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.