Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘The medium of diffusion,’ said Professor Wind in the fifth of his Reith lectures, ‘tends to take precedence over direct experience of the object.’ He was thinking mainly of visual art in relation to photographs, but the remark applies painfully well to live drama, a gregarious form which attracts impurities in the atmosphere as surely as white gloves in a coal mine. The media of diffusion now include radio, cinema and television as well as the theatre itself; and the ‘rawness of vision’ Wind disapproves of conditions both new plays and revivals. On the stage it can actually be the object, in which case it supplies the authentic kicks of abstract expressionist painting, ends and means well suited. When the object to be experienced is the embodied text of some master playwright whose vision is anything but raw, then trouble starts. It can take the form of director, actors and audience conspiring unconsciously to debase the original until the gap between the thing intended and the thing done is not to be excused.

     Unless this gap is quickly narrowed, I think we can expect performances aligned on a lowest common denominator of showy effects. These, apart from being bad for everybody concerned, would keep informed lovers of the drama glued to their texts at a time when it is at last being accepted that the texts, however elaborate, are no substitute for the experience to be had from acted plays, any more than analysis of the texts can usefully replace analysis of performance. There is a sense in which plays are diffused by being done in the theatre, but strictly speaking their artistic function is precisely to be acted and they are in limbo on the page. When they are sifted through media not even thought of at the time of creation the processes of mechanized art are at work, as much as in the reproduction of Tintoretto by colour prints. Furthermore, mechanized drama in one form or another is a climate in which many of us, including directors and actors, spend a lot of tune. Unless we are to jettison critical attitudes which take stock of an author’s intention, it’s necessary to allow for a change in sensibility no less drastic than the Restoration urge to supply Caliban with a mate.

     Today’s sensibility, with its rawness of vision, accounts for the contrast in style between Finney and Scofield, between Langham and Guthrie, among directors, between Sillitoe and D. H. Lawrence, Arden and Fry. Obviously it reflects a positive impulse with deep roots in social conditions and artistic taste. Here I want only to clear the ground a little by pointing out its debt to the media of diffusion, one which can’t be disregarded because it recoils sooner or later on the higher reaches of dramatic art. This year, for instance, television directors are staging Shakespeare at the Old Vic and Stratford-on-Avon.

     What about the audience, a factor the most exalted literary dramatist ignores at his peril? One thing we can be sure of is a difference in conduct between people at a straight play and those at the opera or ballet. Guinness and Finney have both complained of undisciplined audiences, whereas attentiveness at Covent Garden can be taken for granted. No doubt new playgoers who wouldn’t yet tackle Fokine or Verdi are finding their way into theatres, drawn by the screen glamour of Guinness and Finney much as they would buy Sons and Lovers, the book of the film. In manners there is something like the decline to be noted at cricket matches, where you used to push by to your seat only when the players were crossing over. At theatres, I think the restlessness isn’t confined to newcomers but is a natural result of the viewing habit. Even before the intrusion of commercials it had become second nature to eat, smoke, glance at the newspaper and otherwise relax when assisting at television, without of course any discourtesy to the performers. Opera and ballet, of which there is little on television, still hold some authority over their audiences; not so the straight drama, which has had its fangs drawn by being tied to a mechanical appliance continually in sight.

     Dramatic dialogue, being more often heard in some homes than human conversation, is losing the prestige given by unfamiliarity without catching the soothing associations of background music. The result can scarcely be anything other than a dulling of response. especially to the spoken word used figuratively, rhetorically or lyrically in a way to demand close attention. Visually the tyranny of the close-up, imposed by the cinema for a quarter of a century and now fortified by television, tends to supersede other forms of emphasis. When people so conditioned are expected to form a theatre audience, it’s no surprise if they are ill at ease; they are being asked for the kind of effort required of church congregations by comparison with the casual habit of fireside drama on the screen. People in the back rows of an auditorium resent more and more a remoteness which used to be taken for granted.

     Although directors may not be consciously aware of this tendency, they sense it and adopt their methods of staging accordingly. ‘Any fine actor,’ Peter Wood has said, ‘knows how to put himself into the equivalent of a close-up.’ Faced with the need to hold audiences enfeebled by mechanized screen drama, the director has three main ways of fighting back. First he can mechanize his productions literally, following Italian Renaissance tradition rather than the declamatory drama of Greeks, Elizabethans and Versailles; in short, he can go visual, with the excuse that picture-frame stages like those at the Old Vic and Stratford-on-Avon invite him to. No harm in that, if, and a very big if, the sport with revolves, hydraulic lifts and insets doesn’t emasculate the text by making it pant behind mechanical traffic until actors blurt their lines like the man asking for his ticket after chasing a bus. Having avoided that, there remains the likelihood of needless illustration, of visually echoing the text where it is self-sufficient. There’s nothing to stop directors projecting moving pictures of a housewife knitting up ravelled sleeves behind Macbeth’s lines on sleep or filling the stage with rogues and peasant slaves to help Hamlet. It would be called ‘re-thinking the classics in modern terms’.

     Secondly, the theatre director can select from mechanized drama its stock formulas of communication without resorting to stage machinery proper. He can go all out for an equivalent of the screen’s emotional fodder, its staple violence and sentimentality. Comedy of manners is just about the only genre intractable to this. Tragedy lies wide open to it, as Milo Sperber proved in having Aegisthus killed on stage in the RADA’s Electra. It came over so well that I had to consult a classical scholar to make sure Sophocles didn’t make an exception in this case. As for Jacobeans, you can always say they brought it on themselves if revivals highlight the sadism; but if any are major dramatists, it’s because of poetic diction which the screen wholly neglects.

     The third, and most reputable way of holding a bemused audience, other than bringing the actors almost within spitting distance and calling it theatre in the round, recognizes the authority of opera and ballet. You mount the production in such a way as to please new playgoers without offending the intelligentsia. The masters of this are Guthrie and Zeffirelli, followed, at a distance caused by their proletarian bias, by Littlewood and Planchon. All four use machinery, music and ensemble in the service of a broad statement about the text concerned. None of them excels in the projection of heightened language, but you can rely on them for a literate version of the classics, inasmuch as philosophy, narrative and human relationships enter. But their mastery of the technical means of production can be a menace to the spoken word. Guthrie and Zeffirelli are, of course, ace opera directors and Littlewood’s gifts incline towards music drama, as in The Hostage. Wind’s ‘rawness of vision’, in a positive, creative sense, applies to all of them except Guthrie.

     It applies even more to the younger actors, as much at home in the mass media as on the stage. Their toughness of fibre comes from the subject matter of new English drama coupled with the replacement of classical training by the Method, itself literally a vulgarization of the Stanislavsky System reflecting the American Group Theatre’s sensibility. Recent trends in the Method have been towards the mechanization of ‘inner feeling’ in close-up on cinema and television, what I call Method Ham. Robbed of camera and microphone in the theatre, young English actors have to hold their audience by projected feeling; they cannot, like those in the Moscow Art Theatre, shelter within the bourgeois manners of Chekhov characters or enjoy Molière’s detachment in the French repertoire. Having no National Theatre, they are likely to model themselves on Armchair Theatre in which dramatic action tends to be nasty, brutish and short. They find the language of heroic drama difficult to speak, in fact the concept of heroic drama unsympathetic; and the Method, with its dismal record in this field, has little help to offer. It is understandable that any director with an approach to live theatre based on concessions to popular taste should find allies among actors in this predicament.

     Concessions to popular taste, of course, are to be found in great drama and often make for strength, as in Shakespeare’s habit of translating a word like ‘incarnadine’ into basic English the moment after he’s used it. Methods of speaking, dressing and so forth, undergo changes which alter the brand image of a play from year to year. But none of that is quite so drastic as the conditioning of actors, directors and audiences now taking place. The media of diffusion are more accessible and more lucrative than drama itself, and none of the parties concerned in it can easily throw aside the effects of trafficking in mechanized drama when a live audience faces live actors. The microphone discouraged rhetorical delivery, even of passages meant to be rhetorical; then the film camera encouraged physical action. It can be seen as early as the Arthur Bourchier silent film of Macbeth, the best sequence of which was built round a comic soldier losing contact with the others while he waved his fragment of Birnam Wood. Finally, the television cameras imposed their own type of anxious intimacy, as can be seen by comparing Clarence’s dream in An Age of Kings with the same passage in Olivier’s Richard III.

     Many of the masterpieces come over better on the screen than they would on the stage, for the screen can hide defects which only a secure company, highly trained and permanently housed, can avoid in live performance. But all this makes nonsense of the idea that the masterpieces can be safely left in book form to discussion by critics who won’t dirty their hands by going backstage. Most of these texts came from backstage in the first place. They were meant to be acted; and long stretches of them were certainly not meant to be acted the way they are acted now. On the production line which stretches between text and dispersing audience there intervene directors, designers and actors, not forgetting the audience in its active state, hypnotized according to Stanislavsky, alerted by Brecht or simply crackling sweet-wrappers and wishing they’d stayed at home for the quiz. It’s always been so, but never before have the interveners all shared a sensibility sprung from drama shrunk to moving pictures. Most of today’s creative theatre begins by accepting the fact. Whether you conform or resist depends on how far you agree with Wind that art is degraded by mechanization.

     Perhaps in the end a performing art can’t afford to be too much better than the taste of its audience. Here is a dialogue overheard by a friend of mine between two elderly ladies in the balcony of a West End theatre. It was a play about Redbrick students, promisingly written. The matinée was timed to begin at 3 o’clock.

A: What a late start
B: Too late. We shall never see the big picture.
A: This is not a cinema. It’s a theatre, and they’re doing a play.
B: Really! What is the play about?
A: Young people. Undergraduates.
B: Oh, dear! I’m tired of plays about young people. I shan’t like that.
A: You can shut your eyes and listen to the music.
B: The stage is much too far away.
A: Because we’re so high up.
B: No, not that. The stage is so low down.

The play didn’t have much of a run.