Julian R. Munds - acting classes

The nobles in Shakespeare's history plays get names, speeches, and interiority. The soldiers, gunners, and messengers get job titles. "Second Soldier." "Boy." Is that a limitation of the text, or is Shakespeare deliberately showing you a second, uncredited history running underneath the official one?

Romeo and Juliet is full of b***y jokes, incompetent adults, teenage stupidity, sudden violence, and people behaving badly. We've turned it into moonlight and tasteful music for two "patron saints of tasteful romantic suffering." What would it take for a production to actually let those two teenagers be as reckless and ridiculous as Shakespeare wrote them?

Unpopular opinion: an enormous amount of Shakespeare is basically a clown scene, and Canadian theatre culture has spent a century too reverent to notice. Do you think Shakespeare gets performed the way it does because that's what the plays demand, or because we're scared of what "juvenile" says about us as an audience?

There was a night, during previews of a play I wrote called Changeling: A Grand Guignol for Murderous Times, when I think the soul of the entire enterprise escaped from its bottle.
The play is a wholesale demolition and reconstruction of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, which we reimagined as something approaching the Three Stooges after several unfortunate encounters with a blood bank. We used blood. Considerable quantities of it. During one performance the actor playing De Flores, the play’s antagonist, ended up marinated in the stuff. He was covered from head to toe.
I retained a line from the original play where the protagonist confronts De Flores and points out that there is a little blood on his collar. De Flores replies that it is only a little from shaving.
Think about the image for a moment. A man is drenched in what appears to be somebody else’s blood and when challenged about it he responds, with the casual dignity of a man discussing his morning ablutions, that he nicked himself shaving.
It was hilarious.
It was also horrible.
More importantly, it was both at the same time.
I thought it was the best thing in the production. The director disagreed and made certain it never happened again on the grounds that the moment was gratuitous. This has always seemed to me a dangerous word in theatre. “Gratuitous” can mean unnecessary, certainly. It can also mean that someone has discovered the thing that makes the scene interesting. That willingness to allow a scene to become funny at the precise moment when it ought also to be horrifying seems to me central to a particular theatrical spirit. Shakespeare possessed it in industrial quantities. We have spent much of the last century teaching ourselves not to notice.
I say this because I have been looking at the Shakespeare productions surrounding me here in Canada, and Canada has inherited an Edwardian relationship with Shakespeare. The productions tend to approach the plays as though they have arrived from heaven in a velvet box and we have been entrusted with the solemn responsibility of not dropping them. There is a great deal of reverence. There is a great deal of weight. There is, often, a pleasant amount of tripping on the tongue.
Then there is the American contribution, which arrives carrying a psychological excavation kit. The American theatrical tradition has developed an understandable enthusiasm for psychological realism, with the result that actors are often encouraged to discover the secret interior life of a character somewhere beneath the script, beneath the scene, beneath the floorboards and, if possible, beneath the foundations of the theatre itself. This becomes interesting with Shakespeare because there is a genuine historical argument lurking underneath the whole business. Did early modern writers and audiences understand character interiority in the same way we do? The question remains contested in Shakespeare scholarship.
Francis Barker and Catherine Belsey, among others, have argued that the interiority of figures such as Hamlet may function as theatrical display. The character presents interiority rather than possessing the psychological coherent inner machinery that modern productions assume. The effect is gestural, theatrical, public.
Katharine Maus has challenged this position, arguing that early modern writers worried about the distinction between inward disposition and outward appearance. Renaissance literature is full of people wondering whether another person’s face, words, and behaviour correspond to what is happening inside them. To dismiss Renaissance interiority as something invented by modern psychology would therefore be premature. I have no intention of settling several centuries of literary scholarship in the middle of a theatre essay. That way lies either a tenure appointment or a long evening.
This point is narrower. A production that behaves as though Shakespeare’s characters possess modern psychological interiority as an unquestionable fact has made an interpretive choice. A production that behaves as though they possess none has also made an interpretive choice. Either can be interesting. Neither should pretend that it has discovered the objective truth.
What interests me is Shakespeare’s actual dramatic machinery. His characters tell us what they think. When they lie, Shakespeare will tell us that they are lying in an aside. When they scheme, they explain the scheme. When they change their minds, they are forthcoming about the change. Shakespeare does not make us sit in the audience for forty-five minutes while we reconstruct the protagonist’s childhood trauma from the way he holds a teacup. That tells us something about the dramatic technique. It does not tell us whether Elizabethans had inner lives. This distinction matters.
Britain sits somewhere between these two tendencies. West End and Royal Shakespeare Company productions are often beautifully acted and technically accomplished, hovering between American psychological naturalism and a more presentational English tradition. They are good. The trouble is that they are often not alive. They often feel stale; but a kind of stale that is a good night out.
Globe productions have moved further toward acknowledging the audience. The actors perform for the people watching them, and that simple fact can produce a different theatrical electricity. But the psychological strain keeps finding its way through the back door, carrying a respectable-looking handbag.
I encountered the alternative again while rereading Henry VI, Part 1 for this series. Act One, Scene Two gives us the Dauphin being comically dismantled by Joan la Pucelle before he has finished testing her. Then comes Act One, Scene Three, which may be one of the great, overlooked, pieces of theatrical nonsense in the canon. Gloucester storms into the Tower of London and discovers that his great-uncle, the Bishop of Wi******er, has already installed himself there to control the young king. The two men begin insulting each other. Officers intervene. The Lord Mayor of London gets dragged into the affair. Everyone is furious. The scene resembles a street brawl organised by people who have been informed that they are members of the aristocracy and have chosen to interpret this as a personal insult.
Reading it, I kept thinking: this is a clown scene. In fact, an astonishing amount of Shakespeare is a clown scene.
We have somehow become so frightened of Shakespeare’s cultural importance that we forget that he appears to have enjoyed people behaving like idiots.
The BBC’s 1983 production of the complete Henry VI cycle, directed by Jane Howell, understood this better than almost any Shakespeare production I have encountered. Howell and designer Oliver Bayldon staged all four plays, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, on one set designed as a kind of children’s adventure playground. The production is full of bright primary colours, platforms, catwalks, and artificial structures. Nothing pretended to be an authentic medieval castle. Nothing whispered, “We spent eighteen months researching the masonry of fifteenth-century Warwickshire.” The artificiality is the point.
As the cycle progresses and England collapses into the Wars of the Roses, the playground itself deteriorates. The bright colours darken. The world becomes charred and oppressive. By Richard III, the playground has become a nightmare.
In the first, still-colourful Henry VI, Part 1, Gloucester and Wi******er threaten one another while riding rocking horses.
Rocking horses.
These are powerful noblemen in the middle of a vicious political struggle, and they are sitting on children’s toys while having a tantrum. It is one of the most delightful images I know in Shakespeare on screen because it understands something that solemn productions miss. Their childishness is not an embarrassment that the director needs to conceal. Their childishness is the scene.
The American Conservatory Theater’s 1976 production of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by William Ball and later broadcast on PBS, made a similar decision with a different play. Ball staged the production as commedia dell’arte, embracing slapstick, stock-character logic, physical comedy, and the sheer theatrical indecency of the thing.
The result moves.
It is fast. It is funny. It is physical. It does not spend its entire running time apologising for the fact that The Taming of the Shrew contains material which might make a modern audience uncomfortable. That discomfort remains. Of course it does. But the production understands that one can confront an ugly or difficult element of a play without embalming the rest of it.
In Canada, calling a Shakespeare production “juvenile” or “silly” functions as a devastating criticism. It means the company has failed to understand the profundity of the material. Someone, somewhere, has not taken Shakespeare seriously enough.
I think we have the hierarchy upside down. When I worked with actors on classical text, I would tell them not to approach Shakespeare psychologically in the narrow modern sense. Again, I did not mean that the characters have no psychology. I meant that the actor should stop treating every line as a cryptic archaeological fragment from which the audience must reconstruct an invisible private life. Shakespeare gives you the thought. Play the thought. Then give the audience the next one.
For this reason, I often pointed actors toward Theatre for Young Audiences as a model.
This may sound insulting to Shakespeare until you have watched good Theatre for Young Audiences. It is the hardest theatre to do well.
Children possess a remarkable and terrifying honesty. An adult audience will sit through a bad performance for a long time. Adults have jobs. They have social conventions. They have been trained to clap. They may even have paid for parking.
Children have no such obligations. If they are bored, they will tell you. Sometimes they will tell you collectively. Sometimes they will tell you in the middle of the scene. Sometimes they will begin discussing something else at a volume that makes it clear the production has lost its territorial claim over the room.
That forces the actor to engage. There is nowhere to hide behind dignity. When actors made that leap with Shakespeare, something extraordinary happened. The language became energetic. The jokes landed. The audience responded. People stopped enduring Shakespeare and started watching him. That is the spirit I recognise in the De Flores moment.
A man covered in blood says he has cut himself shaving. It is ridiculous. It is appalling. It is funny.
The laughter makes the violence worse, and the violence makes the laughter worse. The two things feed each other. The scene acquires the peculiar electrical charge that occurs when an audience suddenly discovers that it does not know whether it should laugh. That is theatre.
I suspect it is also one of the things we have disciplined out of Shakespeare. We have decided that certain plays are too important to behave badly. I would like to see what happens when we stop.
I would like to see Hamlet treated with the kind of dangerous comic energy that lives inside Henry VI. I would like to see Lear allowed to become grotesque and absurd before anyone rushes in to make it profound. I would like Macbeth to remember that Shakespeare’s theatre could be funny about murder, blood, ghosts, ambition, and people making poor decisions.
Romeo and Juliet may need the most violent intervention of all. That play has become so reverent that it has nearly stopped breathing. We have turned two teenagers making an appalling series of decisions into the patron saints of tasteful romantic suffering. Shakespeare gives us b***y jokes, incompetent adults, adolescent stupidity, sudden violence, s*x, death, and an extraordinary amount of people behaving badly. We give him moonlight and tasteful music.
I keep wondering what would happen if we took the clownish, childlike spirit that makes the Henry VI scenes so alive, and the ACT Shrew so shameless, and released it into Romeo and Juliet. I do not know exactly what that production would look like.
That is the point. I would like to find out

Shakespeare's Joan la Pucelle is, on close reading, kind of a bedroom farce character. The Dauphin falls in lust with her mid-battle, his lords stand around gossiping about what she's "doing" to him offstage. This is not the saintly Joan of Arc we've inherited. Does it change anything to learn the "real" Shakespeare version of a historical icon was written as a joke?

For years I told acting students Joan la Pucelle (Henry VI, Part 1) was a hidden gem monologue. Nobody was doing it. There's a reason: when actresses brought her in, what showed up was never Shakespeare's Joan. It was Joan of Arc: the saint, the martyr, the Ingrid Bergman version. Four hundred years of reverence walked in and did the acting instead of the text. Ever catch yourself performing someone's reputation instead of who they actually were?

For several years, while teaching young actresses, I kept a reliable answer in my pocket for the perennial question: Where can I find a Shakespearean monologue nobody else is doing?

Joan la Pucelle. Henry VI, Part 1. Act One, Scene Two. Nobody else is bringing her in. There is a reason for that which is worth examining, because when actresses did bring her in, what arrived in the room almost never looked like Shakespeare's Joan. It looked like Joan of Arc.

More precisely, it looked like the Joan of Arc who has been assembled for us over four centuries: the saint, the mystic, the peasant visionary, Shaw's inconveniently indestructible heroine, the martyr in a hundred paintings, and, somewhere in the middle of all this, Ingrid Bergman looking as though she has been personally appointed by God to make the rest of us feel inadequate.

Shakespeare's Joan is another creature altogether. On close reading, she is rather funny. Go back to the scene. Charles the Dauphin and his lords have been trading war stories, the particular gallows humour of men who are losing a war and have therefore reached that stage where jokes become cheaper than ammunition. Joan arrives. Before anyone takes her prophetic powers seriously, Reignier decides to test her by having somebody else pretend to be the Dauphin. This is such spectacularly childish stagecraft that it might have been written for a sitcom in which the characters have just discovered disguises.

Joan sees through it immediately. She announces that nothing is hidden from her, with all the theatrical confidence of a carnival mentalist who has just guessed correctly that the man in the third row is called Michael. Charles remains unconvinced. So he proposes single combat. They fight. Joan wins, then something rather extraordinary happens. Charles does not fall to his knees in awe of God's chosen warrior as later variations on this “miracle” propose. He falls in lust.

“My heart and hands thou hast at once subdued,” he tells her, offering himself as her servant rather than behaving like the sovereign he is supposed to be.

The joke has now become fairly difficult to miss.

Meanwhile, Reignier and Alençon are standing around watching the Dauphin take rather a long time with Joan. They speculate about what exactly he is doing with her and conclude that women are “shrewd tempters with their tongues.” I don’t see this as solemn national history. Rather, this is a bedroom farce wearing a battlefield costume. That matters, because Shakespeare's audience already knew what to think about Joan. England had every cultural incentive to turn the French enemy into something ridiculous, morally suspect, s*xually dangerous, or preferably all three. Joan is brought onstage, mocked, s*xualized, defeated, and eventually killed.

But that is almost never the Joan who walks into an acting studio. What usually arrived instead was reverence.

The cadence is slowed. The chin is rise. The eyes acquired that particular expression actors produce when they have decided that their character is experiencing a religious revelation somewhere just behind the proscenium.

It could be a perfectly good performance. It was simply a performance of another play.

The actress had not necessarily failed to read Shakespeare. Something more interesting had happened. She had arrived with Joan already installed. Culture had done the casting before she entered the room. She had been handed four hundred years of Joan of Arc, fully assembled, sanctity included, and her task became less an investigation of Shakespeare's character than the placement of this pre-existing Joan onto Shakespeare's stage.

Call it colonization, because that is essentially the mechanism. A pre-existing structure of meaning arrives on territory that already has inhabitants. The new structure then establishes itself by persuading everyone that it was there all along. The scene bends around the icon. The icon is rarely forced to answer to the scene.

What gets lost is more interesting than a mere question of textual fidelity. We lose Shakespeare's joke, certainly, but we also lose the question underneath it.

Why does this play need Joan to be ridiculous?

Why does an English culture threatened by the memory of its conquering enemy need her reduced to a s*xual, comic, quasi-demonic figure?

Why does Shakespeare's company, having created this absurd Joan, need to kill her three acts later?

There is an obvious moral available here. Actors should read the text. Actors should return to the primary source. Actors should resist cultural assumptions.

Very good.

Except I am no longer entirely convinced that this is sufficient. Because the Joan those actresses kept bringing into my studio, dignified and doomed and somehow illuminated from within, was not simply wrong. She was the product of several centuries of people doing to Shakespeare's Joan exactly what Shakespeare's company had done to the historical Joan. They decided in advance what she must have been. Then they built a performance to confirm the decision.

Shaw was colonizing too. So is every schoolbook illustration of a girl in armour gazing heavenward.

So, perhaps, was Ingrid Bergman.

Now I find myself wanting to do it again. Somewhere underneath all these Joans, I want to believe, there is the woman who rode into Orléans. The woman who stood before armies. The woman who altered the political imagination of France and England. The woman who, as far as anyone actually recorded, never once delivered a knowing little speech about her own virginity while the violins swelled behind her.

I want to say that she is still there. Waiting. Waiting for somebody to read her first and decide what she means second.

But I have just spent the better part of this essay explaining why we ought to distrust precisely that impulse.

So I distrust it.

There may be no untouched Joan waiting underneath the rubble of four hundred years of interpretation. There may be no pristine historical figure sitting patiently at the bottom of the cultural excavation, dusting herself off and saying, “At last, somebody has got me right.”

Perhaps every Joan is constructed. Perhaps every reading is another act of colonization.

Perhaps the honest thing to do is admit that there is no floor underneath the interpretations.

I find, unfortunately, that I prefer the reaching to the honesty.

I would rather keep digging for the Joan who may not exist than congratulate myself for having discovered that she may not exist. Which may explain what all those actresses were doing in my studio. It may also mean that, after all this, I am not especially different from them.

I am merely the latest person to walk into the room carrying a Joan of Arc.

If I could go back and vandalise one particular decision in the early years of my acting career, I would begin with the monologues I took into auditions.

Auditions were difficult for me. I never seemed to do especially well in the room, which I attributed, with the serene confidence of the young, to some mysterious defect in my acting. In fact, part of the problem was that I had misunderstood the basic purpose of the exercise. I had fallen into the trap that catches most young actors, which is to regard the audition as a sort of bureaucratic checkpoint standing between you and the actual job. You arrive, perform your little sacrificial goat of a monologue, and then, if the gods are sufficiently entertained, you are permitted to become an actor.

Years later I read something Bryan Cranston had written about auditions and the distinction finally became embarrassingly clear. The audition is the job. There is no preliminary round in which you demonstrate your ability to perform, followed by the actual performing. The room is the room. The table is the table. The people behind it are already watching the thing you imagine you will eventually be allowed to do.

I had misunderstood that, but I had also chosen terrible material.

Almost everything I took into a room was a climax. I would select some spectacular little summit from the most psychologically catastrophic region of a play and carry it in like a man arriving at a dinner party with a severed head under his arm. Here, I seemed to think, is my emotional range. Observe the anguish.

You see the same instinct constantly in young actors approaching Shakespeare. There are, broadly, two things a Shakespearean monologue can ask you to do. It can ask you to be alone with a feeling, or it can ask you to be alone with a fact. Young actors almost always reach for the first. They want a classical monologue, so they immediately head for the great soliloquies, those glorious stretches in which a character is left alone onstage to discover that existence is terrible, time is meaningless, murder is complicated, and perhaps somebody should have mentioned all this before the curtain went up.

Hamlet provides several. Macbeth has the dagger. There are equivalent opportunities for women, although Shakespeare occasionally makes them travel by a slightly different route to psychological ruin: Juliet among the dead, for example, or Julia with her letter in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

These are wonderful scenes. They are also relatively unusual.

Read Shakespeare's plays from beginning to end and you discover that the great bulk of them consists of something considerably less glamorous. Someone comes onstage and tells someone else what has happened. Or what is going to happen. Or what has happened somewhere else, which is particularly useful because Shakespeare, having no budget for horses, armies, weather systems, or basically anything else, had to make the audience imagine an extraordinary amount of the world.

Making information interesting is one of the great, neglected skills of acting. You have to tell people something they do not know, make them understand it, and somehow make the information acquire emotional weight while you are doing it. The audience has to feel that a fact has just entered the room and changed its atmospheric pressure.

This is considerably harder than standing alone beneath a spotlight and announcing that you are tormented. It is also, I suspect, much more interesting to the director sitting behind the table. There is, of course, an obvious risk here. If the panel doesn't know the play, you are not just acting, you are also quietly doing the work of context, and that is a harder thing to pull off in ninety seconds than anguish, which requires no introduction because everyone already knows what anguish looks like. I think that difficulty is exactly the demonstration. Anyone can convince a room that grief is happening. Convincing a room that a battle occurred, that they missed something, that the facts of the world have just rearranged themselves, that requires you to be doing something the panel cannot do without you. You are asking them to trust a stranger. You are taking them in.

If I could go back now, I would choose one of the messenger speeches from Act 1, Scene 1 of Henry VI, Part 1. A messenger arrives with news that Talbot has been captured in battle, brought down partly through the cowardice of another soldier. The scene is already filling with these reports, each messenger depositing another piece of military catastrophe onto the growing heap. The man delivering this particular report is unnamed. He appears nowhere else. Shakespeare has given him, essentially, a brief lease on existence and then sends him back into the historical darkness.

For the duration of the speech, he owns the stage. He has to reconstruct an entire battle for people who did not see it. He has to make them see the movement of armies, the disaster, the humiliation, the consequences. There is no swordfight. There is no co**se. There is no great revelation about the human condition. There is simply a stranger arriving and saying, in effect: this happened, and you need to understand what it means. It is a tiny role that suddenly becomes an enormous performance.

The Henry VI plays are not exactly queuing outside theatres demanding revival. Their political intrigues are labyrinthine, their allegories have acquired the faint smell of a museum, and the number of characters is sufficient to make a casting director briefly consider becoming an accountant. Hidden inside all that historical machinery is a remarkable quantity of audition material, because Henry VI is full of people reporting things. Battles. Deaths. Defeats. Betrayals. Disasters. The endless consequences of people having made decisions several scenes earlier, which is essentially what history is when you remove the portraits of dead kings.

That is exactly why I would take one of those speeches into a room now.

I would leave the great emotional breakdown at home. I would leave Hamlet staring into the abyss, Macbeth contemplating the metaphysics of murder, and everybody else having the sort of afternoon that requires an Elizabethan playwright to invent a new punctuation mark.

I would walk in as a stranger. I would tell the table what happened.

Since theatre school, I have read plays slowly. Almost offensively slowly. I read them the way some people rewatch a film they already love, except I have a pencil and considerably less regard for my own free time.

First, I read the play straight through and write down whatever strikes me. Then I return to it beat by beat, testing those first impressions against the machinery of the thing. On the third pass, I stage it in my head. I decide where the actors stand, what the light does, what the audience sees, and, increasingly, what the audience feels sitting in the dark.

I have a drawer full of notebooks containing productions that will probably never exist. This is a strange habit. It is also how I think.

A few years ago, that habit collided with Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets, and something in my understanding of theatre cracked open.

If you don't know the play, the basic situation is wonderfully unsettling. Isobel is a young girl who was murdered years earlier. She walks through a city she can no longer belong to, observing the living as they carry around their cruelties, griefs, failures, and various emotional furniture that they have somehow never managed to throw out. She isn't there to solve a mystery. I there because something in her remains unfinished. The play follows her until she can finally leave.

Thompson's theatre occupies an unusual territory. It begins with recognisable people in recognisable rooms, then quietly opens a trapdoor beneath them. Ordinary conversation becomes poetry. Realism begins to behave strangely. The world becomes heightened, ritualistic, almost incantatory.

For years, I had seen productions of Thompson's work that felt oddly hollow to me. They tended to lean heavily into realism, with actors behaving as though these were ordinary slices of life that happened to have been written by someone with a particularly alarming vocabulary. Then I read Lion in the Streets alone, with a pencil in my hand, and suddenly understood what had been bothering me.

This play wants to be a ceremony. The scenes don't simply march toward a tidy plot resolution. They circle something. They accumulate emotional pressure around it. They keep feeding the thing at the centre of the play until, eventually, it can be released. That is the structure of an old human ritual. Something is taken out of ordinary life. It enters a strange middle space where the normal rules loosen. Something happens to it there. Then it is returned, transformed, or sent away, and everyone else goes home carrying the consequences.

We do this constantly. Weddings. Funerals. Initiations. Coronations. Religious ceremonies. Even the peculiar little rituals by which humans convince themselves that signing a piece of paper has transformed their relationship to another human being. Theatre may belong to this family more deeply than we usually admit.

That sent me back to an old question: why do we keep trying to make theatre look like ordinary life?

Stanislavski certainly wasn't asking actors to become human photocopiers. He wanted psychological truth. He wanted behaviour to emerge from circumstances, objectives, impulses, and inner life. He understood perfectly well that the stage was a box with three walls while several hundred people sat in the fourth wall staring at you. But, theatre has spent a great deal of its modern history behaving as though the stage were a window.

Film has largely won that competition. Film can give us photographic reality because film is, in a rather literal sense, photographs moving around at speed. Theatre has a different weapon. A ritual doesn't imitate the thing it represents. It performs it. A wedding doesn't merely depict marriage. The people standing in that room are actually getting married. Something has happened by the time everyone goes home.

I think theatre, at its oldest and most potent, works in much the same way. Theatre doesn't merely show you an event. It does something to you.

Once I started thinking about theatre that way, a rather uncomfortable idea appeared. Human beings have always had things they struggle to carry. Communities accumulate grief, fear, guilt, violence, desire, shame, resentment. Sometimes those things become unbearable. So cultures develop ceremonies through which some of that burden can be concentrated, transformed, or expelled. The scapegoat is perhaps the darkest version of this ancient impulse. Tragedy can become a highly controlled artistic version of the same machinery. In Lion in the Streets, Isobel's suffering happens within the story, but something also happens to the people watching her. We accompany her through the ceremony. We carry the weight for a while. Then she leaves.

Theoretically, so do we. We get to walk out of the theatre a little lighter. I had the embarrassing realisation that none of this was especially new. Antonin Artaud wanted theatre to assault the audience's nervous system rather than politely entertain it. Jerzy Grotowski stripped theatre down until the actor's body became the essential instrument. Richard Schechner began dissolving the distinction between performance and ritual, between the stage and the people sitting around it.

And Oskar Kokoschka, decades before much of this became fashionable, wrote Murderer, Hope of Women, an expressionist little bomb of a play that seems to have wandered into theatre carrying a lit match and several unresolved psychological problems.

I was late. A lot of people had already been standing in this particular room. Knowing that, however, doesn't prevent you from rearranging the furniture (to use an overworn metaphor of mine).

Since that afternoon, whenever I sit down to stage something, I have begun with a different question. It could be Romeo and Juliet. It could be Lost in Yonkers. It could be Sophocles. It could even be a Ray Cooney farce, although there are limits to how metaphysically serious one should become about a man discovering that he has accidentally married two women while simultaneously being pursued through a hotel by a taxi driver.

The question remains: What is this play trying to get rid of? What has entered the room? What has to be confronted? What has to be carried to the edge of the theatrical world and finally sent away? What will remain in the audience after it has gone?