Blanche and Blanchett

The Oscar for best performance by an actress was awarded to Kate Blanchett for her role in Blue Jasmine.  In her acceptance speech she thanked the theatre company she has been working with in Australia, and noted (here and elsewhere) that her stage training was essential for playing this role.

There's more than one reason for that.  While some critics mention its debt to A Streetcar Named Desire, the classic play by Tennessee Williams, they generally go on to quickly discuss the contemporary resonance after the high profile real estate swindles.  But this movie is almost scene for scene a reinterpretation of Streetcar, and Blanchett is very much Blanche Dubois.  It has been noted that Blanchett played that role on stage in Australia in 2008.

Blanchett as Blanche

The point of mentioning this is not to accuse anyone of anything untoward, but to note both the movie's debt to Williams' play and the fact that this cements the play's place as an authentic American myth.  I can think of only one other American play that has this mythic weight: Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. (They were first produced in New York within two years of each other.)  Miller's play has demonstrated its mythic status through a series of successful New York stage revivals and films, as well as productions in many other countries.  Now Williams' play has proven its mythic power by being powerfully adapted to different times and a different situation.

Revival

How do you make an old play new again? Moving the era of a Shakespeare play, especially closer to our own time, has become a strategy so common that it now seems reflexive, as predictable as the movement of a knee tapped with a hammer. Following the screen success of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of a few years ago featured teens in prep school uniforms carrying cell phones. But such elements depend on surprise and especially wit, as well as relevance, and their effects wear off quickly. Some work better on screen, but not always even there (Almereyda's postmodern Hamlet with Ethan Hawke was less successful.)

Sometimes, changing the period can be illuminating, but this depends on an original, relevant and brilliantly applied vision. However, there are a couple of other ways to revive older plays and make them more relevant to contemporary audiences.

One way--which is the essential way--is to play it honestly. The most difficult task for actors in Shakespeare and other well-known plays is to convince the audience that the characters are experiencing these events for the first time--that they don't know what happens next. Actors enact emotion, and this is the core of both the performance and the audience response. If the production, and particularly the actors, can make it real, the audience will experience it as new and relevant.

In general, a production that finds the vitality in the play can't help but to make it relevant to the times, because it will engage an audience living in these times. Playwright Terrence McNally spoke recently about the process of creating Ragtime, The Musical (he wrote the script), first produced on Broadway in 1998 and revived there last year, just nine years after the original production closed. He made this perceptive comment (published in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Dramatist) about the revival: " Everything will be the same as before but everything will be different, too. That's because we have a different country than when Ragtime [the novel by E.L. Doctorow] was published and Ragtime, The Musical premiered. If Ragtime seems different to you this time around it's not because we've re-written it. It's because this is a society that has re-written itself."

Stage on Film

Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind and David Oyelowo
as Orlando in "As You Like It" on DVD, an HBO
film directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Branagh's "As You Like It"

With Henry V in 1989, Kenneth Branagh burst onto the world cinema scene as a combination Orson Welles (theatre enfant terrible who directs and stars in his first major film while in his twenties) and Laurence Olivier (choosing the same play as Olivier did for his first of several director/star Shakespeare flicks, to become Shakespeare’s foremost cinematic interpreter of his time.)

Branagh brought a strong visual sense and cinematic storytelling, combined with an accessible acting style. For my money, his best Shakespeare was his second, Much Ado About Nothing (1993.) A remarkable title sequence, Branagh’s easy but compelling way with the verse, the sparks flying between him and a sparkling Emma Thompson, and Denzel Washington in Shakespeare are just some of the highlights.

Then after warming up with a bracing if unknown comedy about another actor doing Hamlet (A Midwinter’s Tale, 1995), he directed and starred in his big screen Hamlet in 1996, and pulled out all the stops, filming the long version of the text for a 4 hour movie.

It won awards and may yet be judged the definitive film version, but in budgets and buzz, it’s been a downward slope for Branagh’s Shakespearian efforts ever since. His oddly charming Love Labour’s Lost (done as a kind of 1930s musical) died at the box office in 2000, ending his plans to do Macbeth and postponing his next comedy, As You Like It for five years. Originally meant to be a big screen feature, it’s played in the U.S. only on HBO before being released on DVD, just recently available for rental locally.

At first, it may seems that Branagh is indulging in the latest fad of heedlessly transplanting Shakespeare to bizarre times and places. Branagh’s Forest of Arden is set in 19th century Japan, even though ironically enough, it was filmed in an English wood. But this does little harm (most of the characters come from a settlement of European traders) and sharpens the play’s meaning in at least one obvious way (a wrestling match that’s important to the plot but hard to make credible becomes more theatrical and dangerous when a Sumo master is involved) and in one more subtle theme: there are a couple of religious conversions in the story that seem absurd to modern audiences, unacquainted with the Christian contemplative tradition, but they probably make more sense to us when they involve Buddhist monks.

Some people despise this play, and this film is unlikely to change their minds. But since As You Like It is my favorite Shakespeare comedy, I also have a high standard. It’s visually beautiful: shots of the forest are appropriately enchanting. Bryce Dallas Howard (now better known as Gwen Stacy in Spiderman 3) is convincing and exciting in the key role of Rosalind—it’s easy to see why she caused such a stir when she played it on stage in New York. Her scenes with David Oyelowo as Orlando, and with an ardent Romola Garai as Celia, in the first half of the film are magical. There are excellent performances by Alfred Molina as Touchstone, Brian Blessed as both the good and bad Dukes, Richard Briers as Orlando’s loyal servant, and Kevin Kline as Jacques. Until…

Branagh’s strange, distant, almost embarrassed approach to Jacques’ “all the world’s a stage” speech, and Kline’s mumbled delivery, is deflating. Then the movie falters in other places, losing its magic spell in the second half. There are still crisp, funny performances by pretty much the whole cast, good scenes and striking images, but the film didn’t fulfill the promise of the early scenes, and it ends with a pale imitation of the passionate dancing that ended Much Ado About Nothing with some embarrassing singing, plus a postmodern coda that falls equally flat. (Branagh doesn’t appear in the film at all, though his voice is the last to be heard—saying “cut.”)

To call it the best film version of this play isn’t saying much—the runner up is a rarely seen 1936 version co-written by J. M. Barrie and featuring a very young Laurence Olivier in his first film role. Fans of the play—and those who have to study it—may find much of the acting illuminates the characters, and a lot of the typical problems of staging the play are neatly solved (even if a lot of the text is missing.)  Most impressive: the Duke suddenly becoming a holy man after a chance conversation with a clergyman always seemed a stretch to me.  But by setting the play in Japan, the Duke meets a Buddhist monk, and such a re-dedication seems much more credible.

Despite my disappointments, Branagh at his best can still merge Shakespeare with screen entertainment. I’ll see this one again.

Alice in Christmasland

Was his name Lewis "Christmas" Carroll? Not really. (It wasn't even Lewis Carroll, come to that.) But Lewis Carroll has been associated with Christmas long before Dell'Arte and Ferndale Rep both decided to do their Christmas plays based on his writing, here on the North Coast.

Since the mid 20th century, it was Walt Disney who linked Alice in Wonderland and Christmas in the American mind. Even before his animated movie version was completed, he showed a scene from it as part of his Christmas television special in 1950, co-hosted by the young Kathyrn Beaumont, who provided Alice's voice in the film. When his Disneyland show became a weekly series, he featured an hour version of the movie as his Christmas shows in 1954 and again in 1964.

All this is revealed on the two disk DVD of the Disney movie, still the best known dramatization of Alice. Moreover, the digitized DVD version reveals its breathtaking use of color, and of course the kind of sumptuous and witty animation that just isn't done anymore. (The people who made Yellow Submarine must have watched it many times.)

Alice has been dramatized many times for the stage (including ballets and musicals, and experimental dramas by the likes of Andre Gregory, whose early 1970s version is immortalized in a book of photos by Richard Avedon) and in movies and TV, where the usual practice became to fill the many brief roles with well-known actors and comedians of the time.

Jonathan Miller did a 1966 television version with Peter Sellers, John Gielgud and music by Ravi Shankar. Ralph Richardson and Michael Crawford were in a 1972 film, with Alice played by the future "Bond girl," Fiona Fullerton. There was a 1985 version, scripted by Paul Zindel and with music by Steve Allen, that featured Donald O'Connor, Martha Raye, Telly Savalas, Shelley Winters, Sid Caesar and Ringo Starr. Kate Burton was a charming Alice in her first credited role in 1983, co-starring with her father, Richard Burton, as well as Nathan Lane and Maureen Stapleton. And a 1999 TV movie featured Martin Short, Robbie Coltrane, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lloyd and Miranda Richardson with Jim Henson's puppets. (All of these and more are available on DVD.)

Charlotte Henry as Alice in the 1933
film, with script by Joseph Mankiewicz.

Othello on Film: Olivier

Frank Findlay as Iago, Laurence Olivier as Othello.
Though this is a black and white still, the 1965
film is in color.

Othello on Film: Olivier

I didn't realize until I read another review of the show that in my review I hadn't noted that Jabari Morgan, who played Othello at the Arcata Playhouse, is black. Partly that's because he gave a great performance as an actor, regardless of any additional category. But also I suppose I realized that discussing the racial politics of this role would take more words than I had in the print version of the review.

Othello is called a Moor, which could refer to a number of racial types. He is called (and calls himself) black, but that's a dodgy term historically. Even in the early 20th century America, some Italians were considered "black."

There has been a great scholarly argument especially over whether Shakespeare was referring to a North African-- a lighter-skinned Muslim Berber, or a darker skinned sub-Sahara African. In terms of Shakespeare's time in England, it could go either way. The internal evidence within the play is ambiguous, though I tend to be more persuaded by the Berber interpretation.

Nevertheless, it has become standard that actors of southern African descent have a corner on the Othello role. Now in the early 21st century it is so much so that when Patrick Stewart wanted to play the role, he did so (in Washington, D.C.) with a completely reversed cast--all the other actors, including Desdemona, were black.

But at least until the 1960s, the role was often played by white men in dark makeup. There may not have been enough black actors in England until the 20th century but the racism was overt in the U.S., where even the play itself was not allowed to be performed in some places in the South because of the interracial romance, regardless who played the parts. And even when the great African American actor Paul Robeson wanted to play the role, he had to play it in England first (opposite Peggy Ashcroft) before getting that opportunity in the U.S., more than a decade later. But Paul Robeson's performance opposite Uta Hagen in 1943 is one of the most famous American Othellos, and a tremendous hit--it played more than twice as many times on Broadway than any Shakespeare before or since.

Which brings us to the movies. The most famous filmed version of Shakespeare's Othello has to be the 1965 movie with Laurence Olivier as Othello. Olivier played Othello as a dark African, with something like a Caribbean accent. "I had rejected the modern trend towards a pale coffee-colored compromise," he wrote in his autobiography. He designed his own three layers of makeup, which took three hours to apply. He had prepared for the role by doing vocal exercises to deepen his voice. His stage performance was one of the triumphs of his career.

Though the filmed version of the stage production (with Frank Findlay as Iago and young Maggie Smith as Desdemona) was shot in just three weeks on obvious stage sets, there is enough camera movement to qualify it as a movie. Olivier often used external changes (he was famous for building new noses for himself) to get him in touch with the internal identity of the character. In this case he wanted to feel "black to my very soul."

In 1965, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and more obvious racial variety in England, Olivier risked a lot, and he got a lot of criticism for--some said-- playing a stereotypical black, in an interpretation that made Othello's heritage a key to his passionate behavior. Others felt it honored the reality of a black character.

By contemporary standards, at the very least, Olivier overdoes it at times. But his portrayal is still powerful, and provides plenty of opportunity for debate, about Othello and race, separately and together. Though Olivier later wrote that the role is essentially unplayable, his acting is gripping at times.

Findlay played Iago with a working class accent, and later films would adopt and extend this approach.

Othello on Film: Hopkins, Fishburne

Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Kenneth Branagh
as Iago in the 1995 Othello.

Othello on Film: Hopkins, Fishburne

Less well known is the BBC version of Othello, directed by Jonathan Miller in 1981 with Anthony Hopkins as Othello and Bob Hoskins as Iago. The casting of Hopkins did cause controversy because of his race. The role had been offered first to James Earl Jones (who played it in the U.S. opposite Christopher Plummer as Iago) but the British unions wouldn't allow the role to be played by an American. They wanted a British actor of African heritage. What the real politics were in all this is impossible to know.

Hopkins had played the role on stage, although in recent years he's referred to it as not a success. In fact, when he auditioned as a young man for membership in Olivier's National Theatre, a speech from Othello was nearly the only Shakespeare he knew. When he offered it at his audition, Olivier--who was playing the role on stage at the time--cried "You've got a bloody nerve!" Then Olivier expressed nervousness that Hopkins might do it better. When Hopkins finished, Olivier offered him a place in the company. "I don't think I'll lose any sleep tonight," he said, "but you're awfully good." (Olivier became a mentor to Hopkins, who later became so adept at imitating Olivier's voice that he was hired to dub in some of Olivier's lines in the restored version of Spartacus.)

But in contrast to Olivier, director Miller has Hopkins play Othello as a light-skinned Moor, more Arab than African. Viewers today may well find Hopkins' wild hair a bit much, but like Olivier's very different take on the role, he is compelling to watch. More than in these other films, Hopkins' Othello seems to be rebelling against killing Desdemona until almost the end, when Iago applies his most naked pressure, attacking Othello's masculinity. And when Iago's treachery is revealed, the understanding of how he was skillfully duped that comes into Hopkins' eyes, sets up the rest of the scene: his relatively calm farewell speeches, salvaging some honor in his dishonor, and his suicide.

His Desdemona is Penelope Wilton (known these days to Doctor Who fans--such as myself--as Harriet Jones) but it is Bob Hoskins as Iago who delivers a truly great movie performance in what is even an less cinematic version than Olivier's, except for the remarkable closeups (especially of Iago as he devises how to trap Othello, and Othello as he is about to go into his fit.)

Hoskins makes his every thought eloquent by facial expression, voice and body movement. Even the way he walks tells us about the character. He plays Iago as a working class conniver, an improviser who makes mischief and manipulates his "betters," apparently for his own amusement, just to see them make fools of themselves. He's barely suppressing his laughter in the very first scene, and his scorched mirth is evident many times throughout. But as the play moves to its bloody conclusion, his laughter became almost constant and psychotic. Yet there is still the air of the trickster about him.

Since this was part of the BBC project to film complete versions of all of Shakespeare's plays, this is the most complete text available on DVD. And it does seem to me that some of the supposed mysteries of motivation etc. are cleared up by lines that are often cut.


The most recent filming of Shakespeare's actual play that I know of is the 1995 version starring Laurence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago. Filmed on location in Italy, it is the most scenic version--beginning with a long shot of Othello and Desdemona (played by Irene Jacob) in a gondola. As it approaches, Othello puts a white mask in front of his face.

This film flirts with this very racial interpretation as well as a few others, without being very consistent about any of them. For example, the Freudian disciple Ernest Jones argued that Iago had a homosexual crush on Othello--an interpretation that Olivier tried when he first played Iago in the 1930s on an uncooperative Ralph Richardson as Othello. In this film there is one scene where Branagh makes a blatant move in this direction, but that's about it.

Laurence Fishburne has worked on stage as well as on TV and in the movies, notably in August Wilson plays. He gives Othello a dignity and authority, and, like Hopkins, is very calm at the end. He plays Othello as intelligent, sensitive and too trusting and naive. Branagh's Iago owes much to Hoskins', (as indeed does A.J. Stewart here in Arcata.) There are some nice cinematic touches by director Oliver Parker--eyes that literally glow green, Iago knocking chess pieces into the water and then the bodies of the dead dropped into the sea. It's an inconsistent but often provocative and always watchable film.

One other interesting interpretation is of the key character of Roderigo, the first of the nobles that Iago manipulates. In the Olivier version (as in the Arcata stage version), Roderigo is mostly just dim. In the BBC version, he's dim but also proud, easy to flatter. But in this version, Michael Maloney (who stars in one of my favorite unknown films--about a ragtag company playing Hamlet--directed by Branagh, also in 1995, called A Midwinter's Tale) plays Roderigo as excessively passionate and impulsive. Which he plays very well.

Othello on Film: Welles

Orson Welles as Othello in the
1952 film version he directed.

Othello on Film: Welles

The first of these Othellos to be filmed, but one of the last to be seen, was directed by Orson Welles, who also played Othello. This film's history is an epic journey. It started in the late 1940s, when Welles--a Hollywood outcast at the time--was filming his vision of Othello in bits and pieces, between paying film work and when he had the money. He filmed it in various locations throughout Europe, wherever he happened to be.

The film was finished in 1952, and released in the U.S. in 1955, to very mixed reviews. After being shown in only three theatres, the film essentially disappeared for the next three decades. Thought completely lost, a print was found in 1981, but still it was not really seen until the film was restored in 1992: exactly forty years after Welles completed it.

And "completed" is a relative word. The restoration was far from perfect, and the shoestring budget shows up in some bad dubbing and a few awkward effects. But apart from all that, it is very close to magnificent.

At least as a piece of moviemaking. This is the most cinematic of Othellos on film. The words are Shakespeare's but the editor is Welles--he tells the whole story in about 90 minutes. It begins with a montage of the funerals of Othello and Desdemona, while Iago is hoisted to his punishment. These opening scenes, the black and white cinematography, the framing, askew camera angles and silhouettes are reminiscent of Bergman, and later of Kurosawa and even Fellini.

Welles started out directing theatre, including Shakespeare--he created the famous Federal Theatre Project production of an all-black Macbeth during the Depression. He knew the plays, and by this time he knew moviemaking, too. So he could re-imagine the text as a film script--for example, by showing Othello's epileptic fit from Othello's point of view, as he wakes.

Iago is played by Micheal MacLiammoir, an accomplished Irish actor, who later wrote that Welles instructed him to play Iago as a repressed homosexual, fixated on Othello but in an impotent rage--once again, a variation of the Freudian via Ernest Jones theory. It doesn't clarify the play, nor does Welles performance, but the movie does--and it is striking, even amazing to look at.

Suzanne Cloutier played Desdemona--blond, lovely and so young she's growing up on screen, over the four years it took to make the film. She probably looks more the age imputed to Desdemona in the play, and has the beauty to bewitch Othello, but I didn't sense any sparks between them. That's something lacking, it seems to me, in all these films. Maggie Smith was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in the Olivier version (as was Olivier), and Irene Jacob and Penelope Wilton give fine performances in their films, perhaps even true to Elizabethan mores, but the central romance remains a convention and Desdemona's part in all these films is too much as a cipher to be satisfying.

Gallery: As You Like It

This is Helen Mirren as Rosalind in the wedding scene at the end of the play, looking feminine and and sexually ardent.

Gallery: As You Like It

It was my birthday when I first saw this movie, a serendipitous appearance on a small TV in my tiny room in the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. This 1936 film version of As You Like It was made as a starring vehicle for Elisabeth Bergner, a prominent German actor who had played the part of Rosalind in Germany, and had just won an Academy Award in 1935. So after she fled Hitler's Germany for England, this project must have seemed a natural.

It wasn't. Her heavy accent could not make up for her energy, and the production was uneven, at best. The movie is notable for a treatment by J.M. Barrie, music by William Walton, and editing by the young David Lean--but mostly as the Shakespearian film debut of Laurence Olivier. He played Orlando, the male lead, to Bergner's Rosalind. He apparently didn't enjoy making the film, and couldn't relate to Bergner in the role. (She had seen him on stage and chosen him for his part.) He felt the only way to make his character credible was to play him as a little daft.

Still, he was the perfect Orlando in some ways. Physically, he looked like he could wrestle a bigger man, and also might have the sensitivity to write love poems. But his voice, perhaps his greatest asset and best known characteristic, now and again made the part indelibly his. When Orlando comes upon the good Duke's party in the forest of Arden, threatens them with his sword to obtain food, he is told that "Your gentleness shall force more than your force move us to gentleness...Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table." I can't help but hear Olivier's voice always in Orlando's reply: "Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you. I thought all things had been savage here..."

This hospitality is in fact the hallmark of civilized behavior among countless tribal peoples, and this scene is the first indication that the idea that the court is civilized while the forest is savage is wrong.

As for Olivier, although his earliest audition piece was the "Seven Ages" speech which shortly follows in this scene, as far as I can tell he never played in As You Like It on the stage.