The Merchant of Venice

Viewpoint
On Doing Shakespeare

I BELIEVE that doing Shakespeare, whether as a performer or as an audience member, is very like making love: there is no "right" way, just ways that are more - or less - satisfying to the individual at the time. There are those who say that the only true version has doublets and hose - Shakespeare's "missionary position" - and there are those who won't attempt it without complicated and expensive gimmicks. I have no argument with people who favour either of these approaches, unless they claim that only their sort of Shakespeare is valid.

SEX

In both sex and Shakespeare, the first experience sets the tone for later expectations. Many people say they dislike Shakespeare, a feeling often traced back to initial unsatisfactory adolescent fumblings. They encounted something at school which they were too young and inexperienced to understand, learning off the page things which can only have meaning when shared with other living human beings. Badly taught sex education and GCSE English have much to answer for! At least with sex, there is an inbuilt drive to overcome initial bad experiences. Shakespeare may never be given a second chance.
I have seen lots of Shakespeare, good and bad, in theatre and cinema, but I would hesitate to call any production definitive. Take Henry V for example: Olivier's classic film brilliantly set the play within its original Globe Theatre, before shifting it into the "reality" of the fifteenth century, with a background taken from medieval books of hours. Kenneth Branagh's film took Shakespeare's references to the artificiality of theatre and applied them to a modern film set, showing us cameras,

MUD

cables, lights, before creating the illusion. He also gave us the mud, squalor and pain of war, with his helmed soldiers looking very like the tin-hatted rain-soaked figures we see in newsreels from 1915. 1997's Globe Theatre production had all the immediacy of a living, present Henry, encouraging us to go "once more unto the breach" - the audience drawn into the action. It also had the women's parts played by men, as they would have been in Shakespeare's day and it was wondrous to see how convincingly a talented lad could play an awkward, shy, modest girl-princess. I also have fond memories of a television workshop done by Michael Bogdanov with volunteer residents from a Birmingham council estate.

DRAG QUEENS

Two local drag queens did the scene with Princess Katherine and Alice, her maid, which rediscovered all the rude jokes which are there in the text, but nowadays go unrecognised! None of these was "definitive". All brought out different facets of the play, all were exciting and enjoyable, but none made me feel I would never want or need to see Henry V again. The best Shakespeare, for me, should enable an audience to relate, to feel with the characters, to care what happens, to see something they hadn't noticed before, to leave the theatre still thinking and talking about the people whose story they have just witnessed. It should be a great experience. The final question has to be: how was it for you?

Val Foskett is the director of this Carlton production of the Merchant of Venice