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 year in review

Top Shows of 2015

Here’s my list of my ten favorite shows of the year, in chronological order. I saw much less than last year, so it was a bit easier…

1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I was definitely very late to the Curious Incident game, but I’m so glad I finally made it. It demonstrated for me the immense empathetic capacities of theatre. More artists should be using the stage not only to explore unshared stories, but through unshared subjectivities.

2. Golem. The first show I officially saw as a critic, which was very exciting. And luckily for me, the show itself was exciting, too: one of the more original and successful uses of multimedia that I’ve seen so far, paired with truly spectacular performances. Plus, some of the music still gets stuck in my head.

3. Romeo and Juliet. This play is done so badly so much of the time, I had almost lost faith in it. But I don’t see how you could help but be deeply moved by this production, rooted in an intelligent, achingly youthful Juliet and a sensitive, guilt-ridden Romeo.

4. DruidShakespeare. I’d longed for years to get to see a full set of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, and though DruidShakespeare presented abbreviated versions of all four plays, the experience of seeing Richard II, the Henry IVs, and Henry V in succession was as interesting and moving as I always hoped it would be. I only touch on it briefly in the linked article, but highlights include Derbhle Crotty’s extraordinary Bolingbroke, Garrett Lombard’s deeply sexy Hotspur, and possibly the only cast I’ve ever seen that actually earned the name ‘gender blind.’

5. The Beaux’ Stratagem. The final entry in a series of masterfully directed comedies I saw in England, all of which derived their strength from recognizing that a comedy still must rest on the essential dignity and humanity of its characters– and in these specific cases, its female characters. Title and hilarious laddish hijinks aside, the heart and soul of the play lay with the women. And the musical numbers.

6. King John. I know, it’s hard to believe that a production of King John could make this list. It’s hard to believe that there could be a production of King John that you’d want to see twice, but that’s what James Dacre managed for the Globe. Given the recent outcry about people who dare to suggest altering Shakespeare’s texts, it provided an excellent example of the wonders a little tinkering can work.

7. Richard II. Maybe this was the year of restoring faith in Shakespeare plays I’d started to doubt in spite of myself (though after two go-rounds, I still don’t like Measure for Measure). This Richard succeeded by refusing to let the title character steal the show, instead broadening the scope of the history, allowing every character to feel important, and thus, every scene to feel propulsive. This was enabled in large part by David Sturzaker’s Bolingbroke, who, in counterpoint to Richard, quietly and stoically was led through a tragedy of his own.

8. Spring Awakening. I saw the original Spring Awakening shortly before it closed and wasn’t a fan. This production, on the other hand, was a revelation. Sign language provides a much, much more effective metaphor than rock music for the play’s central themes of miscommunication and alienation. The performers are all tremendous, and the fact that Wendla and Melchior actually look like teenagers makes a surprisingly large difference for the better.

9. Hamilton. Yeah, yeah.// EDIT: TIED WITH FUN HOME. I can’t believe I left this off at first. While Hamilton may be an unmatched musical achievement, I think Fun Home is at least as groundbreaking, and I found it more emotionally impactful (not that that means something is better, but still).

10. A View from the Bridge. I was so annoyed that I let myself miss this in London, but Russell Tovey, added to the cast for Broadway, is the ideal Rodolfo, so I’m not too mad I had to wait ’til I got back to New York. What is there to say? A sharp, clean, barebones production of a play that I personally think is nearly perfect. If Mark Strong doesn’t win a Tony, it will be a crime.

hbachrach essay

Breaking the Chain (of Being)

In London this past July, I had the opportunity to participate in TranShakespeare, a series of workshops on gender in Shakespeare led by Lisa Wolpe. This is a version of an essay originally created in response to those workshops.

 

When my acting teacher introduced me to E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture during my second year of undergrad, I thought I had been handed the secret key to Shakespeare. That slim volume apparently laid out with clarity and detail what Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed about the world. The central concept is that of the chain of being, which proposes that Elizabethans viewed the universe as a precise and incontrovertible hierarchy from God to monarch to men to women to animals, with various detailed gradations within those groups. Everything could be ranked: types of animals, types of plants, types of metals and stones. In espousing it, Tillyard was following in the footsteps of scholar Arthur O. Lovejoy, who wrote The Great Chain of Being. Between them, they articulated one of the most influential concepts in Shakespeare scholarship and performance. But The Elizabethan World Picture was published in 1942, The Great Chain of Being was in 1936. And yet, despite the political, social, scholarly, and theatrical revolutions that have taken place in the past seventy years, the theory of the chain of being is still widely taught as unquestioned fact, especially to performers.

I still understand exactly why, as an aspiring actor getting a grip on Shakespeare for the first time, I found Tillyard so appealing. Faced with the daunting task of somehow bringing this epically long, extremely dense, hugely famous poetry into my own voice and body, Tillyard’s implicit promise of a set of clear rules to follow was immensely comforting. Read this book, understand where Shakespeare was coming from. Understand where Shakespeare was coming from, automatically know how to live in his roles. Easy! Or at least, easier. But such easy answers are always oversimplifications. One particularly pertinent example of this is the question of gender, a hot topic in Shakespeare studies and performance at the moment. As theatre artists question and challenge the boundaries of gender in our own social and theatrical culture, we must also be prepared to embrace the full complexity of the time period in which the plays we grapple with were written.

The place of gender within the chain of being is clear: women are inferior to men. Men are closer to God, women are closer to animals. It fits in perfectly with the general sense of historical misogyny, and seems to mesh in turn with some of the more sexist displays in Shakespeare’s plays. The only problem is that it’s just not true. Whenever the idea of the chain of being gets brought into a workshop or rehearsal room, I reflexively cringe: I can feel the stereotype that scholarship is rigid and uncreative being reinforced once again. But dismantling the chain of being is, in contrast, another excellent example of how recent Shakespearean and early modern scholarship can act not as rigid rules to bind in creativity, but creative forces in themselves.

No one culture can be compressed into a single set of guiding principles. Plenty of Elizabethans likely believed the basic ideas behind the chain of being … but many almost certainly did not, and those people were not simply lone, subversive voices. Like any time period, there was a multiplicity of perspectives, and this cultural foment of contradictions is reflected even within individual plays and poems.

Critic Phyllis Rackin has repeatedly written that many scholarly assumptions about the early modern period, particularly those regarding the role of women, seem much more invested in upholding contemporary gender roles rather than actually reflecting the realities of a society in which women ran businesses, were guild members, performed in non-professional drama, and of course, were the reigning heads of countries. This is not to suggest that sexism did not exist, because of course there were essential and powerful strains of misogyny at the heart of fifteenth and sixteenth century law and culture, but Tillyard and Lovejoy’s hierarchy suggests a frankly unrealistic rigidity that even Shakespeare’s own plays do not uphold.

When I consider this question, I often think about a pair of plays whose exact relationship is admittedly contested, but which highlight not only the multiplicity of opinions that characterized the period, but also remind us that times, tastes, and authorial interests change. These plays are Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, a sort-of sequel to Shakespeare’s play in which Petrucchio’s second wife, Maria, embarks on a scheme to ‘tame’ her unruly husband. While hardly a rousing call for feminism by modern standards, it is a fascinating reflection of how Shakespeare’s own contemporary, and future protégé, contested Shakespeare’s early perspective on marriage and sexual hierarchy. (It also raises the question of what we are losing by so completely focusing gendered explorations of classical theatre on Shakespeare. Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Fletcher and his collaborators, but also Ben Jonson and former boy player Nathan Field, played much more radically with the possibilities of cross-dressing on an all-male stage, and produced works that could be much more explicitly reinterpreted from a modern perspective as reflections on the potential fluidity of gendered identities.)

Shaking up the chain of being is just one step in freeing scholarship from its undeserved reputation for stodginess. I hope artists can move instead to exploring how bringing a scholar and dramaturg’s understanding of the period and its writers into the room can, in fact, open up creative possibilities far broader than the strict, stiff ‘rules’ about the place and identity of men and women that early twentieth-century historians have handed down to us.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

Rejecting Romance

I sometimes mutter about this, but it’s time to confess it outright: I’m a romance denier. I don’t believe “romance” is a genre of Shakespeare play. And two plays I saw recently at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival helped confirm this impression for me. One of them is a play we categorize unequivocally as a comedy, Much Ado About Nothing. The other, Pericles, is generally labelled a romance. But seeing them back-to-back drove home their similarities, and drew attention to the ways in which separating the early and late comedies into different generic categories warps our understanding of both.

So first, romances. A critic named Edward Dowden is to blame for using the word for the first time. While we have divested ourselves of most of the nonsense that Victorians made up, for some reason the genre Dowden proposed in his 1875 book has stuck around. Their tragicomic elements, their emphasis on mysticism and redemption, their deus ex machina endings… all of these are pointed to as reasons that romances deserve to be considered a separate genre from other comedies.

Pericles seems to offer proof of this in spades, particularly in OSF’s sublime production, directed by Joseph Haj. The elegant, sweeping production, interspersed with music and dance, neither mocks nor attempts to rationalize its inconsistent tone and improbable series of events, but allows the play to speak for itself. Accepting, as Haj writes in his program note, that “[t]he play is only troublesome if one insists on it behaving like other plays” allows Pericles’ s episodic structure, amazing coincidences, and heightened emotions to accumulate into a fantastical but cohesive world in which the miraculous culminating reunions seem both natural and essential.

The continuing insistence on romance as a genre seems to stem from an effort to explain precisely the strangeness that Haj chose to embrace in his Pericles. But this labeling has led, in my opinion, to a widespread neglect of the fact that all of the supposedly unique elements of a romance are also present in almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies– romances just demonstrate them in a more extreme and concentrated form. And sometimes not even that much more extreme. This was emphasized for me by Lileana Blain-Cruz’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, which I saw at OSF the night after I saw Pericles. 

Productions of Much Ado often seem at a loss as to how to handle the scene where Claudio and the soldiers, as ordered by Leonato, go to Hero’s (fake) tomb to sing a song of mourning and apology to her (not actually) dead body. As my parentheses imply, it’s hard to know what to make of such a long scene of mourning for someone who isn’t actually dead by characters who contemporary audiences aren’t particularly inclined to trust. But Blain-Cruz’s staging of the scene, with Hero herself draped in fabric standing in for her own burial monument, transformed and elevated the scene and song into something just about as mystical as the revelations in Pericles.

Hero behaving as her own statue called to mind at once Shakespeare’s most famous living statue: Hermione at the end of The Winter’s Tale, a character to whom Hero is frequently linked in scholarly criticism. And with good reason. Both are apparently killed by their lover’s irrational jealousy and apparently reborn to renew the union and forgive. Hero’s choice to forgive Claudio is too often dismissed by contemporary artists as not a choice at all, sexist and a bit pathetic, Shakespeare ignoring the complexities he himself has created in favor of a tidy ending.

But the critical and artistic insistence on the difference between comedy and romance has erased the highly mystical transformation that Hero undergoes, one that Blain-Cruz’s staging highlights and the text itself clearly supports. Hero’s response to Claudio’s exclamation that there is “Another Hero!” is not “No, I’m the same Hero,” but “Nothing certainer.” To paraphrase Haj again, by expecting Much Ado About Nothing to act like other comedies (and I think a similar argument can be made about the endings of almost all of Shakespeare’s comedies), Hero’s power to be reborn and forgive, and the agency implied by such a choice– in fact as radical and transformative as Prospero, Hermione, and Imogen’s ability to do the same– is underrated and ignored.

It is easier for Shakespeare’s early comedies and middle tragedies to masquerade as something like naturalistic, but that doesn’t mean that they are. In cordoning off Shakespeare’s most bizarre and mystical plays into a genre of their own, we have ignored the mysticism of the rest of his canon. So many plays hinge on the power of forgiveness, and whether or not such redemption is permitted or even seems possible can often be the biggest difference between comedy and tragedy. By allowing the magical potential of the romance to seep back into the rest of the canon, as these OSF productions do, the familiarity of these plays can be shaken, the easy answers of sharp genre designations rejected.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

Tell My Story: Shakespeare and Hamilton

I wasn’t going to write about Hamilton, because after the utter flood of coverage, what’s left to say? But I love history plays, and have spend huge portions of the past year and a half thinking about them– and the more I thought about them in relation to Hamilton, the more of a pattern I began to see with regards to the female characters.

Hamilton’s reclamation of the history play for minority voices is one of its most trumpeted elements– and for English-language drama, the history play is a genre that is deeply indebted to Shakespeare. In addition to his participation in the Shakespearean tradition of layering the patterns of tragedy onto the events of history, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s treatment of female characters in Hamilton also directly evokes tropes and structures made famous by Shakespeare.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous historical scenes is found in Richard II, and depicts privileged people who are nonetheless at the very margins of power: the Queen of England, wife of King Richard II, accidentally overhears from two gardeners’ gossip that her husband has been deposed, that she is no longer queen. She’s so far from power, it has evidently not occurred to anyone to even update her on what is going on.

In another famous scene, female characters are more actively shoved from power: in Henry IV Part One, Lady Percy begs her husband, Henry “Hotspur” Percy, to let her in on the rebellion that he’s planning. She obliquely suggests that she has a double right to the knowledge, as his wife and as the sister of his suspected co-conspirator. Hotspur flatly refuses, and though he agrees to allow her to follow him on his impending journey, he refuses to tell her where they’ll be going or why.

So far, so familiar. Wives left behind by duty-bound, ambition-fueled men, we see that all the time. We even see it in the first act of Hamilton with Eliza Hamilton’s repeated refrain of “isn’t this enough?”, to which Alexander’s implicit answer always turns out to be no.

But with both of these Shakespeare characters– and, indeed, with other women throughout his history plays– there is a slight twist. As King Richard, now deposed, is led away to prison, he bids farewell to his wife and leaves her with a final request: “In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire/With good old folks and let them tell thee tales/Of woeful ages long ado betid;/And ere thou bid good night, to quit their griefs,/Tell thou the lamentable tale of me.”

Lady Percy actually does this, positioning herself as the true bearer of her husband’s legacy after he is killed in battle, relating tales of his deeds when she thinks they have been forgotten: “[His honor] stuck upon him as the sun/In the grey vault of heaven, and by his light/Did all the chivalry of England move/To do brave acts […] He was the mark and glass, copy and book,/That fashioned others.”

Despite their explicit exclusion from their husbands’ actions, they become the bearers of their stories after their deaths. And the same can basically be said of Eliza in Hamilton. Her aim in most of her scenes echoes that of Lady Percy in most of hers: to persuade her husband to stay home, stay domestic, stay by her side. And both Harry Percy and Alexander Hamilton reject this offer repeatedly, committing great deeds (and not-so-great ones) in a world in which their wives aren’t welcome. Like Richard’s Queen’s eavesdropping revelation of her husband’s deposition, Eliza finds out her husband’s lurid secret when he publishes a pamphlet revealing it to the world.

Subsequently, in her only entirely solo number, “Burn,” Eliza undertakes to “eras[e herself] from the narrative/Let future historians wonder how/Eliza reacted when you broke her heart.” It’s an exciting example of how a dramatist can use gaps in the historical record to fill in a character’s arc– in this case, the fact that the real Eliza Hamilton, for some reason, destroyed her letters– but also points to what she clearly views as her future role: not a player in her own right, but a source of the information with which others may build her husband’s legacy. And, in the final number, when she “put[s herself] back in the narrative,” it is in precisely this role.

The closing number, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” provides an answer to the third clause of its title: Eliza will tell Alexander’s story. It details her fifty-year effort to tell her husband’s story– like Lady Percy, to remind others of the importance of a life she fears is being forgotten.

(It’s interesting, and probably too much to fully cover here, that this precise role also exists in In the Heights, but is filled by the main male character, Usnavi, while his female love interest yearns to escape and rejects the vision of neighborhood loyalty that Usnavi ultimately dedicates himself to upholding.)

The unique ways in which female characters interact with and ultimately propagate historical narratives are strikingly similar in Miranda’s musical and Shakespeare’s later history plays. The women are not quite in the room where it happens, but maybe listening at the door. In Shakespeare, there seems to be an implicit link between their exclusion from the direct action of the play and their ability to assume the role of narrator. It’s fascinating to see how directly this narrative pattern is echoed by Hamilton. If it’s not a conscious look back towards Shakespeare (which I certainly wouldn’t put past Miranda), it’s proof of how deeply embedded Shakespeare’s tropes and structures are within our impulses about how to dramatize history.

hbachrach review, Shakespeare

Review: Richard II

Richard II has long been sort of an article of faith with me, as far as Shakespeare plays go. I devoutly believed that it could be great, even though I had never actually seen any live evidence– and indeed, several instances which seemed determined to prove that the play was just inherently quite slow and boring in spite of the beautiful poetry, or (in the case of DruidShakespeare’s marvelous adaptation) could only succeed if significantly trimmed down. But I should have foreseen that if anyone could prove otherwise, it would be the director of the hugely delightful Beaux’ Stratagem, Simon Godwin, who is clearly having a very productive year, given that he has also just opened a gorgeous (and in my case, faith-affirming) production of Richard II at the Globe. 

 
I recently heard a director say that she has never produced Richard II because she works with an ensemble, and Richard II has nothing worthwhile for an actor besides the title role. This very often seems true; the major productions of the last few decades are inextricably paired with their lead actors: the Ben Whishaw Richard, the Fiona Shaw Richard, the David Tennant Richard. But Godwin has built his ensemble with performers so compelling, and allows every scene to fill with such engaging urgency, that for once the world of the play manage to expand beyond the long shadow of the King himself. 
 
A world over which he has wholly cast the shadow of his own sunlight is, of course, just what Richard likes to imagine: crowned at ten years old (in a beautiful opening sequence alternately featuring Thomas Ashdown and Frederick Neilson as the child Richard), Richard has grown up to be a giddy, self-centered monarch, certain that his crown and power are  his due by divine right and not things that must be upheld by steady rule, prudent spending, and politic dealings with his nobles. 
 
Charles Edwards as Richard is everything this complex role demands: frivolity mixed with sensitivity, a dazzling intellect that only gradually begins to creep out from behind the facade of entitled delusion. His delicate Richard is compelling even at the height of his vanity, and amply fills out the tragic dimensions of the latter scenes. It is a sensitive, nuanced performance.
 
Swanning around a dazzling gilt set, surrounded by a quartet of high-voiced favorites in satin and brocade, the implications of his aesthetic are inescapable, though not (as in many productions) ever made explicit. Indeed, he and Anneika Rose present one of the warmer potential versions of Richard’s relationship to his Queen, with the textually nameless French princess (called Isabel, after Richard’s historical queen, in the program) proudly taking her place amongst the giggling, whispering cloud of courtiers until suddenly left bereft by Richard’s departure and her own abrupt loss of position. 
 
Richard’s opposite and eventual rival is his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, a role that an article I read recently described as ‘completely thankless.’ But if this is its theatrical reputation, you wouldn’t know it to see David Sturzaker’s performance. His sharp, patient, and deeply feeling Bolingbroke defies the easy interpretations of his character as a quick-tempered proto-Hotspur or a ruthless Machiavellian climber. Godwin and Sturzaker suggest a Bolingbroke swept away in the strange current of shifting power that leads without any explanation from Bolingbroke publicly protesting he does not seek the crown, to Richard’s Queen overhearing by accident that her husband’s deposition is imminent. Where Richard is obsessed with pageantry, Sturzaker’s Bolingbroke is like a stage manager, continually delivering silent commands in the background through looks and gestures, a tendency which ultimately demands far closer attention from his subjects than Richard’s flamboyant performances ever did. But deep down, though it takes a quieter form, Bolingbroke is as determined as Richard that he end up the hero of his story, and movingly horrified when he realizes that that is not to be. 
 
This production makes the play feel more than it ever has for me like the story of three families, three branches of the family tree descending from the oft-invoked King Edward III: his last two living sons, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, now patriarchs with sons of their own; and the necessarily fatherless King Richard, whose recklessness, flanked by York and Gaunt’s steadiness, draws continual attention to the skipped generation of rulership, the king who never was. While this structure makes sense textually, it rarely feels alive in performance; that it manages to do so is thanks to the stand-out performances of William Gaunt as Bolingbroke’s father John of Gaunt (yes, really), William Chubb as a scene-stealingly sarcastic and endearing Duke of York, and Graham Butler as his increasingly unsteady son Aumerle, Richard’s cousin and confidant, who seems to be an almost unwilling survivor of Richard’s fall. Sarah Woodward and Sasha Waddell also deserve mention for their refreshing interpretations of the Duchesses of York and Gloucester respectively, and for making so much of the little they are given. This is not a play that is very kind to actresses. 
 
In his famous speech in the penultimate scene of the play, the lonely, imprisoned Richard tries to ‘people this little world’ with his imagination. Very often, this is how the play itself feels: faintly drawn characters fluttering around Richard, who is himself the only real, full person onstage. But Godwin’s vision is more expansive– more history play than tragedy, many people’s stories rather than just the one. The result is a boisterous, generous production that is not afraid of letting laughter butt right up against tragic sincerity, or of letting other characters become as important as the lead, or of letting the sad story of the death of kings be genuinely enjoyable, too. 
hbachrach review, Shakespeare

Review: King John

I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about Shakespeare’s King John that doesn’t at some point call it something along the lines of “infrequently performed” or “seldom seen.” So consider this your requisite mention of the fact that for most of its life, people have considered King John pretty crap. After all, it is a play about King John that includes neither of his reign’s two most famous features: Robin Hood (technically from when he was Prince John, I guess) and the Magna Carta. 

But the common thread between both these well-known stories and Shakespeare’s play is John’s illegitimacy as a ruler. As the villainous Prince in Robin Hood stories, he has all but usurped his older brother, Richard the Lionheart, off fighting in the crusades. And he was forced at sword-point by his nobles to sign the Magna Carta (or so the simplified version goes), promising them certain rights in the face of his mismanagement of the kingdom. 

Shakespeare’s John is a temperamental tyrant, stoutly backed by his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, in seizing the throne from his older brother Geoffrey’s son Arthur after the death of his oldest brother, King Richard. By right of primogeniture, the throne should be Arthur’s, and Geoffrey’s widow Constance has rallied the French king and his son Louis to fight for Arthur’s claim. 

If this sounds vaguely confusing… it is. Or at least Shakespeare sometimes makes it seem that way. Part of King John‘s checkered production history doubtless has to do with the fact that the play’s plot seems to careen out of control, devolving into subplots and intrigues that spring up seemingly out of nowhere. But director James Dacre and the company do a remarkable job of sifting through the loose threads, highlighting apparently throw-away lines (like an early comment of John’s about looting monasteries for money for his wars) that gain unexpected significance later on and teasing out unexpected resonances that help shape the central characters’ journeys, even if many of them (by Shakespeare’s design, not a failing of the actors) are lines and circles rather than arcs. 

Music features heavily, not just as background or pre-show adornment, but within the scenes themselves. Lines are set to music, and many of the scene transitions are accompanied with hymn-like, choral settings of particularly essential words and phrases, which also helps to knit the play– which skips from darkly comic to tragic to political with abandon– into a more cohesive-feeling whole.  

But all of Dacre’s excellent work in structuring the production would be worthless if it weren’t resting on such excellent performances. Jo Stone-Fewings’s King John is splendidly petulant. He has the perfect look of a medieval king, which literalizes the contradiction Queen Eleanor astutely notes in the opening scenes: that his kingship is a question of appearances and possession, not of right. 

Barbara Marten and Tanya Moodie’s rival queens Eleanor and Constance are formidable and stately. Constance’s eleventh-hour lament for her captured son is a staple overwrought audition monologue, and it was a breath of fresh air to hear it delivered with a dignified grief that did not blunt the character’s sharp intelligence. 

The show-stealing role is that of Philip Falconbridge, the bastard son of John’s older brother Richard, the only entirely fictional main character in any of Shakespeare’s histories. Alex Waldmann combines irreverent charm, boisterous arrogance, and genuine feeling. Ciaran Owens does some scene-stealing of his own, making a big impact in the relatively small role of Louis the Dauphin, whose glowering and preening provides a silent, foppish parallel to the Bastard’s running commentary. The stubborn confidence of Owens’ Louis, particularly in the later scenes, shifts the play away from Shakespeare’s usual characterizations of the cowardly, villainous French, and instead casts much of the blame for the play’s chaos on Cardinal Pandulph (Joseph Marcell), a meddling Papal legate.

The date of King John’s composition is uncertain, but most scholars put it in the mid 1590s, after Shakespeare had finished the Henry VI plays and Richard III, but before Richard II and the Henry IV plays. Watching it, however, the play that came to mind was Troilus and Cressida: they share a sharp cynicism at their heart, though King John ultimately offers at least a superficially hopeful conclusion. But the penultimate image is striking: the Bastard, not the soon-to-reign Prince Henry holds the crown– implying not, I think, some secret desire for usurpation, but the continuance of the cycle that began with Eleanor and Constance: those who might be best suited for power can only– because of their birth, their class, their gender– watch from the sidelines. 


Stay tuned, as well… on June 13, King John will he performed in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for one night, and I’ll be there. I’m very excited to see how such sprawling, combat-filled show fits into that little space, and I’ll be sure to write about it. 

hbachrach review, Shakespeare

Review: As You Like It

The Lady Parts blog recently posted a casting notice for Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It which described her like so: “a saucy, sexy heroine who saves herself (and others) all while getting her man.”

….well, it’s not wrong? “Saucy” is indeed a word Rosalind uses to describe her intended behavior when she is in disguise as the shepherd boy Ganymede. Sexy… well, her lover Orlando thinks so, though in his self-centered, Petrarchan rhapsodies, he probably wouldn’t use exactly that term. But the only thing Rosalind can really be said to save anyone from is sexual frustration: the real danger lurks outside of the Forest of Arden where she, in her own words again ‘proves a busy actor’ in both the pursuit of her own desires and others’. She does get her man, though. But only after teaching him how to deserve her. 

That dangerous outer world where the play begins– the dual courts of Duke Frederick, who exiled his brother, Rosalind’s father; and that of Oliver de Boys, who has robbed his youngest brother Orlando of his inheritance– seems best characterized in the Globe’s current production by irrational hate. Oliver (William Mannering) confesses that he has no idea why he hates his brother so much, and Duke Frederick refuses to give his reasons for suddenly banishing Rosalind under pain of death. Orlando (Simon Harrison) brings traces of this fury and violence with him into the forest when he flees there, only to be quickly and easily pacified by the exiled Duke (David Beames, who also plays Frederick) and brought over to placid country living, where the only intrigues are romantic and the only violence done to deer. 

On the other hand is Rosalind, who is also forced to flee to save her life, and decides to do so disguised as a boy. I don’t know exactly how to describe what Michelle Terry does except to say that it is wholly winning. Her Rosalind shrieks and shouts and flails and makes faces and is dazzlingly clever yet utterly gobsmacked by her feelings for Orlando. It’s thrilling to watch a woman onstage behave with such lack of inhibition, and for that behavior to be framed as joyfully funny, not as laughable and worthy of mockery. And Terry’s Rosalind does not derive this abandon from her masculine guise– it is what characterizes her private games with her cousin Celia (Ellie Piercy, equally charming). Living as Ganymede simply allows her to bring all her exuberant weirdness out in public. Rosalind and Celia are perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest female friendship (the field of competition isn’t large), and director Blanche McIntyre’s greatest strength there and throughout the play (and one she also demonstrated in The Comedy of Errors) is perhaps her ability to recognize that comic characters can be absurd and human simultaneously. 

Another sterling example of this is James Garnon’s Jaques, melancholic follower of the exiled duke. I frankly tend to find Jaques insufferable, but Garnon’s depiction transformed my understanding. Rather than playing up the character’s pomposity and protestations of melancholy, his understated performance suggests something profoundly truthful about Jaques sadness, while avoiding the kind of hyper-naturalistic performance that does not work particularly well with classical texts in general, but especially not at the Globe. Oh, and he’s funny, too, and finds what seemed to me at least to be a genuinely original spin on the classic ‘All the world’s a stage…’ speech.

In a strange way, though, As You Like It could be Shakespeare’s most naturalistic play. Nothing much happens; the events are mostly structured around watching different characters encounter each other and just seeing what comes of it. It’s a testament to McIntyre’s skill that even so, the play never feels shapeless and the pace always seems brisk. It’s a delightful play about people finding themselves and each other; thankfully, this production doesn’t try to turn it into something more by making it Dark and Serious. Its ethos is perhaps best expressed (as so many things are) by Rosalind herself: “I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.” As the first half of the play makes plain, such experiences cannot always be avoided… but As You Like It is more in the business of merrymaking.