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Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide (Methuen Paperback) - Softcover

Barton, John

 
9780385720854: Playing Shakespeare: An Actor's Guide (Methuen Paperback)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385720858 ISBN 13: 9780385720854
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Playing Shakespeare is the premier guide to understanding and appreciating the mastery of the world’s greatest playwright.

Together with Royal Shakespeare Company actors–among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, and David Suchet–John Barton demonstrates how to adapt Elizabethan theater for the modern stage. The director begins by explicating Shakespeare’s verse and prose, speeches and soliloquies, and naturalistic and heightened language to discover the essence of his characters. In the second section, Barton and the actors explore nuance in Shakespearean theater, from evoking irony and ambiguity and striking the delicate balance of passion and profound intellectual thought, to finding new approaches to playing Shakespeare’s most controversial creation, Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice. A practical and essential guide, Playing Shakespeare will stand for years as the authoritative favorite among actors, scholars, teachers, and students.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Barton has been associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for more than thirty-five years and has directed more than fifty productions. He lives in London and conducts Shakespeare workshops throughout the U.K. and the U.S.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Now in its first American edition, Playing Shakespeare" is the premier guide to understanding and appreciating the mastery of the world's greatest playwright.
Together with Royal Shakespeare Company actors-among them Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, and David Suchet-John Barton demonstrates how to adapt Elizabethan theater for the modern stage. The director begins by explicating Shakespeare's verse and prose, speeches and soliloquies, and naturalistic and heightened language to discover the essence of his characters. In the second section, Barton and the actors explore nuance in Shakespearean theater, from evoking irony and ambiguity and striking the delicate balance of passion and profound intellectual thought, to finding new approaches to playing Shakespeare's most controversial creation, Shylock, from The Merchant of Venice. A practical and essential guide, Playing Shakespeare" will stand for years as the authoritative favorite among actors, scholars, teachers, and students.

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part one

Objective Things

chapter one

The Two Traditions

Elizabethan and Modern Acting

[The following actors took part in the program that

forms the basis of this chapter: mike gwilym, sheila hancock,

lisa harrow, alan howard, ben kingsley,

ian mckellen, david suchet.]

Playing Shakespeare. Not reading him or writing about him but playing him. Over a thousand books or articles are written about him every year. In 1980 there were 195 books and 877 articles, many in Japanese. And yet very little is put on paper about how to act him. I think I can guess why. I have been urged to write about this but I have always felt I couldn't do it. I thought that the sort of points that need to be made could only arise truly in the living context of working with actors. On this subject each actor and his experience of acting is worth many books. So what I shall be saying in Playing Shakespeare is by itself worth nothing. It only has value if it comes alive in the performances of living and breathing actors.

The best guide to an actor who wants to play in Shakespeare comes, I think, from Shakespeare himself, who was an actor. Listen to Hamlet's advice to the players. It can't be quoted too often.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus. But use all gently. For in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness . . . Be not too tame neither. But let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature . . . For anything so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as t'were, the mirror up to nature.Hamlet: III:2

I believe that speech goes to the very heart of it. It's one of those utterances which seems a bit simple and limited at first, but if you live with it you will find that it begins to resonate and to open doors. I also believe that in the Elizabethan theater the actors knew how to use and interpret the hidden direction Shakespeare himself provided in his verse and his prose. I believe that the kind of points we shall be making in these workshops work best in the theater, not by a director telling an actor about them but by an actor learning them, largely by experience, and applying them for himself.

There are few absolute rules about playing Shakespeare but many possibilities. We don't offer ourselves as high priests but as explorers or detectives. We want to test and to question. Particularly we want to show how Shakespeare's own text can help to solve the seeming problems in that text. Of course, much of it is instinct and guesswork. We will try to distinguish between what is clearly and objectively so and what is highly subjective. I hope that if I'm too dogmatic the actors will challenge me. I should also make it clear what I'm not talking about. I shall hardly talk at all about directing, and at first I shall try to keep clear of interpretation. We won't talk much about individual characters, and we shall say even less about plays as a whole. We shall simply concentrate on finding out how Shakespeare's text works.

Of course what we say is bound to be personal. We don't believe that there's only one way of tackling Shakespeare. That way madness lies. But out of the infinite number of questions which come up when we work on him we have picked the ones that seem to us the most important at this time. Another actor or another director would rightly stress things differently or violently disagree with us or stress points which we shall leave out. What we say will of course be colored and limited by the fact that we are the products of a particular time. One bit of me is uneasy at holding forth about Shakespeare. I am not a pundit but a man who works in the theater at this moment and I can only talk about what seem to me the main needs and problems at this moment. I am deeply aware that these sessions will probably seem outdated and odd before many years are past. That is the nature of the theater. We can only speak about what we think and feel at this time.

We shall look at many short individual passages, often cut down, from many different plays. I believe they can all make sense out of context and that those who don't know the play in question will still be able to follow quite easily the points we are making. As ever, the audience is quite as important in all this as the actors. If we don't reach our audience we fail. We must make them listen and share and follow the story. But above all, listen. It's so easy for an audience not to listen, particularly with a knotty and difficult text. I may be cynical but I don't believe most people really listen to Shakespeare in the theater unless the actors make them do so. I certainly don't. I know that it's too easy for me to get the general gist and feeling of a speech, but just because I get the gist I often don't listen to the lines in detail. Not unless the actors make me. What I want to explore are the ways in which they can achieve that.

But you may say, "All that's very fine, but what's so difficult about acting Shakespeare? What's the problem?" Or indeed "Is there a problem?" Well, yes, I believe that there is. Two things need to come together and they won't do so without a lot of hard work and much trial and error. First, there's Shakespeare's text written at a particular time and for particular actors:

Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads,

Stain all your edges on me. 'Boy'! False hound!

If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there

That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles.

Alone I did it. 'Boy'!Coriolanus: V.6.

Secondly there are the actors today with their modern habit of mind and their different acting tradition, based on the kind of text that they're more used to:

len: (Mike Gwilym): 'S great 'ere.

pam: (Lisa Harrow): What?

len: Why did you pick me up like that?

pam: Why?

len: Yeh.

pam: Sorry, then?

len: Tell us.

pam: 'Ow many girls you 'ad?

len: No, I tol' yer my life.

pam: 'Old on.

len: What?

pam: Yer got a spot.

len: Where?

pam: 'Old still.

len: Is it big?

pam: 'Old still.

len: Go easy.

(She bursts the spot on his neck.)

pam: Got it!

len: Ow!Saved by Edward Bond

Well, there we are. The two chief ingredients with which we start rehearsals are Shakespeare's text and a group of modern actors who work mostly on modern plays. How do the two come together? Let's start with the second as the more accessible. Our tradition is based more than we are usually conscious of on various modern influences like Freud and television and the cinema and, above all, the teachings of the director and actor, Stanislavsky. I suspect he works on us all the time, often without us knowing it. So let's ask ourselves what are the most important things in an actor's mind as he begins work on a modern text. No, any text. What are the most important things to go for?

David Suchet: We might do worse than start with something Stanislavsky wrote: "If you speak any lines or do anything mechanically without fully realizing who you are, where you come from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination."

Ben Kingsley: Or, to put it in our own words, what is our motivation, our objective or our aim or our intention? We use lots of words for...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385720858
ISBN 13 
9780385720854
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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Verantwortliche Person
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