Thoughts on Shakespeare: Remembering The Aldwych
The Observer

After 21 years the Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican-bound, has vacated the Aldwych Theatre. The Aldwych has been taken over by a commercial management, which will begin its reign by presenting the RSC in Good. Good. 

I suppose it’s traditional to leave home on your twenty-first birthday. It is anyway an irresistible cue for a retrospective. But first, a digression. A series of books is about to be launched by Cambridge University Press: its title, Directors in Perspective. The first two volumes deal with Ingmar Bergman and Peter Stein; future subjects are Roger Blin, Peter Brook, Joseph Chaikin, Jerzy Grotowski and—representing the deceased—Appia, Brecht, Craig, Reinhardt and Stanislavsky. There is something numbingly predictable about that list: not so much who is on as who is off it. 

When the series was announced last year, I was prepared to lay odds that the editors were not commissioning monographs on, say, Trevor Nunn or Michael Blakemore or even—despite his unexampled output here and abroad—Tyrone Guthrie. It would be wrong to say that Guthrie never theorised—he evangelised constantly for the open stage—but academics always thought him frivolous and he would probably have agreed with them. 

In the American theatre one hardly expects serious attention to be paid to the men who have really done the work—to Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan or Hal Prince. Who in France cares any more about Jean Vilar, whose Théâtre National Populaire was in its day the beau ideal of a subsidised rep?

I am not knocking the chosen few. The dead ones are important as influences (and the case of Craig, whose actual directing career was negligible, as nothing else) and I have seen brilliant work from all but one of the living. But I do get the impression that they have qualified on their ideas, especially when written down, rather than on their practice; Brook once wrote a wonderful article called ‘Don’t Be Bamboozled by Theories,’ which should be required reading for everyone concerned, not expecting its author. 

The RSC has frequently been praised or damned as a director’s theatre, but it seems that by international standards it has still a long way to go; whether one wants it to is another question. Assembling my memories, I find myself aware of directors but not usually to the detriment of either actors or plays. This pleases but surprises me. 

First, let us classify the product. Aldwych shows have divided into those born in London and those imported from Stratford; and over the 21 years the second category has become increasingly dominant. Peter Hall’s first stated plan was to stiffen a repertory of classics and new plays with the occasional proven Shakespeare. From his first Stratford season in 1960 he chose for London his own production of Twelfth Night, whose acting, as seen from the upper circle by this jaundiced 17-year-old, had faded to almost nothing. 

A few months later it was supplemented by a far livelier Taming of the Shrew; Kate was Vanessa Redgrave, already glorious for her Stratford Rosalind, which soon and duly came to London. Her performance is legendary, and the production should be; this As You Like It was the only play directed for the RSC by Michael Elliott, a loss for both parties. It was more benevolent in tone than was to prove typical of the company, but it heralded an era of microscopic scrutiny of the text, which, here at least, was never portentous; the opposition of court and country was illuminated, but not heavily underlined, as sometimes happened in later years. 

These were all decorative productions, the legacy of a previous regime at Stratford. Sterner and bitterer times were heralded by Peter Hall’s sandpit Troilus and Cressida, a miracle of balance and Hall’s best Shakespeare production ever; relieved by Clifford Williams’s Comedy of Errors, hilarious but simple; and definitely embodied by Peter Brook’s unforgiving King Lear, with its leather costumes and visible thunder-sheets, with Paul Scofield’s growling Lear and, in Irene Worth, a Goneril who managed to make ‘pluck out his eyes’ sound sympathetic. 

The authority with which Brook imposed his vision made us wish, in retrospect, that he had tackled the whole play: roughly, he cut the redemptive bits. The production is now—and I say this without prejudice to the excitement with which I watched it at the time—intellectually discredited. So, for other reasons, is the crowning achievement of those early years, the War of the Roses cycle. It no longer seems as permissible as it did then for John Barton to rewrite even junior Shakespeare; you can tell the difference, and the endeavour reeks of a desire to make Shakespeare say what you think a twentieth-century audience wants him to say, thereby selling both sides short. This production—the power game in three instalments—set a fashion; from now on barons were to be mistrusted on sight. (When they actually proved traitors, the surprise was gone.) All this, though true, is very unfair. The Hall-Barton production was more than a concept; there was immediate life in every minute of its 11-hour progress. Peggy Ashcroft went through it all in the same role, girl to crone. I have never cheered anyone louder. 

Actors were being taught subtly of speech, though this did not always equal subtlety of characterisation; often in fact it was reductive; of Barton’s Troilus, overheated, overrated. Brook lit the next beacon with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which saw in the Seventies. Everybody loved it or hated it; everybody but me. I thought it looked lovely and was fun, especially the juggling, but those who claimed that it redefined the play can never have read or seen it. The lovers are always played young and comic, the clowns are usually funnier and therefore richer; and, apart from a fine Titania and Puck, the acting was nothing special. 

I found it far less enlightening and invigorating than Barton’s bitter-sweet productions of All’s Well That Ends Well and Twelfth Night both crammed with high comic performances, the former an explosion, the latter a miracle of sustained tone. Both were radical improvements on their Stratford selves; this came to be expected of the RSC, a tough break for other management who have to get it right first time. 

In general energy was slackening; productions were becoming cerebral and the cerebrations were producing odd results. Nunn’s Roman cycle, brought wholesale to London, revealed a painful lack of personality in supporting ranks; Nicol Williamson’s anguished Coriolanus showed everyone up. 

Revival came in two stages. Terry Hands, whose earlier productions had been carnivals of overwrought flamenco acting, simmered down for a rousing series of English Henries (though his later Richards showed him slipping back into his old ways); Nunn recruited a largely new and breezy company that restored our faith in ensemble. 

His Macbeth with Williamson had been the RSC at its worst, straining painfully after new insights; his Macbeth with Ian McKellan and Judi Dench was the RSC at its best, the insights coming unstrained and at a rate of one line. We are seeing far more Shakespeare at the Aldwych than we used to: Stratford seasons transplanted whole. Partly, we were told, this was for reasons of company morale; it must also have had to do with there being a guaranteed audience for Shakespeare. 

It has meant, though, that new plays have been fewer than ever, mostly siphoned off to the Warehouse. Once the Aldwych virtually had Pinter as a house playwright, but when Hall went National, he went too. They persevered with David Mercer; and were rewarded, in After Haggerty, with one good play out of four. There was Stoppard’s Travesties, and there have been a couple by Peter Nichols, both fine, though neither had much to do with the RSC as a company. The Aldwych was never a playwright’s theatre, though the taste in modern drama paralleled attitudes to Shakespeare. 

First it was dressy: Giraudoux, Anouilh, John Whiting; they they discovered Beckett and Pinter. The RSC has fully exercised its prerogative of not being the National Theatre committed to a broad-based repertoire. It started out with The Dutchess of Malfi, but has done few Jacobeans since, though Nunn’s Revenger’s Tragedy and Alchemist, both Stratford transplants, were triumphs. The company’s addiction to things Russian has become a joke, but a good-natured one; there has been at least one Gorki too many, but Russian realism, in novel and drama, is the nearest thing there is to Shakespearean inclusiveness, so it fits. 

Only Dickens competes; and there is no doubt that the glory of Nicholas Nickleby could only have been encompassed by a Shakespearean company. It connects too with the appetite for showbiz demonstrated in Once in a Lifetime and the musical Comedy of Errors, and with the good theatrical equation of quality and quantity as in The Greeks. Company attitudes seem to me fundamentally sounder than at any time since the heady early Sixties. 

I should have mentioned many more actors; Ian Richardson who was there at the start and put in 13 years becoming supremely accomplished, Tony Church who seems never to act on anyone else’s stage and Patrick Stewart ditto, Holm, Howard, Pasco, Sinden, Suzman…. But we have lost two superb actors who never played wth either major company, though doubtless they were asked; Alan Badel—who in his generation ranks with Burton and Scofield—and Harry H. Corbett. Both died prematurely; both, maybe, had the careers they wanted. But not leave in their wake a feeling of waste.