Globe to Globe - the Second Week

The Yohangza Company's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream has been around for a while - I remember the opening scene tearing the roof off an Edinburgh preview in 2005 - and it's got the confidence of a show that's been playing in for several years.  This is very much a Dream told from the point of view of the fairies, adapted as the spirits of Korean folklore, with Puck (here divided between two actors) as a roguish master of ceremonies.  The lovers are intruders in this world, and the mechanicals disappear entirely, apart from a single female herb-gatherer, who in an surprising gender-reversal, in wooed by the king of the fairies after being turned into a pig (an image which carries a strange overtone for anyone who grew up in the '80s).  This is a very physical, joyous production, with the cast, in beautiful costumes and make-up,  throwing luminous bracelets into the audience like rock stars - one tweeter described it as 'the closest I've seen to a rave in the theatre'.

I Termini's Italian Julius Caesar was an altogether drier affair, the kind of thing you might expect to see at the Barbican.  The cast was stripped down to minimum - Caesar himself was kept offstage, discussed but never seen - and costumes were eclectic; Casca in leather and jeans, a bald-headed Cassius in tails and Brutus in a moustache and frockcoat that gave him something of the look of fellow assassin (and actor) John Wilkes Booth.  Spaces were created with moving doors, in the manner of Steven Berkoff's The Trial.  This was a polarising production; I spoke to many people who hated it, and it was certainly sometimes annoying - when the schoolchildren behind me started giggling at Portia's headbutts to her husband, I wanted to shush them, then realised that I agreed  - but there were also moments of extraordinary beauty, like the assassination itself, with the three killers gathering round a black chair (to the Balanescu Quartet's version of 'The Model') and slowly drawing lines on it in red chalk.  Written down, it sounds absurd, but (as I observed last week) the step from the ridiculous to the sublime can sometimes be as short as that in the other direction.

The South Sudan Theatre Company were here as representatives of a country which has only existed for a year, and their production of Cymbeline did, at times, feel like something that should be admired more for its existence than for its quality - the Jupiter scene, with spirits in white sheets appearing in the gallery, was pure school nativity play.  This was another piece of ensemble storytelling, like the Greek National Theatre's Pericles, drawing in this case on African traditions rather than Mediterranean - an usher told me that the company had blessed the stage before the performance by pouring a bottle of beer round the perimeter (He seemed very keen to tell us this; I think he was worried that we might think that the alcohol smell was coming from him).  It was an unpolished but good-hearted show, made remarkable by the sense that we were witnessing the birth of a nation - my companion quoted Theseus "never can anything be amiss/ When simpleness and duty tender it" - and it would have taken a heart of stone not to be moved by the curtain call, as the cast took the hands of the entire front row.

National politics were also inevitably brought out by the Ashtar Company's Palestinian Richard II.  But for my season ticket, I probably wouldn't have bothered with this show - it's a play I dislike, and one that only seems to work if you accept that the detestability of the lead character.    Here, Richard was clearly a Machiavellian villain - the play opened with an additional scene showing the political killing of the Duke of Gloucester, his throat slit Sweeney Todd-style as his shaved in prison, using the first of the show's many mirrors.  As you might expect, this production was cynical about regime change - Bolingbroke gradually became as brutal as his victim, his final pledge to travel to the Holy Land gaining an additional irony from the company's origins.

One of the incidental pleasures of this festival has been the matching of national companies with individual plays.  A few patterns have emerged - plays involving magic have tended to go to Asian companies, complicated plots to Africa, political plays to Eastern Europe and Latin America.  In this respect, it's interesting that the two most gory plays - Richard III and Titus Andronicus - have been performed by Chinese companies.  The Tang Shu-Wing Theatre Studio's Titus, in Cantonese, was a cool, minimalist production, with clean angled furniture and colour-coded costumes - Titus' family in grey, the Emperor's in sharp-looking whites and the Goths, like their subcultural homonyms, in stylish blacks (Tamora, in particular, wouldn't have looked out of place on Camden High Street of a Friday night).

I've already written about the Q Brothers' Othello; the Remix, a smart, very knowing adaptation, so I won't go on about that.  So far, everything I've seen has been either inspiring or (at the very least) interesting.  We're nearly at the halfway point, and a few themes have emerged: absent lead characters, the different performance aesthetics of hot countries, political subtexts and bare (male) buttocks - I'll write about these in my next post.

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.)

Wherefore art thou Quentin?

When I first aired my theory about the reasons for the popularity of 'JB' as initials for action heroes, a friend pointed out that not everyone with those initials is heroic, his prime example being Jim Bowen.

In real life, people often lack the nominal suitability of fictional characters - the real James Bond, after all, was an ornithologist.  Stephen Fry once pointed out that if Noel Edmunds were a fictional character (and there's a pleasant thought), no author would have given him that first name.  A few years ago, I'd have said the same about Quentin Tarantino but, as time has gone by, the tension between the two elements has come to seem more and more appropriate for his odd combination of badassery and nerdishness.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the list of people whose names suit them perfectly includes a few cultural icons.  Orson Welles, with its suggestions of 'awesome' and 'swell', is ideal for a man whose genius was constantly brought down by grandiosity, in several senses of the word.  Similarly, it's fitting that Brian Eno, the music business' presiding intellectual, should have a name that combines an anagram of 'brain' with a surname that sounds like a technical device, or medicine.  The fact that his middle names are Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle is just a bonus - Eno, like Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, sometimes seems like a person whose exuberant nature was determined at the font.

My two favourite examples of real people with well-chosen names are less illustrious.  Nicholas Parsons, with its surfeit of syllables, is the ideal name for a generous, slightly befuddled quizmaster, not least because of its suggestion of minor clergy losing their underwear, like an image from an unusually frank Whitehall farce.

By contrast (and it's a demonstration of how much difference an abbreviation can make) Nick Bateman, villain of the first series of Big Brother, seemed predestined for that role by both his first name, evocative of both Machiavelli and the Devil, and a surname that suggested one who lays a trap, as well as American Psycho's Patrick Bateman, itself a hint of his eponymic ancestor, Norman Bates.

Margot Asquith said of Lord Kitchener that, if not a great man, he was a great poster.  Bateman was a C-list celebrity with an A-list name.

One of the many reasons why I never learnt to drive.

Woman, overheard on the train out of Waterloo, evening of 12/4/12:

"She works on the ticket desk at Alton Towers. Now, you get in free if your child's disabled, and lots of people come along saying their child is deaf. So, every ticket seller at Alton Towers has a brick on their desk, and if someone comes along and says their child is deaf, you're supposed to take the brick and drop it on the floor, and if the child flinches, you say 'I'm sorry...'."

Take Care of the Sense and the Sounds Will Take Care of Themselves (Or Not)

Okay, it's time to start dealing with the really important issues:

Why does the announcement at London Underground stations say 'The lift on the left shall (rather than 'will' ) be the next lift' and why does it sound weird?

I've always been interested in phonics, the way in which the meaning of a word is affected by its sound. I've written before now on the subject of why so many action heroes have the initials JB - James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer. I reckon it's because of the sound of the consonants - the J promises adventure, as in jump, jaunt, journey and the parachutist's cry of 'Geronimo!', while the plosive B is comforting, suggesting a happy ending.

By contrast, heroes with the initials JC tend (despite the religious connotation) to be more morally ambiguous, the harsh C sound denying reassurance - Jack Carter, Jerry Cornelius, John Constantine. (If you wanted to get really clever, you could argue that the two best actors to play James Bond brought something of that harshness through the C sounds in their own surnames.)

Back to that 'shall'. Standard usage guides are fairly clear on this; the rule is that, when using the future tense, 'shall' denotes simple futurity, 'will' is for intention, determination and, in its other sense, will. To this extent the underground announcement is by-the-book.

However, a little thought demonstrates that everyday usage is exactly the other way round, and has been for many years. 'I will get up early tomorrow' is a statement of fact; 'I shall... ' is a resolution. General Douglas MacArthur's 'I shall return!' sounds ludicrous as 'I will...' It works the same way with negatives - recalcitrant toddlers shout 'Shan't!' rather than 'Won't!'.

Why did the two words change places? Again, I think it's in the consonants. W is weak, watery, and wimpish - one of the reasons why a German accent still seems sinister to English ears is its lack of that sounds - 'Ve heff vays...'. Sh, by contrast, is effortful - you have to shove, shift, or schlep it, and it can be a bit shitty. 'Shall' took over from 'will' to indicate determination simply because the word sounds more like what it describes.

That's why the underground announcement sounds odd - it sounds like it's making a resolution rather than simply promising a lift. The etymology says that 'shall' is correct, but phonetics guarantees, in this context, the triumph of the 'will'.

Buck's Fuzz

Following the monarchistic merriment of the last few weeks, it seems like a good time to mention my own connection with the Royal family. Those of you who've known me since university days will have heard this story, as I told it a lot in my first weeks there - like everybody else, I was trying to make myself sound interesting, and there's not many people who can say that they've been arrested under suspicion of trying to break into Buckingham Palace.

One afternoon, in the autumn of 1982, I was walking from Hyde Park towards Victoria Station. On my left was a high. mossy wall, topped with a metal bar surrounded by spikes. For no particular reason, I developed an idle curiosity as to whether these spikes rotated round the central bar. Since I'm fairly tall, and was carrying a rolled-up magazine, it was a simple matter to jump up and hit at one of the spikes. Having established that they didn't move, I pocketed the magazine and carried on.

As I got to the end of the road, I noticed a police constable standing and looking in the face of every pedestrian, as if trying to find someone who fitted a description. His eyes met mine, and a little smile of triumph appeared on his face. He stopped me, and started asking me questions - where I was from, where I was going, where I lived and whether I could prove it. (The only evidence that I could produce to show I was a Londoner was a Borough of Wandsworth library book, which didn't seem to convince him.) Suddenly, five more policemen appeared from different directions, presumably summoned by walkie-talkie. The constable turned to a figure standing behind me.

'This him?'

The sergeant, a woman, nodded. 'That's the one.'

By now, the seven of us were starting to block the pavement, so we moved into a doorway, where the questioning passed into the hands of a second constable, a tall, slightly overweight man with an abrupt manner and a bushy moustache. He asked me all the same questions, then said 'Have you ever been in trouble with the police before?'

I smiled; this was obviously a joke. 'Am I in trouble now?'

'Of course,'

'Why? What am I supposed to have done?'

'You were hitting at that railing, weren't you?'

'I wasn't hitting at it, I hit at it; there is a difference. Anyway, is that a crime?'

'Course it is. That's trespassing.'

At this point, I began to wonder if I was dealing with a lunatic. 'That's a bit petty, isn't it? I mean, you're leaning on the wall. Is that trespassing?'

For some reason, he didn't seem too impressed with the brilliance of my logic.

'That's different. I'm employed here.'

'In what capacity? What is this place anyway?'

'You don't know?'

'No.'

'You say you're a Londoner and you don't know?'

'No idea.'

'This' (and here the constable drew himself up to his full height) 'is the back wall of Buckingham Palace.'

Suddenly, everything was clear. This was just a few months after the Michael Fagan incident, in which a man had broken into the Queen's bedroom and borrowed a cigarette from her. I, nineteen with shoulder-length hair and a tatty raincoat, had obviously struck the sergeant as a copycat criminal, casing the joint before a break-in. A Black Maria arrived, and four of them ushered me in, presumably leaving the other two to guard the Palace on their collective tod.

When we arrived at the station, the sergeant informed me that, legally, she had to keep a hold on my upper arm on the way to the office. This meant that we couldn't get through doors without squeezing together in a rather undignified manner, with one or the other of us banging our ankles. We made it to the interrogation room, where I emptied my pockets, asked if I could hang on to my library book, and sat down to wait.

Altogether, they kept me waiting for two and a half hours. There were two policeman there - a sullen one who sat silently with his arms folded throughout, and a chatty one, who turned out to be a Physics graduate from Durham University, and who told me quite happily about how well the job paid with others open to a physicist.

Two other people passed through while I was there. One was a middle-aged, working-class woman with a flustered manner, whose son, as far as I could gather, had disappeared on his way back from school, and who gave disconnected answers to the sullen constable's questions, constantly referring to some unnamed adversary ('What time would he usually get back from school.' 'Well, they'd tell you different.'). After she'd gone, a younger, more well-spoken woman, apparently the first's social worker, dashed in. She had a brief, bad-tempered conversation with the physicist policeman, bristling with long-standing antagonism and cryptic references to official forms: 'You can't do it on a 647, it isn't legal.' 'Well, we haven't got time for an H58.' I carried on reading.

Eventually, the sergeant reappeared with her statement, and handed it to the sullen one. I tried to read it upside-down on the desk, but could only make out one sentence. It was, however, a sentence I shall never forget; I was described as 'taking an undue interest in a wall'.

They'd decided not to charge me with anything, so I was free to go. I signed off on the objects that had been in my pockets (I corrected their addition on my loose change, which didn't go down very well), and headed for the door. On my way, the sullen one stopped me.

'Just one thing.'

I turned. 'Yes?'

'Don't waste our time like this again.'

Postscript: Fifteen years after this, I discovered that Michael Fagan and I had a mutual acquaintance, the late Ken Campbell. Sadly, Ken died before he could introduce us, so I haven't had a chance to thank him for giving me this anecdote. If you walk past the back wall of the Palace now, you'll notice that, as well as the non-revolving spikes, it's topped with several layers of barbed wire. I'm unlikely ever to warrant a statue, so that fence is the closest thing I've got to a memorial.