Playing Shakespeare - Irony and Ambiguity

Isn't this a cool painting? It's called "All the World's a Stage," and it's by James Christensen.

I managed to watch disc 3, episode 1 of Playing Shakespeare earlier this week, and was delighted that John Barton, Shakespearean director and host of the show, tackled not only irony and ambiguity but also included sonnets in the examples.

Shakespeare's sonnets, except for the most popular, elude me. I love the sonnet structure and words themselves are rich, but finding meaning is hard. Hearing them delivered by a skilled actor makes them far less slippery.

I've been slowly making my way through James Shapiro's excellent book, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, so it was especially interesting to hear Ben Kingsley deliver Sonnet 138 (When My Love Swears), which Shapiro discussed at length in the chapter on the case of the purloined sonnets (see here for my post on that topic).

Backing up to irony and ambiguity, Barton coached the actors to play up whatever irony can be detected in the words themselves by stressing specific words--what he termed speaking in capital letters or inverted commas--and using facial expressions to excentuate the double-meaning of the words. However, many passages are ambiguous--it's not a fluke that the plays and characters have been discussed vigorously for the past 400 years--and the ambiguity allows the actor to interpret the character and situation and emotion and motivation and the trick is to convey that interpretation to the audience so that they are not confused or lost by the performance.

There was a wonderful example in which Richard Pasco delivered the speech from Richard II that includes the wonderful lines,

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

Pasco delivered this first as he did it when he played RII, presumably with the RSC. Then, coached by Barton, he played up irony, with RII mocking himself. Finally, a third time, again at Barton's urging, he delivered it much more quickly. Seeing the three versions one after each other was truly marvelous. I think a mistake most actors make with regards to Shakespeare must be delivering the lines too slowly and too reverently. The quicker pace in the third rendition added a level of self-mockery that I hadn't anticipated.

Alan Howard also did a great back-to-back variation on the speech that the herald Mountjoy delivers to Henry V when he first comes to propose, on behalf of the Dauphin, that HV ransome himself in lieu of battling the French. The first delivery was a typical haughty tone. The second was a tone of mock sympathy that really drove home the arrogance and was delightful.

To end the session, Michael Pennington and Tony Church played Hector and Ulysses from the scene in Troilus and Cressida in which they survey the walls of Troy and discuss what is to come. Barton had them play this scene 3-4 times, and it was amazing to see how subtle variations such as sitting versus standing affected the interaction and tone between the two. In this final scene, Barton drove home the point that irony is completely in the realm of interpretation. When you move from blatant sarcasm (i.e., unambiguous sarcasm that jumps off the page at the reader), to irony, you move from the objective to the subjective.

Playing Shakespeare - Set Speeches and Soliloquy

Disc two only had two episodes--the first I talked about briefly in last Sunday's post, it was how to play Shylock...interesting but pale when compared to the second workshop on disc two, Set Speeches and Soliloquy. Here are the notes I took whilst watching.

The job of the actor, of course, is to hold the attention of the audience by telling a story. This is easier to do with dialogue because you have the natural tension between two or more actors conversing, learning, interacting, discovering, debating. In Shakespeare's set speeches and soliloquys, the actor's job is the same but it is hard because the actor must interact with the audience. In a way, I think John Barton, the director who leads the workshops, is saying that set speeches/soliloquys can become like dialogue with the audience being the silent other participant in the dialogue.

Barton says that speeches and soliloquys can easily allow the play to lose the story momentum when the actor generalizes the emotion instead of keeping it fresh and discovering it as the text unfolds.

Sinead Cusack led the examples by delivering Portia's Mercy speech--Barton used this example to show how the initial dialogue to a speech should be used to trigger the emotion so that the speech is delivered as a response to provocation, with the thoughts being explored in real time, and resolved as if for the first time.

I also loved seeing Barbara Leigh-Hunt as deposed Queen Margaret in RIII telling current Queen Elizabeth what the future holds for her. The point Barton made with this example was how it's easy and dangerous for an actor to treat a speech as rhetoric and then lose the sense of the text in the rhythm of the words.

Patrick Stewart as Titus was exceptionally good--not just because I don't like the play and avoid it when possible, and so it was a treat to actually hear good things about it. Here Barton talked about how an actor can use the words to cope with and express the emotion. He had Stewart deliver the speech twice--first with raw emotion in which the words were completely lost and the meaning of them irrelevant, and the second time with Stewart trying to convey the emotion behind each image, and so giving a deeper sense of the horrific feeling that Titus was subject to.

Tony Church as the Archbishop of Canterbury in HV delivered the speech justifying HV's claim to the throne of France, and demonstrated Barton's point that an actor needs to juggle seriousness with comedy, varying the tempo in order to hold the audience's attention.

Barton then moved on to soliloquy and stressed that to be successful an actor must let the emotion displayed arise out of the situation itself, tell the internal story, and be spontaneous, as "if these words were being spoken for the first time."

Jane Lapotaire did a terrific job delivering a soliloquy from Troilus and Cressida. The first time, Barton asked her to talk to herself, and Barton used this to show how the speech easily got stuck on one note, Cressida's vanity. When she talked to the audience in the second delivery, it was much easier to follow her thought process and understand her as a character.

The other highlights of the soliloquy section were Judi Dench as Viola highlighting both pain and comedy of her situation (i.e., discovering that Olivia was in love with her, while she is in love with Orsino) and Michael Pennington as Hamlet delivering the To Be speech. Both were terrific and I feel priviledged to see both, even if only in a workshop setting.

Barton's final parting advice? Don't be too solemn and you must share the text with the audience.

While looking for an appropriate image for this post, I stumbled across Hamlet - A User's Guide, by Michael Pennington. As if I don't have enough to read already, but I couldn't resist and it's on my Amazon list now!

Playing Shakespeare - disc 1

I heard about Playing Shakespeare, a series of taped workshops led by legendary Shakespearean director, John Barton, and finally got the opportunity to watch disc 1 over the weekend.

Judi Dench wasn't in the first three episodes, which constitute the first disc, but awonderfully young Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, and Ben Kingsley among others, read lines, acted scenes, and talked about their craft. Frankly, the first episode was a tad slow--partly I needed to get used to the format, and partly there wasn't a lot happening on stage as Barton mostly talked about Elizabethan acting versus modern, method acting and the development of the naturalistic approach with minimal examples.

Episode two, "Using the Verse," was fascinating. Barton talked at length and a variety of actors provided examples and anecdotes relating to how iambic pentameter not only works but helps actors memorize lines, interpret character, and breath. Also interesting was the discussion regarding how Shakespeare broke the rules for effect.

And episode three, "Language and Character," was the best of three with full speeches delivered with Barton's pre-scene coaching. The best bit in this episode is when Barton delivers a speech in what he thinks, with some reservation, to be close to how an Elizabethan actors would have sounded. The other wonderful bit was the discussion of the most important word in Shakespeare and the showing of a skit in an over-zealous director (Stephen Fry) coaches an actor (Hugh Laurie) regarding Time. V. funny and apropos! Here it is, although Playing Shakespeare only shows it from about 2 min on.



After the two budding Shakespearean actors who call me Mom are done with this disc, it goes back to Netflix. Luckily I have disc two to tide me over until disc three arrives.