The Routledge Companion to Actors' Shakespeare

John Russell Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136720376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Shakespeare-Drama

The Routledge Companion to Actors' Shakespeare is a window onto how today's actors contribute to the continuing life and relevance of Shakespeare's plays.

The process of acting is notoriously hard to document, but this volume reaches behind famous performances to examine the actors' craft, their development and how they engage with playtexts. Each chapter relies upon privilieged access to its subject to offer an unparalleled insight into contemporary practice.

This volume explores the techniques, interpretive approaches and performance styles of the following actors:

Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Kate Duchene, Colm Feore, Mariah Gale, John Harrell, Greg Hicks, Rory Kinnear, Kevin Kline, Adrian Lester, Marcelo Magni, Ian McKellen, Patrice Naiambana, Vanessa Redgrave, Piotr Semak, Anthony Sher, Jonathan Slinger, Kate Valk, Harriet Walter

This twin volume to The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare is an essential work for both actors and students of Shakespeare.

1

Simon Russell Beale

Carol Chillington Rutter

Actors are ambassadors from the playwright to his audience, but part of the message they bring is their own. A performance is a role seen through a temperament; an imaginary person realised through the perceptions and technical skills of a real one.

John Peter, Sunday Times, 9 September 1990

… actors are endlessly interviewed by outsiders who hope to pluck out their mystery, and who always fail …. Reviewers are seldom able to analyse what actors do. But they can describe it; this being the one undisputed service they can offer to the theatre.

Irving Wardle, Theatre Criticism, 1992

1 Undisputed Service

I enlist two of the finest theatre critics in the business to help me frame an account of one of the finest Shakespearean actors in the business, and I’ll have in mind the terms of their critique as I proceed. But I begin with ‘the one undisputed service’ that I, a theatre viewer (and re-viewer), can offer, a performance memory, a spectator’s 25-year-old memory (so a no doubt flawed memory): describing a place in the past where an actor – an ‘ambassador’ – delivered a message that was charged with something more than the playwright’s dispatch, something all his own.

The theatrical conceit was conventional enough. A cry of players in doublet and hose led by an Edward Alleyn-esque strutter and bellower had arrived at a tavern where the cannikin clinkers didn’t want any of that high falutin’ ‘O for a muse of fire’ metropolitan stuff, but something with local colour. How about ‘Bess Bridges’, the ‘girl worth gold’? The players groaned – but gave in. So the company bookholder – a swottish-looking, bungling sort of neurotic flop-haired youth, tubby, in big breeches and spectacles, flapping silently in the background – began passing out the players’ parts. Not, you’d imagine, life-threatening work. Except that his every move made it just that. Crossing the stage, he might have been negotiating a minefield. His panic was palpable, and registered as both endearing and deeply silly. A stage manager – with stage fright! He retreated to invisibility, to prompt corner, to a stool set well back from the action where he huddled over his promptbook, a lump of apprehensiveness, making turning the pages look like handling gelignite. Every time he noticed the audience, his goggle eyes bulged – risking head-on collision with his wire-rims. But worse was to come. Much worse: the awful moment in this actor-hungry adventure story when the players realised there simply weren’t enough of them to fill all the parts. They froze. Where to find an extra? The penny dropped. They turned on their hapless bookholder – and frog-marched him into the play.

My memory is of the 25-year-old Simon Russell Beale playing Fawcett in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West in 1986, his debut season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, when he also played Ed Kno’well in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and – his first professional Shakespeare role – a gloriously idiotic, wonder-full Young Shepherd in Terry Hands’s The Winter’s Tale (by a wonderful symmetry, 23 years later, his latest Shakespeare role would be Leontes, of which more, anon). These first parts were epitomes, and promissory notes on a career playing Shakespeare that would take Beale from prompt corner to centre stage, from the RSC to the National, the Almeida, the Old Vic, playing Thersites, Navarre, Richard III, Ariel, Edgar, Iago, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cassius, Malvolio, Benedick, by way of Chekhov, Ibsen, Marlowe, Middleton, Farquhar, Pinter, Stoppard, Brecht: a list stretching from the gormless, dopey and ineffectual to the consummately Machiavellian, the traumatically broken, and the terrifyingly, yet gleefully, psychopathological to demonstrate the critic’s observation that Beale is ‘typecast to defy expectations’ (Independent, 28 June 1993). But Fawcett, Ed and Young Shepherd gave audiences the first measure of this actor, drafted his performance signature: the ability to embody contradiction, to play both the cornered soul and the klutzy clown, to break spectators’ hearts while he has them doubled over with laughter. If, as John Peter writes, performance is a role ‘seen through a temperament’, it’s also seen through a body, and it’s the body of this actor I’ll look at first, observing how he uses the physical to address Shakespeare.

2 Body Consciousness

Let’s take the actor’s body as his instrument, and analogise that to the orchestra (apt enough in Beale’s case since he wasn’t supposed to be an actor: a boy chorister who graduated to choral scholar at Cambridge, he originally went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to study singing). Pursuing the analogy, one actor’s body is a flute, another’s a cello, a bassoon, a trumpet, each excellent in its own terms, with a range, register, repertoire. And limit. The instrument must observe decorum, the ‘Cyrano effect’: like the man with the ludicrous snout who can’t ‘do’ love, the grumpy bassoon can’t ‘do’ madrigals. Or can it? Can a lover woo his lass any more beguilingly than with Frescobaldi’s ‘Canzona Prima’ scored for basso?

The pleasure in performance of the limit defied is as great as the limit observed, and Beale is an actor who delivers that anarchic, even dangerous, defiant pleasure. Paul Taylor sees him as ‘the very incarnation of paradox’, a ‘walking, built-in drama’, a squat, unmade bed of a man, mountain-bellied (like Ben Jonson), a face out of Brueghel, someone whose ‘flesh seems to have played a spiteful practical joke on the fastidious intellect that is trapped inside it’: Caliban’s body, perhaps, holding Ariel’s mind hostage (Independent, 14 January 2005). David Leveaux dryly comments that Beale’s self image is ‘not exactly a love affair’, and Beale deprecates himself as tending ‘to walk on to a stage sideways’ (David Lister, Independent, 22 February 2008). But – Leveaux again – ‘when he acts you have the sense that he is completely in his body’. ‘Sensual’, able ‘to communicate thought and feeling on the same waveband’, he’s turned ‘lack of self-esteem into an art form’, a body evidently built for laughs into an engine to probe alienation, exclusion, the serious grotesque, the kind of self-loathing that flips from mischief to menace and that, his performance habitually discovers, has at its core a devastated sense of disappointed love.

Trying to fix this art form into words, you can feel reviewers outbidding each other for comparisons. Beale’s skin-head, bunch-backed Richard in his full-length black leather trench coat (that had to be gathered around the collar to allow for the extravagant hump) was ‘the unhappy result of a one-night stand between Pere Ubu and Gertrude Stein’ (Paul Taylor, Independent, 13 August 1992), a ‘depraved blend of Mr Punch and A. A. Milne’s Piglet’ (Benedict Nightingale, Times, 13 August 1992), a ‘collision of Magwitch, Big Daddy and Mussolini’ (Michael Coveney, Observer, 16 August 1992). His Thersites ‘makes your average dosser look like a fitness fanatic’; ‘he reminds you of an anthropomorphised storybook animal – Toad, say, dressed up as the washerwoman’ (Paul Taylor, Independent, 30 April 1990). His Cassius might have been ‘a Marxist don embittered by the undeserved promotion of a conservative colleague’ (Benedict Nightingale, Times, 22 April 2005). His Ariel, in blue Mao jacket and kohl-rimmed eyes, the perfect colonial civil servant, moving with weird balletic gestures at half-speed, was a ‘dauntingly glacial’ subaltern who, freed, gave Prospero as ‘a parting present’ a ‘gob’ of spit ‘full in his face’ (Paul Taylor, Independent, 4 September 2000).

Uniquely, Thersites and Richard were parts he ‘built from the outside in’ (interviews with the author conducted in 2009; all otherwise unattributed quotations come from these interviews). Thersites looked like a walking spoil heap or midden, ‘botched together by a sort of stream of consciousness’: wrecked pinstriped trousers held up by old Etonian and MCC ties; flasher’s mac blazoned with CND and GAY PRIDE badges; leather bonnet strapped under his chin, ear holes cut out, like a pilot’s – or 17th-century alchemist’s – cap, surgical gloves (borrowed from prep school days, the memory of ‘a boy who used to have iodine on his feet, for eczema, who had to put them in plastic bags at night to sleep’), nicotine yellow with sweat, put on backwards, making the thumbs flap. He was a palimpsest of cross-cultural signifiers that registered this pro-war protester’s body as constitutionally, insistently and ironically dissident: ‘The CND badge made me laugh! Thersites is the least likely member of CND.’ But given Thersites’s intellectual disdain for the indolence and stupidity around him, he had to be read as an oxymoron. It was hard to tell, for instance, whether he wore those surgical gloves ‘to cover some hideous disease or to protect himself from contamination by forced fraternizing with dolts whose suicidal idiocy might be infectious’ (Rutter: 2001, 141). Here, says Beale, ‘once we discovered the grotesque – and I have a joy in the physical – we had the part’. None of the physical was gratuitous or ‘designer decorative’. The body – and this defines Beale’s physical process – was the beginning of what the actor expressed, seeing Thersites as ‘thwarted’, ‘a cynic’, but ‘like any cynic, actually the most romantic man in the play; someone who profoundly believes in Achilles’s greatness, wants him so badly to be great, and is just so staggeringly disappointed! Thersites believes in FAME – Homeric FAME – and Achilles is being just lazy! If we’d come out to Troy and done Homer – if we’d done The Iliad! But we were doing “wars and lechery”. What a waste!’ Thersites’s body became the walking comment on that waste.

Beale claims to be ‘terrible with props’. Perhaps. But he uses them to capture character, to contain a history or inform a world. His Richard was heard long before he arrived, tap, tap, tapping his way down some distant corridor, then entering, standing under the dim light of a single naked bulb, leaning his monstrous bulk on his little, but bizarrely rather elegant, Charlie Chaplin walking stick – which he later, eye-balling the audience with his gob-stopper eyes like some somnolent toad, with a gesture so quick it couldn’t be followed, plunged straight through the neat, tied-upwith-string-and-sealing-wax brown paper parcel in which Hastings’s head had been delivered. His Malvolio, roused from bed in the caterwauling night kitchen scene, was a man discovered to sleep in a hairnet; his Cassius was ‘the lone grammar school boy amongst a load of Etonians’, and ‘furious’, socially – but then ‘got seduced by nice cuff-links’ (Rutter: 2006, 208); his Benedick arrived home from the wars (to a Beatrice who sat at breakfast absorbed in reading) carrying a single rose and a parcel of books tied with a ribbon.

Even more significant than the body work he does with props is the way Beale expresses character through gesture. Leontes wiped Mamillius’s ‘smutch’d … nose’. Then he lingered, seeking paternity in the boy’s face by measuring Mamillius’s little nose against his own, a gesture (and doubt) he absent-mindedly remembered later, settling the child to sleep, singing a lullaby under his breath, when he gently tweaked the child’s nose – and half-consciously remembered again, sixteen years later, meeting a girl called ‘Perdita’, when he reached out a hand instinctively as if – strange impulse! – to touch her nose. His Iago, dead-eyed as a gutted fish, endured Emilia’s hungry kiss – then wiped it off his mouth. Rubbing Othello’s mind raw with pornographic images (‘Lie with her? Lie on her?’) that finally felled him in a seizure, his Iago tugged his uniform straight, settled himself onto a wicker couch and calmly observed the spasming body, leaning forward, when its convulsions eased, without emotion to prod it with his boot. Then suddenly he himself doubled over and retched. Konstantin in The Seagull (the part Beale thinks of as his audition piece for Hamlet, as he thinks of Chekhov as sustaining his most important actorly crossconversation with Shakespeare) stood almost paralysed over his desk, tidying papers, destroying writing, a two-minute silence re-playing a whole damaged life before exiting to suicide. His Hamlet was a son grieving for the loss of two loved parents, who, in the closet scene, reached out arms to the Ghost and to Gertrude. His Macbeth – counter-intuitively for a warrior who can ‘unseam’ an opponent from ‘the nave to the chops’ with a single up-swing of sword – spent the final act of the play screwed to his throne as his ‘sticking place’, ‘waiting for the world to come to me’. Earlier, he’d stood apart, supervising the slaughter of Macduff’s household. Killing Duncan had been, astonishingly, ‘a gift’, his ‘gift to his wife’, to ‘heal the trauma’ of the loss of their own dead child. At Macduff’s, he needed to know what the death of a child looked like, and he observed ‘the prolonged death throes of his thane’s wife with detached fascination’ as if watching ‘a fluttering moth beating itself to death at a window’. Sitting still for the end, Beale had an image in mind of ‘Stalin trapped in his paranoid little room’. He wanted to see Macduff coming, ‘to explore what it’s like for Macbeth finally to meet the father of the children he has had murdered’. But he had something else in mind. Consciously denying the physical, the body’s exhibitionism, the extreme work timed in Shakespeare’s performance text to explode in the final showdown with Macduff, he was making space for what Shakespeare’s playtext was doing. ‘The last bit of the play,’ he comments, ‘is linguistically and spiritually very interesting.’ That move to language takes me where I want to go next.

3 Vocal Register/Actorly Acoustics/Textual play

Beale is an actor who’s earned Ulysses’s review of Cressida: ‘There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip – Nay, her foot speaks’. But the voluble body is articulated, too, in a voice that not only produces an extraordinary acoustic range but that works on Shakespeare the way a Stradivarius works on Bach in the hands of Pablo Cassals. His ‘enunciation is matchless’, writes Paul Taylor. ‘He can pounce on a phrase with a plump, voluptuous relish, and comically switch to recoiling, fastidious distaste in a twinkling. No one can inflect a passage of verse with such haunting insight or such subtle variations of pace and dynamics’ (Independent, 14 January 2005). To wit, his Richard, in the opening soliloquy, started deadpan, a man droning the shipping forecast, when, twelve lines in, he hit a vocal oil-slick: ‘the lascivious pleasing of a lute’. The last word bloated in his mouth to an act of obscenity, the ‘t’ snapping open a trapdoor plunging listeners down a vocal shaft into the black hole of Richard’s hatred. His Benedick, cannon-balling into Leonato’s garden pool to ‘hide’ from Don Pedro and Co., bobbed to the surface, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Simon Russell Beale
• 2. Sinead Cusack
• 3. Judi Dench
• 4. Kate Duchêne
• 5. Colm Feore
• 6. Mariah Gale
• 7. John Harrell
• 8. Greg Hicks
• 9. Rory Kinnear
• 10. Kevin Kline
• 11. Adrian Lester
• 12. Sir Ian McKellen
• 13. Marcello Magni
• 14. Patrice Naiambana
• 15. Vanessa Redgrave
• 16. Pyotr Semak
• 17. Antony Sher
• 18. Jonathan Slinger
• 19. Kate Valk
• 20. Harriet Walter
• Index of Plays
• General Index