Words Into Action Read online

  William Gaskill

  Foreword by Christopher Hampton

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  To the memory of George Devine and Jocelyn Herbert

  Contents

  Foreword—Christopher Hampton

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  1.

  Trusting the Writer—the Royal Court

  2.

  Basic Lessons—Brecht and Beckett

  3.

  What is an Action?—Ibsen and Chekhov

  4.

  Action and Inaction—Hamlet

  5.

  Talking to the Audience

  6.

  Stage Directions

  7.

  Action for the Actor

  8.

  Action and Intention

  9.

  Movement and Stillness—the Noh Theatre

  10.

  Sentences and Rhetoric—Wilde, Webster and Winston Churchill

  11.

  Phrasing and Pauses—Congreve and Beckett

  12.

  Masks and Action—Ben Jonson

  13.

  Language as Subject Matter

  14.

  Verse and Prose—Hamlet again

  15.

  The Words of Puritans—Shaw and Bunyan

  16.

  Action and Imagination—Macbeth

  17.

  Stress, Metre and Pitch

  18.

  Magic and Metaphor—The Tempest and Henry VIII

  19.

  Words and Music

  20.

  State of Play

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  Foreword—Christopher Hampton

  I have more than one reason to be grateful to Bill Gaskill: as Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre he was responsible, in 1966, for scheduling my first play as a Sunday-night ‘Production Without Décor’; then, in 1968, he devised for me the position of Resident Dramatist at the theatre, now, of course, a commonplace, but at that time, I believe, the first such post of its kind in this country. Characteristically, he told me I need not be deceived by the important-sounding lustre of the title, which he regarded merely as a useful negotiating ploy to secure a grant from the Arts Council; I would be expected to run the literary department and perform any and all other delegated tasks. This made the gift doubly valuable: instead of sitting in my quarters writing plays (the fate, I imagine, of subsequent and current Resident Dramatists) I became thoroughly immersed in the day-to-day life of the theatre—then at one of its creative zeniths as one of the leading theatres in Europe—for two crowded years, in which I learned considerably more about the practicalities of my profession than I could possibly have picked up in any other way.

  So much for my personal feelings of gratitude: but there are other, broader reasons for many contemporary playwrights to offer their thanks to a Royal Court ethos, of which Bill was one of the founders and which the essays in this book go a long way towards defining. ‘When I start preparing a production,’ he says, ‘I always work from the text outwards’—and the book’s starting point is a chapter called ‘Trusting the Writer’. Those of us who have worked on the continent—in Germany, Austria, Switzerland or France—will be vividly aware just how alien a concept this is in other European countries, where directors are utterly baffled by the notion of presenting a play to their critics and public as written. As it happens, Bill begins his consideration of writers with Beckett (who lived in Paris and wrote the majority of his plays initially in French) and Brecht: but these writers above all—Beckett with his strict notations and Brecht with his own generously funded Ensemble—knew how to maintain an iron control over their work. For those of us less confident and in less powerful positions, the determination of Bill and his cohorts at the Royal Court to search out the essence of our plays and respect it was absolutely invaluable. My second play, Total Eclipse, about the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, started rehearsal when I arrived to work at the theatre in 1968; Bill liked it and was encouraging. He listened sympathetically to the reservations the director, Robert Kidd, and I both felt about the play, then said that, certainly, there were things wrong with it, but that I was very young and would learn most if the play, with all its imperfections, appeared in front of an audience as I had first imagined it. He was, of course, unquestionably right, though it’s almost inconceivable that a writer would be given that kind of leeway today. It’s my firm conviction that one of the essential preconditions for a healthy theatre is this kind of moral support and robust nurture of playwrights; it exists in very few parts of the world, but its centrality as a feature of Bill’s regime in Sloane Square was of incalculable benefit to all the writers who passed through the doors of the Royal Court Theatre.

  One of the great beauties of the theatre is its ephemerality. Films (doubly so with the advent of the DVD), books and records are all permanent, filable objects; but the theatre is written on the wind. Obviously, a play exists on paper, but its only real being is in the present tense and subsequently in the memories of however many thousand people may have chosen to experience it. I had the privilege, when I was at the Royal Court, of making a version, for Anthony Page, of Uncle Vanya, with Paul Scofield, Colin Blakely and Anna Calder-Marshall. It ran for only a few weeks forty years ago, but I can still remember it in considerable detail and hear, in my inner ear, the particular woebegone and embittered cadences, the eccentric swoop and plunge of Scofield’s voice. Bill has always been as strong a champion of actors as he is of writers, and his book explores in fascinating detail his experience with actors like Maggie Smith and Alec Guinness and his memories of Gielgud, Olivier and Edith Evans. It’s precisely the evanescence of the theatre which makes statements of first principles so essential, especially when expressed with Bill’s exemplary lucidity. Every generation in the theatre has in some sense to start from scratch, lessons learned are seldom retained, and it’s this fragile ecology which accounts for the numerous black holes in theatrical history, the long, arid stretches when no one can quite remember how to practise this most rigorous and demanding of arts.

  Let me try to illustrate my point with a couple of specific examples: two of Bill’s productions I saw at the turn of the seventies, Edward Bond’s Saved and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem. Again, one is reliant on the images provided by memory, but in the one case, a kind of spare, poetic naturalism supported by John Gunter’s pared-to-the-essentials, resonant sets, and in the other case, a supple, good-humoured, recognisably truthful narrative, lightened by René Allio’s graceful, fluid, dancing pieces of décor and as far as possible removed from the usual grating artificiality of Restoration Comedy, each provided, in their very different ways, an object-lesson in how to discover the style which most perfectly complemented the substance of each of these plays. These are lessons, as I say, which can be easily, swiftly and lavishly forgotten: and the patient detail in these essays, the attention to stress and pause, lighting and design, timing and music, as applied to numerous specific plays and writers, remind us how important but how rarely pursued is the quest to present a play in a way which teases out, honours and clarifies the author’s intentions, even those which he or she may not have been conscious of harbouring in the first place. The distance between good and bad theatre is far shorter than the distance that separates the good from the unforgettable; it is this latter terrain that Bill Gaskill patrols, contemplates and elucidates, as a true keeper of the flame.

  Preface

  These essays are about the way drama works in the theatre; drama in the sense that a play is about—and has always been about—people talking
to each other in recognisable situations. It is about words and how they move an action forward, how words are actions, how words convey a physical staging not just through stage directions, and how the relation of actions to words makes for the tension of drama. It is about the form and diction of the language as indications to the actor, not just of his character, but of the shifts and changes in the meaning of the play as a whole. Some of it is a statement of the obvious, but necessary because we have lost touch with essentials. Some of it is made up of practical tips about speaking. Some of it is pleasure at memories of performances and some of it is wonder at the skill of the writer, particularly Shakespeare.

  William Gaskill

  Acknowledgements

  The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from Poetry and Drama by T.S. Eliot, Endgame, Play and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, No Man’s Land by Harold Pinter, and A Resounding Tinkle by N.F. Simpson, all published by Faber and Faber Ltd; A Guide to English Literature by F.W. Bateson, published by Pearson Education Ltd; Early Morning and Saved by Edward Bond, both published by Methuen Drama, an imprint of A&C Black Publishers Ltd; Exposed by the Mask © Peter Hall (2000), published by Oberon Books Ltd; Ulysses by James Joyce, published by Penguin Books Ltd; John Berger’s translations of Brecht, published by Scorpion Press; an extract from the Saturday Review (January 1897) by George Bernard Shaw, by kind permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of Shaw’s estate; and Sir John Gielgud’s letter to Richard Bebb (30 January 1976) from Gielgud’s Letters: John Gielgud in His Own Words, edited by Richard Mangan, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, by kind permission of the trustees of the Sir John Gielgud Charitable Trust.

  1

  Trusting the Writer—the Royal Court

  I was lucky to start my career at the Royal Court Theatre a year after it had become, in 1956, the home of the English Stage Company under the leadership of George Devine. It had been founded on a very simple basis. There was a need for new writing, for change in the theatre. The only way to find writers was to have a theatre that would put on new plays. What happened is a story staled by repetition: the arrival of Look Back in Anger and its almost immediate reception as a breakthrough in dramatic writing. It’s all a long time ago. Those reading or seeing Osborne’s play for the first time today may be puzzled as to why we felt so excited. But we did. It was immediately of our own time; speaking to us and for us. I remember my first reaction to reading it was not that it was controversial or political and certainly not avant-garde, but that it restored language to a robust rhetorical life. And it was only the beginning.

  There was a succession of young writers—Ann Jellicoe, John Arden, Arnold Wesker—all in some way experimenting with language or dramatic form or staging. I discovered the excitement of working with a living writer for the first time. I had already done some time in weekly repertory companies as well as directing amateur productions at university, and I thought I knew what it was all about. My dream of a career was having more rehearsal time, of an ensemble developing new styles based on exploring what would now be called physical theatre. ‘A writer’s theatre’ seemed a necessary idea, but I didn’t see it as basically altering my approach to directing. But I wanted to be in on this venture and was prepared to direct anything that was offered to me. My chance was one of the try-out Sunday-night productions.

  N.F. Simpson, whose play A Resounding Tinkle was my first production at the Royal Court in 1957, was completely new to the theatre but his exploration of language and comic timing was wholly original. I didn’t really understand the play. It had no story and progressed—if it could be called that—by a series of disconnected sequences, loosely held together by a middle-class couple debating how to name an elephant that had been delivered in their back garden, intercut with two comedians searching for the essence of comedy. It sounds rather precious but it has a gravitas and polish in the dialogue that sets it apart. It was only two years after the first British production of Godot and some years before Monty Python, on which it could be claimed to have some influence. Simpson, who knew little of stagecraft and avoided narrative more completely than Laurence Sterne, had a great deal to teach me. He probably only wrote the play because of a playwriting competition sponsored by the Observer and chaired by its drama critic, Kenneth Tynan, but he had a very clear idea of what would make the dialogue work when spoken, even though he didn’t know where the actors would be on stage. In particular his awareness of time, of the relation of the pause to comic effect, was new to me. The response of the audience to the one performance of the play on a Sunday night proved he was right.

  Working on a new play with a writer changed my whole approach to directing. The writer’s exploration of form and of the nature of theatre experience meant I had to work more closely to the text than I had realised. There were times when I would know more than the writer but also many times when I had to be prepared to go down new roads with him or her. When I came to direct classics I already had experience of several living writers, and I tried to read the old writers as if I were in as close and direct contact with them as I was with the new. Sometimes I try to break away from this relationship but I have always returned to words as the starting point.

  Devine was a protégé of the French director Michel Saint-Denis, a nephew and pupil of Jacques Copeau, and was very influenced by his attempts to recover the acting styles of the past—particularly the Commedia dell’Arte—and his insistence on the importance of building an ensemble of actors, directors, designers, technicians and writers. The first season at the Royal Court was built round a resident company, with staff designers and technicians. The productions were all by Devine or his associate Tony Richardson. Richardson had never been really interested in the Saint-Denis approach. He thought it dragged the theatre back into an arty past. The success of his production of Look Back in Anger in the first season validated his attitude. The ensemble was soon disbanded, though there were sporadic attempts to revive it. The writers had become the prime mover in the work. The discovery of style would be initiated by them. There were important continuities of design, mainly through the work of Jocelyn Herbert, and of directing, through the staff directors, who became linked to the work of particular writers: myself with Simpson and later Edward Bond, John Dexter with Arnold Wesker, and later Lindsay Anderson with David Storey, but the writer came first. It has been said by David Hare and Peter Gill, amongst others, that the Court was really a director’s theatre and not a writer’s theatre at all. It is true that Tony Richardson would ruthlessly cut Osborne’s plays, Wesker’s plays could not have been realised without the brilliant stagecraft of John Dexter, and David Storey owes a great deal to the poetic realism of Lindsay Anderson’s productions. On the other hand, George Devine always did what Beckett told him and so did I with Edward Bond. But for all of us the starting point was the writer’s words.

  As the Royal Court was starting in Sloane Square, Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop were already at work in Stratford, East 15. Littlewood’s idea of theatre was quite different. She too believed in the totality of the theatre experience in which writer, director, actors and designers were part of the same creative process, but the start of the work was in the theatricality of the actors’ improvisation. No one, except perhaps she herself, was going to dominate. Certainly not the writer. She had a dedicated group of young actors—a true collective—on a share of the box office, often with barely enough to live on, who knew they would be cast in every play, however unsuited to the part. Instead of a play being written and then handed over to the interpreters, the writer was there in rehearsal, ready to rewrite at a moment’s notice. It’s true that writers were present at rehearsal in Sloane Square, but only to safeguard the sanctity of their text.

  Littlewood’s theatre used music, movement and, above all, improvisation to create the final experience. And it didn’t stop there. Joan would go to every performance, give notes and make changes all through the run of the play. I once told h
er how moved I was by the end of A Taste of Honey and she promptly changed it. But it would be wrong to think of Theatre Workshop as ‘Director’s Theatre’, as we would now use the phrase to describe the work of egomaniacs who impose their concepts on a play and any actors they happen to be working with. Joan’s work was essentially that of a group making theatre together. The group would not have existed without her powerful personality and vison but it was still a group with a shared political viewpoint and with a social purpose.

  I admired Joan but I was on the other side. I believed in the exactness of writing, the importance of the choice of words. Coleridge thought poetry was ‘best words in the best order’. How would he have defined drama? ‘Best actions in the best order’, perhaps. Words too are actions and the sequence of words and actions and their interplay is the basis of dramatic writing.

  2

  Basic Lessons—Beckett and Brecht

  As the Royal Court was starting its first season in 1956, Brecht’s company the Berliner Ensemble was preparing to come to London. Brecht died before they left Berlin but the last thing he wrote was a note to his actors telling them that the British public thought that everything German was heavy, boring and slow and that, therefore, the actors had to play quickly and lightly.

  Everyone on the intellectual left was keyed up for their arrival and at the opening night at the Palace Theatre there was animated discussion with John Berger, Christopher Logue, Lindsay Anderson and the rest about whether it was a completely new theatre experience, as we had been led to expect from Ken Tynan. The opening production was The Caucasian Chalk Circle. The simplicity but richness of the settings, the sense of actors moving in space, the cool unatmospheric lighting were all wonderful but it was the playing that most impressed us. Grusha, the simple peasant girl who saves the Governor’s baby in the middle of a revolution and is allowed to keep him at the end, was played by Angelika Hurwicz, a homely dumpling of a girl who walked on the stage as if it were her native soil. She epitomised the open playing that Brecht wanted; realistically observed and with a sense of ‘Look at this character, see what she does, see where she has to make decisions, judge whether they are the right ones.’ Psychology and empathy were out, no searching of motivations or ‘emotion memory’, only an awareness of the character in society. That was the theory, and the playing of Hurwicz and the rest proved that it worked. When we saw Mother Courage a few nights later there was no doubt. This was a new theatre.