Drama
Gregory Doran is a consistently exciting director associated with the Royal Shakespeare Company, a major player in the new Michael Boyd regime. One of the delights of a company like the RSC is that I have been able to follow the development of this director since his first RSC production, Henry VIII.
Doran started as an actor at the RSC. He is both dazzlingly enthusiastic and deeply scholarly about his work. This season his project was directing cross-cast productions of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Fletcher's sequel The Tamer Tamed. In the latter play, Petruchio marries for a second time after "the shrew" Katherine's death and is himself tamed.
"I was so impressed by Fletcher's contribution to Henry VIII that I questioned a friendly scholar who put me onto The Island Princess and The Tamer Tamed. I managed to do The Island Princess as part of the RSC season that I oversaw of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. In it, Fletcher deals with feminism, the clash of European and Far Eastern cultures and imperialism. Until about 1642 when the Puritans closed the theatres, that era was a time of explosive energy and questioning of everything, as well as great religious debates. I think it is the start of the modern era - and the basis for all English theatre, the reason we have to keep re-examining and re-interpreting these plays. Our language got completely re-defined by that era and that is preserved in the plays. Did you know that in the period of Shakespeare's lifetime alone something like 10,000 new words were added to vocabulary of our language?"
The Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas are like early cinema; there is a mass of material, some great, some dross, which appealed to the widest possible audience and gave them a shared set of cultural references.
"Maybe 600 texts have survived from that era." Doran tells me, "and we have hardly performed more than a handful of them in modern times, excepting Shakespeare and a few plays by people like Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd or John Ford. The Tamer Tamed has never been performed by the RSC, and yet Fletcher was closely involved with Shakespeare. The play stands on its own as a brilliant comedy about the battle between the sexes; but if you take it in conjunction with The Taming of the Shrew, it is also a comment on how far the perception of women in that society and their role has developed in the 20 years that separate the two plays. The period from, say, 1592 to 1612 was like the 1960s and 1970s in terms of the change of women's roles. Yet segments of society including King James I feared women as witches."
In this Taming of the Shrew Kate and Petruchio, in their first, private scene together are clearly attracted to each other. Each realises the other might be a worthy sparring partner and not a foe. The text supports this. As Doran reminded me, Petruchio's father has just died a few weeks before the start of the play. "Clearly Petruchio suddenly has to take on the mantle of responsibilities that he has been avoiding as a tearaway. A lot of Kate's character comes from her having grown up as the undervalued older sister to a petted, spoilt Bianca. Each senses the other is really hiding behind a mask of bravado. Then when the other men enter part way through Petruchio's scene with Kate as in the First Folio, and not at the end of it as in later editions, Petruchio's sudden switch to blustering makes sense as a socially correct display for the other men and not as his real attitude towards Kate."
These productions represent everything that makes the RSC worth our interest and continuing support. For Doran they are exactly what the RSC is about: they provide audiences and actors with an opportunity to experience real repertory work, they encourage cohesiveness of company acting and they offer an energetic and untamed rethinking of a familiar classic along with the discovery of a formerly forgotten work.
Doran is also already planning for the RSC a production of Shakespeare's "problem" play All's Well that Ends Well, an Othello with his partner Anthony Sher as Iago, and a season of plays from the Gold Age of Spain - examples of the adventurous, exploratory and utterly contemporary excitement that the RSC and Greg Doran constantly aim to generate.
The American community of Oxford is booming. Every college seems to have a vibrant and ever increasing group from across the pond. It is fitting therefore that Kirsten Schmidt's new writing piece, 'Touch and Break', should take a comic look at this growing phenomenon. She also puts her writing talents to good use. This college production, in which many of the cast are making their Oxford theatrical debuts, is giving all its profits to The Map Project, a charity that helps young people recover from drugs problems.
Unlike many new writing pieces, Schmidt's romantic comedy is both very well written and genuinely funny. Set around a group of Americans in Oxford preparing for a wedding it takes a quirky look at the delicacy of love and the trials and tribulations of life. It can be both very funny, capturing perfectly the cat fighting and perfectionism that surrounds a wedding, but equally very profound, the sad transience of a wedding is emphasised through the ghostly image of the wedding dress, worn only once.
Inevitably with so many new actors the performances are not perfect. However some do shine, Lindsay Levkoff brilliantly handles the character shifts of the outwardly confident but reclusive and scared Daphne while Clara Zverina's Italian dress shop owner Francesca is a richly comic creation. Over all there is an understandable lack of confidence amongst the cast that leads to slips but they still manage to bring out the quality in the script making this an enjoyable show.
'Touch and Break' is not the smooth, confident theatre of the OFS or Playhouse's larger scale shows but it is a good production of a well-written piece of New Writing. It also represents two very positive things, it is Oxford theatre working for the community and also it is helping to bring exciting new talent into the Oxford drama scene. Long may this continue.
Oh, it's you. Hello. You catch me wheeling a stump up the high street, hungover, itchy and dripping. I'm suddenly overwhelmed by the primacy of the apparently heretical truth that we are all acting as single, individual agents. Ultimately, nobody cared enough to help with the stump. I'm moving my bedroom to the BT from Cowley, by hand, abandoned by friends, on my own. Soon I will yoke a bed to a bus and pray it's the 18, so my bed won't be forced to embark, Angela Lansbury-style, on an adventure through the working class multiculturalism and aquatic delicatessens of the Cowley Road.
Aren't actors shit? I can't think of any I like. Reciting lines in that identical voice, like melting wine gums into bread sauce. My play is about me because I am the one-eyed king of this blind horse town. Why choose me above other plays? Simple. They will be shit, like everything else here that isn't me. I can hear them now:
"Jacques?"
"Yes, master?"
"Let's have a relationship of some ambiguity."
"Wouldn't that be a bit forward (pause) sir?"
"Oh bollocks to that and you. There ain't nothing like a dame."
"Biggins, sir?"
"Precisely."
I can hear them now; true. One orange one, brimming over and talking about decay. I think I'm a failure, but so was Milton. Here cometh a short man, objectionable. So this is my pathetic whoop to the masses: ego annihilation and death therapy. Come to my party; leave bruised and bilious. Tendentious. What is the American about? I really like Americans except confused ones and racists. I've always suspected aliens would talk yank. Ultimately, I couldn't say it better than Dave from the Eurythmics: some of you want to abuse me, WHEREAS some of you want to get abused by me. Both are possible, but the later is tricky territory.
So, I talk about myself and have characters. One is artless, the other dodgy. My mother talks cunt. My GBF (gay best friend, girls, a mine of information for fellatio) talks queer and talks of infidelity and piggery are revealed. Blood, sweat and queers. You all watch me hopefully in accute discomfort. A good time you have to pay for. The question is will you?
"Do a play" they said. "It'll be fun" they said. "We're all friends, it couldn't possibly go wrong". Couldn't it? Bollocks.
So, is it possible that six perfectly amenable, chatty and mildly alcoholic Freshers be transformed in a few short weeks into rampant thesps, complete with tantrums, air-kissing and rampant hyperbole? The one-word answer is a simple yes, and to all of you wannabe directors out there, this is a potted guide on how to do it. First, rehearsing in as bizarre a set of locations as possible is a great start, as the discontinuity utterly throws your cast. Chapels (particularly in plays with lots of swearing), gardens that are patently far too big, bedrooms that are patently far too small, and only at the very bitter end, to stave off a revolt, should you move to the actual theatre, or in the case of the Moser I should say the Badminton court. In addition, all these rehearsals should be both disjointed and disorganized, containing a random selection of cast members who aren't actually in the scene being rehearsed, doing an excellent impersonation of a disgruntled, hungover Oxford audience. Even when the first audience slip in don't be surprised if the cast and production team out numbers the paying public, remember that nobody listened to Jesus at first and that MC Hammer is still touring.
Make sure your producer knows what is going on. Money is always a problem, and no matter how much creative artistic dynamism is latent in your director financial institutions like sanity. For some reason convincing people that your production is the solution to the sudden collapse of English drama never seems to quite work. They never believe you when you tell them that your company specializes in educational theatre and that you would be quite happy to take the play complete with the word cunt into primary schools. The fact that you organize workshops for dwarfs interested in playing Superman and women interested in playing Othello doesn't count as inclusive, and it seems they have all heard of King Lear being used as a metaphor for getting rid of tuition fees. In short being pretentious is a difficult game. You can do all the things that everybody else does and be called satirical, or you can be truly original and be called difficult and inaccessible. The secret is to try, as to do something shit is infinitely better than doing nothing at all. People come to see plays in the BT, the Moser and college gardens not to be half baked critics but to explore a world that simply doesn't exist outside the world of student theatre. The more drama is left to thesps who want to found small touring companies specializing in the theatrical implications of voodoo rituals in Jacobian drama and take them to Ulan Bator, the more theatre loses its magic: the unexpected, the funny, the boring, the manic, the academic acting for the first time, the sight of serious people doing stupid things.
Punctuality is the bane of any student production, or more specifically the lack thereof. So leaving all kinds of backstage work until the last possible minute is guaranteed to crank up the stress levels. Having the cast hacking away at flats to create a monstrously complicated set design 8 hours before the first member of the audience sits down is a sure-fire method of getting them to wind down before opening night. But that is what is needed. Creativity is often best saved up in the hands of the directors so that they have a novel explanation for every blatant failure of a performance. Lines obviously feature heavily, but "flat attitudes" and a "shit audience" are excellent alternatives, when it's clear that a drastic lack of talent is the sole cause. But of course, "it'll all come together" on the final night...
Blood, toil, tears and sweat. As a great man once said, these are the underpinnings of any true student production.
12th Jun 2003