"I'm talking about death. And you've never experienced that. You cannot act it. You die a thousand casual deaths, with none of that intensity which squeezes out life, and no blood runs cold anywhere. But no one gets up after death. There's no applause."
The tricky knot is right there, ladies and gentlemen: how do you act death?
This play is all about death - it's in the title, in the lines, in the stupid and less stupid questions the characters ask, it's in the staging and in Hamlet, in the knives and in the blood, in the dark of the curtains and hopefully in the surprised astonishment of the audience.
But how do you act something you've never experienced? Method acting is rendered automatically helpless. It is the same for madness. It is not the same for drunkenness, yet drunk characters are very rarely convincingly played.
This play is about an actor's death as well, which is "an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on until, finally, it is heavy with death."
I finally realized what everyone was talking about when they where talking about Mercutio's death in "Romeo and Juliet" when I went to see the RSC's production a couple of months ago. Jonjo O'Neill's fantasmatic Mercutio makes a "big" exit, ascending the immense stairway in the middle of the stage, and as he leaves swearing "A plague on both your houses!", his bloodied hands draw a clown's painted nose on his own. And then he never comes back. And his dying off stage and never stepping onto it again is maybe the closest you can get to the death of an actor.
But don't worry, Ros and Guil will die. That's what we're counting on after all. Ultimately.
0 comments:
Post a Comment