Shakespearean Parody in Lockdown: The Show Must Go Online presents William Shakespeare’s Star Wars
In the articles both Gemma and I have written on ‘made for lockdown’ Shakespeare so far, we’ve noted the way in which these productions speak to our current cultural moment — both through the ways in which they adapt Shakespeare, and in their utilisation of technology to create and making available Shakespearean performance. Gemma noted that Made at Home’s Midsummer Night Stream ‘[draws] on and [plays] with the unusual conventions of our currently locked down society’; and in my article on Creation Theatre’s The Tempest, I suggested that such productions ‘have popularised, if not created, a new form of performance . . . between theatre and screen, live and recorded, ephemerality and permanence, as well as bringing technology to the fore perhaps more than ever before’. In this article, I consider how this ‘new form of performance’ has already established its own set of conventions, and how those creating ‘made for lockdown’ Shakespeare are beginning to play with these tropes.
The most prolific creator of ‘made for lockdown’ Shakespeare so far is The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO), an online project set up by actor and director Rob Myles. Beginning with The Two Gentlemen of Verona on 19th March, Myles has assembled and directed a troupe of actors from around the world each week to perform a Shakespeare play in its entirety via Zoom streamed live on YouTube. As one of the earliest adopters of this performance method, TSMGO has arguably influenced the likes of Made at Home’s Stream and Creation’s Tempest (although both of these productions allowed Zoom as a platform further into their adaptation than Myles generally does). Whilst allowing for the costumes and props actors will have to hand in their homes means that TSMGO has inherently updated the time period of its productions, the focus of Myles’s productions is on fidelity to Shakespeare’s texts. With minimal cuts, some performances have run over three-and-a-half hours in length (including introductory and concluding segments), and the director reads act and scene numbers as well as stage directions throughout each play. That said, TSMGO is still created to entertain — as Myles says on his website: ‘We are here to surprise and delight. We hope you enjoy it’.¹
To celebrate ‘Star Wars Day’ this Monday, Myles teamed up with publisher Quirk Books for a departure from the Shakespearean canon, assembling a cast to perform a selection of scenes from Ian Doescher’s William Shakespeare’s Star Wars — a retelling of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) as a pastiche of early modern drama. In his introduction to the performance, Steve Purcell describes Doescher’s adaptation as ‘an affectionate send-up of both Star Wars and Shakespeare’. The writer uses the conventions and pop culture cachet of both the sci-fi franchise and Shakespearean drama to parody each simultaneously. TSMGO’s production of Doescher’s adaptation reflects this dual parodic status. As the performance begins, a mock production logo for ‘16th Centvry Fox’ is displayed lit by candles instead of searchlights, mashing up cinematic conventions with those of early modern indoor playhouses.
Doescher takes on the role of the Chorus to deliver his adaptation of A New Hope’s opening crawl — an effective blend of the part seen throughout both Henry V and Pericles, Prince of Tyre with the signature opening of every Star Wars film. Doescher’s script simply states ‘Enter CHORUS’,² but Myles takes the opportunity to add extra direction. As the Chorus, Doescher begins close up to the camera, but gradually begins to walk backwards up a flight of stairs behind him. He wears a yellow shirt and black jacket as well as yellow socks, performing the ‘role’ of the iconic yellow text moving backwards into the blackness of space. It is an entertainingly silly touch — made all the more amusing through Doescher’s straightfaced and impassioned delivery — which playfully sends up the relatively low-tech visual and special effects of the first Star Wars film.
However, considering the performance within the context of TSMGO as a purveyor of ‘made for lockdown’ Shakespeare, the choice also resonates as self-parodic. By having Doescher move up his stairs and away from the camera as he speaks, awkwardly climbing each step backwards as he gesticulates to emphasise each line, Myles both brings attention to and sends up the shoestring nature of the streamed Shakespeare that he and others have been creating since mid-March. As well as parodying both Shakespeare and Star Wars, Myles also uses this opening scene to establish an extra level of parody by gently poking fun at ‘made for lockdown’ Shakespeare itself.
Most of TSMGO’s performances so far have necessarily opted for minimal costuming and props. Titus Andronicus has perhaps created the most distinct sense of world-building through a Luhrmann-esque updating of the weaponry to guns and the cast wearing black suits, creating a gangster aesthetic reminiscent of early Tarantino films. William Shakespeare’s Star Wars breaks this trend, with most of the cast wearing makeshift costumes reminiscent of their big-screen counterparts. Many also incorporate ‘Shakespearean’ touches into their costumes — a nod to the faux woodcut illustrations that accompany Doescher’s books depicting George Lucas’s characters with early modern elements added to their usual appearance. Particularly notable are many of the cast’s Elizabethan-style ruffs — a cultural reference to Shakespearean performance as both a regular feature in ‘traditional’ stagings of Shakespeare’s plays, and a visual shorthand for Shakespearean acting in popular culture. If you want someone to ‘know you’re doing Shakespeare’, put your characters in ruffs.
In line with their inherent presentist nature, none of TSMGO’s previous performances have included ruffs in their costuming, so juxtaposing them with the character costumes worn by the actors in William Shakespeare’s Star Wars furthers the performance’s status as an early modern sci-fi mash-up. However, Much like Doescher’s backwards stair-climbing as the Chorus, they also call attention to and gently mock TSMGO’s status as a ‘made for lockdown’ Shakespeare company. The ruffs are not just necessarily low-tech but consciously so — most are simply a concertinaed strip of paper hanging loosely from string around the actor’s neck. The effect is reminiscent of the ‘Sweded’ films seen throughout Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind (2008), in which the main characters shoot homemade replacements of classic films themselves after accidentally wiping the entire stock of VHS rental store. The ‘Sweded’ versions are not created with postmodern cynicism, but through genuine love and affection for the originals. The result is an amateurish charm, a sense which is strongly echoed in Myles’s production of Doescher’s script.
TSMGO’s paper ruffs and other simplistic props and sets — lightsaber hilts made from cardboard and tin foil, TIE-fighter cockpit windows created with card and lollipop sticks — give Myles’s production a childlike sincerity. Despite (or perhaps because of) the rough-and-ready nature of William Shakespeare’s Star Wars as performed by TSMGO, the actors commit entirely to the premise. Instead of trivialising either Shakespeare’s plays, Lucas’s franchise or the tropes of ‘made for lockdown’ streamed performance, the production humorously — and more importantly, lovingly — celebrates all three. The result potentially positions the adaptation, and TSMGO’s output more widely, as metamodern in its approach: accepting the postmodern referentiality of Doescher’s text whilst imbuing it with authenticity and earnestness. The fact that Myles is able to parody the very medium he has helped to establish in under two months, recognisably playing with the conventions and restrictions of Zoom-facilitated performance, is a further signifier that ‘made for lockdown’ Shakespeare deserves to be recognised as a distinct evolution of live performance in its own right.
¹ https://robmyles.co.uk/theshowmustgoonline/
² Ian Doescher, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope (Quirk Books: Philadelphia, PA). p. 8
