from Lyn Gardner's March 16, 2007 article in the Guardian
Inventive: Shakespeare performed in a language other than English often has a liberating effect on both audiences and directors. Yes, of course you lose the poetry, but Shakespeare was a playwright first and foremost: the text is only one part of the experience, and one that sometimes seems overfamiliar. ...
When a company stages the first folio of Hamlet, it makes you sit up and listen to the play afresh. It is akin to being in a room you know well but discovering it's been painted a different colour. It's often the same with Shakespeare in a foreign language. …
Love or loathe the director's approach, but productions such as Bieito's Catalan Macbeth make you feel as if you are seeing the play for the first time. Directors not hidebound by a reverence for Shakespeare means productions not to everyone's taste but driven by a genuine passion for the play.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I think the best way to cure oneself of over-familiarity with Shakespeare is to re-read him. In re-reading, we rediscover his inexhaustibility, which gets blunted, polemicized, and often made ridiculous in actual production.
Someone recently put me on to "Shakespeare Our Contemporary" by Jan Kott, and I am really enjoying it.
It's hard for to see some Shakespeare plays with no previous knowledge and take much in, but if I have done some research I can get more.
I agree with David that there's no such thing as over-familiarity with Shakespeare. "Over-familiarity" just means you have a surface understanding and you're ignoring the parts of the work that interfere with it. On the other hand, the depth of Shakespeare means that staging the text demands a strong sense of what you want to do, otherwise everyone is acting well at the end of the four weeks and you still don't have a play.
Although a second feature of overfamiliar Shakespeare is simply how rushed most American productions are. I followed a hunch--Bieto's Macbeth had a three-month-long rehearsal period. It's a testament to American theatre how much we can achieve in our time, but it also chokes our visions into what can be made consistent in a short time. This in turn makes it very hard to do a production that has a strong "message" without the whole thing seeming forced and artificial.
I can't imagine anyone who thinks all Shakespeare should be staged in period costumes in a replica of the Globe theatre (and if there was anyone, I'd like them to research the evolution from the folios to our current text). You can do very good Shakespeare like that, but it's an exhibition piece. Be opposed to bad theatre, always. But don't lump "updating" and/or "message" in there with bad theatre.
It's important to not assume one's audience is overly familiar with Shakespeare, because I can assure you, the general public simply isn't.
Overly familiar with? Doubtful.
Bored with? Possibly.
Uninterested in? Probable.
I think that it's important to remember that definitely in the article and probably in the comments, the overly-familiar Shakespeare is a style of production; bland, mildly anachronistic, and so reverent towards the text that it doesn't manage to actually say anything. Henry V was a very affecting, good version of this style, while PCS's Merchant of Venice (and apparently Catalan's Macbeth as well) was a good example of its antithesis.
Post a Comment