Rough Magic

Let me start by saying that I’m a big fan of the work of Sam Mendes. His 1994 production of Cabaret starring Natasha Richardson remains one of the most memorable evenings of theater that I’ve experienced in over forty years of attending plays in New York, London, Cambridge, Mass., and elsewhere.

But things were a little rough last night during his Bridge Project’s fourth performance of The Tempest last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And I’m not only talking about forgotten lines, clumsy blocking, and some stagecraft that didn’t quite work. What seems most problematic is the uneven pace of the play. It doesn’t run as long as the Project’s other production: As You Like It took 3 hours and 40 minutes on the night that I saw it, and the first two acts were played as if they’d been lifted from a Chekhov play. The lines were delivered ponderously and with frequent pauses. Intermission came at the end of Act 2 with the staged death of the servant Adam after Duke Senior’s closing lines:

Good old man,
Thou art right welcome as thy master is.
Support him by the arm. Give me your hand,
And let me all your fortunes understand.

Perhaps Mendes was making a bridge between last season’s Project (which featured The Cherry Orchard) and this year’s. But the result was a production that lacked a coherent directorial vision, in stark contrast to last year’s productions (and Cabaret several years ago).

The same problem afflicted last night’s  Tempest, which ran two-and-a-half hours without intermission (the insert in the program had promised a running time of two hours). The production felt static, and the conceit of having the characters not active in a given scene seated in chairs in a puddle of water at the rear of the stage served only to emphasize the overall lack of dynamism in the production.

As I result, I felt my mind wandering. Perhaps I have Percy Jackson on the brain (I’ve just started reading the second book), but surely I should not have been thinking about The Lightning Thief during Prospero’s famous “rough magic speech”:

… to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. [Italics added.]

And certainly I shouldn’t have been thinking about the television series Lost during the final act and hoping that The Tempest might yet prove to be a significant intertext for the show.

What I’ll remember fondly from this year’s Bridge Project are Ron Cephas Jones as Charles the Wrestler and, especially, Caliban; Anthony O’Donnell as Trinculo; the hole in the sand through which Jones’s Caliban first appears; and, above all, Juliet Rylance’s portrayals of Rosalind and Miranda. I’ll be following her Rylance’s career with interest from now on.

[Above: publicity photo of As You Like It released by the BAM Press Office, showing Anthony O'Donnell (Corin), left, Thomas Sadoski (Fool) and Juliet Rylance (Rosalind), right, (AP Photo/BAM Press Office, Joan Marcus)]

Kevin Kline’s Lear

Last night I saw Kevin Kline play King Lear in the New York Public Theater’s current production, directed by James Lapine. I’ve seen quite a few Lears in my time, but Kline was the first I’ve seen who entered in the finally scene and utter the lines "Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’ld use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack" without howling. Kline spoke the lines in just above a whisper, imploring rather than demanding or railing. This was an exemplary moment in Kline’s grandly understated performance. His Lear was indeed an egotist, but not a rash or naturally volatile man. He was, rather, a rationalist, a man of a calculation … who miscalculated — and was too self-confident and self-absorbed to consider that he might be in error until it is far too late. He can see madness approaching but tries to hold the line: "Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow," uttered without histrionic display that other interpreters often affect. Kline’s Lear, in contrast, for example, to the Lear that Christopher Plummer powerfully presented at Lincoln Center in 2004, is not yet a man on the verge of infirmity: he is driven to infirmity and madness by those around him.

Around Kline’s Lear, the production swirls noisily, with actors climbing up and down the scaffolding erected in the Anspacher. The blinding of Gloucester has a touch of Tarantino about it, with quivering eyeballs held up and then thrown down. The heath scene is staged in a way that sets it off from the rest of the production. White gauze curtains stream down on all four sides of a square downstage, surrounding Lear, Kent, and the Fool: light simulates rain pouring down, punctuated by flashes of that illuminate the whole auditorium. The staging has the effect not only of dramatizing the stormy heath but also of dramatizing the isolution and claustrophobia that these characters feel. The Fool was played, for a change, by an older man, allowing the production to emphasize the likeness between Lear and the Fool — and allowing Lear to emerge as himself a Shakespearean fool. The wise Fool disappears halfway through the play: in this production, his place is taken by Lear.

My favorite directorial touch, however, was an addition to the text: a Shakespearean dumb show presented as the audience is sitting down before the play. Three young girls, dressed in red, green, and blue, portraying Lear’s daughters when they were children, are playing with bottles of brightly colored sand, slowly creating a map of Britain, the coast outlined in red, the land green, marked by blue rivers, surrounded by a bright blue ocean. As the play opens, the girls are replaced by their adult counterparts: Goneril in a green gown, Regan in red, and Cordelia in blue. The girls appear again later, as apparitions: young Goneril and Regan in the trial scene that Lear directs in Tom’s hovel, young Cordelia as a vision that Lear takes with him to the grave.

I found myself moved by the exchanges between Cordelia and Lear in the play’s second half. Kline’s Lear showed me things in the text I hadn’t seen before, and I’m grateful to him for the experience.

Twelfth Night Translated

Over the years I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen many productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. My favorite has always been the production directed by Andrei Serban for the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1989. The production starred Cherry Jones as Viola and Diane Lane as Olivia (both pictured at right), with a marvelous supporting cast that included ART stalwarts Thomas Derrah (Feste) and Jeremy Geidt (Sir Toby). The Romanian director has always been known as an experimentalist, and his Twelfth Night featured Sir Toby watching cartoons on television and Sebastian meeting Antonio in a gay bar for sailors with an actor dressed as Shakespeare sitting in the back drinking a beer and taking notes.

Last night, I saw a production of the play that was equally memorable, a wildly cosmopolitan version of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. It was directed by Declan Donnellan and designed by Nick Oremerod, who are the founders and co-Artistic Directors of the Cheek by Jowl Theater Company, which now makes it home at the Barbican Centre in London. What makes it "wildly" cosmopolitan, however, is the fact that it is performed in Russian with English titles. The titles are taken from Shakespeare’s text, but according to a Russian student who accompanied me, the Russian was far more verbose and far less "literary" than the titles. The production was originally produced by the Chekhov International Theatre Festival in 2003; three years earlier Donnellan and Ormerod had formed a sister company in Moscow (Donnellan jokingly refers to it as "Cheek by Jowlski").

I’d just been making the argument, earlier in the day during the lecture for my "Conversations of the West" class that as the students read Hamlet over the weekend, they should think about the ways in which Hamlet suggests that Aristotle may have underestimated the importance of diction to the succesful creation of tragedy onstage. In the Poetics, Aristotle valorized plot above all, but is plot the most powerful element of Hamlet, I asked. Is there not something in the way Shakespeare puts words together in all of those marvelous speeches ("To be or not to be …"; "O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I!"; "The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.") that is crucial to the play’s evocation of tragic experience?

And here I was watching a production of Twelfth Night whose implicit premise was that Shakespeare’s play can transcend the language in which it is written. Ben Brantley in it this way in his review for the New York Times:

The glorious surprise of this ”Twelfth Night” … is in how it finds an alchemical substance in Shakespeare that transcends the verbal. … Mr. Donnellan and Mr. Ormerod … make the heretical case that the essence of Shakespeare isn’t exclusively linguistic. The words, it seems, are but steppingstones to a universal pattern of images and insights about human behavior and the perplexing world that thwarts and shapes it. Shakespeare’s first language, it would seem, is not English, after all; it’s Theater.

Well, it worked marvelously, because the actors were superbly evocative in both speech and gesture; the elegantly minimalist set and lighting created beautiful tableaux and arresting moments; and Donnellan’s direction emphasized physical comedy, constant movement, and quick pacing. Frankly, I’m not sure it would have worked with a play like long, wordy play Hamlet.

The all-male cast meant that the production could draw on some of the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s original stagings, which featured men playing women playing men in plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It. The "women" in this production — the Andrey Kuzichev as a lithe Viola; Alexey Dadonov as a straight-backed, almost regal Oliva; and Ilia Ilin as a limber Maria — were uniformly persuasive. The ambiguities of the final recognition scene came across beautiful (especially in the tense shrug offered by Orsino [Vladimir Vdovichenkov] after he has mistaken Sebastian [Sergey Mukhin] for Viola/Cesario. Ormerod’s design emphasized the contrasts of black and white, with black dominating the first act, full as it is of mourning and melancholy, and white dominating the second, with its hopes for renewal and rebirth — with a stunning intrusion of black in the person of Malvolio at the very end. Every now and then, Donnellan would freeze the action during an aside by a character, as if to suggest the momentary imposition of order amidst chaos, but these moments seem, in retrospect, motivated by the desire to build up to the final freeze-frame, Malvolio’s "I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you," which Donnellan turns into the final spoken line of the play. While the rest of the cast, dressed in off-white costumes, is revelling to Feste’s lounge-lizard version of "the rain it raineth everyday," Malvolio returns, clad once again in the butler’s black tuxedo, to serve champagne and offer his promise of revenge — as an aside to the audience. I’ve never seen it played this way, but it made for a stunning theatrical moment.

My students seemed to enjoy the play, though almost none of them seemed to have ben familiar with it beforehand. I found myself wondering what it what be like to encounter Twelfth Night for the first time in this way. What was getting across to them? And how different was it from what would have gotten across were the watching a standard, untranslated production of the play. Did they, paradoxically, get more out Shakespeare’s text last night because they were reading it as they watched, rather than listening to it? I also wondered how different an experience my Russian student in attendance was having. Did the play she was watching seem more contemporary because of the translation, with the titles seeming like a bad translation written by non-native speakers of English? (An effect enhanced, perhaps, by the fact that the titles were full of typos.)

What I found myself wondering, finally, was lost in the translation. And what was gained?