(no subject)

[skygiants]

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent is a very entertaining ramble through Judi Dench's Thoughts On Shakespeare that both charmed me exceedingly and made me miss my opinionated friend Bill Redfield ....

The book is comprised of a series of interviews between Judi Dench and her friend and collaborator, Shakespearean director Brendan O'Hea, that iirc were originally meant to serve as master classes for up-and-coming actors. Each conversation centers on a play and a part, and walks through the role and the plot of the play in general, and then what Judi Dench's particular experiences have been in playing it.

This yields a lot of extremely entertaining plot summary, anecdotes and jokes -- Judi Dench presents herself as a bit of a chaos demon in terms of on-set behavior, I deeply enjoyed the [numerous!] stories of her accidentally pranking and shouting at total strangers that she'd accidentally mistaken for dear friends and I also enjoyed the stories about her and Kenneth Branagh getting kicked off-set for corpsing too hard -- although not a great deal of deeper Shakespearean analysis. Not infrequently O'Hea proposes an idea, interpretation or theme that Judi Dench just shoots down, as in this example about Measure for Measure:

O'HEA: It is sometimes said that Isabella and Angelo are two different sides of the same coin.
DENCH: Why? Course they're not. Who said that? It's ridiculous.
O'HEA: The name 'Angelo' means 'Messenger of God,' and Isabella means 'devoted to God.' They're both zealot-like in their thinking, they believe strongly in the rule of law, they both appear to have the same moral values, they're well-matched intellectually -- certainly if this scene is anything to go by.
DENCH: That may be, but saying that they are 'different sides of the same coin' isn't helpful to an actor. How do you play that? How does that help you in the scene?
O'HEA: Well, it doesn't really.
DENCH: It doesn't at all.
O'HEA: I suppose I'm thinking of themes and mirroring, and if I was writing an essay --
DENCH: Which you're not, you're acting, trying to bring a part to life. You can't act a theme.

Now I personally would have said you could act a theme, and that it might even be interesting to do so, to try to bring different things out in different iterations of the play; this is honestly one of the things I find most fun about Shakespeare, is that it's all been done so often that everyone is always trying to bring out different themes in interesting and compelling ways.

However, far be it from me to argue with Judi Dench, one of the greatest Shakespeareans of all time, who is clearly doing it much better than I ever will or can! And I do feel it's quite likely that the fact Judi Dench refuses to do this, that she's interested in the character as written on the page and just portrays that person as clearly and directly and with as much conviction as she can, is one of the things that makes her so good, while my friend Bill Redfield, who agonizes for pages and pages and pages about the themes and psychology of Hamlet as related to Guildenstern of all people, languishes forever in second tier. But Redfield's pages and pages worth of character meta are fun for me ....

The other thing that's very funny about Judi Dench is that she is the straightest woman in theater -- she clearly has many queer friends but, God bless, she would not notice a queer theme in Shakespeare if it jumped up and bit her on the nose. The chapter on Merchant of Venice is one of my favorite chapters even though Judi Dench does not like Merchant of Venice because you get to see her discover that Bassanio and Antonio's relationship might be a bit romantic in real time. Genuinely inspirational to learn that even the greatest and wisest among us can still learn things at any age.

Comments

[satsuma]

That sounds like an entertaining read! Tho I am wondering a bit if they trimmed some of the acting advice, or if the general thinness of said advice in how the interviews turned out was part of why it became a book and not a masterclass. Bc as it stands it sounds fascinating but maybe not the most helpful for actors looking for advice on acting haha

[kore]

"DENCH: That may be, but saying that they are 'different sides of the same coin' isn't helpful to an actor. How do you play that? How does that help you in the scene?"

Ahahaha I love her. That's very old-school acting style I believe.

[azdak]

I hope you don't mind a stranger jumping in on this very interesting post?

I have to agree with Dame Judi here - it's the director's job to bring out the themes, not the actor's. Of course the way the actors play the roles is a very important part of bringing out the themes, but you don't achieve that by telling them "Play this character as the embodiment of early 21st century capitalism" or "Play this character as a dark reflection of this other character" - that's where you, as a director, want to end up, not how you get the actors there. It's very tempting to think that explaining the theme is short-cut to getting this effect, but it doesn't actually help the actor at all. There are some very intellectual actors, like Redfield, who might enjoy talking about themes (although I got the impression Redfield mostly wanted confirmation that Gielgud had a coherent artistic vision for the production and his panic over Guildenstern had a lot to do with the fact that he never really believed he had one) but that isn't where the work of constructing a character lies. Isabella the character doesn't know she's the other side of Angelo's coin, so for an actor trying to find her inner life, being told that doesn't get them anywhere (any more than "I want the lightness of a rehearsal run-though" helps with constructing Guildenstern). Isabella's actor needs to know what makes her Isabella and Angelo needs to know what makes him Angelo, and then when the two face off against each other the audience can go "Gosh, these two are eerily similar in a way I didn't expect!" (and maybe even the characters find themselves thinking that, but it isn't something they can know in advance, it isn't a shortcut to figuring out who they are).

[oracne]

I loved this book.

[chestnut_pod]

Extremely amused that Judi Dench "would not notice a queer theme in Shakespeare if it jumped up and bit her." Truly, even the great among us are fallible!

[skygiants]

Yeah, it was incredibly fun!! I think probably some of the advice would be useful to people who really are actors tbh, but as someone who is not an actor but just enjoys meta about Shakespeare I kept wantinb to be like "but surely Judi we can riff a little bit?" (and sometimes she does riff, I think her most interesting thoughts come in about Ophelia and her family unit and how that dynamic plays into her actions in the play, but she's also very quick to shut down any riffing she thinks is not relevant.)

[skygiants]

She's so absolutely no nonsense, it's extremely fun charming (and clearly very effective!) even when I'm like "no wait Dame Judi I would like to talk about that a little more --"

[skygiants]

I don't mind at all, thank you so much for your thoughts! I do think you're probably right that it is more the director's job than the actors to do that kind of explicitly thematic work, but at the same time -- and probably this is the fact that I'm a writer and not an actor! -- I can't quite get my head round not being interested in the themes relating to one's character either. I'm thinking about watching the film of the Gielgud production of Hamlet, and how we realized during Ophelia's madness scene that the actress seemed to be explicitly mirroring Hamlet's faux-madness earlier in the play; that's of course both a character choice and a thematic choice and worked really well on both levels, but it seems to me that thinking about the themes first might help an actor find the character choice there in a way where they strengthen each other.

(And I can't help but have a soft spot for actors who get so invested in building up their own characters around the boundaries of the page that they end up essentially -- or literally! -- writing their own novels to get down all their Thoughts and Ideas about them, cf. Andy Robinson and Garak and "A Stitch In Time" or that one Fiddler on the Roof actress who wrote a mediocre but heartfelt post-Anatevka sequel novel.)

[skygiants]

It was so much fun to read!

[skygiants]

The interviewer is like "I'm thinking in light of Richard II's ambivalent sexuality -- " and she's like "wait, what? since when is Richard's sexuality ambivalent? he and his wife are deeply in love???" It's SO funny.

[chestnut_pod]

Of all the kings!!

[azdak]

Being a writer is very like being a director, except with a limitless budget and no tech guys to say "Can't be done!"

Your Ophelia example is very interesting, but I would still be inclined to think that while Gielgud saw the parallels with Hamlet's madness, the actress probably got there from the inside out rather than the outside in, if you see what I mean. With Gielgud's help, she found her own way to Ophelia's madness and then discovered that it mirrored Hamlet's rather than starting with "I need to mirror Hamlet's madness, how can I do that?"

This discussion has reminded me of an interview I read many years ago with Niels Arestrup when "Un Prophete" came out (I can't find it now, I'm afraid, it no longer seems to be online). Arestrup played the gangster boss who rules the prison the teenaged Arab protagonist is sent to and which will turn him from a petty criminal into an accomplished murderer and gangster boss in his own right. Arestrup won a Cesar for the role and said of the director that he really knew how to get the best from actors and as an example gave Audiard's instructions for his first scene with the protagonist: "He's like a lion playing with his food." I was reminded of it because it's about as far from the kind of abstract, thematic thinking directors and writers engage in as it's possible to get, but for an actor it was really inspiring.

To the list of actors who end up writing their own novels about their characters, one might add Paul Darrow's "Avon: A Terrible Aspect" (known in Blake's 7 fandom as "Avon: A Terrible Novel"), in which fandom discovered that the character Darrow thought he was playing bore no resemblance to what everyone else saw on screen.