Shakespeare and the Time Arts

by Fred Dennehy

There is a story, no doubt amplified through repetition, about the great British Shakespearean actor, Sir Laurence Olivier. He had been starring in a long run of a play in London’s West End. One night his performance, always superb, was astonishing in its aliveness and intensity. The audience felt that they were witnessing something more real than the world around them. His fellow actors felt it, too. After a sequence of thunderous curtain calls, Olivier suddenly raced to his dressing room and locked himself in. He could be heard sobbing from the corridor. Finally, one of his fellow actors went to the door, knocked tentatively, and said “Larry, what’s this all about?” Olivier’s voice came back, broken: “It’s about tonight.” “Tonight?” she asked. “Tonight was the greatest performance you’ve ever given.” “I know it was,” the voice roared back: “And that’s just it. I don’t have any idea how I did it.”

That’s the thing about the ‘time arts’ generally, and live theater in particular. A given performance, or even a moment within the performance, may be utterly stunning – and it is never repeated. Even if you should happen to listen to a recording or watch a video of it, the same magic isn’t there.

One reason is that those rare occasions are experienced by both the actor and the audience outside the physical body, in the etheric. There are no instruction manuals for the etheric, so the experience can neither be encapsulated nor imitated. The power of the performance lies not so much in its content as in its emergence, its becoming, and that happens for us only once.

Theater at its best, as Steiner often pointed out, is an invocation of the spiritual, a visible realization of the invisible. It seeks to bring a play to life – to beget an experience on a different plane from the underlying sensory sequence of events, to realize a spot in time where the immediacy of the present moment is the focus, and everything may be possible.

When what is happening on stage in fact becomes a spiritual activity, the actor is no longer thinking about carrying out a task. Though what he says and does on stage goes according to the script, the quality of his speaking and moving shifts into improvisation. He acts spontaneously, the way a child plays. Each thing on the stage – each object, each person, each event – is experienced as something new, in its full dignity.

Such a transition does not flow readily out of the accustomed exercise of the actor’s craft. It is outside the causal chain, beyond habit, beyond expectation, and even beyond concepts.

How does it happen? It may be something abrupt in the course of the performance. There is a pause, an interruption, and the actor is suddenly faced with what the great director, Peter Brook, calls ‘the empty space’ or ‘the open door.’ He is without the customary emotional and associative supports that have been carrying him from scene to scene. He feels alone, turned in on himself, called upon to do something, but not knowing what that something is. Maybe it is only a brief discontinuity, a gap, but it can be encountered by the actor as an abyss.

Rudolf Steiner has written of the intensity and danger of such moments in works like How to Know Higher Worlds and The Threshold of the Spiritual World . The actor may well shrink back from this invitation from the spirit. His attention may become divided, and (since we are our attention) he may feel torn apart. His performance can deteriorate precipitously and he may experience paralyzing stage fright, even to the extent that he walks off the stage.

But something else may happen. He may embrace the void with his full attention and find himself at the beginning of a performative freedom that can create an original interpretation, a new meaning. The invisible may in fact begin to become visible. For a brief time, the actor’s everyday I may coincide with a higher I, and he may surrender his own gratification and security and simply let himself drop away. “Renunciation,” as Georg Kuhlewind has said, “is the secret of every true ascent.”

We can never summon back an otherworldly jazz solo that has disappeared into the ensemble, or the flash of recognition between two people on stage that cracks open with ferocious energy and then subsides into simple discourse. But we can prepare the way for the grace of their coming. At the very least, in the theater, we need plays that can bear those moments. And even today, after more than four centuries, there are no plays that can carry the spirit better than Shakespeare’s.

Shakespeare’s plays, as his contemporary Ben Jonson famously put it, are “rammed with life.” Peter Brook has imagined Shakespeare writing lines like atoms, able to release infinite life, if only we can split them open.

Shakespeare’s ‘mirror of nature’ is always a two-way mirror. Though his mind works in polarities, he never writes crudely, giving us stale matchups between ‘heroes’ and ‘villains.’ His polar forces generate one another within every one of his characters, so that the portrayal that emerges is full to bursting with living contradictions – and utterly real.

Of all dramatists, Shakespeare is alone in his generosity. He could have used his pantheon of totally believable human beings to say what he wanted to say to the world, but he doesn’t. He lets them say what they need to say. He steps back. He is happily content to be the bearer of others’ truths. As the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges has put it, Shakespeare is everyone and no one.

No one ever understood this generosity of mind that Shakespeare possessed better than John Keats, who called it “negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats means a letting go, a surrendering to what is simply there. Negative capability is a renunciation of the ego, of the lust to make judgments, of the seductions of pandering entertainment. It embodies the same qualities of wonder, reverence, acceptance and devotion that Rudolf Steiner set as preconditions for knowledge of the spirit in How to Know Higher Worlds. It opens for us what Keats calls “the penetralium of mystery.” Without the ability to “be still and know,” the mystery in the world vanishes, and with it the life of things

Shakespeare himself was an actor and a director –a creator of time art. He understood his audiences and knew from decades of experience that when everything goes right, the audience is swept along with the performers.

How do we account for the silent exaltation of an audience after the end of a great performance of “King Lear” in which the actors have discovered something truly new? They have just sat through the most heartrending final moments of all theater. They know that Cordelia will “never, never, never, never, never come again.” They have seen Lear himself die without any perceived redemption from his torment. There has been no final saving secret communicated to them.

What is it? We could say, with Aristotle, that the members of the audience have experienced “catharsis,” a purging of the emotions of pity and fear. But there is something more. They have been awakened into a part of themselves that they rarely touch. They have been awakened into freedom.