Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
In March 2020 the covid-19 epidemic
forced the closure of all British theatres. Some companies adapted
by putting archive recordings of past productions online, others
by streaming new shows. And we take the opportunity to explore
other vintage productions preserved online. Even as things return
to normal we review the experience of watching live theatre
onscreen.
The
Waste Land
BBC
1995, AppStore 2022 January 2023
The Waste Land is a long-ish (It takes about a half-hour to recite) poem by T. S. Eliot that is generally agreed to be one of the greatest and most difficult poems of the Twentieth Century.
Fiona Shaw is an actress of extraordinary emotional intensity and sensitivity along with an even rarer quality in actors, academic intelligence.
In 1995 Shaw and director Deborah Warner took on Eliot's poem for a television broadcast. She went on to perform it onstage in London, New York, Dublin and other cities, to acclaim and prizes everywhere, and in 2013 her performance was filmed again.
YouTube has the 1995 recording and a short selection from the 2013 film, and they, along with vivid memories of her London performance in 2010 (reviewed here), provide a complex and fascinating portrait of both poem and actress.
Before looking at them, let me briefly put on my English professor hat and quote from my 2010 review:
The Waste Land is a sometimes bewildering cacophony of different voices, expressing the experience and confusion of the post-Great-War generation while also reaching back through virtually all of Western culture for means of expression and understanding.
In practice, this means that the musings of an upper-class voice will jump without warning into the professional patter of a tarot reader with a head cold, a heroic description of a lady's boudoir or the shrill gossip of a pub at closing time, with the vocabulary and style changing just as abruptly, pausing only for veiled echoes or direct quotations of writers from Homer through Shakespeare to Bram Stoker.
Shaw's 1995 performance (On YouTube it is the one made up almost totally of close-ups against a blank background) is a recitation of the poem.
It is a very skilled and intelligent recitation, successfully identifying the various voices and capturing the emotional content of each moment. But it is – at least in the opening section – just a recitation.
Shaw finds the different voices but not the characters. We know that the first speaker – the one who calls April the cruelest month – is upper class only because some of her memories are of posh places and people, and the tarot reader with a head cold doesn't sound all that different from her.
Pause your watching at the end of the first section and switch to the 2013 version (the one that opens with her walking up a flight of stairs), which includes just this first section of the poem.
Actress and characters are clearly older, and the one now knows the others more fully. The opening speaker is now ruefully recalling many cruel Aprils of the past, and her other memories now come upon her unbidden and unexpected rather than being chosen.
The tarot reader has a clear personality of her own, fully professional but chatty, and the poem's nightmare vision of the war dead walking through London is hers, a psychic moment that frightens her.
Back to the 1995 version. Things pick up in the second and later sections of the poem, as Shaw does begin to act rather than recite, finding the voices and experiences of the various speakers.
The detailed catalogue of the lady's boudoir, deliberately echoing Shakespeare's lush description of Cleopatra, actually tells us more about the bedazzled speaker (as does Shakespeare's), and the confession of a trivial and frivolous life hints at a deeper and more frightening sense of emptiness.
As the poem goes on, the jumps between voices and the stream-of-consciousness thought processes of each voice are given emotional weight. An autumnal riverside scene leads to thoughts of death, which are abruptly interrupted by an overheard bawdy song. The seer Tiresias is depressed and repelled by what he sees but unable to stop seeing.
And the actress gives the poem's final section, a seeming jumble of different languages, literary references and religious allusions, an emotional arc that leads through panic to a kind of peace.
Even if the 1995 version is the weakest of the three Shaw performances I've experienced, it is still a remarkable accomplishment and a moving experience. And the complete 2013 film is available on a Guide To The Waste Land app on sale wherever such things are sold.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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