R.P.

[Seeing a copy of Emrys Jones's New Penguin edition.] Is that the one you're using?

P.S.

Emrys Jones? Yes. Very good.

R.P.

There didn't seem to have been much cutting of it either. A very full text you're using.

P.S.

I would think it is probably one of the fullest performances of the play that there have been. We've lost two complete scenes, which were lost the last time I did it. [Patrick Stewart played Enobarbus in Trevor Nunn's production which ran at Stratford and in London between August 1972 and March 1974.] They are a fragment - we could never quite understand why it was there - between Lepidus, Maecenas and Agrippa[II, iv]. And we've also lost the Eros, Enobarbus scene [III, v], which is quite an important little plot scene, in that it ties up the ends about Pompey.

R.P.

And Lepidus.

P.S.

I rehearsed that for six weeks too in 1972, and it was cut at about exactly the same point that this was ……… Other than that, there are no entire cuts, and very, very few internal ones. I am playing a much fuller text than I played for Trevor in 72 - which I'm pleased about.

R.P.

I'm pleased about it too: it went very well. I got a curious experience, last night, of a performance which - because you were playing it again - had an element of familiarity in it, and yet it was a different person from last time.

P.S.

Well, that's completely satisfying.

R.P.

He seemed both more sombre, and happier.

P.S.

Well! You couldn't have said a more pleasing thing to me. I've never thought of it in such simple terms, but I guess that's what has happened to Enobarbus as a result of this new production. At the very beginning, when I talked to Peter in Paris, his first remark was, 'Well, this is good. You can build on the previous work.' And then when we started work, I made a serious mistake. I tried to wipe out that past experience, denying myself access to all of that previous knowledge, richness, from rehearsal, and two years of performances. And this was an error. I think now it wasn't too damaging a one, because it meant that we seriously explored other aspects of Enobarbus and his relationship with Antony, and his major objectives and motives in the play, in a very, very new way. But latterly - in the last two or three weeks - I have been thinking much more about the old Enobarbus, and indeed the experience of playing the man has been pulling me more and more towards him. Also, in the meantime I've got seven years older, which naturally changed things - and all the surroundings are quite, quite different. I would say that the major difference this time is that the performance of the part is perhaps less sentimental than it was before, and that he has become - I would hope - a little more complicated.

R.P.

I had a feeling that he was less golden, that he'd got a bit greyer, and that made him more interesting, in a way. It was a different tone, less cynical than he was last time.

P.S.

You thought me cynical last time?

R.P.

Somewhat - at moments. It was an appreciative cynicism.

P.S.

There was something of the old soldier who has seen it all and is not really going to be impressed by anything any more. In this, he is - I think - wiser. And in working with Alan and Brook, we've tried to tie in Enobarbus's deepest desires with those of Antony. They are both, in their way, looking for some richer fulfilment of their lives. Antony is making that search very, very openly, and it explains many of his curious actions in the middle part of the play. Less obviously, Enobarbus is too. And of course I think they both find it too, for there is, in a curious way, a real fulfilment in the deaths of both men. They do change themselves; there is a - what does he call it? - 'transmigration'. [The reference here is to Antony's description of the crocodile, a passage played with great emphasis and comic brilliance by Alan Howard.]

R.P.

I've never seen the death scene played before so as to make such total sense. It was just the involvement of the audience in the simple question whether or not Enobarbus is dead. You were dead, but the soldiers expressed real doubt of it. Death is so beautiful in this play, isn't it?

P.S.

It is. It is something to be embraced. I'm always immensely touched by Cleopatra's line about Iras: 'If thus thou vanishest, thou tell'st the world / It is not worth leave-taking.' It's one of those bits of Shakespeare that one can carry with one for a very long time, and it brings a great comfort. Yes indeed, death is a changing process. It does not mark dust and a blank, but something much more than that. All of the people - the major characters - are fulfilled in their deaths. Enobarbus is educated during the process of his dying enormously. In the course of about the last twelve hours of his life he learns a very great deal.

R.P.

What very much struck me was the underlying sense of joy in this performance of the play. The pleasure and the joy and the love are so real this time. There is nothing forced, nothing superficial, nothing strained about the passions. They all seem to be growing very, very powerfully out of the people. I can never remember the first act seeming so genuinely, unforcedly happy.

P.S.

Oh, that's marvellous - because that's a word that has been used a lot in the last three weeks. Joy and delight - the two key words for us. In trying to create that Egyptian world - I think that Peter is absolutely right - it is not necessary to create in detail some magical or mysterious or semi-oriental world. No, it lies with the people and their attitude to life. And it's revealed in all kinds of curious ways. One of Enobarbus' lines - I think one of the key lines in the play - describes the Egyptian world and also Antony's and Enobarbus' feelings about living. When he says to Lepidus - they're arguing at the very beginning of the meeting scene [II, ii], and Lepidus is saying 'Now come on. Use your influence to calm him down', and Enobarbus says 'No. Quite the opposite. If there's any trouble, I shall encourage Antony to go in both fists flying', and Lepidus says 'Tis not a time For private stomaching'. Enobarbus says 'Every time Serves for the matter that is then born in't.' Living in the moment.

R.P.

Yes! 'Some pleasure - now.'

P.S.

That's right. It is not for the future, or in the past, but you enrich that very moment that you're living in and you suck it dry. You take everything from it. And what is at that moment is the most important, no matter what it is. This is one of the things that distinguishes the Roman and the Egyptian worlds, that Rome is very much a world where they are not living in that moment, but thinking of the future, and the past, and history.

R.P.

There's a great sense also - in relation to what you said - of courage, and of courageous acceptance of defeat. The bit of the play I've always found most difficult is the middle, acts III and IV. In this production the general, overall shape of what happens is clarified in a way that I'd never seen before. The sense of courage and joy past despair, beyond defeat, in face of defeat, is very strong.

P.S.

For Antony in particular this is a great question. Although he has to face up to the defeat at Actium, it must not be a destroying defeat, to him personally, because the energy and his own personal search has got to continue with the same sort of determination as it had before. The actor has to find a way of absorbing that defeat and making direct use of it in order to push himself further.

R.P.

Has the experience of working with Peter Brook measured up to the kind of awe you expressed when you spoke to us at the Shakespeare Conference in August? [Patrick Stewart addressed the International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford in August 1978, answering questions mainly about his playing of Shylock in John Barton's production of The Merchant of Venice at The Other Place.]

P.S.

There is less awe in me now in that sense of fear and the restrictiveness that that sort of awe can bring on you. Through these rehearsals I've learned to respect and love the man very deeply. I've also learned - which is an important lesson for all one's work - that to be made free and to be liberated from fear - as a performer - from habits, from inhibitions, is perhaps the most important search that we should make. And that is one of the things that he dedicates his life to. When I spoke of awe, I spoke of being a performer knowing that Peter Brook was in an audience, in a production that was not his. He came to see The Merchant, and his influence on that company that night was absolutely terrific. I don't think that can happen to me again now, because I know that for him there is never an expectation that anything is completed, that he would not expect to see a 'finished' piece of work. Work is always in progress and constantly changing and transforming itself and developing and growing. In fact, if one takes seriously to heart what Peter teaches - because he's a great teacher too, to all of us, the most experienced among us - he can reduce those elements of insecurity and fear, which can be such a limiting thing on an actor. So I don't think I would ever feel that same fear about him being at a performance again. Though, you see, I think tonight he may come to see our performance and he didn't last night, and his mere presence out there is going to add a kind of sharpness to the play.

R.P.

I find it hard to imagine it being much better than it was last night - but it must feel different from your side.

P.S.

Well, you are much relieved to get the first night over. Last night you were a wonderful audience. We had a disastrous audience the first night: hard to please, not prepared to make a move towards us. And so last night, with it all behind us, we could relax, and it was a warm audience.

R.P.

It certainly felt like a very attentive audience.

R.P.

The main thing that I would like to ask you about is just what happened during the rehearsal period, the progression of work on the play, the order of events. A lot has been written about Peter Brook's work on various productions and with his Paris group. Did the rehearsal period correspond to what you had expected, in the way of activity that went on during it?

P.S.

I tried to go with as few expectations as possible, to be able to leave myself open to anything that came up. I would say the rehearsal period was divided very. very clearly into three quite distinct phases. Because he wanted to have a long rehearsal period and he wanted to begin before the last production (which was Love's Labour's Lost) had opened, he only had available to him six actors. They were Alan and Glenda, Jonathan Pryce and myself, Paola [Dionisotti] and Marjorie Bland. So you had the four principals, and Charmian and Octavia - important figures too. The six of us worked, with Pete, alone, for three weeks. I look back on those three weeks as being in many ways the most exciting and the richest time of rehearsal. The work was intensely concentrated. He makes demands on actors in rehearsal that are not made by many other directors. At any one moment, every person who is present in that rehearsal room has to be fully concentrated on the thing in hand. He frequently refers to others, who are not perhaps rehearsing the scene. He will frequently turn and say 'What did you think? Tell us.' - and so you can't switch off. In those three weeks, it meant very often eight hours of unremitting attention. But also with great relaxation. He seemed to be very happy during that time. I think working with a small group too was pleasant for him. We spent the first two days not in a rehearsal room but at his house - reading the play and talking about it, reading and talking, very, very slowly working through the play. We talked about language, and we did some exercises in language too. Then after the second day, we came into a rehearsal room, which had a square of carpet in the middle of it, and that carpet was to be our rehearsal space. Nothing but that for the next four or five weeks. We never moved off that carpet. Each day would begin with a period of exercise, warm up, which could take many, many forms. Physical integration, sound - but perhaps the dominant theme in all these exercises was the freeing and releasing of the imagination, coupled with an increased awareness and sensitivity to the things around you, your fellow actors. To develop a responsiveness that was lightning-sharp, and free of habit and cliché. We did many, many, many varied exercises - and improvisations. Some of them utterly demanding - where perhaps an actor had to hold on to two or three things - maybe a rhythm and a bodily movement, and a conversation, and another conversation, with someone else. Three of four things having to go on at the same time, all of which he had to keep in the air - very much like a juggler. I found those sessions - thrilling. They would last usually an hour and a half, sometimes a little longer, sometimes half a day. But, they were always geared to move from the exercise into the work on the play, in such a way that the exercise would reflect directly into the text work we would then go on to do - always. Peter constantly asked us to 'make the connections.' This was not isolated exercising followed by conventional rehearsal. We had to carry over that experience into our work on the text.

R.P.

Was much of what appears in the production devised during rehearsals in this way? I'm thinking particularly of the scene on Pompey's galley, the song and dance passage there. I thought it worked quite superbly well and had a range of meaning and effect that I hadn't seen in it before. Is that something that was worked out at rehearsal?

P.S.

There's almost nothing that is 'worked out'. It is the one scene which was built up out of pure improvisation. It is not his way to take any scene and to place the actors and to ask them to move here and there, so that at rehearsal things would change constantly, every rehearsal, in a search to find the happiest solution to a particular problem. That scene was given no formal shape until a very few days before we appeared in front of an audience. He knew that he wanted it to have initially, not a sort of boisterous rugby-club feeling, but something which was to do with liquor and food, which had not brought men into a beery, boisterous state, but rather to something which was elevated and very refined - where wits were sharpened. A little bit like - I suppose - being slightly stoned. This was the way we rehearsed it one time, and out of that, delicately, the Egyptian bacchanal would begin to grow. And what happens there is entirely improvised - and indeed is every night: it never repeats itself.

R.P.

The singer isn't necessarily picked up by the same people?

P.S.

That, finally, was worked out. What happens to the singer is plotted, and when he passes from one character to the other. But all the things that happen on the fringe, the moving around, the wildness, the tumbling onto the carpet, when the carpet goes up - all that, that is improvised.

R.P.

Your business with the bench? [At the climax of the dance, Enobarbus falls off a bench, pulling it on top of him and embracing it.]

P.S.

That is now fixed. I had to look for something that would feed Jonathan's 'strong Enobarb is weaker than the wine', and so that was found. And it was thought to be good, so it was kept in. It is interesting, because many people refer to that scene. In rehearsal, I was eager to get it set, to get something firm about it. I always felt it was a bit of a mess whenever we did it. It bothered me that Peter seemed to be perfectly happy. At the end of maybe two hours spent on the scene, with many of us feeling that we had achieved nothing, and that we still had the same sort of confusion we'd had two hours before, he seemed to be utterly untroubled by that. Well, his way proved to be the right way, because it marks a change in the rhythm of the play.

R.P.

It was satisfying and exciting to see it also followed, and broken into, by the Parthian scene (which is usually cut) rather than by the interval. It so often is made the climax before the interval.

P.S.

It was the last time.

R.P.

The placing of the interval too was very satisfying indeed. [It came after III,vi.] That strong opening to the second half - your entrance in collision with Cleopatra, the opposition that's so strongly projected at the beginning. You get the play moving tremendously.

P.S.

Yes, it's completely satisfying. It is for me, because putting the division there marks the great change in my story - I think even in the major story of the play. It puts us on the edge of Actium, and nothing is the same again after that.

R.P.

It curiously harks back to the beginning of the play as well. It almost has a second movement feeling to it.

P.S.

We played around an awful lot with intervals. We've had three of four different ones. We actually had two intervals at one time. I mean, we played it with an audience with two intervals. But everyone knew that it was not possible to make a second break in the play, between Antony's death and Cleopatra's. The two must be linked.

R.P.

It made more sense than any other placing of the interval I've seen in other productions.

R.P.

I was very interested to hear you speak of having started rehearsal with a reading of the play. One has heard that sometimes the text of the play entered Peter Brook rehearsals rather later.

P.S.

We met those words on the first day. We began to read them to one another - but only six of us. It's not the same as a whole company sitting around. I was talking about the shape of rehearsals. For the first three weeks, we had just six of us. When the other productions were on, we were joined by four more actors - David Suchet [Pompey], Alan Rickman [Alexas, Thidias], Paul Brooke [Lepidus], Richard Griffiths [Messenger, Clown]. They were with us for about ten days. It was only in the last four or five weeks that we had all the twenty-six actors. When we all met on the first day, after a morning of exercising with the whole company, we sat in a circle, and we all read the play from beginning to end. But there was only one copy of it, and that copy was passed from hand to hand. I mean, there was in a sense only one copy, in that no one read their own role, but somebody said: 'All right. Start with "Nay, but this dotage of our general" - there.' And at the entrance of each new character, or the beginning of each new scene or development, it would be picked up by the next person round the circle. And so it was read around, and it went round the circle three or four times. That was the way that this company first read the whole of Antony and Cleopatra.

R.P.

What you say about the whole company having come in later is very surprising. One would never have guessed. The sense of focus in the performances is tremendous. I can't remember when - if ever - I last heard the whole of a Shakespeare play spoken so intelligibly as last night, and so devoid of any kind of theatrical cliché. It seemed quite wonderful as a rendering of the text to listen to.

P.S.

Isn't that marvellous! From a man about whom usually one thinks - well - improvisation, movement, great stage effects, and so on.

R.P.

Initially, I was rather puzzled by one thing about Cleopatra, which could be related to Enobarbus. When you got to the bit about 'hopping through the public street', my credulity stretched to breaking point. This seems to imply in Cleopatra a degree of fragility somewhere, which was nowhere apparent in Glenda Jackson's powerful performance of the role.

P.S.

Peter and I think it's a very important passage. It's actually marked by my taking two or three steps forward - in a sense, almost out of the scene - it is isolated. That's an attempt for the audience to be put in touch with something about this personality which is deeper, more profound, than someone who is a behaviourist. There is something about her which cannot be explained, a power, indeed a perfection. It's a thing which occurs so much in the play - the contrast of opposites: that at a time when she would appear to be most vulnerable, most human - she has been running through the streets and she was out of breath - her very disorder displayed itself as a kind of perfection, a sort of magic. I don't think that that suggests there is any particular fragility in her, but that it's to do with an inner quality, a completeness at the centre of the person, which expresses itself at all times. When I was playing the part before, I often used to want to cut those last few lines of Enobarbus' speech - 'for vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish'. Those lines always seemed to me to be an anticlimax after what had just gone before. But not so: because it's right at the heart of the whole barge speech, that it is when she is at her coarsest and crudest - apparently so - that she expresses something that is almost religious in its nature. I feel they must be very important.

P.S.

The week when we did our first previews, Monday was a day of technical work, with a full dress rehearsal at night. Tuesday was to have been a similar day, and Wednesday was our first public preview. So, we were breathlessly within hours of going in front of an audience. Having done the dress rehearsal on the Monday night, all of Tuesday - the entire day - was given over to the company, and Peter, and at times the designer and the composer, sitting, in a circle, talking about the performance of the previous night. The whole day was given over to it - when in any other experience I've had - you know - last-minute desperate adjustments will be made here, and the director will be working on this point, and on that point. No! We sat down quietly, and yet again every member of this group was encouraged - indeed it was insisted upon - to make his contribution. We were all invited to be out in the audience whenever we could that night, watching scenes we were not involved in, so that we could then come back and talk about them. And nothing was held back. Now, to do that - to have the courage to do that! Of course it's not courage, it's actually common sense, when you see it work. To do that had a wonderful effect on this group. It's a case of what you feel your priorities are. You reach a point when you can spend every spare moment perfecting. But to do that would suggest that finally there is going to be something which will be complete. You will add the last piece - and that is it. As though you would say, 'Hold it! Let's take a picture of it! Because that's what we've been working towards for eight weeks.' It's not like that with him. Nor is it really like that with any of our directors. Now, nobody believes that. But Peter takes it very much further. It is 'work in progress'. And the first night was simply one moment, a very important moment, for all of us. But it was important because we were performing the play, and in that sense no more important than last night, or tonight. And that's in another way one of the reasons why the actors were so calm on that first night.

R.P.

Obviously it's to do with his extraordinary personality and gifts and experience, but how much do you think the extended rehearsal-time is a necessity for achieving a result like this? Presumably you had much shorter rehearsal for The Merchant?

P.S.

Oh, yes. Actually - no we didn't. We had eight weeks on that production. Yes, we were very, very lucky. Though it was much broken into, because people were rehearsing other shows as well. There were people who were in The Tempest and The Merchant. With Antony we needed all of those ten weeks. If we had only had five weeks, or six weeks, it would have been difficult to have spent the amount of time exercising that we did. You couldn't give over half of every morning - or perhaps a day - to talking. But with a play as complicated as this, as structurally difficult, with creatures who are so complex, I would say that time was necessary.

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Playing Shakespeare/Antony and Cleopatra