Virile Armitage, or: richard armitage + samantha colley + anna madeley in The Crucible, part 1

[It took me forever to write this because every time I sat down to write, I got distracted by my fantasies. Cough. Drat you, Richard Armitage. You interfere with your own analysis!]

How could I write about any of Richard Armitage’s roles and not eventually talk about the chemistry aspect? I’m surprised it took me this long. In this post, when I say chemistry, I’m referring generally to the energy of attraction or rapport generated between two actors as a part of creating their characters, and at times specifically to sexual chemistry, or the appearance of sexual attraction and energy between them. A lot of both kinds was on display in The Crucible, between John Proctor (Richard Armitage) and his spurned servant-girl, Abigail Williams (Samantha Colley) and between him and his wife, Elizabeth (Anna Madeley). The stage fairly crackled in some of those scenes!

[Left: Laila Rouass as the oft-maligned Maya Lahan, from Spooks 9. Source: wikipedia]

Evaluating chemistry from the audience member’s perspective is complicated. How we see chemistry certainly involves our personal preferences and whether the actors conform to these. But we must also take into account the skills of the actors involved (and somewhat less, the degree of their personal affinity, for talented actors should be able to produce chemistry no matter their own feelings), as well as the history and relationship between characters they are playing, and particularly strongly in the case of The Crucible, the context in which their stories take place — because sexual attraction is a culturally conditioned phenomenon whose signs are different in different historical and cultural settings. A convincing New England Puritan doesn’t show his attraction in the same way as Lucas North might. I mention this mainly because Armitage’s chemistry with co-stars has been a dicey issue for us in the past. It’s been my impression that if we didn’t like the character his character was involved with, we have often tarred the actor opposite him with the brush of “no chemistry” — even when, as frequently in the scripts he’s had, the character itself was supposed to be either ambivalent about Armitage’s character or playing games. The most notorious case of this was Genevieve O’Reilly (her admittedly lousy U.S. accent notwithstanding), who got what was in my opinion a lot of unnecessary criticism from us, as Sarah Caulfield was supposed to be playing bait-and-switch with Lucas North. Laila Rouass, whose Maya Lahan was always uncertain about John Bateman’s reappearance, got a comparatively minor shower of the same thing, and even Lucy Griffiths got her share of criticism for what was Marian’s behavior, not her own poor work. The actresses who haven’t gotten this treatment from us tend to be those whose characters comply with our desires for Armitage’s character (Daniela Denby-Ashe as Margaret in North & South; Paloma Baeza as Elizaveta in Spooks 7, who have both been fan favorites independently of our assessment of the quality of their work).

In other words — if we see The Crucible and think Elizabeth Proctor is cold or abrupt — that is because Anna Madeley is playing the character as written (as Elizabeth herself admits in Act Four when she says that she kept a cold house). The challenge, as billiepops noted a few weeks ago, lies in playing intimacy in a relationship where the partners are now partially estranged.

So — having noted the potentially complex aspects of our perception of chemistry — now I’ll move on to Armitage’s production of a sexual vibe for John Proctor and his chemistry with his female counterparts.

Sexy Proctor? The virile Puritan farmer

I admit that it starts for me with aspects of the Proctor costume — especially the boots (at right) and the coat and the beard. These symbols all trip certain synapses in the Servetus brain. But as with many roles that Armitage has played, it’s not so much the signs per se, but the way that Armitage wears and uses them.

The core of Proctor’s sexuality as Armitage plays the character stems from his virility. Note the etymology of that word from vir (Lat. man, and the related term virtue from Lat. virtus, the quality of manliness, bravery, and moral excellence, so that virtue is historically intertwined with the notion of maleness in the history of the West — a theme Obscura explores from time to time in her discussions of Richard Armitage and the Roman virtues.) I’m using the term here explicitly to reflect its connotations (described in the OED) in order to differentiate it from a more general notion of masculinity. Virility involves power, solidity, health or vigor, productivity, and particularly, the capacity and desire to reproduce. A key element for me in that distinction lies in the way that modern masculinity separates desire from reproductivity (in the general sense not just of having babies, but of building and perpetuating things), even though both modern and premodern men display the characteristic desires of men that signal and thus perform their masculinity to onlookers. To make a much-too-bald distinction, the male gaze exists in both cases, but the pre-modern male gaze desires among other things for the purposes of production and reproduction, performing its desire in forms that facilitate these ends, while the modern male gaze is more narrowly focused on desire and pleasure as ends in themselves. If you’d like a too-rough sample distinction: for Guy of Gisborne and Mr. Thornton, Marian’s and Margaret’s attractions lie also and decisively (if not exclusively) in their capacity to provide children, family, position, and posterity — things that involve a figurative multiplier effect. Lucas North and John Porter, in contrast, look chiefly (if not exclusively) for pleasure, satisfaction, and (possibly) emotional comfort or companionship.

I’ll offer an example of how the differences in that gaze work in a moment, but first I want to talk about how Armitage uses the requisite symbols to perform virility and (re)productivity in Proctor’s case. The boots, for instance, which signal power and control when he wears them. (Someone who met Armitage at the stage door in June asked why he was wearing Proctor’s boots and he mentioned that he had bought his own pair. I suppose a part of living his way into the character? In any case, a third of the way through the run they seem to have disappeared from the stage door.) When Proctor wears the boots, as he does in Acts One and Three, they affect his entire stance, making him more authoritative, particularly in the way that he can use them as the axis for leaning back in suspicion, anger, and detachment when interacting with other men (as in the exchanges over Parris’ salary in Act One) or venturing forward in menace (as with his exchange with Putnam over the ownership of the forest and wood he’s about to drag out). Men perform their virility not only to women, of course, but also a means of establishing status amongst each other, and Proctor’s use of his stance and the way he moves his boots offer a powerful counterbalance to the “weighted” books of the scholars Parris (Michael Thomas) and Hale (Adrian Schiller). Part of establishing status as it affects chemistry comes when women observe men. When Proctor wears the boots, he walks with weight — even if he is running around, or shaking Abigail off. It’s also key to the way he plays these scenes that the encounters with Abigail occur in settings where he’s wearing the boots, while most of his exchanges with his wife occur when he’s barefoot. Taking off the boots reduces his status and thus the sense of his own power and self-awareness both as a member of the Salem community and in relationship to his wife.

Then, there’s the coat (left). It’s a piece of clothing well-suited to Armitage’s physique, it’s true — for reasons similar to those that made the Mr. Thornton costume so successful; that is, it not only adds substance to his general shape, but it makes his shoulders and trapezius, already marked parts of his body, seem even more prominent — here, set in sleeves that don’t cut all too close to the actual shoulder construction of Armitage’s body adds the appearance of muscularity. (In the screen shot from the curtain call on the night they were taping you can see the actual architecture of Armitage’s shoulders during the run of the play without much covering.) Look, at left, how powerful his upper body appears; consider the ways in which the prominent elevated collar adds lines and an arrogant, lordly energy to his neck and head area; look how the patches in the coat suggest a carelessness driven by hard, muscular physical labor.

Even when Armitage takes off the coat, he seems hugely masculine (right, in the costume he wears for Act Four — try to imagine him not smiling, as he never does in the play). Of course, the torn fabric of the clothes he wears in jail emphasizes his build rather than hiding it — something that Armitage worked against during performances by strongly modifying his posture and to some extent with his makeup, so that his chest and pectoral muscles, for example, almost looked sunken under that tunic. But the beard — that quintessential classical symbol of virility — even dusted to greyish dullness, continues to broadcast the message of his virility. Note that in Act Four, he’s not supposed to be strong but weakened, and yet his capacity to build and reproduce remain represented by the beard. Establishing this status is important for two reasons — first, despite his broken words, the capacity for a productive life “after” his confession (note how often he mentions his legacy to his children in this scene) has to seem a real one to both the character and the audience. Secondly, Proctor has to have some mechanism by means of which to exercise his own power over against Danforth when the judge questions the veracity of his confession and Proctor must repudiate it. The script requires a powerful Proctor at the end — and here the connection referred to above between masculinity and virtue becomes important, for in order for the rhetoric of the play to work, we must see Proctor as fully virile (capable of exercising manly power) and also fully virtuous (and particularly, more virtuous than the other men around him, who speak in the name of the lawful state [Danforth] and the ultimate moral authority [Hale]). The beard — and the way that Armitage projects its presence by pushing his chin out, as he has done all the way through the play in moments of threat — connect this imprisoned, initially apparently broken Proctor with the powerful man of Act One.

So the beard, coat and boots function as symbols of virility — as does Proctor’s rather direct glance (the modifications of which in each case I’ll explore more fully below. Proctor looks directly, and looks burningly, whether up from under his eyebrows in Act Three or down upon his challenges as in Act One. Importantly, however, his glance doesn’t signal desire in the same way as his modern characters do.

Look, for the purpose of contrast, at Lucas North, whose glance follows Sarah Caulfield out of the morgue room in the first episode of Spooks 8. Lucas has the signals of modern desire down to a tee — pumping up the lascivious glances both secret and ostentatious that adults take at each other nowadays to just the point at which we as audience members can no longer ignore them.

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As Lucas (Richard Armitage) watches Sarah leave, he takes a very unsubtle look at her rear, in Spooks 8.1. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

This mode of interaction becomes incredibly noticeable at the point in Spooks 8 where Lucas has clearly realized that Sarah is deceiving him (the closing scene of episode 8.5), and she becomes primarily a tool for gaining more information about “Nightingale” and an attractive sexual partner

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Lucas North (Richard Armitage) takes a subtle glance at Sarah Caulfield’s (Genevieve O’Reilly) chest in Spooks 8.6. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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This is the look of desire — not of generativity.

OK, this is 2,000 words, so I think I’ll stop here for now and break the piece about chemistry with female castmates into a separate post.

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to part 2

~ by Servetus on September 21, 2014.