As with The Playlist, the rules are simple: one track for every production, so long as it captures something of the essence of the play (or production).
Showing posts with label Comedies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Comedies. Show all posts
07/05/2014
The Shakespeare Project
As with The Playlist, the rules are simple: one track for every production, so long as it captures something of the essence of the play (or production).
26/04/2014
Why Shakespeare
The glib answer is, of course, ‘Why not?’
But the proper,
longer – real – answer goes a little something like this.
Four hundred
and fifty years ago, a boy was born in Stratford Upon Avon, the son of a glove
maker and wool merchant. He studied a little Latin (and less Greek) at the
local grammar school, and discovered the power of storytelling, the joy in making
things up and sharing them. After marrying and becoming a father to a daughter,
Susannah, he disappears from history for about a decade – what he was doing or
where he went no one really knows. Theories abound, but they’re just stories
when it boils down to it, his very stock in trade. We can only guess, but we
know what happened next.
He wrote plays,
sonnets, poems. He loved and learnt, listened; lived. Within the wooden O of
the great Globe itself, he created kingdoms for a stage, had outcasts to act and monarchs to behold his swelling
scenes. He captured the soul of the age in such a way no one before
or since has ever come close.
He wrote before
dictionaries in their strictest sense were a dream, though books of words were
being compiled in their own respective manners. He created words as he needed
them, and we still use them. Spellings were erratic at the best of times,
because there was no accepted way of spelling any one single word. Spellings were
influenced by accent, dialect, speaker and the ear of the person writing it
down, hence the reason his name is spelt diversely in various records.
Every other
contender for the authorship theory falls flat on their face when you realise
that Shakespeare wrote for a group of actors – the Chamberlain’s (and then
King’s) Men – and every role was specifically tailored to an individual’s
talents. There are no small roles, the old adage goes, only small actors, and
for Shakespeare’s troupe, there was no such thing as a small actor. Forget
unimaginative theories like the necessity for him to have been learned at
university, a soldier, a merchant, a Moor, a braggart, a thief, a king; forget the
need to have travelled to the continent and further abroad: he had every bit of
knowledge he could ever want at his finger tips, the most powerful repository
for every scrap of recollection he could ever collect. He had two ears and an
incredible memory, and learnt at a young age to listen, to savour details, to
remember and save and scrounge scraps wherever you could find them. He
listened, and in doing so, created worlds from words.
He was a
genius, but only insofar that geniuses are merely a focussing lens for a
collective group of dreamers, thinkers and practitioners. Each role was
tailored to a specific actor because they created their role from the ground
up, everyone making scenes from scratch, while Shakespeare beautified them,
clarified their dramatic arc and rhythm.
He wrote for a
blank stage, devoid of any decisive elements of set, yet his worlds are as rich
as Breughel’s or Hogarth’s. He used words words words to create his pictures,
and if you can’t imagine them, then perhaps it’s not his fault.
He wrote before
dramaturgy was a thing, before there was any modern – let alone post-modern –
way of seeing theatre. We may see holes in his characterisations, his plots
perhaps seem implausible, and his endings often leave us feeling confounded,
but that is because we are looking at his plays four hundred and fifty years
later. After four hundred and fifty years of dramaturgical thinking, as ways of
thinking about dramatic forms and principles have changed and evolved.
He did not
write roles for exclusively male actors. Some of his greatest roles are his
Cleopatra and his Lady Macbeth, who both make their male foils look rather weak
in comparison. His Rosalind is a joy, while his Juliet is naïvely worldly. He
was writing in a time when women were not allowed on stage. It wasn’t so much
that there was a law explicitly forbidding it (that had, in time, been lifted);
it was just the convention. Boy-apprentices played female roles, while the
share-holding members of the troupe played the other meatier roles.
Four hundred
and fifty years ago, there was no such thing as racially prejudiced casting, or
gender-biased casting. There were simply a group of actors in a troupe – typically
white men – and roles were created for them. There is nothing in the world stopping
gender- and racially-blind casting from being implemented across the globe
today in every production. Nothing, except perceived ‘convention’, absurdly-ingrained
tradition, and small-minded didacticism.
Shakespeare
wrote humans, not characters. He understood human psychology better than perhaps
any dramatist or writer before or since. He understood jealousy, love, madness,
sickness, health, youth, old age, beauty, truth, deceit; humans. Us.
Shakespeare is
bulletproof, foolproof, idiot-proof; indestructible. You can cut up his works,
rearrange them, bowdlerise them to buggery and back; you can adapt them,
conflate them, transpose them, savagely edit them down, but they still bounce
back. In the eighteenth century, English theatre adapted (or Bowdlerised) every
Shakespeare play they could lay their hands on to fit their accepted
conventions of dramatic form: tragedies were rewritten to have happier endings,
comedies were conflated and edited, histories were sidelined, and the great
tragic roles were reprised time and time again by the same actors, well into
their old age. What we are doing to Shakespeare now is nothing new. We can edit
and adapt his plays until our heart is content, but we have to remember it is
not new. Shakespeare did it himself.
‘Shakespeare’
is not a brand name; his is not an icon synonymous with, nor a byword for,
quality. Each play needs to be renegotiated and tackled head-on with every new
production, with every passing day. ‘Shakespeare,’ as a catch-all term for his
collected works, cannot be left on a shelf or revered on a pedestal otherwise
he and it will become stale, a museum piece; his importance will not be
reasserted.
Like the other
great masters of Western culture, be it in art, literature, science, music,
history, there is a reason why they are the masters. No one before or since has
done what Shakespeare did in such a short space of time. No one. In just
twenty-odd years, Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, one hundred and
fifty-four sonnets, and several poems (and that’s just what we are certain of).
Like it or not,
Shakespeare is responsible for much of the dramatic ancestry which informs our
contemporary theatre practices today. He changed the way we think about
characters, about plots, about stories; about cause and effect, about
motivations, scenes, dramatic arcs, beats and moments. He gave actors advice
and mercilessly parodied his own contemporaries, and he never shirked away from
challenging the status quo, though he was always careful to do it at one or two
removes, often in a place calling itself Rome .
Why
Shakespeare, you’ll ask me. Because he was human, I’ll answer. Because he
understood what it is to be human, what it is to be mankind in all of our
crazy, passionate, fluctuating, contradictory and compulsive moods. He
understood what motivates us, what rash deeds we may do when we let our
instinct overtake our senses. He understands us, because he was one of us. He
lived four hundred-odd years ago, yet he understands us better than we sometimes
do ourselves.
Why Shakespeare,
you’ll ask.
Because he was
Will.
And where there’s a Will, there is always a way.
20/04/2014
05/04/2014
The Merchant of Venice
Sydney Shakespeare Company, 2013
 |
Photo
by Rob Studdert (distudio)
for Sydney Shakespeare Company. |
As You Like It
Belvoir, 2011
 |
Photo
by Heidrun Löhr for Belvoir.
|
Characterised
by a theatrical delight and a rare whimsy which is so often missing in modern
interpretations of Shakespeare, let alone his comedies, Eamon Flack’s As You Like It delighted in the
language, in the words, the rhythms, the theatrical possibilities inherently
written into one of Shakespeare’s greatest tour de force’s of theatrical
disguise. Switching the genders of characters made no difference to the text,
and there was a rambunctious playfulness which even the staunchest purists
would’ve found hard to deny or ignore. When the cast appeared as sheep during
the interval, the theatrical illusion of a pastoral idyll was complete. The
perfect play for summer, it was everything modern Shakespeare should be: smart,
funny, sexy, intelligent, respectful, clever, and above all, thoroughly
Shakespearean.
Much Ado About Nothing
 |
Photo
by Wendy McDougall for
|
Directed by
John Bell, Shakespeare’s battle-of-the-wits (and -sexes), suitably played by
Toby Schmitz and Blazey Best, erupted in a riot of triumph, colour and joy, set
in a mid-twentieth century Italian villa. Beatrice and Benedict’s verbal
sparring was a match for their physical antics, and as they fell for each other
despite their best intentions and the infidelity plot untangled, you felt the
passions, the heart and the life at the centre of Shaksespeare’s great verbal
duel.
Twelfth Night
 |
Photo
by Brett Boardman for
|
This is the
production I credit with showing me just how beautiful and heartbreaking
Shakespeare can be, the production with which I ‘got’ Shakespeare on stage. Lee
Lewis’ Twelfth Night was set in the
aftermath of the recent Victorian bushfires; the characters emerged out of the
blackness, exhausted and covered in soot, and proceeded to tell each other a
story, assuming the identities and roles of the characters in Shakespeare’s
play. Set around a giant pile of clothes and cardboard boxes – a refuge centre,
we assumed – Lewis delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the
simple answers to switching identities at the drop of a hat, and the joy and
aliveness was never far away from the very tangible sorrow and heartbreak that
sits at the core of all Shakespearean tragedy. Ending with a beautifully
effervescent dance to Katrina & The Waves’ ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ it was
hard not to be moved by the panache, verve and relish in theatrical delight
with which the production revelled.
Measure for Measure
Company B Belvoir, 2010
Continuing his
examination of power in Shakespeare’s plays (following Julius Caesar, and the divisive and behemoth War of the Roses, both for STC), Benedict Andrews turned his
distinctive aesthetic vision and directorial style to this, one of
Shakespeare’s more problematic comedies. Set in a revolving hotel room,
complete with sheer curtains, functioning shower, toilet, and television, not
to mention video cameras operated by the cast, it took a long hard look at a
society where, as he says, “pornography has become mainstream, sex tapes of celebrities
are public fodder, politicians speak in the name of God; where all private
lives are under constant surveillance, where everything is numbered and
consumable.” Culminating in one of Shakespeare’s classic ‘wonder upon wonder’
revelatory endings, outrage is heaped upon outrage, and
it leaves is bewildered, morally and imaginatively. This is not so much
Shakespeare as Andrews’ stream of falling coloured confetti, his cluttered mise
en scene, his over-reliance upon video close-ups, and his hyper-intellectualisation
of everything which seems to have no rational explanation in his on-stage
world.
 |
Photo
by Heidrun Löhr for Company B Belvoir.
|
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
 |
| Photo
by Jeff Busby for Opera |
Benjamin
Britten’s gorgeous orchestrations, shuffled-around scenes, and sung Shakespeare
might sound a bit of an unlikely combination, but when set upon Catherine
Martin’s sumptuous turn-of-the-century Indian Raj set, it seems as though it
was always meant to be. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, there were brilliant colours
– reds, pinks, yellows, blues, oranges, lush greens – enough richly coloured
silks, embroidered fabrics, sun-blasted linen and British pomp to set the scene
perfectly, and more than enough magic to swoon over. Without his dazzling
cinematic tricks, Luhrmann’s direction (here rehearsed by Julie Edmunson and
choreographer Belynda Buck) is clear, theatrical, and perfectly attuned to both
his aesthetic vision and the demands of the piece, and I am certain this is one
of the best ‘Dreams’ I have ever seen.
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