Atmosphere Space Stasis - "Staging Pinter's 'Mountain Language' and 'A Kind of Alaska' using the techniques of Michael Chekhov by Jonathan Pitches

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Atmosphere, Space, Stasis:Staging Pinter's MountainLanguage and A Kind of Alaskausing the techniques of MichaelChekhovJonathan Pitches & Anthony ShrubsallPublished online: 20 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Jonathan Pitches & Anthony Shrubsall (1999) Atmosphere, Space,Stasis: Staging Pinter's Mountain Language and A Kind of Alaska using the techniques ofMichael Chekhov, Studies in Theat re Product ion, 19:1, 36-66

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36 Atmosphere, Space, Stasis

Jonathan Pitches and Anthony Shrubs all

Atmosphere, Space, Stasis: Staging Pinter's Mountain Language and A Kind of Alaska using the techniques of Michael Chekhov.

In the introduction to his course for professional actors held in New York in 1941, Michael Chekhovused a, now familiar, example to illustrate what he meant by atmosphere:

Let us imagine a street accident - there is a definite atmosphere around the place where the catastrophe has taken place. When you enter the scene where all the people are running or moving or standing still, you, first of all, feel the atmosphere before you understand what it is that has happened.

(Chekhov 1985, 28)

Some five years earlier, Constantin Stanislavski, Chekhov's teacher, had also referred to a street accident in his chapter on emotion memory inAnActor Prepares ( 1936) .1 For Stanislavski, a tragedy in the street offers an emotional stimulus for the witness/ actor, which can be recalled and used on stage. The focus is on utilising the actor's personal material. Chekhov, by contrast, highlights the more general stimulus of the surrounding atmosphere. 'To whom does this heartbeat belong?' he asks in the same passage, 'To nobody. You can't fmd the person who has created this atmosphere, and still it is there' (ibid).

Where Stanislavski's interest is in the sense stimuli of actual past events, Chekhov's is in his actors' sensitivity to the more objective, yet no less stimulating, world of atmosphere. The difference is significant for it highlights an important change in emphasis in Michael Chekhov's work - away from what he calls the 'dying grandfather' approach (dependent on an historical, emotional root) and towards an understanding that the actor's task is to imagine. In his own words:

'I am speaking against remembering things that are still too personal. The whole question is, can we develop in ourselves the power of imagination and concentration. I am sure we can.'

(1985,42).

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Studies in Theatre Production 37

Chekhov's reference to the street accident also highlights an important distinction between the general (or objective) atmosphere and the personal feelings of the witnesses (the individual atmosphere). The individual moods of the people present will, he argues, be sensitive to the general atmosphere but will nevertheless remain distinct from it. Thus, two sets of feelings can exist in the same space simultaneously - the one coming from outside (the objective atmosphere), the other coming from inside (the individual atmosphere). In theatrical terms this clash of atmospheres helps the actor to establish a relationship to the play, distinguishing him/herself from other characters. The distinction is made clear in the entry on Atmosphere in Chekhov's manual of acting: On the Technique of Acting ( 1991):

Imagine the air around you, or a theatre space, filled with the Atmosphere that you have chosen. It is no more difficult than imagining the air filled with light, dust, fragrance, smoke, mist, and so on ... You must try it practically. .. After a period of time, when you feel sure of being able to imagine and sustain the atmosphere around you, proceed to the next step. Try to relate the reaction inside you to that of the imaginary atmosphere outside.

(32-33)

Chekhov's work on atmosphere forms part of a comprehensive method of acting developed by him, firstly in Russia as an actor in the Moscow Art Theatre, and as director at the second MAT, then in Europe (in Berlin, Paris and at Dartington College, England) and fmally in America. Chekhov's complex set of ideas is represented in diagrammatic form in On the Technique of Acting ( 1991, xxxvi) and includes the psychological gesture, work on the four brothers (the feeling of ease, form, beauty and the whole) as well as exercises on qualities of action and a recurrent emphasis on imagination and concentration. Viewed as a whole, Chekhov's system forms a kind of web of practical skills for the actor. As one pays attention to Atmosphere and Radiation, for instance, so many of the other 'lights of inspiration' will be illuminated (xxxvii). As such, it is a non-hierarchical acting system, which models acting rather like modern science models the brain: as an organic web of connections.

With its emphasis on imagination and the concomitant shift away from the actor's real life experience, Chekhov's system does not restrict itself to any one style of theatre. Indeed, the many contexts in which he worked whilst his system was being developed makes it impossible to say where Chekhov's work is located. In a sense this is a liberating factor when working with his ideas practically as there

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are no preconceptions about how the work should look, no predetermined Chekhovian style. Our interest in his work stemmed from both a practical and a pedagogical root, from training with Sarah Kane and Alistair Ganley from the Michael Chekhov Centre and from using his exercises in class with students. Neither of us, however, had had the chance for a full-scale investigation of his work and its relationship to text. The project with which this article is concerned set out to work specifically with Chekhov's exercises in Atmosphere, although some time was devoted to imaginative work with objects, to qualities of action and to improvisation with the Laban effort actions. 2 Our second objective was to continue and further problematise our research into the actor-director relationship. 3 To this end, we shared responsibility for directing and acting, exchanging our roles half way through the Pinter double bill we had chosen with myself (Jonathan Pitches) directing the first play A Kind of Alaska and Anthony Shrubsall playing the role of Hornby; whilst I took the role of Prisoner in the second play; Mountain Language, under Anthony's direction. In arranging things this way we could extend our exploration of the director-actor relationship through Michael Chekhov from both sides of the operation. The rest of the cast for both plays was drawn from the three performance-based degrees taught at University College Northampton - the BA in Combined Honours (Drama major), the BA in Performance Studies, and the MAin Theatre Studies.4

The choice of Harold Pinter for the performance text was, in the main, motivated by a simple creative desire to stage his work. Juxtaposing A Kind of Alaska with Mountain Language raised many interesting questions in terms of theme and design. But Pinter's work was also particularly appropriate for the project. The privileging of atmosphere over understanding is central to an audience's experience of Pinter in performance and although one might argue that ultimately there is an overriding logic to Pinter's action on stage, this pattern is deliberately concealed and felt first in less explicit form - in the mood on stage. Indeed, the adjective 'Pinteresque' evokes an atmosphere in one's mind before anything else. One of the principal challenges facing a production team staging Pinter's plays is how to grasp the underlying action and communicate it to an audience without losing this sense of atmosphere. Chekhov's acting methods are clearly suited to Pinter's plays for this very reason: they serve to provide the actor and director with a way of articulating the intangible, of evoking the general atmosphere of each scene and of capturing the individual moods of the characters.

The rehearsal schedule was organised to allow us one week of intensive rehearsal in the Easter vacation, followed by three weeks of evening work leading up to performance. The week's activity was arranged in three periods: l) work on

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Michael Chekhov as an ensemble, 2) rehearsal of Mountain Language, 3) rehearsal of A Kind of Alaska. The evening sessions leading up to performance were exclusively devoted to work on text.

In the period leading up to the vacation week we had quickly found that it was impossible to share the workshop leader role between the two of us. Swapping between director and actor, leader and participant led to a superficial engagement with each role. We found our concentration was divided between focusing on the present task and anticipating the next. The need for absolute attention to the task is a particular characteristic ofChekhov's work and one in which he agrees firmly with Stanislavski: 'The first and absolutely essential element is concentration: strong and undeviating attention to the work at hand. When the artist's attention is distracted, he stops functioning as an artist' (Cole 1955, 1llt In order to alleviate this problem we alternated the responsibility for leading the day's workshop. In doing so we allowed space for our directorial role to function - as workshop leader- without compromising our involvement as actors.

The ensemble arrangement also enabled us to workshop both plays at the same time using generic exercises. Cast members drew inspiration from the circumstances of their particular character but would present the findings to the whole of the cast. From a directorial point of view, this cross-fertilisation of creative material enabled some common reference points to be signed in performance: aspects of movement (contrasted with stasis), gestural patterns and character motivations were 'discovered' in the ensemble workshops and then selected for dramatic emphasis in the individual rehearsals on text. From a performer's perspective the sharing of improvised work across the two pieces helped reinforce the sense of the plays as a duet rather than as discrete halves of a double bill. In addition, the imaginary scope of Chekhov's work opened up the actors' creative investigation beyond the confines of each play. In the words of one of the student actors (Zoe Dods):

It helped me understand the possibilities of the exercises. I didn't have to just stay within the realms of the text ... I could just explore whatever I wanted to do with my character.

This perceived freedom with the text is a notable consequence of the unfettered imaginary work, which Chekhov encourages. Chekhov himself was criticised for taking his work beyond the playwright's intentions, specifically when working on Boleslavski's production of the Wreck of the Good Hope ( 1913). But the impulse for

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imaginative improvisation outside the text was with him even earlier. According to Mel Gordon:

The idea that an actor can 'go beyond the playwright or the play' is the first key to understanding the Chekhov technique and how it differed from Stanislavsky's early teachings. Chekhov claimed that the impulse 'to go beyond' came to him during his earlier apprenticeship at the Maly Theatre [in 1910].

(Chekhov 1991, xii)

Although we returned to the very specific demands of Pinter's language in the rehearsals on text, the forays beyond the play in the workshops had a striking impact on the actor's creative confidence. In the first instance this was evident in debates in the rehearsal room over character motivation. These debates were informed by imaginative decisions made by the cast in the workshops and, as such, seemed to carry more weight for the actor during text work. More specifically, the explorations beyond the text, focusing as they did on work with imaginative objects, began to develop the actors' facility with real objects in rehearsal and performance - an area that can be a weakness in student work. The following exercise began the intensive vacation course:

Object work: Think of an object you know, recreate it in all its detail, then think of an object your character knows: imagine a long corridor, at the end of it is your character's room, enter into the room, pick up one object and then discard it, pick up a second, develop a dialogue with it, select some text. Respond to the object as it becomes cold.

This exercise resulted in an elaborate and complex web of given circumstances being created by the actors. The Sergeant in Mountain Language (played by Stacey Swift) 'found' a knife in the room, previously owned by the character's father (not referred to in the text) and used 'to hurt people'. A real knife was then introduced into the scene in rehearsal, and was used in the innocent action of peeling an apple. In turn, the knife became superfluous and was dropped from the scene but the apple was retained, the eating of which became imbued with the same quality of menace and violence discovered in the workshop experience. In Stacey's own words: 'The object of the apple, because it had been born from my imagination, had a hyperreal quality for me.' Selecting this object for performance was a way of respecting its imaginative genesis and of exploiting the richness it had for the performer. As we have already stated, Chekhov's atmosphere work is divided into the general,

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Srudies in Theatre Production 41

objective atmosphere (of the play) and the specific, individual atmosphere or feeling - what Chekhov calls 'personal business' (1985, 99). For Chekhov, clarification of the former is part of the director's work whilst the latter falls within the remit of the actor. 6 Our workshops focused on establishing an understanding of this distinction and on encouraging and stretching the performers' imagination.

We began this process by setting up the studio space carefully, including what we called a 'special' space surrounded by a perimeter of'safe' space. Initial exercises concentrated on the threshold between the two spaces: at first by asking the actors to imagine crossing between the two spaces and then directing them to enter physically into the special (objective) space before returning to the safe space. A sense of'transition' between the two spaces was thus developed. This perimeter of safety is significant and serves a number of functions. It is there if an actor loses concentration, corpses or fmds the experience overwhelming and allows an immediate psychological distance from the imaginary work on stage to be established. As the central area is a space of imaginary ideas, withdrawing from that space is also a withdrawal from the ideas and feelings generated by the imagination: a safety valve which Chekhov thought was missing from the personal work demanded by Stanislavski.

Having established the objective space, we offered suggestions for atmospheres which filled this space: at first directly from our Chekhov training - the Gothic cathedral - then keyed in to our own concerns as directors of the Pinter plays. The latter set of atmospheres was wide ranging - from the emotional (boredom, tranquil love, hopelessness) to the material (marble, ice), and was chosen to resonate with both plays. The cast was invited simply to enter into the space, feel the atmosphere, respond in some manner, and exit. This process began without any structure, with individual actors following their own impulses to enter the space. Gradually, though, the improvisations were more carefully controlled, with the workshop leader asking particular pairings drawn from the plays to enter the space with an awareness of each other. Later still, brief improvisations in twos and threes (grouped from the plays) were played through with each actor using a small piece of their character's text.

Atmospheres were also suggested by music, relying on the actors' imaginations to fill the space. We used The Residents' Hunt and Charlie Mingus' version of Stormy Mather. These were chosen for their contrasting atmospheric qualities: the former evoking a barren snowscape and the latter a steamy, late-night music

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1. A Kind of Alaska

Tent

lilcr L!J Chai o-

2. Mountain Language

AUDIENCE

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club. They also suggested a thematic pattern in the two plays - the move from an Alaskan chill inA Kind of Alaska to a dark, torturous heat in Mountain Language. Having experimented with the music pieces separately, we split the space in two, dedicating each half to one piece of music (now retained in the memory) and asked the actors to explore the transitions from one space to the other. No two objective atmospheres can exist in the same space, according to Chekhov; the overall atmosphere will always change to accommodate a new character or set of circumstances. By splitting the objective space into two, the actors are asked to explore repeatedly those moments of transition- what might be a new entrance or a new scene in a play. Split into two, the space models the shape of a play moving from one atmosphere to another. Developing a sensitivity to these atmospheric shifts is central to Chekhov's creative method and for our purposes essential for the scoring process we were to adopt.

Finally, the cast was asked to decide upon an individual atmosphere for a particular moment in the play. It transpired that these atmospheres were also of varying kinds and emerged from previous rehearsals as well as from predominant imagery from the text. Noting down the choices of the cast, they varied from simple emotional, Boredom, to the more complex emotional, Awkward Nai"vete, to the simple material Marble and complex material, Bruising. We then experimented with the clash of objective space and individual atmospheres, improvising meetings between characters in the space. Again, the space was later separated into two to explore how the individual atmospheres of each character transformed when moving from one objective atmosphere to another.

Only when we had thoroughly explored both parts of the atmosphere work did we take the step of scoring the plays in objective atmospheres. We took our lead from the instruction by Chekhov in the chapter on Objective Atmosphere and Individual Feelings in On the Technique of Acting:

The director can organize the rehearsal period of a production so that different Atmospheres within a play will be investigated, decided upon, and rehearsed as exactly as the dialogue or mise-en-scene. The script can be marked with a succession of Atmospheres. The division of the play into scenes and acts need have no connection with the division of the play into Atmospheres. These can be freely distributed to cover several speeches or an entire scene, or only part of it, according to the interpretation of the play. As a result, the actor, instead of waiting for the inspiration of an atmosphere to 'accidentally come to him' will have before him a score of

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Atmospheres that he can consciously assimilate, rehearse and perform. (1991, 30)

All our work in the vacation course had been leading towards this approach to rehearsal and our directorial method was underpinned by this technique of scoring atmospheres. For the final rehearsal period we developed a prompt book which defined the atmospheric shifts as clearly as the change in lighting states. The specific atmospheres chosen for the score had been suggested to us by the workshop investigations and then organised by us to make conscious links between the plays. The cast was then asked to make their own decisions concerning their individual atmospheres in response to the objective score. The fruits of this process are discussed below in two sections devoted to each play in turn.

Staging A Kind of Alaska by Jonathan Pitches

A Kind of Alaska is Pinter's very individual response to Oliver Sacks' collection of case studies: Awakenings (1973). Sacks' sensitive documentation of patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica - or sleeping sickness - has inspired many creative responses, from short stories, to novels and poems as well as a Hollywood fllin starring Robert de Niro and Robin Williams. The fllin version (1990) follows a rather predictable line of romance - an idealised struggle against the odds, documenting Leonard L.'s 'awakening'. Pinter's play, by contrast, explores the stark reality of a Doctor's obsession with the illness, the subsequent tensions placed on his marriage (with Pauline) and the confused world of his patient, Deborah, who has, in Pinter's words, 'erupted into life once more' (1991, 305) after twenty nine years of frozen 'sleep'. Deborah is very clearly based on Sacks' patient Rose R: 'the youngest child of a large, wealthy, talented New York family. .. endowed with a passion for parties, social life and aeroplanes' (Billington 1996, 282). One might read Pinter's play as a dramatic response to Sacks' rhetorical question in Awakenings: 'Is it possible that Miss R has never, in fact, moved on from the 'past'1 Could she still be 'in' 1926 forty-three years lated Is 1926 'now'1' (Sacks 1990, 83). It is a typically Pinteresque conundrum reminiscent of the sort of temporal complexity seen in Old Times ( 1971) when, with Anna's first entrance, Pinter fuses past with present effortlessly.

The time frame of the play offers a particular range of difficulties for a director, firstly in casting the play, then in setting the dramatic context for the actors. Sacks' patient had slept for forty-three years before her revival at the age of sixty-four, Pinter's, as we have seen, sleeps for twenty-nine years. It is not clear why

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Pinter reduces Deborah's period of sleep, but the effect is to limit significantly the patient's life experience, before the illness. Rose R.lived a wild life up to the age of twenty-one. Deborah is caught in adolescence at sixteen. Our casting of A Kind of Alaska reversed the acting problem for the actress playing Deborah - Zoe Dods, aged 20 -for she was physically stuck in the youth of her character and had to make the mental leap into old age, rather than vice versa. This became a point to emphasise in her interaction with the middle-aged doctor, Hornby, played by my colleague, Anthony Shrubsall ( 41). The father/daughter relationship, which is referred to momentarily in the text but remains implicit throughout, became prominent and was layered over with suggestions of other possible relationships: romantic lovers, doctor/patient, lecturer/student.

Following Chekhov's approach, the shifting pattern of relationships between the two main characters was scored in atmospheric terms. Thus, the opening section of the performance, before the first piece of dialogue, was performed in an objective atmosphere of Romance (Fig.3). Accompanied by Billie Holiday's Yesterday and bathed in a sepia-quality light, Hornby carried Deborah literally over the threshold and into the performance arena, laying her gently down on the hospital/marriage bed. The space into which they entered was a gauze tent which absorbed colour very effectively and thus could act as a visual transformer of atmosphere against the imaginative shifts of mood detailed in the score. The significance of this design will be discussed later. Here, though, let us note that from the outset the objective atmosphere was designed to problematise the doctor-patient relationship. Hornby's and Deborah's opening image was deliberately redolent of early Hollywood classics starring Rudolph Valentino?, setting up the couple's association on a foundation of intimacy whilst evoking a strong sense of an idealised past.

The opening atmosphere was then sharply transformed. As Hornby methodically pumped up the hydraulic hospital bed (a theatrical analogue of the administering ofL. Dopa by injection), the atmosphere shifted to one of Expectation. At the same time the lighting transformed from a warm wash of pink to bright white. Accordingly, the relationship between the two characters changed to the orthodox set-up of doctor and patient.

For the performers, the shift in atmosphere helped clarify the newly established environment of the hospital ward whilst also demanding an individual response from them. Both actors were invited to determine a personal score of individual atmospheres. Expectation pervaded in general but the two characters' responses to this objective atmosphere were very different. Anthony brought an individual atmosphere of Professionalism to the scene, as Hornby, which was set against

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46 Annosphere, Space, Stasis

Zoe's Awkward Naivete, as Deborah. These individual feelings complemented the status shift: from the equality of lovers to the imbalanced doctor-patient relationship as Hornby assumes control in the clinical environment. Hornby's reaction to Expectation was coloured by his professional concerns as the carer and this was reflected in his instinctive note making during her awakening. Deborah's naive response to Expectation, by contrast, resulted in her radiating a sense of hope, tinged with uncertainty. These choices helped clarifY for the actors what lay behind the ambiguous statement with which Deborah opens the play -for Hornby, a whole new case study presents itself, for Deborah, there is a tentative recognition that her mental incarceration is over.

Deborah:

behaviour ofD] Hornby:

Something is happening Silence [Hornby observes and notes down the

Do you know me? Silence Do you recognise me? Silence Can you hear me? She does not look at him

(1991, 307-8)

As a director, the explicit scoring of the text in such a way made clear a range of other performance issues beyond atmosphere. Questions of rhythm, gesture, movement and character motivation became focused once the atmospheric context of the work had been established. This is not to say all these questions were solved by this method, but that the exercise of deciding upon the pattern of objective atmospheres for the whole of Pinter's play closed down the near infinite range of possibilities with which a director is faced at the beginning of a project and suggested fruitful ways forward. This was particularly clear when working on the latter part of the play with the whole cast of three.

Pauline's entrance and her reunion with her sister, in the last third of the play, eschews any sentimentality, highlighting instead the problems of relative-patient relationships. Not only does she remain unrecognised by Deborah: 'she must be an aunt I've never met' (333 ), but her husband is clearly critical of what he considers to be her premature entrance into the ward. To capture this highly dramatic charge we chose the atmosphere of Competition for Pauline's entrance, and having done so the complex physical and psychological dynamic between the three characters at this crucial moment in the play was brought into focus. Pinter

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deliberately concentrates on the confusion of the moment - where wife meets husband and sister meets sister for the first time in the play (and in the case of Deborah and Pauline, for the first time in thirty years):

Hornby:

Pauline: Hornby: Pauline: Hornby: Pauline: Hornby: Pauline: Hornby:

I didn't call you. Pauline regards him Well, alright. Speak to her. What shall I say? Just talk to her. Doesn't it matter what I say? No. I can't do her any harm? No. Shall I tell her lies or the truth? Both.

(328-9)

Underlying this ambivalence is a clear conflict of interest between Pauline and Hornby. Pauline's silent stare speaks volumes to the tensions in her marriage. Kept out of the way and uninformed by Hornby, while her sister comes back to life after thirty years, she is entitled to be upset. The directorial challenge is to find a way of communicating this frisson to an audience without reducing the richness of the moment.

Scoring this moment in the objective atmosphere of Competition not only marked the important change in mood felt when someone else enters the room but also suggested a complete physical pattern for the scene. Deborah became an object of desire for both Hornby and Pauline - although, again, the nature of the desire was determined by the individual atmosphere chosen by the actors. In territorial terms, Pauline commandeered her husband's desk space (SL), displacing him to the bed ( SR), thus establishing her own relationship with Deborah (who remained seated at the desk), whilst ensuring the previous atmosphere of Intimacy, shared between doctor and patient, was completely eradicated. Later Deborah moved back to the bed with Hornby, the action being interpreted by the doctor as a victory.

In motivational terms, the atmosphere of Competition served to offer a clear explanation for Pauline's aberrant line: 'I am a widow' (335). Having struggled to find what lay behind the statement in earlier rehearsals, the actress playing Pauline (Louise Mason) hit on a subtextual motivation by working through the

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48 Attnosphere, Space, Stasis

implications of' competition' for her character. As a younger sister, her relationship with Deborah, would naturally have been competitive. Seeing her husband so deeply engaged in Deborah's nostalgic narratives as to lose sight of her pain is a sign of the emotional distance between them. 'I am a widow', then, in the context of Competition, is Pauline's realisation that she has lost her husband to Deborah's illness. Hornby says as much in his speech minutes later:

Your sister Pauline was twelve when you were left for dead. When she was twenty I married her. She is a widow. I have lived with you.

(337)

These lines form part of Hornby's longest speech in the play: a defining moment in his evolution as a character. It is a speech dominated by categoric statements of fact, arguably given to the doctor by Pinter to lend them a professional weight:

I have been your doctor for many years. This is your sister. Your father is blind. Estelle looks after him. She never married. Your mother is dead.

(336)

At the same time the arrogance of his medical mind is exposed: 'It is we who have suffered', he states, convincing himself that Deborah's time asleep was spent unconscious. This is contrasted with Pauline's sensitivity and her deeper understanding of the pain Deborah has experienced. She is not concerned with getting the facts straight. 'Is it my birthday soon? Will I have a birthday party?' Deborah asks, grasping for some fixed temporal marker.

You will. You will have a birthday. And everyone will be there. All you family will be there. All your old friends. And we'll have presents for you. All wrapped up ... wrapped up in such beautiful paper.

(338)

To mark this distinction in attitude we chose to score the text with two contrasting atmospheres - the Lecture Hall and the Birthday Party. The first atmosphere lent itself to the clinical delivery of Hornby's speech and excluded Pauline from the proceedings. The second re-established a historical connection between Deborah and Pauline and excluded Hornby. 8 In deciding upon the atmosphere of the lecture hall, I was able to suggest to Anthony, playing Hornby, a range of gestures and a pattern of movement which drew from his own experience of lecturing. The space used by the actor (DSC) drew the audience into the atmosphere of the lecture hall, implicating them in the action and heightening the sense of observation,

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which was a recurring motif of the production.9 The choice of the lecture hall also gave a theatrical edge to the conclusion of the play, which was picked up by Zoe in Deborah's fmal words: 'thank you', delivered directly to the audience in acknowledgement. Shifting from the lecture hall to the birthday party, brought Pauline into the action and marked a transition from the self-justification ofHornby to the selfless attitude of his wife. Again, the change in atmosphere initiated a change in the physical arrangement of the scene with Hornby being forced once more to retreat as Pauline took on the atmosphere of the birthday party, positioning herself at the end of the bed, evoking a sense of the excitement children have on the morning of a birthday. Here, though, the status of the two sisters was reversed with Pauline taking the older role, effectively mothering Deborah.

The production concluded by reversing the imagery of the opening; Hornby letting the bed down on its hydraulic as Deborah is consigned to sleep again. A vase of flowers was lit in a chilling steel blue to further sign her retreat into Alaska and Pauline and Hornby were frozen in speechless incomprehension overlooking the hospital bed. The image consciously foreshadowed the motif of stasis in Mountain Language and concluded an imagistic through-line of immobility begun before the play had even started, outside the studio. As a prologue to the performance we staged a dumb show inspired by the photograph of Seymour L. in Awakenings ( 1990, opposite page l). Hunched over a radiator and framed by a similariy threatening corridor, Zoe opened the proceedings as Deborah 'exercising' in the hospital. The image was designed to make a virtue of the institutional austerity of Avenue campus as well as suggest a before-time for the play. Her physical shape (bent double and stretching forward with the right arm) was then echoed in the production; firstly, by Hornby as he described his patient's care during her 'sleep' (325); and secondly, by Deborah herself as she recalled the moment she froze as a sixteen year old, clutching a vase and looking, as Pauline says, 'like ... marble' (333).

Picking up on this image, we agreed on the objective atmosphere of Marble for Pauline's longest speech in the play, spoken as Deborah returns to her own position of stasis in the bed. Here, Pauline is given the task of relating to Deborah the actual events surrounding the moment she had frozen in statuesque paralysis:

Mummy was laughing and even Estelle was laughing and then we suddenly looked at you and you had stopped. You were standing with the vase by the sidetable, you were about to put it down, your arm was stretched towards it but you had stopped.

(332)

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Appealing to the actor's imaginary response to Marble addressed both the technical and the creative aspects of her performance. Marble suggested a progressively slow rhythm for the speech as if she herself was becoming frozen. It also created an inspiring imaginary vision of Deborah's first attack of akinesia- the subject of Pauline's speech. Thus, the imagery of the play, indeed its central motif - the threat of mental and physical imprisonment in a kind of Alaska - served to inspire the choice of particular atmospheres and provided a consistent point of reference for physical (in)action.

As a director, the organisation of these atmospheric choices into a score became a key focal point- a way of both stimulating an imaginative engagement with the play and of orchestrating the actors' responses in a coherent order - making clear decisions regarding the juxtaposition of atmospheres, for example. Working for the first time in a directorial capacity, such a balance between the technical and creative demands of the text was, for me, the most significant aspect of the atmosphere work - a point that was most evident in the genesis of the stage design. As a new director the desire to control events and to communicate my vision to the cast was strong - possibly too strong. My original interpretation of the play used white as a sign of the cold medical world Pinter ostensibly offers us inA lund of Alaska. The audience would be raked steeply as they might be in the lecture hall of a medical school and the doctor/patient relationship would dominate. Whilst this clinical reading of the text remained, in part, for the fmal performance, the work with Chekhov encouraged an imaginative look outside of the text, informed by the results of the improvisation work we had done in the ensemble sessions. This led me to re-evaluate the setting of the piece in response to the imaginative work of my actors, who were uncovering a much more complex range of relationships than I had first conceived. Although my initial instinct was to play it safe, this was not operating in the spirit of Chekhov. 'The bolder the artistic imagination, the greater the power of the work' he had said in 1922, ostensibly summarising Stanislavski but more obviously communicating his own credo (Cole 1955, 113). To respond to this call and to produce an overall atmosphere that would communicate the sexual complexity of the two main characters, we took inspiration from Deborah's line: 'This is a white tent. When I open up the flap I'll step out in to the Sahara desert' (316), throwing the designer, Piers Veness, the challenge of realising this environment on stage. Thus, in the final performance, the Alaskan cold of the hospital was offset against the Saharan heat of Deborah's and Hornby's distilled passion, encapsulated in the sensuous atmosphere of draped gauze. The use of an authentic hospital bed ensured that the atmosphere of the clinic was never entirely lost. Instead it would be constantly in tension with its theatrical antithesis: an oasis in the desert. The atmospheres of

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ice and sweat, played with in our workshop week, had obviously been stored somewhere, 'transformed and purified', as Chekhov suggests ( 1991, 13 ), by one's artistic subconscious.

Although this was a radical departure from the context suggested by Pinter it was nevertheless entirely faithful to the essential dynamic of the play.10 Perhaps more importantly, it was also true to the spirit of Chekhov. Working through the imaginative process as a director demands that one takes the same leap of faith as one asks of the cast. At the same time, any such leap needs to be grounded in an achievable reality. In a sense this is Chekhov's great appeal, for he not only gives space for the imagination to expand into other worlds, but at the same time offers the director a language with which to communicate this vision to others.

Staging Mountain Language by Anthony Shrubsall

It was the economy and sheer brutality of Mountain Language as a text that made this minimalist gem from the Pinter oeuvre an appropriate accompanying piece to A Kind of Alaska. The play offered an interesting opportunity for extending thematic, theatrical and imagistic elements concerning what for us was to become a central theme of A Kind of Alaska, the notion of oppression. The doctor/patient relationship offered a number of variations on this theme in terms of the tension between medical precision and physical warmth, and professional determinism and sexual passion. In Mountain Language the oppressive potential of the text is realised via a transformation of the doctor/patient relationship into the more overtly oppressive one between soldier and civilian. The pairing of the two plays would thus offer what we perceived as the perfect opportunity to make an imaginative leap from hospital to military prison via the institutional quality of our own buildings. (The drama studio housing the double bill was itself a science laboratory before assuming its current guise).

Mountain Language was written in 1988 and is often associated with Pinter's 'political period' along with Party Time and One for the Road, although such a view seriously undervalues the political undertones of much of his earlier work. In many ways the play marks a return to Pinter's fascination with interrogation11 and offers a chilling view of bureaucracy and oppression under an unspecified regime. Whilst identifying the oppression of the Kurds as its starting point Pinter insists upon its more universal significance:

The play is about suppression of language and the loss of freedom of expression. I feel therefore it is as relevant in England as it is in Turkey. A number of Kurds have said the play touches them and their lives. But I

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believe it also reflects what's happening in England today- the suppression of ideas, speech and thought.

(Gussow 1994, 68)

The play is made up of four short sharp scenes each followed by blackouts and when first performed at theN ational Theatre lasted twenty minutes from start to finish! As a director I was interested in quite literally stretching this piece in three ways. Firstly, as a vehicle for testing Michael Chekhov's imaginative work on atmospheres and their direct implications for textual and dramatic exploration. Secondly, as a means of reconfiguring the studio space from an end-on theatre into a side-on one. (See Figs l and 2.) Thirdly, as a means of marking a theatrical shift in the use of colour from white to black, whereby the audience would leave a white space and after a twenty minute interval re-enter it to find black has replaced white, thus changing their physical and perceptual relationships to the same space.

I will begin with the final point in commencing this discussion of the production, as it was instrumental from the very beginning. I was particularly interested in achieving a distinct corporeal quality to the blackness of the space, with the drapes stripped away to leave the pure black bricks: it was to be as if the walls of the studio were actually sweating with fear. In effect, the walls of the studio were to act as a witness to the cruelty of events portrayed, an actantial signifier of both barbarity and indifference within the space. How this effect was to be achieved was the problem I set our designer, Piers Veness. 12

In casting the play I was well aware of the shortage of men in our student body and thus from the outset was looking at the possibility of cross-gendered casting as a practical necessity. The audition process provided just one male actor who was ideally suited to the part of the Sergeant. With the male parts of the Officer and the Guard taken by a black female actor and white female actor respectively, the triangular nature of power relations within the play achieves a gendered significance reflected equally in both oppressors and oppressed. Sergeant, Guard and Officer formed one unit and the Prisoner, Young Woman, Old Woman formed the second. Conflating the roles of the Hooded Man and the Prisoner inferred closer relationships between the latter human triangle than Pinter had indicated. For our purposes the Prisoner was both son and husband in the text. The cross-gendered and racial casting also posed interesting questions concerning the sanction of violence within the play as the Sergeant's male brutalism constantly cedes ultimate authority regarding violence to the female officer, who in turn is clearly just one small link in the chain of distinctly white state control. 13

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As noted in the introduction the first phase of the rehearsal process involved an intensive week of rehearsals and workshops examining Michael Chekhov's work on atmospheres in relation to the text of the play. This was where the basic blocking and shaping of the play took place prior to the setting of objective atmospheres. Chekhov suggests that performance can be regarded as an independent being in comparison with the individual human being and that the 'atmosphere' of a performance is comprised of: ' ... the realm of the feelings, the heartbeat . . . It is not the feelings of this or that actor, it is the feeling which belongs to the performance itself' (Chekhov 1985, 28). For Mountain Language, this was to come from the site specific experience of the actors in their working of Pinter's text and their direct relationship to the cold, uncompromising blackness of the studio walls. The opening stage directions set the first scene:

A line of women. An Elderly Woman cradling her hand. A basket at her feet. A Young UVman with her arm around the woman's shoulders.

(Pinter 1991, 392)

Given that there are only two women identified within the play this is a clear instance of Pinter's imagistic approach to playwrighting. Pinter presents a line of women as a collective endorsement of the themes of persecution and suffering that resonate throughout the play. The two main characters are subsequently highlighted against this human wall as the prime focal points of the stage picture. Pinter himself has always acknowledged the visual centre of his creative process as a place where image can freely engender image:

. . . I start writing a play from an image of a situation and the couple of characters involved, and these people always remain for me quite real; if they were not, the play could not be written.

(McTeague 1994, 81)

It thus seemed appropriate to begin our rehearsal process from a similar image-based perspective. In our production the starting image of the play was to embody the line of women as a line of two set against the real bricks and mortar of the studio space (Fig 4). The physical hardness and materiality of the wall in this opening image thus acts as the third point of the triangle behind the two women, reinforcing the oppressive nature of the prison environment via the contrasting softness and humanity of the actors' bodies within the space. A second element of the image provided a distinct link to A Kind of Alaska through the use of stasis in the character of the Old Woman, although here, medical, physiological causation was replaced by the blank frozen terror appropriate to that induced by tyrannical

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54 Annosphere, Space, Stasis

regimes all over the world. For the actor playing the Old Woman (Sue Whyte), working within this notion of stasis was made achievable by her individual choice of the personal atmosphere ofMarble. Her comments on the experience provide an eerie echo to the character of Deborah in the previous play: 'Any thought process going on was separated inside my head. I concentrated on my space by closing everything down outside of it'. 14

Just as the first dramatic image opening the scene was to utilise a quality of stillness the fmal image concluding the scene was to develop the sense of threat implicit in stasis. Pinter's stage directions indicate that the Sergeant brings an overtly sexual quality to his role as representative of state violence in the physical invasion of the young woman's body:

Silence. The Officer and Ser;geant slowly circle her. The Ser;geant puts his hand on her bottom.

(Pinter 1991, 395)

This intensification of the environmental threat through physical gesture is accompanied by the acerbic, abusive tones of the Sergeant:

Sergeant: What language do you speak? What language do you speak with your arse?

(395)

In our rehearsals, within the ensemble sessions, the ensuing dialogue between Officer and Sergeant acquired a mocking, game-playing quality that contrasted sharply with the overt sexual violence of the situation. This was necessary as the Laban work identified clearly for the actor playing the Sergeant the tendency to 'punch' and 'slash' the lines in accordance with the authority and inherent violence of the character. Given the total domination of the Sergeant over the young woman inscribed within Pinter's text this overlaying of authority upon authority only succeeded in flattening and deadening the dramatic potential of the scene. Against this terribly bleak background, the young woman's plea for reason and her insistence upon a reclamation of human dignity are marked by simple physical action as opposed to stasis:

.The l#iman moves away from the Ser;geant)s hand and turns to face the two men

Young Woman: My name is Sara Johnson. I have come to see my husband. It is my right. Where is he?

(1991, 396)

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Just as physical action assumes a moral purpose within the image, stasis, in turn, becomes corrupt through the form of the Sergeant. The Young Woman moves away from the groping hand of the Sergeant who is left frozen, his right hand extended in a perverse inquiry into the vacant space she has just left. The scene finished with a grotesque parody of its own opening image, but with the injured hand of the Old Woman replaced by the sexually grasping, abusive hand of the Sergeant.

Following on from the week of workshops and rehearsals the task of scoring the play atmospherically was one that had to be approached with a degree of caution. The experience of the workshops had shown the need for scope to be left regarding the relationship between individual character's atmospheres and the objective atmospheres of each respective scene. If the objective atmosphere set was too close to the one chosen by the actor the resultant improvisation was invariably compromised by the fact that the actor felt they had nowher... when the objective and subjective atmospheres contrast and clash, they create a most wonderful effect while in collision, and the sparks they generate bring extra illumination . . .

(Leonard 1963, 102)

Consequently it was with this conflict model of performance in mind that I scored the atmospheres for Mountain Language. Given that the world of Pinter's text is so bleak and that we were working deliberately from the site specific experience of the space, I was concerned that the atmospheres selected would not overpower the actors in combination with these other factors. To this end I avoided the obvious and excessively dark while still staying broadly in line with the prison confmes of the text. The opening atmosphere was thus one of Anticipation, which shifted into Bureaucracy at the opening dialogue:

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56 Attnosphere, Space, Stasis

Sergeant: Young Woman: Sergeant:

Name. We've given our names. Name.

(1991, 392)

As an opening atmosphere Anticipation was logical as regards location and setting in that the women are waiting outside a prison. It also ties the audience into the theatre event itself by a marking of the liminal space between entering the auditorium and the onset of action on stage, the profundity of the relationship between actors and audience being stressed by Chekhov:

The performance is in reality a mutual creation of actors and audience, and the Atmosphere is an irresistible bond between actor and audience, a medium with which the audience can inspire the actors by sending them waves of confidence, understanding, and love. They will respond thus if they are not compelled to look into empty psychological space.

(Chekhov 1991, 28)

Interestingly, Anticipation also relates to the opening atmosphere of Expectation inA Kind of Alaska. The close affinity between the two found both convergence and divergence in their differing theatrical considerations of the image of stasis in performance. In the remainder of the scene general atmospheric conditions were to oscillate between varying states of Bureaucracy and Lust, with the latter to the foreground during the abuse of the Young Woman.

In the second scene the action shifts from outside the prison to inside. It features the Prisoner, Old Woman and Guard. Throughout the scene the tenderness of the Old Woman is constantly undercut by the aggressive threatening behaviour of the guard, who jabs her with a stick following each initial utterance. Atmospherically, Bureaucracy gives way to Suffocation and then to Curiosity as the scene unfolds. In staging the scene the action was almost entirely set around the table. Given that this was placed extreme stage left, in order to maximise the presence of the wall throughout the piece, one became aware of the need to open the action out in order to fill what was initially a long dead space. The table was set lengthwise with the old woman seated facing across from the prisoner; the guard was perched uncomfortably on a stool looking down on the two of them. The opportunity to open up the space came about by placing a real red apple on the table in response to the line 'I have apples' (Pinter 1991, 398) uttered by the Old Woman. This enabled the Guard to take the apple, which was ostensibly for the Prisoner, and roll it off the table across the floor to stage right. The image was a slow-motion

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throw and retrieve situation between owner and dog, with the Guard as owner urging the Old Woman to get the apple. The animal's eagerness was thus replaced by human resignation and determination in the character of the Old Woman as she slowly traversed across the space, picked up the apple and brought it back triumphantly to the table. The image was drawn, albeit obliquely, from the Dobermann pinscher referred to in the previous scene. The focus of attention then switches to the Prisoner, who in unwittingly echoing the personal revelations of the Guard: 'I've got a wife and three kids' ( 399) opens up the door to his own violent degradation in the following scene. The scene concludes with the Sergeant's entry and his munching of the apple on the lines: 'What joker?' (400).

The significance of the apple in the scene developed as a result of our workshop experience on the imaginative properties of objects in relation to the plays. Initially, the apple acquired its phenomenological relevance indirectly: as the logical, textual focal point for the Sergeant's imaginary penknife - the object selected as a means of 'fleshing out' the role by Stacey Swift, the actor concerned.15 However, in rehearsal the 'knife' was quickly discarded, leaving the focus of the scene effectively upon the apple, a focus that had three facets in performance. Firstly, as a visual image the colour red was to imagistically echo the presence of the Young Woman who wore a cheap, skimpy red dress underneath a shabby beige cardigan. Secondly, when the apple was off the table the skin would break and bruise upon contact with the floor, thus indicating the impending violence toward the prisoner.16 Thirdly, the Sergeant's eating of the apple/Young Woman during the beating would graphically illustrate the levels of callousness inherent within state brutility. The process of discarding the 'knife' in rehearsal draws one directorially into Chekhov's advice to actors:

It must be remembered that courage is needed to discard first images and to resist being too easily satisfied. What has already been found will never be lost, but will be transformed and purified in one's subconscious .... It will also become a great stimulus for the imagination to reveal to us new and unknown things.

(Chekhov 1991, 13) In this instance, discarding the first image in favour of the second draws one as a director back to Pinter the playwright's oft quoted maxim to 'Play the text' (McTeague 1994, 80).

The third began with the violent beating of the Prisoner by the Guard using a rolled up newspaper as the instrument of abuse, accompanied by the Sergeant's munching of the apple. The beating provided another opportunity to fill the space as the Guard chased the prisoner from the table ( SL) to the wall ( SR) and

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back to the table via the wall (US) ending with the interjection from the Sergeant that marks the beginning of the spoken text as the atmosphere shifts to Amazement:

Sergeant's Voice: Who's that fucking woman1 What's that fucking woman doing herd Who let that fucking woman through that fucking door1

(401)

Given that the blocking of the scene had involved the utilisation of the whole acting area during the beating, the text effectively reinforced the environmental location of the studio by enabling the Sergeant to refer specifically to the stage left door through which the young woman entered. According to Pinter's writing, the scene is a mixture of present and past action interspersing real action with voice-over commentary. From the very beginning we had decided against the voice-over effect and so determined to play the whole scene in the present in the form of direct reminiscence between the Prisoner/Hooded Man and his wife, with the Sergeant and Guard looking on. This again saw the stretching of the space to positive effect, with the Prisoner slumped against the upstage wall and the Young Woman seated at the table staring blankly straight at the wall throughout the assault (Fig. 5). The second part of the scene reveals a similar dramatic structure to the previous scene, the tenderness between the Prisoner and Young Woman conjuring up a poignant and gentle image oflost sexual love in contrast to the maternal bonding of the former scene. Here the extensive floor space effectively became the water that laps longingly around the edges of their shared memories in an atmosphere ofTranquillity:

Man's Voice: We are out on a lake. Young Woman's Voice: It is spring. Man's Voice: I hold you. I warm you.

(402) This affectionate reverie is brutally brought to a close by the Sergeant who, tiring of such meaningless platitudes, clicks his fingers to signal the termination of the moment and the removal of the Prisoner to the anguished cries of the Young Woman. I marked the moment of transition atmospherically by a sudden change into Matter-of-Factness, which is in line with the ergonomic efficiency demonstrated by Guard and Sergeant in dragging the prisoner out of the space. The scene concludes with the Young Woman resorting to the brutalised language of the prison in response to the Sergeant's absurd posturing and the blurring of identities between the Prisoner and the Sergeant's computer engineer, Joseph Dokes:

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Young Woman:

Sergeant: Young Woman:

Smdies in Theatre Production 59

Can I fuck him? If I fuck him, will everything be all right? Sure. No problem. Thank you.

(403)

The fmal scene sees a resumption of scene two, only now the Guard indicates something of the arbitrary nature of state control by informing the Prisoner that his mother can now finally speak in her own language. Her response is a silence, which ultimately proves too much for the Prisoner and he falls writhing to the ground. The state's victory appears complete.

This last scene encapsulates something of the dilemma I experienced as a director of Mountain Language. At first sight the play seems to have gone full circle: the Old Woman who begins the piece in stasis concludes it apparently in the same state. The prisoner has shown a dramatic progression culminating in his fmal collapse at the sight of his mother, frozen with fear, who throughout the play has remained passive, and mostly silent. The scoring of the play by atmospheres, though, suggested an alternative view with regard to playing Pinter. The fmal scene was played in an atmosphere of Futility as this seemed the most appropriate given the Prisoner's abject disintegration at the end, and initially followed a conventional interpretation of the Old Woman as terrorised victim. Playing the text through the atmosphere of Futility, however, enabled a reading that was significantly different. Here the prisoner, in his eagerness to speak in his own language, unwittingly indicates his eagerness to comply with the state's authority:

Prisoner: speak.

Mother, I'm speaking to you. You see? We can You can speak to me in our own language.

She is still You can speak. Pause Mother. Can you hear me? I am speaking to you

in our own language. Pause Do you hear me? Pause It's our language. Pause Can't you hear me? Do you hear me? She does not respond.

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Mother? Guard: Tell her she can speak in her own language. New

rules. Until further notice. Prisoner: Mother? She does not respond. She sits still. The Prisoner's trembling gruws. He falls from the chair on to his knees, begins to gasp and shake violently.

(405)

It is this compliance with state authority that the Old Woman rejects through her stillness and lack of response to her son's desperate pleading. This rejection within the confmes of interrogation provides evidence ofPinter's profound belief in the optimism of the human spirit under appalling conditions. Silence is a weapon of control that cuts both ways. It is both a powerful instrument of oppression for the interrogator but equally the ultimate symbol of defiance for the interrogated. Stasis thus once again assumes a moral purpose, indicating a profound shift in the trajectory of the play from the opening image. For the actor playing the role of the Old Woman, Sue Whyte, the shift was helped by retaining her choice of individual atmosphere, Marble, from the beginning of the play. In this fmal scene the personal atmosphere of Marble, whilst predominant, was subject to subtle shifts and changes in mood; what Michael Chekhov called action with qualities:

Our doing, our action, is always in our will, but not our Feelings. Here lies the key: the feeling was called forth, provoked, attracted indirectly by our 'business', doing, action.

(Chekhov 1991, 37)

As the Prisoner fell to the floor, the personal atmosphere of Marble for the Old Woman was enhanced by the act oflooking down into the table with the quality of despair, thus breaking the stasis at that moment. At this fmal point the Sergeant re-entered through the door at extreme Stage Right:

Sergeant (To Guard): Look at this. You go out of your way to Give them a helping hand and they fuck it up.

Blackout (406)

The growth of the character is evident in Sue Whyte's personalised relationship to the role at the end of the piece: 'I had a sense of despair because of my son's collapse, but when the Sergeant started to speak it was a reminder of why I hadn't

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played the game. My triumph was therefore tinged with defiance'. The play finished with the blackout gradually encompassing each of the players on stage as the Old Woman looked up at the speaker. First the Prisoner, shaking on the floor; then the Guard, followed by the Sergeant with a rather quizzical expression on his face, and lastly the Old Woman, holding the gaze of the Sergeant as a blue light framed her profile before the blackness encroached over her.

This transformation of the Old Woman from passive victim to prospective heroine in my reading of the play derived, I believe, directly from the work on atmospheres in relation to Mountain Language. I have to admit that the true potential of what I may call my Director's second image (appropriating Chekhov's advice to actors referred to earlier) wasn't sufficiently explored before the play was performed and thus what I got as a director was only an indication of what could be possible if one engages fully with Chekhov's technique in staging Pinter. Unfortunately, the actor playing the Young Woman had to withdraw in the week prior to production through serious illness and thus the fmal flurry of pre-production activity was spent orienting a new actor (Kaye Ratledge) to the part. Pinter's own advice to actors in his plays made a useful starting point:

You can play this part. You will be marvellous in the part once you stop acting.

(McTeague 1994, 95)

In many ways the task of assimilating a new actor into an existing company is an onerous one for a director. In this instance the task was made substantially easier in that the objective atmospheres set provided an existing score for the actor to follow. As we had invited our actors to create their own score of personal atmospheres I decided to create a comprehensive score for her which could be referred to when necessary. As she was coming in to the production so late without the benefit of the workshop experience the Pinter credo outlined above provided a useful directorial benchmark that I had already used with other members of the cast. In effect I was asking her to be open to what was already happening in the space and asking her to resist resorting to what she knew previously. To her credit she did so admirably:

We may understand atmosphere, but when we start to act, our old habits overwhelm the atmosphere. Therefore, without exercising this new thing, it is actually impossible to produce it. In time, it will become more and

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more obvious that atmosphere is one of the ways -one of the most important ways - to get new things out of ourselves, and to be original and ingenious each time.

(Chekhov 1985, 73)

This final quote from Chekhov issues a warning that has merit for both directors and actors alike. As a director, this experiment in exercising this new thing called atmosphere was an illuminating and invigorating one that reinforced a simple truth: old habits die hard in the theatre, and in the theatre of Harold Pinter these are already well established! As to what one gains from approaching Pinter through Chekhov techniques, an interesting parallel can be traced in Peter Hall's comments on his approach to Pinter back in 197 4. In an interview with Catherine Itzin and Simon Trussler, Hall identified that a good deal of the tone of Pinter's work has to do with a form of veiled mockery that actors need to learn in order to play Pinter:

Now actors can't play veiling until they know what they're veiling, so we play mockery, we play hatred, we play animosity, we play the extreme black and white terms of a character. . . . The mystery to me is that there is a communication in the theatre which is beyond words, and which is actually concerned with direct feeling.

(Hall1974, 6)

It is this investment with direct feeling that provides a direct line from the rehearsal methods of Peter Hall to the techniques of Michael Chekhov. Instead of 'play mockery/hatred' it is a short step to substitute an 'atmosphere of Mockery/Hatred' in the search for contact with this direct feeling. Hall's exploration of'extremities of feeling' was his answer to the purely external exigencies of style he identified in actors' responses to Pinter. These responses had resulted in a dangerously naturalistic reading of Pinter as actors tried to normalise Pinter's speech rhythms and thus significantly reduce Pinter's realisation as a poetic dramatist in performance. It was our response to these dangers in rehearsal that led us into our Chekhovian odyssey through the wildness and stark beauty of Pinter's Alaskan terrain and the jagged peaks of Mountain Language. In so doing Chekhov's 'atmospheres' became our way of making contact with this direct feeling and thus, hopefully, putting the Pinter back into the Pinteresque.

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Notes

1. Until Jean Benedetti's new translations emerge, critics are obliged to use the problematic translations of the Hapgoods. Whilst the authors acknowledge the difficult issues surrounding translation, there is not scope in this paper to deal directly with them. The translation problems for critics of Michael Chekhov are equally complex. He wrote in English after learning it very quickly after 1935 but was not confident in his use of it. Deirdre Hurst du Prey acted as transcriber of the practical sessions, taking shorthand notes of all the sessions. These notes form the volume: Lessons for the Professional Actor (1985). It is perhaps inevitable that things were lost in this process. In addition, Chekhov's book on acting, finished in 1942, had three assistants working on it and was heavily edited by Charles Leonard, who very like Elizabeth Hapgood and by Stanislavski, was given unlimited freedom by an ailing Chekhov (Chekhov 1991, xxxiii). This book came out with the title To the Actor (1953). Finally, in 1991, On the Technique of Acting was published. This reinserts all the cut material from the 1942 manuscript but which has itself deleted paragraphs from this text. How confident we can be that this is finally 'the true and practical voice of Michael Chekhov' as claimed by Mel Gordon (xxxiv) is debatable.

2. Our source for the Chekhov work was On the Technique of Acting (1991). Other helpful sources for Chekhov exercises include Lessons to the Professional Actor ( 1985 ), The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia (1987) and the Michael Chekhov edition of The Drama Review: Vol 27, No. 3 (1983). The Laban effort actions are as follows: Press, punch, slash, wring - the 'strong' actions - and glide, dab, flick, float - the 'weak' actions.

3. See our article on Biomechanics in Studies in Theatre Production Number 16, December 1997, (93-128).

4. The full cast was as follows: A Kind of Alaska: Deborah: Zoe Dods, Pauline: Louise Mason, Hornby: Anthony Shrubsall, Director: Jonathan Pitches, Designer: Piers Veness; Mountain Language: Young Woman: Kaye Ratledge, Elderly Woman: Sue Whyte, Prisoner: Jonathan Pitches, Guard: Michelle Benton, Sergeant: Stacey Swift, Officer: Angeline Anderson, Director: Anthony Shrubsall, Designer: Piers Veness.

5. From Chekhov's own summary of Stanislavski's thinking, Stanislavski's Method of Acting, written in 1922.

6. This does not, of course, preclude a director from making proposals for an actor's individual atmospheric score, or indeed, an actor having suggestions concerning the general atmospheric score.

7. Specifically Valentino's sleek appearance in Cobra (1925)- a dark contemporary two-piece suit and slicked back hair. For visual details see Hirsch (1991, 26).

8. This triangular structure leading to the exclusion of one character is a familiar pattern in Pinter's plays. Old Times, Betrayal and Mountain Language also operate on this basis.

9. In the opening stage business Hornby watched Deborah for a full minute, standing at her bedside. Later, both Pauline and the doctor were caught in a frozen state of observation as Deborah delivered her harrowing speech at the conclusion: 'Yes, I think they're closing in. They're closing in .. .' (340)

10. The recent Donmar Warehouse production (May 1998), directed by Karel Reisz, remained true to the original context, set on a steep rake with marble tiles and sharp white lighting. Reisz's reading of the characters suggested nothing other than a professional relationship between doctor and patient.

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64 Atmosph ere, Space St . ' as1s

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11. See The Birthday Party and The Examination in H. Pinter, 1991. Plays One , Faber &Faber.

12. The idea of transforming the theatre space from white to black was one that we had originally witnessed in a fmal year Combined Honours piece a couple of years previously. At the time we had been struck by the dramatic effectiveness achieved by a simple stripping ofblack drapes around the space to reveal an all white environment made up purely of bed sheets that covered the acting area and surrounded the audience. For our purposes the transformation would need to be reversed. The sweating of the walls was achieved by an experimentation with combinations of vaseline and water, butter and water and margarine and water, the water sprayed on top once the wall was covered. Margarine received our vote! The effect was highlighted by a series of floods creating a searchlight quality.

13. It needs to be acknowledged that a black actor being black might be totally irrelevant to playing the part if one wishes to pursue a 'colour blind' approach to casting an actor in a role. However, in this instance, the sanction of violence necessitated an awareness of the dangers of racial statementing in performance. With this in mind Angela's role as authority figure was implicated within the web of state violence but never overtly contributed to it.

14. The objective atmosphere of Marble was used inA Kind of Alaska for Pauline's speech. For the actress playing the "Old Woman in Mountain Language, appropriating this personal atmosphere was particularly effective in helping her minimise the naturalistic clutter that had characterised some of her previous work as a smdent actor.

15. For Stacey, the knife he imagined had an elaborate history for his character: as noted in the introduction it was his father's knife and had been used violently in the past. This need for justification and the creation of an intricate series of given circumstances exposes a tension between psychological causation and imaginative play. At times there was a danger that our smdent actors would become more preoccupied with the history of the character than the imaginative potential of the object!

16. The apple dropping to the floor and being damaged in the process gave Jonathan the personal atmosphere of Bruising, which he was to follow for the remainder of the play.

Works cited Benedetti, J. 1989. Stanislavski: An Introduction, London: Methuen Billington, M. 1996. The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, London: Faber Chekhov, M. 1985. Lessons to the Professional Actor, New York: Performing Arts Journal

Publications-- - - - - - 1991. On the Technique of Acting, New York: Harper Collins Cole, T. 1955.Acting, New York: Crown Publishers Gordon, M. 1987. The Stanislavski Technique: Russia, New York: Applause Gussow, M. 1994. Conversations With Pinter, London: Nick Hern Books Hall, P. 1974. 'Directing Pinter' in Theatre Quarterly, 16/4,4-17 Hirsch, E 1991. Acting Hollywood Style, New York: Harry Abrams Inc.

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Leonard, C. 1963, 1984. Michael Chekhov>s To The Director And Playwright, New York: Limelight

McTeague, J. 1994. Playwrights and Acting> Acting Methodologies for Brecht> Ionesco> Pinter and Shepard , Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press

Pinter, H. 1991. Plays Four, London: Faber Sacks, 0. 1990.Awakenings, New York: Harper Collins The Drama Review. 27/3 (Fall1983)- Michael Chekhov edition

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Documents

Atmosphere Space Stasis - "Staging Pinter's 'Mountain Language' and 'A Kind of Alaska' using the techniques of Michael Chekhov by Jonathan Pitches