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The Tempest Roundhouse experiment
notwithstanding, far from neglecting the text of a play, Brook's involvement in
a work which interests him is total. For this Shakespeare comedy, his actors
must never be allowed to forget that they are playing in the context of
continual stage happenings, a world 'swift as a shadow, short as any
dream'.
'After a long series of dark, violent, black
plays I had a very strong wish to go as deeply as possible into a work of pure
celebration. A Midsummer Night's Dream is, amongst other things, a celebration
of the arts of the theatre. On one level the actors have to display a physical
virtuosity - an expression of joy. Hence our production at Stratford involves
acrobatics, circus skills, trapeze acts. Equally, certain parts of the play
cannot be played without using a Stanislavskian sense of natural character
development. There's the play we all know - and also a hidden play, a hidden
Dream. That's the one the actors set out to discover for
themselves.
'The Dream is a play about magic, spirits,
fairies. Today we don't believe in any one of those things and yet, perhaps, we
do. The fairy imagery which the Victorian and even post-Victorian tradition has
given us in relation to the Dream has to be rejected - it has died on
us. But one can't take an anti-magical, a down-to-earth view of the
Dream. When I directed Titus Andronicus at this theatre sixteen years
ago I was convinced that the play wasn't just a series of gory events but was a
hidden play - the drama behind Titus was a ritualistic expression
of a primitive cycle of bloodshed which, if touched, would reveal a source of
immense, atomic power. In the same way, the interest in working on the
Dream is to take a play which is apparently composed of very artificial,
unreal elements and to discover that it is a true, a real play. But the
language of the Dream must be expressed through a very different stage
imagery from the one that served its purpose in the past.
'We have dropped all pretence of making magic
by bluff, through stage tricks. The first step must be moving from darkness to
daylight. We have to start in the open - in fact we begin in a white set and
white light (the only darkness in the entire production occurs during the
public encounters between Theseus and Hippolyta). We present all the elements
with which we are going to work in the open. This is related to one of the key
lines in the play when the question arises about whether the man who is going
to play the lion should be a real lion or only pretend to be real. Out of this
academic and very Brechtian discussion comes the formulation that the actor
should say to the audience, 'I am a man as other men are'. That is the
necessary beginning for a play about the spirit world - the actors must present
themselves as men who are like all other men. It's from the hidden inner life
of the performer that the magic, the unfolding possibilities of the play, must
emerge. The core of the Dream is the Pyramus and Thisbe play which
doesn't come at the end of a highly organised work just for comic relief. The
actor's art is truly celebrated in this episode - it becomes a mysterious
interplay of invisible elements, the joy, the magic of the Dream. The
play can become an exploration, through a complex series of themes, of what
only the theatre can do as an art form.'
Brook has several of his actors doubling, even
trebling their roles in the play. Most notably Alan Howard and Sara Kestelman
play both Theseus-Hippolyta and the fairy king and queen, Oberon-Titania. Was
this for thematic or economic reasons?
'There were two motives. Firstly I wanted to do
the play with a small group. There is a quite different quality of involvement
with such a group than with a large cast where the actors come on, do a little
bit and then disappear for the rest of the evening. When I directed the RSC
experimental group in a version of Genet's The Screens we used a small
group in which one actor played two, even three, roles. In this way you can
take an actor much further - if he reappears in a different part during a
performance. Close to this was the fact that in the Dream there are no
set characters - the more you study the comedy it becomes a comment on what
makes a dream; each scene is like a dream of a dream, the interrelation between
theme and character is more mysterious than at first sight. Theseus and
Hippolyta are trying to discover what constitutes the true union of a couple,
what can bring about the conjunction whereby their marriage can become true and
complete. Then a play unfolds like a dream before their wedding in which an
almost identical couple appear - Oberon and Titania. Yet this other couple are
in an opposition so great that, as Titania announces in language of great
strength, it brings about a complete schism in the natural order. She claims
that her dispute with Oberon is the cause of the whole world going awry. Thus
on the one hand we have a man and woman in total dispute and, on the other, a
man and woman coming together through a concord found out of a discord. The
couples are so closely related that we felt that Oberon and Titania could
easily be sitting inside the minds of Theseus and Hippolyta. Whether from this
you say that they are actually the same characters becomes
unimportant.'
I then asked Brook if he shared Jan Kott's view
of the Dream - that far from being a 'celebration' the play contained a
darker, more sinister exploration of love than is normally suggested. 'Most
definitely. Kott wrote very interestingly about the play - though he fell into
the trap of turning one aspect of the play into the whole. The Dream is
not a piece for the kids - it's a very powerful sexual play.
'There is something more amazing than in the
whole of Strindberg at the centre of the Dream. It's the idea, which has
been so easily passed over for centuries, of a man taking the wife whom he
loves totally and having her fucked by the crudest sex machine he can find. We
had a long discussion about this at one point in rehearsals - we listed all the
alternative animal-mates with which Titania might have been presented by
Oberon. One realises that every other animal could have left Titania with a
certain sexual nostlagia - it's a sort of romantic dream for a woman to be
screwed by a lion or even a bear. The ass, famous in legends for the size of
its prick, is the only animal that couldn't carry the least sense of romantic
attachment. Oberon's deliberate cool intention is to degrade Titania as a
woman. Titania tries to invest her love under all the forms of spiritual
romance at her disposal - Oberon destroys her illusions totally. From
Strindberg to D.H. Lawrence one doesn't find a stronger situation than that.
It's not only an opposition between this ethereal woman and a gross sensuality
that's coupled between Titania and Bottom - but the much darker and curious
fact that it's the woman's husband who brings this about - and in the name of
love! Yet there's no cynicism in Oberon's action - he isn't a sadist. The play
is about something very mysterious, and only to be understood by the complexity
of human love.'
If it is part of Peter Brook's intention to
lead his actors through 'most of the schools of theatre that we know' during
their performance of the Dream, it is also part of a preparation for a larger
experimental programme which Brook is finally to begin in Paris this October.
He has been trying to find a subsidy for his room in the French Ministry of
Works, his 'empty space', for the past two years. As there are to be no public
performances money has been difficult to find - but, of all places, a subsidy
has finally come from Persia.
I asked Brook why so many directors were
currently questioning the value of the work they were doing, uncertain about
the state and future of our theatres themselves. Typically, he answered with
confidence and faith. Unique among our directors, Brook has been questioning
the meaning of conventional theatre for years. Equally strangely he has been
searching for and inventing new forms on his own, as though bent on rescuing
the art of the theatre for a future, unknown generation:
'All questions of this sort exist or disappear
in relation to the level of intensity that is reached. A low level Shakespeare
production sets up boringly archaic barriers for an audience - all that is true
life is only dimly perceived. All that is lukewarm, passive, conventional in an
audience is brought into play. At that level one has to question the meaning of
a performance - to ask what social function it performs.
'Above that, there's another level where in
place of a lack of an intention, an intention appears. With that intention,
which may be political or social, comes a force, a clarity of purpose and a
meaning. It might involve doing a play about a dock strike in the right place
at the right time.
'Then you approach the next level, which
includes very few writers (of which Shakespeare is the strongest and most
unique example), when you suddenly discover an essential area where meanings
between actors and an audience can be shared again, on a very different level
to, say, a treatment, of a dock strike - but a meaning which is quite tangible.
This form of intensity makes all questions of the play's relation to the past
unimportant. It's happening now - whether the characters appear to be archaic
or contemporary in their costumes and behaviour. All theatre begins when it is
alive - all other theatre is dead. The theatre event that increases our power
to perceive is something rare but, to my mind, to be cultivated at all costs.'
Peter Brook talks to Peter Ansorge.
Plays and Players, October
1970. |
