Another dash of Barton: on soliloquys and balance

The art of playing Shakespeare is fraught with traps.  In this post I want to touch on the delicate balance between attention to language and structure, and attention to emotion.

Much has been written about approaches to performing Shakespeare, and a great deal of it has to do with how to approach verse structure. Most classes I know of begin their approach with discussions on iambic pentameter and verse line and line phrasing.  The trap there is that actors focus on those areas at the expense of approaches and questions that are more familiar to them. The result can be a dead and purely technical delivery, where the audience is being told about the verse structure when they wanted to hear and see a story being told.

The opposite also occurs. Modern actors may opt for an emotional — dare I say ‘method’ — approach to complicated, unfamiliar text in order to understand it. They may put it in their own words to figure out what it means, mine the stakes and the emotions in the text, and then pour all of that work back on to the original wording.  The result in this case can be emotionally satisfying to an audience, but not for three straight hours; and important technical elements that describe the impulse and the response to argument are lost.

My belief is that one of the keys to compelling Shakespeare performance is care and appreciation of language, shaped by both passion and intellect.  Actors playing Shakespeare must be detectives; the language is often viewed as an obstacle but it is actually the road map. Trust it.

Let’s take a look at an example as performed by Dame Judi Dench as part of John Barton‘s ‘Playing Shakespeare‘ video series.  There are two interesting things I’d like to point out about what you’re about to see. First, Dame Judi is permitting herself to experience the speech in the moment, line by line (key, in fact, to the speech from Twelfth Night she’s performing).  Second, technical purists will note that she is not a slave to the structure of the verse, the line, or the punctuation.  She has decided to abandon several ‘rules’, at times, in order to communicate her interpretation of the story. This is every actor’s prerogative.

The second video ciip shows Patrick Stewart tackling a speech from Titus Adronicus.  In his first run at it, he goes a little overboard emotionally (and gets some of the text wrong, perhaps as a result of his emotional over-investment).  We get a very clear picture of Titus’ state of mind, but lose track of what is actually being said.  Titus is responding to a horrific situation with language that people don’t spontaneously find in moments of horror, but the trap lies in an attempt to “overcome” that language, rather than use it.  His second take is much more clear.

As in all performance, communicating Shakespeare is about telling a story.  The language, rhetoric, and form of Shakespeare’s text are unfamiliar to us now, though, so we have to work harder to transmit a clear message to an audience.  This onus falls squarely in the lap of the actor. Quoting John Barton:

If we don’t reach you, we fail. We must make you listen and share, and follow the story… but above all, listen.  It’s so easy for an audience not to listen, particularly with a naughty and difficult text. I may be cynical, but I don’t believe most people really listen to Shakespeare in the theatre unless the actors make them do so. I certainly don’t.

The clips of Barton’s Playing Shakespeare that I have been putting up are taken from an old VHS transfer of the video series; you can’t buy a copy anywhere. However, I just found out that the entire nine-part Playing Shakespeare series is being re-released on DVD in June.  This is, as far as I know, the first time it’s been available in more than 20 years… and it’s a terrific investment.

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