If we put aside the so-called ‘Romances’, we can call twelve of Shakespeare’s plays ‘Comedies’, though their humour varies greatly, often diverging from what we might regard as funny. In fact there are no two alike and their stylistic differences are remarkable, ranging from bawdy slapstick to lyrical romance to rancid satire.
They are concerned mainly with love and sex—which do not always go hand in hand. The sex is frequently predatory and opportunistic (Touchstone and Audrey in As You Like It, Lucio in Measure for Measure), while love is anatomised from many angles—homoerotic (Twelfth Night, As You Like It), starry-eyed (As You Like It’s Orlando, or Helena in All’s Well), repressed desire (Angelo in Measure for Measure), courtly affectation as opposed to rustic wholesomeness (Love’s Labour’s Lost). Shakespeare’s survey of love encompasses teenage angst and fickleness (the young lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and, most entertainingly, the age-old ‘battle of the sexes’ where a well-matched couple of egos ply their wits in the war for supremacy, to sort out who will ‘wear the pants’. Into this category fall Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, Katharina and Petruchio in Shrew, Rosaline and Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost. As the Comedies mature, the women’s roles become more assured and dominant, with the dazzling personalities of Portia, Rosalind, Beatrice and Viola determining the outcome. This would seem to reflect the development of Shakespeare’s own sexual and intellectual maturity as well as being an indicator of the growing expertise of his boy actors and the delight audiences took in seeing them excel in female roles.
Peggy Ashcroft, one of the greatest twentieth-century Shakespearean actors, remarked:
I think Shakespeare must have loved women very much . . . he felt that even when women were capable of acts of cruelty or violence, there was a compulsion of emotion or frustration which forced them on.
The earliest comedies appear around 1590, when Shakespeare was in his mid-twenties. The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew are both Italianate in their settings but full of English characters. Bell Shakespeare produced The Two Gentlemen in 2005. Directed by Peter Evans, the play was performed in some thirty-six venues in all parts of Australia. Its main interest is in the promise of things to come in the later and greater works: the girl who disguises herself as a pageboy so that she can be near her lover (Twelfth Night), the planned elopement using a cord ladder (Romeo and Juliet). A highlight of the play is Launce’s double act with his dog, Crab. It’s still a crowd pleaser and precursor to a tradition of vaudeville schtick using animals.
The play has a fairly unsatisfying resolution—at least for a modern audience: mateship triumphs over heterosexual love. It’s possible that Shakespeare was being ironic; but if this ending is contentious there is a lot worse to come in another Comedy of around the same time, The Taming of the Shrew.
The Taming of the Shrew
For all its perceived sexism and misogyny, Shrew has always been a great hit with audiences. I guess our great-grandparents would have found nothing to quibble with in its sexual politics and affirmation of male supremacy, and well into the twentieth century the play was still taken at face value. The Zeffirelli film with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor was big box office and there were successful spin-offs like the Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate, which upheld the play’s perceived traditional values.
With the rise of the feminist movement in the seventies, Shrew, among other classics, came in for particular disapproval, though oddly enough one of feminism’s high priestesses, Germaine Greer, staunchly defends the play. Audiences delight in seeing the eternal ‘battle of the sexes’ played out on stage, even when, as has generally been the case, the dice is loaded in favour of the men. And like it or not, Kate and Petruchio are a couple of attractive feisty roles that frequently appeal to celebrity actors. They have a zest for life, a passionate commitment to their individual agendas and a quick wit which sets them apart from the dullards around them. Putting its contentious sexual politics to one side, the play is a brilliantly constructed comedy full of well-defined and colourful characters. The subplot with its rival lovers, tricks, disguises, cunning servants and double crosses is marvellously realised, a feast for a company of character-comedians.
I have played Petruchio twice—once for the Old Tote in 1972, in a production by Robin Lovejoy with a cast that included Ron Haddrick, John Gaden and Drew Forsythe, and later in a production by Aarne Neeme in Perth’s reconstructed Fortune Theatre, an approximation of an Elizabethan playhouse. This time Anna Volska played Katharina.
I directed the play for Bell Shakespeare in 1994 with Chris Stollery as Petruchio, Essie Davis as Kate and Darren Gilshenan as Grumio. Marion Potts directed the play again for Bell Shakespeare’s regional tour in 2009 with an all-female cast.
In approaching the play as director you have a number of options. First, you can present it as a period piece with what we assume is an accurate reflection of Elizabethan values and sentiments. Jonathan Miller came close to this with his TV production for the BBC starring John Cleese as Petruchio. For once Cleese wasn’t playing for laughs. His Petruchio was a tough-minded Protestant Englishman determined to uphold a Puritan’s view of divine order. Having brought Kate into line he led the company in singing a psalm as the end credits rolled. Miller is a director who believes the key to a play is keeping it in its ‘period’.
The more widely accepted tradition of staging the play is to see it as a good-natured rough-and-tumble romp. In this version Kate and Petruchio really fancy each other from the start, but since they are both stubborn, wilful and domineering, they have some heavy negotiating to do, just as in any marriage. A variant of this interpretation is to see them as a pair of mavericks who are absolutely made for each other; nobody else could bear to live with either of them, but once they’ve arrived at a contract they are fair set for a blissful marriage. Yet another approach is to see Petruchio as the shrew; he has to learn as much as Kate does, and change his life accordingly. Chris Stollery, by contrast, saw Petruchio as a kind of Zen master who, through rigorous treatment, brings Kate to a stage of self-realisation: her unfocused rage was strangling her and obscuring her true virtues.
As for the famous or infamous final speech of Kate, that is the clincher. There’s no doubt that it’s a masterful piece of writing, and if you buy into its sentiments, a beautiful and moving one. It would seem a surprising number of women still heartily agree with everything Kate says . . . But if you don’t, what are your options? A common recourse is to play it ironically, as did Peggy Ashcroft, paying lip service but underneath still deeply defiant. Then again, you could remind yourself that this is a comedy and that one of comedy’s staple tricks is to have a character who has sworn all night that black is white suddenly do a complete about face and swear the opposite: confirmed bachelors like Benedick and Berowne eventually become marriage’s greatest advocates. But a simple comic turnaround does not do justice to Kate’s speech; there’s a lot more to it.
Charles Marowitz’s cut-and-paste version of the play turned it into a vehicle for the Theatre of Cruelty, and perhaps taking this as his cue, Michael Bogdanov in his RSC production showed Kate as both brainwashed and broken in spirit. As she mechanically parroted her final speech the other characters looked away in embarrassment.
A more cynical but comical viewpoint might see Kate and Petruchio in cahoots by the end. They have already reached an agreement and in this last scene she is aware that he was wagered a great deal of money on her playing ball. Aware of this, she delivers her speech with great panache then helps her husband scoop up the winnings. This would be in line with the play’s insistence on the mercenary nature of marriage contracts and Petruchio’s self-proclaimed status as a fortune hunter:
I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua.
In all of Shakespeare, romantic love is constantly underscored by mercenary considerations. As Juliet’s nurse says:
He that lays hold of her shall have the chinks.
Rather than avoiding the gender politics, Marion Potts’ BSC production sought to comment on them by using an all-female cast. Actresses were allowed to depict male ‘bad behaviours’ so that we were simultaneously distanced from it and confronted by it.
When I played Petruchio I tried to find everything that was appealing about him—especially his candour. He is absolutely straight with the other characters and with the audience as to what he wants and how he’s going to get it. Initially all he’s seeking from a marriage is wealth and security. When he learns about the lively Katharina he’s intrigued, and when he sees her he realises that here is a person of real worth, undervalued by those around her and getting in her own way through her rages and sullenness. He decides to train and tame her just as a falconer trains a wild bird in order to realise its full potential. Admittedly this is a very male and presumptuous attitude, but that’s the world of the play, where women are simply commodities to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. (It should be noted that Petruchio never strikes Kate, though in Kiss Me, Kate he spanks her and stamps around with a whip in his hand—a very American way of taming a wife.) Physical abuse is minimal—he deprives her of food and sleep for a little until she learns to say ‘thank you’. The abuse is mainly psychological—a determination to break her wilfulness. How far this goes, how seriously to take it, is a choice for each production.
When I directed the play in 1994 I tried to shift the emphasis away from Kate’s bad temper to an examination of what lay behind it. I gave the play a deliberately Australian setting—an RSL club in somewhere resembling Surfers Paradise, where the emphasis was on rampant materialism: financial wheeling and dealing, gambling, bling and big boys’ toys. Instead of the induction we had a chook raffle and talent quest in which members of the audience were invited to participate. So when the play began the ambience of an RSL club was firmly established. Kate’s rebellion against this world and its marriage market set her apart and one could see her point of view.
In this production Petruchio was a footloose Vietnam vet who lived with a pretty rough crew of his mates in a junky old car yard in Nimbin. He too had no taste for the glitzy world of Baptista and co. and was determined to get Kate out of it. Her capitulation was based on gratitude for this as well as a temperamental kinship. In the end Kate and Petruchio are the lucky ones; they’ve sorted out their differences and seem destined to become one of the few happy couples in all of Shakespeare. The marriages of Lucentio and Bianca, Hortensio and his widow, seem far less assured of success. The play probably caused as much debate in 1590 as it does today. The recipe for a happy marriage and the negotiations necessary to achieve it will always be as fascinating as they are contentious.
The Comedy of Errors
There is a fair deal of farce and horseplay in Shrew and this is carried a lot further in The Comedy of Errors. Like Shrew it owes a lot to the commedia dell’arte shows Shakespeare and Ben Jonson saw performed by the Italian troupes in London, but its prime source is an old comedy by Plautus. Whereas Plautus has a set of twins searching for each other, Shakespeare doubles the fun by supplying each of them with a servant, who are also identical twins. Comedy is a cleverly contrived piece and the dialogue rattles along with a couple of cross-talk routines that would be quite at home on the modern vaudeville stage. It’s curious to see in this very early play some of the themes that preoccupied Shakespeare throughout his career. We have a shipwreck, a family split asunder, twins searching for each other and being reunited, husband and wife finding each other after years of separation. Some of these ingredients recur in Twelfth Night, some in The Tempest and others in Pericles. In fact Comedy and Pericles are connected by the action taking place in Ephesus, a city condemned by Saint Paul as a centre of witchcraft and debauchery. Shakespeare’s Ephesus is in Comedy a hospitable, friendly town, although strangers, like Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio, persist in their superstitious prejudice:
They say this town is full of cozenage;
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin . . .
The Comedy of Errors was a palpable hit for Bell Shakespeare in 2002. We revived it two years later and in 2006 took it to the Bath Shakespeare Festival. Although we had toured parts of Asia (our education teams to Malaysia and Singapore, Dance of Death to Tokyo and Nagoya), this was our first venture to the UK, which we undertook with some trepidation, bearing in mind the old adage about taking coal to Newcastle.
We need not have worried. The audiences in Bath and Blackpool were warm and appreciative, the Blackpool newspaper critic lamenting that the Aussies had not only won the Ashes, they were trouncing the Brits at Shakespeare too. That was pushing it a bit far, but I did agree with him that the show was a ray of sunshine in a bleak English winter. And Blackpool in winter is as bleak as it gets. We were only there because an old mate from my Nimrod days, Paul Iles, was running the lovely old theatre, and hearing we were going to be in Bath, extended our tour by a couple of weeks.
Although it has its fair share of slapstick, gutter humour and broad characterisation, the play is indeed a comedy—not a farce. To me comedy has a certain humanity which farce dispenses with. In farce the characters are stock types, not people. We are never meant to identify with the characters, empathise with them or take them seriously. They are simply part of a mechanism—they are there to get into a pickle and gag their way out of it. We laugh at them, never with them. Comedy is more warm-hearted. Although we know it’s all a set-up and that things are going to work out for the best, we do feel for the characters’ dilemmas and anxieties. They have experiences close enough to our own; we share their joys and sorrows and enjoy the anticipation of a happy ending. They can move us to tears. Comedy has the potential for tragedy if things don’t turn out right.
Playing farce is a very mechanical operation—it’s all about timing the jokes and opening the doors on cue. It’s essential that the characters are bold, one-dimensional and predictable. In comedy there is room for ambiguity and multi-layered characterisations. People can behave atypically, they can change. So in rehearsing comedy it’s a fatal mistake to think about being funny. Avoid ‘funny’ costumes and props, ‘funny’ voices and walks. To work well comedy has to be grounded in reality. In rehearsing The Comedy of Errors we began by imagining how disconcerting, how frightening it would be to arrive in a foreign city where you are greeted by total strangers who know you by name. They claim you owe them money—one even claims to be married to you! This is the crisis faced by Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse. Once you have established their bewilderment and confusion, the comedy can start to roll. The audience, one step ahead, knows that there are two sets of twins, laughs at their dilemma.
In rehearsing a tragedy I try to keep the atmosphere buoyant and relaxed so that we don’t get bogged down in solemnity. But there comes a point in rehearsing comedy when it’s deadly serious and has to be got just right; anything loose or sloppy will kill it. I recall the last words of the great David Garrick: ‘Dying is easy—comedy is hard.’
As with tragedy it’s essential that all the hard work must be left in the rehearsal room and what appears on stage is light, deft and effortless. In the last days of rehearsal it’s good to do a ‘speed run’ to see how much time can be knocked off the show by cutting unnecessary pauses and laborious overexplaining.
Directing Shakespeare Comedies has been one of the greatest joys of my life. You have to keep reminding the actors, ‘Don’t expect any laughs in the first couple of acts—in fact, do your best to kill them; you don’t want to wear the audience out. The first couple of acts are all set-up: the audience has to take in a lot of information. Keep it light, keep it truthful and keep it moving and you get all the pay-offs in the last scene.’ The last scene of any Shakespeare Comedy is a delight, once you’ve sorted out the traffic, because for the first time you have all the characters on stage together. All the chickens come home to roost, all the pay-offs occur and you are swamped by gales of laughter and euphoria that engulfs both stage and auditorium. I recall the last night of my Nimrod Much Ado in Adelaide when the audience stood and walked down the aisles and onto the acting space to embrace the actors.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
While I was studying for my arts degree at Sydney University in the late 1950s, I lived a fairly impecunious existence. But when I saw a copy of Euphues published in 1623 in a bookshop near Circular Quay, I knew I had to have it. The First Folio was published in 1623 and this little copy of Euphues hit the bookstalls at the same time. I even fantasised that Shakespeare might have handled this very volume, because Euphues was the target of his satire in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The book cost me ten pounds, and the bookseller agreed to my paying it off at a pound per week, which was quite a struggle.
John Lyly’s Euphues was enormously popular in its day and created a vogue for flowery poetry full of conceits and cleverness. Shakespeare himself was not averse to this and is occasionally overindulgent by our standards. But he was still able to laugh at the excesses of euphuism, as it came to be known. The four young courtiers in Love’s Labour’s Lost are prone to euphuism, none more so than the play’s hero, Berowne. Like so many of the other characters in the play he is obsessed with language and word games. With his three companions Berowne has sworn to live a monastic life—to fast, study and abjure the company of women. But when the Princess of France and her three comely companions appear on the scene, the young men’s oaths fly out the window and they fling themselves into an orgy of sonneteering and lovemaking. The fantastical Spanish knight Don Armado follows suit, penning poems to the country wench Jaquenetta, while the schoolmaster and parson entertain each other with Latin tags and quibbles.
All this preoccupation with language, says Shakespeare, gets in the way of true feelings and simple honest expression. He demands that affectation be stripped away in favour of sincerity and plainness. Reproved by his mistress, Rosaline, for his verbal excesses, Berowne promises:
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise
Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical—these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
I do forswear them . . .
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.
The play’s merriment reaches its climax in a performance of The Nine Worthies by the village folk for the entertainment of the court. The festivities are interrupted by the appearance of a French messenger:
Marcade: God save you, Madam!
Princess: Welcome, Marcade;
But that thou interrupts’t our merriment.
Marcade: I am sorry, Madam, for the news I bring is heavy in my tongue. The King, your Father . . .
Princess: Dead, for my life!
Marcade: Even so; my tale is told.
Berowne: Worthies, away; the scene begins to cloud.
With this masterful stroke, a cloud does indeed descend over the end of the play, which achieves an instant gravitas. The four ladies make their lovers promise to study and meditate for a year as a sign of their seriousness and then return to proffer their love. The hardest task is reserved for Berowne, who is enjoined by Rosaline to exercise his wit by giving solace to the sick and dying in hospitals. Berowne remarks:
Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
King: Come sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day, and then ’twill end.
Berowne: That’s too long for a play.
I’ve seen a few productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost. One of the most memorable was John Barton’s in Stratford in 1965 when I joined the RSC. It was staged in Elizabethan costume in a big empty space indicative of a forest glade. On the opening night it seemed tedious and overwrought, but as the season wore on it ripened, all of Barton’s scholarship and attention to the language taking effect. By the end of the season it had become one of the most satisfying and moving, multi-layered readings of a comedy I had seen. A play like that is hard to bring off with five weeks’ rehearsal, even for an experienced ensemble. You need time for things to sink in, relax and breathe, for the juices to flow.
Before I returned to Australia in 1970 I spent six months back at my old drama school in Bristol and undertook as my first essay in directing Love’s Labour’s Lost with second-year students. It was a frustrating exercise, trying to impart, in such a limited time and with such inexperienced actors, the complexities of the language, the sophisticated humour, and the underlying humanity and seriousness. A tough first lesson in directing.
My next encounter with the play was a production for Sydney’s Old Tote at the Sydney Opera House in 1973. It was directed by Bill Gaskill, whose work at the National (including The Recruiting Officer with Olivier, Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith) I had much admired. It had a strong cast, including my wife Anna, Jacki Weaver, Drew Forsythe and Alexander Hay. I found the production a bit stodgy. It was set in a sort of rural Oxbridge in Edwardian costume—all tweeds and pipes and button-up boots. That is somehow antithetical to the spirit of Shakespeare, especially his Comedies. A play about vibrant youthful sexuality is not helped by shutting it within the confines of Edwardian respectability.
But during the rehearsals Gaskill did two very good things. He could be a real martinet and insisted on absolute clarity. The language of Love’s Labour’s Lost can be knotty and intricate. We were rehearsing in a vast concrete warehouse and Gaskill made each of us in turn stand at one end of the room and deliver a complex speech to the rest of the group at the other end. This demanded not only the highest level of voice projection, breath control and diction, but precision of thought, meaning and intention. Gaskill’s only response, time and again, would be, ‘I can’t understand you. Do it again.’
It was a frustrating exercise but focused the mind wonderfully and was a very good piece of direction. After an exhausting afternoon with the four young men, I heard Gaskill mutter to the stage manager, ‘That went well . . . Tomorrow I’ll give the ladies a bit of stick.’
His other good move was to help us appreciate the art of the sonnet. Each of us was supposed to compose a sonnet to his mistress in the play, so Gaskill had us each compose a sonnet to the actress playing opposite us. This made us really look at and think about the qualities of our ‘lovers’, which was a nice bonding exercise. It also made us realise what a difficult thing it is to compose a sonnet, so that when we came to recite them in the play we did so with a lot more understanding and respect.
Berowne was a very enjoyable role to play: he is smart, witty, passionate and sceptical. He enjoys life, he enjoys love and he enjoys a joke. If you are looking for a self-portrait of the young Shakespeare, I suggest you look no further than Berowne. He is deprecating about sonneteering and flowery love-talk in the same way that Shakespeare is. Rather than being resentful at being shown up by Rosaline and the other ladies, he graciously accepts defeat and ruefully confesses his shortcomings.
Anyone wanting to charge Shakespeare with misogyny had better reread Love’s Labour’s Lost. The young men of the play are portrayed as naive, affected and as shallow as youth dictates. The young women, on the other hand, are a lot smarter as well as being more mature. At the end of the play they bring their lovers to heel and impose on them penances for their folly and presumption. These penances are designed to bring the boys to a realisation of the true nature of love and its place in the world. It’s the same lesson that the other Rosalind teaches her Orlando: love isn’t about writing fluffy poetry and playing at dress-ups.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is seen infrequently, which is a pity. It needs a large cast—at least eighteen—and people are probably frightened off by the deliberate preciousness of the language. Kenneth Branagh, a renowned populariser of Shakespeare, made a valiant attempt to film the play, but made the disastrous choice to fill it with pop songs to make it more palatable.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A play that is perhaps presented a little too often is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, surely the most popular of all the Comedies. I’m not gainsaying its greatness but cannot help suppressing a groan when I look at the theatre program for the year ahead and note that there are at least half a dozen productions of the Dream about to descend on us: on the beach, by the pool, in the park; Indian versions, hip-hop, circus, high school, pro-am, along with opera, ballet and concert versions. In spite of all this the play survives and is assuredly one of the finest works of art ever created.
It is entirely original. Shakespeare usually resorted to old plays, historical chronicles or novellas for inspiration, but the Dream is all his own. And despite the fact that it deals with three utterly different worlds and genres—the mischievous and lyrical land of faerie, the earthy prosaic endeavours of the artisans and the bickering entanglements of the young lovers—the play has a wonderful homogeneity, all its elements caught in the web of an enchanted moonlit forest. The stories of the fairies and the lovers certainly overlap, as do those of the fairies and the artisans, but then all three stories meet in the grand conclusion where the love-suicide of Pyramus and Thisbe shows up the fickle behaviour of the lovers who are watching the play. Like The Magic Flute, Shakespeare’s Dream is a perfect gem and you can’t cut a note or a line without damaging the fabric.
As with others of the Comedies, English names and characters infiltrate an ostensibly foreign setting. We are told we’re in Athens, ruled by Duke Theseus. He is attended by convincingly Greek counterparts—Egeon, Hermia, Helena and Demetrius. But in this same Athens we find a bunch of artisans with very un-Greek names: Peter Quince, Nick Bottom, Francis Flute, Snug, Snout and Starveling.
Like the artisans, the fairies belong not in classical Athens but in the world of English folklore and so does the forest:
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock,
The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud . . .
Puck is also known as Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin, and is renowned for tormenting milkmaids and farmers’ wives, for playing tricks on gossips and solemn aunts as they sit by the fireside.
Again, this odd amalgamation of classical Greece and Elizabethan Warwickshire is entirely acceptable in the theatre. Peter Hall achieved a magical production in Stratford in the fifties by setting the whole piece in a sort of Elizabethan great hall, with even the fairies in Elizabethan costume—but with bare feet. He also had a stellar cast, including Charles Laughton, Ian Holm, Robert Hardy and a very young Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave. The production was recorded for television and still stands up very well, as does Elijah Moshinksy’s more recent production for BBC TV. But the production that became a touchstone for the play and for Shakespeare productions generally was Peter Brook’s remarkable rethink at Stratford in 1970.
By placing the action in a stark white box, Brook maintained that real theatrical magic could be created by words and by actors rather than by scenic artists and lighting effects. Brook not only rejected any vestige of literalism, he demonstrated that speaking verse can be a sexual act and that the essence of theatre is playfulness. But his production possessed gravitas and challenged preconceptions. His forest could be a cruel and exposing place, one of traps and obstacles. And by playing Pyramus and Thisbe with heartfelt sincerity, the artisans revealed the true wonder of theatre:
For never anything can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.
For all its clumsiness their performances had integrity, making the lovers’ posturing seem shallow and fickle, their wisecracks all the more heartless.
It’s a pity that so many productions of the Dream miss out on its delicacy, its lyricism and poignancy, settling instead for noisy horseplay and wild caricature. I’ve had only one go at directing the play and that was back in 1970 at NIDA, where I spent a year as head of acting. It was my second production and I still had a lot to learn, but even then I was deeply conscious of trying to find an ‘Australian’ way of performing Shakespeare, of wrenching ourselves away from aping what we thought was the ‘right’ way, the ‘English’ way, of doing the plays. I had been back in Australia only a few months after nearly five years with the RSC, but I made the decision that I would not try to transplant that experience. Rather, I would try to start from scratch and involve myself in developing a kind of theatre that was appropriate and necessary in Australia then and there. I felt a bit dashed at the time that all I had seen and learned in England was of no use here. But of course that was far from true. I had seen great performances and worked with great actors and directors who had made their mark on me and taught me invaluable lessons on which I would draw for the rest of my life.
The Merchant of Venice
In 1595, the year after A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare staged The Merchant of Venice, which has remained an equally popular but more controversial comedy. Shakespeare was now thirty-one years old and riding high. Besides the comedies so far listed, he had scored with his Henry VI trilogy, Richard III, King John, Richard II, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet.
He was still locked in competition with Christopher Marlowe, who had recently had a great success with a grotesque comi-tragedy, The Jew of Malta. Like Shakespeare, Marlowe was an opportunist with a keen nose for popular subject matter. A recent court scandal gave him what he was looking for. Roderigo Lopez was a Portuguese Jew and the Queen’s personal physician. Caught up in factional intrigues at court, Lopez was found guilty of attempting to poison the Queen. The charge was most likely quite unfounded, but the unfortunate Lopez was hanged, drawn and quartered.
Riding the wave of anti-Semitic hysteria that attended the Lopez case, Marlowe dashed off The Jew of Malta, whose hero-villain Barabas, attended by his evil black sidekick Ithamore, poisons a whole conventful of nuns.
Barabas is a fantastical and nightmarish Jewish monster, the kind of caricature you see in Nazi propaganda movies and posters. Anti-Semitism was hardly an issue in Elizabethan England, mainly because there were so few Jews around. The majority had been banished by King Edward I in 1290. By the sixteenth century a small Jewish population was tolerated in London and being Jewish was no bar to Dr Lopez becoming the Queen’s physician. But prejudice was always there, ready to be tapped, just as prejudice against Dutch and Moorish refugees would occasionally flare up in ugly riots.
Noting the success of The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare responded with his own Jewish villain, Shylock; but as always with Shakespeare, there was a surprise in store. He seems to have delighted in turning audience expectations on their heads, subverting established models. No doubt the audience flocked eagerly to the Globe to see another amusing and damning Jewish caricature, and that’s the way Shylock seems to be set up. But then we see him being kicked, spurned and spat on by the pious Christians, one of whom not only elopes with Shylock’s daughter but persuades her to steal her father’s money and convert to Christianity!
By the time we get to the trial scene in Act IV, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Shylock, despite his murderous intentions. Earlier, at the top of Act III, he is given the floor to air his grievances in one of the most affecting speeches in all of Shakespeare:
He hath disgraced me and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies. And what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
It must have shocked an Elizabethan audience to the core to hear from a Jew such an eloquent rebuttal of Christian bigotry, especially in a theatre where there was so much direct address to the audience. Shylock is damning not just Antonio and all the other Christians on stage, but those looking on from the pit and the galleries as well.
Bell Shakespeare has produced Merchant three times so far. It was one of the productions of our opening season in 1991, in repertoire with Hamlet. Carol Woodrow directed the production, in which I played Shylock. We brought the production back for the following two seasons. We staged a new production in 1999, this time directed by Richard Wherrett with the late Percy Sieff playing Shylock, and in 2006 Anna Volska directed the play for our thirty-six-venue regional tour, with Robert Alexander playing Shylock.
Merchant is always a hit with audiences despite the contentious subject matter. Perceived anti-Semitism is not the only thing to leave a slightly nasty taste in the mouth. The bigotry and racial prejudice expressed by some of the characters extends beyond reviling the Jews. The second scene of the play opens with the glamorous and virtuous heroine Portia launching into a catalogue of bitchy remarks about the Neapolitans, the French, the English, the Scots and the Germans. A few scenes later she dismisses the black Prince of Morocco with:
A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so.
Bassanio’s friends Solanio, Salerio and Gratiano are all Jew-baiters, Gratiano being the nastiest of the bunch, for all his merriment. The clown Launcelot Gobbo embodies simple-minded medieval superstition, equating the Jew with the devil.
All of this is unpleasant enough, but then add the play’s fixation with materialism. It’s supposed to be a romantic comedy, but Bassanio makes it very clear from the start that his wooing of Portia is as much a mercantile gamble as are Antonio’s argosies. He has thrown away his inheritance and wasted the money he borrowed from Antonio. Now he wants to borrow more so that he can woo a rich heiress.
The rivalry between Antonio and Shylock is business-based, even though it is poisoned by Antonio’s virulent, almost hysterical anti-Semitism. Lorenzo’s wooing of Jessica might seem a romantic escapade (all that Venetian carnival atmosphere, masks, moonlight and disguise) but the fun is undercut by the fact that she robs her father in the process, renouncing both him and her religion. Launcelot is a treacherous little sod who happily quits his master when made a better offer. Despite Antonio’s generosity and his being placed in mortal peril, it’s hard to feel warmly towards such a racist bigot and even the warm and sunny Portia can chill one with her xenophobic one-liners.
So, given all this nastiness, where lies the play’s charm and enduring popularity? To begin with, the play is fantastically well structured, with all the best elements of courtroom drama, romantic comedy and melodramatic cliffhanger.
At its centre is a fascinating love triangle between Antonio, Bassanio and Portia. Bassanio undoubtedly trades on his youthful charm and the fact that Antonio is smitten with him. Although Antonio can never possess Bassanio, he will sacrifice his fortune and even his life for him. He seems almost to welcome the opportunity to prove his devotion by submitting himself to Shylock’s knife:
Commend me to your honourable wife;
Tell her the process of Antonio’s end;
Say how I loved you; speak me fair in death;
And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.
At the beginning of the play we are presented with the enigma of Antonio’s habitual and deep-seated melancholy. What is it but ‘the love that dare not speak its name’? And why else should Antonio regard himself as ‘a tainted wether of the flock, Meetest for death’?
By sacrificing his life for Bassanio he will have a hold on him from beyond the grave, a nexus that Portia will never be able to break. Realising this, Portia is determined to thwart Antonio’s death wish by saving his life. She tests Bassanio’s constancy by giving him a ring and bidding him never to part with it. Then, in the character of the lawyer Balthazar, Antonio’s saviour, she demands the ring as a reward, a demand backed by Antonio. In the final scene she reveals the ruse but imposes another binding ring on Bassanio and this time makes Antonio the go-between, dissolving whatever bond remains between the two men. The ‘ring scene’ at the end of the play is by no means a frivolous anticlimax but the resolution of the love triangle and a proclamation of Portia’s victory. As the three newlywed couples stroll off into the moonlight, Antonio is left alone on stage, much like the other lovelorn homosexual, Antonio in Twelfth Night—another outsider excluded from the all-white, all-Christian, all-heterosexual club.
Without its cruelty, its racial and religious tensions, its running commentary on a materialistic and exclusive society, Merchant could be a cheesy romantic comedy. As it is, it remains a troubling, ambivalent and exciting work, both a challenge and delight for actors and directors.
Part of its enduring charm is the play’s lyricism, irony and forceful rhetoric. The play bestrides two worlds, the tough, pragmatic, mercenary and legalistic Venice and the almost fairytale floating world of Belmont, where dwells the exotic Portia:
. . . the four winds blow in from every coast
Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos’ strand
And many Jasons come in quest of her.
Belmont is a site for romantic wooers, mysterious caskets governed by a dead father’s love test—all legendary stuff. It is a world of feasting, marriage, music and moonlight expressed in exquisite lyrical poetry. The juxtaposition of Venice and Belmont is a remarkable achievement. Without the softening effect of Belmont, Merchant would be a cruel play indeed.
To our post-Holocaust sensibilities, Shylock will always be a problem to be got around. Interestingly, Jewish actors are not self-conscious about the role and take to it with relish. In recent years Antony Sher, David Suchet and Henry Goodman have all had great success in the role, and Goodman’s performance in the televised version of Trevor Nunn’s production for the National is the best Shylock I have seen. American actors who have played Shylock recently include Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. Orson Welles played the role in his unfinished film version.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when anti-Semitism was rife throughout Europe, audiences had no problem laughing at Shylock, but even then actors like Kean and Irving invested the character with pathos, dignity and some heroic stature. Don’t forget that around the same time as Irving Charles Dickens, that compassionate champion of the underdog, was creating Fagin, a far less sympathetic character than Shylock.
When I came to play Shylock in 1991, I was very aware of the controversy surrounding the play and the character, and I was determined to see things from Shylock’s point of view. I studied Jewish history and culture, got myself invited to synagogue and Friday night Shabbat gatherings. I had already attended weddings and funerals of various Jewish friends and I now spent time in Bondi coffee shops observing Jewish businessmen, listening to conversations and observing behaviour. One ultra-Orthodox couple I interviewed advised me, ‘Watch Fiddler on the Roof—that’s pretty accurate.’ I was so determined to make Shylock sympathetic I may have pushed it too far out of whack. Some Jewish friends who came backstage after the first night said, ‘I think you were a bit tough on the Christians.’
And I guess there’s the essence of it: Shakespeare shows us people with both their faults and virtues, always the product of a particular environment. He is non-judgmental and so should we be. We have to accept the ambivalences, the inconsistencies, show all facets of a character or situation and let the audience draw their own conclusions.
One of the most remarkable Shylocks I have seen was that of Gert Voss with the Berliner Ensemble. He looked and behaved like all the other German businessmen on stage. He wore the same clothes, read the same newspaper; until he was pointed out you didn’t know which one was the Jew. It reminded the audience how integrated the Jews were into pre-war Germany; how much they regarded themselves as Germans and could not comprehend why they were suddenly being rounded up.
The Merry Wives of Windsor
In 1599, Shakespeare delivered The Merry Wives of Windsor in response, legend has it, to a demand by Queen Elizabeth, who had so enjoyed Falstaff in Henry IV that she wanted to see the fat knight in love. Apparently Shakespeare knocked off the play in a fortnight so that it might be ready in time for the Garter ceremony at Windsor Castle. The piece is a pleasant prosaic comedy, chiefly notable for its depiction of small-town life with, as I’ve mentioned, particular insights into the classroom that only a grammar school boy would have had. Falstaff is only a shadow of his former self, but the other characters are presented with verve. The only stage performance I have seen was one by the RSC in 1965. Ian Richardson was born to play the explosive and obsessively jealous Master Ford, but the whole show fell victim to the tyranny of the design concept. It was a prime example of how not to approach a comedy. The director and designer obviously thought it would be terribly funny to have everyone dress in very exaggerated versions of Elizabethan hats and pantaloons which the actors then tried to inhabit with funny walks and funny voices . . . No truth. No reality. No funny.
Much Ado About Nothing
Fifteen ninety-nine also saw Shakespeare produce what is to my mind his sunniest comedy, Much Ado About Nothing. There is a touch of darkness in the malignant character of Don John and a cloud settles over the action when Claudio rejects Hero at the altar. Friendships look like cracking and a duel is impending. But thanks to the timely intervention of Constable Dogberry and his bumbling Watchmen, the situation is saved and the way clear for a canter to a happy ending. It’s basically a good-natured play, which is something you can’t say of Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens or Troilus and Cressida.
The tone of the play and its main attraction is to be found in its leading couple, Beatrice and Benedick. As Leonard Digges remarked in 1640:
. . . let but Beatrice and Benedick be seen, lo in a trice
The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes all are full.
Both characters are witty, egotistical and fiercely independent. Each decries the opposite sex and mocks the idea of marriage: obviously they are made for each other. Tricked into declaring their true feelings, their love is sorely tested when Beatrice demands that Benedick challenge his bosom buddy Claudio for slighting Beatrice’s cousin Hero. To the very end they battle for supremacy but there can be no doubt they can look forward to a future of high-spirited marital bliss. The same can be said of Kate and Petruchio, Berowne and Rosaline. They are usually cast as young and feisty but a lot of fun can be had when both Benedick and Beatrice are a touch older, set in their ways, in danger of being left on the shelf. This gives their friends’ matchmaking a touch of urgency.
Like several of the other Comedies the play is set in Italy. (Apart from Merry Wives none of Shakespeare’s Comedies is set in England, although an Englishness pervades them.) The Italian (Sicilian) setting is important to remember because it helps to explain (if not excuse) a lot of what happens. Claudio’s rejection of Hero on such flimsy evidence is reprehensible, especially if played with a cold British priggishness. But if Claudio is a hot-headed young Italian, impulsive and passionate, his actions are more easy to forgive. So are Beatrice’s vengeful rage and the macho posturing of the young soldiers. We accept, in the theatre at least, that this Sicily is fiercely proud of its codes of honour, of vendetta, of female chastity and family names. They go with the territory and are attended by a degree of romance and the sort of fascination with which we watch movies like The Godfather.
I highlighted the Italian setting very deliberately when I directed the play for Nimrod in 1975. It was my first attempt to bust open the way of performing Shakespeare and take it away from the ‘proper’ English way of speaking the text. This was not because I am averse to good diction and affecting cadences but because I had found that in trying to sound ‘proper’, actors often adopted a self-conscious pose accompanied by stiff, conventional and meaningless gestures. It was a third-hand attempt at what they thought was a ‘classical style’. I had been guilty of it myself and knew how this preoccupation killed truth and spontaneity.
So first I tried to free up the actors by freeing up the space. I put some acting areas in the auditorium and some of the seats on stage. Actors were encouraged to enter through the audience, sit and hide among them, crawl over the top of them and involve them as much as possible in the action—without harassing or embarrassing them. I removed any sense of ‘naturalism’ by setting the play in a circus tent with the costumes influenced by those of circus performers. I brought in actors from the Theatre for the Deaf to teach us a whole new repertoire of sign language and physicality to counter any temptation to fall back on ‘Shakespearean’ gestures. And, most radically, I had the actors rehearse the whole play in broad ‘greengrocer’ mock Italian accents. This was designed purely as a rehearsal technique to have fun with the language, free it up and steer clear of pomposity.
As opening night drew near, I said, ‘Okay, it’s time to drop the Italian accents,’ but I was met with looks of horror. ‘We can’t drop them now! They’re in our bodies, they’re part of our characters.’ I realised that the actors were right; so the accents stayed—to overall general audience acceptance except, of course, for a few who strongly disapproved. But that freeing up of voice and body, that sense of fun and irreverence, that deliberate cocking a snook at tradition, these became an important part of my work from then on.
Peter Brook’s influence was still very much with me, as was his endorsement of ‘rough theatre’. It accorded well with my own earliest and happiest theatre experiences: the circus, the pantomime and travelling tent shows. I had a good company of actors who revelled in the homely informality of it all and Anna Volska’s Beatrice was a creation of heartbreaking warmth and beauty. Her combination of tenderness, vulnerability and feisty passion set the tone of the production.
As You Like It
I first directed As You Like It (with Anna, who also played Rosalind) at Nimrod, then directed it again for Bell Shakespeare thirty years later. It’s a tricky piece in that it ceases to be plot-driven after the first couple of acts. The play begins with a wrestling match, a conflict between brothers, some dastardly plotting and characters fleeing from danger. Then after all this excitement it settles down into meandering pastoral idyll where people ‘fleet the time carelessly as they did in the Golden world’. They fall in love, they write bad poetry, they feast, sing, dance and philosophise and seem in no hurry to move things along. If you get it wrong it all seems rather pointless, but if you can get it right it has all the joy of a long, lazy picnic in the summer sun. The play seems carelessly flung together, but is in fact beautifully paced and structured.
The greatest strength of the play is the character of Rosalind and the most charming scenes are her love games with Orlando. Like Juliet, and like her namesake in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Rosalind’s job is to teach her callow suitor the real meaning of love. In Orlando’s case love isn’t about writing corny poems and pinning them up on the trees—it’s about being punctual, practical and realistic:
Men have died from time to time, and
Worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Her magic is contagious and enlightening. She educates not only Orlando, but also the flirtatious Phebe and moony Silvius, who come to realise that love is
All made of passion, and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty and observance,
All humbleness, all patience and impatience,
All purity, all trial; all obedience . . .
Rosalind has wisdom beyond her years and is an amazing amalgam of spontaneity, intelligence, wit, tenderness, passion and vulnerability—perhaps the most convincingly feminine of all Shakespeare’s creations apart from Cleopatra. And all this to be portrayed by an adolescent male actor!
The second most interesting character in the play is Jaques, who can be played in many different ways. The actor and director have to decide how seriously we are meant to take Jaques and how much he is meant to be a figure of fun. It seems Shakespeare is making light of that stock character, the Melancholy Man, of whom Hamlet is the serious version. Every generation has its affectations, its poseurs. Jaques takes his melancholy terribly seriously:
I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these; but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
He is, to some extent, affected and self-deceived. He is also a self-appointed critic and scourge of social evils, but here his authority is undercut by the fact that he is a reformed libertine. There is no one more self-righteous than an ex-smoker or reformed alcoholic. It is possible to see in Jaques a satirical sketch of Ben Jonson, a ‘humorous’ man and avowed social reformer.
Jaques undoubtedly sees himself as being on a spiritual quest and at the end of the play, when the assembled company line up for a wedding dance, Jaques absents himself. He is off to find the penitent Duke Frederick and pick his brains. The other characters treat him with a mix of amusement and bewilderment, and maybe that’s our cue too. His famous ‘seven ages of Man’ speech may be no more than a catalogue of commonplaces but it is wonderfully written. It can be delivered with acid sarcasm, wry amusement or a worldly-wise sadness. But it’s entertaining however you do it. Duke Senior treats Jaques as a sort of court jester and delights in baiting him; he’s a sour version of Touchstone, with whom he feels a certain kinship. He adds a necessary touch of vinegar to the overall high spirits of this good-natured play. Shakespeare is very far from being a Jaques himself and enjoys taking the mickey out of this self-obsessed courtly poseur; even his name is a pun on ‘Jakes’, the Elizabethan slang for a dunny.
Of all Shakespeare’s clowns, Touchstone runs the greatest risk of being terminally unfunny. We have to bear in mind that all of Shakespeare’s clown roles were written for particular comedians who had their personal repertoire of facial expressions, physical and vocal mannerisms, and familiar schtick. Kemp was renowned for his dancing, tumbling and bawdry; Armin for his dry wit and musicality. So I have no problem with cutting, translating or even rewriting gags that have ceased to mean anything to a modern audience. The important thing is for the clown to be both funny and comfortable with his material.
There’s not much that endears us to Touchstone. He has quick wit, but is always whingeing about how tough his lot is. He has a courtier’s contempt for rustics or anyone lower than himself on the social ladder, failing to appreciate the homespun wisdom of Corin. He is a sexual predator who is willing to go through a shonky marriage with the goatherd Audrey, and employs a hedge priest for the purpose:
I were better to be married of him than of another; for he is not like to marry me well; and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.
Jaques is amused by Touchstone but shocked by his gutter morality.
The original story of ‘Rosalynde’ by Thomas Lodge was set in France, in the forest of the Ardennes. (As You Like It is set in Arden, the forest playground of Shakespeare’s childhood.) Shakespeare happily throws together French names such as Le Beau and Amiens with a clutch of English ones—William, Audrey, Sir Oliver Martext. He throws some classical pastoral names into the mix as well (Corin, Phebe, Silvius) and a few from medieval Romance—Orlando, Rosalind, Celia and Oliver). He embraces the popular escapism of the pastoral, interpolating songs, dances and a masque of Hymen, but undercuts audience expectations of pastoral bliss by stressing the hardships of winter and rough weather, the dispossession of the shepherds and the slaughter of wild animals, the ‘native burghers’ of the forest. The pastoral idyll is shown to be no more than a courtly confection; after their brief sojourn in the forest, most of the characters return happily to ‘civilisation’, refreshed and rejuvenated by their holiday and having learned a few things along the way. As always with Shakespeare’s comedies there are a few deliberate loose ends. The newly smitten Oliver decides to remain in the forest and turn shepherd, while Jaques settles for a hermit’s cave. Four weddings are celebrated but only three, according to Jaques, are going to last: a final squeeze of lemon to forestall a cloying sweetness.
During the tour of my Bell Shakespeare production I was called upon at short notice to go on for Jaques, as Damien Ryan was suffering from food poisoning in Moonee Ponds. It was a rather terrifying experience. I had a pretty good handle on Jaques, but I was also doubling as Monsieur Le Beau, about whom I had no idea, even though I had directed the piece. I was grateful to the other actors for shunting me around the stage. A few weeks later I had to go on as Duke Senior because Julian Garner had taken ill. (With only eleven in the cast it was impossible to understudy all the roles from within the company on its lengthy regional tour.)
The only more terrifying experience was having to go on for Rhys McConnochie in my production of Henry V. Rhys was playing the King of France plus Sir Thomas Erpingham (a spit and a cough) and also the Archbishop of Canterbury, who opens the play with that hair-raising speech about the genealogy of French kings—so many Pepins, Clothairs, Childerics, Ermengards and Blithilds! Again, even though I had directed the show, I had no idea of Rhys’s moves and the other actors kindly shepherded me around with mingled expressions of pity, apprehension and suppressed hysteria.
Twelfth Night
The first performance of Twelfth Night was in 1600. Shakespeare was nearing the end of his comic vein. Two years later came Hamlet and the melancholy shades of one tend to bleed into the other, along with some cruel comedy and strains of madness. Of all Shakespeare’s comedies I find Twelfth Night the most irresistible in its heart-stopping mix of lyrical pathos, melancholy and outrageous foolery. It carries echoes of Chekhov’s great comedies and the exquisite sadness of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Cosi Fan Tutti.
In too many productions the subtle shades can be obliterated by boisterous horseplay. While I was at Stratford I played Valentine—or Curio, I forget which—in a pretty disastrous production by Clifford Williams. It had a good cast, including Diana Rigg as Viola, Ian Holm as Malvolio and David Warner as Aguecheek. But it was dressed in bright primary colours on a starkly lit stage that we shared with a brass band. It was all gags and slapstick upon which no moment of pathos intruded. Clifford reasoned that the play embodied a night of chaos and misrule—but it’s about other things too. The play is a whirling carousel of mismatched love affairs: Viola is in love with Orsino, who thinks he’s in love with Olivia. She is being pursued by Sir Andrew and Malvolio. Maria loves Sir Toby and Antonio loves Sebastian, who is finally possessed by Olivia, while Orsino finds his real love in Viola. All these threads are marvellously pulled together and interwoven—yet some critics have complained that Shakespeare was weak on structure! In fact, Shakespeare’s sense of structure is remarkably sound—nowhere more so than in Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice and Midsummer Night’s Dream, all of them perfect models.
I played Malvolio with the Sydney University Players in 1960 in a production directed by Ken Horler with whom, ten years later, I would set up the Nimrod Theatre. John Gaden played a very funny but rather thin Sir Toby while Bob Ellis provided a somewhat rumpled Regency courtier. I’m sure my Malvolio was all flap and dash—histrionic gestures and outlandish affectations—but, as students, we had the kind of fun you can have only with Shakespeare.
I played the role again in 1994, this time with Bell Shakespeare. The great delight of this production was having my daughter Lucy play Viola—the one time we’ve worked together, and that for only one brief scene. This time I sketched Malvolio as a stitched-up Tory with repressed sexual desires and lubricious fantasies. The press had recently carried a story about an English Tory MP who had been found hanged with an orange in his mouth and a plastic bag over his head. He was also wearing ladies’ knickers and seems to have been dabbling in a bit of masturbatory fantasy. Shakespeare had no love of the Puritans, who were always trying to put him out of business. He hated their hypocrisy as much as their wowserism and got his revenge with Malvolio, whose name roughly translates as ‘evil thoughts’. For all his assumed moral rectitude, Malvolio’s daydreams are centred around screwing his mistress and lording it over her household. I adopted an Enoch Powell persona—brushed-back hair and clipped military moustache—then slipped into a suspender belt with yellow stockings and high heels for his attempt at seduction. The cruelty of the play was well brought out in this production by David Fenton. When Malvolio is shut up in ‘a dark room’, I was tipped, with the household rubbish, into a metal garbage dumpster. Darren Gilshenan as Feste clambered over it and banged on the lid with a baseball bat.
I directed the play for Nimrod back in 1976 in a glamorous production designed by Kim Carpenter, who drew inspiration from Visconti’s film of Death in Venice. It tried to evoke that air of nostalgia and other-worldliness which Venice inevitably conjures up, and the motif of wistful homoeroticism was enhanced by having a male Viola (Russell Kiefel) who wore a sailor suit identical to that of Sebastian (Tony Sheldon).
For those who are puzzled over the meaning of the title, it should be recalled that the play was written to be performed on the twelfth night of Christmas, the last night of the courtly Christmas revels. (Shakespeare carelessly threw in an alternative title: What You Will.) Twelfth Night was traditionally a night of misrule, when all normal protocols were turned topsy-turvy and masters and servants swapped roles. All sorts of practical jokes could be played without fear of retribution. (There were inevitably a lot of sore heads next morning; the closest we come to it—and it’s pretty close—is New Year’s Eve.) This is how Toby, Andrew and Feste come to play such a cruel trick on Malvolio; this is how Malvolio dares to daydream about marrying his mistress and being transformed from a mere steward to being Count Malvolio; this is why Toby and Andrew are so furious with Malvolio for banning their carousing.
Because the original performance was aimed at a specific audience it is full of private jokes whose references are now lost. Malvolio was almost certainly a caricature of the prominent courtier Sir William Knollys, and the reference to ‘Mistress Mall’ must have raised a few titters since Mary (Mall) Fitton was the object of his lust. We know that the Queen disliked the colour yellow, but there are dozens of other in-jokes which go on providing fertile ground for academic research and conjecture.
There are a number of exquisite songs in Twelfth Night and their original settings have never been bettered. They seem to have been well suited to the talents of the original Feste, Robert Armin, a sharp-witted and dwarfish figure, noted for his excellent singing voice as well as his dry, acerbic wit.
There are many different voices in Twelfth Night—the languorous affectation of Orsino, the sly bawdry of Sir Toby, the giggling inanities of Sir Andrew, the trenchant sarcasm of Feste, the inflated pomposity of Malvolio and the rapturous, heartbreaking sincerity of Viola:
Viola: Ay, but I know—
Duke: What dost thou know?
Viola: Too well what love women to men may owe:
In faith, they are as true of heart as we.
My father had a daughter lov’d a man,
As it might be perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
Duke: And what’s her history?
Viola: A blank, my lord: she never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men may say more, swear more, but indeed
Our shows are more than will: for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.
Duke: But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
Viola: I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.
Sir, shall I to this lady?
All these voices meld effortlessly in this sweet symphony of a play. But there are very few productions which manage to extract and balance them all, to capture that particular Elizabethan mix of lyricism, bawdry, sadness, cruelty and reckless high spirits. The two I have seen come nearest I have referred to earlier in this book: John Barton’s RSC production with Judi Dench and Donald Sinden, and Declan Donnellan’s all-male, all-Russian company of wonderful actors.
Maybe the note of wistful sadness that pervades the play stems from the fact that Shakespeare’s younger daughter, Judith, was now sixteen. Her dead twin, Hamnet, would have been the same age. Is Shakespeare bringing the drowned twin back from the dead and uniting brother and sister in an heroic act of wish fulfilment?
Lee Lewis’s 2010 production of Twelfth Night for Bell Shakespeare was based on this possibility. The production was designed to do a long national tour, including those parts of regional Victoria which had recently been devastated by bushfires. So the actors were dressed as refugees from a natural disaster drifting into a community hall piled high with old clothes. Here they acted out Twelfth Night as a healing exercise, an attempt at bonding and dealing with their grief and loss. At the end there was a hint that the actress playing Viola’s brother had survived the catastrophe and she rushed off joyfully to embrace him. The production had the desired impact on the community it was designed for, but even audiences in metropolitan centres appreciated this show that revelled in robust horseplay while maintaining a peculiar poignancy.
Measure for Measure
The years between 1602 and 1604 produced the last of Shakespeare’s Comedies and they share some of the darkness of his other plays around that time. Before Measure for Measure (1604) Shakespeare wrote that most bitter, bleak and nasty deconstruction of the Trojan War, Troilus and Cressida (1602); then we get All’s Well That Ends Well (1602) followed by Othello (1604).
Measure for Measure has never been a box-office favourite. Its leading characters are resistible in various ways, its subject matter distasteful to squeamish stomachs, its resolution and moral standpoint ambiguous and its locations (the cold prison, judicial headquarters and seedy brothels) not necessarily places you want to spend time in. Nor can you take much refuge in lyrical or uplifting language—it tends to be dry and legalistic or shrill with anguish verging on hysteria or else downright filthy.
Yet the play has many admirers and I count myself among them, having had the pleasure of directing it twice, for the Nimrod and for Bell Shakespeare. Measure is one of those Shakespeare plays we readily identify as Jacobean rather than Elizabethan. Gone are the last vestiges of linguistic ornament and carefree ostentation. We are now in a gloomier world of dungeons, spies, the rack, disguise and eavesdropping. There is a stench of moral corruption that hangs over Jacobean drama, and it’s hard to know if that was merely literary fashion or a true reflection of the mood of the times.
The Duke in Measure has some similarities to King James himself. They both abhor crowds and popular demonstrations. Both are obsessed with seeking out and exposing evildoers. Both are secretive and both believe in administering tough justice with the occasional magnanimous display of mercy. James must have seen his likeness in the Duke and one has to conclude that he approved of it. But the role remains one of the most difficult in all of Shakespeare and very few actors succeed in bringing it off to universal satisfaction. In playing the role you have to take a strong line and make firm decisions upfront. Why does he pretend to leave his city in the care of Angelo, a man he suspects of being corrupt? Why does he come back, in disguise, to spy on him? Is he (as in Tyrone Guthrie’s very Catholic reading) an avenging angel, a Christ-like figure of divine justice? Or is he a moral coward who wants to pass the buck for his own incompetence? Is he driven by prurience to eavesdrop on the privacy of Claudio, Isabella and Juliet?
How outrageous is his behaviour in hearing confessions while disguised as a monk! How cruel is his deceit of Isabella (telling her that her brother is dead, just so he can miraculously ‘resurrect’ him), and how appalling his presumption in demanding her hand in marriage! Of course if you take the Guthrie line that this is the course of divine justice, all the above can be swallowed (just), but I suspect Shakespeare’s intention is more darkly comic than that.
On a human, rather than divine, level, this Duke is fallible, paranoid, spiteful, sexually inhibited, punitive, opportunistic and manipulative. Of course, he would be the last person to recognise or acknowledge any of this, but it makes him human and far more interesting to play than trying to impersonate a symbol of divine justice. Sean O’Shea, in my Bell Shakespeare production of 2005, captured many of these jarring inconsistencies, as did Garry McDonald in my 1973 Nimrod production; in fact Garry played him as not merely eccentric but mildly crazy.
Angelo, his opposite number, is not easy to warm to either. So self-righteous, so sexually repressed, so lacking in empathy, he is a mere legalistic machine until a sudden onrush of sexual desire brings him face to face with his real self. If he acknowledged this it could be the start of a transformation, but he is so hamstrung by pride, fear and a desire to maintain his public image that he decides to use his newfound authority like a tyrant, first of all forcing Isabella to sleep with him to save her brother’s life and then, worse, by double-crossing her. His contrition at the end seems sincere, but his forced marriage to the jilted Mariana doesn’t bode well for either of them.
It was customary during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to play Isabella as a saint, an unassailable icon of chastity, the perfect Victorian or Edwardian heroine. Modern actors and directors (and audiences too, I imagine) find this too pallid and simplistic a rendering. Fair enough that she repudiates Angelo’s advances and revolting proposition—every feminist in the house should be cheering for her. But we feel a chill run through us when she calmly announces, ‘More than our brother is our chastity.’ We understand her dilemma and are forced to ask ourselves how much of our own integrity or sense of personal honour would we be prepared to sacrifice to save the life of a loved one. (And Shakespeare does raise the stakes by making her a novice nun!)
But our sympathy for Isabella is tested when poor callow Claudio begs her to do the deed of darkness to save his life. She rounds on him with a fury bordering on hysteria:
. . . O, you beast! O faithless coward, O dishonest wretch . . .
Die, Perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed.
I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,
No word to save thee.
This has led most modern actors and directors to see Isabella warped by the same kind of sexual repression that torments Angelo and, to some extent, the Duke, who is most insistent about his sexual probity. Maybe it’s this fear of sex rather than a spiritual quest that has led her to the convent. For all her virginal posturing she is more than willing to play the ‘bed-trick’ on Angelo, sending Mariana in her place—apparently Mariana’s virginity is of no great account. To see Isabella in these terms—as a repressed, awkward and stubborn woman, fallible and inconsistent, is far more interesting than the version which presents her as a put-upon plaster saint. It places her in the same world as the other characters, where straitlaced priggishness is assailed by callous licentiousness.
At first glance the low-life world of Pompey Bum, Lucio and Mistress Overdone looks more attractive than the stitched-up court. But this world of pimps and brothels is raddled with disease and selfishness—it’s not as much fun as you’d expect. Shakespeare seems to have been no stranger to London’s brothels. Both here and in Pericles he shows great familiarity with the habitués and their language. Incidentally, his co-author of Pericles was George Wilkins, his next-door neighbour in Silver Street, who was himself a brothel-keeper as well as literary hack. Whatever the apparent fun and camaraderie of the brothel and the tavern, their ethos is summed up in Lucio, who openly brags about getting Kate Keepdown pregnant then dumping her. At least ‘the better sort’ wrestle with their consciences and agonise over moral dilemmas, even if they do the wrong thing.
We can be amused by Pompey and spare some tender feelings for Claudio and Juliet, but overall Measure is easier to admire than to love. Like all of Shakespeare’s plays—Comedies, Tragedies, whatever—Measure is full of matter to ponder, with many contrary viewpoints to consider and ambiguities that are left unresolved. Performed unsentimentally, with the right mix of dry observation and sympathy for every character, Measure can hit you like a refreshing dash of cold water in the face.
All’s Well That Ends Well
All’s Well That Ends Well is performed even less frequently than Measure for Measure. It is not a ‘feel-good’ comedy like As You Like It and Much Ado, nor does it have the magic of Twelfth Night or the drama of Merchant of Venice. It has a sobering commentary on the relationship between integrity and courtly ‘honour’, it has a very affecting heroine in Helena and in the Countess a role that George Bernard Shaw regarded as the loveliest in the canon for an older actress. It also has a great clown’s role in the cowardly rogue Parolles. Plot-wise we return to the ‘bed-trick’, which is by now wearing out its welcome, and in the role of Bertram a character who can expect to win very little audience sympathy. He comes across as a particularly cold and selfish individual, try as we might to excuse his behaviour because of his strict upbringing, the unreasonable expectations of his elders and their stifling social mores. He’s still a cad.
It’s the one Shakespeare Comedy with which I have had almost no personal connection, apart from the fact that my wife Anna was in John Barton’s RSC production which toured with Peter Hall’s Macbeth to Russia in 1967. The two shows played in repertoire in Moscow and Leningrad (as it was then) and All’s Well dropped in to Paris on the way home. I was playing Lennox in Macbeth in which Anna was a very pretty third apparition, popping out of the witches’ cauldron.
It was fascinating to get a look behind the Iron Curtain on its fiftieth anniversary but it was a very showcase kind of tour. We were carefully shepherded from place to place and had little opportunity to meet or relate to people in the street. After performances we were given prolonged standing ovations, but were not convinced this was altogether to do with the quality of the shows. It may have been mere political protocol or maybe a sign of genuine gratitude that we had made the effort to visit this still relatively closed country—hands-across-the-sea stuff.
One thing in Anna’s and my favour was that we had a baby with us. Hilary was eighteen months old and we had little choice but to take her with us into the depths of a Russian winter. The few exchanges we had with the citizenry were when we were stopped in the street by clucking old ladies who wrapped her bonnet even more firmly about her little ears. The food in the hotels was very plain and pretty dire, but when we had Hilary with us an egg might magically appear or even a piece of fruit—much to the envy of the rest of the company.
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The relative popularity of Shakespeare’s plays tends to be subject to fashion. At certain times the Histories seem most resonant, depending on the state of global politics. Individual Tragedies will be rediscovered as the result of some astonishing star performance or directorial vision. The great Romances, always in danger of being dismissed as too fantastical, will suddenly strike a chord with a generation and manifest their spiritual nourishment. And at certain times in our lives, or due to the vagaries of fashionable taste, it is the Comedies that speak to us most directly and feelingly. They are a monument to half of Shakespeare’s soul, and actors and directors are obliged to take them seriously. They should eschew the funny hats, funny voices, general campery and effete buffoonery that calls itself ‘style’. They should chuck out all the tired old gags and clichés and go to the heart of the matter. For no two of Shakespeare’s Comedies are alike. Each has an individual voice, and if we listen carefully we can hear the subtlest tones of the human heart making its grave demand for love.
The first page of his that I read made me his for life; and when I had finished a single play, I stood like one born blind, on whom a miraculous hand bestows sight in a moment. I saw, I felt, in the most vivid manner, that my existence was infinitely expanded . . . I did not hesitate for a moment about renouncing the classical drama. The unity of place seemed to me irksome as a prison, the unities of action and of time burthensome fetters to our imagination; I sprang into the open air, and felt for the first time that I had hands and feet.
Goethe