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~ Shakespeare, American Drama staged in the UK and other theatre research musings

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Tag Archives: Gregory Doran

Director-proof Much Ado met its match in Mark Rylance

24 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by Dr. Jami Rogers in Americans on the UK stage, Shakespeare

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Gregory Doran, James Earl Jones, Mark Rylance, Much Ado About Nothing, Old Vic, staging, Vanessa Redgrave, William Shakespeare

On the most basic level Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic should have been absolutely brilliant if for nothing else than the two leads. James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave are arguably two of the best Shakespearean actors of their generation from either side of the Atlantic. They also clearly enjoy working with one another as this project seems sparked by their previous stint in the West End in Driving Miss Daisy, so chemistry should not have been a problem either. Yet the production got slated by the critics and it was indeed disappointing. The high point for me was that at the matinee I saw Vanessa Redgrave was off and the excellent Penelope Beaumont was in her stead.

After seeing Gregory Doran’s Richard II at the RSC (review to be published in Shakespeare Bulletin, possible scratchings to come after I’ve finished that) and The Winter’s Tale in Sheffield (musings here), to come back to mediocre Shakespeare was dull in the extreme. And that was largely the problem with Much Ado: it was exceedingly dull and lacklustre. Without seeing it multiple times (and since I didn’t take notes), I can’t comment on nuances within the production but there were several things that were worth noting in the staging.

The director seemed to make no compromises to the fact that he was no longer at the Globe’s open air space with its square stage in close proximity with a portion of its audience standing in the yard. Mark Rylance’s designer had provided a set that was a polished wooden surface, doors that opened at the back like a large aircraft hanger and a square canopy that stood centre stage crafted from the same polished wood as the rest of the set. No doubt due to the presence of Jones, Rylance had set it on or near a US Air Force base during World War II (ish), which turned Benedick, Don Pedro and their comrades – including Don John, Borachio and Conrade – into USAF officers. On a logical basis, this makes no sense given the wars are over at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play.

Shakespeare himself is also key – although the director loves Shakespeare so much that he thinks the playwright’s actually Edward de Vere. Which may explain the dismal use of text (or not). Having both worked with directors and observed the rehearsals of others (see piece on David Thacker’s rehearsals here) who are meticulous in their attention to text, Rylance’s method was blatantly obviously one that had little connection with the words other than that his actors said their lines. No nuance was pulled out of the script, little emotion that wasn’t provided through technique (i.e., faked) was present in the delivery and almost every scene contained extraneous background business that distracted from what was being said, rather than added to it (which is one of the best indicators, I find, that the text has been worked with only on the most superficial of levels). For example, when the audience is supposed to be finding out why Don John is so unpleasant, characters were scurrying around upstage placing chairs, moving furniture, and just walking across the stage on the pretext of setting up the next scene (the revels), preventing the audience’s concentration on the important dialogue taking place downstage. In well-staged productions, this scene change happens between scenes but in Rylance’s the eye was completely distracted by the business to the point that I wasn’t listening to the words; the text was superfluous to the action rather than the action coming out of the text. This happened throughout the production.

As touched on before, the setting was also layered on to Shakespeare’s script rather than being an organic part of it. Yes, there needs to be a military-infused element to it but very specific questions need to be asked about the society in which the play takes place, not least of which are those dealing with ideas of patriarchy, honour and male attitudes to women. These can be difficult concepts for a contemporary audience to comprehend – despite the fact that women are still disadvantaged in the workplace and domestic abuse, both physical and mental, is still present – because as a society we no longer overtly (key word: overtly) tolerate the idea that women are property and a woman’s chastity linked to male concepts of honour. Productions that succeed in drawing out these elements are often those that place the play in a society that parallels the action of the play, for example John Barton’s 1976 British Raj setting and Gregory Doran’s 2002 Sicilian omerta-infused 2002 productions. Doran’s in particular highlighted the notion of women as property with the result a particularly violent rebuttal of Hero by not only Claudio but Leonato and an Antonio who menacingly threatened Claudio with a switchblade. I have written about it at length in my thesis and in the shorter article “Much Ado, Sicilian Style” (available here), but essentially Leonato’s language in the church scene is unpleasant in the extreme as he threatens his daughter with death because she has sullied the family’s honour – there is no room for doubt in Leonato’s head that his daughter could be slandered; he believes the men, not the women. None of this was apparent in Rylance’s production largely because the setting was not a society associated with this mindset; Leonato paced and yelled and circled the large wooden object in the middle of the stage, but his shouting was over-compensating for an incomprehension of Shakespeare’s text (it goes back to lack of work on the script).

In short, Rylance’s directorial style was clearly lazy with too much movement and seemingly no work done on the script. When Jones did get his teeth into it, he began to soar – but those moments were rare and were just that: moments. Penelope Beaumont rocked it, though – very strong, assertive and funny.

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“All’s Well” as “problem play” – what does that mean?

04 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by Dr. Jami Rogers in Shakespeare

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All's Well That Ends Well, Bertram, Gregory Doran, Helena, Judi Dench, Nancy Meckler, Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare

I’m not seeing the new RSC All’s Well That Ends Well production – directed by Nancy Meckler – until tomorrow, but last night I was sandwiched between an actor friend and that other species of human being in the Dirty Duck, a non-actor friend. The actor friend is in said production and the non-actor friend is of the academic persuasion who is an enthusiastic theatre goer. (This is of course the perfect metaphor for my existence in straddling the two worlds).

The words “problem play” came up – as they tend to do in relation to discussion of a handful of Shakespeare’s plays, including All’s Well – and this morning I find myself thinking a bit about the conversation. Ultimately “problem play” is problematic as a category, but the specifics of what caught my interest were two interrelated comments by the people on either side of me. The non-actor recounted that Judi Dench had said in an interview that Helena was a stalker (I’ve found it attributed to Gregory Doran in a repost of a Financial Times piece here), a position she agrees with. The actor disagreed which led to a discussion about how audiences engage with plays and how different audience members read things into their viewings that can completely contradict each other.

My input into this discussion was to note that these two aspects of both Helena and Bertram (i.e., stalker or romantic in the first case; total creep or trapped human being in the second) can be read into a single performance because they’re both present in the text. My actor friend went further and said that the characters can be both at the same time, which is when the light bulb went off in my head – perhaps not in a very revolutionary way – about the phrase “problem play”.

What we have on one side is the Judi Dench/Greg Doran (quite possibly flippant) remark about Helena as stalker. It is a phrase that feeds into media narratives, which prefer simple things, which is precisely why it’s been lodged in my friend’s brain for a decade now. But it is redolent of the uncomplicated black/white view of the world that leaves no room for nuance. And because we as human beings seem to like to categorize things into uncomplicated boxes that are easily labelled, saying Helena is a stalker falls into that.

Yet, Bertram rejects Helena on the basis of class, stating to the King of France once Helena has chosen her husband:

But follows it, my lord, to bring me down

Must answer for your raising? I know her well.

She had her breeding at my father’s charge.

A poor physician’s daughter my wife! Disdain

Rather corrupt me ever.

(II.3.113-117)

George Bernard Shaw admired Helena as a New Woman and she has the blessing of the Countess of Roussillion, Bertram’s mother so branding her a stalker simplifies the character within the confines of a problematic narrative (turning the “problem play” phrase on its head).

Yet what most interests me is the idea that in performance the multiple aspects of character can breathe. If the actor gets the motivation “right” then there is that pull and tug of sympathy and absolute disgust at the character’s behavior. But as long as the motivations are understandable, then the audience can see both the nasty and the noble sides of human nature in one person, like it’s there in all of us.

I wonder, therefore, if these plays labelled “problem” plays are discussed in these ways not because the twentieth century was finally ready for them but because they didn’t fit into the simple black and white narratives of print culture. Yes, their sexual mores were problematic for the Victorians (who weren’t averse to their equivalent of page three “girls”), but perhaps it was the complexities of human nature that the labellers couldn’t cope with: the better and lesser angels of human nature present in one character (several characters in fact).

And I’m with George Bernard Shaw: I love Helena. I think she totally rocks.

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