Shakespeare in Bergen

Abstract

Parallel productions of the Marowitz Shrew and of Romeo and Juliet at the Bergen National Theatre (main stage and studio stage respectively) challenged us to contrast the different kinds of insight to be gained from a meta-Shakespearean theatre collage, on the one hand, and a new production, on the other. The two offered differenit kinds of reinterpretation: the first, a radical yet parasitical creativity; the second, a textbased yet adventurously-conceived smal-scale performance. / Charles Marowitz, guest-directing his version of The Taming of the Shrew from the London Open Space Theatre, transmogrified the comedy/ farce of taming into a decadent Jacobean tragedy, supposedly latent in Shakespeare's text and carved out of it, with post-Artaud scenes of psycho-physical horror. In his version every step in the wooing/mating dance was choreographed by the professional sadist (Petruchio) to diminish the ultimately weaker amateur sadist (Kate). In Romeo and Juliet, by contrast, the local director Stein Winge set his star-crossed lovers in a potential comedy that might have been called Errors in Verona: physical clowning, contented brawling, festive release in the market place, irony, bawdy, and lusting for the marriage bed (with Mercutio and the Nurse in the foreground) rather reluctantly gave way to the (initially backgrounded) tragedy. Both kinds of reinterpretation exploited an assumed instability of genre, of mode and mood, through a strong point of view that shifted our customary perception of these plays into new perspectives. The Marowitz Shrew (main stage) was ideological: Shakespeare cut and extrapolated to enact