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| Hamlet Kenneth Branagh 1996 |
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Posted Sunday, March 19, 2006; 10.31GMT
All The World's a Stage ... and Screen
Shakespeare may have turned into a bookseller, a leadership guru, a myth — but he started out as a poet and playwright. And the beating heart of the Shakespeare industry is still the plays he wrote and the performances that come out of them. British scholar Bate is working on a project that he hopes will take Shakespeare back to his roots. In collaboration with the rsc, he's putting together a new collection of all Shakespeare's plays that will get closer to 1623's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies than any other. In the past, scholars trying to collate the definitive complete works have taken bits of the First Folio and mixed them together with earlier editions of the 18 Shakespeare plays that had been published during his lifetime. Apart from updating the English and fixing obvious printer's errors, Bate is sticking to the First Folio. "Shakespeare's plays were working scripts, and it's in the nature of theater that plays get changed in the course of rehearsal and revival," he says. "Other editions were trying to recover something that didn't exist, namely a single lost original. We are going to recover something that did exist, namely the texts that were authorized by Shakespeare's fellow actors." Plus, it comes with more naughty bits: Bate's book will have an on-page glossary pointing out every double entendre. "Everybody's always known that Shakespeare uses puns that involve genitals," he says. "But going through word by word, line by line, we're seeing that he does it far, far more than anyone's ever realized."
As for the plays, the Complete Works Festival is a chance for the rsc to defend its title as the most famous classical ensemble group in theater. Pushing its biggest stars center stage, it's also inviting theater companies from around the world to give their take on Shakespeare. "It's a chance for us to rub shoulders with some of the major European ensembles and see what they can teach us," says Michael Boyd, the rsc's artistic director. A production of A Midsummer Night's Dream from India, with dialogue in seven languages, mixes elements of Bollywood, street performance and the Western stage. "That's going to tell us an enormous amount about Shakespeare's relationship to magic and spirituality." Russia brings an all-male version of Twelfth Night, Poland's Song of the Goat Theater goes avant-garde on Macbeth and New York City-based Tiny Ninja Theater will act out Hamlet with plastic ninja figurines. Says Prince Charles, a dedicated supporter of the arts and president of the rsc: "Shakespeare's art and observation go beyond the cleverness of his words, approaching a collective consciousness ... [The festival] will be the perfect opportunity to discover why Shakespeare's work is as relevant today as it was 400 years ago."
It's also an opportunity to catch some of Britain's most respected thespians treading the boards. Before Judi Dench became James Bond's revered M, before Ian McKellen donned Gandalf's gray beard, before Patrick Stewart was trekking stars as Captain Picard, they all made their names as Shakespearean actors. The Bard's plays are notoriously challenging — marathon speeches, exhausting running times and the gamut of emotions, from despair to joy and back again. There are enough ambitious actors, and enough people willing to watch them try, for Britain to maintain two theater companies to showcase the work. Along with the rsc in Stratford-upon-Avon, there's a repertory troupe at London's Globe Theatre. And the National Theatre, on that city's South Bank, originally proposed as yet another temple to the Bard, still stages his plays a few times a year. "There's a place in the market for live performance that stirs and shakes us, sat down together, achieving some kind of human consensus about what to do next with our lives," says Boyd. "And I don't think anyone's got that better than Shakespeare." Each year, around 850,000 people visit the rsc's three theaters, generating a turnover of over $50 million.
Onstage, a performance of a Shakespeare play ends when the lights go up. On celluloid, it's preserved forever. Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V (1944) was ground-breaking, and with Hamlet (1948) he became the first actor to direct himself to a best-actor Oscar; while Marlon Brando still thrills as Marc Antony in Julius Caesar (1953). More than 600 films based on Shakespeare's work or life have been made over the past century. They go from classics like Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet (1968) to porn (2000's A Midsummer Night's Cream) to almost unrecognizable: How many people watching the 1956 sci-fi Forbidden Planet knew it was based on The Tempest? Few are huge hits, but some prove just how bankable the Bard can be. Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet was a commercial champ, seducing the mtv generation and pulling in $135 million at the box office. Shakespeare in Love (1998) is almost as famous for the seven Oscars it picked up as it is for Gwyneth Paltrow's weepy acceptance speech. Almost.
If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd probably be writing movies. And Kenneth Branagh would probably direct them. A celebrated stage actor who took his love of the Bard into filmmaking, Branagh has adapted six of the canon to the big screen, starting with the award-winning Henry V in 1989. "The stories that Shakespeare writes, about kings and queens, the fates of nations and very intense domestic dramas, are written at a pitch, an extremity, that can be presented in a bold and heightened way through film," he says. "In the theater, the words and the performances are the same, but film does it in a language people are more familiar with." In As You Like It, due out in the summer, Branagh transfers the action to 19th century Japan, where romance blossoms against the country's tranquil landscapes. This new setting speaks to modern audiences because, Branagh says, the play is partly about "the idea of the simple life, that feeling of getting out of the rat race, being somewhere quiet, meditative and transformative."
Some might disagree. Which is kind of the point. Shakespeare's work, with its complex characters and universal themes, can mean anything to anyone at any time. The possibilities are endless. "When you're working on a Shakespeare play, you know you're never finished," says Branagh. "With Shakespeare films, you don't complete them, you abandon them."
It's exactly this freedom to rethink, refresh and rediscover that keeps the industry alive: as long as people find new ways to pay tribute to Shakespeare, others will pay good money to join in. But it's his words that keep them coming back for more. As Tranio says in The Taming of the Shrew, "No profit grows where is no pleasure taken." In 1623, Condell and Heminges practically had to beg people to buy a book of Shakespeare's work; today, he sells himself — and he sells well.
With reporting by Mimi Murphy/Rome, Beata Pasek/Warsaw, Ulla Plon/Copenhagen, Grant Rosenberg/Paris, Ursula Sautter/Bonn and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow
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