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Playing ShakespeareDateline: 24th November, 2002With two reviews of Shakespeare plays this week - Macbeth at the Albery and the English Touring Theatre's King Lear - and the York Shakespeare Project's Richard III a few weeks ago, the time seems right for a look at Shakespearean productions in the 21st century. I have no doubt that Shakespeare is still relevant today - let there be no doubt about that. I wonder, however, about whether we have yet really thought out how to play him in the 21st century. I suspect that the majority of the audience for Lear at Durham's Gala Theatre would not have shared the unsatisfied feeling that I experienced at the end, or that the audiences at the Albery would have gone along with the criticisms voiced by Philip on this site and by other critics in the press. "In the long-term," says Philip, "it is unlikely that this will be remembered as one of the great theatrical productions of the play." In The Guardian Michael Billington goes further: "it rarely rises above a dogged competence reminiscent of the Old Vic of the 1950s," he says, and "there is more to this great play than Saturday-night melodrama." Whilst, in the Independent, Paul Taylor writes, that it is "a crude and disappointing venture from a director of the calibre of Edward Hall." And the Evening Standard's Nicholas De Jongh calls it a "lightweight abbreviated production." The two productions I saw, Lear and Richard III, could be described as being very traditional, whilst Edward Hall's Macbeth had many of his personal trademarks, what Michael Bllington describes as "an assemblage of tricks Hall has used in earlier Shakespeare productions: flashing lights, SAS gunman for the final carnage, and Latin anthems to denote spirituality." The two - if you like - extremes of Shakespearean production. A theatre-going audience always appreciates a traditional reading of a Shakespeare play: they like the costumes, the pageantry and even - God forgive them! - the awful Mummerset accents which seem to be de rigueur for the peasants/ordinary soldiers. By the opening night of ETT's Lear at Durham's Gala Theatre this week, booking for the whole week was heavy: by the following day it was more or less sold out completely. As the theatre's PR man observed to me on the opening night, give people what they want and they'll flock to see it. But my concern is this: are we not in danger of turning Shakespeare into a museum piece? A traditional interpretation means no new insights, into either Shakespeare or the human condition. Surely if, as I believe, a real play is a collaboration between author, the company and the audience, then the experiences of all three participants must inform the production. Modern directors and actors bring a modern sensibility to the text and hence to the performance. The audience reacts to that performance with a modern sensibility. The play, therefore, becomes something more than the playwright originally intended. This is inevitable unless we try to freeze the play in a moment of time, which is what the traditional reading does. And that moment of time is not Shakespearean: rather it is the mid-twentieth century. There is an interesting parallel here with the world of amateur operatics. A friend of mine who was, at one time, deeply involved in am. op. once gave this explanation for the unwillingness of many (although, thankfully, not all) amateur operatic societies to perform modern shows. The people who run the societies, he said (and he was referring to the society of which he was a member in particular) are all of a certain age, and the shows they choose to do are the shows they wanted to do - because they were modern and exciting - when they were young. However the old guard which ran the society then wouldn't countenance this contemporary stuff. Now they are the old guard and they are doing precisely the same to the younger generation as was done to them by their older generation. How often do people get excited about Shakespeare? Odd question? If we find it odd, if we don't equate Shakespeare with excitement, then I don't hold out much hope for his survival as a playwright, except as an item for academic study, a museum piece. Next>> Read Philip Fisher's reply: Shakespeare for the 21st century (or The Bard is Really Cool) Articles Indices:
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