Robert Shaw by John French

Author:John French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2017-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

After a silence of three months from the National Theatre Shaw now received a letter in Los Angeles from Laurence Olivier. After much discussion internally, they had decided to postpone the promised spring production of his play, he said. It was everyone’s opinion that the play needed further work and to that end he had asked Kenneth Tynan to write a memo containing the view of his new associate directors Michael Blakemore and John Dexter. Tynan sent the memo on 11 February:

The play is conceived with great vigour and theatrical daring. It opens and closes with some stunning scenes; the massacre at St. Peter’s Fields and later the trial and the executions. Lord Sidmouth is characterised with melodramatic boldness that is a wholly appropriate counter to the revivalist fervour of the revolutionaries, and his appearance at the end ot the first act provides a superb curtain. What criticisms I have were first voiced when I heard that the plan was to rewrite during rehearsals. I believe this to be a disastrous procedure with almost any play. Too many voices become involved, and the inevitable partiality ot rehearsals makes detached judgments very hard to come by. On a bad day the play takes the blame when perhaps the fault lies with the actors or the director. The resulting insecurity, when even the words are there to be disputed, is usually destructive. I think I am right in saying that previous experience at the National, where the text has been shaped during rehearsals, point to this. It can work of course (as in Oh, What a Lovely War) when the director virtually usurps the writer’s function, but I am assuming you would like to avoid this.

My concern with Cato Street was some uncertainty about the way the narrative line of the play was clarified and sustained. Particularly in a work deriving from historical fact, where an audience come along expecting a story with a strong informational content, such clarity is most important, the more so when the writing and the characterisation is as highly coloured as in Cato Street. The case of Charles Wood’s H illustrates this. Shortly before the play opened, I saw the author on a 20-minute television programme in which he confined himself to a simple exposition of the historical events of his play; it was spell-binding. In performance narrative interest sank and vanished under the weight of his (frequently magnificent) writing. He knew the story so well himself that he seemed to be taking it for granted that we did too.

As the play stands at the moment, the narrative line seems to me to be missing a link. The radicals have met at the Crown and Anchor and violently disagreed. Up till now, the play had proceeded at a gallop. We now jump to the Cato Street loft, and settle down to a long scene in which as far as the story is concerned practically nothing happens. Grenades are prepared, gin is drunk, ideas and emotions are expressed and certain characters like Brunt are shown to us in greater detail.

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