I had a wonderful time getting together with friends, Howard and Royce, and their respective mothers last night, for a quick bite to eat (soup at Miss Saigon) and then to see "Phedre" the National Theatre's HD presentation showing at The Loft. For those of you who might not know, this is a Jean Racine version translated and adapted by Ted Hughes. Its a stage performance filmed in HD.
The company and the conversation of the night was glorious, a real treat.
The production itself, hmmm. There was a gentleman I didn't know sitting to my left. At the end he turned to me and said "You are a actor aren't you? Or involved in theatre somehow?" I half nodded the truth. He continued, "I thought she (meaning Helen Mirren as Phedre) was in over her head. I thought knowing her she would at least give some moments recognizable as real human behavior. Instead all we got was sing songy words and playing with the voice. What did you think?" I nodded again, in complete agreement with his quick assessment. Cliche, Over-Acting and Obvious Wailing and Intoning of False Passions - Thy name is this production. It was a weird one-hundred percent falsely wrought presentation of a brilliant play.
Let me put that in perspective. I can endure, even enjoy at times, a little affectation and melodramatic ranting. This damn near wore me down though. In all honesty, I didn't think this kind of acting existed anymore. I didn't think this type of understanding, interpretation and execution of plays existed anymore. Boy was I wrong. Its alive and well and apparently thriving at the National Theatre, London. From this production we would be forced to deduce that human behavior has only a handful of possibilities. If you are feeling bad, look down, or away from everyone. If you are thinking of love, look up with wide eyes. If you get some bad news, bend over like you were punched in the gut. If you have some news to tell, get generally excited and frantic. Everyone wring your hands at all times. And always, always, always, intone in the most obvious fashion the very sound of the words you are speaking, i.e. if the word is "roar," make a roaring sound with your voice as you speak it. If the word is "chopped," clip it sharp and hard and fast like you are chopping something. Whine and wail constantly and never, ever, ever do anything but be perfectly still if you are not talking.
Those traits that made/make the Greek Dramatists (and Racine in this case too) so interesting, things like complexity, reasoning, curiosity, were nowhere to be found in this production. It was like a bunch of freaks suffering uncontrollably at the hands of the gods, fate. As opposed to an epic and detailed battle of human thought and feeling and intention verses the gods, fate. Its a "battle" we all face, even as today we soothe ourselves with the mantra "everything happens for a reason" (meaning a good reason). Dramatist put this conflict on the page right up through Hamlet, which is more or less a turning point, eventually leading on to Dramas where humans started working and thinking in consideration with each other rather than only as heroic individuals in relationship to fate.
The Greeks had this notion, which is evident if you closely examine the script, the events, the words, that when emotion overtakes an individual, it is the gods intervening. That is why in those moments that read or seem to be "emotional" the characters are talking to the gods, cursing the gods, making deals with the gods, etc. The characters know the gods are stepping in. These actions, these times by the characters (the actors really) therefore must have a different quality than the rest. Prior to, or after the gods intervention, the emotion, there must be a real sense of human reasoning and feeling and individual control. There cannot be the same level or quality of emotion or else the logic is completely defeated and you end up with this unwieldy and unrecognizable blend of activity that this production had. For example, when the King finally makes the pact with Poseidon to kill his son, this should have a distinctive ritualistic quality of behavior that is different from the Kings otherwise behavior. The emotion is present and different. In this production that moment carried the same grouchy and irritated quality as the rest of the dude's behavior. Physically it was nothing really - actually kind of stagy and awkward. It could and should be a sadly but beautifully revealing moment and it simply wasn't. And lots, all, of those types of opportunities were lost, gone, non-existent in this production. The specifics just were not there and it makes me wonder how much the director and the actors even considered it all. I had a hard time believing that Phedre, in her supremely melodramatic state of suffering was capable of composing a letter to her stepson such as the one in Ovid's version for example. Now granted we/they were working with Racine's script as translated and adapted by Hughes, not Ovid's work, but even it (Racine's) offers and carries a certain degree of creative and complex thought and reason by the characters, guided by knowledge and intention - individual control in other words. To render those thoughts and words as if they are guided by whining and out of control emotional states makes no sense. It creates a falsity, an evident and confusing one for the spectator.
The fact that Hippolytus is supposed to be a hunter and love the dynamic activity of being outdoors, sport, while not completely lost in this production, is made non-influencing. Phaedra is supposed to like the fact that he "is not a man who looks like a girl." Hippolytus is rugged and tested and proven physically in every way except the way he wants - in war and large events. The actor in this production certainly had the potential for that except he looked more like Hollywood tanned and tamed. They should have taken those good looks and charisma and turned them wild instead. Let the actor have his day in the sun so to speak, not the tanning booth. Give a guy his beer drinking spear throwing moments! He's a John-John riding his bike, flying his plane, skateboarding, dare-devil waiting his turn. It should be reasonable and understanding that women of all ages want him. In this production he was a little too much like one of the confused cousins.
Each of the other characters have "traits" as given in the various legends and myths which to my way of thinking were not evident or present in this production and which also could/should play key factors in establishing or revealing the action. I won't go into them all.
Just to throw in something I did like - the running water, the faucet, plumbing - something the Greeks did have in that place and time. Too bad it wasn't used but once in a random way!
But what a great night otherwise! And I am certainly glad I got to see this trendy and popular HD filmed production.
In the 3rd edition of Benedetti's biography of Stanislavsky -- a wonderful improvement over the other editions, maybe his best book -- Benedetti includes excerpts from a letter Stanislavsky wrote to his Russian editor in, I believe, 1931. It is the best explanation I have ever read of the essential process of acting as experiencing as opposed to acting as indicating, conventions, cliches, voice and movement, style and/or theatrics:
ReplyDelete"I, too, make a distinction between stage and real experience. Evidently I have not expressed that distinction clearly enough. What I say is that on stage the actor lives genuine feelings, but that they have their origins in affective memory, in which feeling is stripped of anything superfluous. This feeling is the quintessence of all similar feelings. Thanks to its purity and concentration it is often stronger than in real life....Actors live on such memories of the past on stage and I call them real....When we contact these affective memories on stage, they and similar memories come alive.... the only difference is that in these moments he [the actor] feels the truth of his feelings more richly than in life itself. Does this lead to madness? Fortunately not...Again you say, they are accomplished in an impersonal way, through the magic if and don't touch personal concerns. That is just not true.... All that remains of the character and the play are the situation, the life circumstances, all the rest is mine, my own concerns, as a role in all its creative moments depends on a living person, i.e., the actor, and not the dead abstraction of a person, i.e., the role..."
You think Stanislavsky was cribbing from Lee Strasberg somehow, or maybe Lee just got it right? :-). The fall of the old USSR and the new documentary evidence released as a result of that political change has not been kind to the interpretation of the 'system' coming from the Meisner/Adler/Lewis axis of the American Stanislavsky tradition
Even Benedetti says after reading Vladimir Volkensein's 1922 biography of Stanislavsky and VV's description of how Stanislavsky worked early on in the "system" that it is now apparant that an emphasis on what Stanislavsky called 'physical action' is old news:
"Volkenstein's book is significant in its description of the 'system' for the emphasis it places, even at this early period, on physical action rather than the search for emotion, thus undermining the notion that Stanislavski's work in his final years represents a total break with earlier practice."
I think the scholars are getting closer to grasping what we have known for a long time: in the 'system' physical actions = sense memory -- the royal road to the creative state of being and thus genuine emotional response either consciously spurred or unconsciously inspired. I wonder how much longer it will take for them to go the rest of the intellectual distance? We wait and hope.