Michael Caine on learning lines

I read a small book by Michael Caine called Acting in Film over the holidays. It was timely, as I'm due to start rehearsals in another play in a couple of weeks. What's that got to do with acting in a film, you might ask. Quite a lot, as it happens. Certainly there are differences, but in one respect in particular Mr Caine offers some excellent advice, and that's about learning lines. What he has to say may not be everyone's view, but I found it helpful.

The first thing of note is this: The first step in preparation is to learn your lines until saying them becomes a predictable reflex. And don’t mouth them silently; say them aloud until they become totally your property. Hear yourself say them, because the last thing you want is the sound of your own voice taking you by surprise or not striking you as completely convincing. If you can’t convince yourself, the chances are that you won’t convince the character opposite you, or the director. You’re your first best audience long before anybody else hears you. So don’t be an easy audience. Keep asking for more. I learn lines on my own; I never have anyone read. Nevertheless, I try to learn lines as dialogue, as logical replies to what someone else has said or as a logical response to a situation. You’ll never find me going down the page with an envelope, blocking out my own speech and revealing the one before because it then becomes nothing more than “cues” and “speeches.” If you haven’t grasped the logic of why you say a particular thing, you won’t say it properly or convincingly. And if your thoughts aren’t linked to what you’re saying, then you won’t be able to say a line as if you invented it on the spot. So you must be familiar with the whole conversation, not just your own bits. One of the most crucial jobs you’ll have as an actor will be to know what you’re thinking when you’re not talking.

I've found as I've got older that fluency is something I struggle with, that sense of being able to say the line without stumbling over a particular word. Caine writes here that the lines need to become a predictable reflex, your 'property.' He notes elsewhere in the book that the difference between working on stage and working in movies is that the stage actor learns more about his part as he goes through rehearsals, but a movie actor is expected to turn up on the first day of the shoot and get on with the job as though he'd been rehearsing for months. But I've found more and more that if I know my lines in advance, before I start rehearsal, I feel much more confident. Of course, if it's a big part and you've only been informed that you've got the part a little while before rehearsals start, then you may still be getting the lines under your belt once you start rehearsing. However, with this current part (which is a small one) I'm going to aim to have my lines learnt before we start rehearsing. It boosts the confidence enormously, and that's something Caine is all for doing.

He adds: Say your lines aloud while you’re learning them until you find what strikes you as the best possible expression of that particular thought. If there are plausible variations, develop them, practice them, too; but keep them up your sleeve. If the director rejects your brilliant interpretation, you’re not left in a blank state of horror. You've already imagined and prepared other reactions to demonstrate. And most important, you’ve allowed for some element of malleability in your performance. Give your best reading as if it were the only one possible; but your mind should be hanging loose enough to take a leap, if necessary. For the moment, go with the line readings that seem to you the most valid. It may take some doing, but once the thought process is right, the words will follow. So much of it really is a matter of repetition, of saying the lines over and over again until you’re sick of them; until someone can give you a cue, and you can say, feel, and react to the whole cycle of events, including those related to everyone else’s parts. That confidence is your safeguard against terror. Otherwise, in the tension of the close-up, when you’re standing there and someone is saying, “Quiet! Turn over! Speed! Action!” you may well go, “To bum or not to bim, that is the question!”

Of course the stage actor doesn't have anyone insisting you say the thing correctly from the word go, but some directors do make you tense, and if your preparation of the lines is sound, then at least you won't be forgetting the lines because some other aspect of the rehearsal has upset your equilibrium. Anyway, even as an amateur, it's good to have a professional attitude. 

He also writes: It may sound like a contradiction, but you achieve spontaneity on the set through preparation of the dialogue at home. As you prepare, find ways of making your responses appear newly minted, not preprogrammed. In life, we often pick up the thought that provokes our next remark halfway through someone else’s speech. Thoughts don’t leap to the mouth automatically. We don’t interrupt at every occasion when a thought formulates itself; or, if we do, we don’t have many friends. Similarly, in a film script, your internal thought processes might well start articulating themselves long before you get the chance to speak. The script sometimes directs you to interrupt, but if it doesn’t, your thought may start well before you get a chance to respond. There may be a key word that triggers you during the sentence the other actor is saying. So pick up on that; form your thought and be ready to speak. For example: Other Actor: I’ve got to get a bus to Clapham—I’m already late for my date. You: You won’t get far. There’s a bus strike. The other actor doesn’t stop talking after he says “bus,” so you can’t get in and say your line at the actual moment of thought recognition. But when you hear the key word “bus,” from that point on you know what you’re going to say directly after he stops. You can show this by your reaction. And that bit of acting can only come from serious listening.

This is good advice altogether, but again the important thing for me is that achieving of spontaneity by being thoroughly prepared. And part of preparation is trying out all sorts of ways of saying the line, so that it doesn't sound stale. 

There are a host of other things in the book that apply not just to film acting but to acting in general, and I think any actor could benefit from it.  

Acting in Films

Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making by Michael Caine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a shorter book than I expected. Nevertheless, it has a great deal of valuable advice, especially for actors working in the movies. I don't anticipate doing this myself in the near future, but I do a bit of acting on stage (as an amateur) and some of what Caine says here is applicable to that. I like his basic down to earth approach, no frills, just good solid hard work. It's his professionalism that shines through in this book. Don't think of being an actor (a professional one, anyway) if you're not prepared to give your all to the time you're being paid to work.
He's helpful with learning lines, and with working on a character; while he's not a method actor, his 'method' is sound and useful. He's very helpful in making the distinction between stage work and screen work. There are still very good stage actors who get caught out when they first work in a movie.
The book started life as transcripts from a masterclass Caine did, which explains it's rather bitsy style. However, it's a good little book for actors, and I'm certainly glad to have come across it.

View all my reviews

You Can't Take It With You

Last night I watched - for the first time, I think - the 1938 movie, You Can't Take It With You. I've had a DVD of it for some time, but apparently have never got round to viewing it! Though it's based on the stage play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, it substantially changes a number of things, drops some characters, adds others, and in general makes a much more successful fist of things than if it had stuck to the layout of the original play.

A good deal of the original script survives, especially in terms of the main characters, but the snobbish and extremely wealthy Kirbys are given a much greater amount of screen time than they get on stage, and this adds strongly to the contrast between them and the eccentric Vanderhofs. In this version, Mr Kirby, a ruthless businessman, is about to take over entire blocks of the city in order to build a massive munitions factory.  In the process, a whole community will be torn apart. The only thing standing in his way is Mr Vanderhof, who refuses to sell his house - it's right in the middle of the proposed development. Apart from the romance between Kirby's son (James Stewart at his gawky best) and Vanderhof's granddaughter (Jean Arthur, not as dizzy as in some of her comedies) the film focuses on the contrast between Kirby and Vanderhof's philosophies of life: the latter is content to live with what he has, and to enjoy life; the former can only see life in terms of making money, and lots of it, yet he enjoys it not at all, and is told at one point he has stomach ulcers - though he claims it's merely indigestion.

The eccentric Vanderhof family look a little unlikely these days, and the idea of them just surviving on next to nothing, and welcoming others into their home to do the same, was probably somewhat improbable even when the film was made. However the point of their eccentricity is that they're not driven by ambition, or money, or any of the other things that give people emotional disease. Furthermore, in the film at least, they express a certain kind of Christian ease with the world, and it's notable that people flock around them (Vanderhof himself in particular) because there is a kind of charisma about them. Vanderhof even walks (or rather limps - he's sprained his foot) into a busy office and persuades an unhappy worker to give up his job and do what he really enjoys doing - making crazy toys.

Mr and Mrs Kirby live the life of wealth - he is full of greed and ambition and ruthlessness; his wife is a snob who's only hobby is spiritualism. This 'hobby' is trounced soundly by one of the Vanderhofs at a later stage of the movie as being nonsense.

It would be interesting to know how much input director Frank Capra had into the script. Though it's credited to Robert Riskin (who collaborated on several Capra movies), it seems as if Capra may have had a great deal to do with the structuring and characterization.  The film is full of typical Capra touches and scenes, the sorts of things that couldn't have been added at the last minute.  These include the hectic night court debacle with four attorneys turning up to defend the Kirbys (who've been arrested along with all the Vanderhofs), a host of reporters getting wind of the story, a crowd of the Vanderhofs' friends and neighbours - who at one point pass the hat around raucously to fund the Vanderhofs' fine - and the arguments and interactions between all the main characters. It's the kind of thing Capra revelled in, and did very well.  He seemed very capable of directing crowd scenes in which every person visible has a part to play, rather than just being in the background, and of bringing chaos to the screen without losing his audience.

The film is probably more Christian in tone than the play. Twice Vanderhof prays a grace before a meal, and on both occasions (addressing God as, 'Well, Sir') his prayer is simple and humble, showing a willingness to go along with the Lord's plans rather than his own. The parable of the wise man who built on a rock, and his opposite, the foolish man who built on sand, is brought to mind frequently, even though it's never overtly stated. There's a sense that everything happens according to a plan rather than randomly in spite of the chaos of the household, and there's a wonderful ease amongst the characters who live in the house - even though some of the things they do are basically pointless. Vanderhof's daughter (Spring Byington) spends her time typing plays - because a typewriter turned up one day.  Her own daughter, played by Ann Miller, spends her time dancing - yet she's not very good at it, and never will be. Her husband enjoys printing things, some of which are misinterpreted as revolutionary - he also plays the marimba, accompanying his wife at the drop of a hat. Byington's husband, and the iceman who arrived one day to deliver ice, and never went away again, spend their time in the basement making fireworks for the sheer pleasure of it. Two black servants seem as relaxed around the place as anyone. Though they're still servants, they have as much honour as anyone else.

Vanderhof is played by Lionel Barrymore, that bastion of many movies of the period, and member of a well-known theatrical family.  He was only sixty at the time - Samuel S Hinds, who plays his son-in-law, was two or three years older than him. Edward Arnold (who once supposedly said, in regard to not losing weight, "The bigger I got, the better character roles I received") is Mr Kirby, and he brings a great subtlety to the role, which may well have been expanded to fit his talents.  Incidentally, the theatrical poster pictured above must rank as one of the worst in terms of disfiguring the actors' faces. Most of them are unrecognizable.

Grimhilda! the ebook

Well, it's taken a lot longer than I intended, but the ebook of Grimhilda! is almost ready for publication. Just a few aspects still to be dealt with and then it'll be off to Amazon Kindle for them to do their bits of sorting out, and the book will make its way out into the wider world.

I had intended that the book would be ready last year, not long after the musical was presented, but it turned out that adapting a stage script and turning it into a novel was a bit more of a task than I'd imagined. The first draft was very close to the stage script in many ways, and I had to rethink things, expand my view and get away from what I'd been watching night after night on stage.

Then procrastinations set in, and delays caused by 'more important things' and so poor old Grimhilda! mark two went on the back-burner again. It's been her major failing in life.  She first turned up in the world over thirty years ago, and had a struggle to come to full term, as it were. Anyway, after many fits and starts she's just about there.

I just clicked on the #Grimhilda on Twitter, and was surprised to find that someone had sent this tweet back in November:
υиα єтєяиι∂α∂ ‏@emarina14 24 Nov

Con ganas de que sea maňana para volver al escenario ! ; #theater #grimhilda #teatroGuimera #shoutout… http://instagram.com/p/hENsI1JgMH/

Unfortunately the instagram link no longer works, and the Spanish (I think it's Spanish) translates as something along these lines - according to one translation site:

Wanting to make the morning to return to the stage!

With the desire to be wholegrain to return to the scene !

With desire of which it is maňana to return to the stage!

 

I like the middle one best. Of course, it could be that I'm getting a Spanish site to translate Portuguese or some other variation of the tongue. 

 

@emarina14 supplied a photo - of herself, presumably - as Grimhilda (I guess!). I hope she won't mind me copying it here.  This is a more conventional witch than the one who appeared in our show - or is imagined in the book.

 

I don't think there's any connection with our musical/book, though it's intriguing to come across this all the same.  Here's a picture of our Grimhilda [Helen Wilson], as she appeared in the Dunedin production: 

I've just looked up that other hashtag #TeatroGuimera. Apparently this theatre is located in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands (Spain) is the oldest theater in the Canary Islands. So at least I was right about the language. Here's the theatre's own page.

 

Anyway, back to the book.  It'll be available - at least initially - for Amazon's Kindle, so you'll be able to read it on any of their devices, or on the iPad, or on most smartphones.  That should cover a few bases! 

 

Adapting

After the production of Grimhilda! was over, I wrote the draft of a book version of the musical.  I thought this would be an easy task, but it turned out to be full of hooks that I kept getting stuck on.  On the stage, a dramatist doesn't have to explain everything: some of what isn't in the script will be filled in by the actor, or by the director - or even by the music.  Things are pared down in a stage script: the scenery is often the bare minimum, just enough to convey an idea of the place.  Time is loose; even though it pays to keep things within a certain specific period (such as a day, or a night, or two weeks), the actual chronological time can be stretched and tightened as the scriptwriter desires.  There's no clock on a stage (and if there is one, it's often a bit of a nuisance).  The background of the characters may be left quite skimpy - in the musical we didn't tell the audience what the parents did for a living, where Toby went to school, why the toys were as big as the 'real' adults, how Mr and Mrs Map could possibly be married when they were separated by a parchment (and why didn't they just rip it up?)  All these sorts of things are irrelevant on stage; the audience lives in the particular moment, and can ask itself questions afterwards, if it so desires. 

With a book, it's necessary to fill in all sorts of details for the reader, otherwise their imaginative landscape can seem very bare.  The reader may not pay attention to all this detail (I'm a terrible one for missing vital points by skim reading) but it needs to be there.  Even in modern novels, there has to be a sense of a real place, of real time, of people having real jobs and having to go to work, or a real neighbourhood in which they live, and much more.

In the musical we could start straight into the action by showing, quite briefly, that the parents didn't give their son much of their time.  In the book, it proved very difficult finding exactly how to start things, how much explaining to do before the action started, as it were, and perhaps most importantly, why these parents were so selfish.  And then having explained a great deal of that, it was a matter of taking unimportant bits of those details back out again.  It was all a bit like the conga: you put your detail in, you take your detail out, you put your detail in and you shuffle it about. 

I was reminded of all this by seeing an ad for a diamond engagement ring, because of course, part of the story of Grimhilda! concerns a diamond mine run by the villain of the piece.  What, on the stage, was a relatively small space in which the 'diamond mine' existed, and in which the dozen or so workers worked, couldn't be as small and as barely inhabited as that in the book.  I had to re-imagine the mine altogether: it had to be a much bigger place, and there needed to be a lot more people there (though I avoided adding in yet more names and personalities - in fact two of the women in the musical became one person in the book).  It had to be placed within towering mountains, and as soon as the mountains appeared (they're only mentioned in the musical), it became a matter of how tall they were, how impregnable, and so on.  Was there grass on the mountain sides?  Were the paths steep and slippery?

The worst business of all was dealing with the death of the other little boy in the story: Jackie Axelquist.  He's mentioned a number of times, and is a vital part of the plot, but how he died isn't discussed.  Unfortunately, you can't just say in a book that Jackie died.  There are no bones on the skeleton, and skeletons aren't very attractive to readers (unless it's a horror story).  You have to consider what details to include as to how Jackie died, and then you realise that this could be quite grim for the younger readers of your book.  Oh, what a task I set myself!  :)

I have a book on my shelves (yes, I still have some left after the big purge) called How to Adapt Anything into a Screenplay.  It's by Richard Krevolin.  It would be a useful book, no doubt, but it's remained one that I haven't really got my teeth into yet.  But more than a book about turning anything into a screenplay, what I need is a book called: How to adapt your own musical into a book.  If you know of such a piece, tell me about it.  I really, really need it.

Clarinets, clarionets, Dickens, and bagpipes

I played at a concert last night. It was held at the clubrooms of a women's group that's dwindling in the way of many old clubs - in other words, as the members get older there are no younger people to replace them.  Seems to be the way of society in this present age. Maybe it'll change again once all the old clubs have died out and people figure out new ways to get together.  For all the complaints about Social Media and the like damaging personal contact, especially face-to-face contact, human beings are immensely social creatures, and will find ways to keep in touch no matter what the technology. So the idea in all those movies where people appear totally separated by the technology will probably not come to pass.

Photo courtesy of Devin Langham

What do I know? This isn't even what I started to write about. Which is that one of the women approached me after the concert and asked to see my music. She stared at the two staves (one for the right hand, one for the left) and exclaimed, 'So that's how they write it out; I wondered how you knew what to play in each hand.' This was a little bit surprising, because I would have assumed everyone knew what piano music looks like - there's enough of it around - but plainly not. And then I learned that she's a bagpipe player and has been for decades. And wants to play something that doesn't require her to blow!  (Bagpipes also have only nine notes, which is quite limiting.)

So suggesting a clarinet is probably a bit of a waste of time, since clarinets also require blowing.   The word clarinet used to be spelt, if Charles Dickens is anything to go by, as 'clarionet'.  I'm reading Little Dorrit at the moment, and finding it a bit slow. Dorrit is one of Dickens' unspeakably righteous people - the trouble is, we just don't believe in her. She's too goody-good for this world, or even the next. Maybe Dickens thought that giving her some scenes in which she expresses her sadness at the restrictions of her life might help; they don't. And her eventual husband, Arthur Clennam, is much the same. He seems almost without personality. There's one scene where he fancies that it might be nice to fall in love with the daughter of a friend. The girl is twenty years younger than him, and Clennam decides it probably isn't a good idea. I suppose all of us have had that kind of thought at some time in our lives: what it would be like to fall in love with someone different to the person we seem to be in love with (Clennam must know he's in love with Little Dorrit by this stage of the book, so it's odd that he speculates like this). But falling straight out of the thought again, as Clennam does, is a little too sudden. Most of us would give it a day's reflection, or two.  

Straying from the topic a bit tonight: I started to talk about Dickens' using the word, clarionet. He has a character who plays clarionet in a pit (theatre) orchestra. His description of this man's life is wonderful, and makes up for all the soppy stuff about Little Dorrit and her forty-year-old lover boy. In this extract, Little Dorrit goes to find her sister at the theatre (her sister's a 'professional').

Little Dorrit, as her eyes became used to the darkness, faintly made him [her uncle] out at the bottom of the well, in an obscure corner by himself, with his instrument in its ragged case under his arm. The old man looked as if the remote high gallery windows, with their little strip of sky, might have been the point of his better fortunes, from which he had descended, until he had gradually sunk down below there to the bottom. He had been in that place six nights a week for many years, but had never been observed to raise his eyes above his music-book, and was confidently believed to have never seen a play. There were legends in the place that he did not so much as know the popular heroes and heroines by sight, and that the low comedian had 'mugged' at him in his richest manner fifty nights for a wager, and he had shown no trace of consciousness. The carpenters had a joke to the effect that he was dead without being aware of it; and the frequenters of the pit supposed him to pass his whole life, night and day, and Sunday and all, in the orchestra. They had tried him a few times with pinches of snuff offered over the rails, and he had always responded to this attention with a momentary waking up of manner that had the pale phantom of a gentleman in it: beyond this he never, on any occasion, had any other part in what was going on than the part written out for the clarionet; in private life, where there was no part for the clarionet, he had no part at all. Some said he was poor, some said he was a wealthy miser; but he said nothing, never lifted up his bowed head, never varied his shuffling gait by getting his springless foot from the ground. Though expecting now to be summoned by his niece, he did not hear her until she had spoken to him three or four times; nor was he at all surprised by the presence of two nieces instead of one, but merely said in his tremulous voice, 'I am coming, I am coming!' and crept forth by some underground way which emitted a cellarous smell. 'And so, Amy,' said her sister, when the three together passed out at the door that had such a shame-faced consciousness of being different from other doors...

And that mention of the door reminds me of a slightly earlier passage, when Dorrit turns up at the stage door...

Little Dorrit was almost as ignorant of the ways of theatres as of the ways of gold mines, and when she was directed to a furtive sort of door, with a curious up-all-night air about it, that appeared to be ashamed of itself and to be hiding in an alley, she hesitated to approach it; being further deterred by the sight of some half-dozen close-shaved gentlemen with their hats very strangely on, who were lounging about the door, looking not at all unlike Collegians. On her applying to them, reassured by this resemblance, for a direction to Miss Dorrit, they made way for her to enter a dark hall--it was more like a great grim lamp gone out than anything else--where she could hear the distant playing of music and the sound of dancing feet. A man so much in want of airing that he had a blue mould upon him, sat watching this dark place from a hole in a corner, like a spider; and he told her that he would send a message up to Miss Dorrit by the first lady or gentleman who went through. The first lady who went through had a roll of music, half in her muff and half out of it, and was in such a tumbled condition altogether, that it seemed as if it would be an act of kindness to iron her. But as she was very good-natured, and said, 'Come with me; I'll soon find Miss Dorrit for you,' Miss Dorrit's sister went with her, drawing nearer and nearer at every step she took in the darkness to the sound of music and the sound of dancing feet.

The delightful incidental touches are what makes Dickens so great: 'a curious up-all-night air', 'more like a great grim lamp gone out', 'a man so much in want of airing that he had a blue mould upon him', 'in such a tumbled condition altogether, that it seemed as if it would be an act of kindness to iron her.' Who else has ever been able to write like this?

mics and voices

One of the complications of putting on the musical, Grimhilda!, is how much use do we use mics?  Some of the cast will be fine without them, but we have two kids in the show each night, and sometimes they have to talk over music playing in the orchestra pit, and, of course, they'll be singing with the orchestra.   It seems logical to use mics for them.  But what about other members of the cast?  Mics are an expensive item in the budget and supplying them to everyone isn't going to be an option.  Which means that the man controlling the mics is going to have his work cut out balancing miked voices with unmiked ones.    It's going to be an interesting process.  

When you're rehearsing a show there always seem to be some members of the cast who are comfortable with using a stage voice even when in a smaller rehearsal room, and some people who find the size of the space inhibiting.  Once they're out in the theatre their voices bloom, and you can hear them easily wherever you are.  But in the rehearsal space you sometimes despair of hearing them at all anywhere else.

And it's easy for inexperienced cast members to forget that they're going to have to throw their voices further than a couple of metres once they go on stage.  I don't know why that should be, but it is the case.  I prefer to be using a stage voice (somewhat modified to the surroundings) from early on in the rehearsal process.  It makes the transition from rehearsal room to stage a much easier one.

Looking for ideas

Want a chance to win a couple of free seats to the musical, Grimhilda!? 

We're looking for ideas as to how to 'fly' two adults and two children off the stage into the wings without using wires or pulleys or other normal stage machinery - the Mayfair Theatre doesn't have this kind of equipment. 

The actors in question take off in a "wind' using a large map as a kind of sail.  It all happens fairly quickly so we're basically trying to give the illusion that they're lifting off from the stage.   And it's at nighttime, so there isn't full lighting.  

If your idea gets used in the production, we'll give you two free seats. 

Break a Leg!

The other day I posted a couple of limericks here relating to the Rugby World Cup.

Just while I'm in limerick mode, a friend tweeted me that typical good luck greeting - Break a Leg! - in regard to The Mousetrap.   It's a very peculiar thing to say to anyone, let alone an actor - the last thing an actor wants is more drama!   So here's my response, limerick-wise:

When supporters say Break a leg,

Actors feel they’ve got egg

On their faces and

Go through their paces and

Hope it won’t be on one peg. 

For anyone who's interested in following up the possible origin of this peculiar expression, check out the page focused on it in the Glossary of Technical Theatre Terms. 

The 39 Steps

I watched Hitchcock's The 39 Steps again a couple of nights ago. It was even better than I remembered, full of typical Hitchcock moments - comedy in the midst of suspense - and beautifully cast.

I watched it in part to check it against the play, The 39 Steps, which the Fortune Theatre here in Dunedin has just presented. Supposedly this stage version uses every bit of dialogue in the movie's script. Perhaps the Wikipedia description is closer to the truth:

The play's concept calls for the entirety of the 1935 adventure film The 39 Steps to be performed nearly verbatim onstage, but with a cast of four. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, an actress plays the three women whom he has romantic entanglements with, and two other actors play every other character in the show: heroes, villains, men, women, children and even the occasional inanimate object. This often requires lighting fast quick changes and occasionally for them to play multiple characters at once. Thus the film's serious spy story is played mainly for laughs, and the script is full of allusions to (and puns on the titles of) other Alfred Hitchcock films, including Rear Window, Psycho and North by Northwest.

Note the use of the words, 'nearly verbatim.' The movie has more dialogue overall, mainly because there are several crowd scenes. What the play does is take the scenes where there are fewer characters, for the most part, and hang its 'played mainly for laughs' production on this. It also adds occasional lines. Furthermore it takes the lines from the original script and overdoes them to such a degree that every line is milked for any possibility of a laugh. You have to see the thing to understand how this can be done, but, in general, it is done. Furthermore lines are elasticated hugely in order to fill them with all manner of business. The result is a two-hour play extended out from a ninety-minute movie.

It wasn't just the Fortune production that was done like this; this is the norm for all productions - UK, Broadway, wherever.

Now don't get me wrong - for the most part I enjoyed the play, but (there's always a 'but' with me) many of the laughs are the result of a nudge, nudge, wink, wink approach. In other words, the audience is constantly pushed to see the humour, however weak it may be. And by the second act I was beginning to tire of this overdone approach to comedy. Comedy doesn't need to be drummed up; is something is funny the audience will laugh. There was plenty of rapid change stuff that was funny in itself; there were lots of daft ideas that were visually funny, and there were even some subtle moments.

Hitchcock set out to make a comedy thriller - it's typical of the British thrillers, for the most part, made at a time when Hitch was in his prime. And it's a precurser to the likes of North by Northwest, made during Hitch's American period. Hence the movie has Robert Donat (as Richard Hannay) and Madeleine Carroll handcuffed to each other for a chunk of the movie; this creates all manner of humorous moments. And there are several excellent characters who are simply funny in themselves (compared to John Laurie and Peggy Ashcroft, who have the most tense scene in the movie, and play it straight). Even Lucie Mannheim, as the spy who appears early in the story, has several charmingly funny lines.

So there was plenty of humour in the story to start with. The stage version is never content with any of this; it dredges humour out of everything, which leaves the piece with no breathing space, and nothing in the way of a suspense.

However, on top of all this, the Fortune theatre production had Patrick Davies as one of the two actors who play nearly every part between them (except the three main women's roles). Davies is a brilliantly physical actor. There's one moment where he does something straight out of the ministry of silly walks - a movement that would cripple most people in two minutes. But as the play goes on, Davies almost seems to take over. His Scots hotelkeeper's wife was a shrill noise, like someone in need of a colon cleanse - the lines were invariably lost under the shrieking. His softly spoken political speaker mouthed absolutely nothing for about two solid minutes - some people, including a couple of my friends, found this hysterically funny. I just wanted him to get on with the play and stop hogging the limelight. And when he's playing the Professor at the end of the play, and is shot, he becomes a marionette, quite unable to lie down and die. I found this embarrassing, to be honest. It unbalanced the play.

All this griping aside, the play had huge energy, the cast likewise, and again and again it showed how it's possible on a stage with almost no scenery, to conjure up all manner of places, rooms and situations. (Incidentally, the Fortune production actually had a cast of six: two women doubled as stage crew and played a few tiny roles. Yet Wikipedia says the cast consists of just four actors.)

The Magic Flute

By chance I came across Ingmar Bergman's film of The Magic Flute on DVD at the library the other day. I'd just been talking about it to a friend a few days before, not having seen it since it came out in 1975.

I watched it last night, and I can't say it's Bergman's greatest movie. But then, it was made for television, and doesn't have the feel of a 'real' Bergman movie as a result. Still, he doesn't just film a stage production, but gives the impression that he has, even though there are extreme close-ups and camera viewpoints out into the audience. And in the intermission there's a lovely moment when the singer playing Sarastro joins a little boy (playing a Moor) and they both look out through peep-holes in the curtain to see who's in the audience.

There are a couple of other moments when the 'stage' version approach is broken by having the camera invade the backstage where the singers are already into their characters, and playing them offstage as well as on.

But it's Mozart's music that makes the thing worth watching; again and again the delight of the music for this particular opera strikes home. It must surely be his most 'perfect' opera overall because of the wide variety of musical characterizations and the felicity of the accompaniment. (I'm sure others will vote for different operas; I vote for this one.)

When I say it's his most perfect opera, of course, I'm thinking of the music rather than the libretto, which is basically a fairy story that turns into a load of old tosh as it moves forward. All the super serious stuff that Sarastro and his brotherhood discuss tend to pull the story away from its basic fairy tale origins: prince and princess, bad witch, good uncle, a couple of low characters (Papageno and Papagena) and a Moor thrown in for good measure. The way the libretto goes it makes it almost a war between genders: bad mother, good father, with the kids caught in the middle. But that isn't worth worrying about; everything else is wonderful about it.

The man (Josef Köstlinger) who plays Tamino is a bit earnest (Tamino is a bit earnest, but he doesn't have to be played quite that way), but Håkan Hagegård as Papageno is a lot more fun, not just because his character is livelier anyway, but because he is obviously happier in front of the camera. (The Papageno/Papagena duet with a gradual disrobing of the winter gear - right down to shoes and socks, is a delight.) It appears that most of the cast are/were opera singers primarily, rather than actors, but Bergman gets good performances out of them in general.

The staging is full of fun moments: it appears at first to take place on a fairly small stage but Bergman expands it at will, while still keeping the scenery as painted backdrops and flats. Within that framework he produces some lovely effects however, winter turning into spring, stars appearing, the mechanical balloon with the three boys and so on. And then there's the stage dragon, and the various animals that appear when Tamino plays his magic flute.

My suspicion is that The Magic Flute is almost indestructible, and an artist of Bergman's calibre would be hard pressed to make a bad film out of it. He didn't.

Stage struck

When I was a young man, I had two very close friends, both of whom left New Zealand for the bright lights of London - with intentions to go on the stage. Neither of them went on the stage; one of them eventually came back home after having an interestingly varied career in the usual sort of jobs NZers do when they go on the Big OE. The other got a lot closer to show business, at one time being part of the film promotion team for MGM. Which meant he got to see all the movies that were worth seeing, often before they went to the English public. I saw Last Tango in Paris in a tiny little private cinema as a result of this (not that I was greatly impressed with it), and also Pinocchio before it came out on a re-release. (Those were the days when you couldn't just go down to your local video store and hire a movie you liked - you had to wait until either the distribution company decided it was time to give it another go (which could be years after its original release) or until you caught it at some niche cinema where they managed to ferret out movies that weren't readily available.) I'm not sure if I saw Pinocchio as a child, but even as an adult it was a revelation in that small cinema; animation like you couldn't believe possible.

This same friend stayed in the UK until he died (much too young); he lived on the fringe of the show business world, flatting with a fellow Dunedinite who'd been big time in amateur theatre here and wound up on a daytime soap there. This actor had a tiny part in A Clockwork Orange, as a policeman. I think he's visible for all of a minute and a half.

I was reminded of this by reading an article in the Guardian today about young actors at the Royal Scottish Academy of Drama and Music in Glasgow, people who are still hopeful of getting in the business even in these tough times. Not that it's ever been easy to be an actor: two-thirds of them may be out of work at any one time, and reality TV certainly hasn't helped.

The curious thing is that when I joined my two friends in London, I hadn't had any plans to go on stage, but I certainly got a lot closer to it than either of them did. I went over to study as a repetiteur at the London Opera Centre, and wasn't only involved in the productions the Centre put on in-house (and the one that was presented at the Sadlers Wells Theatre), but also had free access to opera rehearsals at Covent Garden, which became almost as familiar to us as the Centre. I even played for auditions at the English Opera's theatre once. On the stage (a rather scary moment, actually). And on another occasion I played for a young singer in a competition, Abigail Ryan, at the Wigmore (pictured on right) - and she won. And went off to Germany to study as a result.

Well, that'll do for name-dropping, for the moment. Our mini-dramas at church have finished their 'run' - there were five in all, and I made it into four of them. (The second was on at the same time as When We Are Married.) Last Sunday's featured the four blokes who've appeared in the previous plays, and they were celebrating the loss of the All Blacks at home. One of them, who's become increasingly angry over the last couple of episodes, tries to explain his anger amidst the banter. It was a good little piece, and should have got a number of laughs, but the audience was surprisingly subdued, and it became hard work for the actors to keep up the momentum. Never mind, it made its point, I think. It had a second 'half' as it were: a return to the four soliloquies we'd started the series off with; this time the four actors (three of the guys and one of the two women who'd appeared in the plays) went in reverse order to the first play, and their speeches showed the progress they'd made. Different levels for each, but progress nevertheless.

North by Northwest

I watched Hitchcock’s North by Northwest again the other night. I don’t think I’d actually seen most of it since it was first shown; some of it I caught up with on television a few years ago, but obviously not all of it as there were many scenes that I’d forgotten.
It’s the sort of Hitchcock movie where the plot is irrelevant; the set-pieces are what make it: the climax on the Mt Rushmore faces (very little of which was actually shot there); the wonderful sequence where the crop-dusting plane attacks Cary Grant in the middle of nowhere; the nonsense Grant makes of a very dignified auction. The film was virtually written around these sequences – it’s one of the few Hitchcock movies that isn’t based on a book. (Not that he ever stuck to the books: in most cases he took a few key ideas and made his own film.)
North by Northwest epitomises Hitchcock’s style. The suspense, you say. Well, yes, up to a point, but once you know what’s going to happen, the suspense goes out the window. No, I meant Hitchcock’s humour. Very few of his movies lack some aspect of humour (except perhaps I Confess, The Wrong Man and Psycho – and even Psycho has a few humorous moments early in the piece).
For instance, it was a nice surprise to find that in one of his earlier movies (Young and Strange, I think it was) there isn’t just the suspense, but some wonderful moments of humour – much of involving children, who often play a humorous role in his movies. Both the American and English movies have some glorious humorous sequences – North by Northwest is full of them (with Grant at his ironic best), but Stage Fright, which I caught up with again recently too, has some great moments, particularly those featuring Alistair Sim, whom apparently Hitchcock didn’t take to and objected to his ‘mugging’ – in spite of that, there’s a great deal of Sim in the movie, along with a marvellous scene he shares with the inimitable Joyce Grenfell. I still remember how delighted I was to find her in a Hitchcock movie when I first saw Stage Fright years ago.
Back to NBN. The cast is great. Eva Marie Saint – who never appeared in another Hitchcock movie – is wonderful: elusive, persuasive, romantic; a quiet surface hinting at considerable passion beneath. Why he chose to use Tippi Hendren, for instance, in later blonde roles remains a mystery, when Saint was available. James Mason does a subtle villain, and Jessie Royce Landis (only a couple of years Cary Grant’s senior) plays his mother with considerable aplomb. Cary Grant (who mugs almost as well as Alistair Sim at times) thoroughly enjoys his role, even though he was far too old for the part – but Hitchcock delighted in using him, in spite of that.
And the crop-dusting scene remains a triumph of crafty filmmaking: Grant is actually more in the studio than out of it during the sequence, even when he’s being chased by the plane; and an analysis of the scene, shot by shot, would reveal just how well planned the whole thing is – and how economically.