{"id":1231,"date":"2016-02-03T17:25:59","date_gmt":"2016-02-03T17:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=1231"},"modified":"2016-02-03T17:25:59","modified_gmt":"2016-02-03T17:25:59","slug":"history-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2016\/02\/history-boy.html","title":{"rendered":"History boy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rsc<\/a><\/p>\n

There are productions I\u2019ve never seen that are burned onto my brain. As a teenage Shakespeare geek, I devoured books on stage history, describing landmark productions staged long before I was born. I read reviews and memoirs, saw the same few photos. Sally Beauman\u2019s heartfelt history of the RSC was my bedtime reading (still is, sometimes).<\/p>\n

Last month John Wyver<\/a> curated a season of films<\/a> of RSC productions at London\u2019s Barbican. Some were fairly recent (David Tennant\u2019s Hamlet<\/a>), but others were vintage stagings I feel I know intimately but had never seen. I caught Vanessa Redgrave\u2019s Rosalind<\/a> in As You Like It<\/em> (staged 1961, broadcast 1963) and the first two parts of the War of the Roses<\/em> <\/a>trilogy directed by Peter Hall (staged 1963, broadcast 1965).<\/p>\n

Both had been filmed for BBC television, and appeared in spanking new black and white prints. In a predominantly greybeard audience (\u2018Oh to see 50 again,\u2019 sighed the gent behind me. \u2018Or 70\u2026\u2019), some people had clearly been there first time round. I wonder how the films rubbed up against memories.<\/p>\n

For a first-timer, they were absorbing, and showed the young RSC defining itself with serious fervour. In starkly emblematic productions, the stage was cleared of naturalistic clutter or shift-scene spectacle (the tv histories added some docile livestock for verisimilitude. Bad call). And you can hear the emergence of straight-arrow verse speaking at Hall\u2019s RSC. Clean, direct, scrubbed of ornament. Rational, analytic, understood and understandable. Like the scenery, the words aren\u2019t painted: lines aren\u2019t decorated, nothing is fudged \u2013 this is functional speaking for a modern age.<\/p>\n

\"Janet<\/a>

Janet Suzman’s Joan of Arc. Photo: Tom Holte Collection \u00a9 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust<\/p><\/div>\n

At the height of the cold war, the Wars of the Roses<\/em> channelled the arctic clang of realpolitick: Hall hoped one \u2018blood-soaked century\u2019 would speak to another. John Barton\u2019s text<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 trimmed from the Henry VI<\/em> plays and Richard III<\/em>, but also expanded by his own additions \u2013 streamlined the narrative, favouring politbureau switches of allegiance over primal images of loss and myth. John Bury\u2019s design is unyieldingly metallic \u2013 inexorable cage-like walls, the central council table, even the costumes. Everything, said Hall, \u2018revolved around steel \u2013 its texture and its brightness and its capacity to rust.\u2019 In this environment, David Warner\u2019s soft king is the cycle\u2019s prime victim but also, in retrospect, its counter-cultural icon \u2013 a peacenik in flowing shirt, boots and unkempt hair.<\/p>\n

At crucial moments in the histories, the intelligently mobile camera noses up close to an actor and stays there. It hunkers down when Janet Suzman\u2019s scathing Joan of Arc is at bay. During his \u2018molehill\u2019 speech, it pays attention to Warner\u2019s Henry, to whom no one gives much heed. And, most powerfully, it stares unflinchingly at Peggy Ashcroft\u2019s Margaret after she\u2019s tortured and tormented York (Donald Sinden), smeared his face with his young son\u2019s blood. He curses her \u2013 the cycle runs on worst-case predictions coming true \u2013 and we see her absorb his words, feel yet resist his grief, fear yet resist her fate. Ashcroft\u2019s eyes elsewhere glitter with strategic mischief; her recessed \u2018r\u2019 marks a beguiling note of difference among the Anglo earls. But here she absorbs the wider pattern of this cycle, in readiness to become Richard III\u2019s victim and curser-in-chief.<\/p>\n

\"Vanessa<\/a>

Vanessa Redgrave as Rosalind. Photo: Angus McBean\/RSC<\/p><\/div>\n

Michael Elliott\u2019s production of As You Like It<\/em> is less audacious, but reminds us that some relatively edgy tropes began decades ago. In particular, the play begins just as harshly as does Polly Findlay\u2019s <\/a>excellent current version at the National Theatre, set in a grim corporate world. Orlando\u2019s slogging labour and vicious wrestling bout, the unpromising arrival in a cold-weather arcadia (\u2018So this<\/em> is the forest of Arden\u2019): they all shape Elliot\u2019s reading. Redgrave\u2019s Rosalind seems almost cowed, especially against her splendidly crisp cousin Celia (Rosalind Knight). As Arden warms up, so does she \u2013 working against the grain of the precise verse speakers around her in a numinous ebb and glow. It was only sad that the film cut Rosalind\u2019s wall-breaking epilogue: why didn\u2019t she buttonhole the camera?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a production we may never see: Peter Brook\u2019s joyously radical Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/a><\/em> from 1970, an acrobatic white-box dazzler that blazed into the history books. Last year, BBC Radio 4<\/a> gathered original cast members (Sara Kestelman, Ben Kingsley, Frances de la Tour and Barry Stanton), plus Brook and his designer Sally Jacobs to discuss the production and its afterlife.<\/p>\n

It toured the world and was filmed for Japanese television, but no complete copy exists \u2013 Stanton described a ritual burning after just three broadcasts. \u2018I\u2019m very happy to think that there isn\u2019t anything,\u2019 Brook insisted. \u2018[That is] the way that something must live, through the experience of those who have lived it, and that\u2019s the same for the audience. These are the real recordings of the production.\u2019 More recently, he chuckled, a theatre producer had invited him to revive it in the West End: \u2018I sent back a very rude and contemptuous answer.\u2019<\/p>\n

Theatrical impact \u2013 the particular spark of place and time \u2013 can\u2019t be bottled. Even on film, without a genius behind the camera, and a stage director willing to let go, the result will sit between retread and record, deprived of the full pullulating impact. And perhaps that\u2019s as it should be \u2013 live performance ebbs away from us, reminding us that we live in time. As Kingsley had it, \u2018the ephemeral nature of theatre is a very beautiful and gentle way of introducing us to mortality.\u2019<\/p>\n

Main photo: Peggy Ashcroft as Margaret .Photo: R Viner\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/em><\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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