Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1995-96

Abstract

In its brochure advertising 1995-96 Stratford season Royal Shakespeare Company defined itself as the finest actors and directors working great plays in some of best theatre spaces in and promised World Theatre. One can hardly blame any company for setting out its stall as attractively as possible, so there is no need to require that possibly or perhaps be inserted in this kind of statement. However, actual achievements of 1995-96 season suggest that some questioning is in order. If in this marketing context Classical means mainly well-known plays from an established repertoire, choice of plays for season did justify this claim. But if Classical implies a distinct performance style or tradition, as it does in dance, or if World Class is to be understood as on a par with best available anywhere, there was room for doubt. Distinctive ingredients of world-class classical theater should include innovation, a dynamic relationship with what is familiar and traditional, and an ability to make old texts new without ceasing to be attentive to their expressive idiom. Having proclaimed itself world class and classical, what did RSC deliver? The season offered only five Shakespeare productions in Stratford's three theaters. The main house presented a challenging Richard III (which Robert Smallwood discusses pages 326-29) and a vigorous and quirky Shrew, but other main-stage productions, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, were lackluster affairs. In Swan Theatre, one of best spaces for his plays, Shakespeare was represented briefly by The Tempest, which was paired with Edward Bond's Bingo. The quasi-Elizabethan space was also used for a lively staging of The Devil is an Ass but otherwise hosted plays written later than those for which it was designed: Chekhov's Cherry Orchard (directed by Adrian Noble and best production in company's season), Ian Judge's flamboyant Relapse, and Michael Bogdanov's assault both parts of Goethe's Faust. At Other Place were Calderon's The Painter of Dishonour, an adaptation of William Golding's Lord of Flies, and Euripides's Phoenician Women. The season's most challenging piece of scheduling was coupling of The Tempest and Bond's Bingo, directed by Sam Mendes for a tour that took in British regions and Vienna. Between 14 July and 24 August tour visited Swan; there were twenty-six performances of Shakespeare's play and five of Bond's, which reflects relative viability of two plays at Stratford box office. (And indeed elsewhere: reportedly many regional venues were reluctant to take Bingo at all.) Paul Jesson played Shakespeare and Prospero; Sarah-Jane Holm was Judith Shakespeare and Miranda; and Ben Jonson and Caliban were played by Dominic Letts. The usurper Antonio was cast opposite incarnation of new entrepreneurial spirit, William Combe (Daniel Flynn), and Bonnie Engstrom was Shakespeare's Ariel and Bond's vagrant and victimized Young Woman. Developments in British politics since 1970s, when it was first produced, have not diminished force of Bond's picture of 1600s as a money-get, mechanic age, but his grim reduction of Shakespeare to an impotent, inarticulate, and weakly complicit burgess still seems calculated to antagonize rather than persuade-at least in Stratford context. The reviewers' consensus was that Shakespeare's play came out a long way ahead of Bond's. Parallel casting only works, of course, when audiences are able to compare and contrast, but