SOURCE: “‘Beginners, Please’; or, First Start Your Play,” in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1993, pp. 72-84.

[In this essay, first delivered as a lecture in Vienna in April 1992, Smallwood describes a series of Royal Shakespeare Company productions in which directors prefaced the first lines of text with various devices designed to promote specific interpretations, create atmosphere, or lead the audience into the world of the play. The critic points out that each of these techniques evokes the same question: where does a play begin?]

I want to begin in Vienna.¹ In one sense it is 1991, in another it is 1604, but it looks late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century, and it sounds it too, with a Strauss waltz rather wheezily rendered on an inadequate band with too much brass about it, and couples dancing in a half-lit café before dispersing, a little mechanically, apparently in search of more intimate surroundings. The episode has taken perhaps a minute and then the scene, or rather the lighting, changes and we focus on a middle-aged, bewhiskered figure, little round spectacles on his nose, sitting on a couch, examining scraps of paper which he is taking from a green folder. He reads them through quite carefully, not hurrying over the process. We can see that they are newspaper cuttings, perhaps half a dozen of them. They are carefully replaced in the folder. Our middle-aged, bespectacled, scholarly figure now picks up a little printed volume of verse and leafs through it, thoughtfully. He pauses on an apparently familiar page, peering at it quizzically, and we wish (with Sir Toby, from quite another play) that “the spirit of humours” may “intimate reading aloud to him”. We are in luck; he begins to read what are clearly long-pondered words:

He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know,
Grace to stand and virtue go.

The simple, gnomic sentiments further strengthen his resolve; he will put the idea he has long been turning over in his mind to the test, he will make the experiment. And so, three or four minutes since we heard the first notes of the Strauss waltz, he calls out sharply “Escalus” and a gracious elderly civil servant enters. “My lord”, he says, with a deferentially enquiring lilt. And Measure for Measure begins. Or did it begin when the music started?

The episode I have described began Trevor Nunn's production of Measure for Measure in Stratford in the summer of 1991. All that the Folio text of Measure for Measure offers by way of an opening stage direction is “Enter Duke, Escalus, Lords” followed by the first line of dialogue: the music and the dancing couples were pure invention; the creation of a time-gap between the entry of the Duke and the entry of Escalus rather less pure but still inventive; and the events that occurred in that gap the director's means of asserting and demonstrating the interpretative direction he wished to take (and a very interesting and revealing direction it was). This was, in short, yet another example of a phenomenon surely on the increase in recent Shakespeare production—the little directorial dumb-show (and sometimes not altogether dumb) that so often begins the evening. The stage manager's warning announcement, over the back-stage tannoy system, “Beginners, please”, calling the actors to the stage five minutes before the performance begins, is frequently to be heard a great deal more than five minutes before the first line of the text will be uttered. And it is with this phenomenon, taking my examples from a series of recent productions by the Royal Shakespeare Company, that I am concerned in this paper.

Any production of any Shakespeare play, of course, involves the making of hundreds, thousands, of choices among options that remain open for as long as we are merely readers. The vast majority of these decisions, however, are based on the need to interpret the text in one way rather than another: how to inflect a word or line, where to place an emphasis, whether or not a remark is or is not an aside to the audience or is overheard by other characters, and so on from the first line to the last. What is particular about my topic here, of course, is that it is off the text. That, indeed, is its very raison d’être: the director is, as it were, creating a free space for himself before the authorial text comes along to restrict that freedom and to cramp his style. Almost all the early texts of Shakespeare (the obvious exception is The Taming of the Shrew of which more later) simply bring characters on for the play's opening scene with stage directions that, in the Folio and quartos, imply nothing more than that actors walk onto the stage (presumably by way of doors in the tiring-house wall) and start talking: “Escalus. My lord.” … “As I remember, Adam.” … “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” … “Tush, never tell me.” … “Who's there?” … and so on. Of course there may easily have been much more elaborate business than the texts record (here as elsewhere), all sorts of variations, and pregnant pauses, and what not, but the bald and cryptic information of the Folio and quarto directions preserves no evidence of it: just “Enter A, B and C”—and get on with it. In the earlier years of our own century, and throughout the nineteenth and before, the moment of beginning a performance of a Shakespeare play (or any play for that matter) was identifiable to the second: a musical overture would quieten the audience and set the mood and then, at the appointed moment, up would go the curtain and the audience was instantly invited to enter the play's world of make-believe, the theatrical version of “once upon a time”². The phrase ‘curtain-up’ is still, of course, the usual way of referring to the beginning of the performance, long after the disappearance of the curtain in productions of Shakespeare. But with the disappearance of the curtain the moment of transition is obviously much less clear-cut and the audience's journey from reality (if that is not too portentous a term) into the world of the play has become an area of infinite fascination, endlessly exploitable by directors. Let me go back to Trevor Nunn's Measure for Measure.

The Strauss waltz and the dancing couples in the half light that began the evening returned for a few seconds at the end of the play: a musical overture, a musical envoi, and the great experiment in social morality that had been imposed on Vienna was over and things were going back to being exactly as they always had been. The newspaper cuttings reappeared in Act III, Scene 1: “She should this Angelo have married” said the Duke to Isabella, offering her a way out of her dilemma as he handed her the first cutting from his little green folder—it was apparently the announcement of the engagement. “Her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea”—and another cutting about that; “left her in tears”—and another cutting announcing Angelo's defection when the dowry was lost. The cuttings that the Duke was examining so thoughtfully at the start of the evening were, then, all about Angelo's treatment of Mariana; that episode was not a sudden Act III twist of the plot, as has sometimes been argued, but, it now emerged, the sole motive, cause, and origin of the Duke's entire experiment. And thus the transfer of the Duke's little soliloquy, printed in the Folio at the end of what later editors have called Act III, Scene 1, but floating a little loosely there and believed, by the Oxford editors among others, to have been transposed from a later scene. Whether this slightly unanchored state is sufficient excuse for transplanting it right to the front of the play is, of course, beyond my brief here.

He who the sword of heaven will bear
Should be as holy as severe;
Pattern in himself to know …

The Duke clearly intends the lines to refer specifically to Angelo, on whom he is about to conduct a psychological experiment—and the fact that he is sitting on a couch in turn-of-the-century Vienna looking vaguely like Sigmund Freud is all part of that. The play became a series of psychological experiments, in fact, Isabella taking over from Angelo as the object of Duke Sigmund's investigations from the moment he watched her in the prison with her brother; by the final scene the Duke himself, the middle-aged celibate contemplating marriage, seemed to be becoming the subject of his own psychological curiosity.

I have spent a little time on Trevor Nunn's Measure for Measure because it is a perfect example of my subject. His interpretation, his ‘reading’, of the play left out, of course, a huge amount that academic criticism has at different times found there—not a sign of the Christian allegorical interpretation, for example, and not a whiff of the presence of King James I—but within its own chosen terms it was entirely coherent, convincing, and impressive. And (central to my purpose here) all the main lines of its interpretative route through the play were set up in that opening few minutes before Shakespeare started writing.

“Beginners, please”: “Enter Leonato, Governor of Messina, Innogen his wife, Hero his daughter and Beatrice his niece, with a messenger.” Thus both the 1600 quarto and the Folio begin Much Ado about Nothing. Innogen never speaks and modern editors leave her out; nor have I ever seen her on stage. But the last three productions of the play I have seen have all delayed the arrival of the messenger by a crucial minute or so. For the RSC in 1988, in a modern-dress production, Di Trevis brought the lights up on the Leonato household lounging about in languid attitudes, each very isolated from the other, on the patio of what was obviously their very expensive villa. A messenger in battle dress arrived when we had had time to absorb the idea of bored wealth, of a society that is rich, decadent, and selfish. A sunny terrace had also provided our first glimpse of Messina in Dame Judi Dench's nineteenth-century costumed production for the Renaissance Theatre Company the year before, but here the figures presented themselves in attitudes of mutuality, social coherence, and interdependence, Beatrice helping Leonato with a jig-saw puzzle, Margaret and Hero winding wool together. One director wanted the events of the play, the inability of the Hero/Claudio relationship to withstand the threats that shake it, to come as no surprise, to seem, in a sense, deserved; the other wanted them to strike us with shock, pain, pity. At Stratford in 1990 the play began in Bill Alexander's production with the Leonato household on stage, in splendid Renaissance costumes, and the somewhat incongruous spectacle of Beatrice engaged in a little bout of rapier-fencing with Leonato and (in spite of the encumbrance of her long, flowing skirts) winning—easily. And then the messenger arrived and the play began—except that it really began, as far as the audience was concerned, with the spectacle of a woman defeating a man at what (given the costuming of this production) was distinctly a man's game. “O God, that I were a man”, Beatrice will say, with minor variations of phrasing, half a dozen times in the church scene. The idea of the restrictions, the frustrations, the search for an appropriate role, for an intelligent woman in a patriarchal society, one of the ideas this production sought to pursue through the play, was set up in that opening little dumb show. Three productions of Much Ado about Nothing, then, each postponing the entry of the messenger for a minute or so, to set up a mood, to raise an issue, to create an angle on the play.

The examples I have chosen so far have all been moments, episodes, bits of business that begin with the houselights going down at the time printed on one's ticket and aim to build a little bridge to Act I, Scene 1, line 1 of the text. There is, however, another form of “Beginners, please” that takes rather longer over the journey from the outside world, the ‘real’ world, to the world of the play. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre (like most British theatres) normally opens its doors thirty minutes before the start of the performance (7 p.m. for 7.30). In some recent Shakespeare productions arrival even at the very second the doors were opened still did not mean that one got into the theatre before actors were on stage.³ It might say on your ticket that the performance of Twelfth Night started at 7.30, but even if one arrived at 7 p.m. precisely there sat Orsino, looking as if he'd been there all day, listening to the music which, thirty minutes later, he would still be wanting to “play on”. Or consider the As You Like It directed for the RSC by John Caird in 1989: from ‘doors open’ at 7 p.m. most of the cast were on stage dancing to music of the 1930s. The set reproduced the thirties decor of the public areas of the theatre itself, the art deco marquetry panelling, chaises longues, and lamps of the dress circle bar, the huge silver-figured clock of the foyer showing the correct time and dominating the stage in the middle of the panelling which blocked off the proscenium arch. All of this set was forward of the arch, occupying space that would not have been regarded as part of the acting area when the theatre was opened in 1932. Actors entered the stage from the auditorium and continued to move freely between the two spaces; most of them were in thirties evening dress and gowns, though a few of them wore the uniforms of ushers and usherettes; one could not tell whether they pursued their ushering profession at Duke Frederick's court or at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. “All the world's a stage”, and the boundaries between playing area and auditorium were being examined and challenged. Then, as the great stage/foyer clock approached 7.30, a figure in simple fawn breeches and shirt, an alien in this elegant, black-clad world, appeared and moved downstage: “As I remember, Adam”; a frail little butler was nearby, but the speech was presented straight out, as a prologue, justifying Rosalind's words at the end of the play: “It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue”. For the wrestling scene there was a great processional entry down the central aisle of the stalls, to a pompous ducal anthem, an armed bodyguard threateningly requiring the audience to stand as Duke Frederick took his seat in the royal box (situated in the dress circle slips). (Failure to obey the requirement to stand was, I observed on the occasions I saw the production, rare; it did not, of course, necessarily imply failure to respond to the production: it might also imply an involvement so complete that one could not allow oneself to stand for the usurper.) When Rosalind and her companions arrived in Arden she pushed against the wooden panelling under the proscenium arch and a huge door swung open, breaking the great clock in two (“there's no clock in the forest”), and in a swirl of mist and falling leaves, with a rush of wind and the cawing of rooks, she passed through the proscenium arch and into that magical space (the stage, in the original design of the theatre) called Arden. Strongly backlit, that first unlikely pair of dwellers in this strange region approached downstage, “a young man and an old in solemn talk”. It was a moment brilliantly recalled at the play's ending when Jaques, having delivered his verdicts on the various couples and declined to join the dance, withdrew upstage to the rear wall to push open another door, a miniature replica of the enormous one here, and, again strongly backlit, departed in search of that other unlikely pair, the converted Duke Frederick and the “old religious man”. Are there other doors, off other stages beyond that, one wondered, with a succession of possibilities for make-believe (and self-discovery). The whole approach of the production, its basic concept, depended upon the ideas set up in that elaborate silent induction preceding the first line of the text and inviting us to wonder, to feel uncertain and confused, about the boundary between auditorium and stage, real world and play world; to consider, in short, the question of where the play begins.

Shakespeare, of course, on one notable occasion, evinced his own interest in such questions by providing his own bridge, his own half-way house. The Christopher Sly scenes of The Taming of the Shrew offer one of the more elaborate inductions in Elizabethan drama. One might have supposed that they would be enough. Yet all three RSC productions that have used the induction in recent years have been unable to resist the temptation to add to it and the one that did not use it (Jonathan Miller in 1987) substituted something of its own. Let me take Miller first.

On entering the theatre (and one had to be immensely early to be there before them) one was greeted by a street band, Paduan style, dressed in Renaissance—vaguely commedia—costumes and performing musical selections on an assortment of period instruments led by an imposing figure playing the hurdy-gurdy. Members of the company in costume wandered by, occasionally stopping to pass a word or two with musicians not currently occupied. The auditorium audience too enjoyed the music, applauding the various pieces, and as the musicians moved off behind their hurdy-gurdy-winding maestro, on wandered Lucentio and Tranio: “Tranio, since for the great desire I had / To see fair Padua …”. And the journey to Padua, made across “the pleasant garden of great Italy” by the travellers, had been made by the audience, Jonathan Miller clearly hoped, upon the viewless wings of the music of the shawm and the sackbut. Sly and all his dreaming-waking and waking-dreaming were deemed to be superfluous.

Three years earlier, in 1984, we had had the Sly induction lavishly and lovingly treated. Barry Kyle spent a great length of time (more or less from ‘doors open’) inducing the induction, again with the help of the theatre band. As one entered the theatre one confronted a lively Elizabethan inn scene, a little band of woodwind and percussion playing sixteenth-century dance tunes, a group sitting on benches for a meal, tapsters and waiting wenches hurrying hither and thither, chickens (sic) occasionally visible—if, bane of the stage-manager's life as they were, they'd not got into the auditorium. There was cheering as some of the musical numbers were decided on and from the general hubbub of voices an occasional phrase emerged: “it's in C sharp as I do recall”, and such like. There was, predictably, a bit of bottom-pinching as the waiting wenches passed hither and thither and there was, equally predictably, an outbreak of the sort of galumphing dancing much associated with Elizabethan inn scenes in twentieth-century theatres. Inevitably things got rowdier: somebody started throwing punches when one of the wenches was interfered with once too often and retaliated and, as 7.30 approached, the perpetrator was ejected and identified, of course, as Christopher Sly: “I'll pheeze you, in faith”.

Rather more notorious was Michael Bogdanov's induction to the induction in his 1978 production of The Taming of the Shrew. One entered the theatre to be confronted by a set for Padua that looked unbelievably old-fashioned—all painted flats and a poor attempt at an Italian street perspective, with comical little balconies and urns of flowers here and there. As 7.30 approached an altercation broke out somewhere near the front of the stalls; a drunk was in dispute with an usherette in RSC uniform who seemed to be accusing him of having no ticket. It was a very Scottish, a very Glaswegian drunk. The promptbook records no words for the usherette, just an increasingly threatening monologue from a character labelled Jim from which the following phrases are extracted: “It's a’ reet … My mate's got ma ticket … It's a’ reet … There's nae problem … Don't you bloody well talk to me like that … No, y’ canna tell me what to do … No bloody woman's goin’ t’ tell me what to do … If anybody's goin’ to be sorted out, it's you.”⁴ As the altercation continued, Jim clambered up onto the stage⁵ and the promptbook then records the following, amongst a good deal more: “He throws right urn and pulls down right balcony … He throws left urn and pulls down left balcony … Moves to downstage left pillar; downstage left and downstage right pillars collapse … He throws fruit baskets … Grabs statue and removes legs … Moves to red mark; flats fall on him … Wraps himself up in opposite-prompt tab and collapses downstage centre.” And at this point the lord entered with the instruction “Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my hounds” and we were into the play, or at least Shakespeare's induction to it, with Jim gradually merging into Sly, though still uttering occasional bits of modern Glaswegian: “I was just having a quiet drink, honest I was” or, in response to the servingman's enquiry, “Dost thou love pictures” “I saw a good one last week”. Fairly rapidly, however, Shakespearian idioms took over and this most radical of pre-plays merged into the very radical version of The Taming of the Shrew that Michael Bogdanov offered, with the taming as a brutal piece of male chauvinism carried through in a set which, when thus stripped, was heavily reminiscent of a prison. The drunken Jim became Sly, who became Petruccio, and the brutality of gender relationships in that opening row with the usherette was seen to operate right through the play.

Michael Bogdanov's The Taming of the Shrew was notable for many things, but for the purposes of this paper perhaps most for the highly controversial creation of new dialogue to accompany what are normally the dumb shows that directors offer as preludes to their productions and which are my concern here. And interestingly The Taming of the Shrew has now provoked the same phenomenon again. Bill Alexander's current (1992) RSC production begins with Sly being thrown through the door of a pub (named, perhaps a little too obviously, the Ugly Duckling). He falls asleep and is discovered by a group of flamboyantly upper-class young persons (Hurray Henries, Sloane Rangers—whatever epithet for the stereotype one favours). “Is he dead? Is he breathing? Leave him alone, Simon, he's disgusting—probably working-class.” Then some servile-looking actors come in; they have been summoned to perform for Lord Simon's birthday party. The company is introduced to them: “This is Lady Sarah Ormsby. This is Mrs Ruth Banks-Ellis … Go, make you ready—as you say.” The new dialogue is self-consciously banal and (like a modern museum conservator's repair of an ancient vase) makes no attempt to disguise itself or to match the original, the really rather splendid writing of the Sly induction in the Folio text. It is, nevertheless, an excellent example of the phenomenon I am dealing with, for it seizes on the play's essential concern with its own theatricality—why an induction at all, why present the Paduan episodes as if they are just a tinker's dream?—and tries to take it further. “Do it”, shrieks Lord Simon, when his fiancée defies his order to get his brother to dress up as Sly's wife, “you're always crossing me.” And then, presenting his plan for deluding Sly, “we'll just mess around with his mind for a bit”. Lord Simon and his party (with Sly) sit up-stage in their elegant drawing room in modern dress while down-stage of them, in Renaissance costume, the Paduan play is performed. As the performance wears on the upper class spectators are called upon to take small roles in it and find themselves yelled at by Petruccio as they play his household servants. It becomes clear that their minds too are being ‘messed about’ with, affected by this harsh story of gender relations upon which has been superimposed a story, no less harsh, of social relations. By the end of the play the elegant young people are noticeably less edgy with each other than at the start and as the sleeping Sly is carried out for the little epilogue from the 1594 A Shrew quarto the instruction “Don't hurt him” comes a little surprisingly from the cocky young man we had seen at the beginning. “For she is changed, as she had never been” says Kate's father about his daughter in the Paduan play's final scene. The director is using his pre-induction device, his induction to the induction, as a way of suggesting that the scenes in which Kate has been involved may have changed more than her. And though I found it all a little heavy-handed, a little obvious, one can see the motive easily enough and even sympathize with it: if the Sly scenes are in some sense there to provide a bridge, 1594-style, to the Paduan play and its exploration of mental metamorphosis, why not provide a bridge, and a transformation, 1992-style, to go with them?

The examples I have discussed so far fall into two main groups based on a straightforward technical difference: those which greet one when one enters the theatre, however early one gets there, and those which do not begin until the official starting time printed on the theatre ticket, usually after some sort of music cue and short black-out. The examples I have considered from The Taming of the Shrew comprise two from each category: Kyle and Miller the long pre-7.30 lead-in, Bogdanov and Alexander the short post-7.30 prelude, though oddly enough the latter are the more radical, both involving (highly unusually) the creation of new dialogue. I have also been dealing with fairly elaborate examples of the form, for one needs to see the phenomenon in operation on a large scale before one begins to see how pervasive it is in rather less conspicuous ways. I turn now, therefore, to a few rather simpler examples.

“Enter Theseus, Hippolyta, with others” says the Folio (and quarto) opening stage direction of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The order in which characters are listed in a mass entry is usually (though not quite consistently) hierarchical in the early texts. Perhaps that hierarchical order was preserved in sixteenth-century stagings; few modern directors, however, would feel bound by it. Nor would it be sensible to argue that the grouped listing implies that the persons should manifest themselves with synchronized simultaneity. And yet, of course, the order of appearance does matter very much. At the beginning of the most recent RSC production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (by John Caird in 1989), Hippolyta came first onto the stage with an expression on her face strongly suggesting pleasure and relief that she had found somewhere to be alone, an expression that changed immediately when she sensed Theseus following her a second or two later—as who should say “O, damn, here he comes again”. Theseus's now in “Now, fair Hippolyta” was then uttered in such a way as to contrive to mean something like “Ah, there you are …”. A rather similar message was conveyed by quite different means in Bill Alexander's 1986 production: at the 7.30 black-out there was a music cue and the lighting of a lamp by a servant illumined Theseus relaxing on a chaise longue in evening dress. Hippolyta, in long black gown, entered a couple of seconds later and glanced disdainfully at him, obviously furious with herself for having chosen the one room in the palace where he was. As soon as he became aware of her presence he started patting the seat encouragingly, patronizingly, for her to come and sit beside him, enthusiastically announcing “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour / Draws on apace”. Hippolyta looked bored. In both productions only a few seconds elapsed from the lights coming back up to the first words of the text, but in both cases a great deal had been said in them about the mood of this conquered Amazonian queen oppressed and depressed by the prospect of marriage to her captor.

“Thunder and lightning. Enter three witches”—here is one of the few texts in the Folio that does not have Enter as its very first word. The last RSC Macbeth (by Adrian Noble in 1988), greeted its audiences as they entered the theatre with a devastated battlefield, what seemed to be a corpse lying downstage, a ragged bundle beside it, battleflags tattered and torn stuck into the ground on their poles. At 7.30 down went the lights and to the sound of the storm (wind rather than thunder, as I remember) three women came shuffling on through the flags, poking about the stage like battlefield scavengers, scrabbling about, making breathing, sucking, groaning, and generally sexually disgusting noises, grabbing the ragged bundle and discovering, with a terrible glee, that it contained a living child and carrying it off triumphantly after the scene's brief dialogue. When they next appeared there was no child but the one of the trio who had carried it off now had a blood-stained mouth and face. That powerful early image of the horrible connexion, Turn of the Screw fashion, between evil and the child, which the production was to exploit throughout, was thus established before we had even reached “When shall we three meet again”.

That particular Macbeth offered a mixture of the pre-7.30 and the post-7.30 preludes, though the former was a ‘show’ not only dumb but also still. Let me offer one other example (more animated in its pre-7.30 phase) of the combination, before returning to Vienna where I began.

Howard Davies's 1985 production of Troilus and Cressida on the main stage at Stratford was set in the period of the Crimean War. One entered the theatre to be confronted by the sight of a badly shot-about chateau interior, doors hanging off hinges, pictures awry and smashed, an ornate metal stair-bannister twisted and broken—past elegance and grandeur wrecked by war. At a table, near a piano, wearing a straw hat and a rather dapper suit somewhat past its best, sat Pandarus, every now and then whistling a little tune that tried to be cheerful but was really only monotonous, its repetition (he later played it on the piano—a lot) making it seem more and more forlorn. He was reading a newspaper. He had been there for ages, certainly since before the doors opened at 7 p.m., but actually, one felt, since the Trojan War began. He would be there again at the end, same suit, same hat, same piano, same tune, same diseases to bequeath to us. As he sat there at the start he stirred slightly in acknowledgement of a distant trumpet call (which came, in fact, at 7.30) and looked up from his newspaper. Then came shouts as of battle, wails, echoed mournfully (perhaps by the empty house) and two soldiers in uniform rushed on with a wounded soldier. Another Trojan soldier follows in haste, onto the balcony above. The wounded soldier is laid out; his face is covered; he has died. Pandarus sits, emotionless, inured to it all, watching. One of the bearers stands up and turns to the audience: “In Troy, there lies the scene …” uttered with stinging irony. Pandarus sits through the Prologue and the two soldiers carry off the corpse. The stage is left to Pandarus and the soldier on the balcony who has watched it all. It is Troilus. The appalling endlessness of the war, the sense of “beginning in the middle”, had been established before the first word had been spoken.

Let me go back to Vienna, not last year but three years earlier, to Stratford's main stage in 1988 and to a production of Measure for Measure by Nicholas Hytner. As the lights came up after the 7.30 black-out, to the accompaniment of harsh, jangling, nervy music, the Duke was before us seated at a desk and staring blankly, emptily, rather helplessly into the void. Escalus stood before him, vainly waiting, presumably for some business of state to be transacted. Then, one by one, other civil servants entered, one, two, three, four, five of them, four men and one woman, all in dark grey suits, all proffering papers which apparently needed the ducal signature, all of them unheeded, unnoticed by him. The group of them, standing, a little petulantly, comparing notes, as it were, on the executive inertia, finally prompted their senior, their Cabinet Secretary, Escalus, to slap a paper on the Duke's desk, distinctly audibly. And at last he responds: “Escalus”, he says, and the name is uttered with an interrogative lilt, as if to say “Is that you?”. “My lord”, comes the reply, a little reproachfully, meaning “Yes of course it is, as you surely ought to know”. We had finally started on the text, but then came another very long pause before, with no perceivable connexion with the anxious civil servants, or the matter in hand, but no doubt with every connexion with what he has just been so deeply and anxiously contemplating, he started; “Of government the properties to unfold …”.

Trevor Nunn's Duke of Vienna resigned the reins of power with the carefully considered and straightforward intention of experimenting on Angelo, of treating him as a case for psychological investigation. He was wholly in control when the play began—whether he was by the time it ended is another question. Nicholas Hytner had clearly set out to answer exactly the same question as Trevor Nunn, the question tantalizingly raised, but never answered, in Measure for Measure: why does the Duke do it? And he had come up with an altogether different answer. His Duke needed the temporary abdication because he had lost his way, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and knew it. He needed, therefore, to relocate himself in order, as one might say, to re-locate him-self, to rediscover his way. That two directors should come up with very different answers to the same question is not, of course, in the least surprising; it is, indeed, exactly as one would expect and is the reason one keeps going to the theatre. My point here, however, is that they had both revealed those answers before a word of text had been spoken in either production.

The journey into a play's world requires a leap of the imagination. “It is required you do awake your faith”, says Paulina before one of Shakespeare's most extraordinary theatrical shows. The topic this paper has addressed is the attempt by the directors of some recent RSC productions (and one could find dozens—and dozens—of further examples) to help us make that imaginative journey into the play's fiction by taking it in stages, coming out to meet us with an intermediate fictional world in order to create an atmosphere, or set us on our way, or (more particularly) state interpretative objectives, before we arrive at Shakespeare's first line. For where, after all, does a Shakespeare play begin—when one first enters the theatre and begins to contemplate what is presented to one's attention, or when the first line of the text is spoken? The space between the two is clearly of immense (and, I suspect, increasing) interest to directors, a most fecund area for investigation, exploration, and, perhaps, exploitation. And the best of it is that no way in can ever be definitive, no starting point ever wholly right. There are as many ways of starting as there are stage managers poised at their tannoys to call “Beginners, please”.

Notes

1. This paper was written for delivery at the Vienna conference of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft West in April 1992. I am deeply grateful to the President and Committee of the Gesellschaft, and to Dr Manfred Draudt the conference secretary, for the generous invitation to be present in Vienna. I have left the paper much as it was prepared for oral delivery. The paucity of documentation arises, however, not so much from this cause as from the fact that all the raw material for the paper is drawn from personal observation of Royal Shakespeare Company productions over the last decade or so. I am grateful to the librarians of the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford for the patience they showed to a tiresome library user who exhausted his interest in the video recordings of RSC productions which he kept demanding after watching only their opening few minutes. I am grateful also to Sonja Dosanjh, Company Manager of the RSC in Stratford, for information relevant to the preparation of the paper.

2. I am grateful to my friend Jean-Marie Maguin for suggesting this simple but apposite epithet for the phenomenon with which I am concerned.

3. In discussing ‘pre-7.30’ specimens of preludial dumb-show I am concerned only with examples where the actors one encounters on entering the theatre may be described as being ‘in character’. That phenomenon prevalent a few years ago but (fortunately, I think) less in evidence of late, of actors (in their own personae) mingling and endeavouring to chat with members of the audience in the period before curtain-up, is a different matter, beyond my scope here.

4. Promptbook for the 1978 RSC production of The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon. In this and the following quotation I have expanded stagemanager's theatrical contractions and made other minor editorial adjustments for the sake of comprehensibility.

5. Many audience members took the event for real; some tried to come to the usherette's assistance. Actors on the stage were under instructions to prevent members of the public from getting up to try to save what they thought was the set. David Suchet (playing Grumio) told me of being particularly worried at one matiné by the sight of a huge man striding onto the stage clearly intent on teaching the appalling Scot a lesson and assuming, when remonstrated with, that caution was being counselled. “Don't worry about me, son”, he said, “I can cope with half a dozen like him.” Only frantic reassurance—“It's part of the show, it's part of the show”—saved the skin of Jonathan Price, who was playing Jim/Sly/Petruccio.