The Two Gentlemen of Verona (21 page)

Two Gents
is regarded as an early play, an apprentice piece, in which characters and plot are not fully realized; did this perception affect your production in any way?

Thacker:
I think it’s an exceptionally good play. I’ve liked it since the first time I encountered it. There may have been people who thought, because of the imaginative choices we took in our production, that I felt the play needed shoring up in some way, but that was never the case. I think it is self-evidently a young person’s play, written by a young man; it has a lot of the enthusiasm and spontaneity of youth, and also the innocence of youth. I felt that the style of it was very pure and shows Shakespeare at an advanced stage in his development.

Hall:
No, not really. There is a youthful exuberance and energy about the writing that I imagine is the expression of a young writer first discovering the possibilities of drama. Like
The Taming of the Shrew
, another early play, and to a degree
The Comedy of Errors
, there is a wonderfully warm, enthusiastic style that is all about youth, about young people. When you embrace that it’s exciting: to feel the real spirit of youth, as embodied by the four principles, coming off the page. When you feel that, suddenly all those academic worries and concerns about the printed text recede in the “doing” of it. We certainly found that when we were working on it.

Many of the most successful productions have updated the play and set it in recognizable modern locations; when and where was your production set?

Thacker:
As a director I need to imagine a world in which I believe the events of the play could plausibly take place. It’s sometimes difficult to explain why it is that a particular way of staging or presenting a play comes into your mind. In this particular case I can remember vividly that I was lying in bed reading the play, thinking about the possibility of doing it, and the songs of the late twenties and early
thirties came into my mind. Years before I had done a play about life in Lancashire between the two world wars—it was called
The Rose Between Two Thorns
—which consisted entirely of transcribed verbatim material. In it we had used a lot of songs from the period, so those songs were quite familiar to me and I had become very fond of many of them. I found myself hearing those songs as I was reading
Two Gents
and it struck me that some of the lyrics and also the melodies of the songs seemed to be a very close correlative to what Shakespeare was investigating in this play. The innocence of some of these Cole Porter and Gershwin songs, and some of those other songs from the period, suddenly made me wonder whether this play would work well if set in that period.

At that time I was not particularly clear in my own mind that one might use songs from the period. I was still having this little imaginative adventure while reading the play, but then I read it through again more carefully and began to feel that the period would work extremely well for the play.

I started to check out the dates of composition of the songs and talk to the designer, Shelagh Keegan, about whether or not she felt the play would work well aesthetically in that era. We looked at what kind of clothes people were wearing at the time. The next piece of the jigsaw arrived when I received a letter from Guy Woolfenden, who had composed music for every play by Shakespeare at the RSC apart from
Two Gents
. He wrote me a very charming letter to ask whether I would be prepared to consider him to compose the music for the production. I phoned him up and said, “Well, of course I’d be privileged if you were to do it, Guy, but I should tell you that I’ve got this very strong idea about how I’d like to do the play and you may think it’s terrible; and if you did I wouldn’t be offended but you might feel that it wasn’t an idea that you would like to run with as composer.” I explained the idea and almost immediately he said, “My father had a band in that period and I love that music, and I think it’s the most fantastic idea.” We met up, and he brought along with him well over one hundred examples of songs from the period, and we convinced ourselves very rapidly that this was going to be a way of enabling the play to have a full and vivid expression.

Some people may not agree, but I can say with total conviction
and honesty that the wish to set it in that context, using that music, was because we respected the play enormously—not because we thought it needed improving in some way. The music became like an additional design feature. We had a band on stage the whole time and a female crooner singing, and sometimes the songs would actually underscore the text. It was an organic process whereby we decided to run with that as a settled concept. I have to say that of all the productions that I have ever directed, it is one that I have been most proud of, because I think it reached the audience in a really powerful way. After playing at the Swan and then the Barbican it had a national tour and also became the first play by Shakespeare for many years to transfer to the West End.

Hall:
Our production was set in modern-day Italy. It was a very stylish, fashionable setting; that was the touchstone to the production. The wood was a wasteland where we stripped everything away, almost like the side of an autoroute somewhere in the middle of Italy. We kept a contemporary Italian feel to it which fed the play in a very satisfactory way.

The play has an intrinsic interest in twoness: two gents, two girls, two fathers, two comic servants, and so on; how did you explore
/
exploit this patterning?

Thacker:
Not in any conscious way. So much of Shakespeare is to do with antithesis, both in his linguistic techniques and within the language that he chooses to use. He clearly sets up opposites but it wasn’t something that we particularly highlighted, we just allowed it to play out as it was expressed.

Of course, the two servants are wonderfully contrasting and they play brilliantly. Richard Moore gave, I think, one of his favorite performances playing Lance and we were blessed with the most wonderful dog, Woolley, who sadly has passed away now. Woolley and Richard were so popular and made such a strong impression that there was even a cartoon in
The Times
of the two of them.

Hall:
We didn’t make a particular effort to exploit it, but yes, it has a pair of everything, apart from a pair of dogs—so you could argue that the whole thing is set up to make Crab work as best as possible! The early plays have a lot of pairs in them; possibly the death of his twin son, Hamnet, is fresh in his mind [the other twin, a daughter, Judith, survived]. It’s also to do with two halves of the self. Twins represent two people feeling different things and disagreeing and then coming together to agree. You are split down the middle, and when people come together and understand each other they become more whole as people, as individuals.

7.
David Thacker’s 1991 RSC production with Richard Moore as Lance with Woolley the dog as Crab: “Richard Moore gave I think one of his favorite performances playing Lance and we were blessed with a wonderful dog, Woolley … Woolley and Richard were so popular and made such a strong impression that there was even a cartoon in
The Times
of the two of them.”

Same-sex friendships seem stronger and more satisfying than heterosexual love in this play; did you see homoeroticism and male bonding as in conflict with romance, and how did you play it?

Thacker:
Our belief when we were working on the play was that these young men had hugely strong feelings for each other, but I
don’t think any of us felt that those would have been consummated sexually or, indeed, repressed homoerotically. We all believed when we were working on the play that it was fundamentally to do with heterosexual love but with men who were very close and loved each other very powerfully. The conflict that arises between them is more powerful because of the strength of their love. But I don’t think we ever saw it as homoerotic.

Hall:
No. You have to understand that Elizabethans didn’t categorize sexuality in the way that we do. We always make the terrible mistake of imposing our notions of sexuality onto sixteenth-century England. The idea of love was very highly evolved in Elizabethan society, whether it was physical love or spiritual love. A relationship between two men could be seen to embody the highest form of spiritual love. It doesn’t have to engender something physical and it certainly doesn’t necessarily have to make a comment on the particular sexuality of the person. Shakespeare writes about love in all its forms, but doesn’t reduce it to being about sexuality. Running all the way through his plays he challenges conservative notions of sexuality: show me somebody who loves a woman and I will show that same man loving a man. I think I have always approached his work like that. I directed
Two Gentlemen of Verona
back in 1998 and I remember feeling that you’re dealing with different kinds of love. It’s to do with being true to somebody as much as it is to do with something physical. It becomes something physical in the last scene, and I remember us looking closely at the book of courtly love, looking at pictures by Hilliard, trying to get under the skin of the whole culture of courtly love at the time, so that we didn’t reduce it to contemporary terms and miss what was really going on.

For modern audiences (and perhaps for early modern ones too), there’s a difficult moment in Act 5 when Valentine calmly offers his beloved Silvia to his friend, her would-be rapist, Proteus; how did your production understand and deal with this moment?

Thacker:
For a lot of people the play hinges on the attempted rape and the nature of redemption and forgiveness. I was incredibly fortunate to have a really exceptional young company of actors. The
central quartet of the actors were Finbar Lynch and Hugh Bonneville, both of whom have become major actors now, and Saskia Reeves and Clare Holman, both of whom were young, very talented actors and ever since have had distinguished careers. So I had four brilliant young actors at the heart of it and they all bought into it being a play about redemption and forgiveness. So many of Shakespeare’s plays—and certainly his mature and brilliant plays in later life, culminating in
The Winter’s Tale
—are about redemption and forgiveness and being prepared to actually accept an apology when it is truly meant. I think we all believed that Valentine’s forgiveness of Proteus was absolutely credible and, for me, the actors demonstrated that to be true, irrespective of how it might read on the page.

I still believe very powerfully that is what Shakespeare was intending to achieve. Although he would have done it much more effectively later in his life, nevertheless it is very moving and very powerful, not least because of its innocence. It is a play written by a young person about young people and it is very powerful because of that.

Hall:
When you go out into the wasteland you discover the truth; you leave the confines of court society and strip away all artifice, and you come down to the truth of your feelings and how you really are. When we rehearsed it we made sure that we didn’t play it faster than the actors could feel it, and it explained itself in performance. If you play it very quickly and just drive through it, it all seems glib and suddenly the play means nothing. Clearly that is not Shakespeare’s intention, so you have to invest as deeply as you can in what happens in the wasteland to both of them and not play it too quickly—not just the lines, but the space between the lines—so when we arrived at that moment it felt very natural for what it was. The question is rather like asking how do you do
The Taming of the Shrew
? How does Kate capitulate in the last scene? If you haven’t got the rest of the play right, you can’t do that scene. That is particularly true of Shakespeare. Act 5 of Shakespeare is like a set of dominoes going down: if they haven’t hit each other just right in the preceding four acts, you find yourself having completely misarticulated what he was intending. If you set off on the wrong track then the further you travel, the
further away you find yourself from where you need to be. So when you get to Act 5 in
Two Gents
you are suddenly in the woods and that moment seems ridiculous, or you get to Act 5 of
The Taming of the Shrew
and Kate’s capitulation seems ridiculous. But I do believe that if you have got the play right, then those moments explain themselves and I like to think ours did.

Music has often featured prominently in productions, perhaps to cover for the play’s perceived weaknesses; were you tempted by this strategy?

Thacker:
See answer to question two.

Hall:
We did use music, some recorded and some live, but it wasn’t a musical. When Proteus serenaded Silvia he hired the best tenor he could find, so it wasn’t actually him singing. I imagine he got someone from the local opera company and paid them a lot of money, which gave us an excuse to get a rather wonderful singer to play that moment for him.