Shakespeare in England, 1983

Abstract

The 1983 season at Stratford-upon-Avon was exceptionally uneven. There was no detectable sense of purpose in the season as a whole, nor even within individual productions, some aspects of which were hard to reconcile with other aspects. The first half of Julius Caesar, for instance, used a bare, spacious stage with gleaming modern furnishings, including (for perfectly legitimate interpretive reasons) a television screen; but the claustrophobic second half evoked the muddy trenches of the First World War. Halfway through the season the television screen was scrapped, either in response to the unfavorable audience response or because of technical difficulties. Such a basic change shows an alarming lack of confidence in the interpretation. There were similar inconsistencies in Henry VIII: opulent costumes after Holbein clashed with brash music after Kurt Weill. In Twelfth Night, a lumberingly old-fashioned set-a gigantic tree and a pseudo-realistic rocky hillside-overwhelmed the play, obscured much of the action, and distracted from the director's aim of exploring the emotional complexity of the characters. On the other hand, all the characters in The Comedy of Errors were presented as circus clowns; yet beneath their red noses and blue makeup, the actors brought out the very humanity which the director seemed bent on eliminating. Although Measure for Measure was set in the eighteenth century, it was neither Hogarthian in the low-life scenes nor elegant in the court ones. Its director, Adrian Noble, clearly has no visual sense, or only a very crude one, and his designer here, Bob Crowley, is a specialist in visual hideousness, the creator of a New Brutalism which is spreading alarmingly at Stratford and elsewhere. Of course new approaches must be tried, and new interpreters too; but the casting seemed as hit-and-miss as the general approach. Of the newcomers to the company, by far the most consistently successful was Joseph O'Conor, whose immense experience in Shakespeare elsewhere meant that his performance in three relatively unrewarding roles-Julius Caesar, Egeon in The Comedy of Errors, and Escalus in Measure for Measure-showed an authority, humanity, and easy command of the verse which contrasted markedly with the performances of other newcomers, notably Richard O'Callaghan, who was simply too small-scale and too inaudible for parts as crucial as Lucio in Measure for Measure and Feste in Twelfth Night (which he reduced to a minor role). It was surely perverse to cast an aggressively contemporary actor, John Thaw, as Sir Toby, and then bury him beneath the visual cliches of the part-huge doublet, red cheeks, white whiskers-instead of giving him the chance to use his tough contemporary quality to cut through such cliches and perhaps make the character more interesting. But another newcomer with a markedly contemporary style, David Schofield, provided an audacious but stimulating re-thinking of Antony, Buckingham, and Angelo. Contrasts, even contradictions, are perhaps inevitable in a modern production of Julius Caesar. Some aspects of the play, such as political