Shakespeare’s take on the #Metoo movement
From #Metoo to multiculturalism, Shakespeare wrote it first, says Ben Lawrence, on what would have been his 454th birthday
Shakespeare was born 454 years ago today but speaks so clearly to the world we live in that you could almost call him our most modern playwright. The way King Lear bleakly depicts a nation fracturing along internal divisions? It feels a mirror image of 21st century Britain. A furious adolescent battle against a corrupt adult world in Hamlet? It seems to directly reflect the mood of today’s politicised grassroots youth movements as they wrestle against an established political order.
Last Thursday, to mark Shakespeare’s birthday, Gregory Doran, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director, Tracy Chevalier, the novelist, and Iqbal Khan, the director, met at The Other Place in Straford-upon-avon to discuss just why it is that we can see our world depicted so cogently in Shakespeare. Recorded as a special podcast in our Much Ado About Shakespeare series, and available to listen to from today, the conversation ranged across social disorder in Antony and Cleopatra and African politics in Julius Caesar. First off, though, was gender politics. For Doran, Measure to Measure is the play for today’s #Metoo movement. “A woman, Isabella, is compromised by a man in power and, basically, Angelo says: ‘Have sex with me or I will execute your brother.’ She threatens to expose him, at which point he says: ‘My false will outlive your true.’ She is left alone reeling from this encounter: ‘To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, who would believe me?’ That could be the sort of strapline for the #Metoo movement. It is astonishing how relevant that play has become.”
Chevalier was equally exercised by Shakespeare’s handling of race. Her most recent novel, New Boy, transposes Othello to an elementary school in Washington DC in the Seventies. “Race is such a potent issue in the States right now,” she said. She used the framework of Shakespeare’s play to find parallels between race relations today and those from a few decades previously. “You start making connections. You start thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Khan has directed Othello for the RSC. Intrigued by the possibilities in the play to explore how race becomes complicated in a multi-ethnic society, for his 2015 production he cast a black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago. “Iago incites racial hatred but that is only one of the things that he does,” he said. “I wanted to challenge this idea that he is a proto Nazi… To cast an actor who is darker skinned than Othello allowed us to tell the story of what experiences these two black men had in society; how Othello is embraced as a superstar and the other [Iago] has a more proletarian experience. In the scene where Cassio gets drunk, we were able to show submerged racial attitudes and the way people broke into tribes.”
Khan’s take won rave reviews. And Doran was able to find a way to make his 2012 all-black production of Julius Caesar talk to the many complexities of life in modern Africa. With its preoccupation with democratic systems, Julius Caesar has been revived several times in recent months, including a modern-dress production directed by Nicholas Hytner in London. Yet Doran also strikes a contrary note, warning against trying to force too many 21st-century parallels: “You have seen those productions of Julius Caesar that have been in Western modern dress, and it does sometimes seem like it’s about knocking off a particularly truculent chairman of the board. It loses a kind of mythic resonance, the sense that you have with Caesar that this man is going to die, but also that the state is going to topple as a result.”
Such is the beauty of directing Shakespeare in the 21st century. It’s an ever-evolving conversation between the play and its audience, and that is why the debate will continue to rage.
The Telegraph Much Ado About Shakespeare podcast series is in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. To listen to the full debate, and to previous podcasts, visit telegraph. co.uk/william-shakespeare or rsc.org.uk or subscribe at Apple podcasts