Has high-concept Shakespeare gone too far – or not far enough?
A dialogue.
Holly O’Mahony: I imagine that for most directors staging a Shakespeare play, two questions front of mind are: how do we convey the continual relevance of this timeless story to new audiences? And what the hell can we do with it that hasn’t been done before? Both are often answered through design innovations, where the subtext shines through the set, costumes and other frills, while the language is preserved.
But I’ve seen three productions already this year that have made me question how loose a Shakespeare interpretation can be without confusing or alienating audiences – particularly those approaching the material for the first time. There was Richard Twyman’s Macbeth, which chopped up the text and reordered whole scenes; Corey Campbell’s Romeo and Juliet, which infused the text with raps and songs, extending the run time considerably; and Rupert Goold’s Hamlet which, as well as being set on the Titanic, gave the script a weird treatment that expelled the rhythm of the verse. Both Goold’s Hamlet and Campbell’s Romeo and Juliet are touring this year, meaning they have the potential to be seen pretty widely.
You couldn’t accuse any of these productions of being boring, but I wonder if there’s a risk of creating false associations with a play if an adaptation swerves too far from the source material (might viewers of Goold's Hamlet misremember the tragedy as one of Shakespeare’s shipwreck plays in years to come, for instance?), or whether this is not so much an issue, so long as audiences are engaged?
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Is there a sweet spot for tinkering with and embellishing his plays? Or a spot that, if missed, should require a version to be labelled ‘based on’ rather than ‘production of’?
Hailey Bachrach: I have a lot of empathy for directors when it comes to Shakespeare. Nobody will produce your rap musical about lovelorn teenagers? What if you make it a version of Romeo and Juliet? Asked to direct Hamlet for the tenth time? Okay, what if it’s… on the Titanic!
The (for lack of a better word) market pressures that bend directors, actors, and theatres endlessly towards Shakespeare are more to blame than any individual, but I do think these kinds of choices are therefore a symptom of directorial boredom, and I wish directors and adaptors would take a step back and ask themselves why (aside from the fact that perhaps they were asked to) they are doing these plays at all if they don’t believe in their ability to be interesting on their own merits.
Obviously I’m biased: I was a Shakespeare scholar, so I do think many of the plays (not all of them…) are really pretty good, and if you just perform them as they’re written and invest in their nuance and complexity, they will make for interesting, relevant, and entertaining performances. My frustration with these types of productions therefore isn’t some sense of duty to the text for its own sake… it’s that the text is usually richer and frankly better than whatever half-supported concept is forced on it, and artists probably could have made a better version of their vision with a different text. The need to cling to Shakespeare does a disservice to everyone involved, except maybe the marketing teams, who have an easier time selling Shakespeare than something new.
The result, ironically, of these attempts to make the plays fresh is often to render them incomprehensible. The cuts, additions, and rearrangements all track for the artists who have done these plays a dozen times, but so often makes it a struggle for a newcomer to have any clue what’s going on. At the end of the day, the plays are just plays with their own internal logic and structures that, like any contemporary piece, simply won’t make sense anymore if you knock out too many of the narrative supports.
Matt Barton: I totally agree. Too often it seems to be: “What if this play was set at/on/in…?” And most of the time all that does is create a wrestling match for the audience to watch between the logic of the concept and the logic of the play.
