A HORSE ON A TREADMILL. The Bridge Project, founded by Sam Mendes, has been bringing Shakespeare and Chekhov to audiences around the world for the past two years. An article about the company in the weekend Financial Times (June 18/June 19) included comments by one actor abut the differences in audiences. The German audiences, he thought, were “unnervingly polite”—no laughing, no coughing, no shuffling. On the other hand, “In Paris and Madrid they were so exuberant….” I mentioned this to Mary Jane, and she said that she had been to a play in France once, but that her experience was different. It was a performance of Cyrano at the Theatre Mogador that she found very exciting, but there was little response from the audience until a scene where there was a horse moving forward on a treadmill. The audience went crazy about the horse.
Archive for the ‘Shakespeare’ Category
A HORSE ON A TREADMILL.
Monday, June 21st, 2010MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS AS ATHLETES.
Monday, June 7th, 2010MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS AS ATHLETES. Mary Jane commented that the actors we saw in the Guerrilla Theatre production of King John, who stripped to the waist for fight scenes, were really “ripped.” Then she commented that the muscularity seemed to be contemporary—an anachronism. And then we thought about it some more and decided that the nobility in about 1200 must have been “ripped.” They were professional warriors who fought with in chain mail with heavy weapons. Every so often when I am watching a football game, I think that the professional football players of today would have been nobility in medieval times. (As an aside, I did some googling and found that chain mail apparently weighed about 30 pounds while plate armor weighed about 90 pounds. However, as this wikipedia article says, “The notion that it was necessary to lift a fully armed knight onto his horse with the help of pulleys is a myth originating in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”)
SEEING KING JOHN VERSUS READING IT.
Monday, May 31st, 2010SEEING KING JOHN VERSUS READING IT. Reading all the Shakespeare plays is different from seeing them. There is good reason to being a completist. The Guerrilla Theatre cast found all kinds of things that I had not seen when I read the play. For one thing, I had commented to Mary Jane that I couldn’t imagine how Constance could be played because she enters at high intensity and her lines keep ratcheting up from there. The actress playing Constance, Ginger Eckert, gave meaning to each hysterical line. Tom Schwans captured the Bastard’s duality—participating in the action and standing aside to provide the perspective of a later time (there is an element of time travel because the Bastard seems to speak to and for an Elizabethan audience living four centuries after the action). Mary Jane had wondered how they could find a young boy to play the part of young Arthur (of course,in Shakespeare’s time, not only did boy actors play all the women, but there were important companies where boys played all the parts.) The problem was solved by a fine performance by a young woman, Patricia Lynn. Finally, I had not succeeded in imagining a King John who spoke forcefully and acted weakly as Jordan Kaplan did.
KING JOHN IS A GOOD PLAY.
Sunday, May 30th, 2010KING JOHN IS A GOOD PLAY. I had never read King John, and had heard no good things about it. Seeing it confirms my view that lesser Shakespeare plays are good plays. As with the lightly-regarded Titus Andronicus and Henry VI plays, there were lots of vivid scenes, and a complex story line. There were foreshadowings of a number of future plays—Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Lear….A problem that history deals the playwright is that King John was a weak and indecisive king. Another problem for the playwright is that the action of the play (reflecting much of King John’s reign) involves diplomacy, negotiations and betrayals on the part of the English and French kings and the Papal emissary, all of which calls for formal speeches. Shakespeare develops a character from a play he used as a source: the Bastard (a bastard son of Richard the Lionheart). Tony Tanner says that the character has been compared by different critics to Petruchio, Berowne, Mercutio, Autolycus, Jaques, Touchstone, Falstaff and Henry V. The Bastard is a character an audience can identify with, but, as newcomer to the court, he also provides an outsider’s comment on medieval courts.The picture of medieval courts is persuasive—diplomacy leading to broken truces and broken vows. The Bastard’s commentary also solves the problem presented by the heightened rhetoric at the court by undercutting and mocking it. (One aside: ” Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words/ Since I first called my brother’s father dad.” Note the short informal word at the end).
A COMPLETIST GOES TO SEE KING JOHN.
Saturday, May 29th, 2010A COMPLETIST GOES TO SEE KING JOHN. I am a completist. Mary Jane and I saw Shakespeare’s King John last weekend. It was done by the Guerrilla Theatre Company, and it was done splendidly. I wanted to see it because I always try to see Shakespeare plays, but also because it gave me a chance to get closer to having seen all of Shakespeare’s plays. I have now seen 32 of them (I count seeing the movie Titus as equivalent to seeing a performance of Titus Andronicus.) This article calls people who try to see all the works of an author “completists” and cites completists who are working on Horton Foote, Sondheim and August Wilson. The article tells about an English couple who completed all of Shakespeare by going to New York to see The Two Noble Kinsmen. Interestingly, they saw it at the Guerrilla Theatre Company, and I came across the article at the Guerilla Theatre Company website. The article indicates that Edward III should be included in the list of Shakespeare’s plays, so it looks like I still have 7 to go, but I have been very lucky to see as many as I have.
WHAT WAS SHAKESPEARE LIKE?—THE OXFORDIAN VIEW.
Friday, May 21st, 2010WHAT WAS SHAKESPEARE LIKE?—THE OXFORDIAN VIEW. Oxfordians (who include Justice Stevens, Justice Scalia, Justice Blackmun, Freud, David McCullough, Orson Welles, John Gielgud, Michael York Jeremy Irons and Mark Rylance) believe that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s works. Their main argument is that the works are autobiographical and that certain plays and sonnets have parallels in Oxford’s life. For example, Oxford had three daughters and was once kidnapped by pirates. I have never paid much attention to the Oxford claims so I did not know what Charles Nicholl says in his review in the Times Literary Supplement (April 23) of CONTESTED WILL by James Shapiro. Nicholl describes Oxford as “one of the nastiest Elizabethans on record: shrill, violent, unstable and pathologically extravagant.” Nicholl adds that “Among his contemporaries [Oxford] was a byword for preening vanity….” Nicholl gives examples, including Oxford’s killing an unarmed cook (the coroner’s report concluded that the cook ran upon Oxford’s sword). My first reaction was amusement that this is the kind of man thought by Oxfordians to have written the plays. But then I thought that Shakespeare’s plays are filled with villains and villainies—and that perhaps if you take autobiographical theories seriously, this is the kind of candidate you wind up with.
BEING READY FOR A FIGHT.
Friday, May 7th, 2010BEING READY FOR A FIGHT. During the time that I found myself on stage playing Gonzalo in THE TEMPEST, I learned a lot about how I should carry myself, even though I wasn’t very good at carrying myself. One thing I was taught was the difference in being prepared to fight. Consider the scene where Gonzalo and others are awakened from a spell by Ariel in time to forestall a plot on the King’s life. My first instinct, in order to show that Gonzalo was ready to take action, was to assume essentially the ready position that a basketball player takes—the so-called “triple-threat position”—described here as “Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, knees bent, and in a slight crouch.” Crouching in a balanced position is natural in a lot of modern sports. It would be disastrous in a fencing match where one wants to present as small a target as possible. Somebody who is ready for a sword fight stands erect with one foot ahead of the other and the hips turned. And the idea is that all movements by gentlemen in that century were shaped by that ingrained stance. After all, at any moment, an insult might require one to draw his weapon.
MEL GIBSON—THE BEST HAMLET PERFORMANCE?
Monday, May 3rd, 2010MEL GIBSON—THE BEST HAMLET PERFORMANCE? Mary Jane and I have up to now considered Mel Gibson to be the best Hamlet we have seen, and, I think, for the same reason. The first Hamlet that each of us saw, when we were quite young, was Maurice Evans (apparently I would have seen it when I was 11). Evans was given to intoning his lines. His Hamlet was weak and incapable of taking any strong action, much less killing Claudius. Even though I knew better once I had read the play, that impression of Hamlet stayed with me at some level. Mel Gibson not only gave a good performance, he brought with him his persona from Mad Max and Lethal Weapon, so that when Gibson’s Hamlet refrained from killing Claudius, it was a deliberate choice. I think that I build up my image of each Shakespeare play, with each new line reading or performance I encounter either changing or deepening that image. I will be bringing Gibson’s Hamlet along when I watch David Tennant.
HAMLET AND DOCTOR WHO.
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010HAMLET AND DOCTOR WHO. Mary Jane and I were unfamiliar with David Tennant. When I e mailed Lee Bryant to alert him to the RSC HAMLET, he wrote back: “I loved David Tennant as The Doctor on Doctor Who, so I’m going to record this.” I replied: “So Tennant does have good classical credentials.” Mary Jane asked me if I was joking, but I was quite serious. I’ve always said that a lot of non-Shakespearian actors should do Shakespeare. I used to give Jackie Gleason and Carol Burnett as examples. Now, John Goodman, best known for playing Roseanne’s husband, is considered to be a great Falstaff, and I would love to see him do it. Good acting is good acting. Patrick Stewart says here that Shakespearean training helped in Tennant’s doing Dr. Who and Stewart’s doing Star Trek. Stewart says: “I think that the experience that we get in making a 400-year-old text work is exactly what you need for giving credibility and believability to fantasy, science fiction, and the like.” Let me suggest this as a thought experiment: Suppose you had only seen Michael Gambon or Kenneth Branagh or Maggie Smith in the Harry Potter movies or Ian McKellan only as Gandalf. You would feel comfortable casting them in a Shakespeare play and you’d be right.
IS THIS THE BEST HAMLET?
Saturday, May 1st, 2010IS THIS THE BEST HAMLET? Mary Jane and I saw enough of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s HAMLET with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart on PBS the other night to make us wonder whether this will be the best HAMLET we have ever seen. (We Tivo’d it to set it aside for when we can watch it straight through). This HAMLET will be released on DVD on May 4, and you can also find a link to it here. Mary Jane and I were immediately seized by the opening scene (my father’s favorite scene). We each exclaimed: “This is the best I’ve ever seen.” All the line readings in the first scenes were good, and Tennant’s first soliloquy was raw emotion. I have not heard the soliloquies in my head as private thoughts, and here they were from a suffering man. And then we turned it off.
