Ms-directing Shakespeare at the Globe to Globe Festival, 2012
King’s College London
The Globe to Globe Festival showcased thirty-seven productions in thirty-seven languages at Shakespeare’s Globe during the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012. Only five of these productions were directed or co-directed by women. Such a low figure sadly confirms that women theatre directors are still less likely to direct Shakespeare than their male counterparts – as Elizabeth Schafer pointed out in 1998, when she first used the wry term ‘ms-directing’ as a riposte to those who viewed productions directed by women as somehow intrinsically ‘misguided’ and ‘misdirected’.1 Although proportionally under-represented, the women directors whose work was included in the Globe to Globe Festival made a significant contribution to this event, which turned out to be the highlight of the World Shakespeare Festival as a whole. Productions directed by women ranged from Maja Kleczewska’s Polish Macbeth, where rape and infanticide, rather than regicide, epitomized the horrors ushered in by moral and political disorder, to Rachel House’s Maori Troilus and Cressida, a stunning celebration of the indigenous language, culture and performative traditions of New Zealand. Less obviously controversial or uncompromisingly local, but more subtly ground-breaking in several respects, was Daniel Goldman and Sarah Norman’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, a collaboration between Bitter Pill and the Theatre Company of Kenya. My interest in this production lies in its interestingly hybrid, intercultural qualities, which effectively neutralize the risk of reducing not only non-Western cultures but also women directors of Shakespeare to mere markers of an essential otherness.2
Goldman and Norman’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor was fast paced and extremely entertaining. They cut exchanges generally omitted in performance, including William’s Latin lesson at the beginning of Act IV. They also relied heavily on physical comedy and on repetition, which is already central to the structure of Shakespeare’s play, where, most memorably, Anne Page has three suitors and Falstaff is subjected to three humiliating acts of retribution aimed at purging his sexual and financial greed. In Goldman and Norman’s production, which followed the received text of the play quite closely, repetition informed several new comic routines. Slender, for example, became increasingly frustrated in the opening scene, calling out for his servant Simple three times before the latter came rushing on to the stage. Seconds later Anne entered the gallery above the main stage and Slender gestured for his servant to move off and give them some privacy. Simple, his eyes sheepishly fixed on his master’s face, took three steps sideways, prompted each time by Slender’s thundering looks, until he ended up balancing dangerously on the edge of the stage. The audience roared with laughter when after a well-timed pause, Slender stared at Simple impatiently one last time, and the latter, played by a diminutive young actor (Eric Wanyama), had no choice but to jump awkwardly into the yard. Slender went on to entertain Anne by miming Sackerson the bear (1.1.175) and did not realize that, halfway through his routine, Anne slipped out and was replaced by a bemused but congenial Page, who eventually invited him to join his other dinner guests indoors. Goldman and Norman skilfully guided the audience’s response through this opening sequence by casting three actors in the role of temporary spectators, with Anne Page and her father in the gallery above the main stage and Simple in the yard. The opening act set the tone for the rest of this production, which was impeccably acted and directed throughout and was generally very well received, with one reviewer aptly describing it as ‘visually intoxicating’.3
This thoroughly enjoyable production came across as strangely familiar, despite the fact that it was performed entirely in Swahili by a Kenyan cast and despite the recurrent use of traditional songs to punctuate changes of setting and of traditional tribal masks and dancing in the last scene, when Shakespeare’s fairies were reimagined within the context of East African folklore. Emma Cox, for example, noted that ‘[w]hile it felt a long way from Merrie England, this Swahili production … stuck to fairly conventional, recognizable means of attracting laughs … and tapped into … tradition[s] of English comedy, clearly familiar to a London audience’.4 The production seemed even more familiar to those who had seen Christopher Luscombe’s 2008 Globe production or its revival in 2010. The Kenyans moved equally seamlessly on the main stage, the upper stage, and the yard and interacted often and confidently with the audience. Two members of the audience were, for example, enlisted to push the buck basket off stage, once a fat-suited, flamboyant, and unusually young Falstaff had somersaulted into it to hide from Ford. More crucially, both companies distanced themselves from darker interpretations of the play, which became popular on both page and stage in the second half of the twentieth-century.5 Some reviewers compared both productions to popular sit-coms. Maddy Costa in The Guardian took her cue from the programme of the Globe production and compared Ford to Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers.6 Similarly, the Kenyan production, with its ‘feisty, wickedly funny women’, their ‘pretty grand households in a wealthy neighbourhood’ and ‘[a] gaggle of flawed men, jealous or lecherous, who have in common their desire for, and their failure to outsmart, the local ladies’ reminded Sarah Olive of ‘Desperate Housewives, or any other such American comedy-drama where secrets and lies, truths, and untruths, are spun out and revealed by groups of female friends’.7
The surprising familiarity of the Kenyan production was probably, at least partly, the product of the potentially problematic division of labour between two British-trained directors and the Kenyan actors, who were trained not only to feel at home on the Globe stage but also to personate their characters through rehearsal techniques and exercises that were unfamiliar to them. In an interview conducted during their brief residence at the Globe, Sharon Nanjosi, who played Sir Hugh Evans, Anne Page, Pistol and Robert, and Joshua Ogutu, who played Page, Nym, and Mistress Quickly, described their physical training and the detailed profiling of their characters, which they were required to discuss in rehearsal, as a novel and challenging experience.8 Even the extensive use of doubling (eight actors played twenty characters, the only exception being Mrisho Mpoto, who played Falstaff alone) did not interfere with the actors’ personation of their characters as consistently recognizable types, if not necessarily psychologically realistic individuals.
Despite similarities with recent stagings of the play as a festive romp, this production was marked by a sustained attempt to negotiate, rather than to erase or neutralize, cultural difference. Significant in this respect was the opening sequence. All companies invited to take part in the Festival were issued with basic guidelines, ranging from the running time (not to exceed two hours plus a fifteen-minute interval), to the use of small props and no sets. Other guidelines proved more problematic, including the ban on English even for companies who regularly perform Shakespeare in English both in their home countries and on tour and the ban on flags or any other signifiers of national identity that might antagonize communities in conflict over land or political independence. Blatantly contravening the organizers’ brief, the actor playing Mistress Page, Chichi Seii, stepped onto the main stage, invited the seating members of the audience to stand up, and sang the Kenyan national anthem beautifully and solemnly, thus occupying for a few minutes the powerful position of prologue, a key vehicle for addressing the audience directly before the fictive world of the play is fully established. Seii cut a striking, elegant figure against the backdrop of the Globe stage, where prologues and epilogues would originally be delivered not only by members of all male companies but also almost exclusively by male characters; as Rosalind reminds us at the end of As You Like It, ‘It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue’ (5.4.197–9).9 Even when women actors were first allowed to perform on the public stage, they were not generally expected to address their audiences directly. On the few occasions when they did, their lines stressed the exceptional quality of their role. Mrs Nell, for example, donning ‘an Amazonian habit’ at the revival of Ben Jonson’s Catiline at the Theatre Royal in 1669, saluted her audience as follows: ‘A Woman’s Prologue! / This is vent’rous News; / But we, a Poet wanting, Crav’d a Muse’.10 Though no longer familiar to modern audiences, the roles of the prologue and the epilogue still have unique resonance of the Globe stage, especially as the actors who address the audience walk downstage and stand in a spot which is close to the centre of the theatre. Other actors, always male, greeted the audience, often in English, during the Globe to Globe Festival, but Seii made a different type of statement: by singing the Kenyan anthem, five decades after Kenya gained political independence from British rule, Seii was claiming a confident and affirmative voice for her people as she and her fellow actors were preparing to re-present Shakespeare in Swahili on the Globe stage.
Given the collaborative nature of this production, the decision to open it with the Kenyan national anthem did not seem driven purely by nationalist sentimentalism. National identity is extremely fraught in modern-day Kenya, mostly because Kenya, like the majority of African countries, became a ‘post-tribal’ state following the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, when, as Kole Omotoso has eloquently put it, ‘Africa was delimited and mapped as a place of modern states with no consideration of tribal borders and cultural differences’.11 Ethnic difference often underlies political conflict, which in turns leads to outbursts of civil unrest. The violent clashes that followed the last presidential election in Kenya in 2007 were symptomatic of such tensions; in 2012 all Kenyans would have been aware of the possibility of the reigniting of such violence in the build-up to the next election in spring 2013. Rather than pushing to the fore a nationalist agenda, Seii’s spell-binding recitation of the national anthem accented the power of Swahili as a vehicle through which not only Shakespeare but also cultural and political identities in modern-day Kenya can be reimagined. The singing of the national anthem at the beginning of this production pre-empted the risk of reducing the foreignness of the language for non-Swahili members of the audience to an incidental, aesthetic feature of an otherwise familiar play.
Even those features that were registered as familiar and conventional by British critics and reviewers – the doubling of characters and a regular interaction between the actors and the audience – were in fact also specifically meant to appeal to Kenyan audiences because they reflect local theatrical styles and concerns.12 Regular interaction with the audience is for example intrinsic to the type of popular theatre championed in Kenya by Ngugi wa Thiong’o since the 1970s. As Ciaruni Chesaina and Evan Mwangi explain, Ngugi revived traditional dramatic forms to critique the neocolonial quality of public institutions, including the elitarian ethos that informed the Kenya National Theatre, which, first founded before Kenya reached independence, continued to be ‘European in orientation’ afterwards.13 In Ngugi’s model of popular theatre ‘democratic values are expressed through action in which the audience and the actor participate actively in the theatrical production’.14 Similarly, the extensive use of doubling in Goldman and Norman’s production did not simply aim to revive one of the main staging conventions in Shakespeare’s theatre. In fact, the most prominent and memorable use of this convention, which involved the casting of one actor, Neville Sanganyi, to play all of Anne’s suitors, Slender, Dr Caius, and Fenton, foregrounded the motif of arranged marriages as a resonant issue among Kenyans. By representing the suitors as ultimately interchangeable, this production suggested that the comic resolution depended more on Anne’s ability to choose her husband, independently of his qualities or the arguably disinterested nature of his attachment to Anne, than on the fulfilment of a romantic interest in the subplot. Interestingly, while British reviewers remarked on Sanganyi’s virtuoso performance of three key roles, only Kenyan reviewers have singled out Anne’s predicament and Page’s opposition to Fenton because ‘[t]he gentleman is of no having’ (3.2.64–5), since Goldman and Norman’s production has started to tour Kenya.15 More generally, the fact that this production has appealed to British and to Kenyan audiences for different reasons is a testament to its sustained and ultimately successful effort to put the play and the traditions and conventions associated with Shakespeare’s theatre into a productive dialogue with contemporary forms of theatrical performance in Kenya and with issues that have social and cultural currency among Kenyan audiences.
The collaboration between Goldman and Norman was also significant in light of the enduring disparity in the numbers of male and female directors currently working on Shakespeare, both at a national level in Britain and at international events, like the Globe to Globe Festival. Norman first directed a version of The Merry Wives of Windsor in Shona in 2009. This earlier production was conceived and performed at the Oval House Theatre in South London, a key venue for intercultural experiments with Shakespeare involving local diasporic artists and communities, especially of African origins. It was then revived, later in 2009, at HIFA, the Harare International Festival of the Arts. When the Festival organizers expressed an interest in her work, Norman restarted working on The Merry Wives of Windsor with a different company, in a different language, and with a new co-director.16 The collaborative impulse that prompted Norman to seek new partners in preparation for the Globe to Globe Festival has clearly paid off. Not only has her Swahili version of Merry Wives proved immensely popular, both in London and in Kenya, but it has also eluded categorization as ‘Ms-directed Shakespeare’, thanks to Norman’s collaboration with Goldman and with Theatre Company Kenya. Less optimistically, though, I was disappointed to find that, by the time this production returned to Kenya and started to tour in East Africa and India, Norman’s contribution as initiator and co-director of the version staged in London during the Festival had started to disappear from reviews and press releases. While changes in the crediting of Norman's contribution to this production were undoubtedly benign – Norman has recently redirected her artistic and professional efforts towards non-theatrical projects – one can only hope to see more, not less, of Norman in future projects involving intercultural experiments with Shakespeare on stage.
Last, but not least, I should like to stress that Norman and Goldman’s collaboration with Theatre Company Kenya reflects an exciting new tendency to ‘Africanize’ Shakespeare and ‘spaces associated with European theatre’ in Kenya, which first started in the 1990s.17 Theatre Company Kenya, which was founded in 2000, create original Kenyan-based performances but also use Swahili as a vehicle to appropriate and localize classical texts drawn from a worldwide theatrical repertory, within which Shakespeare enjoys a prominent role. Goldman and Norman’s co-production with Theatre Company Kenya fulfilled one of the main objectives of this new breed of theatre artists in Kenya, who strive to close the so far gaping distance between neocolonial forms of institutionalized theatrical entertainment, aimed only at wealthy minorities in Nairobi, where the Kenya National Theatre has been based since it first opened in 1950, and the popular theatre promoted by leading theatre theorists, writers and practitioners like Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I certainly left the Globe Theatre, after its opening at the Festival on 25 April 2012, feeling that this production of The Merry Wives of Windsor had confidently and joyfully pointed the way towards refreshingly productive collaborations across gender and cultural divides.18
Notes
1Elizabeth Schafer, Ms-Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare (London, 1998), p. 6.
2The other productions directed by women at the Globe to Globe Festival were Corinne Jaber’s The Comedy of Errors, performed in Dari Persian by Roy-e-Sabs, an Afghani company based in Kabul, and Paula Garfield’s Love’s Labours Lost, performed by Deafinitely Theatre in British Sign Language.
3Andrew Gilchrist, The Guardian, 27 April 2012.
4Emma Cox, ‘The girl defies’: A Kenyan Merry Wives of Windsor, in Susan Bennett and Christie Carson (eds), Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment (Cambridge, forthcoming 2013) pp. 53–66.
5The darker undertones of the final scene, where Falstaff can be represented as victim and scapegoat and his public shaming as symbolic emasculation, became central to the approach of some late-twentieth-century critics and directors, including Terry Hands, who directed the play for the RSC in 1968, and Jeanne Addison Roberts in her seminal study, Shakespeare’s English Comedy: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in Context (Lincoln, NE, 1979). Roberts relied on Northrop Frye’s ritual interpretation of comedy and her work in turn affected critics such as Nancy Cotton (cf. ‘Castrating (W)itches: Impotence and Magic in The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in Shakespeare Quarterly 38, 3 (1987), 320–6), who links the play’s representation of masculinity to anxieties about cuckoldry as symbolic castration that are reinforced by Falstaff’s ritual bashing.
6Maddy Costa, The Guardian, 20 August 2010
7Sarah Olive, review of Merry Wives of Windsor, in Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan eds, Year of Shakespeare: Re-Living the World Shakespeare Festival (London, 2013), pp. 133–5.
8A recording of this interview can be found at http://soundcloud.com/globe-education/tracks?page=2
9See also the anonymous play Every Woman in her Humour (1609; STC 25948), where the boy actor playing ‘Flauia as a Prologue’ remarks: ‘a she prologue is as rare as an Vsurers Almes’ (A2r).
10Ben Jonson, Catiline, 1669 (WING J1008), A3 ll. 6–7.
11Kole Omotoso, ‘Concepts of history and theatre in Africa’, in Kole Omotoso ed., The History of Theatre in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–12:11.
12Keith Pearson, managing director of Theatre Company Kenya, private correspondence.
13Ciaruni Chesaina and Evan Mwangi, ‘Kenya’, in Omotoso (2004), pp. 206–32, p. 219, p. 221.
14Ibid., p. 227.
15Joel Magu, The Star, 10 January 2013, http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/article-102278/wanawake-wa-heri-wa-winsa-great-masterpiece.
16Keith Pearson, managing director of Theatre Company Kenya, private correspondence.
17Chesaina and Mwangi, in Omotoso, 229.
18I would like to thank Patricia Tatspaugh, as well as the volume editors, for reading earlier drafts of this essay.