Intervals

Pain in the backside

Charles Duff believes sitting still for two-and--half hours is not a rewarding activity here is bad news from Stratford. Julius Caesar is being given without an interval. It is part of a disagreeable new fashion for interval-less Shakespeare. I have forgotten the last time we were allowed to stretch our legs in the middle of Macbeth. Does the R.S.C. management honestly think that sit- ting still for two-and-a-half hours in a 1930s' auditorium is a rewarding activity?

From the new Globe on Bankside, the news is no better. Professor Alan Dessen from America, in the annual Globe lecture on Shakespeare's birthday, argued 'with passion' (according to their newsletter) that all performances should be given without a break, even though it is admitted that their potential punters still have to 'find out what it is like to sit on a wooden bench for hours on end'. Or stand.

The contemporary audience is being made to feel guilty by academics and direc- tors if it becomes uncomfortable. We are told that we do not listen as well as the Elizabethans and Jacobeans; our powers of concentration are wanting. If we fidget or become bored, it is because we have been corrupted by the 20th-century soundbite. Our ancestors, however, with their prodi- gious memories, also had attention-spans that make our own seem like fruit flies.

An unpleasant artistic puritanism is afoot: suggesting that emotional and aes- thetic reward is greater if some kind of endurance test is undergone.

But has such a theory any provenance? I would suggest not.

The progenitor of this idea that an audi- ence, at the turn of the 17th century, lis- tened with rapt and unbroken attention to (presumably) more than two hours traffic of the stage, seems to have been Granville Barker. In one of his vastly influential Pref- aces to Shakespeare, he rather triumphantly fails to fmd a suitable break in the middle of Antony and Cleopatra to place a single inter- val, so he assumed that it must have been originally played with none. But Antony and Cleopatra — like the four great tragedies, for instance — is written in three move- ments, and I submit that in c.1607, there would not have been one interval, but two.

In the British Museum there is a manuscript by Philip Massinger, in his own beautifully clear hand, of his 1631 play, Believe As You List. This manuscript was used as a prompt copy. There are additions by the book-keeper (stage manager), which include pro-lists, and, significantly, shows that there were two 'long' intervals after Acts I and III.

Likewise a stage direction from the prompt copy has crept into the printed text of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the First Folio. It comes after Act III, when Puck has put the quartet of lovers to sleep, and reads; 'They sleepe all the Act', meaning that the four actors remained asleep on stage throughout an interval.

Because the stage could not be cleared, it would seem a fairly clumsy place for a single break (before the previous scene now called Act III Scene i, — would be more obvious,) unless there had already been an earlier pause; which probably came after Act I, as in Massinger's play.

There are other instances: in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (1623), a direction reads; 'In the act-time De Flores hides a naked rapier behind a door.' This time after Act II, which, in this play, is a good place for a first interval.

In the second edition of Marston's The Malcontent (1604) it would seem that when the play transferred from the indoor Black- friars Theatre to the outdoor Globe, addi- tional dialogue was required because there had been so many musical interludes at the former. (The Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, who went to the Blackfriars while in Lon- don in 1602, heard a whole hour of music complete with singing boy, before the play had even begun.) The Jacobean experience of the interval was clearly different from the modern one, when a whole audience deserts an auditori- um for bars and lavatories; but it does appear that then, as now, theatre managers knew that the action of a play needs to be interrupted for the public's physical and mental refreshment — with no need for any loss of dramatic tension if natural hia- tuses were provided by the writer.

None of the West End's late Victorian or Edwardian theatres was designed for an audience to sit still for longer than an hour, as the act-lengths of well made plays from T.W. Robertson to Terence Rattigan testi- fy. And Frank Matcham and W.G.R. Sprague, those theatres' great architects, would surely be most surprised and dis- pleased that it was being expected. After the arrival of gas lights in the early 19th century when, with dimmed auditorium and brightly illuminated stage, an audi- ence's focus was enhanced because its attention was now required, two-and-a-half hours in the middle of a row with little leg- room becanie an uncomfortably long time for anyone to be held captive. So when Sir Peter Hall, in his recent excellent, but nearly uncut, Hamlet, at the Gielgud, ran the first two movements of the play togeth- er and only placed an interval before the third, I for one, sitting in the gods, found that such a long time of unbroken focus was nearly impossible. The emotions slacked off with the effort, and the mind wandered because it became crowded.

Even Richard Wagner, not greatly sensi- tive to his public's comfort at Bum-aching Bayreuth, realised that two-and-a-quarter hours of Das Rheingold was too long with- out a break, and in 1882, one year before his death, authorised Angelo Neumann, whose touring company introduced The Ring to most European capitals, to put an interval before the intermezzo which links the second and third scenes. Covent Garden, please remember.

Anyone who was connected with old- fashioned rep will recall that the bar tak- ings often exceeded those of the box-office. And any director who announced to the management that his production would lack an interval, would have been dis- patched on the first train back to London. Of course I am not saying that the Front of House Manager should have authority over artistic matters; but in these dark days, when nearly every theatre has a deficit, surely such a consideration cannot be dis- missed with complete contempt.

An audience needs time to digest, reflect, discuss, clear its mind and emotions — and yes, to drink and pee as well — dur- ing the course of an afternoon or evening's dramatic entertainment. And for modern directors to decree otherwise is presumptu- ous and puritanical; and, furthermore, is no part of any tradition.