Playing the Mask by John Wright

Author:John Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

The Blocking Game

Playing a Commedia mask like Arlecchino can be tricky when you’re working with someone who’s been taught ‘How to play Commedia’ and who slips into a choreographed lazzo. (A lazzo is a set movement sequence, or comic routine.) If you’re too busy acting the part of the dancer to play the mask, it will look like we’re watching a dance routine, and the mask will look disengaged. If it looks as if you’ve been told to behave like that, I might intervene. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I might say. ‘That’s obscene. How dare you? Do it again and I’ll send you off.’

Of course, there’s nothing ‘obscene’ about it at all. It’s an outrageous accusation. But it doesn’t matter what reaction I get from the mask at this point as long as it’s spontaneous and credible – and it isn’t dance. It might be contrition, anger, indignation or profound embarrassment. The important thing is that it’s a change of rhythm. Ideally, we’ll see an abrupt change in your engagement, and the scene is forgotten instantly.

‘Do what you like,’ I once said to an actor, in the middle of his obviously choreographed routine. ‘I’ll just read the paper over here.’ And he stopped immediately and looked as if he were about to burst into tears. At that moment we saw the mask for the first time: Arlecchino came alive, and the audience burst into applause. But the actor looked completely lost. We all liked him, but he didn’t know why.

Once again, we were responding to an abrupt change in rhythm, from a ‘dance’, which he’d obviously been taught, to a grotesque but amusing individual in an Arlecchino mask with a big open mouth and a compelling humanity. In the end he returned to the ‘dance’ (only to drop it to ask me if it was still okay), and then back to the dance again.

It isn’t that the ‘dance’ was wrong; it was simply that half-masks are more spontaneous and more unpredictable than the set routine of a lazzo. Spontaneity reveals itself not so much in wild ideas as in abrupt changes of rhythm. In real life, we call changes in eye contact, or breathing, or physical tension, ‘emotions’. Psychologists call them ‘symptoms’. But in theatre, I call them ‘rhythms’. This makes it easier to handle rapid changes of feeling, particularly when working a challenging mask like Arlecchino, and to to come alive with bold rhythmic changes.

It’s easier, more immediate and altogether more accessible to change the rhythm than it is to ‘play an emotion’. It’s this facility for rhythm change that gives us the impression that Commedia masks have a huge emotional range. The big-mouthed masks and the animal motifs that characterise Commedia masks immediately give you a bigger canvas to work on, but it’s your ability to effortlessly change from one rhythm to another that enables you to fill that canvas.

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