My Life in Pieces (57 page)

Dickens wrote fiercely and pertinently about the abuses of his day, which are not, alas, so different from the abuses of ours. He attacked imbalances in income, indifference to mental suffering, the venality of lawyers, the heartlessness of capitalists, the death of the soul and the rape of the child. But it is not for this alone that we read him now; not even for the great generous heart, or for the unique literary voice. It is for his huge populist energy that we love him and need him, for his assertion of the glorious vitality of human life and the united diversity of society, for his denial of uniformity and his exploration of the unbounded manifestations of man and woman, both peccable and sublime. Dickens, the hero of his own age, reaches out to a tradition and a culture which long precedes it, which even antedates the Elizabethan period, and asserts, for our own age in which the twin horrors of globalisation and fundamentalism – both tending towards the standardisation of human experience – threaten to overwhelm us, the glorious, contradictory and unsuppressible bounteousness of the human experience.

Dickens's passion for the stage and indeed his own performances of his
own work brought an inherently theatrical dimension to the enterprise.
Although Peter Ackroyd is not a dramatist, his stupendous biography of
Dickens, like much of his work, is theatrical through and through, full of
mirrors and smoke, and with a superlative sense of the grotesque. He prov
ided me with a wonderful play which at first he called
Bring on the Bottled Lightning
(one of Dickens's descriptions of himself as a reader), a
title we feared would not be immediately comprehensible. Instead, reluct
antly, we settled on
The Mystery of Charles Dickens
(obviously on the
model of
Edwin Drood
). In the event it turned out to be rather apt: the
play grew into the title. I performed it all over the world, in Australia, in
Ireland, in Chicago, on Broadway. This is the second part of the article I
wrote for the
New York Times
in time for our opening there
.

As in
The Importance of Being Oscar
, the central event in
The Mystery
of Charles Dickens
is, we hope, the raising of a ghost, in this case that of Charles Dickens. By the end of the show, we hope that you will feel that you have been swept up in and touched by the life and the unparalleled charisma of that unique author: that you will have spent time in the company of his characters, invoked not so much in rounded psychological depth as by the flickering footlights of the Victorian theatre in all its excess and power: and that you will have walked the dank London streets with him and experienced the vanished idyll of childhood which he so desperately sought to recover. G. K. Chesterton said of Dickens that wherever he went in the world, his journeys were always travels in Dickensland. Here is another, in the company of the author. The form of the piece is perhaps even better suited to Dickens than it is to Wilde. Wilde was a dramatist, which Dickens was not; his plays are peculiarly bad, lacking any individual touches. He was so utterly stage-struck that in his dramatic works, he simply and slavishly imitated the plays of the day.

But his novels, paradoxically, are supremely theatrical. ‘Dickens enters the theatre of the world through the stage door,' as Santayana memorably remarked. He himself longed to go on stage, and participated, with some distinction, in innumerable theatrical productions as an amateur, playing a fine Falstaff and a better Bobadill; he even secured an audition with a famous actor-manager. The very form of his novels, the structure of his characters and the arc of his dialogue, are derived from popular theatrical forms of his time, in which he would play many characters in the course of an evening. Eventually, Dickens fused his talents in the public readings which dominated his last years, in the course of which he astounded huge crowds on both sides of the Atlantic with his histrionic genius, producing uncontrollable mirth and asphyxiating horror in his listeners, and inhabiting no less than eighty-nine characters in the course of eighteen different readings, seeming to become each in turn.

Dickens is the Writer as Actor, finally come to claim a Broadway stage. And in the course of the evening, this one-man play will introduce you to forty-nine characters, Charles Dickens and – ahem – me. Or me as invented by Peter Ackroyd: one more level of ontological jiggery-pokery. It's all done by mirrors, of course; it's a conjuring trick (one of which, perhaps, Dickens would have approved: he was a practised and dazzling
magician himself, in the guise of the Unparalleled Necromancer Rhama Rhia Roos). Now perhaps it's a little clearer why we call it
The Mystery
of Charles Dickens
.

I had been rather in love with Oscar Wilde, but Dickens took me over,
body and soul. He is titanic: phenomenal, inspiring, appalling. He is gen
erous and destructive, subtle and stupendous. To be in contact with him
and his work is like standing in front of a blazing fire. He is a life force.
In his journalism, Wilde affected an amused and fastidious disdain for
Dickens's vulgarity and broadness. But when he was admitted to prison,
the first books he asked for were Dickens's (though they did not include
The Old Curiosity Shop
, of the death of whose heroine, Little Nell, Wilde
had famously remarked that it was impossible to read without bursting
into… laughter). From my point of view as an actor, I had the odd sensa
tion that I had found my perfect author. He fitted me like a glove. This was
a little regrettable in that he had neglected to write any performable plays,
so I would always – or so I assumed – be at the mercy of adaptations. The
distinction between drama and theatre is a profound one, and it is not a
paradox to say that our greatest novelist is our most theatrical writer.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens
was my first experience of the so-called
No. 1 Touring Circuit in the British Isles, something to which I took with
great enthusiasm. Apart from anything else, it was deeply satisfying to
act in the remarkable theatres – most of them Victorian or Edwardian –
which are still the underpinning of this country’s remarkably healthy tra
dition. I reviewed John Earl’s
British Theatres and Music Halls
in 2005
. 

Theatres are architecture, to be sure, finished, achieved, but they house a living art and accordingly and inevitably are both influenced by the work that appears on their stages, and exercise an influence over it. The revelations offered by the reconstructed (or, more precisely, reinvented) Globe Theatre on the South Bank are the most vivid example of the interdependence of building and performance; whatever you might think of any individual production under Mark Rylance’s richly idiosyncratic regime, no director or actor of plays by Shakespeare or his contemporaries can think of them in quite the same way again.

The relationship with the audience is the key. Any player will tell you that certain plays suddenly come to life in certain spaces, although it is by no means dependable that a small theatre will afford you intimacy or that a very large one will inhibit it. The whole business is something of a mystery, and it is hugely to the credit of John Earl’s small but exceptionally nourishing volume on the subject that he acknowledges, as he traces the development of the theatre building from the sixteenth century to the present, that it has above all been a pragmatic process, and that certain
individuals (the Edwardian theatre architect Frank Matcham perhaps the greatest of them) have mastered its secrets without being able to pass them on. He traces a steady chronological line, showing how the Elizabethan outdoor theatres evolved out of courtyards, how the move indoors immediately changed the habits of audiences and of practitioners, both actors and writers. He charts the regular decline and fall of enthusiasm for theatre, how regularly it seems to sicken, then on its very deathbed leaps up with new vigour.

He is particularly good on the growth of the music hall from mere incidental entertainment into a central and unique phenomenon, cutting across classes and giving rise to massive buildings of unparalleled splendour. The London Coliseum was the greatest of these, but, with characteristic vividness of phrase, Earl notes that in its very design ‘it contained an infection that was to prove fatal’ – a projection booth: film would kill the music hall and probably (with its housebound sister, television) for ever destroy theatre as a great popular art. He is no architectural nostalgic, cheerfully contemplating the complete reconstruction of Elisabeth Scott’s unsatisfactory Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, though he professes a surprising enthusiasm for Lasdun’s ugly, dysfunctional National Theatre.

It is astonishing how much information and stimulation Earl has packed into his sixty pages, and the illustrations are simply superb – plentiful, unhackneyed and magnificently reproduced. And very – improbably – cheap. The book should be put in the Tessa Jowell grab-bag of books that all schoolchildren are about to receive: it’s an utterly alluring introduction to the passion that theatre buildings inspire both in audiences and actors. Now that the Sixties’ conviction that red-and-gold auditoriums were elitist and alienating has quietly died, audiences have voted with their feet on the subject. The theatre building should be an entertainment in itself, an environment out of the usual run, an invitation into the world of the imagination. Earl admirably demonstrates the variety of forms that invitation can take.

Because the Dickens show, like the Wilde show that had inspired it, had
such direct contact with audiences, the venue was of paramount impor
tance. Facing the audience head-on of course creates an immediate and
direct relationship with them which is matchlessly exciting.

Although the solo performances dominated so much of my professional
life, and were so deeply satisfying, I was conscious that in a sense, they
were divergences from the main path. I wondered whether I had aban
doned the proper pursuit of an actor which is, after all, the interpretation
of character. In my frustration with, and doubt about, acting, I had been
reading and rereading various books on the subject, and had become fas
cinated by a good new translation of a book I had struggled with some
twenty years earlier,
To the Actor
by the great Russian actor and teacher,
Mikhail (or Michael, as he called himself after he fled to the West)
Chekhov, Anton’s nephew.

The more I read, the more I fell in love with Michael Chekhov, both as man
and as teacher. Mostly through his writing, of course, but what little we
have of his acting on film, and the electrifying descriptions of his stage
work – even the photographs of his characterisations – are both inspiring
and encouraging. If I cast my eye back over my own work as an actor, it
was clear that I was at my best – Arturo Ui, Mozart, Molina in
Kiss of the Spider Woman
– when I was able to be expressively free, not trying to
offer photographic or realistic conceptions, but rather creating fantastical
projections of character, each one a complete universe of expression in
itself. This was the Michael Chekhov route. I attended Chekhov sympo
siums and weekends, meeting some of the leading practitioners in the
world, Russian, American and Australian, discovering what the practical
applications of the teaching might be. As a result of these encounters, per
haps, I was asked to write an introduction to a new edition of
To the Actor.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are in the throes of a crisis in theatre acting. It is clearly not a crisis in talent: actors are as eager, as gifted, as attractive as they have ever been – perhaps more so. The stars are younger, their bodies are in better condition, they apply themselves energetically to all the physical aspects of the job. But something isn’t happening. Audiences feel it; actors feel it. Disappointment is in the air. The theatre isn’t delivering. Audiences over a certain age start to rumble about the Golden Age when actors were really
actors
, while actors for their part start to complain about the declining quality of audiences. All sorts of other theatre experiences become more interesting than those which focus on acting: the musical theatre, for example, with its
combination of spectacle, noise, rhythm, and sheer energy, which can, properly manipulated, whip up an audience into a state of frenetic excitement; or what is called physical theatre – as if theatre, which is the word made flesh, could be anything other than physical! – which brings elements of dance, of acrobatics, of circus into play, taking the spotlight away from language and from character and into the realm of choreography. The search for new forms of theatre never ceases. What is curious is that no one ever discusses acting in this context.

The last time there was a full debate about acting in the British theatre was in the late Fifties and early Sixties of the last century, and it may be interesting to consider what came out of it. The debate was provoked by the revolution in playwriting at the Royal Court Theatre, which led to an urgent demand for new kinds of acting. The old guard of actors, whether suave exponents of drawing-room comedy, or high priests and priestesses of the classics (often they were the same people), had dominated the post-war theatre and they were now denounced as bourgeois, individualist, elitist, shallow, technical. Where were the new actors for the new plays? They were there, waiting in the wings, ready to swing into action, the generation famously trained by John Fernald at the RADA: working class, regional, feisty, real. For a while they and their mentors – the firebrand, mostly left-wing directors of the epoch – plunged into a heady exploration of the possibilities of acting. Sometimes from aesthetic, sometimes from political perspectives, they investigated mask work, improvisation, theatre games; they embraced the theories of Bertolt Brecht. Occasionally they threw a loving glance sideways to the pioneering work of Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop in the East End of London. With her unique mix of theory and sheer bloody-mindedness, she had offered an approach both to new plays and to the classics which was almost medieval in its vitality and impudence and demanded of her actors a kind of magnificent rough poetry.

In the early 1960s, some of the results of this exploratory work passed into the mainstream of the theatre; both Olivier, at the newly created National Theatre at the Old Vic, and Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company he had formed slightly earlier, absorbed the work of these directors and actors. Every so often these companies would present a piece of truly experimental acting – like, for instance, Robert Stephens’s electrifying performance of the sun-god Atahuallpa in Peter Shaffer’s
The
Royal Hunt of the Sun
, or Ian Richardson’s Herald in the
Marat/Sade
– but the dust soon settled, and a consensus began to emerge, a sort of new realism: a kind of unvarnished, unsentimental manner in which real life could be credibly presented, in plays both modern and classical. Above all, this approach eschewed theatricality. Any sense that actors were unusual or exceptional human beings was rejected. The job of actors was now to be as like their audience, or their hoped-for audience, as possible: the man on the stage was now the man on the street.

What the revolution had really achieved was the absolute dominance of the director. Experiment became centred on design and
concept
, both under the control of the director. The actor’s creative imagination – his fantasy, his instinct for gesture – was of no interest; all the creative imagining had already been done by the director and the designer. The best that an actor could do was to bring himself or herself to the stage and simply be. Actors, accepting the new rules, resigned themselves to serving the needs of the playwright as expressed by his representative on earth, the director. Of course they rebelled against this; they started to sneak amusing and charming and original elements into their work. But they had lost control of their own performances. And so they started to desert the theatre. The financial rewards could never compare with those of television or film; if there were to be no creative rewards, what was the point? It seemed like very hard work for very little return. Most of the celebrated actors of the recent revolutionary period disappeared into film. They came back again, from time to time, on a visit, but the theatre had ceased to be their natural habitat. It wasn’t just a question of fame or money: the stage had become unexciting to them. They were simply not getting the response from their audiences. They were not satisfied by an activity which now had neither the grandeur, the glamour nor the sense of heightened emotional power of the old school, which had engendered such intense energies in the auditorium, often taking the experience into the realm of the primal. Audiences felt this too. Despite the frequently challenging and inventive work of the dramatists, the designers and the directors, the contribution of the actors – what might be called the acting enterprise – was circumscribed. It was all very rational and objective and credible, but it was not markedly different from what was readily – and more cheaply – available in the cinema or on the television.

The older actors – that fabled generation of Evans and Ashcroft, Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Redgrave, Guinness – never gave up, of course. They
continued more or less unreformed, despite exposure – in the case of Olivier and Ashcroft – to the Royal Court during its fervent years; Gielgud and Richardson, in particular, became much loved as they ventured in extreme old age into plays by David Storey and Harold Pinter. But there was a clear shared sense that no one was going to replace these living national treasures: we were watching a gorgeous sunset without hope of a repeat. It was not the individuals that were dying, it was an entire view of acting and of actors. Above all what was disappearing was the idea that the actor was at the centre of the event; that his or her contribution was the core of the experience. Actors started to become embarrassed by their job; anyone who had the temerity to talk in public about the complex processes involved in acting, or to suggest that acting might be a great and important art, was remorselessly mocked. The phrase
luvvie
was invented by the British press to put actors in their place. Only those who claimed that there was no more to acting than learning the lines and avoiding the furniture were accorded any respect.

The roots of these developments are deep, and it is here that we need to mention the name of Konstantin Stanislavsky, a towering figure in the history of twentieth-century theatre, who – sometimes directly, sometimes more obliquely – has profoundly influenced attitudes towards acting. Deeply concerned to advance the art of acting itself, seeking to establish the conditions necessary for what he called creative acting, he studied the work of actors he admired and began to extrapolate theories from his observations. Little by little he formed a corpus of exercises and analysis which came to be known as the Stanislavsky System, the central tenets of which are brilliantly simple and convincing. In the Theory of Actions, he proposes that a play consists of a series of interlocking actions, or objectives, out of which the actor’s path through the play is constructed; in the Theory of Emotional Memory, he maintains that the actor finds the truth of the role by using his own experiences, thus achieving a lifelike as opposed to a merely theatrical performance. These two ideas, most potently expressed in question form – What do I want? and Who am I? – formed a powerful tool for combating what Stanislavsky defined as the actor’s worst pitfall: acting
in general
.