 |
|
|
|||
|
Interviews
|
|||
|
|
On Jewishness, Shylock and Tevya Rivka Jacobson talks to Henry Goodman: Part II - Shylock and Tevya Much has been written about Henry Goodman the actor. I therefore suggested that we discuss two very different protagonists into whose shoes he successfully entered. One is Shylock, in Trevor Nunn 1999 production of The Merchant of Venice. That electrifying performance won Goodman the Olivier Award for Best Actor. The other character is Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof at the Savoy Theatre, the success of which meant the production has now been extended to 26th January 2008. Goodman points out that he is first and foremost a British actor. The Jewish roles may have been enhanced by his personal understanding of where the characters come from. The wide repertoire of characters he successfully performed establish him as a great actor in his own right. Shylock the Jew that forced to convertIn Nunn's production Shylock was an individual with private life. He lit the Friday night Sabbath candles, he sang the customary song that an Orthodox husband sings to his wife on Friday night, namely Eshet Chail which means The "Virtuous Woman" (Proverbs, Chapter 31). Shylock stood there with Jessica, his daughter and faced the framed picture of his late wife, Leah. Shylock was given a dimension that is not in the Shakespearian text, yet consistent with it. Goodman explains that he and Nunn discovered things together. There is no Hebrew in the play but he put in Hebrew songs because "I thought this guy is… he does not have to be, but if you assume he is... an Orthodox Jew looking after his daughter. The mother is not there and therefore he has to perform the mother's functions. He has to keep the Sabbath table, he has to light the candles, and he would know all that." Shylock's love for his late wife is clear. The pain of the loss seems raw when he refers to her. That helps to understand the character portrayed. "It is not what is on the lines but the effect of everyday life in Venice." Goodman travelled to Venice, visited the Jewish ghetto there and immersed himself in histories of the period. "The great thing about Shylock is that he tries to joke with you and maintain a convivial relationship with Christian merchants. Even though he has hatred and bitterness in him, he tries to convey warmth, not irony and cynicism. But the two pull against each other and if you push him a little, the underlying bitterness comes out." Goodman explains the journey into Shylock the Jew and the individual. "He always submerges his pain and humiliation." In this production, there was no need to bring in Nazi-type paraphernalia. There were no jackboots, no graffiti, no spitting. The production dispensed with that, and it was ten times more powerful. Nobody spat on his gabardine, which it says in the play they do, but the audience is so sophisticated in a post-Holocaust world you insult its intelligence by blatantly showing Jew-baiting on stage. It is so obvious and ridiculous so they decided earlier on that they did not need all of that. What needed emphasis are people who despise the Jew deep inside. They are jealous and uncomfortable with a cosmopolitan mercantile culture. That is why the production spoke to people." Shylock learnt to take all this and to live with a smile on his face and a pain in his heart. "That to me was the secret of understanding the man in that culture. It is totally different from Tevye. Shylock has been so brutalised and traumatised that if you push him too hard he becomes an animal. I felt very strongly that we don't want to be too nice and sympathetic to him. We must believe that he could kill someone. He is actually not a nice guy. He is a scheming, dangerous man. And if you try and make him a nice guy because he is Jewish, and I am Jewish, then you throw away the play. You don't feel sorry for him. You become weary of him." Shylock the mirror of his ageShylock has to be seen in the context of his period, explains Goodman. We must look at all of the things that Shakespeare inherited from Marlow's play, The Jew of Malta, and from the death of the Queen's physician Lopez and all those other things that were going on at the time. These foreigners that are coming from Spain or Portugal were looked at suspiciously. England has just been at war with Spain. Modern scholarship clearly points to the presence of a few hundred Jews who had been in and out of London in the 1560s and in the following decades, when they were supposed to have been all expelled in 1190 and thereafter. These were eminent Jews in Elizabethan England. They were members of the Royal College of Physicians and Lopez was the Queen's personal Physician dealing with the Queen's body, the Royal body. He was hung, drawn and quartered shortly before the play was written and the public was screaming and cheering at Tyburn, which is now Marble Arch. That was the climate when the play was written. The Jew was the foreigner from Spain TevyeFiddler on the Roof is based Sholem Aleichem's stories, which are full of wonderful humour. He captures the superstition, the rivalry, the pettiness of the small Jewish community in Anatevka in Tsarist Russia, in a middle of nowhere, where Jews were living for generations. Goodman admits that he knew about Sholem Aleichem's stories but only read them when he was given the role of the main protagonist, Tevye. "The keynote is that they are very critical of each other, they argue with each other; Sholem Aleichem shows them with warts and all. In Sholem Aleichem's words 'my muse does not wear a veil'. "Tevye has that overriding quality; he is not a savage, dangerous and traumatised, as a racially abused man. He likes and gets on with the Constable, the Tsar's local representative. Pogroms happen somewhere far away. When they are told they have three days to get out of Anatevka, he asks the Constable, 'What are you talking about?' "This powerful modern musical is about upheaval and treating people badly, and in many ways it is a dark story: the people are happy in that village, but they are parochial and cut off so that they are very vulnerable. "Shylock is in a mercantile Venetian city, where all kinds of people are coming and going, and interacting, but the Jews there are under no less of a threat. In Fiddler on the Roof, there is a father with five daughters and all the rites of passage of children growing up, while Shylock has one daughter and he knows that he is living a lie, being publicly gracious and warm and in the home he is a difficult father. That is why in the play, when I slap Jessica the audience is shocked. He does not want her to be tainted with the exciting outside world. Although he is very metropolitan man, he is frightened by the outside world. I think he is actually a good father but he is aggressive in his attempt to protect her. Shylock is familiar the outside world and tries to shield his daughter from it. By contrast, Tevye has a more generous attitude to it, but then the outside world encroaches into his life." Peasants on BroadwayIf you think of Broadway you don't think of peasants, you think of 6ft blond girls with their legs up in the air. You think of dynamic routines, of great songs. You think of intensified emotions. If someone came to you to say that he is going to write a musical about a group of a medieval peasants in a shtetl in Russia, everyone will tell you it would not work. Jerry Robbins the choreographer and director of the original show on Broadway in 1964, an immense creative force and energy, drove and secured this musical's phenomenal success. "Robbins was an obsessive and very difficult pain in the neck man," says Goodman, who read the diaries of the first productions, 'but he was a brilliant creative force. He directed and choreographed every day to make it happen." The diaries reveal a director obsessed with every minute detail, from the nails of the actors to lipstick-free lips. The music and songs are essential to the evolving story. Every single song develops the action. Goodman explains that in Fiddler on the Roof, "a brilliant piece of writing," when you begin a song you are in a different place to where you at the end of it. "In many ways the Broadway tradition had to change with that and I very much cherish the acting truthfulness that is available here." That means as he explains, that you can be funny, silly, ridiculously inventive, innocent or shocked. Goodman sees in this play a journey of self-discovery. While in life, one can get to a point of realisation that the relationship he is in, is no longer what he really wants and may conclude that he is going to get a divorce or enough is enough. In Fiddler, that happens not once or twice but eight to ten times. He tries to get on with his life, trying to deliver milk and the horse breaks down and he blames God. His life is filled with the turbulent changes he has to face on a daily basis. Goodman is very proud of this impressive production where a music band of 12 replaced the original 26 and the 25-strong cast successfully brings to life the village that originally had a cast of 42 in the Broadway production. The fact that this musical has now been extended by nearly four months, to 26th January surely is a clear indication of its success. You can book tickets for Fiddler through our sponsor, 1st 4 London Theatre
|
||
|
|
