Against Interpretation (23 page)

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Last, and I suppose least, a few words about two Shakespeare productions.

From John Gielgud’s excellent essay, “The Hamlet Tradition—Some Notes on Costume, Scenery and Stage,” published in 1937, one could educe most of the particular mistakes in Gielgud’s present production of
Hamlet
in New York. For instance, Gielgud cautions against playing Act I, Scene 2—the scene in which Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude all appear for the first time—as a family quarrel, rather than a formal privy council meeting, the first (according to tradition) held after the accession of Claudius to the throne. Yet this is just what Gielgud has allowed in the New York production, with Claudius and Gertrude looking like a weary suburban couple having it out with a spoiled only son. Another instance: in staging the Ghost, Gielgud in his essay argues convincingly against increasing ghostliness by using a miked voice coming from offstage, rather than the voice of the actor who is on stage and being seen by the audience. Everything must work toward making the Ghost as real as possible. But in the present production, Gielgud has forfeited the entire physical presence of the Ghost. This time the Ghost is really ghostly: a taped voice, Gielgud’s own, resonating hollowly through the theater, and a giant silhouette thrown on the rear wall of the stage.… But it is a waste of time to look for reasons for this or that feature of the current production. The overall impression is of complete indifference, as if the play hadn’t really been directed at all—except that one gathers that some of the dullness, at least the visual dullness, is actually deliberate. There is the matter of the clothes: most of the actors, whether courtiers or soldiers, wear old slacks and sweaters and windbreakers, though Hamlet’s pants and shirt match (they’re black), and Claudius and Polonius wear natty business suits, and Gertrude and Ophelia have long skirts (Gertrude has a mink, too), and the Player King and Queen have gorgeous costumes and gold masks. This silly conceit appears to be the one idea in the present production, and is called “playing
Hamlet
in rehearsal clothes.”

The production affords exactly two pleasures. Hearing John Gielgud’s voice on tape, even thus Cineramarized, reminded one of how beautiful Shakespeare’s verse sounds when it is spoken with grace and intelligence. And the excellent George Rose, in the brief role of the gravedigger, rendered all the delights of Shakespeare’s prose. The rest of the performances gave only various degrees of pain. Everyone spoke too fast; that fault apart, some performances rose to the height of mediocrity, while others, for example the performances of Laertes and Ophelia, deserve to be singled out as particularly immature, unfelt. It might be mentioned, though, that Eileen Herlie, who does a perfunctory Gertrude, gave a striking performance in the same role in Olivier’s movie some fifteen years ago. And that Richard Burton, who does as little as possible with the part of Hamlet, is indeed a very handsome man. Correction: he does play the whole of Hamlet’s death scene standing, when he could have sat down.

But no sooner had one recovered from Gielgud’s effrontery in presenting a Shakespeare play absolutely nude, without any interpretation at all, than a Shakespeare production arrived which, putting the best face on it, was marred by overinterpretation and too much thought. This was Peter Brook’s celebrated
King Lear
which was staged at Stratford-on-Avon two years ago, was received with great acclaim in Paris, throughout Eastern Europe, and in Russia, and played—more or less inaudibly—in the New York State Theater (which, it is now discovered, was designed for music and ballet) at Lincoln Center. If Gielgud’s
Hamlet
was without thought or style, Brook’s
King Lear
came laden with ideas. One read that, inspired by a recent essay by Jan Kott, the Polish Shakespearean scholar, comparing Shakespeare and Beckett, Brook had decided to play
King Lear
as
Endgame,
so to speak. Gielgud has mentioned, in an interview this April in England, that Brook told him it was his controversial “Japanese”
King Lear
(sets and costumes by Noguchi) in 1955 which gave him the basic idea for the current production. And by consulting the “Lear Log” of Charles Marowitz, Brook’s assistant at Stratford in 1962, one can find other influences, too. But in the end none of the ideas that fed into the production matter. What matters is what one saw and, hopefully, heard. What I saw was rather dull—if you liked it, it was austere—and arbitrary, too. I can’t see what is gained by going against the emotional climaxes of the play—leveling off Lear’s tirades, bringing the Gloucester plot almost to equal scale with the Lear plot, cutting out “humanist” passages such as where Regan’s servants move to aid the newly blinded Gloucester and where Edmund attempts to revoke the execution of Cordelia and Lear (“Some good I mean to do, Despite of mine own nature”). There were a number of graceful and intelligent performances—Edmund, Gloucester, the Fool. But all the actors seemed to work under an almost palpable constraint, the desire simultaneously to make explicit and to underplay, which must have been what led Brook, in one of the most curious choices of the production, to keep the stage fully lit and bare during the storm scenes. Paul Scofield’s Lear is an admirably studied performance. On Lear’s great age—with its egotism, its awkward movements and appetites—he is especially good. But I cannot see the point of his throwing so much of the role away, Lear’s madness for instance, by arbitrary vocal mannerisms that deadened the full emotional power of his lines. The only performance which seemed to me to survive this strange, crippling interpretation which Brook has imposed on his actors—even, to thrive on it—was Irene Worth’s complex and partly sympathetic Goneril. Miss Worth appeared to have searched every corner of her role and, unlike Scofield, to have found more, rather than less, than others had before.

[
Summer 1964
]

“The Primary and most beautiful of Nature’s qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times. But this motion is simply the perpetual consequence of crimes; and it is conserved by means of crimes alone.”

SADE

“Everything that acts is a cruelty. It is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theatre must be rebuilt.”

ARTAUD

Marat/Sade/Artaud

T
HEATRICALITY
and insanity—the two most potent subjects of the contemporary theater—are brilliantly fused in Peter Weiss’ play,
The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
The subject is a dramatic performance staged before the audience’s eyes; the scene is a madhouse. The historical facts behind the play are that in the insane asylum just outside Paris where Sade was confined by order of Napoleon for the last eleven years of his life (1803–14), it was the enlightened policy of the director, M. Coulmier, to allow Charenton’s inmates to stage theatrical productions of their own devising which were open to the Parisian public. In these circumstances Sade is known to have written and put on several plays (all lost), and Weiss’ play ostensibly re-creates such a performance. The year is 1808 and the stage is the stark tiled bathhouse of the asylum.

Theatricality permeates Weiss’ cunning play in a peculiarly modern sense: most of
Marat/Sade
consists of a play-within-a-play. In Peter Brook’s production, which opened in London last August, the aged, disheveled, flabby Sade (acted by Patrick Magee) sits quietly on the left side of the stage—prompting (with the aid of a fellow-patient who acts as stage manager and narrator), supervising, commenting. M. Coulmier, dressed formally and wearing some sort of honorific red sash, attended by his elegantly dressed wife and daughter, sits throughout the performance on the right side of the stage. There is also an abundance of theatricality in a more traditional sense: the emphatic appeal to the senses with spectacle and sound. A quartet of inmates with string hair and painted faces, wearing colored sacks and floppy hats, sing sardonic loony songs while the action described by the songs is mimed; their motley getup contrasts with the shapeless white tunics and strait-jackets, the whey-colored faces of most of the rest of the inmates who act in Sade’s passion play on the French Revolution. The verbal action, conducted by Sade, is repeatedly interrupted by brilliant bits of acting-out performed by the lunatics, the most forceful of which is a mass guillotining sequence, in which some inmates make metallic rasping noises, bang together parts of the ingenious set, and pour buckets of paint (blood) down drains, while other madmen gleefully jump into a pit in the center of the stage, leaving their heads piled above stage level, next to the guillotine.

In Brook’s production, insanity proves the most authoritative and sensuous kind of theatricality. Insanity establishes the inflection, the intensity of
Marat/Sade,
from the opening image of the ghostly inmates who are to act in Sade’s play, crouching in foetal postures or in a catatonic stupor or trembling or performing some obsessive ritual, then stumbling forward to greet the affable M. Coulmier and his family as they enter the stage and mount the platform where they will sit. Insanity is the register of the intensity of the individual performances as well: of Sade, who recites his long speeches with a painful clenched singsong deliberateness; of Marat (acted by Clive Revill), swathed in wet cloths (a treatment for his skin disease) and encased throughout the action in a portable metal bathtub, even in the midst of the most passionate declamation staring straight ahead as though he were already dead; of Charlotte Corday, Marat’s assassin, who is played by a beautiful somnambule who periodically goes blank, forgets her lines, even lies down on the stage and has to be awakened by Sade; of Duperret, the Girondist deputy and lover of Corday, played by a lanky stiff-haired patient, an erotomaniac, who is constantly breaking down in his role of gentleman and lover and lunging lustfully toward the patient playing Corday (in the course of the play, he has to be put in a strait-jacket); of Simone Everard, Marat’s mistress and nurse, played by an almost wholly disabled patient who can barely speak and is limited to jerky idiot movements as she changes Marat’s dressings. Insanity becomes the privileged, most authentic metaphor for passion; or, what’s the same thing in this case, the logical terminus of any strong emotion. Both dream (as in the “Marat’s Nightmare” sequence) and dream-like states must end in violence. Being “calm” amounts to a failure to understand one’s real situation. Thus, the slow-motion staging of Corday’s murder of Marat (history, i.e. theater) is followed by the inmates shouting and singing of the fifteen bloody years since then, and ends with the “cast” assaulting the Coulmiers as they attempt to leave the stage.

It is through its depiction of theatricality and insanity that Weiss’ play is also a play of ideas. The heart of the play is a running debate between Sade, in his chair, and Marat, in his bath, on the meaning of the French Revolution, that is, on the psychological and political premises of modern history, but seen through a very modern sensibility, one equipped with the hindsight afforded by the Nazi concentration camps. But
Marat/Sade
does not lend itself to being formulated as a particular theory about modern experience. Weiss’ play seems to be more about the range of sensibility that concerns itself with, or is at stake in, the modern experience, than it is about an argument or an interpretation of that experience. Weiss does not present ideas as much as he immerses his audience in them. Intellectual debate is the material of the play, but it is not its subject or its end. The Charenton setting insures that this debate takes place in a constant atmosphere of barely suppressed violence: all ideas are volatile at this temperature. Again, insanity proves to be the most austere (even abstract) and drastic mode of expressing in theatrical terms the reenacting of ideas, as members of the cast reliving the Revolution run amuck and have to be restrained and the cries of the Parisian mob for liberty are suddenly metamorphosed into the cries of the patients howling to be let out of the asylum.

Such theater, whose fundamental action is the irrevocable careening toward extreme states of feeling, can end in only two ways. It can turn in on itself and become formal, and end in strict
da capo
fashion, with its own opening lines. Or it can turn outward, breaking the “frame,” and assault the audience. Ionesco has admitted that he originally envisaged his first play,
The Bald Soprano,
ending with a massacre of the audience; in another version of the same play (which now ends
da capo
), the author was to leap on the stage, and shout imprecations at the audience till they fled the theater. Brook, or Weiss, or both, have devised for the end of
Marat/Sade
an equivalent of the same hostile gesture toward the audience. The inmates, that is, the “cast” of Sade’s play, have gone berserk and assaulted the Coulmiers; but this riot—that is, the play—is broken off by the entry of the stage manager of the Aldwych Theater, in modern skirt, sweater, and gym shoes. She blows a whistle; the actors abruptly stop, turn, and face the audience; but when the audience applauds, the company responds with a slow ominous handclap, drowning out the “free” applause and leaving everyone pretty uncomfortable.

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My own admiration for, and pleasure in,
Marat/Sade
is virtually unqualified. The play that opened in London last August, and will, it’s rumored, soon be seen in New York, is one of the great experiences of anyone’s theater-going lifetime. Yet almost everyone, from the daily reviewers to the most serious critics, have voiced serious reservations about, if not outright dislike for, Brook’s production of Weiss’ play. Why?

Three ready-made ideas seem to me to underlie most caviling at Weiss’ play in Brook’s production of it.

The connection between theater and literature.
One ready-made idea: a work of theater is a branch of literature. The truth is, some works of theater may be judged primarily as works of literature, others not.