In the thoroughly passive state to which I have been reduced by this bout of covid I have found myself perhaps watching more TV than usual. This can throw up some interesting experiences (apart from indicating the eclectic nature of my TV taste–or perhaps that of my wife.) We are working our way through the four episodes of that great political comedy House of Cards. This has coincided with a really great film of the Rolling Stones on their “stripped down” tour. The way in which the mind works can occasionally produce some surprising, but really interesting comparisons. I’ve been thinking about the remarkable differences between two approaches to performance …. Ian Richardson in the House of Cards, and Mick Jagger on stage.
When I was a university teacher I used to offer a course entitled Society as Theatre, in which I explored the interest of the theatrical metaphor for social science. I got to know quite a bit about acting, and different traditions of performance, and this all came to mind again last night.
Jagger is undoubtedly a phenomenon. He absolutely embodies the music. Every part of him is in motion, reflecting or commenting on the music, responding to the rhythm or interpreting in some way the words. He absolutely commands the stage, and hence the entire auditorium. “Commands” is actually a suitable word, because there is something about his gestures which imposes his presence on the audience, and hence on the music. I have to admit that I’ve never seen anything like it. It is hard to imagine anything more different from the acting of Ian Richardson, in the role of Francis Urquart, in House of Cards. For me, the summit of acting achievement in the series is the number of occasions in which Urquart directs a fraction of a second of attention–no more than the flicker of an eye–to the viewer. I suppose that this is the TV equivalent of the Shakespearian “stage aside”, but to much more transitory and subtle. These fractions of a second are masterful, as they manage to implicate the viewer as collaborative in the action. We understand something, shared with Urquart, that the other participants in the action don’t. It is astonishingly under-stated, but devastatingly effective.