Razzle dazzle ’em

What is it that endows an actor or performer with stage presence? Jane Goodall introduces her exploration of this phenomenon with three disparate examples: Maria Callas commanding an audience of 20,000 at Epidauros, including a ten-year-old girl who would never forget the experience; Bob Dylan recalling the professional wrestler Gorgeous George making an entrance ‘in all his magnificent glory’; and a young Simon Callow, who, employed in the box office at the Old Vic, sneaks into the empty theatre and, setting foot on the stage and declaiming a few lines from Hamlet, is shocked by the ‘physical, or even psychical, power released, a small earthquake’. Interestingly, all three are experiences of the young and impressionable, memorable enough to be recalled years later. But they also carefully foreshadow that Goodall’s account will not be restricted to the realm of high culture. It is no surprise to find the likes of David Garrick, Henry Irving and Sarah Bernhardt making their legendary presence felt, but Goodall’s analysis also accommodates gigastar Dame Edna and concludes by making a case for the apparently talentless Johnny Rotten. Stage presence should be, as she adroitly puts it, ‘taste proof’. And Callow’s reference to psychical power also hints at the ‘uncanny’ aspect of stage presence (and ‘uncanny’ is a key word here) with which Goodall’s narrative flirts. Goodall distinguishes between two forms of stage presence. The ‘dignitary’, stemming from the ideal of the Renaissance man, is the performer who is a superior exemplar of theatrical skills. The ‘magus’, on the other hand, drawing on an older holy tradition (and yes, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is lurking in the historical background), conveys ‘a sense of inner power being radiated outwards’, often inviting the metaphors of magnetism and mesmerism. It is the ‘magus’ who is of primary interest to Goodall, but while ‘the scientific and the uncanny, mystique and technique, may be frequently in tension’, she stresses that ‘they are also hand in glove’. Nor is stage presence the same thing as charisma. Charisma is ‘longitudinal’, often animating and sustained through a career, while stage presence is ephemeral and, in a particular sense, of the present. Off-stage, a leading actor might pass unnoticed. Within the tradition of holy theatre, there is often a distrust of the dignitary’s accomplishments. Peter Brook, while recognising that outstanding actors have ‘some mysterious psychic chemistry’, seeks in his training of actors to strip them of ‘the repertoire of physical and verbal behaviour’ they bring to rehearsal. In its most extreme form, this critique of the actor leads to Edward Gordon Craig’s proposal, made half seriously, to replace actors with über-marionettes, which would not be tainted with ‘the flashiness of displayed personality’. Samuel Beckett would have sympathised; he didn’t treat actors kindly. In Happy Days, Winnie is part buried in a mound, unable to move. This imprisonment is carried even further in Not I, in which only the actor’s mouth is seen, Beckett demanding that the rest of her body be completely immobilised. Indeed, Beckett once confessed that he thought ‘the best possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the text’. I doubt that he would have approved of the recent London production of Waiting for Godot, which boasts an all-star cast of Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Simon Callow, and Ronald Pickup. But then, in a sense, it is no longer ‘his’ play. As quickly as you might attempt to smother it, stage presence has a habit of reasserting itself. There is a mystery at the heart of stage presence, and it is Goodall’s fascination with this continuing mystery that propels the narrative. It is easy enough to understand how eighteenth-century scientific interest in magnetism would feed into the language of theatre appreciation. So, too, with electricity: how often have we heard a performance described as ‘electrifying’? But the nineteenth-century fad of mesmerism, which, in spite of Mesmer’s showmanship, had scientific pretensions, was capable of a more literal transposition to understandings of stage presence. Goodall cites the extraordinary experience of Bram Stoker when Irving gave him an impromptu recitation of Thomas Hood’s ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’: Such was Irving’s commanding force, so great was the magnetism of his genius, so profound was the sense of his dominance that I sat spellbound. Outwardly I was of stone; nought quick in me but receptivity and imagination. Here was incarnate power, incarnate passion ... The surroundings became non-existent. After the poem’s dramatic climax, Irving ‘collapsed physically’ and Stoker, ‘after a few seconds of stony silence … burst into something like a violent fit of hysterics’. This encounter with Irving is said to have sowed the germ of Dracula in Stoker’s mind. Goodall sees one effect of the infatuation with mesmerism being to endow ‘the stage star’ with ‘an aura of supernatural energy’. Not surprisingly, there has been some resistance to this authoritarian form of stage presence. In her insightful analysis, Goodall identifies the tendency for Brecht to be reduced to a style, detached from the ‘present’ which concerned the playwright. Brecht may not have shared Beckett’s disdain for actors, but he was often dissatisfied with their performance of his work. It seems they struggled to meet his requirement of maintaining a ‘double consciousness in the audience: of the imagined world of the drama and the actual situation of the performance in the here and now’. Yet even Brecht could find himself matching the imagery employed by Stoker when evoking the physical presence of the dramatist and cabaret artist Frank Wedekind (whose plays provided the basis for Berg’s opera Lulu). Brecht described Wedekind as ‘ugly, brutal, dangerous’; his ‘intense aliveness’ and energy giving him ‘his personal magic’. Although Jane Goodall, who shared this year’s Calibre Prize, writes out of the University of Western Sydney, where she is an adjunct professor, the book bears no signs of its Australian source. Indeed, the case studies are carefully chosen to be familiar to ‘readers across different continents’. But it is surprising that her analysis of Barry Humphries draws upon no Australian commentaries – I think particularly of Ian Britain’s perceptive essay in Once an Australian (1997). Similarly, while Jim Sharman’s kaleidoscopic memoir, Blood and Tinsel (2008), may have appeared too late to be used in the discussion of The Rocky Horror Show, it is odd that his crucial role in the creation of this cult celebration of camp is not mentioned. The book is mercifully free of typos and inaccuracies, though Ian McKellen’s name manages to get misspelt. Goodall has written a compelling book. Some of it is densely argued, but the author’s stylish prose and clever imagery carry the reader along. Comparing Johnny Rotten’s brief fame with Bob Dylan’s status as the ‘laureate’ of ‘the times’, she conjures up Rotten, the cynical social realist, as ‘a gunpowder apparition who occupies a flashpoint, gone almost as soon as it appears, yet leaving a burning after-image’. Of course, for all the illumination offered by Stage Presence, it cannot provide a ‘solution’ to the ‘mystery’ of stage presence. That is not the point. However, I wonder if Goodall allows sufficiently for the temptation for critics to draw unthinkingly on the repertoire of popular metaphors. To reach an audience, performance usually requires exaggeration, and much theatre criticism tends to follow suit. But in so far as stage presence may at times seem inexplicable, the uncanny lingers on. What adds to and conditions this feeling is the ephemerality of the theatrical moment: the sense in which ‘the present’ is lost and can only thereafter be imagined. And it is why many of us keep going back to recapture, if not that experience, one like unto it.

John Rickard

From the New Issue

God and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s tour de force of Australia and New Zealand by Shiroma Perera-Nathan

Non-Essential Work by Omar Sakr

Deep Water: The world in the ocean by James Bradley

‘Information and transformation: The continuing expansion of AustLit’ by Maggie Nolan

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