Shakespeare, performance and Ian McKellen

Michael Dobson, editor
PERFORMING SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES TODAY
The actor's perspective
144pp. Cambridge University Press. £40.
978 0 521 85509 9

David Bevington
THIS WIDE AND UNIVERSAL THEATER
Shakespeare in performance then and now
242pp. University of Chicago Press. £15 (US $25).
978 0 226 04478 1

Shakespeare
KING LEAR
The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

It sometimes feels that we are all, whether academic or actor, journalist, or journal keeper, increasingly surrounded by our own debris. Biographies and autobiographies, performers’ notes and directors’ memos, production histories and critical volumes confirm our intentions and record our expectations. A paper residue left over when the high tide of performance has come and gone, our books then lie beached on shelves, dry, seemingly lifeless, even if, now and then, we catch within them a glint of authenticity, a piece of writing that because it tries, however desperately, to keep the moment of performance intact is worth preserving in itself.

Michael Dobson’s Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The actor’s perspective extends the long-established Players of Shakepeare series with ten essays in which actors reprise their roles, among them Samuel West on his Hamlet, Simon Russell Beale on his Macbeth, Antony Sher on his Iago, Imogen Stubbs on her Gertrude. David Bevington’s historical overview, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in performance then and now, tries to show how certain situations requiring gestures and actions that are said to be implicit within the Shakespearean text have, over the centuries, been embodied in different ways. Despite the varying aims of the two books there is a telling similarity in their titles: the word “performance” itself, obviously, and the insistence on “today” or “now”. This may tempt the book buyer but is slightly duplicitous. By the time a book comes out, “today” is already “yesterday”, and where, in any case, are “today’s” performances taking place? Both Dobson and Bevington confine themselves predominantly to English and American productions, ignoring the multiculturalism that has generated some of the most powerful of recent Shakespeare experiments. There are even larger questions, too. Some would say that stage and page are fundamentally irreconcilable. When a performance is over, how can anyone possibly recapture in words the anticipation, sometimes prolonged, the satisfactions and the disappointments that accompanied its realization?

How, for instance, should we wish to commemorate Trevor Nunn’s new King Lear for the RSC, whose press night (or press afternoon as it turned out) finally arrived after an unprecedented period of postponement and an extraordinary amount of publicity, contrived or otherwise? Is there a performative kernel that can or should be separated from the many supplementary performances – all those interviews, special features, the countless items of gossip – which have kept the newspapers going during the waiting weeks? And, if so, is that central event primarily to be registered as a milestone in the career of Nunn, the director, of Ian McKellen, the star, or of some other lesser-known but especially memorable actor? Critics and reviewers, whole audiences, will decide for themselves, leaving records which may well not coincide with those of the practitioners. The section on King Lear in Bevington’s book concentrates on the historical placing of Edgar, which has at times been politically crucial but is not an obvious focus of attention for most contemporary spectators, even when the role is as well performed as it is by Ben Meyjes at Stratford.

For Nunn, the director, clearly the practical task must have been a felt need to fill the vast Courtyard theatre with life. Its exceptionally large thrust is an undeniable instance of what Bevington sees as a widespread and prolonged return to a “presentational” stage after the “representational” styles of the nineteenth century. But a talent for orchestration is one of Nunn’s greatest strengths, and this production is, in its early scenes, characteristically and perhaps predictably operatic in its scale, its choice of set (majestic balconies to the rear, clearly destined to crumble) and of costumes (big beards and courtly uniforms for the men, ball gowns for the women). Swelling organ sounds accompany an opening procession as we find ourselves perhaps in the Balkans, certainly sometime before 1914; there will even be quasi-Cossack dancing and religious gestures which, though pagan, have a touch of the ecclesiastical, of the Eastern rite. A little later, Lear’s knights really are riotous; there is more music, shouting and a good deal of laughter. Though the choice of epithet must seem unlikely, initially this is an entertaining Lear.

Writing in Dobson’s collection, David Warner, who has played Lear at Chichester, asserts that “doing Shakespeare my basic priority has always been to make it clear to the audience what is going on. If you do that properly in King Lear, they cry. And it’s only right that they should”. At Stratford, by contrast, it seems that there will never be a wet eye in the house. Yet Nunn’s Lear does always tell us very precisely exactly what is going on. The Stratford actors, following a modern version of what used to be known as the “Cambridge” tradition, respect the verse, invariably breathe in the “right” place, establish a rhythm, make things clear whenever they can. They can even afford little jokes at the expense of Shakespeare’s obscurity. Kent’s “cackling home to Camelot” is met with a baffled “What, art thou mad?”.

In his astute introduction, Dobson reminds us that actors invariably reproduce in their writing some aspect of the role in question. Samuel West’s essay seizes the chance to talk about agnosticism and family relationships; Russell Beale is most at home in soliloquizing mode. One might guess (partly from the public statements he made during the rehearsal period) that, subjectively, for Ian McKellen the problem of Lear is essentially to do with the passing years. Now in his mid-sixties, McKellen has always been skilled at representing different ages. When he first made his name as a classical actor with Richard II and Edward II in 1968 and 1969, he was obliged to make himself look rather older than he actually was. In a single year, 1976, he played at Stratford three men – Romeo, Leontes and Macbeth – who are usually thought of as occupying contrasting points in the male cycle. His first Coriolanus was in 1963, his second in 1984. Since then, he has played an older woman in pantomime and a very old wizard in epic film. But McKellen’s Lear is no Gandalf. Here is a man whose body is not yet fully synchronized with the social demands and conventions expected of the aged – still physically vigorous, needing spectacles only for reading, capable of aiming a mean kidney punch at anyone who gets in his way.

Theatrically speaking, old to young is not like male to female or black to white, those edgy binaries on which theatrical transformations thrive. Age is simply a moving marker on the single continuum to which we all relate, death being the only true universal that we possess. Michael Dobson says that actors sometimes have to persuade us what it might be like to die without, of course, knowing it themselves. In any production of King Lear, death must be continually present though not always visible (even if Nunn, ever the elucidator, does choose to show us the hanging of the Fool). On the cliff at Dover, Gloucester thinks he’s going to die but he doesn’t; Cordelia, notoriously, may or may not expire. McKellen has Lear at the end insisting “Look there! Look there!” while he himself, far gone, is already looking elsewhere. The turning point, if indeed there is an isolated moment, has come much earlier with “Reason not the need”, which McKellen plays with frustrated and waning physicality. When Edgar writhes on his back, his legs raised and apart, “a poor, bare, forked animal”, Lear will peer down at him from above. Nor will he show any embarrassment about exposing his own genitalia.

There is a powerful changeableness about several performances. Frances Barber’s Regan glides easily and sexily across the stage, stopping for moments of vituperation; Cordelia (Romola Garai), initially gauche, is finally commanding (if sometimes inaudible); Edmund (Philip Winchester) is at first more casual than the malevolent force he will become; Gloucester (William Gaunt) may be blind but for much of the time he stays upright nonetheless. Even the Fool, performed by Sylvester McCoy as a spoons-playing old pro who may have picked up a few gags from Ken Dodd, scrapes away his reddish wig to reveal the grey hair beneath. The production, for all its opening grandiosity and its general explicitness, refuses to ignore moral inconsistencies. As with any serious attempt at this inordinate play, human presence must be shown to be indeterminate. And there lies the lesson for those who would write about theatre, of whatever kind. Certain purists say that the pressures of publicity and our hunger for material evidence, for souvenirs, destroy the thing they would preserve – theatre books, reviews even, can only be mementi mori. The endpoint of this argument is that theatre should leave us speechless. But must this be so? Theatre, even as ambitious a production of King Lear as this one, is no more and no less available for capture in words than any other profoundly temporal experience. That is the most convincing justification for all the writing about it.

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John Stokes is Professor on the Department of English at King's College London. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, published this year.

 

Click here to listen to an interview with Trevor Nunn about this production of King Lear.