From our critic in residence:
The ways in which the human voice can project hundreds of feet are close to the heart of Western theatre. In opera – despite occasional rumours of amplification in recent decades – evidence suggests that many voices now carry across greater volumes of orchestral sound than they did one or two centuries ago. Yet in the spoken theatre the opposite has become the case. Vast theatres from the Lyceum to the Olivier were constructed, in a bygone age, to showcase the ability of the unamplified voice, just as great Greek theatres from Epidaurus to Siracusa had been. In the 1990s, I was dismayed to find that almost every New York theatre (even intimate fringe theatres) used microphones. Now, in the 2020s, I’m dismayed by how many London theatres now do the same. For most of yesterday’s young actors, the highest goal was to play Shakespeare in a big theatre. For most of today’s, however, the prime goals are TV and film. When they act onstage – alas – they tend to like (and to need) mikes.
At present, the Theatre Royal Haymarket is a happy exception when it comes to amplification. (Twenty years ago,Kevin Spacey singled this and the Old Vic out as the two London auditoria best designed for actors’ speaking voices.) This is where, earlier this year, Brian Cox and colleagues played Oliver Cotton’s play about Bach and Frederick the Great,“The Score”, without miking. Now, again without amplification, it’s where Tamsin Greig and colleagues are performing a superb revival of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea” (1952), the still startling account of how a judge’s wife, having left her husband months ago for a younger man, tries – after attempting suicide – to comes to terms with a life in which neither her lover nor her husband can match her own capacity for love. (It’s an upper-middle-class “Anna Karenina” without the train.) Even though it’s widely known that Rattigan based this on a same-sex real-life story of his own experience, Hester Collyer, the heroine, really is no surrogate gay man: the emotional gaps she finds in her men are the same gaps found by only too many women today.
This production, directed by Lindsay Posner and designed by Peter McKintosh, began life a year ago in a far more intimate space, the Ustinov Studio at Bath’s Theatre Royal. You can tell the actors, having mastered the play in a small space, are trying to draw the much larger three-tier Haymarket audience into the same kind of intimacy. They succeeded – just – for my seat in the central front stalls (row G), but not for all. At the performance I attended (May 22), those members of the audience who could see empty seats very audibly moved into them during the opening scene. Eventually, however, the production settled into the kind of you-could-hear-a-pin-drop immediacy.
It was otherwise so admirable that I wish the actors had worked harder to project currents of gleaming vocal tone to pull listeners more powerfully into this play’s tale of heartbreak. From this, I except the marvellous Finbar Lynch, never forgotten from multiple roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the last century: he never raises his voice, he often seems always to murmuring, but he knows how to make his wisdom project far into the auditorium, like gossamer.
One of the fascinating dichotomies about Tamsin Greig is the contrast between her memorably strong face and her generally soft voice. As “The Deep Blue Sea” proceeds, you discover how large a gamut she has: her voice reveals layers not just of raw despair but also of wry humour. And she stands on her flat feet – vehemently, unflinchingly – with a quality of direct weight that I have seldom seen since the great Lynn Seymour. Nicholas Farrell has never been better than as her husband Sir William Collyer; Hadley Fraser perfectly embodies the engaging energy and emotional limitation of her lover Freddy.
In Stratford-upon-Avon, the beautiful Swan Theatre, opened in 1986, used to be an ideal venue for actors’ voices: there are two upper galleries and a thrust stage. I’m sad therefore that the Royal Shakespeare Company is playing Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” there in a production that is more often amplified than not – even though the cast is led by Simon Russell Beale and Emma Fielding, who were both playing lead roles for the RSC back in the 1990s. The production also shows the problems of amplification: words and whole sentences are often lost in the echo-chamber around the voices.
“Titus Andronicus”, notorious as Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, is always amazingly gripping. (This is the fifth production I’ve seen.) Most of it feels pre-Shakespearean in its shortage of three-dimensional human psychology. There’s terrific vitality to Titus, to Tamora (Queen of the Goths), to her black lover Aaron, to her gruesome sons Chiron and Demetrius, and to Titus’s brother Marcus (here played, very effectively by Fielding, as his sister Marcia) but only Aaron has real inwardness and complexity. Natey Jones plays Aaron with wonderful spontaneity and brightness: I’ve never felt more on the side of this ruthless villain.
Shakespeare has such theatrical drive that the plot enthralls, even though this remains the Shakespeare play with the smalllest amount of the subtlety for which we love this playwright. Max Webster, directing, keeps the action fast and engrossing. (And gruesome.) Remarkably, he makes the Andronici often less appealing and the Goths more sympathetic than has been the norm.
Simon Russell Beale (Titus) has become our most flawed great actor. The mere sound of his voice has immediate qualities of intelligence, experience, bile, wit, rage, and more. His Titus has effortless authority; as his family are killed and mutilated around him, he becomes the embodiment of pain. But he is fatally addicted to his love for the actorly caesura – the pause whereby he conveys the notion that he is spontaneously hunting for the mot juste and for which he will forsake both her logic of grammar and verse rhythm – and he is increasingly indifferent to projecting lesser sentences. He has the mastery to make us hang on his words, and yet he can’t be bothered always to make us hear them.
Alastair Macaulay
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