Treading the Boards
JOHN GIELGUD, in the seventies, was asked live on television what he thought style meant. His brilliant answer: “Style, is knowing what play you’re in.” That is, that the trickiest part of putting on a play is to decide on, and stick to, the style of the play. In particular, is there a fourth wall? Is there a barrier between the audience and the stage? Too many plays seem to get this laughably wrong, while some blur the two which leads only to confusion.
Molière’s Don Juan was famously put on in London two years ago, and the play, which revolves around religion and heresy, failed simply because the audience were not able to believe that the characters believed in God: It was set in a jazzed-up Parisian hotel room. And even more miserable was the arrival of the speaking statue, which became a source of embarrassment and nonsense in such a naturalistic and unstylised world, ceasing to be real in the context of the rest of the piece.
The actors’ relationship with the audience is perhaps the other huge problem with a vast number of our plays. With Shakespeare, the excitement misplaced in the classroom at an early age is comprehensively lost on arrival at a theatre. Who can blame a young teenager for hating the man? We sit in the dark, and we spectate, listening to tricky and unfamiliar words. The relationship is totally passive.
And do not fall into the trap of thinking that four hundred years ago bored adolescents did not exist — what needs to be done is to remember that theatre is a twoway process, so that architecturally there is no divide, so that we are not, in terms of lighting, plunged into darkness, and so that the actors speak to us when needed, so that Henry V does not open up his mind to a painting on a wall but to four hundred-plus real people.
And yet one thing is clear: theatre (outside Oxford), amonge younger generations, is not trendy. Believe it or not, in the sixties, going to see a play was both trendy, and dare I say it, left-wing. Perhaps theatre just needs to once more reinvent itself.
8th Jun 2006