Power to the actor Essay Example For Students

Power to the actor Essay Faced so consistently with actors maneuvered by auteur-directors who disdain them almost as much as they loathe the transparency of good playwriting, Im prepared, at last, to confess that Donald Wolfit was one of the greatest actors I ever saw. By which I mean to indicate, quixotically perhaps, that great actors in the full sway of their passions, eccentricities and startling ideas, are likely to be more persuasive conduits to the interior of plays than postmodernist directors with their terrifying grip on arbitrary, decorative conception. Confession is called for in Wolfits case because he would appear to be the worst argument on behalf of actors vs. directors. As a student in London, I joined my classmates at his performances in order to be astonished by an antediluvian display of actor-manager tricks; we knew him as the last survivor of a thoroughly discredited fashion the actor as organizer of Great Moments featuring Himself. In Gielgud and Olivier, we recognized not rivals so much as complementary actor-visionaries in touch, albeit from different directions, with tradition and possibility, willing to serve the directorial quirks of Tyrone Guthrie and Peter Brook even as they were preserving the granitic truths embedded in their own talents. Wolfit, by contrast, was letting the century pass him by without giving a pass to what had been learned about acting. Not for him the reflective intelligence of Chekhov: more than pre-Freudian, his acting was positively biblical in its hortatory, insistent presence. The role m ay have been Lear, Oedipus or even Volpone, but Wolfit was always Job. Surely that was what we thought we were seeing. How could we look ahead to a time when such gigantic individuality would be missed? Instead, our dismissive laughs helped us to overlook what was splendid amid the ruins. There he stood towards the end of a long evening as Oedipus in both parts of Sophocless tragedy, alone center stage on a raised platform, surrounded by a company that would have disgraced Crummless troupe in Nicholas Nickleby. Preparing himself for his final declamation by paying absolutely no attention to the buzz and bustle of this hapless colleagues, he was blind Oedipus in search of his follow-spot. Meanwhile, he was also uncomfortable with his hat, pulling it forward, nudging it back or side-saddle, intent on making it sit squarely over his great white pudding face. And considering that it was more like a Dali-designed chapeau than a hat, a cross between a futuristic schooner and a hero sandwich, this was quite an achievement. When the fuss was over, his blind eye s silenced the others with a gaze so baleful that it might have burned through steel. The speech   and speech it was   could now begin. But this too was excavation rather than acting   a voice heard unaccountably after the lava had frozen over the dead city. The first sound, a primordial wheeze, was the signal for experienced Wolfitians that the organist was merely pumping air into the pipes. This was baby-breath, the early tentative statement of a fugue that would soon gather a second, third and even fourth voice into its complex weave, striding finally into an outburst of sunshine on a storm-swept sea Wolfit as reckless mixed metaphor, not likely to be ruled by manners or restraint. Had we known better about such distinctions almost 40 years ago, we should have seen not ham, but a porcine Olympian defying the other gods: I may be a falling star, he was saying, but dont take any wagers on what the cosmos will be like without me. That it hasnt done so well isnt exactly news, though truth to tell, a multitude of Wolfits would not have much effort on our sorry situation in all its particulars. Most American directors have long since turned from the pressure of the next and the presence of the actor to Smart Moments featuring Themselves. At the New York Shakespeare Festival recently, Anne Bogarts version of Brechts In the Jungle of the Cities was obssessed by a private agenda involving faces made up in differing colors. (Greg Mehrtens Worm, for example, was a sickly sea-green that did nothing to conceal his own discomfort as an actor required to stand ramrod-stiff while shouting his lines.) Brechts journey into blasted souls Garga and Shlink, especially, on a strange slow-motion trajectory into each others sexuality   was nowhere in evidence, not out of prurient indifference, but simply because the actors were programmed to do something else, most of it having to do with postures, gestures and positionings. T wo actors going literally nose-to-nose in an argument are not automatically a howl, at least to those of us who havent yet called a truce with canned laughter. Oh, for a muse of ice! EssayBut that cant happen if, unlike Mnouchkine, youre ripping metaphor from every source except the text and the actor. Too often, the images on stage reveal a director at work who has lost the memory of how an actor moves from one point in his discoveries to another. Just as instrumentalists such as Ashkenazy and Barenboim travel from solo performance to podium, actors might seize the day for themselves, not necessarily assuming theyre better than our best directors, only that   like their musical counterparts   they have vital messages to deliver about ank ancient art. Let the auteur be the author, even when, in Shanleys case, he stumbles over his own words. Better than miscalculation than the pretence that live theatre is about amplified voices, moving scenery and air-tight grouping of bloodless, semi-paralyzed actor-marionettes. An actor, says Mnouchkine, is not paid to conceal but to show, although you wouldnt always recognize that truth when direct ors work so hard to conceal what actors can show. Wolfit surely courted status as an endangered species, but he dominated the stage, as Tynan said, by a mighty exercise of talent, thrust, and will, qualities available to actors that neednt be buried yet. Its not the actor whos endangered, anyway, its the audience. But I doubt if anythings to be done except to revive our faith in the primeval ritual of the living performance. Let a director have the last word. Mnouchkine again: Each time, the path towards beauty in the theatre seems harder and the precipice steeper. I feel this fragility more and more. I think that theatre is eternal, although when I watch the television, I sometimes think that it might die. Im afraid that soon we will no longer know what an actor is.