Shakespeare on the Factory Floor

A Handbook for Actors, Directors and Designers

Andrew Hilton

• Éditeur: Nick Hern Books
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788505741
• Sujet: Médias et arts de la scène
• Sous-sujet: Direction et production théâtrale

A passionate, illuminating exploration of Shakespeare's greatest plays and characters, by the director of acclaimed theatre company Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory.

Combining close textual analysis with practical insights based on his extensive experience of directing Shakespeare's plays, Andrew Hilton delves into a fascinating range of topics such as emotional truth in the comedies, the importance of the plays' social dynamics, the choice of settings and periods, making and withholding moral judgements, working with different versions of the texts, and even adapting them.

Throughout, Hilton urges us as audiences and theatre-makers to set aside our preconceived notions, and instead to approach Shakespeare's plays with an open mind, moment by moment, so that we can connect with them in fresh and vital ways.

'The clear-sightedness, wit and depth of knowledge and insight into the plays and their worlds is unparalleled... should be required reading for everyone approaching these plays... A fabulous book, brimful of wisdom and revelations and a gift to anyone interested in Shakespeare or, quite frankly, in people' John Heffernan, actor

'Andrew Hilton's Tobacco Factory Shakespeares were an inspiration... What audiences saw and heard was not a display but an uncovering. His productions did not add to the drama: they revealed it... In Shakespeare on the Factory Floor, Hilton has once again lit up Shakespeare: lucid and penetrating on the page and on the stage' Susannah Clapp, theatre critic of the Observer

'The detail and simplicity of Andrew Hilton's directing is as potent in his writing as it is in the rehearsal room... A wonderful book' Dorothea Myer-Bennett, actor

'Andrew Hilton has used his rich experience of many years to create a penetrating, timely and distinctive study of the plays… I only wish this book had been around when first I read Shakespeare. It would have opened my eyes and my mind much earlier' Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, Former Rector of the Royal College of Art and Chair of Arts Council England

'Andrew Hilton's fascinating book reveals how theatrical performance offers insights into longstanding questions of literary interpretation… Written in an engaging and readable style, it will be of interest to actors, directors, scholars and anyone who enjoys reading Shakespeare's plays or seeing them performed' Lesel Dawson, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Chapter One – Serious Comedy

1. Antipholus of Syracuse and Lucian

2. Rosalind and Orlando

3. Orsino and Viola

Chapter Two – The Word as Deed

1. Ophelia

2. Duke Vincentio, Angelo, Isabella and Claudio

3. Leontes, Hermione, Polixenes, Perdita and Florizel

Chapter Three – The Misery of Evil

1. Lady Macbeth

2. Goneril

Chapter Four – The Self, Lost and Found

Edgar

Chapter Five – The Unstable Text

Hamlet

Afterword – On Cuts, Emendations and Additions

Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory: Production History, 2000–2017

Index

About the Author

Copyright Information

For Diana and Jim
&
in fond memory of
Carrie

Preface

Over eighteen spring seasons, from 2000 to 2017, I directed twenty-seven Shakespeare productions for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, the company that I created for the new studio theatre in South Bristol. That added up to 5,000 hours or more spent putting the plays on their feet on the Tobacco Factory floor, a process that required that every line, every relationship, every feeling, every motive, every entrance and exit was questioned and understood; one that constantly threw up new problems and new possibilities. It was a truly collaborative process that, year by year, deepened our understanding, overturned many of our preconceptions, and confirmed me in my own belief that in tackling Shakespeare we should start with questions, not with answers.

While I hope theatre study students and a general audience might find food for thought here, this is a book principally for practitioners – for directors, actors and designers. I am a passionate believer in the collaborative approach to production, that there should be crossover between all three disciplines; most specifically, that actors should be allowed an interpretative head, a voice on the development of the whole. It is a matter of mutual respect, but also of stimulus. In my many years of teaching Shakespeare acting, at the Bristol Old Vic School and elsewhere, I have found that the intense pleasure in getting to grips with Shakespeares’ purpose – intellectually as well as instinctively and emotionally – has a profoundly liberating effect on young actors’ work; a release from exacting self-analysis about their technique; about their voice, their movement and their stagecraft. And at the Tobacco Factory the same collective sharing and focus fostered a degree of unselfishness I had never encountered in the theatre before.

At the Factory ours was that now rare thing, an ensemble company. We gathered for about sixteen weeks each January to put on two plays, mainly Shakespeare, but also Chekhov, Middleton and Rowley, Molière, Sheridan and Stoppard. Despite no public funding we were able – by keeping administration to a minimum, with a team of never more than three multi-talented managers and publicists – to afford an acting company of between fifteen and twenty-two. In our improvised space we worked in the round, with little more than actors in costume, and a few sticks of furniture, on a part-tiled floor bare but for four structural iron pillars. These we learned to dress as stone or wooden columns, as stove chimneys or as trees; we hung hammocks from them, built seats round them, or bolted ladders to them for fairies to hang from in the Athenian woods.

The space was intimate without being poky; it made for Shakespeare in close-up, with no member of the 300-strong audience sitting more than twenty feet away. The glories of the plays – and sometimes their shortcomings – were laid bare, as were the actors’ immersion in their roles; for them there was no hiding place, and nothing to be gained from grandstanding or rhetorical booming; Shakespeare need only be spoken ‘trippingly on the tongue’, as the great man prescribed, with a complete understanding – instinctive, emotional and intellectual – of the dramatic moment.

This book is just one fruit of that process, and is likewise an attempt to understand and explore.

*

Shakespeare Text: All the quoted text I use – allowing for some generally accepted emendations – is from the First Folio collected edition, except where noted. But the punctuation throughout is my own, as is my choice not to capitalise the first letter of every verse line. I find almost all Shakespeare texts too heavily punctuated, and the formality of the traditional typography at variance with the light and rapid flow of Shakespeare’s words.

Of the two conventions used to denote whether or not the final ‘ed’ in a past tense verb is sounded – by replacing the ‘e’ with an apostrophe when it is not, or marking it with an accent when it is – I use the former. And for consistency’s sake – and because Shakespeare’s prose is almost as rhythmic as his verse – I follow this through in the prose sections (as does the Folio, on the whole).

I follow many editors in attempting to show when a verse line is shared between two speakers, as in this passage from Act 3 Scene 2 of The Comedy of Errors:

LUCIANA. Why call you me love? Call my sister so.

SYR. ANTIPH. Thy sister’s sister.

LUCIANA. That’s my sister.

SYR. ANTIPH. No.

– the second, third and fourth speeches sharing an iambic pentameter. The Folio texts do not do this, and there are many instances when the sharing is uncertain, owing to the frequent irregularity of Shakespeare’s verse, but as the sharing implies a continuity in the rhythm it can be an illuminating practice. I will point to one such instance in the great scene between Isabella and Claudio – Act 3 Scene 1 – in Measure for Measure.

I also risk interpreting a missing syllable or two in the pentameter pattern as a break, a momentary hiatus in the flow; this is always speculative, but always worthy of consideration.

I quote extensively, so that – although a broad knowledge of the plays in question is assumed – readers will not have to have copies of the texts open as they progress through the book.

Glosses on obscure words and phrases are my own. My production practice has been to substitute current usages in those relatively few instances where I believe an audience might be baffled, but here I use Shakespeare’s words only, again unless otherwise noted.

‘Shadow text’: I use this term of my own to describe an implied meaning – expressed in imagery or metaphor – that is not the intended meaning of the speaker and may even contradict that meaning, as in a Camillo speech in the opening scene of The Winter’s Tale. This is distinct from a ‘subtext’, the term we use to describe an underlying intent or feeling of the speaker that generates – and can occasionally be masked by – the surface text. There are times, however, when the distinction between the two is blurred. The ‘shadow’ meaning may be registered by the onstage hearer(s), or not.

Production Notes: Completing each section, I detail a number of choices we made – including some radical edits and additions – in the Tobacco Factory productions.

Sources: the study of Shakespeares’ transformations is always enlightening, and a number of the key source texts I refer to are available (see the notes at the end of each chapter) to download in modern spelling versions from my own website: www.andrewhilton.online

References: I am not an academic, and this is not an academic book; as far as possible I restrict my references to commentaries easily accessed by the general reader – for example, to such works as Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, The Genius of Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate, 1599 by James Shapiro and Women of Will by Tina Packer, all of which have figured in good High Street bookshops. I also refer to some older critical works that still have currency, such as John Dover Wilsons’ What Happens in Hamlet and T.S. Eliot’s Essays. There are references to some more testingly academic works, mostly from America’s fecund university presses, but these are few.

Introduction

Image and Word

Theatre now, following in the footsteps of film, so often foregrounds the image. In the Elizabethan theatre it was the word. Words were deemed sufficient ...