NEW SITES FOR SHAKESPEARE

New Sites for Shakespeare argues that our understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare is
limited by the kinds of theatre we have seen. On repeated visits to Asia, John Russell Brown
sought out forms of performances which were new to him, and found that he had gained a
fresh and exciting view of the theatre for which Shakespeare wrote. New Sites for Shakespeare
shares these extraordinary journeys of discovery.
This fascinating study pays close attention to particular theatre productions and
performances in Japan, Korea, China, Bali, and especially India. The book is divided into
separate chapters which consider staging, acting, improvisation, ceremonies, and ritual. The
reaction of audiences and their interaction with actors are shown to be crucial factors in these
theatrical experiences.
Bringing to bear his background as theatre director, critic, and scholar, the author considers
current productions in Europe and North America, in the light of his insights into Asian
theatre. Ultimately this book calls for radical change in how we stage, study, and read
Shakespeare’s plays today.

Theatre writer and director, John Russell Brown was an Associate Director of the National
Theatre, London for fifteen years and has taught at various universities in the UK and US. He
is currently Consultant to the School of Drama at Middlesex University.
NEW SITES FOR
SHAKESPEARE

Theatre, the audience and Asia

John Russell Brown

London and New York

 First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, NewYork, NY 10001

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.

© 1999 John Russell Brown

The right of John Russell Brown to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-415-19450-4 (pbk)

ISBN 0-415-19449-0 (hbk)
ISBN 0-203-03045-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17546-8 (Glassbook Format)
 CONTENTS

List of Plates vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

PART I
Visiting 5
1 Open Stages: presence and occasion 7
2 Audiences: on stage and off stage 29
3 Ritual: action and meaning 43
4 Ceremony: behaviour and reception 53
5 Performance: imagination and involvement 71
6 Improvisation: freedom and collusion 91
7 Response: actors and audiences 103
8 Settings: actors and stages 121

PART II
Returning 137
9 Criticism: texts and study 139
10 Control: directors and companies 144
11 Scenography: theatres and design 162
12 Actors: training and performance 173

Forward prospect 190

Notes 200
Index 206

v
 P L AT E S

1.1 Jatra actors prepare backstage 8

1.2 Jatra actors ready for cross-gender roles 8
1.3 The stage crowded for a dance by Jatra actors at the beginning
of an evening’s entertainment 11
1.4 A Jatra actor makes an exit 19
1.5 The stage-manager’s and control position behind a Jatra stage 23
2.1 Preparations for a cremation on Bali 30
2.2 A cremation procession on Bali 31
2.3 The crowd around a pyre on Bali 32
4.1 The central character supported by members of the chorus in
Waiting for Romeo 57
4.2 Ceremonial dance in a production of King Lear 58
4.3 Clear and energetic acting in The Prisoner of Zenda 68
5.1 Kutiyattam performance; Margi Madhu as Ravana in Himakaram 73
5.2 Kutiyattam performance; Margi Madhu as Arjuna in Subhadra
Dhananjyan 77
5.3 Ammannur Kochukuttan Chakyar Madhu (Margi Madhu) 78
7.1 An onnagata performer; Tokicho as the wife of a warrior,
rehearsing at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, August 1977 113
8.1 Shang Changrong in the title role of King Qi’s Dream (based
on King Lear) 130
8.2 Shang Changrong, actor; photographed during a break in rehearsal 131
8.3 Folk dance in Seoul 133

vii
 ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

My debts to others while writing this book are huge and numerous; I could have done very
little alone. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, I enjoyed the help of students,
friends, and colleagues, especially Erik Fredricksen, the Chairman of the Theatre Department,
P.A. Skantze, who commented on a first version, and all those students who enabled me to
put what I was learning into practice in a series of productions that included plays by
Chekhov, Farquhar, Goldoni, Mamet, Racine, and Shakespeare, and the première of Blue, by
Surrena Goldsmith. The University’s various grant-giving committees in the Theatre
Department, the School of Music, the School of Graduate Studies, and the Office of the Vice-
Provost for Research contributed generously to my expenses. At Middlesex University, I am
indebted to Leon Rubin who showed me how to use the opportunities of travel and with
whom I could talk through my adventures.
Away from home, I owe a very special debt to Ram Gopal Bajaj who invited me to teach
and direct at the National School of Drama, New Delhi. I am most grateful for his generous
help, and that of his colleagues, students, and many friends, during those months. My
thanks are also due to Vicki Ooi for inviting me to contribute to a Conference on Asian
Performing Arts, to King-fai Chung and Fredric Mao for two invitations to work with actors
at the Academy of Performing Arts in Hong Kong, and to the Japan Foundation in Tokyo and
London for generous assistance at all times.
Several critics and friends have encouraged and helped me as the book was being
written: Robert Weimann by his careful response to early versions of several key chapters;
Dennis Kennedy by reading and commenting on an early draft and inviting me to Trinity
College, Dublin; A.K. Thorlby by meticulously annotating the same draft and helping me
to consider the wider implications of my theme; and Talia Rodgers whose work as editor
at Routledge has not only guided and supported this publication but provided inspiration
to many besides myself who try to write about theatre and performance. I am deeply
grateful for all this help.

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To numerous editors, I am indebted for publishing several articles which were, in effect,
preparations for writing this book: ‘Acting Shakespeare’, Shakespeare from Text to Stage
(Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1993), ‘Jatra Theatre and
Elizabethan Dramaturgy’, ‘Representing Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Plays’, and ‘Theatrical
Pillage in Asia’, New Theatre Quarterly (1994, 1997, 1998), ‘Shakespeare, Theatre Production,
and Cultural Politics’, Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
and ‘Theatrical Tourism’ in Journal of Literature & Aesthetics (Kollam, Kerala; 1997). I am
grateful for permission to use later developments of material from these publications. I have
also drawn upon passages in ‘Back to Bali’, originally published in The Critical Gamut:
Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage, ed. Enoch Brater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1995).
On my travels I found help and friendship on all hands: more especially, in Japan, from
Takahashi Yasunari, Suzuki Tadashi, Ninagawa Yukio, Wayne Silka, and Kondo Hiro, together
with the helpful officers of the Japan Foundation; in Korea, from O Tae-suk and Kim Su-gi;
in China, from Luo Jian Fan, Rong Guang Run, and Chang Shu; in Bali, from A. Badra and
I.B. Alit. My indebtedness in India is particularly extensive: in Calcutta, to Pratibha Agrawal,
Samik Bandyopadhyay, and Usha Ganguli; in Orissa, to Byomakesh, Biswakesh, and
Byotakesh Tripathy; in Kerala, to K.N. Panikkar and K.A. Paniker; in Bangalore, to Arundhati
Raja, Girish Karnad, B. Jayashree, B.V. Karanth, and Sunder Raj; in Bombay, to Feroz Khan,
Rajeev Naik, and Shata Gokhle; and during an early visit to New Delhi, to Smita Nirula and
Balwart Gargi.
In these many ways, my book has had many contributors and its merits will be in large
part due to them; its faults and failures, likely to be numerous when working with such a
wide perspective, are very much my own.
While preparing this book for the printer, I have been greatly helped by Tom Keever at
Columbia University, New York, and by Jason Arthur and Ian Critchley at Routledge; I am
most grateful.
Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from Peter Alexander’s edition of 1951, unless
otherwise noted.
John Russell Brown,
Court Lodge, Hooe.

x
 INTRODUCTION

Over the course of more than six years I have been able to visit theatres in Asia that were
almost entirely new to me. Previously, I had seen productions which had toured Europe or
North America, but I had seen none playing in their own theatres and to their own audiences.
What had started almost by chance continued as a determined quest, for I not only enjoyed
many of the plays I saw in Japan, Korea, China, and various states of India, but I found that
my view of what theatre was capable of being in our present age was changing with each
successive visit. In particular – and this is the main focus of this book – my understanding of
Shakespeare’s plays and how best they can be studied and staged was also changing. Some
previous ideas were strengthened or modified, but I was seeing other elements in the texts as
if for the first time and making better sense of what is generally known about the theatre of
Shakespeare’s day. I was also developing plans for productions I could never have imagined
until I had visited Asia.
At the start of my explorations, I went to Japan more often than any other country.
Traditional forms of theatre are honoured and protected there and many entirely new plays
are written and produced for crowded young audiences. Besides, other critics and scholars
had already made similar journeys and written about relationships between Shakespeare’s
theatre and the traditions of No, Kabuki, and Bunraku so that help was at hand wherever I
travelled. Latterly, however, I have visited India more often than anywhere else. Its traditional
theatres are not run in such authoritarian ways as the Japanese, and many of them play to
much wider audiences than the retirees, schoolchildren, sponsored parties, and tourists I
have sat amongst in Tokyo and Kyoto. Theatre in parts of India can still be genuinely
popular, with audiences drawn from almost all sections of a community. Traditions are
varied and contemporary plays, while lacking the evident success of the Japanese, show a
determination to experiment and pursue forms suitable for the present time. To visit India in
search of new theatre experiences is to enter a world with a great inheritance and where the
future is being confronted with open minds as well as respect for the past.
I travelled elsewhere, too, throughout the 1990s, to China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia,
Bali, and numerous parts of Europe and North America. All these journeys have helped me
to write this book but they have not turned me into an authority on any of the theatres I have
visited away from home. I hope to raise interest in those I write about, but I have not
attempted, after less than ten years of travel, to write a scholarly introduction to any one of

1
 INTRODUCTION

them. Still less have I attempted to make a comparative study of various cultures: I do not
possess the languages or life-experiences that would permit a first footing into that difficult
and most interesting field of study. It will also be evident very quickly that I do not presume
to be a theatre anthropologist and am not, in this book, concerned with systematic descriptions
of performance. What is on offer is an attempt to share my own experiences in the theatres
I visited for the first time using the terms I am accustomed to at home, and to show how this
has influenced my thinking and practice with regard to theatre in general and to Shakespeare’s
plays in particular.
By centring this study on my own experiences I have forfeited a great deal of the support
that most writers about theatre and Shakespeare derive from working within a reassuring
network of other people’s scholarship and theorising. I have, of course, read all that I could
find in English about the theatres I have seen and wearied the experts I met with my
questions, but comparatively little of this will be seen in this book. My subject leads me to
deal with imprecise and personal impressions as much as facts, and the facts that I do relate
are more important here for how they were perceived than for themselves as observed
objectively and scientifically. I have willingly, and not ignorantly, worked in this way because
theatre’s essential life lies in the imaginations of audiences, not in playscripts or what
happens on stage. If we are to rate its successes and try to understand its processes, we must
deal in terms of an audience’s experience and, in this case, my own response must stand in for
those of many others.
This book will not, therefore, be rigorous and thorough in the customary ways of
scholarship. It will convince only by its own story and the telling of it. Writing about theatre
calls for such risks. As Marvin Carlson has warned: ‘Performance by its nature. . .resists the
sort of definitions, boundaries, and limits so useful to traditional academic writing and
academic structures.’1 I am here trying to bring to Shakespeare studies the same experiential
understanding that others have begun to use when writing about theatre.
I have chosen to focus on Shakespeare because that is where my thoughts repeatedly led
me. His plays are at the centre of most of the European and North American theatres that I
know and in which I have worked. As they attract each new generation of actors, directors,
writers, and audiences, they have remained a constant touchstone for innovation and have
sometimes provided a model. I have found that they have the same value when trying to
understand theatre history and observing how any theatre functions. Indeed, wherever I
travelled, Shakespeare seemed to have been there before me. Much that was new to me I
found out subsequently was already implicit in the ways he had written. Indeed, knowledge
of his plays helped me to grasp the fleeting impressions that were exciting my imagination.
Today most theatres in Europe and North America occupy only a part of the spectrum
of what theatre can be and we have become so used to accepting this that, without thinking

2
 INTRODUCTION

about the process, we view Shakespeare’s plays through this distorting filter. If we are to
understand Shakespeare more fully and develop a theatre to meet the unfamiliar challenges of
a very new age, we need to gain knowledge of those parts of the spectrum of theatre that have
been forgotten or ignored in practice and in criticism.

3
 Part I

VISITING
 1

OPEN STAGES
Presence and occasion

Thinking of Shakespeare’s plays in performance in his own times, we tend to visualise the
Globe Theatre with its massy wooden and encircling walls, a storeyed background for a
platform stage set against one side of its interior. All too often, for lack of the real thing, this
theatre is, in our mind’s eye, an empty model, a toy-like replica rather than the full-sized
version with an actual audience. We have an even less distinct notion of the smaller Blackfriars
Theatre which had come into use around 1610 when Shakespeare began to withdraw from
London and the writing of plays. A visit to the full-sized Globe replica in London will not
completely correct these mental images because Shakespeare’s plays were not always
performed in the London theatres. They were also to be seen at court, fitting as best they
could into a banqueting hall, and were performed up and down the country in guildhalls,
market-places, inns, and the comparatively small halls of colleges, schools, or country
houses, almost anywhere that could hold an audience and provide an acting-space. The
Chamberlain’s Men and later the King’s were often travelling, carrying along a few of their
most popular plays and using the minimum number of larger stage properties.
London theatres were outstanding and upstanding buildings (to judge from perspective
drawings made of London at that time) and were said to be ‘of notable beauty’: not seen as
the hand-crafted, eloquently simple structure that has risen on the South Bank in London
but, to Elizabethan eyes, magnificent, sumptuous, and gorgeous playhouses painted to catch
the eye with simulated splendour. The plays were very much at home there, since the senior
actor-sharers of the King’s Men were part-owners of the theatre as well as the acting
company, but in performance they often had to survive in very different circumstances, on
makeshift stages and often at short notice, before crowds who were witnessing an exceptional
occurrence, as part of a small repertoire of well-tested plays which could draw their properties
and costumes out of the same portable kit. These were not cut-down versions of the plays,
as used to be thought: a full company would travel and the playing-time seems to have been
as lengthy as it was in London.1

7
 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

Plate 1.1 Jatra actors prepare backstage; for a performance by Orissa Opera at Puri, Orissa
Photograph: Biswakesh Tripathy

Plate 1.2 Jatra actors ready for cross-gender roles; for a performance by Orissa Opera at
Puri, Orissa
Photograph: Biswakesh Tripathy

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 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

With these thoughts in mind, I was quick to take the opportunity to see Orissa Opera, a
Jatra (or ‘touring’) theatre, when it was performing at Puri, a place of pilgrimage near the
coast, south-west of Calcutta and north of Madras.2 The company was in town for a little
over a week and its members had spent the first day setting up their gear on a raised stage
under a great temporary awning supported on long bamboos lashed together. The site was
just off the broad main street, at once an approach to the Juggernauts’ temple and a busy
concourse and market-place. That night I was amongst an audience of three or four thousand
to watch a performance which started about 11.30 p.m. and finished around 6.30 in the
morning, after the sun had risen. Spectators were mostly male and mostly under the age of
thirty or so, although there were some groups of women and mixed company. Just in front
of me sat a three-generation family, grandmother and mother taking turns to hold the youngest
child and deal with a son of about seven who would fall asleep and then wake and struggle to
follow the play. Tea, coffee, breads, nuts, and other refreshments were brought round for
purchase from time to time. Here was a well-run and commercially successful theatre company
with a ‘popular’ audience, as at the Globe, and an auditorium as temporary as those of an
Elizabethan touring circuit. I had found a new setting in which to imagine Shakespeare’s
plays in performance and since that time it comes to my mind whenever I re-read the texts.

* * *

I had seen Jatra performances before on video,3 but that was no preparation for the actual
experience of sitting amongst the crowd surrounding this open stage. The entertainment
started with songs and dances and a short play with a good deal of music, singing, and
elaborate costumes. The long rows of chairs filled gradually, and yet still more people were
moving around or standing in the aisles. After about an hour and a half, the main offering of
the night began. It was a new play about contemporary life and was received warily at first,
as if it were on trial, but by three o’clock in the morning the audience began to join in, not so
much with applause as with encouragement: jeers and occasional laughter – never very
prolonged – and sometimes intense silence. Individuals would shout out their advice or
warnings about impending danger.
One feature of the play which was being performed was quickly apparent. Although I
knew no word of the language, I could hear that its text was very repetitive. The same things
were said again and again, three or even four times, until the audience would know what was
coming. This knowledge encouraged some of the spectators to shout out to hurry on the
characters in the play; others began to say key words, joining in with the actors. A more
general response was a kind of indulgence: satisfied that it knew what was happening, the

9
 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

audience was happy to watch and observe how everything happened, how each character in
turn was affected, how some new incident modified what had already been said and done.
Seldom was anything rushed and so the audience had time to exchange opinions without
fearing that the play would leave them too far behind. The actors, having to hold or regain
attention, were always finding new resources or new tricks whenever the text of the play
was not doing this work for them: repetition both enlarged and clarified performance.
I do not mean that the four-hour play engrossed the audience all the time. Around four-
thirty in the morning, the episodes of its story seemed to follow each other with determination
rather than sprightly invention. Yet this phase passed and, towards the end with the coming
of dawn, the audience was roused anew to greet large scenes of reconciliation and celebration
with satisfied applause; the play was moving now at a slower pace as each resolution of the
plot was clearly marked. The conclusion was received as if everyone had completed a
physically taxing job together and in good form. By this time, the actors might be said to be
sharing the play with the audience, and the other way about: both actors and audience had
made it all happen. No great applause greeted the actual conclusion; it was taken as if for
granted with a somewhat tired satisfaction. The crowd then relaxed, packed up their
belongings, stretched their legs, and prepared unhurriedly to leave and rejoin their daily lives.
Handling the large audience was a crucial part of the whole enterprise. The dramatist
had had to judge when it would be ready for a new initiative or for a resolution of conflict.
The actors, surrounded on three sides of the stage, had to be constantly aware of their
supporters and their critics, so that they responded to the crowd’s silences as well as its
impatience or its hectorings and encouragements. The audience’s response is so important
to this company that the next day’s play is not chosen until the one being played has
almost reached its end and the mood of the crowd has been judged; then an announcement
is made saying what will be on offer if they come back tomorrow. A couple of songs from
this new attraction are played on the sound system, as if trailers for a forthcoming film.
This performance in Puri both unsettled some of my assumptions about English theatre
at the end of the sixteenth century and seemed to explain some anomalies. For example, the
way in which the play was written to encourage this audience’s active participation in the
unfolding of events could explain why an Elizabethan theatre, in contrast to those of our
own day, always took more money when it offered an entirely new and unknown play,
whoever had written it. On those days, it now seems to me, the audience would have been
happy to enjoy a more active role, the actors being more open to its encouragement or
censure; there would have been more enjoyable risk on both sides. Another example of the
rethinking which followed this performance at Puri concerns the Elizabethan practice of
concluding performances in public theatres with a grotesque dance,

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 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

Plate 1.3 The stage crowded for a dance by Jatra actors at the beginning of an evening’s
entertainment; performed by the Orissa Opera at Puri, Orissa
Photograph: Biswakesh Tripathy

called a jig. The custom makes more sense having seen how long it took for this auditorium
to empty, everyone filing out through the single narrow gateway which had controlled entry
more than six hours earlier. As this was happening, some songs and dances were performed
to amuse those who could not make a swift departure. However much the play had pleased,
this audience still had to be watched and provided for.
Dramaturgically, the performance also made good Elizabethan sense. Repetition of certain
phrases in Shakespeare’s early history plays could work on an audience in the same way as
the Jatra repetitions. In the first scene of Henry the Sixth, Part Three, ‘resign’, ‘crown’,
‘throne’, ‘come, . . .away!’ sound repeatedly, bell-strokes that the audience comes to expect.
What I had not realised before was that this would alter the audience’s relationship to the
play’s characters: no longer surprising spectators, or keeping them waiting, or intriguing
them, but laying the characters wide open for the audience to urge them on. Repetition I now
saw as a means of drawing the audience in so that it would participate in the play’s action.
Richard the Third is particularly full of repetition, between the women, for example:

— . . .Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him;

Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill’d him.

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 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

— I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him;

I had a Rutland too, thou holp’st to kill him.
— Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard killed him.
(IV.iv.40ff.)

Later, the Ghosts who appear before the Battle of Bosworth conclude their curses on
Richard with ‘Despair and die!’ and most of their blessings on Richmond with ‘Live and
flourish!’ (V.iii.120–64). Often the audience will know what to expect and, at Puri, they
would have joined in, as a free and willing chorus in support. The effect of all these repetitions
on a Jatra audience might well include that impression of formal ordering which strikes a
reader of the text today, but it would also alter the relationship between stage and auditorium.
Free to share in the making of the performance, audience members might join together in
competitive outcry, or register the absurdity, as well as the force, of the play’s dynastic
power struggles, or share with the persons in the play a sense of inevitability and so watch
more helplessly.
Once I had seen that repetition gives scope for audiences to respond as they see fit and
so their take part in the making of a play, I found that Shakespeare had used it in many
different ways. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, Capulet, Paris, Lady Capulet, and the
Nurse repeat their various cries several times: ‘O woe. . .O day. . .O love. . .O child. . .’
(IV.v.50–62) and Friar Laurence, in the last scene, tells his part the story which the theatre
audience knows very well by this time. The repetitions in both these incidents are often
reduced in number for modern productions and sometimes whole speeches are cut; the
audience knows that the cries of grief are unnecessary and it hears nothing new from the
Friar. But in Puri they would have served an essential purpose in helping the audience to stay
ahead of the fateful story and, in these instances perhaps, encourage them to feel superior to
the persons in the play, to stand back from the characters’ responses and view them more
adversely than they would otherwise. In this way, repetition can alter the effect of what the
actors do by empowering the audience to believe it might have done better and allowing the
expression of that judgement. In response, the actors would have to fight against this
disapproval and possible rejection.
In King John, the Bastard’s comic reiteration of Constance’s mockery of Austria for
wearing a lion’s hide on his back, would have had the Puri audience joining in with the
mockery, taunting him with each repetition: ‘And hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs’
(III.i.129–34, 220, 298–9). But later in the same play, Shakespeare used a simpler, far less
confident repetition to show a depth of feeling which the speaker cannot adequately express.
The King repeats the Messenger’s news in the fewest words sometime after he has heard it:

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 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

‘What! mother dead!’ (IV. ii.127) and then, fifty lines later, ‘My mother dead!’ (IV.ii.180).
These repetitions may well, like others, draw the audience into the character’s thought and
feelings but, because they are unexpected and seemingly unwilled, they will draw attention
to what lies hidden, rather than making the audience feel superior to the character or confident
in knowledge of what is happening. Here repetition at first sets a challenge for the audience’s
understanding and then offers opportunity to confirm what has been sensed.
Some scenes whose effectiveness has seldom been questioned may be revalued if repetition
is considered in the light of Jatra techniques. Young Arthur’s repetitive ingenuity when he
pleads for Hubert’s pity in King John (IV.i.9–121) or Bassanio’s when he chooses the correct
casket in The Merchant of Venice (III.ii.73–107 and 114–29) may be designed as much to
encourage audience-participation as to reveal the speaker’s state of mind and the dynamics
of the dramatic situation. In Hamlet at the close of the Closet scene (III.iv), the five repetitions
of ‘Good night, mother’, with only slight variations, are usually taken as indicating an
intellectually or passionately tormented mind, as if a deeply insecure Hamlet were reaching
for the security of an earlier relationship or stumbling in what most deeply concerns him, and
perhaps recognising this progressively with each repetition. I now think these repetitions
were Shakespeare’s way of encouraging the audience to feel fully at one with the hero at this
crucial moment by giving them opportunities to share in a certainty which is new to him and
to realise, unmistakably, that he now feels free to leave his mother and devote himself to
further action against the king. The same technique may be at work in the repeated ‘To a
nunnery’ in the crucial scene with Ophelia (III.i). Wherever repetition is found in Shakespeare’s
plays, an experience of the Jatra audience has led me to look for the way in which the author
wished to affect the audience–stage relationship, either to draw spectators in to take part in
the speaker’s thoughts and feelings or to encourage their critical judgement about them.
The slow ending of a Jatra play, in which each element of the story comes to its almost
expected conclusion and the audience has ample time to take notice and respond, is very
unlike the way we expect plays to conclude in our theatres and here, too, this Indian practice
may be closer to Shakespeare’s. The Friar’s summary of past events in Romeo and Juliet has
already been mentioned: Burgundy’s account of the despoiled land of France in the last scene
of Henry the Fifth (V.ii.23–67); the speeches and song at Hero’s monument in Much Ado
About Nothing (the whole of V.iii); Touchstone’s disquisitions on lies and quarrels at the end
of As You Like It (V.iv.62–101); the entry of the Ambassadors with Fortinbras at the end of
Hamlet – and even the entry of Fortinbras himself – all these are parts of Shakespeare’s
conclusions which are not necessary to give plot-information or mark character-development
and, not surprisingly, they have frequently been cut in the productions of post-Shakespearian
theatres. In the original performances, however, they may all have helped to give the audience

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a sense that they had thoroughly assimilated the stories’ endings and that there was time to
look around and stretch themselves, mentally and physically, free from a climactic excitement.
By slowing up the conclusions and so preventing the most intense reactions to it,
Shakespeare was inviting the audience to enter into its multifaceted events. With repetition
and the introduction of unnecessary business – the bringing on stage of the bodies of
Goneril and Regan – the last scene of King Lear has been considered too slow-moving
for twentieth-century audiences and it is always cut to some extent for performance,
sometimes by more than a hundred lines.4 The differences between the Quarto and Folio
texts show that Shakespeare’s handling of the conclusion was questionable from the
very start of the play’s history.
The end of Othello has many different devices to draw an audience into the action and
encourage a quite unusual intimacy. The repetitions of Desdemona’s reveries and singing in
IV.iii give access, in the stillness, to the mood in which she prepares for bed at Othello’s
request. Repetitions occur several times in his opening soliloquy of the last scene: ‘It is the
cause. . . .Put out the light. . . .One more. . .’ – each said three times. They hold him still, as
it were, for the audience’s comprehension and invite empathy or judgement. In the subsequent
duologue, repetition occurs still more rapidly, as in Othello’s ‘take heed, take heed. . .’ or
Desdemona’s ‘I never did. . .never loved. . .never gave. . .never gave. . .’; and also in
Desdemona’s:

And yet I fear you: . . .

Why I should fear I know not,
Since guiltiness I know not; but yet I feel I fear.
(II. 40–2)

If the play were performed on an open stage, the audience sharing much the same light as the
actors, a bewildering, appalling, and yet delicate ending would have to take its own time,
moving in accord with the audience’s reactions on that particular occasion. The effect would
be protected and shepherded by the actors by the simplest of means compatible with the
highly charged situation.
In Puri, the forward pull of the performance was often allowed to go slack, so that the
audience could take its own time and make its own decisions. Jatra’s customary pace and
style allow spectators that freedom and so, as Dhiren Hash says in Jatra, The People’s
Theatre of Orissa (Bhubaneswar, 1981), ‘Spectator’s participation is an every-day affair’
(p. 8). The Jatra audience is encouraged by playtexts and performances to give themselves
wholly to the experience and sometimes seem about to take possession of the occasion.
Sitting in that audience, I came to feel that the audiences for Shakespeare in our theatres are
kept too much in thrall to the excitement of moments and encouraged too consistently to

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wait for some conclusive revelation or stage effect. When reading Shakespeare’s texts and
recalling Jatra performances, I wonder whether I allow sufficient scope to my own personal
responses and reflections upon the action that is unfolding in my mind’s eye. If the plays
were written to make room for the entry and expression of our own convictions, then we
should consider them as a site for collusion and remaking, rather than for meaningful shows,
political statements, or the development and exposure of particular feelings. These playtexts
do not exist entirely in their own right. We have more than a right to reinterpret: this is an
invitation to take part in performance, with the possibility of taking it over and changing
what is received. I take this to be a momentous distinction, that I may have sensed previously
but without realising its far-reaching consequences.
Although used to performer–audience interplay in public political meetings, gospel services
and sermons, stand-up comedy, communal music-making, and some party games, possessive
intervention and mutual collusion during performance of a scripted play are not familiar in
Europe and North America. Recognising the validity of this degree of interaction will entail a
shift in our understanding of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays were expected to function.

* * *

Second to the audience, the actors were the most striking feature of the night’s entertainment.
The play was Ramesh Panigrahi’s Majhi Naire Ghorea, or The House in Mid-river, a
contemporary work about contemporary people and events. What happened on stage was
immediately recognisable by the audience: what was spoken echoed their own talk and
concerns; the clothes worn by the characters were the same as they wore. But the play was
not altogether life-like: the people on stage were grander; not pompous or remote, but
remarkable, resourceful, dynamic. The clothes they wore were new and bright; their actions
and speech decisive. Whatever these characters did, they did fearlessly and completely. Not
all the actors were equally skilled, but that was not hidden; it was all part of the variegated
liveliness of performance. On the square platform set up in the middle of the audience, the
actors were on display on all sides and, in order to present their characters, they had to exert
and, even, flaunt themselves.
The long speeches and the occasionally protracted stage-business of the plays I have
seen could only be played by actors able to hold attention and this, according to published
accounts, is true of all good Jatra performers. According to Balwant Gargi’s Folk Theater of
India (second edition; Calcutta, 1991):

A Jatra actor can be recognized by the way he stands – a tilted tower. He does not
hold himself back but throws his weight forward. Passionate, charged with energy,

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he explodes into fiery dialogue. He moves like a tornado in the small arena. In spite
of continuous action, he has a firm grip on the ground.
(p. 11)

The Jatra actor has a sense of composition and speech delivery. He is superbly
aware of the four-sided audience and is sturdily graceful from all angles. There is
speed, action, flamboyance. Sharp turns in mood, abrupt flares and sudden drops
in pathos are underlined by orchestra. Drums clatter and thump and rumble.
(p. 20)

Dhiren Hash is unequivocally partisan and takes the power of Jatra for granted. He stresses
simplicity and popular brashness in performance, while at the same time claiming an
educational importance:

The production style of the Jatra of Orissa is absolutely simple with the acting
area (stage) in the centre with spectators all around it. . . .With stylised gaits,
ornate costumes, tuneful traditional music, plenty of dances, songs, conflicts and
humour, Jatra of Orissa has remained not only a mere place of entertainment but
also an essential institution for learning for the people in general.
(Op. cit., pp. 8–9)

Jatra dramaturgy has been developed to draw upon and encourage this strong style of
performance. The play I saw at Puri presented a narrative with several strands competing
for attention, with each of the leading characters given a series of scenes in which to shine
and hold attention. In brief, the story told about a family and, more especially, its younger
generation. Ambition, greed, love, and pleasure were the motives in incidents involving
danger, deceit, drugs, drink, sharp business practice, and gangster violence. Halfway through,
when everyone came on stage dressed for a grand wedding, it seemed that the play was
about to conclude, but the father, who had got into debt, was now in prison and another
two hours were used to bring him back to the family. Time was also needed for another
wedding to be prepared and for his daughter to become a police officer. The story was
handled so that it provided a series of conflicts which pitted the characters against one
another in vigorous argument or in more physical combat using a wide variety of weapons,
from fists to revolvers and whips. The scenes seldom presented large-scale engagements,
but usually set one character against another, or one against two or three. While the
lengthy narrative had similarities with soap-opera television, the stand-offs, the constant

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testing of strength, and the exposure of everyone on stage to unrestricted scrutiny, gave
rise to a very different experience for the audience. The stage looked like a boxing-ring and
very often it was used like one to present a series of bouts which tested the mettle of all
the characters in turn and the skill of all the actors.
Soliloquies are common in Jatra. They bring no lessening of dramatic interest but, rather,
a heightening as if the audience knew that a secret was about to be shared. The active
attention of three or four thousand people would be concentrated on the single actor, seen
without visual distraction: in rare silence, he will hold attention by what his character says
and, through the eye of that needle, draw the thread of the dramatic action carefully and
cleanly. Everything in these moments is dependent on dramatist, actor, and audience working
together. By their means, each character at Puri had the chance to establish an independent
point of view as every member of the cast had a solo-spot. On video, I have seen how a Jatra
drunkard, after being reviled by everyone he had encountered, was given a soliloquy in which
he has the pleasure of explaining why he drinks and will not stop doing so. I was reminded
of Falstaff holding forth about Honour.
In comparison with its frequency in Jatra, soliloquy is a rare feature in the texts of
Shakespeare’s plays, but not the concentrated focus on single characters on which the
device depends. Their common reliance on strong and assertive acting can be seen in the
treatment of entries and exits. No matter what is going forward on the Jatra stage, attention
is drawn to whichever character is arriving or departing. Access to a Jatra stage is by means
of two long gangways leading at either side from the actors’ dressing-room. In between
these, a large area is occupied by a band of some fifteen players and a smaller one, closer
to the stage, by the stage manager and technicians. On the way to the stage and dividing
these two lower positions, the gangways are joined to form a small secondary stage on
which short scenes can be acted by characters in the process of making their entries or exits
(see p. 18). For smaller Jatra companies, a single Puspa Patha, or entrance passage, runs at
ground level until it approaches the stage by a number of steps. Whichever configuration
is used, these pathways ensure that each character has to make a lengthy entry or departure
and so can hold focus for a considerable time on his or her own terms and can be appreciated
independently of whoever occupies the main stage.
On video I have seen a Jatra actor playing a queen and mother take about five minutes
to make her way to the dressing-room while her children remain on the main stage. About
to move down the Puspa Patha, she stood still and alone, weeping with heaving breast, her
gestures alternately expressing encouragement for her children and grief for herself. She
stopped again a little further down the pathway, out of communication with the main
stage, to soliloquise with tears flowing in unreal quantities. I had thought this must be part
of some ceremonial of departure appropriate for the ancient setting of this drama or that
the actor was milking the moment or teasing the audience, but exits and entries were just

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Plan of a Jatra stage, as used at Puri by Orissa Opera, November 1992
 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

as prolonged in the contemporary play at Puri and were supported by music and special
lighting effects. Here I was also aware of the active attention of the audience which explained
for me how pausing while making an entry had the effect of a camera close-up and was an
opportunity especially created for a display of feelings or an explanation of an individual
point of view before the character joined those already in the action on the main stage. On
leaving the stage, the actor had a similar opportunity to assert disapproval, indifference,
reluctance, or terror, as appropriate to the character and story.
The dramatic effect of these prolonged entries and exits can be complicated, creating a
double focus or double time-scheme. The audience pays attention to a new initiative without
losing sight of the ongoing situation. The after-effects of a conflict are seen from both the
victor’s and victim’s point of view, as first one and then the other takes time to make an exit.
Individual and personal issues are given prominence because each character is assured of
independent stage-life.
This close-focus device is heightened by the use of many costumes. On entry, a new
costume is able to register a turn of the story instantaneously, even if the character appearing
in the new guise does not acknowledge this or is unable to speak of it. Many entries are
devised to take advantage of this and Jatra companies

Plate 1.4 A Jatra actor makes an exit; from Khona, performed by Satyamber Opera at Perulia,
West Bengal
Photograph: Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India

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will go to great expense to build and maintain a large wardrobe of well-made and well-
laundered costumes, which is what their Elizabethan counterparts also did. Out of the Vesha
Ghara – a tent with uneven earth floor, crowded with clothes-racks, make-up tables, and
very busy people – the play’s characters appear in a succession of new clothes, whether it
is a contemporary or historical drama. Careful choice was evident in each garment at Puri and
every opportunity was taken to make a change. Reappearance in a new outfit was sometimes
greeted with loud approval by the audience because it said so much and spoke so clearly of
the latest change in the character’s fortunes.
While the cost of staging an Elizabethan play today has led our theatre companies to use
the smallest practicable number of costumes, it would better suit Shakespeare’s plays to
imitate Jatra practice and use them in the greatest possible number and variety; the texts
were written for entries to be exploited in this way. On the open stages of Elizabethan
theatres, the distance to centre stage was not so long as in the Jatra but was quite enough for
each new entrant to make a distinct impression, clothes as well as deportment signalling a
development in story and character. Shakespeare sometimes underlined this effect by insisting
on sufficient time for entries with comments such as: ‘Look where he, or she, comes.’ Some
entries in Hamlet are accompanied with descriptions of a new appearance or stage-properties:

QUEEN: But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.
POLONIUS: Away, I do beseech you, both away:
I’ll board him presently. O, give me leave.
(II.ii.167–9)

Or, more elaborately:

HAMLET: But soft! butsoft! awhile. Here comes the King,

The Queen, the courtiers. Who is this they follow?
And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken
The corse they follow did with desperate hand
Fordo its own life. ’Twas of some estate.
Couch we awhile and mark.
(V.i.211–6)

Occasionally Shakespeare’s dialogue registers the effect of a new costume after the audience
has seen and enjoyed the transformation, so that the manner in which the clothes are worn
can become the cause of renewed laughter. Such are the comments on the love-struck Benedick

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in Much Ado About Nothing (III.ii) or the fortunate shepherds in their new finery at the end
of The Winter’s Tale (V.ii).
Jatra practices suggest that many entrances and costume changes in Elizabethan plays
should be given greater prominence than the words of their texts explicitly suggest. For
example, in the Council-chamber scene of Act I of Othello, after the cry ‘within’ of ‘What, ho!
what, ho! what, ho!’ and with the Officer’s brief identification of ‘A messenger from the
galleys’, the Sailor’s entry would have had prolonged impact so that the audience could take
note of his haste, his work-clothes, and the urgency of all his actions. The second Messenger,
whose entry is marked some twenty lines later, may well have started to come on stage some
time before this to establish his presence and urgent business; this man is ready to give his
news before being asked a question. Alternatively, the half-line of the Officer’s ‘Here is more
news’ might indicate a pause while the entire company as well as the audience has to wait for
this anonymous character to reach centre stage and then speak. The combined effect of these
urgent and anonymous messengers, spot-lit by the use of prolonged entries, contrasts with
the Venetian splendour of the council meeting and suggests the danger underlying all its
wealth and superiority, as well as the need for Othello’s military acumen and authority.
If Elizabethan performances used something like the Jatra method with entries and exits,
Shakespeare exploited this in many different ways. In the same scene of Othello, the next
entry of Othello, Brabantio, Iago, Roderigo, and various Officers, has six lines (47–52) to
accompany it and these imply complicated movements on stage. A nameless Senator reacts
first, speaking as if he sees Brabantio and Othello together. However, the Duke’s words then
imply that he sees only Othello; then, having talked with him, he adds to Brabantio, ‘I did
not see you; welcome, gentle signior, . . . .’ Rehearsal could find many different ways of
accounting for this discrepancy, but what seems certain is that Brabantio and Othello are
intended to be two independent and mutually exclusive centres of attention on the stage and
that the audience would be encouraged to see both. Desdemona’s entry at line 170 is identified
as a particularly long entry by Othello’s ‘Here comes the lady: let her witness it.’ It could be
staged, however, in several different ways. She might begin to come into view with Othello’s
earlier line, ‘This only is the witchcraft I have us’d’, so that she enters on this mysterious cue
either in conscious response or by some fateful instinct. Alternatively, Othello could see her
at the first possible moment and speak of her at once; she then would continue to make her
entry and hold the audience’s attention during the next ten lines, establishing a silent but
sensational visual counterpoint to the words of her father and the Duke. How Othello
responds to her presence in continued silence still further complicates this entry, the first
appearance on stage of the play’s heroine of whom the audience has already heard a great deal
from conflicting viewpoints.
Shakespeare used similar devices even in his earliest plays. In III.i of Titus Andronicus, at
the very moment when Aaron cuts off Titus’ hand, Lucius and Marcus re-enter still at ‘strife’

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as to which of them shall offer his hand, so that the audience is made acutely aware of how
far the story has already leapt ahead. Exactly when they enter is left, however, for the actors
to decide: they may be too late to stop what is happening or they may enter earlier but be so
involved with each other that they cannot see anything until too late; or they may see all that
is happening on stage but become so moved that they cannot speak or do anything. Either
way the entry will mark the horror and cunning of what Aaron has done and also carry the
story forward. On his subsequent exit, Aaron must pause to speak an aside (ll. 203–6) and
so will draw attention to the contrasting pleasure that he takes in his villainy. At the end of
the scene, a slow and painful movement off stage draws all the Andronici together, except
Lucius who is about to go into exile: some of his words accompany the silent procession and
express for the audience its speechless horror. Lucius then draws attention to his own
purposeful exit in a soliloquy which defines his own purposes.
A strong and prolonged shift of focus on entry and exit is a Jatra device that on many
occasions would strengthen a performance of Shakespeare’s text. This is not simply a
‘montage’ effect, marking contrasts and the progression of narrative, although that is part of
what is achieved. Irony, subversion, heightened expectation, tension, laughter can also be
introduced as the new entrants establish their different sense of the dramatic moment. But
the main effect is to enhance the presence and power of individual characters; it is a primary
resource for plays which are grounded in narrative and personal conflict. When we read the
plays, we are apt to sense only the sequence of speeches and their combined effect; seeing a
play in Jatra-like performance, we would repeatedly be impressed by the separate point of
view and the power of each character, the irreconcilable aspects of his or her involvement in
the action that tend to pull the play apart rather than maintain progress in a story or establish
a single argument.
Many of the dramatic devices of the Jatra stage – strong entries and exits, frequent
costume changes, soliloquies, plot development through a series of conflicts or bouts,
repetitions which serve to put the audience ahead of the characters in understanding of the
drama – all serve to focus attention on individual characters. Scenically, too, everything
works in much the same way. The main stage, some fourteen or sixteen feet square, is bare
except for a small rostrum with three steps which is set to one side between the two
entrances. On this characters sit to rest or reconsider, or to make love or share confidences;
or they stand on it to dominate proceedings. In some companies, the rostrum is replaced by
a single chair which, as Mr Hash remarks, can be used as: ‘a king’s throne, a poor man’s hut,
a bed cot, a lover’s bench, a tree, a hiding place, even a weapon to fight with, as the story
demands in different scenes’ (pp. 8–9). The stage does have ornate decorations hanging
around and above it but these do not change during the play and therefore do not compete
with the dynamic of figures moving within its small compass.

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Plate 1.5 The stage-manager’s and control position behind a Jatra stage; for a
performance by Orissa Opera at Puri, Orissa
Photograph: Biswakesh Tripathy

The play’s characters in action and interaction on the open stage were the source of
dramatic energy and the means for arousing expectation and defining the progress of its
story. Even those with minor parts to play are written so that they are able, at certain
moments, to attract the same uninterrupted attention. Here was the heart of the performance
throughout the night at Puri and here, too, may be the heart of Shakespeare’s plays as he
imagined them in performance – not only what their characters say, but what happens to
them as complete, independent, and active beings, alive in physical actions and reactions, as
well as in thoughts, feelings, and imaginations. When we read the texts and try to understand
them, we need special prompting to reach a similarly multi-focused, physical, interactive,
space-enclosed, time-locked realisation of what is afoot, moment by moment, in the play’s
action. When staging the plays, all the characters should be given opportunities to shine
individually, as they are in Jatra performances.

* * *

When a Jatra company comes to town for a week or more bringing a dozen or so plays in its
repertoire, three or four being new that season,5 an audience member can see a different play
every night, some of them set in the present, some in the past. Attention is bound to be
gained, under these conditions, not only by the characters but also by members of the

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company, the actors who are the constant elements from night to night. Behind a succession
of varied characters the audience will get to know the actor who plays them and becomes
increasingly more recognisable no matter what disguise is being worn.
Before long I could see that the Puri audience knew individual actors very well and even
intimately, as football supporters know the players of their own team. But here the game
was being played much closer to the spectators, in an arena so small that all of it could be
seen at any one time; and it was played nightly in varying forms for a short season, always
on the same ground and with the same players. The game was usually played between no
more than two, three, or four individuals; at times a single player would hold attention with
no one in opposition. The audience assumed a role in the game by vocal appreciation of the
finest moments of play and by encouragement and admonishment of the players. Sometimes
an actor would respond to this audience or might egg it on by seeming to pay no attention.
When an especially acute comment came from one of the spectators, an actor would find
some way of acknowledging it. Towards the end, a few in the audience moved up to the stage
to offer flowers and other tributes to the player they particularly admired as he made an exit;
some would tuck rupee banknotes into his clothing. Occasionally an actor would drop out of
character to receive a gift and then resume the exit in character. I could not distinguish, during
the closing hour or so, whether this audience was responding to the characters of the play or
to its players.
From this distance in time, we cannot tell how similar the Elizabethan audiences were in
this respect, but we do know that actors were recognised off stage. In Hamlet (II.ii), the
prince makes the players welcome as people known to him personally, calling them ‘Masters.
. .good friends. . .my old friend. . .my good friends. . .’. In an Induction for a revival of
Marston’s Malcontent at the Globe Theatre in 1604, John Webster brought two audience
members to life on the stage, one of them boasting; ‘I am one that hath seen this play often,
and can give them intelligence for their action: I have most of the jests here in my table-book’
(ll.14–16). He has personal acquaintance with three actors, Henry Condell, Richard Burbage,
and William Sly – Sly was, in fact, the actor who was playing this playgoer. In The Duchess
of Malfi (1614), Webster implied that actor and role were often confused:

we observe in tragedies
That a good actor many times is curs’d
For playing a villain’s part.
(IV.ii.288–90)

Thomas Nashe had asserted, more than twenty years earlier, that the ‘very name. . .of Ned
Alleyn on the common stage was able to make an ill matter good’.6 As an actor was sometimes

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seen beneath the role, so, when the performer was good enough, the role was said to find its
life in the living person of the actor. An elegy for Richard Burbage, chief actor of the
Chamberlain’s and King’s Men, claimed that he had acted Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Lear, and
Othello so well that these fictional characters ‘lived in him’.7
Modern critics often note the frequent references to the actor’s art in Shakespeare’s plays
and those of his contemporaries, and have deduced that their audiences must have maintained
a double and critical view of the stage, so that what was enacted was seen for what it was,
simultaneously real and unreal, substantial and fictive. But in the Jatra performance I
witnessed, a recognition of the actors in their roles seemed rather to make the fictive character
more real, or at least more accessible, than they would be otherwise. As Hamlet was said to
have ‘lived in’ Burbage, so the characters of this play lived in each actor’s familiar features
and, seemingly, in his real being and mentality. The actors were hailed as familiar and very
special individuals who were going to entertain them. In consequence, all that happened on
stage tended to be received as topical and of local importance: here were well-known people
who were appearing as various other people for the pleasure of a conniving audience. Actors
were not segregated from their public, but amongst them on an open stage, their favourite
representatives: adventurers who vicariously acted for them; the play’s characters lived in
and through them. It was a theatre of engagement and trust, as well as of make-believe and
entertainment; for the audience, an experience about lives like their own and, in that sense, it
was political because, imaginatively, they were all in it together.
Even plays set in historical or mythological times could catch the conscience of this
audience. Sometimes, I have been told, politically topical lines are added to an old playscript.
So long as the story is strong enough, the actors will make it live in the present for the
audience. Balwant Gargi tells of Neel Kothi, a popular Bengali play of the 1930s about a
workers’ revolt in the nineteenth century; the British banned it and confined its author to
his own town because its performance spoke too clearly and directly of a contemporary
and explosive political situation.8 Rhaumukta, a tale of a peasants’ revolt in ancient times,
was first produced in 1954 and was given such topical meaning that it continued to be
performed for many years, attracting huge crowds wherever it travelled; and it is still being
staged today.9
The House in Mid-river was only one of the plays in Orissa Opera’s repertoire dealing
with contemporary life. Byomakesh Tripathy’s Baaje Nataka Banda Kara, or Stop This
Vulgar Opera, is also about corruption and social ills. The plot has many strands and
involves two generations so that it repeatedly challenges established authority:

Subir, a high-caste boy, woos Bharati, a low-caste girl, gets her pregnant, and then
deserts her: their child, Bijay, is adopted and at seven years old is orphaned.

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Meanwhile, Guru, a journalist, is threatened for exposing political corruption

and, when he does not listen, his wife and one of their two sons are killed; he turns
terrorist in revenge, disguising himself as a beggar; he finds and adopts Bijay, the
son of the other couple.
Time passes and Bharati becomes a politician and Chief Minister of Orissa;
Subir becomes a multimillionaire industrialist: they are pitted against each other.
Guru trains Bijay to be a terrorist like himself, while his son who had escaped the
killings becomes a police officer and is given the task of arresting the beggar-
terrorist who is his own father. Bijay, too, meets his parents. Ultimately the
policeman gives up his job to join his father in fighting injustice.10

In such a play, the contemporary issues are self-evident, no matter what the characters
say, because the action itself has political implications without recourse to political slogans
or verbal allusions to real persons. Politically committed speeches would have obvious
advantages, but a dramatist will often prefer to let the story speak for itself because words
can easily be censored or cause the whole play to be banned. A strong story is able to speak
for itself and when members of a Jatra audience become imaginatively engaged in it they
can relied upon to shout out and say what must be done to remedy injustice and stop
violence. The leisurely pace of performance, the open stage, and the audience’s familiarity
with the actors will together ensure that all is accessible and well understood. The size of
the audience – for Jatra is hugely successful – encourages bold responses and invites a
competition in making the most telling comment. The cries of the audience become more
urgent when repetitions ensure that it understands what is happening better than the
characters in the play.
Thinking of Elizabethan theatres, I began to wonder whether dialogue alone was a sufficient
indication of the political power of their plays. Performed on open stages before popular and
vocal audiences, the very story of Hamlet when he finds himself alone in a corrupt world
would speak inescapably to those spectators without the help of words addressed specifically
to them. So, too, would the stories of Macbeth, ambitious in violent and treacherously
deceitful times, of Lear, unpredictable and old-fashioned in a divided and distrusting nation,
and of Coriolanus, trusting his own courage and pride alone amongst a nation of cowards and
then, at the cost of his own life, acting upon instinct for compassion and loyalty. These
stories speak for themselves, arousing strong reactions because of what can be seen to be
happening on the stage.
Shakespeare’s history plays would have awoken political consciousness more strongly
when the kings and politicians of former times were impersonated by actors the audience
knew very well as people from their own world. I have previously wondered why his
Richard the Second was performed in 1601 in support of the Earl of Essex’s rebellion which

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was due to start the following day when what is said in the play so often emphasises a
monarch’s sacred prerogative and the dangers of insurrection. But the Jatra performance at
Puri suggested that words that brand Bolingbroke as a dangerous, self-serving adventurer
may have mattered less than the action of a successful deposition staged in full view of a large
and actively responding crowd: to this spectacle, the audience could have brought their own
thoughts and used their own words. Their vocal reaction would displace the historical world
of the play and substitute other players for its characters. In the ears of a popular audience,
authority will always sound suspect and encourage some of its members to think and speak
for themselves. Shakespeare, I suspect, must have known this and expected such a response.
Perhaps twentieth-century readers of Elizabethan plays should not only look for
words to nail down the topical political references in the text, but also consider what
enactment of a play’s story might suggest to the minds of an Elizabethan popular audience.
A dramatist of Shakespeare’s generation could be imprisoned for what was said on the
stage; he was more free to choose what was done because he could not be held responsible
for what the audience said.
A critic trained in a textual tradition will not easily believe that story – action, bodily
presence, interaction, change, and completion – is more powerful than speech. Shakespeare’s
dazzling and inexhaustible verbal invention makes this adjustment especially difficult but,
for holding attention in Elizabethan public theatres, a dramatist’s most important asset may
well have been his ability to create strong stories that place characters in situations that
arouse the audience’s own thoughts and its verbal participation. To thrive in this theatre,
Shakespeare would have needed a strong non-verbal or pre-verbal imagination. This would
explain why John Manningham, having seen Twelfth Night in the winter of 1602–03, noted
the ‘good practice’ of the counterfeit letter against Malvolio but recorded nothing in his diary
about all that was said and done by Viola, Feste, Sir Toby, or Sir Andrew – their roles do not
have such strong story-lines when judged by their implications for a lawyer. Dr Forman,
seeing Macbeth, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale, in 1610–11, showed the same preference
for story and action. While quoting some actual words from Macbeth’s encounter with the
witches which are crucial for understanding the plot, he was mainly concerned with what
actually happened whether on stage or off; for example:

And Macbeth contrived to kill Duncan, and thoro’ the persuasion of his wife did
that night murder the king in his own castle, being his guest. And there were many
prodigies seen that night and the day before. And when Macbeth had murdered the
king, the blood on his hands could not be washed off by any means, nor from his
wife’s hands, which handled the bloody daggers in hiding them, by which means
they became both much amazed and affronted.11

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At some plays a few audience members would have had their ‘table-books’ to note down
verbal jokes and wise sayings, but the ‘action’ of a play was what lodged in their memories
effortlessly. As we read Shakespeare’s texts we should try to stage them in our minds as if in
performance before such an audience.

* * *

In several ways a Jatra audience is unlike that for which Shakespeare’s plays were written.
Almost all the members of the one I had joined were seated throughout the evening. Only
those near the stage were in approximately the same light as the actors. Their ears were
sometimes filled with amplified popular music. They watched throughout the night and not
in the middle of a working day. Before the performance began, some of them might have
noticed an actor breaking a coconut, lighting incense, and saying prayers on the stage. The
play they watched would not be published as some of the most popular of Shakespeare’s
were in his own day. But despite all this, similarities were plentiful, far more numerous than
when we compare the Elizabethan audience with those of European and North American
theatres today.
Seeing a Jatra performance was for me the start of a determined search for the most
suitable context in which to imagine Shakespeare’s plays. I had been given a whole night’s
entertainment and was left with vivid impressions as clues to be followed. Of these, the most
hopeful seemed to be that the nature of an audience is one of the most necessary parts of the
puzzle to try to get right.

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 2

AUDIENCES
On stage and off stage

I travelled to Bali in the hope of seeing one of the dance dramas for which the island is
famous. Years after witnessing a staged version at a Colonial Exhibition in 1931, Antonin
Artaud remembered them as ‘the most beautiful manifestation of pure theater it has been our
privilege to see’,1 and as more people followed him to Bali to see the plays in their proper
form and setting, their reputation grew. I had hoped to see an Odalan, or temple feast, where
the ancient dramas still fulfil their original purposes for people who gather on special days,
but my timing was wrong or my information misleading. I could see only the demonstrations
which are staged routinely and almost nightly for tourists. Crudely lit so that cameras and
video recorders can capture evidence to be carried back home as trophies and subjects for
study, these performances showed little competence, except in the leading drummers and
two or three of the dancers. But Bali did provide one extraordinary experience when I
attended a cremation ceremony in a small village deep in the jungle. Reacting to this pre-
arranged and public event, I found that my views of what an audience might contribute to a
theatrical performance had to change yet again.

* * *

The cremation was on a working day, a Friday, but five or six hundred people had taken time
off from ordinary business to attend. I arrived a good hour before it was due to start and
already the lane outside the house of the deceased was crowded, and also the courtyard and
the home itself. Further down a forest track, its earth levelled and tidied for the occasion, two
gaudily decorated structures of bamboo, cloth, and tinsel stood waiting. One was the bier
surmounted by a structure of many small storeys, the other a large black animal, with a
parasol poised above it. Both towered above their attendants. The ritual started when the
body was brought out of the house and placed on the bier. Various offerings and gifts were
brought with it, tokens of the deceased’s life to accompany his soul as it passed out of the

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body: a small, framed photograph, a coconut filled with rice, a small eggshell lamp to
represent the soul itself. Then the bier and effigy were lifted onto many shoulders and a
procession gathered to make its way for some half-mile through the jungle to an open space
near the largest of the village temples. Here the beast was placed under an awning that had
been prepared to receive it. Then its stomach was cut open and the corpse moved from the
bier and placed inside. More offerings, including food and coins, were brought and prayers
were said. The deceased had been a policeman and so ten of his colleagues in uniform formed
themselves into a squad and made their own presentation. Everything was unhurried so that
those who did not know what to do could be given instructions or led through the appropriate
part of the ritual. At length all was ready for fire to be applied to the beast-effigy with the
corpse inside and to the offerings piled-up around it. Flames rose into the sky and the last
stages of the spirit’s journey were completed.
The crowd, as much as the rituals, held my attention. I could see none of the lonely
grieving figures to be found at English-speaking funerals, standing apart and inconsolable.
Nor was any one group of persons actively participating throughout, but individuals would
fulfil some particular duty and then, with that completed, would be lost in the crowd again
and, as it seemed, forgotten. The spectators were in small groups, which shifted in membership
from time to time.

Plate 2.1 Preparations for a cremation on Bali

Photograph: John Russell Brown

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Women and small children stood together, sometimes holding hands or with an arm around
another’s shoulders. Some young men walked or stood in couples, linked together by two
little fingers. Others, in a tight knot and wearing Harley Davidson T-shirts, were more
restless, engaging in sharp bouts of talk and laughter. Older people tended to keep somewhat
apart. Everyone seemed to have their own thoughts and their own concerns, as important to
them as the ritual or the deceased’s life and death. On this Friday morning, however, they had
all forgotten about earning their livings so that they could be present with the body and spirit
of a deceased friend, family member, fellow villager, or fellow police officer. This also meant
that they were present with each other and involved with each other in whatever groupings
they chose or happened to join, according to the ongoing affairs of their daily lives.

Plate 2.2 A cremation procession on Bali

Photograph: John Russell Brown

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Plate 2.3 The crowd around a pyre on Bali

Photograph: John Russell Brown

Everyone had made an effort to be there and everything took place in some previously
determined way and sequence, but that is about all the organisation that could be observed.
No one moment appeared to be more important than another, no place of vantage privileged,
no one way everyone had to face; I could see no prescribed attitude or posture for prayer. No
singing or chanting drew everyone into a single reaction and the music had ceased long before
the flame was applied to the corpse. Various tourists, like myself, were also present,
intermingling anywhere with no attention being paid to them. Whatever we saw and whatever
we did was part of one essential action; whatever we thought was our own business.
Attendance at this cremation has proved a more lasting memory than being present at
almost any other funeral. It is also clearer in my mind than visits to native North American
rituals, where I have always been aware of my strangeness, or encounters with English

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Mummers’ plays, where performers have seemed locked into a world of their own. From
Bali I can still recall the non-exclusive, unprogrammed attentiveness which was both singular
to each watcher and shared between us all. Many had travelled considerable distances to this
remote village and everyone had broken ordinary routines to participate in the artificial,
garish, lengthy, and significant happening as if it were a matter of course and an unquestioned
part of their lives. The event was favoured by having a special day allotted to it, as decreed
by the local temple’s priest, but not so that other concerns and relationships had to be put
aside. I did not see any one component of the ritual which transfixed or transformed the
entire crowd of spectators, making them all react as one, as would happen at a public event
in Europe or North America, such as a President’s swearing-in, a state funeral, or a football
game. Music never held everyone rapt; it kept the procession moving and filled in any gaps
in the ritual, and that’s about all. Individuals seemed to pay attention as they wished, from
wherever they happened to be and at whatever time suited themselves. The mood was
unforced and unprogrammed: alert and contagious at times, but often no more than watchful
or, even, passive.
As a visitor with no understanding of the language and only book-knowledge about what
I was watching, I cannot claim any authority for my description of this event beyond how
it seemed to me and the effect it had on myself. Curiously, I had felt very much at home here
and at first this struck me as absurdly presumptuous. Only afterwards did I begin to think
that this was a consequence of the way the event had been managed. I also began to wonder
whether I might have been one in a crowd of spectators that was more like an audience in an
Elizabethan public theatre than any I had known before. For this reason, an event which was
not theatrical finds its place in a book about Shakespeare and theatre.
Obviously it was not the same: no professional actors were involved and we did not
applaud; we knew ahead of time exactly what was meant to be happening – a spirit travelling
out of the body in which it had lived. The similarities were, however, self-evident and
significant. We had all decided to give four or five hours of a working day to be in this
company and watch a representation of a life and death. Most of us stood and could move
around as and when we wished. We were in the same light as the spectacle we watched. That
spectacle had many and varying parts as a whole lifetime was brought before us. What
surprised me most and, on reflection, seems as though it also might have belonged to early
audiences for Shakespeare, was the freedom we all enjoyed to interrupt any part of the show
by paying attention to our own concerns and, consequently, to invest the occasion with
whatever interests we happened to bring with us. Very obviously, these people continued to
live their own lives and think their own thoughts, even as they also shared in the ritual.

* * *

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Surviving evidence about audiences at Elizabethan theatres can be interpreted in many

different ways, the more so in that scholars are writing about circumstances that have long
since disappeared so that none of their conclusions can be brought to the test of experience.
When they try to imagine what play-going was like, they tend to rely on the very different
circumstances of European or North American theatres at the present time to guide their
thoughts and lend them some substance. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, envisages a
submissive audience for Shakespeare’s plays:

The triumphant cunning of the theater is to make its spectators forget that they are
participating in a practical activity, to invent a sphere that seems far removed from
the manipulations of the everyday. Shakespeare’s theater is powerful and effective
precisely to the extent that the audience believes it to be nonuseful and hence
nonpractical.2

Although it held attention without fuss or strict control over the course of many hours, the
event I witnessed in Bali provoked a very different reaction. The occasion was not ‘triumphant’
by means of some ‘cunning’ or because the audience had forgotten their daily concerns and
private relationships. Its meaningful content seemed to have been taken for granted, without
any recognition that it was ‘far removed from the manipulations of the everyday’. Moreover
the whole colourful and artificial ritual was ‘practical’, and in several different ways: we
could see how everything was contrived and it was assumed that all this had to be enacted;
besides, everyone wanted to take some kind of part in it.
If Shakespeare wrote for such a practical and independent audience, we would be wrong
to look for any single ‘meaning’ in one of his plays or the resolution of any problematic issue.
Rather we should expect conditions that encouraged a performance to be accessible to an
audience and consider how its members might make the play their own according to individual
and pre-existing interests.
The earliest plays, with the exception of The Comedy of Errors which is indebted to the
tighter forms of Roman comedy, have an ample and unhurried variety of incident which
would allow an audience to pick and choose, to give most attention to whatever caught its
fancies, not bothering with episodes which did not. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is so
written that its performance will give a great deal of pleasure with a number of its scenes
missing: Speed can be treated as redundant; Julia talking with Lucetta in Act I, scene ii can
make her mind clear enough in any twenty of the scene’s hundred and forty lines; Panthio
talking with Antonio (I.iii.1–87) is expendable; and so on. Launce with his dog in Act II,
scene iii is an enlightening comic turn no one would want to miss but, should that happen, the
play would be understood well enough without it; on the other hand, if this was where

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someone first gave attention to the play, the following scenes would be clear enough without
any of those that came earlier.
The play’s action proceeds with great variety of incident, but all its scenes, many of them
very short, start by clearly defining what is afoot and much of the story so far:

SPEED: Launce! by mine honesty, welcome to [Milan]. . .

(II.v.1)

PROTEUS: To leave my Julia, shall I be forsworn;

To love fair Silvia, shall I be forsworn.
(II.vi.1–2)

JULIA: Counsel, Lucetta; gentle girl, assist me;. . .

How with my honour, I may undertake
A journey to my loving Proteus.
(II.vii.1–7)

DUKE: Sir Thurio, give us leave, I pray, awhile;

We have some secrets to confer about. (Exit Thurio.)
Now tell me, Proteus, what’s your will with me?
(III.i.1–3)

DUKE: Sir Thurio, fear not but that she will love you
Now Valentine is banish’d from her sight.
(III.ii.1–2)

Critics have often remarked on the variety of incident in Shakespeare’s earlier plays, but the
instant credibility of each scene and the disposability of many of them are equally remarkable.
The episode of Thurio’s song, ‘Who is Silvia?’ (III.ii.16–80), exemplifies all three
characteristics.
A member of the audience could take his or her own way through The Two Gentlemen and
still have an enjoyable entertainment to go along with any more ordinary and personal
thoughts as might continue at the same time: fantasy and reality could mingle to mutual
benefit, even if they clashed or sometimes displaced each other. Perhaps this is why the most
critical moment in the entire story is treated with utmost economy or, to put a different face
on it, with a completely inadequate explanation of what is going on in the minds of its

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principals. Perhaps the author and actors were well aware that, by this last scene, the
audience would still be sufficiently in charge of their own minds to put their own valuations
on the shocking abruptness with which many things happen almost at once: Proteus asks for
pardon; Valentine gives him ‘All that was mine in Silvia’ (V.iv.83); Silvia continues to say
nothing; Julia swoons; the ring is recognised and all is revealed; and everyone accepts the
outcome or, at least, no one protests. Independently minded members of an audience are
likely to have many different opinions about what has happened and are liable to start
arguing amongst themselves before the entry of the Outlaws together with the Duke and
Thurio. Now moral judgements do start to be made on stage, as the hapless Thurio is
condemned as ‘degenerate and base’ (l. 136) – words, it may be, that have been in some minds
amongst the audience a few moments earlier, but with reference to one or both of the so-
called gentlemen of Verona. In sharp contrast, a free pardon is pronounced for the Outlaws
although they have been responsible for murder, theft, and other crimes committed in the
‘fury of ungovern’d youth’ (IV.i.44–52). Then, at this very latest possible moment, the
audience’s thoughts are sent back in an earlier direction as Valentine introduces Julia to the
Duke, drawing attention to her blushes as she stands speechless in boy’s clothing (V.iv.165).
The conclusion of this comedy needs robust playing while the audience is repeatedly given
opportunity to exercise its own sense of right and wrong, and of what is laughable.
In Shakespeare’s early history plays, the march of events and consequences of actions
are given much more weight, but here also the audience is encouraged to follow as it wishes
and make its own judgements. The sheer accumulation of scenes in the three Parts of Henry
the Sixth or in the long text of Richard the Third would make for bewilderment if all were
given equal and adequate attention. In modern productions, these plays are cut, shaped, and
interpreted, and then some precise issues are emphasised by means of careful rehearsals,
strong lighting-changes, scenic and sound devices, and fine tuning of many kinds, all resources
which were not available in Shakespeare’s day. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the Henry the Sixth plays were not played at all and Richard the Third was very heavily cut
both within scenes and by the excision of whole episodes. These texts came back into favour
only when they had been doctored and rearranged to give a concerted, powerful, and meaningful
experience to their audiences. However, between late twentieth-century control and nineteenth-
century neglect another course may be possible.
If these plays were put back into something like the context of their original staging by
performing them before audiences who were in the same light as the stage and free to follow
their own individual thoughts and varying interests, then the curse of complexity and burden
of length might both be lifted. Some scenes would hold attention while others would not, or
only partly so, and the audience would find its own way through the play. Actors could
shine in a variety of incidents and the audience might sense a lively competition between
them. All of which could add to the efficacy of whatever parts proved able to draw the whole

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crowd together in its response. The audience would have the impression that they were the
persons who had made sense or, possibly, nonsense of history; and that would give a
pleasurable sensation of involvement and achievement.
All this supposes a very different audience from that which Stephen Greenblatt imagined
to be wholly caught up in a ‘nonuseful’ and ‘nonpractical’ world of the play, as if living, for
a time, in a ‘sphere’ far removed from ordinary life. These individuals would have to be held
with a looser rein, as the Prologue to Henry the Eighth mockingly explains:

Those that can pity here

May, if they think it well, let fall a tear:
The subject will deserve it. Such as give
Their money out of hope they may believe
May here find truth too. Those that come to see
Only a show or two, and so agree
The play may pass, if they be still and willing,
I’ll undertake may see away their shilling
Richly in two short hours. . .
(ll. 5–13)

The cunning of this kind of theatre lies in giving the audience its own head, and so allowing
its own thoughts about everyday matters and longer-lasting social or personal problems to
interact with the fantastic or ‘truthful’ happenings of the play, each with its own distinct
demands for attention.
In Richard the Second, for instance, the pace of narrative is sometimes hurried, so that
Bolingbroke seems to return to England before there has been time for his banishment to
start, and yet the dialogue is often very slow, especially when ceremonies or arguments are
elaborated. In telling this tale, Shakespeare has created a number of stopping-places where
the situation is exposed and explored in varying ways and which, in consequence, can almost
stand on their own. Some scenes could be dropped without confusing the narrative or main
characterisations but with gain in forward energy. In modern productions, Act I, scene ii is
sometimes cut so that the Duchess of Gloucester does not appear in the play. The Earl of
Salisbury and Welsh Captain in II.iv are similarly removable. The Queen need not meet the
Gardners (III.iv), Aumerle, Percy, and Fitzwater need not throw down their gages (IV.i) –
this is a favourite cut because it can raise unwanted laughter – and the Duke of York need not
call repeatedly for his boots and horse, his Duchess need not kneel before the new king (V.ii
and iii). The entire abdication of King Richard was omitted in the first three printings of the
text, almost certainly in accord with stage practice at the time. The end of this history is

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spread over two separate scenes – one of Richard’s death and the other of Bolingbroke’s
reception of the news – so that the audience is left to relate one to the other, to think well or
ill of the murdered king as he lies in his coffin, and also of the new king who is the cause of
his death. Bolingbroke prompts such questions, without admitting guilt directly:

. . .my soul is full of woe

That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow.
(V.vi.45–6)

As Shakespeare developed ways to draw attention more intimately into the minds of his
characters, from Romeo and Juliet onwards, the structure of the plays became less amenable
to excision; dramatic focus was brought to bear upon a few principal characters with more
sustained insistence. A comparison of, say, Love’s Labours Lost and Twelfth Night illustrates
these changes, although the plays followed each other within only a few years. The same is
true of Richard the Third in comparison with Henry the Fifth, and both of them compared
with Macbeth. The dramatist was taking stronger charge, as if he wanted, now, to draw his
audience closer into the heart of some mystery. But the development of Shakespeare’s
stagecraft was not all one way, which suggests that he knew his audience remained very
ready to take matters into their own heads and would do so when that was what he wanted.
For example, the scene in England in the fourth Act of Macbeth is often staged today in a
shortened version, despite the overall shortness and concision of the playtext. Shakespeare
relaxed tension here and took time for an account of the English king curing the sick and for
Malcolm’s detailed pretence that he is a more evil man than Macbeth as a way of testing
Macduff’s loyalty – a virtue which the audience could scarcely doubt without one word of
interrogation to help.
Whatever control Shakespeare began to exercise over his audience, several of his old
plays continued to be performed and they would keep alive its earlier freedom. Besides, he
encouraged its independence in some of his latest works, especially in Pericles and parts of
The Winter’s Tale, and in a final history, Henry the Eighth. Even when most wishing to take
charge, he may still have calculated on a spirited counter-pull from his audience, its members
bringing a sturdy sense of common reality to engagement in his fictions and drawing
independent strength from each other’s responses. Such an audience is hard to visualise
today when in our theatres only the stage is lit and members sit comfortably in their seats,
seldom stirring or talking, or calling out in approval or disapproval. They expect rather to
leave their own, more practical, everyday thoughts behind them.
Where a play has survived in more than one version we may deduce that attention was
paid to how the text was received. If Shakespeare expected his audience to exercise the
freedom of response that the structure of many of his earlier plays invites, he would be

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unlikely to resist when asked to delete, add, or change to suit the reactions of audiences.
Between the Quarto and Folio texts of King Lear various adjustments took place, allowing
new episodes to be added and others dropped or adjusted. This play has a structure which
allows two stories to interweave and offers a wide range of incidents and characters: if some
had found favour and others had not, changes in the script could readily be made and its
longer than usual playing time reduced. If these were the conditions in which these two
versions came about, the Folio text should not be preferred over an earlier one simply
because it came later from Shakespeare’s hand. So far as structure is concerned, the Quarto
may well be the closer of the two to what Shakespeare wanted his play to be.

* * *

Structure and plotting vary markedly at different stages of Shakespeare’s career, but at all
times he wrote dialogue that calls upon audiences to bring their own concerns to the
theatre in such a way that they become an inextricable part of their response to the plays
in performance. As his story-telling was often calculated to allow this freedom of mind, so
his choice of words, while giving expression to character, narrative, and the play’s various
themes, at the same time serves to awaken the audience’s memories of ordinary living and
individual experience. Alongside thoughts and feelings arising directly from the great or
fantastic events of the drama, instinctive sensations are also provoked that belong to every
mind’s huge reservoir of memory filled with matters of everyday consequence. When
Richard II is being most intellectual and his predicament most unlike that of his audience
in the theatre, Shakespeare has made him touch on the simplest needs and feelings that
belong to everyone:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends.
(III.ii.175–6)

The same appeal is made no less confidently in the most gripping and highly wrought of
the later plays. When Othello drives towards its conclusion and the dramatic focus narrows
to draw a very intense and exceptional attention, at that very time the words spoken evoke
quite ordinary sense-experiences, both in Desdemona’s frightened responses and in the
impassioned utterances of Othello. Repetition, as we have seen, ensures that the audience is
encouraged to take full possession of the hero’s predicament in these accessible terms: ‘My
wife! my wife! what wife? I have no wife!’ (V.ii.100). At other times actuality is evoked in
a single but strongly placed image:

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Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe
Did yawn at alteration.
(V.ii.102–4)

Ordinary words and affective commonplace imagery go together with matters of great
profundity:

Where should Othello go?

Now, how dost thou look now? O ill-starred wench
Pale as thy smock!
(V.ii.274–6)

In Macbeth, the appeal to mundane and individual experience is perhaps most arresting of
all, not only drawing daily events and perceptions into its account of a metaphysical,
political, and moral dilemma, but also the actual attendance of the audience at the current
performance:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(V.v.19–28)

An active-minded and independent audience could find immediate echoes of their own
everyday experiences at the conclusion of Shakespeare’s most terrible tragedy and so, as
individuals, become closely involved on their own accounts. The play supplies common
‘bread’ for the imaginations of its audience.

* * *

Accounts of play-going that have survived from Shakespeare’s times back-up this hypothesis.
Thomas Heywood’s praise of ‘our domestic histories’ in his Apology for Actors (1612) has
often been quoted in other contexts:

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What English blood seeing the person of any bold English man presented and doth
not hug his fame, and honey at his valor, pursuing him in his enterprize with his
best wishes?
(Sig. B4)

Familiarity with these words should not allow us to miss how active the verbs are, speaking
of hugging and honeying as if the audience were responding intimately and sexually (compare
‘honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!’, Hamlet, III.iv.93–4), and of pursuing the
play’s characters as if, in imagination, it were clambering up onto the stage itself.
Thinking about the forthcoming theatricals, Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream explains how much he is willing to give, as an audience, when overanxious performers
‘dumbly have broke off’:

Out of this silence yet I pick’d a welcome;

And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
(V.i.100–3)

Thinking of the actors who were about to entertain his guests, he looks forward to a
similarly active participation:
Our sport shall be to take what they mistake;
And what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.
(V.i.90–2)
In the event, the responses of the on-stage audience to Pyramus and Thisbe reveals to the
audience in the theatre the differing natures of its members. In much the same way Mrs
Quickly in Henry the Fourth, Part I, Polonius, Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius in
Hamlet, and the superior young courtiers in Love’s Labour’s Lost are all shown, as Puck says
in the Dream, to be more than passive ‘auditors’ of what is performed for their pleasures and
are all shown for what they are in their individual responses to a play in progress.3
In such a theatre, a playtext is agent for a multiple arousal. It inspires and activates the
performers and, through their acting, awakens memory, expectation, argument, resentment,
fear, pleasure in the minds of the audience, so that the performance is experienced with a
sense of personal discovery and such intimate sensations as hugging, honeying, and pursuing.
The performers learn how to play the text and to play with – and play off – their audience.
Timing is a large part of the skill needed to handle such an event: phrasing, suggestive
intonation, varying of pitch or volume are all as effective as they are for a stand-up comic
playing with an audience, with no stooge or settled script in support, but relying on a skilled

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adaptation of prepared routines to the needs of each particular performance. In response,

members of the audience soon learn how to play with the actors and text, and with all sorts
of personal memories, fears, and desires. They can make the play their own, the ‘shadows’
on stage attaining their fullest life in their imaginations.
For these reasons, when critics try to understand and assess Shakespeare’s texts, they
should explore the dynamic relationship between actors and audience as the plays come to
life between them both. Their task is not to decode a hieroglyph or provide specific meanings
for a series of signs written on paper, but rather to discover what can happen, both on stage
and in the minds of the audience, and to show how, between the actors and the audience, the
play may please. Of these two elements, the second is the more difficult to trace and yet just
as crucial to understanding as the first. A critic should understand how the audience’s thoughts
will ‘deck’ the kings and queens – as the Prologue to Henry the Fifth reminded his hearers –
and all the other dramatis personae that are presented.
Knowledgeable about the life and times of Shakespeare’s day and aware of many theories
about how the world goes at present, a critic will be deeply immersed in the host of ideas
which could be aroused by the enacting of a text. Which are the most significant? Which
judgement should oversway others? This book will return to these questions. So far, the best
answer would seem to be that those ideas that can be traced throughout the action of a play,
being relevant in more than a single episode, are ones which should be given most attention.
To this a proviso is necessary: any idea should be evaluated with regard to its power to
entertain an audience – to awaken instinctive, sensuous, and individual responses, as well as
intellectual certainty or debate about generally valid issues. We should value the plays’
openness as much as their intellectual power and effectivness.
The effect of finding myself amongst a crowd of spectators on Bali, whose varied members
were both attentive and independent, was an almost total surprise to me. As a member of
that ‘audience’, I had rediscovered a sense of self-possession. The strange ritual aroused
unexpected thoughts and sensations, all intimately connected with my own life, whereas
when I see a Shakespeare production or read a book of criticism, I am usually expected to
submit to what is placed before me.

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 3

RITUAL
Action and meaning

At one time, European theatre was thought to have derived from religious rituals, such as
funerals, weddings, sacrifices, purifications, initiations, and other rites or ‘mysteries’. In the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this view of theatre’s origins made the pursuit
of realism, which was then the current fashion, seem staid and hidebound, a cul-de-sac from
which escape should be attempted by retracing steps towards a more impressive and elevating
past. As Gordon Craig wrote in 1905: ‘The first sign we have of the art of the theatre is in the
religious rites. All the arts which I wish to see back again in the theatre were brought together
and focused in the religious rites.’ T.S. Eliot was to echo him: ‘drama springs from religious
liturgy, and. . .cannot afford to depart far from religious liturgy’.1
A play is not, however, the same as a religious ritual. Seldom in Europe has attendance at
a theatre involved worship of a supernatural power or promised either spiritual rebirth or
human benefit. Seldom, since the late middle ages, has one play been like other plays in
representing a significant event or action on which they have all been modelled. (The variety
of the ancient Greek plays that have survived was not a feature to which the ritualistic critics
paid much attention; like Aristotle, they were trying to define common factors, rather than
account for individual examples.) In so far as a priest re-enacts a past action or kills a beast
to represent the death of a hero, victim, or scapegoat, a ritual can be called a dramatic
representation, but turning this statement around, to claim that theatre is like a religious
ritual, is a confusing half-truth.
While recognising similarities between some plays and pre-existing religious rituals, the
origins of European theatre may also be located elsewhere. Processions or parades, which
celebrated and to some extent re-enacted an actual event to the greater glory of its human
agents, contained some features of theatre which were not ritualistic in a religious sense,
because their validity was temporary and unrepeatable: were it not for the human conqueror
or human prisoner, they would not be taking place. Public debates, an essential part of
ancient Greek democratic society and government, are now recognised as another source for

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a play’s structure, theme, and diction, and, sometimes, for its characters and setting as well.
Games and competitions provided models for engagement and resolution. Still more influential
was public story-telling, especially when supported by music, illustrated in dance, and
supplied with dialogue using the different voices of various characters. In Christian times,
sermons contrasting hell and heaven, good persons and bad, sometimes contained dramatised
narrative or debate with each side given a voice. All these activities could bring the past to
present life, dealing with far distant places, long periods of time, varied adventures of heroes
or victims, and changes in families, societies, and nations. They provided models for plays
on modern or ancient themes. Here, together with rituals that celebrated what was believed
to be of constant significance in human existence, are sources for the great and various wealth
of theatre. Beyond Europe and its colonial influence, theatre has still other origins such as
trance, medicine, cultivation of the land and other forms of labour, propaganda, and education.
How Shakespeare created his distinctive plays out of theatre’s many resources is a
question that leads into the most hidden reaches of his art and can be approached only with
greatest difficulty. In countries where religious observances are still a familiar part of
contemporary life, as they were in Shakespeare’s England, there is, however, an obvious and
valuable opportunity to reassess the effect of rituals in the plays. Because other religions,
histories, languages, and ways of life are involved, simple equations are not possible, but
comparisons can help to identify those basic elements that are common to both heritages and
observe their different applications.

* * *

The cremation ritual on Bali, which was described in the last chapter, held crowds for longer
than most religious rituals that survive in European countries. Procession, offerings, and
culminating fire were its distinguishing features during the four or five hours of its duration,
but none of these provided one crucial action to which everyone paid attention; one phase
eased, as it were, into another, and everything could be witnessed without rush or tension. I
sensed, rather, that each of these elements was implicit in every moment and that this was
largely due to the permanent presence of the two large and gaudy constructions which
accompanied the corpse from the deceased’s home to the burning ground. These provided a
strong statement of the nature of the entire event. They dominated the field of vision
throughout and together they spoke of a life that had been concluded and of the aspiration
and journey of its soul.
Such over-sized visual constructions provide continuous points of focus in many Christian
rituals. A cross or some holy image – a depiction of Christ in Glory or of Mary as Mother of
God – is raised high above an altar so that it is visible to a large congregation, or the image of

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some local saint is carried on many shoulders in a commemorative procession. In Western

Europe, such strong visual statements are also found in secular meetings where political
protests tend to be dominated by words written large on banners and placards or by a
simplified logo often semi-abstract in design like the swastika. Occasionally religious practice
is followed more closely when political rallies are dominated by giant figures; and sometimes
the crowd is processional rather than static, following the image to one particular and
meaningful landmark. This is more common in Asia and Africa than in European countries. A
world-famous example was the assembly in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on 30 May 1989,
when an all-white figure of the Goddess of Democracy and Freedom, more than thirty feet
tall with hands lifted high, was carried until it stood over against the enlarged portrait of
Chairman Mao in its permanent place in front of government headquarters in the ancient
palace, known as the Forbidden City; by its means a confrontation was marked for all to see
and to acknowledge by being present in the procession.
In Shakespeare’s day, dramatists would sometimes use similarly dominant visual devices
that held attention over long periods and could impress an audience by more permanent
means than ever-changing words or human actions. To mark the hero’s passage through the
two parts of Tamburlaine ( 1587), Christopher Marlowe brought on stage crates of captured
treasure, a man-sized cage for Bajazeth, a chariot drawn by kings, and the embalmed body of
Zenocrate covered in gold. Some of these striking visual images give significance to the action
over the course of several scenes while, in the last moments of Part Two, both chariot and
hearse, together with a map of the world, build up a comprehensive visual statement that
contrasts with Tamburlaine’s boastful and courageous words. Ben Jonson started Volpone
(1605) with an impressive locker or ‘shrine’ for the hero’s treasure and a bed for his supposedly
infirm body, and both remained on stage for much of the play as powerful visual reminders
of its basic situation and theme. John Webster used a strong ritual image for one short scene
in The Duchess of Malfi (1614) located, in an unusual stage direction, at the ‘Shrine of Our
Lady of Loretto’ (III.iv). This shrine was famous for its statue of the Virgin and two Pilgrims
are brought on stage to wonder at its ‘goodly’ spectacle. Webster’s heroine kneels in front of
this visual manifestation of virtue, as she had knelt previously at her betrothal and as she will
again in submission to her executioners.
In Shakespeare’s plays, such visual statements of permanent value are less dominant.
The most common ones are political rather than religious – throne, crown, and heraldic
impresa – and seldom are they used straightforwardly. In Henry the Fourth, Part I, the
king sits on his throne or chair of state and gives audience in three successive scenes (I.i,
I.iii, and III.ii), but the centralised groupings around this symbol of inherited power are
contrasted with intervening scenes in which the king’s restless son occupies no fixed point
of focus and rebel leaders try to manage their business without any of the generally

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acknowledged signs of rule and dominion. In King John, the crown is at first given solemn
significance, the smallness of the object offset by the respect paid to it, but later, at the
start of Act V, the same crown is tendered to and fro, between John and Pandolph the
Papal Legate, so quickly that as a sign of inherited power it is open to ridicule. In the
deposition scene of Richard the Second (IV.i.155–320), the crown is a symbol of an
‘anointed king’ and ‘God’s deputy’, but it is held in very human and unpriestly hands, and
transferred in an improvised act of deposition. A formal coronation is announced ‘solemnly’,
but this ritual takes place off-stage.
Shakespeare used other conventional stage properties as visual images of timeless and
general significance: a coffin, tomb, monument, bed, the bar of a court of law, or the
furnishings of a church or friar’s cell will set a scene and give expression to generally
accepted ideas of morality, mortality, religion, or politics. The use of these symbolic
properties is, however, limited. The formal rituals involved with them take place off stage:
kings enter after their coronations, the princess Elizabeth after her christening (Henry VIII,
V.v.80); brides prepare for weddings and leave before they take place. The start of a
marriage may be on stage, but both Martext and Friar Francis are interrupted and the ritual
never resumed. Acts of mourning are shown on stage, but they have no presiding priest
and follow no prescribed order. The operation of Justice in courtroom or by combat is an
occasional exception to this refusal to stage formal rituals, but here the focus is on an
uncertain outcome, not the ritual process itself.
Clothes appropriate to rituals are used more frequently, as part of the exploitation of
entrances and exits that was noticed in Chapter 1. Hamlet’s mourning clothes are a generally
accepted sign which makes a silent statement as soon as he appears off-centre amongst
members of Claudius’ court who are standing submissively before their king and dressed
richly for a celebration. Later his disordered clothes, with ‘doublet all unbrac’d’ (II.i.78),
make a different counter statement by destroying the first well-ordered image that he had
presented. In Act V, a ‘sea-gown scarf’d’ (V.ii.13) about him contrasts with the black mourning
clothes of everyone else dressed for Ophelia’s funeral. In the last scene, as Hamlet faces
Laertes in the duel, he may be indistinguishable from his opponent who, like him, is stripped
for action. Clothes have been used, as in a ritual, to mark distinct stages of the narrative by
signs that are generally valid and commonly understood.
In most of the plays clothes make some strong contributions of this kind. Prospero’s
cloak and staff representing his power over nature are striking visual signs in The Tempest
that are ritualistically meaningful, especially as they are being put on or laid aside. In King
Lear, the visual trappings of power are potent at first, but a stripping-off takes place that
associates the king with the nakedness of Poor Tom whom he takes to be a Bedlam beggar;
then it is his unkingly appearance, together with his white hairs and enfeebled body, that has

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long-lasting impact on everything that happens in his presence. Whatever the audience
thinks of what Lear does and what is done to him, as he struggles to keep his sanity and
assert his will, his scant and soiled clothes have a general validity that mark him as suppliant
or outcast. Probably Shakespeare’s boldest single use of costume as a dominant visual sign
is Shylock’s ‘Jewish gaberdine’ (The Merchant of Venice, I.iii.107) together with other marks
of his racial difference.
Such visual statements contribute to the plays from first to last, but come far short of
establishing that religious ritual was an influence on their composition or that any action in
the play has a general and timeless significance. The comedies, alluding to various folk rites
that were still honoured in rural England of Shakespeare’s day,2 come closest to following a
ritual form by reproducing festivities on stage. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Duke
Theseus hunts on May morning and in the last scene the fairies dance throughout the house
in honour of the weddings. In As You Like It, the killing of a deer is celebrated in song, two
pages sing of springtime, and the god Hymen makes an entry to choral singing to bless the
conclusion. Shakespeare was well aware of the ‘rites’ that marked the progress of the year
(see Midsummer Night’s Dream, IV.i.130), but his use of them was incidental and allusive,
rather than basic and structural as they were in the numerous ‘Entertainments’, celebratory
welcomes, and court masques common at the time. Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and
Testament (c.1593) is a rare example of a thoroughly festive Elizabethan play.
The last comedies, or romances, contain stronger ritual elements. In The Tempest, Prospero
has presiding power over spirits as well as other characters, all of whom, sooner or later, pay
reverence to him. The arrival on stage of gods in Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale
give shorter but strongly positioned moments when every element of the drama is given a
more than human importance. These supernatural appearances are developed furthest in
Cymbeline, where circling apparitions prepare for Jupiter who descends ‘in thunder and
lightning, sitting upon an eagle’; he throws a thunderbolt and the Ghosts fall to their knees
as he speaks. When he ascends and the ghosts vanish, the mortals who remain report that
they have smelled the sulphur of his breath and seen the ‘marble pavement’ close as he
entered ‘his radiant roof’ (V.iv.114–21). Yet even this awesome event provides no conclusion
for the play: before that can come, all the characters must resolve their own problems and, at
that time, Jupiter is remembered only when a Soothsayer is called upon to interpret the
message he had left behind. Then the King instructs his people to leave the stage in order to
visit his temple after the play has ended:

And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils

From our bless’d altars.
(V.v.475–6)

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That Shakespeare was well aware of the power of ritual is most evident in Macbeth with
the dancing, chanting, oblations, and invocations of the witches as they worship the spirits
whom they serve. The authenticity of the text is questionable in Act III, scene v, when
Hecate descends to take command of her subjects, but that ritual appearance in some form
would provide a climax after the two earlier scenes in which the witches do acts of reverence
to their superiors and a fitting preparation for their last, most elaborate and definitive
contribution to the play’s action in Act IV, scene i. Shakespeare’s use of ritual here, with its
influence on language and events throughout the play, cannot be missed by any reader or
spectator: it indicates the power that it might have had in other plays. Yet, even here, ritual
is not central to his purpose. Without Macbeth’s ambition, guilt, and courage, or without his
awareness of the predicament to which his decisions and deeds have led him, the tragedy’s
conclusion would have been merely terrible and inevitable. Without Macbeth’s changing
relationship with Lady Macbeth, and with servants and soldiers, the last scenes would have
much less power to catch and hold attention. As the tragedy draws to its close, the witches
and their rituals have long since disappeared from the stage.

* * *

Compared with ancient Greek or medieval religious theatre in Europe, or with many theatres
in non-European countries today, the theatre of Shakespeare’s England was not only non-
ritualistic in basic form but also in the expectations of actors and audience. A visit to Asian
countries or to the remains of ancient theatres in Greece and its colonies will make this clear.
Elizabethan theatres, unlike many in other countries, were not sited either within or near a
temple; there was no altar on stage. Many of the England’s priests or ‘ministers of religion’
were opposed to theatre of any kind. Treatment of religion and politics was forbidden on
stage and these rules enforced by powerful censorship. More than all this, its theatre companies
were commercial enterprises, not organisations responsible to Church or State. Their noble
patrons were protectors against interference by persons or institutions, not masters to be
served and very specifically honoured. Theatres and acting companies were run by their
owners and for their own benefit.
The company with which Shakespeare was involved, the Chamberlain’s (later, the King’s)
Men, was owned by its leading actor-sharers of which he was one. Each member’s status
was the result of individual initiative and achievement, not dependent on the gift or purchase
of some official position. Influence and nepotism might sometimes be involved, but to join
the company or enter the profession did not require membership of any family, guild, union,
or incorporated institution. Everyone involved was a venturer, an individual rather than a
functionary or servitor. Their plays, prepared for the general public, were also performed as

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entertainments at court and other occasional employment was found, but members of the
company had no regular involvement with official occasions or public rituals. Such
independence is comparatively rare in the history of theatre and sets the company to which
Shakespeare belonged apart from very many others.
Almost all theatres in modern Europe and North America are run under more restrictive
conditions. Most receive some form of annual subsidy from state, municipal, or private
institutions, or from individual or commercial patrons, and are therefore responsible to a
publicly constituted board or trust. Most ‘commercial’ theatres serve no masters except
persons with management, financial, and other producing functions; to these proprietors,
the actors are responsible and the success of their performances is measured by return on
money that has been invested. In Asia, the contrast to Elizabethan practice is greater still:
there many theatre companies have official status and responsibility for public or religious
celebrations. Frequently they also have long-lasting family affiliations, three or even four
generations being active together in a single company under the senior member. Without any
of these stabilising arrangements and lacking the support of modern bureaucracy, the wonder
is that Elizabethan theatre companies stayed together for so long and maintained such varied
repertoires. The one to which Shakespeare belonged, and which he partly owned, was the
most permanent of them all and the most favoured. Some of its members, and he chief
amongst them, made private fortunes out of the enterprise.
In some countries, the very fact of making theatre is still considered a ritualist act that
fulfils a public and permanent need, even when a company is clearly the product of individual
enterprise. Suzuki Tadashi’s theatre bears his own name – the Suzuki Company of Toga –
but everyone involved is very conscious of a ritual attaching to performance. Its buildings in
the Japanese mountain village of Toga are constructed out of simple and beautifully crafted
local materials: they are kept at an extraordinary degree of cleanliness, floors polished and
unobstructed; space is carefully and very obviously ordered; silence often seems obligatory;
the journey to Toga is long and difficult, even with modern transport. The actors follow a
demanding all-day regime which would be totally unacceptable to theatre unions elsewhere
and an exclusive loyalty is assumed. Their performances are all in accord with strict and
codified criteria and actors are instructed to perform, not to the audience or for the audience,
but as if to an unseen presence above both stage and auditorium.3 This theatre does not have
the rich and abundant repertory of the Elizabethan and it does not work in the midst of a
thriving city, yet its difference in practice goes deeper than that. Performance is ritualistic:
ancient traditions are studied and copied; everything has a purpose beyond each moment,
certain images being constant throughout the play; the action is both in the present and in the
past; and the audience witnesses rather than interacts. Such a theatre marks how far away
from ritual Shakespeare’s theatre had placed itself.

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Austerity and discipline are not the only signs that a theatre sees its performances as rites
and seeks to represent more than the individual and temporal on stage. In India, the text of
the Natyasastra, some two thousand years old, lays down rules for making theatre and
explains its origin in the gods’ desire to give pleasure to men and women and to show them
the nature of life, especially of the eight basic rasa or sensations. Performing a play was a
way to honour the gods:

Of all duties of the king, this has been proclaimed as possessing the best result. Of
all kinds of charities, allowing people to enjoy a dramatic show without payment
has been praised most.
Gods are never so pleased on being worshipped with scents and garlands as
they are delighted with the performance of dramas.4

Influenced by these ideas, almost any theatre performance in India is implicated in ritual,
because what happens on stage has its source and justification elsewhere.
In the popular Jatra theatre, as already mentioned, the breaking of a coconut on stage by
a single member of the company before the play began, together with the burning of incense
and saying of prayers, was a ritual act of dedication for the entire performance and this ritual
was taken further behind the stage in the dressing room. As the whole company was getting
ready, a conch shell was blown, its sound gaining immediate attention. Everyone stopped
whatever he or she was doing and in silence turned towards a young man, dressed all in white,
who made an offering at a small altar and said prayers. Then preparations for performance
resumed with a new quietness and concentration while the chief actor, who was to play the
father in the performance that night, moved around the tent offering to everyone a small
piece of the coconut that had been broken on stage. As a visitor, I was included as a matter
of course. No fuss attended this ritual; it was part of a daily routine and an accepted
recognition of the significance of what they were doing.
When I had taken part in this ritual and was back in my seat in the auditorium, I wondered
if anything had been done to effect a similar sense of shared purpose behind the tiring-house
facade of an Elizabethan theatre. Some kind of discipline must have been needed to achieve
good order in that confined and crowded space, where everyone was working on a multitude
of very different tasks all of which had to be completed on time and where the actors had to
make themselves ready with the necessary individual concentration for performance. Few
records of difficulties or errors in all this back-stage business have survived, beyond some
accounts of late or ill-prepared entries, and yet there is no record of a bell or other signal being
used to mark the beginning of preparations or to summon attention. Perhaps the ‘book-
keeper’, who seems to have been both prompter and stage manager, went around giving the

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final word, but that could not have been as effective for the company as a whole as some
more general call for attention. All that is known to have signalled the start of a performance
was the trumpet, drum, or flag whose chief purpose was to attract the public to the playhouse.
In Shakespeare’s theatre, it was perhaps those signals, augmented by the sounds of a gathering
audience, that provided the final impetus to the company as a whole and gave the cue for
concentration in preparation for performance. If this was the custom, they all made ready
because they each, individually, knew that their audience was ready for them. Their chief
playwright, when he was preparing to go on stage as an actor, would have had the same
attitude to his work.
In India, theatre is treated as a god-given art and in consequence many theatres are
situated within a temple precincts and gods are represented on stage with proper ritualistic
respect. Even in theatres run as commercial businesses in large modern cities, some of the
actors will kiss the stage before they tread on it, whether to rehearse or to perform. Many
common practices are reminders of a world beyond that of either audience or stage. In a
crowded market-place, I have seen a story-teller squatting down on a piece of carpet amongst
the stalls, with a microphone and an open, red-bound book in front of him. He had created a
separate space in which to exercise his art. His speech was half-intoned, his bearing relaxed
and yet intent. An audience of about a dozen youths listened and sometimes talked amongst
themselves. When he had finished, without marking any obvious climax, he bowed his head
over closed hands, and prayed aloud, ‘Shantih’, three times; then he closed the book and
bound it up in a red cloth along with two other volumes. The audience started to move away,
throwing a few coins into a copper bowl set down on the mat in front of him. When they
were gone, he collected the money and a few other belongings, and then, with the parcel of
books under his arm, his small stooped figure was soon lost in the crowd. I suppose that he
or another story-teller would soon reoccupy the place where he had left unattended the piece
of carpet and sound-equipment.
Story-telling in many different forms, and often accompanied by music, is an entertainment
throughout India and other Asian and African countries and is in effect a simplified form of
theatre that can claim significance by being performed in the presence of the gods. Shakespeare’s
theatre, in contrast, based its validity and legal status on the service of some noble or royal
patron who had little or nothing to do with the running of the company. However constrained
by censorship and by social and political pressures, its actors and dramatists recognised, in
their day-to-day business, no other authority than that of those colleagues who were personally
responsible for the staging of plays so that they satisfied their audiences. This comparative
freedom from ritual and public responsibilities brought its own difficulties, as independence
is always open to disaster, but it also encouraged Shakespeare to write about life as it was

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actually lived and to show aspirations and fears as experienced within the wide range of the
public that crowded the theatres up and down the land.
Shakespeare’s plays may have timeless significance, but they were not written in order to
celebrate any religious faith or public event, and attendance at them was not thought to have
any specific effect. They cannot in such primary senses be considered as rituals. For other
plays and at other times, these were important functions of theatre and in other countries
they are so still. But, as readers, critics, theatre directors, or actors of Shakespeare, we will
bring very different expectations than those of their author, actors, and audiences if we
search the texts for overriding or timeless significances. We should look, first of all, for a
representation of human behaviour that will hold the attention of audiences, and for the
workings of an unusually independent mind.

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 4

CEREMONY
Behaviour and reception

In one respect, Shakespeare’s England was very familiar with ritual and so was its theatre. In
daily life, for all classes of people, the lesser rituals of ceremony were everywhere apparent.
Personal interactions, in private as well as in public, were defined by ceremonies – that is, by
the repetition of actions and forms of speech which have general rather than individual or
personal meaning and acknowledge power or authority. To our eyes, it would have been a
very formal age: even when at home, young people rose to their feet when a parent entered
the room, and paid some form of respect; a teenager would kneel to receive his or her father’s
blessing. Age and class also had their privileges. Official regulations laid down the kind and
quantity of ornamentation proper to the dress of persons in each walk in society and anyone
would be expected to stand aside, to ‘take the wall’, when a superior was approaching.
Such formalities, ceremonies, or little rituals would be duly represented as part of the
imitation of life on the stage and send their wordless messages as part of a play’s meanings.
At that time, these signs could be decoded by anyone and needed no reinforcement, but to
recapture them today requires very special care. Readers of a Shakespeare text are given little
or no notice of ceremonial activities and may leave them out of the performance that they
visualise in their mind’s eye. Theatre directors frequently omit them from performance as
meaningless waste of time and effort. In at least two ways the plays suffer in consequence:
first, because ceremony is a natural resource of theatre; and second, because it was part of
social life as Shakespeare would have known and represented it.
How much is lost will be obvious to any traveller to countries that still use everyday
ceremony. In Europe and North America, it governs very few relationships between people,
either in public or private, and we commonly pride ourselves on that freedom. Some public
occasions are conducted with time-honoured ceremonial, but we feel awkward when we try
to adjust our ways and thoughts to such formality and predetermination. Normally we do

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not wish to waste time on mere ceremony. In these respects, a visitor to Asia senses a
difference at once and, in my experience, this is most noticeable in Japan. Here ceremony is
used constantly, in greetings and farewells, with hands placed together, heads and bodies
bowed – how low they are bowed depends on the status of the person addressed. Television
announcers bow to their unseen audiences and I have seen some viewers bowing back in
return. Ceremony is used on entering a house, on being served a meal in a restaurant – even
when one dines alone – and when taking a bath or going to bed in a traditional inn. In services
at a shrine, worshippers may be seen standing in strict line and equidistant apart, their
responses in staccato and brief unison, apparently allowing no scope for expression of
individual piety or doubt. Ceremony is a part of business negotiations and the giving of gifts;
it is involved in choice of dress and presentation of self. Looking into a Tokyo department
store, early in the morning before it had opened for customers, I saw rows of uniformed
assistants being drilled in the proper approach to a member of the public, how to bow and
what to say. Ceremony will even enter the running of a theatre company; after a break in
rehearsals I have seen a director clap his hands, making a sharp, slapping sound to summon
a uniform attention before work resumed; it was the same sound as I had heard at a shrine,
but it came now from someone who, moments later, would be helping individual actors,
casually and intimately, as any European director would do.
In order to maintain an appropriate ceremony, individuality and quirks of manner are held
back and a common, physical language of gesture, posture, or sound appears to take over.
During the passage of some time, pressures of individual life are put on hold and each person
follows a predetermined pattern of behaviour. At the same time, however, within and beneath
the ceremony, the participants will continue to be themselves, alert and independent, or
perhaps muddled and afraid. The inner self does not cease to exist as the outer self speaks in
the familiar and comprehensible terms of ceremony. It is interplay between these two modes
of being and expression – between inner and outward existences – that gives to ceremony
some of its most valuable contributions to the making of theatre.
Becoming aware of the theatrical power of ceremony by spending time in a very different
country from my own – in some ways, a more old-fashioned society – has changed the way
I respond to the texts of Shakespeare’s plays and, in particular, the way I sense the life of his
characters. Such formalities may well have origins in religious rituals, but in everyday use
ceremony is a common reaction to all kinds of authority. Any submission or exercise of
power, or any pretence of these, can be expressed in ceremony’s non-verbal language.

* * *

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Actors in every production I have seen in Japan are naturally ceremonious, at least some of
the time.1 By sinking individuality under the cover of routine ceremony, they are able to
make a statement with relevance outside the present moment without loss of dramatic
content or inner drive. Because a ceremony takes time to make its comparatively calm effect,
its visual image has an extended exposure so that it becomes a marker in a wide field that is
crowded with many more fleeting impressions. A sequence of such markers may enter
securely into an audience’s memory-bank and, by the end of the play, these can be drawn
upon to awaken a complex response that reaches outside the limits of any momentary effect
or any one character’s consciousness. When a ceremony is repeated in different circumstances,
the earlier occasion will tend to be recalled, making a recognition of an inward difference part
of the new experience. All this may make an audience more aware than characters in a play
of significance, irony, complication, development, submission, ineffectiveness, consequence.
The use of ceremony gives an extra expressiveness to performance in Japan, a valuable effect
that is not so often used or seldom registers in less ceremonious countries.
These effects can be demonstrated in No and Kabuki, two ancient forms of theatre that
retain the still more ceremonial styles of earlier ages. For example, numerous ceremonies of
farewell are used successively at the end of the Kabuki play of Shunkan, when its hero is left
alone on a remote island having sacrificed his freedom for that of his friend’s wife. The scene
develops from one ceremony to another, each taking its own time as in a slow dance of
achievement, grief, courage, stoicism, resignation. A spectator is drawn into ever fuller
knowledge of this man’s experience, as if a jewel were being viewed facet by facet. Time is a
vital ingredient of theatre and the time taken by ceremony introduces a kind of slow-motion
which allows an audience to realise what neither direct action nor a lot of talking would be
able to hold steady for their attention. Progression is also vital to good theatre and this is well
served by the single-mindedness of ceremony – its simple-mindedness – because an
increasingly complex or profound impression can be accumulated as it moves through its
well-signalled, successive stages. Contemporary Japanese dramatists, directors, and actors
seem to know this very well since they use ceremonies freely, especially at moments when
feeling runs high or the extraordinary is about to take place.
When I saw Kara Juro’s Orugoru-no Haka (Music-box Cemetery) in its 1992 revival by
the 7th Ward Theatre Company, I found that the preparation and serving of a meal was at the
heart of the play and provided the occasion for the two leading characters to establish their
mutual relationship and uncertainties. To my eye, their ceremonies often seemed like childish
games, but an intent and crowded audience was telling me otherwise; its attention was
securely held. Even I could see that nothing was as simple as outwardly it appeared to be:
these people taking part in a shared ceremony were not at all simple, nor did they have very
much else in common. He was a puppet-maker who could seemingly make himself disappear

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and she a whore who had expected to receive her lover, the Boss. All this was expressed in
the performance of commonplace domestic ceremonies in which slight variations and instinctive
hesitations, or a momentary lapses, could signal significant differences and tensions.
In the action-packed La Vie en Rose (1992), written and directed for his Third Erotica
Theatre Company by Kawamura Takeshi, ceremonies were various and numerous, often
noisy and as often striking. Inspired by Dostoevski’s The Possessed and containing crowds
of characters, historical and fanciful, the production was played by a cast of (I think)
twenty-four on the very small stage of a small and uncomfortable theatre. Ceremony was
here a way of coping with a roller-coaster of events and many collisions of purpose in what
the author called ‘The Age of Confusion’. I saw a funeral with two corpses (one of which
steps out of his coffin), a wedding where all the men were played by women and vice versa,
a civil war with rifles, machine-guns, and poison gas in which fortunes changed rapidly. A girl
reappeared in different guises – on stilts, pregnant, dressed for work, infantile, glamorous.
Peter, the central character who is trying to make a verbal record of this phantasmagoria, is
made to pose almost naked to be photographed in the postures of a pin-up girl with her
expected expressions of allure on his face. Each element in this noisy world was presented
by its appropriate ceremony, all instantly recognisable and sufficiently brief for the hard-
working actors to sustain the headlong momentum of the action.
I am not sure, in my ignorance of the language, if this play worked for its audience, but I
do know that I had more sensations to absorb than I could easily manage and yet seldom did
I lose sight of what was afoot. If the actors had had to create individually realised performances
in all the various realities the author had had in his mind, they would have been exhausted and
the audience confused; and the play would have taken many more hours to perform. As it
was, the production was packed close with instantly recognisable images and so able to force
even an alien like me to look for connections and to question the motives and necessity for
the action: in short, to think about what I saw and heard. Whereas Music-box Cemetery had
used ceremonies to slow up stage-events, La Vie en Rose used them to speed up and
concentrate the drama.
Sometimes simple ceremonies are used to widen the scope of a play. When Kishida Rio
spoke to me of her play Ito Jigoku, or Woven Hell, she told the story of a young girl searching
for her mother: she finds her in a pre-war weaving factory and here they start a long struggle
with each other, at the end of which the girl kills the mother. When I heard this synopsis, I
envisaged an episodic narrative play in which the mother–daughter relationship took central
place, but a video of its production showed that this story was told within an elaborate
staging of the continuous activity of a dozen women in routines of work that subjugated
them to their male supervisors. The play was not only about the blood relationship of two

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individuals, but also about woman’s enslavement to social, moral, and economic forces. By
using almost mindless and repetitive ceremonies, the author had shown how people are tied
together and kept apart by unthinking routines of living. The simple narrative thread had
been presented within a vista of continuing life and drawn through a complex net of
interdependence.
Seeing Suzuki Tadashi’s Waiting for Romeo (1993) as a first or early encounter with
Japanese theatre, a European or North American spectator might wonder at the complicated
way in which the central character sits down to a meal, and still more at its slow and formal
service, and the poised stillness of the single partaker. Yet the heart of the play is within
this single figure, whose thoughts and sensations are more freely expressed by other
figures who appear out of the distance to encircle the stage in other ceremonies. A line of
male actors dressed in women’s skirts and sitting in wheelchairs propel themselves with
their feet working energetically in unison and making uniform and loud clacking noises
with the bright red, high-heeled shoes they all are wearing. A non-Japanese onlooker might
easily get bored as this activity goes on and on, varied chiefly by some hilarious and
panicky moments when one of the automata goes astray or gets stuck against an immovable
obstacle. But these non-individualised and repetitive activities are the very means by
which the director-author has grounded his work in a mélange of the unthinking activity of
everyday ceremonies. By using a mixture of repetitive actions to be found in hospitals and
in popular musical entertainments, Suzuki has presented a nightmare dance of interminable,
obsessive, and almost mindless fears experienced by his central character. Without such a
strong physical language for their expression, such instinctive sensations could have been
no more than fleeting impressions or the subject of laborious verbal statements. Meanwhile,
by means of age-old ceremonies involved in serving a meal, he has held the central

Plate 4.1 The central character supported by members of the chorus in Waiting for Romeo;
directed by Susuki Tadashi for the Suzuki Company of Toga

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character still so that the audience is able to focus on what is familiar and become more aware
of any variation in how the ceremonies are performed.
Shakespeare’s plays are now very popular in Japan and directors make audiences feel
at home in them by taking full advantage of their opportunities for using ceremonies. For
the k ing’s first entrance in a production of King Lear at the Panasonic Globe in 1991, the
entire court had entered in due order and then prostrated themselves on the floor of the
stage. Lear’s absolute power, not mentioned in the text at this point but crucial to the
drama of this scene, was everywhere apparent and impossible to ignore. Ceremony was
also used to display complications which are unstated but inherent in a situation: so when
the unmoving, self-contained, and outwardly respectful figures of Lear’s daughters did
break out of that fixed order, they drew total attention, both when speaking to their father
and when hearing what their sisters said. In the original editions of this play, a simple list
of characters entering is the only stage direction to aid a reader or director, but if the whole
scene is staged with full respect to ceremony, each position nicely judged, all persons
facing the king, each movement calculated and competitive, then instinctive glances or an
inner tension can draw attention and give a sense of suppressed rivalries and fears. Within
the king himself, almost unmoving as his status requires, his deepest needs can become a
nontextual drama of undeniable power. Personal feelings, suggestive and incipient,
rather than definitive, became apparent to the audience as they show signs of breaking

Plate 4.2 Ceremonial dance in a production of King Lear; performed by Banyu-Inryoku,

directed by J.A. Seazer, at the Globe,Tokyo, 1991
Photograph: The Globe,Tokyo

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through the outward composure of ceremony; they were more ominous than if they had been
fully played out.

* * *

Experience of Japanese ceremonies and ceremonial theatre can alter the way Shakespeare’s
texts are read. Any group entry which includes figures of power, whether king or head of
family, or even an elder with a younger brother, will be seen as an invitation for ceremonial
and a consequent sharpening of attention. In Shakespeare’s day all this would have been
taken for granted, and so only rarely do stage directions or dialogue prompt a reader or
director in what should be done. If the prince entered last, ‘cum aliis’, at the start of the first
court-scene in Hamlet, as the ‘good’ second Quarto specifies (I.i.0, stage direction), the focus
drawn to his displaced figure would have been intense long before he spoke. When a royal
person refuses his proper position he does not act alone; everyone else does not know where
to place themselves, and so he brings about a general disorder and uncertainty.
Few stage directions are so helpful or bear similar signs of being authorial in origin as this
in Hamlet, but the dialogue, if read with an eye to ceremony, will often show that Shakespeare
was attentive to such matters and expected respect to be paid to them in staging. Returning
again to the first ceremonially ordered scene of King Lear, the marked absence of speeches
for Cornwall and Albany, as they move and stand in direct relationship to their wives, will
bring them into focus early on, especially when Cordelia speaks pointedly of her sisters’
‘husbands’. Still more searchingly, the audience will look for their responses when the king,
without preparation, calls each husband by name and invests them, and not their wives, with
his power as, equally, his two ‘belovéd sons’ (ll. 126–38). Why do they not reply, or why are
they allowed no opportunity to do so? Perhaps they come forward, with or without their
wives, ready to speak; and, certainly, they must kneel. What are their wives thinking as they
also say nothing, and how do they relate to their husbands at this moment? In a ceremonial
age these questions were bound to be asked. Ceremony has set the stage and ensures that the
audience can sense undercurrents of thought and feeling in the smallest deviation from
expected behaviour. It also invites the actors to mark their individual courses throughout this
corporate scene.
One obvious cue for such effects is a general exeunt. Someone must go first: who should
this be, and how will precedence be decided? In this same scene, the two princely sons-in-
law will both come into focus as they take leave of their wives, without a word being spoken;
and their wives will have to discover how they stay behind to be alone on stage with Cordelia
and the King of France. Rules for courtly behaviour will ensure that such issues surface into
the physical management of the moment and here the dialogue is also helpful. The status of

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the new bridegroom is defined as Lear leaves the stage calling the rejected suitor to take the
place of honour at his side, with ‘Come, noble Burgundy’ (l. 266): in contrast, France’s
position is defined wholly in his physical relation, as husband, to Cordelia. Yet this is not the
end of the matter, because she says nothing to him throughout the whole of this concluding
episode. Only her actions and bearing will speak for her relationship to her husband: to him
she says ‘nothing’, which is how she said she wanted to react to her father earlier in the scene.
Silent ceremony, at this moment, can show her confidence in France as her words are
concerned with her sisters and with her father who has just left the stage. It is left to the new
husband to show in words the closeness of their bond and his admiration for her, with the
simple, ‘Come, my fair Cordelia’. The situation, that involves such a series of breakdowns
in usual ceremony, is further complicated when the dialogue implies that Cordelia speaks
through her tears (see ll. 267–8) and this has no effect on her sisters. When Cordelia offers a
formal ‘farewell’, neither Goneril nor Regan replies verbally and so, once more, an expected
ceremony is missing or reduced to a silent response as each sister chooses what to do. By
such means, throughout the first scene of King Lear, individual characters are placed in self-
revealing moments as expectation of ceremony is built up and broken down. When wordless
improvisation has to take over from prescribed formality, the effect is similar to that of
cinematic close-ups as small movements register powerfully. It also gives a more general
sense that power and subservience are not securely based: this is a society under strain to
maintain expected relationships, a situation in which words are not always adequate.
In more domestic circumstances, ceremony will make the Gloucesters’ family relationships
an equally present concern in this play. Tensions are shown in the first moments when the
virile Edmund is standing behind his father, dependent but unacknowledged, and when the
Earl of Kent speaks directly about him without addressing him: ‘Is not this your son, my
lord?’ (I.i.7). How does Edmund react when all eyes turn to him and the father speaks of his
son in the third person, as if he were not present? What ceremony is used as Edmund replies
to Kent with: ‘My services to your lordship’? Almost certainly, he should kneel, as he has
not done to the father who would only have ‘blushed to acknowledge him’ (ll. 9–10). How
is his relationship to his father expressed now? Gloucester says nothing until after Edmund
again replies to Kent with ‘Sir, I shall study deserving’, and then he again speaks of his son
in the third person: ‘He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again’ (ll. 31–2). The
contrasts between the ceremonies used between Kent and Edmund, which are entirely
regular, and those used between Edmund and his father, which are entirely irregular, would
have been very noticeable and alerted the audience to Gloucester’s unthinking assumption of
dominance and Edmund’s quick improvisation of an entirely new relationship. Unless a
production or a reading recoguises these disrupted and discordant ceremonies, it can
misrepresent this scene: dialogue does not say it all.

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Sometimes the words spoken say nothing to the purpose and ceremony is forced to take
over. When the newly crowned Macbeth dismisses his court, everyone, including the newly
crowned Lady Macbeth, leaves without saying a word:

Let every man be master of his time

Till seven at night;
To make society the sweeter welcome,
We will keep ourself till supper-time alone.
While then, God be with you!2
(III.i.40–4)

Ceremony here ensures that everyone waits for the queen to leave first and everyone watches
her. Why does she say nothing? Does she delay before going? Did she intend to reply? Are
any of her husband’s words addressed specifically to her? Can any signs of affection, mutual
understanding, or uncertainty be seen between king and queen, or husband and wife? This
moment is not one of those when the words of the text suggest a deep relationship between
the two protagonists, but in their parting here the actors have a spot-lit opportunity for
marking their differing ways through the story that they share.
In Shakespeare’s comedies, ceremony is as varied as its use is constant. Twelfth Night, for
example, offers many opportunities for contrasting effects in the two very different households
of a Duke and a Countess, not least when he at last meets her and tries to behave as if ‘heaven
walks on earth’ (V.i.91). Until then Orsino has moved only amongst young male attendants
who are variously and, apparently, randomly favoured: as Valentine says to the disguised
Viola, ‘If the Duke continue these favours towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much
advanc’d’ (I.iv.1–3). In Olivia’s household, funeral ceremonies are still in place at first; but
two knights are taking their different pleasures in the Buttery Bar amongst servants, the
steward is having noble dreams above his element, and Maria, a waiting gentlewoman, is
wielding power over everyone. In both places, the fool Feste exercises his freedom from
paying respect and yet can be seen to have unspoken cares and desires.
That ceremony was a major resource in the game of making Elizabethan theatre is even
more obvious in the history plays with their power struggles between kings, nobles, and
other persons of very different status. Henry the Fifth contains an account of the continuous
presence of ceremony and the expository advantages a playwright gains through using
ceremonies of submission. The king himself speaks it after he has disguised himself as an
ordinary soldier and talked with those who are, in fact, ordinary soldiers:

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O Ceremony, show me but thy worth!

What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
(IV.i.240–3)

Henry goes on to speak of the other side of that coin, the abuse of ceremony:
Wherein thou art less happy being fear’d
Than they in fearing.
What drink’st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison’d flattery?
(IV.i.244–7)

Ceremony’s message can be false and dangerous: a ‘proud dream / That play’st so subtly
with a king’s repose’ (ll. 253–4). Its effect on stage is twofold: to awaken the audience’s
attention to unspoken rebellion or insecurity, quite as much as to show power and fearful
dependence.
Shakespeare’s awareness of this seems to have grown with the years, if his characters’
views of ceremony are any indication. An uneasy Brutus acknowledges its uncertainty in
Julius Caesar:
When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.
(IV.ii.20–1)

In Lear, a nameless attendant feels constrained to comment, his syntax betraying his unease:

. . .your Highness is not entertain’d with that ceremonious affection as you were
wont; there’s a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the general dependants
as in the Duke himself also and your daughter.
(I.iv.57–61)

When an urgent servant runs in with news, Cleopatra protests:

What, no more ceremony? See, my women!
Against the blown rose may they stop their nose
That kneel’d unto the buds.
(Antony and Cleopatra, III.xiii.38–40)

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Timon knows misuse as ceremony’s only useful function:

. . .Ceremony was but devis’d at first

To set a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes,
Recanting goodness, sorry ere ‘tis shown. . .
(Timon, I.ii.15–17)

Except in non-European societies or on the rare occasions for which old traditions are still
maintained for public occasions, it is not easy for us to grasp how widespread and significant
ceremony was in Shakespeare’s England and in his plays. His contemporaries took it so
much for granted that they did not often speak of it. In much the same way, stage directions
in printed plays take so much for granted that they are inadequate guidance to what would
have been shown on the stage. Lengthy and apparently tireless accounts of courtly occasions
show, however, that ceremony was often used to excess. For example, Sir Dudley Carleton
wrote to Mr Winwood from London in January 1604 about the marriage of Sir Philip
Herbert and the Lady Susan on St John’s Day at Whitehall:

The Court was great, and for that day put on the best bravery. No ceremony was
omitted of Bride-Cakes, Points, Garters, and Gloves, which have been ever since
the Livery of the Court; and at night, there was sewing into the sheet, casting off
the bride’s left hose, with many other pretty sorceries.3

The monarch’s arrival on a state occasion would be governed by long lists detailing who
entered and in what order of precedence, who greeted the king at the first entrance, who at the
second and third, what special duties each named officiant enacted, and so on. The elaborate
and careful procedures could be fascinating to those who took part: each person had his or
her own share of attention at a moment and in an office which signified either inherited rank
or achieved merit and favour.
The long stage direction in Act IV, scene i of Henry VIII provides the fullest description
of a ceremonial procession in Shakespeare and the dialogue that follows shows the interest
two ‘Gentlemen’ take in small details of its arrangement:

— A royal train, believe me. These I know.

Who’s that that bears the sceptre?
— Marquis Dorset;
And that the Earl of Surrey, with the rod.

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— A bold brave gentleman. That should be

The Duke of Suffolk?
— ’Tis the same – High Steward.
— And that my Lord of Norfolk?
— Yes.

There is no doubt who is the Queen, but the positions around her need some explanation:

— They that bear

The cloth of honour over her are four barons
Of the Cinque-ports.
— Those men are happy; and so are all are near her.
I take it she that carries up the train
Is that old noble lady, Duchess of Norfolk.
— It is; and all the rest are countesses.
— Their coronets say so. These are stars indeed,
And sometimes falling ones.
— No more of that.
(IV.i.38–55)

And so the procession leaves ‘with a great flourish of trumpets’.

The extent to which such ceremonies could affect the imagination in Shakespeare’s day is
not easily illustrated from the exhaustive and occasionally enthusiastic accounts that have
survived. Deeper impressions were to be given several decades later in the freer and more
graphic style of prose fiction. So Margaret Cavendish describes the assembled court when
the heroine of The Contract (1656) arrives at a ball:

when they came to the court, all the crowds of people, as in a fright, started
back, as if they were surprised with some divine object, making a lane, in which
she passed through; and the keepers of the doors were struck mute, there was no
resistance, all was open and free to enter. But when she came in into the presence
of the lords and ladies, all the men rose up, and bowed themselves to her, as if
they had given her divine worship; [excepting] only the Duke, who trembled so
much, occasioned by the passion of love, that he could not stir: but the Viceroy
went to her.
Lady, said he, will you give me leave to place you?
Your Highness, said she, will do me too much honour.
So he called for a chair, and placed her next himself; and when she was set, she
produced the same effects as a burning glass; for the beams of all eyes were drawn

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together, as one point placed in her face, and by reflection she sent a burning heat,
and fired every heart. But he could not keep her; . . .4

Such a slow-motion view of a court occasion suggests something of the power of regular
ceremony and its disturbance, the polarities within which we should try to envisage
Shakespeare’s plays. It gives an idea of how strongly Hamlet’s displacement in the first
court scene might register and how the actions and behaviour implied in his talk with Ophelia
as the court prepares to watch a performance of The Murder of Gonzago would place huge
and unexpected pressures on both Ophelia and the Queen, and consequently on everyone
else, including Claudius:

QUEEN: Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me.

HAMLET: No, good mother; here’s metal more attractive.
POLONIUS: O, ho! do you mark that?
HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
(III.ii.105–9)

Margaret Cavendish’s awareness of how members of the court bear themselves also reflects
on the opening words of King Lear, as two courtiers discuss the impressions made by the
monarch’s behaviour at some earlier occasion:

KENT: I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than
Cornwall.
GLOUCESTER: It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the
kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most. . .
(I.i.1–5)

In a ceremonial world, ‘appearances’ are often of crucial importance; they can also be
wrongly interpreted.

* * *

Would a renewed emphasis on ceremony in productions of Shakespeare’s plays lead,

inevitably, to museum-like reproductions, attempting to mirror a forgotten and irrecoverable
society, or does the contemporary use of ceremony in Japanese theatre point towards more
accessible presentations which mirror present-day living and modes of perception? These
questions also have significance for readers and critics of the plays.

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The very words ceremony and, especially, ceremonious and ceremonial speak to us
of old-fashioned pomposity, pretence, or specific religious practices and beliefs. But
psychologists and sociologists have given new meaning to the related word ritual and
the usage of ceremony may be similarly updated. Following H.S. Sullivan’s Inter-personal
Theory of Psychiatry (1947), Erving Goffman’s Interaction Ritual (1967) used examples
from contemporary life to show how we are all liable to use similar postures, gestures,
and actions, and, sometimes, forms of speech, to represent unspoken recognitions of
power, dominance, fear, need, intention, and so forth. Because ritual was used in
Shakespeare’s day comparatively rarely, and then in connection with religious rites, I
have used ceremonies for the unconsidered and often small actions that denote the
presence of power and submission; as we have seen, this was the word Shakespeare
used in entirely secular contexts.
Attention paid to ceremonies in Elizabethan and secular senses, or to rituals in
Goffman’s sense, need not lead to museum-like productions or readings of the plays
that would fix them into a long-lost world – the reverse is true. If we look for ceremonies
in contemporary life that can be used to take the place of older ones, we may find means
to animate the action of the plays so that they will represent the ceremonious nature of
their original enactments. More than this, the use of modern ceremonies will help us to
realise the plays in action so that they reflect our own lives.
In Japan, where contemporary life is more obviously ceremonial than in Europe or
North America, dramatists and directors, as we have seen, use ceremonies to reflect their
own times in entirely new plays as well as in Shakespeare’s. Many of these devices are
not specific to this Asian culture but equally available in other technologically advanced
societies. The plays and productions of Noda Hideki show this spectacularly well. This
author-director-actor finds ceremonies in most aspects of life around him, and they all
come together in his teasingly intellectual and highly popular productions: outward
signs of power, of submission to power, or of craving for power; unconscious tricks of
behaviour which express acceptance of fixed ways of life; games of hide-and-seek within
a world made mechanical and frightening by the adoption of pre-made patterns of
reaction. Recurrent ceremonies in Noda’s plays are those associated with up-to-date
processes of salesmanship, education, technical instruction, medicine, grooming and
personal hygiene, military training, parties of many sorts, arrivals and departures by
various forms of transport, and so on. Besides this welter of contemporary material,
ancient ceremonies are also introduced from Kabuki, No, and Bunraku theatres, and
from religious worship. Old-fashioned but still recognised emblematic figures are seen
briefly and parodistically in ceremonial postures; one play has two Father Christmases,
another a Lucifer, Jesus Christ, and Alice in Wonderland. Routines of performance are
also taken from circuses.

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In Noda’s plays characters often seem to be all packaging and no substance, their
actions determined by the routine and repetitive actions of submission to superior
power or custom, not least to the dictates of pop-culture, mass-media advertisement,
consumerism, big business, and technology. The way in which so many routine elements
are fused together is highly original: these ceremonies echo each other, destroy each
other, or self-destruct by increasingly frantic implementation. Contemporary ceremonies
so dominate the action on stage that the characters’ other responses can appear to be the
ineffectual striving of dumb creatures caught in a trap or struggling helplessly in the grip
of some disease. Eventually, the whole dizzying dance comes to a stop, as if by magic
rather than by an individual’s responsible act, or as if this world of externally imposed
behaviour has burned itself out. Possibly someone has destroyed it, having seen too
clearly the absurd mindlessness of the activity.
The basic actions in Noda’s plays are, however, heroic enterprises: a story close to
that of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, or a family’s response to the arrival of twin girls who have
to be separated surgically, or the adventures of the Prisoner of Zenda and the Children’s
Crusade (these two in a single play), and so on. Somewhere in the huge entanglement of
pre-packaged behaviour lies an aspiration struggling to achieve something or to make
independent sense. Often the end comes with repeated gestures or movements associated
with levitation or the flying of birds, as if the characters long to be free. Yet audiences are
left to take the plays as they wish: as bright festivals of everyday clichés – fashionable,
glitzy, infantile, paradoxical, funny – or as elaborate puzzles in which they may discern
the forces driving a modern frenzy or seeking to transcend it.
Noda takes old and new ceremonies with equal relish and equal scepticism, and
because of that his plays can seem impenetrably Japanese to foreign eyes. Besides
he drives them at such a furious pace that there is little time to develop a sense of
an underlying organisation, except in general and therefore abstracted terms. These
elements of his dramaturgy make his work seem inimitable and insular, but to view
his plays in Tokyo, with the packed and enthusiastic audience for which they
were written, is to be sure that ceremonies – repetitive actions, individually
mindless and yet generally meaningful – lie around everywhere in modern urban
life, waiting to be used in other theatres wherever in the world mega-businesses,
mass sales-techniques, bureaucratic priorities, and technical dehumanisation of
effort exercise their power and enforce uniformity.
This strength of the new Japanese theatre is available anywhere, to any dramatist,
director, and actor who has the wit to use it. Because our old forms of religious
and class-ridden ceremony have fallen into disuse, we do not always recognise
how modern ceremonies of power and submission have taken their place and
how mindless activity often governs how we live and think. The use of these
in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays and in our appreciation of the plays as

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Plate 4.3 Clear and energetic acting in The Prisoner of Zenda; directed and devised by
Noda Hideki
Photograph: Noda Map, Tokyo

readers offers a wide field for exploration and experimentation. None of this would be easy
but the attempt would give a clearer view of important qualities inherent in the plays and
of how Shakespeare imagined them in performance.
Some directors in Europe and the English-speaking world have staged Shakespeare in
recent years using the more ceremonious styles of performance found in ancient Asian
theatres. They go to great trouble to import foreign behaviours, movements, costumes,
and music in order to imitate the force and sensitivity of Kabuki in Japan or Kathakali in
India. Unfortunately, this practice removes the plays from present-day reality and the
instinctive reactions of audiences. A search for new and current ceremonies in the audience’s
own lives would offer a more open road to the rediscovery of that element of the plays
which uses purely physical means to concentrate attention and express relationships.
Noda has shown how much lies ready to use and how this creates productions that speak
directly to contemporary audiences in a visual language which they recognise as their own.
Repeated actions that were not in themselves meaningful were used to great effect in
Deborah Warner’s production of Richard the Second at the National Theatre in London
(1995). In the early meeting between the Duchess of Gloucester and John of Gaunt, in Act
I, scene ii, the director had the actress approach across the length of a long traverse stage
so that each step of the elderly woman was a separate acknowledgement of her need and
his power. Peter Holland has described the effect:

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the entire scene was controlled and shaped by the slow progress of the aged and
crippled Duchess of Gloucester down the theatre, leaning heavily on two sticks,
while John of Gaunt stood immobile. Indeed the staging of this scene precisely
enabled what was, quite simply, the most brilliant and perfect Shakespeare
performance I have seen: Paola Dionisotti’s Duchess, brutally hard in her vindictive
grief, spitting out her words with frightening power and the utmost lucidity,
confronting Graham Crowden’s Gaunt, as every step of her progress and every
movement of her body underlined the words with the utmost intensity.5

Such praise for an actress in a minor part (which is often cut from an acting script) is a tribute
not only to her artistry but also to the eloquence that a director can gain by a ceremonial
extension of a simple meeting.
A second reason to pay attention to the new theatre of Japan and reintroduce the ceremonial
to productions of Shakespeare is that ceremony can be found in some of the newest work in
theatre elsewhere. Samuel Beckett is the supreme exemplar. In the apparently casual and
unthinking behaviour of Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, of the women in Happy
Days and Rockaby, of Hamm and Clov, and of many other characters, Beckett was showing
their inward natures and the otherwise hidden implications of their more conscious efforts.
By cunning repetitions and unfamiliar contexts, Beckett revealed what would have been
obscured by confident verbal statements or clear-headed argument. He was not concerned to
create rituals of unambiguous significance but used many small ceremonies to show the
dependence, craving, isolation, courage, and other fears and resources of his characters. By
these means, he could express reactions of which his characters were not fully conscious. His
lead has been followed by many other dramatists who look closely at the habits of everyday
life, and especially by those who are also influenced by film and its ability to focus intensely
on unconsidered actions and responses. Harold Pinter and David Mamet are two of many
dramatists who use current ceremonies – for example, the way coffee is served after a meal
or a breakfast ordered from a nearby bar6 – to reveal their characters’ unspoken fears or
desires, and their otherwise hidden intentions.
Directors and actors who make most conscious use of ceremony in Europe and North
America tend to work outside established theatre companies, not basing their work on
written texts but preferring to develop plays out of ordinary experiences and their own
instincts; their productions are often dance-like or wordless. ‘Alternative’ theatre festivals
are crowded with productions of this kind, but unlike their Japanese counterparts, they are
not run-away successes and mount no effective challenge to established theatre. One does
not have to struggle to get a ticket, as you must in Tokyo for plays by Noda.
I am not suggesting an easy correspondence between the formalities of life in Shakespeare’s
day and the routines of late twentieth-century salesmanship, television, bureaucracy,

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education, travel, home or business life – the stuff of much contemporary theatre. Rather I
would argue that both codes of behaviour have elements, involving physical actions and non-
personalised forms of speech, in which timing, positioning, repetition, and small variations
have a similar capacity to express relationship and, especially, the operations of power and
dependency. Both give a dramatist or director opportunity to disrupt expected patterns and
so reveal otherwise hidden reactions. Both enable a chosen moment to be extended and
shown from varying points of view. These similarities mean that our own unconsidered
ceremonies could help bring Shakespeare’s plays to life on the stage in such a way that they
would reflect more fully our own everyday experiences.
For readers, I would argue, the task is one of re-imagination. If we bring more of the
immediate sensations of daily life to a reading of the texts by looking for currently viable
ceremonies that could be relevant, we may, in our mind’s eye, extend and illuminate their
actions. Neither this kind of reading nor the kind of production I advocate would entail a
modernising of the plays so that they reflected only repetitive and simple aspects of present
experience. Rather, these are the means to realise the texts’ potential in fuller accord with the
imagination that was responsible for writing them.

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 5

PERFORMANCE
Imagination and involvement

During the morning of 15 November 1995, at Trivandrum in Kerala, towards the southernmost
tip of India, I experienced a performance unlike any I have known before or since.1 The
theatre and its location, the single actor and what he was wearing, the style of his performance,
the drummers, the script, perhaps the time of day, certainly the absence of many of the usual
arrangements and equipment for production, my own expectations in this unfamiliar land,
and many other factors all combined to make up an event that provided, without any fuss or
complicated calculation, a simple and surprising conclusion, one that not only seemed correct
and undeniable, but also applicable to almost everything I had previously thought about
theatre and much else besides. In particular, it changed my views about Shakespeare’s plays
and how best they can be staged.
The nature of this actor’s performance was the main factor. In retrospect, the words he
spoke and the characters he portrayed – there were more than one – do not seem so important
as how they were acted. In fact, the play was written in ancient Sanskrit, a language of which
I know nothing and to which only students of considerable learning have any access. That
the play’s action was mythic, superhuman, and impossible could easily be sensed and yet it
was brought convincingly before me by quite unremarkable physical means if one discounts
those belonging to the actor himself. I must try to explain what he did, if I am to show the
consequences of this morning’s experience and show how this strange event can prompt
lines of enquiry for anyone to pursue.

* * *

The actor’s name is Ammannur Kochukuttan Chakyar Madhu, known as Margi Madhu:
Madhu means honey, and Margi is the name of the theatre of which he is a member. The third
son of a Brahmin actor, Moozhikulam Kochukuttan Chakyar, he has been active in training
and performance since the age of seven. At the age of twenty-nine, he has twenty-two years

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of experience in the extraordinarily demanding acting style and the strict regimen which is
known as Kutiyattam. Kuti means ‘together’ and attam refers to acting or dancing; ‘ensemble
performance’ is a possible translation.
The company lives as a self-contained unit alongside the theatre in which it trains and
produces its plays. Because they always perform for the gods, the theatre is situated close
to a temple and is itself a place for worship. Its plan is simple: a roofed rectangle on a
single level is divided into two squares, each about five metres wide, one for the stage and
one for an audience. Adjoining one of the theatre’s long sides are living quarters and
changing rooms; here too are stores, wardrobe, laundry, and other basic facilities. The
walls opposite to the rear of the stage and the company’s quarters are little more than a
metre high, leaving an open space up to the roof. At the rear of the stage, away from the
audience, are two doorways, one at stage left for entries and the other, at the right, for
exits. A third entrance to and from the stage is down-stage right. The audience enters
through a gate and across a narrow open space (which was waterlogged on the day I was
present, after heavy rains the night before) and then through a single entrance to the theatre
itself. The audience sits on the floor to watch a play, but between them and the actors, and
centrally placed, is a brass lamp on which, at the sitting audience’s eye-level, three flames
will be lit at the start of the prolonged rituals which precede performance. Except for
musical instruments, there is no further equipment for the stage.
Descriptive texts about Kutiyattam have survived from the twelfth century (in our
reckoning) and these give detailed instructions for all that has to be done: acting techniques,
procedures for staging and for music and dance, regulation of performances, interpretations
of the plays’ stories, and more. Also extant and dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth
century is a critique of Kutiyattam performances by a Brahmin scholar who believed that an
original purity had been lost. In his view, too many characters had been cut from the plays,
too many irrelevancies added, and the Vidushaka or fool was being allowed to play too big a
part and to use the regional language rather than Sanskrit. Yet the modifications which this
purist attacked were to prove their worth and have now become part of current practice. The
critic had been unable to disrupt an evolutionary process that adapted performances to
current interests and tastes. Today Margi Madhu inherits a tradition which has been
developing constantly over the course of some two thousand years.
As usual when travelling to see theatre which is new to me, I took no notes during the
performance and had no camera or recording device to take my attention. As far as I could
remember when I came to make notes early the next morning, what happened on that
November morning was as follows. I sat near the lamp on the floor close to the stage with an
interpreter at either side to whisper explanations from time to time. They introduced the
drummers and then Margi Madhu, who was dressed in a white loin cloth with a circle of

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white cord worn diagonally over one shoulder, the mark of his caste. The actor then showed
me how he makes an entrance, through the rear doorway to centre-stage front, his back
arched hollow and head erect, feet wide apart and legs bent outward. For a short time he will
take in his audience, after which he no longer sees them and ceases to be conscious of them.
He acts either to another actor representing another character or, perhaps more often, towards
the lamp which represents the god’s presence. This means that the elaborate costumes worn
by the Kutiyattam actors are designed to be seen only from the front, as it were from a god’s-
eye viewpoint.
Margi Madhu demonstrated the basic postures for a number of contrasted characters.
He also acted the fool, to show his freer behaviour and speech. He demonstrated how an
actor playing one character would impersonate other characters when required by the
narrative, moving with ease from a god to a servant, from a man to a woman, with no
change of costume or make-up. He spoke and chanted from the ancient Sanskrit texts. He
gave examples of particular gestures of feet and hands as appropriate for various sensations
of anger, lust, pride, fear, suffering, and so forth. Standing on one foot, he could raise the
other high to either side, adding a further range of possible gestures to those supplied
by arms and hands, backbone and head. Fingers of either hand moved at will to signal

Plate 5.1 Kutiyattam performance; Margi Madhu as Ravana in Himakaram

Photograph: Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India

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particular thoughts or emotions. Eyes, too, have their own vocabulary and my instructors
explained that daily exercise develop their ability to open wide and to be controlled precisely
as the drama requires. For performance, the whites of the eyes are reddened and their pupils
brightened by applying the dried seed of the chunda, a flower which grows locally; this is
said to make effects more noticeable as the drama requires.
I was shown how the Kutiyattam actor is like a dancer when impersonating his characters,
body as well as voice being responsive to the drama with remarkable refinement and
sensitivity. Movement is more within the body than across the stage, the actor often being
stationary while assuming postures that would be impossible in life and need perfect
balance to execute. The calm attention needed to achieve the extraordinary physical and
mental feats required by this art meant that this demonstration, while not a performance,
was an entirely serious occasion. A sense of gravity was in everything that was done – a
natural gravity, weightless and unconfined – and it began to possess me too. The day was
hot and humid, but in this shaded theatre, as the unhurried and complicated demonstration
proceeded through a great range of dramatic situations and moods, I began to sense a cool
timelessness in this art: a freedom from unwanted tension; complete concentration of
mind; no sign of effort despite its great difficulty; an unstated assurance, impossible to
achieve without long and specialised training.
For the last item of his demonstration, the actor became Ravana who after a victory in
battle decides to abduct Sita, who is the Lord Rama’s queen, and finds the path of his chariot
blocked by a mountain. His charioteer can do nothing – the actor becomes the charioteer so
that the audience sees his confusion and shame – and the frustrated Ravana is now driven by
pride, anger, and lust. He becomes so determined that he gets down from his chariot and faces
the mountain; and then he bends down to lift it out of the way. He fails; and so he draws back
and tries again, every physical strength drawn from his low-bent body. Again he fails and
again draws back, as if he can do nothing more. He crouches there for some time and then,
slow and watchful, he again gathers strength for a supreme effort, bends still lower and seeks
a firmer grip before once more applying all his might. The sinews of his back take the strain,
his wide-open eyes seem to glaze over; he is alert and yet totally harnessed to the immense
task. He tests his hold, shifts a little, very deliberately, and then extends all his effort. For a
long time he stays there trying every means and every possible adjustment; and then slowly
defeat begins to show. He sinks down, low to the ground, and stays there as if dead.
I remember thinking I had never seen anyone lie so entirely close to the ground and yet
seem to touch it only with his feet. (Is that possible? I do not know, but that is how it
seemed.) I also became aware of the drumming more clearly than before, for whereas Ravana
was absolutely still, as if not even breathing, the drums were pounding with slow and

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unbroken force. From them, as if they were part of a hidden reaction and not in conflict with
what I was seeing, Ravana gained strength and, slowly and deliberately, began to rise to his
feet. For a moment, I became aware that nothing was out of proportion and that it seemed
entirely natural for his body to rise from its deeply prostrate position to turn and face the
mountain again with a steady gaze.
Slowly, now, Ravana began to look at the mountain in careful detail. He noticed each
huge crag, each plateau, gully, and crevice, the trees growing out of fissures in the stone, the
streams, trickling at first and then in torrents. His eyes took it all in and then he reached up
and touched the topmost peak as if asserting his power over all that he had seen. Then he
bent down again, felt for a grip with his hands, and again harnessed all his powers to the
task of lifting the mountain. After more time than before, one side seemed to move slightly,
but then dropped back. After still greater exertion, it moved again and he tried the other
side as well, only to see the first dropping back so that once more it was unmovable.
Nothing would move now and Ravana had to fall back, low to the ground and powerless to
do more. The drums, however, were beating and lust, anger, and determination all slowly
returned. Then everything happened again, each part of the mountain being taken in by his
mind and its top once more within his grasp; and this time the second side also moved. But
still both did not move together, so that all this gigantic power of mind and body had failed
again before the immovable mass.
Yet once more he rose very slowly and turned towards the mountain, but differently this
time. Ravana did not look at each part of it in turn, but stared at it until he saw it as a whole,
taking it all in as one irreducible fact. I knew he had the entire mountain in view now: he bent
down and, not taking his eyes away, summoned all his strength – he had done this before, but
now still more firmly, and unhurried – and slowly, at the right hand first and then at the left,
the mountain moved and was lifted; and then both sides were raised, just a few inches, and
then a little more; and then back a little at one side. Ravana did not once take his eyes off the
whole mountain and his body did not give way or buckle as it was slowly raised, higher and
higher, until it was level with his chest; and then it passed his eyes and he lost sight of it. But
the movement was now unstoppable and Ravana lifted the huge mass high over his head and
with a new freedom swung it to the ground at his side. After a pause, he looked ahead
towards Sita and slowly his body began to express pride and satisfaction, and he turned
towards his chariot, mounted it and was driven away by his awed and silent servant.
That, as far as I can remember, is what happened and by the end of it I was exhausted,
because I had lifted the mountain. So complete had been the performance, so transparent,
and, I must presume, so thoroughly imagined in the actor’s head and being, that I had entered
into his mind and everything had become as real for me as it was for him. I did not move, but

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nothing distinguished our perceptions; he did the acting and I, at the same time, imagined it
all with him as it happened, as my consciousness, my memories and passions, were involved,
all together and in that present moment. It seemed as if it was my body, as well as my mind,
that had done this gigantic deed. I cannot account for the phenomenon in any other way: I
had lifted the mountain.
While I know very clearly how I felt, I am not sure that I have described accurately all that
had happened. I cannot, for example, remember how much was spoken or, indeed, if anything
was spoken during the entire episode: it had occurred so spontaneously, without the underlining
or obvious preparation for a climax which a director would give to a production. Although no
rush or imbalance was apparent in the complicated body-movements and postures, or in the
movement of eyes or position of fingers, every detail had seemed fresh as if it were happening
for the first time. I would say that it all had been improvised, but there was none of the quick
adjustments and uncertainties that are normal in even the best theatrical improvisations. Yet
the sensation of immediacy was such that watching the performance was like driving a car
and being conscious of movement, the road, and other traffic, but not noticing the landscape
or the act of driving. When it was over, I wondered how I had arrived where I had with such
little memory of the journey; and, somehow, I had been both driver and car, since it was I
who had covered the distance.
When Margi Madhu had stopped acting, he looked unremarkable; and it occurred to me
that he might always seem quite ordinary except when acting. Nothing was here of the ‘star
actor’, with that aura of self-importance which marks even the most modest of the great and
renowned actors in a rehearsal room in Europe or North America. His voice, which was
capable of amazing sounds when acting, in conversation was clear and unforced, but not
otherwise distinguished in range or texture. He looked more patient than most actors – or
most people I know – but that might have come from the land he lived in rather than as a
result of his art. He seemed impersonal, even; almost uninteresting. I wanted to know how
this person related to the characters he played. When playing Ravana, he answered, he was
not conscious of himself, because he was being Ravana. When playing Krishna, he was
conscious only as Krishna. His individual thoughts and feelings did not come into his acting,
he said, but then added as an after-thought: ‘Of course, the mountain Ravana sees is a
mountain that I have seen; only now it is he who sees it.’ I had nothing to say to this, but
afterwards I wondered who was Sita and who was the Charioteer that I also had seen? And
who was the Ravana whom I had become when I lifted the mountain?

* * *

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Plate 5.2 Kutiyattam performance; Margi Madhu as Arjuna in Subhadra Dhananjyan

Photograph: Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India

Amazement at this experience began to be joined by a great curiosity about the complicated
art and compelling performance. Unexpectedly I had learned about a part of the spectrum of
theatre’s possibilities that I had previously not known to exist and, increasingly, I began to
think that I had stumbled upon a key that would unlock some secret about Shakespeare’s
exceptional achievements. So I discovered as much as I could about Kutiyattam while I was
in Trivandrum and, later, I read all the books and articles I could find.
The actors, I learned, are always in training, their day starting very early when it is
coolest at around five in the morning. Sanskrit texts have to be studied and memorised, a huge
task bearing in mind that complete plays can take months to perform. With daily prayers
and rituals, the actors’ lives are strictly disciplined; once, as a penance, Margi Madhu’s
father had given a performance that lasted for

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Plate 5.3 Ammannur Kochukuttan Chakyar Madhu (Margi Madhu)

Photograph: Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi, India

forty-one consecutive days. The whole company of actors, actresses, musicians, make-up
artists, wardrobe attendants, teachers has settled routines for performing and for improving
their skills.
Music is principally percussion. Rather than providing a support for the actors to use,
by establishing the mood and shape of a scene, fixing and building certain climaxes, or driving
home particular words, it more often follows the actors to add to their performance. It
supplies an emotional context for the performance, so that it becomes an aural stage-setting;
but this is not fixed; it responds to the smallest details of what is done on stage. It can also
reflect or counterstate what the actors are expressing. It can distinguish one aspect of the
drama from another and enable several to co-exist without confusion. Music is therefore
dependent on the actor at all times and not the other way around, as in the operas or stage
musicals of European traditions.
Small cymbals are used by an actress, sitting alongside the down-stage right entrance, and
serve to mark the phrasing of dramatic action. An Edkka drum is played down-stage left,
from where the drummer has the best possible view of the dramatic action. This instrument,
shaped like an hourglass, is tuned with one hand and struck with a stick by the other; it has
a range of nearly two octaves but the volume it produces is comparatively low. At the back
of the stage are two Mizhav drums, big copper pots up to a metre high and two-thirds that

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in width at the greatest point. Leather is stretched across their narrow mouths on which the
seated drummers play with both palms and fingers. One drum is used to keep time, the other
for variations. These instruments are too powerful to accompany speech in verse or prose;
they mark the entry of characters and the development of the main themes and sensations.
Perhaps the most significant fact about Kutiyattam is that both actors and musicians
improvise their complicated and carefully refined art. The total performance is, therefore,
both strictly controlled and essentially free. Despite their great length in enactment, the texts
of the plays are short, providing only the nub of each situation from which, in movement,
gesture, and speech, the actors improvise, re-imagining and elaborating the text. The musicians
will then play according to what the actors have improvised, introducing their own
contributions within their own set of rules. To give some idea of the degree of elaboration
that can be used, D. Appukuttan Nair has written down and translated some of the Abhinaya,
or amplifications of the text, which were spoken during a performance. In the text of the
Nagananda, a prince suggests his state of mind in four lines of verse starting with the words
‘Did I not brave moon-lit nights, unbearable for lovers in separation’ and, in his elaboration
upon it, the actor had said something like:

Didn’t I suffer nights? For separated lovers, grief intensifies at night. Suffering
that grief, I managed through the night. This is not an easy task at all. How are
nights? – radiant, because of the presence of the moon. How is that? After sunset,
the moon rises in the west, spreads its rays everywhere and shines brightly. It
looks like this: the fisherman (that is the moon), in order to attract the vanity (that
is fish) of women, climbs into a boat (that is the western mountain) and spreads
his net (that [is] the rays) in the pond (that is the earth) all over. How is that? The
moon-fisherman sees the women happily whiling away time in the company of
their husbands. When a damsel looks at her husband, she sees that there is a tinge
of collyrium on his cheek. She suddenly gets up, thinking: ‘Why is this? He must
have kissed another one in her eye, and the collyrium must have spread into his
cheek. I will not touch him now’, and turns [her] back on him. . . .2

Translation into twentieth-century English prose is bound to be awkward but it shows how
freely the actor comments and innovates, as he amplifies a single line of his text, improvising
variations and exploring one possibility after another. (This example has been cut short; he
had much more to say in elaboration of this moment’s thought.)
Physically, too, the actor will explore each situation. His art is more individual and
independent than that of any actor who is confined by author or choreographer, or by stage-
business invented and arranged beforehand. The actor on stage is personally responsible at

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each performance for realising the play, for extending or curtailing the time taken, for placing
and defining climaxes, and for creating a fresh conception of the roles, narrative, and conflicts
of the drama. He has practised many traditional means of doing this, so that the progress and
embodiment of a briefly scripted play can be entirely unscripted.
According to Dr. K. Ayyappa Paniker: ‘The playwright who specifies in advance what
the character has to do before or during or after a piece of dialogue or monologue is not the
ideal playwright for the Kutiyattam theatre.’ A written text usually accounts for no more
than a quarter of any performance, the actor supplying the rest: ‘by the power of his
imagination [he] visualizes, fantasizes, creates scenes or situations’. In this creative act, the
audience is able to share: ‘The greater the gift of the actor, the greater the pleasure of the
spectator. The “togetherness” implied by the word Kutiyattam seems to extend from the
actors to the audience as well.’3
Because the point of contact between audience and stage is in the minds of actor and
audience, no scenic devices are necessary. When Ravana sees a mountain, that mountain is
there at the centre of the dramatic experience. When he thinks of Sita, she is present and she
could, if he wished to impersonate her, speak and act as well. One curious convention
follows from this: when two characters are talking to each other and one of them has little to
do but listen, that secondary character walks off stage to return only when there is matter
that he or she will contribute. No special timing or method is involved in making such an exit;
the actor simply walks off stage while the character he or she represents does not leave the
on-stage situation. So long as the central character is aware of the person who is being
addressed, that character is present both for the speaker and the audience.
I went back that night to see a performance with two actors and one actress, in full
costume and make-up. Said to last for two-and-a-half hours, it so happened that elaboration
caused the play to overrun by some thirty minutes. Again I sat just to the left of the lamp
as I faced the acting area, with a handful of other people sitting on their own around the
audience-space. The play showed Rama with Sita his wife while they were living alone in
a forest; his father had recently died and his mother had supported her youngest son so
that he now rules the kingdom. Action being limited to meetings and arguments, the chief
interest of this particular play is persuasion. A younger brother, after expressing both
sorrow and anger, wants to revenge the wrong that has been done; against this, Rama
argues that all will work for the best since a ruler needs to spend some time alone and
without power, so that he may learn about suffering and his own deepest thoughts. He
also rebukes his brother for hating their mother, saying that she must always be honoured
as the source of their lives and family bonds.
The nature of Rama’s experience was the centre of attention, not the physical realisation
of his story. On the level of actuality, there was nothing to see or hear. Rama was not dressed

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like a hermit with lean face and tangled hair as the narrative requires; his appearance is
described in this way before his entrance and then he comes on stage in the full regalia and
painted face of an all-powerful king. Similarly the forest itself was nowhere to be seen, only
its effect on the minds of the three persons who have taken refuge in it. Stage-attendants
brought in or removed a stool, or replenished the lamp, without the least disturbance to the
drama. Words were chanted with great variety of pitch and tone, freely extending or contracting
vowel-sounds and giving a steady ongoing beat when the large drums were silent. The
expressive signs made by hands, feet, and eyes were as complicated and unlifelike as those
of Margi Madhu in the morning’s demonstration
To my ears and eyes this performance was far less accessible. Make-up and costume
were unfamiliar and did nothing to increase my awareness of the performance. While
emphasising eyes and mouth, the bold lines and vibrant colours of the make-up hid all other
facial expression of the workings of the mind. The costume hid the actor’s body in the same
way, although the morning’s uncostumed demonstration had shown that in this kind of
performance the slightest movements and tensions could give immediately accessible
expression to the character’s involvement in the drama. Like the face-painting, the elaborate
clothes emphasised the most expressive elements – the hands and feet – so that all other, less
artificial effects were lost to view. On this night, a power failure cut off the electric lights
with which the theatre had been fitted, so that the stage was lit only by the lamp at audience
eye-level; the costumes being wide-skirted, this meant that the actors seemed to float in the
darkness, their feet visible only when moving into the light as they were lifted for some
expressive gesture. This unplanned return to earlier conditions of performance still further
obscured the actors’ bodies and removed the play from any sense of ‘real’ existence, evoking
a dream-like state of being in some limitless world.
Whereas in the morning, I was affected directly by the actor’s performance, here too
much was new and too much hidden for that to be repeated. A sense of alienation was my
strongest reaction. These plays when fully staged make no attempt to be accessible, even
while enormous, life-involving pains are needed to present them. I was embarrassed that I
had not experienced the play more fully and said afterwards how sorry I was that more
people had not seen the performance; to that the reply was that the players should be the
ones who were apologising. The ideal audience for their plays is one person sitting close to
the left-hand side of the lamp; anyone else present will be a potential distraction from the
intent and sensitive attention that these performances require and can satisfy. It then dawned
on me that this play had been given entirely for my sake, so that I should have the opportunity
to enter fully into its creation. Such magnanimity seemed to be taken for granted, as the
proper procedure for the guardians of this art.

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Because Margi Madhu, without ornate costume and make-up, had been alone and simply
dressed with the least possible encumbrance, the morning’s experience of Ravanna affected
me more deeply than the evening’s more complete performance and it has now become an
irremovable part of my memory. Here follow some notes from my journal written over the
next two weeks while I was still in India. I have not altered what I wrote then in the hope that
a shifting perspective may show how my understanding slowly developed.

What parallels are there for this art? A high-wire acrobat? But difficulty and
danger provide the thrills of that performance; no story is being told in time and
place, with consequences and changing demands. Perhaps the Kutiyattam actor
is more like a great writer, a Shakespeare: one who enters into each and every
part of a fictive world, moving from one character to another with total
commitment and giving no sign that he has lacked resource or lost a sense of the
whole. This actor finds what may be called his ‘words’, both simple and unlikely,
from out of his memory, and speaks them while improvising each moment of
consciousness for a fictional person. The main difference is that Margi Madhu
works with his actual and complete self as material, not only with words. His
total act, involving mind and body, is as pure and necessary, as simple and
sensuous, as a great poet’s words.
This actor seems to possess nothing, for he leaves no permanent artefact or
sign behind; always what he creates will melt or resolve itself into an unassuming
man, waiting and ready, and seemingly without any personal needs. His art is
essentially improvisational and, at the same time, carefully trained in specific
skills and comprehensively knowledgeable about how to respond to demands
made on it. Any challenge can be met in myriads of ways, transforming the given
and expected into an unprecedented gift for the audience. Tomorrow’s performance
will be very like today’s, calling on all the capabilities that have been accumulated
in a lifetime and using them in ways that can never be predicated.
The complexity of this art is one of being, not only of saying and doing. What
is done on stage is, as it were, transparent, because an audience sees through it into
the actor’s imaginative engagement in the drama. So it comes to share with him the
character’s experience and seems to take over the drama from him at each moment
of creation. This transference is more than empathy: both audience and actor lose
the sense of self; both, simultaneously, become the character as he or she is created
in both imaginations. The audience, unused to the experience, finds itself exhausted
when the performance is over.
The imaginative experience of Kutiyattam is both intimate and instinctive,

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distinctive and yet boundless, shared and yet separately individual, as if audience
and performer were natural twins.Yet, of course, the audience is dependent on the
actor: only by responding to the work of his imagination does its imagination take
fire and enter into the character and the drama.
Performance is never fixed but always immanent, ready to be freshly created.
It is open, so that it may be entered, enjoyed, endured, enlarged, illuminated,
or ignored by its audience. Any response is possible, except an attempt to
possess or define what happens. Neither performer nor audience owns anything
of what happens, beyond the fact that the actor has the long-nurtured abilities
which are put to use in the mutual and forever-changing enactment of the
characters of the drama.
This theatre offers a drama that is experienced as if real but is, in fact, intangible.
In this, it is like a contemplative or mystical religion, but it does not predicate a
supernatural existence or the presence of god within the actor. Its material is
entirely natural to a human being, so that performance is available to anyone who
is willing to attend to its imagined fictions. This sharing of imaginative consciousness
is not the ‘indwelling’ of a ‘holy spirit’ or possession by some ‘other’; it is more
like an intimate experience between two unself-regarding friends or lovers.
Part of the effect is due to the strangeness of what Madhu does. We, his
audience, could not, mentally or physically, perform as he does. Is he like a great
writer who summons up words which lie outside our reach and uses them in ways
that make original music and awaken unfamiliar sensations and thoughts? This
parallel may be closer than it seems at first because, as a writer’s words are drawn
from the same stock that we unremarkably use every day of our lives, so Madhu’s
actions use the same basic elements as we do: spine, limbs, nerves, muscles, blood,
heart-beat, and breathing; and, also, the same wear and tear of achievement and
disappointment, the same experience of growth and loss. Because these are his
means, his performance, that is impossible for the untrained to imitate, is also
wholly accessible to anyone who pays close and unpossessive attention.

* * *

While this archaic, unscripted, complicated, and elitist theatre is obviously far removed
from Shakespeare’s plays and the theatre for which they were written, an experience of
Kutiyattam has changed the position from which I now view Shakespeare. I did not
think so at first, but over the course of some months, after I had returned home, I began
to realise that this had happened.

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The freedom for the actor to be what he chooses to be and for the audience to follow him
into amazing deeds and states of mind and being began to challenge earlier ideas about
Shakespeare’s stagecraft and the almost unchanging background of the Shakespearian theatre.
In the intense focus of the Kutiyattam theatre, nothing external is needed to change from one
character to another or move from one place to another wherever the drama is happening. A
person who is being addressed need not be on stage. Everything is created by the imagination
of the actor and formed in his consciousness and his being. In response, the audience not
merely sees and hears what is happening on stage, but in its imagination moves through that
into an individual experience of the play at the same time as it is being created in the mind of
the actor, as if both his and their perception of the dramatic reality were one and inseparable.
By doing this, the audience does not merely echo or repeat, but re-imagines the dramatic
event in terms of its own individual memories and sensations, so that it seems to have
achieved the experience on its own account. The actor, betraying nothing of himself, has
become transparent and the play is no longer an object to look at and listen to. The question
which this began to raise with regard to Shakespeare’s plays is whether they allow for such
interpenetration of viewer and performer.
Clearly they do not rely upon it as Kutiyattam does, because what happens on stage is
changing constantly and no time is given to build up such a deep and sustained reaction. The
crowded stage and pageantry, changes of costume and physical appearances, direct
confrontations between a great variety of characters, and all the outward shows of the drama
required by the playtext demand a lot of attention. Besides, performance imitates ordinary
processes of living as if they were happening on the stage: in Shakespeare, and not in
Kutiyattam, a mother may wipe the face of her son who has become ‘scant of breath’ and an
actor’s ‘visage’ can become ‘wanned’ with his ‘whole function suiting / With forms to his
conceit’ (Hamlet, V.ii.286, 279; II.ii.546–50). Nevertheless, I would argue, all these important
aspects of Shakespeare’s stagecraft do not imply that the audience can never enter the mind
of a character as in Kutiyattam, so that they think and feel as one. Since this is part of the
spectrum of possible theatre experience, it might be called upon, instinctively, by any
dramatist on some occasions
The final scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, while busy with new incidents
and driven by the force of strong passions, are sometimes so very simple, verbally and
visually, that they might give scope for such an exceptional transfer of consciousness. In the
imagination, at these times if not at others, an audience could have direct experience of what
is happening within the mind and being of a character.
Juliet’s death is not to be summed up in the few rhymed and riddling lines of her last
speech or in what she does in order to kill herself. At this point Shakespeare has used the

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simplest dramatic means – even crude ones when compared with the splendour and sensitivity
of much of the dialogue elsewhere in the play – so that the inner-consciousness of the actor-
as-Juliet, having reacted to all that has been said and done before this moment in this
particular performance, will be something far more complicated and less describable. The
dramatic reality of the play – whatever it is that holds the audience’s attention – has been
given life by the actor’s imagination and has taken over the very being of the actor. So it is
what happens in the play that outreaches the words that are said or the particular actions
that are done and, at this point, the experience of Kutiyattam suggested to me, an attentive
member of an audience might lose any sense of the actor and might, in the imagination,
become Juliet, according to his or her own life-experiences and sensuous capabilities. The
play does not depend upon this transference, as Kutiyattam does, but the comparatively
simple nature of the text at this moment might make it possible.
So it is, to a greater or lesser extent, with later tragedies, which all end with some
simplification of expressive means: Hamlet and Cleopatra stop in the middle of sentences;
Othello reaches across to kiss the dead Desdemona after all words have been spoken;
Coriolanus is silent as he ‘falls’. In each case, the dramatic reality that holds the audience’s
attention cannot depend on the text alone and will require further substantiation by the actor,
his imaginative creativity and the audience’s ability to share in that creativity.
If this hypothesis is correct, an audience has been given a task with important repercussions
on its reception of the entire play. The culminating moment of Macbeth, for example, is not
simply a fight that fills a spectator with horror and terror but, rather, the predicament of the
character as imagined by the actor who has created the whole role and now lays it open, as
it were, for the audience to make its own in varying and individually necessary ways. At this
point, after Macbeth’s last words have been spoken, held tight in a couplet, and just before
the conclusion of the fight with Macduff or during a stand-off in the middle of it, the dramatic
focus narrows inescapably on to the protagonist and Shakespeare intrudes no more words.
Now an audience-member could enter into an imaginative involvement with the character and
find little impediment or competition. On the other hand, the audience could switch off
attention from the hero and follow only his adversary. Unless it is to be merely bloody and
brutal, as Macbeth’s final words would encourage it to be, on such an intangible and uncertain
effect the conclusion of the tragedy will depend. It seems to me, now, that the audience is
given a choice, either to become at one with Macbeth or to see him, as Malcolm subsequently
does, as a ‘butcher’ fit for death (V.viii.69). Still later, it will have to make what it can of ‘th’
usurper’s curséd head’ (V.viii.55), held high above the army.

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This tactic of moving beyond expressive words is illustrated at the end of King Lear over
a longer period of time. After Lear has asked for a button to be undone, there is only:

Thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips.
Look there, look there!
(V.iii.309–11)

The Quarto text of 1608 has still less dialogue: after ‘thanke you sir,’ giving only ‘O, o, o, o’.
Neither version of the text has much that can define the king’s last moments and the nature
of his thoughts, little with which the actor can express or represent the character’s involvement
in the drama. Both texts do, however, invite an open and actively imaginative performance at
this all-important moment so that, after all the words have been spoken and all actions
played, the actor might become transparent and allow the audience to enter fully into the
mind of King Lear and, in collusion with the actor’s imagination, create the character’s
experience for themselves. The text does not say whether he is mad, grieved, relieved,
resigned, hopeful or, at last, satisfied: in the last resort, members of the audience find what
is fitting for themselves.
The speeches of other characters on stage at the end of King Lear mark a shift of dramatic
attention to the inexpressible and imaginative. They try to speak with the dying king but
then draw back:

EDGAR: He faints. My lord, my lord!

KENT: Break heart; I prithee break.
EDGAR: Look up, my lord.
KENT: Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass!
(V.iii.311–13)

The play’s final words refer to what has been felt like a physical pressure exerted on those
who have only stood by. They imply that this audience on stage has shared imaginatively in
Lear’s predicament and have now emerged from an unprecedented experience:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.
(V.iii.323–6)

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After this, the characters and the actors must make their way off stage as best they can. The
Folio text may represent theatre practice in adding: ‘Exeunt with dead march’; the Quarto
has, more simply, ‘FINIS’. What Shakespeare expected or wanted to happen is therefore
unclear, except that he has provided no Fortinbras or Horatio, no Cassio or Lodovico, no
Malcolm or Macduff, no Octavius Caesar, to make a verbal judgement on what the audience
has witnessed and may imaginatively have undergone at the end of the tragedy.
The comedies, of course, lack such final intensities, but here too, from time to time, the
leading characters may stand still and silent so that, at these moments, the audience might
enter their very minds. When interplay moves beyond wit and comic confusions, and the
characters have no immediate intention or activity, the play might be apprehended, almost
timelessly, at the centre of a particular character’s consciousness and being. These moments
are scattered throughout the later parts of the comedies. In As You Like It, Rosalind’s
disguised encounter with Orlando in the Forest of Arden can come to this brink several
times if she pauses and allows pretence to fall away. Later, when Phebe commands Silvius
to tell Rosalind ‘what ’tis to love’, Orlando’s vows and Rosalind’s admissions of her own
experience are so simple and become increasingly so expected that the audience can travel
with the two lovers or, indeed, ahead of them, until Orlando’s final assertion that his love
is not present brings all to a halt: a pause here can hold for a long time in performance, and
during it the audience could be active in imaginative identification with either of the lovers
or, possibly, with both. The significance of the moment is emphasised by Rosalind’s
change of tone and tactic that follows: ‘Pray you, no more of this; ’tis like the howling of
Irish wolves against the moon’
(V.i.76–103).
In the last scene of Twelfth Night, amazement repeatedly brings a silence, as marked by
Olivia’s simple and isolated half-line, ‘Most wonderful!’, or by the pause before or after
Sebastian’s incomplete verse-line:

VIOLA: My father had a mole upon his brow.

SEBASTIAN: And so had mine.
(V.i. 217, 234–5)

In a pause before or after his ‘I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you’ (ll. 364–5), Malvolio
needs to leave the stage abruptly and the audience may go with him in imagination. If
everyone else is silent for a moment, that would suit such a moment.
I used to think that all these ‘simple’ moments were occasions when Shakespeare had left
the play to the actors who would find what they had to do in response to each performance
and audience. I think now that they are occasions when an audience is invited to enter into
the play and recreate it afresh in its own terms. From the actor, some astonishing way of

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expressing the character’s reactions and clinching a performance is not required; they would
intrude on the working of the audience’s imagination. What the actor must do is to rely on his
or her imagination to become the character and do very little more. In this way the character
remains open for individual members of the audience to make an answering engagement for
themselves.
A critic who does not recognise the potential of these outwardly very simple and often
silent moments will have undervalued one of the plays’ most distinctive features. The task
is to recognise how they may work upon an audience: someone who has sat down in front of
a single actor speaking in an unknown language and avoiding any imitation of real life and,
under those conditions, has lifted a mountain, is bound to wonder whether these moments
might not have a more transforming effect on the audience and its reception of a play than is
marked by the words set down to be spoken. Everything that is actually on stage might go
out of focus, as if in abeyance, while an individual observer, in his or her own imagination,
becomes an active participator in the drama; even the actors might seem to disappear.
Of Kutiyattam, Dr Paniker writes:

From the point of view of what the performance communicates, Kutiyattam may
be thought of as the theatre of imagined reality. . . .The actor, with the active
support of the drummer, has to rouse the imagination of the spectator so that the
latter can catch up with the flights of imagination of the former while presenting
detail after detail of a specific passage.4

* * *

If we believe that this transference from the enacted drama to the audience’s imagination
could happen at moments of silence or textual simplicity, might it not occur at other places
in Shakespeare’s plays? Seldom, must surely be the answer. When his characters speak
about the effect of performance, they assume otherwise: actors are ‘brief chronicles’ to
whom the audience should pay attention; they hold a mirror ‘up to nature’ in which some
image is to be seen (Hamlet, II.ii.519; III.ii.23–4). The audience’s imagination has to ‘amend’
what is offered, not become at one with the performers’ imaginations (Midsummer Night’s
Dream, V.i.210–15); its thoughts have to ‘deck’ the kings on stage, not identify with them
(Henry the Fifth, Prol., 28). We may ‘wonder’ at the strange events that are enacted, but are
not invited to make them our own (Dream, V.i. 126–7). The whole contrivance of a play is
like a dream that happens as the audience ‘slumbers’, not one in which they consciously
participate (see Dream, V.i.412–18).
Nevertheless, the potential for total transference must remain: it is part of the spectrum
of possibilities in an audience’s response and, in other theatres, whole plays have been

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designed for its evocation. If it is possible when a drama draws to its close and becomes
almost silent and still, perhaps it is also possible when a single character holds the stage in
soliloquy or extended speech. When their words do more than pursue an argument or make
a statement, or give a mental picture – the art of verbal scene-painting – but seem, rather, to
transport the speaker in imagination to an off-stage reality, some members of the audience
might find themselves following on their own accounts. Gertrude’s account of Ophelia’s
death gives precise details in such a way that she seems imbued with the very movement and
sound of what she saw. Macbeth seems to be actually lost in the dark, dreamlike menace of
the world he depicts, and to be pursued by its phantoms. Prospero seems to be present in
the gentle pastoral idyll that he evokes as he prepares to abjure his art. The more the actor
draws upon his or her own active imagination at these moments, transporting the character
into the other world, the more likely it will be that an audience is drawn into that other and
intangible reality. This would not be achieved easily: the actor must give no sign of difficulty
or provide striking actions or ways of speaking to make a particular effect. Here the imagination
must be trusted and the actor be prepared to ‘disappear’.
I am the more persuaded that Shakespeare sometimes sought such an effect when I find
he might have used it with considerable variety of effect. The First Murderer in Macbeth, in
tense preparation for an ambush, starts to speak his mind with a piece of ‘scene-painting’
which is interestingly delicate but, as a shift of consciousness, not very remarkable. Only
then does he invoke the image of safety and comfort:

The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day;

Now spurs the lated traveller apace
To gain the timely inn, . . .
(III.iii.5–7)

Description of the time and place has given way to another imagined reality. At such times,
Shakespeare asks the actor for such a leap forward in imagination that the audience will
almost certainly be outpaced and left behind. Examples of this are most challenging when
they break through ordinary speech, as in Romeo’s ‘O, I am fortune’s fool’ (III.i.133),
Othello’s ‘Goats and monkeys!’ (IV.i.260), or Macbeth’s ‘She should have died hereafter’
(V.v.17). Such shifts of imagination are so great and so tightly expressed that shock can
prevent an audience from following at first, but they are sometimes followed by a silent exit
or some very simple words, such as Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’
(V.v.19), during which an audience might be able to catch up and begin to create the moment
with the actor.
If active interplay in imagination between actor-as-character and audience-as-character is
possible and can be provoked at any time in a play, the consequences would be far-reaching.

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Response to the rest of a performance would lack the same immediacy and personal
commitment. Repeatedly the audience would lose the closer identification because so much
else is present on stage, clamouring for attention and raising issues or expectations with
obvious significance for a play’s narrative and thematic development: the play might therefore
be more difficult to comprehend as a whole and any sense of closure at its conclusion could
be weakened. Theatre would become an art that beckons as well as it attempts to fulfil,
offering far more than might be expected and yet leaving its audience with a sense of loss. So
the play would seem to remain forever out of reach – and having written that, I realise that
I have restated what I have instinctively held to be an important characteristic of Shakespeare’s
art. While this notion had previously seemed strange and somewhat absurd, it now presents
itself as a reasonable explanation of other features of the writing and points the way towards
better ways of staging the plays.

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 6

I M P R O V I S AT I O N
Freedom and collusion

The improvisational mode of all aspects of Kutiyattam performance seemed to be an important

factor in its ability to rouse the audience’s imaginative activity: both actor and audience
experience the play with something of the same uncertainty about what will happen next so
that both make fresh discovery of it in the same instant. Could such mutual spontaneity be
appropriate for plays with dialogue as complex and as subtle as Shakespeare’s? Innovative
and traditional imagery, sensitive and energetic syntax, new-minted words, varied allusions,
and metre make so many demands upon an actor that sudden inspiration could hardly be
sufficient stimulus for more than brief moments. Besides, so much happens on stage that an
audience can only occasionally concentrate on the imaginative centre of an actor’s performance
which is where all those words must find their dramatic validity.
Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s dialogue often implies that, for the speaker, new thoughts
come unsummoned out of those that have just been spoken and that the task of reflecting this
in performance would benefit from some element of improvisation. Examples are found in
every play, for this is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s writing at every stage of his career. All the
speeches that have become famous out of context give an impression of spontaneity to
greater or lesser extent:

Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night; come, loving black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
(Romeo and Juliet, III.ii.1–31)

Underneath the speaker’s momentary commitment to each word, a further and deeper
level of consciousness seems to supply an ongoing impetus for speech, the need to say
something more.

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Sometimes an abrupt change of attention indicates that the speaker’s confidence in what
has been said has broken down and another line of thought and feeling takes over as it rises
from the unconscious to conscious mind. Hamlet’s soliloquies are obvious examples, as in:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? –To die, to sleep:
No more; – and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. –To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. –Ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, . . .
(Hamlet, III.i.56–88)

Punctuation can suggest different units of thought in this speech, but not its varying speed,
direction, and impetus. Modern editors differ widely on how to represent the original texts
for readers or actors.
In exchanges between characters, two or more speakers must listen closely to each
other’s timing, phrasing, and colouring so that each reply sounds like a response to the
momentary impression. Viola, talking to Orsino when pretending to be Cesario, exemplifies
what she says later about a fool’s need to play close attention:

He must observe their mood on whom he jests,

The quality of persons, and the time;
And, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man’s art;
(Twelfth Night, III.i.59–63)

Viola also listens to her master as a hawk watches and responds to its prey. Simple replies,
such as ‘Say I do speak with her, my lord, what then?’ or ‘I think not so, my lord’ (I.iv.22 and
28), must be nicely judged for each performance if they are not to give offence and yet have
sufficient force to cause Orsino to veer away from his line of thought and take another tack.

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Such impressions of improvised speech fall short of an insistence upon improvisation in

performance. The reverse could be true: the more vivid and subtle the dialogue, the more an
actor will want to be sure how to control it. While every performance will have some element
of improvisation, our actors like to ‘make choices’ before playing for an audience. This
phrase, common in training manuals,1 reflects an awareness of the many interpretations and
re-tunings that a text can be given and a desire to simplify the moment of speech. Lengthy
rehearsals are used to base a performance securely and strongly in a predetermined ‘through-
line’ of interpretation, so that what an audience usually witnesses has already been tested
and chosen, and more or less fixed. Such performances cannot give the same experience as
being present at the creation of a drama that has never happened before, in which all
participators – actors and audience – have a share in defining each moment of enactment. One
of the major changes in theatre during the twentieth century in Europe and North America is
the gradual increase in the length of rehearsals for Shakespeare’s plays. In the 1930s, two or
three weeks were given to each production at Stratford-upon-Avon, whereas today rehearsals
may stretch over as many as eight.
Modern scholarship has compounded the actors’ desire for preparation and pre-emptive
decisions. As more is known about the subtleties and ambiguities of Shakespeare’s texts,
their possible reflections of everyday life in his times, and their relevance in our own, so
actors will be more anxious to make a choice for each particular phrase ahead of performance,
and to stick to that. They know that if they emphasise this, then that will be lost. If they take
time to ensure that a particular point registers, they accept that this will modify the rhythms
and thrust of a whole speech and, perhaps, the effect of an entire performance. Directors
work with the actors to sift through the niceties of the text and then to decide what ‘choices’
are made and, consequently, how a whole scene will be shaped. By the time a production is
ready for a first night, it will be held together by myriads of such choices and its actors will
have come to depend on this mutual prearrangement in order to be confident in what they are
doing and know how their performances fit together with the rest of the production. In this
way, actors can be more powerful on stage and dare to be more subtle and original in their
interpretations. A greater understanding of the texts has helped to turn Shakespeare’s plays
into carefully arranged and meaningful spectacles with opportunities for high-definition
performance. A jolt is needed, like that of seeing a very different kind of theatre, to make us
ask whether these procedures are not against the grain of the texts and fail to provide the
performances that would best suit them.
When they were written, Shakespeare’s plays would have been performed in a large
repertory and seldom would one play have been repeated within a week or longer. Rehearsals
of each script were few and short; stage management simple and barely adequate by modern
standards. A play had to take the fortunes of each performance and so had its ‘interpretation’

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(as we would say, but the phrase was then unknown in the theatre). By twentieth-century
standards, the whole procedure seems fraught with risk and imprecision, so that we are
amazed that everyone seems to have been content with the result. What a performance of
Kutiyattam shows, in relation to this, is that a complicated and thoroughly demanding style
of performance is no bar to improvisation: we need not presume that the procedures of
Shakespeare’s day were inimical to refinement or a profoundly considered performance.
In my first encounter with Kutiyattam I had sensed that everything in its elaborate
contrivance was being created freely, then and there, and unpredictably. In these performances,
actors accept the chances and changes of imaginative recreation; supporting music is improvised
according to the actors’ improvisations; even the ancient text in an otherwise dead language
is recreated by an actor’s instantaneous invention. Of course, many methods and set responses
are ingredients of this improvised drama but, essentially, no foreknowledge can be invoked
for its moment-by-moment enactment. Behind whatever outward show and whatever words
are chosen is that further reach where the actors’ imaginative exploration of the drama is in
absolute command and open for an audience to share and recreate in its turn. Perhaps twenty
or more highly individual actors in Shakespeare’s theatre performed his complicated texts as
if for the first time with comparable assurance. That seems improbable, but on reflection it
is not such a foolish idea. The idea that one might feel at home in the highly contrived,
improvised, and alien world of Kutiyattam had seemed in prospect just as unlikely and yet,
in the event, that was the impression I received. I thought I could lift a mountain only after
I had, so unpreparedly, done so; before that, I would have dismissed the notion as ridiculous.

* * *

At the centre of any actor’s performance is a consciousness in which many strands of

thought and feeling can come together, at least on occasion, with assurance, strength, and
apparent simplicity. When that happens, what is done needs no argument in support and is
met with an audience’s instant recognition. Unfortunately, this experience is rarely offered to
an audience in modern theatres within European traditions. It is experienced more often in
rehearsals than in finished productions; then the actor is exploring a role and has little
thought about a ‘final’ performance; he or she does not seek an assured effectiveness. What
happens then is a matter of improvisation and collusion, not settled or predetermined but, on
occasion, confident in the very moment of creation. It can live for a time on an unstoppable
wave-crest of imagination that carries everything forwards. Verbal definition and suggestion,
syntax and structure, imagery, metaphor, rhythm, aural texture, and the dynamics and music
of speech – all these details seem as simple then, as they are necessary and cohesive. At such
times, in rehearsal, the entire being of the actor, physical and mental, conscious and unconscious,

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can be involved and unassertively dominant: the setting and other physical circumstances of
the play may then be evoked by the simplest of means as it is happening.
If performance of Shakespeare’s plays could be like such a rehearsal, it would be a
creative act similar to that of the dramatic poet in the act of writing and one which an
audience could witness and to some extent share. Whether this mutual creativity could be
sustained throughout a whole play there is no means of knowing, but for many moments its
aptness and possibility can hardly be questioned.
Experiments with skilled and experienced actors could test the practicality of this kind of
performance before an audience. Actors would be dressed in clothes that demonstrate status
and relationships. No scenery would be used and only the fewest properties and those as
unspecific as possible: some objects to sit or stand on, one rather larger than the others to
serve as table, bed, or tomb, or to provide a higher level for more than one actor at a time. The
larger scenes would be simply staged, relying a great deal on formal arrangements and regular
ceremonies. The audience should be comparatively small, so that each member is close to the
actors on an open stage, and it should be lit as the stage and actors are lit, not too brilliantly
and changing only rarely when needed by practicalities of the action. The actors should be
fully prepared in that they have completely mastered the technical demands of comprehending
and speaking the text, but they should also be free to vary how they speak and what they do,
according to how the play is coming to life and the audience responding. They should have
considered various interpretations of their roles, however different from each other and
contradictory in effect, and then activate whichever seems most appropriate in interplay on
the occasion of each performance. Perhaps they should also be free to repeat any lines or,
even, alter what has been set down for them to speak, always subject to the cohesion of the
whole performance and the actors’ involvement with it at the fullest reach of his or her
imagination.2 A great many of the marvellous and affective possibilities of modern theatre
productions would be lost in such performances, but they might take actors and audiences
beyond their obvious and outward signs into fresh imaginative engagement with the plays.
European theatre has not always been governed by the need to develop strong and sustainable
productions. Nor has the present system always been defended. Back in 1922, Harley
Granville Barker, actor, dramatist, and director, argued against carefully contrived and long-
running productions:

a slight objection to the whole glorious business (and the dramatist should have
been the first to note this) is that it tends utterly to destroy the art of acting. This
cannot prosper under such conditions of employment. It may profit a little by
failure, but what it cannot endure is the numbing monotony of success. So acting’s
place is taken by the artifice of stage effect, a mechanism guaranteed fool-proof,

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which makes, therefore, for the encouragement of fools both among the actors and
in the audience. It may really be asserted that most young playgoers of to-day do
not know what acting is.

Well-prepared and frequently repeated performances, he went on to say, are related to good
acting as a reproduction is to a Rembrandt.3
Present-day actors can often sense what is missing in well-organised productions, although
few can do much to change the conditions under which they perform. Some limited adjustments
can be managed, as Judi Dench explained with regard to Peter Hall’s production of Antony
and Cleopatra at the National Theatre in London in 1987:

Tony Hopkins [Antony] and I had established that we both like to change things,
so that we would never be quite sure where the other was going to come on from.
Peter Hall agreed that if we wanted we could have that freedom for the two of us.
We moved the scenes in Cleopatra’s court on the round stage of the Olivier [Theatre]
in big circles; Peter said they should be like fish in a tank: ‘Where one goes, they all
go, and if it changes direction they follow.’4

So two actors ensured, on one occasion, that they regained a degree of freedom to improvise
nightly.
One might argue that readers can respond better than actors to Shakespeare’s texts
because their minds are free to react to momentary suggestion. But a printed playtext does
not supply enough information to ensure that a play is experienced as an imaginary
performance. A reader lacks the stimulus of tangible, individual, real-life performers on a
solid stage in relationship with each other as the text is enacted in real time and in conjunction
with a particular audience. These are essential elements of a play which a reader must do
whatever is possible to supply and then be led willingly wherever imaginary performance
suggests. A patient reading of a text with a great deal of speculation about opposing and
interlocked interpretations of words and actions, all of which takes its own time and raises
a series of distinct visual images, is not an adequate basis for trying to discover what a
playtext can achieve or the relevance of any one of its phrases.

* * *

The improvised relationship that must always exist between actors and audience is a crucial
element in any performance and the most difficult of all to understand or for a reader to

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appreciate. A Kutiyattam actor ignores any audience other than the presence of a god; once
he has made his entry he sees and hears nothing other than the drama. But that is not suitable
for the public and secular art of Shakespeare’s theatre. Its stage was open on three sides and
its audience free to do as it liked. Actors could not ignore the spectators but needed to tame
or lead them as seemed suitable for each developing performance. This audience was never
the same from day to day and so an improvised reaction to its response was obligatory.
When considering Jatra theatre in Chapter 1, we saw how its audience would call out in
support of the actors on the open stage, giving praise or advice, and even presenting gifts; the
actors responded as members of a team to its fans or as heroes to the populace. In Asia,
where audiences are not placed in artificial darkness, such interaction is not at all rare. Even
in Kabuki, with its highly developed and unlifelike conventions, the star actors are greeted
by name as they make their entrance in character along the hanamichi bridge from the back of
the auditorium to the stage, and again when they achieve a particularly demanding feat or
make a spectacular exit. In small-scale street theatres in Europe and North America, and,
indeed, all round the world, audience contact with the actors is a matter of course and
similarly direct and unpredictable, but what is unusual in Asia and other countries that have
resisted European influences is the occurrence of the same phenomenon in their largest
theatres and for extended dramas and elaborate productions. Many performances thrive
according to how fully the audience participates vocally in the stage action.
Actors of Marathi theatres in and around Bombay have a strong tradition of playing
directly to their audiences, even when the various characters of a play are engaged in talk
with each other. They know very well how to provoke and use an audience’s response. I saw
the first performance of Char Divas Premache (Four Days of Love) in a crowded Bombay
theatre at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. Four actors, two female and two male,
performed a series of small plays so that they had to change rapidly from one character to
another. The men were rather fat and middle aged, but adept comic performers. One of the
women played all the more glamorous parts, the other a very wide range of ‘characters’. No
one story-line held throughout the two halves of the production, but the general theme
announced in the show’s title connected all the episodes, as they dealt successively with
courtship, married life, inter-generation difficulties, clashes of business and family interests,
and wheeling and dealing at an international conference on industrial development (which
was cross-cut with a bedroom drama in which the woman was the active and aggressive
partner). A final scene had a religious theme, a blind woman, and some wailful singing to a
harmonium. After this, a brisk song-and-dance concluded the entertainment.
Although this ‘proscenium’ or picture-frame theatre sat considerably more than a thousand
spectators, everyone seemed to feel included in what was happening on stage and free to

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respond as they wished. A good line of dialogue or a neat piece of action would at first get
laughter and then applause, and sometimes both together. The actors knew how to build on
this and it seemed to me – I did not know the language – that they would repeat a line several
times to get still more signs of approval: certainly they did this with various pieces of stage-
business which I understood very well, such as encountering physical difficulties or making
mistakes, or registering double-takes and other signs of surprise. They were, frankly, pumping
up the response, but they were also developing a number of bold and open performances
with which the audience could go along and feel as if it were in charge of what was happening.
The play was not particularly remarkable, but the audience was hugely satisfied and expressed
approval openly.
Anything more different from watching a film is hard to imagine, and this may well be the
reason why Marathi theatre is booming in a town where the highly productive Indian film
industry is also thriving. The production I saw was enjoyed by all sorts of people, men and
women, old and young, teenagers and children; and there was not an empty seat in the house.
With the exception of the representatives of big business in the conference scene, the characters
in the play were dressed as the audience was, only rather more smartly, and all were part of
the same sort of society, only caught up in far more dramatic or comical events. The actors,
with whom the audience had almost continuous contact, were not so very different either.
This theatre in very many ways reflected and belonged to its audience.
As soon as the first performance was over, the production was going to travel some
twenty-five kilometres for a performance at four-fifteen that same afternoon to an audience
in the outskirts of Bombay. It was expected to have some two thousand performances before
being withdrawn; it would be talked about and, perhaps, revisited. Another play, with the
English title Take it Easy, was the current hit in Bombay, being played in two theatres by two
companies simultaneously, and both clocking up hundreds of performances. Marathi theatre
has the air of being at ease and accepted, of flourishing with and for its audience.
Aesthetically or intellectually, such productions are not demanding but, even for a visitor
like me, their spirit of cooperation and pleasure-giving is infectious as it is shared between
actors and audience. This experience remained in my mind and, when I next read a Shakespeare
play, I found that its text asked to be played differently than I had previously imagined. One
after another, short speeches could be said to the audience and, at times, for the audience.
Some seemed to invite response from an audience, or its judgement about what was happening
on stage. Most soliloquies and those speeches marked by modern editors with ‘Aside’ can
obviously be spoken like this, but now I imagined many more lines and parts of lines being
acted so that they asked for the audience’s attention and involvement. Through long exposure
to plays written or edited in the twentieth and late nineteenth centuries, we have come to

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expect dialogue with regular interchange of speeches between the characters: now, I saw, that
need not be. Plays can be written so that both actors and characters use the text to develop
an active rela-tionship with their audience as well.
For Shakespeare’s clowns, an openness to their audiences has long been recognised as a
staple of their style, a kind of performance that was inherited from more ‘popular’
entertainments. Now I thought I could recognise further speeches that should be spoken to
audiences that were written for characters who are not usually considered to be clowns, or
only partially so – in much that is said by Richard the Third, Shylock, the Nurse in Romeo
and Juliet, Polonius, Hotspur, Falstaff, and more. Even lines for characters who are in no
sense comic seemed now to have been written for speaking to an audience in much the same
way. When Henry the Fourth addresses his court he could also include the theatre audience
amongst his hearers. Even in private, when talking earnestly with his son, the actor-as-
Henry could address many of his words to the audience, and try to sway its members to his
side. Eventually, he could invite them to share his newfound confidence: ‘A hundred thousand
rebels die in this’ (I, Henry IV, III.ii.160) – no personal pronoun is here to insist that this line
has to be addressed to Prince Hal.
Shakespeare’s handling of leading characters frequently gives scope for such a direct
appeal. To whom, for example, does Macbeth address his first words, ‘So foul and fair
a day I have not seen’ (I.iii.38)? Banquo does not acknowledge the remark. When he
addresses the witches, he often speaks some lines to himself when he should, perhaps,
be addressing the audience:

. . .and to be King
Stands not within the prospect of belief,
No more than to be Cawdor.
(ll. 73–5)

Later comes the disjointed short sentence ‘Would they had stay’d’, to which Banquo again
makes no response; he would not have heard it if Macbeth had spoken to the audience. Still
later, as if in a progression, come lines which are so separate from the rest of the dialogue that
modern editors usually mark them as asides, to no one in particular; these could be spoken
to the audience:

Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor!

The greatest is behind.
(ll. 116–17)

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In the great mid-scene soliloquy which follows, the actor could build on an established
relationship to engage directly with the audience as Macbeth grapples with his own
conscience:

This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth?. . .
(ll. 130ff.)

The last one-line speech in this scene – ‘Till then, enough. Come, friends.’ – is usually taken
and marked in editions as if its first part were an ‘Aside to Banquo’, yet this too could be
spoken to the audience, and so mark suffering as well as resolve and political awareness.
Macbeth’s nature is such that his relationship with an audience can never be easy and will
seldom provoke an enthusiastic response to boost a performance. If started early, however,
the speaking of lines directly to the audience will increase its sense of his struggle, pain, and
courage. Late in the play, his need for ‘troops of friends’ and for ‘honour, love, obedience’
(V.ii.25) could make an appeal to those who understood such feelings and so gain an insight
into his terror which otherwise might outstrip their imaginations.
Few major characters are so capable of speaking to the audience as King Lear at the very
end of the tragedy. The frequency and ease of such contact increases during the course of the
action, until he seems to recognise no barrier between himself and anyone either in the
audience or on the stage. In the play’s first scene, Lear is totally bound up in what he must
do with his daughters and their partners. Direct address to the audience seems to have been
reserved for Cordelia so that she can gain attention for her own feelings and purposes, in this
way emphasising a contrast with the closed minds of everyone else. The time for Lear to
establish contact with the audience is when his family and followers begin to reject him: in
Act II, scene iv, for example, with his cry for ‘Vengeance!’ and his brief exclamations ‘plague!
death! confusion!’, and then his questions: ‘Fiery? What quality?’ (ll. 93–4). His advice to
himself will be all the more affective if shared with the audience:

No, but not yet. May be he is not well. . . .

I’ll forbear;
And am fallen out with my more headier will
(ll. 103–11)

Once the audience is involved, as well as the characters on the stage, it will be pulled in many
ways with Lear, and not least as he shares his pride and sense of justice:

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Let shame come when it will, I do not call it;

I do not bid the thunder-bearer shoot,
Nor tell tales of thee to high-judging Jove.
(ll. 225–7)

Perhaps the very short and contrasting ‘I can be patient’ (l. 229) should also be played to the
audience, marking for them a recourse which is not present elsewhere in the scene. If so
played, the audience’s feelings towards Lear will be more sensitive than those of the persons
on stage who will not have heard these words. Lear’s cry in the oncoming tempest could be
an attempt to call witnesses for his pain and resolution:

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.
(ll. 283–5)

An actor, who is willing and able to improvise, and is, by now, entirely open to the audience,
will have to choose, at this crisis, whether he does indeed weep or remain dry-eyed – or,
perhaps, I should say that his imaginative improvisation in each particular performance will
show him what he must do. In the context of an experience which the king shares with the
audience, his turning to the fool will be a decisive action, a prophecy that arises unexpectedly
to his mind – ‘O fool, I shall go mad!’ The unknown horror of this possibility will seem all
the more threatening on account of this narrowing of focus.
In all the main elements by which we know and judge a stage drama – in character, action,
argument, diction, spectacle, music – the Marathi theatre offers nothing comparable to King
Lear, but its openness to the audience and its audience’s participation with its actors provide
performances which can cause us to question how we experience Shakespeare’s plays. We
cannot visit Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres to join with audiences that took a more active
role than in our own theatres5 but in Bombay we can experience at first hand the improvised
interplay which arises in a similar kind of performance. We will recognise that every moment
in a Shakespeare production which is shared with a free audience would have to be improvised.
Timing what is said and done to awaken a response, controlling, developing or in other ways
reacting to that response when it does come, looking individual members of an audience in
the eyes, sharing its laughter or stopping it, waiting for deep feeling to be experienced, or
taunting hearers with wit or irony: all this needs the invention and judgement of a moment,
and the courage and expertise to improvise. Nearer home, we may find a new interest in
stand-up comedians, public speakers at disorderly meetings, musicians on stage at a pop
concert, or performance artists with an appreciative audience who all show, in theatrically

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more limited contexts, how audience–stage reactions can add vitality and, sometimes, a sense
of danger and adventure to performance.
After a visit to Jatra theatre, I saw that attendance at a Shakespeare performance might
have been like going to watch football or some other sport, when spectators, by the end, feel
that they have shared in the players’ success or failure. When visiting Marathi theatre in
Bombay and other popular theatres elsewhere in India, that comparison seemed to fall short
of capturing the experience. Here the spectators were in the game and the actors played with
them throughout their performance; to some extent they also played against the audience.
They sought out, encouraged, and mastered the audience’s attention; and so used it to build
and direct their performances. Giving pleasure and awakening collusion were the main objects
of the game: improvised action and speech were necessary to quicken and concentrate
attention.
To unlock the potential of Shakespeare’s texts, a new format for production is needed
that will encourage openness and freedom in performance. Improvisation and its inevitable
risk-taking should be encouraged so that actors live in the moment of creation rather than
repeat what has been prepared and so that the audience participates in the play and influences
its performance.
Should all this happen in the theatre, one consequence would be that readers and critics
– for whom change can be so much easier and who have a natural appetite for it – will be
encouraged to study the plays with a similar openness and sense of adventure. A recognition
that the strengths of a text are not likely to be revealed to a narrow gaze or pre-programmed
investigation is the first step to take; the second, that a play should awaken a competitive
and self-implicating response and also, paradoxically, lead to a scrutiny of its likely effect
upon others unlike oneself.

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 7

RESPONSE
Actors and audiences

Whatever is enacted on stage finds its fulfilment in the minds of the audience, in their
perceptions and reactions. Here, in any analysis, performance should be assessed, as well
as in the signs and signals given out from the stage. Travelling to unfamiliar theatres makes
this abundantly clear. Many companies, such as the Jatra in India, allow audience members
to talk amongst themselves, call out to the actors, move around and meet other people, or
eat and drink, fall asleep, or become engrossed with their own concerns. In these theatres,
attention is held and developed by more obvious and direct means than are appropriate for
audiences with European standards of behaviour and sitting comfortably in darkened
auditoriums where silence and no-fidgeting are expected behaviour. Elsewhere, for No
theatre in Japan or Kutiyattam in Kerala, an audience’s freedom is on a different level and,
in one sense, even greater, since these performances never try to grab attention or spring
surprises, or overwhelm an audience’s senses with irresistible sights and sounds. These
theatres encourage a willing submission and intense attention so that a few of those who
watch may enter the dramatic illusion so fully that they find a quiet, deep-seated, and
imaginatively active satisfaction. A major task for both critic and director is to determine
what kind of audience–stage relationship between these extremes is most appropriate for
each playtext and production.
A play cannot be defined solely by what is put upon on a stage because its full expression
involves some form of interplay between actors and audience. This becomes very clear when
a production is taken away from its own theatre and its own public; in consequence both the
performance and its reception will change, however carefully actors and directors attempt to
maintain their original effects. Laughs come in different places and at different speeds, and
are often different in kind, so that the timing of speech and action has to be changed and
sometimes the words themselves. Jokes can fall dead and others, that were not effective
before, come to life. Some moments of intense silence disappear altogether because they
depended on small signs that are recognised only by an audience that has developed a special

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awareness of them. Knowledge of the actors in other plays and of other work by the author,
director, and designer, besides familiarity with the theatre building itself, all contribute in the
minds of audiences to what the occasion offers and what it can become.
Traffic is two-way between stage and audience. One may doubt this sitting in the dark,
unmoving and silent, at the hundredth consecutive performance of a well-drilled and technically
accomplished production that is at home in its own theatre and knows very well what it is
doing. But travel changes that opinion. The power of an audience to influence performance
becomes obvious when seeing actors confront and deal with vociferous crowd-reactions and
individual protests of pleasure or disapproval, or when the actors have unlimited scope to
improvise and perform in an open environment in broad daylight. The audience’s more
subtle influence on the actors will also register strongly when one sits amongst strangers in
a strange land, as part of an audience but also an observer of it. Not knowing the language
spoken, one’s attention is drawn to physical language, on stage and in the auditorium, and
then, even when the audience’s response is outwardly restrained, a mutual sensitivity will be
sensed around one, different from one’s own reaction. An unspoken bond between actors
and audience makes itself felt, even though neither party draws attention to it. In fact, a
giving-and-receiving in both directions is fundamental to almost every theatre performance,
however small its outward signs.
In a meeting with a group of theatre people from Guangxi Province in south-west China
at the Theatre Academy in Shanghai, the consequences of this interplay between actors and
audience were vividly brought home to me. These directors, managers, playwrights, and
critics had been given time off and brought to China’s most prestigious centre for theatre
research for a year’s study of ‘theory, criticism, history, and dramaturgy’. They were a quiet,
thoughtful group, eager to learn by asking me about ‘Western Theatre’, recent films, and the
latest technical equipment. Yet this curiosity was balanced by a shared self-knowledge and
soon they were also talking about the difficulties of touring in mountain villages with simple
stages that had not changed much in the last few hundred years. They spoke, too, about their
struggles to maintain audiences in overcrowded towns or to find good new plays. Then,
gradually, they fell silent, as if absorbed in their own problems. I asked what achievements
in theatre, that any of them had seen in the last few years, had confirmed their decision to
work in theatre despite all the difficulties. At home, this question leads to discussion about
very particular enthusiasms, such as a production by Strehler, Stein, Mnouchkine, Brook, or
Lepage, a performance by a particular actress or actor, a new play by a new dramatist, the
work of a highly skilled touring company, or a quite exceptional performance on a well-
remembered night. Sometimes it is an entire festival which has proved decisive in maintaining
a belief in theatre and a committal to it. But here the response was very different. After some
moments of silence, as if they did not understand what I had asked, one of them indicated

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that he would try to answer: ‘It is my sense of the power – my translator thought this should
perhaps be “the emotion” – that we receive from our audiences.’ A pause showed others to
be in agreement, and he went on: ‘When I feel that power I know that I am doing what I most
want to do.’ A director, not an actor, was speaking, but he knew about audiences and had
found confirmation for everything he struggled to do in the surge of energy that came from
audience to stage during performance. He envied no other person’s achievement and remembered
no particular moment of his own work. He was committed to making theatre because the
audiences paid the actors back with an enabling power.
All elements of theatre are affected by this interchange. As they move from rehearsal to
performance, actors, designers, and directors, and everyone else involved, find that they
have to make all kinds of adjustment, some drastic and many more instinctive and minuscule,
but significant none the less. In European and North American theatres, a number of previews
are arranged before a ‘first night’ to give greater opportunity for last-minute changes as the
play finds its own feet, each detail settling into proper proportion and prominence. Even the
play-text, fixed for rehearsals, may be changed as it is rehearsed and meets its first audiences.
Only after a play has met an audience does a dramatist sense the full theatrical life of what
he or she has written and knows what works and what does not, what passes expectation or
fails the test of performance.
For these reasons, a literary criticism, which cares only for what words can convey to a
reader, will not be sufficient to appreciate the quality of a play or the effect that it has in
performance. Even a more theatrical criticism, that is intent on assessing visual images and
physical activity taking place on stage, will be inadequate if it does not consider the audience’s
perception of performance. Between the players and the audience, and nowhere else, a
dramatic text shows its true mettle and the force of its argument. The actors’ performance of
a text affects their audience and the audience’s reception of that performance affects the
players; and, because both transactions alter what a text does, a critic must try, somehow, to
assess them both, however varied they may be from theatre to theatre and from day to day.

* * *

The audience–stage relationship is further complicated because what happens on stage is

not, necessarily, what an audience sees or thinks that it is seeing. This becomes very clear
when visiting Asian theatres or reading books about them. In the Bunraku theatre of Japan,
for example, a puppet only half life-size and manipulated by three men shrouded in black can
be seen to shed tears or find resources of inner strength during a performance. What happens
on stage is obviously manipulated and unlifelike but, in the minds of an audience, it becomes

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as real as the work of any flesh-and-blood actor, however skilled and experienced. At the
most deeply felt part of a drama, the puppet becomes in some ways more real, in that every
member of the audience has helped to create the illusion by letting his or her own imagination
work and so give to the drama something drawn from the reality of their own individual and
actual lives. Of course, this would not happen to someone who walked into a performance
halfway through and saw only a few moments of it. The play’s vivid and personalised ‘truth’
has to be built up or accumulated throughout a performance, as attention is shepherded and
imagination aroused by the recitation of sensitive words and by various kinds of music and
other stage devices, all of which are like nothing seen or heard in life. The sensation of an
exceptional and highly refined reality which is experienced by an audience as it watches this
unreal stage performance is carefully and imaginatively engineered, but it is also, in part,
created by members of the audience who with their own imaginations convert the strange
contrivance into something palpable, challenging, and quite as affecting as an event occurring
in life itself.
The eyes and eyebrows of Bunraku puppets can be made to move and their mouths can
open for speech or to show amazement, but these are crude devices which on their own
would deceive no one. Nor are the playtexts naturalistic: those most frequently performed
today were written in the eighteenth century and bear little relationship to present-day
circumstances in Japan or anywhere else. Many, and especially those by Chikamatsu
Monzaemon, are written with great refinement and their narrative shaped without regard to
practicalities of time and space. All this would seem to militate against an audience’s ability
to feel directly and passionately about the obviously manipulated manikins, but it does not.
In the minds of an audience, the strange deeds shown in the plays, which may mix violence
with pathos or ingenuity with strong feeling, are made actual and affecting. So a maidservant
puts the corpse of her mistress on a fallen bamboo tree and drags it off stage, the puppet’s
jerking movements seeming to use every possible muscle in her body. A hero, who has his
hands tied behind his back, expresses feeling by a movement of his head, its effect augmented
by the music, the narrator’s emotional rendering of his story, and the half-seen reactions of
the puppeteers; pride, submission, grief, and a determination to submit to captivity for the
sake of the young son of his leader, all join together in the sustained climax of a play that is
elsewhere full of more eye-catching fights and massed encounters. A child’s foster mother
closes her eyes and then bows her head, trembling very slightly, all crudely but carefully
executed, and then, when she has become entirely still, emotion seems to fill her whole body.
In the imaginations of members of an audience these are all palpable dramas to be experienced
with immediate sympathy as if they had really happened.1
In the other direction, in an actor’s response to an audience, the usual barriers between
separate consciousness may also disappear, although not with such completeness because

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the performer faces many persons who react in different ways and all of them cannot be
taken in at any single moment. But an actor does react and change before an audience, often
in ways that give very little outward indication that this is happening. Theatre is not cinema,
where what is done in performance is captured by the camera, and edited and given a
soundtrack, and only then offered to an audience as a fixed commodity to be watched and
commented upon, or to be taken for real if that is what the director intends and the audience
wants. In the theatre, an actor always senses the audience, even when it is not encouraged to
respond openly, and, because the audience differs in composition and mood every time the
play is performed, the actor’s reaction also changes; and, in consequence of that, performance
will change too.
The two-way relationship between a play and each new audience at each moment of its
action is necessarily complex and to some degree unpredictable and unknowable. It is also,
potentially, the source of great pleasure and power which artists should foster carefully and
readers and critics should try to understand and assess.

* * *

In the give-and-take between stage and auditorium, the imagination can play amazing tricks.
By calling upon the instinctive involvement of both audience and performers, it can transform
what is on the stage and leave the bare facts of gesture and speech far behind. What happens
in any one example is far from easy to understand and knowledge of it will always be
incomplete; and this is especially true when considering, as we attempt to do in this book, a
theatre which no longer exists – the performances which Shakespeare had in mind as he
wrote. However, an opportunity does exist to examine one very special kind of performance-
and-response and to compare what we can deduce about its function in the lost Elizabethan
theatre with what happens in another theatre that retains many early performance techniques,
although in a very different culture. To show how an audience can respond to what is unreal
on stage as if it were real, we can examine the effect of using male actors to play female roles
in the English theatre of Shakespeare’s day and in the Kabuki theatre of Japan both now and
in the past.
Why should cross-gender casting prove successful with audiences in these two theatres
at times when both were widely popular, attracting very little adverse comment except from
persons who for other reasons were opponents of theatre in any form? Why did it give rise
to little in the way of apology or excuse? How can plays hold a mirror up to human nature
when differences of gender are obscured on the stage and all representation of heterosexual

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feeling between characters depends on performers who share the same sex? Here questions
of performance and response come into particularly sharp focus.
Cross-gender casting was adopted for different reasons in the two traditions. In Kabuki
it was a matter of necessity. This form of theatre had started at Kitano in Kyoto as the
invention of a marvellous woman, famed as a singer and dancer, who was called O-Kuni. The
physical attractiveness of female performers was one of the main features of Kabuki until
1629 when the government banned all appearances of women on public stages in the name of
sexual morality. Theatre remained in demand none the less and so female roles were given to
boys until this practice was also banned for much the same reasons. So it was that onnagata
or female roles came to be played by adult men, who became highly skilful and specialised.2
In Shakespeare’s theatre, the practice of cross-gender casting is less easy to explain. Earlier
practice and, perhaps, a certain amount of convenience would partly account for it, but it
may also have been a question of choice, for there was no decree or regulation banning the use
of actresses. Women did, indeed, perform on some occasions in non-professional shows and
also in tours by foreign companies in which this was an established practice.3 It is not
altogether clear why boys and young men up to the age of twenty-two or twenty-three were
cast as women in all English companies until they were shut down for the duration of the
Civil War in 1640.
The later histories of the two theatres in this respect are also very different. With the
Restoration in England, actresses took over the female roles and have, for the most part,
continued in possession to the present day. In Japan, however, the onnagata actors have
continued to perform female roles in an unbroken tradition; although audiences are now very
different and theatre buildings have been modernised, the playtexts are still the same and
many old acting traditions are consciously maintained. Enough has remained as it was
centuries ago for the experience of seeing Kabuki to supplement historical research when we
attempt to understand the effect of using all-male casts.
Many studies have been published on this topic in recent years which require a detour
from Asian theatres before returning to their ancient and current practices. It has been
suggested that the Elizabethans accepted boy actors because the young male body offers
some resemblance to the female and might, with the corsets, farthingales, and rich adornment
of that time, deceive an audience about his gender. But no such argument for female
impersonation can be made for the onnagata because both pictorial records of early Kabuki
and present practice show no attempt to deceive by using the adolescent male body. Men
in their fifties or older still act the youngest of heroines. Make-up is distinctive and
simplified, rather than reproducing that used by women in the audience. An unnatural
voice is adopted with a high pitch and exaggerated modulations. The onnagata do not
behave like young women in any sort of reality but present a physical presence that their

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audience accepts as that of a young woman: were the Elizabethan boy actors different in
trying to appear and act so that they might pass as women, either off or on stage? We have
few descriptions of how Elizabethan boy actors performed – that is one of the curious
facts to which we will return – but prominent amongst them are some derogatory references
to the inadequacy of their voices, the most famous being ‘some squeaking Cleopatra’ who
would ‘boy’ the greatness of Shakespeare’s queen (Antony and Cleopatra, V.ii.219). In this
respect, at least, the boy actors could be recognised as unreal women in much the same
way as onnagata actors are today.
The very use of ‘boy actor’ as a generic term when the performers were sometimes in
their early twenties also suggests that some special ‘voice’ might have been used for all
female parts, as in Kabuki. This would also accord with the practice of the men and boys in
Jatra theatre who adopt a standard, unnaturally high pitch when acting women and maintain
this tradition even when, as often today, they perform alongside actresses speaking in their
own natural voices. An unreal, high-pitched voice would account for Samuel Pepys’ comment
in 1660 on the acting of Edward Kynaston, the last of the boy actors, who performed female
roles after the Restoration when he must have been more than thirty years old: ‘one Kynaston,
a boy, acted the Duke’s sister but made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life – only her
voice not very good’.4 John Downes, however, did not notice the voice when he declared this
actor to be a more convincing lady on stage than any actress.5 Perhaps one witness accepted
the convention of an artificially high pitch which was by then exceptional and the other did
not. In any case, their difference in this respect makes their unanimous praise for lifelikeness
the more remarkable. It may be that the credibility of ‘boy actors’, like that of the Japanese
female impersonators, was in the mind of the beholders, not in the facts of performance.
Transvestite performance is common enough today to show that appropriate casting and
skill could have deceived an audience with regard to the boy actor’s gender if that had been
desired. An ability to represent female sexuality, however, raises other issues about which
current opinion is divided. On one hand, the open stage of the Globe or Blackfriars theatre,
and still more the various stages used on tour, would not have provided suitable conditions
for intimate and sustained physical contact between two persons, whatever their gender and
sexuality – not unless it was intended to raise laughter. With spectators in close proximity to
the stage and free to move around, call out, applaud, or speak amongst themselves, simulation
of actual sexual activity would scarcely have been attempted, whoever were the actors. On
the other hand, the dialogue of plays performed by all-male companies in both theatres we
are considering lay great emphasis on women’s sexuality and many of their plots are driven
by a woman’s sexual passions. Something unreal must have happened on stage to represent
all this and the audience must have accepted it as the real thing.

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Shakespeare did not shy away from sexuality in his plays or from sensitive and intimate
physical contact; in fact, he drew attention to them with a frequency that is surprising in the
theatre and public culture of his times. In Much Ado About Nothing, for example, we hear
nothing from Hero while she tells Claudio ‘in his ear that she is in her heart’(II.i.283–4); the
text provides other matters for the audience to attend to during most of this intimacy, but
Beatrice’s words bring attention back to the young girl in close physical contact with her
future husband. Sometimes when sexually driven activity is required, Shakespeare’s text
directs an audience to observe its physical enactment: for example, when Cleopatra kisses
Antony, she says nothing while the audience hears only:

Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates

All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss;
Even this repays me.
(Antony and Cleopatra, III.xi.69–71)

What is the ‘this’? Something suggesting sexual potency must have been enacted when these
demonstrative words are spoken and, in the silence that follows the half-line, some further
action must have filled that gap of time in a way that satisfied the dramatic situation. When
Shakespeare’s Pandarus says of Cressida that ‘she fetches her breath as short as a new ta’en
sparrow’, he is preparing the audience for seeing her meet with Troilus. Once she is on stage,
both the young lovers are ‘bereft’ of all words (l. 53) and what Pandarus says encourages the
audience to watch their physical and silent encounter:

An ’twere dark, you’d close sooner. So, so; rub on, and kiss the mistress.
How now, a kiss in fee-farm! Build there, carpenter; the air is sweet. . .
(Troilus and Cressida, III.ii.39ff.)

For Pandarus’ words to have credibility in performance, the actors of the young couple must
be able to give the illusion of sexual attraction and activity.
Another current idea about cross-gender casting in European plays is that putting on the
clothes and habits of another gender has the effect of simplifying stage performance and
limiting the drama to the depiction of general traits rather than individual character and deep-
seated feeling. Because the male actor is bound to construct his female performance, using
observation and judgement, the result in any role, it is said, will be more generally truthful
than that of an actress. Jan Kott has often been quoted in support of this view: ‘When an
actress is asked to act a woman, walk like a woman, sit like a woman, sip tea like a woman,

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she will at first be surprised and ask: “But what woman?”. . .Femininity can only be acted by
a man.’6 To which Alisa Solomon’s reply must surely win immediate assent: ‘if femininity is
best performed by men, why isn’t masculinity best performed by women?’7
In Bertold Brecht’s The Messingkauf Dialogues, the Philosopher discusses what happened
when he saw an actress playing a man. According to him, this casting had prompted an
increase in the audience’s understanding of gender, in generalised and critical terms:

If a man had been playing that man he’d hardly have brought out his masculinity
so forcibly; but because a woman played him. . .we realized that a lot of details
which we usually think of as general human characteristics are typically masculine.

Here cross-gender casting is again valued for providing a thinking-man’s theatre in which
bipartisan reflections are stimulated by the performance. The Actor, whom Brecht imagines
taking part in this dialogue, makes a rather simpler observation, but again it is general and
comparative: ‘I must say I’ve seldom seen such feminine women as at the front during the
war, as played by men.’ The Actress in the dialogue is quick to add: ‘And you ought to see
grown-ups played by children. So much of grown-up behaviour strikes one as odd and alien
then.’8 All three support the notion that cross-gender casting and other forms of ‘mis-
casting’ make the audience’s experience significantly different in a way that is more thought-
provoking. It is seen here as a weapon to use on the audience’s minds, alerting them to gender
issues and class distinctions.
If the aim of cross-gender casting were always to construct a performance which drew
attention to general features of the characters presented, we would expect to find a more
intellectual and thoughtful audience than the popular ones that crowded to Shakespeare’s
plays as well as the early Kabuki. In modern Jatra performances, enthusiastic audiences
respond to individual female impersonators, seeking to touch them and present them with
gifts. Western parallel is the pop concert, where sexual arousal is obviously part of the
attraction for many in the audience.
Against the assumption that cross-gender casting for Shakespeare’s plays was intended
to provoke thought about women in general, we have the evidence of our own senses and
our good sense. His female characters are scarcely more or less individualised than the
male, and they were written using much the same techniques. Besides, innumerable actresses
have triumphed in Shakespeare’s female roles by using all their physical, emotional, and
sexual attributes: few of them have said they were aware of any special demands or
restrictions placed upon them. Performed by women, the texts have given rise to plenty of
subtle, complete, and highly individual performances in which sexuality has undoubtedly
played its part. Shakespearian theatre no longer uses boys and young men in the female

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roles because casting according to gender has so obviously had its own rewards in the
stage-life of the plays.
Another current explanation for the use of youths and young men in female roles is that
the audience took pleasure in the merging and confusing of different sexualities. In Desire
and Anxiety: Circulation of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (1992), Valerie Traub has
argued that in Twelfth Night Viola becomes sexually attracted to Olivia when she is pretending
to be the page Cesario and pays suit to her in Orsino’s name. Moreover, looking like a male
youth, which is what the actor in reality was, Viola was also able ‘to elicit the similarly
polymorphous desires of the audience’ (p. 131). From this premise, the critic concluded that
a performance of this episode is a ‘theatricalization of desire’ in trans-gender complexity and
excitement (p. 132). The matter is complicated, of course, because Olivia was also played by
a young male: so the degree of polymorphous desire would have varied, and the exact point
at which any one member of the audience might sense the sexual reality under that of the
fiction and be directly caught up in it. Response would have been a matter of individual
choice or instinct, according to whether the deception or the actuality seemed the more
attractive proposition. This line of argument suggests a collision of reactions, in which the
person of the actor, the role played, and the gender indicated by dress are all active and
reactive elements in a sexual and cognitive tangle. It turns a theatre with wide public appeal
into a means of providing some very private satisfactions and a good deal of intellectual
uncertainty.
Compared with both these explanations of European cross-gender casting and gender
disguise on stage, the early accounts of Kabuki performances are in almost total contrast. For
the onnagata, performance was not a matter of intelligence and skill alone: it had to have a
basis in real life and also what was called a ‘soul’; it should bear fruit, it was said, as well as
being a flower. These are the ‘Words of Ayame’ as set down by Fukuoka Yagoshiro in 1727
or thereabouts, at the time of Kabuki’s greatest popularity.9 This Master always assumes
that an adult male actor can have within himself the feelings of a woman and that he must
nurture these and make them the source of all his art. He should also encourage their
development off stage:

if he does not live his normal life as if he was a woman, it will not be possible for him
to be called a skillful onnagata. The more an actor is persuaded that it is the time when
he appears on the stage that is the most important in his career as an onnagata, the
more masculine he will be [and therefore the less acceptable]. It is better for him to
consider his everyday life as the most important. The Master was very often heard to
say this.
(Item VII)

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When a young man has chosen to become a player of women’s roles, he has crossed a bridge
which is then destroyed behind him:

Plate 7.1 An onnagata performer; Tokicho as the wife of a warrior, rehearsing at Sadler’s Wells
Theatre, August 1977
Photograph: Mander and Mitcheson Theatre Collection

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If one who is an onnagata gets the idea that if he does not do so well in his chosen
career he can change to a tachiyaku [performer of male roles], this is an immediate
indication that his art has turned to dust. A real woman must accept the fact that
she cannot become a man. Can you imagine a real woman being able to turn into a
man because she is unable to endure her present state? ‘If an onnagata thinks in
that way,’ he used to say, ‘he is ignorant of a woman’s feelings.’
(Item XI)

Backstage, in the green room, the actor must maintain his on-stage character:

To [sit there] alongside a tachiyaku playing the lover’s part, and chew away at
one’s food without charm and then go straight out on the stage and play a love
scene with the same man, will lead to failure on both sides, for the tachiyaku’s
heart will not in reality be ready to fall in love.
(Item XXII)

If an onnagata actor is married in real life, the Master warned, he should feel like blushing
if it should happen that ‘people talk about his wife’ (Item XXIII).
Such intimate and sustained identification with a role is comparable to ‘The Method’ of
the Actors’ Studio in New York in the decades after the Second World War. It is far from the
usual assumptions about the boys and young men who played Shakespeare’s heroines, or
about the performances of men as a generalised ‘woman’ in European theatres. Elsewhere
Ayame’s words about originality and imagination imply the same insistent search for
‘truth’ and the same refusal to be content with outward manifestations of character that
can be found amongst actors and actresses of almost any good theatre company today. He
also warned, like a modern acting-teacher, against repeating business that is known to be
successful: ‘If a piece of acting comes off successfully three times in a row, the actor loses
his skill’ (Item XXI).
No apology is made for being a male actor playing a woman and no sense is given that
performance should be an exposure of what any ‘woman’ is supposed to be. The male actor
acts as if he were a woman and the audience is invited to perceive him as such, both in the
innermost spirit, or ‘soul’, of his performance and in its outward manifestations. ‘Soul’ is,
interestingly, a word which Stanislavski used often, in Building a Character (translated,
1949), to describe the inmost and most powerful part of an actor’s performance in a role.
While the appearance and voice of an onnagata on stage were not like those of a woman
in everyday life, a great deal of the preparation for performance involved the actual processes
of living and the actor’s persistent, imaginative attempt to think as if he were an actual

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woman. Behind what the audience witnessed on stage was a much more naturalistic engagement
in the mind of the actor, and it was assumed that this would be perceived by other characters/
actors on stage and be the means of pleasing the very varied members of an enthusiastic
audience. All this reflects on the Elizabethan performances and implies that enquiry into the
practice of the ‘boy actor’ should shift from concerns about outward appearance and actual
sexuality to a consideration of the imaginative grounds of their performances and the audience’s
response at a comparable level.
The actual sexuality and gender of the onnagata actor were comparatively unimportant
because an audience was able to sense an inner and imagined femininity and so endow the
moment with a similar inner lifelikeness that outstripped the outward performance; this
sexuality would be in part created by each individual spectator’s imagination. The dearth of
contemporary description of the performances of ‘boy actors’ is an argument that they
received some form of acceptance as satisfactory and convincing. Could the characters
played by them have been given an imaginative inner life and their audience find access to it?
This could hardly be so by the same time-consuming and thorough means as in Kabuki
because these young female impersonators had much shorter careers and less strict regimes
of life; nor were they old enough to see very far into the minds of mature women if they had
attempted do so. They might have dealt in a few stereotypes but that would not have
satisfied the more popular appetite except in a broadly comic way, and could have come
nowhere near the complexity and strong individuality that later actresses have revealed in the
text when acting Shakespeare’s roles. Searching for the means whereby such qualities of
performance might have been within the reach of ‘boy actors’, we may find it, most plausibly,
in a responsive speaking of the texts of the plays: there any actor can have direct access to
a character’s ‘inner life’ as imagined by the author. Momentarily, and occasionally for longer
periods, members of an audience might sense a female character in the carefully crafted text
as it excited the actor’s imagination and caused the words to be spoken. If this were to
happen, they might also share in the dramatic life of the play as it had been played out in
Shakespeare’s mind during the act of writing.
This is not to argue that Shakespeare’s was a literary theatre, in which the transmission
of words was all that mattered. The mere task of speaking complicated dialogue so that it can
be heard in the open air by an audience of two thousand will inevitably call upon the
resources of the whole body to achieve the necessary variation of breath and projection of
sound. The shaping of sentences, changes of tempo and pitch, the building and placing of
vocal climaxes also draw upon physical powers in execution. Complex sequences of nervous
tension and relaxation are needed to give vocal force and clarity to the words and are another
necessary part of performance. More than this, as an actor responds intuitively and sensuously
to the images conjured up by the text and to the texture, weight, and flow of its sounds, his
physical being will respond in necessarily intimate correspondence with speech and this will

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also add to the impression received by audience. By such means and with a thoroughly
imagined and sensitive text, the sexual drive and sensations implied by the words that are
spoken will inform a performance in many inevitable ways. When an audience responds to
this physical component of utterance, it can accept an incomplete imitation of outward
behaviour as if it were life itself – the same might be true of an intentionally falsified
imitation. The reason why a theatre might choose to cast female roles with young males,
whose performance was bound to be incomplete, could be that the practice had proved to be
popular: their audiences enjoyed the creative act of completing the illusion of life for
themselves, sharing the task with actors and dramatist, seeming to possess the drama on
their own account. In the minds of the audience the illusion could work and be infinitely and
variously attractive.10

* * *

The sustained physical commitment to speech by which an actor provides the breath and
nervous tension or relaxation for making the appropriate sounds and projecting them towards
the audience becomes a large part of any performance. On some occasions, Shakespeare’s
words make little continuous sense to an audience without this necessary accompanying
effort and then the person speaking seems to be driven by unspoken desire or almost torn
apart with contrary feelings. At other times, a sequence of variously affective images, or a
number of hesitations followed by quick conviction and lengthening rhythms, will require
the speaker to become increasingly open to new sensations so that his whole being becomes
active, receptive, and attentive. The person presented on stage can appear aware, tentative,
surprised, delighted, or seemingly overcome by a spontaneous inrush of sensation because
of the very sounds and rhythms of speech, even though the words themselves do not
directly say as much. In such ways an impression of sexuality can be imminent and infinitely
varied: not limited and defined by the individual body, predilections, and real-life experience
of the performer, but suggested, and so ready to be quickened and heightened in the active
minds of spectators. Whether the actor is cross-dressed or not, performance can then carry
conviction as the personal and sexual life of the drama quickens to its fullest life in the active
minds of the audience – which is where it needs to be felt.
The end of the first scene of All’s Well That Ends Well, where Helena is left alone after
Bertram, her mistress’s son and heir, has left for Paris, may be taken as an example of how
the emotional and sexual content of the drama can be expressed in the physical accompaniment
of speech as much as in the words themselves. Helena is easily drawn into talk with Parolles
who will be travelling with Betram and soon she dares to speak, as if in soliloquy, of all the
things she imagines happening at the king’s court. But then she stops in mid-sentence before

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expressing the confusion and fears that crowd into her mind, with halting syntax, broken
rhythms, and uncertain metre:

HELENA: Now shall he –

I know not what he shall. God send him well!
The court’s a learning-place, and he is one –
PAROLLES: What one, i’faith?
HELENA: That I wish well. ’Tis pity –

When she stops the second time and Parolles presses his question, Helena’s reply suggests
a mind in which arousal and reserve are now able to co-exist:

PAROLLES: What’s pity?

HELENA: That wishing well had not a body in’t
Which might be felt; that we, the poorer born,
Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends
And show what we alone must think, which never
Returns us thanks.
(I.i.163–74)

On the page or in mere recitation, this whole passage may be analysed and shown to be a
subtle presentation of a personal and social dilemma, but in a full performance they become
indistinguishable parts of an affecting presentation of a young woman. At first, Helena is
both assertive and hesitant, fixed on a single purpose but aroused to both gentle and turbulent
sensations, thoughts speeding to extremities. Sudden stops and starts, quick intakes of
breath, forceful speech and perhaps very quiet, hesitant moments are followed by more
sustained rhythms towards the close and the vaguer plurals of her final thoughts. All this
needs a great variety of physical engagement in uttering the words so that they make
appropriate sense and that, in turn, can suggest the physicality of sexual arousal and frustration.
So it is that performance goes beyond the words as found on the page and speaks directly to
the senses of the audience.
A ‘boy actor’ playing Shakespeare’s Cleopatra may not look very like a great mistress
and queen, and his voice may be ‘cracked within the ring’ (Hamlet, II.ii.421–2). Yet when
both his voice and physical performance are used in speaking the text, the audience’s
imagination can add to the facts of performance and bring Cleopatra to absolute life in their
own minds – which is where the drama must find its effective life. Her sexuality need not

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be present on stage because it is implicit in the text and that is caught up with and, thus,
expressed by the physical facts of the actor’s utterance. To support this statement in a
book rather than in rehearsal or performance, one can do little more than quote the text and
ask readers to speak the speech aloud and so begin to hear, but not yet see, its mysterious
inner power; for example:

CLEOPATRA: Courteous lord, one word.

Sir, you and I must part – but that’s not it.
Sir, you and I have lov’d – but there’s not it.
That you know well. Something it is I would –
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten!
ANTONY: But that your royalty
Holds idleness your subject, I should take you
For idleness itself.
CLEOPATRA: ’Tis sweating labour
To bear such idleness so near the heart
As Cleopatra this.
(I.iii.86–95)

Two features are typical of Shakespeare’s presentation of sexual passion. First, the
abrupt pauses and hesitant repetitions (notably after the fourth line quoted), as the pulse of
the speaker seems to quicken and sensation seems to overflow the capacity of previously
spoken words. Second, the sustained sensual and active image that crowns the outburst after
interruption and draws upon what the other speaker has just offered: ‘’Tis sweating labour.
. . .’ Also typical is the way that this concluding image draws into the reception of this
exceptional situation an audience’s memories of an experience which is open to all humankind
and associated with the pain and satisfaction of actual physical activity.
A sense of being at the limits of what can be communicated and of participating in the
creative adventure of realising a text in performance is immediately attractive to audiences. It
is especially so when this realisation is experienced below the surface of performance in the
writer’s maze of consciousness that lies behind the actual words that the actors say. There,
belief may be found by everyone for him- or herself in very personal terms, according to
what they are able to imagine. The onnagata actors achieved this ‘soul’ of performance
through their disciplined absorption in the dramatic fiction of being women, on stage and off.
For the female roles in the theatres of Shakespeare’s day, the same grounding could not be
provided, but in so far as the young actors responded, in mind and in body, to the task of

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speaking the texts as the drama took its course, what they said and what they became were
in tune with the imaginative engagement of the dramatist in all the subtlety, sensuality, and
varying strengths of those texts.
Although Shakespeare was pre-eminent in writing major female roles of compelling
lifelikeness – at least until a generation later, when Webster, Middleton, and Ford followed
some of his innovations – he was only one of many who wrote for the ‘boy actors’. Perhaps
cross-gender casting was generally acceptable in his day because all plays were then presented
with bold physicality on an open stage and had the advantage of being written when the
English language was growing ever more responsive and varied, and also because theatres had
responded to this situation by attracting poets to be their dramatists. These talents and
resources were sufficient to distinguish English theatre from others in Europe and to keep
‘boy actors’ in employment.

* * *

This attempt to explain how Shakespeare’s female roles were performed in the light of the
Kabuki’s onnagata has been introduced as part of a wider enquiry into the nature of actor–
audience relationships because it has a more general relevance. Two complementary practices
have been identified. First, from the audience’s point of view: with an appropriate text and
a performance responsive to it, what is unlifelike on stage can be accepted as an experience
like life, but more intense or marvellous. Second, from the actors’ point of view: for this
acceptance to happen, performance must be informed by an imaginative response to lived
experience either by the actor or by the author of the play, or by both.
For a director responsible for staging Shakespeare’s plays, the consequences of this
extend to every aspect of the work in hand. Actuality on stage – full nakedness, real pain or
physical exhaustion, absolute realism of setting, the accents of ordinary speech – will not be
helpful because it would limit the work to be done by the audience’s individual imaginations.
As a corollary of this, however, the director should inform his or her work with an experience
of everyday living, drawing on visual images, sounds, behaviour, activity, expressive means,
and states of awareness that are common in the day-to-day lives of all persons on stage and
in the auditorium. The task is to assist members of an audience to make good the imperfect
illusion of reality on stage but not to do all that work for them. In this way, an audience
becomes implicated in a performance so that it speaks directly of their own lives and the
plays become up to date and immediately relevant.
A reader or critic of the plays should respond similarly. However many intellectual ideas
are brought to bear on explication of the texts and whatever efforts are made to reconstruct
the mind-sets of Shakespeare’s England and so restore their original ‘meanings’, more remains
to be done. The texts have to be read in relation to common experience. No idea is ever quite

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the same from generation to generation, as our active minds bring fresh demands or privilege
certain responses, but in seeing, hearing, touching, we remain much as men and women have
always been. What is common between us is access to natural experiences: we all have ‘eyes,
. . .hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; [we are] fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer. . .’ (Merchant of Venice, III.i.52ff.). The
lifelikeness and force of Shakespeare’s plays in the minds of audiences and readers can draw
upon this common inheritance. Their ability to provoke and use such responses are one
explanation of the success of Elizabethan ‘boy actors’ and it may also explain the plays’
popularity with audiences drawn from all classes of society.
A critic should ask how a play encourages an audience to respond instinctively, with the
senses and with personal memories and experience. The words of a play operate in many
ways: intellectually they set other words and various ideas to work, but they also work as
sounds that set actors working with their entire beings in action as well as speech. To this
complex and ever-changing physical phenomenon the audience responds instinctively. It is
a music and dance that calls for critical attention, just as much as statements, arguments,
visual images, and stage business. That they work on the audience’s consciousness, bypassing
explicit verbal definitions, does not lessen their importance: quite the reverse, that only
renders their effects almost unstoppable, even though inadequate performance can obstruct
or obscure it. A critic who neglects these performative elements of a play has ignored a major
part of their power to influence and move an audience.

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 8

SETTINGS
Actors and stages

I was able to learn more about India and its theatre when I spent nine weeks directing King
Lear at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. What engaged me almost daily was an
unexpected way of running rehearsals and preparing for the show’s opening. I am used to
relying on a stage manager, with a number of assistants, to organise rehearsals and keep me
and everyone else fully informed. From a stage manager’s desk, he or she will eventually give
cues for actors, light and sound operators, stage crew, and front of house manager. On this
desk is ‘the book’ with every cue marked and numbered, and usually colour-coded, and the
means for electronic and audio contact with everyone concerned. A computer screen will
provide complex checks and keep tally of all that happens. In the theatres of Europe and
North America, the stage manager is specially trained, highly skilled, much respected, and
essential to the good running of any show. He or she copes with mishaps, broken properties,
miscues, fire drills, understudy rehearsals, taking the show into new theatres on tour, re-
rehearsing a production should a member of the cast have to be replaced, and so on. Once a
show has opened, this person is in charge of all that happens on stage and will file daily
reports with the management and director of the play. It follows that he or she has much to
do with the ‘company feeling’, the way in which many very variously gifted and motivated
people work together. In New Delhi this was not the case and I soon came to realise that this
was not at all remarkable, however uneasy I was made by this state of affairs.
I did have a stage manager who was able and willing to do all that was expected of him, and
much more as well. But there was never a properly maintained ‘book’ that, in an emergency,
could be understood by anyone, and the theatre, though only one year old, had neither a stage
manager’s desk nor the means for him to communicate directly with anyone during a
performance. There was not a single assistant stage manager for a necessarily large production
and a cast of twenty-four. The whole show was kept going by each and everyone doing what
seemed necessary at what seemed the right time as the action took place on stage. Most of
the music was played without a written score. The last weeks of technical and dress rehearsals,
previews, and the official opening performance was a particularly anxious time for me

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without a stage manager equipped to do all that I expected of him. I had to accept that the
play would be made out of whatever happened to happen, and would at any time be prone,
or at least open, to disaster.
On reflection, I see that this absence of off-stage control fits well with much I already
knew about Indian theatre. Folk plays, such as the Gavari of Rajasthan, are held together in
performance by the leading actor who makes no attempt to hide his instructions to others,
by a drummer, and by a fool-figure who makes his own contributions, interweaving with the
main action wherever he wishes. So performances can last as long as convenient and take
place almost anywhere, in a neighbouring village or at some new ‘Folk Art Centre’. Even
technically difficult forms, such as Kutiyattam or Kathakali, are improvised with everyone
responding independently to the actor who is holding centre-stage. The Marathi and Jatra
actors take many of their cues from the audience according to how it reacts from night to
night. In Jatra, the stage assistants sit in full view behind the main stage to operate lights and
microphones, not taking their eyes off the actors.
Parallels are to be found in Indian music which is mostly solo and improvisational.
Attempts at ensembles or orchestras are likely to run into trouble: the instrumentalists have
learned to be such individualists that seldom are more than two or three able to play together,
and then only one is likely to be the main attraction and acknowledged leader.
In Indian theatre, the demarcation between leading actors and supernumeraries or attendants
is very clear and by this means some order and coherence is maintained. One of the theatres
I have not yet visited is called Kariyala and is found in the small towns around Shimla. I was
told about this by Neerag Swod, one of the cast of Lear. At twenty-eight years of age he had
come to Delhi after some eleven years acting with the group based in Mandi, a town of sixty
thousand and also a district of Himachal Pradesh, where life depends on agriculture and,
increasingly, on tourism. Twenty or more groups are to be found in the state, each playing
their own variation of the same kind of theatre. Basically there are three characters only: a
Sadhu (holy man) or priest; a gentleman or landowner; and a clerk (the part Neerag would
usually take). The plays are all comedies about local life and are unscripted, relying on
improvisation and frequent communication with the audience. They are accompanied by
music, according to the musicians available, and are simply staged on the earth of village
squares or on a platform the actors carry around with them. I asked how long a show would
last, to be answered that they usually began in the early evening at around six and go on to
about the same hour the following morning. ‘With only three characters?’ I asked, to which
the answer was ‘No, not at all.’ As many as thirty or forty other characters might be
introduced into the action, according to who wanted to join in. ‘And this free-for-all drama
keeps audience interest for all that time?’, to which the answer was that the local apple wine
and another drink made out of a root were available; and the leaves of a locally grown herb

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were used for smoking. By morning both actors and audience were sharing the play and
everything else.
Listening to that account, my problems with the production of King Lear seemed nothing
to make a fuss about. I think it was the third or fourth public performance in which all its
elements seemed more or less in place and working together, so that, with just a few mishaps,
everything seemed strong and eloquent, the better parts and the least satisfactory. Nothing
went like clockwork, but each episode found and took its own volition and, in doing so,
became changed into a performance that seemed inevitable, a strong basis for tragedy. Somehow
meaning and passion had been created out of stage conditions that I would normally call
chaotic: a sense of everyone else’s achievement filled me with amazement and gratitude.
Only later did I realise that this concerted effort of preparation and improvisation,
mixed with a kind of carelessness, had provided me with a performance that in some ways
was similar to those I had conjectured taking place in Shakespeare’s time. His theatre had
been without stage manager or assistant stage managers, stage manager’s desk or intercom.
Tiremaster and book-keeper or book-holder were the two functionaries identified in surviving
documents, one in charge of the many and expensive costumes, the other ready to prompt
and warn actors to be ready with whatever properties were necessary for their entries. A
number of ‘stage-keepers’ were available to assist in these tasks but they also functioned
as actors in the plays. The effect of having a whole battery of cues to be followed, together
with a large and varied repertory in which, as a matter of course, any play was likely to be
performed at short notice for only one day at a time, must have put performances at the
mercy of each moment – as had been the case with my production of Lear. Whereas today
in the West we rehearse and re-rehearse, one play at a time, until everything is as right as
it can be and able to be repeated flawlessly, in the past, for Shakespeare and his fellows, all
was open to chance.
A story in Samuel Pepys’ diary, concerning a company less well patronised than the
King’s Men, illustrates just how improvised and uncontrolled the performance of a crowded
scene might be. Thomas Killigrew (1612–83) told him how he had been able to see plays
when he was a boy:

He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, ‘Who will go and
be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?’ then would he go in, and be a devil
upon the stage, and so get to see plays.1

For some years I had known that the leading actors in traditional Indian theatres would
improvise each performance; now I was learning what it was like for a whole production to
function in a similar way. The effect was most noticeable in what are sometimes called

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production numbers, those episodes in which action is complicated and a large number of
actors are on stage: in Lear, this meant the first court scene in which the three daughters are
put on trial and one of them is banished, the king’s return from hunting, his arrival at
Gloucester’s castle, the preparations for war, and the final scene of all. If the storm was
created by a number of stage-keepers, so that thunder rolls round the theatre, lightning cracks
in various places, wind howls, and the sound of lashing rain threatens to tear everything
apart, then those central scenes would also depend on large-scale activity that was open to
chance. All such scenes can be staged very effectively in Europe and North America today,
with assured stage management and many technical devices, but take those props away and
large, uncontrolled, and attention-grabbing effects will be pitted against the central
performances. Leading actors will have to turn to improvisation and self-assertion if they are
to withstand and, occasionally, subdue or lead all the people who are working in the scene
with them. The dynamics of the drama will be significantly different.
I found that my understanding of the text was often changed because of the context
that a necessarily improvised staging had given to the action. For example, Edgar’s
concluding speech:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.

Several aspects had always seemed strange to me. First, that he should be taking charge so
quickly after Albany and then Kent had in effect left the responsibility to him, and that he
had been given no speech of dedication to sovereignty or even of acceptance: compare
Richmond at the end of Richard the Third, Malcolm at the end of Macbeth. (The Quarto text
may acknowledge this difficulty by giving the speech to Albany, even though he has abdicated
power and cannot speak of ‘we that are young’ as Edgar can.) Second, that he should finish
by speaking of himself, for I had taken the ‘we’ of the penultimate line to be a newly assumed
royal plural; I could not see the use of asserting this about himself. Such questions disappeared
when, at Delhi, the stage was filled with sixteen younger actors, who had entered with the
armies, or bringing messages or carrying the dead bodies of Regan and Goneril, all of them to
some extent wearied from the long play and all used to performing as individual and improvising
actors. The intense drama of Lear’s drawn-out death had held them absolutely quiet and still,
but the absence afterwards of anything so compelling had allowed that tension to give way.
As Albany ordered ‘Bear hence the bodies’ they began to move to do so, picking their way
over the debris which had fallen after the battle and the trial by combat. Just as their

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individual responses began to be more evident, they were stopped by the speeches of
Albany and Kent about the transfer of power. Briefly everything was almost still again as
they wavered, not knowing how to respond, or to whom; and then they stooped to take up
the bodies. It was then that Edgar spoke the play’s last lines and again arrested their
movements. And now, in this largely improvised staging of the scene, his words seemed to
relate himself to those others who were like himself in being ‘young’ and had, immediately,
to bear ‘the weight’ of those bodies from the stage. An act of identification with others
completed the play, rather than one of authority and newly assumed self-consciousness.
It is easy for a director to control the ending of this play and so set an individual
interpretation on it. The central figures can be so lit that they are clearly distinguished from
the rest of the company on stage and the audience is directed to take notice of the different
relationships of Edgar, Kent, and Albany to the dying and then dead king, and to each other.
Whatever words the director chooses from the text can be given impressive statement. But
in a less controlled production, a full cast of unspeaking and nameless attendants of various
ranks, all silenced by the appalling event, can also take focus, and even more strongly, as
instinctively they move forward together with bowed heads or averted eyes. After Edgar’s
last words, they each will have to respond as best they can, as they take up their burdens
and, again, draw attention.

* * *

In many Asian traditional theatres – in Jatra and Kutiyattam, Bunraku and Kabuki, amongst
those considered here, and also in No, Balinese dance dramas, Beijing Opera, and more –
what happens centre-stage is supported by music, drum-beat, song, or recitation, or by a
large chorus-like group of dancers or actors, or by the responses of half-hidden puppeteers.
Compared with these dramas, Shakespeare’s plays and many others in European traditions
are remarkable for dispensing with much of this support and being content to leave a great
part of the drama as the sole responsibility of the leading actors. However, an experience of
other theatres will suggest that the degree of presentational support that is required by
Shakespeare’s texts is more extensive than would at first appear. It was probably intended to
interact more strongly and constantly with what was the heart of this drama than a reading
of the text or the practice of modern theatres may lead us to think.
Most of Shakespeare’s plays can be staged today in a theatre of moderate size with a
total cast of twenty-five; in a smaller space, with doubling and perhaps a little cutting of the
text, as few as twelve can manage. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the Chamberlain’s
Men had a larger company, with ten or so ‘principal players’2 supported by variable numbers
of ‘hired men’, ‘boys’ and lesser actors or attendants, also known as stage- or door-keepers.

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There can be no doubt that considerable forces were available to interact with a play’s leading
actors whenever Shakespeare and his fellow actor-sharers saw the need.
Obviously in the histories he did make frequent use of them, as armies are required to
march and countermarch. More than that, while they stand and wait for the main dramatic
action to be carried forward by their leaders, they provide a sounding board or reflective
surface that can enlarge the effect of a change of fortune or weariness after long strife, or any
move to prepare for battle or surrender. Martial music was also available to extend whatever
effect the dramatist required: trumpets could sound with sudden clamour, drums speak both
loud and low, persistently or in sharp outbursts. Such music could give a boost to any
performance: Falstaff, preparing to go off to battle, calls out instinctively, ‘O, I could wish
this tavern were my drum!’ (I, Henry IV, III.iii.205), as if he knows that rousing music should
be accompanying a martial exit. Perhaps he pounds on the table as if he were calling for more
drink, but here improvising rough martial music.
The variety of ways in which Shakespeare used such choric and musical effects may be
illustrated in Richard the Third. Richmond concludes his address before the Battle of
Bosworth with

Sound drums and trumpets boldly and cheerfully;

God and Saint George! Richmond and victory!
(V.iii.269–70)

so that here the vigorous cries of a whole army will be augmented by bold music. In
contrast, Richard has two very different climaxes in his battle-speech, neither of which
calls specifically for music. The first is on the sound of Richmond’s drum from off stage
which prompts him to call for fighting, bloodshed, and ‘broken staves’; the second when
he calls for action and victory:

Advance our standards, set upon our foes;

Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!
Upon them! Victory sits on our helms.
(V.iii.348–51)

If drums and trumpets were used here, Richard has not summoned them. The soldiers,
however, will have to move off stage and how they do so will reflect or magnify whatever

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effect Richard makes in speaking the words that have got them underway. Perhaps they do
cry out on ‘fair Saint George’, but if so they are given no clear cue for a concerted reaction so
that the effect will be more scattered than that of their opponents. In any case, the whole
episode will contrast with Richard’s very precise call for military music in an earlier scene
when he wishes to silence the women who confront him:
A flourish, trumpets! Strike alarum, drums!
Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women
Rail on the Lord’s anointed. Strike, I say!
(IV.iv.149–51)

These four incidents, all raising the expectation of musical support and each meaningfully
varied, demonstrate the careful attention that Shakespeare gave to this way of extending and
controlling dramatic interest.
In Henry the Fifth, he employed many sounds of warfare – soldiers’ cries, cannon-shot,
trumpets, and drums – to show the king putting heart into his troops before Harfleur. At the
Battle of Agincourt, however, such presentational support is more muted:

Now soldiers, march away;

And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day!
(IV.iii.131–2)

Even if Shakespeare expected more music and sounds than the text insists upon here, this call
for everyone to leave the stage shows a new wariness. After the battle, no stage direction
specifies what should happen but, as the soldiers are ready to leave the stage, Henry calls for
‘all holy rites’ and the singing of ‘Non nobis’ and ‘Te Deum’: here the troops might all join in
singing one of the ancient hymns, as if they had been given an order, or some individuals
amongst them might fall to private prayers; on the other hand, the troops might very well
hesitate, not knowing how to proceed after so unusual a command, and so emphasise
Henry’s contrasting determination to demonstrate his piety. Certainly, many soldiers are on
stage so that their leaving will take time and draw attention to how it is effected. Possibly a
silent exeunt, with no accompaniment, a simple but necessarily ragged response, would make
greatest effect in the play’s sequence of massed and regimented movements.
Once a reader of the text starts looking for use of supportive stage movements and
sounds, it will yield suggestions in almost every scene. Before Agincourt, while Henry
watches and prays, there may be stillness and as complete a silence as the theatre could

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provide but then, when the scene moves to the French camp, an unmistakable sound is heard
from off stage to which the nobility immediately react: ‘Hark how our steeds for present
service neigh!’ (IV.ii.8). A more complex chorus of off-stage sounds is suggested by the
Prologue to this Act which speaks not only of ‘high and boastful neighs / Piercing the night’s
dull ear’, but also of ‘busy hammers closing rivets up’, ‘country cocks’, and clocks striking
the small hours. Words may have replaced, at least for this moment, the use of the acting
company to provide a sound-context for performance but, even if none of these sounds is to
be heard, the aural sensibility represented in the words of the Prologue shows Shakespeare
to have been well aware of a wide range of possibilities in the use of sound as support for
central performances or as a contrast to them.
Shakespeare continued to use the clamorous and usually concerted chorus of war in other
plays. All seven tragedies that followed Henry the Fifth were given its help, although by no
means all their central arguments depend on winning battles. Regimented formalities, military
music, and associated sound-effects enhance each play’s reception and their concluding
scenes are all attended by soldiers with their drums or trumpets. In Hamlet, for example,
Fortinbras is expendable as far as the main action of the play is concerned and he has
sometimes been entirely cut in production. However, the deployment of a full complement
of his soldiers will ensure that the audience hears and sees more than just another character.
On his first appearance only nine lines of text are spoken (and this is all that is kept of the
entire Act IV, scene iv in the Folio version) and their effect would be small without his
Norwegian soldiers marching ‘over the stage’ and so projecting and enlarging the image of a
foreign intruder who brings the possibility of war. This impression is unexpected, efficient,
and perhaps rather sinister and threatening: the soldiers come to a halt, one captain is detailed
for special duty, and then, on the order ‘Go softly on’, the whole stage empties noiselessly ‘at
ease’, or even ‘gently’ as the Arden editor glosses softly. This short incident will, by these
means, make a powerful impact, especially as it is in strong contrast with the hurried orders,
entries, and exits, the fleering jests and sharp questions, of Hamlet’s confrontation with ‘the
Danish king’ that has immediately preceded it. By the context which his army provides for
him, even more than by what he says or does, Fortinbras, a new player in the game, makes
an immediate mark – the substitute scoring a goal as soon as he comes on to the field.
At the end of the last scene of Hamlet, Fortinbras’ re-entry with the same, but now
wearied, soldiers has an even greater impact as it brings military discipline to a scene of
‘havoc’ (V.ii.356). With his men in support, he holds the stage with undisputed authority,
despite the fact that the audience has had very little preparation for this and has been told
little of what he stands for. In the last words of the play, Fortinbras orders nameless soldiers
to take over:

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Let four captains

Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage
The soldier’s music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.
(V.ii.387–95)

According to the Folio stage direction, which represents either stage practice at the time of
early performances or the author’s second thoughts, the effect is prolonged: ‘Exeunt marching,
after the which a peal of ordnance are shot off.’ A drum probably marked a funeral-pace as
everyone either carries or follows the bodies off stage. Then the sound of ‘ordnance’ may
break upon the quiet and, perhaps, momentarily stop this procession with its ear-splitting
noise. By these means, the last view of Hamlet himself is prolonged: an inert corpse carried
by soldiers amongst a subdued and shocked procession of persons whose minds had a
moment before been
wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.
(ll. 386–7)

This full-stage and off-stage presentational support is a potent part of the ending of this
tragedy and, after all words have been spoken, it is bound to stir the audience and invite its
reassessment, in its own terms, of the play’s hero.
The contexts provided for the main performances are a major element in Shakespeare’s
plays, the effect of which a reader has to make positive efforts to hear and see. Those who
stage the plays will, necessarily, take them into account, but in modern theatres of European
origin one aspect of their intended effect may well be underestimated. Originally, we should
remember, this choric support was largely unrehearsed and improvised. Individual reactions
amongst its ranks were left to chance, except on the comparatively rare occasions when the
playtext provided a few words for a common reaction or for one or two individual responses.
Everything which today is subjected to long exploration and complex preparation and control
was left to the moment by moment reactions of each participant. This means that while the
company as a whole could give great support to the main performers, its involvement also
added a great hazard in being the most unpredictable and unstable element in the carefully

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scripted play. In consequence, the success or failure of any performance was far more
dependent on supporting actors, musicians, and stage-technicians and attendants than the
words of the text indicate. On the other hand, when all went well, a powerful and overall
unison, a common judgement on events, a concerted yet instinctive reaction could emerge of
its own volition and, as it were, carry the central drama on its shoulders to success. Then a
sense of excited involvement would also arise amongst the audience, and spread irresistibly.

* * *

Plate 8.1 Shang Changrong in the title role of King Qi’s Dream (based on King Lear)
Photograph: Shanghai Theatre Academy

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Plate 8.2 Shang Changrong, actor; photographed during a break in rehearsal

Photograph: John Russell Brown

In some Asian theatres, the participation of supporting actors is more strictly controlled, as
in Beijing Opera where large numbers of supporting actors and almost continuous musical
support are constant features. Their plays are in every outward way far removed from life,
with very elaborate costumes that call for special walks and gestures, amazing acrobatics
that express excitement, large-scale and well-drilled on-stage movements of ranks of actors,
and facial make-up that gives a mask-like emphasis but can, nevertheless, be variously
expressive when worn by a master-actor. However, three other practices ensure an
improvisational element in this well-prepared performance. First, the leading actors are
highly respected and responsive artists who maintain an individual sense of performance,
like a soloist playing with a great orchestra or a diva in a European opera. Second, and most
significantly, the music follows the principal actors in performance and not the other way
about as in European traditions of opera and musical theatre. No conductor, following a
printed score, stands in front of the stage to control the performers both on stage and in an
orchestra pit. Rather, the orchestra is placed at stage-level, but off to one side where only its
chief percussionist faces towards the acting area. He controls the musicians, but cannot
control the actors since he is unseen by them. His task is to ensure that the music takes time
from the actors and supports their performance as it evolves moment by moment; he does
not – and is positioned so that he could not – give time to the actors.

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The third practice which ensures a strong element of improvisation is the way in which
rehearsals are conducted. To watch the Shanghai Beijing Opera Company in rehearsal
when its actors are without make-up and in street clothes is very like seeing a rehearsal in
one of our own theatres. The reactions and behaviour of ordinary life are equally the basis
from which the actors work: they slip easily out of the artificial postures and voices that
will be used in performance and into familiar talk and awkward demonstrations, as if there
were no barrier they cross to do so. The main difference is that no one director is in charge,
but three people each with a distinct function. One of them operates in much the same
way as a director in our theatres and is a comparatively recent arrival in this company. He
is in charge of interpreting the script with regard to the actors’ characterisations and the
physical staging. The assistant director is not, as very often with us, a willing and discreet
person attending on the director’s personal needs. On this occasion, she was a retired
actress who seemed to have the entire play by heart, both words and music, and was
responsible for seeing that her practical experience of this opera was available for use in
the present revival. The third person in the directorate was the technical coach who knew
how to achieve each of the physical feats required of the actors and could show them what
had to be done. Rehearsal would be put on hold so that all three could talk separately with
members of the cast or take part in wider consultations on what seemed to be equal terms.
In effect, three minds and not one were in charge and, consequently, each of the leading
performers had three distinct modes of instruction to follow. In such a production,
performance is like a balancing act in which the actors must satisfy all the various demands
placed on them, as the accidents of each differing moment allow.
Paradoxically, theatres using very demanding techniques, which take years to learn
and assimilate, are amongst those in which improvisation is most prized because it can
give a sense of actuality or immediacy to a drama that is in so many respects fantastic
and minutely controlled. The actor must make such unusual sounds and such complicated
gestures, dependent on fine judgement as well as practised skill, that a performance
cannot be achieved in exactly the same way from one occasion to another. This is
analogous to a juggler’s performance once he is balancing himself on seven or eight chairs
or juggling with many balls. When a large number of actors are employed, they all have
feats like these to do, with the additional task of adapting to each other without help
from a conductor who ensures that all cues are given and taken on time.
Asian productions of European classics will sometimes include elements imitated
from their own ancient theatres or from folk practices which require this high
degree of specialist skill and therefore carry with them this necessary element of
improvisation. Finesse and alertness give the excitement of a game that has to
be won: the actors have no opponent to defeat, but a common and difficult
physical feat to achieve which calls for watchfulness, inspired spontaneity,

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Plate 8.3 Folk dance in Seoul

Photograph: John Russell Brown

and last-moment adjustments to cover-up any lapse that might have been made. For
example, O Tae-suk’s production of Romeo and Juliet in Seoul in 1995 used the routines of
an athletic and martial folk-dance, still seen in town squares today, and so involved the
young Capulets and Montagues in aggressive and communal displays of strength and
energy. The young men of this Verona sprang to life as they vied with each other in
demonstrating expertise, especially when one of their number took the lead in a particularly
daring sequence. They often faced the audience in a show a strength before display changed
into combat, with staves striking violently and advantage suddenly changing. Out of these
spatially and musically presented scenes, the play’s dialogue took vigorous and proud life,
with a sense of danger derived from improvisation.
When expertise in performance is carried to great lengths, it is possible to break out of the
pre-ordained patterning to large and disconcerting effect. In Trivandrum, the Sopanam Theatre
Company (the name means ‘steps leading to the holy place’) directed by Kavalam Narayana
Panikkar has developed its own very demanding style of acting from traditional martial arts,
folk singing and narrative poetry, and the local traditional theatres of Kutiyattam and Kathakali.
The result, after almost two decades, is a repertoire which includes ancient Sanskrit texts,
adaptations of Western classical plays, and Panikkar’s own plays on modern themes written

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especially for his company. Poranadi (‘Boundaries’ or ‘Borders’), first staged in 1995,
presents a corrupt society in an earlier India by employing music and the company’s
demonstrative acting style. Its action had fluency and a continuous mockery, as each cowardly
character boasts of his or her own power or good sense, strutting, bowing, falling down, or
quickly agreeing with whatever suits the moment. So when the Chief Minister says
‘Everything is under control!’, a great deal of extraordinary stage activity shows quite
obviously that it is not. One low-born character, Pokkan, is different and refuses to do what
he is told; expecting to be ritually killed, he gets drunk and then breaks out into a speech to
the audience which ends the play. Warning them of the evils of conformity and complacency,
he calls for revolutionary action. In this role Krishna Kumar, three years in the company and
wooed, at that time, by film makers to leave, gave a startling performance. As his character
attacks a corrupt feudal absolutism, the actor abandons the production’s almost entirely
comic use of the company’s elaborate and well-drilled ensemble-style, but keeps its
physicality and musical shaping so that his performance is simultaneously unfettered, daring
and sharply defined, able to make great leaps and rapid turns in thought as in action.
Something that had seemed impossible has happened as if spontaneously. Finding sudden
freedom, Pokkan’s anger appears raw and its power boundless. The audience must either
share his passion or stand aside, as it were, unable to accept what is being said and done.
The use of ancient skills in contemporary plays shows that specialised techniques, if
shared by an entire company and involving a degree of risk and improvisation, would be a
way to vitalise Shakespeare’s crowd-scenes. In England and North America, however, folk
customs have not won wide acceptance in present times and are therefore not easily available
for use in theatre; ancient theatre traditions do not even exist. Both can be imported from
other cultures but then they seem artificial in the new context and this militates against alert
or subtle dialogue. They also bring a sense of make-believe which obscures any attempt to
reflect the concerns of their audience. Besides, when such ‘ethnic’ productions are attempted,
even long periods of concentrated training are insufficient for actors to absorb the necessary
skills so that they become second nature; without that depth of assurance their performance
is not able to draw the audience into the heart of what has been made, for them, a very
unfamiliar drama. A better way to achieve a concerted power is to seek out contemporary
‘ceremonies’ – as proposed in Chapter 3 and illustrated in the productions of Noda Hideki
– and elaborate these in ways that take lessons from Asian reliance on complicated folk
ceremonies and techniques.
A few small companies in Europe and the United States have shown the way: for
example, Theatre de Complicite directed by Simon McBurney who worked for some years
in a French circus with acrobats and clowns, and the actors of Saratoga International Theatre
Institute (SITI), directed by Anne Bogart who collaborates each year in a festival with
Suzuki Tadashi in Japan. Knowing the theatrical value of physically demanding ensemble

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performance, both these directors try to find contemporary means to harness it. In Complicite’s
The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994–6), seven actors, with great dexterity and often to
music, act many different persons as well as horses, goats, chickens, and parts of the
scenery. The production is an amazing contrivance, like an elaborate puzzle or dance at the
centre of which the story of a few individuals is clearly and sensitively exposed to the
audience’s view. In SITI’s The Medium (1993–6), a small group of actors play even more
characters, either appearing on television or reacting to television. Pace is often rapid, with
many costume-changes and physical contortions and transformations, so that the audience
is both amazed and caught up in the varying exploits. With both productions, however,
constant repetition during long tours has tended to reduce the improvisational element in the
work and so the directors travel with the actors to conduct re-rehearsals and add new
elements in order to keep some hold on spontaneity and freshness of invention. Unfortunately,
the financial and organisational difficulties of this kind of production are considerable and
may well prevent a wider adoption of these techniques of training.
Highly skilled ensemble acting, even when it retains an improvisational edge, is not,
however, an entirely suitable style for staging Shakespeare. For moments of concerted
action, such as dances, fights, formal confrontations, displays of loyalty or subservience,
or outbreaks of joy or fear amongst numbers of persons, its qualities serve very well. Yet
the greater part of Shakespeare’s writing has an ease and flexibility that demand acting of
a kind quite contrary to regimentation and coordinated power. This is obviously so in solo
moments that call for careful, sensitive, and heightened enactment of ordinary words and
actions: ‘Pray you undo this button’; ‘She should have died hereafter’; ‘My wife, my
wife; I have no wife’; ‘Most wonderful!’; ‘My father had a mole upon his brow. . .And so
had mine’, to chose from amongst those already mentioned in this book, and there are
many more of the same kind which need acting that is open, unsupported, and sensitive,
as much as it is powerful.
Ensemble acting has little to offer in reaching the heart of most of the plays, the sustained
presentation of two or three very independent persons in subtle and often uncertain
interaction. In scenes of this sort, placed at crucial moments in the story and structure of a
play, the characters are progressively revealed and the audience drawn progressively closer
to the working of their very beings as they face the demands of story and situation, and of
each other. They seldom join to make a united and strong impression, have no set resources
to fall back on, and may have little understanding or acceptance of each other. They cannot
be represented by actors who rely on the carefully nurtured expertise of a group working
together under strong leadership.
This book has argued that performance of Shakespeare’s plays requires actors to maintain
continuous contact with the facts of ordinary lives as well as develop an ability to improvise,
seek dramatic clarity, subtlety, and authority, and rely on their own resourceful imaginations.

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This prescription holds good for those scenes of large-scale actions or confrontations for
which inventive ensemble acting would give added excitement and power: even here, concerted
effects should not take over entirely from improvisation and individual actions and reactions.
The authoritarian training methods used by some ensemble companies can lead to single-
minded effects that are seldom suitable for Shakespeare’s plays. The deployment of a large
company of actors without confining their individual responses or over-organising the action
seems to have been amongst the strengths of English theatre in his own day, however
unlikely it may seem in ours.
Thomas Heywood, in his Apology for Actors of 1612, told a story which illustrates this
ability to maintain an improvised impression of a real event even when many actors are
involved in making a powerful effect:

an accident happened to a company [of actors] some 12 years ago, or not so much;
who, playing late in the night, at a place called Pe[n]ryn in Cornwall, certain
Spaniards were landed the same night, unsuspected and undiscovered, with intent
to take in the town, spoil, and burn it, when suddenly, even upon their entrance,
the players (ignorant as the townsmen of any such attempt) presenting a battle on
the stage, with their drum and trumpets struck up a loud alarm: which the enemy
hearing, and fearing they were discovered, amazedly retired, made some few idle
shot, in a bravado, and so, in a hurly-burly, fled disorderly to their boats. At the
report of this tumult, the townsmen were immediately armed, and pursued them
to the sea, praising God for their happy deliverance from so great a danger.3
(Sig. G2r)

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RETURNING
 9

CRITICISM
Texts and study

Each time I returned from my travels, I became aware that I was reading Shakespeare’s
plays differently. The chapters in the first part of this book have set out various changes
as they occurred and now they can be drawn together and questions asked about their
combined effect.
I think that experiences of most far-reaching importance happened when I was either
sitting or standing amongst audiences that were free to respond openly to the persons in the
play and, sometimes, to the actors who were performing them. Often we were in the same
light as the actors so that we could forget, at times, that there was any barrier between us and
yet not be caught up in a wholly private experience, as if watching a film or sitting back in a
European or North American theatre, more often than not in the dark. Along with other
persons in the audience, we became involved with the action and found ourselves partisan
according to our own sense of what was at stake. While free to follow our own thoughts and,
if we wished, to cut ourselves off from the play, there were times when everyone seemed
concentrated on one particular event or argument, or on an individual who was speaking as
if for our benefit.
Even when the play’s situation and action were far removed from the circumstances of
the everyday, what was said and done would continually call up our personal memories and
experiences so that we got caught up in the play in ways that made it seem part of our own
lives and of the world in which we lived: the persons on stage became persons we knew, or
had heard about or seen from a distance.
Recalling, now, the numerous occasions when I, with many others, was intent on following
strange and impossibly marvellous events in a free performance on an open stage, I find
myself remembering words of Shakespeare’s Richard the Second:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends.
(III.ii.175–6)

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The kings and queens, lovers and fools, wives and husbands, soldiers, scholars, politicians,
servants, masters in the plays all behave as if they live by the same bread as their audience,
the same day-to-day and nourishing means. They also experience emotions as we do and are
open to contact with us so that we sometimes sense that they need to receive our response
and endorsement. We give them our willing attention and they thrive on it; this is a very
ordinary exchange, of giving and taking, but by its means the play comes alive in our minds
with a force that we instinctively appreciate and accept.
When I read Shakespeare’s texts now, my strongest impulse is not to grasp for the
meaning of words or to delve into their messages or significance. I allow myself to be drawn
into the action in my imagination, giving attention instinctively to the persons in the play, as
if they were close to myself. Then I may engage with them in the action or stand back and
question what is happening. Until this process has at least begun, I am not ready to pay
attention to individual words in order to work out what they all imply. Stranger still, I am not
yet concerned with what these various persons are talking about. When I read the text, I want
to see what is happening, to whom, by whom, and with what intent. The words are what
cause all this to happen, but I quickly go through them, look past them, as it were, to try to
find out who these people are and what they are doing. Sometimes they come alive in my
head in ways that have to be corrected later but, often, with a quick rush of recognition, as a
sensuous and emotional experience that is special to myself.
Sometimes, it seems, that I am meant to question and feel uncertain, to want to know
more and engage in very detailed speculation about the nature of the fate, history, belief, love,
or ambition these people are talking about – their words provoke argument and debate – but
events on stage will almost immediately pull my attention forward because these persons
will not wait for me. My struggle to keep up and my surprise at a turn of events seem to be
part of what the drama intended and so my uncertainties continue to be played upon for
purposes I cannot guess and no person on stage will stop to define for me. These plays
provoke many different responses; they do not give clear directions about what to think but
seem to encourage people in an audience to stay in possession of their own minds and see
everything in terms of whatever concerns they brought to the theatre with them. I have come
to think that they were written so that we could all make what we want out of them in our
own time and place, so long as we are prepared, always, to go on further with the play as its
action draws us.
What holds each play together, and holds the attention of many different persons in a free
audience, is its action or story. At certain times in the theatre, we are all caught up in the
dramatic event as it occurs and now, as I read, I try to understand the nature of that central
and sometimes spell-binding experience. Any perception of meaning or relevance, historical
or of the present moment, has its origin and fullest life there; if it does not, it will drop away

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as of momentary interest only, a side-dish or condiment for the main course that stands
ready on the table.
I am very aware of the variety of attention a play can provoke. We may see the actors
only, and through them experience the persons in play; or the two can seem as one and, for
the time being, the actor is entirely lost to mind as we encounter the person he or she
enacts. We can see the persons in the play as people like ourselves and, sometimes, we
may see only ourselves in them, so that we are in the play as one of its persons and even
as several of them at one and the same time. On rare occasions, we see neither ourselves on
stage nor the actors or the persons they play, but in our imaginations we are a person in
the play and through that imaginary being, at the same time as the actor, we ourselves do
and say whatever the fiction requires. Identifying these various kinds of reception when
reading a text is by no means easy, but an attempt to do so leads to a fuller understanding
of what any particular play does for an audience. At least, we may identify those places in
the action where it draws most effectively on the audience’s own experience and imagination
and that, I have come to believe, is vital information to anyone who wishes to enjoy a play
and assess what it has achieved.
As I read the texts, now, I am aware of how performance feeds on my own responses and
stirs my imagination. What might happen on stage, according to calculations and deductions
I can make from the text or can draw from memories of specific productions and records of
earlier ones, does not have the arresting and challenging impact of what is happening as if on
its own accord in the minds of an audience member, one like myself or very different from
myself. More than its possible life on a stage, I want to know what a play does to an
audience while it is being performed. When I examine a text on the page, I am scrutinising
relics of what it has been, the incomplete foundations and not the building itself: highly
important evidence, but inadequate in terms of height and space, purpose and use, the
experience of living within the complete building. Or it is like judging animals by laboratory
examination of their meat taken from a shop window or refrigerated display-case: necessary
evidence for both scholarship and criticism, but with obvious limitations if we are interested
in live beasts.
None of this means that the words of the text are unimportant. In some ways, I now, in
due course, want to give closer attention to them than before, though not always for the same
reasons. Of course, I want to know what generations of scholars and critics in the twentieth
century have discovered about the probable meanings of words and their usefulness in their
particular contexts. I would like to know why one word and not another has been preferred
by the author and what is the force of each image or allusion. I want to understand rhetorical
structures and stylistic variations. But a further question or series of questions has come to
take my greatest attention when scrutinising a text: what does the play do for an audience,

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with an audience, to an audience? From these difficult questions still others spring: what
does an audience, very varied in membership and full of independent minds, make of the play
and its performance? What do the actors take from an audience? I find that I return to the text
with more questions than before.
I need to know how speaking the play’s words affects its physical realisation. Which
passages are slow and which fast?What words have inescapable importance, like trigger
points for new actions and reactions? When are large-scale group responses a necessary part
of the action and how do these affect the central persons in the drama? How are entries and
exits controlled by words or when is one silent person given a position of power? What
unresolved conflicts of feelings or thoughts are suggested but not defined by the words
spoken? What drives these persons or causes them to hold back from the ongoing action?
What impression does the physical being of each person make, and how and where does this
change, and why? How does the conclusion of the play supersede, sum up, or modify the
various impressions each person has made during a performance? How are the events of the
play shown to be like or unlike the life-experiences of an audience, and what are the effects
of the disparities? What is an audience expected to give to the play, moment by moment,
during a performance?
One question needs a far closer investigation of the text than I would have given previously.
Ideally, I now would like to know the physical means by which any speech can be spoken.
This means looking at its rhythms and pulse, its shifts of tone and weight, pitch and texture,
the sensuous quality of its allusions and references, the way it echoes what has been said
before, where and how it repeats itself with variations, where breath needs to be taken, and
how the shaping of speech echoes the shape of the underlying thoughts and feelings, whatever
meanings an actor may give to it. Then arise questions about the variations in these matters
between different speakers who are on stage at the same time. When he was writing dialogue,
Shakespeare’s imagination was engaged in the progress of the play’s action so that implicit
in its every detail are indications of how he saw and considered each of the persons involved.
For this reason the text deserves the closest attention and gives to an actor who is speaking
its lines a direct and practical contact with Shakespeare’s creative mind. In performing his
roles, actors are recreating that imaginative engagement and using it, unconsciously, to shape
and colour what they speak while their physical performance is instinctively moulded by
the sound, suggestions, and vocal necessities of utterance. As I have already argued in this
book, it may be that in a skilled actor’s response to the technical difficulties of speaking
Shakespeare’s language he or she may offer an audience the closest and most sensitive
contact with what the play becomes in performance. The actor may well be totally unconscious
of what is happening in this part of a performance and an audience unaware of how it is being
affected: but the physical response to the imaginative writing is always there and visible on

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stage; it is noticeable, too, because it provides necessary energy to the dramatic fiction and
is always changing with its action.
For the critic, scholar, or reader, the performative qualities of Shakespeare’s texts and an
audience’s response to them are not easy to identify or describe. But they demand attention
and so send us off to theatres to see more productions, and to libraries and rehearsal rooms
to seek further knowledge about theatre practice. At least, it was so with me, on each return
from Asia where the range of theatre I had seen made me question what performances of
Shakespeare’s plays might be.

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 10

CONTROL
Directors and companies

No two theatres are alike and they would not stage Shakespeare’s plays in the same way,
even if they used the same director, designers, and actors. Each production is the result of
many people working in close contact with one another in a particular context and bringing
to a very demanding task whatever their lives have made of them at that time. In the process,
to adapt the words of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, they will inevitably ‘show the mettle
of their pasture’.1
The power-structure of a theatre company and the culture of its members are both
implicit in any performance. A director may intend a play to carry specific messages, but
the organisation of the theatre and the day-to-day life of its members will be reflected in all
they produce and be evident on stage, whether the director likes it or not. In some ways,
this inevitable and unwilled statement communicates better, or at a deeper level, than any
concept a director might impose on a production because an audience is not usually
conscious of its influence.
Most experienced directors know this very well. For Peter Brook, what a theatre company
brings affects the entire process of production and is to be cherished. At the end of a long
series of rehearsals he told an enquirer:

We are a small group of human beings. If our way of living and working is infused
with a certain quality, this quality will be perceived by the audience, who will
leave the theatre subliminally coloured by the working experience we have lived
together. Perhaps that is the small contribution we can make, the only thing we
have to convey to other human beings.2

By putting on a show, the product of a ‘working experience. . .lived together’, theatre

expresses the ‘form and pressure’ of its life and times3 – its cultural politics – no matter what
a director might want to achieve or a censor to guard against.

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Clearly the theatres of Asia represent very different cultures in their productions than
European or North American ones; their employment contracts, financial administration,
organisation, policies for advertisement, sales procedures, schedules, and, not least, their
audiences are all quite different. On returning home, this is one of the first things a traveller
concerned with the staging of Shakespeare will notice; he is bound to make comparisons and
ask what working conditions would best suit the plays and how their texts could best be
served by an entire theatre company.

* * *

Today companies producing Shakespeare in Europe or North America work in a variety of

organisations and therefore represent different elements of contemporary culture. But a few
dominant forms are everywhere present, working repeti- tively and confidently, as if there
were no hope of change or regeneration. Taking a phrase from Fredric Jameson, Dennis
Kennedy has identified the power of ‘late monopoly capitalism’ in the most admired
Shakespeare productions of our times.4 Like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s hamburgers, this
mode of production ‘works by transcending national borders and creating attractive images
of its material products designed to make their consumption inevitable’. He cited productions
by Brook, Mnouchkine, Bergman, Strehler, Sturua, Ninagawa, all of which seem to thrive on
this political-cultural situation and are made available for purchase around the world.
These well-financed productions share another cultural mark in that they are all the
products of an accepted dictatorship. Their accomplishment depends on a supposedly
benevolent but undisputable exercise of power by what Sir Peter Hall calls a ‘final voice’, the
daily submission to an experienced ‘editor’ who is relatively distant from the work because
never on stage and personally involved with enacting the play:

In the early stages of rehearsal, the shape and pace of a scene must not be imposed.
The actors should be free to create while their director helps to release their
imaginations; and if that means going very fast or very slow, or taking enormous
pauses, it must happen; everything must be allowed. But once the truth of the
scene is found, the director becomes the editor.5

The authority of this overriding editor/director is often said to be inevitable because of the
complicated technical resources which are nowadays brought to the staging of Shakespeare.
If theatre is to be efficient, the argument goes, there can be no choice in this matter. Like any
successful production process, it must be thoroughly organised and carefully controlled, and

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only one central authority can be responsible for this and so, ultimately, for everything else.
Industrial firms may set up work councils and listen to unions, but these have comparatively
little influence over product; and so it is in theatre. Neither committees nor representatives
can argue with an authority which has control of all input and output. Maximum effectiveness
will always entail some sacrifice of individual freedoms and initiatives – or so it is said.
These procedures of late capitalism operate across the whole spectrum of society and the
dominant theatres are those which have been content to go along with them. Producers
organise companies and hire directors to do the work. Rehearsals for each production are
under the charge of a director and performances are formed by his or her decisions, as if
strength were achieved only through enforced unity organised by a single authority. The
pursuit of unquestioned financial success is an aim of commercial enterprises which theatres
follow by trying to seduce audiences into uncritical acceptance by proclaiming the virtues of
their products – as high in quality as those of the most ruthless business – and by stunningly
confident presentation. In doing this, theatre remains the mirror of the age.
Cultural and political influences can be identified most easily in productions of Shakespeare
when two versions of the same play are available for comparison, such as Richard the Third
staged by the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain in 1990–1 and by the Odeon Theatre
of Bucharest in 1993–4. In the English version the director, Richard Eyre, organised activities
on stage as if he had inherited an old-fashioned taste for military parade: grand and formal
effects were carried out with precision but not much thought for the independent and
idiosyncratic creativity of the participants. Certainly the scheme of the production was
grand, offering not only Shakespeare’s play but also twin pictures of dictatorship in Nazi
Germany and the resurgence of the extreme right wing of politics in post-war Europe, and in
England more especially. The production made much the same comment on contemporary
politics as Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui of 1958 which had borrowed from
Shakespeare’s Richard the Third; but, in London in 1990, Richard Eyre’s production kept
Shakespeare’s text intact while fingering it incessantly to make precise interpretative points.
The packaging was impressive. The actors appeared to order in formal white-tie evening
dress, black-shirt uniforms, or serviceable everyday clothes with armbands displaying the
cross of St George or the image of a boar. They employed banners and slogans, public-
address systems, boardroom ceremonies. They posed for a group photo, stood around while
a toy train ran across the front of the stage, and then provided a red-carpet welcome at a
railway station together with a review of attendant troops. These superimposed and
disciplined ceremonies were used to plug a political message into the words of the text and
keep the actors in line.
Richard himself was defined by what he looked like and his manner of speaking. At first
a Sandhurst-trained officer bearing the psychological and physical wounds of war and an

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elitist education, he then became, one after the other, a right-wing demagogue and a melodramatic
actor in medieval costume who performed in front of a huge painting showing himself naked
and in triumph, astride a rearing white horse. In Richard’s dream before the final Battle of
Bosworth, the ghosts of those he had slaughtered took on fantastic life, regardless of the stiff
formality of their speeches: Clarence tried to force wine down Richard’s throat, Anne danced
with Richmond, the two young princes played games, and Buckingham brought on a crown
of thorns. Queen Margaret, restored to youth and dressed in white, roamed the stage in
gloating triumph. Here the director had pushed his actors beyond the limits of Brecht’s
reworking of the play, creating his own images of infantile competitiveness and hackneyed
horror as signifiers of Richard’s terminal state of mind and, possibly, of his motivation
throughout the action. This was achieved by tight discipline on stage and in the design-
rooms, workshops, and control booths.
Even the intense and compelling Richard of lan McKellen had its effects nailed down and
sometimes upstaged by what had been busily provided around him. Having wooed Elizabeth
to allow him to marry her daughter, Richard’s comment on her departure, ‘Relenting fool,
and shallow, changing woman’ (IV.iv.362), had less impact than the contribution made by the
watching soldiers. These henchmen were directed to break out into a loud guffaw, ‘echoing
with male barrack-room mockery of all women’,6 which took the audience’s attention away
from Richard’s heartless and sardonic humour.
The means whereby the director presented the play had turned it into an unmistakable
political statement about the dangers of dictatorship. But viewed as a political and cultural
product, expressing the nature of the theatre that presented it, the very consistency and
thorough workmanship that ensured success had a very different effect: the audience was
given a production controlled by a director/dictator who had subdued individual freedom.
This involved ignoring the two most obvious challenges of Shakespeare’s text, both the great
variety of independent engagement offered to a company of actors and the variously dynamic,
egocentric, anti-establishment, witty, buffoonish, coldly cruel, self-reflective aspects of the
central role that often clash with one another. The whole company on stage had been
subdued and their efforts confined by the dictates of a director with a single political point
to make, a view of the play that made performance narrowly effective. The brilliant and well-
executed production could then settle down as part of the company’s output in a small and
privileged repertory and on heavily subsidised foreign tours.
The playtext had been both respected and patronised by making a great effort to
emphasise one aspect of it. Some members of its audiences might have resented being led
repeatedly towards the director’s view of twentieth-century history, but the show was
carefully promoted and sold to many more who were pleased to purchase a ‘treatment’ of a
masterpiece that they could easily understand. Often slow and sometimes shrill, nicely

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judged and yet completely achieved, so carefully consistent in every effect that it seemed
afraid of attempting anything uncertain, the production was praised for stage-business
rather than acting, interpretation rather than passion, accomplishment rather than intellectual
exploration. Critics were kept so busy noting the period of its setting and the political
parallels to the present time that they had little space to consider whether the production
was entertaining in any other way.
The ‘working experience. . .lived together’ by the National Theatre Company as sensed
in this production could scarcely be further from that of many theatres encountered in Asia
and, alerted by all these differences, a traveller returns more conscious of how far modern
theatres differ in organisation from those of Shakespeare’s day. Then a theatre was run by a
group of actors who benefited financially from any success and bore the cost of failure.
Actors dominated what was shown on stage as they performed before a lively and diverse
public, sitting or standing in the same light as themselves. We have no idea how the text was
‘interpreted’, but we do know that Richard the Third was a great popular success for its
author and producers. The actor playing the hero also grew in fame in the process of giving
many single performances spread out over many years. There was no director/dictator, no
designer, few technicians, and almost no budget for scenic effects. In contrast with this way
of working, and by most other standards as well, the lifestyle made evident in the National
Theatre production must be judged overwrought, repressive, and cautious. It placed
Shakespeare’s play in a cultural and political context which could scarcely be more different
from that of the theatres where it was first staged and for which it had been written.
The production of Richard the Third by the Odeon Theatre of Bucharest, playing in its
own Majestic Hall in the centre of town, won prizes for both its leading actor and director.
The success was then exploited abroad, in the manner of ‘late capitalist monopoly’, and
was a triumph of ‘benevolent’ dictatorship. Yet it differed from the National’s production
by still more strongly controlling most members of the cast and giving more freedom to the
star performance. Twelve actors were uniformly dressed and drilled so that they were a
support-team for Richard, his attentive listeners, playmates, and agents of destruction;
they were as little individualised as a chorus in classical ballet, and worked as hard. In
contrast, Marcel lures as Richard had been encouraged to be extrovert, smiling, impulsive,
and playful, making a great show of energy and charm. He gave the role a hyped-up
dynamism which made it hard to believe that every effect was calculated and equally hard
to make consistent sense of his commitment to the play’s action beyond an increasingly
manic, self-satisfied childishness. The other named roles achieved little individuality: the
men were tough and energetic, dressed in long, heavily padded robes of uniform style and
stiff with appliqué decoration; the women were strong-voiced and demonstrative, dressed

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in the same material but with more vibrant colours. They all had received what were
essentially the same orders, so that they played along with Richard in the idiom of the
production, throwing their bodies around and sharing energetic embraces, salutes, kneelings,
kissings of hands and faces. On-stage laughter seemed to come whenever bidden, as victims
were strangled or as Richard ordered ‘Off with his head!’
In such a setting Richard’s freedom had obvious limitations, as if he had been allowed free
scope but in a selected and limited environment. He did not exist in any recognisable world,
but within a highly contrived and theatrical fantasy. Ideas that arose in rehearsal had been
developed to work efficiently and show off the leading actor in whatever he did: for example,
Buckingham shared an apple with Richard who insisted on having the bigger half, and then
gave Buckingham a bite out of his. The director’s most striking addition to the play provided
Richard with an attendant who was half-wolf and half-fool, who howled and chattered with
laughter, and breathed deeply in shared commitment. In a calculated coup de théâtre, this
attendant lost his mask at the end of the play and revealed the face of a Medusa; he or she
then cradled Richard and, as he died, kissed him.
Here again was a single-minded interpretation, but applied almost exclusively to the task
of placing the central character in a non-specific theatrical environment. The success of the
production was that of an infectiously riotous, but circumscribed, celebration of performance.
With the exception of the leading actor, the company acting under orders had subdued their
individualities to the corporate discipline of the production. Little money had been spent on
set or stage-effects, but great attention paid to music, choreography, and the martial arts; this
gave the director an unstoppable power to seduce the audience with physical activity and
histrionic display. In cultural and political terms, this Shakespeare production revealed a
company committed to success, every bit as much as the National Theatre in London, but
less cunning and careful, and less self-consciously solemn and restrained. The Odeon Theatre
was content to create a work that made little direct reference outside the theatre, as if the real
world, past or present, would be better if it were avoided. In comparison with Shakespeare’s
theatre this East European and late twentieth-century organisation had insisted that all the
actors should have a continuously energetic presence on the stage and that all the roles except
one should become well-drilled members of a team. It was the product of an operation
isolated in its theatricality, an engagement in product promotion by means of well-organised
and energetic group reactions and by spectacular martial arts.
Dictatorship in theatre is not always so effective. In regional companies in the United
States, for example, a ‘visiting’ director may be put in charge of an annual Shakespeare
production and yet have very limited powers. Priority must be given to the ongoing needs of
a large number of patrons who have already bought their seats for the season and so the

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company is geared to a stable supply economy, not ready to give exceptional attention to
any one production. Choice of cast will be governed by local talent and the high cost of
bringing in additional actors; these will be more expensive but more acceptable if they have
made a name on television or in film. Rehearsal period is likely to be no more than three or
four weeks, without all the actors being available all the time. A high proportion of the
company assembled to stage Shakespeare will have spent most of the previous year only
occasionally acting and will be experienced chiefly in television serials, films, or new plays
using modern speech and representing modern living; some may have done very little acting
of any kind. Knowledge of each other and a shared attitude to Shakespeare’s text are seldom
found in theatre companies of North America, except at festival theatres specialising in
Shakespeare, and there the actors may well be without any other significant experience.
The political and cultural consequences of these arrangements will render all but the
broadest strokes of directorial invention ineffective. Productions are therefore given as
much song and dance as possible, with eye-catching decoration and display, broad comedy
and up-to-the-minute caricature, all devised to grab the attention of patrons seated in their
pre-paid and regular seats. Actors in such a production will usually show some signs of
unease in submission to what the director has required, together with a few indications of
individual exertion or even defiance, but the general impression will be that everyone is
putting on a ‘good show’ to the best of their abilities, quick to take any opportunity to
please their audience and hoping that everything goes well enough. These characteristics
are not essentially Shakespearian, but an index of the cultural politics of this time and
place; as such, they have a pervasive and inescapable effect on performance and,
consequently, on the reactions of an audience.

* * *

As the better-off theatres have either become market leaders that eliminate effective
competition or tried to live secure in an established supply economy, so poorer and smaller
ones have had to learn how to live at a distance from them, content with much more modest
productions, reduced casts, shorter rehearsals, lower standards of performance and seldom
able to stage such demanding work as a play by Shakespeare. But this does not satisfy
everyone and a new generation of theatre companies has attempted alternative modes of
operation. A bitter sense of dispossession, which the unmatchable success of established
theatres encourage, has led to what amounts to outbreaks of civil war. Often desperate and
always underfunded, militants have sometimes used violent and unexpected tactics to
penetrate into what had previously been considered safe areas.

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In effect, theatre reflects contemporary politics as described by Hans Magnus

Enzensberger:

Few dispute that the world market, now that it is no longer a vision of the future
but a global reality, produces fewer winners and more losers as each year passes.
. . .The losers, far from regrouping under a common banner, are hard at work on
their own self-destruction, and capital is retreating from the battlefields wherever
possible. . . .
[In] NewYork as well as in Zaire, in the industrial cities as well as in the poorest
countries, more and more people are being permanently excluded from the economic
system.7

Disadvantaged theatre artists have had to search for the means to thrive outside the safe
areas of the major companies. They set up business on their own, aggressively and self-
importantly. Freedom and independence beckon, even if this means doing without a working
wage and other hard-won workers’ rights, as well as all the fruits of successful trading, such
as new and powerful technical equipment, an effective propaganda machine, large subsidies,
and an assured audience.
Such rebel uprisings cause little permanent damage to the large companies which remain
virtually unscathed, but the emergence of small-scale, independent companies has become
a part of present-day theatre which cannot be ignored. Some of the work is rushed or
crippled by bad management and lack of funds, but the shows are on stage and making
their own noise. The strange thing is that, while in other arts the rebellious assert their
rights by working with new material and claiming ugliness, discord, or the previously
unthinkable as their proper territory, in theatre the latest and most bellicose innovators
turn very often to Shakespeare’s plays. In their hands, the old texts, usually considered
grand and sacrosanct, become unpredictable and sensational small-scale successes, contrived
at minimum financial expense.
Some small companies do not look very much as if they were waging a ‘civil war’. They
are more like units of a cottage industry which serves a small clientele living in remote or
disadvantaged areas or having a peculiar taste for performances which are individually crafted,
however crude and ill-prepared. But in their own worlds, all these small theatres are starkly
and boldly opposed to those which create expensive and durable productions with recognisable
brand images. Even in their most painstaking work, belligerence usually shines through.
These companies believe passionately that they are taking part in a necessary struggle and
they perform Shakespeare as if these plays provided them with all the armament they need.

* * *

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The twofold division of Shakespeare productions, the mass-market on one side and the
piratical on the other, drastically simplifies a complex situation. The Budapest and London
Richard the Thirds differed significantly in the relationship developed between the show on
stage and its audience. The Odeon Theatre’s Richard was able to make contact and invite
connivance in its fantasy. A reviewer from the London Times (13 May 1994) noted both the
company discipline and the free-booting, audience-conscious hero:

His soldiers worship him – and this production can afford to give him a bodyguard
of 12 devoted swordsmen who step, turn and threaten in unison. [Marcel] Iures
[as Richard] tosses a smile at the audience after putting them through their paces.

In contrast Ian McKellen’s Richard was on stage for the audience to see for itself and figure
out its meaning. Up there, in the carefully created world of the production, the actor made no
concessions to the silent watchers in the audience. This contrast of style did not however
affect the common purpose of each exercise; both companies were providers of a show that
had been developed to run for a long time and impress their audiences in ways decided by a
director. The small-scale, upstart, and pirate companies prefer to see themselves as sharers
with their audiences, or as representatives or leaders of them, or as provocateurs and instigators
sent on a mission to impress them.
The twofold distinction holds good in most of the basic choices involved in production.
Market leaders are possessors and purveyors, providing their public with what they have
reason to believe will sell. (No subsidy is big enough to allow any company to escape the
financial restrictions of competitive commercial enterprise, and patrons no longer pay unless
they are sure of their entertainment.) They manipulate the market through the media and
their own self-promoting propaganda, and their skills in this grow ever more impressive.
Necessarily they try to become highly distinctive on the surface, but nevertheless their
products become more and more similar because they seek to satisfy much the same market-
place and by much the same exploitative means. On the other side of the divide, variations
are essential to existence and so each company will flaunt its difference from the rest of
theatre and show that it has its own way with Shakespeare. One company uses all male
actors, another all female. In others, the actors are dancer-actors, or singer-actors, mime-
actors, or clowns. Some companies insist on using only contemporary costumes and
fashionable manners and intonations. When money will stretch so far, a company may
employ only actors who are also musicians so that their productions can be accompanied at
all times by music, creating mood and sustaining forward movement and unity. Another
company will maximise doubling and play Macbeth with a cast of three actors, King Lear
with a cast of five. Another will use only the minimum of company rehearsals, trying to

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‘free’ their actors from prescribed movements and interpretations, and from a director’s all-
seeing control. Others use film clips to provide a contemporary context for the play’s action.
Some always perform in small, intimate spaces where there is little division between stage
and auditorium. Some perform to special audiences, the old, the very young, the politically
committed, or people living in particular places or social conditions. Others break up the text
and play it in a different order, or use only one section of it and play that several times, each
in a different way, or play it very slowly, so that the excerpt provides material for a whole
evening’s entertainment. All are united in trying to break through the limitations of monopoly
practice, seeking their own kinds of success as if struggling to draw the very breath of life.
Very few can give themselves time to develop skills and take good care of their work.
Sometimes, briefly, the dividing wall is breached. A benevolent, large-scale operator will
set up a small company-within-the-company to ape the freer spirits outside its bounds and
show good intentions towards innovation and young artists. This subsidiary unit will then
mount workshop, studio, ‘educational’, ‘outreach’, or ‘mobile’ productions of Shakespeare
on very tight budgets. But every enterprise of this sort remains subordinate to the dictates
of its masters. Directors and actors do not stay here for long, the best being promoted into
‘mainstage’ productions where they will spend and earn more money, and learn the necessities
of the market-place; the less good will be dropped, and often the whole ‘experimental’
enterprise goes with them. On the other side of the divide, small companies can be corrupted
by success and restrict their own freedom by mounting productions which are designed to
please the other market; these undertake long periods of touring or take up residence in a
large theatre run by producers seeking the profits and stability of monopoly suppliers.
Cheek by Jowl is a British theatre company that took its name from the defiance flung at
his rival by the callow Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (III.ii.338) and it started
life in piratical vein, back in 1981:

there’s no-one who leads, no-one who follows in a Cheek by Jowl production. All
participants go together in a world of the imagination.
There’s a spirit in Cheek by Jowl which is intimate but raucous, private yet
public, cerebral but celebratory. . . .Theirs is the regeneration game, the fruition of
impulses from a collective creative imagination.

So declares the Introduction to a publication celebrating the company’s first ten years of
life.8 But already, in its choice of a succession of productions of Shakespeare, European
classics, and adaptations of well-known novels, the company was trading on safe household
names. Soon it was also balancing its books and boosting its image by holding on to
productions for long tours around the world. By 1994, a production of Measure for Measure,

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after months of constant touring, settled for a further month at the Lyric Theatre,
Hammersmith, close to the West End of London. The show had started as workshops in the
summer of 1993, but by July of the following year the actors seemed to be enacting routines
and their fully staged production played for some quarter of an hour longer than it had at
first. The company’s all-male version of As You Like It, after touring for many months in
1991, was revived in 1994–5 for a West End management as a Christmas show. For these
extended engagements to be successful, the intimate, raucous, and impulsive band of actors
had to become ordered enough for their product to be repeated and exploited for greatly
increased consumption in the supertheatre market-place.9 In this more established world, the
company’s two directors were now building their own careers and Cheek by Jowl staged
ever fewer productions and kept them running for longer; its disbandment or change of image
was inevitable.
Other companies staging Shakespeare, which started small, free, and valiant, have advanced
right up to the gates of established citadels and then failed to continue. Some lacked the
finance or skill to enter that competitive world; others found that the energies with which
they had started life could not sustain work on a larger scale and for longer periods of time.
Yet when the rebellious have committed themselves freely to a strong leader who works
adventurously and with a loose rein, they have managed to straddle the divide long enough to
give large-scale performances which remain audacious and glowing with independent life.
The English Shakespeare Company, led by director Michael Bogdanov and actor Michael
Pennington, managed this at least once when they finished a nationwide tour at the Old Vic
in London in 1987 and presented Richard the Second, Henry the Fourth, Parts I and II, and
Henry the Fifth in a single day. These productions had already played in repertoire for some
months and bore the marks of directorial decisions in every scene, but the occasion provided
a quite exceptional boost with which predictability could be cast away and new invention
attempted. When John Wodvine entered as Falstaff astride a barrel on a handcart, his
disquisition on honour responded with effortless freedom to unscripted responses from the
crowded audience which had been watching the story unfold for well over seven hours. This
was not a display of secure excellence or smart efficiency, though the standard of work was
comparable with that of many market leaders. Nor was it a carnival entertainment such as
historians usually describe, because everything had been carefully prepared and all performers
were professionals who performed every day and knew their script, their places, and their
artifice. Rather it was a triumph of free thought and feeling, shared between actors and
audience, that lit up the whole production. Quite exceptionally, the production was both
well practised and unconstrained: intense, joyous, palpable, unprecedented, and shared
openly between actors and audience.

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A sufficient number of moments like this keep recurring to remind us that Shakespeare’s
plays in performance need not be clearly packaged and processed by directors working for
the market leaders and, equally, need not have the exaggerations and obvious shortcomings of
aggressive and piratical newcomers. But the politics and culture of our age are so strongly
ingrained that they remain highly exceptional. We get the Shakespeare we deserve and,
because theatre is a collaborative art, it will take more than a few zealots to reverse current
trends. Perhaps a sufficiently financed programme of reform could succeed, but it would
have to start with the organisms that create theatre, not with more new ideas about staging
or more reinterpretations of individual plays: as Falstaff said of mere ‘reasons’, such ideas
for change are ‘as plentiful as blackberries’ (I, Henry IV, II.iv. 232–3) and do nothing to
improve the basic situation. Reformers would have to find modern counterparts for those
elements of corporate theatrical life which Shakespeare supposed would be in force for the
staging of his plays and would have to draw upon the experience of working and living
together in the present time.
It may seem impossible to alter the habits of our time, but theatre can be an agent for
testing ideas which society as a whole will not admit. This has been proved in very recent
years by theatres in Eastern Europe and is being proved again by theatres in oppressed areas
of Africa, Asia, and South America. Moreover, a visit to Tokyo, for example, will soon
demonstrate that theatres elsewhere can thrive in a twentieth-century, high-tech, capitalist
culture using very different organisations. Knowing that the search is not hopeless and aware
that other ways of running theatre are practicable, the obvious places to turn for help in
finding new forms for theatre are the plays themselves and what is known about the conditions
of early performances.

* * *

First of all, actors should be in charge, as a group or, to use Hamlet’s word, as a ‘fellowship’
of players (III.ii.272). The producing company should be run by eight to ten people who
have all earned their livings on the stage, and most of them should still be primarily actors.
The tasks of running the company would be shared out amongst them, this arrangement
being helped by the knowledge of each other – though not a total trust – that would be
fostered by the common experience of acting on stage together. Individual members might be
in charge of finance, repertoire, production, and public relations, but ultimate responsibility
for everything would rest with the group. As they judged best they would employ
administrator, accountant, technical director, or stage manager, and they might hire designers,
directors, and others, but there should be no doubt that the last word, the power to hire and
fire, belonged to the actors. If possible, some members would own shares in the theatre
building in which they performed.

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Such an arrangement worked in Shakespeare’s day, but its feasibility cannot be taken
for granted today. Living conditions, finance, and the theatre profession and its techniques
have so changed that power has slipped away from the actors. In Europe and North
America no fellowship of players has much chance of managing anything, but the idea is
not necessarily a lifeless fossil of interest only to historians. Something of the kind still
exists at the back of the mind of anyone who has complained about the divide between
‘them’ and ‘us’, between those who plan and those who work, those whose labour earns
the money and those who control it. Somehow, this division should be removed and it
could be that the small yet complex world of theatre, where on stage all life is kept within
view, is one of the most hopeful sites for following such aspirations, rather than keeping
to the established practices of the present time. Failure to make such an attempt only
perpetuates the double breakdown of responsibility: management thinking only of efficiency
and finance; operators and achievers abdicating control of their own work. Many small
businesses do start as a fellowship of equals, and continue so very happily until drawn
into the pattern and aspirations of larger organisations.
By the words he set down as the basis for their performances, Shakespeare developed
many ways of controlling the actors’ work, but he also placed an astonishing trust in their
originality and responsibility. Richard the Third is an early play which would be cumbersome
and repetitive without a leading actor able to hold the stage, driving the narrative forward
while delighting and taunting his audience. The other actors in the company have a large
number of roles to play, each asking for clear definition and sufficient energy to offset that of
the hero and give grist to his activity. Several of them must sustain interest when they are left
alone on stage, or virtually so, in scenes crucial to the development of the drama: notably,
Clarence, Margaret, Hastings, Tyrrel, the last-minute challenger, Richmond, and even the
anonymous Scrivener. This pattern of demands on a company of actors was repeated with
variations in other plays: Richard the Second, Henry the Fifth, Hamlet.
More usually Shakespeare made interplay between two or more leading actors the centre
of the drama and its driving force. In the second scene of Henry the Fourth, Part I, Falstaff
and Prince Hal are placed on stage together and left alone to animate dialogue which would be
curious badinage if it were not sustained, on both sides, by a lively and deep-rooted compulsion
to talk and challenge each other. Much of the interest and originality of this play stems from
the individual forces at work behind the cross-talk of this opening duologue. In the first scene
of Much Ado About Nothing, a short exchange between Benedick and Beatrice sets up the
stakes for the comic and serious game which will take them to the edge of sanity and
acceptable behaviour. If the actors fail in this, the scene becomes a short and tedious sparring
for advantage using wise-cracks which could never by their merely verbal life grab the
attention of an audience or, with repetition, be anything more than tedious to perform. At the

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end of Henry the Fifth, a similar device is used, this time in a lengthy encounter between the
king, played by the company’s leading actor, and Katherine, Princess of France, played
originally by one of its young male actors; this duologue must have two very different
sources of energy clashing with each other if it is to establish and develop the new thoughts
and feelings within Henry that will carry the play to its conclusion.
The heath scenes of King Lear are where Shakespeare’s trust in a group of actors is most
in evidence. Those who represent the king, the fool, and the pretend madman, together with
the sober and almost silent Kent who is locked into his disguise as Caius, have to make sense
while speaking lines which on the page seem to be overladen with obscure and almost
infantile jokes, together with curious and wayward phrases, repetitions, snatches of song,
broken syntax, silences, and non-sequiturs. The actors must play their characters with an
inner consistency underneath this great variety of wordplay and ostensible nonsense or the
audience will become entirely lost and perplexed to very little purpose. Either the actors win
through and are able to show the tempests in each independent mind or they have to
simplify, cut large sections of the text, and concentrate on what little narrative can be
extracted from an encounter of almost crazed individuals. These difficulties are compounded
in that the actors cannot rely here on their strongest qualities. The leading young actor has to
pretend to be a violent madman and has little opportunity for direct expression of his
character’s thoughts and feelings or for showing that growing strength which will allow him
to challenge and defeat his brother Edmund in a sword fight. The fool has to fail when he
attempts to supply grotesque comedy and so must expose his own isolation and helplessness
without the help of his customary artifice. The king has to become foolish and ordinary, a
frail old man who is soaking wet and disorientated by the storm, and yet he must also be
angry, horrified, proud, powerful, prophetic, deranged, and dangerous – all attributes of the
traditional tragic hero. Amongst these uncertainties and contradictions, the actors have to
hold the play together so that it develops in a course that seems as necessary as it is
unprecedented. Stage-effects efficiently marshalled for the storm can do very little to
compensate for any shortcomings in the actors’ performances; indeed, too great reliance on
recorded sound can obliterate whatever they strive to do. In our theatres today, a director
will usually make choice of a few significant sentences to be delivered in a way that forces an
audience to hear them distinctly and so provide some points of certainty, some landmarks,
for both actors and audience. By taking overall charge in this way, the director can gain
coherence and clarity at the cost of losing that fierce and deep-seated contention which
should threaten to disorientate them all.
None of these scenes, and none of the many like them, can be staged effectively to the
order of any one person. Independently minded actors are needed for the wellbeing of
Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre, persons used to taking charge and bringing confident

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imagination and mutually responsible originality to each of the roles. Many other matters
have to be attended to, especially control of modern technical equipment and development
of acting skills, but none is so vital as this if the plays are to live on the stage and be
responsive to the words of the texts. Somehow the organisation of a theatre for staging
Shakespeare has to give greatest attention to imaginative and skilled acting, subordinating all
other concerns.
The ‘lived experience’ of a company working together will always have a palpable effect
on an audience. So much may readily be granted, but the consequence is more contentious
because that experience must be of the right kind for the work in hand. For Shakespeare’s
plays it has to be strong and individually motivated, and in Shakespeare’s day this was
encouraged by putting experienced actors in charge. Today we use other types of organisation
and none of them offers a viable equivalent. Actors employed by the larger established
companies are held back by the need to please the directors and producers who are their two
very different masters. Actors engaged in small pirate companies are usually without great
experience and are forced to give priority to surviving and promoting themselves, rather than
to maturing their talents or exploring a text so that it draws them further towards meeting its
own difficult demands. Until a number of experienced and talented actors want to join in a
‘fellowship’ and try to make it work, no one can know whether such a group in charge of a
company would improve significantly the playing of Shakespeare’s plays in the present age
as it did in his. As we have seen, some parts of this recipe have been tried, but not for long
and not with a large and varied repertoire of plays in performance.
Many aspects of theatre work would have to be rethought if Shakespeare’s plays were to
be staged in accordance with the qualities of his writing and the changes involved would often
have cultural and political consequences. For example, the barrier between stage and audience
which has been built up in the centuries after Shakespeare’s time would have to be demolished.
Modern lighting and sound can be used most efficiently if the audience is placed at some
remove from the stage, as if it were in another world, and the audience must be in more or less
total darkness if the lighting is to have full effect. Both these aids to production have to be
programmed with great care ahead of performance and operated by some person who can
observe what happens on stage rather than being part of it. Some other way of using light and
sound must be found so that an audience is in direct contact with performers without
intervening agencies.
The form in which most modern theatres have been built, and consequently the ways in
which most theatre settings are designed and manufactured, also creates a distance between
stage and audience. In their seats spectators sit back comfortably to watch what is happening
elsewhere, in another more amazing world which cannot be entered or fully known.

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The way in which most actors live and work also implies a distance, or even a gulf,
between them and their audiences. They enter the theatre by a separate entrance and live
with very different routines from those of most other people. Spared the practical details of
running a company and seldom meeting their audiences, they tend to inhabit the self-enclosed
world of their performances, rehearsals, professional advancement, and private lives. These
are amongst the factors which combine with modern technology to make theatre culturally
specialised: at best, elaborately and masterfully contrived, but cut-off in what amounts to a
ghetto from the minds and lives of the public which is expected to support it. Theatre works
in the dark and keeps its audience in the dark: light that audience and let it come closer to the
stage, and encourage the actors to know that audience, and a new situation would revolutionise
every aspect of play production.
Another obvious step towards openness between actors and audience would be to avoid
huge theatres in which a human being on stage appears no larger than a doll. Ideally, every
member of an audience should be no more than ten metres from the stage and so able to see
changes of expression in mouth and eyes, and around the eyes and in the hands, and catch the
slightest movement and change of posture. They should be able to sense nervous tension and
hear breathing. Large theatres have financial advantages, but some five hundred spectators
can be accommodated at no great distance around three sides of a stage measuring about ten
by eight metres – more if some of them are standing – and those numbers could provide
sufficient income if expenses other than actors’ salaries were strictly limited.
Long runs and long tours must both be rejected, even though this policy would go in the
face of those current political, commercial, and cultural trends which seek to maximise
returns in the shortest possible time. If plays were produced in a true repertoire, each
playing for no more than one or two nights in any one week, performances would be
encouraged to be open to chance and to each change of political circumstance and, as a
consequence, a theatre might find itself the prized provider of irrepeatable occasions and up-
to-the-minute entertainment. Actors would not be imprisoned for months or years in the
same roles and texts, and the same routines of performance. Audiences would not be prepared
by advance publicity and told what to expect and what to think. All this presupposes
independent minds amongst actors and audience, but these might exist in greater numbers
than we have come to expect if the right conditions existed – we are not all content to buy
identical and mass-produced merchandise.
No matter how far away in setting or how fantastic in action their drama may be,
Shakespeare’s plays were written to reflect the lived experience of actors and audience.
Actors should keep alive to current thoughts and feelings by performing, as a matter of
course, in new plays by new writers as well as in Shakespeare’s. When dressed in other than
present-day clothes, as they may well be in productions of Shakespeare in order to fight

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with swords, travel by horse, have many servants, and so forth, actors should avoid treating
them as fancy-dress; doing so encourages voices and manners far removed from those of their
audience. Considerable tact and experiment are needed to represent a period way of life on
stage without losing immediate contemporary relevance, but it can be done because
performance, in a moment, can bring together like and unlike, not destroying difference but
using it to awaken attention. Theatre need not imitate any one pattern of behaviour, because
it can contain, lighten, and concentrate, and so reveal the complexities of our lives which
seldom follow any single behaviour pattern.
Time alone will tell whether the culture and politics of our theatres can change. Perhaps
the present generation of actors is so conditioned by the technological revolution and the
effective power of the larger theatres and the corporations in charge of television and film
that the future course of theatre is irrevocably fixed. Any hints of other possibilities could be
merely a few weak notions surviving from the past. On the other hand, some discordant
voices already testify to an unrest and may eventually gain sufficient impetus to break the
present hegemony. David Mamet, dramatist and director, has sounded an alarm, blaming
producers rather than directors:

This unreasoned commercial hierarchy of actor-director-producer has drained the

theater of its most powerful force: the phenomenal strength and generosity of the
actor; and, as in any situation of unhappy tyranny, the oppressed must free the
oppressor.10

The director Deborah Warner has said how necessary it is to achieve performances that are
‘genuinely alive’, but added that ‘getting the necessary altitude for each performance is like
ballooning. It simply isn’t possible to achieve this seven, eight times in a row for three hours
and forty-five minutes each time, as actors are sometimes asked to do.’11
At present, directors are leading the way. In the mid-1990s, Katie Mitchell was much in
demand for productions by major national theatres in Britain, and yet she insisted on
working only in small intimate theatres, with the audience close to the actors. Simon McBurney
of the Theatre de Complicite is both director and actor, in a company which bases its style
in skilled yet freely inventive rehearsals in which all members join. When asked to direct in
the Olivier Theatre at the National in 1997, he insisted on closing its remote balcony, raising
a stage in the middle of the building, and putting part of the audience on what is usually the
vast stage, so that everyone was as close to the actors as possible and arranged on all sides;
he then took a leading role in the production himself. These are all signs that a new style of
theatre may be emerging, one in which the actors may be more dominant and more responsible.

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In Asia, ‘alternative’ theatres – as we would say – are not rare. Performances of Kutiyattam
and Theyam in Kerala, India, and, until recent times, of No and Kabuki in Japan, have
depended not on producers, company managers or play directors, but on families of actors
who have cherished and developed their art. In Kerala, some theatres are maintained as part
of the ongoing life of a temple. The Jatra companies of Bengal and Orissa have a business
manager to make arrangements for performances, but the most senior actor is in charge of
them; he chooses the repertoire and the company, superintending every artistic activity. In
Korea, companies are often run by directors who use actors who have been at the school in
which they teach; their theatres have an intermittent existence, returning to life only when
the director finds a new project and money can be raised. In India, director-dramatists, such
K.N. Pannikar in Trivandrum, Kerala, or B.V. Karanth in Mysore, have had charge of their
own companies with sufficient support from the State for continuous existence and daily
training sessions with regular teachers: such theatres perform only on occasions when someone,
or some village or organisation, pays for a performance and invites an audience to come for
free to enjoy the show and celebrate. In Tokyo, the productions of Noda Hideki, described
in Chapter 4, are based on his own experience as an actor and his active presence on stage
with his company. All responsibility and decision-making are his and, from 1978 to 1992, his
company produced at least one new play each year, performing it in a hired theatre for only
a few consecutive months – more than sufficient to recoup all expenses. While providing no
easy models to follow elsewhere, these Asian theatres show that the organisations and
systems of control familiar to us are not the only possible ones. The further one looks
around in other countries and the closer one studies the texts of the plays, the more urgent
seems the need for radical change in how our theatres are organised for the staging of
Shakespeare.
For readers who wish to respond to the printed texts of Shakespeare’s plays, a search for
new theatre organisations has obvious importance. Productions by the most respected and
successful companies of our time do not provide appropriate sites in the mind’s eye for
imagining the plays in performance. Reading a play, we should feel engaged in an exploration,
rather than confronted with some finished statement about a particular political or moral
issue. We should be able to share and participate quite as readily as we sit back and judge.
Perhaps above all, readers should not approach any of these plays expecting that they will
find a guaranteed package and still less what they have been told to look for. They were
written to be always changing, always ready to be performed and received in an exceptional
way, and as readers we should expect to react in keeping with that mobility.

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SCENOGRAPHY
Theatres and design

In the last decades of the twentieth century, technology changed European theatre more
thoroughly than any other single influence had done before. Computer-controlled lighting,
multi-channel sound, animated three-dimensional projections, and mobile, remote-controlled,
and three-dimensional scenery can build up stunning effects to overwhelm the senses of an
audience. Fine tuning and pre-programming have given to theatre directors and designers an
absolute power: the ability to create sensational audio-visual experiences in which words
and the human form need play only small parts in the whole. The ‘setting’, which once was
hailed as a way of preventing the star actor turning every play into an opportunity for
egocentric display of temperament,1 has now become ‘scenography’, a word which indicates
control over the entire visual presentation of a performance. The scenographer, in charge of
everything the audience sees, can be the dominant partner in meetings with dramatist,
director, actor, and audience.
Alongside this revolution in theatre practice, the development of film, television,
journalism, and advertising has altered the way in which we respond to all phenomena and,
some would say, the way we think and live our lives. We are quicker to respond to visual
images than before; we have come to expect sequences of short and sharp statements; we are
accustomed to having our attention switched frequently between different aspects of reality
as they become instantaneously visible before us; we are used to looking, either closely or
casually, at the faces of the men and women who are responsible for running the State,
managing big businesses, or offering us entertainment. We can see behind designed and
projected images and have learned to be aware of the artifice that has been used to make them.
Inevitably, the presentation of Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre has changed and so has
the way we respond as we read them. On the page, they are much the same as they have
always been: editors are more knowledgeable and sometimes more conservative, but the
changes they have made to texts are small compared with what goes on in theatre productions
and what happens in our minds as we read. These new developments raise two large questions:

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do we use the new resources well when we stage the plays and has a reader’s response to the
texts been influenced for better or for worse?

* * *

Most of the new techniques of staging were developed for film and television, and then
adapted to create mega-musicals. These huge stage shows, which match lavish spectacle
with compelling music, need a great deal of money to produce and, if all goes well, bring in
much more as profit. Financially, their success has been enviable and so their influence on all
forms of theatre is now widespread. Although Shakespeare’s plays are not natural material
for this kind of production they have too many and too complicated words, too much
emphasis on conflict within their characters, too few songs and dances – the new techniques
have been applied to them and changed the effect they make on audiences. To a certain extent
the influence has been both ways. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Shakespeare’s
crowd scenes had given theatre directors experience of using wide stages and large-scale
effects, and so, in Europe rather more than in North America, young Shakespearian directors
have been recruited to stage the new spectacular musicals. Soon they were looking for
opportunities to adapt their new expertise to the staging of the old plays.
For producers, as well as directors, this has been an attractive development. It offers
hope of appealing to a wider audience than these ‘classics’ might otherwise attract.
Productions of Shakespeare are likely to remain a minority taste because they cannot be
promoted through videos or sound recordings of popular singers, but devices used in the
new spectacular musicals can widen their appeal. Big scenes involving many actors can be
made to seem even bigger and louder. Episodes of pursuit, celebration, or transformation
respond very well, and so does almost any action taking place in semi-darkness, exotic
places, or large open spaces. Besides, directors have found that the new technology can
also be used when the drama is confined to a very few actors and the setting is not an
important factor. Here subtle changes of light, sound, colour, and recorded music can
provoke some highly predictable responses and hold others back; in this way the director
can boost whatever effect he or she chooses to emphasise.
Lights, sound, and stage machinery can create marvels without actors having to do
anything. Dennis Kennedy’s description of Bob Crowley’s designs for a series of history
plays at Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1980s catches the wonder of ‘a scenography that filled
the stage with opulence’ – even though the plays deal with battle, hardship, and personal
crises: ‘Back-lit and down-lit, often by high-powered halogen lamps, the stage pictures
sometimes appeared to levitate from their solid surroundings: images literally detaching
themselves from both historical and human contexts.’2

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Sometimes the designer creates a huge mobile structure that can be lit variously as a continuous
comment on the play’s action. So, at the same theatre in 1990, David Fielding’s set for
Nicholas Hytner’s production of King Lear was, as Bendict Nightingale described it:

a vast turning crate whose bottom opens to reveal a stony pothole for Poor Tom,
and whose inner walls are a strange shade of turquoise. That may make a suitable
space for Goneril’s drawing room; less so for the heath, even with a diamond-
encrusted sky revolving behind it.3

The new scenography has greatest impact when a director uses its irresistible effects in
close association with the developing action, so that costumes and stage-business work in
harness with sets, light, and sound. Richard Eyre’s production of Richard the Third, discussed
in the previous chapter, used a wide and open stage appropriate for large-scale dance routines.
With lights and sound busy in support, lines of soldiers, assemblies of politicians and
socialites, and a procession of strangely disposed ghosts could all be manipulated as effective
backgrounds to emphasise the figure of the king in whatever way the director chose. Eight
years previously, the same director had used a similar stagecraft for a revival of the 1950 hit
musical, Guys and Dolls, to resounding and very profitable effect.
Now that lighting and sound can be controlled so fluently, directors of Shakespeare’s
plays know that they can add small details of physical business and ensure that attention is
focused upon them and will use an active group of actors on stage like a chorus in a musical.
At the Royal Shakespeare Company, Katie Mitchell’s 1994 production of Henry the Sixth,
Part III had quantities of religious ceremony added with barely a hint in the text that this
should be done: prayers were offered at a small illuminated shrine; the actor playing the
Duke of Exeter was also a priest figure who turned up on numerous occasions to make the
sign of the cross, the action being held up to allow him to do so; power figures were
approached by prostration on the floor in the form of a cross; whenever possible, the
characters would cross themselves and groups of them would start singing plainsong in
Latin. Religion was injected into political events in these many ways and then, at the end of
the play, everyone joined together in pious singing, like the chorus at the end of a musical, the
lights slowly changing to a softer glow. However cruel and hopeless political life might be, all
would be well, the production seemed to say, so long as one sings about heaven. Such
additions are by no means new stage devices, but they are being handled now with
computerised deftness and disciplined chorus-work to create impressive displays with
cumulative effect: the audience has to submit to the director’s view of the play, or else
struggle to resist and find little in compensation. By the standards of other productions
considered in this chapter, this was a low-budget, low-tech show, designed to be easily

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toured; yet even with these reduced means, new technology had sharpened and stabilised the
director’s mastery.
Almost any production today, with large budget or small, will stage a Shakespeare play
like a modern musical: strong, confident, well managed, and, where possible, irresistible. The
stage will be used dynamically and the production fitted out with novel visual images and
impressive audio support. So much is obvious, but equally significant is a less obtrusive use
of the new techniques. Speech, especially in extended soliloquy and formal address, is now
frequently accompanied by music or sound and by sympathetic changes in the lighting. A
single actor can be pin-pointed in bright light or high-lighted with varying intensity. A voice
may be amplified or its sound modified as a director judges appropriate. A pause may
precede or follow a chosen word while the actors are pre-programmed to keep still as if
frozen or, perhaps, move and react with concerted effectiveness; perhaps the lights are timed
to blackout on the last word or slowly increase throughout; or both lights and sound may
pulsate, or one may dim as the other comes to full power – whatever the director thinks is an
appropriate and reliable effect. At the end of King Lear, at Stratford in 1994, a narrow beam
of white light appeared for the first time from behind the audience to pick out the spot
downstage-right where the king was dying: he looks at it and then, leaving Cordelia where she
lies dead, moves a little towards it saying, ‘Look there! Look! There!’ It is to the light
provided by director and designer that Lear points and then collapses at some distance from
his daughter whom he appears to have forgotten. In this process, an entirely new and eye-
catching end has been provided to give hope to Lear and, presumably, to his audience.
In mega-musicals, the star actors who open the show, adding to its glitz and publicity
value, are replaced after a decent interval with other actors who have no fame and comparatively
little experience, and are very much cheaper to hire. Yet the appeal of the shows seems
undiminished; they still play for years to capacity houses. This is not true of Shakespeare
productions, but the new artifice has provided a useful cover-up for any shortcomings in
performance. If an actor cannot bring off a climax alone, good technical support can be added
so that the audience will not notice. Sound, recorded music, an alteration in the stage setting,
or some well-timed stage movement, all effected with well-tested and precisely controlled
pre-programming, can supply in their own scenographic way a substitute for good acting.

* * *

The stage effects that Shakespeare’s plays themselves require are often comparatively simple
– other than the contributions that must come from actors. A striking example is found near
the conclusion of King Lear when a large-scale conflict is about to take place and the blinded
and suffering Duke of Gloucester is required to hold the stage entirely alone. He is brought

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forward by Edgar, his faithful but disguised son, and then left there. He is like one of the blind
bears who were kept as special attractions in Shakespeare’s day, to be tied to a stake and then
whipped4 – except that this blind man remains motionless of his own free will near the tree
or shrub to which he has been led. Edgar tells him to ‘pray that the right may thrive’ (V.ii.2)
and then leaves. All that the audience is shown of the battle is ‘Alarum and retreat within’,
and that will be present only in sound, if this direction is carried out off stage as the Folio text
requires. While the action of the entire play hangs in the balance, waiting for the outcome of
battle, the audience is shown only a worn-out old man, who can see nothing and do nothing,
and does not even understand who has brought him where he is. Does Gloucester react at all
as the sound of conflict rises and eventually dies away? No further words or stage-directions
are provided, but the long-suffering body with sightless eyes must remain in view with no
supporting character or pre-arranged stage effect to help in defining his reactions.
In present-day theatres the hunched figure of Gloucester will sit in a carefully chosen
place, carefully cross-lit. Lights may dim progressively, and a vast back-cloth redden to
represent the off-stage battle; perhaps carefully drilled soldiers with implements of war will
cross and re-cross in front of Gloucester or behind him film clips of actual or simulated
warfare will be projected in huge scale at the back of the stage. And, all this time, appropriate
music and semi-realistic sound will work on the audience’s minds with changing rhythm,
pitch, and volume. Spectators will sit back in the dark and watch, their eyes and ears
controlled completely by the play’s director working with several designers and a team of
highly skilled technicians. A performance at the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s London
could hardly have been more different: no light could be changed there, and the sounds of
battle could not be orchestrated to be effective and meaningful; everything on stage was what
it happened to be as the play was revived for that one day only. Audience members, in the
same light as the stage, were free to withdraw attention, move around – many had been
standing for two hours or more – or talk amongst themselves. The actor playing Gloucester
had nothing to help him attract attention and not a word to say, as he sat alone with eyes
shut; and he could have only the vaguest idea of how long it would be before Edgar returned.
He would gain or lose attention simply because he was there, a victim of violence and of his
own son’s inability to tell him of his presence and his love. The audience would have looked
at him or not as they chose, and would have understood for themselves, or not. Watching the
performance there, if most of the audience did not seem to care or, possibly, did not even
notice, one might feel very alone; Gloucester’s suffering would seem to exist unregarded by
his fellow human beings as well as by whatever powers could be imagined looking down
upon the scene. On the other hand, among a large audience that was moved by the outrage but
denied any further explication of it, a desire to lessen the suffering may well have been the

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dominant fact of the whole experience. Shakespeare has presented the consequences of
violence so that the audience has to shoulder responsibility for its own reactions.
In some ways the handling of this incident implies a greater reliance on both actor and
audience than would have been expected by audiences at early performances. The blind bear
who was exhibited for public entertainment in Paris Garden, not far from the Globe Theatre,
would not have been paraded on his own, but surrounded

by five or six men standing circularly with whips, which they exercise upon him
without any mercy, as he cannot escape because of his chain; he defends himself
with all his force and skill, throwing down all that come within his reach and are
not active enough to get out of it, and tearing the whips out of their hands, and
breaking them.5

No one approaches to whip Gloucester and this blind victim provides no clumsy entertainment.
So what might this actor do and what would this audience think?
In our own days we might expect to see a mutilated old man as he would be shown on
television or film, where he would briefly fill the screen with arresting and horrific images,
and then disappear before attention could flag, leaving no trace behind. That effect would
have been created, not as part of an actor’s continuous performance in the play, but as an
image cunningly arranged by many people, just for that moment. Between them, the make-
up artist, costume designer and costume fitter, the technicians in charge of setting, lights, and
sound, and, most significantly, the cameramen, director, and editor would control what the
audience sees and so make whatever they will out of the incident. Gloucester sitting alone on
the battlefield might give rise to a few seconds or few minutes of overwhelming horror or
pathos, but this could never be one part of a sustained performance by an actor who in some
very real ways has been living through the whole course of the role. In Shakespeare’s theatre,
long before a technological revolution, an actor represented the lived experience of violence,
rather than taking some part, with other people’s help or hindrance, in a moment or two of
sensational effect.
Shakespeare’s use of stage spectacle is not always so spare in style. The stage must often
be full and a scene build in effect over ten minutes or more. The resources of an entire acting
company are sometimes mobilised and special properties, costumes, and music required.
But even when spectacle is large scale and boldly used, the centre of attention returns
repeatedly to the principal actors and the precise nature of their performances. The end of
King Lear is an example of this. The stage is full with soldiers and their commanders, all
weary after battle and after political and personal crises that have made huge emotional
demands on loyalties and endurance. Drums and trumpets are available as everyone waits for

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the release of their aged and half-crazed king. Yet the culminating atrocity of this tragedy,
Cordelia’s assassination and Lear’s immediate revenge upon her killer, takes place off stage
and only then does the protagonist take his place for the final scene. The old man’s continued
physical energy is perhaps the first effect to register on the audience as Lear enters carrying
his daughter’s corpse, crying out in suffering, longing, and anger, and searching for a sign that
Cordelia lives.
Lear asserts himself by means beyond any usual use of words, the power of his anger
barely controlled in the compact grip of verse:

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack.
(V.iii.257–9)

If the audience, like Lear, notices the silence of those who stand watching, it will turn back
to the speaker more aware of the isolation brought about by his suffering, and of the quick
and varied ways with which he now seeks some reassurance. The central role at this time
demands the actor’s total absorption and commands the audience’s closest scrutiny. Saying
‘Never’ repeatedly involves a physical struggle which leaves him in need of a deeper breath
and help with undoing a button. So, for this one moment, narrative development must wait
upon a very small and ordinary physical action as Lear waits for an unnamed person to do
what he has asked.6 When that is completed, he thanks the servant and, with short-phrased,
repetitive questions and injunctions, emphasises his need to see, or think he sees, that
Cordelia lives, and his need for others to see it too.
Shakespeare used Lear’s last speeches to emphasise a series of physical actions and his
concern for Cordelia’s body. An audience which does not know the play may well believe
that she is alive. Those of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who were familiar with the story in
any of the published accounts would know that she did indeed live and her father continued
to reign: so it will watch for an eventual revival that never comes. Shakespeare gives no
certain information about what Lear thinks because what he says one moment is contradicted
the next. When he falls silent and the words of those on stage show only that he may, for
some unstated reason, continue to struggle physically until Edgar says ‘He is gone indeed’,
four lines later.
What King Lear thinks as he dies is not defined by words or a spectacular action on stage.
The words which others speak ensure that the audience watches intently as he struggles to
assert his will in a body that can bear no more and as the actor must draw on his own hidden

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resources to sustain the role to its end. Here in painful effort, rather than in sustained speech
or eloquent words, lies the performative centre of the tragic hero’s last moments.
No amount of quotation from the text is sufficient to explain the experience of violence
and suffering which this tragedy provides. Nothing short of the whole progress of its action
can give some sense of what is at stake at the end. The philosophical, political, and
psychological issues declared in the play’s dialogue are comparatively easy to grasp, and
may be considered and debated at length, but to understand how Shakespeare held the mirror
up to the form and pressure of his times, and so to whatever is similar in ours, attention must
be paid to what is done as well as what is spoken. This requires an experience of the play as
if in sustained performance, in large-scale stage effects and in very small. It also means that
a critic’s imagination must draw on first-hand experience of suffering and endurance in order
to ‘piece out’ the ‘imperfections’ of the action (see Henry V, Prologue, 23) and the implications
of the words.

* * *

It is hardly surprising that among all the elaborate stagecraft which is now employed in
bringing Shakespeare’s plays to the stage, a contrary procedure is sometimes attempted.
Small playing-spaces, performances more or less free from directorial control, public rehearsals
or workshops, minimal stage sets, simple lighting with no sound support have all been tried,
and in various ways and special circumstances. Sometimes a lack of money is the reason for
the return to non-technical theatre, but not always. Peter Brook’s 1974 production of Timon
of Athens at Les Bouffes du Nord Theatre in Paris was the result of a deliberate choice and an
attempt to slough off the clichéd professionalism of other stagings. The director had reflected
on the original conditions of the play’s performance: ‘the Elizabethan theatre was always
played in the open air, in a sort of forum, a place where all the currents met’.
Consequently, as Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves report in a detailed record of the
occasion:

The performance was essentially the telling of a story by a group of actors to an

assembled ring of spectators. Initially, the actors consciously adopted a narrator’s
stance, maintaining a certain distance between themselves and their roles. The
only scenic props were sack-like cushions arranged in a circle, so it looked like a
carpet show.7 When the play began the actors not performing sat on the cushions
to form an inner circle of focus; they listened and watched, so there was very little
separation between actor and spectator. . . .

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With all the mystique stripped away, and such detached presentation of feeling,
[and with] precise, economic signalling of behaviour, there was little of what
traditionally might be expected: the epic grandeur of Timon’s universal despair. . .
.The images were of a society in which human behaviour turned wholly on the
possession or lack of money and gold.8

Yet even here, the instincts of a showman in the late twentieth century led Peter Brook to use
powerful lights and the large spaces and great height of the building behind the main acting
area to create impressive spectacles by more routine and technically accomplished means,
outdistancing what the actors alone could bring to the play.
In his own fashion, Shakespeare was also a showman and used large effects. The essential
difference between what his texts require and what directors bring to modern productions is
that in his mind every stage effect was dependent on the actors’ skill and their imaginative
involvement with the play as it evolved, moment by moment, in performance. The end of
Richard the Third, for example, must have stretched the resources of the Chamberlain’s
Men, backstage and on stage: the Duke of Buckingham is taken off to execution after the
action is held up for a speech in which he re-evaluates his entire life; two armies encamp; a
number of ghosts appear and Richard wakes from this threatening dream to find himself
alone; rival armies are addressed in turn by their commanders; battle is joined and the king is
seen, briefly, ready to risk everything in order to engage in single combat against Richmond;
then the two commanders do fight hand-to-hand, the text giving them no words to speak;
then Richard is slain and, finally, the victors fill the stage and Richmond is crowned king and
makes a politically astute speech. The whole company has been mobilised and in
comparatively little time the audience has had a great deal to look at, but each phase of this
conclusion is dominated by the leading actors presenting themselves in sustained speech or
fighting for their lives. More than this, Richard reveals himself after his dream as never before
in the play, in broken speech and defiant cries; perhaps there is no trace of his characteristic
humour now or of his conscious play-acting – but that will depend on the actor and his
performance. Played in many different ways, Richard’s ‘A horse! a horse! my kingdom for
a horse!’ (V.iv.7 and 13) becomes a summation of each actor’s interpretation of the role and,
as the play’s stage-history shows, a watchword for an entire production.
Throughout much of the last act of Othello, in contrast with those of King Lear and
Richard the Third, the focus is repeatedly on the hero. He ends with a long speech in which
he self-consciously sums up his life and then, suddenly at its end, discloses that it was a
prelude to taking his own life. He then moves towards his dead wife and dies as he attempts
to kiss her. While the central character has held focus, he addressed all the persons on stage
and so, immediately after his death, the words of Lodovico can pull dramatic focus back to

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the silent figure of Iago whose reaction remains totally wordless. Stage-history shows how
powerful and haunting the last look of Iago can be on the crowded stage, before he turns
away from the ‘tragic loading’ of the bed which is his work (V.ii.366–7).
Shakespeare’s habitual alternation between large-scale effect and a far more intense focus
on the acting of particular roles is nowhere more evident than in the comedies. After the
spectacular entry of Hymen at the close of As You Like It, for example, the god brings
attention to bear on each of the pairs of lovers in turn, who will in turn react wordlessly to
his words. After a song, in which all may join as at the end of a modern musical, Hymen
leaves the stage and a moment or two later an entirely new person enters, Jaques de Boys,
the second son of ‘old Sir Rowland’ of whom neither of his two brothers has ever spoken.
After he has held focus to tell what has happened off stage, all seems set to come to an agreed
and general conclusion, but now Jacques steps out of the assembly and soon, as Hymen has
done before, he directs the focus to each pair of lovers in turn. Then he leaves, a lonely man
drawing brief attention, and only then is the whole stage given over to dances in which all the
other persons in the comedy will be seen as part of a general celebration.
Each play yields its own patterns of wide display and close focus. These alternations are
part of its identity and an important source of that sense of active and ongoing engagement
which is one of the hallmarks of all Shakespeare’s writing for the stage. Tragedies, histories,
and comedies all positively invite directors to use their new technical resources to set out the
action with a series of impressive and often celebratory stage pictures, large in scale and
expansive in reference to the world outside the theatre. Many signs in the texts suggest that
the dramatist would find the new facilities for presenting lavish stage spectacles greatly to
his taste, but not as they are customarily used today so that they dominate every other
impression. He handled big scenes so that simple words, silence, or small-scale actions could
be all-important. These crucial elements in the spectacular whole tell us that actors are
intended to remain in charge and that this responsibility should not be transferred to anyone
off stage giving moment-by-moment cues for technological marvels.

* * *

A task for the future is to find how to use the new techniques so that they are responsive to
the actors and not the other way around, supportive of whatever they bring to the moment-
by-moment realisation of their roles. This recommendation has many ramifications. The
shape of many theatres, in which members of an audience sit facing the stage on only one side
with many of them – perhaps the greater proportion – at considerable distance from it, is fine
for watching spectacle, but not for responding to the actors’ performances. A theatre for
Shakespeare’s plays needs to be actor-centred rather than a scenic showcase and should, if

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possible, be a place in which the audience can feel close to the play and aware of its own part
to play in the occasion.
In staging Shakespeare’s plays today, full use must be made of modern technology
because that is the only way they can reflect the form and pressures of our lives, as they did
for early audiences. Yet the experience given by the plays must continue to emanate from the
actors’ performances and respond to their leads. Readers of the plays may seem to have an
easier task in adjusting their minds to this mode of performance, but that is hardly the case.
Without experience of performances that are responsive to the texts in ways appropriate to
them, a reader has little with which to build appropriate mental images of their active stage-
life: we cannot respond to what we have not, in some manner, experienced. An inextricable
part of this problem is the nature of the performances actors give in their roles, the subject
of the following chapter.

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 12

ACTORS
Training and performance

‘One cannot too often insist that the art of acting is the theatre’s very flesh and blood’ – the
words are Harley Granville Barker’s from his Exemplary Theatre, published in 1922. He
often insisted on this, and more in sorrow than in pleasure because he found so much wrong
with the actors of his day: ‘Taken by and large, the present lot of English-speaking actors do
not know their business.’1 As we have seen, he argued that financially successful long runs
with their limited rehearsals and repetitive performances were producing the wrong kind of
actors and that a National Theatre with a repertoire of plays would do much to solve the
problems. More than seventy years later, however, and also writing in England, Clive Barker
voiced a similar dismay: ‘I am appalled by the low standards of skill and professionalism in
the two national theatres and the regional reps.’ Where high skill was to be found, Barker
reported that he had found ‘no personality’: ‘the stage is peopled by actors who seemingly
carry out the director’s instructions to the letter, and whose faces you cannot remember
fifteen minutes after the performance ends’. New experimental groups offered more to
enjoy, but some of these ‘appear to feel that no technique is necessary’.2
Against these two judgements can be cited many words of journalistic praise for actors
and the theatres which are packed with audiences for some, at least, of their productions. If
all actors were incompetent, it is unlikely that there would be any theatres for them to act in.
Besides, many books about Shakepeare’s plays in performance testify to enlightenment and
pleasure received from seeing and studying the work of actors in all the styles that have been
followed over the centuries since the plays were written.
A recognition that acting is the theatre’s flesh and blood can do much to explain the
excitement that sometimes grips an entire audience and the persistence of some of their fans
and critics, but the consequences of believing this are not at all simple. ‘What happens when
a text is acted?’ is not an easy question to answer. Other questions arise immediately. How
do actors perform in our theatres today in comparison to those of the time when Shakespeare’s
plays were written? How should they act now to serve these texts well, and how might they
act? Do we know how to define the infinite variety of actors or the subtleties of their

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techniques? Do all Shakespeare’s plays call for the same kind of acting? Does not one play
call for several different kinds of acting? Who can best act Shakespeare? Where? When?
What happens when an actor rehearses a part, learns the words, ‘finds the character’, and
performs the play with other actors and in front of an audience? How can we judge the ‘very
flesh and blood’ with which a play’s text is realised in living performance?

* * *

Current practices have already been questioned with reference to a range of acting styles in
theatres not set up to stage Shakespeare’s plays. Returning now to more familiar ground,
basic issues might be raised by further consideration of surviving evidence about Elizabethan
actors. But unequivocal facts are few and, in any case, we cannot create present-day actors
in an old mould, as we make replicas of ancient musical instruments and play on them.
Besides we must suppose that Shakespeare made demands upon his actors which none of
them could fulfil: his imagination seems to have been boundless and any actor will be a slave
to his or her own physical and mental limits. More progress may be made by examining
references to acting and behaviour on stage in the plays themselves and then enquiring about
present training and practice. Even though speculation will be involved and not hard facts, at
least Shakespere’s own descriptions will be part of the evidence.
A place to start is the text of Hamlet, a play in which the central character has definite
opinions about the actors’ art and a company of actors arrives on stage to perform a play
within the play. We notice at once that its text has been written with exceptional energy, with
new words and word usages, teeming and extended images, unusual and sometimes broken
syntax, and much more. Understanding it is not always easy; speaking it demands mental
quickness and subtlety from almost all the cast. When watching this tragedy and responding
to its actions and dialogue, an audience is drawn to consider the inner consciousness of its
leading characters, so that it becomes sensitive to their most private thoughts and feelings,
and increasingly aware of what drives them. All this means that actors must give life to this
text as if what their characters think matters, not only what they say and do.
Many speeches show that persons in this play are, at certain times, unable to understand
their innermost thoughts, or unwilling to express them. Whether good or bad, instinctive
reactions seem to have a force that is not always under control: ‘I do not know, my lord, what
I should think’ (I.iii.104); ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below’ (III.iii.97); ‘rank
corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen’ (III.iv.148–9). From his first entry, Hamlet
has ‘that within which passes show’ (I.ii.85), feelings that can be expressed in neither words
nor behaviour. Not long before his death, he confesses ‘how ill all’s here about my heart’ yet
he gives no verbal clue to what he feels, other than that it is ‘such a kind of gain-giving as

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would perhaps trouble a woman’ (V.ii.203–8). The ‘thinking’ of these stage characters includes
unsatisfied desires, nameless fears, shifting consciousness, and changing purposes. Thoughts
enter these minds half-formed and sometimes fly ‘beyond the reaches of [their] souls’
(I.iv.56). The actors should perform so that an audience is aware of their characters’
uncertainties and is sometimes led to consider ‘curiously’ what ‘any show’ could possibly
mean (V.i.200 and III.ii.136–42).
The persons in this play interact constantly, thinking their own thoughts in a way that
makes particular and different demands on the several actors involved together in a scene.
They may listen, and yet not hear; they may hear, and yet move without pause to put their
own gloss on what is said, botching up the speaker’s words to ‘fit to their own thoughts’
(IV.v.10). Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that for him Denmark is a prison but
they do not hear what he says in the sense in which he speaks:

HAMLET: . . .What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of

Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord!
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one. . .
(II.ii.239ff.)

They continue the topic without making contact, despite Hamlet’s warning that ‘there is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (ll. 249–50).
As the play proceeds, these people learn to unsay what they have said earlier, as they
are brought to a truer sense of their own selves or their own changeable purposes. So
Claudius tells Laertes, when there is little reason to do so, that ‘time qualifies the spark
and fire’ of love:

And nothing is at a like goodness still;

For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too much. That we would do,
We should do when we would; for this ‘would’ changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;. . .
(IV.vii.110ff.)

For Hamlet, such changes spur both speech and action, so that he responds afresh at each
moment, right up to his death:

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You that look pale and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time, as this fell sergeant Death
Is strict in his arrest, 0, I could tell you –
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead:
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
(V.ii.326–32)

An actor’s task is to speak each word with the thought of the moment, whether that
thought is soundly based or not, whether its expression is true or false, predetermined or
unexpectedly improvised.
If actors do not show how unspoken thoughts and feelings drive certain speeches, the
plotting of the play – its exposition, narrative, and action – loses much of its impetus and
drawing power. Moreover, speech will become confusing and clumsily overwrought because
much of Shakespeare’s invention will go unused – wordplay, imagery, syntax, the shape of
each thought and the fineness of its expression, and the varying support of verse and rhythm
– and much of the vitality of the dialogue will be lost.
By bringing flesh and blood to the speaking of Shakespeare’s texts, actors bring to the
stage persons whose minds are alert, changeable, accomplished, and, on certain occasions, in
contact with another person’s thoughts. They will also be open to the audience’s understanding
as they appear to live in each unprepared-for moment. Not all the persons in the play could
be called intelligent in real life, but even those who are dull, simple, or obtuse have been given
speeches written with an acute intelligence so that what is stupid or unfeeling is expressed
with great economy and often appears spontaneously self-revealing beyond the intention of
the speaker. The talk of soldiers at the beginning of the play exemplifies this.
One of the first specialist demands that all texts of Shakespeare make upon actors is
intelligence, beyond customary measure. They must be quick-witted and strongly so, able to
use and reveal crucial distinctions in verbal encounter and suggest several layers of meaning.
Forcefulness in argument is not enough, or vocal dexterity; these will help, but the essential
requirement is a keen and well-exercised mind, a consciousness that is constantly alert.
Meaning must be changeable, imminent rather than definitive, and it follows that, however
skilled and well prepared an individual performance, it must often seem improvised and
must, imaginatively, remain so.

* * *

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At times Hamlet speaks directly about acting and, in soliloquy, is objectively descriptive:
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d;
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit?
(II.ii.544–50)

Of course, Hamlet is not a disinterested or cool observer, and he starts by thinking about his
own inability to act. Moreover, the ‘Tragedians of the City’, that Hamlet is said to have
taken such delight in, are not Shakespearian actors. But granting all this, here is a detailed
account of a performance, given with such energy and discrimination that it develops beyond
the comparison which was the cue for it. This soliloquy establishes that Shakespeare thought
that actors could seem capable of vivid and complete physical performance.
The text of Hamlet calls for many eye-catching physical actions. Hamlet, himself, must
appear a ‘fool of nature’ who is shaking ‘horridly’ (I.iv.54–5). The word horrid was more
potent then than now, meaning revolting to see or hear, frightening, terrifying: in this play,
Pyrrhus is said to be ‘horridly trick’d / With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons’
(II.ii.451–2); Macbeth’s ‘whose horrid image doth unfix my hair’ (I.iii.135) uses the word so
that its original connection with hair standing on end seems to be explicitly present. Elsewhere,
Hamlet must show a ‘turbulent and dangerous lunacy’ (III.i.4) and, a little later, must be
‘blasted with ecstasy’ (III.i.160). Such cues are not easy for an actor to take seriously
without involving some extraordinary physical changes. Later, Hamlet must convince an
audience that he could
. . .drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
(IIl.ii.380–2)

Suiting action to these words, and using all the ‘modesty of nature’ (III.ii.20), an actor will
appear as a man ready to drink blood as it flows out of new wounds and able to create as great
a disturbance as an earthquake.3
The Tragedy of Hamlet is not unusual in these demands, nor are all such descriptions
suspect as the product of a fevered imagination. Macbeth becomes a ‘hell-hound’ (V. viii.3)
and earlier must show ‘flaws and starts’ and ‘make. . .faces’; he must ‘tremble’ as if he were

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‘the baby of a girl’ (III.iv.63, 67, 100–6). Othello becomes speechless and has to lie down and
‘roar’ (V.ii.201). Lear suffers so that thoughts and feelings tear at his mind and from his
senses take ‘all feeling else, / Save what beats there’ (III.iv.12–14). His innermost being must
struggle against tears:

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.
(II.iv.283–5)

At his life’s end, suffering is almost silently borne as he bends over the dead Cordelia to listen
and look for – what is there no more – the slightest breathing through her lips; and, at this
time, his whole function must suit these inward conceits as if his worn, old body were being
stretched out on a torturer’s ‘rack’ (V.iii.314–15).
At other times, when persons in these plays become speechless, physical action takes
over from words: Macbeth goes to his death in a wordless fight; Othello as he kisses
Desdemona, or tries to do so. When Lear and Cordelia come together in the Fourth Act, they
express their feelings by kneeling or trying to do so and then touching each other as, with a
kiss, she attempts to ‘Repair those violent harms.’ Presumably, Lear must touch Cordelia’s
tears before pronouncing that they are ‘wet’ (IV.vii.26–8, 71). None of this implies that
physical performance operates only when it takes over as an alternative to speech. Only if
the two have been inseparable, in tenderness or violence, in danger or calm, will a silent
physical response be able to continue when words have stopped and not disturb the drama
and its representation of reality.
Cues to physical performance are innumerable and incessant in the texts of the plays,
showing that Shakespeare wrote with a continuous awareness of this part of an actor’s task.
Some actions are directly described in the dialogue. Early in Twelfth Night – to take examples
now from the comedies – Olivia, Viola says, could only ‘speak in starts distractedly’, staring
as if ‘her eyes had lost her tongue’; Viola speaks of herself as a ‘poor monster’ desperate for
love and of Olivia as occupied in ‘thriftless sighs’ (II.ii.17–37). In Much Ado, Claudio must
leave the stage alone like a ‘hurt fowl’ that tries to ‘creep into sedges’ and Beatrice must run
on ‘like a lapwing. . .Close by the ground’; Leonato goes off stage amongst others of his
family with little energy: ‘Being that I flow in grief / The smallest twine may lead me’
(II.i.180–1, III.i.24–5, and IV.i.249–50).
Many specific physical actions are detailed in stage directions or implied in entries and
exits. The most numerous cues for action lie in the continuous and varied energy of
Shakespeare’s dialogue – cues which are largely hidden until an actor begins to make

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Shakespeare’s words his or her own in the wide space of a theatre or rehearsal room. The
remarkable variety of sensation implied by the words is but one part of the text’s physical
demands, calling for response from an actor’s entire nervous system. Still more inescapable
are the directions that come from the phrasing, syntax, and metre of the dialogue which
sometimes require breath to be sustained over considerable periods of time without break or
to be suddenly stopped; more generally, it must be continually varied and controlled. Speech
in these plays is not only a collection of words that can be taken apart and analysed, but also
a complex physical activity originating at the physiological centre of performance.
To appreciate these ‘hidden’ demands of a Shakespeare text if one has never been an
actor, one should probably attend rehearsals and watch while words become part of the
complete action of a human being in a role. If that does not confirm the importance of the
physical component of speech, verbal references to breath and modes of thought and feeling,
together with the continual change of intention, syntax, and rhythm, all argue that, in these
plays, speech must go beyond ordinary measures of physical activity to achieve satisfactory
performance. To some extent speech was given highly dynamic form in response to the
needs of the open platform on which the plays were usually performed in Shakespeare’s
day, but his texts demand of actors a more varied and spirited enactment than those of most
of his contemporaries – the extended periods of Marlowe, for example, or the well-judged
detail of Jonson’s verse dialogue.

* * *

Earlier chapters have argued that an actor’s relationship to an audience is a vital element of
performance on the open stage used in Shakespeare’s days. His texts seldom refer to this
specifically, but its importance can be inferred from the number of speeches that either must
or can be spoken directly to the audience. The effect can be immense, as members of an
audience feel included in the drama and their varied imaginations are set to work so that they
may even take over and change what is presented to them.
One piece of evidence for this kind of response happens to have survived in the diary of
Simon Forman who visited the Globe Theatre in London on 20 April 1611: ‘There was to be
observed, first, how Macbeth and Banquo, two noblemen of Scotland, riding through a
wood, there stood before them three women, fairies or nymphs, and saluted Macbeth.’4
Of course, no ‘wood’ had been placed on the stage through which the actors could ride
and in this scene no one makes even a passing verbal reference to trees; nor were any
horses on stage or referred to in the text. But neither impression is foreign to the play in
performance: in the last Act, there is a wood of sorts on stage when Birnam Wood is
created by soldiers holding ‘leafy screens’ or ‘boughs’ above their heads (V.vi.1, and stage

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direction); and, in Act IV, an apparition of Macbeth’s adversary has ‘a tree in his hand’
(IV.i.86, stage direction). Moreover, throughout the play, men are said to ride and spur
their horses and the ‘galloping of horse’ is heard from off stage as Macbeth commits
himself totally to survival, knowing that

The flighty purpose never is o’ertook

Unless the deed go with it.
(IV.i.140, 145–6)

For this member of the audience, when the actors had performed the play and he had gone
away and thought about the experience, its action seemed to start with two noblemen riding
through a wood.
This diary entry is not hard evidence about how Elizabethan actors acted a text, but it
does show that the effect of a performance could be to engage a spectator’s own imagination
so that he seemed to see more than the actors had performed – as it might be ‘Helen’s beauty
in a brow of Egypt’ (Dream, V.i.11). Shakespeare was not only imaginative in himself, but
also the cause that imagination was awakened in others. In the last resort, actors are but
‘ciphers to this great accompt’ (Henry the Fifth, Prologue, 17) or, rather, they will be when
they act in a way that includes members of the audience in the action by addressing them
directly and responding to their responses.

* * *

What kind of actor can set about these various tasks today and serve Shakespeare well?
Earlier chapters have argued that certain natural endowments are required and that some
theatrical organisations and production methods are more suitable than others. But on turning
back from Asian theatres, another way of tackling this question is to examine some instructions
that are given to actors today and consider how well these serve the dialogue of the plays.
What is most commonly required by teachers of acting is, surely, most necessary: that
physical and vocal training must ensure that actors are beyond common measure fit and agile,
able to sustain long and demanding roles, both emotionally and physically, and able to speak
the words of the text with sufficient clarity and projection to be heard, and with sufficient
variety not to tire the hearers but, rather, to keep them alert and receptive. As well as
physical and vocal fitness, a keen intelligence is necessary for acting in Shakespeare’s plays,
whatever the intelligence of the person portrayed. Quickness on cues, an understanding of
what is being said, especially when that may not be immediately obvious, and precise

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pointing of sentences are all necessary if the long texts are not to seem overlong and obscure.
The Chorus of Henry the Fifth speaks of the ‘quick forge and working-house of thought’ (V.
Chorus, 23) and that image catches the unusual demands made by the words alone: a
consciousness that is robust, burning-hot, productive, and, also, swift. To some degree, all
actors and their instructors are aware of this, but in other matters, especially about how to
shape a performances and use the intelligence, they differ widely.
A major influence on acting in European and North American theatres today, long since
his death, is Constantin Stanislavski. The terminology which he developed at the Moscow
Art Theatre is still used by actors, teachers, directors, and critics wherever his books have
been available. His idea of a ‘subtext’ – ‘that [which] makes us say the words we do in a
play’5 – has helped actors to separate different levels of intention and to distinguish inner
thought and feeling from outward statement, both verbal and physical. This concept is
immediately relevant to the presentation of inner consciousness that is such a major feature
of Shakespeare’s writing for the stage. In a more general way, Stanislavski’s idealistic vision
of acting as an art has given new currency to the idea that the actor provides ‘the very flesh
and blood of the theatre’. In Part One of Creating a Role, written a year or two before
Granville Barker’s Exemplary Theatre, Stanislavski had asked:

Need one point out that while the actor is on the stage all these desires, aspirations,
and actions must belong to him as the creative artist, and not to the inert paper
words printed in the text of his part. . .? Can one live. . .on the stage with the
feelings of others unless one has been absorbed by them body and spirit as an actor
and a human being?6

Above all, Stanislavski – actor, director, and teacher – has encouraged generations of actors
to believe that a play must live in and through them. They must attempt originality and inner
truth in performance and, in doing so, see themselves alongside the greatest artists in all other
art forms; in the theatre, they should yield in importance to neither playwright nor director.
Stanislavski was practical as well as inspirational, and his detailed instructions have
sometimes been taken so rigorously that they developed into ‘The Method’ for training and
performance. Actors of Shakespeare have found some procedures especially helpful: ‘creating
inner circumstances’, distinguishing ‘inner impulses and inner action’, developing from
‘physical actions to living image’, and so on. But other instructions have proved less helpful
and, potentially, dangerous. The quick thought and openness of encounter which are needed
to suggest the inner consciousness of one of Shakespeare’s leading roles will not be encouraged
if the actor has chosen a single ‘goal’ for the character and holds on to it, each time he or she
steps on to the stage. Yet clearly defined and boldly pursued ‘goals’ were recommended by

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Stanislavski as the means to become strong and effective. Such goals, he wrote, should
change from scene to scene, but that variety must be limited because each actor should also
discover an ‘inner pattern’ for his or her character. The task is to ‘find the key to the riddle
of the inner life of a character which lies hidden under the text of the play’.7 The actor must
decide upon a single ‘superobjective’ which is:

the inner essence, the all-embracing goal, the objective of all objectives, the
concentration of the entire score of the role, of all its major and minor units. The
superobjective contains the meaning, the inner sense, of all the subordinate
objectives of the play.8

Like reductive kinds of literary criticism which give clear definitions to ‘the meaning’ of a
text, these instructions are bound to make a performance more intelligible, but this is at the
cost of emotional and intellectual adventure. They do not encourage an actor to expose
conflicts of consciousness within a character or to give a sense of moment-by-moment
change in action and interaction. Instead they demand premeditated forcefulness and inner
assurance. When emphasising a single superobjective, an actor may lose some of the obvious
meanings of the words he or she has to speak, and much of their suggestiveness. Most
seriously, following these instructions can make all intentions so settled, and so geared to an
actor’s own mind, that an audience has little freedom in imaginative response.
No one who has read the whole of Stanislavski’s writings and followed his career
throughout his long life could believe that he wished to encourage isolated and self-centred
study or hard-line interpretations based on a single, ‘all-embracing’ subtextual choice. Yet,
nevertheless, these have become the marks of the ‘Method Actor’ and inhibit many others,
influenced less strongly, from playing Shakespeare in open encounter and with ever-varying
consciousness. For example, Robert Cohen’s Acting in Shakespeare (1991) tells student-
actors that the ‘choices’ they make individually will define the characters they present (p.
13): ‘you need to pursue a goal (a victory, an objective) for your character’ (p. xiii). To follow
these precepts is to depend on individual decisions and clear, inflexible intentions. There
must be a ‘reason’ for each speech and action so that the young actor will ‘understand’ what
he or she is about at all times. For King Lear’s ‘Peace, Kent! / Come not between the dragon
and his wrath’ (I.i.121–2), the teacher does his best to narrow the options: ‘Lear seeks,
through these words, to become depersonalized, mythic, and invulnerable in the court’s
eyes, using the power of metaphor to attempt a transformation. . . .So, once again, try to
terrify Kent and impress the court.’ Actors are told to be guided by a specific reason, choice,
goal, intention, ‘desire for victory’, or other clear and narrow motivation, so that they are
able to ‘seduce’ and ‘impress’. So, in a Stanislavski tradition, actors are taught to be definite

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and effective with the result that they can be inhibited from creating the open and spontaneous
inner-life that Shakespeare’s texts suggest.
Bertolt Brecht – playwright, play director, theatre director, and poet – is the other
widely acknowledged master in the theatre of our time. His instructions are very different,
emphasising service to the play and to an audience, rather than the development of individual
distinction and effectiveness. He offered no ‘method’ for an actor but, rather, strategies for
playwriting and play direction. To turn to his writings, from those of Stanislavski, is to
escape from individual intensity and find an invitation to be reasonable and cool, and a
reminder to be conscious of the entire play.
In some passages, Brecht seems to take up a position directly opposed to
Stanislavski:

The speeches’ content was made up of contradictions, and the actor had not to
make the spectator identify himself with individual sentences. . . . Taken as a
whole it had to be the most objective possible exposition of a contradictory
internal process.9

In ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, written in 1948, Brecht declared that ‘Observation is
a major part of acting.’10 The actor must first choose a viewpoint carefully and responsibly,
and then ensure that everything he or she does on stage is deliberately controlled by this
choice. The alternative for an actor would be to ‘become a parrot’, merely mouthing the
words of others.
A Brechtian performance does not seek to implicate the spectator in a stage situation but,
rather, to turn the spectator into an observer who is made to face something and invited to
form an opinion about it. Brecht emphasised the physical and corporal elements of
performance, but not in order to focus attention on an actor or communicate an individual
sensibility. Acting is not an isolated creative activity, but a learning process which must be
‘co-ordinated so that the actor learns as the other actors are learning’.11 Brecht advised
finding a single ‘gestus’ – an action and gesture – which would demonstrate the nature of a
character’s involvement in a complex situation or puzzling story, and make that crystal clear.
Can Brechtian acting serve Shakespeare’s plays? His instructions are probably most
useful when they assert that actors must maintain the contradictions in their roles, but their
main effect has been to help actors become part of a huge combined operation, a production
that seeks to present a ‘view of the play’. Actors are not considered the very flesh and blood
of theatre. According to the ‘Short Organum’:

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The exposition of the story and its communication by suitable means of alienation
constitute the main business of the theatre. Not everything depends on the actor,
even though nothing may be done without taking him into account. The ‘story’ is
set out, brought forward and shown by the theatre as a whole, by actors, stage
designers, mask-makers, costumiers, composers and choreographers.12

While the director becomes the resourceful ‘chronicler’ of the time, the players do not ‘tell
all’ (Hamlet, III.ii.138); they work for the director in order to set out or display the story of
a play and the meaning that has been chosen for it.
In other ways both Stanislavski and Brecht are less appropriate for what we know about
Shakespeare’s plays and the theatre for which they were written. They had little to say
about acting for and with an audience. Neither of them stressed the openness to an audience
and willingness to improvise that these texts seem to require. Both took it for granted that
actors should be rehearsed again and again, so that performances could be improved and
become assured and secure before they meet with an audience – a practice which would have
been impossible with the schedules of the theatres for which Shakespeare wrote. Because
they foresaw well-finished productions, they did not teach that technical mastery and
imaginative improvisation can give audiences opportunity to share in the moment of an
actor’s creation, to discover the play afresh with the actors at each performance. These are
achievements which in Asia can be seen to be attainable and which the plays seem admirably
fitted to support.

* * *

After Stanislavski and Brecht, who worked and wrote near the beginning and middle of the
twentieth century, many other voices have been heard formulating new ways of training and
performance. More emphasis is now placed on the actors’ ‘physical reponse’ and on
performances that are instinctive, complete, and true to the individuality of each actor.
Training and rehearsal often take place to music so that actors have a constant spur to
movement and variation, and are encouraged to work together as an ‘ensemble’. Masks are
frequently used to free them from habitual characteristics and limitations, and to draw out
fresh responses. Interaction between actors is encouraged, as if they were improvising a
dance together, allowing their impulses and sense of rhythm and shape to control what
emerges from their common exploration of a theme or a piece of music. Such ensemble
exercises are a powerful counteraction to the deliberately organised objectivity recommended
by Brecht and the individual psychological search prescribed by followers of
Stanislasvski.Working in smallish groups, these actors find confidence, both individual and

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corporate. When skilfully guided, their exploratory work leads to fluent performances that
are especially impressive in variations of repetitive actions and speech, or when drawn
towards moments of unified or unexpectedly isolated effects.
These new ensemble actors are usually released from careful study of demanding texts
such as Shakespeare’s. Typically, they ‘devise’ their own plays by ‘exploring’ a theme or
situation together; or they take passages from a known play or novel, or from miscellaneous
documentary material, and use them as a basis from which to develop a show to suit their
own talents and outlooks, and the interests of their director. When they do ‘work with’ a text
that has been written before rehearsals begin, the task will be to discover the actors’ instinctive
and physical responses to those words and then chose elements of whatever they find from
which to develop a performance; only then will the speaking of words become part of their
work and take their place in rehearsals.
Anne Bogart has directed ensemble performances for some twenty years and the playwright
Eduardo Machado has described how she worked on his script, freeing his responses along
with the actors’:

Anne works on a play by choreographing moves driven by the actor, which begin
to fill up the stage like a moving painting. Words are superfluous, it seems. And
words to a playwright are everything. So there was a moment of panic. . . .Actually,
what the movement is doing is making the words live in a theatrical reality instead
of a television reality. As the rehearsals continued I felt the most free I have ever
felt as a writer. I spoke freely to the actors about what I wanted to say in the play
and all of us together brought to life a moving, verbal, emotional song.13

Ellen Lauren has given an actor’s view of the same process:

What Anne is asking is that you build with your fellow players a physical life
unrelated to the text; choreography with perhaps ten stops or moments that in and
of themselves speak of a relationship. Not relationship as in lovers or enemies,
rather a relationship to time, the surrounding architecture, physical shape.

This work, Ellen Lauren continued, allows an actor to ‘begin to build a true sense of identity
as an artist’.14
Generalisations cannot cover the great variety of the new ensembles and theatre ‘groups’
founded in recent decades. They acknowledge no single master. Indeed a common assumption
is that the actors’ task in any combination is to find their own particular form of theatre. This

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has been a fundamental tenet of Odin Teatret which was started in 1964 by the Italian
Eugenio Barba and, since 1974, has been based in Holstebro, Denmark, and worked in many
countries. As this company’s recorder puts it, any production begins with ‘the gathering
together of a group of actors and saying, “Let’s see what we can find.” ’ Productions arise out
of periods of training and the methods for this are developed out of the needs of the
investigations in hand: there is ‘a continual exchange of impulses between the two’. Obviously
enough, these actors have no use for Shakespeare’s plays and, often, very little interest in
what might interest their audiences:

The point of departure is each individual’s need to change himself or herself

through the theatre. This is why all the productions also deal with Odin Teatret’s
own history and experiences and with the group’s particular conditions of existence
as a unit and for its individual members. . . .
To a certain extent, the theatre becomes self-reflective, its own point of reference
and its own meaning, which neither can nor must be legitimised relative to something
external.15

Strange though it may seem in the face of such pronouncements, many elements found in
ensemble groups, even in those who reject dramatists entirely, are very fitting for Shakespeare’s
texts: the actors’ personal commitment to playing and their spontaneity and energy; the
focus in productions on the actors and their interactions, rather than on scenic devices; the
use of improvisation in preparation for performance and belief in instinct and lively
imagination. Training is strict and continuous so that actors often give physically virtuoso
performances that would be well able to respond to Shakespeare’s call for strenuous, subtle,
and impassioned action. However, their physical and, sometimes, dancer-like technique is
seldom matched in vocal achievement or put to the task of staging a text which would lead
actors out of their own range of responses and stylistic strengths.
Despite exciting performances, many of the new ensemble theatre groups would have to
develop further qualities before tackling Shakespeare’s plays, should they ever wish to do
so. Their actors would have to rely less on self-assertion, and yet be boundlessly ambitious;
to believe and delight in words in a way that encourages physicality and not inhibits it, and
that can lead them into unfamiliar imaginative territory and unprecedented events; to be able
to sustain long and demanding roles without the continuous collusion of other actors; and to
possess a style that encompasses speed and stillness, the remarkable and the utterly and
unaffectedly simple. They should be ready to play to their audience when the text calls for
this and to react to the audience’s response so that performance becomes a shared imaginative
experience. They would also have to learn how to work on many plays at the same time so

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that each comes alive uniquely at each performance, rather than concentrating, as most
ensembles do, on one production at a time and keeping it in rehearsal and performance for
months or years at a stretch. They would have to be suspicious of purely theatrical answers
to rehearsal problems and those that ‘feel’ good to the performers; instead of this, they
should make a conscious attempt to reflect the audience’s lives on stage as well their own.
This list of shortcomings in respect to Shakespeare’s plays is long, but it should not blind
us to one quality many of the new theatre groups are proud to possess and that is essentially
Shakespearian: their acting is technically very accomplished and yet remains instinctively
improvisational in rehearsal if not in performance. However, there is no company that I
know that uses highly developed skills to share Shakespeare’s plays with their audiences
while encouraging interplay and improvisation wherever possible and responding to the
concerns of each day as it comes. These procedures sound difficult to accomplish, but
achieving them would be more practicable if the plays were to be staged in a manner more like
that which Shakespeare would have expected as he wrote – a production process more like
some to be found in Asia for performances of quite different plays.

* * *

The requirement that actors should draw on their own experiences and attempt to mirror the
lives of their audience in what they achieve on the stage may strike a reader of the texts as an
all but impossible task. It is, however, advice that many actors will follow in rehearsal, no
matter what style of performance and production is being attempted. Indeed, an actor’s
‘study’ for a Shakespeare role will often provide an example that students of the plays
would do well to follow. For an actor preparing to present a role on the stage, the text seems
to draw upon every resource of mind and body, and all that he or she knows or guesses about
what it means to be alive. To cite one example, Jonathan Miller has told how Kathryn
Pogson, playing Ophelia in his production of 1982:

was constantly on the look out for characteristics she could use onstage. One
afternoon, on a train journey, she saw a girl talking to herself with all the angry,
knowing quality that schizophrenics have as if they alone are privy to a secret. She
re-created that easy distractibility, and exaggeration of movement on stage. . .[and]
came [to rehearsals] bearing her own discoveries and observations.

Constantly on the look out for further clues in the text, the director and actress seized upon
Ophelia’s brief reply to Polonius’ question as to what she should think: ‘I do not know, my
lord, what I should think’:

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This seem[ed] to epitomize her character – she does not know what to think.
Subsequently, she responds to Hamlet’s similar question as to her thoughts, ‘I
think nothing, my lord.’ All her actions are reponses to what other people think
for, and of, her before they disappear and all her support is removed. There is a
very touching moment in Act III scene i when Gertrude shows a strangely
intimate sympathy for Ophelia, and in that split-second there is a suggestion
that Ophelia could have been rescued if only that kind of affection had been
available to her before.16

So from the words and the interactions of characters, and from the unspoken responses
between characters, together with observations and experience outside the rehearsal room,
the performance began to come together, tested by its ability to be sustained throughout the
play and to hold attention of an audience. For a present-day actor, no matter how he or she
has been trained, such a process has become second nature and this, I think, should also be
instinctive while reading and studying a play, to whatever limits we are capable. The text will
come alive in this way, but not so that it provides one interpretation that could hold its own
against all others in argument. What was discovered for Ophelia in this production had its
momentary validity and drew upon certain lines in the text of the play; another Ophelia and
another occasion will uncover other ways of becoming implicated in Shakespeare’s text.
The testing of what to do with any line of text that is undertaken by an actor in
rehearsal and during a series of performances provides a second model for the reader-critic.
Actors’ accounts of their work provide countless examples of the need to be wary and to
remember the whole play and the audience at each and every moment. For instance, Simon
Russell Beale has told of his problems as Thersites in his first scene (Troilus and Cressida,
II.i); he saw that:

[This] is, at its simplest, a scene of comic relief slotted between two of the most
difficult debates that Shakespeare ever wrote. It is also a violent scene. I began to
wonder, rather late in the run of the play, whether the sight of a huge and powerful
warrior beating a smaller and apparently defenceless servant somehow restricted
the audience’s enjoyment of the scene. But it was important to establish that
violence is a regular and expected part of Thersites’s life, that it is wearying and
boring as well as painful, and that far from being defenceless, Thersites has plenty
of his own effective ammunition. The danger of trying to show this sense of a
tired, unhappy, brutal relationship was that the beating of Thersites by Ajax
tended to look a little pat, a little staged. At its best, the scene showed a neat
balance of spontaneous, precise violence and dance-like predictability.17

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A text by Shakespeare encourages an actor to consider any moment while looking before and
after, and to judge what happens on stage with regard to how it is received by an audience and
how he or she might respond to that. The words on the page do far more than activate
speech; they are cues for mental, emotional, and physical performance; they awaken memories,
ideas, and feelings so that, in the imagination and in what is said and done on stage, the actor’s
whole being takes on the person in the play. Any one speech affects all the actors in a scene
because they are caught up in the enacted drama, interacting with each other and with the
audience as the play takes its course.
A text contains much more for actors than an indication of what a succession of characters
says at each moment and this should affect how a play is both played and read. A good actor
can work on a single part over the course of many years, never wholly satisfied. A good critic
or scholar can take the widest view of what is presented on stage so that the words of a
speech are never considered in isolation as the sole clue to what a play is about and what it
can achieve for both audience and reader.

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In the course of this book, three issues have recurred without receiving sustained attention.
Now, on looking forward, they are uppermost in my mind. All three are closely related.
The first is the subject of much current debate: how far should we try to stage
Shakespeare’s plays as they were originally performed? The issue is especially live at the
present time because productions of Shakespeare’s plays and those of some of his
contemporaries are regular attractions at the reconstructed Globe Theatre that has been built
close to its original site in London. At last, one can walk into a building like one of the
Elizabethan theatres and stand to see a play in performance. It is exciting and makes us think
afresh, in practical terms, about Shakespeare’s plays and what they mean to us. At first, we
may be tempted to believe that this is how Shakespeare should always be staged and that
here is a way to unlock secrets in the texts. Access is easy and many writers are now engaged
in assessing the experience. Each production is reviewed in major newspapers and journals.
While the very fact of the new Globe’s existence will go directly to the head of anyone
interested in Shakespeare, the building is only a reproduction and should be treated with
caution. Seldom are all the necessary facts known to ensure a completely authentic
reconstruction of anything from the past. Inevitably, a great deal that belongs to the present
time will have been mixed, inextricably, into the rendering of somebody’s idea of the past or
of some committee’s consensus about it. However much care is taken, all the prescribed
materials and practised craftsmanship will not be available. In this case, some scholars argue
that the new Globe on Bankside has been built some ten feet too wide in diameter, giving a
total area of 8,658 square feet, rather than 7,087;1 that means an additional 22 per cent and,
consequently, changes in acoustics, the audience’s lines of sight, and the scale of a human
figure in relation to the stage area and its background. For a theatre, the task of reproduction
extends from the building and its equipment to how it is all used, and here the new Globe has
many disadvantages. Modern fire regulations impose a maximum size of audience and forbid
the unregulated thousands that would sometimes crowd into the original building. The

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occasion for performance is different too: in Shakespeare’s day, public performances were in
the afternoon so that Londoners had to take time off during their working day to see the
plays – perhaps five hours or more, if travelling from the other side of the Thames, and that
often in winter. In countless ways, both actors and audiences would have had very different
expectations from their counterparts today: their lives were shorter and had different patterns;
their education, beliefs, prejudices, loyalties, duties, habits were all different, and their
pleasures and suffering. When we go to the new Globe, we do not travel backwards in time
but enter a little, carefully fabricated world with the rarity, pretence, and educational
advantages of an Elizabethan theme park. To stage Shakespeare’s plays authentically at the
new Globe, a culture which has almost entirely disappeared would have to be reconstructed
along with it. To use productions there as a guide for staging a play in any other theatre
would be to copy an already very imperfect copy.
Whether the Globe has been rebuilt correctly or not, the use of that theatre will confer no
special authority on a production, although it will have an undoubted interest in so far as it
differs markedly from generally accepted present-day practice. We may find answers to
problems that are tied to theoretical notions of what Shakespeare’s theatre was like, but
nothing to prove whether they are right or wrong. Much more important will be what is
entirely unexpected in a production because that will encourage us to think what we have not
thought before and so widen the range of enquiry. For the advancement of our understanding
of Shakespeare’s plays or for a chance to discover how to stage them more appropriately for
the present time, a restored Globe is useful in the same way as any other unfamiliar form of
theatre, but probably not so useful as others because it is, in large part, dependent on what
we have always thought and our theatres have got into the habit of doing.
In some ways, Asian theatres offer a better site than the new Globe for reconsideration
and reform. Flourishing in their own rights as the original Globe was able to do, they have no
experimental or educational agenda. The skill of their actors is often of the highest order, the
result of long training and constant practice over many years. Performances are often formed
directly from intact traditions and influenced by the response of audiences which have come
without any further thoughts than their own interests in the play itself and which sometimes
include all classes of a society. The entertainment on offer does not have to be explained to
those audiences so that they behave appropriately, and the plays are not interrupted by
repeated intervals when they were written to be performed continuously. The actors do not
have to adapt their customary style of performance and, frequently, they need no director to
tell them what to do. The playtexts may be either ancient or modern, and are sometimes both
at one time. A great range of theatres is available to enjoy elsewhere in the world and each one

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will be different to those we know in our own culture; they are all able to raise issues about
how our response to Shakespeare might change.
The productions staged in a reproduction of Shakespeare’s theatre provide no certain
guidance towards a better way of staging the plays today or towards the kind of theatre that
should be built to accommodate them. Anything that was done at the original Globe cannot
be done, in the same way and to similar effect, in our very different times, not even in this
new building that is similar in structure to those for which the plays were written. Everything
about a theatre changes with time and with the society it serves: old methods, even if they
were available, would never be right for the present time. Whatever we can learn about what
was done before, we will still have to find our own ways of staging the plays and thinking
about them.
The second and related issue that has run through this book is the extent to which theatres
in Europe and countries whose cultures are based in that tradition might borrow from Asian
theatres. An answer, that has often been implied in this book and may now be stated more
clearly, is that borrowing and direct imitation are not useful exercises, for much the same
reasons as there would be no great merit in borrowing from Elizabethan theatre practice if we
could know, infallibly, what that was. Any production displaced from its own cultural
environment will suffer losses, changes in relevance and in effectiveness, besides those
which are due to misunderstanding and the awkward processes of translation. Styles of
performance are similarly non-exportable without considerable loss and damage. Actors
train over whole lifetimes and their sensibilities and imaginations draw on their entire
experiences in specific family, social, and geographical contexts; such processes cannot be
imitated, except superficially, even if a course of special training extends over many months
or a number of years.
As a study of Elizabethan theatres can bring suggestions for possible experiment and
development, so travel can encourage new ideas and new visions in the context of one’s own
theatre and its culture. Whereas replication leads only to mimicry or caricature, the encounter
with theatre performances of kinds never experienced before can set in motion many new
lines of thought and suggest modifications of practice in terms of the theatre we thought we
already knew well enough. By extending the boundaries of what we can imagine, such
experiences can help us work with our own materials and processes.
I have taken nothing tangible away from my travels, no tourist trophies or cultural
pillage, no special costumes for actors to wear on stage or movements and gestures for them
to imitate. I see little purpose in trying to do any of this. The chief argument against such
action is that, even if the ways of an Asian theatre were to be perfectly imitated in a theatre
in Europe or North America, the resulting performance would not reflect the lives and

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concerns of its audience with that directness which is one of the most startling and enduring
qualities of theatre as an art form. If the purpose of the exercise were to encourage intercultural
understanding, the best result would be only an imperfect recognition of a difference
imperfectly presented; much better, for this purpose, would be to make a production that
uses Asian ways of working and tries to adapt them to the actors’ own performance style
and apply them to material that would in itself interest the theatre’s audiences. Then the
members of an audience might see their own selves on stage in an unfamiliar yet immediately
affecting performance.
A third issue to consider, at the end of the journeys which have been the occasion for this
book, is what might happen in the future to our staging and understanding of Shakespeare’s
plays: how will we change our ways, if at all? The obvious answer is that we are bound to
change because every generation has done so. But now the changes are likely to be faster and
more basic. As soon as we look at theatre in general, beyond the well-established companies
that stage Shakespeare, innovation is to be found everywhere. Theatre is being forced to alter
because of new methods of finance, organisation, and public relations, and because it finds
itself in a very new society with new expectations. Some theatres are searching for ways to
change because they realise that the alternative is death, by sudden financial failure or a slow
attrition of the audiences they have previously relied on. In certain respects, change is
inevitable: as noted earlier, new technology has radically altered the production resources of
theatre so that it can offer many new sensations and control them with new speed and
sensitivity. Moreover, all these changes are occurring at a time when theatre must redefine
itself against the more easily accessible and reproducible forms of film, video, and television;
it is being forced to learn how to make the very most of its unique ability to present live
performers and share with an audience the moment of fresh invention and creation.
As powerful as these external reasons for change are those within the minds of people
who have chosen to work in theatre. At every level of education, enrolment in theatre courses
is booming around the world, which suggests that the coming generation feels a strong need
to satisfy personal aspirations by making theatre and creating an imaginary world that has
more attraction or more truthfulness than that in which they live. These students soon learn
that to have a future in theatre they almost certainly will have to make their own opportunities
to do so. There are few openings in established theatres for people who have not already
proved their worth and those that are on offer hold out little hope of individual development
or achievement. Educationalists often point out that job prospects are appalling in theatre
and some do their best to switch their students’ attention away from the creative art to
‘theatre studies’ and modes of performance that are found in public life. Nevertheless, the
queue to join the profession grows yearly and, in this situation, alternative theatres and

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fringe festivals have all flourished. Countless companies start from nothing except a group of
young people willing to go out and seek an audience and make its own distinctive mark;
innovation is necessary for the very existence of these small pirate theatres, as well as to
satisfy their need to speak for themselves.
As noticed in Chapter 10, the effect of a challenge to established ways of working has
already been felt in terms of Shakespeare production, although, at present, this opposition
has proved ineffective in the long run because success leads to absorption into the stronger
side or the sheer hard work of being independent proves too demanding. Change is bound to
be slower and more irregular in Shakespeare production than elsewhere because each new
effort is unable to make a move before it reaches a scale of operation that is beyond the means
of the new and mobile organisations.
That change is in the air is evident in many ways but especially in the smaller companies’
relationship to their audiences. In this, they seem to be developing along some of the lines
that this book has identified as current practice in well-established Asian theatres. Usually,
dramatists have given the lead by challenging the assumption, so frequent in Shakespeare
productions, that audiences need to be reassured by providing clear meanings and large-scale
unambiguous spectacles. At least as early as the 1950s, after the premières of Waiting for
Godot in Paris and London had set their audiences searching for meanings, dramatists have
continued to prod audiences into more active responses. Plays have been written so that
they surprise and wrong-foot their audiences by moving backwards or forwards in time with
little or no warning; for example, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1978) or Richard Nelson’s Sensibility
and Sense (1989). Others switch between reality and fantasy or dream, so that the whole
stage-picture may become fractured, as in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child (1977), Brian Friel’s
Faith Healer (1979) or Terry Johnson’s Hysteria (1993). Some are almost wholly puzzling,
with no direct clue to their meanings: Samuel Beckett continued to unsettle audiences by a
succession of new demands, leaving them to make what sense they could of a play without
words which lasts only thirty-five seconds (Breath, 1966) or one which does not say or
show what is happening for the first twenty minutes and then repeats itself a second time
word for word all over again, but not necessarily in the same order (Play, 1964); in another
play, a woman’s mouth is all that can be seen with absolute clarity (Not I, 1973). Watching
many recent plays, audiences have to think for themselves, find answers for questions that
have been raised and left open, or wonder why they have been involved in what has puzzled
and, perhaps, not satisfied them.
The more innovatory directors, working without the restraints of a dramatist’s script,
have followed suit, so that their audiences will often come away arguing in terms that are
largely of their own making. So, for example, a play by Richard Foreman: ‘compels the

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audience to scan it for minute alterations. By calling attention to itself – how it works – it
stimulates the audience’s powers of perception.’2 Robert Wilson makes a point of not
interpreting his productions for the audience, leaving that task open for them: images are
presented to the public and its members are left to work out some sort of meaning for
themselves. Interestingly in the present context, and against the way his plays are customarily
staged, Shakespeare has been a model for Wilson:

If you do Shakespeare in a naturalistic way, or in a psychological way, it only

limits this great work. What’s beautiful about Shakespeare is that you can read it
one night one way, and another night read it another way, and the third night still
another. . . .I prefer a formal presentation of a text like that so that the viewer can
read through the text in his own way. You as a director or designer or performer are
there to help the public read through the text, but you don’t interpret the text.3

By many different means, dramatists and some directors who work in newly formed
companies have moved theatre in the direction of leaving more for audiences to contribute,
almost as if they were copying Asian theatres in this respect. A review in The Times on 10
June 1993 reported:

By refusing to spoon-feed the audience or pacify them with visual prettiness,

Emanuelle Enchanted stimulates spectators into helping themselves. It makes
them search for their own connections and meanings among the cryptic fragments.
. . .One can be bored or flummoxed, but that is part of Forced Entertainment’s
agenda. . .this is courageously radical, intelligent, provocative work.

Some self-professed experimental productions go further. Audience members are invited to

walk around and talk, or take refreshment during a performance, or to take an active part in
the dramatic event, or to consult various exhibits, monitors, or even alternative plays being
performed simultaneously. Sometimes a performance is stopped and the audience asked to
decide in which of several possible ways the characters should take the story. Actors may
speak directly to their audience, either in character or as themselves; frequently they switch
from one character to another, presenting one point of view and, immediately afterwards, its
opposite. At performances of the Wooster Group in New York during the 1980s and 1990s,
for instance, no one member of an audience could take in all that was on offer at any one time,
on television monitors showing wholly dissimilar images, at several levels or in several
compartments of the stage setting, or on moving elements of it, in simultaneous narration and

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enactment of different parts of the material being presented, in very different styles of
performance borrowed from film and video as well as from theatrical models.
In fact, the idea of an independent audience has been around for a long time even though
it is at odds with the response that well-financed and critically acclaimed productions of
Shakespeare have encouraged and continue to aim for. In the 1960s, John Arden had invoked
earlier forms of production when he said of his own play:

I would have been happy had it been possible for The Workhouse Donkey to have
lasted, say, six or seven or thirteen hours (excluding intervals), and for the audience
to come and go throughout the performance. . . . A theatre presenting such an
entertainment would, of course, . . .take on some of the characteristics of a fairground
or amusement park.4

Together with Joan Littlewood and others, Arden was speaking in favour of a theatre that he
could call ‘vital’ and, although they never achieved this, a search for such an experience still
goes on, intermittently and with more or less conviction.5
The fact that theatre audiences were once as eager and representative as the crowds at a
football game has haunted many people: Jacques Copeau, Bertolt Brecht, García Lorca, Joan
Littlewood, Peter Brook, Dario Fo, Peter Schumann, Edward Bond, and John McGrath are
amongst the many who have left the metropolis to perform in countryside, desert, streets or
factories, in social clubs, bars, community centres, or schools, searching for a popular and
lively audience for theatre. Their success has always been limited, but travel to Asia shows
more clearly than anything these pioneers have achieved that this audience is still a possibility
today. By studying what could never be imitated in Europe or North America, we may find
clues to how we, in our own fashion, might advance towards a realisation of this goal.
Elsewhere than in Shakespeare productions by established companies, the tide is turning
against many old assumptions and in directions that are accepted practice in Asia. Actors
need not be imprisoned within the bounds of a stage, whether that is fashioned like a room
with an absent fourth wall or as a world of its own that is carefully lit to emphasise the
configuration of both actors and scenery as they have been arranged by designers and
director. Necessity has led newly formed companies to perform in ‘found spaces’ or
untheatrical environments that awaken powerful images in physical surroundings with which
their audiences are already familiar. Music is being used with a new freedom, partly because
a small company, with no alternative but to supply and play its own, will seize the
opportunity to give a stronger and more varied dynamic to their performances; it also learns
to vary the setting for a play’s action by aural rather than visual means.

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Change is very obvious in actor training where a wide range of new or newly revived
methods is in use. Advertisements in theatre magazines offer courses based on mime, mask
work, commedia dell’arte, tumbling and juggling, improvisation, ‘theatre games’, ensemble
development, circus techniques, dance, ‘movement’, stage-combat or the ‘physical language
of violence’, text analysis, singing and voice work, tai chi chuan, yoga, ‘Alexander technique’,
Lee Strasburg’s or ‘Method’ acting, stand-up comedy, performance art, and so on. Twenty
years ago, the menu on offer was much shorter and very predictable.
Most of the new techniques that are being taught are concerned with what is usually
called ‘physical performance’: young actors can be active, lively, and quickly responsive in
all parts of themselves. Rather than wait for performances to develop slowly from speaking
a text that provides the anchor and limits for all that they do, they are quick to use all their
bodies and their wits as guided by a text or in opposition to it. In small, ill-funded companies,
the results are beginning to be seen: actors themselves are the chief and, sometimes, the sole
resource for a production, and so they want to maximise their input, to make the story as
varied as it may be, and to grab and hold attention. These demonstrative and unruly qualities
light up some hastily written new scripts, and others which stumble or drag, and they will,
in time, also change how Shakespeare is presented. Again, Asian practice shows that what is
being attempted in our more experimental theatres is capable of great refinement as well as
popular appeal. What actors do on stage matters as much as what is said, when totally alive
and expressive performances spring out of what the words and the story demand of them. If
half the lessons that are now taught in schools are backed up with practice and appropriate
talents and so prove to be effective, actors will develop a confidence similar to that found in
Asian theatres and will discover it in their own ways for their own purposes.
Perhaps the most certain indication that theatre is about to undergo a great change – and
Shakespearian productions with it – is that more and more influences can be identified that
do not come out of current theatre practice. When asked which artists had most influenced
his work, Robert Lepage, director of newly devised works as well as classic texts, went
outside ‘legitimate’ theatre for two out of three of his heroes:

I’d say definitely Peter Gabriel. The reason why I like Peter Gabriel is because I
saw a Genesis show when I was seventeen. Rock theatre or theatrical rock is more
theatrical than theatre: it was the kind of theatricality that really seduced me. . . .
Another person would probably be Gilles Maheu in Montreal, who is a terrific
director. But I’d say that the only other person would be Laurie Anderson, because
she has translated information and imitation into communion and this is very
different from communication. Communication can stand on stage and say ‘This is
what I think and this is what I’m doing the performance for’. . . . communion is

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actually to share, it’s not just to announce but to share it, to give a sensation of
what you are saying: few people are concerned with this.6

Praise for a theatre director is the most conventional in this short catalogue and shows that
Lepage still respects a director’s power as much as an audience’s responsiveness. It is natural
for the imagination to be activated by music as well as words, but this director relishes the
personal qualities of a particular musician in live performance. Theatre as ‘communion’ is,
perhaps, the most provocative of Lepage’s notions, even though it would be a staid and
limited description for the interplay between actors, characters, and audiences that is found
in Marathi or other popular and once-popular Asian theatres; it indicates that the invisible
palisades set up around the stage are about to be dismantled in favour of a new openness and
freedom in performance. It may also suggest that improvisation, which is so essential to
most Asian theatres no matter how complicated their material or techniques, may be
increasingly sought after amongst us: ‘communion’ entails a reaction at every moment to
how the audience perceives and responds to a play.

* * *

Should all these changes, and more, operate upon established theatre practice, the presentation
of Shakespeare’s plays would be radically altered in consequence and, in turn, a reader’s
instinctive understanding of the texts would change because he or she would visualise and
engage with them differently. As the study of Shakespeare’s characters ceased to be the norm
when the great star actors no longer dominated and controlled productions, so the study of
themes, meanings, and political or social implications could begin to seem less interesting or
less all-sufficient when interplay between stage and audience becomes more open and free.
Critics and scholars, who can change so much more easily than theatre organisations and
audiences, will be encouraged to engage with the texts of the plays with something like the
same sense of adventure that will be found in the theatre. A recognition that the possibilities
inherent in a text are not likely to be revealed to a narrow gaze or pre-programmed investigation
would be a first step to take. The second priority might be to consider what a play can do for
a popular audience so that the critic or reader will have to bring to its text a personal
experience of day-to-day living.
Necessarily, this approach would be limited by the critic’s life-experience and ability to
write about it, but amongst its ingredients must be an awareness of the physical and sensuous
elements of life. At present such experiences do not figure largely in criticism and scholarship,
which are dominated by intellectual, antiquarian, or political concerns. Influenced by a more

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active and reactive theatre, the most valued responses would be those that are sustainable
throughout the play and can be shared between many people, and not those that register
sharply only at certain moments on an ideological ground-plan or some other external measure
that has been supplied by the critic according to his or her own reading in related literature.
What a particular play requires of its performers and the various ways in which it engages
an audience’s attention will be recognised as important subjects for study. The concerns I
listed on returning from Asia are immediately relevant: how are narrative and action presented;
how does the text elicit and respond to enactment by actors; how and where can the play
change from performance to performance; what sensations are aroused in an audience and
how do these vary in effect; where will actors be most responsive to an audience and where
least; how and at what moments can what happens on stage be of less power than, and be
quite different from, that which take place in the imagination of individuals who are watching
the play; does a spectator ever become, in the imagination, a person in the play enacting its
drama; what is the progressive effect of a performance of the play in both private and public
terms at the present time? Criticism must be experiential and its primary question must be:
‘What does the play do to an audience?’

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 NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996), p. 189.

1 O P E N S TA G E S : P R E S E N C E A N D O C C A S I O N

1. The evidence for this and much information about the prevalent practice of travelling
theatre in Shakespeare’s times is to be found, conveniently, in Andrew Gurr, The
Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996), pp. 36–54.

2. For making this visit possible and for much translating and information, I am indebted to
three brothers, Byomakesh, Biswakesh, and Byotakesh Tripathy, who were my hosts and
guides in Orissa in November 1992. I have given a fuller account, with special reference to
Marlowe’s plays as well as Shakespeare’s, in ‘Jatra Theatre and Elizabethan Dramaturgy’,
New Theatre Quarterly, 40 (1994), pp. 331–47.
3. In the collection of the Theatre Institute in Calcutta.
4. See John Russell Brown, ‘The Worst of Shakespeare in the Theater: Cuts in the Last Scene
of King Lear’, ‘Bad’ Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice
Charney (1988), pp. 157–65.
5. Based on a memorandum to the author by Biswakesh Tripathy, 3 March 1993.
6. Thomas Nashe, Strange News (1592); Works, ed. R.B. McKerrow (1904), i, p. 296.
7. Quoted, with further testimonies, in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923), ii, pp.
308–9.
8. See Folk Theater of India, p. 33.
9. See Rangvarta (News Bulletin of Natya Shodh Sansthan, Calcutta), 33–4 (1988), pp. 7–12.
10. For a fuller synopsis, see New Theatre Quarterly, op. cit., pp. 342–3.
11. These and other reports of much the same kind are conveniently available in Gamini
Salgado, Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performance 1590–1890
(1975).

2 A U D I E N C E S : O N S TA G E A N D O F F S TA G E

1. The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary C. Richards (1958), p. 57.
2. Shakespeare Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988),
p. 18.

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 NOTES

3. See Dream, III.i.70–1; and Henry the Fourth, Part I, II.iv.378–85, Hamlet, II.ii.492–8 and
III.ii.131–264; Love’s Labour’s Lost, V.ii.543–703.
Christopher Sly’s reactions in both The Taming of The Shrew and The Taming of A Shrew are
more uncertain evidence, because Sly scarcely knows where he is or what is happening; but it is
relevant, in the context of this enquiry, to notice that his self-interest, as the play is performed
for his benefit, outweighs any matter that properly belongs to the dramatic fiction.

3 RITUAL: ACTION AND MEANING

1. Gordon Craig, The Art of the Theatre (1905), p. 11, and T.S. Eliot, ‘On Poetic Drama’, an
introduction to John Dryden, Of Dramatik Poesie:an Essay (ed. 1928), p. xvi.
2. See Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year 1400–1700
(1994), especially ch. 5.
3. Suzuki has written about his methods in The Way of Acting (trans. 1986).
4. The Natyasastra, XXXVI, 80, 81; trans. Manomohan Ghosh (1961; edn 1995), ii, p. 204.

4 C E R E M O N Y: B E H AV I O U R A N D R E C E P T I O N

1. The accounts of Japanese theatre productions which follow derive mostly from visits to
Tokyo, and more briefly to Kyoto and Toga, in 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1995. They are
intended to be read as a visitor’s response, not as fully informed accounts.
2. The verse is irregular; the text is quoted here so that a half-line suggests a pause after the
first abrupt announcement.
3. Memorials of Affairs of State. . .of the Right Honourable Sir Ralph Winwood, ii (1725).
4. The BlazingWorld and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (1992), p. 16.
5. ‘Shakespeare Performances in England, 1994–1995’, Shakespeare Survey, 49, ed. Stanley
Wells (1996), p. 265.
6. At the beginning of Act II of The Homecoming (1965) and early in Act I of American
Buffalo (1976).

5 P E R F O R M A N C E : I M A G I N AT I O N A N D I N V O LV E M E N T

1. My theatre-going in Kerala was guided and informed by Dr K. Ayyappa Paniker. He and

everyone to whom he introduced me were extraordinarily helpful in arranging for me to see
the work of three companies and have discussions before and after. I am greatly indebted to
them and everyone else involved.
Information about Kutiyattam can be found in a special combined issue of Sangeet Natak,
numbers 111–14, published in 1995 by the National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama in
Delhi, for which Dr Paniker was Guest Editor. Gurus, scholars, actors, musicians, translators
have provided in this one volume documentation, original texts, histories, and criticisms.
2. ‘Abhinaya in Kutiyattam’, Sangeet Natak, op. cit., p. 56.
3. ‘Introduction: The Aesthetics of Kutiyattam’, op. cit., pp. 8–9.
4. Op. cit., p. 8.

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 NOTES

6 I M P R O V I S AT I O N : F R E E D O M A N D C O L L U S I O N

1. See Chapter 12, pp. 182–3, below.

2. The Kutiyattam practice of improvising additional text, varying what the play itself provides,
offers a suggestion for a further experiment which would choose a section of Shakespeare’s
text and develop variations of that, changing its time and place, the characters involved and
their intentions, references to off-stage reality and to political or philosophical thought,
and so on. It could replay the same episode several times or present several distinct
developments one beside another. Obviously no one can imitate Shakespeare’s language
successfully; but that need not diminish the interest of such a performance if the actors were
skilled and inventive, their audience willing and able to follow closely.
3. The Exemplary Theatre (1922), pp. 258–9.
4. ‘A Career in Shakespeare’, Shakespeare: an Illustrated Stage History, ed. Jonathan Bate and
Russell Jackson (1996), p. 208.
5. In ‘Shakespeare’s Plays and Traditions of Playgoing’, Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions,
ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (1994), pp. 253–65, I have surveyed
changes in audience handling and audience behaviour from Shakespeare’s day to our own;
present habits are mostly no older than the present century and the arrival of modern
technology.

7 RESPONSE: ACTORS AND AUDIENCES

1. All three incidents are from different episodes of Hirakana Seisuiki (The Battle of Genji and
Heike) in the repertoire of the National Bunraku Theatre of Japan, in Osaka, August, 1995.
2. This account is mainly indebted to Benito Ortolani, The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic
Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism (1990).
3. The evidence is marshalled in Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s
England (1996) by Stephen Orgel. While advancing a different argument, this present
account is greatly indebted to Professor Orgel’s clear and comprehensive study.
4. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (1970), i, p. 224.
5. G.E. Bentley, Profession of the Player in Shakespeare’s England: 1590–1642 (1984), p. 115.
6. Jan Kott, The Theatre of Essence (1984), p. 124.
7. ‘It’s never too late to switch: crossing toward power’, Crossing the Stage: Controversies on
Cross-dressing, ed. Lesley Ferris (1993), p. 145.
8. Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (1965), pp. 76–7.
9. Reference is made throughout to The Actors’ Analects, ed. and trans. Charles J. Dunn and
Bunzo Torigoe (Tokyo, 1969).
The account of the onnagata in this chapter is a development of part of my paper,
‘Kabuki and Shakespeare: Two Traditions’, read to a Conference on Cross-Gender Casting
organised and hosted by the University of Osaka in August, 1995; I am greatly indebted to
the stimulus and instruction of this occasion and its participants.
10. I have argued the same case, using evidence of some Elizabethan ideas about sexuality, in
‘Representing of Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Plays’, New Theatre Quarterly, 51 (1997), pp. 205–13.

202
 NOTES

8 S E T T I N G S : A C TO R S A N D S TA G E S

1. Quoted in G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vi (1968), p. 243.
2. See Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996), pp. 280 and 303–4.
3. Reprinted for the Shakespeare Society (1841), p. 58.

1 0 C O N T R O L : D I R E C T O R S A N D C O M PA N I E S

1. Cf. Henry the Fifth, III.i.27.

2. Peter Brook: a Theatrical Casebook, compiled by David Willams (1988), pp. 348–9.
3. Hamlet, III.ii.25–7.
4. ‘Shakespeare and the Global Spectator,’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 131 (1995), pp. 50–64.
5. Peter Hall, Making an Exhibition of Myself (1993), pp. 99–100.
6. Peter Holland, ‘Shakespeare Performances in England, 1990–1991’, Shakespeare Survey,
44 (1991), p. 187; almost all the details from this production mentioned here are corroborated
by this careful and perceptive review.
7. CivilWar (1993; trans. Piers Spence, 1994), pp. 34–6.
8. Simon Reade, Cheek by Jowl: Ten Years of Celebration (1991), p. 11.
9. Similar stories can be told about other companies that have started out in defiance of the
dominant patterns of work: the Actors Company in Britain or Seattle’s Empty Space
theatre in the United States during the 1970s, the quasi-independent company directed by
Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge at the National in the 1980s, and the Bremen
Shakespeare Company in the 1990s. With time and success, and because of the need to keep
going and keep making money, each company became increasingly like those in opposition
to which they had been founded.
10. From ‘An Unhappy Family’, Writing in Restaurants (1986); reprinted in A Whore’s Profession:
Essays and Notes (1994), pp. 130–1.
11. ‘Exploring Space at Play: the Making of the Theatrical Event’ [an interview], New Theatre
Quarterly, xii, 47 (1996), p.236.

11 S C E N O G R A P H Y: T H E AT R E S A N D D E S I G N

1. See, for example, Lee Simonson, The Stage Is Set (1932; ed. 1963), pp. 90–1:

The actor has ceased to dominate the modern theatre. . . .Settings have acquired a new
value because they can aid in bridging the gap between the mind of a playwright and
that of his audience. The revival of scenic design as an important factor in the art of
the theatre coincides exactly with the emergence of the director as a commanding and
necessary figure on the modern stage.
It is these directors who realized the need of changing the rôle of scenery from that
of a static and perfunctory background to that of a dynamic element in projecting a
play.
2. Looking at Shakespeare: a Visual History of Twentieth-century Performance (1993), p. 294.
3. The Times (London, 13 July 1990).
4. See Hentzner’s Itinerary (1598); quoted, translated from the Latin, in Joseph Strutt, The
Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), ed. J.C. Cox (1903), p. 206.

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 NOTES

The comparison of the Duke of Gloucester to a bear has been made explicitly earlier in
the play, when he sees himself as ‘tied to th’ stake. . .[to] stand the course’ of being
baited by fierce dogs trained for the task (III.vii. 53–7).
5. Ibid.
6. Today we would say that Lear struggles against the restriction of breath associated with a
heart attack. It would seem that Shakespeare was recreating the actual circumstances he had
witnessed in a death from a series of strokes.
7. When Peter Brook took his company to Africa in 1972–3 in search of totally inexperienced
theatre audiences, it was his custom to lay out a carpet in a village square or other place of
assembly and have his company perform on that, with no other theatrical device to support
them.
8. Quoted, together with Peter Brook’s preceding comment, from Peter Brook (1995), pp.
215, 218–19.

1 2 A C TO R S : T R A I N I N G A N D P E R F O R M A N C E

1. The Exemplary Theatre (1922)

2. ‘What Training – for What Theatre?’, New Theatre Quarterly, 42 (1995), pp. 106 and 105.
3. Perhaps Hamlet only thinks he could do such things or dares himself to do them; in either
case the actor has a more complex but no less demanding task.
4. Quoted in the Arden edition of Macbeth (1951), p. xvi.
5. Constantin Stanislavski, Building a Character, trans. Elizabeth Hapgood (1950), p. 113.
6. Creating a Role, trans. Elizabeth Hapgood (1963), p. 50.
7. Ibid., p. 42.
8. Ibid., p. 78.
9. Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (1964), p. 54.
10. Ibid., p. 196. See, also, the table of differences between dramatic and epic theatre Brecht
drew up in 1930 (Ibid., p. 37).
11. Ibid., p. 197.
12. Ibid., p. 202.
13. Anne Bogart: Viewpoints, ed. Michael Bigelow Dixon and Joel A. Smith (1995), p. 74.
14. Ibid., pp. 67 and 69.
15. Erik Exe Christoffersen, The Actor’s Way, trans. Richard Fowler (1993), pp. 3, 98, 190–4.
16. Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances (1986), pp. 116–17.
17. Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance by Players with
the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (1993), p. 166.

F O RWA R D P R O S P E C T

1. See R.A. Foakes, ‘The Discovery of the Rose Theatre: some implications’, Shakespeare
Survey, 43 (1991), pp. 144–5.
2. Introduction by Bonnie Marranca to Pandering to the Masses, a Misrepresentation; The
Theatre of Images, ed. Bonnie Marranca (1977), p. 7.
3. John Bell, ‘The Language of Illusion; an Interview with Robert Wilson’, Theater Week,
January (1994).
4. Preface, The Workhouse Donkey (1964), p. 8.

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 NOTES

5. An account of much of this experiment can be found in Bim Mason’s Street Theatre and
Other Outdoor Performance (1992). Engineers of the Imagination: The Welfare State
Handbook, ed. Tony Coult and Baz Kershaw (1983) is an account of one company’s
attempt to involve audiences actively in their work. John McGrath’s A Good Night Out
(1981) is a dramatist’s defence of his search for a vital theatre.
6. Interview in In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre, ed. Maria M. Delgado and
Paul Heritage (1996), p. 156.

205
 INDEX

actors, 173–89 ; audiences and, 10 , 24–5 , 26 Balinese cremation ritual, 29–33 , 42 , 44

, 103–20 ; Elizabethan, 24–5 , 174 ; Jatra, Balinese dance drama, 29 , 125
23–5 ; supporting, 130 , 131 ; see also Balinese temple dance (Odalan), 29
‘boy actors’; ‘choices’; cross-gender Barba, Eugenio, 185
casting; doubling of parts; ensemble acting; Barker, Clive, 173
‘hired men’; improvisation; ‘stars’ Barker, Harley Granville, 95–6 , 173 , 181
Actors’ Studio, see ‘Method, The’ Beale, Simon Russell, 188
actresses, Restoration, 108 bear-baiting, 166–7
advertising, 162 Beckett, Samuel: Breath, 194 ; Endgame, 69;
Alice in Wonderland, 67 Happy Days, 69 ; Not I, 194 ; Play, 194 ;
All’s Well That Ends Well, 116–17 Rockaby, 69 ; Waiting for Godot, 69 , 194
Alleyn, Sir Edward, 24 Beijing Opera, 125 , 131
‘alternative’ theatre, 69 , 161 Bergman, 145
Anderson, Laurie, 197 Blackfriars theatre, 7 , 109
Antony and Cleopatra, 96 , 109 ; boy actors, Bogart, Anne, 134–5 , 185
109 , 117 ; ceremony, 62 ; ending, 85 ; Bogdanov, Michael, 154
sexuality, 110 , 117 Bond, Edward, 196
Arden, John: The Workhouse Donkey, 196 Bouffes du Nord, Les, 169–70
Aristotle, 43 ‘boy actors’, 107–20 , 126
Artaud, Antonin, 29 Brecht, Bertolt, 196 ; Messingkauf Dialogues,
As You Like It : Cheek by Jowl, 154 ; ending, 111 ; Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 146–7 ;
13 , 171 ; folk rites, 47 ; marriage scene, ‘Short Organum’, 183–4
46 ; silences, 87 Brook, Peter, 104 , 144 , 145 , 169–70 , 196
asides: Shakespeare, 98 , 100 Bunraku, 67 , 105–6
audiences: actors and, 10 , 24–5 , 26 , 29–42 Burbage, Richard, 24 , 25
, 103–20 ; Bali, 29–33 , 34 , 42 ;
Elizabethan, 9 , 27 , 34–42 , 98 , 101 ; Carleton, Sir Dudley, 63
involvement, 71–90 ; Jatra, 9–10 , 11 , Carlson, Marvin, 2
12 , 14–15 , 97 ; Marathi, 97–8 ; repetition Cavendish, Margaret: Contract, 64–5
and, 9–13 , 14 , 26 censorship, 51
audio-visual support, 165 ceremony, 53–70 , 134 ; see also ritual
Ayame, 112–14 Chamberlain’s Men, 7 , 24 , 48–9 , 126 , 170
Cheek by Jowl, 153–4

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 INDEX

Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 106 ensemble acting, 135 , 136 , 185 , 186 , 197;
Children’s Crusade, 67 see also ‘stars’
Chinese theatre, see Beijing Opera entrances and exits, 142 , 178 ; Jatra, 17 , 19,
‘choices’, 93 , 182 22 ; Kutiyattam, 72 ; Shakespeare, 20–2 ,
Christian ritual, 44–5 58–9 , 60
circus, 134 , 197 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 151
Civil War, English, 108 Essex, Earl of, 27
clowns, 72 , 99 , 122 , 157 exits, see entrances and exits
Cohen, Robert, 182 Eyre, Richard, 146 , 164
Comedy of Errors, The, 34
commedia dell’arte, 197 Father Christmas, 67
Condell, Henry, 24 Fielding, David, 164
Copeau, Jacques, 196 film, 69–70 , 107 , 139 , 150 , 162 , 163 ,
Coriolanus, 26 , 85 167, 193
costume, 152 ; Elizabethan, 7 , 19 , 20 , 167 Fo, Dario, 196
; Jatra, 8 , 15 , 16 , 19 , 22 ; Kutiyattam, folk-customs, 134
73 , 81 , 82 , 84 folk-dance: Seoul, 133
Craig, Gordon, 43 folk-plays: Gavari, 122 ; mummers’ plays, 32
cremation ritual, Balinese, 44 fool, see clowns
criticism, 105 , 139–43 , 189 , 198–9 football, 32 , 102
cross-gender casting, 8 , 107–20 ; onnagata, Forced Entertainment, 195
107–19 Ford, John, 119
crowd-scenes, 134 , 163 , 170 Foreman, Richard, 194
Crowden, Graham, 69 Forman, Simon, 27 , 179–80
Crowley, Bob, 163 ‘found spaces’, 196
cuts, 37 , 126 Four Days of Love, 97
Cymbeline, 27 , 47 Friel, Brian: Faith Healer, 194
Fukuoka Yagoshiro, 112–14
dance, 44 , 197 ; Elizabethan, 10–11 ; Jatra,
9 , 11 , 16 , 22 Gabriel, Peter, 197
Dench, Dame Judi, 96 Gargi, Balwant, 15–16 , 25
design, 162–72 Gavari, 122
Dionisotti, Paola, 69 Genesis, 197
directors, 132 , 144–61 Globe theatre: audience, 9 , 24 , 27 , 33–42 ,
door-keepers, 123 , 126 98 , 101 ; Panasonic, 58 ; reconstruction,
Dostoevski, Fyodor: Possessed, 56 190–1 , 192 ; replica, 7 ; staging, 109 ,
doubling of parts, 125 , 152–3 166–7 , 179–80 , 192
Downes, John, 109 Goffman, Erving, 66
Duchess of Malfi, The, 45 Greek drama, 43 , 48
Greenblatt, Stephen, 34 , 36
Eliot, T. S., 43 Guys and Dolls, 164
Emanuelle Enchanted, 195
endings, 142 ; Jatra, 13 ; Shakespeare, Hall, Sir Peter, 96 , 145
13–14 Hamlet, 40 , 41 , 59 , 84 , 88 , 89 , 99 , 117,
English Shakespeare Company, 154 155 , 156 , 187–8 ; acting, 174–7 , 184 ;

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Burbage, 24 ; clothes, 46 ; final scene, 13, exits, 17 , 19 , 22 ; lighting, 17 ; make-up,

85 , 128–9 ; Murder of Gonzago, 65 ; 8 ; music, 9 , 17 ; pace, 14 , 26 ; production
players, 24 ; repetition, 13 ; soliloquies, style, 16 ; repertoire, 23 ; repetition, 9–
92 , 177 ; story, 26 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 26 ; soliloquies, 17 , 22;
Hash, Dhiren, 14 , 16 , 22 stage-manager, 23 ; staging, 17–18 , 22 ,
Henry the Fourth, Part One, 17 , 41 , 99 , 26
154, 155 ; music, 126 ; second scene, 156; Jesus, 67
visual devices, 45 jig, see dance: Elizabethan
Henry the Fourth, Part Two, 99 , 154 Johnson, Terry: Hysteria, 194
Henry the Fifth, 42 , 61–2 , 88 , 144 , 154 , Jonson, Ben, 179 ; Volpone, 45
156 , 169 ; ceremony, 62 ; chorus, 180 , Julius Caesar, 62
181 ; ending, 13 , 157 ; sound effects,
127–8 ; structure, 38 Kabuki, 55 , 67 , 68 , 97 , 125 , 161 ; onnagata,
Henry the Sixth, Part One, 36 107–19
Henry the Sixth, Part Two, 36 Kara Juro: Music-box Cemetery, 55–6
Henry the Sixth, Part Three, 11 , 36 , 164–5 Karanth, B.V., 161
Henry the Eighth, 36 , 38 , 46 , 63–4 Kariyala, 122–3
Herbert, Sir Philip, 63 Kathakali, 68 , 122 , 133
Heywood, Thomas: Apology for Actors, 401 , Kawamura Takeshi: La Vie en Rose, 56
136 Kennedy, Dennis, 145 , 163
Himakaram, 73 Killigrew, Thomas, 123
‘hired men’, 126 King John, 12–13 , 45 , 46
Holland, Peter, 68–9 King Lear, 38 , 62–3 , 121–5 , 130 , 153 ,
Hopkins, Sir Anthony, 96 164, 182 ; audiences, 100–1 ; Burbage,
Hunt, Albert, 169–70 24; ceremony, 59–61 , 62–3 ; clothes,
Hytner, Nicholas, 164 46–7 ; entrances and exits, 58–9 , 60 ;
final scene, 14 , 85–9 , 124 , 100–1 , 165,
imagery, Shakespeare’s, 39–40 ; see also 167–9 , 170 , 178 ; opening scene, 65 ,
verbal scene-painting 124 ; Quarto and Folio, 14 , 39 , 86–7 ,
improvisation, 91–102 , 123 , 124 , 134 , 124 , 166 ; storm scenes, 124–5 , 157 ;
135 story, 26 ; structure, 38
Indian theatre, see Gavari; Jatra; Kariyala; King Qi’s Dream, 130
Kathakali; Kutiyattam; Marathi; Theyam King’s Men, 7 , 25 , 48–9 , 123
Iures, Marcel, 148 , 152 Kishida Rio: Woven Hell, 56
Kumar, Krishna, 134
Jameson, Fredric, 145 Kutiyattam, 72–84 , 85 , 91 , 94 , 103 , 122,
Japanese theatre, see Bunraku; Kabuki; No; 125 , 133 , 161 ; costume, 73 , 81 , 82 ,
7th Ward Theatre Company; Third 84 ; entrances and exits, 72 ; gods, 72 ,
Erotica Theatre Company 97 ; make-up, 81 , 82 , 84 ; music, 78–9 ;
Jatra, 8–28 , 50 , 97 , 102 , 103 , 122 , 125 , ritual, 77 ; staging, 72 ; training, 77
161 ; actors, 15–16 , 23–5 ; audience, 9– Kynaston, Edward, 109
10 , 11 , 12 , 14–15 ; characters, 22–3 ;
costumes, 8 , 15 , 16 , 19 , 22 ; crossgender ‘late monopoly capitalism’, 145–6
casting, 8 , 109 , 111 ; dance, 9 , 11 , 16 ; Lauren, Ellen, 185
décor, 22 ; endings, 13 ; entrances and Lepage, Robert, 104 , 197–8

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lighting, 17 , 95 , 158 , 162 , 163 , 164 , 165 Music-box Cemetery, 55–6

Littlewood, Joan, 196 musicals, 163 , 165 , 171
long runs, 159 , 173
Lorca, Federico García, 196 Nagananda, 79
Love’s Labours Lost, 38 , 41 Nair, Dr Appukuttan, 79
Lucifer, 67 Nashe, Thomas: Strange News, 24 ; Summer’s
Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 154 Last Will and Testament, 47
National Theatre, see Royal National Theatre
Macbeth, 40 , 61 , 85 , 89 , 152 , 177–8 , Natyasastra, 50
179–80 ; asides, 100 ; audience, 99–100 ; Neel Kothi, 25
ending, 85 , 124 ; English scene, 38 ; ritual, Nelson, Richard, 194
48 ; story, 26 , 27 ; structure, 38 New Delhi, National School of Drama, 121–5
McBurney, Simon, 160 Nightingale, Benedict, 164
McGrath, John, 196 Ninagawa, 145
Machado, Eduardo, 185 No, 55 , 67 , 125 , 161
McKellen, Sir Ian, 147 , 152 Noda Hideki, 66–9 , 70 , 161
Maheu, Gilles, 197
make-up: Beijing Opera, 131 ; Jatra, 8 ; O Tae-suk, 133
Kutiyattam, 81 , 82 , 84 O-Kuni, 108
Mamet, David, 69 , 160 Odalan, 29
Manningham, John, 27 Odeon Theatre of Bucharest, 146 , 148–9 ,
Marathi, 97–8 , 101 , 102 , 122 , 198 152
Margi Madhu, 71–84 Odin Teatret, 185–6
Marlowe, Christopher, 179 ; Tamburlaine,45 Old Vic, 154
Marston, John: Malcontent, 24 onnagata, 107–19
masks, 184 , 197 Orissa Opera, see Jatra
Measure for Measure, 154 Othello, 39 , 89 , 178 ; Burbage, 24 ; ending,
Medium, The, 135 14 , 85 , 170–1 ; entrances and exits, 21–
Merchant of Venice, The, 13 , 47 , 99 , 120 2 ; repetition, 14
‘Method, The’, 114 , 181 , 182 , 197
Middleton, Thomas, 119 Panasonic Globe, 58
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 41 , 47 , 88 , Panigrahi, Ramesh: House in Mid-River, 15 ,
153 , 180 25
Miller, Jonathan, 187–8 Paniker, Dr K. Ayyappa, 80 , 88
Mitchell, Katie, 160 , 164 Panikkar, K. N., 161 ; Poranadi, 133–4
Mnouchkine, Ariane, 104 , 145 Paris Garden, 167
Moscow Art Theatre, 181–4 patrons, 51 , 150
movement, 197 Pennington, Michael, 154
Much Ado About Nothing, 178 ; costumes,20; Pepys, Samuel, 109 , 123
ending, 13 ; first scene, 156–7 ; marriage performance, 71–90 , 173–89
scene, 46 ; sexuality, 110 performance art, 102 , 197
mummers’ plays, 32 Pericles, 38 , 47
music, 44 , 122 , 165 , 184 , 196 ; Balinese, Pinter, Harold, 69 ; Betrayal, 194
32 ; Jatra, 9 , 16 ; Kutiyattam, 78–9 ; Pogson, Kathryn, 187–8
Shakespeare, 126–7 , 128 , 167 pop musicians, 101–2 , 111

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Prisoner of Zenda, The, 67 , 68 Shanghai, Theatre Academy, 104

‘production numbers’, 124 Shanghai Beijing Opera Company, 132
projections, three-dimensional, 162 sharers, 48–9 , 126 , 156
properties, 7 , 46 , 95 , 167 Shepard, Sam: Buried Child, 194
public speakers, 101 Shunkan, 55
puppets, 105–7 , 125 silences, 87–8 , 142 , 171
Sly, William, 24
Red Bull theatre, 123 soap opera, 16
Reeves, Geoffrey, 169–70 soliloquies, 16 , 22 , 89 , 92 , 98 , 165 , 177
rehearsal, 93–4 , 94–5 , 123 , 132 , 145 , 150, Solomon, Alisa, 110–11
153 , 173 , 184 Sopanam Theatre Company, 133
repertory, 159 , 173 ; Elizabethan, 49 , 93 ; ‘soul’, 114 , 118
Jatra, 23 sound, 127–8 , 158 , 162 , 163 , 164 , 165
repetition, 53 , 173 ; Japanese theatre, 58 ; speech, 142–3 , 165 , 179 , 189
Jatra, 9–10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 26 ; spontaneity, see improvisation
Shakespeare, 11–13 , 14 , 39 , 69 sport, 32 , 102
Restoration theatre, 108 , 109 stage combat, 197
Rhaumukta, 25 stage directions: Shakespeare, 178
Richard the Second, 39 , 68–9 , 99 , 139 ,154 stage effects: Shakespeare, 165
, 156 ; deposition scene, 37 , 46 ; Essex stage machinery, 163
rebellion, 27 ; story, 26–7 ; structure, 37–8 stage management, 23 , 93 , 121–2 , 123 ,
Richard the Third, 99 , 146–9 , 152 , 156 , 124 , 155
164 ; ending, 124 , 170 ; music, 126–7 ; stage-keepers, 123 , 126
repetition, 11–12 ; structure, 36 , 37 ritual, staging: design, 162–72 ; Elizabethan, 20 ,
43–70 ; Balinese cremation, 44 ; Christian, 84 , 97 , 190 , 192 ; Jatra, 17–18 , 22 , 26;
44–5 ; Kutiyattam, 77 ; Shakespeare, 47– Kutiyattam, 72 ; Marathi, 97–8 ; open,
8 , 66 ; see also ceremony 7–28 ; settings, 162–72
Roman comedy, 34 stand-up comedians, 101 , 197
Romeo and Juliet, 89 , 91 , 99 ; ending, 13 , Stanislavski, Constantin, 181–4 ; Building a
84–5 ; repetition, 12 ; structure, 37 Character, 114 ; Creating a Role, 181
Royal National Theatre, 69 , 96 , 146–8 , ‘stars’, 76 , 97 ; see also ensemble acting
149 , 152 , 160 , 164 , 173 Stein, 104
Royal Shakespeare Company, 163 , 164 , story-telling, 26–8 , 39 , 44 , 51 , 140
165 , 173 Strasburg, Lee, see ‘Method, The’
street theatre, 97
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, 113 Strehler, 104 , 145
Saratoga International Theatre Institute, structure: Shakespeare, 34–8
134–5 Sturua, 145
scenography, 162–72 Subhadra Dhananjyan, 77
scholarship, 93 , 139–43 , 189 , 198–9 subtext, 181
Schumann, Peter, 196 Sullivan, H. S.,66
Seoul: folk dance, 133 superobjective, 182
sermons, 44 Suzuki Company of Toga, see Suzuki Tadashi
settings, 121–36 , 162 Suzuki Tadashi, 49 , 135 ; Waiting for Romeo,
7th Ward Theatre Company, 55 57–8
Shang Changrong, 130 , 131 Swod, Neerag, 122–3

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Take It Easy, 98 Tripathy, Byomakesh: Stop This Vulgar

Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, 45 Opera, 25–6
television, 54 , 150 , 162 , 163 , 167 , 193 Troilus and Cressida, 110 , 188
Tempest, The, 46 , 47 , 89 Twelfth Night, 92 , 178 ; ceremony, 61–2 ;
texts, 139–43 sexuality, 112 ; silences, 87 ; story, 27 ;
Theatre Academy, Shanghai, 104–5 structure, 37
Theatre de Complicite, 134–5 , 160 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 34–6
‘theatre studies’, 193
‘theatre games’, 197 verbal scene-painting, 89
Theyam, 161 video, 165 , 193
Third Erotica Theatre Company, 56 Vie en Rose, La, 56
Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, The, 135 Volpone, 45
Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 45
Times, The, 152 , 195 Wagner, Richard: Ring Cycle, 67
Timon of Athens, 63 , 169–70 Warner, Deborah, 69 , 160
Titus Andronicus, 21–2 Webster, John: Duchess of Malfi, The, 24 ,
Tokicho, 113 45; Malcontent, 24
topicality, 25–8 Whitehall, 63
touring, 104 , 159 ; Elizabethans, 7 , 9 ; Jatra, Wilson, Robert, 195
8–28 ; Marathi, 98 Winter’s Tale, The, 20 , 27 , 38 , 47
training, 77 , 136 , 173–89 , 191 Woodvine, John, 154
transvestite performers, see cross-gender Wooster Group, 195
casting workshops, 169
Traub, Valerie, 112 Woven Hell, 56

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