I’m not a great fan of cracker-barrel philosophy, but…

One of the very few positives to come out of the coronavirus lockdown has been to see the way artists, both amateurs and professionals, have adapted to the completely new constraints imposed. It has been almost impossible to keep up with all the short videos circulating: orchestral instrumentalists, popular singers, members of ballet corps, performing in isolation and being post-edited together; lovers of musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan creating and performing corona-themed parodies; visual and verbal humour; lip-syncing of stand-up comedy routines (when did that become a thing?); and so on and (it sometimes seems) on and on and on.

And then there’s Staged.

For the benefit of those who don’t either live in the UK or have a way to access BBC iPlayer, and for whom this may have slipped under their radar, let me briefly explain. Simon Evans is an English comedian, who was due to start rehearsals for a production at the Chichester Festival this year…until corona. When the director suggested holding the rehearsals over Skype or Zoom, this sounded like a really bad idea to Evans, but, in a eureka moment, he realised it was a brilliant idea for a comedy drama. He and Phin Glynn, desperate to find creative work during lockdown, developed the idea. Evans recruited a couple of pretty big names in British theatre – David Tennant and Michael Sheen (who are apparently good friends in real life) and the result is a 6-part series of 15-minute episodes, following the story of Evans as director trying to guide his two leading actors, Tennant and Sheen, through Zoom rehearsals for a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author. All three play (slightly exaggerated versions of) themselves. It undoubtedly helps that both actors are married to female actors*, who also put in the odd appearance.

This is, quite simply, the laugh-out-loud funniest and sharpest humour I have seen on television for a long time. Tennant and Sheen (or Sheen and Tennant) are completely natural, and have a wonderful rapport. Indeed, Bernice and I argued about whether one scene in the final episode was rehearsed or improvised, because the response of all the cast to the lines is so authentic.**

I mention Staged only because it serves, I think, as a wonderful example of a truth about art. What initially looked like the constrictions of lockdown, preventing artists from breathing, turn out to be, rather, simply parameters. In the hands of a team of artists who are not intimidated by them, and who are prepared to explore the possibilities of this new situation, they can open up unexpected creative opportunities.

For example, with each actor’s face occupying exactly a half (or, when Evans is involved, a third) of the screen in close-up almost all the time, the focus is not on the speaker (with an occasional cutaway to the listener for a reaction), but, rather, all the actors are equal players all the time, whichever one of them is speaking at the moment. This means that the interplay and the relationship between them is always in focus. Again, the medium places tremendous importance on the facial gestures of the actors. Both of these actors, it has to be said, have very interesting faces and several months without a haircut means that their faces are interestingly framed by their hair. Finally, the contrast in the lifestyles of the actors is a constant, captured in the domestic background in front of which each of them appears. This is new, refreshing, exciting drama….and screamingly funny.

Every artist works within the limitations of the medium; the great artist makes a virtue of that necessity, and sees new possibilities within it.

There is, for me at least, a great thrill in admiring the technical skill of the artist. Alan Ayckbourn wrote a trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, which tell the story of a couple inviting four of their friends to stay with them at a country home for the weekend. Each of the three plays is set in a single area of the house – the dining room, the living room, the garden – at various times during the weekend, and to some extent the times overlap, so that if a scene in Table Manners starts at 6:00PM, and 45 minutes into the scene a character leaves the stage by walking through the door that leads to the living room, then in the play Living Together, in a scene which starts at 6:30PM, the same character will enter the stage by walking through the door from the dining room 15 minutes after the scene starts. Each play is written to stand independently, and each play does; however, the trilogy is ideally viewed as a unit, and can be viewed in any order, with no loss of impact.

Bernice and I watched it in the 1970s in Cardiff over a single weekend: Friday night; Saturday matinee; Saturday night. The production starred David Jason – then unknown but already a brilliant comic actor, and the weekend was a unique theatrical experience. As with many of Ayckbourn’s works, the technical constraints (in this case entirely self-imposed), far from holding the work back, send it soaring, and give it a very effective claustrophobic intensity. As the weekend unravels the audience revisits the scenes of disastrous events we have previously only heard about or seen the fallout from. These accumulating revisits create a sense of the intensity of the emotions closing in ever more stiflingly. (Like all the best Ayckbourn, the plays have no difficulty being simultaneously achingly funny and painfully sad.)

I have read that Ayckbourn wrote the trilogy in two weeks. While that seems to me to be a display of almost supernatural creative powers to rival Mozart’s, I can only assume that the rigid frame he had locked himself into allowed him to find relatively quickly the only way out.

And finally, m’lud, Exhibit C is a sad case of a square peg in a round hole: a stage production that was, I would argue, completely insensitive to the play it was presenting. Cast your mind back to the London theatre world of 1597. This is actually very easy, now that you can visit Shakespeare’s Globe on the south bank of the Thames in London. The first thing that struck me when we visited is that wherever you are in the audience, you are very close to the stage. This is a very different theatrical experience from the one in most of London’s theatres, especially older theatres where climbing to the upper balcony requires a Sherpa and an oxygen mask, and the view that awaits you is largely of the tops of the actors’ heads. Bernice and I once went up to London for the day and saw Frank Finlay in Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Anthony Sher in Singer (a powerful play inspired by the story of the slum landlord Peter Rachman). In both cases we stood behind the last row of seats in the upper balcony. I mention this only because the force of Sher’s performance hit us, even that far back, so powerfully that it was all we could do to remain standing.

However, that kind of acting, while brilliant in context, doesn’t work in the Globe, which calls for a more delicate touch. Shakespeare knew this, and he took full advantage of it in his writing. For example, when Iago moves to the front of the stage, so that you, in the audience, are closer to him than Othello is, at the back of the stage, you can easily accept that, while you can hear Iago’s aside, Othello cannot,

Another feature of the Globe is that it does not allow elaborate scenery. There are no wings to roll scene changes out of; no flies to drop sets from the space above the stage; no possibilities of lighting changes. This means that everything must be done through the poetry, as Shakespeare was well aware: indeed, in the Prologue to Henry V, he appealed to the audience’s imagination to supply scenery, accommodate changes of location, infer the passage of time:

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.

Nowhere does Shakespeare create magic from the technical limitations and intimacy of his stage more effectively than in Antony and Cleopatra, with its short scenes jumping repeatedly between the hedonism of Egypt and the harshness of Rome, and with its multiple scenes of intimate exchanges between just two characters. The National Theatre recently chose to broadcast, as part of its At Home series, the 2018 production directed by Simon Godwin and starring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo. It may be that, on a traditional stage, in front of a large audience stretching a long way back, this production was as great as the critics indicated. However, the filming of a production, using close-up and sensitive microphones, unavoidably emphasises anything that is ‘big’ in the acting or speaking. As a result, on the screen, there was no sense of intimacy between Antony and Cleopatra: she in particular came across as raucous. This was a bad choice of production for NT to make. They do much better sticking with productions whose very character is large and unsubtle: One Man, Two Guvnors, for example.

A more fundamental criticism, and this is a criticism of the stage production itself, is that it used the full panoply of modern staging effects: a revolving stage alternated clunkily between the sunken pools of Egypt and the satellite-fed hi tech war room of Rome. There are no fewer than 42 scenes in Antony and Cleopatra, and a production that does not recognise that this calls for minimal sets and instantaneous, seamless transition between scenes is bound to be a leaden failure.

It turns out that, while Staged proves that every problem is, indeed, an opportunity in disguise, this particular Antony and Cleopatra showed that, equally, every opportunity can be a problem in disguise.

Judge for yourselves whether Micha’el and Tslil are unmasking the opportunities in their problems, by watching their latest YouTube video, with a guest appearance by their very own toddler.

*Sorry: there’s a cultural time lag between Britain and Israel. I know I’m no longer allowed to say ‘actresses’, but I haven’t yet absorbed the fact that I’m no longer allowed to say ‘female’.

**Having just watched an interview with T&S (S&T), I can confirm that there were improvised scenes; Bernice was, of course, right.