The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0414 Thursday, 30 July 2009
From: Robert Projansky <
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Date: Tuesday, 28 Jul 2009 03:29:23 -0700
Subject: 20.0402 Updating Shakespeare's Plays
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0402 Updating Shakespeare's Plays
Sorry, but I think "updating" is Newspeak for what is routinely done to
Shakespeare's plays. Using actresses, typing, modern sets, photocopied
computer-edited scripts, e-mailed rehearsal schedules, recorded
music/not-visible musicians, audio amplification, electric stage
lighting, polyester-nylon-Velcro costumes, turntables, hairspray, video
projections, dry ice, smoke machines, etc., etc., etc. -- that's
updating, a whole brave new world of wonderful tools. But planting MND
in a '70s disco or TS in 1915 Arizona is not "updating"; it is travesty,
hubris, failure.
If you present "Death of a Salesman", nobody thinks it needs to be set
in war-torn Kosovo or colonial Bombay or in any place or any time other
than when and where Arthur Miller put it. So why does it seem necessary
to so many directors to visit their abusive improvements upon
Shakespeare? You can never force any of the plays into a director's
alien place/time "concept" without doing some injury to the play. Trying
to do Kosovo or colonialism or Vietnam or fascism or the antebellum
south or the wild west or Wall Street or Miami and the mob just doesn't
ever work. It can't work. Shakespeare's world is the warp and woof of
his work. Sad to say, such conceptual hogwash is now the norm and
Shakespeare played straight the aberration. Stacey Keach and everyone
else in that DC production deserved a chance to do "King Lear", not
"King Lear Dragged Mindlessly Into the Balkans". But, you say, you want
to acknowledge some particular inhumanities of our own age on your
stage? Great! Produce Caryl Churchill then, or Tony Kushner or Ariel
Dorfman, but Balkan horrors don't belong in Shakespeare's "King Lear".
I think these kinds of practices usually come either from directors'
foolish ambitions (Watch clever ME breathe life into this boring old
thing!) or out of an inappropriate lack of confidence in their audience
(Dear old Shakespeare won't be enough; we'll have to give 'em boaters
and seersucker and a brass band too). And sometimes the director just
wants to see 1920s-30s silk gowns and evening dress onstage -- for no
good reason.
The only non-period productions I have ever seen and thought a success
have been low- or no-budget shows, essentially setless with abstract
costuming (say, all in black but Desdemona in white). Among the best of
these -- but hardly a low-end show -- was the RSC's MND I saw at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2000, directed by Michael Boyd. The
all-white set made no attempt to be the Duke's palace or the forest. The
costumes I remember were little more than ordinary rehearsal-style
clothes. The high-energy show concentrated on the language and the
action, with some brilliant use of props (and Hermia Thrown
Astonishingly High and Far!), and it was very funny. Michael Boyd,
however, did not try to force the play into another place and time;
instead, his very stylish and stylized production scanted illusionistic
stage elements in favor of visual abstraction that looked like no time
or place at all. Although the background was different, the Duke's wood
and the royal trappings and the fairy world, as they would have been
four hundred years ago, were pretty much left to your imagination. A
fantasy played as -- a fantasy. I loved it.
Shakespeare's plays present opportunity enough for any director to shine
without resort to trying to jam the square peg of the play into a round
hole of the director's choice. Directors who cannot see that shouldn't
be directing Shakespeare (or maybe anything at all). They are missing a
sure-fire high concept for success that is always right there in front
of them: Shakespeare is first of everything his language, so bring the
play to life in the language and keep it moving, give them rousing
fights and good music, and try to find all the comedy in the play. Can't
miss. No body bags required.
Best to all,
Bob Projansky
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