A Comparison of Two Stagings: Stratford-upon-Avon and London

Abstract

HE stage practice of the Elizabethan theater promises to yield a remarkable second harvest in the modern theater. With this opinion Richard Sothern opened his report to the International Conference on Theater History, in London, i8 July, 1955. Mr. Sothern supported his opinion with seven specific points, but they may be summed up in a single generalization: the nonrepresentational stage of the Renaissance was ideally adapted to the creation of poetic drama, and is adaptable and available to the modern poetic dramatist. It is also, of course, particularly pertinent to the revival of Scholars have long been aware that, under the stage conditions for which the part was created, Cleopatra appeared before her first audiences in Elizabethan dress, that the stage on which she acted was unencumbered by tables and chairs and potted palms, that locales were shifted by the words of the actors and the imagination of the audience rather than by the art of the scene painter or the stage mechanic. If poetic action constituted, as estheticians maintained, a kind of speaking picture, it was a picture without a frame, and the spectator had direct and immediate contact with it. Mr. Sothern was suggesting that this scholarly awareness could be, had been, impressed upon modern producers and directors, that glorious poetry was once more free to live an abundant life in the professional theater of England. It is a sweet dream. But a sampling of the Shakespeare being offered to the public at the time of Mr. Sothern's speech revealed how insubstantial was the dream and how substantial the pageant. The modern producer nods respectfully in the direction of William Poel and Adolf Appia, but he sits at the feet of Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree. There are exceptions (like the enchanting Pericles of I954 at the Birmingham Repertory) which in their proverbial way attest the continuing rule of what John Gielgud has called Wagnerian Shakespeare. The Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon has been in the Shaklespeare business so long and so continuously that its life and success with audiences is hardly a matter for speculation. It can do the classics with its eyes shut and its mind elsewhere, and the faithful tourists will attend. To save itself from boredom it can even do Titus Andronicus, and reverently, without the accompaniment of community singing and the incitements to riot that are de rigeur when the commercial theater undertakes the revival of dead melodrama. Sometimes the new insights of scholarship or criticism are invited to participate in