By Sheila T. Cavanagh, Emory University

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival. 2019. Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Directed by José Luis Valenzuela. Scenic Design: Christopher Acebo. Costume Design: Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko. Lighting Design: Pablo Santiago. Projection Design: Micah Stieglitz. Composer/Sound Design: John Zalewski. Dramaturg: Amrita Ramanan. Voice and Text Director: Rebecca Clark Carey. Phil Killian Directing Fellow: Kareem Fahmy. Fight Director: U. Jonathan Toppo. Stage Manager: Jeremy Eisen. Photo: Jenny Graham.

2019 marked a transition in leadership at Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) from Bill Rauch to Nataki Garrett. This final season of Rauch’s tenure as Artistic Director presented a host of remarkable productions, although the strongest plays suggest that OSF might currently be more aptly named the Oregon Theater Festival, since the Shakespeare productions were generally the weakest shows on offer.  Rauch’s time at OSF has marked him as a visionary leader, whose commitment to “Access for All” and his initiation of the multi-award-winning American Revolution initiative  have brought great acclaim, even as the controversial “Play On” series of Shakespearean re-imaginings and the strategic and economic burdens generated by recent wildfire seasons have prompted innumerable  artistic and financial  issues at this renowned Southern Oregon venue. Since Garrett’s well-regarded directorial background has not focused on Shakespeare, it remains to be seen how the Festival’s signature playwright will fare under this new regime.  In 2019, Shakespeare did not appear to generate much conversation among patrons, who were dazzled, however, by newer plays such as Octavio Solis’ Mother Road, Laureen Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, Christina Anderson’s How to Catch Creation and Paula Vogel’s Indecent. The bilingual La Comedia of Errors, adapted by Lydia G. Garcia and Bill Rauch, was derived from one of the “Play On” texts. While that program has instigated significant criticism as well as positive attention, La Comedia seems to have engaged audiences far more visibly than the other Shakespearean offerings of Macbeth, All’s Well that Ends Well and As You Like It.  La Comedia was timely and lively, drawing upon current immigration issues as it told a poignant story of loss, separation, misunderstanding, and redemption.

Artistically and interpretively, the other Shakespearean productions offered a mixed bag.  Macbeth opened with a child-sized coffin on the stage, immediately presenting a non-textual rationale for the mayhem following.  The many references to children within the play often lead directors to fashion backstories involving deceased offspring in order to frame the narrative.  Justin Kurzel, for instance, opens his 2015 cinematic version of the play with Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) attending their young child’s funeral. It’s not typically clear how such additions enhance these productions, however and José Luis Valenzuela’s direction does not adequately answer that question.  In the program’s director’s notes he identifies the couple’s childlessness as the key to their transition from “heroes” to murderers, but the issue does not resonate as strongly as he suggests.  Neither does his assertion that Macbeth is struggling with “the other.”  The question of how people interact with those unlike themselves reverberates throughout many of the plays this season, but not in this Macbeth. Amy Kim Waschke’s Lady Macbeth largely carries the production, especially in her visually striking death scene.  The other actors perform well and the design team present an appealing set and costumes, but the prominence of the child’s coffin and of Macbeth’s (Danforth Comins) interactions with the witches while in the bathtub suggest that paying more attention to the text and less emphasis on unnecessary additions could have led to a more powerful Scottish play.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival. 2019. Alls Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare. Directed by Tracy Young. Scenic Design: Mariana Sánchez. Costume Design: Alex Jaeger. Lighting Design: Carolina Ortiz Herrera. Composer/Sound Design: Amy Altadonna. Live Score Compositions: Jane Lui. Movement Director and Assistant Director: Kjerstine Rose Anderson. Production Dramaturg: Lydia G. Garcia. Voice and Text Director: Ursula Meyer. Associate Dramaturg: Wiley Basho Gorn. Fight Director: U. Jonathan Toppo. Stage Manager: Mandy Younger. Photo: Jenny Graham.

Rosa Joshi’s As You Like It similarly downplays pertinent issues that OSF’s non-Shakespearean offerings present more effectively.  Despite changing the gender identity typically associated with Duke Senior and Audrey (here presented as Aubrey), this production largely suppresses the play’s emphasis upon the relationship between gender, sexual identity, and sexual desire. Kate Hurster’s Celia, for instance, seems largely indifferent to Jessica Ko’s Rosalind, so that those unfamiliar with the play would likely not realize that the relationship between these two characters is often homoerotically charged.  In addition, the play’s epilogue, where the actor/Rosalind ambiguously states “if I were a woman,” is exchanged for the “Seven Stages of Man” speech, thereby erasing one of the moments where Shakespeare’s drama explicitly addresses the gendered metanarratives imbedded in the text. Since OSF dedicates significant attention to diversity of many kinds, this production’s suppression of gender fluidity and related issues remains surprising, particularly since some of the casting decisions suggest that these concerns were meant to be emphasized.  Regular patrons may well have wished that the spirit of Bill Rauch’s remarkable and unconventional 2018 production of Oklahoma! had taken over this As You Like It. That production emphasized more of the anxieties associated with sexuality and gender in this comedy than Joshi’s rendition introduces.

Macbeth and As You Like It are typically far more accessible plays than All’s Well That Ends Well, and that proves true here also.  Tracy Young offers a modernized, energetic production, but the challenges inherent in this “problem” play prove insurmountable.  In the director’s notes Young indicates that this “play is centered from the heart,” but the narrative consistently resists this interpretation.  Shakespeare’s Bertram (Daisuke Tsuji) does not project a likeable personality and Helena (here Helen, Royer Bockus) does little to ingratiate audiences who frequently struggle with how to respond to this story.  This production does little to offset the inherent difficulties associated with this play.  Presenting Helen as a “misfit,” fails to explain why these characters consistently make questionable life choices. Contorting the ending merely emphasizes how complicated Shakespeare’s narrative remains in modern times.

OSF’s non-Shakespearean productions in 2019 regularly offered more successful and profound examinations of the concerns resonating across this repertoire.  The artists associated with this company are imaginative, energetic, and bursting with talent.  One can only hope that Nataki Garrett can find ways to reinvigorate the Shakespearean portions of the OSF season.  Their execution of these newer plays makes it clear that the company can soar.  Here’s hoping that 2020 will be a year of noteworthy Shakespeare also in Southern Oregon.

The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.

Reviewing Shakespeare is produced by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the University of Warwick to provide a searchable archive of independent reviews of worldwide Shakespearian performance.

Reviewed by James Loehlin.

Siobhán Cullen and Aaron Monaghan in Richard III by DruidShakespeare. Photo Credit, Robbie Jack.

Druid is a leading Irish theatre company based in Galway, perhaps best known for premiering contemporary work like Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which won four Tonys in 1998.  A few years ago, as DruidShakespeare, they staged an epic production of the Henriad, and they recently returned to Shakespearean history with this thrilling Richard III, which played in Galway before a brief run at Lincoln Center’s White Lights Festival.  A vivid and dynamic production full of unforgettable theatrical imagery, Druid’s Richard III made the play seem both timely and timeless.

Richard III is a tricky play for the twenty-first century.  Its protagonist’s deeds are so reprehensible that contemporary audiences would be unlikely to respond to the swaggering bravura of a Laurence Olivier or Antony Sher.  Yet a wholly repellent Richard becomes hard to watch.  The 2012 discovery of the remains of the historical Richard III reawakened a sympathetic interest in his physical body, twisted by scoliosis and hacked by swords.  Druid’s program quoted Carol Ann Duffy’s recent poem: “My bones, scripted in light, upon cold soil,/ a human braille.  My skull, scarred by a crown,/ emptied of history.”  Druid’s production allowed measures of both swagger and sympathy to Aaron Monaghan’s energetic Richard, but distributed interest and blame across the dramatis personae, and eventually out to the audience.

The set was a cold, prison-like enclosure, similar to that used in the Almeida Richard II, with grey sheet metal panels and high barred windows, both of which were occasionally opened to create a greater sense of space and light. High over the stage hung a glass box containing a skull; the floor was carpeted with synthetic earth, and a grave-trap yawned downstage center.  It was from this trap that Richard emerged in the opening moments of the play.

Aaron Monaghan was a charismatic, handsome, and dynamic Richard, but not an especially likeable one; the production made no bones about his psychotic evil.  He walked on two canes, rather in the manner of Sher’s famous crutch-propelled performance.  He used a remarkably wide and expressive vocal range, moving from powerful commanding shouts to an almost shrieking falsetto laced with irony.  He also brought a sense of dangerous, menacing sexuality to the role.  His “wooing” of Ann was one of the production’s signature images.  She entered dragging the body of Henry VI (a shrouded dummy) on the long train of her dress, which stretched across nearly the whole stage.  He stopped her progress by slamming down his cane on the train, causing her to fall.  During the scene, he prowled restlessly round her, leaning forward on his canes at a severe, preying-mantis angle that was both seductive and sickening.  At the end of the scene he tipped the corpse unceremoniously into the grave.

While Anne capitulated under protest, the women of the play represented, on the whole, a strong counter-force to Richard’s tyranny.  The female roles were strongly cast and left largely uncut, so the choral effect of their resistance to Richard came through pointedly.  Jane Brennan was a powerful and majestic Queen Elizabeth, and Ingrid Craigie a stern Duchess of Gloucester: part of their impact came from the scale of their costumes, gilt-encrusted and grandly bustled.  Marie Mullen (the Tony-winning lead in The Beauty Queen of Leenane) made a contrasting but equally vivid impression as Queen Margaret.  She was the first character seen in the production, even before Richard: a ghostly shrouded figure who tottered across the back of the stage, a haunting memory of past turmoil.  In the Irish context of the production, she perhaps suggested the mythic matriarch Kathleen Ni Houlihan, personification of a wounded nation.

Mullen also doubled the role of the Mayor, in a sequence that highlighted Hynes’ effective marshalling of her human resources.  Richard III is a huge play with fifty-odd characters; Hynes employed shrewd doubling and streamlining to convey the story clearly with a cast of thirteen.  3.7, the scene in which Richard accepts the crown from Buckingham in front of the London citizens, is usually crowded with shouting supernumeraries.  In this production the theatre audience served as the crowd, with Mullen’s Mayor as our lone representative.  The economical staging extended to representing the clergymen who accompany Richard by life-size puppets, contrived by draping bishops’ robes over crosses at the back of the stage, so that they were literally, in Buckingham’s words, “two props of virtue”.

The most memorable doubling came from Druid core ensemble member Marty Rea, who played a haunted, poetic Clarence and a chilling Beckettian Catesby.  The latter was an especially prominent character in the production, set off by his distinctive appearance.  While the costumes, on the whole, mixed medieval and Renaissance elements filtered through a grimy dystopian aesthetic, Catesby cut a somewhat more modern figure.  With his bowler hat, thick glasses, waistcoat and gartered shirtsleeves, he was a mix of Dickensian bookkeeper and steampunk Droog.  He was expressionless, laconic, and omnipresent, carrying out Richard’s orders with grim efficiency.  He executed Rivers and Hastings with a compressed-air bolt-gun (like that used in the film No Country for Old Men), first courteously seating them in a chair center-stage.  When it came to be Buckingham’s turn, the gun had a couple of hissing misfires, protracting the moment painfully before its inevitable conclusion.  By contrast, Catesby’s disposal of Anne—smashing her head against the stage wall in immediate response to Richard’s order to “give out/ That Anne my wife is sick and like to die”—was shocking in its sudden violence.

In an original and striking bit of streamlining, Catesby took on the lines of the Scrivener about the warrant for Hastings’ execution.  When he asked, “Who is so gross,/ That cannot see this palpable device?/ Yet who’s so bold but says he sees it not?”, he turned and spoke openly to the audience, then peered out into the house, looking around for several seconds as though challenging us to reply.  This Brechtian moment seemed to sum up the production’s overall approach to the play: that as bad as leaders like Richard III may be, they come about only when the people allow themselves to be bullied into accepting them.

The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.

Reviewing Shakespeare is produced by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the University of Warwick to provide a searchable archive of independent reviews of worldwide Shakespearian performance.

Reviewed by David W. Hartwig (Weber State University)

Benedick (Jeff Stinson) and Beatrice (Allison Froh) in New World Shakespeare Co.’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, photo courtesy Beth Bruner.

New World Shakespeare Company’s raison d’etre is to make Shakespeare’s works accessible to modern audiences. The company has adopted a race-blind and gender-blind casting ethos, and provides interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays that emphasize themes relevant to 21^st Century American audiences. NWSC is “amateur” in the most important of ways: the actors are all volunteers, many of whom are active members of Salt Lake’s thriving theatrical scene, who choose to work with NWSC because of the company’s ethical standards. Additionally, NWSC partners with local community organizations whose work mirrors each production’s thematic emphases, and donates all proceeds to these community partners.

For Much Ado, NWSC chose to partner with Utah Women’s Giving Circle, which invests in projects designed to empower women in Utah with the goal of overturning the gender-based discrimination faced by women in the state. It is no surprise, then, that this Much Ado took as its locus the disempowerment of women that is at the play’s core. The producers explained in a program note that Hero “is manipulated, cajoled, and tortured through the action of the play” while the men “who perpetuate these wrongs go unpunished and even ultimately rewarded.”

This thematic emphasis created dissonances during the performance that were very effective. The Wasatch Theatre’s black box space had been decorated with topiaries and park-style benches. The women characters wore brightly colored dresses, and the men began in military-style garb. The opening scene captured the gendered “worlds” of this mise-en-scène. While she has few lines, Hero (Jenn Waterhouse) was in constant interaction with both Beatrice (Allison Froh) and the audience, emphasizing the importance of the character to the company’s vision. The men, on the other hand, were bold and brash, emphasizing their immature masculine exuberance. The initial interchange between Benedick (Jeff Stinson) and Beatrice became quite heated, bordering on outright anger, and Stinson’s baritone sounded deeply threatening at times.

Similarly, during the not-a-wedding scene, the gendered power dynamics were strongly apparent. Eli Unruh played Claudio with very little outward anger in the scene. Rather, he maintained an effective coldness toward Hero, and a confidence that his accusations were accurate and would be accepted. After the men exited, the interchange between Beatrice and Benedick provided a stark contrast in tone. Stinson’s Benedick was at a point of desperation for Beatrice, and the range of emotions Beatrice went through were impressively played by Froh.

In contrast with the thematic emphasis on the play’s dark misogyny, Trinchet’s direction maintained balance with the play’s comedy. Thus there were stark tonal shifts leading to the aforementioned dissonance, but which kept each scene feeling fresh and new. The comedic action of the play was perfectly encapsulated by Conor Thompson’s over-the-top performance as Dogberry AND Verges (who was a fierce, German-accented puppet on Dogberry’s hand). Thompson’s manic energy and comic timing had the audience convulsing with laughter. Similarly, the comic villains seemed to convert their roles into caricatures, with Elise C. Barnett-Curran playing Don John as a vaudevillian dominatrix leading on Bryce Kamryn’s perpetually drunk Borachio.

The gulling scenes likewise reveled in their own silliness. Benedick’s “the world must be peopled” speech was cut, allowing for at least some temporal balance between the two scenes, and the gulling of Beatrice had the audience in tears of laughter with its physical humor. At one point, Froh’s Beatrice hid beneath the chairs stage-right, while Waterhouse’s Hero sat above her and directed her pointed critique at her cousin below. This was one of the few productions of Much Ado I’ve seen in which the gulling of Beatrice outshone that of Benedick, and not because the latter was poorly done. The physical humor of Froh and Waterhouse excelled, and the previously established closeness of their relationship had developed the requisite pathos among the audience for the scene to be so effective.

The production was paced very well, with no scene changes, three entrances in similar position as on an early modern stage, and subtle light changes to enhance the comic-tragic contrasts of the play. In a semi-comic twist, Hero snuck into the “graveyard” for Claudio’s mourning scene and hid behind a topiary; this functioned as both a nod to the earlier gulling scenes, and an effective way to return some of the power to Hero by allowing her to witness and judge Claudio’s repentance. In another twist, the final lines of the play were reassigned to Beatrice, allowing women the final word.

This ending was effective, but not altogether satisfying. Given New World Shakespeare Co.’s ethos and thematic emphases, I was left feeling, as the producers’ note elucidated, that the men were in some way rewarded for their bad behaviors. Perhaps this is a stark reminder of the intractable nature of patriarchy in Shakespeare’s time and as evidenced through his plays. Short of a drastic rewrite, these plays reflect values that are over 400 years old. And yet, perhaps the ending of this Much Ado also stands as a profound reminder that while we may have “come a long way” in those four centuries, contemporary America has still not achieved true equality. Upon reflection, given the company’s casting policies, it would have been interesting to see the gender of the characters flipped in some way. In Utah, a state consistently ranked among the most misogynistic in the country, the casting and thematic emphasis of this production may have been exactly what is needed. Rather than flipping characters’ genders, the audience saw a stark reflection of the misogyny so prevalent in the immediate geographic area. What more could one ask from a small, local company dedicated to its community?

Reviewed by James Loehlin, University of Texas

The Hidden Room’s Duchess of Malfi cast demonstrate some of their work with historical gesture. Liz Beckham (Duchess) is seated center, next to her husband Antonio (Brock England) and their young son (Sadie Schaeffer). On the other side are her brothers, Duke Ferdinand (Ryan Crowder, seated) and the Cardinal (Robert Matney), whose finger points in the direction of Bosola (Judd Farris, with clasped hands). Photo by Christopher Shea.

The Duchess of Malfi extends the Hidden Room Theatre’s project of marshalling historical performance techniques for potent contemporary theatre.  Beth Burns’s tense, agile production incorporates period movement, costume, and lighting effects, while delivering a lucid, accessible version of one of the greatest tragedies of the Renaissance.  The production, which will return in May 2020 and then tour to the UK, represents a high-water mark in Hidden Room’s ongoing exploration of period performance.

The goal of the company is not a systematic, archaeological use of “original practices,” but the creation of what Burns calls a theatrical time machine, working back historically through what evidence we can find and trying to connect the dots through the creative work of the company.   Past projects have included a barnstorming Richard III using John Wilkes Booth’s promptbook (in the Cibber version) and a production of Nahum Tate’s King Lear emphasizing historical gesture and Restoration costuming.  Other productions have synthesized period work with more modern aesthetics, as in a seventies glam-rock Henry IV and an edgy, #MeToo-inflected version of Behn’s The Rover with eighties teen-film touches.

The Duchess of Malfi is Hidden Room’s first fully period-set Renaissance production in many years, perhaps since their celebrated all-male Taming of the Shrew.  Sumptuous costumes by Jenny McNee, of the American Shakespeare Center, perfectly capture the elegant extravagance and bejeweled menace of Webster’s Jacobean world.

Like most of the company’s previous productions, The Duchess of Malfi is performed ‘in a Hidden Room somewhere within the York Rite Masonic Hall’.  A large rectangular room with the audience on two sides, the space works well for the ceremonial progresses and split-stage, presentational moments in the play.  It is slightly less effective for moments of hushed intimacy or claustrophobic imprisonment, but on the whole Burns’s staging overcomes these challenges.  Some of the particularities of the space enhance the production: the cruciform pattern on the flooring suggests a cathedral nave and transept, and a hidden wall panel serves for surprise entrances.

One of the striking features of the production is its emphasis on lighting, an element of undeniable importance in The Duchess of Malfi, but one that has not featured heavily in past Hidden Room productions.  While the whole space is lit with ceiling fixtures that cast a warm, dim glow over actors and audience (as in past Hidden Room plays), these are occasionally dimmed or turned off altogether, and are supplemented with candelabra and wall sconces using simulated candle flame.  The variety of lighting effects has startling power in certain key scenes of the play, most notably when the sinister Duke Ferdinand plays a ghastly psychological trick on his sister the Duchess by giving her a dead hand to kiss, and then using waxwork figures to convince her that her husband and children have been murdered.  Burns pulls out all the stops on this scene, and it proves harrowing and effective despite some of the challenges of the space.

The company’s continued work with historical gesture is less strenuously foregrounded in this production than in some past work, but it has two different kinds of payoffs.  One is the consistency of movement and gesture work across the company, which creates a Renaissance courtly world without ever seeming distracting or overplayed.  The other kind of payoff comes in individual moments where gestures introduce a layer of psychological detail or social commentary, often to do with the power relationships between characters.  When the widowed Duchess woos her steward Antonio, for instance, the expressiveness of her downward-pointing gesture, in instructing him to kneel, reminds us that for all the love that eventually flourishes between these two characters, this is essentially a scene of sexual harassment between employer and employee.

The Duchess/Antonio relationship feels ill-fated from the beginning, though the actors evince sympathy for these doomed characters.  Brock England’s nervous, earnest Antonio seems constantly aware of the dangers of his position; and while Liz Beckham’s dignified Duchess shows pluck and wit in dealing with her brothers, she doesn’t seem destined for any but a tragic conclusion.  Her strongest scenes, appropriately, are those in which she faces her fate with steely resolve and courage, seconded ably by Jill Swanson as a more-than-usually serious Cariola.

There are a number of fine performances by the excellent cast.  Ryan Crowder is a fierce Duke Ferdinand, whose incestuous longings for his sister are expressed in a sudden, impulsive attempted kiss.  Robert Matney is a gleefully dissolute but pompous Cardinal, whose mistress Julia is given a scene-stealing performance by Amber Quick.  But the presiding figure of this production is Judd Farris’s brooding Bosola.  Farris expertly charts the character’s evolution from snarky malcontent to eager intelligencer, and then, through Webster’s astonishing moral imagination, to conflicted executioner and fervent revenger.  Bosola can sometimes be a marginal presence in the play, an unpleasant observer, nastily commenting from the sidelines and doing occasional dirty work.  Farris makes him a full-blooded hero, whose worst deeds actually enhance his stature in the corrupt world of the play, because he alone feels their full ethical weight. By the time Bosola realizes he has killed Antonio—the one man he wished to save—“In a mist, I know not how, / Such a mistake as I have often seen/ In a play”, the production has fully plumbed the play’s moral depths and conveyed its immense tragic power.

Reviewed by Tracy O’Brien

Mark Antony watches the conspirators. Paul Wilson as Antony; Bridget Wareham as Cassius, Steve O’Connell as Brutus. Photo credit: Pamela Whelan

Director Danielle Irvine had no shortage of real-world inspiration on which to draw for Perchance Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar this summer. In an era dominated by “fake news” and social media, it is easy to forget that political conspiracy and upheaval have been influenced by fear and rumor for thousands of years.

Irvine forgoes the common practice of many directors to adapt Shakespeare’s plays using modern settings or costumes. Her decision to transport viewers to 44 B.C. Rome, represented by faux-stone emblems mounted on the stage, draperies, togas, swords and shields, has the effect of underscoring how the needs and desires of the general public have been manipulated by political leaders for millennia. Brutus (Steve O’Connell) is well loved by the Romans and is an impressive speaker who implores the people to be patient and to understand that Caesar (Owen Van Houten) would have become a tyrannical leader. He cannot, however, compete with Mark Antony (Paul Wilson) who sways public opinion against the conspirators by praising Caesar’s good works and generosity. Brutus presents a logical argument, while Antony plays on the public’s emotion, growing anti-elitism and the promise of future wealth for all people. Two thousand years after the real-world events on which this play is based, we still grapple with matters of political corruption, economic disparity and violence. Shakespeare’s four hundred year old text is replete with language and circumstances that encapsulate modern day social and political conditions. Irvine capitalizes on how little political rhetoric and strategy have evolved across the three time periods.

This is also a play about relationships and loyalty: Caesar and Antony versus Brutus and Cassius (Bridget Wareham), Caesar versus the Senate, and everyone vying for the support of the Roman people.

Wareham delivers a powerful Cassius. She is commanding, convincing and absolutely staunch in her commitment to persuade Brutus to her cause. ““Brutus” and “Caesar” – what should be in that “Caesar”? / Why should that name be sounded more than yours?”” The rhetorical power of Shakespeare’s text is indisputable, so the joy for viewers watching and listening to Wareham’s Cassius emerges out of her masterful oration. Her articulation, vocal modulation, and physical gestures blend in a persuasive declamation that Brutus has little hope to resist. Anyone familiar with O’Connell’s past performances knows that he is an imposing presence on the stage. His Brutus coupled with Wareham’s Cassius form an irresistible force that at the play’s opening in July occasionally felt imbalanced with other relationships in the play, which did not come across as strongly. Wareham and O’Connell instil palpable empathy and pity in the audience as they struggle with their desperation to protect Rome and their loyalty to each other and to Caesar.

As one expects of a professional company, imbalances in early shows had been long corrected by the closing performance. In particular, Paul Wilson delivers an Antony whose loyalty to Caesar is admirable and whose speaking skills cast doubt on how strongly Julius Caesar’s ambitions actually run.

Wilson’s Antony is wholly convincing. I tried to dislike him because of his manipulative rhetoric, but it was difficult to do so. His colleagues did, after all, just murder their leader and his best friend. In a play brimming with bent truths and half-truths, misperceptions, and an overarching desperation to sway public opinion, it is only Mark Antony who remains true. Antony’s fault is not in disloyalty, then, but in the object of his loyalty. Like Julius Caesar, instead of first being loyal to Rome and Romans, Antony is first loyal to Caesar. Though viewers may accept the conspirators’ rationale for the assassination, Wilson’s Antony is unsettling in his grief. His rage is palpable. And Wilson’s delivery of one of the play’s most famous speeches – “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;” – has its desired effect on listeners. No longer comfortable with the assertion that Caesar’s death is the only recourse, the audience grapples with the ethics of executing someone who is guilty only of appearing to have the potential to become a despot.

One intriguing artistic choice in this production is the use of masks. Mask maker Chuck Herriott’s training and experience as a visual artist and actor add yet another layer of uncertainty to a play already rife with doubt. Main characters do not use them, but secondary and supporting characters do, and in a cast where actors play multiple roles, the masks make them more believable and easier to distinguish. But while the masks help us identify characters, masks are inherently suspect. Is the wearer who they say they are? What do they want? What are they hiding? Again, the audience and the Roman people are asked to make decisions based on words alone, without visual proof.

We never witness Caesar do or say anything that outright implicates him as a potential tyrant and there is just enough doubt left in viewers’ minds that it becomes impossible to choose a “right” side. We are left to base our judgments, as the characters do, on speech. The play raises questions about justice, truth and the distribution of power that are unsettling in their relevance to our current world. As Irvine writes in the playbill, “In an age of news and fake news, and of good leaders versus bad, this all too familiar story challenges us to ask ourselves exactly who and what do we believe and why?”

For more information, visit www.perchancetheatre.com or phone 1-709-771-2930.

The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.

Reviewing Shakespeare is produced by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the University of Warwick to provide a searchable archive of independent reviews of worldwide Shakespearian performance.

Review by Paul Franssen (Utrecht University)

Photograph by Koen Timmerman. A shy Isabella (Inge Wijers).

As usual in Diever, the auditorium was split in two by the narrow central stage. Spectators were faced with the one-dimensional outline of a row of houses in the middle, and churches on either side of the stage. Large, window-shaped cut-outs allowed the audience on both sides to see what was happening; and with their huge arches, these windows sometimes looked like the niches containing the statues of saints or monarchs on the outside of a cathedral. In the very centre of the stage was an elevated platform that mostly served as the rostrum from which a powerful male addressed his subjects. Underneath this seat of power, the bars of the prison were visible, behind which Claudio sometimes appeared.

Before the show started, costumes were hanging all over the stage, which created the impression of a slum; some of the actors were being made up in full view of the audience, and gradually they put on the various garments, so that, by the time the performance began, all the clothes had gone from the set. The costumes, apart from those for the nuns and friars, seemed designed to accentuate gender differences. The male costumes in particular had huge shoulder pieces, Angelo’s most of all. The prostitutes wore bodices and frilly bloomers, reminiscent of the nineteenth century. Pastel colours were predominant, with the Duke, Angelo, and the nuns all dressed in pale blue.

In a year when most professional Dutch theatre companies decided not to stage Shakespeare or any other classic dramatist, the Diever amateur theatre company showed once more just how relevant Shakespeare still is—or can be made to be. The choice of play for this season, decided upon a year ago, was probably inspired by the topical affairs of that moment, which have not lost their interest since: me-too, fake news, trial by media, and the general public’s volatility in public debates. These, rather than piety or sexual abstinence, were the themes foregrounded by this production.

The role of the general public as a many-headed twittering monster was suggested by placing all of the actors, when they were not needed on stage, among the audience, occasionally shouting their comments from there. This could be merely funny, as when they repeatedly reminded hesitant characters on-stage of what country the Duke was supposedly visiting (“Poland!”); but sometimes it was almost threatening, as when Mistress Overdone’s accusation that Lucio had impregnated one of her girls, Kate Keepdown, was greeted by shouts like: “Fake News!” At other times, the people’s voice was common-sensical. When the duke, disguised as Friar Lodowick, suggested that Angelo had merely tried to test Isabella’s virtue (3.1.160ff), the actors in the audience reacted in utter disbelief: “You must be crazy!”, one was heard to shout. All criminal or questionable behaviour was exposed in public. When Claudio complained to the Provost of his public shaming and desired just to be led to prison (1.2.105), he wore a sign around his neck saying “Fornication;” later Pompey and Mistress Overdone were treated similarly. Erratic as public opinion seemed to be, not all reported crimes were fake news. Angelo here did not just blackmail Isabella, but on her second visit he tried to rape her on-stage, throwing her down and tearing her dress and knickers.

Most attention was attracted by Isabella. The actress, Inge Wijers, was generally praised by reviewers as a promise for the future. She played her role as an impassioned young woman, courageous and determined, yet without any obvious piety. Wijers’ novice was somewhat awkward, lacking in the social graces. Like the other nuns, she was startled by Lucio’s visit to the convent in 1.4, and wanted to run away; when it became clear that it was her that Lucio wanted to speak to, another nun cravenly pushed her forward, to deal with that dangerous creature alone. Isabella then overcame her hesitation, when she heard her brother’s life was at stake. Also in her dealings with Angelo, she was unsure of how to approach him; sometimes deferential, at other times almost cheeky. Here Jack Nieborg’s free Dutch translation also helped, as she hailed Angelo (and other dignitaries) with an overfamiliar “Hoi!” [“Hi there!”], and oscillated between the polite, formal form of the second person pronoun and the indecorous, familiar form. “Angelo, man, listen to your heart!”, she appealed to him. Rather than having Lucio with her on her first visit (2.2), to encourage her to try once again to persuade Angelo, she bravely faced the deputy alone. On her second visit, when Angelo tried to rape her, she struggled bravely, and with success: by pulling his wig from his bald head, she made him lose his appetite for the moment. This unexpected, farcical outcome of a highly serious scene earned her a big laugh from the audience. When the duke/Friar Lodowick later began to propose his bed-trick plan to her, telling her he had a plan that would help out a “poor wronged lady” (3.1.196), meaning Marianna, Isabella interjected: “I am not a poor wronged lady!”, and we believed her: she was far from a helpless victim. When he then instructed her to agree to Angelo’s proposals, she almost walked out on him. Yet at the end, this brave girl, too, was at a loss for words, when the duke suddenly proposed to her, then walked off stage, commanding her to follow him to the church. She was left alone on stage, flabbergasted, obviously reluctant to follow him but hesitant about what to do.

Although the performance dealt with serious issues, this is not to say that the comedy was forgotten. In its fast-paced rhythm, the show switched constantly between scenes of high seriousness and farce. Isabella occasionally burst into over-the-top hysterical screaming, as when her brother begged her to give in to Angelo. When the dead pirate’s head was needed to stand in for Claudio’s, Pompey went underneath the stage and loud sawing noises were heard. He then threw up a head with the stereotypical pirate’s eye-patch, but in his enthusiasm he produced one more head, plus a number of limbs, until the Provost cried down to him, “That will do!” The remains of the pirate’s body were then also brought upstairs, to be taken away in a coffin, but the corpse fell out. When another nun, Francesca, came on, she was confronted with the corpse, and ran off in hysterics.

Lucio (Floris Albrecht), too, provided much of the comedy, in his obvious folly and hypocrisy. When Pompey appealed to him for help, his basic meanness and feelng of superiority were obvious. His punishment, having to marry Kate Keepdown at once, felt fully deserved.

The duke was an elusive character. In the opening speech, he addressed his people very much like a politician on election night, trying to win their hearts by talking down to them. In this sense he was the opposite of Angelo, who seemed aloof and arrogant. When the duke later asked whether Angelo should be dealt with as he had dealt with Claudio—”measure for measure”—(5.1.412-18), speaking from the platform, the audience was moved to silence. Yet this very character, the one man whom Isabella trusted, betrayed her in the end by almost demanding, rather than proposing, marriage to her. Men, in this production, tended to be unreliable creatures. The nuns’ instinctive fear of them looked like a merely farcical element at first, but turned out to be justified in the end.

The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.

By Sarah Olive

It’s a popular fallacy in Japan that it is difficult to produce Othello because the country is too culturally homogenous: fallacious because, in Japan, there are several marginalised indigenous populations plus zainichi Koreans (usually denoting Koreans who came to Japan as its colonial subjects) and, in the twenty-first century, an increasing immigrant population with the largest numbers coming from China and Vietnam. Gaijin (outside + person) is a term often applied to both temporary visitors and non-Japanese nationals resident in Japan, with opinions about its usage ranging along a continuum between innocuous and derogatory. There is a history of, and ongoing, prejudice against all of these groups in Japan.

Happily, this production undercuts this fallacy, and junks a tradition still seen in Japan of playing Othello in blackface or brownface, by focusing on tensions between ethnically Japanese and Ainu people, who have belatedly been recognised by the Japanese national government as the indigenous people of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. The production opens with several performances from Ainu traditional culture by four Ainu women from the dance group Pirikap (directed by Debo Akibe, they are Yuka Hayasaka, Yuni Hayasaka, Chiyomi Fujioka and Ayumi Ueno). These include a mukkur performance (a kind of mouth harp played by women to initiate courtship), a crane dance where the women’s boldly patterned jackets were flapped over their heads to becoming beating wings, and a tonkori performance (a stringed instrument, held vertically over the heart). At first giving the impression of a variety show of Ainu arts, the performances became increasingly well connected to Dezuma’s (Ai Ishida) marriage to Othello (Takafumi Mito) as these actors appeared on stage in their wedding garb and the ire of characters like Roderigo (Natsuki Katou) and Brabantio (Masayoshi Fujino) at the match emerged. For example, the tonkori was originally developed as an aid to mourning a lost child, while crane dances offer multiple possible commentaries on the experience of fledging a chick, warding off evil and mateship. Othello wore clothes denoting his Ainu heritage. Dezuma initially wore a red chrysanthemum kimono showing her Japanese ethnicity: chrysanthemums are associated with the imperial family of Japan (indeed, its seal comprises of the flower’s image), symbolise longevity and renewal and connote Japanese fine arts, in which it is a common motif. Upon her marriage (vows taken in the Ainu language), she exchanged this for a matanpushi (a headband, handed down from Othello’s mother it stood in for the handkerchief of Shakespeare’s play) and robe embroidered and patterned in the same way as the Ainu performers. Othello’s Christianity in Shakespeare’s play became, in this production, a vociferous commitment to the Ainu gods.

This Othello, raised within a Japanese military household, holds a senior role in the forces of a Japanese clan guarding against a Russian invasion (the Russian island of Sakhalin is separated from Hokkaido by less than thirty miles of sea). His account of his exploits describes a wintery northern landscape of snow, bears, and, when the thaw comes, plum blossom. The sea lies at the centre of this verbal canvas, and references to fishing adventures here join up with the narrative details of the voyage to combat the invading fleet elsewhere in the play. The storm that destroys the Russians and brings Othello safely to Hokkaido is woven into Ainu story-telling, being performed by the Ainu women who billow sheets in imitation waves. Othello retells his story of joining the Japanese in Hokkaido and falling in love with Desdemona to a backdrop of kirigami (paper cut-out) images projected onto the stage wall, interestingly a Japanese rather than Ainu art form, so the story of his love for the Japanese general’s daughter has become aesthetically Japanese in his imagination. This aesthetic, black figures on a white backdrop, was echoed when the murder of Roderigo by Yago was performed in lighting which silhouetted them.

It’s a something of a truism to say that Iago (here, Yago) is the best role in a production, and it applies here. Yago adds to his rationale for his malice towards Othello  that he is himself ‘half Ainu’ (rataskep in Ainu). Yago’s hair and beard echoed Othello’s, but his clothes seemed more in tune with those of the Japanese army. This adds a compelling twist to his motives and reweights the whole story towards the Ainu perspective. The programme provided an extract of a public conversation between the Japanese and Ainu co-directors, in which Akibe seems to caution fellow Ainu people not to ‘retaliate’ against or seek ‘revenge’ on ‘the Japanese’ for years of ‘discrimination’ and ‘mistreatment’, but offer ‘confronting’ dramatic representations of them. Akibe apparently asked Shimodate to make Yago Ainu as well as Othello. His words, translated into English, suggest that his request was about equality of representation, adding nuance to the production, and avoiding Shimodate’s first impulse to lionise the Ainu through Othello : ‘There are plenty of Ainu villains…Victims of mistreatment can join up to resist, but they can also turn on each other. And that can be the more savage’.

Isamu Izumori conveyed Yago’s villainy with his easy shifts between outward, crass bonhomie (miming voluble urination against a wall as ‘one of the lads’) and devious plotting  (parodying Othello and Dezuma’s sexual encounters in ways that both titillated Roderigo and himself).  In the final scene, he faced Othello, with his hands on the other’s shoulders, squarely; faced death squarely; laughing into Othello’s and death’s face. His cackling after being stabbed suggested his commitment to villainy and to his own perverse form of bushido (samurai behavioural code/ethics), in an outrageous and dishonourable death that contrasted strongly with Othello’s quiet determination not to leave Dezuma’s side but to join her in death (even though his belatedly recovered sense of devotion remains, as ever, unpalatable in the twenty-first century). He reprised an earlier set of gestures  reminiscent of those used to waft incense over your face and body at a Buddhist temple, and therefore to cleanse and bless you – though these are likely to have a, possibly different, Ainu significance — before falling on his knife and Dezuma, as the Ainu women surrounded the corpses, perhaps to reclaim them.

Despite Othello’s not being the most obvious soil from which to grow feminist theatre, there was much to like about the production’s treatment of women actors and roles. Several female actors played male roles, effortlessly adopting a lower pitch for their speeches, in a pleasant contrast to this season at the Royal Shakespeare Company where getting more women on stage has involved rewriting roles as female, with rather variable success and debatable contribution to the plays’ hermeneutics. Emilia was played by the producer, Kate Yamaji, apparently at very short notice. The small playing space made Emilia’s accusations to Yago of his possible villainy even more awkward than usual, cutting closer to the bone, and it was delightful to watch him try to shrug off her indictments. The Ainu women performers joined the action beyond dancing and singing. For example, they echoed various curses heaped on Dezuma, by her father and, later, Othello, not so much agreeing with them as heightening their fearfulness for her or perhaps for the impact conflict would have on the Ainu people. They sprang up as though to protect Dezuma when Othello would strike her, hands over their aghast mouths. They made deep, buzzing, crane calls when Yago suggests strangling Dezuma to Othello as a remedy for his distress at her (falsely) alleged infidelity. Was this female fellow feeling, or feeling for a woman they had actively adopted into their culture and who was now, for all her apparent privilege of wealth and dominant culture, being made a vulnerable outsider by Othello? Unusually, Bianka (portrayed as an Ainu woman by Shima Koda) bore no outward indicators of her status in the play as ‘whore’, perhaps suggesting the production’s refusal to judge or demean women in colonized lands who make their living from sex-work with the oppressing forces. Her antagonistic relationship with other Ainu women was marked by their scattering away from her and her snatching up the tune they had been singing and rendering it parodically herself. There followed an interesting exchange with Kashiro (a typically dashing Casio, played by Kinji Watanabe) which poignantly captured her conflicted identity and loyalties. Kashiro told her he had made a copy of a headband he had found, showing her the original and the copy. Her immediate exclamation was one of horror, since, as she explained, it is not in the Ainu culture to steal designs in that way. However, she then accepts the copy for herself, explaining that she can’t say no to a gift from her irresistible lover.

The subtitles, written by Fumiaki Konno, largely using a mix of Shakespearean and modern English idiom, were clear and mercifully concise, allowing one’s eyes to get back to the action on-stage. The action was tight, fitting the production into around two hours and twenty-minutes including an interval. This production saved oodles of time usually spent languorously changing Desdemona into her wedding night apparel. Instead, Dezuma slipped on her Ainu robe first seen in the wedding scene over her ordinary wear. Instead of watching Emilia make up a bed with immaculate hospital corners, this Emiria (Kate Yamaji) promptly plonked an over-size cushion on stage. Instead of the usual ‘Willow song’, Dezuma touchingly sung ‘the song of the Ainu’, which Othello had taught her and which captured her own dedication to immersing herself in Ainu language and culture. Perhaps more controversially, Dezuma’s fleeting revival was cut: her strangulation with the headband, returned to Othello by Emiria as proof of Dezuma’s fidelity, was instantaneous. Otherwise, the few weak points were bits of over-acting between Yago and Roderigo, in their plotting scenes, that jarred with the otherwise naturalistic performances. Additionally, the multiple occasions when Dezuma is struck could be either more decisively realistic or stylised –from my vantage in the theatre, they hovered unconvincingly between the two.

While, as reviewer, I am perhaps representative of a good chunk of the audience on the night – white, mainly monolingual, know a bit about Shakespeare and about Japan, but little about the Ainu people – I would be fascinated to read reviews of the production by others with a greater knowledge of Ainu and Japanese language and culture as well as those newer to them and to Shakespeare.

Review by Paul Franssen (Utrecht University)

Regan (Kelly Poukens) and Goneril (Ekaterina Levental) triumphant on the upper playing level. © Ben van Duin.

Holland Opera, formerly known as Xynix, has a long history of musical adaptations of Shakespeare, particularly for the young, including children’s versions of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew. Since 2005, however, their focus has changed from children’s musical theatre to work for a more general public, though accessibility remains one of their priorities. This year, they performed King Lear, in an English text largely based on Shakespearean fragments, with Dutch surtitles. The programme booklet spoke of Giuseppe Verdi’s plans for an opera on the basis of Antonio Somma’s libretto, but Holland Opera’s plot involved a far more radical reworking than Somma’s. The music was partly by Verdi, lifted from different works—no music written for Re Lear survives—partly by Fons Merkies, a Dutch composer mainly known for his film scores. Joke Hoolboom’s libretto condensed the plot and the dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s King Lear to the utmost, combining several characters and episodes into one, thus reducing the cast to Lear, his daughters, and Edmund, as well as a chorus that commented on the events. Lear and Gloucester became one character, as did Cordelia and Edgar, while Edmund merged with Oswald. Kent, the fool, and the daughters’ husbands had all disappeared, as had the political implications of the plot, wars and marriages of state.

At times, Hoolboom’s condensed plot seemed slightly puzzling and illogical—Lear deliberately blinding himself in his grief seemed not just implausible but was also easy to miss—but in an opera such flaws matter less than in a play. Besides, it did make sense to merge the plots of Lear and Gloucester, which are so obviously parallel. Also the two duels involving Edgar, once against Oswald, once against Edmund, were merged into a single fight in which Cordelia/Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom/the peasant kills Edmund, but is herself mortally wounded in the process—which brings in a motif from a third sword fight, that between Cornwall and his servant. Most importantly, the condensed plot became more of an Aristotelian unity, as there was one clear original conflict that motivated everything that followed: it is Edmund’s frustration at being denied his birth right that turns him into the machiavel who brings about the destruction of Lear and his family.

This production of Lear took place in the open air, in one of the nineteenth-century fortresses to the east of Utrecht. The extensive grounds, with their undulating terrain and ancient buildings, offered an ideal backdrop for such a production, although some scenery had been added. In front of the audience, a kind of bandstand had been erected for the orchestra. On top of that, there was an upper playing area representing Lear’s court. A ramp connected this upper area to the lower playing area at ground level, representing life outside the court. At the top of the ramp, there was a gate which was sometimes open, sometimes locked, depending on who wished to enter the court. In addition, at ground level, stage right, there was a shrine with a flame burning on top, inside a small glass building, suggesting a kind of mausoleum; adjacent to this, a few rusty metal sheets planted in the earth represented tombstones.

This graveyard setting played a role in the prologue. After the chorus had sung their opening lines on storm and thunder, dressed all in black and descending slowly like a funeral cortege, Lear went to pray in the mausoleum, while simultaneously Edmund knelt down before one of the humbler tombstones. The suggestion was, at least in hindsight, that Lear was praying for his deceased wife, Edmund for his mother; for it soon emerged that, in this much condensed plot, Lear doubled as Gloucester, the father of illegitimate Edmund. Edmund then hailed Lear and appealed to him to acknowledge him as his son. Lear, however, dismissed him mockingly, and told him, in a paraphrase of Gloucester’s words to Kent: “Conceiving [begetting] you was good fun.” He refused to grant Edmund a share of his inheritance, which was all for his legitimate daughters. This prologue gave an extra dimension to both characters: Edmund’s malice was motivated by this direct insult, and besides, his praying at his mother’s tomb suggested that at first he cared for something else than just himself and his goddess Nature. Lear remembers his wife, but brings down his fate on himself by his callous dismissal of his bastard son—cf. Gloucester’s relatively good-humoured remark to Kent: “the whoreson must be acknowledged” in Shakespeare’s original. Edmund went off, threatening to take what was withheld from him.

Soon, however, any audience sympathy that Edmund had gained at the outset evaporated, when he started his scheming. Edmund overheard the king having prophetic nightmares of being cast aside by his people, and so he approached him in his half-sleep, presented himself as “a little voice in your head,” and suggested a solution to Lear: why not give your legacy to your daughters now, to be rid of your burden, and give most to her that claims she loves you most. He even managed to make Lear believe that he had thought up this idea himself, in his dream. Thus, again, external motivation was provided for an action that in Shakespeare remains irrational: Lear’s foolish love test is the result of Edmund’s prompting.

Lear was enthusiastic about the plan, and proud of having thought it up himself (or so he thought) and summoned his daughters. The two elder girls arrived in a decadent open black sportscar, Cordelia, more modestly, on foot. Yet, apart from a penchant for luxury, there was no indication yet of the elder sisters’ innate wickedness. When Lear put the test to them, they of course flattered him fulsomely—Regan asking for time to deliberate, then simply parroting her sister—and were invited to join Lear on the upper level, while Cordelia was stopped by the fence at the gate. The elder sisters’ character was only fully revealed—or brought into being?—when they were subsequently seduced by Edmund. While the chorus sang a chilling “Dies Irae,” the day of vengeance, from Verdi’s Requiem, he reappeared, accompanied by four sinister motorcyclists clad in black, his “friends,” who turned out to be acrobatic dancers. Goneril, standing on the upper playing area, was impressed by the power exuded by this handsome stranger, embodied by the dancers, and fell for his charms. Tutored by Edmund, she became convinced that Lear’s bequest of his legacy before his death was a way for him to put a claim on her, and she began to resent her father. She turned away Lear when he came to claim her hospitality: now he found the gate at the top of the ramp closed against himself. Regan, too, fell for Edmund, expressing her fatal adoration of his dark charms in words derived from Shakespeare’s sonnet “My love is as a fever”:

What miracle has made you see the light?

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

What power!

What grace!

Made you see the light!

She, too, disowned her father as a consequence. The ramp was then altogether disconnected from the upper area, symbolizing the total breach in the royal family, leaving Lear and Cordelia below, the two wicked sisters on the upper level.

Lear was now an outcast, suddenly and inexplicably blind, roaming the ground level playing area and seeking shelter in the mausoleum. Then he met Cordelia, also roving the grounds in disguise as Poor Tom. Having taken on the characteristics of Edgar, she promised to take her father to a cliff, where they never arrived. The focus now shifted to her two sisters, both clad in scarlet, who were fighting each other over the love of Edmund, and ended up strangling one another. Meanwhile Cordelia/Edgar/the peasant challenged Edmund as a traitor, fighting with her cudgel, with the result that Edmund was killed, Cordelia mortally wounded. Lear, realizing what had happened, then held the dying Cordelia in his lap, in an inverse Pietà posture, and mourned his one good daughter. Ultimately the four “corpses” got up again, and one by one they filed through the mausoleum, which was now filled with smoke, and lined up behind it, in an area that seemed to symbolize the hereafter.

Lear remained alone, sitting on the grass, lamenting his fate as the only survivor. The chorus sang a concluding dirge, stressing the consequences of Lear’s folly: “No child, no home. … it’s darkness all around.”

With its modern elements (the sports car and motorcycles) and fast pace, and a duration of less than two hours (without a break), this production was relatively light and accessible also to young people, who were also in evidence among the audience. The singing and orchestral accompaniment were first-rate. The costume design, too, was modern: the actresses all wore trousers, suggesting emancipated women, which was white at first, but the two elder daughters changed to red clothing once they had been seduced by their half-brother Edmund. The chorus wore black, as did the sinister motorcyclists (with a red stripe); Edmund started out in white but changed to black to suggest his increasing wickedness, while Lear was in white throughout. This seeming schematicism was offset, however, by a more nuanced moral evaluation, where Lear himself bore most of the blame for the downfall of his entire family, which he himself survives only as a blinded wreck sitting among the ruins.

Reviewed by Sara Marie Westh

Sometimes you stumble on something truly excellent, and it becomes all the more so by being unexpected. I have attended the RSC Dell performances for several years now, and have enjoyed myself entirely. As a student, I consider the fact that they are free a bonus, and there is something pleasantly subversive about the format: you can come when you like, leave when you like, and no one raises an eyebrow at your departure. It is the most free form of theatre I have encountered, which i probably why it is so dear to me.

While I enjoy this summertime offering, I did not expect it to offer one of the best versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream I have ever seen. With the added framing narrative of the Spinster Society, Dream became a playful way of its performers engaging with their own struggles with men, the formidable spokesperson Olga Dmitrieva taking on the role of Oberon when all other members refused. So the stage was set for an interrogation of gender roles and the way we rely on them in assessing our relationships as women, as well as gentle sending up of how the entire topic itself.

All in all quite promising, I thought, as I settled down on one of the picnic blankets. Then followed an apology from the spokesperson: not all the members of the company spoke English – in fact, some of them only knew the words of their role. They were sorry for their accents, and offered (perfectly delectable) Russian sweets by way of further apology. Imagine the sheer courage demanded to stand up on stage in Stratford, in this political climate, and do Dream. I was blown away.

And the performance itself offered some of the strongest comedic acting I have seen recently. Elena Fedorova’s Titania was a powerful presence, hilariously undercut by her theatricality, while Raisa Vasilyeva, Anna Lesnykh, and Kate Dubova as the fairies were at once graceful and giggling, a mixture of the fairies we imagine and the youngsters who so often embody them. Nick Bottom – Sergey Shulzhenko – was the only man on stage, and in keeping the framing narrative was picked from among the audience. His performance favoured swagger over the traditional bumbling idiocy of the main mechanical, but to see a self-assured Bottom brought a different twang of joyful acceptance to his adventure with the fairies.

In my opinion, a good Dream stands or falls with the play within the play, and here, too, Shakespeare from Russia proved innovative: opening with a side-splittingly hilarious masque of the play, with the mechanicals acting out the storyline in interpretive dance, was as surprising as it was welcome. Anna Fedorova’s Peter Quince was perfectly pitched, with just the right amount of failed stage-mastery to both amuse and invite a twinge of pity, Anna Lesnykh’s Snout/Wall excelled in the physical comedy the role invites, and Irina Blinova’s Snug/Lion was a fierce beast, who, having roared and gored Thisby’s mantle, took great care to fold it up very neatly at the centre of the stage. Thisby, played by Olga Lopatina managed to hold off the pathos of her part for much longer than I’ve seen elsewhere, which heightened the tragedy hiding behind the end of the play within the play.

All in all, this was a masterful production, which managed on a shoestring what big commercial theatres have failed to do with lottery millions: an engaging, thoughtful, and entirely enjoyable Dream. I only hope to see the company again next summer.

Reviewed by Justin B. Hopkins

Production programmes. Photographer: Justin B. Hopkins

I went on holiday to Germany, with a long layover in Iceland on the way home. Setting out, I had no plans to attend any Shakespeare, but my spouse serendipitously found a Hamlet playing in Mainz and a Midsummer Night’s Dream (Jónsmessunaetur Draumur) in Reykjavík—how could we resist?

I want to share some reflections on the productions, but given my lack of fluency in either German or Icelandic, and the fact that I was on vacation, I want to keep it casual. I offer the following few theatrical snippets or “snapshots,” as it were, vignettes from my vacation, arranged loosely according to theme.

First, setting.

Midsummer’s elaborate set depicted an upscale, mid-to-late-ish twentieth century hotel, complete with grand staircase, two tiers of balconies, and working elevator (or lift). Also, it was all built on a turntable. The turntable began to revolve during the shift from Athens to the woods and continued through much of the rest of the play. I liked how it evoked the instability of the world, especially during Titania’s speech about disrupted seasons. I also enjoyed how the moving set was used during the various lovers’ pursuits, especially Helena’s chasing of Demetrius through the hotel’s revolving door while the entire hotel was itself spinning.

In Mainz, Hamlet happened almost entirely on a narrow strip of stage containing nine mismatched chairs, a makeup table and mirror, film lights, and various props (crowns, swords, a cross, a shopping cart). The curtain rose to reveal the masked cast (a variety of visages: commedia clown, porcelain doll, skull) in a straight line. They stepped forward, now in front of the lowering curtain. A grid of thirty television screens squared on a scaffold in the center lit up and flashed a wild montage (cats, foot[soccer]balls, BMWs, a woman applying moisturizer, Trump) while the cast danced in place to loud, electronic music. This disorienting display prepared us for the deconstructed, tech-heavy, symbol-saturated production that followed.

Second, language.

I know no Icelandic at all, so I couldn’t understand what Puck was saying, yet at one moment I (think I) knew exactly what he was saying. Responding to Oberon’s command, the subordinate spirit said something. Then said it again, Then said it again, slightly differently, and with what sounded an awful lot like “Tartar.” Safe to guess he was saying: “I go, I go—look how I go,/Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow (3.2.100-101). But then Puck paused for a moment, as if contemplating, and, turning and shrugging, said something else, which I could neither understand, nor place in Shakespeare’s script, where the next line is Oberon’s. However, since Puck walked straight to the on-stage elevator, I’d guess it was something along the lines of “I’ll take the lift.” Whatever the case, the audience roared with laughter. I chuckled along, delighted to decipher the translation (incidentally, done by Pórarinn Eldjárn)—part of the fun of attending Shakespeare in another language.

Because English has a closer relationship to German than Icelandic, I was able to catch a bit more of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translation. For example, I (think I) could tell that they moved some of the “O that this too, too solid [sullied?] flesh” (1.2.125) speech to the very beginning (completely cutting 1.1). How could I tell? I was pretty sure I heard the German for “garden”—“garten”—as in “’Tis an unweeded garden” (1.2.135), and then when 1.2 came around, Hamlet had very little to say between the court’s exit and Horatio’s entrance. More interestingly, in Hamlet’s confrontation with Ophelia, I was confident I caught the German word for love—“liebe”—though it was Ophelia who said it. This caught me off guard, since Ophelia does not use the word in the original English script; she only responds to Hamlet’s dissembling: “I did love you once…I loved you not” (3.1.116-120). Also, although I wouldn’t swear to it, it sounded like Ophelia said “ich liebe dich,” using the present rather than the past tense. That intriguing interpretation would be consistent with Paulina Jolande Alpen’s portrayal of Ophelia.

Next, surprising moments.

Titania’s lullaby was more aphrodisiac than soporific. On an upstage balcony, Helena sang Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” swaying sensuously, while below and center stage, surrounded by writhing fairies and bathed by red light, Titania and the Indian Boy copulated. I’ve never seen Midsummer’s Indian Boy portrayed so explicitly and emphatically as an object of erotic desire. Tall and muscular, his physique was accentuated by his costume: S&M-style leather strips, complete with muzzle and harness. He and the fairy queen grinded against each other while the other sprites grasped at them. All the while, Helena moaned (I assume, since it was in Icelandic): “You give me fever when you kiss me, fever when you hold me tight.”

Guildenstern was a sock puppet. Yes, you read that correctly. Perusing the programme, I noticed that there was only one actor playing both Rosencrantz und Guildenstern. My spouse jokingly suggested there might be a puppet involved, but we were both astonished when Rosencrantz did indeed strip off his sock, popped it on his hand, and adopted a squeaky voice to speak to Hamlet. Apparently this was an established aspect of their relationship, since the Prince promptly followed suit to carry on the conversation.

Finally, finale.

As far as I could tell, Puck pronounced the penultimate blessings assigned in the script to Oberon and Titania. He spoke the lines while the actors playing fairy king and queen were occupied making the transformation back to Theseus and Hippolyta for the post-wedding entertainment. But after the Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, and before Puck’s playful epilogue, there were several vigorous renditions of pop songs from the past 20 years, including Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” and Justin Bieber’s “Baby.”

More appropriately tragically, following an unusually acrobatic duel—the fencing framed with tumbling, tripping, jumping, tossing foils, and even flipping Laertes head over heels—Hamlet walked slowly to Claudius, stabbed him in the gut without comment. No need for this false Dane to drink anything. The Prince sat center stage to die, while Horatio mournfully spoke his requiem.

Tying it up, again loosely, with audience response.

In Reykjavik, given the average age of inclining rather beyond three score, I was impressed by how bold the production seemed, and how enthusiastic the response was. It’s a stereotype, I know, but I tend to expect older audiences to prefer traditional, conventional approaches, and I would not have guessed the graphic sexuality and the bizarre pop-musical conclusion would receive such strong affirmation—it received a standing ovation.

The audience in Mainz, on the other hand, was full of people closer to their teens—I suspect most were university students—and their reactions were more subdued, or at least less audible. They laughed at the only English spoken during the production: Hamlet’s halting delivery of a blue joke before The Mousetrap: “Better for a boy to meet a girl in the park than park the meat in a girl.” They laughed at The Mousetrap itself: the play-within-a-play was cleverly adapted to a video game with 1990s style graphics and sound effects, and with “cut scenes” that illustrated the murder, re-committed by Claudius, who held the controller. But by and large, they were quiet, and while they applauded at the end, most stayed firmly seated.

While I’ve attended Shakespeare in translation many times, those productions have almost always been on tour. To attend a performance in its cultural and linguistic home is different, somehow, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to experience it.

Companies websites: www.staatstheater-mainz.com/web/ and www.leikhusid.is/english/about-us

The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.

Reviewing Shakespeare is produced by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the University of Warwick to provide a searchable archive of independent reviews of worldwide Shakespearian performance.