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Shakespeare - The Director's Cut
Essays on Shakespeare's Plays, Volume 1
By Michael Bogdanov
Capercaillie Books
£8.99
Dateline: 8th January, 2004
Michael Bogdanov is one of the most innovative and provocative directors
of Shakespeare working in the UK, probably the most provocative
if we factor in the intellectual rigour behind a "provocative"
production. For Bogdanov is not one who is provocative for provocation's
sake, nor different just so as to be different: behind his off-centre
approach is a rigorously thought-out rationale, a deliberate
attempt to look at the text with a fresh eye, trying to shuck off the
baggage of the traditional interpretation of whatever play he is directing.
It's been a life-long thing with him, too. I first met him in the seventies
when he was running a course for teachers and I remember very clearly
his exposition of the economic background to Romeo and Juliet.
It was interesting and thought-provoking then: now he has deepened and
widened his understanding of the play, through much thought and six
productions for companies as varied as the RSC, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus,
Hamburg, and the Imperial Theatre, Tokyo. This depth of experience of
the play informs his chapter on it and makes the reader realise that
the traditional romantic/tragedy interpretation only gives us part of
the picture.
And so it is with all of the plays he looks at in this fasciniating
and very readable book: Hamlet, R&J, The Tempest,
The Merchant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, Macbeth,
King Lear and The Taming of the Shrew.
The book's subtitle is Essays on Shakespeare's Plays, but it's
much more like having Bogdanov sitting with you chatting about them.
The style is informal and he splits each chapter into short sections,
separated from each other by a row of three asterisks, which resemble
nothing so much as natural pauses in a conversation.
His ideas are never less than radical, in both senses of the word:
they are radical in the modern political sense, but also that they go
back to the root (radix - hence radical) of the matter, the text
itself. He goes back to the full text, not the accepted cut text
that we find in, for example, Hamlet, where he shows how the
parts which are usually cut in modern productions (for a full-length
Hamlet would not be to the taste of modern audiences, being a
couple of hours too long!) present us with a play which is very different
to Olivier's "tragedy of a man who couln't make up his mind".
It is a provocative book, provocative and challenging, making us look
afresh at plays we thought we knew inside out. Essential reading for
anyone interested in Shakespeare!
You
can buy Shakespeare
the Director's Cut from our Bookshop for £7.19
Articles Indices:
Articles from 2004
Articles from 2003
Articles from 2002
Articles from 2001
Articles from 2000
Articles from 1999
Articles from 1998
Articles from 1997
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