Lessons From a Vulgar Showman

Thoughts on Shakespeare: David Barton
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

The Royal Shakespeare Company's director, John Barton, stopped by Stratford recently to share a few tips John Barton is the eminence grise of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a semi-official position he has held now for nearly half a century. Formerly a Cambridge don, he joined the RSC at its inception in 1960, as assistant to the artistic director. Barton's own first ventures as an RSC director were unfortunate; he had not crossed the gulf between working with undergraduate actors and working with professionals. But he persevered, creating the anthology show The Hollow Crown (which, in its umpteenth incarnation, came this year to the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto) and working with Hall, as editor and co-director, on The Wars of the Roses, a sequence of Shakespeare history plays that proved to be in itself historic. By the end of the '60s he was back in the saddle as a director in his own right, with a particular talent for the comedies; his Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing were tart, beautiful productions that I never expect to see bettered. Actors seem to have regarded him, affectionately, as the ultimate absent- minded professor -- bearded, cardiganned, and given, according to legend, to chewing on razor blades. You wouldn't have thought it possible to be both tense and teddy-bearish, but Barton seems to have managed it.

He himself talks of his "phony academic reputation; I got a fellowship at Cambridge that I wasn't expecting, and I wanted to stay a student so that I could act and direct." At Cambridge there was plenty of opportunity for both. All this activity, though, was strictly extra-curricular; neither Oxford nor Cambridge has ever had a theatre faculty, a situation of which Barton, who expresses great distrust of university drama departments, thoroughly approves: "I learned more by falling on my feet and doing things."

His university background clung to him, at least as far as the critics were concerned. He was constantly described as the RSC's most scholarly director though in fact, he was liable to take more liberties, especially textual ones, than any of his colleagues. Ian McKellen, who worked with Barton as an undergraduate and was in his RSC productions of King John and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, both of them ruthlessly edited, has this to say about about him: "I wish people would stop calling him academic; he's actually a great vulgar showman." "For years," says Barton of his early time at the RSC, "I did all the fights, then I got very interested in language, words, etymology." He built himself a reputation as the world's foremost practical expert on the speaking of Shakespearean verse. There have been books, TV shows, videos and workshops that he has conducted all over the world. He has just been in our Stratford, working with a cross-section of festival actors, ranging from the comparative veteran Seana McKenna (this year's Queen Katharine in Henry VIII) to the comparative neophyte Haysam Kadri (this year's Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream).

Barton's way in these workshops is to concentrate not on Shakespeare's plays but on his sonnets; "things turn up there" he says "that always turn up in the plays," and they are of course both more independent and more concentrated than speeches out of context would be. Each participant gets to do a sonnet from a short-list of 15 to 20, and is given three days to prepare it: "I get them to do it in their own way, then we find out the important things."

McKenna's assigned sonnet was "When my love swears that she is made of truth." (Second line: "I do believe her, though I know she lies.") First, she delivered it once through, out loud. Then, as she tells it, Barton said "there, you've got it, now follow the argument more." Another actor, Shawn Wright, less experienced in Shakespeare (he's part of this season's musicals company), tackled the same sonnet, and elicited the opposite response: "You've got the argument, it's clear; now you could loosen it up."

McKenna describes Barton as "a wonderful diagnostician -- he knew where to start with this particular author." And also, obviously, with these particular actors: "With you," he would say, "we have to look at this first"; and this, McKenna explains, could be the motion of the whole speech or a particular poetic detail.

Actors at sea, according to Barton, "play a speech as a series of questions, instead of as a continuous statement." Anyone who has experienced the nagging style of performance that disfigures modern plays as often as classic ones will know what he means. "Actors," he also says, "tend to generalize without thinking"; and his primary weapon in fighting this tendency is to tell them to look for the antitheses. The sonnets are loaded with elegant oppositions, and making them clear and sharp is the best way of making sense of these packed poems, for both speaker and listener.

Moving on to the plays, Barton points out that "to be or not to be" is both a good antithesis and a good question. It also turns out that this most familiar of all soliloquies is the best one to encourage clarity of thought in a workshop since it is (and in all my years of Shakespeare-watching, I'd never noticed this) "the only one that doesn't have an 'I' in it."

Kadri had as his sonnet "Who will believe my verse in time to come/if it were filled with your most high deserts?" which he chose because it was lyrical -- not as knotted as some. It contains a line about the author's lines being "yellowed with their age," and this was one of the phrases -- and one of the facts about the words themselves -- that Barton ("use the words") employed as a guide- line. (He also advised, "sit in a tub, read a sonnet.")

"At first I was really nervous -- not too positive with the piece. Now I'm more comfortable, it's less daunting of a task," Kadri said. He'd been pausing too much: "I took out a couple of caesuras that were breaking, I'm not afraid to cold-read Shakespeare now. You know it's all there for you, waiting in the text."

I had hoped that Barton would offer drastic comparisons between the British and Canadian ways of approaching Shakespeare, but he wasn't making any.

"The same questions come up wherever you are: You can't take skills for granted. Actors now come to the RSC from TV, not from rep" where, in the old days, they would have done a lot of Shakespeare. "Drama schools don't necessarily teach it; they're preparing people for films and TV. But people pick it up quickly. In principle, actors want to belong to a permanent company, but films distract them." That, though, may be less of a problem in Canada, where the distractions are fewer. The Canadian Stratford does have a high degree of continuity, and it shows.

Kadri, who trained at the University of Alberta, is also a graduate of what is now Stratford's Birmingham Conservatory, and he found Barton's approach "not radically different." He's still learning, but so is everybody. McKenna, who has been at it for upwards of 20 years, says "it took me a good decade to feel I could juggle with it a bit. Part of it's confidence, being able to speak as quickly as you think."

She notes that Barton was directing as well as instructing, asking the actors questions, and telling them to ask the literal questions that they found in the text. "He'd say 'even ask a rhetorical question as if you don't know the answer.' "

How much full-scale Shakespeare directing Barton will do in the future, though, is dubious. "Technically I'm an advisory director at the RSC. I'm working with Michael Boyd, the new artistic director, on his new production of Hamlet. This will be the seventh time I've worked on Hamlet, though I've only directed it myself once. I've come to feel that I've done every Shakespeare play I want to do. Perhaps now I'm more useful as a contributor."