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Show Jnterprettraj tfte dassks perts from squirming in their seats; it won't make ordinary members of the audience sit on the edge of theirs, which is far more important. But consultation will not have been in vain if carried out in the right spirit. The director's own view of the play will have come into sharper focus. He may have been lucky enough to come across a critic whose view of the play was congenial, and this will have intensified his own feelings about it. Much more likely, he will have come across critics whose views were significantly different and worked as checks and balances pressuring him into a more integrated view. What all this amounts to is that the director of a classic has to become to some extent ex-tent a literary critic. Every production of a literary masterpiece is in effect a critique of it. A good literary critic tries to subordinate himself to the work under consideration. A similar subordination of himself to the work is needed, and badly needed, in the director. A kind of creativity is called for in the direction of course, but it should reinforce the primary creativity of the playwright, not compete with it. In our time the director has been elevated to a position where he challenges the primacy of the author and sees the text as merely a pretext for all kinds of shenanigans. Although the theatrical script is not as precise in its directions as a musical score, it is more definite than those directors who are frustrated playwrights have allowed, and the level of production of the classics will not generally improve until the director recognizes that he is not a creator vying with another creator but an interpreter trying to share his own excitement about a fine piece of theatrical writing. As for Shakespeare, there has never been a playwright with a more developed sense of theatre, and the way to make his plays work best is to trust him. That's easier to say than to do after all, what does "trusting him" mean in actual practice? but it's still our best hope. themselves are conditioned by their own age and that there are fashions in scholarship as in everything else. Still, all things considered, con-sidered, the safest base for a director to work from is recent criticism and scholarship because, if sampled wisely, it will at least give him an idea of how an intelligent member of his audience is likely to react. At the same time he will do well to look at some of the great critics of the past who to some extent transcended their own times. Even sampling along these lines, however, amounts to a formidable mass of material for any of the classics, especially Shakespeare, and one sympathizes with the hard-worked professional director faced with shelvesful of exegesis. What then can he do? Well, he can consult a scholarly critic with a sense of theatrical vaules and ask advice about reading on a particular play or problem. If he's lucky, the theatre he's working for will employ a dramaturge. (One of the healthiest developments in contemporary theatre is the increasing use of this sort of resource person.) But however many experts or critics he may consult, the director has in the long run to make up his own mind. If a play is to come alive, the production must have unified approach, and by definition that can come from only one mind his. Academic correctness will perhaps prevent other ex- cont. from p. Dll different from that for any other. What is more, the production will differ from performance to performance per-formance as the audience differs. If the audience is receptive, the play will unfold organically in the warmth of that response. If the audience is apathetic, the cast will be prone to push the play at them in an effort to elicit response, and this may well inhibit it instead in-stead of eliciting it. This is the complex of never-ending possibility intermixed with occasional frustration which is theatre. The scholar and critic need to recognize all these variants and to maintain a corresponding flexibility of expectation. The person who goes to a concert and finds fault with the conductor because he doesn't observe the same tempos as those in a favorite recording is shutting himself off from the possibility of hearing new things in the work. And this applies even . more to the playgoer. The conductor usually has the composer's fairly precise markings to go by, and A sounds pretty much the same on any oboe. But no system has yet been invented in-vented by which a dramatist can convey his intentions as specifically as a composer, and since the actor is his own instrument he cannot tune himself as accurately as the instrumentalist his in- derline cases such as Shakespeare's so-called "problem comedies" and although dramatists in our time are devising more and more complex textures and tones there is usually widespread agreement about the tone of classical works. So there is seldom any excuse for playing comedy as farce. It's easily done of course; it's a great temptation for the actor, and even for the director, to play for easy laughs. Understandably, Un-derstandably, theatre people are eager for tangible response. The actor particularly par-ticularly is involved in a lifelong life-long love affair with the , public. Yet playing for the easy laugh, the obvious response, can distort a play radically. The way a thing is said is part of what is said. To take the clearest kind of example, a sarcastic tone jndermines a remark. 'You're a a great guy" said sarcastically means the apposite of the normal implication. So in a more complex way the style of a play is an integral in-tegral part of its meaning. The urbane balance between romantic idealism and cynical realism in "As You Like It" is the crux of its mature vision of humanity and the ultimate source of its delight. Play it as sophisticated farce, as they did at Stratford, Conn., in 1961 and you destroy the balance, debase the vision and make the play a bore-no bore-no small feat! When it comes to in-, in-, terpretation of meaning, there is far less agreement, but again there is some. The scholarly critic is trying to get at the meaning as defined by the intentions of the author (if they've been expressed), his handling of his sources, and the culture in which he lived and so on. As I've already noted, in many aspects of his work what we might call his art as opposed to his craft the author himself won't have had a clear-cut intention, and even if he did there may well be a wide gap between intention and achievement. On the other hand, in the technical aspects of his work, in a word his craft, the author will have had a clearer and more controllable con-trollable intention. He will, for example, have envisaged a particular mode of staging. One must know at least what the principles of this were before one can hope to stage the play with anything like the 'effect intended. And it is scholars alone who can define the theatrical conditions of earlier ages. They can also lay bare the bases of thought in an age, which can serve as a guide to interpretation. Of course, a great writer is capable of transcending the limits of contemporary thinking, but his thought can be defined with any degree of certainty only in relation to the framework of his age. At this point it must be admitted that scholars strument. me resulting latitude of interpretation is one of the glories of drama ; a play can go through an indefinite number of reincarnations, rein-carnations, and, as I've suggested, the greater the play, the greater its potentiality. No single actor will every realize the whole gamut of any Shakespeare role. But the director should not take this as license for trying out wild interpretations. Too many recent directors seem to have argued in this way : I can't realize the whole of the play, so I'll aim to realize one particular aspect of it, an aspect that hasn't been stressed before. But this approach can only lead to unbalanced, even perverse interpretations. Knowing that he can never realize the whole play, the director should still aim at it. Otherwise there is no hope of balance. Knowing too that his view of the play is bound to be subjective, he should still aim at an objective view of it. Otherwise his interpretation in-terpretation is liable to be wholly private and not communicable to either cast or audience. In the wide variety of interpretation possible for the classics, it may not be easy to discern much general agreement, but there is some. For example, there is considerable agreement about genre. Many plays are conveniently labeled tragedy, comedy, farce or what have you, and although there are bor- |