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azdak at 09:52am on 02/12/2006 under slings & arrows
azdak at 09:52am on 02/12/2006 under slings & arrowsI have now watched the first series of Slings & Arrows
and I have to say that while it had enormous potential, it was ultimately disappointing. Disappointing precisely because the opening episodes were so promising, and above all because the acting was thrillingly good except for one (unfortunately crucial) performance. Because really, truly, if you are going to have a climax in which a performance of Hamlet is powerful enough to melt stony hearts, convert straying sheep back to the path of righteousness and even offer the hope of reforming society by defeating consumerism – well, you'd better cast a bloody good actor as Hamlet, right? In German theatre there is a saying "The King is played by the other actors", meaning it's the way everyone else on stage responds to the charismatic leader that gives him his kingly qualities. Slings and Arrows proved that that isn't enough. No amount of shots of weeping audience members or close-ups of the wonderful Richard Smith-Jones looking profoundly moved could overcome the deadly blandness of Jack Crew's Hamlet. In real life, half the audience would have left during the first of those famous (helpfully enumerated) soliloquies. I had hoped, up until Geoffrey forced Jack to "speak the lines" and not improvise sub-text, that the actor had a secret weapon in his back pocket and was suddenly going to turn out to be as ravishing a performer as the rest of the cast, but then they did the exercise with the secret listeners – is Hamlet performing for the hidden King and Polonius, or is he genuinely unaware that they're present and is speaking only to himself? It's a crucial question, one that alters fundamentally how an actor plays that scene – except that in Jack's case you honestly couldn't tell what he'd decided. Since we got to walk around inside the scene – inside Jack's head? – and the listeners were physically present, I'd guess that he was supposed to be playing it for his audience, but the dreary, monotonous whine in which the soliloquy was delivered suggested he was talking to himself. Yes, it was dreadful, dreadful even by amateur standards. And here we hit my second major criticism of the series, which is that although it is ostensibly about theatre, the understanding of theatre that it displayed was that of an under-funded am dram group. Seriously. I know I'm a bit of a specialist audience here, but nonetheless it strikes me as a fundamental problem.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what it showed was theatre through the eyes of TV practitioners. Because there was some juicy stuff in there – all of it related to issues of acting rather than staging, as I'll get onto in a minute – but it was stuff that works on TV (and in film) but not on stage. The first really problematic moment is when we are shown parallel work in progress – Darren Nicholls rehearsing Hamlet and Geoffrey exploring Macbeth with Terry from Accounts. Darren has a "vision" of Hamlet, based on the line "something is rotten in the state of Denmark". His vision translates into lots of bad smells, armpit-sniffing and explosions, causing Jack to remark that he hadn't thought theatre would be so like film. This is clearly intended as an "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" judgment on Darren's kind of theatre – it isn't true to the text, it's too flashy, it's too much of the director and not enough Shakespeare; the impression of a damning judgment is confirmed when Darren subsequently admits that he hates theatre and considers it inferior to film and TV. Intercut with Darren's rehearsal we have Geoffrey's exploration of the character of Macbeth, as interpreted by Terry. It's an excellent performance by the actor playing Terry, who shows us one man, new to acting, gradually discovering in the course of the soliloquy parts of the text he can relate to, and finding ways to give that expression. It's a very watchable piece of acting, but, and it's a big but, it's TV acting. It tells us far more about the small-scale character of Terry than it does about the large-scale character of Macbeth. It's shot in close-up, the camera lets us read Terry's thoughts as he finds his way into the role, it's psychologically realistic, and it's totally inappropriate for the stage. Those kinds of tiny subtleties are simply not visible to a theatre audience, certainly not at the Swan, because they're sitting too far away. And even if they were right next to him, they still wouldn't be watching Macbeth, they'd be watching something much smaller, Terry from Accounts, the height of whose vaulting ambition is to get off with the pretty girl from Sales and be an extra in the next production. It's not bad acting, it's different acting, and that wouldn't be a problem, except that the deliberate contrast with Darren Nicholls' rehearsal implies that this is "real", this is "true", this is "heartfelt", in other words, this is what stage acting should be about. It is, in fact, dishonest, because the show dislikes the Darren Nicholls approach to theatre and so has the character say he despises theatre; and yet Darren is the only character we see who actually approaches theatre as a medium fundamentally different from film and TV, where both the style of acting and the use of the other elements of theatre –set, costume, lights, special effects - are non-naturalistic. In truth, it is Geoffrey's approach to acting that is "like film" and Darren's that is theatrical, in the sense of specific to theatre. The message about Shakespeare that you get from Geoffrey is that you only have to "feel" the text for it to work properly, for your performance to be "true". Most of the time, Geoffrey's directing technique consists of acting the part for the actors, to show them how much emotion is contained behind the lines. When, that is, he's not obsessing about blocking (this is the thing that made the whole thing seem so peculiarly like am dram to me – that the director's main task is to make sure the actors know when to come on and off and are facing the audience when they say their lines. As shorthand for Oliver's lack of artistic commitment to his tenth Dream it was okay; as an indicator of how Geoffrey's total artistic commitment results in a raw, living Hamlet it was utterly inadequate).
It's also clear that as far as the writers of the show are concerned, the actual tools of theatre – set, lights, costume, make-up – are irrelevant. As, indeed, is the notion that the director might actually want to say something about the play beyond "this is a jolly good play and it's very sad". Geoffrey tells Oliver that until he knows who Jack is, he can't know who Hamlet is. But if he doesn't know Hamlet, what story does he think he's telling? Or to put it another way, why should anyone go and watch this Hamlet rather than reading it in the comfort of their own home? What is he going to bring to it that expands on the text? The answer appears to be nothing, not even – in the case of Jack – good acting. There is a hint that Geoffrey wants to say that the essential art of theatre can be reduced to acting and nothing else, but he doesn't follow this decision through in any artistically meaningful way. The decision to scrap the set is potentially a good one, but it isn't consistent – they keep a raised area and some columns, which indicate a kingly setting. So instead of saying "Theatre can happen anywhere, in any kind of space, and the audience's imagination will do the work of providing the setting" the set doesn't say anything at all (apart from "We didn't have the budget for a new set"). Ditto the costumes – there isn't a consistent aesthetic behind the choice, it's a mish-mash of what's available. Why are the soldiers dressed alike if the actors are supposed to opt for what they fancy? What exactly is this choice of costume supposed to be telling me, as the audience, beyond the fact that the director didn't think costumes were important? Have them all dressed alike in black t-shirts, or all in their own private clothes, or all in swimming costumes, and that would make it plain that the story can be told without the help of costumes. Have them dress up in bits and pieces of costumes, and you can't tell whether Fortinbras' soliders are soldiers because they're wearing military symbols or because they act being warriors. Lighting doesn't even get mentioned – it's just assumed that there'll be some, and that it will be theatre lighting, whereas consistency would demand that it be deliberately non-theatrical, perhaps just working lights. And if Geoffrey really genuinely wanted to focus his production on the issue of acting, and how essential that is to theatre, then he couldn't ask a greater gift than having someone in the cast who acts badly. Ophelia would have been a wonderful opportunity to get the audience to question why other characters seemed "real" and she didn't, but he doesn't really want that, what he wants is an emotional wallow in the character's suffering. So it's a matter of urgency that she be replaced by someone who can act decently.
When it comes down to it, what Geoffrey Tennant's Hamlet offers us is a bit of drama therapy and an under-rehearsed presentation of the text that offers no insights into the characters beyond "Ophelia sings songs because she's mad" and absolutely no insights into the rest of the play whatsoever. At least Darren Nicholls brought something to the text, and had ideas about how to translate those ideas into theatre, however ridiculous or ill-judged such ideas might have been (and I'm not sure they were ridicuolous – they were held up to ridicule but that's not quite the same thing). And yet this is held up as a model of true, even revolutionary theatre, with the potential to change society and redeem individuals. It's supposedly morally superior to musicals, which just make you feel good instead of making you cry, and it's supposedly superior to film because it's not just explosions, yet we are never shown what this superiority consists in. It is a deeply reactionary view of theatre, that has no notion of its potential for storytelling that goes beyond the text, and no understanding of the processes that underlie theatrical production at any level beyond that of the most basic amateur theatre.
And finally, the series disappointned me because the central mystery of what happened the night Geoffrey leapt into Ophelia's grave and went mad turned out not to be a mystery at all but a banal case of jealousy. I never felt I understood what pushed him over the edge, and by the end I didn't care. Nothing that came afterwards in the plot lived up to the wonderful duel between Darren Nicholls and Geoffrey, or even to Oliver being run over by a lorry full of hams. And yet the acting was almost uniformly wonderful. The villains in particular were terrific - Holly, Richard, Darren, all of them perfectly judged and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny – as were the supporting cast – Anna and Maria and the two old queers in particular. It was disappointing because so much was so good that it generated great expectations, and yet there were huge inadequacies, gaps and dishonesties right at the heart of the show.
and I have to say that while it had enormous potential, it was ultimately disappointing. Disappointing precisely because the opening episodes were so promising, and above all because the acting was thrillingly good except for one (unfortunately crucial) performance. Because really, truly, if you are going to have a climax in which a performance of Hamlet is powerful enough to melt stony hearts, convert straying sheep back to the path of righteousness and even offer the hope of reforming society by defeating consumerism – well, you'd better cast a bloody good actor as Hamlet, right? In German theatre there is a saying "The King is played by the other actors", meaning it's the way everyone else on stage responds to the charismatic leader that gives him his kingly qualities. Slings and Arrows proved that that isn't enough. No amount of shots of weeping audience members or close-ups of the wonderful Richard Smith-Jones looking profoundly moved could overcome the deadly blandness of Jack Crew's Hamlet. In real life, half the audience would have left during the first of those famous (helpfully enumerated) soliloquies. I had hoped, up until Geoffrey forced Jack to "speak the lines" and not improvise sub-text, that the actor had a secret weapon in his back pocket and was suddenly going to turn out to be as ravishing a performer as the rest of the cast, but then they did the exercise with the secret listeners – is Hamlet performing for the hidden King and Polonius, or is he genuinely unaware that they're present and is speaking only to himself? It's a crucial question, one that alters fundamentally how an actor plays that scene – except that in Jack's case you honestly couldn't tell what he'd decided. Since we got to walk around inside the scene – inside Jack's head? – and the listeners were physically present, I'd guess that he was supposed to be playing it for his audience, but the dreary, monotonous whine in which the soliloquy was delivered suggested he was talking to himself. Yes, it was dreadful, dreadful even by amateur standards. And here we hit my second major criticism of the series, which is that although it is ostensibly about theatre, the understanding of theatre that it displayed was that of an under-funded am dram group. Seriously. I know I'm a bit of a specialist audience here, but nonetheless it strikes me as a fundamental problem.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what it showed was theatre through the eyes of TV practitioners. Because there was some juicy stuff in there – all of it related to issues of acting rather than staging, as I'll get onto in a minute – but it was stuff that works on TV (and in film) but not on stage. The first really problematic moment is when we are shown parallel work in progress – Darren Nicholls rehearsing Hamlet and Geoffrey exploring Macbeth with Terry from Accounts. Darren has a "vision" of Hamlet, based on the line "something is rotten in the state of Denmark". His vision translates into lots of bad smells, armpit-sniffing and explosions, causing Jack to remark that he hadn't thought theatre would be so like film. This is clearly intended as an "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" judgment on Darren's kind of theatre – it isn't true to the text, it's too flashy, it's too much of the director and not enough Shakespeare; the impression of a damning judgment is confirmed when Darren subsequently admits that he hates theatre and considers it inferior to film and TV. Intercut with Darren's rehearsal we have Geoffrey's exploration of the character of Macbeth, as interpreted by Terry. It's an excellent performance by the actor playing Terry, who shows us one man, new to acting, gradually discovering in the course of the soliloquy parts of the text he can relate to, and finding ways to give that expression. It's a very watchable piece of acting, but, and it's a big but, it's TV acting. It tells us far more about the small-scale character of Terry than it does about the large-scale character of Macbeth. It's shot in close-up, the camera lets us read Terry's thoughts as he finds his way into the role, it's psychologically realistic, and it's totally inappropriate for the stage. Those kinds of tiny subtleties are simply not visible to a theatre audience, certainly not at the Swan, because they're sitting too far away. And even if they were right next to him, they still wouldn't be watching Macbeth, they'd be watching something much smaller, Terry from Accounts, the height of whose vaulting ambition is to get off with the pretty girl from Sales and be an extra in the next production. It's not bad acting, it's different acting, and that wouldn't be a problem, except that the deliberate contrast with Darren Nicholls' rehearsal implies that this is "real", this is "true", this is "heartfelt", in other words, this is what stage acting should be about. It is, in fact, dishonest, because the show dislikes the Darren Nicholls approach to theatre and so has the character say he despises theatre; and yet Darren is the only character we see who actually approaches theatre as a medium fundamentally different from film and TV, where both the style of acting and the use of the other elements of theatre –set, costume, lights, special effects - are non-naturalistic. In truth, it is Geoffrey's approach to acting that is "like film" and Darren's that is theatrical, in the sense of specific to theatre. The message about Shakespeare that you get from Geoffrey is that you only have to "feel" the text for it to work properly, for your performance to be "true". Most of the time, Geoffrey's directing technique consists of acting the part for the actors, to show them how much emotion is contained behind the lines. When, that is, he's not obsessing about blocking (this is the thing that made the whole thing seem so peculiarly like am dram to me – that the director's main task is to make sure the actors know when to come on and off and are facing the audience when they say their lines. As shorthand for Oliver's lack of artistic commitment to his tenth Dream it was okay; as an indicator of how Geoffrey's total artistic commitment results in a raw, living Hamlet it was utterly inadequate).
It's also clear that as far as the writers of the show are concerned, the actual tools of theatre – set, lights, costume, make-up – are irrelevant. As, indeed, is the notion that the director might actually want to say something about the play beyond "this is a jolly good play and it's very sad". Geoffrey tells Oliver that until he knows who Jack is, he can't know who Hamlet is. But if he doesn't know Hamlet, what story does he think he's telling? Or to put it another way, why should anyone go and watch this Hamlet rather than reading it in the comfort of their own home? What is he going to bring to it that expands on the text? The answer appears to be nothing, not even – in the case of Jack – good acting. There is a hint that Geoffrey wants to say that the essential art of theatre can be reduced to acting and nothing else, but he doesn't follow this decision through in any artistically meaningful way. The decision to scrap the set is potentially a good one, but it isn't consistent – they keep a raised area and some columns, which indicate a kingly setting. So instead of saying "Theatre can happen anywhere, in any kind of space, and the audience's imagination will do the work of providing the setting" the set doesn't say anything at all (apart from "We didn't have the budget for a new set"). Ditto the costumes – there isn't a consistent aesthetic behind the choice, it's a mish-mash of what's available. Why are the soldiers dressed alike if the actors are supposed to opt for what they fancy? What exactly is this choice of costume supposed to be telling me, as the audience, beyond the fact that the director didn't think costumes were important? Have them all dressed alike in black t-shirts, or all in their own private clothes, or all in swimming costumes, and that would make it plain that the story can be told without the help of costumes. Have them dress up in bits and pieces of costumes, and you can't tell whether Fortinbras' soliders are soldiers because they're wearing military symbols or because they act being warriors. Lighting doesn't even get mentioned – it's just assumed that there'll be some, and that it will be theatre lighting, whereas consistency would demand that it be deliberately non-theatrical, perhaps just working lights. And if Geoffrey really genuinely wanted to focus his production on the issue of acting, and how essential that is to theatre, then he couldn't ask a greater gift than having someone in the cast who acts badly. Ophelia would have been a wonderful opportunity to get the audience to question why other characters seemed "real" and she didn't, but he doesn't really want that, what he wants is an emotional wallow in the character's suffering. So it's a matter of urgency that she be replaced by someone who can act decently.
When it comes down to it, what Geoffrey Tennant's Hamlet offers us is a bit of drama therapy and an under-rehearsed presentation of the text that offers no insights into the characters beyond "Ophelia sings songs because she's mad" and absolutely no insights into the rest of the play whatsoever. At least Darren Nicholls brought something to the text, and had ideas about how to translate those ideas into theatre, however ridiculous or ill-judged such ideas might have been (and I'm not sure they were ridicuolous – they were held up to ridicule but that's not quite the same thing). And yet this is held up as a model of true, even revolutionary theatre, with the potential to change society and redeem individuals. It's supposedly morally superior to musicals, which just make you feel good instead of making you cry, and it's supposedly superior to film because it's not just explosions, yet we are never shown what this superiority consists in. It is a deeply reactionary view of theatre, that has no notion of its potential for storytelling that goes beyond the text, and no understanding of the processes that underlie theatrical production at any level beyond that of the most basic amateur theatre.
And finally, the series disappointned me because the central mystery of what happened the night Geoffrey leapt into Ophelia's grave and went mad turned out not to be a mystery at all but a banal case of jealousy. I never felt I understood what pushed him over the edge, and by the end I didn't care. Nothing that came afterwards in the plot lived up to the wonderful duel between Darren Nicholls and Geoffrey, or even to Oliver being run over by a lorry full of hams. And yet the acting was almost uniformly wonderful. The villains in particular were terrific - Holly, Richard, Darren, all of them perfectly judged and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny – as were the supporting cast – Anna and Maria and the two old queers in particular. It was disappointing because so much was so good that it generated great expectations, and yet there were huge inadequacies, gaps and dishonesties right at the heart of the show.