beccaelizabeth | (no subject)

I feel all... brain hungry. Want to know things! Do big thinking!
I'm reading very small sections of college books and having big long thinks about Hamlet between paragraphs. It's not the quickest way to get college reading done, but it has interesting.
Also, by 'big long thinks' I might possibly mean 'imaginary conversations with DT', which, um, pretty.

I like thinking things about the relation between the physical arrangement of the stage and the impact and meaning of the play. There's a whole section of chapter in books about that.
Finding someone to talk to about it who would consider it interesting is... a bit more of a challenge.

It was on a stage that stuck out in the middle of all the people. Much different than those that hide behind the curtains. And everywhere was shiny mirrors. Art to life. Shiny floor, shiny backdrop.
... and there was one family that just got up and climbed over the stage to get back to their seats after the interval. I did not think that was polite theatre. Especially since there had been theatre people on stage in the interval with brushes and mops and things making sure it was clean and dry and tidy. What if someone had spilled a drink? Or scratched it with high heels? Or got oil there? There was a sword fight and lots of running around, getting slippery on it would be Very Bad.

All the running around went through paths through the audience. That's a whole different experience than running around away from audience. I like it.

... I think I especially like things that make it different than cinema. If everything is hid behind the curtain level then it may as well be on a screen, because you see it flat. Yeah, oversimplification, but. When you've got a stage right in the middle of people and there's running around through people and appearing at the edge of the stage in between people and everything, that's not like cinema. And it would be totally different from one of the other two sides of seats. Well, not totally, but a bunch different. And that's not like cinema neither, where you get roughly the same flat thing wherever you sit.

This is part of why I think feet and hair acting is nifty. Because in cinema you'd get one or the other. The camera would focus in on important things and if an actor was wandering around with no pants on you'd never know it if the camera didn't want you to. On stage there's no such selection. All acting all everywhere all the time. And to change your focus the actors have to do things or not do things in patterns. Someone be quiet, someone look at someone, the stage have shiny lights or not, props set out an area, all that. It's clever and different and I want to turn it around and figure out how it works and pay attention to it a lot.

If I'd been to more than two plays in my adult life it would also be a bit more familiar to me and I'd maybe get more out of plays because of being better at reading them.

I was thinking of bare feet in cinema and all I came up with was River in Serenity. Bare feet are crazy apparently.

I am random.

And not wearing shoes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I find theatre in the round (or semi-round) unsettling. In a normal theatre the proscenium arch acts as a barrier, it safely demarcates the world into them and us, and so yes, it does become a bit more like watching the TV or a film. And hence I find I can actually get caught up in the action more, I can forget about the real myself in the real world and just live in the play. As soon as the stage pokes out amongst the audience one is aware of a sense of danger - the actors may approach, they may (worst of all) demand some form of audience participation. I have seen plays where cast members take seats in teh audience, where they address audience members individually and expect a reply - all of this breaks down the ongoing dream of the play and makes me aware of myself as a person and the actors as actors rather than the characters they play. I think this is actually the exact opposite of what the directors probably originally intended when they started performing in the round. I suspect they want the unease and to make the audience feel they are participating directly - but it seems as if they do not understand that that breaks the imaginary dream playing in our heads.

Of course, ironicaly if you go back to the Globe and the theatres of Shakespere's own time that is exactly how they were laid out - with the stage sticking out into the audience. I suspect that going to the Globe is a very different experience if you are a groundling (one of the people standing in the pit) compared to if you have a seat in one of the galleries where there is a physical rail of wood between you and the stage. I couldn't stand for three or four hours on end, so I will probably never know.

there was one family that just got up and climbed over the stage to get back to their seats after the interval. I did not think that was polite theatre.

That is an amazing breaking down of teh barrier between actors and audience! For them not to be conscious of the difference between stage and 'real world', even during the half-life time of the interval, is incredible. Did you by any chance notice who in the group lead the way? Was it perhaps a child - someone less attuned to the social nuances? Or perhaps they are just naturally rude and inconsiderate people who don't mind overstepping normal barriers for their own convenience. But I suspect that if the director was there he was very pleased (although I'm sure as you say that the stage manager was furious).

I've also been thinking about what you said a few days ago about how the experience of the play is now in memory, and slipping further and further back, and cannot be repeated. In many ways of course that is what one pays for - to have a temporary experience that is heightened in its intensity by the very ephemerality of its nature. Some things about theatre the screen can never capture. Did you perhaps notice how much more intense the fight scene was than any screen fight? I have found that to always be the case. It is partly because the eye can choose where to look, and has the full advantage of peripheral vision, plus you don't have the interference of background music trying to tell you what to feel. But it is also the visceral truth of real time - the fight is happening right now, in front of you, and anything could happen. (And indeed I have seen a stage fight where something went wrong and it had to be stopped - the disconnect of emotions was incredible.)

not wearing shoes.

This makes me wonder if any of the filmed versions of Hamlet ever contain that small detail. It is quite common on the stage (indeed I have seen one version with full frontal nudity - quite unpleasant when you are sitting in the second row) but I cannot bring to mind if I have ever seen it in a film. There are practical explanations of course - film rarely shows people's feet and once out of shot they are forgotten again. But there is also that mental difference - bare feet for the actor on set would be 'real' bare feet, vulnerable to knocks and cuts and being trodden upon. I bet any actor asked to bare their feet would slip shoes on between takes. On the stage it is safe. Smooth wood, carefully brushed by the stage hands, and the actor knows exactly where all the other actors are and how they will move all the time. And hence oddly it is much easier to show the vulnerability of bare feet on the stage, and yet the emotion of having them must be much realer on screen. And it follows from that, that when they are used on stage they can be shown to represent a distracted mental state precisely because the actor can forget about them - the stage is a bare feet space like the beach or our own homes, and the actor can mentally inhabit that space, but for the audience, who are caught up in the play, he is standing in a field or a castle and thus the bare feet are significant and they can only represent madness - because it is mad to have bare feet in such a place.

This reminds me of an anecdote I was once told about Maria Callas playing Violetta in Traviata. In case you don't know the story of the opera, Violetta is ill with TB and the first scene consists of a lively party that she hosts. At the end of the scene she is left alone, the guests having departed, and Callas sank down upon a sofa and removed her shoes. This caused considerable scandal amongst the audience because at the time such a thing was unheard of on the opera stage. And yet how natural - after a tiring party the first thing one wishes to do is remove ones shoes, even more so when one is ill. That moment illustrated the force of natural acting into the world of opera - when it can suddenly switch between the set conventions of operatic acting and a realistic, naturalistic style, and the power that such a change can have. In a spoken play naturalistic acting is now the norm and we would not notice the change, in an opera the change can happen at every move between aria and recitative and the power of it used to manipulate the audience every time.

(cut for length - cont. next comment)

(cont.)

I think Shakespeare, because it occupies a similar 'apart' mental space compared to modern plays, can make use of some of the same operatic devices. Even if the audience has never experienced a 'traditional' performance, it is aware of the conventions, and knows how much the current production deviates from or sticks to that model. As if there is a sort of idealised model Shakespearian presentation stuck somewhere in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, where all actors pronounce their words with the tones of Irving or Olivier, and every action is known and predictable. And this is ironic because I believe that the whole notion of 'set' gestures - certain postures to convey certain emotions - was very prevalent in Shakespeare's day. As derided by him in Hamlet's words to the players. Shakespeare himself in this play (and in others - think of the complaints he gives to the Chorus in Henry V 'Can this cock-pit hold the vasty fields of France?') seems to be stretching for a more naturalistic, more realistic, style of acting and presentation. He would, I think, have been in heaven if he had a film crew and modern special effects to play with. And yet his very apologies allow him to use our imagination, in a way that the screen cannot, and there is far more strength in that. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare, and very few other playwrights, is almost always performed without explicit scenery - simply because it is impossible to provide scenery that fully covers the scope of the plays. Contrast this with say a Noel Coward play, where the whole thing would be ludicrous without a set. And that is another thing that Shakespeare has in common with opera. The absence of an explicit set becomes a strength, a way into the world of imagination of the play or opera, so the audience creates the collective dream which all enter into to create the experience of the story.