As He Likes It

Shakespeare is difficult for any actor, explains Peter Hall, who founded London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, but American productions of Shakespeare nearly always disappoint him. “Either the actors pretend to be English, or they are so method-based they strangle the text and you can’t understand what they’re saying,” he says.

So now, after years of talking about creating an American Shakespeare company of his own, Hall is taking a shot at it here: Next Sunday, his stagings of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Measure for Measure” open in repertory at the Ahmanson Theatre. He says he has plans to follow up with more here in future seasons, although no concrete plans have been announced. Given how infrequently Los Angeles’ most prominent theaters present Shakespeare, expectations are high.

Many high-profile actors participated in Hall’s Shakespeare workshop here last December, and the well-known performers appearing this summer include Kelly McGillis and Richard Thomas. Astride the whole enterprise is Hall, successor to Laurence Olivier as head of the Royal National Theatre, world-renowned opera director, producer and director on London’s West End and Broadway and, not least, a man who over more than four decades has directed 28 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, most of them with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Hall and four of his actors--McGillis, Thomas, David Dukes and Anna Gunn--met with The Times in an Ahmanson rehearsal hall recently to discuss how the process works. All of the actors have prior Shakespearean credits, but are best known for other stage, film and/or TV work.

Thomas, an Emmy winner for his work as John Boy on “The Waltons,” plays Angelo, the Duke’s unbending deputy, in “Measure for Measure” as well as the mischievous Puck in “Dream.” McGillis, who has worked at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., takes on fairy queen Titania in “Dream,” while Gunn, who was seen at the Mark Taper Forum in Terry Johnson’s “Hysteria,” plays convent-bound Isabella in “Measure.” Dukes has previously appeared in L.A. on all three Music Center stages and now plays Theseus, duke of Athens, in “Dream” and Lucio, a man about town, in “Measure.”

Their topic: the Peter Hall school of Shakespeare, American style.

Q: Given the popularity of “Shakespeare in Love” and all the new films based on Shakespeare’s plays, there seems to be increasing interest in the man as well as his work. Do you have any thoughts about why that might be, and why now?

Peter Hall: It’s like a fever chart. It happens every 10 years or so. Everyone runs around Hollywood saying, “Gee, he’s commercial after all.” Then one [film] will not make money, and they’ll stop doing it for 10 years.

I think “Shakespeare in Love” is a lovely film, but it’s a show-biz film; it’s not a Shakespeare film. It’ll hot up Shakespeare for a few months, but I don’t think Shakespeare has any need of being hotted up. He survives. I wouldn’t mind his royalties around the world.

Q: You’ve often said how much you wanted to do Shakespeare with American actors. What’s the appeal?

Hall: I just wanted to solve several questions that have haunted me all of my theatergoing life. I’ve seen lots of Shakespeare productions in this country, but to be truthful I’ve never seen one where everybody spoke the same way.

Q: What do you mean?

Hall: I mean that some people observed the rhythm of the verse and some people didn’t. Some people observed the lines and some people didn’t. Some people observed the strength and the actual rhythm of the prose and some people didn’t. Some of them imposed their own rhythms on Shakespeare, and some of them observed Shakespeare. I’ve seen some good productions and some marvelous performances, but I’ve never seen a cohesive production.

I couldn’t quite understand why this was, particularly as I think American actors are by and large more instinctive and more emotional, and let it hang out more than British actors. They are, I think, temperamentally much nearer to the Elizabethan visceral sort of changes of mood. Added to which, American speech and vowels are much, much richer than modern English vowels, and are much closer to Shakespeare.

Q: How did those concerns lead you to the Ahmanson and assembling an American company here?

Hall: It’s been going on for donkey’s years, this flirtation. [The late New York producer] Joe Papp tried to get me to do it, Lincoln Center tried to get me to do it, and all the time there was [Ahmanson artistic director-producer] Gordon Davidson saying come and have a go. Then, about two years ago when I was running the Old Vic, Gordon came over, sat down and said, “Now listen, we’re either going to do it now or we’ll never do it.” It felt like he sat there for some months until I said, “OK, I’ll do it.”

Q: And why did you, the actors, want to do this? You’re all successful in television or film. There’s no money in it. It’s difficult, grueling . . .

Hall: And professionally dangerous. Any sensible agent faced with you all coming and doing this would say this makes no rational sense. There’s no money. There’s a lot of work and a lot of risk, even if you’re successful. No one much will see you. And the danger if you’re not successful is it will be damaging. So the only reason is because of what it gives you.

Richard Thomas: I wanted to learn what I had a feeling Peter would teach me about how to approach the text. Another reason is that I’ve lusted after the role of Angelo for a long time; Puck came as a great surprise. And as much theater as I’ve done, I’ve never done two shows in rep, so I never had an opportunity to rehearse and play two shows, going back and forth and having them illuminate each other.

David Dukes: Between ACT [American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco] and Shakespeare festivals, rep is where I was raised. I also knew Sir Peter from “Amadeus,” and I remember coming out of those note sessions [on Broadway] having just run the play and wanting to go to work again, because a new way of thinking about it had been presented to me. Also, Sir Peter’s kind of famous for doing Shakespeare, and I think one of the things in America that we don’t do is learn from people who have experience.

Anna Gunn: Northwestern [University], where I went to college, focused on academics, but I also went to England for a semester and studied with people who said a lot of the things that I’ve been learning in rehearsals. I didn’t get to put it in practice that much, so coming back to it years later, I’m really starting to understand and take in what the language is about.

Kelly McGillis: A lot of my views about poetry, language, text and form are very much the same, but coming from a different background. For me, the exciting prospect was to work with Peter on the process that he has and he does.

Q: Maybe we should start with some grounding in the Peter Hall process.

Hall: I do want to stress this: It’s not my method--it’s the method. [Laughter.] I’ve been doing it for about 45 years, and I’ve never found it wrong. I was taught it primarily by Edith Evans, who was a great actress, and she was taught by William Poel, who was a great Shakespeare revolutionary [who rejected] the whole Victorian tradition. He’d been taught by [actor William Charles] Macready’s actors, and Macready’s actors had been taught by [Edmund] Kean’s, and Kean’s by [David] Garrick. And it goes all the way back into the 18th century. It’s not mine, and I’m not alone in it--people like [directors] Trevor Nunn and Richard Eyre and a whole slew of actors from Judi Dench on, have grown up with me doing this.

Shakespeare gives you the clues. He tells the actor when to go slow, when to go fast, when to pause, which word to accent, when to come in on cue, when to slow up, when to go fast, when to have a climax, when to have an anticlimax. It’s all written down, it’s there--like notes of music. We just have to find out why, emotionally.

Q: Have you had to make adjustments to the way you usually direct Shakespeare to suit an American ensemble?

Hall: I come to the land of Method acting, of instinctive acting, and the joy has been not one single person in this company from the youngest to the oldest has said to me, “What are you talking about? I can’t do that, you’re crippling me.” Everybody has said, “Let me try and do that. Let me see if I can be liberated by that.”

Thomas: A lot of the time, you go into rehearsal and you feel like you’re rehearsing a production of a play. This process seems to have been more of a communal close reading and investigation of the text itself. We didn’t feel we had to find a way to justify the scenery.

Q: Could we get some examples?

Thomas: At one point, he said, “Generally speaking, the most important information moves toward the end of the line.”

Hall: Yes. The modern actor’s habit is to attack the beginning of the line and fade on the end. But what Shakespeare wants to tell the audience is usually in the second half. It’s why he loves rhyme.

One has to go to the basic principles: Why did he write it in iambic pentameter? He obviously didn’t have to. But it was a way in which he could communicate quickly and keep ahead of the audience. Whereas if you put modern rhythms on Shakespeare, the audience is sitting there, waiting.

McGillis: They’re way ahead of you. And bored.

Hall: It’s exactly like great jazz playing. If you have the rhythm, and you understand the rhythm, the deviation from the rhythm, or the moment when you nearly lose the rhythm, is the excitement. That’s where great Shakespearean acting resides.

I hate actually talking about this outside the kitchen because people--and particularly other actors--will think rules, regulations, being bound, having to do it this way. And the truth is it does free you, but it frees you in the way you learn the steps of a dance or the movements of a fight, or a song. You cannot actually act or perform any of that until it’s yours. And you can’t do Shakespeare until you’ve gone through the form and made it yours; then you breathe inside it.

Thomas: I think observing some of these clues, and the way the lines and scenes then interlock, also promotes a sense of pace. It’s more fluid and more clear at the same time. Having done this groundwork, as we begin to link the scenes together and play through, it feels like the play moves at a quicker pace.

Hall: These plays will be about 25 to 30 minutes shorter than a “normal” production.

Q: In Shakespeare’s time they were performed faster, weren’t they, than they are generally done today?

Hall: Well, we don’t know. Hamlet’s advice to the players is to speak it “trippingly on the tongue.” Certainly everything I was taught in the tradition I belong to is fast, light, witty speaking, not what people think of as Shakespearean speaking, which is slow and rotund and noisy. That’s Victorian. But the main reason why modern Shakespeare takes so long is because people pause all the time. They pause to get thoughts because they haven’t observed his thought process. There are hardly any pauses in Shakespeare.

Q: You all make rehearsals sound like everything’s been so easy. There wasn’t anything that was difficult?

Dukes: Just learning when to take your breaths.

Q: More so than in other theater?

Thomas: Well, one is not breathing the way one would breathe in normal speech, where you usually finish a sentence and then take a breath and go forward, and then finish that thought and take a breath and go forward. We have to find where to breathe, remind ourselves to do it, and then pick our spots and see how many lines we can put together, but without running on.

Gunn: And it turns out to sound like the way we talk.

Hall: You don’t breathe grammatically.

Dukes: The beginning of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” for me is still a big problem. The thought breaks and the line breaks are not the same, so I find it particularly difficult, but we’re working it out. I don’t know that it’s ever going to be easy, but when I get it--it’s usually in the shower and not in the rehearsal room--it’s wonderful.

McGillis: I’m finding that they are real thoughts, and you are thinking them rapidly, the same way that we think and talk and speak and move at the same time in real life.

Hall: I think this is the crux: We could sit here and talk about Shakespeare writing five-beat lines, which he does, and only breathing on the end of the lines, which you should. But, in fact, if you get it right and you’re comfortable in it, it sounds like quick, fleet ordinary speech, with the occasional dazzling metaphor. But it’s very fast, it’s very quick, and it’s a simulation of ordinary speech. The paradox of Shakespeare is that the verse is the most naturalistic thing, and the quickest and the lightest, and the prose is much more ornate, and much more rational, and much more artificial. And much, much, much more difficult.

But what happens with the verse is that people tend to say, “I’m speaking verse,” so they sing, which is horrible, or they breathe in the wrong place and then the whole line collapses, and Shakespeare’s simulation doesn’t emerge. What’s wonderful is once you’ve got it down it’s like a wonderful map that you can be secure in. You know where you’re going.

Dukes: The actor’s intentions become much more clear, and the tension of the scene or the situation becomes clear and much more heartfelt because you’re actually on it. You’re not dealing with anything else. Once you’ve got the verse under your belt, then the life of the scene is what you’re focused on.

Q: How does that come across to audiences? Do you find that audiences hear it differently?

Hall: Yes, they do, absolutely. At a very early preview of “The Merchant of Venice” on Broadway, I promise you, a woman behind me said to her husband as the intermission started, “Of course, it’s modernized. I can understand it.” It was almost the greatest compliment I could have overheard, and that’s entirely because Shakespeare writes bits of information for the audience which are digestible in fact, in narrative and in emotion.

Q: What about adjusting for the Ahmanson? It’s a big hall.

Hall: Yes, but it has focus, and it has good acoustics. I’ve done Shakespeare in Epidaurus in Greece for 12,000 people. We weren’t shouting, either. The thing to be said about Shakespeare is he wrote for a public outdoor theater initially. It was a big public space in which you could both shout and whisper. And if you do Shakespeare in studio circumstances, you often can’t give it the gun that it needs when it needs it.

Q: Why did you choose to do “Measure for Measure,” since you’d never done it before? What made you want to do it now?

Hall: Two reasons. It’s about the abuse of power allowing someone to exercise lust, which seemed to me a fairly contemporary theme, and it’s also a perfect partner to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” One is a comedy about lust and love, and the other is a very black comedy--a disturbing play about lust and love--but they pair very well. They resonate against each other as you play them.

Thomas: Everyone who has roles in both plays has found some way one reflects on the other.

Dukes: I think it was a great thing to pick two company plays.

Thomas: They’re ensemble plays, and so it is a company experience, and I think that’s a very good way to do this.

Hall: That was part of the decision.

Q: How do you work on two plays at once? Do you rehearse both plays at the same time?

Hall: I spend three hours on one play and three hours on the other, each day. We don’t work more than six hours a day, because I don’t find on the whole that it’s productive with actors.

Q: Is it difficult to jump from one play to the next on the same day? For example, Richard, isn’t that a huge jump from Angelo to Puck?

Thomas: It’s a different kind of music. Each is differently rhymed.

Dukes: When you talk to your boyfriend or your girlfriend, it’s one conversation. When you talk to your mother, it’s another. You can shift between them very easily and there’s no confusion. That’s the way repertory is.

Q: What are your long-term plans for a company of Shakespearean actors here?

Hall: I’m afraid this is our pilot program. If people won’t come, our option won’t be taken up, I’m sure. It would be wonderful if one could get a Shakespeare season happening every year, so that there was a habit. I know that’s in Gordon’s [Davidson] mind, and he’s penciled in another season, which I’m certainly game to do. Rehearsals will be in the fall of 2000.

Q: I read that you said if you ever met Shakespeare, what you’d want to say to him was “thank you.” Does that sound the least bit familiar?

Hall: No, but I’m glad I said it. I’d say it again. The wonder of Shakespeare is that he’s so entirely ambiguous, entirely contradictory, entirely human. And he’s inexhaustible from that point of view. I’m in awe of him.

I’ve been blessed that I’ve spent my life mainly doing Shakespeare and Mozart, and in some respects they’re very similar. Shakespeare inherited a very formal verse, and he moved irregularly against it in order to express emotion. Mozart inherited 18th century Baroque music, which is extremely architectural, formal and predictable, and put in all kinds of accidentals and painful chromaticisms and discords. Both inherited a form that they could bend and inflect.

To me, Shakespeare is like all great artists--a real revolutionary, a real eye-opener. I don’t think there’s anybody better.

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“Measure for Measure” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772.

“Measure for Measure”: next Sun., 2 p.m., $15-$52.50. Also June 23-24, 30, July 6, 9, 13-15, 22-23, 27, 8 p.m.; July 1, 2 p.m.; July 11, 7:30 p.m. $15-$47.50. June 26, July 3, 17, 8 p.m.; June 27, July 10, 18, 24, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 1. $15-$52.50.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: next Sun., 8 p.m. $15-$52.50. June 22, 25, 29, July 1-2, 7-8, 16, 20-21, 28-30, 8 p.m.; July 15, 29, 2 p.m.; July 25, 7:30 p.m. $15-$47.50. June 26, July 3-4, 11, 17, 25, 31, Aug. 1, 2 p.m.; July 10, 24, 31, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 1. $15-$52.50.