STRATFORD, '949
By PETER FLEMING
THE last time (I admit this with shame) I visited Stratford- upon-Avon it was to see Mr. Randle Ayrton playing Lear in a building intended for the cinematograph ; I still remember vividly and with pleasure a Mr. Edward Wilkinson's performance as the Fool, less vividly and with some misgiving the jewelled, dog- matic prose which I must, as a result of this expedition, have inflicted upon readers of the Spectator. I thus found myself on Monday entering the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre for the first time. In England we are not used to theatres which stand up on their own like churches and are not embedded among other buildings in a street ; and the edifice at Stratford suggests that our architectural talent lay, in the early 1930's, in other directions. Laved by the gentle Avon, surrounded by lawns dotted with trees, the crouching red-brick outline of the Memorial Theatre suggests a courageous and partially successful attempt to disguise a gasworks as a racquet- court. The interior, where oatmeal-coloured brickwork sets off to perfection the sort of chromium plate " fixings " which used to decorate the cocktail bars of German liners, is singularly tasteless. A vast gulf, twice as wide as the widest orchestra-pit, separates the audience too decisively from the actors, the acoustics are patchy, and the only really satisfactory feature of this grand design is the seating, which is voluptuously comfortable. We shall have to try and do better than this.Bardodrome when we actually build the National Theatre.
Shakespeare, a sturdy figure bearing a strong and unexpected resemblance to Mr. Victor Gollancz, gazed down at us from the safety curtain as we took our places for the second night of Macbeth. The first night had borne out this play's reputation for being unlucky ; the lights had gone wrong, and Miss Wynyard in the sleep- walking scene had had a bad fall whose effects it must have taken great fortitude to ignore. The gremlins, it soon became clear, were still with us ; the lights failed at the main shortly after the curtain had risen, and private enterprise, in the shape of the theatre's own generator, had to come for a scene or two to the rescue of British Electricity. But this was the only hitch in a smooth, imaginative and extremely exciting production. Elizabethan audiences were partial to the supernatural, and took it, both in real life and on the stage, more seriously than we do today. It plays a much more important part in Macbeth than it does in any other of Shakespeare's works (except A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, where only white magic is
deployed) and perhaps that is one of the reasons why modern audiences always seem to find this tragedy less satisfying than the others. Lear's folly, Othello's credulity, Hamlet's indecision are all failings of which—even when they strike us as being overdrawn to suit the author's purposes—we are aware of having a share our- selves ; but superstition, in so far as it is an agent in Macbeth's downfall, strikes no very responsive chord in us, so that in the out- flow of our pity and horror there is a kind of impediment or check, and because one facet of Macbeth's character is now almost wholly alien to us we have become incapable of unconditional surrender to the actor who plays the part.
This may be nonsense ; but it is at least a possible explanation of why Mr. Godfrey Tearle's performance, which is an extremely fine one, just fails to sweep us off our feet in the way that his Antony and his Othello did. Without going as far as Irving, who was so bent on making the central character a coward as well as a villain that he always cut the scene in which the bleeding sergeant reports Macbeth's feats upon the battlefield, Mr. Tearle makes it clear that Macbeth was to put it vulgarly, a thoroughly bad lot, not just a weak, imaginative man with an unscrupulous wife. His stature, his ambition, and his guilt are never in question, the poetry comes out with unforced splendour, yet somehow at the end of the play we are left not quite satisfied. Perhaps—since we cannot remember any- thing that Mr. Tearle could have done better than he did do it—it is a fact that the parts of this character will always prove on the stage to be somehow greater than the whole. Perhaps what we came to see is not there to be seen. I do not know.
Miss Diana Wynyard's Lady Macbeth is a dark, Celtish villainess of great power, Mr. Clement McCallin as Malcolm (though his costume suggests that the Sioux, rather than Siward, are his natural allies) fills a dull part with interest and vitality, and Mr. Harry Andrews gives an account of Macduff which is as moving as it is accomplished. Mr. Anthony Quayle's production puts the play firmly in the early middle ages and keeps it there. The sets and the costumes provide an uncouth, barbaric background, against which the witches, with all the ancient evil that they stand for and the fresh evil they evoke, have as much congruity and compulsion as such external aids can give them. The fights, the murders and the apparitions are managed with great skill, and Mr. Quayle emerges from his trial of strength with a difficult play so creditably that it will be surprising if his next production of it is not a tour de force.
It is a far cry from Dunsinane to Messina, and the contrast between the grim, twilit shambles of Mr. Quayle's Macbeth and the formal, balmy grottos of Mr. Gielgud's Much Ado About Nothing seemed greater even than the inherent contrast between tragedy and comedy. If the acting had been bad, this production would still have lived in the memory by reason of the quite astonishing grace and ingenuity of M. Mariano Andreu's„sets, which are in every way the best I ever remember seeing upon the stage. But the acting, so far from being bad, is very good. To graduate from raillery to tenderness without either appearing inconsistent or being coy about it always seems to me a very difficult task for the actress who plays Beatrice, and Miss Diana Wynyard succeeds in it beautifully. She is well matched by Mr. Quayle's Benedick. This actor has the power to dominate a stage without difficulty, and the sense to use that power more often unobtrusively than not ; his Benedick has in the early scenes that quiet, almost modest self-assurance whose discomfiture is more effective than the downfall of an arrogant bounder. Mr. Leon Quartermaine is very good indeed as Leonato, Mr. Harry Andrews— how well he always wears costume!—again does well as Don Pedro, and Mr. McCallin and Mr. Michael Gwynn take minor, opportunities neatly.
The original of Dogberry came, I rather think, from Grendon in Buckinghamshire ; but only a pedant would quarrel with Mr. George Rose for giving him an Oxfordshire accent, in which he gives such a rich, well-timed and delightful performance that for all I care he can switch with impunity to Lancashire or Somerset. Mr. Gielgud's production is beautifully polished and perceptive, and these two disparate plays have given the new regime at Stratford just the sort of start the season needs.
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