The Tempest
Michael Boyd directs a production that is not only spectacular, but also
thoughtful and imaginative. In the arena-like Roundhouse, the action takes
place on ledges all around and in the aisles, bringing the actors to the
audience. The action moves swiftly from the opening scene of the raging
tempest, with the King of Napes suspended from on high as the mariners
climb and descend the rigging, to the quiet ending as Prospero and Caliban
silently confront each other. Within the course of a day, evildoers who had
wronged Prospero are punished and then forgiven, true love surmounts
obstacles, a murder plot is thwarted, the sprite Ariel achieves freedom,
and the island is left to native Caliban.
Malcolm Storry is outstanding
as Prospero, exploring many facets of this complex character, who guides
the events more easily than he can control his own passions, and who must,
with difficulty, forgive those whom he thirsts to punish in revenge for his
banishment. 
Brian Protheroe and Tom Beard are studies in evil as the brothers of
Prospero and the King, while on the comic level, serving-men Trinculo
(Simon Gregor) and the drunken Stephano (Roger Frost), instigated by
Caliban, attempt to overthrow Prospero and seize power.
Among the many inventive
interpretations of familiar scenes is the Harpy’s banquet, which turns into
a chilling, bloody orgy; the acrobats on ropes miming an erotic encounter
in the wedding masque, and at the end, Miranda’s wonder at the “brave new
world” and its “goodly people,” while Prospero dryly comments of these
thieves and usurpers, “’tis new to thee.” And the interpretations of Ariel
and Caliban are equally imaginative. Kananu Kirimi is a diminutive,
dancing, androgynous sprite, while Geff Francis brings dignity and poetry
to his rebellious Afro-Caribbean Caliban. As the old Gonzalo who saved
Prospero and his magic books, Jerome Willis effectively depicts optimistic
goodness surrounded by cynical evildoers.
The Winter’s Tale
In the opening scene, director Matthew
Warchus attempts to motivate Sicilian King Leontes’ inexplicable jealousy
by depicting him as a 1930s Mafia-type Sicilian-American, who might
understandably go berserk at the thought of his wife’s infidelity and
inflict upon her the cruel and unusual punishment familiar from
television’s “Sopranos.” But this modern-dress production creates more
complications than it explains, like placing Shakespeare’s Bohemia in
America’s Southland. In this transformation, the most successful scene is
the sheep-shearing festival, a blue grass celebration with country music.
Although some of the audience members,
both English and American, complained that they could not understand the
actors’ American accents, the Roundhouse acoustics could not be blamed, for
speech in “The Tempest” was quite clear. Douglas Hodge, a fine actor, was
the worst offender, his violent actions seeming to blur his delivery, when
he grabs his wife Hermione and forces her head down upon the table while he
rants about her “treachery” in having an affair with his best friend, King
Polixenes.
Anastasia Hille is excellent as Hermione,
especially in the scene where she is put on trial by Leontes, and stands
alone in the center of the huge arena, chained by the ankle as she defends
herself in front of a microphone, while the audience seated around the
stage become trial groupies held back by ropes.
 Ms.
Hille’s Hermione, displaying dignity under fire, rationally explains why
she is falsely accused, and reminds Leontes, who judges her, that she has
no fear of death, having been deprived of all she lived for.
Shakespeare’s contrast of the
merriment of the sheep-shearing with the darkness of the earlier scenes is
effectively achieved by a band of musicians playing country music, with a
solo by Lauren Ward as Perdita (Leontes’ abandoned child). Alan Turkington
as a stalwart Florizel is able to make this bland role convincing, as he
does with Ferdinand in “The Tempest.” And Keith Bartlett as the Old
Shepherd who finds and brings up Perdita and Dylan Charles as his son are
especially good as country bumpkins who at the end easily convert to the
aristocracy.
The production opens with a
magic disappearing act, staged as banquet entertainment for the visiting
Polixenes, and foreshadowing Hermione’s disappearance after the trial
scene, when she supposedly dies. When her “statue” comes to life at the
end, the family are reunited, Leontes is forgiven, and Shakespeare’s magic
reigns.
Pericles, third in the
Roundhouse series, runs from June 28 through July 13, after which the three
plays move to Stratford-upon-Avon.
Eastward Ho!
At the Elizabethan Swan Theatre in
Stratford, five plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries are being staged in
repertory, the most enjoyable so far (with two to arrive later in the
summer) being the city comedy by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John
Marston. Dating from 1605, early in the reign of James I, “Eastward Ho!”
recreates Shakespeare’s London as a bustling metropolis, filled with
ambitious traders, shady confidence men, and self-serving tricksters, along
with honest, thrifty guildsmen, like Master Touchstone. A goldsmith,
Touchstone started small and worked his way up to his own shop, where he
employs two apprentices, Quicksilver and Golding. Their names describe
them: the former a wastrel and con-man, the latter hard-working and honest.
Unlike Shakespeare’s plays, there are a
number of women in the cast, for this play was written for the Children of
her Majesty’s Revels, a company of young boy actors. Marston was a sharer
in that company, in which boys performed the women’s roles, a convention
of the Elizabethan theater. The satire and innuendo in which Marston
specialized were more acceptable from the mouths of youngsters. Because
“Eastward Ho!” satirizes the selling of knighthoods and the Scots (both
identified with James I, who was Scottish), Jonson and Chapman were jailed,
but Marston was not.
In what Jonson describes as “a money-get,
mechanic age,” the London comedies invariably presented its citizens in
get-rich-quick schemes, as do “Eastward Ho!” and Jonson’s “The Alchemist”
and “Volpone.” Apprentice Quicksilver, who would rather play tennis than
work, describes in detail how to make copper look like gold, while the
knight Sir Petronel Flash is selling his wife’s inheritance to finance a
voyage to Virginia. There, he is told by the ship’s captain, Seagull,
“gold is more plentiful . . . than copper is with us: and for as much red
copper as I can bring, I’ll have thrice the weight in gold.” He says that
Virginians gather diamonds and rubies at the seashore and “all their
dripping pans and chamber pots are pure gold.”
Touchstone, whose motto is “work upon that
now,” has two daughters. Addle-brained and socially ambitious Gertrude,
with her mother’s encouragement, marries Sir Petronel on his promise of a
title (bought) and a castle (nonexistent), only to have him disappear after
the wedding to set sail for the ill-fated Virginia venture. Quiet sister
Mildred marries apprentice Golding, whose hard work is rewarded when he
becomes a guild member and a deputy alderman.
Among Quicksilver’s other money-making
schemes is lending money to fellow wastrels at the gaming houses, and
getting payoffs from a usurer, Security, to whom he brings customers
desperate for a loan.
An old man, Security has foolishly married young Winifred, who is having an
affair with Sir Petronel. In another plot twist, she will in disguise set
out with him and the crew on their Virginia voyage.
Director Lucy Pitman-Wallace maintains a
lively and entertaining pace for all the goings-on, highlighting the songs
and dances and creating a city atmosphere at the opening with street cries
instead of the spoken prologue. The cast is uniformly excellent, with the
bad characters providing, as usual, the juiciest roles.
As the hoydenish Gertrude,
Amanda Drew scorns her humble family and delights in moving up the social
scale – until disappointment leaves her suing for shelter. Billy Carter’s
Quicksilver changes his approach as he changes his costume, with each new
opportunity to con a victim – until he lands in jail where he becomes as
penitent as he was proud. He sings a warning to other apprentices:
Farewell,
dear fellow prentices all,
And be you
warned by my fall:
Shun
usurers, bawds, and dice, and drabs,
Avoid them
as you would French scabs.
Like the prodigal son, to whom he is
compared throughout, Quicksilver is forgiven. Geoffrey Freshwater is a
stalwart Touchstone, Paul Bentall suitably grasping as Security, and James
Tucker skillfully turns the too-good-to-be-true Golding into a likeable
human being.
Edward III
Printed in 1596, with no author mentioned,
“The Reign of King Edward III” is probably not by Shakespeare, though some
contend that he may have written 150 lines of the wooing scene between the
king and the Countess of Salisbury. Given to long declamatory speeches and
unimaginative or trite imagery and allusions, the play was not attributed
to Shakespeare for almost two hundred years after it was possibly performed
in the early 1590s. In 1767 Edward Cappell, perhaps needing to fill up
allotted space, included it in his complete edition of Shakespeare,
stating that “there was no known writer equal to such a play.” His remark
would be contested by T.S. Eliot, who wrote penetrating analyses of
Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and restored them to favor on the
modern stage.
Regardless of authorship, this Royal
Shakespeare Company production at the Elizabethan-like Swan at
Stratford-upon-Avon proves a good evening in the theater. For those whose
knowledge of the fourteenth-century English wars with France is based on
Shakespeare’s history cycle, this play treats the grandfather of Richard
II. Shakespeare’s cycle of eight history plays begins chronologically
with “Richard II” and ends with “Henry VIII,” which concludes with the
birth of Queen Elizabeth I.
Staged with imagination by Anthony Clark
and acted with gusto by a cast headed by David Rintoul as Edward, “Edward
III” plays better than it reads. Mr. Rintoul makes convincing a character
consumed by passion one moment only to abandon it the next. 
He also is called upon to be pitiless in refusing help to his besieged son,
and to be adamant and claim executive privilege in denying an earlier oath
of safe conduct. .
Although the wooing is drawn
out and the set speeches too long, humor is introduced in the portrayal of
the king’s secretary Lodowick (Wayne Cater), Jamie Glover proves stalwart
and likeable as Edward’s son, the Black Prince, and Caroline Faber is a
convincing Countess of Salisbury whose cool, clever defense abates the
King’s ardor. As the Countess’s father, Warwick, Joshua Richards is to be
congratulated for making sense of lines like: “See where she comes; was
never father had/ Against his child an embassage so bad.”
After the long speeches of
the first section of the play, the bustling battle encounters are welcome,
with the clanking of armor and the clashing of swords. The initiation of
Edward Prince of Wales as a warrior, attiring him in his famous black armor
provides a dramatic moment, as does his return from defeating overwhelming
odds. (The historical Black Prince died in battle, and the succession to
the throne passed in 1377 to his infant son, Richard II) Another telling
scene carries associations with Rodin’s sculpture “The Burgers of Calais”
when, after the siege of that town, the group of “six citizens in their
shirts, barefoot, with halters about their necks” are brought before the
king, who withholds mercy to them until Queen Philippa (Sian Howard) pleads
on their behalf.
The Swan, like the
Elizabethan stage, uses no set scenery, so that the action moves quickly
from scene to scene, with good visuals like the besieged Black Prince
hemmed in by ropes, which also are used to good effect for soldiers
storming a town. Sound effects are impressive as well, with the cawing of
ravens causing the French to fear this portent of defeat.
It is difficult to believe that if Shakespeare were the author
of this play, it would not have been attributed to him in 1596 when the
play was printed, by which time his name was of commercial value. Only two
years later, writer Francis Meres mentions Shakespeare by name as the
author of several plays, including “Richard II,” “Richard III,” and the
early comedies. In the days when the title page served as an ad, there
would have been little reason to omit his name from “The Reign of King
Edward III” had Shakespeare written it. Meres compares him to Plautus and
Seneca and lists the early plays plus the “sugar’d sonnets.” Shakespeare’s
second and third parts of “Henry VI,” vastly superior to “Edward III,”
also had appeared on the stage by the time the latter was printed..
But most convincing is the internal
evidence. There is no character development in “Edward,” in which
Shakespeare excelled, from his earliest play, “Titus Andronicus,” published
in 1594. Next, the long, declamatory debates develop arguments rather
than action. Possibly “Edward” was written to appeal to the law students
at the Inns of Court. Also, Shakespeare, even at his worst, could not have
written such lines of doggerel as:
So lords be gone, and look
unto your charge,
You stand for France, an
empire fair and large.
The couplet also represents
the unknown dramatist’s awkwardness in getting characters on and off the
stage, never a problem for Shakespeare. Occurring throughout are lines
like, “Go leave me Ned [his son], and revel with thy friends” and when
Lodowick brings in the Countess, “Go Lod’wick, put thy hand into thy purse
/ Play, spend, give, riot, waste, do what thou wilt/ So thou wilt hence a
while and leave me here.”
But perhaps the greatest argument against
his authorship is Shakespeare’s sure sense of theater. Compare the
drawn-out wooing scene, in which Edward declares to the Countess of
Salisbury that he “dotes” on her, with the lines in another early play,
“Henry VI Part 1,” where the Earl of Suffolk takes Margaret captive after
the English defeat the French at Anjou. In less than 100 lines, Suffolk
has been smitten (in an aside), she has considered that she has nothing to
lose (another aside), and he has promised to make her Queen of England by
wooing her for King Henry VI :
“I’ll undertake to make thee
Henry’s queen. . . .
If thou will condescend to be
my –
Margaret: What?
Suffolk: His love.
When Suffolk asks for a kiss to take to Henry,
Margaret, kissing him, cleverly signals to Suffolk that her emotions
respond to his: “That for thyself: I will not so presume/ To send such
peevish tokens to a king.”
Edward’s wooing of the Countess of
Salisbury takes up 608 lines, including his writing a love letter, with the
help of his secretary, and his demanding that her father Warwick intercede
on his behalf. Of these, the actual encounter between Edward and the
Countess, in which she cleverly defends her honor until he admits defeat,
take up 149 lines, which Shakespeare might have supplied if, as was often
the custom, this was a collaboration, like “Eastward Ho!” “I am awaked
from this idle dream,” Edward declares, and immediately rallies the forces
to attack France, with which the rest of the play is concerned.
As You Like It
The Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park,
London, is presenting an outstanding production of one of Shakespeare’s
three best comedies, all of which will be seen in London this summer.
Twelfth Night is opening at the Donmar in the autumn, and Much Ado
About Nothing arrives at the Haymarket in July.
Celebrating its seventieth anniversary,
the Open Air Theatre, set amidst the trees, shrubberies, flowers, and
fountains of Regent’s Park, offers an idyllic setting for “As You Like
It.” Directed by Rachel Kavanaugh, this is an ideal production,
fast-moving, clearly and meaningfully spoken, and performed by a talented
cast who sing and dance as well as act.
Ms. Kavanaugh, who guided the delightful
“Love’s Labour’s Lost” at the Open Air last season, is notable among
Shakespeare directors for her exceptionable ability in casting the roles,
paying close attention to physical attributes mentioned in the text, never
resorting to “against type” casting for a cheap laugh (like the
transvestites in the wedding masque in the RSC “Tempest”), making certain
that the actors and thus the audience understand the lines, and providing
many imaginative touches that support the dialogue.
When Amiens sings to Duke Senior and his
retinue in the forest of Arden, for instance, his pose is familiar from
illustrations of pastoral shepherds, enhancing the atmosphere of the
scene. This director also is aware of the value of the set speech, like
the Seven Ages of Man, keeping the actor still and giving the lines their
full value. Just as Hamlet, instructing the Players, knew that it was
important to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” so
there are no distractions by extraneous movement in this production. But
when physical action is called for, it is there, in an excellent rendition
of the Act I wrestling scene (Shakespeare was a master at getting the
audience’s attention early on.)
The cast are uniformly good. Rebecca
Johnson is an outstanding Rosalind, agile and appealing, but not overdoing
her imitation of a boy when she assumes the disguise of Ganymede. Thus she
is able to remind the audience of the woman within the role she is playing
in this game of love. Benedict Cumberbatch brings conviction to Orlando, a
relatively thankless role, for he must play “straight man” to
Rosalind-Ganymede’s witticisms about no man ever dying for love, or about
the fact that “maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when
they are wives.” 
Christopher Godwin is an impressive Jaques, who makes the most of some of
the best lines in the play, while John Hodgkinson as Touchstone, the court
fool who accompanies Rosalind and Celia into the forest, is genuinely
amusing because he reads his lines seriously, as a “wise fool” should. And
in the multiple mating that characterizes Shakespeare’s comedies, Caitlin
Mottram and Adam Levy are ideal as Rosalind’s cousin Celia and Orlando’s
brother Oliver.
The design by Francis O’Connor enhances
the production, with costumes as a mix of Edwardian and Victorian and a
setting combining wooden walls and doors and pillars as trees that turn to
reveal Orlando’s verses carved in gold.
The New Shakespeare Company also is
presenting in its summer season through September 7 at the Open Air Theatre
“Romeo and Juliet” and “Oh What a Lovely War,” performed by the same cast.
Performance schedule:
www.open-air-theatre.org.uk.
Much Ado About Nothing
That “Much Ado About Nothing” was a hit in
Shakespeare’s day the swift publication of the play in a Quarto edition in
1600 bears testimony. If you need proof that it is still one of the Bard’s
best comedies, if not the best, see the Royal Shakespeare Company
production playing, after its sell-out in Stratford, at the Theatre Royal,
Haymarket, in London July 27 through August 22.
Directed by Gregory Doran, with the “merry
war” between Harriet Walter as Beatrice and Nicholas Le Provost as Benedick
expertly acted, this is a rollicking and joyous production.
Ms. Walter ably conveys all the nuances demanded in the role of a woman who
disparages love in general and the object of her affection – Benedick – in
particular. At the same time, she makes us realize that Beatrice jests
about love and marriage to conceal her fear of remaining a spinster now
that the marriage of her cousin Hero is imminent. Ms. Walter’s Beatrice is
a mature, intelligent woman who needs only the encouragement of her
friends’ trick to bid goodbye to “contempt” and “pride” because “no glory
lives behind the back of such.”
The “skirmish of wit” between Beatrice and
Benedick, set the tone for the clever exchanges that characterize
Restoration comedies like “The Way of the World.” The passages in “Much
Ado” are delightfully well spoken by Ms. Walter and Mr.Le Provost, whose
Benedick easily handles the long-winded, rhetorical lines. Here he is
defining the woman he might condescend to marry: “Rich she shall be, that’s
certain: wise, or I’ll none: virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her: fair, or
I’ll never look on her: mild, or come not near me:…of good discourse, an
excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what color it please God.”
The pair are true originals, devised by
Shakespeare to round out the main plot he found elsewhere. Hero (Kirsten
Parker) and Beatrice are daughter and niece to the Governor of Messina, at
whose home the action takes place. The time is the 1930s with the
soldier-followers of Prince Don Pedro in Italian uniforms returning from
the war in Africa. The villain Don John, Pedro’s bastard brother, and his
men wear the black uniforms of the fascists.
It is Don John (Stephen Campbell-Moore)
who devises a plot in which Hero is falsely accused of infidelity. When
her hot-tempered fiancé Claudio (John Hopkins) denounces her at the
marriage altar, Hero expires. To uncover Don John’s plot, Shakespeare
invents a comic “watch,” volunteer citizens who ineptly police the
streets. Their leader, Dogberry (Christopher Benjamin), prides himself on
being “as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina.” When his
keystone-cops-like men capture the instigators, Dogberry hilariously
presses charges, conducts their “excommunication,” and brings them to
justice. Dogberry’s malapropisms (“comparisons are odorous”) find their
way, along with Shakespeare’s witty couple, into later Restoration comedy.
That period so cherished the original pair that in some productions the
main plot was cut and the comedy renamed “Beatrice and Benedick.”
Designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis, the
women wear printed, flared dresses or wide-legged slacks in a sun-drenched
terracotta piazza with gardens and arbors providing suitable hiding places
for overhearing by Benedick on his hands and knees, and Beatrice receiving
a hosing that explains her cold the next morning.
The Royal Shakespeare Company in all its
productions delivers the full texts of all Shakespeare’s plays and the
actors are to be commended for making the lines clear, understandable, and
meaningful, while preserving the rhythm and poetry that distinguish these
works. “Much Ado” is a “Must See.” Schedule of performances:
www.rsc.org.uk.
|
