Merely Players?

Actors' Accounts of Performing Shakespeare

Jonathan Holmes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134363827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

Merely Players? marks a groundbreaking departure in Shakespeare studies by giving direct voice to the Shakespearean performer. It draws on three centuries worth of actors' written reflections on playing Shakespeare and brings together the dual worlds of performance and academia, providing a unique resource for the student and theatre-lover alike.

Chapter 1

Against the grain

Shakespeare and the problem of character

Suffice it, that one great principle [of continuity] is common to all, a principle which probably is the condition of all consciousness, without which we should feel and imagine only by discontinuous moments, and be plants and animals instead of men.

S.T.Coleridge¹

On stage, if the inner line is broken an actor no longer understands what is being said or done and he ceases to have any desires or emotions. The actor and the part, humanly speaking, live by these unbroken lines... Let those lines be interrupted and life stops. A role must have continuous being.

K.Stanislavsky²

WHORE (to RALPH): And what is this play about?
RALPH: Well, there’s this Nurse...

M.Norman and T.Stoppard³

I

The biased perspective of the actor Ralph Bashford, playing the nurse and in turn played by Jim Carter, in Shakespeare in Love is familiar to us all as an exaggerated representation of the stereotypical self-absorption of the actor. Harriet Walter tells her own versions of this anecdote as a preface to her essay in Players of Shakespeare 3.⁴ This time, the story is based on both an actor playing the doctor in King Lear and a scene in François Truffaut’s film Day for Night,⁵ in which successive members of the cast are interviewed by a journalist, each claiming their role as central to the story. Walter goes on from this to claim a grain of truth within the comic hyperbole:

From the moment we are invited to play a part, a mental process gets underway, intended to bridge the gap between me and her/him. Subjectivity begins to set in and the character becomes the centre of our universe.⁶

Richard McCabe, recalling Autolycus, writes in similar vein:

The role invades all your waking and sleeping hours like a bad conscience and is only stilled by finding solutions that are acceptable to both your character’s inner life and one’s own sense of personal truth.⁷

It is suggested by both cinematic representation and the actors’ own accounts that subjective, introspective constructions of character are the norm.

I begin my discussion of actors’ reflections on Shakespeare by looking at the collision between twentieth-century, particularly post-Stanislavskyan, actor training methods and sixteenth/seventeenth-century texts, and investigating the rhetorical processes by which actors bridge the gap between the two within their writing. The focus of the discussion in this chapter will be first on the Players of Shakespeare series, probably the most extensive compendium of actors’ accounts of playing Shakespeare available,⁸ and second on what emerge as consistently problematic roles for actors searching for interiority. The most obvious examples of these are ‘clown’ parts, but the series also reveals a markedly agonistic relationship with two other characters in particular: Richard III and Shylock.

The two films mentioned undermine the idea of interiority by suggesting implicitly that introspection is, in fact, alien to characterisation. In Shakespeare in Love this is achieved by the casting of the burly, lugubrious Jim Carter as Ralph, invoking the audience’s cultural knowledge of vaudeville/music-hall traditions of transvestism and the pantomime Dame. Moreover, those appreciative of the ‘in-jokes’ which are a speciality of this film will have noticed that the ‘real’ nurse in the film—belonging to Viola’s household—is played by Imelda Staunton, Carter’s real-life wife. Thus one actor plays another actor who is portraying a character synonymous with another character played by the first actor’s actual partner. The multiple layers of fictionality, of mimesis, are sufficient for us to feel we are comfortable and familiar with all the types of ‘characterisation’ in evidence without resource to any level of psychology or inner life.

Objections to this line of reasoning could mention the subsidiary and, more importantly, comic nature of the characterisation here discussed—neither Carter nor Bashford are called upon to portray complex or highly emotional situations. I will discuss later the ideologies implicit in this point, which rest largely on notions of the size of a role and, much more problematically, its generic status within the fiction. Sufficient doubt is cast for the moment by the second film, mentioned by Harriet Walter.

Truffaut’s La Nuit americaine is a film about filmmaking, hence the pseudodocumentary on-set interviews described by Walter. One of the actors interviewed is portraying the romantic lead of the film-within-a-film, and is in turn played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Léaud is a regular cast member of Truffaut’s films, occupying the position of alter ego for the director, to the extent of playing the same character, Antoine Doinel, in a sequence of films based on Truffaut’s life begun when the actor was fifteen and ending only at the director’s death twenty-five years later.

In La Nuit americaine, then, the characterisation is complicated from the beginning by this actor’s presence as precisely the type of character we have come to associate on screen with Truffaut/Doinel. Our expectations are then undermined by the appearance of Truffaut himself playing—naturally—the director of the film-within-the-film. It gradually becomes clear from the clips we see that this film-within (entitled Meet Pamela)⁹ is a bricolage of scenes from almost all the director’s previous films, including ones featuring Léaud, which now again feature the same actor, playing an actor portraying characters synonymous with those we know him to have played before. The levels of mimesis here become dizzying, and the approach to characterisation is correspondingly complex, radical and fragmentary, so that the humour of the actors’ interview remarks has a double resonance in that they represent precisely the kind of characterisation that this film explodes.

The purpose of this preamble is to establish not only that there is a myriad of ways of approaching character, but to put forward the premise that the introspective manner in which many actors construct character is more often than not fundamentally at odds with how that character is constructed in the script and subsequently reconstructed by the spectator. Part of the humour of both films is the gap between the speakers’ understanding of character and that of the spectator, and it is this gap that can be so wittily exploited in film by techniques of montage editing.

Moreover, both these films rely on a spectator’s ability to move comfortably between layers of mimesis, understood in subsequent discussions to be consonant with concepts of representation and fictionality. Actor training methods fundamentally equip the performer with mimetic strategies of varying complexity, concerned as they are with representing some idea of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ to an audience through the medium of a persuasive fiction, and in this sense the engagement with a playtext is an engagement with mimesis.

Cinematic form demonstrates clearly how a viewer assembles a coherent and cohesive idea of character from often disconnected or sharply juxtaposed sources of information. In this he or she is assisted by little more than received knowledge and experience of narrative structure, with the continuous presence of the actor’s body acting as a peg on which to hang that structure.¹⁰ The causal relationship that is assumed to exist between event and character gives the narrative meaning, even though this relationship is invariably composed in the editing suite, where actors are (particularly in the case of films reliant on special effects) often made to respond to something they didn’t know anything about when they filmed the scene. Reading a narrative on film therefore becomes an attempt to reconcile the temporal dynamic of plot with the supposedly atemporal demands of character. We want the heroine to experience a ‘journey’. As N.J.Lowe remarks, ‘Our desire for harmony between the two dissonant and incomplete story models makes us vulnerable to sustained and purposeful affective manipulation. It is this that accounts for the power of plot.’¹¹

All this, however, is strikingly at odds with the approach to performance expressed by Walter and McCabe, an approach that is summed up neatly by W.B.Worthen: ‘Actorly reading is notably trained on questions of character, the integrated, self-present, internalised, psychologically motivated “character” of the dominant mode of modern theatrical representation, stage realism.’¹² Cinematic acting is not stage acting, of course, yet as the Truffaut anecdote and its use by Walter testify, actors rarely modify their rhetoric when working in either medium. Discussing the volumes from which the accounts of McCabe and Walter are drawn, Worthen comments:

In the Players of Shakespeare series, the politics of interpretation emerge in the ways performers understand and represent character. Despite the British theatre’s reputation for being less involved in an explicitly Stanislavskian tradition than the American stage, the Players of Shakespeare essays are informed by notions of a coherent and internalised characterisation fully consistent with Stanislavskian mimesis.¹³

It is my contention, as it is Worthen’s and others’, that this approach can be inappropriate and sometimes counter-productive to the performance of Shakespearean drama.¹⁴ Further, I claim in this chapter that a surprising number of essays in these volumes display a thoughtful awareness of this problem, even while sometimes continuing to pay lip-service to post-Stanislavskyan conventions. In short, as in so many areas of Shakespearean criticism, the actors have got there first.

This last factor is important because it is not just actors in performance who tend to be susceptible to a received mythology of characterisation. Scholars and critics, too, still to some extent lack a competent vocabulary with which to analyse the phenomenon of Shakespearean character construction. As Peter Holland comments, ‘We are left with an apparent ability to analyse most of the lines spoken, but unable to analyse most of the characters in any one play, assuming somehow that the few characters we can analyse will adequately represent the others.’¹⁵ When Samuel Crowl writes that ‘if one had to place their efforts in a critical context, the firm of Bradley, Granville-Barker and Barton would quickly spring to mind’,¹⁶ it is only the inclusion of John Barton’s name that tells us he is referring to actors and not scholars.¹⁷ Indeed, the reliance of the academy on A.C.Bradley in matters of character criticism still outweighs that of the theatre, which as Worthen and Holland state, prefers Stanislavsky even in the case of Shakespeare. Indeed, so prevalent are appropriations of various aspects of Stanislavsky’s work in the rhetoric of actors that it may be helpful to outline briefly the contours of this system of actor training.

Born to an extremely wealthy family in Moscow in 1863, Konstantin Stanislavsky co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1897 and, inspired partly by the work of Anton Chekhov whose plays he premiered and starred in, devoted the remaining forty years of his life to composing a system of actor training, left incomplete at his death in 1938. The result is an assembly of ideas, approaches and exercises published in three main texts: An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and Creating a Role.¹⁸ This trilogy focuses on four main principles: physical preparation; psychological consistency in characterisation (expressed in the formulation of a through-line of action, or psychological arc, from the character’s first to last appearance); close study of text (including breaking it down into a series of motivated actions); and construction, using techniques of emotion memory, of an ‘inner life’ and of a full backstory to the character’s actions. The system is rarely taught in complete sequence, even in drama schools, yet most actors will employ a collage of techniques gleaned from it in approaching a part.

A frequent criticism of the academic community by actors is that scholars are preoccupied with ‘examining the most abstruse aspects of scholarly questions in a spirit of audacious inquiry, without realising they are splitting hairs and vivisecting follicles’.¹⁹ Modern scholarship, in other words, is all very well in the lecture room but do...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Merely Players?
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography