Relentless Renaissance of Renaissance Plays

Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Renaissance plays.  I love the words, the characters, the stories, the heightened drama of it all.  And I rarely see a revival that I don’t enjoy.  But secretly, I’m not sure how I feel about how doggedly we insist on reproducing work from that era.  

The Globe and the RSC are excused, because Shakespeare and his contemporaries belong with these companies.They understand, for the most part, that if an audience has bought a ticket to see a Shakespeare play, that’s what they are expecting to see.  But it’s when companies produce work with a vaguely zeitgeist twist that I bristle, and retreat.

David Tennant as Hamlet, RSC 2008

So, where do we draw a line?  The moment in the 2008 RSC production of Hamlet when David Tennant/Edward Bennett flew off stage on a swivel chair was just about digestable.  But the sound of Ian Rickson’s production set in a mental hospital at the Young Vic in 2011 made me feel a little bit unwell.  I completely understand the impetus to retell the story in a way that contemporary audiences can connect with it, and actually, I delight in the new pockets of humour we find in the text.  But I always feel like there’s something a little perverse about manipulating a story from that era and transplanting it directly into our own. 

 It’s like eating someone else’s food without asking.

The way I see it, you have to go hard or go home.  If you want to swap all the genders around: great.  If you want to cast half the characters as penguins: excellent. (This doesn’t exist, but it definitely should.  Although, this does.)  It’s the niggling, subtle changes that bother me, because it makes me wonder: unless you’re doing something ground-breaking in terms of form and style, why on Earth do we need another production of Hamlet?  All we’re changing this autumn is which famous white middle class actor will take on the role next. (Sorry Benedict Cumberbatch – I think you’re sensational - it’s just unfortunate timing.)

It is for this reason that I delight in companies like Filter and Cheek by Jowl.  I saw Filter’s production – nay, total reinterpretation – of Twelfth Night in March, and it blew my mind.  They used an essence of the structure of Shakespeare’s play as a skeleton upon which to hang jazz music, dancing, pizza deliveries and audience participation that turned the comedy into a genuine 21^st Century pant-wetter.  My cheeks hurt, and I guffawed without restraint.

In neat contrast is Cheek by Jowl’s retelling of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which I recently sat at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton.  I dreaded the end, applauded meekly and left feeling a bit queasy, for all the right reasons.  It is loud, and bright, and devastating, and overwhelms its audience with movement sequences and a lot of half-naked bodies that brings out the effect this play would have had on its audience in the 17^th Century, told in a physical language that we understand.  Cheek by Jowl have chosen to set the play entirely in Annabella’s bedroom, complete with a poster for True Blood on the black wall and a fluffy red diary in her underwear drawer.  This intimacy makes every scene feel increasingly like something we ought not to be privy to, but we are immersed, until the stomach-churning end.  To applaud felt very strange indeed. 

Cheek by Jowl, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore'

But what this production achieves best of all is that it never tries to be something it’s not: It knows that it is a play, and celebrates that fact with dance and music and fake blood.  To produce a classic text, we should either seek to emulate how it was originally played, or turn it on its head completely.  To immerse an audience in a production of a classic, then try to nod to contemporary issues like a quirky aside from the clown, is just confusing.  Give us all or nothing, please.