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!
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