The title, of course, is the title of John Barton’s famous work, and this is a bit of a departure for this blog, which usually focuses more on literature, philosophy, and politics. Still, there are a few issues surrounding the performance of drama written by Shakespeare or his contemporaries–specifically challenges for actors and directors–that can be annoying or mystifying for an audience member, and can nudge what might be otherwise good productions into the range of the mediocre or the downright awful. This week, we touch on some of these issues here in order to offer some guidelines (loosely sketched out by an actor and director) as to how actors and directors might specifically help to avoid these potential pitfalls.*
Both actors and audience members sometimes cite language as a specific challenge to Shakespeare, but it really needn’t be the barrier that people make it out to be. Really. It may take time for an audience member to attune their ear to Shakespeare’s language, but much of it is very clear:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet, 2.2.327-32)
These words seem easy enough to understand. The challenge is that actors (and occasionally directors) can sometimes look at an early modern play text and sense themselves suddenly a bit at sea, not always because the language may be dense (which it can be, at times), but also because of the relative complexity of the ideas that tend to be expressed in much more economically muscular prose than that to which we are accustomed in our everyday speech. Hamlet’s words conflating the admirability of human function and capability with the base and ephemeral quality of physical existence say a lot in just a few words of text. And they say much more in the context of the scene, which we will not get into here today.
As actors, we carry the audience with us, lending the sense of the text to them even when they don’t immediately grasp it themselves. Yet, actors who aren’t used to early modern English sometimes seem to take a ‘run at it’ in alarming ways, apparently in an effort to make it through the speech as one might run through a downpour in order to avoid getting more soaked than necessary, or take a running start to leap across a void. This seldom ends well. It seldom gives us effective performance results.
Sometimes, performers will pitch their voices somewhere roughly two thirds up their register and stay there for the duration of a monologue, adopting whatever regular cadence that they feel the language might best suggest. This ramped up delivery seems to be an attempt to portray an energetic engagement with the text. Yet, the tension remains in their speech rather than in their physicality or their characterisation, and this tends to lose both actor and audience relatively quickly.
The resultant speech comes off to the audience a bit like a flat chorus or a vocal machine gun. The variance and modulation of natural human speech vanishes to be replaced by the wooden and metronomic. This is a damned shame. Not only does such treatment do a disservice to the text, but even more so, it diminishes the work of otherwise immensely capable actors, making their efforts fade into the proverbial woodwork or be absorbed, like their natural, internal light, by the curtain.
What Mike Alfreds says about live theatre and the essence of spontaneity is true.** Once that is lost in performance, it becomes much more difficult to recover a production as a whole. The mutually participatory illusion of a play falls down like an ill-secured piece of stage scenery.
The remedy is simple, albeit not necessarily easy to do, and it involves proper preparation. Not only must the actor be able to supply enough underlying energetic force (attention) to the character***, but the actor must also give enough time and effort to properly modulate what a character is saying. Mark Rylance Waters gives us some deceptively simple exercises that can be immensely helpful:
One of the challenges is that, in the case of amateur actors especially, although professionals can do this as well, seem to have less time to devote to honing the modulations of their speech and action, but it remains crucial.
And ‘action’ really is the second part of that. As actors, we sometimes adopt a habit of standing in certain ways, or delivering lines at certain points as we either move or or stand still upon a stage or set. Yet, as in speaking only one way, or in one part of our register, or at one cadence, standing repeatedly in particular ways also becomes static, in ways that can threaten to lose the audience’s engagement with a production. As a good friend (and a fine director) once said to me, “No one is ever ‘just standing’ there on stage.” The actor’s underlying energy should remain the same whether the character is napping beneath a tree or duelling another character to the death, but the attitude and posture should be as variable as the speech while remaining resonant with the character.
Forced variance must be avoided. Balance remains key. Otherwise the onstage attitudes may begin to look like the satirical dance postures in the number “Choreography” from the movie musical White Christmas ****:
It’s hilarious in this number, when the performers do it on purpose, but it doesn’t work nearly as well if it isn’t a satirical piece. Listen to Mark Rylance’s anecdote about pausing in the clip above, and let your modulation fall into the natural cadences of the speech, and not the ego attempting to precipitate some audience member’s pregnant expectation.
Most of the time, in a play, characters are just talking. So listen to how people talk, how they explain things, how they gossip, how they cajole, scold, wheedle, or express affection. Listen to how the tone of their voices changes when they do this. Watch their posture, their physical attitude, and see how they speak and move. It might help to think of Shakespearean characters as living lives too. Iago, Ophelia, Timon, Portia, all are representations of people with lives that extend beyond the boundaries of the stage upon which we see them. Just as comic book characters have lives outside of their drawn frames, so do these stage characters have problems that run like watercolour beyond the boundaries of the small dramatic frameworks that we see.
When we call our mother, our aunt, our friend, our boss, or our coworker, we tend to follow certain behavioural prescriptions, but we also tend to listen and respond to what they say. They have daily challenges too, and most of us do not merely charge ahead with our own agenda regardless of what might be happening in the lives of those to whom we are connected. We don’t just talk ‘to’ them or ‘at’ them. We talk ‘with’ them. We modulate between the effusive and the conciliatory, the supportive and the encouraging, as our engagement with them may direct our efforts. Our speech with others does not tend to be static, and neither is our posture, even in those moments when we may feel more relaxed and at our ease. Instead, we constantly vary our attitudes and postures according to the needs of the exchange.
As noted above, this isn’t necessarily easy to do. Good actors tend to work very hard for something that, in the end, may seem effortless. Great actors tend to look as if they are doing very little when they perform. It seems to pour out of them in the same way that our description of a difficult day might pour out to our mother or our friend. The fact that they can do it illustrates that it is achievable, however, and this is what we should strive for when we work as actors, and this is what directors should encourage actors to be able to do.
Part of the trouble is that, when we stand on stage, or even when we do something recorded, we can’t immediately see what we are doing. Directors (who tend to have enough to do) should break up these log jams when they see them. They should talk about the language, and about what things mean, what ideas are being expressed, and where certain scenes, or plays, might be going. But for the actor, it is important to be able to express oneself on stage or screen much as one expresses oneself in life, for that is the great secret of playing Shakespeare or anything else.
*Are these issues strictly related to performing early modern works? No. What works for early modern performance can almost invariably help with other styles of performance in dramatic works from other ages and cultures, with the exception of stylised dramatic presentation types, like Japanese ‘Noh’ for example, which are couched very specifically in particular kinds of ritual cultural vernacular).
**Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor
***For acting with energy/attention/focus, I suggest that the actor read Sonia Moore, Declan Donnellan, Bella Merlin, and countless others who have written extensively on the subject of acting.
**** (c) Paramount Pictures, 1954