Black Beech and Honeydew (35 page)

In
Romeo and Juliet
he talks about ‘the two hours’ traffic of our stage’. Even allowing for poetic licence this is puzzling.
Hamlet,
played in its entirety, and without intervals, lasts about four and a half hours. Did the Elizabethan actor get up a terrific head of steam and execute his soliloquies at breathtaking speed? Did the dialogue rattle about the stage like bursts of rifle-fire? And were Shakespeare’s audiences much, much quicker on the uptake than our telly-saturated viewers? I believe they must have been.

For a company embarking upon that journey with their playwright that all rehearsals call upon them to make, questions like these constantly arise. I believe that when their fellow traveller is William Shakespeare the actors themselves change a little on the journey. The more sensitive among them arrive enriched at their destination. If it is a happy company, a fine and lasting camaraderie is established. It delights me to record that this has been so with our student-players. We have explored together, striven together and, when fortune was on our side, succeeded together. I began by remarking upon the ephemeral nature of theatrical endeavour: this is the place to say that the bond that was established during our golden days endures.

Nowadays there are four major professional theatre companies in New Zealand and from time to time they all present one of Shakespeare’s plays. Here in Christchurch, in the once-academic buildings that housed our original Little Theatre, is the Court Theatre with one of our earlier student-players, Elric Hooper, now a most experienced, widely travelled and gifted director, at the helm. From time to time English actors are imported for a season and are impressed by what they find. Our hope is that more of those student-players who made the hazardous decision, won a bursary to a London drama school and went professional, will return briefly, as Jonathan Elsom does, to give us a taste of their quality.

At the end of nearly every season when the cast still breathed the heady air of success and commitment, one or two players would come to me, hell-bent on becoming full-time actors. In almost every case they met with little encouragement.

The theatre is the most overcrowded profession in the world. In London when a new play is cast there are enough out-of-work, highly experienced and talented actors to fill each part over and over again. This may be one of the reasons why the standard of performance in the English theatre is so high; it is also a very good reason why any young enthusiast should ask him- (or her-) self how he would shape up in such a competitive field. And even if, after a long hard look at himself, he still believes he has a genuine potential, he must face this cruel reality: success often depends as much upon chance as upon ability. He must find himself an agent. He must be ready to endure exile in a wilderness where he waits, day after day in a bed-sitting room for the telephone to ring. And when, by some fluke, he is cast, it may well be in a small walk-on part that offers no artistic or financial potential but which, by this time, he is glad enough to accept.

Remembering these bleak prospects, one would be less than honest if one did not put them before any starry-eyed hopeful who does not want to consider them. Over the last thirty years and throughout fifteen productions there have been one girl and four young men who I thought would never be happy unless at least they tried, and who seemed to me to be possessed of that unfair and wayward gift known to actors as ‘star quality’. Of the young men, one was unhappily lame. The other three have become well-known and
well-established British professional actors and have prospered. The last, indeed, is now a star. And the girl? She was, I think, perhaps the most gifted of them all; largely an instinctive actress with a Godgiven sense of timing, a lovely voice and witchcraft in her ways. If all had gone well and she had lived, she must have shone very brightly indeed in that most precarious firmament.

Someone once said, and justly was it said, that madmen flock to Shakespeare as flies to a honey pot. The indisputable facts that are known about his life could be covered by three hundred words. Surmise and conjecture ranging from plausible speculation to stark, staring lunacy would, one is tempted to venture, fill as many tidy-sized volumes. Some years ago I used, at intervals, to receive from a gentleman in the Middle West of the United States of America, packets of diagrams purporting (I think) to illumine God-knew-what theory on the authorship of the plays and sonnets. They arrived together with pamphlets typed, cyclostyled, and in some instances printed on different-sized bits of paper. They were totally incomprehensible. In the margins exclamation marks, queries and arrows proliferated. Passages were scored under in scarlet ink and handwritten comments abounded: ‘How true!!!’
‘Bosh!’
‘See
Titus Andronicus
or
Pericles??’
And in one instance a possibly triumphant
‘Ah-Ha!!’
The sender neglected to give an exact address so I was mercifully spared writing acknowledgements which may have been why these baffling documents stopped coming.

Arguments as to the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and the identity of Mr W. H., the subject of the publisher’s dedication to the sonnets, range from the respectable to the thoroughly dotty.

There is one rebuttal to the anti-Stratford arguments that I have never seen advanced but which any actor would find irrefutable. Let us return for a moment to The Globe. The company is assembled. The new piece they are rehearsing is
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
In no time Shakespeare is being asked for explanations.

‘Dear boy, what
do
you
mean
by “the dram of eale doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal"? Could you just give me a
line
on it, dear boy?’

Now. If somebody else wrote the play and if Shakespeare is in fact a Stratfordian semi-rustic clodhopper who has been told (by whom and why?) to pretend he wrote the play, how does he make out? He
will be constantly badgered with such questions to which he hasn’t a notion of an answer and to which his only response can be an oafish guffaw. He would not last a morning’s rehearsal without being rumbled. And if anyone supposes that, Heaven knows why, the Lord Chamberlain’s players were required to keep under their hats a piece of gossip of such an intriguing kind as this, they have no knowledge of what actors are like when they take a drink or two together.

I advance this hypothetical picture for the consideration of any anti-Stratfordian theorists who may chance to read these reminiscences.

I have already ventured to say that in a long association with student-players we contrived to establish as near a professional approach to our work as may be achieved by actors who have other commitments. This was made the more possible by long summer vacations and by the students’ readiness to give up recreational activities and devote themselves absolutely to the production in hand. They came more and more to be wholly committed. I hope I am not arrogant in thinking – in daring to think – that in this process they became less insular, more civilized, more intellectually adventurous and perhaps more responsible beings than they would have been if they had submitted themselves exclusively to the degree-factory process that unhappily pervades our universities.

Directors’ approaches to the plays vary, of course, enormously. Tyrone Guthrie manipulated his actors, I suppose it might be said, like a puppet-master. He experimented. He improvised. He would think of a treatment for a scene, orchestrate his actors’ movements to bring out his reading, rehearse exhaustively and ruthlessly and scrap the whole thing if he decided it didn’t work. ‘No good. What a pity,’ he would say. ‘Never mind. Rise above.’ And away they’d all go on a new tack.

Lewis Casson, on the contrary, prepared his elaborate production scripts beforehand. I have been told that he did this down to the last detail, marked the vocal inflections he was going to require of his actors as if in a music score and insisted on the strictest observance of them.

There are directors who go into huddles with an actor and have inaudible, interminable discussions while the rest of the cast hang about on the sidelines. There are directors who sit immovably in the
stalls and others who are on stage, in front-of-house, all over the theatre. Some like to illustrate and to give inflections and require the actor to echo them precisely. Others never do this. They talk about the character in question, however small his role, and invite the actor to decide how, in any given situation, such a person would feel and react. From what I have already written of my productions with student-players it will be seen that this was the manner in which we went to work.

It was in crowd scenes of course, that the rank-and-file came into their own, most of all in
Julius Caesar.
For our modern dress production of this play in the Civic Theatre on a stage thrust out over the orchestra pit into the auditorium, we had a crowd of about sixty. They formed themselves into small groups of three, five and seven. Each group chose its own background – a working-class family of three generations, a cluster of students, members of a gang, down-and-outs, emotional women. I wrote sheets of cued dialogue for them, often using lines from other plays
-Coriolanus,
for instance, and the Histories. Some groups improvised their own dialogue. This was a hazardous undertaking and sometimes had to be checked. I remember a strongly New Zealand voice soaring above the crowd like a football fan’s tribute:
‘Look ut thet! Look ut thet! Hey! Watch it, mate.’
His zeal was admirable but, alas, it had to be modified.

Julius Caesar
might have been subtitled ‘The Mob’. In it Shakespeare demonstrates a sort of law of opposites – the bigger the crowd, the less responsible its individual members and their corporate reactions. When Mark Antony has finished with them the mob has the mass intelligence and amorality of a vicious six-year-old child. The director’s job is to orchestrate. The volume of sound the crowd produces must be perfectly controlled and synchronized with the orator’s speech. Overall there is one frightening crescendo that finally explodes into violence. Within this structure there are lesser climaxes for which Shakespeare gives occasional specific dialogue that must emerge above the groundswell. A woman gushes of Antony: ‘Poor soul, his eyes are red as fire with weeping.’ (Which they are not.) Her friends cluck with enjoyable concurrence. An aggressive male voice suddenly proclaims, ‘There’s not a nobler man in Rome than Antony,’ and this when two minutes ago they had all been cat-calling and booing him. The mob under Antony’s manipulation
now becomes a single, idiot, menacing entity. To control, balance, order and shape this superb piece of dramatic writing is like conducting an orchestra and in the event I don’t know which was the more exhilarated, the company or I.

And still, in all these productions, indeed throughout our association, I was obliged to take heroic short cuts. Techniques that a drama school covers in two years had to be injected in six weeks. The longer the casts the more arduous this process.

As time went on, a core of experienced actors emerged and were a stimulating influence on the newcomers. I have spoken of the ones who went further afield and prospered. Among them, and most emphatically, is James Laurenson. He came to us as a first-year teachers’ college student and was cast for a small part in
Antony and Cleopatra.
(I telescoped a Messenger, Scarus and Dercetas for it.) It is difficult to find a place for an interval in this play. I took it after the Messenger’s shattering news for Antony. ‘The news is true, my lord…Caesar has taken Toryne.’ Its effect depended entirely upon the way this line was given and Antony’s reaction to it. As soon as I heard Jimmy’s voice I knew we were home and dry. Later, when he came to deliver to Caesar the sword with which Antony had killed himself and announced: ‘I am call’d Scarus-Dercetas,’ it was the same. The next role he played for us was Macbeth.

In this same play,
Antony and Cleopatra,
there is a secondary part: Proculeius, a Roman soldier whom Antony told Cleopatra to trust. He was played by a newcomer from Westland who is still known as Proc to the old hands and is now the author of a number of impressive plays and a notable director of these and as many more: Proc, which is as much as to say Mervyn Thompson. In his autobiography, recently published, Proc indicates that I alarmed him beyond measure in this, our first encounter. I am glad I seem no longer to strike any chords of terror in his bosom.

A university drama society is by its very nature ephemeral. At the end of each academic year it burns out and one can only hope it will rise from its ashes when the new year begins. For this reason our auditions were always open to experienced players who had graduated and were no longer students. With us the play really was ‘the thing’ and must be served above everything else by the best of available talent. For me, when my active association with these players
came, as it must, to an end, it did so in the happiest imaginable way. Jonathan Elsom crops up quite often in these pages. He is now well enough established on the London stage to take the dreaded risk of ‘losing touch’ by too long an absence from it. A year or two after his great success as Chorus in
Henry V
he returned and brought with him a script he had put together for a one-man show called
Sweet Mr Shakespeare.
He asked me to direct him. The first half dealt with what material we have relating to Shakespeare, legendary, apocryphal or positive, from the wildly unauthentic John Aubrey to soberly exact Ben Jonson. Jonathan, by a series of slight but entirely adequate quick-changes, was in turn an Elizabethan man-in-the-street, Aubrey, a sea captain, a pedagogue, Francis Meres, Robert Greene with his acid ‘Shakescene’ and ‘upstart crow’, Sir John Wooton and sundry gossips and commentators. The second half consisted only of sonnets and the little dirge from
Cymbeline.

It was an elegant, accomplished and moving performance.

And now Jonathan and James are in London. Proc is a dramatist and director and lectures in his subject at Auckland University. Elric directs The Court. Canterbury University has its own handsome theatre and the Drama Society, as ever, has its ups and downs. Unhappily I am unable to follow them at first hand because the only approach to the auditorium is by flights of stairs which are not within my compass nowadays. John Pocock, one of the student-players of our early days and now a celebrated and august historian, was co-author with Bruce Mason, our most distinguished playwright, of a book called
Theatre in Danger.
In it they wrote of the times with the Canterbury University Drama Society that I have tried to describe. They called them ‘the Golden Age’. For me, at any rate, they were all of that and that is how I shall always think of them.