Exposed by the Mask

Form and Language in Drama

Sir Peter Hall

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781840029932
• eBook ISBN: 9781849432603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

In these four lectures Peter Hall reveals a lifetime of discoveries about classical theatre, Shakespeare, opera and modern drama. The central argument is that form and structured language paradoxically give freedom to power of thought and feeling, much as the masks of early Greek drama enabled actors to express extreme emotion. The mask may take many forms – the precise language of Beckett and Pinter, the classical form of Mozart's operas, or Shakespeare's verse. Reprinted to form part of the Oberon Masters series, a brand new collection of attractive hardbacks on key themes within the arts written by leading lights in each subject.

The Metaphors of Beckett and Pinter

DRAMA CAN BE expressed in many ways – mime and song, dance and shadow-play, mask and marionette. But whatever the means of representing dramatic action, nothing for me surpasses the power of the word, and particularly the power of the word when it defines or prompts that action. In plays, the word defines silence. In opera, the word inspires the composer to create the music. Allied to the word, the half-anticipated, yet still surprising change of key recharges the action. Shakespeare’s words can provide us with great antithetical paradoxes that illuminate the mind; and his metaphors fire the imagination in scene after scene.

In the theatre, the word always focuses. It is the telling of the story, the narrative that holds an audience. And it is the word that makes theatre complex and ambiguous. Pinter’s eloquent and emotionally shattering pauses are created by the words that surround them. He speaks by not speaking. The paradox of the life-enhancing despair of Beckett is conveyed by the beauty of his Anglo-Irish cadences; and the long, lyrical sentences of Tennessee Williams (with their great dependent clauses from the deep South, always redefining, qualifying, expanding) reveal the heat of his characters’ emotions at the very moment that they are trying to hide it.

I have found that the most useful guide to directing a living playwright’s work is to listen carefully to his speech. Not his dramatic speech, but his speech in life. The tone of his voice is naturally never far away from his dialogue. Whether it be Pinter’s assertive, staccato phrases that are followed by sudden silences; Shaffer’s infinitely antithetical qualifications; Stoppard’s dry yet highly illuminating wit; David Hare’s cryptic and passionate dialectic challenges; or the rueful, haunting repetitions of Samuel Beckett, they all help us hear the writer. It is invaluable knowledge for the rehearsal room.

These modern masters are often thought to write naturalistic dialogue. But of course they don’t – just as Ibsen and Strindberg didn’t. All of them are in a sense poetic dramatists. They use words – even colloquialisms – as metaphors that mean much more than their literal sense. All good dramatists have a style that is personal to them — a precise style expressed by an individual voice. But however formed their dialogue may be, it can never be allowed to destroy the audience’s belief that they are sensible to accept it as normal speech. If it lacks that conviction, they will judge it artificial. It may well be on the borderline of acceptance: that is the excitement of much of Shakespeare’s craggier verse. But however structured and formal it is, the audience must always finally accept it as “real” speech.

Just as in the classics, the phrases of the principal modern dramatists are formed and crafted. They have a shape and an economy and a precision which the actor ignores at his peril. If he tries to make Pinter more “naturalistic” by ignoring his pauses, or Tennessee Williams more colloquial by splitting his long sentences into Brando-like stutters, he will simply ruin the potency of the writing. And it is not easy to play any of these dramatists. Their form must be assimilated and endorsed like an intricate piece of music. Bernard Shaw’s sentences need pursuing to their very ends if the energy of his arguments is to be kept dramatic. It is a disaster to play him slowly or to play semicolons as full-stops. I never met Shaw, but I have heard recordings of him. He is always the public orator, hypnotising us with the torrent of his words. And that is the basis of his style and the style of most of his leading characters. Shaw is the Fabian idealist who has the energy to make political rhetoric sexy. Play him naturalistically, and you dry out his characters and they cease to be people.

How does the use of language differ between plays and novels, or between plays and poetry? The novel can be naturally discursive; the pace can be slow or speedy. There is time. There is also always a productive tension between the authorial voice and the dialogue spoken by the characters. Something may be said; but the author can tell us what is really meant.

Poetry to be read can obviously be much more complicated than speech designed for the stage. There is a limit to what we can untangle in the theatre in the fleeting moment. An audience never has much time. And on stage, the actors know it takes only a few seconds to lose the audience’s attention for minutes, if not for good. A line that is unclear or pretentious (or badly spoken) can drop the tension and lose the audience’s belief. So our playwrights must give us language that is packed, arresting, multi-faceted, and set it in a dramatic situation which supports it or may indeed sometimes contradict it. There is frequently tension between what the line says and the context in which it is delivered. This makes drama. Oberon’s:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

begins one of the finest lyrics in the English language. But it is delivered by a character who is enjoying the beauty of the flower-decked wood because it is in malicious contrast to his purpose. He aims to drug his wife so that she falls instantly in love with a passing monster, horrible if possible:

Wake when some vile thing is near

is how this rhapsody ends.

In this fairy world, love leads inevitably to lust. After the heady description of the flowers, the bathos of this line should get a laugh. And any dramatist will tell you that if an audience laughs, they have understood. The plot is now set up for the arrival of Bottom the ass.

The language of a play is always informed by the dramatic situation. And this tension must be cultivated and understood by the reader. He or she must never forget that this is public utterance, designed for a public space. It is not possible to go back, to read it again or to hear it again. The communication must therefore be instantaneous. It may be that the words are being used to cover rather than parade the emotions of the characters. The reader must also understand that when this is enacted live, the hiding paradoxically reveals the emotion. Chekhov’s characters are constantly exposed by their masks. Or the words may be straightforward, plain up-front narrations of emotional states as in Greek drama or early Shakespeare. The reader is dealing then with the palpable, not the hidden or the qualified. In soliloquy, the character will be dealing with direct public address, so the reader must never forget the response from the audience. A live audience has high adrenalin: it has a quick instinctive apprehension of words, a love of wit, a love of surprise and a love of metaphor. And it is very ready to laugh. An audience is quicker than any reader, more instinctive, and collectively more intelligent than most of the individuals who make up its numbers.

Perhaps naturalism in the theatre is therefore not enough – it can be seen as a limited, and often inadequate use of the theatre’s imaginative power. We can now see the last one hundred and fifty years of naturalism as a passing phase. The theatre can do more, much more than convince the audience that they are watching a slice of real life. And though masters like Strindberg, O’Casey and Williams transcended naturalism with their dialogue and made great efforts to strip away the unnecessary realities of their stages, most theatre was until recently imprisoned in a literal representational style that became increasingly moribund. It was inert because it had lost its metaphorical strength, its capacity to mean beyond itself. Opening the curtains in Ibsen was a strongly illuminating symbol for the audience of 1870 because until then the theatre hadn’t had window curtains to open. It was therefore a metaphor that had an impact. Light was being let in on darkness and the characters were likewise confronting reality. But today, the action is unremarkable and ordinary. At most, it is decorative. And if we understand its metaphorical meaning, we will judge it as obvious. Its potency has not taken long to fade.

T. S. Eliot wrote:

A verse play is not a play done into verse, but a different kind of play...The poet with ambitions of the theatre, must discover the laws, both of another kind of verse and of another kind of drama.

I would go further. I believe that no play is worth our attention unless we can describe it as a poetic play. Because only the poetic play makes metaphors rich enough to persuade the audience to play the essential dramatic game of make-believe and use its imagination.

But I do not mean necessarily a play that uses poetry in the literary sense; rather a play that uses all the vocabulary of the theatre – word, action, visual image, subtext – to be dramatically poetic. In our age of the screen, provoking our imagination is the unique strength of the theatre – the imaginings encouraged by a live performance. Poetic theatre can deal with the widest subjects, the most improbable transitions. We can imagine we are anywhere. We can imagine the heights and the depths of feeling. Though verse is not a prerequisite of this metaphorical potency, form is – it represents the means to encourage a metaphorical interpretation of the play’s language or action. Or both. Too often for Eliot and his contemporaries (Auden, Isherwood, certainly Fry) the term “verse play” indicates that verse has been tacked on to a prosaic text, the images decorating it like a collection of sequins on a rather homespun dress.

The desire to return to poetic drama was obviously a reaction to the naturalistic revolution, but I think it misunderstood how imagination is provoked in the theatre. The so-called poetic revival of the late 1890s with the plays of Arthur Symons, Yeats and Stephen Phillips were responses to the naturalism of Pinero, Shaw, Galsworthy and even of Granville Barker.

But the great plays have always been and always will be poetic plays. Granville Barker is to me a poetic dramatist because though he created a verbal style as particular as Henry James, it is acceptable as the speech of men. Shakespeare did it so consummately that the British wonder every forty or fifty years why others don’t follow him. So there is a “poetic” revival – usually with fanciful language grafted on to workaday dramatics. But the revival is inevitably self-conscious. Antonin Artaud called for a poetry of the theatre, rather than poetry in the theatre. I subscribe to that. Artaud has given a precise description which will serve for any great drama. And it will serve for Shakespeare’s verse: he writes poetry of the theatre, not poetry in the theatre.

The aim of the theatre as a whole is to restore its art, and it should commence by banishing from the theatre this idea of impersonation, this idea of reproducing nature; for, while impersonation is in the theatre, the theatre can never become free.

So wrote Gordon Craig at the beginning of the twentieth century in The Art of the Theatre. (This is still an essential book for anyone who believes in theatre.) What Craig proclaimed has now actually happened. The theatre is freer of decoration, freer of unnecessary reality than it has been for one hundred and fifty years. Less is clearly more. Yet it is one of the few experiences left in the information age where we need other people. It is a social place – a place of communal imagining. The stage is art – but it is an art where the concrete emotions of the particular word provoke the imagination to understand the ambiguous and the intangible – even to understand the at first incomprehensible. It makes a rich game of make-believe. Paradoxically, the game grows stronger and stronger as film dominates more and more of our lives. The camera records reality, and what it photographs in imaginative terms is inert. A picture on the screen is not perceived as other than it is. It may represent fantasy, but it is not fantasy; and its achievement is no spur to the imagination. We are not asked to imagine that the screen image is something other than it is. The camera shows us what it wishes us to see. Indeed, it imagines for us.

If I walk on to an empty stage and launch into a speech telling you that this is Rome, you believe me if I am a good enough actor and my text is sufficiently stimulating. If a camera is brought in and I am filmed telling you that this is Rome, you then look at the projected film and say, “It is not Rome at all, it is an empty stage.” You cannot play a game of make-believe on the screen. The camera does not transcend the visual images that it shows. What is there, is what is. A play of Shakespeare’s therefore cannot breathe and have its being on a screen even in the most remarkable Shakespearean film. Shakespeare is generally not about evocative images but evocative words. The language therefore distracts from the images of the film. Film does not need language that provokes our imagination; it needs images that we can see and react to. My preferred Shakespeare films are therefore all in foreign languages – Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet, the Japanese Throne of Blood, Ran. None of them are embarrassed by the imaginative demands of Shakespeare’s text. Of all the Shakespeare plays I have seen on the screen – in cinemas and on television – and all the opera videos I have seen, only a very, very small percentage actually seem “true” and therefore capable of fulfilling George Burns’ demand for honesty. Let us restate it, adapted: “The thing about theatre is to create the truth. If you can fake that, you have got it made.” Most poetic theatre doesn’t fake on the screen, because it cannot fake. Indeed, it simply looks fake – as if an old-fashioned piece of theatre or an old-fashioned production of opera had been recorded by the camera and shown up as the artificial thing that it is. The camera has no imagination. The camera is itself the form – not what it photographs. So leave Shakespeare in the theatre where he needs words and imagination; and leave opera in the opera house where we can imagine that singing is speaking. Videos and films of either of them are good adverts – good bits of PR for the real thing. But they are like reproductions of famous paintings: they may well win converts, but they are far from being the thing itself.

I must try to define more closely what that poetry in the theatre is. In this last lecture therefore, I will briefly consider how two men have brought metaphor back to the modern theatre: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Neither of them are “verse” dramatists. But both of them deal with a highly wrought form of dialogue which is personal and metaphorical. And both of them have filled their stages with metaphors that go far beyond naturalism.

Beckett led the way in the 1950s. His language is selective and particular. His use of the stage has created images that haunt the modern imagination. Two tramps stand by a road, waiting for something to happen, for someone to arrive; a woman is buried in the earth: in the first Act, she is up to her waist; in the second, up to her neck. These are images that represent the process of living. Then three heads in a row of urns; a spot-lit mouth...The images are reduced to what is completely necessary for the mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Dedication page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Preface
• The Greeks
• Shakespeare’s Verse
• Mozart’s Ensembles
• The Metaphors of Beckett and Pinter