It was in a bar at the Roxburgh Hotel in Edinburgh, during a festival in the mid-’60s, that Alan Bates told me all I’ve ever needed to know about film acting and the theater.
”Film,” Bates said, ”exaggerates everything – the theater diminishes it.” He had much more to say on the subject, but those almost epigrammatic words stuck with me.
Of course, gestures, grimaces, expressions – anything that moves – is first magnified by the camera and then exponentially enlarged by the giant screen. But what else? What are the differences between stage and screen, two media as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, yet as dissimilar as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
The answer is possibly twofold: focus (this is where Bates’ remark is so pertinent) and speed. Usually, play is basically linear, taking place – even though the playwright can often cheat – in real time, while a movie quivers and jump-starts, expands and contracts, flits and flutters.
Oddly enough, perhaps unfairly enough, this makes the movie more realistic. Its jugglings with space and time, not to mention its normally naturalistic settings, endow it with many of the mind-tricks of memory, which the audience subconsciously notes and understands.
A movie takes over our mind in a way a play never quite can. They say a drowning man sees his whole life pass before him: If so, I’ll bet it’s as a movie rather than a play.
Fast forward now to BAM’s Majestic Theater, where earlier this month the visiting Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden gave Per Olov Enquist’s ”The Image Makers,” directed by Ingmar Bergman, a man who has made a few images himself, and is still better known in the United States as a filmmaker rather than as a theatrical director.
Can his work somehow illuminate the elusive differences between stage and screen? I think, simply because Bergman himself effectively negates the differences, perhaps it can. But first the play itself.
Enquist, a contemporary Swedish playwright, is fascinated by the inner workings and turmoil of artistic creation. Witness his earlier play based on Strindberg and his wife Siri von Essen, ”Night of the Tribades,” seen some years ago on Broadway.
Now, ”The Image Makers” deliberately suggests life as a film script, with its rewrites as ”the transmutation of life to what it should have been.”
It’s a true, if elaborated, story about the making of art. Its basic facts concern the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom (Bergman’s own master, and later the star of Bergman’s ”Wild Strawberries”), Sjostrom’s 1920 silent film ”The Phantom Carriage,” and his crucial meeting with the elderly and venerable Nobel Prize-winning Swedish writer, Selma Lagerlof, upon whose novel ”The Phantom Carriage” was based.
Enquist’s play has rather more atmosphere than substance. It too often ends up with psychological cliches and truisms about art and artists – how it’s the grit in the oyster (in this case, alcoholism and co-dependency) that produces the pearl. Sure. And every cloud has a silver lining.
The acting in ”The Image Makers,” as with all the other Bergman productions I have seen, was extraordinary.
I first encountered Bergman as a great movie director, and only realized his stage flair when I saw his version of Moliere’s ”Le Misanthrope” years ago in Copenhagen.
I knew the play, of course, but I don’t speak a word of Danish. Yet the action, the concept, the inner working of the drama, emerged with a clarity of clockwork that the Comedie Francaise itself was unable to match.
It was the same with his lean and vibrant staging of ”Hedda Gabler” with Maggie Smith in London, and all the wonderful productions he and his Swedish company have over the years brought to Brooklyn, from Shakespeare to O’Neill.
Such direction and acting transcends verbal communication. In Brooklyn this time it even transcended a rather off-puttingly dramatized simultaneous English translation from the Swedish.
Bergman makes a bridge between movies and theater. It’s done with focus (at times in the theater he seems to grab your eyes by something perhaps as silly as twiddling feet – the theatrical effect of a cinematic close-up), also with spatial positioning and vocal tone.
He sees both stage and screen not simply as a rectangle of happening, but as a place for pictures beyond the mere pictorial, and dramatic music only just this side of the spheres. It provides a unique vision of life as drama. Most other directors try to present drama as life. Distance is Bergman’s enchantment. *
No one likes everything and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ”The Sound of Music” will never be one of ”my favorite things.” It has been said that Christopher Plummer, who starred with Julie Andrews in the movie, was wont to call it ”The Sound of Mucus.” I would never be so rude, still …
Susan H. Schulman’s new staging – at the Martin Beck Theater – left me a little underwhelmed when it first turned up late last season.
But I had heard that in its final Broadway days, through smart re-casting, the production had taken a huge gulp of life – and it’s true, it really has. It is now as terrific as one of my non-favorite things ever could be. (If you want to see it, you’d better hurry. It closes today.)
I have admired Richard Chamberlain on stage ever since I saw him in ”Hamlet” and ”Richard II,” and in musicals, his Henry Higgins in ”My Fair Lady” was among the all-time best. His steely presence and supple performance as the rigid Captain Von Trapp helps transform this ”Sound of Music.”
He is also immeasurably helped by an unknown, Laura Benanti, as the new Maria. She sings beautifully and acts with a subtle assurance. She has a rare individuality that could easily, with the right breaks, lead to major stardom.