Is John Standring forever? An early ugly Armitage

[Left: Richard Armitage as John Standring in a promotional image for Sparkhouse. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

It’s come up again for me since seeing the snippets of Richard Armitage in Pinter/PROUST, not least because it used to be the case that a stage performance of whatever sort simply disappeared into history and was unlikely to be captured in a way that allowed posterity to see it unless a film had been planned in advance. That must have made stage performances more liberating than they are now. I think of Armitage saying to George Stromboulopoulos, “That’s why they say film is forever.”  We could only harvest details about the styles of actors before film but now we can make actual comparisons.

In any case, the question that has often occupied me recently: which of his works pleases Richard Armitage the most? For which would he like to be remembered some day? (And which does he regard differently now than he might have earlier?) We know that he cringes when watching his own work, which is fully understandable, although he’s suggested that Peter Jackson has helped him deal with this reaction. Repeated statements have revealed that he considers North & South a career highlight. But he has also stated that he saw Sparkhouse as a career turning point in terms of how to audition successfully. I also find it interesting that the scene below was one of the long scenes included in Armitage’s last available showreel (left unupdated after the third series of Robin Hood), which suggests that it might have been there earlier as well, as a piece of his own work that he used to sell himself to possible employers or something he was reasonably proud of. The showreel seemed cut to display a variety of things but heavily put his action repertoire and his capacity for violent athleticism on display over his more dramatic scenes. So I wanted to look more closely at that scene, since its presence seemed to indicate it meant something to him.

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I made all the caps in this post.

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This isn’t my favorite scene from Sparkhouse, I admit, but really I like almost every scene he’s in, and this would probably be among my favorites. Looking at the role of John Standring in the wake of a decade of work, we can see that Armitage has definitely moved on from this (overly detailed? too theatrical) acting style, but it works for the role, there are a number of interesting things about it, and we can see the Armitage of 2013 germinating. I can also see why he’d choose this scene, just because given the many script improbabilities that animated Sparkhouse (such as the crazy proposal, which is possibly my favorite of its weird plot twists and of Armitage’s scenes), this scene actually looks like the sort of encounter that one could have about an unrequited love (albeit an extreme variation on that theme). I think he’s right that this is one of the most valuable dramatic moments of the script that could be transferable to a wider context of viewers. Perhaps, too, he chose it to emphasize his ability to play against type and to demonstrate his capacity to portray less-than-beautiful characters.

What a painful, painful scene. In it, we reel in response to the pained and painful aura of a man who gives his most precious gift absent any belief that he’s truly worthy of being appreciated for it, or himself, in any way. We expect the “morning after” for someone of such gentle mien as John to be loving and tender, but John is severely conscious of his deficiencies as lover, so that his gift is equally an apology, a desperate token of affection, and a request not to be abandoned for his failure. There’s a curious tension in the way Armitage constructs this character between Standring’s awareness of his status as a human (his belief that he could, in fact, have a relationship with Carol, over against our perception of how far out of his class she feels herself) and his performance of the shy hired man who expects rejection that makes so many of these scenes just plain hurt to watch.

As Standring exits the house, every moment of this pain is on display on his face, developing as he moves away from the door and despite an apparent resolution to get away even though he realizes that Carol is following him from the house. Having given his gift, he wants to be well away before it can be rejected, along with him.

As he walks away we see this combination of resolution, inner contemplation, shutting himself into his box again after letting himself out, and apparent pain. It culminates in the last split second before he turns to face Carol (Sarah Smart), when shame is clearly the uppermost mood playing on his face.

Here Armitage is speaking in the upper tones of his then relatively constant baritone, which seemed to drop pitch the longer he worked in television. The pitch of Standring’s voice reflects both the stress of the encounter and the amount of tenderness he feels toward Carol, even if he must express it so awkwardly that merely turning to face her for a conversation presents a bit of a struggle. (Contrast here, again, the awkward man who believes it the normal human thing to do to give a gift on Christmas to the woman with whom you’ve just had an erotic encounter, but doesn’t believe that she will want it. The whole dynamic of going through the motions as if you’re really human but not quite, and the desperation and determination that underlie that problem, how to keep walking, crouched but goal-oriented, through a sort of sheltered half-life, are riveting to watch.)

Standring turns to face Carol, and the distance of the camera from the shot obscures slightly the choices Armitage makes for him here. Here Standring makes his case: “I want you to have i’ now!” The awkward stance, as if his body is a column from which his neck hangs, the deep breath, the twitching left hand, are the dominant impressions of this moment of the scene, but don’t neglect to look at Standring’s eyebrows.

As Standring makes his case, again we see this fantastic conflict between the shades of personality between down at the mouth subject and hopeful man. He’s making eye contact with the much shorter Carol, and his head position looks abject, but his facial expressions and eyebrow movements signal to her his promise to be something different than he was the night before. I know I can be more for you, Carol, his forehead seems to say, optimistically, even if his body already concedes his defeat. His eyebrows move practically like the wings of a bird here, and this is still the expressional repertoire of the stage actor at work, I think (which he discussed having to edit down for television in a post-North & South interview). But with the camera so far away they again call attention to the contradictions in this character.

When the camera turns to him again, we see the way in which Carol steers the scene — in each of these cases, she takes the initiative and he responds, and his response is somehow not enough — he can’t stand up straight, he can’t convince her with his earnest promise to “improve,” and now, one sense from the sadness in his response to her statement that she’s fond of him, his full awareness of the impending rejection.

Above, we see the gradually intensifying introspective look that Armitage would later edit down for characters like John Porter, in an almost slow-motion version. Part of that, I suppose, can be attributed to differences in the characters, but watching Standring is interesting because of how much of his inner conflict we can see, in comparison to later roles where Armitage would reduce certain reactions down to the level of flickering moments or microexpressions. At about 0:31 note also the characteristic eye-lash flutter of distress, which he will intensify in the next cut to his face.

That Standring is fatefully? fatally? cathected to Carol we see when she delivers the lines asserting that no one deserves her — his reaction is so painful that we read that her self-criticism strikes him — the man who admires her — to the bone.

Her rejection of him on the basis of her being “bad,” thus status-worse than him, is something he can’t accept; it hits his self-concept even harder, and his attempt to reach out is rejected with a shake of her chin. All he can do in the end is react, again with a slow-motion version of the developing sorrow and defeat inside of him:

As he looks from the necklace pressed back into his hand toward her retreating figure, we see defeat, puzzlement, and a certain amount of resentment emerge on his features.

So yes, in addition to any structural considerations for using this scene as part of a showreel, many pieces of characteristic Armitage are on view here from the highly mobile and characteristic facial expressions to the multi-layered emotions. We see the remnants of a stage version of a very heavily figured face and we can almost watch the thoughts run through Standring’s mind — appropriate to the character’s perhaps not entirely quick-witted nature, but also a symptom of the early point in Armitage’s career. We see the contradictions in the self-awareness of the character built right in — am I a man or not? am I worthy of regard or not? — down to the Standring’s very stance. We see Armitage wrestling with the status problem of the tall, powerful man who has no sense of his worth, who speaks to a tiny woman who drags that self-concept even further down through her insults to herself, and who has to address both the contradiction in physical sizes and the contrast between their relative power in the interaction, particularly since he’s aware he’s already lost before he’s started. The result is a moving portrayal of a mixture of hopefulness against despair, and humiliation, the sadness of a small flicker of determination fighting against the shame written on every inch of a very large, ultimately defeated, confused body.

Do you think Armitage would use this scene as a display case now? How well does it stand up?

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(In conclusion, this is just a gratuitous thumbshot with frayed cuticle.)

~ by Servetus on February 3, 2014.