New York Times
August 9 1981
He Loathes Violence But Loves a Good Fight
By LUCY A. KRAUS
''Splat! Bang! Whack!'' It was the stuff of Marvel comics, but the protagonists were Shakespearean actors, and the sounds were emanating from a slender, mercurial, 41-year-old mustachioed Englishman named B.H. Barry. As he has done some 500 times before, Mr. Barry was staging a fight.
Mr. Barry, who has crossed swords with the likes of Alan Bates, Nicol Williamson, George C. Scott, Raquel Welch, Richard Dreyfuss, Oliver Reed, James Earl Jones, Christopher Plummer and Michael York, and who has earned a reputation as one of the world's leading fight and tumbling choreographers, was putting his personal stamp to the fight sequences in ''Henry IV'' (Part I), which opens Tuesday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The New York Shakespeare Festival production, directed by Des McAnuff, features Stephen Markle as Henry IV, Mandy Patinkin as Hotspur, John Vickery as Prince Hal and Kenneth McMillan as Falstaff.
On one recent steamy summer afternoon, however, the battle lines were drawn on the floor of a rehearsal hall down at the Public Theater on Lafayette Street. A barefoot Mr. Barry, clad in navy corduroys and a red tank tap and chainsmoking cigarettes, paused for a moment over a small model of the Delacorte Theater stage, then sped to the center of the floor.
''Take his head, smash it against the wall!'' he shouted. ''Take his head off! That's it. Does that feel good?'' In the course of the afternoon, the actors would group and regroup with spears, axes, swords or just barehanded, to go through their martial paces, lunging, turning, sparring and falling.
''Eyes!'' yelled Mr. Barry. ''Look at each other! The moment you don't get eye contact you're not listening, you're guessing. You have to listen with your eyes in a fight.''
Eye contact is crucial, he stresses, particularly in swordfighting, and it will be particularly so in ''Henry IV,'' for which he has chosen lethal weapons for his actors. ''The battle of Shrewsbury was a very bloody battle,'' he explained later. ''I wanted weapons that look mean, vicious, cruel and sharp.''
''I try to give actors as much freedom as possible,'' Mr. Barry said during a break. ''Anything they can work out for themselves is better than anything I can work out for them. Then it becomes part of their acting and they remember it much more clearly. They all know where the blows will be delivered. They remember through a sequence of objectives.
''Aah, I love that movement!'' he said with a grin, turning his attention to a sequence of spins, thrashes and swordplay between Mr. Markle and Ralph Byers, who is playing the role of Douglas. ''Gorgeous movement!''
The participants in this scene were already familiar with the basics of stage fighting, such as where to land a kick to the groin (on the victim's inner thigh), or how to create the sound effects for a slap in the face (the victim claps his hands or slaps his side as the fist sails past his jaw). Later, Mr. Barry would show Mandy Patinkin how to fall without breaking his tailbone.
''My choreography is somewhat circular,'' he explained. ''I believe that through circular motion you can take the sting out of a blow rather than moving in and opposing the force. If, for example, somebody throws a punch at your face, you don't step forward to receive the blow, you move away, in the direction the blow was going. In other words, at the moment of impact I send the energy somewhere else. I redirect it.''
For Mr. Barry, however, staging a fight is not simply a matter of redirecting a blow or interpolating kicks and punches into a drama. Before he begins choreographing his swipes and slashes he has carefully read the script, decided where the fights are, talked with the director, and looked back into the play to see where the beginning elements of the fight exist, that is, when a character first talks about fighting another; he has talked with his actors to find out how they feel about their characters; and he has studied the rehearsals to catch the director's style and language so that the play and the fights are melded into one continous seam.
''The worst thing in the world,'' he said, ''would be for the play to suddenly stop and become a cabaret act in the middle of the production.''
Mr. Barry never uses the same fight sequence twice (''The secret of being a good fight director is having a short memory''), but he has very definite ideas about what role the fight should have.
First, he says, it must support the style and content of the play. If, for example, a director sees a production as being light and romantic, a ''heavy'' fight would probably be incompatible. ''A kick in the groin or a head butt in the face might be too aggressive,'' he said. ''I'd probably do more with grabbing or punches, using very clean, long-flowing movements.''
Second, the fight must tell something about the characters. ''One of the questions I put to actors is, what would be missing from your character if I took the fight away?''
Third, it must tell the audience a story. ''The moment it doesn't, then the violence becomes gratuitous,'' he said. ''Shakespeare never puts a fight into a story if he doesn't mean it to be there.''
He feels that some of the most difficult fights, from the conceptual point of view, occur in modern drama. ''Contemporary writers in many ways don't know how to use violence in their plays,'' he said. ''Sometimes an author will put in a fight because he can't think what else to do. The classicists invariably put in a fight to help the play along.''
Mr. Barry's fights have been lauded by critics as ''realistic,'' ''terrifying,'' ''thrilling,'' ''authentic,'' ''vicious'' and ''sensational.'' How does he achieve these effects?
''For one thing,'' he said, ''a fight has to have a climax - it goes to a crescendo.'' It must also have an element of surprise, which he achieves through a combination of different rhythms and angles.
A good fight also requires ''choreographic shape,'' which he describes as having to do with the positioning, height, angle and direction in which he puts his actors and makes them relate to one another. ''There are certain areas of the stage that are easier to look at,'' he explained. ''Movement done from left to right, for example, feels more fluid than movement from right to left.
''One of my best teachers in that vein was Nureyev. I used to watch for hours to see how he dealt with shape. He has an extraordinary eye. I always remember his saying to me, 'Don't open all your Christmas presents at once.' He would start with simple shapes and they would gradually become more and more complicated. He held back until the climax.
''But the bottom line is, of course, when it feels right. I'm so terrified of violence - I loathe violence - that when it excites or terrifies me, it's doing its job.''
For a man who loathes violence, Mr. Barry has seen plenty of action. Since June alone he has directed fights for ''Romeo and Juliet'' and ''As You Like It'' in Dallas, ''Henry V'' in Stratford, Conn., and ''Cyrano de Bergerac'' in Santa Fe. To date he has done 26 ''Romeo and Juliets,'' including Nureyev's production with the London Festival Ballet; 15 ''Macbeths,'' including the Polanski film and the Verdi opera; five ''Othellos,'' including the Public Theater's production. He also worked on ''Mahagonny'' at the Metropolitan Opera, the Circle Rep's ''Hamlet''; ''Fifth of July'' and ''Frankenstein'' on Broadway, and many productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company in England. When he completes ''Henry IV'' (Part I) he'll go on to ''Othello'' in Stratford, Conn., and later this year to Houston for ''Cyrano'' as stage director.
He was born Barry Halliday, the name he used as a young actor on British television and as an acting teacher at an English drama school. One of his early mentors was Patrick Crane, Erroll Flynn's understudy and a fight director for film and theater, who came to the same school in 1959 (and who now works mostly out of Stratford, Ontario). ''The theater at that time was becoming more physical,'' said Mr. Barry. ''The declamatory theater was disappearing and more of a physical theater was coming in - with Pinter, Ionesco, Beckett.''
But to Mr. Barry, the fight scenes always stood apart from the drama, and he became fascinated with the prospect of linking the performance of the play with the performance of the fight.
His interest in the martial arts led him to study aikido - a Japanese form of self-defense - and he picked up other fight pointers from fencing teachers and actors. But it wasn't until ''High Adventure,'' a highly successful BBC television film for which he had directed the fights, that his career took off. And by the age of 30, as ''B.H. Barry,'' he was directing fights at the Royal Shakespeare Company and most of the major theaters in London, as well as teaching at four drama schools.
Today he commutes across the Atlantic, working on productions in addition to teaching ''armed and unarmed'' stage fight techniques and tumbling at the Circle in the Square and at Juilliard, New York University and Yale - thereby spending little time at his home in Sunningdale, England.
Are there women in his classes? Indeed. ''It's a totally nonsexist area,'' he said. ''Women do the same as guys. Invariably they learn tumbles and rolls quicker. They're good with lighter weapons and they have a good sense of line.''
Besides teaching stage fight techniques, Mr. Barry has also managed to train five fight teachers (one of them a woman). It's an apprenticeship that takes roughly seven years and one he feels is important in safeguarding actors who are often the victims of unqualified fight instructors.
On that score Mr. Barry prides himself on a track record of safety that is blemished by only three serious accidents in 20 years. ''It's the unexpected on stage that causes accidents,'' he said, recalling how one actor injured his kneecap when he rolled into a staircase that turned up in a different place. ''There are so many factors to guard against. A good set designer can take a way a lot of the problems for you. A bad one will create a death trap.''
With ''Henry IV'' (Part I) Mr. Barry, as usual, will have gone around ''safing up'' the set - rounding out corners, making sure the steps are the right width and the stage is swept. And because there will be a moat full of water, he's putting sand into the paint to make the stage surface non-slick like the deck of a ship.
How will the fight scenes look by the time they get to Central Park? One would just have to wait and see. But there is little question that Mr. Barry will be doing his best to protect not only his actors but the illusions he has created as well.
''The theater is about a separate kind of reality,'' he said. ''It isn't about realism - it can't be with 2,000 people out there watching you.
''What I have to do with the actors is to fool the audience so that nobody's even thinking about how the tricks work. And I think audiences like to be fooled, but I don't think they like to be made fools of. If I do a trick on stage and they can work out how I did it, then they will feel I'm underestimating them. I've got to fool them well.''