On Saturday the RSC marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a slap-up gala in Stratford-upon-Avon that will be broadcast live on BBC2 and boasts, as MGM used to say, “more stars than in the heavens”. If you are in London, you could stroll from Westminster to Tower Bridge and see a sequence of short films produced by Shakespeare’s Globe. Alternatively you could pop into a fascinating exhibition at the British Library titled Shakespeare in Ten Acts. To confirm Shakespeare’s global reach, in Dubai you could catch an immersive Romeo and Juliet staged in a vast shopping mall, and in Warsaw there’s a season of Shakespeare-inspired ballets with Polish dancers and Iranian designers.
This bombardment of Bardolatry prompts a series of questions. What is it about Shakespeare’s plays that keeps them so constantly performed and studied at a time when the idea of a western canon is in question? Is the hierarchical status given to Shakespeare’s tragedies due for urgent reassessment? And how should we stage his plays in a period of rapid social change and shifting theatrical techniques?
Aside from the obvious richness of plot, language and character, two things especially strike me. One is that Shakespeare, like his contemporary Cervantes in Don Quixote, displays a pioneering freedom that anticipates many of the developments of his chosen form. Just as Cervantes gives us magic realism and a self-referential narrative avant la lettre, so Shakespeare plays with time, space, direct address, inner consciousness, cosmic despair and metaphysical absurdity in ways that prefigure future drama. When Peter Brook directed King Lear in 1962, critics commented on the Beckettian nature of the moment when Alan Webb’s blinded Gloucester fell to the ground believing he was hurling himself off a Dover cliff. Brook wasn’t, however, imposing Beckett on Shakespeare: the great modernist was always present in his predecessor.
A second key Shakespeare quality is an ambivalence that allows his plays to change their meaning according to when and where they are produced. Hamlet is the most famous example. As Oscar Wilde remarked, there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet: the role is defined by the temperament of the leading actor. The play also changes according to historical and geographical circumstance. The western tradition is, by and large, to see it as a study of existential doubt. In contrast, at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow in the Soviet era, it became a portrait of obsessive state surveillance with characters constantly observed from behind a vast mobile curtain. As staged by the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest during the Ceausescu years, Elsinore was transformed into a decaying museum that became a symbol of a declining Romania.
Shakespeare’s infinite adaptability is the source of his global popularity. In 1992 I gave a talk to a Shakespeare conference in Adelaide mischievously titled Was Shakespeare English? I heard recently that this is also the title of a forthcoming documentary which argues that Shakespeare’s Italy-based comedies could only have been written by a native Italian. I wasn’t, however, questioning the veracity of Shakespeare’s origins. My point was that Shakespeare was too elusive, variable and pluralistic to be the exclusive property of one culture. It’s a point that has been richly confirmed by international seasons at Shakespeare’s Globe and the RSC. Even in English, the plays are brilliantly unstable.
The great South African actor John Kani once told me a story about playing Othello at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. To local liberals, the play was a tragedy about the hero’s destructive credulity. To the weekend township audience, claimed Kani, the play suddenly became a topical drama about the eternal fraudulence of the white liar.
The examples I’ve quoted have all been from Shakespeare’s tragedies and they retain their popular currency. This year you can hardly move without stumbling across King Lear. Don Warrington in Manchester and Michael Pennington in Northampton are currently playing the king. Later we will see Antony Sher in Stratford and Glenda Jackson at the Old Vic crazily dividing their kingdoms. Among the comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also a perennial favourite. Erica Whyman’s RSC production, billed as “a play for the nation”, is now traversing the land, and Emma Rice shortly opens her reign at Shakespeare’s Globe with a radical new version.
I relish Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies. But I question the inherited assumption that they represent Shakespeare’s supreme achievement and speak to us most clearly today. Peter Brook once wrote that Shakespeare’s plays are like planets which move closer to or further away from Earth at moments in their orbit: he cited Timon of Athens, which, in its bitterness and cynicism, seems peculiarly modern. My own claim would be that it is Shakespeare’s histories which today seem more urgently apprehensible than even Lear or Othello.
It’s a big assertion but one that is backed up by current performance schedules. The RSC is halfway through an epic history cycle. The BBC is about to unveil the second part of its Hollow Crown sequence, comprising the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo and Michael Gambon. This weekend, Ivo van Hove brings his acclaimed Kings of War, placing Shakespeare’s histories in the war rooms of modern political leaders, from Amsterdam to the Barbican. In late May I will set out eagerly for America to see the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s version of the histories, in which director Barbara Gaines promises to view the cycle from the perspective of the common man. Last year I saw Galway’s Druid Theatre Company offer a radical take on the plays in which both Henry IV and Henry V were played by women.
So why is it that Shakespeare’s histories speak to us so clearly today? One reason is that the plays are not, as often thought, simple exercises in Tudor propaganda, but penetrating studies of politics and power. James Shapiro’s book, 1599, reminds us just how subversive Shakespeare’s Richard II was in the age of Elizabeth I: as Shapiro writes, the authorities were concerned that Londoners might draw lessons from a story about “the overthrow of a childless monarch who had taxed them ruthlessly and mismanaged Ireland”.
Today the play has lost none of its potency since it poses a perennially topical question: at which point does it become legitimate to unseat a leader who claims unquestioned authority whether it be divine, as in Richard’s age, or democratic, as in our own? I don’t imagine, for instance, that Dilma Rousseff would be keen to see the play revived in modern Rio.
But all Shakespeare’s history plays deal with ever-pertinent issues. Henry V never ceases to astonish me with its capacity to reflect the mood of the moment. Laurence Olivier’s 1944 movie was sanctioned as a morale-booster by politicians and dedicated to the fighting men liberating Europe at the close of the second world war.
And in 2003, at the time of the Iraq war, Nicholas Hytner chose the play to begin his tenure at the National Theatre and showed Adrian Lester’s king launching a foreign invasion on questionable legal grounds and making chauvinist speeches to TV cameras and embedded journalists. The Polish academic Jan Kott once wrote a book called Shakespeare: Our Contemporary. If Kott’s claim is still true, it is because it is repeatedly endorsed by Shakespeare’s histories.
This, however, raises the question of how we stage Shakespeare’s plays today. Do we heighten their application to the present? Or do we leave it to audiences to deduce the contemporary parallels? I don’t believe there is a fixed solution. Everything hinges on the integrity of the approach and the insights it provides.
I would cite the case of Rupert Goold. When he set The Merchant of Venice, first for the RSC and later at the Almeida, in modern Las Vegas, he brought out brilliantly the gambling culture that pervades the play and highlighted the tragic solitude of Portia who ended up as a wealthy heiress belatedly realising she was tied to a husband whose sexual preferences lay elsewhere. But I was less struck by a Goold Hamlet set among 1940s Parisian existentialists: a bright idea that was not fortified by the text.
What is clear is that our approach to casting is changing rapidly, and has to go much further, in matters of race and gender. David Oyelowo has played Henry VI, Adrian Lester Hamlet and Henry V, Paapa Essiedu is the new, very good, Stratford Hamlet. But this is the first stage in reclaiming Shakespeare for black and Asian actors. I can’t think of a single Shakespeare play that wouldn’t be reinvigorated by this process.
And, although it may annoy some, I long for the day when a white actor can once more play Othello. If Jonas Kaufmann is permitted to sing Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden, why can’t a white actor, without the obscene literalism of “blacking up”, play the Moor?
Gender-blind casting is also refreshing and right. Acting is a feat of imaginative impersonation: a point made by Harriet Walter in an interview in the British Library Exhibition, where she says she has just as much, or just as little, in common with Brutus as she has with Cleopatra. I take that to mean that it requires the same feat of transubstantiation to turn herself into an anguished Roman senator as it does into an omnipotent Egyptian queen. My only observation is that mixed-gender casting works just as well, if not better, than single-sex productions. When Maxine Peake played Hamlet in Manchester, it made total sense for her to have a male Claudius and a female Polonius.
Similarly, in the current Stratford Hamlet, it is intriguing to see a male Rosencrantz and a female Guildenstern. In gender, as with race, the only true test lies in the quality of the actor.
In the end, Shakespeare’s plays will always be a mirror for the times. But, while I applaud the cyclical re-invention of Shakespeare, I also believe that should not preclude a microscopic attention to the text. If I have any fear, it is that more attention is sometimes paid to ostentatious design than to the excavation of meaning. For me, a great Shakespeare production is one where I emerge with a new understanding of the play achieved through acting and direction. If we are to make the festivities surrounding Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary something more than a ritual gesture, it will be through a renewed focus on his language. The best way to mark his death will be by giving his words renewed and vigorous life.
