Peter Holland offered a more complex, detailed account of the play's most difficult moment:
All problems in the play pale into insignificance beside Valentine's handing over of the nearly raped Silvia to the rapist: "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee" (5.4.83). Thacker's production, while not making the line unproblematic, offered it as a problem squarely confronted and tentatively solved. The production had, slowly and thoughtfully. allowed the significance of the women to grow as the play progressed, accepting their rights to decide what happens to them, their ability to initiate action and to actualise a form of friendship that the men talk of but cannot carry through into action. It seemed only logical and fully justifiable therefore to see Silvia resolving the play's crux ... Thacker's modest and highly intelligent solution reintegrated the moment into the development of the comedy as this production had explored it. After Proteus's "My shame and guilt confounds me" [5.4.77] Barry Lynch left a colossal pause, showing Proteus considering the possibility of conning Valentine again, before finally resolving on genuine repentance. If the audience hesitated slightly as to the genuineness of the repentance--and Lynch's smirk was so beguiling that one had to have a moment's pause--it was Silvia's silent intercession, a calm gesture of moving towards Proteus, that reassured them. Her judgement that this man was worth forgiveness justified Valentine's generosity, a symbolic act of love and respect for Silvia as much as of friendship for Proteus. Such work, accepting the play's difficulty, was as honest and intelligent as one could wish for.53
Robert Smallwood describes how, in Edward Hall's production,
The journey of the play was marked by two single gender, non-sexual embraces: at the end of the first scene by a valedictory hug of separation, expected all through the scene, between the leading men, Proteus and Valentine; at the end of the last scene, by an embrace of welcome and union, expected all through the scene, between the leading women, Julia and Sylvia. The embraces framed the intervening account of the awkwardnesses and inadequacies of the play's heterosexual relationships.54
Alastair Macaulay analyzed the leading performances perceptively, again highlighting their youth:
Four little-known young actors are given important breaks in the leading roles. Of these, the most completely successful is Poppy Miller as Silvia, who brings bite, freshness, interest to every least episode she is given. As Proteus, Dominic Rowan starts coolly but well, and with charm; later, when losing his cool, he becomes somewhat too emphatic to convince. Tom Goodman-Hill develops the opposite way as Valentine: beginning rather stiff and tepid, he acquires, when in adversity, a wonderful stillness and quiet philosophical authority that helps to explain the emotional wisdom with which he resolves the play's climax--forgiving Proteus and even offering to give up Silvia--with such brisk simplicity. Lesley Vickerage, though lacking edge, is a Julia of beauty and vulnerability.55
Of Fiona Buffini's 2004 production, Michael Billington argued that,
Without overplaying the point, Buffini also suggests that there is a homoerotic twist to this tale of love and betrayal in which the caddish Proteus attempts to steal his best friend's girl. When Laurence Mitchell's Proteus and Alex Avery's Valentine initially part, you half expect them to indulge in a farewell kiss. And later, when Valentine shockingly says to Proteus "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee," you realise this is a world in which male bonding counts for more than hetero urges. What is usually seen as a trial run for the later comedies here becomes an intriguing study of what Rene Girard called "triangular desire," in which two men are indissolubly linked by their desire to possess the same woman. Buffini implies all this with grace and wit. And, even if she strangely bungles the classic scene in which the eloping Valentine is caught with a telltale rope ladder, she brings out the extent to which the women become bemused spectators of laddish love-games. Rachel Pickup's excellent Silvia has a touching vulnerability as she is cast adrift wearing little more than a Freudian slip and Vanessa Ackerman movingly suggests that Julia's passion for Proteus is sadly misplaced.56
One Man and His Dog
However much or little critics enjoy the performances of the two pairs of lovers, though, it must be said that there is one double-act that never fails to delight. Shakespeare's plays are often recalled in the popular imagination by some special character, for example the ghost in Hamlet or the Witches in Macbeth. The Two Gentlemen has a dog. The play's two comedians Speed and Lance/Launce are admirably contrasted. Speed, as his name implies, is all quick wit and mercurial dash, and actors have generally made the most of their opportunity with the role, while Lance's fidelity to his dog provides a counterpoint to the inconsistencies of the human affections in the play.
Lance and Crab were the most widely praised performances in Peter Hall's production:
Patrick Wymark as Launce animated his repetitive speeches by a variety of timing and emphasis, and based all on a sympathetic understanding of the large-minded, stubborn character who is yet at the mercy of circumstance. He made the audience wait for words, when he could do so without slowing up his performance, and so invited them to enter his view of the world of the play: correcting Speed for counting "slow of speech" among his maid's vices, he then looked in blank wonder at the audience so that the following line, "To be slow in words is a woman's only virtue," was the necessary statement they had been waiting for, an exaggeration which satisfied where it might have fallen dead with its stale wit.57
His dog, Crab, took to the stage like a veteran. A small white terrier ... he has the priceless theatrical attribute of repose and an uncanny knack of putting on the right expression--even a yawn ... Most people, I think, will say they have seen a play about a dog.58
Patrick Stewart playing Lance in 1970 gave a richly characterized performance:
but what makes his [Phillips'] production unforgettable is his amazing vision of Launce (Patrick Stewart) and his dog, Crab. Who would have thought that this servant, usually so crude and vulgar, could so certainly be the play's sad, dark angel, harsh and sinister, yet with such depth of feeling, and so schematically beautiful as he stands framed in a panel at the back of the stage gravely contemplating the apparent happiness of his employers?59
Crab on this occasion was played by Blackie, a good-natured mongrel, who, as Peter Roberts comments, was "a cur of the kind that would win a sneer at Crufts and a very big bone everywhere else":60
He [Stewart] recites most of his lines in the company of a big dog, Blackie, and he needs all his talent and experience to prevent Blackie from stealing several scenes. In one of Launce's long speeches Blackie emitted a big yawn. It nearly brought the house down.61
Critics frequently comment on the resemblance between man and dog. In John Barton's double bill, it was the dog's resemblance to the director which struck a number of reviewers, as well as its appearance in Titus:
When John Barton assigned the role of Crab against considerable canine opposition to an old English sheepdog named Heidi, there were murmurings in Stratford about "mirror images." Barton himself now affects a shaggy, rumpled appearance from his grizzled head to his Hush Puppies.*62
Richard Moore as Lance in Thacker's immensely popular production achieved a remarkable comic performance: "a blend of Leonard Rossiter, Tony Hancock and a big-eared Victorian toby jug, never more hilarious than when he is lugubriously berating a dog which, on opening night, stood and implored the audience for rescue, death, anything but this."63
Margaret Ingram's evocative account concluded,
But I have not mentioned Launce (Richard Moore) and his dog Crab (Woolly) who perhaps contributed most of all, Launce with his lugubrious humour and Crab who evinced a look between dullness and despair at being confined on a brightly lit stage when he might have been enjoying a dog's life elsewhere but who nevertheless seemed to appreciate that, this being a British audience, he received the greatest applause of the evening.64
Mark Hadfield's performance in Edward Hall's production was also singled out: "The most entert
aining scenes of Two Gentlemen belong to Launce (Mark Hadfield is a fine clown) and his faithful, similarly downbeat mongrel, Crab."65 Robert Smallwood described him as a "sad and knowing Launce," and Cassie's Crab as "a most economically paced performance."66 In Buffini's 2004 production Lance was played by Andrew Melville, "a lachrymose Scot and his dog Crab, an elderly Irish wolfhound, whose only crime on stage was to yawn--not fair comment."67
Conclusion
In his discussion of the play, quoted in the 1992 program, Stanley Wells concludes that it is "a failure" but it is "far from being a total failure."
[The] most important reason for the play's success is that however immature he may be in other ways, he [Shakespeare] is already completely assured as a writer of comic prose, of lyrical verse, and even sometimes of genuine dramatic verse. When we try to get below the surface of the play, we find that it rests on shaky foundations. In these circumstances, the best thing to do seems to be to come up to the surface again and examine that.68
Successful productions have done just that; they have attended to the play's surface, updating it with contemporary settings and ideas to suggest modern parallels, which, far from detracting from the text have enabled its virtues of vigor, freshness, and lyrical charm to shine through.
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH DAVID THACKER AND EDWARD HALL
David Thacker was born in Northamptonshire in 1950. He was the artistic director of the Young Vic from 1984 to 1993, where his directorial achievements included The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Stags and Hens, Macbeth, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Enemies Within, The Crucible, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Some Kind of Hero, Ghosts, Julius Caesar, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He directed the production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona discussed below for the RSC in 1991, and became director-in-residence for the company in 1993. He is a prolific television director and is currently the artistic director of the Octagon Theatre, Bolton. He has won Olivier Awards for Best Director (Pericles) and Best Revival (Pericles) and the London Fringe Award for Best Director (Ghosts) and Best Production (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
Edward Hall, son of the RSC's founder Sir Peter Hall, was born in 1967 and trained at Leeds University and the Mountview Theatre School before cutting his teeth at the Watermill Theatre in the 1990s. His first Shakespearean success was a production of Othello in 1995, though he used the experience as inspiration to found Propeller, an all-male theater company with whom he directed The Comedy of Errors and Henry V, which ran together in repertory during the 1997-98 season, and Twelfth Night in 1999, all at the Watermill. In 1998 he made his directorial debut with the RSC on the production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona discussed below, and went on to work with the company on Henry Vin 2000-01 and Julius Caesar the following season. In between Henry and Caesar, Hall returned to the Watermill to direct Rose Rage, his (in)famous and celebrated abattoir-set adaptation of the Henry VI trilogy. He has continued to work with Propeller on such productions as A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2003 and Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew in 2007, becoming artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre in 2010.
Two Gents is regarded as an early play, an apprentice piece, in which characters and plot are not fully realized; did this perception affect your production in any way?
Thacker: I think it's an exceptionally good play. I've liked it since the first time I encountered it. There may have been people who thought, because of the imaginative choices we took in our production, that I felt the play needed shoring up in some way, but that was never the case. I think it is self-evidently a young person's play, written by a young man; it has a lot of the enthusiasm and spontaneity of youth, and also the innocence of youth. I felt that the style of it was very pure and shows Shakespeare at an advanced stage in his development.
Hall: No, not really. There is a youthful exuberance and energy about the writing that I imagine is the expression of a young writer first discovering the possibilities of drama. Like The Taming of the Shrew, another early play, and to a degree The Comedy of Errors, there is a wonderfully warm, enthusiastic style that is all about youth, about young people. When you embrace that it's exciting: to feel the real spirit of youth, as embodied by the four principles, coming off the page. When you feel that, suddenly all those academic worries and concerns about the printed text recede in the "doing" of it. We certainly found that when we were working on it.
Many of the most successful productions have updated the play and set it in recognizable modern locations; when and where was your production set?
Thacker: As a director I need to imagine a world in which I believe the events of the play could plausibly take place. It's sometimes difficult to explain why it is that a particular way of staging or presenting a play comes into your mind. In this particular case I can remember vividly that I was lying in bed reading the play, thinking about the possibility of doing it, and the songs of the late twenties and early thirties came into my mind. Years before I had done a play about life in Lancashire between the two world wars--it was called The Rose Between Two Thorns--which consisted entirely of transcribed verbatim material. In it we had used a lot of songs from the period, so those songs were quite familiar to me and I had become very fond of many of them. I found myself hearing those songs as I was reading Two Gents and it struck me that some of the lyrics and also the melodies of the songs seemed to be a very close correlative to what Shakespeare was investigating in this play. The innocence of some of these Cole Porter and Gershwin songs, and some of those other songs from the period, suddenly made me wonder whether this play would work well if set in that period.
At that time I was not particularly clear in my own mind that one might use songs from the period. I was still having this little imaginative adventure while reading the play, but then I read it through again more carefully and began to feel that the period would work extremely well for the play.
I started to check out the dates of composition of the songs and talk to the designer, Shelagh Keegan, about whether or not she felt the play would work well aesthetically in that era. We looked at what kind of clothes people were wearing at the time. The next piece of the jigsaw arrived when I received a letter from Guy Woolfenden, who had composed music for every play by Shakespeare at the RSC apart from Two Gents. He wrote me a very charming letter to ask whether I would be prepared to consider him to compose the music for the production. I phoned him up and said, "Well, of course I'd be privileged if you were to do it, Guy, but I should tell you that I've got this very strong idea about how I'd like to do the play and you may think it's terrible; and if you did I wouldn't be offended but you might feel that it wasn't an idea that you would like to run with as composer." I explained the idea and almost immediately he said, "My father had a band in that period and I love that music, and I think it's the most fantastic idea." We met up, and he brought along with him well over one hundred examples of songs from the period, and we convinced ourselves very rapidly that this was going to be a way of enabling the play to have a full and vivid expression.
Some people may not agree, but I can say with total conviction and honesty that the wish to set it in that context, using that music, was because we respected the play enormously--not because we thought it needed improving in some way. The music became like an additional design feature. We had a band on stage the whole time and a female crooner singing, and sometimes the songs would actually underscore the text. It was an organic process whereby we decided to run with that as a settled concept. I have to say that of all the productions that I have ever directed, it is one that I have been most proud of, because I think it reached the audience in a really powerful way. After playing at the Swan and then the Barbican it had a national tour and also became the first play by Shakespeare for many years to transfer to the West End.
Hall: Our production was set in modern-day Italy. It was a very stylish, fashionable setting; that was the touchstone to the production. The wood was a wasteland where we stripped everythi
ng away, almost like the side of an autoroute somewhere in the middle of Italy. We kept a contemporary Italian feel to it which fed the play in a very satisfactory way.
The play has an intrinsic interest in twoness: two gents, two girls, two fathers, two comic servants, and so on; how did you explore/exploit this patterning?
Thacker: Not in any conscious way. So much of Shakespeare is to do with antithesis, both in his linguistic techniques and within the language that he chooses to use. He clearly sets up opposites but it wasn't something that we particularly highlighted, we just allowed it to play out as it was expressed.
Of course, the two servants are wonderfully contrasting and they play brilliantly. Richard Moore gave, I think, one of his favorite performances playing Lance and we were blessed with the most wonderful dog, Woolley, who sadly has passed away now. Woolley and Richard were so popular and made such a strong impression that there was even a cartoon in The Times of the two of them.
Hall: We didn't make a particular effort to exploit it, but yes, it has a pair of everything, apart from a pair of dogs--so you could argue that the whole thing is set up to make Crab work as best as possible! The early plays have a lot of pairs in them; possibly the death of his twin son, Hamnet, is fresh in his mind [the other twin, a daughter, Judith, survived]. It's also to do with two halves of the self. Twins represent two people feeling different things and disagreeing and then coming together to agree. You are split down the middle, and when people come together and understand each other they become more whole as people, as individuals.