… and
this time it’s not about Donald Trump. (Though this should be the final proof
of Gods non-existence – if any was needed after Hitler and Stalin! – that she
hasn’t done it yet. Just to see what will happen … or stop happening. No doubt
the world would stop turning. I suppose, though, that, if she existed, she’d be
a lot cleverer than I am and would probably have decided that the world needs a
move on …) No, I meant about “Ocean’s 8”! Luckily I just saw a trailer and
decided that I would see the film – WITHOUT knowing that Richard Armitage
played the “villain”. HONEST! I didn’t even see him in the trailer – which is
weird … And I honestly don’t get it how people can make time for twitter. (Of
course I don’t twitter, but Claudia gave me a shout ...) I obviously didn’t
even get around to looking into the Internet Movie Database during the last few
months. Good! Saved me weeks (or months) of skittishness. Now I AM skittish …
So,
there is my own “tweet” – just because. (I don’t regret that I don’t twitter for
real because I would have been too late anyway, and my tweet would have come
long after the shit storm had blown over.)
I don’t know Chris Pine, so I can’t really judge.
“No name” will be over for good, though, after this! Welcome to the world of
fame and fortune!
So,
that’s done!!! Just to get rid of the skittishness until I see him again in the
cinema. (Interesting that to know that Ralph Fiennes will be in a film gets me
excited, to know that Simon Russell Beale will makes me happy, and to know that
Richard Armitage will makes me skittish …) But most of the skittishness was due
to so much happening, and there was just no time for writing about it. So I
decided to skip everything I planned to write about and to get on with what
just happened on the spaceship named “Shakespeare” which I built in my blog ( –
sorry, but I am rather into “Doctor Who” right now!) And THIS really is
exciting because I think the ship JUST LAUNCHED …
What I
will do in this post is to sum up what happened. I think this will take a while
anyway.
It began
way back into our last e-mail exchange where I brought up the concept of the “correctness”
of an interpretation. Since then we met and had an exciting conversation which,
I think, brought us much closer together. I wrote that I TRIED to disagree
because I knew there was something I still didn’t understand and this was a way
for me to find out what it was. When we talked it suddenly struck me that it
was probably just a word. That “correctness” was just the wrong word for
something we were both looking for, and which is crucial for both of us.
Before
we met, Claudia wrote me an e-mail where she mentioned that she had spent part
of her weekend on her balcony, watching “scraps” of “Hamlet” with Andrew Scott
on UTube. I had been disappointed that, at the time, I had only found
interviews with some scraps of monologue in them, and I somehow didn’t have the
time – or the nerve – for “Hamlet”. But in the meantime they obviously released
bigger parts of the production, like the closet scene, and I finally got
around to watching this one. And I saw Andrew Scott and Juliet Stevenson play
this and couldn’t believe what I had missed …
Even
before I could watch anything, though, I read a sentence from an interview by
Andrew Scott about “To be or not to be …”:
“These lines were not written to be famous,
they were written to be authentic.”
And THIS
was the moment when it launched.
I knew
this as soon as I had read it, and e-mailed Claudia:
“After
having struggled for hours with one of the most hideous periodicals I have encountered
in my life – successfully, in the end! – I thought I deserved a bit of “Hamlet”
and looked up Andrew Scott on UTube. Even before I could open anything this
quotation struck me: “These lines …”
And THIS
is exactly what I wanted to explain and somehow didn’t get across when we last
talked. This is what I missed when I saw Benedict Cumberbatch, and why I am so
sorry that I will never see the Almeida’s production.”
She
answered this with the comment that “authentic” – like “correct” - might be
opening another can of worms. Who is to judge about what is “authentic” …???
Then
came the weekend where I took time off all this, spending endless hours
repairing my bathroom floor and making endless corrections to my “fan fiction”
… and, on Monday, after having gone through the shit pile on my desk, I found
time to REALLY watch the closet scene. That was already in the afternoon, and I
just e-mailed something like
“I
finally watched the closet scene, and I am blown away …”
And now
things began to boil up (– even though twitter got in the way …) Obviously
Claudia had been thinking about “authentic” and got back to me with something
which I know I have already written more than once in my blog, but it didn’t
really “launch” until now.
“… About
authenticity – this was one of the things that left such a lasting impression
when I saw “Henry V”: the characters talked as if these sentences came to them
naturally, not as if they recited a given text.”
And THIS
is exactly what “authentic” means – and it is EXACTLY what I wish to see more
than anything. And, like Claudia, I went back to where it happened to me for
the first time IN THIS WAY. And I noticed that it hadn’t been Shakespeare. It
had been Schiller – not surprisingly because Schiller is what comes closest to
Shakespeare as to the “charged” quality of the language on a German stage, and
I couldn’t see any Shakespeare in English at the time. It was a production of
“Die Räuber” at the Augsburg theatre which I frequented at the time. And at the
time I thought I was just bored with my life and desperate to get so deeply
into something weird like this. (I think I saw the production about seven
times!) But now I know that there was a REAL reason, and I even know what it
was. Very unusual for this kind of play, they decided to produce it “without
gimmicks”, just concentrating on the text, making the “blown up” language fill
a huge and empty stage, and the actors rose to the challenge. It was utterly
beautiful and satisfying because, by using the text like this, they transcended
it towards its HUMAN QUALITY which we MUST experience if we partake in the
beauty and precision. For the actors there is an infinite amount of hard work,
and intelligence, and skill required to work themselves “through” a text like
this AND make it authentic. I noticed
this on behalf of Andrew Scott – how difficult it is to make it authentic and
not sacrifice most of the text – without
which there would be no authenticity; it just becomes random feelings.
Sometimes - when the text becomes too verbous - he can hardly manage. Hamlet’s
lines can be a REAL bugger – even for Shakespeare! But the difficulties, I
believe, partly come out of trying not to compromise on authenticity. It is just not possible to let all this text go "through you" in this way. I think I learned
a lot about “Shakespeare acting” here, in a very short time, as I did in fact
already watching Lucian Msamati playing Iago, or the amazing Martin Hutson (“no
name”, not doubt!) playing Cassio in the RSC’s latest “Julius Caesar”.
I think
it is this AUTHENTICITY which always “gets” us, and which is what I described,
inefficiently, as “truth”. “Gimmicks” can be great; often they are great
shortcuts to arrive faster at the heart of the matter, more often, probably,
they are just diversions. This was where I THOUGHT we disagreed, but I got this
feeling that we basically agree about the most important thing – that something
extraordinary and singular MUST happen between an actor and a text. Which may
then, in turn, happen to us. That the main thing is to get as close as we can.
For the actor this means not to concentrate on playing the text brilliantly but
to somehow get to what is really happening – to him! – when he “processes”
these lines. For this, Andrew Scott’s Hamlet is a stellar example!
I realize
already that this sudden breakthrough is also a bit of a setback because it
makes so much of what I have written recently just meaningless. But this is
what happens when the ship has finally launched: all the painstaking work of
months (or years) suddenly doesn’t matter anymore. On the other side of it
there lies the Unknown … Of course this scares me – main reason for the
skittishness? – but it is also exciting. And, the best thing: I have a feeling
that I am not the only passenger anymore. Of course, if you need the “world” to
agree or disagree with, there is twitter, but for something AUTHENTIC to happen
two appears like a good number.
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