Shakespeare in Stratford and London, 1981

Abstract

It is pleasing to curl one's fancy around the symmetry that London and Stratford-upon-Avon are as important today as centers for theatregoing as they were in Shakespeare's time. The steady flow of eminent and not-so-eminent itinerant companies through Shakespeare's home town in the midand late-sixteenth century ensured that the populace, then as now, was well entertained and that any keen citizen had ample opportunity to try and join the profession. It is true that nowadays transference is reversed, with major productions having conception and birth in Stratford before moving in willowy young maturity to London. But the symmetry is there, and a sense that the country's metropolitan heart depends mightily on the arterial flow from the environs. It is fervently to be hoped that this pattern will survive, though it must be strongly tempting for the management to relegate the awkward, old, curmudgeonly inconvenient Memorial building at Stratford now that the spanking new London Barbican center for the Royal Shakespeare Company is opened. The Aldwych Theatre (known till recently as the RSC's London home) will doubtless go. Money problems may well be added to the lures of newness, so that Trevor Nunn and company may soon confront Sir Peter Hall at the National, with headquarters in London-Stratford left slowly to museum their way into secondary status. This would be a sadness and probably an error with several dimensions-not least because it would only add one more cultural facet to a divisiveness between center and periphery, between capital and provinces-a divisiveness that is already dangerous and sapping-but perhaps most because, at Stratford, the RSC has created at its Other Place's small auditorium a theatre of exciting potency and achievement. Stratford's main house still has to come to terms with the presence of this small theatre, but it is out of the tension between the two (the Warehouse in London is a pale imitation) that the Company is likely to revitalize itself. Monolith Barbican (Trevor Nunn) facing stony National (Peter Hall) will create no tensions, only a kind of clobbering, unproductive medieval warfare-perhaps scenarioed by John Barton. In any case, so far as Shakespeare is concerned, the National has never begun to rival the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is no real contest. In Stratford, because of The Other Place, the RSC is now in creative challenge with itself-and that is good. But there is a world elsewhere, in theatre as in reality, and the specific relationships of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company have to be seen against a context of some doubt, confusion, and not a little anger. All theatres lack money-many of them, though not all, partly because they tend to spend it loosely, with childlike incontinence. One has to see, but few do-including Great Britain's clumsily indeterminate Arts Council (indeterminate in the sense that it seems to base some of its funding less on policy than on sentiment, apprehension, hazy ideology, or benevolent unconviction)-the poor financial state of British theatre in ternis both of the economic situation and of its own natural, ineradicable profligacy. Theatres are incapable of real economy-though they play at it-because their world is one of illusion and self-delusion. The credit titles for staff at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National would be terrifying to many a canny businessman. They are feasible only if you remember that theatre survives solely by being larger, in every sense, than life. In the long run small theatres suffer more than larger ones because they have less to be profligate about and fewer opportunities to indulge in endearing but incredible shadow-play with reality. The Royal Shakespeare Company (or any large organization) can always cock a snook at public relations and, for example, charge theatre critics for their second tickets at first nights (traditionally a free privilege). The smaller theatres may not dare to do it-at least they haven't. How many pence the Royal Shakespeare Company has saved by its fiddling and farcical gesture one cannot say. Enough to pay for yet another (and again temporary) alteration to the main house stage for the