Apologies!!!

I would never have thought that I might be so absolutely delighted to make apologies! I went to the “Cinema” to see “Antony and Cleopatra” with Claudia, and now I have to apologize for what I have written in my last post.

First of all, I am almost insanely delighted to be able to apologize to Ralph Fiennes. I didn’t WANT to acknowledge how disappointed I was with him – and how much this mattered! And this shows me how substantial a place he has in the large aesthetical section of my heart. (And disappointing me and then making up for it appears to be a good move to make it even more substantial.) I wasn’t really sure about him until now, I guess – even though his Richard was my second greatest theatre experience! – because I never acknowledge “falling in love” when it actually happens. I think I granted him the “unlimited credit” seeing him as Voldemort – after having seen “Richard III” - which is a character I don’t care about the least bit. I just loved the way HE cared about him. (And I am still trying to get his version of the Red Dragon which appears to be kind of impossible - and won’t stop trying until I have it! Maybe it actually isn’t good, but I won’t believe this until I see it …) (First apology!)

The reason I don’t just delete my last post is that – nonetheless! – it is one of the best posts I have written. And, actually, there is very little in it I would change – from my past point of view! First of all I was right in this respect that the show I saw was far from being as good as the one they recorded for the cinema. (I don’t know, but paying for the flight and the expensive ticket for a seat with a bad view, being forced to breathe in the bad air and bad breath of my neighbour, and all the distractions and other inconvenience I don’t have being in the cinema, and THEN seeing the show on a bad day! There actually is a lot to say FOR seeing it in the cinema, especially in this case – which will be dealt with later.) Even though it was partially my fault – having read it so often and having seen the other versions, so that I was kind of “glued” to the text, and not really free to appreciate what they were doing with it - I am adamant that not just Ralph Fiennes but most of the actors weren’t really good on the day I saw it, so the production couldn’t really “take off” and make the play come to life in the way it happened when they recorded it. It wasn’t just beautiful, it was really, really good! (Second apology!)

There are a few actors, though, whom I don’t include in the apology because they were good on the day I saw the show in the theater, and I did them justice, although probably not as much as they deserved. These were experienced Shakespeare actors like Tim McMullan, who played Enorbarbus, or Tunji Kasim, who played Octavius Caesar – and who appears quite young for being such an expert … (Probably looks younger than he is …??? IMDB says nothing about his age … but I can do the math on Wikipedia: He must be almost forty! So, obviously, quite old enough for Shakespeare.) And Sophie Okonedo who played very well, maybe even better than on the day it was recorded where she overdid it a few times – but with Cleopatra being such an eccentric this didn’t really hurt. An important part of my last post is about what happened between her and me, and this was basically the same when I saw the play the second time.

The other two I want to write a few sentences about because they both present a certain type of “Shakespeare acting” in a very accomplished way. (O, and apologies to no one in particular for daring to write a whole post about acting – again! But what’s the point of apologizing if I know that I will always do it again …)

I have already seen Tim McMullan play Shakespeare more than once and always disliked him because of the way he speaks the text “through his nose” and doesn’t appear to be interested in the physical aspects of acting, which makes his characters appear artificial and lifeless. But I was really, really impressed by the way he “dissected” and analyzed Enorbarbus, and made me see what a complex “matrix” there is for this character, and what a central function he has for the play. As Enorbarbus seems to be a very spontaneous and natural kind of guy, Tim McMullan didn’t fit the character at all, but he covered another aspect of him in a really interesting way. An aspect of “Shakespeare” that usually isn’t covered anymore - or only “implicitly” - on a contemporary stage. The most important structural function of Enorbarbus is, in my opinion, that he analyzes almost everything that is happening – and especially his master Antony and his relationship with Cleopatra - from a COMMON SENSE point of view. Which really is a big help for the audience to deal with the complexity. (As to the complexity of the human stuff and the political matters this play is really intimidating!) I became aware of this realizing how much “happened” when I heard him describe this first encounter between Antony and Cleopatra – where she is on her barge on the Nile and he waiting in the market place for her arrival. And because this is such a central aspect of “Shakespeare”, in my opinion, this will become a bit longer than I thought. There certainly is a reason for Tim McMullan being cast so often for Shakespeare even though he is deficient in common requirements for contemporary acting. What he has to offer is this superior understanding of how language – and especially the beauty of language – works in “Shakespeare”. That it is IN ITSELF a means of analysis. In fact, this is half the point of “Shakespeare”: that the aesthetic use of language affects us DIRECTLY, and that things will happen “in us” just because what we are hearing is so beautiful. I am aware that this sounds like philosophical commonplace - until we realize that this happens all the time when we are reading. I just did when I reread one of my favourite works of French literature, “Une vie” by Maupassant, because somebody made a film about it. The film was crap, but the reading was so great! I read most of it aloud, though I am totally convinced that I cannot speak French anymore, but the language was just so beautiful and enticing that I suddenly could. I really felt as if I understood every word I was reading! And I remember being fascinated with the discovery that the first form of literature was probably spells. It is just such a great expression of this function of fictional text that when we put the words in the right way so that they work ON US like a charm they would be able to do all kinds of things! I think the best thing anybody ever said about this to my knowledge was this casual remark of Richard Armitage about “The Crucible”: that there were still sentences in the play he couldn’t really say. Of course he said them anyway, and what came out was then most likely the best way they could have been spoken. And if an actor can convince himself to deal with great language in this way – experience how it affects him directly and use this – that will make great “Shakespeare” because this is exactly what Shakespeare intended. - THIS was great literature happening on the stage and, in my experience, had a “deepening” effect that extended to the entire production. Motivated ME to deal with the complexity instead of being intimidated by it.

Tunji Kasim, for his part, is absolutely perfect in the art of great “Shakespeare acting” I already tried to describe a few times as FOLLOWING EXACTLY what Shakespeare has written. It is certainly quite difficult to LEARN – like playing a complicated musical instrument – and requires hard work and a powerful brain. I have seldom heard somebody manage the complexity of these sentences with such transparency! But when he is on the stage most of the work is already done. It is just concentration and habit, and, consequently, will not take such a big toll every time. And because of this it is, generally speaking, the best way of playing Shakespeare because it is the only way of really getting the complexity on the stage WITHOUT an impracticable effort. What the audience sees will be EXACTLY the same every time they are running the show. Maximum efficiency for delivering the highest standard of plays and playing he could imagine – THAT is what, I think, Shakespeare intended. And there must have been actors at the time who could meet these requirements, as there are today! As a rule, EVERY Shakespeare character can be played successfully and satisfactorily in this way, but there are characters whom this style suits better than others because of the changed expectations of a contemporary audience. (I suppose I mean: MINE 😊!) Octavius Caesar certainly is such a character, who requires a scope of superficial qualities to be shown very clearly: a rational, cold, ruthlessly ambitious, kind of prudish person who is suspicious of emotions – and all this is important to show in the clearest possible way to set up the contrast with Antony and get the antagonistic relationship, which we want to see, on its way. But this doesn’t mean that he missed out on the emotional side, on the contrary! If I hadn’t seen Tunji Kasim’s Octavius Caesar I probably wouldn’t have realized that there is one, but there is this very strong emotional link with his sister Octavia. It absolutely is in the text, but I never saw it getting out on the stage before. And it is really important as motivation for his merciless rejection of Antony in the end. Where “Shakespeare” is concerned, not just the brainy analysis and what has to happen physically on the stage but also all the NECESSARY emotions are IN THE TEXT, just waiting to be played!

Thinking about the art of these two actors – mainly as a contrast to what I observed about Ralph Fiennes – I realized that there was still a different method of playing Shakespeare in “high definition” represented by Sophie Okonedo. Which I didn’t take into account because it is what most actors are doing “naturally” – even what, I believe, constitutes what “we” usually understand by acting: to develop a very clear and powerful representation of WHAT KIND OF PERSON it is they are playing and then taking everything “from there”. In my opinion, she did this extremely successfully, basically fulfilling my expectations. Not surprisingly, as she would have been my dream cast for Cleopatra anyway ( - whereas I felt that Ralph Fiennes was a strange choice for Antony!) The interesting thing in this case is that both Claudia and I experienced the LIMITATION of this CONTEMPORARY method of acting where “Shakespeare” is concerned as we both missed the political and intellectual – “grown-up” – dimension of Cleopatra. I already feel another apology coming on … and an urge to state that I totally love Sophie Okonedo as an actress. (I was delighted to discover in the program that I have seen her already in “The Crucible” – without knowing that it was her at the time! - where she impressed me as the slave woman who is sentenced to death and, I think, doesn’t understand what they are doing to her, repeating that she is finally going home – which appears to be the only thing she ever wanted. I am usually not very empathic in this way, but somehow she made this a moment I’ll never forget!) She has this crazy energy and naturally graceful way of moving and acting, and this great “open” face that can look like a mischievous monkey, a baby girl, and her grandmother in rapid succession. So, the “infinite variety”, in her case, is not just an expression, and “age cannot wither her” might, to a certain degree, apply to the actress herself because she somehow kept this four-year-old girl in her alive. (IMDB says that she just turned fifty! There is hope yet, isn’t there? Though probably not for everybody. I became unpleasantly aware recently that I HAVEN’T bid farewell to middle-age yet, and am debating with myself if I am wrong …). Cleopatra certainly is a character that came naturally to her. And she brings a very special kind of humour to her characters which I like, though, in this case, it contributed to my impression that she played Cleopatra too superficially. But this is the most immediate benefit of this style of acting: that there is almost always a personal side to it which might turn out interesting if “we” find it interesting. In Sophie Okonedo’s case I obviously do because I already noticed it about her Queen Margaret – strangely one of my favourite characters in “Shakespeare” – in the “Hollow Crown”. She was one of the few actors in this production who added a new dimension to this character – quite like Simon Russell Beale did with Falstaff. And she was the only actor in “Antony and Cleopatra” who played her character as a contemporary person – to fit the entirely contemporary setting of the play! – not as a historical queen. I laid this impression down in my last post when I wrote that she was playing Cleopatra like an ageing celebrity. And Claudia texted me the day after the show: “I get Cleopatra now. She is this great queen, but she fell in love and is acting like a teenager.” (I think it is kind of obvious why I still prefer e-mail (and blogging) to texting, but texting definitely has its benefits!) The morning after I began to write about this – when I woke early and stayed in bed because it was Sunday – the analysis of what I think is the problem with this, and the reason why, in my opinion, it kind of worked for Cleopatra nonetheless, came to me. But this will become a lot longer than I intended, and I will continue with Cleopatra and Antony in my next post …