The Quality of Mercy

I had a similar experience when I staged Hamlet for the first time. Full of awe and respect for this great challenge, I closely studied all the detailed analyses I could lay my hands on. As a result, intuition had no place, and the production was dull, except for Paul Scofield, who refused all discussion and analyses.

When we look at a printed page of Beckett’s plays, we see almost every short line followed by ‘Pause’. This was Beckett’s Advice to the Players. Chekhov did the same, but for ‘Pause’ he used ‘ . . . ’. For the simple series of words to take on the fullest human dimension, the speaker must trust the resonances that arise in these tiny gaps

one of the greatest dangers, I think, that all of us who practise the staging of Shakespeare encounter is the tendency to simplify and reduce.

Al Pacino made the experiment, crossing a busy street in New York to ask the most unlikely passer-by, ‘What do you know about Shakespeare?’ The answer was immediate: ‘To be or not to be.’

A word is like a glove—an inanimate object to be admired in a shop window or even in a museum. But life is given by the hand that fills it—every shade from banal to expressive.

The hour glass gives us one aspect of time—each grain that drops is lost for ever. But time has many dimensions and in the end, time opens to timelessness.

His ruthless brother was a man who understood order in the crudest way, in the way that is always understood by politicians. Today there isn’t a politician who doesn’t at one time or other drag out of his vocabulary ‘the necessity for order’. It’s there within his party machine, within its whole structure. He gets himself elected by exploiting a tiny part of the great concept of order. And of course in the process he pulls the great concept down to something not only petty but ultimately dangerous and destructive

Ask any Shakespeare lovers if they can remember the last word of Shakespeare’s last play. As far as we can tell, this could well be the last creative word that he wrote. The last word of The Tempest is ‘free’

In this triad of ever-so-simple phrases, we can find as many levels of life as Shakespeare’s tumultuous times must have brought into them.

In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare typically makes links between sky above and mud below. He refuses the customary dichotomy.