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.

Welcome Back... and Five Memorable Midlands Outings

Five Memorable Midlands Outings

Ok, this is supposed to be a ‘DC’ diary and I don’t live in DC anymore but… as I’d like to start keeping track of my cultural encounters again, this seems as good a place as any to put them. It’s been a year and half since I returned from Washington and during that time there have been a few interesting trips to the theatre, of which these five are the most memorable as I’m sitting here at this moment…

1)   Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Curve Theatre, Leicester. April 2014. This performance was put on by the English Touring Opera company. I would guess that some of the people who like and understand opera look down a little at the really popular examples of the genre: Carmen springs to mind, and the Magic Flute is also in that category – so popular that a real aficionado can’t really demonstrate their superiority by praising it. To make matters worse, this version of the Magic Flute has been translated into English, which probably makes it about as déclassé as Cats. Still, being an operatic dunderhead, I loved it. My experience of opera largely consists in watching the film Amadeus, but this was a much jollier affair. The Queen of the Night’s aria, so manifestly the handiwork of a composer with swagger, was simply mind blowing; and the song of the bird catcher and his new missus is a delight. Sitting on the front row and getting to look straight down and close-up on the orchestra doing their stuff was fun too. Philosophically, I found the enlightenment mumbo jumbo a little hard to swallow, and ended up rooting for the dark powers of reaction and superstition by the finale (but what’s new?)

2)  Antony and Cleopatra at the Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. November 2013. Cleopatra would be one of history’s great characters even if Shakespeare had never mentioned her. Seducing Caesar, ruling half the Roman Empire with Mark Antony and frolicking away madly in oriental luxury while Octavian plotted against her. And then her final epic victory, defeating defeat by serpentine suicide. But with Shakespeare’s assistance, she has left the other feminine enemies of Rome (Boudicca, Zenobia) in her wake to became the ultimate icon of feminine power and mystery, even achieving that acme of honours: her own Lego mini-figure: 

               

So the performance of Cleopatra should decide the success of the production. In this case, it didn’t. Joaquina Kalukango as Cleopatra was not the force of nature the role calls for but, somehow, the play managed to be a winner anyway. Perhaps it was Jonathan Cake as a particularly hunky and sculpted Antony, or the stand out performance of Chukwudi Iwuji as Enobarbus, or perhaps it was the experience of seeing such an epic play in such an intimate theatre, but the result was a triumph all the same.

3) The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. August 2014. The BBC made the effort to produce television versions of Shakespeare canon in the late 1970s. The budget can’t have been great and some of them fell a little flat, The Two Gentlemen of Verona included. This version at the RST didn’t have a particularly famous cast and walking into the theatre to see the stage set up like an Italian piazza, complete with café and gelateria, set a few alarums ringing. I needn’t have worried. The audience interaction was fun (although being introduced to Julia as Silvia’s boyfriend was initially a little discombobulating), the acting was great and some of the scenes were weirdly hypnotic (the nightclub dancing scene was a little like Twin Peaks set in Milan). But one role makes or breaks the Two Gents: Crab the Dog. In this case, an up and coming actor by the name of Mossup was a revelatory force of comic genius.

4) Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. October 2014. Ok, ok, I should probably stop watching this. In Washington alone we had this and this. But it’s just so gosh darn enjoyable. In this case, the result was a little disappointing. The first intimation of trouble was renaming it Love’s Labours Won and arguing in the programme that Much Ado is really an alternative name for one of Shakespeare’s plays considered lost, the sequel to Love’s Labours Lost (except with, er, a completely different group of characters and plot). The slapstick didn’t quite hit the right notes (although the rest of the audience sounded their appreciation) and the setting (England immediately after World War I) wasn’t remotely compatible with the warmth of the dialogue. Setting it in Italy (the Kenneth Branagh film), California (the Joss Whedon film) or somewhere latino (the version in DC) reflects both the characters’ names, the summery feel and the pure joy we feel in rooting for Shakespeare’s most likeable couple. The sombre shroud cast over proceedings by the horror of the Great War, not helped by the wintry stage décor, took something special away from what might otherwise have been an excellent production. Later in the play, time seemed to skip forward a few years and we had the flappers of the roaring twenties, which suited the play much better. Michelle Terry was brilliant as Beatrice, although Dogberry was played as somebody with genuine mental health issues, which again undercut the humour, and Benedick (Edward Bennett) was so camp that an entirely new dimension was added to the play (intentionally or not). Imagine, if you will, a Benedick played by this guy’s double. Beatrice at one stage dressed up in a suit a tie which on its own might not suggest much but, with Benedict's Matthew Kelly impression, it did raise an interesting question… did Benedick and Beatrice want to remain single because they were gay, and was their eventual union then a lavender marriage?

As an aside, why did we change enigmatical to enigmatic and politic to political?

5) Antigone at the Lakeside Theatre, Nottingham. October 2014. This adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy stuck closely to the plot whilst setting it today in gritty urban interiors. Classics is a rich, white person’s thing, populated by progressives who genuinely want it to be less white and rich, so I suspect this version got good reviews from lots of people who felt a lot of right on condescension towards it. Unfortunately, for me it was memorable only in the way that the things we really want to forget are the things we can’t forget. Putting ancient works in new settings can work fantastically well, for example the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Antigone itself has been cleverly adapted, or perhaps used, since it became almost unrecognizable, in the anti-apartheid play, The Island. This is not one of those times. It is not even a brave crack at one of those times. It is New Jack City minus the charisma crossed with Eastenders minus the humour. No. Just, no.

Anyway, with this brief round-up out of the way, next up will be a more in-depth review of Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday at the Swan Theatre in Stratford.

Legacy of Greek Political Thought in America

Classical Association Conference 2014: Legacies of Greek Political Thought in America panel, 11-14 April 2014

Working on behalf of the Legacy of Greek Political Thought group, I recently organised a successful panel for the 2014 Classical Association Conference. The challenge was to provide a narrow enough focus that the four papers provided an integrated and coherent narrative, while still appealing to a varied audience of classicists. With that in mind, the panel was focused upon American receptions of Greek political thought, and its aims were to examine and challenge the links between ancient Greek political thought and its modern invocations in the United States.

The Great Seal of the United States (reverse)

The reverse of the Great Seal of the United States is a reminder of the Founding Fathers’ ambition to create ‘A New Order of the Ages,’ unlike any previous society. Yet correspondence between the Founders shows a keen awareness of and engagement with past societies. In ‘Is there space for a Greek influence on American Thought?’ Nicholas Cole (Oxford) considered the American revolutionary period and addressed this paradox head-on. Nicholas argued that Greek history and thought made important contributions to American thinking, and that these help to explain the development of American thought in the early republic. But historians need to move beyond the narrow debate on political borrowings towards an appreciation of the wider multiplicity of ways that early Americans engaged with Greek thought.

Aesop Said So, Hugh Gellert

Vaulting forward to the twentieth century, Sara Monoson (Northwestern) explored contrasting attitudes to antiquity in ‘Classical sources and the promotion of literacy in radical critique: Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads (1933) and Hugo Gellert’s Aesop Said So (1936).’ Her paper focused on the presence of classical imagery in 1930s expressions of radical critique by visual artists.   In his controversial mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York, Diego Rivera used the imagery of damaged yet formidable classical statuary to suggest the corrosiveness of weighty traditions and to question the value of harking back to antiquity. Though sharing his political viewpoint, Hugo Gellert challenged that view of antiquity. He produced books that combine text and illustrations to find other narratives in the sources (chiefly, the figure of Aesop as a view ‘from below’) that were, to him, able to inspire class consciousness and a sophisticated examination of problems like the greed and corruption of the high and mighty.

In the first of two papers looking at the conservative thinker Leo Strauss, Liz Sawyer (Oxford) presented ‘Leo Strauss, in context: Classical Literature as Political Philosophy in 1950s/1960s American Universities.’ She examined how Strauss’ use of classical literature, especially Aristotle, Plato and Thucydides, fitted within the broader context of how political philosophy and Western literature were taught in the 1950s and 1960s. By studying Strauss’ writings in the light of the educational methodologies of his time, Liz demonstrated how Strauss’s legacy as the ‘founding father’ of today’s neoconservative movement developed. In the final paper, ‘The original neoconservative? Leo Strauss’s version of Xenophon’s version of Socrates,’ I argued that Strauss’s interpretations of Xenophon have been overlooked by political commentators seeking to praise or malign the (exaggerated) Straussian influence on American politics. Using Strauss’s commentary on Xenophon’s Oeconomicus as a case study, I argued that Xenophon, a much more deeper and more nuanced thinker than often portrayed by classicists, rather than Plato or Thucydides, is the classical key for unlocking Strauss’s political ideology.

The focus on Greek thought in America gave the panel coherence, whilst differences in the subject matter and methodological approaches of the speakers ensured variety. Each of the other papers gave me fresh insights into my own work, and the discussions which followed were almost as fruitful as the papers themselves (and gave no indication that any audience members might have over-indulged at the previous night’s gala dinner). Having spent the build-up to the conference worrying about my own paper, which passed in a flash, it is only in retrospect that the real benefits of attending a conference like this became apparent – the unexpected connections and the perceptive and creative conversations with fellow delegates made attending this CA conference an enriching experience.

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