What do you think?
Rate this book
Shakespeare On Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles
Thirteen leading actors take us behind the scenes, each recreating in detail a memorable performance in one of ShakespeareOCOs major roles. Brian Cox on Titus Andronicus in Deborah WarnerOCOs visceral RSC production Judi Dench on being directed by Franco Zeffirelli as a twenty-three-year-old Juliet Ralph Fiennes on ShakespeareOCOs least sympathetic hero Coriolanus Rebecca Hall on Rosalind in As You Like It, directed by her father, Sir Peter Derek Jacobi on his hilariously poker-backed Malvolio for Michael Grandage Jude Law on his Hamlet, a palpable hit in the West End and on Broadway Adrian Lester on a modern-dress Henry V at the National, during the invasion of Iraq Ian McKellen on his Macbeth, opposite Judi Dench in Trevor NunnOCOs RSC production Helen Mirren on a role she was born for, and has played three times: Cleopatra Tim Pigott-Smith on Leontes in Peter HallOCOs Restoration WinterOCOs Tale at the National Kevin Spacey on his high-tech, modern-dress Richard II Patrick Stewart on Prospero in Rupert GooldOCOs arctic Tempest for the RSC Penelope Wilton on Isabella in Jonathan MillerOCOs ?chamberOCO Measure for Measure
The actors discuss their characters, working through the play scene by scene, with refreshing candour and in forensic detail. The result is a masterclass on playing each role, invaluable for other actors and directors, as well as students of Shakespeare ? and fascinating for audiences of the plays.
Together, the interviews give one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of these characters in performance, and of the choices that these great actors have made in bringing them thrillingly to life.
'These passages of times remembered contribute vividly to the sense of a teemingly creative period when Shakespeare seemed to have been rediscovered.' Trevor Nunn, from his Foreword
'absorbing and original... Curry's actors are often thinking and talking as that other professional performer, Shakespeare himself, might have done' "TLS"
The actors discuss their characters, working through the play scene by scene, with refreshing candour and in forensic detail. The result is a masterclass on playing each role, invaluable for other actors and directors, as well as students of Shakespeare ? and fascinating for audiences of the plays.
Together, the interviews give one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of these characters in performance, and of the choices that these great actors have made in bringing them thrillingly to life.
'These passages of times remembered contribute vividly to the sense of a teemingly creative period when Shakespeare seemed to have been rediscovered.' Trevor Nunn, from his Foreword
'absorbing and original... Curry's actors are often thinking and talking as that other professional performer, Shakespeare himself, might have done' "TLS"
- GenresShakespearePlays
220 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 28, 2010
7 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 20, 2018
A triumph of a series that makes you look at the plays in ways that reading, discussing or watching them - whether live in production or on film - simply do not give you: this insight into characters and motives and contexts you would otherwise not find, from the performers who know these leads so well.
Indispensable.
I look forward to it's follow-up volume two...
- BRIAN COX on TITUS ANDRONICUS in Deborah Warner's visceral 1987 RSC production
A crimson river of [...] blood...
Brian Cox brought a few more things out of Titus Andronicus [1591-2] that I'd not equated before: that Titus has 'played madness to the point where the line has been crossed.' (p.12). This is exactly the echo of Hamlet in the Closet Scene (3.4) where he 'accidentally' kills Polonius - the man against whom he has largely railed his 'antic disposition' upon, the man who has connived with Claudius to spy on Hamlet to prove his madness and get him banished, or worse, and the man who has used his own daughter as spy, the daughter he's more than paternally over-protective about, and sets her up in a potentially dangerous situation, is suddenly, unexpectedly killed by Hamlet in his madness - because Hamlet has crossed that line.
Cox's passion for what is the most brutal of Shakespeare's plays (many deaths, much dismemberment, mutilations, rape, filicide, cannibalism) makes you review it very differently from when you read the play or saw the RSC 2017 filmed production: it's more than it at first seems, a kind of a Hieronymus Bosch scarlet vision of Hell (right-hand triptych of 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', ~1500), yes, or Dalí's 'Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)' [1936], all mangled limbs and grimaces in the throes of dismemberment, parts chopped off to go in pies...
It's more than the gore and horror, it's tragedy is Titus's loss - not merely of 20-odd sons, a life's service to the brutal empire, and the most atrocious act probably ever to be witnessed on stage, of his poor Lavinia's ravagement - but of Titus's whole raison d'être, his humanity, and very nearly his entire blood-line.
Cox talks of vomiting, fainting women in his 1987 production - and more - and yet he puts all this disgust into a context of both Shakespeare's brazen experimentation at the time and of the echoes in the later works (influencing Coriolanus, of course, but of that 'line' crossed in Hamlet and Macbeth, and the fall of Lear, a somewhat timid play after Titus Andronicus) - and, as with all these insightful interview-essays of the 13 plays incorporated in this first edition, it opens up your mind's eye to the manifold possibilities, layers, meanings and cross-references within Shakespeare's portfolio - and I love it.
So, despite an earlier warning to myself, I may well revisit Titus again someday. But first, Othello, Richard III and those kin histories... be they ne'er so bloody.
- JUDI DENCH on being directed by Franco Zeffirelli as a twenty-three-year-old JULIET
Not pulling her punches, Judi Dench denounces the critics as being both contradictory and unsupportive, because of the mixed reviews of her 1960 performance at the Old Vic. But I'm with her all the way on how Juliet grows from a girl of not-quite 14 to a woman in just four days, how the story is fundamentally Juliet's story, and how she drives the development of the play. Apart from the Nurse, and her irritating parents wanting her to marry the silly Paris, it's all about Juliet falling in love, and although this lends weight to Romeo's part, it really is the story of Juliet that lights up the starlit nights of her doom. Romeo And Juliet is [1595-6] Juliet's story.
- RALPH FIENNES on Shakespeare's least sympathetic hero CORIOLANUS
... and my soul aches
To know, when two authorities are up,
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take
The one by th'other.
Fiennes love for the part and play - which he had a few reservations about getting quite right during his 2000 performance with the Almeida - led to him direct and play Coriolanus again in his filmed version of 2011.
When I read it many years ago I found it a very linear play, in that it had no depth other than the main plot. And this is because, unlike the psychological sub-plot of Cassius in Julius Caesar [1599], for example - which betrays a personal revenge against Caesar, a righteous determination to have such an autocrat brought down, and a love for Brutus, and in all these threads brings about his side's downfall - Coriolanus has no sub-plots. It is about a man bred by an autocratic mother to be a victorious general of Rome, and in her removed raising of her son to this end, doesn't endow him with any emotional intelligence through her lack of motherly love, and this becomes the general's downfall, for he is ever her dog on a leash.
It doesn't need any strong sub-plot with Aufidius, homoerotic or not; it doesn't need Coriolanus to have a strong relationship with his wife; it doesn't need a deep friendship with Menenius: it just needs Coriolanus to be the beast he was raised to be, always at his mother's beck. His tragedy - not merely that of pride - is that he learns to rebel against Volumnia's autocracy far too late in life, because he was brought up so well to believe his life was his role, a victor of Rome. When he finally breaks down, it is because he realises - not in any Oedipal way - that he loves his mother, unconditionally, and we don't know from what he says if he realises that she will never - could never - love him so, which is all he really needs now.
In this lies the tragedy, not merely in that of pride.
Fiennes brings this home, without ever directly stating it so. And this is what I love about Shakespeare and this series of interviews: you re-cast your view of the plays, you look at them through another's eyes, another's interpretation, who knows the part inside-out - and yet still there is more, still there are things missed or glossed or elevated beyond the text... It is this very dynamic accessibility and multi-layered availability of both Shakespeare's plays and the rendering of them that keeps them continually alive for us.
I must re-read it and watch the film within the new year.
- REBECCA HALL on ROSALIND in As You Like It, directed by her father, Sir Peter, 2003
What comes out of Rebecca Hall's discussion of Rosalind is the complexity of her character's prevarications about her love for Orlando, not simply because she is dressed as a man counselling him on how to woo this Rosalind woman he's in love with, but that she, being so young and inexperienced in love, and being frightened that if she commits herself to him, will it last, or will it fail and hurt her, are real problems we can equate with that I didn’t fully get from reading the play nor seeing the Branagh 2006 film, where I got more of the laughter, the joy out of the film.
Hall's Rosalind insight is that she's young, immature in love, and actually afraid of committing - i.e. revealing herself - to him, because she's afraid of potentially being hurt. It's a serious issue with her which, seeing her confidence in her disguise as his confidante and friend in 'schooling' him in how to love that Rosalind of his poetry, that this real Rosalind is wondering if she can actually be exposed to such a wild and often savage force. There' a constant sense of doubt in her, despite her outward disguised confidence.
This is certainly a piece I would re-read before watching the film or reading the play again, because it speaks of the interiority, of the psychology of the character which you cannot get from just watching the performance - the value of these interviews is that you get the interior doubts as well as desires from the actress playing the part that you would not necessarily get from the reading, and certainly I didn't get from the film, which was as much full of laughter as it was anything serious about the fear of truly loving.
- DEREK JACOBI on his hilariously poker-backed Malvolio for Michael Grandage, 2008
Malvolio is not for me a central character in Shakespeare's canon - he's a fall-guy, a sad, sorry, isolated, deluded fool who had been brought down in the world to his jealous position under Olivia, who gives more affectionate attention to the fool Feste (great name for a fool) than she does to him. So when Maria and co. set him up, he's completely self-deluded into believing he is worthy of Olivia's love - and that's a sad man who deserves our pity. He's such a lonely soul.
Of course, Shakespeare sets him up so that we even the more pity him when he comes out wearing his stockings and yellow hankie and becomes the fool, and is then thrust into this dark cell for his ungainly presumption.
What is interesting, therefore, to me, about this interview is that Derek Jacobi opens it with an admission that he had suffered from serious stage fright so severely in an earlier production of Hamlet in 1979 in Sydney, where he ran on in a soliloquy on pure autopilot, and that this affected him for 3 years. Considering his prominence in 'I, Claudius' earlier in 1976, and his nuanced Claudius in Branagh's 1996 Hamlet (where, with a single quizzical look, a raising of the eyebrow, towards the end, when he realises he has lost Gertrude, seems to snatch the play to himself in one second - an unforgettable moment), and his masterful Chorus in Branagh's 1989 Henry V, you would not consider for one moment that this man - Branagh's mentor and firm favourite thereafter - would actually be forced out of his calling for 3 years because of stage fright - it would be the last thing you'd expect.
But what it speaks of is that there is a very thin line that an actor treads in carrying a part before an audience on stage, almost like walking a tightrope, whereby, particularly in a doubting role such as Hamlet, he can just suddenly fall off it. And that is what stage fright is: it's a sudden blankness which nulls your world, blanks your vision, and prevents you seeing anything before you, it's a white-out, and there's no way out of it except becoming an automaton - if you're lucky. He was lucky that night, because he'd learnt those lines and out they flowed on their own - like having driven miles down the motorway without even being conscious of your surroundings. We've all done that.
So even though I was not particularly enamoured of Jacobi's discussion of the part, Malvolio, I suddenly felt a kinship with and a love for a man I had considered professionally as highly accomplished, revered and always at the top of his game. Yet here he was, playing the part of someone brought to his knees by his utter isolation and loneliness, and his own personal story made me suddenly feel so very much for that poor lonely soul so heartlessly teased and scorned and chucked in a cell.
Now THAT'S a story!
- JUDE LAW on his HAMLET, a palpable hit in the West End and on Broadway 2009
I love this series.
Part of this interview was an extra in the Norton Hamlet, and what's interesting about these actors' insights is that they add extra meaning to parts you thought you'd got covered, but also take lines you don't always agree with, or omit threads you think are relevant, in their discussion.
For example: in a single sentence, Shakespeare is multi-voiced, multiply layered: ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (3.1.122) has manifold meanings: I can’t love you, nor you me, because I know things that are dangerous to us; get away from your duplicitous, machinating, over-possessive father, he’s causing trouble (Ophelia is currently acting as spy for her father Polonius); I have to do something wicked that you cannot be involved in (avenge my father); get to a safe place, protect yourself, there’s serious trouble at court. All from one seemingly angry statement of rejection, which we, the reader, the audience know the background of, yet Ophelia little. But, of course, I missed an obvious thread: Hamlet's really annoyed by the behaviour of 'women', because of his mother's over-hasty marriage to his uncle, so as well as all that previous, he's miffed with Ophelia for just being female.
The discussion of his madness - and Hamlet is primarily an investigation into madness - follows from the 'antic disposition' put on after the grave message from his father's Ghost, but Hamlet actually does become mad when he 'accidentally' kills Polonius hidden behind the arras, believing it to be Claudius; he knows by now he is being spied upon, but in acting out his antic disposition primarily towards Polonius in his knavish foolery to an old prating fool, he underestimates Polonius's machinations in putting Hamlet into this position of isolated threat - so Polonius is culpable for his own death, but Hamlet shows little true contrition, and that's not merely a sign of resigned fatalism, nor a nod to Hamlet’s knowledge of Polonius's scheming against him: it's when Hamlet actually becomes mad.
However, what I found rather a straight interpretation was Polonius's motivation in trapping Hamlet before the king: sure, he's protecting his daughter, but what is he protecting her from? Hamlet, as Jude Law points out, is a good catch, a prince, the heir, etc. But all of Polonius's machinations are out of character for the doddery old fool whom Hamlet derides; and sure, Polonius is trying to protect the new established order. But he's also too over-protective of Ophelia, his daughter, curtails her liberty, and even sets her up as bait to catch his prince and propel him, at least to banishment, or otherwise certain death. To what end?
This doesn't quite add up. It is because Polonius - and to a similar extent, Laertes - are too over-protective of Ophelia; they are not merely trying, as Laertes does, to protect her from hurt because Hamlet may appear loving now, but could drop her later, because of ambition etc; and Polonius's exaggerated lie to Claudius about him informing Ophelia that Hamlet is a star too far is merely a cover for the inevitable conclusion that Polonius is not merely a scheming old right hand, but he's overbearingly protective and manipulative of his daughter: perversely so: he goes as far as setting her up as bait whilst proving that Hamlet is mad - even if out of excessive love - which is just a mite dangerous, wouldn't you say.
Yet, as with the inevitable Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet and Gertrude (and his frustration and inaction propelled by Claudius having usurped his Oedipal determinations in killing his father and appropriating his mother), we must read into Polonius's using of his own daughter to eliminate Hamlet a similar psychological perversity of father over daughter - a reverse Electra effect, if you like - or a dodgy 'doddery' old father....
So the manipulative machinations of Polonius are not overlooked, in this analysis, because he is effectively - along with Claudius, whom he leads by the nose in this - rather an unpleasant overbearing father oppressing his daughter and shifting her into danger, into the path of an alleged 'madman'. But the potential psychological motives of possession of his daughter are, and I think that's an omission we should be mindful of. And that, to a certain degree also, Laertes compounds. Ophelia is never allowed by any of these four men to become herself and make her own choices. And her true madness and loss of all future is the more poignantly, plaintively heart breaking because of it. And it's largely her own father's fault: not Hamlet's.
Quite why this relevance is omitted from all analyses is slightly beyond me.
But otherwise, everything - barring this omission - that Jude Law says about the play and his and his director Michael Grandage's interpretation of it is sound, thoughtful, and obviously passionately informed, on the nose, and I love this stuff, from the performer's mouth.
I haven't found this on disc yet, but I'd love to see it: it looks as sumptuous in places - the gorgeous snow setting of soliloquy 4, 'To be...' (3.1), the cover picture - as Branagh's opening ceremony. I’d love to see the rest of the setting. And, of course, Jude Law in full flow.
- ADRIAN LESTER on a modern-dress HENRY V at the National, during the invasion of Iraq 2003
A very revealing insight into the play and the mind of the King and how he'll use whatever psychology he can to WIN. Winning is all, even in the teeth of defeat. It's both a play about winning and an anti-war play, particularly since, between casting and rehearsal, Britain went to war with Iraq, on that shaky argument, just as Henry V does.
The play is dissected by the act and the exigencies of the circumstance prove Henry's mind through Lester's deep familiarity with it. But because they set it in a modern military setting, with lots of effects during the battle scenes, and because he maintained eye contact with the audience, he could gauge the different reactions to those who harrumphed at his just cause, those younger members who saw the glory of it, the patriotic jingoism was heroism to them, and to the older audience who have lived through conflicts, may have been in them, and got very different reactions, as well as on different nights. But he always wanted the lights up to see the front rows so that he could act off and with the audience.
This was a fantastic piece to read and thoroughly enjoyable, largely because of Adrian Lester's utter enthusiasm for the part, and the context he found himself in. I didn’t like the play when I read it recently; not when I saw the local drama group do it quite professionally, yet uninspirationally; I liked Branagh's film so-so, 50/50. But when I read Lester's insight into the play and the character, I suddenly re-thought the piece, and it became doubly meaningful to me, and far more involved than anything I’d got out of it so far.
THAT is the success of these interviews, their value, their indispensability. Because I may even re-read it, now - whereas, a month ago, in my review, I said I'd never touch the play again.
- IAN MCKELLEN on his MACBETH, opposite Judi Dench in Trevor Nunn's RSC production of 1976
Ian McKellen is one of our finest favourites who would have to pull off such a difficult feat: that of portraying a man at the height of his professional powers, brilliance and confidence - a revered conquering hero - fall apart through guilt of assassination, which is what the play's entirely about. Again, that tightrope walk between authorised savage and unconscionable murderer.
But his discussion delivers at length Macbeth's and his Lady's predicaments: he fiercely deteriorates into savagery, plagued by his conscience, ghosts and daggers until finally giving up; she goes utterly mad because she is not the creature of imagination he is, and cannot cope with the aftermath of atrocity. The darkness of the play is something of a pre-Freudian investigation into the subconscious: not 'unconscious', because everything in Macbeth's mind spills out about the stage and into the audience from the very off, with the witches, and more and more of it spills from his mind as more and more blood is spilt and covers not just his hands but his vision and his friends' families and, well... rivers of blood again. Shakespeare liked rivers of blood (Titus, Richard III, that Scottish thing).
[Insufficient room for the detailed consideration of the remaining interviews]
Altogether, a fund of knowledgeable insights into 13 of the greatest writer's phenomenally rich and multi-layered plays which any lover of Shakespeare should grab and devour with joy.
Indispensable.
I look forward to it's follow-up volume two...
- BRIAN COX on TITUS ANDRONICUS in Deborah Warner's visceral 1987 RSC production
A crimson river of [...] blood...
Brian Cox brought a few more things out of Titus Andronicus [1591-2] that I'd not equated before: that Titus has 'played madness to the point where the line has been crossed.' (p.12). This is exactly the echo of Hamlet in the Closet Scene (3.4) where he 'accidentally' kills Polonius - the man against whom he has largely railed his 'antic disposition' upon, the man who has connived with Claudius to spy on Hamlet to prove his madness and get him banished, or worse, and the man who has used his own daughter as spy, the daughter he's more than paternally over-protective about, and sets her up in a potentially dangerous situation, is suddenly, unexpectedly killed by Hamlet in his madness - because Hamlet has crossed that line.
Cox's passion for what is the most brutal of Shakespeare's plays (many deaths, much dismemberment, mutilations, rape, filicide, cannibalism) makes you review it very differently from when you read the play or saw the RSC 2017 filmed production: it's more than it at first seems, a kind of a Hieronymus Bosch scarlet vision of Hell (right-hand triptych of 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', ~1500), yes, or Dalí's 'Soft Construction With Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)' [1936], all mangled limbs and grimaces in the throes of dismemberment, parts chopped off to go in pies...
It's more than the gore and horror, it's tragedy is Titus's loss - not merely of 20-odd sons, a life's service to the brutal empire, and the most atrocious act probably ever to be witnessed on stage, of his poor Lavinia's ravagement - but of Titus's whole raison d'être, his humanity, and very nearly his entire blood-line.
Cox talks of vomiting, fainting women in his 1987 production - and more - and yet he puts all this disgust into a context of both Shakespeare's brazen experimentation at the time and of the echoes in the later works (influencing Coriolanus, of course, but of that 'line' crossed in Hamlet and Macbeth, and the fall of Lear, a somewhat timid play after Titus Andronicus) - and, as with all these insightful interview-essays of the 13 plays incorporated in this first edition, it opens up your mind's eye to the manifold possibilities, layers, meanings and cross-references within Shakespeare's portfolio - and I love it.
So, despite an earlier warning to myself, I may well revisit Titus again someday. But first, Othello, Richard III and those kin histories... be they ne'er so bloody.
- JUDI DENCH on being directed by Franco Zeffirelli as a twenty-three-year-old JULIET
Not pulling her punches, Judi Dench denounces the critics as being both contradictory and unsupportive, because of the mixed reviews of her 1960 performance at the Old Vic. But I'm with her all the way on how Juliet grows from a girl of not-quite 14 to a woman in just four days, how the story is fundamentally Juliet's story, and how she drives the development of the play. Apart from the Nurse, and her irritating parents wanting her to marry the silly Paris, it's all about Juliet falling in love, and although this lends weight to Romeo's part, it really is the story of Juliet that lights up the starlit nights of her doom. Romeo And Juliet is [1595-6] Juliet's story.
- RALPH FIENNES on Shakespeare's least sympathetic hero CORIOLANUS
... and my soul aches
To know, when two authorities are up,
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take
The one by th'other.
Fiennes love for the part and play - which he had a few reservations about getting quite right during his 2000 performance with the Almeida - led to him direct and play Coriolanus again in his filmed version of 2011.
When I read it many years ago I found it a very linear play, in that it had no depth other than the main plot. And this is because, unlike the psychological sub-plot of Cassius in Julius Caesar [1599], for example - which betrays a personal revenge against Caesar, a righteous determination to have such an autocrat brought down, and a love for Brutus, and in all these threads brings about his side's downfall - Coriolanus has no sub-plots. It is about a man bred by an autocratic mother to be a victorious general of Rome, and in her removed raising of her son to this end, doesn't endow him with any emotional intelligence through her lack of motherly love, and this becomes the general's downfall, for he is ever her dog on a leash.
It doesn't need any strong sub-plot with Aufidius, homoerotic or not; it doesn't need Coriolanus to have a strong relationship with his wife; it doesn't need a deep friendship with Menenius: it just needs Coriolanus to be the beast he was raised to be, always at his mother's beck. His tragedy - not merely that of pride - is that he learns to rebel against Volumnia's autocracy far too late in life, because he was brought up so well to believe his life was his role, a victor of Rome. When he finally breaks down, it is because he realises - not in any Oedipal way - that he loves his mother, unconditionally, and we don't know from what he says if he realises that she will never - could never - love him so, which is all he really needs now.
In this lies the tragedy, not merely in that of pride.
Fiennes brings this home, without ever directly stating it so. And this is what I love about Shakespeare and this series of interviews: you re-cast your view of the plays, you look at them through another's eyes, another's interpretation, who knows the part inside-out - and yet still there is more, still there are things missed or glossed or elevated beyond the text... It is this very dynamic accessibility and multi-layered availability of both Shakespeare's plays and the rendering of them that keeps them continually alive for us.
I must re-read it and watch the film within the new year.
- REBECCA HALL on ROSALIND in As You Like It, directed by her father, Sir Peter, 2003
What comes out of Rebecca Hall's discussion of Rosalind is the complexity of her character's prevarications about her love for Orlando, not simply because she is dressed as a man counselling him on how to woo this Rosalind woman he's in love with, but that she, being so young and inexperienced in love, and being frightened that if she commits herself to him, will it last, or will it fail and hurt her, are real problems we can equate with that I didn’t fully get from reading the play nor seeing the Branagh 2006 film, where I got more of the laughter, the joy out of the film.
Hall's Rosalind insight is that she's young, immature in love, and actually afraid of committing - i.e. revealing herself - to him, because she's afraid of potentially being hurt. It's a serious issue with her which, seeing her confidence in her disguise as his confidante and friend in 'schooling' him in how to love that Rosalind of his poetry, that this real Rosalind is wondering if she can actually be exposed to such a wild and often savage force. There' a constant sense of doubt in her, despite her outward disguised confidence.
This is certainly a piece I would re-read before watching the film or reading the play again, because it speaks of the interiority, of the psychology of the character which you cannot get from just watching the performance - the value of these interviews is that you get the interior doubts as well as desires from the actress playing the part that you would not necessarily get from the reading, and certainly I didn't get from the film, which was as much full of laughter as it was anything serious about the fear of truly loving.
- DEREK JACOBI on his hilariously poker-backed Malvolio for Michael Grandage, 2008
Malvolio is not for me a central character in Shakespeare's canon - he's a fall-guy, a sad, sorry, isolated, deluded fool who had been brought down in the world to his jealous position under Olivia, who gives more affectionate attention to the fool Feste (great name for a fool) than she does to him. So when Maria and co. set him up, he's completely self-deluded into believing he is worthy of Olivia's love - and that's a sad man who deserves our pity. He's such a lonely soul.
Of course, Shakespeare sets him up so that we even the more pity him when he comes out wearing his stockings and yellow hankie and becomes the fool, and is then thrust into this dark cell for his ungainly presumption.
What is interesting, therefore, to me, about this interview is that Derek Jacobi opens it with an admission that he had suffered from serious stage fright so severely in an earlier production of Hamlet in 1979 in Sydney, where he ran on in a soliloquy on pure autopilot, and that this affected him for 3 years. Considering his prominence in 'I, Claudius' earlier in 1976, and his nuanced Claudius in Branagh's 1996 Hamlet (where, with a single quizzical look, a raising of the eyebrow, towards the end, when he realises he has lost Gertrude, seems to snatch the play to himself in one second - an unforgettable moment), and his masterful Chorus in Branagh's 1989 Henry V, you would not consider for one moment that this man - Branagh's mentor and firm favourite thereafter - would actually be forced out of his calling for 3 years because of stage fright - it would be the last thing you'd expect.
But what it speaks of is that there is a very thin line that an actor treads in carrying a part before an audience on stage, almost like walking a tightrope, whereby, particularly in a doubting role such as Hamlet, he can just suddenly fall off it. And that is what stage fright is: it's a sudden blankness which nulls your world, blanks your vision, and prevents you seeing anything before you, it's a white-out, and there's no way out of it except becoming an automaton - if you're lucky. He was lucky that night, because he'd learnt those lines and out they flowed on their own - like having driven miles down the motorway without even being conscious of your surroundings. We've all done that.
So even though I was not particularly enamoured of Jacobi's discussion of the part, Malvolio, I suddenly felt a kinship with and a love for a man I had considered professionally as highly accomplished, revered and always at the top of his game. Yet here he was, playing the part of someone brought to his knees by his utter isolation and loneliness, and his own personal story made me suddenly feel so very much for that poor lonely soul so heartlessly teased and scorned and chucked in a cell.
Now THAT'S a story!
- JUDE LAW on his HAMLET, a palpable hit in the West End and on Broadway 2009
I love this series.
Part of this interview was an extra in the Norton Hamlet, and what's interesting about these actors' insights is that they add extra meaning to parts you thought you'd got covered, but also take lines you don't always agree with, or omit threads you think are relevant, in their discussion.
For example: in a single sentence, Shakespeare is multi-voiced, multiply layered: ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (3.1.122) has manifold meanings: I can’t love you, nor you me, because I know things that are dangerous to us; get away from your duplicitous, machinating, over-possessive father, he’s causing trouble (Ophelia is currently acting as spy for her father Polonius); I have to do something wicked that you cannot be involved in (avenge my father); get to a safe place, protect yourself, there’s serious trouble at court. All from one seemingly angry statement of rejection, which we, the reader, the audience know the background of, yet Ophelia little. But, of course, I missed an obvious thread: Hamlet's really annoyed by the behaviour of 'women', because of his mother's over-hasty marriage to his uncle, so as well as all that previous, he's miffed with Ophelia for just being female.
The discussion of his madness - and Hamlet is primarily an investigation into madness - follows from the 'antic disposition' put on after the grave message from his father's Ghost, but Hamlet actually does become mad when he 'accidentally' kills Polonius hidden behind the arras, believing it to be Claudius; he knows by now he is being spied upon, but in acting out his antic disposition primarily towards Polonius in his knavish foolery to an old prating fool, he underestimates Polonius's machinations in putting Hamlet into this position of isolated threat - so Polonius is culpable for his own death, but Hamlet shows little true contrition, and that's not merely a sign of resigned fatalism, nor a nod to Hamlet’s knowledge of Polonius's scheming against him: it's when Hamlet actually becomes mad.
However, what I found rather a straight interpretation was Polonius's motivation in trapping Hamlet before the king: sure, he's protecting his daughter, but what is he protecting her from? Hamlet, as Jude Law points out, is a good catch, a prince, the heir, etc. But all of Polonius's machinations are out of character for the doddery old fool whom Hamlet derides; and sure, Polonius is trying to protect the new established order. But he's also too over-protective of Ophelia, his daughter, curtails her liberty, and even sets her up as bait to catch his prince and propel him, at least to banishment, or otherwise certain death. To what end?
This doesn't quite add up. It is because Polonius - and to a similar extent, Laertes - are too over-protective of Ophelia; they are not merely trying, as Laertes does, to protect her from hurt because Hamlet may appear loving now, but could drop her later, because of ambition etc; and Polonius's exaggerated lie to Claudius about him informing Ophelia that Hamlet is a star too far is merely a cover for the inevitable conclusion that Polonius is not merely a scheming old right hand, but he's overbearingly protective and manipulative of his daughter: perversely so: he goes as far as setting her up as bait whilst proving that Hamlet is mad - even if out of excessive love - which is just a mite dangerous, wouldn't you say.
Yet, as with the inevitable Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet and Gertrude (and his frustration and inaction propelled by Claudius having usurped his Oedipal determinations in killing his father and appropriating his mother), we must read into Polonius's using of his own daughter to eliminate Hamlet a similar psychological perversity of father over daughter - a reverse Electra effect, if you like - or a dodgy 'doddery' old father....
So the manipulative machinations of Polonius are not overlooked, in this analysis, because he is effectively - along with Claudius, whom he leads by the nose in this - rather an unpleasant overbearing father oppressing his daughter and shifting her into danger, into the path of an alleged 'madman'. But the potential psychological motives of possession of his daughter are, and I think that's an omission we should be mindful of. And that, to a certain degree also, Laertes compounds. Ophelia is never allowed by any of these four men to become herself and make her own choices. And her true madness and loss of all future is the more poignantly, plaintively heart breaking because of it. And it's largely her own father's fault: not Hamlet's.
Quite why this relevance is omitted from all analyses is slightly beyond me.
But otherwise, everything - barring this omission - that Jude Law says about the play and his and his director Michael Grandage's interpretation of it is sound, thoughtful, and obviously passionately informed, on the nose, and I love this stuff, from the performer's mouth.
I haven't found this on disc yet, but I'd love to see it: it looks as sumptuous in places - the gorgeous snow setting of soliloquy 4, 'To be...' (3.1), the cover picture - as Branagh's opening ceremony. I’d love to see the rest of the setting. And, of course, Jude Law in full flow.
- ADRIAN LESTER on a modern-dress HENRY V at the National, during the invasion of Iraq 2003
A very revealing insight into the play and the mind of the King and how he'll use whatever psychology he can to WIN. Winning is all, even in the teeth of defeat. It's both a play about winning and an anti-war play, particularly since, between casting and rehearsal, Britain went to war with Iraq, on that shaky argument, just as Henry V does.
The play is dissected by the act and the exigencies of the circumstance prove Henry's mind through Lester's deep familiarity with it. But because they set it in a modern military setting, with lots of effects during the battle scenes, and because he maintained eye contact with the audience, he could gauge the different reactions to those who harrumphed at his just cause, those younger members who saw the glory of it, the patriotic jingoism was heroism to them, and to the older audience who have lived through conflicts, may have been in them, and got very different reactions, as well as on different nights. But he always wanted the lights up to see the front rows so that he could act off and with the audience.
This was a fantastic piece to read and thoroughly enjoyable, largely because of Adrian Lester's utter enthusiasm for the part, and the context he found himself in. I didn’t like the play when I read it recently; not when I saw the local drama group do it quite professionally, yet uninspirationally; I liked Branagh's film so-so, 50/50. But when I read Lester's insight into the play and the character, I suddenly re-thought the piece, and it became doubly meaningful to me, and far more involved than anything I’d got out of it so far.
THAT is the success of these interviews, their value, their indispensability. Because I may even re-read it, now - whereas, a month ago, in my review, I said I'd never touch the play again.
- IAN MCKELLEN on his MACBETH, opposite Judi Dench in Trevor Nunn's RSC production of 1976
Ian McKellen is one of our finest favourites who would have to pull off such a difficult feat: that of portraying a man at the height of his professional powers, brilliance and confidence - a revered conquering hero - fall apart through guilt of assassination, which is what the play's entirely about. Again, that tightrope walk between authorised savage and unconscionable murderer.
But his discussion delivers at length Macbeth's and his Lady's predicaments: he fiercely deteriorates into savagery, plagued by his conscience, ghosts and daggers until finally giving up; she goes utterly mad because she is not the creature of imagination he is, and cannot cope with the aftermath of atrocity. The darkness of the play is something of a pre-Freudian investigation into the subconscious: not 'unconscious', because everything in Macbeth's mind spills out about the stage and into the audience from the very off, with the witches, and more and more of it spills from his mind as more and more blood is spilt and covers not just his hands but his vision and his friends' families and, well... rivers of blood again. Shakespeare liked rivers of blood (Titus, Richard III, that Scottish thing).
[Insufficient room for the detailed consideration of the remaining interviews]
Altogether, a fund of knowledgeable insights into 13 of the greatest writer's phenomenally rich and multi-layered plays which any lover of Shakespeare should grab and devour with joy.
September 27, 2023
A book made up of a series of interviews with different people is destined to be uneven, but this book was remarkably strong throughout. Most of the actors had a variety of insights that would be interesting to actors and non-actors, Shakespeare aficionados and newbies alike.
The big surprise for me was just how much Julian Curry's personality came through and how pleasant it was. The draw of an interview is obviously the interviewee, and usually when the interviewer inserts himself into the conversation too much, it's off-putting. But Curry is not only a seasoned Shakespeare actor -- having played in some of the very productions that the leads are interviewed about -- but a charming person in general.
The strongest interviews for me were Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart for the technical performance details and Judi Dench for entertainment (Dame Judi is so fucking funny). The weak point was Jude Law's interview about his Hamlet. It felt like most of his answers to nuanced questions were just rote recitations of basic plot points.
Overall, a fun read, especially for actors and fans of the plans.
The big surprise for me was just how much Julian Curry's personality came through and how pleasant it was. The draw of an interview is obviously the interviewee, and usually when the interviewer inserts himself into the conversation too much, it's off-putting. But Curry is not only a seasoned Shakespeare actor -- having played in some of the very productions that the leads are interviewed about -- but a charming person in general.
The strongest interviews for me were Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart for the technical performance details and Judi Dench for entertainment (Dame Judi is so fucking funny). The weak point was Jude Law's interview about his Hamlet. It felt like most of his answers to nuanced questions were just rote recitations of basic plot points.
Overall, a fun read, especially for actors and fans of the plans.
January 17, 2011
Quite a nice read for those who either know the performances in question or the actors/actresses. It is particularly interesting to see how much the interviewees really own their characters ad how much they can still remember about their own performances even after decades. It helps the imagination, however, if one has seen the productions or at least videos of them.
December 13, 2013
I enjoyed every single one of these interviews -- even the ones with actors I'd never heard of before or about roles I haven't seen performed. Each is a treasure house of insight into some of Shakespeare's greatest and most challenging characters.
Definitely recommended for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare in particular or performing arts in general.
Definitely recommended for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare in particular or performing arts in general.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews