The Two Gentlemen of Verona (20 page)
Read The Two Gentlemen of Verona Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
The gentlemen, for once, seem really young, so are more easily forgiven. Peter Land plays an initially soppy Proteus, but finds a way to convey shame and bewilderment at the unexpected shift in his emotions. Peter Chelsom’s engaging Valentine, full of boyish charm and innocence, youthfully pleased with himself, has the right mixture of comedy and romance, and develops into the most interesting character. The moment of his banishment, when he kneels to John Franklin-Robbins’s entertaining, strongly characterized Emperor, introduces a new dimension of seriousness; in the final scene, the genuineness of his concern both for Silvia and Proteus carries us surprisingly well through the notoriously difficult dénouement.
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Thacker’s production also lent a comprehensible social context to the young men’s behavior in the 1930s “salon society”:
There is a logic to this idiom which emerges clearly on through the horseplay of the two suitors. They are public school types whose relationship, if not overtly sexual, has a competitive closeness. Schoolboy rough-and-tumble lingers on the brink of adult eroticism; a boy’s own complicity is almost confusable with declarations of love.
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Benedict Nightingale suggests why updated versions of the play should have worked so well:
When lovers appear in doublet and hose, we expect them to behave in conventional romantic ways. Transpose them to places we can more easily associate with youthful skittishness and folly, and they can do things offensive to earnest scholars and yet seem perfectly plausible. Who knows, maybe Shakespeare meant to make romance look silly. Maybe to take liberties with this play is to be truly faithful to it. After all, every era is familiar with Proteus, the young blood who swears eternal love to one woman, then falls for his chum Valentine’s girl, and proceeds to behave outrageously to everybody. At Stratford, Barry Lynch is certainly the kind of intense, secret boy who, with a little sophistry, can convince himself that his feelings are morally paramount. The last scene, with its hurried reconciliations, admittedly poses special difficulties for him, since Proteus must switch from a rapist to a penitent, in what good taste should prevent me calling a flash. Yet among men of a certain age is that really so unlikely? By then the zest and humour of Thacker’s production have anyway swept away most objections.
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Peter Holland offered a more complex, detailed account of the play’s most difficult moment:
All problems in the play pale into insignificance beside Valentine’s handing over of the nearly raped Silvia to the rapist: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee” (5.4.83). Thacker’s production, while not making the line unproblematic, offered it as a
problem squarely confronted and tentatively solved. The production had, slowly and thoughtfully. allowed the significance of the women to grow as the play progressed, accepting their rights to decide what happens to them, their ability to initiate action and to actualise a form of friendship that the men talk of but cannot carry through into action. It seemed only logical and fully justifiable therefore to see Silvia resolving the play’s crux … Thacker’s modest and highly intelligent solution reintegrated the moment into the development of the comedy as this production had explored it. After Proteus’s “My shame and guilt confounds me” [5.4.77] Barry Lynch left a colossal pause, showing Proteus considering the possibility of conning Valentine again, before finally resolving on genuine repentance. If the audience hesitated slightly as to the genuineness of the repentance—and Lynch’s smirk was so beguiling that one had to have a moment’s pause—it was Silvia’s silent intercession, a calm gesture of moving towards Proteus, that reassured them. Her judgement that this man was worth forgiveness justified Valentine’s generosity, a symbolic act of love and respect for Silvia as much as of friendship for Proteus. Such work, accepting the play’s difficulty, was as honest and intelligent as one could wish for.
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Robert Smallwood describes how, in Edward Hall’s production,
The journey of the play was marked by two single gender, non-sexual embraces: at the end of the first scene by a valedictory hug of separation, expected all through the scene, between the leading men, Proteus and Valentine; at the end of the last scene, by an embrace of welcome and union, expected all through the scene, between the leading women, Julia and Sylvia. The embraces framed the intervening account of the awkwardnesses and inadequacies of the play’s heterosexual relationships.
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Alastair Macaulay analyzed the leading performances perceptively, again highlighting their youth:
Four little-known young actors are given important breaks in the leading roles. Of these, the most completely successful is Poppy Miller as Silvia, who brings bite, freshness, interest to every least episode she is given. As Proteus, Dominic Rowan starts coolly but well, and with charm; later, when losing his cool, he becomes somewhat too emphatic to convince. Tom Goodman-Hill develops the opposite way as Valentine: beginning rather stiff and tepid, he acquires, when in adversity, a wonderful stillness and quiet philosophical authority that helps to explain the emotional wisdom with which he resolves the play’s climax—forgiving Proteus and even offering to give up Silvia—with such brisk simplicity. Lesley Vickerage, though lacking edge, is a Julia of beauty and vulnerability.
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Of Fiona Buffini’s 2004 production, Michael Billington argued that,
Without overplaying the point, Buffini also suggests that there is a homoerotic twist to this tale of love and betrayal in which the caddish Proteus attempts to steal his best friend’s girl. When Laurence Mitchell’s Proteus and Alex Avery’s Valentine initially part, you half expect them to indulge in a farewell kiss. And later, when Valentine shockingly says to Proteus “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee,” you realise this is a world in which male bonding counts for more than hetero urges. What is usually seen as a trial run for the later comedies here becomes an intriguing study of what Rene Girard called “triangular desire,” in which two men are indissolubly linked by their desire to possess the same woman. Buffini implies all this with grace and wit. And, even if she strangely bungles the classic scene in which the eloping Valentine is caught with a telltale rope ladder, she brings out the extent to which the women become bemused spectators of laddish love-games. Rachel Pickup’s excellent Silvia has a touching vulnerability as she is cast adrift wearing little more than a Freudian slip and Vanessa Ackerman movingly suggests that Julia’s passion for Proteus is sadly misplaced.
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However much or little critics enjoy the performances of the two pairs of lovers, though, it must be said that there is one double-act that never fails to delight. Shakespeare’s plays are often recalled in the popular imagination by some special character, for example the ghost in
Hamlet
or the Witches in
Macbeth. The Two Gentlemen
has a dog. The play’s two comedians Speed and Lance/Launce are admirably contrasted. Speed, as his name implies, is all quick wit and mercurial dash, and actors have generally made the most of their opportunity with the role, while Lance’s fidelity to his dog provides a counterpoint to the inconsistencies of the human affections in the play.
Lance and Crab were the most widely praised performances in Peter Hall’s production:
Patrick Wymark as Launce animated his repetitive speeches by a variety of timing and emphasis, and based all on a sympathetic understanding of the large-minded, stubborn character who is yet at the mercy of circumstance. He made the audience wait for words, when he could do so without slowing up his performance, and so invited them to enter his view of the world of the play: correcting Speed for counting “slow of speech” among his maid’s vices, he then looked in blank wonder at the audience so that the following line, “To be slow in words is a woman’s only virtue,” was the necessary statement they had been waiting for, an exaggeration which satisfied where it might have fallen dead with its stale wit.
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His dog, Crab, took to the stage like a veteran. A small white terrier … he has the priceless theatrical attribute of repose and an uncanny knack of putting on the right expression—even a yawn … Most people, I think, will say they have seen a play about a dog.
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Patrick Stewart playing Lance in 1970 gave a richly characterized performance:
but what makes his [Phillips’] production unforgettable is his amazing vision of Launce (Patrick Stewart) and his dog, Crab. Who would have thought that this servant, usually so crude and vulgar, could so certainly be the play’s sad, dark angel, harsh and sinister, yet with such depth of feeling, and so schematically beautiful as he stands framed in a panel at the back of the stage gravely contemplating the apparent happiness of his employers?
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Crab on this occasion was played by Blackie, a good-natured mongrel, who, as Peter Roberts comments, was “a cur of the kind that would win a sneer at Crufts and a very big bone everywhere else”:
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He [Stewart] recites most of his lines in the company of a big dog, Blackie, and he needs all his talent and experience to prevent Blackie from stealing several scenes. In one of Launce’s long speeches Blackie emitted a big yawn. It nearly brought the house down.
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Critics frequently comment on the resemblance between man and dog. In John Barton’s double bill, it was the dog’s resemblance to the director which struck a number of reviewers, as well as its appearance in
Titus:
When John Barton assigned the role of Crab against considerable canine opposition to an old English sheepdog named Heidi, there were murmurings in Stratford about “mirror images.” Barton himself now affects a shaggy, rumpled appearance from his grizzled head to his Hush Puppies.
*
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Richard Moore as Lance in Thacker’s immensely popular production achieved a remarkable comic performance: “a blend of Leonard Rossiter, Tony Hancock and a big-eared Victorian toby jug, never more hilarious than when he is lugubriously berating a dog which,
on opening night, stood and implored the audience for rescue, death, anything but this.”
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Margaret Ingram’s evocative account concluded,
But I have not mentioned Launce (Richard Moore) and his dog Crab (Woolly) who perhaps contributed most of all, Launce with his lugubrious humour and Crab who evinced a look between dullness and despair at being confined on a brightly lit stage when he might have been enjoying a dog’s life elsewhere but who nevertheless seemed to appreciate that, this being a British audience, he received the greatest applause of the evening.
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Mark Hadfield’s performance in Edward Hall’s production was also singled out: “The most entertaining scenes of
Two Gentlemen
belong to Launce (Mark Hadfield is a fine clown) and his faithful, similarly downbeat mongrel, Crab.”
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Robert Smallwood described him as a “sad and knowing Launce,” and Cassie’s Crab as “a most economically paced performance.”
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In Buffini’s 2004 production Lance was played by Andrew Melville, “a lachrymose Scot and his dog Crab, an elderly Irish wolfhound, whose only crime on stage was to yawn—
not
fair comment.”
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Conclusion
In his discussion of the play, quoted in the 1992 program, Stanley Wells concludes that it is “a failure” but it is “far from being a total failure.”
[The] most important reason for the play’s success is that however immature he may be in other ways, he [Shakespeare] is already completely assured as a writer of comic prose, of lyrical verse, and even sometimes of genuine dramatic verse. When we try to get below the surface of the play, we find that it rests on shaky foundations. In these circumstances, the best thing to do seems to be to come up to the surface again and examine that.
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Successful productions have done just that; they have attended to the play’s surface, updating it with contemporary settings and ideas to suggest modern parallels, which, far from detracting from the text have enabled its virtues of vigor, freshness, and lyrical charm to shine through.
David Thacker
was born in Northamptonshire in 1950. He was the artistic director of the Young Vic from 1984 to 1993, where his directorial achievements included
The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Stags and Hens, Macbeth, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Enemies Within, The Crucible, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Some Kind of Hero, Ghosts, Julius Caesar
, and
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
He directed the production of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
discussed below for the RSC in 1991, and became director-in-residence for the company in 1993. He is a prolific television director and is currently the artistic director of the Octagon Theatre, Bolton. He has won Olivier Awards for Best Director (
Pericles
) and Best Revival (
Pericles
) and the London Fringe Award for Best Director (
Ghosts
) and Best Production (
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
).
Edward Hall
, son of the RSC’s founder Sir Peter Hall, was born in 1967 and trained at Leeds University and the Mountview Theatre School before cutting his teeth at the Watermill Theatre in the 1990s. His first Shakespearean success was a production of
Othello
in 1995, though he used the experience as inspiration to found Propeller, an all-male theater company with whom he directed
The Comedy of Errors
and
Henry V
, which ran together in repertory during the 1997–98 season, and
Twelfth Night
in 1999, all at the Watermill. In 1998 he made his directorial debut with the RSC on the production of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
discussed below, and went on to work with the company on
Henry V
in 2000–01 and
Julius Caesar
the following season. In between
Henry
and
Caesar
, Hall returned to the Watermill to direct
Rose Rage
, his (in)famous and celebrated abattoir-set adaptation of the
Henry VI
trilogy. He has continued to work with
Propeller on such productions as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in 2003 and
Twelfth Night
and
The Taming of the Shrew
in
2007
, becoming artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre in 2010.