Othello/Otello ‒ black or white?

What a problem Verdi left to us in casting his Otello.

It’s not such a problem nowadays with the original Shakespeare. As early as 1959 I saw the amazing Paul Robeson on the stage at Stratford (Sam Wanamaker his savage Iago, Mary Ure a delectable Desdemona). And later (in 1989) Willard White at the Young Vic (Iago ‒ Ian McKellen, Desdemona ‒ Imogen Stubbs).

If only Verdi hadn’t conceived his Moor as a tenor, both of those great black bass-baritones might have been just the ticket. But he didn’t. He demands not just any old tenor, but a genuine dramatic one, with a powerful ringing top and a baritonal timbre. What’s more, one who can act. These creatures are hard to find.

And all that is still not enough. In our enlightened times, it’s no longer satisfying to have a white man blacked up, often conjuring up stereotypical black gestures and accents. Shades of the ghastly Laurence Olivier performance.

When I saw the exciting Graham Vick production of the Verdi with his Birmingham Opera Company a few years ago, Vick cast the West Indian Ronald Samm in the role. Samm was good, perhaps very good. But not great.

So what was David Alden to do in his new production for ENO at the Coliseum?

He has at his disposal perhaps the finest dramatic tenor of this generation, the Australian Stuart Skelton, who has the ideal vocal equipment and acts powerfully, but is oh so white. Alden has left Skelton au naturel, no blacking up. And the result is an unforgettable evening in the opera theatre.

And yet. And yet, there’s still something missing in this wonderful evening, and that is the shocking fact that the Moor is black, not white ‒ a former slave, an outsider and misfit in Venetian society.

Dealing with Macbeth

A friend, feeling under threat from a direct-report colleague, asked me how King Duncan might have dealt with the situation more effectively, rather than be murdered by Macbeth. Of course, it is a universal question as well as a personal one.

I made seven suggestions:

1.       Study Machiavelli, who focused particularly in The Prince on the retention of power: ‘The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.’

2.       Bring about major strategic disagreement.

3.       Move Macbeth to another country.

4.       Appoint a Prince over Macbeth.

5.       Accuse Macbeth of treason and lock him up.  

6.       Abdicate the throne (who needs that kind of exposure anyway?)

7.       Murder Macbeth (before he murders Duncan).

Machiavelli warns: ‘Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.’

And, finally, lamenting that the great Russian poet Pushkin died young, Clive James recently proposed: ‘If you are a poet, do not get into a duel with someone who is a better shot than you are.’

 

For night-owls shriek in the Base Court…

I went to Hampton Court Palace in the half-term holidays with daughters Kate and Dora, and granddaughter Isobel. And the first quadrangle we entered in the Tudor part of the palace was the “Base Court”.

Base Court? The outer court of a great house or castle says Wikipedia. But where do I remember it from? Of course, from an angry and frightened Richard II, about to be deposed by Bolingbroke in Shakespeare’s play… 

Earl of Northumberland:

My lord, in the base court he doth attend
To speak with you; may it please you to come down.

King Richard II:

Down, down I come; like glistering Phaethon,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitors' calls and do them grace.
In the base court? Come down? Down, court! down, king!
For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.

What an amazing and terrifying passage that is.

 

Finding Shakespeare's brother

Arriving early for the Duchess of Malfi matinée at the Globe, I wandered slowly through Borough Market, bought fish and chips from a stall and consumed them, well rugged up, in the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral.

Still with time to spare, I decided to go in search of the flagstone commemorating Shakespeare’s actor brother, Edmund. And there he is, on the floor of the chancel, next door to two other stones, for the playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger – they wrote a dozen plays together in the early part of the seventeenth century (Fletcher two of the lesser known ones with Shakespeare). I was told by an attentive steward that WS had paid for his brother’s stone.

What a pity he didn’t pre-purchase one for himself at the same time. We’ll just have to make do with his gravestone at Stratford – the one that contains the dire warning that “Bleste be the man that spares thes stones, / And curst be he that moves my bones”.  

The last time that I was in that cathedral was in 1993 – for the memorial service for Sam Wanamaker, along with shoals of other Wanamaker-helpers from his 25 year campaign to rebuild the Globe. Sam is commemorated in the south aisle, appropriately right next to the nineteenth century Shakespeare memorial.

Do you suppose all those Bankside playwrights and actors ate fish and chips in the churchyard?

In search of Mrs Shakespeare

It's said with rather boring regularity that little is known about Shakespeare the man. It is this that has fed the Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare movement. And yet, in reality there’s so much that has been turned up on him, much of it ill-fitting our Romantic view of The Artist.

That’s aside from all those quartos and folios of his work.

Recently I’ve been grappling with a biography of his wife, Ann Hathaway, by Germaine Greer. At one level, it’s an extraordinary achievement – to write 350 pages, tightly packed with relevant information, on a woman about whom next to nothing is known (aside from his leaving her the second best bed).

On the other hand, I’m not at all sure that I will stay the course. One can only take a certain number of might-have-beens, could-haves, we-can-only-imagines, possiblies and supposes.

Conquering Cleo

Ahead of the première of Antony and Cleopatra at Stratford, Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph pointed out that he had “never seen this play fulfilled on stage or witnessed two actors adequate to its leading roles.”

I know what he means. The last time I risked it was a couple of decades ago ‒ a dreary production with a schoolmarmish Cleo at the Birmingham Rep.

Well, the new production at the Swan, a joint effort of two American companies (the Public in New York and GableStage in Miami) together with the RSC, scores a creditable one out of two.

The Mark Antony, the well-established British actor Jonathan Cake, really looks as though he has wandered in from a remake of Carry On Cleo.

But the Cleopatra, Joaquina Kalukango, virtually fresh from the Juilliard School in New York, is absolutely magnificent. What a pity she didn’t bring her own leading man.

Pretending to be

When I was at school in the 1950s and early 1960s, it seemed to be generally accepted that Sir Laurence Olivier was, alongside Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud, the greatest of a great generation of “classical” actors.

Problem was, even at thirteen or so, he seemed to me to be a tremendous ham. On film both his Henry V and his Richard III appeared over the top (but just about tolerable), and his Hamlet reduced me to uncontrollable fits of giggles, so inflated was his assumption of the role.

He seemed to spend his time in so many roles gurning, unable to speak without addressing the throng in stentorian tones, both loud and soft.

Now, over fifty years later, his work remains for me completely unwatchable. Thank goodness for the Method, which has enabled actors to be (and not to be), rather than just pretending to be.

All’s Well That Ends Well

I seem to be in another Shakespeare immersion phase again – the fourth time in my life, I think. This time around I’m especially interested in the plays that I’ve failed to connect with well previously ‒ King John was something of a revelation last year.

Now it’s the turn of All’s Well That Ends Well, a wonderful production in the main house at Stratford. This is truly how I experience Shakespeare best: an uncluttered stage; real belief in the plot, the characters and the words; a modern staging, but without supermarket trolleys (Nancy Meckler the director); and great acting from a cast which was also a completely interdependent ensemble.

Especially noteworthy were Joanna Horton’s Helena, Alex Waldmann’s feckless Bertram, Jonathan Slinger’s brilliant Parolles, Greg Hicks’s King of France, and the fabulous Charlotte Cornwell’s Countess of Roussillion.

Together they made this often underrated “problem comedy” seem like genuine premier-league Shakespeare.

When I think, I must speak

To Stratford for their current As You Like It.

A feminist production that seemed to be the offspring of 1960s Hair (I was there then), including the smoking of dope.

It was ironic that the biggest laugh came when Rosalind declared: “Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.”

Not very PC, Will. But a magical play.

Does Putin have a Fool?

So often leaders, especially strong leaders, surround themselves with yes-men (and yes-women). This can seem helpful to teamwork and a sense of direction.

But it can be extraordinarily valuable for the strong leader to include in the court a Fool. Someone who regularly sees things from completely different perspectives, without illusion, and who is empowered to speak up, saying the unsayable.

Shakespeare has Fools in so many of his plays – Feste in Twelfth Night, Touchstone in As You Like It, Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream among them. But the best model for our modern leader is the Fool in King Lear.

The Fool uses song as well as speech to give the king feedback. He is the only one permitted to challenge head on, to say to the aging Lear that he’s deluded and stupid. And yet Lear treats him as his friend.

There’s a long traditional of Fools in Russian literature, not least in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.

I wonder if Vladimir Putin has a Fool? Not that he’d last long, one senses.

Ten more things I like

The playing (and singing) of Chet Baker
South Indian cooking
The Leaves of Southwell
Being a groundling at Shakespeare’s Globe
Walking in Old Shanghai
The prose of Patrick Leigh Fermor
The brief life of peonies in flower
Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen
Test cricket at Adelaide Oval
Writing in my office at home

How about you?

Murdoch’s Fool

Shakespeare’s Fools are entitled, privileged. And in ways that no other characters are. They may presume to speak up, to tell the truth as they see it, fearless on all occasions – whether they are dealing with princes or paupers.

They use a variety of means: they sing; they dance; they juggle; they joke - they do stand-up.

A particular favourite for me is the Fool in King Lear. Yet while the Fool tells Lear when he’s being foolish and is listened to, others who do so are given short shrift. When Lear’s favourite daughter, Cordelia, doesn’t go along with his wishes, she is disowned.

As Isaac Asimov puts it: “That, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool – that he is no fool at all.”

So many corporate and political leaders seem to surround themselves with yes-men (and women). Maybe it would be a good idea to appoint some licensed jesters, whose job it would be to puncture idiotic balloons.

I only ever met one ‒ Paul Birch at British Airways ‒ but he lasted eighteen months in the job.

So how to give them protection?

Mad Lear understood that his own Fool was intensely loyal and spoke out of love for him. Stalin, I sense, was less forgiving.

Does Rupert Murdoch have one? Could be useful.

Elbow-room at King John

Sad, and unusual in my experience, to see a half empty (half full?) house at the Swan in Stratford for Shakespeare’s King John.

Sad because, although the play is rarely performed these days, it turned out to be a magical production, filled with insight and vigour, and played to perfection by an outstanding cast.

The director, Maria Abegg had made a number of strategic decisions, making both the Bastard, by far the best part (and brilliantly played by Pippa Nixon), and the Cardinal, into women. But she kept the stage simple and clear throughout, allowing the drama to speak for itself.

Although King John was regularly staged in the nineteenth century, it has a distinct lack of well-known Shakespearean phrases. “Bell, book and candle”, “cold comfort” and "elbow-room” were the only ones I caught – none of them originating with the Bard.

A terrific night at the theatre. Catch it if you can.

Getting started at the Globe

It’s widely known that Sam Wanamaker dedicated most of his adult life to re-building Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London – and sadly died before it was completed.

Perhaps it is less well known that he drew into the project
shoals of individuals who could help him in one way or another to realise his dream. This became completely clear to me at his memorial service at Southwark Cathedral early in 1994.

I looked around and recognised people that I knew, who, to the best of my knowledge, had had nothing to do with the project. But we all had contributed in one way or another.

Sam always knew where and when he needed help. And he had the great gift of being able to inspire us all.

I came in to beef up the marketing and communications for the project – at a time when fund-raising had virtually dried up. It was not easy. And in fact that situation did not change until, in direct contravention of the board’s express wish, Sam started building.

“Now we’ve started, the money will come,” he told the board. And he was right.

Snoozing through Julius Caesar

My colleague, Bill Boggs, came over from America to work with Andrew Bailey and me on a new book on creativity. (Sadly it never saw the light of day.)

Since we were nearby, I took them to a performance of Julius Caesar by the RSC in Stratford.

Quite early in Act One, I noticed that Bill was asleep. Irritated, I wondered why I had brought him along.

Then, later, I glanced in his direction again. He was awake. And his lips were moving constantly. He was silently mouthing the words of the play. All of them, apparently.

I didn’t know at that time that he suffered from sleep apnoea and was likely to drop off for a nap at any time.

Nor had I realised that he knew Julius Caesar inside out.

Alyque at Shakespeare’s Globe

All that Shakespeare in the air at the moment reminds me of the day when I took my friend Alyque Padamsee to see the nearly-completed Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside in London.

Alyque is a colleague who led Lintas in India and was also founder, director and leading actor with the Theatre Group of Bombay. He’s best known in the English-speaking world for playing Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the film Gandhi. He was on a trip to London with his wife, the actress and singer, Sharon Prabhakar, and wanted to see how the project was progressing.

This was in mid-1996, the year before the theatre was opened, and Alyque was accorded a VIP tour. It so happened that the stage had just been installed – the great apron reaching out, to be surrounded by the groundlings.

Alyque enquired as to whether the stage had yet been performed on. “No, not yet,” was the reply. So without further ado, Alyque stepped forward and, to the amazement of the hordes of tourist groups also there at the time, he declaimed Jaques’s speech from As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…

So, rather extraordinarily, whatever the books will say, Alyque was first.

Learning to be more creative

I haven’t yet read Jonah Lehrer’s new best-selling book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works, but I have read his extended article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, and I’m not impressed.

He starts from the proposition that “there’s no such thing as a creative type” and that “anyone can be learn to be creative”. It is not an encouraging thesis.

Basically it’s an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours insight. And while it’s true that everyone can improve their connection-making skill (this being at the heart of all creativity), nevertheless it’s quite observable that some amongst us have creative skills of a quite different order.

Think Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, Edison, Turing… To be frank, even with a million hours of skill-building, I’m unlikely to achieve their level of, well, genius. And to deny this strikes me as, well, blind.

I have been training people in creative thinking over several decades now, and I notice consistently that the students who have lost their creativity (or suppressed it or never seemed to have had much anyway) can indeed up their game substantially. However they never catch up with the ones who have real self-confidence in their connection-making capabilities.

The latter make massive progress in a structured training session, because they are enabled to hone skills that already exist, taking them up to a whole new level. Whether the basis for their special talent is nature or nurture seems to me to be of secondary importance.

Gaius Petronius or Charlton Ogburn Jr?

If we must make a choice, who carries the greater weight? The Roman author of Satyricon, Gaius Petronius (c. 27 to 66 AD), or a forgotten American obsessive believer that all of Shakespeare was written by the Earl of Oxford, Charlton Ogburn Jr?

All over the internet, there is a challenging and well-composed sentence about change management attributed to Petronius. Here it is:

We tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.

I think it’s brilliant. So good that it should perhaps be on the wall of every CEO in the world.

Trouble is, it was never written by the legendary Roman. In reality, it was part of an article in Harper’s Magazine written by Ogburn in 1957.

My own belief is that reorganizing is the last thing you do.

The teacher who changed my life

A few years ago I gave a talk in London on “100 Years of Macbeth Recordings”, Verdi that is.

The audience for the talk, mainly gents (and a few ladies) older than me, and very expert in the history of recordings and opera and singers, were not to be impressed by my knowledge of (and insights regarding) Verdi. But they understood pretty quickly that I had a good grasp of the play and of how Verdi had gone about reshaping and compressing it for the lyric stage.

It was only later that I realised that my love of Macbeth started much earlier, with GS Braddy’s production at Uppingham School in 1957. Not having any performing role in that, I studied the text privately, and knew it well by the time of the performances. I was thirteen.

Later I had the good luck to be in Gordon Braddy’s English literature class. We studied Bernard Shaw’s St Joan and Shakespeare’s Henry V. I can’t think that Braddy himself can have been very inspired by Saint Joan. (I certainly was left with no great love for Shaw’s wordy pontifications.) But Henry V stays with me, illuminated by that inspiring man. And Shakespeare since those days has been a constant presence in my life.

Many of his pupils have referred to Braddy’s treatment of boys as his equals. I feel sure that this was an illusion, but one which is at the heart of so much great teaching.

One day, under the spell of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1958 (was I the only one?), I wrote a pseudo-drug-filled pastiche which Braddy read out in full to the class in his best American-poetic voice. Although he had not himself read Kerouac, he sensed fundamentally what it was. I was overjoyed.

In due course I escaped from the cloistered, for me repressive, world of Uppingham. The piece I took with me was Gordon Braddy.

Does everyone have such an influence in their life?

(Above: Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, photo by Angus McBean.)

Revisiting Tom Stoppard’s Travesties

I went on a double pilgrimage yesterday.

First to see Tom Stoppard’s play, Travesties. It’s thirty seven years since I first saw it in its first run in London. Although many of its allusions passed me by then, I already knew that it was to be one of the finest works of twentieth century theatre.

Set in First World War Zurich, multi-layered and filled with reference from other works and worlds – Oscar Wilde, Dadaism, Lenin and Marxism, Shakespeare and James Joyce among them – nevertheless it communicated so clearly. And with such constant wit.

It was so wonderful to see it again. A play of great genius. Fine production and playing – rightly focused on the words.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch three Stoppard plays in recent times – The Real Inspector Hound, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (both at Chichester) and now Travesties. Hopefully I’ll see more soon.

The second purpose of my pilgrimage was to visit, for the first time, the Old Rep Theatre in Birmingham. My father used to speak of it, and of its founding director Barry Jackson, with great warmth.

The theatre was built in 1913 and for several decades Jackson presented there pioneering, ground-breaking productions of plays old and new, building a worldwide reputation. Perfect for Travesties, it’s a small theatre, seating just 464. I suppose that was just one of reasons why the Birmingham Rep company abandoned it in the 1970s. But I never warmed to their new venue.

Perhaps they should consider going home.