Shaking up the empire’s Shakespeare blind spots
• Some online productions are not for jingoes
Itry not “other life to”write as an about academic Shakespeare too often in this column, because I spend a large chunk of my talking about the Man from Stratford. This is both a gesture towards journalistic integrity (I don’t think it’s fair to impose my scholarly interests on readers) and a self-serving measure (keeping myself from becoming bored or boring).
But Shakespeare’s plays constitute about 4% of the professional productions staged around the world every year; almost 50,000 books about him published annually; and he continually crops up in music and the visual arts, whether as an earnest or an ironic point of reference. So I reckon I wouldn’t be doing my job as an arts writer if I didn’t give him any coverage.
With the variations on lockdown that have been implemented around the world over the last two months, and our collective obsession with digital arts content. Shakespeare’s prominence has only increased. Well-meaning friends and colleagues keep sharing links with me. My phone pings incessantly.
“Did you know that the Royal Shakespeare Company is streaming X production for free?”
“Thought you’d be glad to hear that Shakespeare’s Globe has put up Y content on YouTube.”
“This dodgy Google Drive link includes loads of films, and one of them is Shakespeare adaptation Z.”
Don’t get me wrong: I always appreciate it, and I know they’re trying to speak my love language. But the problem is I’m not so much a Shakespearean as a kind of anti-Shakespearean. Over the years I’ve become more and more interested in how the plays serve certain ideological functions, how they can be flashpoints for sociopolitical debate, how they intersect with SA history and current affairs, and how their place in education opens up wider discussions about language, race and resources in the classroom.
It’s not really “on brand” for me to gush about some amazing Shakespeare production performed in London a few years ago. The odd effect of all this is that I’ve taught myself to dislike any form of Shakespeare that comes from — um, where Shakespeare came from. I end up avoiding British (and, specifically, English) productions because watching them would seem to acquiesce to all the jingoistic Anglophile ideas about Shakespeare and the “sceptred isle” I spend most of my working week opposing.
This is a rather grim, not to mention paradoxical, reality to occupy if you do, like me — despite it all — enjoy watching Shakespeare’s plays. Happily, this week, I experienced something of a Damascene conversion; or perhaps, to keep up the biblical analogy, it was more of an Emmaus Road experience, bringing me back into the Shakespearean fold.
The means of my reawakening was a videostreaming service recently launched in SA, Marquee TV. Pitched at arts enthusiasts who are tired of Netflix, Showmax, Hulu, Apple TV and the like — which have a very limited offering when it comes to recorded stage performances — Marquee TV offers the best of the Bolshoi and the New York City Ballet, the Royal Opera House and the Teatro Real, and much more on demand.
This includes, of course, the Royal Shakespeare Company. But Marquee’s best Shakespeare is director Phyllida Lloyd’s trilogy of Julius Caesar, Henry
IV and The Tempest, each staged at the Donmar Warehouse. These productions are notable for their womenonly casts, but for much more than that. First, they are set in a women’s prison. This setting acknowledges the role of the inmates and prison theatre practitioners with whom Lloyd collaborated; it also creates a rich interplay between the world within the prison and the world outside, emphasising the metatheatrical aspects of Shakespeare’s plays, which so often foreground the slippage between reality and illusion.
Second, they succeed in demonstrating that — just as there is no normative way that “Shakespeare” looks or sounds — the UK is not the homogeneous place Brexiteers and Tory ethnonationalists want to believe it is: the diversity of Lloyd’s cast in terms of age, accent and race demonstrates this beyond any doubt. That’s the kind of Shakespeare I’ll sign up for any day.
So thank you, Marquee TV! I look forward to more revelations.