The kingmakers
The Guardian, 21st
May 2005
Olivier and Gielgud
set the template for portraying Shakespeare’s heroes. But their performances
would baffle us today, says Michael Pennington.
In
Michael Blakemore’s memoir ‘Arguments with
As
a teenager I saw both Olivier’s Titus and his Coriolanus, and although I left
extremely impressed, especially by his famous death fall, I also felt a little
uninvolved. This was unlike Michael Redgrave’s
Hamlet, who even at 50 touched the heart with his scathing, tender intelligence
or Paul Scofield, able to make the imagination fly with some apparently random
cadence, not even, perhaps, to be repeated the next night. Maybe I already felt
there was something tyrannical in Olivier’s supremacy over his audience,
something unyielding. Unmatched as Shakespeare’s self-confident heroes – Henry V,
Richard III – he disliked the “complainers”: the inner collapse of a Lear or
Hamlet tended to evade him, and his best studies of failure lay outside the
world of iambic pentameters, as Archie Rice or Chekhov’s Doctor Astrov.
A brief
clip exists of him in live performance as Archie, and it is one of the most
astounding pieces of acting I have ever seen. Olivier had a gift for play – for
believing that he could become anything he wanted – and an ability to spring
any number of physical surprises. In comparison, John Gielgud, who transformed
himself brilliantly elsewhere, in Pinter and Chekhov particularly, played
Shakespeare as if in unending rapturous tribute, the language harrowing him
like fire. Live, his great gift was a speed of thought that saved him from the
sentiment that creeps in on surviving recordings such as his ‘Ages of Man’. I have
never known a performer put so much passion into the act of speech as Gielgud,
but his Prospero and Lear, and his Benedick and Mercutio, sound somewhat the
same as each other.
Everything
has changed today – the industry, the audience’s expectation of the classics,
standards. Professionally, these men swam in far less crowded waters: Gielgud,
who played Hamlet more or less when he wanted to, generously used to reel off a
list of parts that he thought I should ask the National Theatre to mount
productions for, just so I could play them. Olivier not only ran the National
Theatre but, with his knack for capturing the mood of a country, was able to
turn ‘Henry V’ into superb propaganda during the war and personally rallied the
nation from the stage of the Albert Hall.
Such
privileged positions are no longer available to the classical actor. The term
itself, with its slight ring of superiority, has even become a shaky
compliment. And audiences look more sceptically both on heroic acting and on
the grand characters it portrays. They are more likely to be caught by the
sinewy arguments and subversive ironies of Shakespeare than by the ring of a
beautiful line. An instinctive populism means they enjoy seeing the tragic hero
being tripped up by an ordinary person, a player, a grave digger or a fool. Drawn
to ‘King Lear’ to experience the exceptional suffering of the perplexed old
man, they will come out feeling short-changed if they haven’t also felt
sympathy for Goneril and Regan, driven to revenge by his paternal bullying.
In
‘Hamlet’, they will watch Claudius with eyes attuned by ‘Newsnight’,
observing the fast decisions a political leader takes in the face of an
unexpected question, noting how swiftly he can call up his data and override
interruptions – something Claudius does in his court by the simple expedient of
rarely finishing a sentence at the end of a verse line. They may also reflect
that, guilty or not, Claudius was a better leader than either the belligerent old
King Hamlet or his over-complicated son, who leaves his country stripped and
ready for annexation by Fortinbras, whose drums threaten to drown Hamlet’s
beautiful death speech.
And,
more alert than previous generations to dark themes in comedy, modern audiences
will enjoy ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ all the more because it starts with the
most unnerving premises in Shakespeare – the possibility that a father will
have his daughter executed by the state for disobedience. In the same play,
Oberon’s speech about the little purple flower he will vengefully apply to
Titania’s eye used to be dressed up in gratuitous splendour by Gielgud, but it
works much better if it can also be seen as a great piece of espret d’escalier; having managed
little in his argument with Titania beyond monosyllables and spite, Oberon
finds, now she’s gone, a purely poetic supremacy. He becomes for the moment as
small a man as Leontes in ‘The Winter’s Tale’ or Ford in ‘The Merry Wives of
Windsor’ – unable, like many of Shakespeare’s heroic fools, to cope with a
woman’s vision.
And
we speak differently in these plays now, hoping to find as conversational a
form as possible for the complex patterns of tension and release, lightness and
weight, in Shakespeare's verse – not to mention the taxing architecture of the
prose. This without betraying its soft, heavy beat, the way the melodic line
sometimes strains against the rhythm, and the moments it takes off
metaphorically. The actor needs to enter the language, not feel he has to
massage it into life.
Olivier
and Gielgud gave their times a vital new sensibility and naturalness. The skill
with which they adapted to changing styles, as well as creating them, was a
remarkable feature to both actors. But both had finished with live Shakespeare
by the mid-1970s, and so stood apart from the many revisions that followed. Who
knows what either would have thought about the three very different Macbeths
earlier this year; or what Gielgud would have made of the audience breathing
down his neck from three sides, having parked their plastic tumblers on the
edge of a tiny studio stage; or how eagerly Olivier would have welcomed the
kind of rehearsal in which the Duke of Exeter’s opinion can be rated as highly
as that of King Henry.
Just
as in the Mechanicals’ play at the end of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ the
novice Flute perhaps outshines Bottom the star, we have become used to many
people achieving greatness for a moment, in one part, on one night of the run. I
can remember moments of absolute trueness in Shakespeare from dozens of unsung
heroes; exposing the heart of these plays has become a matter of profound
teamwork.