Theatre is not all one thing....

One of the shortest interviews in Richard Eyre's book of them (Talking Theatre, Interviews with Theatre People) is with Cameron Mackintosh, the extraordinary entrepreneurial producer of shows like Les Mis, Phantom, Miss Saigon and more.

In this interview there's no talk of Brecht, or Beckett, or Joan Littlewood - people who dominate the questions in many of the other interviews. Here the name of Andrew Lloyd Webber isn't temporarily forgotten by the interviewee (as it is in the preceding interview with John McGrath); in this interview, of course, it's celebrated.

There's one brief question and answer I'd like to quote - it comes from page 278 of the book.

Eyre: Do you accept some sort of hierarchy of art by whichpeople talk about operetta as sort of second-rate are and, as it were, Verdi and Mozart as first-rate art?

Mackintosh: I always thought the best defence of that was a wonderful critic in the Sunday Times called Harold Hobson, who wrote about a Ray Cooney farce saying: 'This is on an equal part with Hamlet.' Because, you know, whatever the art is, as long as it is absolutley of the best and true to what it is trying to do, then it is a marvellous piece of work. To me, there is absolutely no difference.

Through the rest of the book we've had the 'intellectual' theatre people saying some wonderful things, but also seemingly focused on political, physical, metaphysical, out on the edge theatre. Mackintosh is quite refreshing. Pity there's no more of him in the book!

Working to the script

It's not easy to drag in a comment about a stainless steel drum when you're intending to write about actors and playwrights and the theatre. Though if I go to a different kind of theatre - that is, the one in a hospital where operations are done - I can find a connection: there you'll find dressing drums and stainless steel kidney trays, and yikes! catheter trays. Please don't remind me.

A short while ago I came across an unusual interview with actress Laura Linney. Each question had been posed by an email correspondent to the New York Times.

Someone asked: How does being the daughter of a playwright impact how you approach a stage role, if at all? and Linney responded:

Oh yes, it certainly has influenced the way I read a play, or any script for that matter. I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have an intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used.

I tend to approach everything with story first. Every choice I make I hope will feed the story and flesh out the narrative.

It's an interesting response; there are some actors who don't seem to find the original script that important, and substitute words of their own - or worse, there are directors who encourage them to do so.

In their book, Notes on Directing, Hauser and Reich note in their 25th point: Director Lloyd Richards said that if you [the director] continually find yourself itching to make changes in a script, consider whether you should give up directing and take up playwriting.

I've just been reading another book on the theatre - Talking Theatre, by Richard Eyre. It's a series of interviews with about fifty famous playwrights, directors, designers, actors, and others. More than once the comment is made in relation to Samuel Beckett's plays that even the punctuation mattered - if there were three commas at a certain spot in the dialogue, it meant a longer pause needed to be taken. Beckett's writing was so precise the actors could rely on it to work if they followed the instructions to the letter.