Studio Shakespeare

The Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place

Alycia Smith-Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351897228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

An extensive history of The Royal Shakespeare Company's studio theatre, Studio Shakespeare: The Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place also includes a biography of its founder and first artistic director, Mary Ann 'Buzz' Goodbody (1947-75). Alycia Smith-Howard reveals how, as a socialist, feminist, and the RSC's first female director, Goodbody sought to invigorate classical theatre and its approach to producing the works of Shakespeare. The Other Place, which opened its doors in 1973, was her greatest achievement, and was, in the words of Ron Daniels of the American Repertory Theatre, 'a training ground for an entire generation of Shakespeare actors and directors'. The volume examines Shakespeare productions at The Other Place from 1973 to its closure in 1989. The author's sources include Goodbody's 'Mission Statement' for the studio theatre as well as other previously unavailable materials such as Goodbody's private papers, journal entries, director's notes and correspondence. In addition, it contains interviews and commentary from such theatrical luminaries as Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Ben Kingsley, Cicely Berry, Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall, Patrick Stewart, and many others. Smith-Howard's narrative discusses productions of twelve plays at The Other Place, among them King Lear (1974), Hamlet (1975), The Merchant of Venice (1978), Antony and Cleopatra (1982), King John (1988) and Othello (1989). The cast lists of productions at The Other Place are included in an appendix. Smith-Howard's study captures the spirit and ethos of an important and radical exercise in theatre which influenced the mainstream work of The Royal Shakespeare Company. It is a lucid, compelling and valuable contribution not only to Shakespeare studies but also to theatre history. This book, as directors once said, 'has legs'.

Chapter 1
New Beginnings and Methods of Change

From its humble beginnings in 1974 to its closing in 1989 The Other Place combined the excitement and social challenge of the fringe and alternative theatre movement with the classical strength and tradition of the RSC. The Other Place was the product of a long history of experiment, change and development that occurred at the RSC – and elsewhere – between 1950 and 1970.

Before the so-called overnight revolution set off by several minor skirmishes within the arts and elsewhere around 1955–56, British theatre is said to have been dominated by ‘sofas, fireplaces and ashtrays filled with water.’¹ The Second World War devastated British theatre. Many theatres faced bankruptcy, were sold and subsequently converted into cinemas. Powerful companies and a small group of owners dominated the profession and controlled every facet of the medium. The Tennant Company and such organizations as Prince Littler’s Consolidated Trust, or ‘The Group,’ greatly influenced the theatrical tastes of their generation.²

During the 1950s, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon established a ‘very Tennant’s’³ style of production. This style relied upon the force of the best star actors, exquisite and sumptuous costuming, elaborate decor and superbly designed settings. The yearly Shakespeare seasons under the direction of Anthony Quayle and Glen Byam Shaw operated largely on the premise of a star system. This meant that the productions centred on the presence of such performers as Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, Charles Laughton, Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft. Some critics claimed that more often than not audiences flocked to see the star players as opposed to the plays themselves.

In 1955, the London stage had more than its share of musicals, largely American imports, alongside two notable seasons: John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft in King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing at the Palace Theatre; and Peter Brook with Paul Scofield, presenting Hamlet, The Family Reunion, and The Power and the Glory at the Phoenix Theatre. However, the two most popular productions of 1955 were The Chalk Garden, a high comedy by Enid Bagnold, and Romanoff and Juliet, a satirical commentary on the relationship between the superpowers by Peter Ustinov that brought Romeo and Juliet into the twentieth century. Productions of works by non-British dramatists proved the most critically successful and most progressive at the time – such as Pirandello’s Henry IV, which first appeared in London in 1942 and Camus’s Caligula (1944). Judging solely by the number of productions Jean Anouilh was the most successful dramatist in London after the war: Antigone (1949) with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier; Point of Departure (1950); Ring Round the Moon directed by Peter Brook (1950); The Rehearsal (1950); Ardele, Time Remembered, and Waltz of the Toreadors (1952); followed by The Lark (1955), and Becket (1959).⁴

European influences, however, were at their most visible in London’s theatre underground which buzzed with the names of Beckett and Brecht. Peter Hall made his name directing the premiere of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre in 1955. This challenging and daring play had achieved enormous success on the Continent over the previous years, but had no such reputation in Britain. Initially it was met with hostility from audiences and critics, but it was then ‘saved’ by laudatory reviews from Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan.⁵ The next year (1956) Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble visited Britain for the first time. The German playwright’s epic theatre provided a model for social critique that functions within the dramatic text and its performance. Samuel Beckett’s dramaturgy, as understood in association with existentialist philosophy, has often been defined as antithetical to Bertholt Brecht’s political theatre. Both dramatists however, utilized images of authority and oppression to set the boundaries of human behaviour and focused on master and servant, ruler and follower relationships. The dramaturgy of both playwrights can also be described as a type of theatrical archaeology which exposed the mechanisms of political dominance and gave the oppressed a voice. For both Beckett and Brecht, the act of theatrical performance was vital as it constituted ‘the activity of those who occupy the periphery of society and who articulate and refract the structures of the dominate centre from the perspective of marginalisation.’⁶

The works of Brecht and Beckett exemplified the objectives of the avantgarde and also revitalized activity within classical theatre. Classic texts were reinterpreted by way of the analytical structures that developed in response to avant-garde texts and new forms of theatrical performance. The methods and theories of Epic theatre and the Theatre of the Absurd greatly influenced the RSC’s social and philosophical approaches to Shakespeare production and influenced its aesthetic course in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1960s have been described as a pathfinding decade for the staging of Shakespearean drama. The need to create an illusion of uncomplicated enchantment was thought to be no longer the director’s primary goal, as it had seemed to be in the 1950s. Instead directors searched for and focused on the social and political currents running through Shakespeare’s texts. During this time of social and political upheaval, directors not only emphasized the social and political tensions already embedded in those texts but placed alongside them their own society’s contemporary issues and gave them voice through Shakespeare.

Peter Hall was appointed Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1960. His main objective was to ‘express Shakespeare’s intentions in terms that modern audiences could understand.’⁷ Hall believed this could only be achieved by cross-fertilizing the company’s work on Shakespeare with work on modern texts. He stressed that actors needed the edge of modern ideas to cut through all that lies between Shakespeare and a contemporary audience; while the experience of handling Shakespeare would bring vitality into the staging of new works. To accomplish this, Hall opened a venue for the RSC in London, at the Aldwych Theatre, for the presentation of a mixed repertoire of neglected classics and commissioned work from new writers. This provided actors and directors with a fresh outlook and approach to theatre that ensured the company’s continual growth and change. Instead of five productions a year at Stratford-upon-Avon, there were now six, plus a further eight or nine at the Aldwych. He also created the ‘Royal Shakespeare Company’ and changed the name of the Memorial Theatre to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre:

The title Royal Shakespeare Company helps us … ‘It’s got everything in it except God!’ And it is a good commercial title, but it also has an enormous danger. It makes us sound antique, square, institutional, conservative, traditional … We are none of these things. We want to run a popular theatre. We want to get people who have never been to the theatre – and particularly the young – to see our plays.⁸

The year 1962 was also pivotal in the artistic development of the RSC. During this year designer John Bury, and directors Michel Saint-Denis and Peter Brook joined the company. John Bury, who had previously spent eight years with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, revolutionized design at Stratford-upon-Avon. Bury was strongly opposed to the traditional philosophy of the role of designer as one of merely prettying the scenery to create a sort of fairy-tale unreality. He discontinued the Company’s use of painted canvas to illustrate setting, and opted for bare, empty stages. At the same time he used real materials, odd chairs and ‘heaps of junk’⁹ to establish a realistic reality on stage. He created the fluid, functional and coherent scenic language that has since characterized Stratford’s style of the period.

As General Artistic Adviser, Saint-Denis’s primary objective was studio work and actor training. For this he founded the RSC Actors’ Studio; which was initially housed in a tent on the Stratford lawn before a tin hut was constructed for this purpose. In establishing the Actors’ Studio, Saint-Denis’s aim was to further develop each actor’s individual potential and to assist them collectively in a continual exploration of varying forms of staging and modes of performance. Tuition was offered in singing, period and modern movement, fencing, mask work and mime. Acting technique exercises included work on Greek tragedy, music-hall performance, miracle plays, and non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama, Molière, Chekhov and Brecht. Actors also experimented with materials other than dramatic texts, such as: diaries, sermons, letters and poems.¹⁰ The exercises culminated with the presentation of in-house productions, which provided opportunities for actors and directors to experiment in varying capacities: actors directed, stage managers acted, men played women’s parts and so on. Saint-Denis had a deep suspicion of any theatrical method or dogma that inhibited questions or denied change. His goal was to challenge his actors and impart to them the richness of dramatic experience. For him, acting was ‘Not a trick to be learned but rather a revelation of the whole human personality.’¹¹

When Peter Brook joined the directorate he hoped to develop a new dynamic for the company as a whole. Brook’s contribution to the Royal Shakespeare Company and to theatre in general has been immense. A sworn enemy of what he has termed ‘Deadly Theatre,’ he advocated vital and relevant performance which sparked people’s senses. In his landmark text The Empty Space he declared, ‘Nowhere does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of Shakespeare.’¹² Brook combined the colour and poetry of Shakespeare with the vitality and vibrancy of modern masters Artaud, Kott, Beckett and Brecht for his landmark production of King Lear (1962). King Lear provided Brook with a forum for confronting Shakespeare with modern sensibilities. Artaud’s visions of a theatre that disturbed and confronted its spectators through the vestiges of ritual, mime, music and song greatly influenced this production and much of Brook’s later work. In 1963–64 Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz organized a series of club performances of experimental work entitled ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ for the RSC at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) studio theatre. The most intriguing and controversial work of this series was Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (known as the Marat/Sade). Weiss’s work captured for Brook ‘a theatrical language as agile and penetrating as the Elizabethans’,’ and provided ‘the raw material of a total theatre,’ a revolution in terms of stylistic experimentation that challenged sensibilities.¹³ Other performances included David Rudkin’s equally controversial ‘Afore Night Come, Artaud’s Spurt of Blood, Jean Genet’s The Screens, John Arden’s Ars Longa Vita Brevis, Marowitz’s 28-minute collage version of Hamlet and a mime based on Richard’s wooing of Lady Anne from Richard III. There was also a staged reading of a letter from the Lord Chamberlain that detailed the particular cuts he required in a previous RSC production. Arguably the most suc...