Why do modern theatre directors trash the Bard?

My eye was caught by a splendid review by Lloyd Evans in of a new production of Elsinore is “presented as a sort of Travelodge, with sliding glass doors, swivel chairs and squishy round-thecorner sofa units” (complete with CCTV).

Hamlet, writes Mr Evans, is dressed to resemble a professional snooker player, his little face making “perfect casting for Third Crackhead in a squat melodrama” – “cynical, bad-tempered, ever prone to the hissy fit”.

The actor bawls out the text of “to be or not to be” at the top of his voice, making absurd little hand gestures “like a signing exercise for the deaf ”. The director “likes his actors to lose control of their voices, even if their seagull honking becomes unintelligible”.

Gertrude, like “a nympho with a bus pass” and Claudius as “a bloodless technocrat” are always “snogging like naughty virgins”. Ophelia speaks her tragic “good night, sweet ladies” farewell like “Diana Ross sacking her PR team”. At the end, the corpses littering the stage all leap up to dance around the Travelodge bar.

What is psychologically interesting about so many defiantly “modern” productions of Shakespeare is how they go out of their way to turn everything he intended upside down.

We’ve had, of course, a female Lear, a female Hamlet and a “Julia” Caesar, set in a female prison. I saw a set in pre-war Italy, in which Shylock was the hero, the Venetians were all anti-Semitic Mussolini fascists, and Portia, as a spoiled 1930’s heiress, wearily recited the crucial “quality of mercy” speech as if it was just a set of all-too familiar clichés.

A had its heroine Isabella as a screeching, feminist. A had a black actor playing the hero Petruchio so dismally that it was as embarrassing as Laurence Olivier’s blacked-up Othello, speaking in a cod Jamaican accent in 1964.

In younger days, I was fortunate enough to see many unforgettable Shakespeare productions with all the finest actors of the time, from Peggy Ashcroft’s Cleopatra to Paul Scofield’s Prospero.

In the right hands even moderndress Shakespeare can sometimes work superbly. In the Seventies, Trevor Nunn turned

into a hilariously tuneful musical, starring the likes of Judi Dench, turning a play that is tedious on the page into all that comedy at its exhilarating best can be, sending his audiences joyfully out into the night still singing the closing chorus.

As I say, the real mystery is why so many other directors should want to trash Shakespeare like this, when they so obviously hate his plays and haven’t the faintest idea what they are about. Hamlet at a Travelodge: ‘modern’ versions of Shakespeare seem to go out of their way to turn everything he intended upside down