Shakespeare survives every
modernisation
Timed for various openings of Shakespeare plays, The Independent,
1998
The groundlings are all astir. American cult teen star Claire Daines
has moved on from MTV's My So-Called Life to an LA gang-war Romeo
and Juliet, opening in cinemas here next week [[march 28]]. So all's
well: people have always messed with the Bard.
Shakespeare is enjoying a success which is likely to prove light
years longerlasting even than Star Wars'. He can be digitised but
not mastered. You can throw what you like at the plays and feel
that the old begger was on your side all along. whilst the audiences
comes out talking about the special effects, it's the poetry and
themes they dream about later. That, and the performances, of course.
Repertory theatre may be dead, but there remains a sense of a national
repertory theatre - enhanced if anything by television - and there
is a special sport in watching a familiar face from a soap or a
thriller working with a different class of material. And then there
is the buzz of watching a new generation of actor and actress ageing
into the big stuff.
The National Theatre unveils a new King Lear this weekend [March
27], and for once we haven't been teased with star interviews. The
fun is in wondering whether the quiet Holm is up to this noisey
and dark piece? Out comes his 1967 Henry V (on audio cassetete)
for a rerun of the younger man, with John Gielgud the well-mannered
Chorus reminding us - what is hard to remember with hi-tech modern
productions - that we are invited to "be kind and eke out our
performance with your mind". The mind skips along to Laurence
Olivier's filmed Henry V, where the camera oes backstage to enhance
Shakespeare's game of showing us the swan of Avon's feet paddling
beneath the serene surface.
In the surreal world of Lear nearly anything can work. Youngish
Kathryn Hunter at the Haymarket, Leicester, was a mesmerising Lear:
acting beyond gender and years to portray a regal loss of command
of self, family and realm. There was a little, but only a very little,
of Patricia Hayes's Edna the inebriated woman about it.
One half hopes the National's is one of the quieter productions.
It's true, we are mostly glad that modern effects are high-powered.
Vulgar they may be, but even a dedicated follower of Shakespeare
is glad of things which help pass the time. And sometimes, they
add clarity too. In the Royal Shakespeare Company's Lear, Robert
Stephens' job was made a little easier when the protagonists' allegiances
were mapped out in colour-coded costume.
Having cancelled the milk for the nonce, one was almost grateful
for all that Dolby sound in Brannagh's Hamlet. The King's ghost
can bellow, "Swear, swear, swear", in the rib-cage jarring
Sensurround which accompanies intergalactic conflict in Hollywood
offerings. And if Brannagh's Hamlet had resonances of Oliver's Prince
and the Showgirl, well, if we're to have the full text we might
as well have some pecs too. All distractions were welcome.
The bigger effects are not confined to film: the RSC's Lear had
the planet earth split with the awfulness of family strife, and
it was drenched in the quantities of light you mostly see in rock
concerts or the most unnerving kind of modern restaurant. Granted
that half the audience at Stratford can't follow the words, it is
only fair to give them some other thrills to remind them of No theatre:
but an English-speaker can quite enjoy them too.
There is nothing wrong with mucking about with the look of Shakespeare.
Actors have to be dressed in something or other, and they have to
stand in front of some sort of scenery. Currently, productions tend
to transmute into the feifdoms of dictators. This month [[march]],
the Haymarket, Leicester's Lear and Richmond Theatre's Hamlet took
advantage of the cheapness of ex-Army greatcoats and charity shop
evening wear. They drew on Kafka and Orwell to give us a vaguely
East European nihilism. Granted that Medieval history was mostly
about "domestics" and the troubles absolute rulers faced
from their barons, dicators and gangleaders make a perfectly good
simulcrum. A fine coffee table book, Shakespeare In Performance*,
usefully and uniquely hauls together historical and near-historical
representations of the plays, and points out that Donald Wolfit
based his 1942 RIII on Hitler. Who wouldn't have, then?
Ian McKellen (a good Dauphin in 1967's HV) says that Shakespeare
plays started by being staged anachronistically, and thus liberated,
went on to embellish Richard Eyre's reading of RIII into something
which was not merely nearly modern and dictatorial, but piercingly
English because it had hints of The Remains of the Day and its themes
of a Mosley-ite Britain.
More worryingly, McKellen seems to believe that the modern age
can at last see Rlll as a man more sinned against than sinning:
people had always been horrible to him, partly because of his deformity,
and so he became beastly. The Elizabethan mind apparently felt free
just to hate deformity in its own right and we need to move on a
bit from that. But equally, we find in Shakespeare a mind so good
that the centuries add little to his insight and anyway we can assert
that this is a body of work so respectable no political correctnes
can censor our discussion of it. There are limits: as we saw on
television last weekend [[march 22]] Deborah Warner's direction
of Fiona Shaw in Richard ll produced something thrilling and gorgeous,
but finally a little pantomimic. Any King snogging his barons in
the throne room seems a tad improbable. Shakespeare doesn't get
near to hinting it. According to Nigel Saul, in a biography to be
published next month [[April] in the revived Yale English Monarchs
series, Shakespeare got Rll more near to life than we might expect.
This king may or may not have been queer, but he was a stickler
for formalities in public anyway.
Still, our recent crop of Shakespeare adventures remains more vigorous
than silly, and Shakespeare's texts chew up psychobabble and spit
it out. So it is good fun to spot someone like Al Pacino doing a
Richard lll which revels in depravity with little apology from character
or actor. This is an Rlll in which God is invited to stand up for
bastards. Pacino folows Olivier's 1955 rendition in seeing the hunchback
as a bit of a laugh. Perhaps it took a short Italian to see an English
monarch as an over-acheiving Mafiosi. Above all, he did service
by showing a modern movie audience that violence doesn't have to
be mindless.
Nor do larger political sensitivities matter. Brannagh's Henry
V, said to be anti-war, is actually plain intelligent. But it doesn't
matter, either, that Olivier's wartime Henry V was zenophobic. Shakespeare
wrote Tudor propaganda, and a nation fighting for its life is liable
to be tolerant of a bit of cheering on. Perhaps this attitude will
become laughable; but some future age may find it necessary too.
Whatever the verdict on old performances, we will always have the
evidence on which to base it. Every generation from now on will
not merely have the timelessness of the text, but, in video and
celluloid aspic, every production style from the Second World War.
This does have its drawbacks. We may forget the value of the ephemeral
stage and the special skills it demands and rewards. Amongst contemporaries,
Brannagh of course stands out, at least for now. He has been our
Olivier: as actor-manager he almost as much invented as he discovered
the modern Shakespeare mass audience. His acting, like Olivier's,
is varied but quite limited. He looks great in tights. He can say
the verse and gets way beyond craftsmanlike emoting, but even more
than Olivier, his amiability robs him of darkness.
But it is lovely to see the hammy, actorly, tradition alive and
well in him. Perhaps the very luxury by which we all know them both
so well is their undoing: better the magic of their work in a darkened
room, in person.
But there is, even on film, a lot to be said for staginess. Pacino
was a joy because his was not merely a New York "method"
performance, but his film is a "method" portrayal of an
actor discovering the part. Pacino had done RIII on the stage long
before the film: his naive excitement at exegesis is disingenuous
but charming. It is also camp, in its own way.
Actor-spotting is a blood sport. Lear is attempted by few actors
and utterly sinks surprisingly few of them. But most more or less
fail: Robert Stephens was a cheerful dried-out drunk and Michael
Hordern seemed to have early onset. Mind you, Hordern was performing
in a BBC Shakespeare cycle of the 70s and 80s, which seemed curiously
dull considering it was the offspring of the Peter Hall-John Barton
Shakespeare revolution of the 60s. On cassette and video, we can
all have ulitmate Lear of our time: Paul Scofield's. Peter Brook,
the director of this Lear's several outings (The Aldwych in 1962,
audiotape 1965, and film 1970) is the epitome of the post-Beatle
theatre, but demonstrates also the evolution of Shakespearean style.
James Shaw, at Stratfords's Shakespeare Centre, points out that
Brook cut his teeth on bold productions of Titus Andronicus and
The Tempest with the likes of Olivier and Vivien Leigh from the
40s onward.
Anyway, Scofield's voice (even if at times carrying a hint of the
Dalek) had (and has) great power, but also an occasional squeak
which conveys imperiousness swerving off into querrulousness in
just the right way.
Hamlet sinks most actors. It requires an ability to convey physicality
and playfulness, introspection and madness. Mostly, it's the Adrian
Mole in him that comes out. Derek Jacobi is getting better and better
in butch parts, but for the BBC's effort seemed just weak. Mel Gibson
never got close. Oliver's gloomy prince seemed narcissistic. The
more you see the others, the more Brannagh's effort seems worth
treasuring. Best of all was Michael Maloney's bits of Hamlet in
Brannagh's lovely In the Bleak Midwinter (like Pacino's outing,
an exploration of actorliness and the Play). True, on stage at the
Richmond, Maloney scampered and scarpered too much and was a tad
too winning.
J B Priestley pointed out that Shakespeare certainly liked box
office success. It's a safe bet he wouldn't mind whether Romeo and
Juliet was set in New York or LA, just so long as it was staged
at all. As for Lear, we will admire it whether it's set in an old
folks home (as was the Haymarket, Leicester's) or outer space. And
the odd things is how anyone English is especially allowed to be
proud of Shakespeare. Every generation has shared that curious sense
of ownership: when we perform or watch him, we are participating
in his work of inventing Englishness.
*ed Keith Parsons and Pamela Mason, Salamander Books, London. |