The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  There was nothing in the evolution of the rehearsal process that prepared him for what happened opening night. Until, he said, the technical rehearsal two days before the opening. Up till then Brook had withheld direction, in a New Age collaborative way, refraining from giving the cast line readings, refraining from taking control of the production, from directing. But suddenly, Nunn said, “Peter began to bark out orders and then everything fell into place like magic, like he’d snapped a whip.” And the night of the first performance “something happened I’ll never forget,” Nunn told me. And, recall, Nunn is a man who had gone on to direct some of the most celebrated Shakespearean productions of the late twentieth century—including one I’d just seen, at the National Theater, his devastating Troilus and Cressida.

  The opening night of Brook’s Dream, though, “was a revelation from the first moment. And at the first interval [Anglicism for “intermission”] we knew. You have to understand about that interval,” Nunn was telling me. “Nobody gets a standing ovation at a first interval. It just had never happened before. But that moment before the interval with Titania and Bottom borne aloft to the Mendelssohn ‘Wedding March’ with the fist coming up triumphantly between his legs …”

  That last bit needs a little explication for those who weren’t there. It’s the moment when Bottom, transformed to a hairy-eared ass, is lifted up on the shoulders of the fairies and workmen who bear him to his tryst with Titania the Fairy Queen. She of course has fallen madly in love with Bottom-as-ass under the influence of Puck’s love potion. Now there is much scholarly debate over whether Bottom and Titania physically consummate their love potion–induced union, the mating of an ass and a goddess. Brook’s production jubilantly takes the position that it’s more than a nesting and cuddling moment. A gesture had developed in rehearsal that captured the spirit of it all. Just as the “Wedding March” breaks out, confetti explodes from the heavens; one of the workman bearing Bottom to his bed swings a forearm and clenched fist up between Bottom’s legs.

  It was more than a metaphor. “Peter used to tell us that the ass has the largest penis in the animal world,” Sara Kestelman (who played the Fairy Queen and the mortal Amazon Queen Hippolyta in the production) told me, and there is even a scholarly debate about whether Bottom is endowed with more than an ass’s ears during his transformation. But in any case, the moment, the gesture, was the climax of an electrifying scene. It only would have worked if the gesture genuinely embodied the physical excitement, the almost aphrodisiac energy the play itself imparted. It only would have worked if everything else worked. But everything did work brilliantly. That triumphant fist brought the audience to a standing position as well, for an explosive standing ovation.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it in the theater before,” Trevor Nunn told me. The Dream was suddenly in every sense of the word “theater-filling.”

  All of which is to say (as I learned to my cost), Peter Brook is no experimental theater flower child. He can crack a whip (I felt its lash). For all his rhetoric of collaboration, there is a single mind, a single vision behind what happens on the stage when Brook does Shakespeare. He’s a terrifying perfectionist who feels the stakes in Shakespeare are high enough to warrant whatever mind-games and psychodrama manipulations are necessary to produce a single embodiment of Brook’s vision. To make the company, make the language into a single-minded organism with “a single beating heart” (as he would call it on the night of the Embarrassing Incident).

  On the night of the Embarrassing Incident, however, I felt hurt by Brook’s disapproval. Hurt most of all because I appeared to have offended someone to whom I owed a lifelong debt of gratitude. For having given me a unique gift, with that Dream.

  Some sort of powerful initiating experience turns out to be common to lifelong Shakespeareans. It came up in a number of my conversations with Shakespeareans. For Harold Bloom the revelatory encounter was a role—seeing Ralph Richardson play Falstaff, when Bloom was just fourteen. For Ann Thompson, the editor of the Arden three-text Hamlet, it was a moment during an outdoor production of King Lear. For Frank Rich it was Peter Brook’s stage version of King Lear with Paul Scofield.

  But more often than not, among an impressive array of directors, scholars, actors, critics and private citizens it was Peter Brook’s Dream. From the moment it opened to ecstatic reviews in 1970 to the end of the long world tour some four years later, Brook’s Dream drew people to it and changed them. Made them see differently, the way Puck’s love potion dropped into the eyes transforms all to love at first sight in the Dream.

  Think of it this way: there are biographers and collectors and antiquarians who might give their lives to find some lost artifact of “the real Shakespeare,” the tiniest unintelligible scrap of his handwriting, not so much for its monetary value (although that might be inestimable) but out of the belief that such an icon might somehow bring us closer to Shakespeare.

  It’s the illusion, even the delusion, behind the impulse to believe certain verbal icons—like the “Funeral Elegy”—might bring us closer to Shakespeare. It’s the illusion that portraits of Shakespeare—every decade or so someone claims to have uncovered another one, mostly of dubious provenance—might bring us closer to Shakespeare.

  It’s the illusion that may be what’s really behind the “authorship” controversy: the illusion that since we can’t know Shakespeare, since there’s not enough material evidence to paint a complete portrait, let’s select someone else that we can know as our Shakespeare. A different more knowable Shakespeare. One we can get closer to.

  It was a similar illusion in another realm that sparked the frenzy behind the phony Hitler “diaries”: the longing to believe that somehow these dubious scribblings would bring us closer to the mystery Hitler represented.

  But even if we could find some Hitler-diary-equivalent for Shakespeare, I’m not sure it would bring us closer to what matters most about Shakespeare—the work, the spell—than Peter Brook has. He is the icon who gave us what no antiquarian relic possibly could: an experience of Shakespeare’s presence, the spell Shakespeare cast—the most unbearably real thing about him.

  THE SHOCK OF THE DREAM

  Brook had this effect on people from the beginning. He was in many ways an Orson Welles–like prodigy whom Shakespeareans took note of, argued about, loved and hated from the moment when Brook was an Oxford undergraduate and John Gielgud lent him some old movie sets which Brook used to make his first film, an adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. (According to Gielgud’s biographer, Sheridan Morley, “Already Gielgud knew that Brook was going to be one of those rare directors from whom an old dog could learn new tricks.” Brook was nineteen at the time.)

  He soon made a name, Morley reports, “with Paul Scofield in some early seasons at the Birmingham Rep,” and followed this with a revelatory Measure for Measure at Stratford featuring John Gielgud as the repressed lecher Angelo. Kenneth Tynan said the role gave Gielgud’s acting “a second lease of life.” After that Brook became a fixture at Stratford with an eye-opening Romeo and Juliet and a Titus Andronicus that almost single-handedly transformed that neglected early tragedy from a disparaged relic whose violence many were embarrassed about to an utterly modern, eloquent realization of the heart of Shakespearean darkness. People still talk about the red ribbons of “blood” that streamed from the mouth of the mutilated Lavinia (played by Vivien Leigh to Olivier’s Titus).

  And then in the early sixties Brook’s Lear with Paul Scofield playing the King (first on stage and then on screen) found some fusion of bleakness and dread that left audiences devastated and cathartically exhilarated and marked the moment when Lear displaced Hamlet in the minds of many as the more profound Shakespearean experience.

  Until Brook’s Dream. Which, like Titus, was in a kind of reputational decline at the time, burdened with the encrustations of Victorian fairy imagery, elaborate woodsy sets, some of which featured real rabbits hopping about. It was considered Shakespeare-for
-children by some.

  What Brook succeeded in doing was to reawaken people to the centrality of the Dream to Shakespeare’s cosmos; he led many to see that the Dream is, in effect, the King Lear of Shakespeare’s comedies, a work just as dizzying and profound.

  He also achieved an astonishing popular success. The reviews were so sensational that suddenly “helicopters were landing in Stratford,” as Sara Kestelman recalled it. “People were jetting in from all over the world.” One of them was Clive Barnes, then chief drama critic of The New York Times. He called it “a magnificent production, the most important work yet of the world’s most imaginative and inventive director … the greatest Shakespearean production I have seen in my life.” In the London Sunday Times Harold Hobson called it “magnificent, the sort of thing one sees only once in a lifetime and then only from a man of genius.” An enormously intense spotlight was focused upon the production and the players. And an enduring mystery was created as well: What had Brook wrought? Why was this Dream different from all other Dreams? What made it exceptional?

  Since seeing it I’ve seen a lot of misguided explanations which all too often focus on surface aspects of the production. For some reason Brook’s detractors, many of whom never saw the production, only still pictures or the ten-second film clip that is all that survives, focus on the eerie circus-like costumes and props, the bare bright-lit white cube of a set.

  In my first interview with him Brook told me that what he’d seen when he first saw the Peking Opera Circus perform in Paris was a way to capture the spirit of the fairies, the lighter-than-air, globe-girdling swiftness and grace—without being imprisoned by the antiquated fairy convention of centuries of stage cliché that had deadened the exhilaration implicit in Shakespeare’s language. “I wanted to capture their lightness,” he told me.

  By clearing away all the scenic underbrush, so to speak, what Brook had done was allow the language itself to flourish, for the language to be the star. He allowed the language of the play to achieve what Brook had once spoken of as his goal: to bring the actors so deeply into their interrelated roles in the rigorous rehearsal process that the words didn’t seem to be recited but uttered for the first time. Minted at the moment of speaking as if they were utterly inevitable and spontaneous: as if they had never been uttered by anyone before. Permit me to utter this again: what Brook was doing was not making the Dream something radically new, but rather something radically old. Making it seem as if we were watching it, experiencing it as if in a dream, performed for the first time, on its first night.

  This was a physical as well as metaphysical effect. A physicality that was captured beautifully by veteran Shakespearean actress Zoe Caldwell, who saw the Dream in her youth and saw vast quantities of Shakespeare at its best since then. And yet still remembers her first exposure to the Dream as unique.

  “The effect was truly dreamlike,” Ms. Caldwell wrote in her memoir, “but the main difference was the incredible clarity of the play. I had never heard and understood every syllable of the text before and it was shocking to sit in an audience and never for a moment have your attention wander. I remember feeling a breeze around my neck and I realized that it was because my head had sat high on my spine as a child’s does at a circus for the entire evening.” There’s that word: “shocking.” It’s overused these days, but for me it was a shock that has left me still shaken.

  What impressed me most, once I began seeking out Shakespeareans in a more systematic fashion, was the way the most discerning and attentive scholars of Shakespearean language turned out to have feelings like mine about Brook’s Dream. Stephen Booth and Russ McDonald, for instance. Both of them told me they’d seen the Brook Dream and had felt much like I had about its language. I recall the three of us speaking about it at a lunch during a scholars’ and directors’ conference in Staunton, Virginia. As soon as we started talking about it, for all three of us the excitement of that Dream was as fresh as the moment it transfixed us first.

  It was the remarkable enthusiasm of these two that fortified me against the objections of the two foremost anti-Brookians, John Simon and Harold Bloom, because frankly, whatever the virtues of the latter two, their attunement to Shakespeare’s language pales before that of Booth and McDonald in my estimation. And my sense is that even Bloom and Simon insist on seeing Brook through the wrong lens, as some kind of experimentalist, rather than as someone more deeply classical than the classicists.

  THE EXCEPTION TO EVERY RULE

  In any case it was something Peter Brook said about Shakespeare in my first personal encounter with him, nearly three decades after the Dream, that helped crystallize the idea for this book. If seeing the Dream had been the distant cause of this book, an initiating cause had been that first encounter, two years before the Embarrassing Incident, when Brook had come to New York on the book tour for his memoir, Threads of Time, and I spent an hour with him talking about Shakespeare in a hotel lobby bar. Here are some of the things I recall about Peter Brook’s persona from that first meeting:

  First how pale he was. Not in an unhealthy way, something more ethereal. An aura of serenity bordering on (doubling as?) a cool hauteur that radiated from pale blue eyes. The simplicity of his garb: black blazer, gray slacks, dark turtleneck. And the style of his greeting: no handshake but a polite Zen-master-like nod-bow with hands pressed together beneath his chin as if in blessing, briefly dipped toward one in acknowledgment.

  As he tells us in his memoir, Brook’s father was originally called Bryck; his parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants to England in the early twentieth century. Those eyes are Baltic blue. Brook himself is not conventionally religious although he does follow a spiritual discipline which he began practicing in the forties known as the “Gurdjieff work,” an esoteric Eastern- and Western-based spiritual path with some roots in Sufi mysticism brought to the West by the Russian writer P. D. Ouspensky. Brook would eventually make Gurdjieff’s account of travels in Central Asia in search of enlightenment, Meetings with Remarkable Men, into a film. (In addition to Meetings and Lear, Brook’s films include Marat/Sade, based on his sensational stage production, and Lord of the Flies, an adaptation of the William Golding novel.)

  I frankly have never been able to glimpse profound depths in what I’ve read of Gurdjieff but he seems to have attracted an array of highly educated followers. The best brief definition of what they were seeking may be the one in the Skeptics Dictionary which calls Gurdjieff a spiritual “con man” but describes his appeal thus: “he offered to show his followers the way to true wakefulness, a state of awareness that transcends ordinary consciousness.” Sometimes con men have the power to con the receptive into a new consciousness.

  What makes “the Gurdjieff work” unique and arduous (and thus, somewhat self-importantly, called “work”) as I understand it is the emphasis on confrontational self-examination designed to uncover layers of self-deception. And although Brook has frequently disclaimed any Gurdjieffian influence on his Shakespeare, according to many I spoke to it may well have influenced his all-important rehearsal techniques.

  When we met that first time in 1998 Brook had not done Shakespeare in any traditional sense for nearly a quarter century, since his Antony and Cleopatra with the Royal Shakespeare Company (starring Alan Howard and Glenda Jackson). In fact one could almost say he’d fled Shakespeare. Which was why what he had to say about Shakespeare and the “exceptionalist question” had such an impact on me.

  You’ll recall the exceptionalist question with Shakespeare: Is he on the continuum of other great writers, perhaps the greatest, but still understandable in the same terms as other great writers, or does he occupy—has he created—some realm of his own, beyond others?

  The reason Brook’s experience seemed so pertinent to this question is that he cannot be easily accused of culture-bound “bardolatry” as some of those who take the exceptionalist position on Shakespeare have been.

  At the peak of his success and celebrity as a Shakespearean director in
the U.K. with “people jetting in from all over the world” to see his productions, he had already uprooted himself and moved to an abandoned music hall in an industrial suburb north of Paris where his Centre for Theater Research was located. And neither the spectacular success of the Dream nor the world tour could lure him back.

  Instead he abandoned traditional English-language theater entirely, abandoned language itself entirely for a time, when he and the poet Ted Hughes took a huge company to the shah’s Iran where they staged a play on the ancient cliffside ruins of Persepolis, a play in which the actors spoke an entirely invented—and to everyone else unintelligible—language that Ted Hughes devised (“Orghast”). One which he and Brook in their sublime if dizzy madness insisted would convey more authentic meaning than mere words in any specific language. (Of course the dream of all mystics, conjurers, alchemists and fraudulent spiritualists in Shakespeare’s time was to discover just such an ineffable universal language, the language God taught Adam in the Garden, the language lost in the mists before Babel.)

  In other words Brook not only fled Shakespeare, he fled Shakespeare so violently he fled language itself. He fled it, I suspect, as one flees a violent consuming love affair because it became so unbearably intense he had to question the experience—see it from the outside in, from as great a distance—culturally, theatrically, geographically—as possible.