Terrible Mouth, the opera by Nigel Osborne, libretto by Howard Barker, the Almeida Theatre, 1992.
reprinted in:
Arguments for a Theatre
by Howard Barker
Paperback - 250 pages 3rd edition (November 1997) ISBN: 0719052491
For fifteen years I had watched McDiarmid's engagement with my texts.
That Good Between Us. The Love of a Good Man. Crimes in Hot Countries.
Downchild. The Castle. Pity in History. The Early Hours of a Reviled Man.
He had given extraordinary performances unique in the theatre.
He had created a style.
He had married the body to the voice.
He explored the unforgivable.
He excavated the illegal.
He tortured himself.
He was unrepentant.
He brought the private to the public.
He would not tolerate indifference.
He was shameless and therefore mythical.
After these fifteen years he played another text, Terrible Mouth. In this, he was deaf, sick, voyeuristic, self-hating, self-advertising, sexually mad, tortured, pitiless, adoring. It was a role created for him, who loves the extremes. In this opera, he was required to sob. This sob he treated as part of the text and not a thing incidental to it. In it he saw not a momentary loss of articulation, but an opportunity. Always he seized the opportunity for other means of articulation -- the seizure of an object, a garment, the annexation of things was part of his way as an actor. Here he found in the sob not a conclusion to an emotion, but the essence of it, and therefore brought to it that same excoriation and invention that attended on every line he spoke. He invested it with his physical resources as well as his mental agony so that his body struggled with the failure of words, as if words had been driven out of the cavities they inhabited -- lungs, mouth, and arching throat -- leaving gaping muscularity behind them, and into this vaccuum flooded nothing but incomprehensible pain. The loss of language was the loss of oxygen to a diver. Without speech his body writhed in dumb agony, desperate to articulate but betrayed by articulation, and in this silence he began to drown, for speech, as long as it existed, enabled him to trash the waves of self-contempt and loneliness that plunged over him, but, speechless, he quickly succumbed a wreckage of jaw and tilted cave of mouth. He hung here as the unwillingly delivered sound of moral capitulation gathered from every extremity of his body, the sob which, overwhelming his reluctance, uttered itself into a silence of seized time. This sound was unearthly, recognizable only from smothered pains of too-private life, or appaling memories of deaths and partings. It endured, and made one ashamed, as if one watched a secret horror through a pierced wall, which is also theatre and part of its power to discomfort us. Here was the hypnotic spectacle of another's pain, solitarily suffered yet giving strength, for what McDiarmid dared and triumphed in, we also might. There was a full ten seconds here, but such an anatomy of anguish one watched as if a cadaver were flayed before our eyes by skilfully-wielded knives, showing us what lay horrifically beneath surfaces, an écorché of despairing life. The sob was precisely a sob. In its sculpting, its unearthly musicality, it contained what we know from *within* a sob to be. It was experience exemplified, a testamental moment, gathering to itself the history of every individual witnessing it, and therefore the greatest accomplishment of the actor's craft.