Does Nothing Come from Nothing?

/, Theatre/Film, Blesok no. 33/Does Nothing Come from Nothing?

Does Nothing Come from Nothing?

Good evening. Now, you must help me, because it is impossible to talk without knowing who one’s talking to. I’ve been very kindly introduced, but I don’t know you. So can you tell me who is a psychoanalyst here? Ah, you’re in a minority. Who amongst you feels covered by the enormous blanket words psychologists, psychotherapist, and psychiatrist? Oh, hands are moving up! Good! Now, who has nothing to do with any of these? Ah, a majority!
Once, some years ago, we did a performance of a play called Kaspar — which you may know; it’s about Kaspar Hauser — in a French psychiatric hospital in Paris. We did two performances. One in a room about this size, full of patients and it was quite an extraordinary experience because of the intensity of the listening. In fact, it compelled the actors to have a quite unusual degree of sensitivity. They felt that the least image that they projected could easily go too far and be dangerous to the patients. After that experience we went upstairs to another hall, where we did a second performance which was entirely for the psychiatrists of the hospital there were four hundred. This was a very interesting experience because we could actually feel and hear the movement of four hundred brains, debating with themselves whether they agreed or disagreed with what they were seeing. And this produced a hum that was quite audible. So just listen for a moment and see, because I think I can detect something similar tonight…
When I received this invitation, which I felt was a very serious one, to take part in this very impressive series I consulted my brother, Alexis, who is an old standing member of the Psycho-Analytical Society, about what I should do.
He said, “What are you going to talk about?” So I said, “Obviously, about the brain and the mind.”
He raised his hands in horror and said, “But my God, that’s what they listen to all day long. They want you to talk about theatre.”
I said, “But I hear myself talking about theatre all day long. I can’t see why I should go into another context and go on talking about theatre.”
In the end I realized that in fact the interest of the subject and that is why I chose the most non-committal title I could find Does Nothing Come from Nothing? – was that it doesn’t matter if one is talking about theatre or if one is talking about the mind. One is, in fact, talking about the same essential and incomprehensible human experience in two completely different types of practical work. This is what Ernest Jones so strongly underlined. Inevitably, there are both areas of confirmation and areas of completely opposite understanding in the same field. So it seemed to me there can not be any difference between speaking on one subject or the other.
For instance, it always struck me over the years that there is something totally incomprehensible in the mystery of an actor’s ability to enter, instantaneously, into the depth of another human being with an exact understanding of the complex mechanism of that person’s mind. The actor is an Instant Analyst.
Now this immediate entry into the secret mechanisms of behaviour is a common experience in rehearsal and is very curious. An actor, once he has left drama school, has very, very little time in the day and in the week to go around and observe other human beings — he spends most of his time locked in a very small closed circle, which is the theatre world. Yet, you find that the moment you start speaking to him about a character that he is playing or preparing to play, he will speak in a precise and analytical way about the motivation of the character, with deep insight, using very practical and often very simple language: “Well, he’s the sort of person who… No, he wouldn’t do that, I mean he would be thinking this, but he would be doing this because his feelings would be leading him, but it wouldn’t be quite true.” All that is the natural jargon of an actor, which comes through something strangely difficult to define, because the penetration often is instantaneous. Very often an actor can read a script this happens in film acting all the time and can instantly, through what you can only call intuition, instantly penetrate into a specific understanding of the workings of somebody, apparently very far from himself and sometimes not through a long and difficult process, but at once. From here he, or she, develops what one calls a character. And as everyone knows who watches actors, this newly created person is sometimes extraordinarily complex. Where does the actor acquire the understanding that for the doctor takes years of study?
When I first began to work in the theatre, I worked with a very young Alec Guinness. Alec Guinness, who had already done a lot of work, said to me, “I must warn you, if you interrupt me while I am rehearsing something emotional, if in the middle of a scene you just interrupt me because you just want to tell me something, I’ll yell at you”. “But”, he said, “don’t take this as showing any bad faith, any bad intentions on my part. I can’t bear to lose the thread, the unity of my character, so I will shout so as to stay within what I am doing”. This is the only occasion I have ever heard an actor say such a thing and to me it is the exception that underlines an astonishing rule. Normally, an actor can be deeply inside an extraordinary, complex character, inter-relating with great passion with another character and you can say, “Just a moment, could you just step two inches to the right because otherwise you would be out of the light” and he says in his normal voice “Oh yes, certainly”, immediately picking up again not only the thread of the scene, but the entire human being who is, as it were, put on and taken off as easily as a coat. But the mystery is that this coat goes on and off inside and the actor can slip into the entire fibre and structure of a human being in a flash, without using any mental devices or tricks.
The most striking experience of this was when we made a film of King Lear in Denmark in the middle of winter. I remember Paul Scofield sitting in the freezing ice and snow I think about 20° below zero – covered in furs with Danish assistants bringing him little glasses, either of hot coffee or Schnapps or both, and smoking his pipe while the shot was being lined up. He would pass the time chattering with whoever was by him. But when we were ready to shoot he would get up from the chair, dropping all these rugs and fur coats, step in front of the camera and in the same movement stop in to the most complex character there is King Lear. Not like a rehearsal in the theatre where, as Alec Guinness was trying to express, the actor is carried along by the movements of the scene, but here in the cold, out of all continuity. It happened just like that he would get up as Paul Scofield and in the movement from being out of the camera to being in front of the lens, the whole body would absorb the character in all its fullness. Anything that needed to be improvised (because after all in a film he has to make very different gestures from what he would have rehearsed in the theatre) like just a way of reaching out his hand would belong totally to Lear. Then I would say “Cut” and the other person would be dropped. I’d say “We’ll do another take”, and the other identity would instantly be resumed.
This is the sort of everyday experience of acting, which remains for me an extraordinary mystery. But there is another mystery that goes beyond this; there are bad actors and there are good actors. The difference between a bad actor and a good actor is something that everyone recognizes; but when our job is to find a precise way to transform the level on which an actor is acting, to make “bad” become “better”, then one is in front of a great enigma. What makes for a change in quality?
Quality in external things, quality in a motor car, quality in any visible object is very easy to define. Quality when it comes to human actions and human relations is exceptionally difficult to define. But it takes on a special interest when it is related to the same blueprint, to a shared written structure, a shared physical structure, whether involving two actors or twenty. When an understudy takes over from another actor, he may do exactly the same gestures and movements as the person he replaces and everybody in any audience will unmistakably tell whether what they are experiencing is now on a lower level of quality or a higher level of quality. However terrified people are today of anything that suggests “value”, empirically every single paying audience recognizes and responds all the time to an absolutely unmistakable, if indefinable, scale of values. So when one works, one is all the time looking for a “value” and this is quite specific. It is not just the generalized thing of playing a scene well, of having a company that “plays well together”; this is not enough; each single word counts, as does each single intonation, or the way that a hand moves forward, moves backwards or can pause for a moment. These all contain exactly the same question: What is this strange human fabric, this ectoplasm that the actor has taken from nowhere, put on and which has penetrated through all his fibres and which can be of cheap quality, of middle quality, or supremely fine quality, just like a carpet? What produces this substance of variable quality? All that one can say for certain is that there is a crystal clear reference, a yardstick and like everything in the theatre, this yardstick only exists “in the moment”.
Nothing in the theatre has any meaning “before” or “after”. Meaning is “now”. An audience comes to the theatre for one reason only, which is to live a certain experience and an experience can only take place at the moment when it is experienced. When this is truly the case, the silence in a theatre changes its density and in every form of theatre, in all different traditions and all the different types of theatre all over the world you can see exactly the same phenomenon. An audience is composed of people whose minds are whirling — as they watch the event, sometimes this audience is touched — again we do not really know what “touched” means, except that it is a phenomenon. At first, the audience isn’t touched — why should it be? Then all of a sudden, something touches everyone. At the moment that they are touched an exact phenomenon occurs. What has been up till then individual experiences become shared, unified. At the moment when the mass of people becomes one, there is one silence and that silence you can taste on the tongue. It’s a different silence from the ordinary silence that is there at the beginning of the performance and it is a silence that can, according to the quality that is lived by the actor, become an experience that is of another quality for the audience, one which each person recognises. This shared recognition expresses itself through the increasing density of the same silence.
Because of this, one can see that there is a mystery, which has always been present in the nature of a theatre event. And I think this must be linked to something very fascinating — the difference between drama and tragedy. When an audience sees a sordid, miserable reflection of the misery of life, if this is amusingly presented, or excitingly presented the audience can have a good and interesting evening and applaud at the end. But this is not what one means by the word tragedy. Tragedy has a very special effect. If tragedy reaches the intensity we’ve just described when the deepest of silences is produced in the audience, then the audience confronts the intense core of a living experience, and the audience leaves the theatre totally renewed.
Now, the very obscure word “catharsis” refers to this, but unfortunately a word cannot help one’s understanding. What can help us, on the contrary, is to return to the question, recognizing a true enigma when we meet one. When terror is aroused in a particular way, instead of the reaction being negative, something positive is released. This seems to me very important to stress because the theatre has a possible vocation — it can be a healing process. There was a time, the time of Greek tragedy, when a whole city could come together and the fragmentation of all the individuals who make up the city would be transformed into a shared, intense experience in which self is transcended. For a moment, a life of a completely different nature was tasted and then each person would leave the theatre and go back into their ordinary preoccupations. But a temporary healing of the diseased and fragmented community took place, even if the fragmentation and the conflicts took place again as people left the theatrical space. And the transformation and the taste — and the confidence — it gave could take place again and again whenever the audience came together in the special circumstances of a performance. Society cannot be healed permanently, but temporary healings can constantly redress the balance.
There is no point, however, in dwelling romantically in the distant past, saying this was once possible maybe in Greek tragedy. What is important is to see how this possibility is inherent in the theatre process, wherever it takes place. This throws a responsibility onto everyone who is practicing theatre. Which is why, picking some words out of the blue six months ago, when I was asked what I was going to talk about tonight, I chose as a title Does Nothing come from Nothing? So I ask you: Does nothing come from nothing? For instance, if one takes a purely behaviorist view on the living process, if every single action of a human being comes from inner conflicts and pressures whose causes can be traced to recognizable, social, cultural, racial, environmental factors, if this is true, then every single form of behavior out of which life and theatre are made comes from “Something”. Any behaviorist would maintain that everything that even the greatest writer can put into a play and everything that the finest performance can offer is still made out of the material that these people have acquired in their lifetime or through their genes. If that is so, we have the answer, something comes out of something, nothing comes out of nothing. But direct experience disagrees with this easy conclusion.

AuthorPeter Brook
2018-08-21T17:23:29+00:00 August 1st, 2003|Categories: Theory, Theatre/Film, Blesok no. 33|0 Comments