I may have ruined myself for Churchill: The Play.
Seriously.
And
may now do the same for you, though that's not my intent. But added
perspective is a powerful thing.
See, I recently “discovered” the work of a forgotten American writer—a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, ironically—named Robert Lewis Taylor, who alternated between magazine profiles, novels and full-length biographies. And among the bios was one titled (in hardcover) Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness. (The more ubiquitous paperback release, also out of print, was given the much less interesting and less tonally accurate subtitle, The Biography of a Great Man.) [You can download this public domain book for free at the Internet Archive. You may have to sign up for a likewise free membership, but once that's established and activated, go to this page for a PDF or a scanned EPUB: https://archive.org/services/borrow/winstonchurchill00tayl ]
What
distinguishes Taylor’s work, and puts him far ahead of many in the biography
game, is not only how exuberantly he brings his subjects to life, but how
wittily and incisively—and economically. He doesn’t report exhaustively,
in the modern, often-overkill manner; he
reports selectively, to give you
overview, essence, dimension and above all, soul. He captures his subject in a brilliant evocation of spirit. Here’s
an early sample from his Winston Churchill book, published while Churchill was still a living,
very public figure:
In
any study of a foremost man it is of vital interest to ponder the probable
causes of his rise above the mediocre and the merely talented. The people who
know Churchill best believe that his motive-power derives from a blend of three
main ingredients: matchless energy, a combination of intelligence and memory,
and the pushiest ambition since Alexander's wistful complaint about the
scarcity of worlds to conquer. Eminent physicians have decreed that energy is
born and not made, that humans, through the secret formulas of heredity,
receive an impetus at birth which sets the pace for their bumpy journey across
the mortal span. In a general way, then, the life-force is influenced more by
ancestors than by vitamins. Churchill has been fortunate in both departments;
his ancestors could hardly have been selected with greater profit, and his
successes with nourishment have been a source of international amity. The
Russians in the late war, while disgruntled at his funny suit, were enormously
impressed by Churchill at the board. The impunity with which he absorbed caviar
and vodka convinced the Soviet leaders that they were fighting on the right
side. Hitler, a bilious ascetic, had drunk next to nothing and picked at his
food like an anxious raccoon.
The
fathomless wellsprings of energy that drive Churchill have led to interesting
alterations in his home of Chartwell, a red brick, nineteen-bedroom farm
establishment he acquired in 1923, near the village of Westerham, in the county
of Kent. Not long after he bought the place, with his literary earnings, he
went down to watch some bricklayers patch things up here and there. He quickly
conceived the notion, not entirely foreign to him in other connections, that
here was an enterprise at which he could readily excel. He got a trowel and a
barrowful of bricks and set to work on a crumbling outhouse. The head
bricklayer thereupon advised him that laying brick was not something one went
around doing promiscuously but involved joining a union. With a little help, Churchill
practiced up in secret, to the point where he was laying, as he said, "two
bricks a minute," then he applied for membership in the Southern Counties
Division Building Union. The application provoked a genuinely heart-warming
row. One local branch went on record as considering the gesture a piece of
"dangerous and degrading buffoonery," and another suggested that all
bricklayers desist from drinking beer, so as to withhold beer-tax funds from
the Exchequer, of which Churchill was then Chancellor.
I wish adapter-performer Ronald Keaton had come anywhere that level of spiritedness, but I simply found his show to be a very typical stage bio for one actor, constructed to the usual paradigm—we enter on the main character in his lair, he notices us and instead of calling the cops, accepts that our presence is perfectly natural and then, with no discernible motivation, tells the story of his life and career. Oh, it’s pleasant enough, and Mr. Keaton decent enough company, but it somehow lacks the implicitly promised grandeur of the title figure’s company.
In part, this has to do with the nature of the adaptation. For what, I wondered, was Mr. Keaton adapting. As it turns out, a teleplay by James Hume for a 1986 PBS special in which Robert Hardy portrayed Churchill for a live audience. According to this article (https://richardlangworth.com/leaders-churchill-with-robert-hardy-1986), it was not as accurate a bit of dramaturgy as it might be, and that, one assumes, accounts for at least some of Keaton’s motivation to revise and expand the script with additional research of his own.
But somehow that hasn’t improved matters, only made them drier and more academic. I have no idea how many of Humes’ “inaccuracies” were intended as dramatic license, but at its very core is the fact that Churchill gave a series of lectures in America. The lecture he posits never happened, and occurs years after the actual lectures took place; but in borrowing the circumstance, Humes delivered one of the most overlooked, yet key, ingredients any one actor show ought to have: a reason for the character to address the audience. In jettisoning that, Mr. Keaton also jettison’s urgency, overall motivation and over-arcing dramatic tension.
And
then, to be perfectly crass about it, there’s just this. Here’s an extended
montage of clips from Keaton’s portrayal of Churchill, at the play’s official
website. It’s a more than representative sampling. Click on the link here and,
when you get to the page, click the video tab. Return to this point when you’re done.
Now
compare what you've just seen to this, a far shorter clip, but I think far more to the point.
Robert Hardy in an excerpt from the original teleplay. Again, return when you're done.
I don’t (obviously) know about you, but by my lights, the contrast illustrates the difference between a very decent journeyman actor showing the effort of playing greatness, and a great actor revealing none of the work at all, just carrying himself with innate, natural, charismatic authority. Keaton is a seasoned pro who can hold stage respectably; Hardy is a force of nature. As well, the contrast seems to illustrate the difference (I hedge my bets here because the unabridged Hardy-Humes video is neither commercially available nor found online, save for this clip—not an easy resource to locate) between a script that takes a somewhat vanilla approach to a summary record of a life (Keaton’s adaptation); and one that specifically presents a man addressing an audience (Humes’ unaltered original) who has a passionate world-view to impart—a man who is actually, actively pursuing an objective that makes what he has to say seem urgent.
Now
don’t get me wrong; Mr. Keaton’s Churchill is
far from a misfire and it’s not to his discredit. He’s developed a nice little
show that he can take on tour, pull out of the trunk whenever, perform on
demand in special engagements and generally have on tap as a little annuity for
pretty much the rest of his life. More power to him. My appraisal is merely, or
perhaps not so merely, about the power of him. And how it seems proportional to the power of his dramatic
approach.
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