Review: Shakespeare’s Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Shakespeare’s Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

In 1415 a rag-tag army of Englishmen were retreating through France. After a tougher than expected siege of Harfleur and an outbreak of dysentery, their plans of conquest lay in tatters. On 25^th October, St Crispin’s Day, they met a French army near the castle of Agincourt. Outnumbered by the fresher French forces, the English stood their ground and won a victory that has resounded down the ages (largely thanks to Shakespeare). The English king eventually married the French princess, a legend was born and a new golden age seemed to be in the offing. As it turned out, Henry’s early death called time on the golden age before it got going and cost his country not only France but its internal peace as well, as the Wars of the Roses destroyed his successors.

So in Henry V Shakespeare captures an England full of hope between the years of treason and rebellion which marked the reigns of Henry IV and Henry VI. It is full of instantly recognizable patriotic scenes such as the St Crispin’s Day and the ‘once more unto the breach’ speeches, but it also occasionally expresses a darker side to Henry’s rule. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s slippery justifications for the invasion, Henry’s doubts before the big battle and his often quite unlikable hypocrisy are all troubling aspects. Henry doesn’t seem to care about the death of his old friend Falstaff and he executes old cronies Nym and Bardolph. There is lots of thanking god, but how much is it a public act? He’s a careful politician, so outward religiosity for the sake of morale would not be surprising. And Henry even admits his own illegitimate right to rule, thanks to his father’s treason against Richard II: ‘Think not upon the fault my father did…’ However, the context of that admission is important. On the eve of battle, all alone, Henry prays to god for his men’s safety. And there is enough elsewhere in the play to overcome any doubts about Henry’s character. Much of our scepticism comes from modern sensibilities perhaps alien to the original audience. Are we perhaps too sentimental in wishing Henry would save Nym and Bardolph? Or should we embrace a ruler who exercises justice without favouritism? The characters in the play are unequivocal: Henry is a great and well-loved king.

In terms of this production, the stage set is immediately both simple and striking. At the beginning, the backdrop is entirely removed and the backstage area creates extra space. During the play, the backdrop occasionally appears, via a clever guillotine device, during intimate moments (or to create Harfleur’s walls). The stage’s floor bears an interesting pattern which, during the great battle, is revealed as an invisible Perspex layer above a textured muddy field. This is nicely done.  It was also nice to see a few of the cast from last year’s Two Gentlemen of Verona in minor roles. Having now seen a few RSC plays, the return of actors from earlier productions allows one to appreciate the actors’ impressive versatility. I suspect some of them will one day be well known.

The most recognizable face is Oliver Ford Davies’, who plays the chorus. He got the play rolling with his entry from the backstage area looking for like an elderly and befuddled audience member who had taken a wrong turn. This effect is probably calculated and he got an early laugh when he curiously picked up Henry’s crown only to have Henry stride out and snatch it away from him. Although the main cast wear medieval dress, Ford Davies is bedecked in brown corduroys and a blue cardigan. He is intentionally distanced from the rest of the cast but it doesn’t really work. Admittedly, the chorus must be a difficult part for a modern director to pull off and Shakespeare himself wasn’t exactly keen on them. Its origin is ancient and tragic, and its use in Henry V was perhaps intended to burnish the play’s epic quality. But epic patriotism isn’t really the done thing for the modern intelligentsia. Ford Davies has the odd stab at it (this is the 600^th anniversary of Agincourt, so this production has to be at least partly celebratory), but at times he is ironic rather than patriotic and at others he is earnest but over the top. As I’ve indicated earlier, the text at times questions the legitimacy of Henry’s exploits, but it is done with much more subtlety than Ford Davies musters here, veering erratically between over-gesticulating jingoism and sardonic scepticism.

Joshua Richards’ Fluellan is hilarious as the warm but garrulous old Welshman and Jennifer Kirby as Kate

was also excellent. Both funny and beautiful, she balances chastity and eager curiosity with great comic timing. In fact, the humour is deftly handled throughout this performance. It was also good to see Jane Lapotaire as Queen Isobel of France. She’s had some health problems but is now back on the stage, even if the role was smaller than some she’s had in the past.

Alex Hassell is a handsome and august Henry, but perhaps not quite tough enough and for much of the play not quite down to earth enough. He also has a slightly annoying tendency to address the audience instead of his fellow characters. Presumably the director asked him to do this, and perhaps the aim is to tie the audience more closely to the action. If so, the effort is wasted.

The St Crispin’s Day speech should be the climax of the play:

                ‘From this day to the ending of the world,

                But we in it shall be remembered-

                We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

                For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

                Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

                This day shall gentle his condition;

                And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

                Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

                And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

                That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.’

Here it is the biggest disappointment, desperate rather than inspiring. The tone is flat and the result is anti-climactic. The courage of the men is undercut by an attempt at comedy as Pistol almost takes up the offer to go home, and the end of the speech is followed straightaway, almost before Henry had finished speaking, by the announcement of a messenger’s arrival. No cheering, no signs of grim purpose, no response at all from the army. Again, the director was afraid to appear too patriotic. Henry is much better after the wars, and the wooing scene with Katherine is delightful. Even if flawed in places, Hassell’s performance contains enough to convince me that he is a fine actor, surely due a breakout role in the near future if he turns his sights on television or film.

Overall, this production has a few blemishes and compares unfavourably to the year’s best Stratford performances: Volpone and The Jew of Malta. But a comparison with those great productions is unduly harsh. For all its faults, this is an enjoyable and thought-provoking work, with a number of standout performances. 

Review - The Hollow Crown: Henry IV, Part I

Mini-review: Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (BBC Hollow Crown series)

To whet our appetite for Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, let's have a quick look at Henry IV, Part I from the BBC’s HollowCrown series (originally shown in 2012). Before Henry V was Henry V, he was Hal, a binge-drinking hooligan trickster… or so he would have everybody think. In fact, his plan all along was to lead a life of debauchery and then, just when everybody had completely written him off, he would reform and thereby dazzle people all the more with his excellence. While Hal is putting this meticulously executed, if largely pointless, plot into effect, his father is threatened by rebellion. The star of the rebel camp is the son Henry IV thinks he really wants: Harry Hotspur, a dutiful son and brave warrior. Luckily for Henry IV, his actual son comes good by the end and slaughters his spiritual brother to save the kingdom.

Tom Hiddleston as Hal is magnificent. There is a sadness about him at even the merriest times, which

humanises him (for what short of person would really break their father’s heart and betray his best friend, just to make himself look better?) He’s funny too, and seems to be channelling a little Loki as well in this performance. Simon Russell Beale is likewise wonderfully cast: as funny a Falstaff as you could hope for, and as pitiful as a kicked do (not that I’ve ever kicked a dog. But kicked dog seems catchier than ‘like a dog you refuse to give a bit of your dinner to’).

The Voice: Informing and Educating

This is a beautifully made production. It’s clearly a work of love and the BBC has invested real cash in it too. Some would perhaps use this as an example of how wonderful the BBC is and how lost we would be without it. Being more of a glass half empty type, I’d say that by showing they can still make programmes which conform to the BBC’s original mission (to ‘inform, educate and entertain’), programmes like this actually highlight just how much complete bilge the Beeb turns out the rest of the time…

Anyway, all in all a great film; now roll on Henry V in Stratford.

Review: Richard III at Leicester's Curve Theatre

Shakespeare's Richard III at the Curve Theatre, Leicester, 25th July 2015

A bit of a change this week after a visit to a community production of Richard III at Leicester’s Curve Theatre. My expectations beforehand were not especially high, but the production gave me a number of pleasant surprises. The set had a professional look. The industrial minimalism thing is getting a little tedious at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but this looked just as good as the ones they’re churning out in Stratford. There was an unpleasant David Lynch-esque humming sound effect before the show started: it reminded me of the last moments of consciousness before having a seizure, but for people without such a point of reference it probably wasn’t so bad. An unpleasant but arresting moment occurred at the very beginning of the play. A shirtless Richard gave his ‘winter of our discontent’ speech and we were treated to a very realistic, scabby, sore looking hump which a nurse then injected with a syringe. It was always unlikely that such a great beginning could be maintained, and so it proved.

It would be harsh to single out any individual because the problems ran through most of the cast. Many of the speeches were given at breakneck speed, giving the impression that the lines had been learned without being understood. This might also have been a problem caused by lack of editing: it would have been a good idea to make a few changes here and there, but perhaps being amateurs there was not the confidence to start messing editing the Bard. As it was, there was too much hurried talking and not enough acting. Some of the cast found it difficult to project their voices clearly, whilst others overacted their scenes (my companion actually preferred the latter approach, as it at least had the benefit of making sure you could understand what was happening). The industrial setting sort of went with the kleptocratic Russia theme, but this theme was only applied intermittently in costume and there was no real effort to draw deeper parallels. Occasional fur coats, orthodox priests and paramilitaries wandered around with a Church of England Bishop and, at the end, a bunch of World War One Tommies. The fighting at the end perhaps went on a little too long for a professional production, but this cast have clearly had a lot of fun arranging the battle scenes that it is hard to begrudge them a little fun with them.

The actor in the title role, Mark Peachey, was the highlight of the night and, on balance, made this a pretty

good performance. I could point out that he managed to be comprehensible without shouting every line, but this would damn him with faint praise. In fact, his Richard was charismatic, humorous and menacing – everything you could ask for. This was a warrior Richard, more Stannis Baratheon than Frank Underwood. Overall, he would not have been out of place at any of the RSC performances I’ve seen over the last couple of years: one hopes that he soon gets a shot at acting on a stage that will do his talents more justice.

Merchant of Venice at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Review

Review: The Merchant of Venice, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, 16^th May 2015

Having so recently written about Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, there is no need to rehearse the relationship between the two, though it is worth emphasizing again their paradoxical performance history in recently years. Marlowe’s play was originally called The Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, but is now usually performed as a dark comedy; Shakespeare’s play was originally The Comedy of the Merchant of Venice, but is now usually (always?) performed as a tragedy (with occasional comic elements). The transformations reflect our changed attitudes and the problematization of race in the modern era. Marlowe’s Jew is so irredeemably bad that we can only read the portrayal ironically; Shakespeare’s Jew is treated so badly that we can only read the portrayal tragically. Whether or not the problematic elements were there in the original productions is another matter (though I’m inclined to believe they were). In this respect, both recent RSC productions have trod familiar ground: we sympathise with both Jewish characters and feel discomfort at the behaviour of most of the avowedly Christian characters. Polly Findlay, directing the current RSC production, takes the same familiar track as, for example, the 2004 film starring Al Pacino. Shylock has an understated but solid nobility, Gratiano is an oaf, Bassiano is shallow and Antonio is a bigot. But though it covers familiar ground, it glides over it very elegantly.

The Duke and Antonio

One of the most arresting features of this production is the stunning set design by Johannes Schütz. There are none of the clichéd accoutrements for plays set in Venice (Gondola moorings, the Rialto painted in the background and so on), and neither is it conventionally modern. The stage floor and back wall of the stage are covered in metallic reflective tiles, making the theatre seem much bigger than it is. The only piece of scenery is a large metal ball hanging from a wire. Reflected on the back wall, it is perhaps meant to evoke the three-ball symbol of money lenders associated with the Medici. The cast sit on stools at either side of the stage (being a bit of a thickie, I initially thought this was a new space the RSC had set aside for people with mobility problems). The stage is spare but not stark, because light and shadow are bounced around erratically by the reflective tiles, accentuating both the lighter and darker episodes in the drama. At the conclusion, candles are placed on the stage, beautifully realising the magical unreality of Belmont; and throughout the play the musical accompaniment, evoking haunting renaissance church music, helps to underline a rising atmosphere of heavy unease.

One disappointing aspect of the play is the costumes. The actors wear modern dress, which makes sense (Elizabethan dress would probably not suit the nightclub feel of the stage), but the outfits are either tediously drab (Antonio, Lorenzo, Bassiano) or garishly ‘street’ (Gratiano). In either approach, the results are bland and often ill-fitting, completely ill-suited (bad pun intended) to the Venetian setting, in which glamour, even an understated or decaying glamour, might have worked better.

As the audience enter, Antonio stands alone on the stage. Only after a few minutes, does it become clear that he weeps. At first, this seems to humanise Antonio. Much more so than the hard but melancholy Antonio of Jeremy Irons in the 2004 film, Jamie Ballard’s Antonio might at last be a character we connect emotionally connect with. This intriguing approach (a likeable Antonio!) might cast a penetrating light on the relationship between Shylock and Antonio, but it is quickly and disappointingly stubbed out. Soon after, Antonio is hard and unattractive, whilst being at times frighteningly close to a nervous breakdown. Perhaps the director thought that taking two new approaches to Antonio would be too much for the audience to take, because she does make clear (does she ever!) that the love between Antonio and Bassiano goes far beyond even the strongest heterosexual friendship. By keeping Antonio both gay and un-likeable, we end up with both the gayest character, as well as the character played by a black actor (Gratiano), being the most bigoted.

The sparseness of the stage decoration helps to emphasise the moments of extreme physicality. Jamie Ballard’s convulsive torment in the moments before his expected execution is intense, but the most shocking moment of the play occurs when Antonio tells Shylock to ‘lend it rather as to thine enemy’, taking the menace to a new level as he grabs Shylock by the throat and spits three times into his face. Besides Antonio and Shylock, Ken Nwosu does well in the lesser role of Gratiano and Patsy Ferran as Portia is also excellent, although perhaps not really beautiful enough for the part. Her ‘which the merchant and which the Jew’ line, played for laughs as she says it facing the two men, one in a skullcap, allowed for a moment of brotherhood between Shylock and Antonio, as both roll their eyes at the idiocy of the young jurist sent to decide their case. Tim Samuels is a riotous and riveting Launcelot Gobbo, almost singlehandedly putting the humour back into a play that has largely lost it.

Makram J. Khoury

Makram J. Khoury as Shylock is the standout performance, making up for the predictable characterization and making the production truly memorable. The nobility of his character is fully realised, but so too is his fragility. Dressed like somebody’s grandfather, shuffling along and with shaking hands, his physical weakness in contrast to the young hooligans of Venice helps to clarify the life of communal contempt he stoically endures and the terrible vengeance he feels entitles to take after the Christians have humiliated him and destroyed his family. This solitary obduracy gains tragic grandeur combined with his physical frailty. We cannot get around the fact that killing a person for not paying a debt is bad. But so too is Shylock’s treatment by the Venetians. The laws of Venice are his only chance to attain a semblance of justice and that justice is not only taken away, but new injustices are heaped upon him. When Shylock’s justice is denied, we see the limits of state sanctioned equality. No matter how cosmopolitan the laws of Venice claim to be, Jews like Shylock will never be equals as long as men like Antonio call the shots.

Jew of Malta at the Swan Theatre Review

Review: Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, RSC at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta was perhaps the most popular of the 1590s, but for a modern viewer, the issue of the play’s overt anti-Semitism pushes itself forward as the most pressing concern. After the Holocaust, how it could it not? And the resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe today only adds to our unease about a play in which the Jewish anti-hero is such an outrageously roguish mass-murderer. The similarities and dissimilarities to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice are worth considering. Both Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock are unpopular, miserly businessmen. However, Barabas is a pantomime figure, whereas Shylock is a more rounded character who seems to have a life beyond the play. Barabas’ boastfulness and failure are typical of the villains in traditional English ‘Vice’ plays. Marlowe adds a perceived Machiavellian self-interest to Barabas, but this is complementary to the villain rather than a departure. Shakespeare gives Shylock sympathetic lines, such as the ‘Hath not a Jew Eyes?’ speech, whilst still giving him detestable qualities, which makes him seem much more human and ‘real’ than Barabas. Still, there may be a little more to the Jew of Malta – both in terms of warming our attitude to Barabas and in terms of themes which extend beyond the play’s crude anti-Semitism. This RSC production is a success in bringing both aspects to the audience’s attention.

Fernese

As the title suggests, the play is set on Malta, a largely Christian community with a Jewish minority, governed by the Knights of St John but nominally ruled and threatened by the growing menace of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. After neglecting to pay tribute to their Turkish overlords, an Ottoman fleet arrives to demand ten years’ worth of unpaid tribute. The Christian governor, Fernese, calls the island’s Jewish merchants to a meeting and delivers an ultimatum: turn over 50% of their wealth to the government, convert to Christianity and pay nothing, or lose everything. The other Jews agree to hand over half their wealth but Barabas, the wealthiest man on the island, refuses and so loses everything. In vengeance, Barabas engineers a feud between the governor’s son and his friend in which they are both slain. This leads to further crimes; including the poisoning of an entire nunnery (including his daughter Abigail), the murder of a friar, the framing of another friar for murder and the betrayal of the island to the Turks. Finally, Barabas even betrays the Turks but improvidently trusts Fernese and ends up himself betrayed to a grisly death.

The prologue, spoken by ‘Machiavel’, asks us to watch sympathetically the doings of his friend Barabas but, as many modern versions have emphasised, the most successful Machiavellian in the play is the arch hypocrite Fernese, who betrays his alliance with the Turks and in the end betrays Barabas, whilst accusing Barabas of treachery. One area where Fernese’s Machiavellianism falls down is his leaving Barabas alive after confiscating his property (as well as the other Jews who have lost half their wealth). The Prince says men will more easily forgive the murder of their father than the theft of their wealth and Barabas spells out the Machiavellian sentiment when he says that ‘I esteem the injury far less to take the lives of miserable men than be the causers of their misery’. Barabas can be Machiavellian at times, especially in the use of deception to achieve his aims, but he is far from perfect. In the end, in possibly the least psychologically realistic part of an often psychologically unrealistic play, Barabas trusts Fernese. In this production, Barabas’ explanatory soliloquy for this strange about face is put instead into the mouth of Abigail’s ghost/hallucination, which both humanises Barabas (is she the personification of his guilt, the personification of a subconscious desire to die?) and makes more believable the absurd and un-Machiavellian reasoning for trusting a man he has so badly harmed.

Barabas is converted

The prologue’s claim that ‘there is no sin but ignorance’ is given extra emphasis in this production by giving it both at the very beginning and then repeating it in its usual place slightly later on. The effect is to underline the anti-religious aspect of the play, which in itself take something away from the anti-Jew angle. If Marlowe was accusing all of ignorance, and including all religions in that accusation, then the specific aspects of anti-Judaism are simply facets of a broader assault taking in Christianity too. One has to be sceptical that the original audience would have viewed it that way (or the majority of them at any rate), but this interpretation does make the play more palatable to a modern, more secular audience, used to the anti-religious musings of Dawkins & co. Marlowe uses complex ironies to devastating effect, as in Fernese’s hypocritical exclamation that ‘covetousness, oh ‘tis a monstrous sin’ as he steals Barabas’ property. Even the friars argue about who will get Barabas’ wealth, and one exclaims upon Abigail’s death, ‘Ay, and a virgin too, that grieves me most’, suggesting that Ithamore may have been right when he said ‘hath not the nuns fine sport with the friars now and then?’ Friar Jacomo (Matthew Kelly) and Friar Barnadine (Geoffrey Freshwater) are excellent – slimy, smirking, seedy and greedy.

The current production makes Barabas more sympathetic by having him enter holding baby, leading ceremonial march of Jewish men, and singing (I think) a Hebrew lullaby. Likewise, before the madness of his vengeance takes control, his relationship with his daughter Abigail is both warm and realistic. Barabas’ vengeance stems from what appears to be almost a nervous breakdown in this version, brilliantly portrayed by Jasper Britton, whose complex and charismatic Barabas is outstanding. In contrast, the original text makes the change less comprehensible: Barabas begins as a contemptible Jew and then becomes a rampaging pantomime villain. Shylock’s resentment is realised much more fully. Shylock realises he is hated by the Venetians (‘I am not bid for love’), so his anger (‘thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause’) is understandable (especially when is tipped over the edge by the elopement of his daughter with his ducats). Barabas’ justifications are less clear-cut (though having all of your wealth confiscated because of your race and religion is hardly a trivial matter), but this RSC adaptation accentuates the daily humiliations poured on Barabas by his Christian neighbours, ranging from mocking laughter, to spitting on him, to physical violence. All this serves to make us sympathise with Barabas. Likewise, Barabas’ joyful, cheeky laughter on seeing Abigail dressed as a fake nun and laughing like a schoolboy with Ithamore (admittedly after wiping out a nunnery) is endearing. And, though evil, he is at least multi-talented: miser, murderer, trader, engineer, governor, lautist. Barabas is simply too immoral to be real, and has no problems pretending to convert to Christianity to further his ends, whereas for Shylock conversion is a real punishment. Barabas is closest to Richard III – except he has more justification for his hatred and he is a lot funnier in the way he goes about his vengeance, like the House of Cards’ Frank Underwood on coke.

Nevertheless, Barabas is a caricature of everything anti-Semites accused the Jews of doing, which makes him much less subtle than Shylock. It is tempting to think that these traits were played up to play them down, in effect to be such a parody of anti-Jewish tropes that the anti-Semitic tropes appear nonsensical to any sane observer. This might be the case or it might not (it doesn’t take much research to discover that anti-Semites today seem to seriously entertain some absurd beliefs about Jews). Still, perhaps carried away on a wave of Barabas’ charisma or suffering from a surfeit of post-modern irony, I don’t think Barabas’ confession to Ithamore is supposed to be taken seriously:

            As for myself, I walk abroad o’nights

            And kill sick people groaning under walls:

            Sometimes I go about and poison wells…

Did the original audience believe such wild libels or, like the Swan Theatre’s twenty-first century audience, did they think that Barabas was taking advantage of anti-Jewish gullibility (in this case to impress an anti-Christian Muslim)? In other places, Barabas does use others’ preconceptions of Jewish difference for his own ends (e.g. saying that Abigail’s weeping over an unhappy engagement is really a Jewish custom). Ithamore responds with his own tall tales of anti-Christian atrocities – although in the age of IS, perhaps I should not be so quick to discount their intended earnestness.

Ithamore

Marlowe was writing in the English morality play tradition and, although he introduced some innovations in melding this genre with that of tragedy, and in adding the heavy dose of dark humour, his characters remained as representations lessons or types, rather than people. Shakespeare took the Marlovian original theme, and enhanced it using folk tales, classical allusions and techniques and a greater emphasis on well-rounded characters, in a fusion of English and Renaissance attributes to create something new and brilliant. So the humanity in this production usually comes from the talent of the actors. Andy Apollo as Ludowick is suitably posh and irritating as the governor’s son – ensuring we had no sympathy for his death. Colin Ryan as Don Mathias is also irritating, but too boyish and not attractive enough to be an authentic love interest for the beautiful Abigail (Catrin Stewart). Lanre Malalou acted well as Ithamore but he played it too slavish, too damaged, as if he has suffered a lifetime of abuse and slavery: facial tics, stooping, stuttering, but he was only just enslaved, according to the Spanish admiral he was captured shortly before being sold on Malta. Either they have seen ‘slave’ and fitted all our modern guilt and hang-ups into the term, or the actor is a believer in Homer’s idea that Zeus ‘takes away half of a man's virtue, when the day of slavery comes upon him’ (Odyssey). The problem was the approach rather than the technique. The battle scenes were somewhat weak. Over-stylized and choreographed, they are like a line dance or something the Jets and the Sharks might get up to in West Side Story.

Overall, the Swan’s Jew of Malta is highly recommended – it is brisk, there is plenty of action, the play’s timely themes are cleverly engaged with, and this performance uses a high level of physicality to highlight nuance (rather than to simply get cheap laughs, although there are plenty of laughs too). The acting is of a high quality and the director’s interpretation has reached the perfect balance between black humour and tragedy. After such a spirited and thoughtful adaptation of Marlowe’s great Jewish comic tragedy, expectations are high and mounting for the RSC’s latest production of Shakespeare’s great, Jewish, tragic comedy in May.

Classical Association Conference 2015

Theorizing Reception Panel at the Classical Association Conference 2015

I presented a paper ('The Classicizing of the American Mind: Plato versus Theory in the Culture Wars')at the recent CA conference held at the University of Bristol recently. Carol Atack has given the panel a write-up over on the Legacy of Greek Political Thought blog...

The Shoemaker's Holiday Review

Review: The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Thomas Dekker, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. 14 February 2015

Shakespeare’s contemporaries get a raw deal in the game of glory but, although they were all dealt a poor hand, some still managed to win bigger shares of the pot than others. Partly for the seedy and mysterious glamour of his life and death, Christopher Marlowe lives on in our collective imagination; and Ben Johnson also managed to find a little space in our hearts. But we’d have to work our way a long way down the list before we got to Thomas Dekker. This is in some ways unfair. Like Shakespeare, he was competent in different genres, including a successful side-line as a pamphleteer, and he was perhaps ahead of Shakespeare in seeing the future of comedy. Modern rom-coms like Love, Actually are closer to Dekker’s city comedies, set in London and featuring ordinary folk, than Shakespeare’s tales of Italian aristocrats. And whereas the little we know about Shakespeare’s private life suggests it was a fairly ordinary (some might say boring) journey towards comfortable respectability, Dekker’s life included such fascinating if unfortunate titbits as a seven year stretch in the slammer. Even so, there is no dishonour in being outshone by Shakespeare. The real indignity has been inflicted by Google: search for Thomas Dekker and you’ll find our playwright appearing below his modern namesake, an actor renowned for appearing in TV versions of The Terminator and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

So, it’s nice of the RSC to put on a Dekker at the Swan Theatre. The Shoemaker’s Holiday consists of two intertwined love stories. One story revolves around the aristocratic Rowland Lacy and the rich but un-aristocratic Rose Oatley, both of whom are despised by the others’ families. Rowland is tasked with rounding up men to send as soldiers to fight in France under Henry V (the play was put on shortly after Shakespeare’s Henry V and is in some ways a comedic response) and he rounds up married shoemaker Rafe, who is sent to France, from whence he eventually returns a cripple to find out that his wife thinks he is dead and is about to marry somebody else. Rowland deserts the army and stays in London disguised as a shoemaker, taking Rafe’s job so that he can continue to woo Rose. SPOILER ALERT: the two couples wind up together at the end.

The play begins to go wrong almost immediately by including a needless introduction which gives much of the plot away before the play begins. The introduction does say that ‘Nothing is purposed here but mirth’, which is at odds with the anti-war theme picked up by some critics and focused upon in the RSC programme. But were Elizabethans anti-war in a recognizably modern way? Or were they more fatalistic – war was a tragic but inevitable part of life, to be avoided if possible, to be accepted if necessary.

The humour is juvenile: fart jokes, names like Cicely Bumtrinket, much pissing, talk of bums, a character named Firkin, around whom there are numerous uses of ‘Firk you’ and ‘Firked’, a couple of ‘prick’ puns, and everything is excessively, needlessly, tediously spelled out. Where the humour does initially work well, it is often repeated until it becomes stale. The phrase, ‘Prince am I none, yet am I nobly born, as being the sole son of a shoemaker’ is said at least four times. To ‘Dance the shaking of the sheets’ is a good description of sex, but repeating it smacks of desperation. Likewise, the play overall dragged on much too long, with seemingly irrelevant issues cropping up at the end such as a new hall where the shoemakers could trade leather two days a week: presumably this was once topical, and perhaps interesting, now it is neither. Despite the over-simplicity of the story, the needless repetition and the reliance throughout on the lowest common denominator, the play is paradoxically more difficult to understand than anything by the much more complex Shakespeare. The reason is Dekker’s over-reliance on jargon, whereas Shakespeare had the gift of being able to use simple language in clever ways.

David Troughton as Simon Eyre

Perhaps the biggest weakness, for what is, after all, a love story, was that the two pairs of lovers are both incredibly dull. The actress playing Rose Oatley, Thomasin Rand, gave a game performance, but neither she nor the others had much to work with. The most interesting character is Simon Eyre, whose language is odd but not especially clever: much of it relies on the incongruity of calling London bums ‘Brave Hyperboreans’, ‘Mad Mesopotamians’, ‘Babylonian Knaves’, ‘True Trojans’ and so on. The programme describes Eyre as Falstaffian and there is something in this, which fits in nicely with the Agincourt link: Shakespeare had killed off Falstaff so by introducing his new Falstaff and having him befriend King Henry V , Dekker was perhaps trying to tap into Falstaff’s, and Shakespeare’s, popularity. Even so, the programme goes a little too far in suggesting that Eyre shares Falstaff’s moral qualities. Eyre is a much more upright, though less interesting, character; extremely loyal to his workers and the soul of generosity. David Troughton, playing Eyre, was excellent but again let down by some mediocre dialogue: I suspect he would make a fantastic Falstaff. It was a very nice idea of the director’s to have the clothes of Eyre and his wife change as their social standing improved during the play. They begin the play in rags but by the end of the play she is Queen Elizabeth I and he is Henry VIII.

From a social perspective, there is more here for the common man than we would get in the average Shakespeare play: cross class love affairs, the victories of the apprentices over the gentlemen, the rise of Simon Eyre to Lord Mayor, and the sympathetic portrayal of an entire profession (the ‘gentle craft’ of shoemakers). Even Henry V turns out to be an egalitarian at the end: ‘Does thou not know that love respects no blood?’

Historicist readings of Shakespeare attempt to explain his plays based on the historical context, explaining why and how he covers certain themes because of the society he lived in. This can be an enlightening approach, but it can also blind us to what is unique about Shakespeare: his genius. Watching a play like this reminds us of a simple truth: Shakespeare is better remembered than his contemporaries because his plays are better than theirs. But if Shakespeare was the towering genius that the old ‘Great Men’ historians might have portrayed, could he have been so great as to transcend his historical context? If we moderns can discover ‘history’ then we are exempting ourselves from its grip (by knowing ideas are historically determined, then can’t we disregard the ideas we recognize as determined by our own historical context?) But in discarding such ideas, does that leave us with nothing, nihilism, or does it free us to recognize eternal ideas? And if we can put aside our historically determined ideas (a big if) isn’t it possible that other people (like Shakespeare) might have done so in the past? Perhaps the ability to transcend his historical conditioning was one of the factors that made Shakespeare such a great playwright (ok, this is getting a little circular). The Socrates of Plato’s Republic argued that society is a cave of opinion, from which only a few philosophers find their way out into the sunlight of real truth. Many of today’s intellectuals accept that society is a cave of opinion, but think there is nothing at all outside the cave. All supposed truths are mere opinions. On this evidence, Dekker is firmly ensconced inside the cave. Take away the play’s topicality and there isn’t much left. The Shoemaker’s Holiday is an interesting picture of the Elizabethan cave, but it doesn’t point the way to any deeper idea of what it is to be human. A number of Straussians have examined Shakespeare’s plays for the eternal problems, believing that Shakespeare was able to see that sunlight of real truth. Maybe there’s something in it.

Final Post - Top Nine DC Sights

Top Nine DC Sights

Ok, it seems a shame to sign off with the rather rushed review of the Free For All Much Ado About Nothing (excellent though it was), so here is my final post on DC, written in the comfort of my living room in England. This final list of DC sights includes those that were not covered in my other reviews or, mostly, covered in the post on the sights explored when my family visited.

1)  The Library of Congress – this has already been mentioned  in my ‘family sights’ post, but it gets in twice because I’ve been working there, and it really does have some great artefacts that I didn’t mention before. Even beyond the great works from America’s earliest days, the Library also displays some incredibly important global books – like the Gutenberg Bible, the first great book to be printed, which sits in the Great Hall opposite the Giant Bible of Mainz, the last of the great handwritten books from the days before printing. And the Jefferson Building itself is impressive. The Great Hall and the Main Reading Room are worth a trip in themselves.

2) The National Gallery is another wonderful building. The neo-classical architecture can get a bit same-y but the East Building is a modernist marvel, and the interiors of both are perfect, especially the in-door seating/arboretum areas upstairs in the West Building. Art-wise, the dearth of Georges Braque works was a little disappointing but it was made up for by the El Grecos – these really are dazzling. I was walking past their room when I caught a glimpse and then I had to examine them. Hundreds of years ahead of their time, these were the highlight of my visit.

3) The Phillips Collection. A special Braque still life exhibit was on during my visit, which was beautiful. A lot of cubism can be quite depressing, but these works from the late 20s to the 40s manage to be both profound and uplifting. There is also another wonderful El Greco here too. The building was clearly grand as a house but as a gallery it feels almost intimate compared to the National. Well worth a visit.

4) Arlington Cemetery  - I didn’t get to find the grave of Orde Wingate (the man who created the Chindits and led my granddad against the Japanese in Burma in WW2) who is buried there, but a moving trip nonetheless.

5) Ford’s Theatre (where Abraham Lincoln was shot) – great after hours tour by Charlotte Reineck – it’s not a period of history I know much about (and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter isn’t as much use as you might wish), but this tour was informative enough that I came away knowing a lot more about it, but entertaining enough that I didn’t feel overwhelmed with facts.

     6) Baseball games at the Nationals Park. The really weird thing here, which you would never guess from the mobs of devoted fans attending on a Friday evening, is that DC has only had its own Major League Baseball team for a few years. Before 2005, most Washington residents supported the Baltimore Orioles (and many apparently still do). For somebody, like me, who watches his local cricket team struggle to get a few hundred spectators turn up for a first class match, the fact that so many Americans can get so excited so often (they have around 80 home games a season!) is truly impressive. I watched a mere three of their home games, but each one was lots of fun, although I’m still a little dubious about the nutritional value of the Half Smoke. 

      7)  Freer Gallery – Asian art is not normally my thing, but this place has such an excellent collection, it is so stylishly laid out and it is such a calm

      and cool pool of tranquillity on a hot DC day, that you cannot help but fall for the pieces on display. The inclusion of western artworks inspired by Asian artefacts, like Whistler's Asian influenced scenes of London, was also

      surprisingly successful. And these beautiful Chinese jade artefacts from the neolithic period were new to

      me.

8) Dumbarton Oaks. This is definitely worth a visit whether you enjoy beautiful old houses, delightfully peaceful and charming English-style country gardens, or wonderfully idiosyncratic museums (a museum focusing only on pre-Columbian American art and Byzantine art doesn’t sound like it would work, but it really does). And it’s in Georgetown, so you can check out one of DCs best areas for shops, bars and restaurants too.

9) Great places for a drink that really should have appeared in House of Cards. The Capitol Hill Club (you’ll need a member to accompany you inside), the Old Ebbitt Grill, and the Teddy and the Bully. Teddy Roosevelt plays a prominent role in the latter two establishments (and there is at least one painting of him in the Capitol Hill Club), including the heads of a bunch of animals he shot in the Old Ebbitt Grill (which makes it sound worse than it is).

So that’s it for my trip to Washington, DC. It hasn’t transformed me into a Renaissance Gentleman, as I had hoped it would, but it’s been a lot of fun and it’s kindled an interest in theatre which I hope to maintain (my first trip to Stratford upon Avon to see some Shakespeare is already booked). As big cities go, Washington is one of the best.

Week Eighteen, Much Ado About Nothing Redux

24th August 2013, Much Ado About Nothing by the Shakespeare Theatre Company

This will be a short and sweet final instalment of my DC Culture Diary. During my busy final few days, I don't have time for an in-depth review, and this particular play, although not this production, has already been dissected on this blog here. This is probably my favourite Shakespeare play (according to the mother of my theatre companion, it's everybody's favourite Shakespeare play), and all that really needs to be said about this production was that I wasn't disappointed. The Cuban setting made for a raunchy, salsa-filled and passionate production, which managed to seem both novel and traditional at the same time (Sicily being a Spanish-owned island as well, when the original play was set). The comedy was as funny as in Whedon's film, but more impressive for being live, and the biting banter between Benedick and Beatrice both charming and edgy. Recognising an actor from television (Tony Plana, from Ugly Betty) was also a nice bonus. All in all, a great performance, and all the better for being free - after four entries to the Free for All ticket lottery I was just beginning to think I might have to join the queue outside, but my persistence finally paid off.

Now, it's back to England - my next appointment with the Bard will be in his home town for a performance of Antony and Cleopatra by the RSC.

Week Fifteen, A Midsummer Night's Dream

1^st August 2013, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Synetic Theater

This is my second visit to ‘DC’s premier physical theater’ so I had a fair idea of what I would be getting. The Synetic’s speciality is wordless theatre, telling stories though action alone. My first visit was for a performance of The Three Musketeers which included some dialogue alongside the dance though, so I wasn’t getting the full-force of the Synetic experience in that show. In that earlier case, the dance/mime aspects were better than the spoken sections, so my expectations for a full dance/mime play were high. Even the thought of seeing a ‘daring’ and ‘innovative’ interpretation of Shakespeare doesn’t cause me the usual fear, for the simple reason that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my least favourite Shakespeare plays. They could have distorted the story as much as they fancied without blighting any beloved memories of mine.

The performance opened in darkness, with unseen dancers moving, seemingly haphazardly, across the stage holding small lights. It was as though a swarm of fireflies were floating frenetically in the night. But as the stage grew lighter, the music took on a tenor suggestive of eastern mysticism, the performers moving like Indian temple dancers and the lights now obviously mini electric candles, evocative of Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Finally, two more dancers emerged, more gloriously arrayed than the others, Titania and Oberon. But Titania as Hindu Goddess. There then follows a bizarre prologue to the play in which we see Puck being born (fully grown) years earlier from a mother who then dies, leaving him to be reared by the faerie monarchs.

Outlandish and captivating so far.

Then the story cut to the more prosaic present, in Athens, where Hermia is due to be married by Duke Theseus to Lysander. But Hermia really wants to marry Demetrius and Hermia’s friend Helena wants to marry Lysander (but he’s seemingly in love with Hermia). So there follows the standard Shakespearean story of the youngsters fleeing into the woods where they are the focus of Puck’s mischievous magic, and all is chaos until the denouement when everybody loves the person they are supposed to love and Theseus agrees to let them all be married. Along the way we have the domestic tiff between Oberon and Titania and the incredibly dull sections with Bottom and his fellow actors. All told without words.

The Synetic is a small theatre and for this show I’d bagged an especially good central second row seat from which to appreciate the physicality of cutting edge dance. I was not disappointed. There are some fantastic uses of movement to create illusion, such as the early section with Demetrius running on the spot and somebody running past him breaking paper doors over him to create the illusion that Demetrius is running through a building and barging through doors (you probably had to be there). Titania and Oberon’s battle over Puck, with the three actors suggesting magical forces at play purely from their own movements, was delightful and stunning. The crowded movement scenes, as in The Three Musketeers, were the most engaging, and another excellent scene was that when the enchanted Demetrius and Lysander were fighting over Helena and fighting off Hermia. There was lots of playfully raunchy humour in that scene too (more Benny Hill than anything actually erotic), which was charming in its knowing innocence. But Puck (Alex Mills), even when alone on the stage, was the real star of the show throughout. Whether climbing up a rope, jumping onto the moon, doing back-flips, contorting himself like a yogi or walking around on his hands, every leap and twist was so natural and, seemingly, effortlessly that one could not help but be impressed. The scene where is was seemingly being pulled all over the stage by a small flower in his hand sounds pretty feeble in description, but actually both funny and beautiful. Really.

Of course, Shakespeare is rightly loved for the power of his words, so you can’t take all the words out and expect every single thing to be hunky dory. For one thing, the performers’ actions have to be extremely obvious to make sure everybody sees them, especially when there are multiple actors on the stage. The jokes were often particularly banal (fart noises, really?), such as depicting Helena’s unrequited longing by having her swig dramatically from an oversized bottle whisky and Hermia overacting when appearing drunk at her engagement party. Shakespeare was at fault for the most tedious, cringe-worthy sections, which were the scenes involving Bottom and the play within a play. These sections are the key reason, for me, that the play doesn’t keep me gripped whoever is performing it. Dull with dialogue, dull without. Nonetheless, there were a number of laugh out loud moments, especially relating to Helena’s attempted wooing of Lysander. The actress playing Helena (Emily Whitworth) has a real gift for comedy.

One of the strongest aspects of the performance was the original score by Constantine Lortkipanidze, who really ought to be scoring major films. The music always added to, and never distracted from, the action. He also had a small part in the cast as the pianist accompanying Bottom’s play, where his musical accompaniment was the highlight (indeed, the only light) of those otherwise dull sections.

Overall, it wasn’t always as funny as I might have liked, but I was still swept along by sheer admiration for the acrobatic feats of dance and movement. For me, this made a bad Shakespeare play watchable. I would love to see a Synetic version of a Shakespeare play that I actually like, but unfortunately I’ll be leaving before the new season begins. The Synetic gives me one more reason to return to DC in the future.

Week Fourteen, The Book of Mormon

25^th July 2013, The Book of Mormon at the Kennedy Center

Mark Evans as Elder Price

I had a few complaints about The Book of Mormon, but these were essentially ethical (see below). Of the key components needed for a good musical – captivating songs, delightful dance routines, a story that keeps you hooked, characters you care about – The Book of Mormon is handsomely kitted out. The songs are not quite up there with the best efforts of Rice and Webber, but then what is nowadays? The song ‘Hello’ is incredibly catchy and gets the show off to a flier, and ‘You and Me (but mostly me)’, a duet between the talented, hardworking Elder Price (Mark Evans) and the lazy, laid back lying Elder Cunningham (Christopher John O’Neill) is also solid. A couple of the better ones were simply comedy copies of other musical hits; for example The Lion King’s ‘Hakuna Matata’ became ‘Hasa Diga Eebowai’ (‘Does it mean no worries?’ ‘No, it means F#!k You, God’), and Annie’s ‘Tomorrow’ morphed into ‘Orlando’ (one of the Mormon missionaries vision for the afterlife involves becoming the god of a new planet based on Disney World). ‘Joseph Smith American Moses’, the African villagers’ version of Mormonism as explained to them by Elder Cunningham, is a hilariously messed up mélange of Mormonism and sci-fi. And Evans is so perfectly cast as the good but soon to be disillusioned, all-American Mitt Romney lookalike that I was surprised to learn later that he’s a fellow Englishman.

But then we come to the shortcomings. I don’t especially like jokes about raping babies or the number of Africans with AIDs, but I accept that my delicate moral qualms are out of sync with our wider culture. If there were any absolute moral standards to cling to such personal discomfort might begin to engender thoughts about Western spiritual decline. But, of course, moral standards are a repressive pre-modern myth. And I’m sure the creators would be disappointed if there weren’t still a few old fuddy-duddies like me around to offend. ‘Pushing boundaries’ has become the key criterion for judging art. Inevitably this means ‘transgressing’ the rules that art should be beautiful and uplifting, and the only way to get a response is to produce something ugly and offensive. So how do you shock the audience? You get everybody chuckling by drawing attention to the incongruity of our images of Africa from The Lion King and the ‘reality’ portrayed here of prevalent AIDs, men raping babies and the mutilation of girls’ genitals. These issues do demand attention (though not necessarily through the medium of musical theatre); but I was also struck by another distasteful, but this time unintended, incongruity: here was an audience of predominantly liberal, progressive types, many having paid $250 a ticket, guffawing at jokes about disease ridden, mutilated Africans.

The overwhelming popular acceptance of The Book of Mormon does reveal something interesting about the extent of hypocrisy surrounding the values of modern progressive culture (because, of course, relativism is really only applied to debunk traditional moral standards). One doesn’t need much imagination to know that if any known conservative had depicted Africans with anything approaching this level of idiocy and depravity, they would have been mercilessly castigated as a racist reactionary. However, because The Book of Mormon’s more obvious target is religion, a perfectly acceptable progressive object of ridicule, the overt liberalism of anti-religiosity earns them a pass on any potential question of racism. The treatment of Africans here is an echo of the contrived controversy last year in America when a conservative talk-show host called a graduate student a slut. This was clearly not a very nice thing to say and it reflected badly on the man who said it (Rush Limbaugh). The storm of abuse Limbaugh received and the line taken by feminists, that the use of that word reflected Limbaugh’s misogynism and the entire Republican Party’s ‘War on Women’, was unsurprising. But that liberal response to Limbaugh would have been more convincing if an equally strong line had been taken when prominent liberal Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a c&*t. Instead, Maher’s textbook liberalism on other issues allows his sexism to be passed over in silence; just as The Book of Mormon’s more obvious send up of religion lends it the leeway to lampoon Africans as well.

But my main criticism of the musical goes beyond nauseating baby-rape jokes, the hypocrisy of politically correct progressivism and even the obvious conclusion that we’re living in the sort of degenerate era usually followed by a dark age. No, the main weakness of the musical is its lack of controversy in its key selling point. Is a satire on religion really especially daring in 2013? Jesus Christ Superstar took some liberties with the Bible and earned some controversy, but that was back in 1967. Monty Python’s Life of Brian was even more evidently a satire on religion, and was banned in a number of cinemas across the world. That was back in 1976, when church attendance and respect for religion were much higher than today. And the religion under attack was Christianity. A satirical musical on Islam would also be daring… but the Mormons? Only a tiny percentage of Americans are Mormons and they have few defenders outside their sect. Atheists and agnostics see it as a joke religion already and even mainstream Christians find them suspect. And unlike certain religions noted for their angry attitude towards perceived insults, Mormons are nice too. There were no Mormon pickets outside the theatre, and the programme actually contains friendly adverts from the Mormon Church pointing out that ‘you’ve seen the play, now read the book!’ The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, may have once been voted ‘The MostPowerful Octogenarian in America,’ but he isn't in the fatwa-issuing habit, so the cast and creators probably don’t need to go into hiding just yet.

There was plenty of emphasis in the musical about Mormonism being the American religion, created in America and having a uniquely American character. This makes it fair game for attacks from leftist anti-religionists who would normally avoid attacking non-western religions because their anti-religious sentiment in those cases is cancelled out by their anti-western sentiment. We don’t have to imagine how liberals react when non-western religions are insulted because there is a good recent example to hand. In 2011 the American ambassador to Libya and his security team were attacked and killed in an attack originally (mistakenly) attributed to Muslim anger about an internet video produced in America by an Egyptian Copt named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. This low quality film depicted Mohammed in a very bad light and provoked a good deal of anti-American anger. President Obama was quick to label it a ‘crude and disgusting video’ and he ‘made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video,’ whose ‘message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.’ It was also ‘an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well.’ He went on to add that ‘the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.’ He did also point out that America believed in freedom of speech and would not ban the video; however, then Secretary of State Clinton told one of the victims’ parents that the administration would ‘get’ the perpetrators of the video. Despite the video itself breaking no American laws, Nakoula was duly investigated and found to have violated his parole for a former offence and imprisoned for a year. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Nakoula was really locked up to appease Islamic anger. Now, picture an alternate reality where a Republican president had made a similar speech attacking the creators of The Book of Mormon, where the Secretary of State had promised to ‘get’ its creators and where they had been duly ‘got’ and locked away on trumped up charges. There would be a liberal outcry. Islam cannot be attacked, Mormonism can.

There has been no real controversy over The Book of Mormon because they are a weak religion, unpopular with both Christians and atheists, with no defenders. Satire should bring the powerful down to earth. It should be a tool of the weak against the strong, but The Book of Mormon does exactly the opposite. In essence, its creators are bullies, and we, the tittering audience, are their supportive stooges. And this isn’t altered by the fact that Mormonism was such an enticing target because of the apparent wackiness of some of their beliefs (getting your own planet after death, the gold tablet that nobody was allowed to see, the 2,000 year old Jewish civilization in America that has vanished without a trace).

Despite these scruples, I still enjoyed the show. It ends on a happy, and even slightly pro-religious, note. It’s not an endorsement of religion as the truth, but it does portray the Mormons as extremely decent and blissful people (despite the occasional need to repress their un-Mormonic urges), and it does portray religion as something socially useful in backward places (and the Uganda of the musical is definitely a backward place). Essentially, the show shows us that a ‘good’ religion is one which has no regard for the truth but is instead tailored to solve the social problems of the local area. It isn’t exactly an uplifting view of religion but, with the catchy songs, a few great lines, and the joyous finale, it would be difficult for even a curmudgeon like me to leave the theatre without a spring in his step.

Next week,a silent version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Synetic Theater