Plays and Players:
Model Roles
The Daily Telegraph,
3rd June 1985, John Barber
People don’t realise what anxieties an actor suffers in preparing a big classical role – the weeks of study, the problems of liasing with directors and colleagues, and then what Michael Pennington calls “the seemingly haphazard process of planning and rehearsal, with its chance discoveries, its missed opportunities, its dry calculations and intuitive hunches … and jumps in the dark.”
Since Sarah Siddons set out her thoughts about Lady
Macbeth there has been nothing quite like ‘Players of Shakespeare’ to be
published by the Cambridge University Press this month, edited by Philip
Brockbank, who invited a dozen actors to analyse their experience with some
formidable part.
Once the p lay was on the stage, their fretting
often relaxed – thought Sinead Cusack never stopped worrying about her Portia
in ‘The Merchant of Venice’: she declares roundly she failed in it – not quite
witty enough, she feels, nor light enough in touch in the last scenes. But most
of the actors concentrate on the agonies of preparation.
As Brockbank says, an actor feels exposed and
vulnerable, both in preparation and performance, knowing his personality and
human resources are always on the line. “I have to endow her with me and my
complexities,” Gemma Jones told herself at first, tackling the role of Hermione
in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ – falsely accused of adultery by her husband, and
restored to him, after years when he thought her dead, in the form of a statue
which comes to life. Then the actress found herself contending with her
egotistical desire to impress – to act devious, clever, complicated and
interesting.
But Hermione is simply innocent, and knows it, like
Joan of Arc. To convey simple virtue in that sepulchral rehearsal room off
Leicester Square is agony (“Will my fellow actors think I’m good? Will I get a
bigger part next season? Will I ever act again?). And when it comes to standing
frozen like a statue, and think herself marble and keep “very very still and look
very very lovely in a very very soft light,” she is musing “Have I enough money
to pay the babysitter? And “I must remember to fill up the car with petrol.”
Approaching Hamlet, Mr Pennington realised
that to pull it off takes an actor further down into his psyche, memory and
imagination, and further outwards to the limits of his technical knowledge and
equipment, than he has probably been before. For this performance (which I
greatly admired) he tamed the hero’s sharp sarcasm in the first scene so as to
present a Prince admired for all his courtesy and grace.
To achieve in the character “a kind of sweet
optimism, bitterly disappointed,” he thought it truer to struggle to overcome
the maelstrom inside him rather than make a continual public display of his
demons – though he had his eruptions of violence, and seized on these to make
the audience question the hero’s morality and so rouse some antipathy towards
him as well as sympathy.
At times the part shook him like a rat. On some
nights, it seemed to play him, effortlessly, while on others he felt he was
labouring with an out-of-tune violin. Off-stage, it had the effect of
separating him from his colleagues and friends, while the whole issue of private
references underpinning his performances quietly changed with the patterns of
his own life and even the world news. This deeply considered essay is worth
setting beside the usual superficial tape-recorded interview, when an actor
talks off the top of his head and conveys few of the struggles, the
humiliations and rewards of his calling.