Three Shakespearian Productions: A Conversation

Summary

Scene: A stone terrace in Sicily.

Personages

Hilton Edwards, a producer Micheál MacLiammóir, an actor and designer

Macliammóir (emerging into the evening sunshine as he continues a sentence presumably launched upon indoors)...“and anyway, who wants to talk of the stage in such a setting? Are you anxious, now you have escaped to Paradise for a season, to recall the agonies endured in a dusty theatre in Dublin, to consider seriously the drawbacks and advantages of the Elizabethan manner, to rack your brains in an endeavour to remember exactly why you were a little bored by any modern effort to revive that manner, or why the Shakespearian producer is at sea the moment that manner is abandoned?

Edwards I would not have been bored in Shakespeare's day. Not because my own mentality as a spectator would have been different, but because the actors themselves, with their fresher understanding, their surety of purpose, their reliance on their own craft instead of the electricians' and the dressmakers', their direct contact with their audience which is a forgotten secret of Shakespeare's magic, would have revealed the plays as no mouthing nineteenth-century Hamlet or muttering, impotent Othello of our own day can do, with all the ingenuity of our lighting, our swiftly-changing scenery, our amusing, fashionable disguises.