Patrick Carnegy

Back in the 1920s someone complained there wasn’t a play on the London stage that didn’t have a telephone in it. While it’s the lifeblood of theatre to move with the times, a mania for modish contemporaneity can only get you so far. The danger is especially endemic in theatre troupes dedicated to outreach and to widening access. New York’s ‘Theatre for a New Audience’ is plainly one of these and it was the final visiting company contributing to the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. (Injury has sadly postponed the official opening of King Lear with Ian McKellen, the RSC’s own final contribution on which I hope to report later.

The RSC’s Complete Works festival continues to produce wondrous juxtapositions. In the Courtyard Theatre Michael Boyd has rounded off his Wars of the Roses sequence with a Richard III which for a week played alongside an Arab reworking of the same play in the Swan. There seems no end to the uses to which the poor old hunchback villain can be put. Plainly he was in the running to be exposed sooner or later as Saddam Hussein. This was confessedly the first idea of Sulayman Al-Bassam in adapting the play for his Kuwaiti-based theatre  company.

Shakespeare’s ill-advised reimagining of Falstaff as a buffoon at large in Windsor has always been fair game for adaptation. The story goes that he wrote The Merry Wives in response to Queen Elizabeth’s wish to see Sir John in love. The fee may have been a good one and the Bard actually subverts the wish (if that’s what it was) in showing the fat knight more enamoured of the wives’ money than of their good selves. Such pleasure as there’s to be had in the play has to do with its picture of life in an English provincial town (a far cry from the exotic locations of the other comedies). French doctors and Welsh pastors are tolerated for their care of bodies and souls but are otherwise the butts of xenophobic mirth.

Michael Boyd’s Complete Works festival may not have over-garlanded Stratford with bunting and flags, but it’s made the town a much more buzzy place. Boyd is not only bringing back some of the best Shakespeareans of the older generation — including Patrick Stewart as Antony and Prospero, and Ian McKellen as Lear — but also nurturing a wonderfully talented younger generation. Tamsin Greig and Joseph Millson light up the stage as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, both starring also in King John alongside Richard McCabe’s arresting performance in the title role. For Much Ado, director Marianne Elliott goes to the pre-Castro Cuba of the 1950s, opening the way for a feast of salsa music, song and dance.

The programme gets it right in rating Henry VIII ‘at the edge of William Shakespeare’s drama and theatre’. It’s from the very end of his working life, co-written with John Fletcher, and is but seldom given. This, as became abundantly apparent in AandBC’s production for the RSC’s Complete Works, is because it’s a dry biscuit, and especially so when ‘staged’ along the length of the narrow centre of the nave of a church like Stratford’s Holy Trinity. Seated in raked tiers on either side, we were supposedly judge and jury in the machinations of Henry’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon and the battle royal between Catholicism in Wolsey and emergent Protestantism in Cranmer.

The story so far of the RSC’s Complete Works marathon has been largely that of performances, some wonderfully rich and strange, coming in from abroad. Unable to spend an entire summer camped out in Stratford, I have still to catch up with some of the reputedly stronger offerings by the home team. But even the prospect of having to battle for hot water and breakfast at one of Stratford’s more reputable hotels couldn’t keep me from the inauguration of the new Courtyard Theatre with Michael Boyd’s Henry VI trilogy, or from Patrick Stewart as Prospero in the unsatisfactory cinematic 1930s theatre which is shortly to be disembowelled (not before time) and reconstructed. The Courtyard Theatre is a crucial transitional step.

On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan It was really rather a surprise to stumble across Shakespeare in his native tongue after the revelatory pleasures (I do not jest) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a cornucopia of Indian languages and of Titus Andronicus in a phenomenally eloquent guttural Japanese. On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan for its contribution to the RSC’s international exploration of the complete works of the bard.

Titus Andronicus is the Shakespeare shocker of the moment. At the Globe in London the groundlings have made Page Three news by fainting away in droves as limbs are lopped and tongues excised in Lucy Bailey’s staging (which I regret I haven’t seen). In the Daily Telegraph Charles Spencer rates it the hottest, goriest ticket in town. Arriving in Stratford-upon-Avon from Japan, Yukio Ninagawa’s extraordinary company eschews the buckets of stage blood in favour of fountains of exploding red ribbon. Ninagawa’s previous venture with the RSC — an Anglo-Japanese Lear with Nigel Hawthorne uneasily in the title role — fell between the two cultures.

Listing page content here In my first report (13 May) from the front line of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, I praised a visiting German company’s take on Othello, making unfavourable comparison between its radical daring and the RSC’s own often disappointing response to the big S in its title. If that was an unkind generalisation, it’s time to get down to specifics in two of the resident company’s early contributions to the festival. In the Swan there’s a starrily cast Antony and Cleopatra directed by Gregory Doran, while in the main theatre Nancy Meckler takes on Romeo and Juliet.

At its première just over 50 years ago, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was, at least in part, a sane man’s strike against America’s McCarthyite paranoia about communism. Miller’s cover for his protest was, of course, the infamous Salem witch-hunts conducted by the New England Puritans in 1692. In resurrecting the play as its tribute to Miller, who died just over a year ago, the RSC is plainly aware that the piece is now tested against new terrors confronting the liberal world.

Farewell to Bonfire Night, farewell to the heedless celebration of ‘gun- powder, treason and plot’. Events since 9/11 have branded us all with the grim reality of religiously inspired terrorism. Play after play now seeks to dramatise the underlying causes. Who’s to say that the theatre doesn’t stand at least as good a chance as psychologists, sociologists and the rest of the pack of casting a glimmer of light in the dark? My critical colleagues certainly felt this of Edward Kemp’s treatment of the Guy Fawkes conspiracy, 5/11, a hit at this year’s Chichester Festival, and which I’m truly sorry to have missed.

The other day on Radio Four David Hare set one of his namesakes running when he remarked that the RSC was ‘completely irrelevant to the theatrical life of the country’. Well, certainly in so far as it’s a company dedicated to the Swan of Avon rather than the Bard of Hampstead. Is it self-evident that a play by Hare about the Middle East is a more useful contribution to debate, theatrical or otherwise, about that subject than a play by Shakespeare about the Wars of the Roses? The RSC is no stranger to the slippery notion of relevance, though more wisely circumspect than Hare. Hence, at least in part, the rationale for its ongoing ‘Gunpowder’ season of plays, written around 1605, by Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

A chill spring day in Stratford for the RSC’s launch of its summer comedies season with a new Midsummer Night’s Dream from Gregory Doran. A production to warm the heart? Certainly, for how could any half-competent staging fail to do so, and anything directed by Doran is usually rather better than that. But where so many are constantly beating a path through the Athenian forest, it’s a task of tasks to find anything new to say. On this score he chalks up few points. On the other hand, there’s perhaps some relief that no alien concept has been imposed, no abhorrent substructure excavated, no relevance insisted upon. A startling beginning will do very well.

What does anyone readily recall of the Two Gents other than the servant Launce and his magnificent dog Crab? Maybe that’s all you need to remember, for it’s really only in Launce’s observations on Crab that the unmistakeable voice of Shakespeare surfaces from the dross of a comedy that may well have been his first. Who but Shakespeare would have had Launce boast that when Crab farted under the Duke’s table he himself owned up and took the punishment on his own back? Hard to escape the feeling that the apprentice Bard was so bored with injecting a semblance of life into a stock tale of lovesick heroes and their ladies that, in a couple of scenes, he mischievously allows a dog to upstage the lot of them.