THE NEW YORK TIMES once
said Scott Shepherd was a practitioner of "extreme acting". "It
was a long time ago," laughs the Wooster Group stalwart when I remind him
of the quote. "Maybe I've got less extreme with age."
There's no doubt the
newspaper had a point. This is an actor who played every part in Macbeth in a
one-man staging nearly 20 years before Alan Cumming had the same idea. More
recently, Shepherd memorised The Great Gatsby in its entirety for a celebrated
six-and-a-half hour performance.
By contrast, playing the
lead role in Hamlet may sound like taking it easy. Except, with the Wooster
Group involved, this is no straightforward Shakespeare. We're talking about the
experimental theatre company whose production of La Didone six years ago in the
Edinburgh International Festival managed to fuse a 1641 opera with a 1965
B-movie. The Wooster Group does not do conventional.
True to form, Hamlet is
less a staging of the play than a staging of a movie of the play. In 1964,
Richard Burton played the doomy Dane in a Broadway production directed by John
Gielgud. At the end of the run, in a move that now seems 40 years ahead of its
time, the company filmed the show with 17 cameras and, thanks to "the
miracle of Electronovision", screened it for two nights only in 2000 US
cinemas.
Now, director Elizabeth
LeCompte has dug up what remains of that rare movie footage and used it as the
basis for her Hamlet. Splicing the two things together, she gives us live and
recorded Shakespeare at the same time. It means Shepherd has the task of
playing Burton playing Hamlet, sync-ing every gesture and articulation with
that of the great movie star.
"In certain forms of
Japanese theatre you spend years meticulously copying the performance of some
kind of master," says Shepherd. "In the western tradition, we think
it's each actor's duty to bring some original idea. Their performance is
supposed to spring from them as some kind of self-expression."
By working from
recordings, the actor found himself freed from this expectation. "It's a
way of getting beyond your own tricks, clichés and impulses," he says.
"You're doing gestures because you've been instructed to. I've got to move
my arm here now because that's what's happening in the movie. Out of that
emerges a performance that you begin to understand and shape to yourself.
Making your performance becomes a process of discovery as much as
invention."
Shepherd can say this now,
but it took time to get into the right frame of mind. His impulse was to play
Hamlet in his own way, almost as a comment on how Burton played it. That,
though, was too confusing to watch. "I thought I would put my performance
next to his. I suppose I thought I could compete with him. But I soon learned
that wasn't going to work and there was more to be discovered by finding some
sort of collaboration with him. I had to learn how to channel the ghost of that
performance from 50 years ago and build my performance on top of that."
Few actors would ever get
the chance to study another actor's performance in such detail. For Shepherd,
once he went with the flow and stopped thinking of Burton's style as
old-fashioned, it has been like having a personal masterclass with one of the
greats. "I learned to appreciate what he was doing and find those impulses
within myself," he says. "It's kinaesthetic. By doing the movement,
you begin to understand something that you don't understand by watching. It's
an education for me and the group as a whole."
He hasn't started talking
in a Welsh accent but he has felt Burton's influence on his work. "There's
something that I keyed into about his confidence with the language of
Shakespeare. With a lot of actors, you end up feeling their struggle to sell
Shakespeare's expressions as natural. Burton didn't have that anxiety. I tried
to learn that from him."
Some Wooster Group
reinterpretations have given only a fragmentary taste of the source material, but
this one does offer a coherent, narratively complete version of Shakespeare's
tragedy. Bringing Burton back to life may sound like a gimmick, but there is
method in the madness. Hamlet is haunted by the ghost of his father and, here,
Shepherd is effectively haunted by the ghost of Burton. "A looming figure
comes back from the grave to give him instructions that he doesn’t entirely
agree with," says Shepherd, who has been obsessed by the play since
directing it at college and "inadvertently" memorising it. "It may
come as a surprise to connect the Wooster Group with this old Broadway play
from the 60s but this is a genuine connection."
WHERE & WHEN
Hamlet
Royal Lyceum Theatre,
10–13 August, 7.30pm
From £10, Tel: 0131 473
2000
© Mark Fisher 2013
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