H05082 STAGING THE DYNASTS -10/13/05 - HARDY FORUM ARCHIVES ____________________________________________________________________________
From: wwmorgan@ilstu.edu
Subject: Re: Reading "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 7:59:38 AM PDT
I've been reading the postings on *The Dynasts* with great interest, since I've long admired Hardy's epic-drama. How refreshing to see the work actually taken seriously and talked about in some detail! Thanks to Keith Wilson for initiating this thread.
Just a couple of additional suggestions about some of the more engaging features of the work:
• the so-called "Wessex" scenes, in prose, in which Hardy's trademark skills with dialect, class-based comedy, etc. are on full display.
• even more impressive, to me, the stage directions (also in prose) in which Hardy's perspectival imagination has full rein: "The clouds part, and Europe is disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, the Alps forming its backbone. . . . " Wow! (John Wain has suggested that the work is filmic in its conception.)
Maybe this thread will persuade some readers who haven't encountered the work to take it on. I think it's well worth the effort.
cheers,
Bill Morgan
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Reading "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 8:56:21 AM PDT
At a Dynasts workshop in Dorchester a few years ago we acted out some scenes selected by James Whitehead as Director (his doctoral thesis is on the Dynasts). James appointed Peter Coxon to the role of Napoleon and myself to the role of Josephine. Until you act it out (we had props and costumes--albeit ad hoc) you don't realise how "camp" (to use an old 60s word) some of the scenes are. If you have read TH's version of the Mummer's play of St George you'll know what I mean. Pure Monty Python -- some of it!
And filmic --Absolutely. Even to the background scenes where woman and children, camp followers in the battle zone, are making repairs to equipment and gossiping. Great stuff.
Rosemarie
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From: hardycor@owl.csusm.edu
Subject: Filming The Dynasts
Date: October 13, 2005 9:25:39 AM PDT
(John Wain has suggested that the work is filmic in its conception.)
Bill Morgan
I have long thought The Dynasts would lend itself perfectly to an
artistically rendered animated film. This would overcome some of the
obstacles which using real actors and real-life sets would present to this
highly imaginative work, with its constant shifts from cosmic overviews to
detailed close-ups.
Betty Cortus
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From: michael@perceptivecreation.co.uk
Subject: Re: Reading "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 10:38:28 AM PDT
I've been intrigued by this discussion on The Dynasts. Speaking as a theatre director, with a penchant for Hardy, I did "take a look", very cursory, a few years ago, and made an early decision that it was almost certainly unplayable and unstageable, as well as being unfeasible economically - and like some of your undergraduates short on stamina, failed to persevere with reading it through. I suspected however that it might just be collapsible into a single evening that fairly represents the work, while not overtaxing an audience to walk-out point. However the cast size is phenomenal, I seem to remember. Has anyone produced an edited stageable version - or is it a work strictly for readers?
Michael Barry
(Wessex Actors Company)
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From: hardycor@owl.csusm.edu
Subject: Re: Staging "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 11:01:34 AM PDT
Michael Millgate's new biography speaks of two stage productions, Michael,
one by Harley Granville Barker at London's Kingsway Theatre, 1914,15 (462),
and another of selected scenes, by OUDS at Oxford in1920 (487). Apparently
Hardy was less pleased with the former than the latter.
Betty
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Staging "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 11:30:34 AM PDT
Hardy was delighted with the Oxford group for choosing the Dynasts. Tradition had it that they were obliged to choose a Shakespeare play for this annual event and the student who propsed Hardy expected to get shot down in pieces by the commitee. As it was -- he won! Next, he was nervous about approaching Hardy for permission to perform the Ds and was taken by surpirse at the old poet's simple pleasure.
Rosemarie
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From: kgwilson@uottawa.ca
Subject: Re: Reading "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 11:58:59 AM PDT
Yes it has been staged. Those of you who have good filing systems and long affiliation with the UK Thomas Hardy Society will find in The Thomas Hardy Society Review, Vol 1., 10 (1984): 300-01 a brief report by Mary Maynard Whyte on an adaptation of "The Dynasts" staged in Exeter Cathedral in September 1980 by the Northcott Theatre Company (which had a cast of about 30). In fact, those of you with even better filing systems will be able to find an earlier report on this production by Gerald Garland in Newsletter #45 of the UK Thomas Hardy Society (December 1980): 3-4. The adapter was Hugh Durrant, who got the play down to about three hours. Garland describes the "enormous platform" running the length of the nave, with seven stages around it in the aisles, each representing a different country/dynasty: Union Jacks under the west window, Tricolours at the east end. Scenes included Napoleon's coronation, Trafalgar, Nelson's funeral, retreat from Moscow, Austerlitz, and Waterloo.
I saw this production (a very noisy one!), and one of the advantages of its being staged in a cathedral was that the various Spirits could be given exalted vantage points -- clerestory gallery, pulpit etc -- from which to look down and comment on the human action. My memory is that it was very effectively done. I have on file somewhere a copy of the script, so could find you some further details, although the adaptation itself is presumably copyright.
The most famous adaptation of The Dynasts was that done by Harley Granville Barker -- in consultation with Hardy -- for a wartime production at London's Kingsway Theatre (opening night, 25 November 1914), which very much selected its material in order to turn the production into patriotic propaganda. Script copies of this are located at the Dorset County Museum and Harvard. If it is of interest, there is a chapter on that production, other minor adaptations involving the Hardy Players, and a 1920 Oxford University Dramatic Society production of a revised version of the Granville Barker adaptation in my Thomas Hardy on Stage (Macmillan, 1995): 83-104. Hardy took a close interest in these adaptations and agreed to the Oxford performance in part because of the opportunity it offered to correct one or two of the blemishes he had identified in the Kingsway production.
Best,
Keith
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From: tomlessup@hotmail.com
Subject: Re: Staging "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 12:25:08 PM PDT
Betty Cortus wrote:
Michael Millgate's new biography speaks of two stage productions, Michael,
one [being] of selected scenes, by OUDS at Oxford in 1920 (487).<
The costumes for the latter production presumably being the ones that appear
in the marvellous little ITN/British Pathe archives film that someone drew
to the list's attention recently. It can be found at
http://www.itnarchive.com/cgi-bin/taweb.exe?x=d&o=d&q=(dynasts)&d=BPATHE&i=12634&p=1&t=doc.tmpl&v=tabbed
Tom Lessup
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Staging "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 12:49:35 PM PDT
This is marvellous footage! And authentically Shakespearean/Elizabethan in streetwalking tradition
Thank you Tom
Rosemarie
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Reading "The Dynasts"
Date: October 13, 2005 6:25:47 PM PDT
This sounds like an unforgettable performance.! What a pity nobody thought of filming it.
I didn't know about the "blemishes" though (Kingsway -- I think I have the program cover somewhere -- a copy ) -- have you any idea what they might have been, Keith?
Well, it's up to you now Michael Barry. Your turn!
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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From: kgwilson@uottawa.ca
Subject: OUDS "The Dynasts"
Date: October 14, 2005 7:17:27 AM PDT
Hardy's concerns are outlined on p. 397 of Life and Work: he writes
"The one feature he could particularly have wished altered [in the Kingsway production] was that of retaining indoor architecture for outdoor scenes, it being difficult for the spectator to realize -- say in the Battle of Waterloo -- that an open field was represented when pillars and architraves hemmed it in. He thought that for the open scenes a perfecly plain green floorcloth and blue backcloth would have suited better."
See also TH's letters to A. E. Drinkwater, 6 December 1919 and to Maurice Colbourne, 11 December 1919 (Collected Letters V: 346, 347). OUDS accommodated TH's preferences, by the use of a backcloth on rollers that provided various permutations of sea, sky and land. See Maurice Colbourne to TH, 9 December 1919 (Dorset County Museum).
Hardy also favoured the idea of the Spirits simply being "heard singing and speaking in large hollow voices from the sky" (TH to Granville Barker, [27] September 1914, Collected Letters V: 51), an idea that wasn't adopted for either the Kingsway or OUDS productions, a visible choric Strophe and Antistrophe being used instead. In later Kingsway performances, Barker had excised two scenes that he thought would cause particular distress to members of the audience who had lost relatives in the war (one of these scenes was the burial of Sir John Moore), and OUDS retained these excisions, despite TH's feelings that they were two of the best scenes whose removal "brought other scenes together that should have been kept apart" (TH to Charles Morgan, 11 December 1919, Collected Letters V: 349).
Overall, TH seems to have preferred aspects of the OUDS production (although this has all to be seen in the context of the opening night performance that he saw having taken place at the end of the day on which he had received an honorary degree, so the whole day's experience was obviously a very uplifting one for him). He mentioned specifically improvements in scenery, and the fact that the youth of the amateur student actors (there were by his count 110 speaking characters in all, which didn't, of course, translate into 110 actors) "lent a great freshness & vivacity to their exhibition." (TH to Florence Henniker, 28 February 1920, Collected Letters VI: 9).
Best,
Keith
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: OUDS "The Dynasts"/Henry Newbolt
Date: October 14, 2005 9:32:16 AM PDT
Thank you Keith for the wonderfully comprehensive reply.
Another question: I have tried to find early issues of The Monthly online without success. I'd like to read Henry Newbolt's review of the Dynasts (1904). Hardy was delighted with it (Newbolt was a great fan of his) . I'd like to read it . Any tips?
Thanks
Rosemarie
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From: kgwilson@uottawa.ca
Subject: Re: OUDS "The Dynasts"/Henry Newbolt
Date: October 14, 2005 1:55:03 PM PDT
I can't immediately help: I suspect I read it at Colindale and don't think I have a copy on file, though I'll check when I have a moment. Cox, ed., The Critical Heritage has a truncated version of Newbolt's 1909 Quarterly Review piece that appeared after publication of the final volume, but not of the notice from The Monthly (March 1904). Newbolt returns to the subject of The Dynasts in his My World as in My Time (Faber, 1932).
Sorry I can't be more help.
Best,
Keith
Keith Wilson
Professor of English/President, ACCUTE
University of Ottawa
70 Laurier Avenue East (Room 313)
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA K1N 6N5
Tel: (613) 562-5800, Ext. 1160
Fax: (613) 562-5990
e-mail: kgwilson@uottawa.ca
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: OUDS "The Dynasts"/Henry Newbolt
Date: October 14, 2005 5:26:57 PM PDT
There are also truncated versions of the Newbolt pieces on the Gerber-Davis Annotated Bibliography on TTHA's Members' Page. Many contemporary reviewers find the Dynasts unsuitable for stage performance unless as a puppet show. In light of this, it would be interesting to read reviews of the the Kingsway and Oxford productions.
One or two citations on the Gerber-Davis Bibliography mention that Hardy didn't favour the idea of a puppet show. I believe he knew of John Stuart Mill's visits to the Punch and Judy show which performed outside the House of Commons satirizing activities within. Some scenes in the Dynasts would seem ripe for this medium.
Take the Dumb Show in Part Third, I.vi?
_____________
Travelling carriages, teams and waggons, laden with pictures, carpets, glass, silver, china, and fashionable attire, are rolling out of the city, followed by foot-passengers in streams, who carry their most precious possessions on their shoulders. Others bear their sick relatives, caring nothing for their goods, and mothers go laden with their infants. Others drive their cows, sheep, and goats, causing much obstruction. Some of the populace, however, appear apathetic and bewildered, and stand in groups asking questions.
A thin man with piercing eyes gallops about and gives stern orders.
_________________
( love that last bit!)
Actually I agree with Betty that film animation might be the most apt artistic medium for the Dynasts.
Thanks again. Keith, for your time and wisdom!
Rosemarie
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