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Sep. 11th, 2010 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaThis evening we went to see Much Ado About Nothing performed for free in a local park. Michael and I saw some Shakespeare when we used to have season theater tickets (King Lear and the rock opera version of Two Gentlemen of Verona), but I think I was in college the last time I lounged on a picnic blanket to watch a Shakespeare play.
It was a fun performance. Their Benedick was particularly good, and the young woman who played Dogsberry was fun to watch. Claudio's acting didn't stand out, but his looks certainly did: he was gorgeous.
Before the show there was a brief introduction in which members of the company explained the ways in which they try to replicate the original performance style for the plays: dropping the fourth wall to make asides to the audience, contemporary-to-the-production music, minimal sets and props, ambient light rather than lighting effects, doubling roles, crossdressing (women playing male roles rather than vice versa).
There was a playground not far from the theater area, and after we finished dinner Colin spent most of the evening there. Michael and I swapped off so that we'd each get to watch some of the play. Alex, surprisingly, sat through almost the entire play. We prepped her with a comic book retelling so that she'd have some ability to follow the plot, but let's face it - the comedies move fast and don't make a whole lot of sense, and they have a lot of characters to keep track of. She asked a lot of questions. At the end, when the entire cast broke out singing and dancing to the Beatles' "She Loves You" (a surprisingly good match-up), Hero wound up not far from us and Alex ran up to dance with her.
They weren't kidding about the breaking-the-fourth-wall aspect. For the scenes when Beatrice and Benedick are in the arbor, overhearing carefully-staged conversations, the actors moved into the audience and blended into the various picnicking groups. At one point Beatrice ended up hiding under our picnic blanket. (Yes, we had finished eating by that point.) Alex was in heaven.
It's interesting to be in the position of trying to explain the whole phenomenon of Shakespeare to someone who hasn't ever heard the name. It is kind of odd: there are these plays that are more than 400 years old, and even the least literary English-speaker imaginable has heard of the playwright, while pretty much everyone who has been to school has seen at least one of the plays. They are very hard for people to understand, but still they are important enough to us that some people donate money so they can be put on for free in a public park, and random other people drag out their lawn chairs and picnic baskets to listen to long strings of sentences they can barely track. And they enjoy themselves.
I wonder if there will ever be a time in the English-speaking world in which Shakespeare will no longer seem important or worthwhile. The language and culture have already changed so drastically, and yet here we all still collectively are. What kind of change would be necessary for Shakespeare to be discarded, and would anything else from the past survive?
It was a fun performance. Their Benedick was particularly good, and the young woman who played Dogsberry was fun to watch. Claudio's acting didn't stand out, but his looks certainly did: he was gorgeous.
Before the show there was a brief introduction in which members of the company explained the ways in which they try to replicate the original performance style for the plays: dropping the fourth wall to make asides to the audience, contemporary-to-the-production music, minimal sets and props, ambient light rather than lighting effects, doubling roles, crossdressing (women playing male roles rather than vice versa).
There was a playground not far from the theater area, and after we finished dinner Colin spent most of the evening there. Michael and I swapped off so that we'd each get to watch some of the play. Alex, surprisingly, sat through almost the entire play. We prepped her with a comic book retelling so that she'd have some ability to follow the plot, but let's face it - the comedies move fast and don't make a whole lot of sense, and they have a lot of characters to keep track of. She asked a lot of questions. At the end, when the entire cast broke out singing and dancing to the Beatles' "She Loves You" (a surprisingly good match-up), Hero wound up not far from us and Alex ran up to dance with her.
They weren't kidding about the breaking-the-fourth-wall aspect. For the scenes when Beatrice and Benedick are in the arbor, overhearing carefully-staged conversations, the actors moved into the audience and blended into the various picnicking groups. At one point Beatrice ended up hiding under our picnic blanket. (Yes, we had finished eating by that point.) Alex was in heaven.
It's interesting to be in the position of trying to explain the whole phenomenon of Shakespeare to someone who hasn't ever heard the name. It is kind of odd: there are these plays that are more than 400 years old, and even the least literary English-speaker imaginable has heard of the playwright, while pretty much everyone who has been to school has seen at least one of the plays. They are very hard for people to understand, but still they are important enough to us that some people donate money so they can be put on for free in a public park, and random other people drag out their lawn chairs and picnic baskets to listen to long strings of sentences they can barely track. And they enjoy themselves.
I wonder if there will ever be a time in the English-speaking world in which Shakespeare will no longer seem important or worthwhile. The language and culture have already changed so drastically, and yet here we all still collectively are. What kind of change would be necessary for Shakespeare to be discarded, and would anything else from the past survive?
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Date: 2010-09-12 03:38 am (UTC)What change would hap to vanish from our ken
The Bard of Avon's sonnets, plays, and rhymes?
That at the last no voice of mortal men
Would speak the words, would bring within their times
The stories of Othello, Caesar, Lear
Or brief Midsummer's dreams with Robin Puck
What loss to all mankind 'twould be, I fear
Though truth be told, some wouldn't give a hoot.
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Date: 2010-09-12 04:08 am (UTC)(
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Date: 2010-09-12 05:33 am (UTC)To me, even then, Hamlet was part of the furniture, something I knew so well that my response was about details and director/actor choices. In the first intermission, I started to say something to one of my friends, an engineering major.
"Don't tell me how it ends!" he said, intensely.
It had never occurred to me that he might not know, that any adult in the English-speaking world didn't know.
And I enjoyed the play much more than I would have otherwise, because I remembered that it was a story, which I keep trying to remember.
I don't know what it is about Shakespeare that makes him last through the ages and speak to so many different times and places. But I think it will still be a long time before he disappears. (This summer, I saw Hamlet: Blood in the Brain, a very stark retelling of a contemporary ghetto Hamlet, performed by Oakland high-school students. It's still real now.
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Date: 2010-09-12 12:37 pm (UTC)If you're ever in New York City in the summer, you should check out New York Classical Theater's Shakespeare productions--they do them in Central Park with similar energy and fourth-wall-breaking, but also move to different locations for scene changes, and when you scramble after them it's surprisingly engaging and fun.
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Date: 2010-09-12 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-12 02:44 pm (UTC)When I was a kid, watching Shakespeare was as much about the experience of APT as it was about anything else. (We also had to drive to and from Spring Green, so we'd get home really late at night, and there's this loooooooooong walk up a wooded path from the parking lot, then back down when the show is over, and there was no running water up by the stage so the "bathroom" was a column of portapots. So going to APT fell as much into the category of "adventure" as "entertainment/art.")
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Date: 2010-09-13 11:04 am (UTC)And maybe it's the directors playing games which keep Shakespeare alive? Hamlet or Richard III in Twentieth Century dress reminds us that they're still applicable today. Richard III is certainly Tudor propaganda, rather than an attempt at history, but that doesn't make the idea of the strong, ruthless, and flawed, leader an irrelevance.