Coen Heijes

oThus play I in one person many peopleo : The art and craft of doubling in the Boyd history cycle

In this article I discuss the principles and practice of doubling in the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company history cycle directed by Michael Boyd. I first discuss the lack of systematic, scholarly attention to theatrical doubling in general and develop a new taxonomy of doubling, incorporating two main categories: “practical doubling” and “significant doubling”. Practical doubling stems from economic necessity; significant doubling, consisting of six subcategories, is employed by directors and actors as a vehicle of meaning. I illustrate this taxonomy through a critical study of the Boyd-directed history plays, showing how the use of doubling in that cycle allowed for a multi-layered approach, which enhanced both coherence and ambiguity.

Play review: HamletHamlet, an opera by ThomasAmbroise (libretto by BarbierJulesCarréMichel), directed by van VeggelSerge for Opera2day, conducted by SchvartzmanHernán, New European Ensemble, Drachten, The Netherlands, 7 March 2018

It’s Dad! He tells Hamnet that it’s okay to talk to strangers after all. Hamnet is visibly shaken by this presence, and, as he moves to take his father’s hand, he vomits. His onscreen doppelgänger also vomits, but it is now clear that the screen is no longer capturing live events. The blocking is crucial here, and young West must be careful to duplicate whatever movements his double makes or spoil the illusion. Still queasy, he lies down onstage in a pose reminiscent of a dead child. On-screen Shakespeare tries to google the reference on his cell phone, but onstage Hamnet recovers and asks him the question that has been most on his mind: ‘Who do you prefer? Me or Hamlet?’ It’s Shakespeare’s turn to vomit. Hamnet responds by announcing how ‘bad’ he (Hamnet) is. He claims to know what ‘country matters’ are, and, in another topical reference, he begins quoting President Trump’s infamous ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ comment. His father strikes him. Hamnet responds that he deserves to be punished. He then sits down onstage and sings a Johnny Cash song that was popular in the 1960s: ‘My name is Sue! How do you do!’ The screen again goes dark, and when the lights return, the players’ roles are reversed. Hamnet is on-screen but not onstage, while Shakespeare is only onstage. The latter begins a recitation of his own: ‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child: / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, / Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, / Remembers me of all his gracious parts . . . ’ (King John, 3.3.95–8). Shakespeare removes his false beard and performs a sort of striptease. Soon he is naked and alone onstage, a ‘bare, forked animal’, to quote Lear. The set again goes dark. When the lights come on, Hamnet is back onstage, and he and Shakespeare are both on-screen. The two make a pact that Shakespeare will not ‘play out’ the boy’s life onstage in the future. Shakespeare’s image disappears (‘Dad? are you there?’), leaving Hamnet to throw a ball one last time at the screen; this time it goes through, in a successful act of quantum tunnelling. Hamnet and Shakespeare finally arrive at an accommodation of sorts. The playwright won’t portray the boy onstage, and Hamnet will no longer ‘haunt’ him. Is the play a refutation or a confirmation of this pact? Is Hamnet a ghost or a figment of his father’s imagination? Is Hamnet the product of parental (or perhaps scholarly) neglect? His last words are more Bobby McFerrin than Shakespeare: ‘Don’t worry. This isn’t very long’. The screen turns white then black. The boy disappears from onstage and is returned to the screen. The audience’s reflection disappears. Applause.

Richard III dir. by Joeri Vos (review)

finally admitted: “I am a very foolish, fond old man, [. . .] I fear I am not in my perfect mind” (4.6.53-56). He also walked away unassisted. The production in this way suggested that he himself finally released his mind and his body, giving in to the inevitable—old age and death. Klata’s King Lear won the Golden Yorick at the 2015 Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival, and it fully deserved the award. It was visionary, powerful, inspirational. No matter how well I know the given play or how many productions of it I have seen, whenever I watch Shakespeare directed by Klata it is as if I am watching the play for the first time.

Review of Shakespeare's Macbeth (directed by Johan Simmons for Toneelgroep Amsterdam) at the Stadsschouwburg (City Theatre), Groningen, the Netherlands, 18 January 2013

To this day, Shakespeare is the playwright most performed on the Dutch stage. His Macbeth is one of the 10 plays performed most regularly, averaging once every two to three years. The latest production was by theatre company Toneelgroep Amsterdam. This company is the largest repertoire theatre company of the Netherlands and has as its home the well-known Stadsschouwburg (City Theatre) of Amsterdam. The company, led by artistic director Ivo Van Hove, has as its core a fixed ensemble of 21 actors. It has an average of 20 productions and 350 performances each year, and is one of the most renowned and innovative companies of the Netherlands. A recent Shakespeare production of Toneelgroep Amsterdam was Roman Tragedies – a six-hour multi-media production, in which the audience was invited to walk around and sit on stage – including Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The production received very good reviews and toured through Europe, with three performances in 2009 at the Barbican in London. The theatre for this production of Macbeth, directed by Johan Simons, renowned director for many Belgian, Dutch and German theatre companies, had a proscenium arch, which is customary in the main Dutch theatres. The text was based on the poetic translation by Hugo Claus (1929–2008), a highly respected Flemish author and playwright. As the audience filtered in for the production, they had to squint, as they were blinded by the auditorium’s spotlights. At the rear of the stage stood an iron-framed stand around which some of the actors, most of whom were dressed casually in T-shirts and shorts, were seated. The other actors filtered in with the audience and took their seats on the stage. It was an obvious and deliberate reversal of roles, with the actors as the audience and vice versa, that immediately set the tone for the production. What the audience was about to see would not so much be about the character Macbeth: this production would be about us, the audience, about the man we could and, indeed, would turn into ourselves, if we let go of our control. The audience, not Macbeth, stood accused. When Macbeth declared “My name is Macbeth, / The most horrible name in Hell”, the reversal of roles highlighted that it would not so much be his horror that we would confront, but our own potential for it. However, the clarity of this opening quickly disappeared. The relatively bare set (figure 1) and a central square in front of it on which the action took place directed our

Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew

The thorough renovation that changed the auditorium of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over the past few years from a proscenium-arch to a thrust stage auditorium included many other projects as well. One of these was a special toy: the instalment of a huge, illuminated advertisement board right above the main entrance to the theatre. The blazing signs on this board for the latest Taming of the Shrew at the RSC did not leave much room for doubt as to what the production would be about, as huge, red flashing letters told the prospective audience: ‘‘Let the battle of the sexes begin’’. The line promised excitement, asking the audience to sit down, join the show and watch this impending fight between men and women, this long awaited match with an as yet unknown outcome between two seemingly equal contestants. The opening scene of the play, however, offered anything but a battle. As the audience filtered in, they were confronted with upbeat, jazzy music played from instruments such as the clarinet, accordion, trumpet reminiscent of the old blackand-white slapstick movies, rather than the more threatening Eye of the Tiger music expected at official fights. In the background, the sounds of laughter and entertaining conversations could be heard, while the set itself was rather surprisingly a large bed, slightly raised backstage where the two pillows were supposed to be; it was a set that hinted both at the sexual energy and at the sexual frustration that would course through this production. During the production characters would constantly roll over this bed, dive under its sheets as Sly repeatedly did to the amusement of the audience or point towards it while mentioning the word bed. In fact, only a few Shakespeare plays most notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream employ the word bed more often than Taming. The bed is omnipresent and director Lucy Bailey said that to her Taming is a very ‘‘sexy play, where you want the two most interesting persons to come together’’, arguing that although ‘‘consummation does not take place, the play is a kind of long foreplay towards that’’ (Bailey). When, at the end, Kate and Petruchio, after a long and drawn-out kiss, undressed each other on stage as far as middle-class decency allowed and ran joyfully and entangled in each other towards the back of the stage

Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Over the past few decades, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night have been the two most popular plays of the RSC: they can be counted upon to draw a full main house, they do not need a star actor or actress to achieve good box office, the reasons for staging them are rarely questioned and they generally enjoy positive reviews. However, that popularity has its distinct drawbacks, as well, as each new director is confronted with an ever-growing history of productions, an ever-growing continuum that reaches back through so many, many Dreams before him or her. There is a weight of precedence, at the RSC, of previous performances that can be both inspiring and intimidating for a director whose aim is to breathe new life into one of the glittering horses of the Shakespeare merry-go-round. Nancy Meckler, artistic director of Shared Experience, was the latest director to take up this challenge after Doran’s highly lauded 2005 Dream, which he had revived and revamped in 2008. Her innovative, well-received and joyous 2005 Comedy of Errors, and the equally inventive, although less favourably received, 2006 Romeo and Juliet, boded well and, in her third Shakespeare production at the RSC, she proved fully capable of breathing new life into one more Dream. Newspaper reviewers warmly welcomed the production and applauded, in particular, the fine comedy of Lucy Brigg-Owen’s almost manically obsessive Helena and Marc Wootton’s charming and lovably bombastic Bottom. However, the real innovation of this production lay not in the mechanicals or in the four lovers, but in the acting and resolution of conflict between Pippa Nixon’s Hippolyta and Jo Stone Fewings’s Theseus. As the audience filtered in, the set and early action on the stage created a clear narrative which seemed to set the tone for the remainder of the production. Three men dressed in black suits, white shirts and ties were seated at a small, black table, front stage, drinking and playing at cards while, backstage, three women sat on a white leather Chesterfield, scantily dressed in sexy black bodysuits, stocking suspenders and high-heeled shoes, moving over to the men now and again, stroking them or sitting on their laps. Centre stage, on a second white sofa, sat another woman, also dressed in black but with a white, furry overcoat, looking bored and uninterested in everything around her. There was nothing else on stage, apart from a