From the King (Continued)September 29th 2007 |
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POGUE HAMLET BLOG TWO
September 29, 2007
“Words, Words, Words…” as Hamlet says somewhere…and now that the play has been roughly blocked by our valiant director, Rick St. Peter (though it’s constantly being re-blocked, refined, and polished), it’s time to start concentrating on the words, not just memorizing them, but weighing them, savouring them, penetrating their value and meaning (though much of this has already been done long before rehearsals began), weaving them into our soul, psyche, and inner being so that they pour forth as a natural inevitability.
Though all line-learning (“learning” a much better choice than “memorizing”…because there is more to it than mere memorization; “learning” evokes a much deeper sense of the process an actor engages in to serve the playwright’s words and make them his own) has gotten a bit more torturous with age, I’ve always found Shakespeare relatively easy to learn. The flow of the verse certainly helps, as does his punctuation, word choice, and alliteration (“That we with wisest sorrow…”; “Whereto serves mercy but to confront the visage of the offence? And what’s in prayer but this twofold force, to be forestalled ere we come to fall…” How can one not learn such singing sounds and phrases but quickly?).
I have been told by some who might know that I seem to have a certain facility with Shakespeare’s language. If true, I’m not sure where this comes from. Though I have always considered myself a classical actor by affinity (my acting career has been pretty much evenly divided between the classics and the modern American comedies and British sex farces that were the staple of dinner theatre fare) and my first job was in a Shakespearean theatre, I have not really done all that much Shakespeare. My biggest roles during my Shakespeare gig were always in that non-Shakespearean classic third play they did every season.
Still I remember two lovely compliments paid me during my tenure there. On the second or third day in residence, my director for THE TEMPEST had me declaim the one sizable speech I had in my small role of Fransciso (a speech, if memory serves, about seeing the King’s son making for shore after the tempest), lauding it to the cast as an example of clear, crisp, simple verse-speaking (I later graduated to Ferdinand in this play; a part I learned in 24 hours after the actor playing it had been injured).
The other compliment was opening night after Macbeth, in which I played Malcolm. Actress Claire Luce, who was there directing, rushed up to me backstage and gushed, “It’s so good to hear a VOICE in the theatre again!” As Miss Luce made her mark on the American stage playing Curly’s wife in the original production of OF MICE & MEN, had danced with Fred Astaire to Night and Day in THE GAY DIVORCE, and had been the first American ever to play Stratford-On-Avon (as Viola in TWELFTH NIGHT), you can see why I cherish the remark.
But I’ve never played any of the great… or even big… roles of Shakespeare (Claudius will be the biggest). I’ve done sizable roles in other verse dramas and classics, but I’ve never had any formal classical training.
And while I’ve made an educated foray into Shakespeare’s works and their production history that surpasses the average layman, I’m certainly no scholar. I’ve several book shelves devoted to the Bard, seen at least 27 plays out of canon (too many productions of some of them); read or heard recordings of even more (Timon of Athens and a few others still elude me); but have never encountered any of the disputed works or collaborations…the Edward III’s, Cardenio’s, or Two Noble Kinsmen and such like.
I vaguely remember UK theatre professors Charles Dickens and Wally Briggs in my undergraduate years doing some work on speaking Shakespeare; maybe some of it stuck, but I have no distinct memory of it. English professors Ben Black and Connie Drake certainly stoked my intellectual romance with Shakespeare, but I still have no idea how I achieved any skill I might have performing it.
Of course, I could be kidding myself, and I may not have any skill in it at all. But the other night I thumbed a copy of Sir Peter Hall’s SHAKESPEARE’S ADVICE TO THE PLAYERS. Hall insists that all the actor’s clues are in Shakespeare’s text: “Shakespeare tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow; when to pause, when to come in on cue and when to accent a word…He tells the actor when, but never why or how…”
I more or less understand this intellectually but get tentative when it comes to consciously fathoming rhythm, meter, stresses, etc. and tend to get bogged down in terms like “caesura” or “enjambment”. But I agree with Sir Peter (my favourite director, by the way) that it’s all in the text. The lovely thing about Shakespeare is you have only the words; very few stage directions that elucidate anything.
Anyway, I perused a section of the book where Hall breaks down in detail Claudius’ “O my offense is rank” speech and was delighted find that it pretty much confirmed my performing instincts and I was fairly on the mark.
So, if I’ve actually grasped anything about playing Shakespeare, where did I pick it up? Osmosis? Funny as that sounds, that would be my guess. My training was all that reading of the plays I did. All those Shakespeare movies, all those plays, all those Caedmon recordings I used to watch or listen to. My tutors have been Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson (both Ralph and Ian), Dench, Tutin, O’Toole, Burton, Scofield, McKellen, Jacobi, Branagh, Barrymore, so many others…All those years of watching and listening and reading about their productions and processes must have paid off somewhere and penetrated my little sponge-like brain to where it picked up a teeny smattering of their inestimable examples. I certainly hope so.
More anon.
Charles Edward Pogue
Mr. Pogue appears courtesy of Actor's Equity Association
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