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)

The Bed Before Yesterday (1975)

(Helen Mirren, Ben Travers, Joan Plowright, 1975. Photo by Zoe Dominic)

By Ben Travers (1975)
First performance: Lyric Theatre, London, 9 December 1975

The other play in the Lyric Theatre repertory in 1975-6 was a country mile away from Chekhov’s pre-Revolutionary Russia. Its author had no time for the melancholy satire of provincial dreamers sunk in passivity:

I know I am a pitiable, unashamed Philistine, worthy to be lynched and to have my remnants thrown into the Thames or Volga, but I simply cannot abide the plays of Anton Chekhov… Many of the characters spend their times sitting with their chins in their waistcoats, deliberating at great length whether or not they will commit suicide. Anyone can tell them the right answer, but they ought to have arrived at it themselves before they came on.
(Travers, A-sitting on a Gate, p150)

Ben Travers (1886-1980) had enjoyed great success in the 1920s and ’30s as the author of ‘Aldwych farces’ but had fallen on hard times after the War as the Angry Young Men of British theatre swept all before them. In the 1970s he made an extraordinary comeback. One of his early successes, A Cuckoo in the Nest, was revived to acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre. Emboldened, the octogenarian playwright turned out an entirely new play, taking advantage of the freedoms allowed him now that his old adversary, the Lord Chamberlain, no longer exercised the right to blue-pencil anything remotely ‘off-colour’ in his scripts. He approached the relaxation of censorship cautiously, as he told The Times: ‘Don’t get the idea that I suddenly said: “Hey, let’s write a load of dirt!” It was nothing like that. But it does give me the chance to write about people speaking as they really do speak.’ The new play was set in 1930, the era of Travers’s greatest successes, the era of his youth, and its dialogue perfectly captures the period (albeit fruitier than we’re used to in Noël Coward). But the plot would never have passed muster in 1930:

I hit on the idea of a woman of young middle-age and ample means, who had been brought up in the aftermath of the Victorian age, uninitiated in the secrets of sinful sex. In this state of ignorance she was to fall victim to a rotter (period term) outraged and agonised on her bridal night (exit the rotter) and thereafter avoiding and abhorring the very thought of sexual intercourse until she becomes lured into giving it one further try-out many years later; when, discovering and revelling in the delights of the orgasm, she is driven to the verge of nymphomania.

The lead role of Alma was a gift for the accomplished comedienne in Joan Plowright, and so The Bed Before Yesterday joined The Seagull in repertory. Irving Wardle hailed the new arrival as ‘an extremely funny play written in deadly earnest. One cannot help contrasting the vigour and emotional generosity of this piece with the cold premature senility of authors half his age. It treats with kindness a figure who is usually the target of derisive sniggers.’ For Harold Hobson, The Bed Before Yesterday called ‘not so much for a review as for a cry of ecstasy. Rabelais would have revelled in it. Wycherley would have been green with envy.’

It wasn’t obvious territory for Lindsay Anderson as director, but, as Travers recalled, they ‘got on splendidly from the first’. Anderson respected a well-made play when he found one, and Travers delighted in the way the director’s ‘assertiveness’ and ‘remorseless candour’ in the rehearsal room would suddenly give way to a ‘Puckish sense of humour’. Anderson’s supreme talent lay in ‘his appreciation or rather judgement, of values – the value of an inflection, of a pause, of the movement or reaction of the character at the right moment’.

Helen Mirren played Ella, a penniless movie ‘extra’ and a typical ‘fast girl’ of the era. She saw Anderson’s admiration for the old-school Travers as another example of the ‘flip side of Lindsay the rebel’, and threw herself into the part. ‘Mirren is stirringly voluptuous as the Harlowesque good-time girl,’ Michael Billington enthused. Her insistence on wearing a platinum wig for the role rather disappointed the elderly playwright, who would have preferred to see her in her own hair. In his memoirs, Travers paints an intriguing portrait of how the then 30-year-old Mirren came across to a thespian of a much earlier generation:

She had just reached the stage of having become a notoriety, welcome to the theatre-gossip columns, which, while acknowledging her acting abilities, presented her as a good-time girl with a special and rather unpredictable good-time nature of her own. Where they went wrong was in presuming that the good time came first; she is above all a gifted and versatile and conscientious actress. I don’t know much about her private affairs (well, I do know a bit because she and I used to exchange confidences sometimes during rehearsals) but it is her stage job that comes first with her and although her performances are liable to vary she is always the first to say so and to repent a lapse.

For his eighty-ninth birthday Mirren gave him what he describes as ‘a bright red pullover with green sleeves and a picture of a beatnik couple in a tango attitude on the chest’. He wore it to every subsequent rehearsal, under his dinner-suit shirt on first night and, well displayed, in an appearance on the Parkinson show. He delighted in the fact that no one on the production treated him as ‘a venerable old has-been to be polite to’. It’s one of the therapeutic virtues of the arts that old age can be perpetually reinvigorated by youth. In a sense, that is the theme of his play, which Travers himself was acting out in the Indian summer of his career. In The Bed Before Yesterday, it is the young Ella who first plants in middle-aged Alma’s mind the determination to make up for lost time:

ELLA: There are heaps of other girls like me, you know.
ALMA: I do not know and I don’t want to.
ELLA: I think most unmarried girls will soon be doing it as a matter of course, like men do.
ALMA: I keep telling you I’m not interested. (She sits on the sofa)
ELLA: (sincerely baffled) Honestly, you’re awfully different from everybody else about it. (Sitting on the sofa) I mean, for instance, look at my grandmother.
ALMA: Why should I look at your grandmother?
ELLA: She had a boyfriend in Bordighera, an Italian boy, a gigolo. She used to spend every winter out there with him in Bordighera. Right up to the time she was seventy.
ALMA: (incredulously) Seventy?
ELLA: Over seventy.
ALMA: Poor thing. She must have had a particularly nauseating type of aberration.
ELLA: I don’t think she was a poor thing at all. I think she got the best out of life. I only hope I live to be seventy.

Needless to say, when Alma impulsively takes a foreign trip between scenes in Act Two, it is to Bordighera that she bends her steps.

If things had turned out differently, this production (which, alas, I didn’t see) or something close to it might have been preserved on film. In 1976 Joan Plowright’s husband, Laurence Olivier, finally overcoming his aversion to the small screen, began Olivier Presents on TV. At the launch press conference it was announced that both The Seagull and The Bed Before Yesterday would be televised as part of this series. It wasn’t to be, although Mirren appeared (with Olivier) in a play that did make it into the series, Pinter’s The Collection. According to Ivan Waterman, The Bed had other, perhaps less happy, consequences for the arts. When Tinto Brass was in London setting up the infamous Caligula project, Malcolm McDowell took him to see Mirren in the Travers farce. ‘Brass was enthralled. They chatted backstage, by which time Brass was in a trance.’ He had found his Caesonia.*

* I am uncertain how much credence to give to anything in Waterman’s biography. He gives no sources for anything, other than his own interviewees, and the one paragraph he devotes to describing The Bed Before Yesterday (p62) is spectacularly wrong.

References

Michael Billington, review, Guardian, 10 December 1975
Harold Hobson, review, Sunday Times, 14 December 1975
Ben Travers, A-sitting on a Gate: Autobiography (1978)
Ben Travers, Five Plays (1977)
Irving Wardle, review, The Times, 10 December 1975
Ivan Waterman, Helen Mirren: The Biography (2003)
‘Diary: Ben Travers liberated at 89’, The Times, 12 November 1975
‘Lord Olivier takes on TV roles’, The Times, 21 May 1976

The Seagull (1975)

By Anton Chekhov (1895).

Translated and adapted by Galina von Meck and Lindsay Anderson.

Opened: Lyric Theatre, London, 28 October 1975.

By 1975 Lindsay Anderson (1923-94), who had been associated with the Royal Court Theatre on and off since the late Fifties, was growing frustrated:

At the Court I’ve never been able to work with a company because the theatre can’t support one. And it is also dedicated to new plays – new plays are challenging, but also a bit limiting. I’ve done nothing but new plays for years. And I wanted to do The Seagull. (Guardian, 18 September 1975)

For some months he’d been in talks with Helen Montagu, joint managing director of HM Tennent, about forming a new West End repertory company. The Seagull (or The Sea Gull, as the translators preferred to style it) was ideally suited to this environment, and he assembled a distinguished cast of actors for his new venture, among them Joan Plowright, Frank Grimes, Peter McEnery and Helen Mirren. Anderson was upbeat (for once), confident that audiences like to see the same actors in different parts and actors like the versatility of ‘rep’. Mirren, interviewed by Sheridan Morley on the eve of opening, struck a note of uncharacteristic scepticism:

It’s still too early to talk about a real company at the Lyric, despite what it says on the posters. It takes months to get a real company feeling unless you all come from roughly the same theatrical background, as we did in Teeth’n’Smiles. At the Lyric we’re a very mixed group, and there’s no real community like there is in Sloane Square – now we simply meet for rehearsals and the theatre only comes to life for an hour or two each evening… I also don’t believe you can get a real company going without absolute equality of salaries, and that’s not what’s happening at the Lyric.

Early in the twentieth century, as Chekhov’s plays began to find a place in the British repertory, a view developed that they were best performed by permanent companies (somewhat along the lines of the Moscow Arts Theatre). Patrick Miles has suggested that this was based on a misunderstanding. The plays ‘require ensemble-acting’ and are themselves ‘powerful ensemble-makers’, he comments, but we need to ‘disentangle the Chekhovian ensemble from the Stanislavskian model of a theatre company’. The Lyric Company didn’t stay together for long, but long enough to deliver two fine, if sharply contrasted, pieces of ensemble drama. (The Seagull played in repertory with a Ben Travers farce, The Bed Before Yesterday.)

Bernard Shaw believed that Chekhov was aiming at a new theatrical genre, ‘tragicomedy’, that is to say ‘a play that was essentially a comedy but into which the tragedy of life boldly intruded.’ The elements of romantic comedy are certainly piled high in The Seagull. Everybody is in love with the wrong person: Trepliov loves Nina; Masha loves Trepliov; Nina loves Trigorin, and Medvedenko loves Masha. But Trepliov’s unreturned affections have tragic consequences: in Act Three he attempts suicide; in Act Four he succeeds.

Just as generic distinctions slip and slide, so are meanings elided and diffused, beginning with the play’s title. The eponymous seagull is both a prop and a symbol. As such it is traded among three characters – a successful writer, a would-be writer and a would-be actress. To the actress it’s naturally a prop; to the writers it’s naturally a symbol. Nina recognises that, for Trepliov who’s given to ‘talking unintelligibly in a sort of symbolic way’, it’s ‘apparently another symbol’ but confesses herself ‘too simple-minded’ to understand it. (Her artless admission might almost be Chekhov’s riposte to the accusation that he has over-determined his meanings with this multivalent image.) For the hapless Trepliov as he lays the dead bird at her feet, it seems to be an improbable love-token. For the hardened Trigorin, accustomed to factoring experience into art, it’s a subject for a short story and a metaphorical premonition of Nina’s vulnerability. He asks to have the dead bird stuffed (thus reconverting it into a prop). When the result is presented to him two years later, he claims to have no memory of making the request. The returning Nina of Act Four identifies with the seagull. Or does she? The Russian language has no definite or indefinite article, with the result that her famous words, ‘Ya – chayka’, hover in the gap between ‘I am a seagull’ and ‘I am the seagull’.

I saw this production late in 1975. Sadly, at a distance of 36 years, I remember very little of it: only a single image, like a tableau, perhaps the play-within-a-play in Act One. When I try to recall Mirren’s performance as Nina only one adjective comes to mind: ‘demure’. Actually, I don’t suppose it was anything of the sort. By Act Four, when Nina has had an affair and an illegitimate child, she has left behind whatever ‘demureness’ she started out with. I surmise that what stuck in the memory (irritatingly elbowing out any other thoughts) was the contrast between Mirren’s appearance here and the last time I’d seen her on stage, three months earlier, as frazzled rock chick Maggie in Teeth’n’Smiles. Gone were the slashed skirt and platform shoes, to be replaced by sober, buttoned-up period dress.

So I must turn to the critics for a reminder, who I find, whatever reservations they had about the old-fashioned staging and some of the casting, were united in their praise for La Mirren. Benedict Nightingale was struck more by the similarities between Maggie and Nina than the differences:

As Ms Mirren played them, the two women didn’t come from separate species… When her Nina reappeared in Act Four, she gave the impression not of a badly wilted flower but of a plant that had grown hardier with time.

Robert Cushman made the same point:

Miss Mirren… begins almost as Alice in Wonderland, and is superbly unabashed about it. But along with Alice’s wide-eyed hero-worship goes Alice’s instinctive practicality. There is nothing distracted about her final scene; the famous antiphony (‘I’m a seagull; no, I’m an actress’) becomes a balancing of possibilities and there is no doubt that the second will win. She is not going to become a thing in anyone’s dream. The part, though Miss Mirren finds a totally different style for it, is analogous to her rock singer in Teeth’n’Smiles, both doomed in theory, both survivors in fact.

Gavin Lambert also noted her approach to the final scene. Nina’s famous monologue is ‘usually played for tragic vulnerability,’ but ‘Helen’s performance implied that Nina, in spite of her hopeless obsession with Trigorin, was sustained by her belief that she could become a great actress.’ Charles Lewsen admired how, with ‘superb irony’, she ‘entirely eschews pathos in Nina’s final scene, quoting Konstantin’s symbolist play with a smile that displays the boy’s work as poor art, but a perfect expression of what has been.’

Nina’s final scene is critical to the play’s success. There are many, David Hare among them, who think that Chekhov’s playwriting is at fault here, condemning any actress who attempts the part to failure. Michael Billington points out that, after Trepliov has filled in her back-story for the benefit of the audience, ‘Nina herself enters out the night and has to convey two years of personal and professional failure in about ten minutes.’ Oleg Yefremov of the Moscow Arts Theatre has written:

The main question at the end, of course, is whether Nina is broken, finished as a person, or has attained a wisdom that will help her to believe. We have to understand why she has come, why she is seeing Trepliov again. (Chekhov on the British Stage, p129)

Peggy Ashcroft played Nina in a much-lauded 1936 production. Ashcroft’s biographer describes her trepidation as she approached that final scene. Fortifying herself backstage with a sip of brandy ‘to take off the edge of terror’, she sat ‘alone in a corner with a shawl over her head working herself up to her big entrance while the wind and rain effects whistled all around.’ Influenced by the director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, she believed that Nina was ‘destroyed’ by the end of the play, that her ‘protestations of belief in her future career’ were ‘only a covering up of her disbelief’ in herself. Helen Mirren’s approach to the character forty years later was very different.

[Note. Galina von Meck (1891-1985), whose translation was used in the production, was a grand-niece of Tchaikovsky: true cultural aristocracy. I’m guessing that Anderson had little or no Russian and adapted from a literal version she supplied. That’s how these things tend to be done in the London theatre, as I know to my cost. But I’d be interested to hear otherwise. Anderson’s diaries, as published, tell us nothing about this period at all.]

References

Michael Billington, Peggy Ashcroft (1988)

Robert Cushman, ‘Down in the country’, The Observer, 2 November 1975

Hugh Hebert, ‘A change of scenery’, Guardian, 18 September 1975

Charles Lewsen, ‘Chekhov’s perplexing challenge’, The Times, 29 October 1975

Patrick Miles, ed. and tr., Chekhov on the British Stage (1993)

Sheridan Morley, ‘Helen Mirren makes the West End’, The Times, 23 October 1975

Benedict Nightingale, ‘Life in the theatre’ in Helen Mirren – Prime Suspect: A Celebration, ed. Amy Rennert (1995)