David: Notes on Giles Ramsay's lectures on theater

Theater was the particular focus of our Elderhostel package. There was to be a theater expert on board the Queen Mary 2 to offer lectures on the history of theater in general and in Britain in particular, and tickets to a selection of shows once we arrived in London.

Our expert, Giles Ramsay, had done this package a number of times before and could hardly have been better qualified for the job. An independent director and producer, he has not only directed many shows from Palestine to Vermont, lectured at various universities and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and toured with the British National Debate team, but has also had several of his own plays (“Shall We Go to the Alhambra?”, “Territory,” “Only as Multiple,” and “Crocodile”) produced in Britain. His recent long-term projects involve theater in “post-conflict” zones such as Kosovo and Zimbabwe. A native version of “Oedipus Tyrannus” with a local cast had gone over big in Harare in May 2009.

The notes I made of his shipboard lectures, which included not only video clips off a laptop but drawings and copies of theater plans and photos that were illuminated by a good old-fashioned overhead projector (remember those from school?), are very sketchy because I was familiar with a lot of what he was saying and only took down things that caught my fancy.

A few items below were already noted in our travel blog, but I wanted to collect all my notes on his lectures in one place.

THEATER’S ORIGINS

After a full round of three tragedies, a day of theater competition in Athens ended with a satyr play, which satirized everything and everyone in thoroughly obscene style as a way of cleansing the audience’s palate. Euripides’ “The Cyclops” is the only extant full satyr play today.

Someone asked why there are only a handful of each great Greek playwrights’ supposed works extant (7 of more than a hundred by Sophocles, for example, and 18 of 90-plus from Euripides), and how they survived. Giles said evidence of them, and whatever copies existed, were lost with their respective civilizations and the destruction of the Alexandria Library. It was mostly Arab/Muslim scholars who preserved copies of a few of them, and Western scholars eventually recognized and translated them into Latin or their vernacular.

To give a context to the fiery nature of Medea, a foreigner in the Greek court, Giles reminded us that she came from a port on the Black Sea in what has recently been known as Georgia. As an illustration, when he was in Tbilisi, Giles was puzzled by the beefy guys in sidewalk cafes who all had makeup bags, until he realized they contained guns.

Euripides “is the Ibsen of his day: he writes great roles for women, and he undermines the society he lives in and writes about.”

Giles showed us a video clip of a production of a Japanese production of “Medea” by Yukio Ninagawa which was totally Japanese (very foreign-looking) and yet utterly emotionally true and devastating.

Charlemagne “reboots Western civilization,” although “the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.”

POST SHAKESPEARE

Commenting on the fact that he was hugely popular/reasonably wealthy while at the same time doing groundbreaking writing for the stage, Giles said Shakespeare was “Lloyd Weber and Chekhov in one – in his lifetime!”

On the other hand, despite Jonson’s eulogistic tribute that Shakespeare was not of his age but “for all time,” Giles said Shakespeare was largely neglected and rewritten in the 17th and 18th centuries. From 1631-1838, Nahum Tate’s version of “Lear,” in which the old man survives and Cordelia also lives to marry Edgar, was “Shakespeare’s King Lear” for audiences in those years! Macready did the first revival of Lear as Shakespeare had written it, in 1838.

Margaret Hughes was the first known woman to appear legally on stage, in the 1660s, near the end of the Restoration. “Breeches parts” were roles written with plots especially contrived to put female actors in breeches to show off their legs, which otherwise would have been hidden beneath the dresses of the era.

Garrick launched the Cult of Shakespeare in Stratford and London. Giles showed us several depictions of Shakespearean productions from various eras, and noted that most of them performed in “modern” dress for the time. Thus, there’s nothing radical about modern dress productions of Shakespeare, and “period” dress “appropriate” to the time period of the characters as we conceive of it is a more recent development – an innovation, if you will.

Edmund Kean pushed for “realism” in the form of costumes and elaborate sets. Things could get pretty hefty: Giles showed us a poster for a production of “Macbeth” dated Nov. 5, 1814, which advertised 15 “principle witches” and a witches chorus.

For a time in the mid 19th century there was a vogue for child stars. Kate and Ellen Bateman made their stage debut at the ages of 6 and 4, and toured in the 1850s marketed by their father Hezekiah Bateman and by P.T. Barnum. (They toured in “Richard III,” for example, with Ellen playing Richard and Kate as Richmond.) “Master Betty” (William Henry West Betty) was the most famous of child actors, assaying Hamlet and Romeo in runs at Covent Garden from the age of 13 to 15. The fad for him was so huge that top adult names like John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons went into temporary retirement so as to avoid competing with him. By the age of 17, he was a has-been.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

While discussing Oscar Wilde and the subversive undercurrents of his plays: “Never underestimate the seriousness of the light, frothy plays.” You’ve got to work harder with the comedies – presumably as an audience member as well as an actor or director. Noel Coward went completely out of vogue for a good 20 years after the Second World War, until Laurence Olivier staged “Hay Fever” at the National Theatre.

Pinter acknowledged a debt to Coward: “It’s all about the gaps in life … how we feel isolated.” In the banality of Pinter’s plays, “there’s always a lurking menace….” The characters could lose it, “and often they don’t, but they could break out at any instant.”

Giles showed us a clip from a black-and-white 1984 BBC production of “The Birthday Party” which showed Joan Plowright serving breakfast to her husband. She natters on at him about his corn flakes and various people while, head buried in his newspaper, he barely responds. The dialogue is flat, unremarkable, superficially unrevealing, but painfully hilarious and in Plowright’s execution, terribly revelatory about her character’s desperation and insecurity. Is anything funny about the dialogue, Giles asked us. No. “You have to have incredible dexterity to make Pinter work,” Giles commented, “because on the page he doesn’t.”

Note to read or see “Saved” by Edward Bond, which caused a minor scandal because it depicts a couple turning up the volume on the telly to drown out a baby’s crying, and later the infant is stoned in its pram by street toughs.

RANDOM REMARKS

“Never think of the past as a primitive place. The past was always the present, and it was always cutting-edge.”

“Art is intended to prepare us for the great experiences of our life”: oh, this is love, I’ve observed this before; ah, this is what death is like.

He recalled attending a production of Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” during which a woman in the audience spontaneously called out, “I feel so witty!” Giles thought this was wonderful. My job as a playwright, he concluded, is to give you a new costume, so that you say, “God, I never knew I felt that before.”

“If you go to ‘Mamma Mia’ and it changes your life, I would change your life back.”