Peter Mudford Making Theater

MAKING THEATRE
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Making Theatre
From Text to Performance
PETER MUDFORD
THE ATHLONE PRESS

LONDON & NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ
First published in 2000 by
THE ATHLONE PRESS
1 Park Drive, London NW11 7SG
and New Brunswick, New Jersey
Peter Mudford 2000
Peter Mudford has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 485 11551 4 HB 0
485 12158 1 PB
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mudford, Peter.
Making theatre: from text to performance/Peter Mudford.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-485-11551-4 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-485-12158-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. DramaExplication. 2. TheaterProduction and direction. 3.
PN1707.M83 2000 792'.023dc21 00-055882
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cambridge University Press
This book is dedicated to the past, present and future students
of the Department of English at Birkbeck College
in the University of London.
Contents
Acknowledgement Vlll
s List of X
Illustrations xi
List of Abbreviations and References in Text xiii
Foreword: A Personal
The Stage and Note
Performance 1
Words 45
Vision 102
Music 165
Index 229
Acknowledgements
I would like to record my thanks for permission to reproduce the
copyright photographs in this book as follows: Ralph Richardson;
Peer Gynt (Naomi Campbell/John Vickers). Laurence Olivier;
Macbeth; John Gielgud: Prospero (Angus McBean, The Harvard
Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library). Michael Frayn:
Copenhagen, (Conrad Blakemore). Janacek: Jenufa, (Mike
Hoban); Anouilh, Ring Round the Moon (Victoria and Albert
Museum Picture Library). Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights
Dream; Henry V (The Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-on-
Avon). Brecht; Gallileo, (McDougall/Group Three Photographs).
Shaffer: The Royal Hunt of the Sun (Angus McBean, The Harvard
Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library). Wagner:
Gotterdammerung (Ray Dean), Loesser, Guys and Dolls (John
Haynes).
I would also like to express my thanks to Dr. Vesna
Goldsworthy who made invaluable comments on the first draft of
this book; and to Harriet Bagnall who, through her knowledge of
the theatre, made many useful suggestions to improve and clarify
it. Professor Katharine Worth made many further useful
suggestions and corrections as well as encouraging me in the
project. Over many years I have been helped by conversations
with Professor Willard Pate of Furman University, South Carolina
whose knowledge of the theatre in London, and whose enthusiasm
have always been stimulating. Discussions with colleagues at
Birkbeck have given me many insights. The positive support and
encouragement of Professor Leonee Ormond has also been
invaluable. Finally, I would like to record my thanks to my wife,
who has accompanied me to many produc-
Acknowledgements IX
tions, and whose interest and response has been a constant help.
I am also grateful for support from the special fund of the
English Department at Birkbeck College in the publication of
this book, and to David Atkinson for compiling the index.
List of Illustrations
1. Ralph Richardson: Peer Gynt (1945): see p. xvi.
2. John Gielgud: Prospero. (1957): see p. 34.
3. Laurence Olivier: Macbeth (1955): see p. 38.
4. David Burke, Sara Kestelman, Matthew Marsh in Michael
Frayns Copenhagen (Royal National Theatre), 1998: see p.
47.
5. Designs by Sally Jacobs for A Midsummer Nights Dream,
(Royal Shakespeare Company), 1962: see p. 115.
6. Set by Oliver Messel for Jean Anouilh: Ring Round the
Moon, Act Two, (Globe Theatre), 1950: see p. 139.
7. Janacek:Jenufa, set by Tobias Hoheisel, Act One (Glynde-
bourne Opera), 2000: see p. 150.
8. Set by Tanya Moseiwitch for Shakespeares Histories
(Richard II-Henry V) (Stratford-on-Avon), 1951, see p. 141.
9. Set by Jocelyn Herbert for Brechts Gallileo, Act One,
(Roy^ National Theatre), 1980, see p. 146.
10. Set by Michael Annals for Peter Shaffers The Royal Hunt
of the Sun, (Royal National Theatre) 1964, see p. 147.
11. Set by Josef Svoboda for Wagners Gotterdammerung, Act
Three, Scene One (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden)
1976, see p. 160.
12. Finale of Guys and Dolls, setting by John Gunter, (Royal
National Theatre), 1996, see p. 206.
List of Abbreviations and References in Text
Barrault, Jean-Louis Barrault, Memories for Tomorrow, translated
by Jonathan Griffin, Thames and Hudson, London, 1974.
Bilhngton, Ashcroft, Michael Billington, Peggy Ashcroft,
Mandarin Books, London, 1989.
Billington, ONS, Michael Billington: One Night Stands, Nick
Hern Books, London, 1993.
British Theatre Design: British Theatre Design, The Modern
Age, edited by John Goodwin, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
London, 1989.
Brook, ES, Peter Brook, The Empty Space, Methuen, London,
1968
Brook, Ring, Preface to Jean Anouilh, Ring round the Moon,
translated by Christopher Fry, Methuen, London, 1950.
Brook, SP, Peter Brook: TTte Shifting Point, Forty Years of Theat rical
Exploration, 1946-1987, Methuen, London, 1988.
Burian, Jarka Burian, Svohoda: Wagner Wesleyan University
Press, Middletown, Connecticut, 1983.
CaUow, Simon Callow, Being an Actor, Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth, 1984.
Cole, Playwrights on Playwriting, edited by Toby Cole,
MacGibbon and Kee, London, 1960.
Cox, Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor, edited by Murray Cox,
Jessica Kingsley, London, 1992
Duff, Charles Duff, The Lost Summer: The Heyday of West End
Theatre, Nick Hern, London, 1995.
Eyre, Richard Eyre, Utopia and other Places, Vintage Books,
London, 1994.
Gielgud, John Gielgud, An Actor and His Time, Pan Books,
xii Making Theatre
Guinness, Blessings, Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise
Hamish Hamilton, London, 1985.
Guinness, My Name, Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me,
Hamish Hamilton, London, 1996.
Guthrie, Tyrone Guthrie, A Life in the Theatre, Columbus Books,
London, 1960.
Hall, Peter Halls Diaries, edited by John Goodwin, Hamish
Hamilton Paperback, London, 1983.
Herbert, Jocelyn Herbert, A Theatre Workbook, Art Books
International, London, 1993.
Holden, Anthony Holden, Olivier, Sphere Books, London, 1988.
Mahabharata, Peter Brook and the Mahabharata, edited by David
Williams, Routledge, London, 1991.
Meyer, Henrik Ibsen, A Dolls House, translated by Michael
Meyer, Hart-Davis, London, 1965.
Miller, John Miller, Ralph Richardson, Sidgwick and Jackson,
London, 1995.
Mortimer, John Mortimer (ed.). Three Boulevard Farces by
Georges Feydeau, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 9
11.
Pilbrow, Richard Pilbrow, Stage Lighting Design, Nick Hern,
London, 1997.
Shaflfer, Peter Shaffer, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Pan Books,
London, 1964.
Spoto, Dennis Spoto, Tennessee Williams, Bodley Head, London,
1985.
Stanislavsky, Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage, translated by
David Magarshack, Faber, London, 1950.
Tynan, Kenneth Tynan, A View of the English Stage, 19441965,
Methuen, London, 1975.
Foreword: A Personal Note
My love of theatre began in 1943 with Ralph Richardsons Peer Gynt.
On the radio. Every house in England was blacked out. Each
night the German bombers rumbled over the sky. In a
Gloucestershire valley, Ut only by lamps and candles, a wireless
crackled. As Bristol burned, voices told tales of other worlds,
other places, of a mountainous ride on the back of a reindeer, of
dreams and visions, which turned out to be lies, and some other
truth.
The following year Peer Gynt was performed by the Old Vic
Company in London. I asked to be taken. It was a strange request
from a boy of seven whose family had no interest in theatre, to
whom Ibsen meant nothing; but my godfather took me. London
was stiU a dangerous place, with the doodlebugs falhng. The
theatre meant excitement and danger, the actors whose names I
never forgot Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, Sybil
Thorndike, Margaret Leighton, Nicholas Hannen inhabited
enchanted worlds which bombs could not destroy.
Since that first afternoon in war-time London, the theatre has
always been for me a place of exploration. The following book
attempts to revisit these imagined worlds, and to recall some of
the extraordinary richness of the English stage in the last fifty
years, through plays performed, performances given and
productions which bring words alive through the various arts
which theatre uses.
These arts involve scene design, costume, fighting, music,
movement within very different stage spaces, and with resources
from those of the simplest kind to those of technological wizardry
which as in Peter Pan can make actors seem to fly. Books of
many kinds have been written about the history
XIV Making Theatre
of the drama, its trends in the twentieth century, and the work of
individual dramatists. Very few books of any kind have been
written about the visual and physical languages of theatre, except
as technical guides for those who work in the theatre, or are
involved in play production. Critics, writing in newspapers and
journals, comment on the qualities of particular productions and
performances; but their comments are inevitably confined to the
production under review. As a teacher of drama in the University
of London for more than thirty years I have always been aware of
how difficult students find it to relate what they have read on the
page to the interpretation of a play in performance, even if they
have seen it on the stage. The analysis of plays often reads as
though they are novels or tracts, and seldom as though they are
living things, performed by actors in front of an actual audience in
a particular space; or that every performance is an interpretation.
Audiences for many forms of theatre are growing all over the
world. Drama and Performance play a large part in school and
university courses in many different countries. But much that is
written shows little sense apart from books by directors and
actors that the languages of theatre bring together many
different arts; or that a play only comes to life when it is being
performed. Even audiences may not be aware of the different
forms of magic which are being used to arouse their response and
interest. This book attempts to illustrate how these languages
work. It is intended both for the student of theatre, and for the
theatre-goer who may be helped to recall why some performances
remain vivid and memorable.
The book does not attempt to be comprehensive in its
coverage. Almost everything I have written about I have seen; but
there is also much I have missed. The largest and most obvious
omission is ballet and dance-theatre because they have influenced
me less, and I know less about them. Theatre exists most
profoundly for me in its relation between words, and its other
languages. This book records and analyses those productions
which have continued to resonate over a long a period of time, as
a piece of music which once heard is never
Foreword: A Personal Note XV
forgotten. Its principles of selection have been shaped by memory, and
are inevitably subjective; but that does not prevent them, I hope,
from illustrating qualities and values in the life of the theatre
which have general application. The book attempts to probe the
relation between theatre and life, between stage and audience, to
rediscover why the theatre has mattered; and to offer a view of its
creativity in the second half of the twentieth century. I admit the
books partiality, but can only write about that part of theatres
legacy, in which I have discovered the greatest riches.
The opening or rising of the curtain is itself a metaphor for
what theatre does, whether or not it has a curtain. It shows (again,
as in the phrase, weve been to a show); s/iou's but does not
state; and what it shows will in one sense always remain
indefinable, because each member of the audience will carry
away some other memory. Dramatic images, created out of
theatres various languages, matter because they reveal and
suggest. The theatre, even as it entertains, means always a search
for meaning, a quest.
Among the many changes which have occurred in the last fifty
years, none has been more significant than the diversification of
types of performance, which theatre includes, and the spaces in
which it is performed The pocket-size programme schedule (with
its distinctive yellow cover) of the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre, as it then was, after the war was a treasure- trove of
immense riches; but infinite riches in a small room. I went for the
first time in 1949 to see Godfirey Tearle and Diana Wynyard in
Othello and learnt (though I did not know the word till many
years later) what Aristotle meant by catharsis: the power of a
great dramatic performance to purge the emotions, and create a
calm of mind, all passion spent. Though it can equally well
disrupt, leave the mind jagged,or inspire joy.
The cycle of thirty-eight major Shakespeare plays would take
a long time to revolve in a short Stratford season in one theatre.
(The Old Vic undertook it as a five-year plan between 1953 and
1958.) Now Stratford has three theatres
XVI Making Theatre
and, as elsewhere, the repertory has widened. Revivals are sometimes
spoken of by critics with deprecation. But revivals, if they are
good, reinterpret the plays of the past, giving them a new life and
necessity. A revival, just as much as a new play, can explore the
contemporary. In both, the languages of theatre forge new ways of
looking at reality, or the realities, in which we live. The live
theatre belongs to the present.
The theatre has also become international. As I started to write
this book, A Midsummer Nights Dream was being performed by a
visiting company in Japanese; at the Edinburgh Festival,
Chekhovs Uncle Vhnya was being performed in Italian, directed
by a German, Peter Stein. Since then there have been memorable
productions of Racines Phedre with Diana Rigg (in English) and
with Valerie Dreville (in French), of Schillers Don Carlos, of
Victor Hugos The Princes Play, of Goldonis Le Baruffe
Chiozzotte, directed by Giorgio Strehler, and Eduardo de Filippos
Filumena with Judi Dench, to mention just a very few.
AH the worlds a stage has become true in a different sense.
The modes of drama in different cultures, languages, historical
periods have become familiar and, hke Puck on his travels, girdle
the earth, confronting audiences with images drawn from cultures
and societies different to their own.
In the last act of Peer Gynt, Peer, peeUng an onion, in search
of the Gyntian self, finds that it lacks any heart, and writes his
own epitaph, here no one is buried. Drama has remained for me
an attempt, shared between actors and audience, to peel away the
layers of the onion, to see if it has a heart, to ask what it means to
write here someone is buried. The question is asked of each
member of the audience, and of the society to which we belong.
What are the unique contributions which theatre makes to a
culture? What does it enable us to see about our lives, and our
times? Why in the end is it necessary?
As a way of beginning, something needs to be said about the
nature of plays, the stages on which they are performed, and the
art of performance itself.
1
The Stage and Performance
In the last half-century, the theatre has often been described as being in
a terminal state. Silent movies, then talkies, television and videos
have all threatened the Hve theatre. The expense and risk of
productions have escalated; the cost of going to live theatre has
risen. How much easier to stay at home and watch a video where
there is no sense of imphcit formality or communal participation.
But the living quality in the theatre, watching people perform,
in front of an audience whose response is audibly felt, has
unquestionably helped to ensure that it does not die. Theatre
always aspires to the excitement of watching the artist on the high
trapeze. When it falls flat it does so because it has not taken the
risk, shown the dazzhng skills of performance and daring which
the great actor shapes. The theatre is a dangerous craft, composed of
many different kinds of language. Because it involves danger, it
offers the opportunity for greatness; and no one knows when, or
if, it is going to happen. We cannot know whether the
performance we are watching, which the previous night might
have seemed a skilful impersonation, is going to touch greatness.
Once the curtain falls on a play, it is over; but it is also
unfinished. The action continues in the mind of the audience.
What win happen to Denmark after Hamlets death under the rule
of Fortinbras? Will the Three Sisters ever get to Moscow? Are
Vladimir and Estragon still waiting for Godot? These questions
forbidden by some critics who argue that nothing exists outside
the text overlook the living presence of the actor whose
performance does not end with the play any more than his own
existence does. Unlike a film where the
Making Theatre
words The End mean what they say, what we have shared with those
on the stage has created a continuing life of its own. The
Muscovites, who on cold winter nights used to say outside the
Moscow Art Theatre, lets drop in and see how the Three Sisters
are getting on, spoke perhaps more wisely than they knew.
But the darkened theatre is also a place where something has
ended. The performance can never be repeated; and the production
once closed has vanished into air. Unlike the film which can be
viewed any number of times, and where particular shots or
sequences can be reviewed and analysed as long as the celluloid
lasts, the performance and the production of a play is always
transient, ephemeral. This is not just because a production comes
to an end; but because every performance depends on a
relationship between the actors and audience.
An audience makes no difference to the showing of a film
because a film once made is finished. A play, as Thornton Wilder
once said, is what takes place . . .. It exists in the simultaneous
present of actors and audience. A play only exists in the living
present of the performance, creating its sense of inner vibration
between audience and stage. The darkened auditorium and the
illuminated space create a different relation, and make quite
different demands on the audience to the projection of a film in
the cinema. A play comes closer to life; a film tells us what to see,
while the theatre plays on, and with, the inner worlds we inhabit.
To go on the stage remains a common colloquialism for
becoming an actor. Unlike to go on stage which merely implies an
entrance, the little word the suggests an ascendancy, makes us
imagine at least a raised platform, on which the performance takes
place. But this image raises the most fundamental questions about
the nature of theatre, about the physical relationship between
performer and audience, about the architecture of theatres, and the
importance of illusion. What happens on a stage, the nature and
kind of performance given is shaped by the space to be filled.
The Stage and Performance 3
In many modern plays, the audience will constandy be
reminded that they are in a theatre, but as well as making them
question the relationship between what they see on the stage and
the world outside, this may paradoxically intensify the power of
the illusion.
To a modern audience the dimming of the hghts in the
auditorium (and often the rising of the curtain) means the
compulsion of silence,and the expectation of being transported
(hterally carried across into another world) for as long as the
action lasts. The darkening of the auditorium only became
possible in the mid-nineteenth century with the introduction of
gas, and then electricity. Sir Henry Irving, one of the great
Victorian actor-managers, was the first to believe the fighting
more important than the scenery, and to hold fighting rehearsals
with his actors. Charles Gamiers Opera which opened in Paris in
1867, contained 28 miles of piping and 960 gas-jets. The
technology of the theatre in the last one hundred and fifty years
has radically altered the nature of dramatic art in the Western
world. Radically or superficially? The answer is both. And both
are related to the nature of stage-space.
Greek theatres were cut into a hiU-side, and the audience
looked down on the acting area. The performance started early in
the morning, and the watchman who sees the sun rising at the
start of Aeschyluss Agamemnon would have been inviting the
audience to do so too. But this was the start of no ordinary day.
Agamemnon was about to return, after ten years absence, from
the Trojan War and, stepping down on the purple carpet, reserved
for the gods, make his entrance to his palace, where his wife,
Clytemnestra and her lover Aegistheus will murder him. The
pride of Agamemnon will result in his downfall, as hubris results
in nemesis. What is invisible has been made visible. And thus
from the very start, performance arouses the most fundamental of
all dramatic emotions: wonder. It is sometimes argued that art is a
matter of observation; but equally it depends on making visible,
often through silence, a gesture, an image, what we had not seen
before.
Making Theatre
What the characters in a play say, and what the play means to us, the
audience, are two very different things. From this very simple fact,
there grows gradually the theatre as a place of illusions; and in the
twentieth century, the theatre as a place of anti-illusion. The
history and nature of the stage is inseparable from the debate
about these two views.
The engineering skills of the Romans enabled a theatre to be
built with free-standing walls, as opposed to being cut from a hill-
side; the scaena (or scene building) then rose to the same height as
the seating. The scaena allowed for appearances at different
levels, for emperors and gods to be given a different symbolic
relation to the mere humans on the pro-scaena. Vitruvius, writing
in the first century AD, gave instructions for the design of a Roman
theatre, in which he describes painted scenery, with perspective
effects. Visually, the relationship between actors and audience had
been altered, and with it the possibility of stage illusion. The
theatre had become an amphitheatre in which audience and
performers were enclosed. The difference between the Greek and
Roman theatre can easily be seen by comparing the theatre at
Epidau- ros in Greece with the Roman theatre at Orange in France,
both still in use for summer festivals.
In the Middle Ages, a stage was made out of any open space: a
street, a haU, a tavern, a field, a church; and the performance
could move with the audience from one to another, freeing the
relationship between performer and audience, and making one
more involved with the other, as still happens in many forms of
theatre today, in pubs and warehouses, converted attics and nissen
huts.
The Elizabethan thrust or apron stage, with tiring houses
behind, enclosing the audience as at the Globe, sustained and
intensified a personal and intimate relationship, compelling the
actors to make themselves heard over the clamour of those who
had come to the theatre for many other purposes than watching the
play. This made visible one interpetation of drama as metaphor
(all the worlds a stage, and all the people on it merely players),
while at the same time intensifying
another, that drama itself was an illusion, a performance, a coming
together of many different talents, in which clowns were as
important as tragedians, musicians and tumblers as important as
either, and those who found, made or borrowed the costumes
central to the creative endeavour. The actors as a company, itself
a metaphor for the idea of community outside the theatre, became
well known in Shakespeares time, as the Lord Chamberlains
Men or the Admirals Men. Scenery was still unimportant,
except in the form of a bank or trees; but voice (speak the speech
trippingly upon the tongue, I pray you ) gesture (sometimes in
dumb-show) and properties of various kinds had become
essential. You cant have alarums and excursions without drums!
All were capable of provoking wonder at the spectacle; and
wonder belongs to the sub- Uminal, the threshold of perception,
where drama occurs at the meeting-point between the imagined
and the actual.
The increasing complexity of the spectacle has dominated the
history of the theatre in the post-Renaissance period; and still
does in the musical theatre of the late twentieth century in The
Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Les Miserables. All this
sophistication half-conceals the fact that, for theatre to occur, all
that is required is a space, an audience and someone performing
in that space so that the audience wonders at their skill. At its
simplest, this may be the skill of appearing to eat fire; at its most
complex, the power to make the audience see in imagination what
they had not seen before, whether a wood outside Athens, or
Prosperos sea-girt isle. As many contemporary productions
prove, lavishness and expense do not make this magic, though
the technological resources of the modern theatre can help. Stage
design remains the art of pruning, because the simple allows the
imagination free play; the over-elaborate deadens and restricts
because it states too much.
In Shakespeares theatre, the performance beginning in the
late afternoon would continue as the evening drew in, so that the
rush-lights and tapers could cast their flickering shadows over the
tragedies of blood which were frequently performed. Natural hght
was beginning to give way, however simply, to
Making Theatre
the light and shadow which the enclosed space of a theatre like the
Globe made possible. But it was in the fuUy enclosed space of the
Hall, where Royal performances occurred, that in the course of the
first part of the seventeenth century, particularly in Italy, and the
masques of the Caroline court, the scenic theatre began to evolve;
and with it the theatrical form, in which music becomes as
important as any of the other creative talents: opera.
In the Court masque for which elaborate stage machinery was
required, costing then as now immense sums, the clouds could
part, and Heaven be revealed. But the illusion could only be
sustained if the machinery was concealed; and the machinery did
not interfere with the audiences illusion. For this the proscenium
arch, like a picture-frame, was indispensable, as were the wings
which gave depth and perspective. All this radically altered not
just the stage for opera but the theatres for all kind of
performance, and the dramas which came to be written for them.
Even the names given to the tiers of the theatre, the stalls, the
royal or dress circle, the gallery (and gods) invoked a new
formality in the relationship between stage and audience, which
the rise of the high bourgeoisie in cities, mainly capital cities,
intensified.
Whatever the shape of the stage, including its rake, the size of
the auditorium and the position of the spectators, the only purpose
of any arrangement is to facilitate the performance. To perform
means literally to complete by adding what is wanting. The
performing arts do this; and the more holly they complete what is
written down - whether a musical score, a choreographers design
or the script of a play the more an audience will be aware of a
great performance. The act of completion requires an audience.
As the Chorus puts it at the start of Shakespeares King Henry V:
O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention;
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And
monarchs to behold the swelling scene.
Without the monarchs - or the substitutes for them the
scene would not swell, because the completion occurs in their
imagining.
Since the proscenium arch was removed at the Shakespeare
Memorial Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, and Tyrone Guthrie
insisted on an arena theatre in Stratford, Ontario in the 1960s the
debate has continued about theatre-space. Tyrone Guthrie has
been among the few practitioners - like Richard Wagner at
Bayreuth who has been able to see a theatre built which
matched what he thought to be the right conditions for a
performance. Unlike Wagner, Guthrie had to produce his first
festival in a specially designed tent, later replaced by a permanent
structure. The relation of the stage to the auditorium is such that
a large audience - nearly two thousand people can be
accommodated so near the actors that the farthest spectators are
only thirteen rows from the front. In a proscenium theatre of
similar capacity those in the back rows would be more than twice
as far from the stage. (Guthrie, pp. 300-1). In positioning the
audience two-thirds of the way round the stage, Guthrie realized
his own conception of what a performance was intended to be and
do; and unlike Wagner who made his orchestra invisible so that
nothing should interfere with the stage-illusion, Guthrie started
from the opposite conviction;
I beheve that the theatre makes its effect not by means of

illusion, but by ritual.
People do not believe that what they see or hear on the
stage is really happening. Action on the stage is a styhsed
reenactment of real action, which is then imagined by the
audience [my italics]. The re-enactment is not merely an
imitation but a symbol of the real thing. ... It [the audience]
should, however, participate in the ritual with sufficient
fervour to be rapt, literally taken out of itself, to the extent
that it shares the emotion which the actor is suggesting. It
completes the circle of action and reaction; its function is not
passive but active. (Guthrie, p. 313)
Making Theatre
In this active participation, the performance will determine not
only the degree to which the audience is rapt but also when the
play is done what it reflects on, what it has been moved by, what
it rationally assents to. A performance continues in the mind after
the performance is over; and we ask ourselves what we have
witnessed. The power of the actor to draw the audience into the
stage illusion creates at the same time the shock-waves which
continue after the performance has ended. A somewhat crude
distinction is possible between the emotions aroused in us at the
time, and the reflection upon those emotions which occur after we
leave the theatre. Wordsworths emotion recollected in
tranquillity inspires him to write poetry. A re-creative act of
another but not altogether dissimilar kind occurs for an audience,
which crystallizes from the performance a view of what has
occurred.
All the arguments which continue about the shape of the stage,
the position of the audience, and the size of the auditorium are
only of interest in their relation to the resonance and clarity of the
truths which the audience carry away with them into the night: the
sword has many edges, but they must be sharp.
The three stages of the Royal National Theatre in London - the
arena in the Olivier, the proscenium arch in the Lyttelton, and the
studio in the Cottesloe can be seen as three commentaries on
this debate; and each has proved its strengths in different
productions. But the Olivier, for all its openness, remains the
hardest to fill with meaning. In the Olivier an audience is much
more likely to go to see than to participate in a performance.
Not surprisingly, young directors prefer to work in the Cottesloe
which, while an awkward space compared to the Swan at
Stratford-on-Avon, draws its audience into each move on the
stage. Theatre [as Peter Hall has remarked in his diaries] is about
people not buildings. Buildings are fine, they give you
opportunity, a foundation, but they are the second priority, not the
first. (Hall, p. 332).
The stage is an illuminated space which we can be made to imagine is
any place, any time. Within the wooden O of Shakespeares
theatre as in any other, we can be transported to the vasty fields of
France, and hear the very casques that did affright the air at
Agincourt. At one moment we can be in the Rome of Octavius
Caesar, and the next in the Egypt of Cleopatra. All that is required
is a Muse of fire, that will ascend the brightest Heaven of
Invention. This Muse may take the form as in Shakespeares
prologue to Henry the Fifth only of words; but we may also be
transported by a set, or music, or silence into some other land.
Just as space can be girdled very fast, as Puck knows, so time too
is the stages domain. Arthur Miller in The Death of a Salesman
(first called Inside his Head) created a drama in which there was a
mobile concurrency of past and present. Spatially and
temporally, the stage mirrors the processes of consciousness.
Between birth and death, waking and sleeping, consciousness is
like an illuminated space, pained, humorous, joyful, questioning.
Every minute consciousness presses against the ceiling of self-
knowledge, trying to make sense, find pathways of whatever
sort, and is limited by closed doors through which it cannot pass.
Consciousness has its own sight-lines, is enclosed and boundless;
and like a stage action can shift rapidly in time and space, but
cannot move beyond its own sight-lines. We can explore our
consciousness, our consciousness can develop or shrink, but we
can never stand outside it, just as, although people and events
exist offstage, they only do so in relation to an action we are
watching on stage. The action of a play cannot be other than it is;
its details are variable; but not its substance, any more than an
identity is variable. (Even when someone goes mad, the change
occurs only within certain limits; they are still recognizably
themselves in many aspects of their bearing and behaviour, as
Blanche always reminds us in A Streetcar Named Desire.)
Samuel Becketts Play makes brilliant play of this relationship
between stage and consciousness. The three characters, up to their
necks in urns, only speak when the light shines on
10 Making Theatre
them. The spotlight is an interrogator; it compels them, by shining on
them in turn, to speak, which is to say, reflect, remember, feel
pain, attempt to come to terms with what they have done, make
sense of experience, when it would be more peaceful to be left in
the dark; but once the light shines, they have no choice, just as on
waking we have no choice but to resume consciousness, and find
another way of surviving another happy day. So the spot is also
an internal light: the light of awareness pressing against its own
limitations. When it goes out, sleep once more relieves the pain.
But we are also aware in this post-Brechtian theatre that the spot is
just a spot: Play is play; and like all theatre is a liberating release
of energy, a coming together of multiple skills. We see the
relevance of the action to a waking-sleeping world; but we can
also find relief in watching the spots create the action, reminding
us that this is theatre, not life.
What happens on the stage, and everything which is on the
stage throughout the performance is part of an action abstracted
from experience not in the sense that it is abstract, on the
contrary it is (or should be) vivid, concrete in every detail but
an abstraction in that it is an action complete in itself: isolated,
and held up before us in that illuminated stage space, in which we
become participants. Here too it differs from the cinema, in which
we are always taken in by moving images: and everything which
moves, moves from somewhere to somewhere. The essence of a
moving image is that it is not where it was five minutes ago; and
so the cinema is always concerned with passage. The camera
tracks, moves in and out of close-up, pans from left to right and
right to left, changes in focal length and depth. A movie is built up
from sequences. Its success (or failure) depends on the way those
sequences are edited together, cut short, held, juxtaposed; its art is
an art of moving at variable speeds, in a process where we are
always losing the previous sequence, like a ship which loses in its
wake the water its passage has just churned up. A play is an act of
simultaneity, even if divided into acts and scenes,a whirlwind of
concurrent events; a play in performance is always in
the present; a film has been engraved, a play is always being
painted.
Sophocles in his late play, Philoctetes increased the number of
actors from two to three, so that the conflict became not as
previously a battle of wills but of characters acting and reacting
with each other; and so working out their fate. Sophocles set his
play on a desolate part of the island of Lemnos, where Philoctetes
has been abandoned by his companions on account of a foul-
smelHng wound, until they have need of his bow to win the
Trojan War. Writing three hundred or more years after the Trojan
War, Sophocles abstracted from it an action which questions
mans nature and the standards by which we judge it. As he wrote
eleswhere, many things are strange, but nothing is stranger than
man. Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra has forty-two scenes;
and observes none of the unities of which Aristotle approved, but
in an action also abstracted from experience, and even more
remote from the Elizabethan world, asks whether the world is
well lost for love. What matters is the action as whole. The
images before us we know to be imaginary, and they ask us to
question their relationship to the world in which we live, where
the value we place on public roles and private lives remains equally
divisive, and open to censure. A play, abstracted from experience,
offers a way of getting ones bearings on the world, an orientation
in space.
The nineteenth-century play with its three-act structure, each
act being in its way complete in itself, attempts to conceal this
fact (out of deference to an audience wishing to refresh itself).
This risks fracture,but does not conceal that the play succeeds or
fails by the significance of the action overall. Every Greek play
has this in common with a play by Samuel Beckett or Arthur
Miller; and all of them differ in this from the art of the cinema.
When an attempt was made to film Arthur Millers Death of a
Salesman it failed because the cinema did what it has to do, in
moving from location to location, while Millers play has only
one location, inside Willys head, where the action moves freely,
as in consciousness
12 Making Theatre
between past, present and future. But this very restriction is also what
makes a stage action boundless; it has the freedom of the mind at
play, while the film is bound by a visual narrative, which in
recapturing the past depends on the crude device of flashback.
The cinema is also dependent on what can be captured on film.
The camera cannot see at night, while a darkened stage can be
boundlessly suggestive, as in the first scene of Hamlet. The ghost
is here, is there and gone. The camera has to see something, even
if it is only swirling mist. The theatre compels us to imagine what
we do not see.
A dramatic action, because of its brevity, presses towards a climax, a

goal, even if not a resolution. In this whirlwind motion we see the
content of the world as simultaneous, a cross-section of inter-
relationships in what appears to be a single moment, though we
know it not to be. In a dramatic action there is always a triumph
over time, for speed is the single means for overcoming time in
time, of making time disappear. Stage time and real time bear
little relation to each other, even when they are meant to be
related. This matters litde even if as in Othello the time-scheme
makes Cassios seduction of Desdemona impossible, since they
travel to Cyprus on separate ships, and spend no time together, a
fact which neither Othello, nor the audience, notices.
The axe which falls on Chekhovs cherry orchard cuts down a
way of life, a set of relationships which cannot be restored. The
poignancy felt at the end of The Cherry Orchard is not to begin
with political or social, but the feeling left by the absence of the
familiar, of what gives a sense of assurance and identity, and
arouses in the audience an affection for lives as distinctive and
familiar as those of friends. Gayev, like any uncle, has an
affection for a bookcase, enjoys his boiled sweets and playing
billiards. The transience of things is as inseparable from the
theatre as firom life itself. Until a family moves, the hfe of a
house appears to have permanence; the particularities of a way of
life, the cars in the drive, the curtains in the
window signal how it is; until one morning they have all disappeared,
as though they have never existed. As Linda tells her sons in
Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman: Youve got to get it into
your head now that one day youll knock on this door and therell
be strange people here.
And so it is with theatres which when we pass them in the
street can only offer the ghosts of insubstantial pageants faded.
The two or three hours traffic of the stage plays on a deep
recognition of life outside the theatre. AH that is here today, is
gone tomorrow. A part of the theatres hold comes from this
translation. Cinema and televison can in no way rival or
reproduce this effect, which rises from the presence of actors and
audience in a living relationship, bonded by the knowledge that
we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our litde life is
rounded with a sleep. All too are but shadows: an awareness
which Shakespeare shares wdth Sophocles, and both with those
who go dancing at Lughnasa, or find with Tom in The Glass
Menagerie that they are more faithful to their memories than they
intended to be. As the wily Odysseus, the counterfeiter and actor
asks: Are we not all. All living things, mere phantoms, shadows
of nothing? (Sophocles, Ajax, hnes 11617). Seen like this, the
theatre is always a metaphysical art.
The wind and the rain to which we are returned on leaving
Illyria suggests a transportation from a land we have come to
know and love to another of deeper uncertainty. The play at one
and the same time takes us to a place where nothing can ever be
other than it is, and then dissolves it, when the curtain falls, with
the finahty of death.
Plots differ from stories in novels in that their juxtaposition of scenes

adds up not to a sequence in time, but to a single picture of how
things are. Plot and sub-plot (Lears mental suffering and
Gloucesters physical suffering in King Lear) are both parts of a
single action. Even Ibsens Peer Gynt the most sequential of all
plays, representing Peers life from youth to old age, does not
dramatize Peers life as in a Bildungsroman but
14 Making Theatre
Peers self. The enigma of the action revolves around the gyntian
self; and whether the self, like the onion, has any heart? Is Peer
right to say his epitaph should read, Here no one is buried? What
actually happens to Peer becomes increasingly unimportant. In the
Egyptian lunatic asylum he is crowned the emperor of self; and
selfhood becomes a reductio ad absurdum. In Dickenss David
Copperfield, unlike Peer Gynt, one cannot speak of the
unimportance of events. A play is in this sense much closer to a
poem than a novel.
A play also differs from a novel in another fundamental way.
A play, like life, is always concerned with roles, and roleplaying,
with masks and masking, with identities which shift and are fixed.
Eugene ONeill once expressed this duality, like this: Ones outer
life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; ones
inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself
(Cole, 67). An actor is cast in a part; and for the run he will play
that part, however much the performance differs from night to
night.
Jean Anouilhs Antigone (1942), one of the great plays of the
Second World War, written in occupied France, sees this as being
central not just to tragedy as a dramatic form, but to life as tragic.
Antigone will continue defying Creon and burying her brother
against his orders because that is what it means to be Antigone.
She can do no other night after night. That is what Antigone is
born to do. In life too, all are given roles, which they cannot
change; no one can become someone else; and though they may
not be entirely the same person they were yesterday, they are
much more the same than they are someone else. Characters in a
play also change only within limits. Cleopatra, the serpent of old
Nile puts on immortal longings; but she is stiU Cleopatra; and
the Duchess of Malfi, tortured, forced to endure the sight of her
murdered lover and children, subjected to the worst forms of
mental and physical suffering is Duchess of Malfi still. However
much they change, people, like characters in a play, remain the
same.
Nonetheless, identity is not a fixed, simple or stable thing.
And the theatre plays on this in many ways which neither the
cinema, nor the novel can. An actor in a film is always seen as the
camera perceives him to be; the angle fiom which he is shot, the
length and nature of the sequence will determine how we see him;
and that cannot be changed. The camera is a private eye which
observes and records, under the complete control of the director.
Apart from the interference of studios and censors, the director
fixes the work for ever.
The novehst can only write about events which have
happened, since they cannot be written about as they occur. In the
theatre, there are no private eyes, only the palpable presence of
someone playing a role in the present, shared by the audience for
as long as they remain in the theatre, and sustained by the actor
only as long as he or she remains in the theatre. For a time, on
both sides of the footlights something has been shared, which
involves an awareness of the roles we play, and of their shifting
nature; that what people say may not reflect what they feel, or
like mountain tops rising above the mist may misrepresent it.
The adoption of roles in both cases is far from being a
conscious process, though for the actor it is more radical and self-
aware, a separation of what he does from what he is; and may
involve as Lynne Redgrave has recendy shown in her great solo
performance of Shakespeare for my Father in England and the
United States the disappearance of the person behind the disguise
or disguises, so that he becomes even to his own daughter the
roles he plays, a Richard, or Hamlet, or an Antony.
A great deal has been written by actors and directors about
this talent for transformation. To Stanislavsky, it involved a
method which had to be acquired, a discipline not unlike a
spiritual exercise, requiring complete submission and involving
the imagination of characters past and future fives. Brecht in his
dislike of empathy, and his belief in the gestus wanted the actor to
distance himself fiom the part, so that he could always signal to
the audience its provisional nature, its social conditioning.
Accordingly, his characters lacked any focused inner life. But
between these two grand conceptions lies a
16 Making Theatre
more particular landscape of observation, and imitation, which the actor
practises all the time. When preparing a role Laurence Olivier
always tried to hit on some external starting point - be it a false
nose, a wry smile, a specific person or just a pair of old boots
as a prop on which to build the rest of his performance (Holden,
p. 3). As the Captain in Strindbergs The Dance of Death he
strutted like an officer on parade through his marriage, with aU
the assurance and insecurity which the non-promoted may often
personify. Oliviers greatness arose out of many things which
were physically calculated, however unconsciously acquired; he
built the part inward from the outward thing. The terrible cry
which he uttered as Oedipus when he realized the truth about
himself was achieved hke this: He read in a magazine of the way
ermine are trapped in the Arctic; the hunters put salt on the ice, the
ermine licks it and its tongue freeezes to the ice. It was from the
unique torment of the trapped ermine that Olivier conjured his
devastating Oedipus scream. To him, the technique justified his
belief that it is next to impossible to produce the effect of great
suffering without the actor enduring some degree of it. (Holden,
p. 249). Ralph Richardson built outward from an inward question
such as what would he sound like? The magic of a Richardson
performance came from a feeling that however much observation
had gone into the part, there was always something just out of
reach in the role, for which he was searching, trying to pluck the
heart out of the mystery which was someone else. And as we all
do with ourselves, let alone other people, falling just short of the
goal. Richardsons dissatisfaction with his acting, with his
continued working at a role after the play had opened came
perhaps from a profound, if unexpressed awareness, that we are
strangers to one another, and to ourselves. When he was eighty, he
still believed he had not achieved much.
At times perhaps at all times acting may depend on
some intangible symbiosis between the role and the performer, as
in this analysis of Peggy Ashcrofts relationship with Hester
CoUyer in Terence Rattigans The Deep Blue Sea. She
was married [at the time] to an eminent QC,Jeremy Hutchinson, and
one of her two earlier marriages had been sexless. She was, by all
accounts, a most passionate and amorous woman, whose
enjoyment of sex with many lovers also shocked her sense of
respectabiUty. There is conflict between Hesters conventional
manner and her relish of sex. Maybe Aschcroft truly found no
common denominator between herself and the character [as she
claimed] or maybe, Uke Hester, she had difficulty in
acknowledging it (Duff, p. 131).
Role-playing, masking, putting on costume and make-up have
always been things which theatre has played with; and in the
twentieth century drama has become more selfconsciously aware
of them. The theatre which held a mirror up to nature has also
enjoyed holding a mirror up to itself.This is not something
entirely new.Jaques in As You Like It knew that all the worlds a
stage, and all the people on it merely players. Coriolanus never
forgets, or Shakespeare never forgets in writing Coriolanus the
difference between political rhetoric, and the man within. In
speaking at all, we are playing roles created by the language we
command. Wittgenstein was right in saying, the limits of our
language are the Hmits of our world; but language is not the
limit of our identities, and is frequently a concealment of our
selves which are not unitary, shifting with our circumstances and
our environment, physical and human. In this century, and
particularly in the last fifty years, the language of drama has
become more audaciously concerned with itself, and with this
fact.
One of the great plays of the twentieth century, Pirandellos
Six Characters in Search of an Author is about just this. At the
start, the actors are rehearsing an earlier play by Pirandello, The
Rules of the Game. Their rehearsal is interrupted by a family of
characters whom their author has created, and then abandoned.
They are looking for a play to be in; and, understandably, the
director and his actors are irritated by this sudden invasion of
their rehearsal.On the spaces of the OHvier stage in 1984, when
Richard Pasco played the part of the Father, the family emerged
mysteriously from the bright
18 Making Theatre
illumination of the stage door into the shadowy areas of the rehearsal
space towards the front of the stage. Moving as a group, they
seemed to find assurance from each others proximity - ironically
in terms of the subsequent action - as they advanced into a world
which they did not understand, and was hostile to them. They
demand to be heard, to find the author who has created them, and
to understand the play for which their parts have been written.
They come as supplicants who will not be ignored, and who
interrupt the action which already is in rehearsal. They are both
afraid of coming into the light, and at the same time are compelled
to do so. The emergence of these visionary figures depends for its
effect on their distancing at the outset from the actors on the stage
- an effect which was destroyed in Franco ZeffireUis production,
when he filled the stage with movement and confusion.
The characters come to the dramatist out of the dark in an
action which is not yet complete; whose meaning he does not yet
know. Imaginative truth and truth to life are inseparable here,
since we are all in search of an author, of a key to understanding
the action in which we are involved; and are also surrounded as
these characters are here by those who think, or appear to think,
that their roles have been given in a play which is complete. We
all emerge on a stage where the rehearsal has been going on a
very long time; and into which we insert ourselves, demanding to
be heard, to speak our lines and to find ourselves truly
represented. The irony of the action as it subsequently develops is
that the actors in trying to play the roles of the characters turn
them into people they are not, ascribe to them actions and feelings
which they deplore, and turn their truth into a fiction. Only the
characters in search of their author have a certain identity; and
their tragedy is that it is fixed; they are born to play themselves.
The action of the play is created out of that gap which exists
between what cannot be changed and what cannot be interpreted
with finality.
This tension between what is fixed and subject to change
(Hamlet is always Hamlet, and always different) is grounded in the
metaphor of the stage itself which is at one time the most limited
and bounded of spaces: bounded by sight-lines (what the audience
can see from aU parts of the auditorium), and by the relation
between stage and audience, whether in the round, on an apron or
behind a proscenium arch. When we go to the theatre, our
attention is focused on that illuminated and restricted space, the
stage or acting area. But the stage is also the most boundless of
spaces; it is finite, and also without an end, bounded without a
boundary. What is happening off-stage may affect those on stage,
as in Harold Pinters The Dumb Waiter where the instructions
placed on the dumb-waiter come firom above, without those on
the stage (or the audience) knowing who sends them. What the
audience, and the characters can know about off-stage action is
always limited; here too the stage reflects the determined and
indeterminate nature of things. In Samuel Becketts Act without
Words, 2 Beckett uses the stage as metaphor to suggest this:
Desert. Dazzling light.

The man is flung backwards on stage from right wing. He
falls, gets up immediately, dusts himself, turns aside, reflects.
Whistle from right wing.
He reflects, goes out right.
Immediately flung back on stage, befalls, gets up
immediately, dusts himself, turns aside, reflects.
Whistle from left wing.
He reflects, goes towards the left wing, hesitates, thinks
better of it, halts, turns aside, reflects.
A little tree descends from flies, lands. It has a single
bough, some three yards from ground and at its summit a
meagre tuft of palms casting at its foot a circle of shadow.
He continues to reflect.
Whistle from above.
He turns, sees tree, reflects, goes to it, sits down in its
shadow, looks at his hands.
20 Making Theatre
A pair of tailors scissors descends from flies, comes to rest
before tree, a yard from ground.
He continues to look at his hands.
Whistle from above.
He looks up, sees scissors, takes them and starts to trim his
nails.
The palms close like a parasol, the shadow disappears.
He drops scissors, reflects.
The man when we first see him is being flung back on the
stage from the right wing (this is the stage, not a desert but the
desert is also a stage) by something, someone off-stage, and what
is off-stage we can never know; no more can he. When a whistle
summons him to the left, he tries that too, but hesitates and thinks
better of going out left. What is the nature of these forces, which
throw us to the ground, whenever we attempt anything, and which
nevertheless we resist by picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves
down, reflecting and having another go? Genetic, psychological,
social, historical, economic? Or some complex combination of
them all? We cannot know. In life, as on the stage, you also cannot
make your exit until the author lets you go, if as here the means of
self-destruction are denied you. The meaning of what is happening
cannot be fixed with certainty, just as life itself cannot be fixed on
a pin.
But stage space is also space to be played with. A litde tree
descends from flies: the space above the stage where a piece of
scenery is concealed from the audience until it is required in the
play. Who causes it to be lowered, or subsequently flown again?
What it stands for, what it offers - temporary relief, or a new
torment? - these remain open questions. But it is indisputably a
stage effect, determined by design and lighting. The meagre tuft of
palms casts at its foot a circle of shadow; and it is into this circle
of shadow that the man will temporarily move, and where he will
seek refuge from the pitiless desert sun. So playing with space is
not just playing with stage as space, but playing with space on the
stage, and in doing so establishing relationships between inner and
outer worlds.
In deciding (though this is probably too conscious a word)
what to illuminate in this stage-space, the dramatist may use as
Shakespeare and Brecht do the distancing of historical time. In
Brechts Mother Courage set in the Thirty Years War of the
seventeenth century, the progress of war in time matters httle.
The town of Halle, which features in the final scene of the play,
might be any town which the progress of the war threatens. The
action of this so-called chronicle play is not a chronicle at all; its
episodes resemble a series of superimposed snap-shots which
reveal the effect of war on the lives and relationships of Mother
Courage and her family. By the end of the action, she will have
lost all three of her children, and will have to drag her cart,
relendesly on, over a windswept landscape, alone. In the final
image of the BerHner Ensemble production, the cart receding into
a frozen stillness, we are left simultaneously with an image of
courage and loneHness, of courage and despair, of courage and
baseness. Mother Courage has lost all and changed nothing. She
has risked everything to survive, and survived alone. She has fed
off the bones of war, and received her just reward. In a world, and
a war, where necessity goes unchallenged, according to Brecht,
out of ignorance, the repetitions of time only reflect the lack of a
critical spirit which demands to know why. War as an implosion
within human territory is being questioned, not war as a sequence
in time. When this play begins, the war has already begun; when
it ends, the war still goes on. The central image of the play is that
of human society at war with itself, where dog eats dog. The
figures of the seventeenth century speak to us out of the past,
asking whether a world which has not changed at aU, by 1939
(when Brecht wrote the play) or by 1996, has to be hke this. The
space which is illuminated is that of a space between people; a
national and personal no-mans land, which becomes the territory
of violence.
Brecht uses his illuminated space to show a social order
which, whatever the names or the place, does not change.
Timberlake Wertenbaker in the more recent Our Countrys Good
(1988) suggests that, while human nature changes very
22 Making Theatre
little, the stage is a space where change can occur. Set in a convict
colony in Australia in 1787, the action of Our Countrys Good
revolves around a debate as to whether the proper entertainment
for convicts is watching a hanging, or whether the violence done
to them by the society from which they have been sent into exile
might not be exorcised by getting them to put on a play the first
Australian performance of Farquhars The Recruiting Officer -
whether they might not be humanized by fine language and
sentiments: a tenuous enough argument, it might be thought. The
action begins with the savage flogging of one of the convicts on
the voyage out; it ends with laughter and clapping, and the
triumphant music of Beethovens Fifth Symphony, as the
audience (or audiences in the convict colony and the theatre)
begin to watch the performance. Both have been recruited into an
action which moves from sullen cowed silence to victorious
affirmation. Convicts who begin without words have been
restored to language. The action has moved from one state of
feeling to another with that whirlwind motion of which the drama
is capable; and has sent the audience (both audiences) away with
the knowledge that inarticulate rage and despair can be turned at
least temporarily into something other: that the illuminated space
can not just question, but transform (possibly) the nature of our
little society. The play is a world in itself a tiny colony we
could almost say. Our Countrys Good is concerned not just with
what a play says, but what a play can do; and in arguing the
transformation of which theatre is capable argues also by analogy
for the same possibility in society. The theatre is like a small
repubUc, it requires private sacrifices for the good of the whole.
The play itself is an enactment, not so much of what it says, but
what it is: and it exploits the resources of the language of the
theatre: physical action, music, silence, lighting, costume and
suggestiveness.
Every production, and performance, has its moment. Even

though video recordings make possible a record, it can only be a
historical record, interesting for its technique and its style.
Theatres power to take the audience out of itself, rises out of a
mutual recognition between stage and audience, which is created
out of the moment, and at the moment. A production and a
performance may to a greater or lesser extent affect us like a
dream. But every production has one thing in common with a
dream. No one dreams yesterdays dream: the essence of
dreaming, whether by day or by night, is of the moment, images
fusing from past and present in a new apprehension. A
performance, like a dream, is always something being worked
out. Whether the play has been written six months or two
thousand five hundred years ago, theatre is always born of this
truth,which the producer and the actors discover. Peter Brook puts
it like this:
it became clear that a play of Shakespeare, and therefore a
production of Shakespeare, could go far beyond the unity that
one mans imagination could give, beyond that of the director
and designer. And it was only through discovering that there
was far more to it than that my interest moved from just liking
the play, and therefore showing my own image of the play, to
another process, which starts always with the instinctive
feeling that the play needs to be done, now.
This is a big change of attitude; without thinking
consciously or analytically, there is this sense that this play is
meaningful in many ways at this moment which opens a new
awareness. Its not only that its meaningful for me
autobiographically at this moment. At certain points in ones
life one can identify and wish to do a youthful play, a bitter
play, a tragic play. This is fine, but one can then go beyond to
see how a whole area of living experience that seems close to
ones own concerns is also close to the concerns of the people
in the world around one. When these elements come together,
then is the time to do that play, and not another. (SP, pp. 78-9)
24 Making Theatre
Peter Brooks productions of King Lear (1962), The Mahab-
harata (1988) and The man who (1994) mirror these transitions.
Brook was drawn to King Lear as the the prime example of the
Theatre of the Absurd (Waiting for Godot had first been produced
in England by Peter Hall in 1955). The barbarism and ferocity of
the Second World War, and the almost unimaginable depths of
cruelty in human nature that it revealed were still being absorbed
into the consciousneness of Europe. Brooks production reflected
this sense of horror and absurdity. By the time of The
Mahabharata, a new global consciousness, created out of the
migration of people, the mixing of cultures, the questioning of
national identities made the moment right for its appearance, and
its performance by actors themselves drawn from many different
countries and cultural backgrounds. The production attempted to
suggest both how Indian (and culturally different) The
Mahabharata will always be, and its power to echo feelings which
have been true for all mankind. As Yudhishthira says: Each day,
death strikes and we live as though we were immortal (p. 105).
The man who, dramatized from Oliver Sackss book on
neurological disorders, reflected a quite different and growing
preoccupation of the nineties, with the frontiers of human
perception and behaviour, with the relations between mind and
body, with the bizarre and inexplicable in human nature, at the
crossing-points of consciousness. The last decade of the
millennium seemed to combine a growing interest in science and
medical research (Oxford University now has a Chair in the Public
Understanding of Science) with a return to a sense of how
mysterious and inscrutable human beings are; and the new
frontiers into other spaces which the human brain may yet cross:
space travel in both senses.
Productions do not reflect conscious intentions of this sort.
Theatre, like other forms of art, is intuitive, catching things on the
wing, only fully realized for what they are when they have passed.
We have the experience, and only later know the meaning. There
is an irony here, peculiar to theatre in all its forms. Although by its
very nature theatre is transient, it is the
transient thing which Hves in the memory as a presence. Some
productions seem, as the scroll moves on, to define a moment
with a symbohc relation to past and future by the particularity
with which they belong to the moment of their conception.
What Peter Brook identifies as the moment for a production
apphes equally to the preparation of a role. Every actor and
actress goes about this in his or her own way, needing more or
less direction from the director. Out of the subtle and complex
chemistry between the roles of performer and director has grown
the often aggressive argument in the last forty years beween those
who resent a directors theatre, and those who applaud its
achievements. In both roles the English stage has been inspired
with a huge amount of talent since the Second World War. Its
creative diversity, of which the country has every reason to be
proud, has enabled the theatre to remain a place of exploration
and invention, including directors as different as Peter Brook and
Peter Hall, actors as different as John Gielgud and Steven
Berkoff, companies with styles as different as those of the Royal
Shakespeare Company (though the style is now that of a
production, rather than that of a company) and Cheek by Jowl or
Theatre de Complicite. Whatever the relationship between actor
and director, however the actor prepares his or her part, and
whether or not the director has an idea or a concept for the
production, aU that matters in the end is the truth of the result;
and this again is something which only the audience judges when
the theatre has gone dark.
Shoot first, ask questions afterwards defines how theatre
works, as Peter Brook has said. And the same is true of the actor
who has to find within himself those other beings who
temporarily he (or she) becomes. With the greatest actors this can
become an almost physical transformation not just through make-
up and costume; but as though another of the many selves we all
bear within us has risen to the surface, like the Kraken from the
deep, and transformed one person into someone else: the actor is
quite literally a shape-shifter. Laurence OUviers acting was
memorable for this physical
26 Making Theatre
transformation, which became the inscape of the character. As Astrov
in Uncle Minya, Solness in The Master Bw/Wer, James Tyrone in
Long Days Journey into Night, Tattle in Loue for Love, and the
Captain in The Dance of Death he drew upon resources and
strengths of an always shifting kind which affected his posture, his
manner of walking, his physical deportment, down to the smallest
detail. In his famous performance as Othello (1963), he took
infinite pains in the training of his voice, to reproduce the
intonations, the gestures, the rolling eyes which represented for
him not just Othellos character as a Moor, but as a negro. He
belonged more to the Caribbean than to Cyprus, reflecting the
words of the play Haply for I am black, but also what he saw
around him in London. He would look and talk and walk like a
negro - yes, a contemporary negro, of the kind now commonplace
(if only recently) on the streets of London, drawing the play not
always comfortably into the arena of race relations (Holden, pp.
4624). The performance as well as the production belonged to its
moment.
The physical strain of giving such a performance is immense,
as Tyrone Guthrie has pointed out:
It is not perhaps generally realized what a great physical, as
well as intellectual and imaginative, effort is involved in the
performance of a great role like Macbeth, Lear or Othello. A
series ofarias have to be performed which, if they are to be
adequate, make elaborate demands on the breathing apparatus,
under the full resources of the voice from top to bottom. At
some stage of the evening, athletic demands will be made -
Lear must carry Cordelia, Hamlet must carry the body of
Polonius; there are duels, battles. Othello must, after a violent
struggle with lago, feign epilepsy. In mere casual movement
hither and yon upon the stage an actor wiU walk several miles
in the performance of a big part, often in armour or dragging a
great cloak; there wiU be several changes of costume, all of
which have to be accomplished under the strain of very
limited time. An important
thing to learn in the course of rehearsal is where and how to
rest, how to eke out the hmited resources of energy so that
there will still be enough in reserve for the critical last lap. All
these are problems which do not arise in the film studio.
(Guthrie, p. 11)
Films are almost never shot in sequence; and actors may have
litde sense of the performances being given by those in scenes
other than their own. Even rehearsals, as they occur in the theatre,
with the possibility of experimentation and rejection of the
excessive are rare. Only the director really knows when he has
got what he wants; and then the scene is finished. In the theatre
everything has to be recreated every night. Whether it works, or
how well it works, depends on a dynamic between the actor, his
fellow actors and the audience: a dynamic which changes every
time the play is performed. Olivier, being congratulated on one
occasion after a performance of Othello repUed angrily: I know
it was great, dammit, but I dont know how I did it. So how can I
be sure of doing it again? (Holden, pp. 2-3) It depends, at least
partly, on the combination of an intense preparation and
discipline with an ability to let go and let the play perform. The
pianist, Alfred Brendel, writing about a concert performance,
summed up this interplay between preparation and spontaneity,
demanding the utmost control and self-discipline, as it apphes to
all the performing arts: You have to think and feel in advance
what you want to do and, simultaneously, to listen to what you
are doing, and react to that. You have to play to satisfy yourself,
and also play so that the people in the back row will get the
message (Interview with A.Alvarez, New Yorker,! April
1996,p.55).
The impalpable element in a performance, the heart of its
mystery, which cannot be plucked out, or made to order, lies in
the imagination. As Stanislavsky realized, scenic truth is not like
truth in life. Stage truth is discovered by the actor within himself,
through imagination, and a childlike naivety and trustfulness
which enables him to develop an artistic
28 Making Theatre
sensitivity to the truthful in soul and body. Simon Callow, describing
the effect of a good performance, associates it with a dazzling
mental clarity. The chambers of the brain open up one by one.
The number of levels on which you are thinking is uncountable
(Callow, p. 200).
This sense of being totally present which all acts of
imagination involve is brought by the great actor to every part,
however small. No one can show, no one can really act what the
audience sees a great actor do. He doesnt in point of fact do it.
He suggests it to you and you do the work in your own
imagination (Miller, p. 4).
How a line is spoken - or can be spoken - depends on the
actors position on the stage whether he is sitting or standing
how near or far he is from everyone else on the stage. (These
things matter very much less on film, where the camera angle, and
sound-track determine the effect.) Simon Cadell (who died
recently when he was only just over forty) recalled a lesson he
had learned when he was twenty-two and acting with Richardson;
When I got too close to him, within two feet of him on the
stage, he said, Oh no. No. No, too close, youre in my
bubble. I understand it now totally. He knew that, unless one
was playing an intimate scene with somebody, space on the
stage is terribly important; and, if two characters who are not
being passionately intimate get too close, the audience
definition between the two disintegrates, and he called it his
bubble. It was in no sense ungenerous. (Miller, p.246)
In 1978, five years before his death, Ralph Richardson played
Firs in The Cherry Orchard. At the end of the play, when
everyone is thought to have left the house which has been closed
up for the winter. Firs suddenly appears again, abandoned, alone
with his memories of the life and the lives he has known there. He
is the sole survivor of a way of life which will not return. The axe
is already starting to faU on the
orchard trees; and the snapping of the string which symbolizes many
different kinds of ending - including hfe itself- is about to be
heard for the second and final time. What Richardson brought to
this part had a special poignancy for those of us who had known
and loved what he had brought to the theatre over many years. In
playing Firs he created the dignity and eccentricity of the ordinary
human being knowing he has to face his own death alone, and at a
moment when the way of hfe which has given him his identity is
also ending. As Kipling once said, there is something very lonely
about the soul preparing to go away; and Richardson alone in the
empty and silent house brought to those closing moments of the
play the immense resources of an actor who could imagine what
Firs was feeling. Not a feeling which could be articulated or
expressed, but a feeling which everyone understood as
inescapable, and to be confronted. His gift for perceiving poetry
in the commonplace was joined here to silence - that paper on
which the actor writes - until broken by the falling of his stick at
the moment of death.
This act of imagination which makes possible truthfulness in
soul and body plays in turn upon the audiences imagin ation, and
in doing so creates a sense of real presence more powerful than the
presence of people in a room can often do.
Nora in Ibsens A Dolls House has been played by many
famous actresses, from Janet Achurch in 1889, to Eleonara Duse,
Joan Greenwood, Anna Massey, Jane Fonda (in the film), Claire
Bloom, Juliet Stevenson, and most recently Janet McTeer. How
we respond to A Dolls House and what we think about it
afterwards, depends to some extent on the degree of sympathy
which we feel for Torvald: he can be anything, from odious bore
to a man whose emotional intelligence is tragically limited by the
conventions of his time. More crucially our response depends on
the change which occurs to Nora in the middle of the fourth act.
Here she changes from being Torvalds little song-bird into a
woman who reahzes her survival depends on leaving her husband
and children. As Shaw remarked, the sound of the front door
30 Making Theatre
slamming was heard all over Europe. In the recent production by
Anthony Page (1996), with Janet McTeer, it was not heard in the
front row of the stalls. When Janet Achurch turned on her
husband, her performance was described like this: In the last act
this great actress would magnify herself into the magnitude of
Boadicea, Briinnhilde and the Statue of Liberty thrown into one
(Meyer, quoting James Agate, p. 112). In overthrowing the petty
tyrant, she became the champion of womens emancipation
(however much Ibsen denied it), the expression of individual will
and the charioteer, who, with swords on her wheels, cuts down
those who get in her way. The type has not died out. Janet
McTeer, creating the role in 1996, played Nora from the start as
someone whose identity is created by her role, and who discovers,
to her cost, that the two things are not the same. When the
moment comes for her to turn on Torvald, she does so not with
triumph but with the deepening pain of what she has to give up -
her children and her home - to discover who she is. She
symbolizes a harsh truth that sometimes it can be necesary to
break down completely in order to discover a new self and a real
identity. She did not slam the door, because there was more pain
in her than anger; and the path she was going to take meant
isolation, hardship, and only perhaps renewal. In Janet McTeers
performance there was no triumph, only the hardening recognition
of what she had to do to survive. In the modern world - without
any obvious compass - that act of survival is what most of us have
to perform every day. Janet McTeer created from the first moment
of her appearance on the stage, when she tore at the parcels she
could not unwrap, the impression of a person under very great
stress. This local observation became part of her whole
conception of the effect on people of a close relationship
proceeding to ruin, of reaching the point where you know you can
no longer cope. In every gesture and movement she revealed a
stress only pardy understood, until it resolved itself into the
deeper pain of knowing she could not go on, without change. In
reflecting the conscious and unconscious ways in which
relationships disinte-
grate, Janet McTeers performance was drawn from the air of its time.
The way in which an actor builds up a part depends on a
combination of observation and technique, in which every actor
likes to conceal a good deal of the mystery; and every actor has
his or her own technique. As Richardson once remarked to a
fellow actor about to be interviewed: Dont tell them how it is
done! In rehearsal, two processes occur, sometimes separately,
sometimes together. Peter Hall has commented on this: I think
more and more that rehearsal should be divided quite clearly
between the learning of technique, and the creative process of the
actor. We shouldnt confuse the two and that is what we always
do.. . . Theres teaching technique, and theres trying to provoke
imagination, but separate them (Hall, p. 421). The learning of
technique may include learning to sew, or appearing to play a
musical instrument: in performance these acquired techniques
may enable an actor to be absolutely present; and at the same
time free the actor so that the play performs. As in many arts,
not to appear to be doing it is the secret of doing it well.
Even the learning of hnes presents an obstacle, and a technical
problem which is overcome in different ways, for reasons which
are far from technical. Noel Coward liked the cast to turn up to
the first rehearsal word-perfect (not so difficult for him as he had
often written the words) because otherwise so much time was
wasted. Gielgud preferred a different approach:
In my view, it is much easier to learn the words when you
have the movements and the business. It is important to know
how the other actor is going to speak his line so that both of
you can react properly. If you start absolutely wordperfect,
like a parrot, I think it makes every thing flat and dull.
(Gielgud, pp. 45-6)
Some actors, even great actors, do not get to know their lines until the
first night, and even then continue to be able to
32 Making Theatre
cover up lapses of memory by skilful ad-libbing, which the audience
may even not notice, provided the rhythm of the performance is
not broken. Edith Evans was notorious for not learning her lines,
Ralph Richardson, for inventing when his memory failed him.
One night when he was playing Sir Anthony Absolute in
Sheridans The Rivals, the cast heard him say; So let me invite
you to the Om-pom-pom-pom, where we will drink a health to the
young couples and a husband to Mrs Malaprop. But nobody in
the audience seemed to notice. His inner rhythm . , . always
preserved the metre . . . (Miller, p. 207) Learning the lines is only
part of the process of building a part in such a way that it relates to
the performance of the company and that chemistry which can
exist between stage and audience.
This process of transference can only occur when the technical
skills of acting are matched with the profound imagining of the
part, and its integration with the precise musical rhythm of a
production, through which we are constandy seeing what is not
actually there. Alec Guinness takes enormous pleasure, quite
rightly, in this power to conjure something out of the air.
It was during the rehearsals of The Seagull that I received, via
Peggy Ashcroft, a sort of compliment that chuffed me no end.
She returned early from a lunch break one day and found me,
chewing an apple, in a corner of the stage. Ive just had a
squabble with Komis [the director, Komisar- jevsky] about
you, she said. My heart sunk a little. She went on, 1 said to
him, isnt it clever how that young man who puUs the rope to
open the curtain makes you manage to see it? and Komis
said, Not clever; he just pulls on a rope which hangs from the
flies. When I pointed out that there isnt a rope he refused to
believe me. She looked at me almost doubtfully for a moment
before adding, there isn t a rope, is there? Of course not, I
said. Theres nothing. Thats what I told him. Hell be
furious. She moved away smiling; leaving me smiling too.
Suddenly there was a new
world hazily forming before my eyes; a world of mime which
could create illusion; a world where props and scenery would
be of minimum importance to the actor, an area where the
actors use of his body, his eyes, and above all his
imagination, would create for an audience things they only
thought they saw and heard. {Blessings, pp. 156-7.)
Alec Guinness defines here an essential element, not just in
mime, but in all performance. You dont have to eat a meal in
order to make an audience imagine you are eating it. In recent
years, companies such as Shared Experience, Theatre de
Comphcite, Theatre le Ranelagh,and those of Steven Berkoff and
Robert Lepage have used this truth about theatre, and turned it
into a style of dramatizing works as different as Tolstoys War
and Peace, George EUots The Mill on the Floss, Kafkas
Metamorphosis, Oscar Wildes Salome, Shakespeares Hamlet
and Romeo and Juliet; inventing concept productions, or
reinventing plays Uke Diirrenmatts The Visit. In the first
production of The Visit by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in
1960, Lynn Fontanne as the millionairess, who returns to her
native village to buy the vengeance of the inhabitants on the man
who had seduced her, had live leopards on stage as her pets. The
savagery and vengefulness of Kathryn Hunters looks some
twenty-five years later dispensed with the need for their actual
appearance. A single glance was as good as leash of leopards, and
the simple act of mounting a step-ladder enough to suggest her
power over the community she corrupts with her money.
Performance in becoming more physical makes spectacular
demands on the actors and also leaves more to the imagination of
the audience. As Gregor Samsa who wakes up to find he is a
beetle, Steven Berkoff suggested this physical change as he
scuttled about the floor of his room, while conveying in his voice
the increasing pain and loneliness of the son rejected by his
family. Robert Lepage in Seven Streams of the River Ota (1996)
staged an act of voluntary euthanasia in a silence which made the
audience concentrate on the physical preparations for death, while
at the same time
34 Making Theatre
investing it with an unemotional dignity. Style in performance becomes
a bore, when it becomes a routine, or predictable because it lacks
the power to surprise, and only demands of an audience that it
watches what happens. A theatre where the audience does not
participate to laugh, gasp, feel terror, amazement, wonder - is
dead. We go to be held in thrall by the skills of the performer, of
whatever kind they may be.
Skin in speaking lines, whether in verse or prose, has
remained one of the great strengths of English acting. It requires
immense control and discipline. No one, it was once said of the
young Olivier, could make blank verse sound more blank. Gielgud
was helped to learn his lines by trusting the sweep of a whole
speech, concentrating on the commas, full- stops and semi-colons.
If I kept to them and breathed with them, hke an inexperienced
swimmer, the verse seemed to hold me up and even disclose its
meaning (Gielgud, p. 78). Gielguds speaking of our revels now
are ended in Peter Brooks production of The Tempest on the
Drury Lane stage in 1957 will never be forgotten by anyone who
heard it, as an elegiac cUmax to an interpretation of Prospero in
which authority was never separate from the imaginative pain of
exercising it.
Every actor finds their own particular way of shaping a line,
and a speech; or is helped to do so by a director. Simon Callow
has recorded his debt to Peter Hall who showed him how in
speaking Shakespeares lines, the meaning of the line often
resides in the second half, so go towards that, which has the
additional advantage of sustaining the forward movement of the
verse (Callow, p. 125). The pulse of the line becomes a window
on the soul of the character being created. Every human voice has
its own timbre, pitch, range which is unmistakeable; and how each
performer uses that instrument, makes use of its strengths and
weaknesses differs. (A lightweight voice is unlikely to be right for
the great tragic roles.) In preparing a role, how a character sounds
remains of central importance. Peggy Ashcroft, rehearsing with
Peter Hall the
part of Winnie in Becketts Happy Days agreed on an Anglo- Irish lilt
with a shght echo of her old friend Cecil Day Lewis (BiUington,
p. 239). Judi Dench, playing the part of the well- known actress,
Esme Allen, in David Hares Amys View (1997) found a way of
timing her lines to sound as though she was a very good actress
speaking them off-stage: a precise combination of mbato and
attack.
A successful performance is always well-judged: a subtle
talent which combines an inner feeling for the part, and the ability
to integrate it with the production as a whole. The director, and
the actors, have to discover a way of speaking the hnes which
amounts to a vision, paring away ideas, however fertile, which do
not fit, arriving at a consistency of feehng which relates every part
to the whole. Dogberry, and the rest of the watch in Much Ado
about Nothing, are indispensable to the plot as they succeed in
arresting the villains, by comprehending all vagrom men. Their
persistent malapropisms (long before Mrs Malaprop) come like a
breath of fresh air after the contests of wit between Beatrice and
Benedict. (Oscar Wilde and Tom Stoppard do not provide such
relief.) But Dogberry and Verges can easily become a bore,
destroy the rhythm of Much Ado, if their performances are not
well- judged, becoming caricatures of sillyfunny men.
Shakespeares inventiveness with words must never be allowed to
seem drunken.
Even more crucial because deeper feelings are touched, is the
playing of the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Nights
Dream. The carpenter, joiner, weaver, bellows-mender, tinker and
tailor do not just provide comic relief; and the more they are over-
played, the more tedious they become. They restore the human
balance, with common sense and practicality, to the dreamy maze
in which the lovers are lost; and, in their playing of Pyramus and
Thisbe, they make us recall not just another kind of theatre with a
doubtful seriousnes (to which the gentry, not to mention the
intellectuals, are addicted),but the sheer fun of playing a wall,
moonshine or a lion. They bring innocence to their playing, and
discover for the first
36 Making Theatre
time a love of theatre which shines over the play as a whole. As Peter
Brook has expressed it:
the mechanicals scene is often misinterpreted because the
actors forget to look at theatre through innocent eyes, they
take a professional actors views of good or bad acting, and in
so doing they diminish the mystery and sense of magic felt by
these amateurs, who are touching an extraordinary world with
the tips of their fingers, a world which transcends their daily
experience and which fills them with wonder. {SP, pp. 100-1)
Peter Brooks sense here of something which must not be
violated by performance appHes equally to the speaking of the
lines. The nineteenth-century style of stepping forward, and
hurling the great speeches at the audience has sometimes been
replaced by shuffling them under the carpet as though they do not
exist, as though rhetoric is an embarrassment. Because so many of
Shakespeares lines are well known, this means depriving the
audience of an anticipated pleasure, whatever the intended gain in
dramatic effect. You cannot go to Romeo and Juliet without
waiting to hear the actor say:
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiops ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth to dear!
(Act I, scene 5).
If they are spoken without an instinctive feeling for their sound, as well
as their pace, their effect will be lost. But Shakespeares plays
must not become a series of operatic highlights, because the
drama as a whole requires a different musical effect. Some
classical actors, of whom Ian McKellen is the most oustanding
example, make the lines sound natural, almost as though he is
thinking aloud, discovering in them a new emphasis and a natural
rhythm. Tyrone Guthrie identifies
what happens when the right notation is found in this account of Edith
Evans as Rosalind in As You Like It:
Edith Evans was nearer fifty than forty and I think that, for the
first five or six minutes of her performance, audiences may
have had reservations about the wisdom of this marvellous,
but quite evidently mature actress playing the part of a young
girl, wildly in love and masquerading as a boy. For my part 1
had no reservations whatever; from beginning to end the
performance swept one along on the wings of a tender and
radiant imagination. It was a comment upon womanhood and
upon love, more interesting and moving, not less, because it
had the ripeness and wisdom of experience. It was a feast of
spoken music a revelation to me of how Shakespearean
verse, when wonderfully spoken, gilds the meaning of words
and opens the windows of the imagination in the way
which the theatre uniquely can, but seldom does. This was a
great performance. (Guthrie,
p. 166)
Only when words and performance are fused together can
windows open on what lies within. Without this, Rosalind hke
other Shakespearean characters may simply seem to talk too
much!
As well as an ear for the shape of a line, and a speech, an actor
needs an attack which involves the whole being. Donald Sinden,
recalling rehearsing with Peggy Ashcroft in The Wars of the
Roses put it like this:
However well you know someone, there comes a moment
when youre rehearsing when something changes. One
moment its Donald would you be awfully sweet and do this?
And then there comes a point when youre not Donald but the
character. We do it to each other. So in the death scene of the
Duke of York - though we were getting on like a house on fire
off-stage suddenly I could see genuine hate in her eyes. I
thought she cant hate me weve just
38 Making Theatre
had a cup of tea together. But the character has completely
taken over. So often you dont see it in the eyes. You simply
see it in an attitude, a face, a voice. With Peggy you see it in
furious close-up. {Ashcroft p. 201)
In some performances, for example, Oliviers Macbeth, this
attack greAV out of his whole conception of the role. He was
guilty from the start: his single state of man shaken from before
his first entrance by his thought, whose murder yet is but
fantastical. He grew in horror of himself, the more he put on
kingly robes, reaching in the banquet scene, where he was clothed
in royal purple, a crazed apprehension of the man he had become;
a man who in acting out his fantasy shrank increasingly from the
physical role this made him play. He conveyed, or held the
audience relentlessly in the grip of, the widening gap between
mind and body, so that as the outward trappings became more
splendid, the inner life withered and died, appalled at its own
extinction. Kenneth Tynan wrote in his review.
Last Tuesday, Sir Laurence shook hands with greatness, and

within a week or so the performance will have ripened into a
masterpiece; not of the superficial, booming kind, but the real
thing, a structure of perfect forethought and proportion, lit by
flashes of intuitive lightning. (Tynan, p. 157)
Ian McKellens performance in 1976 was no less great, but an
interpretation of an entirely different kind. His hair swept back
like Toshiro Mifune in a Samurai epic (Billington, ONS, p. 87),
McKellen revealed the soldier who out of ambition turns into a
killer, driven by his own inner evil. As with Oliviers
performance, the shaping of the role grew out of its inner
conception, which reached its climax in an epileptic frenzy after
the appearance of Banquos ghost at the Banquet.
Physicality the outward manifestation of the changing
inner self as though the body bears the imprint of its inner
notation - is one of the signs of performances which reach
beyond the ordinary. When Michael Gambon in 1987 played Eddie
Carbone, the New York lighterman who falls tragically in love
with his own niece in Arthur Millers A View from the Bridge his
heavy shambling appearance reflected his occupation; but also
quite literally a man who was being torn apart by emotions with
which he could not deal, unable to conceal in his looks and his
actions his jealousy of the young Rodol- pho. As he moved
around the room, or sat reading his paper, while his eyes followed
the lovers, he became a man whose emotions had passed beyond
all reason, making him dangerous to all those around him. His
body expressed the emotions which his words could not reveal.
In 1998,Juhette Binoche played the part of ErsiHa Drei in
Pirandellos Naked, a role created on the London stage thirty
years ago by another actress more famous in the cinema than on
the stage, Diane Cilento. Ersilia Drei, not unlike Ibsens Peer
Gynt, feels herself to be nothing, to be naked, a woman whom
people use without seeing anyone there. When she explains her
attempted suicide she says: I couldnt believe that anything I
might do . . . not even dying. . . would affect you. I thought I
wasnt important enough. I thought I was nothing. And I wanted so
much to be more than that. I wanted people to believe me. I wanted
them not to pass by. What was extraordinary in Binoches
playing came in the change from Act I, where she was stiU the
hurt, confused woman just out of hospital, to the fierce defender
in Act II of her own right to an identity, not just the person her
lovers want her to be. As she told Franco, dont touch me, her
eyes and her posture expressed the inner fury of a person who
refuses to be saved by someone elses idea of them. In her
clenched fierceness which seemed at times to be on the point of
tearing her body apart, she expressed the loneliness and the
courage needed not to give in to someone elses idea of her role.
Binoche brought to this part the great stars sense of an inner
emptiness and nakedness; the tragic relationship of acting to Hfe
where as Simon Callow has put it, life can sometimes seem a sad
second.
40 Making Theatre
Some plays (and productions) depend on bravura
performances, in which the energy and technical skill dazzle on
the surface, without suggesting any depths below (and no bad
thing either!) Actors are entertainers; and their skills in
entertaining give delight and hurt not. As with any artist, their
talent for doing something supremely well communicates itself to
the audience as a form of joy. The role of the Pohce Inspector in
Eduardo de Filippos La Grande Magia (1995) does not look
much on the page; in the National Theatre production David
Rosss postures and grimaces turned it into a comic impersonation
of the great image of Authority which is all gesture and no
substance.
Sheridans farce. The Critic depends for its success on timing,
and technical skill: The two nieces draw their two daggers to
strike Whiskerandos: the two uncles at the instant, with their two
swords draim, catch their two nieces arms, and turn the points of
their swords to Whiskerandos, who immediately draws two
daggers, and holds them to the two nieces bosoms. The timing,
which needs to be musical in its precision, determines the impact
of this entanglement. In The Critic as in Tom Stoppards The Real
Inspector Hound everyone has to perform with panache to make
the play work at all; but the meaning of the play does not shift
with the production. Congreves The Way of the World is a much
more socially complex play, though most of us go to see how
Lady Wishfort, Mirabell and Millamant will be played; Margaret
Rutherfords Lady Wishfort was immortalized in so far as a
performance can be by Kenneth Tynans account of it:
Margaret Rutherford . . . got up as Lady Wishfort, the man-

hungry pythoness. This is a banquet of acting in itself. Miss
Rutherford is filled with a monstrous vitality: the soul of
Cleopatra has somehow got trapped in the corporate shape of
an entire lacrosse team. The unique thing about Miss
Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone: among its
many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding, the
chin in doubt and the chin at bay. My dearest
impression of this Hammersmith night is a vision of
Miss Rutherford, clad in something loose, darting about her
boudoir like a gigantic bumblebee at large in a hothouse.
(Tynan, p. 124)
For a great Millamant, who could be loved not in spite of her
faults but for her faults, we had to wait another twenty- five years
when Maggie Smith played the part; and her words flowed, as
Kenneth Tynan also said they should, whether tinkling like a
fountain or cascading hke Niagara from a great height. Millamant
is described just before she enters, in rfull sail, with her fan
spread and streamers out, and a shoal offools for tenders'. Her
performance has to fulfil these expectations.
The Importance of Being Earnest, like The Way of the World,
continues to be revived partly because we want to see how every
part, ranging from the moral priggishness of Jack to the innocent
fatuity of Miss Prism, will be played. The appearance of Lady
Bracknell is awaited with keen anticipation. How will she differ
from the grande dame immortally created by Edith Evans, and at
least partially preserved on film? Her subsequent cross-
examination of Jack as to his suitability for marrying Gwendolen
delights, however many times it has been heard, by its combination
of the Socratic with the absurd. One almost believes that only
carelessness can account for having lost both ones parents. All
the roles in The Importance of Being Earnest including Merriman
the butler, are written to be performed with verve and style; they
are all outward show and technique, and our pleasure is created
from seeing how fauldessly, and how differently, they are done.
But there is another kind of performance, altogether stranger,
which only occurs when an actor seems to bore deeper and deeper
into the character as the play continues. It is made possible by a
certain kind of dramatic writing; but the writing does not ensure -
in fact nothing ensures - that it will occur. When Tennessee
Williamss The Glass Menagerie (1944) went into rehearsal,
Laurette Taylor had been cast to play the role of the mother,
Amanda. She was then sixty and, although once a
42 Making Theatre
star, was living in retirement, in poor health and an alcoholic. With
only a week to go before the opening, she attended the final
rehearsals in what can only be called an alcoholic stupor, barely
summarising the dialogue and so broadly defining the womans
southern accent and character that . . . she made the play sound
like the Aunt Jemima Pancake Hour (Spoto, pp. 11011).
After a couple of half-empty performances - and thanks to a
couple of reviews which recognized the spell of the play, and the
poetry beneath its colloquial prose - something shifted.
On the third night, Laurette Taylor was not simply discharging
a half-formed role, she was creating a legend; she had begun
to draw a more wonderful portrait than anyone could have
imagined . . . she was continually working on her part, putting
in little things and taking them out almost every night in
Chicago there was something new, but she never disturbed the
central characterisation. Everything she did was absolutely in
character.
She was to repeat the role in New York, establishing fame and
fortune for Tennessee Williams, and creating a piece of American
theatrical history. What reserves of strength and imagination
Laurette Taylor drew on to create the role wiU always remain part
of that mystery which makes actors like all other people
tick. While playing Amanda in New York, she was diagnosed as
having cancer, and frequently had to vomit when not on stage,
during the performance. Four months after the production closed,
she was dead. But, although Laurette Taylor in the view of the
author almost came to direct some of the scenes in the play, the
production had a wider significance which Arthur Miller
expressed like this some years later.
It is usually forgotten what a great revolution his first great
success meant to the New York Theater. The Glass
Menagerie in one stroke lifted lyricism to its highest level in
our
theaters history, but it broke new ground in another way.
What was new in Tennessee Williams was his rhapsodic
insistence that form serve his utterance rather than dominating
and cramping it. In him the American theatre found, perhaps
for the first time, an eloquence and amplitude of feeling. And
driving on this newly discovered lyrical line was a kind of
emotional heroism; he wanted not to approve or disapprove
but to touch the germ of life and to celebrate it with verbal
beauty. (Spoto,pp. 116-17)
Beauty was trapped not only in the net of words, but in those
fragile glass animals so easily shattered, which symbolize all that
the withdrawn and repressed daughter finds to love in her
enclosed world. Walter Kerr, the well-known critic of the New
York Herald Tribune was later to characterize Williamss gift in a
way that links it with the success of Laurette Taylors
performance. What makes you an artist of the first rank is your
intuitive gift for penetrating reality, without junking reality in the
process; an intuitive artist starts with the recognisable surface of
things and burrows in. (Spoto, p. 188). Tennessee Williamss
view that were all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside
our own skins became a motivating force and a raison detre of his
theatre in which writing joined to performance pierced that outer
shell to reveal the living being beneath the skin. In 1994, Zoe
Wanamaker recreated the role of Amanda in London, and showed
once more how the steeliness and tenderness of Williamss
writing survives the years, but requires that kind of performance
which, Uke the mole, can work underground.
What happens on the stage, what an actors can do with the
space in which they are given to act, depends on a dynamic
relationship with the audience, which is being created, or
destroyed every moment the show goes on. This dynamic is
created from spatial relationships on the stage, and between the
stage and the audience. As space is restricted, so is time. By its
very nature a performance is transient. What happens between the
audience and the performers can never be
44 Making Theatre
exacdy repeated; and paradoxically this also gives a performance
permanence: unique because unrepeatable. As with bfe itself, the
moments as they pass cannot come again, and unhke the pages of
a novel, can never be turned back.
Inventiveness, technical skiU, disciphne, control, daring and
imagination are common to performers of every kind from the
clown to the tragedian. The exclamations which greet the artist on
the high trapeze make audible the silent wonder with which we
respond to those who have mastered an art, and give to their
audiences the shock of recognition at seeing how things are, by
drawing us for a time into their illuminated space.
2
Words
KING: HOW fares our Cousin Hamlet?
HAMLET: Excellent. Ifaith, of the chameleons dish: 1 eat the air,
promise crammed; you cannot feed capons so.
KING: I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet; these
words are not mine. HAMLET: NO,
nor mine now.
Hamlet (Act 111, scene 2)
Silence, as has often been remarked, is the most effective thing in the
theatre: the paper on which the actor writes. The performance of
a play begins with silence (the hush in the auditorium as the lights
go down); and it ends in the silence of remembered images. The
action of a play floats on silence. Drama, as Richard Eyre has
said, is about the spaces between the lines (Eyre, p. 34).
This may seem paradoxical, as the action of a play depends on
dialogue. A chapter in a novel Chapter 11 in Evelyn Waughs
Vile Bodies, for example - may be written entirely in dialogue,
and be brilliantly funny as a result, but it draws attention to itself
as a narrative device. Except in mime, characters on the stage
converse: a fact which to the film buff, Dominic Tighe, in David
Hares Amys View (1997) means theatre is outdated (The image
is much more important. The image has taken the place of the
word.) Whether this is true or not, an ear for dialogue remains
indispensable for the playwright; and his skill will often reveal
itself with the greatest dramatic power at the point where words,
phrases, exclamations shade into the inarticulate, leaving the
audience to imagine what the character cannot fully express.
Dialogue in a play needs to be
46 Making Theatre
interesting to speak, to have its own rhythms and pitch; it also needs to
be interesting to listen to, which means what it does not say, as
often as what it does: to reflect the silence beneath the lines. An
actor has got to be able to speak the lines, inflecting them in such
a way that they become the voice of the role as the actor feels it to
be. He has to find a pulse which is natural in them.
To find the pulse, the actor needs to be in complete control of
emphasis, rhythm and breath. And the second two go together in
creating pauses, which the audience will hear as one form of
silence. In the meticulously written plays of Harold Pinter, where
every comma and full-stop has the equivalent of a musical value,
the dramatist differentiates between pause and silence. A pause
controls, as a rest does in music, how a phrase is played; but a
silence is as much a dramatic device as anything else which
happens on stage. A silence is like an exit or entrance. As Pinter
has said, silence is fear.
This is so because an audience listens in a state of expectation.
Silence is uncomfortable, disconcerting, painful, as it can be off
the stage. Whatever can he or she be thinking, feeling, planning to
do? Silence makes us all nervous; how long we can bear it
expresses our nerve. In the theatre, the audience fills the silence:
each motionless listener is part of the performance. But silence
is not just fear as Pinter suggests. Michael Frayn in his profound
play, Copenhagen (1998), about the meeting between the Danish
physicist, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the German
physicist in Copenhagen in 1941 centres his action around the
question about what they actually said to each other concerning
the possibility of creating an atomic bomb. The various
possibihties about the nature of that crucial conversation lead to
the conclusion that perhaps Bohr saved the West from a nuclear
attack by not asking Heisenberg the one question which would
have made him see the critical omission in his calculations. On
such unsureness and indeterminability the fate of nations, and
people, often depends. Margrethe, Bohrs wife, who often acts
Words 47
as a kind of choric commentator on their dialogue says at the end of
what passes between them: Silence. The silence we always in the
end return to. It is an explosive comment on the nature of theatre,
and the way in which performance interprets a text.
The action of a play takes place in the imagination of the
audience; and during a silence that action continues, as it
continues after the curtain has fallen. The silence in the theatre
when you can hear a pin drop is caused by the intensity with
which that act of imagination continues; the audience is quite
literally in a state of suspended animation. (The same effect is
impossible in the cinema because the camera is always rolling, the
sound-track never blank.) Here, we can see one reason why
Brechts rejection of empathy does not work. He wanted us not to
empathize with his characters, so that we could judge their actions
and ask ourselves why they acted as they did (for example.
Mother Courages dependence on the war); and whether things
were necessarily like this. But it is not only a character or
characters with whom we empathize; we become imaginatively
involved with the action of the play, playing it out in our own
minds eye. And this does not result from a particular way of
writing a play, as Brecht claimed, but from the nature of theatre
itself. We go to see a play performed; but there are in fact two
performances. The first we watch on the stage, the second is being
enacted in the imagination of the audience. Silence in a play,
whether written in by the dramatist, or played by the company, at
the directors suggestion, allows this interaction a breathing space,
a moment of drawing back so that it can then surge forward. To
imagine an action we need time to see through it.
Like everything in the theatre, the writing of dialogue depends
on a conjurors magic. The banality of everyday conversation has
to be transcended, in its verbal flatness, and its lack of a taut
dynamic. Conversation drifts like smoke; dialogue in a play needs
the strength of steel wire, to have an inevitabUty which is
constantly shaping the action, to have, though we do not reaUze it
at the time, a goal. But at the same
48 Making Theatre
time we need to feel that this is how people speak, or have spoken.
Keith Dewhurst, reviewing Ralph Richardsons performance in
David Storeys Home (1970) where he and John Gielgud played
two elderly men in a mental institution, put it like this: Richardson
has a strange elegiac quality, a cadence of winds and weather,
and seasons of the year, that enables him to express like no other
actor something that is at the heart of Enghsh drama, and thus of
actually being English [my italic]: something instinctive and
involuntary in the rhythm of both phrase and situation that recurs
whatever the style or generation (Miller, p. 229). Winsom
Pinnock in Leave Taking (1994), about a Jamaican family living
in London, draws on the patwah of a culture whose rhythms and
colloquialisms have been influenced by reggae music. Words in a
play reflect these heart-beats in a way that the dramatist cannot
always explain. I learnt that when we no longer have the words to
explain our choices we are on dangerous ground. It is this
dangerous territory that is most exciting in the theatre (Winsom
Pinnock, Programme Note to Leave Taking). Tennessee
Wilhamss ear for the intonations and rhythms of dialogue in the
South of the United States needs to be interpreted with the
accuracy of a musical score; an English actor who could not hear
the beat would be unable to perform the part.
Dialogue always reflects and heightens the conventions of its
time. Oscar Wildes characters speak in witty and elegant
epigrams, closer to a convention about how people should speak
in high society than would be the case today. Wilde was not
alone in thinking that style was everything; he just had more of it
than most of his contemporaries. At the opposite extreme, the
breakfast conversation between Meg and Petey at the start of
Pinters The Birthday Party (1958) - which was eventually to
establish his reputation - reflects and heightens contemporary
banality, with an effect that is both very funny and disturbing. I
saw the play in Oxford, before its disastrous failure in London.
The humour and, later, the brutality of the dialogue made a lasting
impression because nothing quite like this had ever been heard on
the stage before.
Words 49
What was not clear then was how deep-rooted and capable of
development Pinters originality was to prove:
MEG: Here you are, Petey.
He rises, collects the plate, looks at it, sits at the table. Meg
reenters. Is it nice?
PETEY: I havent tasted it yet.
MEG: I bet you dont know what it is.
PETEY: Yes, I do.
MEG: What is it, then?
PETEY: Fried bread.
MEG: Thats right.
It isnt just a question of class or sharpness (though it is both

of them) which distinguishes this piece of dialogue from another
breakfast conversation between the Dangles at the start of
Sheridans The Critic:
Mr and Mrs Dangle are discovered at breakfast reading

newspapers.
DANGLE (reading): Brutus to Lord North. Letter the Second
on the State of the Army Psha! To the first L dash
D of the A dash Y. - Genuine extract of a letter from
St. Kitts. Coxheath Intelligence It is now
confidently asserted that Sir Charles Hardy Psha!
Nothing but about the fleet and the nation! - and I
hate all politics but theatrical politics. Wheres the
Morning Chronicle?
MRS DANGLE: Yes, thats your Gazette.
Drama responds to the pulse of its time; and so it has to reflect
in some way an audiences conventions (and expectations) about
how people speak to each other outside the theatre: the rhythms, if
not the chosen words, reflect conventions of discourse. These are
often exaggerated, as in Wilde, to give the audience a sharper
version of themselves, and their society. In Patrick Marbers
Closer (1997), characters speeches
50 Making Theatre
are seldom longer than a line, and bring to the surface what is often felt
but seldom articulated. As Hamlet knew, a play gives the very
age and body of the time his form and pressure.
As well as reflecting rhythms, and intensifying idioms of
contemporary speech, a play draws upon the conventions of
contemporary theatre, and the expectations of an audience about
how people will speak on the stage. (The initial rejection of
Pinters The Birthday Party was caused in part by its failure to
fulfil these expectations.) As Martin Esslin has shown in Brecht:
A Choice of Evils (1959) Brecht achieved the rare feat of creating
in his poetry and plays a language all his own, which suggested
the rhythms and gave the feeling of real speech without being tied
to any particular regional dialect. It is still not a language spoken
by anyone in reality - with the exception perhaps of Brecht
himself. But while it is a synthesis, this language is such a vital
and original synthesis, so deeply rooted in a number of different
traditions, that it creates the illusion of real speech (Esslin, p.
96).This abihty to draw upon the rhythms of contemporary speech
without using the exact words is perhaps not so rare after all, but
the basis of all dramatic dialogue. The gap between talent and
genius lies in the vocabulary. Pinter has spoken about his interest
in, his ear for, the oddities, of everyday speech, since boyhood;
and at the same time his concern for the rhythm and harmony of a
sentence. When writing he often speaks lines aloud to see if they
please his ear. Brechts case, like Pinters, is only extreme because
both are poets.
The soliloquies in Shakespeares plays developed out of
rhetorical conventions in earlier Ehzabethan drama: speeches of
lamentation and expectation, expressions of intent and reflection,
of greeting and farewell, in which characters made speeches
without reflecting the idiosyncrasies of individual accent.
Elizabethan love of word-play, punning, new-minted words and
phrases, aphorism and paradoxes were absorbed into these larger
structural devices, and in Shakespeares case assumed an
individual accent. He drew his words from every level of society,
from every age of man, from the countryman
Words 51
to the townie, from the courtier to the King, from whores to Queens,
from tradesmen to merchants, from noblemen to the poor naked
wretches who bide the pelting of this pitiless storm. He made
everything out of living at a time when the Enghsh language was
exploding, and human reflection about the self was going into a
new orbit. Play with language, with syntax, rhetorical structures,
and play with the nature of the self resulted in the sublimity of
Hamlets reflection:
I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth,
foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so
heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth,
seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy,
the air, look you, this brave oer hanging firmament, this
majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth
nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of
vapours. (Act II, scene 2)
The integection of the look you breaks up the speech, making it
suddenly colloquial, and provides the opportunity for varied
interpetation by the actor.
Hamlet is of his time; but in his power of expressing himself
transcends it.
In Loves Labours Lost, love of language results in the comic
pedantry of Holofernes:
You find not the apostrophus, and so miss the accent: let me
supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified; but for
the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret.
(Act IV, scene 2)
Holofernes did not miss the accent of his time; but heightened
and exaggerated it. The twists of the phrasing, the emphasis on
selected words, and the onward thrust of the speech, require no
less skill of the performer, than Hamlets. Though both speeches
are written in prose, both relish their own music.
52 Making Theatre
Shakespeare still leaves to the actor the test of finding the
pulse in the phrasing, turning the punctuation to pauses and
discovering a pitch for the words which resonate with the rest of
his performance and the rest of the cast. The words are like
moving shuttles of the enchanted loom which is the text as a
whole.
Long speeches, whether sublime or pedantic, are not the
modern manner. Those who make long speeches cause the eyes to
glaze over; perhaps because we have lost even Holof- erness
enjoyment of playing with words; perhaps because we no longer
wish to listen to each other, except as a form of debate, or lack the
necessary powers of concentration. Long speeches in life require
an apology, though those who make them do not usually seem
aware of the fact; counsellors and therapists are paid to listen.
Long speeches in drama need a justification, and make special
demands on the actor. Bernard, the English lecturer in Stoppards
Arcadia (1993), played by Bill Nighy with undashable self-
admiration, likes nothing more than giving lectures, without the
least interest in whether anyone wishes to listen. Speechifying is
his modus vivendi; the longer he keeps talking, the more he
prevents others from revealing his hollowness, or puncturing his
vanity. In David Hares Amys View (1997) Esme AUen, a famous
actress, keeps talking to protect herself from the fear which, as she
admits, touches all actors of not having a role, or a less good role,
outside the play.
Outside the theatre, as inside it, making long speeches has
become a suspect gift, practised, for example, by politicians, who
by common consent do not mean what they say, and do not intend
to practise what they preach. Making speeches may be a cover-up
for charlatanism, or more simply a way of persuading others to let
you do what you want to do, whether or not (which is more likely)
you intend to do what you are asking their consent for.
Conventions and attitudes outside the theatre determine what is
said on the stage. The memorable long speeches in contemporary
plays as in hfe are to be found in moments of self-confession,
under the pressure of
U^rds 53
insupportable feeling, as in Luckys outburst in Becketts ingfor Qodot
(1955) or Astons account of electro-convulsive therapy in
Pinters The Caretaker (1960). But characters who make long
speeches may not necessarily mean what they say. Words paper
over the fear of silence.
The major transition from Shakespeare to the present day has
been from the rhetorical, and expansive, to the laconic and
monosyllabic; from the articulate to the unnameable;from a
society which loves and flourishes on its language to one which
increasingly ignores it, or lets fuck and fucking, as in the plays
of David Mamet, express the weight of personal feeling.
I know of no one who has caught more precisely than Mamet

the pathos of the dim and unverbal in their desperate attempts
to express themselves with language which is dead and
repetitive. They say fuck every other word, because that is
their only way of getting emphasis. It is pathetic and moving.
(Hall, p. 364)
In everyday speech the four-letter word has no such effect,
and is merely boring in repetition. Mamets skill comes from his
placing of it in the rhythm of the line, his ear for the shape of a
line and the imaginative resonance of the play as a whole, which
Peter Hall is describing. Patrick Marbers Closer uses fucking
and coming just as repetitively but for a different purpose.
Although his characters have occupations (a doctor, a journalist, a
photographer and a stripper), they have become their sex lives;
and their vocabulary is mainly restricted to its gains and losses.
As in an expressionist play, these characters express impulses,
desires, drives, satisfactions and resentments, with an honesty
more commonly felt than articulated. Their words define their
identity; and that identity is constructed out of their sex lives.
Marber is perhaps commenting on this reductiveness, and at the
same time dramatising its compulsive honesty. Mark Ravenhill in
Shopping and Fxxxxxg (1996) goes even further in making the
language of sexuality.
54 Making Theatre
physical and verbal, an expression not of relationship but of transaction.
Words, like money, become a form of surface exchange.
Dialogue in a play is not how people speak (though they might
like to do so) outside the theatre; but it is not altogether separate
from it. Just as the brushstrokes of a painter do not depict a leaf or
ship, but suggest to us that we are looking at a thousand leaves in
the wind, or a sailing ship on a choppy sea, so words spoken on a
stage create an illusion of being drawn from life. The ways in
which this illusion is created are as various as those of the
painters brushstrokes, but the further they seem to be removed
from everyday speech the more artificial the action will become.
Because dialogue is in this sense surrogate speech, the idiom has
to be right for, seem natural to, the audience, however stylized it
is.
New ways of writing dialogue create new dramatic forms.
Konstantin Trepliev in Act I of Chekhovs The Seagull (1898)
knows this, and attempts his own solution.
On a large stone sits Nina, dressed in white:
NINA: Men and lions, partridges and eagles, spiders, geese and
antlered stags, the unforthcoming fish that dwelt
beneath the waters, starfish and creatures invisible to
the naked eye; in short, all life, all life, its dismal round
concluded, has guttered out.
(translated by Elizaveta Fen)
It will not be long before this new form of drama has been
mocked off the stage by Konstantins mother, Arkadina, the
famous actress, who is irritated by these poetic ravings.
Arkadinas behaviour is cruel and rude; but she is right, this new
theatrical form is going to become a bore and yet for a moment
as Nina will recall just before Konstantin kills himself in Act 4 -
the stage, the lake, the moonlight, even the language itself (in her
final words to him she repeats the speech above) hovered, like the
seagull itself, on the edge of something new. The feeling was of a
new dramatic form, an
H^rds 55
image. But the problem, also apparent to Arkadina who as an actress
understands theatre, lay in the absence of characters, of people
who spoke to one another as people do; and Chekhovs triumph,
the new form of drama which he created in The Seagull as a
whole, was created from a new way of writing dialogue. The
action which is created out of dialogue reflects discourse outside
the theatre, but it is also a technical skill needed for writing a play
that works, as Konstantin has discovered to his cost.
The characters in Chekhovs The Seagull, the dramatic images
they compose, are not in themselves new; they could come out of
his earlier plays, Platonov (the manuscript was not discovered till
1923, but it was written in the 1880s) and Ivanov (1887). In their
secluded lives on a country estate, they are closely related to the
characters in Turgenevs A Month in the Country (1850). The
suicide with which Chekhov ends The Seagull repeats the
melodramatic ending of Ivanov, which had given Chekhov his
first theatrical success in 1888.
In Ivanov, characters speak about their inadequacies, sorrows,
torments, illness, love; and they firitter away their days like their
lives in games of cards, and idle romances. They tell us what is
happening to them. In The Seagull we see what is happening to
them. We see how empty or full their hves are, how sincere or
pretentious their feelings; we see how life is not one thing or
another, but made of a multitude of conflicting, irreconcilable
things, feelings, desires, impulses. Arkadina can want as Mother
to bandage Konstantins wound, but she can bitterly resent him as
son whose talent (if that is what it is) she does not understand and
rejects. Arkadina wants to be a mother, and at the same time
resents her sons demands for maternal affection and money.
What is new Ues in the intensity of our seeing, and feeling: the
dialogue acts like a window through which we see; or one
window, because the action is made from all that happens on the
stage. (For example, the proximity and distance between mother
and son, which Vanessa Redgrave and Jonathan Pryce played
with physical endearment and violent repulsion.) Chekhovs stage
is a very
56 Making Theatre
physical place, a head turned, a look averted can signal disaster. When
Dorn says at the end of Act 1, how distraught they all are! he
confirms, like a Chorus, what we already know.
The transparency of Chekhovs characters becomes possible
through a manner of writing dialogue which refracts light from
different sources into a single focus on their inner isolation. This
technique, like a fibre-optic cable, becomes capable of carrying
more and more complex images in each of the three plays which
succeed The Seagull.
In Three Sisters (1901), Masha knows that Vershinin, her
lover, is leaving town with his regiment; and she will not see him
again. There return to her memory, as often in such moments,
some lines of poetry with no apparent connection:
A green oak stands by a curving shore
And on that oak hangs a golden chain
What we see is that the golden chain saves her from total breakdown,
insanity. The images of the oak and the chain are all, quite
hterally, she has to hang on to; and the fragment of a tune which
she and Vershinin had once hummed to each other. Between the
lines of the text, the inner lives of the characters have to be
performed.
The stage direction to The Cherry Orchard (1904), Act II,
reads:
Open fields, a way-side shrine - old, crooked, and long
neglected. Beside it - a well, large slabs which were evidently
once tombstones and an old bench. A path can be seen
leading to the Gayev estate. At one side rise the dark shapes
of poplars; this is where the cherry orchard begins.
In the distance is a row of telegraph poles, and a long way
away on the horizon a large town can just be made out,
visible only in very fine clear weather. The sun is just about to
set.
Here is a landscape of confused images, belonging to a
halfforgotten past, and a future not yet created, both theatrical and
Words 57
of their time. Of the figures on stage, Charlotta, the German governess,
is the most prominent. She has taken a gun off her shoulder.
Where I come from and who I am, I dont know. Who my

parents were - whether they were even married or not I
dont know. (Gets a cucumber out of her pocket and eats it.) I
dont know anything.
Each one of these images, so different in kind, compels us to
construct a mental picture of lostness, uncertainty and near-
desperate loneHness: a world waiting to be born into certainty, on
the edge of suicide and absurdity. Chekhovs dialogue reflects a
time when outward confidence, the selfassurance of the individual
belied an inner distress. His plays do not point, as has been
suggested, to the need for a Russian revolution, but they do reflect
an awareness of how people are trying to live without a compass,
and need a new world to be born, to give them a goal which in
life, if not in art, has been lost. He made his characters seem to
speak as they would off the stage, but all the time he was
compressing their speech to expose a new form of existential
despair. He brought to this the wisdom of humour. This
relationship between humour and despair needs to be reflected in
the dress, deportment, spacing and lighting of the characters, both
in their relationship with one another, and their unredeemable
solitude. The text is like a scaffold through which the audience
sees and feels.
Harold Pinter, in his early work, created a form of dialogue
which expressed that sense of menace, far from specific, which
hung in the atmosphere after the Second World War. How could it
not do so, when subjectively all was possible? The beginnings
of Pinters creative work He close in time to the dramatization of
The Diary of Anne Frank; itself an account of an imprisoned life,
outside the walls of which a hideous barbarism prowls in search
of its Jewish prey. A fear, as yet unknown, though even more
terrible in actuality than
58 Making Theatre
imagination could conceive it, creates the fabric of Pinters world, just
as it had of Anne Franks. And so it had for the world at large. No
one since 1945 can live free from the fear of the depravity of
which human beings are capable. And this fear infects feeling and
language. Dialogue has come to live on the edge of the bestial.
Theatre as always stalks its prey in the changes taking place in the
world outside it; but, unlike that world, its dialogue moves to an
end, the final curtain, relentless as a reaper.
Words in a play reflect the idioms of their time. Equally they are
created by the conventions of theatre. Conflict in drama arises
from the difference between the image characters have of each
other, and the image they have of themselves. Words act as forms
of self-protection, and self-revelation. When the first is
inadequate, we are seen through; when the second misleads,
words act as a trap for the unwary. The interest of a character on
the stage, for the audience, involves a question about what he or
she is really like. And the harder the question is to answer, the
greater the dramatic interest will be (for a contemporary audience,
at least). What does it mean for Hamlet to describe himself as
mad but north-northwest? How much the actor allows the
audience to see into the soul of the character will determine at
every moment the effectiveness of the interpretation. As with
everything else about a performance, it must be well-judged, of
a piece. Performance as a subtle art of self-revelation and
selfconcealment grows out of a much more ancient theatrical
tradition; that of masking.
Masks, physical and metaphoric, are among the most ancient
conventions of theatre. They continue to be central to
performances throughout India and the Far East, in the Noh drama
ofjapan, as in the religious festival dramas of Bhutan. A mask
enables a spirit to enter into the performer, and become what the
mask presents, whether Krishna dancing under the stars in the
theatre of the world, or Kali the destroyer.
Words 59
In Greek tragedy the mask enabled actors to take on roles
from the mythical past, and achieve the stature of heroes. In a
recent production at Epidauros in Greece, and later at the
National Theatre in London, Peter HaU used masks to suggest the
archetypal nature of the drama which was being performed, as he
had for the Oresteia in 1981. But, since there is no tradition of
using physical masks in English drama, they present special
problems for the performers, requiring special rehearsal
techniques, and for the audience, who are unused to responding to
the different notation of individual masks. To an unpractised
audience, reading the visual signs of the mask, while listening to
the complex flow of the words is a difficult task. In the Western
European tradition, masks are more often felt than seen.
Shakespeare uses masks for local and psychological ends. In
Loves Labours Lost the ladies mask themselves to deceive the
wrong men into making love to them, proving their infidelity.
Romeo goes masked to the Capulets feast to avoid detection as a
Montagu. In the final scene of Much Ado About Nothing the
lovers unmask when the moment for denouement arrives:
HERO: And when I livd I was your other wife (unmasking):
And when you lovd you were my other husband.
(Much Ado About Nothing, Act V, scene 4)
Masking arises out of the dramatic situation and has an
important bearing upon the relationship of characters to one
another. Juhet in the balcony scene expresses it like this:
Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face.
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek For
that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.
(Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene 2)
The image expreses the freshness and innocence of Juliets young

love; and this metaphorical form of masking - the
60 Making Theatre
invisible mask - is used by Shakespeare in many different ways.
Disguise itself is a form of masking. Viola in Twelfth Night
and Rosalind in As You Uke It disguise themselves as men in order
to survive in a new world; Kent disguises himself as a poor man in
order to continue to serve his outcast master, Lear. In Much Ado
About Nothing, Margaret pretends to be Hero, and deceives
Claudio into thinking that she is unfaithful the night before their
wedding. Mariana pretends to be Isabella in Angelos bed in
Measure for Measure. Stage conventions about masks not being
detectable are indispensable to the dramatic structure, requiring
the audiences willing suspension of disbelief.
This form of masking, or disguise, soon disappears from the
Western European tradition, except in commedia dell arte.
Elsewhere it becomes further internalized and psychologized,
finding its expression in words. We are not simply the people we
say we are; the self we present to one person remains different to
the self we present to another. In the character of the young Henry
V, Shakespeare dramatized this kind of masking too:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold The
unyoked humour of your idleness;
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world That
when he please again to be himself Being
wanted, he may be more wonderd at.
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
{Henry 11^Part One, Act I, scene 3)
From that moment on, we know that the identity in words and actions
which Hal presents to his friends, Poins and Falstaff, involves a
temporary concealment; and that, before
Words 61
the play is done, he will reveal himself in new words and actions, as he
does in his rejection of Falstaff:
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dreamd of such a kind of man.
So surfeit-swelld, so old and so profane;
But being awakd, I do despise my dream.
{Henry Part Two, Act V, scene 5)
Much has been written about the rejection of Falstaff, and the cold
indifference of Hal to his former friends now he has become
King: the indifference of power which shores itself up with a
newly acquired morahty. The complexity of our response is born
of the knowledge that however cynical and mean Falstaff has
become in the war, youth, festivity, hfe itself is being rejected
with him. The dream Hal now despises bears little resemblance to
the dream he once had. Shakespeare gives a clear insight into
the nature of dramatic dialogue as being composed of verbal
identities which only partially represent the inner person; and
which, when another identity wishes to come out from behind the
clouds will need to find another vocabulary to project itself.
The case here is extreme; Hal foresees the need at the outset;
and then apparently forgetting it, though the audience does not,
continues to live out his youthful identity until his father is dead,
and the time arrives for him to assume the crown. Then the new
identity presents itself in new words, and a new bearing which
only his physical deportment on the stage can characterize.
The passage of time, though scarcely referred to, from the start
of Henry fpf Part One, to the conclusion of Part Two separates
out these two identities with clarity. More normally they are seen
simultaneously. We see through the surface of words to the
person beneath, as the other characters on the stage cannot. As
Duncan remarks shortly before he is murdered, Theres no art to
find the minds construction in
62 Making Theatre
the face. We know what he does not. The art of performance requires
that the audience should be aware to a greater or lesser degree of
subterfuge.
In one case - that of lago - this transparency is suddenly cut off
like a shutter coming down; and the contrast of this shows up our
normal expectations. When in Act V, scene 2, of Othello, lago is
unmasked by his wife, Emilia, as the architect of the tragedy, he
replies:
Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.
Although lago has given several reasons during the course of the play
for his envy of Cassio, and his hatred of Othello, his motiveless
malignancy remains one of the plays enigmas. When offered the
chance to come clean at the end, he chooses to shut up. The
audience is denied the transparency made possible through an
articulated identity. This is not a criticism of Othello; on the
contrary, it remains a source of its fascination. To say that lago is
cloven-footed, the devil personified, does not answer the case
because Shakespeare does not throw in allegorical characters; his
characters are created out of verbal surfaces which allow us to see
the depths beneath them. lagos silence has a special, if not
unique, place in dramatic literature, in that even to the audience he
refuses to reveal himself. Simply the thing he is has made him
live. And his performance must remain enigmatic, the outcome of
motives which are not self-consistent.
The tragedy of Richard II arises not out of his unwillingness to
speak, but out of the inadequacy of words to represent who he is.
As he knows, he sets the word against the word. The more he
projects images of himself, the more he realizes their brittleness
and shallowness: the mirror where he sees himself reflected, and
which he breaks in despair, destroys the image of the man he has
constructed, or tried to construct for himself and others.
Richard the Second whether played as poetking by
l^rds 63
Michael Redgrave or ironic self-mocker by Jeremy Irons is doomed to
Hve and die without finding what lies behind the mirror. His
words, however sonorous and beautiful to hsten to (which they
are) can never reflect what lies below; they only reflect
themselves back to the speaker.
Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments Are
merely shadows to the unseen grief That
swells with silence in the torturd soul.
(Richard II, Act IV, scene 1)
Words confer roles. In Richards case to lose the name of king is to
lose his role. But the word king does not fit the character
underneath: its tortured soul is doomed to silence.
An actor is sometimes described as completely miscast in a
particular role. The phrase signals a profound relationship
between role-playing and identity, and with a modern awareness
that identity is not a single, but a multiple thing. We are made up
of many selves, and our roles are determined by the stage on
which we are playing. Some three hundred years after
Shakespeare, Pirandello used this idea as a new way of thinking
about theatre, and its mirroring of the masks which are worn in
everyday life.
In It is so, if you think so.' (1917) Pirandello, Uke Shakespeare
in Richard II, poses the question of the mirror, and what it
reflects. Laudisi, hke Richard, finds when looking in the mirror
his image mocking himself: Between you and me, we get along
very well, dont we! But the trouble is, others dont think of you
just as I do ... I say that here, right in front of you, I can see
myself with my eyes and touch myself with my fingers. But what
are you for other people? What are you in their eyes? An image,
my dear sir, just an image in the glass! Theyre all carrying just
such a phantom around inside themselves . . . (translated by
Arthur Livingston). Irony and complex truth here demand a
particular control of the actor.
The image we have of ourselves has no necessary or real
64 Making Theatre
relation to the image which others have of us; nor is the image
necessarily a reflection of the person underneath. So the daughter
in this play finally discloses that she is nothing, only the image
which others take her to be. The individual is imprisoned by
phantoms of other peoples others making, like the actor in his
make-up before his dressing-room mirror.
In Henry IV (1922) - a difficult play which nonetheless has
been revived a number of times in recent years, with the central
part played by actors as different as Rex Harrison and Richard
Harris - Pirandello raises the question of identity even in the title.
In an English audience it arouses the expectation of seeing a play
about the Plantagenet King. Berthold, the new servant, who
appears at the start of the play, has made a similar, though
different mistake, in thinking that he is to serve in the court of
Henry IV of France in the sixteenth century, when in fact he has
come to serve in the court of Henry IV of Germany who
submitted to the Pope at Canossa in 1071.
The scene is set in a secluded villa in Italy of the 1920s. In this
villa (a set inside the set, like the person or persons underneath the
mask), the salon has been made to look exactly like the throne-
room of Henry IV at Goslar. The set is dominated by the imperial
chair and baldaquin. All that is said and done in this room the
clothes which the servants wear, their deference to him - are
intended to confirm Henry in his belief that he is the Emperor of
Germany a delusion he has been under since his fall from a
horse twenty years previously, when dressed as the Emperor at a
carnival. His sister and his nephew have preserved the illusion
around him by providing him with servants who act as his
courtiers.
The mad identity of Henry is a frozen mask, a conception of
his identity to which he has become tied. To begin with, the
audience, like the servants, believe Henry to be really mad. His
face is heavily made-up, with spots of rouge on his cheekbones,
made up, as it were for his performance. But then and it is a
moment of great theatrical effectiveness - before his
Words 65
terrified servants, who have always assumed him to be really mad, he
drops the mask.
Oh, look at this imbecile watching me with his mouth wide
open ! {Shakes him.) Dontt you understand? Dont you see,
idiot, how I treat them, how I play the fool with them, making
them appear before me just as I wish? Miserable, frightened
clowns that they are! And you are amazed that I tear off their
ridiculous masks now, just as if it wasnt I who had made
them mask themselves to satisfy this taste of mine for playing
the madman!
Words, he tells them, are what others impose, and from which
they create an identity for you, which may, or may not,
correspond to the reahty within. He has been labelled with one of
those words which everyone repeats: madman! All our Ufe is
crushed by the weight of words! which the past, and others give
to us. What oppresses him most remains the impenetrability of
others, and of himself to them.
I would never wish you to think, as I have done, on this
horrible thing which really drives one mad: that if you were
beside another and looking into his eyes you might as well
be a beggar before a door never to be opened to you; for he
who does enter there will never be you. (translated by Edward
Storer)
Henry in the end will choose to confirm himself in his role of
madman by killing the man who has always been his rival in love;
and in this way fix for ever, in the eyes of the world, what his
identity is. Rex Harrison brought to the part the immense vanity
of a pathological self-regard; Richard Harris a murderous gloating
instinct for self-preservation. In the Richard Harris production, a
portcullis crashed down behind the throne at the end confirming
the role which Henry had chosen, and from which now there
could be no escape. He had become for ever his mode of survival.
66 Making Theatre
Pirandello wrote plays in which the stripping away of masks
caused as much pain as the tearing of skin from flesh, leaving a
raw, bloody substance exposed; but he also proposed a witty,
ironic explanation of the relation between plots of this kind, and
theatre itself. The theatre, to which he came long after he had
established himself as a writer of fiction, and with reluctance, was
a place of illusion: the illusion of believing that identity is fixed,
or that human motivations, desires, impulses have a more static
relation than molecules in a cell which collide, jump, jostle,
circulate, rearrange themselves with relentless energy. In writing
with an ironic detachment about this, in using it to create the form
and pressure of his drama, Pirandello exposed what had been true
of much in the dialogue of Shakespeares plays, in Ibsen,
Strindberg and Chekhov, as in some later plays. Masks, as Oscar
Wilde realized, are a way of creating illusion, and of stripping it
off. This too is what making theatre means.
The effect of dialogue in a play depends on how it is written, and how

it is played. After seeing Frank Benson play Hamlet, Tyrone
Guthrie recorded the following impression:
It was an intelligent performance, and, for the first time, I
began to see why these plays were once considered
masterpieces, to realise what great elaborate pieces of
structure they were - dramatic cathedrals; to see how
interesting they were as narrative, how, over and above and
through the narrative were implicit meanings, like the echoes
in a cathedral. (Guthrie, p. 82)
Tyrone Guthries final phrase says a great deal about how
words work in a play, and what they leave to the actors. These
echoes in a cathedral, implicit meanings and resonances which
exist within a character and through the action as a whole, give
dramatic dialogue in the greatest plays an openness to which the
actor brings the whole power of his
Words 67
suggestiveness and imagination: the actor will hit the word, as the
pianist does a note on the piano, creating a resonance within a
character, as well as between characters, which the audience
responds to, and amplifies. Everything which is said
reverberates through the play as a whole.
T.S. Eliot, writing about Shakespeares Antony and
Cleopatra, showed his own genius as a critic, as well as
Shakespeares as a playwright, in pointing out what Shakespeare
had added to his source in Norths Plutarch. In Act V, scene 2,
Charmian, Cleopatras attendant, has watched the queen commit
suicide by applying the asps to her arm and breast. She follows
her queen into death, as the guards rush in.
FIRST GUARD: What work is here! Charmian, is this well done?
CHARMIAN: It is well done, and fitting for a princess Descended of
so many royal kings.
Ah! soldier.
{Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, scene 2)
Ehot pointed out that Shakespeare had added the last two
words, Ah, soldier, and commented, I could not myself put into
words the difference I feel between the passage if these two
words, Ah, soldier, were omitted, and with them. But I know
there is a difference and only Shakespeare could have made it.
Christopher Ricks - the finest critic of poetry writing today
pointed out again what Eliot had first perceived, adding it is an
act of genius in the critic to see that the act of genius in the artist
was the cry Ah Souldier . (Geoffrey HiU quotes this in an
essay on T.S.Eliot in Agenda, 34, 2, p. 16.) Shakespeare has left
to the actress, and the audience the responsibihty for settling upon
the right response to a phrase which gathers up all the previous
action in a final comment on the quality of Antonys love for
Cleopatra. The resonance of the phrase illustrates the relationship
between word, performance and audience as Shakespeare created
it, and at the same time gave it freedom. In The Tempest
Prosperos control
68 Making Theatre
and liberation of Ariel (leaving him free to work his magic)
metaphorically suggests this tension and release at the heart of all
dramatic dialogue.
In Act II of Ghosts, Ibsen writes a scene between Mrs Alv- ing
and Pastor Manders which might have been only a scene of
confrontation and recrimination between a woman and the lover
who once spurned her. What Ibsen enables us to see goes far
beyond that. We see mirrored in their dialogue the social
conventions which Manders uses to protect himself from
sexuality: and the blame which Mrs Alving attaches to him for
expelling her into a loveless marriage, of which her sons
inherited syphilis becomes the legacy. What happened between
Mrs Alving and Pastor Manders is recounted by her: how she ran
away to him, and was then rejected for the sake of convention,
and respectability. The past is reconstituted in the present, as both
have to face the ghosts which stUl haunt them. (The plays title in
French, Les Revenants, suggests better than the Enghsh title these
echoes within the characters out of which the larger action of the
play is constantly growing.) The old dramatic device of putting
the audience in the picture which Ibsen had used with some
crudity in earlier plays resonates here with the anguish and
resentment of all which has flowed from those past events,and
with Mrs Alvings anxiety for Oswalds future in the almost
unbearable present. We see the state of Mrs Alvings and Pastor
Manderss souls in the silence beneath the words.
The ghosts of the title refer as much to this shadow life of the
internal person, as to the ghost of Captain Alving who returns
from the past in the form of his sons promiscuity. Vanessa
Redgrave and Tom Wilkinson, playing this scene in the round at
the Young Vic in London in 1986, revealed to the audience every
registration of their accumulating inner distress. Wilkinsons
shifty guiltiness when confronted with his rejection of love for
respectability was matched by Redgraves irresistible refusal to let
him get away with it. In this small space, the victim could not
evade the cobras strike. Seeing what happened between their
eyes
Words 69
allowed us to see what happened within and between them.
In later plays by Ibsen, this ability of the characters to locate
and identify what has bugged their lives becomes obscure to
them. Except in TTte Lady from the Sea where Ibsen writes about
the curing of a psychotic obsession, he sees his characters as
Hving in a mist where the desire for hfe-joy founders on rocks
which neither they, nor the audience, can fully perceive. Rebecca
West and John Rosmer live together in Rosmersholm, but unable
to marry out of inhibitions which are only partly to be explained
by their guilt about the death of Rosmers first wife, Beata, in the
mill-chase. Freud in writing about Rebecca attributed her suicidal
response to Rosmers proposal of marriage as resulting fi-om an
incestuous relationship with her own father. Freud is perhaps
right. If so, no such realization comes to Rebecca; her words, like
Rosmers, prowl around a problem which words cannot identify.
Ibsen writes dialogue which knocks at doors that will not open.
We, the audience, are aware of resonances now muffled and
obscure, but equally hfe-threatening. The clouding of the focus is
intensified when we can see, as in the Cottesloe production
(1987) how closely the characters eavesdrop on each other, watch
in unobserved proximity, attempting to find a way through their
repressions. The enclosed space becomes a space in which they
are enclosed with their anxiety and their frustration, and begin as
in the production of Little Eyolf at the Swan in Stratford-on-Avon
(1997) to tear each other to pieces.
Ibsens John Gabriel Borkman (1896) has been given two
memorable productions in 1975 and 1996, the first with Ralph
Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft, the second with Paul Scofield
and Vanessa Redgrave. Love of money and power has once
caused John Gabriel, the banker, to betray his love for Ella
Rentheim; he has heard them as ore singing deep down in the
mountains, which he is compelled to mine. Lured by them to
social disgrace and exile, he will finally let the ore which stiU
sings in the deep lead him to physical death on the
70 Making Theatre
cold of the mountain-side. For Richardson, this siren-call from within
became the voices to which every artist must listen, even though
they destroy him; for Scofield the final and doomed attempt to
assert his own power: the pride and fear of the wolf who knows it
is cornered by death.
Resonances such as this are made possible both by the
performance, and the way in which the dialogue has been written.
This is not a quality of poetic, as opposed to prose drama.
Strindberg used it in a very specific way in The Father. No man,
at least in Strindbergs time, could be certain he was the father of
his own child. Bertha uses this as a means of tormenting and
dominating her husband to the point of madness. The anger,
hatred and anguish of the relationship between them reflects
Strindbergs own experience of marriage. But the pain is seen as
an existential problem: words cannot prove, cannot offer certainty;
we cannot know whether or not they deceive. And once we fall
into the trap of doubting language itself, we have fallen into an
abyss from which there is no escape. Words are a mise-en-abime',
and thin as the paper on which they are written. As Lear discovers
with his daughters, words and silence bear death within them. The
performance of the text becomes a revelation of the impotence of
language to resolve the insecurities of personality.
Strindberg admitted the influence of Shakespeare on him in
writing The Father. Hamlet is called to revenge his fathers death
by killing Claudius; but he can never know the status of the ghost,
whether it comes from Heaven or Hell, whether the words of this
perturbed spirit tempt him to ensure his own damnation, or to
settle a debt of honour, to see that justice, however wild, is done.
No words, no knowledge exists which can give Hamlet
certainty, just as words cannot prove to the father that he is the
father of his own child. By not giving his character a name,
Strindberg licenses us to think of him not as a particular neurotic,
but as an exemplar of what happens if we allow ourselves to fall
into a state of extreme scepticism. There are no wings to buoy us
up. The play, in growing out of this philosophical and emotional
torment.
Words 71
discovers a dialogue between Bertha and her husband which founders
on the inadequacies of words to represent their individual needs
and impulses, or to express them in such a way that understanding
and forbearance become possible. As the audience perceives,
dialogue exists as a matchwood bridge over an abyss; and in
doing so is compelled to confront the flaw in all human dialogue.
Dramatic dialogue created out of these echoing chambers of
the soul with all that it requires the actors to bring to the
performance continues to characterize a certain kind of play-
writing which belongs to the Shakespearean tradition.
But there is another tradition where words do not create resonances, are
not echoes in a cathedral, where they play - often joyfully - on the
surface, hke rain falling on a pool of water. This does not mean
that the dramatic action lacks implications outside itself, or is not
an action abstracted from experience; or is less interesting in
itself; but it does determine how dialogue is written, and what
actors have to bring to the performance. In the first kind of drama,
the breaking of the ice lets us see how deep is the water beneath it; in
the second reflections are thrown off the surface, the rain-drop
appears to rise again and catches the light. Characters are what
they say; and actors build the performance out of the words which
they speak. The action is built from a surface of words which do
not conceal hidden depths.
It might seem at first as though this distinguished drama
written in prose from drama written in verse. But, as the
illustrations from Ibsen and Chekhov in the previous section
show, it does not. Equally, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Browning,
Tennyson and Christopher Fry wrote plays in verse whose words
do not echo with the depths beneath them. In much of their work
verse remains a form of stage-rhetoric, where feeling belongs to
the surface, not to the undertow.
Shakespeares four plays from Richard II to Henry V, if performed in
sequence, as they were in Stratford-on-Avon in
72 Making Theatre
1953, and by the English Shakespeare Company around the country,
and at the Old Vic in 1987, explore the state of England in courts
and taverns, in peace and war, from kings to soldiers, from youth
to old age; they reflect the image of a nation, and the discord
which follows once the string of order is untuned. Whether in
1953, or 1987, they confront the audience with the idea of a
nation, in which two old men discussing the price of ewes in a
Gloucestershire orchard has as much place as the death of a king.
They make play of the relationship between the gratification of
individual desires and the health of the kingdom. They make us
aware of the difference between order and anarchy; and the price
which must be paid in individual freedom if order is to be
preserved. While living with characters we never forget, we also
sense how sovereignty, whether for the individual or the state,
depends on the delicate balance between freedom from unjust
interference, and freedom to live as we choose.
David Hares plays. Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, The
Absence of War (19903) examine the institutions of State. But
their dialogue only belongs to the surface; it states the case from
different perspectives. The clash comes not from the fact that
people are different (which is insoluble, as Shakespeares
language shows); but because they see things from different
points of view which implies the possibility of change. David
Hare, professional as always in stagecraft, offers only a
dramatized debate about the Church, the Law and the Labour
Party. No character is given a depth greater than the attitude he or
she represents. The audience has no role but to listen and watch;
agree or disagree at the end. David Hare wants us to see what kind
of nation we live in, as his politics shows it. In Shakespeares
plays, the ideology does not precede the words; it flows from
them.
Dramatic dialogue in which characters are what they say
originates in the morality play. Knowledge presents himself to
Everyman and says he will be his guide (in this world, virtue is
knowledge). So too do Discretion, Strength, Beauty and Five
Wits. Miltons Comus a masque of extraordinary music.
Words 73
magic and power - includes both kinds of dramatic speech, creating a
fissure which is never entirely healed. At its centre, the masque
contains an extended debate between Comus and the Lady on the
subject of Chastity. According to Comus, a very modern
enchanter, Beauty is Natures coin must not be hoarded, while
to the Lady
Thou hast no ear, no soul to apprehend
The sublime notion, and high mystery
That must be uttered to unfold the sage
And serious doctrine of virginity.
(lines 783-6)
Even though these lines were written to be spoken by Ahce,
the 15-year-old daughter of the Earl of Bridgewater, which gives
them an innocent radiance, they state the substance of her as a
dramatic character. In the Attendant Spirits opening speech, as in
the song which summons up the nymph Sabrina to release the
Lady from the Enchanters spell:
Sabrina fair
Listen where thou art sitting Under the
glassy, cool translucent wave In twisted
braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy
amber-dropping hair.
Listen for dear honours sake
Goddess of the silver lake.
Listen and save............
(lines 858-65)
Miltons verse reaches quite different levels of dramatic effect which
holds us in thraU and spell-bound. In writing a masque, Milton
was not working within the bounds of ordinary stagecraft; but the
speeches of the Lady reveal how declaration lowers dramatic
power, unless it also sharpens character, as happens in Sheridans
The School for Scandal.
74 Making Theatre
Lady Sneerwell at the drinking-table - Snake drinking
chocolate LADY SNEER: The paragraphs, you say, Mr Snake were
all inserted?
SNAKE: They were, madam, and as I copied them myself in a
feigned hand, there can be no suspicion whence
they came.
(Act I, scene 1)
In the first seconds of the play, the words of Lady Sneerwell
and Snake declare their credentials, as will those of Mrs Candour,
Joseph Surface and Sir Benjamin Backbite shortly afterwards.
Scandal itself is tittle-tattle, words for harming reputations,
another verbal surface. What matters is the effect made by words,
not any concern for the truth or untruth of what is said. As Joseph
Surface himself remarks:
To be sure, madam, that conversation, where the spirit of
raillery is suppressed, will ever appear tedious and insipid.
The brilliance of the surfaces does not obscure, rather it
reflects the shallowness of the human and social feeling beneath.
Or to change the metaphor, you only have to break the ice to feel
the coldness of the water beneath it! When the screen falls down
in Act IV, scene 3 (the first time it did so the roar of the audience
was heard all over London) and Sir Peter Teazle discovers his wife
to be the little French milliner behind it, only a screen has fallen!
Something has been revealed to the Teazles, and to us; but it
would be ridiculous to ask whether at the plays end they will
enjoy a happy marriage, even though Sir Peter is an ageing man
married to a young and spirited wife. In a play where words are
surfaces, the action stops when the curtain falls; when characters
stop speaking they cease to exist. If a character in The School for
Scandal said, the rest is silence, we know they would have to
start speaking again a moment later, or scandal itself would die.
And so too, in a rather different way with The Importance of
Being Earnest (1895), a play where nothing matters at all apart
IVords 75
from being ready with the right response, as Jack Worthing discovers
when being cross-examined by Lady Bracknell as to his
suitability for becoming engaged to Gwendolen.
Edith Evans and Maggie Smith remain the two most
memorable interpreters of the part: Edith Evans for an hauteur
almost stifled with surprise at being confronted, Maggie Smith for
the preciosity of the ingenue whose husband has all the money.
Each is compelled for quite different reasons to keep up
appearances; and in each case the words are the appearances. The
differences lie in the skill of the two actresses, in the precision of
their technique in conceiving the detail of the character; but it
scarcely affects the interpretation of the play. The Importance of
Being Earnest cannot usefully be interpreted; it is simply there to
be enjoyed, and played with all the skills which actors and
actresses bring to it. No one in the play has a future or a past
(whatever they have to say on the matter of handbags), only a
brilliant present.
The plays of George Bernard Shaw occupy a special and
unique position in the drama of words. They also remain big box-
office draws. Major revivals of Shaw succeed in the West End as
well as the state-subsidized theatres; and they have been frequent
in each. Shaws characters are played by stars, and his plays
continue to be remembered for productions which figure
prominently in the history of twentieth-century theatre. From the
early performances at the Royal Court Theatre, associated with
Harley Granville Barker and Mrs Patrick Campbell, through Sybil
Thorndikes Saint Joan, to Laurence Oliviers Saranoff, Vivien
Leighs Cleopatra, Alan Badels John Tanner, Richardsons
Waiter (in You Never can Tell), Roger Liveseys and Paul
Scofields Captain Shotover, Brewster Masons Undershaft and
Judi Denchs Barbara, and Alan Howards Higgins, the power of
the plays to entertain and deUght has proved enduring.
Pygmalion made possible, and provided the source for many of
the witty lyrics which Alan Jay Lerner wrote for. My Fair Lady.
But not everyone likes Shaw. Peter Hall directed Man and Superman
for the fiftieth anniversary of the Third Programme,
76 Making Theatre
but admitted in a radio interview that he had never been drawn to
directing Shaw before, because of the lack of feeling. (He has now
(1998) directed Major Barbara.) Peggy Ashcroft, who had
idolized Shaw when young only once appeared in a play by him:
Caesar and Cleopatra in 1932. The controlled passion which
provided a source for one aspect of Peggy Ashcrofts greatness as
an actress could not be tapped in Shaw, because there is no
passion beneath the surface of the words; the passion is in the
words. They remain among the most musical plays ever written.
Man and Superman (1903), Shaws longest play with the
exception of his metabiological pentateuch. Back to Methuselah
(1921), takes four and a half hours to perform, and through much
of it John Tanner has been talking. It ends like this:
VIOLET {with intense conviction): You are a brute,Jack.
ANN {looking at him with fond pride and caressing his arm).
Never mind her, dear. Go on talking.
TANNER: Talking!
Universal laughter.
Tanner as the author of the Revolutionists Handbook has

advocated a rejection of the social mores and economic principles
by which he, like other members of the idle Rich Class, live. But
he has done nothing to change his way of life. At the plays end,
he will have lost the batde of the sexes to Anne Whitfield who, as
the inheritor of the Life Force, intends to make him her husband.
The stage is set for Shaw, some fifteen years later, to write in the
last act o(Heartbreak House (1919) of an air-raid as Heavens
angry growl of thunder at these useless, futile creatures who talk
so much and do nothing. Even EUie, who represents the next
generation, expresses in the last line of the play the hope that the
bombers will come again. The universal laughter which covers all
at the end of Man and Superman, in a tumult of talking, confirms
an inadequacy in a drama where everything depends on what
people say, and
Words 77
shows almost never what people do. As in Wildes plays, there would
be no play at all, if they did not speak so weU.
Shaws mind belongs to the eighteenth century where words
still have their effect; in the twentieth century they often lack the
power to cut ice. The more people talk, the more they show up the
ineffectiveness of talking. Words are dwindling into mere
surfaces; and the people who use them mere ciphers, who mouth.
Jean Giraudoux in his finest play, The Trojan War will not Take
Place (1935) or, as it was called in Christopher Frys translation.
Tiger at the Gates (1955) shows how even as statesmen talk and
express good-will, on a terrace in a garden overlooking a lake,
war is preparing; and the following day will break out. In a more
extreme form, this lack of grip of language on event becomes the
absurd.
But Shaw is saved - and the effect of his plays is saved -
because he never despairs of the universe. He continues to believe
it is worth going on talking. In writing dialogue, he perceives the
ineffectuality of talking, and at the same time the necessity of
doing so. His characters remain embodiments of the wiU to hve.
Alexander Pope, at the end of his mock-epic. The Dunciad, wrote,
Light dies before thy uncreating word, and the words which
Shaw gives his characters to speak, for all their inteUigence and
wit, for aU the effervescent energy of their dramatic effect,
remain confined within the bounds of the stages on which they
are spoken, unable to touch what lies beyond. Our dehght lies in
seeing how words understood and misunderstood can be used to
reverse a stage situation, but seldom a human one. The
conversion of Cusins and Barbara in the last act of Major
Barbara (1905) remains among the least convincing, and most
rhetorical which Shaw wrote. Cusins claims, I now want to give
the poor man material weapons against the intellectual man. . . .
And we are left wondering what on earth he has in mind.
Nonetheless, the performance has to make us continue wanting to
listen.
Andrew Undershafts success as an armaments manufacturer,
enables him to create an ideal community with its schools,
hospitals and good housing at Perivale St Andrews.
78 Making Theatre
His bombs, when they fall, do so on Mongolia, as remote in those days
as Mars, and so distancing Undershaft, and his audience from the
effect of what he is causing to happen. Even the unethical source
of the money with which he proposes to save the Salvation Army
shelter, though vehemently rejected by Barbara with the cry,
drunkenness and murder, affects only the surface of the drama,
like wind on water.
Shaws Prefaces and Plays, taken together, stiU retain the
power to shape minds and inform attitude. John Tanners rejection
of moral disapproval at Violets pregnancy (or what he takes to be
her pregnancy) in favour of rejoicing at the creation of life
remains one such Shavian touchstone. But, as always with Shaw,
it is the utterance which matters, because the characters are what
they utter. Again this is not intended as a comment on Shaw as
philosopher or political thinker, but more circumspectly as a
comment on the way he writes dramatic dialogue, and its power to
explore how human beings feel and live. His desire for the theatre
to be a temple of the ascent of man a hope clearly not
realized yet! was based on a wholly unrealistic view of human
nature, not shared by the dramatist he most admired, Henrik
Ibsen, that people understood what bugged them, that they could
actually grasp who they were, as opposed to living in a mist, even
when they thought they could see the stars. His reason did not
recognize how partial all his consciousness is, or how much
darkness exists even in its understanding of itself. Shaws
intelligence blinded him to the tragedy of human character,
including his own, making his plays paradoxically artificial. The
time for the saints, as he said in Saint Joan, had not come.
Verbal wit which gave Shaws plays, like Wildes and
Sheridans, their power to delight has continued to provide a
source of inspiration in the writing of dramatic dialogue; but, for
reasons which Shaws plays suggest, it too has become
increasingly edged with darkness. In Noel Cowards Hay Fever
(1924), the Bliss family are so blissfully unware that they are
incapable of attending to anything beyond their own personal
concerns, including the guests whom they have independ-
Words
ently invited for the week-end. They are unmade by the manners19which
they do not possess. In the last act the guests creep out of the
house unnoticed, while the BUsses continue to talk, wrapped up
in themselves, like bed-clothes. When David, the novelist father,
attempts to reveal himself by reading his novel, he only succeeds
in irritating his wife who claims he has forgotten the lay-out of
Paris.
DAVID: J^ne Sefton, in her scarlet Hispano swept out of the
Rue Saint Honore into the Place de la Concorde. . . .
JUDITH: She couldnt have.
DAVID: Why?
JUDITH: The Rue Saint Honore doesnt lead into the Place de la
Concorde.
DAVID: Yes, it does.
SOREL: Youre thinking of the Rue Boissy d Anglais, Father.
DAVID: Im not thinking of anything of the sort.
JUDITH: David darling, dont be obstinate.
DAVID (hotly): Do you think I dont know Paris as well as you
do.
Beneath these polished, and finely crafted surfaces, what goes
on? Coward never reveals or hints. In a farce, we may say,
nothing goes on except for the situation. When the situation is
over, it ends. But Coward who deserved to be called the Master
was much too good a writer to let his audience off as lightly as
that. Bliss family life shuts out the whole world, just as each
member of the family shuts out the others. As they would never
ask the question - what are we BHsses like underneath? - the
audience is left to ask it for them; and the answer is neither
consoling nor pleasant. Words provide characters with a good
pair of skates, oblivious that what they skate on is ice. The Bhss
family do not know how funny they are, or how disconcerting.
They need to be played absolutely straight which is much harder
than it sounds.
Noel Coward in his preface to Hay Fever warned of the
80 Making Theatre
difficulties of performing it because it has no plot and remarkably little
action. It demanded expert technique from every member of the
cast. As with all comedy, this depends on a sense of period; in
dress, accent, intonation, posture (sitting and walking),gesture (for
example, how you smoke a cigarette through a long holder,
vertically as Maggie Smith did) and timing which brings out the
tenuousness and triviaUty of what is being said, and in doing
so liberates laughter. The characters themselves have to be created
out of all these different forms of style; and style, like the words,
belong to the surface. The person is not to be found in the feeling
beneath the words, as for example with Malvolio (What, are you
mad, my masters!) because the words have no undertow. The
superficial brittleness (scoring a point or losing one) is all. The
dialogue is like a paper screen which you cannot walk through
because the paper screen is all that exists. Dialogue written hke
this may disconcert not as some critics said at the time because of
its triviality but because its triviality shows up a certain kind of
performance: the emptiness of gesture when there is nothing to
gesture to, and which leads in the end to the absurdity of late
twentieth-century fashion.
Words as surfaces, like people as theatrical images without
depth, have continued to inspire one form of dramatic writing
which is funny and disturbing because it points to a void. Ionesco
personified it in The Bald Prima Donna (1950) (which he
described as an anti-play) in a certain form of Englishness:
MRS SMITH: Goodness! Nine oclock! This evening for supper we

had soup, fish, cold ham and mashed potatoes
and a good English salad, and we had English
beer to drink. The children drank English water.
We had a very good meal this evening. And
thats because we are English, because we live in
a suburb of London, and because our name is
Smith.
(Mr Smith goes on reading his newspaper and clicks his
tongue.)
{The Bald Prima Donna Act 1)
^K
,c
1. Ralph Richardson: Peer Gynt (1945), see p. xvi.

2. John Gielgud: Prospero (1957), see p. 34.
3. Laurence Olivier: Macbeth (1955), see p. 38.
4. David Burke, Sara Kestelman, Matthew Marsh in Michael Frayns Copenhagen (Royal
National Theatre), 1998, see p. 47.
5, Designs by Sally Jacobs for A Midsummer Night's Dream
(Royal Shakespeare Company), 1962, see p. 115.
6. Set by Oliver Messel for Jean Anouilh: Ring Round the Moon, Act Two
(Globe Theatre), 1950, see p. 139.
7. Janacek: Jenufa, set by Tobias Hoheisel, Act One (Glyndebourne Opera), 2000,
see p. 150.
8. Set by Tanya Moseiwitch for Shakespeares Histories (Richard II~Herry V)
(Stratford-on-Avon), 1951, see p. 141.
9. Set by Jocelyn Herbert for Brechts Gallileo, Act One (Royal National Theatre),
1980, see p. 146.
10. Set by Michael Annals for Peter Shaffers The Royal Hunt
of the Sun (Royal National Theatre), 1964, see p. 147.
r* ^^
Set by Josef Svoboda for Wagner s Gotterdammenmg, Act Three, Scene

One (Royal Opera House, Covent Garden), 1976, see p. 160.
Camai ifocffl,
PLA.\*th
I c';!i , o^
r' S' wfi- * 4'^ *
' V '
Finale of Ctiy$ tind Dalk, setting by John Gunter (Royal National Theatre), 1996, see p. 206.
Words 81
In one state of consciousness Ionesco said he asked himself,
what possible reaction is there left, when everything has ceased
to matter, but to laugh at it aU? But in another, A curtain, an
impassable wall stands between me and the world, betwen me and
myself; matter fills very corner, takes up all the space and its
weight annihilates all freedom; the horizon closes in and the
world becomes a stifling dungeon. Language breaks down in a
different way and words drop like stones or dead bodies; I feel I
am invaded by heavy forces against which I can only fight a
losing battle. This combination of levity and heaviness, together
with a feeling that the surreal is present within the banality of
everday speech conveys a quality present in the work of Joe
Orton, Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn, all of whom continue
to write dialogue in which the effect is reflected oflf the surface,
rather than coming from beneath it.
Joe Ortons plays need to be acted, as he himself pointed out,
perfectly seriously and with absolute reahsm. Like Wildes
characters, Ortons are never surprised by their own witty
improprieties, they take them entirely for granted. They are
spoken for effect, to reflect a pose - as well as to amuse - without
feeling or moral content, in a world without feeling or moral
content. A character may ask for a straight answer, as McCleavy
does in Loot (1964), but he can be sure of not getting one. Words
have no purpose except to advance the action. They cannot reveal
because there is nothing to reveal. In Loot, a mothers funeral rites
provide the opportunity for the son to stash the body in a
cupboard and fill the coffin with banknotes which he and his
partner Dave have acquired in a robbery. In this way they hope to
evade the investigations of Inspector Truscott, who poses as a
man from the water board. The dialogue is composed of non
sequiturs and bizarre logic as when Truscott discovers the stolen
banknotes in the casket.
TRUSCOTT: HOW dare you involve me in a situation for which no

memo has been issued? In all my experience Ive
never come across a case hke it.
82 Making Theatre
Every one of these fivers bears a portrait of the
Queen.
A logical world without logic, a world where the effect of
every cause is random, creates a new kind of anarchic humour. In
Ortons last and funniest play, What the Butler Saw (1969), the
invention of the wit is joined to the pace of the stage- action, set in
a psychiatric clinic, where undressing and crossdressing provide a
good deal of the fun; and the plot includes nymphomania, incest,
transvestism, blackmail and mistaken identity. (Ralph Richardson
was reviled for having taken part in a play which caused old ladies
to jump up and down on their programmes in hatred.) Dr Ranee,
who is intended to restore order in the clinic, proves to be madder
than those inside it; and like Inspector Truscott shows up the
hollowness and corruption of Authority. But as with The
Importance of Being Earnest the play only acts as play; it does not
succeed in referring outside itself: the action remains imprisoned
within the consciousness which created it. This gives Ortons plays
not the detachment of Ionescos first form of consciousness, but
the heaviness of the second in which the world becomes a stifling
dungeon, refreshed only by laughter. The characters at the end,
pick up their clothes and weary, bleeding, drugged and drunk,
climb the rope ladder into the blazing light. Or in other words
into the spot and the flies. Paradoxically, it may seem,
performance in this kind of theatre requires restraint. Playing for
laughs destroys the laughter.
Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead took
the town by storm in 1967. In making Hamlets two friends,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose only role is to wait, the
central figures of his play, Stoppard showed a brilliant
inventiveness and power of parody. His imagination was
nourished by literature and drama; but not by anything outside it.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been sent for to Elsinore; but
they do not know why; they pass the day spinning coins, waiting
for something to happen, something to do. They wait for a role. As
Guildenstern admits when the Player admon-
Words 83
ishes them for questioninng their situation at every turn, we dont
know whats going on, or what to do with ourselves. We dont
know how to act. They can only say for certain, we came. They
fill the time with verbal cleverness, games. Like the audience
they are kept intrigued, without ever being enlightened. The only
world they refer to, or can try to relate to is Hamlets, creating
around them a cold, dry air of introversion. Denmarks a prison,
and they too are imprisoned within the world of the play, with its
verbal windows which only look inwards.
The contrast in the way words are used, dialogue is written
and the action conceived is most apparent when it is compared
with Waiting for Godot, a play which in some ways it resembles:
in both, two characters wait for something to happen. At the end,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as the tide forewarns us, are dead;
Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting for Godot. The plays
eyes, however blinded or blind, are turned outwards. The action
of Waitingfor Godot takes place at the cross-roads where existing
means getting through another day, and being means trying to
find out what they are doing there.
VLADIMIR: Ah yes,the two thieves. Do you remember the story?
ESTRAGON: NO.
VLADIMIR: Shall 1 tell it to you?
ESTRAGON: NO.
VLADIMIR: Itll pass the time. It was two thieves, crucified at
the same time as our Saviour. One - ESTRAGON: Our what?
VLADIMIR: Our Saviour.
ESTRAGON (suddenly furious): Recognize! what is there to

recognize? All my lousy life Ive crawled about in
the mud! And you talk to me about scenery!
84 Making Theatre
These utterances are reflected back from the world outside the
theatre, taking soundings in our own belief, or unbelief, or
agnosticism. They are at the same time, funny and tragic.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can only refer back to the world of
theatre, from which they take their being, puppets within the real
tragedy of Hamlet. The languages of theatre are being played with
to subvert, invert and anatomize each other, resulting in a curious,
cold air of emptiness. Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for
Godot; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are waiting to die. In the
meanwhile they are witty, clever, inventive and dangerous.
In Arcadia, written thirty years later, Stoppard continues to
write dialogue with an unflagging zest for words, and how they
can be played with, as the first two lines of the play between the
the 13-year-old Thomasina, and her tutor Septimus makes clear.
THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
SEPTIMUS; Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing ones
arms around a side of beef.
So far, so clear! The next few lines contain a miniature Latin
lesson, as well as references to the Gallic wars, onanism (or
masturbation), algebra and poetry. As the action begins, so it will
continue: not being learned for its own sake, but using learning
for fun, to make play, to demand a response of the audience, and
other characters which may, or may not be, forthcoming:
SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the
insertion of the male genital organ for purposes of
procreation and pleasure. Fermats last theorem,
by contrast, asserts that when x, y and 2: are whole
numbers, each raised to power of , the sum of the
first two can never equal the third when n is
greater than 2.
(Pause)
THOMASINA: Eurghhhh.
Words 85
The text exudes self-confidence which has to be reflected in the
performance; being learned and witty is simply a sign of being
alive.
The action takes place in the same house, Sidley Park, in the
early nineteenth century, and at the present time, in scenes which
interlock past and present to create a single dramatic image of
how it is: an action abstracted from experience. In the eighteenth-
century scenes, Thomasina and Septimus remain engaged - in
addition to problems caused by sex - with problems of writing a
formula.
THOMASINA; ... if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula
for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever to do it, the
formula must exist just as if one could.
SEPTIMUS: (Pause) Yes.
In the contemporary scenes, Bernard, an English don, shows

an equal persistence though for much more questionable
motives in trying to prove that Byron fought a duel at Sidley
Park with a minor poet called Ezra Chater, over his wife, killed
him and was forced to leave the country in a hurry (which he did).
In fact, as the play eventually reveals, Chater went to the West
Indies where he died, after being bitten by a monkey.
A great deal of this verbal conjuring in both centuries is as
Hannah, a historical biographer, points out, performance art.
Rhetoric! They used to teach it in ancient times, Uke PX Like
PT it is energizing, involving the audience in intellectual
gymnastics which they may, or may not, be able to do. The
dialogue rushes on with tremendous momentum, throwing up
ideas like rockets in a fireworks display. But, when the fireworks
go out, they are seen to have flared in a dark night sky. The title is
taken from the phrase, Et in Arcadia ego where the I is death. The
idea which Thomasina hits on becomes a hundred years later the
second law of thermodynamics: heat only passes in one direction,
from hot to cold, fiom the more
86 Making Theatre
ordered to the less ordered; the energy of the universe is always
decreasing, tending to stasis. In human life nothing is as certain as
it appears to be; small things may lead to huge change, or huge
things lead to no change, as with the weather. Randomness,
chance (as with Bernards success and failure with literary
detection, or Thoniasinas death by fire at the age of seventeen)
rule individual life. But the play ends with a dance in which the
characters from past and present participate, where feelings and
carnal embrace still matter. The human festival continues, but
always in a universe ruled by death, and which itself is dying. In
art, in theatre, the party continues, can be played again, dazzle
with its brilliance, seem curiouser and curiouser, liberate tired
spirits with laughter; but outside the ring of light on the stage, the
darkness grows deeper, the cold grows worse. The theatre
becomes a way of putting ones back to the night, but not by
pretending that it isnt there.
Alan Ayckbourn gained his reputation through the writing of
farce, plays written to brighten a rainy afternoon in the seaside
town of Scarborough. As has often been said, his plays, while
continuing to be very funny, have darkened in tone. Although he
has now written more than forty plays, he has continued to invent
new ways of using the stage, so that each play surprises in its
stagecraft. Dialogue remains confined to a middle-class milieu,
and restricted by practical everyday concerns. While Stoppards
characters never stop saying interesting things, Ayckbourns
characters can be relied on never to do so. Lacking depth, his
characters need all the skills which actors bring to them in
performance, where timing - an immediate relation between
words, actions and audience - is of the essence. Ayckbourn is a
master at putting his characters through their paces; and the fun
derives from seeing how well they do them.
In Man of the Moment (1990), Douglas Beechey, created by
Michael Gambon, has been brought to Spain to appear in a TV
programme where he will be brought face to face with the bank
robber whom he confronted eighteen years earlier. When the gun
went off, it disfigured the woman whom
Words 87
Douglas subsequently married, leaving them to a half-life of childless
isolation and impoverishment. The robber, after a fe'w years in
gaol, has become a super-rich TV personality; and the programme
has been set up in his Spanish villa to record their reunion.
Beechey arrives unexpectedly, when the cameras are not yet
ready to capture his reaction on seeing how the bank robber
lives.Jill RiUington, the TV host, asks Beechey to make his
entrance again.
JILL: OK. Listen, I want you simply to come in through that
gate - Hke this - (She demonstrates.) OK?
DOUGLAS: (Watching her intently.) Yes. I came in the other
way, originally. When I arrived. Does that matter?
JILL: Not in the least.
She wants him to look a bit amazed - awed by it all. But

Beechey cant act, cant walk through the garden gate looking
natural, cant speak as though he is not speaking lines, lacks all
sense of timing. The discord which followed in Michael
Gambons performance, and the laughter it caused, grew from
seeing a great actor act very badly. Ayckbourn has conceived
Beechey as a man without desire, apparently incapable of wanting
anything except what he has, and incapable too of playing
himself. Whether this results from a lack of imagination, a loss of
feehng or some terrible complacency in him are questions the
play does not even begin to raise. When Jill tries to question him
on camera about his marriage, she can get nothing from him; he
wont give her a story because he has no story to give.
JILL: Are you happy together, for instance?
DOUGLAS: Yes.
JILL: Truly happy?
DOUGLAS: Yes.
JILL: No problems?
DOUGLAS: No. Not really. I cant think of any, offhand.
88 Making Theatre
JILL: Despite the fact that she cant face leaving the house?
DOUGLAS: Well. Thats true, yes. But weve both learnt to live
with that, you see. . .
JILL: Doesnt it upset her?
DOUGLAS: No. She doesnt seem to mind. She doesnt want to
go anywhere.
Dialogue develops the action, but it never reflects or suggests
what lies beneath the surface, if anything does. Its a meaningless
question to ask what Ayckbourns characters are really like; they
are as they appear. Words shock, surprise, cause laughter; but do
not involve or seek to involve - the audience in imaginative
exploration. Even in Act II of Absurd Person Singular (1972),
where Eva makes multiple attempts to kill herself, thwarted by
those who do not realise what she is trying to do, our attention is
focused on the causes of her failure (for example, dropping the
sleeping pills down the sink), and the unawareness of those who
interrupt (thinking she is trying to clean the oven when she puts
her head inside it), not on her reasons except human
unhappiness, and the blindness of others to its existence.
At the end of A Small Family Business (1987), duplicity,
sexual and economic, will have been extensively revealed, through
the use of a single set which we take to be different houses
according to the characters on stage. "A Small Family Business
takes place in the sitting room, kitchen, hall, landing, bathroom
and bedroom in the houses of various members of the family over
one autumn week. Words and actions reveal how these characters
live; existence is what people do and say. Their situation is all. But
in these situations Ayckbourn shows a good deal about attitudes,
relationships, forms of behaviour, personal and social, as the
millennium draws to its end. And he does so with a tireless
originality in what can be done with the stage. His performers
need equally to have an acutely observed sense of the social
milieu, with all its nuances in intonation and dress, to which his
characters belong.
H^rds 89
On 8 May 1956, when John Osbornes Look Back in Anger was first
performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, the chmate of
opinion changed on the Enghsh stage, and with it the kind of
dialogue which could be expected to be heard there. The theatre
became overdy political, and the writer came to be judged by what
was deemed to be his or her commitment. This reflected the
conflict outside the theatre between left and right, marxism and
capitalism, democracy and authoritarian regimes, north and south
within England, and outside it. Words on the stage, what people
talked about, what aroused their passions, caused conflict between
them, were inspired by new emotions, reflecting a young
generation, new social groupings, which in time became
illustrative of the plurality of contemporary culture.
Kenneth Tynan, reviewing Look Back in Anger, attempted to
estimate the size of the potential audience. I agree that Look Back
in Anger is Hkely to remain a minority taste. What matters,
however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it at roughly
6,733,000 which is the number of people in this country between
the ages of twenty and thirty, and this figure will doubtless be
swelled by refugees from other age- groups who are curious to
know what the contemporary young pup is thinking and feeling.
(Tynan, p. 178) Tynan was right to be jubilant about the passion
which had been restored to the English stage in Jimmy Porters
excoriating candour, after the soft water-colours of plays like N.C.
Hunters Waters of the Moon (1951) and A Day by the Sea (1953).
But, as with all change, there was also loss. Terence Rattigan and
Noel Coward in the previous generation wrote dialogue which had
the effect of melting a solid surface with a volcanic eruption from
underneath; the audience felt the disintegration of the person
beneath the literal meaning of the lines. This came from a certain
kind of English reticence - an embarrassment before too
pronounced an avowal of feeling or of deep emotion which
Jimmy Porters candour was to banish, and with it banish
90 Making Theatre
much of the poetry from the English stage as well. Landscapes of
feeling are created by impulses, desires, inhibitions, represions
which though unexpressed determine how characters act and
react.
Terence Rattigan, who was homosexual at a time when
homosexuality remained a criminal offence, and was constrained
by the law, and by the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain,
succeeded in transposing what could not be admitted; and in
writing dialogue in which the tension comes from the unspoken.
In The Deep Blue Sea (1952), Peggy Ashcroft, Vivien Leigh,
Googie Withers and Penelope Wilton have all brought to the part
of Hester CoUyer, in various ways, a combination of intense
outward control and inner suffering, implicit in the dialogue, but
requiring immense technical skill and discipline in the
performance. Hester cannot express her exorbitant sexual and
emotional demands to the young ex-BJ\F pilot for whom she has
abandoned the security of her life with a High Court Judge; nor
can he respond to them. She in her middle-class English way lacks
the words to express such feelings; he lacks the emotional
commitment, as well as the sexual drive, consoling himself with
booze and golf. The war was more exciting than Hester. Living in
genteel poverty with Freddy, she is visited by her ex-husband who
continues to treat her with an understanding and friendship which
can never satisfy her needs. Seeing her living as she does, he does
not have an inkling of what these are.
HESTER: Oh, but he can give me something in return, and even does, from time to
time.
COLLIER; What?
HESTER: Himself.
She can no more explain to her husband, or to herself (in

words) what her lover, Freddie Page, means to her. But the
audience knows - or which is more important, feels - the
li^rds 91
pressure of that almost unbearable desire to possess and be possessed,
which nearly drives her to suicide, and which had driven
Rattigans young lover to kill himself in the autobiographical
events from which the play was derived. Rattigans dialogue
reflects the conventions of its time, with its taboos on self-
expression, and observation ofgood taste, but also the
inadequacy of language to express the complex interweaving of
feeling in powerful emotions, reducing the sufferer to the
monosyllabic, or the silence of a physical response. When the
curtain rises at the start of the play, Hester is lying in front of the
unlit gas-fire, and is only saved by the intervention of the doctor
(himself struck off the register) who lives upstairs. The pressure
in Rattigans dialogue comes firom the need to be secretive and
surreptitious; and its dramatic effectiveness fix)m all that this
leaves for the audience to imagine of inner pain and loneliness.
When words are always taking soundings from within, characters
remain open to interpretation; and the resonances of the poetic
remain part of the dramatic action.
More conservative critics than Kenneth Tynan complained of
Look Back in Anger that they could not see what Jimmy Porter
was so angry about. While it is true that his anger could be
attributed to many causes, including the absence in his world of
any brave new causes, the words of the play remain closed; they
do not lead to hidden chambers, or unsuspected rooms. They
remain what they say. Even Archie Rice, whom Osborne created
for Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer and Olivier returned
the compliment by turning it into one of his most memorable
performances - fails to be anything other than his own
performance. The music-hall artiste who is dead behind the
eyeballs cannot by definition be the window on anything else.
ARCHIE: Were all out for good old Number One

Number Ones the only one for me. Good
old England, youre my cup of tea. But I
dont want no drab equality . . .
92 Making Theatre
Why should I care Why should I
let it touch me Why shoulnt I sit
down and cry Let it pass over me.
Like the music-hall act, The Entertainer (1957) can be
interpreted Archie becomes an image of post-imperial sleaze
and decay- but the meaning does not well up from within the play.
We are left with moral judgements we impose from without. The
sad family life behind the performance and the death of Mick
killed by the bloody wogs in Cyprus - do not startle with any
new awareness: they belong to the world of dramatic reportage.
And this remains true of much dramatic writing since 1956,
however profound its comitment to causes of many sorts. Plays in
which the meaning of the action is confined to what the dialogue
says do not often merit revival not just because the message once
heard does not need to be repeated, even if the moment for it has
not passed, but because a character on the stage who is what he or
she says offers little possibility of reinterpretation. Every writer
expresses an ideology in writing at all; but when the purpose of
writing becomes the expression of an ideology it hardens into
rigidities which preclude any depth of insight. Words are closed
off from what lies underneath them.
John Osborne in Luther (1961), owed a great deal to Bertolt
Brecht in stagecraft, as did many dramatists of the sixties,
seventies and eighties, who succeeded him. The episodic structure
of the plays, the distancing of character and the political
commitment, as well as the constant reminders of being in a
theatre colonised English dramatic writing. But Brecht had one
gift which they did not possess and could not be imitated; this gift
distinguishes his work from that of almost all those who saw him
as the creator of a new form of theatre. Brecht was a poet, a great
master of the lyric. In prose and in verse, his words are as sharp as
a sharks teeth, even though his plots often lack tension. Baal, his
first major character (played
Words 93
by Peter OToole in 1963 with an enormous relish for indifference and
debauched excess) follows his instinct as poet, indulging his lusts
and committing murder. He pays the price of exclusion from the
normal human world by his indifference to everything except his
own words. Brecht can create Baal who violently rejects the
sexual mores and social niceties of middle-class society because
he can write his poems for him.
In his first popular success, Die Dreigroschenoper {The
Threepenny Opera), for which Kurt Weill wrote the music,
Brecht, who had learnt a great deal from Kiphngs Barrack Room
Ballads, created lyrics which went with a new kind of operatic
style based on jazz and folk-ballad. The Moritaten singers ballad
about Mack the Knife which opens the show, is raw and vibrant, a
song to whistle, as it should be, on street-corners on a dark night;
An dem schonen blauen Sonntag
Liegt ein toten Mann am Strand Und
der Mensch geht um die Ecke Den
Mann Mackie Messer nennt.
On a beautiful blue Sunday A dead Man
lies on the beach And the man who goes
round the corner Is the one they call Mack
the Knife.
(Prologue)
In the Canonen-song, soldiers who live by the gun make
beafsteak tartare out of their enemies; and later Jenny reveals
how she will only say yes to the man who is poor and rough and
smells of sweat.
Brechts words, always absolutely clear above the physically
vibrant rhythms of Weills music, create their effect through a
controlled casualness:
Mac and Polly (singing together on the night of their

marriage)
94 Making Theatre
Die Liebe dauert oder dauert night
An dem oder jedem Ort.
Love lasts or does not last In
this or some other place.
Brechts words always open themselves up to the audiences
involvement, leaving them to make up their minds about what is
being said. Here is how he writes the love-scene between Grusha
and the Soldier when they are reunited, after the parting of war, in
The Caucasian Chalk Circle:
GRUSHA: Simon!
SIMON: Is that Grusha Vachnadze?
GRUSHA: Simon!
SIMON (politely): A good morning, and good health to the young lady.
GRUSHA (gets up gaily and bows deeply:) A good morning to the
soldier. And thank God he has returned in good
health.
SIMON: They found better fish than me, so they didnt eat me,
said the haddock.
GRUSHA: Courage, said the kitchen boy. Luck, said the hero.
SIMON: And how are things here? Was the winter bearable?
Did the neighbour behave?
GRUSHA: The winter was a little rough, the neighbour as usual,
Simon.
SIMON: May one ask if a certain person is still in the habit of putting her leg in the
water when washing her linen?
Standing on opposite sides of a river, and speaking in a

language so formal as to be almost impersonal, they leave the
audience to imagine the feelings between them at this moment
when Grusha is about to tell him she has married.
IVords 95
GRUSHA: How can I explain it to you? So fast and with the
stream between us? Couldnt you cross that bridge?
(translated by Eric Bentley)
An emblematic setting (a piece of cloth for the river) and the
simple words fuse here in a stage poetry, which is deeply erotic in
its impersonality. In the dialogue of much English dramatic
writing, influenced by Brecht, poetry on the stage becomes stage-
rhetoric, as in Beatrices long speech at the end of Arnold
Weskers Roots, with its vision of a socialist Utopia. Beatrice tells
us what we should imagine; she does not leave us to imagine;
words remains propaganda. Even more important, words alone
fail to use the resources which theatre can use to play upon the
audiences imgination. John Osbornes contempt and
disillusionment at the neglect of his later work failed to see how
uninventive his work had become in theatrical terms.
One play of the seventies, Trevor Griffithss Comedians
(1977), succeeded memorably in creating a poetry of the stage
which owed much to Brecht, but was true to its own vision.
In Act II of Comedians a group of would-be cabaret-turns in a
Manchester working-mens club try out their acts before a talent-
spotter from London in the hope of getting a professional
engagement. Their sexist and racist jokes play upon the
audiences uneasy response, and awareness of the laceration of
what ceases to amuse. In the last turn, Gethin Price, created by
Jonathan Pryce, is made up half clown and half street performer.
He encounters two dummies in full evening dress, as it were
outside a theatre, and offers to hail them a taxi. His act before
their dismissive silence expresses the hatred of those who are
disregarded because they are poor; and the laughter which it
draws is intended to be as painful as it is funny. When Gethin pins
a flower on the girls dress, a blood-red stain spreads out behind
it. Using the theatrical language of music- hall and clowning.
Comedians explodes the idea that there can be one nation where
hatred is justified. To be poor in such a
96 Making Theatre
society is to be unworthy of notice because the rich have inherited the
earth.
The act succeeds because of the number of theatrical
languages it uses. Gethin holds a tiny violin which plays a piece of
intricate Bach unaided, the bow catches fire, he smashes the violin
underfoot; and with another plays a few bars of the The Red
Flag. The laugher literally draws blood from the girl. The political
passion is expressed, not spoken. The very silence and disregard of
the dummies, like the unaided playing of the violin, succeeds in
being eery and funny. When in Act III the play turns into an
argument between Gethin Price and his liberal humanist mentor,
Eddie Waters, the play shrinks into a not very clearly articulated
debate, about different kinds of hatred.
A play which lacks the resonance and compression which the
poetry of the stage can create confines a play to being a stage-
debate, often interesting as showing the conflicting and opposed
points of view which exist in a modern society; but while this may
clarify issues and attitudes, it catches litde from the dark undertow
where human action and reaction have their source. In doing this,
it shrinks the area of the audiences imagining. David Hares
Trilogy Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, and The Absence
of War (1995) was a professional piece of theatre, in Richard
Eyres staging; it anatomized the Church, the Law and the Labour
Party, and did so with compelling energy. But these were plays
born of research which wore their heart upon their sleeve. David
Hares Skylight (1996) belongs to that other kind of dramatic
writing in which words open up on constantiy shifting landscapes
of feeling. Skylight with its title suggestive of a vision beyond,
and of an upstairs room of confined space is created out of an
incandescent and transient encounter between two people whose
lives had once been shared, and have now diverged. Unlike the
later work of Pinter which conjures with memory as a theatrical
device, where characters are never sure what they remember and,
if memory itself is only a fantasy, not a record of what actually
occurred, Kyra and Tom
Words 97
know what they shared. They also know what theyve become.
Kyra used to live in Toms house, while he was making his
fortune as an owner of restaurants, and was his mistress. When his
wife, who is dying of cancer, discovers their relationship by
finding letters which Tom has carelessly left around, Kyra
immediately leaves him. The action of the play takes place during
a single night when, a year after the wifes death, Tom calls to see
her again. The dialogue of the play turns naturally around all that
has happened to them since Kyra walked out; but the inner action
of the play comes from a fencing-match between them in which
each is trying to find out whether the solution to their solitariness
would be to try living together again. They are well-matched. On
both sides the hits are palpable, the pain greater than either
admits. Only the sex is easy.
The apparent conflict between them often turns on
contemporary political and gender issues: his Wimbledon house
versus her cold, cheerless flat in north-west London; her hfe as a
school teacher versus his as a wealthy business man; his eating
out in expensive restuarants versus her spaghetti at home; his
desire to possess versus her need for independence and freedom.
But David Hare has made these the exo-skeleton of an action in
which we feel all the time the flesh beneath the bone. But uiflike
Strindberg with whose chamber plays Skylight has something in
common, the struggle does not come from an elemental love and
hate, but from a broader range of human sympathies and
antipathies: friendliness, enjoyment of each others repartee,
awareness of difference and up to a point acceptance of
difference. The smell of burning in the play does not come from
the desire to inflict pain, but from the realization of how much
pain exists between them. Words become skylights on inner
worlds, and on the interaction between those solitary worlds.
Tough, often humorous, without sentiment, David Hares
dialogue enabled Michael Gambon and Lia Wilhams to create that
inner play of controlled silence in which all that was not being
said was being entered into by the audience. Dramatic writing of
this range
98 Making Theatre
has been evolved out of the politicization of theatre in the last fifty
years; but the achievement is subtler and more profound than
much which has preceded it. When Skylight is revived in five or
fifty years with different actors, it will require the same degree of
technique and control; and will inevitably be altered by their
appearance, their movements, their gestures and reactions in a
way that only the living theatre makes possible. Skylight on film,
however effective, would be fixed; on the stage it requires the
intuitive spontaneity, recreated at every performance, which
acting is all about.
Dialogue in Hares play, for aU its intuitive probing, works
within a well-established tradition; its surprises, except in the
introduction of Toms son at the beginning, and his return with
great effectiveness at the end, are surprises of character and
situation. Brian Friels Translations (1981) conceives a wholly
new way of thinking about words in a play. It is set in an Irish-
speaking community in County Donegal in 1833, at a time when
the English are remapping and renaming Ireland for the purposes
of colonial rule. The audience hears the characters speaking
English while knowing they are speaking Gaelic. In addition,
Jimmy or Jack Cassie, a bachelor in his sixties is more content
quoting in Greek or Latin than speaking any modern language.
Hugh, who speaks Irish and English, can interpret one community
to the other. But while he recognizes the practical advantages of
learning English, he knows English . . . couldnt really express
us. The substitution of English names for their Irish originals
attempts to change the landscape of fact for political ends; that
Ireland may be better ruled. But this invasion violates the human
identity which comes from a shared language, and community of
feeling. Words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And
it can happen - to use an image youll understand - it can happen
that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which
no longer matches the landscape of. . . fact. (This profound
remark defines the relevance of this play to all other parts of the
world where, for whatever reason, English has been adopted.) The
one Englishman, Lieutenant YoUand,
Words
99
who attempts to cross the boundary betwen these linguistic contours
through falling in love with Maire invokes the retribution which
comes from ancient hatreds and separations. Like Brecht in The
Caucasian Chalk Circle and Timberlake Wertenbaker in Our
Countrys Good Friel succeds in writing a potent love-scene,
where each speaks in a language the other does not understand.
What they want to tell each other remains a mystery, until Maire
catches a single word.
YOLLAND; I would tell you I want to be here to live here -
always - with you - always, always. MAIRE: Always? What is
that word - always.
(Act II, scene 2)
They dont understand, and yet each knows what the other is saying. In
dramatic terms, this becomes a new way of expressing the secrecy
of love.
What remains possible between two individuals, even without
a shared language, remains impossible between two communities
or nations even with a shared language, where one is imposing
and imprinting itself on the other by force of arms. Natural
intuitive acceptance, a reciprocity of trust stabilizes le milieu
interieur, but cannot be absorbed into le milieu extMeur where
these predispositions do not exist. Lieutenant Yolland goes
missing, presumed murdered by the Donnelly twins, and the
English army exacts a terrible vengeance for his disappearance.
The play ends with a speech which invokes the power of
language to summon up a past culture:
Urbs antiquafuit - there was an ancient city which, tis said,
Juno loved above all the lands. And it was the goddesss aim
and cherished hope that here should be the capital of all
nations - should the fates perchance allow that. Yet in truth
she discovered that a race was springing from Trojan blood to
overthrow some realms and proud in war who would come
forth for Lybias downfall
(Act III)
100 Making Theatre
At the same time it invokes the ghosts of the past as a warning to the
present: dramatic language working with superb precision to
express a person, and through him to express us.
At the first performance of Translations in Londonderry,
people of both communities, politicians from London, Dublin and
Belfast, Church dignitaries, critics and novelists rose to applaud
what they had witnessed. Theatre only exists, Peter Brook has
written, at the precise moment when the two worlds of the actors
and the audience meet: a society in miniature, a microcosm
brought together every evening within a space {SP, p. 236).
Words, whether between nations, cultures or individuals,
translate and are mistranslated; language itself is the bearer of
disease. It attempts to control what is made uncontrollable by its
own subversive effect. Moses at the end of Schoenbergs Moses
and Aaron, after the orgy of worshipping before the golden calf,
can only exclaim in despair; O Word, Word that I lack!
Ionesco at one time recorded in his Journal: There are no
words for the deepest experience. The more I try to explain
myself, the less I understand myself. Of course, not everything is
unsayable in words, only the living truth.
In beginning this chapter on words with silence, and with its
special role in theatre, I recalled what Wittgenstein said: what we
cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. This is true not
only of, or for, philosophers; but in a general sense for us all.
Theatre and music are the only two arts which enact this truth.
Theatre does so in a way that is more specific than music, because
it shows silence in or between people: what they cannot articulate
because there are no words to express their feelings, or their
feelings are so complex that any attempt to express them would be
a violation of what is true. As Pascal wrote, there is someting
eloquent in silence, which is more persuasive than words.
At the end of Uncle Vanya (1899), when everyone has left
except Dr Astrov, we know that this is the last moment at which
he could ask Sonya to marry him, if he wanted to do so.
H^rds 101
Sonya and Astrov know this too; and know as we do that he wont. He
walks to the back-wall, examines a map of Africa, and says: The
heat must be terrible down there now! All our attention is
focused on that terrible intensity, and emptiness. The words do
not fill the silence between them. They enlarge it. Theatre in
using language on the threshold of silence takes the audience to a
certain point, and then abandons them to their imagining.
Whatever the nature of the play, whether by Shakespeare or
David Hare, theatre in this act of abandonment confronts us with
what is held in abeyance, and with what cannot be expressed in
words. Only theatre can do this in the living present which exists
between actors and audience; and in doing so fulfils a function
which is unique and irreplaceable. The French actor, Jean-Louis
Barrault has described it as a collective cleansing, a smoothing
out of all the wrong creases, a readjustment of balance: an act of
Justice (Barrault, p. 123). At the same time as the theatre holds a
mirror up to nature, it also - to quote Shakespeare - halloos a
name to the reverberate hills. These reverberations constitute
the special nature of its genius. Actors who are aware of words in
all their potentiality and their limitations confront us with human
fallibility, with societys ills and with the healing powers of
laughter. They do so by a living presence shared with the
audience.
Peter Brook expresses it Hke this: Theatres role is to give
this microcosm a burning and fleeting taste of another, in which
our present world is integrated and transformed(SP p. 236). Such
metamorphic moments may come rarely but, when they do, they
bite deep. For the present writer, one such moment occurred when
Edwige Feuilhere and Jean-Louis Barrault played the final scene
of Claudels Partage de Midi in the World Theatre season of
1967. It ends with the words, Iesprit vainqueur dans la
transfiguration de Midi! And so it was.
3
Vision
The visible
Is not produced without light. In the going down Of the light vision
half-opens
(Andres Sanchez Robayna, translated by Charles Tomlinson)
When I studied the text of Love's Labours Lost, I was struck
by something that seemed to me to be self-evident, but which
at the time seemed to be unheard of: that when, at the very
end of the last scene, a new unexpected character called
Mercade came on, the whole play changed its tone entirely.
He came into an artifical world to announce a piece of news
that was real. He came on bringing death. And it was through
this that I brought Mercade over a rise at the back of the stage
it was evening, the lights were going down and suddenly
there appeared a man in black. The man in black came onto a
very pretty summery stage, with everybody in pale pastel
Watteau and Lancret costumes, and golden lights dying. It
was very disturbing, and at once the whole audience felt that
the world had been transformed.
(SP, pp. 11-12)
It was evening, the lights were going down. . . . As in Once
upon a time, all theatre magic begins like this. But Peter Brooks
poetic description of his 1950 production of Loves Labours Lost
highlights a particular moment in which a metaphorical
interpretation of the whole play crystallizes. The solitary figure in
black entering over a rise at the back of the stage to a peopled
space changes the tone of a carefree play, with an old device: Et
in Arcadia ego - I, death, am also in Arcadia.
Vision 103
A revival of a well-known play paints it in new colours, and
gives it fresh meaning: a vision and revision. Here, this comes for
Peter Brook as much from a perception about the eighteenth-
century paintings of Watteau as from Shakespeare, an awareness
in them of an incredible melancholy associated with a dark
figure somewhere, standing with his back to you, who some
people take to be Watteau himself This still figure in the painting
is set in motion, transposing the play into a new key, carrying all
which comes from the world of Watteau and superimposing it on
Shakespeares court of Navarre. We are in two worlds separate in
time, and instantaneous in space. In visualizing a text, what
matters most is the feeling conveyed to the audience, because a
performance is absorbed through the eye as much as the ear.
Everything which happens on a stage what is seen and
what the audience is conjured into imagining it sees
determines the effectiveness of a production. Scenery, costume,
lighting, physical and spatial relationships, and, as here, the stage
as a shaped space all fuse in the vision of a script, and its
interpretation.
In a film, the camera moves with people in their relationships;
the stage frames objects in space, only some of which are people,
though none are empty of dramatic meaning. Objects on the stage
become the projections of feeHng, and not simply, as often in the
cinema, the landscape in which an action occurs. In one of
Samuel Becketts plays, the only object, apart from a shrouded
listener, is a mouth. Not / is a sixteen-minute outburst, and a
torrent of words which Billie Whitelaw described as being like
falling backwards into hell. Becketts genius signals two things;
first, that all drama conjures with objects in space and works upon
the audience to interpret them. As in physics, the uncertainty of
their relationship to one another, and of our relationship to them is
central to the enactment. Second, that in drama the simplest things
work best. Whether part of the script, or of a directorial vision,
drama involves a reduction and an abstraction from experience,
enabling the narrative to achieve a symbolic force. This
104 Making Theatre
is true of acting and production alike. A cluttered stage, like any space
with too many perspectives, diminishes the possibility of
imaginative concentration: that intense focusing on something
taken to be significant, even though simply interpretable.
Becketts mouth shares with Wagners ring this simplicity of
explosive power. As Samuel Beckett has put it, a theatre should
have the maximum of verbal presence, and the maximum of
corporal presence. Perhaps one difference between the late
nineteenth and late twentieth centuries is that the maximum which
can be said, or represented, has shrunk, that we no longer have the
certainty about objects in space, including ourselves, enabling us
to invest them with the authority of an absolute presence: a
change prefigured in Wagners Wotan whose spear is broken. The
maximum has been reduced to the minimal; the god has become a
mouth!
A play occurs in four-dimensional space. In time, the two or
three hours traffic of the stage, becomes an instantaneous event.
Once we are out of the theatre, the action as a whole is what we
consider. In space, the realistic acquires a symbolic power. Ralph
Koltai, in his design for Hochhuths The Representative (1963)
a play about the silence of the Catholic Church in the face of the
extermination of the Jews recreated a gas-chamber. In the
centre of it stood a single object: the papal throne. A play,
whether old or new, which does not make the audience ask what
is the significance of this action for us and create a transaction
between stage and audience, has failed. Director, designer and
lighting designer explore the space of the stage, individually and
together; the actors people it. The play and its production are not
finally separable; but they originate in different arts: writing, and
its physical interpretation.
What we see on the stage is fixed within varying limits by
what the dramatist has written. A play is concerned with people
and objects within an envelope of space. Waiting/or Godot needs
a tree which is bare in the first act, and has leaves in the second,
as well as a boot, a carrot, a hat. Mother Courage needs a cart;
Othello a handkerchief. Objects act as catalysts
Vision 105
within the dramatic action; and embody the dramatists vision. Even on
the page, a play is a visual and physical thing in which they move
apart and they move closer can mean as much anything spoken.
The realization of the play becomes the problem for a director
and the design team who have to explore the stage- space they
have been given to work in. The director has a vision of what he
needs; and the designer who is exploring space in a very different
way has to meet those needs. The success of the production will
depend on how well their two visions work together, and fuse.
Until the nineteen-fifties, stage design was created mainly out of
painted scenery; now the stage has become a sculptured space in
which the effect of the design will be created by the materials of
its construction: wood, glass, aluminium, steel, hessian, plastic,
polystyrene, leather, as well as paint. Materials determine
lightness, heaviness, transparency, occlusion, and produce in the
audience a tactile response.They give the stage texture which is
heightened by colour and hght.
Costume, like everything else, has become more eclectic. Two
forces which pull in opposite directions have both gained in
strength. On the one hand, knowledge of costume, of materials, of
how clothes are put together, of hair-styles, of jewellery and
ornaments, and other accessories from canes to rapiers have
become more detailed and precise, through the work of
professionals like Lucy Barton and Janet Arnold. Distinctions in
terms of class, age, gender, occupation and nationality have been
researched and chronicled in precise drawings. On the other hand,
authenticity has come to be recognized as only one aspect of
dressing a play. A production has to create a psycholgical aura,
which reflects both the dramatists and the directors feeling for
the play, which must be cohesive. This may be created from a mix
of the historical and the modern, the formal and the casual, the
exotic and the everyday, but the one thing it must not be is
random. At an instinctive level, it has to be imagined.
Clothes in any period are the outward signs of particular
106 Making Theatre
individuals; and are as distinctive as the people wearing them. They
must be right for the actors playing those individuals. A splendid
costume can make an actress, as Judi Dench has said, feel that she
is Queen Elizabeth 1; the wrong costume can inhibit the actors
ability to play the part at all, just as off the stage wearing the
wrong clothes can embarrass and humiliate, or enlarge and
liberate. The right costumes determine not just what the audience
sees, but what the actors and audience feel. The overall effect lies
close to the harmonies, and disharmonies, felt in music.
The fashion for updating the setting of classical plays
proves, when it works, a fertile way of seeing them with fresh
eyes. This has more to do with an audiences visual response to
the colours and atmosphere of a production than any important
relationship with a changed historical period. Othello set in the
First World War, does not become a play about it. The noble
Moor may seem less noble, or more ironically so, because of
subsequent attitudes to generals in that war, and lagos scheming
be coloured by attitudes to class conflict in the twentieth century.
More importantly, substituting khaki for Venetian robes will
modify the audiences tactile reponse to the play as a whole.
When, as often happens, it is asked what is gained or lost by
changing a setting, the answer lies less in any intellectual
justification, than in whether the changed visualization paints the
play in fresh colours and tones so that we feel it as though through
new eyes.
Stage-space has become sculptured by light as well as design.
The coming of light at the start of the play makes visible, and then
highlights,shadows, darkens, brightens, colours, mutes; lighting
paints with colours which move; lighting is a living, tactile
thing, a visual music creating its own rhythms, and noiselessly
shaping its own transitions. The fading of the light at the end of
the performance returns to darkness a completed image which
lives only in memory.
All that has been conceived is set in motion by the actors who
bring heat and life to what was cold. Their performance, and aU
that has gone into its making, cannot be separated from
Vision 107
changing style, or styles, which themselves reflect the changing
cultural context. The theatre has become more physical as we
increasingly live in a time when we express ourselves more often
physically, less often with the refinement of words. The writing of
plays has nonetheless always drawn a great deal of its hfe from
the visual and concrete. What Oedipus says will always be
remembered less often than the image of Oedipus who has put out
his eyes to atone for the plague he has brought upon Thebes.
The first part of this chapter is about the physical nature of
plays; the later part about their staging when vision and
visualization become one: theatre in the present, catching
something on the wing and creating a transaction between stage
and audience. The theatre of the last fifty years has been kept
alive not only by the range of its acting talents but by the fertility
of its experiment and innovation in the arts of direction, stage
design and lighting.
The stage direction for Act I of Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard reads
like this:
It is early morning; the sun is just coming up. The windows of
the room are shut, but through them the cherry trees can be
seen in blossom. It is May, but in the orchard there is morning
frost.
Here is an image of incandescent beauty, and stillness: an
image made all the more poignant by the knowledge that at the
plays end the axe will fall on the trunks of those trees. But should
we see those blossoms, whether at the start, or a little later in the
act, when the shutters are flung open, and the old house with its
newly returned family comes once more to life? The Cherry
Orchard is filled with a sense of joyful returning, and inevitable
parting. It is only illusion to pretend that the room still referred to
as the nursery can be a nursery anymore; and yet it stiU carries
with it the signs, the objects of its original purpose. Objects in this
play have a symbolic value
108 Making Theatre
conferred by our seeing them at the moment just before they disappear
for ever.
As stage design has become less naturalistic in the last thirty
years, so the cherry orchard is less often seen. In the Royal
Shakespeare Companys 1997 production, directed by Adrian
Noble, and designed by Richard Hudson, the set had no windows
to open on other worlds: the cherry orchard could only be
imagined. This may partly have been a decision brought about by
the stage-space for which the production was designed at the
Swan Theatre in Stratford; but it also reflects a basic decision
about the interpretation of the play. Here, the house coming to life
with the arrival of all the luggage, and its death with the removal
of all the trunks and hat-boxes at the end, gave the play a material
heaviness to which the invisible cherry orchard offered no relief.
The objects we carry with us are the stuff of our lives; and what
exists beyond the freight of our daily existence which weighs us
down, remains only a transcendent possibility, always invisible
and always remote. The house with its bare wooden floors,
staircase and corridors, resounded with the sound of human feet,
walking and dancing to the playing of the Jewish band. The
enclosure of the set suggested not dancing as liberation, but as a
futile distraction, while the cherry orchard was being sold, and an
intensification of the familys inability to face the reality of what
was happening to them.
Every play, as written, contains images, verbal, visual and
physical which define what the play is about. They may be
realized in different ways; but they cannot be excluded. The
Cherry Orchard is about the cherry orchard, whether or not we
see it. Michael Kustow recalled how twenty years later the form
and pressure' of a production by Giorgio Strehler lived in the
mind;
He created a distilled world of fine white cloth. Above our

heads, bellying from the stage out into the auditorium, hung a
great white sail, which rose and fell. As it did so, autumn
leaves drifted over its edge, and you realised it was
Vision 109
the cherry orchard that haunts everyone in the play; a presence
more than a depiction. (Michael Kustow, Programme Note to
Carlo Goldonis The Chioggian Quarrels)
What matters is that we feel its presence. This part of a play -
the objects in the script - come from the dramatic imagination of
the playwright, and to a greater or lesser degree structure the
action.
William Blake once wrote that the body is that part of the
soul which perceives through the five senses. The inner synthesis
implied by this, as though the soul processes the disparate
impressions and sensations of the senses, creating a single vision
from them suggests the reciprocal relation between audience and
stage. A performance creates a visual and audible poetry,
capable of arousing intuitions beyond the normal reach of the
audience. A director who tries to find a metaphor for a work is
seeking to realize it in such a way that the intuitive or subUminal
consciousness of the audience will be worked on. The theatre is in
this sense like a musical instrument intended to create a swift
movement fiom a world of action to inner impressions, to which
everything which happens on the stage contributes.
In Ibsens Hedda Gabler, Act II opens with Hedda, standing
by the open French windows, loading a revolver. The pair to it
is lying in an open pistol-case on the writing-table'. She fires at
Judge Brack, narrowly missing him as he approaches. At the end
of the play she will kill herself with it. The pistols create a fierce
and foreboding physical presence throughout the play; they are
also essential to its inner action: what we are imagining Heddas
situation to be.
The source of Heddas fascination for actresses, and audiences
comes from the fact that she cannot be known; the heart of her
mystery cannot be plucked out. She is driven by demons of power
and destructiveness, which the pistols symbolize. Her fear of
being dominated, her loathing of trivial domesticity, her disgust at
the thought of being disfigured by pregnancy, her refusal to be
trapped in a relationship by Judge
110 Making Theatre
Brack all these offer insights into Heddas daemon; but she herself
remains unreadable. The pistols give the play its psychological
focus, and its dramatic climax. Without the pistols, the play would
lack its structural and figurative cohesion. Hedda is a woman
spiralling downwards, and the pistols are there waiting at the end.
Judge Bracks comment that people dont do those sort of things
shows the hollowness which cannot discourse with the demons
within. Heddas demons can only be brought into focus by a
performance; but the performance will not throw light on the
black hole which lies at their centre. At the end of Act III, Hedda
sits feeding the pages of Eilert Lovborgs masterpiece into the
flames. She is also having her revenge on Thea Elvsted who gave
Eilert Lovborg what she, in her repression, could not.
HEDDA (throws one of the pages into the stove and whispers to
herself). Im burning your child, Thea! You with your
beautiful, wavy hair! (She throws a few more pages
into the stove.) The child Eilert Lovborg gave you.
(Throws the rest of the manuscript in.) Im burning it!
Im burning your child!
Ibsen places the stove downstage right against the wall. When
Peggy Ashcroft played Hedda, the stove was, as it were, in the
position of the prompters box. The flames cast a hellish glow on
her face; and we saw them as an inner fire. The lighting, the body
posture, the physical act itself fused in an image of Heddas inner
disintegration. Peggy Ashcroft saw Hedda as like an iceberg with
a fire underneath; and at this moment she crystallized the
complexity of that conception.
The text of a play before actors or directors start to work on
realizing it contains both an outward and inward action. The
outward action is conceived in terms of stage directions, of the
dialogue and its silences, of exits and entrances, of setting and
costume, and the moments in time at which scenes or acts begin
and end. The rise and fall of the curtain is like a guiUotine-knife
which shapes the size of a piece of paper, and
Vision 111
the action is shaped by the precision with which it is used. The inward
action is created out of what the audience is compelled to
imagine; but which is not necessarily seen.
Waiting for Godot (or as it might be translated While Waiting
for Godot) compels the audience to imagine who or what Mr
Godot might be, if he ever came. The play could not, of course,
exist without him; and he is entirely Becketts invention. There is
nothing for actors or directors to do with him, since he never
appears, and is not described in the same way twice. But he
remains as much a presence in the play as any of the characters
who do appear. He is not God, but Godot; like God, and not like
god, he becomes the focus of hope (his coming would fulfil
Vladimirs and Estragons expectations in some way), and of the
non-fulfilment of human expectation. Life remains a process of
waiting for what does not occur. It requires courage and
ingenuity; it is also absurd. These conflicting silhouettes, seen
through the action are as important a part of the audiences
visuahzation of the play as what is actually seen on the stage. In
the Middle Ages, the stars were sometimes thought of as light
shining through holes cut in the sky. The inner vision of a play is
not unlike this.
In the original 1955 production by Peter Hall, in which both
actors and director confessed they did not know what the play was
about, the performances had to draw upon the deepest of aU
theatrical resources which Michael Redgrave has compared to a
conjuring trick. A conjuring trick, he goes on to say, tells us
nothing. We watch absorbed and mystified. Only when we have
seen it done many times, as now with Waiting for Godot do we
ask how it is done, and what it means.
What is seen, and how it is seen, modifies the feeling of what
is imagined. Vladmir and Estragon exist on a road, with a single
tree. In theatre-in-the round, the road can seem hke an open space,
constrained and unconstraining, where the characters of the play
fill their days between waking and sleeping. Behind a proscenium
arch, with the road dominated by a sloping bank behind it, as in
the National Theatre Production
112 Making Theatre
of 1987, directed by Michael Rudman and with a set designed by
William Dudley, the feeling of enclosure was intensified, as
though these beings were crushed and confined by their
environment, as though the sky was quite literally about to fall on
their heads. Godot becomes part of their obsession, and their
claustrophobia. The piece of road they exist on remains their only
domain.
At the time when Waiting for Godot was first performed at the
Criterion Theatre, I had just been conscripted into the army for
National Service. For the first time in my life I had learnt what it
meant to be imprisoned, not to be able to walk outside a waU
without being arrested. On wet afternoons on the rifle range, I
read King Lear under my poncho in a tiny edition measuring three
by three, while waiting for my turn to be told to shoot! I was
literally on a stretch of road with nowhere else to go.
One Saturday when I was given a 36-hour pass, I went up to
London and saw Waiting for Godot. Godot, like Lear, questions
the nature of human life, at that cross-roads between being and
existing. It questions the significance, if any, of being, and shows
how we exist, filling our days with repetitions and routines. Both
plays stare into the abyss of nothingness and absurdity; both plays
in their obligation to express redeem meaning from the dark.
Vladimir and Estragon aroused that uneasy laughter, when we are
not quite sure whether it is appropriate to laugh. Then Peter Bull
as Pozzo strode on to the stage driving a pasty-faced Lucky before
him, and the play began to burn. Lucky broke out of his silence
into those mouthings of a man trying to climb a cliff without any
footholds, and the stage was filled with an exultation, and a
terrible despair; the exultation of language trying to make sense of
a world which made no sense, of one man trying with almost
unbearable courage to say how it was, while another cracked a
whip over him, deaf, uncomprehending, calling him pig, hog.
And finally came the voice of a child, saying Mr Godot told me
to tell you he wont come this evening but surely tomorrow. The
actors on the stage were not so much
Vision 113
characters as presences, made visible by actors: ancestral voices on
whom, at the end of each act the moon rises, spectral and
permanent, asking the questions which cannot be answered, about
the nature of being and non-being:
What are we doing here, that is the question?
Only one thing is clear in this immense confusion: We are
waiting for Godot to come
Lear, unlike Vladimir, is denied even that ironic humour:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life.
And thou no breath at all?
As Peter HaU has said, the greatest art is characterized by
clarity and simplicity; and these qualities are often to be found in
conjunction with the most ordinary objects, given an
extraordinary meaning.
In Oscar Wildes farce The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady
Bracknells discovery that Jack has lost both his parents, which
seems like carelessness, leads to his admission that he has been
found in a handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station. The fact
that it is the Brighton line remains, as she says, immaterial; but the
handbag itself is not. In fact, its production in the third act, before
the terrified Miss Prism who has left the baby in the handbag, and
placed her three-volume novel of more than usually revolting
sentimentality in the pram resolves the mystery of Jacks
parentage, and the problem of his suitabihty for becoming
engaged to Gwendolen. The production of the handbag makes
possible the happy ending; and its physical presence on the stage
both a moment of high comedy, and theatrical gratification. The
handbag has become as much a presence in the play as the
characters. But the handbag is only the most significant object in a
play about a very material society, where unsurprisingly objects
things - count for a great deal. But the ways they are used in
The Importance of Being Earnest makes it a more dazzling and
defter play than Wildes other works, and not least because
114 Making Theatre
they have an originality and vividness more potent than elsewhere.
Letters and a fan in Lady Windermeres Fan, shares and diamonds
in An Ideal Husband are used to dramatic effect in plays of
brilliant conversation; but cucumber sandwiches, a cigarette case,
lumps of sugar, pieces of cake, funeral clothes as well as the
handbag - in The Importance of Being Earnest derive their
effectiveness from a mundane simplicity. To fill someones tea
with sugar when they say they dont take any, just as to eat all the
sandwiches before the principal guest arrives remains fair ground
for a quarrel, even now; and our pleasure is heightened by seeing
the enjoyment with which the bad behaviour is practised. The
objects characterize the society in which their appearance is
entirely natural so that they do not seem to be there for the sake of
the plot. The ritual of tea served by Merriman and the footman in
Act II of The Importance of Being Earnest dramatizes a social
ritual which occurs in country-houses throughout England; but
once Cecily picks up the tongs to fill Gwendolens cup with sugar,
we are aware of the intense dislike she feels for her. Sugar
becomes a metaphor for feelings which are the opposite of
sweetness! The rite has been ruined.
The physical nature of dramatic action, and the crystallizing
power of objects in it, before any debate about staging and
performance begins, stands out in all of Shakespeares plays. The
Prince of Words understood with an equal genius how physical,
visual and simple theatre was. In Act III of A Midsummer Nights
Dream, Bottom exits from the rehearsal of Pyramus and Thisbe
only to return, unbeknown to himself, with an asss head on his
shoulders. His fellow actors are terrified by his translation. (O
monstrous! O strange! we are haunted. Pray, masters! fly, masters!
- Help!). Their amazement is our delight. A delight which is
heightened when Titania, awaking in her bower, perceives in him
her love.
TITANIA: I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:

Mine ear is much enamourd of thy note;
So is mine ear enthralled to thy shape;
Vision 115
And thy fair virtues force, perforce, doth move me.
On the first view, to say, to swear, I love thee.
The wooing of Bottom in the guise of an ass by the Queen of
the Fairies never fails to be one of the plays great comic and
ironic scenes. As ass. Bottom achieves an innocence he does not
possess as weaver; and Titania, as Queen of the Fairies, promising
to purge him of his mortal grossnness, reveals the limitations of
even fairy grace.
Like all effective metaphors, the asss head acts in a resonant
way, suggesting the complexities of feeling involved in love, and
the different levels at which human life goes on. On a larger scale,
the visionary world of the dream needs interpretation for a
modern audience. In the famous all-white production by Peter
Brook, with designs by Sally Jacob, in 1962, trapezes were used
to suggest the relationship between the human and the fairy
world. By dwelling on the image fairy, it gradually becomes
clear that the fairy world is a manner of speaking in symbolic
language of all that is lighter and swifter than the human mind ...
A fairy is the capacity to transcend natural laws and enter into the
dance of particles of energy moving with incredible speed. (SP, p.
96). Through her stage-design and her use of trapezes, Sally
Jacobs found a way of reinterpreting the fairy world, so that the
fairies became part of the physical world we all inhabit, and at the
same time an expression of the power to transcend our normal
apprehension of it. When Titania sees the translated Bottom as
her lover, she sees with the folly of human love, as he for a time
is able to dream of being loved by the Queen of the Fairies. The
transaction works both ways. But when both are returned to their
own ways of seeing and loving, they will have grown by their
immersion in another level of feeling. The production succeeded
in conveying the joy and the folly of love, as in the sounds on a
musical scale. Both in text and production, fairy grace and
human earthiness complemented each other; and did so through a
performance which was acrobatic. Acrobatics
116 Making Theatre
demand physical discipline of the body, and at the same time make
bodies light as air. What we saw became in a true sense visionary.
The staging of A Midsummmer Nights Dream, like that of
The Tempest, presents problems of particular visual complexity.
But in essence we are seeing things which derive their power from
their simplicity. In the court-room scene of The Merchant of
Venice, Shylock comes to demand his bond; a pound of Antonios
flesh, to be cut from his breast nearest the heart. Portia asks;
Are there balance here to weigh
the flesh?
SHYLOCK; 1 have them ready.
PORTIA; Have by some surgeon, Shylock, on your charge. To
stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death.
Shylock rejects the suggestion as not being in the bond; and Portia
orders him to proceed.
PORTIA; And you must cut this flesh from off his breast;
The law allows it, and the court awards it.
SHYLOCK; Most learned judge! A sentence! come, prepare!
With the knife poised above Antonios breast, Portia drops her
bombshell.
Tarry a little; there is something else.

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood
(Act IV, scene 1)
The physicality of this scene is of the essence of theatre. A knife, a pair
of scales, a bare breast; the scene never loses its terror. Is Antonio
really going to have that pound of flesh cut from his breast by that
wicked-looking knife? When I first saw the play at the age of ten,
I did not know the answer; and the terror has never left me. Now,
the knife of the pathological
Vision 117
killer poised to strike has become a visual cliche of innumerable films;
but by comparison they reveal httle of states of mind, of inner
impressions. In Shakespeares play, the transforming object is the
scales; not just because they suggest figuratively the scales of
justice; but because they attempt to domesticate, and legitimize,
an act of enormity. We look at the scales, and realise the
impossibility of weighing one thing against the other; they focus
our attention on, and enlarge the monstrosity of what Shylock
intends to do. They make us reahze he is free to choose, to weigh
one course of action against the other; but that being Shylock he
has abjured his freedom. Without them the scene would be litde
more than a public execution, revolting enough if enacted; with
them, the whole balance of human motivation, of what makes
these hard hearts (a question Shakspeare asks even more
insistently in King Lear), of the value of life (what price a pound
of flesh?), and the relationship between crime and legality is
raised. As Portia has just reminded us, these are all questions
prior to the feuds between Jews and Christians, to race relations
and the authority of the State over them:
The quahty of mercy is not straind.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath; it is twice blessd;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
(Act IV, scene 1)
As we are witnessing a ritual which invokes more than human

law, so too we are witnessing a ritual which depends on more
than ceremonial robes. Portia comes dressed as a Doctor of Laws;
and on the stage her costume proclaims her role. We are
confronted with the majesty of the Law, its learning, amid its
sense of its own dignity. On a point of law, Portia catches
Shylock out: the pound of flesh must be exact, not light or heavy
in the substance, or the division of the twentieth part of one poor
scruple, and taken without the shedding of one drop of blood. The
scales in which life and death seem
118 Making Theatre
only a moment since to have hung have shrunk again into their natural
domestic significance, absurdly inadequate, even ridiculous in the
drama where they just seemed about to play so central a role. We
no longer have any interest in them; but without them the scene
would have lost much of its tension, and its metaphorical
meaning.
Shakespeares plays especially at moments crucial to the
action as a whole - work through his understanding of physical
objects in space, of the attention they draw to themselves,
bringing about a transference of feeling between audience and
stage. Mark Antonys oration over Caesars body intended to stir
the citizens of Rome to such a sudden flood of mutiny (however
much he denies it!) achieves its potency through his production of
Caesars mantle. (Brutus in his defence of the murder used only
words):
You all do know this mantle: I remember The
first time ever Caesar put it on:
Twas on a summers evening, in his tent.
That day he overcame the Nervii.
Look! in this place ran Cassius dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbd;
And as he pluckd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar followd it
When Caesar perceives the most unkindest cut of all.
then burst his mighty heart;

And, in his mantle muffling up his face.
Even at the base of Pompeys statua.
Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell.
(Act III, scene II)
The mantle, with its stab-wounds (no doubt dishonestly identified) and
its blood-stains has all the numinous power of an exhibit in a trial
for murder. Antony plays his audience, on-
Vision 119
stage and off, like a matador caping a bull, until he knows the game is
won. Without the mande, without the physical object on the stage,
the voltage of the drama would be very much lower, its power to
electrify an audience both audiences - diminished.
In all Shakespeares plays, it is possible to perceive a kind of
fulcrum in the dramatic action, like the trial scene in The
Merchant of Venice or the play scene in Hamlet, after which
nothing will be the same again. And very frequently, if not
always, it is conceived in terms of a physical and visual event,
which occurs at a mid-point in the play. In Act III, scene 1 of
Romeo and Juliet, the swords flash out, and within seconds
Mercutio is dead:
I am hurt.
A plague o both your houses! I am sped.
Shortly afterwards, Tybalt will return, and within moments Romeo will
kill him.
BENVOLio: Romeo, away! be gone!
As the stage empties in the play scene of Hamlet with Claudiuss cry
for Lights, here it is filled with a crowd of citizens, and the
Prince. A sudden glint of steel, a fall and a cry, a rush of people
these signal the start of the end.
In comedy, as much as tragedy, Shakespeare conjures with the
visual to bring about the transformation of the action, not to the
exclusion of words, but in ways inseparable from them. In
Twelfth Night Malvolio is set up by Maria to appear to Olivia in a
guise which will ruin him for ever in her eyes:
He will come to her in yellow stockings, and tis a colour she
abhors; and cross-gartered, a fashion she detests; and he will
smile upon her, which will now be so unsuitable to her
disposition, being addicted to a melancholy as she is, that it
cannot but turn him into a notable contempt.
120 Making Theatre
The appetite in the audience for this encounter waits to be
satisfied; and Maria feeds this hunger by describing him to her
companions. When he does appear, the play, as with Bottoms
translation, achieves a visual comedy of immeasurable delight.
Malvolio was one of Oliviers great roles. He affected a
deliciously dainty walk, a superior nasal whine and a self-
parodying speech defect (Some have gweatness thwust upon
them.); and his grimacing, lisping, contorted appearance,
resembled a man still rehearsing every move in front of a mirror.
Few pleasures in the theatre equal that of watching a great actor
imitating a character who is putting on an act he cannot do: the
timing, the moves, the facial expressions are aU off-beat,
grotesque, absurd. He becomes a musician giving a concert on an
instrument he cannot play, or appearing not to, while at the same
time doing it superbly well.
The visual extravagance which Shakespeare demands reflects
the vanitas vanitatum for which Malvolio will pay in the end,
when he is locked up for being allegedly mad. Visual playfulness,
the device of costume, turns into a very dark joke, justifying
Malvolios equally dark desire to be revenged on the whole pack
of you. As audience we are moved by Malvolios plight, but also
too by a recognition in ourselves of the dangers of acting out our
fantasies, of overreaching the roles we are called to play, and
turning ourselves into absurd fanta- sticks whom our friends and
colleagues will reject. All the time we risk making fools of
ourselves, and paying heavily for it, as Malvolio does, in being
cast out from a household where he once had a role. His desire for
revenge speaks only of the depth to which he has been hurt.
Without the yellow- stockings, and the cross-gartering,
Shakespeare would not have been able to let us see this, because it
touches so nearly on how we feel about dressing every day. Is it
just possible, that I have misjudged, look absurd, or, as in the
nightmare, have forgotten to put on my trousers, causing everyone
to laugh? Whatever the reason, few of us are entirely happy with
our clothes, because we know the degree to which they expose us
to ridicule. For all its comedy, Shakespeares visual sense
Vision 121
enables him to play on the audiences sense of a painful unease. He
also transforms the everyday into the strange.
The bareness of Shakespeares stage also enabled him to write
plays in which the simple object could absorb the audiences
whole concentration. As with Malvolios stockings or
Desdemonas handkerchief, bewitchingly embroidered with
strawberries - and suggesting to Othellos fevered imagination the
drops of blood which will have to be shed the simple object
seen in isolation acts as a prompter. It prompts OHvia to think
Malvolio is suffering from midsummer madness, and needs to be
taken care of (which his words and his body language confirm);
but it also prompts the audience to imagine Malvolios inner state
of mind, his feelings, what manner of man he is. The process of
prompting, whether between actors, or actors and audience, is
central to the dramatic imagination not as in a novel or poem
as a matter of reflection - but as an instantaneous effect, an
ignition of what had previously been in the dark. The role of the
prompter is peculiar to the theatre, and may seem only a technical
support for actors who dry; but his unseen presence suggests
metaphorically what is occurring the whole time in the nature of
theatre magic. We, the audience, are being prompted into what we
did not think we knew or felt.
In a recent book, edited by Dr Murray Cox, entitled
Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor, actors in the Royal
Shakespeare Company commented on the significance for them
of performing for an audience to whom the more extreme events
in Shakepares plays - murder, rape, violence had been lived
experience. Holding a mirror up to Nature was actually ocur- ring
in a potentially dangerous way, and in a relationship with the
audience which had little in common with performances in
Stratford or London. Gertrudes cry to Hamlet that he is turning
his eyes into her very soul a felt, not a thought experience -
was actually occurring. And yet that is, or should be, the function
of all theatre, whether by making us cry, or laugh at human foUy.
In this summer lightning or darkness visible, the transforming
power of simple images - at crucial
122 Making Theatre
moments projected onto physical objects determines the depth at
which theatre works, or, one might say, to which it works.
King Lear is, amongt many other things, a play about descent
into chaos. Lear himself was recently and memorably played by
Ian Holm, like an ageing Phaeton who cannot control the chariot
of the sun, and causes the rapid dissolution of all bonds, familial,
political and geographic. The play shows what happens when
these bonds are sundered; and the first part of it culminates in the
storm scene. How this is actually staged absorbs the ingenuity of
the director, scene, sound and lighting designers. But whatever the
effects, the words spoken by Lear Blow, winds, and crack
your cheeks leave no doubt that the chaos is in his mind. In one
sense, this is unactable and unstageable. The play is on the edge of
an abyss, in which all germens are about to be spilled at once,
leaving no action to be performed. Shakespeare restores the
balance in this action of transcendent metaphor by his most
terrible piece of physical theatre, and his most cruelly memorable
use of objects on the stage: the putting out of Gloucesters eyes.
This is a scene which, like Dr Johnson, most of us do not want to
live through again. When it was performed in Broadmoor, the
prison for the criminally insane, and Regan castrated a servant as
part of the action, the response was dead silence, apart from a
stifled gasp, Jesus Christ (Cox, p. 68). The blinding of
Gloucester strips away the last defence of the audience before the
image of horror, which is chaos. We are forced to look into the
heart of darkness, and see an image of ourselves, when all the
restraints of humanity have been fractured. Such things cannot be
spoken of, but they can be experienced, and have been, in
Auschwitz, Cambodia, Bosnia.
Through these objects - Gloucesters eyes so idly cast on the
stage Shakespeare makes us do just that. In any other play, it
would have seemed excessive, and even here nearly does so,
except through its power to make us look inward at what can
result from a descent into chaos. The storm and the
Vision 123
eyes are an inseparable part of the same figurative action. Theatre
requires that the inward be made actual, if we are to experience an
action, not merely watch it.
The vision of a play - all that we see on the stage - is created from a
combination of what the dramatist has written, how the director
and his design team interpret the text, and the resources of stage
space and money which are available. What matters is the
effect on the audience.
When the screen fell down at the first performance of
Sheridans The School for Scandal the roar of the audience was
heard all over London. The little French milliner whom Sir Peter
Teazle expects to discover in the house of the corrupt Sir Joseph
Surface, turns out to be his wife. Ironically, he and Josephs
good-hearted* brother, Charles had hoped to discomfort Joseph
by the disclosure; but the truth turns out to be more complex. As
Charles Surface angrily remarks: Egad, you seem all to have been
diverting yourselves here at hide and seek, and I dont see who is
out of the secret. The School for Scandal, as its title states, is a
play about words (scandal does not consist of immoral acts but in
the description of them as immoral by others). At the outset. Lady
Sneerwell confides to Snake:
Wounded myself, in the early part of my life, by the

envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no
pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own
injured reputation.
SNAKE: Nothing can be more natural.
The envenomed tongue gives birth to plot and wit; but the
play is made, and made memorable, by the falling down of the
screen. What is disclosed will depend a great deal on the body
language of everyone on stage, as on the way the Teazles have
been visualized and played throughout: the degree to which Sir
Peter has been presented as an old man married to a young
124 Making Theatre
wife in a match doomed to failure, or alternatively, as a marriage of
affection, suddenly confronted with its own weaknesses.
Michael Billington, writing about the 1972 National Theatre
production by Jonathan Miller described the effect like this:
The screen scene is brilliantly handled, a marriage lying
momentarily in ruins as Lady Teazle cowers in a corner like a
frightened rabbit caught in a cars headlights and a stricken Sir
Peter pulls his wig over his eyebrows.
(ONS, p. 16)
The mirror which is turned on their marriage and relationship at this
moment works, on the audience too, as a sudden and complex
probe: a moment of confrontation in which the truth cannot be
avoided. Such moments come to us all; but more often not through
something said, but as here through some chance misadventure. The
simplicity of the event is in inverse proportion to the complexity of
the effect.
In Act III of Chekhovs Uncle ]/hnya, a play described as
Scenes from Country Life, Vanya, finally driven crazy by
Yelienas rejection of him, and Serebriakovs inabihty to
understand his rage at the proposal to seU the estate, rushes off. A
shot is fired off-stage; and Serebriakov runs in, terrified, followed
by Vanya. He fires the revolver again, misses and flings the
revolver on the floor with a curse, before sinking into a chair
exhausted. Chekhov combines a moment of potential tragedy with
a farcical outcome. But in these few moments of frenzied action,
Chekhov reveals the intensity of hidden feelings, the hatred and
incomprehension which cannot be expressed, and the dangers of
confronting them when they are suddenly released. As audience,
we laugh, we are horrified at the sudden turn of events, and are
amazed. Serebriakov is struggling for his life; Yeliena is
struggling to prevent Vanya from committing murder; and for
these few moments of physical action on the stage, the audience
acts like
Vision 125
the analyst on to whom Vanyas pent-up fury and frustration is
transferred. We feel the burden of what he cannot deal with; and
it arouses in us the anxiety of our buried frustration and anger.
Chekhov succeeded in not ending his act with the conventional
sock on the jaw; but in turning dramatic convention upside down,
he produced an effect of a more deeply undermining kind and
one of his most memorable moments of theatre.
In Peter Steins production at the Edinburgh Festival for the
Teatro di Roma and Teatro Stabile di Parma in 1996, he began the
next act with Vanya curled up on the bed in the corner of study,
foetus-hke, as though he had suffered a complete nervous
breakdown, which the subsequent playing of the scene between
him and Dr Astrov confirmed. This seemed the natural outcome
of what Vanya had suffered. It darkened the tone of the last act,
making the Sonyas final vigil with him the more terrible, lonely
and relentless. As the lighting on the stage was slowly reduced to
that of a single candle, EUzabetta Pozzis voice rang out, while
Vanya worked on at his accounts: Reposeremo . . . Reposeremo
(We shall rest. . . We shall rest).
In this production it expressed not so much a hope as an
elegiac comment on what could not be changed, and had to be
endured. When, as is more usual, Vanyas eruption in Act III is
played as a temporary aberration, Sonyas final words in the face
of a relendess destiny can sound like a transcendent vision, as
happened when Anna Calder-Marshall played Sonya to Paul
Scofields Vanya in Anthony Pages 1970 production:
We shall hear the angels; we shall see the sky all dressed in
diamonds; we shall see all this worlds evil and all our
sufferings drown in the mercy that will fill the earth
And we beheved her.

However a director sees a play - whatever he or she feels its
atmosphere, tone, and smell to be - its effectiveness in
126 Making Theatre
performance will depend on a sense of timing. A play no less than piece
of music has a pulse; it can be played faster or slower; but how it
is played will determine its effect. In the playing of farce, timing
and physical activity become central to its visualization. A mis-
timed farce will be flat as an unrisen Yorkshire pudding. Exits and
entrances, encounters, misadventures, confusions, mistakes,
recognitions succeed each other in precisely controlled chaos. In
the farces of Georges Feydeau, the performers need to be middle-
aged, out of condition, Olympic athletes. His women breathe
virtue and are forthwith out of breath (Mortimer). As one of his
greatest interpreters, the actor Jacques Charon has said, Feydeau
invented a new form of comedy which foreshadowed the crazy
gags of the silent screen. Among his frenzied creations: rooms
twirhng on pivots, eiderdowns that walk by themsleves and
hallucinated people who turn as required into visions of the Angel
Gabriel . . . . Feydeaus nimble dialogue skips along with the
action, keeping pace with its perilous leaps and gambols. Its like
an acrobats tights, lightweight and supple, which fit his muscles
like a second skin. In A Flea in Her Ear, the breathlessness of the
action involves a man with a cleft palate who consequently cannot
be understood, a German with a Lolita complex, and a hotel
porter, Poche, who is the double (played by the same actor) of
Chandebise, a husband, suspected of infidelity. In A Little Hotel
on the Side, Matthieu suffers from a stutter which only comes on
when it starts to rain.
For all the miraculous precision of their plotting and
subplotting, Feydeau himself said my plays are entirely
improvised. And it is this sense of spontaneous inventiveness and
ingenuity which the timing has to preserve. Our pleasure derives
from seeing these apparently conventional people caught in the
glare of their own indiscretions. Their panic generates the speed of
the action. The director has to find a visual and physical
equivalent for a kind of mania, mathematical in its precision: or
total chaos in the grip of an iron vice. As the characters have to
perform physically (hiding, running, disguising themselves) and
invent verbaUy, to save their bacon.
Vision 127
so the set needs too to be a place for exuberant indiscretions: it has to
accommodate their flight, and their concealment from one
another. In A Flea in Her Ear, the stage-action requires a fast
revolve. The right side of the stage is taken up by a small
bedroom, with a bathroom door and a bed on a small raised
platform. This bed is on a revolve which can turn to reveal a
similar bed in the room behind it. The button beside the bed
which controls the revolve enables the bed, and its occupant, to be
switched, without the character on the front part of the stage
having noticed, so that when he attempts to resume his advances,
he finds his partner has changed from a woman into a man!
When Jacques Charon directed A Flea in Her Ear at the
National Theatre in 1966, he succeeded in establishing his
characters as being vraiespersonages. Feydeaus characters are in
their right mind; they simply find themselves in situations where
they act as though they are out of it. The directors sense of
timing, keeping dialogue and action in relentless counterpoint
made the whole action a jest, but never a joke. Farce enacts a
simple law of Nature that, as John Mortimer has said, at a certain
speed things disintegrate. Sustaining the right momentum
requires also an appropriate visual sense. In the 1989 production
at the Old Vic, directed by Richard Jones with a set designed by
the Brothers Quay, the Hotel Coq dOr became a grey place of
morbid repressions, which no one would want to visit for a bit of
fun on the side, except in a nightmare. The set which conveyed
depression destroyed the relation between lightness and speed.
This delicate balance has to be preserved too in the performances
which must never deteriorate into mere jokiness, or an attempt to
get laughs. No one who saw Alec Guinness in the 1956 production
of Hotel Paradiso will forget the moment when he began to
revolve on the end of a bit and brace, as the hall porter bored a
hole in the opposite side of the wall to spy on what was happening
inside the bedroom, or Robert Hirsch as the pigeon-breasted man
of letters, Bouzin, in the Comedie Fran9aises production of Un
Fil a la Patte. In each the actors control of his body, and the
directors control of timing in the scene as whole (in other
128 Making Theatre
words no exaggeration for the sake of laughs) creates the visual effect.
The end of Noel Cowards one farce, Hay Fever, depends on a
double action, in which the timing and the visualization must fuse
precisely. While the Bliss family shout at each other as loudly as
possible, their week-end guests, and lovers, ignored and
disregarded, have to make their escape. The stage direction reads;
During this scene, Myra, Jackie, Richard and Sandy creep
downstairs with their bags, unperceived by the family. They
make for the front door.
Well performed, this scene is both very funny, and a
devastating criticism of a familys preoccupation with its
immediate affairs. It will send the audience away, laughing and
uneasy.
In the visualization of some plays, the director may decide to have a

palpable design upon us, and add a great deal to what exists in the
text. When successful this can give new life to a play, and make
us see what seemed famihar with fresh eyes. In his production of
J.B. Priestleys An Inspector Calls (1946), Stephen Daldry has
done just this. Using stage technology to create a tremendous
coup de theatre, he has created a production which has run for
years in England and been successful around the world, while a
conventional revival at the Westminster Theatre in London a
couple of years previously lasted a few weeks only.
The house in which the wealthy Edwardian industrial family
live becomes quite hterally a dolls house, standing in a desolate
emptiness of rain-swept cobble-stones, looked down on by a
lowering sky. Writing in 1946, Priestley intended his play as a
warning to a country which had gone through two world wars, of
the need to find some new sense of community if it was not to
continue its progress towards self-destruction. The inspector,
possessed of metaphysical canniness acts as a probe of the
familys conscience, or lack of it, of peoples
Vtston 129
desire to think well of themselves, without regard to the effect of their
acts on others, or the communities in which they hve. In Daldrys
production, the dolls house (a sohd-looking structure) collapses
dramatically forward at one point, on its supports, and is later
restored, when the familys self-image finds a way of rebuilding
itself.. The metaphor is blatant; and its effectiveness derives from
a combination of this blatancy, and the sheer surprise of what
happens to the set.
Past time tugs at us all from behind, the future tugs us towards
it. In the present moment these forces converge. Priestleys
characters in their evening dress and ball gowns, belong to the
past; their actions and attitudes gesture towards an increasingly
ominous future, blasted, unpeopled as the spaces surrounding the
dolls house suggest. In the present (and a stage-action is always
in the present) where these forces intersect, the audience watches
discomforted, and at the same time amazed, by what this piece of
theatrical legerdemain can suggest. As visual theatre, and as
theatre with vision, this production deserves its success.
In the last fifteen years vision in the theatre has become
associated as much with companies, working together over long
periods of time, as with the imprint of individual directors and
design teams. Companies such as Shared Experience, Cheek by
Jowl and, above all. Theatre de CompUcite have created new
styles of visualizing a dramatic action, and a style of performing,
inspired by a physical and often violent simplicity, in which the
inventiveness of the actors counts for as much as that of writer
and director.
Everything CompUcite actors do is rooted in what they have

heard and seen. This is a theatre of bodily functions and
impulses, of class-defences and universal desires. Its logic is
merciless, its techniques virtuoso, its energy without bounds.
It is rude and funny and fearful, for inside the vortex of frenzy
the individual is always alone.
(Michael Ratcliffe, Programme Note for
TTte Street of Crocodiles (1992).
130 Making Theatre
Complicite, as a collective, devises its own shows, sometimes from a
text as in the case of Durrenmatts The Visit,znd sometimes from a
theme or idea, developed through months of argument, rehearsal
and research. Their work is created from vitality, invention,
rhythm, humour and, in combination, a sense of texture on the
stage which conjures with what the audience can be made to
imagine. In The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, based on a story by
John Berger in Pig Earth, Complicite created and explored the
peasant life of Europe, now on the point of being extinguished by
farming policies, devised by bureaucrats, and the gravitational
pull of urban life.
Seven actors play children, chickens, cows lowing in their
stalls, even the earth of the ploughed field as the ploughshare rolls
it over. Outstretched fingers suggest the fruit and mushrooms
Lucie is gathering; chairs and buckets become a path, planks a
wall separating the cow-stall from the house, and the actors
holding them the cows. This is a form of theatre in which the
inventiveness of the actors, and the power of sug gestion compels
the audience to cross the boundary into the lives of the peasants, to
see how they have lived, suffered and survived at a moment in
time when their way of life is threatened with extinction, and in
doing so makes the audience question whether the alternative
being offered in the name of modernization is better. The third
life of Lucie Chabrol takes place after her death (felled by the axe
of an unnamed intruder in her lonely chalet). In this other world of
la terre et les morts, the peasants continue to work because they
have nothing else to remember. Justice will only come about in
such a world when the living come to know what the dead have
suffered.
Mime, physical activity and suggestion become a means of
exploring what had previously been invisible.
This theatre smuggles the public into places which are
normally considered closed. And they smuggle out of those
distant places the daily routines and the triumph and the pain
of being alive, all of it stuff which, carried on their shoulders,
in their voices and under their arms, is immedi-
Vision 131
ately recognisable and intimately familiar. Contraband
nevertheless. Contraband because its about what is habitually
marginalised, dismissed, belittled, made voiceless. Maybe the
essential contraband today is hope. Hope which is inseparable
from life, like the violent theatre these gentle artists make.
(John Berger, Programme Note to The Three Lives of
Lucie Chabrol 1994)
In their production of Brechts The Caucasian Chalk Circle at
the National Theatre (1997), the Olivier auditorium was
rearranged to create a theatre in the round. As in Chile and Brazil,
where crowds have gathered to watch Complicite performing in
the street, so here some of the intimacy, and proximity of folk
theatre was reinvented. As Brecht himself said, You can achieve
every shade of seriousness by means of ease, and none of them
without it. Improvisation and informality, the simplest of props,
create this sense of ease, leading naturally to the image which
gives the play its title: Asdaks drawing of the chalk circle. Asked
as judge to give the child to its true mother, Asdak makes the two
contending women pull it out of the circle. As in the Judgement of
Solomon, he awards the child not to the stronger woman who
puUs the child out of the circle, but to the woman who in order
not to hurt it, pulls least hard. In a play concerned with right
judgement, with what is appropriate, natural and humanly best,
the chalk circle is like the magic ring, the arena in which we
succeed or fail in our lives. As a piece of theatre, and as a visual
device, it could not be simpler, but it has the power to conjure
from airy nothing a way of suggesting a test which applies not just
to Grusha and the Governors wife,but to us all. Where do we
draw the limits of our own chalk circles? At what point do we
think it right to let go to avoid the destructiveness of hanging on?
Simon McBurneys production of Ionescos The Chairs for
Theatre de Complicite (1997) used a set, designed by Quay
Brothers, in which multiple doors, and cupboards piled on top of
one another, and painted a ghostly grey created a room
132 Making Theatre
which was surreal. The non-realism of the stage reflected the unreality
of Ionescos view of the world: At certain moments the world
seems to me devoid of significance, devoid of reality: unreal.
And yet as the Old Man and the Old Woman ushered in their non-
existent guests to hear the Orator deliver the lecture which would
articulate the Old Mans message, filling the stage with empty
chairs, the stage was filled not with the unreal, but with the
presence of their loneliness, their need for each other, their
anguish in trying to make sense of their lives, their desire to feel
wanted and fulfilled - and finally in the presence of a non-existent
God not to be judged harshly, to be treated with mercy. When the
moment came for them to die, separated by the whole space of the
stage, and stretching out their hands towards each other, as in
love of a further shore, they discovered a kind of exultation
which overcame space before death overtook them. When the
Orator wrote on the door, Angel sweep, (or was it Angels
weep?) and God is agone, enough reality had been lived
through to make the angels weep. Here was no self-pity, or
coldness of heart, but a yearning for explanation, for plenitude,
and the discovery ofnowhere without the no. In every movement
and gesture, as they ushered in the absent guests, Richard Briers
and Geraldine McEwan discovered a grotesque and bathetic
comedy, the comedy of the undefeated, grappling with the
infirmity of age and language at the moment before night comes,
when all must sit in doom- session on their souls. The skills and
inventiveness of acting were matched in these performances to a
production where the rhythms and musicality reached always
towards a meaning which existence could not supply, where
theatre and life fused to reveal the face of the unreal to each other.
Peter Brook in his day-long (or night-long!) production of The
Mahabharata, which toured the world, used the talents of a
company drawn from many different countries and cultures. Peter
Brook has related how, in 1975, he and Jean-Claude Carriere, who
was to write the script, met a French Professor of Sanskrit who
began telling them the stories of The
Vision 133
Mahabharata. They fell under their spell, determining at once to share
these stories with audiences in the West. Together, they travelled
widely in India to gain images of dance, film, marionette theatre,
village celebrations and plays. They came back, knowing that
what they had to do was not to imitate but to suggest. What was
eventually created was a production of immense visual splendour
and beauty, also of great simphcity, with ochre-coloured earth
which covered the acting area suggesting the heat-baked soil of
India. Red light was used to stand for fire, a piece of cloth a river
running through ancient plains; boots stood for a dead person; a
single wheel suggested a war-chariot, a stick became a sheaf of
magic arrows. The play started from the oldest of all devices: an
old man telling a young boy a story.
BOY: Whats your name?
VYASA: Vyasa.
BOY: Whats your poem about?
VYASA: Its about you.
BOY: Me?
YASA: Yes, its the story of your race, how your ancestors were
born, how they grew up, how a vast war arose. Its the
poetical history of mankind. If you listen carefully, at
the end youll be someone else.
The musical-instrument on which Vyasa plays will in time be
used to suggest a bow, a sword, a mace, a river, an army and a
monkeys tail. A stick can be either a weapon or a flute; a piece
of cloth held by two performers suggest the barrier between the
everyday and the magical worlds. And in the battle scenes, mime,
orchestrated with sound and light, suggests the shooting of ten
thousand arrows.
Chloe Obolensky, who designed costumes as well as
properties and scenic elements has described her aims.
It was a question not of undertaking some sort of

archaeological reconstruction of the costumes of ancient
India,
134 Making Theatre
but of finding what could both evoke India and best lend itself
to our purpose and subject matter. My only guiding principle:
suggestion and evocation rather than illustration. . . . One thing
that is truly beautiful to see in India is the way in which certain
items of clothing are used constantly; the big rectangular
scarves (schotti) they wash at the waters edge in the day are
used as covers when they go to sleep at night. Now thats just
what we are looking for: a rigorous economy, and incredibly
strong and stark simplicity.
{Mahabharata, p. 74)
The vision of this epic was created from a poetic
minimalism, in which the colours of India, red, white, saffron
complemented its elemental life in earth, water and fire. Garlands
of flowers, bowls of rice, spices, floating candles, the fabrics from
India, and the cut of the wide-skirted kmtas,the masks of demons
and Gods, the multiple use of bamboos, as biers and weapons, the
low-footed tables at which people sat to play dice, the drums and
the nagaswaram, all evoked an India, ancient, epic and continuing
which was always suggestive because seen in the space of an
uncluttered stage where the simple became the translucent.
Unmistakably an act of Western theatre, and described by one
Indian writer as a transcreation, the Mahabharata succeeded in
asking a universal question: we live in a time of destruction -
everything points in the same direction. Can this destruction be
avoided?
When I first started going to the theatre, naturalism (the fourth wall of
the room removed so that we can look into it) still predominated
as the visual style, for what was then known as the straight play,
whether by Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan or N.C. Hunter. In the
last fifty years, visual style, whether in clothes or cars, has been
constantly changing; visual style in the theatre has been no more
static. It has become more varied and eclectic, partly as a result of
what has become
Vision 135
technically possible - for example, the trucks on electrically operated
air-castors which enable large pieces of scenery to be moved
around the stage swifly and silendy without interrupting the
action; partly, from changing conventions about the nature of
stage illusion, deriving from the influence of Brecht; and partly
from an increasing rejection of naturalism, as an adequate, or
even interesting, representation of the real. Fantasy, the surreal,
dream and the subconscious have become ever more deeply
embedded in our conception of how things are. In the late
twentieth century what used to be called a slice of life has
broader and subtler dimensions; and visual perception in the
theatre has been modified by this change. Visually, the theatre is
both an interpretation of, and comment on, how we take things to
be. Its inventiveness in relation to both derives from a constant
scrutiny of its own conventions. Visual style in the theatre
depends upon the space to be filled (the envelope within which
the designer has to work), the resources available, financial and
technological, and changes occurring outside the theatre, which
affect our visual perception of the world. When the Moscow Art
Theatre first came to London in the nineteen-fifties, the interior
life of the acting contrasted with the old-fashioned sets, and the
tatty painted scenery.
Stage designers, and lighting designers have increasingly
developed their own arts, and work in creative collaboration with
the director, but also independently, and in isolation. Each has to
solve their own problems in their own way; but the conceptions of
the design team and the director need to coincide with each other.
The solutions to problems of design and lighting must give the
director what he or she wants. They must also succeed in
interpreting the play. The greater the play, the more essential it
becomes for the visualization not to be intrusive, distracting the
audience from the plays inner action. In 1983, John Gunter
designed the sets for Sheridans The Rivals, in the Olivier
Theatre, and put the whole of Bath on the stage, with all the
characters having their own houses. The effect for all its visual
elegance added little
136 Making Theatre
to the play, and detracted from the human interest of the plot.
While theatre directors are well known and often controversial
figures, the names of designers, whether of scene or hghting, are
much less familiar outside the theatre; and their work often
unrecorded and undescribed in books. Jocelyn Herberts A
Theatre Workbook (1993) is an invaluable account of the process
of creative collaboration,between designer and directors. She
begins with a resume of what is required for each production (for
example, Purgatory: Yeats calls for a ruined house and a bare
tree in the background), eventually commenting on what has
succeeded, or failed. Held still, the stage has the appearance of a
sculptured space; released into motion, it becomes a musical
composition in which what is seen and what is heard create a
rhythm of their own.
What works depends on the space to be filled. Intimate
theatre, as Strindberg observed at the start of the century, has one
particular advantage over plays performed in larger spaces. When
Shakespeare wrote, the lunatic, the lover and the poet are of
imagination all compact, he knew that what they saw was
reflected in their eyes. The eyes are the mirrors and windows of
the soul. One mark of the great actor is the degree to which he or
she can open these windows. In creating a role, an actor develops
a technique for using this form of selfrevelation. In the greatest
performances it becomes wholly instinctive and inseparable from
the role: an essential part of its visuahzation. The degree to which
the audience can respond to this part of the performance (in spite
of all that can be done with modern lighting techniques) depends
to some extent on proximity. Deborah Warner, writing about the
experience of bringing the Royal Shakespeare Company
production of King Lear to Broadmoor, commented;
It is always an exciting experience when a production moves
from a large space to a smaller one. There is no question that
it brings out the best in everyone. Actors enjoy playing
intimate spaces. Any company who has never had that
experience is going to be tremendously inspired
Vision 137
by the freshness of the result. . . . The actors were very aware
of the audience. Many spoke afterwards of playing lines quite
differently because of this. The members of the audience
were, as they should be, active contributors to the event. (Cox,
p. 94)
The loss of eye-contact between stage and audience is an
absolute loss for which nothing compensates. The photo of
Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice (dead behind the eyeballs) in
John Osbornes The Entertainer has become a classic, not just as
a photo, but because it reveals a great deal about the art of acting.
The close relation between stage and audience in the Royal Court
Theatre, particularly in Archie Rices music- hall turns played by
Olivier at the front of the stage, made this interrogation of
Archie possible. The Other Place in Stratford, the Donmar
Warehouse, the Cottesloe at the National Theatre, the Almeida
Theatre,as well as many other less formal spaces all over the
country, preserve this form of communication without which
audiences become passive observers, and cease to be active
participators, interpreting all that they see.
In 1997, Trevor Nunn directed Ibsens An Enemy of the
People on the Ohvier stage at the National Theatre in London.
The settings were by John Napier, and the hghting by David
Hersey. Ian McKellen played Dr Stockmann. The Olivier stage
and its revolve were used to create the ambience of a coastal town
in southern Norway, with its market-traders, bands, sky-scapes
and the cries of guUs. Three out of the five acts take place in the
Stockmanns house; the action is domestic, and concerns the
effect on family hfe of public pressures - a theme of obvious
contemporary relevance. The spaces of the Ohvier stage distanced
this action, making the play seem more like an opera without
music than a domestic drama. Only in the fourth act, where Dr
Stockmann addresses the townspeople some of whom were
found in the audience - did the elaborateness of the staging, and
its visual spaciousness enhance the action, and not diminish its
138 Making Theatre
intensity through the need for exaggeration of gesture, and of reaction.
Any acting-space, whether large or small, whether its stage-
design is simple or complex, only comes to life when there are
actors within it. The style has to create a space or spaces in which
the actors feel at ease. When the performances begin, they are
alone with the audience and, without this ease - a sense that the
space is appropriate for the action they cannot be expected to
discover that naturalness on which all good acting (and all art)
depends.
No one can enjoy playing, being playful, if they feel cramped
in relation to the other actors on the stage, confined in terms of the
movement expected of them, or within a stage ambiance which
creates the wrong tone, atmosphere - at worst, where they are
wondering if they wiU be killed getting on or off the stage.
Disasters do occur, as, for example, when in a performance of
Handels Samson, Samson pushed the temple down not just on the
Philistines, but into the orchestra pit as well.
Modern theatre has drawn life and strength from a variety, and a
changing variety, of visual styles - painterly, architectural,
constructivist, symbolic, minimalist which themselves reflect
changing perspectives outside the theatre. In 1944 when Tyrone
Guthrie directed Ralph Richardson in Peer Gynt the sets designed
by Reece Pemberton were painterly in style, but succeeded in
reflecting the inner battles of Peers consciousness. The
mysterious Boyg which tells Peer to go round about,
determining the future course of his life as an evasion of self, was
seen as the branch of a vast tree in a misty wood. As I was later to
realize, it had the force of those psychological blocks to which we
cannot put a name, and which obstruct our self-understanding. It
introduced me to the idea that the stage was not only capable of
being a magical place (here, the enchanted wood of fairy-tale), but
a place with its own poetic power. Whatever the visual style
and
Vision 139
whatever the play - theatre is diminished when it loses poetic power.
As in poetry itself, economy and compression determine intensity
and depth.
Stage design of the forties and fifties was dominated - at least
for being enduringly memorable by Oliver Messel. His sets
combined beauty with space, the fantastic with the real, and had a
feeling for the plays world, whether in the detailed mediaevalism
of Christopher Frys The Ladys Not for Burning or in Ring
Round the Moon, translated by Christopher Fry from Jean
Anouilhs LInvitation au Chateau, set in a rococo winter-garden
in spring. In style, the play owes much to commedia dell arte.
Peter Brook, who directed the London production wrote of the
play.
His [Anouilhs] literary quality is that of theatre literature, the
elegance of his dialogue appears when it is spoken by
comedians in the rhythm of a comic scene. His plays are
recorded improvisations. Like Chopin, he preconceives the
acccidental and calls it an impromptu. He is a poet, but not a
poet of words: he is poet of words-acted, of scenes set, of
players performing. Messel created out of wrought iron, green
plants and Chinese lanterns a setting which reflected the
improvised lives of those characters; decorative, stylised,
witty and heartless.
(Ring, p. 7)
Unlike most designers before him, he realized the importance of
materials in building the set, insisting that the winter- garden be
built out of steel, not wood, which created an effect so light that,
as Christopher Fry remarked, it would have taken off if not fixed
to the ground. The rococo style offers no vision, its blandishment
is to charm and amuse.
In the play, Paul Scofield played the part of two identical
twins, one good without depth, the other scheming without
kindness. The atmosphere of the play is ironic and comic, not
farcical or tragic. The artificiality of Messels stage decoration
reflected the improvisation of the characters lives, dominated
140 Making Theatre
by whim, impulse and desire. Like the charade which is only played for
the pleasure and inventiveness of the game and has no
significance once it is over - the playing is aU. Through his
decorative style of scene-design, Messel created an equally
playful set, making no reference outside of itself, and arousing
delight as a jeu desprit.
Although stage design as decoration has become
unfashionable, and can be deadly, Messels influence can still be
felt. Philip Prowse in his production of Oscar Wildes A Woman
of No Importance (1991) used visual richness in an equally
appropriate and comparable way. Wildes play is about a world
where class and money count for everything, and goodness of
heart for little at aU. Few plays have a more ironic tide: a woman
whom society rejects and demeans turns out to be the only woman
of any importance at all. A society which, like a luxurious and
decaying nature morte, lavished its rewards on those whose
shallowness was matched by their hardness of heart was reflected
in a decor equally plush and dead. An exorbitant period sense
the massive chandelier, the red velvet banquettes, the gilt
decoration - suggested the lack of any real worth: dingy,
claustrophobic and heavy with the heaviness which comes from
displays of opulence for their own sake. Unlike many productions
of Wildes plays which seek to flatter the audience by appealing to
a nostalgia for a style now lost, Philip Prowses production used
visual style as a sign of inner corruption, of grandeur without
human feeling, and an extravagant materialism which said as
much about the 1980s as the 1890s.
Since the 1950s, the rejection of the decorative style of scene
design has been inspired by the desire, as the director, John
Dexter, has put it, to provoke the audience to think for
themselves, and use their imagination. This has taken many
forms, and always been most productive when the design becomes
inseparable from the interpretation of the play, not an excuse for
showmanship on the part of the designer. Peter Hall on being
shown a stage design is reported to have remarked on one
occasion: Its very nice - but is it neces-
Vision 141
sary? Low budgets and the stripping-away of the unnecessary have
often proved good medicine.
In Stratford in 1951, Shakespeares tetralogy of history plays,
Richard II, Henry Ilf Parts One and Two, Henry V, was
performed for the first time as a cycle. Tanya Moiseiwitsch
designed a permanent set of rough wooden beams which included
a balcony, and an inner recess, or acting area, as in the
Elizabethan theatre. This structure could be transformed to
indicate change of location by the simple and fast use of drapes
and curtains. Banners and flags told us which army we were with,
whether in Wales or France. The set gave continuity to the action.
These plays were both about individual lives (with Michael
Redgrave as the moist-eyed poet king unfitted for his role) and
about the relentless tide of historical events which carry some
upwards as others are swept away. The simple indications of
change of location compelled the audience to imagine what was
suggested by a brush-stroke or two, while at the same time
allowing the drama an unimpeded flow. In addition, by
concentrating colour in the costumes and emblems of power,
national and heraldic, it presented the four plays as about
kingship, and the nature of personal authority which the legitimate
King Richard lacked, and the conscience-stricken usurper
Bolinbroke, played by Harry Andrews, possessed. Richard Burton
as Hal and Henry V blazed upon the scene as a brooding presence
whose gaze was always fixed on the fulfilment of ambition,
indifferent to the feelings and advice of others. The new-found
comet was to blaze its trail across the skies, but disappointingly in
lesser Agincourts.
If Tanya Moiseiwitschs set-structure now seems too
dominating and assertive, this is because its strengths - speed of
change in locality, flexibility in the use of stage-space and
imaginative involvement on the part of the audience have been
built upon and developed, as the technological resources of the
stage have increasingly allowed. What used to be called the
transformation scene in pantomime, when a tap on the wall
revealed to the astonished audience the cloud-capped
142 Making Theatre
towers behind, has now become a modern convention. The scene is
transformed in time and space without any break in the action.The
device may be as simple as getting the actors to create a new
space by moving the objects within it, so that we see them in
altered spatial relatonsips, and in a new light indicating a time
change, which creates a new tone and atmosphere.
In Christopher Hamptons Tales from Hollywood (1983) the
story-teUer, Odon von Horvath, killed in a thunder storm on the
Champs-Elysees by the falling branch of a tree, shifts the
audiences perpective from Paris to Hollywood as the locality of
the stage changes behind him. Summoning up people and things
from his imagination - Garbo, the Marx Brothers he can show
us around his brave new world. As in the novel, he can appear to
us as a reliable and unreliable narrator, since we know him to have
died before any of this happened. Stage-time and stage-space
become supple, allowing the power of visual suggestion to take
the place of verbal explanation.
ACT II
Light-show: garish neon. Franz Waxman's music for Sunset
Boulevard. Projections: Hollywood landmarks of the forties.
Horvath steps into this, grinning.
HORVATH: Ah, Hollywood! The kitsch! The desespoir!
This suppleness and speed may be achieved with technical
sophistication, as here, or with the utmost simplicity. In Deborah
Warners production of King John, at The Other Place in Stratford
(1988) the scenes before, and on, the walls of Anglers were
suggested by placing ladders against a stage- balcony, creating the
idea of siege (Our cannon shall be bent Against the brows of this
resisting town). Because the playing had urgency, and conveyed
a feeling of real threat, the siege was more effective than in many
film sequences costing millions of dollars, which leave nothing
for the audience to
Vision 143
imagine, except that nothing ever happened like this except in a
Hollywood movie!
Chekhovs early play, Platonov, has long been regarded as an
over-long, wordy attempt at a form of comedy about the
irresistible boredom of country life, of interest only as a precursor
of his later great plays. In Michael Frayns version, called Wild
Honey, performed at the National Theatre in 1984 in a production
by Christopher Morahan, with settings by John Gunter, an
inventive piece of staging, and a memorable performance by Ian
McKellen gave it new life. In this production, a steam train roared
to the front of the stage, looking as though it was about to plunge
into the stalls. The effect was comic and theatrical. But the point
was not mere ornamentation. Platonov, the local schoolmaster
suffers from a lack of energy and boredom, alleviated only by
sexual attraction (hence the title) and booze. In contrast to the
human world of late nineteenth-century society, the train exudes
steam, power, energy and the determination to get somewhere!
The visual contrast between the train, and the laid-back,
despairing quality of Platonovs existence commented humorously
and without over-emphasis on the conflicting forces in Chekhovs
world.
The effective solution of problems of staging can also
determine what productions it is possible to mount. In a recent
season of plays by the Peter HaU Company at the Old Vic
Theatre, a simple but flexible box set was desgined by John
Gunter to allow performances of plays by Shakespeare, Vanbrugh,
Granvillle Barker, Chekhov, Beckett as well as new work by
contemporary dramatists to be set up quickly - with two
productions a day. In Vanbrughs The Provokd Wife the lowering
of topiaried trees in the shape of gallants and beaux indicated the
setting of St Jamess Park, and the atmosphere of lecherous
assignation, of eavesdropping and revelation, associated with it.
The obtrusive artificiality of the visual design reflected a social
world where outward appearance and the intention to deceive
went hand in glove. Settings like this derive their effectiveness
from a simplicity which is both literal and metaphoric.
144 Making Theatre
In scene design, the use of varied materials has also increased
the range of visual responses. Heavy leather costumes in Peter
Brooks production of King Lear (1962) intensified the feeling of
a relentless world, without gentleness or pity. As in all aspects of
stage design, radical experimentation has renewed visual
language. Jocelyn Herbert, designing The Seagull for the Royal
Court Theatre in 1964 described her approach like this:
The garden was just a tree and a painted backcloth of birch
trees and the lake - birch trees are somehow the symbol of
Russia. When I was working on the tree I first made it by
cutting folded paper and making holes, then I found some
material and experimented with it, and it really looked quite
like a silver birch. There was an awful problem about fire-
proofing the leaves - there always was in those days with trees
now its easy because you just dunk the material in fire-
proofing liquid. The backcloth was filled with gauze so that as
the moon came up you saw it rising above the lake until it
reached an unpainted space in the gauze where it shone
through. (Herbert,
p.62)
Change, however never occurs without meeting resistance.
When I introduced the idea to the workshops at The Court
they were upset and wanted to use wood. In 1960 when I used
metal for Antigone the carpenters and painters wouldt touch it
and I had to do the whole thing myself. Workshops are often
wary of new materials and feel threatened; its their whole
way of life and you cant blame them. (Herbert, p. 41)
By bringing the originality of her ideas to stage design,

Jocelyn Herbert has contributed a great deal to keeping the poetry
of the stage alive; and her involvement extends, as that of the true
artist always does, to concern for every detail.
Vision 145
When Peggy Ashcroft was rehearsing the dual role of Shen Te/Shui Ta
in Brechts The Good Woman of Setzuan she was against wearing
a mask to begin with, but wanted to move from one sex to the
other without changing costume. Jocelyn Herbert designed a half-
mask of leather which was light and supple; and Peggy Ashcroft
recorded its effect upon her;
I remember the horrible process of having it made - my face
was covered with plaster. The mask was very light and it
thrilled me to see its effect on me. It was very, very exciting. I
think my idea of a mask had been something much less
plastic, much harder and more confining, but this litde affair
was the reverse of that. (Herbert, p. 19).
Many years later when Rex Harrison was rehearsing the part of
Captain Shotover in Shaws Heartbreak House and driving the
director, John Dexter, to despair, because he couldnt get the
part,Jocelyn Herbert again invented a solution.
He wanted to wear the proper reefer jacket from Watts, the
yachting place, and a navy blue sweater and black boots. I
thought it was completely wrong, but I got him what he asked
for. I also got a very old donkey jacket from Porto- bello
Road, and I made some old dhotis those baggy Indian
trousers made from cheese-cloth and collected an Indian
type shirt and waistcoat, an old cap and some espadrilles. . . .
One day he [Rex Harrison] said he didnt know about the
costume, that it didnt seem to give him anything. I suggested
he tried the old clothes Id collected. He put them on and
suddenly saw he could play the part. The trousers were
shapeless and hung on him I explained they were things he
had picked up on his travels, and that he didnt mind any more
about clothes, it was part of his eccentricity. I put the
espadrilles out and he was very suspicious of those but they
helped him to shuffle about like an old man. From the
moment he put the costume on his performance took off and it
was fascinating to watch it
146 Making Theatre
develop. The old clothes gave Rex a way of doing the part;
you cant impose that sort of thing, you just have to wait for
it to happen. (Herbert, p. 161)
This was a problem which Stanislvasky had discovered when trying to
play Othello dressed as an Arab. As with other aspects of stage
design, much of the hard work which goes into the final effect,
and its artistry, involves a process of discarding the unnecessary,
or inappropriate. What remains from this process of stripping
down is the essential which reveals rather than adds.
Jocelyn Herberts designs - especially associated with the
Royal Court Theatre, a space which she particularly loves with its
beautifully proportioned stage and close relationship with the
audience - have always discovered the appropriate and the
beautiful in the simple. As with the plays of Beckett with which
she has been closely associated, everything on her stage tells, and
has its place in the dramatic telling; nothing is overstated, and
nothing which matters can fail to be observed by the audience. In
designing Brechts The Life of Galileo for John Dexters
production at the National Theatre in 1980, she created a space
which was free, and flexible, incorporating the use of stage-trucks
and projections, and allowing the expository nature of the action
to be conveyed with poignancy and force. The space of the Olivier
stage seemed right for a play about the movement of the stars, and
at the same time right for a scene like the first where Galileo gives
a lesson to the son of his housekeeper, about the difference
between a universe of which the earth is the centre, and one where
the earth moves round the sun. To do this Galileo carries the boy
on a chair, asking him what he sees as the chair swings round; and
whether the sun is on his left or his right. He makes the boy see
the sun does not move; but the chair on which the boy sits gives
the impression of movement. The boy realizes with a sudden rush
of excitement how his perception of the world has been
transformed by this simple demonstration. And the audience feels
it too. With this visual device, Brecht
Vision 147
creates the intellectual excitement, and dramatic energy on which the
rest of the play depends. Jocelyn Herberts design for that first
scene combined both the domestic and the cosmic, by designing a
stage in which spatial relations were very close, and at the same
time suggestive of immense distance. We could feel the fear that
comes from the silence of space {le silence kernel de ces espaces
infinis)and at the same relate to the human drama which everday
is played out within it. The success of this production which
brought Brecht for the first time to a very large audience came
from the fusion of language and visualization; a vision of the play.
Stage design as an exploration of space and what can be done
with it has created a new language on the stage since the days of
painted scenery; and in some productions achieves a power equal
to anything said. Peter Shaffers The Royal Hunt of the Sun,
produced by John Dexter, with scenery and costumes by Michael
Annals in 1964, about the Spanish conquest of Peru, achieved its
great success not so much through its verbal debate between two
ideologies and cultures, but through the splendour of its
visualisation in which, as Simon Callow has pointed out gesture,
voice and movement, a linear movement, count for more than
depth. (Callow, p. 115).
Peter Shaffer, while noting that all that is required is a bare
stage and an upper level, has paid tribute to the way in which
Annals succeeded in solving the visual problems of the play.
Basically this design consisted of a huge aluminium ring,

twelve feet in diameter, hung in the centre of a plain wooden
back-wall. Around its circumference were hinged twelve
petals. When closed, these interlocked to form a great
medallion on which was incised the emblem of the
Conquistadors; when opened, they formed the rays of a giant
golden sun, emblem of the Incas. Each petal had an inlay of
gold magnetized to it; when these inlays were pulled out (in
Act II, scene 6) the great black frame remaining symbolized
magnificently the desecration of Peru. The centre of this sun
formed an acting area above the stage.
148 Making Theatre
which was used in Act I to show Atahuallpa in majesty, and in
Act II served for his prison and subsequently for the treasure
chamber.
This simple but amazing set was for me totally satisfying on
aU levels; scenically, aesthetically and symbolically. (Shaffer,
pp. 7-8)
When skilfully used as here, stage technology becomes a
means of clarifying and deepening meaning. The Royal Hunt of
the Sun concerns two countries gorged with gold, both of which
die different deaths of their avarice; the set was able to dazzle
with its lure, and warn of the doom it engenders.
Stage technology has been equally effective in creating fantasy
worlds, as, for example, in Mark Thomsons staging of The Wind
in the Willows (1990), dramatized by Alan Bennett, which filled
the National Theatre for many months and several Christmas
seasons. Standing outside the auditorium just before the
performance began, with an audience in which many children
were present, you could be aware of an immense sense of excited
anticipation which reaches back to the origins of all performance
at the moment when something is on the point of being created
before our eyes, and which the young give back to the theatre.
Mark Thomson used the drum revolve of the Olivier stage to
create beneath the Wild Wood the homes of Badger, Moley and
Mr Toad. The simultaneous use of the revolve with the lowering
and raising of stage made possible a flow of visual images which
prevented our sense of being in an enchanted fantasy world from
being fractured, as inevitably happens with the lowering and
raising of a curtain. Almost paradoxically, the technology of the
stage becomes part of the magic of the fantasy and, in its arts to
enchant, a form of modern wizardry.
The habits of Badger, Moley and Toad had been observed in
their natural habitats, and the actors,under Nicholas Hytners
direction, brought to them that mixture of animal sense and
human eccentricity which creates the imaginative genius of the
book Kenneth Grahame started to write for his
Vision 149
five year-old son. Mr Toads red car was driven furiously round the
revolve, and went Poop-poop at anything real or imagined
which got in its way, while under the vast cyclorama, and the
lighting of Paul Pyant, the Wild Wood endured winter and wild
weather. This was theatre magic conjured out of all the arts of a
National Theatre, and the technology of its stage. More recently,
the cluttered and crude (in design and colour) set of the Never
Never Land in J.M. Barries Peter Pan, (1991), on the same stage,
lacked visual magic of any kind.
Neither money nor technology create it. Often it occurs in
circumstances with little of either. In 1978 Richard Blackford
wrote an opera based on the fourteenth-century poem Gawain
and the Green Knight for the village of Blewbury in Berkshire.
The orchestration included tuned wine-glasses and a home-made
bamboo organ, as well as recorders, guitars and strings, brass,
wood-wind and percussion so that a huge variety of musical
talents, both young and old, could be included. The opera was
conceived as a work for children and adults performing together.
A hundred and fifty members of the community made the props
and costumes, creating out of the simplest of resources a work
about the journey from innocence to experience, involving both
the supernatural and the human. In the dark January days when it
was performed, Gawain and the Green Knight created its vision
out of music, colour, light and movement; and without any of the
resources with which Harrison Birtwistle a few years later was to
create a costly bore on the same subject for the Royal Opera
House. Stage technology has become part of the language of
theatre (the best thing in Birtwisdes opera was the head of the
Green Knight which continued to sing after it had been cut off);
but the power to conjure with our imaginations is not dependent
upon it.
Colour - indispensable for the Green Knight! - plays an essential role in

interpreting the text, and shaping our response to it. As with Ught,
from which it is not separable.
150 Making Theatre
colour determines tone. In Nicholas Lehnhoff s production of Janaceks
Jenufa at Glyndebourne in 1989, with sets designed by Tobias
Hoheisel, Act 1, set in a lonely mill, revealed an orange-red barn
stage left, and the mill house, with slowly turning wheel, stage
right. Between them running across the stage was a high green
bank cutting out any view except of distant mountain tops. The set
with its sacks of corn and its turning water-wheel created a picture
of rural life in Czechoslovakia, but the colours conveyed the
emotion; the acid green bank, and the oppressive red buildings
evoked a feeling of hatred, jealousy and enclosure, acting as a
tonal reflection of the impassioned score, and its narrative of
insoluble emotions in a place from which there is no escape.
Nuria Espert in her production of Lorcas House of Bernarda
Alba, with, designs by Ernesto Frigerio (1988) used absence of
colour in an equally emotive way. Bernarda Alba keeps her five
daughters as prisoners inside their Spanish home. Her love of
power, memorably suggested by Joan Plowright in her voice and
her use of an ebony walking-stick which seemed like a rod to beat
their backs, is directed at preserving their virginity, so that they do
not bring shame on the family honour. The high white walls,
with barred windows, of the set reflected the domestic architecture
of Southern Spain; it also created a space within which the family
was imprisoned, and repressed. As the sun scorches in Andalucia,
so these lives were scorched by the dryness of their virginity. The
whiteness of the set was realistic and symbolic.
As this production suggests, perhaps no single factor is more
important in the visualization of a play than how it is lit. None has
seen more radical changes in the last fifty years, and none by its
very nature is more difficult to analyse and describe.
In 1957 Richard Pilbrow founded Theatre Projects, a company
which developed computerized lighting systems, and promoted the
training of lighting designers - a role which had previously been
part of the function of the director, and in many cases still is. But
the centralized control of
Vision 151
lighting together with computerised memory enables one person to
control many hundreds of dimmers. Multiple banks of spotlights
(which can be motorized at a price) above and at the side of the
stage, as well as within the auditorium allow intensity and colour
to be mixed throughout a performance to create changes of mood
and atmosphere, as well as to sculpture the performers in three-
dimensional space. The theatrical effects of new lighting
techniques are seen most blatantly in pop concerts, where light,
colour and rhythm are orchestrated together. Within the theatre
itself, the removal of foothghts except as a historical device,
where they can still be used effectively to recreate an earlier stage
style, has helped to break down the barrier of the proscenium arch
between actors and audience. The thrust-stage and theatre in the
round have meant the mounting of lights, usually visible, which
enable performers to appear within the audience, and to use the
same gangways to approach and leave the stage. At the same time
lighting design has made make-up less and less necessary, except
for special effects, and reduced the reliance on greasepaint (once
a symbol of the theatre) to create the effect of legerdemain on
which acting depends.
Technology can only act as an aid, however, to lights
elemental relationship with theatre. Artifice which loses its
contact with central human feelings thins into emptiness,
provoking the response, amazing but so what? Theatrical ritual,
whether at Stonehenge or Epidaurus, was responsive to the rising
and setting of the sun, to the seasons and solstice. Light and
darkness shape the human world. The dark theatre, like the tomb,
is a place without life; and the illumination of the spot on a single
figure a conjuring into life of what was previously concealed.
Light is a shaping power, which has qualities in itself, and a
border where shadows and darkness begin. Light allows us to see,
but does not allow us to forget that we only see what it shows.
Light is in this sense always gesturing towards the invisible.
Tiepolo, the most theatrical of all artists, many of whose
paintings, especially The Banquet of Antony and Cleopatra, looks
like a stupendous stage-design, thought that
152 Making Theatre
light was divine. Glancing, shifting with infinite gradations of tone,
colour and atmosphere, light controls our psychological responses
with varying degrees of intensity, inside and outside the theatre.
When God said, let there be light, he made visible the separation
of heaven from earth, and illumination from shadow.
In the performances of Cirque du Soleil, whose name
invokes the ritual and elemental nature of theatre, light fixes our
gaze on figures whose daring and precision of timing enables
them to fly through the air, passing and meeting, locked as a
matter of life and death into their solitary worlds, describing their
swift parabolas, plunging in and out of the darkness, like the notes
in a musical composition. In their silence they write in air what
light enables us to see as both equilibrium and liberation.
As scenery has become less painterly, light has become more
so. When Beckett writes in his stage direction for Act without
Words II, Desert. Dazzling Light, he describes what painters
over the centuries have done, capturing the quality of light in a
particular place, whether in Venice or Essex. Light sculptures
actors in three dimensions, but also captures them in the
particularity of the fourth, as when Romeo says to Juliet,
It was the lark, the herald of the morn.
No nightingale; look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.
(Act III, scene 5)
Richard Pilbrow in Sfaê Lighting Design (1997) quotes a remarkable
passage from Robert Edward Joness The Dramatic Imagination
(1941) on the creative effect of working with light:
At rare moments, in the long quiet hours of light rehearsals, a

strange thing happens. We are overcome by the Hvingness of
light. As we gradually bring a scene out of the
Vision 153
shadows, sending long rays slanting across a column, touching
an oudine with colour, animating the scene moment by
moment until it seems to breathe, our work becomes an
incantation. We feel the presence of elemental energies.
There is hardly a designer who has not experienced at some
time or another this overwhelming sense of the livingness of
light.
Jones goes on to describe the first duty of the fighting design to the
actors, to make them and their environment clearly and fully
visible. But in a very special way.
Lighting a scene consists not only of throwing fight upon
objects but in throwing fight upon a subject. We have a choice
of fighting a drama firom the outside, as a spectator, or firom
the inside, as part of the dramas experience. We reveal the
drama. We use fight as we use words, to elucidate ideas and
emotions. Light becomes a tool, an instrument of expression,
like a paintbrush, or a sculptors chisel, or a phrase of music.
He sees fight on the stage as being like Wordsworths
visionary fight that never was on land or sea: its aim to
achieve lucidity, penetration, awareness, discovery,
inwardness, wonder. (Pilbrow, p. 114)
But shadow too is as important as light.
How shall I explain to you the meaning of shadow in the
theatre - the primitive dread, the sense of brooding, the
blackness, the descent into endless night? (Pilbrow, pp. 114-
15).
Othello understands this better than anyone;
Put out the fight, and then put out the fight.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former fight restore.
Should I repent me; but once put out thy fight.
154 Making Theatre
Thou cunningSt pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.
(Act V, scene 2)
The effectiveness of the lighting design in Act V of Othello remains
crucial to its dramatic effectiveness. Light, just as much as
Desdemona in this scene, is a tactile thing.
Light and colour create a tone, an atmosphere, feeling. How
they relate to the action determines the tactile style of the play,
and becomes an interpretation of it. Luchino Visconti in directing
John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore (called rather coyly in French
Dommage quelle soit p. . . .) in Paris in 1961 drew upon a very
simple fact about an Italian setting. In the piazza seen through the
arches of the room, the sun shines down brilliantly on unpeopled
spaces. Everything is clear, bright, hard and empty. Inside the
room which occupies most of the stage, salvers heaped with fruit,
shadowy embrasures create an atmosphere of a claustrophobic
luxury, where private emotions will fester in a play about the
incestuous love betwen brother and sister. The scene heightens a
simple observation about an Italian setting; the contrast between
the simple sunlit beauty of the public world, and the shadowed
inwardness of the private. Light and shadow were used to create
an atmosphere, and a context in which the tragedy was played.
The problems of lighting have to be solved in relation to the
flow and feeling of the whole production. Ralph Koltai once
designed Loues Labours Lost for the Royal Shakespeare
Company with all the colours and shades of Autumn, and a
lighting scheme appropriate for it. The desire to create feeling or
atmosphere, though, must never be allowed to make it hard for the
audience to understand what is happening. Lucidity as in all
aspects of production is what counts most in the end. Act IV of
Mozarts The Marriage of Figaro always presents a particular
problem. Set in a garden at night it depends on assignations and
encounters between characters in disguise;
Vision 155
and yet we need to be sure exactly whom we are looking at, and to
perceive the mistakes they are making, so that we can also
appreciate their eventual embarrassment, when their true
identities are revealed.
The first and third scenes in Hamlet, when the Ghost appears
on Elsinores battlements, need bright illumination and obscurity
at the same time. An audience cannot be involved with an action
which cannot be seen; and the irritation of trying to see will
distract from the words. The storm scenes in King Lear need the
right balance between what we hear of the storm, what we see of
it and what see of Lears face. When Paul Rogers played King
Lear at the Old Vic in 1962, he seemed almost to be standing
under the lights of a boxing-ring so that the lightning became a
form of selfexamination, accentuating to great effect the inner
nature of this scene.
In Ibsens later plays fight becomes both a presence and
absence on the stage. What his characters search for within, and
cannot find, is reflected in the weather outside. Rosmer- sholm is
set entirely indoors. The country house of the title stands in a grey
landscape where the rain pours down. We do not see the
landscape, but the weather outside suggests and confirms that
struggle with unidentified inhibitions which wiU in the end send
Rosmer and Rebecca into the mill-chase, as Beata has gone there
before them. The fighting needs to suggest that Rosmersholm is
not just a gloomy country house, but a spectral place, where the
appearance of the white horses presages death. In the last scene
of John Gabriel Bork- man, when John Gabriel goes out alone on
the mountain, the fighting, even more than the snow, will convey
the cold which having entered his heart, will kill him. Perhaps
most momentously of all, fight and dark as symbols of inner fife
become presences on the stage in Oswalds dying words in
Ghosts: Give me the sun. Mother ! Give me the sun! The effect
of that fine will be determined as much by how it is fit as how it is
spoken.
In any play, pace, variation of rhythm, acceleration towards
156 Making Theatre
climax and retardation (all qualities of musical composition) are
essential in the writing, and in the playing. Light-changes control
rhythm too by indicating movements in time and location. In Alan
Ayckbourns A Small Family Business (1987), a single set served
as the rooms in various houses of a single family. The setting
remained the same, but the location was different: a change made
perfectly clear by the attitudes and behaviour of those in the
house. Changes of light advanced the action through the autumn
week in which the whole play takes place, as, for instance, in the
following stage direction: The location changes again. It is
evening now, a couple of days later. A rumble of thunder and
rain. As always in effective theatre, the point is not just a matter
of technique. The various houses in which the families live are the
same house: an ordinary modern house, perhaps on an executive
estate. The life-styles in each are the same, involving corruption,
lies, dishonesty, betrayal, and ripping each other off. The single
set becomes an accumulating revelation of rottenness in a society
of competitive materialism and self-gratification, even though its
plot contains a great deal of farce, to which the set is also well -
suited. At the end of the play, the 16-year-old Samantha, unable to
face the family party downstairs, will be left sitting in the
darkened bathroom, drugged and blankly staring ahead. The
contrast between the adults gathering below, toasting the family
business, and Samanthas despair is suggested by light and its
absence.
As light can be used to create flow and continuity in the
action, so too through the use ofblack-out it can be used for an
action which is fractured and episodic, conceived as a series of
scenes which are associative, rather than linear. Harold Pinter
constructs a play like No Mans Land in this way, using black-
outs to allow a fresh start to the action between Spooner
(originally played by Gielgud) and Hirst (played by Richardson)
in which the opposites in their characters and ways of life are seen
from different angles, and the struggle for domination between
them never finally concluded.
As in many aspects of theatre, Samuel Beckett proves the
Vision 157
most radical in his use of lighting, especially in Play. Three characters,
two women and a man, up to their neck in urns, speak only when
their spot shines on them. The spot illuminates the character on
whom the audiences attention is directed: a simple theatrical
device. The light also acts to interrogate each in turn, probing
their memories, and their anxieties in the triangular relationship
which they have shared. But since they never speak direcdy to
one another, the Hght, like consciousness itself, is the pain of an
inner light which only in darkness, whether of sleep or death,
finds any peace.
The demands made by the staging, though not the
performance, of Becketts Play are minimal. The staging of
Wagners Ring demands immense resources. The relation
between light and vision - not just what we see, but how we see it
- is equally critical in both cases; and The Ring because of its
scope and length, has provided the opportunity to incorporate new
technologies of staging and light as means of reinterpretation.
As the longest and most complex work of theatre, taking more
than twenty hours to perform. The Ring has attracted many of the
major European talents in every aspect of production over the last
fifty years, and has offered them the scope to experiment with
new forms of design and lighting. Like the exploration of space,
and whatever value is attached to the project. The Ring has helped
to develop potentialities within the theatre, which have been
influential and of lasting importance, for reasons which Wagner
himself could not have foreseen, though he might in the end have
approved. Ironically, The Ring having helped to develop these
new technologies, now seems almost unstageable!
Wagners own staging at Bayreuth was dominated by the
pictorial scene-painting of the nineteenth-cenury theatre, in an
opera house where the orchestra was concealed by a hood, so that
nothing intervened between the audience, and the vision on the
stage. Wagner was drawn to the idea of a grand show, but also
firustratedby the inability of the stage to represent his visions. As
he said on one occasion now that I have
158 Making Theatre
made the orchestra invisible, I should like to invent an invisible stage.
The revolutionary ideas for staging Wagners operas came not
from Wagner himself, but from Adolph Appia (1862-1928). Close
in spirit to Edtvard Gordon Craig (who was to be equally
influential on British designers and lighting designers), Appia
believed that the staging of Wagners operas should reflect the
music with its power to reveal the hidden world of our inner life.
Appia thought of the stage as a three-dimensional space of
sculptured or architectural forms in which the movement of the
performers was conceived in terms of the rhythmic configurations
of the music. Light, as for Edward Gordon Craig, was to be the
key to unifying the stage-action.
Light is to production what music is to the score: the
expressive element in opposition to hteral signs; and, like
music, light can only express what belongs to the inner
essence of all vision. (Burian, p. 14)
The resistance of Wagners widow, Cosima, to seeing Wagners stage
directions as anything other than the final word on Wagnerian
production kept the operas in a time-warp, until the reopening of
Bayreuth after the Second World War. Bayreuth needed a new
style to shed the Nazi image which Hitler had created around it,
and Wagners music. Wieland Wagner, Wagners grandson, had
both the vision, and the understanding of the revolutionary ideas
of Appia and Gordon Graig to create this new style. By
conceiving the operas on an almost bare stage, which emphasized
their elemental mythic nature, he did much to purge them of their
nationalist consciousness, their anti-scmitism, and their
glorification of German art. But he was also putting into practice
ideas about staging which neither Appia nor Gordon Craig, for
various reasons, had had much opportunity to realize. Although
the changes which Wieland Wagner initiated in Bayreuth from
1951 had much to do with the problems of Bayreuth itself, they
can now be seen as part of a much larger movement in the theatre
against naturalistic settings and production styles
Vision 159
which failed to make use of the far-reaching changes in the technology
of the theatre which were being developed and were radically
altering the languages of theatre.
To anyone who had sat through the sheer ugliness of Nordic
representations of Wagner, with heavily clad figures plodding
about an unimaginative pictorial set, or a crudely symbolic one,
the liberation of Wieland Wagners staging was immense. Figures
when they moved - and there are great distances to be moved on
the Bayreuth stage moved in a natural rhythmic configuration
with the music. The stage became a place as Appia wanted it to be
of rhythmic spaces, with a lighting design that picked out the
simple beauty of the costumes.
The second of Wieland Wagners Ring cycles which I saw in
1967 two years after it opened showed how his ideas had changed
since the 1950s. He understood how swiftly visual language could
become sterile, how an audiences response to visual effect
changed, and recognized the need for vision in the theatre to be
renewed. The 1965 cycle was more heavily symbolic than that of
the fifties; some elements of scenery had been reintroduced; and
the production reflected the influence of Robert Doningtons
Wagners Ring (1963), which analysed The Ring in terms of
Jungian archetypes. In the programme note to Das Rheingold
Donington described the visual effect of the production;
The large stage looks even larger for being left almost bare;
the lighting is commonly subdued, often verging on darkness.
But the figures who appear out of darkness are brilliantly lit.
The colours of their costumes are pictorially beautiful; the
fight picks them out with all the concentrated vividness of a
painting. The actors look like characters in a dream. And they
act neither with the stiff exaggeration of the old operatic
tradition, nor with the studied realism of the naturalistic stage.
They may hold a long, quiet pose; but when they do make a
gesture or a movement, the effect is all the greater because of
the previous restraint.
160 Making Theatre
Doningtons account of the Bayreuth stage here brings out
some of its memorable effects: a formalized and a-historical
beauty created out of the colour of the costumes (itself a quality of
the light in which they are seen), the lighting of the figures in
spaces which shade away into darkness so as to give these figures
the appearance of sculptured forms, and the restriction of
movement to those which have a musical necessity.
Discovering a visual style for The Ring cycle remains an
immense task, different in degree but not in nature to the problems
of aU theatre design, which involves a wide range of difficult
choices. Gotz Friedrich in his 1974 Covent Garden cycle, with
sets designed by Josef Svoboda, mounted the whole action on a
vast platform which revolved and could be tilted, angled, raised
and lowered to create different stage spaces. The underneath side
of the platform, which weighed three and a half tons and could be
raised to an angle of forty-five degrees was mirrored, so that the
underworld of Nibelheim where the ingots were being hammered
by the Nibelungs was seen in a fiery half-light. The tilting of the
platform at different angles (which was completely silent),
combined with brilliant use of laser lighting, allowed the scene to
move from one location in a seamless verwandlung. At the end of
Gotterdammerung, Hagen fell into the Rhine from the tilted edge
of the platform into the trap beneath, while the Rhine Maidens
were seen on the top of the platform, as it reversed its tilt, in a
flowing water projection on the surface.
This vast, shifting platform gave a visual coherence to the
whole production; its technology suggesting the crushing weight
and power of the forces at work in the contemporary world. The
basic intention, according to Friedrich, was to present the Ring
as a parable of this world on the stage. The world as theater, the
stage as world theater (Burian, p. 155).
By refusing to impose a single interpretation on The Ring and
conceiving it as a piece of music theatre, they hoped to
Vision 161
present Wagners thought in its contradictions. The empty platform, the
most basic and elemental of all stage spaces, became here an
entirely flexible stage space, capable of interpreting everything
we need . . . . Can we have a nineteenth century stage dragon and
laser beams? The answer is yes if were playing theatre - world
theater. We have the right because the moment that we elected to
have an ordinary stage, a platform, a stage floor, we created the
right to play theater from antiquity onward, perhaps even Chinese
theater. (Burian, p. 57). The stage is what we take it as being.
In the introductory and transitional passages, Svoboda used
laser Hghting, creating moving patterns of Hght projected onto
cycloramas or even parts of the set as an abstract, expressive
accompaniment to the music and action:
The intention . . .was to produce not a tight correspondence

between the images and the musical score, but rather an
impressionistic accompaniment ... As the prelude of Das
Rheingold began, a spark of red light was cast on to the dark
cyclorama: the inception of Ufe. The spark became a streak,
then a swirl of ever-changing red and blue patterns as the
platform silently rose, leveled and began to rotate slowly. Out
of the void, creation and matter. Svoboda described the event;
We have created a world, our world. The world of the Ring.
Weve given birth to a stage, bare boards, the plainest stage
floor, the most simple reahty. (Burian, p. 59)
As the platform at the close of the cycle finally returned to its
original almost level position where we had first seen it, it stated
once again that what we had witnessed was a piece of theatre. It
made no concluding statement, but Uke the end of a ride at the
fun-fair, invited you to roll up for another ride. Whether the
world, or the stage, next time round, will be different remains to
be seen. Theatre is always a gesture towards something, not a
statement about it. The Ring makes a gesture in two directions.
The ring returned to the
162 Making Theatre
Rhinemaidens by Brunnhilde stands for a world redeemed by Love, but
it also stands for a world which has gone up in flames, been
annihilated, where nothing remains except the possibility of a new
beginning. As Gotz Friedrich put it, Every ending conceals a new
beginning, and only that could mean a step forward toward
Utopia.
Whether the world ever changes, is ever more than a cyclic
wheel of fire, only the future will tell. In seeing the Ring as
theatre, the Friedrich-Svoboda production brought together these
two gestures which asks their questions about the nature of being,
of recurrence and evolution.
Like Wieland Wagner, Friedrich and Svoboda put into practice
the ideas which had first been advocated by Appia, and Gordon
Craig, but used too ideas and technologies relating to their own
time. Svoboda, like Wieland Wagner, believed that stage design
must reflect contemporary sens- ibihty, and not merely echo past
traditions. Its function is always to convey a plays (or an operas)
meanings. This problem is not solved by accumulating meanings
in an elaborate visual style, loaded with cultural references, as in
the Jones- Lowery cycle at Covent Garden in 1996; nor can a
strip- cartoon style diminish the power of Wagners music
superbly played by more than a hundred people, or comment upon
it. The function of effective stage design is not to puzzle the
audience by making them ask what does this mean, or why this is
here; but to clarify the meaning of the work as a whole. A ship
that is over-loaded with freight inevitably sinks. Tom Sutcliffe in
the Classical Music Weekly, commented with accuracy: Josef
Svobodas designs, wholly integrated with Friedrichs conceptions
in their practicality, provide some of the most stunning images I
have ever seen in the theatre. At last Gordon Craigs dreams of the
visual impact of which a Wagner production should be capable are
being matched. Yet each image, whether it follows or ignores
Wagners wishes, serves to underline clearly aspects of the total
work; nothing is there for prettiness or convenience. (Burian, p.
78). In a work as long and as complex as The Ring, the process of
paring-
Vision 163
down so that only the essential remains enables the vision to shine
through. And so it is with all theatre.
The vision of a play, and the way we respond to its visualization,

cannot be separated from the way in which it is cast. The light
which sculptures an actor sculptures a presence; a physique, a
vocal range and a deportment. A stage-space which only comes to
life when there are actors within it is given its life by their
individual and particular presences. The English stage has been
fortunate in the last fifty years in the richness and variety of its
memorable human talents.
When an actor seems to be miscast, it may be out of a failure
to make out of the eating a fruit, or the folding of a letter,
profound mirrors of character (Callow, p. 230), but also because
their stage presence jars with the rhythm and feeling of the
production, like a piece of music scored for the wrong instrument.
When we go to see a well-known actor or actress, they will
always impress us with these unique physical and physiognomical
attributes which are quite instinctively part of their presence, and
which reflect in a profound way their underlying psychology
whatever part they are playing. This power to be utterly different,
and always the same remains an essential part of the magic with
which theatre works. Companies, both old and new, have often
tried to do away with the star system for good reasons. And yet,
although we can and do respond to a performance by actors
entirely unknown to us, a part of the potency of theatre depends
on the relationship between the familiar and the strange. Theatre
is always playing on, whether unconsciously or consciously as in
Pirandello, our sense of the different identities within us, so that
in seeing a familiar actor play a role we compare him in this role
with previous performances in other plays. The presence of the
familiar creates a sense of permanence in a shifting world; but the
strangeness prompts an awareness of the actor as shape- shifter
whose real identity we never know. As Proust remarks, the actor
in performance becomes so transparent
164 Making Theatre
that he is only a window opening upon a great work of art.
In the cinema we go to see an actor in a film which is the
conception of the director. Even the language of the credits
suggests this: A film by . . . In the theatre we go to see the actor
in a role, knowing that this is only one of many roles they might
play. The type-casting of an actor not only limits his talents, but
also restricts, or buries this other dimension of acting which the
audience supplies. We are aware at every gesture, glance,
movement, look, of how deep the transformation is. Only the
living presence, felt along the blood, and in the veins, can give us
this sense of illusion creating reality and of a reality which is also
illusion.
Vision in theatre depends on the chemistry of this reaction
and, however skilful the performance, it does not happen in quite
the same way with actors entirely unknown to us. Shakespeare
and Sheridan wrote parts for those they worked with; and who
also were known to their audiences. Playwrights from Shaw to
David Hare have continued to write parts for particular actors and
actresses, who become familiar to those who go to the theatre with
any frequency.
Not all actors possess this quality of stage-presence, itself a
form of alchemy, which is part of their talent, and at the same time
separate from it. We have been fortunate to live in a period rich
and distinctive in its talents, as even the briefest of lists will recall:
after the generation of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson,
Donald Wolfit, Sybil Thorndike, Edith Evans, and Alec Guinness,
that of Paul Scofield, Ian McKellen, Albert Finney, John Wood,
Judi Dench, Dorothy Tutin, Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Alec
McGowan, Richard Pasco, Daniel Massey, Penelope Wilton, Alan
Howard, Donald Sinden, Patricia Routledge, Anthony Hopkins.
Michael Gambon, Frances de la Tour, Fiona Shaw. Everyone will
have their own list, and it could be much longer.
Vision in the theatre is always a vision of particular people in
particular places, made memorable by the coming together of the
familiar and the magical which gives to aery nothing a local
habitation, and another name.
4
Music
Music when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Music has been inseparable from drama in performance since the Pan-
Athenaic Festivals. The orchestra or dancing-floor separated the
audience from the scene, or stage. The Choruses in Greek drama
were written in metres which differed from the main action, and
were chanted in strophes and antistrophes. The performance
began with their offering a libation to the gods. The dramatic
ritual which followed composed of words, music and movement,
initiated a style which persists, for all the changes in cultural
context, to the present day in West Side Story. In the tragedies of
the House of Atreus, as in the American musical, a curse written
on the underside of things is being worked out; in each the
expression is inseparable from its music. Opera, and the musical,
among other things make audible what is at work in the rhythms
of all drama and its performance.
Music in the ancient world was used as a means of curing
madness and soothing minds that were troubled. Symphonia
meant a harmony of sounds, inducing concord in the listener.
Many performances still perform a similar function for their
audiences, and their performers. The poet Orpheus plays his lyre
to restrain the furies of the Underworld and, later, transcends his
sorrow, by controlling it in song.
In many different kinds of play, music is indispensable to the
dramatic action. In King Lear, Shakespeare uses music to restore
the King to sanity:
166 Making Theatre
DOCTOR: Please you, draw near. Louder the music there.
CORDELIA: O my dear Father! Restoration, hang
Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair
those violent harms that my two sisters Have in
thy reverence made.
(Act IV, scene 7)
With music too, Hermione is returned to life and Leontes at the end of
The Winters Tale:
PAULINA: Music, awake her; strike! {Music)
Tis time; descend; be stone no more
(Act V, scene 2)
A play of Shakespeare, T.S.Eliot once remarked, has a very
complex musical structure: a structure which only performance
brings out; and this is true of many plays other than those by
Shakespeare, where music as an expression of harmony sets the
seal on the forgiveness of human illusion. Peer Gynts restoration
to Solveig, at the end of his lifes long search for the self is
suggested by music, whether or not by Grieg.
As well as acting as a restorative, music in the classical world
inspired frenzy. Bacchus (or Dionysus) drove his followers to wild
dancing which induced a state of ecstasy or standing outside of
oneself. Pop concerts with the electronic sophistication of their
amplified sound, and new forms of worship still have the same
effect. In a more implicit way the same thing happens when an
audience is rapt.
Drama, whether or not it actually uses music (to conunent,
heighten, cause echoes beyond the power of words) possesses a
symphonic structure, moving from apparent order, through arousal
of conflict to a climax, followed by a restoration of order,
however temporary or insecure. An audience responds to this
musical structure; and the success of a performance depends on
the sensitivity of the cast to its notation. Richard Eyre has
developed the comparison like this:
Music 167
When I see a production, I think as it were after a few bars
ah, the director has brought the actors in on the beat, and
even if Im not altogether having a wonderfirl time, even if
every moment of the production is not illuminated by the vital
spark, I think: Its not drifting, its being directed, (Eyre,p.
109)
In opera, the tempi of the conductor affect the length of the
performance, amounting in some performances of Wagners
operas to a difference of half an hour for a single act; but these
variations do not necessarily correspond to a listeners sense of
whether the work is being taken fast or slow. AU good theatre
depends on a sense of ease, on establishing a natural rhythm
between what is seen, and what is heard or sung.
A distinction, though not a very clear one, is often made
between plays, musicals and opera. The relation between words
and music differs in all forms of theatre but in other respects they
are the same, requiring the skills of performance, of acting,
direction, costumes, scenery, sound and lighting; and a space for
the performance to take place. As with all forms of theatre, opera
has come to be performed in spaces of many sorts: from floating
stages on lakes, to Roman arenas, in tents, gardens and private
houses. The opera house has long since been superseded as the
only place in which performances of the highest standards can
occur, though it may still be the place where singers and
orchestras of the greatest talent are most often to be found. While
opera is sometimes dismissed as being a minority interest for the
wealthy (clearly untrue), musicals are equally looked down on as
being mere popular entertainment, a view which is equally
spurious, and ignorant. Each can be mere entertainment, or
distraction from distraction by distraction; each can be a form of
art, which explores an aspect of truth. Whatever the style of
music, and whatever the degree to which it shapes the work,
drama remains a musical, rhythmical art, drawing upon ancient
rituals, and absorbing the audience into its own world through the
power
168 Making Theatre
with which those rhythms work upon them. Audiences, listening to a
song in a musical, an aria in an opera or responding instinctively
to the rhythm of a stage action, are engaged in the same activity.
In aU forms of theatre, the relation between words and music is
inseparable from theatres magic power. W.H. Auden summed up
the situation in a memorable aphorism when he described The
Importance of Being Earnest as the only pure verbal opera in
English. This final chapter is concerned both with the implicit
musicality of aU performance, and the explicit ways in which
music becomes a living presence, as important as the actors, in
many different forms of theatre, culminating in opera where it
assumes the central role.
Music exists in individual lines of dialogue, as in the action as a whole.

Harold Hobson, writing ten years after seeing Ralph Richardson
as Dr Sloper in The Heiress (a dramatization of Henry Jamess
Washington Square) of the moment when he was reminded that
his wife had died a long time ago, said he could still see him
a cruel, relentless figure whose cruelty and relentlessness were

due to a great grief within; and I can hear his voice ring out,
That is no consolation, every word spoken as if it were a
note in music, resonant, reverberating, echoing down the
corridors of interminable years of sorrow. The emphasis on
the word that was terrible; at one stroke it destroyed all the
healing properties of time, and the consolation lingered on
the air like the distant and dying tolling of a bell.
(Miller, pp. 133-4.)
When an actor cannot speak a line, it is not because no one
would say such a thing, but because his sense of the inner ear of
the dialogue is fractured. No emphasis, or lack of emphasis, can
make it sound right to the inner ear, or form part of that
Music 169
inner action which involves every movement on the stage. Paul
Scofield when playing with Ralph Richardson in Graham
Greenes The Complaisant Lover recorded how this affected
performance.
Ralph was an actor of rhythm - he had a beat, a pulse inside
him which dictated to him; and playing opposite to him one
had to learn to respect that rhythm. I am inclined to syncopate
a little, and coming in one night with a Une a shade later than
usual, Ralph clapped his hand behind his ear as if to say,
What was that? His rhythm had been broken - -I had let him
down. It was the discipline of music.
(Miller, p. 174)
Peter Brook, writing about Scofield, illustrates the same innate
musicality working in a somewhat different way.
Scofield, when I first knew him as a very young actor, had a
strange characteristic: verse hampered him, but he would
make unforgettable verse out of lines of prose. It was as
though the act of speaking a word sent through him vibrations
that echoed back meanings far more complex than his rational
thinking could find: he would pronounce a word hke night
and then he would be compelled to pause: listening with all
his being to the amazing impulses stirring in some mysterious
inner chamber, he would experience the wonder of discovery
at the moment when it happened. Those breaks, those sallies
in depth, gave his acting its absolutely personal structure of
rhythms, its own instinctive meanings: to rehearse a part, he
let his whole nature - a milhard of super-sensitive scanners
pass to and fi*o across the words. In performance the same
process makes everything that he has apparently fixed come
back again each night the same and absolutely different. {ES
p. Ill)
Simon Callow in Being an Actor reveals the importance of
music in preparing a part.
170 Making Theatre
The various approaches are perforce idiosyncratic, because
everything you do in a the play must be completely grounded
in your own personal sensations. For me, music is the most
immediately acccessible point of reference. Since childhood, I
have been immersed in classical music. My first question for
myself is what is this characters and for that matter, this
plays - music. (Callow, p. 170)
The musical action of a play as a whole, like music itself,
expresses feeling which is complex. The complexity lies both in
the characters, and in our reponse to the action as a
whole.Watching Othello murder Desdemona or commit suicide
does not make us feel murderous or suicidal; we continue to be
aware of the nobility in Othellos soul. Even as he destroys the
most precious pearl in all his tribe, he is aware of the pity of it.
His tenderness is not exclusive of his rage, or his jealousy of
tenderness, just as in listening to a piece of music we can be
aware of sadness and joy.
Every performance of a play has to discover this inner musical
structure, and communicate it to the audience. As in a piece of
music, striking the wrong note will jar. As Richard Eyre has
written,
I dont know a good actor who is not intelligent, but this
intelligence is like a musicians, to do with timing, rhythm,
hearing, sensibility, physical coordination, rather than with
cleverness and the ability to express ideas. (Eyre, p. 87).
The actor who plays to the audience by ad-libbing, or
deliberately upstaging others on the stage whether by ham or
great acting breaks this internal rhythm. An actor who is miscast
will not fail only because of an inability to imitate the part, but
because his performance will sound out of tune with the rest. The
physical expression, and speaking of the lines, have to fuse as in a
symphony with all other players in the performance. This
becomes more possible when a company play together for a
season or more, and the players become
Music 171
increasingly well-attuned to each other: a vision which inspired Peter
Hall and Peggy Aschcroft in the founding of the Royal
Shakespeare Company, as it had inspired the companies in the
Elizabethan theatres of London, the Moscow Art, and the touring
companies in England and elsewhere today. The idea of the
troupe or company does not differ from that of the chamber group
or symphony orchestra whose work together over a period of time
enables them to respond to the mutual interaction of feeling and
rhythm between them: in a true sense, philharmonic.
When Hamlet rebukes Guildenstern for his disloyalty, he
reminds him of an important difference between the solo player
and the member of the company:
You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops;
you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would
sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and
there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet
cannot you make it speak. (Act III, scene 2)
The heart of the mystery in an actor can only be played upon

by other actors who can make it speak, and who can hear at the
same time the echoes which return from the audience. Ensemble
playing, the absence of a star system even the
interchangeablility of roles which Stanislavsky introduced in the
Moscow Art Theatre are all aimed at this same end. But a
company, for all the desirable things it embodies, cannot be held
together too long. It needs the fresh air of new ideas, or it dies.
Musicality in performance reflects what the greater dramatists
have always made part of their words, and their stage action: the
poetry of life, which comes from its suggestiveness and all that
remains inexplicit. Because of its brevity, a stage action requires
the associative strength of what has been deeply felt; and what in
poetry itself creates lyrics. The term lyric theatre, sometimes
used of opera, makes a false distinction, as all theatre is lyric.
172 Making Theatre
Samuel Beckett, rehearsing his own plays, insisted on their
being performed exactly as he had written them.This could
involve conflict, even if unspoken, with the actor trying to find a
way into a part, as this account of the rehearsals of Peggy
Ashcroft in Happy Days shows.
Her approach to a role is one of steady digging towards
psychological truth via tonal [my italic] accuracy: Beckett
regards his texts almost as scores in which words and gestures
amount to a tonal notation. . . . Peggy is far too diplomatic and
admiring of Beckett to admit that the first two weeks of
rehearsal were pretty hellish as he gave her every gesture in
fine, meticulous detail. What is revealing is her observation
that, even with a role as exactly orchestrated as a piece of
music, the actress still has to find her own personal route into
the character. {Ashcroft, p. 238)
To do this, Peggy Ashcroft had to discover how Winnie
should sound, borrowing in the end a great deal from Beckett
himself.
Peggy allowed his gentle incantatory reading of the text to
creep into her own. She realized instinctively what scholars
have confirmed: that Beckett is a profoundly Irish writer. . . .
The result was a performance gaily flecked with the music
[my italic] of Irish speech. {Ashcroft, p. 239)
Some directors prefer not to bring out Becketts Irishness
because this ties the action to a specific location, but in some way
an internal rhythm needs to be discovered and sustained, as
Natasha Parry succeeded in doing in Peter Brooks production of
Happy Days (1997), through playing Winnie with the self-
mockery of the demi-mondaine.
Shaws plays, though sometimes thought of as being plays of
argument and debate, work on the stage because they are
nourished by the musicality of Shaws Irishness, and an ear
Music 173
which made him, among other things, the finest music critic of his
time. After watching Ralph Richardson make his first entrance as
the Chocolate Soldier in Arms and the Man Shaw took him
aside and said.
When you come in youre very upset, you spend a long time
with your gasps and your pauses and your lack of breath and
your dizzinness and your tiredness; its very well done, its
very well done indeed, but it doesnt suit my play. Its no
good for me, its no good for Bernard Shaw. Youve got to go
from line to line, quickly and swiftly, never stop the flow of
the lines, never stop. Its one joke after another, its a
firecracker. Always reserve the acting for underneath the
spoken word. Its a musical play, a knockabout musical
comedy. (Miller, p. 41)
Act Three of Man and Superman, in which the characters of
the two previous acts take on the roles of the characters in
Mozarts Don Giovanni, represents his most extraordinary and
daring exploration of ideas, sustained by his inner ear for the
rhythms of speech. We Usten and one of Tanners/Giovannis
speeches lasts at least fifteen minutes not Just because of the
intelhgence of the ideas, but because of a sensuous rhythmic ebb
and flow in their expression. The ear, as well as the mind, is
seduced by the pulse, not just of what is being said, but of how it
is being said.
Shaws Prefaces have this quality to a much less marked
degree because they do not need the rhythmic variation of a
dramatic action, nor do they have to catch in their net the
dissonances and conflicts of opposing points of view and feelings,
or resound with the complexities of which all human speech is
made up. In his Prefaces, Shaw always tries to persuade his reader
of his point of view; in his plays he knows that he has to draw the
audience into the action by the internal rhythms of speech, in
which a word or a phrase accentuated or paused over can bring
back echoes from the deep. Heartbreak House is notable, in
dramatic literature, for the
174 Making Theatre
number of times in which characters fall asleep. (Not, it might seem,
the most theatrical of activities, but of course, a rhythmic one!)
The play even begins with Ellie Dunn falling asleep when no one
takes any notice of her, on her arrival in Captain Shotovers
house. At the start of Act III, almost everyone is asleep under the
stars. The lull in talking is only the silence before the storm of the
bombs which will start to fall; and sleep an image of the day-
dreaming which prevents these idle, futile creatures from seeing
the rocks on to which they and their society are drifting.
Heartbreak House is described by EUie in the final act as this
silly house, this strangely happy house, this agonizing house, this
house without foundations. Heartbreak House is to be wept over,
and loved; loved not least because of the presence of Captain
Shotover, who in his old age can still remember what it is like to
be the Captain on the bridge in the eye of the storm, and now still
hopes to achieve the seventh degree of concentration.
I sit here working out my old ideas as a means of destroying

my fellow-creatures. I see my daughters and their men living
foolish lives of romance and sentiment and snobbery. I see
you, the younger generation, turning from their romance and
sentiment and snobbery to money and comfort and hard
common sense. I was ten times happier on the bridge in the
typhoon, or frozen into Arctic ice for months in darkness, than
you or they have ever been. You are looking for a rich
husband. At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror,
and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did
not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, 1
had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern
your life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you
will not live.
(Act II)
Anger, turbulence, irritation but never quite despair, or the
longing for rest, impel the rhythms of Shotovers speech; a part
which has been memorably played in recent years by
Music 175
Roger Livesey, and Paul Scofield, but which seemed inappropriate for
Rex Harrison, an actor fired by irritation at human silliness, in
conflict with his own ego, but never capable of suggesting that he
wasnt entirely satisfied with being himself. Shotover has never
ceased to be an explorer, for whom arriving matters very much
less than never coming to journeys end. The musicality of the
play comes from the conflict between resistance and inertia,
between rest and exploration, between sleep and defiance: inner
rhythms to which the audience responds all the time instinctively,
while consciously thinking of the cleverness of what is being said.
In verse drama, unlike Shaws prose, we are aware of the
design which the music has upon us in the varying rhythms with
which characters speak. In T.S. Eliots fragments of Sweeney
Agonistes, the rhythms of the jazz age are audible in the rhythms
of the words:
Under the bam
Under the boo
Under the
bamboo tree.
In The Ascent of F.6, by WH. Auden and Christopher
Isherwood (1937), Mr and Mrs Smith respond to each other, and
the world, as though programmed by a computer (proving
themselves prophetic!) and speak in rhythms wholly distinct from
other characters.
MR. A.: No, nothing that matters will ever happen;
Nothing youd want to put in a book;
Nothing to tell to impress your friends - The
old old story that never ends:
The eight oclock train, the customary place. Holding
the paper in front of your face.
The other characters speak in prose, except at moments of

visionary intensity. As T.S. Eliot said in The Use of Poetry,
Poetry may make us from time to time a litde more aware of
176 Making Theatre
the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being,
to which we rarely penetrate. It can also be used as in the lines
above to express our failure to do so. Both become part of the
rhythmic variation of the play.
In T.S. Eliots plays, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family
Reunion, The Cocktail Party all of which prove their
continuing dramatic life in revivals - music and form are fused in
a more subtle way. In writing Murder in the Cathedral for a
religious drama festival at Canterbury, Eliot became aware that he
would need another kind of verse for a contemporary play. In his
later plays he achieved this, though not without being criticized
for writing verse which could not be distinguished from prose.
This overlooks how Eliots plays draw a response from the
audience by rhythms and repetitions which flow like currents
through what is being said. In Murder in the Cathedral (1935), the
Choruses of the Women of Canterbury express, at the start,
anxiety and fear at the thought of Beckets return to England.
They are living and partly living, not wanting to be disturbed, or
to have to bear witness. They speak in questions, their minds full
of an unknown fear, obsessed with danger, the heavy throb of the
verse creating a feeling of uneasy anticipation.
CHORUS: Why should the summer bring consolation
For autumn fires and winter fogs?
What shall we do in the heat of summer But wait in
barren orchards for another October? Some malady
is coming upon us. We wait, we wait.
And the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall
be martyrs and saints.
But at the plays end, when Becket has been murdered, the Knights
have made their excuses and given their explanations in prose
(which, as Eliot noted, had been influenced by Shaws Saint
Joan), the Chorus have moved, or been moved to a new tone of
acceptance, even of praise.
Music 177
For wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has given his
blood for the blood of Christ,
There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart from it Though
armies trample over it, though sightseers come with guide books
looking over it
The significance of Beckets martyrdom is expressed in this change
from a minor to a major key which works below the level of
questions of belief raised by the play. Music is in this sense
irresistible; and its rhythms cannot be misinterpreted.
In The Family Reunion (1939),Eliot develops a more elaborate
musical structure, though now in the secular setting of a country
house in the north of England. Like the Women of Canterbury, the
uncles and aunts, gathered at Wishwood for a family reunion, are
forced to bear witness to things they do not understand, and would
prefer to avoid. They are embarrassed, fretful, ill at ease, like
actors who have been assembled and not assigned their parts.
They neither see nor understand, in contrast to Amy who owns the
house and does not wish to see or understand; and Harry, her son,
Agatha, her sister and Mary, a cousin who in the course of the
action come both to see and understand the meaning of their
experience. When Harry arrives home, haunted by guilt (pursued
by the Furies), and by the fear that he may have murdered his
wife, seeing, and not seeing obsess him. He sees the Furies, but
knows that others do not see them, and so they can bear to be
stared at by eyes through a window. Michael Elliott in his 1979
production at the Round House in London solved the problem of
how to stage this part of the play by using a non-proscenium
stage. The mysterious up-stage, and its evocation of other worlds,
is not locked away beyond French windows. We have reversed
the polarity so that the audience are closest, not to the tea-cups,
but to the Eumenides (Michael Elliotts Programme note to The
Family Reunion). Harry entered through the audience, and the
Furies in their black and malign form intervened between him and
the illuminated figures on the stage, before Harry joined them.
178 Making Theatre
A little later Harry comes to understand the special nature of
his seeing:
Now I see
I have been wounded in a war of phantoms.
Not by human beings - they have no more power than 1
The things I thought were real are shadows, and the real
Are what I thought were private shadows
(Part Two, scene 2)
The contrast between those characters to whom nothing has
ever happened, and those who live in a tormented privacy (the
awful privacy of the insane mind) is sustained again by rhythms
and repetitions of varying kinds: words which invoke the power to
see, or express the desire to remain unaware. As Professor
Katharine Worth has pointed out, the two most moving and
effective scenes of the play take the form of lyrical duets
between Harry and Mary, and Mary and Agatha. Harrys final
decision to leave his mothers house and follow the bright angels
reduces his previous contortions of syntax to a simple statement
and a single image, which Paul Scofield made to resonate with aU
the echoes from submerged being that had not yet come to light,
and Edward Fox to burn with the conviction of a new
illumination.
The Cocktail Party (1950), like the two earlier plays, develops
out of a conviction that all things are but simple when they are
known; and involves the audience in the solution of a mystery or
mysteries, which centre around the disappearance of a succesful
barristers wife, and the appearance of an enigmatic psychiatrist,
Henry Harcourt Reilly, in his apartment. What sounds from its
title like another West End drawing-room comedy becomes an
anatomy of souls, forced to choose a pathway through life, and
accept the consequences wherever they lead. The rituals of social
life food, drinks, cooking, telephoning, going to parties - have
been absorbed into another ritual: that of understanding. Edward
cannot understand why his wife has left him, Celia cannot
Music 179
understand why she feels a sense of sin at the life she is leading in
London. Reillys role, as a healer of souls, is to help them
understand for themselves. Once again, this inner pilgrimage is
mediated through the interrogations of the verse. Characters echo
each other, picking up on each others words, creating patterns of
meaning and sound, which press towards a solution.
ALEX
..............................Im afraid you cant have Celia.
PETER
Oh.........................Is she married?
ALEX
Not married, but dead.
LAVINIA
Celia?
ALEX
Dead.
PETER
Dead. That knocks the bottom out of it.
EDWARD
Celia dead.
JULIA
You had better tell them, Alex,
The news that you bring back from Kinkania.
(Act III)
Reilly, with his taste for drinking gin and water, and his
strange song about One-eyed Riley(with its refrain Too-ri- oo
ley. Toorii-ley. Whats the matter with One-eyed Riley)
requires the talent of an actor whose presence depends on an
Oriental inscrutability, wholly in command of the situation
because he has the power to understand more, even though he
never intimates the source of this power, and the grounds on
which he knows he is right. The part seemed made for the style of
Alec Guinnesss acting in which there always remains a secrecy,
a slyly humorous unwillingness to
180 Making Theatre
divulge what exactly is going on. But Reilly was also played with equal
skill by Alec McGowan in 1986, whose air of puzzlement
tempered with authority humanized the role. In this production by
John Dexter, with designs by Brian Vahey, Edward and Lavinias
London flat was given a 1930s decor which reflected the style of a
play, set in 1949, but whose tone belongs to the pre-war period.
In his essay on The Music of Poetry, Eliot claimed that the
properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly are the
sense of rhythm, and the sense of structure. It is these properties
which he brings to the writing of his plays whose strength lies in
what remains unsayable, what characters do not understand about
themselves or their behaviour, which the rhythms of the verse
catch on to, as reeds are caught by the flow of a stream.
In the plays of the other verse dramatist of the post-war
period, Christoper Fry, whose work attracted many of the major
talents of the English stage from Richard Burton to John Gielgud,
Laurence Olivier and Edith Evans, in productions by Peter Brook,
and with designs by Oliver Messel, the verse was driven not so
much by the inner rhythms of character, as by a witty evaluation
of the world. In a blithe way their problem was existential; their
conflict was not so much with each other as with existence, with
the hard heart of the world, amounting at times to an
indifference at being in it. Where, asks one of the characters in
Act II of The Ladys Not for Burning (1949), in this small-talking
world can I find / A longitude with no platitude? Nonetheless,
when Edith Evans played Rosmarin in The Dark is Light Enough
(1954), she brought to the role a pained authority which at times
discovered a music beneath the surface of the verse, as, for
instance when she asked of Colonel Janik,
Only
Tell me what is in this war you fight
Worth all your dead and suffering men ?
(Act II)
Music 181
Christopher Frys characters were often a source of wit, and
always interesting to listen to, but their music too often belonged
to the surface; its flow was elegant, swift but lacked a dark
undertow, or that feeling of danger which comes from what is not
spoken, and to which an audience who watches and listens
responds. Recent revivals of The Ladys Not for Burning, and
Venus Observed at the Chichester Festival Theatre with Donald
Sinden have revealed the pleasure to be derived from hearing
Frys dialogue spoken with such relish for its polished surface,
but have also shown its lack of an inner music which words do
not touch.
Memory has been used in a number of prose plays, including
Wilders Our Town, (1938) Tennessee Williamss The Glass
Menagerie (1944), Pinters Landscape (1969) and Friels
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) to create a music of this sort.
Memory is by its nature a kind of inner music, working with
feelings, associations, images, words, experiences only half
recaptured and questioned. In a memory play the audience is
confronted with a present which it watches being woven from the
past: watching people who have already become ghosts, but who
stiU exist as though alive in the memory of the narrator or, as in
Pinters case, the two separate memories of Beth and Duff. In the
memory play we are asked to accept as present and living (a
dramatic performance is de facto in the present) a way of life
which the narrator knows to exist no more. He has to recreate it
for us and, in this act of conjuring, he will cast upon the audience
the speU of a time gone by, of people who can no longer speak
for themselves, and whose lives were passed in rooms, and
circumstances, now utterly changed. Memory, though it may
contain nostalgic feelings, is not nostalgia; it is a re-creative act.
What we hear and see is not just the figure on the stage, but the
figure on the stage succumbing to the spell of his own memory
and casting it on us. Tennessee Williams in his first major play.
The Glass Menagerie, creates Tom, a narrator close to himself,
who recalls his own mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura in their
fives of depressed gentility in an apartment in St Louis where the
Williams family had
182 Making Theatre
lived. Amanda, who had once been a Southern belle, deserted by her
husband a telephone man who fell in love with long distances
lives in her own memories, and in her overprotective love for
her daughter, who walks with a limp, has no gentleman callers
(except one as the action develops), and the isolation of whose life
is mirrored in her collection of glass animals. What Tennessee
Williams catches through the rhythms of Toms memory
combines a Southern tolerance with a neurotic tension, drawling
and wounded, susceptible of being hurt, and capable of causing
pain; a stability as threatened and fragile as that of the glass
animals themselves, but also enclosing somewhere a heroic
toughness. Tom alone is destined to escape.
I left St Louis. I descended the steps of this fire-escape for a
last time and followed, from then on, in my fathers footsteps,
attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. I traveled
around a great deal.The cities swept around me like dead
leaves.
(Act II)
The cities which sweep around him like dead leaves have
swept around us too, turning themselves into the figures of his
family, and their shattered, continuing lives. The candles which
Laura blows out to close the play bring to an end Toms memories
of those days, until as he says somewhere else Laura touches him
on the shoulder. As she touches us too; an effect which only the
theatre in the intensity of its present and its brief lightning before
darkness can bring about.
In Friels play, Dancing at Lughnasa, memory and music are
associated even more closely, becoming the source of the plays
whole action. In the closing words of the play, Michael sums up
what we have entered into through him. His memory of Lughnasa
is composed of a
dream music, both heard and imagined; that seems to be both
itself and its own echo; a sound so alluring and so
Music 183
mesmeric that the afternoon is bewitched, maybe haunted by
it. And what is so strange about that memory is that everybody
seems to be floating on those sweet sounds, moving
rhythmically, languorously, in complete isolation; responding
more to the mood of the music than to its beat. When I
remember it, I think of it as dancing. Dancing with eyes half
closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing
as if language had surrendered to movement as if this
ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to
whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some
otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes
might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed
rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing
as if language no longer existed because words were no longer
necessary . . . {Slowly bring up the music. Slowly bring down
the lights.)
(Act II)
In these words, about the limitations of words, Michael
defines much that is true not just of the memory play, but about
the inner action of all drama, which brings us into touch with
private and sacred things, which puts us in touch with some
otherness, the otherness those on the stage are living, so that we
may feel at times they have forgotten they are acting, possesed by
the actual and the illusory. Acting at this level can only be
instinctive, performed out of the rhythms of an inner invisible life.
In Pinters much more laconic play. Landscape, Duff and
Beth, created by David Waller and Peggy Ashcroft, are divided
by a cleft running across the floor and along the wall behind
them, suggestive of two identities joined in marriage, divided by
time and memory. (The set for the first production was designed
by John Bury.) For Duff, life is to talk of beer, and walk his dog;
for Beth to recall an ecstasy of love, now past for ever, summed
up at the close in a single line, Oh, my true love, I said.
As with the set, the life between them is fractured, whether
184 Making Theatre
because they do not hear each other, or because Beth dreams of another
man, is never clear. What matters is that the dialogue creates a
broken music between them, in the same room together, and
distant as people on different planets in their feelings. The love
which in John Donnes poem makes a little room an everywhere
makes a little room here a desert in which two voices are heard,
out of all contact with each other. Not knowing this, they cannot
talk about it, or to each other; only the rhythms of their contrasted
voices, their pauses for reflection, their silence can suggest it to
the audience: a suggestiveness which goes on expanding through
the presence of those two words, I said, which fade away into
interstellar space, carrying with them a memory of what has been
unspeakable and remains unsayable.
The whole performance of a play has an innate musicality. In plays of

many sorts this sense of rhythm breaks through the surface. Song,
and dance are used to heighten the inner action, to intensify and
ritualize a particular moment, or to comment upon the action as a
whole.
Songs, dances, solemn music, drums, fifes, trumpets are all
used by Shakespeare as instruments of dramatic action; they are
never separate from the dramatic action, but a way of conceiving
it. The maskd dance at which Romeo meets Juliet in the house of
the Capulets surrounds them with danger, while providing the
opportunity for the first private conversation between them, stolen,
secretive and passionate.
Songs in Shakespeares plays and the way they are
performed which differs from production to production -
crystallize aspects of their feeling, and give the audience a pause
to reflect upon it. Festes song at the end of Twelfth Night:
When that I was and a little tiny boy
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
A foolish thing was but a toy.
For the rain it raineth every day
Music 185
dismisses the audience from the sunlight of Illyria, with its wedding
feasts and true loves knotted, to the wind and rain of London
streets. It can be sung in many different ways; but what it must
preserve is the magic of performance (all our attention is
concentrated on Feste in his skills as entertainer), and an
awareness that even spells have an ending.
The best rendering of that song that I have heard not vocally,
but dramatically, was in Peter Halls production at the
Playhouse a few years back. The Feste used his tambourine as
if raindrops were beginning to fall, starting with a few slow,
heavy drops, such as we often experience at the end of
summer, and then increasing in intensity with the feel of
winter. You almost turned up your coat-collar for protection.
The actor was only drumming with his fingers under the
tambourine, but it was magic. (Guinness, My Name p. 80)
The actor was Robert Eddison; and Guinness describes precisely the
effect of what happened.
The song and dance at the end of A Midsummer Nights
Dream create magic of another kind. Oberon and Titania enter
with their train, invoking beings of another sort, to bless the
house, and the issue of its marriages:
Now until the break of day.
Through this house each fairy stray.
To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;
And the issue there create Ever shall
be fortunate.
So shall all the couples three Ever
true in loving be
(Act V, scene 2)
Through the power of music, the fairies cast a spell of heavenly grace,
capable of preventing disfigurements in birth.
186 Making Theatre
and quarrels in marriage. Music as in the later Saint Cecilias Ode is
inspired with the power to raise a mortal to the skies, and call an
angel down. Blessing, grace and harmony are the gifts of song;
the gifts of the fairy world to the human world; and the audience
are touched by them too when they have dreamed this dream. The
song at the end of the earlier Loves Labours Lost, a play for, and
about, courtiers ends with an earthier and no less effective
reminder that greasy Joan must keel the pot. At close of play,
music can set the seal, and turn the knife. How the songs are
performed becomes a commentary on the action as a whole.
Shakespeares songs intervene in the action, as well as
concluding it, and matter as much in tragedy as in comedy. The
mad Ophelia torments Gertrude, and Claudius, with her song, He
is dead and gone, lady reminding the audience of the finality of
death, a prelude to the numerous deaths about to occur, including
her own by suicide, and the frailty of the mind before unbearable
grief. (Her own ex-lover has violently murdered her doting
father.) Desdemonas willow-song expresses grief of a different,
but no less desperate kind; Desdemonas loneliness, her distress
and incomprehension at the frenzy of which she has so suddenly
become the object:
The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee.
Sing willow, willow, willow
(Act IV, scene Two)
Shakespeares infinite variety means that not all tragedies or

plays contain songs; and their positioning, like their effect,
surprises. In Measure for Measure, a bawdy, lustful play
(ultimately concerned with judgement, human and divine), there
is only one song, given to a boy who sings to Mariana in her
moated grange at the start of Act IV;
Musk 187
Take, O take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day.
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again, bring
again.
Seals of love, but seald in
vain, seald in vain.
The song is broken off by the appearance of the Duke, disguised as a
friar. She apologises for being found so musical:
Let me excuse me, and believe me so!
My mirth it much displeasd, but pleased my woe. DUKE:
Tis good; though music oft hath such a charm To
make bad good, and good provoke to harm.
(Act IV, scene 1)
Mariana, already contracted to Angelo, is about to be persuaded to take
Isabellas place in his bed, in order to save the life of Isabellas
brother, Claudio. Angelo has demanded Isabellas body as the
price of reprieving him. (The bed-trick, however implausible,
becomes the means of preventing the play from becoming a
tragedy.) In this play, dominated by lust, and partly set in the
brothels of Vienna, the song reminds us of another kind of sex:
sex as desire, as bodies given, however temporarily, as seals of
love, of eyes which shine so brightly they make dawn think the
night is over, and of desire to make love again. This is the sex of
reciprocated pleasure, of an exchange, as opposed to an exaction,
a rape the price which Lord Angelo who is very snow-broth
demands of Isabella. Just for a moment, the song reminds us that
even in faithless love, there can be pleasure as well as pain. When
John Neville played Angelo in 1962 he conveyed precisely the
coldness of his desire for self-gratification, arising out of a nature
puritanical and power-loving to which the song presents a tender,
even if almost despairing alternative.
188 Making Theatre
Festes earlier song in Twelfth Night also invokes light loves
and passing amusements but in a way appropriate to Illyria, and
not disfigured by the money-making or power-breaking
exchanges of Vienna ;
What is love? tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
Whats to come is still unsure;
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youths a stuff will not endure.
(Act II, scene 3)
But, coming where it does, it also sustains the dramatic action of
Twelfth Night at another level. Toby Belch and Andrew
Aguecheek, devoted to cakes and ale, have asked for a love song;
and the love song they get does not reflect their own boisterous
and jaded appetites, but the appetites of young lovers to whom in
the end this play belongs: those of Sebastian and Viola. In another
play where they were not brother and sister, they would be
intended for each other. Here in Illyria, they are both destined for
older and more sophisticated partners, Viola for Orsino (whose
appetite for love has to be fed with music) and Sebastian for
Olivia, whose life would otherwise be confined to watering her
chamber round with eye-offending brine. Neither has the vigour
of a Beatrice or a Benedict, or the mad intoxication of a Romeo
and Juliet. Autumnal stagings of this play suggest this love on the
brink of maturity, while Festes song warns of the danger of
forgetting that youths a stuff will not endure. In Twelfth Night
Shakespeare writes his farewell to young love, until at the end he
returns to it not so much for its own unfettered joy, but as part of
the pattern ofgreat creating Nature.
In Shakespeares last play. The Tempest, the songs of Ariel
become the instruments of that island music which as Cahban
knows give delight and hurt not. Ariel alone can articulate the
sounds and sweet airs of which the isle is full, and turn
Music 189
them into the exactness of a song. As in A Midsummer Nights Dream
this involves magic, but not just fairy magic: Ariel draws down
the powers which exist in Nature, and invokes their help to
prevent murder and restore harmony. Alan Badel who played
Ariel at Stratford in 1952 brought to the part a speaking voice
both musical and other-worl^y, so that in his songs he seemed to
be drawing down powers just out of human reach. At the banquet
offered to the conspirators and whisked away before they can
enjoy it, Ariel acts as Master of Ceremonies. Solemn and strange
music accompanies its appearance; Ariel in the shape of a harpy
claps his wings and causes the feast to disappear, before he too
vanishes in thunder. Then, to soft music, enter the Shapes again,
and dance with mocks and mows, and carry out the table.' Over
against Stephanos and CaH- bans drunken songs, Ariel offers
the music of transformation:
Come unto these yellow sands And
then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kissd
The wild waves whist. . .
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade.
But doth suffer a sea-change Into
something rich and strange.
(Act I, scene 2)
When Prospero releases him from his tasks, Ariel will be found under
the blossoms that hangs on the bough. Ariels songs come closest
in the play to expressing the powers which Prospero, as white
magus, has learned from his books, drawing upon the resources of
Nature of which Ariel, as spirit, always remains a part. Song
becomes another kind of harmony - not the music of the spheres,
as in The Merchant of Venice - but music unheard by those whose
senses are deadened by the muddy vesture of decay.
190 Making Theatre
In drama, since Shakespeare, music has continued to be used
as a means of intensifying the dramatic action. In Ibsens A Dolls
House, Nora dances for Torvald to prevent him looking in the
letter-box -where she knows he will find the letter from Krogstad,
betraying her forgery of her fathers signature. The rhythms of the
tarantella express her increasing desperation; and at the same time
heighten the audiences anxiety about what is going to happen. In
Strindbergs The Dance of Death (1901), the Captain dances
himself apparently to death as yet another way of tormenting his
wife. In a lonely marriage, on an island fortress, their relationship
is sustained (or their days are passed) in a series of games and
black jokes, of which this dance becomes the most deadly
example. The Captains fiendish glee on reviving, which
Laurence Olivier played with all the relish of a man possessed,
expresses his pleasure in surviving to torment her further: life is
quite literally a dance of death.
In Chekhovs plays, music is used to suggest things which are
not spoken of. Prozorov in Three Sisters has had ambitions to
become a university professor in Moscow; but he knows that his
time has passed, and he will never become more than a member of
the local council. Chekhov, unlike Ibsen, does not write about
what causes the failure of hopes and dreams; but he does write
about the consequences of their failing. Prozorov finds refuge
from his unhappy marriage and failed hopes in his playing the
violin, which we hear off-stage. Played unaccompanied, the
violins plaintiveness expresses, more succinctly than any words
could, his isolation, and his will - close to despair - which makes
him go on. Prozorov does not complain (except, ironically to the
deaf porter Ferapont); but his violin expresses the yearning of an
unfulfilled soul, and an unhappy man: a part to which Anthony
Hopkins brought a grim fortitude.
Prozorovs solitary playing stands in contrast to the use which
Chekhov makes of the military band in the last moments of the
play. Vershinin, like Prozorov trapped in an unhappy marriage,
has fallen deeply in love with Masha, and
Music 191
Masha with him. But when his regiment is posted away from the town
he has no choice except to go with them, in company with a wife
who revenges herself on him by her attempts to kill herself.
Masha is left, equally unhappy in her marriage to the worthy but
boring schoolmaster, Koolyghin. Almost unable to bear the
future, Masha listens with her sisters to the sound of the bands
receding music. As it fades way into the distance, the sisters talk
once more of their longing for Moscow, and of their uncertainty
of what the future holds for them. If only we knew. If only we
knew. The playing of the band becoming more and more distant
accentuates that fading hope, even as it carries away Mashas one
hope of love. As this happens, Chebutyldn, the doctor who has
given up on caring, and has done nothing to prevent the Baron
being killed in a duel sits humming to himself the song associated
with him:
Tarara-boom-di-ay . . . Im sitting on a tomb-di-ay.
This fragment of song, expressing an awareness of mortahty which
nurtures indifference, recalls another totally diffferent fragment of
music earlier in the play for which there can now be no reprise,
expressing the intensity of Masha and Vershinins love for each
other.
MASHA (sings): To Love all ages are in fee.
The passions good for you and me . . .
(Laughs.)
MASHA (sings): Tara-tara-tara . . .
VERSHININ: Tum-tum . ..
MASHA: Tara-tara . . .
VERSHININ: Tum-tum, tum-tum . . . (Laughs.)
Mashas and Vershinins inner Ufe is conveyed here with a clarity and
intensity which explicit statement could never match.
The three sisters are left isolated from each other, and from
192 Making Theatre
what they believe would give them a new way of life. In Moscow, they
would find refuge from this terrible isolation, and from a suffering
they can neither understand nor overcome. Music fading into
silence matches the fading of their lives into silence; a balance
rendered with almost unbearable anguish in the National Theatre
production by Laurence Olivier in 1967, with sets of great beauty
and simplicity, by Josef Svoboda, who used silver rods to suggest
the enclosure of their lives, and the birch trees which Chekhov so
much loved. In that production, Robert Stephens brought to the
part of Vershinin a mixture of disillusion and passion, matched by
Joan Plowrights Masha whose yearning existed on the very edge
of total breakdown.
Music in Chekhovs plays brings to the surface currents of
feeling which are always flowing underneath, whether of
temporary communion, or more frequently of isolation. The
originality and genius of his dramatic technique comes from
holding together an action in which every character follows (they
have no choice) their own path through life, separated from, and
independent of those with whom they are associated by kinship or
location. Houses bring people under the same roof; they derive
from them their identity; and within them they play their roles as
husbands, lovers, mothers, sons, uncles and so on. But these liens
matter far less than the inner life which every character carries
within the enclosure of the self, and which the dramatic action
enables us to imagine. The Cherry Orchard combines the unifying
force of the image which gives it its title and the explosive,
disintegrating force of its characters incompatible lives. The
luggage which is carried on in Act I, when they return to the
house, and taken away again when they leave in Act IV suggests
their arbitrary and transient togetherness, like the cast of the play,
and like all our lives.
As with everything Chekhov wrote it is done with a lightness
of touch, and an indirectness of expression which makes us see the
more clearly what is going on underneath. In Act III, when
Lopakhin is off making his bid for the orchard.
Music 193
Madame Ranevskaya (Liuba) is giving a dance, for which she lacks the
money to pay. Everyone knows what news is awaited; and the
orchard bobs in and out of the conversation like a cork on the sea.
While the Jewish orchestra play, the German governess, Charlotta
entertains the guests with her tricks, and Liuba cares only about
the telegram from her worthless lover in Paris.
Everything that happens is a fashion of forsaking, until
Lophakhin, the former peasant, enters to tell them all that he has
been the one to buy the orchard. In the embarrassment which
ensues, only the music again can cover up feeUngs which no one
knows how to express, as Lopakhin whips up the band to more
fenzied tempi, in keeping with his mood of crass self-approbation.
Hi, you musicians, come on now, play something. I want
some music. Now then, all of you, just you wait and see
Yermolai Lopakhin take an axe to the cherry orchard, just you
see the trees come crashing down. . . . Come on there, lets
have some music! {The band plays.)
The music cannot conceal that Liuba is crying. The cherry

orchard, it is true, has been sold; and somewhere else it will have
to be planted in some form again, if her life is to be renewed. We
all know that for her the dance is over; and the dance-band
continues to play.
Chekhov has used the dance to structure the Act. Once again
it repeats what the two previous Acts have shown: Liubas
recklessness in the face of disaster, her unwillingness even to
notice it coming; but it also suggests a continuing normality to
which Lopakhin belongs, and which remains indifferent to the
ways human beings ruin their lives.
Music performs a different function here to that of Tely-
egins guitar playing in Uncle Minya, signalling his withdrawal
into a private world, which no one can share because they already
exist in their own.
194 Making Theatre
YELIENA; What a lovely day! . . . Not too hot either . . .
VANYA; It tvould be even pleasant to hang oneself on a day like
this . . .
{Telyeghin tunes his guitar. Marina walks to and fro near the
house,
calling the chickens.)
MARINA: Chook, chook, chook.
SONIA: Nanny, what did the peasants come for?
MARINA: The same as before - they are all still going on about
the waste land. Chook, chook, chook . . .
SONIA: Which is it youre calling?
MARINA: The speckled one. Shes gone somewhere with her
chicks. The crows might get them . . . {Walks
away.)
{Telyeghin plays a polka; all listen in silence.)
(translated by Elizaveta Fen)
Each character has his or her own music. Each is lost in sohtude.
The recurrence of music in Chekhovs plays articulates his
awareness of the rhythms of peoples lives which life orchestrates
in its own arbitrary ways. What is offered today will not be
offered tomorrow. The trajectories of individual lives cross but do
not meet. The unique effect of his drama comes from the
randomness of its inner music, and his control over form. Acts in
his plays are structured around an event; a performance of another
play, a name-day party, a duel, a fire, an annoucement, a
declaration, a return, a departure - techniques which he learnt
from his enjoyment of popular vaudevilles, in his youth. But
unlike The Bear and The Proposal (1888) two of the funniest
short plays ever written his major plays depend not on a single
accelerating rhythm, but on the discovery of a pulse in the play -
sometimes slower, sometines faster - which holds together the
varied and individual pulses of the cast as a whole. Mannered
playing by one or more actors which has the effect of retarding
the action can wholly destroy this. Each member of the cast has to
be in tune with all the others, and all responsive to the particular
Music 195
tone of the plays production. This is in every nuance a musical
activity.
Apart from Shakespeare, Chekhovs plays have probably been
more frequently revived with more distinguished casts than those
of any other dramatist in the last fifty years; and performances of
all his major plays remain in the memory; Gielgud as Ivanov, and
Gayev, Michael Redgrave and Laurence Olivier, as Vanya and
Astrov, Vanessa Redgrave and Jonathan Pryce in The Seagull,
Robert Stephens as Vershinin, Tom Courtenay as Trofimov,
Peggy Ashcroft, Dorothy Turin, Lil Kedrova, and Judi Dench as
Liuba, Anna Calder-Marshall as Sonya, Albert Finney as
Lopakhin, Michael Gambon and Ian McKellen as Vanya; Alec
McGowan as Gayev; Ralph Fiennes as Ivanov; the visits of the
Moscow Art Theatre itself Everyone who has been to Chekhov
will have their own Hst of memorable performances and
productions. They are bound together by a love for the author,
shared by audiences and actors, and by the authors love for most
of his characters. (Although they are plays which require
ensemble playing, paradoxically, they are also memorable for
interpretations of particular roles; and in this too they resemble
life.) When played by a company attuned to each other,
Chekhovs plays, as well as using music from squeaking boots to
guitars and military bands, create another kind of music which is
of individual souls, not at one with each other (we are all alone)
but transiently brought together. It is this which we hear all the
time in listening to Chekhovs plays: a harmony which remains
discordant because one can never be attuned to another, or anyone
to life; and an action in which harmony is sought for, whether in
rest or in Moscow, or in death. The musicality of Chekhovs
plays results in something understood: a contact between the
imaginative subconscious of the performer and the audience:
symbolized by the distant breaking of a string which is heard in
Act II of The Cherry Orchard, and again at the plays end.
Chekhovs plays work with the deepest resources of
196 Making Theatre
theatrical art; and at the same time only once refer to it directly.
It is a pity we do not have hve orchestras any more. In the old

days, if the play was not very successful, or was rather thin
such orchestral interludes brightened things up a little,
although it was often somewhat grim, with an awful chamber
orchestra sawing away under a lot of imitation palm leaves,
playing tea-shop music between the acts. (Gielgud, p. 172)
Brightening things up a little between the acts does still occur,
though usually on tape, and with the advantage of professional
recording and stereophonic sound, as the scene is changed. Such
music - like other off-stage sound effects - adds to the
suggestiveness of a production, and helps to confirm the mood at
which the director is aiming. It provides a link or bridge between
scenes or acts, not broken by an interval, amplifying feelings
which run as an underground stream through any production. The
selection or composition of this music sustains a tone, atmosphere,
feeling which might otherwise be lost. As with lighting, the
technology of sound in some theatres has become very
sophisticated and expensive, though no amount of money can
substitute for the imagination which integrates every aspect of a
production.
In some plays, the dramatist prescribes the music which needs
to be used, as at the start of Death of a Salesman.
ACT I
A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It small and fine,
telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises.
Before MS is the Salesmans house. Hi are aware of
towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all
side. . . . From the right, Wily Loman, the salesman enters,
carrying two large sample cases. The flute plays on.
Music 197
This flute music, recurring throughout the action, becomes
Willys theme. Elegiac and dream-like, it expresses the unfulfilled
aspirations of the salesman to whom society no longer pays
attention. After his suicide, and at his requiem it is heard as
Linda begins to speak, 'not far away, playing behind her speec/i.
When the stage is left empty, 'only the music of the flute is left on
the darkening stage as over the house the hard towers of the
apartment buildings rise into sharp focus.' WiUys music is
always reaching for feelings which words cannot express, and so
lies close to that relationship between music and drama,
associated with musicals and opera. At other moments in the play.
Miller specifies different kinds of music to create other kinds of
tone.
Act II begins with music which is 'gay and bright'. Howard,
Willys boss, who is only interested in showing off his new wire
recording machine, makes Willy listen to his daughter whistling
Roll out the barrel on it, while Willy waits to ask him for a job
in New York (which will be refused). The brash, cheerful song
(Roll out the barrel, weU have a barrel of fun) acts as a
counterpoint to the anguish of Willys last desperate attempt to
get work he can cope with; his life has passed beyond all fun.
Raw, sensuous music accompanies the scene in which WiUy is
caught by his son Biff in a Boston Hotel with another woman,
accentuating the gap between what WiUy wants to feel, and what
Biff s unexpected arrival has made him feel.
At the end of Our Countrys Good Timberlake Wertenbaker
uses music to celebrate and confirm. The convicts in the
Australian penal colony have overcome the disadvantages of lack
of education and present suffering to learn and rehearse the first
performance of Farquhars The Recruiting Officer (1706) in
Australia. As the curtain is about to go up on this triumph of
civilization over barbarism which theatre has made possible, we
(and they) hear the opening bars of Beethovens Fifth symphony
with its famous morse-code chords for Victory. The play has
opened with a very different music; the sound of the lashes being
counted out as a convicts punishment. The trajectory of the
dramatic action moves from violence and
198 Making Theatre
negation to triumphant affirmation, sealed by Beethovens music. As
was discovered in the Second World War, when this symphony of
Beethoven was used to disconcert the Germans, no one can listen
to its opening without responding to its feeling of an unassailable
confidence won over despair.
In Peter Shaffers Amadeus (1979) Mozart, and his music,
become the centre of the action. Many films have been based on
the lives of composers (Liszt, Wagner, Mahler, Elgar); they
provide, among other things, a sound track, which can be used to
half-conceal the defects of the screen play. On the stage, however,
the music needs far more subtle treament, if it is not to bring the
dramatic action to a standstill. Peter Hall who believed in the
importance of Amadeus from his first reading, recognized from
the start its central problem on the stage.
All day working on Mozart and Amadeus selecting little bits
of music for the production. Music, like colour, is the most
dangerous thing to put in the straight theatre. It generalises
emotion, generates it easily, and ends by dissipating it. And,
my God, when its Mozart. . . . You cant easily let him into a
play.
The problem was solved with the help of the composer, Harrison
Birtwistle.
It must be distant, under speech; Mozarts music, of course,
but as if through a slightly distorting glass. If we inject
Mozarts music into the play, to then follow with speech is
impossible. (Hall, p. 462)
Shaffers play is concerned with the enmity between Salieri,
the court composer blessed with talent but no genius, who realises
that Mozart - as his name and the title of the play suggests - is
beloved of God, inspired with a divine gift, oddly accompanied by
a love of scatological humour and farting. Salieri knows that
whatever the defects of Mozarts character, his own compositions
will never approach Mozarts inspired
Music 199
art; and jealousy of this child of God turns to the need to have him
murdered. As Salieri is telling his story, the distortion of Mozarts
music reflects its emotional impact on him. As in many post-
modern novels, the narrators viewpoint is perceived to be a
distortion, which the audience is left to interpret, at times through
hearing Mozarts music briefly as it really is. As Peter Hall said,
there must be tension between what the audience sees and what
Saheri describes. A difficult balance to achieve (Hall, p. 465).
The solution of the technical problems of Shaffers play
turned it from being a play with music (most films about
composers are only films with music) into a play which
questioned the origin of music. The heaven of Mozarts music is
contrasted with the hell of Salieris hatred: music of another
sort. Both humanly and metaphysically, the savagest sorrow
arises from the feeling of love to which we are exiles. As a young
man Salieri has made a contract with God or thinks he has -
that in return for leading a virtuous life he will be inspired with
music which is Gods Art. God chooses to inspire Mozart
instead. Ironically, Safieri has the talent to realize, as few of his
contemporaries do, that Mozarts music is immortal; and that his
music, although acclaimed for a time, will soon cease to be
played. His one chance of immortal fame lies in spreading the
rumour that he has murdered Mozart. In the original production
the part of Saheri was played by Paul Scofield with the half-
concealed menace of a rabid dog; in its 1998 revival David
Suchet brought to the part a rhetorical circumspection which
demanded the audience consider its mediocrity, as he was
compelled to confront his own.
Words in Shaffers play matter very much less (Mozarts
scatological humour exemplifies this) than feelings. The dialogue,
apart from Salieris rhetoric, is unmemorable and repetitive,
throwing no fight upon the nature of Mozarts genius. The
originality of his play comes from the difference between the
feelings aroused in the audience by Mozarts music, and its effect
on Salieri. Music becomes the instrument for suggesting the
difference between talent and genius, and
200 Making Theatre
the inexplicable nature of inspiration. Ironically, and perhaps
consciously, Mozarts music comments too on the Hmitations of
Shaffer as a dramatistist.
Music, and musicality in plays is absorbed, sometimes more,

sometimes less obtrusively, within the action as a whole. In two
dramatic forms, the musical and opera, words and music have a
more specific, though very different, relationship. Opera is
dismissed by low-brows as elitist; musicals are dismissed by high-
brows as mere entertainment. No one buys a ticket for any form of
theatre without the desire of being entertained; and any form of
theatre which does not entertain deserves to fail at the box-office,
the sole arbiter of what continues to be performed.
The power of the musical to entertain needs no arguing
beyond its success at the box office, which may also feed on the
impossibility of buying a ticket! But the success of a musical is
secured by the number of arts which go into its making and the
skill with which the languages of theatre are used. When Ira
Gershwin wrote:
I got rhythm I got music

Who could ask for anything more?
he asked a very good question.
The words in a musical are always waiting to burst into song.
In the second scene of Rodgers and Hammersteins Carousel
(1945),JuUe and Billy are left alone. Billy has lost his job for
putting his arm round her on the carousel;Julie has lost hers for
refusing to return to the miU-owners lodging-house before the
doors are closed. After a short conversation between them, the
musical accompaniment begins in the background (creating a
sense of expectation in the audience), building to the moment
when Julie will break into song:
Music 201
If I loved you
Time and again I would try to say
All I would want you To know
Once she starts to sing, her words and its melody takes over
from the orchestra. As in any good song, every word has to be
audible, and the feeling behind the words has to communicate
itself immediately and directly. Through the melody we enter into,
and share, the feelings of Julie and Billy as they imagine what
they would say if they loved each other (which as yet they dont!).
Simplicity is essential to this effect: in a musical, however
complex, there is no indirect action; everything belongs to the
immediate present of what we are looking at, and listening to. The
orchestra exists to provide a rhythmical accompaniment,
harmonise the melody, and improvise round it, with the tone
being varied when the melody is taken up by different
instruments. Nothing must distract from what happens on the
stage; the orchestra never upstages the singer; the orchestra is
seldom allowed to act.
Unlike opera, where overture or prelude initiates the dramatic
action, the overture of the musical contains a medley of as yet
wordless songs, to which the audience pays htde attention, even if
they are not still arriving. The big numbers are created only when
they have been sung; and are inscribed on the memory by the
reprise, which often occurs in changed circumstances.
When we hear the reprise of If I loved you in Act II of
Carousel Billy is dead; he has returned from Heaven as a spirit to
comfort Julie; and he sings it on his own. As soon as the orchestra
takes up the melody the audience can complete it with the words,
and the melody itself becomes an instrument of dramatic irony,
and nostalgia. The singer is quite Hterally the song, confirming
what Julie has just been told in the shows other big number,
Youll never walk alone.
The formal reprise has no place in opera, though Verdi uses
brief repetitions for intense dramatic effect in the final acts of
202 Making Theatre
La Traviata and Otello, as Puccini does in the last act of La Boheme.
The musical has another tradition inconceivable in the opera
house of playing the audience out with a further repetition of the
main numbers, which the audience carry away, with accretions of
feeling, absent in the overture, and built up in the course of the
dramatic action, through the addition of the words, and their
repetition, in a changing situation. The melodies in a musical are
memorable not just in themselves but for the particular feelings
they arouse; and they are incomplete without the words as in
Rodgers and Hammersteins Oklahoma (1943):
O what a beautiful mornin
O what a beautiful day Ive
got a glorious feelin
Everythings goin my way
The words and the melody are infectious, and cannot be separated from
each other.
In the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, made famous in their
performances by the DOyly Carte Opera Company, W.S. Gilbert
played ingeniously with rhyme schemes and rhythms in the verses
which Sullivan set to music. But for all their tunefulness, these
musical plays lack any deep feeling (perhaps reflecting an English
embarrassment before it). There is fancy, sentiment, energy,
humour (of the good clean fun sort); but the effect is of brightly
painted screens, with nothing behind them. Only in The Yeomen
of the Guard (1888) does the final reprise of I have a song to sing
O generate a resonance of effect like that in the reprise of later
musicals.
The effectiveness of Gilberts words depended on the absolute
clarity with which they were heard, the comic skill with which
they were performed, and the inventiveness of actors, like Martyn
Green (famous for the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado),
who knew how to vary the repetitions within the rhyme schemes
of the lyrics, and the da capo form of the songs as a whole. The
orchestra ornamented and emphasized.
Music 203
but could not be allowed to intervene between the words and the
audience, or the point of such numbers as I am the very model of
a modern Major-General would have been entirely lost.
Verbal wit, and humour, have remained a vitalizing
instrument in the lyrics of many twentieth-century musicals, a
source of pleasure and energy derived fixjm plays without music,
and easy to remember in themselves. For example, Adelaide in
Frank Loessers Guys and Dolls (1950):
Take back your mink Take back
your poils What made you think
That I was one of those goils?
Or Annie in Annie Get Your Gun (1947):
My uncle out in Texas Cant even

write his name He signs his
checks with Xs,
But they cash them just the same.
Hes as happy as can be Doing
what comes naturally.
Cole Porter in Kiss me Kate (1951), his spoof of
Shakespeares Taming of the Shrew, rivalled Byron in the wit of
his rhymes, brilliantly accentuated by their musical
accompaniment, in songs such as
Where is the life that late I led
Where is it now Totally dead
Where is the fun I used to find?
Where is it gone?
Gone with the wind.
A married life may all be well But
raising an heir
204 Making Theatre
Can never compare
To raising a bit of hell.

In dear Milano Where are
you Momo?
Still selling those pictures
Of the scriptures

In the Duomo?
And sweet Lucrezia So
young and gaieii What
scandalous doins In the
ruins Of Pompeii?
Ive often been told Of
nuptial bhss.
But what do you do At
quarter to two With only a
shrew to kiss?
and Brush up your Shakespeare;
Brush up your Shakespeare Start quoting
him now Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
Just declaim a few lines from Othello And
theyll think youre a helluva fellow.
-k
If she says your behaviour is heinous
Kick her right in the Coriolanus.

If your baby is pleading for pleasure Let
her sample your Measure for Measure
Brush up your Shakespeare And they all
kow tow.
Alan Jay Lerners songs in My Fair Lady (1955) preserved a
Music 205
good deal of George Bernard Shaws Irish acerbity in Pygmalion
(1912):
Why cant the English teach their children how to speak This
verbal class distinction by now should be antique . . .
If you use proper Enghsh youre regarded as a freak
Why cant the English learn ... to speak?
Stephen Sondheims lyrics for Leonard Bernsteins West Side Story
(1958) were sharp and inventive, in their rhymes as well as their
rhythms, in a very different manner. Both need to be performed in
such a way that the audience can pick up every syllable:
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupki
Youve gotta understand Its
just our bringing upki That
gets us out of hand Our
mothers all are junkies Our
fathers all are drunks Golly!
Moses!
Naturally were punks!
Officer Krupki, were down on our knees
And none wants a fella With a social
disease
But social dis-ease had also been for a long time an important
element in the musical, providing a counterbalance to the innocent
sweetness of songs Hke Maria and Make of our hands one
hand, in West Side Story. Shakespeare in A Midsummer Nights
Dream knew that his enchanted wood needed rude mechanicals
as well as fairies; the sentiment of the musical has been tempered
by grit and raunchiness, drawing upon the anarchic energy of the
underprivileged and the dispossessed. Brecht and Weill, with help
from the Barrack- Room Ballads of Rudyard Kiphng, achieved
this modern balance in Die Dreigroschenoper or The Threepenny
Opera (1928).
206 Making Theatre
In this opera for, and about poor people, Brecht and Weill drew their
lyricism from the dark underbelly of society. Their words, and
their music expressed a zest for living, an energy which they
found in those who were repressed or ignored by the existing
social order, and were happy to make beefsteak tartare out of
their opponents. Brecht and Weill achieved an economy not
characteristic of many later musicals, but they created a style
which in the relation between words and music has remained
central. In the other great folk-opera of the period, George and
Ira Gershwins Porgy and Bess (1935), the blacks on Catfish Row
in Charleston, South Carolina became the voices of a new
direction in American society as well as American music. The
crippled Porgy expresses it in his final song when he sets out in
pursuit of Bess, tempted away to New York by Sportin Life, with
the words, Tm on my way.
In very different ways, the central figures in the Amercan
musical remain the dispossessed who become in musical terms the
self-possessed, and provide it with the energy which comes from
liberation: the cowboys in Oklahoma, the sailors in South Pacific,
the crap-shooters in Guys and Dolls, the Jets and Sharks in West
Side Story. The heroes and heroines, as well as the chorus, are
also to be found among those excluded, or isolated from society:
Billie and Julie in Carousel, Porgy and Bess, Sarah in Guys and
Dolls, Anna in TTie King and I, Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady,
Maria and Tony in West Side Story.
The popularity of the American musicals which followed after
the Theater Guilds success with Oklahoma was created out of a
lack of complication, a directness of feeling, even a kind of
innocence, which never let high spirits get depressed too far, or for
too long; and sent audiences away feeling like a million dollars.
This transformation of feeling is something more than
entertainment.
The enormous success of Richard Eyres production of Guys
and Dolls at the National Theatre in 1982 and again in 1996,both
repetitions ofits original triumph in 1953,point to
Music 207
the truth in Kenneth Tynans description of it as the second best
American play (after Death of a Salesman]). George Kaufman,
the original director, wrongly insisted on calling it a play with
musical numbers, and retired to the lobby for a cigarette when the
singing began.
Guys and Dolls has two good stories, which intersect, and are
finally brought together, one comic and the other romantic. Frank
Loesser, who wrote the music and the lyrics, possessed a talent
for romance, and a wit which captured the originality of Damon
Runyons style, on which the work is based. Like P.G.
Wodehouse, Damon Runyon created characters, and a language
for them, which was sui generis, and original as his own life in
which he was a kind of Boswell to A1 Capone, and other
mobsters, who hked to have him around.
Adelaide, the well-known fiancee has been engaged to the
crap-shooter, Nathan Detroit for fourteen years; meanwhile she
sings in the Hot-Box, and waits for her wedding day, while
writing letters to her Mama about her husband and five children
(with a sixth on the way). Adelaide, ever hopeful and eventually
(of course) victorious embodies the feminine spirit of another age.
In the romance plot, Nathan Detroit bets the gambler Sky
Masterson a thousand bucks that he cant persuade the Salvation
Army Girl, Sarah Brown, to fly with him to Havana for the day.
Sky wins, and falls in love, which leads in the finale to his own
marriage to Sarah, and Adelaides to Nathan. On the way, Loesser
writes a score of songs which combine innocence and
knowingness, wit and pathos, and raw energy as in the mobsters
chorus:
Sit down, sit down, sit down!
Sit down, yourre rocking the boat!
The moral of the tale that whatever a guy is doing, hes doing it for
some doU derives its zest from seeing the battles of the sexes as
comic in the case of Adelaide and Nathan Detroit, and romantic
in the case of Sally and Sky. The intersection of the
208 Making Theatre
two inspired Loesser to write music of constandy shifting rhythms,
incorporating the marches of the Salvation Army (Follow the
Fold ), the Crap Game (Luck, be a lady tonight) and romantic
yearning of Ive never been in love before.
The variation in rhythm and tone of plot and music were
matched in Richard Eyres production by John Gunters set.
Under the neon signs of the New York sky line for Wrig- leys.
Camel and Coca Cola the brilliantly lit signs by night transformed
the seediness of the city by day, and created a changing
environment which suggested not just the New York of Damon
Runyon, but the composite and swiftly changing city of the late
twentieth century in which we live. The literal and metaphoric
languages of the theatre were fused.
Stephen Sondheim, in a style which reflects a more
sophisticated New York, has continued to write musicals where
lyrics, music and dramatic action nourish each other. A lyrical
form needs its lyrics, and it needs them to have punch, as the
oyster needs grit to secrete its pearl. The non-linear plot of
Company (1970) brings together a group of New Yorkers, all of
whose lives are in disarray. As Bobby, the unmarried 35- year-old
for whose birthday party the company has assembled, puts it:
afraid of commitment, afraid of being alone, afraid of life. In this
post-modern world, Sondheims musical is more self-absorbed
than its predecessors, and has lost some of the exuberance which
draws upon the resources of deep social feeling, of which wit, as
the child of repression, is the natural outcome. As in the famous,
Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music (1973)
Sondheims musicals reflect our sad lives where his
predecessors were set alight by an anarchic and positive force.
The musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber are an altogether
different case. The structure of the American musical with its
strong story-line, its distinctive characters, its constantly changing
melodic inventiveness, and its catchy words has been dissolved
into a more operatic form where the music lacks
Music 209
grit at one extreme and sublimity at the other, inhabiting a middle land
of over-orchestrated emotion, squeezed out of words of little
intrinsic interest. This might not matter, as in many operas, if the
music itself was not so meretricious.
Lloyd Webbers musicals succeed by making no demands on
the audience, except to experience, and to say we have been.
In spite of their immense success, they diminish what musical
theatre is capable of. The auditorium of the New London Theatre
was rebuilt for Cats. Scenery disappeared and environment
and machines took its place. {British Theatre Design, p. 157).
The words of T.S. Eliots finest poem on The Naming of Cats
are lost in the companys singing, and only occasionally do the
words of any of the poems make any impact. Bustopher Jones
who wears white spats, and McCavity, the Napoleon of Crime
have no more character than turns in a pantomime, while the
dance-routines of the Jellicle Cats are repetitious. The role of the
audience is only to watch and exclaim.
Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonbergs Les Miser-
ables is slightly more interesting. While it aspires to a political
concern for the future, its message is emasculated by the
complexity of plot, its inaudible words and its pre-occupation
with technical sophistication. As its designer John Napier has
written: My starting-point was the centre of the plays biggest
moment, the barricade. Once that was solved everything else fell
into place. The barricade could split, lift and revolve, and was a
mass of objets trouves which the actors picked up firom time to
time and used {British Theatre Design, p. 151). It remains the
productions most memorable feature. As Noel Coward once
remarked of over-elaborate theatre, I came out humming the
sets.
In the British musical theatre of the last decade, technical
virtuosity attempts to conceal the vacuousness of the show;
earnestness has taken the place of wit, emotion of feeling,
lugubriousness of joyfulness. AU the languages of theatre have
been diminished by making them serve the sensational effect. As
the saying goes, we have had the experience, but missed
210 Making Theatre
the meaning, which is not surprising because there was very little. In
the theatre technique is never all.
The central difference in the relation between words and music in opera
as compared to the musical is indicated by the role of the
conductor. The names of the conductors of musicals are scarcely
mentioned, and remain unknown outside the profession.
Performances of opera are often remembered by the name of the
conductor: Klemperers Fidelia, Bohms Tristan, Giulinis
Falstaff, Haitinks Ring. In aU performances of opera, the
orchestra is an actor, as important as any of the singers. The
orchestra acts under the direction of the conductor, whose sense of
the architecture of the opera, and its rhythmic flow, whose power
to bring out the local subtleties of the orchestration and relate
them to the drama controls the stage performance. But the singers
have also to act with their voices, which a few great singers can
inflect with the tones and atmosphere of the action (a gift which
Angela Georghiu shares with Maria Callas) as well as their
physical presence on the stage. Not all singers can suggest the
physical embodiment of their roles; and, when this is so, the
performance remains flat, no more than a speaking picture, as in
non-musical theatre. But the operatic stage in the last fifty years in
many countries of the world has been rich in talents where beauty
of voice was combined with the power to become the part. Birgit
Nilsson, Hans Hotter, Tito Gobbi, Boris Christoff, Anya Silja,
Geraint Evans, Placido Domingo, John Tomlinson and Bryn
Terfel are among those who like Callas and Georghiu at once
come to mind.
The words of the libretto tell a story which music develops
into a dramatic action expressing feelings and emotions which the
words alone cannot express. The words on which the composer
sets to work, whether their own (usually disastrous) or other
peoples (often lacking dramatic plausibility or even good sense)
act as sounding-boards to liberate and explore, as theatre always
should, what is often half-hidden or
Music 211
unsounded. In many nineteenth-century operas, the music becomes the
means of expressing real feeling, for which neither the plot nor
the words would be adequate on their own, as they are often
melodramatic and lacking in resonance. The conductors role in
finding a balance between everything which happens on the
stage, and in the orchestra pit neech above all to be well-judged.
Robert Schumann once wrote about the setting of poems to
music: The poem must be crushed and have its juices expressed
like an orange; it must wear the music like a wreath, or yield to it
like a bride. In opera it is the last which most often happens: the
words yield to a union with the music which expresses what
neither could express alone, and which can encompass changes of
mood and feeling as swiftly as the wind changes the surface of
the sea.
In the first great opera in EngHsh, Purcells Dido and Aeneas
(1689) (with words by Nahum Tate who also rewrote King Lear
with a happy ending!), the sailor at the start of Act III, exhorts his
mates to board their ships, and set sail from Carthage:
Come away, fellow sailors, come away.
Your anchors be weighing.
Time and tide will admit no delaying.
Take a boozy short leave Of your
nymphs on the shore.
And silence their mourning
With vows of returning
But never intending to visit them more.
Once the sails are unfurled, the witch can rejoice:
Our plot has took
The Queens forsook
Ho, ho! Ho, ho! ho, ho (etc.)
But within a few minutes, the action has moved to Didos suicide, and
her lament to her companion, Behnda:
212 Making Theatre
Remember me! Remember me! but ah, forget my fate!
Here, the words inspire one of Purcells most haunting and plangent
melodies, which raises the action from a Gilbertian ffivoUty (in
which deep feehngs have no place) to a tragic elegy for loss, and
betrayal, worthy of Book IV of Vergils Aeneid on which it is
based.
Music can encompass, and frequently does, these swift
changes of mood from the playful to the solemn, from one level
of being to another, from one kind of drama to another, through
changes of rhythm and key signature. In later opera, feelings of
different and conflicting kinds are expressed simultaneously in
duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, etc., while the chorus as a
whole can comment, as in Greek drama, on the action which they
are witnessing, whatever its mood. They identify for the audience
a generahzed response, while the principal singers continue to
express and relate their own individual feelings. While opera is
often criticized for its artificiality, it remains the only form of
dramatic art in which the simultaneous expression of wholly
different states of mind and feeling (by a group of people in a
room) can be represented. The solitariness of the individual finds
liberation in song, but song which remains at variance with the
songs of others. In real life we can never be sure what other
people are thinking or feeling; sorrow, rage, hope despondency
exist in the same room together. In opera, music expresses that
dramatic undercurrent, making audible what often remains a silent
rhythm beneath the surface of plays.
As in all kinds of theatre, playfulness - in this case the skills of
orchestra and singers in performing together remains central
to the delight they give. Purcells Frost Scene in King Arthur
expresses musically what it is like to shiver and shake:
I can scarcely move or draw my breath
Can scarcely move or draw my breath.
Let me, let me, let me
Freeze again to death.
Music 213
Soloist and a Chorus of cold people suffer fk)m a spell cast by a wicked
enchanter, which only love can thaw. The inventiveness and
effectiveness of the scene depends on the skills of the director,
designers of scene, costume and lighting (cold turns us blue!) as
well as the performance by orchestra and singers; and the singers
ability to act with their voices as well as their bodies. Although the
scene has a symbolic significance, its aesthetic pleasure derives as
much from its play with all the languages of theatre.
In comic opera, music as well as words can become an
instrument of humour, inseparable from the exuberant sense of fun
on the stage. In Rossinis Italian Girl in Algiers (1813), the first
act ends with a septet for the principal characters, who, by this
time, are all suffering from the confusion of their situation,
making them hear ringing, hammering, cawing and booming in
their heads. After telling us how they are afflicted, they give up
words for the onomatopoiea of what they are hearing, which the
orchestra through its varied instruments joyfully reflects:
ALL; Ding, ding, ding, etc.
Caw, caw, caw, etc.
Boom, boom, boom, etc.
Bang, bang, bang, etc.
And so they continue to the end of the act, discussing their situation in
utter perplexity, with musical exactness. Only in opera can such
play be made with the confusion of human lives.
Once the orchestra becomes an actor in the drama, the balance
between words and music assumes a subtlety and complexity
wholly different to works in which the orchestra accompanies the
singers, however inventively. Richard Strauss in Capricdo (1942),
described by him as a conversation piece for music, creates an
opera in which the relative significance of words and music are
debated. First the words, and later the music; or first the music,
and later the words? At the end the
214 Making Theatre
Countess is asked to choose between the poet and the composer. Is it
the words, she asks herself, or the music which has the more
powerful effect on her feelings? They are bound together, she
replies, in a new harmony, the mystery of the moment, in which
one art is reborn of the other.
The operas of Mozart, like the plays of Shakespeare, contain
words which are beautiful to sing and to listen to, because they
are about human feelings which are immediately understood. Like
all the greatest art it is apparently very simple. When in Die
Zaubeiftdte (1791), Tamino, looking at the portrait of Pamina, the
daughter of the Queen of the Night, sings:
Dies bildnis ist bezaubernd schon Wie

noch kein Auge je gesehn!
Ich fiihl es, ich fiihl es
Wie dieses Gotterbilt
Mein Herz mit neuer Regung fiiUt. . .
This picture is bewitchingly beautiful No
eye has ever seen anything to equal it.
I feel it, I feel it!
This heavenly face
Fills my heart with new feeling
we know at once the magic of falling in love with an image, which he
is experiencing. Equally when Pamina, drawn to her lover by the
sound of his flute-playing, is ignored by him because he is bound
to an oath of silence, of which she is ignorant, we understand at
once the pain of her rejection:
Ach, ich fiihls, es ist gcschwunden Ewig
hin der Liebe Gluck!
Nimmer kommt ihr, Wonnestunden,
Meinem Herzen, mehr zuriick!
Ah, I feel it has vanished now For Ever !
The joy of love.
Music 215
Never again will joyful hours return
Bringing gladness to my heart.
The Queen of the Nights desire for revenge when she feels
her power is being challenged, the longing of Papageno for a
wife, the mean vidictiveness of Monostatos because he is ugly
and a slave, the determination of Sarastro to preserve a sacred
place from violation - all these feeUngs are ones which we can at
once recognize and respond to. As in all good lyric poetry, the
feeling behind the words, even if complex, is clear. Mozarts
melodies reflect and magnify this complexity which is at the same
time very simple. But the words must be audible and understood.
In the part of the action concerned with Papageno, where the
humour delights, Mozarts music has a profound seriousness. It is
not possible for music alone to be moral or immoral; but in
Mozarts operas, in conjunction with words, it becomes so.
Papageno is punished first for his lies, and later for his cowardice;
Tamino however much he loves must prove his love through a
rite of passage in which he overcomes his fear of death; and
Pamina, helped by the playing of the flute to endure, must also be
purified of human fear. At another level, the Queen of the Nights
murderous desire for revenge (Der holle Rache kocht in meinem
Herzen) must be overcome by the wisdom of Sarastro. While
verbally he may seem a figure of repressive authority, hke
Prospero in The Tempest, musically Sarastros solemnity comes
from harmony beyond the self. As it is impossible to listen to the
Queen of the Nights music, without recognizing the self-
destructive nature of rage, so Sarastros music, and those of his
initiates, is felt as an unshake- able self-assurance and faith. The
music generalizes what the Temple of Isis and Osiris stands for;
but the words give it a local habitation and a name. As the
Countess says in Capriccio, one art is born of the other.
Depth [as Isaiah Berlin once observed] is an odd word. Its a

metaphor, but you cant translate it into other terms.
216 Making Theatre
Depth means penetrating into something very basic in oneself,
and touching it, and feeling an electric shock.
Act II of Mozarts Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) stands out for its
complexity of feeling - its depth in Isaiah Berlins sense - within a
dramatic action as complete and perfect as it is possible to imagine
one to be. At the end, MarceUino, Basilio and Bartolo come to
demand the fulfilment of the contract by which Figaro will marry
Marcellina for failing to repay the money he owes her. Susanna
and the Countess express their hope of having avoided disaster by
enabling Cherubino to escape through the window without the
Count discovering him in his wifes bedroom; the Count still
deeply suspicious tries to reimpose his authority by demanding
silence, and Figaro blames the devil for bringing everyone
together at the same moment. Only in opera can this simultaneous
action be performed, with the music driving towards its harmonic
resolution, and binding together with absolute precision the
dramatic differentiation of the characters individual feelings. The
effect combines expectation of what is going to happen in the next
act (in other words an effective curtain) with an aesthetic joy at the
completion of an act which has developed faultlessly with
dramatic surprises and reversals, from the Countesss heart-broken
lament for the loss of the Counts love, to Cherubinos light and
unstressed expression of desire (the contrast between the power of
Love, and the prickings of Cupid) to the Counts sexual rage and
hurt pride in suspecting his wife unfaithful, and the humour of the
appearance of Antonio, the gardener, complaining of the flowers
which have been trampled on, when Cherubino has jumped from
the window. Cupboards, windows, doors, keys, disguises, love-
letters, tools for forcing locks, a drawn sword and a bunch of
crushed flowers aU play an essential part in the drama. Da Pontes
libretto, based on Beaumarchaiss play, provides an action which
is tender, witty and acerbic. Mozarts music creates the shifting
colours and flow of human feelings beneath the surface of spoken
words. In all dramatic writing
Music 217
the goal towards which the action is moving must never be lost sight of
(though not apparent to the audience till the end). In this act, this
development is flawlessly matched to a musical action which
begins slowly, elegiacally, in the highest style in the Countesss
aria Porgi Amor and ends with a septet of turbulent and
uproarious confusion. The action on the stage needs a comic and
dramatic timing as precise as the tempi of the music from the
orchestra; and actors capable of styles which range from the coldy
aristocratic to the grumpily rustic.
Throughout he Nozze di Figaro, Mozart wrote music which
embellishes the words, by widening and deepening the feehng. In
the Countesss second aria, Dove sono i bei momenti, Mozart
expresses both a sense that the only true paradises are the
paradises which are lost, and a more personal regret for what the
Counts lust has destroyed. Such feelings are musical, because by
their very nature they are non-verbal, though we are always
looking for ways of identifying their nature. In the first few bars
of Act IV when Barberina is hunting in the darkened garden for
the pin she has lost, Mozart writes music without words,
expressing loss, anxiety close to despair, which have been born of
deceit, unkindness, betrayal: a few brief bars as beautiful and
haunting as anything he ever wrote.
The moral faihngs of all the characters will be fuUy revealed
by the end of the Act, and call for atonement. The Count will
kneel to ask pardon of the wife he has wronged. In that moment
of confrontation, the words are necessary, they have to be spoken
(Contessa, perdono, perdono, perdono) before the festivities can
begin. The musical transition is inevitably from minor to major;
and only in music can mood and feeling be changed with such
speed. The moral force of the need to forget and forgive if
contentment is to be achieved is matched by the psychological
force of an instantaneous musical change which is irresistible. No
one can fail to respond to a sad tune, or resist a cheerful one. But
no one also leaves at the end of Le Nozze di Figaro doubting what
the cost of contentment must be.
218 Making Theatre
Don Giovanni, or 11 dissoluto punito (1787) penetrates even
more deeply from its first D minor chord into what is basic in
oneself, because it is concerned with damnation, a concept or
feeling which may be theologically unfashionable but remains in
spiritual terms wholly comprehensible. When Macbeth speaks of
Duncans murder as the deep damnation of his taking off, we
know at once what he is feeling. Deborah Warners production at
Glyndebourne of Don Giovanni, in 1995, much criticized by some
for its modern costume, brought out what is undoubtedly true that
Don Giovanni tells a tale of rape, murder, lust, deceit, and self-
gratification of the kind which makes newspaper headlines every
day. What Mozart adds through his music, when the Com-
mendatore comes to life in the graveyard, and as stone guest
accepts the invitation to dinner carries with it the cold from
thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice. The music expresses the
spectral haunted nature of the guilty soul confronted with its
crimes, and Mozart does so in music which chills the marrow,
leading to the judgement which all must make of what they have
witnessed: this is the end of the man who does evil.
The moral force of music in Mozarts operas is reduced in
many later operas to an intense personal feeling. To adapt
Schumanns words, the poem, or the libretto must be crushed, and
have its juices expressed like an orange. Quite literally, till the
pips squeak. La Boheme (1896), a superlatively effective and
moving piece of theatre, is about the discovery of love, and its
loss, first through jealousy, and finally through death. The musics
power to move comes in the first act from Rodol- phos and
Mimis voices finally joined in unison (an effect of total
identification, difficult to achieve through words alone because
people cannot speak simultaneously; and then at the end of La
Boheme where the music (and death) strikes suddenly out the
darkness in a single chord, to which Rodolphos numbed reaction
can only be; It cant happen like this. But it does, and it has.
Music acts here not as a revelation (what cannot be said in words)
but as an intensification of a human
Music 219
situation, making us realize its pain, its fragility and briefness; it
orchestrates what we are watching.
The score of the second act of Tosca (1900) orchestrates a
human situation of a very different kind, expressing the mounting
lust of Baron Scarpia for the woman he is determined to make
love to, and her controlled rage as she hears the cries of her lover
whom Scarpia is torturing (a scene played with unforgettable
precision by Maria CaUas and Tito Gobbi, and preserved on film).
The act reaches its climax in Scarpias cries for help as she stabs
him: Aiuto! Aiuto!, and her remorseless, Muori, muori, muori!
(Die, die, die!). The music expresses with great dramatic
intensity the different emotions which they are simultaneously
feeling.
Impassioned human feeling - often in circumstances which are
doomed inspires much of the music in the operas of Verdi and
Puccini, as well as the opera seria of Donizetti, Bizet, Janacek and
others. But at the end of Verdis final opera, Falstaff (1893), the
humanist balloon goes up. Mocked, and haunted by what he takes
to be elves and fairies in Windsor Forest at night, Falstaff is paid
back by his neighbours for his attempts to cuckold them. But
unlike his previous opera, Otello (1887), where alleged adultery
leads to murder, Falstaff ends with festive mockery; Tutto nel
mondo e burla: AH the worlds a joke. . . . All are cheated.
Everyone laughs at everyone else; but the best laugh is the last
laugh. This choric, and comic, rejection of taking the world too
seriously points in a direction, which Verdi had not pursued, of a
wholly different relation between words and music, and another
kind of music-drama. In humanist opera, the music enlarges upon
and intensifies ordinary human emotions jealousy, love, hate,
lust and so on; but in another kind of music-drama, the music
transcends the words, suggests another level of reality, into which
we are drawn; and of which music is the only possible expression.
Music which is always intensely physical, producing through its
rhythms an inner vibration (which in turn expresses itself in dance
and song) becomes the instrument of a vision which is
transcendental and metaphysical. When
220 Making Theatre
Walter Pater remarked, all art aspires to the condition of music, he
indicated what some operas, in which the words are only
signposts, achieve through the languages of theatre. A difference
exists between pure music - let us say the arietta of Beethovens
Opus 111 - which when we listen to it leaves no doubt of an
experience, unnameable, beyond normal human perception, and
Beethovens opera, Fidelio (1805), which identifies words with
musical expression, while the music soars into orbit, beyond all
language.
Here, the literal and metaphorical effectiveness of the staging
matters a great deal. In Act I, we are in the gaoler Roccos house,
and in the courtyard of the prison where he allows the prisoners to
enjoy fresh air and sunlight, until they are driven back inside on
the orders of the evil Governor, Pizarro. Sunlight and darkness
mirror good and evil. In Act II, we are in the dungeon, where a
single prisoner, Florestan, is kept in isolation and is being starved
to death, because he has spoken up about Pizarros crimes against
humanity.His wife, Leonora, has disguised herself in order to gain
access to the prison and to try to discover where Florestan is being
kept by Pizarro. As she and Rocco descend into the darkness of
the dungeon, the music gives way to spoken dialogue. Leonora
does not know if the man in solitary confinement is Florestan, and
neither knows whether the man whose grave they have been
ordered to dig is dead or sleeps. When he stirs, he asks first for a
message to be sent to his wife in Seville, and then for something to
drink. Leonora gives him the last drop of Roccos wine: Da ist er!
Da ist er! And a crust of bread. Then the music begins: Euch
werde Lohn in bessern Welten! Der Himmel hat euch mir
geschickt. (May you be rewarded in a better world. Heaven has
sent you to me!). The serenity of the music is to be short-lived,
for Pizarro is about to appear to kill his prisoner, until once again
Leonora intervenes, holding him at bay at first with her body and
then with a pistol, until a trumpet sounds announcing that the
Minister has arrived to find out who is being held in Pizarros
prison. A brief verbal exchange takes place between Florestan and
Leonora:
Music 221
FLORESTAN: O meine Leonora, was hast du fiir mich getan?
LEONORA: Nichts, nichts, mein Florestan! FLORESTAN: My Leonora,
what have you done for me? LEONORA: Nothing, nothing, my
Florestan!
And then at once like the sun bursting out in this dark place, they sing
together: O namenlose Freude! . . . Nach unnen- nbaren Leiden
so iibergrosse Lust! (O nameless joy . . . after such unspeakable
suffering, such surpassing Joy!) Here, Beethovens music
expresses a joy which is nameless, beyond language in its
harmony and confidence, because light has triumphed over
darkness, justice over tyranny, love over cruelty, bearing witness
to Leonoras assertion (also spoken) before she challenges
Pizarro, that a Providence governs all things (Ja,ja, es gibt eine
Forsehung).
The magnitude of the effect comes from its following upon the
unsung melodrama, as though music breaks the bondage of
words at the moment when Leonora also secures Florestans
release from the bondage of his chains. Both here, and in the
equally jubilant duet and chorus in the final act, the power of
music confirms a faith in a world where all is possible when
loyalty, courage and hope remain unshaken. The concentration of
the music charges the whole scene with an electric tension which
returns to the audience magnified and life-affirming, made more
plausible than in the Ninth Symphony because of the rescue
which we have seen achieved with desperation and daring. The
words locate in the particular what the music transforms into an
expression of human hope at the instability of evil, when
confronted with courage. The music alone (for the characters as
such lack any great weight or subtlety) makes it impossible to
leave the theatre without that feeling of having been renewed.
In Wagners Tristan und Isolde (1865) the relation between
words and music becomes even more extreme. In Act II, language
is strained to the point at which it disappears into nonmeaning.
Night and death are invoked by the two lovers who
222 Making Theatre
see daylight as hostile and deceitful. Night, it is claimed, can set them
free from the world, which is delusion, and Hberate them into
ecstasy.
TRISTAN and ISOLDE {together):
O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe.
Gib Vergessen, dass ich lebe;
Nimm mich auf in deinem Schoss
Lose von der Welt mich los!
O sink down upon us. Night of Love
Make me forget that I live Take me
into your keeping Free me from the
world.
The world as maya or illusion has become entangled with a
mystical rapture in which the lovers, as in John Donnes poem
The Ecstasy are temporarily removed from their bodies. Death
is invoked as loving, because in death Tristan will become Isolde
and Isolde Tristan. Sexual ecstasy is interwoven with desire for
release from a world in which daylight perception deludes, and
where night-time expression remains ineffable. In John Donnes
poem, The Ecstasy, the lovers know they must return to their
bodies (souls and bodies are intertwined); in Tristan und Isolde all
such realism is extinguished. When, in Act III, Isolde reaches
Careol where Tristan is dying, he rises from his bed, causing the
wound she has come to heal to burst open, and greets her in death
with the blood flowing from him. Isolde in her liebestod (love-
death) which ends the opera expresses this ecstasy as a union in
death beyond the limits of the world;
Mild und leise wie er lachelt wie das

Auge hold er offnet,
Seht ihrs, Freunde? Seht ihrs nicht?
Immer lichter, wie er leuchtet, stern-
umstrahlet hoch she hebt?
Music 223
In dem wogendem Schwall, in dem tonenden Schall, in
des Welt-Atems wehendem AH, ertrinken, versinken
unbewuss, hochste Lust!
How gently and quietly he smiles How fondly he
opens his eyes!
Do you see, friends? Dont you see?
How he shines, always more brightly Rises ever
higher, surrounded by stars. . .
... In the surging swell, in the ringing sound In the vast
wave of the worlds breath To drown, to sink
Unconscious, highest bliss!
As in much of Act II, the exorbitance of expression, drawn fix)m a
mish-mash of Oriental philosophy and Christian mysticism, might
lead to the conclusion that Wagner wrote less meaningful lyrics
than Cole Porter. (One of Strindbergs crazier projects in his
Intimate Theatre was to perform Tristan und Isolde without the
music.) The melody, and harmonies of the liebestod can be heard
in the head; but no one in their right mind would go down the
street singing the words. The words cannot say what the music is
about; and in their attempts, as T.S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets,
they slip, shde, crack, perish. In their perishing they give birth to
music which has no verbal equivalent. The music expresses what
words cannot say. At the close of Tristan, it hovers at that point
where sound itself becomes transcendence, the physical
disappears into what can no longer be heard, and the silence
which follows the final note is the silence of something
reluctantly rehn- quished, as the physics of music becomes the
metaphysics of silence.
If the music is felt here as a liberating counter-balance to the
destructive effect of human actions, there are some operas where
the music works in the opposite direction to confirm and
generalize a world from which human beings can find no
224 Making Theatre
release or freedom, where their actions confirm their imprisonment
within a set of conditions, social, economic, sexual and genetic
which cannot be changed. The orchestra as actor assumes a much
darker role; the inner drive of the music expresses what is
irresistible and inevitable, a fatality that cannot be denied. In
different ways this is true of Debussys Pelleas et Melisande
(1892); and Alban Bergs Wozzeck (1925). Both operas have had
memorable productions which by creating a visual poetry on an
uncluttered stage where every object tells, succeeded in relating
the complexity of what the music was expressing to a stage action
which was simple and unobtrusive. Wozzeck (1952) at the Royal
Opera House was designed by Caspar Neher, who worked with
Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, and found a visual
language which brought out individual chac- terization, and the
symbolic significance of the plot in images of striking beauty.
Peter Stein produced Pelleas et Melisande (1992), with sets by
Karl-Ernest Hermann and costumes by Moidele Bickel, for the
Welsh National Opera, using various areas of the stage vertically
and horizontally, to create a stage action reflecting a plot where
the characters go down into the dark in caves and cellars, but also
climb in search of hght to terraces and towers. The performances
were conducted by Pierre Boulez.
The opera is about the jealousy of Golaud, when he discovers
the love between his wife Melisande and his halfbrother, Pelleas.
Golaud has found the mysterious Melisande beside a spring in a
forest, into which she has dropped her crown. Melisande refuses
to teU Golaud why she is there, or where she has come from.
Golaud takes her away, marries her, and returns with her to the
court of his grandfather, Arkel. There, Pelleas falls in love with
her, arousing Golauds jealous rage. Golaud kills Pelleas, and
fatally wounds Melisande before turning his sword on himself. As
Arkel says at one moment in despair at what is unfolding before
him, Si jetais Dieu, Jaurais pitie sur les coeurs des hommes(If
I was God, I would have pity on the hearts of men). In the
Music 225
music, as in the words at this moment, there exists an infinite sadness.
The depth of the opera comes from questions which cannot be
answered. The mystery and mysteriousness in Maeterlincks
original play which Debussy follows closely has been transformed
into a work about the fatality of human lives. These characters
lack a sure sense of their own identity, are lost in forests by day
and surrounded by darkness at night. They cannot answer the
questions which others ask of them, or of life. The truth about
ourselves and others is unknowable. In the world of matter there
is no light. The demand to know, like the belief that through
action events can be controlled, adds to the sum of human
unhappiness. When Golaud demands to know if MeUsandes love
for Pelleas has been guilty, she cannot tell him. As Golaud has
proved, the more you act, the greater the harm you do. At best, as
the ageing Arkel reflects, one can acquire a sort of faith in the
fidelity of events.
The action of the whole work is expressed in music which
remains enigmatic and unconcluded, drawn on by its own
constantly shifting moods and colours, suggestive of all that
human beings cannot control, and expressive of the fatality within
which they live. The child (whose child?) which Melisande has
given birth to on her death-bed must five now. Its her turn: her
turn to try to find answers to the questions (whatever they are) in
a world which does not provide answers. The marriage between
the music and the words in this great work comes from the
inscrutabUity of music itself. Even when we attach words to it,
music remains unreadable. It has no programme, and speaks only
of itself, as life does too, unless we impose a programme upon it.
Bergs Wozzeck like Debussys Pelleas is closely based on an
existing play. In this case, written by Georg Buchner in 1836.
Like Pelleas too, it is written in a series of short scenes, whose
connection expresses a view of how things are. Buchner writes
about the life of poor people, of the impossibility of virtue without
money, and of the terror of trying to work for
226 Making Theatre
thirty years, with only the prospect of poverty, abuse and violence.
From the start, Wozzeck is haunted by fantasies, hallucinations,
voices and premonitions of disaster. The music is an expression of
this inner score; but it also enlarges upon the individual fate of
Wozzeck who is driven to murder when his woman, by whom he
has a child, is seduced by the Drum- Major. To Wozzeck, man is
an abyss. One grows dizzy looking into his depths. As others
notice, he tears through the world like an open razor. But it is
Marie who suggests to him how he must solve his problems.
Rather a knife in me than a hand on me. It is with a knife that
Wozzeck will stab Marie to death, and drown himself in the pool
where he has thrown the knife.
The music of the score frequently sounds askew, using
rhythms and dances from more traditional forms of opera and
folk-dance, but twisting them to reflect the way in which the
increasingly tormented and psychotic Wozzeck hears them. The
world outside torments him the Doctor uses him as a guinea-
pig, persuading him he must live entirely on beans making his
inner world increasingly impossible to live, or endure. The music
expresses aU this but also the tenderness of which Wozzeck and
Marie are capable. At the start of Act III, Marie reads from the
Bible to her child, telling him the story of Mary Magdalene. Only
Dostoevsky equalls Berg in his awareness of the need for pity in a
world where so much savagery and cruelty exists. At the operas
end he expresses the cruelty and the tenderness in the figure of the
abandoned child, whose parents are dead, left alone on the stage to
sing the fragment of a song; Hop, Hop! Hop, Hop! Like all great
moments of theatre, it only expresses its vision glancingly. Its
effectiveness depends as always on colour and lighting which
create a focus of intensity for the boy, and his words.
As in all drama, performance counts for everything in that
only when the audience is present can that unitive action between
performer and listener occur. The diversity of that experience, in
revivals and new works, in theatres, halls, streets, pubs, open
spaces, in reviews, plays, musicals, operas is con-
Music 227
stantly creating moments of shared experience and intuited community.
The theatre is not a pulpit, and it makes no claims for what
happens after the lights go out. Its ghosts remain palpable
presences, of living people in actual relationships; it always
exemplifies through the concrete. Conflict is of its essence,
making us more aware of that dark mass of factors whose
general drift: we perceive but whose precise interrelations we
cannot formulate.
Actors, directors, designers of costume and lighting and music
are engaged in a shared act of illustrating the shadows, of drawing
into the area of light, which is the stage, what was less clearly
seen before. Their talents in the last fifty years have been
prodigious. But in theatre, there always exists an element of luck,
of right timing, of conjuring out of what exists offstage from that
whole entangled mass of different perspectives, of conflicting
wills, and roles, an image which clarifies: an action abstracted
from experience.
Hans Sachs in his Monologue in Die Meistersinger (1868)
reflects on the madness which underlies so much human activity,
on the way in which people torment each other in useless foolish
anger. No one has a reward or thanks for it, or knows quite how it
started, or what brings it to rest. But nothing ever happens without
such madness. As in life, so on the stage: a kind of wrestling
occurs, to bring roles out of words, people out of what exists on
paper: rooms, streets, landscapes out of descriptions, gestures out
of silence, movements out of stillness, till a pattern is formed. No
one knows at a rehearsal by what alchemy something organic will
be created from diverse talents; whether the performance will fall
on deaf ears or, as with Chekhovs The Seagull, when it was
performed by the Moscow Art Theatre, be greeted first with
silence, and then with a roar of applause as spontaneous as it was
unexpected. The theatre in making us applaud Uke this involves a
mutual act of recognition; and in this spontaneous, intuitive act
learn not only to love the theatre and its players but also, perhaps,
a little more the shadow-play in which we are involved for the
two or three hours traffic of our stage.
Index
Achurch, Janet, 29,30 Play, 9-10,157; Waiting for
Admirals Men, 5 Godo/, 24,53,83-4,104, 111-
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 13
3; Beethoven, Ludwig van, Fidelio,
Oresteia, 59 Almeida 220-1; Fifth Symphony, 22,
Theatre, 137 Andrews, Harry, 197,198; Ninth Symphony,
141 Annals, Michael, 147 221;Opus, 111,220 Bennett,
Anouilh, Jean, ^ntiône, 14; Alan, 148 Benson, Frank, 66
LInvitation au CMteau, Berg, Alban, Wozzeck, 224,
139 225-6
Appia, Adolph, 158,159,162 Berger, John, Pig Earth, 130
Aristode, 11 Arnold, Janet, Berkoff, Steven, 25,33 Berlin,
105 Ashcroft, Peggy, 16- Irving, Annie Get Your Gun,
17,32,34, 37- 203
8,69,76,90,110,145, Berlin, Isaiah, 215-16 Berliner
171,172,183,195 Ensemble, 21,224 Bernstein,
Auden, W.H., 168; and Leonard, West Side Story,
Christopher Isherwood, 165,206 Bickel, Moidele, 224
The Ascent of F. 6, \7S Billington, Michael, 124
Ayckbourn, Alan, 81,86-8; Binoche, Juliette, 39 Birtwistie,
Absurd Person Singular, 88; Harrison, 149,198 Bizet,
Man of the Moment, 868; A Georges, 219 Blackford,
Small Family Business, 88, ^chard, Gawain and the Green
156 Knight, 149 Blake, William,
Badel, Alan, 75,189 Barrault,Jean- Karl,Bloom,
108
210
Claire, 29 Bohm,
Boublil, Alain, and
Louis, 101 Barrie,J. M., Peter Claude- Michel Schonberg, Les
Pan, 149 Barton, Lucy, 105 Miserables, 5,209 Boulez,
Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Pierre, 224 Brecht, Bertolt,
Caron de, 216
Beckett, Samuel, 11,103,143, 15,21,47,50, 92-5,131,135,224;
The
146,156,172; Act without
Words II, 19,152; Happy
Days, 35,172; Not I, 103;
230 Making Theatre
Caucasian Chalk Circle,Claudel, Paul, Partage de Midi,
94,99, 131; The Good Woman 101
of Setzuan, 145; The Life ofComedie Franâise, 127 Congreve,
Galileo, 146-7; Mother William, Lave for Love, 26; The
Courage, 21,104; and Kurt Way of the World, 40-1
Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper, Courtenay, Tom, 195 Coward,
93,205-6 Brendel, Alfred, 27 Noel, 31,89,134,209;
Briers, Richard, 132 Brook, Hay Fever, 7880,128 Cox,
Peter, 23-4,25,34,36, Murray, 121 Craig, Edward
100,101,102-3,115,132, Gordon, 158,
139,144,169,172,180 Browning, 162
Robert, 71 Buchner, Georg, 225 Criterion Theatre, 112
Burton, Richard, 141,180 Bury,Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 216 Daldry,
John, 183 Byron, Lord, 71,203 Stephen, 1289 de Filippo,
Cadell, Simon, 28 Calder-Marshall, Eduardo, La Grande Magia, 40
Anna, 125, de la Tour, Frances, 164 Debussy,
195 Claude, Pellias et Melisande,
Callas, Maria, 210,219 Callow, 2245 Dench,Judi,
Simon, 28,34,39,147, 169 35,75,106,164, 195
Campbell, Mrs Patrick, 75 Dewhurst, Keith, 48 Dexter,John,
Carriere.Jean-Claude, 132 140,145,146,147, 180
Charon, Jacques, 126,127 Diary of Anne Frank, The, 57
Cheek by Jowl, 25,129 Dickens, Charles, David Coppe
Chekhov, Anton, 547,66,71, field, 14 Domingo, Placido, 210
143,194,195; The Bear, 194; Donington, Robert, 159-60
The Cherry Orchard, 12,28, 56- Donizetti, Gaetano, 219 Donmar
7,107,108,192-3,195; Ivanov, Warehouse, 137 Donne, John,
55; Platonov, 55,143; The 184;The Ecstasy, 222
Proposal, 194; TTie Seagull, Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 226
32,54-6,144,227; Three Sisters, DOyly Carte Opera Company,
56,190-2; 202
Uncle Vanya, 26,100,124- Drury Lane Theatre, 34 Dudley,
5, 193-4 William, 112 Diirrenmatt,
Chichester Festival Theatre, Friedrich, The Visit, 33,130
181 Duse, Eleonara, 29
Christoff, Boris, 210 Cilento, Diane,
39 Cirque du Soleil, 152
Index 231
Eddison, Robert, 185 Elgar, Edward,Freud, Sigmund, 69 Friedrich, Gdtz,
198 Eliot, George, The Mill on 160,162 Friel, Brian, Dancing
the Floss, 33 at Lughnasa, 181,182-3;
Eliot, T. S., 67,166; The Cocktail Translations, 9^100 Frigerio,
Party, 176,178-80; The Family Ernesto, 150 Fry, Christopher,
Reunion, 176,177-8; Four 71,180-1;
Quartets, 223; Murder in the The Dark is Light Enough,
Cathedral, 176-7; The Music 180; The Ladys Not for
of Poetry, 180; The Naming of Burning, 139,180,181;
Cats, 209; Sweeney Agonistes, Round the Moon, 139; Tiger
175; The Use of Poetry, 175 at the Gates, 11; l^nus
Elliott, Michael, 177 English Observed, 181
Shakespeare Company, 72
Epidauros, 4,59,151 Espert, Nuria, Gambon, Michael, 39,86,87,
150 Esslin, Martin, 50 Evans, 97.164.195 Gamier, Charles,
Edith, 32,37,41,75,164, 180 3 Gershwin, Ira, 200; George
Evans, Geraint, 210 Eyre, Richard, and
45,96,166,170, 206,208 Ira, Porgy and Bess, 206
Gheorghiu, Angela, 210
Farquhar, George, The Recruiting Gielgud, John, 25,31,34,48,
Officer, 22,197 FeuiUiere, 156.180.195
Edwige, 101 Feydeau, Georges, Gilbert, W. S., and Sir Arthur
126; Un Fil a la Patte, 127; A Sullivan, 202; The Mikado,
Flea in Her Ear, 126,127; 202; The Yeomen of the
Hotel Paradiso, 127; ^ Little Guard, 202
Hotel of the Side, 126 Giraudoux,Jean, The Trojan War will
Fiennes, Ralph, 195 Finney, Albert, not Take Place, 11 Giulini,
164,195 Fonda, Jane, 29 Carlo Maria, 210 Globe
Fontanne, Lynn, 33 Ford,John, Theatre, 4,6 Glyndebourne,
'Tis Pity Shes a nhiore, 154 150,218 Gobbi, Tito, 210,219
Fox, Edward, 178 Frank, Anne, Grahame, Kenneth, 148
58 Frayn, Michael, 46; Wild Granville Barker, Harley, 75,
Honey, 143 143
Green, Martyn, 202 Greene, Graham,
The Complaisant Lover, 169
Greenwood, Joan, 29 Grieg,
Edvard, 166 Griffiths, Trevor,
Comedians, 95 Guinness, Alec,
32-3,127,164, 179,185
Gunter, John, 135,143,208
232 Making Theatre
Guthrie, Tyrone, 7,26,36,66, 137; Ghosts, 68,155; Hedda
138 Gabler, 109-10;John Gabriel
Borkman, 69,155; The Lady
Haitink, Bernard, 210 HaU, Peter, from the Sea, 69; Little Eyolf
8,24,25,31,34,53, 69; The Master Builder, 26;
59,75,111,113,140,171, Peer Gynt, 1314,138;
185,198,199; Company, 143 Rosmersholm, 155 Ionesco,
Hampton, Christopher, Tales Eugene, 81,82,100, 132; The
from Hollywood, 142 Handel, Bald Prima Donna, 80; The
George Friedrich, Samson, 138 Chairs, 1312 Irons,Jeremy,
Hare, David, 101,164; The Absence 63 Irving, Sir Henry, 3
of War, 72,96; Amys View,
35,45,52; Murmuring Judges,Jacob,Washington
Sally, 115 James, Henry,
Square, 168
72,96; Racing Demon, 12,96; Janacek, Leos, 2\9;Jenufa, 150
Skylight, 96-8 Harris, Richard, Johnson, Samuel, 122 Jones,
64,65 Harrison, Rex, 64,65,145- Richard, 127,162 Jones, Robert
6, 175
Heiress, The, 168 Herbert,Jocelyn, Edward, 152-3
136,144-7 Hermann, Karl-Ernst,
224 Hersey, David, 137 Hill,Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis, 33
Geoffrey, 67 Hirsch, Robert, John, 71 George,
Kaufman, 207 Keats,
Kedrova, Lil, 195
127 Hobson, Harold, 168 Kerr, Walter, 43 Kipling,
Hochhuth, Rolf, The Rudyard, 29; Barrack- Room
Representative, 104 Hoheisel, Ballads, 93,205 Klemperer,
Tobias, 150 Holm, Ian, 122 Otto, 210 Koltai, Ralph,
Hopkins, Anthony, 164,190 104,154 Komisaijevsky,
Hotter, Hans, 210 Howard,
Alan, 75,164 Hudson, Richard, Theodore, 32 Kustow,
108
Michael,
108 Hunter, Kathryn, 33 Hunter,
N. C., 134; A Day by the Sea,Lehnhoff, Nicholas, 150 Leigh,
89; Waters of the Moon, 89 Vivien, 75,90 Lepage, Robert,
Hutchinson, Jeremy, 17 Hytner, 33 Lerner, Alan Jay, and
Nicholas, 148 Frederick Loewe, My Fair
Lady,
Ibsen, Henrik, 30,39,66,68-9, Cecil Day, 75, 204-5,206 Lewis,
35 Liszt, Franz, 198
71,78;/I Dolls House, 29- Livesey, Roger,
31, 190; An Enemy of the 75,175 Lloyd
People, Webber, Andrew, 208-9;
Index 233
Cats, 5,209; The Phantom Napier,John, 137,209 Nationd
of the Opera, 5 Theatre, 40,59,111,
Loesser, Frank, Guys and 124,127,143,149,192,206;
Dolls, 203,206-8 Cottesloe Theatre, 8,69,137;
Lorca, Federico Garcia, The House Lyttelton Theatre, 8; Olivier
ofBernarda Alba, 150 Lord Theatre, 8,17,131,135,137,
Chamberlains Men, 5 Lowery, 146,148
Nigel, 162 Lunt, Alfred, 33 Neher, Caspar, 224
Neville,John, 187 New
McBurney, Simon, 131 McCowan, London Theatre, 209
Alec, 164,180,195 McEwan, Nighy,Bill, 52 Nilsson,
Geraldine, 132 McKellen, Ian, Birgit, 210 Noble, Adrian,
36,38,137,143, 108 Nunn, Trevor, 137
164,195
McTeer, Janet, 29-31 Maeterlinck, Obolensky, Chloe, 133 Old Vic,
Maurice, 225 Mahabharata, 72,127,143,155 Olivier,
The, 24,132-4 Mahler, Gustav, Laurence, 16,25,27,34,
198 Mamet, David, 53 Man 38,75,91,120,137,164,180,
lIAio, The, 24 Marber, Patrick, 190,192,195
Closer, 49,53 Mason, Brewster,ONeill, Eugene, lA, Long Days
75 Massey, Anna, 29 Massey, Journey into Night, 26 Opera, 3
Orton,Joe, 812; Loot, 81; What
Daniel, 164 Messel, Oliver, 139
40,180 Mifune, Toshiro, 38 the Butler Saw,95; 82
Miller, Arthur, 11,42; Death of Osborne,John, The
a Salesman, 9,11,13,1967, Entertainer, 912,137; Look
207; A View from the Bridge, Back
92
in Anger, 89,91; Luther,
39
Miller, Jonathan, 124 Milton,John,Other Place, The,Peter,
137,142 OToole,
93
Comus, 72 Moiseiwitsch,
Tanya, 141 Morahan,
Christopher, 143 Mortimer, Page, Anthony, 30,125 Parry,
Natasha, 172 Pascal, Blaise, 100
John, 127 Moscow Art Theatre, Pasco, Richard, 17,164 Pater,
2,135, 171,195,227 Walter, 219 Pemberton, Reece,
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 138 Pilbrow, Richard, 150,152
198-200; Do Giovanni, Pinnock, Winsom, Leave
173, 218; The Marriage of Taking, 48
Figaro, 154,216-17; Die Pinter, Harold, 46,49,50,57-8, 96;
Zaubefldte, 214-15 The Birthday Party, 48-50;
234 Making Theatre
The Caretaker, 53; The Hammerstein, Carousel,
Dumb Waiter, 19; Landscape, 2001,206; TTte King and
181, 1834; No Mans Land, I, 206; Oklahoma, 202,206;
156 Pirandello, Luigi, 66,163; South Pacific, 206 Rogers, Paul,
Henry IV, 64-5; It is so, if you 155 Ross, David, 40 Rossini,
think so!, 63 Naked, 39; The Gioacchino Antonio, The
Rules of the Game, 17; Six Italian Girl in Algiers, 213
Characters in Search of an Round House, 177 Routledge,
Author, 17-18 Playhouse Patricia, 164 Royal Court
Theatre, 185 Plowright,Joan, Theatre, 75,89, 137,144,146
150,192 Pope, Alexander, TheRoyal National Theatre, see National
Dunciad, Theatre Royal Opera House,
77 149,224 Royal Shakespeare
Porter, Cole, 223; Kiss me Kate, Company,
203-4 25,108,121,136,154,171
Pozzi, Elizabetta, 125 Priestley,J. Rudman, Michael, 112 Runyon,
Inspector Calls, Damon, 207,208 Rutherford,
128-9 Margaret, 401
Proust, Marcel, 163 Prowse, Philip,
140 Pryce,Jonathan, 55,95,195 Sachs, Hans, Die Meistersinger,
Puccini, Giacomo, 219; La 227
Boheme, 202,21819; Tosca, Sacks, Oliver, 24 Schoenberg,
219 Arnold, Moses and Aaron, 100
Purcell, Henry, Dido and Aeneas, Schumann,
211 Robert, 211,218 Scofield,
12; King Arthur, 21213 Paul, 69-70,75,125,
Pyant, Paul, 149 139,164,169,175,178,199 Seoen
Streams of the River Ota, 33
Quay Brothers, 127,131 Shaffer, Peter, Amadeus,
Rattigan, Terence, 8991,134; 198-200; TTie Royal Hunt of
The Deep Blue Sea, 16,90-1 the Sun, 147-8 Shakespeare
Memorial Theatre,
Ravenhill, Mark, Shopping and Shakespeare William, 13,21,23, 7
Fxxxxxg, 53 Redgrave, Lynne, 70,101,136,143,195,214;
15 Redgrave, Michael, 63,111, music, 166,184-9; objects,
141,195 11423; theatre, 5,9,164;
Redgrave, Vanessa, 55,68,69, words, 34,35,36,50,52,53,
195 66,72; Antony and
Richardson, Ralph, 16,28-9, Cleopatra, ll,(il;As You Like
31,32,48,69-70,75,82,138, It, 17,37, 60; Coriolanus,
156,164,168,169,173 Ricks, 17; Hamlet, 12,
Christopher, 67 Rodgers,
Richard, and Oscar
Index 235
33,51,119, \55;Julius Sondheim, Stephen, 205,208;
Caesar, 118-19; King Henry Company, 208; A Little
H^Part One, 6Q-1,141; Night Music, 208
Henry IK Part Two, 61,141; Sophocles, 13; Ajax, 13;
King Henry V, 6,9,71,141; Antigone, 144; Philoctetes,
King John, 142; King Lear, 11 Stanislavsky, Konstantin,
13,24, 112-13,117,122- 15,27, 146,171
3,136,144, 155,1656; Stein, Peter, 125,224 Stephens,
Loves Labours Loit, Robert, 164,192,
51,59,102-3,154, 195
186; Measure for Measure,Stevenson, Juliet, 29 Stoppard, Tom,
60, 186-7; The Merchant of 35,81,86; Arcadia, 52,84; The
Venice, 116-18,119,189;^ Real Inspector Hound, 40;
Midsummer Nights Dream, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
35-6,114-16,185-6,189, 205; Are Dead, 82-4 Storey, David,
Much Ado about Nothing, Home, 48 Strauss, Richard,
35,59,60; Othello, 12,27, Capriccio, 213-14,215 Strehler,
62,104,106,154; Richard II, Giorgio, 108 Strindberg,
623,71,141; Romeo and August, 66,70,97, 136; The
Juliet, 33,36,59; The Taming Dance of Death, 16, 26,190;
of the Shrew, 203; The The Father, 70-1; Intimate
Tempest, 34,67-8,116,188- Theatre, 223 Suchet, David,
9,215; Twelfth Night, 60,119- 199 Sutchffe, Tom, 162
20, 184-5,188; The Winters Svoboda, Josef) 1602,192
Tale, 166 Swan Theatre, 8,69,108
Shared Experience, 33,129
Shaw, Fiona, 164 Tate, Nahum, 211 Taylor, Laurette,
Shaw, George Bernard, 29, 413 Teatro di Roma, 125
75-8,164,172; ^rm5 and the Teatro Stabile di Parma, 125
Man, 173; Back to Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 71
Methuselah, 76; Caesar and Terfel, Bryn, 210 Theater
Cleopatra, 76; Heartbreak Guild, 206 Theatre de
House, 76,145, 173-5; Major Complicite, 25,33,
Barbara, 76, 129-31
77S; Man and Superman, Theatre le Ranelagh, 33 Theatre of
75, 76,173; Pygmalion, 75,205; the Absurd, 24 Theatre
Saint Joan, 78,176 Shelley, Projects, 150 Thomson, Mark,
Percy Bysshe, 71 Sheridan, 148 Thorndike, Sybil, 75,164
Richard Brinsley, 78, 164; The
Critic, 40,49; TTie Rivals,
32,135; The School for Scandal,
73-4,123-4 Silja,Anya, 210
Sinden, Donald, 37,164,181
Smith, Maggie, 41,75,80,164
236 Making Theatre
Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, The, Welsh National Opera, 224
130-1 Wertenbaker, Timberlake, Our
Tiepolo, Giambattista, 151 Tolstoy, Countrys Good, 21-2,99,197
Leo, War and Peace, 33 Wesker, Arnold, Roots, 95
Tomlinson, John, 210 Turgenev, Westminster Theatre, 128
Ivan, A Month in the Country, Whitelaw, BiUie, 103 Wilde,
55 Oscar, 35,48,49,66,77, 78,81;
Tutin, Dorothy, 164,195 Tynan, An Ideal Husband, 114 The
Kenneth, 38,40-1,89, 91,207 Importance of Being Earnest,
41,74-5,82,113-14, 168; Lady
Vahey, Brian, 180 Vanbrugh, Sir Windermeres Fan, 114;
John, The Provokd Wife, 143 Salome, 33; A Woman of No
Verdi, Giuseppe, 219; Falstaff, Importance, 140 Wilder,
219; Otello, 202,219-, U Thornton, 2; Our Town, 181
Traviata, 202 Visconti, Wilkinson, Tom, 68 Williams, Lia, 97
Luchino, 154 Vitruvius, 4 Williams, Tennessee, 42-3,48;
Wagner, Cosima, 158 Wagner, The Glass Menagerie, 13,41-3,
181-2; y4 Streetcar Named
Richard, 7,104,167, 198; Desire, 9
Gdtterddmmemng, 160; DasWilton, Penelope,
Rheingold, 159,161; TLe Ring, Googie, 9090,164 Withers,
Wittgenstein,
157,15962; Tristan und Ludwig, 17,100 Wodehouse, R
bolde, 2213 G., 207 Wolfit, Donald, 164
Wagner, Wieland, 158-9,162 Waller, Wood, John, 164 Wordsworth,
David, 183 Wanamaker, Zoe, 43 William, 8,153 Worth,
Warner, Deborah, 136,142, Katharine, 178
218
Wars of the Roses, The, 37 Watteau,Yeats, W.B., 136 Young Vic, 68
Antoine, 103 Waugh, Evelyn,
Vile Bodies, 45 Zeffirelli, Franco, 18

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MAKING THEATRE

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THE ATHLONE PRESS

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend

I beheve that the theatre makes its effect not by means of

A dramatic action, because of its brevity, presses towards a climax, a

Plots differ from stories in novels in that their juxtaposition of scenes

Desert. Dazzling light.

Every production, and performance, has its moment. Even

Last Tuesday, Sir Laurence shook hands with greatness, and

Margaret Rutherford . . . got up as Lady Wishfort, the man-

It isnt just a question of class or sharpness (though it is both

Mr and Mrs Dangle are discovered at breakfast reading

I know of no one who has caught more precisely than Mamet

Where I come from and who I am, I dont know. Who my

The image expreses the freshness and innocence of Juliets young

The effect of dialogue in a play depends on how it is written, and how

Tanner as the author of the Revolutionists Handbook has

MRS SMITH: Goodness! Nine oclock! This evening for supper we

1. Ralph Richardson: Peer Gynt (1945), see p. xvi.

Set by Josef Svoboda for Wagner s Gotterdammenmg, Act Three, Scene

TRUSCOTT: HOW dare you involve me in a situation for which no

ESTRAGON (suddenly furious): Recognize! what is there to

In the contemporary scenes, Bernard, an English don, shows

She wants him to look a bit amazed - awed by it all. But

She can no more explain to her husband, or to herself (in

ARCHIE: Were all out for good old Number One

Mac and Polly (singing together on the night of their

Standing on opposite sides of a river, and speaking in a

He created a distilled world of fine white cloth. Above our

TITANIA: I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:

Tarry a little; there is something else.

As we are witnessing a ritual which invokes more than human

then burst his mighty heart;

Wounded myself, in the early part of my life, by the

And we beheved her.

In the visualization of some plays, the director may decide to have a

Everything CompUcite actors do is rooted in what they have

It was a question not of undertaking some sort of

By bringing the originality of her ideas to stage design,

Basically this design consisted of a huge aluminium ring,

Colour - indispensable for the Green Knight! - plays an essential role in

At rare moments, in the long quiet hours of light rehearsals, a

The intention . . .was to produce not a tight correspondence

The vision of a play, and the way we respond to its visualization,

Music exists in individual lines of dialogue, as in the action as a whole.

a cruel, relentless figure whose cruelty and relentlessness were

The heart of the mystery in an actor can only be played upon

I sit here working out my old ideas as a means of destroying

The other characters speak in prose, except at moments of

The whole performance of a play has an innate musicality. In plays of

Shakespeares infinite variety means that not all tragedies or

The music cannot conceal that Liuba is crying. The cherry

It is a pity we do not have hve orchestras any more. In the old

Music, and musicality in plays is absorbed, sometimes more,