Interview with : John W.Harris

John .W. Harris is one the UK's leading authorities on mask Theatre and Commedia dell'Arte. He is a former Head of Drama at the University of Hull and his lectures at SMPC are always one of the highlights of the year. He also writes books and invents card games. Masks & Puppets caught up with him.

If the student is potentially an actor, they usually react with great interest. However, the effect of first wearing a mask can be claustrophobia, suffocation or disorientation. Even masters of Japanese Noh drama admit to having this experience at first. It is probably not a good thing to allow students to see themselves masked in a mirror until they have examined the mask and all its aspects first and thus become acquainted with it. If they have not done this the mirror will present them with an alien image which can have drastic consequences.

For instance, a first-time wearer can simply be paralysed into total inaction, as if removal of their known image has left them completely without resource. Another not infrequent response is for the masker to be-have in a very childish manner, as if some repressed part of their personality had been suddenly released. For instance, a person who is usually the most peaceable of individuals may start to go around punching people! It is as if the vision of an exterior face that is not their usual face neutralises their so-cial persona and all the learned behaviour patterns that accompany it.

In native rituals masks are often used as releasing agents to empty the personality of the wearer so that they may be 'possessed' by an external 'spirit', although arguably, such a spirit is probably some archetypal element of the wearer's own character.

Because of the power I have mentioned it is very desirable for the actor to take control of the mask since they are using it as a tool of communication rather than possession.

This is why there are pictures of Greek and Roman actors staring fixedly at their masks, shifting the angle so that they can see it from all of its aspects, noting the mood that each communicates, or aspects where it is neutral and has no mood at all, which means that any desired mood can be imposed upon it. In this way the actor is able to relate to a particular aspect of the mask to the emotion arising within them and physically link the two.

The association will eventually become virtually instinctive so that upon the feeling of the emotion an appropriate aspect of the mask will be presented without any intervening reflection. At this final stage, the actor will be truly 'playing the mask' and at that point what matters most is what is 'in' the mask, what the maker has put there to be found.

A mask can be highly expressive, but even at its best, its 'vocabulary' is far more limited than that of the face. When an actor wears a mask, they have to express themselves more through posture and movement of the arms and legs.

It is not surprising that the main mask cultures of the theatre, like Greek drama and Japanese Noh originate in dance. Arm and hand movements (if the audience are close enough to see them) are also very important. Kathakali, which is viewed from fairly close, has an intricate set of mudras, or communicative hand gestures. Early vase paintings of Greek drama show the actors wearing costumes with lines painted or woven down the arms, emphasising the movement to more distant audience.

Natural actors have an awareness of these needs although they can be greatly helped by being shown how to make them work better. They also need to learn that the process of selection is even more crucial when using a mask than it is in normal acting. The action must be boiled down to a number of clear and precise movements, each achieving a specific effect. Fussiness or 'wooliness' of any kind merely obscures the mask and is aesthetically unpleasing.

Yes and no. The kind of enhanced awareness I have mentioned, getting to know the mask and its moods and finding out what physical posture and movement is most effective for it, applies to all masks. However, you then have tragic masks and comic masks (if we consider only theatrical forms) and these are played in very different ways.

The comic masks demands more physical action to animate it because it is a simple type. The tragic mask, which often has more built-in subtleties requires more stillness and concentration on posture and facial image.

In the theatre, the mask has an iconic quality that makes it particularly appropriate for the treatment of heroic legend, folk or fairy tale - not unlike puppets, which are in one sense a more independent form of mask. The mask denies the intricacy of naturalism and for that reason is very good for heightened, stylised and essentially 'theatrical' forms of drama, such as farce and tragedy. Its simplicity and clarity of presentation causes the public to make imaginative leaps to 'flesh it out', even to the extent of sometimes truing to participate, instead of just sitting still and being 'fed'.

There is also an interesting doll-like quality to a masked actor which makes it possi-ble to present the extreme horrors of Greek tragedy without their seeming too ghastly, keeping them at arms length and thus making it more possible for the audience to think about what is happening rather than simply reacting to it - a kind of Brechtian Verfrendungseffekt.

The original tradition of theatre was undoubtedly masked dance, probably accompanied by choric narrative.Speeches then became allocated to specific members of the chorus who specialised as protagonist and antago-nist, and later to other characters. For centuries after that, the theatre dealt essentially in types, with the occasional character that was more complex and that developed as a result of what happened to it.

The pattern of an Elizabethan play, for example, was usually of one developing character (e.g. Hamlet) surrounded by a gallery of types, each of which was written for an actor who specialised in tat particular type of part. This tradition contin-ued until the melodrama of the 19th Century. Then came naturalism and the form of drama changed to simulate the detailed, 'internalised' approach to character of the popular novel and the effects of family and environment on the central character.

Despite attempts by absurdists and physical theatre to supersede this pattern, the exis-tence of highly visual and documentary media like film and particularly television has tended to fix western thea-tre in a naturalistic mould. Hence the alienation of the modern western audience from the mask and from pup-petty, except in the stop-animation forms which link up in the public mind with the cartoon film.

As a consequence, the puppet today is seen mostly as children's entertainment and the mask as something which comes out of a Christmas cracker - which is sad.

The answer is very simply no. Hull is one of the very few university drama departments that has consistently made use of masks, and even Hull has no course on puppetry.

Both should be studied by all drama students, partly on account of the aesthetic demands they make and the aesthetic pleasures they can provide, and partly because they point to a possible means of escape from over-explanatory and therefore increasingly 'deadening' forms of naturalistic entertainment.