Shakespeare in the Theatre: Trevor Nunn

Russell Jackson

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350164574
• eBook ISBN: 9781474289597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama

Sir Trevor Nunn is one of the most versatile and accomplished directors in the English-speaking theatre. This book examines his achievements as a director of Shakespeare within the wider context of debates on the cultural politics of Britain's theatrical institutions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His approach has been marked by the combination of close textual analysis with inventive theatricality, in performance spaces ranging from the large stages of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre to the intimacy of the companies' studio theatres. The principal focus of the book is on Nunn's work as director of Shakespeare during his artistic directorship of the RSC and the NT. The four core chapters focus in detail on major productions that can be said to have challenged and changed perceptions of the plays, including The Winter's Tale (RSC, 1969), the 'Roman Plays' season (RSC, 1972) and All's Well That Ends Well (RSC, 1982), and the studio productions of Macbeth (RSC 1976), Othello (RSC, 1989) and The Merchant of Venice (NT, 1999). The study draws on archive material, as well as reviews and other published commentary, including that of actors who have worked with him.

1

The Main Stage at Stratford, 1968–72

Ever since the opening in 1932 of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (as it was known until Peter Hall renamed it in 1962), actors and directors had been struggling with a theatre that was handsomely executed and furnished as a public building but ineptly designed for the putting on of plays. Not only was it yet another proscenium-arch house, it was also poorly designed even within the chosen configuration of stage and auditorium. The overall effect was to enforce a separation of audience and performance, as the seating faced the stage in rows parallel to the front of the stage, with blank side walls; and the dress circle and gallery (subsequently designated as a balcony) receded from the stage in a manner that challenged actors with the prospect of gazing into a void above and beyond the stalls. In addition to this fundamental flaw, the acoustics were eccentric and the sightlines from many parts of the house were poor.

In 1960 Peter Hall had commissioned plans from the stage designer and architect Sean Kenny for a radical rebuilding to create a thrust stage with a 2,000-seat auditorium configured as an amphitheatre, but it was clear that the removal of the proscenium arch would take away structural support from the stage house and, critically, cause the fly tower to collapse: the compromise was the creation of a wedge-shaped forestage and a 1-in-18 rake to project the performance as far forward as possible.¹ Alterations to the masking around the proscenium opening and the space on either side of it served to mitigate the effect of a picture frame, but the basic architectural space, 7.23 metres (23ʹ 9”) high and 9.06 metres (29ʹ 9”) wide at the curtain line, remained problematic. In subsequent years further alterations were made, notably an extension to the front of the original gallery and adding side boxes and by various reconfigurations of the forestage. But a forestage could never be taken far forward without losing visibility from the balcony, and only a limited number of seats in the stalls could be repositioned to allow for spectators to be placed alongside it.

Despite all its limitations, this remained the theatre that would have to provide the main revenue of each season. One of Christopher Morley’s first actions on his appointment as Head of Design in 1968 was to devise a new, box-like masking for both Stratford and the Aldwych to surround the central acting area behind the arch. This was a ‘grey box’, as close to neutrality as possible, that would help to facilitate quick changeovers from matinée to evening. Among possible future developments, Morley told an interviewer for Flourish, the house magazine distributed to the RSC’s mailing list (or ‘club’), perhaps the company ‘should be considering the area over the stage not to be a place where scenery is flown but to restrict it to lighting equipment’. As the area above the stage in Shakespeare ‘must always be associated with “the heavens and the elements”’, it should be possible by this means to achieve ‘lighting in the truly Shakespearean sense’.² The desire to achieve a degree of flexibility in the use of the space, and an increased freedom from the older pictorial conventions, were accompanied by a revision in the kind of stage picture offered. The basic set for Nunn’s production of Much Ado About Nothing in the 1968 season illustrates this: within the grey box ‘a translucent gauze box’ was formed. Morley described this as ‘a device to emphasize, by its use with lighting, the ever-changing light and shade of a charming Elizabethan society’.

Between 1968 and 1971 most productions on this stage, including those by other directors and designers, occupied the space created by this strategy, although not all made use of an inner box within that delimited by the masking. Nunn’s productions during this period were King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing (1968), Henry VIII and The Winter’s Tale (1969), and Hamlet (1970). The solid lateral walls of the white box for Brook’s 1970 Dream, designed by Sally Jacobs, extended across the curtain line, with vertical slots to accommodate the legally required safety curtain. It is arguable that Morley’s example influenced or at least facilitated this famous ‘empty space’, if only in the sense that his thinking was inspired by the same ideas as Brook’s.³ (The important distinction is that Nunn and Morley put things into the space, while Brook emptied it, at least of extra scenic elements and furnishings.) The significant break with the ‘box’ strategy came in the 1972 season of four Roman plays (plus a revival of The Comedy of Errors from 1962), for which machinery was installed to support a complex of stairs and platforms. This was a spectacular stage in its own right, flexible in a different sense from that offered in 1968. After 1972 this staging was not seen again, and the next substantial rethink produced a pseudo-Elizabethan wooden stage that would serve for all the plays in the 1976 season, this time without any coherent theme in the programming of the repertoire.

Although other adjustments would be made in the course of the next three decades, this was the last attempt at radical structural alterations to the stage before the major demolition and rebuilding of both auditorium and stage in 2007–10. After Romeo and Juliet (co-directed with Barry Kyle), The Comedy of Errors and King Lear (co-directed with Barry Kyle and John Barton) on the season’s ‘Elizabethan’ stage in 1976, Nunn directed only two main-stage productions at Stratford before his departure to become a freelance in 1986: As You Like It (1977) and All’s Well That Ends Well (1981). The first of these transferred to the Aldwych in 1978 and the second to the Barbican in 1982. He also directed the two parts of Henry IV for the Barbican’s opening season in June 1981, but these were not shown in Stratford. His focus as a director of Shakespeare during his tenure as head of the company was thus predominantly on its main-stage productions. In doing so he took on the challenges and opportunities afforded through its various permutations, notably through his collaboration with two designers, Christopher Morley and John Napier.

Before the Romans: Variations on the ‘box’

Morley’s account of the ‘grey box’ and its use in the 1968 Much Ado About Nothing has already been cited: Nunn was not the only director working with it, but it is his productions between his appointment and the radical reconstruction of the stage in 1972 that reflected most fully the range of possibilities it afforded. Morley’s set for The Taming of the Shrew in 1967 was ‘a masterpiece of ingenuity and design’, displaying the exterior and interior of the inn where strolling players performed the comedy for Christopher Sly, but was so positioned that the presence of Sly and his companions as onstage ‘spectators’ obstructed the view from parts of the auditorium, a mistake that seems not to have been rectified when the play transferred to London late in the summer.⁴ Much Ado About Nothing opened with a masked dumb-show that reminded some reviewers of The Revenger’s Tragedy, but it was more notable for an aspect of Nunn’s direction that would be more fully revealed in some of his subsequent work on the comedies. Irving Wardle describes the ‘players’ in The Taming of the Shrew as being ‘prone to form up into rings and chorus lines to the accompaniment of a scratch wind ensemble’.⁵ Whereas Wardle hailed ‘an intricate variation on the Shakespearean theme of false appearances, and the interchangeability of dream and reality’, identifying a serious thematic intention consonant with Nunn’s reputation as a Leavisite, Harold Hobson vented his disgust at the antics of ‘a crowd of greasy, noisy, dirty country louts playing about on the dunghill of [a] deliberately proletarian production’.⁶ Nevertheless, Hobson was won over by the emergence in the second half of the evening of ‘dawning tenderness’ between Janet Suzman’s Katherine and Michael Williams’s Petruchio. At Katherine’s declaration of obedience ‘a great stillness fell upon the stage audience; these louts and layabouts were moved to a bemused silence’. Hobson ended what began as a hostile review, infused with social and political prejudice, with the surprising declaration that this was the best production of the play he had ever seen. Nunn’s strategy in framing the play was not in itself innovative, but the balance of critical opinion seems to suggest a desire on his part to make the strolling players less than respectable, and to push the collective antic disposition even further than some reviewers could accept, at least until the shift into seriousness at the end.

The first of Nunn’s two productions in his first season as artistic director showed the potential of the open stage within the new masking. They also gave a fuller sense of his interpretive approach in establishing an onstage world corresponding to a view of each play and the range of his technical skill as a director. King Lear, the season’s opening production in April 1968, began with an effect reminiscent of The Revenger’s Tragedy, against a dark background but this time in gold rather than silver. Rosemary Say in the Sunday Telegraph captured the impact of the court’s entrance after the brief conversation between Gloucester, Kent and Edmund:

An entry of soldiers as stiff and precise as guardsmen on sentry duty; a group of courtiers sombre against a pitch dark background save for the metallic gleam of their cloaks as they turn their backs on the audience; a flaming crown perched high and fantastic; a sweep of collective obeisance, and an old man is revealed, huddled on his throne, waiting impatiently for the coming ritual … In front of him lies a giant, many handled sword to remind the audience that these are pagan times; the indeterminate clothes show that we are in the world of myth and legend.⁷

For their declarations of love, Regan and Goneril sat to each side of him with Cordelia at the centre, forming a tableau of sinister splendour with the sword stretched out in front of them, its point towards the audience. All wore robes of gold-painted netting, and the pattern of the gold crown worn by the king, with its high spikes, was continued in the smaller crowns worn by all three sisters. The grouping seemed to exemplify the societal organization described by Nunn in one of the programme’s extracts from his talk ‘at rehearsal’, where he reflected that ‘Lear’s action is irrational, it is virtually a denial of reason, and so the perfect pyramid, which is only held together by reason, tumbles and collapses, and each individual thereafter is stumbling in anarchy’.⁸ This was an arresting example of what J. C. Trewin identified as Nunn’s ‘surprising gifts for theatrical atmospherics and significant movement’.⁹ Other critics recognized the intention of what Herbert Kretzmer in the Daily Express called ‘this dark, stark and thunderous production’, played out on ‘an empty stage bare of any adornment except light and props’.¹⁰ The hunting of a boar, wrote Harold Hobson, ‘in which the baited animal seeks in vain to escape from the ring of cruel spears held by Lear’s gentlemen’, was in itself ‘a thrilling piece of theatre’.¹¹ The battle was suggested in ‘slow motion mime, with silver lances moving in the half-light as though seen in a nightmare’,¹² and like the storm scenes appeared to be integral to the more general world picture that Sheila Bannock described in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald: ‘the stage represent[ed] both Lear’s terrestrial realm and the region of his imaginative experience. It is peopled, as the mind is, with dimly perceived figures patterned with signs and portents.’¹³

The comparisons with The Revenger’s Tragedy suggest that in King Lear Nunn established his credentials as a director capable of taking on a tragedy central to the Shakespearean canon, deploying the same command of spectacle on a set no longer borrowed from another production. He was also unavoidably challenging comparison with the austerity of Brook’s 1962 production. Whether this was in fact (as Trewin claimed with evident relief) ‘a major tragedy put directly upon the stage and allowed to speak for itself with its traditional meaning’ is another matter. Nunn may not have had ‘any revolutionary theories to support’, but the contrast with Brook’s confrontational avoidance of glamour was in itself indicative of an informed approach to the play and to the means by which it might be expressed – not at all the unmediated access to ‘a major tragedy’ hailed by Trewin.

Robert Speaight found the performance ‘well-balanced rather than inspired’, praising the actors – in particular Eric Porter’s formidably aged king: ‘Here was kingship incarnate, and Mr. Porter had in every wrinkle in his face what Kent recognized as authority.’¹⁴ In the New Statesman, Philip French described the effect when the ‘tent’ was opened to reveal Lear ‘bald, frail, old, and lit like a Rembrandt patriarch’, conjuring up ‘a coherent spiritual and social order … with at its head a tired, remote man convincingly ready to be unburdened and crawl towards death’. (Porter was in fact thirty-nine, but appeared to be nearer eighty.) French found the ‘excellent, beautifully spoken performance … a sustained intellectual achievement and powerfully moving’.¹⁵ Speaight’s response to the company’s speaking of the text was sympathetic but not uncritical, for example in his comment that Alan Howard was

a most persuasive Edgar, letting us see an alert intelligence behind an apparent gullibility – an intelligence which would have been just as clear without so arduous a labouring of the text’. Porter ‘understood – what Peter Brook so perversely ignored – that the passion of the part must be sustained by a rhythm which is plain for those who have ears to hear.¹⁶

Trewin, who had contrasted the production’s rich and ceremonious opening with Brook’s ‘Beckettian treatment of the tragedy in a world of decay’, compared Porter’s performance with that of Randall Ayrton at Stratford in 1937, in its sense of ‘a crumbling crag, a similar agonized pathos’. What Irving Wardle described as ‘the shadow of the Brook-Scofield Lear’ could not be avoided, and a number of reviewers shared his opinion that this was ‘a workmanlike addition to the repertory presented in the familiar bare Stratford style’ that offered ‘no new way of looking at the play’ and came ‘nowhere near touching sublimity’.¹⁷ Hobson found Porter ‘admirable’ in the scenes of anger, but possessing ‘scarcely any touch of beauty or of pathos’ in the later scenes of the play.

Among the critical and historical material that had become customary, the programme included extensive quotation from Trevor Nunn’s comments ‘at rehearsal’ that supported not only his general thinking about the play, but also some specific elements of the production, notably the first scene’s demonstration of the hierarchical order and the stripping of Lear in the storm, exhibiting in literal terms the vulnerability of the king’s naked body. The text (Folio version 3.4.102–3) suggests that Lear starts to remove his clothes but is prevented from doing so, but here Edgar’s near-nakedness was complemented by that of the king. There was also a lengthy quotation from the fashionable psychiatric theorist R. D. Laing on psychotic experience: ‘No one who has not experienced how insubstantial the pageant of external reality can be, how it may fade, can fully realize the sublime and grotesque presences that can replace it, or that can exist alongside it.’¹⁸ The literal as well as emotional or psychic denuding of Lear seemed to be a stage in the kind of experience Laing describes.

The season ended with Much Ado About Nothing, which demonstrated the potential of the basic design outlined in Morley’s Flourish interview for evoking a world very different from that of tragedy. In the Observer, Ronald Bryden gave a lyrical description of the ‘high, bare Jacobean chamber through whose translucent panels filters the dappled light of dim diamond panes, summer orchards, or moonshine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• A note on the text
• Series preface
• Author’s preface
• Introduction: ‘Controlled flamboyance’ and Leavisite analysis
• 1. The Main Stage at Stratford, 1968–72
• 2. The Main Stage at Stratford: After the Romans
• 3. ‘Chamber’ Shakespeare at The Other Place
• 4. 1997–2007: The National Theatre, and beyond
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Shakespeare productions directed or co-directed by Trevor Nunn
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint