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

In case any doubt still exists that International Style is now the accepted way of acting classics, a young Pakistani actor is playing Romeo at Stratford-on-Avon and Mr Franco Zeffirelli’s version of the play was the Old Vic’s outstanding success in a bad season. Briefly, International Style is an interim solution at a time when older actors brought up to favour the spoken word and young ones committed to inner feeling are almost impossible to blend in one production. Where there’s no agreement in England or France on the broad lines of speaking heightened language in public, directors have found an idiom which conveys the dramatic action by other means. The dialogue serves as a commentary on physical action, groupings or personal feelings and the gist of it is all an audience needs to understand.

     Clearly there are strong advantages in this way of going about it. You can use actors untrained in the classics to reach audiences unused to seeing them; you can tour the show untranslated. The reservoir of public ignorance about heroic drama is so great that you can sincerely call your work cultural pioneering. Casting no farther than two hundred miles from London, it’s reported that Bradford, a city of 292,000 people, has seen no professional Shakespeare for the past eight years. Many of the touring dates in the USA and Canada had never seen it at all. Wide open territory. The trouble is that all these places contain students of one kind or another, the meritocracy of the future, eggheads. These form a valuable potential audience, but I think they are too literate to put up for long with the linguistic weaknesses of International Style.

     After a second visit to Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, I am more than ever convinced that it is proletarian pop Shakespeare, stylistically nineteen-fiftyish and dated as compared with, say, Hall and Barton’s Troilus and Cressida (Stratford-on-Avon, 1960) or Croft and Hampton’s Richard II (OUDS, 1960), both of which let dramatic speech do much of the work. From the standpoint of show business Zeffirelli’s production, an expensive one by Old Vic standards, has paid off and has delighted young playgoers. Everyone agrees it has vitality and impact. But I think much of that is brought about through a by-passing of important elements in the script, and since the production is to remain in the repertoire and go on tour, it is of some critical importance to gauge its weakness and strength. They are likely to condition the response of many people to Romeo and Juliet for a long time. The play badly needs rehabilitation, for several of the lines have become music hall jokes and it must be twenty-five years since the heroine’s part has been adequately done.

     Here, at any rate, is an unusually precise confrontation of Shakespeare and a single interpreter, of director and text. We know that the director was in full control, that it was his first experience of staging Elizabethan drama in English, that his native language is Italian and that none of his cast is a top-flight Shakespearian actor. All credit, then, to Zeffirelli for his two successes: Friar Laurence, and, in the potion scene, Juliet. They come from two distinct acts of creative imagination, one considered and the other intuitive. Friar Laurence is simply given the authority and status a Roman Catholic priest has in Italy, and so, for once, is more than a subdued secondary actor. This means, among other things, that Juliet’s fear that he has given her poison to drink, instead of a sleeping draught, is plausible. He is already a decisive, positive influence on the action. Judi Dench has our sympathy, as any actress must in this lonely scene of veering anxieties. But she is not left remote on the bed to convey them by words alone. Her misery sweeps her back and forth compulsively, seeming to fill the stage. Once she consults the audience, dumb, neutral observers. Every time she moves, a change of tone or subject in the verse is pointed. As the function of her long solo is to express inner feelings, the strong, sweeping movements and the sense of the words are enough. It doesn’t matter that Miss Dench is not yet an authoritative speaker of verse. In this scene actress, director and set convey Juliet’s terrible situation. It is an almost operatic set-piece, defined as such: ‘My dismal scene I needs must act alone.’ Zeffirelli uses the bed as a full stop. In the end Juliet returns to it, her refuge, and swallows the liquid as if she no longer cares whether it’s poison or not.

     I have never seen this episode done before with such tension and economy of means, the situation screwed so tight. I wonder, though, whether the effect of it would be much less if one didn’t understand the language. On the other hand there are vast areas of this play which don’t even begin to yield to a realistic approach. The balcony scene, for instance, reads as if Shakespeare was wholeheartedly intent on lyrical verse. Zeffirelli’s insistence on compulsive movement all through it makes the unoriginal point that sexual attraction aspires to a clinch, and in doing so distracts attention from the verse. Worse still, it compels Romeo to stand with his back to us on a stringcourse hall-way up the wall. Unfortunately one is inclined to remember this kind of plebeian scrambling later on, when the entire drift of the action invites us to take Romeo very seriously indeed, if not as an embryo Hamlet. More so when the shoddy naturalism of his poses forms a recurrent motif, for in addition to attacking the balcony scene like a corner boy scaling the wall of a girls’ remand home, poor John Stride has to embrace the Nurse and to gambol round Friar Laurence. Juliet’s entries and exits in the Capulet palace are habitually made at a run; and once she pirouettes several times.

     The historical objection to this frolicsome youthfulness is familiar. Castiglone’s Renaissance grandees never run; ladies are advised not to play wind instruments, presumably because it involves blowing the cheeks out like drunken Silenus. The dramatic objection has little to do with any antiquarian respect for social realism; it rests on the friction set up between kinds of behaviour and kinds of language when these arouse contrary associations in the minds of a theatre audience. Concede, if you like, that Capulet heads an Italian family in decline and bullies his daughter like a Tudor shopkeeper on the way up. That’s still no excuse for emphasizing the effort involved in making an extravagant speech about Queen Mab. Either the conceits come easily to Mercutio or they don’t come at all. By all means cut them altogether, but don’t leave a quick-thinking actor like Alec McCowen to dredge them up laboriously, one by one, to an accompaniment of fatuous ad libs. from his friends. Dr Johnson insists that they are supposed to be gentlemen, Coleridge and Middleton Murry that Mercutio’s lines have poetic value.

     In fact there is scant evidence in this production that Zeffirelli has much interest in the poetry. ‘I give thee poison. Thou hast sold me none,’ says Hamlet — sorry, Romeo — to the apothecary, emphasizing the wrong word. Earlier he has turned to the audience pop-eyed, after saying: ‘I had forgot that name,’ when the discarded Rosaline is mentioned. But after his banishment there is still time to raise Romeo a point or two above the family conflict and the misunderstanding between generations. His speech in the tomb scene over what he thinks is Juliet’s dead body is of sustained gravity amounting to a stage direction. It moves slowly on a tide of open vowels. Part of its function is to distance the final suicides, ennoble them. No other analysis of the diction makes sense.

     To understand what Zeffirelli makes of this final scene, we must go back to the beginning. Trained in neo-realism, a disciple of Visconti, he can locate a scene brilliantly, as he does during the prelude of Cavalleria Rusticana by assembling a crowd in the village square. He has done the same at the start of Romeo and Juliet, visually and by the emotive use of songs and church bell. It could not be better done, but in the case of Romeo and Juliet, although the impact is great, the relevance is marginal. So is the unforgettable inspiration of having Mercutio’s friends take him at his word when he says he has only been scratched. In fact this idea misfires, because it gives his death the shocking surprise of an accident among children, whereas Renaissance violence was endemic.

     Consistently enough, the last scene of Romeo and Juliet in this production is sentimental: two handsome young people untimely dead. They have been trapped, as Juliet was in the potion scene, and now they are given a final dignity by the lighting and the sombre bell. It is International Style at its best, a situation broadly and sensitively outlined. But Romeo’s great speech has been delivered naturalistically. He is still the anonymous youth of the balcony scene; he has not been permitted to grow with the lines written for him or with the emotions gone through. Like Mercutio he has been cut down to the size of an adolescent in West Side Story.