IV. Extention.

A. Select the topic you may find interesting to enlarge upon and discuss more complex issues related to the film (may be done in the form of an interview).

1. Parents encouraging the children's future profession.

2. Why does a creative person come to a profession?

3. Absurdity of life and the theatre of the absurd.

4. Productivity of the work with an actor.

5. The greatest gift a director/a teacher must have.

6. The problem of violence in Brook's productions and in mod­ern films.

7. Peter Brook's conception of theatre.

8. Shakespeare in modern world.

9. Why should we listen to people carefully?

10. The empty space comes to using our imagination as much as we like, doesn't it?

11. Integration of cultures is a necessary way of developing art.

12. Teacher/director - student/actor relationship.

B. Render the following extracts:

1. Об этом спектакле помнят до сих пор. В театральных кру­гах о нем ходят легенды. Это был первый «бруковский» спек­такль. Он не отличался большей смелостью или оригинально­стью, чем последующие работы Питера Брука. Он просто был первым.

Некоторое время после премьеры английская театральная критика пребывала в состоянии глубокого шока. Теперь мы уже привыкли к особой, «бруковской» манере интерпретировать Шекспира. Нас не удивляет более известная свобода в обраще­нии с текстом. А выявление и выведение на первый план тех элементов философского замысла и художественной структуры,

которые позволили бы развернуть все произведение лицом к проблемам. волнующим человечество сегодня, представляется нам теперь вполне закономерным. Эта связь с современностью представлялась Бруку важнее, чем следование букве канониче­ского текста, и уж, конечно, важнее, чем соблюдение традиций.

С точки зрения критиков, а тем более шекспироведов, Брук делал недопустимые вещи. Он вымарывал полностью одни сце­ны, менял местами другие, разрушал традиционные принципы в оформлении спектакля.

2. Спустя несколько месяцев после премьеры Брук, отбива­ясь от нападок критиков и шекспироведов, заметил, что «Ромео и Джульетта» - это «пьеса, которая требует широких про­странств, где подробная декорация, детальные задники, бутафо­рия легко утрачивают всякий смысл. Здесь достаточно одного дерева на пустой сцене, чтобы передать дух одиночества, царя­щий в месте изгнания Ромео. Довольно одной сцены, чтобы соз­дать впечатление целого дома, подобно тому, как это делал Джотто в своих полотнах.

Возможно, Брук несколько перегнул палку в своем стрем­лении освободить сценическую площадку и довел мысль о не­существенности декораций до чрезмерной крайности. Не слу­чайно некоторые критики жаловались, что пустота сцены в не­которых моментах спектакля становилась «мешающим факто­ром». Но основной своей цели он все же достиг. Ему удалось передать атмосферу шекспировской Вероны, «обжигающего по­лу денного солнца, под лучами которого начинается кипение бе­зумия в крови», были созданы условия для динамической и энергичной «хореографии», которая с тех пор стала непремен­ной частью многих постановок этой трагедии. В общем Брук был прав, полагая, что наличие пространства - необходимое ус­ловие при всякой попытке передать дух Ренессанса. Статич­ность несовместима с самым существом эпохи, где всякий чело­век был прежде всего человеком действия.

3. Питер Брук задумал поставить «Короля Лира» как траге­дию человеческого бытия. Тема ее - человек и мир, или, если угодно,

человек и жизнь. При этом он исходил из такого понимания человека, человеческой жизни, законов ею управляющих и общественного бытия, которое характерно для неко­торой части интеллигенции современного Запада. Следует при­знать, что это понимание распространено довольно широко и породило такие явления в духовной жизни, как философия экзи­стенциализма, театр абсурда, «новая волна» в сфере литератур­ной и т.п.

В сущности говоря, теоретическая основа этих явлений и

есть абсолютизация идей и понятий, не имеющих универсально­го значения. Всякий раз, когда «абсурдисты» и экзистенциали­сты утверждают: «Жизнь выглядит так», им следовало бы ста­вить не точку, а запятую и добавлять: «в глазах определенного круга людей».

Это же с полным основанием может быть сказано и о ре­жиссерском замысле Брука. Ужасная картина жизни человече­ского бытия, представленная в спектакле, должна восприни­маться как воплощение вневременного, внесоциального, внеисторического всеобщего закона. Отсюда, вероятно, и соблазни­тельные параллели, сближающие работу Брука с театром абсур­да, которые можно обнаружить у целого ряда критиков, рецен­зировавших спектакль. С наибольшей отчетливостью мысль о близости режиссерского замысла Брука к сочинениям Беккета была сформулирована в обширной рецензии, опубликованной в американском журнале «Ньюсуик». «Брук вывел пьесу, - писал рецензент, - за пределы ее эпохи и за пределы самой шекспиров­ской трагедии. Он поставил ее как «черную драму» безжалостно­го разрушения... Поступая так, режиссер дал возможность ей об­рести современное звучание. Проявилась связь этой трагедии с такими документами человеческой несвободы, неискупленности, как пьесы Беккета «В ожидании Годо» и «Конец игры».

(Ю. Ковалев «Пол Скофилд»)

С. There are two extracts from Shakespeare's plays «A Mid­summer Night's Dream» and «King Lear». Listen to the actors' performance and try to imitate the intonation and expressive­ness. Explain where the scene is laid and the characters' position.

1.

There sleeps Tifania sometime of the night, Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin, 'Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in; And with the juice of this I’ll steak her eyes, And make her full of hateful fantasies.

2.

Know that we have divided

In three our kingdom; and

tis our fast intent

To shake all cares and business from our age,

Conferring them on younger strengths,

While we, unburden'd crawl toward death.

3.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks; rage, blow.

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks.

You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder

Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th' world;

Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,

That makes ingrateful man.

D. Below you will come by the helpful information from а BBC programme dedicated to P. Brook's King Lear. Read on the issue of multiple levels of the play that make its production up-to-date.

Q.: The production of Lear that you staged quite some time ago has had an extraordinary influence and then, of course, you did the film What was it about the play of King Lear that fascinated you?

That is very simple. I really think it is one of the greatest, per­haps the greatest, play in existence. I waited for many years, quite simply because it seemed that the decision to make something as im­portant as King Lear depends on there being in existence an actor who you really believe is ready and capable of taking it on. I waited, having worked many times with Paul Scoffield, till the time when he felt he was ready.

You need the stamina of somebody in full possession of their health to be able to portray this very unique old man who had, at the age of eighty or eighty-five, an incredible strength and vitality. So Paul, who was about forty, was exactly right to take on this challenge. Q.: What sort of challenge is it to direct a play like that?

Unless you're very stupid, you're bound to see that your point of view can't be very broad. Each person's point of view is very limited and it shrinks the more you say that's what I believe, that's what I think, this is my conception, until really that becomes something so narrow.

I am now, with the help of all the actors, trying to discover what this play is about for us today. King Lear is a very rich, complicated, dense, complex myth. It is a myth in the sense that like any great le­gend the start is not something that you have to justify psychologi­cally. A king calls together his three daughters and says, «I am going to divide my kingdom». This is the beginning of an irresistibly strong story which touches anybody because it's about real things, about fa­thers and children, property, power and possession.

What does a myth mean? A myth means that something profound in human experience is capsulated in a little situation that needs no justification, it is there and you’re with it.

If you say King Lear was a silly old idiot otherwise he wouldn't have done something so stupid as to divide his kingdom - you're finished, you can't do the play any longer, because if you look honestly and attentively and in a sensitive way at what's written, you see he isn't a silly old fool. So, a point of view that capsulates him into a single moral judgement is just idiotic because it reduces something great to something trivial, and that can never be a virtue.

It is at the same time a metaphysical play in the same sense that every myth is metaphysical, in the sense that it talks about something beyond anything that can be analysed and capsulated in normal, eve­ryday terms. The great quality of the play is that the two are ba­lanced. This is a quality that you find in Homer, that you find in Greek tragedy.

Of course he's a father. He is also a dictator. He's an old and apparently totally successful monarch, the equivalent of the sort of dictators that we still have today all over the world. Only one thing compared to all the other dictators that we know and have around us to this day and that is that there is deep-down buried in him, some­thing that has not been completely destroyed in his inner sensitivity and that is shown dramatically by his relationship with the Fool.

His deepest quality is hidden, submerged, he is blind, he is proud, he is arrogant, he is stupid in the way that anybody is stupid if they're completely eaten up with their own self-importance, but something is not destroyed. Cordelia is linked to that, the Fool is linked to that.

The daughter is not one rebellious daughter, it's a range of three forms of daughter rebellion, going from the hypocritical, where the rebellion is completely covered up, to the sincere, where the rebel­lion is inseparable from a love and respect for the hidden nature of the father. Q.: What does Lear actually go through in the storm scene?

He knows very well that the moment he's not there, the children will start quarrelling amongst themselves and so he realises that as he makes - what any old person with children wisely does - his \V ill now and supervises this and, as he says, remains like a shadow watching over it, he will avoid future strife because he doesn’t want,

after his death, the kingdom to collapse. It is a very sensible decision for an old person still in full possession of it, not to go on clinging to power but give it up. So he renounces his power. Then he makes his one fatal mistake that brings about the tragedy, through losing his temper From then onwards he loses step by step, because he loses what he wanted very much - to retain his dignity and retain his way

of life.

Having lost the human support, the next inevitable step is being

turned out of the house. He loses simple human comfort, which any old person naturally expects and which he's in no way prepared for -to be naked in the storm. This is such a shock to him, that this is a revelation. Through the powerful and cruel shock of this experience, something in him that hasn't stirred for years begins to open up and he begins to ask himself questions about power, about being a king, about the meaning of life, about what it is to have possessions, in a completely new way. It's mind blowing.

Then, when he comes out of his deep sleep, like a long therapy -there's this deep sleep therapy which is a known and important de­vice in mental illness - when he comes out of it, something is clari­fied, something is simplified. He discovers a contact with life through the love of his daughter.

Q.: Why do you think Shakespeare included the blindness of when he's starting to lose his mind? Does that create a challenge for you as a director?

That's where a director can do nothing without the right actors and that's why the part demands everything of an actor, because he has to find his way truthfully to all these obscure zones in his own understanding and beyond his own understanding. He has to open himself up to something that's hidden deeply, which is one's own potential madness. We all have a potential of madness which we keep well bottled up.

In all the great traditions of the world you'll find the same theme expressed m almost the same way - all of us are blind and deaf, we think we see but we don't see, we think we hear but we don't hear.

Lear is supremely blind. That is a fundamental theme which leads to the very emptiness of the end.

GUIDE

to Hamlet

a Franco Zeffirelli video film with Mel Gibson as Hamlet

and Glen Close as Gertrude.