Roman Actors and Egyptian Transvestites

Abstract

In its 1999 season the Southwark Globe took up several challenges from its critics: to prove that it could do Shakespearean tragedy as well as comedy, to adopt more Elizabethan conventions (in this case, all-male casts for frius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra), and to perform a new play. To make room for the last of these, which opened after I left, there were no plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries this year; I suspect that they will mostly be relegated to the small indoor theater when it finally materializes, and that the same will be true of new plays. The Globe theater has also taken notice of last season's complaints about problems seeing and hearing the actors. The pillars have new, slimmer bases; though actors can no longer stand on them, a little more of the forestage can now be seen from the side. This year each production has had a "Master of Play" and "Master of Verse," and the work of these coyly named individuals, especially the latter, has made a difference. While some of the actors occasionally sounded as if they were forcing their voices, most could make themselves heard even above the sound of a helicopter. The stage movement was also much more inventive, with most actors apparently comfortable about playing to the whole of their audience instead of just the quadrant directly in front of the stage. The result was that, even more than last summer, one play seemed to differ from another largely in terms of the roles it offered the Globe audience. What made me particularly aware of this odd categorization was the experience of watching a production in which I as audience member apparently had no role, the Kathakali King Lear presented by the visiting Annette Leday/Keli Company. In Kathakali, a traditional Indian dramatic form that ultimately derives from an even older Sanskrit tradition, the visual and verbal components of a character are entrusted to separate performers. The words are chanted by two narrators, with emotions represented by a cascade of percussive sounds and words accompanied by an uncannily rapid fluttering of hands and fingers on the part of the heavily made-up actors. The much-simplified plot (adapted by David McRuvie, translated into Malayalam by K. Marumakan Raja) deals only with Lear: Goneril and Regan are unmarried and competing not only for their father's love but also, rather blatantly, for France's, a fact that exacerbates their antagonism toward Cordelia. Since Tom is simply a madman, not the disguised Edgar, France largely takes over Edgar's role, finally killing both the wicked sisters. Goneril, Regan, and France had some bravura dancing-France enacted the entire battle himself-while the Fool was played as a character role. Like Shakespeare's company, the Kathakali one is normally all-male, though in this production Cordelia was played by the choreographer Annette Leday, who indicated the character's silence by means of restrained hand movements. I suspect that the production took some other liberties with the conventions: in the storm scenes, musicians represented the onset of Lear's madness with eerie nonmusical noises, and at the end, when the sounds of grief came from Lear himself instead of the chanters, there seemed to be a deliberate shattering of convention. The production offered a fascinating glimpse of Lear as a folktale, with occasional moments of real beauty and poignancy. But it was both frustrating and instructive to see it in a theater where the audience normally expects to be fully involved in the per-