Michael Boyd
William Shakespeare’s As You Like It
The Royal Shakespeare Company
The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
In repertoire through October 3

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In Michael Boyd’s new production of As You Like It, the action moves from the frozen monochrome of a court in crisis to a forest less welcoming than a Siberian tundra. The comedy of Rosalind following her father into exile in the Forest of Arden is often portrayed as a play of riotous thigh slapping and lurid green sets, with plenty of opportunity for flowers, straw, and a strutting “Ganymede” (Rosalind’s male alter-ego; this being Shakespeare, she exchanges her skirt for trousers for much of the play). Instead, the latest Royal Shakespeare Company production finds both savagery and beauty in this beloved Shakespeare play. The result is a compelling exploration of the comedy’s dark heart.

Returning from the Histories season, Boyd and designer Tom Piper create a new aesthetic for the new RSC ensemble. From the blue-ochre blaze of the Histories sets, Piper has moved to a starker, colder look.  Initially, the stage is spare, the back of the courtyard dominated by a gleaming silver-white structure of square panels. Its metallic sheen provides a static backdrop to the glittering, inhospitable court that Duke Ferdinand, Orlando and Adam, Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone successively flee.

But then Boyd and Piper unleash destruction on the set: the wrestling bout between Orlando and Charles smears the panels with blood; an enormous ball of straw bursts through double doors—quite literally the forest of Arden. Inside is Richard Katz’s Touchstone, a man with the frizzy grey hair of a clown, with his legs strait-jacketed together. The square panels are opened, battered, or removed altogether, revealing a casual abattoir (a deer hangs from a meathook, coat glistening), dead branches, or a dusty, yellow light. Instead of elegant poems on parchment, Orlando’s sonnets are big black letters on scrappy placards, enormous cardboard panels suspended from the flies or pinned to the pillars and set. In this production, the concepts As You Like It usually conveys with charm—clown, forest, poetry—are pushed to their limits, creating visual shocks that alternately amuse and surprise.

At the end of the interval, Geoffrey Freshwater as Corin guts and skins a real dead rabbit onstage. Detractors may find it too gory, but even the decapitation (a flash of the cleaver while the audience braces itself) is remarkable more for its efficiency than for its horror. The moment is an effective metaphor for a production fighting audience assumptions about this cosy comedy. Boyd’s As You Like It refuses the notion that a big-budget staging has to look safe or beautiful.

Where other productions gloss the play’s darkness to foreground the comedy, Boyd and his cast address the psychological impact of the characters’ experiences. Katy Stephens’s Rosalind is, above all, a woman who has just lost her father, and her performance has the sharpness of raw grief. Rosalind’s love for Orlando is as painful as it is instantaneous, and in the intimacy of the courtyard, it’s a shock to see her stand on the stage with tears in her eyes after the first wooing scene. Rather than looking the part of a wriggling schoolboy, when Stephens cross-dresses to become Ganymede, she turns into a dashing young man. She is the only Rosalind I’ve seen who convinces in the fainting scene, when Rosalind has to endure news of her beloved Orlando’s tussle with a lion, herself dressed as the male Ganymede (a slightly spivvy aesthete in Barbour and moustache). Usually, Rosalind keels over at the briefest flash of Orlando’s blood-stained handkerchief; here, she is forced to stand with the gory white scarf around her neck until the proximity of the blood becomes excruciating. Both of them are fighters, the extent of the blood indicating just how much Orlando had to bear.

Mariah Gale’s Celia is Rosalind’s junior, a princess full of an enthusiasm that renders her vulnerable. Celia is a problematic role: she tends to disappear into the trees as the Rosalind-Orlando relationship takes over. Her own last-minute love plot with Oliver is conveyed in a couple of sentences. Nevertheless, Boyd fleshes out the role with a bizarre, but enjoyable, dream sequence and a well-cast Oliver. As Oliver, Charles Aitken, a veteran of physical theatre companies such as Headlong and Frantic Assembly, echoes Stephens’s Rosalind by rooting his performance in trauma, which stems from a father’s death.

The most memorable performance comes from Forbes Masson as Jacques, the melancholic courtier who masterminds the utopian project of Duke Ferdinand’s exile. Masson plays a gin-soaked Goth with sneering blacked eyes and a purple velvet blazer, faintly ridiculous with his Cuban heels and ginger hair ruffled to the ends. Masson sings with intensity. His tenor is disarmingly icy, like Rufus Wainwright turned malevolent choirboy. There’s a hint of the jilted lover in his sneering, bitter relationship with Clarence Smith’s Duke Ferdinand, the exile who sets out to find “sermons in stones, books in the running brooks”. Ferdinand raises Jacques’s hopes of a utopia in Arden, but by the end of the play, those hopes are dashed. When Duke Ferdinand’s crown is miraculously restored, the company drops to their knees, while Jacques stays standing. His sense of contempt as Ferdinand takes the crown—the lure of power is just too strong for the exiled duke—is palpable; their sylvan dream is shattered. Jacques skulks offstage alone, leaving the festivities he can no longer enjoy.

The members of Boyd’s new ensemble have, in As You Like It, created an almost flawless conception of a fiercely flawed world. This company will perform together until 2011, opening the New Royal Shakespeare Theatre currently being built. Traditionally, acting contracts are much shorter, forcing actors into hothouse collaborations lasting only for the few weeks of rehearsal. The Long Ensemble, together since January, has time to develop intense relationships with one another and with the roles they will reprise in future seasons. The visceral emotion and fierce intelligence of this production suggests that summers in Stratford will be hot for years to come.

Sophie Duncan is reading for an MSt in English Literature at Oriel College, Oxford, where she is focusing on Victorian theatre. She is the Theatre Editor of the Oxonian Review.

King Lear
The Young Vic
Directed by Rupert Goold
Running until 28 March 2009

Othello
Royal Shakespeare Company
Directed by Kathryn Hunter
On tour until 7 March 2009

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King Lear and Othello both begin with a daughter’s disobedience and end with a parade of death. Together, one onstage at the Young Vic and the other just finishing a Royal Shakespeare Company tour, they remind us of Shakespeare’s enduring ability to deliver an audience into a shocked state of despair.

The Headlong Theatre’s production of King Lear at the Young Vic, directed by Rupert Goold, is a solid, if flawed staging of the tragedy. Goold’s directorial decisions are an attempt to deliver a grotesque, even campy Lear. The most flagrant example is Cordelia’s bizarre return to England, dressed in a tennis outfit, amid buzzing helicopters and gasmask-wearing soldiers. The Princess herself brandishes a semi-automatic behind a bouquet of daisies, sending us off to intermission in a storm of gunfire.

The blinding of Gloucester borders on torture porn. Cornwall and Regan are visibly aroused by the act. Regan does not remove Gloucester’s eye with her fingers, but with her teeth, spitting the severed orb out for all to see. We are more disgusted with Regan and Cornwall than we are despairing for Gloucester.

Goold’s production also features a continuous rain shower falling on Lear as he is expelled from Regan’s castle. The rain is a nice effect, but it is diminished by a distracting interpretative song and dance by the rest of the cast as Lear, Kent and the fool battle the storm. You’ve never seen such a crowded heath.

Perhaps Goold is trying to chart a new course for productions of the tragedy. There is no doubt that this show stands in stark contrast to the high drama that most Lear stagings follow. In a sense, Goold emphasises the theatricality of the pain induced in the performance—whether that is the stylised blinding of Gloucester, the song and dance of banishment or the brotherly brawl between Edmund and Edgar that begins with toy swords and ends with an affectionate, albeit murderous embrace. But this interpretation only serves to distract us from the bleak vision of the play.

In spite of the directorial decisions, Pete Postlethwaite and the cast achieve the pathos the text demands. Postlethwaite, as the title character, is better at playing Lear as madman than Lear as King, and, as such, improves as the hours pass. The actor, nearly two decades younger than the King he is portraying, is convincingly feeble, to the point that we get no glimpse of the man who inspired such loyalty in Kent and such love in Cordelia. Once Lear is abandoned by his daughters and thrown out into the storm, however, Postlethwaite breathes a sympathetic, sometimes humorous portrayal into the man.

The Fool, played by Forbes Masson, is the King’s aggressive partisan, giving him an edge not found in most productions. Tobias Menzies is a stirring Edgar, whose decision to disguise himself as an insane beggar is at first one of necessity but becomes a way to hide his horror at seeing his father beaten and blinded.

One cannot be as kind to Jonjo O’Neill who plays Edgar’s brother, Edmund. This Edmund seems more interested in eliciting laughs than in scheming against the rest of the characters. His performance leaves the production without the Iago-like villain that the text demands. After all, this is the man who betrays his brother to banishment, his father to torture, and sends Lear and Cordelia to their deaths.

The most interesting interpretation is that of Goneril, Lear’s eldest daughter. In the opening scene, Goneril seems as pained as Cordelia in professing her love to her father. What’s more, she’s pregnant. Very pregnant. She gives birth just before Lear enters the heath. The decision to depict Goneril with child might have served simply to make Lear’s famous curse of barrenness even more horrifying, but it also puts another character onstage.

The child in swaddling clothes is a fixture through the rest of the production, its cry the last thing the audience hears from Lear’s world. The baby’s scream is a coda to the awkward rhyming couplet that ends the play. Depending on the version of the text, either Edgar or Albany declares that those who remain must speak as they feel and not as they ought to say. The child’s cry of pain is the articulated emotion—a more fitting statement than the words that finish the play.

The play ends with those who survive, amid the bodies of the rest of the cast, huddled together just as Lear and his ragged friends huddled earlier in the hovel. Cordelia lies lifeless in Lear’s dead arms. Goneril’s newly-born and now motherless child cries out as the lights fade to black. Those who are left are merely voices watering a stony place.

While the Lear production’s static set evokes the Beckett-like barrenness of human existence, the RSC’s touring production of Othello is a stormy one. You never forget how close you are to the sea. Othello’s squall-filled voyage from Venice to Cyprus is represented with typical seafaring theatrics. Atypically, Iago, played by Michael Gould, is the person who stands above the storm, directing the tempest. However, in this production, he does not need the powers of Prospero to stir up a squall. It rages in spite of his machinations.

Any production of Othello must give the audience one or even several answers as to why Othello believes Iago that Desdemona is unfaithful. Does Othello believe Iago’s slanders because Othello is paranoid? Too trusting? Or is Iago just that good at being bad? Kathryn Hunter’s production offers an alternative explanation—that in a society as misogynistic as Venice, men believe it when other men tell them that their wives are whores.

Iago’s slandering of Desdemona and Othello’s credulity occurs in an ocean of prejudice. Having quickly defeated the Turks in Cyprus, Othello’s troops pass the time with grotesque entertainment. The clown, played by RSC stalwart Miltos Yerolemou, appears in blackface, using a wedding-gowned, life-sized doll of Desdemona to give birth—to the horror of his soldier audience—to a black child. Othello and Desdemona, played by Patrice Naiambana and Natalia Tena, happen upon this repugnant performance and must stomach it. Hunter’s production seems to suggest that the constant barrage of racism thrown at Othello, both from the nobles in Venice and his soldiers in Cyprus, make him more suspicious of any attempt to dishonour him.

The vile vaudeville returns later in the play with a rendition of the Al Jolson standard “You Made Me Love You”, causing the one black soldier in the chorus to leave in disgust. Iago follows this scene with a soliloquy relating his evil plans, while he manhandles and smears with pitch the very doll the clown used to portray Desdemona. The connection between Iago’s crime and the soldiers’ hate is clear.

Iago’s case is thin, but Othello is all too willing to believe it. Naiambana’s Othello is an exceedingly violent one. He throws furniture, shoves soldiers and manages to put nearly every major character into a chokehold with his whip at some point in the production. Before he murders his wife, Othello berates her, slaps her and tortures her in front of his fellow soldiers. As her husband, he is her self-appointed judge and executioner. Even after he realizes that Desdemona was nothing but true to him, Othello cannot admit the nature of his crime. Asked what should be said of him, Othello responds, “An honourable murderer, if you will/ For nought I did in hate, but all in honour.”

The mistrust of wives, the vilification of women and the hatred of blacks are Iago’s greatest allies. Othello’s crime is not solely his own, nor is it Iago’s. In this production, the crime is symptomatic of a world that treats women and blacks as something less than human—a world not unlike our own.

Where the Young Vic’s Lear ends with a child’s cry, the RSC’s Othello concludes with Iago’s cackle. But in both productions, our thoughts are not with the living, but those who lie lifeless on the stage. Even an audience as desensitised to the representation of violence as today’s cannot help but be horrified at the destruction.

We are like Edgar who, having just proclaimed his ability to brave all the winds of the world, watches as his own father stumbles on stage, the old man’s eyes ripped from his face, blinded and bleeding, hoping to find a cliff from which to jump. We ask as Lear did: “Is man no more than this?” After all that carnage, we are left with a child’s cry and a madman’s laugh—both images of that horror.

Andrew Hammond is reading for an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at St John’s College, Oxford. He is a Senior Editor at the Oxonian Review.

Photograph of Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear © Stephen Vaughan

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Donmar West End
Directed by Michael Grandage
Running until 7 March 2009

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Donmar West End’s production of Twelfth Night aspires to the condition of music, but never finds the right pitch. A string quartet’s angry chord brings Orsino, tormented by his unrequited love for the countess Olivia, on stage. It is a brutal blast of sound, overwhelming any hint of tenderness. This music might feed murderous rages, but it is certainly not “the food of love”. Viola, shipwrecked on a strange island, misses her music too, almost shouting her way through some of Shakespeare’s saddest, most melodious words: “What should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium.” Most offensive of all, though, are the songs. The clown Feste begins well enough, accompanying himself on the guitar. Without warning, though, a chorus of strings enters, piped in through the sound system, utterly obliterating the beautiful simplicity of a single voice and instrument.

These all may seem trivial points against Michael Grandage’s extravagantly praised production. But they are symptomatic of a staging deaf to subtlety and nuance, one that plays Shakespeare’s comedy at a constant and unremitting fortissimo. The central performances are almost uniformly overwrought, and there is little in the direction that suggests a deeper understanding of the play’s dynamics. The production as a whole falls prey to some lamentable fashions in West End theatre: bland design, unimaginative direction and, most disappointingly, central performances that rely more on technique than psychological acuity.

Like Grandage’s first production of the Donmar West End season, which showcased Kenneth Branagh as Chekhov’s Ivanov, the staging of Twelfth Night is little more than a star vehicle. Sir Derek Jacobi has a grand old time as the inflated butler Malvolio, giving a master class in pomposity to match Branagh’s earlier one in states of despair. Jacobi is extremely funny, as Branagh was extremely bleak. However, both performances showcase far more their virtuosity as actors than their sensitivity to character. The challenges of the roles are quite different, but both require moments of extreme rawness to rise above stereotype. For all their extraordinary talents, neither Branagh nor Jacobi can quite conjure the depths. As a consequence, they seem like great actors in less-than-great roles.

Ivanov allows an actor many moments of high drama, but the young Chekhov’s lines do not live up to the despair of the character. Between Ivanov’s words and actions there is a gap that Branagh’s performance, very much in the classical vein of language-driven theatre, elided. The play Ivanov can be powerful and even shattering, but only when we feel the character’s failure of communication acutely. The words came too easily to Branagh (this may be partly the fault of Tom Stoppard’s immensely fluid translation); the character was too composed, too heroic. His finest moment was the one when speech failed, an extended silence as he slumped to the ground in desperation. When Branagh opened his mouth, though, it was impossible to forget that he is one of the stage’s greatest speakers. I left the theatre impressed, but not moved.

Malvolio, however, should be a star turn, as Ivanov should not. Jacobi, by no means as showy an actor as Branagh, lends the role an appropriately heroic silliness. The physicality is perfectly calibrated to Malvolio’s pompous, declamatory speech, which Jacobi delivers as if he were chewing the scenery as Macbeth or Hamlet. Indeed, he seems to be on autopilot, enjoying his romp too much to bring out more in the character than the obvious. This is particularly frustrating in the scene where Malvolio’s makes his final appearance after being humiliated, imprisoned, and nearly driven mad by a prank gone out of control. The moment, which can be a stinging indictment of the lovers’ giddy world turned upside-down, is for Jacobi another chance to go over the top. In his angry cadenza, he misses Malvolio’s extraordinary silence, the way language fails him utterly in responding to the malicious trick. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” is of a different register from the rest of Malvolio’s speech: visceral and angry, after all pretence. It is neither heroic nor anti-heroic; it is merely deflated. But Jacobi has not stopped being a star, and his delivery remains in the high style; he does not sink to the occasion.

Perhaps due to Jacobi’s magnetism, the central love triangle seems largely forgotten, and with it, the romance of the play. Though many reviewers have praised the Viola of Victoria Hamilton, I found her performance undynamic. As she finds herself dressed as a boy, in love with her employer Orsino, and wooing Olivia on his behalf (who in turn falls for the her/him), we do not feel the humor of the situation, only its confusion. Indira Varma’s Olivia displays a cold intellect when resisting advances, but fails to conjure the vulnerability of her own passion. As Orsino, Mark Bonnar gets no better after the misjudged entrance; he remains at a high pitch of self-regard throughout, too much a bore to be convincing as a lover. Where the play demands a delicate three-way choreography of desire and frustration, none seems very attentive to what the others are doing. As a result, we see isolated performances, never an ensemble.

The romantic leads could not be more of a contrast to the raucous assemblage of nobles and domestics that torment Malvolio and provide the play’s low comedy: an appropriately hulking Andrew Aguecheek from Guy Henry, Zubin Varla’s acrobatic, ethereal Feste; best of all, the couple of Ron Cook’s Sir Toby and Samantha Spiro’s Maria has never been quite so tender. The quartet’s scenes capture the joyful dance music of Shakespeare’s text, making their humiliation of Malvolio all the more dissonant. They prove such a centering force for the production that the main love triangle seems marginal in comparison (this is partly Shakespeare’s fault, admittedly—the play’s noble characters are singularly boring). We want to remain with Jacobi and his antagonists below stairs.

The unevenness, perhaps, was to be expected. The poster for the season gave it away: it shows four famous faces (still to come are Judi Dench and Jude Law) staring out at us, dressed in modish black. The publicity for the individual plays again focuses on the lead’s face, without costume or context. We come to see the actors, not the characters; the players, not the play.

This ethos seems to have penetrated the design. Grandage’s productions have been calibrated perfectly so as not to draw attention to themselves. They are attractive but unatmospheric: monolithic, multi-purpose sets; sharp, unobtrusive costumes; most of the visual drama comes from overly dark chiaroscuro lighting. Exchanges are lively and fast-paced—too fast either for Stoppard’s Chekhov or Shakespeare’s language. Dialogue seems designed to get us on, as quickly as possible, to the star’s next moment.

There is nothing wrong with showcasing great actors, and we should be grateful to have Branagh and Jacobi on the London stage when they could be engaged in far more lucrative and less taxing projects. But the problem is that the productions have abdicated any more ambitious goals. Grandage’s direction sterilizes the vodka-soaked desperation of Ivanov’s characters, just as it reduces the intricate counterpoint of Twelfth Night to monotone. These productions ultimately have the effect of dwarfing their stars, doing an injustice to playwright, play and player.

Star-craziness, of course, is not limited to the Donmar. Everywhere one looks in London theatre these days, it is clear that stars sell. Perhaps they are the only way to sell serious, classic theatre (think of Ian McKellen in Lear, Ralph Fiennes in Oedipus, or David Tennant in Hamlet). There is nothing wrong with such productions, but the involvement of big names only increases the burden for a staging to bring something unexpected. The familiarity of player and play creates an even greater need for a director to imagine the work freshly, and for actors to push beyond their comfort zones. Star-driven shows are valuable for the chance to see well-known faces in new masks. They should challenge audience and actor by exploring unexpected dimensions of a familiar presence. As Branagh demonstrated (if all too briefly), this means playing the music of silence.

Joshua Billings is writing his doctoral dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800 at Merton College, Oxford.