Actors have been saying unscripted things again. Riz Ahmed is the star of a brand-new film version of Hamlet directed by Aneil Karia and set among the South Asian community in contemporary London. He told the BBC at the weekend that the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy is not actually about contemplating suicide at all, but about ‘resistance’. He adds that Hamlet has been ‘deradicalised’ in ‘recent years’.
We expect performers who have superb performing skills to be intelligent and insightful. But this is a mistake
Elsewhere, Olivia Colman has been promoting her role in another new film Jimpa, the everyday story of introducing her ‘non-binary’ daughter to gay grandad Jimpa, telling Them magazine, ‘I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man’. As Julie Burchill observed here yesterday, this was both rambling and exquisitely daft.
Not to be outdone, the actress who plays her daughter in Jimpa, a silly ‘non-binary’ nepo-nobody called Aud Mason-Hyde (whose mum and dad just happen to have edited the film) has dropped a more-in-sorrow response to John Lithgow, the actor who plays Jimpa, for the mortal sin of taking the role of Dumbledore in HBO’s big new Harry Potter TV adaptation. J.K. Rowling – the most successful, popular and beloved author in the world – happens to get up the noses of the delusional by standing up for women’s rights. Very bad form.
‘I consistently felt that he was a very loving and a very guiding co-star,’ says Aud of Lithgow. ‘And so there’s an element of this that feels vaguely hurtful – it’s a strange decision, for sure. And also I found it… disconcerting, maybe, is the right word’.
Lithgow himself, the poor old soul, has had to defend himself. ‘It upsets me when people are vehemently opposed to me having anything to do with this. But in Potter canon you see no trace of transphobic sensitivity.’ Maybe because it’s a children’s story about wizards?
Actors don’t half come out with some rare old rubbish when they have to speak for themselves using their own, rather than somebody else’s, words.
Has Hamlet been ‘deradicalised’ and ‘defanged’? When and where was that, and by whom? How did they go about that? I’m not sure when it was ever radical. Certainly not in 1599, when a ‘radical’ play of any kind would’ve seen everybody locked up for treason, in the unlikely event that it got past the beady eye of the Lord Chamberlain. This attempt to spin Shakespeare as too cool for school is yet another turn in the long and regrettable tradition of trying to boost its appeal to avoiders by making it funky, which is fooling nobody.
Because Shakespeare is stuffy, it is difficult, (though not overwhelmingly so), and much of it is about a world we cannot comprehend. You have to make an effort while watching it, an unpardonable sin in the modern world.
Hamlet, in particular, is marvellously open ended and ambiguous. But we can agree on some key points. Hamlet is many things, but it is not about resistance, in the same way that it is not about doing the dishes, and that it is not about ostrich racing in Johannesburg.
Ahmed, Colman and Lithgow are all very good actors. (I cannot speak for Mason-Hyde, with whose talents I am unfamiliar.) We expect performers who have superb performing skills to be intelligent and insightful. But this is a mistake.
Actors do not need to understand a script to give a good performance. In my TV career, I saw spectacular displays from actors that did not grasp the slightest thing about the lines they had memorised the night before. Somehow an instinct kicks in, a feeling for the rhythm and flow of dialogue. On Coronation Street there was one actor who was nothing but instinct; she didn’t consciously consider her role at all, just showed up and delivered the words, brilliantly, every time.
Some people just possess this knack, even if they aren’t actors. One of the most famous recitations in our cultural history is the reading of W.H. Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ at the end of the 1936 film of the same name. The narrator was production assistant Pat Jackson, later a director, who never acted or recited anything else in his life, and rather regretted his moment in the sun, reflecting that, ‘I sounded like some Oxford pimp on the prowl’.
When I was at university, I acted as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream opposite a fellow student as Titania who’d auditioned for a lark. While I got tangled up in the language, stumbling over myself with overthinking, she winged it, and was immaculate. She grasped every simile, caught every nuance. When everybody fainted with surprise, she shrugged and laughed that she didn’t understand a single word.
Sending such an actor out to do promo for your film, play or TV show can be fraught with worry for those backstage. What the hell are they going to say? But it is an unfortunate necessity, as nobody but nerds cares a fig for the thoughts of writers or directors. As George Sanders says in All About Eve, ‘their function is merely to construct a tower so that the world can applaud a light which flashes on top of it.’
It can be scary when an actor has read a couple of Penguin Classics and now thinks they’re the cat’s intellectual whiskers. One of the other ‘turns’ on Corrie – a simple soul who played a simple soul – had a terrible habit of waffling in interviews about things like the ‘arc of redemption’ and ‘catharsis’.
On another show I worked on, an actress (again, a very good one) gave an authoritative sounding interview, telling the press that she’d read a book that really helped her understand the part. Afterwards the producer, who had also read it, asked how it had clarified the role for her. She replied breezily, but with a straight face, ‘Oh, I’ve only read the back cover.’
We must remember that an instinctive feel for language and expression doesn’t necessarily indicate anything else. Good actors are just as likely to be thick as bricks as they are to be insightful and thoughtful. As they have demonstrated in the media over the last few days.
