Sunday, November 02, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Editor

LONDON -- Mark Rylance doesn't like the label "authentic." But the soft-spoken, American-raised actor and artistic director is not dogmatic about it.

Mark Rylance is rarely seen without a hat offstage; onstage in Pittsburgh, the actor and director of the Globe Theatre will be crowned as Olivia in "Twelfth Night." Click photo for larger image. Related article Opposites are attractive in Rylance's personality Audio Amid the bustle of the Globe Theatre, Mark Rylance talks about plans for staging "Twelfth Night" in Pittsburgh (1.4MB MP3) Visit the following sites to download MP3 players: Real Player Microsoft Windows Media Player WinAMP Reviews of this summer's performances at the Globe Theatre Resurrected Shakespearean theater has authentically exciting productions "Twelfth Night" Where: The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust presents Shakespeare's Globe at Theater Square, 665 Penn Ave. When: Performances run Nov. 12-16: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; student matinee Thursday at 11; with a talk-back session after Friday's show. Tickets: $50 ($20 students); 412-456-6666 or www.pgharts.org.

Indeed, on a warm summer morning in his small, airy office atop the reconstructed Globe Theatre on London's Bankside, looking across the Thames toward the dome of St. Paul's -- swathed in scaffolding, as though, Rylance notes, Christopher Wren were still at work -- he is gracious and forthcoming. Head of the Globe company since it was founded in 1995, he cares about nearly everything that has to do with the Globe, Shakespeare and theater at large.

At ease, pursuing a conversation wherever it goes, he jumps up to grab a book, illustrate a dance step or trace a movement pattern in the air. With charisma and enthusiasm, he speaks for a project with radical goals and assumptions.

Chiefly, they include using the Globe company and its unique Elizabethan stage to explore and question much taken for granted in 20th-century staging. And while he's at it, Rylance, 43, wants to return the actor to the center of the theatrical event, diminishing the command -- tyranny, he might say -- of the director.

"Actors need to recover their ground." He speaks of "the old line of actors handing on, not just [memorabilia like Edmund] Kean's sword, but advice -- a tradition of when to hold still, how to give and take focus."

Instead of "authentic," the umbrella term for the conditions of preparation and performance Rylance enlists in this project is "original practices." Five American cities are getting a look at the result in the Globe's touring production of "Twelfth Night," which arrives in Pittsburgh Nov. 12-16.

One objection to "authentic" is its hint of the ersatz. It has become an advertising label like "genuine," used in hawking imitation art or theme park phoniness. So used, "authentic" actually means inauthentic, just as recent TV has co-opted and debased "reality." The result on stage is what the British sneer at as "heritage theater," a tourism-driven commodity like a Renaissance Faire or Medieval Feaste.

In response, Rylance points out that he's an associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which also attracts tourists. The public responds to the "feeling of heritage," he says. But while such charges still linger in the academic margins, they've been largely silenced by the seriousness and skill of the Globe's eight seasons.

The other objection to "authentic" is the reverse, that it claims too much. Today's audience and actors can never be Elizabethan, and from them all else flows. So Rylance says he considers "authentic" to be "confusing and arrogant." Tim Carroll, master of play (a.k.a. director) for "Twelfth Night," calls it "a claim that is begging to be shot down. Anybody with an opinion or a bit of knowledge you lack or have chosen to ignore is able to stand up and say, 'You're charlatans.' We know it would be madness to claim what we do is authentic in detail."

In contrast, "original practices" is designedly plural. "Some people are keen to say we can't do it at all," says Carroll, "just because we can't do it perfectly," but, undeterred, the company picks and chooses what to explore from a whole range of Elizabethan theater practices. Carroll and Rylance both compare this to the movement for period musical instruments, which was sneered at in the '70s but which has recovered much about baroque music.

On the road

One original practice is touring itself. Shakespeare's company also took "Twelfth Night" on tour, staging it at London's Middle Temple Hall on Feb. 2, 1602, in front of the same 1574 hall screen present today. To mark the play's 400th anniversary, Rylance's much-praised production began in that same hall in 2002. Both Shakespeare and Rylance then took "Twelfth Night" back to the Globe's thrust stage. But for the American tour, it is re-creating that dining hall staging, bringing a hall screen and rectangular oak floor.

At the Globe Theatre in London, "Twelfth Night" is recreated in the original practice of using men in women's roles. The cast, on its way to Pittsburgh's Cultural Trust starting Nov. 12, includes, from left, Rhys Meredith (Sebastian), Mark Rylance (Olivia), Liam Brennan (Orsino) and Michael Brown (Viola). Click photo for larger image.

Rylance has brought his company to New York before in brief runs of "Cymbeline" and "Two Gentlemen of Verona," but this tour skips New York to play eight weeks in five cities: Los Angeles (UCLA, closing today), Minneapolis (Guthrie Theatre, Nov. 5-9), Pittsburgh (Cultural Trust, Nov. 12-16), Ann Arbor (Nov. 18-23) and Chicago (Shakespeare Theatre, Nov. 26-Dec. 14).

Barring the transatlantic flight, hitting the road like this is what Shakespeare's own company went through in forays to court or beyond that were essential to its financial success. At the open-air Globe, Rylance's company is limited to a May-September season. There are plans, so far unfunded, to build an adjacent indoor Jacobean theater, like the indoor Blackfriars into which Shakespeare's company eventually expanded.

But the recent experience of taking productions to Westminster Hall, Hampton Court and Middle Temple Hall -- "actual, existing spaces [Shakespeare] played in" -- leads Rylance to wonder if touring alone might keep the company together.

It also pays timely tribute to the rebuilt Globe's founder, American actor Sam Wanamaker, who died in December 1993. Rylance says, "It's about time we came back to America and celebrated the extraordinary vision and generosity of this American," still a "very active presence" at the Globe.

For the tour, Rylance says, "We asked every venue to find a hall," meaning a simple open space, even just a warehouse, to replicate the original dining hall conditions. The flexibility of the raw space in the Cultural Trust's new Theater Square building beside the O'Reilly Theater -- space due to be fashioned into a cabaret theater next year -- helped Pittsburgh secure its spot on the tour.

Presumably the space will allow Rylance's company to do what it did at Middle Temple Hall, letting the audience enter early while musicians play and actors don their original clothing. "We also plan some Elizabethan confits [sweets], so your senses are introduced gradually to their world, to the subtleties of the music, clothing and food -- not just to the play."

As he talks, Rylance suddenly imagines doing "King Lear" in the very same Banqueting Hall in Whitehall where Charles I heard it as a boy and was later tried: "The warnings Shakespeare was giving those leaders, to beware of separating themselves from the people, were not heeded," he exclaims, starting off on a fresh tack. It's a reminder that Rylance first ventured into theatrical leadership in 1990 with his own collaborative company, Phoebus Cart, which staged plays at sacred or magical sites.

In 1991, that led him to the site of the Globe, then under construction. On its circular foundation, his company staged "The Tempest." And Rylance came to know Wanamaker, who insisted on scrupulous research.

"Sam said the heart [of Shakespeare] was to recover the original way of making the art," Rylance says with affectionate respect. For that, the Globe, re-created using original building methods, is the chief laboratory.

Its openness, where the audience is as fully lit as the players and there's competition from airplanes and weather, creates a style "more like sports. You have to use the field, create opportunities for passes. ... Bolingbroke sends the ball to me, I send it to Mowbray." He stands up and begins to act it out. Then he shows a chart of Globe stage movement patterns, looking like a series of soccer plays, and speaks of the plastic movement needed.

"It's a very visceral space," he says, for audience as well as actors. Much of the audience stands.

In Pittsburgh, in the dining hall configuration, the standing area will be replaced by pillows for some spectators. Otherwise, the conditions of the Globe will be evident mainly in the style of play. But other original practices are independent of place, such as costumes, music -- and casting.

Male and female

The last is most evident: Rylance's "Twelfth Night" is performed by an all-male company. Rylance himself plays Olivia, the mourning aristocrat. In praising his performance, one British critic called it a "heart-fluttering performance"; another, "awesomely, exquisitely funny"; a third, "one of the most brilliant Shakespearean performances I have ever seen," ranking with Scofield and Olivier.

This may surprise those who believe Shakespeare's company used boys to play the romantic female leads. Rylance's wife, Claire van Kampen, the company's master of theater music, says, "I just don't believe it was young boys." Boys of 14 or 15 already have deep voices, she notes, so if voice were the chief concern, they would have had to use children, who could hardly play such complex roles.

"Mark's well suited to female roles," van Kampen says. "It's not to do with age, but with vocal tract and the physiology of his face, the high, reedy pitch, and his [small] size." She likens the Elizabethan companies' use of men as women to the onnagata of Japanese Kabuki. Older women characters were presumably played by comic actors, in the style of the Dames (character leads) in traditional British panto. For the Globe, Peter Storey plays Maria, Olivia's housekeeper, drawing on long experience of Dame roles.

In "Twelfth Night," gender itself is problematic. Shakespeare took the gender of his actors into account in exploring enigma. So following his original practice helps us recover layers of meaning that modern practice obscures.

Rylance speaks of Shakespeare's "ongoing swing back and forth between the intellectual and visceral," assisted by his "use of sexual energy to carry higher philosophical meanings -- the marriage of Earth and heaven." After all, the original Globe was located in the red-light district and was undoubtedly "full of prostitutes," he says, like staging a play in a modern strip club -- an original practice we just have to imagine.

Music and dance

One of the company's most striking original practices is dancing. In 1599, Thomas Platter, a Swiss traveler, recorded a visit to the Globe to see "Julius Caesar," after which there was "a most elegant and curious dance" by four men, two dressed as women. Though we are used to Shakespeare's comedies ending with the dance called for in the script, it strikes us odd that a tragedy should do the same. But Shakespeare's great clown, Will Kemp, was famous for post-show jigs.

"It feels increasingly right that at the end of stories we stamp and dance and clear the air, get [audience members] back into their bodies," Rylance says. It's also an aerobic workout and very good for developing the actors' sense of verse rhythm. And it provides ecstatic release, which no one seems to enjoy more than Rylance.

The music is live. Van Kampen and six musicians accompany the tour. Trained as a concert pianist by a pupil of Vaughan Williams, in the mid-'80s van Kampen became music director at the RSC, where she and Rylance met. Now, she conceives of her role as intermediary between theater and music.

In consort with Keith McGowan, music director and master of historical music, van Kampen decides what combination of original instruments works for each play. For "Twelfth Night," they will use such instruments as theorbo, rauschpfeife, curtal, hautboy, recorder, violin, flute, lizard, sackbut, trumpet and percussion.

Other Globe shows make use of shawm, dulcian, cornett, and bagpipes. "There's far more choice in Renaissance music than people think," van Kampen says. Itinerant Elizabethan musicians worked at both high aristocratic mansions and playhouses. Trumpeters (to command cavalry) and drummers (infantry) were needed for war, but there were too many for Elizabeth to employ steadily, so they were available to the theaters, too. There were similar connections through the Queen's Wardrobe, where theaters often obtained costumes.

The extent of the costume work is apparent. Shakespeare's company wore contemporary clothes but, when Rylance's company uses period styles -- specializing in sensuality and color -- they are hand-sewn as clothes, not as costumes, a distinction important to him.

Four wardrobe people are traveling with the tour, along with the master of makeup, who uses pigment with an oil base (no lead). For the men playing women, chest hair is waxed off.

'It should be playful'

There are many original practices the Globe company does not pursue, such as original pronunciation: "I like a mixture," says Rylance. "I feel it is unlikely it was homogenized. And some actors, like me, have [messed] up their accents. It's changed so much, I don't know what my accent is."

Speed is another. Rylance believes Shakespeare's phrase, "the two hours' traffic of the stage" is literal, though he assumes "two hours" could mean "less than three." Even so, that would take a speed difficult for modern ears.

As to "master of play," Rylance says the term is designed to return the director to the acting company. "The master of play is the captain of the ship, [concerned with] the relationship between actors, between actors and audience and of all to the story."

"Twelfth Night" master of play is Tim Carroll, 37, who has been with the Globe since 1999. He admits that his title "is really a matter of emphasis. Mark having worked in a lot of hierarchical, patriarchal theaters, where the director is at the apex, a combination of philosopher, tyrant, guru, father figure and Svengali, he was keen to reconfigure it as not a pyramid but a circle and to use various masters of their craft to feed into the actor in the middle."

But the title is also appropriate "because it is a play, in the widest sense -- it should be playful."

Carroll also notes original practices the Globe does not pursue. On acting styles, "we decided quite early on that any decision to act in an Elizabethan manner would be such guesswork, so patronizing and wrong, it was safer intellectually and practically to take at face value what Shakespeare says about acting in his plays -- about naturalness and living through the experience and making a real connection with the audience."

Nor is he interested in original practices on accent or race. "It's deadly to suggest to actors that there is one correct pronunciation or dialect. None of those actors would have sounded then as they sound now; they came from all over England." He is happy to use black actors, because "it's a pure accident of history" that there were no black actors then, "and they wouldn't have had an American, either, thus no Mark."

As to text, the Globe takes the usual care, without going to scholarly extremes. For "Twelfth Night," "we've barely cut anything -- about five lines."

Directing at the Globe, Carroll says, "You learn to let go of some of the toys you rely on elsewhere, [like] lights and sound, learning to create focus and atmosphere without those props. It has taught me an enormous amount about relating with the audience. ... It taught me to relinquish control, aiming instead at creating situations which are fruitful and allow interesting things to happen."

Among those, the Globe's "Twelfth Night" ranks high.

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