| New Year Theatre Book: One Big Spoiler at the National Theatre’s Fiftieth Birthday |
Theatre Director Book |
| Michael Blakemore "Stage Blood" , Faber and Faber , January 8, 2014 |
The National Theatre had a good, even a great, fiftieth birthday. Box office outside the South Bank is rolling in, the percentage of subsidy is down, two hours of documentary history were broadcast across Britain, and a Sunday evening hosted a gala performance that was also broadcast. But every party has its spoilers. Jonathan Miller stayed away. And then there is “Stage Blood.” The climax of “Stage Blood” is a management meeting that took place in London forty years ago. A manager confronts his boss. It ought to be arcane but in fact it grips. It grips offstage in the way that Harley Granville Barker’s “Waste” grips onstage. The subject matter may be antique but the way in which the process unfolds is riveting. The meeting itself takes up ten pages. It is the tale of a defeat, or less a defeat than a rout, an Agincourt or Cannae of an encounter. Blakemore’s rout unfolds for the simplest of reasons. Even the member of the humblest committee of a local amenity society knows that it is all in the preparation. It is the sounding out of potential allies, the identifying of adversaries, the gauging of fence-sitters. It is all there, with brilliance, in the first series of “the Killing”, when the rebellious yes-men try to rise up against Troels Hartmann. Blakemore possesses the gifts to mount the large-scale comedy hits of Frayn and Peter Nichols with their requirements of the most complex cues and timing. As a political operator his confession is an honest picture of a stumbling barely-starter. “Stage Blood” is history with a lot of history running through it. Names like Jocelyn Herbert, Bill Gaskell, Frank Dunlop, John Dexter, Kenneth Tynan, Bill Bryden are history now for a new generation of theatre-makers. Jonathan Miller is still active and in Wales in 2014 for “Carmen” for Mid-Wales Opera. Blakemore warms instantly to “his gift of intimacy, chatting with unguarded candour about the ups and downs of both his professional and personal life.” Much of the detail is sharp and illuminating. In Peter Nichols he identifies the lethal temptation in writing for theatre. It is “the dichotomy between on the one hand a dramatist who breathes life into his characters and then gets out of the way, and the pundit who cannot resist using his characters to tell us what’s what.” The latter, overly common on stages in Welsh, can be a tedious persona. Blakemore likens it to “as if Chekhov were guiding the pen in his right hand and Bernard Shaw the one in his left.” “Stage Blood” is not just record of productions and the machinations behind productions. It is an intermittent record of the directorial experience. Tom Stoppard’s “Jumpers” proves to be a technical nightmare. A few seconds of a Tarzan swinging across the stage emitting his yodel takes hours to get right. Michael Hordern has to master enormously long speeches of philosophical content. If the first half of “Stage Blood” is a hymn of homage to Olivier it also catches the actor at an ebb of vulnerability. They have four hours ahead of Eugene O’Neill at his most intense. At the technical rehearsal the first few lines are spoken and Olivier dries. “That’s funny. I’ve got stage fright” he says. The politics of theatre as depicted here are unedifying. “Directors” in the Blakemorean view “are unforgiving people and rarely acknowledge merit in the work of their peers.” Like Stephen Sondheim he puts in print a deep dislike for one critic. Robert Brustein is “an accomplished and persuasive essayist, but…too oracular and incurious to be a good critic”. As the critic holds a professorship at Yale the practitioner views him as “what he seemed to expect from a visit to the theatre was a validation of his own doctrines.” The first reviewers of “Stage Blood” homed in on Blakemore’s treatment of the National Theatre’s second artistic director. The accusation is simple. The life is extravagant with mansions for a home, a Barbican flat, endless transatlantic flights and a stream of marriages and divorces to finance. The management of Britain’s then only national theatre assumes a single purpose, the extraction of maximum personal wealth. As the “Diaries” reveal the personal vote was cast in the crucial 1979 election against the soggy post-war consensus. In Blakemore’s view this most public of theatres was turned into another 1980’s institution slotting in nicely alongside train leasing companies and power generators. This manifests itself in several ways. There are the prolonged absences, anything up to five months, from the job as if running Britain’s largest theatre were not an executive function. The emphasis on pay is constant. Employees are represented by agents; those clients represented by the director’s agent get preferential pay. An opera directed elsewhere is revived for the National’s stage. Blakemore dips into the “Diaries”- “in this remarkable volume he manages both to come clean about himself and to cover his tracks.” Commercial transfer is the ever-present lure. “Can I have my cake and eat it” say the “Diaries..” “I think I must.” An attempt is made to give a short Cottesloe run to a play by, of all playwrights, William Douglas-Home, before a lucrative transfer. It is scuppered by protest from London’s commercial managers. “Amadeus” gets to Broadway and the pay-outs, according to Blakemore, are four or five percent of the gross and five percent of the profits. These are for the director. The National Theatre receives nothing. As a picture of an era of artistic governance it is as remote as the time of Nero. Michael Blakemore is already author of a memoir and a novel and he can write. To him the director is “the fat boy at the children’s party, who, when offered a slice of cake, takes the cake and leaves the slice.” On a point of dissent with Olivier he observes the “smile on his lips that was razor-blade thin.” He observes actors responding to a coughing audience with too much activity. But then they hit a key scene and “the play began to uncoil. The actors were now in charge and like horses on the homeward journey they knew it.” At work on a Ben Travers farce he describes “Working on the first half of the play was rather like attending a funeral where all the mourners have been disinherited.” Blakemore has a noble view of theatre in general and national theatre in particular: “to bring to the stage productions of such accomplishment and concentrated intent that anyone who saw them would remember them for the rest of their lives”. “Stage Blood” is about drama and it is composed as drama. At the very heart of the experience of making art Blakemore discerns a dichotomy. On the one hand “ego-driven feuds about art” are set against “the quiet perseverance, swinging between belief and doubt, that brings art into existence in the first place.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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