#Rethinking2020: Reclaiming Shakespeare
As we close out both 2019 and the 2010s, each of our writers has chosen to present a retrospective of the last decade of Shakespeare. Other than looking back at the past ten years and forwards to the next ten, they’ve each chosen their own focus and format.
Earlier this week, Ben focussed on Shakespeare on film over the last decade. Later this week, Ronan will consider standout performances in Shakespeare both on screen and onstage. For my retrospective, I’m focussing on a trend that seems to be gathering momentum towards the end of the decade — a move towards reclaiming Shakespeare.
Phyllida Lloyd/Harriet Walters’s company at the Donmar Warehouse set the tone for the trend to reclaim Shakespeare — while all-female Shakespeare companies weren’t new, Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse in 2012 and revived in 2017 brought an anarchic energy to the play. Michael Billington, reviewing for the Guardian, found the anti-establishment female cast ‘witty, liberating and inventive’ foregrounding ‘the anti-authoritarian instinct that runs through the play’.¹ The production can be read in conversation with Mark Rylance’s hugely successful all-male Richard III and Twelfth Night (2013) for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Whereas Rylance’s were original practices productions, Lloyd pushed hers firmly into the twenty-first century, reframing Julius Caesar as an amateur production set in a women’s prison — Shakespeare, not for the purist educated elite, but for society’s outsiders.
Emma Rice’s controversial tenure at Shakespeare’s Globe pulled no punches — it was clear that the target market had changed. Rather than pandering to the established audience base, Rice targeted the youth. Speaking to the Guardian in 2016 she claimed: ‘I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider, and theatre is a great saviour for those of us who are outsiders. So the more people we bring in from the cold, the better.’²
For me, two productions during Rice’s tenure stand out: Matthew Dunster’s Imogen (2016), Cymbeline ‘renamed and reclaimed’³; and Daniel Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet (2017). Imogen was a brave reimagining of Cymbeline, which for me is not a great play. It has a meandering, confused plot, and verges on the ludicrous. But I felt that Matthew Dunster’s approach took the play and found a path through it that made it resonate with a modern audience — yes, he lost the absolute purist audience (setting Shakespeare to Skepta will always do that), but he found a truth. Not a comfortable upper-middle-class truth, but the uncomfortable truth of gang violence and drugs. But more than that, he found Shakespeare’s flawed, broken characters and gave them space. He allowed Maddy Hill’s Adidas-clad Imogen to claim centre stage and speak with all the anger of a female character denied the honour of headline status, despite Shakespeare giving her twice as many lines as her eponymous title-stealing father.
Daniel Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet was divisive. Michael Billington hated it: his one-star review dismissed it as a ‘perverse show that vandalises Shakespeare’.⁴ With respect to Billington, he just missed the mark. He wasn’t the target audience. Kramer’s production, referred to as an adaptation,⁵ was a reworking of Shakespeare’s text employing scene-splitting and layering to force the timeline. In modern dress, Kramer’s production claimed to be ‘vibrant, volatile’ and to ‘fearlessly confront the darker themes present in the play, the grotesque glamorisation of violence, sex and the brutality of death’.⁶ His production uses a reworked text in which scenes are layered to force the chronology. Essentially, 2.4 to 3.3 are reordered and merged such that events that happen contemporaneously are acted simultaneously. For example, 2.4, the Nurse talking to Romeo, is merged with 2.5, Juliet waiting for the nurse’s return; and similarly Romeo and Juliet’s marriage in 2.6 is merged with the start of Mercutio’s fight with Tybalt in 3.1. This re-ordering acts to accelerate an already compressed timeframe added to the play’s sense of urgency and underscored the role of fate and fortune. The scene-splitting and layering also showcases Kramer’s vision — he needs to ensure that the audience sees his violent interpretation rather than the ‘the lyrical, pretty thing people want it to be’.⁷ This was Shakespeare for those who grew up with Baz Luhrmann — the movie-going youth that otherwise felt excluded from Shakespeare and theatre.
We closed off the decade with two productions that were influenced, rather than written, by Shakespeare. In 2018, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia hit the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe. Her protagonist became every woman, embodied their anger, and social media responded. Emilia was established as essential viewing — working as a manifesto for a feminist revolution — placing Lloyd Malcolm’s historically fictionalised Emilia Bassano not only in conversation with modern women, but also in conversation with Shakespeare. The act of writing back across textual boundaries functioned as historical recuperation, placing the real Emilia Bassano back into the body of early modern text. It raised questions of whose stories get told and by whom, and about who gets to control the narrative. In 2019, the West End musical & Juliet picked up the baton, allowing Shakespeare’s Juliet (with the assistance of a historically fictionalised Anne Hathaway) to rewrite her future without Romeo. Like Emilia, & Juliet places early modern women in conversation with both a modern audience and Shakespeare himself.
As we enter 2020, we have hit a high-water mark of reimagined Shakespeare: it’s hard to find a mainstream production that doesn’t employ diversity casting in some way. There have been successes — Eleanor Rhode’s King John at the RSC (2019) casts Rosie Sheehy as John, and Ilinca Radulian and Sean Holmes’s Richard III at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse sees Sophie Russell and Stefan Donnelly as Richard and Margaret respectively. In both productions, actor gender rather than character gender are flipped allowing the audience to see the play anew without compromising dramaturgy. In November I considered the positive impact of placing Donnelly’s male body in the distinctly female role of Margaret in reframing and validifying feminine emotional response.
However, there have also been failures, largely where the gender swaps confuse rather than enhance. Kimberly Sykes’s As You Like It (2019) for the RSC somewhat baffling my offered Phoebe the choice of rejecting Ganymede when he turned out to, in fact, be a woman (Rosalind) and marry instead, not Silvius as written by Shakespeare but rather Sylvia, a woman as reinterpreted by Sykes. The change made no sense, offering instead what Norah Williams, in her plenary address at BritGrad 2019, termed incomplete dramaturgy. The change was made, but not fully thought through. I’d place Justin Audibert’s 2019 Taming of the Shrew (also for the RSC) in the same category — a complete gender-flipped production, placing the women on top, doesn’t make the uncomfortable abusive sexual politics of this play any more acceptable.
What I would like to see moving into the next decade is more intelligent changes rather than change for change sake. I have no issue with women in male roles, or indeed men in female roles. However, changing character gender has impact and, in most cases, changes the essence of the text — where character gender changes are made, I’d like these to be fully followed through and to make sense! I’d like women in lead roles to be less controversial. For example, Mark Rylance as Olivia wasn’t challenged, whereas Michelle Terry as Hamlet (2018, also at Shakespeare’s Globe) led to reviews that can only described as misogynistic. Writing for The Spectator, Lloyd Evans offered the following comment:
No one but Ms Terry would have hired Ms Terry for this role. She’s a decent second-tier actress without any special vocal or physical endowments. Her distinctive features are a toothsome grin and a habit of squinching up her eyes and blinking like an anxious governess unexpectedly robbed of her sunshades while surveying the pyramids.⁸
It’s offensive, and I confess to thinking twice before repeating these words. But, I think it’s important that we call out sexism and misogyny when we see it.
Professor Sir Stanley Wells recently claimed on Twitter that:
Too many current productions use — exploit — Shakespeare’s plays parasitically for eg political social or cultural purposes rather than interpreting them. Thus directors become surrogate playwrights.⁹
There is a fine line between exploitation and interpretation. But I don’t share Wells’s concerns. For me the exploitation of Shakespeare is what makes theatre exciting and each interpretation allows me to see the play anew. However, what I feel was lost in the last decade was a sense of balance — we moved away from traditional performance. In the next decade I’d like Shakespeare in performance to be more inclusionary rather than exclusionary. There’s a place in theatre for all tastes to be accommodated — the ongoing appeal of Sir Kenneth Branagh’s brand of Bardolatry proves that there is still a market for old-school Shakespeare. In seeking new audiences, I don’t want the established audiences to be lost.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/dec/05/julius-caesar-review
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/05/shakespeares-globe-emma-rice-if-anybody-bended-gender
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/05/shakespeares-globe-emma-rice-if-anybody-bended-gender
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/apr/28/romeo-and-juliet-review-globe-shakespeare
[5] Heather Neil, ‘Heather Neil talks to the director Daniel Kramer about young love in an age of greed, rage and violence’ in Theatre Programme for William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Dir. Daniel Kramer) (2017).
[6] Shakespeare’s Globe, Romeo and Juliet [2017], http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discovery-space/previous-productions/romeo-and-juliet [Accessed: 21 April 2018].
[7] Peter Conrad, ‘Incendiary Affair Peter Conrad talks to Daniel Kramer about blowing up Romeo and Juliet and the myth of romantic love’, GLOBE, Summer 2017, p.20.
[9] https://twitter.com/stanley_wells/status/1209085043508953090
