GHISLAINE KENYON
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Working in the theatre of the
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I’ve recently had cause to think about the theatre. Working as a researcher with the playwright Diane Samuels on a play about Cornelia Connelly (Waltz with Me), the range of skills involved in putting a play on the stage have become particularly apparent to me: how these competencies are deployed in different roles, how they are meshed together, and how collaboration between talented people can produce something seamless, coherent and inspiring.
Beyond the author who dreams up the work, I have come across, among others, producers, whose main responsibility is to bring the play to a theatre; directors who deal with what happens on the stage; designers who create the look of the work, and finally of course, the actors who present and realise the play for the public.
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These were of interest to me not only on account of my work on Waltz with Me but also because I have spent the last few years researching and writing a book about the work of the well-known and much loved illustratorQuentin Blake (now published by Bloomsbury). The book is called Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination and, as often happens to me, the words of the title were actually the last ones I wrote. Having rejected several working titles, it was only while reviewing my last draft, which included checking the many illustrations, that I found the solution. What struck me again on that occasion was the rapid freshness of Blake’s inky drawings, which makes them appear to come to life on the page the moment you catch sight of them.
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I knew from my many interviews with Blake what the theatre has meant to him since childhood: he acted in school plays (mainly small roles he says) but his star moment came during his time doing National Service in the Royal Army Education Corps when he played the leading role of Subtle in Ben Jonson’s Alchemist - and was congratulated by Alec Guinness who was in the audience. His favourite film, which he saw while studying French at school, was Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, an iconic wartime movie about the Parisian theatre scene in the 1820s and 30s. The leading character is a mime artist,
Baptiste, (played by Jean-Louis Barrault) and Blake remembers a
It occurred to me then that the Blake modus operandi is a kind of magical amalgamation of all the theatrical roles. He starts with the imaginative vision, he creates and gives life to the characters, if he is also the author he writes their narrative. He ‘acts’ them while drawing them, directs them on the page, and finally designs them an environment. He will usually be closely involved in title pages, endpapers, and the look and feel of the physical book.
scene where Baptiste sits puppet-like on a barrel outside the theatre and ‘comes to life ….and acts the story of the little pickpocketing incident which has taken place in front of him’.
This, says Blake, taught him how vital the element of mime is in illustration. How much the illustrator must focus on gesture and expression in order to create narrative without words, and how much timing matters. In a book this means an image on one page must create in readers a sense of suspense, encouraging them to turn the page.
The Old Cornelian SUMMER 2017
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