I complained on 22 March of the antics of foolish stage directors, perhaps with a half sense that this was yet another sign of the daftness of the contemporary world.
I am relieved in some ways to have come across a reference to Alec Guiness's production of Hamlet in the 1960s, in which Ken Tynan, playing the Player King, was required to wear a large false plastic ear for Lucianus to pour the poison into, for all the world, as Tynan put it, as if it were 'an advertisement for a proprietary brand of rum'. So arrant stupidity is not, after all, a characteristic of directors of the twenty-first century only.
There seemed to be more point, in a production in which I was involved, in putting the Players to act in half-masks, to detach them from the real world. The only snag from my point of view, in this and other productions, has been that actors always want to keep their masks as souvenirs, so that I have no reminders of all the work that went into designing and making them. In this case I put Lucianus into black and silver, corvine, with a laid-back plume, and Prologue into scarlet and gold, cocky, with a tuft on top, rather, in retrospect, like a cross between a cock and a hooded kestrel (a coistrel ?- see Twelfth Night)
The two lads playing the parts could not agree who should wear which, so they ended by changing parts each night. I can't remember who took home which, but certainly I never saw them again. So eventually I had to make a set of display masks for an imaginary ballet of the Four Elements to put up at home. The picture, in case you have been wondering what it had to do with directors, is such a mask, for Water, shown only in the hot dry months of summer. Perhaps it has been performing a rain dance.
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