Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show ended after thirty years last night with a film about the RSC that embodied all the programme’s virtues and vices: a patient, informative documentary with an almost Stalinist lack of critical rigour.
The decline of the company under Adrian Noble was air-brushed out, the present situation taken as good, brave, positive.
There were embarrassing shots of the rehearsal room and a risible film sequence in the Ukraine with artistic director Michael Boyd and designer Tom Piper, both scruffily dressed with their shirts hanging outside their trousers, listening to a bunch of old peasant women in headscarves.
The central focus was on the Russian production of The Grain Store, about the 1933 famine, which played for a mere handful of performances in the Courtyard last autumn.
Then there were shots of the As You Like It production in which the acting was as startlingly bad as indeed it had been in the summer, but nobody said anything about this.
Boyd gave an emphatically decisive interview to Bragg about “taking our art and craft more seriously” and “flying in the face of commercial commonsense” but he wasn’t challenged on anything. Bragg just grinned and looked mildly perplexed.
Boyd was also allowed to remark that he was glad that the company was no longer holed up in the Barbican — another word for fortress, he wryly noted — but wasn’t asked about the company’s confused London profile, or whether he cared about this.
There were some enticing shots of the new theatre going up by the river in Stratford and Boyd in a hard hat proudly claimed that they had now reduced the distance of the furthest seat from the stage by over a half.
In The Grain Store rehearsal there was a top table pow wow over the translation of a single word: was it to be gruel, soup, stew or porridge? Had nobody thought of bouillabaisse, chowder or consomme?
The actors now have voice and movement classes every day and have to put themselves through a crash programme of Meyerhold’s biomechanics. No more standing around pretending to be trees, apparently. No wonder they look so exhausted in performances.
It was good that Boyd said the RSC could learn a lot about how to do Shakespeare by “exposing” themselves to the Spanish Golden Age dramatists, or Russian theatre practices, and (isn’t this at least controversial, if not downright pathetic?) by linking up with other British companies.
You do wonder how distinctive this will leave the RSC as an ensemble. Won’t it resemble a job lot of other influences rather than something organically developed through much closer attention to Shakespeare and indeed the Elizabethan and Jacobean repertoire they now largely ignore? Well, it was something Bragg might at least have asked about.
Instead he concluded weakly that “it was good to see the brave work continuing.” So that’s all right then.
Except that some grainy footage of Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade film and Vivien Merchant and Ian Holm in The Homecoming suggested there was still some way to go. And they were productions of well over forty years ago…with really wonderful actors.
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Dear Michael – I simply want to both encourage and applaud your continual prodding of the RSC. Somebody needs to be saying something about what is going on there – and it comes well from a man of your calibre and position.
Unfortunately, I did not see the recent South Bank Show on the Company as I am currently living abroad – and so I can’t comment.
But what I can comment on is the truly poor standard of production and acting under the present regime. They talk alot about what they are doing and what they are aiming to achieve – an awful lot of hype about buildings and projects, and an awful lot of spin about extra Meyerhold, Voice, and Movement classes for the actors, the Long Ensemble et al – but I see no evidence of any real quality in the place where it counts – on the stage. As you rightly point out, the standard of acting in the recent “As You Like It” was “startlingly bad” and the whole production a blurred mess. I had to spend twenty minutes calming down across the road afterwards before venturing to being able to speak to anyone. In fact my anger was so great that after ten of those minutes, I looked in vain for any presence of Michael Boyd – in order that I could might take him firmly by the throat and ask him if he felt that that was good enough.
It really angers and upsets me to see where the RSC now is. One can’t help but remember, as you do, those days of the 60s and 70s – the focus on the text – unbelievable!
I know that I am not alone in my reaction – and it’s time to put our heads above the parapet.
So please – keep prodding away Michael, on our behalf. Because as things are at the moment – it simply will not do.
I thought this was a real damp squib of a final bow for Melvyn and the SBS. Why choose this rather low-key production when he could have featured, say, a profile of Greg Hicks, the one truly great current RSC actor.
It was obvious Bragg hadn’t bothered to do any background research prior to filming and therefore equally obvious why the South Bank Show has finished main channel transmission. Same old pompous mantras from Boyd, indulgence from Bragg and a luvvie luv in. Won’t do in the new era of ‘public’ (eg you and me) accountability; but like Hytner and the RNT Boyd and the RSC are hugely admired by ACE with new money always available when they run short!
I agree the programme didn’t challenge Boyd, Surely the RSC had leaving the Barbican was a bad idea and has had a negative impact. I would also have liked Boyd to have been asked about new work which does seem to have gone down hill.
I fear for the RSC. Having seen all of the productions in The Courtyard since the two main houses closed, I can only say ‘HELP’. With a couple of notable exceptions (McKellen’s ‘Lear’ and Tennant’s ‘Hamlet’) the standard has not so much been low – simply disastrous. Actors who cannot speak the verse, understand the character and appear to have no feeling for Shakespeare and the play. Best summed up by a very distinguished gentlemen who stood in front of me in the queue for coffee in the interval of one appaulling production (‘Merchant of Venice’) He suddenly turned to me and barked ‘What do you think?’ I told him….’Quite,’ he said.’They sound as if they are reading the telephone directory – and very badly at that’. I shudder to think how the RSC will cope with three theatres up and running.
Thanks for making my morning a little bit better with this great article!!
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