Entry Four: The Spitballs in King Lear
Let me tell you about the spitballs.
Though I had been going to Stratford regularly since the age of four, I did not attend the Festival with people my own age until my mid-teens, when I attended 'school matinees' with over a thousand teenagers, all arriving by bus from across Southern Ontario. I remember my first experience of this kind of theatre-going quite vividly, because of the spitballs.
We were there for King Lear, with William Hutt in the title role. The audience was as quiet as a large room of teenagers can be, which is 'not at all.' When the lights went down into total darkness--no doubt the first time anyone attending had been in a room that large, with that many people their own age, that went to black. As the lights dimmed, the roar of the audience rose, as if we were all inside a haunted house. It was a completely new experience, I imagine, and something they were not prepared for. The roar was entirely necessary. Indeed, many years later, as an adult attending a student matinee, the Festival sent a younger member of the company (of course, someone who looked like a teenager) to talk with the audience, to tell them that he had attended these matinees, and he understood, and he was on their side, and that there were, after all, some rules they should know about. He then proceeded to have all the lights lowered, inviting the audience to get the noise out of their system--which they proceeded to do. With enjoyment, passion, volume--and permission. Clever company, harnessing the energy--though I have no memory whether that resulted in a more attentive audience.
But my first time was not so carefully managed. The lights down--'ooh-aah'. 'King Lear' begins. There was fidgetting and whispering and people wondering what the hell was going on and who was whom. Nothing unusual, and I won't say I never experienced this with an older audience. But then, people just seemed to stop listening. There was some kind of group murmer that was unnerving. Not a disruption, exactly, but something not attending to the performance. King Lear--Hutt--was just entering the depths of the storm scene. He was in the deepest boom of his voice, resonant and sonorous and musical, reaching back into the melodramatic performances of decades past. He had a loose gray robe and a staff, and the lighting and sound cues were flashing and crashing all around him. It was all very impressive, and I was in the moment. I, for one. I couldn't imagine anyone not paying attention--or vying for attention. In scenes like that, the stage wins. Except--
In the middle of the scene, when Lear was at his most over-wrought, Hutt bent over toward the ground--you won't believe me, I know, but I do remember this--as if he was in deep pain, overwhelmed by the storm and recent events and his own turmoil. There was a pause in him, as if he was considering--Lear, that is--his place in the universe. And then Hutt--I mean Lear--I mean Hutt--reached out his right hand, palm up, and slowly raised his body to a more-than-upright position, as his head and hand both were lifted to the balcony. And as he did this, he said, in the same sonorous voice as Lear railing against the storm:
'Li-i-i-ghts!' [A long, rolling thunder of a word that filled the theatre and seemed to go on for some seconds.]
'Some. One. Threw. A. Spit. Ball. On. This. Stage!' [Each word came with a pause, and it was melodic....]
'This Is Not A Garbage Pit!' [Again, musical, and with the word 'Pit' the Pit-ch went up]
And then a pause. I don't remember him saying anything more, though he might have.
Or perhaps that was sufficient--considering that at this point, at the end of 'Pit,' the lights in the entire theatre, including the audience, were up, the thunder and lightning had suddenly stopped--just as impressive, that, when sound suddenly ends. And there was Hutt, in full costume, seemingly still in character, but in full non-theatrical lighting, frozen, face and hand raised to the balcony. Portrait of Lear with Spitballs on the ground. And who knows, perhaps on his face.
There was a pause--a long pause, as I remember it. As one of those lost in the narrative of the play, and doing my best to ignore all those around me, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I was suddenly taken out of one world and shoved into another. I was disoriented--and for a moment, I'm sure I thought this was all a part of the performance. Hutt didn't come out of character in voice or gesture, after all.
I might be forgiven for believing for a moment in the prescience of Shakespeare's use of language, this the first Elizabethan use of the word 'spitball,' and the strength of the imagery, of the Gods raining spitballs onto humanity.
And then there was applause. Hutt held his ground, frozen in the bright un-theatrical lights, and the audience started to applaud. I want to say that is started tentatively and built--but I don't remember it that way. The applause was just the same as the 'oohs and aahs' when the lights went down at the beginning of the play--it was spontaneous, complete, and over-the-top in its passion. And included, in my memory, a standing ovation.
Maybe, maybe not--I often imagine standing ovations where there were none, perhaps the subject of another essay. But either way, it was a strong statement of--what? Solidarity, perhaps? Understanding? Sympathy? An audience appreciating the chutzpah of an actor stopping a show to chew out the young people who were throwing the well-chewed wads of paper that should not be there, on his stage, disrupting the finely-crafted world of Lear?
I have no idea. I stood (if I stood) and clapped vigorously, and there might have been cheering, I don't know--though I'm quite certain I was still in a fog, wondering when the world of the play had actually given way to the world of the audience.
What are we to take away from this moment? Because there is a lot going on here, it seems to me. In the midst of one of the noisiest and most emotionally over-wrought scenes anyone could put onto the stage, a group of (I'm going to say) boys spent some time ripping pages out of their notebooks, chewing them, forming them into wet wads, and preparing a reign/rain of terror on the stage. That takes some planning. And I can say, knowing what I know about the history of the theatre now-and-not-then, that it sounds very familiar. Eighteenth and Nineteenth century audiences in any Western-European-influenced theatre were quite capable of being noisy, competitive, and (sometimes) well-armed with items to throw onto the stage if they disapproved of the performanes. I have seen one reference of someone throwing a turkey carcass on stage in the middle of a show--begging the question, I would hope, just what an audience member was doing at the theatre with a turkey carcass.
This incursion onto the stage and into the other world that was being created there was nothing new, as I discovered many years later. But it was indicative, it seemed to me, of an active competition between all those involved in 'the production' and all those involved in 'spectatorship.' That audience, from the moment the lights began to dim, did not want to be in the dark, did not want to be silent, did not want to be in that 'other world of the play.' They wanted to be in another kind of space, where they were active and not passive, seen and heard and not invisible and silent, moving and not still. Attending to the narrative, perhaps, yes, I can well believe that, based on other experiences with this kind of audience. They wanted to be present for the event.
It was a terrible thing, of course, interrupting Mr Hutt with spitballs. And I, at that point the very picture of the well-groomed theatre-goer, was very upset. I'm quite certain my predilection for 'righteous indignation' kicked in, and I was furious. But this passes with time.
The fact is that the darkened theatre into which we disappear is a completely artificial and ahistorical blip in the long tradition of performance, an imposition of technology, and magicians, and the 'literate,' who want their theatre to be a book, and their audiences to be solitary. The untrained audience experiences this now perfectly normal theatrical experience--and is either cowed into submission or acts out to retake the space.
Of course, you don't have to agree with that.
The end of this moment is just as interesting. Hutt/Lear stopped the show and as Lear/Hutt made it clear that no one took the spotlight away from him, and no one disrespected him. And though I'm sure there's a school of thought that would say to ignore the spitballs--something most of the audience did not see--and keep the character and the world of the play intact--well, look at the result of embracing the disruptive moment. Hutt/Lear did what some of the audience wanted, yes, so, yes, he let them 'win.' But this is what people do in the dark. The lights were up, the audience engaged, the actor was on the attack, engaging with his audience directly, and not in that 'I can feel their presence in the room' way we're all taught, forcing everyone to admit that this was a live performance and not some mystery-hologram or...god help us...film. Hutt/Lear--and I use both, because I believe the audience saw both at once in that moment--engaged, and at the same time, as Hutt and Lear, both gave a measure of credence to the audience that they expressed when the lights first went down, and took it back again.
And then, without moving his body at all, as I remember, the lights dimmed again, and he went back into the scene. Now--there's a skill.
