fionashaw pod notes chekhov

How to Academy Podcast - Fiona Shaw - A life on Stage and Screen
26:11

'you said earlier in a way all theater is stand up comedy'
' comedy's quite hard to do becasue if you find it funny it really isnt funny. But of course, you have to find it funny. You have to know its funny, but you mustn't play that its funny, because the situation isnt funny, so i mean i think my pleasure has been finding comic moments in things like bedeyer?? or hedigabre? (cant work out what shes saying) which was very funny. and then of course, the evening is {.??} for the audience because they think its funny but then it really isnt funy. And i think a lot of really good drama does that. There should be nothing that doesnt have funny moments in it.'

'Comedy is often built on the gap between someones expectation and  their failing to get it, but how they asssume they've got it.'

'Interviewer: THinking of Johnanthan Miller, so he used to say that he wouild go on the tube  and he would observe people very accutely, so that when he was directing an opera, if the heroine was crying she might be fiddling with her hankerchief, cos actually thats what people do or might do when theyre grieving. Think of Jane Austen, the genius of Jane Austne was that she finds the bigger human picture by really paying attention to the small details of how people interact.'

Fiona Shaw' Yes, and i suppose the difference between me and Johnathan miller would be that i wouldnt then ask somebody to play with their hankerchief in order to show that they were grieving, I would find out what they would do, if they were grieving.So i do think that the actor, and the performance should be connected. I would hate a director to tell me what to do to indicate grieving. I would want to find it. I dont think you can be told it.

17minute mark:

Ibson end of 19th century - beginning of godlessness. 
World became more introved, so Brecht was able to take a theatre and be sus of EVERY suduction techniwque of the theatre. Invented a theatre that allowed yyou to feel that you didnt have to have feelings about being seduced by the actor. but then he would write briliant lines. He would suddenly put in an emotional line in the middle of a play thats ostensibly about an argument - something the greeks have done.

Beckett is sort of his grandhcild really -- the abstract of a human being - everything is an extraction of what he heard so hed get the rhythm of peoples crazy minds. 

44:25

we borrowed chekhov and made chokhov very english

Theres a pause in the middle of Act one, where theyre all looking out at the forest in a chokhovian way and theyre all thinking about their lives - which are falling apart adn hteres a pause. And in chekhov we always have a pause in england of about 5 seconds, because people get embarrased and start coughing and gettting upset. But because he was such a detovee of the russian way of doing things, we had a pause of about 2 and a half minutes. And we would sit there, looking out at the audience, looking at the forest, and the audience bagan to titter and then they went silent, then would laugh again, then silent. and then laugh again, and then they began to cry, becasu ethey began to get sucked into that pause. That was really, again not about what was going on on the stage, but going on in your mind. Becketts very good at this too. And they began to cry and it was the most astonishing experience. And we were all relived when somebody said ' i was at the opera last night' or whatever the line was. But i think Chekhov was a genius at understanding the epic moment