December 2020
Strapped to a lunatic: Sonnets, in action, with actors
In March 2020 all the theatres closed.
We were washing our hands, singing happy birthday, avoiding the tube where we could blah blah blah, and apart from that assuming that whatever was going on outside wouldn’t affect us terribly much. We were openingThe Comedy of Errors in Stratford in May, what could possibly get in the way of that? I’ve seen Juliet play with a broken metatarsal, hobbling and onstage as Friar Laurence said “so light a foot would ne’er wear out the everlasting flint”. I’ve seen Oberon twice incorporate an offstage vomit in to “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows”. It was like Saving Private Ryan backstage that night, with stricken asses and Titania’s fairy train puking in to a bucket trying not to spatter the puppets. I’ve seen Macduff in traction, asking for a paracetamol at four pm to patch him up in time for the half, while imaginatively incorporating the fractured vertebrae in to the climactic fight scene. An audience member died in the foyer during a matinee of Twelfth Night and we hey nonny noed through to the (rapturous) curtain call (1)(2). Coronavirus was obviously just going to be a problem for the civilians who didn’t want to go to their unlovely office jobs. The soldiers, whose life is their work, who measure their lives in show openings and closings, were obviously going to be fine.
It simply wasn’t possible to close theatres.
First it was for a few weeks, then it was for a few months, then it was going to be fine in the late summer, now it won’t be over by Christmas and Broadway isn’t opening until Autumn 2021. Whatever happens in the UK post Covid-19 we know that the theatres and concert venues are going to be at the very back of the queue when it comes to the order in which the economy is fully reopened. Theatres have people close together in cramped spaces often with low ceilings. If we’re good, people laugh and cry, spraying droplets pell mell. The actors while in the torrent, tempest and whirlwind of passion shower one another with spittle. (Many’s the time I’ve seen Desdemona leave the stage looking akin to a plasterer’s radio). This dark realisation dawned on us all at some point throughout the year. This is very, very serious, indeed. Doctor theatre (3), made redundant, playing golf in the afternoons. The actors now needing actual science to save their livelihoods. If anything the prospects for the theatre are less clear than they were in March, and in many ways less clear than they have been since the plague of 1665/6, which came on the back of eighteen years of closures under Cromwell and his mob of puritans hell bent on telling actors and writers what it was permissible for them to say on a stage (4).
I stayed optimistic until September. At some unknown moment – time behaving like it does in Dalí paintings, these days, melting, reflecting swans and oranges – I realised that like the theatres we love, I had succumbed to the dark. No Shakespeare on a Stratford stage for the first time since the days of Garrick. That thought occurred to me one afternoon at the height of the summer and I couldn’t stop weeping.
But back in March and April, in those almost Edwardian pre-war days of novelty and optimism, before the Daily Mail started lavishing praise on Scandinavian social policy, and the Guardian cheered on Macron’s tanks as they mounted the streets of Paris, things were different. Back when everyone was a newly qualified epidemiologist, and Zoom quiz curator, I thought to myself, theatre closure in time of plague is not without precedent (5). What did Shakespeare do when the theatres closed for eighteen months in 1603? He had King Lear, Othello, and Measure for Measure ready for his acting company on their return in 1604. And he’d written many of his one hundred and fifty-four sonnets.
We had no excuse.
My friend Steffan Rhodri contacted me and suggested that we might get a group of actors together and work on the sonnets together over Zoom. We’d met at Clwyd Theatr Cymru (now Theatr Clwyd) in the early noughties. Our great friend and teacher, the director Terry Hands, who ran Clwyd and before that, and the Royal Shakespeare Company for twenty-odd years previously, used the sonnets to brush up our Shakespeare technique at lunch time, when we were rehearsing one of the canon. He’d have us speak aloud and thereby make sense of Shakespeare’s knotty cycle of fourteen-line poems on the themes of love, hate, sex, sexual ambiguity, forbidden lust, longing, disappointment, dysfunction, addiction, marriage, jealousy, disconnection, reconnection, loss and grief.
Terry died unexpectedly in February – mercifully, he never saw the theatres close in his lifetime – and our little group began as a sort of tribute to him. We’d try and remember all of his best advice. More and more actors joined the group through friends of friends. We’d meet on Mondays and Thursdays at midday. Actors who’d been in Z Cars and The Crown, actors from the current Royal Shakespeare Company, actors who’d played fortnightly rep in the sixties and student actors in their second year at the Royal Welsh College. Through these poems, there was an exchange of ideas and technique, taste and sensibility. We had visits from eminent Shakespearean academics keen to share their knowledge. Even Simon Russell Beale joined us for a session. People dipped in and out from week to week. We worried if we hadn’t seen people for a little while. So we’d check in. Actors aren’t good doing nothing in the house all day. They act. Clue’s in the name.
We hadn’t realised how much we’d needed it. How much we missed doing it, how out of shape we felt not playing or rehearsing for just one month. The sessions were part laboratory and part group therapy.
The madness in these sonnets, these fractured psyches and open wounds that Shakespeare writes, were a balm and at least convinced ourselves of our own relative sanity. Quite early on, the distinguished actor David Neilson (6), selected a sonnet as it made him think about not seeing his grand children for the duration of lockdown, it ends
This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, that thou must leave ere long.
In the specific, the universal.
The classical and the popular have their place “in mutual ordering” as Sonnet 8 has it. We listen to pop songs that tell us that love is hearts and flowers and me and you and harmony and oneness and forever and ever. When love doesn’t feel like that, when it’s contradictory and when it feels sharp as hell, when it feels like a madness, we might assume we’re the only ones doing it wrong. That we’re not measuring up. Pop is great at getting us in to a massive room, but it can make us feel very alone singing back the lyrics of the latest anthem to the idol. Shakespeare is always relevant because he’s always telling us that life is lived specifically not generically. That you don’t always feel happy, and you might not fancy someone who you’re supposed to, or in the way you’re supposed to. Take Sonnet 130:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
But
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Or to put it another way, ‘my love doesn’t look like people’s loves are supposed to look. My mistress is real. She’s sexy precisely because she’s real. And because she’s unlike anyone else’.
It’s comforting to know that four hundred and twenty years ago someone knew precisely how addiction feels, as in Sonnet 129:
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
And Shakespeare knows grief. He lost his son to complications resulting from plague when he was just eleven years old in 1596. He knows it bleak, as in Sonnet 146,
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
And he knows it hopeful, when he thinks about remembering those he loves in verse, and how they stay alive in his soul, as in Sonnet 18,
So long as men can breathe and eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
And this is how come we’re playing this little anthology of sonnets at the Norden Farm Theatre. We’re doing it to raise money for a charity set up by one of our actors Christian Patterson and his wife Michelle McTernan, also an actor. When five-year-old Harry Patterson, died in a tragic accident outside the family home, his Mother, Father and Brother were plunged into the most extreme grief. There was precious little help available to get them through their darkest hours so they decided to set up a charity in Harry’s name to help people who have lost children in sudden or accidental death circumstances. Harry’s Fund was founded shortly after Harry’s death in 2011 and has funded private grief counselling for parents and children, as well as residential courses for those who have experienced sudden or accidental loss. Harry’s Fund has also employed grief specialists to work with school teachers so they can tell when a child is struggling as a result of losing a parent or a sibling and how best to help a child through the grief process.
We’re also playing to help Norden Farm stay open. Local arts centres are bearing the brunt of budget cuts. But big theatres also close in times like these and like local arts centres, when they’re gone, they’re gone. In 1593 The Earl of Pembroke’s Men were doing just fine, playing at court for Queen Elizabeth, they had two young writers by the name of Marlowe and Shakespeare writing for them, and no less a star than Edward Alleyn as their leading actor. By the August of that year, due to plague, their tour raised virtually no cash, and they retuned to London bust and had to pawn their costumes. In 2020, many of our colleagues, who live from hand-to-mouth at the best of times have had contracts and jobs cancelled with no financial recompense. Contradictory information has caused great distress. We are desperate that theatres are there for us whenever this is over. Jane Corry and her brilliant team are just one group of hundreds of like groups nationwide fighting to keep these important buildings open and producing work, in the face of this epochal crisis. They deserve our help and support.
For those of you who have been to Athens, you will have been faced with the ruins and splendour of the ancient world, some of which will need a classical education to fully understand. I know I do. But a child could point out where the theatre is. An empty space surrounded by seating for audience. It’s very simple. That theatre that has been hosting plays for thousands of years. And will continue to host plays for thousands more. Because one thing that this proves is that people need plays and playwrights and actors.
People need, through their collective imagination, to collectively encounter their deepest fears, hopes and dreams. That relic in Athens says that the theatre is not an addition to human life it is our essential need. We go the theatre to feel less alone in the world, to be reminded of our common humanity. To collectively experience the best and worst aspects of being human. We need to feel the person sat next to us laugh and cry because they too have felt that specific shame, that specific thrill made manifest by an actor and a playwright; so we can all see the universal in the ultra specific. Anyone can tell you what love is like generally. It takes an artist to explore it specifically.
We go to the live theatre for the spittle and viscera and the blood and the pain and the laughs and the tears. We go to mediate on truth. Together. Is this play true? What do you think? Even before Covid, opportunities to do this were fewer and further between as we made ourselves the gods of our own digitally constructed realities. Now this feels turbo charged. Shutting ourselves off from the possibility of dialogue with those we disagree with behind small screens. We’re running headlong away from the spittle and the viscera and the blood and the pain and laughs and the tears. Ambiguity. The wound open. The wound closed. Contradictions. Things that are both true and false at the same time. The droplets of tears and laughter and song spread the virus. So now everything is clinical. Even the spell check on my Apple Mac has tried to sanitise Shakespeare’s sonnets as I typed this article. That word it didn’t recognise, didn’t exist. The spittle and viscera and the blood and the pain and the laughs and the muck feels like our crying need. Our crying need to be part of something bigger than ourselves that will spread a virus and a messy truth to the ends of the earth, and help us know ourselves as we are again. In the mess. And the contradiction. And we’ll run headlong toward it before too long. Humans don’t stay behind straight lines and the flat planes of screens and arguments for too long.
Sonnet 29 has it…
Yet in these thoughts myself, almost despising
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate
It’ll be great to play in front of an audience again, and share this work with you. Live. Socially distanced, wearing masks, we’ll look a bit like a piece of seventies-style East German experimental theatre. But we’ll take the masks off to speak. Even if you can’t take off yours to laugh. We play with optimism and great excitement to be back in front of an audience. But we have a shard of melancholy in our hearts. We’re not out of the woods yet. These times need actors. These times need people to act.
_____
(1) All true stories.
(2) Obviously we didn’t know about the death at the time. Patrons faint in the theatre all the time.
(3) The whimsical idea that an imminent curtain rising before a thousand people, cures actors of their minor ailments. There is some science in this as the adrenalised body does help us forget our bad back for two and a half hours.
(4) We’ll have to wait for a mob of puritans hell bent on telling actors and writers what it is permissible for us to say on a stage until after the theatres have reopened.
(5) Although the theatres didn’t close for the Spanish ’flu pandemic of 1918/19.
(6) David Neilson has played Roy Cropper in Coronation Street for the last twenty-five years.
© Phillip Breen