The Bubble Rule bursts (sort of): August 26th, part 2

Continued from here. Funny — this post somehow seems extremely important, one of the most important ones I’ve ever written, and that made me stop before publishing last night and reminds me of the extreme queasiness I felt on the day I’m describing. Have been to the bathroom twice now. Just write it down, Servetus.

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Up till now I’ve been writing about this performance descriptively and analytically, with an eye toward what my own observations might bring to fellow fans, especially those who have not seen the play, but also those who want to remember what they have seen. My notes from Tuesday night (which were delayed in composition) are exceptionally strange, even by my standards.

[And I interject to mark that as I force myself to revise this post, my stomach now empty, the Old Vic has announced they will film the production. I’m still going to write everything I know down, though, as this was a truly life-changing experience. Read or ignore at your pleasure.]

When you walk into the theater space, past the bar and into the seating, you immediately hear a very subtle monotone noise of something like drums or a very low percussive stringed sound. It evokes the mood of the play and sets your teeth on edge. Except my teeth are already on edge. I find my place, tuck my bag under my seat, and sit down and clasp my hands together and wait for the liturgy to start. I say שהחינו‎ (Blessed art Thou … who has enabled us to reach this season) because it feels like that kind of moment. Maybe it should have been גומאל, although the journey doesn’t feel anything like over yet. And breathe deeply.

As I see Guylty sit down in the side stalls a bit later, my heart rate is still twice normal and my jaw is clenching. I am worried about proximity to Armitage, and my stomach is completely unsettled about seeing him play. I am sitting in the very front row. F19 stalls. I had seen pictures of how close I’d be to the stage, but still, I couldn’t credit it. LondonFriend told me that she felt the people sitting in the front row of the theater had a special responsibility, and she’s right: there will be no way not to be seen here. I can’t gauge it at all, but I decide that if I get too desperate due to proximity I can clap my hand over my mouth, or wait until a point when the audience is looking elsewhere and simply walk out of the theater.

The beginning is very atmospheric. The theater already smells inside as if someone’s cooking over a wood fire, and something begins to disseminate jets of smoke or fog from the margins of the stage. The lights fall. The movement begins. Proctor (Armitage) is the last to enter, and my view of him is obstructed, and that’s a good thing at this point, I think — I have established he’s there, but I don’t have to see him.

I’m familiar with the play from all the re-reading of it I’d done this summer, and so I know immediately that we’re seeing something incredibly special, an unbelievable piece of artwork that elevates a problematic source to an entirely new level. This turns out to be really useful, because I become engrossed in the play itself and watching all of the movement before Proctor’s first entrance in Act One. We’re seeing the show after the actors have had an additional night off, and of the performances I will see this week, this one has the highest level of physical energy. As the girls proceed to challenge each other over what they will admit to having done in the forest that night, my body becomes even tenser, watching Mercy Lewis (Zara White) threaten to hit Betty (Marama Corlett), and witnessing the malevolence in Abigail’s (Samantha Colley) every posture. When, standing not far from me, Abby throws Betty across the room, I and ever other audience member seated in that first row flinch.

And then he’s there.

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John Proctor (Richard Armitage) ascends the stairs into Betty Parris’ room in Act One of The Crucible. Source: Geraint Lewis Collection.

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My heart and my stomach leap, and I breathe in deeply through my nose, trying to grab some additional air, though luckily my body stays still. Here he is! Maybe twelve feet away from me. The real Richard Armitage playing John Proctor. I don’t twitch although my whole body would like to. Oddly, my first perception of him physically involves his hairline; my eyes focus on the texture of his hair against his scalp, and this will be a decisive perception all the way through my watching of the play. But the scene begins and it’s clear that it’s John Proctor. I don’t need my hand over my mouth; it’s enough to bite my lips. What a presence — he scares Mary Warren home, and then walks over to Betty’s bed, and as he says, “You’ll be clapped in the stocks before you’re twenty,” I relish the way he says “twenty” (Yorkshire accent most pronounced in this of all the lines in the play, I think later) and

I.

am.

lost.

Where I glimpsed him, earlier, in the play’s opening, and wondered if this was going to be another instance of feeling that I had just glimpsed or touched him with my eyes and he had slipped away, I now sense his full presence.

Richard Armitage, and he’s here, and he’s playing and I’m watching and not just watching, I am in the middle of it all. Immersed. He’s now two feet from me. I can feel the energy radiating off his body.

Armitage begins the next moment of the scene (telling Abby to put their relationship out of her mind) standing in left profile toward me, glaring for all he’s worth, and then moves closer toward her as he tries to press his insistence that their affair should be forgotten — and suddenly it hits me —

This is it.

It will never be any better than this. Never. No matter what happens.

This is flow. I am witnessing, experiencing unmediated connection between Richard Armitage and the primal energies of the universe. He is totally in what he’s doing, fully concentrated, fully involved, building the borders of a world with his acting, making this ephemeral thing for us and us alone to see — weaving together a world that will evaporate in a few hours, but in which, while we are there, we will be totally occupied, our every perception controlled by his connection with the sublime.

Sorcerer, indeed.

While it could be glimpsed in pictures, this is what I was supposed to see. This is why I was brought here in spite of everything.

Flow personified, embodied, demonstrated, projected. Taught? I have seven chances now and only seven to see what it is he is doing and how he does it, to try to plumb this secret of the universe. I lean in even more intensely, turn my sense receptors up to maximum, keep my eyes open as much as possible, breathe as deeply as I can and lose myself in looking.

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“A wild thing may do wild things.” Abigail Williams (Samantha Colley) springs into the air as Proctor (Richard Armitage) looks on, in Act One of The Crucible. Source: Rex Images.

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Looking. And the heady way that looking makes me breathe, makes me a part of everything that is going on around me. This is the thing that feels most real, that will feel most real all the way through these performances. Theater like worship.

I don’t fully understand why suddenly nothing else matters, at this early point, but at some point around Thursday it will hit me in a dream: The fascination with Armitage comes from the way it re-induced flow in me, and short of being able to attend a rehearsal, this is the closest connection to that process I will ever have. Yes, his person fascinates me, because I want to understand the man who creates the flow; yes, his appearance incites positive feelings in me — but in no sense I am witnessing an “act” here — while Richard Armitage is not John Proctor, the figure I am seeing on stage, too, is the “real” Richard Armitage. I’m not dichotomizing between man and art and indicating a preference for art over the man — because what becomes clear during this week as that at these immanent moments, the man is his art. This thing that he’s creating — it’s here that he’s at his most real, doing what he wants to do, making a beautiful thing that he wants to make for all of us. I am not only observing the thing, I am in the same room with him while he’s doing it, and as the play progresses, at times inches away from that creative process.

There is no “more real” of a Richard Armitage than this manifestation of John Proctor that he builds for us. On that night I am so captivated that I only sense this dimly, but it’s true nonetheless, as I think again and again — This. Only this. Only now. Nothing else matters.

Energy pours off him as he twists around Abigail’s attempts to capture him. His voice is deeper (but not hoarse to me — a longer post on this at some point, perhaps), and he uses the scratchiness he produces to good effect. At two places in Act Two I see things in the play I hadn’t seen before because of his acting, or find something plausible that has always bedeviled me about the play. He knows to play not only Proctor’s noble qualities, but also his ego, his defensiveness, his very real awareness of his sin — and to indicate how those things stand in the way of his navigation of this fraught, impossible situation. His brutality with Abigail in Act One is contrasted with the extreme tenderness with which he plays the opening of Act Two on this evening. And his physicality — Armitage’s real strength as an actor, his ability to fit his body into any position — it’s used here to perfect effect. He forces us to see him, to see Proctor. And when the action of the play finally reduces him to tears, then with his whole body. At the end of Act Two, when the court officials take Elizabeth away and he collapses in pain, his back is to me — and I can see every muscle in it move as he sobs.

People say he owns the stage. The power that pours off of him. This simply was not something I would have predicted from his screen presence, as much as it alone changed my life. Armitage — devastates.

The lights fall and the applause is thunderous. I say שהחינו again even though you’re not supposed to do that. I feel like I’ve reached a different season than the one I was in two hours previous.

Guylty and I meet up. I am — beside myself. Now that I’m no longer watching, I’m filled with a crazy nervous energy of the like I haven’t sensed in my body in years, and I’m not sure what to do with it. Ab jetzt, I say to her, nur noch Deutsch, because I don’t want anyone around us to understand the crazy level of excitement I am feeling. I’ve been nervous all day, but now every synapse in my body seems to be firing, all at once.

We walk outside so Guylty can smoke one and share our impressions. The discussion pours out of me, and her as well — how he acts with every muscle, the movement of his back, his own motion, the viscerality of his delivery, the alternations in the play’s tempo that pull us forward and backward, our doubt that this production can be effectively filmed — and I, we can’t stop speaking. (Her impressions, substantially altered by her change in perspective, are here.)

A down-at-the-heels-looking man about our age comes by and bums a cigarette off Guylty and is surprisingly well informed about Richard Armitage as the reason we might be there. “Is he any good?” the man asks us. Guylty gives him the cigarette — part of the smokers’ code, I’ve always thought, smokers are exceedingly generous with their poison. An usher see it and rushes over — to protect us from begging? — and to shoe us back into the theater. Guylty tips her half-smoked one into the street and she says, “Meet you afterwards? Are we doing the stage door?”

“It doesn’t matter if we do or don’t,” I tell her. “It just doesn’t matter. It — he, Richard Armitage — will never be any more real for me than he is now — in the way he’s made himself real after these two hours.”

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to part 3.

~ by Servetus on September 5, 2014.