Nicholas Brooke

The Characters of Drama

U
P and down over the past fifty years or so discussion of the
centrality of ‘character’ to the Drama has been bandied
about. But the snake has always turned out to be scotched,
not killed; so weak has the attack become, that the blatant beast
is in a good way to complete recovery, the revivalists almost rule
the farm. ‘Back to Bradley’ advised Professor Alexander a few years
back; more recently, Professor Una Ellis-Fermor’s posthumous
book, Shakespeare the Dramatist, has offered both the most whole-
hearted, and the most sensitive and subtle, restatement of the old
thesis that I know. This evidence is not marshalled towards exposing
a conspiracy to re-establish antic modes of thought; indeed John
Russell Brown, in the last two issues of Critical Quarterly, has
argued that the example of our latest dramatists should turn our
attention away from symbolic interpretation of Shakespeare on to
the revelation of character. These distinguished minds witness what
I suspect lies somewhere in most of our minds, that when all the
tumult and the shouting dies, there will character be, back where it
always was, right in the heart of the matter. Now I suspect that the
reason for this is that, though this century has produced plenty of
cries of ‘The play’s the thing’, the main attack on Bradley’s position
came from other interests. It is true that E. E. Stoll referred many of
Bradley’s ‘problems’ to the conventions of Shakespeare’s theatre,
but so much of Stoll’s attack seemed to deflate Shakespeare’s
achievement and responsibility, one lost interest; and though his
rare positive passages are very lively and suggestive, they are not apt
to be in dramatic terms at all: I remember most vividly his comparison
of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet to a grotesque scherzo in music.
On the other hand, L. C . Knights’ famous pamphlet How Many
Children Had Lady Macbeth?, though shrewd and telling on the
origins and history of the character tradition in criticism, substituted
for it an anti-theatrical idea, of the play as dramatic poem. Wilson
Knight might spring to mind in this connection, but in fact, as he
said in The Wheel of Fire, he has always regarded himself not as
contradicting Bradley, but as supplementing him.
So ‘character’ has survived, more alive than dead, and we come
to the summary statement with which Miss Ellis-Fermor opens her
second essay, ‘The Mode of the Dramatist’:
Our conclusions suggest that the most direct way to an understanding
of the nature of drama may be in the study of character and that it is
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 the dramatist’s approach to and universal sympathy with his characters
that leads him to those methods of communication that distinguish his
art from all others.
The centrality of character is offered here both as the essential
characteristic of Drama, and as the characteristicwhich differentiates
it from all other art forms. Now it is obvious that the word ‘character’
has been subject during the last three hundred years to a series of
meaning changes corresponding to changes in attitude to man and
psychology, but there seem to be two broadly different senses which
co-exist nowadays: the first sees the character of a man as what
distinguishes him apparently from other men, the second refers to the
resources of experience and behaviour which are more or less
common to all men. The Victorians tended to stress the first, and
so ended up with that supposedlyloveable troop of eccentrics which
dominated the social and academic scenes circa 1900;we, on the other
hand, tend to stress the general explanations of human behaviour
and so have to repeat at frequent intervals that we do believe in the
individual. Now Professor Ellis-Fermor saw both these senses as
relevant to drama, the tension between them representing the tension
present in all art between the particular and the general. But she
sees other elements as also present, and the one with which she seems
to have most difficulty is what she calls ‘thought’, which means
Shakespeare’s thought, and which in ‘essential drama’ cannot be
directly expressed by any character, and must therefore be coter-
minous with the whole play (a difficult entity to define).

I1
Now it follows from this that the commitment of drama to
character makes of it both (a) a mode of expression and communi-
cation; and (b) a restriction on expression and communication;
and this involves another, also recognised, tension inherent in the
form. But I should not have thought that this problem would arise
very obviously from the definition of drama which I quoted, for if
the study of character is the essential in drama, then the only
relevant thought to be coterminous with the whole play would be
the revelation of character. That this is not so appears not from any
reflection on the definition, but from the awkward intervention of
the practice of great dramatists-Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare,
Ibsen, etc. Aeschylus established a re-adjustment of the moral order
in the Oresteia; Sophocles examined the relation of man to the
inhuman in Oedipus Rex; Shakespeare was the most prolific source
of moral and metaphysical reflection, simple or profound, in English
-and his thoughts, great and small, prove remarkably
quotable out of the context of the character who spoke them. Miss
Ellis-Fermor solves this by asserting that Shakespeare is unique in
adjusting such utterance always to the character that speaks. It
73
seems to me odd that our greatest dramatist should have created
90 % of his characters with a peculiar disposition to gnomic utterance.
One classic instance of this problem is Ulysses’ speech on the
interacting harmonies of Order and Degree in man, society, and
the starry heavens, in Act I of Troilus and Cressida;we can say about
this that ‘thinking, for such characters, is passionate experience’,
and so seem to assimilate the thought to the character-but I question
whether we shall believe ourselves. The relevance to character is not
‘essential’, it is very superficial; if we try to make it otherwise, we
get some odd results. What is the character of the man who speaks
this? a philosopher? what he offers is a commonplace resumt of
what should have been ‘0’level material; he is an acute debater?
a pompous and self-assertive bore, who should have been told to
stick to the point, which was how to get Achilles to obey orders; a
poet? no doubt, but out of season in a staff meeting on the battlefield.
So what is the actor to do? should he deliver the speech as a comic
revelation of a pompous, poeticising, hectoring, tedious, over-
bearing fuddy-duddy? I have seen it done in just this way, disas-
trously.
But if one thinks of a different kind of character here, of the
character of the speech, not the speaker, the result is surely very
different: it is splendid, and memorable. What should the actor do
then? Speak it splendidly and memorably. Delivered so, there will
be no trace whatever of the pompous, poeticising, hectoring, tedious,
overbearing, about it.
Here then is the problem : if Ulysses’ speech is ‘thought’ rather than
‘character’, then here at least Shakespeare is not Miss Ellis-Fermor’s
essential dramatist. She distinguishes drama from the novel on the
grounds that drama can work only through character, the novel
may also allow direct comment by the author. But this I think is
quite false: the drama can as well accommodate the author-chorus as
the novel can the author-commentator. In fact, in the late nineteenth
century, novelist and dramatist both tended to extrude themselves,
equally. But either way, one point seems to me clear, that for
analytic exploration of character as such, the novel is better suited;
it can be both fuller and more subtle. If that is the essential character
of drama, then it is essentially second-rate; and its only justification
could be that it is supposedly more ‘popular’ and requires less effort
of its audience than reading. Which I take to be nonsense, only a
piece of that common snobbery that now finds reading more
meritorious than sitting in a theatre, cinema, or before a T.V. set.
In fact, surely, the difference between novel and drama is very
simple and very obvious: drama takes place in a theatre; and this
is also its difference from film and T.V. The point is a platitude;
but one more often greeted with pious assent than serious thought
about its implications. For it does, I think, make an essential
difference: the theatre is not a ‘medium’ through which the same
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thing can be done as through other mediums. It is a human situation,
that of a few people in front of many, a live spectacle. Everything
follows from that situation, and as long as it is retained, all is well;
as soon as it is lost, drama shrivels up like a balloon when you stop
blowing.
Now if we apply this situation to the problem of Ulysses’ speech,
it becomes much clearer. I said that if it is delivered splendidly,
it goes over, but as ‘character’ it shrivels away: the ‘situation’ in
which it works is very similar to that of the preacher, the didactic
voice before an emotionally conditioned audience. Actors and
preachers are well-known to be closely akin, and to understand the
character of drama it is the actor we have to investigate, and his
relationship with the audience: the actor, and not the char-acter.
111
So the scope and variety of drama as such is coterminous, not
with the words the author wrote (‘the whole play’ so-called) but
with the potentialities of stage personalities. Here, the main tendency
of modern theatre has been sadly narrowing, towards the single type
known as the ‘straight’ actor, who is of course the least independent
purveyor of tne author’s words; worse, the tendency has been to
deprecate the actor’s personality (sneering at star-quality and so on)
in favour of that dreary derivative of the Henry Newbolt tradition,
team-spirit; and that tendency goes with the dominance of the
designer, the lighting-expert and above all the director: all these
things work to the same effect, they diminish the actor; and in so
doing they diminish the human potency of the theatre.
An important point heie is that all actors are themselves individual
personalities; but in so far as they professionally approximate to
types, it is to a series of very different types: the heroic actor, the
straight actor, the juvenile, the comedy actor, the character actor,
the clown, and so on; and since I have defined the essential situation
as that of man on stage in front of audience, that must include
other talents less obviously theatrical, such as the preacher, and even
(with reservations) the lecturer.
The relation of this situation to dramatic character involves at
once the recognition that none of these figures is, on the stage,
the same ‘person’ that he is off it (vice versa, of course, all may carry
their public persona off stage to some extent, always deplorably);
but only two classes at all commonly present on the stage a person
unrecognisable as their private selves-the clown and the character
actor. And there is a connection here: the ‘character’ part does very
frequently incline towards the clown, becoming eventually either
comic, or pathetic, or both: he can never be wholly serious, never
tragic. Few actors who have the ability to succeed as either ‘straight’
or ‘heroic’ actors will make their career as ‘characters’: it is the more
limiting condition. Since the war Alec Guiness has made a great
75
reputation as a character actor, and though he does not quite
conform to my notion of the role, this is certainly his forte; he has
tried unsuccessfully to play Shakespearean leads. And further, I
would suggest that the film in which he made a great success, The
Bridge on the River Kwai, failed in a final bid for tragic effect,
precisely because it was founded on character acting. The reason for
this limitation seems to me quite simple: essential to character acting
is the complete disguise of the actor; the stage persona is therefore
always less than the man who acts. Straight or heroic acting exploits
the fullest capacity of the personality. (This is one, very elementary,
reason why major tragedies usually dealt with great men: such a
role gives immediate scope to heroic actors.)
There have, of course, been great dramatists who exclude heroic
acting, most notably Ibsen and Tchekov. Ibsen employs straight
actors (with some heroic tendency, which he inhibits) and characters,
almost clowns; tragic acting tends to distort and obscure the
subtleties of his writing, and only Hedda Gabler has proved much
of a temptation; but here a too heroic Hedda obliterates her character
husband, and the play falls apart. Tchekov is more really theatrical,
I suspect,than Ibsen, and Tchekov relies very largely on the condition
of ‘character acting’, exploiting that inclination I remarked towards
the comic and the pathetic. The question often raised as to whether
Tchekov was primarily concerned with atmosphere, or really meant
to be funny at all, is very abstract in relation to his words; it is much
clearer in relation to theatrical possibilities. The English tradition
has been to do Tchekov with straight actors in subdued tones,
leaving the producer dominant ; and a sad pious travesty it yields. I
know that Tchekov worked in the theatre and was much concerned
with discipline, standards of production, and so on; but he worked
at these as modifications of an existing tradition, the nineteenth-
century theatre with its well-typed character actors and actresses. Now
this tradition still survives in the theatre, but it has ceased to be
respectable, and tends to be exploited only by the most banal of
entertainments ;the ‘team’ of insignificant personalities is much more
normal, particularly in ‘serious’ theatre-and in that situation there
seems to me an inherent tedium.
There have been-a few-exceptions to the general tedium: John
Osborne’s earlier plays, Look Back in Anger, and The Entertainer,
both offered genuine theatrical opportunities to a single actor, and
left the rest nowhere. This is obvious about The Entertainer, a
tour-de-force exploiting music-hall tradition, and gaining such life
as it has entirely from this; it may not be so obvious about Look
Back in Anger, but I think it is still true: Jimmy Porter is a simple
and easy personality to project, for the right kind of actor. Osborne
provides highly speakable words : not very distinguished, but
speakable. It is this which conditioned the play’s success; this, I
suggest, much more than the paraphernalia of sinks, ironing boards,
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etc., and certainly more than any special intelligence Osborne has
to offer: much of the play-the cuddly toys and all that-fails to
come off; the hinted criticisms of J. Porter are putative and inade-
quate (in the text: the stage directions are another matter). But my
point is that Osborne exploited the theatrical possibility of a positive
personality, and in a devitalised, N. C. Hunter-ised, theatre, romped
home an obvious winner. Luther is a more elaborate play, but the
source of its success is similar.
Significant here is that N. F. Simpson, Harold Pinter, Ionesco,
all began writing revue sketches-and their plays exploit the very
special possibilities deriving from that : Simpson pretty thinly,
Pinter much more potently; and Pinter’s plays do, I think, depend
very much on revue performance. Beatrix Lehmann gave a very
distinguished performance when The Birthday Party was first
produced, and quite failed to get it over; Gladys Henson, or any such
specialist in comic dreary landladies, could have done it with ease;
John Slater was much more successful. Pinter of course is a specialist,
concentrating on a single theatrical possibility, the comic-sinister
(a condition neglected since the decline of Victorian melodrama) ;
Ionesco works in a similar mode, but with much more variety: he
could write most of a revue by himself-I hope Pinter won’t;
neither, in fact, makes use of song and dance, which Brecht did.
Beckett is less exclusively theatrical in this sense, but no less so in the
wider sense of my initial definition: Waiting f o r Godot demands
basically two kinds of clown, the glum and the perky; but it also
makes very adroit use of the lecturer situation, in Lucky, who seems
to me rather like a variation on the theme of The Blue Angel, where
the Herr Professor, reduced to playing a cabaret clown, his eloquence
reduced to cock-a-doodling, takes effect from the contrast of stage
possibilities (lecturer and clown) rather than from any remarkable
degree of psychological plausibility. The same theatrical incompati-
bility was exploited by Charles Chaplin in Limelight.
What 1 am claiming is that the best ‘serious’ drama of late has been
strongly rooted in theatrical entertainment rather than in the
‘straight play’ ‘conflict of characters’ tradition; none makes a primary
demand on the intelligence of the actors, all go best with performers
experienced in particular popular forms. Intelligence indeed is a
disadvantage in a sense: the actor’s business is to make the theatrical
mostest of the material, not to ‘interpret’ what it’s all about. And I
would go further, and apply this to the producer, the most arrogant
figure in the modern theatre: the more a production ‘interprets’
plays of this kind, the more it kills them. But there used to be another
use of the word ‘interpret’ in the theatre-bringing plays theatrically
alive, and this is what is right: they depend on theatrical experience,
on the simultaneous development of pain and laughter, in the
context of familiar experience (Pinter and Ionesco), or of familiar
ideas (Beckett).
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 IV

Obviously, or I hope obviously, I am not saying that drama equals

revue, music-hall, pulpit or whatever. But all these things are essen-
tially ‘dramatic’-they depend on a stage and an audience. This is
what a dramatist must make use of; it is into these things that he
must project his sympathetic imagination, not, as Miss Ellis-Fermor
claims, into ‘the minds of his characters’: they don’t, as far as the
theatre is concerned, have minds, only talents. Valuable ‘use’
depends on the dramatist’s intelligence, and is judged by the
audience’s, the critic’s: Pinter displays some, not too much, in his
plays-I do not think he gives himself the scope for much; Beckett
has more than enough, of an arid kind; Ionesco, I think, very little-
he depends for structure on clichCs of modern thought, what every
schoolboy knows of Freud, surrealism, etc.
A return to Miss Ellis-Fermor returns me equally-and about time
-to Shakespeare: she claims him as the most essential dramatist of
all-so do I, so do we almost all. She, because even with Shakespeare’s
minor figures, ‘though only a slender arc of each personality enters
the frame of the play, the circle is complete beyond it, living full and
whole in the poet’s imagination’. I don’t believe it: she is talking
about Banquo’s murderers, who can be cast for almost any kind of
bit player; we neither know nor care a hoot about them beyond their
brief scenes, and if Shakespeare did, he had thewit to suppressthe fact.
So my case for seeing Shakespeare as the most essential dramatist
would be that he deploys the maximum range of theatrical possibility:
heroic, straight, lecturer, character, clowns (of several kinds),
dancers, even conjurors (Autolycus), possibly bears, and certainly
bards. All these are essentially dramatic; and they are all very
different from each other. Fundamentally, the magnitude and unity
of Drama depend on this variety enclosed within the common factor
of stage and audience. The main difficulty is one of combining these
manifold egotisms of stage performers into a single connected
performance, and here it is conspicuous that Shakespeare takes a
wider range into his plays as he goes on; one can feel that he was a
poet before he was a dramatist, although always a dramatic poet.
The first tragedy with an important part for clowns is Hamlet; Lear
has a far more important part; it is The Winter’s Tale which has the
richest range of all.
Perhaps the simplest, certainly the commonest, of combinative
devices in drama is the ‘story’; but its great difficulty, disadvantage
even, is that it does not easily accommodate more than a few
theatrical elements. If it comes to be regarded too seriously, as if it
were the heart of drama, it soon weakens the theatre, and in fact I
think it was attention to story plus attention to character which did
debilitate the theatre. This paradox, however, brings out a funda-
mental point which Mr. Brown stressed in his discussion of Beckett :
78
 plays are not any one single thing, but an inter-action, sometimes a
tension, between different things, as between theatrical forms and
narrative structure, variety and unity, actor’s egotism and producer’s
discipline, human actions and morality structure, and, of course,
actor’s personality and the assumed ‘character’.
This last brings me to the one type of actor whom I did not
discuss before, the heroic-and he is vitally important, for by long
tradition he dominates profession, drama, and certainly Shakespeare’s
tragedies. The heroic actor, like the straight actor, is commonly
said to be ‘always himself’, whatever role he plays: in this, he is
utterly unlike the character actor, who is precisely not himself. Yet
it is unquestionably the heroic actor who takes the leading
‘characters’, and this has interesting implications for Miss
Ellis-Fermor’s metaphor about arcs of personality: in so far as any
stage performance suggests a total personality, it is apparently that
of the leading actor; and in so far as leading actors seem to be
always, more or less, themselves, then a major arc of the circle will
be their personality, and in no sense an invention of the dramatist.
I know that our leading professional actors speak against me
here, or seem to: Gielgud and Redgrave have both written about
studying the ‘character’ (an older generation studied the part-a
different thing), working on their performance until they felt they
could be the character the dramatist intended, and so on; I do not
know that Olivier has written to this effect, but his performances
imply that he would agree. He, in fact, is the nearest of them all
to a character actor: his most famous role is Richard 111, which he
plays as a character, and partly limits himself thereby (the things
which depend most directly on stage personality, like the wooing
of Anne, he cannot do because he must encompass them within
the malignant character); as Titus Andronicus he seemed to play
the first Act as Winston Churchill: there was less of this later, but
it had fatally weakened his performance; when he was most the
character he least filled the part; the more he filled the part, the less
trace there was of the character. I have seen Redgrave similarly
uncertain, but not Gielgud-and at his best (his worst is lifeless)
Gielgud sesms to me the finest of them. Of these actors in leading
Shakespearian roles I would almost be prepared to say that the less
they study character, the better the performance they give.
And this for quite a simple reason: notoriously, the actor’s job
is to ‘project’ his performance on to the audience; this is a simple
trick of mass psychology dependent on what is known as a strong
personality (almost all that is effective in theatrical illusion depends
on this). And the only personality you can project is your own;
the only escape from this simple fact is to postulate mystical
experience-a kind of possession-for the actor ; this has been sug-
gested, but such accounts as I know of the great Shakespeareanactors
-Burbage, Betterton, Garrick, Kean, Irving-do not bear that out.
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 V

Yet, of course, there does have to be a differentiation between

roles, and I have not yet found a place for it. I can indicate an
answer here most easily by speaking of my own very limited
experience as an actor, a poor thing, but mine own. Amateur and
professional acting are very different things, but the difference (I
guess) is rather in degree than kind: an amateur projects far less, and
differentiates far less efficiently. Very well: for me there is a radical
difference between a character part and a straight one: the former
is very largely mimicry, the latter very slightly so. A wheezy old
man is the easiest ‘character’; usually it is done by mimicking in a
stage convention ;it can be made more interesting by imitating a real
old man, but still it is essentially mimicry. I have done this kind of
thing, in revues and such, but on the whole I am too shy to be any
good as a mimic (for some people it can be a cover for shyness, a
self-disguise). Straight parts are sheer opposite, scarcely mimicry at
all, but self-adaptation. To fill a role, one must fill every part of it:
that is, give full force to every action and speech called for. And
to do this one finds, not ‘how it ought to be done’, but how I can do
it. This is what, in the theatre, ‘interpreting’ a part really means:
not a theory about the character, but a way for a particular actor to
play it. Always there are some lines a particular actor finds he cannot
speak, not because they are unspeakable, but because he cannot
speak them; and there are fewer of them in the last rehearsal than
in the first, if the producer has been helpful. This is what one isfirst
concerned with in rehearsal; in performance one does something
quite different, one projects this: that is, in rehearsal one works at
the role, in performance one works at the audience. This requires a
more or less conscious effort of will, possible only when the role
has become more or less unconscious; what remains conscious of
that is apt to be trivialities-what do I say after she says so and so,
etc.-just the consequences of nervousness. That willed projection
can only be achieved if one is ‘comfortable’ in the part, has found
one’s way of moving and speaking (or being still and silent).
Now this does mean that even the great Shakespearean roles, even
Hamlet himself, are open to a very various range of ‘interpretation’
in my sense. I have tried in this paper to clarify the clichC that drama
is an art of the theatre, that a play is not a play until it is being acted;
and so it is simply a fact that when we speak of the ‘character’ of
Hamlet we should think, not of a single ideal form, but of an actor
playing Hamlet. Hamlet’s character is Gielgud as Hamlet, or Olivier
as Hamlet, or O’Toole as Hamlet; each has been successful, each
is very different. But, the range of variation is not infinite: I shouldn’t
want to see Wolfit as Hamlet, his stage persona would not adapt to
Hamlet (I think); and when Redgrave last played it at Stratford, his
age caused comment. That is a simple and obvious limitation, and
80
one that has been overcome; in fact, in any role, there are far more
and far subtler limiting factors than this. And these limiting factors
define the ‘character’ of the particular hero; in so far as they are
common aspects of human personality, any well-developed
personality can represent them; in so far as they are in any degree
idiosyncratic, some actors will fail in the role. Richard Burbage
probably created almost all Shakespeare’s leading roles : one can
easily feel the single person involved in Richard 11, Romeo, Brutus
and Hamlet; or a single personality behind Othello, Lear, Macbeth,
Antony; I find it rather harder to imagine one man playing both
series :maturing powers easily explain the more dominant personality
called for in the later series, but what is more surprising is the more
aggressive quality these later heroes have in common; but one can
see this emerging in Hamlet.

VI
There remains one last point to be made: the function of drama
is not to explore character, but to exploit it; and it is a fundamental
aspect of this that the character of a heroic actor is at once egotistical
and verbose: to put it crudely, he is a spouter. He wants words, and
can use them, like a preacher, like the spell-binding type of lecturer ;
and this does not mean mere decorative diction, but something to
say, to put over-you cannot project decoration. For me, this solves
one of Professor Ellis-Fermor’s dilemmas: where the thought
comes into drama. Ulysses can harangue us on the Great Chain of
Being because he is a lecturer with a taste for big ideas; and, given
them, he will put them over with the full force of a largely vocal
personality (not, of course, as if he had just thought of them).
And having that, not a character performance, behind them, the
ideas will have an authority beyond just that of the character: the
author is not finally committed to what Ulysses says, but nor is he
wholly distinct from it: he can ‘speak through his characters’
because his straight actors will speak for him; his characters, never.
This indicates a duality at the root of drama: we can always
simultaneously attend to the person who speaks, and to what he
speaks, as we can in a smaller way outside the theatre. And this
sense of the person can be exploited to limit and define, but never
to exclude, the acceptability of what he says. What is said has not
at all singly the function of ‘revealing the character’ of the speaker.
The classic exploitation of this fact, is the morality play Everyman,
where everyone on the stage is at once addressing another person,
and the audience-‘Everyman, I will go with thee’ etc. ; but in so
doing he is not being in the least undramatic-he is doing what every
actor does: lesson one for the tyro is, speak it out to the audience,
even though it is addressed to someone beside you on the stage. And
so Shakespeare can, more variously, exploit the same condition and
81
employ Hamlet, for example, to deliver a very remarkable meta-
physical poem on being and not being.
Far more than music, then, because the score is so much less
precise and performance involves so much more of the personality
of the performer, Drama is an art dependent on performers, for its
very character. Criticism has concentrated on character, and
encouraged the theatre to follow its example, but it was always
literary criticism: the literary critic must interpret the play-
provide the actors as he reads-and that will make very heavy
demands upon his imagination as he reads, and so he talks largely
about character. But the character he discusses is the one he deduces
the dramatist had in mind, not the one an actor will present, which is
what an essential dramatist must in fact have had in mind. The
dramatic critic should therefore do no such thing. The characters in
drama are only a peripheral aspect of the character of drama.

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