Benthall was always to be seen in well-pressed trousers and a blue blazer. We were just about permitted to address the leading actors by their first names. Rehearsals were also much more structured than they are now, largely because they lasted only four weeks today eight weeks is the average. The first read-through was remarkable: all the leading actors gave finely prepared readings - they could have gone on stage and performed the play that evening.ĭirectors would present actors with a more or less rigid blueprint of what was expected of them. Moves on stage were given and rigorously adhered to they had to be written down in the script, in pencil in case there were any changes. Strict silence was observed in the rehearsal room and the reading of newspapers was discouraged. Costume and set designs were equally rigid, something that today's actors would find unreasonably imposed. The Tempest's set was by Loudon Sainthill and was highly pictorial, with lots of coral reefs and seaweed. Looking back, I feel that Benthall was more a choreographer than a director by today's standards. His groupings were always superb, but he seemed to be happy for the principal actors to work out their own interpretations. There was little analysis of the emotional and dramatic structure of individual scenes, and no analysis of the power structure and political attitudes of the characters. Richardson's Prospero was a whimsical and ingenious magician, but hardly a vengeful figure, which I think the play requires. The potentially murderous Neapolitan lords, meanwhile, were a feeble bunch, hardly serious opponents for Prospero. Michael Hordern (who at the time I had never heard of) was a glowingly rebellious Caliban, physically quite animal-like, which is amply justified by the text. It was probably the most completely realised performance in the production.Īs I was merely playing one of the mariners, most of my time was spent watching rehearsals. I soon realised that the young actor, bent on self-improvement, had to find his own way to it. No movement or vocal coaching was available, nor any instruction in swordfighting. But Patrick Crean, the fight arranger, did offer to take us through the general technique of stage fights, and I also discovered Denne Gilkes, the widow of a Scottish professor, who offered singing lessons at five shillings a time in her beautiful Tudor house in High Street. She was an eccentric figure, dressed in a heavy woollen smock, summer and winter. She sat at the piano, smoking a stubby pipe, giving instructions out of the corner of her mouth. Her teaching was fierce and relentless, wonderful on breathing and the use of words. I don't want to give the impression that the work in the early 1950s was in any way inferior to what we see today. Performances like Gielgud's Angelo, Benedick and Cassius, Ashcroft's Beatrice, Portia and Cleopatra, Redgrave's Antony, Lear and Shylock, Quayle's Falstaff, Coriolanus and Mosea, Harry Andrew's Henry IV and Enobarbus, live with me vividly to this day. The first Histories sequence, Richard II to Henry V, performed in 1951, is still one of the best seasons ever.
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