The contrast between the two performers presented a familiar lesson about the difference between stage and screen acting: breathing, presence, quicksilver emotional flexibility, the ability to speak to evoke, to command a room with one's body, and endless stamina are the craft of one, but not-so-much of the other. Sadly, the same distinctions are referenced in a brief piece in the NYTimes about the death of Natasha Richardson.
Leaving aside the morbid fascination with blood clots and liability, Isherwood writes about the Redgrave family legacy and implies that the values of stage technique are the values of theatre-as-art: perseverance in the face of life's realities. In other words, the theatre is inherently more real; a stage actor needs to be more real, too, not merely realistic.
I especially like these two passages:
"...in England acting is still considered above all a discipline requiring hard study and careful apprenticeship — as well as a healthy taste for challenge — not merely a convenient expressway to riches and fame..."
"Although Vanessa, Lynn and Ms. Richardson all had significant movie careers, the fertility of the family talent surely is linked to their dedication to the stage, which demands a special discipline, a raft of technical skills that cannot be mediated by the ministrations of directors and cinematographers. The dailiness of stage acting, I imagine, may have helped keep the family from disintegrating under the onslaught of media attention that has dogged many of them since birth. The rigorous discipline of stage work — you’re punching a clock, after a fashion, only it’s set at curtain time — mirrors the grind of more mundane lives, the trudging pace that may deaden the spirit at times but also helps us fight through the sudden batterings of misfortune that every life has."
The whole thing:
Critic’s Notebook - Natasha Richardson and the Redgrave Dynasty - NYTimes.com
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Yes, I read it too.
ReplyDeleteI've been very affected by this death, and honestly, I hardly knew her work. I saw the famous mother/daughter SEAGULL in 1987 in London, but not CABARET or any of her other famous performances.
Still this family is the ultimate living theatre family we have in the real sense.
Carine
I don't know HOW Vanessa Redgrave is going to get thru her performance of THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING in April. The fact that she wants to go ahead with it is amazing... and yet an incredible gift to those who will see it. I didn't see her do it on Bway, but I've read it.
I saw Richardson and Neeson in Anna Christie. I really wanted to see her again someday..
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