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Can an institution be creative?


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As though he'd been reading our thread on "Becoming an Institution," Peter O'Toole launched into a diatribe about how institutionalization ruined the Old Vic and Stratford on Charlie Rose last night. Unfortunately, they don't provide a free transcript now, as PBS does, but here's the gist.

This is a paraphrase from memory:

If we wanted to do anything creative, Richard (Burton) and I had to go off and do it ourselves. The Vic became an institution....I don't know what you need to be a company manager now. If you can't act, you can't write, you can't juggle, all you can do is talk -- that's what they are.

The British stage today is full of crushing mediocrities. I don't know why anyone goes. At the Vic, we'd act for nothing -- nothing -- just to do those parts. And people came from all over the English speaking world to act against the best. That's why there were great actors then and not now.

To do a good play, we can't go to the Vic or Stratford now. We have to do it in the commercial theater and it's deadly, deadly. The same thing night after night, just to put money into the manager's pockets. You shouldn't be on stage more than three times a week if you want to keep performances at a high quality.

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O'Toole's idea of the "great days" was repertory theater, citing Burton's doing Hamlet one night and Caliban the next.

The model he grew up in -- the actor-manager model -- has now been replaced by the institutional model. I thought it interesting that there were so many parallels betwen ballet and theater.

Did anyone else see this show? Or comments on his points in general?

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Great minds think alike. I saw the show and had thought of starting a similar thread. :)

I don't know enough about the current state of play in the English theatre to say how accurate O'Toole's characterization might be. His comments may be in part defensive, because once upon a time Burton, O'Toole, Finney, et al., were viewed as the logical successors to the three Sirs (Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson) along with Paul Scofield, who stayed in the theatre -- it was supposed to be Burton v. Scofield à la Olivier v. Gielgud, and it didn't happen -- they were accused of selling out to the movies, etc., and it's true that although they did do the occasional play -- Gielgud directed Burton's Hamlet, Olivier did the same for O'Toole -- they didn't come back very frequently. ( And classical acting on that level is similar to ballet in that it requires intensive work and training; you can't just take years off and then plunge into a thumping enormous part like Lear or Macbeth. )

Christopher Plummer has remarked, in a similar vein, that the kind of training and experience that aided his own development is no longer available, although I don't think he said why. This is not good news; however, I don't know that the decline of the actor-manager model, which did have its own problems, is necessarily responsible. An institution can carry on a tradition if you have the right people at the top. A very big if, of course. :)

I must say it was a pleasure to hear and see O'Toole again, in any case. I miss him. Must rent My Favorite Year again. I noted also that Rose, who usually interrupts more often than Larry King, listened respectfully for the most part. And who do we have now that could play T.E. Lawrence or Henry II with the same charisma and authority? Sigh.

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I'm not sure whether to address O'Toole's remarks in the context of theater or ballet, but here goes.

What O'Toole says about institutionalization is only partly true in the theater. Yes, the Royal Shakespeare Company has been looked down on (and, in Britain, derided and scorned) for some time now, owing to mediocre productions. Personally, I've found the company's offerings to be ordinarily humdrum, sometimes downright dreary, with the occasional spark of originality. However, the National can usually be relied on to produce fresh, interesting work, and it is just as much an institution as the RSC. Here in Washington, our theater productions are almost all the work of nonprofit companies as opposed to independent commercial ventures. I don't know how many of them qualify as institutions, but I'd say the Shakespeare Theater does, and its productions usually display a high level of imagination and execution. Is the difference, then, in the way an institution is managed?

In ballet, creativity is almost always up to a choreographer or company director. Today, serious, creative ballet occurs almost entirely in institutions, due to both financial and artistic necessity. But once you've got an institution, you have to fund it primarily through ticket sales, and the temptation is to cater to the lowest common denominator of taste in order to move the most tickets. Full-length ballets with recognizable titles sell best, but not all choreographers are interested in making these (especially new ones, who might understandably be frightened by the task). IMO, the decline in the presentation of mixed bills is the biggest obstacle to the development of new choreographers. Companies even seem reluctant to sneak a short new ballet into an evening composed primarily of a shortish "full-length" ballet. Why not add a 20-minute work, either new or classic, to the Nutcracker bill? It would help people realize that ballet can be many things beyond what they expect.

The limited amount of rehearsal time available is also a barrier to creativity. It takes a lot of work for dancers and choreographers or ballet masters to achieve the right style, the proper understanding of the work they're rehearsing, and the budgets simply don't allow them this time. O'Toole spoke of being willing to work for nothing in order to get the chance to act great roles, but should artists have to starve in order to be able to be creative? We seem to have tacitly agreed that we will pay performers to do their thing, but we're only going to pay them so much. Even the best-paid dancers earn far less than their status as top professionals merits. If we compensated them fairly, the costs would be prohibitive.

Most of the great choreographers worked in an institutional setting. But there have been others who worked outside it (Massine, Nijinsky, Tudor before ABT, Balanchine between Diaghilev and NYCB), and because there was no institution to carry on their work after they died or left the company, their ballets have been lost. The question is whether budding choreographers are best served by making their ballets for an institution or whether a more informal setting would benefit everyone involved—and then whether an institution's artistic director would know when the time is right to "promote" the choreographer to the big stage.

Obviously there are lots of issues here.

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There can be no creativity without technique, technique, technique.

Before Margaret Thatcher and her ilk wrecked the country, there was a thing called repertory theatre in England.

That is where people learnt technique. The backbone of technique, is the repertory based on Shakespeare.

To play Shakespeare, one needs technique, technique, technique. That is, inter alia, voice projection, diction, metric/rhetoric, dialects, singing, fencing, dancing, blocking. It also means a deep knowledge of the period, and of the ideas behind the plays. The precise opposite of Method Acting.

If you can play Shakespeare - as Hans Brenaa would say about Bournonville - you can play anything.

By choking off the subsidy to all those "two-bit" repertory houses out in the provinces, the Old Crone choked off the stream that had been supplying theatres all over the English-speaking world with outstanding actors for the past two or so hundred years.

The standard of acting in England has collapsed. Go to any playhouse, and compare the standard of the over-sixty actors, with that of the younger, from a sheer technical standpoint. Scary. The level of acting at the Globe Theatre, for example, is risible.

Anyone who has a vocation for acting, has now got to pay the rent six months a year by moonlighting for the television. One whispers or mumbles into the microphone, slumps, lurches, poses for close-ups...And one's technique breaks down.

Whereas, a repertory theatre based around Sheakespeare is the equivalent of the POB or Vaganova School, for the ballet.

The bad news, is that it no longer exists. The good news, is that one does know what the problem is. It can therefore be solved.

How much stronger is the theatre, than any film ! Compare the brilliant play by Ronald Hartwood on Furtwaengler, "Taking Sides", which played to a full house every night at Paris for one full year, to the rather flabby film adaptation now being shewn in Europe.

This Sunday at Paris, we saw a three-hour adaptation of the "Odyssey", purportedly for children, written by a fellow called Christian Stauff-Graf. The costumes and decors were made of things collected by the rag-and-bone man. The actors were mediocre (the French are always better at SILENT art forms !), but the text itself was excellent. The thing worked, as theatre, in fact, it was terrific, and the house was full of little children, none of whom squealed except at the bits they were supposed to.

The theatre du Gymnase where it played, was built in 1820. It is a little Pandora's Box, shredding, collapsing, the velvet fraying, the plaster flaking, the floorboards creaking. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, namely Cannes, quite literally billions of euros were being spent to promote absolute rubbish, films like IRREVERSIBLE. Brain-dead rubbish.

The question of film versus the theatre, is a little like the question of why Atylnai Assylmuratova did not leave Russia along with everyone else when she was at the height of her career ten years ago. She would have become a multi-millionnaire, and a household name. Even now, she would be paid perhaps ten or even twenty times her current wage as head of the Vaganova School, were she to teach in the United States or England. Why did she not leave ?

Interesting question. Some people are just too committed to principles.

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Having worked in repertory theatre many, many years ago, I can assure Katharine that it died long before Margaret Thatcher came on the scene, largely due to a phenomenon called Television. And in most provincial reps, we did more Agatha Christie thrillers than Shakespeare I'm sorry to say, as they were what brought the audiences in.

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