Long day’s journey
Suddenly epics are everywhere. Ardent cycle addicts can see all eight of the RSC’s Shakespeare Histories at the Roundhouse in the space of four days. A six-hour version of War and Peace has been occupying Hampstead Theatre. Even a living dramatist, Mark Ravenhill, lately came up with a set of 18 plays, Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, admittedly lasting only 20 minutes each.
Why are we so hooked on epic structures? Mostly, I think it’s part of theatre’s need to be seen as an “event”. We are bombarded daily with a ceaseless flow of information and entertainment. We also talk of “dropping in” to a movie and often give television half our attention. But theatre confirms its special-ness by making inordinate demands on us. People fought for tickets for the recent Covent Garden Ring cycle. And I’m told the first seats to sell out for the RSC Histories were the eight-pack weekend cycles.
I’ve sat through a lot of day-long shows in my time. It all began with Peter Hall’s The Wars of the Roses back in 1963. Since then, we’ve had numerous comparable events: The Oresteia, The Mysteries, Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and the David Hare trilogy at the National; John Barton’s ten-play version of The Greeks at the RSC; Tantalus at the Barbican. And something extraordinary happens on these days. You start talking to complete strangers. You feel an unusual bond with the actors. Daily normality retreats into the background. So hermetic is the world created during these theatrical marathons that I suspect some people discover, or possibly even lose, their life-partners.
But I confess to a moment of Pauline conversion during a recent Roundhouse day seeing Henry IV Parts I & II and Henry V. Much as I loved the productions, halfway through I was overtaken by exhaustion. This may be due to external factors. I had left Greece at dawn on the Monday in time to see Richard II. By Wednesday, I was back in my seat in the Roundhouse. I don’t think it was just tiredness. There was something about the verbal and visual richness of the plays that left me feeling sated. “Is this a good idea?” I began to ask myself around three o’clock. “Are there not practical limits to how much the senses can absorb in a single day?” Naturally, I stayed the course. But I noticed that even Chalk Farm acquired a certain dirty glamour when one was eventually released for good behaviour. I began to question not only total immersion, but even the habitual conventions of theatregoing.
Max Beerbohm has a wonderful essay in Around Theatres, published in 1924, where he indulges in some sky-blue thinking. His argument is that in the evening, when plays generally take place, we are at our most sensual and sentimental. As for the afternoon, we are “tired, disillusioned, sedentary”. But, he goes on, “in the morning all our faculties are agog. We are fresh from sleep. We come into the sordid world purged by our repose from it, with all that in us is divine and elemental restored to us.”
Beerbohm admits that his dream of morning performances is unrealisable. But he has a point. It was significant that, during that day at the Roundhouse, it was the 10.30am performance of Henry IV Part I that came across with crackling vitality.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever get to the stage of regular morning shows. The audience, for a start, would be confined to the retired and leisured classes. But wouldn’t it be fun if some adventurous management gave it a whirl? I strongly advise the RSC and the National, next time they are planning an epic project, to give us morning and evening performances and allow us – and the actors – the afternoon off for a much-needed rest.
