Book Review: Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

Bryson’s 2007 Shakespeare biography doesn’t cover any new ground, but it’s immensely readable. However, Bryson is so keen on reminding us there’s so little real, hard evidence of Shakespeare’s life that it’s pretty pointless trying to surmise whether he was a Catholic, the state of his marriage, or what he had for breakfast.

I actually agree with Bryson. I’m not that interested in Shakespeare’s life story. Instead, the play’s always the thing. I’ve never been one for poring through The Merchant of Venice or Othello and trying to find clues to the author’s life. Shakespeare’s sonnets are a good illustration—you could go bonkers trying to work out if the writer is gay or straight or bi or even actually Shakespeare himself. As Bryson points out, looking for ‘biography—Shakespeare’s or anyone’s—in the sonnets is almost certainly an exercise in futility’.

But whilst this may be true, I would still expect a biographer to have some sort of opinion. Bryson’s point (and he makes it continually) is that you can’t really know anything much about Shakespeare at all. We don’t even know how he spelled or pronounced his name. 

As much as I agree with Bryson, I kind of wanted some wild conjectures. Of course, what Bryson does so well is rubbish some of these crazy theories in a funny way, for example the bizarre Delia Bacon who decided Shakespeare was in fact, Francis Bacon by months of academic research which seemed to involve spurning any archives in favour of hanging out where Bacon used to frequent, picking up frequencies by ‘a kind of intellectual osmosis’.

Another thing Bryson does really well is context—he captures a myriad of small details about life in early modern England, dropping them in seamlessly. I would say for a biography of Shakespeare, a large proportion of the book is spent exploring the everyday life of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. This is as it should be of course, but Shakespeare isn’t slotted into any of these scenarios Bryson paints.

There’s an amazing section on London—back in those days the City of London was a cramped, tiny city stuffed into ‘448 exceedingly cosy acres within the city walls’. Greater London was beyond the gates, often slum-like shanty houses while Chelsea, Hampstead and Hammersmith were separate villages. As we know, the playhouses were outside the walls, nestled besides brothels and other places of ill-repute, ready to be closed down at the first sniff of the plague. It’s these sections which work the best. 

Bryson also does a good job of creating the idea of the network of contemporary dramatists—your Fletchers and Marlowes and Johsnons and the trials and tribulations of the early theatres, such as The Red Lion, The Curtain, and Burbage’s cunningly named The Theatre. There’s even a lovely little section on what might have happened if scrappy Marlowe hadn’t got himself stabbed to death in a brawl (I have to agree. Perhaps he’d be the favoured playwright in today’s schools).

He includes fascinating details about the First Folio of 1623, printing generally and the good and bad quartos. Again, nothing new to anyone who has even a passing familiarity with Shakespeare, but Bryson makes it immensely readable. My favourite section probably has to be on James I, described as a lurching weirdo with ‘an odd shape and distinctive waddle’ whose tongue was too big for his mouth and who played with his codpiece all the time. Suddenly John Webster’s gallery of freaks in The Duchess of Malfi makes much more sense (I always did prefer Jacobean to Elizabethan drama).

Shakespeare: The World as a Stage doesn’t spend much time at all on the plays—a mere twenty pages. As Bryson suggests, picking out the number of occurrences of certain words or looking for lexical sets around say, Italy or sailing, doesn’t shed any certain light on Shakespeare’s life. This does seem short-sighted; textual deconstruction is in a way, one of the best tools we have for deciphering not only the cultures and customs of the time, but textual meanings, even if we can’t be sure they directly relate to Shakespeare’s life. But Bryson isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here. Readers can look elsewhere for literary analysis.

One thing that’s really missing though is images and illustrations. Now Bryson’s a well-known guy. He sells a fair amount of books. Shakespeare is published by an imprint of Harper Collins. They’re pretty well-known too. I guess what I’m trying to say is—why no images? I know copyright can be an expensive and tricky issue (a work colleague is currently trying to sort out images for her forthcoming book and it looks like a right ball-ache. We helpfully offered to sneak into the library and sketch the images for her) but I’m sure there must be enough cash between Bryson and publisher combined. Bryson spends paragraphs and paragraphs describing paintings and illustrations. When I came to the first one, I read his description, got a picture in my mind’s eye (see what I did there?), then went flicking through to find the image section. There wasn’t one. How strange, I thought. Maybe he won’t describe any other images. This is not the case.

Every new description of a painting or portrait got me reaching for my tablet to bring up the image as I read on. So we get a description of a ‘dark oval portrait’ of a ‘balding but not unhandsome man of about forty (the Chandos portrait—you’ll probably know this one but you’ll Google just to check), the intricate description of the City walls with no map to pore over, and a description of a sketch of the inside of the playhouses—I can only assume this is the famous one on the front of all the older New Mermaid editions of early modern plays but I couldn’t be arsed to check by this point. It’s utterly, utterly bizarre.

Bryson’s Bard biography is a light-hearted quick read. It covers no new ground, but it’s accessible and wry. Perhaps a good starter text for those new to early modern theatre, but do read with a search engine to hand if you’d like to see the various paintings he talks about. If not, it might be fun to draw your own representation from his descriptions, or maybe use it as one of those team-building exercises, where you describe and your partner sketches. The possibilities are endless.

Book Review: The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan

The world as we know it is flooded, drowned, and very very soggy. In Kirsty Logan’s debut novel, she gives us a future (presumably) where dry land is in short supply and those who live on it (landlockers) have the upper hand in social status.

That’s unless you’re a dampling, with the sea in your veins, fish stew on your breath, and webbed toes. The Gracekeepers partly follows the Circus Excalibur, a small crew of performers who float nomadically across the ocean, exchanging performances for food. They’re all face paint, hair dye and glitter, a gender-bending troupe constantly reinventing itself in each performance.

We learn about a number of characters in this fanciful world. There’s North, the young woman who dances with a bear in a dangerous pirouette of death and rebirth for the punters. Red Gold (Jarrow), the Circus Ringmaster and owner who is blind to some harsh truths. Avalon, his bitchy wife who wants to rise through the social ranks. And Callanish, a mysterious gracekeeper who spends her time administering rites for the dead by starving small birds in cages over the sea.

Logan’s prose is tightly controlled, dreamy and magical. To call this a dystopia doesn’t seem right somehow, instead The Gracekeepers brings to mind the magic realism of Angela Carter. But there’s not really much more beyond the descriptive language. The characters seem underwritten, with a multitude of gaps left unexplored (I’m still not really sure what happened between Callanish and her mother). Perhaps this is deliberate and I’m not saying we have to know everything, but the effect kept me oddly distanced and unengaged with the story. Threads are woven loosely and then abandoned. This effect is exacerbated by the structure; early on alternating third person chapters from North and Callanish’s perspective are established, before suddenly a hotchpotch of other views butt in, often for only one chapter. It’s disorientating.

There are some arresting passages of prose however. A scene where North dives deep into the ocean and finds a drowned city, for example, or her relationship with the bear. Logan seems indebted to Shakespearean themes, motifs and theatre too—her clowns are surely incarnations of the Shakespearean fool, inciting rebellion against the upper classes while simultaneously acting as scapegoat for society’s ills. The acrobats are male/female, brother/sister, husband/wife, and they seem to swap between all these roles, bringing to mind the gender play of Twelfth Night. The term ‘damplings’ perhaps suggests the ‘groundings’ of early modern theatre audiences. And of course, you can’t help but think Exit, pursued by a bear… 

But these motifs all seem a little bit forced and a little bit too self-aware, while the clowns’ potential is never fully realised. They just kind of slope around in the background, leaving glitter and eyeliner over the bedsheets. The ending, when it comes, feels rushed and certainly not as apocalyptic as it promised to be, although Logan does a good job of creating pathos (you’ll guess what happens).

The Gracekeepers is an odd little fairytale which is definitely worth reading, but just don’t expect a huge amount of depth. Like any good circus performance, it’s all smoke and mirrors.

Theatre Review: Titus Andronicus at the Swan 2013

Shakespeare’s early tragedy Titus Andronicus has always had a bad rap. Featuring (in no particular order) murder, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, filicide and cannibalism, some critics refused to believe it was even

penned by the bard, while it’s rarely performed among the hundreds of Hamlets and Othellos (although it’s certainly increasing in popularity with modern audiences).

In fact, Titus probably has more in common with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy as well as later dark and twisted Jacobean revenge dramas like Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy or Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Shakespeare’s audiences, used to the influence of bloody Senecan drama, loved it.

The story follows Titus, an ageing general of Rome who’s spent years and years dedicating himself to the Empire and fighting the goths. In fact, he’s already lost twenty (yes, twenty) sons in the war. At the start of the play he returns to a Rome that’s in political uncertainty as two brothers campaign to become Emperor. But he doesn’t return alone; Tamora, the captured queen of the goths, and her sons are in tow. Titus promptly sacrifices one despite Tamora’s pleas for mercy.

And this is where the trouble starts. You see Titus is a stickler for rules. He’s the kind of guy who calls a spade a spade and he believes in the chain of command. So not only does he turn down the chance to rule Rome himself, he refuses to support the younger and more appropriate brother. Instead he puts Saturninus on the Emperor’s throne (big mistake). Before you know it, the Emperor’s freed Tamora and married her…and boy does she want revenge on Titus.

Many of the difficulties in the play come from the excessive, almost cartoon-like violence as well as the sometimes jarring combination of horrific action and beautiful language. When Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius, rape Titus’ daughter Lavinia they hack off her hands then cut out her tongue so she can’t speak or write their names. Her uncle’s lament turns her into some delicate woodland creature or plant, ‘hewed […] Of her two branches’ while her disfigured mouth releases ‘a crimson river of warm blood / Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind.’ Michael Fentiman’s 2013 production for the RSC at the Swan deals with the extreme nature of the play with an assured and deft use of black humour.

Not that Lavinia’s assault is handled lightly – I’m pretty sure such treatment would lose any audience immediately. The complete horror of her ordeal is heightened by the early bloodless stabbings in Act One, so when she finally opens her mouth the sight of all that red stuff spouting out onto her soiled white dress is all the more shocking. Chiron and Demetrius’ cruelty is intensified as they've hacked off her long blonde tresses and tied it round her stumps. Rose Reynolds plays the part with sensitivity and an increasing resilience; she delivers a judgemental 100 yard stare that penetrates the dark depths of any soul. There’s even a bit of awkward humour as she tries to eat a boiled egg with no hands in a kind of Hulk-Smash! moment.

But uncomfortable scenes aside, where this production really excels is in its biting, witty and deeply dark tone. In the ‘70s literary critic Nicholas Brooke pointed out how Jacobean and Caroline tragedy provoked “horrid laughter” in contemporary audiences – something that modern performances deliberately tend to minimise. Heaven forbid we laugh in Act Five of Macbeth or Lear.

Fentiman’s production however gives us the go-ahead to laugh all we want. There’s heads and hands flying about all over the place, severed limbs used as comic props, Titus dressed up as a kind of mad Nippy in a Lyons tea shop, and a finale that’s a triumph of orchestration. Tamora’s (Katy Stephens) expression when she realises she’s been feasting on her sons (murdered by Titus and baked in a pie) is priceless. The stage erupts into chaos – a jaw-dropping melee of mass murder and violence by unusual and comic means: Titus is stabbed with a table leg, one of the Emperor’s wenches rogers a dinner guest up the arse with a cake cutter, a corkscrew is rammed into a neck and I noticed one character gleefully brandishing someone else’s tongue on the end of a fork. 

Stage blood becomes more and more prominent as the play progresses, and I'm pleased to report that I got spattered when Titus cut Chiron’s throat (front row seats = very interactive). The audience go with it – there’s laughter and chuckles and guffaws. And a few gasps; Aaron’s murder of the nurse is particularly inventive. Not content with just stabbing the poor woman (who emits an almighty shriek) he rolls her over and sticks the knife…well let’s just say if you’ve seen Se7en you’ll know what I mean. On the night I went one woman in the audience lost all constraint at this point and bellowed out, “OH MY GOD!” in the loudest voice you could imagine. Of course we all laughed. I bet the actors high-fived each other backstage.

Both Stephen Boxer as Titus and John Hopkins as Saturninus are excellent, bringing a great deal of humour to their performances. Katy Stephens is mesmerising as Tamora: fierce, sexy, manipulative and with a great rock queen wardrobe. The sons Chiron and Demetrius (Jonny Weldon and Perry Millward) come as an identical pair of idiotic (but dangerous) buffoons riding BMXs. Aaron, the devious Moor, is physically a commanding presence, but he didn’t quite pull it off; I wanted him to be a bit more wickedly evil. After all, this is the guy who’s done a ‘thousand dreadful things’ (murder, rape, arson, cattle mutilation, corpse defilement…just the usual really).

The set-design and costumes show an eclectic mix of historical periods and cultures; there’s Nazi-esque iconography, modern riot police, Moorish temples, Muslim veils and the influence of classical Rome. Violent acts aren't just specific to one particular time, and a play that was hugely popular with contemporary early modern audiences still speaks to us today (this production opened in the same week as the shocking Woolwich slaying).

Titus Andronicus is an absolute triumph: disturbing, funny and relevant. It never descends too far into farce though, and the last moments are chilling. Aaron, buried up to his neck in the earth, is powerless to prevent the young boy Lucius (Titus’ grandchild) from picking up his baby…and then the cake cutter. The boy looks at both speculatively before the lights go out. It’s a bleak comment on how violence breeds violence, and it’s hard not to think of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. It’s a bloody (literally) brilliant production. Oh and by the way, the stage blood did come out in the wash.

Book Review: Why I love...Moby Dick

A while back I decided to re-read those books on my top book list.  First up was Moby Dick.

Highlighters are my friends

There’s something irresistible about Herman Melville’s 1851 opus, Moby Dick; a novel of monstrous proportions that lurches from high seas rollicking adventure to natural history to existential debate to political satire to etymology lesson like a green sailor yet to find his sea-legs.

From its famous first line ‘Call me Ishmael’ (in which out narrator is introduced) you might expect to become very well acquainted with our guide. But after 680 or so pages we end up knowing surprisingly little about him.  Despite a lengthy set-up in which Ishmael visits Natucket, selects his whaling ship and becomes very good friends with Queequeg (a friendly cannibal who carries around shrunken heads) we kind of lose sight of him as he slips from the narrative. 

Instead Melville embarks on detailed chapters on cetacean anatomy, philosophy, the grisly reality of whaling and of course Ahab – all without a single “I” in sight.  When Ishmael does pop up again it takes a moment to remember who he is.  And then there’s the genre and style of Moby Dick.  It’s a mashed-up tapestry of prose, poetry and drama.  We actually get monologues from Ahab, Starbuck and Stubb plus chapters made up entirely of script complete with stage directions and asides, breaking any remaining illusion of Ishmael actually owning this story.  It’s all very grandiose, Shakespearean, self-aware and also surprisingly modern; there’s just so many voices vying to be heard. 

And what about the ending?  After pages and pages (and pages) Moby Dick pulls Ahab down to a watery grave, along with the Pequod and all her crew (bar Ishmael) in just a few brief sentences.  It’s certainly a strange beast of a novel, but one that’s magnetic in its dramatic urgency.

At the centre of this watery maelstrom is Ahab’s obsession with hunting down the infamous white whale, Moby Dick, who chomped his leg off in an earlier encounter.  The crew may have thought they were off to see the world and gain their fortune in blubber, but soon they’re locked in a fatalistic journey to the depths of mania and madness.  Like the wiped out North American tribe the Pequod is named for, the ship is doomed and Ahab is the devil’s own.  One of my favourite scenes shows the crew working feverishly through the night burning the carcass of a whale in the try-works.

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

The Pequod hurtles towards her doom, the lives of her crew tied to Ahab’s infernal purpose – it’s all pretty epic.  Even worse is the sinister Fedallah, a creepy Parsee who Ahab smuggled aboard.  Fedallah spends most of his time literally hanging around in Ahab’s shadow so he doesn't cast one (clearly also of the devil) and prophesying an ominous future.

But Ahab isn't just a cut-out monomaniac.  Melville gives his captain Shakespearean tragic depths as we see both the extent of his hubris as well as the tantalising possibility of deliverance through Starbuck.  I'm a little bit in love with Starbuck.  Ahab’s first mate, he’s in between a rock and err...another bigger rock as he tries to follow his master while battling with the knowledge that Ahab is completely bonkers and will get them all killed.  There’s a great passage when he hovers outside the captain’s door, questioning whether to murder him.  Of course he can’t.

‘Oh my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! […] why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! Let us fly these deadly waters! Let us home!  Wife and child too are Starbuck’s […] this instant let me alter the course! […] See, see! The boy’s face from the window!  The boy’s hand on the hill!’

Nice try Starbuck.

However Ahab’s having none of it.  ‘This whole act’s immutably decreed,’ he tells poor Starbuck, ‘‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.’

Ahab is created in the mould of Shakespearean tragic hero – flawed and doomed to follow his purpose to the end.  He reminds me a bit of Macbeth in V.vii when he’s outmanoeuvred and knows he’s heading for a sticky ending.  ‘They have tied me to the stake,’ Macbeth says, ‘I cannot fly / But, bearlike, I must fight the course.’  There’s something strangely impressive about a man who will always stand by his decisions and actions, even when they’re clearly insane. 

Noah's not bothered about Ahab's troubles

Other Shakespearean motifs abound in Moby Dick too, such as little Pip, the cabin boy who goes overboard.  When he’s picked up later he’s lost his mind through a mixture of pure terror and transcendental experience in the open empty waters: knowing God.  Not surprisingly he ends up living in Ahab’s cabin (the crazies stick together), reminiscent of Lear’s fool, poor Tom.

It’s no wonder that Khan Noonien Singh liberally quotes and adapts Moby Dick throughout STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982) – another reason I love this book.  Reading through Moby Dick and finding passages used in Star Trek is like looking in the pocket of a pair of jeans you haven’t worn in a while and finding a twenty (and it’s also one of the many reasons why the new reboot just isn't, well, real Star Trek….).  Like Ahab and his whale, Khan is obsessed with getting his revenge on Kirk and he will sacrifice anything and everyone to get it (there’s a great Moby Dick reference in STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT too concerning Picard and the Borg). 

In epic vengeful situations nothing beats a bit of Ahab:

Khan: ‘He tasks me! He tasks me, and I shall have him! I'll chase him round the Moons of Nibia, and round the Antares Maelstrom, and round Perdition's flames before I give him up!'

Ahab: He tasks me; he heaps me […] and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up!’

Or when Khan borrows some of Ahab’s exact words from the end of the novel, as he also faces destruction:

Ahab: ‘Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!’

And then there’s Moby Dick: Ahab’s nemesis and the epicentre of his rage.  The fact the whale is white makes it even more horrific; ‘an ‘elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than the redness which affrights in blood’.  Ahab believes Moby Dick is the source of all evil.  Yet at the same time Moby Dick is almost sublime – beautiful in its ghastliness and capable of bringing you closer to God – if you can actually figure out the divine workings going on.  The sailors dissect other whales they've killed, trying to pin down the essence of “whale-ness” but it’s something they can’t find or explain.  The white whale becomes a site where meanings multiply and collapse.  The ultimate mystery, Moby Dick sinks from view, Ahab trapped forever in its jaws (as you can see Melville brings out the grandiose in anyone).

Best Moby Dick Quotes

‘Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!’

‘He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.’

‘Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.’

Moby Dick goes with…

• Shakespeare (Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Hamlet) for epic language, motifs and tragedy

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov for obsession

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad for madness and the insane quest

• Beloved by Toni Morrison for a darkly destructive and obsessive relationship

Theatre Review: Troilus and Cressida at The Swan 2012 (RSC & Wooster Group)

Stratford Upon Avon always looks amazing in the sun

What could be more tempting than watching a play that’s rarely performed?  And about the classical world?  I’m a complete sucker for anything vaguely to do with togas.  So when I saw that Shakespeare’s little staged Troilus and Cressida was coming to the Swan this year I had to get tickets.

This was my mum’s first introduction to live action Bard.  Should we go to Much Ado? I pondered.  It did seem a safer bet. 

‘Mother,’ I said, ‘would you like to go and see a romantic screwball comedy with lots of witty wordplay and an almost tragic plot but not quite?’

‘Hmmm,’ she said.  ‘I think I’d prefer something a bit more, well, sad.’

So, Troilus it was.

A quick character map of Troilus and Cressida - yes I know,
I always forget Shakespeare calls Odysseus 'Ulysses'

Troilus and Cressida is about the two eponymous lovers and the breakup of their relationship, set against the backdrop of the Trojan war.  They’re both Trojans, but Cressida’s father is a turncoat and in the Greek camp.  When he asks that his daughter joins him she can’t say no.  Sounds familiar?  Well, this is where it all ends.  The rest of the play is a strange mish-mash of manly virtue and anger, fight scenes and anti-climax.  It’s a strange beast and has won the dubious honour of being called “problem play”.

The 2012 production is an ensemble cast featuring both the RSC (the Greeks) and the American Wooster Group (the Trojans).  It’s part of the World Shakespeare Festival, but did this collaboration work?

Right.  First things first, I’d like to say I have mixed feelings about this performance.  Let me start with what worked.

Stratford upon Avon. Can I move here right now?

The Greek Camp: The audience feels pretty safe in these guys’ hands.  Scott Handy in particular is effortless as Ulysses.  Joe Dixon’s Achilles is all shades of manly.  He’s kind of mesmerising actually – the stage works by rotating and the sight of Achilles slowly inching into view leaping around on an army bed to loud music, towel about to fall off is er, memorable!  He comes across as a petulant boy, refusing to fight for whatever sulky reason his teenage brain can devise.

I like the concept of the set and staging too.  The Greeks are the British army while the Trojans, Native Americans.  But more of this later.

Some of the Trojans are strong – Hector in particular.  And I did like Pandarus’ body language and way with words. There are some genuine laughs too.  The excellent Scott Handy plays Helen in super-camp mode.  And what better way to undercut the weight placed on the ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ than by turning her into a joke?  Paris started a war – for this?  The Trojans have no choice but to step in line, support their prince and fight.

So let’s move onto those parts that were a bit more questionable.

If you’re a theatre follower you may know this production got a bit of a roasting.  And it’s true, I did notice a fair number of empty seats after the interval.  What wasn’t working so well then?

I have to say it but I found (on the whole) the Wooster Group’s performance weaker than the RSC’s.  That’s not saying there weren’t some great moments there, but I’m not sure I really “got” everything that was going on.

Firstly this interpretation as I’ve said had the Trojans as Native Americans.  I did love their wardrobe – a mixture of traditional costumes and skins married with broken Greek statues (as kind of capes) and the detritus of western society.  I like the fact that these guys carry basketballs around and use them as temporary seats – it’s like they were living in a bubble for years and then, wham! their culture’s been surrounded by this new one and they’re going to take aspects from it.

I can even go with the TV screens.  Onstage large screens are positioned high in a few prominent positions and we get to see clips of documentaries and old movies.  When the Trojans have important scenes the actors kind of copy or mirror the actions on the TVs.  This makes for quite disconcerting viewing.  So in Troilus and Cressida’s love scene instead of close actor interaction we get this kind of distancing performance where both actors are looking over each other’s shoulder and mimicking the screen.  What does it all mean?  I was thinking about this and for me I see it as a comment on the outside influence of the media on a more primitive society; they’re starting to look to filmic representation to work out how they should act in their own world.  This distancing is amplified by the Wooster Group’s use of microphones and occasionally a distortion effect.  It’s quite ghostly actually – trying to work out where the voice is coming from.  But herein lies most of the problems with the Trojans – voice, intonation and projection.  Not only is it hard to work out where or who each voice is coming from, but the actors’ unemotional, deliberately stilted and Dalek-esque intonation made it really hard to follow the metre, rhythm or meaning.  Some parts I just couldn’t make out – lack of projection meant I didn’t have a clue what they were saying.  And if you take away Shakespeare’s language, what have you got?

So I really came away from this production a little confused.  Some parts I loved: Scott Handy, Achilles’ well-documented penchant for cross-dressing, Zubin Varla’s bitter Phoenix Nights delivery as Thersites, complete with wheelchair, wig, drag and spotlight.  I was left with some really vivid and often amusing images here, although you could say no revolutionary new ground was covered.  But for some bits in the Trojan camp I felt oddly disengaged.

And my mum’s opinion? 

She says she’d quite like to go and see another play, but maybe not for a while, and maybe not Shakespeare.  

Theatre Review: Julius Caesar at the RSC 2012

Got a review up of the RSC's latest production of Julius Caesar over at The Hollywood News.  I loved this production; it was also televised a few weeks ago on the Beeb as part of their Shakespeare Unlocked season.  Not that I could watch it again as it clashed with a certain England football match...

Theatre Review: RSC Macbeth 2011

We managed to get tickets to the Michael Boyd production of Macbeth at the RSC in September.  Despite having taught Macbeth for around 4 years I've yet to go off it - a fate that often meets the other texts we study (Hamlet - shudder).  Anyone who knows me well knows I'm a bit of a fan-girl of early modern drama.  Shakespeare, Middleton, Marlowe...  I just love that good ol' tragic action and spectacle.

Now I haven't seen Macbeth live for years - not since Derek Jacobi played the lead in 1994 at the Barbican! How would the 2011 production compare?

The setting offers clues to this interpretation.  We are faced with a stark, eerie stage, full of broken statues and stained glass fragments.  Perhaps a reminder of the reformation and iconoclasticism?  The characters stride across these ruins, oblivious to their tragic arc and the workings of fate.  Interestingly, Ross is played sympathetically as a priest, trying to find meaning where there is none.

Ghosts literally haunt this performance.  Aside from Banquo, the ghosts of Macbeth's victims begin to fill the stage, following the King round and round.  Whilst this is visually effective, in the flurry of short scenes in Act 5 the audience is treated to a lot of feet clumping around as they gallop on and off stage, chasing the tyrant like Roman Furies.  This really is a play at the interstices of the reformation - broken remnants of Catholicism vie with very Catholic revenants.

One of the most intriguing aspects is the directorial decision to have the witches played by children: Macduff's children.  So we see a circular pattern of fate and violence where the children set up Macbeth's destruction on the heath, and are also the victims of this initial meeting, savagely slaughtered on Macbeth's orders.  I'm still not quite sure about this.  Shocking, yes.  But it hurt my head a bit - like some kind of Gordian knot.  There's no denying the power of seeing the witches for the first time however, hanging like broken lifeless dolls above the stage - before they start to jerk.  Freaky children eh?

I like Jonathan Slinger's Macbeth.  He's earthy and natural.  Lady Macbeth on the other hand is played quite safely.  Big hair harshly swept back and swinging dress - a real hard bitch.  I'd have liked to see a bit more subtlety in her.

The porter and Seyton though - wow.  Both played by the same actor, the porter's scene (you know the one - when he's pissed at the gate) reminded me a bit of Guy Fawkes.  Jamie Beamish swaggers around, yelling "knock knock" and getting lots of laughs before chucking a load of explosives.  But this comic character quickly develops into much more.  He often stays onstage, watching Macbeth and Lady M with knowing eyes.  And when the elusive Seyton appears in Act 5 (pleasingly pronounced "Satan") we begin to understand his role.  The porter/Seyton straddles this world and the after life, but he definitely seems to be of the devil's party.  Finally we see him surveying Macbeth's crumpled dead body left on stage.  The tyrant moves, starts to get up groggily, and moves to Seyton's beckoning finger, as he ushers Macbeth's ghost into the ominous door at the back of the stage...

In short, it's a wicked performance.  We stayed in Stratford overnight and were amazed at the lack of places to go after.  We found an Italian restaurant eventually.  I've already booked tickets for the production of Julius Caesar next year (part of the Shakespeare World Festival).  I'm an absolute sucker for any of the Roman plays.