Thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn

Favourite play?

I was often asked by students to name my favourite Shakespeare play or poem or sonnet. I have always found it an impossible task because each work contains moments of sublime stagecraft, astonishing language, profound thematic concepts and fundamental ideas about human existence. And most of the plays contain at least one bit of tatty old rubbish: clumsy characterization, an underwritten scene, some impenetrable phrases, images that no longer make sense and, of course, Shakespeare was writing for a stage with particular constraints (the most glaring being the inability to employ living breathing women as actresses, so female roles are fewer than they should be.) It surprises some people that I am happy to talk about the rubbish bits in Shakespeare, but, for me, it makes his work all the more wonderful for its raggedy unevenness. What I do know is that the best way to experience Shakespeare is to see it or hear it – always my philosophy as a teacher. Simply reading Shakespeare is only a fraction of the experience.

Exit, pursued by a bear - the famous stage direction from The Winter's Tale

Favourites at certain times

A good production can make any play feel like a favourite during its two or three hours length. My first Hamlet and my first Love’s Labour’s Lost were experienced at Bolton Octagon when I was a student in Manchester. I remember the Hamlet starred Douglas Hodge as the Prince and Ophelia’s dead body was brutally zipped up in a body bag on a pile of ruins in a war-torn “Denmark.” Love’s Labour’s Lost was directed by Ian Judge and set in an Oxbridge quadrangle, anticipating the designs for Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play. In both cases the plays were sparklingly clear for me and I became convinced that Shakespeare plays could survive being set anywhere anytime. Whenever I directed students in productions of the plays, each play became a favourite for the time I was working on it. But some plays have always been in the top five and The Winter’s Tale is one of them. Sally and I therefore travelled over to Bolton Octagon to renew my acquaintance with that theatre and had a great evening in Sicilia and Bohemia.

Sicilian scenes in David Thacker's The Winter's Tale at Bolton Octagon. Photographs by Ian Tilton

David Thacker’s production

The cast were uniformly strong:

• Rob Edwards brought Leontes’s morbid jealousy and consequent grief and remorse to blistering life 
• Amy Nuttall was a heartbreaking Hermione, dignified and queenly
• Margot Leicester created a Paulina that was compassionate as well as formidable and determined 
• As Polixenes, Christopher Wright personified humility (and later paternal rage after some comedy capering) 
• Christian Edwards’s Young Shepherd and Eric Potts’s Old Shepherd were delightfully unpretentious and endearing 
• Colin Connor was an engaging and appealing Autolycus 
• The young lovers, Harry Long as Florizel and Leila Mimmack as Perdita, were direct, vivid and vigorous 
• Most touching of all, I found Marc Small to be a compelling Camillo; both on and off text the actor was a brilliant listener and reactor to every nuance of every line spoken by every other character.
  

James Cotterill’s set and costume designs were clear in revealing the play’s moods and David Thacker’s direction was masterful in controlling the pace and the strange changes of tone in this extraordinary play.

Bohemian scenes in David Thacker's The Winter's Tale at Bolton Octagon. Photographs by Ian Tilton

Favourite lines

As well as being one of my favourite plays, The Winter’s Tale contains some of my favourite lines, spoken by Florizel to Perdita at the sheep-shearing festival after she has distributed flowers. The best way to appreciate Florizel’s sentiment is to say the words aloud (gently and calmly) and appreciate how the sound of the words echo the contents of the speech, so that “move still” and “still so” sound (to me anyway) like the “wave o’ the sea” in the previous line….

                        What you do
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever: when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so, and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that: move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.

Florizels and Perditas from the net. Main picture = by Ian Tilton of Harry Long, Eric Potts and Leila Mimmack at Bolton Octagon

The Entertainer

Postman’s Park

So last Saturday (my birthday, you know) I paid a flying visit to the capital city of this country wot I am Iiving in and ate food, drank wine, went to the theatre and did something old and something new. A suitable celebration for the likes of me! The something new was a visit to Postman’s Park, so-called because of its popularity with postal workers in the nearby GPO headquarters. It featured in the film Closer and has been famous since 1900 because of the wall of tiles, the George Frederic Watts’s Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. The wording of the stories of everyday heroism reflects the age in which they were written, so there are some gruesome details which seem lurid today; but the overall effect is a moving testament to the bravery of ordinary people who leapt into danger to save others. Behind every word on every tile a whole other world is conjured.

The British Library

The something old on my birthday weekend was a visit to the British Library near King’s Cross on the way home. If I have a spare 30 minutes before a train going north I have regularly popped in to the Treasures Room at the Library and drooled over the Shakespeare First Folio, Jane Austen’s writing desk, the writings of Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. This time I was excited to see stages of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea on display. And, memorably, we took a backstage tour to see the Reading Rooms, the Map Room, the book delivery system and learn about the building, its history, its capabilities, its ambition and its future. There are some things that are still great about Great Britain and the British Library is one of them. Thank you, Nigel, for the personal tour.

Don’t clap too loudly, it’s a very old building

In John Osborne’s The Entertainer, the Music Hall is a microcosm of the British Empire, a garish and confident entity that is nonetheless dying and fading. Christopher Oram’s set design for the Rob Ashford production starring Kenneth Branagh as Archie Rice made the crumbling Empire visible throughout the running time so the dysfunctional family at the heart of the play is seen desperately trying to negotiate their futures amongst the wreckage. The family were played memorably: Gawn Grainger’s set-in-his-ways patriarch, Billy; Greta Scacchi’s loyal (second) wife, the drunken Phoebe; Sophie McShera’s politicised and simmering daughter Jean; and Jonah Hauer-King’s eager-to-please-his-dad but gullible son Frank. Seeing the play in 2016 made me think Osborne had underwritten the roles for Jean and Frank, perhaps giving too much voice to the cynicism of the older generation. Though the play was first staged in 1957 there are plenty of modern resonances to the politics of today, but most effective, I thought, was the sense of a family ploughing on through the confusions of modern times (“foreigners…. tax-evasion…. war-mongering…. the futility of political protest…. a crowd wanting entertainment not knowledge…. bread and circuses….”) The family were clinging on to elusive (and shifting) values that are constantly undermined and changed by the march of time. As all humans do.

Branagh and Olivier

Kenneth Branagh’s career has been an echo of Laurence Olivier’s in so many ways – directing films with great verve (far more than Olivier now), starring in key texts like The Winter’s Tale and The Entertainer and working as an actor-manager with some distinction. I have read about Olivier’s performance as Archie Rice so can only imagine its impact but feel Branagh successfully brought the monstrous old hoofer to life, creating an extra layer of faded glory in 2016 knowing that Olivier had also played the role. Archie is a sad, sad character whose attempts to stay chirpy and upbeat are tragic; he seems to have terrible self-knowledge – “I’m dead, just like the whole dumb, shoddy lot out there” – making the play itself seem to implode, as if the protagonist himself loses impetus and Great Britain (Archie Rice? the family? the Music Hall? the theatre? the town? the country? the continent? the world?) is an empty shell of what once was. Excellent production but not a feel-good play by any means. Somehow the productions of 400-year old Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale gave me more hope than Osborne’s more-modern text. The Branagh residency at the Garrick has been a fantastic achievement for the casts and production team involved so I hope that more actor-managers will manufacture opportunities like that in the future.