LEAN UPSTREAM includes the first showings of The Forest and the Field, a new performative lecture by Chris Goode, made with the collaboration of Jonny Liron.
This new stage version of The Forest and the Field is loosely based on an essay written by Chris in early 2008 and given as a paper at the Miscellaneous Theatre Festival, Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, University of Cambridge, at the invitation of studio manager Jeremy Hardingham. The stage version is essentially a theatrical exploration of the same ideas, rather than an adaptation of the original essay: but the essay nonetheless gives some hint as to the kind of issues raised by the stage piece.
You can read the opening of the essay here, and download the whole thing via a link at the bottom of this section.
The Forest and the Field
Some years ago I was running a class for young actors who felt intimidated by Shakespeare, and in all the rich and various texts with which we worked to remedy their aversion, there was one word in particular which they struggled to pronounce correctly. See if you can spot it in these four well-known lines which begin the prologue to Henry the Fifth:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention,A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
The difficult word, of course, is ‘O’. Many actors, by no means only my daunted students, instinctively shrink from its radical, exposing intimacy. In performance it needs to be given a certain weight, especially here because it’s the first word uttered in a large and robust play, and the first word in an argument about whether art, and theatrical performance in particular, can ever be adequate to the presentation of enormities. But how can an appropriate weight be given to something that is in so many ways not there? To an actor even more than, perhaps, to a literary critic, ‘O’ is not so much a word as the lack of a word. It is a space that opens like a stigma in language to denote the expression of a feeling, a sensation, or an ideation that eludes or exceeds or at best precedes language. It’s a ground zero from which the grand edifices of poetic articulation have been eliminated. Not even a consonant remains, unlike such other comparably detested particles as ‘Fie!’ or ‘Pah!’. No, with ‘O’, the actor experiences an incredibly long one-and-a-half seconds of his mouth just hanging stupidly open as if it were an effigy of the circle on the page of the playscript, that little round zone that denotes the dreadful impossibility of fully encapsulating in language the movements of pain and anguish, of sorrow and despair, of shock and awe, of longing and wonder and desire. For the actor, just as for the sexual neurotic such as Lear or Malvolio, ‘O’ is a hole into which he is terrified of toppling.
What’s particularly fascinating about the prologue to Henry the Fifth, however, is that within just a few lines, the actor is asked to say ‘O’ again: and this time, he says it absolutely fine:
...But pardon, and gentles all,The flat unraised spirits that have daredOn this unworthy scaffold to bring forthSo great an object: can this cockpit holdThe vasty fields of France? or may we cramWithin this wooden O the very casquesThat did affright the air at Agincourt?
‘This wooden O’ is, of course, the Globe Theatre, where the play was first performed in 1599; and in fact these lines would have been the first to be heard at the brand new venue. Conceivably that very first ‘O’ is therefore a kind of stereoscopic pun, not only an expression of a desire to attain “the brightest heaven of invention”, but also a vocative address to the Globe itself: “O, O!” Certainly, ‘O’ is as responsive to a multiplicity of readings as might be any more obviously turbulent word. But what particularly interests me here is the possibility that in invoking the ‘wooden O’ in this context, Shakespeare is describing a material realization of the linguistic O, the radically intimate zone of sensation and imagination that exists at least partly outwith the parameters of verbal articulation.
It would probably be overeager to see this in itself as Shakespeare anticipating a theatre that mistrusts text as the principal carrier of information. But it can certainly be taken to suggest a model of theatre as an ‘O zone’, as it were: a demarked territory in which the excessive experience of pain and sorrow and desire and wonder can be somehow contained and shared...
Download the whole essay here.
