Vague Views

Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night
St. Georges Theatre, Chichester
The Observer

Last week I got my first glimpse of the St. Georges Theatre in Islington, dedicated to putting Shakespeare back were he belongs. The externals are plain: quaint music, doublet and hose, and an apron stage. This, of course, is the easy part; it brings us no nearer to an understanding of how the Elizabethans thought. If we are to find out, we will have to give the matter a lot more investigation than George Murcell, the director of the theatre and of its new Romeo and Juliet, can reasonably be expected to have had time for. 

When he declares that Shakespeare’s characters were ‘bounded by certain attitudes and beliefs relative to his time and not by modern political, ethical and psychological factors,’ he is talking obvious sense, though there may be more overlap between the two sensibilities than he allows. But he then goes on to tilt at productions which make ‘Hamlet an Oedipus complex melancholic and Julius Caesar a fascist dictator in the Hitler mode.’ But those are not today’s distortions; they belong to the thirties, when the second was tried out by Orson Welles and the first by Tyrose Guthrie—whom, funnily enough, Mr. Murcell names as one of his mentors. 

His views on modern Shakespeare production seem, in short, a bit vague. The chronology of Mr. Murcell’s own career and his invocation of Guthrie and Michael Benthall suggest to me that they really boil down to a feeling that Shakespeare was getting on very nicely in the 1950’s until Peter Hall and the Royal Shakespeare Company came along and spoiled everything. This is quite a widespread attitude within the profession and among theatregoers; having myself received my theatrical education at the Old Vic in the fifties, I may still unconsciously regard that style as the norm, and everything else as a mutation. But when I think clearly, I can see that it was no more ‘authentic’ or ‘Elizabethan’ than what has displaced it. 

There have, God knows, been absurdities perpetrated in the name of ‘making Shakespeare relevant.’ (Actually I don’t believe that you can make a play relevant; either it is or it isn’t. I doubt if you can even ‘bring out’ its relevance, though probably you can, accidentally or on purpose, obscure it.) But basically Mr. Murcell is bugged less by modern directors’ treatment of Shakespeare than by their treatment of actors. The dominance of the major companies has led to the disenfranchisement, in the name of some rather academic conceptions of theatrical taste, of a whole parade of players. Some, like Mr. Murcell himself, have gone rapidly through these companies and come out the other side. Others have never got in; in these terms, Mr. Murcell has a lot going for him. 

However sympathetic many of us may be to the RSC ethic (which is what we read about), we have become increasingly resistant to the RSC mannerisms (which are what we actually see). Here Mr. Murcell’s Romeo scores heavily over this year’s production at Stratford. It is refreshing to find that double-entendres can hit their mark without laborious underlining; that a clown (Ronnie Stevens) can be a clown and not an angry underdog; and that they young men of Verona do not have to be irredeemably vicious. David Collings’s Mercutio is even quite likeable; his Queen Man speech, in the displaced lyrical tradition, for once makes atmospheric sense. 

Peter McEnery’s Romeo is interesting though; he does not actually duel with Tybalt and Paris, just goes up to them and stabs them. Sarah Badel’s Juliet is tough, too, though this is more an inbuilt facet of her personality than of her interpretation. The two are at war, but it is a thrilling battle and since all Miss Badel’s skill and intelligence are exercised in Juliet’s cause, not her own, she has some ecstatic moments; her stillness after her one night with Romeo is very moving. She is hampered by a muscat Nurse (Rosemary Leach) who comes on like her older sister; altogether too bright and personable to sort with the text. 

C. Walter Hodges’s permanent set may have the prescribed number of balconies and alcoves, but is garishly coloured and looks strangely insubstantial. Mr. Murcell directs for the open stage by stringing his actors across it, even in conversational scenes. Extras, reacting, look lost; routine naturalism is occasionally disturbed for the sake of a picturesque but improbable grouping. There is not, in short, much style, but there is plainness and energy, and for Romeo, a narrative play, this works better than the more rarefied treatments we are used to. 

I can see that it would have done less well for Twelfth Night, a mood piece, though I doubt if the St. Georges production of the play (which I missed) was worse than the one that opened last week at Chichester. Keith Michell, like Mr. Murcell an artistic director at large on his own stage for the first time, opts for regulation Chichester gaiety: lots of romping but no actual comedy. High life is pallid, low life denatured: Barbara Windsor’s Maria even looks flat-chested. Gordon Jackson’s Malvolio proves, for the second time this season, that this actor is no soloist. 

In its last stages the production lurches surprisingly towards melancholy, allowing Tony Robinson to suggest that his Feste might have been quite interesting. Bill Fraser, Michele Dotrice and Charles Keating also have moments. Mr. Mitchell places important scenes in corners of the stage, leaving the centre to attendants in whose reactions, with no ill will towards them, I was not much interested. There being so much Shakespeare, I defer Stratford’s new Winter’s Tale until next week.