Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You

This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared on thespellofwakinghours in March 2012.

O, is all forgot?
All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]

People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for life, for the simple reason that as we mature and grow, so do our tastes; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us. Throughout my early teens, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still, but I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Mum and Dad took me to see The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to. But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of ‘favourite’ Shakespeare plays is actually a part of our education whether we like it or not (or at least it was when I was at school; I believe the continuity and design behind it has been amended and inverted somewhat since then). Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle – more conscious – than we’d ever assumed at first.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet

Baz Luhrmann, 1996.

Year Nine English. Romeo and Juliet. Imagine you’re fourteen, at an all-boy’s school (for the time being), and hormones are flying everywhichway, when along comes this play about love and all its heady adrenaline-thumping rushing glory. It’s got everything for nearly-fifteen year olds – swordfights, love and exile, (with only the slight hiccup of a death (or two or four) to dampen the mood). Enter, then, Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive reimagining. In Luhrmann’s film, moreso than the play (at least on the page), you get sucked into its heady world, it catches you up in its frenetic exuberance and brashness, and disgorges you at the end, exhausted and exhilarated. For many years afterwards, I couldn’t listen to Radiohead without thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hawaiian shirt or Clare Danes’ angel wings. Despite all its detractors, it’s not a bad place to start watching Shakespeare on film, nor is a bad film by itself. If anything, it’s quite good, even if it is its own cliché (the play as much as the film). But I spose when you’re almost fifteen, you don’t really care.

Romeo and Juliet

Sydney Theatre Company, 2013

Photo by Lisa Tomasetti for Sydney Theatre Company.

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