Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Naked should mean nakedAuthor(s): Malachi O'DohertySource: Fortnight, No. 462 (NOVEMBER 2008), pp. 22-23Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25704199 .

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Naked should mean naked

Malachi O'Doherty ponders on the merits of clothing on-stage

^ TT t is a hard call on young performers who

I know that they are going to be stared at

JL for their physical merits and flaws rather than for the quality of their pace and delivery but the alternative is that the body is the one thing that is usually not shown or at least plausibly simulated.

Take the performance of Bruised at Omac this month. The culmination of one strand of the interwoven plays

was a confrontation between a

man and a woman who, up to that point, have

been kidding themselves that they have a richer life than they actually have. Then, in a quarrel they sneer at each others clothes and go from there to tearing their clothes off and flinging them onto the floor.

There is a point to this implausible moment. The theme across the four stories is that the body is the repository of memory, and the couple will see this when they examine each other's bruises.

But they do not actually get naked. They go on to discuss how rarely they are naked together, they poke and examine each other - but in their underwear.

It isn't even ordinary underwear, but reinforced

modesty underwear.

All very well if the priority is to spare the blushes of actors Richard Clements and Susan Crothers. Maybe the director, Anna Newell

thought that some in the audience would respond more with lechery than with the response the

script writer had in mind. Maybe she feared, God

forbid, that huge audiences would swarm in - for the wrong reason - as soon as word got out that

there was nudity in the play. My concern is that a woman armoured by bra

and panties is not naked and therefore the dramatic suggestion that she is does not work, because being in your underwear isn't an

approximation to nudity but something else

altogether. And a man with the white of his

underpants showing over the rim of his boxers is not giving of his best in a role that demands that we believe his partner is seeing more of him now than she has for months.

^^^^^^^

Yet, it is easy to see what the problem is and to

sympathise. The problem is that we live in a culture which has a big body problem.

You can see it on European beaches, where

women from here either flaunt or hide it but

rarely just relax in the way the Germans and Dutch do.

But nudity does not detract from a drama if a

good script says the character is naked at that

point. I was at a performance of Pam Gem's Stanley

in the Cottesloe one night in 1996, when Anna Chancellor was playing the part of Stanley Spencer's lover, mostly without any clothes on at

all. The novelty was that she was, at about the

same time, playing the harridan sister of Mr

Bingley in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice. Here was a woman who could, as the part demanded,

be bristlingly irritating or alluring. Mostly, however, we are offered only a pretence

of nudity. Where directors or performers think that the real body and the audience should be shielded from each other, then the body stocking is the answer, surely. At least that way, the

audience is assured that what is being offered is a

pretence of nudity. Sometimes it isn't clear. In

Bruised, there was a scene in which another

actress, Ruth Lehane, also in bra and panties, burst in on the supposedly naked couple

- acting

naked in their underwear - to invite them to an

underwear party. The audience was being asked

to imagine too much. Was Ruth supposed to be naked too? Presumably not, but underwear was

22 FORTNIGHT NOVEMBER 2008

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code for nakedness in this play, so she should

probably have been wearing an overcoat. The

precedent for this coyness is countless American

films in which love scenes end with the man

getting out of bed in his boxer shorts, or the woman going to the bathroom, dragging a sheet off the bed to wrap round her. The artistic

problem with this is that it breaks the essential conceit of drama that there is no audience. There

is no reason for these people to be hiding their bodies from each other. This strikes me as a

radical breach of the dramatic code, as if during a

fight scene one of the actors turned to the

prompters and stage hands and urged them to run for cover.

Curiously, on the same night that I saw Anna Chancellor in Stanley, Christians were picketing the film Striptease in which Demi Moore played a pole dancer and seemed not to have heard that

Anna Chancellor was nude on stage in another

part of town or presumably they would have seen that as even more morally offensive.

The fear of some directors is that the nudity will distract from the psychological interaction of the characters. The male gaze has an instant reflex

to respond to naked female flesh, but the body does not stay interesting

- merely as a body

- for

very long. The fidgety lecher in the audience is more likely to be distracted by the actress in bra and panties than by the one who is totally naked because he will spend his energy trying to see

through the reinforced underwear and complete the image he is presented with.

But if the concern is that the naked body will be distracting, there is the added complication that some bodies are more

distracting than

others.

Where Anna Chancellor is lithe and bony, Susan Crothers and Demi Moore are not. Demi

Moore, however, sees her cup size as an asset, an

addendum to her persona, while Susan Crothers,

in Bruised, - with more integrity, perhaps -

waives the advantage. And, to be fair, the size of her breasts was irrelevent to the story

- though

not ignorable.

Is it not possible then to be neutral about breasts?

In Bruised, the nude scene in underwear

evaded the prospect that those particular bodies

might have borne messages which deflected from the consideration of the play. For the purposes of the story, it was

important that the couple saw

each other's bodies, but not necessarily that the

audience should see those bodies, other than to affirm that they were actually naked. But if that shock of nudity was to be avoided then drama was the wrong medium for this story.

If directors have problems negotiating the shock of nudity, the solution is for them to familiarise audiences with more of it, rather than to go on treating them so coyly.

I think the shock of Chancellor's nudity was

momentary. The tedium of the strip show attests

to how familiar and ordinary the naked body is. I had been round about half a dozen of them one

night when I was on my own in Paris and had ended up more intrigued by the audiences than

by the women.

Occasionally the rarity of nudity can add to the

impact of it and some might argue for reserving it for those moments of increased effect, as when

Donal McCann appeared naked on stage in The Steward of Christendom. During that play a

couple of silly American tourists behind me discussed the legitimacy of nudity, on the

presumption that it has to be justified by its

effect, as if it is always, on first consideration, to be avoided. That is what local directors and actors seem to think too.

But the only reason it shocks us is that we are not used to

seeing it.

So give us more. Get them off. |

Daniel Radcliffe and Joanna Christie in the recent production of Equus. Radcliffe insisted that the nude scene was not

'gratuitous' and that he should portray the character and the scene as called for by the script. He reputedly worked-out for an hour a day to finesse his physique before

playing the role.

amp

Peel"

lie

14

14

FORTNIGHT NOVEMBER 2008

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