Balance

I have a list of First Principles which I trot out at the beginning of every rehearsal process. They tend to be simple, pithy, one-word concepts like "Respect," and "Trust," which I can later expand and contort to fit whatever lesson I'm trying to convey at the time. Well, that sounds awfully cynical; the fact is, I do believe in "Respect" as a ground-rule for rehearsals (and live theatre itself). But the words themselves don't mean very much--or rather, they mean too much. They need specificity.

I'll get into those specifics on this journal, but not now; when rehearsals start in November, I'll have more tangible examples. For now, I want to talk about a concept that doesn't usually constitute a First Principle--but which might, in the case of Lear, serve as a lodestar for the whole play. I'm talking about Balance.

Here's how it went, inside my brain: I was re-reading Playing Shakespeare by John Barton, the excellent print companion to the excellent BBC TV series. In the chapter called "Language and Character," Barton introduces the concept of "antithesis." He says:

If I were to offer one single bit of advice to the actor new to Shakespeare's text, I suspect that the most useful think I could say would be, 'Look for the antitheses and play them.'

I agree with Barton. And, since I anticipate that many of my actors will be new to Shakespeare, I want to introduce antithesis to them very early on, and return to the concept again and again.

So what the hell are antitheses? They are comparisons, or contrasts, which Shakespeare has his characters employ to make an argument, or develop a metaphor, or generally to keep the language of the play dynamic and interesting. They can be very simple contrasts:

To be or not to be--that is the question;

Or they can be complex and intricate, lacing multiple comparisons together into one phrase:

For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.

Finding the antitheses helps the actor to understand the meaning of the language, and to communicate that meaning to an audience. I suggest that actors think of themselves as a weigh-scale, with one half of the contrast balancing in either hand:

Here's three of us are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself: Unaccomodated man...

Barton admits that antithesis is a clunky, academic-sounding term, but the only alternative name he suggests is the awkward literalization, "setting the word against the word." I was thinking about antithesis, and how I could convey it more directly to my actors, and the image of the weigh-scale kept coming back again and again. Balance...

Then it occurred to me that balance is an important concept in the thematic world of the play itself. In fact, it's important in most of Shakespeare's tragedies, where the delicate order of nature is upset by some unnatural deed or deeds. The world of Lear begins in a state of harmony, balance...but it quickly becomes unbalanced when Lear abdicates and banishes Cordelia. From that point on, the increasingly violent battles for authority onstage send the world's balance tilting further and further askew. It's like a flat plane balanced on a stick, and the further out from the centre all the characters get, the more precarious the plane becomes.

Okay, maybe that's not the best simile. But I can borrow one from myself by returning to the image of the vortex, or whirlpool. Once that gaping "nothing" has been opened up, there is a gravity, a riptide pull that threatens to suck all the characters--the whole world--into its maw. The further from the vortex you are, the easier it is to maintain your balance. The closer you get, the more unstable everything becomes.

So I think that balance is important, and a good place to start when analyzing not only the text itself, but the world which the text creates. It's also a highly physical way to approach the play--trying to keep one's balance while walking on a thin line is something everyone can relate to, even if you've never been up on a tightrope (or in a whirlpool, for that matter).