative history”), tale from the Old English talu (“reckoning, speech”) and the Old Norse tala (“talk, tale, number”). Novel comes from the Latin novella narratio (“new tale”), and poem from the Greek poeima (“something made”).
Before deconstruction a text in common parlance was one of two things: a school textbook, or “a short passage from the Scriptures, especially one quoted… as the subject of an exposition or sermon.” The expans
ion of the term to include all written works inevitably suggests to the uninitiated observer that literature is not intended to entertain but to instruct; a text is something we study under the direction of an authority. The discussion by Roland Barthes of “the pleasures of the text” may at first suggest an attempt to restore enjoyment (“jouissance”) to reading. But in practice this enjoyment seems to be both dependent on critical interpretation and directly related to a disregard of the author’s intentions; it is a kind of guided erotic tour.
The word “text” derives from the Latin texere (“to weave”) and textus (“a web; texture, structure”). The suggestion is of something made by a spider or a human weaver. Appropriately, the texts studied by theorists are approached not with any interest in their individual authors, but as examples of the mumblings of the Zeitgeist, as if they were the work of either an ignorant artisan or an anonymous arachnid. And indeed many critical papers give the impression that their authors are flies struggling in the sticky verbal strands of theoretical discourse.
If you are a theorist, for practical purposes, the author is irrelevant. The encounter is always with the sick, criminal text. Earlier schools of literary criticism have usually been interested in writers, sometimes even too intrusive—prying into their personal lives and their psychological and economic motivations. I have found it so. “Theory,” by contrast, usually excludes them from consideration. In a way, this can be restful. The author of a guilty text is now no more to blame than those innocent girls in Salem who, when possessed by demons, screamed curses and blasphemies. When I was teaching at Cornell University, I once learned through the student grapevine that a new junior colleague would be using one of my novels in an undergraduate seminar on modern fiction. Assuming that this person was too shy to ask, I volunteered to visit the class and answer questions about my “text.” “Oh, no thank you,” I was told. “That won’t be necessary.” For pedagogical purposes, I did not exist.