I will be breaking with my own tradition and writing two blogs this morning. Or at least copying and pasting this one! As you will know if you are regular readers of my blog Peter Brook is one of my inspirations in making theatre - so here is a faithful copy and paste of his National Theatre Platform interview with Mark Lawson. Bring it on Pete!
Peter Brook on Shakespeare
Last night our theatre editor, Nell Frizzell, went to a National Theatre Platform where Mark Lawson interviewed the legendary director Peter Brook about his new book, The Quality of Mercy, and his 70-year career. Here are some of the highlights...
I never tried to do things to a pre-arranged pattern. It was always an intuitive choice. All you have is a feeling that, at this moment, this particular play will be appropriate, if you succeed in bringing it to life.
If your tragic hero isn’t somebody of tremendous richness, power and consequence, then how the hell can you stay interested in his decline over three hours? In King Lear, his decline is also a passage of self-knowledge and revelation. If he were an old man, thrown up into the storm, he wouldn’t survive. You need a strong pillar for its fall to be something that really catches us.
There are three stages of actors. First is impersonating. You have an idea, they think of a person and the actor impersonates or caricatures that person externally. The second stage is inhabiting. Then you get to the rarest level of all – incarnation. That is when the great role actually enters every fibre of the flesh; it only happens once in a generation.
A great writer, or great poet doesn’t start with the rhythm. He has words, images and feelings – like a composer. Out of that comes a moment when the word, the rhythm, the flow and the thought are all part of one thing, and he puts it down.
We have to go through a similar process. Through working, quietly and attentively, you find the essential meaning. That is the meaning of that moment in the play, as a whole; the way that character, at that moment expresses something that cannot be expressed in any other way. Through that you discover the shape, sound, musicality and rhythm of the words, the shape of the line, the breaks in the text, the rhythm. But that comes after the vital meaning of that passage.
When Paul Schofield did the “never, never, never, never” speech, it was different in every single performance. Not because he wanted it to be different, but because that line comes out of the whole of four acts. If you’ve been living them, when you come to that point, that night, your experience of the whole story is renewed.
We are not the pinnacle of culture. We are a fragment. Each fragment takes on a greater sense when it comes together and interrelates with another fragment. The most disgusting feature of human life is racism; it is unjustifiable.
To make theatre in which different people from different cultures try to bring together bits of their jigsaw is just simple common sense.
With theatre, we are talking about something that is alive, in the present. That’s all. If it’s good, it’s good. If someone is bursting with vitality and ideas, and suddenly produces something that moves us, who cares cares whether they’re aged 18, 28, 88 or 90?
To say that someone is a good actor is as simplistic as to say that someone is a good person. What the hell does that mean? A good actor is somebody who is born with a mass of complicated inner life and a rich capacity to express this through their different organs.
An actor is not an object, or a robot. An actor is evolving as an artist, and separately as a human being, both through his obligation and his political convictions. It is part of the actor’s job to feel and sense, without analysing, the world that they’re living in.
We talk about “presenting a play”: that means it doesn’t come to life until it is in the present i.e in the presence of an audience.
Would you like to learn how to tackle Shakespeare with help from the RSC and Manchester Royal Exchange? Then visit the Mastering Shakespeare brief.
To find out more and to book for the National Theatre Platform events, visit the website.
(quoted from IdeasTap website)
http://www.ideastap.com/
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