Sarah Olive

Review of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives (directed by Barrie Rutter for Northern Broadsides) at the York Theatre Royal, 17 May 2016

The York Theatre Royal reopened fittingly enough on the eve of Shakespeare’s birthday and – lest we forget – the 400th anniversary of his death. Northern Broadsides was not the Shakespearean company to christen the revamped theatre: it had already hosted York Shakespeare Cluster’s The Tempest, performed by eight local schools, and Birmingham Royal Ballet’s mix of works inspired by Shakespeare. Merry Wives preceded Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Triple Bill containing Kate Flatt’s exploration of his sonnets, Undivided Loves. Any of these other productions, however, have their work cut out in toppling the sizeable oak established by Barrie Rutter (director and Falstaff) and company. With the newly gilded plasterwork of the auditorium glimmering more subtly than the glint in Sir John’s eye, the stage was set for a summer’s day of yore. Not late medieval Windsor, mind, but 1920s North Yorkshire. Those with the keen eye of my companion will have noticed the defiant dropping of Windsor from the title of this proudly regional company’s production. Additionally, “Eton” became “Skipton”, “Brentford” became “Ilkley”. No castles here, but a genteel interwar country house with a lino-tiled conservatory floor, dotted with low-slung wicker furniture, baskets and barrels stuffed with dusty-looking sporting implements. The green and yellow lighting and circular park bench conjured a sun-bathed terrace. Taking Merry Wives to this period worked in manifold ways. Shakespeare’s play is nostalgic for the Plantagenet period; this production captured its audience’s nostalgia for the early twentieth century. It allowed the company to maintain its trademark accessibility, with audiences able to draw comparisons with lush Yorkshire-set period drama series such as Downton Abbey and Brideshead Revisited, and – geographically and generically further from the company’s home – ITV’s adaptations of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction set in southern England. The sisterly solidarity of Mistresses Page and Ford (Nicola Sanderson and Becky Hindley), with their plans to out-do the misdirected ingenuity and expose the folly of the men-folk about them, could have been that of a pair of not-quite retired suffragettes. The interwar concept “excused” some of the play’s unpalatable stereotyping of foreigners (and the Welsh) as suspicious, laughable, overemotional, temperamentally unstable cranks. Doctor Caius (Andy Cryer), for example, was lumbered with a Tintin-esque quiff in addition to Shakespeare’s “French” exclamations and pronunciation. Audience members may have been able to soothe any qualms they felt about the play’s English supremacism by appealing to their doubly historical nature in this production: Shakespeare’s and early twentieth-century England’s unenlightened attitudes. If play-goers did so successfully, they may have been repressing the currency of Brexit-related xenophobia from certain politicians and quarters of the national press: an apparent contiguity that made me squirm. Perhaps the production also hoped that this historical setting would do something similarly apologist for the audience’s acceptance of its depiction of Slender (Jos Vantyler) as an effeminate and excessively fastidious gay man. It may have garnered some wary audience titters, but this was one choice that did not work for me. I am beyond bored with and now getting increasingly irate at the anachronistic, severely limited way of staging homosexuality in twenty-first century

Researching post-war British Shakespearean productions: A review of the Theatre Archive Project

Recent years have seen an impetus to collect and disseminate oral theatre criticism in Shakespeare studies, which is traditionally spontaneous and ephemeral. One manifestation of this is the Theatre Archive Project (TAP), which focuses on post-war Britain (1945–68). This article offers an overview of the TAP’s content in relation to professional Shakespeare productions. Moreover, it articulates some of the pleasures and challenges of using the TAP. Outlining these is intended to benefit researchers considering using the project’s materials but also the project itself as it continues to collect, digitize and share material.

Review of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (translated by Øyvind Berg, directed by Peer Perez Øian for Den Nationale Scene) at Småscenen, Den Nationale Scene, Bergen, 5 June 2012

Having already reviewed plays from the World Shakespeare Festival and eagerly attended more besides, it was with no trepidation that I trotted along to the Bergen International Festival ticket booth and bought a ticket for Den Nationale Scene’s En midtsommernattsdrøm. It was only as an actor kitted up with headset, representing a stage manager, emerged into the playing space and (according to my Norwegianspeaking neighbour) announced that he would like to try ‘‘doing things differently’’, ‘‘to try an experiment’’, that I began to realise I might have been too cocksure. Unlike the World Shakespeare Festival or the production of Peer Gynt that I had seen at the same theatre a few days previously, there were no concessions to nonNorwegian speakers here. At both the above events, dual-language programmes were available. Here, programmes were not exactly being pushed. Those that were available contained a message from the theatre’s artistic director, an article on Shakespeare as the ‘‘poet from Stratford’’, an essay from a theatre studies professor and a cast list . . . in Norwegian. At the World Shakespeare Festival, I had made some use of the plot summaries on electronic screens at the Globe and been distracted by the fuller surtitles at the RSC/Companhia BufoMecânica Two Roses for Richard III. At Peer Gynt, I had been given a handy (literally hand-held) gadget with an English translation that rolled across the screen in perfect time with the actors’ speeches. Here, as someone who spent almost a fortnight in Norway struggling over whether ‘‘thank you’’ should be pronounced ‘‘takk’’, ‘‘taak’’, or somewhere in between, I rapidly began to feel out of my depth. This was despite reasonably frequent codeswitching into English by the actors, who would suddenly deploy phrases such as ‘‘rise and shine, wakey-wakey’’, ‘‘sleep’’, ‘‘so far so good’’ and ‘‘perfect text’’. The decision not to have the performance titled in English was not an oversight, but an unavoidable product of the freewheeling use of the translated text. My feeling of estrangement from the speech, but also sometimes the action, of this production brought to me a new awareness of the huge extent to which companies involved in the World Shakespeare Festival worked to use gesture, music, colour a panoply of non-verbal devices to connect with their audience. In this production, Den Nationale Scene was working to defamiliarise the play not just for, quite possibly, the only non-Norwegian speaker in the audience, but also for the home crowd for

“She will a handmaid be to his desires” : theatre reviewing in the service of education in Rex Gibson’s Shakespeare and Schools

if we were playing the word association game and i put forward the name rex gibson as a starter, you might be expected to reply with one of the following: active methods — a pedagogy for teaching Shakespeare which espouses the active engagement of students’ bodies and minds with his texts, and which is characterised by participative and playful, dramatic and student-centred approaches; the Shakespeare and Schools research project, run during the 1980s and 1990s at the cambridge institute of education and funded by leverhulme; the cambridge School Shakespeare editions. You might also invoke the book Teaching Shakespeare (1998) or, indeed, the more generic activity of teaching Shakespeare. it is possible that you would mention his other publications on topics ranging from curriculum reform to structuralism; from Shakespeare’s language to the education of feeling. i would, however, be surprised if you said “reviewing Shakespeare”. Yet it is gibson’s involvement in the latter field of endeavour with which this paper is concerned. i will argue that gibson’s role as a reviewer of Shakespeare demands attention: not only are his reviews skilful, interesting, and often unique in their perspectives, but they offer further insight both into the nature of (and relationship between) reviewing and the cambridge Shakespeare and Schools project. aside from material gleaned from my exploration of the literature on reviewing in the past decade, the staple source for this paper is five issues (18-23) of Shakespeare and Schools (1986-1994). originally branded a “newsletter” and published triennially to coincide with the three terms in the british school year, this title was dropped after readers petitioned gibson that the issues were far more weighty than the term denoted.1 unlike other teaching journals, then and now, these volumes feature reviews (twenty-six in total) of over a dozen performances of Shakespeare, six early modern