REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Kenneth Hurren on plays as directors' playthings
The late Shakespeare had a fairly wretched time on my wideranging beat last week, and only one who had lost his capacity for indignation could fail to feel incensed about it. Three of the deceased's works came up for review — King John at Stratford-upon-Avon, King Lear at Wimbledon and Hamlet at Greenwich — and there is only one of them towards which I can feel even mildly charitable.
This last is King Lear, which is at least well-meaning. It is a production of the Actors' Company, which seems to command the respect, forbearance and even indulgence of most of my confr6res on the grounds that it is run as a sort of actors' commune or co-operative on 'democratic' lines (with a generous subsidy, I need hardly say, from the Arts Council). As they put it themselves, "the workers [i.e. the actors] are in control," and though I cannot myself see that this need necessarily result in more satisfactory entertainment — if it is not too heretical to suggest that the pleasure of the audience is a rather more important aim than the artistic independence of the players — the truth is that their arrangements produced last,week a tolerable treatment of a Shakespeare play, which is more than I am able to say for the other two companies, both at the mercy of amusingly idiosyncratic directors.
The man in charge of King Lear is the unusually conventional David William — presumably hired by the actors to direct their efforts — and he has approached the assignment with what we must nowadays describe as a quite novel respect for the text of the author. That is something, but it is not everything. I am not often wooed from the belief that if a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly, but I am not sure that this monumental work can seem in the least rewarding — and I am altogether certain that its greatness cannot be communicated — if the title role lacks an actor of prodigious tragic depth and almost volcanic power. In this company, Robert Eddison, who plays the hapless king, has been asked to leap cruelly beyond his natural and not inconsiderable range. Eddison has often in the past received too little recognition — he is unquestionably one of the finest lyric actors of our day and an elocutionist with few peers — but for his Lear he is in danger of receiving too much. Lear is a great oak struck by lightning; a willow bent by the wind is not quite the same thing.
The vital aspect of the play lies neither in the story of a rather majestically senile old man with sensationally assorted daughters (two of them of almost total depravity, the other of perfect virtue), nor, of course, in the story of an ancient king who is somehow the victim of wicked politics we can never hope to understand; but rather in the astoundingly complex creation that is Lear, a synoptic force of nature, a towering figure whose words are not so much addressed to the elements as they are part of the elements. The storm is as much within him as about him, but you would not guess it at Wimbledon. This may seem, perhaps, too harsh a judgement, for Eddison is not without majesty and is often moving, but when the heights are attempted but not reached, it would seem to me foolish to accord to aspiration the compliments that are properly reserved for achievement.
Aspiration may well deserve special compliments for itself, though, especially in the light — or in the darkness — of last week's other exhibits, in which it seemed that the desire and intention to offer plays by Shakespeare were miserably subordinate to the curious notions of directors eager to show us their own wilful interpretations. Both took me rather by surprise — even the Hamlet directed by Jonathan Miller, who has not hitherto been renowned for reverence in his treatment of Shakespearian texts.
His Hamlet, however, was completing a trio of plays he has directed at Greenwich, and there had been evidence in the first two — Ghosts and The Seagull — that Miller had acquired a new and laudable respect for dramatists. We were, I fear, misled. It is not that he has taken any inexcusable liberties with the themes of Hamlet, but that he has more or less obliterated them. Belting through the piece in less than three hours, trimming out charactaers and scenes with larkish abandon, he has unfleshed a masterpiece to reveal a skeletal melodrama with no intellectual sinew and little dramatic muscle.
The company, inevitably dispirited, offer colourless performances (the Ghost of Hamlet's father, chattily played by Anthony Nicholls, is arguably the liveliest character on, hand) and it is doubtful whether anyone unfamiliar with the text could divine from the remains of it what precisely are the motives of the principal figures for their odd behaviour. Claudius, as played by Robert Stephens looks a doomed man from the start, never one capable of the villainy that incites Hamlet to vengeance (what his reaction is to the abbreviated play-scene is hard to say, for he has his back to the audience), and dies with shrugging resignation. Gertrude (Irene Worth) and Ophelia (Nicola Pagett) are a passionless pair, neither seeming to share much of a relationship with Hamlet (Peter Eyre), a moody weed given to neurotic and, here, irrelevant soliloquies.
The damaging treatment meted out to King John is both less and more offensive: less, because the play itself is of only minor consequence in the canon; more, because of the peculiar indecency of assaulting Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, where I take it to be the justification for the theatre and its company that they present with reasonably gracious fidelity the works of the man to whom they owe their existence. John Barton, who directs King John, plainly thinks little of Shakespeare's play of that name and has substituted for it an eccentric little hybrid.
Retaining part of the bard's text and filling out the rest of the evening with bits from two other sixteenth-century plays on the same subject (the anonymous King Johan and The Troublesome Reign of King John), plus a certain amount of vivacious pastiche of his own, Barton has produced a sardonic comedy in which he is less concerned with the historical context than with giving us the benefit of his comments on our contemporary political and economic situation, with especial reference to the European involvement. It has to be said that there are some excellent performances — Emrys James's jovially cunning little clown of a king is always diverting, and Sheila Allen, with the advantage of Shakespeare's lines to portray the brief of Constance, makes a memorable impact — but the casual facetiousness of the enterprise is deplorable.
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