Evening News
Glasgow, Scotland Wednesday, April 29, 1981 THEATRE Trial that packs a lot of power The Caine Mutiny Court Martial opened a week’s run at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow last night...and what a powerful, compelling production it is. Peter Miles plays Captain Queeq, confident at first, but gradually disintegrating before your eyes under cross-examination by defense counsel Barney Greenwald, played with controlled emotion and biting sarcasm by Iain Cuthbertson. BRILLIANT Mark Dowse plays Maryk, who took over command of the Caine and faces court marital, with believable nervous conviction that his actions were justified. Joe Praml, as Keefer who backs him right up until his nose bleeds, is quite brilliant. A truly splendid production, well worth the time and money. IAIN MACDONALD Glasgow Herald Queeg coloured shades of grey COURTROOM cliffhangers have always been successful grist to the mill of commercial theatre. The Caine Mutiny Courtmartial (at the King's Glasgow until Saturday) is however a substantial cut above the average...
Peter Miles (Queeg) has the necessary semblance of self confidence, bordering on obsessive pride, characteristic of this pitiful, unbalanced man to whom duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. Iain Cuthbertson (Greenwald) gives a thoughtful performance as the lawyer. Well-rounded cameos from the witnesses, particularly Sam Naylor and Joe Praml, give a welcome sense of variety to the first half. |
JFC, I Got This Far!
Episode: "A Tear in Glasgow" by Joe Praml The Caine Mutiny Court Martial tour was going well. Especially when we got to Scotland. Iain Cuthbertson, who was playing Greenwald, Queeg’s defense counsel, was one of the Scot’s favorite sons. Some said he was more liked than even Sean Connery. The Scots and the Welsh are far more tribal than the Irish. They love their own even when they don’t become famous, or dead. But you must be accomplished in your endeavors and Iain Cuthbertson was that.
One of the high points of the tour was when Iain, Alexander, Julian and I went to play golf at St. Andrews. The other three were real golfing aficionados and had their own clubs. They looked forward to golfing at St. Andrews from the day we began the tour in London. Now St. Andrews is not a place where they rent clubs. And you do not play on St. Andrews without a full bag of them. There are many old rules here at St. Andrews where some say the game of golf actually began. I would have been content just to walk along with them on this incredibly beautiful stretch of grass, trees, heather and shining clear creeks. But when the curator saw that I was with Iain Cuthbertson and that I was an actor with The Caine Mutiny he waived the rule and allowed me onto the course to play if I wanted to. I shared the clubs of the others and actually went 9 holes of golf on the famous St. Andrew’s golf course. I was struck with the beauty of the day and the course and the realization that here I was on these hallowed links, and my golfing suffered. The other three were relieved when I gave up playing after nine holes, and I followed them around and gawked at the scenery. Iain had a bottle of the finest local single malt, and we took an occasional slug. Scots love their whiskey. Or at least making it. Each area has its distillery, like the French have their small chateaus. And each whiskey does have its own taste and character. The secret of Scots whiskey is the water. Each area's water is subtly different. Indeed, a lovely day. St. Andrews is the site of St. Andrew’s Monastery. This was an important bishopric during Scotland’s time of Roman Catholicism. On this site, besides the enormous monastery, itself a small self contained city, stood a majestic Gothic cathedral. It took a couple of centuries to build this complex of buildings, built with beautiful white local sandstone and granite. The massiveness of the ruins, even after three centuries of scavenging the ruins for the stones, tells of an enormous engineering and constructing tour de force. Yet even more impressive to me was the devastation. Oliver Cromwell brought down this vast monument with a nod of his devout head to his prayer thirsty Puritan engineers. Impressive indeed are the skills and resolve of destruction. While on tour the Beeb (BBC-TV) called and offered me a reprise on the role I played in Tailor Tinker Soldier Spy. They were going to do a sequel, Smiley's People. I was over the moon. Tinker, Tailor turned out to be an event, a real high spot of British TV. Though I had only a small role in one of the episodes, I now had the panache of being in this production. There was a joke going around London that the three best acting companies in the British Isles were the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare, and the cast of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And I was now offered a role in the sequel. I was looking forward to be working again with Alec Guinness. My agent told me we’d be doing scenes together in Switzerland. I got to know him quite well. Sir Alec was such a nice person, so accessible. And he loved to talk about acting. He said he couldn't build on a character until he knew how the character used his feet, how he walked, stood, even crossed them when at rest. After that he could build and burnish. With me it was the voice. Not the patterns of speech. That was in the script. The writer gave me that. But the voice. The range. The vibrations. When I had those, I had the root of the character. Sir Alec didn't have to worry about that, he had such a beautiful instrument, that great resonant voice of his. And I had noticed through the years of seeing him on screen and on the stage that his characters varied by voice as well as how they walked or stood. What I admired about the British was that voice was so important to an actor. They are taught that in the acting academies. The theatre is words. The voice forms them, projects them, and brings them to life creating ideas and images for the audience. I considered myself lucky that I had no acting classes when I was at the University of Minnesota where the Strasberg bastardization of Stanislavski held as the canon of acting. To me all that thrashing around on a stage, and the eruption of sometimes phony emotions didn’t always bring the idea alive. The idea. The Aristotelian Catharsis. Ideas. That is what theater is for. All the best actors I saw could bring alive the words of the author and give them drama, tragedy, comedy, catharsis. Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Ian Richardson, Alec Guinness. With them theatre thundered like Coleridge said it should. I worked hard to turn my voice into an instrument. I was fortunate to have run into Lou Stein, a director at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill Gate. He showed me a simple technique to project my voice, and to begin it in the pit of my stomach and let it fly forth almost at its own will. It was so simple and easy. Like Zen, all in the mind. People would be surprised when a softly spoken person like myself could hit the highest rafter in a theatre with no effort. It was the difference between yelling and projecting. Later when I directed, I could teach actors in a half an hour what would take in a year of expensive classes and voice teachers. The King’s Theatre in Glasgow is not only the largest theatre I've played in it is the largest theatre I've ever been in. Glasgow is now seen as a grey city of slums and depleted areas. Once Glasgow was second only to London as pearl of the British Empire, and was one of the important engines of the Industrial Revolution. It is this Glasgow that built the King’s Theatre. I would always prowl the theatre I would be playing in during the still hour or so before curtain on opening nights. This gave me a feel of the theatre. I walked around in the darkness, up and down the aisles, along the stage, all the corners of it even where I wasn't blocked. That was so I had an idea of what the audience was seeing. The stage looks different from the seats than how it is when you are on it. The stage is like an altar. A sacred place. Theatre began over two and a half thousand years ago as a religious ceremony. And the stage indeed was a site for holy rituals. Here, the inner plumbs of the heart and soul became exposed and blessed. To me, it still is, very powerfully so. Lamb of the god of Jacob, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. Lamb of the god of John the Baptiser, grant us the salving peace of love. Lamb of the gods of Achean Greece, curtain up, beginners on. Dionysus. Yes. I settled into my role of Keefer, the troublemaker who instigates the mutiny and then smarmingly absolves himself of any responsibility at the trial. I did my actor’s research. I looked into his family background. He wasn't wealthy nor was he of any social position. He was an academic who was on his way to being an author. He was someone who hustled his way through the academic life, not really a bad person but certainly not a good one either. He had to be likable. As an actor I could make him smile a lot and bring out other cliches, but that was too obvious. His smarminess had to come from within. Keefer saw himself as a regular guy although he knew he really wasn’t. He thought himself superior to all his mates on the Caine. Keefer possessed charm. It was this charm that was his strength. I let my own natural presence, and the words of the text do their work. This is what got me the role in the first place. Charm cannot be forced. This paid off, and I delivered a Keefer that many critics, theatregoers, and most important, my colleagues, were impressed with. Huge, that’s the word for the King’s Theatre. The seats went up and disappeared in the darkness high above where the theatre gods come to dwell. My work would be cut out for me here. I visualized the vocal arcs I would have to erect between stage and spectator. There was all this distance to bridge so that meant I would have to flatten the trajectory of my delivery. I would have to slow down on the parts when I wanted to reduce the volume, to change the pace, to vary the rhythms. I would have to stretch out the vowels so the words and meaning wouldn't be lost. Up, up, up I went. The aisles were steep, the steps going up and still further up. The rows of red velvet seats gave off the odor and aura of timelessness and use. I went beyond the loges and the boxes and the royal seats. As I went up higher, the stage below me got smaller and more distant. I was past the area where patrons would be seated for this play. The seating didn't go beyond the first balcony and the management would be extremely happy to fill that. I wondered when the last time it was that this theatre was filled, filled all the way to the rafters toward which I was still climbing. Was it Gertrude and Noel perhaps? They filled any theatre built and could do it reading the local phone book. And Private Lives and Blythe Spirit aren't your usual directories. Not That Scots Play (tradition prevents me from mentioning its name even in print.) The Scots never felt comfortable with that one and all the misfortune associated with it. Lear! King Lear, of course. Lear was the real Scots play. It was the true Celtic play. Even the Irish claimed it as their own and a Welshman in any pub in Wales would give you a knock on the head if you intimated that Lear was anything but Welsh. As I kept climbing I listened for Lear’s majestic voice in the stormy wilderness, sweet Cordelia’s quiet firmness of truth, the evil whispers of Goneril, Gloucester’s yowls of pain as his eyes are pressed from their sockets, the price of his loyalty. I didn’t hear any of this. Just the quiet of this theatre, the power of its silence, a silence that was something real, like space, something that belonged to this theatre, its own silence, like its own darkness and light. Then it struck me. Here on this ascent to Damascus it came home to me. After all the unhappiness, the distresses, the fears, the humiliations, the pains of the past, something deep inside me said, “No,” it cried out, blurted out from me so urgently, so suddenly: “Look at me, this one eyed kid from St. Paul and I’m here in this famous theatre, on a tour with a respected company, a good role in a well known play.” That night there’ll be a good chance I’ll be inhaling the intoxicating aroma of a new woman that I’ll meet because of my talents and good fortune. I'd gone past all the humiliations of my eye, the troubles in school and at home and at all the places in which I spent my childhood and youth. Yes, a one eyed kid from St. Paul. The description carried comfort. Truth. That's what I was. By god that's exactly what I was and there was no shame in it. And then I heard another voice. It was my dad, my father, this man who I had feared when I was younger, this man capable of such awful cruelty and such inexplicable tenderness, whose life was one violent flash across the heavens of his world. And I heard him say to me, clearly, as clear as the dialogue I was hoping to make clear in tonight's performance. And he said, “I’m proud of you Joe. Good for you.” And so the tears came. Down my cheeks and along the corners of my mouth where I could not only feel them but taste them. I felt so much sourness fly from me. Not bitterness. No, I never gave into bitterness. There was nothing or no one who could make me bitter. But sour? Oh, yes. But wait! Who cares about that, about sourness and its dank spiritless smell, I felt myself thinking. “No, not that. I’m a one eyed kid from St. Paul, that’s what I am, and I came this far and my father is proud of me.” That night I did my Keefer, hit all the spots in that huge theatre, and the next day I got rave reviews in Glasgow’s two daily papers. |