RSC Production Research Articles

The stage-within-the-screen: Peter Brook’s film adaptation of King Lear

Abstract In his film of King Lear (1971), Peter Brook reimagined his landmark production of the play on screen through an intricate interplay of theatrical and cinematic codes. This article revisits Brook’s adaptation, focusing on how its much-discussed debt to theatrical traditions relates to broader issues regarding the production and reception of Shakespearean films in the UK. I argue that the film’s overt affiliation to theatre sets it apart from other Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare grounded in Hollywoodian conventions that broaden considerably their potential to reach a global audience across time and location. In establishing strong links between his film and the RSC production, Brook’s counter-cinematic approach to filmic storytelling, alongside his casting of acclaimed stage actors, asserted the authority of theatre as a privileged medium where Shakespeare is made to signify. We shall see that the various marks of site-specific theatrical traditions in the film underscore its appeal to a local – rather than global – audience, thus dismantling essentialist and universalist views of Anglophone adaptations of Shakespeare on screen.

Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History by John Wyver, and: Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear ed. by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and : "Hamlet" and World Cinema by Mark Thornton Burnett

Reviewed by: Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History by John Wyver, and: Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear ed. by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, and : "Hamlet" and World Cinema by Mark Thornton Burnett Sally Barnden Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History. By John Wyver. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 268. $100. Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear. Edited by Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 254. $99.99. "Hamlet" and World Cinema. By Mark Thornton Burnett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 291. $99.99. This trio of new books demonstrates the breadth and variety of screen Shakespeares across territories and media, arguing for a flexible understanding of adaptation and for nuanced analysis of the relationship between screen and stage. Collectively, they address a huge number of works, many of which have received very little critical attention to date, and offer reflections on the developing role of screen Shakespeares in a global, networked media market. Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company: A Critical History has the narrowest focus of the three, and is presented for the most part as narrative history. John Wyver traces the chronological story of the Royal Shakespeare Company's various experiments with screen media over more than a century. The RSC's first onscreen work was a silent film of Frank Benson's company in Richard III (1910); today, the company's screen output has been accelerated by the global pandemic since the publication of Wyver's book, and RSC productions can be accessed in filmed versions via three different streaming services. Since 2013, several productions a year have been broadcast as complex, multi-camera hybrid products, screened both live and belatedly as "event cinema." Rather than becoming embroiled in the difficult question of how far screen adaptations are capable of communicating and preserving live performance, Wyver focuses on the contexts, makers, and audiences of the screen outputs. In this respect, the book offers both an institutional history of the RSC and a history of screen media across the twentieth century. This screen history resists giving undue weight to influential film adaptations such as Peter Brook's King Lear. Wyver's willingness to discuss snippets of [End Page 181] performance woven into TV documentaries, promotional YouTube shorts, and archival recordings makes clear that the RSC's engagement with screen media has been varied and decidedly mixed in its success. The book is at its most engaging when discussing the history of suspicion between the theater and cinema. A series of RSC directors adopted the orthodox position that theatrical work takes its value in part from its ephemerality—a moment in a shared space between performers and audience that would only be cheapened by reproducibility. Some of them also worried about a fundamental tension between theater's allegiance to text and screen media's emphasis on visual storytelling. Trevor Nunn's stated policy in adapting Antony and Cleopatra (1974) was of "photographing a text," focusing in tightly on his actors' verse-speaking (109). But several RSC directors later regretted that their work had not been preserved. Michael Boyd, stepping down from leading the company in 2012, reflected that he may have been "a bit absolutist" in his resistance to screen versions of his productions (156). Wyver discusses the fragmentary remnants left by Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the most canonical production of its generation, and emblematic of the "I was there" tendency in theater criticism). The production was captured by the Japanese TV network NHK with "three or four cameras" and a "functional but unadorned" visual style (98). After the broadcast, according to the agreement the network had struck with Brook, the negative was burned even though Brook, having seen that the recording was of a higher-than-expected quality, tried to rescind his order at the last minute. Wyver nonetheless gained access to a recording during his research for Screening the Royal Shakespeare Company, taped from the broadcast "with an early domestic U-matic system" (98). Wyver is a generous viewer of the RSC's screen archive, finding merit in some of their maligned early experiments such as the "elegant miscellany...

“There would this monster make a man”: Colonial power in the 1993 RSC production of 'The Tempest'

Taking on assumptions about oppression, identity and representation as they are developed in contemporary postcolonial theory, this study proposes the analysis of the 1993 theatrical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest by The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). It aims to discuss the role of Caliban's monstrosity in the production and how it pertains to issues such as power relations and spectacle. The main benefit of doing an analysis of a performance of a Shakespearean text seems to be the possibility of seeing the play's meaning as contingent, as a result of a series of elements (actor's body, visual clues, the theatrical institution, spectatorship) that release it from the burden of being considered as the work of a single, universal, non- contradictory mind that contemporary criticism has pointed out as the 'Shakespeare Myth'. I conclude that the 1993 RSC production presents a Tempest that, in many ways, reinforces traditional positions about the legitimacy of Prospero's dominion over the island.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“LÁ ESTE MONSTRO FARIA UM HOMEM”: PODER COLONIAL NA PRODUÇÃO DE A TEMPESTADE DE 1993 PELA RSCPartindo de discussões sobre opressão, identidade e representação desenvolvidas na teoria pós-colonial contemporânea, este estudo propõe a análise da produção teatral de 1993 de A tempestade pela The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Tem como objetivo discutir o papel da monstruosidade de Caliban na produção e como ela se refere a questões como relações de poder e espetáculo. O principal benefício de fazer uma análise da produção teatral de um texto de Shakespeare parece ser a possibilidade de ver o significado da peça como contingente, como resultado de uma série de elementos (corpo do ator, pistas visuais, instituição teatral, espectadores) que a libertam do fardo de ser considerada como o trabalho de uma mente única, universal e não contraditória que a crítica contemporânea apontou como o “Mito de Shakespeare”. Concluo que a produção da RSC em 1993 apresenta uma Tempestade que, em muitos aspectos, reforça posições tradicionais sobre a legitimidade do domínio de Prospero sobre a ilha.---Original em inglês.

Queering Poins: Masculinity and Friendship in Henry IV, The Hollow Crown, and the RSC's "King and Country"

Queering Poins:Masculinity and Friendship in Henry IV, The Hollow Crown, and the RSC's "King and Country" Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich Ned Poins, Prince Hal's rabble-rousing sidekick in the Henry IV plays, appears in only five scenes across two plays and vanishes in each play before the third act.1 Murray J. Levith suggests that his name alludes to his being "as tiny and insignificant as a point" (38), and indeed scholars and theater critics have overlooked him. In the usual understanding, these plays are about Hal's relationships with his father, Falstaff, and Hotspur—not with Poins. Two recent productions have challenged these assumptions by offering memorable, homoerotic Poinses. Series 1 of the TV program The Hollow Crown (2012) and the Royal Shakespeare Company's "King and Country: Shakespeare's Great Cycle of Kings" (2016) both represent Poins as a roguish but beleaguered queer hero whose erotically charged friendship with Hal must be swept aside to facilitate Hal's rise. Although several scholars have noted the second tetralogy's obsession with masculinity, few consider how Poins matters to this definition, and queer studies tend to focus on Falstaff or Hotspur.2 As this essay moves Poins into the spotlight, it analyzes sixteenth-century texts and twenty-first-century performances as equally rich instances of a Shakespearean "work," which Margaret Jane Kidnie defines as "a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users" (2). My method also draws on W. B. Worthen's definition of performance as "a collective means of knowledge making" (21) to argue that The Hollow Crown and "King and Country" do not simply present Shakespearean texts. Instead, each production enlarges them by offering what Pascale Aebischer has called "negotiated readings," or the fleshing out of "empty spaces" and marginalized characters, [End Page 635] that allow critics and spectators to tell alternative narratives (12). Each instance of the Henry IV plays, whether an early modern text or a modern production, is entangled with its culture's ideas about queerness, masculinity, and friendship. I begin by investigating how the earliest printed versions of these plays represent Poins as "queer" in its early modern connotations: peculiar, dubious, or disreputable. The playtexts suggest that he is not conventionally masculine, and they mark his friendship with Hal as inappropriate and suspect because of their disparity in rank. I then turn to the recent BBC and RSC productions, which offer versions of Poins that recall the past but are mediated by twenty-first-century notions of love and loss. To accommodate shifting definitions of masculinity and friendship, both use homoeroticism to underline how Poins's relationship with Hal can be "queer" in a modern sense: not corresponding to our established ideas about heterosexuality.3 In both the early texts and the recent productions, Hal's rise to the monarchy hinges on his fulfillment of culturally defined masculinity, yet by making Poins a likeable character and by embracing temporarily his friendship with Hal, The Hollow Crown and "King and Country" encourage discomfort with Poins's disappearance and the conventional behavior expected of Hal. This alternative, twenty-first-century narrative requires no radical transformation of the sixteenth-century texts, but relies on cultural changes to produce a new understanding of Hal's narrative and Shakespeare's Henriad. Emphasis on the Poins subplot in our current cultural moment can make the Henry IV plays into modern tragedies about conformity and injustice. "Be not too familiar with Poins": early modern texts and contexts The texts of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays provide little information about Poins's status and background. Poins calls himself "a second brother," suggesting that his family has something to inherit, but his precise social rank is difficult to pinpoint (1 Henry IV, 2.2.53). Descriptions of him as the Prince's "continual follower" and "shadow" suggest that he is a kind of courtier, but we never see him at court (1 Henry IV, 4.3.53; 2.2.127). We might describe him as a gallant—not the brave kind like Hotspur, but a man concerned with fashion and pleasure—but 1 Henry IV seems to mock that possibility when Falstaff...

Modernizing Metatheatre in the RSC's A Mad World My Masters

Modernizing Metatheatre in the RSC's A Mad World My Masters Eoin Price A Mad World My MastersPresented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, England, 06 6– 10 25, 2013. Directed by Sean Foley. Designed by Alice Power. Lighting by James Farncombe. Music and Sound by Ben and Max Ringham. Choreography by Kate Prince. Fights by Alison de Burgh. With Ellie Beaven (Mrs Littledick), Ishia Bennison (Mrs Kidman), Ben Deery (Sponger), Richard Durden (Spunky), Richard Goulding (Dick Follywit), John Hopkins (Penitent Brothel), Linda John-Pierre (Singer), Harry McEntire (Oboe), Ciarán Owens (Master Whopping-Prospect), Nicholas Prasad (Master Muchly-Minted), Ian Redford (Sir Bounteous Peersucker), Steffan Rhodri (Mr Littledick), Sarah Ridgeway (Truly Kidman), Dwane Walcott (Constable) et al.. Presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton, England, 02 26– 02 282015, Grand Theatre Blackpool, Blackpool, England, 03 5– 03 7, 2015, Theatre Royal Brighton, Brighton, 1003– 1403, 2015, Malvern Theatres, Malvern, 03 24– 03 28, 2015, Hall for Cornwall, Truro, 03 31– 04 4, 2015, Theatre Royal Bath, Bath, 04 7– 04 11, 2015, Darlington Civic Theatre, Darlington, 04 14– 04 18, 2015, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 04 21– 04 25, 2015, Barbican, London, 04 29– 05 9, 2015. Directed by Sean Foley. Designed by Alice Power. Lighting by James Farncombe. Music and Sound by Ben and Max Ringham. Choreography by Kate Prince. Fights by Alison de Burgh. With Ellie Beaven (Mrs Littledick), Ishia Bennison (Mrs Kidman), Michael Moreland (Sponger), David Rubin (Spunky), Joe Bannister (Dick Follywit), Dennis Herdman (Penitent Brothel), Lee Mengo (Oboe), Charlie Archer (Master Whopping-Prospect), Nicholas Prasad (Master Muchly-Minted), Ian Redford (Sir Bounteous Peersucker), Ben Deery (Mr Littledick), Sarah Ridgeway (Truly Kidman), Christopher Chilton (Constable) et al.. [End Page 131] Midway through Sean Foley's 2013 RSC production of Thomas Middleton's A Mad World My Masters, Penitent Brothel (John Hopkins) utters what is admittedly, a pretty awful pun. Masquerading as a doctor, Penitent tends to Truly Kidman (Sarah Ridgeway), a courtesan who feigns illness to dupe the wealthy old knight, Sir Bounteous Peersucker (Ian Redford). Penitent prescribes a preposterously elaborate and expensive cure, worrying Peersucker, who implores Penitent to show "patience." Penitent replies, "I cannot be patient and physician too" (46). Turning to the audience, he quips, "Thomas Middleton, 1605." Of this moment, Emma Smith observed "That Middleton should be explicitly credited with one of the lamer jokes in an hilarious production is symptomatic of a surprising lack of confidence in the play's original language" (2013). José A. Pérez Díez acknowledged that the audience found this moment "hysterically funny" but his response was also sceptical: "it seems unlikely that the RSC would have done this with some of Shakespeare's occasionally unfunny or obsolete jokes" (2013, 148). Peter Kirwan likewise attested to the "huge applause" this aside received, but his reaction was more favourable. For Kirwan, "The explicit pointing out of the play's multiple authorship, the apology for a bad joke that also acted as a celebration of the author, and the production's own entertaining self-consciousness all came into play in one aside" (2013). All three reviewers were broadly positive about the production, but this particular moment was marked out as contentious. Was this self-conscious interpolation a playfully affectionate testimony to the continued vitality of Middleton's play, or was it an example of anxiety, attesting to the production's distrust of Middleton's language? In their preface to their edition of the playtext, Foley and his co-editor, Phil Porter, say that part of the appeal of the play is that "it knows that it's being funny, and invites us to have fun knowing that it knows" (11). Although they do not use the word, the quality they ascribe to Middleton's play accords with many critical conceptions of metatheatre. Writing more broadly about laughter in Shakespearean drama, Indira Ghose states that: metatheatrical signals […] increasethe pleasure of the spectator by drawing attention to the artfulness of the staged fiction. They gratify both the audience's pleasure of absorption into the fictive world and the pleasure of detached awareness of the...

Taking The Alchemist Seriously: Polly Findlay’s RSC Production as Seen by a Theater Historian

Taking The Alchemist Seriously: Polly Findlay’s RSC Production as Seen by a Theater Historian

The Comedy of Errors

Reviewed by: The Comedy of Errors Jayme M. Yeo When spectators arrived at Nashville's Centennial Park in the summer of 2016 for the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of The Comedy of Errors, they were treated to an uncanny echo of circa 1960s downtown Nashville, reimagined on stage. This production of Errors placed the madcap comedy of the play—as well as its underlying pathos—firmly within the country-western music industry. Staging this play as a country-western musical was a bold choice for director Denice Hicks, given the mixed reception of musical adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth When spectators arrived at Nashville's Centennial Park in the summer of 2016 for the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's production of The Comedy of Errors, they were treated to an uncanny echo of circa 1960s downtown Nashville, reimagined on stage. This production of Errors placed the madcap comedy of the play—as well as its underlying pathos—firmly within the country-western music industry. Staging this play as a country-western musical was a bold choice for director Denice Hicks, given the mixed reception of musical adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth [End Page 350] century, including Trevor Nunn's 1976 RSC production of Errors. The local history that grounded the production paid lighthearted homage to the folksy twang of Nashville's music history while simultaneously drawing from the submerged currents of longing and lament that informed much of the music produced during that time. The result was a production that blended the two impulses of the play—towards both comedy and tragedy—by tempering, in director Denice Hicks's words in the playbill, "the conservativism of Nashville with the liberality of folk music." But perhaps even more surprising than this blend of comedy and tragedy was the commentary on women's history, on the struggle between domesticity and economic independence, that emerged through the staging. The set designed by Todd Seage and John Sevier and the costumes by June Kingsbury gave the production a visual coherence with country-western music via references to Music City itself. When Antipholus of Syracuse, attired in a tie-dyed t-shirt, pulled up to Nashvillian Ephesus in a Volkswagen van, audience members in the know recognized the nod to Bob Dylan, who arrived in Nashville in the '60s as a change-agent, forming a partnership with Johnny Cash that would lead to the development of country rock (although on stage, Antipholus S. quickly switched his hippie clothes for a cowboy hat and boots). This was the decade when songwriters could still make deals in the smoky honky-tonks that lined lower Broadway, some of which, including Tootsie's World-Famous Orchid Lounge, remain prominent features of Nashville's downtown today. The iconic purple exterior of the Orchid Lounge was reimagined on stage as Tiny's World-Famous Porpentine Tulip Lounge (fig. 3). Fig. 3. Set designed by Todd Seage and John Sevier, with the Porpentine stage left, in the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's 2016 production of The Comedy of Errors, directed by Denice Hicks. Photo by Rick Malkin, courtesy of the Nashville Shakespeare Festival. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 3. Set designed by Todd Seage and John Sevier, with the Porpentine stage left, in the Nashville Shakespeare Festival's 2016 production of The Comedy of Errors, directed by Denice Hicks. Photo by Rick Malkin, courtesy of the Nashville Shakespeare Festival. [End Page 351] For this production, however, music took center stage as the major connection between the production and its environs. Productions of the play are frequently criticized for a kind of gratuitous slapstick that obscures the work's underlying darkness, and the staging for this production certainly included its fair share of physical comedy, including a Keystone-style chase at the end of act four. Rather than situating these gags within the overwrought realm of musical theater, however, the production occupied a register that was more perceptively reminiscent of the country-western musical variety shows that dominated the airwaves of the 1960s, including The Porter Wagoner Show, The Johnny Cash Show, and the Grand Ole Opry. This generic context—classic country and folk—supplied...

“Men and Women o’the Time”: Allegory in Three 2015 Productions

This essay starts with a comment from a choric figure in Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626): that the Vice and other figures from the older moral drama now appear onstage “attired like men and women o'the time.” After a review of contemporary evidence, the focus is on three 2015 productions. First is a clearly allegorical script, Carol Ann Duffy’s adaptation of the best known moral play, Everyman , at the National Theatre where a relatively short early Tudor play, with its homily linked to the protagonist’s preparation for Death and a final reckoning, was transformed into a much longer polemic against today’s abuse of the environment. The other two items singled out are the RSC productions at the Swan of The Jew of Malta and Volpone , neither of which contains overt allegory yet both include sections that may have been understood then in near allegorical terms, whether to depict a sleeping Christianity in Marlowe’s Malta or an ejection of Conscience in Jonson’s Venice. The goal is to call attention to the possibility of new possibilities and meanings lurking behind a familiar episode or configuration so that theatre history, rather than being reductive, can display how the play of ideas in a scene or sequence could be both entertaining and meaningful in their theatrical terms and--perhaps--still translatable into ours.

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”: The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions

“Let me twine / Mine arms about that body”:The Queerness of Coriolanus and Recent British Stage Productions Michael D. Friedman Coriolanus is queer. I mean to assert, by this statement, that Shakespeare’s play portrays masculine erotic desire in a way that defies traditional categories of sexual identity.1 The play not only challenges heteronormativity by offering several examples of homoerotically-charged dialogue between male characters, but it also contests homosexual identification by including declarations of heterosexual desire by the same male figures.2 The full erotic natures of Caius Martius and Aufidius cannot be confined within the strict parameters of conventional hetero- or homo-sexuality, and yet the stage history of the play, since the mid-twentieth century, reveals repeated attempts to fix what Shakespeare has portrayed as fluid; to stamp as either gay or straight a wellspring of eroticism that defies stability and binary classification. To illustrate this point, I will draw upon material from six British stage productions of Coriolanus that appeared after 1958, when, as James C. Bulman notes, Britain’s Lord Chamberlain relaxed his veto upon the discussion of homosexuality on stage (39). Three of these productions are connected by their casts, as well as by their treatments of male sexual desire. Tyrone Guthrie’s staging at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1963–64 has been generally acknowledged as the first major production to incorporate a homosexual bond between Coriolanus, played by John Neville, and Aufidius, depicted by a young Ian McKellen. Two decades later, McKellen graduated to the title role in Peter Hall’s 1984 production at the National Theatre, which featured Greg Hicks as Aufidius. Their performance incorporated various homoerotic elements, but it stopped short of depicting the two men as homosexuals. Hicks then ascended [End Page 395] to the part of the Roman general opposite Chuk Iwuji as his Volscian nemesis in David Farr’s 2002 RSC production. In this version, Coriolanus did not display a palpable sexual attraction towards his enemy, and all of the production’s homoeroticism emanated solely from Aufidius. The three remaining productions that I will examine here share no cast members, but they do correspond to individual examples within the first set of performances in their attitudes toward the representation of male sexuality. Like Tyrone Guthrie, Gregory Doran, in his 2007 RSC production, depticted Martius and Aufidius as homosexual lovers. Josie Rourke, whose Donmar Warehouse production, which opened in December of 2013 and was broadcast to cinemas around the world by NT Live in early 2014, emulated David Farr by portraying a one-sided eroticism between a homosexually-inclined Aufidius and a heterosexual Coriolanus. Finally, David Thacker’s 1994 RSC staging featured a mutually homoerotic relationship between the two foes that resembled the one in Peter Hall’s production, but Thacker’s version did not exhibit the same striving toward binary categorization of sexuality that is evident in interviews with McKellen and Hicks about their rehearsal process ten years earlier. In fact, by representing the erotic relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius in an intentionally ambiguous manner, Thacker’s production, among those examined in this essay, comes closest to capturing the queerness of Coriolanus. Before Tyrone Guthrie directed Coriolanus, he developed a reading of the play based on now-discredited psychoanalytic theories of the origins of homosexuality, an interpretation that he later embodied upon the stage. As R. B. Parker observes, “Extrapolating from Freud’s connection between overmothering and the narcissistic idealization of other men, Tyrone Guthrie concentrated his […] production at the Nottingham Playhouse on a homosexual attraction between Martius […] and Aufidius (126). In an essay entitled “On Producing ‘Coriolanus’” published in the Laurel Shakespeare edition of the play (1962), Guthrie seized upon Coriolanus’s obsession with Volumnia as the underlying cause of his eroticized bond with his Volscian enemy. As Ian McKellen recalls, Guthrie gathered his cast together on the first day of rehearsals and presented this analysis of the play without revealing its author: “I’m going to read to you this introduction to an American edition of Coriolanus. I agree with every word of it.” This short essay concentrated on Coriolanus’s heroism, under-pinned or undermined by a mother-fixation. His archrival Aufidius was a...

Screening the RSC stage: the 2014 Live from Stratford-upon-Avon cinema broadcasts

During the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2014 summer season, both parts of Henry IV and The Two Gentlemen of Verona were presented as Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcasts in cinemas around the world. This article presents a case study of these broadcasts, drawing on the author's observations and insights as their producer as well as interview contributions from those involved in both the stage and screen presentations. Recognising that the hybrid form of “live cinema” performance has developed rapidly over the past five years but is as-yet little-documented, the study develops an analytical approach to its creative processes and to its aesthetics. This discussion is combined with a consideration of the history of earlier screen adaptations of RSC productions at Stratford-upon-Avon. The article details the stages of the production process for the Live from Stratford-upon-Avon broadcasts in 2014 and considers the ways in which the broadcast teams collaborate with the casts and creative teams of the theatre productions. In addition, the article explores processes of adaptation in the journey from stage to screen, the poetics of multi-camera presentation and questions of “live-ness”, the social experience of viewing performance in the cinema, and possible developments for live theatre on screen.

The Wars of Love’s Labour’s Lost: Performance and Interpretation

This paper investigates the trope of war in relation to the critical and performance history of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The “civil war of wits” has long been recognized as central to the play’s linguistic texture, as has the “war against your own affections” that Navarre urges on his fellow academe-lovers. In addition to these linguistic and psychological threads, the play’s disputed debt between France and Navarre concerns the “wars” waged by Navarre’s father, while the four lords’ names point toward historical actors in the French wars of religion from the 1570s into the 1590s. Beyond these well-cited links, however, the play has an unusual history of being performed in actual war-time, or staged in a war-setting, as in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the Branagh film, and productions directed by Robin Phillips, Trevor Nunn and Corinne Jaber, among others. Publicity for the current RSC production describes the setting as just before the First World War, “conjuring up the carefree elegance of a pre-war Edwardian summer.” This paper explores why the play has so frequently been associated with war, and particularly the Edwardian period.

The Red and the Purple: Reflections on the Intercultural Imagination and Multicultural Casting

This article critically examines the contextual rationales behind the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) production of The Orphan of Zhao, arguing that the casting choices were linked to the conceptual limitations regarding the presentation of the three plays produced in the ‘A World Elsewhere’ season. After proposing an Asia-centric rationale for tying the new adaptations of Boris Godunov, A Life of Galileo, and The Orphan of Zhao together (such that a substantial East Asian presence would be highly beneficial if not essential) I use Chen Shi-Zheng’s 2003 English-language adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao as a telling point of comparison. The RSC production thus illustrates the shortcomings of colour-blind casting and reveals the broader pattern of discrimination faced by artists of British East Asian descent.

Asian Mutations: Yellowface from More Light to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Orphan of Zhao

In this article I examine the contention that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC’s) The Orphan of Zhao used yellowface. By comparing The Orphan of Zhao to a recent production of Bryony Lavery’s (1997) play, More Light, I argue that yellowface is a highly mutable practice. In particular, I suggest that in the period between these two productions, contemporary British understandings of yellowface shifted from ideas around racial impersonation using prosthetics and make-up to the casting of white actors in Asian roles in general. This latter conceptualisation of yellowface draws attention to the inequalities, exclusions, but also the possibilities of casting in The Orphan of Zhao. The article offers a nuanced account of yellowface in the RSC production by attending to how racial-ethnic minorities are represented in theatre.

The Roaring Girl in Retrospect: the RSC Production of 1983

With its second revival of The Roaring Girl now in the Royal Shakespeare Company's repertory, Chi-fang Sophia Li documents in this article the making of the first production, as directed by Barry Kyle in 1983. She reviews the other RSC productions that informed Kyle's directorial approach, and, using the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library's archival materials and a research interview, she attempts a reconstructive criticism of Kyle's project of ‘theatrical archaeology’, arguing that what Kyle did was adapt Dekker and Middleton's Jacobean angst about the radical economic changes of the first decade of King James's reign to articulate current anxieties about Thatcherite economic ‘reforms’. The revival became compellingly invested with Kyle's critical reflections on triumphalist capitalism and ‘Victorian values’. Chi-fang Sophia Li is Assistant Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. She has also published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes and Queries, and English Studies (Routledge), and in Chinese in Review of English and American Literature.

Social Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet , Social Media, and Performance

Social Shakespeare:Romeo and Juliet, Social Media, and Performance Geoffrey Way (bio) In January 2010, the Birmingham, Alabama-based Sloss Performing Arts Company began work on a performance of Romeo and Juliet that experimented with the social network site Facebook to allow their audience the ability to access and participate in the rehearsal process that led up to four live stage performances in May. Later that spring, the Royal Shakespeare Company began a five-week performance of Romeo and Juliet entitled Such Tweet Sorrow that was performed entirely via Twitter. Six actors and actresses tweeted the performance over five weeks, and anyone with an internet connection could follow the performance at any time by visiting the performance website or the individual characters' Twitter profiles. While these were two quite separate projects, one by a small local performing arts company and the other by the internationally recognized RSC, both incorporated social media into their performances of Shakespeare. As such, their uses of social media raise a variety of scholarly questions. What, for example, were the desired and achieved outcomes for allowing the audience access to the rehearsal process via social media, as with the Sloss production? Did their use of social media shift or change the audience's role in the production, and if so, how? In the case of Such Tweet Sorrow, what happens when a social media site such as Twitter becomes the platform for a dramatic performance? What are the promises and challenges [End Page 401] for performance companies that utilize social media? How will performance scholarship account for these implications? The use of social media in dramatic performances is a fairly recent practice, yet there are already certain trends in the ways productions attempt to weave social media sites into their practices. In looking at the Sloss and RSC productions, I am concerned with the ways that each company incorporates a specific type of social media—social network sites (SNSs)1—into its performance. These are sites that danah boyd and Nicole Ellison define "as personal (or 'egocentric') networks, with the individual at the center of their own community" (boyd and Ellison 2007). However, boyd and Ellison's definition is still somewhat generalized, and getting more specific can help us understand the ways individual SNSs develop their own specific sets of user practices. These user practices are generally shaped by two separate yet intertwined aspects: a site's technological constraints and active members' participatory practices and culture. Twitter provides an excellent example for considering a SNS's technological constraints, as a single user update, or "tweet," is limited to 140 typed characters. Twitter users must work within this constraint, often abbreviating words, shortening hyperlinks, or cutting unnecessary characters in order to fit their message to the tweet's 140 characters. While this limit affects the length of a tweet, it is, as communication scholar Nancy Baym states, through users' "shared behaviors" on a site that, "[c]ommunity norms of practice are displayed, reinforced, negotiated and taught" (Baym 2010: 80). In this way, SNSs such as Twitter and Facebook operate as online spaces in which members enact a type of social performance, where specific practices established and reinforced by the user, and members of the user's network, signal their membership within the community. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear's study of Facebook membership explicates how both technological constraints and user practices shape accepted means of participation. They argue that, "The knowledge system involved in participating within Facebook is complex. Part of it in-volve[s] 'co-ordinated sets of actions' or 'skills' concerned with performing the technology. . . . Beyond this, however, the knowledge systems that users bring to their social networking involve discursive knowledge and how to render [it] effectively" (Knobel and Lankshear 2008: 276). Knobel and Lankshear identify the effects Facebook's technological constraints can have on user practices, as well as the fact that users create and maintain [End Page 402] worthwhile connections with each other through their recognition of, and participation in, shared user practices. Here I argue that participation on a social network site constitutes a type of social performance, as a user determines how to present him or herself in an online space...

The Malcontent (review)

Reviewed by: The Malcontent Andrew Fleck The Malcontent Presented by The Antaeus Company at Deaf West Theatre, North Hollywood, California. April 28-June 19, 2011. Directed by Elizabeth Swain. Scenic Design by Tom Buderwitz. Costume Design by A. Jeffrey Schoenberg. Lighting Design by Elizabeth Harper. Composer Peter Bayne. Properties Design by Heather Ho. Stage Manager Ritchard Druther. Dramaturg Christopher Breyer. Choreographer Heather Allyn. With John Achorn (Bilioso), John Allee (Ferrardo), Mark Doerr (Pietro), Bo Foxworth (Altofront), Joe Holt (Celso), Alex Knox (Ferneze), Adrian LaTourelle (Mendoza), Lynn Milgrim (Maquerelle), Christopher Parsons (Equato), Marisol Ramirez (Bianca), Devon Sorvari (Maria), Jason Thomas (Prepasso), Abby Wilde (Emilia), Jules Willcox (Aurelia). John Marston's bitter satire of courtly corruption has enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade. In addition to an RSC production in 2002, the play has recently been performed in Washington, DC and Staunton, VA. Now the play has come to the West Coast of North America, in the intimate setting of the Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood, courtesy of [End Page 414] Elizabeth Swain's championing of the play for the Antaeus Company. It was a real treat to see this gem of a production, staged to take advantage of the confines of a small space. The Anteus production did not make use of an elaborate set. Two wooden walls joined at the back of the stage, as if a box had been turned forty-five degrees from the audience. A small balcony in the back corner served as Altofront's chamber and as Maria's prison. Characters entered and exited through two open doorways in the wooden walls, or downstage right. Four seats stage right and stage left allowed for some privileged audience members to sit in on-stage boxes and suffer some of Malevole's taunts. Other than one odd instance of the lights coming down and a spotlight for Altofront's soliloquy after the intermission, there were not many effects of light or sound in this staging. This small space was occasionally a bit crowded—particularly in the opening and closing scenes at court, or as actors had to brush past each other in exits and entrances—and one might have expected some comment on the claustrophobia of the courtly setting. Nevertheless, these close quarters did offer several excellent opportunities to reach beyond the stage to the spectators and draw them in. One of the pleasures of seeing a rarely-performed piece of early modern drama is the chance to come to a new understanding of the play. The famously barbed comments with which Malevole introduces the other characters of Pietro's court take on a greater liveliness when the characters parade downstage center in a small theatre. However, in the case of the Antaeus Malcontent, it was refreshing to realize how much of the play belongs not to the caustic Malevole but to the smoothly manipulative Mendoza. This production was double-cast, with one cast performing some nights, another performing at other times, and a mixing of casts on still other nights, allowing for different actors to play together throughout the run. On the night I saw the production, Bo Foxworth's excellent Altofront/Malevole had a strong rival in Adrian LaTourelle's scheming Mendoza. Throughout the first half of the play, Mendoza appeared to have mastered the art of cunning manipulation. Delivering his first soliloquy while lounging on the steps of the seating area and cooing to the women in attendance, LaTourelle's charm could overcome the misogynistic content of Mendoza's lines and win the audience's interest if not its sympathy. Altofront's stepping out of his disguise—both by removing his wig and tattered garments and by returning his voice to its normal register—late in the play's first half also highlighted the fact that the first audience of Marston's play, presumably lacking the extensive program notes provided for a modern audience, might have been genuinely [End Page 415] Click for larger view View full resolution Bo Foxworth as Altofront in The Antaeus Company's 2011 production of The Malcontent, directed by Elizabeth Swain. Photo courtesy of Geoffrey Wade. Click for larger view View full resolution John Allee as Ferrardo and...

Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources by Mary Ann O’Donnell

217 gray plod, so at odds with Akenside’s own poetic luxuriance, but profit there undoubtedly and frequently is. As a bonus , this volume also includes an edition of Akenside’s nonmedical prose, in appendices. These comprise just over twenty letters, a theological essay (staunch in style, flimsy in thought) written by Akenside at twenty-one, and four essays of 1746 from The Museum, a periodical that Akenside edited capably during its eighteen-month life (1746–1747). Why so few? Because shortly after The Museum stopped appearing , Akenside, in his late twenties, markedly retrenched his short, precocious career as a man of letters—he had begun to publish when he was sixteen— to attend more to his medical life. Mr. Dix’s fullest discussion, seventy pages, of course falls to The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), an extraordinary blending of poetry, philosophy, and learning for someone not yet twentythree . This discussion, plus another twenty pages about the drastic revision of the poem as The Pleasures of the Imagination (a posthumous, unfinished publication in 1772) is the best account of this critical achievement I know. The rest of the book works its way thoughtfully through Akenside’s smallish body of poetry, mainly lyric—odes and their ilk—but also his satire An Epistle to Curio , between Pope and Churchill in date and quality, which carries forward Pope’s late motif of the satirist as victim , but here with a pathos that reminds one of the kinship between satire and sentiment. The last sentence of The Literary Career of Mark Akenside tells us that ‘‘Careers are, in one way at least, like arias: we find them easier to admire if they end on a high note.’’ The career of Akenside , who died in his very late forties, failed at this criterion; but with this book I think the career of Mr. Dix, who died in 2007 at fifty-one, met it. Eric Rothstein University of Wisconsin MARY ANN O’DONNELL. Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. 2nd ed. Aldershot : Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xix ⫹ 711.£65. Behn has been lucky in her bibliographer . When the first edition of Ms. O’Donnell’s magisterial work came out in 1986, it transformed the study of a writer who—strange to recall now— was once neglected. With meticulous care Ms. O’Donnell recorded Behn’s original, translated, and edited texts; works to which she contributed; and attributions . I found it a wonderful gift. The huge expansion of Ms. O’Donnell ’s bibliography testifies to the burgeoning scholarship that the first edition did so much to promote. Editions of Oroonoko, for example, have leaped from 25 in the first edition to 55 in the second (plus online texts). Most are new editions from 1985 up to 2002, the new cutoff point. Of note are the translations, most into European languages, but one into Japanese: Behn, always a writer of wide appeal, has gone global. The secondary bibliography has expanded from 661 to 1610 items, but the real increase is even greater since late entries, as well as additions to the previous list, have been interpolated into the sequence with small letters after the numbers. The annotations to the secondary bibliography, ranging from brief indication of content to minireviews, are an excellent guide. Appendix IX records productions of the plays, noting reviews as well, making it possible to consider Behn’s recent per- 218 formance history. Thirty-four productions of The Rover are recorded between 1979 and 2001, including one of both parts of the play in 1996, and French and German translations, and there are two new adaptations, including Biyi Bandele’s 1999 RSC production. There are productions of other Behn plays, and five different plays about her. Ms. O’Donnell’s work has contributed to her revival: this second edition provides an indispensable guide, and sets a standard for the bibliographers of other writers. Jane Spencer University of Exeter SUSAN WISEMAN. Conspiracy and Virtue : Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford, 2006. xii ⫹ 384. $99. In the opening chapters that provide an overview of Conspiracy and Virtue, Ms. Wiseman makes it clear that hers is a book not about the...

Silence, Rape and Politics in Measure for Measure : Close Readings in Theatre History

This article builds on Philip McGuire's work on the silences in Measure for Measure to re-examine them in the light of scholarship in theatre history (in particular Tiffany Stern's work on rehearsal and Scott McMillin's reflections on the sharer-apprentice relationship) to suggest that the cue-script and apprenticeship systems combined to put the boy performer playing Isabella in a position which would highlight his momentary embarrassment at being unable to respond to the Duke's proposal. The article produces close readings of the encounters between Isabella and Angelo in the centre of the play and relates those to their silence at the end to argue that the Duke's marriage proposal in act 5 is a replay of Angelo's attempted rape of Isabella in act 2. This observation becomes a springboard for looking at present-day performance practices and arguing that six RSC productions staged between 1970 and 1998 (directed by John Barton (1970), Barry Kyle (1978), Adrian Noble (1983), Steven Pimlott (1994) and Michael Boyd (1998)) each engage with contemporary politics in their respective stagings of Isabella's silence. A complex understanding of the relationship between silence, rape and politics underpins each staging, whether it ends on stunned unresponsiveness, a kiss, or a cathartic slap in the face.

Crossbows and Ghosts, Promenades and Gurneys: Shakespeare Onstage in 2007

Playgoing in 2007 yielded many surprises. I have seen a huge number of Twelfth Night productions, but I do not remember seeing Sir Toby best Sebastian in the 4.1 swordfight as staged at Chichester. In the Chichester Macbeth Banquo's description of temple-haunting [marlet] (1.6.4) was triggered not by a to-be-imagined bird but by a carcass on a platter ready to be carved; for her line I have a pilot's thumb (1.3.28) the First Witch brandished not a single digit but a severed hand which she dropped in an onstage sink; and at the news of the deaths of his wife and children Macduff stood for a very long time, long enough to make one wonder if the actor had dried. (1) A significant silence is scripted at the moment of Coriolanus' capitulation to his mother where the Folio stage direction reads: hold her by the hand, silent (5.3.182). When I saw the RSC production at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., that silence lasted fifteen to twenty seconds, but I was told that at some earlier performances at the Swan it lasted a minute or more. The three Globe productions also provided some distinctive moments. A property deer is occasionally seen in a Shakespeare production, especially in As You Like It (Which is he that kill'd the deer?--4.2.1), but the Globe Love's Labor's Lost provided a series of such appearances that started with a pre-show in which a male and female deer were carried onto separate runways by Dull and Jaquenetta and eventually moved together to nose each other. One deer then reappeared for the hunt scene, to be shot and carried off so as to be observed by Holofernes (Christopher Godwin) and set up his delightful rendition of the pricket speech (4.2.55-61). When watching The Merchant of Venice I have seen a variety of ways in which Bassanio has been clued in to the correct casket choice in 3.2; at the Globe he seemed prepared to choose the gold, at which point the singer and corps of musicians accosted him forcefully so as to generate his speech on ornament. This Bassanio, moreover, was very free with Antonio's money (purses were liberally distributed) and blanked on Portia's name in 1.1 (though she and Nerissa well remembered his). The signals for locale in this show struck me as unusual for a Globe production in that scenes of greenery were visible (at least for playgoers placed in the center) through the open doors to denote Belmont (and stayed in view for some Venice scenes), as did the caskets between 2.7 and 3.2, and a bust of Portia's father was onstage for 1.2. Several choices in Wilson Milam's Globe Othello surprised me. One of the first items to disappear when a director streamlines this script is the clown who appears briefly in 3.1 and 3.4. Here not only were these passages included, but the role was beefed up by various additions: at the outset this all-purpose figure shooed away the musicians and gave a short peremptory warning about mobile phones and photographs, and positioned above he later delivered the 2.2 proclamation (with more comic interplay with a musician). Elsewhere, the central opening was used not for discoveries but for the display of visible offstage activity (at least visible from where I was sitting--one of my colleagues was less fortunate), as with the drinking and socializing by townspeople in Acts Two and Three, and Desdemona's bed was in view as early as 4.3, then out of sight during 5.1, and thrust forward in 5.2 by attendants who laid out four lanterns on the floor. As befits the resources available at the Globe, Roderigo's attempted murder of Cassio and its aftermath were played as if in total darkness (some playgoers did not get the point and laughed at the two figures groping around in the to-be-imagined night); then Lodovico and Gratiano entered through the yard carrying a torch, whereas Iago appeared without bearing any such light, despite Gratiano's line in the script: Here's one comes in his shirt, with light and weapons (5. …

Ariel's Liberty

Julian Bleach's performance as Ariel in the 2006 RSC production of The Tempest (dir. Rupert Goold) surprised critics and audiences with its departure from performance tradition. This surprise is a site for exploring the ambiguity of Shakespeare's text when it comes to this role. Defined as a non-gendered "ayrie spirit" and with myriad contradictory descriptors, including bodilessness, the role leaves a large number of performance decisions up the actor. Bleach defines Ariel with a metronomic prowl, reluctant movements, and deep, nasal, otherworldly voicings of lines and songs. Simultaneously otherworldly and human, Bleach's portrayal of Ariel pressed on the questions of what it means to be male or female or neither, human or other-questions prompted any time a human actor embodies this nonhuman role. Highlighting Ariel's strangeness and capacity for empathy, Bleach's performance makes one question Prospero's moral superiority over his captives in new ways and throws Ariel's desire for liberty into relief. Bleach himself takes the liberties granted to him by Shakespeare's ambiguous text, and calls attention to the way the body may trump language when it comes to authoring meaning. Bleach's particular performance exposes the way in which a body on stage can both suggest the tried and true binaries of male and female, frightening and fearful, black and white, living and dead, enslaved and liberated, and break away from them, embodying the more uncomfortable realm which is none of these things.