Actors
are said to hate the 'hideous' Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Rubbish, says Michael
Pennington, who has appeared there since the 1960s
Michael
Pennington
Wednesday
January 16, 2002
The Guardian
So the Royal Shakespeare
Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon has been "long unloved by actors and
audiences" (the Guardian, January 9). I think not. We need to hear more
from those audiences, but who in the profession hates the RST? And what really
happened when the Royal Shakespeare Company board met the Commons select
committee last week to discuss pulling the theatre down and building a new one?
Depending on which report you read, it was either reproached for seeking £100m
for such an "elitist" plan or urged to go ahead and destroy the
"hideous carbuncle" for its own good. It can hardly do one without
the other.
It is a queasy
business watching the company, in its desire to change its home, having to make
common cause with those who have no particular interest in the matter. The MP
who led the attack had visited the theatre once in his life and sat in the
gods. Across the floor, the Tory member for Bromsgrove, while agreeing,
improbably thought there were people in Stratford who didn't know the theatre
existed.
Some actors
dislike the RST, but many of us have gone back time and again to a stage on
which we feel we have done our best work. There is something wrong with most
theatres: at the Criterion in London you can hear the tube from the back of the
stalls; up the road at the Aldwych it is hard to see the height of the stage as
the lip of the circle is low. The RST is a bit high, and thus a challenge - but
it was always something to aspire to.
I have spent three
sections of my life there. As a beginner in the mid-1960s, I marvelled to see
Peggy Ashcroft and Ian Holm (among others) working with the subtlety you would
associate with film but sending the meaning flying to the back of the theatre.
This is the point, I thought; perhaps I can do the same one day. I went back in
the mid-1970s, when Alan Howard was taking the RST by storm in Shakespeare's
Histories. In a natural development, the intimate work done in The Other Place
was beginning to affect the way we dealt with the classics in the main house.
When I left five years later, after Hamlet, I knew that this theatre was the
ideal place for an actor to develop the mixture of delicacy and muscle, speed
and weight, that audiences need from these plays.
I have gone this
way and that with Shakespeare, but whatever I am has much to do with years of
working this "carbuncle". When I went back in 1999 for Timon of
Athens, I finally noticed something I had always thought arcane: a sense of
supporting history, as in those special rooms where you can faintly hear the
voices of the past, in this case my own among them. For us as for its
audiences, including the young ones, this theatre is not quite like others,
just as the plays are not.
By 1999 the
relationship between the stage and the house was very good, thanks to
modifications that had been made over the years. These have continued, at some
cost. But now despair has set in, and the RSC wants the building down. At this
point the argument overheats. A scandalised spokesman says that the stage must
be tilted so that everyone can see. Well, yes: it's called a rake, and theatres
have always been built with one, as a means of creating better visibility. It
is also said that only a third of the seats have good sightlines. Not at all -
if that were so, audiences would have voted with their feet long ago, and the
company would be out of business.
The RSC also
regrets that on Sundays the town is full of visitors but its doors are locked.
So why not open them? A repertory theatre is perfect for establishing
seven-days-a-week playing (as Peter Hall did at the Old Vic in 1997), if only
because not all the actors are in every play, so everybody gets a night off
some time. I know about the cost, but my guess is it would be rewarded.
The rest is
fixable detail. It is regrettable that customers sometimes have to queue for
the loos for most of the interval (though at least that brings the RST into
line with most West End theatres). But since there is a limit to how much
should be spent on shortening the queue, why not simply build some more?
The RSC rightly
wants to be ideas-led not buildings-led. But the work of Adrian Noble, and of
his colleagues and predecessors, has always been ideas-led. How would it have
succeeded otherwise? Nothing could be more dangerous than to imagine that by
pulling down a proven theatre and building a "theatre village"
certain magical properties will automatically flow: a new demotic, new
accessibility, a new forum for questions of race, gender and class. Gerald
Kaufman, who chaired the Commons select committee, thinks the RSC already
demonstrates those things, so where does that leave the argument?
The truth is
something we all know, and is so simple as to be trite. If the work is good
enough to engage a new audience, the bricks and mortar hardly matter; what's
necessary is feasible ticket prices and a competent press campaign. However, if
Romeo and Juliet fails to touch the heart, no amount of backstage visits to see
the flying system and watch the armour being hammered (all of which can now be
done) is going to make people interested. Are the seats going to be cheaper in
the village? Why is the work bound to be better for it?
This building has
served this great company for 70 years. Think of the numbers that have flowed
into the despised place, not all of them "boring rich old fogeys";
think of the performances that have ignited them. I happen to believe there is
nothing wrong with the theatre that matters: it is a Grade II listed building
with, I have always thought, a welcoming atmosphere.
Meanwhile the
rhetoric on both sides is developing a meretricious edge. Apart from Mark
Rylance's excellent comments in a letter to the Guardian on January 12, not
much has been heard from the profession, while objectors are generally
described, rudely, as "a minority of conservationists and local
people". Not so. I know for a fact there is a large groundswell of opinion
that for some reason is not being heard. Let's be having you.