Talking Shakespeare Kaksi (Two)

Like a potter’s wheel (Coasters, Stockings and Nativities)

My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel:

I know not where I am, nor what I do.

The valiant Talbot’s words in Henry VI Part One are a potent reflection of what my mind has felt like during 2020. At times, the effects of the pandemic (on me) have produced clarity, joy and hope but more often confusion, frustration and despair (the negative emotions mostly caused by the UK government, I have to say.) Time has seemed elastic so pre-Covid times feels like two months ago and also two years ago. 

• Local walks continue on most days,
• jigsaws keep the left brain/right brain synapses twanging,
• freshly-baked mulled wine and mince pies have now been sampled and
• posh takeaways from La Rue restaurant provide a once-a-week luxury oasis, providing a time to scrub down, dress up and light candles.

Whatever it takes to cope in this strangest of times…. In the collage below there is evidence that our Advent Stockings (from Sue) have continued to yield treasures at morning coffee time. You can also see the creative endeavours of our Badby friend, Alex Thompson, honorary daughter and sister to the Allard-Johnsons, who has used some of her time at least to design beautiful coasters. These are all evidence of “clarity, joy and hope” – as is the glimpse of an ambitious Nativity scene (see collage above) constructed in a neighbour’s garden, along with child-friendly story sheets telling of those days in May or September (likely) between 4 and 6 BC (probably) when a stable in Bethlehem became the centre of the universe. The centre of my imaginative universe at the moment is re-reading, re-listening to and re-watching Shakespeare plays – it stops my thoughts whirling and helps me avoid becoming frustrated by the news bulletins. I introduced the RSC Talking Shakespeare series in an earlier post (here). PS Kaksi is Finnish for Two so the information below is my record of the second “batch” I enjoyed.

Paterson Joseph and Sir Simon Russell Beale

• Paterson Joseph almost became a chef before turning to acting. All of the interviewees were asked about their earliest introductions to the national poet and Paterson Joseph delivered a classic line that chimed with my own experience: “I didn’t come to Shakespeare – Shakespeare came to me.” I first “noticed” Joseph in 1990 as Oswald in King Lear, and suddenly realised – because of his performance – what a brilliant and significant role Oswald is. I was also lucky to see his shattering Othello (with the evillest Iago I’ve seen in Andy Serkis) at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. I loved Joseph’s Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida and, most jaw-droppingly, his tormented Brutus (pitted against Ray Fearon’s Mark Antony) in Julius Caesar. He didn’t talk about his many non-Shakespearean roles (including the recent Kamal Hadley in the BBC’s Noughts and Crosses and one of my favourites, his role in Survivors; plus on stage his compelling Atahualpa in Shaffer’s Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National Theatre) but then the point of the series is to talk about Shakespeare and I’ll never forget the Channel 4 documentary in which he directed a group of disaffected teenagers in London in a moving production of Romeo and Juliet.
• Simon Russell Beale first exploded into my theatrical knowledge in a series of Restoration plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company playing gut-wrenching comic grotesques with painful vulnerabilities. He has spoken to the RSC Summer School a couple of times and it became obvious that comedy was not his only skill. Seeing him in Ghosts and The Seagull made it clear that he was “one of the greats.” He extracted every moment of impact from his appearances as Edgar in King Lear and his Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was truly disgusting. Then as a toad-like Richard III, an extremely strange Ariel in The Tempest and (at the Donmar) a heart-breakingly buttoned-up, pinched and pained Malvolio from Twelfth Night it became clear he could tackle anything Shakespeare wrote with clarity, intelligence and heart. He triumphed at the National with Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet and surprised (inevitably) with his Cassius in Julius Caesar and Macbeth at the Almeida. I thought he was tremendous as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale at the Old Vic but it was his Timon in Timon of Athens at the National (and broadcast to cinemas) that blew me away, reinventing the play anew as a Play for Today in these no-such-thing-as-society Thatcherite times. Of course he’s done Falstaff on TV (a more vicious one than usual) and (brilliantly) King Lear himself at the National. But his Prospero, on his return to the RSC, in a multimedia Tempest was a revelation – here was a guilty Prospero, as tormented as Ariel and Caliban, struggling to forgive himself never mind anyone else and finally breaking the audience’s hearts as he parted from the island.

Paterson Joseph in Julius Caesar, Othello, Noughts and Crosses, Royal Hunt of the Sun, Simon Russell Beale in The Tempest (as both Ariel and Prospero), The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida (with Paterson Joseph), Juliet Stevenson in Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Truly Madly Deeply, Troilus and Cressida, Antony Sher in King Lear (as both The Fool and King Lear), Falstaff and Richard III

Juliet Stevenson and Sir Antony Sher

• Juliet Stevenson confided that she peed on stage during a spear-carrier scene (alongside Ruby Wax) in her first appearance at the RSC in a production of The Tempest. She paid tribute to early mentors in her acting career (well known like Peter Brook and less well known like David Perry) – sometimes by saying or doing things that she reacted against. Her insights into language and space were marvellous to hear as she discussed in detail her approach to Isabella in Measure for Measure, Cressida in Troilus and Cressida and Rosalind in As You Like It. The season in which she played the latter two roles was a significant one for me as I was living in Stratford-upon-Avon during that year teaching English as a Foreign Language to groups of adults who I would accompany to the theatre so I saw those two productions a great number of times, each time spotting more and more depth and detail, especially in Stevenson’s performances. Of course in later years I got to know her screen work such as Truly, Madly, Deeply and Life Story in which she played Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA.
• (Sir) Antony Sher, one of the most powerful presences I’ve seen on stage in plays like Tartuffe and Tamburlaine the Great, had a plethora of breakthrough roles to discuss, not to mention aspects of his own biography (growing up a Lithuanian-Jew in South Africa, being gay and working at the Liverpool Playhouse.) His famous Richard III (on crutches with a prosthetic back), Shylock (in Merchant of Venice), Titus Andronicus (in a production which started in South Africa where audiences were unsurprised by the anarchic violence in the play which was given a contemporary political context), Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (where he researched and brilliantly portrayed the psychological condition of morbid jealousy), and the warrior-like Macbeth, in a Swan production that he and Harriet Walter infused with a palpable and terrifying sense of panic - all these performances were memorable and mesmerising. In recent years he famously portrayed Falstaff with equal doses of bonhomie and arrogant cruelty in the History sequence of Henry IV and a monumental King Lear arriving on an elevated wheely-throne.

Greg Doran Talking Shakespeare with Paterson Joseph, Simon Russell Beale, Antony Sher and Juliet Stevenson

Such stuff as dreams are made on

Emily, Harriet and Alex conjuring the storm in the RSC's display of Prospero's cell

Indiscriminate audience member?

I sometimes wonder whether I have a very child-like approach to entertainment. It is rare when I don’t enjoy something at the theatre, at the cinema, listening to the radio or watching TV. This sometimes annoys family and friends and I could be accused of having little discrimination. But at the theatre, for example, if the story doesn’t grab me I can imagine the rehearsals and production meetings and work out why the cast and crew have made the decisions they have. In a musical or large-cast production I imagine the director working out how to get everyone on and off slickly and working with lights and sound to create the atmosphere. I always find something to occupy my imagination.

Cast of Greg Doran's production of The Tempest at the RSC; photo credits by RSC website and Topher McGrillis

O Brave New World

In December 2016 (and about to be broadcast in the cinema) I saw Greg Doran’s production at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is a play I have seen many times before and taught to both younger children and A-Level students since the focus can be on the weird story, the magic, slapstick comedy and amazing spectacle; or the focus can be on power, betrayal, art, love, the illusion of justice, masters/servants, appearance and reality, enslavement by parents and colonists and probably many other themes that are not springing to mind right now. Of course A-Level students still want to know about the magic, comedy and spectacle; and indeed many younger children can see Prospero’s (potentially abusive) treatment of Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel and Caliban reflected in their own lives on a daily basis. It is a rich play, simple and complex at the same time, knotty and poetic all at once.

The extraordinary Andy Serkis as Iago, Monsieur Rigaud and his Performance Capture work. Mark Quartley rehearsing Ariel in the centre.

In collaboration with Intel

For the first time, as far as I know, a theatre director worked with Andy Serkis’s Imaginarium Studios. This Performance Capture studio was founded as a result of Andy’s expertise creating cinematic characters like Gollum in Lord of the Rings, King Kong in Peter Jackson’s film and Caesar in the rebooted Planet of the Apes films. With technology provided by Intel, the RSC production of The Tempest is indeed a visual treat, not only with the sight of Ariel growing, flying, swimming and concocting the illusions that frighten the shipwrecked characters, but also with beautiful artistic film and video by Finn Ross and lighting by Simon Spencer. Every production department works together in an example of total theatre. Greg Doran believes the effect might be similar to the original audience’s experience of the masque within the play, a convention that pushed the Jacobean theatre to its limits and, of course, pleased the theatre-loving James I.

Mark Quartley as Ariel and Simon Russell Beale in the RSC's The Tempest

These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits

In the midst of all the technology, though, the characters emerged strongly:

• Simon Russell Beale was at times a frightening and neurotic Prospero whose performance captured Prospero’s sad grandeur, his complex feelings of love and feelings of terrible guilt at his past actions. As always with this actor he commanded the stage in a sympathetic and winning way, able somehow to draw you in to his thought process with gesture, facial expression, volume, inflection, pitch and pause
• Mark Quartley was a muscular and dangerous Ariel with a face of profound concentration and compassion
• I thought Jenny Rainsford’s Miranda was spunkier than usual with more than a hint of rebellion and a sense that she would rule both Daniel Easton’s gentle Ferdinand and the kingdom with more force than her father ever could
• Tony Jayawardena and Simon Trinder made welcome returns to the RSC with bold performances as Stephano and Trinculo, the former a bully and the latter a bit sly, both of course very funny, stupidly drunk and clearly the best of friends
• Joe Dixon, one of my favourite actors, was an imposing, poignant and at once both aggressive and charming Caliban, a performance that allowed every thematic complication of the character to be palpable
• The “court” characters were also clearly and strikingly played: a grief-enraged Alonso by James Tucker, Oscar Pearce’s deliciously evil Antonio, a dimwit Sebastian by Tom Turner and a more-knowing-than-usual Gonzalo by the gorgeous Joseph Mydell 
• All the courtiers, mariners and spirits operated fluently and fluidly to suggest this was indeed a busily inhabited island, even if most of the inhabitants were in the imagination.

Stephen Brimson Lewis has designed this production and, in my view, is building up a legacy as one of the greatest theatre designers in history following his body of work, both for the RSC and elsewhere.

Simon Russell Beale in a performance of great power and variety