From Lyn Gardner at the Guardian UK theatre blog, Should Shakespeare be barred?:
“Shakespeare is our cultural medicine, often nasty but we swallow it all the same because like cod liver oil we think it must be good for us.”
“As the US critic Gordon Rogoff so succinctly put it: ‘Shakespeare is feared by the young precisely because their elders are so damned sanctimonious about him.’ Every Shakespeare revival should treat the play as if it was brand new and the ink barely dry on the page, and until that happens and we have worked out how Shakespeare really can be our contemporary in 21st century Britain, maybe we should do him a favour and give him a rest.”
Do we have this same problem with Shakespeare in North America? How about a five-year moratorium on performing Shakespeare in Canada?
Yeah, I’d say N.A. has the same problem, but a moratorium would prevent all of those productions that do treat Shakes with a breath of new life. It seems like a step towards a helpful idea, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps more urgently, I propose a moratorium on Chekhov.
All too often, this great Russian playwright is used in Canada as a theatrical “comfort zone”. All snob-appeal, all good-taste and wistful, passive naturalism. Canada is far too prone to these vices as is.
Re: Shakespeare. I say put a moratorium on the comedies, for sure.
Being dedicated making new plays I have a major bias here, but yeah, i’m gonna come out and give this idea two thumbs up. Way up. In a theoretical kind of way.
It’s a pipe dream of course. The largest and most successful theatrical institution in the country is The Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada and who am I to say what can and not be produced. I’d still like it if it happened though.
In any case, as someone who works a lot teaching drama and theatre to high schoolers, I can see how Shakespeare becomes the introduction the majority of our teens have to the medium and a lot of them leave alienated from theatre for good. Even when the production is excellent.
I think if they started going to shows that were more contemporary and accessible, they could meet Shakespeare a little later and then really appreciate it once they were hooked on the art form (or not). So I guess I would like to spread the moratorium to English curriculum as well.
Anon: Let’s ban all Chekhov done in the manner you described, but that’s not how it should be done in the first place. And yes, the comedies should go first.
Even when Shakespeare is performed badly, the template of great theatre shows through. So I say keep him.
Re Chekhov, I’m familiar with apologist view of him, ie. he’s meant to be light and funny, etc. I don’t care. Bring on the moratorium.
I’d say put a moratorium on the well-known Shakespeare stuff: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Richard III, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Othello, and The Tempest. Might throw Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing in there too.
Heck, a moratorium on Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream alone might do it.
More things like A Winter’s Tale, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labors Lost, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Pericles, and Two Gentlemen of Verona.
In other words, stop picking stuff that’s been made into movies over and over again, and I think we might see more interesting Shakespeare stuff.
I’d probably put a moratorium on A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, and Waiting for Godot as well.
I’ve seen dozens of theatrical and cinematic productions of Shakespeare. I studied it in high school, like everyone else. I loved the Slings & Arrows television series. I even liked Baz Luhrmann’s version of Romeo & Juliet.
All this and yet I still can’t understand a frickin’ word of it. Let’s stop pretending those play were written in English – or any version of English that’s accessible to contemporary audiences. They weren’t and it’s not.
This is why I hate Shakespeare: I don’t understand the dialogue. At all. And I really feel like I’ve given it a fair shot. I don’t think I’m alone on this.
Enough with the Shakespeare. I mean, seriously.
A five-year artist-led moratorium. Yes! For the love of god.
See, but I swear to god I can direct (and will, it’s in the five-year plan) the shit out of R & J.
The problem is that (most of) the artists hold the same depth of interest in the work as the audience. When the artists are basing their interpretations of Shakespeare on the reactions they have to other interpretations they’ve seen (i.e. the movies and legions of stuffy stage productions)rather than their reactions to the actual words, what can we expect but a downward spiral?
How about a moratorium on prerecorded versions? So when high-schoolers learn Shakespeare, they aren’t learning it via Olivier or Branagh or Zeffirelli or even Luhrman. Make them come up with their own ideas.
Okay, now I’m in the pro-Shakespeare camp.
Re: language. Shakespeare proved language can be a gateway into a universe of tremendous cognitive vastness. The fact that Ian doesn’t get it is Ian’s fault and no one else’s.
Frankly, I’m disappointed to read Ian advocating philistine cultural eugenics.
Hi RVCBard,
Funny you should mention Waiting for Godot – a production of that play just won the Dora Award (a Toronto Tony) for Outstanding Production.
Do productions of Shakespeare’s plays continue to win important theatre awards?
F*ck the Doras. I propose a permanent “Godot” moratorium.
That insufferable shibboleth of a play.
Chicago Shakespeare just won the regional Tony — I think that counts…
You’re right Anon – it’s my fault. I was never any good at French either. And I’m probably just bitter for having had to endure so many hours of productions that were supposed be gateways into universes of cognitive vastness.
So let’s not ban Shakespeare because I say I don’t like it, or don’t get it. Let’s ban Shakespeare in favour of real, live, living, breathing playwrights. You know, the people who are alive and writing plays that no one ever sees because we’re all too busy running around trying to scrape together another lousy production of The Merchant of Macbeth.
Maybe we can find a way to tack an amendment on to Bill C-10.
See, this is where we tread into touchy ground for me, because I’m as much in favor of supporting new work as the next guy, but ‘new work’ doesn’t have to equal ‘new words’. You can do new and innovative work in so many ways alongside of producing new plays.
This damning of the classics only leads to the ‘utopia’ of each play being produced only once. Because why should we mount a second production of a work as long as there is one that is awaiting it’s world premiere? But I never seem to hear other playwrights clamoring to that end.
Bottom line for me is a moratorium on shitty productions: Shakespeare, Chekov, world premieres, the whole shebang. Can we do that first and then look at nixing specific plays after?
Ian, I love that show.
My favourite line sums up my argument completely:
All that glisters is may look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.
We can yack about Shakespeare moratoriums all we want. It ain’t gonna happen.
I don’t think Antoni Cimolino is going to read any of this and think, “hey, that’s a good idea”.
” . . . a moratorium on shitty productions . . .”
Done. No more bad art allowed. Only good art.
That was easy!
D’oh! That’s the problem. We’ve been making bad theatre instead of good!
Note to self: Make Good Theatre. Thank you, Paul Rekk.
Here’s the disparity that I think motivates this conversation:
If you did a Decima research poll, and asked Canadians “If you had to see a play, what would you like to see?”, and gave them some options, how well Shakespeare would do? I’m guessing, not very well.
If you added up all the money that is spent on productions, and divided it by playwright, there’s no way Shakespeare doesn’t come up with at least five times more resources than any other voice in theatre.
There is an imbalance in the ecosystem.
No, I think Shakespeare would top the list. They’re not gonna say George F. Walker.
Andrew Lloyd Webber would also be on top of this list, so …
Mock all you want, you two, but if it’s that easy, I don’t wanna hear any more bitching about ‘lousy productions of The Merchant of Macbeth’ or ‘insufferable shibboleths’ of any sort.
There’s a lot more bad art being created than good. Always has been, but history tends to forget the bad. It also serves to follow that this means there is a reason Shakespeare has survived. It’s not the material, it’s the artists reviving it. Give (dis)credit where it’s due.
Hi Paul,
That’s true. You’re right.
Though I wonder, is there anything about Shakespeare, in particular, that fosters the creation of bad art? Is it because it’s so good that most people try and fail? Is it because it’s so good that people assume its genius to be self-evident and therefor work less hard to unlock it? Or is it because some practitioners are attracted to Shakespeare’s readymade audience, and those kinds of practitioners are more interested in making money than art?
Just throwing ideas out there.
There’s a reason why Shakespeare continues to be performed over and over (even poorly). You could extend the same moratorium, as many have stated to any style or genre. For example, do we really need another production of South Pacific (even on Broadway)???
Ian,
A little of each, probably? I think a big reason is that people do Shakespeare because Shakespeare has the stigma that it is supposed to be done.
If you don’t find Shakespeare accessible in the least, then you shouldn’t be doing Shakespeare (not that I’m assuming you are). And that’s not a value judgement; artists should create in the manner that best speaks to them. Too many artists are more concerned either about selling the Shakespeare crowd or doing some overblown idea of capital-T theatre (and nobody is more capital-T than Willy) than what they truly feel is a necessity to the spectrum of the theatrical world.
I also think that a vast number of people who put up Shakespeare put it up not based on their response to his words so much as their response to another Shakes production (be it Olivier or a storefront dwon the street), which gives it a copy of a copy feeling and so on and so forth until hardly anything is recognizable.
I dunno; I love the dude thoroughly, but as a director, the only one of his shows I have to date had any desire to put up is R & J. And that’s primarily because I think the cliched R & J that everyone knows is a completely bastardized version of the actual play. And from that stance, I’d have a hard time denying anyone else who claimed similar for any of his other works.
Interesting proposal. While we’re on the topic of banning things, why don’t we ban all theatre for two years? See if society even notices. See if theatre is even relevant at all. We’d all go off, get some real life experience and if it seems like society does need theatre, we’d come back and perhaps create better work.
Never gonna happen, of course. Just as there will never be ban on Shakespeare. The problem with productions of Shakespeare is that they are bad productions.
Mike, if you pulled Shakespeare off the curriculum and introduced kids to theatre by making them sit through most Fringe shows, they’d run screaming from theatre just as quickly. At least with Shakespeare they have some good stories, characters and, of course language to dig into if they want.
Thanks Will, I’ll consider that next time we’re teaching Shakespeare together. Right about when all the kids tell us they want to do the scene “Gangster” so they can relate to it in some way.
sorry. that was me. as bookings. don’t ask.
I think you folks can create your own personal moratoriums on anything you want, by closing your eyes, blocking your ears and going “la la la”.
Yes, there are a lot of poor Shakespeare productions out there. Just avoid them, problem solved. There’s a very weird, Cromwellian tone to this whole conversation.
As someone who is dying to direct Shakespeare but who has been holding off because I wanted to make sure I understood how the language works, it would really suck if you put on your moratorium just as I was ready to go.
On a more serious note, some of the most incredibly productions I have ever seen have been of Shakespeare plays. Some of the most moving times I’ve ever had at a theatre has been at Shakespeare plays. I’ve personally put a moratorium on Dream, R&J, Comedy of Errors, & Tempest; yet I broke it recently to see Tim Supple’s Dream, and I regret never seeing Jonathan Crombie play Romeo at Stratford.
It doesn’t seem like a ban is in order, just more artists doing like I am and not immediately jumping to direct/act in it. It is a different style, like the Greeks, and all too often the text seems to be at the mercy of some grand concept.
To tie back to the article, some of the best Shakespeare I have ever seen used a mix of English with actors native languages – not just Supple’s Dream but Frank Theatre’s Crown of Blood (Macbeth). I think there is something to be said to trying to free Shakespeare from Elizabethan English.
Personally, I’ve been wanting to go the other way and go to original pronunciation and open-air performances. The experiments done in this excite me – the plays ran faster and the language had a greater attack. Since some people have trouble understanding the language, let’s just go full out with the feel of the text and see what happens.
I too, am so sick of Chekhov and would be happy to never hear about Godot again as well but am leary of talks of bans on anything artistically related. Each artist needs to go where their muse calls them and there are definite merits to the idea of experimenting with proven scripts.
“…Every Shakespeare revival should treat the play as if it was brand new and the ink barely dry on the page…”
And so should the audience. I’d not like to go 5 years without Shakespeare because I continue to make new discoveries each time I see one of his plays – no matter how familiar I thought I was with the play. Five years of new discoveries is too much to sacrifice!
As for the language, good acting aids comprehension greatly. The words are, for the most part, the same words we use every day; the phrasing is just a little funky. And is there another playwright whose words and phrases have become so commonly used in everyday speech?
Hell, no, to a moratorium. Bring it on!
Shakespeare doth suketh.
And bonus points for being racist AND sexsist.Not to mention fucking BORING. Let’s not even talk about Shakespeare for five years…..
Okay, the person above is a retard. Let’s not mince words.
And to all else who speak of moratoriums …
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” … “Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too.” (12th Night)
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” … “Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too.”
Care to translate this passage into dumbed-down contemporary English for the Shakespeare-impaired?
Thanks.
These words are directed by Sir Toby Belch and his gang of late-night partyers to the uptight, puritanical Malvolio, who has come down to scold them for their debauchery, gluttony and noise.
The point is, Malvolio doesn’t approve of what’s going on downstairs; but Sir Toby asserts that it’s none of his fucking business. Most people in this world like to enjoy life’s pleasures, and Malvolio can just fuck off.
“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Toby asks him.
“Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too!” adds Feste the clown.
MY point is, bad performances of Shakespeare WILL happen because people enjoy performing them. And the Malvolios posting above can go “shake their ears”.
Thanks. That’s funny. And apt.
I don’t think anyone here actually believes it’s possible or even desirably to put a moratorium on a playwright.
Still, many of the issues raised in the comments above are real and valid – and most have used the “moratorium” hyperbole as a point of departure for far more nuanced arguments.
For the record, I am not seriously advocating a ban on Shakespeare. I just tend to find it dull and boring and I’m bitter because it makes me feel ignorant.
The one company that I think could viably suspend Shakespeare would be London’s Royal National. It would be an interesting exercise, and a break for all other playwrights.
FYI, I live & breathe Shakespeare, but I agree that lame productions sully his reputation. For this reason, I increasingly avoid Canadian Shakespeare unless I hear it’s extraordinary.
FYI2, Shakespeare is worth the effort & not so difficult as he seems. Once you zen into his mindset, he makes perfect sense. Just think of him as a chap who talks in a very strange dialect. Listen close. It’s still English.
Wow. 36 comments and no mention of Artaud? Maybe we have to match his “No More Masterpieces” with a similar call for “No More Pointless Angry Prohibitions that Can’t be Enforced Anyway.”
I’ve been working in DC for a while, where Michael Kahn’s Shakespeare Establishment runs in full-force with the commemorative, monument-making spirit of the town. And I still can’t get enough of him.
Good luck and go forth …
Hi,
We’re blogging about Shakespeare, revivals, and what Jonathan Miller terms “Subsequent Performances” @ http://thankyounext.blogspot.com/