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APPENDICES
At The Inland Sea, at the end of ATIS, you have to find various ways of doing
it, but the boy says “look, there is this house and I hear singing, and every time
I go into the house it stops. But I know it is inhabited because...” It is almost
like the children’s three bears story. “But every time I leave the singing starts.
Why can’t I get in and find the singers?” And that’s an interesting problem for
young minds. If you look at the end of Eleven Vests, I invent this ridiculous
language, and people ask me what is he saying? And I say, I don’t know. And
they say you must know, and I really-really don’t know. So I can use gobble-de¬
gook to present a very pressing problem for an audience. But you can then set
up a scene, if you think of say The Crime of the Twenty First Century, when the
man has killed the woman, but he is not sure she is dead, and he has got the
knife with the blood on it. So how can he find out if she is alive or not, so he
says “lick the knife”, she can’t speak but she still might be able to lick the knife,
therefore she is still alive. You see what I mean? But then you can also set up
situations where often the simplest phrase, like: my shoelace is undone, can
carry all the weight of to be or not to be. Because to be or not to be is profound,
it has to do with a situation, but he comes out of the situation. But we don’t have
that, because then we start producing rubbish. A bit of Derrida, a bit of science,
a bit of that, a bit of the other. We wouldn't have the language. But perhaps if
we say my shoelace is undone, it can have that effect, if you put it in the right
situation. Because drama must speak. It is not visual. I talk about the invisible
object and I think it’s almost always something that is seen... if somebody said
to me look, I can make the invisible object: it’s as in my play Existence, the man
goes in and smashes the kitchen, it is this huge effect offstage, crash-bang, as
if the Martians were landing, and then he comes in and he says “there is a cup
on the shelf and it’s not broken” and I remember saying to Christian Benedetti
who directed the first stage production, when he asked me “what’s that cup
Edward?” I said “the whole universe is in that cup”. And he said “ah ha” and
went away. And the next morning he said “how can I get the universe in that
cup?” Well you could do some trick and its rubbish. But I said it’s the way you
break the cup. There is this huge silence after all that breakage and then the
man goes in and only (claps with his hand) only this one cup is broken. So you
make the sound speak. Drama has to be creative and intuitive in a way, but
finally it must speak.
AB: You were talking about how important it is for the actor to create
the invisible object, to enter these extreme or difficult situations. How do you
make it possible? When you are directing how do you help the actors to enter
the situations?
EB: What you have to do is define the situation. This is the matter of practice.
I can give you an example of that. I was holding a workshop at the RSC and
it was on the scene in Lear when Gloucester is blinded. I can’t remember
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