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| Photo sourced from Facebook for Ensemble Theatre. |
14/07/2014
23/06/2014
William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs
Russall S. Beattie Presents for The
Vanguard, 2014
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| Advertisement by unknown for The Vanguard. |
16/05/2014
09/05/2014
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).
All’s well that ends well: Shakespeare’s Romances as restoratives
This essay was first published online at thespellofwakinghours in December 2013.
Thou met’st with things dying,
I with things newborn.
I with things newborn.
Old Shepherd, The Winter’s Tale (III.3)
I.
Of the four genres that Shakespeare’s plays can be broken into, it is the final group that is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood. Yet it is this very same group that perhaps holds the keys to unlocking the humanism at the heart of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. These four plays, the ‘Romances’ – comprising Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – are generally believed to have been written between 1608 and 1612. When viewed together, they form a valediction to one of the most consistently human and moving bodies of work in the modern-English literature canon, and are characterised by their almost fairytale-like plots and structures, and almost-absurdly contrived turns of events that carry them from one incredible scene to the next. Read as a progressive series of Chinese boxes, this quartet (or quintet, as I shall suggest) forms a coda to the plays, poems and sonnets that have come before them. There is a restoration of balance at their heart, a distinct sense of regaining an inherent aesthetic equilibrium, one that sets out to right wrongs; like Prospero at the conclusion of The Tempest, they seem to be asking readers and audiences alike, “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.”
30/04/2014
Revenge wheel: The serial protagonists of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
This is an edited version of an essay originally
written for ‘ENGL394 – Popular Theatre: Polemic, Mirror, Satire’ at Macquarie University
T’will vex thy soul to hear what I shall speak;
For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds…
For I must talk of murders, rapes and massacres,
Acts of black night, abominable deeds…
Aaron, V.1.62-64
Titus
Andronicus has been maligned
and derided for its excessive depiction of, and reliance upon, violence and
brutality since its writing and performance in 1594. Despite Shakespeare’s age
at the time of writing Titus Andronicus,[i]
the play displays a markedly youthful brashness and sensationalistic attitude
which highlights his knowledge of classical authors and sources, as well as a
desire to create a work which appealed to a wide audience[ii].
Throughout the play Shakespeare harnesses the conventions of a revenge tragedy
to his now-trademark sophistication of language, humour and rhythm, and
challenges the established perception and tolerance of violence and abuse, as
well as its implications and consequences. In doing so, Shakespeare shows how Titus Andronicus is “as much about how
the audience experiences violence as entertainment as it is about the tragedy
of the endless cycle of violence itself,”[iii]
and thus demonstrates how popular theatre avoids adhering to the status quo of
the period and, in this case, for all time.
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.
25/04/2014
Cardenio, or A Lost Play Found?
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| Poster for the RSC's 2011 production of 'Cardenio: Shakespeare's Lost Play Reimagined' |
There’s a satirical news story going around the internet at the moment that the lost play Cardenio has
been found, printed, in the personal
collection of a recently deceased English Lord. The ‘holy grail’ of literature,
[The History of] Cardenio is a play written in 1612-13 by William Shakespeare and
John Fletcher, and dramatises an episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The story has
appeared numerous times over the past fortnight, yet the reportage doesn’t
change. At least seventeen days too late to be an April Fool’s hoax, I wouldn't doubt if the story is in fact an elaborate kind of meta-hoax designed to
celebrate Shakespeare’s four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday.
Finding Cardenio is akin to discovering Father Christmas doesn’t exist, or
that the grass isn’t in fact greener on the other side of the hill. I love the
idea of Shakespeare collaborating on a play adapted from Don Quixote; I’d love to know what Shakespeare thought of
Cervantes’ story – I’d like to think he was rather quite taken with it, if a
little apprehensive, but delighted with its erroneous knight, his portly squire
and their wide travails across the length and breadth of Spain .
Part of my
fascination with the story of Cardenio,
as written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, comes from not knowing the play, from
not having the Jacobean play-text to hand; comes from not being certain of its
contents, composition or plot, apart from its entries in the Stationer’s
register, court records for the Christmas period of 1612-13, and the accounts
kept by John Heminges for the King’s Men. While we do have a seventeenth
century adaptation of the play, published as Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers, the fact we don’t have
the original is all the more reason to dream, to conjecture, to rhapsody and to
imagine. Sometimes it’s best not to have all the answers; sometimes it’s better
to not know everything; sometimes the world is a richer place for muses of fire
that transcend the heavens of invention…
Cottingley Shakespeare
I’ve never
bought into the argument against Shakespeare of Stratford not authoring the
works he is credited for. It doesn’t make any sense. Yet, still reams of
academic papers and books are written on the subject, scholars divide themselves
into various other camps too numerous to list in detail here (a full list can be found, as with
everything, on Wikipedia). (And then there's that film, Anonymous - the less we say about that, the better.)
The argument
goes something along the lines of ‘how
could one William Shakespeare – the son of a glove-maker, merchant, and
once-Mayor-of-Stratford – a man who was illiterate, whose name is spelt in
twenty-four different ways at least, and who’d probably never left England, how
could this man have been the author of the cornerstone of Western literature?’
The conspiracists conclude that someone of noble birth or standing must’ve been
their logical author, because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. (Really, they
can’t stand the idea that someone who wrote that many key works of literature
wasn’t born into privilege or wealth).
But what each camp doesn’t actually
realise, is that all of them – Stratfordians, Baconians, Oxfordians,
Marlovians; all of them – agree on the one incontrovertible fact that someone
who called themselves ‘Shakespeare’ wrote thirty-seven plays,
one-hundred-and-fifty-four sonnets, five narrative poems (and that’s just what
we’re certain of). No one is disputing that. All they are disputing is the
exact identity of the writer. It’s a bit like the Cottingley Fairies story – in
1917, two girls aged ten and twelve took a series of five photos which proved
the existence of fairies. The photos are real, but the fairies aren’t; they’re
merely paper-cutouts. By the same token, the fairies are real fairies, albeit
paper ones...
The whole
debate is silly, really – surely, just as with Spartacus, we’re all Shakespeare
in the end?
23/04/2014
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?
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.
20/04/2014
Coriolanus
Ralph Fiennes, 2012.
John Logan’s
script for Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus
is, like the film, robust, muscular, tremendously masculine, and
uncompromisingly contemporary. Set in a place calling itself Rome , it is full of Brutalist concrete
apartment blocks, empty streets, protesting citizens and power-hungry
policiticans and power-brokers. As Coriolanus himself, Fiennes has the menace,
the gravitas and the unnervingly steely gaze of the once-popular general gone
bad. As his nemesis Aufidius, Gerard Butler also has the menace and requisite
air of danger about him, and in their confrontations, you really do believe
they could quite easily kill each other. Filled with muted colours and steely
concrete greys, browns, army-fatigue greens and lots of mud, ice and dirt, it
is a brutal look at the power that corrupts, corruption that empowers, how hard
it is to fight to be heard, and how easily things can go wrong. Again, it’s not
a film for the purists, but it is an intense, muscular and thrilling film, pared
down with considerable skill and flair by Logan ,
without losing any of Shakespeare’s humanist touches and flourishes.
The Tempest
Julie Taymor, 2010.
In The Tempest, Julie Taymor creates
another visual feast from Shakespeare’s rich text. Eschewing ‘traditional’
modes of producing cinematic Shakespeares, she filmed the majority of her film
on the islands of Hawai’i – the black rock, deep orange gorges, lush tidal
forests, rocky shores, cliffs and colours the perfect complement for her vision
of sorcery, magic, redemption and love. Prospera’s island, as in the play,
becomes a reflection of isolation, creating a new hierarchical order in a ‘new
world’, and becomes a kind of antithetical evocation of Donne’s famous
observation that ‘no man is an island’. Helen Mirren’s Prospera is a force of
nature to be reckoned with, and while the decision to make Shakespeare’s
magician a woman was always going to be controversial for many people, I
actually prefer it to Shakespeare’s original, simply because there is so much
more at stake, between Prospera and Miranda, between both of them and
Ferdinand, between Caliban, towards the court and the usurping Duke. While her
visuals are excellent and her cast, crew and rough magic all superb, it doesn’t
quite reach the insane heights of Titus’
carnivalesque, though it is hard to distinguish exactly how or why.
The Shakespeare Code (Doctor Who)
Gareth Roberts, w; 2007.
It’s ironic, in
a way, that the best (and, perhaps, most ‘accurate’) depiction of Elizabethan
England on screen is to be found in Doctor
Who’s 2007 episode, The Shakespeare
Code. In a show about a time-travelling alien from the future, it’s these
historical episodes that can be the most fun, as Gareth Roberts shows here.
Filled with in-joke upon in-joke after in-joke, Shakespeare lines are peppered
like full stops in nearly every scene, allusions and complicit nods abound, and
for David Tennant’s Doctor, you can see he’s having the time of his life. With
its story of witches, a lost play – Love’s
Labour’s Won – words as magic spells, Harry Potter, and unrequited love,
it’s certainly not that far off what Shakespeare wrote about across his career.
There’s the mud in the streets, the filth, the gorgeous wood-and-plaster
buildings, the dark candle-lit interiors and, like a beacon, the great Globe
itself, and it really does feel, well, real, I suppose. As real as it can be
for a television show about time-travel set in an imagined version of 1599. There’s
more Shakespeare in this forty-five minutes than in the entirety of Shakespeare in Love, and that really
only can be a good thing.
As You Like It
Kenneth Branagh, 2006.
Renowned for his popular interpretations of
Shakespeare on film, Kenneth Branagh directed As You Like It for BBC/HBO. And while it might not have reached the
popular success of his Henry V or Much Ado About Nothing, there is a lot
to love in it, most notably Bryce Dallas Howard’s charming, believable and
utterly beguiling Rosalind. Filmed on location in Kew
Gardens , it is set in Japan
Titus
Julie Taymor, 1999.
Prior to
studying The Tempest in Year
Twelve, my English teacher showed us the first ten minutes of Titus. I was captivated by the child
playing at the kitchen table with his toy soldiers; the bold choral, almost
fanfare-like music, that heralded the arrival of the army; the soldiers, like
full-sized copies of the child’s figurines, clothed in armour and leather,
accompanied by motorbikes; the prisoners and spoils of war contained in
chariots and carts pulled by horses and tanks; the heightened dance-like
movement of the foot soldiers, and the authoritarian address by Titus
Andronicus to his people; the way time periods and styles collided against one
another with such force that their anachronistic existences were totally
justified within the deserted coliseum, the original theatre of cruelty. The
rest of the film is nothing short of engrossing, yet also harrowing and
exhaustingly exhilarating in a heightened poetic way. Filmed on location in Italy and Croatia ,
and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome ,
it mixes time periods like smells in a market place, and concocts the giddiest
of pies from its ingredients. Her locations, when coupled with Shakespeare’s
text, become metaphors for the psychological worlds of the characters,
encapsulating emotional throughlines of scenes, sequences and acts. There is
also a frequent and often subtle use of the hand as a visual device – it is
both a blackly ironic statement as well as an examination of the nature and
politics of power, revenge and violence. Taymor’s ideograph of the hand can be
traced in almost every scene – a boy plays at his kitchen table, ripping limbs
from his toy soldiers and dousing them in tomato sauce, all in frenetic
close-up; senators acknowledge crowds and ask for silence; Basianus holds
Lavinia close, out of Saturninus’s reach; Titus fatally stabs his own son; a
large stone hand lies crumbling in a public square, its extended finger seeming
to grope at the square’s occupants; Titus’ hand is chopped off in a twisted act
of salvation; his daughter, Lavinia, is raped and has her hands cut off and
replaced by useless twigs; Aaron the Moor protects his infant son from
soldiers, cradling him in his arms; Titus breaks Lavinia’s neck with his bare
hands in a desperate albeit merciful act towards the film’s conclusion. In its
final shot, there is the rarest of rays of hope, as Young Lucius carries
Aaron’s infant son from the coliseum, as Elliot Goldenthal’s luscious (and
frequently anachronistic) score offers a way out, a way to break the circle of
violence and revenge. Granted, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, and many people
will disagree with it, but I think it is a tremendously bold, audacious and
quite successful rendering of one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays.
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.
05/04/2014
Cymbeline
NIDA, 2013
 |
Image
by Catherine Steele.
|
Set upon a
series of tiered white planes, this Cymbeline
foregrounded Shakespeare’s jagged and uncompromising prose, his torturously
fractured speech-rhythms and borderline incomprehensible plot. Not because the
actors, all second-year acting students, were anything less than superb, but
simply because it is such a strange play. The actors carried the play with
aplomb, making the lines that extra bit clearer, doing their utmost in their
beautifully designed and tailored jackets and dresses and skirts to make the
play as believable, as real, as possible. One of his Romances, Cymbeline’s ending – another classic
revelatory ‘wonder-upon-wonder’ scene – can seem rather awkward and implausible
on the page. Here, under the direction of Tom Wright, the scene – indeed, the
production – was measured, carefully timed and beautifully judged; what could
have fallen over itself became moving, and the grace with which it was played
fed reversely back through the previous two-and-a-bit hours, leaving us drained,
ours brain fizzing as we tried to make sense of the whole crazy mad tale.
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.
Julius Caesar
 |
Photo
by Fotogroup for
|
Peter Evans’
production of Shakespeare’s tragedy deployed his (apparently-trademark)
fascination with Meyerhold’s movement technique to haunting effect. The actors
would coalesce and scatter across the stage, ringed by black office chairs and
a Roman column, slowing down – almost to a stop – as they reached the other
side, and then continuing off. Caesar’s assassination was a rare moment of
poetry – handfuls of white powdered milk thrown in place of knives, actors
jumping and throwing each other away from the stabbed emperor. Reminiscent of
modern politics, Kate Mulvany’s Cassius and Colin Moody’s Brutus stole the
show, and it was a rare example of a production which intelligently captured
the current political mood in such a raw, poetic and theatrical way that you
couldn’t help but make this tragedy exciting and profoundly gripping.
Faustus
 |
| Photo by Rob Maccoll for Queensland Theatre Company. |
While strictly
not Shakespeare, Michael Gow’s adaptation of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus fused the Elizabethan tragedy with Goethe’s Faust, as well as fragments of puppetry,
opera, video projections and a devilishly good dose of audacity, while seeming
to utilise every theatrical style imaginable. John Bell dancing in a steel-blue
suit as Mephistopheles, Ben Winspear’s rock-god Faustus; a trio of devils
singing a Schubert lieder, and a
beautifully school-girlish Gretchen in Kathryn Marquet,
gave us a vision of hell quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It was
sexy, dangerous, edgy and above all, deliciously good fun.
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.
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