A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968/81)

By William Shakespeare (c1595)

National Youth Theatre, 1964
Feature film, 1968
BBC television, 1981

On 29 September 1662 Samuel Pepys attended the King’s Theatre for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He’d never seen the play before, nor ever would again, as he confided to his diary, ‘for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’. The only redeeming features were ‘some good dancing and some handsome women’. Even allowing that the version he saw was probably much truncated, I know what he means. I’ve never seen a satisfactory production of this play. It usually comes out too frothy and pretty. The ideal Dream would present it as a comedy surrounded by a penumbra of troubled seriousness. Over the years there have been critical revaluations that push in that direction. In the 1960s Jan Kott, in a reading that influenced Peter Brook’s famous production at the end of that decade, found darkness not just at the edges but everywhere in the play. Relating Bottom’s dream to Goya’s Caprichos, he saw bestiality and miscegenation in Titania’s sleeping with an ass. He saw masochism in Helena’s submissiveness to her scornful lover (‘The more you beat me, I will fawn on you: | Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me…’) As he rightly said, the wood is not a benign place. When Titania beds down for the night, her attendants must ward off all manner of creepy-crawlies. These include the selfsame creatures that contribute their ‘poison’d entrails’ to the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. The fairies are not the wisps of gossamer who stream through Max Reinhardt’s Hollywood film of the 1930s but something more equivocal. In the realm of fairy, Oberon’s and Puck’s ability to do good lies in their capacity to withhold mischief.

Mischief, not black magic. Kott went too far. After all, a strong body of opinion holds that Shakespeare’s play was written originally for an aristocratic wedding celebration and its elements contrived to flatter that audience, which may have included the Queen – ‘our imperial vot’ress’, in Oberon’s phrase. So ‘light entertainment’ was surely what was called for? But, if so, they’d commissioned a playwright incapable of turning out ephemera or trivia. ‘Sedimented within the verbal texture of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, writes Louis Adrian Montrose, in another of the influential essays on the text, ‘are traces of those forms of sexual and familial violence which the play would suppress.’ The play is marbled with what he calls ‘anxious misogyny’, right from the opening scene, where Duke Theseus has bridled the Amazon queen Hippolyta and Egeus threatens an ‘honour killing’ for his rebellious daughter who refuses to marry the man he has chosen for her.

‘But at the same time that the play reaffirms essential elements of a patriarchal ideology, it also calls that reaffirmation in question’ (Montrose again). As so often in Shakespeare’s comedies, the strongest characters are the female ones. The young men, Demetrius and Lysander, are barely differentiated, which makes it easier for them to undergo random transformations under the influence of the fairies’ love-juice. The two heroines, Hermia and Helena, remain constant in their affections (to their young men, if not to each other). Hermia, no ingénue she, knows her own mind, asserting the claims of romantic love over arranged marriage. And by Act IV the patriarchal imperative has softened. While her father continues to demand that the ‘law’ run its course, the Duke overrules him and permits the lovers to wed.

So all is set up for a comedy resolution in marriage. But is the symmetry perfect? This troubles me. Lysander is restored to his true love (Hermia) after Puck has administered the antidote. Yet Demetrius, apparently denied or judged not to be in need of the antidote, remains to the end under the influence of ‘love-in-idleness’, the fairy Rohypnol. He says he has reverted to his first romantic inclination – his heart to Helena is now ‘home return’d’ (III.ii.172, cf. IV.i.173) – but who’s to say it isn’t the drug talking?

None of these problems (if such they be) is resolved by the various productions in which Helen Mirren appeared. She played Helena with the National Youth Theatre in a 1964 production (‘bad casting as Helena is supposed to be tall and thin and I was short and fattish’, she wrote later) and Hermia in Peter Hall’s 1968 film, then returned as Titania in the 1981 BBC TV version. Of these, the latter captures best the psychosexual ambiguities I refer to, but even this fell short of what it might be.

Hall’s film was made on location in and around a country house, Compton Verney in Warwickshire. Visually beautiful, it suggests a house party of hip youngsters, togged out in Sixties dress. Faces daubed with mud may evoke the ‘dank and dirty ground’ of Shakespeare’s text, but the look remains if anything too beautiful. Helena, played in the later BBC production as a stereotype ‘librarian’ in granny glasses, is here rendered by Diana Rigg, an actress who was far more lusted after in the Sixties than the then relatively unknown Helen Mirren. Hall used disruptive ‘jump cuts’ to present illusion, while employing a hand-held camera to give simulated ‘reality’. By ‘post-synching’ all the dialogue, he got around the difficulties in those days of location filming and put the emphasis back on the text. As he told Roger Manvell, ‘This is not a film from a stage production or a film based on the play. It attempts to bend the medium of the film to reveal the full quality of the text.’

In her autobiography, Mirren says of Titania: ‘It was a role I had always wanted to play but which had eluded me, though I had played both Hermia and Helena, neither of which appealed to me.’ She explains that the BBC production came at a difficult time for her: her father had just died suddenly and she ‘found it almost impossible to act’. What helped her through, she recalls, was a great director (Elijah Moshinsky), the rest of the cast and a spectacular, character-forming wig made out of ‘pure, unbleached, very long, fine white-blonde hair’. In her book about the BBC Shakespeare series, Susan Willis comments on how Moshinsky’s camera ‘lovingly lingers [on Mirren] in mid-pool or mid-bower’. The production, as if bathed in aqueous solution, is dominated by a prominent water-feature, part of the set, through which Titania’s slightly ragged train must wade. Puck is a jagged-toothed punk, like an escapee from A Clockwork Orange. These are pointers in the right direction. Perhaps the Beeb could do it better now? A recent Richard II on television shows how much more fluent production styles have become in the last thirty years and how this ‘insipid ridiculous play’ might be reclaimed for a new generation of viewers.  

References

Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1967)
Roger Manvell, Shakespeare and the Film (1971)
Helen Mirren, In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures (2007)
Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Shaping fantasies: figurations of gender and power in Elizabethan culture’ (1983), in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: New Casebooks, ed Richard Dutton (1996)
Susan Willis, The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon (1991)

Savage Messiah (1972)

When Ken Russell died in 2011, British cinema lost one of its true originals. His work was infuriating, often tasteless, but never boring. As Mark Kermode has said, he ‘proved that British cinema didn't have to be about kitchen-sink realism—it could be every bit as flamboyant as Fellini.’

Savage Messiah, released in 1972, is less flamboyant than most. I always thought it one of his more successful feature films, perhaps because the low budget (he financed the movie himself) forced him to rein in his imagination. That said, it’s still full of trademark Russell pyrotechnics. In telling the story of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, the French sculptor who died virtually unknown in the trenches of the First World War, the director couldn’t resist turning the volume up to 11 in every scene. Gaudier – a one-dimensional turn by newcomer Scott Antony – does little but rant and jump about a lot while proclaiming his genius. The standout performance in the film comes from Dorothy Tutin as Sophie Brzeska, the Polish woman twice his age with whom Gaudier lived for the last five years of his life. Until watching the film again recently, I’d forgotten what an accomplished actress she was. She alone provides any light and shade.

So Sophie is the most interesting character in the scenario – which left Russell with a problem in setting out to tell Gaudier’s story. One suspects he recognised that. The film ends with a long sequence representing the posthumous exhibition of Gaudier’s work. As the camera lingers over those sensuous forms, forms inclined to abstraction yet still recognisably human or animal, you realise for the first time what a damn fine sculptor he was. This realisation goes some way to answering the question that has dogged the viewer up to that point: why would anyone make a biopic about someone so irritating? I say only ‘some way’. For me, Russell’s best work was on TV, especially in the superlative Song of Summer, his portrait of the troubled relationship between composer Frederick Delius and his amanuensis, Eric Fenby. The Delius film succeeds where Savage Messiah (arguably) fails, in that it forces you to take seriously a second-rate creative artist whom you didn’t rate before you saw the film.

No shortage of talent fed into Savage Messiah. The poet Christopher Logue wrote the screenplay, based on HS Ede’s biography of the sculptor. Derek Jarman was set designer and Lindsay Kemp turns in a cameo role as Gaudier’s pal Angus Corky. And then there’s Helen Mirren playing a suffragette and occasional arsonist, an upper-class rebel at odds with her class (at least until the outbreak of war shocks her back into her default mode of jingoism). The character of ‘Gosh’ Boyle is inspired by an unnamed figure in Ede’s biography, a girl whom Gaudier noticed admiring his ‘Wrestler’ sculpture in a gallery. He spoke to her and found her ‘intelligent’, neither ‘prudish’ nor ‘hypocritical’, but ‘dashing and brilliant’. At the outset she informed him that ‘she had no pretensions of being a pure woman, and that she had felt very much annoyed with some man who had lectured her on the beauty of virginity.’ Sophie, the sculptor’s complaisant companion, let it be known that she had no objection to Gaudier making love to this woman so long as she could stand behind a screen while the event took place. This incident, inevitably, is picked up in Russell’s film, as are the model’s unformed ambitions as artist and performer:

[She] went to Paris for a few weeks, and came back with sensational tales of how she had danced naked, greatly to the delight of the artists there; how Isadora Duncan had wanted to meet her, and how several theatres had offered to engage her. Also Modigliani had wanted to sleep with her, but she had refused because he drank and had no money.    

In the film we see her pose for Gaudier, who has been employed to produce a sculpture of her father, an army officer. The scene that follows was evidently suggested by an incident elsewhere in Ede’s biography where Gaudier is commissioned to make a bust of one Major Smythies:

The Major watched the building up of his head with great interest, but objected to everything, as is, perhaps not surprising: his nose was too flat, his forehead too high, and so on. At first Gaudier took no notice, but after a bit changed his tactics. ‘I believe you’re right. See, I will alter it.’ And taking up some clay, he proceeded to make the alteration. After Major Smythies had gone, Zosik protested against his being so weak-minded as to be deflected in his own vision by an outsider.

‘Poor Zosik,’ said Pik. ‘to be so blind. I only took up a little clay and put it on the bust so as to satisfy him, and then, when he wasn’t looking, took it off again, and he never noticed.’  

(‘Pik’ and ‘Zosik’ were the affectionate names that Gaudier and Sophie used to each other.)

Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, veteran critic Pauline Kael put her finger on Russell’s problem:

He’s not trying to deal with the age any of his subjects lived in, or the appetites and satisfactions of that age, or the vision of a particular artist; but is always turning something from the artists’ lives into something else – a whopping irony, a phallic joke, a plushy big scene.

It was a ‘plushy big scene’ in this movie that provided the young Helen Mirren with one of her most eye-catching on-screen moments. Mirren’s performance is unbuttoned, in every sense. She descends a grand staircase delivering an artistic credo while wearing nothing but a necklace and a pair of shoes: ‘I don’t care what I do as long as it’s creative. I want to leave something behind me that was never there before.’ My memory of this scene from first seeing the film in the 1970s was that the nudity, however pleasurable, was entirely gratuitous. Watching it again now, I’m not so sure. If anything was expendable it was the preceding scene, set in the fictional ‘Vortex Club’ – Gaudier was one of the leading lights of ‘Vorticism’ – where Russell requires Mirren to sing. This versatile performer has many qualities, but it has to be said that she is better at descending staircases than she is at singing. In fact, she convincingly plays an artist’s model, with the right amount of disinhibition. Just as the ‘suffragette’ was costumed in Edwardian dress, so the ‘model’ was costumed in her birthday suit.

References

HS Ede, Savage Messiah (1931, reissued 1971)
Joseph A Gomez, Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator (1976)
Pauline Kael, ‘Hyperbole and Narcissus’, The New Yorker, 18 November 1972 

Hamlet (1970/76)

By William Shakespeare (c1600)

‘I believe kids shouldn’t be taught Shakespeare,’ Helen Mirren told the Guardian in an interview last year. ‘They should experience it first by seeing a great production.’ Her own first experience probably wasn’t a great production. It was an amateur Hamlet in Southend-on-Sea, not far from Westcliff-on-Sea where she grew up. Nonetheless, she ‘walked out of that theatre at the end in another world.’ Nowadays, as I’ve often had cause to remark in this blog, she regrets how few parts there are in Shakespeare for older women. ‘I don't want to play Gertrude,’ she confided to the Guardian. ‘I want to play Hamlet.’

Well, she never did play the brooding Prince. She could have done; there were precedents. It’s the only heroic male role in Shakespeare that has been regularly acted by women, in a tradition stretching back to Mrs Siddons and Sarah Bernhardt. This is the tradition that Leopold Bloom muses on in Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide?’ Victorian critics were particularly scathing of Mme Bernhardt’s Hamlet, commenting that her attempts at masculinity, such as cocking her legs up on a couch, her ‘manly stride’ and ‘gruff howlings’, resulted in the portrait of an ‘angy elderly woman’ rather than a ‘young and emotional man’.

Mirren did, however, achieve the unusual double of playing both Ophelia and Gertrude in the same production. Celestino Coronado’s 1976 film, made in seven days on a tiny budget of £2,500, was not so much ‘art house’ as ‘art school’. A production for the Royal College of Art, it took literally Hamlet’s speech to Gertrude concerning the ‘counterfeit presentment of two brothers’ by splitting the role of Hamlet into two. Identical twins Anthony and David Meyer battle with each other like the twin souls in Faust’s breast. Since they also play the Ghost, every opportunity within the text for doubling and mirroring is seized on. The Ghost cradles Gertrude while Hamlet admonishes her. Ophelia is deleted from ‘The Mousetrap’ scene, so Hamlet’s lines to her (‘country matters’ etc) are conflated with those he speaks to his mother. Gertrude, asleep, morphs into the drowned Ophelia on her funeral bier. Graham Holderness characterises Mirren’s two roles:

Ophelia is played as a ‘dumb blonde’ erotically passive and slow of wit. Gertrude is played as a mature and powerful woman, confident in her overt sensuality. But the two can pass into one another and exchange identities.

Running at little more than an hour, the film offers a Hamlet cut down, cut up and reassembled. Quentin Crisp, the ‘naked civil servant’, eyeing the world through a monocle, sets the tone for the whole as a hilariously camp Polonius. Not for the first time, Mirren seems to be sidelined in a play about boys and their bodies (see my comments on Troilus and Cressida). It’s all very balletic -- not surprisingly given Coronado’s former association with the Lindsay Kemp Circus -- and rather weird. As Russell Davies observed,

You do not have to be one of the in-crowd to guess that this is a sort of Homo-let. And of course you can’t make a Homo-let without breaking a few eggs – hence the inevitable messy elisions between soliloquies.

Yet, as befits a film dedicated to Pasolini, it’s undoubtedly cinematic. In the words of another critic, Derek Malcolm:

The whole thing looks quite extraordinary, even though it uses photographic tricks that are now threatening to become clichés and sometimes gets too overwrought for clarity of expression. Mirren in particular speaks her lines with biting eloquence and is so stunningly shot in colour that she rivets the attention throughout.

While I wouldn’t go as far as Kenneth Rothwell, who suggests that ‘Coronado was employing a new paradigm for interrogating the play’s mysteries, which have kept themselves inviolate for centuries’, I found the doubling device a provocative way of dramatising what others have tried to tease out by psychoanalytic tools.

This wasn’t Mirren’s first Hamlet, or her last. In 1970 she was Ophelia to Alan Howard’s Prince in a Trevor Nunn production for the RSC. Nunn had intended a plain anti-illusionistic design that would concentrate attention on the actors and the words, but according to company historian Sally Beauman, he was landed with

an oppressive chamber set, roofed and walled with Venetian blinds which could, theoretically, convert the entire staging from white to black in the twinkling of an eye… a set that brandished the play’s moral extremes in the audience’s face.

Again there was doubling. Ophelia and Laertes were ‘flirtatious doubles, almost twins in their matching fur-trimmed doublets, playing duets on the lute with Polonius looking on’ (Showalter). Mirren ‘did Ophelia’s madness without self-indulgence and to good effect’ (Hope-Wallace). This Ophelia, ‘victim of the same false society Hamlet hates’, follows him into madness ‘so that she too may tell it the truth’ (Bryden). The Evening News was impressed:

It seems only yesterday that Helen Mirren was in the Youth Theatre, but here she is playing Ophelia with originality and maturity and even accompanying her sad songs on the mandolin [sic]. Both these young ill-starred lovers, Hamlet and Ophelia, have the ability to draw compassion from us.

Ophelia is so often seen as an absence. She appears in only five of the play’s twenty scenes. We know little of what passed between her and Hamlet before the play opens. She doesn’t struggle with moral choices, as he does. ‘I think nothing, my lord,’ she tells him – a line that he chooses to interpret in the bawdy sense – but which the Gentleman echoes without irony when faced with the mad Ophelia, commenting that ‘her speech is nothing’, mere ‘unshaped use’. Mirren’s Ophelia was no shrinking violet. She was not prepared to go quietly:

The only one to break through this charmed circle of classicism is Helen Mirren as one of the most spirited Ophelias for many a year. In a tastefully low-key production, she stands out as one unwilling to lower her voice. (Barnes)

This Ophelia was not innocent but she was trusting. Describing the last scene between Mirren and Howard, one reviewer was prompted to speculate

whether Ophelia and Hamlet went to bed and, if so, whether the Prince did so out of lust or love. His ‘I loved thee not’ and her ‘I was the more deceived’ come across as a brutal wish to indicate the former and give the scene an added poignancy. It also accounts for the extreme lewdness of the song recital Ophelia treats the court to before her suicide. (Roberts)

In 1994 Mirren appeared in another movie version, Prince of Jutland, a French-British-Danish-German co-production directed by Gabriel Axel, based on the ancient Viking saga by Saxo-Grammaticus that was one of Shakespeare’s sources. Christian Bale played the title role (called Amled here), with support from Gabriel Byrne, Brian Cox and a very young Kate Beckinsale. Mirren was Geruth, Amled’s mother. The story differs somewhat from Shakespeare, and the differences bring into focus how Shakespeare (or the lost play of Hamlet that was supposedly another of his sources) fused the saga material onto the conventions of Elizabethan revenge drama. In the film, Geruth, having learnt of her new husband’s treachery, conspires with her son to bring about the usurper’s downfall. Amled survives to be crowned, but, in this rather endearing low-budget production, where his subjects seem to comprise a handful of downtrodden peasants from central casting, it’s difficult to see why the crown is considered a prize worth fighting over. Mirren sails through all this, regal as ever (notwithstanding yet another gratuitous nude scene). The music score, by Per Nørgaard, is noteworthy. 

Sources

Anon, ‘Oh, what a wild and wonderful Hamlet!’ Evening News, 5 June 1970

Elaine Aston, Sarah Bernhardt: A French Actress on the English Stage (1989)

Clive Barnes, review of RSC Hamlet, New York Times, 3 August 1970

Sally Beauman, The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (1982)

Ronald Bryden, ‘Nunn’s Hamlet: a report from the kitchen’, Observer, 7 June 1970

Russell Davies, ‘Cinema: Swordplay’, Observer, 5 February 1978

Ryan Gilbey, ‘Helen Mirren: “I want to play Hamlet!”’ Guardian, 3 March 2011

Graham Holderness, Visual Shakespeare: Essays in Film and Television (2001)

Philip Hope-Wallace, ‘Hamlet at Stratford’, Guardian, 6 June 1970

Derek Malcolm, ‘London Film Festival: Hamlet’, Guardian, 30 November 1976

Peter Roberts, review of RSC Hamlet, Plays and Players, July 1970

Kenneth Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (2004)

Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia: women, madness, and the responsibilities of feminist criticism’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Parker and Hartman (1985)

[with thanks to www.alanhoward.org.uk]

Troilus and Cressida (1968/9)

By William Shakespeare (1602)

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, August 1968
Aldwych Theatre, London, August 1969

‘Many actresses will tell you that Cressida is Shakespeare’s most rewarding part for a woman. She is certainly very modern: witty, astute, basically honest, ironic and self-sufficient.’ So wrote Norman Rodway, who played a scrofula-ridden Thersites in John Barton’s 1968 production ofTroilus and Cressida. Cressida on this occasion was Helen Mirren, in one of her earliest outings with the RSC. She doesn’t share her fellow cast member’s faith. In her autobiography, while admitting she ‘was not really ready for this but steamed ahead anyway’, she complains that the part is ‘underwritten’.

Is it? ‘Underwritten’ in Barton’s version, perhaps: that’s the impression you get from the reviews. I’m less sure about Shakespeare’s original, which (not for the first or last time) suffered not a little at the hands of a director Big on Ideas. Or, to be more precise, wary of Big Ideas. Or big on the idea that Shakespeare was wary of Big Ideas:

We use abstract words like Honour, Fame, Beauty and Truth to sanction what we do and give ourselves a sense of order and meaning. We need these to smooth over the confusion of life, and to avoid acknowledging the chaos within ourselves. (From Director’s rehearsal notes, published in theatre programme for the Stratford production, 1968.)

Troilus and Cressida has been classed among the ‘Problem Plays’, and rightly so. It’s hard to know what the focus of Shakespeare’s attention was in this unusually wordy play, but I suspect it’s not the title characters. They serve to illustrate three themes that collide and mesh, each subjected to a critical scrutiny that borders on a cynicism we don’t associate with this author. Unlike Antony and Cleopatra, this pair are not the cynosure of neighbouring eyes. In thematic first place there’s the ‘just war’: one scene entirely devoted to the embattled Trojans arguing among themselves poses the question – is fair Helen worth fighting over? Second into the critical frame is the unquestioned virtue of heroism, subject for argument in the rival Greek camp as Achilles, the legendary hero, sulks in his tent, only to be lured on to the battlefield finally to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. And third comes romantic love: an inspiration for Paris and for Troilus, reduced to a tawdry transaction by Cressida’s conniving uncle, Pandarus. Over it all preside two contrasting voices of commentary: the foul-mouthed Thersites, for whom the whole spectacle is nothing but ‘wars and lechery’, and the high-minded Ulysses, who refuses to ‘beg’ a kiss when Cressida is ‘kissed in general’ by the laddish Greeks.

Barton’s interest was what the Daily Telegraph coyly termed ‘peculiar doings which wasted a great deal of stage time’, mostly centred on Achilles (Alan Howard), who was portrayed as a prancing drag queen, wearing a blond wig and glittery nightdress. Reviewing the Stratford production, Harold Hobson fretted that Cressida was being written out of the script:

It would be pleasant to say that Miss Mirren has actually increased her celebrity this week; but Mr Barton's production, which presses upon the very limits of provocation, gives her no chance to do so.

It is hardly too much to say that Mr Barton sees this most disputed of Shakespeare's tragedies, not as Troilus and Cressida, but as Achilles and Perversion. There are times when the performance appears to be on the point of developing into a homosexual orgy in the midst of which poor Cressida's physical allure and moral delinquency seem a tedious interruption of the main sensational business of the evening, which is to show Achilles as a startling kind of male whore.

If Cressida was a casualty of this simplification of the play, opinion divided on what Mirren made of the part she was left with. Irving Wardle saw in her performance ‘a sensual child who is on the point of seducing her uncle before Troilus takes her, and who moves over with equal facility to Diomedes.’ Gareth Lloyd Evans complained that this ‘bouncy’ Cressida ‘jumps upon her lines like a teenage pop singer’. When Troilus begged Pandarus for ‘swift transportance to those fields | Where I may wallow in the lily-beds | Proposed for the deserver’, Benedict Nightingale responded that even

… her most fanciful admirer couldn’t reasonably compare Helen Mirren with a lily-bed. She’d be better described as a Trojan teeny-bopper; a flirt, a tease, who falls on her back and satirically opens her legs – a rather easy and superficial way of suggesting wantonness. Miss Mirren has nothing to do with the Cressida described by Ulysses, the only voice in the play we can trust. He tells us that ‘her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motion of her body’. Why are English actresses invariably so unaware of the joints, not to mention the motions, of their bodies?

The determination to update the play, in spirit, if not in staging terms, may plausibly be traced back to Jan Kott, the Polish scholar whose book Shakespeare Our Contemporary exerted a sizeable influence on Peter Brook and other RSC directors in the Sixties. Kott describes Cressida as ‘a teenage girl of the mid twentieth century. She is cynical, or rather would-be cynical. She has seen too much. She is bitter and ironic. She is passionate, afraid of her passion and ashamed to admit it.’ Simon Trussler duly noted that Barton’s production ‘mirrors the late sixties as surely as Peter Hall's version was attuned to the earlier years of the decade.’

Other reviewers were much more sympathetic to Mirren’s performance than Nightingale (who seems only to have become a Mirren convert in the Seventies). Robert Speaight thought that her Cressida, ’flexible and flirtatious, marked exactly the right distance between facility and faith’. WA Darlington praised her ‘very clear and original reading’, in his view well justifying her promotion within the company to leading parts:

She makes the girl shallow-pated rather than wicked and establishes this in her first scene with Pandarus. During her love-scenes with Troilus she convinces herself of her own sincerity and is all the more vehement in its defence because she really knows how little depth it has.

Frank Cox wrote that ‘Helen Mirren's Cressida is the most assuredly successful young performance for the RSC since Estelle Kohler's Juliet, intelligently sensual in manner, vulnerable in her attractiveness yet scorning to invite our sympathy for a failure which is not wholly beyond her means to prevent.’ JC Trewin, while regretting that she ‘has still to develop as a verse-speaker’, thought that she ‘expresses lucidly the mind of a girl who is every man's Cressida. At the moment her love for Troilus is true; but she can easily be deflected by the next man, and she recognises her own character.’

When Barton’s production moved from Stratford to London in 1969, there was scope for some fine tuning. Harold Hobson noticed a change:

At Stratford I scarcely noticed either Troilus or Cressida. Something has happened since then either to them or to me. Now they are quietly and impressively the exquisite counterpart to the play's excesses of agony and horror. Helen Mirren is excitingly seductive and treacherous as Cressida, and her momentary flashes of shame are very moving.

In an interview with The Guardian after the London opening, Mirren suggested that her own interpretation of the role had shifted in the interim:

For a while I deliberately played down my sexy qualities. This was my big mistake when I first played Cressida at Stratford last year: I fought against the sensualist, well, against the obvious sensualist, the open, free, sexy, ordinary, slightly silly girl. I wanted to make her intelligent and sharp and sexy, but neurotically sexy; something, in fact, she absolutely isn't. Now I don’t bother. I feel I no longer have to prove anything particularly about myself.

Normally, when writing about a production from forty years ago, one is dependent on contemporary reviews and productions stills. With this Troilus and Cressida we can do a little better. In 1970 ATV made a documentary about Helen Mirren, Doing Her Own Thing, a keen bit of talent-spotting on the part of director John Goldschmidt. The film doesn’t survive, alas, but there is an audio track in existence, and it includes a couple of clips from the 1969 production: scenes I.ii and III.ii (in extract). It sounds like a rather exaggerated, ‘actressy’ performance by modern standards (and by Mirren’s own later standards). In banter with her uncle in I.ii, this is a very pert, sassy Cressida, parading – or at least affecting – first-hand knowledge of the birds and the bees. It’s a characteristic of Cressida’s speeches that she seems to stumble into double entendre. She says something, apparently in innocence, which a man will take in the bawdiest sense (III.ii.133; IV.ii.27; IV.ii.38), causing her to backtrack (‘You smile and mock me, as if I meant naughtily’). In going for the ‘obvious sensualist’, from her first entrance, Mirren may have prepared us better for Cressida’s act of betrayal later, but was something lost?

Simon Schama, who as a young man watched her ‘sinuous’ Cressida from the gods, thought not. He still remembers her performance as ‘the only version of the part that made entirely credible her betrayal of moaning Troilus to the hard man Diomed’. Whatever the merits of Barton’s production and Mirren’s characterisation, that comment goes to the heart of the Cressida ‘problem’ in this ‘problem play’. Shakespeare’s original audience would have been more familiar with Cressida’s story, a medieval embroidery upon the Homeric original, than we are. Since her very name was a byword for infidelity, her behaviour in the Greek camp would have seemed to them a reversion to type after her loyal protestations in Troilus’s arms, and therefore less problematic. Modern audiences look to director and actress to find an emotional arc to carry us from the fervid leave-taking of IV.iv to her flirtatious arrival in the Greek camp in the scene immediately following. Barton’s production made a substantial cut in IV.iv (from Troilus’s ‘Nay, we must use expostulation kindly’ to Cressida’s ‘O Heaven! “be true” again!’, lines 60-76). As Ralph Berry observed, ‘the effect is to drain off some of the intensity of the parting and, indeed, to weaken the focus on the lovers.’ But the cut had another effect: it removed the exchange of love tokens. As earnest of their fidelity, Troilus gives Cressida a sleeve, she gives him a glove.

Why does this matter? In a useful article, Carol Rutter examines the staging possibilities for Act IV. On her reading, Cressida’s glove epitomises what she calls the play’s ‘politics of costume’ and preserves a staging hint for productions in our own time. In Shakespeare’s text the leave-taking which begins at IV.ii is interrupted by a short scene, a twelve-line exchange between Troilus and Paris that serves little dramatic purpose, before Cressida resumes her anguish in IV.iv. Most modern productions cut IV.iii, or move it elsewhere, in order to give Cressida a continuous ‘grief aria’. This was true of Barton’s later production of the play in 1976 and of Jonathan Miller’s TV version of 1981 where Suzanne Burden sobs uncontrollably like a child right up to her enforced departure from Pandarus’s house. Rutter speculates – plausibly, I’d say – that Shakespeare, who knew a thing or two about staging, took Cressida offstage briefly in IV.iii to cover a costume change. At the start of IV.ii, as the lovers awake in cold early morning, she is presumably in night attire. By IV.iv (it is now ‘great morning’) she has resignedly changed into daywear. The glove she gives Troilus is therefore an item she has already put on or is about to put on – not, as rather improbably in Miller’s production, an item she produces from under the pillow while still languishing in her nightie. In Barton’s 1968 production, Mirren had no costume change in Act IV at all. Rutter suggests that the interruption created by IV.iii and the costume change ‘work together to unsettle Cressida’s speech’. Directors who ignore these clues (and cues) run the risk of producing ‘a sentimental reading of the scene which mis-directs Cressida later… Her costume tells a story the lines don’t. The lovers swear constancy. The clothes write inconstancy.’*

At their first meeting in IV.v Ulysses calls Cressida a ‘daughter of the game’. My hunch is that the costume change before then is her recognition that the game is up. Having grown to self-awareness in wartime, she has spent her entire life among men. We never see her interact with another woman. Recognising, with an access of self-disgust, that she’s a chattel in a war economy, she has become complicit in her own commodification. And as people do in extreme circumstances, she compartmentalises her life:

TROILUS What offends you, lady?

CRESSIDA Sir, mine own company.

TROILUS You cannot shun yourself.

CRESSIDA Let me go and try.
I have a kind of self resides with you,
But an unkind self that itself will leave
To be another’s fool. (III.ii)

The speaker of those extraordinary lines is a highly complex character. Not Shakespeare’s ‘most rewarding part for a woman’, perhaps, but far from ‘underwritten’ if the production will give her wings to fly.

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*There have been as many responses to this problem as productions of the play. Rutter cites the solutions adopted in later RSC productions. Tylee gives earlier examples. In Tyrone Guthrie’s 1956 staging at the Old Vic, the parting became comic ‘with Troilus trying to pin Cressida into her clothes between her sobs’. William Poel’s ground-breaking production of 1912 ‘had an opportunist Edith Evans [in her stage debut] already busy with her hat in the mirror while Troilus tried to gain her attention.’

References

Ralph Berry, Changing Styles in Shakespeare (1981)

Frank Cox, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, Plays and Players, August 1969

WA Darlington, ‘Acting of Cressida clear and original’, Daily Telegraph, 9 August 1968

Harold Hobson, ‘Achilles’ fatal flaw’, Sunday Times, 11 August 1968

Harold Hobson, ‘Heroes, heels and hypocrites’, Sunday Times, 17 August 1969

Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (rev ed, 1967)

Gareth Lloyd Evans, ‘The reason why: the Royal Shakespeare season 1968 reviewed’,Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969), 135-144

Benedict Nightingale, ‘Nothing but wars and lechery’, New Statesman, 16 August 1968, p208

Norman Rodway, ‘Troilus and Cressida’, in Shakespeare in Perspective, II, ed Roger Sales (1985), 41-50

Carol Rutter, ‘Shakespeare, his designers and the politics of costume: handing over Cressida’s glove,‘ Essays in Theatre 12(2), 1994, 106-28

Simon Schama, ‘Helen Mirren talks to Simon Schama’, FT Magazine, 25 February 2011

Robert Speaight, ‘Shakespeare in Britain’, Shakespeare Quarterly 19, autumn 1968

JC Trewin, ‘A degenerate world’, Illustrated London News, 5 July 1969

Simon Trussler, ‘As modern as the sixties’, Tribune, 4 July 1969

Claire M Tylee, ‘The text of Cressida and every ticklish reader: Troilus and Cressida, the Greek camp scene’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989), 63-76

Irving Wardle, ‘Sex and warfare at Stratford’, The Times, 9 August 1968

Ian Woodward, ‘A very leading lady’, Guardian, 4 September 1969

[a selection of reviews may be found at www.alanhoward.org.uk]

Antony and Cleopatra (1965)

By William Shakespeare (c1606)
Old Vic Theatre, London, September 1965

Helen Mirren has played Cleopatra three times. It’s a role she’s made her own, but not one which has won her universal acclaim. Her last assault on the part, in 1998 at London’s National Theatre, brought some of the worst notices of her career. Nicholas de Jongh, writing in the Evening Standard, expected to find in Mirren and her Antony (Alan Rickman) a couple ‘whose epic passion proves the death of them’. Instead, he complained, ‘they rose to erotic ardour… with little more enthusiasm than a pair of glumly non-mating pandas at London Zoo, coaxed to do their duty to perpetuate the species.’

Of course, Cleopatra is a notoriously difficult part, an Everest for any actress to climb. She has to be able to turn on a sixpence from one emotion to another, from coquetry to vindictiveness, joy to anguish, and to hold enough back for the final Act to make credible the most flamboyant death-scene in all Shakespeare. There’s no record of the play’s performance in the Bard’s lifetime. For a young boy in The King’s Men, the role must have seemed even more daunting than it does for the modern thespian. Perhaps Shakespeare was writing for a theatre of the future?

Mirren first played the part as a 20-year-old student teacher with the National Youth Theatre, when they took over the Old Vic for a two-week sell-out season. (‘A sixth matinee is being given to cope with the demand from schools,’ chirruped the Daily Mail, sponsors of the season.) For London’s theatre critics, this was their first sighting of a star in the making, and it’s instructive now to look back at what they wrote in 1965. Milton Schulman set the tone for much of the coverage she would receive in years to come:

As Cleopatra, Miss Helen Mirren was well equipped physically for the part with a voluptuous, sensuous figure that swayed with such conviction that rehearsals must have made considerable disciplinary demands upon the rest of the company. I can well imagine them being tempted to break out into storms of appreciative whistles. In her taunting, kittenish treatment of Antony, Miss Mirren pouted and sighed to good effect, but there was little here of the regal eroticism that made Cleopatra a symbol of feminine mystery and power. Her death scene, too, seemed a very small affair.

The ‘panda’ problem evidently threatened this production, too. Of John Nightingale, Mirren’s co-star, Schulman wrote: ‘Whenever Cleopatra was about he seemed to be thinking of something else – a cricket pitch, for example.’

J.C. Trewin reacted more favourably to the final scene, where the ‘pretty worm of Nilus’ goes about its venomous business:

Mark Antony and his Cleopatra were, very simply, two or three times as good as I had hoped. If we did not look for supreme excitement, we did find a reliance on Shakespeare, an unrestrained honesty. It touched the imagination when… the young Cleopatra, who at first had seemed to be from Shaw’s play rather than Shakespeare’s, sat robed and crowned, awaiting the ecstasy of death.

Michael Ratcliffe, for the Sunday press, praised her ‘arresting royal wench, coarse and witty’, while an anonymous reviewer in The Times was even more enthusiastic:

Miss Mirren is continuously exciting both to watch and to hear. If majesty comes to her aid only at the close of the play, it does so after she has displayed all the other dangerous attractiveness that Shakespeare demands.

Speaking at the time, the young Mirren knew that her youth counted against her in taking on the part of a middle-aged lover:

Of course, I know that an older woman would play it better. Life leaves a mark on people, certainly on Cleopatra. I haven’t got that mark yet. I can only try to imagine or think it out. (Quoted in Treneman.)

The actors’ youth was certainly a problem for a number of critics, among them Fiona MacCarthy:

There is plenty of intelligence. There just is not enough age… No one believes John Nightingale and Helen Mirren when they talk about grey hairs. Both act bravely, sometimes better. But Shakespeare’s sensuality is far out of their reach. So is his tragic climax; Cleopatra’s asp gets out of hand.

Penelope Gilliatt’s review for The Observer didn’t refer to the principals at all, singling out only Timothy Meats (Octavius Caesar) as worthy of mention,

a wintry, embarrassed man who allows one to forget for once that the people on the stage are quite simply too young to have experienced the feelings of the play. By professional standards it doesn’t work by miles, and it is a meaningless piece of piety to pretend anything else.

This selection of reviews shows a wide range of opinion, and early signs of the priapic excitement that Mirren has always aroused in male critics, but it’s only in Hilary Spurling’s lengthy critique in The Spectator that we find any true prescience.* She noted that

English Cleopatras, from all accounts, nearly always disappoint – they may excel at coquettish repartee or in swift changes of mood, they rise to moments of majesty and shine briefly in the death scene, but they don’t much relish the actual tumbling on the bed of Ptolemy… All the more startling, then, to find a Cleopatra who, with all the usual graces, is riggish to her fingertips. Helen Mirren’s Cleopatra is unselfconsciously and immoderately sensual.

Spurling illustrated her point with numerous details from the 1965 production (valuable for the theatre historian) and concluded that she was in the presence of a distinct new talent:

Here we seem to have an actress potentially quite outside the English tradition, at any rate since the heyday of Mrs Barry and Mrs Bracegirdle in the eighteenth century. At the end of the week the state ought to have been there, pressing forward with its cheque-book to offer her the finest training that money can buy.

(For the record, the state wasn’t, but the Al Parker agency was. Mirren has said since that she’s glad not to have gone to drama school: ‘I think that experience can destroy as much as it teaches.’)

Forty-four years later Helen Mirren gave a long interview on the role of Cleopatra to fellow actor Julian Curry for his book on key roles in Shakespeare. She proved a rather contrary interviewee. Almost every proposition Curry advances concerning the play she contradicts. Perhaps with those mating pandas in mind, he offers the unexceptional comment that ‘the play relies on strong sexual chemistry between the actors playing Antony and Cleopatra.’ No, it doesn’t, she says; their relationship isn’t about sexuality: ‘It’s about a kind of a love, or a kind of respect, or a kind of mythologisation – loving the myth image in the other person.’ She views Antony as the romantic, Cleopatra as the cynical pragmatist, out to safeguard her nation’s interests whatever it takes. ‘She doesn’t love him in a foolish, romantic way. It’s a very wide-open, all-seeing love.’ At the end of the play Cleopatra is ‘genuinely in love with him’ but Mirren’s ‘not too sure she is at the beginning.’ Like Julian Curry (to judge from his responses) I’m slightly surprised at her downplaying of the character’s sensuality. How is one to make sense of Act 1 scene 5 on this sexless reading – the scene where Cleopatra, frustrated by an empty bed in her lover’s absence, taunts the eunuch Mardian for being ‘unseminared’ (i.e. emasculated)? ‘I take no pleasure | In aught an eunuch has,’ she muses. Hilary Spurling’s review evoked that scene in the 1965 production:

She is borne in on a litter to while away the hours of Antony’s absence and, as she stretches luxuriously and caresses her own soft flesh, we feel more strongly than if he were there her invocation of his physical presence.

The question Curry doesn’t ask, and I rather wish he had, is how far Mirren’s view of the character has changed over forty years. This political manipulator that she describes now, for whom ‘everything is either a performance or a calculation of some sort’, is this the ‘same’ character she was essaying as a bold 20-year-old? In the recent interview she seems to be a bit cross with Shakespeare for not creating the character she wants to play. ‘I was always looking for ways to bring the real person into this rather fake person that Shakespeare presents,’ she declares. Be careful, Helen – that way arrogance lies.

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*Spurling, later to make a solid reputation as a biographer, was only 24 herself at the time and, by her own admission, ‘the most dreadful, scathing, swingeing, destructive critic, a battleaxe’. In the late Sixties, Lindsay Anderson, joint artistic director of the Royal Court, tried to ban her from his theatre, having taken against one of her notices. But in this review she seems to be (as they say) ‘bang on the money’.

Sources

Anon, ‘Disciplined Shakespeare’, The Times, 7 September 1965, p11
Julian Curry, Shakespeare on Stage: Thirteen Leading Actors on Thirteen Key Roles (2010)
Nicholas de Jongh, ‘Suburban Shakespeare as Rickman and Mirren fail to ignite passion’, Evening Standard, 21 October 1998, p7
Penelope Gilliatt, ‘Ever so jocular: theatre’, The Observer, 12 September 1965, p25
Paul Laity, ‘A life in writing: Hilary Spurling’, Guardian, 17 April 2010
Fiona MacCarthy, ‘National Youth Theatre at the Old Vic’, Guardian, 7 September 1965, p7
Michael Ratcliffe, ‘Deep play’, Sunday Times, 12 September 1965, p45
Milton Schulman, ‘With such a Cleopatra could a lover think of cricket?’, Evening Standard, 7 September 1965, p4
Hilary Spurling, ‘Stark naked upon Nilus’ mud’, The Spectator, 17 September 1965, p352
Ann Treneman, ‘Helen Mirren – the drama queen of England’, Independent, 10 October 1998
J.C. Trewin, ‘Another national theatre appears in Waterloo Road’, Illustrated London News, 18 September 1965, p36

As You Like It (1978)

By William Shakespeare (1599)

BBC TV, 17 December 1978

The BBC Shakespeare series (1978-85) was an ambitious project to film the Bard’s entire canon for television. In a sense, Helen Mirren was in at the start. The idea was born when director Cedric Messina was on location at Glamis Castle, filming The Little Minister (1975), in which she played the free-spirited ‘gypsy’ heroine. It struck Messina that this would be the ideal location for an al fresco As You Like It which he was planning for the BBC’s ‘Play of the Month’ strand. What began as a proposal for a single play later became the entire corpus. True to the original concept, As You Like It was indeed filmed at Glamis, although as the series evolved the majority of the Shakespeare recordings were studio-based. Mirren appeared in three of the productions: besides Rosalind in As You Like It, she played Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1981) and Imogen in Cymbeline (1983).

The productions were distinctly conservative. Such a huge undertaking required American co-finance, and Time-Life, the backers, insisted on ‘period’ styling – either Elizabethan/Jacobean or something evocative of the period when the play was set (medieval, Dark Age, Roman, etc). These and other restrictions probably frightened off more adventurous directors from the project. But the series yielded solid workmanlike productions, still valued as teaching aids and still enjoyable in themselves, with casts featuring just about every reliable British Shakespearean of the day.

As You Like It was played pretty straight. The partnering of Angharad Rees’s winsome Celia with Helen Mirren’s plucky Rosalind made for very watchable television. Some of the male leads seemed rather anaemic by comparison. As for Hymen’s appearance at the end, a part that is always difficult to bring off on stage (since it appears so superfluous) was further undermined by the god’s hairy chest. Do gods have body hair? Probably not a question the author intends us to ask ourselves as the play canters towards its dénouement. The character of Jacques, by contrast, is far from superfluous. That melancholy satirist who stands apart from the action and refuses to be part of any happy endings is perhaps the most interesting figure in the drama. Debussy thought so when he sketched an opera based on the play. In the BBC production, Richard Pasco nicely caught the world-weariness of the disaffected Elizabethan courtier, reminding us how many such men must have hung on the whim of the ageing Queen.

The first As You Like It I can remember seeing was in the gardens of Worcester College, Oxford, in summer 1977, an early production (if memory serves) by one Richard Curtis, then an undergraduate at Christ Church. Touchstone was played by grad student Rowan Atkinson. Needless to say, the later Mr Bean stole every scene he was in, permanently skewing my view of the play to this day. James Bowlam, in the BBC version, barely shrugging off his ‘Likely Lad’ persona, came a very poor second. But, of course, it’s not Touchstone’s play, it’s Rosalind’s. She has about a quarter of all the lines. As critic James Shapiro remarks, Shakespeare must have had extraordinary confidence in some boy actor’s abilities: ‘Not even Cleopatra would speak as much. This was unprecedented and may not have pleased his experienced fellow sharers, used to playing the leading roles themselves’.

Rosalind spends more than half the play in doublet and hose. Why did Shakespeare make so much use of cross-dressing heroines? There are historical explanations, certainly. Transvestism had long been a standard element of comedy, but Shakespeare uses the device far more than his contemporaries, and not generally for comic effect. His audience must have got a particular frisson from watching boys playing girls playing boys. Those who see the Bard as a man for all times, as a universal genius existing outside time, would argue that his purpose is to send his female characters on adventures that a woman couldn’t possibly have within the domestic confines of Elizabethan England. By roaming in space, like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, they roam also in time, and explode into our own era. In the words of Jane Lapotaire, herself a memorable Rosalind:

They move entirely out of their own environment. But the crucial thing for me is that Rosalind never becomes a boy at all, her psychology is totally feminine, her attitudes are feminine – she is a fully rounded and understanding woman. (Quoted in Cook, p20).

Exiled to the Forest of Arden, it’s Rosalind who takes control, even of her father. The happy outcome for all is put into her capable hands, albeit by the exercise of ‘magic’ learned from someone ‘profound in his art and yet not damnable’ (V.ii). While the drippy hero Orlando moons about, pinning his execrable sonnets onto trees, Rosalind’s own temperament frees her from the restrictions of romantic love-cults. After recounting the fates of Troilus and Leander, she comments: ‘But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ (IV.i). Using the game-playing opportunities which the Forest opens up, she explores alternate versions of herself:

Rosalind, playing the boy Ganymede, invents another woman: the imagined Rosalind of a brash youth, a girl whose waywardness will cure Orlando of his love. (Dusinberre, p11).

Others see even more complicated reflections or refractions of gender taking place here. They point to the play’s highly unusual Epilogue, in which ‘Rosalind’ steps out of character and addresses the audience as the boy or man that ‘he’ actually was:

If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

Lisa Jardine comments of the Epilogue:

Wherever Shakespeare’s female characters in the comedies draw attention to their own androgyny, I suggest that the resulting eroticism is to be associated with their maleness rather than with their femaleness.

While Mirren adopted a more strident tone for her travesty role as ‘Ganymede’, she still meant us to see that she remains a girl underneath. At several points she winced as Orlando or Silvius, supposing her a him, blokeishly slapped her on the back. For the Epilogue, still in her wedding dress, she broke from the hymeneal round dance to come forward and speak the lines straight to camera. No androgyny there, take it from me.

References

Judith Cook, Women in Shakespeare (1980)

Juliet Dusinberre, ‘Introduction’ to As You Like It (Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, 2006)

Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983)

James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005)

Martin Wiggins, The Shakespeare Collection (BBC DVD): Viewing Notes

Age of Consent (1969)

Mr Mason is relaxed and amiable, Mr MacGowran is mildly funny, and Miss Mirren is attractive to watch, but some of the minor roles are played very unconvincingly indeed. There is, however, a dog called Godfrey who turns in a good performance as a likeable dog. (Daily Express, November 1969)

History has not been kind to Age of Consent. I have a sort of affection for it, but the critic in me knows that it’s a bit of a dog’s breakfast – Godfrey’s breakfast, if you will – a film of career beginnings and endings. As well as providing Helen Mirren with her first starring role on film, it was the last feature to be made by director Michael Powell (1905-1990). In collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, Powell had been a formidable presence in British cinema of the Forties and Fifties, with classics like The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death to his name. But his reputation took a nosedive when Peeping Tom (1960), a gritty thriller about a voyeuristic killer, was panned as ‘pornographic’. Like several filmmakers of his generation, he struggled to come to terms with the new freedoms allowed him in the 1960s – I detect the same hesitancy in Hitchcock’s final films – and although Peeping Tom was later resurrected by Martin Scorsese and hailed as a risk-taking masterpiece, Powell never found his form again.

Risk-taking in Age of Consent is confined to what Powell coyly called ‘a painter’s nudity’. Australian artist Bradley Morahan (James Mason), bereft of inspiration in his adopted home of New York, returns to an island off the Queensland coast in search of solitude. There he encounters Cora, a teenage child of nature (Mirren), who engages in petty thievery to finance her dream of escaping to Brisbane to train as a hairdresser. She becomes Bradley’s model, his muse, and (we are left to assume) finally his lover. There’s comic relief from veteran Irish actor Jack MacGowran playing Bradley’s irritating pal Nat Tate who seeks refuge from an alimony suit by battening on his old friend, and some cute tricks from Bradley’s faithful pooch, one of a great line of canine leads that runs from Rin Tin Tin to Uggie. With erratic intrusions of darker material (an attempted rape, a sudden death), the film never quite finds a persuasive, unitary tone. But it boasts some classy underwater photography, and the Great Barrier Reef (even without the added ornament of Mirren scuba-diving in her birthday suit) looks superb.

James Mason’s performance is indeed ‘relaxed and amiable’, as the reviewer said. You feel he could do this sort of thing in his sleep. As the feral Cora, Mirren has a lot more to prove, needing to cast off some of the baggage of the ‘classical’ actress (as well as her clothes). It wasn’t an easy experience for her, as she told Mason’s biographer:

I’d only been working for about a year, and this was the first film I’d ever done [sic]; James had seen me in a National Youth Theatre season and he and Powell decided I’d be right for the role, but once we got started Powell kept having vociferous fits of anger on the set, and James was just always there for me, very gently guiding and teaching as we went along. Having survived that brutal Hollywood world he was hugely experienced on the set, and tremendously generous to me.

I find hers an engaging performance, suggestive of a young person beginning to understand their own power to influence others. As she looks at Bradley’s painting of her, Cora becomes conscious of her body. Returning to the squalor of her bedroom, she begins to examine it in a cracked mirror, until interrupted by her grandmother who attempts to beat her for her ‘sinfulness’. Cora breaks the old woman’s cane and pushes her away, shouting that she is not to be treated like a child anymore. It’s nicely played, but I’m still not convinced Mirren ever ‘found’ the character. (That’s always assuming that there’s more to be found here than a succubus of the male imagination.)

Powell, as he tells the story, had spotted Mirren when casting for Sebastian, a 1968 spy spoof and Dirk Bogarde-vehicle which Powell produced:

Helen… had come with dozens of other girls to audition for [Mr] Sebastian, and David Greene, who directed the tests, thought she should have played the lead part. He asked her to read a difficult scene two different ways, an old trick but a good one, and she passed it with ease and humour. She moved smoothly and easily from one character to the other. She was no prodigy. She admitted later on that she had been scared to death, but that didn’t stop her doing a good job on both girls.

(Million-Dollar Movie, pp509-10)

That part went instead to Susannah York. But when setting up his next project and in need of an actress who had ‘humour, a glint in her eye, a jaw that showed character’, he knew who he wanted:

Helen Mirren had just signed a three-year contract with the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare company. It was the start of a splendid classical stage career. But at the time all we could think of was how to get her out of it. Her prospective legitimate employers were naturally not pleased, but finally it occurred to somebody that if a girl they already had under contract was going to play opposite James Mason in a film, there might be something in it for Stratford.

With time to kill in the CUP Bookshop one day, I stumbled across The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Looking up ‘Mirren, Helen’ in the index, I expected to find something about Peter Hall’s 1968 Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she played Hermia, or Celestino Coronada’s bizarre Hamlet (1976) where she doubled up as Gertrude and Ophelia, or even the Hamlet-derived Prince of Jutland (1994). In fact, the only reference occurs in a section on refashionings of The Tempest, where Tony Howard finds a connection between Age of Consent, a ‘menopausal male fantasy of sexual/artistic renewal’, and Shakespeare’s last play. It’s an ingenious reading, I grant, but perhaps a little far-fetched. Mason is the isolated magus, Mirren a composite Miranda-Ariel. In this filmic variation, the witch Sycorax (who appears only as a name in Shakespeare’s play) is made visible; she is the drunken old harridan, grandmother to Mirren’s character, who constrains Cora’s natural exuberance and frustrates her efforts to leave the island by confiscating the girl’s savings.

Yet there is a connection somewhere, if only by way of a thought-experiment. Michael Powell had been attempting for many years to set up a film version of The Tempest. The original plan involved John Gielgud and Moira Shearer. That came to nothing. But after working with Mason on Age of Consent, Powell believed he had found his Prospero. The two discussed the project seriously in the early Seventies, by which time Powell had added an opening scene of his own that bracketed Prospero with Galileo as fellows in scientific enterprise. A pair of Greek financiers offered to put up half the money if Powell would shoot the film in Greece. When the golden couple of Mia Farrow and André Previn relocated to London, Powell signed up Farrow as Ariel, with Previn to compose and conduct the score. Topol (!) was engaged as Caliban and Michael York as Ferdinand. Frankie Howerd and Malcolm McDowell were also on board, according to a confident interview Powell gave to The Guardian in 1975, when he still expected to start shooting ‘in the autumn’. Nowhere in what’s written about this intriguing might-have-been of film history do we learn whom Powell had in mind to play Miranda. Three decades later, director Julie Taymor had more success with backers. For her film adaptation of The Tempest (2010) she rewrote the male lead as a female, casting Helen Mirren (now in her sixties) as ‘Prospera’, duchess of Milan. Watching Felicity Jones’s Miranda running barefoot over the volcanic rocks of Hawaii in Taymor’s film, I was reminded of Cora in Age of Consent. A young Mirren as Miranda in a film of The Tempest: now there’s a thought…

References

Raymond Gardner, interview with Michael Powell, Guardian, 7 May 1975

Clive Hirschhorn, The Films of James Mason (1975)

Tony Howard, ‘Shakespeare’s cinematic offshoots’, in Russell Jackson, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (2007)

Sheridan Morley, James Mason: Odd Man Out (1989)

Michael Powell, Million-Dollar Movie: The Second Volume of His Life in Movies (1992)