Shakespeare, William

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Review: ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Cut in Half and Twice as Good

      by

      Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley star as the star-crossed lovers in a compelling stage-film hybrid adaptation.What’s written in haste may be repaired in haste. Or so the fine and fleet new “Romeo and Juliet” from Britain’s National Theater, available here on PBS’s “Great Performances,” convinces me.At 90 minutes, it is even shorter than the “two hours’ traffic of our stage” promised in its first lines but rarely honored in performance. (The entire play normally takes about three hours.) Yet as directed by Simon Godwin, this emotionally satisfying and highly theatrical filmed version scores point after point while whizzing past, or outright cutting, the elements that can make you think it was written not by Shakespeare but by O. Henry on a bender.If the cutting merely left what remains with a much higher proportion of penetrating insight and powerful feeling, that would be enough; “Romeo and Juliet,” at its best, anticipates the great later works in which complexity and ambivalence are made real and gorgeous in language. But the speed serves another function here: telling a story that’s mostly about teenagers with a teenage intensity and recklessness.Not that the stars are anywhere near their adolescence. Though Romeo is 17 or so and Juliet, 13, Josh O’Connor, who played mopey young Prince Charles in “The Crown,” is 30, and Jessie Buckley, the mysterious star of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” 31. Still, there’s a reason they’re called actors: They can perform the acts a play requires of them. Onstage, at any rate, that would be sufficient.Under Simon Godwin’s direction, the masked ball in this “Romeo and Juliet” is closer to a rave.Rob YoungsonOn film, we need an extra push, which Godwin and Emily Burns, who adapted the text, provide by grounding us in a theatrical world before escorting us into a filmic one. The production begins unceremoniously with the cast in street clothes, entering a theater, unmasked and vulnerable, none more so than O’Connor, with the low-slung, “sticky-out” ears he says earned him his role on “The Crown.” Sitting on three sides of a small, square, scuffed playing space, the actors are barely past the greeting phase — O’Connor and Buckley smile shyly at one another, as if across a Veronese piazza — when the play leaps out of the gate.Purists not already offended will soon have plenty to set them off. The masked ball at which the lovers meet is not exactly courtly; it’s more like a rave, and Romeo is given just two lines (instead of 10) to fall for Juliet, who is moaning at the mic like Lana Del Rey.But impurists will be satisfied that the erotic intensity between them is so palpable, even when Godwin dissipates it by cutting away from the theatrical moment to a filmed montage in some other dimension. Similarly, the introduction of a passionate gay pairing among the supporting roles makes up in thematic coherence — the plot turns on forbidden love — what it lacks in textual fidelity.The trade-offs continue throughout. The most fascinating one finds Juliet’s parents inverted, Lady Capulet (Tamsin Greig) getting most of the lines Shakespeare wrote for her Lord (Lloyd Hutchinson). Greig, so funny on the Showtime series “Episodes,” is spectacularly entertaining as she explores what besides the habitual assertion of male power might motivate a parent to threaten a daughter with expulsion. Her interpretation, underlined by “evil” music, nevertheless denatures one key feature of the play, which now suggests that the Capulets are monsters when the really terrifying thing is that they’re not. They are upstanding citizens doing what’s expected.It is that atmosphere of immutable custom and inherited hatred that the lovers are desperate to escape. But Godwin’s staging makes clear by physical proximity and by judicious intercutting that these elements are related: Romeo and Juliet’s passion is as rash and irrational as the other characters’ repression and violence. As the outlines of their love are filled in, so is the hatred around them — and so are the set (by Soutra Gilmour) and props; swords that were simple wooden dowels in Act I by Act III are knives that look menacingly real. In youth, it seems, enmity precedes an enemy just as love precedes a lover.Tamsin Greig as Lady Capulet and Lloyd Hutchinson as Lord Capulet.Rob YoungsonAt every turn we are offered insights like that until, suddenly, we aren’t. Nothing Godwin can do to make the play rough and unfamiliar — whether by having Tybalt (David Judge) urinate on a wall or by excising greatest hits like “parting is such sweet sorrow” — can help it get past the place where the lovers’ ingenuity fails along with Shakespeare’s. The plot thread by which Juliet’s fake death prompts Romeo’s real one is so absurdly flimsy that adaptations have tried for centuries to fix it; Arthur Laurents’s workaround for “West Side Story” is especially strong.For me, though, no production of “Romeo and Juliet” survives the potions of Friar Laurence; they are a lot of magick to swallow in a play about such real and serious things. That Laurence is portrayed here (by Lucian Msamati) with great dignity, not as a nutty professor, helps, raising the profound if wishful idea that faith can correct for society’s failings. Even more movingly, Deborah Findlay, as Juliet’s fond nurse, is able to temper the role’s comic elements with an immutable loyalty to her mistress, and then temper that with something darker and arguably in fact disloyal. It’s a perfect trifold performance.That’s the thing about Shakespeare, at least for me: There comes a moment in many of his plays when only the actors can preserve the emotion the plot keeps leaking. Happily, that happens here: As the tragedy narrows, O’Connor and Buckley flood with feeling.Stars will do that. In the same way an enemy is just a receptacle for enmity that already exists, a starring role is whatever a star can pour ambient emotion into. O’Connor’s essence is a silent yearning — the kind that is not extinguished but fanned by satisfaction. (This is what made his otherwise insufferable Charles almost sympathetic in “The Crown” and the nearly silent young farmer in his breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country,” so expressive.) Buckley, whose face seems transparent at times, is more about wonder; her Juliet clearly wants Romeo but, more than that, is amazed by her good fortune in getting him.Even in a more conventional production — this one was meant to be performed live onstage but was retooled for the pandemic — you need that kind of incandescence to make the play make sense. Remember that Shakespeare was a young star, too, albeit 30 or so himself, when he wrote “Romeo and Juliet.” Indeed, it often seems that his title characters, in haste and passion, wrote it for him.Romeo & JulietThrough May 21; pbs.org/gperf More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Setting the Stage Once Again for Shakespeare, and Live Theater

      by

      With coronavirus restrictions easing in England, several venues have plans to give classic plays new life.LONDON — Shakespeare is coming back, and I can’t be the only person who has missed him.There are signs of renewed activity at Shakespeare’s Globe, and talk of at least one star-studded production that is, after many delays, scheduled to be performed — can you believe it? — live. This comes after a year of a pandemic that has affected in various ways what has, and hasn’t, been staged, with Shakespeare a particular casualty.Understandably so. Amid a theatrical state of affairs dominated by Zoom and a brief return of live performances of small-scale shows in London that came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, the logistics of Shakespeare have seemed pretty daunting. How do you accommodate a writer whose capacious narratives depend on size, scope and dimension in these strange, socially distanced times? It’s far easier to return to the two-character environs of, say, “Love Letters” or “The Last Five Years,” to name just two titles that could be (and were) easily married to coronavirus rules.A lining of sorts to this bleak cloud came in the form of theatrical archives. With playhouses less inclined to revive Shakespeare, recordings of past productions were made available, giving theater fans a new chance to see or revisit notable performances. Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater were among the venues in Britain that drew upon a sizable back catalog. The Globe reported an increase of nearly 500 percent in its video-on-demand GlobePlayer service.What better chance was there to be reacquainted with the National’s thrilling 2018 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which remains among the few productions of this play in my experience with an Antony, in Ralph Fiennes, worthy of his Cleopatra, the sinuous Sophie Okonedo. The R.S.C.’s extensive archive offered up a 2015 “Othello” that, in a first for that company, cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Othello; the result was both riveting and revelatory.The actress Rebecca Hall, right, rehearsing opposite Luisa Omielan for an online presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Hall’s half sister, Jenny Caron Hall.But it wasn’t until the start of this year that theatermakers appeared to find a way to present Shakespeare afresh, even if the same few titles seemed to be under consideration. (My visions of numerous anxious Hamlets subjecting their best “To be or not to be” to the vagaries of YouTube went unrealized.) Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for the West End production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” widened his range in a newly conceived “Romeo and Juliet” that was streamed online in February. In accordance with pandemic-era requirements, the play was filmed with the actors in isolation for the most part, then joined up in the editing. For all its best intentions, this approach just couldn’t deliver the reactive thrill that comes from performers sharing a scene in real time and space.The Royal Shakespeare Company offered the tech-intensive “Dream,” which filleted the multiple plot strands of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a brief if ambitious exercise in interactivity that was arresting to look at but didn’t reveal much about the oft-revived play itself. The result may have suggested new ways of looking at Shakespeare, but it didn’t help us hear him anew.A direct contrast was the rehearsed reading this past Wednesday of the same play, directed by Jenny Caron Hall, whose father, Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was Laurence Olivier’s successor running the National Theater. As might be expected from such a lineage, Jenny Hall’s emphasis on her starry reading of the play via Zoom lay very much with the text, which looked to be in safe hands at a rehearsal I eavesdropped on the previous week: It helped, of course, to have doubling as Titania and Hippolyta the supremely accomplished Rebecca Hall, Jenny Hall’s younger half sister, who brought clarity and a welcome playfulness to some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. (Rebecca Hall played Viola in her father’s final production for the National, a mortality-inflected “Twelfth Night,” in 2011.)Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the young lovers in a coming screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Behind them is Lucian Msamati as Friar Laurence.Rob YoungsonLooking ahead, audiences have every reason to anticipate a marriage of sumptuous visuals and textual expertise from a new screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” For this heavily cut rendering of the play, Simon Godwin, the director of the National’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is refashioning on film a production that had been intended for the National stage. The change means that the leads, Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, will be joined by a heady lineup that includes Tamsin Greig, Adrian Lester, Deborah Findlay and Msamati — deft Shakespeareans all. (This “Romeo and Juliet” will air on Sky Arts in Britain and PBS in the United States.)As for breathing the same air as the actors, even through a mask, that enticement draws nearer daily. Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues.Not to be outdone, the West End’s most recent Lear, Ian McKellen, is opening his deliberately age-blind Hamlet in a repertory season that will include “The Cherry Orchard” and is due to start at the Theater Royal Windsor, west of London, on June 21.That’s the very day long earmarked as the end to the social restrictions in England that have been in place to varying degrees since March 2020.Will these productions go ahead, returning actors and spectators alike to the mutual discourse and interplay upon which the theater thrives and that no degree of technical finesse or Zoom-era sophistication can replace? As ever, time will tell. But the London theater seems poised for action, and the readiness, as Shakespeare knew so well, is all. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Romeo y Julieta’ Review: Young Love in Two Languages

      by

      Lupita Nyong’o and Juan Castano star in a podcast adaptation that delivers the poetry — in Spanish and English — but not the fire.The scheme is so harebrained that it belongs more to farce than tragedy, but Shakespeare decided otherwise. In “Romeo and Juliet,” a trusted friar gives the desperate Juliet a potion to drink so she can fake her own demise.For a good “two and forty hours,” she will seem dead, he tells her, “and then awake as from a pleasant sleep.”Awake in a tomb full of corpses, he means, but that’s a mere detail. In countless productions, the hatching of this plan is where the plot flies off the rails. What is he, nuts, suggesting this to a teenager who’s come to him for help?Yet in the Public Theater’s bilingual audio production “Romeo y Julieta,” the extraordinary Julio Monge portrays Friar Lawrence with such warm ease and steadiness that the ploy seems — well, still exceedingly unwise, but almost persuasive. And the clergyman has his usual fine motive for aiding Julieta and her Romeo: to ally their warring families, turning their “rancor to pure love.”The program note for this production suggests that the Public, the most populist of Off Broadway theaters, has a similar motive concerning our own fractured culture. If this free podcast is better at conveying the poetry than the pulse of Shakespeare, its intention is laudable anyway.Starring Lupita Nyong’o as Julieta and Juan Castano as Romeo, the play is spoken in English and Spanish. It’s not a Sharks and Jets arrangement, either; the Montagues and Capulets are fluent in both languages. Switching nimbly from one to the other, midspeech or midsentence, is a means of welcoming speakers of either into the audience, and uniting us there — albeit at a distance from one another.Directed by Saheem Ali, the play is gently adapted by Ali and Ricardo Pérez González, and based on a Spanish translation by Alfredo Michel Modenessi. Presented with WNYC Studios, the recording (with original music by Michael Thurber and sound design by Bray Poor and Jessica Paz) comes with a downloadable script showing every line in Spanish and English, making it easier to follow along.Each actor in the cast of 22 takes great care with verbal clarity. Interpretive depth is harder to come by; textures of humor and passion, joy and grief, are scarce. Any scene where Monge appears, though, finds the others upping their games.That includes the tantalizingly paired Nyong’o and Castano, whose lucid performances never ignite the rebellious adolescent fervor that drives these just-met, I-would-die-for-you lovers to their irrational extremes. Romeo and Julieta are kids, with all the tendencies toward personal drama of people their age, yet we don’t sense that in them or in Romeo’s friends.It’s not a lack of talent on anyone’s part. What it feels like, largely, is a pandemic side effect. This show’s many artists couldn’t gather in a room to dig into characters and relationships; they rehearsed and recorded over Zoom. And when we listen to the podcast, and need the script to figure out who’s who in a crowd or a fight, we yearn for costume and gesture, for bodies in space.This “Romeo y Julieta” is a production in need of a stage, when that’s possible again. For now, it’s waiting on its third dimension.Romeo y JulietaAvailable at publictheater.org, wnycstudios.org and on all major podcast platforms. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Living the ‘Dream,’ on Your Laptop or Phone

      by

      Gorgeous but thin, this half-hour experiment from the Royal Shakespeare Company turns Puck into an avatar and “theatergoers” into fireflies.Do you know of a site where the wild thyme blows? You do now.“Dream,” an interactive experience from the Royal Shakespeare Company, which runs through Saturday and lasts about as long as a power nap, transports its thousands of viewers to a sylvan grove, then to a rehearsal space in Portsmouth, England, for a live Q&A. Tickets are free, though those who prefer a lightly interactive experience can purchase seats for 10 British pounds (about $14) and appear onscreen as fireflies.Inspired by Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — in the wispiest, most gossamer way imaginable — “Dream” signifies a bounding leap forward for theater technology and a short jog in place for theater itself.A different “Dream” was meant to open in Stratford-upon-Avon about a year ago, as a showcase for Audience of the Future, a consortium of institutions and tech innovators assembled in 2019 and tasked with exploring new ways to make and deliver theater remotely. (Theater on your phone? They saw it first.) The 2020 “Dream” would have played to both a live audience and a remote one, integrating actors, projections and live motion-capture into a verdant whole.Jamie Morgan as Peaseblossom, a character rendered as sticks and flowers.Stuart MartinBut in-person audiences are rare these days, and this remote “Dream,” however gorgeous — and it is gorgeous, enormously gorgeous — feels thinner for it, less a forest of imagination and more a small copse of some really lovingly rendered trees. It begins with Puck (E.M. Williams), that merry wanderer of the night, imagined here as an assemblage of pebbles in the approximate shape of a human body. Why render Puck — nimble, fleet and girdling the earth in the time it takes most of us to load the dishwasher — as a pile of rocks? Dunno. Looks cool.In traveling around the forest, Puck encounters Shakespeare’s other fairies, like Moth (an accumulation of moths), Peaseblossom (sticks and flowers) and Cobweb (an eyeball inside a squirrel’s drey). Apparently, Puck also met Mustardseed (more sticks?). I missed it. And the singer Nick Cave contributed some voice acting! I missed that, too.“Dream,” performed live, is exquisite, denatured and almost entirely contentless. It isn’t quite theater, and it isn’t precisely film, though it could pass for a highbrow “Avatar” short. For stretches, it resembles a meditative video game, but it isn’t that either, mostly because the interactive elements (clicking and dragging fireflies around the landscape) are wholly inconsequential.Those who purchase tickets are represented onscreen as fireflies.Paul MumfordWatching it, I felt inexplicably cranky, like a toddler who has been offered a variety of perfectly nice snacks but doesn’t want any of them. Because maybe what the toddler really wants is to safely see an actual play in an actual theater with an actual audience. And that just isn’t available right now.So I don’t really know what to say about “Dream.” Because it represents an obviously fruitful and seemingly happy collaboration among top-of-their-game actors, directors, designers, composers and technicians, many of whom assumed some physical risk in the making of it. (Among them are Robin McNicholas, credited with direction and narrative development; Pippa Hill, credited with script creation and narrative development; and Esa-Pekka Salonen, the production’s music director and co-composer.) It also signals real progress in the use of live motion-capture (something the Royal Shakespeare Company has already experimented with) and offers a tantalizing glimpse of how that technology might be used when proper in-person theater returns.But this isn’t proper theater. Or even improper theater. It’s a sophisticated demonstration of an emergent technology. Shakespeare is the pretext, not the point. The pentameter, pushed into random virtual mouths, helps us better appreciate the software architecture — which is great if you like software and less great if you like the language itself, or the original play’s plot or characters or keen insights into our big, dumb, desiring hearts. This “Dream” is beautiful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all wake up now?DreamThrough March 20; dream.online More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      A ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History Books

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTheater ReviewA ‘Roman Tragedies’ for the History BooksThe International Theater Amsterdam presented Ivo van Hove’s exhilarating Shakespeare marathon in a one-off, livestreamed production.Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra giving in to grief at the death of Mark Antony in Ivo van Hove’s staging of “Antony and Cleopatra,” part of the director’s “Roman Tragedies.”Credit…Jan VersweyveldFeb. 18, 2021, 4:05 a.m. ETSix hours have rarely passed so quickly, or been so smart.That was the immediate take-away from the livestream last Sunday of the director Ivo van Hove’s “Roman Tragedies,” an exhilarating distillation of Shakespeare’s three Roman plays performed throughout an afternoon and into the evening as part of the International Theater Amsterdam’s ITALive program.This marathon, modern-dress sequence of “Coriolanus,” “Julius Caesar” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” first performed in the Netherlands in 2007 and widely toured since, was revived for one mid-pandemic performance. And where similar offerings often remain online for later viewing, in this instance live meant live. If you blinked last weekend, you missed it — though six hours, to be fair, is quite a long blink.Van Hove wasn’t yet a Broadway and West End favorite when “Roman Tragedies” was first produced, but the Belgian maverick has since moved into the mainstream, winning Olivier and Tony Awards for his searing reappraisal of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” Now as much of a star as the actors he draws to him, van Hove had just overseen the opening of his first Broadway musical, a production of “West Side Story,” when the pandemic shut down New York theaters almost a year ago.Despite van Hove’s gathering renown, I can’t think of a later production than “Roman Tragedies” that better exemplifies his skill for eliding past and present so that centuries-old texts acquire a hurtling immediacy. Precarious governments rocked by political infighting are common to all three plays, and van Hove links those machinations to our current age by playing video footage of contemporary world leaders in the background.The stage is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail. And there are cameras at the ready — another favorite van Hove device. (At one point in “Antony and Cleopatra,” Bart Slegers’s anxious Enobarbus broke the fourth wall to bolt outside into Amsterdam’s wintry streets, catching dismayed passers-by unaware.) But what has perhaps become predictable about his aesthetic over time works stirringly here, as does his insistence on the timelessness of the plays, which seem more apposite now, perhaps, than ever.The stage for “Roman Tragedies” is set in van Hove’s signature anonymous style, with no time for period detail.Credit…Jan VersweyveldHe could never have guessed, in 2007, that talk of advancing upon the Capitol in “Julius Caesar” would link the death throes of the Roman Republic to events in Washington last month. When Hans Kesting’s bearish Mark Antony in the third and longest of the plays spoke of “a sudden passion for mutiny,” you couldn’t help but think of assaults on democracy then and now, from the classical world to modern-day Myanmar.The smoothed-out rendering of Shakespeare’s text — Sunday’s streaming was presented in Dutch, with English and French subtitles — dispensed with Elizabethan archaisms, allowing the plays’ meanings to emerge afresh. Key lines remained intact — woe betide anyone who messes with “Et tu, Brute?” — but elsewhere Tom Kleijn’s translation streamlined and brought clarity to the proceedings, highlighting themes that connect the plays without letting the obfuscations of language get in the way.Only in Cleopatra’s death scene did I miss the luxuriant wordplay of the original, which contains some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. And yet that cavil fell away with Chris Nietvelt’s piercing performance as an Egyptian queen so poleaxed by the death of her Roman lover that she let rip with a series of screams. Could this have been the same actress from the opening play, “Coriolanus,” where she embodied a TV anchorwoman always smiling, no matter how grievous the news she had to report? Nietvelt completed a tremendous theatrical hat trick with her performance in “Julius Caesar” as a Casca full of foreboding about the chaos to come.If Nietvelt stood out amid an astonishing cast of players from the International Theater Amsterdam’s ensemble, no praise is too high, either, for Gijs Scholten van Aschat as Coriolanus. He played the Roman leader not as some blood-spattered action movie hero but as a graying figure of great volatility who won’t be reined in by a jacket and tie when his natural habitat is the battlefield.Both Cassius and Octavius Caesar were played by women, and a neat reordering of the scenes in “Coriolanus” allowed a determinedly macho play to begin with a conversation between the mother and wife of the prideful general of the title: Van Hove, in a clever touch, grants these women voices well before the play’s surrender to toxic masculinity.How thrilling, too, to see a large cast onstage, unfettered by the constraints of social distancing. (The theater said in a statement that Sunday’s show “complied with all current governmental measurements surrounding the regulation of livestreaming for cultural institutions in the Netherlands.”) Shakespeare demands intimacy, but I’ve never seen such a hyper-affectionate “Antony and Cleopatra,” with so many lingering smooches, and not just between the title characters.And yet it’s the countdown toward extinction and death, whether politically or individually, that unites these three plays. “Roman Tragedies” began and ended to the strains of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” a song that looks forward to a waiting calamity. The implication, as van Hove made plain, is that the times haven’t really changed at all.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: Shakespeare’s Baddies Convene in ‘All the Devils Are Here’

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickReview: Shakespeare’s Baddies Convene in ‘All the Devils Are Here’Patrick Page writes and stars in a meditation on the Bard’s villains, moving swiftly through a catalog of characters as if he were a chameleon.Patrick Page in “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” filmed at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington.Credit…via Shakespeare Theater CompanyFeb. 11, 2021Updated 1:00 p.m. ETAll the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the VillainNYT Critic’s PickProspero steps out onto the stage, a sturdy white staff and book in hand. He kneels, opens the book and strikes the stage three times. As the last heavy thud echoes throughout the empty theater, the lights dim to an icy, concentrated glow. This is the magician, and this is his art.But it isn’t actually Shakespeare’s vengeful sorcerer we’re seeing; this is Patrick Page, and when he opens his mouth, it’s not Prospero but Lady Macbeth who speaks, in a jagged whisper. It’s a summoning: “Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts.”It’s enough to make you shiver, and fitting for a play called “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” an enchanting one-man show full of Shakespeare’s vilest, silliest and most misunderstood characters: the baddies. Produced by the Shakespeare Theater Company at Sidney Harman Hall in Washington, and directed by Alan Paul, “All the Devils Are Here” is a chronological catalog of Shakespeare’s villains — including the lady with stains on her hands that no amount of Purell can get out, and the cuckolding, crown-stealing sibling. Page, who also wrote the script (and is lately known for his performance as another grand villain, Hades, in the musical “Hadestown”), begins with some general context, bringing us back in time to the flimsy villains that showed up in 16th century morality plays and how a young Shakespeare, influenced by such shows and those of his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, first broached the role of the villain in his early works.In the roughly 80-minute production, Page peppers in tidbits about his personal relationship to the texts, like how he remained haunted by “Macbeth” even when he stepped off the stage, along with a few nods to Shakespeare in pop culture — like the imprint of “Hamlet” in “The Lion King” and the echoes of “Richard III” and “Macbeth” in “House of Cards.” Addressing some of the nuances behind the characterizations of these rapscallions and miscreants, Page asks worthwhile questions: Is Iago a sociopath? Does Shylock reflect Shakespeare’s early prejudices, and does Othello later subvert them? Is the jolly old rascal Falstaff not just a fool, but another villain to contend with?In the production, Page blends casual analysis with personal reflections on Shakespeare’s plays.Credit…via Shakespeare Theater CompanyThe production reminded me of another I’d enjoyed recently: the Irish Repertory Theater’s “On Beckett/In Screen,” written by and starring Bill Irwin (and available to stream this month as part of the theater’s Home Winter Festival). Both work in a form that speaks to the audience as not just vessels of the actor’s performance, but also as fellow scholars examining the text with him. I’m a student at heart, one of literature especially, so I count any piece that melds the virtuosity of stage performance with the intellectual rigor of a classroom, minus any didacticism, as a precious night of theater.And yet for Shakespeare stans like myself, the contextual analysis is a touch light, no more than the connective thread between villains. But when we do arrive at those villains — alas! — Page, with his bottomless bass (soon to be set to audio in a Shakespeare@Home production of “Julius Caesar”), seems possessed by such a mastery of his craft, moving teary-eyed through the pain of Shylock and the comic pomposity of Malvolio with such swiftness that it’s like watching a chameleon change hues before your eyes: stupefying, effortless.Does Page have the Weird Sisters casting spells by his side? I don’t think so, but just as well, he has Elizabeth A. Coco’s revelatory lighting, heralding and punctuating his tonal and oratorical shifts. Then there’s Gordon Nimmo-Smith’s exacting sound design, to create an air of mischief and terror, or usher in a scene in a verdant garden or rowdy pub.But it’s Page — looking exceptionally svelte in an all-black ensemble, standing or sitting at a lonely desk and chair onstage while the cameras follow him with a pristine eye and perfect attention — who is the devil, the mage, the usurper.In the final scene, he arrives at Prospero, who ends “The Tempest” rehabilitated and delivers one last monologue to the audience — here, the camera moves to show Page facing the empty theater — denouncing his magical games and bidding us farewell. Page does the same, snaps the staff in half and closes his book onstage.But has the spell really ended, just like that? Hours later, I’m still utterly beguiled.All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the VillainThrough July 28; shakespearetheatre.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Lost in 2020: Epic Shakespeare, and the Theater That Planned It

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookLost in 2020: Epic Shakespeare, and the Theater That Planned ItBrave Spirits Theater expected to mount an ambitious cycle of eight history plays. Instead it became yet another victim of the pandemic.Brendan Edward Kennedy, center, in the title role of “Henry V” at Brave Spirits Theater in Virginia.Credit…Claire KimballDec. 29, 2020I’ve written several versions of this story. First it was supposed to be an account of a small theater company’s ambitious stage project, then a story about that interrupted project and the company’s plan to regroup because of the pandemic. Now it’s an elegy for a small theater that the coronavirus shut down.On a bright but chilly Saturday afternoon in February, I hopped on a train to Alexandria, Va., just outside of Washington. I was visiting Brave Spirits Theater, which was presenting the first part of a bold endeavor: staging eight of Shakespeare’s history plays (the two tetralogies, from “Richard II” to “Richard III”) in repertory, over the course of 18 months, culminating in a marathon performance of all eight works.I was there to see the first two plays in the series, beginning with a matinee performance of “Richard II.” On the car from the train station, I peeked at the quiet suburbs of Alexandria — brick houses with wraparound porches, American flags by the door — until I arrived at the theater, which channeled the small-town whimsy of a playhouse in a storybook. The space, a converted church building, had pale yellow columns out front and bright turquoise trim around the windows, with red accents throughout.Charlene V. Smith, a co-founder of Brave Spirits. Credit…Greg Kahn for The New York TimesCharlene V. Smith, who co-founded Brave Spirits in 2011, told me that the idea for the project occurred to her in 2008, when she saw the Royal Shakespeare Company in London do a marathon performance of the histories. Brave Spirits was claiming to be making history by being the “first professional American theater company to mount full productions of Shakespeare’s two history plays tetralogies and perform them in repertory.”A few feet away from where we were sitting, in one corner of the lobby, was a chalkboard. Four calendar months were neatly drawn in perfectly symmetrical boxes — January, February, March, April — with a color-coded schedule of performances of the first tetralogy, which the company named “The King’s Shadow”: Richard in bright red, the first Henry in clover green, the second Henry in yellow and the last Henry in a crisp, royal purple.In a humble but well-done production, Brave Spirits had Richard II crowned and killed, and his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, a.k.a. Henry IV, was named the new king. After the audience left, the cast milled around the space, chatting in the kitchen, which doubled as the box office. “Is your bag of heads upstairs?” I heard someone call out from the hall. A few wore shirts that were being sold by the company, black tees with gray block lettering that read “Richard & Henry & Henry & Henry & Richard.” (Ever the Shakespeare nerd, I bought one.)That evening I saw “Henry IV, Part I,” and every seat was filled. Older couples and families and a couple of teens gabbed and waved at one another; everyone was a local. I left on the train the next morning, still buzzed with the energy in that tiny converted church.I wrote the article, but before it was published the pandemic shut down the performing arts across the nation, and the story of Brave Spirits changed. Like many other theaters, it was forced to cut short the histories project, which DC Metro Theater Arts predicted would be “one of the must-sees of the 2021 season.” April 19-20 was supposed to be a big weekend for the company, when all of the plays in the first tetralogy would be staged in repertory, ending in the capstone of the first half, “Henry V.”From left, Tom Howley, Duane Richards, and Michael Bannigan Jr. in “Henry V.”Credit…Claire KimballJacqueline Chenault, left, as Alice, and Nicole Ruthmarie as Princess Katherine in “Henry V.”Credit…Claire KimballJohn Stange, above, as Henry Bolingbroke and Gary DuBreuil as the title character in “Richard II.”Credit…Claire KimballOn March 12, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia declared a state of emergency and, shortly after, the White House issued a proclamation declaring Covid-19 a national emergency. Brave Spirits decided to cancel the marathon weekend but still go out with one last performance — the opening-night show of “Henry V.”“At that point,” Smith said when I checked back in with her in late April, “people had put so much into it that everyone was like: ‘We need to open “Henry V.” We need that opening-night performance tomorrow. We just need it.’” Brendan Edward Kennedy reported that after the show, in his dressing room, he started to sing the wartime ballad “We’ll Meet Again.” (“We’ll meet again/Don’t know where/Don’t know when.”) He sang it briefly to me on the phone.After that “Henry V,” the theater froze: costumes still on racks and props in bins, stored under the audience risers. As for the tools of war — swords, spears — Smith had them stored for safekeeping in her home in McLean, Va.The theater put up a fight through the spring and summer; an annual fund-raiser netted over $7,000, compared with its usual $3,000, giving the cast and crew some hope. (Smith told me the company’s annual budget was around $50,000, but for the first histories project season it was tripled, to roughly $150,000.)For several weeks, the cast kept up with online script readings and planned for a fall with more virtual rehearsals until, they hoped, they would come back with the second half of the project in January 2021.That was supposed to be my new story: one about a small theater enduring despite the consequences — something that captured the stakes and scope of the difficulties but that still ultimately ended up being about hope and resilience.By this point you already know that’s not the story I’m telling now, 10 months after I first visited Virginia and nine months since the lockdown began. On Nov. 21, Brave Spirits announced its closure: “Without the ability to plan for future performances, Brave Spirits is unable to recover financially from the loss of Shakespeare’s Histories,” a news release stated, the last two words in bold as though spoken through a megaphone.Brave Spirits produced more than 20 plays and employed over 300 artists, and was known for its quietly subversive interpretations of classics, usually through a feminist lens. But the company announced it had one parting gift: audio recordings of the plays in the histories project, which they hope will come out in late 2021. It’s hard not to think of it as another reminder of all the things the coronavirus destroyed in just a couple of months.Brave Spirits Theater, which was housed in a former church.Credit…Greg Kahn for The New York TimesThe fact that Brave Spirits lost this battle would have been sad enough if it weren’t also so utterly, ironically Shakespearean. This spring, during a follow-up call with Kennedy, I asked the actor how he had attacked King Henry V’s famous St. Crispin’s Day speech.The speech is usually said to fanfare and fireworks. King Henry V, no longer the childish, mischievous Prince Hal, has become the brilliant leader, inspiring his men to perform a feat of greatness. Kennedy said that their approach to this scene was a bit different — a glorious moment that is nevertheless fatalistic, with the soldiers fully understanding the cost of war.Kennedy told me that he and Smith had imagined the soldiers’ bleak logic: “‘Let’s go out in a blaze of glory, and let’s hit them so hard that people are going to be talking about this for centuries. They’re gonna remember all of our names, and this deed is going to make us heroes in the annals of history.’” Kennedy was aware of the parallels — that, like the soldiers on St. Crispin’s Day, he and his fellow actors were going into the performance aware of “the possibility that this could be the last time that we ever do this.”The end of Brave Spirits isn’t the story I wanted to end up with. And yet this small theater in Virginia, which persevered until it couldn’t any longer, is just one of many that won’t make it out of 2020. It’s a shame, not just the closure itself, but the fact that the circumstances that led to it were preventable: The government’s poor response to the pandemic, and our country’s general refusal to value and subsidize the arts as it should, guaranteed that some theaters wouldn’t survive.I thought back to that day in February, when after I interviewed the cast, they celebrated a colleague’s birthday with pizza and cake and a round of “Happy Birthday” in the theater’s lobby.I packed up as quickly as I could, not wanting to interrupt, but they had happily forgotten me. Their conversations and laughter filled the space, a separate world and a safe haven for a community of artists. However briefly, I felt that. But this is all I can offer: the image of kings on a stage, a church-turned-theater in Virginia, a post-show pizza party. With Brave Spirits now closed, it’s all I have, and I wish it were enough.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More