The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0676 Wednesday, 18 July 2006
[1] From: David Frankel <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 12:32:10 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
[2] From: Michael B. Luskin <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 12:47:08 EDT
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
[3] From: Susanne Greenhalgh <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 18:54:01 +0100
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0665 Against All-Male Productions
[4] From: Elizabeth S. Angello <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 14:32:54 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
[5] From: Charles Weinstein <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 17:55:45 -0400
Subj: Against All-Male Productions
[6] From: Charles Weinstein <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 18:25:44 -0400
Subj: Against All-Male Productions
[7] From: Jeffrey Jordan <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 22:48:57 -0500
Subj: Re: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: David Frankel <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 12:32:10 -0400
Subject: 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
Larry Weiss said (in regard to all-male casting):
>The more the production
>verges away from Elizabethan/Jacobean conditions, the less
>all male casting is legitimate. It ceases to be an
>experiment and becomes a gimmick.
I think I'd argue that all theatrical production is a "gimmick." Whether
or not the gimmick makes sense depends upon how the conventions that
govern the performance choices and audience responses work together or
collide. Just as there is no authentic text, there is no authentic
meaning-every production creates its own meaning (broadly construed here
to include the feelings that it evokes in the audience, and the
connections that audience members make between the play and world(s) in
which they live).
I do not, by the way, intend to imply a sort of "anything goes" attitude
-- productions are, and should be, critiqued, evaluated, argued over,
and judged-but those arguments and judgments are, themselves, subject to
the same processes of evaluation.
[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Michael B. Luskin <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 12:47:08 EDT
Subject: 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
I wonder if this thread is not a tempest in a teapot. Shakespeare
produced plays with all male casts, and that was that. I don't know if
he ever thought much about other castings. I wonder if anyone does, if
anyone knows of "private" productions with females at the time.
I don't know what "authentic" means. If we use men for the sake of
authenticity, shouldn't we also use Globe-like conditions, no lighting,
almost no scenery, and so forth? Or maybe not. The question is, what
is the director trying to do?
It seems odd that people, who usually present themselves as purists and
narrow constructionists on this list, seem to be in favor of
revisionism, including women, modern stagings, and so forth. We don't
think twice today about women in female roles, but Shakespeare would
have. Today, with gay issues are on the front burner, an all male
staging is in itself a statement. Or all female. I suppose a gifted
animal trainer could put together a staging of Hamlet with parrots. Not
sure what that statement would be, but it could possibly be done. I
guess a PETA message...
Thirty years ago, I saw an all male As You Like It, and, after, ten
minutes, I forgot that it was an all male production, it worked as it was.
Twenty-five years ago, Patrice Chereau did a fine production of the
Wagner Ring Cycle, setting it in nineteenth century England. Wotan and
company were Midlands plutocrats. Much of the scenery was reminiscent
of old factories. It worked wonderfully. Fafner and Fasolt were
brought to life as shop stewards, who believed in their bosses and in
progress, and were all the more enraged when they were betrayed. Mime's
underground sweat shop looked as though it was conceived by the CIO or
the wobblies. And so forth.
At about the same time, I saw a Carmen set during the Spanish Civil War.
Carmen walked around in fatigues and carried a bazooka, and the main
thing she conveyed, aside from the bazooka, was discomfort. It didn't
work. Relevance?
It is possible for there to be "authentic" stagings that do not work,
and "modernized," whatever that means, stagings that do.
To me, the real issue is the piece, not the staging. It seems to me
that the one supports the other, not the other way around. If the
staging takes precedence over the play, the performances is about the
staging, not about the play.
Michael B. Luskin
[3]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Susanne Greenhalgh <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 18:54:01 +0100
Subject: 17.0665 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0665 Against All-Male Productions
Further to the mention of Declan Donnellan's 'King Lear' of some years
ago I strongly recommend those who can to book a ticket to see his
all-Russian, all-male 'Twelfth Night'(Cheek by Jowl/Chekhov
International Festival), which tours the US in the Fall, including New
York, Chicago and Berkeley. Not only is this is a highly enjoyable and
thought-provoking interpretation of the play, but the men's (not boys')
performances in the female roles are wonderfully varied and nuanced.
Susanne Greenhalgh,
Principal Lecturer,
Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies,
School of Arts,
Roehampton University,
[4]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Elizabeth S. Angello <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 14:32:54 -0400
Subject: 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: RE: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
++Olivier was believably made up as a black man, to the palms of his
hands; Stewart played a white black man. The former was drama; the
latter a travesty.++
Painting Olivier black did not make him a "believable" black man. I
don't discredit the subtleties of his performance, but awarding him
authenticity is absurd. Olivier was a great Othello; he was not a black one.
++Political correctness or a desire to spread the work around is no
excuse for revising Shakespeare's plays into something else.++
How can we NOT revise them into something else? We are incapable of
performing a play "original" conditions, on any level-socially,
politically, culturally, linguistically, spectacularly, etc. Each
performance is a revision, each night a "something else." Olivier in
blackface is as much a revision as Stewart in his own skin, as much as
Rylance as Cleopatra, as much as MacKellan as Lear. As much as everyone
after Burbage, and, if you want to get right down to it, as Burbage each
night after the first.
And, not incidentally, Burbage did not perform Othello in blackface.
Does this make his performance, too, a travesty?
On all other points relating to this discussion, I think we had best
adhere to the wise (and more scholarly than mine) postings of Paul
Hebron and Brian Willis.
--Lizz Angello
University of South Florida
[5]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Charles Weinstein <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 17:55:45 -0400
Subject: Against All-Male Productions
"When Shakespeare's greatest female character spurns the thought of
viewing 'some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness' she is mocking the
idea that she could be adequately incarnated by a male."
That seems to me indisputable. Why did Shakespeare devise such a
sentiment and make Cleopatra utter it (in her death scene, no less)?
Metatheatrics notwithstanding, I think he shared her opinion of its justice.
--Charles Weinstein
[6]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Charles Weinstein <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 18:25:44 -0400
Subject: Against All-Male Productions
"Charles Weinstein happened to repeat a myth (that a law kept women off
the Renaissance stage) that oughtn't to go unchallenged here."
Mr. Egan's earlier "belief" that there was no such law has now hardened
into a certainty. I take it that the issue is unsettled. Pending a
resolution, let us say "an unwritten law" or "custom that had the force
of law," since it ultimately required the intervention of royal
authority to end the practice.
--Charles Weinstein
[7]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jeffrey Jordan <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Tuesday, 18 Jul 2006 22:48:57 -0500
Subject: 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
Comment: Re: SHK 17.0671 Against All-Male Productions
Replying to Aaron Azlant.
>2. Who's to say that one of the teenage boys couldn't have
>played the Gravedigger?
Me. I'll volunteer to say it. Although I suppose a few boys could
handle it, such doubling would be a heavy load for a youngster. One
must keep in mind not only whether a boy could have an acceptable
voice, and be given an acceptable appearance for a role, but how much
of a burden one can reasonably place on a youngster without overtaxing
him. Handling both Ophelia and the Gravedigger, and doing a good job
with both, would be a lot to expect from a boy.
However, I think you've got something here....
>In /Hamlet/, at least, it seems likely to me that there would
>have been other work for Armin, who could have played
>both Polonius and Osric (note, for instance, the similarity
>between Polonius' agreement with Hamlet on the shape
>of the fictional clouds and Osric's agreement with Hamlet
>on the weather).
Doubling of Polonius and Ostrick is highly credible, I believe, and
nicely compatible with the play. Symbolically, Ostrick becomes the
reincarnation of Polonius, so to speak. With the deaths of R & G and
Polonius, Ostrick is on track to become the new top aide to the crown,
which is what Polonius was. There's also the observation that in Q2
Polonius is the "smell bad" character, but in Q1 it's Ostrick. In
addition to what you mention about the dialogue, Polonius and Ostrick
share the "smell" as well, if one takes both Q1 and Q2 into account.
And this goes along with what you mentioned earlier about doubling being
obvious to the audience. If the Polonius actor were familiar to the
audience, the audience could enjoy him being "reincarnated" as Ostrick,
and I don't think it would detract from the play. The symbolism is in
the endurance of "the politician." Kill one, and another steps in who
is pretty much the same, only younger. I suggest that Shakespeare might
have intended to convey that idea, and doubling of Polonius and Ostrick
might have been used to go along with it.
_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>
DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the
opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the
editor assumes no responsibility for them.
|
