To hell with technology! You can't beat live actors on a real stage
PAUL JOHNSON
Amazing, isn't it, that the London theatre survives at all, let alone that it is the wonder and envy of the world? The theatres are mostly old-fashioned and inconvenient, the seats uncomfortable, the ticket prices outrageous. Getting there (and, in due course, home) is an intractable problem: nowhere to park; taxis now wickedly expensive. Whether to eat before or after is an odious choice, and getting a drink in the interval an undignified struggle. The chances of a rueful disappointment in return for this prodigious effort are high. I was brought up to love the theatre and to act at every opportunity; immense care was taken to teach me elocution, the memorising of verses, and singing; I wrote plays, designed sets and painted scenery. As a young man, in Paris and London, I attended theatres two or three times a week. Now I rarely stir from my home. It requires much bullying and inducement to get me into a theatre seat.
But one consequence of my rare attendance is that I approach the performances with something like the naivety and surprise of a delighted child. I felt this overwhelming and childish pleasure again last week, when I went to see a new production of an old comedy, Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce, at the Aldwych. My eyes never once left the stage. My thoughts were totally absorbed in its absurdities. I am told I laughed monstrously all the way through. Why so?
Barring a few details, the theatre has, physically, changed little since Shakespeare's day, which is why we can construct a replica of the Globe and use it. Four centuries of technological advance have largely passed it by. It is still essentially a directly personal experience, involving actors and audience. In movies and television we are separated from the actors by an army of technicians, an array of complex machinery, thousand of miles and months of processing and fiddling. The result may be, and occasionally is, tremendous. But it is artificial. It is the tinned food of drama, the frozen vegetables of acting, not the real thing with all its raw freshness and unpredictable flavour and tang. To use Hazlitt's favourite term of praise, there is no gusto. Not only is filmed drama shot in brief takes, ruling out emotional continuity and the slow build-up to dramatic climax; I learn from Simon Louvish's new book, Stan and 011ie: The Roots of Comedy (Faber), that Laurel and Hardy were unusual in insisting that their movies be shot consecutively. This was more expensive but they won their case on behalf of their art. Today, the economics of movies would simply have steamrollered their feelings, like the unleashed tractionengine which flattens their house in the last seconds of The Finishing Touch.
A stage actor lives the play in a way impossible for one helping to make television or film, when he may be physically absent during much or most of its recording, and only sees the results after all is irretrievably projected in a finished version. Indeed, I have witnessed a distinguished playwright quiver in horror when he first witnessed what had happened to his script, in a private showing. In the end, no one is really in charge as the juggernaut of technology trundles on, transforming the actors into human gadgets functioning within the machine. Often television and movie actors do not know quite what is going on: theirs not to reason why, theirs but to laugh and cry, as instructed by the director. From first to last, Marilyn Monroe was bewildered by Some Like It Hot, missing its basic plot, let alone its resonances, and concentrating entirely on carrying out Billy Wilder's orders before each brief take.
By contrast, an actor in a stage play is participating in an almost different art. I discovered this myself when doing Hamlet, aged 17. He is on stage almost all the time, and by the dress rehearsal I not only knew my own enormous part but the entire play. I was so absorbed in being Hamlet that it was a positive effort to return each day to my true persona as a schoolboy working for Oxford entrance. The force of a play springs from the huge and specific acts of imagination which are going on all the time, the transfer of being from real to fictive, the upending of life into art. Imagination takes over not only the actors but also the audience, who forget each other, their hard seats, the limitations of the stage and sets — the very theatre in which they sit — and enter wholly into the drama played before them. All are locked together in an imaginative embrace which endures until the final curtain restores reality with a shock.
It is the nature of theatre to make this miracle of imagination possible. The actors are not edited away when not speaking. They are there, only a few feet away, silently participating in the drama, being their parts. You can examine how they hold themselves, watch their facial expressions when others are speaking, study their clothes, feel their tension, penetrate beneath the make-up to the skin beneath, feel with your eyes the validity of the emotions they are imagining. You can test their will as actors to make the play real. Moreover, this is a performance, not a mechanical transmission. Things are slightly different each night. Accidents occur, improvisation becomes essential, each performance is unique, is live. One reason why old movies often live is precisely because they were in part improvised by actors brought up on the live stage. In Way Out West, Laurel and Hardy's finest feature, the two greatest sequences — the stately dance outside the saloon to the tune of 'At the Ball, That's All', and, within it, the singing of 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine' — were never in the script but were inserted because Laurel suddenly insisted. Inconceivable nowadays, of course.
The performance I watched last week brought these points to the fore, and also the sheer professionalism demanded of all in a neatly contrived and staged farce. The set is all one, and uncurtained, three double beds in different houses, differentiated from each other as acting spaces only by lighting. The exactitude of the rehearsing and the degree of skill required to make this entertaining nonsense whizz along without error are something only the London theatre at its best can provide. I felt grateful to all the eight actors and clapped my hardest at the end. But I specially warmed to the girl who plays the key role of Susannah, a monstress of self-absorption and neuroses who, with her equally paranoid husband, provides the dotty machinery which keeps the whole tottering edifice in rapid emotional shudders.
Rose Keegan has an amazing head of long, gold-red hair and a pale face of dazzling majesty. She has been compared to a PreRaphaelite model, and I quite agree that Rossetti would have scrambled off his habitual sofa to paint her. But I see her rather as a character from Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre galere, an eccentric beauty to be ranked alongside the angular-chinned Yves Guibert or La Goulue, with her warm fleshiness and hints of detonations to come. Miss Keegan indeed detonates herself periodically and the screams are powerful enough to bring down any theatrical walls of Jericho. This was a performance neither pure nor simple but extremely complex and, if Shakespeare had slipped into the Aldwych, he would have recognised the art as essentially unchanged from his glorious day.
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