Playing Shakespeare. Dir. John Carlaw and Peter Walker. Perf. Trevor Nunn, John Barton, David Suchet, Alan Howard, Michael Pennington, Patrick Stewart, Lisa Harrow, Jane Lapotaire, Ian McKellen, and Ben Kingsley. 1979-1984. DVD. Athena, 2009.Fry and Laurie's amazing parody (for which, q.v.) may have its origin in something else amazing: Playing Shakespeare. The four-disc set contains some of the most astonishing Shakespearean actors of the age talking about how best to act.
Here's a short clip. In it, Ian McKellen is asked to enact the first line of The Merchant of Venice with several different shades of emotion and subtext.
It's one line, but its delivery can be so extraordinarily telling. Fry and Laurie have fun with it by imagining an acting coach concentrating all that energy on one word. They make it ridiculous—but there's still some truth behind their ridicule. Not every word in Shakespeare can bear such a multiplicity of interpretation. But many—and perhaps most—of them can.
Links: The Film at IMDB.
Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
While searching the library for "Playing Shakespeare" I found this intriguing title: "Will Power: How to Act Shakespeare in 21 Days."
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Hermann Fan
The flippant answer would be . . .
ReplyDelete"Give a man five acts, and you treat him to a play. Teach a man to act, and he'll play some every day."
More seriously, any member of Shakespeare's acting company would have learned two or three new plays and acted in three to five old ones in a twenty-one-day period!
Less seriously, didn't Olivier follow the method recommended by that book?
kj