Most Stagings of Shakespeare Don't Go Far Enough
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- St_Alia_10191
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more from LoveLife:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/jan/19/shakespeare-m...
"...Every so often critics like to denounce director-driven Shakespeare as belittling the Bard's genius. In an interview for the online magazine Big Think last month, the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout groused about concept-driven Shakespeare, which he epitomised as on-stage jeeps and machine guns. Shakespeare doesn't have to be "transgressive", Teachout proclaimed. "It's actually now more common to see conceptual productions … [in] which Hamlet is played as a Nazi, or a homosexual."Let's ignore, for the moment, how blithely Teachout glides from gays to brownshirts. There's a larger ideological agenda here: how much should the Bard reflect our times? Shakespeare wrote a great deal about war, soldiering and tyranny, not to mention gender inequality and racism. You can't avoid politics in his work – unless you try really hard. Teachout isn't bothered by modern-dress Shakespeare, per se; he just disapproves when you translate the militarism into stark modern terms. You suspect he'd be fine watching the English soak Agincourt's soil with French blood, but he'd rather you not allude to Iraq or Afghanistan.
I also wince at conceptual Shakespeare, but for another reason: most directorial concepts are far too timid. Shakespeare was a moderate, nonsectarian humanist? Nonsense. Why not assume that if the Bard were alive, he'd be a bug-eyed anarchist or an eco-terrorist (he did love nature imagery, after all). Shakespeare, that notorious mixer-up of comedy and tragedy, certainly wouldn't be churning out well-behaved divertissements for conservative critics..."
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