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For Goodness' Sake, Let's Muck about with Shakespeare!Dateline: 2nd September, 2001 One of our regular readers recently sent me an article from a US newspaper about a plan to build a replica of the Rose, a theatre in which many of Shakespeare's plays were performed in his day, in the USA. Obviously the success of the Globe in Southwark has touched a chord and the proposers of the new theatre feel that it will have a similar success there. I was reminded recently, too, of the Original Shakespeare Company, which attempts to produce his plays in the Elizabethan way, with each member of the cast having only a copy of his own part, not the words of anyone else. Obviously this has to lead to a totally different way of working, just as presenting a play within the confines of Shakespeare's "Wooden O" must also impose a specific way of working on the cast and director. All fascinating stuff, and putting the two together would go some way towards helping us understand how Shakespeare's contemporaries would have seen his plays. If only we had some very clear idea of the acting style of his day and of the way English sounded then, we could reproduce an Elizabethan performance. Of course, we do - from internal evidence - have some idea about acting style and we do know that Elizabethan English sounded much more like some American dialects than Standard English. It would be really interesting to put all of these together. Interesting for Whom? Aye, there's the rub! It would be very interesting for those of us who are Shakespeare fans, and that is a very small number, even as a percentage of the theatregoing population, and an extremely tiny percentage of the population as a whole. A young actress friend of mine has just had an interesting job. It was a video of a girl of eighteen in the late 1940s, describing what her life was like. It is playing as part of an exhibit entitled "Real Lives" in the local museum. And that's the point: Laura was employed to produce a museum piece, and that is what we would be doing with Shakespeare if we were to try to produce one of his plays in exactly the way it would have been done in his day, and the only audience would be those with an interest in the history of theatre. Surely the Man of the Millennium deserves better than that? to become a museum piece! My education - MA in English - makes me excited at the prospect of seeing an authentic (or as authentic as we can make it) production of a Shakespeare play, but my experience - nay, my instinct - as a director (and one-time actor) screams No! No! No! Why is Shakespeare produced all over the world on a regular basis? Almost every day of the year sees numerous productions of his plays somewhere in the world. Contrast that to the number of productions of the great French tragedians, Corneille and Racine: few and far between, even in France. And why? - because they are of their time, whereas Shakespeare is as relevant now as he was more than four hundred years ago. But let's be honest: if we make him into a museum piece, then we can forget about any relevance, we can forget that he has anything to say to us today. So let's try different, even off-the-way or positively odd ways of presenting his plays. We don't have to like the results. Our experiments don't even have to work - not all the time anyway. What's important is that we don't put his work into a museum case to be venerated by a decreasing group of cognoscenti, to make him the preserve of an in-group, to hand him over to the academics and say, "There he is. He's all yours." For goodness' sake, let's muck about with Shakespeare! Articles Indices: |
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