ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Shakespeare For The Modern Audience

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31003, 8 March 1966, Page 7

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Shakespeare For The Modern Audience

Clifford Williams is one of the bright directors of I the Royal Shakespeare I Company and. like his I colleagues. Peter Brook. Peter Hall and William Gaskill, has been credited with finding new meanings in Shakespeare They have subjected the plays to thorough re-examina-tion and stripped them of Victorian irrelevancies sol that their productions make the bard more interesting to! modern audiences. A result will be seen when i Mr Williams’s production of “The Comedy of Errors” restaged by Gareth Morgan! comes to Christchurch next month. During a brief visit to Christchurch last week. Mr Williams described in a lecture and an interview some

| changes in Shakespearean production in this century. | He described first the Victorian method of playing Shakespeare, which was still pursued in Germany and not infrequently in Britain. A good deal of attention was paid to the music of the plays but in a way that falsified the real music of the verse. The actors used affected voices and theatrical ges- ! tures that had no relation ; to real life. I The sensitivity to the his- ’ torical background of the I plays was ludicrous and often i upset the balance of the [ drama. i There was a reliance on 1 star names for the big parts. A star would play with any company that could afford his fee, giving his one heroic performance which the company had to fit as best as it could. This indulgence in the rhetoric of the visual substituted a false romanticism for the delicate Shakespearean play structure. “At the turn of the century Shakespeare was as far from life as he could be.” WAVE OF NATURALISM At this time there was a wave of naturalism in European theatre. Strindberg, | Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw! spread the idea that a theatre should mirror life. The movement swept all before it and Stanislavski codified its ideas into a way of acting. Hand in glove this was the break-up of the star system. Although all through the century the star had been very much with the theatre, today’s stars differ from those earlier ones and the system is not as strong as it was.

Naturalism also led to the evolution of the attitude of the play for the play’s sake, for the characters and themes, to attempt to present the whole picture of these ideas. The Shakespeare play was now played for its totality, the whole of “Hamlet” than just the Prince himself. These changes took place against a revolution in British theatre. Today instead of the detached touring companies there was a network of theatres integrated into their communities. ACTING PROBLEMS Mr Williams returned to the subject of naturalism, which, he said, posed all the problems in the playing of Shakespeare. The imagination and experience of an actor told, him that people did not speak in verse

- and that at a moment of ’ crisis a man would be prob- , ably struck dumb, while , Shakespeare insisted that he : speak 50 lines of iambic pen- . tametre. ; The problem was overcome , in several ways. Some i directors and actors pretended the words were not ! verse; some doubled back i and went “Victorian” on ! themselves, turning couplets > into a flowing line and distur- : bing the phrasing; Americans ‘ tried to make the verse into prose but this was rather too difficult; Joan Littlewood . simply rewrote the play. Admitting the nature of the verse, but disguising it with . modern verse was a method which accentuated the clash . between the tiwo perspectives. Mr Williams said the actor • should accept that his crea-

five job was not naturalistic and re-examine in depth the verse itself for any evidence it might throw on the nature of the character. The verse showed the rate of breathing, the nature of temperament, ■ the speed or slowness of replies—a host of significant information. STUDY OF VERSE Another thing that had to 1 be considered was the way Shakespeare book liberties 1 with the previously rigid 1 iambic pentametre. 1 It was from there that a 1 modern director and actor could build a modern under- ; standing of Shakespeare. 1 There was no contractiction 1 between a textual understand--1 ing and the necessary finding ■ of the reality of a Shakes- • peare play “for this very ■ moment.”