Shakespeare ‘poisoned’ by actors going over the top
Theatregoers put off by ‘operatic’ delivery favoured by luminaries of bygone age, says Hamlet director
SHAKESPEAREAN theatre has been “poisoned” by the over-acting of an older generation of thespians, according to a leading director.
Robert Icke, the creative force behind the current production of Hamlet at the Almeida, in London, said the public had been put off by the “operatic” delivery beloved of actors such as Sir John Gielgud.
British theatre had “shot itself in both feet” thanks to an obsession with “verse speaking”, he said.
He claimed the taste for pausing at the end of every Shakespeare line is “nonsense” and ruins lines that are actually “completely normal”.
In an interview about his modern Hamlet, awarded three stars by The Daily Telegraph, Icke said he “never needed to see” a production in Elizabethan costume, opening with dry ice and actors pacing back and forth. “It’s dead,” he said. “It’s completely boring.”
On the topic of language, he told the Sunday Times Culture magazine: gazine: “The water is completelympletely poisoned by reverence verence and bizarre, operaticratic modes of delivery.
“Actors do really weird things. They’ll take lines that are completely colloquial and naturalistic and normal, and they will say it like it’s the Bible.”
The trait, he said, left the audienceudience believing there is “a high-culture party going on, which, if you’re honest, you don’t know how to behave at”. He added: “Verse is one of the things British theatre has totally shot itself in both feet about because we pretend there’s such a thing as ‘verse-speaking’, and people say things like ‘I didn’t think the verse-speaking was very good’, and nobody knows what that means. “All this nonsense about ‘pause at the end of every line’ that Peter Hall perpetuated in the Sixties…” When asked whether he would have liked to have worked with Sir John Gielgud, Icke added: “Oh, kill me! I just don’t think it’s acting, in any modern sense.” The director is one of a new generation who regularly seek to emphasise the accessibility of Shakespeare, convincing a new generation to give productions a try. Sir Nicholas Hytner, former director of the National Theatre, has previously urged actors to use “spontaneous, comprehensible, simple, natural” speech patterns to help audiences understand, delivering lines “as if it’s how they think”. Greg Doran, the director of the RSC, warned last year: “Actors sometimes become addicted to over-stressing. They get so interested in how many nuances the line can bear that they stress every single word and you get battered by nuance and don’t get the simple strength of the line.” Andrew Scott, who plays Hamlet in the new production, said he hoped to convince new fans to love Shakespeare. “You have to have confidence in the product,” he added. Icke said: “I don’t know why we, in theatre, think we have the right to expect a sort of reverence from an audience, whereas on television, if it’s boring or bad or overacted or just not interesting, you switch it off. I also think it’s our job to be captivating for as long as we’ve asked for your attention.”