hbachrach review, Shakespeare

Hotspur (the opera)

As I am completely ignorant about opera, I had no idea what to expect of New Zealand team Gillian Whitehead and Fleur Adcock’s Hotspur, a forty-minute, one-woman opera given two performances at the Arcola’s Grimeborn opera festival. Their Hotspur is not Shakespeare’s– the opera isn’t an adaptation of Henry IV, Part One– but the connection is obviously why I was interested in attending. I can’t begin to talk about it in musical terms, but it’s fascinating to think about in terms of my interest in the dramaturgy of women’s roles in history.

Hotspur is split into five sections: introducing Elizabeth (Harry Percy’s actual wife’s name) and her relationship to her husband, interludes covering the before, during, and after of the Battle of Otterburn, and a summary of the Battle of Shrewsbury and Hotspur’s death there. Singing is interspersed with long sections of silence, erratic melodies punctuated by drums, while Elizabeth (accompanied, in this production, by dancer Isolte Avila, who performs Signdance, choreography that is simultaneously BSL translation) can only wait. Soprano Joanna Roughton-Arnold’s focused intensity in these sections makes them feel anything but passive, an absorbing way of narrativizing the waiting that makes up the core of her relationship with her warrior husband.

The first two sections are all Hotspur: who he is, what he’s like, the names of his castles, his battle against the Earl of Douglas. It seems at first that Elizabeth’s story can only be contained in the wordless silence and waiting: she tells her husband’s story, and the dance and music tell hers. But the third section– which seemed like the longest– shifts: her narrative slows, taking in descriptions of nature, of the castle, of the needle and thread as she and her ladies sit and sew. She returns to the beginning, to her marriage to Hotspur– but now from her own perspective, that of a child bride. It gradually becomes clear that this is taking place as battle rages out of sight. Only in this space, suspended between life and death, between wife and widow– “What should I be sewing for tomorrow?” she wonders; a garment, or a shroud?– only here can her own story exist in words.

This ability to take time, to describe the concrete details of the world around her endures after her husband’s death: the image of the battlefield, the gruesome desecration of his corpse. At the opera’s conclusion, she repeats the line that opened it: “There is no safety, there is no shelter.” Despite the instability of life as a continually assailed wife of a border warlord, she is no safer as an aristocratic widow. On either side of the wordless suspension of waiting, there is only danger.

hbachrach review, Shakespeare

Cinema Shakespeare: Macbeth

The highlight of my trip to see Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, was my dad’s assessment afterwards that, once she realized Macbeth couldn’t take the heat, Lady Macbeth should have just killed him and taken care of ruling herself.

Aside from some striking visuals and some very dodgy Scottish accents, the film highlighted for me two major difficulties with translating Shakespeare to film, neither of which director Justin Kurzel successfully accounted for.

1. Shakespeare is not naturalism.

Film often is. This film certainly tries to be, generally eschewing Shakespeare’s anachronistic castles for the villages of early Scotland. I will happily concede their more ‘realistic’ interpretation of the movement of Birnam Wood is also beautiful. But in general, the dramatic cinema tendency speak low and slow is deadly to good verse delivery. The monotone, raspy whisper that seems to be a staple of period drama renders the poetry nonsensical, delivered as it is without emphasis or shaping of the verse lines. Delivered in the currently-fashionable understated style of Oscar nominees, every scene sounds basically the same. The characters exist in three modes: naturalistic mumbling, madness, or sorrow. This makes for dialogue that is not only monotonous, but difficult to understand if you don’t know the play already.

2. What is all this poetry for?

During one of Macbeth’s soliloquies– I’ll be honest, I can’t remember which– I found myself wondering ‘why is this happening?’ It, along with the retained descriptions of Duncan’s dead body, made me very aware of the extent to which Shakespeare’s poetry was intended to stand in for things the audience couldn’t see– scenery, battlefields, corpses, even the actors’ expressions. These all happen to be things that contemporary film audiences can see very, very well. Seeing the turmoil on Fassbender’s face and hearing him talk about how upset he was felt just as redundant as hearing Macduff describe Duncan’s murdered corpse while the camera lingered on a shot of it. I came way with the distinct feeling that you really only need one or the other… which does suggest that a fundamental element of Shakespeare and a fundamental element of film are somewhat incompatible.

These are both setting aside some of the other narrative choices of the adaptation, most of which I didn’t like, but are certainly within their rights as adaptors to add. These two points seemed to me to be the most egregious misunderstandings of how Shakespeare as writer functions, and what all those words they were muttering and shouting were actually for.

hbachrach review

Adaptations: Into the Woods

All in all, Into the Woods is– fine. The cast are all good to great, everything looks very pretty. But frustratingly, I think if a little more time had been spent thinking not about just putting the musical onto the screen, but adapting it to the screen, it could have been a truly great musical movie. 

What I mean by this is, Into the Woods‘ jokes, subversions, and structure are built on top of theatrical tropes, not least the device of the intermission itself. It’s a musical that’s made to be cut in half, and its structure within the acts– especially the first– relies on repetitions, reprises, montage-esque group numbers, and direct address. Rob Marshall did not grapple with how to translate any of these devices to film, beyond cut-away montages for the group numbers and changing some direct-address songs to be delivered to other characters. But more than the slight awkwardness of these choices, it’s missing the point: Into the Woods riffs not just on fairy tales, but on the way those stories are told in the theatre. I don’t know what cinematic devices could replace things like the false ending before intermission, but I’m sure such tropes exist, and utilizing them to turn Into the Woods into a movie that comments on film in the same way the play comments on theatre would have pushed it, in my opinion, over the line into becoming the movie musical that finally cracks the code. This might also have forced the filmmakers to think harder about the story they were telling, and pushed them away from some cuts and changes that ultimately left the second half, which is supposed to be the weighty one, feeling a bit bloodless. 

This hinges, in part, on a decision that I thought I would hate but instead found almost worked: actual kids playing Jack and Little Red Ridinghood. After Little Red’s number, I was firmly in the “no” camp– the song lost all of its hesitant glances towards impending adulthood, and the sexual elements just felt like an unfortunate implication. But after both her and Jack (who I felt straddled the becoming-an-adult line better than Red) delivered their songs to the Baker, I began to be intrigued by the idea of the Baker becoming a sort of semi-unwilling receptacle for children’s stories, and hoped it would maybe replace stepping into his father/narrator’s shoes as a reason for becoming a storyteller himself at the end. It also made me look anew at the progression of the lessons learned, seeing more clearly that in the first half, the children (and to a great extent, the Baker and his Wife, and the Witch as well, are still like children) come of age and learn their expected lessons. And then in the second half, the adults realize that the lessons don’t stop now that you’re grown. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what happened. 

Yes, they don’t kill Rapunzel. And it doesn’t work. The Witch learning that you have to let your children go is easy and boring; the Witch finally being proven right that the world is dangerous, but finding only loss in the victory is complicated and interesting and much sadder. Losing the reprise of “Agony” also doesn’t work, and not just because it clearly would have been amazing– but because you lose not only the comedy, but the weight behind the Prince’s later confession that he thought marriage would mean an end to longing. And finally, while losing “No More” almost works, it’s just a huge shame, and makes the Baker’s decision to return feel far too quick and easy. All of these choices combined to make the problems of the second half feel much simpler and shallower than those of the first– which is, of course, the opposite of how it ought to feel. 

There’s a lot of good too, mostly in the performances– which might be a first in 21st century movie musicals. I was completely enamored with James Cordon and Emily Blunt’s Baker and Wife, and I thought the decision to have Cordon narrate was the best thing you can do if you can’t have the narrator visible. They had fantastic chemistry and the exactly right sense of partnership. I only wish that Lapine hadn’t felt the apparent need to water down their prickliness from his original script: they never really fight here, never snap or get angry, and there’s something lost (particularly in “Moments in the Woods”) when their fantastic teamwork isn’t paired with reminders that their marriage is also difficult, and they don’t always get along. But Emily Blunt escapes Joanna Gleason’s long shadow, and James Cordon made me badly wish I could have seen his rendition of “No More.” 

 Anna Kendrick is utterly charming, though Cinderella probably suffered most from the oddly quick and shallow feel of what would be act two. Aside from my total shock that Chris Pine can sing, there’s nothing to say about “Agony.” You just have to see it.

And the film itself is unquestionably worth seeing. But I suspect those who are encountering Into the Woods for the first time on screen will need to look to the stage to understand what has made it an enduring classic of musical theatre.