Exit, Pursued by a Bear: the Movie
The Winter's Tale is not Shakespeare's most famous play.
It doesn't have a balcony scene, and no one gets turned into a donkey. There are no introspective graveyard scenes with human skulls, and no one, at any point, longs for a horse at any price.
But The Winter's Tale secures its position in the Shakespearian canon for at least one reason. It features what is beyond a shadow of doubt the most exciting, nerve-tingling, action-packed edge-of-your-seat, adrenaline-pumping Stage Direction in the history of theatre.
ANTIGONUS
Come, poor babe:
I have heard, but not believed,
the spirits o' the dead
May walk again: if such thing be, thy mother
Appear'd to me last night, for ne'er was dream
So like a waking. To me comes a creature,
Sometimes her head on one side, some another;
I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
So fill'd and so becoming: in pure white robes,
Like very sanctity, she did approach
My cabin where I lay; thrice bow'd before me,
And gasping to begin some speech, her eyes
Became two spouts: the fury spent, anon
Did this break-from her: 'Good Antigonus,
Since fate, against thy better disposition,
Hath made thy person for the thrower-out
Of my poor babe, according to thine oath,
Places remote enough are in Bohemia,
There weep and leave it crying; and, for the babe
Is counted lost for ever, Perdita,
I prithee, call't. For this ungentle business
Put on thee by my lord, thou ne'er shalt see
Thy wife Paulina more.' And so, with shrieks
She melted into air. Affrighted much,
I did in time collect myself and thought
This was so and no slumber. Dreams are toys:
Yet for this once, yea, superstitiously,
I will be squared by this. I do believe
Hermione hath suffer'd death, and that
Apollo would, this being indeed the issue
Of King Polixenes, it should here be laid,
Either for life or death, upon the earth
Of its right father. Blossom, speed thee well!
There lie, and there thy character: there these;
Which may, if fortune please, both breed thee, pretty,
And still rest thine. The storm begins; poor wretch,
That for thy mother's fault art thus exposed
To loss and what may follow! Weep I cannot,
But my heart bleeds; and most accursed am I
To be by oath enjoin'd to this. Farewell!
The day frowns more and more: thou'rt like to have
A lullaby too rough: I never saw
The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour!
Well may I get aboard! This is the chase:
I am gone for ever.
[Exit, pursued by a bear]
"Exit, pursued by a Bear" might just be Shakespeare's best stage direction. It's certainly the most violent, and it's a lot more high-octane than your run-of-the-mill "Enter Messenger" or even "They fight" which tend to be rather more typical of Shakespeare's instructions to his players.
As a playwright, Shakespeare gave us some of the most beautiful and memorable poetry ever written. His stage directions? Not so much.
courtesy of the Globe Theatre
Besides, I can give you the real story:
Exit, pursued by a bear was actually written by David Mamet.
David Mamet has been a fixture of the American theatre scene for over fifty years now, and is generally regarded as one of the most notable playwrights working in the US today.
His play Glengarry Glen Ross, about the trials and tribulations of a group of desperate, vicious, Chicago real estate agents, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and has taken its place as one of the cornerstone works of modern theatre.
At its best, David Mamet's writing has a rhythm that is uniquely his. His works often (not always) revolve around angry, urban men dealing with the despair, the fear and the rage that comes out of modern city life.
Mamet dialogue is very good at making the audience squirm. When his searing two-hander Oleanna received its premiere, there were reports of fistfights breaking out during the intermission, and reviewers described witnessing couples screaming at each other as they left the theatre.
In between his stage works, Mamet has also written the screenplays for a number of highly successful films (a few of which he has directed himself). Like his plays, the films he has written tend to focus on angry characters in urban settings (often in or around his home town of Chicago).
His scripts are brilliant and frightening, and often without any safety valve. They cover a wide variety of subjects. But they rarely stray very far from the proverbial urban jungle.
And then there is The Edge.
The Edge (1997) tells the story of Charles Morse (Anthony Hopkins), an introverted billionaire with a much younger supermodel wife (Elle Macpherson). They have travelled to Alaska for a location fashion-shoot supervised by the photographer Bob Green (Alec Baldwin) along with a small entourage.
Presently, Charles, Bob and Bob's assistant Stephen (Harold Perrineau) find themselves in (shall we say) a very atypical David Mamet scenario.
The Edge is, at least on one level, a quintessential David Mamet work. It is a powerful character study and an emphatically dialogue-driven film. Charles and Bob are both immediately recognisable as Mamet creations, but the situation they find themselves in is unlike anything Mamet normally constructs.
Everyone in this story is very much out of their comfort zone - on every level.
But the real star of the film is neither Anthony Hopkins nor Alec Baldwin. It isn't even Elle Macpherson.
The true star (who gets very prominent screen credit, and quite rightly so) is Bart, the ten-foot-tall, 1500-pound Kodiak bear, around whom the entire film has basically been built.
The Edge is generally described by critics and film scholars as a "survival thriller" (and a very good one) and there are certainly enough survival thrillers out there to qualify as a discreet genre.
A survival thriller... by David Mamet?
But then, The Edge is every inch a David Mamet script. Like so many other playwrights, Mamet's writing runs the full gamut of human experience, and that sometimes means taking humans into an environment where they don't belong.
The Edge is David Mamet's Exit, Pursued by a Bear.
We will screen The Edge at 7.30 on Thursday, the 12th of December at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.
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