The Samuel West Script Collection

“It’s a part in which you can’t fail, and you can’t succeed because it’s not about finding answers. It’s all about asking questions.”

The Shakespeare Institute Library is extremely fortunate to have amongst its actors’ script archive Samuel West’s scripts. His collection covers his work as both actor and director of Shakespeare and other work. It is wonderful to be able to promote the research possibilities of this script collection. This exhibition features just some of Samuel’s treasured material.

Photo by Nils Jorgensen

Samuel West was born in London on June 19, 1966, the son of the actors Prunella Scales and Timothy West. It was perhaps inevitable that he would follow them on to the stage, since both his parents have had successful acting careers and even his grandparents Lockwood West and Olive Carleton-Crowe were also actors.

Though Sam West claims that he and his parents do not constitute a ‘family firm’ of actors, the three have appeared together on several occasions. West’s portrayal of Prince Hal in 1996 was opposite his father, Timothy, as Falstaff; they played the same character at different ages in the film Iris, and all the family took part in a reading of Pinter’s play Family Voices. He records that when he told his parents that he wanted to be an actor, they replied ‘Be a plumber.’

West ignored the advice and went on to win a number of awards, act and direct in every medium, and is now one of our most highly regarded Shakespearean actors.

He made his London stage debut in 1989 playing Michael in Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles which drew positive critical comment. Early Shakespearean roles included Prince Hal for the English Touring Theatre’s production of both parts of Henry IV, and Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre.

Photo by Malcolm Davies

In the first of his two seasons with the RSC he undertook the title role in Richard II in Steven Pimlott’s production of 2000. West’s account of planning the production describes how the company saw the play as a chronicle but also a fable, not so much about a king holding on to power as an individual trying to come to terms with mortality. The play was designed with minimal set and props, blue and white lighting that contrasted with darkness, and costumes which evoked the shadows cast on the set.

West has written about the “ammo box” which began life as the base of his throne, became the mirror Richard “crack’d in a hundred shivers” and finally ended as Richard’s coffin.

Reviews were enthusiastic; “A Richard to remember” wrote the critic Dominic Cavendish. In a bold stroke, the soliloquy at Pomfret – “I have been studying how I may compare/ This prison where I live unto the world”- was repeated by Richard’s rival and his queen: the king’s loss of identity a universal condition, not an individual insight. The rehearsal discussions had clearly born fruit.

In 2001, again directed by Pimlott, West played Hamlet. He appeared at first as the typical young student, dressed in jeans and leather jacket, but was soon revealed as clever, able to see through other people’s rhetoric, yet aware of his own powerlessness. West’s performance was set in a highly political world where individual conscience is stifled by power without morality and was generally described as “brilliant.”

Whilst working on Hamlet, West produced three notebooks and one very heavily annotated script. The notebooks cover his initial thoughts and ‘homework’ on the play; his rehearsal process; and fine-tuning of his performance in previews. Evidently a cerebral actor, West’s rehearsal notebook goes into great detail on Hamlet’s relationships with other characters as well as discussing major themes in the play. His ‘reading list’ includes sources as diverse as The Spanish Tragedy, Festen, Fight Club and Batman.

The production featured many memorable bits of staging which are not referred to in the original script, for example in the Ghost scene the phantom held his son close to him in their shared distress, and before Hamlet is sent to England he kissed Claudius squarely on the lips.

Combined with the notebooks, West’s script is a revelation as to how this actor deciphered one of Shakespeare’s most challenging roles.

From 2005–7 West was artistic director of Sheffield Crucible Theatre. As a passionately political man with strong left-wing beliefs, he believed that theatre was a strong vehicle for airing vital issues and making people think. Accordingly, he revived and directed the controversial The Romans in Britain and also directed As You Like It.

West’s As You Like It, which was also performed on the Swan stage in Stratford in 2007, played with ideas of the fluidity of identity with a collection of hats sprouting from the stage to be tried on by the company. The cast included Eve Best, Lisa Dillon and Sam Troughton. Reviews praised Best for “showing all the symptoms of a sparkling wit with a gnawing need inside” and for her “radiant emotional intelligence”.

Eve Best in As You Like It, Sheffield Crucible, 2007

Starting the play with ‘All the world’s a stage’ as a framing device was “subtly magical” but while Michael Billington called it “an eye-opening As You Like It” others thought it “laboured” and “too earnest” and Charles Spencer thought the approach “a load of old bollocks”.

There was praise for West’s leadership of the Sheffield Theatres – both for his choice of plays and his ability to attract actors to the venue and this, his farewell production, “makes one wish he were staying longer.”

West has also appeared in a variety of films including Notting Hill, Hyde Park on Hudson and Darkest Hour but was in the role of Leonard Bast in E.M. Forster’s Howards End in 1991 that he made his name. Bast signals the arrival of the urban white-collar worker in British society, a role that could have been tailor-made for the politically aware West. He plays him as a tragic hero whose dreams of a higher form of existence are in contrast to the spiritual inertia of an office job. He received a nomination for the role at the 1993 BAFTA Film Awards. West was also cast as the colourless and emotionally sterile St. John Rivers in Zeffirelli’s 1996 Jane Eyre, and was praised for his portrayal of the character in an otherwise not highly rated production.

On television, West has had leading roles including Anthony Blunt in Cambridge Spies, a BBC drama about Kim Philby and his associates. In ITV’s 2011 Eternal Law he played Zak Gist, one of two angels who have fallen to earth in order to serve Humankind. The mix of fantasy and legal satire appeared initially to be an intriguing and promising, but critics found it too absurd to take seriously, particularly when West and his colleague appeared with huge white wings sprouting from their backs. Appearances in long-running series, such as Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Mr Selfridge and Grantchester, made West a familiar face on-screen and his prolific work on radio and as a voice artist for audiobooks and documentary narrations make his an instantly recognizable voice.

He is a long-time collaborator with the Shakespeare Institute and has a personal connection to the place. One of West’s earliest Shakespearean roles was Florizel in a 1985 Oxford Playhouse production of The Winter’s Tale in which Michael Dobson, our current Director, played Time ( …and claims to have upstaged him).

 

In 2016, as part of the birthday celebrations also marking 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Samuel West, as Garrick, narrated the actor-manager-playwright’s 1769 Jubilee Ode at Holy Trinity Church giving it its first full-scale performance since the eighteenth century.

Samuel West generously donated his script collection to the Shakespeare Institute Library in 2012 and our students have already mined the scripts for course work, theses and dissertations. 2014 saw West receive an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Birmingham.

 

 

 

 

 

Howl, howl, howl, howl! Lear is mad again…

2016 sees a glut of King Lear productions, which our current exhibition in the SIL explores. LSA and PhD student at the Shakespeare Institute, Sara Westh explores Lear’s enduring fascination.

The by now quite venerable Arden Shakespeare Lear characterises its subject as “a colossus at the centre of Shakespeare’s achievement as the grandest effort of his imagination.”

Whether a fan of the play or not one cannot deny the influence of Lear as an iconic moment of narrative and drama in our age, something that Kott’s praise of it as “above all others the Shakespearean play of our time” seems to bear out. Of course, the date of publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary suggests that rather than being the sigil of one age in particular, Lear has, as the rest of the Shakespeare gang, shown an aptitude for eternity. Maybe Lear speaks to us because the divide between age and youth is always instantly recognisable as well as being infinitely adaptable; the issues that prompted Kott to claim a singularly powerful status for the mad king in the mad world, cut off from human kindness, suffering in a hell as much of his own making as created by the people closest to him, are issues of humanity, and they are no less poignant today.

As we once again embrace the heath for its familiar barrenness, the inevitability of Lear seems closer than ever before. Our world is growing old, the tempests that rage just outside the castle walls are all too real, and the twitterings of our Fool companion are a constant buzz in the back of our minds. When everything appears to spiral out of our control in spite of well-laid plans and best intentions, we all howl with Lear. Unlike the king, however, we know how the story ends.

Turning to the play itself, to the king that staggers across the stage rather than through our minds, its enduring influence can be traced in part to its history, and in part to the fascination it engenders among the audience. There is, apparently, something at once deeply satisfying and unsettling about the gradual destruction of the elderly, followed by the revival (and un-blinding) of everyone involved through the magic of applause. Freud and Lacan can probably offer very incisive analyses of the play, in particular its use of sharp objects, and Barthes and Derrida can beyond doubt oblige us with new worlds of verbal slippage and dead gods from within the lines. And while all of this forms part of the reason why Lear is mad again this year, there is almost certainly more to it than penetration, castration, repetition, and perpetuation in our communal cultural memory.

The reviews of this year’s offerings help us suck the marrow from the bone:

“Through Warrington, Lear’s madness is made at one with the storm […]. He emerges from it transformed: fragile, human, as authentic as Cordelia, whose love – and whose death – he movingly shares.”

“Pennington’s performance charts Lear’s course from overconfident folly to humbled self-knowledge via the storms of madness with moving craft, culminating in scenes of extraordinary loving tenderness, first with blinded Gloucester (Pip Donaghy) and then, heart-wrenchingly, with the hanged Cordelia (Beth Cooke).”

Michael Pennington is portraying Lear at Royal & Derngate, Northampton, while Don Warrington takes the king upon him at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. Judging from the publicity photos, both productions visually evoke an era past, with costumes suggesting the 1930’s-40’s, and both show their protagonists descending into white shirts as they descend into madness.

Clare Brennan reviewed the two productions side by side for the Guardian and according to her description the two lead actors are comparably magnificent; both combine the air of death that clings to Lear’s shoulders like tar with tender moments of excruciating pain. Both portrayals she describes as “moving”.

Apart from the immediate meaning of emotions that transport us beyond the hum-drum every-day, and maybe even deposit us in that rare embrace of catharsis where our own problems fade into insignificance for a few, brief moments, until the lights go up again, and we once more set out across the heaths we spend our lives cultivating, there is a deeper sense of movement at play. Maybe the “moving” centre of Lear is what makes its particular calamity of so long life; the savage joy of witnessing inescapable suffering, sorrow of a magnitude that goes far beyond what any one of us can reasonably pretend to fathom, and yet witnessed from such a privileged point of view that every moment of the old man’s downfall is available to us in the full technicolour of our own senses.

Glenda Jackson will be portraying Lear at the Old Vic later this year, as will Antony Sher at the RSC. The Lears of 2016, then, are so far looking like an at least approximately representative model of the population. The only unifying feature is age: this year’s Lear must, apparently, be old. Perhaps the traditions that surround this theatrical sacrifice demand a certain stiffness in the joints and toughness in the sinews; an old actor’s offering, much as Hamlet belongs to the young, provided that Uncle Monty’s view of the world in Withnail and I is to be credited.

If the 2016 Lear productions are anything to go by, this is the age of the mad king, of the player who only too late realises that he is the star of his own tragedy. And as such it is, of course, the story of everyone alive. It is, unfortunately, a story we love to watch – in others as in ourselves. And we never start clapping until the lights go down.

Sara Marie Westh, LSA Shakespeare Institute Library

WORKS CITED

Brennan, Clare. “King Lear Review – Two Lears Acting up a Storm”. The Guardian. 10.04.2016. web 01.08.2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/apr/10/king-lear-royal-derngate-northampton-royal-exchange-manchester-review&gt;.

Foakes, R.A. “Introduction” King Lear by William Shakespeare. Arden Shakespeare 3^rd series. gen. eds. R. Proudfoot, A. Thompson, D.S. Kastan. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1997.

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Trans. Boleslaw Taborski. London: Routledge, 1988.

 

WORKS CONSULTED

Aebischer, Pascale, Edward J. Esche, and Nigel Wheale (eds). Remaking Shakespeare: Performance Across Media, Genres, and cultures.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003.

Burt, Richard (ed). Shakespeare after Mass Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.

Henderson, Diana E. Collaborations with the Past : Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media. Ithaca; London: Cornell UP, 2006

Holland, Peter (ed). Shakespeare Survey 62: Close Encounters with Shakespeare’s Text. Cambridge: CUP, 2009.

Joughin, John J. Philosophical Shakespeares. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Kelley, Philippa. The King and I. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011.

Lusardi, James and June Schlueter. Reading Shakespeare in Performance: King Lear. London, New Jersey, Ontario: U of Delaware P: Associated UP’s, 1991.

Mack, Maynard. King Lear in Our Time. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1966

Massai, Sonia. World-wide Shakespeares – Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. Oxon: Routledge, 2005.

Muir, Kenneth (ed). King Lear – Critical Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

— and Stanley Wells (eds). Aspects of King Lear. London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney: CUP, 1982.

Ogden, James and Arthur H. Scouten (eds). Lear from Study to Stage – Essays in Criticism. Madison; Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP; London: Associated UP’s, 1997.

Proudfoot, Richard (ed). Shakespeare : Text, Stage and Canon. London : Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

Sun, Emily. Succeeding King Lear. New York: Fordham UP, 2010.

Wagner, Matthew D. Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.

Hand in hand, with fairy grace: midsummer fairy madness

Midsummer is upon us – it’s damp, it’s wet, it’s England. Nevertheless, the RSC, with the collaboration of Slung Low, The School of Night and Rash Dash are seeing in the equinox in style; celebrating, engaging and sharing creativity in their Fairy Portal Camp.

I, like others from the Shakespeare Institute will no doubt join in the fun this week despite the weather, but from a historical perspective our ancestors would be quivering in their boots at the thought of opening a portal to the fairy world, as much of the folklore around fairies in the British Isles revolves around the dangers and avoidance of interaction with fairies. So when looking through books on fairy lore we do not see much on how to conjure images of fairies but a significant amount on how to avoid them.

Liminality is at the heart of the timing of our engagement with the supernatural and the nature of fairies themselves. They are intermediate beings, somewhere between ourselves, spirits, demons, and ghosts. They are material and yet can make themselves invisible, comprised of the fleshy nature of man and yet able to transform themselves into ‘airy nothings.’ In Elizabethan times fairy encounters were closely linked with witchcraft and it wasn’t advisable to demonstrate too much knowledge of fairy lore. On Midsummer Eve fairy visits were linked with visitations from the dead – if you were to stand in a churchyard and eat something before midnight you would see the spirits of all those who died in the last year lining up at the church door in chronological order. Handy that Holy Trinity is so close! Some believed that fairies were the spirits of the dead.

Humans are at their most vulnerable to the fairy world at certain liminal times of the year – equinoxes and solstices, when the increase of day or night shifts over to its decrease. The most outstanding of these festivals are Bealltainn, held on 1st of May; Midsummer Day; the feast of the Sun-god Lugh, in August and Samhain, or Hallowmass, on 1st November. Proof that fairies were placated or dreaded at these seasons is evident from the tradition that those who had been enchanted by them in their dances cannot be released until a year after, this indicating “a recurring festival celebrated annually, the observance of which has been transferred in part to the fairies.” Times of the day are also more conducive to fairy encounters. Some days of the week or even hours of the day are connected with beliefs concerning fairies. In the ballad of Tam Lin we are told that: “They begin at sky-setting, ride a’ the evening tide”. Twilight and dawn serves as a liminal time, between day and night – where one is ‘in the twilight zone, in a liminal nether region of the night’, between sleeping and waking, dreams and reality – the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition. In Ireland it was suggested that no mention of fairies should be made on Mondays and Thursdays. Lady Wilde (Oscar’s mum) maintained that on Fridays their power was exceptionally strong; therefore children and cattle had to be strictly watched on that day. Wednesday, says a passage in The Denham Tracts, is “the fairies’ Sabbath or holiday.

With regards to humans, our own liminal states make us susceptible to fairy encounters: birth, puberty, death, for example. Birth is a particularly strong attractant to the fairy world and there are many tales of fairy blessings at birth times (see Sleeping Beauty) or of kidnappings when fairies would replace a new born infant with a changeling.

In all lore of the supernatural, eating whilst in the presence of fairies or any other spirits is not advisable – to eat in the fairy world is to risk entrapment in that world. However, the eating of eggs or bathing eyelids with egg whites enabled mortals to see the fairies. Eggs, a symbol of birth and therefore of liminality in folklore gave one the power to see across the borders of reality.

The great Katherine Briggs in her Anatomy of Puck explains how mortals trapped in the fairy world risked more than entrapment as ‘Time spent with them passes at a different rate than when spent with mortals; seven days in fairyland is generally equivalent to seven years in mortal time. They are dangerous to human beings, their food is taboo and people who fall into their power are carried away and often crumble into dust on their long-delayed return.’ (14)

Anyone in a high passion and thus a vulnerable state will also attract fairy attention. There are many tales of fairies encouraging passions in mortals with their dances, songs or beauty, in order to entrap them. Sometimes people would be trapped forever in the fairy world and on other occasions, they would bestow supernatural gifts on particular favourites. In the case of Thomas the Rhymer, the Fairy Queen confers “the tongue that shall never lie”, a boon which earned him the popular sobriquet of “True Thomas”. One young man of Nithsdale, overcome by the wild and delightful music and signing of the fays, took part in their dance and was presented with a cup of wine of which he drank deeply. He was permitted to return to the world of men, but “was ever after endowed with the second sight”.

Thomas the Rhymer

Thankfully, the fairies leave us physical landmarks of where they’ve been. Fairies are known for dwelling in mounds, trees, near graves or standing stones, near water – streams, lakes and wells. Beaumont and Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess, make references to a well as a fairy haunt. The fays danced round it by moonlight, and dipped their stolen children in its waters:

So to make them free / From dying flesh and dull mortality.

However, the most famous natural landmark is the Fairy Ring – a dark, circular patch of long grass. The fairies present in fairy rings could not be seen unless you stood in the middle of their circle dance. Alfred Nutt, alluding to the fairy dance by moonlight, describes it as “the classic manifestation of the fairy folk… in wild and desert places.” He thought that it had a realistic basis in the superstition that “night is essentially the time for growth” and that the ritual which sought to evoke growth was “frenzied and orgiastic.” Fairy dancing was associated with the idea that saltation assists the growth of the corps. Violent action has a magical and sympathetic effect upon the powers of nature, and the emanations of action strengthen the supernaturals in their task and are passed on to them; or, by sympathetic magic, they encourage them to similar exertions. Many primitive dances assume the form of imitative motions pantomimic of the growth of the crops, or of vegetation. Participants forming a circle and dancing with their backs to the centre.

“Let turtle-footed peace dance fayrie rings / About her court.”

Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour

To cultivate or dig the fairy ring caused one’s luck to disappear, but to clean it meant an easy death.

At Chathill farm, near Alnwick, in Northumberland, there was a famous fairy ring round which the children of the locality might dance, but not more than nine times. If they exceeded this number of rounds “they would have been carried off by the fairies.” A house built on ground marked by these rings was fortunate for those who inhabited it.

It is unlucky to pass a fairy haunt without leaving an offering there, a piece of cheese, or other morsel. Offerings of milk are given to brownies. In Derbyshire offerings of clay tobacco pipes found in mounds seem to have formerly been made to the fairies. So, as you pass the Fairy Portal Camp it may be worth leaving a gift in order to appease the beautiful but dangerous spirits that may be unleashed! You have been warned.

Karin Brown, Shakespeare Institute Librarian

The China Institute & The Shakespeare Institute: guest blog by Prof. Michael Dobson

2015 has been designated a year of Anglo-Chinese cultural dialogue, and it has already seen the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a certain amount of help from the Shakespeare Institute, embarking on a project to produce a new, theatre-friendly translation of the Complete Works into Mandarin; April 2016, the month that sees the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, will see the RSC taking Gregory Doran’s productions of Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V to Beijing and Shanghai; indeed the whole of next year will find the British Council co-ordinating Shakespeare-related events all over the world under the slogan ‘Shakespeare Lives.’ All in all, if a Shakespearean scholar with an interest in the work of the RSC can’t get flown to China by the British Council in 2015 or 2016, he or she should probably give up all hope of it ever happening.

I was one of the lucky ones, this year, invited to spend the last week before the autumn term touring China to give a series of what are called ‘Smart Talks’ – mildly evangelistic lectures about key aspects of British culture and education, in my case Shakespeare. I was delighted to accept, for a number of reasons. One is that I have cherished a side-interest in the intersections between Shakespeare and China ever since I was a PhD student working on early stage adaptations of the plays, when I first encountered the 1695 semi-opera The Fairy Queen – a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with wonderful music by Purcell, in which the play’s culminating marriages are adorned not by the mechanicals’ performance of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ but by the fairies summoning a spectacular vision of Chinese landscapes and culture, complete with silks, ceramics, and oranges. In the autumn of 1999, moreover, my wife Nicola Watson and I held visitorships at PKU – Peking University, an elite institution sufficiently conservative to have clung to the older English way of spelling the city’s name – and I have tried ever since to keep in touch with the faculty and students we met during that eye-opening and enriching encounter with the city and its intellectuals.

Coriolanus, Beijing People’s Arts Theatre, 2013

Since then, Chinese participation in the international Shakespearean theatre has become much more conspicuous. In 2013, for instance, the Beijing People’s Arts Theatre brought their production of Coriolanus to the Edinburgh Festival, an event for which I was commissioned to write a programme note, and I revisited their home city that autumn to teach a guest class on Othello at PKU — at a time when our best man, conveniently, held the post of British Ambassador to China, and thus had a very comfortable prime ministerial suite at his disposal on Guang Hua Lu. In collaboration with my Singapore-based colleague Li-Lan Yong, moreover, I am at present designing an online MA module about recent performances of Shakespeare in China, Japan and Korea, so I was more than happy to have the chance to get over there again.

After contributing a short on-line interview to the British Council’s Voices website sketching some of the themes I would be exploring in my lectures – I reported for duty at the arrivals hall of Beijing airport on the morning of September 20th. In 1999 Nicky and I were among the last arrivals to pass through the small, battered, state-poster-adorned 1950s terminal which Mao and Nixon had known: today the airport buildings, connected by a swish internal rail system, are vast, sweeping, cosmopolitan spaces covered in the usual large shiny advertisements for international brands. In 1999, similarly, Nicky and I stayed at a wonderfully old-fashioned hotel opposite the PKU campus, the Changchungyuan, known as ‘The Intellectuals’ Hotel’, which provided only pot noodles and jasmine tea for sustenance, and which boasted a diagram of its fire escapes labelled in English as ‘Sketch of Urgent Scattered’: in 2015, my British Council organizer Fraser Deas had me driven to the Chaoyang Westin, an almost embarrassingly luxurious American chain hotel near the embassy district. Beijing’s polluted smog, however, turning the clear blue skies through which my flight had passed over Mongolia to a muffled not-exactly-grey, hadn’t changed at all – in fact my first lungfuls on stepping off the airliner, tinged with the same distinctive local notes of coal, sulphur and charcoal, transported me at once to the city of my first arrival. That jetlagged Sunday afternoon and evening were about the only free time I had for a week, and I spent them with a former PKU student and her family, exploring Chaoyang Park and its fairground attractions, talking with the kite-flyers I was pleased to find still plying their hobby in commercialized, built-up, internationalized post-Olympics Beijing, watching the personal ads and patriotic videos projected on the immense TV screen in the roof of the Place shopping mall, and eating an exceptionally good meal.

Chinese internet company Net Ease

The Monday offered a more representative glimpse of how the rest of the week would be: in the morning, a drive to the familiar Haidian district, near PKU, to record a video interview for the huge Chinese internet company Net Ease; around lunchtime, a press conference at the hotel, conducted, via a translator, with the Beijing Evening News and representatives of three other local media organizations (as curious about the current state of British education as about Shakespeare); in the afternoon, a drive to Beijing Middle School Number 4 to give a Smart Talk to a packed hall of 14-17 year-olds; and in the evening, a return to PKU to give a paper on Hamlet to Zheng Xiaochang’s Shakespeare seminar group, including PKU graduate and former Institute visiting scholar Jia Xu.

I had long ago heard of Beijing Middle School Number 4, the most academically fierce secondary school in the capital, which according to its proud headmistress Chang Jing sends 100 of its 1400 students to PKU every year, and it did not disappoint: its architectural core is two former French Jesuit secondary school buildings just over the wall from Beihai Park, on the site of what was once the elite training facility of the Imperial Guard, and its ethos retains something of the place’s dual past. In the playground – or rather, exercise area — squads of goose-stepping students were competing to be chosen to take the salute during an impending sports day. As a prologue to my lecture, a fifteen-year-old male student performed Macduff’s speech on learning that his family have been murdered and a fifteen-year-old female student performed Lady Macbeth’s first speech, both of them fearlessly, with absolute commitment, and in near-flawless English.

As the British Council had requested, I rewarded the posers and answerers of questions with small trinkets selected from the gift shops of the RSC and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, in particular pin-on badges displaying short quotations from the plays. At that school I particularly gave out some which bear a phrase from The Tempest, ‘Thought is free’: may their wearers bear it out.
My audience in the evening at PKU were as well-informed and acute as always, but then that is a university which has a reputation for Shakespeare studies going back to the early days of Mandarin translation in the 1900s, and its English literature faculty never forget that in the late 1930s and 1940s it was the workplace of the great Cambridge-educated poet and critic William Empson. (When the Japanese invasion forced the university to abandon its campus and its library and try to teach what it still could in retreat, Empson is said to have typed the whole text of Othello from memory – though the typescript no longer survives to be checked for completeness). Zheng Xiaochang, Jia, one of the RSC’s translation team and I had dinner together in the seminar room itself after the session was over – possibly the best Chinese takeaway I have ever eaten.

Tuesday found Fraser, his colleague Diana and I flying down to the ancient rival of Beijing (‘northern capital’), namely Nanjing (‘southern capital’). Equally steamy and dirty in its atmosphere, and in the business district where we stayed overnight just as generically built-up (this time the skyscraper hotel was a Sheraton), Nanjing’s streets otherwise reminded me less of today’s Beijing than of the one I remembered from 1999, with fewer signs transliterated in pinyin and more bicycles and freight-bearing tricycles holding their own among the encroaching cars. Miles of medieval city wall survive, and there is a Forbidden-City-like palace complex fronting a famously beautiful lake, and temples and pagodas adorn the surrounding mountains, but we were destined to see none of this (nor did I so much as glimpse the Yangtse, save from the incoming ‘plane) – instead we were driven out to Nanjing University’s elegant, tree-planted new out-of-town campus some distance from the city centre. More diplomatic small-talk with deans and faculty; ritual exchanges of gifts; another superb meal (as always, our Chinese hosts were surprised by the visiting Britons’ ability to eat with chopsticks – the existence of a vast worldwide culinary diaspora seems to remain a secret in China itself); and a packed lecture hall of lively undergraduates and faculty to hear my Smart Talk. (These included, incidentally, the promising Shakespeare critic Xing Chen, recently back from Edinburgh, who presented me with a copy of her new book Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Lateness for the Institute library). I managed a swim in the hotel pool before getting to bed, but it’s not the same thing as a classical Chinese lake.

Wednesday: southwards once more, to Guangzhou. Given that Birmingham has an office in Guangzhou I was particularly curious to see the city formerly known as Canton, though my expectations weren’t high – the reports I had heard spoke of an overdeveloped, shapeless industrial conurbation which has supposedly sold its soul to international capitalism. In the event I was pleasantly surprised by a city which, though some of its downtown areas offer as arid an assembly of generic luxury shopping malls as does the Orchard Road district of Singapore (of which the lush vegetation and ubiquitous bougainvillea continually reminded me), has a real swagger and distinctiveness to its recent architecture (its skyscrapers somehow add up to a harmonious and imposing skyline, in a way which Beijing’s miscellaneous gigantisms never do) , and which retains a definitely and enjoyably southern atmosphere throughout. In what remained of the afternoon once we had checked into another immense corporate hotel, I took a cab to the silk market, and as the sudden tropical darkness fell I dined in the open air beside the Pearl River (on a local speciality, a superb hot and sour frog soup) before finishing the day with a viewing of the spectacularly-lit skyscrapers from a boat. The Canton Tower – a structure that resembles a giant tulip vase woven in a basketwork of glass and steel – is especially striking: lit in ever-changing combinations of blue and orange and red, it is quite beautiful enough to serve as a modern cathedral or as a monument to art itself, but around its summit all its revolving neon display is currently proclaiming is a series of advertisements, notably for Pantene shampoo.

On Thursday Fraser took me to the British Council’s Guangzhou offices to give another press conference (during which I waxed as lyrical as ever about the life-enhancing charms of Stratford and Edgbaston), and we than had lunch at a nearby restaurant, the menu chosen by the Council’s local driver. I passed the initial test of eating chicken feet with chopsticks (they were excellent), and all relaxed, and we were then told at great length about how the Cantonese way of preparing goose is self-evidently preferable to any possible recipe for Peking duck. After that, it was time to head out to Guangdong Foreign Studies University for the last of my lectures – this one prefaced by a formal session of diplomatic small-talk with the head of the university, in a magnificent reception room adorned with paintings and draperies.

One reason for this particularly marked welcome (at a university, founded by decree of Zhou En Lai, which trains future diplomats and others in over 20 different languages, a sort of Chinese counterpart to SOAS) was the presence of Duncan Lees, a distance learning student of the Shakespeare Institute who is an assistant professor at GFSU and a conspicuously inventive teacher of Shakespeare. In the few minutes that remained before I was due on stage Duncan showed me the university’s cherished statue of Shakespeare. It stands on the edge of jungle, among a canon of other state-approved artistic and philosophical worthies: Marx, Tolstoy, Confucius, Lu Xun, Beethoven – an intriguing counterpart to the more familiar pantheon of colleagues who flank Shakespeare above the main door of the Aston Webb building.

My horoscope in the China Daily that morning urged me to ‘undertake travel, and attend cultural events, for the more your own mind is enriched the more you will have to share with others,’ so though frustrated in my desire to see some Cantonese opera while in Guangzhou (apparently it mainly happens in the afternoons, when I wasn’t free) I happily accepted Fraser’s suggestion that he should put his fluency in at least Mandarin if not Cantonese at my disposal on an excursion to anything historical or cultural which I might fancy that night. I chose the Liurong Temple, with its celebrated Pagoda of the Six Banyans (1097), near which a taxi duly deposited us well after dark. The intricate surrounding streets and alleyways looked suspiciously like the venues for confrontations with gangs of pirates in a martial arts movie, but fortunately the locals we met during our protracted wanderings in search of the well-screened monument (especially a tailor, who drew an elaborate map) were universally friendly (unless you count the large rat we encountered near a fruit stall). When we finally found the temple gates they had been closed to the public for hours, but despite a disapproving Buddhist monk making a mobile-phone call in the background Fraser managed to persuade a guard to let us far enough inside at least to see the dim pagoda looming through the darkness between its sacred trees. Local culture that evening otherwise consisted of another excellent fish restaurant by the river.
I parted from the British Council on Friday morning at Guangzhou’s main railway station, and went through the surprisingly elaborate border procedures which nearly twenty years on from the 1997 handover are still required for anyone passing from the rest of China into Hong Kong.

Indeed, on arriving at Kowloon three hours to the south I not only had to deposit my suitcase in left luggage, but had to change my remaining Chinese yuan into Hong Kong dollars (discovering in the process, incidentally, that one of my 100 yuan notes, worth about £10, was a forgery, symptom of an increasingly widespread problem in the Chinese economy). I had an engagement to give a PhD supervision in the early evening to Miriam Lau, a split-site Shakespeare Institute student who works at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and is writing a thesis about Shakespearean performance in Hong Kong and its cultural valences since 1997, but I did manage take the Star Ferry across the harbour and the sometimes near-vertical Peak Tram to the island’s summit to admire the view before returning to Kowloon to see Miriam.
After our supervision there was just time for her to show me the arcade of wedding-accessory stalls she had patronized while making the preparations for her wedding last year (an event which for her had involved at least 3 entire outfits), and to share some street food as the garish neon lights lit up around us, before I took a cab to the airport to catch the 11.05pm British Airways flight back to London.
One last minor observation. Hours after my arrival home, it would be simultaneously the first day of term, my birthday, and the Chinese mid-autumn moon festival, so in order to mark this convergence – and a lunar eclipse to boot – I took a great deal of advice and stocked up, before my departure, on what I was assured were the best moon-cakes Hong Kong could provide. These are from the Kee Wah bakery, but they weren’t the brand I had seen advertised most conspicuously during the week, from Beijing through Nanjing and Guangzhou right down to Hong Kong itself. When Nicky and I first visited Beijing, in 1999, seven years after we had first tasted what was then a local brand of coffee during a visit to some friends in Seattle, the city had just seen the opening of China’s first branch of Starbucks. In 2015 the country which when I was growing up was filling TV news bulletins with images of the Cultural Revolution, and which is still a one-party communist state committed to a militantly secular materialism, is full of branches of a capitalist coffee-shop chain, all of them offering to adorn the ancient religious festival of the autumn moon with Starbucks’ own-brand moon-cakes.
Present-day China is palpably hungry for the jewel in the British Council’s crown, Shakespeare – international, exotically western in origin, but adaptable to local theatrical and cultural preferences – but its audiences seem to want American coffee in their theatre foyers too.

Prof. Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute

Henry V & the Impact of War on RSC Productions

To mark the anniversary of Agincourt, the Shakespeare Institute Library is staging an exhibition on performances of Henry V which have been particularly influenced by modern conflict. At the recent pressnight for the RSC’s current production Gregory Doran stated that the play is not anti- or pro- war but a play which explores the many aspects of war. To complement our exhibition which focuses on productions by Laurence Olivier, Ron Daniels and Nicholas Hytner this blog explores how modern warfare has impacted on RSC productions in the past.

In the programme to the 1994 production of Henry V, directed by Matthew Warchus, John Ramsden commented:

Largely through Shakespeare, a King who was an unpleasantly ruthless fanatic who liked nothing better than burning heretics became what Hazlitt called ‘the favourite monarch of the English nation’, much cited whenever England was under attack.^[1]

Henry V is a play at the mercy of the society and time in which it is produced. This is strongly evidenced by the ‘swing of 180 degrees, from patriotic heroism to bitter irony’^[2] after the Second World War.

… As the dramatist John Arden once pointed out, it is as if there is a sceptical unofficial play beneath the patriotic official one. We get to know the braggarts and the victims, the would-be war-profiteers and the common soldiers who suspect they will die in an unjust cause. We also hear a great deal of questioning and self-questioning. ^[3]

It is only in the last 50 years that we have seen this emphasis on the ‘unofficial play’, prompted by a radical shift in the way people think about national identity, politics and ideas of heroism.

The programme to the 1964 Peter Hall production used a passage from Erasmus’s essay ‘On Beginning War’ dated 1540, to emphasis the anti-war stance, to give a timelessness to the proceedings, and provide evidence that nothing is learned from history:

War is sown from war. The prince is compelled to expose his young men to so many dangers, and often in a single hour to make many an orphan, widow, childless old man, beggar, and unhappy wretch. The wisdom of princes will be too costly for the world if they persist in learning from experience how dreadful war is.^[5]

Michael Sheen as Henry mourns the dead. Dir. Ron Daniels, RSC, 1997

In a century in which man was supposed to be more reasoned, aware and humane there have been more deaths by war in the last hundred years than in all the centuries preceding in the Christian calendar put together. An awareness of this depressing fact on twentieth-century warfare has had an indelible effect on performances of Shakespeare’s history plays, particularly with Henry V. Terry Hands referred to Peter Hall’s 1964 production as ‘the Vietnam anti-war version’^[6]; Adrian Noble’s 1984 version powerfully and effectively … responded to the Falklands conflict by stressing the awful realities of war’^[7]; in 2003 Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre deliberately drew ‘parallels with the then jingoistic mood of the government as it first justified and then embarked upon the invasion of Iraq.’^[8] During the Iraq war, reports of 100 English soldiers killed in combat in relation to over 100,000 Iraqi civilian dead has nothing to do with a miracle like Agincourt, but has everything to do with the ethics of combat which Shakespeare questions in the play.

The social impact of war has played a part in the staging of Henry V, especially with regards to the democratisation that happens in times of conflict – the bringing together of all classes, the dropping of social pretensions as happened to some extent during the Second World War. This was emphasised in Edward Hall’s 2000 production which dispensed with the Chorus as a single identifiable figure, giving his lines to the cast of men and women in army fatigues:

The Chorus’s text was chopped up so that everyone could have his – or her – own little piece … expressions of relevance and democratic individualism ^[9]

In today’s world soldiers are no longer nameless faceless casualties; we see their families’ grief on television, read about their suicides in the newspapers. At the start of the twenty-first century each soldier has a voice in a way they never had before. The common soldiers’ domination in Hall’s production was also emphasised by the use of striking songs by the political songwriter Billy Bragg. Hall was making a definite statement by choosing a radical and political folk musician who continually questions the nature of Englishness and identity in his own songwriting. Charles Spencer of the Telegraph wrote:

The entire cast wear military fatigues, and the low-life scenes, set in a boozed-up Naafi, are superbly played, with fights breaking out and the entire cast singing an “Ere-we-go, ere we go” – style anthem especially written for the occasion … with repeated cries of “Eng-er-land”.^[10]

William Houston as Henry amongst his soldiers. Dir. Edward Hall, RSC, 2000

The brutal realities of war are not something that can be shirked. Adrian Noble’s 1984 production underlined the conflict between soldiers’ emotional life and the hardships of the battlefield. Michael Billington’s review confirmed how the production explored:

… the cruelty, pain, and pathos of the ensuing war as well as its moments of professional exhilaration … the most touching is the sight of the impoverished English soldiery … huddled together under tarpaulin sheets as the rain pelts down. This is what war means – getting soaked in some foreign field … What this humane and thoughtful production offers is the soldier’s view of war; and their feelings about conflict are summed up in … the memorable sound of the clang of swords hurled to the ground as the battle is finally won.^[11]

Warchus’s 1994 production emphasised the brutality of war by choosing to show the killing of the French prisoners – a moment which is often left off stage, cut, or moved to after the discovery of the murdered boys to maintain sympathy for Henry. Again the effect on the ordinary soldier was marked:

… having the prisoners killed on stage brilliantly produced a reaction of protest and horror from Clive Wood’s Pistol, a coward forced to kill and loathing it, nearly vomiting after the killing, an unwilling participant in the actuality of the war off which he has been freeloading.^[12]

In the words of the critic Jan Kott, in the seminal work Shakespeare, Our Contemporary ‘The greatness of Shakespeare’s realism consists in his awareness of the extent to which people are involved in history’^[13] – the common citizen as much as the king.

By using war memorials as part of the productions’s design, many of these productions have been dominated by a sense of death – the greatest leveller of all. In an eerie opening, the RSC’s 1997 production, directed by Ron Daniels, saw the ghosts of the dead, names from a memorial, coming to life to relive and tell their story in the eternal field of conflict. Henry and the others entered, ‘… a phalanx of officers in gold-and-blue uniforms slow-marching to a drum.’^[14] Rex Gibson in the Times Educational Supplement wrote:

[This was a]… sustained critique of the horrors of war. The set is part American Vietnam memorial, part Menin Gate. Well over 2,000 names cover every wall, an ever-present reminder of the fellowship of death. King Henry is first seen watching with appalled fascination a flickering film of the carnage of 1914-18 trench warfare … the production portrays remorselessly how soldiers on both sides die brutally in war.^[15]

You can imagine the emotional effect this setting had on the audience when Henry sitting amongst the dead read out the names of those who had fallen in battle. Likewise, Matthew Warchus’s 1994 production there was an added sense of mortality and futility as Henry battled across the stage at Agincourt – the stage floor tipped to a steep rake, revealing the dates ‘1387-1422’, the limits of Henry’s life, so that the battle was fought across his tomb.^[16]

Set for the 1994 RSC production with war memorial dominating the rear of the stage.

[1] John Ramsden ‘This story shall the good man tell his son …’, in Henry V, RSC programme, 1994

[2] Loehlin, James N., Henry V, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)

[3] Benedict Nightingale, Times, 12.5.94

[5] ‘War is Sown from War’ condensed from Erasmus’s Essay on Beginning War (1540), in Henry V, RSC programme, 1965

[6] Anthony Brennan, Henry V, Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare, 1992

[7] James N. Loehlin, Henry V, Shakespeare in Performance, 1996

[8] John O’Connor, Shakespearean Afterlives: ten characters with a life of their own, 2003

[9] Rhoda Koenig, Independent, 4.9.2000

[10] Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 4.9.00

[11] Michael Billington, Guardian, 29.3.94

[12] ibid

[13] Jan Kott, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, 1964

[14] Benedict Nightingale, Times, 13.9.97

[15] Rex Gibson, Times Educational Supplement, 19.9.97

[16] Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s, 1997

Othello: Discovering Robeson

At the Shakespeare Institute Library we like to involve all our staff in the production of exhibitions which highlight the breadth and depth of our collections. Our current exhibition on Othello in Performance was a truly collaborative effort. In this blog, Othello; Discovering Robeson, our LSA, Sara Westh captures the wonder of discovering a legend and exploring a period in performance history new to her.

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Photograph from exhibition on Othello in Performance

Not so very long ago, I was told to start work on Paul Robeson for the current Shakespeare Institute Library exhibition on Othello. I had absolutely no idea who Robeson was, but I assumed since the subject was Othello, that he was probably an actor, and probably the lead.
I picked up his autobiography Here I Stand from among the books set aside for exhibtion research, and started reading. He had me at once: “I am a Negro. The house I live in is in Harlem – this city within a city, Negro metropolis of America. And now as I write of things that are urgent in my mind and heart, I feel the press of all that is around me here where I live, at home among my people.” (from the author’s foreword).

Photo shows Harlem in the early 1900’s. Credit: http://www.family-heritage.org

I kept reading through his early years, his awe for his father, the loss of his mother, his love of Harlem, the first time he met his wife, completely forgetting about the tea-break! Robeson was born into segregated America, had lived through hatred most of us find it hard to imagine, and had been outspoken against the ever-present racism of America in the 1890’s. Another biography by Duberman, and very concisely titled Paul Robeson, told me that he had played Othello at the start and end of his Shakespearean career: at the Savoy Theatre in 1930 and at the RSC in 1950. Duberman also supplied some truly captivating behind the scenes stories, that really brought the background to Robeson’s two performances to life, from squabbling between production team and cast in 1930 to pleas and stress in 1950.
What I didn’t know until I discussed my task with the other LSA, Eilis Smyth, was that Robeson was famous for his voice long before he trod the boards. Her response when I looked up from my books for long enough to utter a whole sentence was something close to “Wait. THE Paul Robeson?!” His 1928 rendition of Old Man River in Show Boat defined the song for generations to come – you can listen to it here:

As it turns out, he was the first black performer to sing in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, as well as being the first black actor to play the moor since Ira Aldridge.

Othello, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 1950

Peggy Ashcroft & Paul Robeson, Othello, Savoy Theatre, 1930

The materials carefully collected by the SI Library in their archive, pamphlet and newspaper cuttings collections, along with the extensive RSC Archive held at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust provided the final fleshing out of this 2-decade story. From carefully preserved Savoy theatre programmes to a thick album of production photos and reviews, it all highlighted how the shows had been received, and opened a window to the theatre world of an age ago.

Sara Westh, Library Support Assistant

Bibliography
Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand (New York : Othello Associates, 1958)

Duberman, Martin. Paul Robeson (New York : New Press, 1989)

Hotspur, meet Hotspur! RSC 2014 / Old Vic 1945

The RSC Summer School in August was host to a number of talks on Henry IV and that company’s marvellous productions of parts 1 & 2 which are currently touring the country. The actor playing Hotspur, Trevor White, was informed by Prof. Michael Dobson at a Q&A that the Shakespeare Institute Library held a copy of Laurence Olivier’s script from 1945 when he played Hotspur at The Old Vic. Having been told about Olivier’s performance by Greg Doran, Trevor White was more than keen to have a look at the script. Could we arrange that? Oh yes!

At first glance the Olivier script looks remarkably un-annotated but on closer inspection fascinating details emerge. There are the sketches of the character which Olivier drew.

Sketch from Olivier’s script of himself as Hotspur

The letter ‘w’ is underlined, quite heavily in places. In reviews it states that Olivier stuttered ‘speaking thick’ – it’s obvious on which letter he stuttered. Sometimes there are double-underlinings to indicate the level of impediment. It also becomes evident that when he is in the heat of battle or argument Hotspur gains control of his language with fewer underlinings on the text. When being subdued, for instance, in the scene with his wife, he stutters more. Why the letter ‘w’ – of course, it is the first letter of Percy’s last word which he cannot speak, adding an additional pathos to the death of this charismatic character.

HOTSPUR.   …O, I could prophesy, But that the earthy and cold hand of death Lies on my tongue: no, Percy, thou art dust And food for–

Dies

PRINCE HENRY. For worms, brave Percy: fare thee well, great heart!

It was marvellous to see an actor so engaged in the document of one of his predecessors in the part. Trevor White read, took photos and was excited to see that some of his instincts and movements in the role echoed Olivier’s interpretation, especially in Act II Scene IV and the reading of the letter.

Along with Prof. Dobson we discussed the current staging, especially the breath-taking sword-fight – both he and Alex Hassle were a bit concerned that they’d make it alive to the end of the run! Oliver Ford Davies who plays Shallow in Part 2 also joined us to look at the script along with critic Michael Billington. When Olivier played Hotspur he also doubled as Shallow, something which Trevor White had never been asked to do, he assured his co-actor.

Trevor White commented that he is now looking forward to having a part in which he survives till the end of the play. Maybe a romantic comedy next time!

Boxes of Delight: the SIL Pamphlet collection

When I was asked if I could help re-classify the library’s pamphlet collection little did I realise just what gems we would uncover. The library holds just over 6,000 pamphlets; off-prints from journals, manuscript texts, programmes, unpublished material, magazines and articles, etc. Many of these have been donated to the Library by our users, some of them from academics and enthusiasts and supporters of the Shakespeare Institute Library all over the world. The pamphlet collection also holds a significant amount of material in languages other than English – making cataloguing and classifying a little tricky at times. Dr Martin Wiggins one of the fellows here at the Institute, has saved us many a headache with his knowledge of Greek and Latin – and what better reward for him than to discover some works he did not know the library had which have proved invaluable to his research.

The biggest section of the collection contains theatre programmes of not just the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, the Old Vic and Birmingham Rep for example, but also theatre companies who have performed Shakespeare and Renaissance works around the world. We hold a large number of programmes from Shakespeare festivals both here and abroad, including Stratford Ontario, Dusseldorf, Oregon and Ludlow. In the reclassification project this part of the collection was completed first because of its heavy usage.

Shakespeare in education resources can also be found. If you want to compare how the English Renaissance was taught in schools in previous decades you can discover the joy of the ‘Jackdaw’ folders (so familiar to me from my days in the public library sector). We hold several off these educational packs on topics relevant to the Renaissance period but each pack contains at least 12 separate items, copies of source documents, and of course each needs cataloguing.

It is a mammoth task but as we open each box we begin to realise just what we have and just what treasures the collections hold.

The library’s monthly exhibitions have proved a useful showcase for highlighting the library stock and for most of our exhibitions we have unearthed a little gem to display from the pamphlet collection. One of our first exhibitions was the Jacobean Text exhibition and something that generated great interest was the BBC Radio 3 script from 1973 of Eastward ho! by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, adapted by Peter Barnes.

Daily we see how the collection supports the research of our staff and students. Last Christmas we dug out the 1873 edition of Prof. O. Phelps Brown’s: ‘ Shakespeare Annual Almanac’ for the students on the MA Shakespeare and Creativity course for use in their assessment. This is such a wonderful little treasure which mixes the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet with herbal cures! I have scanned a couple of pages that I’m sure you will find of interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anne Phillips, Information Assistant

The Jasper Britton Script Collection

With Jasper Britton returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company to play the eponymous character in Gregory Doran’s productions of Henry IV, it seems a good time to delve into one of our newest collections in the Shakespeare Institute Library. Our intrepid leader, Karin Brown, is making great strides in expanding the SIL’s special collections, especially those items connected with the performance history of early modern plays. The Jasper Britton Script Collection contains five treasures from four of his Globe and RSC appearances: Macbeth and The Tempest from productions at the former and Gregory Doran’s productions of The Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed from 2003.

Jasper Britton in rehearsal for Henry IV
Photo: Kwame Lestrade

Britton’s association with the RSC begins long before our script collection, having appeared in A Jovial Crew, The Beggar’s Opera, as Meander in Terry Hands’ production of Tamburlaine  (which memorably had Antony Sher climbing up a rope and hanging upside down, just because he could I seem to recall – I’d be surprised if he did that again as Falstaff, although it’d be amusing with him reuinted with Britton in the Henry IVs) and as a Soothsayer in John Caird’s Antony and Cleopatra in the 1992-93 season. The first of Britton’s two ten year gaps between RSC Shakespeare appearances then occurred, during which time he (according to the World Shakespeare Bibliography) played Richard III for Brian Cox at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park in 1995 (incidentally, we also have the Open Air Theatre’s archive collection including material related to Jasper Britton’s Richard III; more of that another time), Theresites in Trevor Nunn’s Troilus and Cressida at the National Theatre in 1999 and Macbeth opposite Eve Best at the Globe in 2001. As a Troilus and Cressida addict, I’d love nothing else but to have a look through the script for that, but alas…

Jasper Britton’s script for Macbeth
The Globe, 2001

No sense in dwelling on what’s missing from Britton’s Shakespearean career, though. What we do have in the Jasper Britton collection is an unadulterated field day for the researcher of contemporary Shakespearean theatre. Unlike promptbooks, which record – with varying degrees of detail depending on the stage manager – the production as set when it reaches the stage, this collection of scripts details the actor’s rehearsal process through a mass of annotations written throughout Britton’s personal copies.

Macbeth, Globe, 2001
Photograph Alastair Muir

The breadth of the comments can be seen on one page of Macbeth in 1.3 just as the witches vanish and leave him alone with Banquo. Next to his line to the Witches, Britton writes: “or witches, what’s in it for you?”; halfway down the page in between Banquo’s “That takes reason prisoner?” and his response, Britton has noted “PAUSE”; and next to Ross’s lines on entry to the scene (“The King hath happily receiv’d, Macbeth”), Britton writes, “Don’t cross legs”. From this one page, we glean a paraphrase, a technical note on line delivery, and a note on the physicality of the character. In other words, a treasure trove of material detailing the process by which Britton has created the character. The snag is having the finished script and not being able to unpack the timeline of the annotations, so we don’t know how this layering developed. What we do know is that it happened, of course, which is extremely valuable to the theatre researcher because so little investigation delves into process.

The Taming of the Shrew
RSC, 2003
Photographer: Jonathan Dockar-Drysdale

The acting process is (to completely simplify something complex) about adding layers to the character in order to create a living, breathing and believable human being from the clues in the text and the imagination of the actor. What Britton’s scripts beautifully capture is the creation of subtext in the margins, providing an insight into the characters Britton built on stage. For The Taming of the Shrew, it is apparent that he was creating a sympathetic character out of what is unrelenting brutality on the page, interpreting Petruchio in a fresh and inventive way against the grain of usual portrayals of the character as a swaggering braggert. Britton’s motivations – as shown in these scripts – are counterintuitive, as with the act four arrival of Kate and Petruchio at the latter’s home. Britton writes on the blank page adjacent to the text in his Applause First Folio edition of the play a note for this scene, saying “All that goes wrong is awful because it’s not good enough for Kate.”  Next to Petruchio’s line “Food, food, food, food!” Britton writes, “Ask for it! – for her – she’s starving,” which again implies his Petruchio is attempting to look after his new bride. Amusingly, Britton’s view of Petruchio as eager to please Kate extends to his dog, as his subtextual note corresponding with “Where’s my spaniel Troilus?” says, “he’s lovely – you’ll love him.” Those of you who are familiar with this scene are possibly shouting at your computer by now and saying what a beast Petruchio is to Kate, making her go to bed starving, picking fights with servants, etc. There’s a subtextual fix for that too as Petruchio is left alone to soliloquize “Thus have I politicly begun my reign” yet he’s thinking – according to Britton’s notes in the margin, “ F***ed that up, didn’t I?” These script annotations reveal an actor who takes risks in making choices by not going for the obvious reading, which translates into a three-dimensional and sympathetic character on the stage, as some reviewers noted:  Susannah Clapp in the Observer noted “Britton’s finely judged Petruchio is no demon: he’s troubled and perplexed” and, similarly, picking up on the fine detail and nuance of Britton’s performance, John Peter in The Times wrote, “His swagger is brilliantly aggressive, but it hides a slight sense of insecurity that makes him human.” The Jasper Britton Script Collection provides a wealth of information about the actor’s thinking about his character and how he created his unconventional reading through thinking clearly about the subtext, marking his thoughts in the margin of his script.

Dr Jami Rogers (Library Support Assistant and alumna of the Shakespeare Institute)

Other actors’ scripts held by the University include those belonging to Samuel West (SIL), Nigel Hawthorne (SIL), Norman Painting (CRL), John Gielgud (CRL), Laurence Olivier (CRL), and Noel Coward (CRL) (SIL – held at the Shakespeare Institute Library, Stratford-upon-Avon / CRL – held at the Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham)

Olivier, Richardson and Henry IV, 1945

Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, two mighty forces in the 20th century theatre performed together in John Burrell’s 1945 Old Vic production of Henry IV Parts One and Two. To mark the opening of new productions of Henry IV by the Royal Shakespeare Company, this month the Shakespeare Institute Library is holding an exhibition on this landmark production featuring Laurence Olivier’s script as Hotspur (held by the Cadbury Research Library).

Sketch from Olivier’s script of himself as Hotspur

These productions were considered by most commentators to be a momentous achievement in the plays performance history. Ralph Richardson as Falstaff disregarded the tradition of playing the character as the personification of lust and gluttony and instead endued him with intelligence and a quick wit. Laurence Olivier with his usual flair and daring took on the roles of Hotspur in Part One and Shallow in Part Two – an unusual double. Olivier’s Hotspur stammered on the letter ‘w’ (stammering Hotspurs had been prevalent from Matheson Lang’s portrayal in 1896 to this point). From hot-tempered rebel leader to subdued and wistful Shallow, his interpretation of both characters was considered a tour de force.

On Falstaff:
… a Falstaff whose principal attribute was not his fatness but his knighthood. He was Sir John first, and Falstaff second… Richardson never rollicked or slobbered or staggered: it was not a sweaty fat man, but a dry and dignified one. As the great belly moved, step following step with great finesse lest it over-topple, the arms flapped fussily at the sides as if to paddle the body’s bulk along. It was deliciously and subtly funny, not riotously so: from his height of pomp Falstaff was chuckling at himself: it was not we alone, laughing at him. (Kenneth Tynan on Ralph Richardson’s Falstaff from He That Plays the King: A View of the Theatre, Longmans, Green & Co., 1950)

On Hotspur:
Laurence Olivier’s Hotspur immediately possesses the audience. Odd, uncouth, now darting of mind and phrase, now almost stammering of speech, sour, fiery – the figure is unforgettable: you watch him at every moment, tenderly domestic, roughly discursive, baiting Glendower, dying with harness on his back and iambics halting his tongue… (Ivor Brown, ‘Theatre and Life’ in The Observer, 30 September, 1945: 2)

 

On Shallow:
As Shallow Laurence Olivier magically transformed from the valiant Hotspur to this rustic “cheese-paring”, acted with a quiet and cheerful senility…
Audrey Williamson, ‘The New Triumvirate (1944-47)’ in her Old Vic Drama: a twelve years’ study of plays and players, Rockliff, 1948: 212)

 

 

 

 

On the orchard scene:
The most treasurable scenes in these two productions were those in Shallow’s orchard: if I had only half an hour more to spend in theatres, and could choose at large, no hesitation but I would have these. Richardson’s performance, coupled with that of Miles Malleson as Silence, beak-nosed, pop-eyed, many-chinned and mumbling, and Olivier as Shallow, threw across the stage a golden autumnal veil, and made the idle sporadic chatter of the lines glow with the same kind of delight as Gray’s Elegy. (Kenneth Tynan, He That Plays the King: A View of the Theatre, Longmans, Green & Co., 1950)

 

Karin Brown, Shakespeare Institute Librarian