Michael Bogdanov on updating Shakespeare
The breakthrough in my thinking on Shakespeare came with a lavish production of Romeo and Juliet in 1974 at the newly opened Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, and then at the city's Phoenix Theatre with what we called the £94 Hamlet - that being all we had to spend on the physical elements of the production. Scaffolding and wear your own clothes.
That Romeo and Juliet had Jonathan Kent as Romeo, Alan Rickman as Paris, Mary Rutherford as Juliet and Bill Wallis as Mercutio. It was, for me, a seminal experience. In rehearsal the story had been coming over hard, clear and very exciting. Adrian Vaux had designed a very interesting modern steel structure for the set, and the costumes were uncompromisingly Renaissance.
When the production moved from the rehearsal room and arrived on to the stage, somehow the clarity and the hardness, the linear quality of the story, had gone. What was more, audiences weren't responding to either the production or the play. At the last moment, after the very final preview, I cut the whole of the end scene, where the Friar recaps the story for the benefit of Escalus and, after the death of Juliet, I switched to a press conference around the unveiling of the two gold statues that Capulet and Montague erect to the memory of each other's child.
Rock music built to a climax during a blackout and, when the lights came up, the entire company was assembled in modern dress in front of Romeo and Juliet, now dressed in gold cloaks and masks standing on the erstwhile tomb. Muzak played: Fly Me to the Moon . . . Escalus, the Duke, read the prologue as an epilogue from a cue card, as if inaugurating at an unveiling ceremony. The main protagonists were photographed in front of the statues, shaking hands, the Nurse holding up a rope ladder, Escalus attempting to bring about the familial reconciliation with a three-way hand clasp. The smile of Jimmy Carter handing over the presidency to Reagan.
The transformation had an extraordinary effect. People in the audience shouted, people walked out, people cheered, people bravoed, people booed, and I thought: "For three hours they have been bored out of their minds and suddenly something has challenged them. A moment of real theatre." It was an anarchic stroke and it turned the whole evening around in a most remarkable way. More importantly, it served to emphasise that I was going up the wrong path in attempting to ape what I thought was a traditional way of performing Shakespeare.
There are many directors in many parts of the globe who are able to tell a Shakespeare story with tremendous power and clarity without having to go to the lengths that I have described, but that is how I discovered a way to tell the stories. By removing the barriers that exist between the language and the audience, by allowing them to identify with the characters clearly, by associating the events with contemporary politics, I allowed the plays to breathe. (I received more letters of complaint from apoplectic colonels for my production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Royal Shakespeare Company than I ever did for The Romans in Britain.)
The battle for modern dress has long been won. A critic recently applauded an Elizabethan-dress production as a refreshing change. The argument has moved on to gender-bending (all-male because that's how Will did it; all-female because that strikes a blow for equality) and role reversal (a white Patrick Stewart playing Othello in Washington with an all-black cast). I have no problem with any of this: theatre is the suspension of disbelief. But if, as in the case of all-male Shakespeare, it is in the name of experiencing the plays as they would have been performed in 1600, then I have a huge quarrel.
It is impossible for us to receive the plays in any other form than a 21st-century appreciation of what is in front of us. All-male Shakespeare is just not our bag. So the only question that has to be answered is whether the plays themselves make sense textually, politically. Claudius is still Claudius, Bolingbroke is still Bolingbroke, and Katherine is still the victim of a male wish-fulfilment dream of revenge, no matter what gender or mode of dress. No post-Burton/Taylor chauvinist romp will suffice, even when all parts are female.
Hamlet in 1975 was my first of five essays into the politics of the play. On the evidence of the gravediggers, Hamlet is 30. Gertrude says he is "fat and scant of breath". The role was played for me in Leicester by the small, amply rotund figure of Bill Wallis. The play - and Hamlet's problem - opened up in a completely different way from that of the tall, thin, pale, haggard, meditative young prince of popular and traditional view. It posed a lot of awkward questions that the text had to answer. And it taught me an important lesson - that directing a Shakespeare play is like reading a detective story, piecing the clues together, never taking anything for granted, ignoring received opinion. The narrative is of paramount importance. Also it taught me to look for those hidden moments, easily overlooked, that tell the real story. Is this the way to open up Shakespeare for a new generation of unengaged kids?
How do we deal with the plays in the 21st century in an increasingly multicultural society? Then again, has there ever been a time when these islands were not multicultural? I suspect that the court yards of Elizabethan England teemed with "masterless men", the tongues of a hundred regions grappling with the sound of a language comprised of the scraps and leftovers of a dozen other languages. London then was the polyglottal stop-over for regional runaways, a bubbling linguistic British brew, the pot full of the still-succulent sounds of French, Latin, Goedelic, Brythonic, Norwegian, Saxon, Plattdeutsch, Hochdeutsch.
Fresh words were entering the language (in a variety of spellings: Mr Shakesshaft, Shagsboar, Shakespear with or without an "e") at a faster rate possibly than at any other time until the postwar American cultural invasion of McDonald's and the white-hot technological revolution. This hybrid, as yet unstandardised, form of communication where a society conversed in strange alien sibilants, dentals and palatals, eyes often bright with misunderstanding, formed the basis of a new language captured in the raw by Shakespeare and others and moulded into a mosaic of multifaceted storytelling.
And this language carried a public health warning. It could kill. It was dangerous, a verbal contract sometimes taken out on one writer by another. Imprisonment was risked to attack public figures, the subjects of thinly veiled allegories set in Thebes, Athens, Verona, Venice.
My love of this and any language is a passion inherited from my father. In pre-revolutionary Russia, in the world in which my father grew up, the word was power. The balladeers, the pamphleteers, the poets, the novelists, the playwrights: those who could read and write held the key to the future. In a world of such devastating illiteracy, they were the truth. They were the word.
My father spoke English with consummate grammatical perfection, as only someone for whom it is not a native language can. And he had the vocabulary to match. Were he alive today, he would be shocked how many words that he used in everyday speech have already disappeared or are under threat. But this is the point - language must evolve.
The battle for the survival of English in America is already on. A wave of Spanish is slowly flooding up the North American continent as the Mexicans take back by stealth what was taken from them by force. Los Angeles is already 75% Spanish-speaking. What will the map look like in 100 years? What price Shakespeare in 50 to 100 years? With hundreds of words dropping yearly out of use, what will be left of our understanding of his plays in centuries to come if we do not adopt a more radical attitude to these changes? We already have Beowulf and Chaucer in translation; why not Shakespeare if it opens up the plays to the vast untapped energies of popular debate?
· This is an edited extract from Shakespeare: The Director's Cut by Michael Bogdanov, published by Capercaillie Books on November 28.