BEYOND NATURALISM: TYRONE GUTHRIE'S RADIO THEATRE AND THE STAGE PRODUCTION OF SHAKESPEARE

Howard Fink

It's my task to say
just where and how things happen in our play,
Set the bare stage with words instead of props
And keep on talking till the curtain drops.
So you shall know, as well as our poor skill
Can show you, whether it is warm or chill,
Indoors or out, a battle or a fair,
In this, our viewless theatre of the air.
A Child is Born, a radio play by Stephen Vincent Benét

There are times when the Canadian scene is at the centre of the phenomena of western theatre: Sir Tyrone Guthrie's two working visits to Canada were such times. His first visit was to produce and direct the Romance of Canada documentary drama series for the CNR Radio Department in 1931; his second, of course, was to create the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario, in 1952-55. This paper attempts to describe the influence of Guthrie's radio experience on his revolutionary concepts concerning the staging of Shakespeare, which, in turn, had their first embodiment in our Stratford Festival Theatre.

J. L. Styan, in his book The Shakespeare Revolution, discusses in detail Guthrie's role in the twentieth-century 'revolution' in the production of Shakespeare on the stage.¹ Styan describes this revolution in staging and acting as a movement 'from the elaborate decoration of Beerbohm Tree to the austerities of Peter Hall, from the illusory realism of Henry Irving to the non-illusory statements of Peter Brook' (p 1). In the chapter 'Guthrie and the Open Stage', he says that 'Tyrone Guthrie's place in this story may not be underestimated ... [especially] the enthusiasm and authority he brought to the building of new playhouses for Shakespeare ... [and] his determination to return to the artifice of performance ... (p 180). Styan makes it clear that Guthrie was not the first in the field - that place both Styan and Guthrie himself award to William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker, whose experiments date from the turn of the century. On the other hand, Guthrie's work on the architecture of the stage and in the related concepts of staging and performing Shakespeare were the culmination of the movement begun by Poel and Barker, and it was Guthrie who brought the seemingly esoteric experiments of his precedessors into the mainstream of British and North American theatre practice. Not only in the production of Shakespeare, it may be added: the style of modern play-production generally has been influenced in essential ways by Guthrie's work.

Central to Guthrie's practice is a return to an acting style, a stage, scene changes and production methods believed to be closer to the original Elizabethan practice. There is a greater reliance on the text of the play, hence a greater reliance on the actor's voice, together with a closer contiguity of actor and audience, to gain the full effect of the nuances in the script. To this purpose, Guthrie conceives of a relatively bare thrust stage, closely surrounded on three sides by the audience, on which the action moves rapidly without a pause. These are radical changes from the proscenium arch and orchestra pit separation of actors from audience, the operatic declamation necessitated by this distancing, and the cluttered naturalistic settings and awkward scene changes, all of which were Victorian practice in staging Shakespeare.

In Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded, the volume marking Stratford's second season, Guthrie argues for the retention of the architecture of the Stratford tent-theatre, 'the arena stage and the wide amphitheatre', in the permanent Stratford building of the future:

First, I consider that it has proved the point that Shakespearean plays gain enormously in impact by relating actors to audience as nearly as possible in what we can conclude to have been the relation which prevailed in Shakespeare's own time, and for which the plays were written.... Evidence on this relation ... all points to two facts: that there was no illusionary scenery, and that the actors were so near their audience that they could speak really low and still be heard; so near their audience that small shades of expression, subtle effects, could make their point. An audience large enough to make adequate productions pay their way can only be as near as this to the actors if the amphitheatre plan be adopted.²

Guthrie does not deny the on-stage resources of declamation and the 'large-scale deployment of temperament'; he argues for a command of 'the full range of the voice from a whisper to a shout' (pp 159-160). It is, however, the quiet, subtle end of this spectrum which is the 'innovation' or renewal at which Guthrie is aiming with the thrust stage. The return to an intimate style of acting relates Guthrie's theatre practice to radio-drama which, he says, 'can often be subtle and interesting but it is always a matter of fine shades, small effects ...' (p 159; my italics). The parallels in phrase here are obvious.

It is not by accident that Guthrie describes his new style of stage acting in similar language to that of radio performance. Guthrie's earliest professional theatre activity was in radio-drama writing and production, which very much affected his theories of staging. The creation and direction of radio-plays, for example, gave Guthrie an insight into the liberating effects of the 'bare stage' which he demanded in his Shakespeare productions. This is the very concept which Peter Brook enunciates in 1969: 'I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.' ³ That same valuable insight Guthrie had already gleaned from radio-drama, the extreme case in which the stage shrinks down to the listener's imagination alone.⁴ Moreover, a major virtue for Brook of the extreme simplicity of the Elizabethan stage was that the range of depiction was much broadened: 'This theatre not only allowed the playwright to roam the world, it also allowed him free passage from the world of action to the world of inner impressions' (quoted in Styan, p 212). But that is exactly the power of a radio-drama production: to move without hindrance in space and time, and from external scene to internal monologue and back. It seems clear that Guthrie was made more aware of these possibilities in the production of Shakespeare by his radio-drama experiences. Guthrie's development of the thrust stage at Stratford, Ontario, one of his major practical contributions to modern theatre practice, was the solution to the problem of achieving the kind of intimacy, fluency and range on the physical stage with which he had successfully experimented in his radio-drama writing and productions almost two decades earlier.⁵

What tends to confirm the thesis that Guthrie's radio experience influenced his concepts of Shakespeare staging is the combination of circumstances surrounding some of Guthrie's most crucial experiences both in radio and on stage. Most significantly, in both 1931 and 1950 Guthrie was given almost complete control over every aspect of the productions as a whole. He used these opportunities to carry out artistic experiments which had profound effects on his later achievements. His two Canadian experiences were sequential and formative ones in the development of Guthrie's stage theories and practice.

Guthrie's work in radio came very early in his career. His first professional roles were at the new Oxford Playhouse where, having left the University, he worked during the 1923-24 season. But the young Guthrie felt his special talents were not in acting, and in the fall of 1924 he moved to Belfast as a producer at the new station of the two-year-old BBC. His responsibilities there included announcing, arranging talks, and choosing and directing the plays. BBC radio-drama had begun only the previous year, with the production of Richard Hughes' Danger, specially commissioned by the BBC. Though Shakespeare and the classics had been broadcast, it was clear to Guthrie that drama on the radio medium necessitated new techniques of writing and production. He experimented with weekly drama productions for almost two years and was quickly attracted to the plays which escaped from rigid naturalism, for example, the Gilbert Murray translation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Taurus, W.B. Yeats' The Land of Heart's Desire, and John Masefield's Easter play Good Friday. He also acted in some of his own productions, and produced a play which he himself had written, A Night in a Mid-Victorian Drawing Room, a kind of episodic entertainment, which had some success in the London and Belfast listening areas but which hardly satisfied Guthrie.

Though Guthrie gave up his job with the BBC in 1926 to become producer of the Scottish National Players in Glasgow, he nevertheless kept up his association with the BBC and with radio-drama.⁶ During his two seasons in Glasgow, he acted in a half-hour Scottish BBC series which included verse, short stories and plays. And when he moved once more to London in 1928 he turned back to radio-drama, writing his first real 'microphone play' (as he called it), Squirrel's Cage.

In this play, Guthrie experiments with an alternating pattern of realistic scenes and poetic 'Interludes', the latter being a fascinating anticipation by a full decade of the poetic radio plays of the most famous and innovative American radio-dramatists, Arch Oboler and Norman Corwin. In Squirrel's Cage scenes and Interludes alternate without a pause, the end of each marked by a gong and siren to suggest (as Guthrie says) 'a rush through time and space'. ⁷ The structure of the play is a cycle of man's life from birth to maturity, within the restricted squirrel-cage of middle-class social conventions. The end of the cycle is a repetition of the beginning, with the protagonist Henry and his new wife now playing the roles previously acted by his parents, and with their child now in Henry's earlier rebellious role. The play is a rather bitter social satire, full of the boredom and frustration of lives sacrificed to the system. The only overt articulation of this theme in the scenes is Henry's aunt's attempts to entice him away; for the rest, the slightly grotesque social rituals in the scenes help to express the message implicitly. On the other hand, the Interludes are central instruments of the satire. First, they parody the social rituals by dramatic rituals; furthermore, they communicate the emotional effects on Henry of the life portrayed in the scenes through the evocative intoning and responses of single and massed voices, and through the emotional evocativeness of sound 'rising to a thundering climax' at the end of each Interlude. The Interludes are pure radio-drama, and the most innovative elements in the play.

The movement away from reality is reinforced in the last Interlude. It is ad-lib, represented on the page only by stage directions:

Fragments of Interludes III and IV are repeated.... They cross-fade one into the other.... The effect should be a composite image of the 'Commuter's' day - trains fading into typewriters - railway lines merging into lines of print - the columns of bobbing bowlers into columns of pounds, shillings and pence.... Dissolving views (Squirrel's Cage, p 75).

Moreover, in the last scene, which immediately follows, the strict realism of the scenes which Guthrie has set up is broken into for the first time by the surrealism of the Interludes. In the middle of this scene, Ivy's words 'Don't, Baby' are picked up and echoed by 'many voices (afar)', a first, sudden and unexplained fantasy intrusion into reality. These voices also give the last speech of the play:

VOICES (loudly) Not to - Not to - Not to - Not to - Not to (continuing ad-lib).... (Voices cross-fade with Closing Music) (Squirrel's Cage, p 84).

This invasion of the realistic convention of the scenes by the Interludes at the play's end is shocking and effective, reinforcing the illusory and conventional quality of the protagonists' lives, and commenting ironically on them - superb radio-drama technique. It is a manipulation of reality - and hence a kind of communication - then only possible on radio.

Squirrel's Cage was accepted by BBC London that year, and this led to the BBC's offer of a position as Drama Script Editor in London - Guthrie was soon to be made a Producer again. So in 1928 Guthrie became once more professionally involved with radio drama. The production of Squirrel's Cage received an enthusiastic response, and Guthrie wrote another microphone play, Matrimonial News. While lighter in theme than the first, this is technically the more daring. The whole play is set in the mind of the protagonist, Florence Kippings. Guthrie's introductory direction is that 'many of the lines are to be regarded more as rhythm and jingle than as sense'. The plot, an aborted attempt to escape lower middle class life, limits the extravagance of this lonely spinster's mental transactions. Having answered an advertisement in Matrimonial News and set up a meeting with a gentleman, Flo backs out at the very last moment, to return to her boring life with her mother. What is fascinating is the technique, adapted from the Squirrel's Cage Interludes: the unimpeded flow of the play from past to present to future and back again, with freedom from naturalistic chronology and stage decorum. The nonsense phrases, repeated with variations, are imaginative and poetic. The effect is hypnotic, especially as the play approaches its climax, when Flo's hold on reality is loosened by her near-hysteria. At the end, after Flo's failure of nerve, the phrases identifying her unpleasant life are repeated derisively. The play is clearly expressionistic, well in advance of its time on radio, and shows what that medium was capable of accomplishing.

Guthrie's third experimental drama was written at the end of 1929, when he had already accepted the artistic directorship of the Cambridge Festival Theatre. The Flowers Are Not For You to Pick, technically and artistically his most advanced play, returns to the theme of middle-class society dealt with in Squirrel's Cage. The protagonist of Flowers is a young man whose personality is submerged beneath stereotyped social expectations. The focus here is on the hero, however, not on society, and the plot is a love story of sorts. The technique of scene-bridging is also similar to that in Squirrel's Cage: the 'gong-siren' scene change is here replaced by the sound of splashing waves. The individual scenes are much shorter than in Squirrel's Cage, following in rapid succession; as the play-direction explains, they are the 'pictures' and voices from a drowning man's past, which give the play something more like the flexible movement of Matrimonial News. Again, as in Squirrel's Cage, the play is built on a cycle of growth and socialization from childhood onwards, but this text delineates a more complex pattern of realistic detail about the characters' lives; Guthrie here advances in the technique of combining realistic dialogue and characters with rhythmic expressionism. The hero, Edward, is not only more specifically pictured than was Henry, he is also more determined; the early scenes invariably end with Edward refusing to give way on a point. When, however, he falls in love and vows not to accept his beloved's refusal, his Vanessa simply marries someone else; the emotional climax of the play involves Edward's response to that unalterable fact.

The last scenes are a daring departure from the relatively realistic patina of the preceding scenes; this is reminiscent of the end of Squirrel's Cage, but more innovative. When Edward hears of Vanessa's marriage, he starts to faint, whereupon the realistic dialogue dissolves without transition into a fantasy discussion among the same characters, involving rhythmic repetition similar to those of the earlier two plays. One function of this radio technique is to indicate Edward's internal emotional upheaval. The conclusion of this scene is a flashback to the play's opening, repeating the injunction to the child Edward: 'Give it up at once....' This repetition underlines the essentially tragic nature of the blocking action of fate on Edward's life, but with the economy that could only be accomplished by the radio play with its sensitivity to textual nuance.

The play moves swiftly in this mode to its conclusion; the final scene is a rapid montage sequence of realistic and expressionistic fragments. It begins with Edward's departure from his family at the station, followed in a feverish poetic monologue by a train trip, which changes into a voyage. The climax is Edward's suicide, suggested simply by a short reprise of his life, communicated, as in the first two plays, by a rapid sequence of speeches selected from the earlier scenes and ending with the direction Waves - then silence. The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick was accepted by the BBC and produced in 1930 by Val Gielgud, who was already making his reputation as the foremost producer of radio-drama in England and America of the thirties. The play was a great success.

Guthrie was immersed, therefore, in all aspects of radio-drama - reading, writing, editing and producing. He was consciously and successfully experimenting almost from the beginning of his career with the particular qualities of the genre, and this experience seems to have had a permanent effect on his philosophy and instincts concerning the theatre in general. The experience itself would culminate in 1931 with Guthrie's visit to Canada.

In 1930, the year Flowers was broadcast, and while Guthrie was still director at Cambridge, an invitation came to produce a six-month series of the radio plays in Canada. Guthrie's Montreal journey came at a watershed in his theatrical life, a time when he first felt the need to define his previously unspecific principles of the theatre. He writes in his autobiography on the page preceding the chapter titled 'Montreal':

At this period I do not remember giving any thought at all to what the art, or arts, of the theatre might be. I accepted a vague jumble of ideas, often entirely contradictory, and believed that they might ... be directed towards the development of better taste, conduce to the benefit of the human race.... I felt now that I had enough experience, enough technique to be regarded as a professional; but that I had not, as yet, worked in fully professional conditions. I had taken, as it were, quite a long course of swimming lessons.... Now I was confronted with the sea. At any moment, I must plunge.⁸

His next chapter, 'Montreal', begins 'The plunge, however, was deferred. I received an offer from the Canadian National Railways' (A Life, p 71).

CN Railways, in the trough of the depression, was hoping to impress Canada with the potential of state-monopoly radio and, more than incidentally, to sell its Radio Department (the only continent-wide Canadian radio network) to the federal government. Austin Weir, Director of the CNR Radio Department, conceived of a weekly series of original Canadian historical plays, to be called the Romance of Canada series, and employed the currently best-known Canadian radio writer, Merrill Denison, to write the scripts. Denison, who had obtained the scripts of Guthrie's three experimental microphone plays, was immediately struck by his obvious understanding of the radio-drama medium, and convinced Weir to employ the young director to produce the series. Guthrie accepted on the understanding that he would have the necessary resources and complete control.⁹

Guthrie came to Montreal not only with a growing reputation as a London stage director, but as an expert both artistic and technical in the infant radio-drama field. His reputation was so formidable in Canada that his decisions were hardly likely to be questioned. The opportunities for controlled experiment were therefore unique, allowing him to bring to a head the ideas on radio-drama which had been developing for six years. Guthrie took over every aspect of the Romance of Canada production. His first task was to create a company; he located actors in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa with the help of Rupert Caplan, then a young theatre professional just back from the Provincetown Theatre and New York (later to become one of the CBC's major radio-drama producers). Though he employed Caplan, Guthrie found that in general professional stage actors were unsuitable for radio work. The problem was central to his later conceptions of acting Shakespeare on the stage: as he explained, stage actors declaimed; it was extremely difficult to untrain them and then to retrain them in the subtle, low-keyed, nuanced style of acting necessary for the radio. It was simpler to take on amateurs and novices, and this Guthrie did, in effect running a radio-acting school in Montreal during most of the time he was producing the series.

As for the studios, Guthrie had sent on ahead a copy of the plans for the recently completed Belfast BBC studios, plans which were used to construct the most advanced radio-drama multiple-studio complex in North America. There were separate, sound-isolated studios for several sets of actors, for the orchestra, and for the sound effects man, all in sight of a control booth from which Guthrie was to direct. Into this booth had been built sophisticated sound controls; Guthrie added a set of coloured 'traffic' lights in each studio, with the controls in his booth, giving him great efficiency in controlling the progress of a production, especially at scene changes.¹⁰ The scripts of the individual plays also came under Guthrie's close control. He made weekly trips to Denison's Ontario retreat, Bon Echo, to thresh out the texts with him.¹¹ There is internal evidence in the plays that Guthrie exercised considerable influence on their final versions. And of course Guthrie cast the plays and directed the rehearsals, so that the productions of the drama, which began with Henry Hudson, Discoverer on 22 January 1931, were very much a product of his creative genius and technical expertise.

Thirteen separate plays in the sixteen weekly broadcasts of the Romance of Canada series were produced under Guthrie's guidance. These included three consecutive episodes in the history of the Selkirk settlers, and the two parts of the Marguerite de Roberval story. Guthrie made it clear to Denison from the first that documentary drama would be the most difficult form to translate into the radio genre: radio-drama's strength was all in interior revelation, impression, rhythm, lyricism, ritual - anything but unadorned history. Nevertheless, Guthrie accepted the challenge, and Denison for his part chose some of the more eccentric passages in Canadian history. The most intractable to translate into radio-drama seem to have been the narrative journals of exploration and settlement: the three Selkirk plays, Radisson, Mackenzie, Thompson; while Laura Secord was not much more gripping. On the other hand, the various battles among the French, English and Indians - Madame la Tour, Grand Pré, Drucour, Montcalm and Dollard - gave the opportunity for dramatic tension and confrontation, the suggestion of heroic character, ritual and pageant. Two of the more successful plays, much in the style of Guthrie's earlier experiments, are tales of personal struggle. These are the opening play, about Henry Hudson's last voyage, at the end of which he is cast adrift in Hudson's Bay; and the moving story of Marguerite de Roberval's enforced stay on the Isle of Demons.

In general, the style of the first few plays is cramped by the low dramatic potential of the source materials (either journals or novels), made mundane by the undertaking to communicate accurately the historical details. The structure of the plays is marred by CN Rail spot-announcements at several of the scene-bridges. As the plays progress, however, a sense of freedom from the necessities of history and realistic accuracy of scene, even from chronology, seems to develop, and a movement towards the primacy of the text: towards poetry, rhythm, heroic portrayal of character, and interior monologue. The development of radio-drama techniques in the series even improved the exploration plays, so that the last three, Radisson, Mackenzie, and Thompson, show a smoother flowing technique of alternating narrative and dialogue. While they are not overly dramatic, they do achieve the standards of professional documentary drama.

The conclusion of Henry Hudson is an interior monologue in the dying protagonist's mind, made up of a pastiche of speeches from earlier in the play; the last of these repetitions is the description of the sighting of a shepherd early in the journey, taken then as a positive image but recognized at last as the joke of fate. This is very much the technique of pastiche-repetition seen in the conclusions of Guthrie's own plays, and it is especially close to the ending of The Flowers Are Not for You to Pick, written only fifteen months earlier. While in Henry Hudson this ending is in contrast to the relatively stilted progression of the play as a whole, the same pastiche technique is used more adroitly in the eighth play of the series, the second half of the Marguerite de Roberval story, titled The Isle of Demons. This is one of the most interesting of all the plays, partly because it has little to do with the panorama of history. It is the story of a woman put ashore on a deserted island with her lover and maid, who gives birth to her lover's child, and then must witness the deaths in turn of lover, maid and child. She spends her last days, before she is rescued, in isolation and fantasy. This last section, an interior monologue, is another obvious echoing of Guthrie's pastiche technique. Here, it makes an inevitable and appropriate conclusion to the play as a whole in plot and style, showing a perfected method of communication of internal landscape.

Two plays in the latter half of the series show even better than The Isle of Demons the development of a mature technique in the portrayal of traditional documentary drama. One of these, Drucour at Louisbourg, is the first play to drop the CNR commercials, and to proceed without interruption from scene to scene. Drucour is carefully crafted; nothing unnecessary to the action or delineation of character is allowed to intrude. It is the story of the British siege and capture of Louisbourg, told from the point of view of Drucour and the other doomed French defenders. They all understand that their position is hopeless, which gives an opportunity to explore their personalities and motivations. At the same time, the play gives full range to the social confrontations, pageantry and ritual also implicit in the historical facts.

These techniques are further perfected in Montcalm. This drama, dealing with the final siege of Quebec, is centered on the sympathetic figure and motivations of the fated leader of the French forces. Yet the personality of his antagonist Wolfe is also developed; the structure of the drama is based on a rhythmic alternation of smooth-flowing scenes dominated in turn by these two heroic antagonists. The dramatic tensions are produced by the attempts of the two war-wise generals to outmanoeuver each other, while fate holds the threads of victory and defeat. The history is there, but subservient to the depiction of the two major characters. Less moving on the level of internal landscape than Marguerite de Roberval, Montcalm is nevertheless the perfection of the documentary style in the Romance of Canada series: the reconciliation of subjective and historical elements, the smooth bridging of scenes, and an overall emphasis on text and on ritual rather than on strict historical detail.

What remains to us of the Romance of Canada series is a set of scripts, some with the sound effects and a few cues identifiable as Guthrie's.¹² We can only imagine the productions from clues in the scripts, just as we can only imagine the reciprocal relation between Guthrie and Denison in the progressive creation and production of the scripts during the early months of 1931. What is clear is the unique opportunity this series gave Guthrie to clarify his ideas on the techniques of radio-drama production, and on the nature of drama generally.

As he was working on the Romance of Canada series, an opportunity arose for Guthrie to articulate those ideas. He had a letter from London offering to publish his three BBC plays, for which he agreed to write an introduction. In it, he explains for the first time that it is just because the microphone play is limited to the sense of hearing that the impression received by the listener 'is highly concentrated in quality'. Stripped of the visual impressions of the stage, the mind of the listener is free to create its own impressions, which are 'less substantial but more real than the dusty grandeur of the stage'. Moreover, the impressions of a radio play 'are more intimate than those of the stage', because both the writing and acting are directed at an audience close to the radio receiver, not at the audience of the characteristic legitimate theatre, who are distanced from the action by the proscenium arch and orchestra pit (Squirrel's Cage, pp 8-9).

The major radio-drama techniques described by Guthrie in the introduction are, first, to aim for the kind of subtlety and intimacy in the dialogue that the microphone makes possible; second, the creation of scene or decor by the use of words. The third goal is a musical, rhythmic effect, achieved by poetic diction in the dialogue, by contrast among the actors' voices, and, finally, by rapid bridging techniques between scenes and in the structure as a whole. These qualities are the very ones which Guthrie will emphasize in his Shakespeare productions. There is, moreover, evidence that in Montreal Guthrie was already beginning to work out the implications of these radio ideas in terms of a new kind of stage. Merrill Denison describes how Guthrie, Rupert Caplan and he would adjourn to a local café during Romance of Canada rehearsal breaks, where they would talk earnestly about theatre. Guthrie would speak eagerly, not only about radio-drama, but about theatre architecture for the staging of Shakespeare, while drawing elaborate plans on the napkins.¹³ Rupert Caplan in an interview described these meetings to me in the same terms.

When Guthrie returned to London in the summer of 1931 to continue his stage career, he began to think with a new explicitness about the theory of Shakespeare production. Concerning the start of his long association with the Old Vic in 1933 he writes,

'I was in full reaction against naturalism.... We would follow Poel and Barker and Shaw, make no cuts merely to suit the exigencies of stage carpenters, have no scenery except a 'structure', which would offer the facilities usually supposed to have been available in the Elizabethan theatres; stairs, leading to a balcony; underneath, a cubbyhole in which intimate scenes can occur.... This structure would serve as a permanent background throughout the play, thereby eliminating tiresome pauses while scenery was changed, eliminating the 'front' scenes (A Life, pp 120-21).

In the event, this initial Old Vic experiment was only partly successful: first, because the architect-designed structure, once built,

proclaimed itself, almost impertinently, to be modern. It was also ... wildly obtrusive.... It was a mistake to employ an architect, however brilliant, to undertake so important a piece of theatrical design without some theatrical craftsman at his elbow (A Life, p 122).

The second problem, in some ways even more intractable, was the Victorian opera-house style of architecture of the Old Vic Theatre. Guthrie's subsequent career is punctuated by his attempts to solve the technical and dramatic problems inherent in the proscenium stage, with its predisposition to naturalism and actoraudience distancing. The various modifications of the Old Vic stage, including the building of an additional apron-stage, were not ultimately successful, as Guthrie had to admit, because in the end the prosceniurn arch remained, and ,some kind of picture had to be put inside it' (A Life, p 207). By 1936, Guthrie had decided that

there could be no radical improvement in Shakespearean production until we could ... set the actors against a background with no concessions whatever to pictorial realism, the sort of background which the Elizabethan stage provided (A Life, p 207).

Guthrie's experiments took a new turn in 1948 when he agreed to stage the sixteenth-century 'satire', The Thrie Estaites for the Edinburgh Festival:

Gradually, as I toiled through the formidable text, it began to dawn that here was an opportunity to put into practice some of the theories which, through the years, I had been longing to test. Scene after scene seemed absolutely unplayable on a proscenium stage, almost meaningless in terms of 'dramatic illusion', but seemed to offer fascinating possibilities, if they could be set and acted in a manner which I felt, rather than clearly apprehended (A Life, p 306).

It is well-known how the adaptation of The Thrie Estaites was produced in the Edinburgh Kirk Assembly Hall, a large, square room with (as Guthrie remembers it) 'deep galleries and a raked floor sloping down to where, in the centre, the Moderator's Throne is set.' Guthrie erected a platform over the Throne, and made use of a gallery behind and above it for the Elizabethan balcony, while the audience was seated closely packed around the other three sides. 'The stage was ... a first sketch for the Elizabethan stage I had long hoped ... to establish' (A Life, pp 307-09).

As Guthrie makes clear, his Edinburgh experience finally clarified his theories. The experiment 'not only suggested all kinds of interesting and exciting technical possibilities, but ... threw a new light for me on the whole meaning of theatrical performance' (A Life, p 311). By escaping the tyranny of the proscenium arch and the illusory artifice of reality, he was able to touch new internal chords, to 'transport an audience' into a realm shared by Elizabethan theatre with myth, religious ritual - and the expressionistic world of radio-drama.

The Edinburgh Assembly Hall was, after all this, yet another makeshift; the full realization of Guthrie's vision of Shakespeare production had to wait on yet another invitation from Canada. Once again, he was asked to take full creative control of a theatre, this time at Stratford, Ontario. Guthrie's first efforts in 1931 had materially aided the decision to create a Canadian national broadcasting network. This in turn, by the forties, had fostered a Canadian national theatre which owed much to Rupert Caplan, whom Guthrie himself had trained in radiodrama. Caplan had by this time been joined by an impressive second generation of radio-drama producers, Esse Ljungh, Frank Willis, and especially Andrew Allan, the Supervisor of CBC Radio Drama from 1944 until the mid-fifties.¹⁴ Now Guthrie would return to create our second and 'legitimate' national theatre. And he would benefit in turn from the seeds he had sown in 1931; for many of the theatre personnel at Stratford in the early years had gained most of their professional experience in that same CBC Drama Department of Allan and Caplan. Caplan and Dora Mavor Moore ensured Guthrie's access to this extraordinary pool of talent.

As in 1931, again in Stratford in 1952-53, Guthrie was given free rein to create not only a festival theatre but a theatre company, and finally, a theatre building. At last he could create his ideal stage and auditorium. This time his collaborator in the structural design was Tanya Moiseiwitsch, the London set-designer with whom he had frequently worked before. The result was, of course, the familiar thrust stage of Stratford, with its permanent balcony, entrances from the sides, front and back stage areas, and almost surrounded by the audience situated in a wide, shallow arc of seats. This arrangement provided the basis for a new kind of staging, a mobile and intimate acting style, and a production that flowed smoothly from scene to scene. As most people would now agree, the Stratford theatre worked and has influenced the structure and production style of many innovative theatres built in the United States and Britain over the following two decades.¹⁵ Moreover, Guthrie's experiments can be seen as part of the twentieth-century move away from naturalism and artifice in the theatre and toward the freedom of style, ritual and symbolic representation which characterize recent activity.

There have undoubtedly been many other powerful influences supporting this modern revolution. Yet, Guthrie did much to legitimize and popularize this movement, and he provided the most appropriate stage for the new production techniques, and indeed the new plays, which were developing. The conceptions of modern theatre architecture and staging owe much to Guthrie's 1931 Montreal radio-drama experiments, and their translation into stage terms in Stratford, Ontario, in the nineteen-fifties.

BEYOND NATURALISM: TYRONE GUTHRIE'S RADIO THEATRE AND THE STAGE PRODUCTION OF SHAKESPEARE

Howard Fink

1 J.L. STYAN, The Shakespeare Revolution London: Cambridge University Press, 1977
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2 TYRONE GUTHRIE, 'A Long View of the Stratford Festival', in Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1954, p 147; my italics. Guthrie's practical argument here is his typical method of masking his principled positions.
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3 PETER BROOK, The Empty Space NewYork: Avon, 1969, p 9
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4 STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT was aware of this effect of radio-drama. In the line from his radio play following those quoted in the epigram to this essay he suggests how medieval actors, with words alone, on bare boards, make Christ's archetypal Passion 'A marvellous thing that could have happened here/In their own town'. 'A Child is Born', in Radio Drama in Action, ed ERIC BARNOUW, New York: Rinehart, 1945, p 113.
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5 JAMES FORSYTH, Guthrie's biographer, suggests a similar thesis. Forsyth says that Guthrie's pioneering days in radio led him to a kind of theatre 'where the most important dramatic action taking place is located in the imagination of the audience'; Forsyth adds that Guthrie's 'radio experience influenced the sort of theatre he built, ... a theatre where there would be no physical barriers between players and audience .... where the action of scene could follow scene with a fluency almost musical'. 'Tyrone Guthrie: Pioneer in the Field of Radio Drama', in Papers of the Radio Literature Conference, 1977, ed PETER LEWIS (Durham, 197 8) vol 2, p 121.
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6 The term 'producer' was the original word for what we now call 'director', a term borrowed from the cinema.
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7 TYRONE GUTHRIE, Squirrel's Cage and Two Other Microphone Plays London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1931, p 14. Citations of the other two plays also refer to this text.
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8 TYRONE GUTHRIE, A Life in the Theatre New York: McGraw Hill, 1959, p 70
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9 AUSTIN WEIR, The Struggle for National Broadcasting Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965, chapter 5, passim
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10 As JOHN COULTER writes in the Introduction to The House in the Quiet Glen, Guthrie had no such efficient control lights in his Belfast studios: 'while a play was on the air, he had to go round among the actors in the studio directing in dumb show, grimacing, waving his hands, sometimes scribbling notes on a huge sheet of paper held up to be seen: "Faster." "Slow it". "Quieter". "Holler!" ' Guthrie's Montreal control lights gave him his first opportunity to conduct adequately the smooth and flexible radio-play performances which would influence his later stage productions. (From Coulter's Introduction, p 12; text kindly supplied by Anton Wagner.)
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11 JAMES FORSYTH, Tyrone Guthrie London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976, pp 101-02
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12 There are several sets of the Romance of Canada series in the Manuscript Division, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa.
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13 Quoted in DICK MACDONALD, Merrill Denison: Mugwump Canadian Montreal: Content, 1973; see also the taped interview with RUPERT CAPLAN, 1977, in the Concordia Radio Drama Archives, Montreal.
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14 In ALLAN's Introduction to GERALD NOXON'S 'Pete Goes Home', On Stage, ed. Herman Voaden, Toronto: Macmillan, 1945, pp 360-61, he writes that the radio technique of picturing scenes with words 'is like getting back to the Elizabethan theatre, when actors in everyday suits and on bare boards employed the magic of Shakespeare's words to clothe the scene with all the panoply of Agincourt, the airy wonders of a mid-summer night's wood'.
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15 STYAN, p 201, mentions the Chichester Theatre and the Delacorte Theatre, New York, 1962; the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, the next year; the Beaumont Theatre, Lincoln Centre, in 1965; the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, in 1967; London's Young Vic in 1970; and the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in 1971.
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