Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

100 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER SHAKESPEARE on the SCREEN AND ON THE AIR it is hardly possible to write about the presentation of Shakespeare without being controversial. With all proper apologies, therefore, I propose to begin with two categorical statements about Cinema and Radio, which must serve as my basic terms of reference in this article. Here they are: First, the Cinema is an art. It is the first and only new art form to be discovered by man within recorded history. He could not have discovered it earlier because it is the child of the industrial revolution. It is the one positive creative discovery of the machine age, for it depends for its existence on machinery, chemical processes and electricity. It is an art because it represents the end of that quest for representation of life in movement which began when the cave men of Altamira painted those leaping figures on the walls of their caverns. Despite the sound track, it is an art because it is visual. Second, Radio is not an art form — though I am sure that with the development of television it will become so — for with visuals it will take on the basic creative attributes of the film. But at present it is mainly the transmitter of other art — music, and, as we shall see, in a way special to itself, of drama. With this preamble — all too categorical because it must be all too brief — I would now like to put before you some ideas about the method by which, through radio and film, the work of the world's greatest poet and dramatist can be brought to millions who might otherwise never know or understand him. For film and radio are mass media. They can reach everyone all the time. So, whatever the problems of technique and of interpretations, no one can argue against the need to use these media to bring Shakespeare to the world. We can best see the problem by starting from the written word. I suspect that the average reader of Shakespeare's plays is impressed more by the poetry than by the drama. Many people have ordinary natural limitations to their imagination, to seeing in their mind's eye. And a Shakespeare text is not, like a text by Shaw or Barrie, plentifully garnished with explicit stage directions. Poetry, and the drama arising from the interplay of character — these are easily obtainable from reading Shakespeare— but for the rest, surely all of us would confess that to see a Shakespeare play performed for the first time is, quite precisely, a revelation. The physical and spatial characteristics have not been fully imagined by the reader. On the stage something quite new appears. Topick up the text of Love's labour's Lost and read it for the first time may be confusing and rather disappointing to anyone who is neither a scholar nor a person of the theatre, nor endowed with an exceptional imagination. To read the same play with the assistance of Harley Granville Barker's preface is in itself a revelation — for he speaks largely of the living play — that is, how it can be staged and how, in terms of the theatre of his own day, Shakespeare expected it to be staged. This article is the substance of a lecture delivered to American and English teachers at a Shakespeare study-course organized by the British Council at Strat ford-onAvon in April 1947. Finally, if you have the good luck to see it well performed, then it is magic ; and there, at last, is Shakespeare's work itself. From now on you can re-read the play with your mind's eye clear and focussed. Now the technique of radio, despite its lack of visuals, does provide an opportunity of enlarging appreciation and understanding. Shakespeare's words are, after all, written to be spoken, and the interplay of fine voices speaking fine lines supplies a means of interpretation, and of heightening the emotions. This holds true, only if the powers and limitations of the medium are understood. Radio producers and radio actors have to remember that the images they are creating in the listener's imagination are changing like waves on the sea. Each listener is seeing a different picture, which he draws for himself under the stimulus of the spoken word — that is, from what is said and the way it is said. But there is not a common stage picture, shared by all the audience, such as you have in the theatre. The rumbustious or the rhetorical — effective if you can see in propria persona the scene, the actor, and his gestures — become, as often as not, idiotic through the loudspeaker. And so the production of Shakespeare on the air must be regarded as analogous more to the performance of a symphony than of a stage play. Some listeners will have their eyes shut, and will be picturing to themselves faces, gestures, rooms and landscapes. Others may be following the work in the score, as it were — and they, too, will be seeing something beyond the printed page. The voices of the actors therefore must be related to this situation, and not to the stage of an imaginary theatre packed with an imaginary audience. Otherwise they will find that their words have vanished 'into the air, and what seemed corporal melted as breath into the wind'. In fact, to present Shakespeare on the radio depends on a complete understanding of the diverse nature of the listener's imagination. As one sort of listener I object violently to the use of descriptive commentary to explain the action. On the other hand, I do not in any way object to the use of sound (be it music or otherwise) to add perspective to the scenes whiefft am 'imagining to myself. But another listener may hold exactly the opposite views. And neither producer nor actor has any opportunity of knowing, or feeling, how this multifarious audience is reacting. I am not a radio man, and must speak with deference, but I believe that Shakespeare on the radio is best when the producer devotes all his energy to the speaking of the words by the right voices, and uses the other means at his disposal — commentary, effects, music, to the minimum. For him, Shakespeare is the imagist more than anything else. Images created by words— as for instance the description of Cleopatra's barge, and of Antony in the emptied market place. This is the very point at which we may turn to the film. What a shooting script is to be found in that famous speech! You can imagine it in Technicolor, directed by Cecil B. de Mille. It would be the climax to a previous sequence showJ ing Caesar and his friends making 'the night ligM with drinking' — 'eight wild boars roasted whola for breakfast' and 'much more monstrous matted of feast' ( — a challenge to de Mille there!) Then the golden and purple barge, the cupids, tbq mermaid-gentlewomen, the multicoloured fansj the enormous crowd surging from the market-] place to the river banks .... There would in fact be only two things missina — the 'strange invisible perfume", and the poetry J Of course this approach to filming Shakespeare is a reductio ad absurdum. It would lead us into! surrealist madness with a similar Technicolor technique being applied to Macbeth's: 'this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red". The whole point of the Cleopatra speech id that it is a description of something which has happened (lifted from Plutarch and transmuted by Shakespeare into pure poetry), and the film producer's problem is not to translate what i: describes into visuals but so to present it that both' its poetry and its dramatic relevance to the\ story are emphasized and pointed. Now , in the film, we have the genuine image, observed in common by all the audience, and not the mind's-eye image of the radio. Thereford the filmic approach basically is to Shakespeare the dramatic. But this must not be taken to mean that a film performance of Shakespeare can be* considered as equivalent to a stage performance. That idea would lead us to put the actor on a stage, and place the camera in the middle of the stalls, and thus merely to record what the audience in a theatre would see. But that is no^ cinema. The whole quality of the film resides in the fact that it creates its own geography and its own time. That is, the spectator's viewpoint is constantly changing, and his temporal sense can be elongated or shortened according to the editing of the various strips of celluloid of which the film is made up. The perfect film is, of course, conceived right from the start only as a film, and not as a translation from another form of expression. But it is a young art, and people like Vigo and Mayer, who could conceive things in screen terms only, and without reference elsewhere, are still rare. Moreo\er, there is no reason why Shakespeare should not be translated — I would almost prefer to say transmuted — to the screen so that all his poetry, all his drama, remain intact. Indeed. I discovered the other day when re-reading the Poetics, that Aristotle and Mr Samuel Goldwyn would find themselves in almost complete agreement on the former's thesis that 'Lvery tragedv . . . must have six parts, which parts determine its quality — namely, plot, character, diction. thought, spectacle, song'. I said 'almost' because the fourth quality might give Mr Goldwyn a moment's pause. However that may be. I think we can all agree that the problem before the film-maker is to strike a balance between the form of Shakespeare's work and the elaborate possibilities inherent in the film medium. It is agreed that just because Shakespeare often wrote in images w hich the stage could not ph> sically reproduce it is not necessary for the film, which could reproduce these images, to do so. What then are the positive contributions it can make'.' Speaking first on a severely practical level, it can provide the movement and paeeantrv which Shakespeare himself demands. Two stage direc " .