Saturday 31 July 2010

Odds and Ends

Just a short entry this time. First of all, I'd like to apologise for my mounting sloth over the last few weeks with regards to updating the old blodgings. A host of events have conspired to impair me from being the least bit productive recently. But rest assured, my sprawling militia of devoted readers! I have plans for the continued prosperity of this production diary, as well as the realistic (if bleak) resolve to wind down its perspicacity ahead of the onslaught of the coming term. There's a heck of a lot of reading yet to be done in aid of this blasted degree, and my long-running catholic guilt complex where work is concerned demands the job be done - as thoroughly as my limited faculties and even more limited attention span will allow.

I've at last finished Dombey and Son, and it was a most pleasing experience. It's one of the more overlooked and underrated Dickens works, probably due to the lack of a canonical film or television adaptation to keep its memory alive. Based on potted descriptions of the narrative and a somewhat misleading cover illustration, I was certain I was in for an extremely dull, Conrad-style wallow through innumerable insufferable descriptions of rigging, delineated in terms so arcane and pedantic that they demand constant recourse to footnotes (and, as Noel Coward once said, 'Having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love'). However, it was an enormous success when first serialised (which can't be said for certain more famous Dickens works, such as the low-selling, riot-inducing enigma of Martin Chuzzlewit), and was at least a work that Dickens believed worthy enough to outlive him. For my money, it's more than deserving of the time it takes to wade through its thousand-odd pages - and every bit the equal of Bleak House, which it seems to foreshadow in structure, character and the pervasive sense of some overwhelmingly deep and terrible mystery at the centre of it all. And despite my perennial failure to 'get' the appeal of Conrad, some of Dombey's most memorable passages are those focused on clutter and complication; the depressing, junk-laden wasteland of industrialised modern life. This sort of thing held a dark fascination for me long before I encountered Dickens, but there's no denying that it's pasted all over the master's work. The horrors of the Jellyby residence in Bleak House might be the finest example - a place where you're as likely to trip on a bawling infant as some vestment of bric-a-brac - but Dombey's sprawling shop of disused nautical heirlooms is nearly as effective. Oliver Twist, which I'm halfway through by now, is one of those select few novels that everyone feels they've read without reading it, but what every adaptation to date has skimped on are the remarkable, horrifying scenes of the London poor wading knee-deep through the poisonous mud spewing from their own decaying houses. Quite unexpected and almost Lovecraftian... One of Dickens's greatest strengths as a novelist is the uncanny impression of buried complexity he conveys. But this doesn't emanate from a razor-sharp affinity with the geographical particulars of the metropolis, as it so often does in Peter Ackroyd - more often it falls to precisely these jagged, disorded images suggestive of an ultimate chaos. There is a strange appeal in all this. Perhaps the sense that Dickens is just as lost as we are? The hopelessness of man's condition redeemed by the dark fascination it exerts? Whatever it is, it's something I intend to pry into further.

The main reason I've been so unproductive lately has been my acting commitment with The York Dungeon. I've been installed in there for three weeks now, and it's lived up to every inspiriting adjective in my slightly camp lexicon. Energising - life-affirming - transcendent - revelatory! As usual, I babble, but the unadulterated pleasure in returning to my macabre and hammy Yorkshire roots has been very special. There is indeed a feeling of having returned to my roots - something at once segregated from the suffocating hierarchies of the Cambridge drama scene and yet so much more important than it. For one thing, it's a professional acting job, and, by that token, a hell of a lot more representative of the real world of acting than the puffed-up imaginative bubble of university play-making. It's back-breaking physical labour, ferociously taxing at times, and if you're not enjoying it, you quickly find that you're utterly lost. There's not an ounce of pretension about it either, another vital life lesson that should be made more accessible in the merry old land of Cambridge. Great friendliness too; that all-too-rare sense of camaraderie. It really is like a family. It is this confused bundle of emotion that has convinced me to fire up and maintain an exhaustive record of the attraction as it currently stands. This will absorb ten entries in total. I'll still be talking Dickens and whatever other nonsense should occur to me, but my first duty will be to describe every Dungeon show in immersive detail. It's a more special and surprising place than it first appears, and deserves to be memorialised properly. So expect something on Clifford's Tower next time - and the truly horrible massacre of the Jews it stands for.

On a lighter note, it now seems that the details for Pickwick & Nickleby have materialised on the ADC Theatre website! And what's more, there's now an opportunity to book tickets! I didn't much fancy messaging people straight away about it - unlike the panto, it's hardly the sort of show that the world at large are going to be clamouring and scrabbling to get tickets for - but the option is now there if you're feeling particularly (unhealthily?) eager. It's another of those slightly heart-in-the-mouth steps, where the knowledge that the show is really happening and that people might drop by to stare at you starts to operate with genuinely skin-crawling terror... However, in the lively spirit of self-promotion, I'll toss you a handful of links. This one opens up the cheery little window shown below, through which you can directly order tickets. Also worth checking out are the ADC Diary and Drama listing, which offer up a selection of tantalising productions you might well be interested in.


An email from John Haidar has also reminded me that The Alchemist is still very much up and running. A programme-style blurb and image are required for the production's website, and eventually the programme itself. A simple enough task perhaps, but it did get me thinking. What, for example, is the best way of formatting a programme blurb? I know that for the programme of Alchemist 1.0 (a beautiful relic if you can find one... which you won't), I regurgitated a simple list of plays with their attendant societies. This seems to be the standard for jobbing actors in the outside world, and even with a host of credits as undistinguished as mine, it does ooze out a heartening gloss of professionalism. But at the amateur level, is it really worth going through the motions? For one thing, it's a bit, well, boring. I like to see what parts an actor has played, even if it does tend towards spear-carriers and individually numbered plebeians rather than Hamlets and Lears. Although that I suppose is one of the benefits of the more prosaic and functional programme model - the aura of heightened prestige it cultivates might be precisely what's needed to give a deflated ego a much-needed boost. However, honesty is more interesting to me, so I've drafted up a new programme that lists roles in conjunction with plays. This is pleasing, if only because it gives me the opportunity to include the attention-seeking lunacy of 'Mad Old Pirate' and 'Schuppanzigh' among my credits. One thing that annoys me in this approach is the steady stream of monosyllables it winds up provoking, with each role aggressively pinned to its dramatic context by an endlessly repeated 'in'. A in B, B in C, C in D, D in E... Taken the wrong way, it all sounds curiously perverted, and, more to the point, comes across as a bit clumsy and fumbling when more than four or five plays are listed. A counter-approach is to list the production before the role - so, E as D, D as C, C as B and B as A... But this of course only reverses the problem. I do like the way that it suggests the production to be bigger than the individual actor, but it's still not perfect.

After lengthy deliberation, I settled on good-naturedly plagiarising Simon Haines's blurb formatting (at least as it appears in Alchemist 1.0), which vetoes the prepositional downpour for a Conrad-esque frenzy of punctuation: so commas, semicolons and brackets galore. (I dislike Conrad's fiction only; his punctuation is to be admired.) I like this approach a great deal - I suppose it could be seen as mechanical, but to me it gets the job done smoothly and elegantly without all the messy frills. The only downside to this procedure is that my blurb feels rather paltry in comparison. So many of Simon's characters are monumental beings, encompassing an indecent quantity of Shakespearean gentility, alongside other wonderful stuff, like Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, while I'm stuck with things like Dull and Coupler, which not even classical pedants are likely to remember. Maybe a spate of canned descriptions is more in line for my sort of character. A Friends-style attack perhaps - 'the one who fouled up some perfectly good iambic pentameter by adding extra syllables onto words' and 'the one with the extreme back pain who groped everything in sight' could work nicely. But this whimsy returns us to the undying problem of length. I've also decided to scrap societies unless they really do have a strong reputation. Now this has solved the problem of length - and much to my liking.

John's email also necessitated taking a new programme picture. I've never had a professional mug-shot taken, so I've no fixed standard to go by with these things. I don't own a camera, so I was forced to resort to my webcam. I have no knowledge of photography, so a desk lamp and abundant darkness were forced to stand in for any creditable talent for things of this nature. It was diverting enough though, and I think I finally managed to settle on one that I was happy with. However, this process exhumed its own set of problems. What precisely is the gurning quotient when it comes to a programme image? It's staggeringly hard to catch anyone off-guard with a photograph. And such an aim may not in fact be desirable here. My brother often ripostes me for my 'acting face', which, with perilously good observation, is actually no more than me tipping my head forward a bit and allowing my upper brow to cut out the better part of my vision. I wonder whether this is more than an idiosyncrasy or mannerism though. There seems to be a vogue for precisely this shade of gurning nowadays - innumerable dark and exotic creatures, far more dangerous and sexy than I could ever hope to be, glaring at the camera lens with rapacious, wolfish intent. Oh, yes. The 'intense' look. It's never wise to argue with fashion, but in this case, it does seem a bit of a sad put-on. These beautiful marble creatures with their sculpted, unyielding facial pavilions only perpetuate the nasty ideology that underpins the current vogue for naturalism in theatre: yes, we'll go through the motions of behaving like real people, but don't you ever forget that it's just to showcase how transcendently wonderful we are - without recourse to character, we'll bloody well hold you spellbound. I'd much rather see someone smiling or behaving outrageously or simply looking a little flawed. In this context, the photo's unlikely to be getting me any jobs, so the mission is to distil some personal quality that I believe deserving of wider broadcast. I went for mildly inquisitive/bemused/befuddled in the end, but I'll probably go off it again as soon as the wind changes.

Shooting the programme image also gave me the opportunity to review my gurning for July 2010 (a vital skill at the Dungeon once your voice packs in). The full gallery of nasties can be found on Facebook, but the image beneath is my current 'favourite'. It was some time before I realised why I liked it so much. But then it hit me. It resembles nothing so much as the infamous Hatbox Ghost (Walt Disney Imagineering, circa August 1969). It seems I am becoming the ghouls that inspired me. All the more reason to write on the Dungeon.

Releasin' the Press Release

I must first flag up that Chrystal had nothing at all to do with the creation of the press release. Now, I don't mean this in the nasty, fawning sense of 'GAH, YA LAZY PUBLICIST, YOU - WHADDAYA GET YA ACTOR TO DO DA PRESS RELEASE FOR! EH EH EH?' Truth be told, I never asked her, and I only hope that I haven't offended her in the process. Chrystal is one of the more phenomenally busy women in Great Britain round about now. Not only has she been simultaneously in rehearsal for two Edinburgh shows - the rebooted Silent Cannonfire (the extra 'n' persists - gladsome!) and The Cure - but she's been dashing off to London and heaven knows where else in aid of the publicity for Rent. (I've been privileged enough to view what Chrystal deemed a rough pencil sketch via webcam... Suffice it to say that if that's what 'rough' means, I can incinerate my GCSE Art portfolio in good conscience, choking away my misery on the compound fumes of pastel and PVA.) Now I understand she's been clapped in iron handcuffs by the company of The Cure, who have opportunely press-ganged her into grinding out multitudinous meals of a foody-based nature to satiate their gaping maws - morning, noon and night! - all while snap-snapper-snaps her photographalist-type renderings and spouts the verse of Auden like a deranged sprinkler system. So, rather than drag her from her RIGHTFUL PLACE in THE KITCHEN (feminists will slay me for that one), I thought I'd have a crack at putting the thing together myself.

Directory James forwarded me the email from the ADC that got me kick-started. Turns out that it's standard practice to put together a large selection of advertising materials to unleash on the press. This came as a nice surprise, simultaneously betraying just how little I know about theatre production. So, I set to slamming together all that I remembered from the glory days of Microsoft Word (circa 1997). You know the sort of thing. Autoshapes - oh, yes, lots an' lotsa Autoshapes. Free Rotation. Text boxes. Different fonts. (Why is it that young children impulsively put their titles in bold and italics and then underline 'em? COULD THERE BE ANY GREATER FORM OF EMPHASIS?) Word Art! Well. Not Word Art. Or Clip Art for that matter. It's but a poor minstrel's version of Chrystal's sumptuous poster design (which I'll post up here when the final one is ready), but it does at least pay homage to the colour scheme... and make use of her photographs! And, self-deprecation aside, I'm reasonably happy with the fruits of my mediocre design skills:


As always, clicking enlarges, but should the text still prove difficult to decipher, I've pasted it beneath for your continued ocular comfort:

'I am in the theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession. I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy...'

In this unique entertainment, one desperate actor will play twenty characters to bring the world of England's greatest comic writer to vivid, anarchic life. The public readings of Charles Dickens have passed into legend. The most famous man of his day, Dickens's genius as an author was matched only by his astounding gifts as an actor, and audiences flocked by the thousand to see him perform in person. The public readings are often considered the greatest of all lost dramatic experiences. Drawn from the exuberant texts of
The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, PICKWICK & NICKLEBY will reclaim all the humour, horror and boundless heart of the defining theatrical event of the Victorian age.

Candlelit, swathed in smoke and smelling of plum pudding, the atmospheric background of a provincial theatre sets the stage for the character actor's audition from hell. Featuring a sprawling ensemble of Dickensian grotesques – the flamboyant Vincent Crummles, the blustering Serjeant Buzfuz, the demented Wackford Squeers – PICKWICK & NICKLEBY promises an evening like no other. There will be wigs. There will be costume changes. There will be facial gesticulations, outlandish walks and utterly unhinged voices. Perhaps even the ghost of Dickens himself will put in an appearance... With all the bombast, bravado and barnstorming one could possibly desire, PICKWICK & NICKLEBY is unmissable.


In many ways, the text is no more than an expansion of the blurb I devised for the ADC brochure. I was fairly pleased with that blurb and starved of imaginative new selling points, so it seemed appropriate to renovate rather than demolish and build from scratch. It's curious how labouring on something as highly-worked as a little bit of advertising gives you an entirely new insight into your own writing style. Just by scrutinising the above, I've come to realise how dependent on the gimmicky nonsense of alliteration, tricolons and list-making my writing has become. Not to mention a growing repertoire of pretty much interchangeable adjectives denoting generic splashes of elation... The text is sensationalistic to put it mildly (it's advertising - you'd be a fool to expect anything less), but I'm pleased to say that it doesn't contain any out-and-out lies. Treat it as a little preview of some of the concoctions brewing in our theatrical laboratory.

To recant for my overexcited misdemeanour in fashioning my own press release (I am miserably chastised...), I'll leave you with an image of Chrystal's own taking. It was snapped while I was all unawares, trying to flatten my unholy mop by aid of partially wettened comb in my Cripp's Court silverfish conservation centre (ie: 'bathroom'), shortly before shooting the image for the ADC brochure. It's been up on Facebook for some time now, but I recently stumbled on it sequestered away in Chrystal's sanctum sanctorum; her wonderful online gallery located just here. Attached was the following caption, which provided warmth and fuzziness all round:

James Swanton, fellow Selwyn English student and character actor, prepares for a publicity photo shoot for his show 'Pickwick and Nickleby' due to be performed at the ADC Larkum Studio.

It's one of the very few non-gurning photos of myself that I don't mind. But perhaps this is a bit of a gurn. The sole comment said: 'oo! The concentration!'. Hmm. Concentration my foot. It's a gurn, no bones about it. As I said, it was caught without my knowledge and/or consent... and I know that that's precisely the sort of photo Chrystal likes best! Goodbye for now!

Friday 30 July 2010

Five Favourite Actors

My very strong OCD tendencies mean that I've long been inclined to cultivate and maintain all manner of charts and tables in an effort to make sense of the fundamentally illogical. On that basis then, I present to you a list of my ten favourite actors - embroidered with unstructured personal diatribes, but a list nonetheless! - grouped with what I believe to constitute their three canonical performances. Still to come is a sequel in which I talk up the virtues of the remaining five candidates. Well... try to have a little fun with it. Matters will run altogether more smoothly if you're on affable terms with classic horror films. If not though, now is the perfect opportunity to become so! In any case, I hope that my ruminations will provide you with the requisite get-up-and-go to persuade you to seek out the work of some of these wonderful performers. And, hey - it might even reveal why my acting style is as screwed up as it is!

1. TOD SLAUGHTER (1885 - 1956)

Squire William Corder, Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935)
Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)
The False Percival Glyde, Crimes at the Dark House (1940)

My passion for Slaughter was written in the stars. For years I'd read about the eminent lunacy of the man's performances, yet remained unable to track down any of his maddeningly obscure films. For those unfamiliar with the Slaughter legend, I present a simple image. Picture a man in black. A beaver-fur top hat and a full-length opera cape are his humble accessories. Now - picture this figure moved to maniacal animation, and engaged in the serious business of shackling a screaming heroine to the railroad tracks. Infernal, grating cackling seems to ignite the air. And the moustache. Pointed - lascivious - impeccably waxed; the horns of the devil transposed to a cringing upper lip... Tod Slaughter is, quite simply, the living embodiment of melodrama. In Crimes at the Dark House, a very loose adaptation of The Woman in White and by far the most cinematic of Slaughter's films, Slaughter does indeed get down to the serious business of twirling his moustache in fiendish glee. Seminal stuff. Incidentally, this tradition seems to have emerged with the loathsome Rigaud in Little Dorrit by (who else?) Charles Dickens - which makes it a perfect addition to the work of his close friend and contemporary Wilkie Collins! Slaughter's performances are an all-too-rare rare artefact of a way of acting long since dead. It's an oft-repeated truism that Slaughter's pictures demonstrate what Victorian filmmaking might have looked like. All of the man's performances contain at least one elusive, unforgettable moment that brands itself upon the memory by its absolute strangeness. In Maria Marten, it's the truly alarming way that his voice crackles and warps when gazing down on the exhumed body of his peasant lover, exclaiming of her murder that 'But you forced me to! You forced me to!' As Sweeney Todd, Slaughter's signature role, it's the bizarre curl of the fingers as he hisses 'Come here, Tobias...!' - which miraculously conjures up every awful, skin-crawling stereotype of paedophilia imaginable. Crimes at the Dark House came late enough in Slaughter's screen career that it's a (comparatively) restrained performance, but he still manages to deliver the immortal line 'I'll feed your entrails to the pigs!' with what seems a disarming level of conviction. Slaughter's performances are deranged, maniacal, barnstorming ham in the very best sense of the word. As an actor, he is strangely impressive for it - and always hugely entertaining. The history books have played no small part in perpetuating the lie that Slaughter was a deluded hack. There is no way that anyone possessed of even half a brain-cell could vault so consistently over-the-top across such a long career without being aware of what a grand joke the whole business was. Demand-and-supply is the name of the game: the public appetite for melodrama has always been unquenchable - even if it is stifled and filtered through the medium of the television soap nowadays. The Face at the Window (a gaslit Parisian werewolf mystery that must be seen to be believed) even opens with a prologue that ensures its audience is as thoroughly prepared for chuckles as chills. For me at least, Tod Slaughter is also a man whose career is an inspiring example. Slaughter is an enduring relic of the real provincial actor. Quite incapable of cut-glass, upper-class polish, Slaughter is rough and raw in his performance style, but with quite enough enthusiasm to carry him through. It's a real shame that Slaughter's stage production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was never filmed... but in complete honesty, it's hard to imagine him playing anyone but Hyde! Slaughter's films have now passed into the public domain, which means that most of them are available to watch online. If ever have the time to spare, you can count on a very interesting hour...

2. GEORGE ZUCCO (1886 - 1960)

Professor Moriarty, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)
Dr. Lloyd Clayton / Dr. Elwyn Clayton, Dead Men Walk (1943)
Richard Stanley, Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)

The appeal of George Zucco is instant - and magnetic. Zucco had - or at least gave the impression of having - one of the most extraoridnary natural instruments of any actor in history. His composure was ever that of the polite English gentleman; his voice the purr of a satanically inspired cat; his eyeballs ever glowing like possessed moons, crystal balls primed to summon up the spirits of the dead... It seems that Zucco could do most anything and endow it with an absolute fascination and integrity. Predictably, the man was a theatrical heavyweight. For a number of years, he was an acting teacher at RADA... I'm sure that the employment qualifications were far less standardised than they are today, and that can mean only one thing - the man was an outstanding actor at the very top of his game. A glance at the man's stage experience only confirms the suspicion. Zucco created the role of Osbourne in the original production of Journey's End - which co-starred a very young Laurence Olivier as Stanhope. Yet by all accounts, it was Zucco who got the most thunderous applause of the evening. Olivier's replacement in the part, the woefully underrated Colin Clive, transformed the production into a prescient celebration of cinemacabre. Clive and director James Whale were fated to collaborate on the movie masterpieces Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, with Zucco turning up for an inglorious strangulation in the later series potboiler House of Frankenstein. Zucco also gained worldwide acclaim for playing Disraeli in the now-forgotten smash-hit Victoria Regina (which featured Vincent Price, a great Zucco-booster, as Prince Albert). Yet in Hollywood, a very different career beckoned. George Zucco fast became the master of the bit part, the cameo, the walk-on role. It's heartening to reflect on just how often he stopped the show. The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a fine example of this phenomenon, with Zucco turning up in monk-like raiments for roughly five seconds to dispense proclamations of doom - but then, so is The Black Swan, in which Zucco's magisterial progress down a monolothic stone staircase upstages the attention-seeking antics of the outrageous Laird Cregar and the annoyingly pretty Tyrone Power. As with all such bit-players, Zucco appeared in a great deal of junk. Dead Men Walk was among the first films in in which I was consciously aware of Zucco as an actor. It's also one of the worst films I've seen - perhaps a surprise to those who think I dismiss only films veneered in colour, widescreen and pseudo-philosophical pretension (Inception springs to mind). Zucco just about carries it, playing the insane dual role of a benevolent doctor and his vampiric brother, but he's fighting a losing battle. For a very long time actually, Zucco's Scared to Death truly was the worst film that I'd seen... His turns in Basil Rathbone's Holmes series are much more fun, delivering not only a definitive Moriarty in the finest installment of the series, but another fun turn as the proprietor of an antique shop equipped with such choice items as a knife-projecting casket deployed to decapitate world-famous detectives. And always with such dignity... He surely knew what trash he was making - quite a fall-off from the glory days of Journey's End - but the absolute class with which he did it has endeared him to a new generation of audiences. It is the dreck that endures, sadly enough, and it is fortunate for Zucco's continued reputation that he always gave his all. And, lest it be forgotten, his favourite author was Dickens. Now that's got to count for something!

3. BORIS KARLOFF (1887 - 1969)

Ardath Bey, The Mummy (1932)
The Monster, Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Byron Orlock, Targets (1968)

Karloff is a man so famous that he requires little introduction. A man so famous that he was once referred to on cinema marquees by surname alone, a feat rivalled only by the glitzy MGM starpower of Garbo. Karloff's great bequest to acting was the niche he carved for the macabre as a separate dramatic area. Horror, mystery and melodrama - all dragged shrieking from the Grand Guignol and flung smack-bang into the heart of modern pop culture. True, Bela Lugosi got the ball rolling with Dracula a little earlier in 1931, but Karloff was the man who carried the torch so triumphantly and set it forever blazing in the cinematic firmament. In addition to his unparalleled box office fire, Karloff managed to court the terror business a strange amount of respectability, and even, at times, a sort of gentility - something that certainly hasn't endured into this modern age of hockey masks, torture porn and human centipedes. But in spite of Karloff's fame and success (a celebrity you felt you knew if ever there was one), a certain feeling of mystery clings to Karloff the man. Frankenstein made Karloff a star in 1931. By that time he was aged forty-four - strikingly old in a period where the careers of leading ladies were summarily terminated in their late twenties. Great chunks of his life are lost to history. He was born to the upper classes - yet was almost certainly illegitimate. He deserted a promising education for decades of unsuccessful work in the repertory system. He was married at least six times, although recent evidence might well bump this figure up to seven. He was dedicated to trade unions and sought reform at a time when blacklisting was a very grave peril. He was identified as (raise eyebrows here) 'Hollywood's greatest swordsman' by a gaggle of prostitutes arrested on a Californian roadside. He owned a pet pig named Violet. This depth is what survives in Karloff's work on film. Whatever far-flung psychological resonances that murky past contained, it haunts his performances with an unsettling aura of the 'other' - perhaps unsurprisingly, 'the Uncanny' were the words that most often followed his monolithic surname on theatre marquees. Nowhere is this displayed to greater advantage than in The Mummy, in which Karloff sets the screen ablaze with his grandiose, crumbling presence. His co-star, Zita Johann, later recalled the indescribable sadness of Karloff, his eyes appearing to her as 'shattered mirrors'. It's a worn old cliche, but it seems fitting to say that experience is what made Karloff so great as an actor. And such a wealth of sterling performances... Frankenstein is naturally seminal, so much so that it is easy to overlook - to the extent that I found myself not liking it that much the first time round. That's a shameful thing for a horror nut like myself to admit to, so I'll elucidate a little. Lugosi's Dracula, Frankenstein's natural bookend, is a film so universally derided that I wound up enjoying its paltry, dusty merits to the direct exclusion of its (many) defects. Frankenstein, being the masterpiece that it is, draws little attention to its brilliance. It sets out its virtues in a disarmingly primitive, unfussy manner, perhaps only half-aware that what it contains is riding on the crest of a new wave, and is, in fact, history-making. 'Why such fuss over Karloff?' I wondered. 'He's not really doing anything. Everyone knows that that's the way the Monster's meant to act...' Little heed did I pay to the fact that Karloff was creating the time-tested stereotypes as he went along. It's a truly majestic performance, and only improved on by the addition of speech and screentime in the follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein. My pre-teen rashness has come full circle now, and today Karloff reigns as my favourite actor of all time. The Body Snatcher is often acclaimed as Karloff's greatest performance, and it is certainly grand, more than deserving of an Oscar nomination, though not perfect. It's perhaps a little too full of what his daughter, Sara Karloff, refers to as her father's sing-song acting voice... Better to my mind is Targets, which came when Karloff had had time to really relax into his persona - and play it out to its natural conclusion, playing the part of an aging horror star who shuns his domesticated terrors for those of the real world. The Walking Dead is a much earlier work (a gangster-horror hybrid from the Warner lot), and too often forgotten. It's heart-wrenching in the extreme, and well worth a viewing.

4. CLAUDE RAINS (1889 - 1967)

Jack Griffin, The Invisible Man (1933)
Erique Claudin, Phantom of the Opera (1943)
Job Skeffington, Mr. Skeffington (1944)

It's only now that it strikes me, but my passion for Rains is very similar to my passion for Zucco, so far as both men project the impression of a stunning, fascinating, but entirely natural presence. It is the voice beyond all that triumphs in Rains, an especially useful gift for an actor who made his name by playing The Invisible One. Nor is it a surprise to discover that Rains, as an acting teacher at RADA (another Zucco crossover), became the hero and mentor of John Gielgud, whose own delivery (as beautiful as it could be) was so fantastically constrained and mannered that Rains can be tentatively labelled its naturalistic original. An earnest effort to describe Rains's vocal capabilities quickly descends into hyperbole, so I won't tire you with an excess of cheery remarks about the great quantity of phone-related books I'd pay good money to hear him read unabridged. Like so much in theatre, nothing is quite what it seems. Rains worked on his voice with an arduous, driven commitment that is both admirable and rather scary. Claude's daughter, Jessica Rains, has vivid recollections of her father slipping into his natural, cockney accent when she was a child - and being unable to understand a single word of it! It's curious that the actors I admire most deeply are not those who plays naturalistically, nor even those who paste character on top of themselves as though with a trowel to cultivate audience interest. It is those who seem to have been fantastically fascinating humans - whether by accident or rigidly enforced, intensely focused design - that have been emblazoned on my memory. For all this though, it was that most brazenly theatrical of turns in The Invisible Man that first endeared Rains to me. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the greatest films ever made, and this is due in no small part to Rains's barnstorming performance. The script, penned by playwright R. C. Sherriff (and yes, I am aware that this blog is operating on an increasingly narrow continuum of Journey's End, long-dead RADA teachers and old horror films...), jousts with the likes of All About Eve for the pithiest of filmic writing, and Rains delivers his every line to fiendish, staccato perfection. A particular favourite of mine is his hilariously relaxed speech on world domination, delivered in a languid, swooning posture from a gently swaying rocking chair: 'We'll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction... We might even wreck a train or two. Just these hands - around a signalman's throat - that's all!' This is an atypical turn for Rains. His conventional screen presence was a great deal more polite and reserved. He always reminds me of Ian Holm in his manner and appearance. Holm has advanced an outstanding observation on acting that might just as easily apply to the effortless naturalism of Claude Rains: "I've always been a minimalist. It was Bogart who once said, 'If you think the right thoughts, the camera will pick it up". The most important thing in the face is the eyes, and if you can make the eyes talk, you're halfway there.' The same can be said for Rains, whose own quasi-mystical approach to acting was nonetheless deeply rooted in the undervalued virtue of simplicity: 'I learn the lines and pray to God'. Perhaps this gets to the root of my bugbear with naturalism. It is absolutely to be encouraged - provided you are a fascinating human being to start with. Rains possessed this quality, and he was capable of the most touching and pure things onscreen. I've harped on about the strengths of his Phantom of the Opera in an earlier entry, so I won't repeat myself here, but Mr. Skeffington has made it into my selection for much the same reason. Watch the scene where he goes to lunch with his infant daughter without crying. I dare ya! The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca and Hitchcock's Notorious are his mainstream hits, and all are worth seeking out.

5. HENRY DANIELL (1894 - 1963)

Henry Brocklehurst, Jane Eyre (1943)
Doctor MacFarlane, The Body Snatcher (1945)
Doctor Moriarty, The Woman in Green (1945)

If I was to sum up Henry Daniell in a soundbite, it might well be 'the Alan Rickman of the early twentieth century'. Daniell was quite brilliant in every respect, and another proof of how little variety there is in my choice of favourite actors. His Moriarty is a particularly interesting creation, and a neat way into Daniell's wider approach to acting. This is a performance containing none of the jovial, good-natured hamminess of his series rivals, George Zucco and Lionel Atwill. Daniell suggests a vain, pampered reptile - strangely stiffened, as though stricken with arthiritis, with unreadable dead eyes. Impeccable coldness is the general impression. I certainly didn't care for Daniell the first time round, and while I still place his Moriarty a peg below Zucco's merry turn (and perhaps Eric Porter's perfectly monstrous characterisation in the Jeremy Brett TV series), it's a performance I've come to appreciate on its own silky, seductive merits. It's not a warm or appealing turn at all, but then, that's exactly the point - the very idea that Moriarty should court charisma is an invention of Hollywood, and Daniell gives a performance that serves the script and story indelibly well. The Woman in Green is among the darkest of Holmes mysteries, with Moriarty dispatching his henchmen to murder and sever the fingers of London citizens. Daniell never seeks to upstage his material, and for that alone he deserves respect - the mark of the really good character actor. It's also worth nothing that Daniell was Basil Rathbone's personal favourite of all of his series adversaries, a choice that has often surprised its followers, but might make a bit more sense with this rationale. Now The Body Snatcher is a completely different kettle of fish. In my estimation, it's one of the most underrated performances in film history. And yes, without a doubt, Oscar worthy. Typecasting was at once the most life-affirming yet soul-crushing force in old Hollywood. Whilst it assured many actors a comfortable living and a restricted immortality as archetypal forces indicative of so many different things (Western gunslinger; tough old bird; crazed gold-digger; English butler; gypsy peasant, ad nauseum), it tended to fundamentally limit screentime as performers slipped ever further into 'character' status. Without The Body Snatcher to his credit, Daniell may have gone the way of someone like Frederic Worlock, delivering a series of memorably insane performances in thirty-second chunks, but never showing much in the way of range or (dare I say it?) humanity. The Body Snatcher must be seen to be believed. It's a stunner, and so many details in Daniell's Doctor MacFarlane have returned to me through the years that it unnerves me a little. At the moment, it's his outburst in the surgery when faced with a disabled girl, congealing ambition and frustration and that unremitting, pitch-black coldness when he lets rip with (at lightning speed) 'confound it, the child's a cripple, of course she wants to walk!' This same cruelty was greatly in evidence in his Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. The white, searing hatred that Charlotte Bronte instils in the reader for the fanatical schoolmaster is one of the greatest things that any writer can hope to achieve, and Daniell absolutely nails it in his performance, at his best when telling young Jane of the delightful tortures of hell. But what Daniell creates in MacFarlane is his lasting legacy. It may be Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs that walked off with the horror genre's only Best Actor Oscars, but, for my money, Daniell delivers a greater performance than either of them, one of the four or five most riveting bits of acting I've seen in my life. Why so many people harp on about Karloff in The Body Snatcher, I'll never know. Daniell owns its every frame. And, as a sidebar, might I add just how deeply unsettling it was to be interviewed by the English Faculty's own Doctor MacFarlane when I applied to this mad institution we call Cambridge, the ghost of Henry Daniell still ringing in my head as I tried desperately to concoct more lies about W. B. Yeats... At some point, I explained my concerns to the undergraduate so efficiently marshalling me from place to place. She didn't get the reference. Such moments in life are to be treasured.

Wednesday 28 July 2010

Guest Speaker #5: Kieran Corcoran

A very special guest this time. I present to you Mr Kieran Corcoran: fellow Selwyn-based English second-year; eternally formidable supervision partner; devotee of all things Grecian; part-time dabbler in the dramatic arts. After the disappointment of the cancellation of The Country Wife, Kieran was sporting enough to quench my theatrical drought with some eleventh hour stunt-casting in Love's Labour's Lost. This production he directed - co-directed, I should say, with fellow Anglo-centric Selwynite Clare Rivers Mohan, who will surely gut me if I neglect to mention her - to justifiable success in May Week. And a jolly good review, might I add, an all too rare commodity in Cambridge that attests to the production's quality. A man committed to the classics, Kieran's remaining ventures in Cambridge drama have been steeped in the seventeenth century. He was Priam and Nestor in Peterhouse's Troilus and Cressida, alternately projecting senility through the psychic medium of a comedy beard and jousting pretentious witticisms with Will Seaward's Agamemnon (an enviable experience, that). The following term saw a double bill, with a sell-out Macbeth in the Corpus Playroom and a site-specific Volpone. If Kieran doesn't mature into an eminent Cambridge professor, afloat in an ever-encircling wreath of tobacco smoke and discoursing voluminously on Socrates and Plato - then, gentlemen, I will eat my hat. And I don't even wear a hat. That's how confident I am.


I'd just like to start by pointing out that in comparison to the theatrical heavyweights who are wont to contribute to this blog, I am but an inconsequential minnow – the smallest of fries, the greenest of horns and the lamest of n00bs. You see, my theatrical career (generous nomenclature) only really gained any shape at all when I came up to Cambridge. No youth theatre for this one, no tricks of the trade, no techniques in the bag – only a stack of enthusiasm. Needless to say, I was roundly outclassed by the likes of James (this continues to be the case), but thanks to the fondness of Shakespeare &co. for bit-parts, and the odd situation in Cambridge whereby there is quite often a shortage of willing actors, I got my foot in the door. As a result, having acted in three shows and directed one, I'm now a lot more confident, at least a bit more competent, and, best of all, I've met some stellar people along the way.

Now, the most pontificated-upon (pontifacted? pontifexed?) aspect of drama in the blog so far has been the art of acting well, and what exactly it consists of. If anyone on the vasty plains of earth can give a definitive answer, it's sure not me, but have my tuppence nonetheless. Although drama is my chief “extra-curricular” activity, there's no way I can leave my day-job (English student) out of it – at the end of the day, they're all texts, ripe for being picked apart. Not to say that all of the extra-textual bits aren't important – lights, action, props, costume and all that are obviously vital, but I don't really know that much about them, whereas scripts are something I can understand (“But do you really understand them?!?” chimes a chorus of glowering academics in my mind – but whether I do or not, I can do more with them than a lighting rig). Time spent in recourse to the text, going over it more, really getting inside every ebb and flow of meaning is never time wasted. One of the big pitfalls I've noticed in student theatre that actors (and I imagine directors too) just don't know the text well enough – and I'm far from guiltless on this count myself. When line-learning is approached with the attitude of cramming for your GCSEs rather than preparing to give the best possible rendition of a work of art, you're bound to loose points – but this is an understandable lapse given the extreme time-pressure which has characterised every show I've been involved with thus far: there are myriad other things which demand attention, and so long as the lines are roughly done, the show can go on – job done. But not really job done – especially with older texts like Shakespeare and Jonson, you need to put the legwork in, you have to really go to the audience since, due to the strangeness of the language and culture from which the script hails, audiences will struggle to come to you. You have time to prepare, they don't, so it's only decent of you to make the effort, old bean.

The results can be phenomenal – the chap playing Parolles when I went to see All's Well That Ends Well at the National Theatre last year was astoundingly good at making the (sometimes extremely obscure) lines make real sense – and comic sense too. Lines I'd puzzled over for several minutes when reading at home before giving up on provoked instinctive and immediate laughter when passing his lips – and it wasn't just because they were accompanied by crude gestures and a sly wink. It was because he knew exactly what they meant, and exactly how to make his audience know that too. This can be rare, even on a professional level. Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost is a prime example – although Branagh himself is on the ball as ever, his supporting members (especially the Princess of France) seemed a bit bewildered at times, and the effect was a tad underwhelming to say the least.

But back to the point – knowing the text, and always digging deeper. So far as my own acting goes, some of the most pleasant experiences I've had of being directed are those in which a speech which I “understood” ended up having a lot more to it than I'd thought. This is an especially prominent feature of good auditions too; auditions in which I walk out knowing the text a lot better than when I walked in are genuinely enjoyable; and it makes any rejection e-mails which follow a lot easier to bare! So much can hinge on a single word, and a passage you thought had one basic thrust, or one emotional mode to it, almost always has nuances, undercurrents and complexities which take time and effort to realise, and putting in the time and effort can be immensely rewarding.

On the flipside, one of my biggest regrets about directing Love's Labour's Lost was that, due to time pressures and logistical difficulties, I didn't have nearly as much time as I'd have liked to get this kind of involved textual work done with the cast members while we were rehearsing. As it turned out, everyone made a very good job of what they'd been given, even without much directorial help, but I'd be a fool to say that more practice wouldn't have improved things. James especially was magic on this front - I barely directed him at all and he made a lot more of his role than I'd even thought possible, which was a godsend given the general last-minute chaos into which he graciously allowed himself to be dragged after a much-needed cast member had to drop out.

However, for all the Yin of my rabbiting on about how vital the text is, there is an inevitable Yang to restore the Zen-like balance of successful theatre. Luckily for Love's Labour's Lost, this came in the form of my co-director, Clare, who was able to remind me (quite forcefully at times) about how I needed to pay attention to other bits of the performance too – troublesome details like who's on-stage when and whether they're standing in-front of each other. So mine is an attitude which can be taken too far, but also one which shouldn't be forgotten.

Well, I've more or less exhausted my reserves of dramatic discourse now, and I hope I've not reminded you too much of a year-9 English teacher moaning about how you have to read the text. All that remains is for me to voice my excitement about the Dickens show – I'm looking forward to it immensely, and this blog alone attests to the huge amount of work James is putting in. I'll see you all in the audience.

Friday 16 July 2010

Fork in the Road

It's high time I dredged up a post on the 'Nickleby' section of the Dickens show, if only to bookend my pontifications on 'Pickwick' from a few weeks ago. Sadly, this means that scariest of things: an on-topic blog entry. However, all is not lost! I've managed to slide into a monstrous twofold tangent on Drugger and the Dungeon somewhere towards the middle. So not only is the structure of this entry forked, ensnaring the reader with the deceptive guile of a serpent's tongue, but my theatrical future - for a little while at least. Competing commitments and the overwhelming tiredness that they'll surely induce look set to distract me from Dickens, if only for a short period. But with a little optimistic luck, I should return to the project refreshed and prepared to go on fighting.

My general tide of opinion in the last entry was that the 'Nickleby' segment was a much stronger piece of theatre than the 'Pickwick' one. That opinion has redoubled and multiplied during the rehearsal process, and it's not an altogether comfortable thought. Deep down, I do believe that an actor can very rarely be much better than their material. Yet the unwieldy and capricious code by which textual value is judged has come to befuddle and dismay me with such frequency in recent years that it's a reality that I've rarely been happy to embrace ('now more than ever!' he claimeth, with the melancholy Byronic posturings of a true English student). Maybe it's some deep-set inferiority complex generated by the sheer number of mediocre scripts I've played in my time - or, more terrifying yet, the recognition that the select few scripts of real brilliance and quality that I've become mixed up with have ended in a distinct feeling of failure... Not making the full use of it and all that. My dramatic instincts, fuelled by the retributive demons of perfectionism and OCD, have always run towards completeness. But perhaps this is neither productive or useful in the long run, as much as it tries to be. Satisfaction is simply not an option for an actor if they're attempting to do their best. Standards shift, expectations rise, the bar is raised and an entire performance can be frittered away in desperately trying to grab at it, hoist yourself into some suspended bubble of comfort. Yet that begs the even more drastic, potentially deadly question of just where we should derive satisfaction from in our acting? It's not in everyone to get a kick out of the puritanical quest for absolute purity in performance... It's not in me, I know that much.

For me then, my joy in a production tends to come from the elements that orbit my performance like so many twinkling meteors, glittering moons and super-secret Russian satellites, rather than the arid, featureless rock of my own contribution. The actors. A certain intonation that strikes or amuses you. Analysing the audience as though dousing for water. A scrap of costume, a fraction of set. Interesting lighting configurations! In essence, the component parts of the very infrastructure that defends against personal failure in the first place. Return to the Forbidden Planet was a perfect example of this phenomenon. Too many elements of absolute joy came together in this production - together, they read like the Christmas list of a hyperactive infant. Oh, but really, it was fantastic. I got to die from being eaten by a giant green monster! An' I got to rise from the dead at the end! An' I got to wear a Dracula cape an' all - like Lugosi, like Carradine, like Lee! An' I got to do the 'Monster Mash' - one of the all-time great novelty songs! An' first done as an imitation of Boris Karloff. Boris Karloff! Karloff the Uncanny! William Henry Pratt! What sainted good luck! Not least of these distractions was the chance to sing. To suddenly discover the power of an orchestra looming behind you is fantastically liberating, especially when you have an inkling, as a non-singer, that it's never going to happen again. Now, attend to the video closely: this is a happy actor. And, as a direct result, it's one of the very few examples of my own work that I can watch with (relative) ease:



The very reasons that I believe the 'Nickleby' section to be a superior piece of theatre are what make it so bloody difficult to perform. Geographically, the pieces are polar opposites. 'Bardell and Pickwick' is extremely limited, boasting only two locations (and even that marginal variety is the result of my clumsily interpolating material from a later chapter to try and provide a more satisfying coda). By contrast, 'Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire School' not only drags its eponymous protagonist into the classroom, but a staggering variety of other locations in the process, including a London inn, a storm-blasted road and a country barn. The opportunities that it provides for physicality and technical distinctiveness are tremendously exciting, but also cause for a few headaches - if all goes as planned, we'll be testing the prosaic functionality of the Larkum to its very limits as a performance space.

There are also a lot of mercilessly quick duologues, usually counterpointing Nicholas with Squeers or Smike - a quite remarkable contrast, pitting the personification of bland, faceless heroism against two of the most hopelessly twisted creatures in the Dickens repertoire. It's probably far more trouble than it's worth, but the effectiveness of switching between two separate lighting cues has come under consideration. Peter Jackson looked to cross-cutting to give the impression of the schizophrenic divide between Smeagol and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. It's perhaps fortunate that we can't drag this cinematic technique onstage with us, because I always found it a little confusing. For one thing, it constitutes a direct breach of Hitchcock's shot-reverse-shot philosophy of character representation by applying it to one subject - or perhaps a too eager literalisation of the same. Just how did the character shift from one position to another so quickly anyway? I know, I know... The psychological aspect of filmmaking is utterly lost on me. The Broadway production of Jekyll and Hyde used lighting cues to great effect in the climactic song 'Confrontation' - but for us to pull it off with this degree of fluidity would be an astounding feat. As with all of these big-budget musicals, the technical elements are surely rehearsed to death, and the very nature of musical theatre means that the lighting technician will at least have an unchanging symphonic background as a reliable guide to follow. In the Dickens show, a consistency of characterisation would have to be secured, and when dealing with bare prose, such a thing can never be assured. There's a professionally filmed version of the stage musical floating about, starring David Hasselhoff (of all people!) in the lead(s). I have my doubts about his singing, and he pulls a succession of pretty dubious facial expressions, so I've decided to avoid using that one. The actor here, Rob Evan, has the benefit of a gloriously floppy hairpiece as well. Squeers's missing eye will be our considerably cheaper counterpart:



I have a feeling that the jokes of 'Nickleby' are a good deal funnier than those of 'Pickwick' as well - although it's vital to regulate this intimation so that it doesn't tip over into the sort of self-satisfied comic hubris that would make the performance utterly unamusing. It probably has a lot to do with the dynamism of tone that 'Nickleby' offers. 'Pickwick' is insane from start to finish and happy to be so; the Monty Python to the Fawlty Towers of 'Nickleby'. Yes, John Cleese is hysterically good in both, but Python's anarchy is so brutal and relentless that it promotes a feeling of disconnection after a while, eventually tending towards a low-key despair with humanity (Family Guy is a later, more violent example of this nihilistic disorder). Fawlty Towers managed to retain some level of humanity amidst the madness with its careful balance of rounded characters and pantomime hysteria. Yet despite the relative strength of 'Nickleby', this hasn't made it more fun to perform than 'Pickwick'. The courtroom setting of 'Pickwick' offers a rare chance for some utterly self-conscious theatre: every character acts a part, and every character acts that part supremely badly, their performances thrown over their baser motives like a semi-transparent veil. I'm always delighted to be able to root myself to the spot and feel justified in doing so (disposing of leg movement - one less thing to worry about), and a courtroom setting provides an exemplary opportunity for this. Disappearing into an extended monologue is also riotous good fun, and the dependable Serjeant Buzfuz engages in this pursuit for well over ten minutes. 'Nickleby' is just that bit more complex. Potential rewards then. But only if it's done right. There's no hiding this time. No seeking salvation in the orbit of exterior elements. The whites of the audience's eyes. Do or die. And such and such.

I've complained about the difficulties of the Smike and Nickleby relationship an inordinate amount of times by now. As a result, I see no harm whatsoever in bothering you with my plight again - for now I feel I'm at the beginnings of a solution. Smike seems to have been roundly brutalised by Phiz, the quintessential Dickens artist and the man responsible for the busy, excitable engravings that accompany Nicholas Nickleby. It's difficult to dispute the huge debt that Dickens's fiction owes to the visual arts. The original premise of The Pickwick Papers was that Dickens's prose would be subordinate to a comic series of renderings depicting the sporting pursuits of English country gentlemen. Oh, yes. People were easily amused back then. Nor can it be denied that Dickens cared very deeply about the images that accompanied his work - so much so that he had Phiz redraw the illustrations of the original Pickwick artist, who had gone and committed suicide only a few installments into the serial's run. So much for preserving the memory of the dead. Smike emerges very much the way one would expect from a superficially sympathetic outlook on the mentally handicapped in early nineteenth century society. By and large, the images of Smike are horrendous - a succession of ugly, gaping, mongoloid facial disasters, more characteristic of the emblematic racism of Uncle Tom's Cabin than a soul in torment. Towards the end, this is sacrificed for the weepy sentiment of a cherubic deathbed scene, but the overriding impression is brutish. One particular image has caught my imagination though. Smike's first appearance is on the bare peripheries of a much larger engraving, depicting one of the most celebrated atrocities of Dotheboys Hall: plying the boys with brimstone and treacle to deprive them their appetites and hence the cost of an extra meal. Even in the bottom left corner, Smike can hardly be argued as the image's focus, what with the impetuous figure of Young Wackford straddling his person as a pilfered boot is thrust onto his foot. But the figure's appearance is truly haunting, in some respects even elegant - a sort of fallen angel, freighted with shadow and decay. It's probably a creative compromise. By this point in the narrative, Smike's character was not established beyond a nondescript phantom of doom, and the figure cultivates an appropriate aura of mystery. Seek it out if you can. Perhaps you'll see what I saw.

A viewing of The Whales of August provided a second and altogether more unexpected source of inspiration. For the uninitiated, it's a sentimental drama about two old spinsters living on the coast in Maine. The Simpsons memorably parodied it as The Buttercups of Autumn, in which an old woman's fevered ramblings that 'I fear I have become a buttercup of winter' are met with a jaunty 'hush up, Nana - that's fool's talk!' I was expecting something of this order when I got round to watching it, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. It's pretty hard to synopsise such a plotless film. The narrative pace is at one with the characters - slow, directionless, even a little arthritic. But narrative really isn't the point here. The Whales of August is a very engaging character study, probing the strange beauty and dignity that can be reclaimed from the plateau of hopelessness that threatens to consume the end of human life. In adapting the stage play to cinema, Lindsay Anderson seems to have delighted in assembling a cast of faded Hollywood legends, most of whom seemed to take their last glorious bow in the film. All else that followed was dross. Lillian Gish, the former silent film actress, so feisty and memorable in The Night of the Hunter, by this time aged ninety-four; Vincent Price, miraculously promoted back from the cinematic mausoleum to the exotic seducer familiar from Laura and Dragonwyck; and Bette Davis, one of the screen's most endlessly fascinating actresses, who so memorably did it the hard way. In the entry preceding this one, my self-important little treatise on ham, I briefly mentioned the macabre fascination to be gleaned from her drastically altered performances after the series of strokes she suffered in her final years. As the only really good film she made in her last twenty years on earth, The Whales of August is the best example of this sad phenomenon. Her character has a spiritual essence in common with Smike - or at least, what I would like Smike to be. One of the film's critical notices (happily reproduced by Wikipedia) expresses the fascination of Davis's performance far better than I can:

Bette crawls across the screen like a testy old hornet on a windowpane, snarling, staggering, twitching – a symphony of misfired synapses.

Here's a clip. In all fairness, Davis takes some getting used to. There's an impulsive inclination to recoil and grit your teeth a bit. Sense prevails with slow immersion. It's a film of supreme emotional manipulation ('OH, LORDY NO!' you scream, 'THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT THE SWANS AGAIN!), but I enjoyed it anyway:



I've got round to producing a 'master' version of the show in audio form by now, the plan being that I insistently listen to it until the lines fit as securely and naturally as a second skin. Smike is a little too wooden for my tastes right now. That may be down to the limitations of recording as much as anything though - standing rigidly to attention in deference to the hearing powers of a little black box is far removed from the action of Smike's scenes, which generally involve lying across some meagre stick of furniture, prostrate and paralytic, all the while doubled up with numerous chokes and sobs. Horribly mechanical to reflect on it this way, but it's a badly needed premeditation. Spontaneity in pencilling in the 'big' emotions simply looks like under-rehearsal, while an animated physicality can be the most fantastic release. I think I've given up on making Nicholas less wooden. It's got to the point where I'm struggling to subtract any further from my natural voice. And who knows, maybe the invasion of a little boredom will serve as a welcome relief from the merciless saturation of grotesques bearing in on the show elsewhere... That's not a very conscientious standpoint though, so rest assured that I'm working on it.

In aid of my dissertation, I've started to labour on the only thing I've found to work when writing about any sort of literature: micro-analyses, which demand a text's every irritating quirk is noted down in pedantic, peevish detail. It's particularly illuminating when the task involves some sort of textual comparison, but all that flicking between the texts of the public readings and Dickens's dauntingly thick novels take a heck of a long time. It's been beneficial in preparing the show though. The Philip Collins footnotes are excellent from start to finish, and have been particularly useful where unearthing some extra bits of business for the show are concerned. Collins records a few of Dickens's more hilarious improvisations from his enactment of the teaching methods of Wackford Squeers - identifying 'window' as a preposition and railing against Greek and Hebrew for no discernible reason, amongst other esoteric delights - and I've spliced them into the show accordingly. One especially pleasing revelation came from W. M. Wright's performance notes on 'Nickleby', noting that Mrs Squeers received 'Mrs. Cluppins's voice'. Beautiful. At the peak of his creative powers, Dickens still stooped to being an inspired self-plagiarist. It may not seem like a lot, but such snippets are an enormous comfort when preparing a show in which virtuosity of character and distinctiveness for the sake of it sometimes seem like the whole point - and quite incorrectly, of course. I also happened upon this quotation from Kate Field, which I thought was an absolute gem:

When Serjeant Buzfuz ... aims a forefinger at the defendant's head, it becomes a query, whether grotesque action is not as difficult to excel in as absolute grace. Dickens has learned its secret.

I'll continue labouring on the micro-analyses of the Dickens readings, but I'm quite aware that any performance work on Pickwick & Nickleby is going to slow down for a while now. Nevertheless, I'm fairly excited by how the first leg of the rehearsal process has gone, and feel reasonably confident that adequate foundations have been laid for future development. As I write this, I've completed my re-training, shadowing and first run of public performances for The York Dungeon. (The time setting listed above this post can be safely ignored; there's something confuddling and awry in what pops up there in relation to publishing times.) This also explains why my productivity of blodging has ground to an almost steady halt, so apologies for that too - not that I imagine the surely ravening hoardes who follow this journal feels a pang of regret when they discover there to be no new entries. The Dungeon has been entirely wonderful - everything I could have hoped for after almost a year away, and stimulating and rewarding in so many little ways. But then, that's a whole blog entry by itself. Or a mini-series of blog entries. A mini-series with a spin-off, a guest spot on Parkinson and a muster of TV spots promoting Butterfingers... A man has dreams, you know. Blame 'a man' for this latest inundation of words, and proceed to the next tangent, quick trot, quick trot...

I've also been thinking lightly in the direction of The Alchemist. I didn't crack Abel Drugger last time (there was barely time to crack an egg, rehearsals were so frantic), but I hope to get a little closer on this occasion. So, in the course of my daily ferreting through various different bookshelves, I've managed to unearth a few halfway interesting fragments. Unbelievably stimulating for anyone who's about to play Abel Drugger, mildly irritating for all else, but here goes anyway. If nothing else, I shall profit by it!

The first interesting thing was in All the World's a Stage by Ronald Harwood. It's been malingering on my bookshelf for quite a few years now, seldom read but often skimmed, and has been imbued in my memory bank mainly for its wonderful closing gallery of actors that Harwood considers particularly notable (with some unusual selections, such as Donald Wolfit and Michael Hordern). On the latest lightning-speed flick-through however, I halfway jumped out of my skin at the sight of a full-page image of Abel Drugger. To be precise, it was a severely cropped detail of David Garrick in the role, taken from this famous portrait (Garrick is the figure on the far right):


I found some additional material on Garrick in a fairly good popular biography of him at the library. The newly redesigned York Central Library, to be precise (or should that be Explore Centre...?), which at least does a good coffee, even if the bookshelves are blasphemously balanced on wheels. The author is Jean Bendetti, and the title is David Garrick and the Birth of the Modern Theatre. Modernity scares me, so I was almost warned off by that pithy title, but the gorgeous cover art of Garrick's Richard III persuaded me to wait until the interval at least. Here's a paragraph that caught my interest, at least partly for distilling so much that frustrated me in grappling with the character:

Abel Drugger is one of six victims of fraud. It is a minor role, with few lines. On the surface there is little in the dialogue to give a clue as to how the role should be played. Everything is left to the actor, and Garrick seized the opportunity to establish one of his most famous roles out of almost nothing. In so doing, he demonstrated a new way of playing comedy, one freed from mugging and grimacing and the obvious playing for laughs that had distinguished Theophilus Cibber.

Given that Garrick opened one fateful theatre season by alternating the roles of Hamlet and Drugger, it's difficult not to speculate on his decision being driven by a spice of ego. High tragedy and high farce side by side; the most brooding and contemplative of characters pitted against the most idiotic and pliable. 'But look at my RANGE!' you hear his phantom fairly cry across the ages. But if Garrick was really out to impress, why did he not go for Face or Subtle? Both offer up a sort of character actor's paradise, boasting multiple identities skewed to seduce the audience with their combined charisma. Perhaps it's something to do with the fundamental difference between leading roles and supporting roles. Both invariably seem to produce performances of a similar nature - and that would very neatly explain why actors have such phenomenal trouble in breaking out of their casting brackets. And the dirty upstaging tricks that Garrick employed in The Alchemist have since become legend. After all, this is the same man who rewrote Shakespeare by granting Richard III the immortal crowd-pleaser 'So much for Buckingham!'. Garrick's motives for the character were not pure, but the greatness of his achievement was such that nobody particularly cares.

Bendetti also includes the humourous anecdote of a Lichfield grocer, who, after an exposure to Garrick's Drugger, was so overcome by the performance's realism that he took the actor for the character, and scorned any further acquaintance with such a seedy, dirt-encrusted peasant. More than a little reminiscent of the modern accounts of viewers confusing soap actors with the characters they play onscreen. Although with most soaps, its arguable as to whether the actor is playing the character or the character the actor, so often do they seem to exactly coincide... It's the hilarious gimmick by which Hollyoaks has gained my undying respect. There's a also a sidebar on the showboating, scene-stealing tactics that Garrick employed to keep the limelight focused squarely on himself. For example, he would take it upon himself to break a urinal and look very dejected to play on the sensitivities of his audiences. This spurious business was apparently stolen for a later production, which featured the Drugger of Colley Cibber: the original Lord Foppington in The Relapse. (Perhaps Andy Brock should take over as Drugger...) Most outrageous of all, Garrick's Drugger would enter an animal passion upon discovering he had been conned at the end, tearing his shirt off as though primed for a boxing match. This is strikingly reminiscent of the way that Macklin and Irving and Olivier would augment Shylock's final exit in The Merchant of Venice with an offstage scream to ease extra sympathy (not to mention terror) from an audience. As much as that though, these actor choices can be taken as filling what many consider a gaping void in the Shakespeare text. Possibly Garrick's bravado amounted to a tacit acknowledgement of something vitally lacking in the Drugger character as written by Jonson. Garrick added a coda that made sense to him based on the rest of his minutely observed performance. It may offer the key to his entire interpretation, but whether it serves the text is a point for debate.

It also seems that Alec Guinness had quite a fondness for the humble tobacconist. Cue book number three: Piers Paul Reid's authorised biography, simply titled Alec Guinness (makes sense). It was one of his greatest early stage successes, hailed as 'a glorious piece of playing' by James Agate of The Sunday Times in the 1946 season at the Old Vic. Michael Billington (who gets my vote as our best living theatre critic) also imparts a little Guinness wisdom that sheds some light on his Drugger:

He was not a lion among actors - he was a formidable and fantastically inventive actor and one that was a pleasure to watch. he had an ability to enact spirituality and goodness and kindness which are normally hard to potray ... And he could play characters with an obsession. Abel Drugger in The Alchemist - a dreamer - is said to have been one of the great cameo appearances of all time...

Simon Callow's latest, My Life in Pieces, builds on this conception of Drugger with a further insight into Guinness:

There was a kind of part that he longed to play but which seemed not to exist: fantastical creations, like the Drugger with which he had such a success at the Vic in the Thirties [Callow is a decade out], but also poetic, moonstruck. 'One had a sort of gift, a rather small gift, for clownish parts, for innocents. There haven't been any possibilities in that line lately.' It was hard to envisage the seriously stout gentleman opposite me, brimful of alcohol and with a fag hanging from his lips, undertaking any such light-footed role, but then he would make a moment's mental contact with the image in his mind, and there it would be, on his face, in his body, in the room with us - his harlequin, an exquisite creation as light as a dragonfly's wing...

The talk that Simon Russell Beale gave at the ADC was a further prod in this direction - and of course came at a time, way back in April, when there were still a few bleak hopes that the original production would go ahead - maybe on the Saturday, maybe in May Week. A ridiculously nice chap actually. He made the effort to stop me while I was rushing in and out of the theatre to pick up various bits and pieces I'd forgotten (common occurrence, this), and initiated a (very) brief exchange. I'd worn my best purple tie as a spiritual commemoration of the lost tobacconist, so I even felt bold enough to answer back. More importantly, the conversation gives me a chance to revive my beloved 'SI & I' format in memorialising the conversation. I really must badger people called Simon more often.

SI: Who did you say you were playing again?

I: Drugger.

SI: Oh! He's - MAR-VELL-OUS!

Not me, you understand. The character, Drugger. This needs flagging up as a potential source of confusion - certainly, when Beale asked us which characters we were playing in a more formal manner a little earlier, the mere presence of Will Seaward in connection with Mammon provoked the most gushing, voluptuous and spectacularly luvvie-ish 'Oh! He's - MAR-VELL-OUS!' in all creation. This was naturally before Seaward fled the ADC in disgrace, having broken the composure of England's greatest stage actor by having the unforgivable nerve to ask a question devoid of pretension. I kid you not!

SI: Yes, we had an Indian chap when we did it.

I: Ah. Were you going for the hippie angle?

By this time I'd read far too many reviews of productions that transformed Drugger into some far-out, pot-smoking delinquent. Now, I'm willing to do many ridiculous things onstage, and usually on the most risible and ill-founded of pretences, but the thought of being forced into a tie-dyed tent and a cloud of appropriately Drugger-ish smoke was sufficiently frightening that I spent the rehearsal week in a mild state of nausea.

SI: No - corner shop, actually.

I don't think there's all that much to be gleaned from the exchange. It was a quite interesting thirty seconds, but rather than penetrate to the heart and soul of Abel Drugger, it focused on the attendent gimmicks that directors fall upon to make the character more digestible. This is the nightmare of Drugger. There's so very little in the text. Maybe there's nothing more to the character than exists on the surface. Even in Being an Actor, in which Callow reports on the nightmares of an earlier National Theatre staging of The Alchemist, he mentions the actor who plays Drugger only by virtue of his wonderful wide eyes. Again, that daunting situation of an actor reduced to their component parts - just a bunch of blinks and twitches rather than entering as a being with a heart and soul to bare.

Perhaps this then is the key. Simplicity. Simplicity seemed to be the keynote of Simon Russell Beale's really quite illuminating talk on the show. He mentioned that the heart should bleed a little for the plight of such blithe, innocent dreamers as Mammon and Dapper and Drugger. Should Drugger really tug on the heartstrings? Is that facility really accomodated by the script? And is that even compatible with the version that we were engaged in creating? It struck me as an astonishingly youthful production. Very fast, very funny, quite a lot of naughty and sexy business, and anarchic from start to finish. But which misfit in this adolescent playground is the lowly Abel Drugger...? In other words, the mystery continues!

Friday 9 July 2010

In Defence of Ham

A word of caution: the following isn't to be taken at all seriously. It's intended to provoke, niggle, pique and otherwise irritate. Like most of the detritus slowly filling up this blog, it's penned in an ultraviolet, mock-heroic hand, so provided you forget my contentiousness and allow the generalised rhetorical sweep to guide you to the end, you're sure to have a splendid time. Terror is my constant companion in rehearsals for the Dickens show. And in waking up... And in not doing the work... And in doing the work, popping to the supermarket for a bottle of milk, most everything really... It's in these times of isolation that I turn to my deepest insecurities, hash out manifestos and get-out clauses by way of protection, and hope to have some relic to comfort me in the dark, dark hours after the sodding reviews come out... Nevertheless, it's also a (very jokey) distillation of a some of what has been building in my head for the last few years with regards to the much maligned lot of the character actor. Perhaps someday I'll produce the serious version and finally settle my score with Stanislavsky. For the time being though:

IN DEFENCE OF HAM; Or
WHY DO I ACT SO HARD?; Or
HELP, VINCENT!* THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE MY PLAY AWAY!


For the majority of people, ham, hamminess and all things pertaining to the hammy point to one very simple thing: overacting. And quite right too. But where so many people fall down is in railing against overacting as an abomination; a heinous sin and a wicked indulgence; a rank insult for all concerned. What total nonsense. There is bad overacting, certainly, and there is bad overacting in spades. But good overacting is something else entirely: a tempestuous, volatile and endlessly intriguing pursuit that remains deeply misunderstood.

The early cinema offers a portal to the past, and it positively abounds with what might be politely termed 'ham'. The smouldering eyes and bewitching arched hands of Bela Lugosi - the screen's eternal Dracula, regardless of the role's requirements. The Boston drawl and acerbic demeanour of Bette Davis, tightened into self-caricature by the strokes she suffered late in life. The futile, ham-fisted blusterings of Nigel Bruce, consistent in picture after picture, back again and again by popular demand. Nor are the accepted greats exempt: look to Olivier and his quivering, rapacious chameleon of a nose; Gielgud with the breathy cultivation of a slightly ruffled peacock; even Brando, the undisputed patron saint of naturalistic realism, and his omnipresent mouth full of toilet paper. Can these be considered the celebrated vestiges of actor 'personality' that the school of underplaying seeks to venerate? Not a chance. These traits pop up with such startling regularity and boldness in the work of each of these performers that they cannot be labelled anything but deliberate stylistic choices. Attention-seeking ones, at that. In acting as in life, what we at first accept as small quirks of personality become absorbed into a style with the passing years. Yet it is often precisely this style that makes an actor so very interesting. 'Mannerism' is another of those cruel terms so flippantly applied to actors whose quirks refuse to be suppressed. But why should they be? Clearly they have risen to a point beyond the actor's real-life persona - they have become tokens to a heightened world, a plane on which human beings can aspire to and eventually become the most expressive possible versions of themselves, at once bound in and released by the creative prison of their natural instrument. It seems that the common maxim of the drama school is to nip such inconsistencies in the bud and expunge their candidates of irregularity at the first opportunity. Theatre is no better for this crude variation on Nazi selection. Acting can and so often should be a wild, fantastical menagerie of spectacle and wonder - and so it was until the last half-century or so. Embarrassment in the face of the theatrical is a very recent innovation, and an altogether baffling one. Overacting is a legitimate performance art in its own right, and deserves to be recognised as such.

It is for this reason that I demand a reassessment of the term 'ham'. What sort of images does this simple word evoke? Abundance; plenty; generosity; flavour; robustness; in short, a feast. Hang on a minute... And these are the things that we're meant to apologise for in our acting? Predictably, there isn't a widely agreed term with which to deride those who persistently indulge in the far greater treachery of doing too little onstage. Very predictably, for the business of doing too little obsesses over such slipperiness and obfuscation. We must instead be content with a tangled, sinewy net of vaguely applicable terms... Nuance. Naturalism. Underplaying. Subtlety above all, subtlety is too often the calling card of the lazy under-actor. And subtlety is not an appealing word. What does it conjure up? Deception; sneakiness; double-crossing; a concentrated effort to defy the rules; if we're going to get horrendously pretentious and allusive about this (here goes), the Subtle of The Alchemist, who spends his complete dramatic career pulling the wool over the eyes of the trusting and the innocent. The ham actor lays all his cards on the table, so to speak. There are no secrets. From the very first line, there is a tacit acknowledgement: none of this is real - this is wonderful entertainment in the great tradition of make-believe - trust me for only a moment and wonderful things will happen. And then, having given ourselves over to the improbable, we can progress to far greater rewards.

For profundity can spring from the strangest of places. Above all, profundity mustn't be laboured for. That is a crime of the modern age. Look to the most primal image of theatre, the child curled up in their grandmother's lap and the telling of fairy stories. Saccharine as hell? Quite so, quite so, but do please stick with me on this one. No false, distorting glass; no smoke and mirrors here - rather, a heightened sensitivity and appreciation that springs from innocence. Does the grandmother seek to hoodwink, to bamboozle, to deceive by successive twists of subtlety and deception? Not at all. The spell emanates from a much purer place. A little trust is all that is required. Ham acting is instinctively trusting. At the very outset, at a single stroke, it overleaps that hurdle which underplayed performances will waste the entire length of a play in fumbling and fetishising over: reality. With that simple agreement of wonder between and actor and audience, a great wave of energy is released. Then a play can truly go into orbit, perhaps even reduce its audience to that primitive child-like state. This is a far more effective way to locate the chink in an audience's armour and penetrate deep into the soul. It needn't do this, of course. Most of the time, it most certainly won't. But this is of little consequence, for at least it doesn't try - at least it doesn't provide us cause for real embarrassment with its incessant proddings for profundity. Subtle performances will naturally summon up the illusion of reality, but this is a reality of strict convenience, clipped and confined to the precise dimension's of the warring actor's ego. It is seldom if ever 'real'. That awful, strained, painfully embarrassing bray for audience rapture is the facetious battle-cry of the naturalistic theatre; the sole preserve and progeny of a supremely ungenerous acting style. By a miraculous inversion, there is nothing less self-conscious than ham, that allegedly most self-conscious of acting styles.

It is curious indeed to note which entertainments have kept the theatre alive. Pantomime. Melodrama. Circuses. And even within circuses, the primordial terrors of the freak show... Throughout the ages, these have been the guaranteed theatrical money-makers. People are always on the hunt for some manner of catharsis in theatre. Why must this be divorced from the allegedly artistic, heightened and exalted side of drama? Shakespeare demands subtlety? Very well, if you insist. But these plays were written for performance - and I really do struggle to imagine what simulacrum of subtlety could thrive in an inn-yard, the goodly players struggling for supremacy against the braying asses and the cackling hens, the drunken peasant thralls and the perennial cabbage flying through the air. Lest it be forgotten, it is the hammiest of the Shakespeare repertoire that has enjoyed the most successful performance history - Titus Andronicus and Richard III, that admirable pair of sixteenth century Sweeney Todds; Macbeth and its sensationalist honour roll of ghosts and wicked witches; even Pericles, a text derided for its geographical schizophrenia and surreal grasp of plot, has always been observed to work remarkably well onstage, a fantasy spectacle that bursts at the seams with wonder. It's a testament to Shakespeare's genius that he crafted plays of such intricate complexity, likely in the full knowledge that not an fraction of it would be comprehended in the hearing - no matter how preciously spoken. Was this something in the order of an act of compensation? Is it beyond the realms of possibility that Shakespeare purposefully saturated his plays with the quite impossible vastness of human experience, well knowing that this was essential practice when so much would be lost to the umpteen distractions of the reality of performance?

Of course, it's splendid that we now think we're equipped to do justice to Shakespeare. But are we any closer? Really? Or are we just working out ever more clever and casually vindictive ways to emend the raw experience of theatre with academic footnotes? You know the sort of drivel: 'Please to note here that Shylock is represented in the style of the King Herod of the medieval Mystery Plays' or 'In deference to Orson Welles, his Mercury Theatre, the spirit of Don Quixote and the most considered mise en scene of Chimes at Midnight, we here interpolate the faintest fragment of the Merry Wives within Henry IV'. The current fashion for productions with puke-inducingly 'relevant' stagings is also symptomatic of this crisis of imagination: 'Now watch as Shylock ordains a glorious Holocaust metaphor - so you see, Shakespeare is timelessly relevant, a Nostradamus figure who predicts the fall of nations' or perhaps 'Our Falstaff has type two diabetes: the good living caught up with him'. That's not to say that modern stagings can't work, when handled sensitively and with a little bit of restraint. But please don't pound our skulls in with it; such ostentatiousness is overacting of an altogether different and quite inexcusable sort. There's something innately childish about it, this dressing up for the critics... All of a sudden, it's no longer enough for Shakespeare to write human beings. Who wouldn't trade a century of RSC performances for the chance to witness just one of those murky rituals when a Shakespeare first slithered out of its slimy, primordial ooze and took its place in the Globe - in all its freakish, bawling, carnivalesque madness? 'Hail Shakespeare, glorious in your morning weeds!' and all that. In spite of its limitations, hamminess here assumes the role of a crusading champion - a last noble vanguard against the insufferable vices of pretension and preciousness.

Do too much. It's far, far better than doing too little. Generosity, compassion and giving, giving, giving to an audience - if only to balance out the guilty burden that you're onstage solely for your own despicable ends. Whenever did attempting to do a good job become a cause for shame? What a hatefully English perspective. For this is the great paradox at the centre of ham acting. More often than not, ham is an antidote to the horrible, hurtful accusations that acting is driven solely by ego. It most certainly is not the manifestation of that principle. That is the province of bad overacting - the ham gone off, banished to some theatrical wasteland and staggering hand-in-hand with 'corpsing' and 'drying' (those two other terms indicative of a fundamental deprivation or decay in performance art). The quest for good overacting - for valiant, true and remarkable ham - is something else again. The stakes are higher, that goes without saying, and the odds of looking an absolute fool or failing outright are significantly raised. But hell, get on with it - it's just a bloody play, for Gielgud's sake, not some shrapnel-spitting, smoke-spewing Vietnam warscape. Embarrassment must be tackled head-on and wrestled into submission. There's no shame in failure, no shame at all - provided your motives are pure. The only real shame is in willfully delivering an audience with less than they deserve. When the hounds come baying for my blood, I'll not palm them off with a sliver of subtlety, the faintest ghost of a properly meaty performance... That way lies death and chomping. I'm hellbent on delivering them robust and juicy ham. It could just mean salvation.

*Not entirely whether this refers to Vincent Crummles or Vincent Price. Both are united by their generosity of spirit, and, like that other famous Vincent, had no qualms about sharing their outsize personalities, their mordant wit and small portions of their ears when the occasion called for it. I intend on creating an amalgam of the two - one who spouts Dickensian epithets before gazing sombrely at a portrait of his deceased wife; who dips his patrons in boiling wax before treating them all to a bowl of smoking bishop.