I love Shakespeare but the BBC is overdoing it
On Shakespeare I have gorged and now I reel. All appetite for William’s works is slaked, all thirst for insight is by surfeit quenched. Every day last week, all weekend, across this week and for months to come every BBC network has offered, will offer, performances of Shakespeare’s work and new works inspired by it. To mark 400 years since his death they have conjured up a mighty creative tempest, great storms of words, music and pictures. My umbrella is firmly up.
What is the BBC doing? Is it trying to show the Government that it, alone, serves national culture and therefore deserves a decent licence fee? Is it displaying the massed might it can call on from its radio, TV and online battalions? Is it showing itself to be a unique patron of writers, actors, musicians and composers? And has it forgotten Orsino’s line from Twelfth
Night about appetite sickening when enough is reached?
Still, there were good things on this overwhelming menu. Radio 3’s weekend direct from Stratford-upon-Avon was a bright idea, well done. Within it Sonnets in the City (Radio 3, Friday, Saturday, Sunday) shone. Each of these five short dramas had roots in a particular sonnet, read as individual prefaces by Maxine Peake. Sonnets are tricky, full of verbal locks to pick. Many of Shakespeare’s are teasingly easy on the eye and charming to the ear. They’re the ones you learn at school, hear at weddings. Others are darker, angrier, more menacing.
The fourth playlet, Tongue (Sunday), was based on Sonnet 140 which begins: “Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press / My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain / Lest sorrow lend me words, and words express / The manner of my pity-wanting pain.”
Playwright Lee Mattinson took this and made it into a scenario that began in a pulsing Manchester club where a blind man’s lover, Oliver, tells him he has kissed a former lover, Aaron. The blind man, Noel, rips out Aaron’s tongue and escapes into the night. The tongue goes with him, talking, explaining, teaching. Quite like the sonnet does, if not as memorably. Yet this was a smart interpretation of the poem with incidental music by Chiu-Yu Chou, performed by the BBC Philharmonic, painting its emotional landscape.
The intention of all these five miniature dramas was to show how timeless Shakespeare is, how he found words for things too deep for easy expression. I admired this play. I quite liked all five of them. I also warmed to Radio 2’s Much Ado About Comedy (Wednesday night) when comedian Matt Lucas presented an hour in which actors, comedians and directors explored why Shakespeare’s jokes still work. The script made plain, as did many a programme over this last week, how much of Shakespeare is now embedded in everyday expressions.
Eleanor Oldroyd did it on Radio 5 Live’s Saturday breakfast show, asking listeners to call in and quote Shakespeare from memory, recalling playing Titania at school in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She handed co-presenter Chris Warburton a line from Oberon to read as a cue to lines she still remembered Warburton read it as “I’ll met by moonlight…” Oldroyd quickly pointed out it was actually “Ill met…” Warburton sometimes mentions his university days. I wonder about those.
On Friday afternoon Radio 4 had Jonathan Holloway’s play Big Time, imagining a meeting between Shakespeare (Nicky Henson) and his contemporary Cervantes (Simon Callow). Much bawdy rollicking here.
On Sunday, Radio 3 had A Play for the Heart: the Death of Shakespeare by Nick Warburton, with Robert Lindsay as WS on his deathbed, conjuring up old friends and foes. It rambled on so long I shouted at him to get on with it. Real Shakespeare lies ahead: The Winter’s Tale on Radio 3 next Sunday, King Lear the Sunday after. Julius Caesar reaches Radio 4 on Tuesday as a three-day serial.
There’s already Shakespeare everywhere. Shakespeare on Radio 4’s Today and Radio 2’s Friday Night Is Music Night, Shakespeare as an international aid to trade, Shakespeare and the American Dream, Shakespeare from now to the crack of doom. I’m starting to feel sorry for all those producers having to fill Shakespeare quotas determined from on high. Dear BBC, you’ve made your point. You’re trying to show Culture Secretary John Whittingdale how patriotic and British all this makes you. Actually, it’s your popularity with listeners and viewers that should make the case for you. And this one wishes you’d stop treating the great WS as a brand to enhance yourself.