Comment

Comment by Kevin M Mitchell on January 16, 2013 at 7:28am

A really good question Jacob ... I can't help think of that theater cliche, and something my high school drama teacher always said, "the play's the thing." There might be some gray area, but there is a line when it stops being about the play and starts being about the director.  I saw that line crossed years ago when I was in LA and saw a production of ... I think it was Troilus and Cressida ... something a bit obscure, and the director reframed it as a video game. The acting and production were top notch, but I kept thinking it stank of "Look at me! The Director!  I'm so very CLEVER, aren't I?!?"

Also I had a play of mine completely taken hostage by a director who decided to add a bit AT THE END where a drunk comes on stage and kinda denies everything that happened before it with just a couple of lines.  (Best part? The director cast herself ... jeez.)

When the crux, the basic intent, of what is on the page is completely lost, that's when it's gone too far.

Comment by Denice Hicks on January 14, 2013 at 9:49am

Great topic, Jacob!  We just had a discussion about how far Shakespeare can stretch at a talk back after the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's performance of Macbeth yesterday.  Our current production has been edited, but no words have been intentionally substituted.  The purpose of theatre, according to Hamlet/Shakespeare, is to hold the mirror up to nature and show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.  Shakespeare's poetry is what makes the works so valuable, and his poetry and prose must be preserved, but the context is what makes it relevant, and I believe that Shakespeare's works hold up to a wide range of concepts.  I agree with A. Thomas Cavano that far too frequently concepts are slapped on to the plays without enough consideration of the text.  We don't work that way.  From the script we find the perfect settings that illuminate the stories and characters, and continually use the text as a touchstone for our productions.  Cowboy AS YOU LIKE IT?  Perfect.  Vaudeville RICHARD III?  Sublime.  1945 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING?  Delightful.  The plays stand up so long as the poetry and prose are respected. 

Denice Hicks, Artistic Director

The Nashville Shakespeare Festival

Comment by A. Thomas Cavano on January 14, 2013 at 6:41am

Hi Jacob

Thanks for this message – I enjoy receiving prompts about TheatreFace, reminding me to check out the blogs. Keep them coming!

I have to agree about your premise that a show needs its own language – music, gesture, conventions – in order to be what it is. I have to disagree about Shakespeare handling a lot of interpretations. My experience is that the plays written by Shakespeare do not survive the various interpretations foisted on them by creative souls. Most often the plays are inaccessible to the directors, and creativity of interpretation is due to lack of access to the plays – substituting modern conventions for interpretive incapacity. This is something more like your premise of how each of the plays you saw this weekend would stop being themselves if they used the language/lighting/costumes of the other. These interpretations and “treatments”  of Shakespeare’s plays are usually, inevitably, substitutes for an understanding of the material, pasted on to whatever is left of an injudicious editing of the script, and the play is lost. They call it HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK because someone does say “To be or not to be . . . .” But usually what is left of the play is shreds.

I have found that this is most often the case. See Peter Brook’s comments on Deadly Theatre. See the RICHARD III as offered up in the film THE GOODBYE GIRL. Shakespeare barely, rarely, survives the treatment of his plays. But we so seldom see the real thing that we don’t notice any more. We know less of Shakespeare’s plays that we know of Noh, Baratya Natyam, or Chinese Opera. But we hear the words, and nod our heads, and pretend to understand.

There is a market for Shakespeare, and it will be done over and over. “If were done, when ‘tis done, ‘twer best it were done  . . .” well.

A. Thomas Cavano