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Peter Hall

The Oedipus Plays
Peter Hall talks to Peter Stothard
Platform discussion 21 September 1996, Olivier Theatre

PS I'm only here because a few weeks ago I decided, on a whim, to give up everything but The Times for a few days and go off to Epidaurus to see these plays. I'm not a professional critic, nor even a scholar, but I am a life-long lover of Greek literature. I went there without any great hopes - I'd seen these plays often, in many places, and one of the hardest things to do is to grasp the reality of them. In Oedipus The King you have a man whose fate has been completely predetermined for him but whose tragedy lies in his absolute determination to find out everything there is to know about his personal catastrophe. The balance between those two - between what has to happen by fate and what someone has decided to do - is extremely difficult to make real in the theatre. It was no more easy for Sophocles when he was doing it originally than it is today. They are eternal tensions. There is a best selling book by Beryl Bainbridge, out this month, about the sinking of the Titanic. Everyone knows that the Titanic sinks at the end, but she makes extraordinary emotional power out of all the things that happen up until the sinking. Sophocles was dealing with some of those same issues.

The fact that the tragedy finally comes about because of this individual's desire to uncover these things has made Oedipus a character with particular associations for everyone in the profession that I'm in. All journalists are in some ways trying to understand things, and to some extent all people are. It's the twentieth-century disease, but it was also the fifth-century-BC disease - whether pre-determined in our genes or by the gods - we all want to know as much as we want to know. It's the curse that's on my profession, the curse that was upon Oedipus. Making the plays work is extremely hard, but I left Epidaurus that evening feeling that they had never worked so powerfully or so well for me and I never expect them to again. I'm here to ask Peter how he achieved that.

Peter, could you tell us why it was you chose to do these particular plays?

PH I think you've touched on it. Oedipus the King is probably the most famous Greek tragedy. On the lowest popular level it's also the first great thriller - a man trying to find out who did it, then discovering he did it himself. It's a wonderful plot, an extraordinary story. But on the metaphysical level, as you've said, none of us wants to believe that our life is predetermined, yet none of us has any approachable way of guessing what is going to happen to us or where those particular turns in the road of our life occur when we should go left instead of right. One of my favourite moments in these plays comes in Oedipus at Colonus when Oedipus, as an old raging man, in self-justification says "If somebody's going to kill you, and you've got to kill in self defence, you don't first of all say 'You're not my father by any chance, are you?'" He says "I didn't know! So how can I possibly be damned, be held responsible for this?" So it's an eternal question and out of posing those eternal questions comes great tragedy.

The second play is about how we prepare for death, the inevitable death which is the one thing that unites us all, the one thing we all have in common, and yet we know very little about it or how we shall face it. That was the metaphysical and artistic reason. The technical reason is that I was taught masks by a great French teacher, Michel St Denis, and I used what I'd learnt from him some years ago here when I did The Oresteia, which involved a whole process of research and work into masks and into Greek drama. Since then, I've done The Lysistrata, but I haven't done any more tragedy and I wanted to something which carried on that work. Also, I owed Richard Eyre a production here before he left, and I wanted to do something which only the National Theatre could do. I think it's timely to pay tribute to this place at this point because whether you like what we've done with The Oedipus Plays or not, the fact remains that a great theatre said you can research, you can find out, you can do it, and you can have the time, space and resources to make another language of theatre. I don't know any other theatre in the world that would have done that. The National Theatre gave a lot of technicians and twenty-one actors, five musicians, a crew of designers and me fourteen weeks to find these plays.

PS There's a considerable parallel with the original way in which these plays were done. There's been a lot of discussion in the papers recently about authenticity, particularly some of the critics who only saw the plays here in the Olivier being rather sniffy about the enthusiasm felt by those of us who went to Epidaurus. But the mixture of financing, to make it as crude as that, that put the original shows on was similar to what happens now. The Chorus was paid for by rich patrons - they would be the NatWest Chorus today, I suspect - and the actors were paid for by the state, and people paid to go in. It was a mixed funding system and it was very very important to that community. The Royal National Theatre is as perfectly placed to put on these plays as the place they were originally performed. This is a perfect spiritual home for them.

The mask is a controversial part of the whole exercise and has certainly confused some critics.

PH I have to say far less than when we did The Oresteia. An awful lot of critics have said "Well yes of course, they do it in masks, that's the way they do it, Hall and his gang". Whereas twelve years ago when we did The Oresteia, there was a lot of "What is this self-conscious pushing back, trying to be antique...?" The mask is a mask. It's inexpressive, immobile. The reason for the mask, I think, is emotional. If you've been taught that the Greeks had masks because the theatres were so big that you couldn't see their faces, you've been taught wrong. If you've been taught that the Greeks wore masks because they were like megaphones, to help audibility, you've been taught wrong. Those two things are absolutely untrue. The Greek mask was human scale, very delicate, and very ambiguous. It was the Roman mask which was grandiloquent and huge, and also set in a very rigid expression.

The Greek mask is like the whole of Greek culture, not about straight lines, but about curved lines, about ambiguity, about contradiction, and it enables the playwright to deal with emotions, hysteria, and pain which you cannot do with the naked face. This is quite hard to explain... In Hamlet, if Gertrude comes on in tears and describes the death of Ophelia, you can't hear what she says and she couldn't possibly shape, form or invent that beautiful speech. Yet she has to be crying, otherwise she is unreal. So she has to present a form of crying which allows her to speak those lines. If a child comes up to you screaming, I think everyone's reaction is repulsion, initially. If a child comes up to you trying not to cry, one is moved.

In exactly the same way, form in the theatre - whether it be Shakespeare's verse or Mozart's arias, the shape of his music, or the Greek mask - gives you the form which allows you to express hideously huge emotion and still be communicating, attractive, and understandable. The Greek stage is itself a mask. All the horrible things happen offstage, they never happen on stage. The only action in any Greek play is someone coming on or someone going off. It's not like modern American movies, you don't blind yourself on stage. You hear how Oedipus has been blinded, which is even more horrifying, then he comes out blinded. The whole thing is based on the worship of form. I think the plays were telling us to go back to masks. I personally don't like Greek plays not done in masks.

PS The beauty of the way it is done here is the fact that you can still see the people behind the masks. The original audience would have known the actors, it was a small community, and later on they had stars. The Alan Howard of the fifth and fourth century BC would have been clearly recognisable to the audience. The mask doesn't stop the actor showing a kind of individuality - that was very clear in Epidaurus - but it does allow them all to have a particular relationship to the text and to what the writer is trying to say. To hear Peter say that is one thing, but to see and watch it and sense that it's working well is an extraordinary thing to happen in the theatre and it made an enormous impression on me. It's hard to talk about, you really have to see it.

PH The other interesting thing about masks is that they can't look at each other, indeed you can't direct masks, which is another problem. What is particular about this work is that nothing was given to the group except the text and the mask. The masks were only evolved once they had begun to understand what the characters were and what they were doing within the plays. They were never given moves, never choreographed, they weren't told "You have to do this". The essence of mask work is that you relate to the mask, you see something in it, you put it on, and you go with it. You become what it is. (It sounds like Pseuds Corner, this, and the more you talk about it, the more it sounds like Pseuds Corner, but it is true.) Even a not very good actor knows when he's not being true, and the only rule in mask work is if you're untrue, you take the mask off. For weeks, masks will not speak, they won't say the text, they won't say anything. Then they start behaving like small children, cursing each other, learning to talk.

You work in two parallel ways: on the text without masks, and improvisations with masks. One day bits of the text start being used and it gradually grows together. Out of that comes the staging and the way it's done. So every performance of these plays is in some sense an improvisation. For instance the normal way of doing a Greek Chorus is to go: One two three, "O Thebes!" and all your hands go up together, and you hold your head so. Can you imagine anything more imprisoning? A mask won't do that. We have to have the feeling of "O Thebes", but twenty-one people do something quite different every night. They're connected with each other but they never look at each other, because if you look at a mask you feel unreal. And they always play front because the actor in the mask is always - even if he's not speaking, if he's listening - he's telling the audience what it is he's hearing. So they have a solitary evening, these twenty-one actors, they're all on their own, but they hear each other.

PS One thing that always comes up when you talk about these plays, is the horrible twentieth-century domination of Freud. I'm pleased to say there's very little Freud, almost no Freud in this production. Freud's invention of the Oedipus complex was actually not designed to solve anybody's personal problems but to solve the problem of why this text is so powerful. He decided it was because everybody's first instinct was to have sexual ideas about their mother and to want to kill their father. Anybody who has seen any of the other plays on that theme would know that this is not the reason this play works, but it's something you have to get out of the system, isn't it?

PH Absolutely, but I think Greek dramatists, and particularly Sophocles, are very accurate in their psychological observations, but they don't build characters in the psychological way that Chekhov, Ibsen, or a modern dramatist does at all. They present certain facets like a mosaic, and you have to go with all the contradictions, put them together, and out of that you will make a person, and it's a person in action. It's no good applying the Method to Greek tragedy, for instance.

Audience question
Having seen The Oresteia and then The Oedipus Plays I was fascinated to notice that they both have a rhythm, like symphonies. With The Oresteia it was percussic, with this one it's more lyrical. Was it difficult to find that rhythm and then make it spontaneous?

PH Aeschylus is a very primitive, jagged, harsh writer in comparison with Sophocles, who has a much more lyrical and ironic touch. They're different animals, and I suppose Tony Harrison's very alliterative translation of The Oresteia was a response to Aeschylus, as Ranjit Bolt's rhyming couplets [for The Oedipus Plays] and the deliberate mixture of the elevated and the colloquial are a response to Sophocles. The Oresteia was six months' work, with Harrison Birtwistle coming to rehearsal and deciding on the percussic nature of it out of the work we were doing on each scene. With The Oedipus Plays, Judith Weir has done the same thing, so the music comes out of the work, it's not imposed. It is very musical because Greek tragedy is very musical. There are the great arias for the solo protagonists, there are the choruses which are very subjective and about the sub-conscious. (They're often very contradictory, they're the anxieties of one person, to an extent, all of us - the paradox. All of us: one.) And then there are the stichomythia sections - the actual dialogues when two people confront each other and argue. All Greek tragedy is constructed on those three forms and they're very musical, but again the music is found, not imposed.

Audience question
PS I recall, the masks for the Chorus in The Oresteia were almost neutral, whereas those in The Oedipus Plays seem to have more individual character. Is that true?

PH They don't actually. They all respond to the person wearing them but are all basically the same character, and were in both productions. I wonder why you're feeling that? On the first day of rehearsal of The Oedipus Plays at the National Theatre Studio, The Oresteia masks from twelve years ago were all laid out, looking at us. There were the Furies, all looking the same, the Old Men, all looking the same, and the Women, all looking the same. But they were dead, of course, because they weren't on people. I remember them all looking different because of the people that wore them. That's the paradox of the mask: you can take the same character and put it on fifteen people and you'll have fifteen slightly different expressions on the mask. The one thing you mustn't do is make them different, in my view. Let me just briefly sketch in what we're trying to do with the Chorus. I do not believe that the Greek Chorus is anything to do with speaking, or even singing, in unison. The Greek plays' Choruses contain the most complex, metaphorical writing in the plays, not just these plays but all the Greek plays. That's where the real meat is, because the Chorus is representing you, the audience, the community. What they say is absolutely complex. I have never heard more than two voices say the same line and make any sense of it. It's just a blur. I've never heard an opera chorus sing so that I can understand a word, ever. I get a general emotion. It's not their fault, it's impossible. The only way you could do it would be to drill the words like the Tiller Girls used to be drilled to do their high kicks. You would have to speak, all together, drained of any emotion, all on the same pitch, and it would be completely inhuman.

When we were rehearsing The Oresteia, I discovered that if you had a dozen people in the same mask and one person said a line, you didn't know who'd said it. If all dozen people acted the line, it appeared that they'd all said it. I thought, "That's something", and that's what I built that work and this work on. Plus the fact that the Greek Chorus is like a shoal of fish or flock of birds - where one goes they all go. The problem about the Chorus is if you split it up into separate individuals, you have one person saying one thing, then another contradicting them. It's like saying "I feel terribly ill at the moment, but actually I feel quite well." The oscillations inside ourselves, which are completely contradictory - that's where the Greek Chorus lies; it's the subconscious.

Audience question
Do I take it that the movement of the Chorus was improvised, not choreographed?

PH It was improvised, then it was nudged, edited and encouraged. But it was improvised by the group who were always doing group movement to try and live physically together. They learnt how to move together, sit together, be together, how to feel this or that together. Then it was fairly easy for them to respond to the words being said, and for Michael Keegan Dolan, the choreographer, to say, "That was wonderful, why don't you go a little further..."

Audience question
This is a very basic question from a non-classicist. The ugly actions happen off stage, the actors wear masks and don't look at each other. Can I ask why the Greeks adopted that form?

PH I think we're very patronising about the Greeks and their masks. After all they had faces; if they wanted to use faces they could have done. I think the question is why does great primitive drama throughout the world use masks? I would extend that by saying there is a mask in all great tragic drama, including Shakespeare. For me Shakespeare's verse is his mask. His form is the mask. You can't do Shakespeare in a mask and it's quite interesting why. Because it's like putting a mask on a mask. The text is too complex and too metaphorical to exist behind the mask. You ask me why? I believe it's to enable us to deal with horrible, horrible emotions at an intensity that would not be possible without the mask. We all go to see American movies. It would not be surprising to see a close-up of someone putting out their eyes, the blood would squirt and people would scream, and we would all be sitting there (particularly those of us in the profession) thinking, "That's fascinating, I wonder how they did that?" because you know bloody well that they didn't put out somebody's eyes.

If they had done they would have been arrested. I think that is a kind of self indulgent and actually not very horrible way of putting out the eyes. I would instance the fact that in King Lear, Gloucester's eyes are actually put out on stage. Now Shakespeare knew his Greeks, and he was very careful about using violence. He wanted a piece of meretricious violence, in my opinion, which wasn't quite the full tragic dimension, otherwise he would have kept it off the stage or described it, or put it in some form other than naturalism.

PS We are talking here about the very origins of theatre. They began with one protagonist, then went to two, and by Sophocles they'd got to three actors. You can see that with only three actors your theatre begins essentially with declaration, with lyric recitals, and if you were a dramatist you would begin by having all the action off stage. Gradually, under Euripides, there is the beginning of more things happening on stage. It does begin to take a more modern shape.

PH That's absolutely true, but I'm in awe of the Greek play for its complete sophistication as a piece of dramatic architecture. They are extraordinarily well organised. I don't quite agree with Peter here, but it is certainly scholarly conformity; the idea that they began doing lyric songs and then said, Oh gosh, we could have an actor, then another, then hey, how about having another actor - seems to me slightly primitive.

PS Well it certainly happened.

PH I know it happened. But I think they began by storytelling. In the stories they sang songs, and as part of the storytelling they did dances, Then one person represented a character, then they gradually built up the characters out of the story. It's not so much the drama becoming sophisticated as the story becoming sophisticated. A group of children will do that. If you say to five children "Read this story, to an audience" they will actually begin to improvise, and will finally make it into a play. I think it's more on that level.

PS We mustn't abstract it too much. These were very real political events for the people who originally saw them. They'd had a plague themselves very recently, the Athenians who saw this. It killed thousands of them, and the city where this play is set, Thebes, was their great enemy. The notion of there being a plague in Thebes would have been considered a jolly good idea, like having a plague in Berlin during the War. And Apollo's oracle was also a huge political player in Greece. We're not just talking about gods who have a distant idea of mankind, these were gods whose oracles drove peace and war, for every one of the actors and the people who were watching. There's a very concrete dimension to these plays, as well as the art that came out of them.

Audience question
I was wondering why you chose to do the plays in the ancient Greek form, with masks?

PH Because I think that's the only way they work. Other people may disagree with me, but I've seen umpteen Greek tragedies, I've seen them with a masked chorus and the protagonist unmasked. I've seen it in modern dress, I've seen the Chorus reduced to two or three people wearing bowler hats and mackintoshes. But throughout all those experiments the actors are desperately trying to make it real and naturalistic, as if it were something you could see on television tomorrow night. And it isn't. In its form it isn't. The speech form, the length of it, the use of the messenger, the use of the Chorus - it is completely unnaturalistic. It seemed to me therefore if, in all humility, one went back to try and find out what the ancient theatre was and what its language was... I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just telling you what I've found. There are lots of other things to be found, I've no doubt, but I feel nearer the plays this way than by any other means.

Audience question
How did the design evolve?

PH There are some very strong rules, which you can feel if you sit in any of the ancient theatres, particularly Epidaurus. You can feel how it works. There is the Orchestra, the circle in which the Chorus works, then there is the Scena, the platform stage where the Protagonists work. The Protagonists never speak to the audience, they only speak to the Chorus or to the gods. The Chorus speak to the Protagonists, to the gods and to the audience, because they represent you, the society. It seems to me that that division of the Orchestra and the upper level is absolutely crucial, and I don't believe you can do a Greek play without that. So that was my brief to the designer, Dionysis Fotopoulos, who is Greek who knows certainly as much about it as me, if not much much more. He designed a Scena which instead of going across, which is what we think it did, came out into the stage area. This is a perilous place on which Oedipus is both grand and vulnerable. So vulnerable that Alan Howard fell off it and broke his arm. In Epidaurus it was 40 metres long.

Audience question
I'm interested that you didn't just use male actors or just use three protagonists. Were there particular reasons for that?

PH When I did The Oresteia I did use only male actors, but then I think that is a very harsh and primitive cycle, and one of the things it's about is the emergence of the dominant male, taking over from the matriarchal society. I thought it said something to us. It seemed to me that to do The Oedipus Plays all male or all female was a simplification which wouldn't say anything much about the plays to us, so I decided not to do it. The Greeks would have been very surprised to see a woman in a play because they didn't have women in plays. In fact, as far as we know, they didn't have women in the audience either. They were ahead of us in most things, but they were not great feminists. We would think it odd to see an all male cast, that would make a point. So I thought it was better to mix. Initially we started mixing the cast so that we had absolutely female parts played by men, and absolutely male parts played by women. But I thought that became rather self-conscious too.

Audience member
The reason I ask the question is because when I saw The Oresteia I was amazed at how quickly I ignored the fact that Clytemnestra was a man. To me it worked almost immediately and never struck me as odd. I'd be interested to see Jocasta as a man.

PH Yes we did try, actually, but I didn't think it fitted the communication of that particular play to our audience. It does seem to me a director's duty - given a dead classic which this is, in the sense that we know very little about how it was performed - your duty is to find out as much as you can and then find means by which to express that to the audience today so that they understand. We're not in an antique business, we're not in a restoration business, we're not in an authenticating business. There is no authenticity, so everything is to some extent pragmatic. If it works for you, then we've succeeded, and if it doesn't work, we haven't, but it varies from person to person obviously.