King Lear (BBC, 2018)

(This review has also appeared, in slightly different from, on the Wales Arts Review.)

Anthony Hopkins must be one of the few people in the world with instantly recognisable wrinkles; the two vertical lines on the left side of his forehead are as much an identifying mark as Liz Taylor’s violet eyes.  Those wrinkles play star parts in his performance as the BBC’s King Lear (2018), on a face that carries as much history as the map that he divides in the opening scene.

It’s inevitable than any actor’s performance should bear the weight of other parts and personal history, and Lear, which an actor usually plays towards the end of his (or for Glenda Jackson, her) career, is more than usually affected by this kind of real-life intertextuality.  In 1982, a similarly aged Laurence Olivier played the part for Channel Four, with the actor’s own weakened physique and voice, shrunk to childish treble, becoming central tools of the performance.

With Hopkins, the baggage is more personal than professional – a history of depression and alcoholism that kept him intermittently off both stages and screens for nearly ten years, until his masterful returns as Lambert la Roux in Pravda and Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs.  Hopkins has said, in a line that could have come from Lear, that having being an alcoholic is a blessing for an actor ‘because wherever I go, the abyss follows me’, and his performance, especially at the beginning, carries something of the heavy drinker’s capriciousness, turning on a sixpence from humour to fury and back – it’s clear from his daughters’ shared looks that this was not an easy man to have as a father.

Pravda was also directed by Richard Eyre, who here surrounds Hopkins with a starry, but surprising, cast, so that Emma Thompson, Emily Watson and Florence Pugh, as Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia respectively, cover a wider age range than the three daughters usually do, suggesting a backstory of royal bereavements or divorces, while Andrew Scott is a bookish Edgar and John Macmillan a Machiavellian Edmund – a lesser director would have cast them the other way round.  Eyre’s television direction is fluid and witty, using techniques – long tracking shots down corridors, direct, conspiratorial address to camera – popularised by shows like House of Cards and The West Wing, themselves heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s histories.

The style is what the scholar Peter Holland has called the ‘materialist’ school of Shakespearean production (1); realistic, evocative locations (here including a lot of stately homes), emphasis on naturalistic details, props that reappear at significant moments, and precise character distinctions so that, for instance, Goneril and Albany (an ineffectual, patrician Anthony Calf) are stuck in a sexless marriage, while Regan and Cornwall are adventurers, getting off on the blinding of a cable-tied Gloucester (Jim Broadbent) as if it were the 51^st shade of grey.

The milieu is militaristic and macho – many scenes are played before a chorus of camouflage-clad squaddies, so that when Goneril stands before them in a blue dress to berate her father, she sticks out like a butterfly caught in mud.  When Oswald (a camp, against-type Christopher Eccleston) gets called a ‘base foot-ball player’, it makes perfect sense – these raucous hard men are clearly more the rugby-playing type.

Not everything works – battle scenes are always a weakness in televised Shakespeare; stock footage and offscreen noise, as used here, looks cheap, while a blockbuster CGI-fest, even if affordable, would be missing the point.  Some modern parallels are more effective than others – setting the ‘poor naked wretches’ speech in what looks like a refugee camp seems self-indulgent, trivial in comparison with the much larger real-life tragedy (maybe that was the point).  In contrast, the coming together of blind Gloucester and mad Lear (pushing a supermarket trolley, and wearing the hat that belonged to his dead Fool – a Milligan-esque Karl Johnson) among the concrete of a new town shopping-centre works beautifully, giving a new pathos to ‘this great stage of fools’.

In the end, Hopkins is the reason for the production’s existence, and he seizes the opportunity like a man who can’t believe his luck – playful, almost flirtatious at times, occasionally sliding into a Lector-like purr, ranting when he needs to, at other times taking it right down – the climactic ‘Howl, howl, howl!’ is played not as a cry to the heavens but as a genuine appeal to the stiff-upper-lipped military chorus.  Eugene Field once said of an actor in this part that he played the King as if afraid that someone else was going to play the Ace; Hopkins has every single trump card in his hand, and doesn’t mind letting you know it.

1.  Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 100.

Richard III (1995)

 (The following, in a slightly shorter form, was originally written as a programme note for a screening of the film at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, on 28th April 2016.)

‘Playful’ is an unlikely word with which to describe a Shakespeare film, especially one in which the protagonist is a multiple murderer, but here it seems appropriate.  A lot of the best film adaptations of Shakespeare were the result of an existing stage performance meeting up with a specifically cinematic sensibility.  Often (Olivier, Welles), the stage and film specialists were contained in the same body; here, they're two people: Ian McKellen, repeating a role he played at the National Theatre in 1992, and joined forces with film and TV veteran (also, incidentally, the inventor of the executive toy Newton's Cradle) Richard Loncraine.

Like the stage production, directed by Richard Eyre, the film locates the action in an alternative British 1930s, with Richard evoking the Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, or an imaginary member of the House of Windsor, a psychopathic third brother for a womanizing Edward and an introverted George.  McKellen, adding another to his portrayals of Shakespeare’s peacetime soldiers (he's also played Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Iago) de-emphasises the character’s physical disability; taking a cue from his self-reference as ‘scarce half made-up’, he gives Richard a weakened left side.  This Richard’s malevolence comes not from his physique, but from people’s reactions to it; he learnt to hate from his Queen Mary-like mother (Maggie Smith).

The film adds the directorial skills of Richard Loncraine – his debut Slade in Flame (1975) is arguably the best rock movie ever made by a British director  (Richard Lester is an American).   Loncraine, neither a Shakespearean nor a theatregoer, is responsible for some of the film’s most striking visual sequences, such as the death of Robert Downey Jnr’s Earl Rivers, which uses the same method as that of Kevin Bacon in Friday the 13^th (1980).

The film version develops the period setting.  In Shakespeare (and history) the Woodvilles, Edward IV’s in-laws, are outsiders to the London court: McKellen and Loncraine wittily reimagine them as American, with Annette Bening’s Elizabeth inevitably suggesting Wallis Simpson.  At times the parallels are more international: Jim Broadbent’s Buckingham, with his Himmler glasses and Goering smile, puts us in the milieu of Hitler, with whom this Richard shares a sweet tooth and a fondness for early morning meetings.

McKellen and Loncraine’s method is epitomized in the opening sequence.  A small budget is used skillfully, with the Wars of the Roses evoked by a single interior set (recycled from a BBC period drama).  Richard is introduced in a gas mask, his heavy breathing providing a subliminal introduction to the iambic pentameter.  McKellen had originally intended to introduce this through the footsteps of the fleeing soldiers, but discovered (as others have pointed out) that it's quite hard to run in iambics.  I once mentioned this in a seminar, and one student suggested that he could have achieved it if Richard had shot one of them in the leg.

A jazz song, with lyrics by Christopher Marlowe, and played by a jazz band with 'WS' on their music stands, takes us into the world of Dennis Potter (Loncraine directed Blade on the Feather on television and Brimstone and Treacle on film), as the characters’ relationships and attitudes are set up in a series of visual vignettes, so that we know who everybody is before the first ‘Now’ of Richard’s opening speech. 

McKellen recasts this speech as a public oration – again, easing in an audience unused to the formal language - before switching to a gents’ toilet, where Richard goes into soliloquy, catching sight of the camera (and therefore, the audience) in a mirror.  Here, McKellen’s performance echoes that of Laurence Olivier, whose 1955 Richard had a similarly flirtatious relationship with the camera, at one point even beckoning it closer.  (Loncraine also nods towards that film in his casting: the Vicar of Bray-like Lord Stanley is played by Edward Hardwicke, whose father Sir Cedric was Olivier's Edward IV.)

At times, the Shakespeare film that this most resembles is Theatre of Blood ; both feature a series of imaginative deaths, and a charismatic, role-playing protagonist.  There are coincidences of casting; Vincent Price played both Clarence and Richard in the two films of Tower of London (1939 and 1962), a horror-fied version of the Shakespeare play, while Jim Broadbent took over Price's role in the stage version of Theatre of Blood.  Both films also use an eclectic collection of London locations.  Loncraine made an early decision not to use iconic buildings like Buckingham Place and Downing Street, so the film takes place in an alternative geography of decayed industrial and imperial grandeur – Battersea Power Station, St. Pancras Chambers (also the location, around the same time, of the Spice Girls’ Wannabe’ video), and Strawberry Hill House, home of the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole. 

Like Theatre of Blood’s Edmund Lionheart, this Richard dies in a conflagration and Lucifer-like fall, with Loncraine adding an Al Jolson song that echoes James Cagney’s dying cry of ‘Top of the world, ma!’ from White Heat (1949).  As Richmond takes over the throne (and Richard’s relationship with the camera), the film reminds us of the time of its making, towards the end of the John Major government, and during the rise of Tony Blair; if the story began with a winter of discontent, it ends with us questioning whether, under the new regime, things really can only get better.

Theatre of Blood (1973) - Notes

(The following, in a slighter shorter form, was written as a programme note for a screening of the film at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff on 18th April 2016.)

Stories of serial retribution have existed since at least Alexandre Dumas Pere’s 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo.  They focus on characters, left to death or dishonour, who return and take their revenge on those who have wronged them, one by one.  The sequence of killing gives the piece a structure and, in the cinema, allows for a good cast; each victim only needs to be paid for a few days of shooting.  The protagonist can be an investigator, an intended victim, as in My Learned Friend (1943), a vehicle for the English comedian Will Hay, or the avenger, as in the most famous British example, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), which shares a scriptwriter, John Dighton, with the Hay film.

In the post Bonnie and Clyde 1970s, there came a mini-cycle of horrors in which the focus was not on the fact of revenge, but the methods of killing.   Vincent Price appears in three of them:  The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) in which the murders follow the Biblical Plagues of Egypt, its sequel Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972), and Theatre of Blood.  In this film, Price plays Edward Lionheart, an actor who murders a series of hostile critics, using methods drawn from Shakespeare plays.  He’s assisted by his daughter, Edwina (Diana Rigg), who serves him as both Miranda and Cordelia, and a chorus of spirit-like down-and-outs; the film bears a surely unique credit for ‘Choreographer of Meths Drinkers’.

Lionheart has something in common with the idee-fixated villains of the British TV series The Avengers, and it’s not surprising that the cast includes former Avengers Rigg and Ian Hendry, the latter as Devlin, most likeable of the critics, and a male equivalent of a splatter film’s ‘final girl’.  Anthony Greville-Bells’ hyper-literate script gives both Price and Hendry a number of James Bond-ish one-liners after each death; the most characteristic comes after the revelation that one murder is dependent on making an alteration (or ‘one rather large cut’) to The Merchant of Venice: ‘It’s Lionheart alright.  Only he would have the temerity to rewrite Shakespeare.’  - how many horror films use the word ‘temerity’?

In-jokes and actor allusions abound: Robert Coote’s bibulous critic meets his end in a wine merchant labelled ‘Geo. Clarence and Sons’, Dennis Price, the murderer in Kind Hearts and Coronets, turns up as a victim, as if passing on a torch,  Robert Morley, a gourmet in real life, plays one in the film, and gets fed his own poodles, cooked in a pie by Price, a real-life celebrity chef.  This murder, taken from Titus Andronicus, is the one that people tend to remember with greatest discomfort when recalling the film, and confirms what Robert McKee said about Fatal Attraction (1987); as audience members, we’ll happily lend our sympathy to a character who kills people (or tries to), but withdraw it once s/he attacks an animal, especially one that’s cute.

When Shakespeare is used in genre films, it’s usually as a sign of ‘high’ culture, either to give a touch of class to a character, as when Christopher Plummer quotes Mark Antony in Star Trek VI; The Undiscovered Country  (1991 - 'You haven't heard Shakespeare until you've heard him in the original Klingon' - a variation on an old Cold War joke) or to oppose it against the more dynamic ‘low’ culture of film – witness Last Action Hero (1993) which imagines Hamlet as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Theatre of Blood is unusual in that its opposition is not between ‘high’ and ‘low’, but between two kinds of ‘high’.  Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart – his name evokes a nineteenth century actor and an eighteenth century playwright – loses the Critics’ Circle Award to William Woodstock, whom he describes as a ‘twitching, mumbling boy’, suggesting a Brando-ish methodist.  Lionheart belongs to the theatrical past – as superannuated as the actor-managers like Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Frank Benson whom we see on silent film under the opening credits.

The film is ambivalent towards Lionheart; his victims, played by an array of British character actors, are an unpleasant bunch (and far more well-heeled than any real-life theatre critic has ever been - Devlin's riverside flat is in Alembic House, currently occupied by Jeffrey Archer) but it’s never made clear whether they're right about his acting – the most complimentary word used about him is ‘vigorous’ (by Milo O’Shea, no shrinking violet himself).  This is complicated by the fact that Price, though very well-spoken, is clearly not a Shakespearean – when he plays Shylock to Rigg’s Portia, it’s like watching an amateur boxer getting in the ring with Mike Tyson.   It’s implied that Lionheart’s murders may be his greatest performance, more credible than anything he ever did on a stage.

The film retains a considerable cult following, among fans of both Shakespeare and horror  (a remarkable number of people seem to have seen the same television screening at Christmas 1979) and extends its influence into gimmicky murder films like Se7en (1995), which reuses several of its motifs – death through force-feeding, a pound of flesh, body parts in a box.  In 2005, Lee Simpson and Phelim McDermott of Improbable Theatre produced a stage version at the National Theatre (which was itself being built while the film was made), with Jim Broadbent as Lionheart and Rachel Stirling, Rigg's daughter, in her mother's part (here renamed Miranda - the play was more explicit about the Tempest parallels than the film).  The play imagined Devlin as a possible future Literary Manager of the NT, a fictionalised successor to Kenneth Tynan, and positioned the Lyttelton theatre, where the show took place, as the critics' final triumph over what Lionheart represents:

'Look at it!  Look at it!  Hard, empty, coy and sexless.  Look at it!  Smooth and gray so you can wash the blood away when you have done the deed and killed the actor.  It should be ours!  It should be mine!  Brave and foolish, ludicrous and magnificent, wasteful and awesome.  Knowing nothing, understanding it all, expressive and inarticulate.  We are dead.  Murdered like mafia hits and buried in the concrete walls of this mausoleum lest we misbehave, lest something not considered by the brains and the nice boys should spill messily onto the stage.  We are the dead.'

(Lee Simpson/Phelim McDermott, Theatre of Blood, p. 92)

The stage production got mixed reviews; for my money, Jim Broadbent was miscast as Lionheart - a quirky character actor, he was never believable as a barnstormer.  (Steven Berkoff would have been perfect.)  It is, however, appropriate that the play should focus on (and criticise) its own location.  One of the film’s incidental pleasures is in the spotting of London locations, including, in the final scene, the Edwardian Putney Hippodrome, which had lain empty since 1960.  Like Lionheart, and the Lear that he plays at the film’s end, the building was a leftover from the past – Theatre of Blood allows all three to make one last grand exit.

Okay, Here's 10 Audiences I Have Known

This is a sort of cover version of/response to Dan Rebellato's recent blog 10 Audiences I Have Known, describing ten theatre audiences he's been part of over the years.   If you haven't read his piece, do so now.

1.  The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens/David Edgar, Aldwych Theatre, London, 1980.

For me, as for a lot of people my age, Nicholas Nickleby was the show that made me want to work in theatre.  Two plays, each about four hours long, putting a whole society on stage, with a cast that sums up a generation of RSC acting - Roger Rees, David Threlfall, John Woodvine, Edward Petherbridge, Ben Kingsley, Bob Peck, Timothy Spall, Suzanne Bertish - and proving that Charles Dickens was, as Trevor Nunn said, 'the greatest playwright who never wrote a play' (actually, he did, but his plays are far less theatrical than his novels).  Pretty much everything I've done in the theatre since then, as director, writer or teacher, has been partly an attempt to recreate the sense of ensemble and community in those shows.

The moment that sums up the piece, and what it did, came towards the end of the first act of the first play.  Nicholas, our hero (Rees), is working as a schoolmaster at the Yorkshire school run by Wackford Squeers (Kingsley), a dumping ground for unwanted sons.  The underfed, disturbed boy Smike (a pre-Shameless Threllfall) has tried to escape, and is due to be beaten by Squeers.  Nicholas watches for as long as he can stand it, then intervenes, grabs Squeers' cane, and beats the schoolmaster.

And the audience cheers like mad.

A metropolitan audience doesn't cheer or boo easily, and when it does, it's usually with a knowing post-modern wink, as when Globe audiences used to boo the French in Henry V, presumably casting themselves as Shakespeare's audience.   This was something different - a genuine moral approval, an acknowledgement that Nicholas had, in defending the helpless Smike, done the right thing.   It remains one of the very few times I've ever heard a sincere, non-ironic moral response in a theatre, and, at the beginning of what we now know to be the Thatcher era, it seemed like a very neceessary thing to hear.

2. The Lover, Harold Pinter, Sewell Barn Theatre, Norwich, 1985.

The Sewell Barn was (and is) an ambitious amateur theatre in Norwich, where I went to university.  The piece was a stage adaptation of Harold Pinter's television play.  Around the middle of the show, the female lead is pouring out tea for her lover, Max.  He picks up a pair of bongos and starts to play, which leads to the two of them playing out a seduction scene, which climaxes (ahem) with the two of them crawling under the tablecloth, and her crying out 'MAX!'.  Blackout.

When the lights come up, the two of them have emerged from under the cloth, and are both drinking a cup of (presumably) post-coital tea.  The woman sitting next to me turns to her companion and says 'It'll have gone cold by now.'.

3. Entertaining Strangers, David Edgar, Cottesloe Theatre, London, 1987.

Another David Edgar play.  So sue me.

Entertaining Strangers was written as a community play for the people of Dorchester in Dorset, one of the massive projects initiated by the playwright Anne Jellicoe.  The year after the premiere, Edgar rewote it for the National Theatre, where it was directed by Peter Hall, in a promenade production with a cast that included Judi Dench and Tim Piggot-Smith.

The evening I saw happened to be the performance to which the National had invited the people of Dorchester, including many of those who'd been in the original production.  The Mayor of the town was there, wearing his chain of office, together with David Edgar and Neil Kinnock (one of the small group of politicians I've seen at the theatre - Kenneth Baker seems to be the most frequent attender).

In the interval I heard one Dorchestian saying 'I think they're doing it very well.'.  At the end, a woman said, in mock (but maybe not) indignation 'Well, whatever happened to..?.'  and named a character, presumably the one she'd played.  The thing that struck me was that, as far as they were concerned, their production was the definitive one and this, by their country's National Theatre, a mere shadow on the Platonic wall.  And, thinking about it, I suppose they were right.

4. Henry V, William Shakespeare, New Theatre, Cardiff, 1988.

In the late 'eighties, Michaels Bogdanov and Pennington formed the English Shakespeare Company, an ensemble designed to challenge the supremacy of the RSC.  Their first project was a three part version of the two Henry IV plays and Henry V - a year later they expanded it to include the whole History cycle.  The plays toured nationally and internationally, allowing an audience the chance to watch the whole lot over a week, starting with Richard II on Tuesday and finishing on Bosworth Field on Saturday night.  The company never did anything nearly as good, and became known as a one-hit wonder, insofar as it's reasonable to call a seven-play cycle 'one hit'.

Henry V is sometimes described as a theatrical equivalent of the duck/rabbit optical illusion, a play that can be read as both as pro-war and anti-war (though not at the same time) depending on how you look at it.  If Laurence Olivier's film gave us the full duck, Bogdanov served up a the most rampant of rabbits, playing up the questionable nature of Henry's claim, his status as a war criminal, and the brutal realpolitick of the final negociations with France.

As with Nicholas Nickleby, there was a defining moment in the crossover between Act II Scene 2 and 3. The low-life characters, Pistol, Nym and Bardolph, are going to war.  Pistol bids a tearful farewell to his new wife, Mistress Quickly, as a guitar plays 'My Way' in the background.  As she leaves, the farewell song morphs into 'Here we go' and the English army become a crowd of football hooligans, complete with scraves and klaxons; some carry a banner that reads 'Fuck the Frogs', the Chorus appears with a sign that reads 'Gotcha!'.

As the English army withdraws, we see the French court, in a peaceful Arcadian scene, carrying champagne galsses and wearing white suits and dresses, as if at a picnic.  The final English hooligan exits and the French King (the late Clyde Pollitt, who'd already played John of Gaunt and Justice Shallow in the previous plays) says his first line:

'Thus come the English.'

It was a beautifully modulated gag, and I'm sure got a laugh everywhere. In anglophobic Cardiff, it brought the house down.

Growing up in London, I'd never really given much thought to the way in which different parts of the country might receive a piece of theatre, that there were regional reactions as well as national ones. Shakespeare's Histories, with their heterogenous world-view, and focus on civil war, taught me a lesson.  (The video version of the production, filmed at the Grand Theatre, Swansea, preserves this  audience reaction.)

5. Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov, New Theatre, Cardiff, 1991.

Same theatre, a few years later.  Kenneth Branagh's production, with Richard Briers as Vanya.  In the interval, a group of people wearing Open University badges are standing in front of me in the ice-cream queue.  They stand in silence for a while, then the man nearest to me says:

'Of course, falling asleep's not necessarily a criticism...'

6. Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine,  Phoenix Theatre, London, 1990.

This was the British premiere of Sondheim's musical, three years after its Broadway debut.  At the end of the show, I overheard the elderly gent next to me saying:

'They don't make 'em like that anymore!'

I'm still not sure what he was doing - was he just uttering a complimentary phrase without thinking about what it meant?  Was he commenting on the decline of the musical theatre since 1987?  Or did he genuinely believe that he'd been watching a show from another era, a golden age?  And if so, when?

Most of us like to think of ourselves as omnivores, who can watch (or read, or listen to) anything, without being influenced by its period and provenance.  Of course we're not; part of our perception of a work of art is created by our sense of how near or far it is from us, in terms of time and place, and where we can put it in relation to other works.  Some of the original audiences of The Boy Friend reportedly thought that it was a revival of a '20s musical, rather than a skilful pastiche/distillation; converesely, I'm sure that many people watch modern translations of classic plays (David Harrower's version of Ibsen's Public Enemy, for instance) without knowing that the original play is over a century old (and more power to them, I say). 

Does it make a difference?  Of course.  How?  No idea.  And I'd still love to know what that man thought he was watching.

7.  Oleanna, David Mamet, Royal Court Theatre, London, 1993.

This is the one production that's also on Dan Rebellato's list.  I saw it a little earlier in the run, at the Royal Court rather than in the West End.  Maybe for that reason, the audience was quieter than the one he describes, with not even a hint of cheering.  In the interval, after watching David Suchet's impossibly smug academic for an hour, I was standing in the Gents next to another man.  We didn't know each other, but the play seemed to demand a response.

Him:  Got it coming, hasn't he?
Me:   And I imagine he's going to get it.

We finished up, and went back to our seats, where Suchet's character did indeed get what was coming to him.

Till that point, I'd always been opposed to intervals, unnecessary breaks in the tension, making a director's job harder than it already was.  That was the first time I'd ever experienced an interval as an actual building of tension.  As Marsha Norman says ' the play is also what is not said, what lies under the lines, and what the audience imagines during intermission.'.We were like the spectators at a sporting event (it's not a coincidence that the set resembled a boxing ring) waiting to see the characters laying into each other, and wanting blood.

8.  Love's Labour's Lost, William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Globe,  London, 2012.

I've written in other posts about the 2012 Globe to Globe season, all of Shakespeare's plays plus Venus and Adonis, each one performed in a different language (stretching the point a bit in some cases).  As I observed at the time, one of the glories of the season was the audience, as multi-culti London emerged for individual shows - the Urdu Taming of the Shrew, featuring Lollywood star Nadil Jamel as Kate, was especially moving in this respect, starting with the Pakistan National Anthem and a senior member of the company giving a speech (in English) thanking the Globe for inviting them to play 'in this theatre, which is sacred to all actors'. 

Love's Labour's Lost was played in British Sign Language, by the company Deafinitely Theatre (showing commendable chutzpah, they took on the most verbal play in the language).  There's a lot to say about the eloquence of signing as a language, and many have said it better than I can.  Some moments still stick in my mind - the four Lords, at the end of the first half, gradually lowering the hands from their hearts, relinquishing the sign for 'oath' as they resolved to break theirs.  Watching Don Armado's Hispanic flourishes was also the first time I realised - and it seems so obvious in retrospect that I'm embarrassed to say it - that people sign in different accents.

In the Globe courtyard, I got chatting to my neighbour, who turned out to be a gay rights activist from Dublin ('Best of luck' seemed the only appropriate response.).  He'd learned to sign when he had a relationship with a deaf man (male homosexuality is far more common in the Deaf community than others - he said that nobody really knows why).  He told me of learning to sign, and being complimented by a mutual friend on the quality of his signing after the conversation in which he and his partner had broken up.

As a theatre-goer, I've often seen shows in other languages, or aimed at audiences of which I'm not a part.  I've been the most heterosexual person at a drag show and the only goy in the village at Hampstead.  I've been the only white person in all-Caribbean audience, feeling like a ping-pong ball in a  bucket of caviar.  In my early forties, I once had the experience of being the youngest person in the audience, by about twenty years,  and the next afternoon, of being the oldest, by about the same margin.  But Love's Labour's Lost was the show, more than any other, where I was conscious of being, although welcome, a tourist in someone's else's world.

9. Mr Burns, Anne Washburn, Almeida Theatre, London, 2014. and

Mr Burns, which brought out rave reviews and virulent hatred in roughly equal measure, is a dystopian fantasy, set in a world where The Simpsons has become folklore.  The three acts are set several years aprt, as the stories get further from their original form, ending with an operatic version of the episode 'Cape Feare'.  Once you've got the basic concept, it's a very enjoyable show, although it helps if you know your Simpsons.  Before you grasp that, it can be a bit tricky, as evidenced by what was (to me at least) a new phenomenon; audience members googling the show on their phones in the interval, to make sure they were following the plot.

10. Flowers of the Field, Kevin Mandry, White Bear Theatre, London, 2014.

Dan included a play he'd written, so I'm going to mention one I directed.  By definition, fringe theatre audiences are more variable from evening to evening than those in larger theatres - a single large party can alter the demographic in ways that you don't expect.

Flowers of the Field was a beautifully-written play about a folk song collector, a sort of fictionalised version of someone like Cecil Sharp, in 1916.  it tended to play to an older audience, one that knew about folk music and/or the First World War, in which the hero had served.  Except for one evening, when an enterprising lecturer from a summer school brought along a group of American students.  It was the youngest audience we ever played to, and one of the best.  Laughs came in different places, the romantic plot suddenly became central, and one girl gasped 'No!' audibly at the final twist.  A couple of audience members walked off with the pre-decimal coins that we'd used as set dressing, and I don't resent the loss one little bit.

Globe to Globe - Weeks 3 and 4.

Got a bit behind, haven't I?  Blame my students...

The Dhaka Theatre's Bangla Tempest was another folk-theatre reading, with much use of music (Ariel played by a singer) and the production book-ended by scenes of ships, represented by models on the fore-arms of the ensemble.  The most interesting moment came at the end , with Prospero giving the island to Caliban, as the latter moved out of the tortured physicality he'd held throughout the show.   This struck me as another of those scenes that Shakespeare didn't write but should have, like the assassination at the beginning of Richard II, and reminded me of the similar redemption that Alan Moore gives (in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) to Caliban's literary descendent, the Frankenstein monster.

Teatr im. Kochanowskiego's Polish Macbeth was, frankly, a bit of a dud, like a conservative theatre-goer's idea of what all modern-dress productions are like.  The general aesthetic was Eurotrash gangland - lots of white suits, drag-queen witches, and a Tarantino-easque use of music, including 'I Will Survive' (which, weirdly, also turned up in the German Timon of Athens) and Nancy Sinatra's 'Bang Bang' (which is also in Kill Bill; as I occasionally tell my students, there comes a point where intertextuality just becomes copying).    The high point was a very drunken post-show party, with drag queens passing vodka shots into the audience (actually water, which made me feel better about not getting any), and Duncan doing a striptease to 'Billie Jean'; the low point was a lengthy onstage rape of Lady Macduff - apart from anything else, she's such a minor character that it doesn't serve any dramatic purpose.

I only saw the first half of the National Theatre of Albania's Henry VI: Part 2, which struck me as a very old-fashioned production, with heavy, undifferentiated costumes and leaden pacing.  Because of this, I didn't bother with the Macedonian Part 3, of which I've since heard nothing but good.

The Compania Nacional de Teatro's Mexican Henry IV: Part 1 and Elkafka Espacio Teatral's Argentine Part 2 were on the day that had the worst weather of the season so far; it was actually hailing during the former.  Despite that, I enjoyed the production a lot more - the Latin machismo suits the play.  This was emphasised by the set, with two cat-walks running in a v-shape into the audience, and down which the characters would run for stand-offs (of which the play has an amazing number).  David Calderon, playing Hotspur, deserves a special mention in dispatches; at one point, he put his foot through one of the catwalks while running offstage, and tore a flap of skin off his leg - he not only reacted in character, but came on in the next scene as Francis without missing a beat.

This was one of the first productions to use any kind of historical costume, a sort of RSC-timeless that mixed medieval and modern.  The Argentine company went in for a sort of cartoon-ish modern dress - justices in wigs and bowlers, Hal blazered like a renegade member of the Bullingdon club, and Rumour, the prologue, who's described as wearing 'a garment painted with tongues' in a Rolling Stones tee-shirt.  (I played the same part at school 35 years ago, and wore the same design.)  When the crowds at Hal's coronation came on waving Jubilee-esque Union Jacks, I did start to wonder if this was intended as an Argentine parody of Englishness - maybe even a comment on the bald men's fight over a comb that was the Falklands War?  Just a thought.

The National Academic Theatre's Armenian King John (described by Dominic Dromgoole as 'a challenge to our marketing department') didn't make that much impression on me, though it had a nifty set, made up of a variety of suitcases and packing cases, which were stacked in various combinations, including John's throne, and the height from which the boy Arthur falls to his death.

The Belarus Free Theatre's King Lear was preceded by the sight of Tom Stoppard in the audience, and an usher warning us that it would contain 'nudity, whipping, water and eggs'.  I thought it was absolutely brilliant - constantly surprising, but never gratuitous.

The tone was set early on as Goneril and Regan sang their rehearsed declarations of love for their father, like a sort of regal karaoke, and were then rewarded with handfuls of earth symbolising their territories, that they gathered in their skirts.  This was a production that constantly returned to the physical realities - Edmund humiliatingly holding a commode for his wheelchair-using father, Edgar, as Poor Tom smearing his face with his own shit (peanut butter, I think), Kent spitting in Oswald's face.

The storm itself was stunning - the cast manipulated a large blue tarpaulin like waves, enveloping Lear as he raged amid the water.  The naked Poor Tom emerged from under the same tarpaulin, causing Lear to tear off his own clothes, and making a reluctant Kent and Fool follow suit.  Like Peter Brook, the company refused to sentimentalise the morality, playing Lear's knights as rowdy football hooligans, and Edmund as the ignored bastard son, Gloucester at one point threatening him with his belt.  

In case you're wondering about the eggs, they appeared in a bird's nest, which the mad Lear wore on his head, carefully placing them at the front of the stage, then stomping on them on 'Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!'.  Strangely, the best other production of this play I've seen - Adrian Noble's for the RSC in 1982 - also featured raw eggs, one being broken and swallowed by Tony Sher as the Fool.  Maybe something to do with the fragility of social institutions?

The Marjanishivili Theatre's Georgian As You Like It was a delight, performed as if by an early 20th century group of strolling players, Chekhov meets Vincent Crummles.  If Lear was an earthy production, this was an airy one - Orlando released his love-notes on balloons,  Jacques (here played as a cross-dressing lesbian, with an emo-kid's haircut) was caught up in a storm of blown leaves.  She also played the best 'All the World's a Stage' speech I've ever seen, relating it to the offstage company and their implied stories - Audrey was the company prompter, Silvius and Phoebe having an illicit affair.  Those of you who know me personally will know that I've got a romantic streak a mile wide, so this production, with its a capella 'love at first sight' theme was right up my street.

(Not everybody's, though - I was discussing this show the next day with the Canadian playwright Jason Sherman, who's a lot less keen on this season than I am.  I asked if he'd enjoyed it, and he said 'Not as much as they did.'  Honesty also compels me to add that this show made no concessions at all to being in the Globe - anyone sitting at the sides would have had a terrible experience.)

The Q Brothers' 'Othello - the Remix' at the Globe Theatre - May 5, 2012.

(To get the effect of this, you really need to read it aloud - it doesn't work at all on the page.  Also note that, in the traditions of both hip-hop and Shakespeare, I claim the liberty to stress and elide words any way I damn well want to.)

Friends, Londoners, countrymen, knock me your lobes,
Othello - the Remix is rocking the Globe's
G2G season, and nobody should mind
That it's not foreign language as usually defined.
You could call it Ebonics but that still wouldn't be right,
As three out of four of these fellows are white
(Which needn't cause you any kind of a crisis -
They're more Marshall Matherses, less Vanilla Ices).
From the moment they enter, with cool finger clicks,
(That inevitably suggests an earlier kind of remix)
These guys have the Globe-goers glued to their seats
As they shake up the story to common-time beats.
They say it themselves, they're just doing what's
The thing Shakey did when he plundered his plots.
'Our own plagiarism is keeping it real;
Good artists borrow, the best artists steal'
(And iambic pentameter isn't much more
Than old-school hip-hop with five stresses, not four).
The story's the same, but they're making it sillier,
By setting it all in a music-biz milieu,
Among three touring rappers - Iago, Othello,
And Cassio, a pretty boy, Bieber-ish fellow
Who takes Iago's place higher up on the bill
Giving I. (as he sees it) a license to kill.
His insinuations split husband from wife,
Rapper from crew and a girl from her life.
He turns poor Othello from lover to slayer
By making him think his beloved's a playa.
Desdemona's unseen - it's the company's choice
That she's only a sample, a soul-diva's voice -
Which is all rather like - the coincidence is curious -
What another show did with Caesar (that's Julius).
In less than two hours, hardly pausing for breath,
They tell the whole story, from marriage to death.
There's lots of good jokes, and some times when you think
That they're going to swear, but come back from the brink.

Emilia and Bianca are played by the guys,

Which starts as a joke, then Emilia dies

And it all becomes moving, as the passage of time

Transforms the ridiculous to the sublime.

Pop culture, high culture, this has it all in
(There's even a quote from Tom Petty's 'Free Falling').
I say this with wonderment, not with disparagement -
This so easily could have been an embarrassment,
But they're truthful to both sides of the equation,
Shakespeareans and hip-hoppers get education,
And I'm not an expert (I mean, bloody hell,
The last rapper I saw was M.C. Melle Mel)
But I hope you can all understand what I mean
When I say forty-something felt like seventeen,
And as culture meets culture, it seems what we've got
Is the wooden O turned to Blue Mink's Melting Pot.
If you haven't got tickets, you've reason to curse;
This is poetry in motion - it's gone bard to verse.

Globe to Globe - the first week

One of the most interesting parts of this summer's Olympics-related Shakespeare shenanigens, the Globe to Globe festival features 37 plays (plus a narrative poem) in as many languages, from not quite as many countries.  I bought a season ticket, which gets me a matinee standing place for all of them for £100.  I'm told there are about a hundred of us - I'm starting to recognise the others by sight, notably a middle-aged couple who bring their toy rabbits and sit them on the front of the stage, dancing them around at the curtain calls.  So far, I've seen six shows and, it's got to be said, every one's a winner.

The Festival began with  Venus and Adonis, from Cape Town's Isango Ensemble.  Although it might seem perverse to kick off with something that isn't even a play, this was a canny choice of opener - fairly short, dance- and music-heavy, partly in English (as well as parts in IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SeSotho, Setswana and Afrikaans), and from a company who've played London successfully before.  As ever, they sang and danced like angels - it's hard to imagine a more moving start to the Festival than the sight of a young South African actress, a little smile playing across her face as she paused before singing words that had left this city four hundred years ago, now returning after their journey a continent away. 

The poem's a story of lust and obsession, in which the young and beautiful Adonis is pursued by the predatory love-goddess.  One of my university lecturers said that the ideal casting for a film version would be Elizabeth Taylor and Woody Allen; in this case, the part of Venus was divided among the seven female cast members, of different ages, costumes and physiques (starting with the regal Pauline Malefane), the collective style creating a Jungian eternal feminine.

The Vakhtangov Theatre's Russian Measure for Measure, by contrast, was characterised by a doubling rather than a sharing - the Duke and his replacement, Angelo, played by the same actor.  This production started worryingly like a '70s fringe show, with boxes of plastic bottles and paperbacks (including Carrell's The Shakespeare Secret) scattered around the stage, but picked up as it went on, with staging flourishes like Angelo's dream sequence as he and Isabella tangoed around the platform, broken by a sudden Spike-like awakening (I wanted at this point, to include a link to Spike waking up after his unexpected erotic dream about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I can't find one that hasn't been messed about with, or turned into a fan's music video.  Anyway, you get the idea.).  The doubling came into its own at the very end, with the Duke's proposal to Isabella, blocked in exactly the same way as the equivalent Isabella/Angelo scene earlier in the play.  It's tempting to conclude that this feeling of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss' is one that has an extra resonance in Putin's Russia.

I only saw the second half of the Ngakou Toa's Maori Troilus and Cressida, after catching Zefferelli's Much Ado About Nothing at the NFT (I realise that sounds pretentious, but it's what I was actually doing that day - so sue me).  I hadn't actually intended to attend it at all (two and a half Shakespeares in a day is quite a lot), but kept hearing positive positive things, from Stella Duffy's blog, and a fellow season ticket holder I overheard in the Measure for Measure queue, who said, in a phrase that stuck oddly in my mind, that the play was well-suited to 'that bare-chested, tongue out, foot stomping haka machismo'.

That turned out to be quite an accurate description - the males tattooed and bare-buttocked, the females more clothed, with plaited hair (which led to one lovely gag on Cressida's post-coital entrance with dishevelled JBF bed-hair).  I don't mean it as an insult when I say that the highlight was the curtain call, with a full-cast haka being answered by another in response from a group of Maori in the audience - it's the only time in my life I've seen audience response get a round of applause.

This illustrates one of the incidental pleasures of the season - the appearance of multi-culti London in the audience, as different nationalities and ethnicities turn out for their team.  This created an especially interesting effect for the Company Theatre's Hindi Twelfth Night, , with South Asian families (who'd obviously booked in advance) in the galleries, and Caucasians in the yard, in a sort of reverse-Raj.  (It also meant that verbal jokes got laughs from the gallery, physical from the yard.)

The Company's blurb described them as drawing on Indian theatrical traditions including Kathakali - to this ghorah, it seemed closer to Bollywood, with primary-coloured costumes, apart from Malvolio's black jacket, and song and dance in almost every scene.  The musicians were placed dead centre, actors joining them when not onstage and occasionally joining the action as a chorus.  This was popular, high-energy performance, with an impish female Feste and odd jokes in English - Malvolio at one point said 'Goodness gracious me'.  At the risk of coming over all Billington, it was a bit one-note for me, strong on the play's humour, less so on its vein of melancholy.

The National Theatre of Greece's Pericles was another production that kept the cast onstage throughout - actors became different characters by slipping on a coat or (for the oily Simonides) a pair of shades, sometimes turning into a chorus of fishermen, or  trouserless punters at Marina's brothel.  Again, there were throwaway jokes in English - Pericles, begging for food from an audience member 'Of course I've got no money -  I'm Greek.'

This was another production where it was impossible not to see the cultural history as part of the experience - the ensemble playing evoked not just conventions from the classical Greek theatre, but of the whole Homeric tradition of storytelling.  The opening captured this beautifully - a single lute-player sat alone on stage; when it was time to begin, an actor joined him, gave a whistle and, as the cast gathered from all over the auditorium said (in English) 'Let's play.'

This sums up the whole wonder of this season for me - companies from all over the world coming to the symbolic centre of Britain's theatrical and literary culture, and bringing their own history and achievements to the party.  Shakespeare's plays are turned into a vast adventure playground, and this year, the world's come round to play.

(In case you're wondering, I didn't see the Swahili Merry Wives of Windsor or the Mandarin Richard III - on the only occasions when I could have done, it was pissing down with rain.  I'm dedicated, but not stupid.)

The Turing Test

Bletchley is an unremarkable place; so much so that, if it hadn't been chosen to house the wartime codebreakers, it'd be best known as a suburb of Milton Keynes. Actually, its nondescript nature was one of the reasons they were there. (Another was that it's roughly halfway between Oxford and Cambridge - a lot were mathematics dons). Part of the beauty of the story is the disjunction between the location and what was achieved there. Winston Churchill - who, let's face it, was in a good position to judge - said that the work done at Bletchley Park, and especially the cracking of the Enigma code, probably took two years off the war.

I have two favourite Bletchley Park stories. One was of a rounders match played between the British codebreakers and the Americans who'd joined them after Pearl Harbour. Rules were agreed, the game was played, and at the end, both sides thought they'd won. This seems to me to say something quite profound about this country's relationship with the United States.

The other concerns Alan Turing, the most brilliant of them all, who committed suicide in 1954, two years after he'd been arrested for homosexuality - as the film director Michael Powell said, Britain doesn't treat its heroes very well. A codebreaker interviewed years after the war observed that talking to Turing made him realise the difference between intelligence and genius. Talking to a very intelligent person, you hear ideas that you (possibly) could have come up with yourself, if you'd only had the time. Talking to a genius, like Turing, you hear ideas that you know you never would have had in a million years.

Since hearing that, I've used it as a personal shorthand for a genuinely astonishing idea - one that I know I could never have come up with myself. I'm not a scientist, so my Turing moments are mostly to do with writing - lines, ideas or images that come from a place I've never been, and never will. Offhand, I can think of a few; the description of the fog at the start of Bleak House, the last line of Some Like It Hot (written, according to I.A.L. Diamond, at the end of an exceptionally heavy day, and intended as a placeholder until they could come up with something better), and Smokey Robinson's realisation that, in large enough quantities, the salt water of tears can leave a track.

Inevitably enough, the writer who's passed my personal Turing test most often has been William Shakespeare, the person for whom, according to Jonathan Bate, the concept of genius was invented. His very familiarity sometimes makes this hard to spot- so many of his phrases are stuck in the language that we forget how genuinely bizarre they are. A trivial example will do; Cleopatra's 'my salad days, when I was green in judgement'. How many of us, if we'd never heard it before, can honestly say that we would have come up a woman who describes her youth by comparing herself to a lettuce?