Players of Shakespeare 4: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance (review)

Players of Shakespeare 4: Further essays in Shakespearian performance by players with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Edited by Robert Smallwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. x + 212. $44.95 cloth.

This fourth collection of essays by actors performing for the Royal Shakespeare Company covers productions of eleven plays dating from June 1992 to November 1996. Each essay involves an actor's firsthand account of his or her particular approach to and development of a character. The productions, in order of the essays, are: The Merchant of Venice, Love's Labor's Lost, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, The Winter's Tale, Richard III, Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. Five of the eleven plays mentioned above have not been featured in previous volumes of Players of Shakespeare, and only the character of Richard III has been covered in Volume 3.

In his introduction Robert Smallwood discusses the "whole issue of presenting Shakespeare plays in the modern theatre" and asks, "[How] should one approach the task as director . . . of engaging an audience, sitting in a theatre in the last decade of the twentieth century with events from the third decade of the sixteenth century as dramatized in a play written in the second decade of the seventeenth?" (1). Smallwood gives the reader an excellent overview of each production, providing the reader a "context within which the individual performances were created" (5) and conceptualizations of the various directors.

Smallwood points to Derek Jacobi's essay on Macbeth (a role for which Jacobi "was not, as he says himself . . . , an obvious choice" [17]) and concludes that Jacobi's "account of his confrontation with the part--and of his character's confrontation with evil and with despair--is evidence of how far the imagination and art of the actor can push back the boundaries of expectation" (17). Smallwood's sentence is very confusing. Whose expectations and what boundaries does he mean and in what context? Smallwood seems to suggest that all of the essays in the series are worthy because they illustrate how actors embody naturalistic or realistic characters. I suggest that individually each volume supports a realistic approach to character development, which in turn promotes the RSC's unspoken ethos and agenda, namely, that their productions of the house dramatist--to use Trevor Nunn's phrase--are a measure against which all authorial productions should be judged. Virtually all of the actors who have written for the series subscribe in the main to David Troughton's clearly articulated point of view:

From my experience gained over eleven years on and off that I have spent with the RSC, I have come to the conclusion that my job as an interpreter of Shakespeare is to incorporate any textual observations, such as why a speech is in verse or prose, the reasons for its basic rhythm and meter and the types of words used (especially with regard to their very sound and shape), into the basic foundations of the part one is portraying. Hopefully, then, a character first emerges from the language of the play, serving as the initial key to unlock its various traits. The actor's ultimate aim, then, is to take this technical appraisal into the practical everyday rehearsal situation and create a truly believable human being.

(76-77)

Each actor in Volume 4 unilaterally supports his or her director's working methodology. Christopher Luscomb, in his second season as an RSC actor, writes about his challenge during the 1993 season of finding believable characterizations for Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and Moth in Love's Labor's Lost. Luscomb maintains that both productions "had strong directorial concepts" (19). Character development discussed and examined in the rehearsal process was superseded, however, by Luscomb's own instincts. "The relative success of the productions can mainly be attributed," he writes, "to the fact that the...