Il Trovatore and Amadeus – Screening and
Casting
Twice in one recent week I’ve
sat in a cinema and watched live broadcasts. The first was from the Royal Opera
House in Covent Garden (Il Trovatore).
The second was from the National Theatre (Amadeus).
Both were excellent
productions (in the main), and I’m not going to add to the many ecstatic
reviews which each has garnered. I am writing about three things: race, age and
camera work.
First: Amadeus. The part the protagonist, Salieri, who is humbled by
Mozart’s talent and is driven by envy to lethally undermine the young genius,
is played by a black actor, Lucian Msmati.
Of course, the historical
Salieri was a white Italian man, living at the white Imperial Court in Vienna.
Msmati’s casting provoked some snide reaction, to which he has spiritedly
responded – essentially saying that the colour of an actor’s skin is, in
general irrelevant to his or her realisation of a character.
Msmati said in an interview :
“There are still some who do not see the actor; they see the colour. To
which my response is that the limit is in your imagination. In this world of
make-believe and fantasy that we create, where it’s perfectly fine to create a
boarding school that is reached by a train from platform 9 ¾, there’s a block
to your assumption that they can’t be black.”
There are some obvious
exceptions. In the classical canon, the main example is Othello. It is crucial to the play’s drama that Othello is a moor –
black. (Although I recall from my University edition of the Arden Shakespeare that some
segregationist American critic had argued that, on account of Othello’s
intelligence and nobility, he was really “a white man”. An argument vigorously
rebutted by the editor.)
But here’s a twist. Msmati’s
previous main stage role, for the RSC at Stratford, had been in Othello – but not as the Moor. He played
his nasty nemesis, Iago. Iago has always been played as a white man, who uses,
among other psychological weapons, racist poison to turn characters against
Othello.
Casting Iago as black was
indeed a bold move, hardly colour-neutral. As Msmati has said, the move
explains the initial loyalty between Othello and his military lieutenant – and
added a bitter undertone to Iago’s murderous verbal betrayal. Enemies of the
same race can deploy the insults of racists between themselves.
Msmati says: “Certain words come out, even from friends’
mouths…”
Salieri is a role, one of
countless, where an actor’s skin colour is irrelevant, for reasons Msmati
gives.
Il Trovatore:
There are two things that troubled me about the screening.
The first is that the camera
is very intrusive. Staged opera is at a static distance from the audience. The
participants are equal, in physical presence, on the stage, but are singled out
by their vocal turns.
But when the production is
streamed, the camera gets in close, as in a TV drama. This contradicts the
rationale of streaming – to put the cinema audience in the roughly same
position as the live audience. Close ups destroy the choreography of the stage,
which has been carefully thought out and rehearsed.
(The streaming of Amadeus was much more respectful of the
stage – if only because the production used the NT’s spaces so well, and to
push the camera in would have lost so much of the staging.)
Another, doubtless
unintentional, result of the streaming’s close ups is that one’s attention is
over-focussed on the ages of the actors.
This is not irrelevant in the
case of Il Trovatore.
The plot has a villainous
count losing his “baby brother” (as a baby) to a theft by a murderous gypsy
girl, avenging the death at the stake of her mother. The baby brother, however,
survives, raised by his gypsy “mother”. He is now a freedom fighter, and the
man who is loved by the woman that the count loves.
The problem with the casting,
accentuated by the close ups, is that the “baby brother” is played by a singer
in his 60s, and the Count by a singer in his late 30s. This is unsettling, in a
way that colour isn’t (“My younger
brother, who is some 25 years older than me..). No wonder there is no
mutual recognition.
Doubtless there are good
musical reasons for the casting. But the cameras should have pulled back.
Feb 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment