hamlet goes business (w&d aki kaurismäki, w. shakespeare)

On Friday we were lucky enough to attend a talk by the Argentine philosopher, Eduardo Rinesi on Shakespeare. Much of the talk focussed on Hamlet as a bridge between the renaissance world of machiavelli, and the coming world of the enlightenment, signalled by the work of Hobbes. Hamlet acts as a hinge between these two worlds, which saw the evolution of the idea of the contract, both legal and social, as society moved away from the blood feud, the revenge tragedy. The talk was engrossing and entertaining, and suggested echoes in the evolution of Latin American society, in a world where clowns roost on the political stage and seize power.

All of which set up perfectly Kaurismäki’s take on the tale. Aside from a twist at the conclusion, which could be said to lend a more Marxist take to the narrative, Kaurismäki stays faithful to Shakespeare. The originality comes from two elements: positing the story in the world of business (similarly to Kurosowa), where contemporary figures squabble to control a business empire; and the ingenuity required to relocate the play in a cinematic near-present. The former allows Claudius the priceless moment of suggesting he is sending Hamlet to London to negotiate with ‘Murdoch’, testament to the omnipresence of the Australian in the shaping of modern culture. As the writers of Succession realised, the modern globalised business world is fertile territory for Shakespearian drama. It would be interesting to learn if Jesse Armstrong is a fan of Kaurismäki.

As for the ingenuity, the director employs his now accustomed blend of deadpan humour and simplicity. If a gun is useful, he uses a gun. If poison works best, he poisons a drink or a chicken. The film flirts with realism, (notably during the titles and credits) whilst constructing its own logic, permitting characters to do whatever is needed to advance the plot. There are few exterior shots, but when Hamlet appears framed against a shipyard he has saved, it has a real impact. (And strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Kaurismäki is seeding ideas here about manufacturing, trade, globalisation and capitalism. Ideas which are often explored in his work, but tend to go under the radar, as audiences revel in his downtrodden characters, punkish sensibility and smiley Nordic misanthropy. 

globe - life in shakespeare’s london [catherine arnold]

This will be the final entry in the blog for 2017, as I soon depart for a land beyond the reach of the internet, more or less. Which will be like going back in time. To a time I cannot help but be envious of, those innocent days when the planet was still a place to roam free, with all the risk and adventure which that implied.

Of course, I am guilty of hyperbole. The planet, or at least our anthropocene planet, has gone through various revolutions of technology and communication. Globe describes one of them. Having read more than a few Shakespeare books of late, this one stands out for the way in which the author places the playwright within the context of his times. Not least making it clear what a young, pristine craft the art of playwrighting was when he arrived on the scene. The pioneers were also the definers; it could be argued that the learning curve in playwrighting is all wrong. The craft reached a peak in this country within fifty years of being initiated and it’s never scaled those heights again. Which might be a little harsh on the likes of Shaw, Pinter, Churchill and their ilk, but there’s no denying the glory of the Elizabethan stage, an explosion of creativity, shaped by ambitious, competitive young men desperate to make their mark. 

Arnold’s book navigates the tricky task of writing about an elusive subject with efficiency. Unlike Shapiro, she doesn’t speculate too much on his motives or the subtexts of his plays. Instead, she carefully lays the groundwork for an understanding of the socio-cultural environment Shakespeare belonged to. A clear love for London helps in this; she reserves her greatest flights of fancy for a re-imagining of the city as it might have been then. The book also does a fine job of tracing the links between Shakespeare and his contemporaries Greene, Marlowe and Johnson. All in all it’s an engaging read and an excellent introduction for anyone wanting to get a handle on who the mysterious genius might have been, he who surfed the net of his new art form with such remarkable agility. 

richard 3 (d. ostermeier)

A few thoughts, no mas. There’s been a lot written about this show and deservedly so. I read a comment the other day by someone reading it who, whilst praising the show, stated that it helped to show that British theatre is fucked. This isn’t the place and I’m not the person to comment on the British theatre debate. The point is that every now and again a show comes along, usually from the continent, (more often than not Germany), which shows up the limitations of the artistic parameters mainstream British theatre (MST(?)) chooses to operate under. Ostermeier’s R3, perhaps like Brecht’s visiting shows, or more recently, Nubling’s Three Kingdoms, would appear to be that show for early 2017.  

Richard 3, for all it’s fame, is a difficult play to stage. It’s a paradoxical play. The protagonist is dazzling and charismatic and the rest of the play is stodgy, save for the odd moment of needless violence. The more one watches it the more it seems like the template for the far more sophisticated later tragedy, Macbeth. Richard dominates the play in a way that’s unhealthy. The play will live or die on the lead actor’s performance.

It doesn’t take a theatrical genius to realise this. Ostermeier gives Lars Eidinger’s Richard free rein to make the stage his own. With its sandy surface, it’s more like his playground. He’s given a hanging microphone as a prop, which doubles as a kind of swing. At one point, Eidinger goes flying out over the audience. This is what director and star do brilliantly. The fourth wall is not a wall. (A phrase that could probably be trademarked in this day and age.) The audience is another prop for Richard to employ. Not only does he swing over their heads, he climbs in to the auditorium, he ad-libs, he treats the audience like his followers. 

There’s nothing new in breaking the fourth wall. Richard is also given clowns’ shoes, making a none-too-subtle point. Clowning, an art that might pre-date theatre, is all about exploring and bridging the gap between the audience and the stage. According to Shapiro, Shakespeare got rid of Kemp, the company’s best clown, because he was mucking around with the text too much, playing with the audience at the expense of the play. This sort of behaviour is also known as irreverent, and this, it seems to me, is the tonal note which audiences have enjoyed so much, and which British theatre so rarely succeeds in achieving. It’s an immensely enjoyable theatrical experience, from an audience point of view, to feel oneself included in a great work, rather than excluded.  To visit the Barbican to soak up culture and discover that this process can be funny and inclusive.

Because, aside from all this, there’s nothing particularly radical about Ostermeier’s staging. The set, sandpit aside, is prosaic. There’s a drummer in public view, off-stage, but whilst this is a nice touch, it’s not ground-breaking. The scenes which lack Richard actually begin to plod, something that’s almost inevitable in this doughy play. (Although the curse of Lady Margaret is nicely subverted). This isn’t a radical staging. What it is a radical re-connect, reconnecting Shakespeare to its pantomimic roots, and doing so without fear of shame or ridicule. When Richard paints his face for the denouement, it reminded me of two things. Brando in Apocalypse Now; and comedia del arte. Rather than soaring into the future, Ostermeier takes Richard back towards his origins, which also happen to be the origins of performance on the European stage. And audiences love it. 

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(Also worth noting the following observation from Chris Goode in reaction to one critical reaction to the play, suggesting Ostermeier undercooks the play’s political content: “The politics is in the form, chaps, not the content.” In the theatre, content can only ever be political up to a point. It is the form in which that content is presented, the way in which it questions the relationship between audience and stage, which defines the play’s political intentions. An idea which some of the more lauded political playwrights of the contemporary British stage sometimes seem reluctant to engage with.)

the taming of the shrew (d. caroline byrne)

a trip to the globe

There’s inevitably something of the heritage experience about visiting the Globe, just as there is when you visit Sutton Hoo or Stonehenge. It’s on the tourist circuit. Lots of people probably go not because they want to see the play, but because they want to experience the theatre. And a wonderful thing it is to experience too. Within its Wooden O, you get a sense of the role the theatre played in Elizabethan society. A space to be seen and a space to see. A space which is both profoundly democratic and hierarchical at the same time. A space possessing an energy within a small town that must have been incalculable. (No matter how similar the Globe is to its forefather, the society and the city have changed beyond compare.) It’s an exciting experience to step into the Globe, cherish its intimacy, cherish the power that the theatre possesses. A power which the black box has done so much to nullify. 

The day we went, we were lucky enough to experience not just Caroline Byrne’s version of Taming of the Shrew, but also a brief piece by Jess Thom, a performer with Tourette’s, and a Q&A with the audience. Thom’s piece was short, sharp and incisive, describing a visit to another London theatre to see a Mark Thomas show about segregation in Palestine, where she had ended up being asked to move to the sound booth because of her disability. The inclusiveness of the Globe as a theatre was made all the more evident by Thom’s brief performance. It’s a space which allows for all manner of performance. all kinds of performers and as diverse an audience as you could wish for. A space which works for a circus or a one-woman show (a soliloquy or a masque). The power of the space was underlined by the Q&A with Thom and members of the Shrew cast. One member of the audience threw out a contentious remark about Byrne’s version of the Shrew being overloaded with theatrical devices, at the expense of Shakespeare’s verse. For a second you could sense the bear pit beneath the stage. It didn’t quite all kick off, but the cast’s response suggested the potential for tension that a space so intimate is capable of generating.

The audience member’s observation helps to pinpoint the difficulties of staging Shakespeare in the Globe. The new artistic director has been chosen because she’s a believer in making Shakespeare accessible. The more classically minded audience might feel this is a populist approach which fails to reveal the true glory of the text. Byrne’s direction of the Shrew is a rumbunctious, entertaining affair. The cast in the Q&A mentioned that they spent the first week of rehearsals exploring the physicality of the play. There are set piece moments, including the wedding, where the choreography supersedes the letter. From this audience member’s POV, this is all to the good. A play which has a reputation for being almost impossible to stage due to its un-PC approach to marriage somehow succeeds in this production in suggesting a neo-feminist subtext. This is in part down to a steely performance from Aoife Duffin, but also down the imaginative and successful feminisation of the casting. Although the Easter Rising 1916 setting in many ways passed me by, it clearly worked as device to lend unity to the Irish cast’s vision of a play which they regard as subversive rather than reactionary. I’m the last person to argue for populism over intellectual content, but not only does it feel to me as though the ethos of the space demands an inclusive vision, I’d also far rather see Shakespeare performed in a fashion that provokes through a willingness to use the imagination rather than a belief in the sacrosanct nature of the bard’s language. 

ophelia’s zimmer (d. katie mitchell)

I’m going to assume that you, the reader, are unlikely to see this show. It had a four day run in London and finished tonight. If you’re in Berlin I guess you might. The show’s in German. It was surtitled, although it didn’t really need to be. 

Zimmer means room in german. The whole play takes place in the hypothetical bedroom of Ophelia. It’s an unremarkable space: a bed, a chair, a cupboard, a side table. The re-imagining of a Shakespeare play from another character’s point of view is not radical. Stoppard did it famously with Hamlet. In Montevideo, Percovich recently did it with the same character as Mitchell chooses here. Ophelia is fertile territory for this kind of project. She’s one of most underwritten characters in literary history. Her tragic denouement is somewhat thrown away by the original author.

The play is split into five sequences, each one announced by a projected sign which denotes the five stages of drowning. Each of these scenes, or sequences, is composed of a myriad of tiny, fractured scene-lets. They are denoted by a sound cue, always the same, and a change of lights. This is the play’s punctuation. 

We are, assuredly, in the territory of deconstruction. Deconstruction of Hamlet, deconstruction of drowning. And deconstruction of the process of creating a work of theatre.

There is very little dialogue. Which is not to say there is none. There are three registers of dialogue. Firstly, a voiceover from a woman, perhaps Ophelia’s mother, perhaps just the voice in her head, instructing her how to behave. How to make herself small and fit in the cracks. Secondly, there is the voice of Hamlet, on tapes which he supplies, as letters, to Ophelia. Hamlet’s voice is playful, lewd, tender, manic, crazy. Ophelia fasts forwards and rewinds these tapes. (They are not the only Beckettian aspect of the play). At one point the tape has Hamlet’s voice say: To be or… Ophelia abruptly fast forwards. That moment got the biggest laugh of the night. The final register is the dialogue of Ophelia herself and four other characters who appear, including, explosively, Hamlet. Mostly she is spoken to by a maid. But the maid’s lines are as repetitive as her actions. She brings flowers, presumably sent by Hamlet. Ophelia and her exchange a few words about the flowers. She tells her she has to go and see a play, or that Hamlet is downstairs and wants to see her. The maid’s role is essentially that of messenger, a mechanism which helps the offstage action to be communicated.

This is a technical theatre where the lighting and the sound have just as much weight as the writing and the acting. It’s highly cinematic. In fact, the way the stage is set up, in part in order to permit the water to enter at the end, means that those in the stalls would have seen a different play to the one I saw in the circle. There’s a raised black section which cuts off the view from the stalls, suggesting the widescreen of cinema. Added to this is another mechanism taken from film. Three of the actors perform foley in a booth in the corner. They create the sound of the outside world. Feet on stairs, doors opening and shutting, keys in locks, feet running. The diagetic world is visibly deconstructed before our eyes.

Once again, this process of deconstruction. As a director of a play, you are aware of every moment, every beat. Moments which apparently have little importance are all part of the mechanics of the machine you are creating. Mitchell reveals this process to the audience. There is no seamlessness. It is all seams. (She has Ophelia doing crochet at times.) The play, like Ophelia’s descent towards suicide (the madness of suicide) is an accumulation of moments. Normally a director tries to hide this process. So that the audience lose themselves in the ‘story’. Mitchell does the opposite here. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s just as hypnotic as a conventionally-told narrative. Once you adjust to the sparse, staccato, rhythm of the piece, you become sucked into the story. A move from one side of the stage to the other has meaning. (Here again, the echo of Beckett, especially late Beckett.) The action is transparent and part of an elaborately constructed journey. A journey towards both madness and the end of the play.

Maybe for some, this becomes tedious. It might be seen as a purist’s theatre. Maybe in Germany it’s ten-a-penny, old hat. For me, it felt like a vision of the theatre freed from the tyranny of the word. I’ve never seen a show that did away as magisterially with the need for a playwright as this one (with all due respect to Alice Birch, credited in the program for “text” ) or, perhaps, which succeeded in showing how rich a non-writer-lead theatre could become. Which doesn’t mean to say that language is not important. Much of Birch’s ‘text’ has a poeticism which contrasts wittily or movingly with the austereness of the room and the staging. Whilst riffing off the untouchable original. A jazz score, if you like. But the point here, in this deconstructed theatre, is that the actions of the actors, the lighting designer, the composer, the set designer, have as much weight as the language. 

I enjoy the transitory nature of theatre. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. When Ophelia’s Zimmer finished, with a wrong-footing flair, (she doesn’t drown), I didn’t want to leave the theatre. I wanted to linger in the play’s strange, hypnotic space. This space which had deconstructed everything and then put it back together again. A kind of clinical madness. Or a clinical kind of madness. Which might be another way of describing the process of staging a play. 

So I cycled back across Hyde Park, Serpentine winking seductively, at me, at Ophelia, at Shakespeare’s ghost, and because I didn’t want to let the play go just yet, I put the bread on to cook and sat down to write these words. 

1606 [james shapiro]

This is Shapiro’s sequel to 1599. Same idea, different year, in the life of the Shake-speare. Once again, Shapiro offers a comprehensive historical resume of the year in question, shaped by plague, the travails of the new king and the Gunpowder Plot, an axis point in British history. 1606 is the year of Lear, Macbeth and Antony & Cleopatra, so there’s no shortage of material for Shapiro to wrestle with. And wrestle with it he does, tracking down every available reference, exercising a prodigious use of contemporary accounts of witchcraft trials, court masques and much more besides. This is where the writer really earns his corn, wading through obscure texts so that you don’t have to in order to construct his portrayal of a precarious time, one where civil war was only a few decades away. The seeds of that war were present in James 1’s reign and Shapiro observes Shakespeare engaging with these conflicts within his texts. As a book, this reader found 1606 slightly less engaging that 1599, which represents a more accessible starting point, (as well as the chronological logic), with the author’s investigations becoming so immersed in the Jacobean world that Shakespeare himself sometimes seemed to slide out of focus. Nevertheless, for anyone with an interest in the three featured plays, or an advanced curiosity in the bard, Shapiro’s scholarship is an essential point of reference. 

1599 [james shapiro]

Shapiro's text achieves several objectives.

It reveals how the writer's work was shaped by his interaction with society. Thereby revealing a figure fully engaged with the complications, complicities and dangers of his age. A political figure, with a small p. It sets out to demystify the reputation of the writer as a romantic, mysterious figure and to a certain extent succeeds. At the very least it  contextualises him.

It also offers a telling vision of Elizabethan society. Just as in today's Britain, it shows a political body which had few qualms in manipulating its people with scare stories. Apocalypse was always around the corner. The intrigues of power like something out of House of Cards. With Shakespeare participating in the debate through his plays. 

This book, which is not a biography, rather a portrait of an era seen through the lens of four of the writer's plays, is already considered a classic and with good reason. The writer, according to Shapiro's vision, becomes a weather vane or tuning fork, plugged in to the nuances of his society's agenda, an agenda which will always possess its metaphysical or spiritual values, alongside base ambition and earthly glory. 

One finishes the book longing for him to write the sequel, and the sequel that comes after that, and those that would follow. 1066 and all that. 

the tempest (d. declan donnellan)

Donnellan & Ormerod’s Tempest is an assured, convincing piece of stagecraft. Using a simple three door stage and occasional projections, they recount Shakespeare’s last play with fluency. There’s many details to savour. The five male Ariels (only 5?) torment the shipwrecked visitors with watering cans. Rather than carrying logs, Ferdinand carries an Ariel. When Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio are accused by Ariel, the projection turns the stage into a Soviet show trial. And the marriage ceremony becomes a paean to kitsch Soviet art, as sickle-wielding farmers line-dance across the stage.

However, in a sense the final two images hint at this production’s Achilles Heel. Cheek by Jowl is working with their sister Russian theatre company. Hence the director and designer’s decision to include various signifiers in their staging which announce a Russian influence, as above. We also get Stefano and Trinculo as materialist oligarchs, hellbent on shopping to oblivion. But the overall impact of these allusions is bitty. It’s unclear what exactly Donnellan is seeking to say about Russian society, or why he is matching this “Russianness” onto The Tempest. (One wonders what Pelevin would have to say.) Is there a deeper theme? Or is it just skilful appropriation of local imagery which goes hand-in-glove with working with a Russian company?

This question felt all the more curious watching the show in Latin America. The role of The Tempest in Latin American culture is well-documented. You’ll meet plenty of people called Ariel here (including the man who watches the cars on our street for pennies). There’s no reason for Donnellan’s staging to refer to this, (it only happens to be on tour here), but what’s apparent watching the play is the extent to which the writer was aware of and infiltrating his text with the geo-political developments of his day. On one level The Tempest can be seen a magical fairytale. But on another it’s a play which is addressing concrete, tangible issues. Donnellan’s use of ‘Russian’ imagery suggests an awareness of the way that the play maps onto a more discursive reading, but ultimately, to this observer at least, that interpretation failed to come through with any clarity.

Instead, the primacy of the magical fairy tale wins through. With regard to this, the director’s handling is deft. The advantages of having worked with Shakespeare’s texts all your working life, and the confidence this gives, is evident. Donnellan teases his audience like a sixth spritely Ariel, interrupting the action, setting up the denoument, in control at every moment. It makes for an enjoyable evening and a notable demonstration of the theatrical benefits of a director and their designer (Nick Ormerod) working as a unit, as they have done for thirty years.

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This is the third Cheek by Jowl Shakespeare I’ve seen (also one Webster). The first, Othello, was I believe, their first ever production, which toured to my school and I watched in the “drama barn” as a teenager. Ten years later, mas o menos, I saw Measure for Measure in the Sala Anglo, and went out for drinks with the cast in the Lobizon afterwards. It’s also worth noting that that Cheek By Jowl have had a unlikely but profound impact on my life, not for artistic reasons, but because a friend of mine once worked for them in their Kennington office. Where, one day, a fax arrived asking if the company knew of any young directors who might be interested in coming to work for a year in a place called Montevideo.