So How Do You Do That Voodoo That You Do So Well....

Friday, 30. September 2005, 13:14:33
This is really a post about teaching Shakespeare in performance, something I've been pondering a lot lately. One fo the great things about working at this Nameless Southern Theatre is that there is an MFA Program associated with it, and one of my tasks over the years as an associate artist here as been to teach as an adjunct faculty member. And in that conversation one of the questions that comes up both in one's own preparation and in the classroom itself is "How do you approach the work? What's your process??". And the answer to that is often fairly amorphous.

There might have been "rules" or a path early in one's career, but over time, doing the work, every actor develops a sort of short hand for him or herself about how to go about creating a character (an alien concept to Elizabethan actors). And recently as I've been tutoring a couple of students on material they've been working on from the canon for class purposes, it occurred to me that such a shorthand often becomes more a shortcut than anything else. We get lazy. And the result is that we don't do the calibre of work that is actually possible to do.

So I thought I'd put down some ideas here, that are more specific to the way that I would teach a class on Shakespeare than anything having to do with how one might work on more modern material.

First I have to point out what anyone familiar with the landscape will recognise immediately; my background is heavily based in the writings and ideas of John Barton. There is, to my mind, no better text dedicated to the acting of Shakespeare than his compilation taken from his series for the BBC, Playing Shakespeare. It is still the bible.

That said, it's helpful to me at least to think about how I would approach the work from four perspectives, or areas of interest.

A. Reading the text, be it play, scene or solioquey, first for overall meaning. This involves doing whatever OED or other research is necessary to make clear for oneself exactly what is being said. It is the first step, and ultimately the last, because the function of the actor in the performance of Shakespeare (or Moliere, or Chekhov, or Mamet) is to clearly and effectively communicate the ideas of the playwright. It is definitely NOT about getting past all that pesky language so that one can get to the actual acting of the scene (most bad Shakespeare in performance is such because the actor is generalizing and throwing ideas aside in order to "get to the point").
B. Next is all about structure. This means do the scansion work. It means studying the nature of the verse (or prose), to see how complex the sentences are, whether the speaker shifts from verse to prose or visa versa, are their shared lines or not, how many caesuras occur within the sentences, how many relative clauses are used within a sentence. This part could also be called checking the grammer I suppose but it really is more than that. For example, if the speaker has a sentence that contains many relative clauses within a sentence before he gets to the end of the full thought (such as Marcus in Titus)), the actor must recognise that it is their responsibility to make ALL of the ideas contained by those clauses as clear as the main idea itself. This means acting techniques like "operative word" have no place in the performance of Shakespeare. If you don't respect this structure there isn't a prayer that as an audience member I'll ever be able to follow a complex sentence; I'll drop out trying to comprehend what I just heard contained in the clause, missing the continuing thread or line of the thought. In Shakespeare, It ALL counts.
C. What should I recognize about the use of rhetoric in the language being used? Things like aliteration, assonace, onomatopeia, repetition, personification, etc. were the tools that Shakespeare and his contemporaries used to make clear to the actor, in the quickest possible way, what he as a playwright intended to be happening on stage. The repeated use of the word "honourable" in Julius Caesar is a good example of how a rhetorical device could quickly suggest to the actor how to play the speech. And chief among these devices would be the use of antithesis, the setting off of one word or groups of words against another...."To be or not to be" is the most famous example. Shakespeare thought antithetically, and it runs throughout his work. Indeed, as biographers like Park Honan and Stephen Greenblatt have pointed out brilliantly, there was a duality in Shakespeare's whole life that expressed itself in varying ways in his art, driven by the tension between the young man raised in the countryside, and the sophisticated poet, actor and playwright who lived and worked at the center of the world as he knew it, London.
D. And finally, how do I want to approach the work from the perspective of "verbal relish"? This language was meant to be played before somewhere around 3000 people, whether at the Globe or the Rose or the Theatre, out of doors. It was language that was meant to be used in a muscular, full voiced, fully realized way. No Pinter pauses here, no kitchen sink, Method mumblings in the name of "honesty" or "truth", whatever the hell that means. Use the rehtoric!!! Embrace the sound of the language. Grapple with it. It is always instructive to remember that if the balcony above the stage and the tiring house, what was refered to as "the heavens", wasn't in use as part of the play, or as a platform for musicians, it was sold as seating to the wealthiest of the gentry, come to see the play. That's right, the most expensive seats in the house were often the ones BEHIND the physical action of the ongoing play. That meant that this was a theatre, however much swayed by spectacle and later by elaborate court masque, that was based on and driven by language first.

And then finally the point. That A through D are really in the service of one thing, and that is to provide the actor with better ideas about how to play the material. There are no rules, but aren't we better off knowing a little bit of perhaps what Shakespeare intended us to do, whether we have the temerity to then ignore it or not??? It IS all about meaning, and these are tools that can point us down a clearer road, toward possible choices to be made in the development of a character.

Now that it's down on screen, maybe I can think about this all some more and see if it makes any sense after all........