Words and Worlds

by Alison Lurie

  WORDS AND WORLDS

  What Happened in Hamlet

  In 1974 Jonathan Miller invited me to watch rehearsals of Hamlet, the third in a season of “Family Romances” he was directing in repertory at the Greenwich Theatre. I said yes at once. I had been in love with England and English literature ever since I was a child reading E. Nesbit and Winnie-the-Pooh. When I first arrived, at twenty-three, it was like stepping into an alternative reality, a wonderful looking-glass world where people actually drove on the left and had afternoon tea. But I was a tourist, there only for a few weeks, as invisible to the inhabitants as they were unknowable to me.

  Twenty years later I returned—this time, fortunately, with introductions from my editor and from friends who had lived in England. After six months as the wife of a Cornell professor on sabbatical, I was more enchanted than ever. I returned as often as I could, renting apartments for a month or more almost every year. I began to meet people who had just been names in the book sections of newspapers and magazines. (Not bold-face names, back then: almost none of them were as well known as they later became.) Among them were Jonathan Miller and his wife, Rachel. Jonathan had made a splash in the review Beyond the Fringe and was now starting to be known as an innovative director. I was keen to discover what he would make of what is probably the most famous play in the English language, and how he would express his thoughts, using not words but a stage, lights, scenery, and actors.

  I was also interested in how a stage production is put together, and in what professional actors are like—who they are, where they come from, and how they learn to pretend to be alternately kings and tramps, heroes and saints, lovers, madmen, fools, and murderers. Would these people and their world be different from the amateur actors and little-theater groups I had known in America, or the same? (The answer was: essentially the same, only more so.)

  I began going to rehearsals, starting with the first meeting of the company in Greenwich in February 1974, following them to a hotel off Earl’s Court Road for rehearsals a week later, and finally back to the theater. I talked to the cast and had lunch with them; I sat in the audience at the first preview, and drifted around backstage on opening night.

  Jonathan Miller

  He is usually compared by journalists to a large untidy sea bird, a stork, or, more accurately, a heron; mention is made of his height, his long legs and wings, prominent beak, and rumpled feathers. Photographs reproduce this accurately; what they cannot show is that he operates at a different film speed from other people; that he thinks, speaks, and moves noticeably faster. Often he is mentally or literally two impatient steps ahead of everyone else. As a director, this gives him great advantages. He can, for instance, see everything that is happening in a scene involving eight characters.

  But speed and intelligence are not enough. Directing is an exhausting job, requiring a great deal of energy and willpower. In rehearsal there are essentially no times when Jonathan is not on stage, nothing and no one he can afford not to attend to. Sometimes he stands back like a painter from his canvas, but more often he watches from nearby in the crouched position of a runner, balancing on his toes, then sprinting forward to stop the action. He explains rather than demonstrates, not imitating the intonation or gesture he wants, but describing it. This is deliberate. “I don’t want anyone to parrot me,” he told me on the first day. “I want them to find their own way.”

  A successful director is, almost by definition, someone with a strong ego. There are times when, in order that his ideas shall prevail, Jonathan will use every weapon at his disposal: wit, charm, threats, praise, flattery, bribery, patience, impatience, argument, and scorching ridicule. There are times when all those weapons fail, and he goes home at the end of the day not only exhausted but, for the moment, beaten.

  Wouldn’t it be easier, I ask, for him to play a part himself?

  “No. I could never be an actor, because of my stutter. I was all right in Beyond the Fringe because there I could improvise. The stutter only comes on when I have to give a prepared speech, or say lines someone else has written.”

  “A protest against anyone’s telling you what to do?”

  “Yes, perhaps.” He looks away, is silent.

  The First Day

  In the theater at Greenwich. It has the haunted, dingy look of all empty public rooms, and is also quite dark and very cold—economy and the fuel crisis having combined to extinguish all heating except during performances. Everyone is huddled in winter coats in the front rows while Jonathan, hunched on a box at the edge of the bare stage, delivers what he has called “a general brief chat” and turns out to be an elegant two-hour monologue full of erudite references and in-jokes.

  “I want to make this production clear and diagrammatic.” he begins. “Get away from all the romantic clutter, all the romantic fog.” The set (by Patrick Robinson) will be absolutely simple—plain benches at the corners and center of the half–arena stage, and fixed screens at the back made of ropes strung vertically. The costumes (designed by Patrick’s wife, Rosemary Vercoe) will be sixteenth-century, but subdued—blacks and browns with slashes of color, based on the portraits of Titian. (Jonathan leans forward to show and then pass round a book of reproductions.)

  In line with this conception, Jonathan goes on, he will not try to make the Ghost look like a supernatural apparition. “Death isn’t a disease which makes you misty, hollow-voiced, and ten feet tall. A ghost is simply, and horribly, somebody who shouldn’t be there; somebody who has broken his contract and then suddenly comes back on stage during a performance.”

  Claudius, he continues, should not be played as a lecherous monster, but as a Renaissance prince who, like so many others, has murdered his way to the throne—and consolidated his power by marrying the queen. He is not in love with Gertrude, or she with him; instead she is terrified and fascinated—but not sexually, rather as a bird by a snake. (This interpretation is to cause much trouble later: it contradicts not only theatrical tradition and Shakespeare’s text, but Irene Worth’s and Robert Stephens’s stage personae. During rehearsals there will be a continual attrition of Jonathan’s version of the King and Queen, so that by opening night there is, to say the least, a strong undercurrent of sexual feeling between them.)

  Basically, Jonathan announces, this is a play about the conflict between thought and action, “the standard Renaissance dilemma.” On the one hand you have Hamlet and his university classmates Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern—young men trained in the scholarly and courtly virtues. (Here follows a lightning exposition of the traditions of the Renaissance gentleman, with references to Castiglione and Sir Walter Raleigh.)

  On the other hand you have Claudius and Gertrude and their court, concerned with worldly power and authority. Here problems are practical rather than theoretical, and the important human relationships are those of husband and wife, parents and children, rather than scholarly and Platonic friendship between men. “1 don’t mean they’re buggering each other,” Jonathan adds hastily. “It’s an intellectual thing… . A conflict of generations. For Hamlet and his friends the world of the court represents corruption. It’s something they have to reject, or come to terms with or, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, maybe be seduced by power and become killers.”

  Peter Eyre

  “I’m very excited about the idea of doing Hamlet with Peter,” Jonathan said to me before the production began. “He’s one of the most conscious and intelligent actors I’ve ever worked with, and also one of the most sensitive and intuitive. Any good actor can project a strong emotion. Peter can do that, and he can also convey two conflicting emotions at once, a situation which is much more common in real life, especially in this country.

  “But beyond all that he has a quality that’s very very, rare in the theater. When you see Peter, you don’t say, What a wonderful actor. You don’t get the feeling he’s acting at all, but that he’s just an ordinary pers
on who’s got on to the stage somehow. At first the other actors are always thrown off by him. He hasn’t had the same training, so he’s always stumbling into them, breaking up their patterns, because he doesn’t know the rules. That can be corrected in rehearsal, of course. But this time I don’t want to correct it entirely, because that’s the role of Hamlet in the play.”

  “I don’t have to explain Hamlet’s speeches to Peter,” Jonathan tells me later during rehearsals. “What I have to do is to get him to speak the verse properly, musically, without losing that quality he has of seeming to think aloud.” This will mean a lot of work, he says, but it is absolutely essential. “And besides, it will be good for Peter to work hard.”

  In Jonathan’s view, Peter is now at a point in his career when he may become—and he actually did become—one of the best actors in England. The trouble is that he has too much money and knows too many fashionable and purely decorative (or in cruder terms, rich and idle) people, who encourage him to waste time and remain only a brilliant amateur.

  Others besides Jonathan have plans for Peter. He will become their friend, their lover, their child; they want him to read their favorite books and see their favorite films. Robert Stephens (Claudius), who goes to a gym twice a week to work out, will invite Peter to come with him (“All he needs now is to get into condition, build some muscle”), Irene Worth (Gertrude) wants to cook him dinner and give him a bath. He gets fan letters from strangers in remote London suburbs who feel that he is their soulmate and beg or demand a meeting.

  Yes but, what is Peter really like? Wishing to avoid the sort of projection I have just described, I will only say that he is a tall, thin, pale man in his early thirties, who looks about ten years younger than he is. He is much subject to illness, real and imaginary. (During the first week of rehearsals, he and everyone else was in a state of anxiety because he was spitting blood, but X-rays proved negative.) He is one of the eight children of an American businessman and an English aristocrat; he was born in New York, educated in England, went to drama school in Paris, and has already appeared with the Old Vic and in plays and films.

  Peter has wanted to do Hamlet since he was a child, when his governess taught him and his brother and sister to recite scenes from the play to their parents. “I think now that playing Hamlet will be like being analyzed for the fourth time,” he told me when we were having lunch in his tall thin house full of contemporary art in Kensington, before rehearsals began. The fourth time? “Yes. I’ve had an Adlerian analyst, and a Freudian, and a Jungian—he was by far the best.” After the play has opened, I ask him if it has in fact been like an analysis. “Oh. yes. It made me think about my parents, and my father’s death; about brothers and sisters—about suicide, especially… . But isn’t that what it’s supposed to make everybody think about?”

  Backstage

  For someone who has spent most of her time in theaters sitting out front, it was amazing to see, that first day at Greenwich, how shabby and makeshift things are backstage. Just out of sight of the audience are mops, brooms, and coils of rope; you descend the back stairs into an area of dingy cement corridors, naked lightbulbs, rickety folding chairs, wire coat hangers, and spilt powder. The common loo provided for the women in the cast is like what you might find in a railway café: small, cold, and dark, with a damp gray-veined sliver of soap on the edge of a bare washbasin—far inferior to the loo for ladies in the audience.

  When the company moves into London, conditions are even worse. There, for four weeks, rehearsals take place in the White House Hotel in Earl’s Court, in a large draughty square ballroom, once grandly Victorian. Now the cut-glass chandeliers and gold-framed mirrors are broken and dusty, the whipped-cream scrolls of plasterwork chipped and stained, the pink brocade loveseats as grubby and hamstrung as old Victorian whores. On fine mornings a weak sunlight leaks into the room through tall dirt-streaked windows—and also a steady, damp, penetrating cold which the single tiny electric heater cannot touch. “It is a nipping and an eager air,” as Horatio keeps saying: the temperature in the room, like that outdoors, varies between six and ten degrees centigrade. The actors rehearse in coats and scarves, and there is a tendency for them to stand with arms folded for warmth even in scenes where other gestures might be more appropriate.

  But nobody complains. It is not English to mention physical discomfort, and besides there is an economic crisis.

  It occurs to me finally to ask whether these working conditions are approved of by the actors’ union. But apparently this is not the sort of thing British Actors’ Equity is concerned with. They have other matters on their mind, as the Equity Deputy, or shop steward, for this production explains to me. And they are not in a very good bargaining position vis-à-vis management—of the Equity members in the country, over half are out of work at any one time.

  It seems right that this Deputy should turn out to be Lionel Guyett, the serious, handsome young actor who appears at the beginning of the play as Marcellus, and again at its end as Fortinbras—both soldiers, examples of orderly authority. Lionel volunteered for his job on the first day of rehearsals, and he has been Deputy for several other productions. His duties are to keep an eye on the management to make sure that they do not break any rules, as by asking the cast to work more than ten hours in a single day, and to collect Equity dues. He has had a quiet time with this play, but things are not always so easy, what with actors who never have any ready money and managements who try to avoid paying overtime.

  The Duel

  An expert has been brought in to choreograph the fight in the last act. He is Bill Hobbs—a slight, spare, flat-faced man with the instant reaction time and sinewy stripped-down build of a tennis pro, who travels all over Europe staging duels and battles. He has a thick folder of scripts for fights, with stage directions and diagrams (“Laertes—cut to head… . Hamlet—parry with rapier… .”) which he goes over with Jonathan.

  Bill’s job is complex, for the weapons and movements must be historically correct as well as looking realistic. It is also quite dangerous. Theatrical swords and daggers are blunt-edged, but they must appear sharp and heavy; an awkward thrust can cut your hand badly, or even blind you. Bill has already been injured several times by clumsy dramatic swordsmanship, he tells me. “It is probably just a question of time,” he says, shrugging and grinning, “until some ass gets me again.”

  The appearance of Bill Hobbs in the dusty rehearsal room has a marked effect on the men in the company. Even those who will not draw or carry a sword in Hamlet get up and move around, play with the practice foils, and make jokes about their own or each other’s clumsiness. Uneasy anecdotes are recalled—that time in Chichester when Smith cut up Jones’s face so badly he had to leave the cast, while Smith took over his (much larger) role. Standing armed opposite each other for the first time, Peter and Nicky Henson, who plays Laertes, exchange a nervous glance. But Bill knows his job. By the end of the second week, the fight scene is so good that when the rest of the company sees it for the first time, they break into applause.

  Robert Stephens

  What I notice first is his physical presence, the impression he gives of being more alive than other people—as if his body, like Jonathan’s mind, ran at a higher metabolic rate. As he moves about the room, I have the sense that this is an exceptionally large, strong, handsome, healthy human animal, the kind that wins ribbons at county fetes.

  Along with this good health goes unusual good nature, a ready interest in and affection for the rest of the company. “I like having Robert in a show,” Jonathan tells me, “not just because he’s a fine actor, but because he’s so good for the general morale.” Even when he isn’t on stage himself, he watches the rehearsal closely, and is generous with praise and suggestions afterwards. As he talks to the others, he stands close to them, often with his arm round their shoulders; he hugs or kisses them as they arrive or leave. (“It’s like being kissed by a cross between sandpaper
and a sea anemone,” Jonathan remarks.)

  If Robert’s own morale is good, it may be because of his sense of his own good luck. He began acting as a child in the back streets of Bristol, where his father was a laborer: putting on plays with his friends and charging the neighbors a halfpenny admission. When he told his mother that he wanted to be an actor, she was horrified. Actors, to her mind, were no better than gypsies and tramps. “‘Why don’t you go on the tugboats like my uncle?’ she said to me. ‘That’s a good, steady, honest job.’ But I didn’t listen to her.” Robert laughs—as if still, after years of success, he is surprised by his good fortune, like a man who wakes up every morning to discover that he has won on the pools.

  At intervals during the production Jonathan worries about Robert: about whether his high spirits arc growing too high to be safe or healthy. He also worries because Robert is what is called “a slow study.” It takes him a relatively long time to learn his lines, and still longer to get fully into a part. At first he is puzzled by the role of Claudius, and keeps asking questions. “Why do I say that?… How do I feel about Polonius?” Jonathan’s psychological explanations make him frown, but his face lights up when Jonathan says “You want a businessrnan voice here, very fluent, comfortable, full of knowing authority. You’re telling him. ‘Well, just between us—as a matter of fact I have four of my chaps on the planning board.’” “I love Jonathan,” Robert told me later. “I’d go through flood and fire for him.”