SPECTATRIX
Playing in Lear
By YVONNE MITCHELL WE shocked many of our friends who visited us in our dressing-room at Stratford after a performance of King Lear. They arrived three or four minute's after the final curtain, red-eyed and very often so moved by the play that they found it difficult to speak, and were confronted with two actresses (Rachel Kempson played Regan and I played Cordelia) who were light-hearted, probably laughing, and evidently untouched by the great tragedy in which they had taken part. We tried to readjust ourselves to their mood, but our effort's were obviously "put on," and they left us, we felt, hurt by the insensitivity of actresses.
It was not. I think, insensitivity. We had not got used to the play, nor did we find it less tremendous than when we first met it. But our experience of it had been different from theirs. During 'rehearsals we had all been submerged by the tragedy, and each day we rehearsed we found it increasingly difficult to break away from its powerful mood in time to play The Merchant of Venice or The Taming of the Shrew at night. But playing in King Lear, as distinct from rehearsing it, held us only the length of time that the curtain was up. It is a fact that, when an actor has been able to immerse himself completely in a play, he is released from it the moment it is over. It is only on those hateful nights when he has failed (nearly always for unknown reasons) to submerge himself fully. t4t he is left after the show with odd tags of emotion still unexpressed inside him. On the " good " nights, immediately "The Queen" had been played, a complete and mirthful relaxation would break out behind the scenes. King tear could be seen challenging Kent to a high-kicks contest on the landing, whilst Regan and the Fool slid perilously down the bannisters. The relief and release of having got the tragedy out. of our systems was enormous and childish.
But " good " nights cannot be foretold. My- dresser Eve would say to me before a performance : "Now, do your best." But one's ability to do so is unpredictable. It is not a question of trying. or of doing a thing right," or being word-perfect. It is a question of human reaction to the things that happen; and it is not until a play is in its third act that one can take its pulse. 'By then, on the exhilarating nights. I worild meet an actor on the stairs and he would say with a glint in his eye : "Lovely house—" (which usually meant that actors and audience were reacting together) or, on the nights the magic did not work, I would confess to Eve, " I'm a rotten actress. I can't play it. It's awful."
An audience experiences the same thing. You can go to a play on any evening and be present at the finest performance of it ever given, or you may be unfortunate enough to strike the worst; but neither audience nor actors can tell before the play is in full motion which it will be. First nights are more precarious than any other, I think, because the audience is not there simply to enjoy the play. Some are there to write about it afterwards, some are there anxiously as friends and relatives, some have taken part in the making of it; there are also agents, publicists, gossip writers and fashion- able first-nighters; so it is natural that they should form less of a whole than most. Rachel Kempson's son had a very isolated reaction to King Lear. He said with filial affection to her afterwards : "I know Regan is hated by most people, but I love her."
As Cordelia I appeared in the first scene of the play and not again until two and a half hours had passed. Yet I could do nothing in the interim. During Richard III, when as Lady Anne I had nearly as long a break, I could write letters or read, because the big emotional scene there is the first one; but with most of Cordelia to come, I could only sit and wait without thinking of anything in particular. In the third act Cordelia returns with the French army. I could not play this small, scene; only twice during the whole run did it feel right to me. Peggy Ashcroft, who played Cordelia three years before at Stratford, told me that she had seldom played the scene to her own satisfaction. Naturally this made me feel' better. She came nearest it, she said, when she entered in an emotional ttinnoil. Strangely, I only got near it when I let the realisation of Lear's state dawn slowly upon me.
The strongest impression I have of the play is the scene on Dover Cliff where, the mad King meets the blinded Gloucester. This is to me (and I suppose to most people) the height and depth of the tragedy. During the early rehearsals of it I was inexpressibly moved; and I never knew what moved me. It was not, I think, the words themselves, but what they evoked; and what they evoked is not easy to define. A response that cannot be located either in memory or emotion. After the first few rehearsals many of us could not watch the scene, because our job was to be part of the play and not an audience to it. Later, when I got to know it well, I would sit at the side of the stage and half listen to it, because its mood prepared me for the scene following, where Lear wakes up and recognises Cordelia. I loved this scene, especially the last moment of it when Redgrave would say in my ear: "Pray you now, forget and forgive." The earlier part of it was conditioned for me by the music. Shakespeare wrote "Louder the music there" as the cue to Cordelia's speech to her sleeping father, so I had to speak the lines through music, which I disliked intensely. Often the music seemed too loud and I felt that I had to pitch my voice too high for the tender words, and that could destroy my belief in what I was saying; but I always enjoyed the latter part of the scene when the music had stopped. Then we would move slowly the whole way across the wide stage into the wings still crying, and a few seconds later could grin with relief that it was over. This was the moment when Redgrave, with the tense angry scenes accomplished and the relaxed compassionate ones to come, could make a joke. The sillier the joke the more it delighted me.
The scene I liked playing best of all was the final one, 'when Lear carries the dead Cordelia in his arms. Redgrave's move- ments varied every night, so I never knew quite how I would be laid; but if he had placed my head at too strained an angle when he first laid- me on the ground, he would gently move it before he died. During the winter months when colds abounded in the company I was terrified that I would sneeze or cough during the scene, and so ruin the great culmination of the tragedy. Redgrave assured 'me that such a thing would be a psychological impossibility, and I believed him; until one day I overheard Gladys, who serves tea in the Green Room, re- calling how a young actress had sneezed whilst lying dead as Juliet. There are plenty of other terrors for an actress than Just acting.
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