"TWELFTH NIGHT"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 872, 20 April 1956, Page 5

"TWELFTH NIGHT"

Sir,-I have. just. received cuttings of Mr. Bertram’s review of Twelfth Night and Mr. Campion’s letter defending his methods of production. Since the "scholastic circles" of which Mr. Campion complains might reasonably be held to include the present writer, may I be permitted a comment? Mr. Campion misrepresents his critics. We accuse him of not putting the word first,.of allowing it to be lost to sight in a welter of stage effects; in reply he declares that the word is not everything, But the issue is not whether the word is everything, but. whether it ought not to be put first; and it is vain for Mr. Campion to remind us that there are stage effects in Shakespeare, when what We are saying is that these effects are of secondary importance to the spoken word, and that Mr. Campion smothers the spoken word with his stage effects, many of which are not by Shakespeare. The point is this. Mr. Campion has the following admirable words: "Rhythm, the rise and fall of action and commentary: rhythm embracing pace, movement, day or night, atmosphere, the sequence of small scenes developing to large scenes, etc., is integral to Shake- speare." This is very well put. The rhythm of a play, the pace at which its action and mood develop, is always the essential thing. But what Mr. Campion has never yet realised is that this rhythm already exists, in the verse in which Shakespeare wrote the play; and that his job is to discover this rhythm in the verse, see that his actors bring it to life by speaking the verse, and then fit themselves and their actions, and his scenery, lights and music into the framework of the rhythm of the verse. He simply does not understand this. He believes that the rhythm of the play does not exist until he and his actors have concocted it out of stagecraft. So long as he believes this, he cannot give us Shakespeare; he can only give us something ersatz, the product of his own (with due respect) lesser imagination. If he would only put his stagecraft at the service of the verse, he would: be able to produce Shakespeare. As it is he can only produce Campion’s Fantasia on a Theme by Shakespeare-bubble instead of bone. It is really incredible that Mr. Campion should have selected, in support of his argument, the passage in which Hamlet realises the King’s guilt and kills him, and supposed, that his methods of production are justified by the fact that here there are few words and long pauses. If Mr Campion has not yet discovered that the pauses between words are part of human speech, it is difficult to see what can be done for him. But he will not see this; he insists on supposing that the pauses are gaps to be filled by his own personal inventiveness. That is why, when Mr. Campion produces Hamlet, it will be necessary for the ‘Prince to leap across an ornamental bridge spanning a goldfish pond in the’ courtyard of Elsinore-on the brink of which Ophelia will have been seen insecurely poised as the lights dimmed two scenes earlier-and stab the King through a gilded wicker diving-bell in which he will have encased himself to watch the duel. Meanwhile Laertes will be surrounded by _ woolly-tonsured priests entoning the Misereré, and ladies in green satin will be enshrouding Gertrude in turquoise gauze. The scene will he lit by Chinese lanterns and plaved to

Balinese music

J. G. A.

POCOCK

(Cambridge, England.)