 |
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Email us with Shaw stuff! |
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||||
 |
||||||
|
Mr. Shaw's Voyage of Discovery
He has the vigor of an actor on a voyage of discovery at Stratford-upon-Avon, where his Shakespearean quest began in 1926. In those days playing Romeo, Prince Hal and Ferdinand in the local cinema after the theater had been burned down, he was ahead of his time. His Prince Hal was heavily criticised in the Press for its audacity. Convention had decreed that when Prince Hal, at the end of Henry VI, part two, rejects Falstaff, he hand changed from a convivial drinking partner into an arrogant upstart. For Mr. Shaw, son of a music teacher, that was a simple-minded view out of harmony with the text. He showed Hal inwardly regretting having to part company with the self-indulgent Falstaff, accepting new responsibilities in kingship at the sacrifice of old pleasures. Today, this is the accepted approach. At the Shakespeare birthday celebrations last weekend, J. B. Priestly and the company's former director, Peter Hall, who now runs the National Theatre, clashed amiable over "interpretative" productions of Shakespeare at Stratford. Mr. Hall defends the present policy, which has often been described as gimmicky, but seeks to find modern relevance in the plays. Shakespeare, declares Mr. Hall, is not sacrosanct and must be made meaningful to modern audiences. Mr. Shaw agrees. "I'm not a confirmed traditionalist, " he said. "There was little experiment when I first came here. If you keep on doing Shakespeare the way his plays have always been done, people get bored. "John Barton, our director, regards the plays as exploratory journeys. There is no preconceived idea to which a play is geared. We discover meanings as we read it. Ideas emerge from rehearsal. "This is why Shakespeare is so exciting."
Mr. Shaw, who plays the lead in Cymbeline next month and is currently playing the Duke of York in Richard II, is one of those reliable and creative actors who form the backbone of the profession. He made his stage debut at the age of five, in a W. B. Yeats play, at what is now London's Royal Court Theatre. Later, he "retired from the stage to go to school" and did not return to aacting until he was 18. In the thirties he had a successful film career - The Squeaker, The Spy In Black, East of Picadilly, and Farewell Again. "Actors were usually typed and leading men had to be clean cut and handsome. They made my lips appear larger and plucked my eyebrows. "It took a long time for actors to break out of the matinee idol mould and to gain public respect. There was a deep-seated prejudice against actors. People thought we led disreputable lives off stage. I think television changed the image. Actors began to appear in people's living rooms and became socially accepted." Mr. Shaw now hopes for further acceptance, by a publisher. His first novel, The Christening, has been sent to his agent and he is working on another. At first, he planned to call his novel The Godfather and is glad he didn't, as someone else made good use of it. As a writer, he has often been on the brink of emergence and then overtaken by events. When his daughter was in her early twenties and girls her age were beginning to share flats, he outlined a TV comedy series about four girls in a flat. Granada liked it and said they would choose between this and another series which had been submitted. They chose the other -- Coronation Street. Writing plays and TV scripts, he has often found other writers working simultaneously on the same ideas. "It's as if certain ideas and themes are picked up by various people from the same wavelength." Like being a father, in The Winter's Tale, for each wind that blows.
.
|
||||||
SEBASTIAN SHAW, greyly bewhiskered, would bridle at being called the Royal Shakespeare Company's elder statesman. At 69 his voluble enthusiasm for fresh insights and new departures belie the settled and ponderous associations of elder statesmanship.