Shakespeare and the Challenge of the Contemporary: Performance, Politics and Aesthetics 9781350182158, 9781350182189, 9781350182172

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Shakespeare and the Challenge of the Contemporary

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Shakespeare and the Challenge of the Contemporary Performance, Politics and Aesthetics

Francesca Clare Rayner

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Francesca Clare Rayner, 2022 Francesca Clare Rayner has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xiii–xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image: André e. Teodósio in Teatro Praga’s Timon of Athens (© Alípio Padilha) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-8215-8 ePDF: 978-1-3501-8217-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-8216-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my brother, Chris Rayner

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CONTENTS

List of figures  viii Foreword: Time is of the essence Rui Carvalho Homem  ix Note on translation  xii Acknowledgements  xiii

Introduction: The challenge of the contemporary in Shakespearean performance  1 1 Border crossings: Intermedial collaborations in Teatro Praga’s Shakespeare trilogy  25 2 Memories of the future: Tiago Rodrigues and dramaturgies of the Shakespearean trace  53 3 Cruel optimism: Nuno Cardoso’s political Shakespeares  79 4 Empowering the spectator: Christiane Jatahy’s The Moving Forest  107 5 Licensing experiment: mala voadora’s Hamlet  129 6 Performance matters: Contemporary Shakespearean performance criticism  153 Notes  175 References  195 Index  205

FIGURES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010), Teatro Praga  34 André e. Teodósio as Timon in Timon of Athens (2019), Teatro Praga  47 Tiago Rodrigues and the onstage audience in By Heart (2013)  63 Sofia Dias and Vitor Roriz in Tiago Rodrigues’s Antony and Cleopatra (2014)  71 Cast of Measure for Measure (2012)  93 Cover image of programme for Coriolanus (2014)  99 Virgilia (Catarina Lacerda) in Coriolanus (2014)  101 Publicity image for Hamlet (2014)  134 José Capela’s scenography for Hamlet (2014)  141

FOREWORD: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE

‘Though time seem so adverse and means unfit’ – so muses Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well (5.1.26), right after uttering the play’s title phrase. Francesca Rayner’s study of Shakespeare and performance proves timely in a great many ways, including in its detection of adversity and a sense of crisis as a defining condition of its object. Rather aptly, a key factor of such timeliness is Rayner’s deployment of temporality as a key operative concern. This is ensured by her focus on ‘the contemporary’, a notion that has been deeply theorised in its ambivalent and elusive signifying of time. As proposed by a range of authors who have discussed the theme in the new millennium, notions of the contemporary paradoxically harness both the immediacy of a here-and-now and its transcendence: ‘The contemporary is the untimely’ – so pronounced Giorgio Agamben in 2007, citing Barthes citing Nietzsche (2009: 40–1). Agamben goes on to claim, for ‘contemporariness’, the value of ‘a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it’; and, for ‘those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time’, the quality of ‘neither perfectly coincid[ing] with it [their own time] nor adjust[ing] themselves to its demands’. This tension between belonging and detachment has been further pondered, with regard to a challenged temporality, in even more recent discussions: ‘The contemporary points towards incommensurable definitions. . . . [It] becomes a selective concept that promotes or excludes things and practices according to their ability to respond to ahistorical or transhistorical aspects of the present’ (Paulo de Assis and Michael Schwab 2019: 7). Such discussions have resonated in the cultural environments that this book addresses, and hence largely inform it – as when

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Rayner construes the contemporary as denoting not just work from our own day and age but rather that which involves ‘a particular perspective on the time and place in which it is created’ (p. 10). The specificities brought out by this study of Shakespeare in a range of theatrical projects in Portugal are here neatly balanced against a recognition of the more general factors of their ‘contemporariness’. At their broadest, the conditions under which they have (re) processed Shakespeare prominently include medial diversity, the extent to which the projects in question participate in what Steven Connor (1997: 219) has described as ‘the semiotic overload of contemporary culture’; and extending the medial range often entails a reduction or inflection of the verbal, towards ‘dramaturgies of the Shakespearean trace rather than the Shakespearean text’ (p. 11). The defining patterns that Francesca Rayner detects in the projects and practices she describes also reveal their keenness on a de-structuring rationale that characteristically targets the hierarchical and directorial, as much as the traditional counterpointing of performers and audience. Such a rationale will require from theatre professionals that they broaden and diversify their ‘artistic, technical and interpersonal skills’, in a ‘move from specialization to generalization’ that will often carry the risk of ‘deprofessionalizing’ the performer (pp. 15–16). Through a sense of conceptual affinity, this tendency may call for critical protocols and modes of intellectual inquiry that likewise challenge conventional distinctions – in this case, of a disciplinary nature; and this homology allows us to recognise in this book that ‘complexity intrinsic to theories of the contemporary, in which theory and its object become aspects of each other’, a conformation that also sustains arguments for a marked conceptual overlap of notions of contemporaneity and postmodernity (Connor 1997: 85). Francesca Rayner’s option to focus on Shakespeare in contemporary Portugal reflects her extensive familiarity with the topic, balanced against the broader vistas afforded by ‘global Shakespeares’. Additionally, her choice is informed by a perception that the country’s liminality makes it an apt terrain for bringing out a rich set of cultural complexities. Indeed, Portugal has been seen as a clear instance of a ‘semiperipheral’ zone – that sense, originating in Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis and developed for the Portuguese case by Boaventura Sousa Santos, that some societies and cultures become areas of ambivalence and transit in

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the operation of the core–periphery nexus (Sousa Santos 1985: 869–901). And this recognition can find a catalyst in the responses of local theatre professionals and audiences to the opportunities and challenges posed by the most canonical of playwrights. Such responses are studied in this book, therefore, with a sharp awareness both of cultural particularity and of how Shakespeare has been processed in a variety of elsewheres (English-speaking and otherwise). It is a vantage point that sharpens Rayner’s critical perspective on such issues as the formal tendencies and organizational preferences that derive from the ‘comparative “lateness” of the contemporary in Portugal’ (p. 10). No less productively, Rayner deploys her knowledge of recent Portuguese history, especially involving the past half-century (from the latter stages of the dictatorship that ended in 1974 to the country’s participation in major global dynamics, including economic crises), to highlight the broader insights to be gained from the manner in which theatrical projects are ‘informed politically by concerns around democracy, disempowerment and austerity’ (p. 10) – like a rich but qualified renewal of Martin Esslin’s resonant claim (two generations ago) that ‘the theatre is the place where a nation thinks in public in front of itself’ (1976: 121). This – and much more – makes Francesca Rayner’s study a welcome and exciting contribution to the efforts that, in European and other contexts, have brought out the striking extent to which Shakespeare’s transits into our cultures have enriched our imaginative lives and helped us develop a sharpened, historicized and contemporary perception of who we are. Rui Carvalho Homem, University of Porto Chair, European Shakespeare Research Association 

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

All translations from performance scripts and critical material in this book are my own.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is in one sense a solo endeavour but in a more fundamental sense the product of exchanges, suggestions, pragmatic advice and, above all, collaboration. Each of its chapters contain material that has been provided by the practitioners involved and then shared with them in a feedback loop that I hope benefits all. All have been interested in the project and eminently helpful in answering questions. Each of these chapters has also developed through conference presentations and discussions as well as through performance reviews. Academic colleagues within the European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA) have provided a supportive and stimulating forum for discussion of the questions raised here. Nicoleta Cinpöes, Veronica Schandl, Rui Carvalho Homem, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, Janice Valls-Russell, Katy Stavreva and Boika Sokolova deserve a particular mention here as do colleagues at the Universidade de Murcia for including me in their excellent Shakespeare in European Culture project. Lawrence Guntner will remain with me forever for the way he welcomed me into my first ESRA seminar. Much of the material dealt with in Chapter 3 of this book is taken from my 2018 article ‘The Footballer, the Trickster and the Dictator: Disidentified National Subjects and Failed European Identifications in Nuno Cardoso’s Portuguese Shakespeares’ in Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 96 (1), 1–13, and I am grateful to the editors of Cahiers Elisabethains for permission to reprint this material. My conviction that editors remain open to proposals they receive even when they know little about the author was reinforced when The Arden Shakespeare accepted this initial proposal. My thanks to Lara Bateman in particular for her cheerful encouragement and support during the writing and editing of this book. The year 2020 has not been an easy one for anyone, and she has ensured

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that this process has been both smooth and rigorous. Last but never least: if anyone needed reminding that no person is an island, 2020 brought that home to all of us. For her love and mischievous sense of humour during this year and many others, my grateful thanks to Palmira Fontes da Costa.

Introduction The challenge of the contemporary in Shakespearean performance

Shakespeare and the contemporary Any book on Shakespeare with ‘contemporary’ in the title inevitably brings to mind Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1974) by the Polish academic Jan Kott. Drawing on his experiences in communist Poland and an awareness of new and challenging theatrical performances of Shakespeare such as those of Peter Brook, Kott’s ground-breaking work moved Shakespearean criticism away from discussion of the timeless and universal qualities of Shakespeare’s plays towards a recognition of the need to reflect through Shakespeare upon ‘our modern experience, anxiety and sensibility’ which is explicitly distanced, however, from a ‘forced topicality’ (144). Kott’s identification of a grand mechanism of history where individuals struggle for power only to lose it to new pretenders in a never-ending cycle combined his interest in the theatre of the absurd with a deeply nihilistic vision of contemporary politics that appealed to those who identified neither with the capitalist West or the communist East. Performance played a key role in Kott’s work as both a spur to critical thinking and an illustration in practice of the ideas he explored in the book. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary revolutionized the terms of Shakespearean criticism and prompted decades of politicized performances and performance criticism of Shakespeare in Europe.

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In 1988, in an event which paid homage to Kott and his influence on Shakespeare Studies, theatre practitioners and critics came together to discuss whether Shakespeare was still their contemporary. A book based on the event was published one year later in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall. The contributions to John Elsom’s Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? (1989) indicated the emergence of new areas of analysis for Shakespeare’s contemporaneity. One chapter looked at translating Shakespeare, while others discussed questions of gender or the televising of Shakespeare plays. Instead of Kott’s emphasis on the grand mechanism of history, the event signalled the influence of cultural materialism in British Shakespeare Studies, although such political approaches to Shakespeare remained hotly contested. The book signalled a shift away from thinking of Shakespeare’s contemporaneity in terms of Cold War politics to contemporaneity in terms of topicality and relevance. Significantly, little of the recent post-communist changes in Europe filtered into the book and it lacked the sense of political urgency of Kott’s earlier work. Michael Hattaway, Boika Sokolova and Derek Roper’s 1994 Shakespeare in the New Europe was the more obvious successor to Kott in analysing new political developments in Europe and their influence on Shakespeare. The year of 1989 has itself been considered a foundational moment of the contemporary as globalization encouraged a greater flow of artistic practice and theory across national borders. Julian Stallabrass, for instance, argues that from this moment on, ‘it becomes plausible to conceive of the art world less as a constellation of fixed centres and more as a series of flows from one locale to another’ (2009: 65). While the three works mentioned here illustrate different approaches to the contemporary, all reinforce the centrality of performance. This is because the here and now of performance necessarily keys in to the immediate and wider contexts of the present moment, but also because performance reveals how notions of the contemporary in relation to Shakespeare are contingent and shift across time and space. Since Elsom’s book, no full-length work on Shakespeare and the contemporary has been published, although key features of the contemporary have been analysed in collections such as Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan’s Shakespeare and the Digital World: Redefining Scholarship and Practice (2014), Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan’s Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year (2015) and handbooks such as

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James C. Bulman’s The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (2017). In the European context, Kott’s political readings of Shakespeare remain influential and notions of political performance have expanded to include questions of gender, race, sexuality, cultural exchange and the role of theatrical institutions. In the developing field of European Shakespeares, an increasing number of books and articles have discussed these developments in collections such as Carla Dente and Sara Soncini’s Shakespeare and Conflict: A European Perspective (2013), Ruth J. Owen’s 2012 The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet for European Cultures and Juan Cerdá, Dirk Delabastita and Keith Gregor’s Romeo and Juliet in European Culture (2017). What these collections illustrate is that Kott’s notion of the contemporary as a progressive, unified, European phenomenon has given way to a sense of the diversity of Shakespearean performance practices in contemporary Europe. More localized discussions have taken the place of pan-European approaches, without always making wider connections between these different contexts. Moreover, complicating Kott’s politically progressive notion of the contemporary, there has been a growing recognition of the imbrication of contemporary Shakespeare in consumer capitalism. Globalization and the development of new technologies have played a key role in marketing Shakespeare performances as contemporary, from international Shakespeare festivals to online resources such as MIT’s Global Shakespeare. Nowadays, therefore, the contemporary plays a paradoxical role. It retains an anchoring in the present moment and in particular locations but also demands continual reproduction in new transnational Shakespeare products for global markets. As such, the linking of Shakespeare and the contemporary requires an analysis of the changing relationships between historical texts and contemporary performance contexts that such developments have brought in their wake. In casting the contemporary as a challenge, this book attempts to move beyond the idea of the contemporary as topicality or relevance to consider its relationship with crisis, erasure and disempowerment. It argues that contemporary Shakespearean performance demands forms of critical thinking that, like Kott in 1964, are shaped by contemporary performances and their response to the tragedies of the present moment, particularly an economically divided, postBrexit, pandemic-saturated Europe and a global climate emergency.

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It builds on the Brazilian academic Cassiano Sydow Quilici’s notion of the contemporary sensibility as ‘an acute and lucid means of suffering the experience of one’s own time in order that an art capable of responding actively to its time can emerge’ (2015: 34). The challenge of the contemporary discussed here recognizes that decisions about what, how and why Shakespeare is performed have been radically transformed by processes of globalization, mediatization and neoliberal market economics and the global inequalities that have resulted from these forces. Such developments raise new challenges for contemporary performance, such as how to reconfigure political alternatives as well as how present-centred performance might evoke a sense of the past and the future. These challenges are made more problematic by perhaps the most pervasive challenge of the contemporary. The capitalist injunction to continually reproduce a Shakespeare that is contemporary at an ever-increasing speed means that attempts to capture a sense of the contemporary in performance are consistently undermined by their rapid disappearance. Emma Smith (2007) has characterized performance  criticism  compellingly as a vain attempt at ‘freezing the  snowman’, yet when the snowman is not even given time to freeze before it melts, when there is an impossible choice between endless numbers of freezing snowmen all demanding attention, or when an image of the snowman claims to be more ‘real’ than the snowman itself, criticism can only capture a sense of such fleeting, contradictory processes if it assumes a historical, critical perspective on them. In this respect, contemporary performances of Shakespeare themselves constitute a challenge to notions of the contemporary which erase the past and homogenize temporalities and geographies because they necessarily reference several temporalities and locations in the moment of performance. This productive tension between the different histories and geographies of contemporary performances of Shakespeare prompts a critical perspective on the social, political and artistic forces shaping understandings of the contemporary in the present moment.

Shakespeare in Portugal Configurations of the contemporary in the twenty-first century have been wide-ranging and remain open-ended. In such a context,

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critical discussion of contemporary Shakespearean performance demands what might seem a paradoxical greater attention to particular local contexts as well as contextualization of this localized analysis within wider critical debates, social and political contexts and historical traditions. In its exploration of contemporary Shakespearean performance, therefore, the chapters of this book focus on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary performances of Shakespeare in Portugal. The choice of Portugal for an analysis of the contemporary might seem somewhat counter-intuitive. Its semi-peripheral geographical position within Europe, its small population and its minimal presence within critical discussions of Shakespearean performance would seem to render analysis of Portuguese performances of limited interest to readers outside the country. However, apart from the interest of these performances in themselves, a focus on a small, Southern European country like Portugal is a fertile site for discussion of the contemporary. It challenges orthodoxies in critical debates on contemporary Shakespearean performance around centre and periphery or local and global and highlights political and artistic networks of exchange outside the dominant Anglophone paradigm. It raises critical and political questions that resonate in other national contexts, such as the transition from dictatorship to democracy or the ways in which periods of economic austerity have influenced the politics and aesthetics of contemporary performance. Such questions have seen limited discussion outside European Shakespeares. Moreover, the tendency of Portuguese practitioners to favour Shakespearean tragedies links their notion of the contemporary more closely with the tragic vision of the present with which this book engages. Notions of the contemporary in Portugal only become possible with the 1974 Carnation Revolution, which ended political censorship and the colonial wars. The forty-year dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar (1932–68) and later Marcello Caetano (1968–74) aimed to keep the Portuguese population in ignorance and poverty and, in the field of theatre, compounded political censorship of both texts and performances with irregular funding and constant logistical obstacles. Many Shakespeares were, however, performed during this period, ranging from the lavish spectacles at the national theatre in Lisbon for those loyal to the regime to the attempts to use the staging of Shakespeare as a stalking horse for more radical material by the independent companies that opposed

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it. After the Revolution, the desire to perform the Portuguese and international dramatists who had been banned from the stage during the dictatorship meant that the performance of Shakespeare was not a priority. However, from Teatro da Cornucópia’s Richard III (1985) onwards, staging Shakespeare became a regular feature of Portuguese theatrical practice.1 After the entry of Portugal into the European Economic Community in 1986, there was something of a boom in the performance of Shakespeare in the 1990s as cultural exchanges within Europe cemented economic integration. After decades of irregular funding, the socialist government and the Jack Lang-like figure of the minister for culture, Manuel Maria Carrilho (1995– 2000), put the funding of the established independent companies on a more permanent basis. Ricardo Pais, artistic director of the Teatro Nacional São João in Porto, directed a series of postmodern Shakespeares between 1998 and 2008 and worked for an extended period with a group of performers and technicians to create a significant school for performing Shakespeare. Encouraged by the new international networks created around contemporary dance, Portuguese performers had access for the first time to the funding and the contacts enabling them to study and perform abroad. However, these incipient developments in Shakespearean performance were brought to an abrupt halt by the 2008 global financial crisis. The long-term consequences of this crisis and the introduction of harsh austerity measures over a period of several years became without doubt the central political event defining contemporary Shakespeares in the early twenty-first century, not only in Portugal but also in the other European countries included within the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) acronym. Austerity became a theme within contemporary Portuguese Shakespeares and also influenced the aesthetics of these performances, enforcing smaller casts, shorter performance runs and a greater need to co-produce between theatres. Endemic unemployment affected practitioners who found themselves without work or working in precarious conditions. It is hard to overestimate the effects of such measures and the period can be seen as an intensely traumatic one in the recent history of Portugal. The election of a socialist government, in a historic alliance with the Communist Party, their associated Green Party and the left-wing Bloco de Esquerda in 2015, introduced some measures to mitigate

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the harshness of the previous years, but their subsequent election win in 2017 reduced the need for such alliances and the period where extensive cuts in wages and services began to be replaced came to an end. While the far right in Portugal remains marginal compared to their presence in other European and global contexts, they did elect their first parliamentary representative since the Revolution in 2017 and the influence of right-wing ideologies has become more visible in the police and security forces. After 2019, the first in forty years where the Portuguese government balanced its economic books, the coronavirus struck, closing theatres and provoking mass unemployment. These constant oscillations between boom and bust, restraint and relaxation, are crucial to understanding contemporary Portuguese performances of Shakespeare.

Portuguese Shakespeare in a global context In a 2002 article discussing Portugal’s colonial legacy, the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos described Portuguese colonialism suggestively as located ‘between Caliban and Prospero’, arguing that it was a ‘subaltern’ colonialism, which was itself ‘colonized’ by other European powers as a result of Portugal’s semi-peripheral status in Europe. The complexity of the Portuguese colonial experience does not, however, minimize the violence and repression of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Principe and Guinea-Bissau and its histories of slavery and forced labour. The physical and psychological torture imposed on populations and the political opposition during the colonial wars (1961–75) have been debated extensively in recent years and several documentary performances have dealt with these experiences.2 After a long period which disavowed the violence of colonial rule, Portugal has been forced to face up to its colonial past as cases of institutional racism within the police force, physical attacks on Black men and women and Portuguese echoes of the Black Lives Matter movement have focused on continuing racism in Portuguese society.3 Sousa Santos describes Portuguese identity as an ‘inter-identity’ constructed at a meeting point between various global cultures, and this formulation conveys the often-

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enforced crossings that have constructed notions of Portugal and the Portuguese. As Alexa Alice Joubin has remarked in relation to diaspora Shakespeares, ‘[t]he myth of global Shakespeare renders invisible some works that do not seem conveniently global’ (2017: 428). At first glance, Portuguese Shakespeares appear not conveniently global in precisely this way. Brazilian performances of Shakespeare are more likely to be seen on the international Festival circuit. On the MIT Global Shakespeare database, Brazilian performances similarly outnumber the Portuguese.4 Yet this does not mean that globalization has not had a significant influence on performances of Shakespeare in Portugal. Models of globalization in Shakespeare Studies tend to construct globalization primarily in terms of export and concentrate on the ways in which performances are created for global markets and circulate within them.5 Yet Portugal has historically favoured a model of importing rather than exporting international performances. This model might be labelled one of hospitable globalization.6 Invitations to international practitioners occur within the framework of festivals such as the FITEI Festival in Porto or the Almada Festival in Lisbon as well as on a more individual or company-based level.7 National theatres also bring international performances to Lisbon and Porto as part of their remit to show the best in national and international performance practices. As Joubin also points out, ‘[t]he postnational space for global arts is shaped by mutual influence’ (2017: 433). In the Portuguese case, this mutual influence comes as much from international exchanges within the country as outside it. This is not to say that Portuguese performances of Shakespeare do not travel abroad and a greater tendency to internationalize their Shakespeare performances is characteristic of the current generation of contemporary practitioners. Tiago Rodrigues and Teatro Praga, who are both discussed in this book, have performed in several European and non-European contexts. Global circuits for Portuguese Shakespeares and visiting productions to Portugal are constructed at the meeting point of two area Shakespeares. The first is the European circuit, which is often aided by European funding or the integration of Portuguese theatres into European theatrical networks.8 Since becoming part of the European Union in 1986, this has been a preferred connection for Portugal. The second is the lusophone or Portuguese-speaking diaspora, which includes

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Brazil, Angola, S. Tomé and Principe, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Goa and East Timor. The Guinean writer Abdulai Silla, for example, adapted Macbeth for this circuit in his 2013 Prayers of Mansata. The performance combined actors from several of these lusophone contexts and embarked on an international tour which included Guinea-Bissau, Portugal and Spain. The performances were also intended for Angola, but were cancelled at the last minute, essentially for political reasons. This incident illustrated the continued fragility of this circuit as a network of exchange and, in other initiatives, a rather large dose of political opportunism.9 Such international tours remain the exception rather than the rule and most Portuguese Shakespeares circulate primarily within Portugal itself. Joubin argues coherently that ‘[m]ental maps of the world that are informed by divisions between nation states and by area studies inadvertently create unknowable objects by flattening the artworks against national profiles’ (2017: 432). Clearly, exclusively national and regional approaches often do ignore the ways in which notions of nation and national culture are deterritorialized by multiple and hybrid borrowings. However, it is also true that ignoring the national, regional or diasporic specificities of Shakespeare performances often homogenizes very different performances in an equally unhelpful way. Nuno Cardoso’s Shakespeares, which are discussed in Chapter 3, are investigations into the state of the nation in Portugal and would be meaningless if this aspect of their creation and circulation were downplayed. They can, nevertheless, also be considered contemporary political performances of Shakespeare in ways that link them to other European and non-European performances of the plays. Critical work on Shakespeare in Portugal has been included within the burgeoning field of European Shakespeares, but this rarely focuses on Portugal’s lusophone connections. Sonia Massai has suggested that the separation between English Shakespeares and foreign Shakespeares be replaced by a sense of the two areas as ‘connected networks’ (2017: 477), and I would extend this useful formulation to emphasize a view of global Shakespeare as constructed through transnational flows which are sometimes impeded by national borders but often overflow them. Such a conception is, I would argue, particularly helpful in the Portuguese context in order to construct a notion of Portuguese Shakespeares within a Europe that includes the UK, but also within a network of

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lusophone Shakespeares and performances of Shakespeare in the global South.

Contemporary Portuguese Shakespeares In 2017, two books appeared in Portugal with contemporary in the title, both of them suggesting that something labelled contemporary Portuguese theatre now existed and, by implication, had not existed beforehand.10 Performers working with Shakespeare are discussed in both of these books although neither develop a sustained reflection on the relationship between Shakespeare and the contemporary in Portugal. The word ‘contemporary’ in connection with Portuguese performance only really emerges in the new millennium as a result of more regular state funding and the networks of international exchange created at the end of the previous decade. It can be seen as a response to the aesthetic and political changes such movements brought in their wake. This comparative ‘lateness’ of the contemporary in Portugal shapes the associations it evokes for theatre practitioners and critics. It links the contemporary with intermediality, with devised rather than text-based performance, with ensembles who co-create performances rather than being director-led and with a focus on the participation of the audience rather than their silent presence in the auditorium. It is informed politically by concerns around democracy, disempowerment and austerity. Such a process is inevitably uneven, particularly in the case of Shakespearean performance, with some practitioners maintaining more traditional forms of theatre making. The contemporary retains within it sediments of the residual forms it seeks to displace as well as the seeds of emergent future forms. However, if the contemporary is understood not only as work created at a particular time but also as involving a particular perspective on the time and place in which it is created, distinct political and aesthetic tendencies associated with contemporary Portuguese performances of Shakespeare in the last decade can be clearly identified in a range of practices. While few of these performances are known outside the Portuguese context, the consistent presence of international performances of Shakespeare and theatrical exchanges within Portugal throughout this period suggests that the configurations of the contemporary discussed in

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this book have a resonance in other European and Portuguesespeaking countries, but also in contexts which do not have strong traditions of performing Shakespeare but do have strong traditions of acculturating Shakespeare in a variety of other forms and genres.

Characteristics of the contemporary in Shakespearean performance Subsequent chapters of this book analyse particular Portuguese Shakespearean performances and specific aesthetic and political features of the contemporary in performance. This section aims to provide a more general introduction to the characteristics of the contemporary in Shakespearean performance that anchors the discussion of the contemporary in later chapters. It is based on close observation of contemporary Portuguese Shakespeares, although some tendencies discussed are not specific to Portugal. Others, however, are so particular to Portugal that they do not easily translate across national borders. The characteristics of the contemporary dealt with in this book include a reconfigured notion of the theatrical ensemble as occasional rather than permanent and the new roles for both performers and directors within this ensemble, dramaturgies of the Shakespearean trace rather than the Shakespearean text, expanded notions of performance space and participation by spectators in performance. These tendencies are by no means exhaustive, but they do mark clear artistic breaks from earlier performance practices. There are as many continuities as there are clean breaks in the various discourses of the contemporary. Nevertheless, the forms in which these continuities have been challenged in the present enable a sense of the contemporary in Shakespearean performance to emerge more clearly.

The occasional ensemble While the notion of the performance ensemble is hardly new, the contours of the contemporary theatrical ensemble differ significantly from the European and North American ensembles of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Out of Joint or the Wooster Group, as well as

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state-funded ensembles such as the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) or the Berliner Ensemble. In the Portuguese context, the post-revolutionary companies that formed part of the independent theatre movement before and after the 1974 Revolution created long-term ensembles with more or less consistent political and aesthetic aims and are markedly different from the ensembles discussed in this book. Major changes have been imposed on the ensemble by the withdrawal of regular funding from the state and the new demands of globalized cultural markets. Yet the ensemble has also been subject to pressure from within as practitioners react against the implicit or explicit hierarchies of earlier formations and avoid regular work within one company to build careers across a variety of projects and media. Max Stafford Clark has contrasted more permanent ensembles with their promise of regular work with the same group of people over time in a fixed location and what he labels the ‘occasional ensemble’ where people come together on a project-by-project basis for a particular performance (qtd in Radosavljević 2013: 69). In some cases, the ensembles exist over time, co-opting other performers and technicians for specific performances. In others, the ensemble exists only for a particular project. In some of these occasional ensembles, the control of the director has been reinforced, for they may be one of the few figures that remain within the ensemble over various performances. In others, directors are brought in for particular performances and have no greater commitment to the ensemble than the other people involved. In yet other ensembles, such as Teatro Praga in Chapter 1, the figure of the director has been dispensed with altogether, ostensibly to enable greater democracy within the ensemble in terms of decision-making. In many of these contemporary ensembles, whether they work with a director or not, practitioners become co-creators and co-authors of the performance rather than interpreters of the director’s unique vision of the play. Nevertheless, even when contributions from all are welcomed and define the final performance, these performances continue to be marketed with authorial signatures, invariably those of the directors. Jen Harvie, in her introduction to Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, suggests a move within theatrical ensembles from experiments with new models of democracy to ‘negotiating democratic practices’, which may more accurately represent the decision-making processes and

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recognition of specific areas of expertise within contemporary ensembles (2010: 4). Duška Radosavljević’s The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre Makers discusses in detail these reconfigurations of the ensemble. She argues that [t]he twenty-first century ensemble takes into consideration different funding structures, different attitudes to tradition and innovation, changing conceptions of leadership and authority and varying artistic vocabularies [and identifies the characteristics of the contemporary ensemble as] shared authority, multi-ethnicity, cultural mobility, multilingualism, inter-disciplinarity and a broad understanding of theatre and performance. (2013: 11–12) In the Portuguese context, shared authority, interdisciplinarity and a broad understanding of theatre and performance are strong features of contemporary ensembles, while multi-ethnicity, cultural mobility and multilingualism are less so. Radosavljević’s book also debates the advantages and disadvantages of the occasional ensemble. Mike Alfreds of Shared Experience and Method and Madness notes that with longer-term ensembles, there are problems of exhaustion and over-familiarity. On the other hand, he is highly critical of the project-by-project ensemble: Theatre is a most inefficient business these days. Many productions mean a group of people who probably don’t know each other, have never worked together before and have no shared language, trying to create a complex phenomenon, a performance, in far too short a time. That’s why so often everyone is cutting corners to get the show on at what looks like a presentable level. If theatre practitioners were surgeons, people would be dying in their hundreds on the operating table. And if we were engineers, bridges would be crashing down around us. (2013: 183) Emma Rice, who has maintained a consistent engagement with Shakespeare in her theatre work and as the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, balances both the pros and cons of the contemporary ensemble. While she recognizes that familiarity can breed contempt, she notes that ‘familiarity also breeds a shared language, a shared understanding and a shorthand, and a

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bravery, a fearlessness that, if you balance [it], the dividends can be extraordinarily high’. For Rice, managing less permanent structures has its challenges. As she suggests: ‘[w]hat’s hard is when you are sort of grafting new people – so you’ve got one person who doesn’t know what they are doing and everybody else who knows it backwards, and it’s quite a mismatch’ (2013: 99, 104). In the Portuguese context, with a relatively small performance sector where funding is invariably inadequate, great emphasis is placed on the importance of affective relationships and working across each other’s projects as a way of mitigating the problems of alienation of the occasional ensemble identified by Alfreds and Rice. In a 2016 interview to promote his Richard III under the revealing title ‘The Pleasure of Bringing Together Friends to Create a Performance’, for instance, the actor and director Tónan Quito remarked: Normally, I don’t choose actors, I choose people. People I feel like spending three months working with. I like being challenged, being with different people who question me and show me that I’m wrong. To be a good actor, you have to work very hard, read a lot, be a generous soul. Having a good voice or good body isn’t important at all. (qtd in Pais 2017: 80) This quote suggests that these affective relationships, sometimes built up over a number of years and sometimes resulting from a desire to work with someone they haven’t worked with before, are not only a necessary form of survival in an underfunded cultural sector but also a central element in the creative process. They are sources of pleasure, surprise and also tension which enable the occasional ensemble to create a performance that cannot be known at the beginning of the process and that is the result of these particular practitioners coming together in a particular place and time. As this quote also illustrates, such affective encounters are considered more important than artistic virtuosity and skill. Practitioners in Radosavljević’s book note that each ensemble is distinct and has its own genealogy. Yet as Quito makes clear, each of the ensemble’s performances are similarly distinct because of the relationships between the particular practitioners involved in that creative process.11

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Doing more for less: Performing Shakespeare In Portugal, the emphasis on the hierarchical structures of the previous generation of theatre makers as opposed to the more democratic structures of the contemporary ensemble is something of a convenient myth for contemporary practitioners who wish to assert their distance from previous theatrical generations and who often substitute new hierarchies for existing ones. Nevertheless, it is true that the ability of practitioners to contribute to performances was curtailed to a far greater degree within these earlier structures and that contemporary ensembles tend to privilege and often demand the contributions of those involved in the process as cocreators. There has, however, been little critical analysis within Shakespeare performance studies of this move from actor to performer and co-creator and its implications both for performance and for performance analysis. The performer as co-creator suggests an equality within the ensemble that is invariably more of an ideal than a reality. It also suggests a more proactive and more collaborative role for the performer than simply working on a character under the guidance of the director. They are asked to contribute to the story the performance will tell about the play and its eventual form. Their cultural memories, thoughts and feelings about the plays are called on in the creative process and activated in a series of tasks in rehearsal. They are asked to help make decisions about what material to keep in a performance and what to discard. Such a process has also diversified the artistic, technical and interpersonal skills of the Shakespeare performer who is now asked to bring a variety of competencies to the creative process. They might be asked to perform music, dance or operate technology as well as act. They may be asked to double roles rather than concentrate on fleshing out one particular character. The issue of whether this is accompanied by greater control over the creative process and final performance is a controversial one, but the move from interpreter of the text to co-creator of the performance event has certainly transformed notions of artistry for the Shakespeare performer and moved the focus away from the star actor to the performer as a member of a multidisciplinary ensemble. This move

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from specialization to generalization in Portugal can also be seen in the fact that most of these performers will perform more often in non-Shakespearean roles than Shakespearean ones, making the boundary between Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare, and between theatre, film and television work increasingly porous. A question that is less often raised but that is particularly pertinent to contemporary Portuguese Shakespeares is that of the social and economic status of the contemporary Shakespearean performer. Budgets and wages, for instance, are rarely mentioned in performance criticism although both are fundamental in determining what can and can’t be done in performance. Encouraged more and more to be an artrepreneur, performers are required by funders to effect social impact, to innovate and to take risks and to find new audiences for their work as well as produce performances. The current economic climate encourages the young performer to accept unpaid internships in the hope of future work opportunities, to freelance and to be self-employed, or leave the country in search of opportunities elsewhere. Limited and shortterm funding opportunities pit individuals and ensembles who have little in common against each other and encourage competition rather than collaboration within the sector. Moreover, the increased participation of spectators in performance can also lead, paradoxically, to the deskilling of the performer. As Jen Harvie has pointed out, ‘[i]t’s [performance’s] endorsement of amateurism can risk de-professionalizing the artist and devaluing artistic expertise, skill, commitment, training and education’ in ways that resonate with neoliberalism’s withdrawal of funding from the public sector. As Harvie also points out, artists have countered neoliberalism’s construction of the artist as an individual entrepreneur by forming ‘horizontal networks of support that defy individualism’, yet the neoliberal cult of impact and constant evaluation has forced most performers to promise funders more for less and to outsource elements of performance to specialists (2013: 23, 41). Contemporary performers of Shakespeare are thus caught in something of a double bind, required to demonstrate a wider variety of skills, to contribute more actively to the creative process and to be responsible for their own risk and innovation, but rarely paid more for doing so and rarely able to construct either specializations or sustained careers due to increasingly precarious working conditions. This inevitably inflects their work with Shakespeare.

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Directing Shakespeare As suggested earlier, the collaborative, co-creating ensemble has also transformed notions of directing Shakespeare, although several models of directing co-exist within contemporary Shakespeares. It is invariably still the name of the director who authors the production and critics tend to refer to the performance as if it were the director’s exclusive vision (from Thomas Ostermeier to Luk Perceval to Nuno Cardoso in Portugal). However, this obscures the fact that the role of the contemporary director within the creative process is less that of interpreter of the text or creator of an innovative vision of the play and more that of a coordinator of texts, persons and tasks who works with practitioners and technicians to produce a theatrical event rather than a performance based on a Shakespeare text. Kevin Ewert’s wide-ranging Shakespeare and Directing in Practice (2018), part of the excellent Palgrave Shakespeare in Practice series, discusses various contemporary approaches to directing Shakespeare, from the director as interpreter or visionary to the director as deviser to the director as a role that can be taken momentarily by any member of the ensemble during the creative process. In his introduction, Ewert asks a question which goes to the heart of debates about directing Shakespeare, namely ‘is a production meant to explain and illustrate “the play” or is it a response to it, and therefore always a new work in its own right?’ (2018: 5). Contemporary directors in Portugal tend towards viewing their performances as autonomous works for the stage, even when they work with full-length Shakespeare texts in translation rather than devised texts. For many, the creation of resonant stage images, evocative lighting schemes and patterns of movement across the stage are as important as the text they perform. Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s expansive notion of the director as ‘a window through which any member of the collaborative team can approach the shared effort’ (qtd in Ewert 2018: 47) is rare within Shakespearean performance, although companies who work without a director, like Teatro Praga in Portugal (see Chapter 1), operate somewhat in this way.12 It is difficult to generalize about the role of the director in the contemporary period, but they are rarely the entirely authoritative figures of the past and more often the figure responsible for choosing from the material generated in rehearsals what remains in the final performance. As Ewert suggests

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in relation to the 2012 adaptation of Richard II, Richie, by Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, ‘the director’s work is in refining and clarifying the emergent gestural and spatial vocabulary that, again, comes out of the company’s efforts in dealing with the tasks.’ As Tamara Kissane, a member of Little Green Pig Concern, aptly puts it ‘[t]he actors and the director are having a collaboration but somebody is in charge of “making sure”’ (2018: 88–9).

Dramaturgies of the Shakespearean trace In his work on the contemporary dramatists he labels writers for the stage, Bruno Tackels details the various strategies used by these dramatists to deconstruct the theatrical canon: [t]hey are not afraid . . . of twisting, diverting, looting, condensing, cutting, reducing, crystallizing and disassembling the texts of the repertoire. They mix them with their own words in order to bear witness to both past and present, convinced that they should not allow the words of the past to dictate their language. (2015: 25)13 Several of the Portuguese artists dealt with in this book have just such an iconoclastic approach to Shakespeare, casting the Shakespearean text as an obstacle to contemporary performance which should be dispensed with altogether or undergo substantial reformulation. Some practitioners base their performances on Shakespeare plays while completely rewriting them or integrating new visual or musical material. Tiago Rodrigues, whose work is discussed in Chapter 2, includes excerpts from Shakespeare within performances that also include excerpts from novels, poems and literary biographies and transforms Shakespearean poetry into contemporary choreography. Contemporary practitioners plunder texts from the past to make political points about the present, as with Nuno Cardoso in Chapter 3 and Christiane Jatahy in Chapter 4. As Tackels suggests, it is not that the text disappears in writing for the stage but rather that the text is reworked as sound or movement and is combined with other forms of textual and non-textual material (2015: 95). Many times, these dramaturgical collaborations with Shakespeare are crafted around the particular

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performers involved and the texts created bear traces of their bodies and their imaginative responses to the play. These are textual collaborations with Shakespeare in the sense that the performance brings together the artistic contributions of multiple authors that include but are not restricted to Shakespeare, but it is not always clear in what sense Shakespeare actively collaborates in these initiatives. Even when artists choose to work with full-length Shakespearean texts, translation choices can defamiliarize what seems to be a familiar text in order to create performable texts for particular productions. The choice to translate poetry into prose, for instance, can result from the director’s view of the society depicted in the play and the play’s potential audience. Cuts to the text to reduce performances to the now regulation hour and a half can radically reshape what is conventionally considered to be the text of the play. As in other national contexts where the idea of a single Shakespearean text has given way to the notion of multiple texts for performance, even the text chosen for translation implies particular artistic choices. mala voadora, for instance, deliberately chose to perform the First Quarto Hamlet, a decision that is discussed further in Chapter 5. Several important questions are raised by these dramaturgical collaborations with Shakespeare, most obviously what remains of Shakespeare within them. It is noticeable in this respect that many of the artists in this book market their performances as their own rather than Shakespeare’s. In one, Shakespeare was given equal billing with the composer Henry Purcell and both appeared under the name of the company. In another, the play was credited through its title while Shakespeare was not. Given what we know of Shakespearean dramaturgy, it cannot be said that such collaborative dramaturgy is in any sense un-Shakespearean, but the notion of the Shakespeare play as simply raw material for a contemporary performance differs radically from the idea of a Shakespeare adaptation or even an appropriation and suggests more far-reaching processes of reworking the text that include its almost total absence. In this sense, this book details an increasing tendency towards the presence of Shakespearean traces in contemporary performance rather than Shakespearean texts, whether this involves words from the Shakespeare text or memories of those texts and performances.

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Expanded performance spaces In their introduction to Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm, Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen suggest that the early modern stage can be seen as ‘a topological “node”, and interface linking different times and spaces in a multidimensional theatrical experience’ (2016: 2). The notion of theatrical space as an interface between different spaces and times might also be applied productively to the analysis of contemporary constructions of space in Portuguese Shakespearean performances. They have considerably expanded ideas about space from notions of stage design and the materialization onstage of the imaginative spaces of the text. Explorations of space now include the role of theatrical architecture in the creation of theatrical meaning, the position of the theatre within the city, performances in non-theatrical spaces, site-specific performances and the wider ecology of performance. Moreover, the increased interaction between performers and spectators in contemporary performance has also rendered the distinction between the space of the stage and audience space more permeable. The use of new technologies has opened up new virtual spaces in performance that further amplify the imagined spaces of the text. Connections between local, national and global spaces increasingly shape performance, and it is clear that the question of space and the ways in which it creates and transforms meaning is a central concern in contemporary performance and one that is essentially multidimensional. In Portugal, most performances of Shakespeare take place within conventional theatrical spaces, although the need to involve various theatres in co-producing performances often means that particular performances will travel to different theatres and adapt the performances to their technical and spatial requirements. The fact that there are two national theatres in Lisbon and Porto, for instance, means that performances will often be conceived with both these very different spaces in mind. Often, such adaptation has to occur with only the minimum of preparation and so contemporary Shakespeares tend to be less burdened with heavy stage equipment and elaborate stage designs. Teatro Praga, who have made a point of including a large, expensive stage item in their productions, are the exception in this tendency towards greater stage minimalism.

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Besides major developments in lighting and sound technology, the rapid development of easy-to-use digital technologies has enabled performers to use real-time filming within performance. This can function as a complement or counterpoint to events on the stage and create events and characters that it would be impossible to represent using performers. It can suggest spaces beyond the stage, from the spaces offstage to the spaces outside the theatre. The use of such technology in performances of Shakespeare remains irregular. Some companies use a great deal of onstage technology. Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies (2007–) is one example of a performance where technology is less an adjunct to a production than its rationale. Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (2014), an algorithmic recreation of Hamlet, questions the nature of liveness in contemporary performance, as the one actor onstage receives instructions from an earpiece while the computer algorithms take on almost human form. Critics have suggested that this use of technology blinds audiences to the possibility of their own agency in this digitally controlled environment, but Dorsen’s work productively suggests that this need not be the case and the discussion of Christiane Jatahy’s adaptation of Macbeth in Chapter 4 examines the ethical and political questions raised by the use of new technologies in performance. Although most Shakespeares in Portugal take place in theatrical spaces, there are occasional productions that take place outdoors, taking advantage of the temperate climate.14 Most of these are geared towards spectacle and foregrounding the large properties in which they take place. They focus on the feel-good factor in Shakespeare and the depiction of love and romance, avoiding more sombre or controversial interpretations of the texts. They take place in the gardens of palaces or large parks, which tends to reinforce connections between Shakespeare and elite culture. Often, however, these performances are created by younger performers without access to conventional theatre spaces and they are sponsored by owners of these locations who are keen to bring in more national and international tourists. The question of Shakespeare and ecology has been taken up within recent eco-critical approaches to Shakespearean performance. Randall Martin has argued that ‘Shakespeare’s greatest possibilities for becoming our eco-contemporary . . . lie not in academic discourse but in performance’ and that Shakespeare’s signature practice of drawing spectators’ attention to the temporal and physical actualities of stage performance

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also encourages them to reimagine both natural and manmade environments not merely as the décor of his dramatic narratives, but as dynamic contexts that materially shape human and nonhuman relations and identities. (2015: 8, 167) In Portugal, while there is general concern about the consequences of climate change, such eco-critical concerns have rarely been addressed consistently, although they were indirectly evoked in Tónan Quito’s Richard III.15 It could be argued that the tendency towards stage minimalism mitigates such a situation. However, lighting and sound systems still consume vast amounts of energy and the need to travel to different theatrical spaces and to test lighting and sound in each new theatrical venue is a practice that contributes negatively to a production’s ecological footprint. Baz Kershaw’s notion of theatre/performance ecology combines various systems of performance in an integrated ecosystem which includes words, lighting, bodies, state funding, audiences and natural/social environments. For Kershaw, theatre/performance ecology refers to the interrelationships of all the factors of particular theatrical (or performance) systems, including their organic and non-organic components and ranging from the smallest and/or simplest to the greatest or/and most complex. . . . These terms can also refer to the interrelationships between theatres (or performances) and their environments, especially when interdependence between theatres/performances and their environments is implied. (2007: 15–16) This wide-ranging approach responds to the expanded notion of space in contemporary performance in ways that highlight productively the interdependence of the various materials of performance within a wider ecology of the performance event.

Emancipated spectators As Anna R. Burzyńska has remarked, ‘[t]he nineteenth century was a century of actors. The twentieth century was a century of directors. The twenty-first century is a century of spectators’ (2016:

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9). Contemporary practitioners in Portugal, as in other national contexts, have experimented with new roles for spectators and much critical work within Shakespeare performance studies has analysed the political and ethical implications of this participation. Two examples of global performances that have included spectatorperformers and that have been analysed extensively for the questions they raise are Ivo van Hove’s The Roman Tragedies (2007–) and Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre version of Macbeth, Sleep no More (2011–). Critical analysis has also focused on performances at the reconstructed Globe Theatre and their interplay with audiences. Indeed, Robert Shaughnessy notes that the Globe and Punchdrunk, despite their artistic differences, both share the view ‘that participation is enabling, empowering, democratic and even transformative’ (2013: 144). Jen Harvie has also suggested that what she labels ‘delegated art practices’, where responsibility for creating sections of performance is given to spectators, attempt to model new forms of democracy in a period of increasing disillusionment with formal political democracy. She argues that such practices ‘model shared participation, engagement, community and responsibility-taking, features which are perhaps particularly important if conventional political models of democracy such as parliamentary democracy are feeling worn, slow, disappointing, faulty, moribund or dysfunctional’ (2013: 40). However, as the term ‘delegated art practices’ suggests, most audience members are given no credit or payment for their performances. Harvie cautions, therefore, that ‘what might appear to be participation in such art and performance might be understood more accurately as delegated or outsourced labour’ (2013: 43). The move towards greater spectator participation owes much to the promise of greater interaction promised by new technologies as well as to a sense that the overtly political messages of theatre makers of previous generations failed to move their audiences to action as Brecht and decades of counter  cultural political theatre had hoped. A crucial text for this present generation of theatre makers in Portugal is Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator (2011). Yet although artists have taken on board Rancière’s desire to open up the theatrical experience to multiple interpretations and to involving the spectators as co-creators of the performance, they have been less interested in his notion that participations should be based on recognition of the equal intelligence of both

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spectators and performers. This poses important ethical and political questions about the quality of such participation and the balance between consent and enforcement. They have chosen also to ignore Rancière’s argument that such imaginative co-creation by the spectator can take place as much in a seat of a darkened auditorium as through physical interaction onstage. In some performances, the emancipation of the spectator is reduced therefore to limited individual choices and decisionmaking as practitioners themselves increasingly evade their own responsibilities in the creation of performance. This is very far from the notion of emancipation as social and collective empowerment in the tradition of the Brazilians Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal and which informs discussion of Christiane Jatahy’s immersive take on Macbeth in Chapter 4. Operating within a neoliberal context of individualism and the so-called power to consume, the invitation, and sometimes obligation, to participate has encouraged a sense of entitlement rather than empowerment in spectators, as they demand thrilling and unique theatrical experiences where their participation is guaranteed as part of the price of the ticket. Undoubtedly, the physical and emotional frisson that accompanies such participation enables spectators to experience surprise, fear, suspense, joy, excitement and uncertainty. It can help build awareness of community and shared responsibilities and rights. However, it can also encourage spectators to disengage their critical faculties to such an extent that the thrill of the moment takes precedence over notions of critical engagement, caretaking, ethical decision-making and the ability to simply refuse to take part. Such paradoxes lie at the heart of the challenge of the contemporary, not only in contemporary performances but also in contemporary performance criticism, a subject that is dealt with in Chapter 6 of this book.

1 Border crossings Intermedial collaborations in Teatro Praga’s Shakespeare trilogy

Teatro Praga (Theatre of the Plague) were for many years the enfants terribles of Portuguese theatre because of their provocative deconstruction of theatrical conventions. Yet during the decade of their Shakespeare trilogy (A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010), The Tempest (2013) and Timon of Athens (2019)), they were negotiating their entry into the theatrical mainstream.1 As the name suggests, the company maintain a love–hate relationship with the theatre, for while they are clearly Teatro Praga, notions of plague and its evocation of Artaud suggest the necessary destruction of outmoded theatrical forms so that new ones can emerge. In their sustained challenge to the theatrical forms of the past, the company have chosen to work without a director and to create performances based on collaboration between the permanent members of the company and other invited artists. In an interview with Gustavo Vicente, Praga’s Pedro Penim has argued that in the company’s work ‘there is a critique and a questioning of your inheritance, the area in which you work, your peers, but there’s also a desire for recognition of this world where we want to continue to work, in this uncomfortable territory’ (qtd in Vicente 2012: 74). For the exploration of this ‘uncomfortable territory’, the company’s trademark performative

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irony both affirms and parodies the conventions of Shakespearean performance.2 It negates their universality in order to reaffirm the possibility of their transformation. It accepts the fact that while they can be ridiculous, outdated, disappointing, absurd or simply boring, they can also be illuminating, pleasurable, committed, enjoyable and surprising. As such, performing Shakespeare is something with which Praga have been keen to experiment, but also to avoid reproducing uncritically like the proverbial plague. This particular brand of irony might seem antithetical to the tragic focus of a book on crisis, disempowerment and erasure. However, such double-edged irony does not avoid the tragic elements of the contemporary. It simply suggests that irreverent play might be a more plausible political and aesthetic strategy for change than nihilism, cynicism or enforced topicality. In each of their performances, Praga have combined contemporary rewritings of the plays with semi-operas by Henry Purcell.3 This has given a sense of unity to a trilogy which is varied in terms of genre and has also raised questions of canonicity, textual authority and theatricality in relation to Shakespeare. The trilogy has consistently played with a distinction between the canonicity accorded to Shakespeare and to the Shakespearean text and the enjoyable musical and visual spectacles created by Purcell the court entertainer. This has served to reshape Shakespearean performance itself as an enjoyable, pleasurable, co-authored experience rather than a representation of fixed textual meanings or a unique directorial vision of a play. Moreover, each of these performances has examined key elements of contemporary performance practice, whether the performer in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the spectator in The Tempest or cultural institutions in Timon of Athens. This has made their performances of Shakespeare not only highly self-reflexive but also distinctly contemporary in terms of their aesthetics. In political terms, Praga have also challenged the heteronormativity, gender roles, colonial and environmental premises that have structured the reproduction of Shakespeare texts in performance. The self-reflexivity of these performances has been enhanced by the various artistic collaborations within this trilogy. While collaboration is at the heart of many theatrical processes, the range and variety of collaborators in these three Shakespeare performances is less often so. Praga have invited singers and musicians to perform excerpts from the Purcell semi-operas, but

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also visual artists to create installations and video artists to create moments of filming in real time. On the one hand, this has expanded the performance ensemble beyond the permanent members of the company and encouraged openness to multiple perspectives on the Shakespeare play. On the other, this has also raised questions about the relationship between the arts in a period which has also seen the greater integration of new technologies. In a recent contribution to the section on media and technology in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare in Performance (2017), W. B. Worthen has suggested that critical work on intermediality tends to discuss technology as if it were an adjunct to live performance rather than part of the structure of performance itself. Adopting the concept of ‘technical system’ from Bernard Stiegler, Worthen advances discussions of Shakespearean intermediality beyond the reflexive staging of relationships between the live and the mediatized to ‘the ways in which theatre as an assemblage represents the human at the defining interface with technology’ (2017: 321).4 He outlines a notion of technicity in Shakespearean performance as a meeting place between various forms of ‘technology’: [t]echnicity, . . . shifts our attention from the uses of ‘technology’ in the theatre – as though those instruments operated within some larger, non-technological framework, as though theatrical performance used technologies but remained distinct from them – to the instruments, objects, spaces, construction, and practices of performance as a ‘technical system’. (2017: 321) Worthen’s notion of technicity is an important reminder that actor training, lighting, dramaturgy and scenography are also forms of performance technology which combine with newer visual and immersive technologies to form the wider technical system of a particular performance. His formulation distinguishes less between digital and more conventional artistic forms. Technicity also invites parallels between the particular technical systems of performance and the wider technical systems of contemporary surveillance, social media, war and the organization of labour outside theatrical performance. This chapter builds on Worthen’s formulation of Shakespearean technicity to analyse the role of intermedial collaborations in Praga’s Shakespeare trilogy. As Aneta Manciewicz has noted, ‘[i]f contemporary players still hold a mirror up to

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nature, it tends to be an intermedial one’ and the chapter highlights the artistic, technological and political crossings at the heart of these collaborations as they foreground similarities and differences between artistic forms in deliberately reflexive ways. As a result, as Manciewicz also suggests, intermedial collaborations encourage ‘multi-perspectivity in terms of presenting characters, situations and themes’ as well as ‘responsiveness to current political, aesthetic, and technological tendencies’ (2014: 8, 83). In the process, this intermedial contagion has reconceived artistic collaboration less in terms of fixed, long-term relationships within one artistic form and more in terms of rhizomatic and contingent networks bringing artists from different artistic backgrounds together for individual projects.

What’s love got to do with it? A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010) Aneta Manciewicz has suggested that ‘[o]ne could write the history of modern European theatre by tracing the alteration of stage devices and performance styles in productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (2014: 12). Even in more conventional productions of the play, it is common for elements of music and dance to contribute to performance of the play as spectacle and such artistic crossings have characterized the recent performance history of the play in Portugal.5 Teatro Praga performed their Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2010, one year before the Portuguese government asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission and the European Central Bank to bail them out of the global financial crisis.6 The performance was commissioned by the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB), a venue built to house the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union in 1992. In the hiatus between the extensive financial rewards of European integration for Portugal and the imposition of profound austerity measures, Praga’s spectacular performance reflected greater investment in the arts since the late 1990s, while also hinting at the turnaround in this funding in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis. As in Midsummer Night’s Dream itself, where the changing relationships between the lovers make the present transitory and the future

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uncertain, the performance picked up on this contemporary mood of optimism shadowed by intuition of impending crisis in a performance where present pleasures were no guarantee of future delights. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is invariably performed in Portugal as a feel-good comedy. However, this Dream, although very much a comedy, also focused on darker aspects of love such as rejection and loss. It treated ironically the contemporary cultural injunction to seek happiness through personal relationships promoted in selfhelp literature and television talk shows. Such cultural products encourage individuals to believe that if they have not found happiness through love and personal fulfilment, this is due to their own lack of positive thinking. Praga’s Dream, while acknowledging the pull of these ideas on contemporary relationships, parodied their claim to be universal panaceas for the contemporary condition and explored the ways in which intermedial collaboration might offer alternative forms of happiness to the clichés and banalities of the essentially individual, consumerist solutions offered by these cultural products. The invitation from a major cultural institution and the substantial budget that accompanied the invitation represented a new challenge for Praga. As the company’s dramaturg José Maria Vieira Mendes mused rhetorically, ‘[w]ere we no longer the off, radical artists, but a collective that could play Shakespeare in a 1000 seat auditorium? Or were we the counter power that the power wants to have on its side?’7 Praga’s response was to reproduce the commission from the CCB in a series of their own commissions to musicians, singers, visual and video artists. As they explained in the Prologue to the performance: We commissioned other artists. We handed over parts of the performance to them. We exercised our power. That is why there are moments tonight which are the exclusive responsibility of other people. (2)8 The word ‘commission’, with its slippage between request and order, illustrates the somewhat ambiguous workings of power within these invitations. In this case, Praga maintained overall artistic control of the performance but gave a large degree of freedom to the artists they invited. The visual artists Ana Pérez

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Quiroga, João Pedro Vale, Catarina Campino and Javier Nuñez Gasco were informed, for instance, that they would be working with large rectangular black boxes onstage and that these would be occupied by performers, but other artistic decisions about the installations were left to the individual artists. The Músicos do Tejo, opera soloists and the Olisipo choir rehearsed Purcell’s The Fairy Queen separately while André Godinho worked regularly but not consistently with the company as the video director. This meant that much of the performance only came together towards the end of the rehearsal process when the various commissions were combined in the final performance. Praga also commissioned a group of younger performers to perform as an ad hoc ensemble known as The End of Irony. This ensemble stood in for Praga’s own countercultural past and prefigured future forms of Shakespearean performance in Portugal. In the same year that Praga performed their Dream, Sarah Ahmed published The Promise of Happiness. Responding to what she called ‘a happiness turn’, resulting from a consolidation of ‘the happiness industry’, Ahmed noted an increase in the publication of books on the science and economics of happiness from 2005 onwards (2010: 2). Ahmed illustrates the ways in which happiness becomes attached to certain ‘happy objects’. Often, these happy objects reinforce connections between happiness and class, gender or racial privilege and Ahmed makes clear that unhappiness results not from a lack of positive thinking but a recognition of social and political inequality. Ahmed does not discuss specifically the role attributed to love in the promise of happiness, but undoubtedly it constituted the period’s central ‘happy object’. Yet as A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrates, connections between love and happiness are by no means taken for granted. Dynastic marriage is clearly bound up with the consolidation of patriarchal and state power. Love and violence, including the threat of rape, are intimately connected and the volatility of desire renders the connection between sexual desire, love and the social institution of marriage unstable. Even the labelling of the play as a straightforward comedy is challenged by the mechanicals’ description of their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe as a ‘lamentable comedy’ (1.2.11), which is echoed in Theseus’s description of it as ‘tragical mirth’ (5.1.57).9 On a more earthly level, Bottom insists that the only way their performance can be a ‘sweet comedy’ (4.2.42) is if the actors refrain from eating

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onions and garlic. All this suggests that underneath this feel-good comedy where danger gives way to the pleasures of love, there is a potential for tragedy as gender and class inequalities render love an ambivalent ‘happy object’.10 When Praga updated the play’s focus on love and desire in their contemporary rewriting of the play, they did so in a way that reflected the play’s less than rosy view of love. The intermedial collaborations with other artists enabled a diverse representation of the experience of love whilst their onstage combination emphasized in particular the relationship between pleasure and pain. Among the various phrases repeated throughout the performance was a short exchange that highlighted this relationship: HERMIA Why is it so difficult? LYSANDER Because if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be so good. HERMIA I’ve never understood that. (32) Purcell’s Fairy Queen also deals with the paradoxes of pain and pleasure in love. One of the songs included in this performance was ‘If Love Is Sweet Pleasure, Why Does It Torment?’ where love is conceived in bittersweet terms: If Love's a Sweet Passion, why does it torment? If a Bitter, oh tell me whence comes my content? Since I suffer with pleasure, why should I complain, Or grieve at my Fate, when I know ‘tis in vain? Yet so pleasing the Pain, so soft is the Dart, That at once it both wounds me, and tickles my Heart. (Act 3)11 In Praga’s Dream, the song was sung by a female soloist and later by a female performer from Praga. While the singer addressed the audience through the convention of the fourth wall, the Praga vocalist sang the song into a mirror, introducing an element of narcissism into this experience of pleasurable suffering. As such, the different media were used to stage contrasting perspectives on the

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same theme that complemented and sometimes contradicted each other. The non-binary, queer possibilities of Shakespeare’s Dream and Purcell’s The Fairy Queen were also foregrounded as the different configurations of the Dream’s couples in the Athenian wood included not only heteronormative but also queer couplings. The queerness of the Shakespearean lovers appeared to be intermedially catching as the duet ‘No Kissing at All’, from Purcell’s Fairy Queen, was also given a queer twist by performing it as a duet between two male soloists. One of the lovers, Coridon, sang of his desire for a kiss, while another male singer playing the coy maid Mopsa attempted to fend off his advances: MOPSA Why, how now, Sir Clown, what makes you so bold? I’d have ye to know I’m not made of that mold. I tell you again, Maids must never Kiss no Men. No, no: no Kissing at all; I’ll not Kiss, till I Kiss you for good and all. CORIDON Not Kiss you at all? MOPSA No, no, no Kissing at all! CORIDON Why no Kissing at all? MOPSA I’ll not Kiss, till I Kiss you for good and all. (Act 3) While this duet was originally written for bass and soprano, more recent performances of The Fairy Queen have seen the duet queered by a bass and a countertenor in drag, a convention that was repeated in this performance but without the distancing effect of female costume. Extending the queer contagion, the installation by João Pedro Vale ‘Victoria’s Secret’ challenged the association of the brand with lingerie for White women, by having a Black ‘fairy’ with pink wings and lingerie played by well-known drag performer Jenny La Rue emerge from one of the black boxes on the stage. Heteronormative marriage and reproduction were completely absent in this performance. The lovers were unwilling to sacrifice their independence for marriage and, while in Shakespeare’s Dream,

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Oberon looks forwards at the end of the play to the lovers bearing children ‘[a]nd the issue there create / Ever shall be fortunate’ (5.1.395–6), this Dream made no mention at all of marriage or children, perfectly formed or otherwise. Additionally, the ending did not include Purcell’s ‘They shall be as happy as they’re fair’ and its linkage between happiness, racialized standards of beauty and heteronormative closure. The ending thus represented a queer challenge to the ‘reproductive futurity’ of both the play and the semi-opera.12 In an open mike session around accounts of contemporary love, Demetrius complained that ‘[i]t’s horrible being in love. Being in love means opening your heart. You open your heart and the other person can come inside you and ruin everything’ (31). In a similar vein, Helena admitted, ‘I’m friends with nobody when I’m in love. When I’m in love, I’m mean. I’m petty. I’m horrible. Love makes me mean. Love brings out the worst in me’ (29). Nevertheless, despite this apparent voicing of inner truths by the performers, the presence of the microphones made clear that even these private and individual feelings were mediated by public forms of communication. It illustrated how individuals frame their experience of love in ways that are inseparable from cultural forms such as popular song (at one stage Titania affirmed that she ‘just called to say I love you’), popular psychology (Demetrius talked of his need for independence, comparing love to a form of enslavement), decontextualized facts gleaned from the internet (there was much talk about reading auras and the idea that we only use 10 per cent of our mental capacities). All of this suggested that the experience of love is always already traced out beforehand as an intermedial happy object, a path which lovers are encouraged to follow blindly rather than (re)invent for themselves (Figure 1). While these artistic crossings enabled multi-perspectivity on the representation of love and connections with technological and cultural forms outside performance, other collaborations pointed to the porousness of the boundaries between theatre and other arts. The visual artist Javier Nuñez Gasco picked up on Praga’s characteristic irony and challenged audience members to watch the performances with their eyes closed. As this challenge emerged on a screen, spotlights surveyed the actual audience to check who obeyed this injunction, reinforcing connections with contemporary mechanisms of visual surveillance. In Catarina Campino’s

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FIGURE 1 Cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010), Teatro Praga, photograph by Paulo Pacheco. Courtesy of Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Guimarães.

installation, a male and female performer were discovered in an embrace. As their bodies were painted white, they resembled statues, particularly Rodin’s The Kiss (1901–4). It was only when the two figures separated that it became clear they were live performers. This installation/performance challenged distinctions between sculpture and performance,13 while both visual artists contributed to Praga’s exploration of contemporary performance by examining the changing relationship between the visual and the performing arts, artistic subjects and objects, performers and spectators. Yet each artist kept their own identity, for the name of the artist and the materials used appeared in white letters over the installations, identifying them as the creators of these moments. The integration of other arts in performance is by no means a tendency only of the contemporary. Chiel Kattenbelt’s notion of theatre as a hypermedium or ‘a space where the art forms of theatre, opera and dance meet, interact and integrate, with the media of cinema, television, video and the new technologies; creating profusions of texts, inter-texts, inter-media and spaces in-between’ illustrates this longer-term tendency of theatre to act as an intermedial meeting

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point between the various arts (2006: 24). Contemporary theatre practice, however, foregrounds this relationship with different art forms more reflexively. Nuñez Gasco’s relational work, for instance, explicitly raised the question of when a visual art piece itself becomes a performance through its inclusion of the performance’s spectators in the artwork. While all these intermedial collaborations were important to the performance, perhaps the most vital one concerned the two very different theatre ensembles: the long-term, well-established ensemble of Teatro Praga and the ad hoc ensemble The End of Irony. In interviews with Theseus framed as celebrity chat shows using real-time filming, members of the latter defined the end of irony as ‘looking at the things we love, but that we are ashamed to love, and removing the shame’ (9) and commented on their trajectories within contemporary performance. Diogo emphasized his national and international training as well as his background in the visual arts.14 Ivo trained as a computer engineer at one of the most prestigious universities in the country before he ‘found out’ he was ‘a faggot’ and left the country. He listed his interests as ‘experimental music, performativity and new technologies’ (9). Ricardo left for Berlin to train as an actor after the Conservatoire had rejected him because he had a Porto accent, acknowledging, however, that having rich parents helped him to train abroad. Miguel simply wanted to entertain. Although each of these statements were laced with irony, they gave an interesting sense of future Portuguese theatre practice as increasingly intermedial, transnational and queer. Moreover, when discussing Praga’s invitation to perform the Pyramus and Thisbe section of the play, Diogo remarked: To begin with, we hated the idea. . . . Of course, we already knew the play, but the most obvious reference was the Thomas Ostermeier version with Constanza Macras that we really hated . . . so 2005 . . . ha ha ha. (15) Ricardo added, ‘the play is a bore . . . come on, it really is shit! That scene with the fairies. . . . It’s totally São Mamede de Infesta Medieval Fair but for an educated Lisbon audience.’ However, the group claimed that they came around to the idea after seeing the Beatles performing the play within the play on YouTube. They acknowledged that the play was a bore but agreed to do it anyway,

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something that they admitted was ‘always happening’. This exchange was written by Praga’s dramaturg rather than The End of Irony and such performative ventriloquism pointed to contemporary intersections between theatrical and popular culture but also to enforced performances inside and outside the theatrical sphere. Praga’s changing status enabled them to outsource the Pyramus and Thisbe episode to younger performers as they outsourced the fairy world to musicians and singers. Somewhat ironically therefore, it was the lower-status performers who performed Shakespeare more or less ‘straight’ while Praga performed their own rewritten script with its Shakespearean traces. The visual artists, singers and musicians and performers thus created an intermedial equivalent of the artisans, fairies and lovers in the Dream and hinted at how questions of power informed the artistic collaborations between these different spheres. Praga claimed in the programme for the Dream that they wanted to ‘provide enjoyment and relaxation’, drawing a parallel with evenings where people avoid ‘certain topics’ so that ‘the conversation can flow’. Being a spectator at the performance should be like ‘driving on the freeway to the Algarve, baroque music playing on the radio, your friend sitting next to you kissing your neck’ even if in the future this means that there will be ‘an astronomical bill’ to pay when Winter comes. The programme noted that the special effects in Purcell’s second production of The Fairy Queen led this successful production to financial ruin and while this contemporary, largescale intermedial spectacle promoted a vision of a contemporary Shakespeare as entertaining and enjoyable without breaking the bank, Portugal’s ‘bill’ to pay after the 2008 financial crisis was certainly ‘astronomical’. Praga’s next performance of Shakespeare took place during the period of economic austerity that followed and was very different in tone to the queer abandon of this Dream.

Sweet dreams are made of this: The Tempest (2013) Of the Shakespeare trilogy, The Tempest was perhaps the least successful performance.15 It combined many of the same elements as the Dream, such as the contemporary rewriting of the play,

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the Purcell semi-opera and the combination of live and filmed performance. It was performed in the same space (CCB) and also invited the same visual artists. However, it added little that was new and there were long passages towards the end of the performance around the themes of death and loss which seemed rambling. While the main conceit of the Dream, an intermedial exploration of the contemporary experience of love, was both clear and explored in diverse forms, the central conceit of this Tempest was more diffuse. It was simultaneously an exploration of tropicalist and isolationist notions of an island, an investigation of the power relationship between performers and spectators and a meditation on various forms of beginnings and endings, both in life and in art. The relationship to the Shakespeare text was also less clearly marked. At times, there were direct quotations from the play. At others, the company’s customary use of the names and autobiographies of the performers seemed to render the relationship with The Tempest less relevant than the relationship with Praga’s previous performances. In Tiago Bartolomeu Costa’s review of the performance, it is revealing that much of the review relies on echoes with earlier Praga performances.16 While such strategies have worked to produce moments of affective recognition on the part of spectators, here it seemed to indicate a degree of creative stasis. The scenography by Bárbara Falcão Fernandes, however, created two innovative visions of the play’s island. In the first, actors, singers and technicians performed in and around a large metal cage, creating a self-contained, self-referential island. Falcão Fernandes’s cage was also a central element in the performance’s exploration of contemporary spectatorship, as the containment of the performers within the cage rendered the experience of spectatorship one that combined the power of spectators over performers with suggestions of pleasurable voyeurism. As the performance began, images of the night’s audience were projected onto a large screen at the back of the stage, highlighting both their discomfort and attempts to use the situation to their own advantage. The performers then introduced elements of irony into this set-up by focusing the camera on individual spectators and asking what they thought of the performance. Without giving them time to reply, performers answered for the muted spectators with comments such as ‘[i]t’s like this, the performance itself: no . . . The audience were amazing’ (3) or even ‘I liked the bit where my opinion was dubbed. It meant I wasn’t made responsible

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for having an opinion’ (4), temporarily altering the dynamics of power in favour of the performers. Prospero (André e. Teodósio) later referred to the audience as ‘people I don’t know and don’t trust’ (40), continuing this focus on shifting spectator–performer dynamics. This sequence at the beginning of the performance was doubly ironic in that the audience were asked for their opinions of the performance before it began, and ideas of finite beginnings and endings morphed throughout the performance. The word ‘End’ was projected onto the screen several times and ‘Epilogue’ appeared near the beginning of the performance together with summaries of the performance. Film credits with the names of the cast and crew were projected during rather than at the end of the performance. The intermedial potential of infinite beginnings and endings was picked up by the visual artist Catarina Campino in her ‘Thriller’ dance of the living dead, also entitled ‘This Is Not It: The Show Must Go On’, where the ‘rap’ was credited to Henry Purcell. This interrogation of theatrical endings and beginnings in a play conventionally considered a Shakespearean ending and which makes much of its backstory fed into an exploration of the indeterminacy of life’s beginnings and endings. Sycorax (Cláudia Jardim) returned as an unwelcome revenant determined to stage-manage the return of her son Caliban (Diogo Lopes), if only theatrically. Her barbed comment that ‘[t]his island should be yours, are you listening to me?’ made this reattribution of lines from the Shakespeare text into a recognizably contemporary Portuguese exchange between hectoring mother and submissive son. In a long sequence at the end of the play, where Prospero died only to return, the spoken eulogy from his brother Antonio (Diogo Bento) was accompanied by home movies of what appeared to be André e. Teodósio and his real-life brother, as well as an image of the type of necrology pages conventionally found in Portuguese newspapers from the visual artist Javier Nuñes Gasco entitled ‘The Tempest: Cutting, Mourning, Content’.17 Sycorax’s return as stage-manager made her a consistent gendered political rival to Prospero and his authoritarian attempts to direct the performance. She played a central role in visual artist João Pedro Vale’s contemporary take on the play’s masque of goddesses ‘Widows of Culloden’, a ghostly black-and-white catwalk sequence around the idea of a Kate Moss hologram, rendered ironic because of the actress’s less than svelte performing body. The various endings did not resolve the question of who won this gendered struggle for

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power on the island as both Sycorax and Prospero negotiated a presence between life and death, live and filmed performance. In an intermedial staging of their final conflict, the performer playing Sycorax addressed an onstage cut out of the actor playing Prospero, while the actor performing Prospero addressed the actress playing Sycorax on screen. In this series of endings that were not quite endings, Prospero repeated the line ‘Ariel, can we come to an end?’ several times without a response from Ariel herself (Patrícia da Silva) or a clear end to the performance. The notes accompanying the video on the MIT Global Shakespeare site cast Prospero the director as having to deal with a series of underdeveloped characters, such as Miranda, Ferdinand and Antonio. Vasco Araujo’s contribution to the performance highlighted this lack of definition as veiled performers walked across the stage carrying placards with the phrase ‘Do you know who I am?’ in different languages, implicitly challenging the assumption of recognition and familiarity that informs the performance of wellknown Shakespeare plays. Diogo Bento, who later played Antonio, asked the other performers which character he was to play, only to be told that he would play the ‘queer’. Miranda and Ferdinand were ridiculous heterosexual lovers with a limited gestural and physical vocabulary. Miranda (Joana Barrios) interrupted Prospero on the piano with constant crying as he revealed her backstory in song. Most of the exchanges between the lovers took place in a television studio with garish birds, brightly coloured sex toys and other props, where the lovers were directed by Prospero, reinforcing the notion that the language of love is repeated rather than reinvented from their earlier Dream. In one such sequence, Ferdinand (Vicente Trinidade) spoke phrases from the play in an exaggerated declamatory English to an uncomprehending Miranda, who was informed by Prospero that Ferdinand was speaking ‘creole’. Such postcolonial jibes at Shakespearean language were echoed when Antonio gave his final speech in Latin, a dead language that stood in for ‘dead’ Shakespearean English. Prospero referred to Caliban as ‘the missing link’ while images of cinematic savages in blackface were projected onto the screen. He later appeared in leopard-skin briefs in a deliberately fake rape of Miranda. When he entered towards the end with the skeleton of Sycorax, he referred to his mother explicitly as a postcolonial figure. Prospero’s evident desire to control everything onstage, even the filming, and his complaint

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that he was always forced to do everything himself made suspect his construction of the other characters as underdeveloped in relation to his own dramatic fullness. Ideas of rounded versus incomplete theatrical characters were linked in this way with postcolonial, gender and queer critiques of Prospero’s patriarchal and colonial control of the island. His reference to the visual art performances he had ‘ordered’ straddled the same ambiguous territory between order and request as the Dream’s ‘commissions’, reinforcing once again questions of hierarchy within the intermedial collaborations. Later in the play, the metal cage island was replaced by a kitsch version of the island as a contemporary tourist destination, complete with sauna, neon palm tree and plastic ice creams. The Spotify selection for this island sequence included random songs with island in the title from Madonna’s ‘La Isla Bonita’ to Jacques Brel’s ‘Une Île’. This more contemporary musical selection contrasted with the selections from Purcell’s The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1695) which, with the exception of a techno version of ‘Full Fathom Five’, seemed less able to illuminate or complement the performance in the same way as The Fairy Queen with the Dream. The notes on the performance on the MIT site reference Northrop Frye’s notion that the vision the characters have of the island is a projection of who they are and argue that the island can represent paradise for some and hell for others. The two stagings of the island in this performance, the one claustrophobic and insular, the other more tuned towards the ‘Sounds, and sweet airs, that delight and hurt not’ (3.2.136) of the island materialized this subjective approach to questions of reality and illusion.18 However, this did not ignore the contemporary political implications of islands and traumatic sea voyages. While all those onstage and in the audience were referred to as in the same experimental ‘boat’, questions of colonialism, gender and global inequality determined who played the passengers, the crew and who were thrown to the sharks in this ‘brave new world’. After texting a message for help to Prospero, Gonzalo’s speech was returned via translation into Portuguese to its source in Montaigne’s Of the Cannibals (1580) and rendered as a political speech. Yet its adequacy for the present was questioned in moments such as when Prospero read out a definition of freedom as ‘the condition of man’ (14) to the actress playing Ariel and the sexist exclusions of this definition were ridiculed openly by both performers.

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The performance included several mentions of the ‘magic position’ from the song by the Anglo-Irish artist Patrick Wolf. On the face of it, Wolf is a typically Pragian reference, with his kitsch appearance, advocacy of artistic pleasure and anti-normative sexuality. There were direct aesthetic references to the video of the song in Caliban’s leopard-skin briefs and the stars that fell from the sky around Miranda. The magic position was evidently conceived as a pop cultural counterpart to Prospero’s book-based magic and a metaphor for the ideal relationship between performers and spectators. Yet this reference to an eminently memorable yet disposable pop tune might also illuminate the intermedial aims of what Praga viewed, in line with Purcell’s adaptation, as a musical comedy. There may have been too many dark elements in this Tempest for it to function as a musical comedy and there were certainly more conceptual frameworks than could be materialized onstage. However, the ‘magic position’ might stand in for the unrealized potential of this performance to achieve the lightness of touch and felicitous performativity of a song which has been understood as both sweet and dirty, revealing Wolf’s hidden self as well as being a simple entertaining song about contemporary desire. At the end of Praga’s performance, Prospero, standing alone centre stage, wrapped himself in a gold curtain that symbolized his cloak. As he unwrapped himself slowly from this ‘magic position’ and his powers, the performance momentarily achieved this lightness of touch and the possibility of a renewed relationship between performers and spectators in yet another ending that was simultaneously a beginning.

The best things in life are free: Timon of Athens (2019) After years of non-performance in Portugal, Timon of Athens became one of the most performed Shakespeare plays in the years after 2010. The Companhia de Teatro de Almada staged the play at the height of the imposition of austerity measures in Portugal (2012) in a production that focused on questions of money and wealth in its translation choices.19 Nuno Cardoso directed a production of the play near the end of the austerity measures in 2018, which highlighted the rise of

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populism in Europe (see Chapter 3) and Teatro Praga performed the play soon after in 2019 as the final part of their Shakespeare trilogy. This suggests that the play’s cynical take on human relationships and exploration of sudden shifts from wealth to poverty found an echo with contemporary practitioners and audiences during this period of prolonged economic austerity and the rise of populist politics. While the two previous performances were more obviously political, the performance by Teatro Praga seemed less so in its barbed critique of the cultural institutions that produce and legitimate theatre and the increased prominence of cultural intermediaries such as programmers and curators. These criticisms included the CCB itself where their Shakespeare was once again performed.20 However, the performance’s exploration of contemporary configurations of luxury highlighted the ways in which extended rehearsal periods, adequate budgets and Shakespearean performance itself had increasingly become luxuries in the cultural sphere.21 This exploration of shifting distinctions between luxury and necessity in the cultural sphere suggested a wider critique of shifting notions of luxury and necessity in the social and political sphere as permanent jobs and the state provision of health, education and unemployment benefit were rebranded as individual luxuries rather than collective necessities. As in their previous work with Shakespeare, Teatro Praga retained situations, narratives and characters from the play in a contemporary rewriting by José Maria Vieira Mendes and members of the company. In this particular case, this also had the advantage of avoiding some of the stylistic differences of the Shakespeare/ Middleton collaboration and some of the more repetitive elements of the play, such as the scenes with Timon’s creditors or Timon’s torrents of invective against those who visit him in the wood. Praga reduced the cast to Timon, Apemantus, Alcibiades, Flavius, the Poet, the Painter, the Jeweller, a Senator and Timandra in an economic and fluid rewriting of the play. The Ludovice Ensemble, under the irrepressible direction of Fernando Miguel Jalôto, played music from Purcell’s 1674 semi-opera, while the opera singers sang parts of the semi-opera. André Godinho worked once more as the video director, but the intermedial collaborations were not as extensive as they had been previously and there was more concentration on Praga themselves. Their satirical and occasionally dark reading of the play created a first half full of well-aimed jibes at the empty promises of the cultural sector, followed by a very different second

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half illustrating the difficulties of getting away from it all when capitalist modes of consumption inform even attempts to escape its worst excesses. The scenography for the performance (Joana Sousa) combined faux classical white pillars and a faded backdrop of the Acropolis and Parthenon for the representation of a contemporary Athens as a heritage site for tourists. An eclectic combination of jarring contemporary fabrics covered the onstage flaps, reinforcing a sense of the contemporary as itself built out of contradictory materials. Ingeniously, this performance began as Timon’s wealth had already run out. Indeed, the wealth behind Timon’s patronage of the arts might never have existed at all in a world of virtual money, where the rumour of wealth is enough to create the illusion of its existence. An angelic-looking Flavius (David Mesquita) attempted to keep the guests occupied so that they wouldn’t become aware of the change in Timon’s fortunes although rumours of Timon’s downfall had already begun to circulate. In terms of the guests themselves, Praga made innovative use of non-normative casting, using performers who did not fit traditional theatrical models for body shape and undercutting gender and sexual binaries. In a play that is notorious for its dismal roles for women and the misogynistic contempt with which Timandra and Phyrinia are treated in Timon’s rants, Praga’s rewriting brought them centre stage in a series of varied and well-crafted performances. Apemantus (Patrícia da Silva) had an excellent line in put-downs, such as in this exchange with Timandra: APEMANTUS You know, I have a button here and when I don’t want to listen anymore, I turn it off. TIMANDRA Cool! APEMANTUS It’s off. [Leaves] (13)22 The fierce Alcibiades (Cláudia Jardim) railed at the absence of war and appeared on the brink of physical violence when the canapés failed to appear. The Jeweller (Joana Barrios) hustled

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the guests in a sparkling gold dress, reinforcing the idea that appearance trumped reality in a world where the illusion of wealth sufficed. Timandra (performed by non-binary performer João Abreu) played a central role in the performance. Conceived as a contemporary luxury escort, she became a social butterfly seeking luxury wherever and with whoever might be most likely to bring it her way. She flitted between the different guests finding everything and everyone ‘cool’. The Poet and the Painter (Pedro Penim and Diogo Bento) were a pair of bitchy queens who addressed each other as ‘girlfriend’ and alternately dissed everyone’s work while hypocritically praising them to their faces. The Poet carried a Nike bag over his shoulder linking notions of contemporary art and economic branding. The slow, ponderous speech of the pedantic Senator (Marcello Urgeghe) belied the fact that he had nothing interesting to say in a finely tuned performance highlighting the emptiness of the discourse on the arts among the Portuguese political class: SENATOR I’m a sensible person and so I cannot swear by this, but I’m absolutely sure everything will go well. I think it is an excellent idea not to sweep behind the column, but it also can’t be done any old way. It is a discussion that should be considered in depth and in the right place. Is it a relevant question? Certainly. (15) Throughout the first half, Flavius stood in for the absent Timon and ran on and off the stage organizing entertainment and refreshments that never actually arrived. This was something of a dig at cultural mediators who keep smiling and promising without actually delivering the goods. He also controlled the performances of the singers who sang excerpts from the Purcell semi-opera such as ‘But ah! How much are our delights’, ‘Who can resist such mighty charms?’ and ‘Come, let us agree’ to replace the play’s masque of the Amazons. The singers also opened the performance in a short exchange with Flavius where their complaints about the lack of adequate conditions for performance were met with Flavius’s threat that if they didn’t like these conditions, there would be others who would. Flavius also advised them not to focus on what the conditions did not permit, but to use their imaginations to supplement these

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lacks. Such strategies were immediately recognizable to those working in the cultural sphere and in other professional sectors.23 The semi-opera’s debates between love and wine, Cupid and Bacchus, recalled the exploration of pain and pleasure in Praga’s Dream: And if so sweet their torment is, Ye Gods, how ravishing the bliss! So soft, so gentle is their pain, Tis even a pleasure to complain. (performance script, 23–4) Towards the end, there was a reconciliation between the pleasures of wine and love in ‘Come Let Us Agree’, sung first by Cupid and Bacchus and then by the Chorus: Come, let us agree Come, let us agree. There are pleasures divine in love and in wine, in wine and in love. (performance script, 24) Yet this song about wine was all the guests received. After being fobbed off with beetroot juice instead of wine, the recalcitrant guests left the house in an attempt to enforce a change, only to be lured back by Flavius with renewed promises of soup and wine. The returning guests were greeted with the song ‘Return Revolting Rebels’. However, Flavius’s promises of food and wine turned out to be bottles of mineral water (a Portuguese joke around a famous brand of mineral water, Água das Pedras, literally ‘water from the stones’) that picked up on Timon’s performative banquet in 3.7, where he serves lukewarm water to the guests and the 4th Lord’s complaint at the end of the scene that ‘[o]ne day he gives us diamonds, next day stones’ (3.7.115).24 The guests left after this manoeuvre, stripping Timon’s residence of anything that was not nailed to the floor. Despite the guests’ fulsome praise of Timon and his generosity as a patron in the first half of the performance, Timon himself did not appear until the second half. The frequent repetitions by the guests of ‘That’s Timon of Athens!’ in the first half served only to illustrate how they projected their own greed, fear, disappointment and anger

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onto Timon, creating a figure who only existed in these multiple projections. The advantage of keeping back the presentation of Timon to the second half was that it created suspense around the man that everyone was talking about and his whereabouts. It also created an image of the man that contrasted with his actual appearance later in the performance. When Timon (André e. Teodósio) did eventually appear, dressed only in a pair of purple shorts and receiving medication and massages from Flavius, the contrast between the expectations generated in the first half of a man outstanding in his generosity and conviviality and the reality of his more fragile physical presence was genuinely shocking.25 However, rather than creating a Timon who was simply a victim of his avaricious guests and their desire for his wealth, this performance suggested that Timon had simply moved on to the next big thing, in this case, a concern with inner rather than outer riches. Replicating capitalism’s tendency to constantly reproduce the new within a contemporary economy geared towards consumption, Timon had recognized that material wealth was giving way to experiential self-contemplation and a Foucauldian ‘care of the self’.26 He refashioned himself as a new minimalist and digital nomad focused on perfecting his body, mind and technological prowess. Like his previous incarnation as a patron of the arts, this new role was not without hubris. With capitalism positing the solution to its contradictions in a getting away from it all from which it also profits, the move seemed to suggest there was no space outside capitalism from which to institute critique. Yet in the intense and focused physicality of his movements, Teodósio’s Timon made clear that the ability to anticipate cultural trends is also the prerogative of the contemporary artist, even if this ability to innovate is contained by cultural institutions and capitalist profit margins. This recasting of Timon as a smart artrepreneur rather than a railing misanthropist emphasized continuity in difference in his representation, rather than the difficult performative volte-face of the character in the play. In this second half of the performance, in a location indicated only by a log lit in new age rainbow colours, Timon remained almost completely silent and still, using a minimum of gestures and words (Figure 2). His meetings with the other characters were filmed in real time and projected onto a screen by video artist André Godinho. This suggested that Timon’s attempt to leave society behind is disturbed not only by his visitors but by

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FIGURE 2  André e. Teodósio as Timon in Timon of Athens (2019), Teatro Praga, photograph by Alípio Padilha. Courtesy of Teatro Praga.

the technological record of these visits.27 In these encounters, a single line from the play (such as ‘Swear against objects’ (4.3. 122) or ‘Lips, let sour words go by, and language end’ (5.2.105)) flashed onto the screen to introduce each visitor.28 These lines alternated with mantras which emphasized the interpenetration of the economic and the experiential (such as ‘I am prosperous’). Apemantus and Timon’s fraught exchange was reduced to two lines from the text (I love thee better now than e’er I did / I hate thee worse [4.3.232–3]), which was projected onto the screen as the performers blew air kisses at each other. The Poet and Painter pitched an excruciatingly bad artistic project, which Timon promised to finance if they left him alone. Timon had a solo scene with his computer where he sang words from the Purcell opera announcing a suicidal intent: I can scarcely move or draw my breath Let me, let me freeze again to death. (performance script, 30)

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Timandra gave a long speech approving Timon’s new life which referenced Gilles Lipovetsky’s work on the democratization and aestheticization of luxury. Writing in 2003, Lipovetsky noted the co-existence of two tendencies with regard to luxury: ‘one banalizes access to luxury and demystifies it, the other reproduces its force as dream and attraction through the politics of price and image’ (19). He also noted the multiplication of understandings of luxury, arguing that ‘luxury has “erupted”, there is no longer one form of luxury but luxuries for different publics and for different pockets’ (18). Timandra’s speech echoed Lipovetsky explicitly: TIMANDRA You see, luxury in the past was a vertical thing, columns and large monuments and so on, for those on earth to be closer to the gods. Then, luxury became squandered, began to reek of wealth because luxury had to be admired and seen by others. TIMON Exactly. TIMANDRA And it made clear who had the power, right, it highlighted inequality. Happily, now it’s a more aesthetic, accessible thing. TIMON True. TIMANDRA Luxury has become more democratic, less showy, more sensorial, more refined, more haptic, yes, that’s it. TIMON That’s exactly it. Good. TIMANDRA You are a luxury. (31) As this exchange suggests, the performance extended Lipovetsky’s analysis to explore contemporary luxury in terms of the ability to have time on one’s hands for self-exploration and the indulgence of multiple and varied experiences. Timandra’s repetition of the phrase ‘What a luxury!’ in this encounter after using the same expression in the very different circumstances of the obsession with material wealth in the first half, underlined this shift in the understanding of

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the term and introduced the performance’s own ironic take on the term in the present. TIMANDRA Luxury is being yourself. And that’s so important for your freedom. It’s a luxury that doesn’t conform. It has no obligations or etiquette. It’s a luxury that keeps its distance from institutions. It’s an emotional, experiential thing. (31) The script for the performance contains an intriguing encounter using the textual lines ‘Th’unkindest beast more kinder than mankind’ (4.1.36) for a dialogue between a vegetable and a mineral who praise Timon for respecting their space and not sitting on them. Sadly, this eco-critical parody of the new age insistence on personal space did not make it into the final performance.29 Timon’s final visitor was the Senator, using the lines ‘Speak not, be gone’ (4.3.128). He puffed on his electronic cigarette and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Timon to return. Refusing to do so, Timon wrote his own epitaph as he covered himself in a white cloth with the words ‘Nothing brings me all things’ (5.2.73). As well as the Shakespearean resonances of mortality and sexuality conveyed by the word ‘nothing’, the performance added an extra resonance to this phrase which linked it with Timon’s leaving behind of material wealth in order to find spiritual or experiential riches. An onstage drone rather than a Messenger carried news of his death back to Athens. For his public epitaph, one of the singers approached the dead Timon in a floating white wedding dress printed with the same words as his shroud, reminding audiences of the dress designs of Viktor and Rolf and their use of phrases to sell clothes. The bride sang Dido’s lament ‘Remember Me’ from Dido and Aeneas (1688), endowing the events with a profound and moving sense of tragicomedy. It was a fittingly ambiguous ending to the performance, as even Timon’s celebrity death was marketed as a cultural product for weeping onlookers, in this case the highpitched offstage voices of the inconsolable mineral and vegetable. Yet this second half also illustrated the ability of the company to renew its commitment to experimentation and to introduce performance practices that moved forwards their engagement with Shakespeare as they complemented their trademark

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heightened performativity with more measured and pared-down forms of corporeal and vocal performance. This Timon lacked the spectacular quality of their Dream but also the claustrophobia of their Tempest, while retaining their characteristic irreverence and experimentation across artistic forms.

Redefining intermedial collaboration In his textual encounter with Timon in 5.1, the Painter distinguishes between ‘promise’ and ‘performance’. While the former is ‘most courtly and fashionable’, the latter is for ‘the plainer and simpler kind of people’ and ‘argues a great sickness in his judgement that makes it’ (5.1.22–8). This early modern English distinction between word and deed maps productively onto Praga’s contemporary focus on the empty promises of the Portuguese cultural sector. However, its devaluation of acting in relation to speech might also be applied to the ways in which the Shakespearean text tends to be given a privileged position in relation to other elements of performance. Such a hierarchy casts intermedial elements like music, dance, lighting, sound or filming in real time as accessory rather than central to contemporary Shakespearean performance. Critical work on intermediality has played a key role in analysing the combination of texts, bodies, sound, dance, histories, visual arts and digital technologies that construct Kattenbelt’s notion of theatre as a hypermedium or Worthen’s notion of technicity. Yet they have focused less on these crossings and intersections as specifically artistic responses to technological and political developments. The intermedial collaborations in Praga’s Shakespeare trilogy were a creative response to performing Shakespeare for contemporary audiences, which enabled Praga to place experimentation with what Shakespearean performance might be at the heart of the performances. They encouraged diverse approaches to a common artistic theme or situation that highlighted crossings between different artistic forms while maintaining areas of artistic autonomy and expertise. In a context where stage minimalism dominated theatre practice, these intermedial collaborations also enabled Praga to perform Shakespeare as large-scale entertainment rather than more serious fare for black box audiences. There were, however, major differences between their initial Dream and later Timon of Athens, which cannot be put

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down simply to generic differences. The extensive intermedial collaborations of the Dream seemed to reach their zenith with The Tempest and Timon reduced both the number of collaborators and their stage time. This movement can be related to the boom and bust of national and European funding, yet it also suggests that an additional role for these intermedial collaborations was to enable the performers of Praga to establish over time their own performance style for Shakespeare through reference to the work of other artistic forms. In their introduction to Intermediality in Theatre and Performance Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt cite Jens Schröter’s notion of ‘ontological intermediality’ where ‘a medium defines its own ontology through relating itself to another medium, and raises the issue that it is not possible to define the specificity of a medium in isolation except through comparison with another medium’ (2007: 13). As such, these intermedial Shakespeares moved towards a particular style of performing Shakespeare shaped through consistent reference to other arts and media. The partnership with the Purcell semioperas, for instance, functioned throughout to challenge the textual canonicity of Shakespeare. Somewhat ironically, this partnership led over the course of the trilogy to the recasting of Shakespeare as contemporary and entertaining spectacle, while notions of the canonical and the stylistically outdated attached themselves instead to Purcell and the semi-operas. The video projections and filming in real time further opened up notions of text and space in which it was possible to experiment not only over time, but within an extended notion of stage space. By the time Praga performed Timon, the aesthetic of Shakespeare as pleasurable entertainment for a contemporary media-savvy, politically progressive audience had become established, enabling the company to refocus their desire to experiment on the conventional technical systems of performance, namely body and voice, within the parameters of an expanded notion of Shakespearean performance. While collaborations have structured many of Praga’s performances, their intermedial collaborations have been more specific to their performances of Shakespeare. On the one hand, this is explained by the larger budgets that the cultural capital of Shakespeare can still command in institutions such as the CCB. Yet as Praga negotiated their entry into the theatrical mainstream and the movement from the theatrical margins to artists with a

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theatrical reputation, the intermedial collaborations enabled them to establish a consistent aesthetic but also to maintain elements of exploration, risk and experiment in their work with Shakespeare. In this sense, while the creation over time of a coherent aesthetics and politics in performances of Shakespeare is common to ensembles from the immediate post-revolutionary period and to contemporary ensembles such as Praga, the continuing openness to intermedial experiment and exchange is a more contemporary trend that guards against the kind of mid-life crisis that left many earlier ensembles unable to move on from this defined aesthetic and politics. Praga’s countercultural movement over the course of the trilogy from the lavish and spectacular Dream to the pared-down focus on the second half of Timon might seem to suggest a movement away from intermedial collaboration. Yet the ending of Timon, with its onstage drone, nods to viral trends in fashion, operatic finale and weeping vegetables and minerals suggest that such collaborations continued to shape their performances of Shakespeare and, in the process, redefine notions of intermediality and its relationship with wider political, technological and ecological practices.

2 Memories of the future Tiago Rodrigues and dramaturgies of the Shakespearean trace

Rewriting Shakespeare for contemporary performance raises a series of questions. First, why rewrite Shakespeare rather than writing a new play? Many Portuguese artists have avoided Shakespeare altogether in favour of contemporary dramatists whose language and themes are considered more appealing to contemporary audiences or to devise performances that more directly stage their personal and political concerns. Second, why rewrite Shakespeare rather than rely on translation to update and acculturate the plays? Portuguese practitioners have favoured both approaches, but in the contemporary context, more extensive rewritings of Shakespeare have replaced the translations and adaptations of Shakespeare of the post-revolutionary period. This suggests that the challenge to the role of the director in the new millennium has led to a new prominence for the dramatist, although not Shakespeare the dramatist, but a new kind of dramatist for the stage whose writing is more directly influenced by the performance context. In these contemporary rewritings, dramatists maintain situations and characters from the Shakespeare plays, but their priority is the creation of a new text and what remains of Shakespeare is more often traces or fragments of Shakespeare within what are

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essentially new plays. The third question is what Shakespeare is constructed through these rewritings and this is the question with which this chapter will be concerned. What are the contours of this contemporary Shakespeare and what are the aesthetic and political questions raised by these rewritings? The 2020 global Black Lives Matter movement focused attention on how we remember the past and which figures should be commemorated and celebrated. What might be the contribution of Shakespearean performance to this critical approach to the past? What elements of Shakespeare remain within collective cultural memory and for what reasons? In order to explore these questions, the chapter examines three performances by Tiago Rodrigues and their trajectory over time from minor references to Shakespeare to including small sections of Shakespeare and finally to full-scale recreations of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare constructed through these performances is a Shakespeare in danger of disappearing where rewriting and performance become the privileged means of maintaining Shakespeare in the collective cultural memory. This endangered Shakespeare has been formed by the political experiences of censorship and economic austerity, has been encountered as much on film and in education as in theatrical performance and is known invariably through translation. It is infused with nostalgia for the past which inflects its vision of the future as a repository of rehearsed memories. There is a central paradox at the heart of Rodrigues’ project. His injunction to contemporary audiences to remember Shakespeare is conveyed through present-centred performance which is ephemeral and prone to disappearance rather than permanence. Moreover, the Shakespeare Rodrigues invites the audiences to remember is as much the Shakespeare of his own creation, in other words, his own rewritings, as the Shakespeare plays or poems on which they are based. Such paradoxes, I will argue, are at the heart of contemporary Shakespearean dramaturgies and their tension between remembering and forgetting Shakespeare. Tiago Rodrigues (1977–) is currently the artistic director of the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II in Lisbon. He is the kind of writer for the stage defined by Bruno Tackels who creates texts which are elaborated ‘for the stage and from the stage’ (2015: 99). Although he is viewed mainly as a dramatist, Rodrigues is also an actor and a director and has programmed the Shakespeare performances of others, making him a more general ‘theatre maker’ in the sense

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outlined by the Rude Mechs in Kevin Ewert’s Shakespeare and Directing in Practice: I think a lot of folks, especially in the devising community, are shifting to a general ‘theatre-maker’ title so as not to get pigeonholed and also to be able to shake off all the preconceived ideas of clearly defined roles that separate writing vs acting vs directing vs choreography vs dramaturgy vs design, not to mention vs producing vs marketing vs stage management. (2018: 135) Rodrigues trained as an actor with the independent Portuguese company Artistas Unidos and the Belgian company tg STAN. The former are associated with staging contemporary European drama while the latter are well-known for their insistence on collective creation and the performer as co-creator rather than interpreter of texts. Rodrigues has made a career for himself by staging rewritings of literary works that are no longer read by a wider public (such as his 2014 Bovary, which took Flaubert’s 1857 Madame Bovary as its starting point) and this attempt to make literary works of the past meaningful in the present through performance has also characterized his work with Shakespeare.1 Rodrigues was born three years after the 1974 Portuguese Revolution and forms part of a generation which has been referred to as the Portuguese postmemory generation.2 This term was coined by Marianne Hirsch in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (2012) to describe the experiences of those who had not lived through the Holocaust directly, but who had grown up with inherited memories from relatives and accounts of the period. This led to complex feelings of guilt at not having been part of the Holocaust, resentment at not being allowed to forget it and a sense that one’s own memories would necessarily be subsumed within these larger, more extreme experiences. As Hirsch suggests: To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. (2012: 5) Similarly, Rodrigues did not experience the 1974 Portuguese Revolution directly but, along with many of his generation, he

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grew up with stories of the risks and restrictions people underwent during the time of the dictatorship as well as the exhilaration ushered in by the Revolution. As such, this generation grew up with second-hand experiences of this period to both inspire them, but also to cast their own history and experiences as somehow never quite as significant. This process was intensified as the Revolution became subject to its own mythmaking, erasures and rewritings. Rodrigues’s work with Shakespeare is clearly marked by the experiences of the dictatorship and the Revolution, but he also reformulates and reshapes Shakespeare for his own generation. As Marvin Carlson suggests in The Haunted Stage (2001), theatre is a dynamic art form that both revisits and reforms cultural memory: It is the repository of cultural memory, but, like the memory of each individual, it is also subject to continual adjustment and modification as the memory is recalled in new circumstances and contexts. The present experience is always ghosted by previous experiences and associations while these ghosts are simultaneously shifted and modified by the processes of recycling and recollection. (2) The dictatorship and Revolution are some of the ghosts that shadow Rodrigues’s early work. Yet in the experience of looking back at this seminal period of Portuguese history, Rodrigues registers his distance from it and widens the context of this remembering of the past to a European and then a global past in his later work with Shakespeare. In the process, he also begins to open up notions of the past to include different historical moments in order to dislodge the hegemony of the Portuguese dictatorship and Revolution as the events of the past. This enables his presentcentred performances to articulate a sense of a contemporary Shakespeare grounded in multiple temporalities, even if it does not always resist the temptation to look back to the past as a standard against which to measure the present. In so doing, he also reinforces the value of performance in maintaining memories of the past and present for the future and his rewritings of Shakespeare in particular are accorded a crucial role in these memories of the future.

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‘A Monster too horrible to be shown’: Three Fingers below the Knee (2012) In his seminal book Portugal Today: The Fear of Existing (2007), the philosopher José Gil labelled post-revolutionary Portugal a country of ‘non-inscription’. He suggested that the events and struggles of post-1974 democratic Portugal had consistently failed to transform themselves into permanent individual and collective rights. This meant that the reference points for moral and political behaviour in Portugal remained, to a large extent, those of the dictatorship. In the same year as Gil’s book was published, António de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who ruled Portugal for forty years, was elected the greatest Portuguese personality of all time in a poll, illustrating the continuing pull of the dictatorship on sections of the Portuguese population. Indeed, the contemporary context has witnessed the return of admittedly minoritarian racist and fascist views in Portugal, as in the US, the UK, Hungary, Poland and Brazil. Gil’s idea of Portuguese ‘non-inscription’ conveys a sense that the period of the dictatorship (1933–74) marked Portuguese society and culture to a far greater extent than anything or anyone in the subsequent post-revolutionary period. It recognized that important gains around democratic and civil rights could be rolled back in periods of emergency and crisis as if they had never existed. However, Gil’s argument plays down the considerable legal and political gains of Portuguese democracy and the continuing attachment to democratic values among the population. Indeed, it is the period of the dictatorship, rather than the post-revolutionary period, that can more accurately be characterized as a period of non-inscription, for it left behind no permanent structures of note beyond a generalized fear and suspicion of the other and of political authority. Rodrigues’s first engagement with Shakespeare confronted directly this complex historical legacy with the award-winning Three Fingers below the Knee (2012).3 The play was constructed out of censorship records from the Portuguese dictatorship held at the Torre do Tombo archives in Lisbon. These were combined with censored lines from plays by international playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, August Strindberg and Shakespeare and the many more Portuguese playwrights who were censored by the regime such as Luiz Francisco Rebello and Bernardo Santareno.

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Included also was a speech given by Salazar himself about the perils of theatre.4 At the beginning of the performance, these written fragments were stuck on a wall at the back of the stage by the two performers, Isabel Abreu and Gonçalo Waddington, and guided the performance’s trajectory.5 Individual lines from the plays were also projected onto this wall and then crossed out to represent the operations of censorship on theatrical texts. In the middle of a seemingly unusable setting, where all onstage objects were covered in plastic, the two performers commented sarcastically and scornfully on the text they were performing through knowing nods to the audience, weighty silences, pauses and physical exaggeration. Such strategies introduced a distance between the period the play explored and the contemporary performance context and replicated some of the strategies performers themselves used during the dictatorship to outmanoeuvre the censors and transmit political messages to audiences. The two performers dressing up as characters from the plays they performed using the National Theatre’s existing costumes added an extra dimension of performative irony as they once more introduced a gap between the theatrical practices of the past and the present. Yet as the promotional material for the performance made clear, this ‘sweet revenge’ on the censors and affirmation of the resilience of theatrical practitioners during the dictatorship also challenged distinctions between ‘the words of Shakespeare and those of a censor’, creating a paradoxical dramaturgy of this period where theatrical texts could not be separated from the censors’ interventions in them. Indeed, the very notion of a Shakespearean text during this period is inseparable from such interventions. While censorship has invariably been viewed only as restrictive and limiting, Rodrigues emphasized here the active, productive role of censorship in creating notions of a text, Shakespearean or otherwise. The title Three Fingers below the Knee referred to a regulation operating during the dictatorship, where actresses could not appear onstage in anything that might be deemed too sexual. A report from one censor quoted in the play, for instance, states, ‘I consider Ophelia’s costume too modern and sensual, exposing the actress unnecessarily’ (2013: 13).6 In performance, this accusation was flung by Gonçalo Waddington at an Isabel Abreu in her underwear, once more opening up a distance between past restrictions on actresses during the dictatorship and the different possibilities of contemporary performance in a way which rendered such assertions ridiculous but

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nevertheless far-reaching.7 Such examples of moral intervention illustrate the ways in which performances of Shakespeare, even if not directly censored during the dictatorship, could nevertheless be heavily conditioned by the enforcement of moral prescriptions. The concern that ‘[t]he death scenes of Othello and Desdemona should be treated with dignity so that they do not (by simple suggestion) hurt the sensibilities of the audience’ (2), for instance, reveals a concern with sexual, racial and theatrical decorum in performance. A separation is often invoked between such moral censorship and a harsher political censorship. However, as these examples illustrate, concerns with morality, especially as they affected women, were highly politicized in this period and could have devastating consequences for actresses who opposed the regime. The belief that political alternatives could be avoided simply by banning them from the stage led to hyper vigilance of the part of the censors that bordered on paranoia. The excerpt from 3.3 of Othello included in Rodrigues’s play, for instance, where Iago uses his silence to make Othello believe in an adultery that does not exist through recourse to ‘[a] monster too horrible to be shown’ (11), created a parallel between the Shakespeare play and the censors who found in the slightest phrase or stage action hidden intimations of chaos and revolution.8 Rodrigues’s play concentrates more on other dramatists than Shakespeare, especially those Portuguese dramatists directly censored by the regime for their oppositional politics. However, it opens with Shakespeare’s Antony carrying onstage the body of Caesar, accompanied by various citizens. Julius Caesar was one of the few Shakespeare plays banned from the Portuguese stage during the dictatorship on the paradoxical grounds that the play could only be approved with innumerable cuts and it was considered not appropriate to make cuts in the texts of authors such as Shakespeare.9 Rodrigues’s simple opening tableaux staged the regime’s greatest anxiety; the representation of the legitimized death of a ruler considered a tyrant. Moreover, theatrical performance meant that this murder would take place in public and be witnessed and approved by the audience. In staging this threat, however, Rodrigues also drew attention to the passing of time, for in the post-revolutionary context, the death of the tyrant/dictator could not only be contemplated but also performed in public. In focusing on this crucial difference between past and present, dictatorship and democracy, the opening suggested a critique of Gil’s idea of the non-inscription of Portuguese democracy, even

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if it also reminded audiences that such freedoms must be rehearsed constantly. The exit of Antony with Titus at the end of the play was perhaps a comment on the failure of the democratic regime to inscribe itself more fully both theatrically and socially. In 2012, after all, severe austerity measures were in operation in Portugal with little open dissent or protest. Most of the censors’ rewritings of Shakespeare in the play had already been recovered from the archives and discussed by academics.10 Nevertheless, when Rodrigues’s play was first performed, it was presented as a performance of material that had not been made available before to the public. This raises important questions about the extent to which academic work on Shakespeare and the Portuguese dictatorship had inscribed itself as public discourse rather than just circulating within academic circles, as well as the ways in which performance can bring this work into the wider public sphere. Nevertheless, some of the material had not been discussed previously. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech in the script included several changes signalled in parenthesis as alterations to the original text. ‘Injustice’ becomes ‘adverse fortune’ or ‘afflictions’, ‘resistance’ is changed to ‘defence’, the ‘slowness of courts’ is substituted by the ‘tardiness of justice’, the ‘violence of tyrants’ becomes ‘the wicked behaviour of the dishonourable’ and ‘oppression’ becomes ‘suffering’.11 Each of these changes reinforces a fatalistic, individualistic, rather than systemic, political rationale for the tragic events of the play. While academic discussion of such changes would be required to quote their sources, it is not clear here whether this passage and its transformation is from an actual censorship record or whether Rodrigues created these examples himself based on the kind of changes demanded by the censors. For the purposes of the play, such questions are irrelevant. Both Rodrigues and/or the censors intervene here to ‘improve’ Shakespeare as both retrograde and progressive forces have done over the centuries. Such rewritings have shaped notions of the Shakespearean text both in the moment the texts are (re)written and for the generation that inherits this (re)written text. Rodrigues’s play reminds audiences and readers of the continuing legacy of forty years of dictatorship on Shakespearean texts and the attempts of contemporary theatre to deal with this legacy in the present. It avoided the overly pessimistic discourse that postrevolutionary Shakespeare performance is merely another example

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of the non-inscription of Portuguese democracy, for it showed the extent of the distance between past and present. Yet it also countered an overly positive discourse that claims to have buried a past few wished to remember. Instead, it moves between the past and the present in a way that alerts audiences to freedoms they might take for granted now but that are never completely secure. Three Fingers below the Knee’s staging of fragments of Shakespeare, the dictatorship’s role in (re)creating those fragments and the dramaturgical recovery of those fragments in a post-revolutionary present emphasized the processual, incomplete nature of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, where notions of what constitutes the Shakespearean text in different time periods are politically inflected and therefore subject to change. The fact that it was performed, among other places, in the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II, which the dictatorship promoted as the theatre of the regime, created another level of historical reference for this contemporary performance. Rodrigues’s Three Fingers below the Knee travelled outside Portugal to many other national contexts, including Helsinki, Rotterdam, Brussels, São Paulo, Nantes, Modena, Singapore, Paris, Dublin, Vancouver and Seattle. It is interesting to speculate on what this genealogy of recent Portuguese theatrical history might have meant to audiences in these contexts. On one level, it was a creative historical document about the effects of censorship on theatre and Shakespeare in a particular national context and could have been viewed as such. Some of these contexts have their own memories of dictatorships, which would have added new layers to the performance. On the other hand, the play’s oscillation between past and present may well have encouraged audiences to think about the extent to which freedom of expression exists in the theatre in a neoliberal market-oriented environment and in contemporary Shakespeares. In the current period, for instance, to what extent is Shakespearean theatre able to make use of democratic freedoms around freedom of expression? Which voices and bodies are now rendered silent or invisible?

By Heart (2013) Rodrigues’s concern with the long-term effects of the dictatorship in shaping Shakespearean texts fed into his second engagement with Shakespeare, By Heart. The context for this performance, however,

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was European rather than simply Portuguese. The historical context of the dictatorship and the Revolution was widened to include the periods of Stalinism in Russia and Nazism in Germany as well as the recent history of urban and rural Portugal. Like Three Fingers, the performance focused on what is remembered of Shakespeare as well as processes of enforced forgetting. However, the earlier exploration of the role of authoritarian political regimes in such processes was complemented by other factors leading to enforced forgetting such as the ageing process or recognition of outdated performance styles. Aneta Manciewicz has suggested that memory is ‘a fundamental theme of the digital era’ (2014: 57). While digital technologies base their appeal on an ability to store information more effectively than personal memory, they are by no means immune from processes of ephemerality and erasure. Rodrigues suggested in By Heart that personal and collective memory, as rehearsed in performance, is a more effective way of maintaining cultural memory than the clouds and back-ups of digital technology as well as a gesture of personal and political resistance. However, theatrical performance is itself characterized by ephemerality and erasure, so how effective can it be in remembering Shakespeare? What Shakespeare is considered worth remembering? As By Heart began, Rodrigues invited ten members of the audience onstage with the following words (Figure 3): Good evening. There are ten chairs on this stage. I need ten people from the audience to sit on these chairs. These ten spectators will learn a text by heart. A short text. Easy to learn. Rather easy. Not too easy. You can do it. You won’t have to act. You won’t have to do anything out of the ordinary. It will be very normal and calm. You’ll just have to learn a few words by heart. I won’t manipulate you in any way. And if I do manipulate you, it will be with tenderness. The performance will only start after the chairs have been taken. Thank you. (2013: 1)12

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FIGURE 3 Tiago Rodrigues and the onstage audience in By Heart (2013), photograph by Magda Bizarro. Courtesy of Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II.

This seductive invitation encouraged ten members of the audience to come onstage to learn the ‘short’, relatively ‘easy’ Sonnet 30 and the performance ended with a collective recital of the sonnet by the onstage volunteers. Sonnet 30 is itself centrally concerned with memory: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste. (1–4)13 The sonnet moves between a contemplation of past losses in the present to a present-centred perspective on the past (‘I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought’) to acknowledging that focusing on these losses makes one waste time both in the past and the present (‘And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste’) and, finally, to the way in which the pleasures of past memories in the present compensate momentarily for the losses and sadness of the past:

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But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restored, and sorrows end. (13–14) The sonnet is both sentimental and nostalgic, but also aware that thinking about the past can entail not being fully present in the moment. It recognizes the need to be alive to the pleasures and delights of the present even if they are deferred to an unknown moment in the future. Such a multi-layered approach to memory and time was also present in Rodrigues’s By Heart as it combined the pastness of the sonnet with its rehearsal in the present as a guarantee of future remembrance. Ana Pais has argued that By Heart occupies a central role in Rodrigues’s work, given that ‘no other [work] has such an irreproachable dramaturgical concept as this one and, at the same time, raises important questions for contemporary theatrical practice’ (2017: 90). The dramaturgical concept was simply that performance is an effective and pleasurable way to remember Shakespeare, not just for performers but also their audiences. The Shakespeare to be remembered is, crucially, the poet rather than the dramatist, and the process of remembering is channelled ‘by heart, and not by brain’. This injunction to remember Shakespeare was surrounded by other performance narratives that emphasized the political consequences of enforced forgetting. These included excerpts from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) about the physical destruction of literary memory and Pasternak’s intervention at the Soviet Writer’s Congress in 1937 Stalinist Russia, where he relied on the audience’s knowledge of Sonnet 30 to challenge a regime engaged in their own ideological reshaping of the cultural memory of Shakespeare. The most extensively developed of these narratives, however, was a personal one about Rodrigues’s grandmother Cândida, who had asked her grandson to choose a book for her to memorize before losing her sight. After writing to George Steiner for a suggestion, Rodrigues chose Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The script has Cândida validate this choice in eminently pragmatic terms: ‘[o]ver the phone, she told me I had chosen well. If it had been a novel, there was the risk she would become blind before reaching the end of the story. Then, she would be condemned to spend the rest of her life without knowing how it ended’ (15). At the end of the performance, with Cândida now in a nursing home, ten people were invited to

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visit so that Cândida could teach them one of the Sonnets she had memorized. When these guests arrived, she recognized none of them, but recited Sonnet 30 from memory. Evidently, this is a plausible narrative rather than a necessarily truthful one, and boundaries between fact and fiction were not clearly marked. Yet the improvisations throughout the performance and the fact that Rodrigues was dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans encouraged the idea that he was performing as himself rather than performing as a character and reinforced a connection between the naturalness of the performance style and its status as truth. The fact that Sonnet 30 was integrated within a network of other textual fragments, personal and political, Shakespearean and otherwise, enabled audiences to create a variety of different associations between them. As Ailsa Grant Ferguson has argued: Where Shakespeare fragments are performed, the re-iteration of a ‘familiar’ text is subverted from its usual course into one where the memory of the audience might reconstruct the ‘whole’ text around each synecdochic fragment, or associate each fragment with an external context . . . and/or receive the entire production as a new text, a sum of its parts. (2015: 210) As such, despite the emphasis on remembering Shakespeare, the wider emphasis was on the connections established in the present by the audience between the different fragments that formed Rodrigues’s play. Moreover, despite quoting George Steiner’s claim that ‘once 10 people know a poem by heart, there is nothing that the KGB, the CIA or the Gestapo can do about it. It will survive’,14 Rodrigues’s concentration on the present use value of performance as a privileged sphere for rehearsing cultural memories of Shakespeare differed greatly from Steiner’s backwardlooking validation of individual memory in reinforcing the cultural value of a fixed literary canon. As such, the narratives Rodrigues proposes the audience remember are only in part Shakespearean and are constructed through the contemporary technologies of performance rather than the literary technologies of the text. In order to teach his onstage audience Sonnet 30, Rodrigues revealed how actors learn their lines.15 After first building up the sonnet through introducing two, then four, then eight, then twelve, then fourteen lines at different moments of the performance,

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Rodrigues helped his onstage volunteers (named Platoon 30 in memory of the resistance movement in Fahrenheit 451) learn their lines through building them up from individual words and then repeating the lines before rehearsing the full sonnet with the group. He was patient with his volunteers when they made mistakes, provided pauses for them to breathe by moving temporarily onto other narratives and reminded them to drink water throughout. In the process, Rodrigues taught not only the onstage volunteers but those in the wider audience as well, multiplying the recipients of the performance’s gift of a Shakespeare sonnet to take home in their memory. When members of the onstage audience forgot or misremembered the lines they had been taught, Rodrigues appealed to this wider audience to correct or help them remember. The intimate relationship established with his audience is a central feature of Rodrigues’s dramaturgical work. As he commented in interview with Ana Pais: Everything I do onstage is always very vulnerable to the audience, in a good and a bad sense. On the one hand, it’s what I want – that the presence of the audience gives meaning to what I do – on the other, the presence of the audience can control what you do. . . . Activating the audience means maintaining a space within the game so that the audience is one of the cards, one of the players, someone in a dialogue with you. (2018: 216) In By Heart, Rodrigues worked with a written script, which was nevertheless open to improvisation and to detours prompted by the participation of the onstage volunteers. Combined with the creation of an apparent onstage naturalness, such spontaneity created controlled elements of chance and risk within the performance and challenged distinctions between spontaneous and scripted, authentic and nonauthentic, fiction and reality. This blurring of the boundaries between everyday life and performance created a performance environment that was warm, relaxed and apparently non-hierarchical. The positive characteristics of the performance environment were key to the emphasis on learning Shakespeare ‘by heart and not by brain’. The phrase set up an implicit distinction between performance and the educational system as repositories of Shakespearean cultural memory. Learning by brain occurs in impersonal, hierarchical educational institutions, whereas

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learning by heart through performance is both pleasurable and relational. While such a formulation is convenient for performers like Rodrigues, it is also somewhat disingenuous. Some of my own students were onstage volunteers in a performance of By Heart. They were totally engaged in learning the sonnet during the performance, for their credibility as performers and desire not to look foolish in front of an audience were bound up in such an investment. However, one week later, the sonnet was almost completely forgotten. The only narrative that remained was that of Rodrigues’s grandmother, Cândida, the logical consequence, perhaps, of learning by heart. Most professional performers are no different. Lines from one performance are necessarily forgotten in order to prepare for the next, even if certain lines remain engraved in the memory. Moreover, the characterization of Shakespeare in education as a place of dry learning demands qualification, particularly as educational institutions themselves have produced extensive critiques of rote learning that emphasize the need for genuine understanding rather than simple repetition. What By Heart successfully achieved was to motivate audiences to want to learn the sonnet, something that educational Shakespeare does not always achieve because it takes the need to learn about Shakespeare as given. Moreover, rather than learning about Shakespeare, the audience for By Heart actually learned Shakespeare, a pleasure that restrictions of time within educational institutions often neglects. What Shakespeare in education can provide, particularly in its more recent emphasis on inclusivity and social justice, is an equally important long-term engagement with Shakespeare and a sense of the wider political and artistic contexts in which Shakespeare is remembered, forgotten and re-formed. The performance thus represented an adroit intervention in what Kate McLuskie and Kate Rumbold have referred to as ‘the latest phase in a long-running contest [between academics and theatre practitioners] over the authority to manage the social relations in which Shakespeare would be assimilated into culture’ (2014: 122), even if it is more productive to view education and performance as complementary rather than competitors, equally prone to erasure and to political manipulation in their claims to ‘own’ Shakespeare. Indeed, the elephant in the room for both contemporary education and performance was the promise of the new technologies to always remember better than either of these public institutions and the

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subsequent removal of individual and collective responsibility for remembering Shakespeare. What sort of an ethical and political intervention might By Heart represent in such a context? In Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics Barbara Adam and Chris Groves argue that the conceptual skills and practical tools needed for the future will involve an ‘acute awareness of the interconnectedness, interdependence and interrelatedness of everything’ and an understanding of ourselves as ‘implicated participants’ (2007: 14– 15). While the claims made for By Heart by Rodrigues need some qualification, there is no doubt that it made an important contribution to the rehearsal for such a future, as do many contemporary experiments in rethinking Shakespeare in education. Indeed, the frequent use of ‘begin quote’ and ‘end of quote’ throughout By Heart to introduce and close narratives, as well as the benevolent image of Steiner, suggested that Rodrigues’s residual affection for such arcane academic practices and academics informed even such a resolutely present-centred performance as By Heart. Graham Holderness, picking up on a distinction made by Clara Calvo and Ton Hoenselaars between the more presentcentred ‘rehearsal’ of Shakespeare and a more backwardlooking ‘remembrance’ of Shakespeare, suggests that in some commemorations of Shakespeare that seem more connected with the remembrance of Shakespeare, elements of rehearsal can also be present. As he notes, ‘we can find a Shakespeare “rehearsed” rather than merely commemorated; a Shakespeare simultaneously celebrated as a cornerstone of British culture, and brought into intimate relation with the scientific, technological, international and popular priorities of the national festivals’ (2015: 100). Similarly, more present-centred ‘rehearsals’ of Shakespeare such as By Heart can also include strong elements of nostalgia and even sentimentality. Rodrigues describes, for instance, the village where his grandmother lived in highly nostalgic terms. Although once teeming with noise, animals and people, it is populated in the present only by people who live in the village’s nursing home and a silence that contrasts with the bustle of his grandmother’s youth. The performance’s encouragement to learn Shakespeare ‘by heart’ might also seem sentimental and backward-looking in its evocation through Shakespeare of a mythical better past. However, Rodrigues also pointed to a more recent history which complicates such a view. He noted that ‘[w]e have learned in our century / that they can take

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everything away from you / Your house. Your family. Your livelihood. That’s what defines the history of this century’ (3). The century evoked here is ambiguous, but the references to losing everything could apply equally to twentieth-century or twenty-first-century Europe. This suggests that it might not be so simple to distinguish absolutely between forward-looking ‘rehearsal’ of Shakespeare and backward-looking ‘remembrance’, as past practices acquire new relevance in the unstable circumstances of the present. By Heart continues to be performed in many different national contexts. The secret of its success lies in this multi-layered approach to questions of cultural memory, its active role for spectators and its pleasurable tension between remembering and forgetting Shakespeare.

Enter the present: Antony and Cleopatra (2014) There are certainly key international theatrical references for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra such as the performances directed by Peter Hall (1987), Trevor Nunn (1972), Peter Zadek (1994) and, more recently, Simon Godwin (2019). However, a central cultural reference for the narrative of the two lovers remains Joseph Manciewicz’s 1963 cinematic Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. In Portugal, there has been no stage history of the play beyond a 1987 performance by Jan Lauwers’s Needcompany which took the play as a starting point for their own creation. As a result, the influence of Manciewicz’s film looms even larger in the absence of a performance tradition. During the Portuguese dictatorship, there were several instances of plays being banned from the stage while film versions of the same plays could be seen without restrictions. An example is Julius Caesar, which was banned onstage but could be seen on film through the auspices of the British Council in Manciewicz’s anti-McCarthyite 1953 production. Such inconsistencies characterized the work of the censors but also illustrated how the possibility of live audiences coming together in a shared communicative space worried them far more than the distanced and individual viewing of a film in a controlled environment. In preparing for his 2014 Antony and Cleopatra, Rodrigues worked with memories of the Manciewicz film. Alex North’s film

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score was present in the performance in the form of an onstage stereo system which played excerpts from the score at three key moments. The first two gave the performers time to rest and the third evoked the drama of the battle at sea. Moreover, the casting of two dancers in the main roles (Sofia Dias and Vitor Roriz), who also had an offstage relationship inevitably referenced Elizabeth Burton and Richard Taylor.16 The publicity material for the performance reinforced the parallel in its comment that ‘Sofia Dias and Vitor Roriz are the duo here and now that they were there and then’. However, this evocation of a past cinematic memory of the narrative was balanced by recognition of the different artistic and political conditions operating in 2014. At this time, Portugal was still in the grip of the austerity measures imposed by the Troika (the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank) and the absolute negation of the kind of financial excesses that characterized Manciewicz’s film. Rodrigues’s performance looked back somewhat nostalgically to the luxury and extravagance of such Hollywood epics, while also attempting to reimagine the play for a contemporary period of political and theatrical austerity. The atmosphere of austerity was most clearly visible in the pared-down text used for the performance, the minimalist staging and the fact that there were only two performers onstage (Figure 4). Rodrigues’s Antony and Cleopatra was based on a translation of the play by Rui Carvalho Homem (2001) and the narrative of Mark Antony in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.17 As with Three Fingers below the Knee and By Heart, however, this Antony and Cleopatra was very much Rodrigues’s own creation.18 In the programme, he labelled it ‘an original play that we built based on the memory of Shakespeare’s tragedy’ and in interview with Gonçalo Frota, he suggested that he had done to Shakespeare what Shakespeare had done to Plutarch, in other words ‘steal the structure, steal the narrative, even steal the language’ in order to invent a new performance based on an old story (2014: 25). However, as dramatic narrative and notions of theatrical character were unfamiliar to the two dancers, the performance recast the play imaginatively in terms of sound, space and movement.19 Constructing the performance around the two dancers and their personal and artistic relationship, Rodrigues created a performance text with a strong focus on the corporeal.20 There was a consistent verbal emphasis on breathing in and breathing out, for instance, that created a rhythm and intensity for the performance and the

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FIGURE 4  Sofia Dias and Vitor Roriz in Tiago Rodrigues’s Antony and Cleopatra (2014), photograph by Magda Bizarro. Courtesy of Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II.

lovers seemed obsessed with the singularity of each other’s bodies.21 Such moments focused the attention of the audience on experiences of the body which are rarely foregrounded in verbal discourse and this physical vocabulary accompanied the movements of the two performers across the stage in a choreography of body and voice. Sustained physical vignettes were built up in individual or shared narratives, almost as if they were being created in real time during performance. An imagined encounter by the Nile, for instance, with Cleopatra disguised as a slave and a river full of crocodiles, was evoked by both performers through a series of verbal images. It recalled and expanded on Lepidus’s questions to Antony in 2.7 in Antony and Cleopatra about the veracity of the rumours about Egypt and Cleopatra and his evident fascination with these orientalizing narratives. At separate ends of the stage, when Antony returned to Rome and Cleopatra remained in Egypt, the two performers’ individual narratives mixed their own perspectives on events with those of the other, illustrating vividly the transformation of the self

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through the experience of love. Characters such as Enobarbus or Caesar were present solely through the words of the two performers, streamlining the performance to focus exclusively on the two performers but also creating a sense of the wider world around them. At several moments of the performance, the dialogue had Antony and Cleopatra literally ‘enter the present’. Cleopatra often fled this present for the past and both had dreams and premonitions of the future. Antony read the future in the flight of a bird while Cleopatra read the future in the shape of the clouds. The latter transferred to Cleopatra Antony’s identification of dragons, lions and bears in the shape of the clouds in 4.14 and the loss of his sense of substance: Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish, A vapour sometime like a bear, or lion, A towered citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon’t that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air. (4.14.2–7) My good knave Eros, now thy captain is Even such a body. Here I am Antony, Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave. (4.14.12–14)22 This need to continually enter the present as a means of maintaining the ‘shape’ of identity not only made the performance explicitly present-centred but also represented a form of survival for the lovers, for whom the future can only be death and the past a reminder of their geographical and political separation. Structurally, the performance included an initial section where both lovers were in harmony in Egypt, a second where they were physically and emotionally separated in Rome and Egypt, a third where they were together but distant as a result of Antony’s marriage to Octavia and Cleopatra’s flight from the naval battle, then a final section where the two lovers became one in death. By integrating short narratives within this wider structure, the performance negotiated the episodic and emotionally diverse nature of the play. Rodrigues’s other dramaturgical innovation was to have the two performers voice the thoughts, actions and words of the other as if they were narrating their experiences and emotions for them. Sofia

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Dias, for instance, prefaced her lines with ‘Antony says’, while Vitor Roriz prefaced his with ‘Cleopatra says’. This trope emphasized effectively the ways in which love made both characters see the world anew through the eyes of the other, while maintaining a separation between performers and the characters whose actions they narrated. When the two characters were separated geographically, for instance, each described what happened to the other in their absence. There, were, however, moments when this trope was interrupted. After Cleopatra’s flight from the battle at sea, Antony spoke for/ about himself rather than narrating what happened to Cleopatra, representing effectively the rupture between the two lovers following this betrayal. At the end of the performance, despite Cleopatra’s efforts to save him, Antony’s death was conveyed through Vitor Roriz’s repetition of the phrase ‘Cleopatra breathes in’ and the silence of Sofia Dias as Antony’s breathing ceased. When the repetition of ‘Cleopatra breathes in’ also ended, she appeared to have joined him in death. However, in an ambiguous moment where it was unclear whether Cleopatra was simply playing with a snake bracelet or a real snake and where both performers remained onstage in the shadows, the physical death of the characters was balanced by the recognition that the performers playing them remained very much alive. The bodies of the performers were given a central role in this austerity Shakespeare, echoing but also contrasting with the more languid movements of Taylor and the more theatrical movements of Burton in the Manciewicz epic. However, not all elements of the performance’s physicality were scripted. When I saw the performance in Guimarães in 2015, Sofia Dias was heavily pregnant. In 3.6 of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Caesar complains that to spite Rome, Mark Antony and Cleopatra have appeared enthroned in public with, at their feet, ‘Caesarion, whom they call my father’s [Julius Caesar’s] son, / And all the unlawful issue that their lust / Since then hath made between them’ (6–8). Apart from their illegitimacy, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra’s children also raise the spectre of biracialism. Later, in 5.2, Cleopatra asks that Egypt be left to her son in exchange for her obedience and riches. However, Caesar uses Cleopatra’s children against her instead, threatening her with their death should she take her own life. Randall Martin notes that Shakespeare ignores Plutarch’s description of the fate of Cleopatra’s children, including Caesar’s murder of Caesarion (2015: 155).23 In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra’s

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momentary concern with her children’s legacy gives way to concern about her own future. Presumably, any unborn children die with her. In Rodrigues’s performance, however, not only was Cleopatra’s fertility written on her body but the fact that the characters of Antony and Cleopatra melted into a metaphorical death in language while the performers remained clearly alive raised the tantalizing suggestion of Cleopatra and Antony’s children surviving and posing a future threat to Caesar and Rome. In performative terms, it was impossible to ignore the large bump in the slim dancer’s body and it remained a centre of attention for the audience. In austerity-ridden Portugal in 2014, young people were increasingly putting off having children they felt they could not afford as pregnancy was cast as a luxury for the few. The pregnancy of the performer thus flaunted Caesar’s desire for control over a foreign woman’s body as well as the Troika’s over Portuguese women in a marvellously visual, embodied critique of the sober premises of patriarchal, imperial control in the text and financial austerity in the contemporary political context. This centrality of the corporeal did not mean, however, that the text was relegated to a subsidiary role. The performance text contained many quotations from the translation of the play and followed much of the action. Just from 4.15, for instance, Rodrigues chose to include Cleopatra’s lines ‘[a]ll strange and terrible events are welcome’ (3) and ‘O sun / Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in’ (10–11) as well as Antony’s ‘[t]he miserable change now at my end / Lament nor sorrow at’ (53–4). In a play which itself makes little distinction between major and minor events, the choice of quotations from the play seemed to be based more on their strength as poetic metaphor than their structural importance to the narrative. An example would be at the beginning of 2.5 before the arrival of the Messenger where Cleopatra claims to be unable to find anything to do in Antony’s absence. By no means a significant moment in terms of the action, it is, however, a wonderfully evocative scene and seems to have found a resonance with Rodrigues who expanded it in his text. There were also some interesting reattributions as a result of having only two performers. The dialogue between Cleopatra and the Messenger which disparages Octavia’s features and personality here became a dialogue between Cleopatra and the returned Antony, which gave it an extra dose of piquancy. A virtuoso sequence towards the end of the performance picked up on the text’s images of liquidity and dissolution in ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’ (1.1.34)

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and ‘Melt Egypt into Nile’ (2.5.78).24 Cleopatra attempted to rope Antony into her monument and keep him alive through sharing with him a constantly mutating flow of homophonic words. It began, for instance, with ‘A/corda’, the verb signifying ‘wake up’ and the noun the word for ‘rope’. This sequence continued for a full seven minutes in the same manner before ending with ‘Matou-se’ meaning ‘he’s killed himself’, spoken by Cleopatra morphing into ‘Meu doce’ meaning ‘my sweet’ spoken by Antony. It equated the struggle to remain alive with the struggle for a shared language. Moreover, the richness of this sequence suggested that such verbal invention might be another creative tool within austerity Shakespeare pitched against the more obviously scripted exchanges between Burton and Taylor in the film. As Bruno Tackels notes in relation to other writers for the stage like Rodrigues, it is not that the text is no longer important in such work, but rather that ‘we witness a surprising return of theatrical writing – a writing for the stage, but which is heavily based on text, a resolutely post-dramatic text’ (2015: 95). In this case, the game with the sound of the words expanded their literal meaning to create a text as poetic in its own right as the Shakespearean play but more focused on the body and the relationship between bodies. During the performance, the stage was bare apart from the record player and a rather dispensable Miró-type mobile at the back of the stage with blue and yellow discs that occasionally cast shadows on the stage. Aside from this mobile and the soft yellow lighting which made the stage appear made of sand, there were no evocations of Rome and Egypt as distinct spaces, as there was no attempt to make Cleopatra Egyptian or Antony Roman.25 This did, however, have the advantage of avoiding cultural cliché, especially the type of orientalist exoticism of Manciewicz’s representation of Egypt. In terms of location, the strongest associations were with Portugal and the here and now, while the occasional references to the film were used to create a sense of the performance’s place within a wider cultural history of the play. The performance was both a cultural homage and a contemporary critique, for while the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) countries were being cast as inveterate, excessive spenders, the financial excesses of Hollywood, particularly in a film that went notoriously over budget have less often been subject to the same moralistic scrutiny.26 Moreover, in a political context characterized by a lack of empathy with refugees and immigrants, a performance based on the ability to transform

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personal and political perspectives by seeing the world through another’s eyes, made the performance an important artistic and political intervention. As with his other performances, Rodrigues began with the cultural memory of Shakespeare in Portugal, or rather the absence of a cultural memory of the play in this case. From this, he co-created with specific performers a new dramaturgy based on traces of Shakespeare. It represented a more extensive use, but also a more extensive rewriting of Shakespeare than his earlier performances.

Memories of the future Rodrigues’s three performances exploring the past, present and future of Shakespearean performance enabled him to approach the question of cultural memory from different angles. In Three Fingers below the Knee, Rodrigues looked back to the dictatorship and its continuing legacy in the present. He highlighted the absences and the prescriptions on theatrical activity during this time, but also introduced a focus on the creative force of censorship, both in terms of the ways in which the censors actively shaped what was considered to be a Shakespearean text and in terms of the creative responses to prohibition by practitioners during the dictatorship. In By Heart, the focus was more on the role of memory in constructing a present that can be remembered in the future, although the examples from the past acted both as a warning against enforced forgetting and an inspiration for the performance of the present. Antony and Cleopatra represented the most multi-layered approach to the question of cultural memory. It revisited the performative absence of the play in Portugal, the global cinematic memory that filled this gap, the austerity of the present moment and, through the performer’s pregnancy, a future that was clearly present but had not yet materialized. Each of these three performances explored the kind of questions raised in Clara Calvo and Coppélia Kahn’s Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory such as ‘[w] hat do we mean when we speak of remembering, or commemorating “Shakespeare”’, as well as what kind of Shakespeare such commemorations perpetuate (2015: 44). Writers for the stage such as Rodrigues certainly encourage remembering Shakespeare

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and caution against forgetting as they cast Shakespeare as in danger of imminent disappearance. However, as By Heart made particularly clear, present-centred performance may not be the best medium through which to remember Shakespeare and is subject to its own processes of enforced forgetting and disappearing acts. Moreover, in all three cases, Rodrigues gave as much priority to his own contemporary texts and the corporeal and vocal qualities of the performers as the traces of the Shakespearean poem or play which legitimate such practices. Nevertheless, in a context where, as Arjun Appadurai notes, culture is usually associated with the pastness of heritage, tradition, custom and habit, particularly so in the case of Shakespeare, and where economic models of the future predominate over models of social, political and ecological justice, this commitment to the future through the performance of Shakespeare in the present can be seen as a particularly significant task (2013: 180). Barbara Adam and Chris Grove argue that visions of future change should be ‘not fragmenting, not abstracting, not decontextualising but relating and reconnecting, embedding, embracing and embodying’ (2007: 190). Rodrigues’s dramaturgy of the Shakespeare trace, although occasionally sentimental and nostalgic, is determinedly embodying and embracing. It is also relational and concerned with personal and political reconnection. Moreover, like the multiple temporalities and geographies of the Shakespeare texts, Rodrigues’s rewritings of Shakespeare reference past, present and future; Portugal, Europe, Africa and Asia in ways that cast the contemporary as the site of multiple discourses brought together in the here and now of the performance event rather than a single evanescent moment in time and space. They point to the erasures and processes of enforced forgetting of the past and their continuing influence in the present as a warning against future forgetting and empower both performers and audiences as witnesses to the memories and losses of the present moment.

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3 Cruel optimism Nuno Cardoso’s political Shakespeares

(Re)defining political Shakespeare Contemporary notions of political Shakespeare have been subject to substantial redefinition since the publication of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s ground-breaking Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism in 1985. Influenced by the work of Raymond Williams on material culture, poststructuralism and deconstruction, as well as postcolonial, feminist and queer theory, Dollimore and Sinfield’s collection explored Shakespearean intersections with the early modern and contemporary state, the heritage industry, film, television, theatre and education. Implicit in the nod to the political in the title was a contestation of readings of Shakespeare which ignored his imbrication in structures of power as well as a focus on subversive readings of the plays. Reading deliberately against the grain, the collection and the critical movement of cultural materialism transformed Shakespeare Studies in profound and lasting ways not only in the UK and the US but also in the wider European context where these ideas have had a major influence on Shakespearean criticism. Comparing Dollimore and Sinfield’s vision of a political Shakespeare with that of Andrew James Hartley in Shakespeare and Political Theatre in Practice (2013) over twenty-five years later

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is illuminating in terms of the ways in which notions of political Shakespeare have shifted over the last thirty years. Dollimore and Sinfield’s collection looked to the ways in which Shakespeare was present in a variety of cultural forms, but privileged textual analysis. In keeping with the series within which his book is published, Hartley locates the political more clearly in theatrical performance’s ability to reshape the meanings of the plays for contemporary audiences. Such a focus illustrates the consolidation of performance studies within Shakespeare Studies: If the burden of Shakespeare, that which makes his work potentially oppressive and disenfranchising, tends to inhere in its textual dimension, if it is in Shakespeare the Book that he feels most alien and elitist in the modern classroom, then it is in performance that more visceral and kinetic modes of reception and response take precedence in potentially liberating ways. (2013: 109) ‘Shakespeare the Book’ is considered here a ‘burden’, ‘potentially oppressive and disenfranchising’, ‘alien and elitist’. On the other hand, performance, because of its ‘visceral and kinetic’ qualities, liberates the political potential of the plays. This is a supposition that might be questioned considering the number of ‘deadly’ Shakespeares that haunt the contemporary stage as well as the page and Hartley does begin his comparison with the word ‘if’, which suggests that this contrast between texts and performances is not a hard and fast distinction.1 Like Dollimore and Sinfield, Hartley’s vision of the political in contemporary performance emphasizes possibilities of transgression and subversion, although such terms are notably more nuanced in 2013: It is the conviction of this book that Shakespeare on the stage can be politically both instructive and subversive, even if it cannot fully escape the exclusive mechanisms of both Shakespeare and the theatre in culture, even if its political victories are minor and incremental. (2013: 35) The notion of political victories as ‘minor and incremental’ and the combination of the ‘subversive’ with the ‘instructive’ might seem like a retreat from Dollimore and Sinfield’s more optimistic

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focus on subversion, transgression and dissidence, even if it also distances itself from the new historicist focus on the containment of potentially subversive forces. Such changes illustrate the ways in which the many crises that characterize the contemporary context have impacted on notions of political Shakespeare. As Ayanna Thompson’s wide-ranging discussion with Hartley at the end of his book makes clear, the idea of a political Shakespeare has even been claimed by the right as well as the left in the contemporary period, through college productions on religious campuses which are eminently political in terms of their reproduction of conservative values. Nevertheless, Hartley’s more nuanced understanding of the political also represents the perspective of a Shakespeare practitioner. As his genealogy of political Shakespeare in performance illustrates, contemporary performances have tended to move away from the Brechtian idea of an explicit political message, however dialectical, and its call to action. Hartley does discuss the historical significance and influence of Brecht on political Shakespeares. However, there is also an acknowledgement of postmodern and postdramatic challenges to such grand narratives of political change in his affirmation that ‘all assessments of political theatre must be provisional, plural, and contextual’, even if he adds that ‘any consideration of what political theatre is must be rooted historically’ (2013: 11). Hartley also notes that much contemporary political Shakespeare has moved out of the institutional theatre spaces conventionally associated with staging the political and, in the process, changed notions of how the political is constructed and by whom. Discussing theatrical workshops for at-risk youth, for instance, he argues: Subversive political theatre need not be simply ideologically subversive. It might also be constructive on the local level. As such, political theatre cannot be defined solely as offering commentary on or critique of current socio-economic conditions or military actions, and must also be allowed to serve as a form of empowerment in itself. (2013: 89) Similarly, in his discussion of a university production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hartley moves away from notions of political Shakespeares based on political readings of the plays and

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more towards the political as the localized, embodied empowerment of those who take part in the performance. He notes: Sometimes political productions which operate under the ideological radar achieve more and reach a wider range of audience than do those whose methodologies are more shrilly agit-prop, even if what they actually say is less controversial or confrontational so much as it is a declaration of what we take now to be culturally and therefore politically normal. (2013: 123) Hartley’s maxim for political theatre that ‘context is all, reception is all, empowerment is all’ (2013: 140) illustrates the ways in which political Shakespeare is understood nowadays less in terms of lecturing audiences from the stage and more in terms of emancipating them directly through participation in the theatrical event in the tradition of Augusto Boal.2 Indeed, one of the markers of the political in the contemporary context has been the belief that participation in theatre is itself socially and politically transformative. Hartley’s inclusion of the contextual in defining the political recognizes the ways in which wider social, political and geo-political events inflect how the political is understood at a particular moment in time as well as the ways in which different performance spaces impact on the politics of the performance. The importance of theatrical reception is a reminder that meaning in contemporary Shakespeares is more likely to be multiple than single and is often reshaped by audiences rather than simply transmitted to them from the stage by performers and directors. Erika FischerLichte (2019), for instance, has argued that it is the circulation of energy between performers and audiences within the here and now of the performance event that constructs the meaning of performance rather than the elaboration of a textual message for which performance is a vehicle. As such, ideas of the political are constructed during this performative exchange rather than before or after. Empowerment comes through participation in this exchange, whether as a performer or a spectator, and the personal, political and aesthetic transformations that occur within it. In such a context, where political performance is increasingly defined outside theatrical institutions and less in terms of a message than a series of emancipatory practices with unpredictable

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outcomes, what might be the role for political performances of Shakespeare at national theatres? This chapter discusses the four Shakespeares directed by Nuno Cardoso. They were staged both in Lisbon and Porto, but Cardoso is associated more closely with the Teatro Nacional São João in Porto, where he took over as the artistic director in 2019.3 Unlike Tiago Rodrigues, for whom working with Shakespeare provides an opportunity to experiment with new dramaturgies, Cardoso’s work has used translations of Shakespeare texts to stage political reflections on the state of the nation. At the same time, however, his Shakespeares provide an opportunity to explore some of the changes in political Shakespeare suggested by Hartley, both within theatrical performance and in his participatory work with local communities. His Shakespeares provide an opportunity to reflect on contemporary redefinitions of the political within, rather than outside, the more conventional format of the state of the nation play and its staging at national theatres.

The unfinished revolution The previous chapter introduced a critique of José Gil’s notion of ‘non-inscription’ in his Portugal Today: The Fear of Existing (2007), where the gains of democracy appeared to have less substance compared to the social and political forms of the dictatorship. This chapter on the Shakespeares of Nuno Cardoso works with another prominent myth of the post-revolutionary period, namely the idea of the Portuguese Revolution as unfinished business. Such a notion distinguishes between the institutions of formal democracy and a wider notion of social, political and cultural democracy based around questions of representation, ownership and participation. The advent of formal democracy in 1974 put an end to the colonial war and to censorship and released the dictatorship’s political prisoners. It established a process whereby free elections, the right to free speech and freedom of association became part of the new 1976 Constitution. Nevertheless, Portugal continues to appear near the bottom of Eurostat tables measuring economic equality and equality of opportunity. The earnings of the top 20 per cent of the population, for instance, are six times that of the bottom 20 per cent. Those 17.9 per cent near or below the poverty line without family

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support can often find themselves falling through the cracks of the limited welfare state in moments of crisis.4 Access to education and health remain determined to a great extent by birth and wealth rather than principles of equality. Neoliberal economics have accentuated rather than reduced such inequalities by increasing working hours, removing workers’ rights and promoting a low-wage, precarious economy reliant on a permanent pool of the unemployed to keep workers in their place. Portugal’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1986 has been paradoxical for democracy. On the one hand, Portuguese infrastructures owe their existence largely to European funding and much progressive anti-discrimination legislation has passed into Portuguese law as a result of European integration. On the other, European economic intervention through the various bailouts of Portugal during the period of austerity have tended to impose conditions that consolidate a view of Portugal as a low-wage economy held back rather than protected by labour laws and with an excessive state sector that must be reformed as a condition for further funding. Moreover, despite progressive anti-discrimination legislation as a result of European integration, this has not meant that such transformations have become part of daily life. The country has shown immense difficulty dealing with its colonial past and racist present. Police aggression in Black communities is only now being brought to the courts and is frequently not acknowledged publicly.5 Legalization of abortion up to ten weeks occurred only in 2007 amidst huge pressures to keep abortion illegal from the Catholic Church. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2010 in order to keep Portugal in line with the rest of Europe and, in 2016, after a series of advances and setbacks, same-sex couples were granted the legal right to adoption. In 2011, an admittedly pathologizing law enabled trans people to change their identity documents if they were diagnosed as suffering from gender dysphoria. These legal developments, although important, have come up against what are often referred to as ‘mentalities’, creating something of a disconnect between progressive legislation introduced in a topdown hierarchical fashion and existing social practices which span the range from the progressive to the conservative. They illustrate in particular the limitations of such supranational approaches when social movements within Portugal remain marginal and fragmented. The statistics for domestic violence, for example, have continued

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to rise despite progressive legislation and government and media campaigns.6 Nevertheless, ideas about the quality and extent of Portuguese democracy remain complex and contradictory. In what might be seen as a retort to José Gil’s polemic on Portugal, the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his Portugal: Essay against SelfFlagellation argues that the dynamic of change versus stasis in Portuguese society depends on the eye of the beholder: Depending on the perspective and point of view, Portuguese society can credibly be seen as a society anxious for change or a society resistant to change, as a society which is part of a vertiginous movement forward, or a society paralysed by vertigo. (2012: 47) Sousa Santos rightly points out that it is only less wealthy European countries like Portugal that are forced to examine their past in this way to find reasons for their less than perfect present. He accurately designates Portugal a semi-peripheral, intermediate European economy whose colonial past has been as important in defining its democracy as its position within Europe. Unlike Gil’s more polemical anatomy of the Portuguese, which often suggested something in the Portuguese character was to blame for the quality of its democracy, Sousa Santos locates the unfinished business of Portuguese democracy within the realm of global politics. While the cynicism about change that characterizes approaches such as those of José Gil tends to encourage political passivity, Sousa Santos outlines a more complex view of what has been achieved since the Revolution as well as what remains unfinished. It is significant, in this respect, that in the contemporary period where populism and fascism are on the rise, leading to the closing of national borders and repressive legislation in several European countries, the United States and Brazil, Portugal has maintained a centre-left socialist government (2015–) in an on–off alliance with the Portuguese Communist Party and their associated Green Party as well as the left-wing coalition, the Bloco de Esquerda. They have welcomed international refugees rather than making them a political weapon, and during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic gave immigrants temporary citizenship. Despite the centralization of control within the Ministry of Finance and the continuing

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dominance of neoliberal economic criteria, this government has gone some way towards repairing the damage caused by the earlier austerity measures and none of the more recent progressive antidiscrimination legislation has been revoked. Fascist mobilization has risen at an alarming rate, but has been challenged both inside and outside Parliament. Portuguese democracy does retain structural problems. The percentage of the population that vote in local, national or European elections remains low. This reveals a long-standing mistrust of politicians for whom politics and economics are linked in promiscuous and often corrupt ways.7 Economic inequalities remain largely unaffected despite a small increase in the minimum wage and the spread of new technologies has widened rather than narrowed these inequalities, leading to new divides between the technologically adept and those marginalized through lack of access and skills. In the cultural sphere, protests from the cultural sector at the Government Arts Funding Body (DGARTES) results in 2018 called for the culture budget to be increased to 1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), yet although the government backed down to a certain extent in the face of this mobilization, even this limited target for the cultural sector has not yet been achieved. Most performers continue to work precariously and intermittently and struggled to survive during the 2020 pandemic. As such, although it would be wrong to ignore the struggles of many over time to extend Portuguese democracy and challenge the dominance of political, economic and cultural elites, there is also a need to consider the ways in which democracy remains unfinished business for many Portuguese, including theatre practitioners, in order to engage critically with Cardoso’s Shakespeares.

Staging the nation As in other national contexts, the two Portuguese national theatres in Lisbon and Porto have had to rethink their roles in recent years in order to accompany global cultural trends and attract new audiences. Nevertheless, the statutory obligation to reflect best practices at both the national and international level remains, as does the obligation to perform canonical drama such as the plays of Shakespeare. National theatres have struggled to reconcile these multiple obligations. The

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four Shakespeares directed by Nuno Cardoso illustrate one possible response to these demands. They have reflected on the state of the nation and wider European or global developments for contemporary audiences. In the process, they have also travelled to theatres outside the national theatres in Lisbon and Porto and worked with local communities using participatory techniques. Central to Cardoso’s four Shakespeares (Richard II (2007), Measure for Measure (2012), Coriolanus (2014) and Timon of Athens (2018)) have been questions of democracy and, in particular, the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. Such a concern with the politics of representation is not exclusive to Cardoso or his generation. In his 1998 staging of Coriolanus, for instance, the Portuguese director, Jorge Silva Melo phrased his understanding of the political as a series of questions which included: ‘[w]ho do we want to represent us? What do we want represented? What forms of government are acceptable? What is the body politic? What forms of organization do we need? How do we defend them? How do we seek to balance opposites? How should we live in society?’8 He contextualized such questions in terms of the need of the polis to see itself reflected and commented upon within theatre. This notion that theatre should both reflect and intervene in society remains a particularly strong current within contemporary European theatre. The Hungarian critic Attila Szabó, for instance, defines the relationship between theatre and the political in terms of ‘their (theatre’s) sensitivity towards a community they define and represent’ and in which they are ‘sensitive barometers’ (2009: 390–1). Cardoso’s work with Shakespeare consistently deals with the question of representation and, in particular, the question of democracy both within and outside formal democratic institutions. The fact that the two national theatres in Portugal can be considered both national and local has encouraged an interplay between local and national concerns in these performances, as well as the ways in which wider European and global developments impact on national events. This thematic focus on democracy has been complemented by a directorial style which, although focused on the authorial signature of the director, also allows space for improvisation and for a degree of co-creation on the part of the practitioners involved. This creates a vital link between democracy as theme and democracy as practice, casting Cardoso’s political theatre

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as an attempt to respond to the limitations of formal democracy both in theatre and the wider society. Cardoso’s sustained engagement with Shakespeare has enabled him to examine the question of Portuguese democracy from a variety of angles and positions. Like Tiago Rodrigues in Chapter 2, he emphasizes the processual, incomplete nature of the Portuguese Revolution and the implementation of Portuguese democracy. Unlike Rodrigues, he is more sceptical about the possibilities for political change even if, as his consistent return to the political suggests, this is more a question of tone than of belief.

Richard II (2007) At first glance, a play about shifting allegiances between nobles in medieval England might seem a curious choice for the first Shakespeare performance of a contemporary Portuguese director. Yet what interested Cardoso about Richard II was the deposition of a supposedly unremovable leader and the struggle for power that comes in its wake. From this, he sought to construct parallels with post-revolutionary Portuguese politicians. In an interview published in the National Theatre magazine, Cardoso noted that the play is ‘a text where the mechanisms of power are central. At the heart of the story is a transfer of power – which is not a succession but a deposition. Nowadays, the ways in which people exercise power and those over whom it is exercised are questions on which we don’t reflect enough in democracy’ (my emphasis).9 In another interview in the newspaper Público-Ipsilon, he commented that although Richard II is a monarch with absolute power, in contemporary democracy ‘the mechanisms of power remain unchanged, in the hands of an elite. It is the divorce between this elite and the rest of the world that is terrifying.’10 These assertions indicate Cardoso’s presentist focus on the politics of the play. However, the suggestion that ‘the mechanisms of power remain unchanged’ from medieval monarchs and their divine right to rule to contemporary liberal democracies illustrates some of the problems in updating and acculturating the play in this fashion. As with all of Cardoso’s performances of Shakespeare, a central stage metaphor created in tandem with scenographer F. Ribeiro

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structured the performance of the play. In this case, the performance took place on a football pitch under the glare of floodlights. The football reference keyed into the nation’s number one passion and one of the most lucrative industries in Portugal. It includes a series of associated television programmes and specialist newspapers that complement the games in the professional league. Cardoso commented in the Público interview that ‘the football pitch has been the great definer of Portuguese identity.’ Accusations of corruption are frequent in a game where so much money is to be made from sponsorship and media tie-ins. Politicians have often made use of national and European events, such as Euro 2004, which took place in Portugal, to canvas public appeal and encourage the population to temporarily forget the difficulties of their own lives and line up behind the national team. Nevertheless, the notion of the football team, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts and where everyone has a role to play is also a useful way to conceive of a contemporary theatrical ensemble. Cardoso often uses football games in rehearsal to create this sense of a common purpose among the performers. While the economy of football in Portugal is far from democratic, especially for women, the notion of the theatrical ensemble as a team does go some way towards creating a level playing field for performers at the beginning of rehearsals. In this respect, it was significant that the ensemble in Richard II included actresses as well as actors and several members of the ensemble played more than one role. The notion of the two competing noble factions under Richard and Bolingbroke as two football teams recast the tragedy of English history as contemporary Portuguese farce. The fat and sweaty Richard (João Ricardo) and the tall, gaunt Bolingbroke (Gonçalo Amorim) were both viscerally unconvincing as leaders, while the nobles, dressed in garish kits by the designers Storytailers looked like amateur sportsmen and politicians. Richard’s throne was a deckchair. A referee with a whistle ran among the performers in a vain attempt to create order. Instead of throwing down gauntlets, the nobles signalled their challenges by throwing down a deck of cards. At different moments of the performance, accordion music signalled a performance game where the different members of the ensemble ran around the throne until the music stopped. During these musical interludes, the crown was passed from performer to performer and remained with the person on whose head it was

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when the music stopped. This showed signs of being a rehearsal game which was carried into performance and cast transfers of power as arbitrary moments of temporary protagonism rather than natural or even linear processes. The energetic dance that ended the performance reinforced this contingent nature of leadership and power. Richard and Bolingbroke waltzed together to the front of the stage before Richard stole back his crown from Bolingbroke, rendering the ending of the play circular rather than linear. Not all critics responded well to such a deconstructive take on the play. Miguel Pedro Quadrio, for instance, in his Jornal de Notícias review found the lack of attention to the rhetoric of the text and the physical and musical exuberance of the performance unconvincing.11 In a programme article, the translator of the play, Fernando Villas-Boas, positioned himself against the need for ‘modernization’ of what are seen as ‘archaic’ Shakespearean texts. He argued instead that ‘the choice of any play because it is not modern seems to me to ensure more surprises, more shock value, more doubts and therefore, more theatre’.12 In a personal email, Villas-Boas identified the objective of the translation as ‘creating a human mass which sometimes came together and sometimes separated, in which the mortal conflicts separated the larger group episodically into arbitrary teams’. Within this, the political leaders in their ambition for power ‘are exposed as solo actors’. The performance made use of a tension between Shakespearean text and contemporary performance present. When the murderer came to Richard in his cell (5.5), rather than drawing a dagger or a sword, he fired a revolver. The challenging of audience expectations of historical verisimilitude made the murder more obviously shocking for they were taken by surprise by this performance device. The fact that the performance in Porto took place in the smaller Teatro Carlos Alberto, which is a much more intimate space, increased the effectiveness of the device. Other performance moments relied more clearly on parallels with contemporary figures and events in line with Cardoso’s presentist focus on the power of more recent elites. Bolingbroke’s speech of remorse after Richard’s death was delivered not to the other characters onstage but to the spectators, casting the speech as a cynical political spin on the situation and bringing to mind the media-savvy socialist government of the time and their manipulation of the media to convey convenient political messages.

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Cardoso’s Richard II provided ample opportunity to parody the pretensions of contemporary political leaders. However, it remains a play about disputes between nobles and says little about those whom they rule, beyond the advocacy of a naturalized status quo by the gardener (3.4.55–66) and minor comments about Bolingbroke’s popularity and Richard’s lack of popularity with the people. 13 To illustrate the impact of political decisions on a wider population, Cardoso introduced a series of shadowy camp followers who moved their suitcases from location to location as they followed the nobles. This visibility of those who actually fight the various battles in the play without having a say as to how and why these battles are fought, moved the field of contemporary reference away from the leaders to those forced into permanent movement by their power struggles. The transit between Richard and Bolingbroke’s camps emphasized how the deposition of Richard and crowning of Bolingbroke made little effective difference to their lives. However, while their silent movement across the stage was both moving and politically effective in indicating wider mechanisms of social exclusion and marginalization in the play, the fact that they had no words limited their ability to suggest a wider political critique of their leaders in either the medieval or contemporary context. More effective in bringing to the stage the voices that the Shakespearean text excludes was a parallel production of the play also directed by Nuno Cardoso. R2 was created using young amateur actors from the mainly Black neighbourhood of Cova da Moura in Lisbon. Rather than exploring politics and political leaders at a national level, the performance set the play in a municipal setting which was closer to the lives of those who participated in the performance and their cyclical struggles with poverty, racism and exclusion.

Measure for Measure (2012) Cardoso’s Measure for Measure began with a sexualized tableau where half-naked men engaged in various forms of sexual activity before the Duke handed over power to Angelo. It was an opening that appeared to justify the Duke’s view that sexual anarchy had taken hold of Vienna. Nevertheless, as Lucio later affirms, however strong the force of the law, sexual desire will never fully be controlled by the state as ‘it is impossible to extirp it quite’ (3.2.91) and the creative

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ways in which citizens circumvent the introduction of harsh laws were at the centre of this performance. Taking place at the height of the austerity measures that followed the 2008 global financial crisis, Cardoso’s Measure for Measure drew a parallel between the play’s period of sexual liberty followed by restraint and the period of greater financial ease in Portugal before 2008 that gave way to financial austerity. Such topical dynamics were made clear in a minor but significant change to Mistress Overdone’s (Catarina Lacerda) speech in 1.2 on her shrinking clientele, where ‘austerity’ was added to the list of reasons why she was ‘custom-shrunk’ (1.2.79–81).14 The performance counterposed the energy and vitality characteristic of periods of financial growth and the struggle for survival in periods of austerity and suggested that in the constant movement between these cycles of boom and bust, democracy inevitably suffered. Unlike the unified stage setting of the football pitch in Richard II, the stage in Measure for Measure was divided into distinct areas. At the back of the stage was the kind of drinks machine that might be found in various public spaces in Portugal. The white plastic chairs and tables at the front of the stage brought to mind the many small cafés around the country. The café and the forms of sociability it promotes suggested a contemporary metaphor for the cross-class interactions that characterize the play and for the exploration of democratic spaces outside social and political institutions.15 Like the football team in Richard II, the café’s non-hierarchical conviviality also represented a way of thinking about the theatrical ensemble as an alternative model for contemporary democracy. Above the stage hung a blue motorway sign for Vienna with an arrow pointing down onto the stage, a reference to Portugal’s paradoxical relationship with the European Union (Figure 5). While European funding of Portugal’s motorway infrastructures in the 1990s had been politically consensual, notions of European intervention were politicized in a more negative way during this period of economic austerity. With the choice of a motorway sign to stand in for the influence of European institutions on Portuguese democracy, Cardoso illustrated the profound effect of European economic measures on national democracies in semi-peripheral countries such as Portugal, particularly their sidelining of democratically elected governments in favour of supranational political or financial institutions. To one side of the stage, there was also a mini stage with red curtains. On the one hand, this was a practical stage

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FIGURE 5 Cast of Measure for Measure (2012), directed by Nuno Cardoso, photograph by João Tuna. Courtesy of Teatro Nacional São João.

device for some scenes in the play, such as the Duke’s overhearing of Claudio and Isabella’s conversation in prison (3.1) or the bed trick (4.1). On the other, the mini theatrical stage suggested a critique of the similarly small size of contemporary cultural budgets and its use later in the play to stage the Duke’s triumphant return highlighted the continuing tendency of politicians to cast the cultural sector in their own image in theatrically orchestrated spectacles of power. In his review of Measure for Measure, Jorge Louraço Figueira spoke of ‘a series of successful comic micro-performances that were not matched by an equal attention to longer, more complex speeches and major characters’.16 Louraço Figueira added that the performances were ‘saying something that everyone knows already, not something that disturbs us’. This sense of ‘something that everyone knows already’ resulted from the way in which the performances created clear parallels with contemporary political figures. Like the Duke, the former socialist prime minister José Socrates had fled Portugal to pursue a qualification in philosophy at the Sorbonne after his election defeat in 2011, leaving the newly elected centre-right coalition to deal with Portugal’s bailout from the European Union, the IMF and the European Central Bank. The

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much-hated new finance minister, Vitor Gaspar, fitted easily into the role of the harsh Angelo, counterpointing the more lenient Duke/ Socrates. When the Duke (Pedro Frias) returned at the end of the play, recalling Socrates’s return from Paris to a successful career as a television commentator,17 he ascended the mini stage amidst applause from his onstage supporters. This was perhaps the defining moment of this use of parallels with national political figures. Significantly, however, the only character from the play without a direct parallel in the contemporary political situation was Isabella. As Louraço Figueira suggests, while these parallels certainly made the production both topical and entertaining, they also tended to reduce the characters to caricatures. This made the performance topical but not necessarily challenging. While it created a sense of a unified ensemble and reinforced the idea that characters shared public spaces regardless of social status, it also homogenized very different characters and registers. Of course, this may well have been intentional in conveying an idea that contemporary democracy encourages such homogenization at the expense of difference, but this removed the element of critique from the use of these parallels. The character of Isabella and her rich and distinctive speech suffered from such a decision and Cardoso seemed unsure how to make her emphasis on virginity contemporary. Dressed for most of the performance in a school uniform, the chastity of Sara Carinhas’s Isabella was associated with prudishness and sexual austerity. After the Duke’s proposal in 5.1, there was a tension between a redemptive and a more transgressive ending for Isabella. In the opening performances at the Centro Cultural Vila Flor in Guimarães, she danced a solo with the wedding dress as if the proposal had been welcome, if surprising. However, when the performances transferred to the Teatro Nacional São João in Porto, the actress threw the wedding dress into the audience suggesting a moment of refusal.18 In interview, Carinhas spoke of how difficult this performance process had been for her. Much of this difficulty resulted from what she characterized as an ‘aggressive’ atmosphere in the overwhelmingly male rehearsal room. Struggling to construct an Isabella who could be both fragile and strong, Carinhas had difficulty finding a space and a voice for her Isabella. In a telling phrase, Carinhas noted that ‘I didn’t have a vision for Isabella while he (Cardoso) did’ and this led to her feeling lost in the process, particularly in the final scene where Isabella has to raise her voice

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among people who are more used to having their voices heard. The trauma of the experience made her ‘bury’ Isabella and ‘forget’ the experience of playing a role that she felt unable to make her own.19 In a chapter on The Marina Project in New Places: Shakespeare and Civic Creativity (2018), Katherine A. Craik and Ewan Fernie discuss their attempt to rethink Marina’s virginity in Pericles and her refusal to submit to the men who frequent the brothel as a radical move rather than an indication of sexual or religious repression. With performers and academics at the RSC, they tested their theory that ‘radical chastity – as a deliberate form of displacement from the status quo, albeit one with complex roots in a tangled political and cultural history – might just cut across the different allegiances which separate people along racial, cultural and religious lines’ (2018: 121). This notion of ‘radical chastity’ challenges associations between chastity, negation of sexuality and religious repression and, in the case of Isabella, suggests that her chastity is an attempt to control rather than repress her sexuality.20 Under Cardoso’s direction, the actress did what she could, but as Isabella was marginalized as a character associated with sexual austerity and had no parallel with a recognizable political figure, it was difficult for her to find room for a coherent interpretation. As this chapter argues, associations of women with regressive rather than progressive politics is something that happens consistently in Cardoso’s Shakespeares, meaning that notions of democracy both in theatre practice and in the social and political sphere are to a large extent compromised by a somewhat conservative view of the roles women might play in these settings.21 Daniel Pinto’s Lucio, however, played a key role in the performance, illustrated by the fact that one of the articles in the production programme by Fernando Mora Ramos was devoted exclusively to him.22 In an interview with Nuno Cardoso published in the same programme, he also chose Lucio as the character he would most like to play in performance, indicating something of a personal preference of the director for this character.23 On the one hand, this is because Lucio’s perspective on those in power is one of cynical deconstruction, echoing Cardoso’s own. On the other, as a privileged character who moves between the sexual anarchy of the brothel and the corridors of power, both legal and political, he is, to a large extent, the type of contemporary character produced by greater democratic access to power without using such access to challenge legal or political power or the figures who wield this

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power. The paradox that greater democracy might not necessarily lead to more progressive politics is one that has haunted postrevolutionary politics in Portugal and ghosted the resurgence of populist and fascist mobilization in Europe. Pinto’s performance drew its strength from one of the bestknown and most ambivalent of Portuguese characters: the chico esperto. Translating literally as something like ‘wise guy’, the chico esperto can be located between the trickster and the hustler. The philosopher José Gil argues (2007: 30) that such a figure ‘traverses all classes, groups, genders and generations’ while the associated phenomenon of ‘chico espertismo’ is considered by Gil a central element of Portuguese sociability.24 While most Portuguese warn against being caught out by this permanent survivor and wheelerdealer, there is also a degree of admiration for a figure who lives off his wits and manages to find a way out of even the most impossible scenarios. Within the context of these performances, Lucio, as homo austeritus, stood in for all those who had survived or even prospered in the period of austerity, from the small businessman who fiddled his tax receipts to the wily banker and his speculative profits to the working-class woman who survived by holding down two jobs but only declaring one. The textual ambivalence of the figure was thus rendered highly political by its local contextualization. In many performances of Measure for Measure, the transition from the leniency of the Duke’s regime to the austerity of Angelo is less than convincing, for characters such as Pompey, Mistress Overdone and Lucio make clear that such regime changes make little difference to the lives of those under those regimes who find imaginative ways to negotiate the new restrictions. They are characters without fear of those in power and for this reason they constitute a potential risk to such regimes. This can be seen in Pompey’s response to Angelo and Escalus’s interrogation (2.1) and in Lucio’s alternative vision of the Duke spoken to the disguised Duke himself (3.2). Nevertheless, such characters prefer to circumvent political power rather than confront it directly, as seen in Pompey’s mention of the ‘wise burgher’ (1.2.96) who intervened behind closed doors to prevent brothels in the city being closed down. Yet in this performance, together with the dark portrayal of Angelo himself by Cláudio da Silva, the scenes in prison avoided the sanitized staginess of most prison representations to convey the physical and mental consequences of being sentenced to prison

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under Angelo’s new regime. Prisoners stood half-naked on chairs with hoods over their heads, recalling the media revelations of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by the North-American authorities in Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. Reinforcing this connection, water was poured over them at regular intervals. Building on Cardoso’s own experiences of working in Portuguese prisons, this prison was not a place where a character such as Claudio could reflect calmly on his impending death. Instead, it was characterized by daily humiliations and the torture of fragile, hidden bodies. When the Duke returned to Vienna, Angelo was unrepentant and there was little sense that the Duke himself, with his media-friendly attempts to win over the population, would dismantle Angelo’s regime completely. Rather, he would continue to turn a blind eye to such abuses of power in order to maintain a view of himself as a generous rather than authoritarian leader. Cardoso’s Measure for Measure examined the ways in which the factionalism and fragmentation of popular movements in Portugal meant that they often choose leaders who are convenient for them in the sense that they will more or less maintain the status quo and turn a blind eye to their forms of minor corruption. He cautioned that such behaviour enables authoritarian rulers to emerge almost by default, a concern that was more fully explored in the performance of Coriolanus that followed.

Coriolanus (2014) In the two-year interval between Measure for Measure and Coriolanus, austerity measures in Portugal had grown harsher, with many falling below the poverty line and those working in the public sector losing around 30 per cent of their salaries in a purportedly exceptional economic measure. While all of Cardoso’s work has been characterized by a certain cynicism about politics and politicians, the cynicism of Coriolanus was noticeably darker. Direct and indirect contestation of a centre-right government which placed being a ‘good’ European partner who paid its debts before time over the well-being of the population had been growing. The young ‘indignados’, representing a generation who had been told by the government to look for jobs abroad rather than stay in Portugal, organized protests around the country. One of these protests occupied the steps leading up to the Parliament building in Lisbon. The protest

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attracted little media attention. However, when members of the police force later protested on the same steps and their colleagues, who were supposedly there to maintain order, allowed them to break through the police presence and reach the entrance of the Parliament building, this event became national news. The protesting police officers attracted much public support for their actions.25 The fact that Cardoso’s Coriolanus took place on a similar set of steps evidently referenced these events and their challenge to the symbolic spaces of formal democracy, while the cover image of the performance programme keyed into a sense of a nation at war with itself (Figure 6). An upturned skull carrying the names of the director and Shakespeare sat above an anonymous mass of people with banners for food and wheat. They identified themselves as rats rather than people. Scattered among this crowd were the faces of the performers in Coriolanus who stood out from the rest of the crowd but who seemed equally unsure what they were doing there. The narrative of Coriolanus, like that of the Portuguese police officers, is a paradoxical one for democracy. Such occupations of symbolic democratic spaces have been carried out both by those seeking to defend and extend democracy and by those who wish to dispense with democracy in favour of direct, autocratic rule. Coriolanus is himself avowedly anti-democratic in his contempt for the people and their representatives and this Coriolanus seemed to caution that in moments of political chaos, charismatic autocratic leaders emerge to offer order and security to a frightened population. The fact that Cardoso cast a handsome, well-known stage and television actor (Albano Jerónimo) in the main role, reinforced this concern about the whittling away of formal democratic structures by authoritarian leaders. Emphasizing the connections between political and military power, both the Romans and the Volscians wore contemporary military fatigues as they marched up and down the steps in tight formations choreographed by the movement director Victor Hugo Pontes, while the translation was deliberately spartan and harsh. The theatrical ensemble here was connected with political orthodoxy and military repression rather than the exploration of new democratic forms. The consequences of this militarization of public space were made clear at the beginning of the performance when the First Citizen’s protest against the people’s lack of food led to him being beaten and left for dead at the front of the stage as news

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FIGURE 6  Cover image of programme for Coriolanus (2014), directed by Nuno Cardoso, courtesy of Teatro Nacional São João.

came through of Caius Marcius’s military victory. The politicians, who were dressed in shiny business suits, kept their distance from such acts of violence but did not condemn them as they benefited indirectly from the crushing of popular opposition. Cardoso spoke in interview of his sense that the performances were taking place ‘at the moment when we have become what we once criticized’.26 He does not elaborate on who constitutes this ‘we’. It could stand for the Portuguese, for the Portuguese left or for Portuguese theatre. Neither does he expand on what it is that ‘we once criticized’ and

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that ‘we have become’. However, the affirmation points to the ways in which political opposition to the Portuguese ruling class had dissipated under the politics of economic austerity, which had allowed this ruling class to pursue their agenda of neoliberal austerity measures with relative impunity. In the Portuguese context, where democracy remains a relatively recent conquest, such moves were seen as rolling back many of the democratic gains of the 1974 Revolution in an atmosphere that approximated what Boaventura de Sousa Santos referred to as ‘social fascism’. For Sousa Santos, this phenomenon is located ‘in the emergence of social relations that generate inequalities between social groups which are so marked that democratic safeguards are unable to defend citizens or oppressed groups’, forcing large numbers to live under ‘micro-dictatorships’ within formally democratic regimes (2012: 32). Two characteristics of Cardoso’s earlier performances of Shakespeare could also be found in Coriolanus. Empathy for those who serve political leaders without themselves having political rights and their particular forms of deconstructive humour inflected the representation of the servants who are preparing Aufidius’s banquet when Coriolanus approaches his former enemy (4.5). The scene itself is an almost throwaway part of the play which serves little narrative purpose, but Cardoso made the servants into a group of weary chefs taking a break from the daily chores of food preparation. Such a characterization avoided the romanticized view of the chef as a media celebrity and reminded audiences that the majority of those who prepare food for others are paid poorly and work long hours. Their wary but ultimately tolerant view of Coriolanus contrasted with the hypocrisy of the Senators and the narcissistic self-regard of Coriolanus himself intent on treating them with physical violence. In terms of the gender politics of the performance, performances tend to focus on the figure of Volumnia and the ways she endorses the class-based contempt of Coriolanus for the people and their representatives. Played here by the magnetic Ana Bustorff, the presence of Volumnia highlighted the transmission of conservative political values through the maternal bond. In the play, Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia plays a minor role, countering Volumnia’s advocacy of masculine militarism with a feminine concern for the loss of life in such conflicts. Volumnia consistently voices the values of family,

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class and nation to support her son’s military exploits. Virgilia never contradicts these beliefs, but desires above all the safety of her husband and son. In her first appearance in this performance (2.1), the actress playing Virgilia (Catarina Lacerda) moved uneasily within a social setting composed of military men and politicians, unable to find a space from which to speak these conventionally female concerns (Figure 7).27 Her lack of space and voice in the militarized space of Rome created parallels with other marginalized characters in the play, such as the citizens or the chefs. This suggestion of a female anti-war position gave way quickly, however, to her reappearance as a trophy wife on the arm of her husband as she failed to influence him away from the military and nationalistic rhetoric espoused by Volumnia. In a post-performance discussion, Cardoso acknowledged that the actress had wanted to make more of the role of Virgilia on the basis of this initial appearance. The fact that this did not happen points to Cardoso’s tendency to cast women as conservative figures rather than explore the complexity of their class, national and gender positions.

FIGURE 7 Virgilia (Catarina Lacerda) in Coriolanus (2014), directed by Nuno Cardoso, photograph by João Tuna. Courtesy of Teatro Nacional São João.

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Timon of Athens (2018) In the publicity for Cardoso’s Timon of Athens, a parallel was drawn between the figures of Coriolanus and Timon in their ‘disenchantment with the prevalence of futility as the common denominator in life’.28 Yet four years after Coriolanus, the tone of Timon seemed even bleaker than its predecessor. The publicity added, ‘[Y]esterday, as today, political conflicts end in impasses or in the victory of opportunists; the population and its leaders are unstable and afraid; virtue gives in to interests.’ As this comment indicates, Cardoso’s Timon dealt with the rise of populism in Europe in the wake of the election in the United States of Donald Trump in 2016. It pointed to the ways in which global media had dealt superficially with these political developments but also to the limitations of the Shakespeare play itself in its comment that ‘the characters in this play, like those in a reality show, are practically all character types or social abstractions, depersonalized and distant. There are no villains, only the weak and the foolish’.29 The five acts of the Shakespeare play were here reduced to two parts with a middle section comprising Timon’s revenge banquet. The first half took place in a male public toilet, emphasizing the overwhelmingly masculine and patriarchal structure of the play. The second half took place in a car park. This movement from private to public space countered the protagonist’s own movement from public to private space and the spaces themselves were the type of transient ‘non-places’ identified by Marc Augé (2009). The choice of a car park widened the notion of impasse to include the inability to leave behind the fossil fuel ecological paradigm that populist leaders have tended to support. Cardoso’s Timon took place at the same time as he was appointed artistic director of the Teatro Nacional São João and the contrast between his highprofile public appointment and the deep cynicism of this Timon might seem somewhat paradoxical. However, artistically, it is very much a development of his previous work with Shakespeare and his concerns around political democracy. His comment to Maria João Monteiro that ‘[d]ebt is one of the greatest wake-up calls we have had in the last few years – friends may be friends, but business is business’, for instance, recalled his interest in the longterm consequence of Portugal’s economic bailout and the erosion of Portuguese democracy by supranational institutions. Like Lucio

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in Measure for Measure, Apemantus was the kind of paradoxical figure produced by contemporary politics, simultaneously deconstructive and representative of the political impasse. The scenes in the public toilet also recalled the physical energy and aggression of the performers in Measure for Measure. Reviews of the performance, however, preferred to consider the performance as a critique of greed, egotism and consumerism rather than discuss the performance’s relation to contemporary economics and politics.30

Political Shakespeare as a discourse of cruel optimism Cardoso’s Shakespeares have constructed a bridge between views of political Shakespeare where a contemporary political situation is represented onstage in such a way that it prompts reflection from spectators and the view of the political as ‘provisional, plural and contextual’ outlined by Hartley. There are, however, crucial absences from both ideas of the political in Cardoso’s performances as they lack either the sense of a clear political message or the sense of empowerment which is crucial to Hartley’s definition of political Shakespeares. However, both these critical formulations of the political also downplay the experimentation with forms of being together which is so crucial to Cardoso’s Shakespeares. In her chapter ‘On the Desire for the Political’ in Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant suggests that the desire for the political can be viewed as a discourse of cruel optimism. Such discourses, which also include the belief in the right to a happy life or a permanent job, are ‘cruel’ in the sense that continued belief in them comes up against the recognition that such notions have largely ceased to exist or are no longer recognizable in their current form.31 In such a context, Berlant argues that notions of the political must ‘manifest a politically depressive position, but without seeking repair in an idiom recognizable in the dominant terms’ (2011: 249). Putting forward a definition of the political informed by contemporary affect theory, Berlant recasts the political as ‘that which magnetizes a desire for intimacy, sociality, affective solidarity, and happiness’ (2011: 252). She advocates an art whose aim is not the transmission of the political as it currently exists but ‘a lateral

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exploration of an elsewhere that is first perceptible as atmosphere’ (2011: 20). Cardoso’s Shakespeares have manifested an increasing cynicism from 2007 to 2018 that might accurately be described as a ‘politically depressive position’ without seeking ‘repair in an idiom recognizable in the dominant terms’. Although Cardoso consistently stages those whose poverty or lack of rights marginalize them within formal democracies, there is little suggestion of alternatives that might redress these situations. Since Measure for Measure, Cardoso has portrayed a nation and, by extension, a world that is riven by conflict and a lack of social justice in increasingly cynical stagings of the glocalized, ‘intervened in’ nation that is contemporary Portugal. The different stage metaphors, from the football pitch and the café to the steps of Parliament and the public toilets and car park indicate a shift from images of the nation as an imagined community, to images of cross-class sociability in the café to images of intranational conflict over the nation’s symbolic spaces to the ‘non-places’ of hypermodernity. Yet each of these spaces are also spaces where people meet and encounter others, exchange views and feelings harmoniously or agonistically, form temporary and permanent relationships and seek happiness in a variety of happy objects. While such interactions are subject to ‘cruel’ optimism in that the expectations associated with them are rarely materialized in practice, they remain an integral part of human conviviality, care-taking and contestation. Moreover, Cardoso’s consistent return to such ambivalent spaces might well be considered ‘a lateral exploration of an elsewhere that is first perceptible as atmosphere’, a sense that the ‘minor and incremental’ victories of political performance take place in these unstable and uncertain exchanges and ordinary locations. Cardoso’s staging of an increasingly divided nation and its consequences for democracy suggest that his political cynicism is closely related to political idealism. Indeed, the very notion of political Shakespeare might itself, paradoxically, constitute a discourse of cruel optimism. The idea of staging the nation to its citizens through a politicized take on Shakespeare and the implicit belief that by doing so, change might occur both within and outside the institutions of formal democracy illustrate this. By holding a mirror up to Portuguese society in all its political, social and affective ugliness and everyday splendour, there is a hope that audiences feel bound to transform the image of themselves that

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his theatre projects. This can certainly be seen as part of Cardoso’s political and artistic project with Shakespeare and the wide variety of characters and situations within the Shakespeare canon provide Cardoso with a sufficiently ample range for this project. While political alternatives are absent in his performances of Shakespeare, Cardoso’s work with his ensemble of performers provides an alternative political model for society which ‘magnetizes a desire for intimacy, sociality, affective solidarity, and happiness’. From the chaotic anarchy of the ensemble in Richard II to the temporary solidarities of Measure for Measure, from the paradoxical belonging of Coriolanus to the self-interested groupings of Timon of Athens, it is through the ensemble that Cardoso explores the possibilities of what is held in common within the nation as the basis for collective survival, sociality and solidarity. Nevertheless, in proposing the theatrical ensemble as a political model, Cardoso’s alternative to formal democracy also has serious limitations. It is clear that his ensemble is invariably constituted by able-bodied young White men.32 I have detailed throughout the chapter Cardoso’s difficulty in thinking though contemporary roles for women in Shakespeare. Non-White performers are conspicuous by their absence. In this sense, some of the democratic promise of Richard II, where women played more of an equal role in the ensemble, and R2, where the majority of the company were young Black men, was not carried through into subsequent Shakespeare performances. This evidently raises questions about the extent to which these performances stage the contemporary multicultural, gender-fluid nation or a nostalgic White male imagined community and highlights the need for national theatres to propose theatrical practices and practitioners that are more inclusive as they stage the nation.

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4 Empowering the spectator Christiane Jatahy’s The Moving Forest

In 2018, Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy brought her The Moving Forest to the D. Maria II national theatre in Lisbon. As this immersive take on Macbeth began, the audience climbed onto the stage to watch four video installations focusing on contemporary abuses of power. My own reaction, which I cannot generalize but seemed to be shared by others, was a dutiful condemnation of these abuses. Just one hour later, in the closing moments of the performance, the spectators were invited once more to watch the videos and this more predictable response had become a stronger physical and emotional one which I verbalized to myself as ‘watching this is intolerable’. This chapter is an attempt to understand the transformation that occurred during this performance. It works with an acknowledged spectatorial response to theatre, that of being moved, to develop a critical perspective on moving the audience in contemporary performance. It layers conceptions of being moved in terms of the transnational movement of Shakespearean performances between different locations, notions of being moved emotionally, or constructing a sense of empathy or sympathy with events and people, notions of being moved as physical movement and a political sense of being moved to action. In the process, it questions separations between the individual and the collective, the corporeal and the perceptual and the affective and the critical that

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tend to structure critical approaches to immersive performances of Shakespeare. The chapter works with Ana Pais’s notion of co-(m)motion (comoção in the original Portuguese) to develop this multi-layered notion of moving the audience. In her work on affective rhythms in the performing arts, Pais defines co-(m)motion as ‘an affective coming together to describe the reciprocity of the relationship between performers and audience’ (2018: 60). Justifying her choice of this term, Pais explores the affective and relational potential of its etymology: Commotion describes a movement which requires something or someone to occur: (cum + moveo, to move with). Unlike emotion, a movement that comes from the inside (e-moveo), commotion is a movement with someone else that highlights the relationship between the inside and the outside. (2018: 242) Pais also highlights the connotations of social agitation and disturbance associated with the term, arguing that ‘commotion . . . suggests not only inner emotional agitation but also the impact of a collective atmosphere’. Her exploration of the multiple meanings of commotion suggests that performance can act as a catalyst for the type of multidimensional moving of the spectators that characterized Jatahy’s The Moving Forest.1 Her analysis might be complemented with a focus on commotion as a transnational movement across national borders, which gains power as it travels between geographical locations like a tropical storm becoming a hurricane. As this performance moved between locations, it accumulated new testimony for the video installations in each national context from those forced into global movement through war, famine or political persecution. This extended the reach of the performance’s focus on contemporary abuses of power. It also contrasted the privileged artistic invitation to the director to travel between these different locations and the more precarious global journeys of those who gave their testimony on video.2 The transnational commotion of The Moving Forest also enables analysis of a lusophone exchange between a Brazilian director and a Portuguese performance context. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, globalization has tended to construct Portugal as a site for the reception of international performances of Shakespeare

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rather than the export of performances for the international festival circuit. I have labelled this model one of hospitable globalization. Brazil has adopted the opposite strategy and for this reason, it is more common to see a Brazilian production of Shakespeare outside the country than a Portuguese one.3 Grupo Galpão’s immensely successful Romeo and Juliet, for example, which used street theatre and circus techniques and included extensive references to southeast Brazilian popular culture was performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London on two separate occasions (2000 and 2012).4 By contrast, although Portuguese practitioners such as Tiago Rodrigues and Teatro Praga have performed Shakespeare in various European and non-European contexts, the Anglophone centres of Shakespearean performance, such as Shakespeare’s Globe, have to my knowledge, never staged Portuguese performances of Shakespeare.5 It is also true, however, that Portuguese Shakespeares have rarely been conceived for the global Shakespeare circuit, focusing more often on local and national concerns and the possibilities of co-production between different cultural institutions within Portugal to reach wider audiences. The Artist in the City bi-annual programme provides a different, longer-term context for international exchanges to the festival circuit and gives international practitioners the opportunity to create work over a year that is shown in various cultural venues in Lisbon. In 2014, Tim Etchells from the English company Forced Entertainment was the invited artist. In 2016, it was the Congolese dancer and choreographer Faustin Linkeyula and in 2018, the Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy. These invitations to international artists aim to encourage the creation of international networks for Portuguese artists and a context for international artists to perform in Portugal. Yet, historically, the invitations to international artists to show their work in Portugal have also functioned as an alternative to the sustained funding and development of theatre work in Portugal itself, as in the short and mid-term, it is less expensive to invite visiting artists to Portugal to introduce new theatrical trends and practices than it is to support the long-term development of such trends in artistic projects within Portugal. The various artists within the Artist in the City programme have conceived of their remit in different ways, sometimes creating new work in Portugal and at others bringing already-existing work to Portugal. In her year as the Artist in the City, Jatahy brought to

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Portugal some previous work and created one new performance while in Lisbon. Her periods of time in the capital were concentrated so that she could maintain her other international commitments. Jatahy brought to the Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II a trilogy based around three canonical texts: Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Shakespeare’s Macbeth over a one-month period. Although the performances were very different, they were presented as a trilogy and audiences were encouraged to see them in this way. In terms of Shakespeare, the invitation to Jatahy was significant because of not only her theatre work but also her gender. Since the 1974 Revolution, very few women have directed Shakespeare in Portugal. Beatriz Batarda directed As You Like It in 2014, but she has been very much the exception to the rule. Considering the time that has passed since the Revolution, this continuing absence of women directors of Shakespeare in the post-revolutionary period is shocking and unless there are specific theatrical programmes to encourage more women to direct Shakespeare, this situation is unlikely to change.

The dramaturgy of The Moving Forest Macbeth has consistently been one of the most popular Shakespeare plays for performance in Portugal.6 During the dictatorship, its exploration of tyranny and enforced exile resonated with opponents of the regime and independent companies seeking to explore new forms of theatrical performance outside the state and the commercial sector. Since the Revolution, the play has been performed by many amateur and professional companies.7 These performances have stressed in particular the play’s focus on political ambition. Macbeth has been performed also in a variety of artistic forms, most notably in a harrowing life-size puppet version of the play by the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto in 2001 and a series of solo performances around the figure of Lady Macbeth. A 1998 performance of the play by Teatro Meridional even cast Macbeth as an Iberian tragedy, although this owed more to its integration of Spanish and Portuguese performers than a particularly Iberian perspective on the play. It did emphasize the fact, however, that the rather abstract evocations of Scotland and England in the play enable its translocation to different cultural

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and political environments relatively easily. Macbeth is also a short Shakespearean tragedy and this combined with an interest in its poetry and politics have been the main factors encouraging Portuguese interest in the play. A more recent performance at the Teatro Nacional São João in 2017, directed by Nuno Carinhas, placed more of an emphasis on the dynamics of the main couple in a somewhat lacklustre production built around the two central performers (Emilia Silvestre and João Reis). In global terms, Macbeth has often been a popular choice for performances by international companies visiting Portugal, while films based on the play, such as those of Polanski (1971) or Kurosawa (1957), have influenced the aesthetics of lusophone performances. The Brazilian Grupo de Teatro Macunaima staged a heavy metal Macbeth in 1993 with visual references to Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. The Brazilian director Ulysses Cruz staged Macbeth in 1993 with members of Porto’s Seiva Trupe company. Considering the extent of Brazilian theatre production and the historical, cultural and linguistic links between Portugal and Brazil, the relatively small number of Brazilian performances of Macbeth in Portugal illustrates how Portugal has tended to privilege its cultural connections with Europe rather than with other Portuguese-speaking countries. Jatahy’s exploration of Macbeth was retitled The Moving Forest. This title referenced events in Act 5, Scene 5 of Macbeth, where a startled Messenger informs Macbeth: ‘As I did stand my watch upon the hill, / I looked toward Birnam, and anon methought / The wood began to move’ (5.5.32–4). Hearing this, Macbeth realizes that if this report turns out to be true, his sense of infallibility is misplaced and this awareness leads to temporary paralysis: ‘If this which he avouches does appear, / There is nor flying hence nor tarrying here’ (5.5.46–7). When Birnam Wood does indeed approach, this signals the beginning of the end for Macbeth. Aside from the performative possibilities of a moving wood, Jatahy was also interested in this moment of the play when a seemingly invincible tyrant senses the loss of his power. Through Macbeth, she sought to explore the ambition for power of more contemporary tyrants and how their regimes might be challenged by collective opposition. She created a performance that combined video installations, recorded film and moments of live performance to prompt spectators to take on this oppositional role. The performance was originally conceived for

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the Venice Biennale and, from its inception, was envisaged as an international touring production. In one of the early dialogues in the creative process, Jatahy affirms that ‘[t]oday I reached the conclusion that I wanted the audience to leave thinking: This is Macbeth and it has nothing or almost nothing of the text of Macbeth in it’ (2017: 43). In the final performance, male spectators read short narrative excerpts from Macbeth in translation which emphasized key moments of action in the play. These excerpts and a later section of the performance where the actress Júlia Bernat and a spectator-performer read the Birnam Wood dialogue from which the performance took its title, were the only moments of the performance taken directly from the text of Macbeth. Christophe Triau has argued that in this performance ‘Shakespeare’s play is neither performed nor adapted; it traverses the performance in echoes and fragments – it haunts it – so to speak, inspires it, provides materials, references and images and functions as a metaphor for the state of the world’ (2017: 267). Jatahy emphasized parallels between the events of the play and contemporary global politics. For her, Macbeth was ‘the system in which we find ourselves’, a perspective which ‘questions us about our willingness to condone it or not’ (2017: 270). Jatahy began by recasting the play as a series of symbolic actions that included a hand picking up a knife or the washing of bloody hands in water. In the performance, rather than following the sequence of events in the play, the first and second acts were refashioned as the video installations, the third act began when the screens on which these videos were projected began to move. The fourth act became the film of the micro-performances that took place during the performance and the final act became a monologue written and performed by the actress Júlia Bernat, which included the spectator–performer dialogue about Birnam Wood. Jatahy was interested particularly in the banquet scene (3.4) in Macbeth. In early conversations, Jatahy was more focused on the experiences of Lady Macbeth, arguing that the performance would be ‘a journey in the direction of Lady Macbeth’s interior monologue’ (2017: 46). As the creative process progressed, this focus became concentrated on her behaviour in the banquet scene where ‘Lady Macbeth is trying to repair a broken window and a broken society that can’t be put back together again’ (2017: 45). Jatahy labels the events of the banquet the period of the ‘moral hangover’ for both the protagonist and Lady Macbeth (2017: 63), where the conflicts

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resulting from the murders of Duncan and Banquo begin to manifest themselves publicly. The rifts that characterize this scene became the vernissage setting of The Moving Forest in which the spectators interacted with each other and the materials of performance.

Immersive performance and implicated spectatorship In an essay on The Moving Forest, Christophe Triau described the performance as one ‘in which the spectators are an integral part, not only through their simple participatory or interactive enjoyment, but also because of the disturbing, speculative and critically intimate experience of the performance of their own position, situated on the “tenuous line” of their condition as observers’ (2017: 267). Triau’s link between ‘enjoyment’ and a ‘disturbing experience’ conveys some of the paradoxes of spectatorship in this performance as well as the ethical and political questions it raised. The performance can be characterized as immersive in the sense outlined by Sophie Nield as theatre ‘in which the audience inhabit the space of the play alongside the actors’ (2008: 531) and where performers, in the words of Stephen Purcell, ‘typically allow their audience to move around the performance site at their own pace, and often to interact with its contents’ (2013: 129). However, unlike many other immersive performances which take place in non-theatrical spaces, this immersive event took place at the heart of the theatrical mainstream and on a conventional theatre stage adapted for the performance.8 When the audience entered the performance space, there were no seats from which to watch the tragedy of Macbeth unfold. Instead, the spectators were directed onto the stage where there were four screens on one side of the stage and a bar on the other with a large mirror. The screens projected the stories of four individuals and their struggles with transnational forms of dislocation and disempowerment.9 Igor was a Brazilian political prisoner who emphasized the social and political factors that lead to people ending up in Brazilian prisons. He claimed that ‘prison is created for the poor’, while his mother added that Brazil is hostile to the notion of people having rights (2017: 250). Michele was a working-class Black Brazilian woman who saw

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her uncle murdered by the police in a Rio de Janeiro slum. Rather than seeking to establish what had happened, the main question that interested the media was whether he had been a drug dealer. Aboud, a refugee from the Syrian civil war, was living in Germany. He related stories about the torture of members of the Syrian opposition and his imprisonment in a cage when he passed through Hungary. Prosper, a refugee from war in the Congo, was living in São Paulo, Brazil. In his video, he emphasized the continuity between war and politics and suggested that people in the West care less about what happens on the African continent than what happens closer to them in Europe. He reinforced one of the central ideas behind this performance, that ‘[e]veryone here has a story, a tragedy that has occurred in the life of each of these people’ (2017: 254). These stories of political persecution and enforced exile were not filmed in conventional documentary style. While the characters narrated their experiences to camera, the visual images focused not on their faces but on fragments of arms, legs, eyes, tables, parakeets and flights of stairs filmed through mirrors. Their testimonies were interspersed with apparently random comments by mothers, friends and children who strayed into the film. Jatahy claimed that the documentaries had been filmed in this unconventional way because in traditional video documentaries ‘the image can wipe out the discourse’ (2017: 97). Spectators chose how long they stayed to watch each of these stories and in which order. They could supplement or replace their viewing of the videos with visits to the bar or private conversations with each other. In her book documenting the creative process of The Moving Forest, Christiane Jatahy notes how more accessible and more compact technologies have offered new possibilities for performance. Whereas in the past an entire room was needed for an editing station, it is possible now to carry one on your back. This has led to the need for what Jatahy calls ‘artists of technology’ who can advise directors and performers on what can and cannot be done in performance and materialize these possibilities for them (2017: 91). Indeed, many of the conversations in the book involve these various ‘artists of technology’ and the final performance developed through their sustained collaboration with the director. As in the Teatro Praga performances in Chapter 1, critical work on intermediality can provide a framework in which to discuss contemporary performances such as these that combine live

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performance and recorded material. However, the combination of video installations, micro-performances by both performers and spectators, pre-recorded film and sequences filmed in real time in The Moving Forest was very different from the Teatro Praga performances in Chapter 1 and illustrates how the umbrella term of the intermedial is applied to very different performances in which these technologies are used for distinct artistic purposes. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Sigrid Merx argue that in the analysis of intermedial performances, ‘[e]ach performance calls for or generates its own concepts’ and, as such, invites its own particular mode of analysis (2010: 219). In the case of The Moving Forest, alongside the use of co-(m)motion outlined earlier to analyse the various ways in which the audience were moved during this performance, this chapter also builds on Pascale Aebischer’s optimistic assessment of how the use of new technologies recasts the relationship between performer and spectator in ways that promote the ethical engagement of spectators: Modern technology . . . can remediate for twenty-first century Western audiences the intimacy, constraints and calls to ethical engagement that are a feature of the performer-audience dynamic in early modern drama and that are scripted into Shakespeare’s plays. (2017: 303) In a play like Macbeth, where the audience is well aware of the abuses of power taking place, questions of ethical engagement are of particular significance. However, while there was a strong focus on the political and ethical engagement of spectators in The Moving Forest, the performance raised further ethical and political questions about the technologies of performance both in and outside the theatre. Jatahy has consistently combined film and live performance in what she labels ‘invisible performance’ where ‘fiction is combined with reality in such a way as it becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is fictional’ (2017: 28). The notion of invisible performance immediately brings to mind Augusto Boal’s invisible theatre and the ways in which it encouraged political intervention in real-life situations.10 However, while certainly building on Boal’s use of invisible theatre to promote empowerment and a sense of collective engagement, Jatahy’s invisible performances also render the technology that structures the performance situation invisible in

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ways that recall the equally invisible operations of surveillance and data-collection technologies outside the theatre. Around twenty spectators of The Moving Forest were given headsets as they entered the performance space.11 They were informed that the director would relay instructions through these headsets during the performance. When she first spoke to the people with headsets inside the theatre, the softly spoken Jatahy made clear that a person could decide not to follow her instructions, but there was also a sense that these instructions formed an important part of the performance and relied on the audience carrying them out for its success. The soothing quality of Jatahy’s voice also encouraged the spectators to follow the performance rules.12 Moreover, those who had been chosen to wear the headsets would have felt a degree of specialness and an awareness that this privilege had not been extended to everyone. The relaying of information to spectators over the headsets enabled semi-private conversations between these spectators and the director which were inaudible to other spectators. As such, the micro-performances undertaken by the spectator-performers in accordance with these instructions were invisible to those who did not have headsets and even when they became visible, those who witnessed them could not be certain whether the spectator-performers were acting on their own volition or carrying out instructions. For the director, on the other hand, there was no guarantee that the spectator-performers would carry out the instructions relayed to them or that they would carry them out in ways that the creative team had anticipated. The headsets might also fail to work. In this way, elements of chance, risk and improvisation were associated with the dramaturgy of these technologies in performance. While other spectators milled around the bar or moved between the videos, the spectators with headsets were led through a series of micro-performances centred around the bar. These included leaving a bag on the counter. Such an action not only raised the possibility of someone stealing the bag but, in the present context, also the possibility of a terrorist act. Later, another spectator-performer was asked to open the bag and put their hand inside. This action explored what others around this act witnessed and whether they would intervene to ask questions or put an end to the action.13 The spectator-performer who placed his hand in the bag was also asked to take out paper money covered in blood and distribute it to other members of the audience. Another spectator-performer removed

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teeth from a dead fish.14 She was then asked to wash her hands in an aquarium, turning the water red as she did so. While the spectators wearing headsets were aware of all these actions, other spectators might have witnessed one or two or even none of them. Adding a further dimension to the notion of ‘invisible performance’, a woman fell on the floor close to those watching the videos, prompting members of the audience to either extend a hand or just ignore her. This woman turned out to be the performer Júlia Bernat. All these invisible performances posed the question of whether the audience’s investment in the visual and performative media that surrounded them prevented them from seeing and intervening in what was happening right next to them. At all times, it remained unclear whether these events were real or fictional and whether those who performed them were professional performers or spectator-performers. Just as the audience had become more or less comfortable with the existing parameters of the performance, the screens on which the video installations had been projected began to move and the images on the screens changed. The four screens were brought together to become one giant extended screen onto which were projected images of animals. These animal images picked up on the prevalence of animal imagery in Macbeth, extending them to include a cat, a harpy (mockingbird), a toad, an owl, a finch, a salamander, a snake, a wolf and a tiger.15 The way in which they were filmed made them look more like fantastical, exotic or mythical creatures than recognizable wild animals. There were also images of roots, skeletons or skins of dead animals, introducing a strong macabre aesthetic into the performance. Jatahy likened the sound of the screens coming together to that of a tsunami followed by a period of intense silence and the animals represented here more clearly referenced the biodiversity of the Amazon forest than the Scottish landscape of Birnam Wood. This evocation of an endangered forest full of exotic and fantastical animals has taken on extra relevance since the election of Jair Bolsonaro in the same year as this performance. Modelling himself on Donald Trump, Bolsonaro refuses to accept the science of climate change and actively encouraged industrial logging in the forest over the protests of environmentalists and the rights of indigenous people. The widespread fires in the Amazon in 2019 were the clear result of turning a blind eye to such illegal activities. The layering of the Amazon forest over Birnam Wood in this performance enabled a prescient critique of contemporary Brazilian environmental politics.

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It also encouraged reflection on the early modern environmental consequences of uprooting woods for military purposes, linking both locations in a form of ecological and transcultural commotion.16 The next sequence of images on the screens reduced the distance between the Lisbon audience and this wider global context in a quite unexpected way and implicated the spectators themselves in questions of power and corruption. The distancing effect of the strange creatures and sounds gave way to a silent pre-recorded film sequence of the spectators who had been present at the performance that night and the micro-performances that had taken place earlier at the bar. Events that had seemed inconsequential and part of the playfulness of performance were now recast as evidence of violent and bloody acts and the complicity of the spectators in allowing such acts to pass unchallenged. Particularly damning in this respect was the attempt of one of the spectator-performers to give away bank notes covered in blood to other spectators. On film, this impromptu performer, as well as those spectators who had accepted the money, were rendered complicit not only in murder but also in widespread corruption. Jatahy has suggested that when the spectators see themselves on film, ‘it’s like you’re seeing your recent past and how close you were to all that was going on and how much you were a part of it, without realizing’ (2017: 66). Christophe Triau notes how in the intermedial commotion that turned the observers into those being observed, the complexity of the spectator’s position was revealed as ‘we see ourselves; we see ourselves seeing; we see ourselves being seen; we see ourselves seeing ourselves being seen; we see ourselves being seen seeing ourselves being seen’ (2017: 270). Triau’s use of ‘we’ here is indicative of the inability of the spectators to place themselves physically, emotionally or perceptually outside this situation, even as they remained critical observers within it. In her previously cited comments on the ethical engagement prompted by the use of new technologies in performance, Pascale Aebischer highlights the ‘intimacy, constraints and calls to ethical action’ that such technologies can promote. Watching oneself on the screen during this sequence was something of an uncanny experience. You were watching someone who was you and who was not you, someone you had been only minutes before but no longer were. This liminal experience of radical dislocation in time, space and media was viscerally and perceptually destabilizing, but also prompted the kind of ethical re-evaluation Aebischer suggests. It was highly

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effective in illustrating the ways in which bystanders get drawn into the dirty game of politics and how even those who stand by and do nothing are complicit in the rise to power of tyrants. This ethical commotion cast the actions of regimes of power and their abuses in terms of collective responsibility rather than individual morality. Nevertheless, this sequence also raised other ethical questions. Jatahy mentions in her book that a spectator at a previous performance asked her what would happen to the images that were filmed during the performance. She seemed surprised at the question. The lack of consent of the spectators to being filmed during the performance and their lack of control over images taken without their consent after the performance is a particularly pertinent question considering current concerns about data protection and personal information online.17 Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Sigrid Merx emphasize the contemporary significance of making the invisible workings of technology visible through performance. They suggest that ‘[t]he fact that our reality is constantly mediated has become invisible. Producing colliding sensual impressions in performance can mobilize a process of knowing by making these acts of mediation once again perceptible’ (2010: 227). Without doubt, the perceptual commotion resulting from the making visible of previously invisible performances was designed here with just such a deconstructive purpose in mind. Yet it is also the case that such revelations simultaneously reinforced the invisibility of technological operations and their power to survey and capture human activity without people’s knowledge or consent. Moreover, the involvement of spectator-performers in a performance game that turned out to have political consequences appeared to cast them as equally culpable as those who take political bribes, promote and profit from corruption and use murder and violence as political tools. This constructed parallel is, at the very least, debatable. In ethical and political terms, was the ‘complicity’ and ‘guilt’ of those who took part in the performance equal to such figures as Bolsonaro, Maduro or Trump and those who have benefited from their patronage? While there are certainly parallels between playing along with the performance game and playing along with the political game, it is unlikely that any member of the audience in this situation was even a Bolsonaro voter, let alone a corrupt politician. More effective in thinking through questions of ethical and political responsibility was the sudden, unexpected movement of the screens towards the spectators that followed, forcing them to make a

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simultaneously emotional, physical and political choice whether to retreat back towards the bar or remain where they were and face down the advancing screens. In the process, a temporary, embodied collective was formed as spectators negotiated individually and collaboratively, corporeally rather than verbally, intuitively rather than rationally, their response to the advance of this technological and newly politicized forest. Rather than blaming the spectators for their complicity and lack of attention to events around them, this action seemed to offer them an embodied and affective choice as to where they stood in relation to the political catastrophes of the contemporary world. It encompassed simultaneously the ethical, political, corporeal, affective and transnational dimensions of the performance’s commotion. While thinking about the role of Lady Macbeth, Jatahy had established a parallel between the Shakespearean character and Marcela Temer, the wife of the Brazilian President Michel Temer. A former beauty queen, she had been criticized for her lavish spending habits and advocacy of a conservative feminine role. Temer himself had come to power after the notoriously undemocratic impeachment of the former President, Dilma Rousseff, and the jailing of Lula da Silva. These events were referenced in a monologue created and performed by Júlia Bernat towards the end of The Moving Forest. Bernat narrated a series of statistics about war and global tyranny which complemented and contextualized the individual stories in the video installations. The statistics ranged from the fact that one adolescent dies every hour in Brazil to the global traffic in child labour and the enforced movement of contemporary refugees. It included examples of police brutality, the innumerable victims of war and ecologically disastrous mineral exploitation in the Congo. These global stories of the inequalities and oppression surrounding global births and deaths ended with the birth of Michel Temer. Three months after leading the movement to impeach Dilma Rousseff and imprison former President Lula da Silva, Temer was himself jailed on corruption charges, which made him a very contemporary Macbeth figure. The monologue functioned as a kind of testimony to the global chaos engendered by a permanent state of economic, political and ecological crisis. As Christophe Triau has noted ‘[i]n Júlia’s speech she says “I see” but what? What she sees and what she tells us she sees is not the future like the witches in Macbeth, but our present. She even mentions the exact date’ (2017: 269). In the process, the monologue

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added a further critical layer to the performance’s commotion as the notion of political agitation and disturbance it signalled here was indicative of the extent of the destruction wrought by these multiple tragedies rather than opposition to them. After this monologue, Bernat asked a spectator to read with her the exchange between the Messenger and Macbeth in 5.5 about the approach of Birnam Wood. She ended the reading with the words ‘[h]ere, now, at this moment, we are also facing the horror of the dark times in which we live. . . . How do we change things?’ (2017: 261). She suggested that the moment when Macbeth learns of the approach of Birnam Wood and first senses his own fear is a pivotal moment in the play and in forging an opposition to the various social, political, medical and ecological catastrophes that characterize the present moment. As the screens moved forwards once more towards the spectators, they dared them to retreat or stand their ground in response to Bernat’s question. As such, the moving technological forest came to represent not only the encroachment of political reaction on private and public, local and global spaces but also the force of a possible resistance to that encroachment by a newly energized collective made conscious of its power to resist. This paradoxical commotion, created by a widespread experience of tragedy but also the basis of resistance to it, represented a complex but hopeful political response to Bernat’s question. In common with many contemporary performances of Macbeth, the ending of The Moving Forest was circular rather than linear. After Bernat’s monologue and the movement of the screens, the actress left the performance space. The lights came up to reveal Jatahy and the camera crew behind the mirror of the bar from where they had filmed the spectators during the performance.18 In a Q-and-A session after the performance, Jatahy suggested that the camera crew had played a parallel role to that of the witches in Macbeth, encouraging spectators to act in ways they would not outside the space of performance and then confronting them with the consequences of their actions. As Jatahy made herself and the camera crew visible behind the bar, the performance space came to resemble less a vernissage and more a diffused panopticon where no action of the spectators remained invisible or beyond scrutiny. Through a microphone, Jatahy invited audiences to stay within the performance for as long as they wished and watch the same videos that had begun the performance. As I mentioned at the beginning of

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this chapter, seeing the videos once more became intolerable after the various forms of commotion the audience had experienced during the performance and I left the performance space almost immediately. Christophe Triau suggests that the spectators see the videos for the second time ‘maybe from a different perspective’ (2017: 269). The fact that the majority of the spectators stayed for the Q and A after the performance suggests that the need to bear witness had become active rather than passive during the course of the performance and that this was a collective rather than an individual phenomenon. The moving of the audience outlined in this chapter worked through a consistent sense of radical dislocation, or glocal commotion, resulting from sudden changes in the space, time and media of the performance. In his work on the politics of postdramatic theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann identifies theatre’s potential to create a ‘politics of perception, which could at the same time be called an aesthetic of responsi-bility (or response-ability)’. In the context of the uninterrupted and disjointed flow of media images, Lehmann argues: Instead of the deceptively comforting duality of here and there, inside and outside [of media images], it [theatre] can move the mutual implication of actors and spectators in the theatrical production of images into the centre and thus make visible the broken thread between personal experience and perception. Such an experience would be not only aesthetic but therein at the same time ethico-political. (2006: 185–6, emphasis in the original) This notion of response-ability, created through the spectators’ individual and collective interactions with the shifting performance situations, illustrates how immersive performances such as these can promote physical, emotional, political and perceptual challenges to the aesthetics, ethics and politics of the contemporary period. It links the various forms of commotion in the performance with Aebischer’s sense of the ethical engagement prompted by the use of new technologies. However, the paradoxical nature of commotion as both provoked by multiple tragedies and a potential response to them and the questions around consent and culpability mobilized by notions of spectator response-ability complicated the performance’s ethics and politics in ways that signal the continuing importance

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of critical approaches to immersive performances in countering excessively optimistic assessments of the performance’s politics and ethics from its creators.

Documenting process Many artists are documenting elements of their artistic process along with their performances and expanding performance to include discussions of rehearsals and the creative process. This is happening for a variety of reasons. Firstly, such documentation shows funders that the performance not only occurred, but also that an extensive creative process fed into this final product. Invariably, only the final performance is visible in the public sphere and making visible the creative process is a way of making public the extensive work leading up to performance and therefore making it worthy of funding. Some artists are also artist-researchers who are engaged on master’s or doctoral programmes or who work in universities. In these cases, documenting process is often compulsory as a theoretical complement to their creative work. Some artists have a sense that such documentation will be useful for those within schools and universities who wish to research their work. Many simply do so in order to have a record of what happened without a clear sense of its short- or long-term purpose. Most of this documentation of creative process is made available online through YouTube or Vimeo or actor/company blogs. In the case of Christiane Jatahy, however, The Moving Forest was accompanied by a 285-page book in Portuguese entitled Invisible Frontiers: Dialogues for the Creation of The Moving Forest. The book is credited to Christiane Jatahy ‘and collaborators’ and cost 24 euros. These collaborators included those responsible for filming parts of the performance, actors and actresses, the scenographer, as well as the people responsible for lighting and music. Jatahy refers to these dialogues as the ‘dramaturgy’ of the performance and they begin in July 2015 and end in November 2015, after the first performances of The Moving Forest (2017: 155). Most of the book consists of recorded dialogues between members of the creative team and Jatahy in her home in Rio de Janeiro, but the book also includes the entire script of the performance (including the scripts of the video installations), a critical essay by Christophe Triau, biographical

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information about Jatahy and a record of her previous performances. The decision to produce a book from the taped dialogues was only taken towards the end of September 2015 and was suggested by someone outside the creative process rather than by Jatahy herself. The first question raised is why this particular process merited documentation in book form and who might be the target audience for such a book. Was the choice of this performance guided by an awareness of Shakespeare’s cultural capital or was there something in this performance that Jatahy particularly wanted to record? Is it a record of the performance for Jatahy and her team or was it meant to offer a glimpse into the creation of the performance for spectators as it toured around the world? Is the book on the process a global cultural product in the same way as the performance? The fact that it was adapted from a Shakespeare play might well have conditioned the choice of this particular performance, but it was also the final performance of a trilogy and the book might be more about reflecting on that trilogy as a particular stage in Jatahy’s trajectory. The work seems geared towards those who saw the performance, although the exhaustive account of the various conversations that helped create the performance might also be of interest to those who did not. The very exhaustiveness of the volume raises the question of to what extent such an unedited account might be useful or interesting for those who read it, and it is certainly true that there are some conversations which seem of little interest to anyone outside the creative process or to other practitioners.19 However, as my inclusion of quotations from the book throughout this chapter suggests, there is also much valuable information for those interested in exploring and analysing the performance and the book functions as a sort of ‘making of’ of the performance. On the other hand, working from information provided by the director and the creative team differs from an interview in the sense that they decide what information is made available rather than this being determined by the interviewer in collaboration with the artist. In this sense, the book extends directorial control over the meanings of the performance. In many respects, the book offers a valuable insight into the busy lives of contemporary practitioners. While Jatahy is working on The Moving Forest, for instance, she is also working on other projects, including a film. This illustrates how multitasking contemporary practitioners rarely just work on one performance at any one time, although much critical work assumes this is the

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case. Moreover, this Shakespeare performance is being performed at the same time as various non-Shakespearean products. ‘Real life’ intrudes often into the artistic dialogues, whether in the form of the death of a much-loved dog, water leaking through the roof or in the form of a break-in which, paradoxically, helps Jatahy to create the atmosphere of risk and danger that is characteristic of The Moving Forest. Such incidents consolidate the oftenexpressed view that to performers, everything in life is material. The dialogues, especially those with Júlia Bernat who worked with Jatahy on other performances in her Lisbon trilogy, make clear how performances bleed into each other so that it becomes unclear where one performance ends and another begins. There are many instances where The Moving Forest, for example, develops its particular form through parallels established with the other performances in the trilogy or previous works by Jatahy. Bernat herself comes up with many useful remarks during the creative process, especially in relation to understanding Jatahy’s ideas and her own role in the performance. It is interesting that when it becomes clear that rather than staging Macbeth with professional performers, the performance will be centred around spectators finding themselves in Macbeth, the actress seems slightly put out that her role in the performance has been reduced in this way. The fact that the increasing involvement of the spectators in performance invariably means less work for professional performers is an aspect of spectator participation that has rarely received critical attention. However, Bernat remains, along with the camera team, Jatahy’s privileged interlocutor throughout the process. In the introduction to the book, Jatahy describes the dialogues as ‘an open process of one artist in dialogue with other artists’ (2017: 7). Jatahy is always at the centre of these dialogues, like a spider at the centre of a web, but there is a strong sense of exchange of ideas and the weaving of various forms of artistic know how into the creative process. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book for those interested in Shakespearean performance is the ability to trace how decisions were made and how the performance developed. The fact that over 150 scripts were written over this period illustrates the extent of the changes the performance went through. While some decisions about the performance had already been taken before the dialogues began, many emerge during the creative process and even after the

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first performances. The idea of using the spectators, for instance, emerged from a rehearsal where one of the professional performers was unavailable and the team had to improvise without them. For a large part of the initial conversations, the idea was to have performers play Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and the gradual transformation into an immersive performance with spectator-performers can be traced usefully through the dialogues. Critical instincts can also be confirmed. When experiencing the performance, I had a strong sense of a horror film aesthetic and this was confirmed by the dialogues. The book also makes clear that the creative team raised potential problems with the performance. At one point, for example, Henrique Mariano, a member of the production team, made the important point that spectators who do not know Macbeth will only see a sequence of images rather than an outline of the story (226). This may well have encouraged Jatahy to include the narrative excerpts from the play in the performance, even if her intention was not to tell the story of Macbeth but rather to create a performance event based on the atmosphere and politics of the play.

The politics of situation In her book on The Moving Forest, Christiane Jatahy claims that ‘[t]he challenge of this project was how to make political theatre today which is not programmatic’ (2017: 62). Such a concern is shared by many contemporary practitioners of Shakespeare for whom contemporary political theatre is located more often in the way theatre is made and experienced than in an explicitly political message. They emphasize the key role of spectators in constructing multiple interpretations of the events onstage which do not presuppose, but do not exclude, the possibility of collective action. As Herbert Blau suggests, the audience is ‘what happens when, performing the signs and passwords of a play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response’ (1990: 25). The content of what happens in such encounters is not pre-defined and may differ from one performance to the next depending on the creative response of spectators to performers and performance materials. The type of political theatre created by Christiane Jatahy and her collaborators in The Moving Forest can be characterized as a politics of situation where the politics of the performance emerge

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from the various situations created within the performance event. Although Jatahy’s opposition to global inequality and abuses of power was clear throughout the performance, especially in the video installations, the ways in which spectators responded to the situations in which they found themselves was as significant as this more directly political vision in creating the political fabric of the performance. The performance situations encouraged the active participation of spectators in the sense outlined by Helena Grehan where ‘they can become intrigued, engaged and involved in a process of consideration about the important issues of response and responsibility and what these might mean both within and beyond the performance space’ (2009: 5). What unfolded in these situations enabled various perspectives on global inequality and authoritarian regimes to co-exist, without negating the importance of struggles for social justice and the need for collective responses. Christophe Triau argues that the political in this performance combined a clear perspective on the contemporary with an embodied, contingent response to its various crises. He argues that ‘[t]he informational and exhortative content of the performance should be combined with the concrete, intimate experience of the constant fragmentation of the position of the spectator’ (217: 270). Triau makes a direct connection between the fragmentation of the position of the spectator that results from the shifting performance situation and their ethical and political transformation. He suggests that in The Moving Forest ‘[i]t is not about finding the correct point of view in order to have access to the legibility of a performance, but rather to challenge the subject to engage themselves in the latter, in order to observe themselves in the destabilization of the position they believe has been attributed to them or that they have constructed for themselves’ (2017: 269). Triau perhaps exaggerates the unity of the position of the spectator in other performances of Shakespeare that this particular performance sets out to destabilize. Even the most conventional Shakespeare performances involve shifting spectatorial positions on characters and events. In their analysis of intermedial performance, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and Sigrid Merx perhaps come closer to the ways in which spectators organize meaning from seemingly disparate and contradictory materials. They argue: To experience intermediality therefore is an active embodied process of negotiating and shifting between different and

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conflicting medial realities, moving in and out of perceptual worlds, relating different impressions and signs, looking for a point of connection that might integrate the confusing and disturbing sensations into a meaningful whole, however unstable and ephemeral this whole might be. (2010: 220) As such, although the position of the spectator in The Moving Forest was subject to consistent dislocation through various forms of commotion, the spectator may not have processed this negotiation of shifting perspectives only as a source of anxiety, but also as involving aesthetic pleasure and individual and collective empowerment. It could be argued, therefore, that the performance’s staging of the political marked something of a (re)turn towards a more explicit advocacy of the need for political mobilization in the face of economic, political, social, sexual and ecological tragedy. However, such a (re)turn is created through audience engagement and shifting embodied perceptions rather than linear narratives for audience consumption. As Florian Malzacher has argued in a recent contribution to contemporary understandings of political theatre, there is a need now for ‘[a] theatre that keeps the necessary self-reflexivity of the last decades but avoids the traps of pure selfreferentiality’ (2015: 20). A Moving Forest seemed to work towards this difficult balance in its tension between an advocacy of a political theatre to respond to global injustice and its use of the performance situations to work out in practice how people might find something in common while respecting their differences. I have questioned earlier in this chapter the generalized attribution of complicity to the spectators and the ethics of the audience’s non-consent to their filming by the camera crew, yet undoubtedly the performance situations did construct injustice as intolerable and inaction as a less than responsible political stance. Such micro-politics might appear incremental, temporary rather than sustained, ethical rather than political, but their affective charge and embodied commotion created a vivid sense of political empowerment in a global context of increasing retrenchment and repression.

5 Licensing experiment mala voadora’s Hamlet

Locating authority in contemporary performance Where might we locate authority in contemporary performances of Shakespeare? This is the question at the centre of W. B. Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997). In his characteristically nuanced and provocative analysis, Worthen’s exploration of this question rejects simple binaries which construct the text as the source of theatrical meaning or, alternatively, envisage performance as an autonomous work with only minimal reference to the text. He notes, however, that ‘[d]escribing performance, performers, scholars, critics, teachers and directors invoke surprisingly literary valuations of a stable text and an intending author. The sense that performance transmits Shakespearean authority remains very much in play, most strongly perhaps when the ostensibly free and disruptive activity of the stage is at hand’ (1997: 3, my emphasis) and adds that ‘“Shakespeare” – sometimes coded as the “text”, its “genre”, or the “theatre” itself – remains an apparently indispensable category for preparing, interpreting, and evaluating theatrical performance, at least as much for practitioners as for scholars and critics’ (1997: 3, my emphasis). Acknowledging the crudeness of the opposition between text and performance, he recognizes nevertheless that ‘notions of authority – a seminal intention, an instigating structure – trace thinking about dramatic

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performance, even when “performance” as a critical conception has become widely disseminated in performance art, literary theory, and theatre and performance studies’ (1997: 5, my emphasis). Against these text-based conceptions of Shakespearean authority, Worthen illustrates how performance constructs rather than transmits authorial and textual authority as rhetorical effects, concluding: (t)o conceive the performance ensemble as interpreting the author means that the ensemble is interpreting an author it creates. ‘Shakespeare’ is a necessary fiction that organizes and stabilizes this interpretive community, working not to provide access to privileged meaning, but to legitimate the relationship between actor and text, between spectator and stage, between critic and performance. (1997: 166) Worthen’s contention that directors, performers and critics frequently mobilize an idea of Shakespearean authority located in the dramatic text, which the director’s interpretation and the actors’ performances transmit through performance, is certainly borne out by the pronouncements of many performers, directors and critics in national theatre institutions, whether in the UK, the US or Portugal. However, in contemporary performances outside these institutional structures, especially in performances by practitioners who work infrequently with Shakespeare, this is often not the case. In several contemporary Portuguese companies, for example, expanded notions of performance drawn from performance art and performance studies have had a significant impact on conceptions of ‘text’, ‘genre’ and ‘theatre’ in ways that do not assume ‘Shakespeare’ to be ‘an indispensable category’ for creating or evaluating performance.1 Instead, they weave Shakespearean texts into performance in fragments, traces or translation, without considering them either indispensable or dispensable. Their de-centred performances of the plays are often deliberately anti-hierarchical in their combination of the different materials of performance. Moreover, with performances of Shakespeare increasingly co-created by the ensemble rather than solely by the director as well as by both performers and spectators, such moves challenge ideas of Shakespearean authority as being located in one particular individual or theatrical institution. They recast authority in Shakespearean performance as created in the here and now of

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the performance event rather than before or after and as co-created collaboratively by performers, designers, translators and spectators rather than by an individual dramatist or director. This chapter explores the question of authority in a 2014 performance of Hamlet by the Portuguese company mala voadora.2 This Hamlet is, to date, the only Shakespeare performed by the company.3 If there is one text around which there is a tendency to locate Shakespearean authority in terms of a ‘stable text’ and ‘intending author’, it is Hamlet, despite the three different versions of the play. However, mala voadora’s Hamlet replaced the notion of the intending author with the company’s own creative signature. They rendered its generic classification as tragedy unstable through consistent recourse to its comedy and extended its metatheatricality to include the stage space and the relationship between performer and character. More radically, it hinted at a productive absence at the heart of notions of authority in Shakespearean performance through an emphasis on the multiple texts of Hamlet that circulated in performance and disrupted notions of singular authority and Shakespearean canonicity. The question raised by such deconstructive practices is whether authorship and directorial authority resist such assaults and render such practices examples of, to use Alan Sinfield’s memorable phrase, doodling parasitic follies in the margins of Shakespeare, or whether they reveal a more fundamental shift in notions of authority in contemporary performances of Shakespeare (1985: 179). As Margaret J. Kidnie has observed in Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009) ‘what is considered essential to an accurate, faithful or authentic reproduction [of “Shakespeare”] on the stage or page is thus continually produced among communities of users through assertion and dissention, not legislated once and for all through appeal to an objective external authority’ (2009: 31). The separation between texts and performances considered Shakespearean and those considered non-Shakespearean is continually subject to redefinition and reflects the ways in which different societies construct, legitimate and materialize that separation. Moreover, as Aneta Manciewicz cogently argues, ‘Thomas Ostermeier’s Hamlet (2008) that by British standards qualifies as an adaptation could still pass in Germany or Poland as a performance of Shakespeare’s work’ (2014: 7). European practitioners and critics tend to have a broader definition of what constitutes a performance of Shakespeare

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that distinguishes less between a performance of Hamlet and adaptations or versions of the play, or rather considers them all to be performances of the play. mala voadora’s 2014 Hamlet is a good example of this broader definition of Shakespearean performance in the European context. Despite the extensive liberties it took with the play, the publicity material marketed it simply as William Shakespeare’s Hamlet by mala voadora, retaining, at least in name, an element of Shakespearean authority which was here shared with the company. Yet the choice of text for this performance of Hamlet, the emphasis on parody and pastiche, the frequent asides to the audience, the generic shift from tragedy to comedy as well as the controversy surrounding the set design suggest that this was something other than simply another performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and thus more of a challenge to conventional centres of dramatic and theatrical authority.

Hamlet in Portugal Hamlet is a play with a very particular performance history in the Portuguese context. Up until relatively recently, it was performed more often in the form of adaptations or contemporary rewritings than the Shakespeare text.4 During the dictatorship, Hamlet’s monologues often formed part of performances that combined fragments of different plays as an accessible introduction to Shakespeare for Portuguese audiences.5 Since the 1974 Revolution, there have been two key engagements with the play. The poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen translated it in 1987 for Luís Miguel Cintra, the main actor in the independent company Teatro da Cornucópia, when he was still a young actor.6 However, despite the company’s numerous and varied performances of Shakespeare, they never performed Hamlet. It was only near the end of Cintra’s career in 2015, with the younger actor Guilherme Gomes playing the main role and Cintra as director, that they finally staged the play. The company had, however, performed Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine in 1998 as part of the international Expo cultural events.7 The other key post-revolutionary performance of Hamlet was directed by Ricardo Pais for the Teatro Nacional São João in Porto with João Reis in the main role in a translation by the academic António M. Feijó. In 2002, Pais directed a fairly straightforward performance

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of the play under the title Hamlet. One year later, Pais directed a much more irreverent, much reduced version of the play with the tongue-in-cheek title Um Hamlet a Mais (One More Hamlet/One Hamlet too Many).8 This imaginative, technologically mediated, postmodern performance was a more inventive reading of Hamlet than the performance that had preceded it, even if it relied on the spectators having at least a working knowledge of Hamlet in order to follow events onstage. It included a critique of the play’s misogyny and the ways in which Ophelia’s physical entrapment by the men in her life leads to the loss of an independent voice, which she only recaptures in her madness. It created a strong sense of the hypocrisy of the Danish court and its mechanisms of surveillance. The two Hamlets directed by Pais illustrate well the particularities of the play’s history in Portugal, especially the greater success of imaginative adaptations over performances of the Shakespeare texts. Since Pais, there have been more stagings of the Shakespeare play, including an all-female performance at Teatro Comuna in 2019, as well as several small-scale adaptations, including Ensaio Hamlet (A Hamlet Rehearsal/Experiment) in 2008 by the Brazilian company Cia​.​de Atores, a humorous adaptation of the play by the company at the Chapitô circus school in 2019 as well as a visiting performance of Societas Rafaello Sanzio’s critically acclaimed autistic Hamlet Amleto (1997). One of the more curious migrations of the play into spheres of activity outside the theatre or the academy is the Portuguese direct marketing company named after the protagonist and his most famous speech, HamletB2. One wonders whether naming the company after such a notoriously irresolute protagonist represented a sound business decision.9

Not that Hamlet The publicity material for mala voadora’s Hamlet was an immediate provocation both to Shakespearean and theatrical authority over Hamlet. The poster advertising the performance was centred around a stark image of a black revolver against white space (Figure 8). This image was based on the visual artist Isaque Pinheiro’s 2009 Bagagem de Mão (Hand Luggage), where a black granite revolver was tagged with a luggage security label. In the 2014 image, the luggage tag was hidden by a single letter H. While

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FIGURE 8  Publicity image for Hamlet (2014) by mala voadora based on the image Bagagem de Mão (Hand Luggage) by Isaque Pinheiro (2009) and photographed by Silvana Torrinha. Courtesy of mala voadora.

the revolver might be associated with Hamlet’s consideration of suicide, the choice of weapon was clearly contemporary, while the synecdochal H stood in for the play and its protagonist. The image’s primary association was to contemporary work in the visual arts rather than a theatrical tradition. The obscuring of the luggage label from the original artwork represented a wink to those aware of this intermedial juxtaposition. However, the image gave little indication of a directorial ‘vision’ of the play or a ‘message’. It functioned instead as an indication of what this Hamlet was not going to be, in other words, a conventional theatrical representation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The image might even be seen as a tonguein-cheek recognition that, as a company best known for their devised work, performing the canonical Hamlet might seem like mala voadora shooting themselves in the foot and denting their reputation as avant-garde, interdisciplinary artists. As the company pointed out when they looked back on their work in 2011, ‘an escape from the theatrical canon has become the company’s canon’ (qtd in González-Reyes 2015: 44, emphasis in original). Yet, as Rita Martins has suggested, ‘[t]he artistic trajectory of mala voadora

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has been constructed around permanent self-referential reflection which makes use of the stage space to question the unstable place of fiction in art and in life, respecting its inconstant, volatile nature’ (2017: 130). In this sense, performing the highly metatheatrical Hamlet becomes a more logical choice for a company interested in exploring the mechanisms of theatrical illusion through the contingent, shifting parameters of the performance event.

The raw material of the ‘Bad’ Quarto Several performance decisions made this Hamlet an exploration of the textual authority of Hamlet and the theatrical canon rather than the company’s more traditional escape from the canon.10 A key decision was the use of the First ‘Bad’ Quarto rather than the Folio text or the amalgamation of different texts, which often structure translations and performances of the play. The company explained their decision in the following terms: mala voadora perform a Hamlet based on the version which has come down to us as the ‘Bad Quarto’. We are not a repertory theatre company. But we do like ‘plays’, even if we are not limited by them. Plays, from the most classical to the most contemporary, are rather raw material – material we shape with the freedom which seems to us to benefit the performance.11 This notion of the play as raw material, whose eventual shape would be determined by the performance context rather than the latent meanings of the text, immediately cast authority with the company rather than the dramatist and in the sphere of performance rather than in the text. This was the first time that the First Quarto had been translated into Portuguese, in this case, by the well-known translator of Shakespeare, Fernando Villas Boas, who also translated Shakespeare for Nuno Cardoso (see Chapter 3). His translation was then reshaped by the company according to their own dramaturgical requirements. The performance retained much of the Shakespeare text in performance as well as the figure of the director (Jorge Andrade). Yet it played with the tension between the text, the performance context and the wider cultural circulation of the play in ways that expanded notions of authority

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in performance to include the performers, designers, translator and dramaturg, spectators, the theatre stage and its objects.

Multiple Hamlets Gaining access to the translation of Hamlet used in the mala voadora performance revealed an intriguing multiplication of translations of Hamlet that was in itself somewhat Hamletian. mala voadora had difficulty identifying which of the versions in their possession was the definitive one and eventually sent me two versions. The first had been sent to the São Luiz theatre where this Hamlet premiered, presumably around the time of the performances. The second was a later version that accompanied the video documentation of the performance. The former had the intriguing title ‘Hamlet final text São Luiz. Revised’. The second had the title ‘Hamlet final stage version’. These titles indicate how the notion of a translation of the play ignores the ways in which the production and circulation of multiple translations of the text at different moments of the performance and for different sites and audiences is more common in contemporary performance.12 These texts inevitably find themselves subject to further revision from directors and performers, while the phenomenon of ‘final’ texts, which are nevertheless ‘revised’ leading to uncertainty around which might be the definitive version, is one familiar not only to translators but to anyone who produces critical or performance texts in the contemporary, technologically mediated context. There are some small, but significant, differences between these two translations, including the more explicit homoeroticism of the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio in the latter. In the conversation before the Mousetrap scene, the text of the second translation reads: HAMLET Show me a man who is not a slave to passion And I will guard them at the bottom of my heart, in the heart of my heart, as I guard you (kisses him) – But I have said too much. (37) This translation choice extends the text’s distinction between inner and outer appearances to include a queer hint at the operations of a

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closet not restricted to Gertrude’s private quarters (3.4) and which guards the open secret of Hamlet’s homoeroticism. Having considered that the two translations I had received were definitive versions, Fernando Villas Boas then opened the Pandora’s box of Hamlet translations further when he sent me various documents relating to his translations of Hamlet. His first email emphasized the fact that the version for mala voadora had been produced hastily in line with the dramaturgy of the performance and had led to ‘gaps and accommodations, as well as errors due to haste which betrayed my own memory of studying the text years before. Shakespeare would have winked at such arguments. I noticed these problems when I worked on a new translation, which is also incomplete but slightly more experienced on this long road which has not yet come to an end’ (my emphasis). His second email included ‘what I think is the latest version of the text from the mass of text that Jorge (Andrade) used in the dramaturgy for the mala Hamlet’. Repeating that this was an imperfect version done in haste ‘in line with the speed of the Bad Quarto itself’, he suggested that the importations from Q2 and the Folio (in this text) would be evident as would ‘the asides I invented to cover gaps, and serve the performance [40–50 lines of pastiche along with short “fillers”]’. He also included another document of ‘addendas and revisions’ sent for the sake of ‘curiosity’. The title of one of these ‘shows the humour of the workshop’ and is called ‘Stroke of Genius’. Villas Boas noted that translating Hamlet was work that ‘never stopped. Any new performance demands alterations. That’s normal. Or at least it should be.’ This earlier version by the translator is longer than the later versions sent by mala voadora (seventy-seven pages compared to sixty-one) and is a more ‘neutral’ version than the stage versions, which more clearly bear the mala voadora trademarks of irony and pastiche. Unlike the stage versions which are organized in numbered blocks, this version is organized as a running text. ‘Ghost’ is translated here as ‘espectro’ rather than ‘fantasma’ in the later versions.13 In the revisions under the title ‘Stroke of Genius’, comparison of the original translation and the alteration in Corambis’s lines about Hamlet’s madness to Ophelia reveals a concern with avoiding negative formulations (‘it is so much of our age not to see the evil there is’ becomes ‘it is so much of our age to see less the evil there is’) and with maintaining the rapid pace of Q1 (‘Well, I am sorry to have been so severe. But what is the remedy? Let’s go to the king’ is shortened to ‘Well, we

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have proof. Let’s go to the king’). Villas Boas’s comments combine views of Shakespeare as a benign advocate of textual instability and the Bad Quarto as the actors’ best friend with multiple revisions authorized by himself, the director and the performance context. In a third email from Fernando Villas Boas, he sent me his latest Hamlet translation for a different company. He noted that it was for a performance that would be two hours long (109 pages) as compared to mala voadora’s 90-minute performance and that ‘among the most notable cuts’ was the graveyard scene. Indeed, this later translation ends very abruptly with Hamlet asking Horatio to tell his story as he dies and Horatio’s final lines ‘Goodnight, sweet prince, let angels guide you to your rest’ (109). This ending is all the more striking as the rest of the translation follows the Folio relatively closely. It is more polished linguistically, but less defined as a text for performance with less dramaturgical focus than the previous translations. With this text, Villas Boas also sent some ‘asides’ and ‘luxury additions’ such as Gertrude’s lament for the death of Ophelia, which he successfully argued should be included against the company’s desire to cut it. He also proposed reinserting more of the speech of Laertes in the same scene so that the audience would have more sympathy on him in the final scene. Citing his debt to an article by Michael Billington about the supposed degeneration of verse speaking in performance, where Billington praises, rather than decries, the verbal delivery of the actor Paapa Essiedu, he noted how the article had inspired an ‘almost non-grammatical twist’ in the lines of this later translation ‘Farei tudo para agradar a vós, senhora’ (‘I will do anything to please you, my lady’, whereas the more normal order in Portuguese would have been ‘Farei tudo para vos agradar, senhora’ (‘I will do anything you to please, my lady’) and which marks a contrast between Hamlet’s attitude to Gertrude and to Claudius.14 Villas Boas lamented that he did not in fact have the definitive translation but that these various versions ‘give a picture of the evolution of the material from the work with Q1 to the most recent version where only the Folio was used’. His final sentence sums up this complex and incredibly rich process of producing a translation of Hamlet: ‘The document HAMLET – complete version – FINAL is not, therefore, what it says it is, but the other working document I’m sending with it to a large extent completes it.’ In the extensive translation process outlined here,

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the various English texts of Hamlet feed into multiple Portuguese translations which relate to, comment on and sometimes exclude each other and which are in turn multiplied further by the different dramaturgical needs of the two companies involved, the increased experience of the translator in translating the play, the translator’s own dramaturgical interventions, additions and reinsertions and his responses to critical texts on political and artistic questions raised by contemporary performance outside Portugal.15 As a final coda to the question of translating Hamlet, after I sent Bridget Escolme’s chapter on Hamlet in Speaking to the Audience to Villas Boas to thank him for making available this material on translation, his comment on her thesis of a theatrical continuity linking Q1, Q2 and the Folio rather than a progression towards a greater literariness in these different texts was that this seemed entirely viable, ‘in the same way that television series’ become richer with each season due to increasingly complex ‘inside jokes’.16 This section on translation indicates that contemporary translations of Shakespeare texts rely less on notions of textual fidelity and more on the circulation and exchange between various texts, performances and authors. Moreover, in line with contemporary editing and performance practices that have replaced notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Shakespeare texts with an acknowledgement of their different objectives and audiences, it is difficult to locate a clear sense of authority in any one of the multiple translations dealt with here. Authority is shared between texts and their authors and gains its authority from the exchanges between them.

Scenography and contested authority mala voadora’s Hamlet was staged around a large rectangular table dressed with a white tablecloth that was moved around the stage into different formations.17 At times, it occupied the centre of the stage with the performers seated around it and at others, it was pushed to one side in order to create more performance space in the centre of the stage. The table was centre stage, for instance, for the opening scene at court where Hamlet (Jorge Andrade) contrasts Gertrude (Anabela Almeida) and Claudius’s wedding feast with Old Hamlet’s funeral and where ‘the funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (1.2.179–80).18 It was moved to the

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back of the stage when Hamlet instructed the actors on performing before the court. Sometimes, groups of two or three performers sat at the table for more intimate dialogues, while in several scenes, the theatrical convention of characters speaking without being heard by other characters onstage was openly parodied as these other characters remained in their seats during these speeches. In the scene where Hamlet and Ophelia (Carla Bolito) met (3.1), for instance, rather than having Corambis and Claudius hide and spy on them, they were very clearly present as Ophelia chided Hamlet for the removal of his affections. Adding to the comedy, when Hamlet asked Ophelia about her father’s whereabouts, her reply that he was ‘at home’ (3.1.130) was flatly contradicted by the fact that he was sitting right in front of her. Such comments, although primarily intended as parody, also illustrate Bridget Escolme’s observation that ‘[f]or the women in Hamlet, privacy is repeatedly insisted upon and then violated’ (68). However, the most impressive scenographic moment of this performance came when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern introduced the arrival of the actors in 2.2.19 As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern announced them, five differently sized screens with photographs of the São Luiz Theatre where the performance took place were lowered onto the stage (Figure 9). They created a metatheatrical mise en abyme as the various photographic images of the theatre appeared within the frame of the real theatre. This visual effect produced the kind of stage illusion that has characterized the theatrical history of Hamlet as well as encouraging a more contemporary reflection on the theatrical mechanisms that have produced such illusions as ‘real’.20 In the process, the apparent fixity of the stage space and the theatre itself were shown to be mutable and capable of transformation. As José Capela has remarked: I am very interested in combining the form of the classic Italian stage, a form that is 600 years old, with contemporary mechanisms for processing images. There is a coincidence here between the fact that the theatre space was born from the invention of a way of creating an image and the fact that now we all live immersed in images.21 Moreover, such a strategy drew the spectators’ attention to the space of performance, which rarely becomes explicitly part of performance in the way it did here. Capela’s imaginative creation

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FIGURE 9  José Capela’s scenography for Hamlet (2014) with cast, mala voadora, photograph by José Carlos Duarte. Courtesy of mala voadora.

of a metatheatrical scenography, however, became the subject of an online controversy when he was accused of plagiarizing the work of Michael Levine for the 2011 Don Giovanni at La Scala. As Capela himself pointed out, the accusation that the scenography was a copy completely missed the point, as his scenography was deliberately presented as a copy rather than an original creation.22 In a Facebook message published on 21 August 2015, José Capela defended himself robustly from this accusation in the following terms (qtd in González-Reyes 2016: 4–7), which are worth quoting in full: Someone who identifies himself as ‘Armando Vasques’ and who ends his message with the expression ‘in friendship’ has been sending personal emails to those involved in the mala voadora Hamlet accusing me of having plagiarized the scenography of Michael Levine for the Milan Scala in 2011. In order to put an end to his insistence, I would like to make public this accusation and clarify the following: (1) The scenography for mala voadora’s Hamlet is effectively a plagiarism, but not of the Levine scenography, of which I was not aware. It is a plagiarism of the baroque Cesky

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Krumlov Castle Theatre in the Czech Republic built in 1765/66. This fact was made public before Hamlet premiered. Maybe it is not I that am taking advantage of the ignorance of the Portuguese public with regard to the international opera context (I am also accused of this); maybe it is rather ignorance of the history of scenography that is at the basis of the accusation. (2) The recourse to ‘what is already there’ – in this case the stage of the São Luiz – has been a strategy in several of the sets I have designed since I first began working as a scenographer. This strategy has been known since the 1960’s, as ‘site-specific’. In terms of the use of photographs of theatres printed on screens, I also did this in House and Garden (with the stage and foyer of the Centro Cultural de Belém) in 2012 and again with the stage of the Dona Maria II in the 2015 Pirandello. I may well do it again in the future. (3) I am very interested in strategies of appropriation. I have already ‘copied’ Mel Bochner, a Vanitas from the 15th century, Superstudio. . . . This is known as ‘referencing’ and it is a strategy that has been explored particularly in so-called postmodern art. The scenography for Paradise 1 was a complete replica of a Joseph Kosuth installation; the performance began with an admission of this and a photograph of the original work. I don’t hide behind anything. This is the petty world of anonymous letters. (4) I think my scenography is more beautiful than that of Michael Levine. Let me finish by thanking the solidarity of those who received these anonymous e-mails. Naturally, this moves me. I would be very grateful if you could share this post. José Capela’s stage design called into question distinctions between original and copy in a way that, as this reply makes clear, locates his work within postmodern strategies of appropriation in the

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visual arts rather than theatrical performance. He makes no apology for the absence of an ‘original’ stage design, preferring to use ‘what is already there’. The controversy it aroused in an area of Shakespearean performance that rarely incites such animated exchanges might simply indicate a case of professional rivalry. Yet the contrast between modernist and postmodernist conceptions of original and copy, a sense of theatre as a distinct, separate art and a wider understanding of materials for performance drawn from various artistic forms, a view of theatre as the privileged space of performance versus a view of theatre as one of many sites for performance does indicate some of the fault lines around notions of authority in contemporary Shakespearean performance. Resisting notions of authorial and textual control over performance, textual fidelity and stability in translation and the originality of the stage design as the privileged loci of theatrical authority, mala voadora’s Hamlet suggested that texts and performances of the play were rather surrogations of an unrecoverable original, standing in for an absence they foregrounded and played with in performance rather than attempting to obscure in order to appropriate for themselves the cultural authority of both Shakespeare and Hamlet.23 In this way, they indicated the distance between contemporary approaches to Shakespearean performance such as this Hamlet, where notions of originality, fidelity and canonical authority are experimented with in performance and the naturalization of these principles in other representations of Shakespeare, even when this reproduces notions of originality, fidelity and authority as little more than empty ciphers. José Capela was also responsible for the performance’s retrobaroque and faux-Elizabethan costumes. The performers seemed to enjoy the pleasures of theatrical dressing up and the effects their costumes created onstage. However, with Hamlet dressed entirely in black, Gertrude in a cinematic turban and long, flowing trousers and the figures of the court wearing long, thin kipper ties in bright colours, or dark business suits, there was no single costume style or period that could be identified. The different costumes referenced instead the ways in which the late-capitalist global present endlessly recycles the styles of the past as signs of the contemporary. In this setting, Hamlet was very much ‘out of joint’ as his black costume and seriousness contrasted with the enforced conviviality of the court and their bright costumes to produce a sustained comedy around

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his singular presence. Costume is rarely discussed as an element of contemporary performance, but in this case the costumes resisted a role as creators of theatrical coherence in performance through emphasizing the artistic crossings between theatre and other cultural practices such as cinema or fashion. The foregrounding of playful heterogeneity rather than theatrical coherence in the costume design diffracted further notions of a central authoritative principle or figure guiding the performance.

Melodramatic display and parodic performance There were many gloriously parodic moments to the performance that highlighted the fiction of the text and the presence of the performers over the characters they were playing. Every time the ghost was mentioned, for instance, melodramatic music heralded his entrance. Yet, the figure of the ghost never actually materialized onstage. Each time this device was repeated, the humour increased with anticipation of its repetition. At one point, Hamlet even explained to the audience that this was where the ghost was supposed to appear in the text, before reading himself Hamlet Senior’s words urging revenge. Afterwards, he wrote down his resolution to take revenge silently in a book which, for the members of the court, only proved his madness. There were also parodic moments based around the names of the characters that echoed the differences between the names in the First Quarto and the Folio. When relating the backstory of the quarrel between Fortenbrasse and Hamlet’s fathers at the beginning of the performance, the performers broke the fourth wall to explain to the spectators the difference between these figures from the older generation and their sons who nevertheless, bizarrely, shared the same names. There was also mockery of the name Fortenbrasse as performers elongated the final syllable and later created an ensemble chant based on the name. Claudius and Gertrude confused Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or changed their names to Rosenstone and Guildencrantz among many other combinations of the names used in performance. Voltemar and Barnardo, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, spoke in chorus to play up the comedy of these double acts where the two characters are almost indistinguishable from each

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other. Names of characters, which invariably attribute authority to those characters on the basis of their consistency, were used here instead as mechanisms of de-authorization. The performative dimensions of sound and rhythm highlighted the strangeness of these archaic, foreign-sounding names, some of which would not have been recognizable to seasoned spectators or would have sounded unfamiliar because of the use of First Quarto names in performance. Such strategies contributed to the performance’s reiteration of the tragedy as farce. Worthen notes that ‘(t)he assertion of genre is an effort to stabilize the text in relation to the fluid values of its ambient culture’ (1997: 57), and this generic shift indicated the ways in which other media such as television news have rendered tragedy difficult to present convincingly onstage except as a parody of itself. Comic asides to other performers and the spectators further deauthorized the text in performance and established a communicative and affective bond between them. Corambis read Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia for Gertrude and Claudius in 2.2, while Ophelia sat at the same table. At one point, Ophelia reminded them of her presence and begged her father not to read out a particular section of the letter to save her from embarrassment. Corambis began speeches before stopping to ask performers and spectators, ‘What was I saying’? When Hamlet chastised ‘barren spectators’ (3.2.39) who cannot distinguish good from bad theatre, he turned to the spectators in the audience to reassure them: ‘I’m not talking about you’. During his ‘To be or not to be’ speech (Ser ou não Ser), he followed these famous lines with the casual, outwardly focused comment, ‘no, that’s too abstract’, as if reflecting on his own performance, before continuing: ‘To be or not to be. Estar aqui ou não estar aqui’. The verb ‘ser’ in Portuguese indicates a permanent state, while the verb ‘estar’ indicates a temporary, contingent one. These juxtaposed translation choices between a temporary and more permanent state of being installed a certain performativity at the heart of Hamlet’s dramatic subjectivity that complicated notions of his character as fixed and emphasized the shifts between his various performances within the play.24 They highlighted the difference between being, in this case, Jorge Andrade and being, temporarily on the stage, Jorge Andrade playing Hamlet. While recourse to asides and other breaks in the theatrical fiction have often been viewed as distancing the spectators in a Brechtian critical sense, such strategies in contemporary theatre more often create a sense of the present-ness of the performance and

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a heightened sense of intimacy. As Christian Biet and Christophe Triau argue, ‘(s)howing process, and the “factory” that is the theatre, does not merely function as a distancing device, but as a way of intensifying the spectator’s relationship to the theatrical act by reinforcing the present-ness of their reception’ (2019: 527). There were also some entertaining puns in the translation with which the performance played. When Hamlet asked the gravedigger how Prince Hamlet had arrived at this state (i.e. madness), ‘state’ was translated as ‘estado’. Yet ‘estado’ in Portuguese also means ‘state’ in terms of nation, so the gravedigger replied ‘sem sair do estado dele’ (without leaving his state, i.e. Denmark). Similarly, in Corambis’s early conversation with Ophelia warning her about Hamlet, Ophelia affirmed that she had ‘provas’ (proof) of Hamlet’s love but Corambis turned this into a sexual inuendo, suggesting that Hamlet had a ‘vontade de provar’ (a desire to ‘have a taste of’), in other words, a sexual desire for Ophelia (10).25 Additional comedy came from characters going ‘off book’ or not knowing their ‘scripted’ lines. Ophelia was consistently stage-managed by her father, who instructed her when and when not to cry. For her scene with Hamlet, he handed her a book to justify her being alone. When Hamlet began to badger Ophelia, both read from books rather than giving their speeches naturalistically. At one stage, Ophelia looked at her book in confusion, suggesting that Hamlet had deviated from the script and left her without a written response. ‘This has all gone wrong’, she wailed to the spectators after Hamlet left. The presence of books in this scene picked up on Hamlet’s weariness with ‘words, words, words’ (2.2.189) and recalled Joaõ Reis’s performance of the role for Ricardo Pais in 2002–3 when he played this scene using a copy of Hamlet. The use of texts onstage illustrated how formulaic these exchanges have become but also, as performers are meant to be ‘off book’ by the final performances, recast the performances as works still in progress and subject to transformation rather than finished products for audience consumption. More pointedly, when Hamlet asked the actors if they could perform The Murder of Gonzago, they looked at him blankly, appearing not to know the play. Only after Hamlet offered them money did the actors agree to perform, and this conceit of performance dependent on payment was repeated several times between Hamlet and the actors. Their ignorance of the speech was

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presented as a canny strategy to ensure payment, yet this moment also suggested the power relation that structures the relationship between those who commission performances and those for whom performance is enforced. Moreover, the speeches the actors eventually gave were substantially reduced and little authority was attributed to these narrative vestiges of a distant past.

Metatheatrical play and genderaware performance When the time came for the actors to play in front of the court, the performers created an impromptu onstage audience by arranging the chairs so that the audience for the play looked out directly onto the real theatrical audience. When the actors finally arrived, they did not perform, for Hamlet merely read out a synopsis of the scene, removing even the necessity of a movement-based dumb show. This gave a new layer of meaning to Hamlet’s claim in 3.2: ‘(m)arry, this munching mallico! / it means mischief’ (3.2.130–1). Here, the idea of malevolence and mischief became an ironic admission of poor stagecraft, for his words were translated as ‘(t)his (the performance) is badly done’ (‘mal feito’ in Portuguese). While Gertrude (Anabela Almeida) was played more or less seriously, with the now standard incestuous stage kiss between Hamlet and his mother, Ophelia (Carla Bolito) was treated parodically throughout. This seemed to suggest that such a stereotypically feminine character could only be rendered through farce for twentyfirst-century performers and spectators. When she first appeared, she was wearing a black-and-white patterned mini-skirt and high heels that set her apart from the other characters who were dressed in bright but elegant tones of red, white and black and linked her more obviously with Hamlet. Bridget Escolme has expressed the wish to see a performance where Ophelia’s madness enables ‘a performance that sanity does not’ (83) in ways that would enable as complex a performance of the songs as Hamlet’s direction of the Mousetrap. During Ophelia’s mad scene in this Hamlet, her sexualized songs were replaced with a rendition of ‘O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree’. Her performance suggested something of a talent for standup comedy, which her fulsome bows, and thanks to the audience

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in the Shakespeare play, hint at but which her incarceration within patriarchal limits within the play tends not to authorize. In the second half of the performance, the narration of the fast-paced events, which include Ophelia’s madness, Leartes’s (the spelling in the translation) bid for power and Claudius and Leartes’s plan to kill Hamlet, was greeted with cries of ‘O!’ by the other members of the cast, emphasizing the improbability of this rapid flow of tragic events. Similarly, as Ophelia ran from one side of the stage to another, jumping adroitly over Corambis’s dead body, the entire cast followed her movement by shifting body position as a group and exclaiming melodramatically ‘O!’ when she ran past them. For her drowning, she simply ran across the stage in a red bathing suit. All tragic events in the play induced either comedy (Corambis’s death, Ophelia’s death) or mockery (Claudius and Gertrude’s theatrically excessive laughter at Corambis’s claims that Hamlet is suffering because of his love for Ophelia). Like the play itself, this Hamlet commented on contemporary theatrical practices. Hamlet instructed the actors how to perform in a parody of the relationship between contemporary directors and performers. The interventions of Hamlet the director were reduced to one-liners, including ‘You don’t need to shout’, ‘What’s going on with your hands? Try and keep them still’, ‘You must be kidding’ and ‘Who are you? You’re the king. People have to believe you’re the king’, ‘Don’t be funny, just tell the story’ and, crucially, ‘You look wooden. Try to be more natural’. The performers attempted to follow the director’s instructions, but at one stage, a performer objected to the director’s injunction to speak his text with the complaint of many a minor performer: ‘I don’t have any text, only movement.’ This short scene parodied the conventions of stage realism that have shadowed performances of the play on the basis of Hamlet’s defence of a more natural style of acting (3.2.16–24) and continue, in their more modern Stanislavskian form, to dominate actor training in Portuguese acting schools. The sequence also de-authorized the role of the director in performance, associating him with the mindless repetition of theatrical clichés. Nevertheless, despite this tendency towards melodrama and farce, some moments of this Hamlet were played straight. When Hamlet turned to face the spectators, for instance, to praise the actor for his ability to make Hecuba a real presence, this seemed like something of a genuine vindication of the art of the performer. However, even

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this moment of apparent seriousness was undercut immediately by the shrug of the actor’s shoulders when Hamlet asked him what Hecuba meant to him, as if ‘Hecuba’ was just one more story from the past to be performed if enough money was forthcoming. This constant switching between the serious and the comic allowed the company to enjoy performing Hamlet, while establishing a clear distance between their more deconstructive take on the play and that of other companies who perform the play more naturalistically. This generic code switching did not enable a sense of the authority of the text, the performers or the director to settle, but it did acknowledge the artistic contributions of each to the performance. In the final, extremely professional duel between Hamlet and Horatio, Hamlet encouraged Horatio to fight in his place, casting Horatio as the man of action and himself as the man of explanation. The two performers swopped places as ‘Hamlet’ died in yet another anti-tragic, anti-naturalistic representation of death onstage. Before this, the actor playing Hamlet appeared to put on Leartes’s jacket by mistake, leading to the impromptu comic line: ‘This one maybe. At least that’s the one I wore yesterday.’ As Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius and Leartes lay dead onstage, this eminently farcical pile-up of dead bodies was heightened by the fact that Corambis was still lying where he had been murdered and the two gravediggers, who had played their scene using a trapdoor, could still be seen emerging from it. As Horatio repeated his promise to tell Hamlet’s story, the fact that this act was to be located on ‘a stage in the marketplace’ rather than a theatre reinforced the notion of this Hamlet as a form of contemporary popular entertainment rather than a reproduction of Shakespeare and the play’s cultural capital (60).

Where is Hamlet? To return to the question at the beginning of this chapter, where is authority located in contemporary performances of Shakespeare such as this one? mala voadora’s Hamlet recognized Shakespeare’s authorship of the play, even if the play itself constituted only ‘raw material’ for the performance and final authority over the performance was the company’s rather than Shakespeare’s. The authority of the text was complicated by the use of the less authoritative First ‘Bad’ Quarto and the multiple translations and dramaturgical interventions

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that created the specific text of Hamlet used in this performance. Moreover, even this text was de-authorized by the constant asides of the performers and their direct communication with the audience. This did not mean, however, that authority resided with the director or the performers. The director/performer deconstructed his own role onstage in the banality of his advice to the actors, while the performers moved between farce and tragedy in metatheatrical comments on the roles they were playing. Even the attempts of the performance to concede a degree of authority to its scenography were invalidated externally by accusations of plagiarism. As such, the traditional centres of authority in Shakespearean performance of the ‘intending author’ and ‘instigating structure’ are certainly shifting. The authority of the company occupied much of the space traditionally attributed to the author. They were responsible for the initial performance proposal and for its eventual shape. Much of the authority of the text rubbed off onto the translation and translator/ dramaturg, but even this was de-centred by the performers who spoke that text. The authority of the director was credited but reduced by the more active role of the performers and the inclusion of spectators in the communicative contract as well as his own appearance onstage as a performer. José Capela’s deliberate use of the notion of the copy in his scenography and references to the visual arts, fashion and cinema in his costume design suggest that authority is passing out of the realm of ‘theatre’ to a wider notion of ‘performance’, yet such a move remains controversial. Authority in Shakespearean performance appears to be located in a liminal space where contemporary models of collaborative and shared authority have not completely displaced past models based on individuals, texts and institutions. The generic shift in this Hamlet from tragedy to comedy and the frequent use of parody and pastiche indicated awareness on the part of the company of the limitations of such past models of authority and the exploration of possible contemporary alternatives. The ludic framing of this exploration, rendering the play something to enjoy rather than endure, signalled the company’s desire to authorize experiment rather than legitimate representation through Hamlet. This is probably the major transformation in (re) locating authority in contemporary performance, as practitioners value artistic exploration over the transmission of existing literary meanings and performative portals that open onto new fields of enquiry rather than plays in performance that represent an end in

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themselves. In response to Kathryn Schwarz’s provocative openended question ‘[w]hat would it mean for “us,” with brazen infidelity to that pronoun of survivors, to say “no” to Hamlet: to refuse not just an inheritance but the very idea of inheritance, to see neither a web, nor a line nor a mirror, but a historical artefact that retains a certain dated charm’ (2011: 139), mala voadora suggested that both the refusal of a Hamlet inheritance and the notion of the play as ‘a historical artefact that retains a certain dated charm’ can act as a starting point for contemporary performance rather than signs of its inevitable failure. The questions around original and copy and reality and fiction, which the performance highlighted, exceeded the performance itself and extended their reach to the play Hamlet. Considering its three, very different texts, its possible basis on Thomas Kyd’s Ur-Hamlet, its later transformation by European translators and authors such as Ducis and Dumas, and the many dramaturgical and performative interventions that have shaped its history, the picture that emerges is less the consistency of this central work in the Shakespeare theatrical canon, from which adaptations and other versions deviate, but rather an endless spiral of contingent signifiers for Hamlet that can only point to an uncoverable original. It is significant in this respect that Margaret J. Kidnie (2009) introduces one of her chapters on Shakespeare and adaptation with the question ‘Where is Hamlet’? noting that the original, unlike art pieces, such as the Mona Lisa, cannot be located in a particular place or time. mala voadora’s Hamlet acknowledged and worked within the vortex created by this primal absence while playing with Shakespearean cultural capital and the canonicity of the play. In a situation where Hamlet can be seen as its own travesty, what remains is not, as Schoch argues, ‘the palpable collapse of a once familiar, once sensible Shakespeare canon’ (2002: 33) but recognition and enjoyment of the fact that, in Portugal in particular, such firm foundations for Hamlet never existed in the first place. Embedded in a national tradition of avoiding performance of the play, mala voadora recast this lack as the basis for exploration and experiment through performance. In so doing, they found much that is comic in Hamlet,26 a central character whose shifting performances make him a very contemporary figure caught up in enforced and contradictory performances, as well as more rewarding roles for women as cinematic divas or slick comedy performers.

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6 Performance matters Contemporary Shakespearean performance criticism

In an important article on the personal and political responsibility of the contemporary Shakespearean performance critic, Christie Carson introduces some key questions for those working in the field. The subtitle ‘Witnessing Global Theatre in and around the Globe’ introduces Carson’s long-term relationship with the Globe Theatre in London and the particular focus of the article on the international productions in the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival. It also casts performance criticism as an engaged form of witnessing, suggesting the ethical and political dimensions of the acts of viewing and reviewing. In a global context where critical experience and expertise have been challenged by new media platforms and, where the diversity of perspectives often takes precedence over informed opinion, Carson reiterates the importance of personal and professional responsibility and exchanges between academic and theatrical knowledge. She argues that ‘personal responsibility in criticism comes from the critic’s presence not only at performances but also at conferences, and that innovation comes from the dialogue between the critical and the experiential in both contexts’ (2017: 460). In her suggestion that informed opinion is more innovative because of its sustained interaction with various sites of knowledge, Carson reaffirms the need for performance criticism that practices constructive critique, whether in traditional media or

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on online platforms. Her argument intervenes in possibly the most significant debate for contemporary Shakespearean performance criticism. With an increasing number of online sites for performance reviews, experiments in real-time reviewing undertaken by the theatres themselves and the tendency of younger audiences to look to performance reviews on Twitter from their peers, to what extent do professional expertise and experience matter in contemporary performance criticism? How might it be possible to practice informed critique on these new sites? In such challenges to the authority of the Shakespearean performance critic, who claims to be a performance critic and on what basis? While the diversity of sites and voices that characterize contemporary performance criticism has many positive features in comparison with a certain tacit homogeneity and the relative inaccessibility of reviews within specialist journals, it is also true that the growth in the number of people writing about Shakespearean performance in a variety of media has not been accompanied either by a greater variety of approaches to those performances or new, innovative forms of critical analysis. Instead, the notion that anyone can ‘do’ Shakespearean performance criticism has tended to consolidate rather than challenge existing forms of writing about performance, while also neglecting the need to contextualize or historicize the affirmations made in these reviews. It is not so much whether reviews appear online or in traditional print media that determines the quality or interest of writing about performance. Many specialist journals who publish reviews have themselves moved online and several exclusively online journals have been established with clear peer-review systems. Yet, as Carson suggests, there continues to be an important distinction between the personal expression of opinion about performances of Shakespeare, which are entirely valid in themselves, and the ethically and politically informed witnessing of performance she advocates, based on the critic ‘being there’ consistently at performances and critical forums. In the same article, Carson restates the need for critical independence on the part of performance critics from artists, programmers, marketers, curators, media departments and education outreach services. She refers to her collaboration with the Globe Theatre as that of a ‘critical friend’ involved in the creation and archiving of performances without compromising the objectivity of her criticism. She affirms that ‘[i]n making transparent

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my relationship with this theatre, I want to highlight issues about objectivity and influence and to illustrate the position of the “critical friend” in all its complexity’ (2017: 461). The emphasis on ‘objectivity’ versus ‘influence’ in this statement references a long-standing concern within Shakespearean performance criticism to balance closer relationships with practitioners and the need to produce objective assessments of their work. Such a balance is particularly difficult to maintain in the contemporary context where the various outreach and media departments within theatres often confuse writing about performance with publicity for that particular performance. Objectivity within performance criticism is an even more complex matter within the Portuguese context. In a small country with a marginal cultural sector, there are difficulties in maintaining a critical distance from artists and their work when everyone knows everyone else and where there are a limited number of critics who write about Shakespearean performances. Moreover, since writing about Shakespearean performance undoubtedly benefits from the insights of the artists involved and their cooperation in gaining access to scripts, directorial or ensemble perspectives on the play, videos and performance photographs, a difficult or negative relationship with practitioners can lead to the withholding of this valuable material if the practitioners feel their work is not being promoted in a positive light by critics. Evidently, such a context creates an even greater need for objective, distanced criticism. However, it does raise the question of whether objective performance criticism is always preferable to more subjective approaches. Does a critic have to ignore their affective, embodied, sensual responses to performance and performers when they write or can these committed, more personal responses form part of performance criticism alongside critical objectivity and distance? Is not much that passes for objective performance criticism in fact deeply subjective in its unacknowledged assumptions about Shakespeare and performance? Carson suggests that in her work with the Globe ‘[t]he trick is to know when collaboration in the creative sense turns into collaboration in its more sinister and coercive political sense’ (2017: 472), yet in practice it is often difficult to separate creative collaboration from processes of manipulation. What are invariably unspoken and improvised arrangements between performers and critics tend to imply, on the one hand, a desire for promotion on the part of the artists and a desire for greater legitimacy

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of their particular approach to the performance on the part of the critic. Performance critics who work with particular artists over long periods of time often come to care greatly for the artists about whom they write and their work, which renders the idea of entirely objective criticism something of an idealization and not necessarily a positive one. Evidently, performance critics should be aware of when they are being instrumentalized by practitioners and their increasingly large entourage, but might they not also be concerned about the effects of their writing on those they write about in the particular social and political context in which both performance and criticism are taking place? In Portugal, artists tend to instrumentalize critics as critics do artists even if both still retain a great deal of independence and a recognition of the different perspectives from which they approach the performance. Rather than pretend this doesn’t happen in the name of a somewhat compromised notion of objectivity, might it not be possible to write criticism that balances a necessary distance and dispassionate critique with a passionate sense of engagement with the performances and the performers about which critics are writing? Might it be possible, as Rita Felski suggests, to ‘forge a language of attachment as intellectually robust and refined as our rhetoric of detachment’ (2011: 585)? Carson’s conclusion that ‘performance criticism has nowhere to go but back to its origins in theatre history, chronicling the interaction and political implications of specific performances’ is unobjectionable and certainly worth reasserting but could be seen as somewhat defensive (2017: 473). Carson herself acknowledges that this argument might seem ‘elitist or exclusive’ and she is unapologetic about this (458). Yet, while the much-vaunted democratization of Shakespearean performance criticism across multiple platforms should be held up to scrutiny and challenged for its assumptions and limits, proposing that Shakespeare performance criticism simply continue in the same form in the changed circumstances of the present seems somewhat inadequate as a response, particularly in relation to the ‘global theatre’ about which Carson expresses her desire to bear witness. Indeed, her account of viewing international Globe productions in the article is saturated with knowledge of the ways in which contemporary constructions of history, theory, performance, Shakespeare and the global intersect in the present moment, suggesting that her own critical methodologies have responded instinctively to contemporary performances in ways

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that her rather backward-looking conclusion disavows. What is of most value in the article are the questions it raises, which are highly pertinent to performance criticism in the contemporary context.1

Challenges for contemporary performance criticism This section looks at some of the challenges for contemporary performance criticism suggested by the chapters of this book and more general observation of contemporary performances of Shakespeare in the European context. They are by no means exhaustive but aim to complement Carson’s questions about the role of contemporary performance criticism with some aesthetic and political questions around how and why performance matters – both in terms of its materiality and its material effects on those who write, read about or make performance.

Corporeality and embodiment While Carson’s article includes presence in the title, her notion of presence refers only to the importance of ‘being there’ for the  Shakespearean performance critic. It does not deal with the embodied presence or ‘being there’ of performers and spectators in line with the more wide-ranging definition of embodiment by Elizabeth J. Harvey as ‘the traffic between the body’s interior and its surround’ (2016: 370). While performance criticism outside Shakespeare Studies has placed both embodiment and corporeality at the heart of its concerns, the body and its material presence tend to be downplayed in Shakespearean performance criticism. Indeed, the thick description of textuality in critical writing about Shakespearean performance contrasts with the invariably thin description of corporeality. Moreover, in the present context, the idea of performers embodying Shakespearean characters or commenting on them in Brechtian processes of non-identification has been complemented by other forms of conceiving the relationship between actor and character. Erika Fischer-Lichte (2019) discusses embodiment in terms of the difference between ‘being’ a body as a performer and ‘having’ a body as a character,

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noting that contemporary performance shifts between attention to the performer and the character or foregrounds the corporeal presence of the performer over their embodiment of a character. Teatro Praga, for instance, besides commenting critically on the gender, postcolonial and sexual premises of particular Shakespearean characters, move between using the names of the characters and the names of the performers. Such an ironic relationship between performer and character, as I have suggested in the chapter on mala voadora’s Hamlet, foregrounds the presence of the performer and their communicative and affective bond with the spectators as well as the present-ness of the performance event. A different model of the relationship between performer and character is suggested by Nuno Cardoso’s Shakespeares, where the characters are often caricatures of contemporary political figures, involving the performers in complex forms of embodiment that oscillate between the theatrical and political in their reference to political figures. In some cases, embodiment itself becomes the central dramaturgical element of the performance. In Tónan Quito’s 2015 Richard III, for example, the ending saw the defeated Richard (the dancer/ performer Romeu Runa) becoming a horse rather than calling for one. Mist encircled a virtuoso sequence where Runa’s Richard transformed himself physically into an image of the horse who might save his life. This was effectively the end of the performance as the triumphalist and redemptive final monologue by Richmond (António Fonseca) in 5.5 was heavily cut. In order to describe this highly physical transition, the ways in which the performer’s body jerked and twitched grotesquely as the muscles of the body shaped this awkward shift from human to non-human body raises a number of questions. When and how did the spectators sense this transition in the performer’s body? Did the human and non-human co-exist to create a hybrid eco-critical, mythical figure? How did grotesque movement create such an exquisite image? Answering such questions might seem to demand an excessive amount of detail for one moment of performance, but the presence of the performer’s body at this time constituted a key element of the performance’s eco-dramaturgy and demanded some form of analysis. Photographs can help to give a sense of such moments of active embodiment, but images tend to be static and have difficulty conveying shifts and transitions within performance, while video clips remain two-dimensional. The pregnant performer Sofia Dias in Tiago

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Rodrigues’ Antony and Cleopatra in Chapter 2 is another example of a performance where critical attention to the materiality of the body imposes itself.

Participation-observation In a period characterized by attempts to encourage the participation of spectators as co-creators or to immerse them physically and/or virtually, what happens when the Shakespeare critic also participates in a performance? How can they convey an experience which is both inside and outside the performance, necessarily individual but sometimes collective? In Christiane Jatahy’s Macbeth in Chapter 4, for instance, the spectators co-created the performance and their physical, affective and perceptual experiences determined what the performance became to a great extent on each night. How might my own taking part as a spectator-performer have shaped the critical approach to the performance undertaken in the chapter? Evidently, it is not only in such immersive performances that individual spectators construct their own interpretations of the performance and negotiate their participation as both participant and observer. However, immersive performances tend to illustrate more starkly the limits of performance criticism in describing such experiences. The sense of moving through different spaces and occasionally through temporal and intermedial dimensions is hard to convey solely through objective critical language. The ethical and political dimension of in-the-moment decision-making tends to evaporate in writing, as does the aesthetic experience of sensory overload. Many artist-researchers have made use of autoethnographic approaches to discuss performances in which they have themselves been involved, and the use of the traditionally abject pronoun ‘I’ becomes a way of detailing the involvement in these performances. The language of the senses, whether the tactile, the aural or the visual might enrich such an approach. Additionally, the language of affect can capture a sense of how the performance feels to the spectator/critic as well as what it might mean and how it might matter socially and politically, as in the idea of moving the audience that structured Chapter 4. These areas of performance experience tend to be downplayed within writing about performance and the

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loss of these more subjective, embodied responses to performance makes writing about such performances less vivid than it might be. They suggest also the relevance of phenomenological approaches to contemporary Shakespearean performance, a philosophical current that has been surprisingly underrepresented within Shakespearean performance studies over the years.2

(Trans)national flows The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has reminded us all that however cosmopolitan and well-travelled we might be as Shakespeareans, we live and work in particular local and national contexts, are shaped by them and view performance through their lenses. Moreover, the pandemic has also exacerbated the closing of national borders and the rise of populist nationalism that has characterized the European context since the Brexit vote in 2016. This adverse context raises the question of how performance criticism deals with the transnational flows that influence performer training and theatrical exchanges in a context which seems to impose an exclusive focus on the local. On a very basic level, travelling to different locations to see performances outside one’s national context became more difficult, especially if, as Portugal was between July and August 2020, that country was on a blacklist for those travelling from and returning to several European countries. Moreover, even after the pandemic wanes, there remains the ecologically questionable, expensive and often unequal practice of flying to see performances. Such questions affect all academics, but particularly younger, untenured academics, those in poorer countries or those who have difficulty arranging visas for the country to which they travel to see performances or work in libraries. As such, the type of global performance criticism academics like Carson have pioneered may, in such a context, reinforce hierarchies between those able to travel and those who cannot, those who have well-stocked libraries and those who do not. Yet, as the chapters of this book illustrate, the global is also about exchanges within national contexts, both performative and critical. These need not be simply between nation states but also involve exchanges between, for example, performance critics interested in queer performances of Shakespeare or performances

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with multicultural casts. Such a focus highlights the multiple influences that feed into contemporary performance even when national borders are closed and travel restricted. Critical writing has a crucial role to play in such contexts in disseminating work that it may be difficult for those outside that particular context to witness. Even local performances and practices are not conceived in isolation and their networks of exchange can be productively dealt with in performance criticism. There are, thankfully, several online platforms, such as MIT’s Global Shakespeare performance database where discussion of Shakespeare performances and videos of Shakespearean performances is both informed and potentially far-reaching. As Christie Carson suggests, international conferences can also provide vital exchanges of information about performances in different cultural contexts and if some are held online, this obviates the need to travel. Yet, to return to one of Carson’s central concerns, these situations do not necessarily imply the critic ‘being there’ at the performance, a live presence that Carson considers important, if not essential, to review performances.3 It is hard to dispute this, but the contemporary context may demand an expansion of the notion of ‘being there’ that involves virtual exchanges of knowledge between academics and practitioners. One way of bridging the gap between local, area and transnational knowledge might be to bring together Shakespeare performance critics in different national contexts within a grassroots network to write about how the same Shakespeare performance is received in different contexts. A contemporary example might be Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III, which has travelled extensively, including to Portugal. This does, however, tend to concentrate critical interest in those productions that can afford to be global products and to neglect those that are unable to travel widely but that might nevertheless be fascinating for critics to see and discuss. Another alternative is to bring together, in edited academic volumes, analysis of contemporary performances of the same Shakespeare play in a variety of national contexts, which enables academics to in some sense witness the performances without being there. Researchers at the University of Murcia in Spain, for instance, have been pioneers in such work within the European context and have helped to make notions of ‘European’ Shakespeare performance a more tangible reality without becoming a fixed set of practices and beliefs.4

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Performance knowledge As performers have come under increasing pressure to justify their funding, many of them, like Christiane Jatahy in Chapter 4, have documented their creative processes either in books or on new media platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo. This represents a significant extension of conventional performance paratexts beyond programme material, post-performance discussions or interviews with practitioners and can be integrated within a variety of new formats that also include podcasts and online seminars. The focus in critical reviews has more often been on the final artistic product rather than the creative process and critics tend to shy away from this material, often out of a sense that they do not possess the knowledge to discuss or include it appropriately. Performance critics and practitioners have come together for many years to discuss decisions made by directors and performers in relation to the performance of particular Shakespeare plays and published these insights into the creative process, but the kind of material being produced by artists about their creative processes nowadays is qualitatively different from practitioner interviews or post-show discussions and prompts questions about how performance critics might approach such material. On the one hand, the ways in which artists discuss their work tends to be very different from that of critics. In an article exploring actors’ blogs for instance, Cary M. Mazer acknowledges a significant gap between the information about performance he expected to find on these blogs and what he actually found there. Mazer notes that: [T]hey in fact rarely convey what actually goes on in rehearsal: the discussions during ‘table work’; the provisional choices that get discarded; the unsolved moments that get revisited after other scenes have been explored and suddenly make sense; the point, often late in the rehearsal process, when the ‘story’ suddenly gets clarified; etc. (2017: 189) Instead, Mazer notes that actors’ blogs tend to stress the affective, the interpersonal, and the everyday over the aesthetic, the conceptual or

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the political. On John Lithgow’s blog about performing Lear in 2014, for instance, Mazer finds the following ‘insights’ on performance: accounts of the actor growing his beard and trying to memorize his lines before rehearsals began; taking each of the actors out to lunch to get to know them better; walking over to the outdoor Delacorte stage just before rehearsals move from the indoor rehearsal room to the open-air theatre and introducing himself to the carpenters and electricians; hearing how the supporting actors playing the knights created the offstage ‘hubbub’; being visited by the company’s go-to physical therapist after injuring his back playing tennis in an ill-advised attempt to build up his stamina; weathering a very real summer storm that interrupted a preview performance; and noticing that a swallow, which had built a nest in a tree near the wardrobe shed, had pushed its hatchlings out of the nest just as the director was pushing the actors of [sic] their nest during previews. All this makes for fascinating reading; but only in rare instances does it illuminate either the overall artistic process or any of the specific choices or discoveries; and only rarely are the material conditions of the rehearsal process specific to the particular role and play. (2017: 190, my emphasis) Such a disjunction between the blog’s promotional focus on the individual actor and his relationships with other human and nonhuman beings in the performance, and the critic’s desire to analyse the production’s artistic choices raises the wider critical question of what ‘matters’ about performance processes and what should be discarded as extraneous. Are details of the forming of personal relationships or the wear and tear on the body during rehearsals relevant information, for instance, or simply anecdotal? The frustration of Mazer’s expectations leads him to conclude that actors’ accounts of playing their Shakespearean roles ‘are interesting not because they are particularly insightful but because they are evidence’ (2017: 197). The distinction between what is ‘insightful’ and what is ‘evidence’ here is questionable. Are not insights and evidence simply different words for using details of the creative process to understand performance? Although Mazer himself is a distinguished director, dramaturg and playwright as well as an academic, his

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distinction between the two seems to reinforce a separation and hierarchy between the doing of performance, which is connected here merely with ‘evidence’ and the thinking about performance which is credited with always being ‘insightful’. In this particular case, however, might not the parallel the actor draws between the swallows forcibly leaving their nest and the performers similarly forced by the director to begin their performance run be considered ‘insightful’ in terms of conceptions of space, ensemble and the role of the director? Is not ‘hearing how the supporting actors playing the knights created the offstage “hubbub”’ a significant detail of how the performance was created? Similarly, might the failure to acknowledge the relevance of such experiences be ‘evidence’ of the critical tendency to value the rational over the experiential or the affective and thus processes of knowing why over knowing how? Do not such divisions make it almost impossible to find anything ‘insightful’ in what performers themselves say about the performance process and suggest that only Shakespearean performance critics have ‘insights’ into performance? Might not critical writing itself be a form of doing? Mazer acknowledges that ‘[t]he process of making – or rather of remaking – a work of art has become as much a thing to be experienced as the work of art itself’ (2017: 184), yet if these divisions between thinking and doing, analysing and feeling and between critical knowing why and performance knowing how are maintained rather than re-assessed, to what extent is performance criticism able to respond to ‘the process of making’ performance if it consigns the elements of process to simple ‘evidence’ rather than considering them a different form of knowledge about performance? While the documentation of creative processes by artists has been little discussed within Shakespeare performance studies, many performance critics have sat in on rehearsals as interested observers, dramaturgs or the type of ‘critical friend’ outlined by Carson. Many will acknowledge that the most memorable moments of a Shakespeare performance occur in the creative process rather than in the onstage performance. Rehearsals can be stimulating and occasionally magical as a performance comes into being apparently out of thin air, but they can also be tedious, apparently aimless and predetermined by short rehearsal periods and/or excessive directorial control. In the course of rehearsals, impromptu and improvised moments enliven the performance process and lead to unforeseen solutions to the dramaturgical questions. Decisions

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about what works and does not are made instinctively and in the moment, decided by processes that are often deliberately mystified by practitioners but can nevertheless be traced to a large degree. My own memory of watching a final rehearsal of Nuno Cardoso’s 2012 Measure for Measure is of wondering how on earth it would come together out of such chaos, but it did and, after a few performances, found its feet. Writing about the performance therefore involved thinking about the first performances as continuations of the rehearsal process as well as a final performance. On the other hand, in situations where the dominance of the vision of the director as privileged reader of the text and as responsible for the overall concept of the performance are maintained, this tends to encourage more hierarchical, less creative performance processes. In these instances, rehearsals can be uninspiring and less than illuminating. Colette Gordon, after sitting in on two rehearsal processes for director-led performances in South Africa, has noted the ways in which both process and performance were limited as a result of the director’s unilateral control over the process: In both cases, . . . I was struck by how closely rehearsals followed the director’s pre-scripted vision, and how little they differed from final performances. Rather than revealing a world of creative work hidden from audiences, rehearsals foregrounded problems all too visible on stage: inert, stilted dialogue; mechanical delivery, lacking agency and intention; performance as carrying out of directives. (2017: 517) With regard to Fred Abrahamsie’s 2011 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gordon adds: Rehearsal is – etymologically – harrowing work, dragging the harrow. Setting off in a harrow (herce), performance may arrive in a hearse . . . the theatre performances felt, if anything, more tedious than rehearsals. The richest moments I had witnessed at rehearsals, when actors found ways to connect and engage each other . . ., had not survived into the performances. (2017: 518) It is interesting that Gordon’s frustration is framed both linguistically and corporeally. It includes her perceptive analysis of what was not working in rehearsal and her embodied sense of

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tedium as potentially rich moments of the performance process were either discarded or ignored. Such details of process can be enlightening for critical reviewing even when, like this, they are negative assessments of the creative process. However, as all the comments included here suggest, critics often come into creative processes with a series of already-formed expectations about what Shakespearean performance should be against which they measure what they experience. It is important for this reason that critics also examine their assumptions and preconceptions if they are to accompany creative processes in this way and maintain a degree of openness to the experience as it unfolds. Despite Gordon’s disappointment, being part of rehearsals can be invaluable for both critics and practitioners, particularly when expectations about what should happen in these processes on both sides are challenged. As critics become more involved in performance processes, they might also think about what it means to approach a performance from its conception rather than work backwards from a final performance to contextualize and evaluate the decisions and affects materialized in the performance. This might also unsettle linear notions of the relationship between rehearsal and performance, where the rehearsals automatically lead into a final performance which represents the end of one process and the beginning of another. They can promote a more complex view of the relationship between rehearsal and performance as mutually constitutive and interrelational. When the Greek director Raia Mouzenidou had various ‘shots’ at Troilus and Cressida between 2003 and 2011, for instance, to what extent might the early performances be seen as a rehearsal for the later performances and be discussed inter-relationally rather than individually? When Katie Mitchell’s 2011 video installation Five Truths: Ophelia with the actress Michelle Terry made each video a version ‘in the style of’ a particular theatre practitioner such as Brecht or Grotowski, such a move not only destabilized notions of a single truth about the character but also made each performance both a rehearsal as well as part of a final performance. Moreover, the relationship between these videos and Mitchell’s later Ophelia’s Room (2016) might also see the former as in some sense a rehearsal for the latter which also sheds new light on the former performances. As such, the relationship between process and performance becomes potentially richer, less one-dimensional and less geared towards the short term as diverse notions of the relationship between rehearsal

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and performance are explored. It is interesting, for instance, that it was only after Timon of Athens, the third of their Shakespeares, that Teatro Praga spoke in terms of a Shakespeare trilogy and that Christiane Jatahy’s Macbeth owed much to the aesthetics of the Strindberg and Checkhov that had preceded this performance in the trilogy she brought to the National Theatre in Lisbon.

Criticism in practice 1: Reviewing Shakespeare and online reviewing In thinking about the challenges of contemporary performance criticism, this chapter includes two examples of existing projects that have responded to contemporary developments in performance in innovative ways. One of the most successful experiments in intelligent and accessible online Shakespearean criticism is the Reviewing Shakespeare project under the auspices of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the University of Warwick. The project came in the wake of the highly successful 2012 Year of Shakespeare project which reviewed the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival international performances. Performance reviews on the site discuss in detail the productions and the plays on which they are based, while the centrality of performance images makes the site not only intellectually stimulating but also visually engaging. By having editors in various national contexts, Reviewing Shakespeare is also notable for the international reach of its Shakespeare performance criticism. Consulting the site on 24 June 2020, the first thing that caught my attention, however, was the fact that the most recent posts were from January of that year, shortly before the coronavirus shut down theatres around the world. The absence of more recent reviews speaks volumes about the devastating effects of the virus on theatre practice and consequently criticism. Nevertheless, the posts also illustrated clearly the transnational flows of contemporary performance. They included one on the change in Artistic Director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and reviews of Richard III by the Irish company DruidShakespeare performed at the Lincoln Centre in the United States, a race-aware Much Ado in Salt Lake City, Dutch performances of Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure and an operatic Lear, a Japanese Othello performed in London in

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the multicultural Tara Arts space, a Russian Dream in Stratford and an Icelandic Hamlet reviewed by a North American critic on their way back from a holiday in Germany who had a long stop off in Reykjavik. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were represented by a review of The Duchess of Malfi in Austin, Texas. In terms of Portugal, the site includes reviews of Richard III (2015), Antony and Cleopatra (2015, see Chapter 2), As You Like It (2014) and Coriolanus (2014, see Chapter 3) as well as Imperfect Actor (2014), an adaptation based on the Sonnets. As the focus of the site is primarily on the UK, the US and Europe, criticism from other lusophone countries like Brazil is less present. The project is praiseworthy in its attempt to bring ‘scholarly reviews of and writing about worldwide Shakespearian performance (theatre, film, TV) to a general audience’ and in the provision of a free resource for those inside and outside the academy. It is an important illustration that accessible online reviewing can also be informed and illuminating. The categories that form the reviews are rather homogenous (relationship to text, theatre space, actors’ performances and direction), but there is no doubt that it forms a valuable resource for performance critics to compare different approaches to the plays around the world, especially for younger academics who may not be able to travel as much as tenured professors. Most of the reviewers are Shakespeare academics and their reviews illustrate the often unacknowledged skills involved in reviewing a performance, such as the ability to convey a general sense of the performance through select details, the ability to evaluate objectively the success of the performance and the ability to relate the performances to the wider cultural and political moment in which they take place.

Criticism in practice 2: The 2018 Craiova Festival An excellent example of the bringing together or communal ‘being there’ of both practitioners and academics from different national contexts is the biannual Craiova International Shakespeare Festival in Romania. The Festival was founded in 1994 and is organized currently by the Marin Sorescu National Theatre in Craiova and the William Shakespeare Foundation. In 2018, it took place from

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23 April to 6 May in the sunshine that characterizes this Spring event. It included international performances such as Warlikowski’s African Tales, Cheek by Jowl’s Measure for Measure with Russian performers, the Korean Romeo and Juliet directed by Oh Tae Suk, The Tempest directed by Irina Brook and Othello Re-Mix by the Q Brothers. There were also several Romanian performances, such as a Macbeth directed by Gavriil Pinte based on a script by George Banu and a Much Ado directed by Diana Lupescu. These were complemented by community performances with local populations such as Philip Parr’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and one-man shows such as Brett Brown’s Henry V, also directed by Parr, as well as several musical and student performances. For several years, Nicoleta Cinpoes of the University of Worcester has organized a parallel critical event at the Festival under the banner of the European Shakespeare Research Association. This event had brought academics from many different countries to Craiova to see the various Shakespeare productions in the Festival, but also to produce critical work on Shakespearean performance. Before 2018, this critical work had taken the conventional form of sessions with academic papers. However, in 2018, the ‘Viewing and Reviewing’ seminar at the conference worked with a different and, from my perspective, innovative format. There were some plenary-style lectures on reviewing by renowned Shakespeareans such as Sir Stanley Wells, Paul Prescott and Paul Edmondson. Yet the seminar itself was organized differently. Before the Festival, those performance critics interested in attending the Festival were asked to choose particular performances they would be interested in viewing and discussing. At the seminar itself, organized in partnership with the Department of British, American and German Studies at the University of Craiova through the auspices of Sorin Cazacu, academics were grouped together in panels to speak about their chosen performances. The day before the performance took place, the members of the panel introduced the play and the performance, discussing various national performance histories and putting forward key critical perspectives. After the performance, the panels discussed what they had seen. Sometimes, the practitioners themselves came and contributed to the sessions as well as answering questions. In each of the sessions, the other academics present also joined in the discussions. After the Festival, members of each panel worked together to write collaborative reviews of the performances

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they had discussed in Craiova for the journal Cahiers Elisabethains and this issue of the journal, edited by Janice Valls-Russell and Nicoleta Cinpoes, came out in 2019.5 Taking part in this event and speaking to other participants, everyone seemed to agree that this was a highly successful format for practising performance criticism. One of the main reasons for this was that the connection between seeing and reviewing performances became the actual format of the seminar rather than the background conversation to the critical event. The other reason was that those taking part felt as if they were really working while they were at the Festival rather than working on a paper beforehand and presenting that paper for discussion at the event. In fact, discussion at the 2018 sessions was invariably animated and collaborative. There are, therefore, several features of the 2018 seminar that indicate possible directions for contemporary Shakespearean performance criticism. To begin with, the panels brought together an international group of performance critics who were not necessarily discussing performances within their own national context or with which they were necessarily familiar. Among other more familiar performances, for instance, I worked on a Japanese Tempest by Yamanote Jijosha directed by Masahiro Yasuda and this involved extensive research into a form of performance with which I was wholly unfamiliar, except in its debt to Grotowski. Moreover, previewing and reviewing were collaborative rather than individual tasks. The exchange between members of the different panels and between participants from different national contexts at different stages of their careers was extremely rich and involved much impromptu and longer-term communication. Not all panels worked equally well. Some panellists contributed more than others and some panels distributed individual tasks rather than working collaboratively.6 Yet such practices challenged conventional academic practices with their focus on individual interpretations of performances and created collaborations which echoed in a different form the artistic collaborations of the performances. They worked towards building performance criticism networks that could bring together various forms of local knowledge about Shakespearean performance and experiment with new forms of writing performance criticism. In the writing process, despite obviously different personal styles, it became clear that a degree of standardization in terms of Shakespearean performance studies training meant that individual differences in

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written content and form were not nearly as marked as had been imagined, even between academics from very different parts of Europe with very different histories of Shakespeare performance.

Towards performative criticism In order to engage with the challenges of contemporary Shakespearean performance outlined in this chapter, performance criticism might look to the development of notions of performance or performative writing within the field of performance studies by critics such as Della Pollock (1998) and Peggy Phelan (1993, 1997). Within a wider cultural shift from theatrical production to performance event, and the integration of performance within the experience economy, this kind of critical writing can, I would argue, respond to the challenges of embodiment, performance knowledge, transnational flows and increased spectator participation. Pollock describes performative writing as ‘a dynamic response to the extent to which writing and performance have failed each other by withdrawing – whether defensively or by pejorative attitudes – into identification with either arcane or apparently self-evident means of knowledge production’ (1998: 79), while Phelan describes it as writing which ‘enacts the death of the “we” that we think we are before we begin to write. A statement of allegiance to the radicality of unknowing who we are becoming, this writing pushes against the ideology of knowledge as a progressive movement forever approaching a completed endpoint’ (1997: 17). The notion of the performative is indebted to J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things with Words (1962), which has become a central text in the field of performance studies and his notion that words as performative actions have concrete material effects on bodies, identities and social and political contexts. Notions of the performative have expanded into a variety of critical areas, most notably in Judith Butler’s 1990 conception of gender performativity as a reiteration of gender and sexual norms. Phelan and Pollock’s notions of performative writing, although differently configured, build upon this idea that the written word has material effects on identities, bodies, histories and theories as well as being reshaped by them. Performative writing also questions distinctions between critical and creative writing. As opposed to conventional critical writing, performative writing tends to be open-ended, self-reflexive

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and often subjective rather than objective, thesis-led and conclusive. It deconstructs stable notions of self and other in order to open up multiple dialogues within and between selves. Unlike creative writing however, it also pursues critical lines of enquiry using theoretical insights from various subject areas. Feminism and queer theory, for instance, are often adopted by Phelan in tandem with her interest in psychoanalysis. This enables her to explore, for instance, artistic disappearances and absences from a psychoanalytical and gendered perspective, but also to explore connections between these art works and theories alongside the more personal, ghostly disappearance that is a death in the family. The potential of such performative writing for Shakespearean performance criticism lies in the fact that it is open-ended and exploratory rather than assessing the performance in the light of existing views of the play being staged or drawing conclusions about the success of the performance based primarily on a reading of the Shakespeare text. Much performance criticism, however wellwritten, reads as if the author already knew what they were going to write before they began. It can therefore lack a sense of critical writing itself as a material practice, a doing, a becoming or even an event. Phelan rejects performance criticism that has as its main objective the recording of a performance which has disappeared, the process of ‘freezing the snowman’ described by Emma Smith in the introduction to this book. She suggests that ‘[t]his urge to record has given rise to an odd situation in which some of the most radical and troubling art of our cultural moment has inspired some of the most conservative (and even reactionary) critical commentary’, adding that such writing will only preserve ‘an illustrated corpse, a pop-up anatomical drawing, that stands in for the thing one most wants to save, the embodied performance’ (1997: 3). Pollock also emphasizes the limitations of purely descriptive approaches to performance in her argument that performative writing ‘does not describe in a narrowly reportorial sense, an objectively verifiable event or process but uses language like paint to create what is self-evidently a version of what was, what is, and/or what might be’ (1998: 80). Such approaches cast performance criticism as a singular creative act whose aim is to create a new, parallel text rather than to simply record the details of a performance, much as a translation of a Shakespeare play is also necessarily an act of (re)creation rather than simply transposition. Moreover, the notion of performativity considers the effects of the

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words and images of performance criticism on bodies, behaviours and political contexts, whether those of the performers, the spectators, the readers or disenfranchised citizens, however unstable and unpredictable these effects might be. In a contemporary context of global inequality, social injustice and environmental urgency, with authoritarian leaders cracking down violently and absolutely against all forms of dissent and the fascist right advocating necropolitics as a political strategy to deal with successive waves of crisis, what difference might performative writing about Shakespearean performance make? If we accept that hate speech can have concrete effects on Black, immigrant and LGBTQI+ bodies or that cartoons can give rise to religious and political violence, can performative writing have similarly concrete effects in promoting communities of care, intersectional solidarities and an appetite for personal and political transformation? Can it contribute to empowering bodies, voices, practices and beliefs that have been repressed, murdered or ignored? Pollock argues that performative writing can evoke ‘worlds that are other-wise intangible, unlocatable worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, insight’ (1998: 80), which can hint at such transformation. Writing about the contemporary performances of Shakespeare in this book has reinforced for me a sense that Shakespearean performance matters. Shakespeare and the contemporary exist in a productive tension where love and hate, irony and earnestness, deconstruction and pleasurable entertainment, hope and cynicism co-exist. These performances challenge perceptions of what bodies and voices can appear in public, as in Teatro Praga’s Shakespeares in Chapter 1, validate performance as a repository for a shifting notion of cultural memory, as in Tiago Rodrigues’ Shakespeares in Chapter 2 and urge protest even when it seems bound to fail as in Nuno Cardoso’s Shakespeares in Chapter 3. Writing this book has reinforced the idea that as well as reflecting on the global tragedies that constitute the politics of the contemporary, performances of Shakespeare evoke multiple temporalities and geographies to suggest alternatives to the social, economic and cultural inequalities and political and ecological blindspots of the present moment that have engendered such tragedies. These alternatives tend to revolve around the reconfigured theatrical ensemble itself and the affective and collaborative exchanges that characterize the creative process as well as the intimate interaction with spectators in the moment of performance.

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Performative criticism of such performances can advocate caring deeply about the act of Shakespearean performance and performers in ways that are simultaneously critical, affective and creative. It flouts neoliberal ideas that performance doesn’t ‘matter’ because its contribution is primarily imaginative, social, ethical and political rather than economic by exploring histories, memories, individuals and communities of practitioners that have transformed perceptions of their worlds. In the process, notions of Shakespeare, performance, text, genre, politics and the global have themselves shifted shape. Grounded in experiences of embodiment in the here and now, the ‘I’ that witnesses performance as part of the ‘We’ tracks its affective, sensory and critical responses to these performances through criticism that feeds back into these experiences and increases their resonance. Performative criticism struggles, resists, negates and excites, welcoming the new when it aids its transformative purpose and challenging the conventional when it ceases to reflect on its achievements. It is writing that represents a continual exploration rather than a confident assertion of arrival and fails as often as it succeeds in capturing something of value about Shakespearean performance. In a culture of technocratic evaluation that tolerates only personal and economic success, performative writing proposes instead a writing that moves, a critical intimacy between readers, writers and performers based on what they might discover in common and that illustrates how the relationship between artistic and political transformation and Shakespearean performance is vital, pleasurable, dynamic, frustrating, never taken for granted and very occasionally life-changing.

NOTES

Introduction 1 The independent theatre movement in Portugal was the contemporary theatre of its time from the mid-1960s to the 1974 Revolution and beyond. As the name suggests, it positioned itself against the state-run national theatres and the commercial theatres and produced ensemble-based, often politically inflected performances of Shakespeare. The two Portuguese companies most associated with Shakespeare in this movement are Teatro da Cornucópia and the Teatro de Almada. The freelance generation that followed them worked between the national theatres and the commercial theatre sector. Perhaps the most representative figure of this generation is Ricardo Pais, who directed several postmodern productions of Shakespeare at the Teatro Nacional São João in Porto in the 1990s and the new millennium. On the Shakespeares of Ricardo Pais, see Francesca Rayner (2012a, 2013). See also Chapter 5 on his two productions of Hamlet. 2 Such a process is relatively recent. In 2016, the Público journalist Joana Gorjão Henriques published a book of interviews with activists and academics living in post-independence Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The book illustrated the ways in which Portuguese imperial and colonial rule had left continuing physical, psychological and socio-economic scars on the populations of these countries, while its sub-title The Forgotten Side of Colonialism hinted at the ways in which the questions raised in the book had been neglected in the past. In 2017, the left-wing historian and former MP Fernando Rosas fronted a thirteen-part television series on Portugal’s relationship with its former colonies in Africa from the nineteenth century to the Portuguese Revolution in 1974. The series highlighted Portugal’s historical involvement in the international slave trade, its appropriation of land belonging to the native populations, its sustained use of forced labour even when this meant starvation,

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incarceration and torture of members of the liberation movement during the independence struggles and massacres of those who rebelled against the colonial regime. 3 This ‘forgetting’ of the violence of Portuguese colonialism results from a series of different factors. The overwhelmingly White ‘retornados’ (returnees) who returned to Portugal after colonial independence attracted much public sympathy for their plight and often viewed their previous lives in the colonies as a mythical paradise compared to the poverty and prejudice they encountered in Portugal. It is also a continuing legacy of the luso-tropicalist belief in Portugal as the ‘good’ colonizer. Luso-tropicalism was a critical term developed by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1950s and was adopted by the Salazar regime in Portugal as an ideological justification for continuing colonial rule. After the Second World War, in the face of increasing pressure to decolonize from international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), the Portuguese colonial administration altered its discursive focus away from the notion of the civilizing mission of the Portuguese. It emphasized instead Portugal’s historic ability to mix peacefully with the local populations rather than resort to violence and physical intimidation. Luso-tropicalism stressed Portuguese colonial exceptionality, based, in the words of Freyre, on cordiality, miscegenation, the ability to adapt and to assimilate. More recently, while the right-wing MP André Ventura held a march in June 2020 under the banner ‘Portugal is not racist’ to counter protests around the Black Lives Matter contestation, a recent European poll indicated that around 50 per cent of the Portuguese population continue to believe that some ‘races’ are intellectually and culturally superior to others. During the coronavirus pandemic, Ventura also called for the compulsory quarantine of gypsy communities. This measure was widely condemned, including by the well-known footballer of gypsy origin, Ricardo Quaresma. 4 Exceptions include Teatro Praga’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest as well as mala voadora’s Hamlet, all of which can be found on the MIT website. 5 Critical writing on the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival represents an important exception to this tendency as it focused on the ways in which the global invitations to practitioners were echoed in the heterogeneous composition of the local audiences. 6 Such a notion builds on the hospitality that is often invoked in relation to the Portuguese tourism industry, but is conscious of the

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ways in which such hospitality is enforced by geo-political inequalities rather than freely assumed. 7 Such a strategy is nevertheless inconsistent. Both these Festivals have seen their funding reduced or removed altogether recently even before the 2020 pandemic. 8 The Teatro Nacional São João, for instance has been a member of the Union of Theatres of Europe since 2003, which has allowed it to bring many travelling productions to Porto. 9 See Rayner (2015) for a discussion of this performance. Christina McMahon’s 2014 analysis of the politics of lusophone theatre festivals includes a chapter that focuses on a revealing artistic divide and subsequent debate around two adaptations of Shakespeare (Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) at the Mindelact Festival in Cape Verde. The former, directed by a White Portuguese director who has lived in Cape Verde for many years and who runs the Festival, continued his existing ‘creolization’ of Shakespeare. The latter was directed by a Cape Verdean director who had formerly been taught by this Portuguese director and who used the play within the play to raise provocative questions about local theatrical practices and the Festival itself. 10 The two books are Pina Coelho (2017) and my own Contemporary Portuguese Theatre: Criticism and Performance 2010–2018 (Rayner 2017). The former contains a chapter by Ana Pais which deals with the Shakespeares of Tónan Quito and Tiago Rodrigues (see Chapter 2). My book of criticism contains reviews of Shakespeare performances by Teatro Praga and Tiago Rodrigues (see Chapters 1 and 2). 11 Quito’s ensemble-based Richard III also indicated a novel approach to the question of multilingualism. Quito took his cue from Richard’s comment that ‘[m]y conscience hath a thousand several tongues, / And every tongue brings in a several tales, / And every tale condemns me for a villain’ (5.3.196–8). The word for tongue in Portuguese (língua) is the same as the word for language, so the text’s notion of Richard fabricating stories and implicitly lies was complemented in a performance where each performer played Richard at different moments of the performance, suggesting multiple languages and speakers within Richard’s unfixed dramatic subjectivity. 12 Teatro Praga do have particular roles for particular individuals within the company from the dramaturg José Maria Vieira Mendes to the semi-directorial roles of André e. Teodósio and Pedro Penim. Nevertheless, they make explicit their desire not to work with a director.

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13 Tackels defines writing for the stage as ‘a text created for the stage and from the stage’ (2015: 99), implicitly contrasting these practices with notions of a dramaturgy which emerges from the page rather than the stage. The dramatists he discusses include Rodrigo Garcia and Angelica Liddell. 14 During the 2020 pandemic, such outside performances had obvious advantages. The first Portuguese performance of King John in August 2020, for instance, took place in the ruins of the gothic Convento do Carmo in Lisbon. The lack of a roof allowed spectators to move between the performance, the setting and the dark sky above. Indoor theatres reopened in September 2020 only to close again almost immediately. 15 Coming after the ‘discovery’ of the historical Richard’s skeleton in a Leicester car park, this 2015 performance took place on a stage covered with shredded black tires. The ways in which the dead bodies of Richard’s victims were dragged across this floor, leaving bodily traces among the tyres suggested simultaneously the ruthlessness of Richard’s rise to power and the end of a fossil-fuel-based ecological paradigm. The final moment of the performance, when the dancer/performer Romeu Runa transformed his own body into Richard’s horse, suggested the hybrid human-animal that might take its place in the future.

Chapter 1 1 It is by no means certain that such a thing as a theatrical mainstream exists in Portugal, considering the limited funding for theatre in the country. However, in terms of venues, budgets and critical interest, there is a definite shift during this period in the recognition of the company’s work. 2 I have taken the notion of performative irony from Michael Shane Boyle (2010). Shane Boyle suggests that irony, because it mobilizes multiple meanings, encourages greater critical reflection on the part of the audience in a similar way to Brecht’s distancing devices. However, he acknowledges that these multiple meanings also mean that irony may not be recognized by audiences or expanded by the audience in unintended ways. Nevertheless, Shane Boyle notes the political potential of performative irony ‘to achieve political significance not by commenting on or reflecting the dominant social or political configuration, but rather through inserting the possibility of play into the system or exposing the fictive foundations of structuring power’ (2010: 213). This accurately describes the ways in which Praga’s

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performative irony encourages a playful questioning of both theatrical and political power structures. 3 Grove Music Online defines a semi-opera as ‘A play with four or more separate episodes or masques which include singing, dancing, instrumental music and spectacular scenic effects such as transformations and flying’ that flourished between 1673 and 1710. Available at www​.o​​xford​​music​​onlin​​e​.com​​/grov​​emusi​​c​/vie​​w​/10.​​ 1093/​​gmo​/9​​78156​​15926​​30​.00​​1​.000​​1​/omo​​-9781​​56159​​2630-​​e​-000​​ 00253​​92. 4 In his definition of Shakespearean technicity, Worthen expands Aneta Manciewicz’s 2014 definition of intermediality as involving ‘inter-exchanges of media in performance, activated through digital technology, which involve interactions between mediatized (digital) and live elements, in a reflexive manner’ (2014: 3), which tends to privilege the operations of digital technology over other performance forms. This brings Worthen’s notion of technicity closer to Chiel Kattenbelt and Freda Chapple’s (2006) notion of intermediality as involving crossovers not only between the live and the digital but also between different artistic forms. 5 A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most popular Shakespeare plays for performance in Portugal. The CETbase database records almost forty performances and adaptations between 1988 and 2015. Available at http://ww3​.fl​.ul​.pt​/CETbase/. 6 There were only two performances of this Dream in Portugal in 2010 and one in 2012 in Guimarães as part of the European Capital of Culture Framework. It was also performed in Salamanca and Paris. The number of collaborators (around fifty) and the budget for the performance have made it difficult to stage regularly. 7 From an unpublished presentation entitled ‘Is There Anyone Out There?’ by José Maria Vieira Mendes sent to the author. Undated. 8 From the performance script. All page references are to this unpublished script. My thanks to Teatro Praga for providing the scripts for their three performances. 9 All references to the play are from the 2018 Arden edition of the play edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri. 10 Parallels between the play and the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet have often explicitly raised the question of the potential for tragedy in the Dream. 11 All quotations from the libretto of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen taken from http:​/​/ope​​ra​.st​​anfor​​d​.edu​​/Purc​​ell​/F​​airyQ​​ueen/​​libr​e​​tto​.h​​tml.

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12 The notion of ‘reproductive futurity’ and its validation of the child as emblematic of a heteronormative trajectory aimed towards the promise of the future is taken from Lee Adelman (2004). 13 Rebecca Schneider (2015: 10–11) has discussed a similar interplay between the live and the inanimate around this sculpture in her distinction between Rodin’s The Kiss and Tino Sehgal’s choreographed performance Kiss (2003). Schneider notes that ‘a stone statue such as Rodin’s The Kiss (1901–4) is not commonly considered a live performance. But Tino Sehgal’s Kiss (2003), as a looping choreography between two dancers that passes Rodin’s Kiss across dancer’s bodies, is live when performed.’ A similar distinction operates in relation to Campino’s performative installation. 14 It has been a Praga convention to use the names of the performers rather than characters, although in this performance this only applied to The End of Irony. 15 This was the only one of the performances that the author did not experience directly. The account relies on the video of the performance on the MIT Global Shakespeare site and the script of the play on this site. This may explain the sense of this performance being less successful as the joy and irreverence that characterize Praga performances are invariably flattened in the video performances. 16 The review can be found on Tiago Bartolomeu Costa’s blog at http:​//​ blo​​gues.​​publi​​co​.pt​​/teat​​ropub​​lico/​​2013/​​03​/16​​/teat​​ro​-pr​​aga​-a​​-dife​​renca​​ -entr​​e​-sab​​e​r​-fa​​zer​-e​​-inve​​ntar. 17 Such pages in newspapers conventionally include a somewhat macabre black-and-white photograph of the dead person, Christian crosses and short texts about funerals and commemorative masses. 18 All references to the play are to the 2019 Arden 3 edition edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. 19 See Miguel Ramalhete Gomes (2018) for a discussion of this production that argues that the focus on gold obscured the more complex mechanisms associated with debt. He is currently working on a book which includes discussion of the productions by Almada and Nuno Cardoso. 20 A rehearsal discussion between the author and members of Teatro Praga revealed that their budget for this performance from the CCB was significantly less than for previous performances. 21 Although it could not be said that theatre had been considered a necessity in any period of its history in Portugal, the financial crisis of 2008 had made conditions for producing theatre more dependent on companies being able to show they were engaged in work that had clear social or economic benefits as well as reducing budgets even for established companies like Praga.

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22 All references are to the unpublished performance script. 23 Such frequent nods to those working within the cultural sphere might seem elitist, especially compared to the more obviously populist Timon directed by Nuno Cardoso in Porto. However, apart from the fact that audiences for the play in both Lisbon and Porto were primarily drawn from local elites, the two performances also illustrate different approaches to staging the political. While Cardoso is more concerned with referencing national and European political events and persons, Praga sought through their focus on luxury to examine the wider social and artistic trends that define contemporary attitudes to politics. 24 All references to the play are to the 2017 Arden 3 edition edited by Anthony Dawson and Gretchen Minton. 25 As he leaves Athens, Timon affirms ‘Nothing I’ll bear from thee / But nakedness’ (4.1.32–3) and his speeches are full of images of physical decay and rot. 26 As the subtitle of Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore’s The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (1999) suggests, theatricality is at the heart of the experience economy and its marketing of unforgettable events. The book is structured like the most conventional of theatre performances with talk of roles and acts and even the inclusion of an intermission. Theatricality works here to blur distinctions between work and leisure as if work was becoming more like leisure time rather than leisure time becoming more like work. 27 As the screen was at the front of the stage, with the performer behind the screen, it was also unclear if what was being projected on the screen was actually taking place onstage. 28 As Anthony Dawson and Gretchen Minton suggest in their note on the text (2008: 282), ‘swear against objects’ indicates a turning away from emotion. In this particular context, it is given an additional layer of meaning in its suggestion of the need to remove oneself from attachment to material objects. 29 I did see this scene performed in rehearsal and the high-pitched voices of the performers made it a very funny scene. It probably was discarded for reasons of performance time and maybe also because its farcical tone might have not fitted well with the more ironic tone of the other encounters.

Chapter 2 1 Rodrigues was invited by the RSC to contribute to their Projekt Europa season with the performance Blindness and Seeing based on two novels by the Portuguese Nobel Prize in Literature winner José

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Saramago. Unfortunately, this performance was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic. To my knowledge, this would have been the first performance by a Portuguese artist at the RSC. 2 This term and its application to the Portuguese context has been pioneered by the writer and performer Joana Craveiro of Teatro do Vestido. Performances such as her seminal A Living Museum of Small and Forgotten Memories (2016) examine the history and legacy of the Portuguese Revolution, particularly its omissions, erasures and consequences for the current generation of practitioners. 3 The play won two main national awards that year for best theatrical performance. 4 See censorship record 7620 at the Torre do Tombo archives in Lisbon. Although there are many censorship records held in these archives, they are by no means complete and the handwriting makes some of them difficult to read. Salazar was known to detest theatre for its challenges to the regime, but also because his own stern, retiring personality was diametrically opposed to the collective pleasures of theatrical display. 5 Like Rodrigues, both Abreu and Waddington were born after the Revolution. As with the Praga rewritings in Chapter 1, the script used their real names rather than the names of characters. 6 All subsequent quotations are from the published version of the play. It is indicative of Rodrigues’s concern with his own dramaturgy that both Three Fingers and By Heart have been published in book form in Portuguese and Antony and Cleopatra and By Heart have been translated into French. 7 The close connection between religion and politics in the dictatorship created an ideology of the feminine within the domestic sphere that had a profound effect on actresses performing on the public stage. Married actresses in this period could not perform without their husbands’ consent and those actresses with communist or socialist sympathies, like Dalila Rocha, found themselves barred from key theatrical institutions such as the National Theatre in Lisbon. 8 In a way the censors were right to be worried, for one of the main forms to cheat censorship was to suggest alternative meanings to the audience through actions or words onstage in a game of cat and mouse. The censors’ alarmed reaction to any mention of the colour red, for instance, meant that when a lighthouse had to change the colour of its light to purple, the reasons behind this decision were immediately obvious to the audience. 9 A request by the amateur Teatro do Ateneu de Coimbra to stage the play during the Shakespeare quatercentenary in 1964 was rejected on these grounds, according to the censorship record in the Torre do

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Tombo archives (no. 7620) in Lisbon, illustrating also the politicized role of amateur theatre during the period of the dictatorship. 10 Graça dos Santos’s 2004 The Distorted Spectacle is the most comprehensive academic work on theatre during the Portuguese dictatorship. Teresa Seruya and Maria Lin Moniz (2008) focus more specifically on performances and translations of Shakespeare. I have myself written on Círculo de Iniciação Teatral da Academia de Coimbra (CITAC)’s 1970 Macbeth, for instance, which so enraged the censors because the company sent them an existing translation which bore no resemblance to the improvised, far more radical, text they actually performed. It led to the student theatre company being closed down, ostensibly for insulting religious pilgrims on their way to Fátima, but more clearly as a result of their oppositional theatre work. See Rayner (2014). 11 I have not been able to find this record in the archives and it may be the case that this is Rodrigues’s invention, based on real censorship practices of the time. 12 All references to the play are from the performance script. My thanks to Tiago Rodrigues and his production company, Mundo Perfeito, for providing me with this script. The play was published in book form in 2016. 13 All references to Sonnet 30 are from the 2019 Arden 3 edition edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. 14 This phrase is taken from the publicity for the performance, which is available at www​.houseonfire​.eu​/by​-heart 15 How actors learn their lines constitutes something of an open secret in the world of theatre. Actor training manuals rarely devote time to this as they consider it a skill that should have already been acquired or that will be passed on orally by other theatre practitioners There are, nevertheless, many internet sites that promise to teach actors and non-actors how to memorize their lines, such as https​:/​/dr​​amare​​sourc​​e​ .com​​/12​-t​​ips​-f​​or​-le​​ar​nin​​g​-lin​​es/ 16 See the publicity for the performance at www​.t​​ndm​.p​​t​/pt/​​digre​​ssoes​​/ anto​​nio​-e​​-cleo​​patra​/ Vitor Roriz and Sofia Dias have been working together since 2006 and the intimacy and complicity built up over the years were a crucial element of this performance. 17 As Carvalho Homem points out in his 2001 introduction, there were only three previous translations of the play before his own, the last of which had appeared in 1970. His own revised translation was reissued in 2018 by Relógio d’Água. Carvalho Homem met with Rodrigues and the two performers in the initial stages of the creative process to discuss ideas about the play and the characters.

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18 English and French translations of the play have also been used for international performances. Interestingly, Vitor Roriz pointed out that performing in another language enabled him more easily to view the text as performance material rather than a dramatic text. Interview with Vitor Roriz on the 8 April 2019. 19 In the same interview, Vitor Roriz explained that the duo had tended to avoid concepts of narrative and character in the past, yet he noted that during the creation of the performance, they had come to realize some of the pleasures in telling a story and the possibility of creating a stage presence rather than a psychologically based character. He stressed the focus of the creative team on the idea of form and composition as a means of bridging their different creative processes and the necessary ‘survival strategies’ the two dancers developed for this text-based performance. 20 Roriz noted that during the creative process, there would be times when Rodrigues would be absent, writing material based on what had been happening in rehearsals. The process of writing and revising continued up to the performance. Roriz also noted the ways in which Rodrigues ‘manipulated’ them in order to create new material for the performance. 21 Antony, for example, referred to Cleopatra’s mole and her snake bracelet. 22 All references to the play are to the 2019 Arden 3 edition edited by John Wilders. 23 According to Plutarch, Antony had seven children by three wives. He justifies the large number of children by different women through reference to his genealogy with Hercules who was similarly careful not to concentrate his seed in one womb. Antony leaves Octavia not only with their own daughters but also with his children by Fulvia. These children are later expelled from Antony’s house with their mother, although the eldest by Fulvia, Antyllus, goes to live with his father. Antyllus is later betrayed and murdered by his schoolmaster, Theodurus. Plutarch notes that Antony has had twins by Cleopatra, Alexander and Cleopatra (the Sun and the Moon, respectively) but there is also reference to another son, Ptolemy. These other children, according to Plutarch, were honourably kept by Caesar and survived. Cleopatra was brought up by Octavia and made a good marriage, while Antony, his son with Fulvia, was greatly beloved by Caesar. Caesarion is murdered because Caesar fears too many Caesars might challenge his own power. 24 This sequence was based on an exercise which the two dancers had used in a previous performance called O Gesto que Não Passa de Uma Ameaça [A Gesture That Is Nothing but a Threat] (2011). Kim F. Hall (1995) establishes a useful connection between such images of inundation and imperial discourse.

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25 In the programme, Rodrigues suggests that the ‘foreignness’ of the dancers to the conventions of Shakespearean performance represented a different notion of the foreign from that in the play. 26 In March 2017, the head of the Eurozone, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, commented that while he believed that the Northern European countries had shown solidarity with the Southern European countries in crisis, the latter also had duties as ‘I can’t spend all my money on women and drink and then at the end ask for your help.’ Dijsselbloem added, ‘This principle holds at personal, local, national and also at European level.’ In the controversy that followed, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa called the comments ‘xenophobic, racist and sexist’ and called for Dijsselbloem’s resignation. The incident illustrated the growing division between the wealthier countries in the Eurozone and those, like Portugal, Spain and Greece, who had been the object of severe austerity programmes in exchange for financial aid. See Maria Tadeo and Corina Ruhe (2017).

Chapter 3 1 The idea of ‘deadly’ Shakespeare is taken from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space (2008) and its chapter on deadly theatre. 2 Hartley also discusses the empowerment of performers in terms of the implementation of race and gender aware casting. 3 Cardoso was the artistic director of the Teatro Nacional São João’s sister theatre, the Teatro Carlos Alberto from 1998 to 2003, and was appointed the artistic director of the Teatro Nacional São João in 2018. Cardoso also performs and directs for his own production company, Cão Danado, playing Iago in Nuno M. Cardoso’s 2007 Othello, and has performed solo in a number of stage adaptations of works by Russian authors, such as Dostoevsky. One of his comments on his 2018 appointment was ‘Agora é como diz Shakespeare: “Trabalhar, trabalhar, trabalhar”’ [‘From now on it’s like Shakespeare said: “Work, Work, Work”’]. 4 These figures are quoted in Sousa Santos (2012) and are based on the year of 2009. Since then, the gap between the privileged few and the majority of the population has increased exponentially. 5 In 2017, for instance, eighteen police officers were accused of falsifying documents and statements as well as the torture of six young Black men in detention from the Cova da Moura district in Lisbon, the same district in which Cardoso staged R2.

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6 In 2017, there were 1,318 cases of domestic violence. Most cases do not involve prison sentences for the perpetrators as they are considered crimes of passion and thus not premeditated murders. 7 The most recent example of this was the appointment in 2020 of the former finance minister and president of the Eurogroup, Mário Centeno, as the governor of the Bank of Portugal despite concerns about this rapid transition from the political to the financial world. 8 Silva Melo’s Portuguese introduction to Coriolanus is available at https​:/​/ ar​​tista​​sunid​​os​.pt​​/a​-tr​​agedi​​a​-de-​​corio​​lano-​​de​-wi​​llia​m​​-shak​​espea​​r/ 9 See Cardoso’s interview with A. Ribeiro dos Santos (2007). The notion of risk is characteristic of Cardoso’s early work with Shakespeare. 10 A. Dias Ferreira (2007: 59). 11 M. P. Quadrio (2007). 12 F. Villas Boas (2007: 16). 13 All references are to the Arden 3 edition edited by Charles R. Forker. In her study of Samuel West’s 2000 performance as Richard, directed by Ben Pimlott, Bridget Escolme notes that ‘this is a play about the “power brokers” rather than the ruled’ and analyses the ways in which the audience were made into ‘commoners, lords and soldiers’ to give a sense of a wider, implicated society. She also notes that such interpellation is inherently unstable and that ‘[i]n attempting to produce the audience as courtiers or commoners, this production also stages the potential of its [the audience’s] rebellion’ (2005: 101, 116). 14 All references to the play are to the 2020 Arden 3 edition edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Robert N. Watson. 15 Political discussions often take place in cafés, along with discussions of football, and consensus around either is never taken for granted here. Although for many years a woman who entered a café on her own was considered morally suspect, more women are now found there although the café does tend still to be an overwhelmingly masculine space. 16 Jorge Louraço Figueira (2012: 29). 17 This success was short-lived, however, as Socrates was later arrested and imprisoned on charges of corruption. 18 I remember watching a rather chaotic final rehearsal before the performance premiered in Guimarães, where it was clear that many things still needed to be clarified. Indeed, the premiere seemed much more of a work in progress than a performance. One of the advantages of this was that the translator was able to include at the last minute

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a whole series of puns in 2.1 around reputação (reputation)/puta (whore), which led to puns such as ‘Ele já tinha reputado com ela antes de casar’ (He had already been reputed with her before they were married) which only occurred to him at the last moment and that replaced ‘respeitada’ (respected). This also created interesting verbal echoes with Angelo and the Duke’s emphasis on the importance of reputation. My thanks to Fernando Villas-Boas for this information. 19 Quotations from interview with Sara Carinhas, 6 May 2019. My thanks to her for this productive interview. 20 The poster advertising the production seemed to hint at such a possibility. It showed a naked female figure with her genitalia pixelated out, suggesting the operations of sexual repression sanctioned by Angelo’s regime. Yet this recognition of the intervention of the state on women’s bodies was not accompanied by a sense that a refusal of sexual assault might be a progressive response to such intervention. 21 In this respect, it is indicative that the actress Catarina Lacerda played both Juliet and Mariana as well as Mistress Overdone. While all these roles are minor roles in the play, they are also very different. 22 F. Mora Ramos (2012: 11). Mora Ramos views Lucio as a neofascistic figure produced by the period of austerity yet does not develop this view in the article, which focuses more on his own performance of the role in 1977. 23 This view is expressed in an interview with the author in the production programme. See Rayner (2012b: 7). 24 Gil argues that ‘[t]he chico-esperto is not a liar, a major criminal or a corrupt individual. On the contrary, s/he takes advantage of a space unoccupied by the law to commit an act which is almost legal, even when this implies minor transgressions of legal norms’ (2007: 32), my emphasis and translation. He also suggests that this figure was particularly prevalent during the time Socrates was in power. 25 The right of those in the forces of order like the police to go on strike was a gain of the Revolutionary period. The Revolution itself was led by the military. 26 Cited in T. Bartolomeu Costa (2014: 1). 27 In this scene, as elsewhere, Virgilia hardly speaks at all. Fernando Villas-Boas refers in his introduction to Virgilia’s ‘silent intensity’ and notes in parentheses that this silence was ‘somewhat hidden in the more marked stage performance’ (2014: 11). 28 The infrequent staging of this production meant that the author was unable to see it and no recording of the production was available.

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This paragraph is included to continue the discussion around central stage metaphors in Cardoso’s Shakespeares and the ways in which the notion of the ensemble shifts from production to production. 29 Available at www​.t​​eatro​​munic​​ipald​​oport​​o​.pt/​​pt​/pr​​ogram​​a​/nun​​o​-car​​ doso-​​ao​-ca​​bo​-te​​atro-​​timao​​-de​-a​​tenas​​-estr​​eia 30 The title of Maria João Monteiro’s 2018 Público article, for instance, was ‘Timon of Athens Denounces the Greed That Exists in All of Us’ and spoke of the performance as a ‘critique of consumerism and egotism’. 31 Berlant includes among the fraying fantasies ‘upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy’ as well as the idea of meritocracy. She wonders why people ‘stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies – say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work – when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds’. Characterizing the present as an impasse borne of a sense of permanent crisis, she examines the affective and political strategies people have developed to deal with the ordinariness of crisis. 32 The actor Cláudio da Silva, who played Angelo in Measure for Measure, contracted polio as a child and has reduced use of an arm and a leg. He was the only actor in these performances who was not able-bodied.

Chapter 4 1 I am using the term ‘spectator’ rather than ‘audience’ because of the prevalence of visual technologies in this performance. 2 To date, The Moving Forest has been performed in various locations in Portugal, Brazil, the United States, Spain, Italy, France, Slovenia and Holland. 3 The election of Jair Bolsonaro may well reverse this trend, although most of the money that funds these performances comes from the private sector, particularly the multinational Petrobrás. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in the same year as this Lisbon performance has haunted the writing of this chapter. 4 W. B. Worthen includes an illuminating discussion of this performance in his Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003). He points out that foreign reviewers tended to focus on the physicality of such performances because they do not understand the language, rather

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than see it as a more complex form of third theatre blending popular theatre techniques with those of contemporary performance. It is to Worthen’s credit that simply by using a translator, he was able to write a more satisfying account of the performance and its various contexts. The book has an image of the Brazilian performance on its cover. 5 Although Chapter 2 notes that Tiago Rodrigues was asked to contribute to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)’s Projekt Europa season, it is revealing that this was not an invitation to perform Shakespeare. 6 Between 1988 and 2015, there were thirty-two performances and adaptations of the play according to the Centro de Estudos de Teatro database at http://ww3​.fl​.ul​.pt​/CETbase/ 7 See Rayner (2014) for an analysis of the performances of Macbeth during the dictatorship and the post-revolutionary period. 8 Punchdrunk’s Sleep no More (2003–), for instance, a much-discussed immersive version of Macbeth, has taken place in various hotels around the world. 9 These videos were continually updated with new material from the countries to which the performance travelled. The quotations used in this section are from the printed material included in the book that documents the creative process. 10 Invisible theatre is one of Boal’s techniques for the Theatre of the Oppressed. The central idea is to create situations where it is unclear whether the events that are occurring are real or fictional in order to provoke discussion about the social and political questions these staged events raise. Examples have included a scene in an expensive restaurant where the refusal to pay the bill inaugurated a series of discussions about the low-wage economy that supported such restaurants and a simulation of a scene of domestic violence on a crowded train where reasons for nonintervention in such scenarios were discussed publicly. The notion of the spectator-performer in this chapter is also indebted to Boal’s notion of the spect-actor. 11 It is important to note here that there were performative criteria behind this apparently random selection. There was a gender balance between men and women and the people chosen on the occasion I witnessed the performance were overwhelmingly young and ‘trendy’. As an older, not very trendy woman, I had to ask the people giving out the headsets to be included. They were too embarrassed and polite to refuse. 12 In the performance I saw, while some spectators refused the headsets before the performance began, those who entered the performance space with them followed Jatahy’s instructions without exception.

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13 In the performance I saw, no one seemed to notice or to act upon this event. 14 In the book on the creative process, Jatahy links this action to the drowning of refugee children who are eaten by fish after their deaths in the ocean. 15 Animal imagery in Macbeth combines images of hedgehogs, worms, owls and eagles with more exotic images of bears, scorpions, lions, rhinoceroses and tigers, emphasizing both the overturning of a ‘natural order’ but also consolidating a ‘natural’ order where certain animals and birds are predators while others are their prey. 16 In Shakespeare and Ecology, Randall Martin includes a chapter on the links between militarization and ecology in Henry IV Part 2 and Macbeth. Noting the deforestation of Scotland, including Birnam Wood, to fuel early modern military conflict, Martin argues that ‘[b]y relating military and environmental histories, Shakespeare opens possibilities of reading Macbeth eco-critically as a non-redemptive tragedy about long-term degradation of human and natural environments by militarized nation-states’ (2015: 103). 17 Jatahy made clear that the footage shown was used for just that night and each night made use of footage of the audience on that particular night, but issues of consent are raised nevertheless. 18 In the book documenting the process, Jatahy notes that the camera crew were first made visible earlier in the performance at the same time as the filmed sequence of the footage taken during the performance was projected onto the screen, but I was not aware of this in the performance in which I took part. She also notes that within the trilogy presented at the TNDM II, this was the only performance where the cameras were hidden. 19 The long technical discussions, for instance, are so specific as to interest solely those with specialist knowledge.

Chapter 5 1 As well as the analysis of the mala voadora Hamlet in this chapter, see also Chapter 1 on the work of Teatro Praga with Shakespeare for examples of companies who do not work from such a premise. 2 mala voadora (the flying trunk) were formed by Jorge Andrade and José Capela in 2003. Andrade is an actor and director, while José Capela is a scenographer who comes from a conceptual art background. Their name is taken from a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen and always appears without capital letters.

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3 Speaking to José Capela around the time mala voadora were rehearsing Hamlet, he seemed somewhat doubtful about the company performing such a canonical play by such a canonical author. 4 From its very beginnings, there has been something of an avoidance of the canonical Hamlet in Portugal. The nineteenth-century actor Eduardo Brazão wanted Hamlet to be his first Shakespearean role. However, arguing that the many interpretations of the role had left him confused, Brazão chose instead to play Othello (1882). He did, however, later play Hamlet in 1901. 5 I presented a paper on such performances at the conference Shakespeare: Sources and Adaptation at the University of Cambridge in 2011 entitled ‘Shakespeare in Pieces: Textual Collage in Portuguese Performances of Shakespeare’. 6 This poetic, looser translation by one of Portugal’s most well-known poets is much loved by performers and is often preferred over more ‘faithful’ translations of the play. 7 Somewhat bizarrely, these performances all took place in secondary schools. One wonders what the students made of the references to events in the communist East and the role of the intellectual in 1998 Lisbon. Müller’s Hamletmachine has been a very popular choice for performance in Portugal. 8 See Rayner (2012a) for a discussion of these two performances. 9 The company’s blog can be found at https://hamlet​.com​.pt​/blog/ in Portuguese and English. 10 This analysis is based on seeing the performance in 2014 and revisiting the video of the performance on the MIT Global Shakespeare database at https​:/​/gl​​obals​​hakes​​peare​​s​.mit​​.edu/​​hamle​​t​-and​​rade-​​jo​rge​​-2014​/. 11 From the mala voadora site: https://malavoadora​.pt​/search​?q​=hamlet 12 In even the most conventional Shakespeare performances, a wordfor-word translation of the play constitutes the first step. From this, a stage version will be prepared in line with the particular dramaturgy of the performance. 13 These two translations would correspond to the English distinction between ghost and phantom or spectre. 14 Rejecting the idea that greater diversity in the theatre has led to a crisis in Shakespearean verse-speaking, Billington uses the example of Essiedu’s Hamlet ‘with its springy alertness that was ear-opening’ and his delivery of the line ‘I shall in all my best obey YOU’ (1.2.120) and its indirect rebuke of Claudius as an example of how great actors

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inevitably break the ‘rules’ of Shakespearean verse-speaking for the better. See Billington (2020). 15 Villas Boas is credited with both the translation and dramaturgical support. The figure of the dramaturg is rare in Portuguese theatre and translators and/or directors tend to take on this role. 16 My thanks are due to Fernando Villas Boas for making available to me all of these materials and for the intelligent and insightful comments on translation that accompanied them. My thanks are also due to mala voadora for providing me with the scripts used in performance. 17 The table also cited mala voadora’s earlier Wilde (2013) based on Lady Windermere’s Fan, although in this performance the table was round. In the final scene, in another parodic stage design touch, the small table that held Gertred’s poisoned chalice was dressed in the same white material. 18 All quotations are from the Arden 3 edition of the play, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. 19 The effect had been used earlier in the performance for the appearance of Hamlet’s ghost. However, it was this moment, with its highlighting of the play’s metatheatricality, that the full effect of the device was revealed. 20 Richard W. Schoch details one nineteenth-century way of ‘magically’ producing the ghost that was parodied in the London burlesque Hamlet; According to an Act of Parliament (1853). The ghost imagined by the magician Pepper was created in the following way: ‘The image of a person standing beneath the stage was projected through a series of mirrors onto a large sheet of glass slotted into the stage floor and held up by imperceptible wires. From the audience’s perspective, the resulting projection appeared to be an incorporeal presence. Because Pepper’s Ghost was only a reflection, a stage actor could seem to pierce it with a knife or even walk through it. When the gas lamps placed beneath the stage were turned on and off, the ghost seemed to materialize and disintegrate’ (2002: 35). 21 See Mariana Duarte (2016). 22 See Amaya González Reyes (2015) on the notion of the copy in José Capela’s scenographic work with mala voadora. 23 In Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), Joseph Roach develops a notion of surrogation as ‘the enactment of cultural memory by substitution’ (80) that focuses on the ways in which performances enact and respond to previous performances.

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24 In Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (2005), Bridget Escolme sees Hamlet as a metatheatrical commentator rather than an inwardly focused meditator on events. She challenges the connection between more complex ideas of dramatic subjectivity and notions of coherent character, pointing out that the variety of different roles Hamlet plays, from lover and melancholy son to madman and clown, illustrate his skilful performativity rather than a sense of a unified personality with a coherent backstory. As such, Escolme concludes that the strongest effects of subjectivity are produced when Hamlet is most a performer rather than when he is most ‘himself’. 25 All references are to the mala voadora translation sent by the company. 26 From a very different eco-critical perspective, Randall Martin also challenges the notion of the play as a tragedy. His discussion of Antony and Cleopatra and Hamlet in Shakespeare and Ecology (2015) explores the integration of both plays in the food and species chain, advocating ‘looking at life from the ground up’ (140) rather than looking only upwards towards the sky and thus grounding political events in material environments. From this perspective, in what Martin labels the worm’s eye view of Hamlet, the play becomes less a tragedy than a feast that ensures environmental renewal, with the worms as tragic heroes bound throughout their lives to decompose and recompose life.

Chapter 6 1 Carson’s work is valuable also because of the limited amount of work dealing explicitly with Shakespearean performance criticism. Paul Prescott’s 2013 historical account of Shakespearean performance criticism is another insightful approach to the question of performance criticism. 2 Kevin Curran and James Kearney’s 2012 special issue of the journal Criticism on Shakespeare and Phenomenology is a rare exception. 3 Carson makes the valuable point that ‘being there’ at performance and recording impressions and opinions of that performance offer a more political, collaborative experience than that offered by the marketing tools made available by the theatres. In contrast to the selections from the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival made available by the Globe and their processes of making available this material, for example, Carson (2017: 473) notes that her own presence throughout

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this Festival meant that what she saw ‘was much more than a product. I saw individual productions within it reclaim, as well as write back to, imperial attitudes and the project of civilizing the natives through Shakespeare’. 4 To date, the team have produced a volume on Romeo and Juliet in the European context and are currently working on a volume on Othello. 5 See Janice Valls-Russell and Nicoleta Cinpoes (2019). 6 Christie Carson was herself present throughout the Festival and contributed to many of the panels and discussions. In her published work, Carson has been a pioneer in co-editing volumes with other authors. In the context of performance criticism, she has co-edited with Susan Bennett Shakespeare beyond English: A Global Experiment (2013) and contributed to Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan’s 2013 A Year of Shakespeare. Both volumes deal with reviewing the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival.

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INDEX

Antony and Cleopatra  69–76, 159, 168 Cleopatra (film, 1963)  69 Cleopatra’s children  73 Plutarch Parallel Lives  70 austerity austerity measures  6, 28, 41, 60, 70, 86, 92, 97, 100 economic austerity  5, 36, 42, 54, 92, 100 Bolsonaro, Jair  117, 119 Brazil  107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 117, 120, 133, 168 Brexit  3, 160 By Heart  61–70, 76–7 Cardoso, Nuno  9, 17, 18, 41, 79–105, 135, 158, 165, 173 censorship  5, 54, 57–61, 76, 83 class  30, 31, 92, 96, 100, 101, 104, 113 co-creation  24, 87 comedy  29, 30, 31, 41, 131, 132, 140, 143, 144, 146–8, 150, 151 Coriolanus  87, 97–101, 102, 105, 168 gender politics  100–1 coronavirus pandemic  7, 85, 160, 167

crisis  3, 26, 29, 57, 84, 120, 173 financial crisis (2008)  6, 28, 36, 92 cultural materialism  2, 79 cultural memory  54, 56, 62, 64, 66, 69, 76, 173 democracy  5, 10, 12, 23, 57, 59, 61, 83–8, 92, 94–6, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105 dictatorship  5, 6, 56–62, 69, 76, 83, 110, 132 disempowerment  3, 10, 26, 113 dramaturgy  19, 27, 55, 58, 76, 77, 110, 116, 123, 137, 158 embodiment  157, 158, 171, 174 empowerment  24, 81, 82, 103, 115, 128 enforced forgetting  62, 64, 76, 77 ensemble ad hoc ensemble  30, 35 Ludovice ensemble  42 occasional ensemble  11–14 theatrical ensemble  11, 12, 89, 92, 98, 105, 173 erasure  3, 26, 56, 62, 67, 77 European Economic Community  6, 84 European Shakespeare  3, 5, 9, 161 European Shakespeare Research Association (ESRA)  169

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INDEX

farce  89, 145, 147, 148, 150 gender  2, 3, 26, 30, 31, 38, 40, 43, 84, 96, 100, 101, 105, 110, 147, 158, 171, 172 globalization  2–4, 8, 108 hospitable globalization  8, 109 global Shakespeare  8, 9, 109 Global Shakespeare database (MIT)  3, 8, 39, 161 Globe Theatre, London  13, 23, 153, 154 Hamlet  3, 21, 60, 129–51, 158, 168 ‘Bad’ Quarto  135, 137, 138, 149 First Quarto  19, 135, 144–5 Folio  135, 137–9, 144 Ophelia  58, 133, 137, 138, 140, 145–7, 148, 166 Q1 137–9 Q2 137, 139 intermediality  10, 27, 50–2, 114, 127 invisible performance  115, 117, 119 Jatahy, Christiane  18, 21, 24, 107–28, 159, 162, 167 Julius Caesar  59, 69, 167 Macbeth  9, 21, 23, 24, 107–28, 159, 167, 169 Birnam Wood  111, 112, 117, 121 Lady Macbeth  110, 112, 120, 126 witches  120, 121 mala voadora  19, 129–51, 158

Measure for Measure  87, 91–7, 103–5, 165, 167, 169 Isabella  93–5 Lucio  91, 95, 96, 102 A Midsummer Night’s Dream  25, 26, 28–36, 81, 165, 169 patriarchal and state power  30 Pyramus and Thisbe  30, 35–6 queer possibilities  32 national theatre  5, 8, 20, 58, 83, 86, 87, 88, 105, 107, 130, 167, 168 Pais, Ricardo  6, 132, 146 performance event  15, 22, 77, 82, 126, 127, 131, 135, 158, 171 performance space  11, 82, 113, 116, 121, 122, 127, 139 expanded performance spaces  20–2 political performance  3, 9, 82, 83, 104 political Shakespeare  79–83, 104 political theatre  23, 81, 82, 87, 126, 128 Portuguese Revolution  55, 83, 88 Purcell, Henry  19, 26, 30–3, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 51 The Fairy Queen  30, 32, 36 The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island  40 queer  32, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 136, 160 queer theory  79, 172 Quito, Tónan  14, 22, 158

INDEX

rewriting  18, 26, 31, 36, 42, 43, 53–6, 60, 76, 77, 132 Richard II  18, 87, 88–91, 92, 105 Bolingbroke  89–91 Richard III  6, 14, 22, 158, 161, 167, 168 Rodrigues, Tiago  8, 18, 53–77, 83, 88, 109, 173

207

scenography  27, 37, 43, 139, 141, 142, 150 semi-opera  26, 33, 37, 42, 44, 45, 51 Sonnets  65, 168 Sonnet 30  63–5 spectator  11, 20, 21, 26, 34–8, 41, 62, 69, 82, 90, 103, 130–1, 133, 136, 140, 144–8, 150, 157–9, 173 emancipated spectator  22–4 empowering the  107–28 participation of  16, 23, 159, 171 spectator-performer  112, 116–19, 126, 159

Teatro Nacional São João  6, 83, 94, 102, 111, 132 Teatro Praga  8, 12, 17, 20, 25–52, 109, 114, 115, 158, 167, 173 technicity  27, 50 The Tempest  25, 26, 36–41, 51, 169, 170 Caliban  7, 38, 39, 41 Prospero  7, 38–41 Sycorax  38, 39 Three Fingers Below the Knee  57–61, 70, 76 and Hamlet  60 and Othello  59 Timon of Athens  25, 26, 41–50, 87, 102–3, 105, 167 tragedy  31, 70, 89, 110, 111, 113, 114, 121, 128, 131, 132, 145, 150 translation  17, 19, 40, 41, 53, 54, 70, 74, 83, 90, 98, 112, 130, 132, 135–9, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 172 transnational flows  9, 160, 167, 171

Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II  54, 61, 110

Villas-Boas, Fernando  90, 135, 137, 138

208

209

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