The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

46 CINE TECHNICIAN March 1955 An Actor's Experiences LAST month. " Cine " reported that among new electronic devices making progress in U.S.A. was a sound-synthesising. device that can duplicate exactly any sound, including any musical or voice-sound. Anything from a piano solo to a speech can be duplicated and recorded by this device, and it is claimed that only experts can tell the difference between the manufactured sound and the real thing. SWIFT decline of theatre and music hall in Britain has already made tragic inroads into the employment of actors, actresses and musicians. Radio has provided some work for performers and musicians. It is now possible to see ahead a time when actors, actresses, commentators and effects men will be no longer needed on radio. Perhaps not far off too is the day when light beams will be used to create the forms and figures of men and women, and then no humans will be needed on films or television. AMID the gloom closing in on England's theatres, a few lights still shine. One bright light of the theatre, and lately of more than one film, is Mr. Donald Wolfit, whose autobiography, First Interval, has just been published, to tell us something of his early struggles to gain a place in the theatre and of his later experiences as star performer and actor manager. First Interval (Odhams, 16s.) is more than a behind-the-scenes glimpse of theatreland. It is the story of a man who has never stopped trying to put the great treasures of English drama on the contemporary London and provincial stage. Not an easy task, even when Mr. Wolfit started his stage career in the nineteen twenties. Much harder and more heartbreaking today as the twilight falls on theatreland, its diminishing theatres almost entirely occupied with musicals, bedroom farces, and, occasionally, neurotic soul probings posing as poetic drama. WHEN world war two came 'V along, Mr. Wolfit had been an actor manager for two years; and had succeeded in touring the provinces with plays by Shakespeare without meeting the ruin and desolation confidently predicted for him by all the practical men of theatreland. War came, E.N.S.A. was set up to provide entertainment for the forces. Mr. Wolfit offered the services of his company, fully rehearsed and equipped. The offer was refused. Take plays by Shakespeare to the troops? What a hope, said the E.N.S.A. chiefs, using, of course, more formal language. " The troops, it seemed," writes Mr. Wolfit, " were not interested in Shakespeare, it was a little time before I was allowed to disprove this glaring fallacy which of necessity placed all entertainment in the lowest-common-denominator category. Meantime the smutty comedian, the accordian player, the brazen-voiced soprano held sway wherever the fighters for liberty were gathered together to be entertained . . ." LATER in the war, Mr. Wolfit did tour Shakespeare round the camps, with great success. And in the last year of the war, when his company was travelling to Egypt on a ship carrying two thousand British soldiers, he played Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet to a succession of delighted Service audiences, ending with a performance of The Merchant of Venice on the aft troop-deck to some 1,800 men in shirt sleeves squatting on the deck and crowded on to every available perch, a performance that was hailed with cheers. WHEN the play had ended and the cheers had died away, Mr. Wolfit asked the audience how many of them had ever seen a play before. " About one hundred hands went up. To my further question as to how many had seen a play by Shakespeare fewer than twenty hands showed. Thus did we treasure our literary and dramatic heritage in the year of grace nineteen-hundred-and-forty-five." THE note of bitterness here is natural enough : England has indeed neglected the poetry that might have saved her people from the ruin and despair that spreads among us. Reading Mr. Wolfit brought back in recollection a night in 1948 or 1949, spent at the Bedford, Camden Town. It was 23rd April, Shakespeare's birthday. The Old Vic. in the Waterloo Road, was closed. The New Old Vic at the New Theatre was occupied with Greek drama. Not a single play by Shakespeare was to be seen anywhere in the West End. Only at the Bedford, where Mr. Wolfit and his company had dared to run a fifteen-week season of Shakespeare's plays, was the Birthday remembered. THE Bedford was packed. And it was fitting indeed that in the old music hall, one of the guest players that night should be George Robey. Not full Falstaffian regalia and make-up, no, nor the auspiciousness of the occasion — " we Shakespearean actors," said George in a speech at the end of his piece — could extinguish the reflective pause, the elaborate hyperbole, the confidential aside and the upraised admonishing finger that had graced our halls for so long. A rowdy, boisterous evening it was, with scenes from the plays, and songs that included Feste's poignant song of the wind and the rain, of childhood and manhood and of the world that began a long, long time ago; and somehow the dear, sad stuff of living and dying mingled with the laughter, the noise, and the applause . . . THEATRE lights dim and go out. The microphone reigns; the great actors leave the scene one by one. Soon it will be ended : the great and tragic tale of a civilisation that neglected its poets and teachers to worship techniques and wonder toys that devour and destroy even as they amaze and titillate. Our senses are too dulled by excitements of the hour to respond now to the truth that is in poetry, in music and in the wonderful works of men's skilled hands. Our words, like our thinking, are lifeless, bloodless, abstract. We have no passions, only complexes. No thoughts, only phrases. No anger, only irritations. No beliefs, only opinions. The wings of our compassion are clipped and we can no longer soar. What should we do in Illyria? What indeed.