Talk About the Theater

THE ATLANTIC

JOHN GIELGUD and EDWARD ALBEE

ALBEE began: “Not being an actor. I would assume that an actor probably thinks about a part a much longer time than a playwright does. I would imagine that actors think about some parts twenty years before they even try to play them. Isn’t that true, John?”

“To some extent,” Gielgud said. “I was very lucky in playing most of the big parts I wanted to play when I was pretty young, and so I had to go at them without thinking too much about them beforehand. but Edith Evans said to me not long ago: ‘I know just how I should say that last line of Queen Catherine’ — that was in Henry VIII, which we did together about eight years back. When you’re older you do look back on parts and you think, I could play Romeo, I could play Hamlet better now — though I would know better than to try. That was one of the reasons why I directed Burton’s Hamlet, to be of some use through experience in helping a younger actor avoid some of the technical snags which you find in playing a part like Hamlet. With older parts like Lear or Prospero, which I would hope to play again someday, I put them right away from my mind and never think about them again until the time comes to do them.

“But with a play like yours I can hardly imagine putting it away and taking it up again in a few years. It was just a unique moment: you wanted me to play it‚ and I’m very happy to try. Of course I was very frightened of playing this part in Tiny Alice, and the first thing I wrote you, you remember, was ‘how old do you think this man is?' And you tactfully wrote back and said, ‘I think that all the people in the play are round about fifty,’ which consoled me a little bit in my temerity of being seduced and dying in two big scenes, for which I thought I had really passed the limit.”

Albee interrupted with a slight qualification: “I don’t know whether I thought that everybody in the play was to be fifty — it really never occurred to me when I was writing the play what ages the people were going to be. Style and content codetermine each other. The nature of the characters and how they speak and how old they are: all these things codetermine each other. Quite often in plays that I’ve written before, it seemed to me that a person would be of a certain age, but in this one it didn’t seem to matter very much. There’s no particular country; there’s no specific locale nor any age given. The most important thing was to get the proper actors. I don’t think that American actors, for the most part, have been trained sufficiently to do roles that are out of the realistic theater, but that was a secondary consideration, and in casting Tiny Alice my major concern was to get the actors who could do the roles the best.”

“Naturally I am enormously flattered,” Gielgud said. “None of the young English avant-garde playwrights has dreamt of writing me a part, and I’ve always had the feeling that because I was a bit skeptical about the ‘kitchen sink’ school in London that school rather despised me as being of the Establishment and a bit snooty, and that I didn’t have any appreciation of the new theater that had come into being because it might rather push me out of the center of the stage — which is not true at all.

“ It s a terribly ugly age; ugliness is made a fetish.”

“The fact remains that I have longed for some years, while being very doubtful of my ability to understand and interpret the new playwrights, to have a shot at one of them because one longs to create a new part more than anything in the world and to find a challenge for one’s experience by playing something completely different. But if I happen not to be in sympathy with the feeling of a play when I read it, I just can’t like it. That has been the case with many of the avant-garde plays in England, though I’ve been an enthusiastic admirer of Harold Pinter since he began.

“As regards the standard of acting in America, I’ve not been able to see the companies at Stratford, Ontario, and Stratford, Connecticut, which have done such tremendous work with the classics the last few years. Of course since I’ve been here there’s been all the trouble at the Lincoln Center, and it’s odd, isn’t it, that Tiny Alice should seem to need actors with classical training even though it is a very modern play. But it would appear that the two kinds of theater are more closely allied than one would think at first.”

Albee nodded and then spoke: “I think there’s a considerable relationship between what’s referred to as the avant-garde play and the classical play. At the same time I’ve always insisted to people who find Samuel Beckett incomprehensible, for example, that I’ve always found his plays totally naturalistic, though they’re not naturalistic in the sense that people usually understand the term, in the post-Chekhovian sense —”

“I’ve never been able to admire Beckett,” Gielgud interrupted, “It’s one of my completely blank spots. His plays are very difficult for me to take. I suppose I am used to climaxes and effective curtains and action and vivid and glamorous characters. To me it’s very depressing to go to the theater and see completely gloomy and subhuman characters in despair, but I suppose this has something to do with the reaction after the last war and the feeling of the world being in a terrible state, worse than it’s ever been in history before. I find that your play, Edward, on the other hand, has a kind of grandeur and a certain glamour which make it exciting to me in a way the Beckett plays that I’ve read and seen have not been.”

Albee laughed: “Maybe Tiny Alice is devantgarde and will set the theater back about forty years!”

Gielgud laughed with him: “Some people think that Zeffirelli has set the theater back fifty years, pictorially speaking, and yet his Romeo and Juliet‚ because it is directed to be acted in an earthy, naturalistic style, has been thought to be something absolutely modern and new. What is so fascinating in all art is that it always seems to be rebounding on itself, and the things that are new one minute turn out to be quite old-fashioned the next, and vice versa. And yet really what I suppose people of my age feel is that it’s a terribly ugly age, that ugliness is made a fetish, ugliness and frankness and outspokenness, in a way that we were brought up to consider was in very bad taste. But who shall say what is bad taste from one moment to another?”

“I’ve always thought‚” Albee broke in, “that it was one of the responsibilities of playwrights to show people how they are and what their time is like in the hope that perhaps they’ll change it.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true,” Gielgud went on. “That’s what’s exciting about the theater — we’re always remaking ourselves in terms of different people’s imaginations and different people’s experiences and the movement of the world, which is so tremendously quick now that one seems to have to rethink things. That’s why the Shakespeare productions of the last twenty years, which have all been gimmicky — you know, Troilus and Cressida in Civil War dress, my Noguchi Lear, which in a way paved the way for Peter Brook’s production last year, and that kind of thing — have not altogether been done just as stunts but to try to bring the play to the imaginations of a modern audience. Sometimes the directors go a bit mad and show off instead of presenting the play, which is the important thing.

“Take Marlon Brando, for example, in the film of Julius Caesar. I saw very little of that performance, but I was very interested in it. I had the feeling that he suffered from the lack of stage experience. You see, if he had known the part in the theater first, as I had the luck of doing with Cassius, he would have known the ‘line’ of the part; but when it came to the Forum scene, for instance, Mankiewicz thought that by doing the speeches singly over a number of days, and putting the crowd’s reaction in between when Brando was tired or found difficulty with his voice, the scene would still have the right impact through the different angles and the cutting, which was an ambitious idea and might have worked. But I think that Marlon was hampered by the fact that he didn’t really know where the scene was going, where the high spots came, where the low spots came; so he just worked with Mankiewicz to get the ultimate effect out of each speech, and therefore the scene became very broken up and did not altogether achieve the power and sweep with which Shakespeare wrote it.

“But Brando succeeded very well all the same, and it was a striking and original performance. At the time we did it, which was in 1952, I said to him, ‘Why don’t you play Hamlet?’ He looked a bit askance and said, ‘Would you direct it?’ And I said yes I would. But I think since then, you know, his agents and his film public would not allow him to take that risk, and he probably would feel that it’s too late to do it now. As to the sustaining of long speeches, surely Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill had exactly the same problem in Virginia Woolf. They had very long speeches, very long parts, very much on the same note. Unless they had been enormously versatile and skilled players they couldn’t have handled those long speeches and those tremendously sustained climaxes and the violence as well as they did. Nobody could have played the parts better.”

“They’re extraordinarily good actors,” Albee agreed, “but the language in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was idiomatic, which makes a slight difference. I think that American actors don’t have enough background. I think our actors need more training in the classics.”

“And our difficulty is,” Gielgud explained, “that if you’re a classical actor you’re always trying so hard not to betray the fact. Even in Tiny AliceT have had to fight like mad not to wave my arms about and become declamatory, because there’s a temptation to do this if you’ve been trained in the classical school. We need modern work as much, perhaps, as the modern actors need classical work. The trouble is that actors are trained now in so many media: they’re trained for the microphone, for the cinema, for dubbing, for television. When they get into a theater and have to control an audience night after night in the same play, they find rather a different problem. It’s very much more difficult to sustain discipline unless since you were quite young you have been used to playing a part so often, and to being observed and to being disciplined and to controlling your performance very correctly.

“Laurence Olivier, for instance. He’s a tremendously observant actor. He makes a complete character, and he impersonates that character from beginning to end in a performance. I don’t think I’ve ever quite been able to do that, except in a few parts that have suited me very well. My difficulty is that the parts always have to be a bit like me, and I can’t really disguise my own personality nearly so well as he can. He knows just how to use his power, and it doesn’t seem to diminish in the slightest degree, even when he’s impersonating a completely different character, as he did in The Entertainer, as he does in Othello. I admire this more than I can say, but somehow I can’t act that way.

“One can’t say how one acts; one only knows one’s bad tricks and mannerisms and tries to control them and tries to imagine a part. I don’t enjoy acting so much now. I find it a great responsibility. I no longer rush to the theater to put paint on my face and a pretty costume, as I used to when I was young. My vanity has left me to some extent, which is a good thing. I am more interested now in the whole show and in being a director and in the other people’s performances and in the details of the play, even if l have nothing to do with them. I just want to be the right ingredient in the pudding which will make the best effect; whereas when one was young, one had dreams of starring and having one’s name in lights and being recognized — all the paraphernalia which goes with the theater — especially in my young days when I was very stagestruck and I was determined to be a star.”

“I suppose I must enjoy playwriting,” Albee said, “since I do it; I try not to do things that I don’t enjoy. Being a playwright is enjoyable except for that six-week period from the first day of rehearsal until the day after opening, which is the worst time in the world. Writing in itself is exhilarating, absorbing, involving. I can’t think of anything else that I’d rather do.

“I try to let the unconscious do as much work as possible

“How does it happen? I usually discover that I have started thinking about an idea which I know is going to be a play. This process may take anywhere from six months to two and a half years, and during that period I don’t think about the play very much except that I realize from time to time that I have been thinking about it, and when the characters who are going to be in the play begin to take shape‚ I improvise with them.

“I choose a situation that’s not going to occur in the play itself and test the characters out to see how they behave in it, how they react within that situation, what they will say to each other in a situation of that sort. And when they start behaving on their own and take over from me and seem quite natural and believable in an improvised situation, then I suppose I know that it’s time to start writing the play.

“I try to let the unconscious do as much work as possible, since I find that’s the more efficient part of my mind. The actual writing itself usually takes a fairly short time — the shorter plays and the oneact plays anywhere from a week to three weeks. The two longer plays have taken about three weeks or a month an act. But it is enjoyable; it must be.”

“I sort of smell a play,” Gielgud said. “When I first read The Lady’s Not for Burning by Christopher Fry, which was then as revolutionary in style as your play is now, I didn’t understand it very well, but I fell in love with it, and I handed it across the railway carriage to the manager I was traveling with and said, ‘I love this play; can we do it?’ and he bought it for me.

“It amuses me to hear the way you speak about your inspiration for plays, because I remember Somerset Maugham telling me that he had the whole program of his life for about twenty years— short stories, plays, articles, and so on — all set out, and he had the entire tabulation of what year, what month he would write these things, and he carried out the entire lot.

“And when I directed his last play, Sheppey, in 1934, I said to him — I don’t remember if I dared say it to him‚ but I’m sure it was true — that the first act was 1910, the second was Bernard Shaw, and the third was whatever the year of the production was, 1934‚ when the play was produced, and the three acts didn’t match at all. It had been hatching in his brain for a great deal too long, and that was the trouble with the play. It seems that our very meticulous Edwardian writers very often prepared their work almost too carefully beforehand, and it seems to me that if one has any brains, or talent, or skill, then it’s pretty likely that the spontaneous creation of a few weeks or months will achieve what you want.

“The maddening thing to me is that an actor, unlike a playwright or any other artist, cannot destroy his work if he doesn’t really think it’s completely successful. Writers very often rewrite their plays without success, but at least they can abandon them unproduced. But actors have to give a performance, for better or for worse, before an audience and be blamed for it if it isn’t good, and therefore our unsuccessful experiments are far more damaging than in any other profession.”

“I wonder if that’s really true?” Albee asked. “Actors are very seldom blamed, at least in the United States, for the failure of a play. It always seems to be the author. But to go back to what I was saying before about writing a play: there are two interesting moments of discovery. The time of sitting down at the typewriter and finding out what you have been thinking about — that’s rather exciting. Then, in spite of the anguish of it, the rehearsal period is exciting too, because then you find out to what extent what you had thought the play would look and sound like can relate to what emerges. And this really doesn’t have much to do with acting or directing; it’s how close your vision can be realized. It’s quite fascinating. ...”

Gielgud interrupted: “You know that Shaw once said that you should be able to write the entire plot of a good play on a postcard. I can’t imagine that you could follow this advice with regard to your play now.”

“Could you do that with Hamlet, for example?” Albee asked. “What is the plot of Hamlet?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Gielgud said. “I once tried to explain the plot of Twelfth Night to Debbie Reynolds, who was going to read two speeches in Hollywood for a picture, and I got into such terribly deep waters with Olivia and Viola, and which characters were disguised as ladies, and which were in love with gentlemen, that I really had to give up.”

“Shaw should have known better than to say that,” Albee added, “because sometimes he wrote prefaces half the length of a play not explaining even half the play.”

“I think,” Gielgud went on, “he only meant that the essential point of a play should be able to be expressed very easily and simply. But I rather agree with you. I don’t think you can do it with Shakespeare‚ and I doubt if you can even do it with the Greeks.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Albee said. “I would think that if a play can be stated in a couple of sentences, that should be the length of the play. One writer was asked to explain one of his books, and he took a copy down and started reading, and he said, I will stop when I get to the last page of the book, and that’s what it’s about.’ I think possibly Shaw was joking, possibly kidding himself.”

Gielgud laughed: “Besides, of course, he was very fond of writing postcards!”

“The pressure on playwrights to sell out to what the audience wants is enormous

“The theater’s always been in a crisis,” Gielgud said. “Everything that comes along — television, movies— we always say, ‘No more theater, we’ve killed it.’ The music hall — the variety stage, I mean — certainly had a crisis, which pretty well destroyed it. There’s no more variety really; it’s moved into other fields — movies and television. There’s too much entertainment. Nowadays, too much entertainment is thrust on the public, whether they like it or not, so that they’ve become soporific and are apt to accept anything they’re given. The writers have gone to Hollywood and to television, and there are not enough good writers to go round. Everything has to go much faster.”

Albee disagreed: “Both in England and the United States there are quite enough playwrights. I suspect there are more young playwrights in the United States and England right now than there have been in the past thirty years put together. And in the United States and England there are quite enough fine actors and directors to handle the work of these good, exciting young playwrights. The basic crisis the theater’s in now is that the audience primarily wants a reaffirmation of its values, wants to see the status quo‚ wants to be entertained rather than disturbed, wants to be comforted and really doesn’t want any kind of adventure in the theater, at least from living playwrights — they’ll take it from dead ones because that’s part of lit-cult.

“The pressure on playwrights to sell out to what the audience wants is enormous. They don’t have to go to Hollywood; they don’t have to write for television; they’re encouraged to sell out even if they stay in New York and write for the theater. Actors sell out in order to earn a living and to support their families; they’re encouraged to play in bad plays because primarily it’s the bad play that the audience wants. But there’s no lack of good playwrights, no lack of good actors.

“One of the things that happened, in New York at any rate, was that the off-Broadway theater came into existence to fill the enormous gap. The result was that three or four years ago, I think, there were one hundred and twenty productions off Broadway, a lot of them by exciting young playwrights with all the actors working for absolutely next to nothing to fill the gap that existed on Broadway, where the important plays weren’t being done.”

“In a way, the same thing happened many years ago in England,” Gielgud said. “When I was first in theater, in the early twenties, we did some Chekhov plays in a little tiny theater, which was a converted movie house across the river in Hammersmith. They were very successful, and we all played for ten pounds a week. These were the first interesting — and fashionable — successes of Chekhov in England, and at that time Chekhov was as advanced as you or Pinter is today.

“So there’s always been this movement, and nearly always the young actors and the young playwrights have got their first chances for less money and have made their reputations from the ground floor, which is the right way. After all, every craftsman has to learn his trade, and I don’t think there’s any harm in young actors and young playwrights having a hard time at the beginning of their careers. It only spurs them on to do better.”

“I agree that it’s wonderful,” Albee said, “that the young actors should get their training, as you say, on the ground floor and suffer a little bit.

“It’s a very difficult thing to say where the commercial theater becomes cheap. . .”

“But I think it’s ironic and unfortunate that once they have gotten their training in excellent plays, they’re encouraged to go on to the larger theaters and do plays that aren’t so good.”

“That’s quite true,” Gielgud said. “But how do you really classify a play that’s not so good? What do you mean by a bad play?”

Albee smiled and then answered: “What I mean by a bad play is a play I don’t like, naturally.”

“Well, that’s what I mean too,” Gielgud said. “But it’s a very difficult thing to say where the commercial theater becomes cheap, isn’t it?”

“You can tell, I suppose, the intention of a work,” Albee said. “You can tell by the intention if it’s written for what the audience wants.”

“I haven’t seen it yet,” Gielgud went on, “but Luv is obviously as good as The Typists and The Tiger‚ which were a great success off Broadway. Now Luv is as big a success on Broadway, and I imagine it has exactly the same quality and firstclass presentation, so there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Things are always relative. I think that the extraordinary thing is that we managed to keep going in both countries during the war and since the war, when everybody came back shaking to the core and everything was changed, values were changed in every direction.”

“I don’t really think it is relative,” Albee said. “One season, I don’t remember which one it was, the ‘59—’60 or the ‘61–’62, the following playwrights — and this is only a partial list—were not performed in the commercial theaters on Broadway: Beckett, Brecht, Genet, Ionesco, O’Casey, de Ghelderode, Shaw, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov — that’s a partial list. These people weren’t performed on Broadway; every one of them was performed off Broadway. Actually, I think offBroadway shouldn’t exist. All the plays done off Broadway should be done on Broadway. I think the commercial theater, appealing as it must be to a larger audience, does sin somewhat, and I do think that actors and directors and playwrights can be swept into this morass altogether too easily.”

“Well, I’m grateful for the commercial plays I’ve acted in. I’ve played in plays by Coward and by N. C. Hunter and even by Priestley and Knoblock. They were all commercial plays; they were very successful. I enjoyed playing in them because they gave me a new public and I was able to develop new skill as a performer. I think an actor ought to know how to play ‘boulevard’ comedy as well as mystery plays or thrillers or farces. Nobody could say that Rex Harrison hasn’t increased his status as a performer by his performance in My Fair Lady, which is one of the finest pieces of virtuoso acting I ever saw in my life. And he was equally brilliant, I understand — although unfortunately I didn’t see it— in a play of Chekhov’s called Platonov, I think, which he did at the Royal Court for only about four or five weeks.

“No one should dare to criticize an actor for being as skilled and as versatile as that. If he can decorate a very smart comedy by Roussin or Noel Coward brilliantly, then it justifies his appearing in it. I think that every actor has the right to do that, especially if he can vary it by playing the classics, and the experience will help him in playing in a modern play like yours.”

“Indeed‚” Albee said. “But the point is that there should be competitive coexistence. I’ve no objections to the musicals and the sex comedies inhabiting our commercial theater. The objection I have is that they inhibit our commercial theater, and there’s no competitive coexistence with the more important plays, or damn little.”

“There will always be that kind of theater in any great capital city,” Gielgud said. “There’s no doubt about it, you won’t get rid of it however much Brecht you push on. I don’t think you will ever have a big commercial success with a Brecht play in any country except possibly in Germany. Certainly they haven’t been either in England or here. I’ve always thought the cult of Brecht highly overpraised, personally, and I’ve never understood why everybody goes mad about him. I have read the plays in translation — I don’t speak German — and I find them very unpalatable except for their purely theatrical quality. The wonderful way they were directed in Berlin was what appealed to me.

“It’s the same thing with Peter Brook’s Marat Sade play, which has been such a success in London. I couldn’t take in the literary details of the play, but the theatrical presentation delighted and thrilled me. I suppose as an actor one is more inclined to be taken by that, and that’s where one sometimes quarrels with authors who naturally want the written word to be the most important thing.”

Albee smiled and then said: “You seem to have trouble with playwrights whose names begin with “B” — Brecht and Beckett. I’m glad that my name isn’t Balbee!”

“Perhaps the bankers should be asked to do the directing”

“The National Theater in London has been a marvelous success,” Gielgud said, “because Olivier has done a brilliant job. He’s given three wonderful performances himself, and there have been two or three other productions in which he was not starring that have also been successful. But I daresay the balance sheet may not be all that he requires. I should think they lose a great deal of money just from changing the scenery over and the lighting over. What they’ve been clever about, of course, is that they’ve taken the Old Vic and turned it into a nursery company, to move later on to the National Theater, which is not yet built. They tried to do the same thing here, but obviously they weren’t successful in choosing the actors or the program. When somebody suggested that Rex Harrison should star in Caesar and Cleopatra for the opening of your new repertory theater, there was a great outcry. They said this isn’t what Lincoln Center is for. Yet the fact remains that Olivier’s Othello has been the jewel of the National Theater’s first two seasons, and maybe if Rex had played Caesar, it would have started the thing off with a big success. I’m not saying that it should be so— it seems dangerous to try and give any opinion when you weren’t in on the discussions of what the program should be or what the company should be.

“I think that for the reasons we were talking about — the lack of American actors with versatile experience it’s probably harder to get a good nursery company here than it is in London. We have the same difficulty, but fortunately we have a lot of provincial repertory theaters from which we can take people. Peter Brook and Peter Hall have got a wonderful company now at the Aldwych, and Peter Hall at Stratford on Avon and Olivier at the National Theater have line companies — not equally fine, but they are beginning to be very good. And these two theaters are paying their actors much better than ever before, which is naturally important, with television and the commercial theater both competing for performers, and I think they have the chance of creating two wonderful companies.”

“The only thing that would seem to be true of Lincoln Center,” Albee said, “is that the people who were ostensibly put in charge of that theater — Kazan and Whitehead — quite evidently weren’t. The fact that they’ve been, in effect, ‘dismissed’ by some sort of nameless governing body suggests to me that they didn’t have the authority to even try to make a good theater out of it in the first place. I find that shocking.”

Gielgud interrupted: “I think it must be very hard to work under a governing body. Anthony Quayle and Glenn Byam Shaw both ran the Stratford on Avon theater for about four, five, eight years each. They were always telling me that the governing body was marvelously tolerant, but I always said I didn’t think I could bear to work under such conditions. It certainly exhausted them most frightfully. But the fact remains that it’s obviously going to take three or four years of being in control and being given a very free hand by your bosses to create something really good.”

“Perhaps, in that case,” Albee said, “the bankers should be asked to do the directing of the plays at Lincoln Center. Of course we do have a number of repertory companies — not with their own theaters — in this country. The APA is a rather good one. There are a number of good ones outside New York. And for all of its shenanigans, the Living Theater was an excellent repertory company off Broadway. Actually, it would be unfair to say anything about Lincoln Center since the men who tried to run it weren’t allowed to make an honorable attempt to run it. And what can you say about the first year and a half of a repertory company? You can’t say a thing about it. The only thing you can say, perhaps, is that a number of playwrights and a lot of actors have refused to become involved with it; and I don’t think it’s only for financial reasons.”

“Drama critics unfortunately have totalitarian power”

“Oh, I would never discuss critics,” Gielgud said. “They never can say the right thing for you however much they praise you. If they don’t like you, you think they have a personal animus against you, so that I’ve always been very embarrassed by knowing them, though I’ve had quite a number among my friends. I never feel I can talk quite freely with them; sometimes I think that they may be prejudiced, either in my favor or against me, for the very fact that I know them off the stage.

“I think it’s a frightfully moot point. Looking back, when I’ve been rash enough to do so, in my scrapbooks of many years, I’ve found that on the whole the criticism of plays I have acted in has not been unduly unfair. I don’t think many roses are born to blush unseen. I think if a thing has real quality and distinction somebody notices it. I don’t think that many very interesting actors or actresses or very good plays are ignored or dismissed. I think it’s very rare that you get a completely distinguished and impartial man to write criticism, because his work is quite as hard as ours and less well paid —certainly in the highest bracket — and he has to see too many bad plays and write his notices in too much of a hurry. And if critics are proud of their own craft, they’re very interested in their own writing style, quite apart from what they may be writing about. That’s why Shaw and Beerbohm were so wonderful they only did criticism for about a year and a half.”

“Another good thing about them,” Albee said, “was that they were both writers primarily.” He stopped and thought for a moment: “It’s not wise for a playwright to say too much about drama critics because unfortunately they have totalitarian power and authority. I think ideally that all of the drama critics should be subject to re-election each year by playwrights and actors. It’s enough to get a good review for the wrong reason.”

“Is ‘Tiny Alice’ meant to he intentionally confusing?”

“What can I say about Tiny Alice?” Albee asked himself. “The play is not supposed to be terribly easily apprehensible. It’s meant to contain things that the audience must take out of the theater with them and think about.

“Now there have been some objections to this — the play is obscure and difficult. I can’t understand this as being a complaint about a play. If a play is confused and muddled in its thinking, then that’s bad writing. But if a play demands a little bit from the audience, including the audience of critics, then I don’t think that’s a failure on the play’s part. Or am I getting defensive?”

“I read a notice,” Gielgud said, “which claims that the audience coughs all through this play. Well, this is quite untrue, because I listen for the coughs like an eagle, and if there is a cough I’ve not a bad idea of how to stop it— at any rate. I have a jolly good try. The fact remains that this is a most holding play. I said at rehearsal, though you weren’t present, that nobody would ever sit through my death scene — they’ll all be charging out getting their snow boots. But I must say I haven’t seen anybody leave before the end of the play.

“And this is the magic of the theater, which you never get in a movie quite in the same way because it’s set forever, whereas the performances in a play can vary like the ticking of a metronome. We actors count on the audience as a sort of sounding board, and they count on us to give them the excitement and the stimulus which they come into a theater to get. If both sides give enough of it, then the result is usually an exciting and rewarding performance‚ and I think this play, from what I feel on the stage, supplies that excitement practically all the way through, which is a very rare thing, and this is really the test of an acted play.

“Oh, of course it’s not an easy play. I think there are many things that are very confusing, but I think you meant that. I’ve often lost my way when I’m watching a play. I don’t think seeing a play once you can ever take in all the details of it. Many people have told me they want to see it again. I’m sure countless people will want to read it.”

“You’re quite right,” Albee agreed. “How can one possibly say one likes a play and not see it a second or a third time.” He stopped and pondered for a moment: “Is Tiny Alice meant to be intentionally confusing? I wonder if I meant it to be intentionally confusing. Maybe I meant it to be something a little different from confusing—provocative‚ perhaps, rather than confusing.”

Gielgud broke in: “From the ordinary standpoint it seems that there are a great many threads that you don’t bother to tie up‚ but presumably you did this quite deliberately. They don’t affect the way we act it‚ I don’t think. It’s a very rare thing to have a play, as you said earlier, in which there is no locale definite, in which the ages are not definite, in which the time of day is not particularly defined, and which still seems to have a wonderful suspense value. One wants to know what will happen to the characters in the next situation, and this is something you’ve contrived, I think, amazingly successfully.

“The actual content, the metaphysics, and the arguments do baffle me in quite a number of cases. Most of those places we discussed at rehearsal, and you modified some of them, changed some of them, cut others. I think there are still things which could be straightened out perhaps, but you’ve written the play and you’ve completed it‚ and presumably that’s what you wanted to say.”

“It’s never what I’ve wanted to say,” Albee said. “I always find things I want to change; but curiously, the only bafflement that you show in playing the part of Julian is the proper bafflement that Julian must feel.”

“The wonderful relief,” Gielgud said, “that I had about this part was that I was supposed to keep wondering what it was all about. I was on easier ground than the other actors, who are supposed to know what they’re about.”

Albee interrupted: “And the audience has got to follow the play through you because you’re the innocent coming into this rather extraordinary assemblage of people.”

“What is more difficult for the audience,” Gielgud said, “is the relationship between the other people. I think that the relationship between the butler and the lawyer — in fact, the butler’s whole position in the play does seem to me to be rather unexplained. Another thing that has always confused me is why you never let Julian refer to the ‘deal.’ He must know that he is the go-between with the cardinal and that the money has been offered through him. In fact, Miss Alice implies many times that the deal will fall through if Julian doesn’t behave as she wants. But you’ve never allowed me specifically to refer to the money in any way. I suppose it’s something to do with the innocence of my character, but I’ve always wondered — when I’m dying they take the money, and the cardinal leaves with it, and I never quite know whether to be even aware that this has happened.

“It is a point in the character that I rather fail to understand. Of course I’m diverted by her questioning in the first scene with Miss Alice; but throughout the entire play f never refer directly to the deal, to the matter at hand. It’s only obliquely referred to.”

“In the beginning, the innocence,” Albee said. “In the end, because you’re preoccupied with your own dying and not with who is carrying off what suitcase full of papers. And also because the whole arrangement about the money was more of a pretext. . . .”

“But in a way,” Gielgud interrupted, “it is the fundamental point of the play. I’m not at all worried by the fact of why she wants to give her money away; I think that’s a perfectly good premise to start the play on. I think that the more difficult things are when you begin to wonder whether it’s Alice who is also directing the three protagonists —the woman, the lawyer, the butler —as well as presumably directing my steps to come to her, which is what she really wants and what they really want.”

“We’re sounding now as we did in the first week of rehearsal,” Albee said. “And the play is already open. I guess we have to assume that that scene took place in the intermission between the first and second acts. There is one other thing, however, and it’s going to sound like the proper thing to say, except you must believe I don’t say the proper thing. It’s that I can’t imagine the play better acted or better directed. I say this only in gratitude and not as obligation.” He suddenly smiled: “I know you want to know what the play is about, John, but I don’t know yet, so I can’t say.”

Gielgud smiled and then broke into laughter: “I hope I shall know by the end of the run.”