Shakesperian Performance as Criticism, Ashland, 1962

Abstract

HE unique importance of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, now twenty-seven years old, continues to lie in its revelations. of what the original performances must have been like. Its duplication of the Globe-Fortune multiple staging is repeatedly vindicated as an agent of critical study of the plays. Whr Happily the producers and actors at Ashland show their awareness that the only sure way toward recovery of past methods of performance must take into account universal features of good theater. Lively, intense, integrated action, clear and forceful utterance, effective stage picture, positive appeal to the audience, these are sought along with the specifically Elizabethan features. The i962 season of four plays affirmed this emphatically in a sparkling Comedy of Errors, which opened the cycle. That it was only less apparent in the As You Like It was strikingly the result of less imaginative use of the elements of the Elizabethan stage. In varying degrees this seemed even more true of the two heavier dramas, Henry IV, Part 2, and Coriolanus. These two stood as interesting contrasts in the study of warfare and the contest for political power. Perhaps their directors were seeking variations on previous successful deployment of battle scenes. Certainly these moments lacked the sense of clang and clamor that have so often shaken the stage at Ashland. Coriolanus, in particular, directed by a newcomer, suffered from the want of mass and movement, the effect being as if the hero found himself supported by only such ragtag as Falstaff chose for glorious death in the other war play. The forestage failed to become a battlefield, nor was it successfully turned into a place of peace and security, the locus amoenus of the Forest of Arden. Since both effects have been repeatedly achieved in previous seasons, there is no need to question the potential of the Elizabethan type of stage. Both scholar and director need to ask what it is that converts a bare and meagerly dressed stage into forest or battlefield. The answer in part is certainly that the actors must believe it to be so. Yet the Banished Duke was asked to discourse to his brothers in exile on their forest retreat in a crowded inner stage setting. Not only was this area largely preempted by a massive table and benches, but the emulators of Robin Hood were arrayed in hugeous Graustarkian costumes such as no hunter, forester, or freedom fighter would be found dead in, not least because they made such broad targets for speedy death. The feel and form of the inner stage is that of a room, or at least a restricted and essentially closed space. Not only was it impossible for the Duke