Shakespeare on the Modern Stage: The Need for New Approaches

Shakespeare on the Modern Stage: The Need for New Approaches ERIC SALMON • IN A LECTURE DELNERED IN LONDON in May, 1971 to the Society for Theatre Research and published in Theatre Notebook (Spring, 1972) John Russell Brown drew attention to and discussed the fact that originality in the production of Shakespeare's plays has, in the twentieth century, shifted its ground. Whereas formerly the originality that was so much prized by Hazlitt, for example, rested essentially on the actor. and his interpretation of the character, both in that character's individual aspects and in his relation to the sense of the playas a whole, the very word "originality" has now come to mean either a radical "interpretation" of the play through the superimposition from outside of some more or less extraneous thematic idea or else it refers purely to some novelty of physical device in the stage presentation of the play. In neither case does the originality spring from either the text or the actor; in the former case the originator is the director, in the latter it is either the director or the designer. John Russell Brown argues, and with cogency, that what is needed is a return to a manner of Shakespearean production which is actor-orientated rather than director-orientated and in which our major actors return over and over again - as Macklin and Garrick and Kemble and Kean and Macready did - to the playing of the major Shakespearean roles, so that what one got in a performance would be the sensibilities and resonances of the play distilled through a lifetime's experience of the interpretative means. Theoretically this sounds perfect,and in the great moments it has, indeed, produced perfection. And one sympathises with the desire to escape from the narrow dominance by the twentieth-century director of the Shakespeare play when directing means the simultaneous processes of enormously complicating the physical appurtenances while 305 306 ERIC SALMON over-simplifying the senses of the play. On the other hand, it was the emphasis on the major actor in the major role that led to the excesses of those productions of Shakespeare by the great actor-managers of the nineteenth century which provoked the revolt of William Poel, Granville Barker, Edward Gordon Craig and Bernard Shaw and caused the last-named of these to write~ in his Saturday Review dramatic criticism of October 2, 1897, after seeing a new production of Hamlet by Johnston Forbes-Robertson : The story of the play was perfectly intelligible and quite took the attention of the audience off the principal actors at moments. What is the Lyceum coming to? Is it for this that Sir Henry Irving has invented a whole series of original romantic dramas and given the credit of them without a murmur to the immortal bard ... whose works have been no more to him than a word-quarry from which he has hewn and blasted the lines and titles of masterpieces which are really his own? And it was this same emphasis on the performance of the central actor that led to those faSCinating but curiously uneven productions of Sir Donald Wolfit's, in which his own performance (always in the leading part) was usually magnificent but in which the smaller parts varied in competence of playing from barely adequate to absolutely atrocious. Despite these dangers, the theory is an appealing one. Similarly, just as this theory of turning the great plays over to the actors, who are after all the one real essential of the theatrical occasion apart from the audience, is a very beguiling one, so is its opposite - putting the play into the hands of a sensitive director who will look at it as a whole, not as a series of chances for actors, who will try to bring out the complexity and sense and feeling of the whole rather than the bravura of a few isolated moments and who, because he is not involved himself on the stage, can see the gradually-developing work, in rehearsals, from the standpoint of the audience and by exercising discreet judgment and choices, guide the concerted effort to the producing of a cohesive and integrated whole. Both theories have...