Globe to Globe Online!

I can’t quite even believe that this is what it claims to be, but look! All of the Globe to Globe productions online and free. I don’t know anything about The Space except that it is apparently a new service; with the World Shakespeare Festival and its other offerings, it seems kinda miraculous, don’t it?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit in front of the screen for a month or so.

 

Apologies to Shakespeare in the Ruff–Not Quite a Review of Two Gents

It’s already been two weeks since I caught the last performance of Shakespeare in the Ruff’s Two Gents. First and most important, it’s great to have Shakespeare back in the Danforth’s Withrow Park. I hope the company is a huge success there for a long time.

Second and equally important, I enjoyed the show. The actors are young (mostly) and energetic. I couldn’t help being won over by their enthusiasm.

But since it’s been so long (unfortunately I have a life outside this blog that insists on intruding) I’m going to be lazy and leave the things I liked about the show to this review, which sums them up quite well. (In fact, I’ll be looking out for Robert Cushman’s reviews from now on.) I’ll just say for now that I was less enamored than the reviewer with some of the changes the company made. Heaven knows Two Gentlemen could use some changes, but I didn’t see most of those that turned the play into Two Gents adding up to a coherent whole. The change from Italy to Verona, Ontario and Milan, Manitoba didn’t make any difference, unless it was to provide an excuse for the (actually pretty terrible) songs and Thurio’s multiple Southern accents. (Though last I checked, people in Manitoba did not speak with US Southern accents.) There was no gain in changing the Duke to a Duchess and one of the play’s better physical jokes lost (the Duke pretends to Valentine that he wants to woo a woman locked up in a tower, needs a rope ladder—“And what are you doing with a rope ladder under your cloak?”). And why change Crab the dog to Lily? I fear the reason emerged in the credits; Lily is the dog’s real name. Which implies that it couldn’t be trained to answer to “Crab.” I don’t expect a company that’s operating on a shoestring to afford an animal trainer, but since Crab is the reason most people see this play, it seems important to get his name right. (It didn’t help rescue the Crab scenes that the actor flubbed his lines the night I attended.)

Ah, and then there’s the ending. For now I’ll just say that I disagree completely with the approach the company took; we’ll look at their solution as well as a whole array of others when we get to that point.

For now, note that though I’ve advanced some criticism in this post, I would much rather experience the DIY roughness of Shakespeare in the Ruff than schlep out to an overpriced, polished, but lifeless performance at the Stratford Festival. You should feel the same, or at least give this company your support.

Fit To Be Tyee’d

The Tyee, based in British Columbia, is one of Canada’s more interesting small independent webzines—the only one, for all I know. It’s the sort of venue you’d think I should be writing for. But I’m probably going to blow my chances by commenting on this recent piece, which could almost have appeared in Slate. The piece is so negative and uncomprehending that I really feel I have to address it. The question “Why Is Shakespeare Still Selling?” isn’t a blasphemous one, but it is one worth taking seriously; I address it implicitly in my every post. What a pity, then, that the item under consideration treats it frivolously. South Park deals with Shakespeare more seriously.

Like a typical Slate piece, this one takes a contrarian view of an alleged paradox. How can Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach (or as I’ll call it, BOB) summer Shakespeare series possibly be so successful (“Concessions are bustling and, in satellite tents, dinner service is finishing up for corporate clients treating staff and guests to an evening of cultural entertainment”) with such unpromising material as Shakespeare? Given what follows, it’s hard to remember that the point of the piece is to praise BOB—for its success in attracting “corporate clients,” not in creating an “intensely moving experience.” Certainly none of the commenters seemed to notice; unanimously, they addressed the question why Shakespeare is or is not “boring.” (The writer, Steve Burgess, takes exception to a commenter who objected to the use of “sell” and “boring” in the headlines, saying that although he approved the headlines he didn’t write them. No comment necessary, except that he does use “sell,” twice, as well as its synonym “peddle,” which unlike “sell” is actually pejorative.)

BOB, then, is essentially selling Vancouverites a bill of goods. How do they do it? Burgess bases his diagnosis on the production of The Merchant of Venice he saw at BOB. “By rights Shakespeare ought to be a very tough sell in the 21st century. And The Merchant of Venice has always been the toughest bauble to peddle.” Here’s a problem right at the start. Is Burgess arguing that Shakespeare as a whole is “a very tough sell,” as his first sentence says, or that The Merchant of Venice specifically is a very tough sell? The next few paragraphs make the latter argument, but even if they succeed that says nothing about As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Richard III, Othello, or any of the other thirty plays.

Well? Is The Merchant of Venice one tough bauble? I’m afraid Burgess’s discussion is an unmitigated disaster. To give him the benefit of the doubt, it sounds as if he only knows the play from this performance and BOB’s program notes. If so, however, that’s the worst possible reflection on BOB. If the fault is in BOB, not in himself, then coming to praise BOB Burgess buries it. He begins:

In some ways The Merchant of Venice feels remarkably contemporary. With its blend of frothy romantic mix-up and life-or-death drama, it’s a template for the modern date movie. And if your date hates Jews, all the better.

Um, no. The real “template for the modern date movie,” as I’ll show, is Much Ado About Nothing. The “modern date movie” never contains “life-or-death drama”; its whole point is to deny death for ninety or so minutes. As I’ll discuss at length when we get to it, what is so unsettling about The Merchant of Venice, what takes it out of the realm of romantic comedy, is precisely the presence of Shylock, and its genius is precisely the way Shakespeare makes audiences uncomfortable. The “If your date hates Jews” remark is just throwaway snark meant to evade argument, as Burgess’s following paragraphs show:

Shakespeare’s plays are always lauded for their timeless quality, which is why Shylock makes so many Shakespeareans squirm. Any production of Merchant must tiptoe over the same eggshells, making sure that Shylock is sympathetically portrayed to balance his dramatic role as the unchristian villain.

I have trouble even making sense of these two sentences (“the same eggshells” as what?), but I think they mean something like: “Shakespeare is supposed to be ‘timeless,’ but the anti-Semitic characterization of Shylock is either bound to its time, or we are complicit in it.” So in order not to be anti-Semites, we must portray Shylock sympathetically. I have no truck with the idea that Shakespeare is “timeless,” whatever that even means, but put that to one side. There would be no “eggshells” at risk if Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock were sympathetic or, mirabile dictu, combined sympathetic and unsympathetic elements—that is, presented a three-dimensional human being. (And isn’t it just barely possible that such roundness of characterization is a selling point for Shakespeare?)

Amazingly, Burgess sees this: “There’s little doubt that Shakespeare was ahead of his time with his well-rounded and sometimes sympathetic portrayal of Shylock.” End of story, thank you very much, see you next column. Right? Wrong. he continues: “But there’s only so much we can expect of Shakespeare. The man never knew he would someday come to be the global face of the humanities. He just knew he had an audience to please.” So apparently for Burgess, the only way Shakespeare could have written a fully rounded character complete with contradictions would be if he had been looking to his twenty-first-century status as “the global face of the humanities.” His own dramaturgy as he sat at his desk and participated in rehearsals in the 1590s had nothing to do with it. After all, he had pandering to do, which meant Jews to mock:

And for me the proof of the play’s attitude comes at the end of the trial, with Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity. No late 16th-century crowd would have groaned aloud at the hateful injustice of it, as the Vanier Park audience did. The scene was surely intended as a crowd-pleaser—the long-anticipated payoff when the villain finally gets his deliciously just desserts (delivered, tellingly, by the wise, virtuous, utterly un-villainous Portia). It was only in the early 19th century that actor Edmund Keane is said to have played the first sympathetic version of Shylock—previously the role was frequently cast with clowns.

Tickets to the Tennant-Tate Show?

Londonist tells us how to get tickets to the Wyndham’s Much Ado and offers a summary evaluation that pretty much jibes with Kate Maltby’s. It’s less eloquent, but I rather liked “If, on the other hand, you want to see a performance of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, it’s on at the Globe Theatre and standing tickets only cost a fiver.” As I’ve said elsewhere, standing tickets are the way to go at the Globe. I just wonder if they’ve started selling hazelnuts yet.

O to be in England, with Two Productions of Much Ado

[The other day I noted that someone had come here by searching on “Kate Maltby Much Ado.” They must have known I’d already decided to write this post . . . .]

I’d always thought that when Evelyn Waugh died, the species “intelligent conservative” (or “Conservative”) died with him. The Spectator’s Kate Maltby seems bent on changing my mind. She also inspires passionate envy by having seen the two productions of Much Ado About Nothing going on simultaneously in London that she reviews here. If I could get over to see them, rest assured I would.

I doubt that Sir Jonathan Miller shares my enthusiasm. Once upon a time he not only had a sense of humor, he was the cause of laughter in others, as a member of the seminal comedy troupe Beyond the Fringe (whom we will encounter when we discuss the Henry VI plays, of all things). Despite substantial cultural accomplishments since, particularly as an opera director (his staging of Janácek’s Kát’a Kabanová remains one of the greatest opera productions I’ve ever seen; he also directed the 1980s BBC Shakespeare production of The Taming of the Shrew with John Cleese as Petruchio, which we will encounter by and by), he is probably best known these days for bemoaning the casting of “that man from Doctor Who” as Hamlet, overlooking the fact that David Tennant has long been a card-carrying member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, having first appeared in an RSC production in 1996. (While researching this post I discovered that Tennant had responded to Miller; the only thing to say is Touché! I only wish that he had taken the opportunity to deny altogether the distinction between “high” and “low” art rather than just the specific characterization of Doctor Who as “low” and Hamlet as “high.”) Now the TARDIS has landed on Miller’s lawn again, disgorging not only Tennant again but Catherine Tate.

That said, one could argue that Miller has a better case here. Tennant’s Shakespearean chops are well established by now, but I doubt that even Tate would suggest that she was cast for any reason other than her stint on Doctor Who. So to a degree this is the kind of stunt casting I’ve questioned before, and I know perfectly well how much lots of people in the UK are bovvered by her; but she did show talent and, more important for casting purposes, real chemistry with Tennant on Doctor Who. There are worse places for Shakespeare than the TARDIS, and we’ll see far, far worse instances of stunt casting (Alicia Silverstone as the Princess in Love’s Labour’s Lost? What was Kenneth Branagh thinking?)

Without having seen either staging, I suspect Maltby’s judgment is pretty much right. Given all I’ve said, the Tennant-Tate Much Ado could scarcely help but be lighter, more pleasing to a summer crowd, and less emotionally intense—“a highly polished comedy expertly designed for box office success,” and it makes perfect sense that that would be at least partly down to Tate’s casting (“Catherine Tate has a great time with the slapstick physical comedy, but she lacks the emotional vulnerability that Eve Best reveals in the same role at the Globe.”) I do think, though, that Much Ado, as the lightest of the major comedies, is far from necessarily ill served by a lighter touch. Featuring Shakespeare’s least competent and least characterized villain in Don John, the play never really makes us believe that Hero’s happiness is endangered, or that Beatrice and Benedick will fail to get together. Maltby is talking about nuances in the relations between Beatrice and Benedick and Hero and Claudio that unquestionably deepen the play and its emotional impact but whose absence wouldn’t vitiate it, as she makes clear.

I wonder whether Maltby would accept a comparison between Tennant-Tate and Bringing Up Baby, one of the funniest movies ever made but one that comes up a little short on emotional depth, largely because of Katharine Hepburn’s performance. Similarly, I wonder whether the Globe production is comparable to The Lady Eve, an even greater screwball comedy precisely because the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck makes us believe that Eve really did fall in love with old Hopsy, dammit, and that all her actions follow from her emotional state. In any case, I’d still like to see for myself. Who wants to fly me over to London for the upcoming long Canada Day weekend?