On Shaking the Bard

This is some explanation of my views that support commentary here and elsewhere--including in this week's NCJ--about staging Shakespeare in times and places that are different from those stipulated in the play itself.

First of all, a director's duty is to bring the text of a play to life for the audience of the time and place in which the play is performed. That's an essential duty, but not the only one.

Let's assume for the moment that we're talking about a sincere attempt to re-enliven Shakespeare’s plays by changing or mixing milieus and time periods. (There are other possible motives that may contribute or dominate, which I'll describe later.) Some such have succeeded, and the best have provided new insights and interpretations as well as being highly entertaining. Others have been honorable failures. What makes the difference?

The most obvious is whether the time and place selected can support the action of the play without straining the credulity of the audience, or puzzling it so much that they are taken out of the play completely, or at least for so long that by the time they get back to it, they've missed so much that now it really doesn't make any sense.

There is one fairly recent example that a lot of people know that succeeded extremely well--in fact, maybe too well, in that it inspired a lot of imitators who didn't figure out what made it work. It was the 1996 film version of Romeo and Juliet, called Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Clare Danes. It is a contemporary setting--in the city of Verona Beach--and uses modern technology (cars, guns) to tell the story, while editing the text but using Shakespeare's words.

The director was very clever in making the story and the words work--the message that arrives too late is botched by a Fedex type delivery, etc. But the essential dynamic of the play is maintained by making the Montagues and Capulets two rival big business/crime families. That's both clever and easy to understand, because it provides a contemporary analogue to the powerful rival families of the nobility in the play.

On a more modest scale--and with less spectacular results--was a production last year of As You Like It at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I wrote about what worked about the concept here: the 1930's America era gave an edge to the difference between rich and poor, and the power relationship between the two brothers was made crystal clear when Orlando was shown working at a loading dock run by the Boss, his thugish, possibly criminal older brother, Oliver.

But things were also lost by setting the play at that time and place, which I discussed here: for instance, some of the nuances of the essential differences between the court and the wilderness, the forest where the exiles are gathered. So the change was partially successful.

In fact, in this play as in a lot of Shakespeare's plays, the locales (both in place and time), have little actual parallel in a real time and place. They mostly exist within the play itself, so setting them in specific, recognizeable places--known worlds with their particular rules--can distort them or, as bad or worse, sink them--the rules simply don't work in the world of the play.

The locales Shakespeare stipulated may have been fanciful, but the world on the stage assumed the understanding of life and reality of Shakespeare's original audiences. So locale is more than an historical period or geographical place. It includes sets of ideas. Any specific locale must support and express those ideas.

These days Shakespeare's plays also come to us with a long history in performance and discussion. And here is a possible point of contention. The tradition that I know of how a director approaches Shakespeare says that the director researches the play's past--what are the most celebrated interpretations, what are the controversies over the play and the characters, etc.? Actors know stories of the great performances, and now they can see some of them recorded. They use the past to help them decide how they will approach the production or the role.

Some directors and actors today may differ on this point. They may want to come at the play without any baggage, without any preconceptions or the need to respond to how it's been done before, or elsewhere. Perhaps also because the audience they foresee will approach the play that way.

While honoring one's own personal responses to the play is important for a director, and coming up with a creative, fresh approach in some way is often necessary to produce something for audiences that will engage them--both something that will spark the imaginations of people new to the play, and that will provoke those who think they know the play all too well to sit up and see something new in it.

But that doesn't absolve the director from taking the history of the play into account. That history doesn't have to be limiting, but it should be a consideration, partly because members of the audience are going to bring some piece of it with them, and partly because that history has enriched the play with questions and ideas connected to emotions, so when it is performed now, it can be richer still. Besides, why not take advantage of all that study and opinion, all those experiences?


Some who stage Shakespeare in a different time or place may justify it solely by pointing to what Shakespeare himself did. They may say that he freely adapted the stories of others in his plays, and based some on old plots that he also took out of their original times and places. And that's true. As Shakespearian actor Paul Gross says in his excellent interview included in the DVD of the Canadian TV series, Slings and Arrows (he's the star of it), Shakespeare was a popular artist, who took from everywhere in order to put on a great, entertaining show. So he endorses the idea of staging Shakespeare in different ways, including in alternate settings--if it works. "But if it's stupid," he says, "it's stupid."

That's because these plays exist: they are texts by the playwright who is generally regarded as the greatest who ever lived. If you are going to do Shakespeare, you should do Shakespeare. Now maybe you want to do the story of Romeo and Juliet, and you want to set it in Manhattan between rival gangs of whites and Puerto Ricans, but you also want to add a lot of songs and dancing, and you want to pretty much keep the older people out of it. And you'd rather not have to use all those words.

Or maybe you want to do the story of The Tempest, only you want to set it in the future and on another planet in another star system, but you also want to have a really cool monster and a robot. And you don't want to be limited by all that damn verse.

Well, then you do what Shakespeare did: you write something new using whatever parts of the story, and whatever characters you want. And so you call it West Side Story. You call it Forbidden Planet.

What you don't do is call it Shakespeare. Or try to get his words to serve your concept.

Why more people don't do that, instead of trying to bend Shakespeare and his plays to their will, has to do with the root of a less noble motive for changing locales than to re-energize the plays. That reason is that Shakespeare is a powerful brand name. People go to see Shakespeare plays when they might not go to see your play or mine. Directors get jobs directing his plays, while they or their producers can't find financing for a production of an original play.

This may not be as they like it, but they want to work, and maybe all's well that ends well. But it ain't necessarily so. It's my suspicion that some directors allow their resentment of the brand name, and of the complexity of the plays themselves, to influence and even shape their productions. What passes for creativity is sometimes peevishness.

Sometimes they simply may not trust the play's ability to communicate, or they don't trust the audience's ability to deal with it, unless it is made as close to pure spectacle as possible. Shakespeare, of course, was a showman--he wrote parts for clowns and comic relief, as well as writing blood and thunder--to keep everybody interested. And some translation of that impulse may be necessary in these quite different times. But trashing the plays with sensational effects and cheap tricks that violate the text, or even fail to do it some rough justice, is another thing entirely.

Which brings me to the third possible motive for changing the time and place of the action: it's the fashion. It certainly is virulently fashionable now to do so, just as it was a generation or so ago to mount the plays in "modern dress" with bare stages and minimal sets. Now directors seem to be competing to set their productions in the most extreme and outlandish settings they can imagine.

They may try to justify it as a way to make the play more accessible. But is it the play they are making accessible? Where is the play? In the nineteenth century it was fashionable to provide new happy endings for some of Shakespeare's tragedies, so Lear and Cordelia walk arm and arm into the sunset, and Hamlet and Ophelia live happily ever after.

In the end, figuring out some sensational locale for the play is the easy way out. So is loading it with tricks, like verse-spouting characters clutching cell phones. It's harder to go into the depths of the play, to come up with an interpretation for a character or characters--even an extreme one--and to stage the actors and even shape the text (somewhat) to support it. Or to imagine a new way of staging a scene, a moment, that will better express the feelings and the ideas discovered in the play.

I understand how difficult any of that can be, especially in productions that don't have the resources of major regional theatres. It's hard enough just to get one of these plays on its feet, and for the actors to learn all the damn lines and to speak them clearly, communicating what these sometimes strange words mean.

But time and energy may be better spent in these endeavors than in creating an attention-getting setting, that gets attention only for a few minutes, and providing a surprising visual world, with the surprise wearing off very quickly, and adding a lot of business that gets a brief laugh here and there. For if all you've ultimately done is create an onstage world that doesn't make sense to the audience, and/or that doesn't serve the play, what often happens is the actors are condemned to struggle for two or three hours trying to reconcile setting and play. And that doesn't serve anybody.