Theatrical Practice and Cultural Context. (2006) Directed by Russ Mcdonald
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FALOCCO, JOE, Ph.D. Elizabethan Staging in the Twentieth Century: Theatrical Practice and Cultural Context. (2006) Directed by Russ McDonald. 433 pp. This study examines some of the major figures involved in the rediscovery of early modern staging conventions. Despite the wide variety of approaches employed by William Poel, Nugent Monck, Tyrone Guthrie, and the founders of the new Globe, I perceive a common philosophical underpinning to their endeavors. Rather than indulging in archaism for its own sake, they looked backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century. My history begins with an introduction in which I establish the ideological position of the Elizabethan revival as the twentieth-century heir to Pre-Raphaelitism. The first chapter is on William Poel and urges a reexamination of the conventional view of Poel as an antiquarian crank. I then devote chapters to Harley Granville Barker and Nugent Monck, both of whom began their careers with Poel. Barker’s critical writing, I argue, has been largely responsible for the Elizabethan revival’s reputation as an academic and literary phenomenon. Monck, on the other hand, took the first tentative steps toward an architectural reimagining of twentieth-century performance spaces, an advance which led to Tyrone Guthrie’s triumphs in Elizabethan staging. Guthrie learned from Monck and Barker as these men had learned from Poel. This lineage of influence, however, did not directly extend to the new Globe. The Globe also differs from the subjects of my other chapters because it doesn’t represent the effort of a single practitioner but instead incorporates the contributions of a group of scholars and architects. While this approach yielded greater historical authenticity, it also tended to minimize theatrical considerations in the process of playhouse design. This neglect caused unnecessary difficulties for the actors and directors who would eventually work at the new Globe. I conclude with a Coda that discusses the attempts of contemporary Elizabethanists, like those of the American Shakespeare Center, to offer participatory theatrical engagement as an alternative to the soporific alienation of electronic media. My hope throughout this study is that, by illustrating the imperfect but significant achievements of the Elizabethan revival in the twentieth century, I might urge scholars and practitioners toward continued exploration of early modern staging practices in the new millennium. ELIZABETHAN STAGING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THEATRICAL PRACTICE AND CULTURAL CONTEXT by Joe Falocco A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2006 Approved by ____________________________________ Russ McDonald APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair _____________________________________ Russ McDonald Committee Members_____________________________________ Chris Hodgkins ____________________________________ Keith Cushman ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee ____________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER I. WILLIAM POEL................................................................................................13 II. HARLEY GRANVILLE BARKER ...................................................................83 III. NUGENT MONCK ..........................................................................................161 IV. TYRONE GUTHRIE........................................................................................213 V. THE NEW GLOBE ..........................................................................................313 CODA .............................................................................................................................385 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................394 iii INTRODUCTION Since the late nineteenth century, theater practitioners have frequently sought to recreate the staging conditions of early modern England. The original incarnations of this phenomenon have long been known as the “Elizabethan revival.” Throughout this study, I will use this term to refer to all such efforts at theatrical reconstruction in the modern and postmodern eras. Despite the wide variety of approaches employed by William Poel, Nugent Monck, Tyrone Guthrie, and the founders of the new Globe, I perceive a common philosophical underpinning to their endeavors. Rather than indulging in archaism for its own sake, they looked backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century. “The theatrical past” served for them as “a crack in the present through which one could grab at a future” (Womack 81). The original nemesis of William Poel was the extravagantly picturesque style represented by Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1900 A Midsummer Night’s Dream , in which live bunnies scampered through an onstage forest (Kennedy, Looking 68). This mode of production was probably doomed with or without the intervention of the Elizabethanists. Inflation, as Poel noted, was “a serious tax on the managerial purse” of producers like Tree ( Monthly Letters 82). The cost of staging Shakespeare in this traditional mode was soon “double that of a modern play” (Hildy, Shakespeare 40), and Tree, who had originally scoffed at Poel’s methods, began to cautiously adopt a similar approach (Bridges-Adams, “Proscenium” 28). Lavishly 1 pictorial Shakespeare was no longer a profit-making endeavor and by mid-century it survived only in heavily subsidized theaters. Along with rising costs, an emerging rival medium contributed to the demise of this elaborate production style. “Only a year or two after Sir Herbert Tree had electrified London by producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream with real rabbits,” Tyrone Guthrie writes, “D. W. Griffith had made Birth of a Nation ” ( Theatre Prospect 18). Alfred Hitchcock claimed that cinema “c[a]me to Shakespeare’s rescue” by making the playwright “palatable” to a public who considered him “dull as dishwater” (449). While the movies may have been a boon for Shakespeare’s reputation in general, they were a catastrophe for traditional producers. The development of motion pictures with sound further wounded the stage. In 1932 Guthrie concluded, “No detached observer can seriously suppose that the big spectacular play has the slightest chance of survival against the big spectacular film” ( Theatre Prospect 18). From that point onward, the prime objective of the Elizabethan revival was to provide a theatrical experience that film could not duplicate and thereby preserve a relevant place for live performance in the cinematic age. This quest mirrored the approach of avant-garde practitioners like Jerzy Grotowski, who defined his efforts largely in reaction to the challenge from electronic media. Rather than pursuing what he considered “the wrong solution” to the problem of cinema’s technological dominance by making theater “more technical” (41), Grotowski sought to emphasize the “one element of which film and television cannot rob the theatre: the closeness of the living organism” (42). A similar rationale informed the 2 architectural solutions proposed by Nugent Monck’s Maddermarket Theatre, Tyrone Guthrie’s Festival Stage at Stratford, Ontario, and the new Globe. The success of these endeavors has been, to some extent, a victory over cinema. “It shows,” says Rory Edwards who played Orleans in the Globe’s 1997 production of Henry V , that “we haven’t completely succumbed to the mechanistic world of film and technology” (qtd. in Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare 139). In its first decades the Elizabethan revival shared a desire to challenge the status quo with other experimental modes of performance. Peter Womack writes that its roots “are effectively the same as the origins of European theatrical modernism” (75). Womack suggests that “the underlying logic, which is seen everywhere in early modernist theatrical theory—in Craig, Copeau, Fuchs, Meyerhold— is that if, as it seems, the theater has taken a wrong turning somewhere, it needs to go back to the beginning and start again: it is the starting again which is, of course, old and new in the same breath.” Shakespeare was for this avant-garde “one influential ‘beginning’” (Womack 79). A “dialectical” (Womack 82) relationship existed between the Elizabethanists and the broader modernist movement. New visual styles such as post-impressionism facilitated the replacement of the realistic picture-frame stage with a non-illusionist early modern alternative (77). As the Elizabethan revival sought to liberate Renaissance drama, artists like Brecht turned to Shakespeare and his contemporaries as models for “retheatricalizing the theater” (79). Elizabethanists consistently defined their efforts as forward-looking in their engagement with modernity, but many critics have interpreted the movement as 3 artistically and politically regressive. William Worthen sees the “return to ‘Elizabethan’ staging practices” ( Authority 33) as an attempt “to mount an authentic Shakespeare on the stage, a Shakespeare whose authenticity