Rich, Famous, and Beautiful -- 1.3

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Wherein the author starts throwing in whole chunks of Shakespeare to fill up pages. Start appropriately; gets gratuitous the farther we go.

III.

Mr. Irving had no studio. His house was a museum of thrones and robes and fake swords, so I was instructed in my own home. My father converted an old play area into a ‘learning facility,’ with a chalkboard, some desks and chairs, and portraits of Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre hung on the walls.

I was terrified at first, of course. Mr. Irving was from the old school of acting and I knew that he would teach me Shakespeare. I had no use for Shakespeare. I wanted to be a movie star.

We started with Romeo and Juliet, because he knew it would be fresh in my mind. He quizzed me beforehand and discovered that I’d absorbed almost none of the play. They were lovers, there was fighting, and they died.

“I suppose it’s that simple,” Alistair said.

We spent a week crawling through the text. When we found longer speeches, he would ask me to recite them. The first words of Shakespeare I ever spoke were:

I’ll look to like, if looking liking move:

But no more deep will I endart mine eye

That your consent gives strength to make it fly.

It was Juliet’s thoughts on being told she would meet a suitor, Paris. It might as well not have been English for what it was worth.

“What is she saying?” he asked me.

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“What do you think she is saying? Tell me anything?”

I thought it over. “She’ll meet Paris but she’s not going to like him.”

“Close,” he smiled. “What does her mother think of Paris?”

“I think she’s got the hots for him.” I couldn’t resist being a little saucy after drenching myself in such a boring lecture.

“Not impossible, dear. Lady Capulet is quite young, where her husband is very old. The Lady very well could have ‘the hots’ for Paris. So, clearly she consents to this marriage?”

“I suppose.”

“So now you have everything you need to know. Translate, please.”

Over the next twenty minutes, I wrote and rewrote what I thought the lines must mean. Alistair gave guidance, but allowed me to use my own words. In the end, I’d written this:

I’ll meet Paris, if this is what you want. But just because you give your consent doesn’t mean I’ll like him any more.

“Excellent. I think that will be enough for today. Please translate the next two scenes for tomorrow.”

However much I complained to my father, I still had to continue the classes. In the first three weeks I was never given one chance to ‘act.’ But father wouldn’t change his mind, probably having paid Mr. Irving enough to secure a year’s worth of lessons.

We remained on Romeo and Juliet for a very long time. I’d rewritten the play, in my words, from start to finish. While scholars might not have been impressed, it was a fairly accurate representation from a sixteen year old convinced that she despised all things Shakespeare. After this, Alistair gave me history to accompany the play. He told me of how only men performed in Shakespeare’s time and that Juliet was probably played by a young boy. We looked into Shakespeare’s sources for the play, the layout of the Globe theatre, the history of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

“Competing with The Globe,” Alistair once told me, “was a theatre named The Rose. Rumour has it that, around the production of Romeo and Juliet, the Rose was plagued with nauseating sewage problems. So it is a very wicked smile that Shakespeare must have wrote, ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

We studied the play until I felt I knew everything that there was to know about it. We never ‘acted’ anything out, as a matter of fact, the learning room my father had constructed was quite small and he’d never figured in the need to move about. So it was in private that I found myself practicing, teary-eyed and histrionic:

Deny thy father and refute thy name;

Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn to my love,

And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Without admitting it to anyone, I was beginning to like Shakespeare very much. Or at least what little of it that I knew of.

We moved on then, to the Scottish play. Those in the theatre generally can’t bring themselves to say the word MacBeth out loud. It is the cursed play, and anyone who has ever performed it can tell a story about how their production was plagued with bad luck. I’ll tell my own in due time.

Thankfully, we didn’t comb through the text in quite so thorough a way. Alistair knew that acquiring Shakespeare was like acquiring a new language. ‘Once one gets down the basics it's quite a simple matter.’ And Alistair made this play much more fun. We cleared everything out of the learning area until it was an unfurnished, featureless box. And we did our first bit of acting then. We played the witches of the first scene. As we needed a third, I pulled our butler in to perform with us.

Alistair made me laugh crazily as he stooped and screeched over the cauldron. But it was the butler who sent me into hysterical peels of laughter as the incredibly dry, incredibly proper and extremely British third witch: “A drum. A drum. MacBeth doth come.”

We acted out most of the play, not including the battle scenes which Alistair’s knees couldn’t take the stress of. When we needed others we would usually draw them from the serving staff. One time, we brought in my mother to play the ghost of Banquo. A more giddy and improper ghost the world has never seen. She wasn't asked to return.

From MacBeth we moved on to the other tragedies. Julius Caesar with it’s decided lack of female roles, did not appeal to me very much. Hamlet, on the other hand, seemed like an actress’s dream. It’s one of the problems with Shakespeare, all the best female characters eventually descend into madness. Then, however, Ophelia seemed like the best role I could dream of—jaded by a lover, used by authority figures, falling into a madness that leads to her death. At sixteen, everyone thinks they’re misunderstood.

Where MacBeth had been a joy to read and to act, Alistair made Hamlet the greatest sorrow. When he recited Hamlet’s most famous speeches, he portrayed a man already half dead. During the ‘poor Yorick’ speech, a melon was substituted for a skull, and still he made me cry. I believed him. I believed that Alistair Irving felt wretched enough to throw himself off of a bridge.

On another day, we watched the Kenneth Branaugh version of the play. I was almost shocked to discover that, in parts, it was as hilarious as it was tragic. Alistair was teaching me that interpretation could make two versions of the same play wildly different.

To accompany Othello, the next play we studied, Alistair started to teach me tragedy theory. It was then that he gave me a copy of Poetics to read, and then that I learned Aristotle’s comments on tragedy: the hero is of elevated status, has a reversal of fortune, and his story evokes pity and fear. Along with this, Alistair taught me tragedy theory that has been applied to Shakespeare’s plays, as a part or extension of what began with Aristotle. Humartia is a character’s fatal flaw. They are well borne, they could have continued in such a manner, but they have a very deep rooted flaw that destroys them. Othello’s was jealousy, MacBeth’s was ambition, and Hamlet’s flaw is considered his indecision.

Shakespeare’s tragic figures always die in the end, as well. From Timon of Athens to King Lear, the hero—at the very least dies. In other stories, like Titus Andronicus, the stage ends bathed in corpses. The hero never ends up simply mad or impoverished, always dead. “That is what the audience likes to see,” Alistair said.

We studied the comedies also, which were never half as entertaining. Some, Alistair said, were actually bad. The Two Gentlemen of Verona he considered to be, bar none, Shakespeare’s worst play. Titus Andronicus, he felt, was his most senseless play. “It takes the fools days to discover that the daughter can write the name of the rapists with a stick in the dirt. And after avenging her, Titus kills the bloody girl in the end!” It was reassuring to know that he wasn’t blindly sycophantic about the bard. His respect was well earned where it was given.

I studied with the great Alistair Irving for two years. I couldn’t quantify the things that I learned. After studying with him, I spoke the language of Shakespeare as if I’d learned it from the cradle. I could carry myself—largely in thanks to ballet—with the grace of royalty. And I wasn’t simply a parrot anymore. Alistair had a theory that there are two types of actors in the world, parrots and puppets. A parrot can only mimic the lines of a character. Although a very good parrot could be convincing, they would never truly embody the character. A parrot imitates, walks on stage and says the lines in the manner they imagine is ‘dramatic.’ A puppet understands a character so well that they can become the instrument of that person. They can hang up their own personalities like a costume and allow themselves to move and speak in the manner that the character would choose to. At the end of two years, the great Alistair Irving declared that, without flattery, I was one of the best puppets he’d ever had the pleasure to work with.

Our studies only went so far because Alistair died in his seventieth year. He was taken by a stroke, in the night. Peacefully, we like to say, without really knowing if this is true. He could have thrown himself around the room before falling into bed. Who is to know?

We were studying King Lear, a play which he was to take part in. By this point, his instruction had become more of a dialogue. Lear was a character he had played numerous times and he hoped that I could give him a new perspective. I told him that Lear’s heartbreak over Cordelia’s death seemed to me to be the most important part to portray. Otherwise, Lear is a tyrant and completely unlikeable. I told Alistair that, the best he could do was to make the audience hate him for the entire production until the very end. People love to see an unredeemable character be redeemed.

“Very well,” he said. Tomorrow you and I shall rehearse the play starting from the end and working our way backwards. And I’ll give you more heartbreak than you could ever have imagined.”

And he did just that.