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APPENDICES
the details very much, but Gloucester is tied to this chair and one of them,
I think it’s Goneril, but I can’t remember, decides to ... No. I remember now.
They have tied him to the chair and they are going to blind him and one of the
servants says don’t do this. It’s cruel — a bit of sentimentality on Shakespeare’s
part perhaps, the loyal servant, but I shouldn’t be cynical. But then the
daughter gets a sword and kills him. How does she get the sword? She doesn’t
have a sword, you know, she is a woman. I had all these actors there, and
I said how does she get the sword? And immediately without thinking one of
the actors said: well I have got the sword, and I drop the sword and he goes
behind me, and I kick the sword there and it goes over there and it lands by
her and she reaches down and she has got the sword. It’s like that. So, I said,
why does Shakespeare want her to do it, why doesn’t she say kill him? Cause
that’s what they normally do, give orders. Why does he do something as odd
as that? And if he is going to do something as odd as that, why pretend it’s an
accident, somebody dropping a sword and doing a bit of theatrical trickery
like that? So we talked about this. What Shakespeare was saying is that all the
codes are breaking down, all the moral codes are breaking down. Therefore
a woman is going to kill. Saint Joan became a soldier and she had to dress as
a man. But this one is not going to pretend she is a soldier, so in the end what
we arrived at was that she just went over to the soldier, took the sword from
him, and she went over to the servant and the servant didn’t even defend
himself, because women don’t come and threaten you with a sword. So he
didn’t even defend himself and so she simply went up to him and did that.
(imitates pushing a sword in) And he didn’t do the RSC “ahahah” (dying), he
just dropped and then she gave the sword back. Because all the codes had
been broken, and therefore all the normal forms of behaviour. Now, that is
dramatizing the analysis. And the invisible object is everywhere. You can see
how everybody is collectively involved in creating the invisible object, it is
almost as if the stage becomes an eye seeing itself.
AB: Does that mean that the actors need to understand the situation
intellectually, to be able to go on to do that? Does it need a philosophical
analysis of the play?
EB: They have to understand it analytically. You can’t say intellectual to an
English actor because he will just run off. They will ask you what the word
means, probably. There is a danger of a pointless discussion. But they do have
to understand totally what is involved in the scene. Now actors will always ...
This afternoon when there was the scene with the teapot and I was trying to
find ways of making them understand what was involved in that scene, trying
to find how to dramatize the scene. Once you can begin to open up the scene
rather than simply tell them how to do it then the actors will begin to search.
One of the actors said, before I intervened, I think Sean said to him what
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