Nicholas Hytner Lecture on How to do Shakespeare

next month marks an important moment for the national theater it will mark 10 years of Nick whiteners tenure as the artistic director of the theater shortly after Nick took over as artistic director down the road at the Old Vic Ian McKellen paid his homage to the major form of British vernacular drama when he played pantomime Dame in Aladdin one of the things that I suspect he didn't know and I'm pretty sure nobody else in the room other than lick knows is that Nick has also played pantomime Dame it may have been that experience as an undergraduate in Cambridge that finally convinced him that perhaps his future did not lie as an actor though I have very happy memories of that particular production but instead as a director as a director it was already apparent in the way that true talent does show itself at that stage that Nick's career was going to be extraordinary it wasn't simply the quality of individual productions but the astonishing ambition of the work that he put on as still then a teenager including a production of breath mahogany in which at some point the orchestra and singers were within two bars of each other but rarely quite worked out how to locate a conductor by closed-circuit television in such a way that the singers could see him but in amidst that extraordinary array of work one production stands out for me and that was the very last production that Nick did isn't it as an undergraduate a production of Love's Labour's Lost in Trinity Hall fellows garden in May week Shakespeare in May week is a good old Cambridge tradition but there was something about the bittersweet elegiac tone of that particular production which I found deeply moving from Cambridge he went on to a career that we all know well with productions in Opera and I think opera has underpinned a great deal of his theater work rather than the theater work underpinning the Opera work and of course in film one of the characteristics of Nick's rain so far as artistic director national has been the extraordinary commitment to new drama I can't think of an earlier point at which the entire repertory at particular stages has consisted of nothing more than new plans when Peter Hall established the Royal Shakespeare Company he offered it his mantra for the approach to Shakespeare the belief that each Shakespeare play had to be produced as if it had dropped through the letterbox that morning as if it were to a brand new play and that has been part of Nick Hytner work at the National Theatre in particular Wykeham mention that production of Henry the fifth which was made clear that the decision to go to war was entirely based on a dodgy dossier of the kind that was oh so familiar and oh so painful in our immediate concerns with what was happening here just as last year's time and of Athens was firmly based on awareness not only of the Occupy movement but also of Enron and what it means for hyper capitalism to implode within in fraudulent ways the cost to everybody about it and to in his hamlet of the previous year in which Elsinore was a castle of surveillance and security a political reading of the play which for me has never been bettered alongside that kind of work for Nick Hytner has also gone his own connection with a particular kind of recent new play and I'm thinking of the work of Alan Bennett with whom there has been such a striking partnership in his introduction to the descriptive of people Alan Bennett says that he quotes Ellen Terry describing theatre as hard work and then goes on to say but of course she was never in the rehearsal room with Nick Hytner what underpins Nick's rehearsal world his hard work and a spirit of fun that is itself the basis for discovery and the discovery is always tightly pinned to a profound understanding of the play itself over and over again Nick shows us moments in the plays that we've forgotten about that we haven't understood that we haven't followed through on because of that concern of the detail at the moment he's a week into rehearsals for a fellow a production starring two actors who have worked with him in major roles before Rory Kinnear is his Iago and was Hamlet Adrian Lester is a fellow and was Henry the fifth but it's not a fellow that gives him the title of today's lecture but instead Hamlet stand and unfold yourself thank you so much PJ it's an honor and a pleasure to give this lecture named for one of the very great experience Stanley wells and it gives me just as much delight that the invitation came from Peter Holland who taught me much of what I know about the Elizabethan theatre and who continues to be a stimulating and provocative source of ideas whenever I put Shakespeare's plays on the stage I'm hoping this lecture goes better than the Cambridge tutorial I remember better I hope than HIDA even thirty-five years later the subject of the tutorial was the changeling that yurid collaboration between Thomas Middleton and William Rowley the problem was straightforward I'd been out late the night before and I hadn't read the play there were two under there were two other undergraduates present who had strong opinions about it and at some point it became necessary for me to have strong opinions too so I took a deep breath and had some I've gone blank on what they were but I have now read the play and I've seen it and suffered through those interminable madhouse scene several times too often and I'd like to say that I was right first time staying out late and not reading the play was practical criticism of rare perspicacity 20 odd years before the changelings saw the light of day i rather better play opened at the Globe Theatre by another of Middleton's collaborators two centuries meet on the battlements of Elsinore in the dead of night one of them is cold the other is gate who's there shouts one to the other it's what centuries ask each other but these two don't know the half of it it turns out to be a very big question indeed and Hamlet spends much of the play grappling with it Francisco the second century duck sit nay answer me stand and unfold yourself in other words never mind who's there show me who you are stand and unfold yourself you might say is what Hamlet wants from everyone around him it's what he wants from himself he spends the whole place struggling with himself trying to unfold himself to himself he tries in vain to persuade those around him his mother his girlfriend his friends even the ghost of his father to reveal themselves fully to him it's maybe because he fails in that enterprise that he finally launches himself heedlessly into an action that leads to his own death but for those of us involved with the performance of Shakespeare's plays it is the injunction stand and unfold yourself that tells us how to do them in the academy Shakespeare's text can be the be-all and the end-all in the theatre I urge you to be very suspicious of actors or directors who tell you they aim to do just the play or that they found everything in the text on stage the text is only part of the story all plays on the page alike newts are like notes in a musical score they require the participation the participation of the player before they become music to make theatre an actor has to unfold himself to make a personal connection with the text of all playwrights Shakespeare requires the most intense interaction between his characters and those who would act them between his world and our world between his plays and his audience actor director and spectator must all unfold themselves to be receptive to the process that brings these plays alive it's possible to stage Shakespeare on a stage that is naked almost of everything except speech without any of the concrete reality of the world outside the stage and theoretically no filter between play and audience nothing to stop a direct communication of thought and feeling there's a respectable argument for this as far as we know the plays or at least the plays that were initially staged outdoors at the globe was stage with no scenery and the bare minimum of furniture and props it's true that several of the later plays are written for the exclusive indoor theater at Blackfriars and call for a degree of spectacle that would not be out of place to Broadway musical but from what we know of the outdoor theaters there would appear to be impressive precedent for the idea that the plays need nothing more than the actors and the text and that any form of interpreted of intervention between text and audience is some kind of violation I'm not convinced of this and I'm sure you weren't either just for a start I don't think Shakespeare conceives of his characters Sean of the physical reality of the world around them I have stage plays which do exactly that in Racine's fed the detritus of real life is rigorously excluded the French neoclassical theater in self-conscious imitation of the Greek reduce his suffering to its essentials Federer doesn't eat or drink or sit down and she certainly doesn't go off like Shakespeare's Cleopatra to play billiards there is no time for billiards in a world where literally every waking thought is consumed by the need to take your disciplining steps on into your bed and the subsequent need to conceal it from your husband the intensity of the tragic experience requires a single-minded focus on the central action alone nothing else matters in Racine's Greece Shakespeare's Egypt on the other hand is a world where you not only decide to play billiards but you have a maid who doesn't want to play billiards because she has a sore arm and you suggest that you be better off playing billiards with your eunuch indeed all Shakespeare's plays are steeped in the mess of real-life and seemed to mean not to respond well to the kind of staging that he aims to strip them back to their essentials the power even of the great tragedies Springs from their ruthless observation of the ambiguities and indignities of the real world this isn't to say that a literal reflect the real world is the only way of revealing what the place have to say about it is Elsinore for instance less a concrete image of the world than a series of theatrical ideas that are thematically expressive rather than suggestive of a real center of government or royal court and how might an expressive and how my expressionistic Elsinore work how would it unlock what the play has to say about the real world well one of the place chief concerns his human authenticity it's one of Hamlet's obsessions he's possessed by the imporant impossibility of being authentically oneself or of knowing others authentically is it possible to completely unfold yourself or anyone else to even or even sorry is it possible to completely unfold yourself to anyone else or even to yourself what constitutes truthful behavior what indeed is truth Hamlet often thinks about truth by thinking about theater at his mother's wedding he has that within which passeth show show is what his mother and his uncle do they seem he knows not seems he isn't theatrical but later in the play acting becomes more authentic to him than his own behavior the player King weeps real tears for Hecuba tears Hamlet should be shedding for his father and when the players present the murder of Gonzago in front of the king they say something far truer about Denmark than the show put on by Denmark's government so you might start from the undeniable premise that Hamlet happens not in a palace but in a theatre Elsinore is less important in this kind of production than the constant reminder that the play is happening on a stage as Hamlet agonizes over the nature of reality so in the theatre reality might be undermined by imagery suggestive of his internal struggles Hamlet appears as a white-faced clown ofili's a marionette her father pulls her strings I've seen a hamlet where the stage walls themselves dissolved at the touch the director and designer responding to the plays febrile uncertainty about the solidity of objective reality unfolding it through a closely argued series of theatrical coos I'm often thrilled by this kind of show one way of unfolding yourself to the play and unfolding the play to the audience is by treating the stage with a poetic freedom analogous to Shakespeare's verse at its most exploratory there are plays that sink under the weight of too literal a response to the world they purport to represent The Tempest sat on a real desert island it's like Treasure Island without the pirate the late plays in particular gain from an approach that embraces the much explored notion that the theatre itself is an image of the world meanwhile in many of the romantic comedies Shakespeare plays with the idea that the experience of love remakes reality that the lover like the lunatic and the poet shapes the worlds according to the dictates of his own fantasy unfold yourself to a play like A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night and you're very quickly imagining on stage a high fantastical world shaped by fancy and yet the world of Twelfth Night he's also a world of late Tudor gentility a world with a strict domestic hierarchy where fancy is undermined by cakes ale and box hedges much ado about nothing is almost free of fancy always better served by productions as down-to-earth as the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick the least delusional couple in all of Shakespeare and therefore ultimately the happiest and in the end I think political plays the great tragedies in particular always work best when rooted in a coherent world an audience will hear better Hamlet's internal debate about the Africa lat theatrical tea and truth and will experience better his struggles with the idea of events of himself if it experiences with him the world that has brought him to his crisis I want to be immersed in his world with him more than I want to watch a commentary on it what then is his world when was it when did King Lear divide his kingdom 2,000 years ago 400 years ago yesterday how modern is Elsinore and how contemporary is the government of Denmark Hamlet was certainly conceived as an entirely contemporary play it's about a surveillance state a totalitarian monarchy with a highly developed spy network it's a barely disguised image of system under which those who first watch the play lived Elizabeth the first exerted control through an internal security system that must have impinge on everyone who watched its first performance at Elsinore you can't unfold yourself without risking your life everything is observed everything is suspect no social gesture is trustworthy Polonius the spy master sends one of his staff to spy even on his son he forces his daughter to spy on her lover and meanwhile Hamlet's oldest friends are hired by the king to spy on Hamlet Shakespeare's audience knew exactly what the play was talking about many of Shakespeare's colleagues at some time or other found themselves behind bars for saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person at the wrong time his most talented colleague was a spy and was almost certainly murdered because he felt all of his spy master there's an unimpeachable argument for creating on stage a vivid image of the late Elizabethan world from which the play sprang but when I did it at the National in 2010 I felt strongly that to do so would rob a contemporary audience of something that Shakespeare's audience took for granted they came to the theatre as much to watch themselves onstage as they did to watch the downfall of princes greater than themselves Hamlet does not ask ask us to marvel at a strange world but to recognize our own a few of us in London can pretend that we know what it's like to live in a security state but I did very much want to create on stage a world that would in me be immediately and viscera be recognisable as a world where you put your life in danger by saying the wrong thing in Shakespeare's tragedies the personal and the political reflect each other the internal and social lives of the tragic hero are in it strictly linked Hamlet is paralyzed as much by the barrier the state puts in the way of anyone knowing anyone else as he is by his desperate search to know what's going on inside himself so Elsinore at the National resembled a post-soviet Central European dictatorship it wasn't a replica and it wasn't specific about exact location and period in the same way as the play is opportunistic about period and location but although it was a world invented stage it was specific in its detail a baroque palace now the center of a modern security state get it out with the hardware of the security state and inhabited by the kind of people who know what it's like to live in terror of their neighbor the King's personal guard are referred to in the text as Switzer's which sounds satisfyingly like the name of some contemporary tyrants secret police literally they're Swiss mercenaries hired by Claudius and presumably before him by the old king another advantage of the world we created on stage was that it created an immediate reference point for an audience far more familiar with the Eastern European secret police and with late 16th century Swiss mercenaries an audience vividly aware of the dangers of saying the wrong thing in such a world even if unlike their Elizabethan equivalents they don't live in it this matters particularly when Ablett's gets the visiting actors to perform an old play in front of the king about the murder of a Duke by his villainous brother the performance of this play the murder of Gonzago should be fraught with danger I have too often seen it defined by theatrical flummery in the Nationals production everyone on stage was aware of how close to the wind the players were sailing and the players themselves knew what Hamlet was asking them to do James Lorenson as the player King came close to refusing to do it Shakespeare knew from personal experience how dangerously subversive the performance of an old play could be on the eve of the Earl of Essex's attempted coup against Elizabeth the first the rebels persuaded Shakespeare's company to put on a special performance of Richard the second a play about a successful rebellion against the reigning monarch at the globe the essex rebellion wasn't a success as its lost his head and the Lord Chamberlain's men were an extremely hot water they only narrowly escaped jail I was reminded of this only a couple of months ago when I was talking to a Hungarian colleague who runs a theater in Budapest Hungary is currently in under the control of a regime that is proto-fascist and violently anti-semitic one of my colleagues friends has been removed from his post at a neighbouring theatre simply for being Jewish my colleague is afraid to stage plays openly critical of his government because if he did so he could be closed so he staged a series of productions whose messages are coded he produced Molly as the misanthrope last year as a contemporary play about the consequences of speaking the truth to totalitarian power and his defense was that he was staging a play about the life of a writer at the quarterly xiv more recently he staged a contemporary polish play called our class which we produced at the National a couple of years ago it's a furious denunciation of pre and post war polish anti-semitism but Budapest audiences got the point this is the kind of theater that Shakespeare was writing a bagged at Elsinore the entire court must know what this suspiciously timely revival of the murder of Gonzago is suggesting can there be anyone at Elsinore who actually believes that the old king was killed by a snake bite in the orchard they must all know or at least strongly suspect what happened to the old King Hamlet even if Donovan a dead talk about it even now in the 21st century we suspect foul play when a dictator dies suddenly so Hamlet turns to the theatre to say something too dangerous to be said out loud and the reason he Commission's the players to revive the murder of Gonzago is to catch the conscience of the king he's not expecting his audience to watch the play in a spirit of critical detachment the purpose of playing he tells that actors is to hold as twere the mirror up to nature show the audience the truth about yourselves themselves their world unfold yourself I'm pretty sure he expected his audience to assume that the players who never again appear after Claudius tops the performance to end up in jail certainly how we did at the National these plays were raw and immediate when they first hit the stage they were all contemporary plays even when they were set in ancient Rome and my experience is that they become visceral viscerally alive when treated even now as contemporary texts I've never made it a rule Leonato's large inhospitable household in much ado about nothing seemed to me to be no less immediate located in 16th century Sicily than it would have been set anywhere at any time else it helps always that rigor about time and place barely registers amongst conventions of the Elizabethan stage so then the way it moved felt and thought the onstage community in much ado was as much an image of the community it played to in the Olivier theatre as it was an image of Shakespeare's invented synthesis of rural England and small town Sicily but it's no accident that my least successful certainly my least interesting production at the national was of the two parts of Henry the fourth I was overawed perhaps by their extraordinarily complete picture of England in the throes of Civil War that politically sophisticated wonderfully rich in detail they range from council chamber to battlefield to the Inns of East Jeep to the orchards of Gloucestershire from the King of England to Francis the potboy and at their centre is a relationship which would exist truthfully in almost any context the son of a powerful man resentful of his obligations and only too aware of his father's disappointment in him find solace and something like love in the company of a hard-drinking old reprobate who gives him license to behave exactly as he wants to behave but I felt that to set a play about civil war in contemporary Britain would say nothing interesting about us now or about the reign of Henry the fourth or about later that's beef in England the plays are driven by a specifically Tudor terror of a return to the bloody chaos of the Wars of the Roses Henry the fourth story is fuelled by the particular uncertainty of a regicide about whether he passes his guilt on to his son you might argue that you'd get more value from the low life scenes if they were set in the pubs and clubs of contemporary London but I'd probably argue in return that a modern audience would see nothing particularly transgressive about a young Prince of Wales knocking about the streets of London with a bunch of troublemakers you might also argue that the plays are entirely Elizabethan in texture and behavioral detail even if they're ostensibly concerned with late medieval history and I'd agree indeed we created a stage world that was rooted in Elizabethan England which is of course 200 years later than the period the play refers to though I'm not sure how many people noticed and I'm not sure that I gave a superb company of actors are provocative enough context I was determined not to mess for instance with those great scenes in Gloucestershire which were quite freely played by Michael Gambon as Falstaff and John Ward is shallow but they're tougher and less sentimental than I realized and could have fitted quite happily into less bland a production one that might in style have taken more from the extraordinary freedom with which Shakespeare offers his can comment Ariane Tudor politics unfolding myself to these plays I should have confronted their contradictions and looked past the historical chronicle theatrically they have more of the imaginative wildness of the comedies than I'd registered Henry the fifth was a different matter entirely at the National in the spring of 2003 it opened a matter of weeks after the invasion of Iraq it would have been perverse not to play it as a contemporary text the production wasn't about to the Iraq war it remained a play about the victor of arjen core but in performance it seemed constantly to throw light on current preoccupations a striking example from the start of the play which Peters already alluded to Henry plans the invasion of France an action recommended in only the fourth part - by his father too busy giddy Minds with foreign quarrels it's a cynical exercise in domestic politics to unite the nation by taking it to war but he needs rock-solid justification in law the Archbishop of Canterbury obliges the king before the council by providing him at great length with an analysis of the ancient salic law and it's applicability to the French succession which rather dubiously he claims allows the King to invade France besides their writers say King Pepin which deposed childerik deposed children did as air general being descended of bliss felt which was the daughter of King Clough fair make claim entitled the crown of France Hugh Capet also who usurped the crown of Charles that you could Lawrence old male heir of the truline and stock of Charles the great conveyed himself as the heir to the lady linger and so on ad infinitum in the Nationals production as he spoke the archbishop had an elaborately produced dossier around a modern cabinet table and the scene made concrete a sense of historical continuity war leaders have always gone to great trouble to massage the case for war maybe the same point could have been made at the scene been staged as a medieval council of war but the big game was an immediacy and clarity the audience force-fed by news media on UN resolutions and dodgy dossiers caught on instantly and listened intently to the sinuous substance of the Archbishop's argument the questions begged by it's bizarre can sort contortions seemed both rooted in history and utterly at the moment is this interpretation of international law true is it relevant is it right a long speech that is often played purely for Laughs sucked the audience right in a large portion of the play turned out to be about presentation the Kings rhetoric always in the service of spinning first the build-up to the war then the initial initially perilous progress of the campaign then its aftermath we gained a vivid impression that Shakespeare was writing for us now we lost of course it's corollary the indisputable truth that Shakespeare was writing for his own audience then the source of so much of the most exciting work that has come out of the Academy in recent years this was in 2003 a serious loss but not a permanent one there's always next time with talking of Athens next time generally seems to mean next time there's a financial crisis at the national last year I think many in our audience discovered for the first time this bitter portrait of a world consumed by greed and a matter of a man whose estimation of his own worth is purely financial it would have taken a theatrical imagination less opportunistic than mine not to recognize in time and as many other directors have recognized a mirror of our own world and the authorial participation of Thomas Middleton a tick in the first satirical half of the play made its presentation as a contemporary city comedy all the more effective the second half of the play is much stranger and much less literal the High Definition satiric detail of the first half skewers the world of money and power it's about a man who spends more than he has finds himself buried under a mountain of debt and he's done over by a bunch of unscrupulous bankers politicians and their disgusting hangers-on in the arts world the second half is more experimental and more Shakespearean and my job was to translate the imagery of the modern city into something that would allow sanam and Russell Beale to unfold his own internal landscape the suggestion of an urban wasteland left behind maybe by a failed building development echoed time and spiritual wasteland but it left all the work to the actor who was working with an unfinished text that required more than his personal response this one required bending to his will it's never true of a play any play but all the answers are available in the text it isn't how plays work novels can aspire to provide everything you need to know but plays like musical scores are instructions for performance the life in them only dim did it dimly detectable until they're performed Shakespeare wrote scripts for his fellow Company members many of his scripts Henry the fifth and Hamlet to name only two were improved versions of scripts by other playwrights already in the company's repertoire nowadays we'd call Shakespearean to do the rewrites certainly he seemed to care nothing for the publication of his scripts so maybe it shouldn't be surprised that he leaves so much to his actors and that one of the remarkable features of his plays is how suggestive they are of lives that vibrate well outside the confines of the action even Shakespeare's great parts ask more questions and they answer and require an actor to fill in fascinating gaps left quite deliberately his smaller parts however striking often leave the actor almost all the work of creating a character with a real biography working on Hamlet Rory Kinnear and I repeatedly find that found that Shakespeare simply left stuff out sup that would have made the play last as long as war and peace if he put it in this was initially frustrating what for instance are we supposed to think has really gone on between Hamlet and Ophelia before the play starts things have gone on his plane from the pile of letters she refers to him I did love you once he says though he never says why stop loving her and I've seen this done so sadhana CLE that it's impossible to believe and a couple of lines later he says I loved you not which doesn't make it any easier to know whether he did although it's the kind of contradiction lovers go in for in any event it feels like there's a missing scene a scene near the start of the play for Hamlet and Ophelia that allows you to experience how they are with each other before things start to go wrong you don't see them together in two he's apparently mad but the genius of the play as opposed to say war and peace is that it is suggestive of multitudes as much as it contains them a good Hamlet will unavoidably reveal himself as much as he reveals Hamlet and it is in the combination of the two that the text comes alive as it happens in the way he said I did love you once Rory Kinnear made you believe that they were profoundly devoted to each other that he was heartbroken maybe by his own mistrust of her that and that he pushed her away he didn't need the missing scene in five words he told you what would have taken Tolstoy in his chosen medium the novel four chapters the play text in other words forces an actor to ask questions which he answers through the way he delivers it what did Hamlet feel for a philia what does he feel now what does he want from her what within himself and in Denmark makes it impossible for him to trust himself or trust her or the world around him a plays meaning its conferred on it by the act of playing it so Shakespeare's texts require an actor always to consider what he's not in them as much as what ease and approached without preconceptions they also turn out to be not entirely trustworthy about what's actually there actors should never entirely trust what their current characters say about themselves to other characters nor what other characters say about them ambiguity and contradiction a Shakespearean hallmarks although Hamlet is for the most part painfully honest about himself as we've seen he contradicts himself about whether he loved a failure or not staged tradition as it that he adored his father and this textual evidence for it here's what Hamlet says about him he was a man take him for all in all I shall not look upon his like again but one of the most striking things about the scene between Hamlet and his father's ghost is that the ghost utters not one affectionate word toward his son the old King is consumed entirely with his own situation which I suppose is understandable he's only recently been murdered by his brother and is now obliged to watch from purgatory as the same brother Betsy's wife under which circumstances we might all of us find ourselves obsessed by thoughts of revenge but the absence of anything recognizable as a bond between father and son led us to examine the whole nature of their relationship we know that the old king was a brutal warrior we know that Hamlet is a thirty year old graduate student we've been absent from his father's board for many years they've little in common and it is the gulf between them more than the bond between them that consumes young Hamlet and makes it impossible for him to take immediate action in response to the ghosts demand for revenge sometimes in rehearsal you notice that the text doesn't necessarily support what you assumed to be centuries of performance practice in the scene between Hamlet and his mother Gertrude at the height of their impassioned argument with each other the ghost reappears to remind Hamlet not to forget what he's been told to do alas he's mad says Gertrude as Hamlet struggles to control himself whereon do look she asks apparently unable to see what Hamlet sees but when you think about it you're forced to wonder why Gertrude can't see the ghost everyone else he comes across him sees him perfectly clearly Horatio sees him even the centuries on the battlements see him this ghost doesn't seem to list invisibility amongst his many undoubted talents which led us to ask is it possible that Gertrude does see the ghost but cannot bring herself to admit to Hamlet that she can see him and the answer is every single line of the scene works just as well if Gertrude's lying and once the actress playing Gertrude has decided that she's lying she has to ask herself why she's lying and whether she's a habitual liar there are good answers to both questions she's lying because even if she wasn't complicit in the murder of her husband she knows exactly what happened and like most of the rest of the court she knows she's married the murderer may be like the Gertrude in John Updike's novel she betrayed her husband with Claudius long before the murder maybe her whole story in the play is underpinned by a consuming guilt about what she's done or at least has allowed to happen in any event it was electrifying to watch Clare Higgins as Gertrude cover up her horror at the sight of her husband's ghost and continue to talk to her son as if she'd seen nothing for those who knew the play it was an opportunity to watch it as if they've never seen it before although there were a few inevitably who had seen it before as Clare turned out not to be the first Gertrude to see the ghost another lesson there are few ideas about Shakespeare that somebody hasn't already had Peter Holland has been one of the pioneers of a way of writing about Shakespeare that acknowledges that many of his most astute analysts have been actors Simon Russell Beale is fond of describing actors as three-dimensional literate it's fun of describing acting as three-dimensional literary criticism and in my personal experience the most mind-expanding insights into Shakespeare have come from actors in the rehearsal room usually without the long introductory preamble with which directors generally preface even the most banal of suggestions many directors can barely ask an actor to move to the left without writing an essay about it but actors just get on with it one day in rehearsal without warning David Calder who played Polonius of a national approached the end of his speech of advice to Lear teased and flinched he seemed to drive and then under the heavy weight of what felt like deep personal shame he said this above all to thine own self be true and it will follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man from the heart like many or even most fathers he wants his son not to make his own mistakes mired in a corrupt Court he like everyone else is incapable of dealing truthfully with others and of being true to himself and David called as Polonius knew it it would be equally plausible to present the Polonius of tradition a man incapable of self knowledge pups puffed up with self regard but I was electrified by David's illumination of three lines worn thin by their relentless repetition out of context usually by public liars wishing to burnish their credentials as truth tellers I knew immediately that the colder Polonius had helped Claudius assassinate the old king and was tortured by his own treachery I started to think that the old king was probably a disaster for Denmark and that like Richard the second he had to go minutes later we were wondering whether barrier had done away with Stalin this I think was the real Shakespeare an actor who provides for other actors an infinite infinite myriad of ways of telling his stories and of being his characters his intuitive openness to interpretation is mistaken for complexity his relish for ambiguity is taken as a challenge to those who would pin him down but they are functions of his calling he writes plays this is not to deny that his texts are often dauntingly complex I can't be alone in finding that almost invariably in performance there are passages that fly straight over my head in fact I'm going to admit but I hardly ever go to a performance of one of Shakespeare's plays without experiencing blind panic during the first five minutes I sit there thinking I have no idea what these people are talking about and I'm the director of the National Theatre it's worth saying therefore that a huge amount of our work in rehearsal goes into achieving the maximum amount of clarity what is tendentious Lee called versed speaking seems to me properly to involve not so much the kind of acting that draws attention to the boundless felicities of the text as a commitment to unfolding it comprehensively the actors I value most are those who speak Shakespeare as if it's their first language they're aware of the rhetorical and rhythmic substructure of the text but they're suspicious of those who would have them reveal it for its own sake but for all the craft and talent of the best actors they're undoubtedly our occasions when in the theatre most of the audience don't understand what's being said sometimes it's deliberate Leontes stops making sense to the audience when he stops making sense to himself more often it's because the passage of 400 years have taken a toll on the immediacy of the language of late this has led me more and more to think that to be true to Shakespeare you have to confront the incomprehensible stuffs head-on by cutting it or an occasion by rewriting it when Hamlet he is for the first time about the appearance of his father's ghost he says my father's spirits my father's spirit and arms I dodged some foul play in fact he doesn't doubt foul play at all as you all know because the world has changed meaning he fears foul play he thinks foul play was involved so the lead line means almost exactly the opposite of what a modern audience would hear to say what Shakespeare wrote would be to betray what he wanted to say so I'd add some foul play became I fear some foul play how many precious seconds in a performance of Othello would it take most of the audience to understand Iago's plan to cause the mutiny of the Cypriot soldiers whose qualification shall come into no true taste again but by the displ anting of Cassio more seconds than they have available to work out that he means that the Cypriots will not be pacified again but by the dis planting of Cassio because they want to be ready for the next line on the next so why can't the Iago say what he needs and to those from the Academy who might flinch I say why should 1,100 out of eleven hundred and thirty people who will come every night to the Olivier theater to see a fellow be left with the entirely misleading impressions that Amelia wants to unpick the Umbra embroidery from Desdemona's handkerchief before handing it over to Yago why without the benefit of footnotes should they know that I'll have the work turn out and give it to ya' go means she'll have the work copied and give the copy to Yago I've been arguing that Shakespeare's plays are scores for performance but sometimes to play the notes he wrote is to play the wrong notes and hum however many ways there are of playing Amelia however terrified she may be of her abusive husband she should never be the kind of friend who would willingly steal Desdemona's handkerchief with no intention of returning it nor the kind of Nutter who'd waste her time on picking it's embroidery so at the National she will say I'll have the work copied and give it yoga with Timon of Athens I went further because the play is quite plainly an unfinished draft probably never performed full of good things but in some important respects not remotely good enough out went the entire scene in the first half of the play when our sabai ADIZ leaves athens in high dudgeon that the Senate's refusal to grant mercy to his unnamed friend sentenced to death for an unnamed crime it's a poorly written scene the copper it was probably Middleton which begs more questions than the answers about Alcibiades motives and was honestly better a place with the suggestion staged without additional text that his rebellion is rooted in a highly contemporary disgust at the financial elite that turns on time and when he goes bust even worse is the visit by the Athenian senators to Timon in his Waste Land to ask him to return to Athens to lead their army ten minutes before the end of the play with no prior warning we're asked to believe that its protagonist is a military genius this is truly unforgivable dramaturgy and if it arrived on my desk from a living playwright I'd send it straight back with a frosty suggestion that it needed more work in the absence of a living playwright I did the work myself and decided the Senators should want what everybody else who visits time and wants his money in their case to finance the defense of Athens from the rebels my contribution wasn't great and it won't trouble the compilers of the oxford dictionary of quotations but the scene wasn't improvement on the one that made it into the first folio I don't want to overdo this most of the time the original text does just fine but it's all of it but it's all a bit provisional in the sense that it's waiting to be completed by its actors and the best of those actors are those who reveal the text by revealing themselves Shakespeare more than any other playwright exposes one of the most persistent misapprehensions about acting that it should always involve the disappearance of the actor behind the mask of an assumed character that the best actors are chameleons I'm much more interested in actors who imagine whose imaginations are large enough to subsume the characters they play into themselves and in the way he writes for actors I think Shakespeare is asking for them salad for the same I'm only a few days into rehearsals for a fellow with two superb actors Adrian Lester Henry the fifth and Othello as a fellow and Rory Kinnear who was Hamlet as Iago Adrian may be the first to fellow who's come to the part by a Henry the fifth Hamlet which he played for Peter Brooke and Rosalind which he played quite beautifully in Declan Donnellan famous all-male production neither of these actors have ever been tricksters they reveal the men and women they play more through imaginative empathy than through disguising themselves so here's one final observation from the second week of rehearsals it's often been noted that Iago's motiveless malignancy in fact comes in his soliloquies with a myriad of motives as if he himself has difficulty locating the source of his own depravity what Shakespeare has done of course is to pay his fellow actor the compliment of trusting him to complete Iago for himself he requires him to be large enough in his imaginative and empathetic capacities to track us psychologically and emotionally plausible path through the play he provides the actor with a solid enough starting point Iago seems to be consumed with fury promotion of Cassio's angry enough to want to ruin a fellow's wedding night but thereafter the play works overtime not to lock Iago downs scene-by-scene the play asks the actor to imagine what it's like to be Yago to unfold himself 2-yard say the actor takes the diagnostic approach say he identifies in Iago a specific personality disorder and defines his cunning and callousness as symptoms of psychopathy and then disguises himself as a psychopath this I think would distance the actor from the role he'd end up as many have ended up presenting a case study which can degenerate too easily into a series of behavioral tics but an actor can allow himself to be surprised by what happens to Yaga and imagines scene-by-scene what it would be like to be a man in the situation with Iago seen confronting the stuff that's happening to him a man who has perfectly good reasons to be what he is in that one scene one who isn't fully in control of what happens next as none of us are to whom the action of the play occurs spontaneously as life happens to all of us something far more striking than a case study of a repressed homosexual narcissistic psychopath or whatever may emerge the audience might be invited not to observe a disordered alien but to imagine what it would be like to be Iago so consumed by hatred and envy that he allows them to run out of control the desire of literary critics over four centuries to solve Iago as if he were a puzzle seems to me to be missing the point the solution is the actor the playwright writes from the premise that the doct the dots can't be joined on the page and writes with the confidence of an actor who knows that if they're any good his colleagues will do the rest of the job for him stand and unfold yourself says the century at the beginning of Hamlet and if the play demonstrates anything it is that Shakespeare leaves far too much out of the play for anyone to be able to see the fully unfolded Hamlet on the page but in the theatre you're seeing much more you're seeing what Shakespeare intended his words in the of an unfolded actor he knew what he was doing and what he knew was that he had no idea who Hamlet or Iago or Cleopatra or even Frances the pop boy and mistress over on the board we're going to turn out to be I think honestly I wouldn't know enough of the actors who who died before I started going to the theater and I think the point I'm making is not so much that actors make literary critics in the sense that they are good writers literally as I said you know there's there's thrilling work come out of the Academy particularly in the last 20 20 years and I think particularly the work that roots Shakespeare in the world he lived in and in the theater he worked for the point I'm trying to make is that actors by the way they embody the characters are often insightful in a way that it's quite difficult to write about to analyze although Peter is one of the literary critics who who has achieved a new way of looking at Shakespeare through the way he's been performed quite often it's not so much that actors it seems to me come up with ideas about Shakespeare that then cannot be ignored but what they certainly do is they tell you how Shakespeare is working as a contemporary playwright era by era or fellow is such a good example of this I don't know what Olivier's of heller was like on stage I only know what it was like what it is like on film and the answer is or almost nowadays I'm impossible to watch I don't know how the great 19th century of fellows said each line but I do know from the way they were described and from the way even theater critics wrote about their performances but they were that they were telling their audience and in retrospect telling us what our fellows seemed to be fifty or a hundred years ago and one of the things it seemed to be was a story about an African general who struggles under a thin veneer of Western civilization of assumed Western civilization to contain his essential barbarism and under the pressure of of yoga's machinations he reverts to something essentially barbaric African and chaotic now that seems not only wrong it seems positively offensive and Adrian Lester he won't want to be writing an essay about a fellow but in the way he performs a fellow he is as it were bearing witness to what a fellow is to a preeminent British actor of his generation who happens to be black and it was Adrian's strong intuition long before we started working on it that the play really doesn't have that much to do with race it's important that a fellow's black it's said so it is it is his his his Moorish origins are referred to a lot but they're never referred to by the establishment as anything to be much bothered about to compare the way Venice in Othello talks about off fellow to the way Venice in the Merchant of Venice talks about you can see they had a lot of problems with Jewishness and really no problems at all with a fellow being black it doesn't seem to be that big a deal those who make racist comments in the play that do so because they have plenty of other reasons to dislike a fellow or or wish to do him harm it matters to our fellow he is an outsider that's probably why the story appealed to to Shakespeare as an outsider he is coming to Venice to command to the army to Cyprus as someone largely self-constructed but what it isn't is a play about about essential African barbarism now it must have seemed to be that in the 1850s and that's what their actors were telling them although I suspect that IRA Aldridge the great african-american actor about whom there was recently a wonderful play in Kilburn didn't think that so it is what I'm saying through act through actors that we discover what Shakespeare means to us now and I'm not even saying that and I'm certainly not saying that they were once wrong and now we're right I'm saying that what was true once is not true anymore and what is true now what would not have been true then and the reason is because as plays these great works don't have one meaning they're script that half of the meaning is in how they're performed and how they're said and to come back to my final point Shakespeare was an actor he knew he knew what he was doing he was writing for other actors and as I also said knows is so often pointed out he didn't think he was writing literature he do you he didn't he took no care for the publication of these things at all none at all well I think it's the question is do I as a stage director what do I think about Shakespeare in the cinema I think it's tricky but my goodness I think there's been some really good films I think I think it's difficult because the way cinema has developed it needn't have developed this way but it is largely its it largely aspires to reflect something much more concerned with the literal truth than the theater has ever aspired or the theater has it has turned out not to aspire to reflect so the first thing a film director it seems to me has to do is to perform a very difficult trick which is to make it seem that there is no other way for these people to be talking than the way they do talk so the cinema director has to create something like a realistic something like a coherent world and you know remember that a room on a stage is always a metaphor for something else whereas a room in a film with a camera in it is just a room so it's hard to speak blank verse it's hard even harder I think to speak Shakespeare's prose the fascinating thing is the most successful Shakespeare film I've seen in the last ten year the two most successful shakes films I've seen the last 10 years both of them treated him as a contemporary playwright the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet and the ray Fiennes Coriolanus in the Ray I still don't know how Rafe pulled this trick off but in the ray Fiennes Coriolanus within five minutes it did it felt like they were speaking in exactly the way those people in the middle of that Civil War some we're not very far away sometime not very long ago would have spoken it was done with such daring and panache the way it was shot the way it was cut the whole grammar of it made sense of the fact that they were speaking the way they were speaking and the the the the caste wasn't you know a really kind of out there amalgam of great experience she experienced like Rafe himself and Brian Cox and people who haven't particularly done Shakespeare before a torrent even speak English as a first language that really worked I think the more reverent and more pompous the Shakespeare films are the the less successful they are but Ken Branagh Henry v I thought was absolutely wonderful absolutely wonderful but so I think it's up to the director I couldn't agree more about the interaction between the actor and the words this is why we want to always you the place where you want to go and see different actors playing these great roast ivan again it's also of course why the forces of past go out of date it's why the film with all the recorded performances of the past I don't quite agree with you about Olivier the Olivier in Othello I saw it that's all that film recently and beforehand I said it's a bad film and at the end of it I said it's a bloody good book because it was such an exciting before when such a physical forms anyhow that's slightly by the way I'm very of course what you say about substitute substitution substituting words occasionally it's not new I mean Peter Brock did it when King John when the Commodities feature example there was a production at the National long ago with Robert students Maggie Smith when Robert Graves rewrote the text in fact what partly rewrote the decks but then reverted is to the original Shakespeare off when they got back home city but the thing I'm most interested in is the loss as far as a new script that Ted Hughes is said to have written for Peter Brooks home of Lea I'm told that Peter Brook commissioned a rewriting of the play in modern verse by Ted you that would have been a wonderful thing to have you see that you've been talking about all minor substitutions of details of the text what it would be wonderful to be have would be a genuine translation into modern English and I mean translation in the sense that say AGID translated Hamlet or the Schlegel text not just a paraphrase which is all too easy a lot too simplistic to do but if we could get a really great writer of our own time to tackle shaker and try to convey the complexity of the Shakespearean not just to simplify it but to convey the complexity that would be worth having and I'm still here because crusade to try to find Ted Hughes's scripts okay Willie death I'd love to I'd love to retake easy script King Lear listen I mean I yes it's work Shakespeare is the glory and the curse of the British classical theatre it is of course predominantly the glory it is no accident that when Shakespeare in translation arrives in London it seems very often so much freer so much wilder so much more exciting than the homegrown product mats because they can translate those plays are fresh every time and it I think maybe maybe it's our luck that we can do the same with Chekhov but Madhvi him I agree with you Sam it would be a bold poet who had a go I think the reason I mean on the I was I was want I was obviously being slightly tendentious about about the rewriting issue and others particularly major issue and I don't think it's particularly controversial but I will tell you this I think not Shakespeare but there are parts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean repertoire which I'm going to be undoable quite see I kind of I'm doing The Alchemist not to particularly difficult play a few years ago we I thought we'd um we've been quite interventionist particularly in the first notoriously hard fifteen minutes and still I found that the difficulty of communicating the play to the audience with with Simon Russell Beale Alex Jennings at Lesley Manville for goodness sake they really know how to make that stuff how to make early one English sing they really know how to make it comprehensible and he written yeah but the firt the first scene is those three I mean the Everest and obviously it was quite a lot of people gave up they stopped listening and look what you find always it even in Shakespeare is if you give up within five or ten minutes you never tune back in and one of the things that you have to do if you're acting it now is to make sure that you get them over the hump at the first place yeah I think there are a lot of people who gave up on Johnson obviously Shakespeare is going to last longer because the way we speak now and the way we'll even speak in two hundred years is so much it is so much out of Shakespeare but and maybe if Johnson had been thought to be the pre-eminent dramatist we'd all took him thinking more like Johnson and Johnson would be easier but I don't know what's gonna happen in in the next hundred years I think those plays are gonna be very very hard to do and apart from repeatedly doing them I don't have a solution watch what you spoke about this mr. Shakespeare's opens ask questions by their own answers what can we do on stage I one British ufi have all admit those moments in rehearsal really where there's a revelatory moments where we're reduce Shakespearean tension that's what he is what it's a great question no you often have them and I would think all probably 99% of the time you're having them in exactly the same way that other actors and directors have had them over the years the most that I find and because we're a solipsistic know those of us who work in the theatre the bit the times when you really thrilled is when he is when you use you realize there were 16 actors in this company and he knew who he was writing for and the reason that these four lines are here is so that someone can run round the button come on again or somebody else just the trivial stuff like that where you feel across 400 years that you're in the same job although of course you know nobody had my job 400 years you need me fine but you didn't mean it the directors we're very very recent invention total experience but but to feel that actors are conning the lines doing the same job discovering the same stuff not necessarily doing it in the same way you sir you get such a strong sense of of continuity can I finish by just telling one story which isn't gonna feel like it's about Shakespeare at all um but it will maybe we'll turn out to be because it's an illustration of something I once heard peterhall say which I thought sentimental at the time which is that he knew how to do shake through because he learned it from Edith Evans and Edith Evans had learnt it from pole and pole and learning from somebody else and Peter quite solemnly takes it right back to Burbidge I like good try I did not very good not very successful production of importance of being earnest about 15-20 years ago 15 years ago maybe Maggie Smith was Lady Bracknell she was quite brilliant and it should have been wonderful and it's my fault that it wasn't and halfway through rehearsals when it wasn't going brilliantly Maggie decided that the only way to deal with it was to take me thank goodness it wasn't going well because otherwise this wouldn't have happened to take me to lunch with John Gielgud who would tell me how to do it so she put me in a car one Saturday and paribus drove out to John Gilbert's house in parentheses tragically the house now belonging to the Blair's an absolutely beautiful Rococo house in Oxfordshire where Sir John greeted us and my god did he give them world's most wonderful performance and Sir John Gielgud you know famous brick dropper the first thing he said as he opened the door was an idea where you're playing this part you're far too common she hold she screamed with laughter oh he did it I mean he obviously did it quite deliberately and he was and they add lives they adored each other it was just what it was wonderful to watch and mostly what he said it but mostly he was about it the positive being honest what he wanted to talk about he wanted to complain he did endlessly about how Edith Evans had completely hijacked the play that in his first production in the 20s some impeccably undistinguished actress had played Lady Bracknell and and therefore the play remained as Wilde had written it Jack Worthing's play Ernests play and roses a clerk the original Lady Bracknell was also impeccably undistinguished and Edith Edith Evans a totally ruined it by being so good and that the advice he was there for giving Maggie was the less distinguished you are the better which didn't go down but that would but the point about the poisoning is at one point he was talking as he was talking about lose the clerk and and and the original production 15-19 of 1895 I said did you know George Alexander not quite remembering when George Alexander the original earnest original Jack worthy and the actor manager who commissioned the play I'm not remembered when he died oh yes I was about eighteen yes you see I thought it's a whole woman and he then talked for quite a long time about George Alexander and other parts he'd seen George Alexander play and how furious he was about George Alexander cutting Wilde dead and and and being now I think famously vile to him at a wild came out of prison Alexander saw him in Paris I think and that was when I believed peterhall because I thought this man John Gielgud knows how to play wild because he knew the guy who commissioned wild to write the play and if that's and and now more than 100 years after the play was first performed it didn't do me much good because the show still wasn't that great but I was listening I did feel I was I did feel wild was in the room I did feel I was listening to someone who was telling me no but who had the authority to tell me how wild should be and so the most exciting moments I do find in rehearsal are the moments where I do kind of think that step by step by step we're we're we're kind of doing the same job rehearsing in the same way in the same city as those original actors so that's some that I do think did a wonderful review of Keane as Hamlet records a bit of stage business that Keenan does in the end of a nunnery scene and he describes it as the finest commentary that was ever made on Shakespeare the actor runs commentary by doing the performance your productions are full of those kinds of moments thank you you

Channel: Shakespeare at Notre Dame

Views: 9,513

Rating: 4.9384613 out of 5

Keywords: Shakespeare, Nicholas Hytner, Stanley Wells, Peter Holland, Shakespeare at Notre Dame, William Shakespeare (Poet)

Id: 6olzcG2CF0U

Length: 69min 46sec (4186 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2013