Small-time Shakespeare: The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2003

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that Shakespeare scholars and teachers can learn something about Shakespeare's plays-about the textual, interpretive, and theatrical possibilities they contain-from productions of these plays at such venues as London's new Globe, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stratford, Ontario. This essay, which gives an account of sixteen Shakespeare productions and adaptations at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, argues that we can also learn something about Shakespeare's plays from productions by high-school students, college students, and amateur theatrical troupes.1 Academic criticism does not pay a great deal of attention to amateur and student productions for what seem like obvious reasons: such productions have limited resources, and the acting is not always very good. But without making unreasonable claims for the pleasures of amateur theatricals, I would like to suggest that, in terms of theater scholarship and theater history, the standards represented by the new Globe, the two Stratfords, and their analogues are too conservative and too homogeneous. In the pages that follow I will describe what I take to be some remarkable successes by amateur and student performers-moments in which theatrical ideas are conveyed with clarity and energy characteristic of the best acting at any level. I will also describe some predictable failures-moments (or whole productions) in which the opportunity to express a theatrical idea is deliberately squandered, moments that are typical of the most cynical and lazy kind of Shakespearean acting at any level. I am here concerned with something that theater reviews do not focus on enough: the relationship between actors and audience. Amateur productions compel the reviewer to ask why am I here? The reasons we go to the Globe or to Stratford-upon-Avon seem self-evident; consequently, it is easy to record the details of those productions so as to suggest that such details are interesting in and of themselves. We become less like audience members and more like stenographers. In contrast, spending a beautiful