• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 462 0

with Stanislavsky. This school of acting served the American theater and motion pictures well, but it was restricting. The American theater had never been able to present Shakespeare or classical drama of any kind satisfactorily. We simply do not have the style, the regard for language or the cultural disposition that fosters a tradition of presenting Shakespeare or any other classical drama. You cannot mumble in Shakespeare. You cannot improvise, and you are required to adhere strictly to the text. The English theater has a sense of language that we do not recognize and a capacity for understanding Shakespeare that we do not. In the United States the English language has developed almost into a patois. Not long ago, perhaps only fifty years or so ago, there was a style of classical acting in England in which Shakespeare was declaimed with an ample distribution of spittle. Even today there are English actors and directors who, to their artistic peril, choose to ignore the precise instructions that Shakespeare gave them in his speech to the players in Hamlet. This not only pertains to acting but to all forms of art. I quote it here:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to see a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipp’d for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it.

What follows is excellent advice for every actor:

Be not too tame, neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve …

The evolution of English theater came to full flower in Kenneth Branagh’s production of Henry V. He did not injure the language; he showed a reverence for it, and followed Shakespeare’s instructions precisely. It was an extraordinary accomplishment of melding the realities of human behavior with the poetry of language. I can’t imagine Shakespeare being performed with more refinement. In America we are unable to approach such refinements, and of course we have no taste for it. If given the choice between Branagh’s production of Henry V or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator, there’s hardly a question of where most television dials would be turned. If the expenditure of money for entertainment in America is any indication of taste, clearly the majority of us are addicted to trash.

The theatrical experience is a little-understood phenomenon. I’m not sure that I understand it. It seems mysterious to me that people will spend hard-earned cash to go to a building that contains a large darkened room where people sit and look at two-dimensional figures reflected on a screen and invest the entire spectrum of their emotions in what appears to be an approximation of reality. They’ll be moved to tears, laughter, empathy, or experience truly deep fear, sometimes becoming frightened for days, perhaps years, by the memory of what they saw. It is even harder to understand that audiences in Japan can be so deeply moved by the Noh theater, in which actors wear masks and classical clothing, and where movement and voice are restricted and highly stylized. On