This happened to me at least twice in London, the need to see the same production of a play three times. The first play was The Best of Friends, in 1988 at the Apollo Theatre, and it featured John Gielgud, Rosemary Harris, and Ray McAnally in the cast as, respectfully, Sir Sydney Cockerell, the museum curator, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, a Benedictine nun, and the playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw.
The play was adapted from the letters and journals of the three over their twenty-five-year relationship and was inspired by the book The Nun, The Infidel, and the Superman. As you might imagine, the production was informative, consistently engrossing and humanly touching to see. It was also thrilling to experience each actor all aglow on stage with creative uniqueness, and before one performance I even waited outside the stage door for Gielgud to arrive so I might thank him.
The street, not that wide, was piled high with many offerings of boxes and garbage for collection the next day and finally, when Gielgud did arrive in this odd setting for one of the world’s legendry actors, he seemed wary at this stranger’s approach on a somewhat dark street, although, in the coming years, we did correspond by mail on several occasions.
The second play which demanded my three-time attendance was The Secret of Sherlock Holmes, starring Jeremy Brett, along with Edward Hardwicke, and written by his friend, the playwright Jeremy Paul. This production was running at the Wyndham’s Theatre s during 1988 when I sent Jeremy a detailed letter requesting an interview with him for my book on creativity. He sent me, in return, a postcard with, on one side, his portrait, and, on the other, his simple handwritten response, “Of course.” So we met, and had a long chat full of detail in Jaremy’s dressing room about how he very diligently prepared his creation of what many consider the definitive Sherlock Holmes.
Naturally, during my flight back to Canada, I only then realized that Jeremy and his unique creation of Holmes would make a fascinating substantial newspaper article, so when the Globe and Mail agreed, I was off back to London in 1989. Jeremy was obviously impressed and quite pleased, when he told Jeremy Paul that I had seen The Secret of Sherlock Holmes three times, and during our final meeting he also revealed a deep love of horses.
He also told me how, on his way home after a performance, he would often go stand among the homeless keeping warm on London’s winter streets. His Sherlock Holmes was the creation of an intense and complex man, and one easily came to expect no less of Jeremy in other ways. I liked the guy.
The first performance of the Shaw Festival’s Gnit I attended was a quite unanticipated experience, an immediately exciting one for a number of reasons. I therefore found myself frantically making notes to understand both what was going on in the pinpoint unpadded writing and how exactly the director proved so decidedly and imaginatively in tune with the playwright’s words and intentions. Indeed, I couldn’t help but suspect that word and physical representation had to be the fruit of one imagination. Margaret and I agreed that we should see Gnit again, especially since she had found my note-taking so distracting and annoying that after the interval she found another seat.
So, we sat apart the second time in the presence of Gnit and, no pen in hand this time, I was consumed by the goings-on before me and swept along by the happily creative combination of playwright Eno and director Carroll, with their respective theatrical energies in full swing.
I was amazed at how, even with so many elements combined, this production possessed a quality of almost unwavering, confident rightness. I watched and concentrated, and one thing I realized was that with the first performance we had seen I had missed the seamlessness of the whole thing, the subtle unity of it.
I also became more specifically aware of the many characterizations by the actors, each one with uniquely compelling human nuances at play. With so many characters in Gnit and with a cast of only six, it took secure artistry to achieve a stamp of individuality each time a character was to appear. Two of the actors confirmed for me afterwards that, no surprise, how much work was needed to achieve performances of this, well, rightness. I’ve rarely witnessed such split-second production in a play.
I enjoyed just sitting back and being drawn in by this, my second experience of the Shaw Festival’s Gnit. In turn, I also began to think unkindly of our too easily accepted ritual of reviewing theatre and what reviewing, as we tend to do it, actually means. I had read two damning reactions – among a number of enthusiastic ones -to this production, and then found that my reaction, on actually seeing Gnit, was, instead, almost ecstatic and absolutely the opposite. Couldn’t these alleged reviewers see that a vigorous and dynamic creative imagination was the going currency here?
Indeed, I recalled once interviewing an annoyed Christopher Newton who’d just received a letter condemning a recent Shaw production and who now wondered what qualifications such people had to criticize anything when all they knew was “painting on black velvet.”
We do indeed inhabit a culture in which it seems impossible for people to own up to their limitations and ignorance, and to take responsibility for becoming adequately informed. They feel compelled to criticize, to “win” fabricated confrontations as, much too often, they merely broadcast their lack of knowledge, aesthetic sensitivity, and experience. Theatre of substance, on the other hand, can require of necessity that we willingly make ourselves open to new ideas, new experiences, new realities.
We have to repeatedly earn our right to evaluate what is offered in the arts and to call ourselves critics. We have to question whether the high standards to which we at first supposedly aspired still guide us. I stopped reading one Toronto critic a few years ago when he began to simply – often devastatingly, sometimes hurtfully – pontificate. One essence of a worthy critic is, after all, a constant willingness to learn beyond familiarity. And to do one’s job as an insightful, imaginative, and self-searching exploration.
One critic who got me interested in theatre in the first place was the Toronto Star’s Nathan Cohen. In high school, I used to walk home and, on the way, often buy the Toronto Star in order to read a social commentary column by Pierre Berton and a theatrical review column by Nathan Cohen. Years later, at the Royal Alex, we sat behind Nathan Cohen at a performance of The King and I for which he then wrote a rave review the next day. I’d observed, however, that for most of the performance that Cohen had fallen and obviously remained asleep.
And now comes a performance of Gnit for the third time and the notes, take them as you will, that I made during the performance…. I just can’t help it; I have to make notes during a performance….
– the dialogue seems like a waltz and one character easily replaces another in this continuum of life in which momentum is all
– these people don’t converse, they quietly (usually) orate and don’t hear one another
– “Fucking Jesus Shit” exclaims Gnit and we notice that as each character speaks, others just happen to be there….co-existence with communication is not a foregone conclusion with these people
– a favorite scene: Gnit asks Solvay “What are you afraid of?” and she so off-handedly lists many
reasons for her fear….one of many funny moments
– Did I hear this? Solvay tells Peter that he is a person with many “problem causing skills”
– in this world, life happens and we talk, but not too often with a real causal link between event and words
– the play Gnit means x and the play Gnit doesn’t mean, x and both assessments are equally true as our words often float off into space
– some characters live a frenzy every second, some do so even quietly
– Peter makes an art of insincerity
-life happens no matter what we do, or is it a series of random disconnected acts
-Not sure of the sequence here…. mom says to Peter, I love you but you don’t do anything
-these people seem to pound away at nothingness and their existence then emerges for a brief minute or two
-We are, but the world is not ordered for us…. if we are a mirror, there is perhaps nothing there to reflect
-at this frenzied pace actors are sometimes indistinguishable theatrical functions and then they are suddenly touching humans
-I keep thinking of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, but without equations
– Gnit is so self-absorbed that he doesn’t notice that he is blatantly robbed\
“A very long day on earth” says the bartender…what a great line!
-these people are non-committal in their words…they make sounds with no meanings guaranteed
-It’s fun to hear individuals in the audience connect with a spoken line and then crack up
-I love this line “What part of every word I know don’t you understand?”
-Each character has a unique body with its own dynamics and its own presence, until it doesn’t
— another quietly eloquent summation, from Solvay this time “I’m in sort of a solitary mood”
-did a character say this or did I think it during the performance? “Life is a painful farce sometimes and we’re lucky that we die”
-these actors give us many carefully-etched theatrical gems
-Why do I hear Anitra’s dance as we find ourselves in a loony bin?
-Peter is quintessentially annoying
-Peter who repeatedly wants to be himself looks around the madhouse and observes “They’re nothing but themselves”
– “what’s an important human being? he soon asks…. yes, we do need to matter, even if we don’t
-Like Donald Trump, Gnit is someone out of tune with everything as he ruins this same everything
-what can be said in the end?… “Gnit tried, that’s a life”
-Nice touch in the set with a series of tubes overhead out of which drop fire and even a walking stick in a visual joke
-Peter wonders about “the achievements of my soul” and adds “there’s more to me than I’m saying” …again we realize that some humans are incapable of being clued in
– Peter does realize (or does he,really?) “I don’t know how to live, I never have”
So that was Gnit for a third time: consistently memorable, progressively thought-provoking, entertaining at every turn, eternally present now in my theatre-loving consciousness. Yes, it is a special experience for me when my imagination gets to inhabit a production like this one of Gnit.
Next, A Christmas Carol at the Royal George, though for only the second time. But who knows?