In Praise of Shakespeare

The latest challenge for my monthly book group is to talk about someone who has had a profound influence on our lives. It could be someone living or dead, someone we have actually known personally or encountered through another medium such as literature. My book group is currently made up of half a dozen men in their forties or fifties. It includes a couple of doctors, one of whom is Colin, the former vicar of our church mentioned in the previous chapter, an English teacher, an inventor, and my playwright friend Simon who earns his money as an accountant. After considering a whole host of options I decided it had to be Shakespeare for me.

Like everyone, I encountered Shakespeare at school and then later, when I went to Drama College, I acted in one of his comedies and also a tragedy as part of my training. However, it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I first came under his spell. The autumn of 1988 was the low point of my life. My older brother, Adam, had died the summer before, the victim of a brutal mugging by Ladbroke Grove Canal in London. I was an out of work actor then with not much to shout about in my first few years in the business and I was back living with my mother in her small basement flat off the Portobello Road. We had begun to go to the Anglican Church around the corner on Sundays. Adam had been a regular attendee there and it felt the right thing to do though I had long since stopped going to Church after too much compulsory Chapel at Boarding school and the sort of wayward lifestyle in my late teens and twenties which had left me ‘far from home.’ The vicar of St. Peter’s, Bruce, immediately befriended us and one day when he came to visit, suggested I might like to use the beautiful neo-classical Church to put on a play. I assumed he meant with members of the congregation and vaguely imagined something about Noah’s Ark or a Passion play, but he was happy for me to involve whoever I wanted and to do pretty much whatever I liked. I had many actor-friends scattered around London who were ‘resting’ and desperate to be doing something creative regardless of whether I could pay them. I had got to know Twelfth Night at college and realized there were excellent parts for all my friends in this play. I decided I would direct the play as a memorial for Adam and this idea caused such a stir that even the BBC pitched up a few days before opening night to cover the story on their local news programme. The interviewer wondered whether a comedy was quite the right thing to remember the victim of such a brutal death by and I think I said something about Adam having a great sense of humour and of the ridiculous, just like the play. I know he would have found Malvolio’s absurd wooing of Olivia in his yellow stockings a joy! Looking back I think it was an inspired choice. Among its many themes it explores loss and grief and our capacity to overcome them which couldn’t have been more appropriate in the circumstances. However, it’s one thing to have an idea, another to carry it out. I had never directed a play before but frankly the best way to learn is to do it and there is no better material to cut your teeth on than Shakespeare. I remember pouring over my Arden edition of the play sprawled on the shaggy carpet of my mother’s open-plan lounge. I was utterly riveted by the challenge of bringing these words off the page with my cast and I think I said something to her about how I believed I had found my vocation. I wasn’t far wrong. People came from far and near, our past and present to enjoy the play and remember Adam. My father was working at the RSC at the time and brought such stage and screen-luminaries as Brian Glover, Phil Daniels and Colin Welland to see the production. Thanks to an excellent cast culled mainly from my peers at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, along with the glorious setting of the Church and the enthusiastic support of its members it was a great success. It felt like a rite of passage into the profession with my father, mother, and their friends from the business being so affirming and in a different sense a rite of passage into the life of the Church; the Prodigal had returned! Moreover, I had encountered the writer and the man who was to have such an influence on me in the coming years.

I was watching a programme presented by the philosopher and writer Roger Scroton the other day called, “Why Beauty Matters.” He was discussing the importance of the arts in fulfilling the universal thirst for beauty and emphasizing their redemptive nature, therefore, in a world of pain and suffering. I suppose this is what I encountered through Shakespeare some twenty years ago and continue to discover as I work on his plays as a director, teacher and still occasionally as an actor. His plays are indeed sublime and though they show a world of folly, coarseness and extreme cruelty they also reveal its beauty. The moment at the end of Twelfth Night when Viola sees her twin-brother whom she had supposed drowned is as moving as the finest master-piece by Rembrandt or most lyrical score by Mozart. Their moment of reconciliation is an image of the beautiful mystery of providence and resonates with our longing to find again the lost half of our lives devoured by the ‘blind waves and surges’ of the past. Though I had not lost a twin, I had most certainly lost a brother and so much else of my life by this stage seemed swallowed up by what Hamlet describes as ‘the whips and scorns of time.’

But as well as opening my eyes to beauty, Shakespeare has been my mentor and guide in my life as both artist and pilgrim soul as I’ve made my way in the world since the death of my older brother. For Shakespeare these two roles were surely as indivisible as those twins in Twelfth Night. I like to think his plays and his hugely successful life in the theatre were the creative outworking of a faith which he must surely have inherited from his Catholic father and what a legacy he left behind. Shakespeare experienced Elizabethan life in all its complexity, its contradictions, its joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy. As a father he lost a child, saw his own father fall from grace, endured the scorn and envy of some of his contemporaries as a young playwright, and suffered the hypocrisy and sometimes vicious cruelty of the reformed Protestant Church. However, rather than be left bewildered or defeated by it all he gave shape and meaning to his experience and held up a mirror to nature for us all to contemplate both virtue and vice. His life in the theatre, at least, was surely a profoundly sensitive response to a Divine vocation which he followed to the end. His plays right up to The Tempest, his last full length play, continually reflect a man with great spiritual authority and integrity. He never became a mouth-piece for a movement or an ideology but rather saw the limitations of any single view-point whether political, religious or philosophical. He used his skills as a dramatist and master of rhetoric to explore the problems of life from the perspective of a whole cast of characters and left the audience space to come to their own conclusions at the end of the play. Many a preacher could learn a trick from this and Shakespeare would certainly have little truck with the sort of fundamentalist, dogmatic religion which has become so wearisome to so many today. In my own journey of faith his complex response to morality, to notions of good and evil explored in his drama have left me very wary of the kind of crude black and white thinking which sometimes passes for Christian truth.

I think what I love most about Shakespeare and what I need to learn most of all from his work, however, is his sheer emotional honesty. I have no idea whether this was a feature of his everyday life and I’m not sure it really matters. I find it a bit tedious when people self-righteously point out that writers such as, say, Dickens was actually horrible to his wife or that Shakespeare supposedly had an affair with the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets or with the Earl of Southampton as if these allleged moral failings diminished their voice or even discredited their entire body of work. It may be that to have had a tankard of ale in a Southwark Tavern with the bard might have proved a surprisingly dull affair, but he was an artist and we encounter him most fully therefore through his art; here, nothing is held back. In his plays we encounter Shakespeare’s youthful passion through the characters of Romeo and Juliet, his fury at falsehood and corruption in Hamlet, his vulnerability and anguish through Lear and his broken and contrite heart in Prospero in the final speech of The Tempest. Here the actor stands naked before the audience, still in role as the Duke of Milan who has divested himself of his dark magical powers and yet also as the author himself confessing his weakness and need for absolution at the end of his final play.

Now my charms are all o’er thrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own
Which is most feint: now ‘tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not
Since I have my Dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from your hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Such vulnerability, such raw emotional honesty expressed so eloquently is the hallmark of a great soul. I will forever be in debt, like countless others, to the one who blazed a trail for the artist in every soul from every age.

Choral Evensong on Armistice Day

There’s a performance which has been running non-stop for more than three hundred years in some of the most theatrical buildings throughout the world. Its essential script and structure has remained virtually unaltered in that time. It invariably includes ancient poetry dating back as far as the late bronze-age set to some of the most beautiful choral music from the renaissance period up to the present day. Its form encourages active participation from an audience congregated in the most beautiful of settings- and it doesn’t cost a penny. Despite its ancient origins, (the roots of the service come from the early monastic tradition) Choral Evensong seems as relevant to the great concerns of the day as ever. This one will no doubt run and run and indeed such is its continuing popularity that it has been broadcast at least once a week on BBC Radio 3 since 1927.

On Armistice Day this year, the broadcast came from my Diocesan Cathedral, Chichester, although I didn’t catch up with it till the following Sunday when it was repeated at 4 pm. Now I must be honest and confess that this was virtually my first, albeit vicarious, experience of Choral Evensong but I listened to the service partly because it came from Chichester and also since I am becoming increasingly aware of the rich heritage of traditional Anglican forms of worship as I approach fifty. As an artist, and specifically a man of the theatre, I can recognize the irresistible dramatic force of rituals such as these. Acts of worship at their best are like great theatre in so far as they confront us with the reality of the human condition and yet enable us to transcend it, or at least see ourselves in the context of a bigger picture. Recently the news has been full of tragic stories of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Last week the Prime Minister was lambasted by a distraught mother because he wrote what appeared to be a hastily scrawled letter of condolence in which he misspelled her dead son’s name. The government is being hounded by the media for its alleged failure to properly equip and thus protect its troops. Bitter arguments rage back and forth about the rights and wrongs of this war to the point where we are almost at each other’s throats and have forgotten how and why the war in Afghanistan began. It seems our society badly needs to regain a more sober perspective on events and perhaps a humbler one.

Well it certainly worked for me last Sunday as I sat on my bed and tuned into Radio Three as the afternoon light began to fade outside. The sound of the choir singing Purcell’s ‘Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts’ for the introit immediately lifted me out of the vague lethargy and distraction of a typical Sunday afternoon spent at home. As the liturgy began, I remembered I had a copy of The Book of Common Prayer and so I could follow the familiar general confession which reminds us that ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’ and ‘followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.’ (Food for thought indeed!) I was especially struck by the chanting of the psalms which I also managed to follow in my edition of the prayer book. Singing through The Book of Psalms is at the heart of Choral Evensong and goes back to the earliest forms of Christian worship. As I suggested earlier, many of these religious poems were written as early as the end of the Bronze Age and were probably in many cases re-workings of even more ancient Canaanite or Egyptian texts. The psalms remind us that war has been with us since the dawn of civilization and that humanity has from the earliest times sought deliverance and hope by reciting prayers and hymns to God or gods with words which remain as poignant as ever: ‘O be thou our help in trouble, for vain is the help of man.’(Psalm 60) The Old Testament reading in the service was from the Book of Micah in which the prophet looks to ‘the last days’ and famously declares: ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ (Chapter 4) One of the great things about Evensong is the absence of a sermon and so the full force of ancient prophetic words like this are left to speak for themselves. We are made to wonder at the mysterious authority of such profound utterance. After the reading of the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew which includes Christ’s timely encouragement, ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ the choir sung an anthem by Maurice Greene based around some verses from Psalm 39: ‘Lord, Let me Know Mine End.’ This beautiful setting by the English composer gently reminds us of our mortality and teaches us to reflect deeply on this reality. How many of the man-made catastrophes throughout the ages such as war erupt when we lose touch with the ground of our being and imagine ourselves as immortal gods? The service concluded with the Hymn, ‘All My Hope on God is Founded.’ Seeing in my copy of the Radio Times that this was coming up, I quickly dug out a hymn book from another room so I could join in with the congregation. Both the music and the words are wonderfully transcendent and full of hope whilst remaining utterly realistic about the perennial failings of every human society. For me and no doubt many others that Sunday, and indeed the previous Armistice Day, this glorious hymn together with the rest of the service put the world to rights, at least for the time being:

Pride of man and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray his trust;
what with care and toil he buildeth,
tower and temple, fall to dust .
but God’s pow’r,
hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.

End Game at Advent

It’s early November now and the Christian year is coming to a close with Advent just a few weeks away. The mist this morning shrouded all but the essential details of my route as I ferried my wife and kids to their respective schools. It’s strange how such a grey haze devoid of colour and the intricate forms of the landscape focuses the mind on what really matters. The cherry trees outside my window are stripped to just a few tattered leaves hanging limply from their spindly branches. The trees’ dark structure is etched against the pale sky now the fog has cleared and I think back to springtime when they were so fleetingly in bloom. On Friday we took the students at my school to see “End Game” in the West End. The play starring Mark Rylance and Simon Mc Burney was written by arguably the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett. Some people find Beckett’s plays either incomprehensible or so utterly bleak that they have little stomach or patience for them. I suspect many Christians would bridle at their apparent nihilism. In his most famous play, “Waiting for Godot” one of the characters makes the following observation about humanity: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ However, as this magnificent production of one of his other great works demonstrated, Beckett’s perception of the human condition is so brilliantly illuminated because it is invariably pared to the bare bones by this master craftsman of dramatic technique.

In End Game a tyrannical old rogue Hamm sits in a bare room, shrouded by grey light. He is unable to stand and his useless legs dangle impotently just above the floor. There are two high windows in this cell which, so we are informed, look out on one side to the earth and on the other to the ocean. His aged parents live in two metal ashbins placed side by side at the front of the stage. We only ever see their drawn faces peeping out and spindly fingers feebly gripping the rim of the bins like animals in a cage. Hamm lords it over them and his sad clown of a servant Clov. This pathetic figure is apparently unable to sit down thus heightening the anguish of the daily trial of serving his master. Hamm summons his servant from an off-stage kitchen by blasting his shrill whistle and he perceives their life together as a game which must be played to its bitter end; hence the title. On one level Beckett exploits these surreal elements to create some familiar comic routines based around clowning and vaudeville acts involving age-old conflicts between masters and servants; but he also uses them as a metaphor for how life can so often feel for many people today. The old may identify with, and even laugh at, the image of life reduced to living in a dustbin, waiting to be fed and hoping to die; old peoples homes can sometimes seem little more than this. Those of us who seem to have spent our lives going through the same predictable routines at work and at home simply to keep a roof over our heads will surely understand Clov’s maddening frustration as he endlessly carries out his master’s bidding. How many of us sit in dreary meetings wondering what on earth we’re doing as we work through apparently unchanging agendas that never seem to change anything. Hamm’s furious, impotent ranting and absurd posturing are hysterically funny in Mark Rylance’s virtuoso performance but they are also perhaps a fair, if somewhat heightened, reflection of our own vainglorious existence emphasizing our futile quest to assert control over our fellow man and the world around us. The writer of Ecclesiastes in the Bible would have recognized Beckett’s world all too clearly. Indeed the first lines of this treatise on the human condition could have been written by Beckett himself: ‘“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”’ The book continues in words akin to those quoted from “Waiting for Godot” earlier: ‘Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes so he departs. He takes nothing from his labour that he can carry in his hand.”
Both Beckett and the Biblical scribe seem to take a perverse pleasure in using their poetic vision to shatter our fanciful illusions of the neat and ordered ‘picket-fence’ existence we are inclined to take refuge behind. However, we can choose to respond to Beckett’s bleak comedy either positively or negatively. We may, rather like the characters in his plays, remain stubbornly entrenched in our false existence, 'waiting for Godot' or playing the same old games over and over again. More positively we may allow his shocking, brutal humour to wake us up from our torpor and begin in us the work of redemption. Advent is also a wake up call. It reminds us what is essential; the birth of Christ and his imminent return. It challenges us to wait in the darkness of winter for the light of Christ to dawn. At Worth Abbey, the Benedictine monastery just down the road from me in West Sussex, the monks keep their walls free of decorations till Christmas Eve. This keeps them focused on the essence of their vocation which is to make room in their lives for what really matters. We would do well, this Advent, to do the same.