Tamburlaine the Great
Cahiers
Elisabéthains, October 1995
‘Tamburlaine’ was broadcast on one evening on 26th
September 1993. The play was cut by around 470 lines, or some 10% of its
length. Most of the cuts were of descriptive passages (such as the description
of the army in ‘I Tamburlaine IV.1, or the roll call of Callapine’s kings in ‘2
Tamburlaine III.5). This relatively light cutting meant that many scenes were
played quickly. The relatively few places where characters faced death – the
most obvious being Tamburlaine’s reaction to the death of Zenocrate – were thus
fore grounded. The director, Michael Fox, set the play in a desert, imagining
‘the play existing on a vast plain of shifting sand, stretching to an infinite
horizon, with small encampments and towns dotted across the bleak landscape’.
This, coupled with the decisions not to attempt realistic battle scenes, played
to the play’s descriptive strengths. The death of Zenocrate was suggested by
nothing more than a speech sotto voce from Tamburlaine with her laboured
breathing in the background. The pampered jades were presented by sounds of
whipping. Without visual stimulus, the capacities of Marlowe’s language were not
measured against existing scenes, but given a freedom to produce, rather than
describe, reality. This play, more clearly than ‘Dido’, revealed Marlowe’s debt
to narrative verse; as with ‘Dido’, that the language was used to evoke scenes
rather than just reveal character or move the action along allowed the play to
survive the transfer to radio surprisingly well.
Fox split the play into some sixty-eight sections –
roughly twice the conventional number of scenes. The music between the scenes
however was not the tense short melodies of ‘Edward II’; the characteristic
tone of the music was a few long notes on an (electronic?) brass instrument.
Whilst the music in ‘Edward’ produced the sensation of time passing quickly,
this did the opposite. The play’s ranging through space and time was
effectively conveyed by sustaining of a very few notes.
Michael Pennington’s Tamburlaine was the
centrepiece of the production. Few of the other characters survived long enough
to make and impression, perhaps inevitably in a production where a cast of
twenty-one handled forty-three named parts between them. ‘Tamburlaine’ has
often been staged as a spectacular play, and Tamburlaine as a vaunting
magnifico. The problem facing this production was to find an alternative to the
play’s visual set and to suggest Tamburlaine’s personal magnetism and power
without being able to show it.
Pennington’s Tamburlaine took its cue from
Tamburlaine’s confidence in his destiny. This allowed him to be quickly
assertive in places where the script might have seemed to require volume and
force. An early example of this was given through the contrasting styles of
Tamburlaine and Bajazeth before their battle. Rudolph Walker’s Bajazeth, facing
his contributory kings, was aware of the public nature of his speeches, and
paced and projected his scorn for Tamburlaine with a confident hauteur.
Tamburlaine, in contrast, showed no attempt to project or impress his
listeners, confident in his contempt for the ‘scum of Africa’.
Pennington’s Tamburlaine was at his most vaunting
when triumphing over Bajazeth in the case in ‘1 Tamburlaine’, and when
describing his prospective entry into Samarkand in ‘2 Tamburlaine’. Battle
excited him, and exulting in his victory, cruelly and sarcastically, came from
the high spirits that winning engendered. The cumulative effect of these
triumphs was to make his last few scenes approach hubris.
That such a low-key approach was made to the main
characters is perhaps because the radio production did not allow the actors to
address themselves to impressing an audience. Pennington’s Tamburlaine was
never speaking to more than a handful of characters, whom he either did not
need to impress (his own contributory kings) or did not care about (his various
adversaries). This quiet intensity made the transition to his reflective
soliloquies, such as that outside Damascus in ‘1 Tamburlaine V2’, or most
obviously in ‘2 Tamburlaine’ during and after Zenocrate’s death, an easy one.
These two instances were the only occasions when Tamburlaine appeared
vulnerable. His anger saw him through the betrayal by his son Calyphas, and his
hopes for his remaining sons through his own death.
With such a large cast, and so much doubling, there
was little in the way of in-depth characterisation possible, even if the amount
of text to be got through had not meant too hectic a pace in many places. The
combination of Tamburlaine’s intensity, and the musical effects, more than made
up for this in establishing a mood of foreboding and cruelty. That this
production was not as shapeless as ‘The Massacre’ was due to this, and the
central presence of Tamburlaine (and Bajazeth for much of the first half)
allowing a focus for the listener.
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