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Will power?
Shakespeare, then. Peerless chronicler of our changing moods, emotions and misdeeds – or an old set of texts in need of a makeover? Read on as some of Bristol, Bath and Shakespeare Unplugged’s key theatre makers give us their take on The Bard
actors adopt a ‘Shakespearean’ voice or a particular way of moving or standing or looking. And anyone who does an all-male production because ‘that’s how they did it then’ needs their head examining. “I’ve been lucky because, with the seven of his plays I’ve worked on as a writer and director, I have had licence to be free with the text. My focus is on storytelling and character – anything that gets in the way of that gets removed. Shakespeare’s language is important but it is not sacrosanct.” FFI: WWW.TIMCROUCHTHEATRE.CO.UK
FFI: WWW.GILLKIRK.COM
Tim Crouch
Sharon Clark
A performer who began his career in Bristol, Tim is now the much-lauded creator and performer of brilliant Shakespeare spin-offs such as ‘I, Peaseblossom’, ‘I, Banquo’ and ‘I, Malvolio’. Later this year he will direct a young people’s ‘King Lear’ for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “Contemporary culture needs a core of historical material – myths, narrative archetypes – against which it can test itself. It can’t just cut itself away from the past and try to re-invent itself from scratch. This is Shakespeare’s great strength: his work is a yardstick against which contemporary culture can measure itself. We have to keep approaching it to measure our current cultural health. “His characters and stories also influence how we think about ourselves as humans. They are, however subtly, hardwired into how we see ourselves, how we talk about our condition. In terms of our humanistic understanding, Shakespeare is as influential as the Bible. “But we mustn’t approach his plays as archaeological digs. Theatre should not be concerned with how we lived then but how we live now. We are free to approach Shakespeare however we want – to cut, rearrange, modernise. It annoys me when
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It’s as much about the man as his work, and about language and the universality of Shakespeare’s themes. Shakespeare was a normal bloke: wife, kids, bills, mates. The play shows us a bunch of people in the pub having the same debates about theatre that we have today. Think [Marx Brothers classic] ‘Duck Soup’ meets the old men from 'The Muppets'… “Shakespeare showed with great sympathy what it is to be human. His characters are believable, warts and all, and the situations they find themselves in – sometimes totally unbelievable – keep us wanting the best for the good guys and justice for the bad ’uns.”
Bristol playwright, author of ‘Tiger Country’, ‘Pavement’ and ‘The Biting Point’ among others.
Gill Kirk
“I was raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, so I have some very big issues of my own with Shakespeare. Being a teenager in a town held in a half nelson by coachloads of tourists, a MacDonald’s with stained-glass windows of the Bard and a huge theatre seemingly slurping up all the energy around it, does not make you yearn to spend three hours watching a king losing his grip on reality. Mechanically studying ‘Hamlet’, line by sodding line, for six
Bath playwright Gill Kirk has written ‘It’s All One’, a “light-hearted demystification of Shakespeare’s language”, for Shakespeare Unplugged. “Shakespeare would weep if he saw the way we run scared from his language. He wrote for everyone, from the highest to the lowest, at a time when hardly anyone could read. Even Elizabethans wouldn’t have understood everything he wrote – so many made up or borrowed words. But that didn’t stop people enjoying what they saw on stage! This play helps to break down that language barrier.
february 2012 // 21
1/25/2012 4:44:58 PM