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Kamarck, Edward (ed.) / Arts in society: the arts of activism
(1969)
Rosenberg, James
Notes and discussion: looking for the third world: theatre report from England, pp. [437]-444
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Page 440
to be truly a novelty, for, in a theatre world where nearly every director can be traced back to Stanislavsky or Brecht or Artaud (or perhaps all three), Nunn appears to come from an entirely different world, and one pretty much overlooked in modern theatre practice, that of Reinhardt - and, through him, Craig and Appia. Nunn's productions, in other words, are not just intellectual puzzles and/or moral tracts (which is not to say that they are lacking in either of these qualities), they are also feasts for the eye and ear as well, great splashing acknowledgments that the theatre appeals not only to the mind and the spirit but also, and most directly, to the senses. I have rarely, if ever, seen such beautifully lit, sumptuously costumed, brilliantly choreographed productions as at Stratford this past year, and, while some strait-laced critics of the old school may -tsk! tsk!" at all this foolishness and frippery, I must confess that, in a world of theatre where plays seem to be getting more and more dry and spare and self-pitying and bitter (cf. Osborne's HOTEL IN AMSTERDAM), this kind of sumptuousness and panache comes like a delightful blast of fresh air. I know I shall not soon forget the opening of Nunn's KING LEAR, with its drumrolls, trumpet-calls, flaming torches, chanting, and Lear being borne in within a huge, portable pavilion, like some ancient idol out of a civilization that seemed as much Aztec or Babylonian as it did Celtic, which was undoubtedly all wrong, in one sense, but in another sense terribly right, for it placed the play where it really belongs, not in the world of prehistoric Britain, or even of Shakespear's time, for that matter, but in the world of fairy-tale and myth and pure theatre. That the rest of the play, after this opening sequence, was pretty much of a letdown, was not altogether the fault of the director, but part of the current story of the RSC, which is that, with a sort of wholesale abdication by the great names having taken place, it is essentially a young and inexperienced company, most notably lacking in the elder actors of the Olivier and Gielgud stature, so that the major tragedies at the moment lie outside its scope. Its Lear was an actor named Eric Porter (who also essayed Dr. Faustus), and, while he is an actor with an interestingly dry, harsh, very narrow sort of range, he is certainly not at the moment quite up to the demands of roles like this. I intend no undue 440 flippancy when I say that he played Faustus like a born Malvolio, and that his Lear, got up in bald pate, wispy beard, putty nose and white nightgown, resembled, in voice and stature as well, a cross between Father Christmas and Justice Shallow; the creaky, querulous irritability of old age was there, all right, but little if any of the great blasted oak on the heath, the "authority" that Kent claimed to have seen in his visage. On the other hand, this was the first time I ever found myself believing in, or even interested in, Edgar, with a most promising young actor named Alan Howard delineating the progress from a kind of doltish naivete through a feigned madness to a shrewd and hard-won maturity in a way that made the play, for me, far more the story of Edgar than it was of Lear or Gloucester. (To give some idea of the flexibility of some of the younger members of this company, Howard also played the comic Benedick in MUCH ADO and a ragingly homosexual Achilles in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA with equal skill.) THE FAUSTUS, directed by one of the RSC's numerous visiting firemen, Clifford Williams, was rather a mistake, I thought, its main feature being a Helen of Troy who strolled about the stage clad only in body makeup and vaseline, but Eric Porter's Dr. Faust seemed as sniffily disapproving of this as of all the other visions in the play; and why not, since who can be truly moved by a stage full of hopping, creeping, masked and costumed Mardi Gras grotesques representing allegories of evil, in a world where the daily headlines scream of real evil in Biafra and Viet Nam and Prague and Chicago and Harlem? That Marlowe's fragment is structurally pretty badly flawed is by now a commonplace among critics, which means that it is up to the director to do something about it, and nothing of this sort was attemped in this production; it also helps for Faustus to have a "mighty opposite," and Terence Hardiman's Mephistopheles, gotten up in monk's habit, was so dull and bland and ordinary as to fade into the scenery most of the time. I suppose the idea was to avoid the melodramatic and operatic cliche of the bearded and horned villain clad in red tights, and perhaps to illustrate what Hannah Arendt has called "the banality of evil," but this is one of those
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