The Politics of Performing Shakespeare for Young People: Standing Up to Shakespeare 9781474234849, 9781474234870, 9781474234863

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The Politics of Performing Shakespeare for Young People

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RELATED TITLES Creative Shakespeare: The Globe Education Guide to Practical Shakespeare, Fiona Banks Essential Shakespeare: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation, Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Versions and Adaptations, Abigail Rokison-Woodall Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System, Liam Semler Teaching Shakespeare With Purpose, Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi Transforming the Teaching of Shakespeare With the Royal Shakespeare Company, Joe Winston

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The Politics of Performing Shakespeare for Young People: Standing Up to Shakespeare Jan Wozniak Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3 DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Jan Wozniak, 2016 Jan Wozniak has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. 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. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

HB : e PDF : ePub:

978-1-4742-3484-9 978-1-4742-3485-6 978-1-4742-3486-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wozniak, Jan. Title: The politics of performing Shakespeare for young people : standing up to Shakespeare / Jan Wozniak. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015033459 | ISBN 9781474234849 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Dramatic production. | Theater—Production and direction. | Children’s theater. Classification: LCC PR3091 .W69 2016 | DDC 792.9/5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033459 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vi List of Abbreviations ix

1 ‘You can forget it mate’? Young audiences, democracy and Shakespeare 1 2 Catching up to Shakespeare? The maturing audience in Shakespeare for young people 53 3 An unworthy scaffold? ‘Poor’ theatre and Shakespeare for young people 109 4 ‘No feeling of his business’? Negotiating Shakespeare as literature and theatre for young people 163 5 Conclusion: Shakespeare is not a school

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Appendix 1: ‘A Bar About the System’ by Toby Thompson 211 Appendix 2: Transcript of gravedigger scene (Scene 13) from BOVTS Hamlet dress rehearsal on 5 February 2011 215 Appendix 3: Gravedigger scene (Scene 13) from Toby Hulse’s script for BOVTS Hamlet 219 Notes 221 Bibliography 269 Index 285 v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people and institutions to whom I would like to express my gratitude. This book began as doctoral research and I would therefore like to acknowledge the financial support of a studentship from the Drama Department of Queen Mary, University of London, and, in the latter part of the project, financial support for a research visit to the Globe from the School of English at the University of Leeds. I feel privileged to have been part of an exciting, diverse, stimulating, and supportive research and teaching community at Queen Mary and would like to thank all of my fellow postgraduate students, teaching colleagues and the undergraduate students I have taught, whose intellectual pursuits and inspirations have informed my own research in ways they may not even recognize! I would especially like to acknowledge the support and encouragement, whilst I was teaching at Queen Mary, of Maria Delgado, Dominic Johnson, Elyssa Livergant, Saini Manninen, Michael McKinnie, Nick Ridout, Catherine Silverstone and Martin Welton. In addition, I would like to particularly thank the undergraduates taking Reading Theatre in 2012 for their keen arguments about Tim Crouch’s work, and the Performance in History teaching team of 2011 – Bret Jones, Sophie Leighton-Kelly and Penelope Woods – for demonstrating just how teaching teams should work. This research would not have been possible without the cooperation of all of the theatre practitioners and administrative and support staff whose shows and rehearsals I attended. All of them were generous with their time and interest in my work, but I would especially like to mention the contributions of Tim Crouch, Jamie Luck and Toby Hulse, all of whom showed genuine interest in the research and have been incredibly vi

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generous with their time and ongoing friendship. I would also like to particularly thank Kate Cross for organizing such wide access to the egg theatre and Shakespeare Unplugged, and to Melissa Blease for allowing me to work with her and Press Gang. The members of Press Gang, of course, deserve a special mention in my general thanks to all of the young people with whom I researched. I would name them here if ethics allowed, but you know who you are! All of the young people with whom I worked were engaged, thoughtful, funny and inspiring. I will treasure our conversations, which ranged far beyond Shakespeare, and I will continue to think of all of them whenever there is a new Dr Who. Bringing the project to publication would not have been possible without the support, encouragement and guidance of Margaret Bartley at Bloomsbury or the careful and detailed feedback of peer reviewers. I would like to especially thank Stephen Purcell for his detailed comments in this respect. The final years of this project, as it made its way to publication, would have been much harder without the flexibility and friendship offered to me by Pete Barrett, Karen Thomas and colleagues in the University of Bristol Library Services, and I thank them for that. Similarly, I would like to thank colleagues in the Workshop Theatre at the University of Leeds who have supported me fully during my transition to full-time academia. I owe a special and enormous debt of gratitude to my PhD supervisor, Bridget Escolme, who was supportive and encouraging about the project since (almost before) it began. Indeed I would like to thank her for ongoing support, advice and encouragement about my career, theatre and life in general: she has been a constant and readily accessible source of both personal and academic support, compassion, enthusiasm, good humour and advice on punctuation. Her dedication to friends, colleagues and students is obvious and certainly, in my case, extends far beyond the call of duty. My greatest thanks must go to my fellow emancipated spectators, Mandy and Lilith: there is no one I would rather

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watch performance with. Without their love and support, none of this would have been possible. Having run out of clever words – perhaps I need some pie – I will steal the words of a great writer to say to them, ‘you’re my guys: and I’m yours. And there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.’

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AHRC

Arts and Humanities Research Council

ASM

Assistant Stage Manager

BBFC

British Board of Film Classification

BOVTS

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

DCSF

Department for Children, Schools and Families (2007–2010)

DfES

Department for Education and Schools (2001– 2007)

GCSE

General Certificate of Secondary Education

KS

Key Stage (e.g. KS 2 = Key Stage 2)

QCA

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority

QCDA

Qualifications Curriculum Development Agency

RSC

Royal Shakespeare Company

SSF

Shakespeare Schools Festival

THSC

The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company

TNTC

Tiny Ninja Theater Company

YPS

Young People’s Shakespeare

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1 ‘You can forget it mate’? Young audiences, democracy and Shakespeare But mention Shakespeare and you will feel the class groan.1 That Shakespeare is at best difficult, and at worst boring, for young people is a commonplace observation given personal resonance by Toby Thompson, a performance poet who was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC ) and The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company (THSC ) to give a young person’s view of the typical experience of Shakespeare for young people. Thompson’s description of his experience of Shakespeare at school, based on recent experience as he was fifteen at the time of the performance, is ‘torture’. However, it is a very specific experience of Shakespeare that he relates. Thompson’s main complaint is that young people are asked not to encounter Shakespeare’s plays as artworks to inspire, but as texts to analyze. He associates this activity clearly with the academic discipline of English, as he moves from a general 1

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criticism of the system of education which allows little room for considering individual pupils’ needs, to ‘talk about English’. He observes that he has found none of his English lessons ‘inspiring’ and relates that ‘if I hear the word analyse, I feel a chill residing in my bones’. The reason the class groans at the mere mention of Shakespeare is: ‘Cos we know that means we gotta read the script; and then write an essay. I can’t even describe that shit; torture’s probably the best way. It’s got nothing to do with whether I respect the play; I do. But if you think it’s reading material, well you can forget it mate. Because of his experience, which he, the RSC and THSC all present as the common experience of school children in contemporary Britain, Thompson is in ‘two minds’ about the relationship between Shakespeare and young people. His poem recognizes as something to celebrate the popularity and longevity of Shakespeare’s plays, emphasizing that Shakespeare originally ‘cooked his rhymes in accordance with the peasants’ taste’ and that millions still appreciate the plays today. He likes the way Shakespeare’s words ‘tessellate’ and thinks that ‘his work is definitely something to celebrate; / To re-adapt, yes’. However, he is not sure that Shakespeare’s words have the same effect or relevance for him as the contemporary artists whose words for him ‘resonate’, and he returns to the practice of analysis as the source of his major problem with his experience of Shakespeare in his penultimate line, his frustration clear as he exclaims: But ‘Analyse how Shakespeare explores the themes of jealousy and deception in Othello’? For heaven’s sake . . .! The laughs of apparent agreement with which this particular line is greeted suggests that the memory of this type of encounter

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with Shakespeare is similarly painful, and long-lived, for the adults in Thompson’s audience. It is clear that Thompson is personally open to getting ‘inspiration’ from Shakespeare but feels that the ways in which he has been made to encounter his work has disenfranchized him, as he ends the poem by stating that: School has put me off Shakespeare somewhat, but if by the end of today I fully get it, then great. Thompson’s poem was performed live to participants at the start of a Development Day organized by the RSC and THSC, in which both organizations sought to share the expertise, methods and findings arising from their efforts to engage young people with Shakespeare through performance. I quote from this particular performance, rather than from a textual transcript, because of the particular meanings which become apparent in the interaction between a live performer and a geographically and temporally specific audience. In this book, I examine similar concerns to those expressed in Thompson’s poem with reference to live theatrical performances of productions of Shakespeare’s plays aimed specifically at young audiences, and what meanings are made in these performances to geographically and temporally specific audiences. I draw consciously here on Terence Hawkes’s assertion that ‘Shakespeare’s plays have become one of the central agencies through which our culture’ generates meaning.2 I examine the performances for the way in which they construct a relationship between young people and Shakespeare and endeavour to reconfigure this relationship in various ways within the specific political and cultural moment of Britain in the early twentyfirst century, and for how they use Shakespeare to generate meaning about a young audience in twenty-first century Britain. I argue in this book that there are important and valuable opportunities which arise in the performance of Shakespeare for young people, which are not available to them when

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encountering the plays as written texts. These opportunities can provide space for young people to assume a voice of equal worth to those of their adult contemporaries, whether teachers, theatre makers or academics, in the circulation of ideas and opinions about Shakespeare in twenty-first century Britain: opportunities which I will, using Jacques Rancière’s particular use of the term, describe as ‘emancipation’. The central place of Shakespeare in the culture and, perhaps more importantly in the context of young people, the education system of Great Britain makes the plays a particularly powerful site where emancipation can occur. Constructed as the ultimate cultural capital, Shakespeare’s works have been a constant presence on school curricula and much effort has been expended on making them accessible to young people. In this book, I examine how performances of the plays contribute to these attempts to ‘widen participation’. However, I also examine how these performances might in themselves be valuable sites for emancipation, adapting what might be seen as particularly democratic opportunities in Shakespeare’s plays. I argue that these opportunities for emancipation are maximized when the young audience is constructed as political, rather than psychological, and I explore to what extent such emancipation might occur when performances of Shakespeare are constructed as work or play, or configured as theatrical, rather than literary. I argue that performance of Shakespeare for young people is capable, where reading is not, of rehearsing, exploring and demonstrating the existence of a democratic public. It can do this better than reading because it offers young people the opportunity to encounter a manifestation of Shakespeare which accentuates polyvocality, the process of collaboration and the materiality of theatre. These aspects allow the potentially damaging perspective of Shakespeare as an authoritative text, with unquestioned literary, high-cultural status – a status which implies work, rather than play – to be challenged in a useful way which gives young people agency and voice.

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The political moment The Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company stresses on its website the social character of its project. Its aim is ‘to help young people build their self-confidence and unlock their creative and artistic abilities’ by ‘demonstrating how modern hip-hop shares many similarities with the themes, language and rhythm used by The Bard’. Significantly, THSC ’s work is aimed at ‘schools, youth theatre’s [sic] and various youth organisations who may not ordinarily be interested in Shakespeare’ and ‘particularly those who are considered “hard to reach”.’3 This, then, seems to be one of the many ‘widening participation’ projects which Helen Freshwater describes as emerging during the term of the New Labour government between 1997 and 2010. There has been, she argues: Ongoing governmental interest in the concept and potentialities of participation, reflected in public policies which aim to increase the electorate’s engagement with the democratic system and local government, and in the education and arts policies directed at widening participation and reaching new audiences.4 The link made between democracy and participation in the arts has not been limited to the New Labour government, but is part of an international discourse which is particularly prevalent in advanced capitalist societies in Europe and which seeks to emphasize the legitimacy of the democracies which they operate. Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies describe the emergence of a notion of cultural citizenship, in which the arts were subsidized with the introduction of the social democratic and welfare state consensus following the end of the Second World War. They identify that this notion of cultural citizenship gained new importance during the period of the New Labour government from 1997, when subsidy became heavily dependent on attempts to justify public funding in terms of accessibility and the arts’ potential to

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overcome the invisible barriers in society, such as class, for instance.5 In her survey of attempts which artists have made to widen participation in the arts, Claire Bishop describes these developments as a ‘social turn’, and observes that New Labour ‘deployed a rhetoric almost identical to that of the practitioners of socially engaged art in order to justify public spending on the arts’, where participation in the arts is seen as equivalent to participation in democracy and combats the problem of ‘social exclusion’.6 Social exclusion is portrayed as disengagement from education, which leads to exclusion from the labour market and therefore imposes greater burdens on the welfare state. In this sense, the contemporary Western configuration of free trade and democracy, which produces inequalities, is legitimized through providing equal access to cultural capital: democracy and cultural capital become intrinsically linked. Cultural citizenship for Western governments, and by association the arts organizations they fund, then, is linked to notions of inclusion and is integral to wider notions of democracy. This is clear, for instance, from the United Nations Development Program publication Democracy in Latin America: Towards a Citizens’ Democracy, which advises promoting ‘democracy in which citizens are full participants’. The report suggests that Integral participation of citizens means that today’s citizens must have easy access to their civil, social, economic and cultural rights and that all of these rights together comprise an indivisible and interconnected whole.7 Thus, ‘easy access’ to ‘cultural rights’ is linked explicitly here to democracy. The central, iconic and ubiquitous position of Shakespeare in Britain makes Shakespeare a prime site for projects which seek to combat social exclusion. The argument is that through effective engagement with Shakespeare, a compulsory element of the National Curriculum and therefore important in passing exams, young people can enhance their later life chances, and be less of a burden on the welfare state.

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However, it is not simply that the plays are still a central part of the education system in Britain and therefore necessary to encounter in order to gain a qualification that makes the plays a prime site for this engagement. There remains a genuine belief among many that Shakespeare can still offer an important artistic experience for young people, often as representative of the highest artistic and cultural achievement. Inclusion here, then, equals access to the best that an artistic experience can offer, rather than merely access to an exam pass. Thus, Lisa Marie Houghton-Reade, after investigating secondary school teaching of Shakespeare, identified that No arguments against Shakespeare’s works being studied in school were recorded by the Project. And none of the secondary school teachers I spoke to have disputed his place on the curriculum either.8 This would suggest that, as much as projects which seek to widen access to Shakespeare might be based on the necessity of being examined on the plays in the National Curriculum, there is a widespread belief in an intrinsic value in young people encountering Shakespeare, and that any boredom or difficulty experienced in encountering the plays is merely a matter of how they are presented and encountered. Such beliefs emphasize a broadly humanist understanding of the value of artistic and cultural activity, where encounters with cultural activities, such as Shakespeare, are seen to be related to ‘postEnlightenment ideas of . . . self-development and selfperfection’.9 Houghton-Reade describes the inclusion of Shakespeare in the National Curriculum as ‘part of an instrumental social project: the aim being to create a more cohesive society, in which all share a common identity’.10 This socially inclusive approach to the arts and culture has been the subject of criticism in the heritage and museum sector, where criticisms of policies of inclusion have identified social inclusion agendas as condoning ‘an assimilationist view of culture’.11 Claire

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Bishop notes how such policies and projects ‘seek to conceal inequality’ by positing a solution to exclusion which effectively allows ‘transition across the boundary from excluded to included’.12 Projects to foster inclusion mark certain activities as useful and valuable whilst other activities are not. The activities identified as useful and valuable tend to be those already associated with the middle class, such as attendance at theatre, classical concerts and museums, whereas more traditionally working-class activities, such as attendance at football matches or performance in folk arts such as brass bands or Morris dancing, all of which may be argued to foster the ‘cohesion’ which Houghton-Reade identifies as central to inclusion, are not identified as suitable for such projects. Discourses which pursue social inclusion, however admirable and indeed beneficial in offering opportunities for intellectual pursuits for working-class children, imply a central culture, in a hierarchical sense, to which everyone should aspire to be part, and do nothing about addressing issues of inequality for those who cannot, or do not wish to, participate in this central culture.13 There are no ‘widening participation’ schemes, for instance, to encourage middle-class children to take up angling. Shakespeare is an obvious candidate for inclusion in a list of nationally recognized useful and valuable activities, and Abigail Rokison identifies that debate on the suitability of the plays for young people centres only on what age is most suitable for them to first encounter Shakespeare, rather than on whether Shakespeare is a suitable cultural activity for young people. Indeed, even the unnamed critics, to whom Rokison refers, who perceive the plays as ‘unsuitable for children’ only make this distinction because too early an introduction makes the works ‘more intimidating’. The value and importance of Shakespeare generally is not challenged in these discourses.14 As Erica Hateley has observed, academic work, therefore, tends to concentrate on an examination of how the plays might be best taught to ensure wide accessibility and their continuing role in transmitting the culture’s central values.15 It is, then, Hateley argues,

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cultural capital – particularly in terms of authorship – that originates the saturation of Shakespeare in Western culture . . . rather than any inherent appeal of Shakespeare for the child reader that dictates his continued appropriation in children’s literature.16 Hateley’s reference to cultural capital indicates the influence of the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, who has identified and explored over a number of works how different forms of capital, other than the economic capital identified by Marx, operate to maintain certain power relationships. The attainment of social or cultural capital, through educational attainment, or through the development of particular forms of social or cultural knowledge, allows, in Bourdieu’s theories, an individual to become socially mobile. Such theories have become central to social inclusion agendas. In surveying the academic field of Shakespeare both as children’s literature and in education, Hateley identifies a lack of political consideration of the circulation of Shakespeare. Hateley’s project seeks to examine both how Shakespeare is taught in the curriculum and how Shakespeare circulates in extra-curricular texts for young people. Rather than identify ways in which the cultural capital of Shakespeare might best be attained by young people, Hateley’s approach examines how cultural capital works through adaptations of Shakespeare for young people to form the cultural citizenship which Pearson and Davis describe. Whereas Hateley restricts her analysis of adaptations of Shakespeare for young people to textual manifestations, I address only theatrical performances. However, similar to Hateley, I am mostly interested in examining these performances of Shakespeare for young audiences for the ways in which the cultural capital of Shakespeare is used by theatre makers to construct the young audience in relation to Shakespeare. There is, however, a certain built-in tension in the project between a desire to critique the notion of Shakespeare as cultural capital and a desire to exploit it. This is potentially true of all projects which address Shakespeare, as the very fact

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of researching Shakespeare might confer cultural capital and validity. In this book, as well as investigating what meanings are made in the interaction between performance and audience in temporally and geographically specific circumstances, my belief and interest in the potential for emancipation which performing Shakespeare for young people provides derives at least in part from the very cultural capital which I also critique.

Standing up for Shakespeare My interest in the performance of Shakespeare specifically for young people, on reflection, emerged from the coincidence of personal and institutional circumstances. Taking my daughter to theatre performances from a young age, I was attracted to performances of Shakespeare which were aimed specifically at young people and found them interesting in their own right as pieces of theatre, rather than as ‘reduced’ versions. Around the same time the RSC re-launched their series of Young People’s Shakespeare (YPS ) performances with the publication of A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools to promote a theatrical approach to Shakespeare for school children as the ‘most engaging way for young people to develop a real understanding of Shakespeare’s stories, characters and language’.17 Michael Boyd, then director of the RSC , made explicit in his opening comments that this theatrical approach was intended to counter the alienation engendered in young people by a literary approach which positions them as encountering greatness: Ask them to comment on a great work of literature and they will shrink away. Give a child the part of Bottom, Tybalt, Lady Macbeth or Viola and watch them unlock their imagination, self-esteem and a treasure trove of insight into what it’s like to be alive that will feed them for a lifetime.18 The Manifesto describes a theatrical approach as ‘active’ and ‘practical’, and encourages its intended audience of teachers

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and parents to ‘Stand Up for Shakespeare’ by getting young people to ‘Do it on your feet, See it Live, Start it Earlier’.19 It explicitly contrasts this with what it perceives as the dominant mode of encountering Shakespeare for young people – as reading – and asserts that: The sensory act of hearing, seeing and feeling the sounds, rhythms and words aids comprehension in a way that reading the play cannot.20 Whereas reading is implicitly conceived as a passive, individual and intellectual activity, the theatrical approach outlined in the Manifesto offers a way to encounter Shakespeare in the way that ‘actors and theatre practitioners work with his plays actively and collaboratively, in preparation for live performance’.21 The theatrical approach is ‘inherently inclusive’, according to the Manifesto, and means that ‘Shakespeare is collectively owned as participants collaborate and build a shared understanding of the play – with the whole class becoming “co-owners” and “doers” ’.22 It is notable that the Manifesto was produced in consultation with the other main national players in performing Shakespeare for young people – Shakespeare’s Globe and Shakespeare Schools Festival (SSF ) – and also with the Department for Education and Skills (DfES ).23 The DfES ’s successor, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF ), also consulted the RSC , Shakespeare’s Globe and SSF in producing guidance for teaching Shakespeare through active methods.24 To this extent, the theatrical approach advocated in the Manifesto might be described as ‘authorized’ or ‘official’ Shakespeare for young people, in a similar way to the RSC ’s productions for adults. Susan Bennett has commented that It has sometimes appeared as if Shakespeare’s own imprimatur is attached to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions – that the Stratford season ‘is’ Shakespeare.25

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This is true whether one attends performances by the company in Stratford-on-Avon or on tour. Through the maintenance of historical archives, recordings of productions available both commercially and for academic research, and through associated commercial products and an expanding education department, the RSC’s influence reaches far beyond those who attend performances. Indeed, the geographical position and integration into the tourist industry surrounding Shakespeare’s birthplace means that, for many, the RSC’s work is the ‘official’ and ‘authentic’ Shakespeare, as Bennett suggests, although as she also recognizes, ‘more recently, performances at London’s Shakespeare’s Globe have been credited as another privileged site for this kind of scrutiny’.26 With similar commercial activities, developing archival resources and educational publications and programmes to match the RSC’s, and online educational resources which arguably are more comprehensive than the RSC’s, the influence of Shakespeare’s Globe also reaches beyond its local geographical boundaries in influencing the reception of Shakespeare by young people. Indeed, this ‘authorized’ status for productions for young people is emphasized by the fact that RSC YPS performances are afforded reviews in the national press and academic review blogs. It is notable that most of the productions which I consider outside of the remit of the RSC in this book struggle to garner even local press coverage, as I discuss below. The RSC has had some success in encouraging performance as an important consideration in the study of Shakespeare, building, as Kathleen McLuskie points out, on a long history of this sort of work, rather than being revolutionary in this approach.27 However, whilst this theatrical approach appears to be officially sanctioned for young people, its success in penetrating teaching methods is still debateable. Whilst many teachers welcome the approach, many others, as HoughtonReade shows, felt unable to adopt these theatrical approaches because they were too time consuming and did not allow for adequate preparation for the examinations, whether National Curriculum tests at Key Stages 1 or 3 or GCSE s, which are

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examinations of the understanding and appreciation of literature, which their pupils sat. Without assessment which could be built toward specifically through performance work, these approaches appear to be side-lined as an all too often unaffordable luxury.28 In fact, Paul Franssen argues that theatrical performance for young people is implicitly devalued in academic and pedagogical discourse and practice. On considering the collection Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, edited by Naomi Miller, Franssen notes that ‘very few of the essays actually addressed the issue of staging Shakespeare for children’. He sees in this a ‘discrepancy’ between the high regard in which Shakespeare was held by most contributors and the practical measures they advocated to make Shakespeare palatable for the young.29 There is, in fact, a relative dearth of attention to Shakespeare in theatrical performance for young people, and consideration of Shakespeare for young people has tended to concentrate on written adaptations and appropriations, and cinema and television versions.30 This perhaps reflects the less assured status of performance as a means of transmitting cultural capital when compared to texts. Abigail Rokison’s recent publication is the only book-length study which pays substantial attention to the performance of Shakespeare for young people, and therefore begins to redress the discrepancy identified by Franssen. However, Rokison also includes in her research cinematic versions and written adaptations.31 Furthermore, whilst partially combating the discrepancy which Franssen notes, by giving attention to these adaptations in their own right, rather than as reductions or oversimplifications of Shakespeare’s plays, Rokison examines these performances and textual adaptations of the works in the context of the debates ‘concerning the most appropriate time for the introduction of Shakespeare to young people, and the means by which such an introduction might be made’.32 Her book

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therefore enters the debate on the relationship between Shakespeare and young people as a consideration of the practical problem of overcoming issues of relevance and accessibility. Following Hateley, who seeks to address a lack of political consideration of the circulation of cultural capital in textual adaptations of Shakespeare, I seek to address a similar lack of political consideration of performances of Shakespeare for young people. Rather than examining how best to transmit, teach or engage young people with Shakespeare, this book examines what meanings might be made from attempts to engage young people with Shakespeare through theatrical performance and how the young audience is constructed by such performances.33 In addressing theatrical performance, I not only consider political questions of the circulation of Shakespeare in contemporary Britain, but also address hierarchical questions concerning the relationship between text and performance, between literature and theatre.

Superior theatre audiences Although the RSC ’s Manifesto has to struggle against a stillpersisting dominant understanding of Shakespeare as literature to be read by young people, in addition to the support it might derive from academic work which values performance, it might also draw support from a widespread argument in recent years concerning the superiority of theatre audiences as an active audience engaged with the performance in front of them. In this construction, theatre is considered superior because, in Matthew Reason’s words, it is perceived as ‘good for us’ whereas other cultural pursuits are regarded as ‘less worthy or more harmful’ than theatre.34 This construction of theatre is implicit in the concepts of ‘applied’ drama or theatre, which see in theatre a unique experience which can be ‘applied’ outside of the commercial or artistic construction of the term to benefit different communities. The perceived benefit of

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theatre in this sense is clear from the subtitle to Helen Nicholson’s book on the practice: ‘The Gift of Theatre’.35 Applied drama is associated by Nicholson with the practice of active citizenship and it is the similar construction of theatre audience as active citizens which underpins a belief in them as superior.36 Richard Butsch provides a summary of what a ‘good’ audience constitutes and notes how this has remained ‘remarkably consistent’: For two centuries, despite dramatic transformations of entertainment media and audience styles, the conception of the ‘good’ audience in public discourse – in popular magazines and trade books, scholarly journals and books, and reports by reformers – has remained remarkably consistent. Uniformly, this discourse has preferred an audience that acts more like a public.37 Social psychologist Sonia Livingstone traces a contested and problematic relationship between the terms ‘audience’ and ‘public’, noting that it has been ‘commonplace to define audiences in opposition to the public’: In both popular and elite discourses, audiences are denigrated as trivial, passive, individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically engaged and politically significant.38 In this persistent discourse, Livingstone argues that ‘a public (knowing, thinking, influential)’ is opposed to audiences as ‘a mere crowd (watching, sharing, emoting) or mass of consumers (driven by tastes, preferences and motivations)’.39 Livingstone argues against these simplistic understandings of the differences between publics and audiences and examines overlaps between audiences and publics. Similarly, Butsch investigates a range of discourses around cinema and theatre audiences and describes where they overlap. Significantly, he argues that ‘the preferred bourgeois audience is a Habermasian ‘public’, active and thoughtful but not unruly and riotous’.40

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The activity of an audience which is critically engaged and politically significant, and is therefore placed as a public, fits a contemporary discourse of engagement and participation as legitimizing democracy and is contrasted with supposedly passive audiences to construct a hierarchy of audience experience. It is therefore significant that the theatre audience is consistently described in these terms as superior. For instance, Susan Bennett observes that in much contemporary theatre the audience becomes a selfconscious co-creator of performance and enjoys a productive role which far exceeds anything demanded of the reader or cinema audience.41 However, I would argue that there are fewer important differences between the experience of theatre and cinema audiences than Bennett suggests. Richard Butsch describes these differences historically, as a progression, rather than as the differences which Bennett highlights. For Butsch, in fact, the cinema ‘appeared to cement the transformation of audiences from crowds to individuals’, a process which was already underway with similar developments in the theatre toward darkened auditoria and dramatic naturalism which ‘stated to the audience that they were to see but not be heard’.42 He observes that the way in which cinema audiences are conceived of as passive consumers of naturalistic narrative today was preceded by developments during the nineteenth century tending toward the same outcome in theatre. Thus, he notes how the development of electric lighting, the proscenium arch and a new naturalism in acting style and scenography in the theatre contributed to the redefinition of the theatre audience from a unified crowd into a mass of separate individuals ‘spellbound in darkness’, as moviegoing itself would also be described. For the first time, audiences were expected to be silent, isolated witnesses in theaters, instead of members of a large crowd.43

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Matthew Reason’s work recognizes that claims for the supposed benefits of theatre over other media are often overstated and without support.44 Reason is one of the very few theatre scholars who have undertaken research with actual audience members about their experience, and the fact that these audiences were comprised of children is obviously relevant to my work on young audiences. In some ways Reason’s work parallels that of research into audiences of other media and entertainment conducted in cultural studies and sociology, in that he seeks to explore the experience of individual audience members.45 However, I want to draw attention here to an important difference in approach in Reason’s work, which is replicated in most other work and research into young people and their experience of theatre and performance. Reason’s latest book clearly shifts his research approach from merely descriptive and analytical, to one which seeks to promote the theatrical experience as positive. Thus, he seeks to ‘enhance’ young people’s experience of it.46 Rather than merely investigate what uses or experiences children have of theatre, it is more important for Reason in this latest work to explore ways in which this experience might be enhanced, because of the perceived superior, ‘public’ value which he sees children deriving from the theatrical experience. Reason recognizes that At one level such perceptions are not dissimilar to those around theatre for adults, which we often unconsciously position as good for us, often contrasting it with supposedly less worthy or more harmful engagement with popular culture or television. Such assertions contain implicit perceptions – about value, quality, benefit, childhood – that warrant further consideration.47 However, he does not actually consider the implicit perceptions in these assertions in any detail. Instead, he perpetuates the idea that theatre, and indeed a certain form of theatre, which I address in Chapter 3, is to be considered a more valuable experience, for both adults and young people, than other forms of entertainment.

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Reason continually argues for the more public, active and engaged aspects which ‘good’ theatre can provide for a young audience. However, any ‘proof’ of such engagement is problematic, as Reason himself identifies. Theatre for children, he argues, too often positions them as akin to ‘a largely passive and disempowered’ audience, as watchers rather than actors; observers rather than participants; spoken to, rather than speaking. The theatre audience is, literally and typically, required to be silent, only heard at appropriate moments. This perception of the audience as there to be entertained, doing little else but sitting still, is most familiar to us in the slouch-backed, couch-potato imagery of passive consumption associated with television or video games. It might be argued, however, that the theatre audience is just as inactive and submissive – part of a wider cultural concern that watching is replacing doing; seeing replacing experiencing.48 In discussing photographs taken of children watching theatre, Reason identifies these photographs as having some of the same characteristics as might be applied to audiences of television, noting a closed quality to the children’s faces, which are bathed in a glow that in effect is not unlike that of the mesmerising television screen. The stillness in the faces, the distant raptness of the expressions and the almost glazed quality of the eyes may lead us to believe that the audience’s experience of theatre is largely passive.49 However, he goes on to argue that such a gaze could also be ‘taken as a supreme level of engagement’, an indication of being outwardly passive but inwardly active’.50 This may well be the case. However, if it is, then it still does not distinguish a theatre audience from a screen audience, whether film or television, for, as Reason has identified, these

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photographs have the same quality as those of viewers of screen. For Reason, however, a theatre audience is still superior because of the ‘work’ that follows the show. He quotes Bennett, in fact, in observing that theatre audiences are passive during the performance, but active following it. Bennett writes that: Spectators are thus trained to be passive in their demonstrated behaviour during a theatrical performance, but to be active in their decoding of the sign systems made available.51 Reason identifies this post-show activity as a key component in maintaining the theatre audience as a superior audience. The discussion which is included in the active decoding following the event positions a theatre audience as akin to a public which is critically engaged, rather than as a crowd or as atomized individuals who merely watch the event. This is made clear in Reason’s preamble to a resource provided for further researchers of audience experience, where he notes that The post-show conversation and discussion is fundamental to the experience of theatre. We have a powerful need to talk about the production, to share memories, interpretations and experiences.52 Wilmar Sauter sees these attitudes as pervading recent audience surveys. They share, he argues, a particular approach to the theatrical event as process, which starts long before the theatrical event and which prevails long after the last curtain falls. Through these assumptions, reception theorists have already made profound statements about the nature of theatre as an ongoing communicative process, which cannot simply be reduced to the duration of the performance proper.53 It should be plain that I share such an approach, whilst also having an interest in focusing on the moment of performance

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particularly. However, I do not claim post-performance talk as particular to theatre, or even arts, audiences. Indeed, the hierarchically superior vision of theatre audiences as a good audience, a public, in being active after the event, is challenged by the following visual arts practitioner, in discussing video installations of performance in an art gallery: The conventions of the theatre, with its manipulation of lighting, the accompanying expectation of audience silence and direct attention on the action tends to make it a solitary experience carried out jointly rather than a social one contextualized by the presence of others. The visual arts are a category about which we can argue in the presence of them: this is rare in the theatre, where we do our arguing afterwards.54 The inclusion of this comment here is to indicate how other hierarchies of desirable sociability and collective experience can be constructed by scholars in other fields; theatre has no claim to uniqueness in this respect. In this extract, the very claims which theatre makes compared to cinema (greater choice of viewing direction, sociability) are made for visual arts compared to theatre. Similarly, the claim that theatre audiences are more active because of their post-show behaviour is challenged by claiming that visual art allows for this active engagement simultaneously with the experience of the art. What are consistent are the qualities which are assigned to a ‘good’ audience, which configures them as a ‘public’: that is, active, critical and engaged discursive activity.55 In identifying this consistency in the attributes of a ‘good’ audience, Butsch notes how, in contrast, the notion of a ‘bad’ or undesirable audience is historically contingent. Bad audiences have changed from being ‘volatile and potentially violent crowds’ in nineteenth century theatres to ‘isolated individuals, weak and vulnerable to the influence of the screen’ in the twentieth century.56 Similarly, as Pearson and Messenger Davies illustrate when considering the cultural habits of theatre

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audiences, the changing policy and anxiety toward the public and private has shifted and vacillated over time. First, the public sphere of entertainment was seen as a cause for anxiety and the private sphere of home entertainment as respectably bourgeois. Today, the anxiety over, as they phrase it, ‘the combination of children, bedrooms, computers and the Internet’, is with the private sphere of entertainment. This is supported by statistics from Social Trends which show that 72 per cent of parents of children aged six to seventeen were concerned at their children’s internet usage and activity.57 In such an atmosphere the avowedly public nature of theatre may be seen as a remedy to these fears and certainly it is this public element which Reason, amongst others, advocates. When combined with the cultural capital of Shakespeare, the opportunities which theatre can offer in constructing a superior audience, which operates as a public, make the performance of Shakespeare for young people a particularly interesting site for the investigation of politics and emancipation in twenty-first century Britain.

Standing up to Shakespeare: The work of Jacques Rancière In what follows, I draw at length on the works of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière as a framework with which to begin to consider the potential for emancipation which performances of Shakespeare for young people might offer. In writings which have spanned the period from the late 1960s to the present day, Rancière addresses a range of areas which have direct relevance to my project, developing a philosophical and political critique of the operation of contemporary democracy, politics, art and education. Because of the wide range of his writings and their relevance to the issues which I consider, I draw on Rancière extensively in this book as a means by which to examine the political aspects of the circulation of Shakespeare

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for young people. By drawing on his idiosyncratic concepts of politics, democracy, consensus, dissensus and emancipation, I attempt to examine what meanings are made in the performance of Shakespeare for young people. As Andy Lavender observes, Rancière ‘often writes glancingly and allusively’ and it is therefore more ‘productive to composite a case from the analysis developed across a number of different lectures and essays rather than derive it from any single output’.58 In reference to Rancière’s works, therefore, whilst I cite sources, Rancière often makes similar arguments, often nuanced toward different ends, in other texts. The lack of political consideration of the circulation of Shakespeare for young people which Hateley identifies illustrates a particular form of democracy in action, which I have described above. Democracy in this context is a matter of assuring equal access to Shakespeare as an example of access to cultural rights and the ability to gain cultural capital. This efficient accumulation of cultural capital is an example of those operations in contemporary advanced industrial states which Todd May describes as a technological approach to democracy. May argues that this amounts to ‘a project of depoliticization’. He writes: In the name of discussion and consensus, political leadership seeks to reduce struggles around equality to technical issues of economic progress and distribution.59 The contemporary legitimacy of democracy in advanced capitalist states is therefore based not on equality of distribution but on equality of access. May notes that whilst this equality is mainly linked to the distribution of material goods, such distributive theories of justice are also evident in the circulation and distribution of nonmaterial goods, such as cultural products. May draws on Iris Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference for his analysis of redistributive theories of justice. Importantly, Young notes how there is a ‘problem with the distributive paradigm’ because

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When metaphorically extended to nonmaterial social goods, the concept of distribution represents them as though they were static things, instead of a function of social relations and processes.60 Shakespeare’s plays are examples of nonmaterial social goods or, more accurately perhaps, cultural products. Thus, the problem with suggesting that equality of access might be applicable to Shakespeare, as is suggested in those projects which aim to widen access to Shakespeare, is that they construct Shakespeare and his plays as static objects. As Margaret Kidnie has argued, however, a play is not an object at all, but a dynamic process which evolves according to the temporal and material needs of its users.61 A play is, as are all artistic and cultural products, a ‘function of social relations and processes’. Todd May’s work on cultural capital and the politics of equality is based on a consideration of the political and philosophical writings of Rancière. It is significant that Rancière’s works include an explicit critique of the uses to which Bourdieu’s theories have been put, as Rancière’s approach to issues of cultural capital does not address its efficient accumulation, but instead constitutes a critique of the very notion. Rancière’s principal criticism of projects which seek to use the acquisition of cultural capital as a means to achieve social mobility and social justice is that inequality is assumed as a starting point.62 Whilst economic equality may well exist, Rancière identifies in the assumption that the acquisition of cultural capital might promote equality a downgrading of the competences and life experiences of those who do not, supposedly, already possess certain types of privileged knowledge. Attempts to address such a lack in the name of democracy are, for Rancière, seriously flawed. In fact, Rancière’s description of the operation of democracy differs from most understandings of contemporary democratic politics. Rancière gives a historical account of democracy, and the acts which contributed to its development, and describes

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‘consensus’ as a key word in the practice of contemporary democratic politics.63 He describes a distinction between this practice of ‘formal democracy’, which operates in contemporary advanced capitalist states and which always seeks consensus, ‘as opposed to real democracy’, which encourages ‘dissensus’.64 He describes democracy as operating in relation to the distribution of the sensible: the circulation of competing ideas, opinions and ideologies which are recognized as legitimate discourses and which compete for primacy in a society. The point for Rancière, here, is that these arguments are all heard. For many, these competing voices in society might be described as the operation of politics. However, Rancière’s term for this distribution of the sensible is the ‘police’. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion that the uniformed and organized officers we see enforcing the law are merely the most visible and obvious manifestation of policing, Rancière sees the police as the existing order of any distribution of the sensible: this ‘policing’ attempts to maintain consensus.65 Politics, for Rancière, occurs only when any distribution of the sensible is disputed and potentially widened, when an unheard discourse, previously only heard as noise, fights to be heard as a voice, a legitimate discourse. In Rancière’s words, politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part.66 Thus, politics is not a matter of addressing some grievance or lack between those already debating issues; rather, the wrong by which politics occurs is not some flaw calling for reparation. It is the introduction of an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking bodies.67 Politics, for Rancière, is about the operation of acts of dissensus; these occur only as momentary disruptions to the police operation which is attempting to establish consensus,

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and are about the introduction of new voices, which make heard and seen those who were previously unseen and heard only as noise. For Rancière, politics is not the exercise of, or struggle for, power. It is the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them.68 Rancière describes in The Philosopher and His Poor how politicians and philosophers have ignored the poor in their work. Even the supposedly redistributive democratic policies, in their technocratic management of economies and societies, he argues, ignore the poor. The poor, then, are both unseen and unheard, even, for Rancière, in the works of those who claim to speak of democracy and equality – the poor are not recognized as capable of putting forward arguments. In fact, the concept of the poor, of those who have no part, is central to Rancière’s notion of politics. Spectacular or otherwise, political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.69 For Rancière, such political acts occur only in many small ways and may be exercised by a number of different groups or individuals; this fact is important, because it digresses significantly from a classic Marxist position that the history of all struggles is the history of class struggle. For Rancière, the potential for change is seen as not only emerging from the proletariat but from other groups as well; for Rancière, the

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demos can be any group that does not have equality within a classification. For instance, historically, one might point to the suffragette movement as insisting on women being heard as equal speaking beings within the distribution of the sensible. For my own project, I interpret young people as a group whose ‘voice’ is not heard in what might be described as the ‘classification’ of Shakespeare. The opportunity for dissensus is linked in Rancière’s writings with the notion of emancipation. For Rancière, emancipation occurs as a rejection of ‘the illusion of consensus’ and occurs when subjects accept their intellectual equality in societies ruled by inequality, and are accepted as equal by institutions which attempt to explain such inequality.70 This can only be achieved through one’s own efforts, as an individual or a group, rather than through the granting of rights by others, and involves individuals or groups of individuals asserting that they are ‘creatures of discourse and reason, that they are capable of opposing reason with reason and of giving their action a demonstrative form’.71 Whilst emancipation is described here in terms of the agency of the poor, Rancière also suggests elsewhere that this emancipation might be partially possible through the recognition in those who are not ‘poor’ that they and the ‘poor’ communicate in a common space. This would require the recognition by those who are not ‘poor’ that the ‘poor’ are not merely creatures of need who only complain and protest, but are creatures of discourse and reason, capable of speech rather than noise. The complaints of young people that Shakespeare is boring or irrelevant are regarded in educational circles, to use Rancière’s terms, at best as ‘noise’, as the complaints of those who merely need to be educated to understand and thence to participate in the consensual distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare. Their emancipation, in this discourse, would occur through education and through the acquisition of cultural capital. In this respect, young people are regarded as analogous to Rancière’s poor, heard, if at all, only as noise, before they are educated. The RSC ’s relationship with Toby

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Thompson is enlightening here. Thompson’s initial performance had a significantly faster and more energetic delivery – sometimes making the words hard to understand – and was performed in a standing position. The RSC video is filmed with Thompson in a seated position and has a much slower delivery, with (nearly) every word clearly audible.72 All of the swearing has also been removed. Significantly, Thompson’s last line from the original performance indicates a changed relationship with Shakespeare. Whereas in the original Thompson states ‘School has put me off Shakespeare somewhat, but if by the end of today I fully get it, then great’, in the video this line has changed to: School did, kind of, put me off Shakespeare. But I’ve come to accept, and respect, the part he most definitely played.73 Whether this change has occurred after pressure from the RSC , or whether Thompson now does ‘get’ Shakespeare, the ambiguity of the first version has completely disappeared. Thompson has ‘come to accept’ (my italics) Shakespeare’s importance. The poem is published on the RSC ’s YouTube channel under the banner of ‘Sound and Fury: Shakespeare Meets Modern Word Play’. However, the incorporation of Thompson’s views into the distribution of the sensible here suggest that this is less a ‘meeting’ than an adaptation of Thompson’s work to fit what is acceptable and suitable for the RSC . This includes Thompson in a consensus around Shakespeare. Rather than allow contradictory, and even dissenting, voices to co-exist in the distribution of the sensible in what Rancière would describe as a dissensus, the RSC appears to extend the consideration of Shakespeare to new, young voices, but seemingly only once they can ‘accept’ that Shakespeare is to be respected. In this book, I assert that emancipation for young people with respect to Shakespeare requires that their ‘uneducated’

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voices should be heard not as noise, but as sensible speech. I therefore attempt to include the opinions of young people alongside my own not to reach a consensus around Shakespeare, but to create a dissensus.

Rancière and performance studies It is this concept of emancipation, especially as expressed in The Emancipated Spectator, which has attracted much attention to Rancière’s works recently within theatre and performance studies.74 Helen Nicholson has identified that many theatre scholars have become interested in the works of Rancière because ‘he explicitly relates participation to political questions of efficacy and agency’.75 Whilst research into theatre audiences within performance and theatre studies itself has until relatively recently been rather limited, a fact I address shortly in this chapter, there is increasing interest in spectators, and, when linked to projects of emancipation, Rancière’s recent work has clear relevance and interest for many theatre scholars. However, Nicholson ignores the potential for greater insights which Rancière’s previous work offers to an understanding of theatre, especially, I argue, for young people. As I have described, Rancière’s concept of the emancipation of the spectator is, in fact, closely linked with very particular and idiosyncratic definitions of democracy and education, which build upon concepts of consensus, dissensus, the distribution of the sensible, politics and police. Nicholson, however, does not give any attention to these concepts, seemingly accepting a common-sense understanding of ‘emancipation’. Nicholson describes, but then skips over rather too easily, Rancière’s rejection of the binary between participation and passivity in theatre, a binary he sees as in need of challenging in terms of political efficacy and agency. Nicholson appears to repeat the binary by suggesting that theatre practitioners might derive from Rancière a direct link between active participation and political efficacy.76 The rather peremptory

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attention to Rancière’s work may also be because, with some justification, Nicholson sees Rancière as providing no way forward from the impasse presented between participation and political efficacy. David Wiles in fact states this explicitly in his consideration of Rancière, and I return to this in the Conclusion.77 Wiles’s and Nicholson’s failure to engage in any depth with Rancière perhaps illustrates their interest in how theatre might function to achieve emancipation ultimately through achieving greater equality. Rancière’s project, however, insists that emancipation is achieved through the pursuit of equality not as a goal but as a presupposition. Alan Read recognizes this and also recognizes that to use Rancière in a study of theatre and its audiences requires a different focus than is the norm in performance studies. Thus, in following Rancière, Read is ‘less interested in the part of those who already dominate the aesthetic airwaves by flaunting the old avant-garde credentials, and more interested in those who until now have never entered the scene’. As such, he seeks to write on the part of those who have no part – the poor – who are the objects of scrutiny ‘not for any intrinsic political merits each might have, but rather for the way that each disrupts our expectations as to what might be worthy of attention in the first place’.78 In giving attention to young people and including their voice in this book, I also seek to write on the part of those who have no part. It is interesting, given this, that Read does not include direct research with ordinary theatre spectators. Helen Freshwater takes Rancière’s work as a prompting for ‘greater engagement with actual audiences’ by theatre scholars, noting that ‘academic publications which address the question of theatre audiences exclusively and directly are relatively few and far between’.79 Freshwater’s book itself is indicative of a growing interest in such studies, which might most usefully be traced back to Susan Bennett’s work in Theatre Audiences.80 This work was important in describing the differing horizons of expectation which any spectator brings to a theatre event, and

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whereby different interpretive communities apply differing interpretive strategies to the spectating experience. However, Bennett’s work did not include any research with actual theatre audiences, and theatre and performance studies research has similarly tended to muse on the difficulties of how to portray these divergent experiences, struggling with the philosophical and practical difficulties of how to describe the experience of attending theatre events. Dennis Kennedy, for instance, admits that he seeks to ‘evade the impossible’ task of examining ‘spectator response outside our personal experiences’ because ‘despite the history of work on spectator subjectivity and audience theory, we know almost nothing about the psychology and emotions of spectators, individually or in groups’.81 Given that audiences ‘respond to the same event in highly individual and sometimes idiosyncratic ways’,82 Kennedy believes that ‘almost anything one can say about a spectator is false on some level’83 and he therefore bases his investigations on his own experiences. He rather casually dismisses the notion of talking to other audience members about their experience because ‘their reactions are chiefly private and internal, and recording their encounters with events, regardless of the mechanism used to survey or register them, is usually belated and inevitably partial’.84 This extends to an occasion described by Kennedy when he has another audience member immediately available: his daughter.85 He ignores her because, for Kennedy, ‘performance history is to understand and give meaning to the event through social and aesthetic analysis, not to be the sum of the audience’s experiences’.86 Similarly, Rachel Fensham also writes only of her own spectating experience, whilst accepting that ‘going to the theatre is not just about “me” but about the experience of sitting as a “we” with others’. In this respect, she identifies that audiences may clearly be ‘gendered or ethnically different’, but she does not seek to consider the experience of other audience members beyond a sharing of ‘similar social and economic conditions of consumption’ because she does not feel that such an approach would help ‘to tease out the diverse aspects of

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spectatorship that make theatre watching a serious critical practice of both public and private value’.87 Fensham argues that her experience of theatre watching may well be taken as representative of a similarly educated wider audience with similar experiences. As she addresses canonical avant-garde performances, this is a valid point, as the audience may well be comprised of similar professional spectators. Both Kennedy and Fensham are careful to acknowledge their own situatedness as academic writers, incapable perhaps of ‘just’ watching a performance. Both are teachers and researchers, who often find it difficult to separate watching theatre for enjoyment and watching theatre for professional purposes, as Kennedy acknowledges.88 As such, I identify them, like myself, as ‘professional spectators’.89 The difference between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ spectators is one which is also implied by Nicholas Ridout in his description of the way theatre studies has, until recently, ignored ‘the kind of things that the non-professional theatre-goer might take an interest in’ because of anxiety surrounding establishing itself as a valid discipline’.90 One would assume that the disciplines of literature and Shakespeare studies had no such anxieties. However, a similar ‘democratizing’ influence of the internet, in introducing new voices into the debate around Shakespeare, is described by Sharon O’Dair as having a ‘de-professionalizing’ and ‘de-skilling’ effect which threatens these disciplines.91 O’Dair calls for the maintenance of some elite, ‘professional’ Shakespeare studies and makes some convincing arguments which describe ‘Left democratization’, ‘in which elites lead the masses to good judgement’, in opposition to ‘Right democratization, neo-liberal, capitalist democratization’ which celebrates merely the strength of the majority.92 Whilst I have some sympathy with O’Dair’s fears here concerning the different types of democracy which might prevail, I concur with Alan Read that to include the voice of those who have had no part in the distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare before is to examine what is worthy of attention in the first place. Democratic politics, in fact, in Rancière’s

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terms, must disturb elites, rather than merely making access to those elites more fair. In trying to address the problem of audience response, Kennedy proposes turning the problem around slightly, to ask questions about how the emotions of spectators are constructed or manipulated by different types of performance, and especially how arousal is encouraged, discouraged or tolerated.93 Kennedy here attempts to support the democratization of theatre studies by acknowledging that audiences should have more attention paid to them, whilst also maintaining the ability of an elite to interpret those audiences without talking directly to them. Whilst I draw on this useful method, analysing performances of Shakespeare for young people to see how they construct their audience, just as Helen Freshwater notes the limitations of using newspaper reviews because of the largely shared horizons of expectation of these reviewers, it must be acknowledged that to rely on the audience experience of academics, who also share horizons of expectation, is similarly limited. This is especially true in considering performances, as I do in this book, which are expressly aimed at a completely different target audience. Young people may be as situated as any other spectator, with horizons of expectation according to their previous experiences; however, they are explicitly not an adult audience. Despite the difficulties which Kennedy observes around talking directly to audiences, then, I want to argue that a consideration of the audience experience should extend beyond the individual experience or analysis of the academic writer, or professional spectator, and should, where possible, actually include talking to audience members about their own experience. I have attempted to include, therefore, where possible, the views of the young spectators at the performances I consider. By including the voice of the audience I also build upon recent and expanding audience research in theatre and

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performance. Willmar Sauter summarizes recent research in theatre audience studies, most of which is not published in English, as being split between ‘Audience Research’, which takes a macro, sociological approach, and ‘Reception Research’, which adopts a micro, psychological approach.94 Similarly, Anne-Marie Gourdon traces a turn away from a semiotic approach, because of its limitations in addressing the full theatre experience. She sees this turn as indicating a change of interest from the intellectual decoding of signs in the theatre event to an interest in the whole physical and mental experience of theatre-going: It is in terms of stimulation rather than in terms of communication that we shall qualify the different types of relations which are brought about between the show and the spectator. To speak in terms of stimuli shows off the sensorial and affective aspect of the reception: it is the whole of the psychosomatic individual who reacts to these stimuli, and not only an intelligent and cultured recipient who engages in a message-decoding task.95 Gourdon rejects the concept of ‘communication’ in the theatre event as too limited, as it is based merely on measuring the distance between the message that is issued and the message perceived. That is to say, adding the signs received and comparing them with the signs sent forth.96 Gourdon argues that treating the theatre event using semiotics may result in ‘something very clear and very easy to define’, but it is a poor reduction of the theatre experience.97 The recognition that the theatrical act is based on much more than simple communication and involves a complicated relationship between performance and many divergent spectating experiences has coincided with a growing interest in ordinary theatre spectators, and Gourdon goes on to claim that a semiotic reading does not reflect how ordinary spectators

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experience the theatre event: ‘it is not what we have observed in the course of our surveys; it comes from the fact that there is no such communication during theatrical performance’. Her surveys indicated that reception of theatre events included ‘various acts which are actually merged: feeling, perception and judgment’.98 However, Thomas Postlewait identifies the major problem with a semiotic approach as its construction of: the spectator as an ideal reader of signs, someone just like the semiotician who explicates the many different signs and unifies them into a systematic interpretation.99 Postlewait sees the semiotic approach as being a ‘poor guide for the theatre historian’ because it ignores ‘the many different ways that spectators perceive and interpret theatrical events’.100 Just as this is true for the theatre historian, restricted to the views of ideal readers and spectators, it is true for the scholar of contemporary theatre who considers only ‘professional’ spectators. There may be little Postlewait can do about recovering the myriad voices of the various spectators attending historical events; however, there is something we can do about extending our understanding of the various spectators who attend contemporary performances. My intention in attending to young audiences attending non-canonical performances and representing their experiences in this book is, in part, to conduct a dissensus which seeks to disrupt the existing distribution of the sensible around theatre audiences in theatre and performance studies. It is, as Freshwater suggests, to ‘trust’ the audience.101 In treating their responses as qualitatively equal to my own and to other academic discourses, I follow Rancière’s suggestion of assuming equality as a starting point rather than identifying it as a goal. Rancière posits this approach as an alternative to one which implicitly positions non-academic subjects and audiences of artistic and cultural activities as less able to critique the operation of art than academics.

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Scope of research The audience responses which I consider in this book are based on performances which occurred between January 2010 and February 2012. During this period, I attended a performance of every production in Bristol and Bath which was available to a public audience and described as by, or adapted from, Shakespeare, and which was aimed at, or advertised as particularly suitable for, a young audience. I also interviewed the makers of these productions and theatre administrators, attended rehearsals of some productions, distributed questionnaires and conducted workshops with young audiences. The performances available to young people during this time were aimed at a wide variety of ages: whilst some were advertised as suitable for teenagers over sixteen, some performances were promoted as suitable for children as young as six. The performances which I write about in this book were largely aimed at young people aged between seven and eleven. This corresponds with the educational stage known in Britain as Key Stage 2, and covers the last years of primary education. By concentrating largely on this narrower age range, I examine how Shakespeare functions for a general audience, rather than one which is required by the National Curriculum to study, and be tested on, Shakespeare. Thus, although I use the educational framework to identify the age range at which performances were aimed, I stress that my research addresses performances of Shakespeare not for any way in which they might effect the acquisition of cultural capital, but for the opportunities for emancipation which they offer. As a general audience, of course, these young people also have access to performances of Shakespeare which are not directly adapted for them, most obviously, for instance, at Stratford and Shakespeare’s Globe. Although I am interested in the reception of such ‘main house’ plays by young people, my interest here was in the implications of adaptations aimed specifically at a particular age group: why, for instance, are certain plays chosen for adaptation, and what does the

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form and content of such adaptations say about attitudes to young people? I chose publicly available performances because my interest in this research concerned how Shakespeare was performed and received as a cultural product rather than as an educational activity. However, in order to observe as wide a range of audiences as was possible, I also attended some of these performances in schools. Whilst, in one sense, the decision to concentrate on performances in the region of Bristol and Bath was a practical one, I also saw this decision as a further disruption to the distribution of the sensible around theatre and Shakespeare. The professional spectators I have described above tend to concentrate on canonical performances and contribute to the creation of a canonical approach to the study of theatre performance and audiences, which considers only those performances regarded as artistically important and, often, only those occurring in London or other artistic centres. My research into these productions was concentrated around Bristol and Bath because I wanted to investigate how Shakespeare is made to operate in localized circumstances. I follow here other theatre scholars who seek to privilege local, and other non-canonical, theatre practices as more representative of theatre, rather than the analysis of national, or international, canonical performances which has dominated theatre studies.102 As Jo Robinson argues, for instance, ‘theatre appears to be, by its very nature, the most parochial, tied to the needs of distinct social, ethnic, or other interests within constituencies limited by the economics of touring’.103 However, because of their potential ‘official’ influence on children in education, which I have described above, I also contextualize the performances in Bristol and Bath by briefly considering performances by the RSC at Stratford and by the resident company at Shakespeare’s Globe during the same period. In concentrating to a greater degree on productions local to Bristol and Bath, whether produced locally or touring to the area, I follow Bennett’s approach to challenging the authority of Shakespeare. Bennett says:

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The argument, then, cannot always, and certainly not necessarily, be drawn around how local knowledges expand and refine our understanding of the Shakespeare industry both inside and outside the academy. Indeed, a critical focus might more productively examine the production and reception of Shakespeare as it has been, and continues to be, a series of practices through which communities create and experience themselves.104 Bennett’s argument challenges the view of those, such as John Russell Brown, who see the function of performance criticism as expanding and refining an understanding of Shakespeare’s texts. Russell Brown identifies supposed ‘limits’ in ‘Performance Studies’, because, in a ‘bewildering array of possible Shakespeare productions’ considered in recent performance-inflected scholarship, little has been added to our understanding of the texts. He argues that ‘many productions are inadequately cast or hurriedly prepared, not worth serious study’ and that only ‘the more persuasive performances’ which ‘find new meanings for the text, invent new stage business, and often tell the tale differently . . . merit close attention’.105 I argue that, in fact, the role of performance studies is not to find ‘new meanings for the text’, and I therefore concur with Michael Dobson’s approach, which seeks to expand the study of performance of Shakespeare by attending ‘not just to those productions which have been exceptionally good and full of fresh insight, but to those which . . . have been completely run-of-the-mill’.106 This approach, which attends to performances which audiences see regularly, might, as Dobson suggests, alter our understanding of what individual plays, and indeed Shakespeare, mean in contemporary Britain. I hope this book will perform a similar function concerning the local productions I examine and might add to a record of ‘the production and reception of Shakespeare as it has been, and continues to be, a series of practices through which’ the young communities create and experience themselves in the Bristol and Bath area.

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This concentration on the regional might also be described in terms of making heard an example of Rancière’s ‘poor’. Largely marginalized until recently, especially in comparison with the attention given to Shakespearean performance in London and Stratford, regional performances are increasing the subject of scholarly research which disturbs a distribution of the sensible around ‘official’ Shakespeare.

Methodology I have employed a range of research methodologies in this book, including my own observations of performances and audiences attending them, observation of rehearsals, interviews with theatre makers and administrators, and a range of work on audience reception, which I describe in more detail shortly. In my own interpretations of the performances, I draw on the approach advocated by Gregory M. Colón Semenza to view adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in their own right. Semenza’s principle focus is the cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare for teenagers. He perceives ‘a prevailing assumption that teenpics dumb down Shakespeare’, and that they are therefore always ‘reduced’ in some way. He seeks to challenge this Not by focussing on tired questions about textual fidelity in processes of adaptation but, instead, by demonstrating what happens when we reconsider these films as viewed, moving pictures rather than static, adapted texts.107 He does so by concentrating not on the raw material of the story as portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays, which in shortened adaptations is always going to have some elements ‘missing’, but on ‘the ways in which these materials are shaped and transformed by artistic procedures’.108 Similarly, I interpret the performances in this book for the ways in which the artistic work which transforms the original material makes meaning in negotiation with its audiences. I make comparisons with

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Shakespeare’s texts and note elements that have been cut or inserted. However, rather than explore such amendments for the way in which they enhance, or limit, an understanding of Shakespeare, I investigate what temporally and geographically specific meanings are made in the moment, and reception, of performance. As I have indicated above, although I recognize the potential problems of considering performance as a text, my methodology draws on an approach to reading the material theatre as a performance ‘text’, as described by Ric Knowles.109 Knowles shares a similar understanding of theatre performance to Kidnie in describing theatre performance texts not as static objects, but as the products of a more complex mode of production that is rooted, as is all cultural production, in specific and determinate social and cultural contexts.110 In examining this material theatre, Knowles seeks to consider theatrical performances as cultural productions which serve specific cultural and theatrical communities at particular historical moments as sites for the negotiation, transmission, and transformation of cultural values, the products of their own place and time that are nevertheless productive of social and historical reification or change. I want, that is, to look at the ways in which versions of society, history, nationality, ethnicity, class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, or other social identities can be both instantiated and contested, to different degrees, in a given performance text.111 Knowles reads the material theatre for the degree to which the transgressive or transformative potential of a particular script or production functions on a continuum from radical intervention and social transformation to radical containment. He assesses the position on this continuum of the performances

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he researches, in part, according to the material conditions in which they are produced and received.112 Whilst I do not use the terms ‘radical intervention’ or ‘radical containment’, my analysis of theatre productions performs a similar operation, as I consider to what extent each production provides opportunities for emancipation. As I have detailed, for Rancière, emancipation occurs through an assumption of equality. I therefore examine performances of Shakespeare in terms of whether they construct the young audience as intellectually equal to the intelligence behind the performance. Similarly to Knowles, I ‘read’ the material theatre, at least partially, through a cultural materialist lens. In addition to my own interpretations, I use the material contexts of the performance and its reception, including journalistic and academic reviews, associated publicity material, programmes, and material aimed at teachers, to ‘read’ the theatre event. However, drawing on Rancière’s concept of the disruption of the distribution of the sensible through the establishment of a part of those who have no part, I seek to introduce the voice of the young audience. By accepting Knowles’s insistence that theatrical performances serve specific communities at particular historical moments, I seek to examine how the young audience is brought into being as a specific community, and move on to include the views of the specific communities at which the performances I saw were aimed. This was, in fact, largely necessary in any case because the materials upon which theatre scholars habitually rely – reviews – were not available for most productions for young people, apart from those ‘authorized’ performances by the RSC which I have discussed above. In contrast to the theatre reviews which are widely available for theatre productions for adults, which tend to, as Matthew Reason shows, combine description, evaluation and interpretation to inform the potential audience,113 any ‘reviews’ of productions for young people which are published tend to be short and aimed more at positive publicity. Productions for young people do not seem worthy of consideration in these terms, reflecting perhaps the major function of a review to

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inform and encourage potential customers to make an economic choice in attending a performance. Young people do not tend to make these choices, attending theatre events according to the wishes of parents or teachers. Therefore, by speaking directly to young people, I seek to extend Knowles’s methodology by widening the range of views which he describes as evidence contributing to meanings and responses that are made with specific performances in particular locations.114 Moreover, in seeking to include the voice of the young audience, I consider my work a political act in the terms in which Rancière describes such acts. My work, then, aspires to a similar sort of political activity as cultural materialist critics. It examines the cultural space of Shakespeare as performed for young people and how young peoples’ experience within that space is framed. For instance, I ask whether young people are recognized as subjects capable of designating and putting forward arguments about Shakespeare. I argue in this book that Shakespeare, as a central site for the contestation of cultural meaning in Britain, offers opportunity for emancipation, in Rancière’s sense, for young people. However, this requires the assumption that young audiences are as capable of putting forward their own views as adult theatre-goers. My work aims to introduce the views of young people, their complaints perhaps about the way education is presented to them, not as cries of pain but as a new voice to disturb the distribution of the sensible. My approach to talking to and listening to young people directly involved a number of different methodological approaches. John Tulloch argues that a blending of audience methodologies is useful for approaching an analysis of theatre audiences, and particularly school audiences at theatrical events. Simple survey questionnaires can give a broad indication of a whole audience reception and identify which moments were most prominent in the performance. However, closer and more intensive qualitative research produces more detailed information about the reactions of individual audience members and, indeed, performers. Tulloch therefore advocates a critical ethnographic approach to the situated and reflexive

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negotiation of meanings by both individual performers and individual audience members.115 I draw on this recommendation in my approach to researching with a young audience. I distributed questionnaires at most public performances, using these to build a general picture of how each performance was evaluated by audiences. However, my main interest for this aspect of the research was based on conducting more intensive qualitative research with young audiences, through informal discussions around performances, focus group discussions, writing exercises and drama workshops. Much of this work was conducted at the egg, the Bath Theatre Royal’s theatre specifically designed for, and partially by, children, where I was also employed over three terms as a Research Associate and a Workshop Leader for Press Gang youth group.116 In all of this research, my research samples were selfselecting. Respondents could, clearly, choose not to complete questionnaires. Perhaps more importantly, the young people with whom I conducted writing and drama workshops and with whom I discussed performances at greater length had either chosen in advance to attend Press Gang or had at least some element of choice in attending the drama workshop, even though this occurred within their school.117 The research sample may therefore not represent a very wide section of society. However, in this research I was not interested in reflecting a particular spread of socio-economic factors, nor indeed did I seek to investigate the socio-economic backgrounds of the young people with whom I worked, or of their families. I was not interested in differentiating reception of Shakespeare according to these factors. Whilst much research and work with Shakespeare for young people is placed within the context of a society which encourages social mobility, drawing implicitly on the work of Pierre Bourdieu on social and cultural capital, I am not, as I have stated, interested in investigating how Shakespeare might be used as cultural capital: Rancière’s notion of emancipation challenges notions of cultural capital because emancipation assumes equality exists already, whereas

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the necessity to acquire cultural capital assumes the existence of an inequality. Clearly, Shakespeare might work as a means to acquire cultural capital. However, I reject the importance of such an investigation in my own work. Indeed, Bourdieu himself rejects a mechanistic model of social origin as ‘the principle of a linear series of determinations – e.g. father’s occupation, more or less crudely defined, determining position, e.g. occupational position, which in turn determines opinions’.118 This is surely particularly true in a mass-media and internet age where opinions, lifestyle models and, most pertinently, cultural products beyond the narrow scope of one’s family background are more widely available. Collecting statistical data on socioeconomic status and attempting to link this to engagement with Shakespeare merely perpetuates a link between taste and background which Bourdieu rejects; opinions are not determined by social class or background. In my research, I continually expressed to the young people with whom I worked that it was their experience of the performance, and the links which they made between the performance they attended and their own lives, other experiences and ideas, in which I was interested. Matthew Reason has conducted similar research with young people and insists on the primacy of them understanding their own experience, rather than researchers interpreting it. Reason argues that ‘If the participants themselves did not come to understand their experience, there was no possibility that the researchers could by proxy.’119 I depart from Reason in that I did not pursue an ‘understanding’, of either performance or experience, from the young people with whom I worked. Rather I was interested in their descriptions of their experience, whether they reached an understanding of it or not. However, similarly to Reason, I sought to research with young people, rather than conduct research on them, involving them ‘as active researchers in an open investigation into their own perceptions and experiences’ of live theatre performance.120 I therefore employed similar methodological techniques to Reason, continually emphasizing

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that I was interested in the experience of the young person, rather than in them being able to understand or explain some hidden and retrievable meanings.121 I based my general interview technique and approach, with both young people and theatre workers, on established ethnographic principles. As such, I accepted an ambiguity in conducting qualitative research, recognizing, as ethnographer Margot Ely suggests, that We do not start with a set of fixed hypotheses. We do not know what we will uncover, reveal, or learn.122 I began this research without a hypothesis to test: I rather wanted to find out what meanings might be made in the performance of Shakespeare for young people. My discussions with young people about their experiences therefore entailed, especially in the early stages of research, as Ely suggests, recording ‘events, including verbal interactions, without any idea if they will turn out to be significant or meaningful’.123 All discussions were therefore based on open-ended questions which sought to elicit what the interview subject’s experiences and opinions were, drawing on Kristin Esterberg’s insistence that in-depth interviewing should ‘explore the research participant’s reality’.124 Because I was not seeking clear answers to predetermined questions, I allowed discussions to flow as much as possible, and to proceed where the subjects wanted them to go. In conducting workshops prior to watching any performances with Press Gang, I also tried to demonstrate that I was ‘a benign, accepting, curious (but not inquisitive) individual who is prepared and eager to listen to virtually any testimony with interest’.125 The development of an ongoing relationship with the Press Gang members, with whom I conducted workshops unrelated to this research, as well as attending numerous performances together, replicated the effect of serial interviews which allow, at least in part, a dismantling of the hierarchy of knowledge between researcher and researched which is

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often at work in questionnaires and other ‘initial’ interviews where both parties by no means participate in the construction of knowledge on an equal footing.126 However, interviews and group workshops were discussions in which I also participated fully, developing points which I found interesting and stimulating. I want to acknowledge here, then, that I was a participant observer in all discussions. However, as Bill Gillham says: You don’t deal with the ‘observer effect’ by denying it: you look for the probable impact of your presence.127 I believe the impact of my presence may have been to prompt young people to think more than they might otherwise about theatre and Shakespeare, but as I developed a relationship with them over a number of weeks, I believe that the views they expressed were their own and not prompted by me. Indeed, as I acknowledge in Chapter 3, my reading of some performances differed from theirs in important ways. In rehearsals, I believe the impact of my presence on the student actors was minimal; they are used to having numerous observers in the form of directors and other visitors. To participate in discussions as fully as possible whilst also making sure that as much as possible was recorded, even seemingly irrelevant details which I might want to develop later, I recorded all interviews, explaining to my interviewees that I did so only so that I did not need to write during the discussions and therefore lose the opportunity to participate more fully in the discussion.128 I allowed discussion to develop according to the shared interests of myself and my subjects. As such I followed a principle of ethnographic research which, according to Esterberg, ‘necessarily involves following up leads, adapting to contingencies, and (re)designing research “on the hoof” ’.129 This allowed the development of the very general research question with which I began: what cultural meanings might be made in the theatrical performance of

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Shakespeare for young people? I expected, in line with ethnographic research, ‘the research questions to evolve and change during the study in a manner consistent with the assumptions of emerging design’.130 Therefore, especially in early research and interviews, this involved the handling of ‘disparate bits of “data” made through odd conversations, first-hand experiences, fact-finding, referrals, collected bits of paper, sketching and photography, web-searching, reading and so on’.131 Ethnographer Mike Crang describes the ideas which emerge from this approach to research as a process where researchers/writers pick up ideas from the world and develop them not so much to prove them right or wrong but to see where they can lead and what they can do.132 Crang describes this as ‘abductive’ reasoning, as opposed to logical deduction or the testing of existing theoretical ideas. The meanings which I describe as emerging from these performances are similarly drawn from ideas which have suggested themselves through the material circumstances and coincidences in which the performances occurred. The arguments which I describe in the following sections, and develop in each chapter, are therefore drawn from ‘abductive’ reasoning. I do not offer these chapters as proof of deducing a general rule or law of Shakespeare for young people, or as proving any theoretical ideas which preceded the project (I had none). Rather, I develop my observations here to examine how Rancière’s concepts of politics and the poor might provide insights into how performances of Shakespeare for young people function. Specifically, I consider what opportunities for emancipation such performance might offer by constructing the audience as political beings, or by constructing the audience as engaged in watching theatrical, or popular, entertainment rather than engaged in intellectual or literary activity.

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Chapter 2 Performance poet Toby Thompson’s poem, cited at the beginning of this chapter, bemoans the fact that the educational system does not consider his views and his personal trajectory, but rather expects him only to pass exams before he can be considered worthy of a voice. Jacques Rancière describes the relationship between voices which are heard as they are, and those which are only heard once they have been tutored, as the difference between a political and a psychological construction of the child. In Chapter 2, I draw on this distinction between a political and psychological construction to consider how the young audience is constructed by performances of Shakespeare. I develop an idea which emerged from seeing three of Tim Crouch’s appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays – I, Peaseblossom, I, Caliban and I, Banquo–performed in one evening as FairyMonsterGhost in Bristol by Company of Angels Theatre Company. I argue that a progressive development in dramaturgy in these productions constructed the young audience as psychological by presenting a narrative of increasing maturity, both in content and, more importantly, in reducing playful and interactive elements of the plays. This narrative suggested that full psychological maturity in the theatre was presented within a more realist frame. I go on to argue, however, that when considering the full range of Crouch’s Shakespeare plays for young people, the audience is often constructed as political by the use of content and dramaturgy which emphasizes a playful meta-theatricality and assumes an equal intelligence between performer and audience. In addition to the performances by Company of Angels, then, I draw on performances of I, Malvolio and I, Peaseblossom by Crouch himself and a webcast of I, Cinna (The Poet) as performed by Jude Owusu.

Chapter 3 In Chapter  3, I develop an argument that is based on the coincidence of different uses of the word ‘poor’ in relation to

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theatre. I apply Jacques Rancière’s concept of the poor, as it is caused to exist through politics, to an observation of the prevalence of a minimalist, ‘poor’ theatre presentation of Shakespeare, which used non-human objects, and a further coincidence with the qualitative use of the word ‘poor’ to describe young people’s theatre. As with Toby Thompson, I am in ‘two minds’ as to whether Shakespeare should be used to educate, and examine in this chapter to what extent ‘poor’ theatre performances of Shakespeare construct the audience experience as education, work or leisure. I argue that these minimalist performances of Shakespeare construct the experience as requiring more than ‘mere’ consumption. Young audiences of such performances, in contrast to how they are constructed as audiences of other theatrical performances, are therefore constructed as intellectually active spectators. I draw on my own experience of RSC productions of The Comedy of Errors and Matilda the Musical, as well as numerous performances at the Shakespeare Unplugged festival in Bath in February and March 2010. In addition I draw on archival research on performances for young people at Shakespeare’s Globe. I also draw on discussions with young people with whom I researched the Shakespeare Unplugged festival in Bath in 2010 as part of youth writing group Press Gang, and a drama workshop conducted with young people who attended one of the performances at the festival. By doing so, I draw further on Rancière’s work in two ways. Firstly, I apply the notion of the poor to the young audience, in the sense that their voice is not heard in the distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare. Secondly, by including their voices in this chapter, I conduct a political act, which is extended by not trying to draw a consensus between my interpretations and the interpretations of the young audience, but rather allowing them to co-exist in a dissensus. I engage with Matthew Reason’s work at length in this chapter, and argue that, whilst his work is valuable in allowing young people sensible voice, there is an increasing tendency, as in so much other work with young people, to suggest ways in which

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they might be educated, rather than presenting their experience as valid as it is. Whilst, of course, education and the acceptance of young people’s experience is not mutually exclusive, in this context Reason tries to suggest how young people might be educated to reject certain types of theatre, which they would appear to enjoy, in favour of more intellectual and serious theatre. I argue that this limits the emancipatory potential of including their voice.

Chapter 4 In Chapter 4, I examine the relationship between the literary and the theatrical in the performance of Shakespeare for young people, and argue that much supposedly ‘theatrical’ work for young people accepts a hierarchical relationship which privileges the literary and therefore limits emancipation. I argue that a challenge to Shakespeare’s textual authority within performances of the plays, by adapting the comic and popular elements, presents greater potential for emancipation. Toby Thompson effectively identifies the literary experience of Shakespeare as ‘torture’ in his poem and identifies the performance of the plays as more appropriate for young people. I consider two productions of Hamlet and one production of Twelfth Night aimed specifically at young people. My research in this chapter is based on my own observations of performances and audiences of all three productions; reviews of the RSC Young People’s Shakespeare Hamlet (YPS Hamlet); observation of rehearsals by the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School of Hamlet and Twelfth Night; interviews with the adaptor/director and actors involved in this production; Assistant Stage Manager (ASM ) reports from the tour; questionnaire responses from two public performances of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (BOVTS ) Hamlet; and an interview with three members of Press Gang conducted immediately following a performance of the BOVTS Hamlet. I give brief consideration to the RSC production as an

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example of ‘official’ Shakespeare, but I concentrate more fully on the BOVTS productions, as they represent the local performances which I identified as important above. I examine these with reference to the popular and comedic elements of these performances and argue that contemporary adaptations of these elements of the plays are important in presenting a theatrical interpretation of Shakespeare, by disrupting the authority of his status as an individual author.

Conclusion I conclude the book by arguing that my examination of performances of Shakespeare for young people shows that performances of the plays are capable of offering opportunities for emancipation, and of staging a democratic public. Performances can achieve this through emphasizing the process of collaboration and the materiality of theatre. These aspects allow the damaging perspective of Shakespeare as an authoritative text with unquestioned cultural status to be challenged in a way which gives young people real agency and voice. However, I argue that such emancipatory opportunities are potentially limited by institutional factors and by projects which seek to emphasize the social efficacy of art. Such projects construct Shakespeare as a ‘school’. I argue that, for emancipation to occur, Shakespeare should not be encountered as a ‘school’, but rather a site for the production of new contemporary stories which emerge from audiences of the plays. These stories can be discovered and more widely disseminated by adopting research attitudes and methodologies toward the performance and reception of Shakespeare which challenge the privileged position of Shakespeare and assume an equal intelligence between Shakespeare and contemporary young audiences. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to the Arden Complete Works, except where I refer to the First Quarto of Hamlet, for which I use Kathleen Irace’s 1998 edition.133

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Where I quote directly from the text, I give act number, scene number and line number(s) within the body of the text. However, where I paraphrase or refer to a scene in order to contextualize one of the contemporary performances, I give the reference in a footnote. When referring to the First Quarto, I footnote the reference, following Irace’s scene divisions and line numberings.

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2 Catching up to Shakespeare? The maturing audience in Shakespeare for young people Only after the child is taught in a certain way will he or she be able to speak. But they already have spoken. They already speak politics.1 In the introductory chapter I described the broadly humanist arguments which are commonly offered as reasons for young people to experience Shakespeare, whether in texts or in performance. These arguments make broad assumptions about the purpose of art, about human progress and about the development of the individual, and, in relation to Shakespeare, are represented in the academy perhaps most clearly by Harold Bloom. Bloom argues not only that Shakespeare should be a pedagogical object, but that he is the pedagogical object, because: 53

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The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach, we cannot catch up to them.2 Bloom’s anti-theoretical humanism has been the subject of thorough critique, but I follow Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer in resisting the temptation to merely dismiss his recent work as one more ‘in a long line of conservative jeremiads against late capitalist culture . . . literary theory and the various “isms” associated with it’ because, as they recognize, whilst Bloom’s approach ‘has largely been abandoned in the academy [it has] remained very much alive outside it’.3 Indeed, I argue in this chapter that Bloom’s canonical, humanist approach is still dominant, in the encounters with Shakespearean performance which young people have. Perhaps more importantly for my purposes, Bloom’s construction of Shakespeare’s works as something which ‘we cannot catch up to’ resonates with Rancière’s description of the conventional and dominant pedagogical logic which constructs a perpetual gap for learners which they can never close. Rancière argues that even most progressive education is based on the replication of inequalities because it has at its heart the practice of ‘explanation’, which perpetuates itself, becoming ‘an end in itself, the infinite verification of a fundamental axiom: the axiom of inequality’. The usual aim of pedagogical logic is to teach the student that which he or she doesn’t know, to close the gap between the ignorant one and knowledge. Its usual means is explanation. To explain is to arrange the elements of knowledge to be transmitted in accordance with the supposed limited capacities of those under instruction.4 The only way a teacher can stop this endless repetition of inequality is to become an ‘ignorant schoolmaster’. Rancière sees explication as the preserve of ‘experts’ and ‘(school)

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masters’: they are able to speak on a subject because they have the necessary learning.5 He implicitly recognizes that these inequalities are constructed within a narrative of maturity, linking narratives of individual development to narratives of societal development, by observing that theories which aim to reach equality through education perceive society as having its ‘savages to civilise’.6 Rancière derives his notion of ignorant schoolmasters from Joseph Jacotot’s utopian educational theories and practice, which were developed during the early part of the nineteenth century. Jacotot’s main theory, sadly now ignored according to Rancière, was that all humans have equal intelligence. This assumption means that each human has the ability to instruct himself or herself, and that teachers can teach something which they don’t know themselves. Rancière describes Jacotot as ‘stumbling’ upon a discovery that contradicted the assumptions which most educators took for granted in the nineteenth century, assumptions which Rancière perceives as continuing today. He describes these assumptions as follows: What is blindly taken for granted in any system of teaching: the necessity of explication. And yet why shouldn’t it be taken for granted? No one truly knows anything other than what he has understood. And for that comprehension to take place one has to be given an explication, the words of the master must shatter the silence of the taught material.7 In order to work with Belgian students whose language he did not share, Jacotot proposed to have them learn French. They did this through comparing a parallel text of Telemaque, without any intervention or explication from Jacotot himself. To his surprise, the students seemed capable, in addition to learning the source material of Telemaque, of also learning French this way. Jacotot argued from this that an educator’s intelligence was not needed in order for the students to learn to explain the subject matter – all that was needed was the

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intelligence of the original writer and the translator, the intelligence of the student, ‘and their will to learn French’.8 This led Jacotot to the development of a theory that explication is not necessary if an assumption of intellectual equality is made the starting point of an educative project. Rather than an inequality between the knowledgeable and the ignorant, the teacher and the student, there is equality. This, for Rancière, is emancipatory education and is contrasted with the explicative method of the ‘Old Masters’, who believe in hierarchical acquisition of knowledge, in a division between superiors and inferiors: superiors can do what inferiors cannot; a child’s intelligence is not an adult’s and must not be overburdened; knowledge is acquired gradually, by recognizing an abyss of ignorance and by having the Master fill that hole before introducing a new abyss of ignorance. Rancière characterizes this teaching method as the logical method and terms it ‘stultification’. He initially describes stultification as occurring ‘whenever one intelligence is subordinated to another’ but accepts that such ‘subjection’ may be necessary in an educational situation, especially where a child’s will is not strong enough to keep him or her on track, because the subjection here is ‘purely one of will over will’. True stultification occurs, according to Rancière, when the subjection of one will to another is accompanied by the subjection of one intelligence to another. He goes on to describe how will and intelligence are linked in the act of education and how the way in which they are linked can lead to stultification or emancipation: In the act of teaching and learning there are two wills and two intelligences. We will call their coincidence stultification. In the experimental situation Jacotot created, the student was linked to a will, Jacotot’s, and to an intelligence, the book’s – the two entirely distinct. We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations – the act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will – emancipation.9

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Sociologists Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta argue that the explicative model of education described by Rancière goes ‘hand-in-hand with a psychological understanding of the child’s intellectual development’.10 The child is treated as a psychological being, someone who needs to learn, to mature, and to move toward adulthood and full(er) understanding. This is true, they argue, of both traditional and progressive educational theories. This is a psychological construction because ‘Psychology explains. It explains because it is part of the explanatory order.’ They do not reject the notion that humans mature psychologically, but point out that this model of a child has important consequences. They argue that ‘There is nothing wrong with this psychological figure of the child aside from the fact that such a child does not speak’, at least not in the political sense. The psychological child, they argue, ‘does not speak because it has already been decided for the child how and when he or she will speak’.11 In contrast, they identify in Rancière’s work an implicit configuration of children not as psychological but as political. The political construction of the child is importantly linked to Rancière’s concepts of equality, which are based on how a child learns to speak its native language. For Rancière, the child learns its native language not by having it explained to him or her but through use, assumption of understanding, and negotiation on what is, effectively, ‘sensible’. Rancière describes children as learning their native language ‘naturally’ and through experience, stumbling arbitrarily until they find the right words with which to communicate effectively.12 Effectively, children ‘immerse’ themselves in the language which surrounds them and negotiate meanings which are relevant and ‘sensible’ to them. They gradually broaden their experience, not through having each new encounter or experience with language ‘explained’ to them but by comparing new words and phrases with their existing knowledge and understanding. Bingham and Biesta describe this experience as moving from ‘proximity to proximity’ in an arbitrary manner which cannot be determined in advance.13 Building on the

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notion of the child as political, Bingham and Biesta reject educational figures of the ‘child-as-emerging person’ or ‘childas-soon-to-be-autonomous’, arguing that to view the child as political offers an opportunity to construct not a new model of education, but a qualitatively different understanding of the child’s place in education and society.14 Bingham and Biesta argue that the problem with the psychological model of the child is the implicit belief that only after the child has been taught in a certain way, and has gained certain competencies, will he or she be regarded as able to speak. The child, in the psychological model, cannot proceed in an arbitrary manner, finding their own meanings and relevancies in experiences and encounters, because ‘It has been decided by the selection of a particular method that will bring him or her to speech.’15 The experience of learning one’s native language, they argue, proves that such preparation or specification of particular methods of learning is not necessary. They argue that children who have learnt their native language already have spoken. More importantly, the way in which they have spoken mitigates against the usefulness of the psychological model in education because ‘They already speak politics.’16 They already speak politics because in making themselves heard in their negotiations with language they disrupt the distribution of the sensible. Remarkably, perhaps, Harold Bloom’s anti-theoretical description of how one should read Shakespeare’s plays seems to parallel Bingham and Biesta’s idea that children move from proximity to proximity as they mature. Bloom writes: In reading Shakespeare’s plays, and to a certain extent in attending their performances, the merely sensible procedure is to immerse yourself in the text and its speakers, and allow your understanding to move outward from what you read, hear, and see to whatever contexts suggest themselves as relevant. That was the procedure from the times of Dr Johnson and David Garrick, of William Hazlitt and Edmund Kean, through the eras of A. C. Bradley and Henry Irving,

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of G. Wilson Knight and John Gielgud. Alas, sensible, even ‘natural’ as this way was, it is now out of fashion, and has been replaced by arbitrary and ideologically imposed contextualizations, the staple of our bad time.17 Implicit in Bloom’s construction here is that Shakespeare does not need to be explained to a reader. Rather, the ‘sensible’ approach is that one should ‘immerse’ oneself in the text and ‘move outward’ from what one reads, discovering meanings which ‘suggest themselves as relevant’, just as Bingham and Biesta describe children learning their own language by being ‘immersed’ in it and by negotiating relevant meaning within the distribution of the sensible. In this chapter, I take Bloom at his word that young people should encounter the works of Shakespeare, whether as texts or as performances, without predetermining which contexts should be taught and without assuming what ends or judgements might be made about the meaning of Shakespeare’s works. In doing so, I draw on Bingham and Biesta’s concepts to examine how performances of Shakespeare for young people might construct them as psychological or political. I use as a case study the work which Tim Crouch has made for young people, paying most attention to his appropriations of Shakespeare for his I, Shakespeare series.18 In each of these plays, Crouch takes a minor character from a Shakespeare play and writes a new story for that character, whilst also incorporating the narration of the main part of Shakespeare’s play. I examine the plays, in text and performance, for the ways in which they construct a young person’s encounter with Shakespeare: do they assume a psychological model of the child, one in which they must be taught a certain way to think and talk about Shakespeare? Or do they assume a political model of the child by assuming that they already have an intelligence and critical competency to understand and make sense of the performances they see? I mean by intelligence here the ability to respond to works of art and culture in any way which might make sense to individual young spectators. To this extent, the assumption of equality of

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intelligence might be allowed to challenge and amend the terms by which interpretive communities perceive Shakespeare, in a Rancièrean display of politics which disrupts the distribution of the sensible by making new voices heard.

The role of the interpreter Crouch’s work is a particularly appropriate case study, firstly, because, as Susanne Greenhalgh comments, his appropriations of Shakespeare are an ‘especially vivid example’ of a historiographical model which presents the plays from different points of view, a model which might be interpreted as ‘explaining’ Shakespeare.19 However, as Greenhalgh’s observation that Crouch’s work ‘offers young audiences a meta-theatrical reflection of their own uncertainties, anxieties and resistance, in a world often controlled by others’ suggests, his work is also a prime site which might problematize a simple relationship whereby Shakespeare’s plays are ‘explained’ to a young audience.20 Moreover, the reception and debate around Crouch’s work for adults places his work as a site for the negotiation of audience agency, and I therefore also compare the I, Shakespeare series with Crouch’s work for adults to examine whether the audience are constructed as psychological or political. It is, of course, significant that Bloom describes attending performances as only ‘to a certain extent’ requiring the same ‘sensible’ procedure as reading the plays to provide the best way of encountering Shakespeare. Bloom does not state the reason for this, but I assume that he is suspicious of the contribution of the other intelligences, such as director, actor and designer, involved in performing Shakespeare which might come between the text and the reader. Bloom perceives the reading of the texts as a direct and uninterrupted communication between Shakespeare and reader. I do not want to engage with this view here, beyond observing that all public iterations of Shakespeare’s work, from the earliest printed publications

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and performances, have involved the contribution of other intelligences in their production. In persisting with a view of reading as providing uninterrupted access to Shakespeare, Bloom ignores the scholarly work that has persuasively argued that published texts of the plays, both historically and in contemporary Britain, are as much ‘performances’ or ‘stagings’, and involve the intelligence of others, for instance editors, as any stage production.21 However, other intelligences in productions for children are perhaps more pervasive and influential than in other iterations of the plays. Janet Bottoms suggests as much in her survey and analysis of the representations of Shakespeare for children.22 She observes how Victorian approaches to Shakespeare for children contain underlying ‘shaping discourses’ based on the hope that children would eventually read ‘aright’ on their own, after guidance. This was intended to pre-empt ‘whatever personal, possibly unorthodox judgement the reader might be tempted to make with regard to character, action or moral’.23 Indeed, whilst acknowledging that ‘Every production of Shakespeare is an interpretation’, Bottoms argues that in ‘ “children’s” Shakespeares the influence of the interpreter is greatly strengthened’.24 Rather than allow the young audience to consider their own meanings in relation to Shakespeare’s text, they are subjected to an interpreter who tells them how they should think about and understand the texts. I want to examine whether this is true of Crouch’s work. All of the plays in the I, Shakespeare series, in one important sense, have an interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays. Each play entails a solo performer portraying one character from a Shakespeare play. In the course of the character telling his own story, the plot from the source play is related to the audience from each character’s point of view. However, this is not presented as a framework within which to understand the play. It is only through these characters telling their own story, which, as written by Crouch, exceeds the bounds of the plays, that the plot of the source play emerges. The audience, then, are presented the source play through the intelligence of one point

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of view, rather than experiencing the polyvocal presentation possible through a production which might portray all of the characters. However, it is the extent to which the young audience is taught to ‘speak’, compared to the extent to which they are assumed to already ‘speak’, that constructs them as psychological or political.

A psychological narrative There is a clear narrative in Crouch’s I, Shakespeare plays which reflects a belief that certain kinds of material and certain approaches are appropriate for children at different ages of psychological development. This is most obviously apparent in the advertisement of Crouch’s works as being ‘suitable’ for particular age ranges. The plays were all presented by Company of Angels as FairyMonsterGhost in Bristol in May 2011, touring to schools and other local venues, as well as being performed in the Studio at the Bristol Old Vic. Set up in 2001 by experienced theatre practitioner John Retallack, Company of Angels aims to produce new and experimental productions for young people which draw on European theatrical practice and ‘broaden the definition of theatre’.25 The performances were advertised on posters and on leaflets distributed through the Bristol Old Vic, indicating guidelines suggesting appropriate ages for attending audiences. I, Peaseblossom, described in Tim Crouch’s original script as a ‘dream for eight years up’ was advertised as suitable for nine years and above, as was I, Caliban, whereas I, Banquo was advertised as suitable for eleven years and above.26 I, Malvolio was subsequently presented on tour by Tim Crouch as also suitable for audiences of eleven years and above. Now, whilst I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban were both advertised as suitable for audiences of nine years and older, I argue that, when presented as separate parts of a series of performances in one evening, in the same space, FairyMonsterGhost constructed a progressively more psychologically mature audience through

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the development of content and dramaturgy in each performance. I am suggesting here not that anything age-inappropriate was presented but that the performances constructed a progressively older audience. I acknowledge here that this narrative of maturing was most obvious when the performances were seen in one evening, as presented by Company of Angels. However, following my methodology of using abductive reasoning and exploring temporally and geographically specific meanings, I argue that this is still significant. A ‘Production note’ in I, Peaseblossom observes that ‘In the script, Peaseblossom is referred to as a “he”. But fairies can be any gender.’27 This refusal to assign gender accentuates the presexual character of Peaseblossom. In fact, in performance an anti-sexual attitude is apparent in Peaseblossom, as is evident in the rejection of the sexual activities described. Peaseblossom refers, in an embarrassed and dismissive way, to how ‘They’re all . . . making love. Everything’s . . . making love’.28 The obvious pause here indicates the difficulty of saying ‘making love’, and when accompanied by a gesture of pretending to put his fingers down his throat in the Company of Angels production, indicates obvious disgust at this adult activity. Peaseblossom later refers, in similarly dismissive terms, to Titania and Oberon ‘coupling’, and his inability to relate to this activity is accentuated by the line being ‘(Whispered)’ and followed by ‘Grown-ups, eh? Brrrrr’.29 Love, sex and marriage are referenced explicitly as confusing, not comprehensible, for this character, as Peaseblossom asks the audience: ‘WHAT ON EARTH DO PEOPLE SEE IN IT ?’30 Such a presentation has interesting consequences in a society often anxious about the early sexualization of children. It may be argued that it figures children as innocent and in need of protection, in an ideological sense that began with the Victorians, and, in terms of Shakespeare, with the editions of Lamb and Bowdler.31 Based on the reception of this subject matter by young people at performances which I have observed, such an anti-sexual attitude is apparent. The reception of I, Peaseblossom was generally positive among children and the

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general bewilderment, embarrassment and outright rejection of romantic and sexual love as appropriate material for them can also be seen in the reaction to the BOVTS production of Twelfth Night discussed in Chapter 4. Innocence as represented through the rejection of romanticized sexual love may be a construction of childhood, but it is a construction which the theatre makers considered in this book perform successfully in eliciting the desired ‘disgusted’ reactions from their audience to scenes depicting romantic and sexual love.32 Given this construction of an innocent rejection of sexuality, I would suggest that I, Caliban, described also as suitable for nine years plus, constructs a slightly older audience. Whilst bearing some similar references to a dependent childlike state, the character of Caliban is presented as having developed very different attitudes toward physical sexuality. I, Caliban is described as ‘a sweet and sorry tale about injustice, inebriation and missing your mum’ and therefore clearly indicates a young character.33 However, the very fact that Caliban is ‘missing’ his mother, and is also experimenting with alcohol, indicates an independence from parental guidance. Of course, in neither The Tempest nor I, Caliban does Caliban mature ‘normally’ to a separation from his mother, as she is described as dying early. His situation is therefore one more akin to a liminal state of maturing, not of negotiating the momentary disorientations which Peaseblossom experiences before returning to the safety of the mother figure of Titania, but of negotiating his independence from parental guidance as a new, and permanent, state of existence. The sense of a psychologically maturing progression from Peaseblossom to Caliban is accentuated when seeing all three performances in one night, especially as I, Caliban followed I, Peaseblossom in an evening which seemed to head toward a more adult theme and content. Indeed, one might argue that the later timing of I, Caliban is indicative of an older audience, the younger children now safely departed for bed. The development of an existence independent of parental guidance for Caliban also includes a developing sexuality, or

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awareness of sexuality. His growing awareness of, and sexual attraction to, Miranda is described. Caliban says: And his daughter’s growing big and I’m growing bigger, and her hair smells nice and I think things and want things like any dog worth their salt, and she looks at me with big eyes and her skin is soft and I think how good it would be to have lots of little Calibans and so one thing of mine tries to lead to another.34 Whilst still described in fairly abstract, non-explicit terms, the sexual act is now something to be considered and confronted. It may be encountered as embarrassing or disgusting and is still implicitly linked with an adult world, as Caliban describes his sexual behaviour as developing from Prospero’s treatment of him ‘like a dog’ leading him to ‘behave like a dog’,35 but sexual desire is now something to be dealt with. It is problematic, certainly, and an urge to be controlled or indulged depending on the point of view, but something that is a recognizable desire rather than an activity to be rejected outright. This recognition of the sexual element of Caliban constructs an audience beginning to deal with sexual love in a markedly different way to the audience of I, Peaseblossom. Indeed, it is notable that, historically, textual adaptations of The Tempest for children have tended to omit any sense of ‘Caliban’s sexual awareness’.36 The lack of parental guidance for Caliban, of course, is problematized by the role of Prospero in this narrative. Prospero acts, as Caliban implicitly acknowledges in I, Caliban, as a father. At first Prospero is a nurturing figure, taking Caliban ‘under his wing’ by ‘feeding me and helping me and lulling me, and stroking me and giving me water’, but he then turns into an authoritarian and punishing father, who ‘beats me and orders me and shouts at me’.37 Crouch’s description of the interesting relationship between Prospero and Caliban suggests a relationship which is resonant of Rancière’s description of a stultifying educational approach in a society which has its ‘savages to civilise’:

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Prospero tries to ‘civilise’ Caliban – to make Caliban into someone like a Duke or a gentleman. To make him think, rather than feel. And when Caliban is unable to become something different, then Prospero really punishes him. That’s what makes Caliban grumpy.38 Prospero here is portrayed as an educator who has a clear end in mind – that Caliban must think, rather than feel – rather than allowing Caliban to develop by moving from proximity to proximity. Of course, as Erica Hateley recognizes, Prospero has long been associated with Shakespeare himself, both in terms of the manipulation of characters but also as a magical father figure. In addition, Janet Bottoms makes the point that, increasingly, Shakespeare became aligned with a father figure, in fact, ‘the ultimate good father who understands “the little joys and sorrows that make up life”, and “the struggle to be good”, and who “would not scorn people too greatly when they were bad”.’39 Children must therefore learn to love his stories, and come, in time, to feel ‘a real love and reverence for this wonderful Shakespere [sic], and keep his name in your hearts, next to the things that are already beautiful and precious to you – your Father – your Mother – your Home’.40 Bottoms recognizes the contemporary relevance and importance of establishing this ‘love’, given the examinations that children will have to undergo later: it is crucial ‘that children be taught to “love” Shakespeare before they ha[ve] to dissect him’.41 Thus, Caliban’s educational journey here mirrors that of a contemporary child in the UK and highlights the challenges which face educators. Adult teachers are at some stage required to develop a love of Shakespeare into an analysis of Shakespeare; children are progressively required to ‘think, rather than feel’. Whilst love, or enjoyment, and analysis are, of course, not mutually exclusive, they are certainly not obviously linked. The portrayal of Caliban in I, Caliban is of a youth who is struggling with the demands Prospero has made of him to develop from a feeling to a

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thinking being: he wrestles for control of the narrative with a father figure. As Erica Hateley has detailed, the role of storyteller is often ascribed to Prospero in adaptations for young children, whereas appropriations for teenagers tend to use Caliban as a focal point.42 In this regard, I think Susanne Greenhalgh’s description, quoted above, of Crouch’s plays as presenting a ‘meta-theatrical reflection of their own uncertainties, anxieties and resistance, in a world often controlled by others’ is an apt description of how both I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban work for a young audience as they chart the negotiations which children must make in relation to adults and their own progression toward adulthood. The notion of the child’s sphere of influence in a world controlled by others is reflected in the experience of each of the characters. Whereas Peaseblossom is portrayed as frozen to the spot by a spell, unable to intervene as she watches the chaos caused by Puck and Oberon, Caliban is portrayed as the storyteller and puppet master of I, Caliban, with at least an element of control. Caliban’s narration of the story in I, Caliban includes the depiction of the sea voyages using small model boats and stick-like puppets; he ‘controls’ the action in much the same way as Prospero is seen to do in The Tempest. Thus, Caliban’s attempt to control the narrative is more overt than Peaseblossom’s. In the final piece of these performances, I, Banquo, the control of the narrator is absolute and the manner in which he tells the story significantly different from the way in which Peaseblossom or Caliban tell their stories. This development, as I shall argue shortly, links psychological maturing in young people with a narrative of maturing dramaturgy. The increased maturity in the character of Banquo for the final piece is very clear, and also reflects the older age group for which it is advertised as suitable. Banquo is clearly portrayed as an adult; in fact, explicitly as a father. In fact, the exploration of separation and independence from mother and father figures in this sequence of performances suggests further psychological development. In I, Peaseblossom, dreams are used to work out

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Peaseblossom’s insecurities and uncertainties concerning adult activity; in I, Caliban, there is an outright and obvious challenge to the father figure of Prospero as Caliban establishes his own sexual identity in the world; in I, Banquo, we see the concern with parental roles extended in the portrayal of a father, rather than a child. In the plays as presented by Company of Angels, the narrative which reflects the concerns of different age groups as they mature is made clear through the physical and visual difference between the different actors playing the roles, accentuated, of course, by costume. Tim Crouch views Caliban as merely a ‘more angry’ nine-year-old than Peaseblossom.43 This may be true to an extent, especially if seen in isolation, and Crouch clearly intends there to be some identification between the intended audience and Peaseblossom, as is clear from his description of the character as an innocent child in the middle of all this mayhem, trying to work out what it all means. This, I thought, would be good for a young audience, too. To share in Peaseblossom’s confusion. They would then understand a bit more about what A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about.44 In Company of Angels’s production, the different actors playing Peaseblossom and Caliban also suggested a narrative of increasing maturity. Peaseblossom is played by Kate Mayne and is certainly out of place and ‘lost’ amidst the adult celebrations. Mayne plays Peaseblossom as a young child in a stereotypical fairy-like costume that is recognizable from fancy dress shops. Mayne is a slight, young actress and the effect of the presentation establishes a signification between fairies and young, innocent girls playing dress-up. They are both unthreatening, benign forces for good; playful and mischievous perhaps, but possessing magic in only a positive sense. Crouch’s performance of the character, on the other hand, distances both the experience and the character somewhat from the children in the audience. There is no attempt to present a

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naturalistic picture of a young boy or girl at a grown-up party. The fairy wings are there, certainly, but they are small and are desultorily applied to an old raincoat. When performed by Crouch, a tall, rather imposing man in his late forties, there is little chance of a young audience detecting a physical reflection of themselves in Peaseblossom. This problematizes any simple psychological identification for the audience. For Company of Angels, Caliban is played by Jimmy Whiteaker, an actor in his mid-twenties but looking more like a teenager. In terms of Greenhalgh’s comment about the performances reflecting the experiences of the intended audience, the plausible physical reflection of the target audience suggests that Caliban is for an older audience than Mayne’s Peaseblossom. In I, Banquo, the title character is played by Adam Peck. Peck is a short, well-built man and, although only a little older than Whiteaker, being in his early thirties, he certainly presents a more mature figure than Whiteaker. There is then, in I, Banquo, no physical reflection of the target audience in the narrator. Indeed, although Banquo begins his story by referencing the universality of the experience of friendship as a means to relate directly to his audience, his tale contains little that is immediately relevant to the experiences of most young people. The ‘reflection’ for the audience, to which Greenhalgh refers, in this play exists in the figure of Fleance, rather than in the storyteller, Banquo. Here, Fleance is a teenage guitarist who sits to the side, and contributes to the narrative only the occasional strum of his guitar. That this figure is intended to reflect the audience seems clear from designer Graeme Gilmour’s description of Fleance in a quite naturalistic manner: Fleance just wears jeans and an AC /DC teeshirt – we wanted to get the idea of him as a real, living, breathing boy across, rather than some distant historical figure.45 The fact that here is a real boy, a real teenage boy perhaps angry at the death of his father, reflects the theme of relationship

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with fathers (or parents) which seems so prevalent in these performances. Fleance, in this sense, ‘reflects’ not only the physical age of the intended audience, but also a potential psychological state. The transition of physical maturity that is presented extends from young, innocent Peaseblossom, through adolescent Caliban to teenage boy in Fleance and father in Banquo. It is significant to note here that in I, Banquo, Fleance is as marginal to the narrative as the characters from Shakespeare’s source plays that Crouch chooses to deploy as narrators. This Fleance does not contribute significantly to the narrative of Crouch’s I, Banquo, much as Fleance does not contribute significantly to the narrative of Macbeth. His role in I, Banquo is to watch the narrative unfold without contributing. In this sense, Banquo’s control of the narrative does not allow for interjections or contributions from others, emphasizing the psychological maturing to adulthood which distinguishes this narrator from Peaseblossom and Caliban. Significantly, his control of the narrative does not allow contributions from the audience either.

‘Pure theatre’: Imagine or participate? The psychological maturity of the character of Banquo is, then, linked to a markedly different dramatic means of presentation when compared to I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban. This change in dramaturgy constructs a narrative concerning the suitability for young people not only of content, but of dramatic forms. Crouch described I, Banquo to me as ‘pure theatre’ and, when pushed for an explanation of the term, identified the practice of one performer narrating a story to an audience, with no set to speak of and few props, creating a theatrical reality between just himself and the audience.46 This, for Crouch, is what theatre is and should be: a live event whereby communication between a performer and audience in a shared physical and temporal space creates a fictional world which can be related

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to individual experience.47 Thus, whilst I have identified a psychological narrative in the changing content and its treatment within these plays, it is the communication between the performer and audience which Crouch celebrates, in the collaborative creation of the theatrical fiction, which is more significant in a consideration of how Crouch’s work might construct the young audience as political by speaking to them as equals. To Seda Ilter, Crouch described pure theatre in relation to a definition of what theatre is, which does not incorporate the West End or those big entertainments, or those spectacles. Theatre at a very pure level is what we’ve talked about here: the notions of transformation. Thus, if we think that something reduced becomes purer, then a theatrical transformation that is reduced becomes more theatrical. In tandem with this description of ‘very theatre’, there is also a commitment to a reduction, to take things ‘simpler’. So if something becomes ‘very’ theatre for me, it becomes the purest and simplest expression of theatre rather than an elaborate demonstration of what theatrical is.48 The audience were continually implicated in the construction of the imagined narrative for both I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban in the Company of Angels productions. In both, performers continued to address audience members directly, and individuals were ‘cast’ as characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in I, Peaseblossom by being handed the place cards for those characters from the wedding table. From the printed text, it is clear that ‘They remain representatives of these two characters throughout’. However, such casting is immediately problematized by Peaseblossom as, amidst ‘Much ad-libbing [which] may ensue throughout all interaction with the audience’, he comments: This is useless. (To the two audience members.) You don’t look anything like them.49

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It is clear from this ‘casting’ that the characters are not to be represented naturalistically or accurately – the audience members ‘don’t look anything like’ Titania or Oberon and, rather than ‘act’ the parts, they are to be their ‘representatives’ in this narrative. These audience members are then asked to read lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream at various points as Peaseblossom ‘gives them scraps of card with the lines on, and asks them to read’. With no time to rehearse these lines, they are not ‘acted’ but rather merely spoken, further undermining any naturalistic representation of character or action.50 Indeed, in clearly demonstrating how theatre might be made, through scripted words, the naturalistic and psychological construction of character is challenged; if Titania and Oberon are not portrayed as psychologically rounded characters, the audience seem to be prompted to consider, what might this mean about Peaseblossom? Participation is often seen as particularly apt for very young theatre audiences in helping to make a version of a play with potentially inappropriate content suitable for a younger age group. Addressing a performance of The Tempest directed by Liam Steel at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park for much younger children, J. Caitlin Finlayson observes that: One of the major ways in which children learn is through participatory play. By involving the audience in the production, Steel made the younger audience not mere passive observers, but actors, who, like the professional actors on the main stage, explored the language, characters, and themes of Shakespeare’s play by embodying them physically. The audience stood not outside the performance, but within it. Why direct The Tempest for children? – because by doing so, Steel has exposed his young audience to the physicality of performance, to the idiosyncratic presentation of ‘character’, and scenic potentiality of the play-text, which is not readily perceptible when reading the text in the classroom.51

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The Tempest, for Finlayson, is supposedly less child-friendly and is made more so partly through participation. It is interesting that, in addition, Finlayson describes the desexualization of the romantic plot and the foregrounding of Ariel and a band of sprites to further make the play appropriate for children. Crouch’s appropriation of The Tempest does not desexualize Caliban or the romantic sub-plot, but it does present a similar experience by exposing Crouch’s audience to the physicality of performance, the idiosyncratic presentation of character, and attempts to place the audience not outside of the performance but as co-creators. However, where at least some audience members of I, Peaseblossom are ‘within’ the performance, as Finlayson phrases it, in I, Caliban this is less true. Caliban manipulates two figures to represent Miranda and Ferdinand, with a clear sexual attraction between them and much ‘Kissing and kissing’. In contrast to Peaseblossom’s rejection of such action outright, Caliban rejects this particular romantic act out of jealousy, rather than a rejection of romantic and sexual love per se.52 What is more significant here, in addition to the increasing sexual content, is the manner in which characters from the play are presented. In I, Caliban, which is, I have argued, presented for a slightly older audience, the audience’s involvement in the construction of the performance is more limited when compared to their contributions to I, Peaseblossom. Beyond the initial reference to the audience as ‘Gods’ on arrival into the space, there is no further use of the audience to act or represent characters. Whilst the action is still not presented naturalistically, and the audience are required to aid in the construction of the narrative through imagination, they are not required to speak. Thus, rather than ‘cast’ audience members as Ferdinand and Miranda for a short acted interchange, as Peaseblossom does with Titania and Oberon in I, Peaseblossom, Caliban manipulates objects which have been introduced progressively throughout the performance to represent each new character introduced into the narrative.

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The audience in I, Caliban are still, as in I, Peaseblossom, required to use their imagination to construct the story. We are required to imagine characters as they are narrated to us. In I, Peaseblossom, for example, we are prompted by Peaseblossom’s stalking through the audience hunting the red-hipped humblebee to imagine the woods through which he stalks; in I, Caliban we are invited to imagine a whole island to be represented by the few random objects strewn around the space when we enter. With the audience on three sides and with this function, we are addressed by Peaseblossom and by Caliban much as the audience are by the Prologue in Henry V; here we are being asked implicitly to use our imaginations to construct the story as it is being told to us. In effect, the narrative is constructed with the actor, who is required, by instruction in the script and through interaction with the audience, to improvise to a large degree – there is a partnership between writer, adaptor, performer and audience member(s).53 Given that I am going to argue that the performance of I, Banquo presents a clearer break with the dramaturgy of each of the pieces considered so far, it is interesting to note that I, Banquo is the only one of these pieces to directly prompt the audience to use their imaginations. In fact, these are the first words – ‘Just imagine, anyway’.54 I will argue, however, that the imagination required of the audience for this performance is of a different character than the collaboratively imagined narrative constructed in I, Peaseblossom or I, Caliban. When the plays were presented as three separate performances on the same evening by Company of Angels, the audience were required to leave the Studio for re-striking between performances. When the audience entered for the last performance of the evening, I, Banquo, the three sides of seats remained, and it would presumably have been possible to sit there. However, we were forcefully encouraged by John Retallack, the company’s Artistic Director, to sit face-on, as ‘this would provide a better perspective’. I am not suggesting that audience interaction of the sort which occurred during the first two performances is impossible with what is effectively a

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reproduction of a proscenium arch theatre space. Indeed, Tim Crouch successfully performed Peaseblossom with a similar front-on audience in Stratford-on-Avon, interacting fully with them, both from his position in the ‘formal’ performing area and by walking around, and indeed, over and through the audience. However, in performing Banquo, the relationship established with the audience by Adam Peck, and the dramatic and imaginative experience asked of it, are very different. Banquo was not waiting as the audience entered, as Peaseblossom and Caliban had been, although the ‘teenage guitarist (Fleance)’ was.55 When Banquo enters, he clearly addresses the audience and, as I have suggested, directly references that imagination is required of audience members. However, the acknowledgement of our presence was minimal. There was no eye contact; Banquo spoke over our heads, rather than speaking the blessings and conversations which both Peaseblossom and Caliban established directly to individuals. The opening, at least, as Lyn Gardner in The Guardian observes, ‘casts us, the audience, as the bloody butcher Macbeth’,56 as we are asked to imagine that we are friends with Banquo. Banquo goes on to relate his relationship with Macbeth as though we were Macbeth. The audience is still required to use their imaginations for this performance – to this extent, it is still meta-theatrical; we are still addressed directly, but now as a collective asked to listen, rather than as individuals asked to respond, indeed required to respond (in a correct way), before certain aspects of the performance can continue. It is soon clear that the type of imaginative work required of the audience is different from that required in the other two performances. Formerly, we have been asked to imagine events, imagine the whole story. Here, we are asked to imagine ourselves as Banquo or Macbeth, to identify with their experiences. Just imagine even if it isn’t true, not really true that we are, and how could it be seeing as we’ve only just met, but just imagine that we’re FRIENDS .57

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The character’s insistence on the fiction of the situation maintains a distancing effect to a degree. However, once effectively ‘cast’ as Macbeth, we are asked to use our imaginations not to people a scene with absent characters, not to imagine an island as represented by a few models and strains of sand, but to empathetically imagine ourselves reflected in the characters we see and hear about. I want to identify this as a markedly different manner of staging, of presenting a performance for an audience, and one that has interesting implications when we consider that the difference occurs with an age-appropriate label attached. With Peaseblossom and Caliban, a character is presented to the audience for consideration who is clearly different and separate from both performer and audience members, but is able to communicate directly with both. The performer is required to ‘act’ outside of the character in assigning roles and asking questions of the audience. This is actually clearer when performed by Crouch himself. With Banquo, there is a more consistent naturalistic presentation of a character, one who can still talk to the audience, who will tell a story and make plain the theatrical construction of the event, but who presents himself as a consistent subject, integrated with performer. Moreover, as audience members, we are asked to ‘be’ the part of Macbeth through associative imagination, rather than, as earlier, being required to ‘play’ parts by reading cards provided for us. There is no requirement of those ‘cast’ as Titania and Oberon in I, Peaseblossom to change, to imagine themselves as anything other than themselves ‘playing’ the part of their assigned character. They merely read out their lines. In I, Banquo, we are told how Macbeth and Banquo feel in ways which we are assumed to already know: ‘Imagine. Not too hard, is it?’58 These experiences which Banquo relates, the performance suggests, are universal: the idea of friends is universal, recognizable across history. As Crouch states: ‘This is a very direct way into the imaginations of the audience. We all have friends; we all know what they mean to us.’59

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I, Banquo is clearly indicated as being suitable for an older audience of children. Lynn Gardner observes that ‘it is not for the very young or anyone who doesn’t have a comfortable knowledge of the original play’.60 Crouch himself recognizes that I, Banquo is different from I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban: It’s different from the other two because it’s written for slightly older children. There’s so much blood in it that I’ve been told people under the age of 11 might faint. I don’t personally believe that! My youngest son is six and he loved the blood! Couldn’t get enough of it.61 Clearly, there is an aspect of content which has contributed to the different age recommendations – I, Banquo is more bloody, more visceral, darker, both literally in terms of lighting in this production and symbolically in terms of themes and events. However, Crouch’s rejection of the content as being unsuitable for a younger audience implies that, in fact, what he considers inappropriate for a younger audience, or perhaps more accurately, appropriate for an older audience, is the dramaturgy which abandons direct interaction and participation. The elements of staging in this production, especially in relation to the audience, identify a change in what is deemed appropriate for a mature audience, what theatre provides for an older, more mature audience and what it provides for children. Rather than suggest that increasing audience maturity requires ‘more’, of set, costume or effects for instance, Crouch equates maturity with simplicity. The effect this has on these three performances is to reduce the presence of the voice of the audience in co-creating the fiction. In moving toward the ‘purest and simplest expression of theatre’, Crouch removes from the script the direct interaction with, and participation of, the audience, and the ad-libbing which is concomitant with this, possibly because the explicitly meta-theatrical elements are an example of ‘an elaborate demonstration of what theatrical is’.62 By doing so, he constructs a more mature audience as not needing these elements.

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The narrative which is constructed here suggests that an older child neither needs nor wants a dramaturgy which involves them directly in co-creating the theatrical event. Whilst the more mature child here is still cast as doing imaginative work, it is closer to the identification which is sought by a naturalistic theatre, a theatre which Bridget Escolme, whilst warning against de-historicizing the term, says is considered ‘a serious theatre, theatre for grown-ups’.63 Crouch’s dramaturgy in I, Banquo is not overwhelmingly naturalistic; however, in connecting the dramatic subjectivity of Banquo as equivalent to our experiences outside the theatre – ‘it’s easy to imagine friendships’ – an identification between the psychological state of the actor and the psychological state of the spectator is constructed, similar to the naturalistic search for plausible real-life examples of Shakespeare’s characters which Escolme argues contributes to a naturalistic theatre. Given this construction of theatre for grown-ups as closely related to a naturalistic presentation of recognizable real-life characters and places, it is significant that the staging and dramaturgy of The Taming of the Shrew which Crouch directed for the RSC Young People’s Shakespeare (RSC YPS ) in 2011 was set firmly in a recognizable contemporary location. With lockers forming the backdrop and contemporary school uniform costuming, the production was set clearly in a contemporary high school. In some ways, in fact, this set resembled a clearly American, rather than a British, highschool setting, addressing perhaps a familiarity amongst teenagers with American high-school movies. Plausible representations of reality for this young audience, this production seems to suggest, are to be found not in ‘real-life’ but in familiar, fictional settings.64 Crouch’s production was intended for older teenagers, over fourteen, as was the production of The Taming of the Shrew which toured to schools in Warwickshire in 2005. This production was also set in recognizable locations and a clearly contemporary setting. The accompanying material in the archive shows the narrative laid out like a magazine photo-story.65 The

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production was framed with recognizable contemporary stereotypes of characters – the bratty sister, the rich, ‘chavvy’ mother.66 The characters suggested these stereotypes through the use of costume and props – Petruchio the disruptive biker in helmet and leathers; Baptista the businesswoman reading the Financial Times. Scenes are described in the prompt book as taking place in contemporary settings – a petrol station, for instance.67 Most interestingly, the ‘taming’ of Katherine by Petruccio at his house, where he constantly frustrates her attempts to eat or to be dressed by the tailor (4.1 and 4.3), is re-labelled here ‘Shaming of the Shrew’ in the prompt book and was presented as taking place within a reality television show. The prompt book notes that there is ‘reality music playing’ and that the action takes place on ‘The set of a reality TV show/s.’ Petruchio’s servants here are re-cast as ‘Production Assistants’, who ‘prepare of [sic] the arrival of Petruchio and Kate and create the world, from flight cases.’68 The shows for older teenage children follow the wellestablished formula of Shakespeare plus relevance in staging the action in recognizable contemporary settings.69 In contrast to the clearly recognizable characters and specific geographical and temporal settings of both of these productions of The Taming of the Shrew, other productions in the RSC YPS series were largely set in non-specific times and locations. Significantly, these other productions were aimed at a younger audience.70 The differences in dramatic forms used follow a narrative which suggests that maturity demands representational, largely naturalistic acting within recognizable settings, whereas presentational acting is an immature dramatic form. What was considered ‘appropriate’ for these different age groups, in terms of genre, content and dramaturgy, mirrors a narrative of developing maturity from an immature theatre of spectacle, including performers interacting directly with individual members of the audience and appealing to a populist crowd, to a more serious, artistic theatre, with a clear fourth wall and overwhelmingly naturalistic acting, which presents serious problems relevant to the lives of the audience. A development

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from entertainment to art, perhaps, and one which suggests that only children need entertainment, or in fact that those who enjoy this type of entertainment, those who ‘need entertaining’, are child-like. Audience agency and involvement is restricted to a private imaginative moment.

A political narrative? Whilst Crouch identifies it as different because it is ‘written for slightly older children’, I argue that I, Banquo is something of an anomaly, even amongst his works for a similar age group in the I, Shakespeare series, as it does not contain the playful dramaturgy of I, Peaseblossom or I, Caliban. In I, Malvolio and I, Cinna, Crouch has continued to construct his audience as agents with a voice in the performance and, moreover, asks them to explicitly consider this agency in relation to their own experience of theatre. In these later performances, Crouch uses similar dramatic devices to those employed in I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban and extends his exploration of the issues of agency. In doing so, I argue, he constructs the young audience as political and presents important opportunities for emancipation. The fourth instalment in the I, Shakespeare series was I, Malvolio, which was not presented as part of the Company of Angels production, but was being toured by Crouch at around the same time. It is possible to identify in this play an extension of the narrative of maturity which I have discussed above. Malvolio is an older man than Banquo, not a father certainly, but an older man whose thoughts have now turned to not just his own experience of life, but the wider issues in his society. This, of course, reflects his occupation in Twelfth Night as a steward responsible for the efficient running of Olivia’s household. One might plausibly view him in I, Malvolio as a responsible and engaged citizen of the type that the National Curriculum expects to produce; a person who has matured into a position of responsibility and concern ‘for the common

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good’; someone who is ‘capable of contributing to the development of a just society’.71 His position as a concerned and mature citizen is emphasized by his opening words, which are directed at the audience. He wonders aloud what to do with the crumpled piece of paper in his hand and, in the absence of a bin, wonders whether he might ‘just leave it here’ on the ground.72 He ponders the consequences of doing so, constructing from this small, seemingly insignificant act of littering a hilarious monologue, fixating on small details, which describes the potential collapse of Western civilization as arising from this one discarded piece of paper. Discarded paper is taken as representative of general littering, which extends to dropping a long list of items culminating in ‘soiled panties’ being left in the street for someone else to clear up. Malvolio extends the notion of this casual littering to spitting, which encourages flies and other vermin, and he describes the spreading ‘rot’, ‘stink’ and ‘germs’ which will spread from this, until We are left with nothing nothing nothing but a vile stinking immoral unchristian heathen evil godless mass of filth. AND ALL BECAUSE OF THIS , THIS LITTLE PIECE OF PAPER .73 Malvolio positions himself as the responsible member of society who would not allow such things to happen, who would be a role model for the young, attending church on Sundays, not drinking or smoking and always putting responsibility to his community before personal pleasure. He goes on to berate the audience for their lax attendance at church, which he sees as mirroring their lax attitude to life in general, promoting drunkenness, debauchery and a general lack of respect which is reflected in a vindictive and unkind sense of humour. Malvolio addresses the audience directly throughout, interrogating their involvement in this supposed comedy, questioning their locality (‘This is Illyria, by the way. / Where did you think it was . . .?’)74 and inquiring about their

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reason for being there. Questions are addressed and fingers pointed as Malvolio prompts the audience to consider their behaviour, wondering whether they are respectable citizens who know how to behave in society. However, Malvolio’s characterization as a model to which this audience might aspire is problematized from the start. The crumpled piece of paper to which he refers is the letter supposedly written by Olivia and left for him by Toby Belch, Sir Andrew, Feste and Maria.75 As the audience enter the auditorium, Malvolio is reading from this ‘almost under his breath’, mumbling so the audience cannot hear the words he reads and gesturing toward them as they enter, although without making any direct contact with them. He is dressed in Filthy long johns; the tattered remains of yellow stockings. Obscene stains down his front and around his groin. His face smeared with dirt. The word ‘Bawcock’ written on his forehead.76 This is Malvolio once he has been undone by the conspirators, both his dignity and his sanity sorely challenged and undermined. Though his first words, repeated often throughout his monologue, are ‘I am not mad’, little in his behaviour early on in the piece might persuade particularly a contemporary audience of this. He includes in his tirade a criticism of the lifestyle and behaviour of the stereotypical teenager as irresponsible, lazy and messy, not caring for the world around them as long as they get their pleasure, whether this be films, fast food or popular music. Malvolio’s responsible citizen, in his overreaction to the dropping of one piece of paper, is to be viewed unsympathetically as ‘a kind of puritan’ by the audience at the start of this performance, much as Maria, Sir Andrew, Sir Toby and Feste view him on his interruption of their revelries in the source play.77 Indeed, Malvolio effectively casts the audience as the conspirators who have played the joke on him with the letter,

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thus ensuring that the audience considers Malvolio as an antagonist. He draws on lines from Twelfth Night in addressing the audience directly and promising to be revenged on them for their laughing at him: YOU ARE IDLE , SHALLOW THINGS . I AM NOT OF YOUR ELEMENT. I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you. I promise that, by the end of the performance, I will be revenged on the whole pack of you.78 By casting the audience as characters from the source play in this way, I, Malvolio continues the practice that I have already identified as occurring in both I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban. In addition to the scripted moments provided for the audience to speak and deploy agency in these three pieces, in contrast to I, Banquo, all three plays also include moments where the audience are addressed directly as themselves. Questions are directly asked to individual audience members in both I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban. As with Malvolio, both characters are present on stage as the audience enter; both speak to individual members of the audience as they enter, asking names, engaging them in conversation. This interaction is improvised to fit each specific performance, but is ‘scripted’ in the printed text to link to their roles in the host plays; Peaseblossom blesses everyone and everything individually, whilst Caliban marvels at the beauty of the audience members, enquiring if we are Gods, as we enter ‘his’ island. The direct interaction with the audience continues throughout these scripts; the audience are asked their names and prompted to respond to questions such as ‘How many of you are married?’ in I, Peaseblossom to ‘Am I ugly now?’ in I, Caliban. The scripts assign the audience answers to these questions and, in performance, both by Crouch and by Company of Angels, the performer insists on a response before continuing.

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In the printed text of I, Peaseblossom, for instance, Peaseblossom’s first question to the audience is phrased thus: Can I ask you a personal question? Can I? (‘Yes’.)79 The answers the audience provide do not affect the course of the narrative; no answer is actually needed for Peaseblossom to continue. However, the italicized affirmative in parentheses indicates that this is expected. More explicitly, in the printed text of I, Caliban, Caliban’s first question to the audience, after distorting his facial features with rubber bands, is ‘Am I ugly now? Now? Am I?’ and is followed directly by ‘A “yes” from the audience.’ Whilst this sets up the next line of ‘WELL YOU ’D BE UGLY IF YOU ’D HAD A LIFE LIKE MINE ’, no answer is really needed from the audience, but again it is expected.80 These presentations go beyond the casting of the audience as characters from the source plays, for these moments at least, by engaging with individual audience members and expecting an answer. The agency of each individual audience member is put to the test, not as a character from the source play given their lines on a card, but as themselves, having to find their own words to respond. They are, of course, free to not respond, without altering the narrative to any significant extent. Caliban, for instance, can continue with the line which attributes his ugliness to his earlier life; however, it is more effective as an answer to a vocalized response from the audience to his previous question. I, Malvolio contains similar moments where the audience are addressed as themselves, the script also containing assumed answers. Indeed, these moments occur early in the performance, for instance when Malvolio directly challenges the audience within two short paragraphs, referring to the crumpled letter he holds: I’ll just drop this here, shall I? Is that what you’d do? ... Is it?

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The script makes clear that ‘He elicits a “yes” from the audience’ before continuing.81 Lyn Gardner has observed that audiences familiar with Crouch’s work for adults will ‘recognise some of the techniques put into play’ in his work for young people. She indicates as common factors involvement of the audience in the action; the undercutting of emotional material with comic; and a fascination not just with the subconscious but with the process of theatre itself.82 The fact that Crouch uses similar techniques in his work for young people and for adults suggests that he treats both audiences with a similar intelligence, which is, in Rancière’s terms, the first necessity in emancipating the audience. By using the same techniques, Crouch implicitly constructs the child audience as already able to speak and hear the same language as his adult audience – he constructs them as political, rather than as psychological. I want to argue here that, in fact, I, Malvolio is the most successful of all of Crouch’s works, whether for adults or for a young audience, in interrogating the involvement of the audience in the process of theatre. It extends the implication of the audience in the theatrical event beyond their casting as characters from the source plays, and beyond the occasional requirement to respond to questions which have little impact on the continuation of the performance, into a consideration of their individual agency, as themselves, in response to the play. Perhaps Crouch’s most celebrated play for adults is The Author, which has been the subject of a special edition of Contemporary Theatre Review considering the play in terms of the relationships it attempts to construct with audiences.83 The play recounts the rehearsal and staging of a fictional play which supposedly portrayed the sexual assault and rape of a young woman by her father. The narrative, mainly delivered in monologues from the characters, recounts the emotional

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problems the writer, two actors (one male, one female) and an audience member have experienced as a result of their involvement and contact with the production. Research into the fictional play by the actors has supposedly involved the viewing of violent videos and meeting victims of abuse, and all are deeply affected by the process in some way. However, what is perhaps more significant, and the issue which has garnered most critical attention, is the relationship between audience, performers and fiction as staged. The play, according to the script, ‘happens inside its audience’.84 Whilst this form of words hints at the notion that all theatrical performances ‘happen’ inside the mind of an audience, emphasizing that meaning is always made in an individual’s brain rather than elsewhere, this is physically true in this case, as the audience enter a space with two banks of seating facing each other and with the actors ‘unspectacularly seated throughout the audience’.85 The characters in the scripted version of the play bear the names of the actors who played the parts at the Royal Court premiere and the script indicates that character names should change accordingly if the play is restaged with different actors, apart from the author character, who ‘should always be Tim Crouch’.86 From the very start of the performance, as with I, Peaseblossom and I, Caliban, audience members are addressed directly. Chris Goode, playing the part of an audience member who attended the play, talks to the audience members near him, asking them questions which initially might or might not prompt responses, such as: This is such a versatile space. Isn’t it versatile? It’s amazing what they can do. They can do anything, can’t they? Goode quickly moves on to directly engage with individual audience members, asking their names, introducing himself and prompting other audience members to recognize that the person he is speaking to is beautiful. As the narrative develops and the subject matter of the play becomes more challenging,

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describing the actors researching beheadings and cases of physical and sexual abuse, direct addresses to the audience increasingly assume an element of checking with the audience that it is okay to continue or whether the actors should stop. Unlike the plays for his young audience, Crouch’s script provides no scripted answer for the audience. A ‘performance note’ in the script indicates that audience members ‘are more than welcome to answer’ these direct questions ‘but [are] under no pressure to do so’.87 However, it is apparent in performance that, beyond the social interactions of exchanging names and pleasantries concerning journeys to the theatre and so on, any answer given to these later questions has no effect on the trajectory of the performance. In performance, audiences occasionally have responded to these apparent invitations; in Bristol, Chris Goode stopped performing the script to respond to a frustrated audience member who complained that they were not being given an opportunity to contribute to the debate. Goode stated that the cast hoped that the questions the audience member raised were, in fact, answered in the scripted performance.88 Crouch himself writes of his own frustration with audiences who try to intervene at performances of The Author.89 In fact, this continual prompting of the audience to apparently respond, without scripting them an actual voice in the fiction, or allowing them an unscripted voice, has been a persistent point of debate about this work. Helen Freshwater describes this frustration and confusion as ‘a product of the fact that [the audience] don’t know which social script to follow’.90 It seems as if the audience are being asked to continually involve themselves with the performance, suggesting a change to the normative ‘social script’ in the bourgeois theatre where the audience sit silently watching the performers. Crouch’s script allows for no such intervention, however. This is apparent from the words which Vic speaks, noting that in the fictional rehearsals described during The Author, ‘Tim said you should get [the audience] to a point where they almost feel able to answer back’.91

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Helen Freshwater, however, argues that this confusion about the role one is expected to perform as a spectator, and the social embarrassment that can be produced by direct address, are key to the affects The Author has produced amongst audiences.92 In challenging the expectations of the audience, in both senses of this phrase – the expectations the audience hold and the expectations which the performers hold about the audience – it is perhaps not surprising that frustrations might arise on both sides as this new relationship is explored. Indeed, the very construction of the audience by theatre makers is referenced in a comic way within the play as Chris Goode speaks about how audience expectations, and expectations of audiences, mean that audiences have ‘been imagined! Poorly imagined! The audience has been badly written!’93 All theatre and performance makers might consider what audience they are developing their work for. However, in The Author, the audience is constructed explicitly as a character – the fact that it has been imagined is acknowledged. This is clear from Vic’s description of Crouch advising that ‘You have to give the audience a character, a relationship to you’ so that the relationship between the performer and the audience is ‘alive, is real, not rhetorical but active’.94 These are, of course, the reported words of a fictional Crouch in fictional rehearsals for the play described in The Author. However, his imagination of the audience in the I, Shakespeare series and how they might respond to prompts from the performer, including their imagined responses in his published scripts, indicate that Crouch is indeed concerned with investigating real, live relationships between performer and audience in his work, rather than relying on rhetorical statements about them. Helen Freshwater observes of The Author that it requires audiences to consider their own responses as it invites them to contemplate . . . It asks them to reflect upon

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the relationship between looking and doing, and whether one should watch spectacles of suffering when there is no possibility of making a direct intervention.95 I, Malvolio requires young audiences to consider similar issues of the relationship between looking and doing, and the ethics of watching spectacles of suffering. However, I argue that in I, Malvolio Crouch explores the issues of audience agency more adventurously and more pertinently than in the celebrated The Author, because the relationship between looking and doing is highlighted through direct audience participation throughout the performance. In The Author, Crouch describes his own fictional suicide attempt, not allowing the audience either physical or verbal intervention in the narrative. Any consideration of the relationship between looking (or listening) and doing in relation to spectacles of suffering must remain an intellectual exercise because the audience, as noted above, are only ever brought to the brink of intervention, to be made to feel almost as if they can answer back. Any intervention would in fact interrupt the narrative and is ultimately denied. In I, Malvolio the relationship between looking and doing is physically staged, most importantly when Malvolio attempts to enlist audience members to assist with a suicide attempt as he begins to recount the plot of Twelfth Night. Following his humiliation at the hands of Sir Toby and his fellow revellers, Malvolio asks for members of the audience to assist him: Volunteers to hold the rope. A volunteer to whip away the chair from under him. A volunteer to check his pulse after an appropriate amount of time. It is horrific and funny at the same time.96 During this preparation, according to the printed version, Malvolio is ‘always checking with the audience if they are all right about it, if they find it funny’.97 Here, both the collective audience and individual audience members are asked not

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just to respond verbally but to commit themselves to helping physically. As in The Author, the audience are asked for continual permission to continue. Whereas in The Author, however, any answer from the audience to the contrary would not stop the performance, in I, Malvolio their direct involvement is required for the scripted narrative to continue. In I, Malvolio there exists the real possibility that the audience, by refusing to co-operate with Crouch, could halt the performance. Of course, even if this does not happen, the possibility is still raised, is still performed; the very negotiations Malvolio has to stage to complete this scene illustrate this. Most poignantly, in fact, Malvolio asks an audience member to hold his hand during his last moments, while he recites a poem.98 However: The momentum is lost. He gives up. Each time this sequence ends differently as the audience is coaxed to consider its pleasure.99 Malvolio returns to narrating the plot of Twelfth Night, whilst also still ‘coaxing the audience to consider its pleasure’. The fact that this sequence ‘ends differently’ each time indicates the agency of the audience in the construction of meaning in this moment. The need for the audience not just to consider agency but to consider whether to commit to agency in the performance of I, Malvolio can produce interesting results because the responses of audiences do not always match the responses scripted for them. At the Unicorn Theatre on 4 October 2012, a member of the audience of I, Malvolio did not find it appropriate to continue assisting in Malvolio’s suicide attempt. After initially accepting Crouch’s invitation into the performance space, she responded to one of Crouch’s persistent prompts about whether she found it ‘OK ’ to continue with ‘No’. She did not want to hold his hand while he hung himself. Crouch politely, if somewhat agitatedly, returned her to her seat, before asking for other assistants.

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In fact, during this performance, there seemed a marked reluctance to assist Crouch, his invitations being greeted with silence and no movement in the audience for what seemed like very long, very awkward moments. Eventually he found two ‘willing’ volunteers. Both of these ‘volunteers’ were, on this occasion, undergraduate students of mine, and their descriptions of their involvement present an interesting contrast in the attitudes of audience members to their involvement in the piece. Freddie, who held the rope, was quite happy to be up on stage and contributing, whilst Kyle, who replaced the female audience member who refused to hold Crouch’s hand whilst he hanged himself, reported that he only ‘volunteered’ so that the performance could continue. The ways in which Crouch has dealt with the audience’s reticence in sticking to the ‘script’ in performance is productive material for a further consideration of the extent to which Crouch’s plays construct the young audience as political. For instance, after abandoning his suicide attempt, Malvolio bemoans his fate: And while I sit imprisoned, in dank despair, it becomes perfectly clear that nobody loves me. You don’t love me. Do you? Do you? Who loves me here?100 No answer for the audience is scripted in the text as it is for the audience in I, Caliban. However, on more than one occasion I have witnessed audience members answer in the affirmative to the question ‘Do you?’ Whilst there is a certain poignancy which emerges from small declarations of love and affection for Malvolio (or is it Crouch himself?) at these points, the pathos of the scene does not work if there is too much empathy for Malvolio, especially if this is voiced. Furthermore, such declarations also hinder the narrative progression as Malvolio’s next line is ‘See?’ In instances where an affirmative answer to ‘do you?’ is voiced, Crouch explains to the audience that ‘it works better if no one says anything’. He then repeats the line ‘Who loves me here’ until he receives

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no reply or can get someone to acknowledge that no one loves him. Similarly, at one point, Malvolio, his back to the audience, stands on a chair and bends over, revealing through a split down the back of his costume his buttocks and arse crack framed within leopard-skin pants. The printed version describes this as Malvolio ‘shows the audience his behind. The audience laughs.’101 However, often this has not produced a laugh in audiences of which I have been a member, or at least not one big enough to justify Malvolio’s next interrogation of the audience: ‘Find that funny still? Is that the kind of thing you find funny?’ However, in such cases, Crouch actually improvises in a way which further highlights the interrogation of the theatrical event. He instructs the audience: This is the way this works. I do something funny; you laugh and then I berate you for laughing. He then repeats the action, garnering the required response, and asks the audience, returning to the script, ‘Find that funny still? Is that the kind of thing you find funny?’102 It might be argued here that Crouch has badly imagined his audience, just as Chris complains in The Author. The character of the audience is assumed to be one which will laugh heartily at arse jokes immediately, whilst their failure to do so indicates that this is not their character. However, firstly, it must be acknowledged that, in one sense, many of the audiences for Crouch’s public performances of his I, Shakespeare plays of which I have been a member have not been so much badly imagined as reflected an increasing interest amongst adults in these plays. This has been especially the case for I, Malvolio. Whilst Crouch has staged performances of I, Malvolio for adult-only audiences, adults are not the usual target audience and certainly were not the target audience for the performances at the Unicorn, a venue associated primarily with theatre for young audiences. As Crouch’s profile increases and the links between his plays for adults and those for young

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people become of academic interest, audiences are increasingly comprised as much of adults as young people. All three of the performances of I, Malvolio which I have attended have contained few under-eighteen-year-olds, and therefore the audience behaviour discussed in this chapter must be considered in that context; an audience of school-age teenagers might react in a completely different way. They might, for instance, laugh immediately at Crouch revealing his leopard-skin pants. However, more significant than any ‘badly imagined audience’ is the opportunity created by Crouch’s need to repeat the gag. His negotiation with a live audience over their ‘scripted’ role and their deviation from it adds both to the comedy of the moment and to the consideration which audiences must give to the pleasure they derive from this form of comedy. The repetition of the gag and the coaching of the audience in the moment actually accentuate their role in the co-creation of the fiction, and therefore accentuate that they are not ‘just’ looking, but doing. The scripting of the audience responses, and indeed their divergence from these scripted responses, continues to the end of the performance. In exacting Malvolio’s revenge by leaving the audience sitting with nothing to do at the end, Crouch clearly hopes that they will remain silent as he leaves the performance area. That this is the case is evident from his response when audiences fail to remain silent and applaud his exit. Crouch’s aim here is clearly to disrupt the conventional end of a bourgeois theatre performance, applause, and leave the audience wondering when the performance actually ends and when to leave.103 Crouch clearly intends that at this point the audience, left with nothing to watch, will be prompted to consider their pleasure and involvement in the performance further, as they have been prompted to do throughout the performance.104 However, on the first two occasions I saw the performance, the audience began to applaud as Crouch left the stage. Crouch returned repeatedly to try to stop this, as it did not fit the scripted end of the performance. To encourage

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the audience not to applaud, he invented a fiction of a puppy with sensitive ears, waiting backstage, which would be irreparably damaged if any more noise were made. He promised to fetch the puppy for our entertainment as long as we did not applaud. Whether the continual audience applause here was due to some members of the audience knowing that this was the end is unclear; Crouch had already received applause after announcing ‘The End’ of the performance moments before, but it appears that these audiences could not allow him to leave without completing the accepted conventions. At the performance at the Unicorn, the audience seemed less aware of the trajectory of the performance, as they maintained their silence at this point. Knowing that I had seen the performance previously, the undergraduates with whom I attended looked to me for direction on this. I allowed the silence to continue, until one of the group began applauding, joined peremptorily by the rest of the audience before we filed out. Indeed, this moment illustrates the audience agency explicitly investigated in this performance. The student who started the applause, quite correctly I think, observed that ‘I just ended the performance’. This may, admittedly, be minimal agency; we, the audience, get to decide when the performance ‘ends’ after a period of silence. Of course, if we ignore the implicit social script of a bourgeois theatre performance, individual audience members have agency at all times, perfectly capable of ending a performance insofar as their individual spectatorship or participation is concerned, by leaving a performance. However, just as Helen Freshwater observes of The Author, Crouch’s work for young people challenges ‘the role one is expected to perform as a spectator’ as well as ‘some of the more glib assertions that are made about the link between audience participation and freedom or agency’.105 I, Malvolio presents the fullest exploration of those themes identified by Lyn Gardner and Helen Freshwater as important in Crouch’s work: audience agency, the co-existence of humour and darker

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material, and the meta-theatrical exploration of the relationship between seeing and doing. In doing so, it constructs the young audience as political in two ways. Firstly, the investigation of issues of agency in the audience and performer relationship during the performance gives the young audience both voice and agency, critical to Rancière for politics to occur. Secondly, by using the same techniques as he employs in his work for adults, Crouch treats them as of equal intelligence and able to engage with both adult themes and adult dramaturgies. By staging Malvolio’s suicide attempt in a sequence which is ‘horrific and funny at the same time’,106 the performance involves the young audience in a consideration of adult themes but also, more importantly, in a consideration of the experience of watching such actions depicted. The ambiguous casting of characters in I, Peaseblossom, where individual audience members are required to read the lines as the characters, but without any character acting, leaves open the question as to whether it is the character or the audience member who actually speaks. In I, Malvolio, the volunteers who respond to Crouch’s invitation to assist in his suicide attempt, to kick him or, later, to help him dress again in his steward’s uniform, are not asked to act a character at all. They are asked to assist as themselves. This play in performance invites the audience to consider what they are watching and their own relationship to it. It continually asks, during the performance, the questions Rancière views as the only questions applicable to education when constructing the child as political: ‘What do you see? What do you think about it? What do you make of it?’107 Seda Ilter describes Crouch’s works for adults as opening ‘up more indeterminate conceptual spaces, to be filled by the audience’s critical and creative input’. Ilter links this to Rancière’s concept of emancipated spectators who ‘develop their own translation in order to appropriate their “story” and make it their own story’.108 Such an understanding of the young audience for the I, Shakespeare plays would cast them clearly as political. Indeed, in Crouch’s construction of titles, especially when

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collected under the title I, Shakespeare, there is a further challenge to the authority of Shakespeare by assuming the position of the father figure – ‘I am Shakespeare’. When combined with the name of the character entering, there are also echoes of the mummers’ convention of entering by announcing one’s character: ‘In comes I . . .’109 That Crouch employs a popular performance trope with which to challenge Shakespeare’s authority mitigates against the narrative of psychological maturity in the work as dominant or as mirroring a narrative of maturity in theatrical forms. In Crouch’s latest work for young people in this series the audience is encouraged even more explicitly to adopt the role of an emancipated storyteller. In I, Cinna, the audience are explicitly encouraged to write their own story.

I, Cinna (The Poet) Tim Crouch’s latest work, commissioned by the RSC , was I, Cinna (The Poet) and was first performed at the Swan Theatre on 13 June 2012.110 Following the same construction of the previous plays, I, Cinna (The Poet) takes a minor character from Julius Caesar and writes a new story for him, but also includes the narration of the main part of Julius Caesar. This play continues the political construction of the young audience in a number of ways, firstly by linking works for adults and young people more closely, but more importantly by undercutting the hierarchical relationship between artist and spectator. The actor who plays Cinna is Jude Owusu, who also played Cinna in the RSC production of Julius Caesar for the World Shakespeare Festival. This continues the RSC ’s recent welcome policy, under Michael Boyd, of integrating more fully work for adults and work for young people. It also increases the status of performance for young people in the context of performances for adults, by creating a direct link between the performances. I, Cinna (The Poet) is told, according to the RSC website, by a

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‘jigging fool’.111 Although in the recording of the podcast Cinna does not appear obviously to be a jigging fool, neither does he fit any stereotypical view of a poet. He is scruffily dressed and nervous, and it quickly becomes clear that he is one of the common people. An artist, as represented here by a poet, is represented not as someone different from us in the audience, not as someone elevated or protected, but as someone prone to the same forces as us, as, indeed, is Cinna in Julius Caesar. He has to queue for scraps of food and is scared by the violence erupting around him; and whilst he tries to deny that the words he writes have anything to do with politics, he also begins to question himself on this. The world in which Cinna lives is stressed as both familiar and distant for the audience, much as Shakespeare might most usefully be constructed for a young audience, prompting them to consider as much what is different as what is the same, or supposedly ‘universal’. The set comprises recognizable household objects – a standard lamp, books, papers, a kettle – and the door through which he enters has a ‘letter box and spyhole’, standard in any block of flats. Above the door is ‘a screen onto which films are projected’.112 However, this flat appears to have been bombed; the walls are bare except for scraps of paper and a world map; half of the brick wall is missing. Similarly, the film which plays ‘slowed down images of politicians and protesters giving speeches’ on the screen above the door as the audience enter is familiar for its content from news programmes but made strange through the slowmotion delivery.113 As the film begins to display violent disputes in marketplaces, Cinna bursts through the door. His recounting of his experience of queuing in vain for bread and of his fear of going out again into streets where ‘the police are waiting at the school gates with their guns, daring us to step outside’ make it clear that he lives in a place where political violence and political danger is rife and affects the availability of daily staples.114 This is a potentially violent world, familiar perhaps from television, but not from the daily lives of the young

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British audience. This is not contemporary Britain, not the world in which his audience live, as Cinna makes clear by telling his audience ‘I live in a republic’, before enquiring of them ‘Is your country a republic?’115 The republic in which Cinna lives has, he observes, both positive and negative aspects: it is a place where ‘everyone is equal’ but also where ‘some words can get you killed’.116 Cinna’s fear of the violent political conflict outside his door, and of the constant threat to truly free speech, appears to initially support a view of the inability of ordinary people to have a political effect on their society. The options open to the ‘public’ appear limited and open to manipulation, as Cinna recognizes. He comments of the people who have taken to the streets: They want to make Caesar king. Or they think that’s what they want. Or they’ve been told that’s what they want. Or they’ve been paid to think that’s what they want.117 Cinna expresses the view that Rancière identifies as the consensual approach desired by politicians everywhere: Sometimes it is better not to think too much. Leave it to the politicians. It’s got nothing to do with poems, has it? Has it?118 However, Cinna’s repeated ‘has it?’ hints at the alternative mode of expression which might be available to the ordinary people, those who are marginalized from everyday political action. Rather than suggest that ordinary people must be excluded from the conflict which is happening outside his door and therefore have their voice excluded, Crouch takes us inside Cinna’s private space, effectively constructing this as a new public space which will recognize the voice of the ordinary people in the audience as speech. The movement of this body of the marginalized poor into sight is a political act as described by Rancière.

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Cinna, in fact, begins by describing his exclusion from the events taking place around him; he has just written a poem, ‘Watching it all go on, but feeling not quite part of it.’ Cinna describes himself as Like brackets. (I am in brackets to real life.) Do you understand? Brackets. Brackets contain material that can be removed without destroying the meaning of the sentence. That’s me. I’m a poet.119 In fact, Cinna’s parenthetical relationship to the world, and to the source play, sees Crouch return to a truly obscure character such as was first examined in I, Peaseblossom, the first of the I, Shakespeare series. Whilst it could clearly be argued that Caliban, Banquo and Malvolio are minor characters in their source plays in terms of their relation to the main plots and perhaps in terms of lines spoken, any production which omitted them would also alter substantially the relationships of the main characters. In contrast, Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has one line, while Cinna appears in one short scene in Julius Caesar.120 It is not hard to imagine either character being cut completely from a production without changing the narrative, or the relationships between the principal characters, significantly. What Cinna introduces explicitly in his meditation on the peripheral role of a poet is an examination of the relevance and usefulness, or otherwise, of poetry and, by extension, I will argue, of art, and theatre, more generally. Here, Cinna recognizes a certain irrelevance of poetry and art to contemporary life – art can be removed from contemporary society without anything important changing; it is in brackets. Art is useless; it has no meaning and no value. However, within minutes, Cinna asserts that ‘Words are free. There is nothing that cannot be done or undone with words . . . They can change things.’121 This is crucial, because Cinna implies that it is from the very lack of economic value that words derive their power. Words are ‘free’; they have no value, they cost nothing, but, as

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such, they are available to everyone and anyone to use. In recognizing the availability of words to everyone, Cinna emphasizes the equality between himself and his young audience. Just as Rancière observes that equality is assumed in the very fact that by addressing someone with language we assume they understand, they have an equality of understanding based in language, Cinna recognizes that words are equally available to everyone. In fact, Cinna’s most explicit reference to equality emerges from a consideration of potential difference between the world he inhabits and the world in which his audience live. In his subtle reference to the fact that he lives in a different country, Cinna both prompts the audience to consider the political character of their own country, and to examine how equality might be established during the performance. Cinna tells them to write on their pieces of paper the word ‘REPUBLIC ’: Do you know what this means? Republic. It means a place where everyone is equal. Where power is held by the people through a democratic system. A republic. Everyone decides together – they vote for what they want. Sounds good, yes? I live in a republic. No kings or queen. Is your country a republic?122 Cinna questions whether the space which he and his audience share is a republic and insists that he wants it to be: I want us to be equal! Here and now. You and me.123 By denoting the difference between Great Britain and other potential forms of democracy, Cinna emphasizes the familiarity and strangeness of his world. Moreover, he asserts that the equality during the performance is to exist through writing; his very next word is ‘Write’. The explicit assumption of equality and the disruption of the hierarchy between performer and spectator is also apparent in the earlier works. Certain spectators are given the opportunity

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to perform Shakespeare’s lines in I, Peaseblossom; spectators are directly addressed both before and during performances of I, Peaseblossom, I, Caliban and I, Malvolio. The equality in I, Cinna, however, is expressed through the writing of words. This performance deliberately changes the relationship between actor and audience and provides the spectators space to write their own stories during the performance. The incorporation of audience writing into the performance itself is an explicitly political act, disrupting quite overtly the distribution of the sensible which sees the performer as performing and the spectator as spectating. At first, the writing is very directed; for instance Cinna tells the audience to ‘write JULIUS CAESAR at the top left of your paper’.124 However, after Cinna draws a parallel between the supposed equality in a republic and the power relationships between words, the audience are progressively encouraged to decide what to write for themselves. They are given themes and broad instructions – ‘write two guilty sentences’ or the ‘Death of Cinna’ for instance – before being encouraged to write their own poem.125 The scripted text does not prescribe how future productions might proceed. It does, however, state quite clearly that: This play invites the audience to write during its performance. Space and time need to be given to allow an audience to find their authority in relation to this invitation. Each audience member should be primed with a pen and paper at the start.126 It is notable here that this instruction requires any production company to ‘allow the audience to find their authority in relation to this invitation’ rather than to insist on a particular means by which the audience should gain this authority. Whilst it is far from clear how this would be done, this ambiguity actually asks future producers and performers of this piece to assume their own agency and authority in making these decisions. More importantly, there is an insistence that, rather than determining how their writing is to be accommodated, it

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is the audience that determines how they will use it, both during the performance and afterwards. Whilst there is still a great deal of guidance, especially initially, the performance models the audience telling their own stories, and finding their own authority, as the performance proceeds. This carries to a new level the investigation in Crouch’s work of audience agency and the meta-theatrical approach of making obvious the construction of the narrative. The reflection on the relationship between seeing and doing which is prompted by the earlier works and is experienced in action by selected members of the audience is here extended to all audience members; every audience member is encouraged to write. In terms of educational approach, the invitation to produce writing in response to a performance is, perhaps, not particularly innovative – many approaches suggest writing and making responses to Shakespeare as a means of understanding and accessing the works. This is clear from the RSC materials which accompany both Crouch’s works and their YPS productions, which encourage writing and creative tasks following attendance at performances.127 Indeed, Kate McLuskie commends the best of the RSC ’s activity in this regard, in contrast to the video-streaming of I, Cinna, as allowing pupils ‘to explore the plays in the best traditions of progressive pedagogy’.128 However, McLuskie accuses the production of reinforcing the ‘teacher-knows-best learning that some of us had hoped had disappeared forever’.129 It is interesting to note that Tim Crouch himself responded to McLuskie’s blog, defending the production and noting that in attempting to move beyond direct pedagogical delivery and invite the audience to consider connections for themselves [he] had in mind Rancière’s idea of the ignorant schoolmaster for my Cinna – someone who doesn’t know how the lesson ends – or even what the subject is.130 I am inclined to agree with Crouch here, having originally analyzed Cinna in much these terms before reading Crouch’s

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explicit reference here. Cinna himself questions the ‘meaning’ of the performance, of the sentences he has written and of his life, none of which seem clear to him. Rather than seeking a consensual understanding of the performance which they have just experienced, the audience are explicitly told that it is not clear what the ‘lesson learnt’ is.131 The meaning of Cinna’s story is explicitly placed in the hands of the audience as they are encouraged by him to ‘Tell my story.’ The fact that Cinna wants the audience to do this, instructing them to ‘Write your poems. Send them out’, emphasizes the audience role in the construction of this meaning: they have a status and ability to tell Cinna’s story equal to that of Cinna himself.132 This attitude to the young audience as writers during I, Cinna marks this out as an overtly political act in the sense in which Rancière describes it. The end of the performance makes clear the political construction of the audience in giving them the voice which assigns meaning to the performance, rather than using writing to access a range of meanings which might already exist. Cinna’s penultimate paragraph, in fact, ascribes an importance to stories which recalls that expressed by Rancière. For Rancière, democratic politics occurs through the proliferation of stories, through the entrance of new voices which disrupt the distribution of the sensible. These stories and voices do not proceed toward a consensus, but instead emphasize the dissensus necessary for politics to occur. Shelley Manis describes the importance of ‘performative’ writing to this disruption of the distribution of the sensible.133 Manis uses Peggy Phelan’s sense of performative writing as ‘writing towards disappearance’ by writing about performance in a way which doesn’t attempt to bring that performance back, but rather ‘restage[s] and restate[s] the effort to remember what is lost’. Manis argues this approach would encourage students to conceptualize themselves not simply as critics outside the authority of performance itself when they write, but as engaged artists in a partnership with

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performance – creating both scholarship and performance themselves.134 Similarly, Della Pollock characterizes ‘writing as the constitutive form of unrealized democracies’.135 In doing so, she rejects the concept of democracy as widening access to existing forms and materials, much as Rancière does, and sees democracy as conflict, compromise and dialogue. Pollock argues closely that there are problems with supposedly democratic ideas of widening access to writing because they privilege certain types of writing and imbue a notion of the artist as possessing certain talents. She argues that this is a construction of the writer as the Romantic poet, and shows how this is a very particular, culturally constructed idea of writing.136 To reach this level of writing, clearly some instruction and induction into a particular way of writing would be required. I argue that I, Cinna permits a similar conceptualization of the young audience to that described by Manis for her undergraduate subjects, and that this is a political action, in Rancière’s terms. I, Cinna offers the audience an opportunity to conceptualize themselves as fellow artists. Moreover, it goes beyond Manis’s notion of writing about performance as a way of writing that does not attempt to bring back the performance, but instead ‘restage[s] and restate[s] the effort to remember what is lost’.137 Here, the creative response starts during the performance. The encouragement to then write afterwards is framed very much to place the writer, the young person, rather than Shakespeare, at the heart of the response. Although they are encouraged to tell Cinna’s story, the ownership of the writing is clearly theirs – it is ‘your’ poems they are encouraged to write. What then happens to these poems is clearly a matter of the material circumstances in which each subsequent performance occurs and, to an extent, of the choices made by individuals. For a time, viewers of the podcast were encouraged to submit their poems to the RSC , where ‘the best’ were published on a website.138 This institutionalization of the process, indeed,

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whilst clearly seeking to positively highlight the artistic achievements of those involved in the exercise, might challenge the emancipatory opportunities by considering certain poems worthy of publication, thereby perhaps signifying their writers as ‘artists’, whilst ignoring others, the writers of which might not be considered ‘artists’.

Conclusion In treating the young audience explicitly as equals, not in an abstract sense, but as fellow writers, I, Cinna perhaps comes closest to treating the young audience as political beings rather than as progressing toward psychologically mature human beings. Moreover, it does so by adopting the means by which Rancière, especially as adapted and adopted by Bingham and Biesta, suggests the distribution of the sensible can best be disrupted: through the individual multiplying of new stories and voices of the ‘poor’. The performance of this piece creates a potential dissensus in the distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare; young people are encouraged to privilege during the performance not Shakespeare, not even the adapted performance in front of them, but their own writing. To this extent the performance offers the opportunity for the young people to become ‘emancipated storytellers’. As Rancière suggests, emancipation can only come from those individuals to be emancipated, and cannot be offered by those in power. However, for educationalists there is an imperative to be able to offer chances and spaces for emancipation. As Rancière also says, it is then the child’s decision whether to accept this invitation and to emancipate themselves; or indeed to reject the invitation and remain emancipated by not participating. Most importantly, I argue, in I, Cinna, Crouch constructs, in Rancière’s terms, a democratic political relationship between spectator and performer. Whereas, as Pollock argues, the relationship between the Romantic notion of the artist and the reader or spectator is constructed as hierarchical, the reader

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always being required to ‘catch up’ to the poet, in I, Cinna the spectator is already considered capable of producing poetry. The spectator can already ‘speak’ the same language as the poet. Any hierarchy between performer and spectator, between artist and non-artist, or indeed between different forms of art – performance and poetry, for instance – is removed. This is consistent with Crouch’s wish to, as Stephen Bottoms describes it, ‘resist the habitual hierarchies of dynamic artist over passive audience, or of intellectual critique over intuitive creative expression’.139 Crouch constructs every member of the audience as already capable of writing, as already an artist capable of telling a story. In doing so, he treats them as political beings, in Rancière’s terms, because he adopts an attitude of assumed equality. There is no difference between the artist and the spectator in this instance. Rather than assume that there is a gap between Shakespeare as artist, storyteller, poet or theatre maker and the audience, Crouch’s I Cinna (The Poet) assumes an equal intelligence in the audience by leaving them free to watch this appropriation of Shakespeare and go outward from there, without trying to put theoretical or contextual constraints on this, much as, I would argue, Harold Bloom advocates. Crouch encourages the audience explicitly to see what relevancies emerge from their own personal encounter with each performance. Rancière observes of audiences that they are always active. The spectator, he says, observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place. She composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her.140 For Rancière, it is the recognition of the specific activity of the audience that emancipates them, that frees them from the dominating discourses which insist on an opposition between seeing and doing, activity and passivity. The writing which the

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audience are invited to perform during I, Cinna makes manifest the poems which are always composed in a spectator’s reception of a performance. Of course, by doing this, the play potentially perpetuates what Rancière describes as an unhelpful opposition between passivity and activity by suggesting that the poetic activity which Rancière identifies as existing only in the spectator’s private, internal reception of a performance is more valuable when made tangible in the form of a written poem. There is a tension here between the persistent exhortation from Cinna to his audience to ‘write’, to ‘pick up your pens and paper’, statements which are always expressed in the imperative, and the fact that the play merely ‘invites the audience to write’ and to decide themselves on ‘their authority in relation to this invitation’. It would of course be possible for any individual spectator to refuse this invitation, to construct their own ‘poem’ in response to the performance in their own head and not to share this. Rancière himself is not consistent in his condemnation of an unhelpful opposition between passivity and activity. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, for instance, he makes it clear that a teacher’s role is to encourage effort; that assessment should be made on a child’s attempt to engage, rather than on any attainment of particular forms of knowledge. In the end, some form of activity is still privileged. In the next chapter, I examine how differently literary and theatrical activity construct audiences and construct politics in relation to young people and Shakespeare.

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3 An unworthy scaffold? ‘Poor’ theatre and Shakespeare for young people The theatre must recognise its own limitations. If it cannot be richer than the cinema, then let it be poor. If it cannot be as lavish as television, let it be ascetic. If it cannot be a technical attraction, let it renounce all outward technique. Thus we are left with a ‘holy’ actor in a poor theatre.1 [Theatre for young people] is a poor, second-division area of theatre in which to cut one’s teeth or mark time.2 There is politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor. Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity.3 109

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The Prologue in Henry V seems to apologize to the audience for the lack of resources available to present the performance: But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object.4 However, as David Bevington argues, whilst ‘Shakespeare apologizes for the crude limitations of a theatre that cannot hope to reproduce the real object [he] also seems to revel in that limitation since it invites us to participate in an active and collaborative enterprise of metonymy’.5 The audience are required to use their imaginations to collaborate in the theatrical enterprise and this activity is, Bevington argues, valued. Similarly, in fact, the necessity to participate imaginatively in the contemporary theatrical event is identified by Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow as exemplary ‘international best practice’ amongst the ‘innovators in the field’ of theatrical production for young people.6 For Bodil Alling, artistic director of Danish company Gruppe 38, theatre should ‘always be “a little bit too difficult”, to counter other forms of entertainment such as television, books and games, which Alling believes are too “digestible” and not sufficiently challenging’.7 Similarly, Rose Myers, of Windmill Theatre Company in Australia, emphasizes that the ‘liveness’ of theatre, the close proximity of human actors and human spectators, is also very important to what is asked of the audience. Myers is quoted thus: Here we are, a group of people standing in front of you, creating a world which we’re asking you to enter into, and we’re requiring you to work a lot harder because we can’t give you all the special effects.8 Although he is not cited directly by these practitioners, I want to adopt Jerzy Grotowski’s term ‘poor’ theatre to describe the minimalist approach which this type of theatre celebrates as

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inviting the audience to work in the production of theatrical meaning. Grotowski identified that ‘Since our theatre consists only of actors and audience, we make special demands on both parties’.9 In this chapter I examine what meanings emerge from the ‘special demands’ which a minimalist ‘poor’ theatre makes of audiences when employed in the performance of Shakespeare for young people. I explore what meanings are made when young people are asked to ‘work a lot harder’ at performances, and how this constructs both them and their relationship to Shakespeare. I explore specifically what type of work and participation is required and valued in these performances. Poor theatre explicitly requires the audience to work, to participate in the theatrical event. However, audience participation is also one of the major factors for Matthew Reason’s assessment that much theatre for young people displays a poverty of both quality and ambition. Although he does not cite specific performances, his criticism appears based on elements of performance which encourage the type of audience participation commonly experienced at pantomimes. In citing, with approval, Matthew Reekie’s opinion that theatre for young people before the 1990s was ‘horribly poor . . . cheap, under-produced, underrehearsed, variations on pantomime with enough audience participation to keep the audiences from catching breath to realise what rubbish it all was’, pantomime and pantomimic elements are clearly identified by Reason as important factors in the poor quality of children’s theatre.10 Reason writes If we think about what we might describe as the worst habits within theatre for children, it is possible to get away with a lot through audience participation, loudness and effectively driving your audience into a state of distracted hyperventilation.11 Reason links these ‘worst habits’ with entertainment, whether for young people or adults, noting that ‘it is possible to get away with a lot and deliver very little if a production is immediately diverting, whether through sex, violence, spectacle or virtuosity’.

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Reason argues that such theatre makes ‘limited demands upon its audience’ and constructs ‘a largely passive experience’ which demonstrates an adult ‘lack of respect for the abilities of child audiences’ to appreciate greater subtlety and variety in theatrical performance. This means that in our society, Reason claims, despite the amount of noise they are purported to make at these theatre events, children are ‘silenced and marginalised’.12 Whilst the noisy and active participation required of audiences in popular performance modes such as pantomime are derided by Reason, he makes it clear that he perceives the theatrical event as potentially very beneficial to young people. The ‘ambition’ in theatre would involve ‘transforming a passive audience of consumers into an active audience’. This requires, however, not so much ‘participation’ as ‘emotional and intellectual engagement’: Engagement, that is, with both the play of theatre and the exploration of life. The result . . . is something that is more than simple entertainment, which goes further and lasts longer and means more.13 Reason describes the way in which this engagement is to occur using similar terms to those used by Grotowski and the practitioners cited by Johanson and Glow: The harder the child, just like an adult, is working to discover meaning the greater their commitment to the event and the more lasting the effect.14 The claims Reason makes for theatre echo what Rancière calls the ‘critique of the spectacle’, an idea of how art should function which emerged in the late 1960s, most obviously in the works of Guy Debord.15 This critique is, Rancière says, the idea that art has to provide us with more than a spectacle, more than something devoted to the delight of passive spectators, because it has to work for a society where everybody should be active.16

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To an extent, Reason adopts a similar outlook to Rancière by identifying that the binary between activity and passivity in spectating ignores the intellectual and affective processes which cannot necessarily be perceived by the outside observer. The seemingly passive audience member may in fact be very active internally, Reason argues. He makes the point that the supposedly ‘transfixed’ audience may be ‘passive externally (publicly) but internally (privately) very active’. Thus, it is not visible, audible or legible activity which Reason seeks from audiences in theatre – in fact, far from it – but the activity of the intellect; ‘at work interpreting, engaging, analysing and constructing what is going on for them’.17 Despite some improvements toward this type of theatre for young people, Reason argues that not enough progress has been made, citing a 2002 Arts Council of England seminar on the ‘quality of children’s theatre’ identifying a lack of ‘quality, respect and investment’.18 Reason observes that there are many reasons for a lack of quality, including commercial pressures to keep ticket prices cheap to ensure access, and the concomitant result that family productions and shows for young people, outside of seasonal pantomimes, tend to generate little income and are therefore largely excluded by the main subsidized, building-based producing companies.19 He cites a number of experienced theatre professionals who describe theatre for young people as a marginalized sector of theatre producing sub-standard work, an ‘ “add-on” rather than something to be integrated with the rest of a company’s work’.20 Reason argues that theatre for young people ‘often straddles the worlds of subsidised, commercial and community theatre, often serving competing purposes of entertainment and education, often slipping between competing criteria of quality and utility’.21 The lack of commercial viability of theatre for young people leads, Reason argues, to most primary school children seeing theatre for the first time in their school.22 Despite the many financial and practical advantages which Reason acknowledges this affords, he argues that it produces a ‘widespread concern within the industry about what such

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productions imply about the nature of the art form’.23 Again, the anxiety here is based on an assessment of theatre in schools as only entertaining and diverting, which has the effect of ‘limiting the child’s experience of the full potential of this collaborative medium. Most damaging of all perhaps, is the fact that the theatre becomes synonymous with the small scale, school and education.’24 In this chapter, I will examine to what extent performances of Shakespeare for young people are implicated in similar ‘competing purposes of entertainment and education’. I assess how these purposes affect the relationship which is created between young people and Shakespeare and the extent to which such performances provide young people with a voice. I examine how a mixture of economic, logistical and aesthetic decisions lead to most productions of Shakespeare for young people being conducted with minimal set and costume, in productions which might be associated with Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of a ‘poor’ theatre.

Anarchy in the UK ? Reviewing a performance of The Comedy of Errors, coproduced by the RSC and Told by an Idiot in 2009 and 2010, reviewers were consistent in identifying the production as playing to an engaged and entertained audience. Lyn Gardner noted that the performance contained ‘such zest that I doubt you could see it without feeling that Shakespeare is your contemporary, whether you are nine or 99’ and that the audience ‘appear to be having a riot of a time’.25 Peter Kirwan described how ‘the cast in particular seemed to particularly relish the freedom to let their hair down’ in a ‘committedly visual and physical production’ which was dominated by ‘slapstick comedy and inventive set pieces’. He refers to Christine Entwistle setting the tone for the performance by ‘spraying the audience with water, ad-libbing commentary on the action and joining in the dumbshow of the shipwreck as a

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cacklingly evil rock’ as Egeon’s expositional story in 1.1 was acted out by the ensemble cast. In Kirwan’s view, ‘the right to be ridiculous was fully embraced [by the cast] in a chaotic mish-mash of ideas and jokes’.26 Similarly, Terry Grimley highlighted the physical comedy elements of the performance, the ‘daft visual gags’ and how the action is ‘interrupted twice, randomly’ for dance numbers.27 However, there is also a certain ambivalence in all of the reviews. Whilst the audience ‘appear to be having a riot of a time’, Gardner goes on to identify the performance as ‘a little over-egged for adult tastes’ and notes that ‘there are times when the madcap invention threatens to suffocate the storytelling’.28 Similarly, Kirwan observes that ‘At times there were almost too many jokes crammed in, with good lines being lost in the hysterical reaction to the previous incident’.29 For Grimley, there was also an ambivalence about the status of the performance as Shakespeare. He describes the Year 5 and 6 primary school children who formed the audience as receiving the performance ‘enthusiastically, though it was clearly the slapstick elements that got the response, rather than Shakespeare’s text, with its puzzling references to “cozening” and “mountebanks”.30 He comments further that: Shakespeare doesn’t often lend himself to such physical, panto-like treatment, but as an exercise in giving children an introduction to the excitement of physical theatre, this show does the trick.31 The identification of the performance as ‘chaotic’, ‘madcap’ and ‘panto-like’ resemble the terms used by Reason to indicate a lack of quality in much theatre for young people. Indeed the potential for unruliness in theatre and links with the commercial entertainment of the pantomime are aspects which, for many years, made theatre seem an ‘unworthy’ site for young people, as Helen Nicholson points out. Nicholson traces an uneasy relationship between theatre and ideas of education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which drew on Matthew

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Arnold’s ideas. Nicholson observes how the anarchy which Arnold’s book Culture and Anarchy, published in 1860, seeks to counter with culture, is actually the product of the expansion of capitalism. As theatre was often too closely associated with commerciality, it was not fully adopted by those proposing aesthetic education as of benefit to the child.32 By the 1970s, however, drama and theatre were increasingly perceived as benefitting children, as is evidenced by the Theatre in Education projects which became widespread, and the development of ‘applied drama’.33 Whilst Nicholson is specifically writing about theatre in relation to education, the dominance of a narrative of education in relation to theatre for young people is evident from the contributions to Theatre for Children and Young People: 50 Years of Professional Theatre in the UK, edited by Stuart Bennett. In this collection, only David Wood addresses issues of commerciality and extensive theatre performance outside of a formal educational context, and even he makes educational claims for the popular theatre which he has produced over the years.34 The ambivalence in the reviews reflects the tension between education and entertainment which is apparent in much performance of Shakespeare for young people. The production was intended to tour to schools and community centres, and also received public performances in The Swan. To aid touring, the set was minimal and not representational of any clearly given location. An old fridge and other domestic appliances were placed at the rear of a single, square, raised shallow platform, which formed the main performing area. Across these appliances were draped some fairy lights. Performers mingled at the rear of the stage throughout the performance, mostly in clear sight of the audience, playing musical instruments and watching and responding to the action on the platform. There were few props and those that were used were treated as found objects more than representative of real-life objects. The action began with a performer creating a simple rhythm with a dry piece of toast and a metal toast rack. This rhythm (and the toast) was taken up by another performer

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before, slowly, the other performers joined in, using other instruments and found objects. The performance continued in this vein, giving ‘the production a home-made, informal feel’.35 Whilst Peter Kirwan saw this as helping to ‘liberate the production from any traces of the RSC “house style” ’, I assume that he refers to the work of the company generally, because this production actually shared many of the features of prior work by the RSC for young people.36 Indeed, the documentary produced by the RSC to accompany the filmed version of The Comedy of Errors production emphasizes that this production is consistent with the RSC ’s aims behind its ‘Stand Up for Shakespeare’ campaign: to foster, through these performances in schools and in their own theatres, a life-long love of Shakespeare by having children experience Shakespearean performance live, early and on their feet.37 Jacqui O’Hanlon, RSC Education Director, makes plain in the documentary that she sees the ‘anarchic enjoyment’ created by Told by an Idiot’s performance as a way of encouraging the young audience to come back to the theatre as adults.38 However, it is the method with which this anarchic enjoyment is produced that I want to identify as significant in other RSC YPS productions as well. In the first five minutes of the documentary, the commentary insists on the unique live character of theatrical performance and contrasts it with the screen-based media which is now available to young people. Echoing the comments of practitioners surveyed by Johanson and Glow, this commentary makes plain the competition for a young audience between contemporary theatre performance and distractions such as screen entertainment and other mobile technology. The commentary goes on to note how the RSC shows are made and performed ‘without the backup of the usual theatre technology’. The work which the audience are expected to do to collaborate in the construction of the theatrical performance is made clear; the commentator notes how ‘in the emptiness of the school hall, the actors, like their Elizabethan counterparts, have to rely on the imagination of the audience’, whilst Paul Hunter, artistic director of Told by

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an Idiot, further insists that ‘we don’t have an interest in trying to create a reality . . . we always acknowledge artifice’.39 Hunter, then, emphasizes a correlation between the audience/performer relationship during a performance using minimal resources in a daylight performance in a school hall, and the original performances of Shakespeare’s plays.40 The identification of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre practices with a minimalist aesthetic which relies on the imagination of the audience to complete the theatrical fiction has previously been made by both theatre practitioners and scholars.41 Joe Falocco notes how theatre practitioners such as William Poel, Nugent Monck and Tyrone Guthrie, who employed varying approaches to staging Shakespeare’s plays using original practices, mirrored the approach of Jerzy Grotowski in rejecting the emerging medium of film and attempted to counter it with an insistence on theatre’s one unique element, the shared space and time of actor and audience.42 Falocco, indeed, links these ‘Elizabethanists’ with the founders of Shakespeare’s Globe in London as sharing a ‘common philosophical underpinning’ by looking ‘backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century’.43 By linking a progressive use of a poor aesthetic in the twenty-first century with historical practices, Paul Hunter expresses a similar ideology. This view is also apparent in the public statement about the RSC ’s work for young people which was made by Michael Boyd, Artistic Director of the RSC : Young people and teachers deserve the best and we’re putting our most imaginative and experimental work into schools. This ethos is at the heart of the company’s work.44 Boyd’s insistence here on ‘experimental’ work emphasizes a similar narrative to that of Grotowski’s experimental work. It is clear, however, that Shakespeare for young people, for Boyd, is inextricably linked with education, indeed with formal

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education. It is not only young people who deserve the best, but teachers too, and it is in schools that Shakespeare is expected, by Boyd, to be encountered. However, these ideologies construct a persistent tension between work and pleasure in encountering Shakespeare in performance: even when not in school, the young person is expected to ‘work’ by using their imagination to complete the minimalist performances. Whilst performances at Shakespeare’s Globe no longer seek strictly to use original practices, it remains an important site of debate and research concerning both the contemporary and historical performance of Shakespeare and the behaviour and experience of the audience.45 It is therefore significant that the work for young people produced at Shakespeare’s Globe is, as Abigail Rokison observes, ‘unique’ in providing ‘rare . . . fullscale Shakespeare productions . . . specifically for young people’.46 Rokison cites Fiona Banks, Globe Education Head of Learning and Teaching Practice, as claiming that the ‘production values mirror those in the Globe’s theatre season’.47 This suggests a far closer relationship between productions of Shakespeare for young people and productions for adults than is evident in the RSC ’s work to date. The productions at Shakespeare’s Globe for young people have been mounted under the banner of ‘Playing Shakespeare’ since 2008, whereby each year schools from London and around the country are provided with free tickets to performances of specially edited and rehearsed performances at the Globe during the winter and spring months, when the Globe does not stage performances for adults. Whilst I agree with Rokison that there is a ‘simplicity of style’48 to the productions, these performances neither subscribe to any attempt at authentic practices, nor do they rely entirely on a poor theatre aesthetic. Indeed, the full use of the ‘usual theatre technology’, apart from lighting (which Hunter observes is deliberately omitted from the RSC ’s Shakespearean work for young people) is in evidence at Shakespeare’s Globe, much as it is in their work for adults.49 Perhaps reflecting the summer productions, there is, in fact, no consistent ‘house

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style’ to these Playing Shakespeare productions. Most have contained some elements of contemporary dress and popular culture and whilst there has been little use of specific sets built to depict recognizable geographical or temporal settings in most productions, Othello in 2015 was set firmly in the First World War, as was indicated by both costume and programme essays. The productions I have viewed in the archive at Shakespeare’s Globe do seem, however, to have increasingly incorporated more elaborate properties, sets and costume designs. The production of Much Ado About Nothing in 2008 included the dancing of a haka, a duet of ‘You’re the One that I Want’ from Grease performed by Beatrice and Benedick, and the return of Don Pedro and his army at the start of the play dressed in contemporary combat gear. Romeo and Juliet in 2009 had few scenic elements, although it did contain a backdrop of colourful graffiti and the younger characters were dressed in contemporary school uniforms. In 2010, Macbeth was set using oil drums and boxes and the actors wore contemporary combat uniforms. This production also included some impressive special effects, the play beginning with the loud bangs of war and a soldier abseiling from the roof of the stage. Macbeth entered on a zip wire from the rear gallery. The 2012 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had a largely bare set but had vertical banners the height of the stage positioned either side of the tiring-house entrance. These banners were used to suggest both changes of location and the operation of fairy magic, as they were turned on a hinge by Puck to reveal mirrors along their whole height, which he then used to confuse the lovers as he led Lysander and Demetrius astray in the woods. This last production, in fact, included some moments which displayed the work of its own theatrical artifice in full view of the audience, in much the same way that Hunter describes of his productions, whilst in other moments the deployment of theatrical special effects meant that theatrical work concealed the artifice from the audience. The cast for A Midsummer

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Night’s Dream was only nine, and doubling was therefore required for the portrayal of fairies, sprites, mechanicals and the lovers. At the end of the mechanicals’ first meeting (1.2), the transition of the actors from mechanicals to fairies for the following scenes was performed in full view of the audience. Puck, all in black, a punk – later he revealed a Mohican haircut – emerged from one of the oil drums. Bass- and drum-driven music started as the mechanicals dispersed, assuming positions centre-stage. Their highly choreographed movements changed as they froze momentarily before moving again. Still highly choreographed, the mechanicals took off the everyday working garments to reveal blue boiler suits. Puck handed out safety glasses. These boiler suits were then ripped from them by their colleagues, and the effect was of a purple-pyjamaed butterfly emerging from a cocoon. As this happened, Oberon crossed the stage on a scooter and autumnal-shaded brown, red and golden leaves dropped from above. Purple drapes were pulled across the back of the stage. The transition to the magical world of the fairies was therefore performed by foregrounding the theatrical work required to achieve it, to noisy appreciation from the audience. In contrast, however, one significant special effect was also employed, to similar appreciation from the audience. Lysander and Hermia entered the forest to effect their elopement, Lysander with pull-along bag and guitar. Music accompanied Puck’s magical powers as he made Lysander sit up to anoint him with the love potion. Puck then mischievously delved into Lysander’s bag, throwing out various pieces of underwear to titters from the audience. He paused on finding a frilly bra, put it on the sleeping Lysander, then took a picture with his mobile phone and sent it to Hermia. A ping of the message arriving was played. The end of the scene was a wonderful surprise use of magic: Puck exited through the bag to approving ‘whoahs’ from the audience. The transition of the mechanicals to the fairies made a virtue of the necessity of doubling and made no attempt to hide the theatrical work involved in the transition; in fact it

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foregrounded it. In contrast, the moment where Puck disappeared into Lysander’s bag utilized a small and simple use of theatrical special effects – the placing of the bag carefully above the trap door – and the theatrical trickery and construction were not revealed. Both moments were very well, and noisily, received by the young audience, who were constructed first as needing to participate in the co-production of the imagined world and second as observers of a special effect. Many of the scenes in these productions displayed spectacular moments, such as the arrival of Macbeth on a zip wire in the midst of a battle scene with loud war effects. Significantly, whilst internal and intellectual work may have been going on, young audiences for these performances, which I have observed in the Globe’s archive footage, also enjoyed the performances in a very participatory and vociferous manner.50 Interestingly, Rokison notes positively the audience’s ‘engagement with the characters and stories’, whilst expressing a concern that such engagement is devalued slightly by being ‘perhaps a little pantomimic’ and accompanied by noisy reactions to representations of romantic or sexual activity.51 Rokison’s concerns here parallel those expressed by the reviewers of the RSC YPS The Comedy of Errors and by Matthew Reason about theatre for young people generally. Whilst this suggests certain similarities between the productions of both companies, there are significant differences which should be noted. The RSC ’s main work for young people is delivered in schools, rather than in their main theatres. Whilst there have been an increasing number of public performances, it is clear that they are designed for touring to other venues. In contrast, Shakespeare’s Globe stages performances for young people at the Globe. These still contain some educational imperative, as is clear from the provision of tickets via schools and the educational tie-ins available both on their website and in their publications of Shakespeare’s plays. However, the link to imaginative work, which is stressed in the RSC ’s productions, is far less clearly established in the Globe’s productions. The

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title of the series under which the Globe’s productions for young people are staged is also significant here. Whilst ‘Playing Shakespeare’ points to the term used instead of acting in the early modern period, the use of the term here also suggests implicitly that any activity required of the audience is not ‘work’. Although the young people attend as members of school groups, they are outside of the school and this constructs the audience more closely as partaking in a leisure activity: they are ‘playing’. Given this, it is significant that Christie Carson identifies the work at Shakespeare’s Globe as increasingly challenging the dominance of the RSC precisely because it participates in popular performance tropes and more fully in an economy of entertainment. She identifies the work at Shakespeare’s Globe, which is not publicly funded, as populist but also, importantly in the context of this chapter, as engaging in similar democratic relationships with the audience as they are beginning to adopt in their digital lives. Whereas the comments in the RSC documentary position theatre as opposing new digital media, in much the same way as Grotowski positions theatre as opposing film and television, Carson suggests that the work at Shakespeare’s Globe pursues similar techniques to digital media by encouraging audience participation and agency.52

Matilda the Musical In contrast to Paul Hunter’s production of The Comedy of Errors, the ‘usual theatre technology’ is, however, often present in the work of the RSC for adults and, more significantly, in their non-Shakespearean work for young people. Matilda the Musical is an incredibly successful show aimed at a family audience, first produced by the RSC in December 2008 and transferring to London in 2009. Most reviews of the production celebrated both the technical and the human aspects of the production. Whilst the presence of the actors and the encounter with them was certainly an integral part of the show, there was

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also extensive use of multi-media effects, huge song and dance numbers, an elaborate set and elaborate costuming. One anonymous audience member reviewing the production on the Theatres.tv website commented that the show does not look out of place amongst other commercial successes The Wizard of Oz and Wicked deliberately showing the audience where every last penny of their grievously inflated ticket price has been spent.53 This reviewer noted the excellence of the set designs, ‘slick set changes and some moderate special effects’ and ‘what can only be described as theatrical “smoke and mirrors”.’54 Another audience member on the same site also comments that ‘The production is undoubtedly slick, glossy and highly impressive, with lots of dazzling special effects and children that are remarkably well drilled.’55 This was a technical masterpiece; in addition to excellent composition, acting, singing and dancing, the technical elements certainly added to the entertainment value, with, for example, magic writing appearing on a blackboard and desks rising from under the stage at the start of a major musical number. Libby Purves, in The Times, correctly identified the production as ‘a vast technical musical built around a small child’.56 The relationship between the technical and the human in this production is significant in an examination of a poor theatre aesthetic in performances of Shakespeare for young people, both because it illustrates the different types of theatre aimed at a young audience and because of the subject matter of Matilda. The story concerns a young girl with magical powers, trapped in a family who do not appreciate her. Her attempts to bond with this family are limited by their ‘addiction’ to television. The whole show, in fact, is consistent with the book, and popular Americanized film. All reject television as a negative influence on children and childhood. Matilda finds her solace in books, rather than theatre, but it is significant that this theatrical performance is also based clearly on a

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rejection of television. In the narrative of this story, television entertainment produces unintelligent and uncaring adults, whilst reading, and presumably theatre, produces intelligent and caring adults. In fact, Time Out’s review was a description of the show as aimed at contemporary Britain, with ‘a couple of spot-on anthems for dumb Britain, like the number in which Matilda’s mum (Josie Walker) recommends “less fact more feel” and “less brains more hair” ’. Indeed, significantly, ‘this is one for telly-lovers too, despite its timely celebration of libraries and heroic literacy teachers’.57 Clearly, for the majority of this audience, a theatrical entertainment as an alternative to television does not need to be ‘poor’. Despite being ‘anti-television’, the rich, technical aesthetic of this performance allows a television-educated audience to view this show without difficulty. Indeed, the Time Out reviewer extends the similarity in experience between this theatre production and television by commenting that the show ‘should spark a lifetime love of theatre for a new generation of round-eyed show-goers’.58 The use of the term ‘round-eyed’ constructs the audience member as being in thrall to the spectacle of theatre in a description that is more commonly used with respect to screen audiences, but there is also a clear parallel here with the language used about widening-access projects aimed at building a life-long love of Shakespeare. However, in identifying ‘a new generation of round-eyed show-goers’ (my emphasis) a very different type of theatre audience is constructed than is constructed by the poor theatre performances of Shakespeare for young people. Both Told by an Idiot’s production of The Comedy of Errors and the RSC ’s Matilda the Musical are entertaining and enjoyed by young people. However, even though Jacqui O’Hanlon, RSC Education Director, emphasizes the ‘anarchic enjoyment’ as central to the experience of The Comedy of Errors, I argue that in adopting a poor aesthetic, this production also explicitly expects the audience to experience more than ‘mere’ entertainment. The production requires imaginative

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work from the audience, in contrast to the production of Matilda the Musical. By doing so, I argue, it constructs Shakespeare for young people as educational, where Matilda the Musical is constructed as ‘mere’ entertainment. Entertainment is, of course, not a simplistic term or concept to deploy here. It is, however, as the authors of an important recent study into theatre audiences acknowledge, ‘a word that theatre academics have often been wary of [because it] is often thought to be in opposition to a more intellectually or socially engaged theatre’. As the authors argue, entertainment and supposedly ‘richer aesthetic and cognitive values’ are not, in any case, mutually exclusive.59 However, the wariness of theatre academics around theatre as ‘mere’ entertainment, which is acknowledged in research on adult theatre audiences who make their own decisions on what theatre to attend based on a myriad of artistic, financial, geographical and personal reasons, is only exacerbated in relation to theatre for young people. Here, as with other artistic and cultural products aimed at children, the educational imperative is never far from exerting influence. For instance, children’s literature, as Victor Watson suggests, is inherently strange in that it is produced by an adult audience for a young audience; it is not a meeting of equals, but rather a meeting of imaginative minds looking in opposite directions. Watson argues: It is unlike any other literature. Though there are many kinds of fiction written for specific groups of readers (gay literature, for example), such literatures invariably involve a reader/writer negotiation between equals. But children’s literature is unique in this respect: that its writers and intended readers are biologically and socially different from one another. Even when writers genuinely believe they are writing from ‘the child within’, or are adept at capturing a child’s authorial voice, I do not believe that children ever lose sight of the fact that the books they are reading are produced by adults.60

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Theatre for a young audience operates with the same dynamic. It is overwhelmingly performed by adults, and even where significant numbers of the cast are young people, such productions are predominantly written, directed and controlled by adults.61 Moreover, access to theatre performances is also overwhelmingly controlled by adults; whether financially by parents buying tickets, or logistically by teachers arranging school trips to theatre performances or visits into schools by theatre companies. What this effectively means is that adults set the agenda for children’s theatre experience; what is considered ‘good’ or ‘suitable’ for children is decided using adult criteria. This extends to whether specific theatre experiences are intended to be educational or entertaining. Sophie Masson, writing about adapting Shakespeare for young people, identifies this status of literature for children as placing a pressure on writers for children that is not evident for writers for adults: that is, to produce a ‘message’ in their work. It is not enough ever to only entertain, even where some entertainment might be desirable. She argues that children’s writers are subjected to the kind of inquisition no one would dream of applying to adult fiction . . . Never mind the story or the characters, what’s the message of your work? What are the issues? What is the moral? What values will children learn from this book of yours? And will teachers gain enough from it to construct lessons that will then ask students to determine what is the moral/message/values of your poor little work, which only set out to entertain, to spin a few happy hours? Can it be fitted into a school of thought, a polemics of some sort? In short, is your book – your imagination’s child – useful, or frivolous?62 The imperative to have some educational use for any children’s artistic or cultural activity is, in fact, clear from the educational resources which were produced in relation to Matilda the Musical, which I have identified above as constructing its

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audience as encountering entertainment, rather than work or education.63 It is interesting to note that the educational resources for Matilda the Musical were produced only once the production was established as a successful show in London. For a semi-permanent production in London, the availability of educational resources for schools is an added selling point to attract school parties. However, whilst, to an extent, ‘work’ following a school visit to a play might be expected, whether this is creative or analytical, what interests me here is the difference in programmes published for each production and available to the public at large. The difference in the programmes emphasizes the different constructions of the performances as educational work and entertainment. Robert Shaughnessy identifies theatre programmes as texts which can illuminate the changing practices and habits of theatregoing itself. This is in part a matter of the ways in which they manage the relationships between expectations, experiences, memories and desires; the program, as something to be consulted before, during and after a performance, also provides evidence of how productions facilitate or determine the responses of their audiences.64 I want to examine the programmes for The Comedy of Errors and Matilda the Musical in this respect; as an integral part of the performance experience which facilitates and manages the responses of the audience. Whilst it might be expected that a pack produced for use in schools would link to the need for studying the plays and being tested on them, such a focus might not be expected of a publicly available programme. The programme for the public performance of The Comedy of Errors was free and contained the biographies of the actors and details of the creative team which are a common feature of most theatre programmes. Significantly, attached to these biographies were questions about each person’s first experience of Shakespeare, their opinions on the productions and their

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favourite Shakespeare character. This clearly sought to link the actors with the audience, presumed to be encountering Shakespeare for the first time. More importantly, the very short section on activities was linked directly to the play, and required reflection and thought on the production. Under the sub-heading of ‘The Port of Ephesus’, reference was made to how the setting was ‘designed as a jumble of leftover rubbish’ and asked: ‘What clues help you to know that you are in a port?’65 Recognizing the ‘Organised Confusion’ which a comedy of this sort requires, readers were asked to consider: ‘What helped you to understand what was going on?’66 Readers were also prompted to consider their feelings in relation to Dromio being hit, under the sub-heading ‘Words and Actions’, and finally, under the sub-heading ‘Working Together’, readers were prompted to return to a consideration of the work they had to perform during the play through considering the music and how they thought ‘this helps with telling the story’.67 The young people are here being prompted to remember and consider the imaginative work that was required of them during the performance. Acknowledging implicitly that the aesthetic of the production meant that the location of a port was not portrayed by realistic scenery, the programme asks the audience to interrogate and analyze the theatrical techniques which were used to construct a stage reality. They are being asked to work at remembering the activity they had to engage in to co-create the performance. What is significant here is that Shakespeare for young people is presented not only as an experience to prompt further thought and work postperformance but as one that involved work during the performance. To an extent, it might seem inevitable, and indeed desirable, that young people treat the theatre experience as both enjoyable and a learning experience. However, in contrast to the free programmes available for The Comedy of Errors, the expensive programmes for Matilda the Musical in Stratford bore closer similarity to the programmes available at the main RSC performances of Shakespeare. The programme contained more extensive

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biographies of the cast and creative team, as well as short articles relating to the making of the show and its origins in the works of Roald Dahl.68 In addition, the programme contained activities for the audience member. Whilst related to the themes of the show, these were not as intellectually based or challenging as the activities suggested in the programme for The Comedy of Errors. The activities had no obvious educational imperative and were presented merely as fun ‘games’. Indeed, their titles emphasized a distance from any educational content, and stressed that they were not serious. Thus, the programme contained ‘Tomfoolery with Titles’, a series of anagrams of Roald Dahl book titles; ‘Silly School Reports’, which allowed the reader to construct a report based on their birth date from words written on a ‘blackboard’; recipes; spot-the-difference pictures; a wordsearch grid; and a fortune teller which could be cut out and made.69 Clearly, there is a difference in the response being asked for by the programmes. For The Comedy of Errors, the audience member is asked to reflect on how the performance was constructed and what imaginative work was required of them; for Matilda the Musical they are presented with games linked to the production but, in fact, in no way dependent on having seen it. The games do not ask the audience to consider their experience of the theatre performance at all. Instead, they extend the entertainment which was available in the performance. Matilda the Musical is therefore placed by its programme and the majority of the reviewers firmly as theatreas-entertainment.70 Matilda the Musical and The Comedy of Errors clearly construct their young audiences differently. These differences illustrate perceptions of theatre for young people as commodity, entertainment, art or education. The RSC YPS The Comedy of Errors, as with most performances of Shakespeare for young people, is constructed by adults largely as educational, whereas Matilda the Musical is constructed as entertainment.71 Indeed, Matilda the Musical, whilst clearly not a pantomime, might be understood in similar terms. It was first performed as a

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Christmas show at Stratford, and contains many elements common to most traditional pantomimes: the child-centred story; the conflict with parents (the usual trope in pantomimes is an evil step-mother whereas here it is both natural parents); the dame (Miss Trunchbull was played by Bertie Carvel); the song and dance numbers. As such, it might be categorized as an entertainment of the type which Reason derides, although clearly this performance was not ‘under-produced’ or ‘underrehearsed’. What is even more significant to note is the difference in aesthetic between these two productions. In identifying the rich theatre aesthetic of Matilda the Musical as suitable for entertainment only and the poor theatre aesthetic of The Comedy of Errors as suitable for educational opportunities, the RSC identifies the work required of audiences in the latter as highly appropriate for young people. In which case, to use Masson’s terms, what is the message, the moral or the polemics of such poor theatre Shakespeare? The ‘message’, to use Masson’s term, in the use of poor theatre is that playful work and active participation are identified as more valuable than passive spectatorship. More importantly, it is a particular type of participation that is valued. The RSC YPS The Comedy of Errors invites vocal and physical activity from the audience during its performance: its associated programme, however, stresses that it is important to reflect on the other work that was required of the audience, the work that was involved in co-creating the fiction presented in a minimalist aesthetic. It is this intellectual activity of remembering and interpreting which is required of young people at minimalist performances of Shakespeare that sets up an interesting relationship between the young as ‘poor’, in Rancière’s sense, and other groups that are potentially ‘poor’. This is because the valued activity in these ‘poor’ performances of Shakespeare is an intellectual, rather than vocal or physical, activity. This, I argue, positions the young audience of Shakespeare as participating in an elite activity, rather than an activity which is accessible to all: it is only through the active

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deployment of intellectual activity, of immaterial labour rather than manual, physical labour, that these performances of Shakespeare can be enjoyed and appreciated fully. In fact, the position of the audience as elite is emphasized further by the way in which the poorer characters from Shakespeare’s plays are portrayed in poor theatre productions.

Where are the poor? The cutting of the poor characters from versions of Shakespeare for young people is both common and long-established and I do not suggest that it is only the minimalist, poor theatre aesthetic which omits them.72 Indeed, it is significant that contemporary productions for young people at Shakespeare’s Globe, which I have described above as not adopting a poor or minimalist aesthetic, tend to cut these poor, working characters. Penelope Woods notes that the main 2009 summer Globe production of Romeo and Juliet both incorporated servant characters often cut from performances and, indeed, introduced non-scripted serving characters carrying out chores on stage.73 In the winter 2009 Playing Shakespeare production of the same play, these roles were cut, and Woods argues that the cutting of the servants as a bodily presence on stage led to the questions directed at these servants in the script being directed at the audience, effectively ‘casting’ them, for those moments at least, as the servants, as the poor: Taking the servants away means the audience have to do a very different kind of work and be consequently differently implicated in the unfolding of the narrative.74 The audience are physically implicated in the narrative as the servants, Woods implies, potentially even being required, encouraged or tempted to respond vocally to the direct address to them. This places them similarly to the casting of the young audience in much of Tim Crouch’s work.

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The poor are also absent from political and philosophical work, according to Jacques Rancière, who describes in The Philosopher and His Poor how politicians and philosophers have similarly ignored, marginalized or excluded the poor in their work.75 Rancière argues that even supposedly edistributive democratic policies, in their technocratic management of economies and societies, ignore the poor. The poor, then, are both unseen and unheard, even, for Rancière, in the works of those who claim to speak of democracy and equality, because the poor are not recognized as capable of putting forward arguments. For Rancière, the poor are those who are excluded, who are considered poor in availability of time as well as poor in a material sense and, in fact, only exist as an entity through politics. It is important here to re-emphasize that Rancière’s description of the operation of democracy and politics differs from most understandings of democratic politics. As I outlined in Chapter 1, Rancière describes democracy as operating in relation to the distribution of the sensible, the opinions and ideologies which are recognized as legitimate discourses and which circulate and compete for primacy in a society. This distribution of the sensible is what most understand as democratic politics. For Rancière, however, as we have seen, this distribution of the sensible is termed the police. The point for Rancière here is that all arguments within the distribution are already heard. Politics occurs only when the poor are heard and seen, are caused to exist, rather than ignored. While Rancière identifies an exclusion of the poor from philosophical and political writing, a similar exclusion of the poor in modernist bourgeois and avant-garde theatre has been observed by Peter Brook. Brook is a clear admirer of the ‘poor’ theatre of Grotowski and contemporary experimental theatre practitioners, but he identifies that the very purity of their resolve, the high and serious nature of their activity inevitably brings a colour to their choices and a limitation to their field. They are unable to be both

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esoteric and popular at one and the same time. There is no crowd in Beckett, no Falstaff . . . These theatres explore life, yet what counts as life is restricted.76 It is, of course, notable that it is Shakespeare who is held up, by Brook, as a model of how theatre can incorporate both the esoteric and the popular. The ‘life’ which is included in Shakespeare’s plays is potentially wider than that offered by most modernist works and, I argue, it is this potential in performance to present a polyvocal representation of all humans, including the ‘poor’, which makes Shakespeare particularly amenable to the production of emancipated spectatorship. In the poor theatre of the twenty-first century touring companies, there are no crowds of humans; the limited economic resources and cost of actors prohibits this. This point is plainly stated by Lorne Campbell, artistic director of Greyscale, who performed Coriolanus at Shakespeare Unplugged in 2010, who observed that his directorial choices for the production were governed by ‘not being able to afford more actors’.77 In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine to what extent the adoption of a minimalist theatre aesthetic in the performance of Shakespeare for young people may result in a loss of individual or social identity, especially of the ordinary person, the ‘poor’. I draw on research conducted with young people attending performances at Bath’s Shakespeare Unplugged festival in 2010, and consider their reception of these performances, partially in an attempt to counter their potential position as ‘poor’ in the distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare. Neither this festival, nor the productions which toured to it, made overt educational claims. Shakespeare Unplugged was described in promotional material as a ‘season of Shakespeare, deconstructed and reconstructed for a 21st Century audience’ and one of the aims of the festival was to involve all the youth groups in some way, whether by performing or by documenting. I do not consider performances by these youth groups in this

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book. The touring performances which were booked were intended to be ‘accessible and artistically successful interpretations and adaptations of Shakespeare’ for young people rather than to offer any direct or measurable educational benefit.78 However, Lindsay Baker, manager of the egg in Bath, significantly identified the biennial Shakespeare Unplugged festival as attracting a markedly different, and new, audience to the venue when compared to the regular audience at the egg. Referring to ticket sales data which indicated that 31 per cent of tickets for Shakespeare Unplugged were purchased by new bookers at the Theatre Royal, he identified this audience as ‘seeking valuable extra-curricular educational experiences’ for their children, in contrast to the egg’s regular audience, which sought ‘family entertainment’.79 Baker’s observation here confirms Michael Bristol’s view that ‘Shakespeare is ambiguously positioned vis-à-vis the culture industry’ and is ‘linked both to a particular sector of the culture industry and to larger economic structures typical of late capitalist society’.80 Whilst clearly a commercial product, this is largely true of Shakespeare for what Bristol terms ‘upscale markets’ rather than mass markets. As Bristol observes, Shakespeare is also seen, by teachers and parents, as an antidote for the debilitating effects of the culture industry. This view is endorsed by anxious parents hoping that school bus trips to the local Shakespeare festival might save [young people] from the seductions of rock videos.81 Nearly all of the productions at Shakespeare Unplugged 2010 attempted to overcome the lack of human actors available to depict large crowds by using non-human objects. The Animated Tales of Shakespeare, produced by en masse theatre, presented Macbeth and The Tempest with an actor, a musician and an illustrator, the latter using overhead projections to depict both locations and characters, with some acetates drawn live.82 Homemade Shakespeare presented Macbeth using cutlery and condiments; Hamlet with two gloved hands; and Romeo and

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Juliet using the contents of two dustbins, including the rubbish bags.83 TheaterGrueneSosse’s Henry the Fifth used balloons to represent the troops of the battles.84 For Tiny Ninja Theater Company (TNTC ), Dov Weinstein manipulated small toys available from vending machines to represent all the characters in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.85 Greyscale presented Coriolanus using small, plastic toy soldiers to represent the different factions of Rome.86 One benefit of using non-human objects as actors is that the massive armies and crowds merely described in many Shakespeare productions can be staged. TNTC did not present its production of Macbeth at Shakespeare Unplugged 2010. However, as Kevin J. Wetmore observes, this production has the ability to have ‘entire armies on the set’ and, argues Wetmore, is therefore able to better represent ‘reality through the highly artificial nature of toys on a tiny stage’ than other productions of the play.87 Indeed, at the climax of this production, piles of the tiny figures represent the slaughtered thousands resulting from Macbeth’s battles, a tiny red laser light playing poignantly over the mountains of non-human flesh in a way that would be very difficult if using humans for this. Tiny Ninja Theater Company did present Hamlet at Shakespeare Unplugged 2010, and its reception amongst audiences was intriguing. This production sees a development in TNTC ’s performances as it includes live filming of the action of the play, which is depicted through manipulation of small toys. These filmed images are displayed on two large screens suspended from the ceiling. Thus, the audience can watch the action unfold on the table-top upon which the play is performed, or on the screen. This makes the performance available, in one sense, to a larger audience – attendance is usually restricted to approximately thirty because of the necessity to be close to the figures to appreciate the performance properly. Whilst some beautiful and intriguing images were produced – the filming accentuating the sense of surveillance, for instance – there was also a sense amongst the audience that

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they were distanced from the performance. This led to numerous audience members leaving the performance. The production of Hamlet, as with Macbeth, has previously been generally well received by reviewers. Kevin Wetmore praises the professionalism of both productions and compares them favourably with other Shakespeare productions for the ‘heights’ which they achieve.88 He places the production in relation to the avant-garde production of Shakespeare for a knowledgeable audience, stressing that the context of the usual performance venues and the price of tickets mitigates against considering this performance ‘being merely a young man playing with action figures in public’. He stresses that these performances are ‘not aimed at youth, they are aimed at those who seek out alternative New York theatre’.89 The performance in the egg, in a festival aimed at a young audience, perhaps then explains why Hamlet was less successful here. Todd Borlik is similarly enthusiastic about TNTC . However, writing about the production of Macbeth, he argues that: It would, for obvious reasons, be hyperbole to claim that Tiny Ninja Hamlet conveyed the full-blown tragic pathos latent in the text. Yet its titillating juxtaposition of the high art of Shakespearean tragedy with the (literally) low art of puppetry suggested that the gulf between them, as well as the gulf between the human and the puppet, is much narrower than is dreamt of in our criticism.90 Borlik does not make clear his ‘obvious reasons’ for preferring not to make claims which Wetmore does make about this production, and which are frequently seriously contemplated when reviewing other productions. In contrast to the generally negative and muted reaction this production received at Shakespeare Unplugged 2010, and in contrast to Borlik’s unwillingness to consider Tiny Ninja Theater as quite on a par with ‘full-blown’, serious Shakespearean productions, Olim, a member of Press Gang, was enthusiastic about the production. Olim described the TNTC Hamlet as

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a production of Shakespeare . . . it was a RSC rate production with full Shakespeare [?] . . . slightly abridged and just . . . the only difference was that it used tiny ninja figures from vending machines.91 Olim is here able to actually see beyond the form of the theatrical presentation in a way that Borlik is not, and to make claims for this production on a par with any made for the RSC productions which he, along with many others, regards as the benchmark for Shakespearean production. It is, perhaps, significant to note that Olim was home schooled and attended theatre regularly with his parents, both in Stratford and Bath. In this sense he was, at the time of the performance, already a member of an established and regular theatre audience and had knowledge of other productions. Whilst the regular audience of which he was part was perhaps not one of Wetmore’s ‘avant-garde’, his prior knowledge and experience may have made him more receptive to the production’s aims. Greyscale’s three-man performance of Coriolanus also made use of small toy soldiers to represent the thousands potentially slaughtered in battle. Their production was shown as a work in progress. Clearly laid out on the stage from the beginning was the shape of a human body, constructed from toy soldiers. Different coloured plastic represented each faction of the different parts of the body politic of the Roman people, as related by the ‘pretty tale’ of Menenius. At times during the performance the toy soldiers were used as ‘puppets’ by the actors, to represent individual characters. To portray the battle of Corioles, two of the actors bombarded the actor playing Cauis Martius with the soldiers. The production which was most clearly and consciously performed within a poor aesthetic at the festival was TheaterGrueneSosse’s Henry the Fifth.92 The director, Detlef Kohler, described their approach as ‘very poor and reduced and abstract theatre’ and, when prompted by me, confirmed his use of the term ‘poor’ as derived from Grotowski.93 This production, described as ‘based freely on Shakespeare’s “Henry

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The Fifth” ’ in TheaterGrueneSosse’s promotional material, adapted King Henry V to be played by four actors, one of whom narrated the story. The set comprised a sand castle, freshly built before each performance on a table, which was surrounded by ropes suggesting a boxing ring. The English and French armies were represented by helium-filled balloons weighted down by dog tags. These balloons were initially presented in a comic context; as they were inflated using helium from a tank, one was deliberately allowed to ‘escape’, once inflated, into the roof space, whilst another was allowed to ‘escape’ before the gas was secured within, as a consequence flying and flapping randomly around the stage space making a farting noise. The use of the balloons and the sand castle was an innovative response to the limitations noted by the Prologue to Shakespeare’s King Henry V. Where the Prologue suggests the play will ‘into a thousand parts divide one man’ (Prologue, 24), this production represents the thousands of common men in the army by a few balloons. No explicit request was made of its audience to make the same division, although the storyteller made it clear what he was doing when inflating the balloons. The ‘brave fleet’ (3.0.5) which the Prologue asks the audience to imagine was depicted here using sticks with flags. At the climax of the performance, as the war-weary, ‘ruined band’ (4.0.29) of the English soldiers becomes surrounded, they were represented by the application of plasters to the balloons which represented the English soldiers, as they were placed to defend the sand castle, the dog tags being inserted into the sand of the castle. In a slow, deliberate manner, the green French balloons surrounded them, being tied loosely around the ropes which formed the main acting area. The battle itself consisted of two actors fighting with wooden swords. As they lunged at each other, they burst balloons, and eventually destroyed the castle. All that was left of each ‘soldier’, as each balloon was burst, was a withered piece of rubber and a dog tag. The synecdochic use of objects to represent humans in these productions, for me, illustrated the low value ascribed to

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human life in war and politics. This was emphasized in both Coriolanus and Henry the Fifth by the uniformity and easy disposability of the toy soldiers and balloons used; any individuality was lost and their only value was in being part of a mass, whether the armies or a rioting crowd. Indeed, when compared to Lorne Campbell’s observation that one of the reasons for having such a small company was the expense of actors, the (literally) throwaway value of the common soldiers and citizens as represented here was stark. Contrary to how a multitude is often perceived, however, Shakespeare’s plays often offer common characters individual voices, rather than as just part of a mass with indistinguishable voices. In Coriolanus, for instance, the citizens do not speak with one voice, but argue with each other about how to respond to Menenius and then Cauis Martius during the opening scenes.94 Their individuality is, in fact, most apparent when the citizens are constituted as an audience for what Coriolanus himself recognizes as a performance – when he has to display his wounds in the market-place to obtain the plebeians’ voice to become a consul in 2.3. The fact that Coriolanus is required to speak to them in ones and twos, rather than as a crowd, displays an aspect of this ‘custom’ which is rarely emphasized – it is not a multitude to whom Coriolanus speaks; it is to (a collection of) individuals. They are a more interactive audience with the opportunity for more immediate feedback than in the majority of theatre audiences, but what is significant is that they do not speak with one voice in relation to this performance – they debate, and disagree on, Coriolanus’ sincerity and worthiness. Similarly, in King Henry V, the common soldiers are given individual characteristics which mitigate against treating them as an unindividuated mass. The scenes with Falstaff’s followers in 2.1 and 2.3 provide both an immediate counterpoint to the Chorus’s claim that ‘all the youth of England are on fire’ (2.0.1) and an opportunity to see these ‘poor’ characters portrayed as individuals. They also provide a commentary on the maturing King and his actions, as well as providing potential

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comedy and bawdy from a common perspective. They allow multiple viewpoints to be established as they do not agree: they have individual voices in a discussion. Just as Coriolanus is brought into direct contact with the plebeians, so is the disguised King in King Henry V. The three common soldiers whom he encounters in 4.1 are not important for my argument here for anything of substance that they say, but for the fact that they speak at all: that they are shown as reasoning men. These soldiers, along with the citizens in Coriolanus, speak with individual voices and are included in what Rancière would call the distribution of the sensible. Indeed, their behaviour in each of these scenes, debating a range of responses to public events, is an example of the practice of ‘dissensus’.95 Shakespeare stages and embodies the common person as an individual and makes this individual voice available to the audience. These poor theatre productions of the plays do not stage or embody in human form these common characters, and therefore they remove their individual voices. I am not holding up Shakespeare as a model of the combination of the high and low aspects of life in the way in which Brook does, or suggesting that these productions reduce or limit Shakespeare. However, for Rancière, the absence of a voice of the poor problematizes the operation of politics which occurs, in his terms, only when the part of the poor is caused to exist. In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine the reception of these poor theatre performances by young people to consider what meanings might emerge once such performance decisions have been made. I also critique methodological approaches to working with young people on their experience of theatre by examining which approaches give them a voice which would cause them to exist as an entity in academic discourse. By doing so, I extend Rancière’s notion of politics. Audience voices are still largely absent from the academic discourse around theatre; to include their voices here is to cause the poor to exist as an entity and is therefore, in Rancière’s terms, a political act. I place my own research partly in response to the work of

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Matthew Reason, one of very few scholars published in the area of young audience reception.

Are the youth of England on fire? During the Shakespeare Unplugged festival I distributed questionnaires, observed performances and audience behaviour before, during and after performances, worked with a youth group called Press Gang, comprising eight members between the ages of seven and fifteen, and conducted a drama workshop with pupils from a local school who had attended a performance of Henry the Fifth. Press Gang was advertised as being for ‘budding young writers and theatre go-ers’ who were offered the opportunity to ‘get involved in every aspect of the egg’s work’.96 Whilst they had been introduced to some more progressive forms of approaching performance documentation through sessions with ‘New Generation Documentors’, a journalistic approach under the guidance of a professional, practising journalist dominated.97 The young people produced reviews and articles for the Theatre Royal’s website which followed the format of the dominant forms of newspaper theatre reviews, identifying plotlines and character portrayals, assessing performances and proffering some limited personal expression of like or dislike. The professional journalistic guidance clearly gives the young people valuable experience, but it is limited to an instrumentalist approach to writing in the pre-determined style of theatre critics. During the period of the festival, between February and March 2010, Press Gang comprised of ten young people aged between nine and fifteen. I conducted two workshops prior to the start of the festival and two short sessions during the festival, followed by one group interview following the festival. I encouraged the young people to approach and document the performances at the festival by privileging their experience, how they felt, rather than necessarily what was happening on stage. They wrote letters to Shakespeare, describing their

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experience of watching his plays. During the final discussion, we considered every production in the festival and discussion was not limited to those who had seen the production; in this way preconceptions were investigated in comparison with actual experience of the performance. Addressing each production, I asked for a one-word description from each member and discussion developed from there. I led the discussion, asking questions which addressed issues of interest that had arisen for me during the festival, although I also tried to incorporate a consideration based on the words used by the participants to describe each production. I tried also to allow the conversation to develop based on the questions and interests of Press Gang members. The ethical considerations of working with young people include protecting their anonymity. For this reason, all recordings of discussions and workshops were kept in secure digital location and were passwordprotected. To ensure their anonymity further, the names I use here to represent the views of Press Gang members, or those attending the drama workshop, are all pseudonyms which were chosen by the young people themselves. The use of discussion with young people reflected my intention to privilege individual voices, to highlight different, and perhaps even competing, narratives of experience of theatre. I was not attempting to identify how an audience might respond as one. However, I still think it is instructive at times to find out how individual opinions relate to those of other audience members: for instance, whether they are in a minority. Some weighting here is important to illustrate where an individual’s opinion, however interesting, fits into the views and opinions of their peers. It was for this reason that I also distributed questionnaires in addition to conducting the discussions and drama workshops. I will draw on all of these research methods to consider the reception of this piece of poor theatre by the young audience.98 I began my workshop by asking the participants to focus on remembering the performance event and what aspects of it were significant to them. I conducted exercises to ask them to

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remember the day, two weeks prior to our workshop, when they attended the performance, then asked them to split into two groups and, first, to construct tableaux reconstructing the performance and, then, to animate these tableaux. The workshops concluded with word association games and a discussion about Shakespeare, theatre, and their experience and attitude to both. The balloons and the sand castle featured prominently in the questionnaires returned after performances of Henry the Fifth, which was well received, with none of the forty-seven completed questionnaires categorizing the performance as ‘poor’ and 72 per cent rating it as either ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. The words used to describe the performance during my Press Gang discussion by those who had seen a performance were ‘funny’, ‘symbolic’, ‘disappointing’, ‘weird’, ‘strange’, ‘fun’, and the sand castle was described as ‘creative’ and ‘really nice . . . it looked like a castle . . . it was clever when they knocked bits off with their hands’.99 Fifteen respondents to the questionnaire noted the balloons or the sand castle as the best thing about the performance. During the question-and-answer sessions which followed each performance, interest mainly lay in technical issues of how the sand castle was made and how snow was produced. All of the tableaux created during the drama workshop contained images of the balloons popping. Indeed, it was often specifically the metonymic use of the balloons and sand castles that was implicitly appreciated, as can be seen from the views of Emma: I thought it was really, really good because the sand castle . . . basically they were fighting over a castle . . . and there were only . . . 4 people . . . and the battle scenes they couldn’t have done with only 4 people so using the sand castle it was really effective.100 In identifying the use of the sand castle explicitly to address the difficulties of presenting a battle with a small cast, Emma recognizes the metonymy as effective and appropriate. The

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appropriateness of the sand castle was a matter of some disagreement, however. For Flora, at the time aged fifteen, the use of the sand castle was deemed appropriate ‘because you associate sand castles with younger children’. This very association with a younger age group can produce anxiety in older teenagers if they feel they are attending a performance aimed at a younger audience. However, even those expressing more scepticism about the use of a sand castle enjoyed its use and acknowledged its effectiveness, as the following extract of conversation shows: Awesome Person: I thought the sand castle was actually quite a childish approach. Jan: In a bad way? Awesome Person: I’m not really sure. It was quite clever because it was like two children fighting over a sand castle; it was basically the sort of thing children would do.101 In discussing the use of balloons to represent soldiers, the response from Press Gang was generally positive. When asked to explain to those who had not attended, the following exchange took place: Daisy: They were the soldiers and each time one of them got killed they popped a balloon . . . Henry the Fifth’s soldiers had plasters over them because they were injured . . . the other’s . . . the King of France’s . . . he’d looked after them really well . . . Hepzibah: Because they were child friendly plays; they had to do that I think. Because otherwise if you just pretended to kill someone on stage that would be quite scary because if you were little would you really think that was the case so they had to do that I think. Dumbledore: I thought that was really good because even though young people wouldn’t really get that I thought it was really good.

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Olim: When I interviewed the director . . . about why he . . . made all the little symbolic things about the balloons and the sand castle . . . he simply said I made the symbolic stuff up afterwards; I simply put them there because they could be destroyed and then replaced. These young people interpret the use of balloons and the sand castle as a creative response to presenting war to the intended audience. Moreover, Daisy makes clear that the use of plasters to represent ‘[T]he poor condemned English’ with their ‘gesture sad . . . lank lean cheeks and war-worn coats’ (4.0.22–6) was an effective way of communicating visually what the Prologue in the original tells the audience. Rather than asking the audience to imagine the state of the army, the audience are presented with an appropriate visual image of the weary troops. Olim’s report of his discussion with the director here actually highlights the symbolic association of the dispensable status of the common soldier in war throughout time. Despite the way in which individual deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq have been commemorated recently, in an important sense such soldiers will simply be replaced by another soldier, another body, just as the director tells Olim that these balloons can ‘be destroyed and then replaced’. Of course, as a teacher accompanying a school party observed, the main purpose of a dog tag is for identification purposes in the event of death. For her, this added a poignant human element to the balloon whilst also illustrating the de-humanizing nature of war, where loss of identity is all too common, in the sense both that individuals lose their lives, and that they have already lost their individuality if represented by a dog tag.102 The use of balloons was also identified as ‘appropriate’ for the young target audience by Hepzibah from Press Gang, aged eleven, who suggested that a young audience would not cope with the acted death of a character. During the discussion following the drama workshop, Jemma also identified the balloons as ‘appropriate’:

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I prefer balloons because they, like, actually disintegrate when they pop; men just . . . act. To an extent, Jemma here voices a different view to Hepzibah: the ‘death’ of the balloons does not protect a young audience from experiencing the emotions connected with the death of another, but rather reinforces these. However, they are still appropriate for the function of portraying death. Indeed, Jemma displayed a sophisticated understanding and appreciation of the theatrical act. She displayed an awareness of thought which extended beyond the moment of performance in identifying the actors specifically as actors: as humans who go home every night and will perform the same parts and, if required by the part and play, re-enact the same deaths night after night. The balloon really is destroyed – it will not suddenly get up at the end of the action and take a bow, or take part in the next performance even. It is destroyed: that is what killing someone does.103 For many young people, then, the use of these elements was effective in addressing the question that TheaterGrueneSosse wanted to raise through this performance – a question which was posed explicitly to the audience through the transmission of prerecorded children’s voices chanting ‘Are we allowed to watch a war?’ at the beginning of the performance. For Jemma, who notes a preference for balloons, the practical aesthetic choice of using the balloons made the point most effectively. However, when discussing the issue with Press Gang, the poor aesthetic was not the determining factor in the effective answering of this question: Olim: I think it is OK to watch a war because then you learn, right OK , what’s this for . . . now you’ve watched it . . . remember never ever do that because you have seen that lots and lots of people have ended up. Dead. Jan: Is it OK to watch a war in a fictional film? [About half respond ‘yes’.] Flora: It’s OK because it makes it less likely to happen again if people see it.104

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Olim and Flora separately identify an educational imperative behind theatrical representations of war, because ‘you learn’ that war is wrong and this leads to it being less likely to occur in the future. The conversation continued: Emma: I think it’s OK as long as it’s not made to look glamorous; that’s really wrong. Because my brother made me watch Black Hawk Down . . . And it didn’t make it look glamorous at all; it made it look really horrible and I think that’s good because a lot of time guns, like in James Bond, even subconsciously you’re being made to think they’re really glamorous and I think that’s totally wrong. Hepzibah: It’s alright if you can see that it’s fake. Olim: It’s OK if it’s fictional. Daisy: Like in Narnia; they have a war there. Jan: Can it be entertaining to watch a war? [Three respond that ‘it depends’, the rest categorically ‘no’.] Jan: Did you think Henry the Fifth glamorized war? [A resounding ‘no’ from all.] Emma: The purpose of it was to make it look not glamorous. Jan: And you think that worked? Emma: Yes. Definitely.105 These young people display an ability to discuss issues across different media, which suggests that they do not treat the theatrical event as appreciably different from other media experiences. Significantly, the young people here indicate that a poor theatre aesthetic might be particularly effective in addressing the particular question of the depiction of war because it is the lack of ‘glamour’, or spectacle, and the display of artifice that is considered important. This suggests that poor theatre’s antithetical relationship to the ‘society of the

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spectacle’ is crucial in the successful reception of the aesthetic choices made by the theatre makers. However, these young people discuss the depiction of the war in Henry the Fifth in relation to the battles in the Narnia series and the scenes in contemporary films such as Black Hawk Down, cartoon violence, high-action violence in the same terms. Neither theatre, nor one particular aesthetic presentation, is marked out by the young people as a particularly effective, or superior, cultural experience. Pearson and Messenger Davies note a similar response in their research and suggest that theatre is not separated out as a distinct cultural experience by audience members. They argue that audience members are capable of defining their own relationships with different media. Among them, there is no such thing as the ‘theatregoing public’ or ‘the television-watching public’. There are simply different modes of engagement.106 Pearson and Messenger Davies refer to adult theatre audiences who, presumably, already possess the critical competencies to which Johanson and Glow and Matthew Reason refer. The discussions I have detailed above suggest that young people, when asked to express their own opinions in relation to theatre performances, display that they already possess similar critical competencies. I move now to consider my own methodology in comparison to Matthew Reason’s, for evidence of where these critical competencies are accepted and where, in contrast, they are regarded as still to be learnt.

Assessment of methodology The questionnaires, discussions and drama workshops all suggest that the poor aesthetic used in this performance of Henry the Fifth produced both enjoyment and engagement for the majority of the audience. However, significantly, the

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questionnaire responses also identified the minimalism of the poor theatre aesthetic as the worst thing about the performance and the area which needed improvement. Thus, twenty-nine of the forty-seven responses identified ‘more’ actors, characters, scenery or props as a suggested improvement for the performance. Two further responses to the question ‘what was the worst thing about the performance’ identified a need for ‘scenery’ and ‘more actors, more scenery’. Such responses may, of course, be directed by the type of question asked. My questionnaire included three small sections which allowed free-form answers. These were: What was the best thing about the performance? What would have improved the performance? What was the worst thing about the performance? There is a possibility here that children might respond to this question by looking for things to improve the performance even if they had not thought about such considerations at all as they watched. Such marketing-style discourse may encourage the respondents to always ask for ‘more’. However, a number of considerations would lead me to assert that my reading of these responses does indicate a certain tension in the young audience with regard to a poor theatre aesthetic. First, the question is phrased so as to be open; it is just as possible to be prompted by this question to answer ‘less’, whether of people, balloons, or any other aspect of the performance. Secondly, many responses to the question ‘What would have improved the performance?’ indicated ‘nothing’, both in relation to this performance and other performances within the festival. This indicates that, in practice, children do not feel the need to identify elements that would make a performance better just because they are asked this question. Finally, responses from young people who had seen the performance previously, which were included in the promotional material provided by TheaterGrueneSosse, indicate similar attitudes.107 All of the responses included in

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this promotional material found the use of so few actors impressive. Martha and Lowri thought that it was very clever play how you used so little people for a big play. We thought it was very enjoyable and very creative idea to do and you made it very simple and easy to understand. Similarly, Chloe and Adam ‘thought it was very clever how you did a whole play with only four people’. However, Chloe and Adam also note ‘that you could of [sic] done it a tiny bit better . . . if you had more costume and more of an interesting background’, whilst another unnamed pair ‘think that you could have dressed up a bit better so that you suited your character’. The comments on Henry the Fifth show a tension with the poor theatre aesthetic. However, these comments also show that the young audience are engaged not just with the content of a performance but with its form. Whether finding the metonymic use of balloons positive, indicating a desire for more elaborate or realistic set or costume, or wishing for more actors, the young audience appear as interested in the means of portrayal as they are in the content of the performance. My own research here tends to confirm the findings of Matthew Reason in this regard and challenge, as Reason does, the earlier findings of Willmar Sauter. It is Sauter’s contention that children are focused exclusively on the fiction of the performance and that the method of performance is unimportant. Sauter refers to research in which children were asked to draw pictures of their experience at a performance, which Sauter describes as including persistent reminders of the artifice of the performance as well as the fiction. A puppeteer involved the children in the construction of the puppets used during the performance and in discussions about how it worked; in their drawings, Sauter notes the almost total domination of the fiction on stage, whereas the way in which it is performed seemed secondary to children . . . for children it does not make very much

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difference if these rabbits were performed by puppets or by adult actors, as a pantomime or as an opera.108 In analysing the pictures drawn by the children involved in his own research, Reason initially follows Sauter by identifying that it is the fiction presented that dominates, rather than any physical reality. Similar to Sauter’s findings, Reason identifies the drawings made by the children in his research as not appearing to depict the puppets that the children could see, but the animals which the puppets were intended to portray. Reason initially observes that it is ‘possible that there is something about the nature of drawing that in itself encouraged one form of representation’.109 Both Sauter and Reason used drawing in attempts to overcome the limitations they saw as inherent in the written or verbal response to performances, especially when researching with children. However, Helen Nicholson finds Reason’s decision to use drawing as a means of investigation of the theatrical experience surprising. In assessing his work with young people, she commends his nuanced approach but wonders ‘why he had not considered how their experiences of seeing plays might also be interpreted creatively in their own drama and dramatic play’ rather than in drawing.110 In fact, elsewhere Reason has interrogated the problems of addressing performance in writing. He writes persuasively about the need to review and consider artworks in their own form. He recognizes that writing reviews about written material is appropriate because it is in the same milieu – one uses words to describe other words and can quote from the original writing under consideration – whereas, in a theoretical musing, he suggests that the only comparable way to comment on, or review, performance is to make a performance.111 Reason questions Sauter’s methodology and the readings he derives from this. He notes that Sauter has apparently used drawings in isolation as evidence of the children’s concentration on the fiction rather than the reality so extensively insisted on by the puppeteer in this performance.112 Reason comments that ‘In the end we can only really speculate as to why the children’s

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drawings seemed overwhelmingly to neglect the reality of the theatre.’113 This seems a strange comment, given the specifics of Reason’s research, because he and his team did, in fact, talk to the young people about their drawings. During these conversations, when asked why they hadn’t drawn the puppets, the children answered that they had, in fact, drawn the puppets they had seen. Their own interpretation of the drawings, in contrast to the adult researchers, was that their drawings accurately represented the puppets they had seen as part of their theatrical experience. Thus, not only is Reason not restricted to speculation – he has the children’s conversations to draw on – but he seems to devalue their own voice in interpreting their own artistic work. Reason does acknowledge that ‘it is necessary to match the drawings to the children’s conversation, with the result that a much more ambiguous and multi-layered impression emerges’, but does not accept completely the interpretation which the young people themselves assign to their work.114 It is significant here that child psychologist Peter Smith identifies that it is only language that allows some definitions between object and pretend play as children develop in their playing. Although talking about younger children than those with whom Matthew Reason researched, Smith notes that it is only when a child is able to report that they are making a prison or a spaceship out of bricks, for example, that some differentiations between object and pretend play can be made.115 Similarly, it might only be when children are asked about work they have done that it becomes clear to an observer whether they are drawing a puppet or what that puppet signifies. This accentuates the need to talk to young people and listen to their interpretation of their actions rather than assume that an artistic response, whether drawing or drama, to artistic activities can somehow produce a more truthful or insightful account of the young person’s experience of the event. If divorced from their interpretation of their response, we are once more left in an adult world of interpretation of child behaviour. My decision to use a drama workshop in part reflected a desire to go beyond the written response, or even the spoken

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response, which can feel so limited when addressing responses to performance. The drama workshop allowed respondents to use performance to quote from, and comment on, performance in the same medium, as Reason’s theoretical musing suggests. In asking the participants to construct dramatic reflections on their experience of the theatrical event, I also wanted to acknowledge a philosophical approach of ‘not knowing’. Rather than the researcher adopting a position of authority, this approach insists on perceiving the child as expert on his or her own art creations and experiences. Such an approach involves asking participants to make creative artefacts as part of the research process and then inviting them to reflect on and discuss the artefacts with the researcher.116 It is for this reason that I want to acknowledge explicitly here that my own reading of the performances of Henry the Fifth, which was, after all, not aimed at me as a target audience, differed from that of the young people with whom I was researching. I read the use of balloons for individual humans as denying the individual voices of the lower class (poor) characters, as silencing the poor. In contrast, the young people tended to perceive the metonymic use of balloons as effective, as highlighting the plight of individual (poor) soldiers in battle, in that these objects really cease to exist once popped. The use of the balloons was seen as an entirely appropriate and somewhat poignant dramatic device. However, rather than, as I believe Reason does, try to position and understand the responses of the young people within my own framework, I want to present both in an attitude which does not privilege either. In fact, by trying to reconcile the interpretations of the young people with whom he researches with his own interpretations, Reason is attempting to present a consensual view of the research. Following Rancière in identifying the establishment of consensus as a police operation rather than an act of politics, I prefer to allow these potentially contradictory opinions to remain together as a demonstration of dissensus and therefore allow a political act within this book.

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More importantly, whilst I continue to believe that nonwritten and non-verbal approaches to exploring children’s theatrical experience, including drawing and practical drama workshops, are useful and valuable, they are perhaps then prone to being interpreted by an adult researcher from an adult perspective. It seems clear from this that to reach an understanding of how the children themselves experienced the theatrical event it is necessary to listen to their voices, rather than to ask them to portray their experience in another way and then to interpret it using adult words. Whilst Reason’s approach is democratic, progressive and methodologically sound in seeking to attain meanings which may not appear in writing or speech, it is only once he considers the voices of the children and how they interpret their own drawings, rather than how he or his fellow researchers interpret them, that he reaches his final conclusions. My own research, which relied on spoken testimony and dramatic reconstructions of the memory of the performance, confirms what Reason found once he talked to the young people: they are as engaged by the aesthetic mode of a performance and by the techniques used to make it as they are by the fictional content with which they are presented, if not more so. In fact, the drama workshop which I conducted was very forceful in emphasizing the central role of the balloons in the reception of Henry the Fifth, as the groups variously used their own bodies to represent balloons being inflated and then popping. Rather than represent the battle in some other way, they deliberately reflected the aesthetic choices made by the company presenting the performance; it was the form of the theatrical experience which they represented rather than the fiction.

Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to include the voice of the ‘poor’, of the young people so often denied a voice in the distribution of the sensible around art and culture which is produced for them. I have done this to the extent that I want to include

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views which do not correspond with my own, to honour a multi-vocal approach, to include a Rancièrean political dissensus. To an extent, Matthew Reason does similar work in advocating a range of innovative research methods to investigate young people’s experience of theatre. Indeed, I have been inspired and influenced by his work in many ways, adapting both theoretical approaches and practical ideas for workshops. It is therefore somewhat surprising, given this earlier work, that in drawing such excellent research into a book, Reason begins to silence the voice of the young audience in his ideas for engaging the young with theatre. He begins, I argue, to adopt a thoroughly adult voice in advocating what sort of theatre is appropriate for young people and how young people might learn to behave appropriately as a theatre audience. I argue that, in doing so, despite his fear that the status of theatre is diminished by its association with education, he constructs the best quality theatrical experience for children as implicitly a learning experience. I have already identified how Reason associates a lack of quality in theatre for young people with the entertainment mode of pantomime. Reason goes on to question whether theatre as entertainment is appropriate for children at all. He notes that: there is nothing fundamentally wrong with sheer entertainment if nothing more is claimed or desired. However, saying there is nothing wrong with it, is not to say there are not some limitations, or that more is not possible.117 Although Reason states that there is nothing wrong with ‘sheer entertainment’, clearly he thinks there is; this is evident in the language which speaks of what populist entertainment can ‘get away with’ by working audience members into a ‘distracted hyperventilation’, ‘diverting’ the audience with a ‘largely passive experience’. It seems a little perverse to characterize the noisy, appreciative young audiences described by Reason at pantomime-type performances as passive.The‘hyperventilation’

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into which they are ‘distracted’ seems to suggest activity, indeed extreme activity. Reason acknowledges that criticizing theatre which appears successful and is enjoyed by young audiences in the moment might be open to accusations that such criticism is ‘motivated by subjective taste or by class and elitism’. However, he counters such potential accusations by referring to the unique character of a theatre experience: It is here that the richness, the fullness, distinctiveness or potential of the audience experience of theatre is relevant. It is a question of the abilities and nature of young people as an audience and of our ambitions for that audience.118 Thus, far from being an investigation solely into how children experience theatre as Johanson and Glow state, Reason’s work increasingly becomes a treatise on what sort of theatre should be provided for them and how they should experience it. Indeed, despite his protestations against accusations of elitism and subjective taste, what Reason argues for is not a universally unique experience which all theatre provides, but rather a modernist, bourgeois theatrical experience, which involves an audience sitting in the dark, working intellectually and emotionally but not responding physically or vocally. This is highlighted in his wish for students to learn to behave according to existing theatrical conventions within theatre buildings.119 But, of course, this is not what theatre is but one historically and culturally contingent form of theatre. Reason wishes, effectively, to widen participation in an existing form of theatre, rather than allow young audiences agency in shaping the type of theatre they want now, or indeed what sort of theatre they might make and enjoy once they become adults. Reason’s work is valuable in giving voice to young people in describing their experience and in his highly self-reflective and critical assessment of his methodology. However, notably, certain aspects of the young voices, those ‘hyperventilating’ voices which seem to enjoy pantomimes, for instance, are only

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portrayed as noise. Indeed, it is interesting to note that, when presenting those voices which seem to benefit from and appreciate the modernist theatre of which he approves, Reason speaks directly to young people and quotes them individually. In contrast, when referring to the enjoyment of pantomimestyle entertainment, he draws solely on his own interpretation of events, supported by anecdotal evidence from other, adult, theatre workers. Significantly, this change in methodology is not accompanied by the critical attitude which so illuminates his earlier work. The ‘distracted’, ‘diverted’ and ‘passive’ audiences remain an undifferentiated mass. In differentiating the intellectual activity of quiet, individual spectators from the noisy behaviour of an anonymous audience, Reason appears to adopt a distinctly elitist modernist position.120 In doing so, he implicitly re-constructs theatre as an educational experience which he has previously identified as highly problematic. Increasingly, Reason is interested in what adults want for young people, or, to use the language of Johanson and Glow, Reason’s later work treats the child as ‘becoming’, rather than ‘being’.121 By focusing on this, he limits the useful political act of hearing the voice of the young audience. Rather than allowing the young audience voice to exist as a dissensus which might disrupt the distribution of the sensible around theatre, Reason tries to ‘police’ the young audience’s voice by identifying how it might be accommodated or trained into the existing distribution of the sensible. Similarly, the poor theatre productions I have considered in this chapter construct a young person’s experience of Shakespeare as being asked to contribute actively to the completion of the theatrical performance. In contrast, the spectacle of theatrical entertainment that is Matilda the Musical is not constructed by the paratextual materials of the programme as requiring the same activity. Abercrombie and Longhurst go beyond the existing models of audience research to suggest a new paradigm which places audience members in any situation as belonging on a continuum depending upon their behaviour in that particular

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audience situation. This continuum, as defined by Abercrombie and Longhurst, is reproduced below: Consumer–Fan–Cultist–Enthusiast–Petty Producer122 Abercrombie and Longhurst stress that they seek only to understand audience behaviour in these terms, rather than to construct a hierarchical relationship, as ‘improving’ from left to right. The distinction between the situations is based upon ‘textual production’, which Abercrombie and Longhurst understand as the making of new meanings by users of media, whether this is textual in the sense of writing, or in the participation with other enthusiasts in other discursive activities around the performance in question. They describe ‘consumers’ as ‘most likely to experience an event and do or say nothing more about it’ and say that ‘as the label would suggest, [they] are involved in little textual production’.123 However, they also argue that ‘it is important to note that [consumers] are involved in textual production through talk, which can often create alternative texts, even if these are fleeting and not written down’. For Abercrombie and Longhurst, ‘in general for consumers textual production is discursive in the sense of involving talk and is woven into the fabric of everyday life’.124 As an individual moves from left to right across the continuum, they suggest, ‘textual production increases in importance’. Thus fans, cultists and enthusiasts will become progressively heavier users of other media or means to pursue their interests in the given activity, moving eventually, potentially to being a petty producer, or one who participates in the creation of the given activity or event.125 To place this activity identified along Abercrombie and Longhurst’s continuum, entertainment requires ‘only’ consumption, whereas the work which is identified as necessary

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for more serious theatre, such as Shakespeare, constructs audiences as clearly more than consumers. Whether this is as fans, cultists or petty producers, participation is accentuated, both in the active decoding of the event after it has happened – in talking about theatre – and in the co-construction of theatre events during their making. For the RSC, the ‘mere’ consumption of the spectacle of Matilda the Musical is seemingly appropriate for young people, whilst such an experience in relation to Shakespeare is apparently not. With Shakespeare, the young people are expected to move along the continuum to make some ‘textual’ contribution to their experience of the event, even if only in talking (or perhaps even if only in thinking) about it further. Young people are effectively constructed by poor theatre performances of Shakespeare as apprentice professional spectators by constructing an active intellectual model as necessary. The positive adoption of a poor aesthetic may overcome the poor quality of theatre, in Reason’s terms. However, to treat the young audience members as ‘becoming’ professional spectators is not to treat them politically, and it therefore limits emancipation. Whilst Reason echoes Rancière by noting that not all activity is visible, Rancière also insists that emancipation is dependent on a rejection of the binary between activity and passivity; Reason still privileges activity. This suggests the continued domination of the existing distribution of the sensible around bourgeois theatre: a physically and vocally passive audience which is intellectually active during and after the performance. It does not interrupt the dominance of the (intellectually) rich in the distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare. It may disturb the authority of the rich theatrical event, but it does not interrupt the dominance of the intellectual rich; rather it perpetuates this by insisting that a professional spectatorship of Shakespeare is appropriate, while this is not required of other, popular, theatre events. The young are only given a voice insofar as this exhibits work and activity; the poor, then, are not caused to exist as an entity. A poor theatre staging of Shakespeare constructs an appropriate theatrical

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event for young people as explicitly rejecting contemporary popular forms. This means that Shakespeare continues to be constructed as high culture. In the next chapter, I consider how the popular might in fact be used to disrupt the distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare for young people.

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4 ‘No feeling of his business’? Negotiating Shakespeare as literature and theatre for young people And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.1 Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard as discourse what was once only heard as noise.2 Evening all. I’m sorry I’m late. It’s my own stupid fault; I took a wrong turn on the way to the graveyard and ended up down a dead end. BooBoom.3

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In this chapter, I examine how performances of Shakespeare for young people might produce an example of ‘political activity’, in the way in which Rancière understands it, by problematizing a hierarchical relationship between literary and theatrical experiences of the plays. I do this largely through an examination of the role of the clowns in Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Robert Weimann has argued that Hamlet’s attitude to clowns – that they ‘speak no more than is set down for them’– is representative of an emergent literary ideology in the early modern period which seeks to undermine any performative authority which clowns had on the stage by insisting on the authority of the author’s text.4 I draw on Weimann’s argument to consider the performance of clowns within Rancière’s understanding of politics and assess the potential for political activity in shifting the body and words of the clown in contemporary performance from the derided position assigned to it in literary discourse. How might a theatrical approach to Shakespeare for young people, an approach which privileges the temporally and geographically specific collaborative process, be promoted in the face of a continuing literary approach which privileges ways of accessing the meanings produced by an individual author? As William Worthen suggests, in eras prior to the institution of literature, to consider the stage as a vehicle for the reproduction of textual authority is extremely problematic. Robert Weimann identifies the role of the clown as an important residual element of popular culture in early modern theatre. He also argues that popular culture was gradually eradicated from the early modern theatre.5 To hear and consider the clown’s role in performance for young people as discourse, rather than noise, might be, I argue, a political act which can provide possibilities for emancipation in the contested site that is Shakespeare in early twenty-first century Britain.

‘Authorized’ Shakespeare Hamlet was produced by the RSC in 2010 as part of its series of YPS performances, which was re-launched in 2005 to coincide with the publication of A Manifesto for Shakespeare

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in Schools to promote a theatrical approach to Shakespeare for school children. I use Susan Bennett’s term ‘authorized’ Shakespeare here because, as suggested in Chapter  1, the influence of the RSC ’s productions, partly through the dissemination of this Manifesto, reaches many more young people than those who attend them as live performances.6 The RSC YPS production of Hamlet toured to Warwickshire and London schools and was performed at the Swan in Stratford, which is where I saw the production. In common with the productions described in Chapter 3, minimal scenery and few props were used, the action taking place against black curtains, which served as a demarcation between front and back stage in schools.7 In front of the screen were seven black cubes, which were subsequently moved to create the merest suggestion of a change of location or scene. The performance lasted approximately seventy minutes and included snippets from popular and folk songs, a very youthful Hamlet, and an expanded comic role for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This RSC YPS Hamlet made significant use of popular culture, mainly through contemporary songs being sung by the cast. In addition, the play was performed with much humour, using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for increased comic effect. They were portrayed in a manner which, to both myself and a young audience member with whom I attended the performance, suggested Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They often acted as incompetent buffoons, which added comedy to their attempts to have Hamlet murdered on his trip to England and indeed to their own deaths. These scenes, only related by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s text, were portrayed on stage. The reviews of the production were largely positive. For instance, Peter Kirwan commented on the ‘appeal’ of the ‘style and wit’ in the production, which ‘seemed to appeal to all members’ of the family. Indeed, despite what Kirwan described as a ‘wilful disregard’ for textual authority in diverging from the accepted text, he praised what he saw as ‘a more “authentic” approach to Elizabethan drama that more serious productions could learn a great deal from’.8 Just as Kirwan made a passing

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reference to the positive audience reception of the production, similarly Dominic Cavendish, though praising the performance less, noted that the real stars of the show . . . proved to be the kids themselves, firing intelligent questions at the cast during the Q&A, rising to their feet to clap out complex iambic rhythms, and volunteering for role-playing exercises.9 The positive reaction of the audience and their participation as noted by Cavendish supports Michael Boyd’s insistence in the ‘Stand Up for Shakespeare’ Manifesto that Shakespeare in performance ‘aids comprehension in a way that reading the play cannot’.10 It seems clear that performances of Shakespeare can be effective. However: effective at what? Whilst this production, as noted by Kirwan, had little regard for textual authority, the institutional context in which it takes place is still firmly rooted in an investment in the authority of Shakespeare. What is at stake for the RSC institutionally seems to be insisting that performance, in fact, displays and accesses authorized meanings in Shakespeare better than reading. Whilst the performance of their production of Hamlet itself, and most of the workshop suggestions in the Education Packs which accompanied it, emphasize the collective creation of meaning through collaboration and a wide range of non-textual resources that I identify as theatrical, the institutional approach is based on performance which is assumed to access textual meanings, on a literary understanding of Shakespeare’s texts and their relation to performance. This is made clear in the work described by Carol Chillington Rutter which she conducted in schools under the auspices of the RSC. She is reminded of ‘Simon Russell Beale’s oft-repeated notion that acting is three-dimensional literary criticism’.11 The act of performing the plays for young people, for the RSC, is essentially a literary one: an act of conducting literary criticism, albeit an embodied literary criticism. Significantly, however, William Worthen has argued that in looking for the authority to access textual meaning, theatre

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seeks to operate on ‘a ground that has already been ceded to “literature”’.12 The RSC ’s argument for the importance of performance in the study of Shakespeare does not, therefore, necessarily challenge the overarching literary character of this study: the RSC ’s Manifesto still places authority firmly in the text, with performance used as an effective means of accessing that authority.Where performances are considered manifestations of text, the literary still dominates. In this sense, whilst the RSC YPS Hamlet and its associated Education Pack emphasize the practicalities of a theatrical approach to Shakespeare, they do so as part of a manifesto which claims performance as an authoritative way to access Shakespeare’s meanings: an authority which is, Worthen argues, literary. In contrast to the authority which literature seeks in text, Worthen had already previously argued that theatre is, in fact, considered ‘licentious, promiscuous, innovative, imaginative, or merely haphazard in its representation of texts’. Thus, Worthen argues that to think of performance as conveying authorized meanings of any kind, especially meanings authenticated in and by the text, is, finally, to tame the unruly ways of the stage.13 Thus, a theatrical approach is not related to a textual approach in any way. A theatrical approach would ask questions of the work in front of us which do not concern authorship or individual meaning: rather they would address collaboration and material processes. This is not to invert any hierarchy that seems to exist between reading and watching theatre or between literary analysis and performance scholarship – it is just that they are inherently different. A performance approach asks how this performance – its characters, its words, its scenery, its action, its material process of bringing this to the audience – can work for a temporally and geographically specific audience; a literary approach asks questions about how the text works for readers. How might a theatrical approach, one which emphasizes collaboration and specific temporal and geographical conditions,

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be emphasized in performances of Shakespeare for young people? I want to examine here how the performance of clowns might offer this opportunity. Stephen Purcell identifies a contrast between the relative longevity and stability of literary traditions compared to the short-lived popular stage traditions, as exemplified by clowns.14 Purcell identifies a potential reason for the omission of clown sequences in contemporary performance in their origin in popular performance traditions in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods: Obscure clown sequences are all but impenetrable today precisely because they were once immediate and topical for their audiences.15 Whilst perhaps not as obscure as some, the Gravedigger’s humour as he discusses Ophelia’s death is based on an understanding of legal and religious attitudes which are no longer immediately relevant to the majority of contemporary audiences. Because clown sequences were potentially largely improvised and not recorded as text, possibly responding to topical events or even immediate exchanges with the audiences, the texts which survive are even more unreliable as records of what was performed than the rest of the text. As David Wiles observes of Richard Tarlton: Tarlton’s script existed only in order that he could destroy it. He destroyed it through improvisation, and in the process enlisted the spectators as his accomplices.16 Thus, the strength of the popular and comedic elements was in their geographic and temporal immediacy, in responding to the current interests of the audience and working with that audience during the performance to produce comedy not necessarily contained previously, or recorded subsequently, in the text. Purcell shows how ad-libbing and improvisation were often present on stage, referring to a range of useful evidence, including Fenton’s The Extra-Dramatic Moment in Elizabethan

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Plays before 1616, in which at least twenty-six ‘etc’s are observed, plus other instances where unscripted dialogue is inferred.17 Whilst the precise chronology and reasons continue to be debated, it is clear that such clown behaviour progressively disappeared from the stage.18 Purcell identifies in the contemporary portrayal of clowns a potential paradox which makes ‘the taboo against the incorporation of extratextual passages . . . somewhat nonsensical’. He writes: On the one hand, we cannot depart from the text without appearing unfaithful to Shakespeare, hovering on the borderline of literary sacrilege; on the other, it might be argued, we cannot fulfil the textual function of anachronistic or ‘unofficial’ passages in performance without some departure from the text.19 Whilst problematizing the very notion of ‘faithful’ performance, Purcell goes on to argue that to mount a contemporary theatrical representation of Shakespeare, it might be necessary to embrace the attitude toward clowning which eventually disappeared from the stage: Privileging a theatrical approach over a literary one, then, it could be argued that in fact the only way such sequences can be ‘faithfully’ performed is, paradoxically, in a departure from Shakespeare’s text.20 Purcell’s argument is, in fact, consistent with William Worthen’s view that theatre disrupts text, is licentious and unruly, a fact he alludes to himself in terms of the clowns’ behaviour: he notes that ‘Tarlton’s improvisation bordered on the illegal’ and that ‘any unscripted public performance in late Elizabethan society was potentially subversive’.21 It is perhaps significant, then, that the only clown in Hamlet, the Gravedigger, was cut from the RSC YPS Hamlet.22 The inclusion or cutting of the gravedigger scene is linked by Ann

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Thompson to developing tastes in the theatre, which have displayed a continuing tension between high-cultural and popular tastes since the original performance and publication of the plays; it was cut in productions from the Reformation to around 1780, when it was only reinstated because of its popularity with audiences.23 The scene has also been regarded as particularly unsuitable for children in adaptations of Shakespeare, being omitted, for instance, in the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare.24 I therefore examine the opportunity the scene affords for contemporary performances for young people to construct a theatrical encounter with Shakespeare’s plays, rather than a literary one. Tarrell Alvin Singh and Bijan Sheibani edited the play for the RSC YPS series to emphasize the narrative and themes of friendship and the supernatural.25 I would argue that 5.1 actually presents opportunities for meditation on the theme of friendship, both present and remembered: we see the working companionship between the two Gravediggers; we see the friendship between Hamlet and Horatio; and we hear Hamlet remember his own close, friendly relationship with his father’s old clown, Yorick. However, the cutting of Scene 5.1 by those seeking to present a shorter version of the play which emphasizes narrative development also seems eminently sensible. The beginning of the scene, before the entrance of Claudius and the funeral party, does not move the narrative forward at all. However, the cutting of this scene also removes important potential challenges to Hamlet’s world-view. The text of this scene, as well as providing comedic moments, has Hamlet bemoan a diminishing hierarchy in Denmark, noting how ‘The age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe’ (5.1.138– 40). Unable to avoid the fact that death is uncompromisingly democratic, treating everyone the same no matter their rank, Hamlet criticizes the Gravedigger for having the same disrespect for rank as death: ‘This might be the pate of a politician which this ass o’er-offices’ (5.1.77–79). Significantly, Hamlet’s anxiety here parallels his anxiety about the form of drama

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upon which he has previously given advice. His question ‘Has this fellow no feeling of his business that a sings at gravemaking?’ (5.1.65–6 combines fear of a diminishing hierarchy with an anxiety concerning the juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy.) The Gravedigger is clearly characterized as a low character – as ‘poor’ – by Hamlet and therefore linked with the ‘groundlings’ Hamlet perceives as only capable of ‘inexplicable dumb-shows and noise’ (3.2.11–3). To Hamlet, neither the Gravedigger’s singing whilst he digs a grave, nor the groundlings’ taste in performance, are ‘sensible’: he cannot understand them or acknowledge them as an acceptable discourse. Moreover, Hamlet’s characterization of the Gravedigger as naive in his literal interpretation of Hamlet’s questions – ‘How absolute the knave is’ (5.1.136) – constructs the Gravedigger as lacking in the ability to converse effectively. However, it is possible, as Ann Thompson has argued, to interpret the Gravedigger in this scene as making deliberate jokes at the expense of Hamlet. Thompson observes: Unlike most of the other characters who become mere butts for Hamlet to display his superior wit, the Gravedigger can hold his own in repartee.26 Indeed, Thompson argues that, in performance, this affords the opportunity for the actor playing Hamlet, whom she interprets as the clown in the play, to ‘endear themselves to the audience at this point by their generosity in being prepared to play the straight man for once’.27 The Gravedigger’s ‘witty’ banter with Hamlet, supposedly his superior, is little different to his earlier banter with a fellow Gravedigger, and the democratic equality experienced in death is further accentuated in this scene through the Gravedigger’s equality with Hamlet. In one sense, this scene, both structurally and thematically, brings the play (back) down to earth, placing all humans on an equal basis. By criticizing the lack of propriety of clowns, and their tendency to challenge the authority of the scripted word,

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Hamlet seems to fear a democratic equality of discourse. In suggesting that clowns have no business being seen or heard, at least beyond the text written for them by another, he suggests that their discourse should be placed outside of the distribution of the sensible, to use Rancière’s terms. For Hamlet, the clown’s improvisations are increasingly perceived as ‘noise’, rather than effective or worthwhile communication. I want to identify in the omission of the gravedigger scene the loss of a potential moment of politics: rather than the poor being caused to exist, they are once more silenced. This silencing removes a potential site with which to construct a more theatrical encounter with Shakespeare. Rather than seek authority in Shakespeare, theatre might usefully challenge that authority, ‘stand up to’ Shakespeare’s authority, not to undermine it as such but to shift authority and show how other authorities might exist. The omission of the Gravediggers from the RSC YPS Hamlet, then, not only mirrors the marginalization of the poor, working characters which I noted in Chapter 3, it also removes a prime site for the contestation of the authority of the writer through theatrical means.

‘I tell the jokes here, sunshine’ I want, therefore, to explore two productions for young people which retain the role of the clown, to explore the political potential of this approach. Toby Hulse adapts and directs an annual production of a Shakespeare play which is performed by seven second-year students on the BA (Hons) Acting degree at BOVTS . The production tours to local schools and is also performed once or twice for a public, paying audience.28 I begin this section by considering the role of the Gravedigger in Hamlet, performed in 2011, before moving on to consider Feste’s role in the BOVTS production of Twelfth Night, which was produced in 2012. In the BOVTS production, the Gravedigger was doubled with Polonius by Laurence North. The entrance of the

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Gravedigger followed a poignant portrayal of Ophelia’s death, the actress playing her being conveyed by the ensemble, held above their heads as they stood on chairs to enact her drowning. She was then welcomed into the afterlife by a lively singing of ‘Dem Bones’, the ensemble juxtaposing the tragedy of death with the comedy of the song, all accompanied by ukulele. The ensemble finished the scene, in poses of prayer, standing on chairs which had been distributed to each side of the performance space, Hamlet downstage right. There was a pause when the song ended, during which time the curtains upstage were seen to move before the Gravedigger entered through the curtain, centre-stage, dressed in a mac and flat cap, with thick blackrimmed glasses and a pipe and carrying a large brown paper carrier bag. In a northern accent, he announced himself with the ‘joke’ cited at the beginning of this chapter. As he stepped forward, his flat cap was grabbed by the actress playing Gertrude. He turned, stared at her and pointed his pipe at her. ‘Just watch it, that’s all’, he said, before turning to the audience and observing ‘We’re going to have trouble with this one.’ He continued his address to the audience by announcing ‘Yes, it is I, the Gravedigger. But where is my grave, you may ask?’ He subsequently ‘constructed’ his grave in full view of the audience by ostentatiously draping his overcoat across two chairs, also forming an obvious screen behind which to prepare his subsequent visual gags.29 On completing his task, the Gravedigger mimicked Tommy Cooper by observing ‘Just like that’. The Gravedigger ‘descended’ into the grave and proceeded to sing and joke as he dug the grave with a dessert spoon, singing ‘Dem Bones’ in a slight reprise of the previous scene. In the ‘grave’ he found first one ‘skull’, actually a showroom dummy head, and then another. These discoveries were accompanied by a number of extremely corny jokes, the Gravedigger noting how the first skull looked ‘pale’ and opining that it ‘should get out more’; how the second skull had ‘scared the life out of me’; and how the last had ‘jumped out of his skin’. As he proceeded to recite a limerick, the Gravedigger was

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watched with increasing anxiety and discomfort by Hamlet, who interrupted as the Gravedigger reached the climax of the limerick to prevent the utterance of an ‘inappropriate’ word which, because of the rhyme scheme, was obvious.30 It was here that Hamlet voiced ‘Have you no feeling of your business?’, returning to Shakespeare’s text. Not seeing Hamlet immediately, the Gravedigger turned to one of the heads and observed: ‘you said that without moving your lips’. Having then noticed Hamlet and passed him a skull, the Gravedigger continued his work. Hamlet ‘recognized’ the skull as Yorick’s and began the oratory to him (5.1.182–193). However, on ‘Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs’ (5.1.187–8), the Gravedigger stopped Hamlet, checking with an unknown figure in the grave below whether Hamlet was allowed to say ‘gambols’ before asking Hamlet to proceed but to be careful ‘because you might do yourself an injury’. However, as Hamlet then resumed his address to the skull with ‘your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment’, the Gravedigger stopped him again and asked his meaning. Hamlet replied, ‘he was dead funny’, echoing both the level and theme of the jokes made by the Gravedigger. At this point the Gravedigger paused, walked up from the grave and approached Hamlet. He pulled Hamlet down by the lapels, patted him on the shoulders and slapped his cheeks gently with both hands before observing: ‘I tell the jokes here, sunshine’.31 For the older members of the audience, the Gravedigger as portrayed here was instantly recognizable as an impersonation of Eric Morecambe, from the long-running music hall and television comedy double act Morecambe and Wise. He was dressed in an iconic representation of Morecambe and included a number of elements recognizable from a typical Morecambe and Wise routine: the ruffling of the curtains as he found it difficult to enter the stage; the use of dummy heads with which to conduct a dialogue; the corny jokes; and especially the trademark ‘friendly’ slap of the cheeks which Morecambe usually reserved for guest stars on the television show who tried to usurp his position as resident funny-man.

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Some comedy might be gained for either an early modern or a contemporary audience in portraying the Gravedigger as the absolute naive knave whose extreme pedantry frustrates Hamlet’s attempts to ascertain who is to be buried. However, as Thompson’s observation that ‘the Gravedigger can hold his own in repartee’ suggests, the Gravedigger is no accidental clown to be ridiculed, but actually presents himself as akin to a professional entertainer, and certainly on a par with Hamlet in his ability to trade on witty banter. I argue here, then, that the use of the persona of Eric Morecambe for this clown role was entirely appropriate and somewhat inspired in presenting a theatrical encounter with Shakespeare. Not only is this the figure of a professional comic, but it is also one associated with an undermining of high culture. As a professional entertainer, he tells the ‘joke’ included at the beginning of this chapter. He sets his stage by constructing the grave which he will dig, from two chairs and his coat, in full view of the audience. Most importantly, when Hamlet attempts to join in the humour by telling his own joke, the Gravedigger asserts his unique role as the comedian: ‘I tell the jokes here, sunshine’. This Morecambe Gravedigger overtly challenges Hamlet for authority here and, importantly, does so by insisting on his right to disrupt the Shakespearean text. Moreover, it is significant that the banter that occurs in this production between the two characters begins with the Gravedigger’s interruption of Hamlet’s oration to Yorick: this is the very instant in Shakespeare’s text where the Gravedigger falls silent, his last line being ‘E’en that’ at 5.1.181. This Gravedigger’s humour is not marginalized in a self-contained comic section but interrupts Shakespeare’s text directly, interrupting Hamlet’s heart-felt memory of his old friend with a joke. Significantly, in the TV shows Morecambe consistently disrupted supposedly high culture. In the weekly plays ‘what Ern wrote’. Morecambe was the ‘clown’ to undermine any aspirations to high culture. That these scenes were often acted by classical actors such as Glenda Jackson and were also often

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set up as Shakespearean adaptations emphasizes here the disparity between high and low culture and makes the use of Eric Morecambe as the Gravedigger here somewhat uncannily Shakespearean in this scene, because clowns in the early modern period continually disrupted scripted performances, as Wiles has observed of Tarlton. Morecambe’s role was also to insist on the value of his own professional popular comedy, most persuasively perhaps in the famous André Previn sketch. Here, Morecambe, as the pianist, continually disrupts Previn’s attempts to conduct ‘Grieg’s Piano Concerto Number 1, by Grieg’. Finally being accused by Previn of ‘playing all the wrong notes’, Morecambe bristles with professional pride, much as the Gravedigger does in this production of Hamlet, approaches Previn, and insists that he was ‘playing all the right notes: but not necessarily in the right order’, before tapping Previn’s shoulders and slapping his cheeks. Morecambe’s victory in this scene is emphasized by the fact that, after showing Morecambe how the introduction should be played, Previn concludes by copying the tune Morecambe had played.32 Wiles also observes how much of Tarlton’s success was based on a performance of a version of himself. Similarly, in the public imagination the role Morecambe played during his television career was, essentially, Eric Morecambe. In addition, the repertoire employed was already largely recognizable to the audience. As Richard Boon observes, the familiarity of the material and the small adjustments that were made were a vital and expected part of any show, and a large part of the viewer’s pleasure lay not simply in the inherent humour but also in the particular enjoyment of watching craftsmen at work producing new laughs from old material.33 It is significant to note here that the recycling of old, recognizable material is central to Hamlet’s extended condemnation of clowns in the First Quarto. Here he expands upon the ‘vile’ and ‘pitiful ambition’ for which he criticizes

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them, observing that it is built upon repeating old and stale material: And then you have some again that keeps one suit of jests, as a man is known by one suit of apparel; and gentlemen quote his jests down in their tables before they come to the play.34 Thus, clowns are appreciated by the groundlings, according to Hamlet, for both themselves and the character they play, and for the use of material with which the audience are already familiar. Stephen Purcell notes this double recognition, of the character and the actor playing it, as crucial to the success of clowns in the early modern period and to contemporary comics such as Morecambe and Wise.35 It is therefore important to consider the use of the specific figure of Eric Morecambe as the Gravedigger in this production. Clearly this trainee actor was not recognizable to the young audience and rather than a figure representing a recognizable celebrity or comedian to the target audience of children aged seven to eleven, or repeating or adapting material already known to them, the use of Morecambe seems to have emerged from the interest of Toby Hulse in music hall and variety-type entertainment. Hulse’s interest here resides in seeing these as more positive alternatives to the popular entertainments which dominate British culture.36 In this context, Hulse’s use of Morecambe as clown seems to be a somewhat nostalgic attempt to return to a unified sense of nation and community which is also, as Sarah Mayo argues, often the imperative behind the use and promotion of Shakespeare in both education and popularculture Shakespeare performance. Rather than a competition for different constructions of Shakespeare, the same ideological belief persists: the universalism of Shakespeare.37 Hulse’s use of Morecambe in this production of Hamlet suggests a similar universalist ideology, not as residing only in Shakespeare, but as residing also in Morecambe and Wise.38 Hulse rejects the contemporary television comedians or any other contemporary clown figure in favour of another historical

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clown, and one which is questionably as anachronistic and obscure to the young audience as the original ‘comic’ text which survives in Hamlet. In doing so, he invokes perhaps the last moment when the nation could be united as an audience of entertainment. Whilst large television audiences still occur, these tend to be for sporting events, national or royal ceremonies or talent shows such as The X Factor.39 The use of Morecambe here, then, recalls ‘the popular culture of an idealized past’ in a manner similar to that, as Purcell argues, of ‘popular Shakespeare’.40 Where Rancière’s idea of politics and of equality is, as Andy Lavender argues, ‘productive in that it implicitly renounces the sentimentalism of a homogenizing, conformist view of communal identity’, Hulse’s disruption of the distribution of the sensible around the role of the clown in Shakespeare points toward just such a homogenizing and conformist view of communal identity.41

Telling the story with all the right words: But not necessarily in the right order . . . When Bottom tells his fellow workers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that ‘I have a device to make all well’ (3.1.15) as they consider how to present the violence in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, he demonstrates an awareness, as it happens misguided, of the expectations of his audience, in effect ‘constructing’ an audience for his performance. In addition, he implicitly recognizes the need for the adaptation of older texts for a contemporary audience. The device Bottom suggests is a Prologue; however, his further suggestions indicate that a certain amount of narration to the audience is necessary to make the play both suitable and intelligible for them. In common with many productions for young audiences, Hulse habitually uses a narrator, or as he terms them in his scripts a ‘storyteller’, in his adaptations. In a shortened version,

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such narrators are often employed to facilitate effective communication with a young audience, guiding the children in understanding the complicated language and plotting of an old and confusing story. The use of a narrator may also be an efficient method of providing contextual information which would otherwise develop at length through exposition in exchanges between characters which are cut from these productions. In the BOVTS Hamlet the storyteller set the scene in a dark, cold Denmark and related the situation as it stood at the start of the play – the old King dead and his brother married to the Queen. The storyteller, played by Leigh Quinn, built complicity with the audience from the start, addressing them directly as she set the scene. However, she was also very quickly involved in the action of the play, encountering and addressing the Ghost with ‘Who’s there?’, the words used by the soldiers in the first scene (1.1.1). Throughout the play, Quinn moved extensively between being part of the action and being complicit with the audience outside of that action. She used Gertrude’s lines (4.7.137–154) to narrate the death of Ophelia, which was also poignantly mimed for the audience by the other actors, and she usurped Claudius’s line, ‘And you, the judges, bear a wary eye’ (5.2.217), which was directed at the audience. Having given the responsibility for judging the duel to the audience, Quinn identified herself further with the audience by then proceeding to judge the contest herself, identifying the ‘palpable hit’ (5.2.285) and that the combatants ‘bleed on both sides’ (5.2.312). As part of the fiction, Quinn often acted the part of Horatio, discussing with Hamlet his feigned madness and assisting in setting up the ‘Mousetrap’, as the Gonzago play was explicitly called in this production.42 As such, this narrator moved easily between the position of narrator and being a character in the play. She moved between fulfilling the role of a character and a dramatic function identified by Robert Weimann as so important in the residual effect of clowns in Shakespeare’s plays.43 Weimann developed the concepts of locus and platea to describe these different

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functions, and how clowns moved easily between them, as they developed in relation to performance in the early modern period. He describes the locus as being the world and time of the play, an area which he argues was increasingly distanced from the audience, whereas the platea is an area closer to the audience, where actors could address the audience directly and potentially comment on contemporary life.44 Weimann sees in the decreasing instances of performers moving easily between locus and platea evidence of the changing tastes in theatre. Whilst these concepts have been challenged for their historical accuracy, the notions are useful in understanding and explaining how Quinn functions as both character and narrator in this production of Hamlet, constantly moving between the two.45 Although serving a similar narrative function whether addressing the audience directly or participating in acting the story, Quinn’s moving between the locus and platea so easily associates her performance with that of an early modern clown. It is significant, in fact, that Hulse calls his narrators ‘storytellers’, because, for Rancière, telling stories is an important aspect of the way in which ‘ignorant schoolmasters’ practice democratic politics and emancipation. As Kristin Ross, Rancière’s translator, observes Storytelling then, in and of itself, or recounting . . . emerges as one of the concrete acts of equality . . . The very act of storytelling, an act that presumes in its interlocutor an equality of intelligence rather than an inequality of knowledge, posits equality, just as explication posits inequality.46 In Hulse’s Twelfth Night, performed by BOVTS in 2012, the storyteller was Feste and was played by Josephine Rattigan, and I want to examine her role here as an ignorant schoolmaster.47 Whilst paralleling the role of the storyteller in Hamlet, setting the scene and giving the audience expositional information, Rattigan’s Feste was a much more obvious storyteller. She recapped plotlines, checking that the audience

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were following this fast-moving and potentially confusing performance, and described the action directly to the audience. She was also far more explicitly entangled in the events of the play than Quinn in Hamlet, following Feste’s role in Twelfth Night, most especially in the gulling of Malvolio. However, in addition to providing a narration of the events, this Feste also commented on the story continually. Thus, as the other cast members constructed tableaux of scenes on a beach to illustrate her descriptions, Feste introduced the performance by describing ‘Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare’ as A tale of the stupid things that people do when they are in love. In love with the wrong person, in love with the right person, in love with themselves, in love with their stomachs . . . It begins with a storm at sea, and a pair of twins, Sebastian and Viola, a brother and sister who love each other very much.48 The performance then proceeded in a fast-paced, heavily edited, hour-long version of the play. The adaptation was written specifically for six performers, with the doubling of Malvolio with Orsino and Sebastian with Sir Andrew (and the less dramatically significant doubling of Sir Toby and the Priest). The action was set in an English seaside scene of the 1950s: this was conveyed only loosely through the use of a backdrop depicting a collection of picture postcards displaying beach holiday scenes with the words ‘Welcome to Illyria’. Costuming and whatever props were brought on to the stage – deckchairs, buckets, spades and a picnic hamper – augmented this setting. The production emphasized clear storytelling, entertainment and visual and physical comedy, rather than verbal comedy or the love stories, and drew heavily on Hulse’s interest in an endof-the-pier music hall tradition rather than any recognizable Shakespearean aesthetic. The cast accompanied themselves during musical numbers on guitar, ukulele and assorted

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percussion. Sebastian remained only as a love interest for Olivia and to be the double of Viola (thus excluding the sub-plot of Sebastian and Antonio entirely). The representation of the twins accentuated the visual comedy through meta-theatrical means. Viola was played by Bebe Sanders, who had vibrant red hair, which the production used to comic effect. Adam Collier doubled the parts of Sebastian and Sir Andrew, and the part he was playing at a given time was indicated by him wearing a poorly fitting bright red wig. Rather than try to disguise this costume change, it was foregrounded for comic effect in the opening scene, Sebastian’s wig depicted as ‘floating’ off during the shipwreck through another actor removing the wig from his head. Later, as Sebastian recounted his tale to Feste, he described his twin Viola, observing that ‘we have the same hair’. This line was actually adapted during rehearsals from ‘we’ve got the same costume’ in Hulse’s script.49 This adaptation to material circumstances and the talents available in the cast is characteristic of Hulse’s work. Similarly, Viola’s disguise as Cesario was foregrounded for obvious comic effect, being achieved through the application of a cheap, plastic false nose, glasses and moustache set. On Sebastian’s entrance, Feste, in her role of storyteller, asked him to assume the same ‘disguise’ just ‘because it fits’. Feste’s opinion on the story as it unfolded continually emphasized the stupidity of both individual characters and events identified in her opening line, as she expressed incredulity at the ridiculous things that happened. On encountering Feste as she reached shore following the shipwreck at the start of the narrative, Viola asked her, ‘What country is this?’ Feste glanced at the audience before indicating the backdrop to Viola, implying her stupidity. Similarly, each new moment of love at first sight was greeted with incredulity by Feste. This culminated in her reaction to Sebastian meeting Olivia. They immediately fall in love, to which Feste reacts by speaking Fabian’s line direct to the audience: ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (3.4.127–8).

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As a commentator able to take a detached view to ironically comment on the action, this characterization of Feste is perhaps hardly an original choice. Indeed, A. C. Bradley considered Feste ‘to supply, in fuller measure than any of Shakespeare’s other Fools, the poet’s own comment on the story’ and if, as Becky Kemper does, we consider Feste ‘a loveable freelance entertainer’ then the use of the character as a storyteller is appropriate.50 However, as a self-confessed clown and ‘corrupter of words’, Feste in this production, similarly to the Gravedigger in Hamlet, might be accused of having little feeling of her business, for, in addition to the disapproval of the love elements she has to describe, Feste is often presented explicitly as an unreliable narrator with an inability to control the story she is telling. Feste is continually surprised at developments and accentuates the gendered confusion of Viola’s disguise as Cesario by never knowing whether to refer to the character as ‘him’ or ‘her’. As she tells the audience, ‘This is going to get complicated . . .’ Moreover, Feste’s scripted ‘Well . . .’ in answer to Sebastian’s question ‘What should I do in Illyria?’ was developed during rehearsal to ‘I don’t know – I haven’t read that bit yet.’ Hulse spent a lot of time with Rattigan discussing how she might deal with the general confusion and lack of control. His advice was to play the incomprehension with abandon and an open, playful and childish attitude toward not knowing: ‘Yes; it’s good isn’t it!? I’m the storyteller, I don’t know what happens next – it’s great isn’t it!?’51 was Hulse’s proposed attitude for Feste. Her reaction should be confused, but this should not detract from her enjoyment of the show. Hulse sees the onstage narrator as a model for the audience, someone on stage to whom they can relate, and made this explicit in urging Rattigan to stay in clear sight of the audience at all times because ‘it is comforting to have an audience member on stage – they will be guided by your reaction’.52 Feste therefore provided a model for the audience by attempting to recap and make sense of the proceedings but never quite fitting it all together. She clearly had some insight

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into the story, because she recapped certain parts and asked the audience if they were ‘following it so far’. In addition she reassured them that if they were not following it then this was not a problem, because ‘It’s the sort of thing they do in Shakespeare, don’t worry.’ Feste’s reaction from the beginning of the performance was to stress that understanding was not important, whether of the language or the strange things happening in this story. What was important, however, was entertainment and enjoyment. The unfamiliarity of Shakespeare both for these young, student actors and for the final intended audience was acknowledged but not problematized. Feste’s approach to storytelling, I argue, positions her as akin to one of Rancière’s ignorant schoolmasters. In trying to tell this story, which she doesn’t understand, Feste plays the part as coming to the material for the first time. Her will to tell the story is separated from the intelligence of the story. Feste, as an ignorant schoolmaster, is not only unaware of what is going on, and discovering the material with the young audience – she is revelling in this fact. The enjoyment of not knowing, of not understanding, but enjoying the moment of finding out (or not) is emphasized. She does not treat the material here as possessing an opacity which resists a child’s interpretive processes. Feste’s approach exemplifies Rancière’s educational theories. Ignorant schoolmasters are those who escape from the ‘stultifying’ methods of education, ‘by separating the sheer act of intellectual emancipation from the societal machine, and from progressive institutions’.53 Rather than assuming any educational outcomes in advance of teaching, they instead promote an approach which Rancière identifies in the methods children use to learn their native language. The child learning their native language is described by Rancière thus: All their effort, all their exploration, is trained toward this: someone has addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to, not as students or learned men, but as people; in the way you respond to someone speaking to you and not examining you: under the sign of equality.54

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Feste, and this production, I argue, address the young audience as people, cast them first and foremost as equal human beings who can recognize and respond to the action, not as students or learners struggling to understand it. Moreover, because this occurs with a wilful disregard for the authority of Shakespeare’s text, disrupting its high, literary status with popular songs and comic routines, it offers a theatrical encounter with Shakespeare: rather than assume an end through exploration of the text, it demonstrates what is possible when the text is considered as only one element of the theatrical performance. This positive attitude to the unknown and the unfamiliar reflects Hulse’s advice to the actors to keep playing with the production and to never ‘fix’ it completely.55 Whilst this experimentation and play was mainly explored in the rehearsal room, the performance was never quite ‘fixed’ on tour, the actors experimenting with different attitudes and actions. For instance, with an audience present, Collier as Sir Andrew and Billy Howle as Toby Belch adapted the action in the scene in which they hide from Malvolio on his first entrance, to hide amongst the audience, sitting on the floor with them. Collier also planted his hat on the nearest child before moving on, so that Malvolio’s first ‘discovery’ of them was actually the discovery of an audience member. Similarly, at Elm Lea Junior School, the ASM ’s report notes Mr Collier did not bring on the squeeze horn during the scene in which Sir Andrew and Sir Toby waken Feste. This was because he wanted to see if the kazoo on its own worked better than both the horn and the kazoo. Mr Collier has agreed to use the horn for the next performance.56 The tone of the ASM ’s report here demonstrates other tensions which impact on the ability of the actors to improvise: Collier here is referred to in the manner of a naughty child who has been reprimanded and will now behave, accordingly, in a preauthorized manner.

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The actors also responded to local and temporal circumstances. During longer than expected costume changes as Martin Bassindale changed from Orsino to Malvolio, Collier and Howle improvised jokes, building on the exceedingly poor puns included in the ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ routine and paralleling the corniness of the Gravedigger in Hamlet.57 Additionally, the ASM ’s report for 7 February 2012 noted that the ring which Malvolio throws on the floor for Viola to pick up ‘was caught by a little girl in the front row. Mr Bassindale adapted his line to ‘if it be worth stooping for, that little girl has it’.58 However, of course, large parts of the production were fixed throughout the tour – this did not claim, after all, to be an improvisation show. Indeed, whilst Hulse stressed to his actors repeatedly not to ‘fix too early’, the clowns in these performances were as tied to a performance ‘script’, developed in rehearsal and through subsequent performances, as the other actors. Whereas it seems that North may well have enjoyed the opportunity to improvise and gain some real, if momentary, control of the performance during rehearsals of Hamlet, he was not actually improvising the role of the Gravedigger to any great extent during the tour. The dialogue became fairly concretized quite early in the tour and relied on the recognizable elements of Morecambe’s repertoire: essentially North was performing the role of Morecambe as he himself portrayed it. His actions looked natural and of the moment; it looked like he was making it up, but he was not.59 Similarly, Feste’s lack of knowledge of the events in Twelfth Night was feigned and her performance largely followed the performance script as it was at the end of rehearsals. These performances by BOVTS ‘staged’ improvisation rather than performing it. Whilst the Gravedigger and Feste in Hulse’s productions disrupt Shakespeare’s text, and Hulse encourages them to disrupt his scripts, such disruption is largely restricted to rehearsal room experiments. These actors did not disrupt Shakespeare’s text, Hulse’s text, or the ‘performance text’ agreed in rehearsal in the moment of performance in front of an audience.

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However, this is not to argue, as Rob Conkie suggests, ‘that rehearsal potentially exceeds performance as a means of imaginative, affective and interpretive engagement with Shakespeare’s plays’.60 I have had the same enjoyable experiences which Conkie and his colleagues describe with reference to observations of rehearsal room activities. However, Conkie’s suggestion, I believe, potentially sets up a similarly unhelpful hierarchy to that between text and performance which has been so long debated. Rather, I would point to the possibility, in this instance, for the activities of the rehearsal room to be replicated in live performance in front of an audience. To do this, however, requires the actor to improvise. Stephen Purcell describes his own work on As You Like It in 2004 and the work of other companies where stand-up, comedy and improvisation is used.61 He describes these productions as popular because they open the way in which Shakespeare is addressed: as a performance to be made through complicity and collaboration, rather than as a text to be reproduced. As such, these productions emphasize the theatrical possibility of interrogating and making Shakespeare in the moment of contemporary performance as opposed to reproducing a literary Shakespeare. Purcell notes that the reception of these improvised elements was mixed: in contrast, the reception of the comedic and popular elements of Hulse’s productions was markedly positive, as I shall now explore.

Reception Unlike the RSC YPS production considered earlier, there are no journalistic or academic reviews available for the BOVTS productions.62 In considering their reception, I therefore rely on my own experience of the performances, in rehearsal and in performance in schools and public theatres. I include in this experience an observation of audience behaviour, and augment this with comments from a short focus group discussion with three members of Press Gang.

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These were decidedly populist offerings, emphasizing comedy in an end-of-the-pier way, old music hall-style songs interspersed with, and accompanying, the Shakespearean text, and it was the popular and comic elements which were most well received. This is clear from both my own observations and the Assistant Stage Manager’s reports. Her reports from the tour of Hamlet include references to the audience enjoying the gravedigger scene in thirteen out of sixteen performances, notably for the public performance at the egg commenting that ‘The audience were very quiet thou [sic] did seem to respond more to the grave digger scene (scene 13)’.63 I distributed questionnaires for this performance. Whilst only four out of twenty-four responses received specifically identified the Gravedigger as the best thing about the performance, it was the specific element which gained the most praise. Following the performance I conducted an informal focus group discussion with three members of Press Gang. As we discussed the performance, we also drew pictures and wrote key words and sentences on a piece of flipchart paper. In discussion, the Press Gang members indicated that the Gravedigger was the best thing about the performance, verbally identifying this sequence as funny and drawing pictures of gravestones with ‘R.I.P.’ written on them. Similarly, Twelfth Night audiences tended to respond enthusiastically to the comedy of the production. Whilst Feste is not mentioned specifically in the ASM ’s reports, there is constant reference to enthusiasm and enjoyment vocally expressed. For instance: ‘The audience were highly entertained and participated throughout – clapping along to songs, cheering and booing.’64 This ‘participation’ is interesting to examine in the context of Reason’s complaint about audience participation at pantomimes and in the context of wider considerations of audience participation in the academy recently. Both my own observations of the Twelfth Night tour and the ASM reports confirm that young people were vocal in answering as a collective audience the prompts from various characters. When Malvolio ordered them to stop laughing,

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they laughed more; they shouted out punchlines to jokes; they gasped when Feste’s teddy bear’s head was ripped off and they shrieked with laughter at Malvolio dressed in a red and yellow swimming costume. Similarly, they shrieked their dismay at scenes of love.65 The active participation of the audience is clear from the ASM report from Ashton Gate on 7 February; the report states that: When Mr Collier went into the audience when Sir Andrew is hiding from Malvolio, the children passed around his hat to prevent Malvolio from getting it. It was returned when Mr Collier requested it.66 The young audience here contributed to the comic disruption of the performance in front of them, building on the clownish disruption of the narrative text which this production modelled. Similarly, the ASM report relating to the performance of Hamlet at The Downs School in Wraxall on 9 February 2012 observed that ‘A child grabbed onto Mr Donald’s [playing Hamlet] sword during scene 4 when asked to “swear by it” Mr Donald then had to ask the child to let go’.67 However, direct individual audience response seems much more limited than response as a collective. The child who grabbed the sword was rare in responding to this invitation by making an individual intervention. Hamlet here confides in the audience that he is going to feign madness and asks them to swear on his sword ‘never to speak of this that you have seen . . . never to speak of this that you have heard’ and, indeed, Hulse in his script has ‘We swear’, giving his audience lines in much the way Tim Crouch does in his scripts. Whilst there were often general mumbles of agreement with this request to swear, few other children responded individually at all to the direct invitation to swear on the proffered sword when Hamlet asked for audience complicity in his feigned madness.68 When accepted, it seemed to be with reluctance. In the performances I saw, and in the performances as reported by the actors from

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the school tour, no one ever answered Claudius in his request to the audience for information regarding Hamlet’s feigned madness. Whilst, of course, this could be read as the audience siding with Hamlet in refusing to betray him, I read it more as an acceptance of a barrier between stage and audience. I directly questioned the Press Gang members about their reaction to such theatrical moments, which are quite prevalent in theatre for young people, wondering why they did not respond more readily. Their reaction to direct address is not straightforward, being best summed up by the collectively agreed statement which I recorded in my handwriting on the sheet for drawing: Am I supposed to do something if they look direct [at me], but OK when they look at everyone. This ambiguous reaction has similarly been recorded by a number of theatre scholars recently. Sophie Nield, in examining the increased interest in immersive theatre and the increased contact between audience and performer which this often incorporates, notes her own personal embarrassment at such contact.69 She describes this feeling as akin to ‘awaking to the actor’s nightmare of being on the stage, and not knowing the play’.70 Nield’s description of a ‘small moment of crisis’ and of having ‘no idea what I was supposed to do’ echoes the confusion felt by the Press Gang members. Nield goes on to question What was so different in this spectatorial encounter from the usual one of sitting quietly, alone in public, atomised with my fellows in the dark? Why was I so particularly uncomfortable?71 Similarly, Nicholas Ridout recounts his own confusion at the direct and individual eye contact he receives from Samuel West in a production of Richard II. Ridout refers to the ‘rarity’ of direct address in conventional theatre and recounts the

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confusion provoked as to which role he should now play. For Ridout such moments are embarrassing because they both reveal the ‘utter foolishness of the theatrical encounter’ and involve an annihilation of the self. He also points to a recognition of the work we are asking the actor to do, which exposes the economic relationship in operation.72 I take issue with this to some extent on a personal level, not feeling embarrassment at such moments. However, more relevantly here, I want to reiterate that such direct address and requests for participation are, in fact, quite common in performances for young people. Moreover, young people’s experience of theatre does not routinely accord with what Ridout and I, as adults, might commonly understand theatre to be in Western industrial or post-industrial modernity. This environment he describes as ‘a theatre in which one group of people spend their leisure time sitting in the dark to watch others spend their working time under lights pretending to be other people’.73 Ridout describes a bourgeois, psychologically realist theatre which is indeed the dominant experience of theatre in Britain today. However, his characterization of this common understanding of theatre today presents some problems for the present study and, in fact, illustrates how theatre for young people exists in a different economy and ecology to theatre for adults. Indeed, the ways in which the theatre experience of young people diverges from Ridout’s description are important. Whilst the performances of Tim Crouch discussed in Chapter  2, which problematize the psychologically realistic presentation of character and therefore the concept of ‘pretending to be other people’, might not be the dominant experience of theatre for young people, I have argued in Chapter 3 that it is problematic to consider the time children spend in theatre as ‘leisure’ time. Whether on a school trip to a theatre or at a performance during the school day on school premises, neither experience is obviously leisure time. In addition, many of the performances I describe throughout this thesis involved shared light and/or standing audiences, as, of course, did Shakespeare’s theatre. Moreover, young people

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have not entered into the same economy of paying directly for tickets and then assessing use-value for the price. They have not usually paid for the performance themselves, and in the case of these school performances they have not paid at all. However, clearly the reticence does seem to be borne at least in part out of embarrassment. Why then might they be confused about direct address and invitations to participate directly in the fictional event? Bridget Escolme argues that when actors address the audience directly as the characters they play, they appear to be allowing an element of risk into the theatre, the risk of the ‘real’, face to face encounter which may not go according to plan or provoke the desired response.74 This ‘risk’ of course, is not limited to the actor: the audience member must risk their own behaviour as well. Rather than the self-annihilation which Ridout identifies, for these children it is the risk of identification of the individual self that is at issue. Lost in the anonymity of the theatre audience as community, when proffered an individual moment of interaction, most balk. Some obviously celebrate and participate, but this is down to individual personality types: generally there seems a willingness to ‘participate’ as a collective, but far less so as an individual. It is important to recognize that this ‘participation’ is incredibly limited in any case and that any disruption is only tolerated so far.75 Nield notes a frustration with the limited agency offered in performances which are supposedly participatory. She reports the accumulated experiences of the compound figure of ‘Spectator’: Spectator complains: ‘There is so little scope to engage in a dignified way with the staged/rehearsed activity – they need you to fulfil such a limited role’.76 Thus, whilst some children are prepared to participate, these disruptions to the performance – the stealing of the hat,

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the retention of the sword, for example – can only be accommodated if they disrupt and divert the narrative only temporarily. Once they begin to impinge on the progress of the narrative – when the child holds on to the sword for too long – they cannot be tolerated. However, the fact that the majority appear to reject these individual moments of participation bears a little more examination. To some it may appear from this that young people are not ‘emancipated’ enough to take such opportunities more fully, that they perhaps need educating in different modes of performance. There is some truth to these views, as children are, of course, already ‘educated’ to certain modes of performance and may not know how to behave when offered different modes of performance. However, as Gareth White points out, the quality and character of the invitation can be vital in determining the character of the response, and as Carl Lavery and David Williams argue in an interview with theatre company Lone Twin, truly ‘variegated, pluralist and open-ended’ participation means ‘there is no obligation to participate in an active sense; the invitation can always be refused’.77 There is clearly a certain influence of ‘education’ and expectation in the broadest sense in how the young people act during a performance. In the schools, the actors on the Hamlet tour reported the presence of teachers as restricting the free behaviour of the young people.78 At the performance in a school which I witnessed, I heard teachers exhorting the young people as they assembled for the performance to ‘behave properly’. On introducing the performance the Head told the children: ‘I need you to be really quiet, a good audience.’ She indicated that the children had ‘had a brief look at the storyline’, and reminded them to watch the actors carefully, in order to promote a ‘belief in the actor being the person’. This constructs an understanding of theatre in which a quiet audience watch broadly naturalistic narratives based on prior, textual knowledge.79 It also, in fact, emphasizes a belief that performances of Shakespeare for young people require activity outside of the performance itself.80

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Hulse’s BOVTS productions work against these expectations of a good audience being quiet and behaving properly. Much like pantomimes, they encourage vocal audience participation. (Indeed, the Malvolio gulling is constructed to almost invite a pantomime ‘behind you’ moment.) Having been in rehearsals and from conversations with Hulse, I know that textual knowledge in the audience was far from assumed, and naturalistic acting was not encouraged.81 This is not to argue that comedy and popular elements are the best way to ‘access’ Shakespeare, preparing young people for more serious and tragic elements at a later date. The juxtaposition of comedy with tragedy was also appreciated in these productions. The Press Gang members identified the importance of the ‘sad’ moments in the BOVTS Hamlet, indeed identifying the existence of this juxtaposition as being ‘Shakespeare’. Tabitha drew a rainbow to illustrate this. Similarly, the responses to my questionnaire contained three instances of approval for the juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic. Indeed, the possibility for extreme juxtapositions in performances drawing on Shakespeare’s texts is a further example of how they are particularly amenable to the production of emancipated spectatorship. As Stephen Purcell argues, it is the ‘balance of seriousness and laughter’ struck by popular treatments of Shakespeare that is ‘their most powerful feature’.82 The theatrical presentation of this juxtaposition, as opposed to a textual reading, can heighten the enjoyment of both in performances for young. For instance, in the BOVTS Hamlet, the doubling of the Gravedigger with Polonius meant that, directly following the Gravedigger’s scene, North re-entered, after a quick costume change, as Polonius, with the dead Ophelia in his arms. Thus, he effectively ‘buried’ her twice: first in comic mode as the Gravedigger, then in tragic mode as her father. In the BOVTS Twelfth Night, where Malvolio was certainly also portrayed as a ‘pantomime villain’, this was particularly evident when Malvolio interrupted the revels of Toby, Andrew and Feste, who had been joined on stage in a riotous take on ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, including breaks for outrageously poor

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puns, by all the other cast members. Feste carried a teddy bear in this production, which had previously been identified as helping her to get to sleep. As the tune broke down into cackles and general laughter, Malvolio entered. He addressed both the on-stage revellers and the audience directly, attempting, but failing, to calm them. He grabbed the teddy bear which Feste had put down to play a ukulele, marched to centre stage and deliberately and maliciously ripped its head off. Feste was distraught and this moment had the superb effect in performance of halting the audience in its laughter immediately.

Conclusion Both the RSC and the BOVTS productions make important contributions toward challenging the dominance of a literary understanding of Shakespeare for young people. Appropriately, young people’s interest in these performances, in all the performances I have witnessed, focuses on the theatrical elements. This is perhaps not as obvious as it may seem. In after-show question and answer sessions, for instance, young people are often prompted to think about the performance they have seen in broadly literary terms. Thus, for instance, following a performance of Taming of the Shrew by the RSC , the cast initially attended as their characters and the audience were prompted to ask questions concerning character motives and how these might relate to a literary, indeed novelistic, understanding of character. However, once questions were opened up, young people were more interested in the mechanics of theatre. Similarly, following performances at the egg examined in Chapter 3, most questions concerned how certain effects were achieved.83 For instance, following the BOVTS performance of Hamlet, much interest was shown in the mechanics of how Isaac Stanmore, the actor playing Claudius, had achieved a frothing mouth in his death scene. However, the extent to which any of these productions could allow the young people to be heard as voice rather than

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noise, thereby casting them as political and shifting the distribution of the sensible, was restricted by the institutional frameworks in which the performances occurred. Shakespeare’s high status, and therefore much of the reason for his inclusion on the National Curriculum, was, and continues to be, based on an acceptance of Shakespeare as literature. It is significant that to advocate Shakespeare as theatre, at this level, would be to apparently downgrade the implicit and inherent qualities of Shakespeare as literature. Literature is a compulsory subject, whereas Theatre Studies is only available to a student choosing to specialize in the area, at GCSE level and beyond. At a general level, drama is available, but not compulsory, from Key Stage 3, and is then considered as a set of practices, in the sense both of writers and of practitioners.84 Within education, then, theatre is regarded as less valuable than literature. To promote a theatrical approach to Shakespeare as one which does not privilege the text is therefore to potentially downgrade Shakespeare’s status by association. Theatrical encounters with Shakespeare in education, then, are constantly pushed toward the literary. Maurice Gilmour quotes teacher David Ashfield’s response as typical of those received in relation to their tour, although he cautions that the number of responses to a teacher survey was small: The play, when it came, captured the attention of the junior children and their initial response was positive and favourable. They had a brief opportunity afterwards to talk with the actors. It has to be said that their first questions concerned technical problems and overall impressions rather than deeper, moral dimensions! Later discussion with the children revealed that the plot was very well understood, and that everyone agreed the Macbeths got what they deserved.85 Ashfield’s pupils seem to have responded in much the same way as the young people I have researched with: they were interested in how theatrical problems had been solved, rather

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than in any meaning or moral of the story or how the theatrical performance might have elucidated this.86 Ashfield directed his pupils toward an ‘artistic response to their experience rather than a written one’ because this is what they seemed to prefer. He argues that he did not, therefore, ‘direct the children into adult-oriented artificial responses’.87 However, it is clear, from the almost apologetic recognition that their initial interest was in ‘overall impressions’ and ‘technical problems’ and from his further promptings, that what he was interested in was not their response to the theatrical event they had witnessed but their literary understanding. It is their response to their understanding of the plot and the moral of the narrative rather than the materiality of the performance in front of them which gains his approval. Matthew Reason correctly identifies these interests in the materiality of theatre as something to be built upon, rather than re-directed toward more ‘literary’ interests, such as engagement with narrative and character. He argues that children’s ‘engagement with the technical and material aspects of the performance can be read as a positive engagement, valued in its own right’.88 It is not that young people are unable to engage with the themes and characters of a performance, as is evident from the considered discussion Press Gang had about the relative merits of watching war depicted across different media and in different dramatic styles.89 However, it is notable to me that they needed my prompting to consider these elements: their own observations, conversations and post-show questions of the cast tended to focus on the technical aspects of the performance. The teachers who continually attempt to prompt the young audiences of Shakespearean performances to address the adapted content, to consider great moral dimensions of the plays, or to consider how characters are developed, continue to promote an interest in the literary dimension of the plays. This is, of course, entirely understandable given the pressures for young people to attain high results in compulsory literature exams: even when teachers are not involved in directly

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preparing young people for these exams, as at Key Stage 2, they are subject to pressures to prepare their students for these future experiences. However, to promote the literary is to implicitly devalue the theatrical performance in front of the children. To accept the young audience’s interest in the materiality of the theatre performance is to accept Semenza’s insistence that there is value in considering not the adapted content, but the processes of adaptation.90 Indeed, I would go further and argue that to accept the young audience’s area of interest allows them to attend to performance as an iteration of the work, rather than a repetition of the text. To change this would need a political act, not in the sense that the curriculum needs to be changed through government action (although I believe it does), but in Rancière’s terms. This would involve the recognition of the claims of theatre in its own right, rather than as a more effective means of accessing text or literature. A theatrical approach would privilege the collective effort of all those individuals involved in a performance rather than the individual work of one author, and would emphasize the range of elements, wills and intelligences which contribute to the theatre event. In addition to the range of talents which contribute to the staging of the performance, it would also need to include the intelligence of the audience. This would recognize a theatrical discourse as, in Rancière’s terms, voice. Howard Marchitello examines the pedagogical use of Shakespeare in somewhat similar terms, describing two distinct approaches as treating Shakespeare as a pedagogical object or a pedagogical site.91 Marchitello argues that adaptations of Shakespeare for children effectively privilege neither the story nor the plot of the adapted play, but the story of the transcendence of Shakespeare. This positions Shakespeare as a pedagogical object, a more or less stable and consistent body of knowledge and meanings to be learned. This approach tends, he argues, to silence the experience of the individual child in encounters with Shakespeare’s plays. Marchitello suggests that a more useful way of encountering Shakespeare

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for young people is as a pedagogical site, allowing young people to investigate their own experience of such encounters. This would provide children with an opportunity to develop in telling their stories, to, in effect, learn about themselves. For Marchitello a pedagogical site produces ‘the stories we would like to help others to tell’.92 This is quite different to how a literary approach considers the plays. As ‘literature’ for young people, the plays are largely considered as pedagogical objects with meanings to discover through deploying reading practices which will develop into literary criticism. As ‘theatre’, Shakespeare’s texts are a pedagogical site or even, in Worthen’s words, a ‘tool’, with which young people might make meanings with Shakespeare.93 To this extent, the theatrical approach fully embraces Terence Hawkes’s assertion that we always make meaning by (using) Shakespeare.94 Rather than shy away from the challenging consequences of Hawkes’s assertion, a theatrical approach acknowledges that new meanings are made in each iteration of a play, and values those meanings: in reference not to any original text but to the moment in which they are created. I contend that a theatrical approach to Shakespeare is therefore potentially more emancipatory for young people than a literary approach. Anthony Dawson observes that young people in his classes were prevented from offering potentially mundane explanations of textual differences in Hamlet, for instance that Act 4 might be trimmed in the Folio as evidence of an acting version of the text which aims to give the actor a rest before the final scenes, because of ‘a feeling of awe before the cultural standing of the bard and the sacredness of his texts’.95 The construction of the text here as literary, containing profound rather than banal and practical meanings, prevents students from responding until they have learned how to respond in an appropriately literary way. A theatrical approach which acknowledges the questions, noted by Reason, which arise from its audience concerning the material circumstances of theatre would not only ameliorate any reticence which Dawson’s students might have felt, but would

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treat them as already capable of responding to Shakespeare, without having to learn a literary framework. This would be to accept Rancière’s concept of emancipation, both of the spectator and of students, which is to proceed from a position of assumed equal intelligence and to require only the exercise of the will, along the lines of asking the three-part question – what do you see, what do you think about it and what do you make of it? – and so on to infinity. To engage a young person on their own terms, then, would require that, as researchers, we focus on the questions they ask of performances – to ask merely what they see, what they think about it and what they then make of it – rather than on how they answer any questions based on pre-existing ideas of how Shakespeare should be approached or what questions encountering Shakespeare should prompt. To re-direct questions from the material processes which make performances to literary-based questions that consider the meaning only of the text which contributed to the performance is to treat the young audience, much as Hamlet treats the Gravedigger, as having no feeling of their business. To build upon and encourage their interest in the material process of theatre-making is to treat them explicitly as having a feeling for the business of their encounters with Shakespeare: as already possessing equal intelligence and as already ‘speaking’ in a political sense. Far from having ‘no feeling of his business’, as Hamlet suggests, the Gravedigger, both in Shakespeare’s text and in the BOVTS production of Hamlet, has an excellent feeling of his business. It is Hamlet’s lack of understanding of the daily work that the Gravedigger must do which is at fault, just as it is a lack of understanding of the business of theatre to use it in an attempt to reveal textual truths. Theatre is different from literature and asks different questions: it is therefore pointless to consider whether it is better than reading or literary analysis at providing insight into a text, because that is not the business of theatre. It is not, as Simon Russell Beale suggests, 3-D literary criticism, it is 3-D performance.

5 Conclusion Shakespeare is not a school

In considering the contemporary political moment, Todd May asks: ‘Are there reasons for hope at this moment in history . . .?’1 On starting this research I was asked a similar question: whether I was optimistic about Shakespeare for young people. I had not even thought about the project in terms of optimism or otherwise and was surprised, both because of a penchant for pessimism and because of a general scepticism about projects which sought to introduce Shakespeare to young people through performance, when I felt able to answer, quite honestly, that I was optimistic. At the end of this project, I remain optimistic that performances of Shakespeare for young people are capable of providing unique opportunities for the occurrence of politics and for emancipation in the way in which Jacques Rancière describes them. In performance, the polyvocal and dialogic opportunities which exist in the text, which I have particularly identified in Chapters 3 and 4, allow young spectators to enter into a relationship with Shakespeare that increases the polyvocality of a dialogic relationship with culture. 201

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I have argued in this book that for this to occur, the young audience must be addressed as political, rather than as psychological, beings. I described in Chapter  2 how Tim Crouch’s plays often provide these opportunities because they treat the young audience as both intellectually equal to the adult performer(s) in front of them and intellectually equal to an adult audience. By doing so, they treat the young audience as having a sensible voice, rather than an untutored voice in need of schooling. In Chapter  3, I argued that much performance of Shakespeare for young people can limit this political potential because it effectively treats the young person as, in the terms used by Johanson and Glow, ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’: as in need of being taught how to speak about Shakespeare, rather than as already speaking competently. In Chapter  4 I argued that the ways in which young people are ‘taught’ to speak about Shakespeare are largely connected with a dominant understanding of Shakespeare as literature. I described the ways in which productions for young people might challenge this literary dominance by including contemporary updating of elements from the plays which were, at the time of their first performance, considered popular and comic. This in fact emphasizes the theatrical, rather than literary, interest which young audiences already displayed in the questions they asked of performances. To allow and encourage the young audience to persist with theatrical questions around performance, rather than re-direct them toward literary questions, is an extension of Rancière’s emphasis on emancipation occurring by treating other subjects as already equal rather than trying to train them to speak in a different way. My optimism, then, is contingent on insisting that Shakespeare is not a school. To state this is not to reject all notions of education in relation to Shakespeare and young people. John Hartley argues that teaching is an anthropological activity (unlike schooling, which is historical and institutional) . . . without it human ‘society’ couldn’t be social.2

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Hartley’s argument identifies the culturally and historically specific construction of ‘schooling’ as problematic in a democratic society because of its construction of hierarchical relationships: ‘teaching’, on the other hand, Hartley argues, is a social activity which suggests a more equal relationship. Indeed, this form of communication is what makes us human. Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta use Rancière’s work to examine various historical approaches to education and also recognize a difference between education and schooling. Whereas Hartley appears to suggest that a different construction of contemporary schooling would address any problems which perpetuate inequalities, Bingham and Biesta suggest an abolition of the school. They recognize in many activities and relationships beyond the physical confines of school buildings what are effectively educational relationships because they replicate the way in which schools reward those students who come up with the right interpretations and [identify] those who have not yet managed as being in need of more education – until they get it right.3 They suggest that it is necessary to recognize these relationships as, effectively, schooling, in order to identify new possibilities of emancipation. They argue: To say that the world is not a school is rather to say that the world ought not to be like a school, and reading the statement in this way actually begins to make it possible to see the ways in which, and the extent to which, societies do actually operate like schools and also to see why and how that is problematic.4 Similarly, to argue that Shakespeare is not a school is to argue that Shakespeare ought not to be like a school, in that encounters with performances of Shakespeare should not construct young people as in need of tutoring before they are able to speak appropriately about Shakespeare and come up

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with the ‘right’ interpretations. To say that Shakespeare is not a school is to begin to open up possibilities of other relationships between Shakespeare and young people. Bingham and Biesta recognize that, by interpreting Rancière’s work in a publication, they are susceptible to criticism of ‘schooling’ their readers themselves, by adopting and recommending Rancière’s method as a way of working in the future. However, they reject the use of Rancière as a model or a method or a school, and prefer instead to treat his work as a story waiting to be retold.5 Similarly, I do not hold up the methods with which any of the performances considered in this book were made as role models for the construction of future programmes for theatrical encounters with Shakespeare for young people. To do so would be to ignore Rancière’s attitudes to education. Rancière argues that the distinction between emancipation and stultification is not a distinction between methods of instruction. Thus, ‘stultification can and does happen in all kinds of active and modern ways’.6 For Rancière, stultification occurs in education because equality is not presumed and an end is already prefigured: the student cannot proceed according to their own will in this philosophy. In contrast, emancipation occurs when there is a presumption of equality between student and teacher, and no end result of the education is prefigured: the student is merely encouraged to exercise their own intelligence. In this emancipatory logic, the teacher is first of all a person who speaks to another, who tells stories and returns the authority of knowledge to the poetic condition of all spoken interaction.7 Thus, for Rancière, the distinction between stultification and emancipation is both a philosophical distinction and a political distinction ‘because it concerns the very conception of the relation between equality and inequality’.8 By treating Shakespeare as a story waiting to be retold, we might recognize the political and emancipatory opportunities which Shakespeare might offer for young people. This requires,

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however, not the adoption of certain strategies which might have been identified in this book as succeeding in this aim. Thus, I do not seek to ‘school’ readers of this book in the methods used by those practitioners I describe as successful: I do not propose a set of particular methods by which young people might successfully engage with Shakespeare, in the way that Matthew Reason produces from similar research a list of potential ways in which young people might be encouraged to engage with theatre. The theatrical approach which constructs the young person as political is not a prescriptive model, but a story waiting to be retold in any number of ways that cannot be predicted or easily measured. However, the political moment is still one which seeks to link arts, and especially arts funding, to outcomes which can ‘improve wellbeing in the UK and boost the UK ’s economy’9, perhaps even more so than I identified in Chapter 1. The place of artistic and cultural activity in the school curriculum is under constant threat, which draws many educationalists and artists in the early twenty-first century into an educational model which seeks to identify the use-value of artistic and cultural pursuit within an advanced capitalist economy: to prove how their activity adds to the general good. As Peter Andreas and Kelly Greenhill recognize in relation to social policy generally: We live in a hyper-numeric world preoccupied with quantification. In practical political terms, if something is not measured it does not exist, if it is not counted it does not count. If there are no ‘data’, an issue or problem will not be recognized, defined, prioritized, put on the agenda, and debated. Therefore to measure something – or at least to claim to do so – is to announce its existence and signal its importance and policy relevance.10 For Shakespeare to matter to young people, to ‘count’, in contemporary Britain, there is always the temptation to measure, to identify efficacy. Examination of Shakespeare

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within this context, as Lisa Marie Hougton-Reade argues, confers high status and attracts resources: without this, less attention would be given to finding ways to interest pupils in his plays. It is also likely that less funding for CPD courses focussing on teaching Shakespeare would be available. Therefore, the Shakespeare SAT and GCSE coursework can be said to have a positive effect, insomuch that they ensure educators can draw upon a wealth of research and advice on optimum approaches to teaching the plays.11 To suggest that Shakespeare for young people is not the pathway to the predetermined and identifiable cultural capital of an exam pass, but is rather an opportunity to tell other contemporary stories, challenges Houghton-Reade’s construction of Shakespeare. An emancipatory logic, when applied to Shakespeare, can suggest no use-value for young people encountering the plays which can be ‘counted’. However, I want to argue that, in fact, Shakespeare, as with other arts for young people, is most capable of emancipation when it is not ‘counted’ in terms of its use-value, but is ‘recounted’, is used as a story with which to begin telling other stories. By rejecting any use-value of Shakespeare in this way, I draw here quite consciously on Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that ‘all art is quite useless’. It is in his explanation to a fan enquiring about the meaning of this aphorism that Wilde’s opinion becomes relevant to the emancipatory possibilities of Shakespeare for young people in twenty-first century Britain. Wilde wrote: Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order,

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or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.12 Crucially for the argument invoked through poor theatre and so often invoked for the efficacy of art and culture for young people – that participation is the key to emancipation – Wilde argues that such activity is not relevant to art. It is the lack of a link between artistic effects – the ‘creation of a mood’ – and other effects that leads Wilde to describe art as useless. This is, of course, similar to Rancière’s rejection of the links between artistic activity and political efficacy. For Rancière, art is also about the creation of a mood. He describes this creation of a mood as art’s ability to ‘rework the framework of our perceptions and the dynamism of our affects’.13 However, whilst he rejects any link between aesthetic effects and political efficacy, Rancière, unlike Wilde, implies that this very creation of a mood is political because it disturbs the distribution of the sensible. Art does this because it can ‘open up new passages towards new forms of political subjectivation’.14 To quote Wilde with approval, then, is not to identify individual accounts of the transformative power of art as false, or somehow deluded. As Matt Kozusko notes in his assessment of prisoners’ ‘misreading’ of Shakespearean performances, for example, there are a host of examples to suggest the transcendent encounters, or at the very least, ‘productive encounters’, spectators can have with Shakespeare.15 However, crucially, for Rancière, there is no link between these experiences, which he would regard as the occurrence of politics because they disturb the distribution of the sensible, and any other political efficacy, because the way in which any distribution of the sensible is disturbed cannot be predetermined. The effect of art, then, cannot be ‘counted’ because outcomes cannot be measured against criteria determined in advance. Shakespeare, as with all artistic experiences, is valuable and political, in Rancière’s terms, not because its effects can be measured or ‘counted’, but because it provokes a heterogeneity of opinions and experiences: stories which can be ‘recounted’. This is why Rancière sees art

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as political: not because of any particular content or form, but because it shifts the focus onto the aesthetic. It is in this way that art has power, because it disrupts the distribution of the sensible of everyday experience. Any supposed ‘aesthetic efficacy’, Rancière argues, ‘means a paradoxical kind of efficacy that is produced by the very rupturing of any determinate link between cause and effect’.16 Therefore, for Rancière, art’s political ability is not in prompting any long-term change or transformation. However, this does not lessen the importance of moments of possible transcendence – of the creation of moods – in the theatre. Erika Fischer-Lichte stresses this point in her description of audience members intervening to stop a Marina Abramovich performance. To understand the transformation which occurred during this event, Fischer-Lichte insists that: Such a performance eludes the scope of traditional aesthetic theories. It vehemently resists the demands of hermeneutic aesthetics, which aims at understanding the work of art. In this case, understanding the artist’s actions was less important than the experiences that she had while carrying them out and that were generated in the audience.17 To understand the disruption of the distribution which might occur in artistic encounters, Fischer-Lichte implies that the focus on investigating these events should shift away from an examination of artistic intentions and on to a consideration of how audience members experienced the event. This would, of course, entail asking audience members to recount their experience. I want to conclude by arguing that to treat Shakespeare as ‘useless’ in the face of neo-liberal demands to ‘count’ is a political act because it disrupts the distribution of the sensible around Shakespeare. I also want to argue that to effect this political act requires the ‘recounting’ of the relationship between Shakespeare and young people to give more attention to the experience of the young audience. I draw here on Kristin

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Ross’s interpretation of Rancière. Ross combines two notions of ‘recounting’ which are used by Rancière, both of which, in the end, imply the same attitude toward emancipation. First, politics for Rancière occurs when the demos needs ‘re-counting’ because a body has been moved from the position assigned to it and is heard as voice, and second, Rancière’s view is that storytelling, or ‘recounting’, by assuming equal intelligence between teller and hearer, is also a political act. Both imply a disruption to the distribution of the sensible.18 Rather than attempting to prove the use-value of Shakespearean performance for young people, or attempting to enhance young people’s experience of Shakespeare, further research should concentrate on how young people experience Shakespeare, on encouraging them to tell their stories. This is why I have attempted to include the voice of the young audience in this book. It may be that such voices merely state what we already (think we) know, that they voice opinions which do not interpret performances in subtle, sophisticated or original ways. Not all young people will accept the invitation to recount their experiences of theatrical Shakespeare in the way Toby Thompson has, and produce their own artistic work. However, for Shakespeare for young people to be political and to allow emancipation to occur, it is necessary not to produce Shakespeare in a particular way, but to adopt a new attitude. This would require Shakespeare to be not a school, not an object or site of education, but a story to be retold in the voices of the young people who encounter the plays, in whatever voice they choose. What I am suggesting is, as Rancière says of his own project, perhaps unlikely, as there is a resistance, even within progressive educational movements, to the abolition of the authority of Shakespeare and, similarly, resistance to the power of the educator. However, Bingham and Biesta insist that: The unschooled world is only feared by those who have been thoroughly schooled. The emancipated word has no enemies among the truant. None among children and none

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among artists. None among those who would take equality as a point of departure.19 As Bingham and Biesta observe, those of us who have already been thoroughly schooled may find the unschooled world difficult. I argue, however, that it is quite safe to adopt this approach with Shakespeare. For even those who fear the abolition of the use of Shakespeare as a school, or in schools, have nothing to fear: no one actually really needs to ‘stand up’ for Shakespeare – the works have managed to ‘stand up’ for themselves through a myriad of appropriations for the last four hundred years. There are, in fact, more important subjects for which we might ‘stand up’. For, whilst Rancière argues that emancipation will only occur when young people, as an example of Rancière’s ‘poor’, make themselves heard, stand up for themselves, it is still possible for those of us in positions to do so to also stand up for them, perhaps by standing up to Shakespeare.

APPENDIX 1: ‘A BAR ABOUT THE SYSTEM’ BY TOBY THOMPSON It’s a bar about the system. Over the last few years, I’ve been starting out on a mission And yeah sometimes it’s hard to be driven sat at desk upon desk just carving inscriptions. But I done my best to accept that it’s part of what I’m living And all this talk of exams has not yet succeeded in scarring my vision I’ll pass: that’s a given. But I refuse to give up time to pass with distinction I got a need for success: it’s a harboured addiction And grades will not feed me the stardom I’m wishing for With kids like me the system’s flawed It’s saying nothing important: why am I listening for? Anyway I stood it out with two metaphorical fists and fought. And now it’s a few months before they’re dismissing [four words are indistinct here on either the video supplied by Thompson or the videos on the RSC ’s YouTube channel.] I was once told: they can have the facts when the wisdom is yours. And that shit took root – it lives in my thoughts Serves as consolation for written reports saying Toby, this kid don’t do shit and he talks. What do you think I’m in a prison just instead of bars you got swivelling doors. It ain’t for my benefit this shit that I’m taught It’s twisted: distorted statistics. And promotion is all teachers scrawl on their wish list And for this they need the best results in all of the district Which means normally their aim is the same as the kids is They can get the grades, go sixth form and be proclaimed winners But, on occasion, that differs. When a kid has chosen his path 211

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And is far enough along it to make going back the way he came . . . It’s ridiculous. I tried to explain for me what’s time efficient and what isn’t. But they been trained different. So we argue and I guess – Fuck it that’s just the way the wind blows. Let’s talk about English though. What have I been taught, what are some of the things I’ve wrote? Well I know to always put a topic sentence in my intro; And I know you don’t get many marks if you don’t put in some quotes. But have I found any of it inspiring – no! If I hear the word analyze I feel a chill residing in my bones. I wanna write poetic about standing in the fading light and skimming stones, Feet sinking into the sand and birds chirping idyllic tones. Words’ll paint pictures: acrylics won’t. But mention Shakespeare to the class and you will feel it groan. ’Cos we know that means we gotta read the script: and then write an essay. I can’t even describe that shit: torture’s probably the best way. It’s got nothing to do with whether or not I respect the play: I do. But if you think it’s reading material well you can forget it mate. I’m in two minds. I think his work is definitely something to celebrate; To re-adapt, yes. But I’m not sure should it be used to educate. For me watching a Shakespearean play is just pleasure for pleasure’s sake. And I got lists of ready role models that are alive and kicking in the present day – People that are present today, And I don’t know if his words can compete with the way that theirs for me resonate. But as I say, I’m in two minds I like the way his sentences seem to tessellate, And it’s cool how millions and millions and millions of people have now seen that poetry on centre-stage And of course it’s good to combat any misconceptions made, Shakespeare weren’t for the rich: he cooked his rhymes in accordance with the peasants’ taste.

APPENDIX 1

213

But ‘Analyse how Shakespeare explores the themes of jealousy and deception in Othello’? For heaven’s sake. School has put me off Shakespeare somewhat, but if by the end of today I fully get it, then great.

214

APPENDIX 2: TRANSCRIPT OF GRAVEDIGGER SCENE (SCENE 13) FROM BOVTS HAMLET DRESS REHEARSAL ON 5 FEBRUARY 2011 GRAVEDIGGER

Evening all. I’m sorry I’m late. It’s my own stupid fault; I was on my way here to the graveyard: I took a wrong turn and ended up down a dead end. BooBoom. Gertrude removes Gravedigger’s hat as he moves downstage centre. (To Gertrude) Just watch it that’s all. We’re going to have trouble with this one. Yes. It is I, the gravedigger. And where, you may well ask, is my grave? He ‘constructs’ a grave using his mac and two chairs Just like that. (Sings) ‘By the light of the silvery moon . . .’ Going down . . .

215

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APPENDIX 2

(Sings as he disappears into the grave behind the mac) ‘Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones . . .’ (× 3) (Rising) What do we have here? A skull. (To the skulls) Hello pale face. You should get out more. You scared the life out of me. This one jumped out of his skin. Why the grey face? What do you think of it so far? Rubbish! And now – a limerick! There was a Gravedigger who was silly Who wore a frock that was frilly He went into town The wind blew it down And everyone there saw his . . . HAMLET

Have you no feeling for your business?

GRAVEDIGGER

(To 1st skull) You said that without moving your lips.

HAMLET

Joking while you’re digging a grave?

GRAVEDIGGER

(To 2nd skull) You can do it as well.

HAMLET

Whose grave’s this, sirrah?

GRAVEDIGGER

Mine, sir. I dug it.

HAMLET

What man dost thou dig it for?

GRAVEDIGGER

For no man, sir.

HAMLET

For what woman then?

GRAVEDIGGER

For none neither.

HAMLET

Who is to be buried in’t?

GRAVEDIGGER

One that was a woman, sir. But, rest her soul, she’s dead. He brings up a third skull which has a blonde wig. (Pause)

APPENDIX 2

217

Where were we? (Pause) Ah: that’s it. He throws up a number of skulls from the grave. Here’s a skull now. Heads up! HAMLET

Whose was it?

GRAVEDIGGER

This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.

HAMLET

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him. A fellow of infinite jest. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols, your songs . . .

GRAVEDIGGER

Whoah! ’Scuse me madam. (Looking down into grave) Just a minute. Can I have a word with you please. Can he say ‘gambols’? (Pause) No: ‘gambols’. (To Hamlet) He says it’s fine but don’t use it too much or you’ll do yourself an injury. Pray proceed.

HAMLET

Your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment.

GRAVEDIGGER

What do you mean?

HAMLET

He was dead funny! BooBoom!

GRAVEDIGGER

I do the jokes around here, sunshine. But I’ll give you one thing. A fine actor. One of the best Piglets I’ve ever seen. He takes out a pipe.

HAMLET

Hamlet.

GRAVEDIGGER

No thank you: I smoke a pipe. (To the rest of the cast) 2, 3, 4 . . . Ukelele begins to play as the Gravedigger gathers his things and exits.

218

APPENDIX 3: GRAVEDIGGER SCENE (SCENE 13) FROM TOBY HULSE’S SCRIPT FOR BOVTS HAMLET SCENE THIRTEEN The churchyard. A GRAVEDIGGER at work. Enter HAMLET. GRAVEDIGGER [Sings] In youth when I did love, did love, Methought it was very sweet To contract – O – the time for – a – my behove, O, methought there – a – was nothing – a – meet. HAMLET

[To us] Has this fellow no feeling of his business? ’A sings in grave-making. The GRAVEDIGGER tosses HAMLET up a skull.

GRAVEDIGGER

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. [Sings] A pickaxe and a spade, a spade, For and a shrouding sheet. O, a pit of clay for to be made For such wa guest is meet. 219

220

APPENDIX 3

He tosses up another skull. There’s another. HAMLET

Whose grave’s this, sirrah?

GRAVEDIGGER Mine, sir. I dug it. HAMLET

What man dost thou dig it for?

GRAVEDIGGER For no man, sir. HAMLET

What woman then?

GRAVEDIGGER For none neither. HAMLET

Who is to be buried in’t?

GRAVEDIGGER One that was a woman, sir. But, rest her soul, she’s dead. He tosses up a third skull. Here’s a skull now. HAMLET

Whose was it?

GRAVEDIGGER This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester. HAMLET

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him. A fellow of infinite jest. Where by your gibes now? Your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment.

STORYTELLER

But soft.

NOTES

1 ‘You can forget it mate’? 1 Toby Thompson, performance poet, sometimes performing under the name Toby T, at a Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC ) and Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company (THSC ) Development Day on 17 February 2010. I quote throughout, unless otherwise stated, from a promotional video made by THSC , and supplied to me by Thompson. The video documents his performance on the day, in front of practitioners. This video is not available publicly, although a version of the poem, titled ‘A Bar About the System’, can be viewed on the RSC ’s YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggZ9zXA aGmo [accessed 22 September 2013]. I have provided a transcript of the performance from the Development Day in Appendix 1, as it, interestingly, differs in minor but perhaps significant ways from the version available on YouTube and has all the swearing removed. See p. 000 for an analysis of these changes. 2 Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. 3 http://www.hiphopshakespeare.com/site/about/ [accessed 22 September 2013]. 4 Helen Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. 5 Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies, ‘Class Acts? Public and Private Values and the Cultural Habits of TheatreGoers’, in Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, ed. Sonia M. Livingstone (Bristol; Portland, OR : Intellect, 2005), 139–60. See especially 143–7. 6 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 13. Bishop examines 221

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these developments within a wider, international context, and as related to artistic discourses, which she sees as exemplified in Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presse Du Reel, 2002). 7 United Nations Development Program, Democracy in Latin America: Towards a Citizens’ Democracy, (New York: UNDP, 2004); Atilio Boron, ‘The Truth About Capitalist Democracy’, in Socialist Register 2006, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: Merlin, 2005), 29–58 (38). 8 Lisa Marie Houghton-Reade, Teaching Shakespeare in Secondary Schools, unpublished MP hil dissertation (The Shakespeare Institute, 2008), 31. 9 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. and expanded edn (London: Fontana, 1983), 150. 10 Houghton-Reade, Teaching Shakespeare in Secondary Schools, 33. 11 Laurajane Smith, ‘Class, Heritage and the Negotiation of Place’, paper given at ‘Missing Out’ conference (London School of Economics, 23 March 2009). 12 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 13–14. 13 ‘Social Inclusion and Cultural Heritage’, Our Place Network Live Debate, online conference, 12 November 2009. 14 Abigail Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Adaptations and Re-Workings (London Bloomsbury, 2013), 1. 15 Erica Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (London: Routledge, 2009). 16 Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature, 8. 17 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC ), A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools (Royal Shakespeare Company, 2005), 2. 18 RSC , A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools, 1 19 RSC , A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools, 2. 20 RSC , A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools, 4. 21 RSC , A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools, 2. 22 RSC , A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools, 4. 23 RSC , A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools, 7.

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24 Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA ), Active Shakespeare: Capturing Evidence of Learning. Introductory Guidance for Teachers (Coventry: QCDA , 2010). See also Department for Children, Schools and Families, Shakespeare for All Ages and Stages (Nottingham: DCSF Publications, 2008), which contains advice from the RSC for teachers. 25 Susan Bennett, ‘The Presence of Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, ed. Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 210–28 (210). 26 Bennett, ‘The Presence of Shakespeare’, 210. Christie Carson argues that Shakespeare’s Globe is fast displacing the RSC ’s influence in disseminating ‘official’ Shakespeare through its increasing use by the BBC in its broadcasts of Shakespearean performance. See Christie Carson, ‘Democratising the Audience?’, in Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, ed. Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 115–26 (124). 27 Kate McLuskie, ‘Dancing and Thinking’, in Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On, ed. G. B. Shand (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 121–41. McLuskie also makes a similar point in a more positive consideration of this initiative in Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Commercial Bard: Business Models for the Twenty-First Century’, in Shakespeare Survey: Shakespeare and Comedy, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–12. 28 Houghton-Reade, Teaching Shakespeare in Secondary Schools, see especially 39–45 and 100–1. 29 Paul Franssen, ‘Preaching to the Unconverted’, in Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeare: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress Brisbane, 2006, eds. Richard Fotheringham, Christa Jansohn and R. S. White, (Newark: University of Delware Press, 2008), 160–8 (160–1). Franssen is referring to Naomi J. Miller, Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults (New York; London: Routledge, 2003). In fact, I would argue that only John Barnes’s essay considers performance to any degree, and he sees performance as largely failing to engage young people. See John

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Barnes, ‘Players, Playgrounds, and Grounds for Play: Play v. Theater v. Realism in a Touring Children’s Version of King Lear’, in Miller, Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, 213–38. 30 See for instance ‘Shakespearean Screen Adaptations for the Teen Market’, a special edition of Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 2 (Summer 2008), edited by Michael D. Friedman. In Borrowers and Lenders II , no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2006), edited by Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, a special edition dedicated to ‘Shakespeare for Children’, apart from a ‘Review Cluster’ which considered one theatrical performance, most of the other articles consider film or textual adaptations. See http://www.borrowers. uga.edu/7150/toc [accessed 23rd May 2012]. 31 Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People. 32 Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People, 1–2. 33 Hateley is interested more in the gendered transmission of cultural capital, whereas I do not address issues of gender. 34 Matthew Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 2010), x. 35 Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Nicholson observes that the term ‘applied theatre’ is both relatively recent and contested by academics and practitioners. However, the views she discusses share the belief that theatre is particularly suitable for examining and changing people’s lives. See particularly 1–16. 36 See Nicholson, Applied Drama, 19–37. James Thompson’s overview of applied drama also associates the practice with citizenship, as does Jonothan Neelands’ book about drama in education. See Jonothan Neelands and Peter J. O’Connor, Creating Democratic Citizenship through Drama Education (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2010); James Thompson, Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012). See also David Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) for a consideration of the relationship between theatre and citizenship beyond applied drama.

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37 Richard Butsch, ‘Changing Images of Movie Audiences’, in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert Clyde Allen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 293. 38 Sonia Livingstone, ‘On the Relation between Audiences and Publics’, in Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, ed. Sonia M. Livingstone (Bristol; Portland, OR : Intellect, 2005), 17–41 (18). 39 Livingstone, ‘On the Relation between Audiences and Publics’, 18. 40 Richard Butsch, The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals (New York; London: Routledge, 2008), 304. 41 Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1997), 21. 42 Butsch, ‘Changing Images of Movie Audiences’, 296–7. 43 Butsch ‘Changing Images of Movie Audiences’, 296. 44 Reason, The Young Audience, ix–x. 45 This is investigated most fully in Matthew Reason, Young Audiences and Live Theatre: An Investigation into Perceptions of Live Performance (York: York St John University, 2005). During my own research, empirical research on theatre audiences has been expanding somewhat, although is still under-represented in relation to work on theatre performers, I would argue. See for instance Matthew Reason and Kirsty Sedgman, eds, ‘Theatre Audiences’ (guest-edited themed section), Participations 12, no. 1 (May 2015), 117–387; John O’Toole et al., Young Audiences, Theatre and the Cultural Conversation (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014). 46 Reason, The Young Audience. 47 Reason, The Young Audience, x. 48 Reason, The Young Audience, 170. 49 Reason, The Young Audience, 170. 50 Reason, The Young Audience, 170. 51 Bennett, Theatre Audiences, 206 (my italics). 52 Reason, The Young Audience, 154.

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53 Willmar Sauter, ‘Who Reacts When, How and Upon What: From Audience Surveys to the Theatrical Event’, Contemporary Theatre Review 12, no. 3 (2002), 115–29 (120). 54 Gregory Sporton, ‘The Active Audience: The Network as a Performance Environment’, in Modes of Spectating, ed. Alison Oddey and Christine White (Bristol: Intellect, 2009), 61–72 (64–5). Sporton, of course, refers to the conventions of the standard, bourgeois theatre. It is notable, however, that even in the many theatre experiences which do not subscribe to the standard, bourgeois notions, discussion during the performance is rarely encouraged. Punchdrunk productions, for instance, which allow for the audience to wander through extensive spaces to discover performances, and which, in many respects, replicate more closely a gallery experience, especially through the experience of walking through scenic, environmental installations, nevertheless actively discourage audiences from talking whilst the performance occurs. 55 It may be significant that McConachie’s work on cognition and performance seems alone amongst theatre considerations of audiences in considering and commenting on other types of audience as being similar. He cites Butsch’s work on audiences without drawing any distinction between theatre and cinema audiences. Bruce A. McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 56 Richard Butsch, ‘Changing Images of Movie Audiences’, 293. 57 Pearson and Messenger Davies, ‘Class Acts?’, 140. The statistic is from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO ), Social Trends (London: HMSO, 2011), 116. 58 Andy Lavender, ‘Viewing and Acting (and Points in Between): The Trouble with Spectating after Rancière’, Contemporary Theatre Review 10, no. 2 (2012), 307–26 (308). 59 Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 148. 60 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1990), 16, cited in May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière, 5.

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61 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009). 62 See, for instance, Jacques Rancière and Andrew Parker, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 10–12. 63 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 115. 64 Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 24. 65 Foucault addressed the ‘police’, best understood as a type of institutional reasoning, rather than a specific institution, throughout his career. 66 Rancière, Disagreement, 11. 67 Rancière, Disagreement, 19. 68 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2004), 22. 69 Rancière, Disagreement, 30. 70 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 50. 71 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 48. 72 See Appendix 1, p. 000, where I indicate a short passage that is difficult to understand. 73 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggZ9zXA aGmo [accessed 10 September 2013]. 74 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009). 75 Helen Nicholson, Theatre, Education and Performance: The Map and the Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 202. 76 Nicholson, Theatre, Education and Performance, 201–2. 77 David Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice, 219–22. 78 Alan Read, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 177. 79 Freshwater, Theatre and Audience, 75 and 5. 80 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1997).

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81 Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 188. Although I do not intend to address it in this work, Kennedy may be simply wrong on this assertion. There is developing work on performance and cognition which indicates that cognitive theories may be very useful in understanding the behaviour of spectators. See, for instance, Bruce A. McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (London: Routledge, 2006), in which it is argued that quite a lot is known about the psychology and emotions of spectating. 82 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 188. 83 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 3. 84 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 3. 85 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 204–21. Kennedy describes attending a ritual performance in Kerala with his daughter but does not consider eliciting her opinion or experience of the performance. 86 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 195. 87 Rachel Fensham, To Watch Theatre: Essays on Genre and Corporeality (Bruxelles; Oxford: PIE -Peter Lang, 2009), 22. 88 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle. Kennedy refers to the difference between watching a DVD from beginning to end and using a DVD for teaching and research purposes and implies in his further observations that it is impossible for him to ‘remember properly a text and performances that have been so stitched into my memory that they have become part of me’. He concludes: ‘I am not a spectator, I am a museum of Hamlet’; 197–200. 89 The term is not defined anywhere to my knowledge, but I take it here to mean a spectator with some sort of professional interest in the theatre – whether theatre maker, critic or scholar. A ‘non-professional’ spectator would be, then, an ‘ordinary’ theatre-goer, one who approaches theatre as part of their leisure activity, rather than their work activity. The place of young people in this relationship is interesting, because, as I explore in Chapter 3, they are often potentially presented theatrical Shakespeare as work, rather than leisure. However, in the sense

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that they are not experienced theatre spectators, I consider them here as non-professional. 90 Nicholas Peter Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 91 Sharon O’Dair, ‘ “Pretty Much How the Internet Works”; or, Aiding and Abetting the Deprofessionalization of Shakespeare Studies’, in Shakespeare Survey: Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 83–96. 92 O’Dair, ‘ “Pretty Much How the Internet Works”; or, Aiding and Abetting the Deprofessionalization of Shakespeare Studies’, 92. 93 Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle, 188. 94 Sauter, ‘Who Reacts When, How and Upon What’, 115–29. 95 Anne-Marie Gourdon, ‘The Spectator’s Reception of Theatrical Performances’, in Performance Theory: Reception and Audience Research, ed. Henri Ed Schoenmakers (Amsterdam: Tijdschrift Voor Theaterwetenschap, 1992), 115–20 (115–16). 96 Gourdon, ‘The Spectator’s Reception of Theatrical Performances’, 117. 97 Gourdon, ‘The Spectator’s Reception of Theatrical Performances’, 117–18. 98 Gourdon, ‘The Spectator’s Reception of Theatrical Performances’, 115. The turn away from a semiotic approach to theatre may also be influenced by a rejection of the notion of ‘reading’ a theatre performance, because reading suggests a textual interpretive strategy, whereas live theatre performances are very different from texts and the practice of watching and hearing very different from that of silent reading. As Howard Mancing points out, reading and seeing are two very distinct cognitive activities and therefore the metaphor of text should not be employed for visual or perceptual arts like theatre, at least not without caution. See Howard Mancing, ‘See the Play, Read the Book’, in Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, ed. Bruce A. McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (London: Routledge, 2006). 99 Thomas Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 227.

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100 Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography, 227. 101 Freshwater, Theatre and Audience, 74. 102 See for instance Jo Robinson, ‘Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History’, New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 3 (August 2007), 229–40. Other developments in this area include the AHRC-funded ’Giving Voice to the Nation’ project, led by Graham Saunders at the University of Reading. This project investigates the Arts Council’s work on regional and touring theatre. Michael Dobson’s recent book also performs a similar function by insisting that amateur performance is as worthy of attention as professional performance in understanding what meanings are made with Shakespeare. See Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Another AHRC-funded project, ‘Amateur Dramatics in Urban and Suburban Utopias’, on which work began in 2013, has an amateur performance and a regional aspect, investigating amateur theatre in the Garden Cities and New Towns of Hertfordshire. See http:// amateurdramaresearch.com/amateur-dramatics-in-urbanutopias/ [accessed 8 September 2013]. 103 Robinson, ‘Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History’, 229. 104 Bennett, ‘The Presence of Shakespeare’, 226. 105 John Russell Brown, ‘Learning Shakespeare’s Secret Language: The Limits of “Performance Studies” ’, New Theatre Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2008), 211–21 (212). 106 Michael Dobson, ‘Two Touring Tempests’, Shakespeare Bulletin 29, no. 3 (Fall 2011), 351–8 (351). I explore the relationship between text and performance in Chapter 4. 107 Gregory M. Colón Semenza, ‘Teens, Shakespeare, and the Dumbing Down Cliché: The Case of the Animated Tales’, Shakespeare Bulletin 26, no. 2 (2008), 37–68 (39). 108 Semenza, ‘Teens, Shakespeare, and the Dumbing Down Cliché’, 39. Semenza derives these descriptions from the Russian formalist terms of fabula (the raw material of the story, what happens) and syuzhet (‘the ways in which

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these materials are shaped and transformed by artistic procedures’.) 109 Richard Paul Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 110 Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, 10. 111 Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, 10. It is interesting that Knowles does not consider age as one of the social identities worthy of mention. It is presumably included in ‘other social positions’, although it is difficult to think of any others not included in Knowles’s list. 112 Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, 10. 113 See Matthew Reason, Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), especially Part IV (Chapters 9 and 10), in which he identifies the major tropes in newspaper reviewing. 114 Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, 21–2. 115 John Tulloch, ‘Approaching Theatre Audiences: Active School Students and Commoditised High Culture’, Contemporary Theatre Review 10, no. 2 (2000), 85–104 (100–3). 116 The egg is usually described in communications, programmes and advertising material without the use of a capital and I therefore reproduce this formatting throughout this book. I describe Press Gang in Chapter 3: see pp. 000–0 below. 117 The fact that there was choice involved is illustrated by the fact that not all of the pupils who had attended the performance attended my drama workshop. 118 Pierre Bourdieu and Randal Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 64–5. 119 Matthew Reason, ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre Part 1’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 26, no. 2 (2006), 129–45 (144). 120 Reason, ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre Part 1’, 135. 121 I interrogate Reason’s methodology, and explain further my departures from his work, in Chapter 3. See particularly pp. 000–00.

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122 Margot Ely, Doing Qualitative Research: Circles within Circles (Basingstoke: Taylor and Francis, 1991), 135. 123 Ely, Doing Qualitative Research, 135. 124 Kristin G. Esterberg, Qualitative Methods in Social Research (Boston; London: McGraw Hill, 2002), 98. 125 Mike Crang and Ian Cook, Doing Ethnographies (London: SAGE , 2007), 38. 126 Crang and Cook, Doing Ethnographies, 75. 127 Bill Gillham, Case Study Research Methods (London: Continuum, 2000), 47. 128 All of my research was approved by the Queen Mary Research Ethics Committee: application references QMREC 2009/0143 and QMREC 2009/64. 129 Esterberg, Qualitative Methods in Social Research, 132. 130 John W. Creswell, Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 3rd edn (Los Angeles; London: SAGE , 2009), 130. 131 Esterberg, Qualitative Methods in Social Research, 132. 132 Crang and Cook, Doing Ethnographies, 184. 133 William Shakespeare, Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011); William Shakespeare and Kathleen O. Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

2 Catching up to Shakespeare? 1 Charles W. Bingham, Gert Biesta and Jacques Rancière, Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation (London: Continuum, 2010). 2 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), xvi–xvii. See p. 000, where I consider an alternative understanding of Shakespeare as pedagogical site, rather than pedagogical object.

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3 Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer, ‘Introduction’, in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 1–2. 4 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 56. 5 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1991), 4–5. This is a model which is implicitly accepted by Bourdieu; power is gained through the possession of knowledge in the form of educational and social capital and the way in which this is gained is by following the path of the teachers. Once the prescribed path has been completed, students can possess social and educational capital and speak with authority. Bourdieu then goes on to show how this social and educational capital is limited not just by this educational path but by disadvantages which are experienced by some, for instance the working class, in even following this path. 6 Rancière, ‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters’, in Jacques Rancière, ed. Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, 12. 7 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 4. 8 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 4–13. 9 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, 13. 10 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 55–7. 11 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 68–71. 12 Rancière does not support his view with any explicit reference to scientific research, although this is perhaps not surprising as, according to a standard reference work about child development, ‘explaining how a child learns language has proved to be one of the most compelling challenges in developmental psychology’; Denise Roberts Boyd and Helen L. Bee, The Developing Child, 13th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ ; London: Pearson Education, 2012), 202. Boyd and Bee detail a number of different theories for language development and reject any comprehensive theory of language development. However, Rancière’s model is seemingly supported by at least some views on how language develops. Bates, O’Connell and Shore observe

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that at first, infant babbling has all sorts of sounds, including some that are not part of the language they are hearing, but these sounds are gradually dropped from around nine or ten months; ‘Language and Communication in Infancy’ in Handbook of Infant Development, ed. J. D. Osofsky (New York: Wiley, 1987), 149–203, cited in Boyd and Bee, The Developing Child, 193. If we consider such development with reference to Rancière, we might describe these infants as learning their language by entering into making ‘noise’ but gradually ‘selfcensoring’ the noise and being regarded only as using ‘speech’ as they fully enter the distribution of the sensible. 13 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 156–7. 14 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 55–63 and 68–71. 15 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 70. 16 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 70. 17 Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 7–8. 18 Published as Tim Crouch, I, Shakespeare: Four of Shakespeare’s Better-Known Plays Re-told for Young Audiences by Their Lesser-Known Characters. I, Malvolio; I, Banquo; I, Caliban; I, Peaseblossom (London: Oberon Books, 2011) and Tim Crouch, I, Cinna (The Poet) (London: Oberon Books, 2012). 19 Susanne Greenhalgh, ‘Part 2: Children’s Shakespeares. Introduction: Reinventing Shakespearean Childhoods’, in Shakespeare and Childhood, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh and Robert Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 117–36 (130). 20 Greenhalgh, ‘Part 2: Children’s Shakespeares. Introduction’, 130. 21 See, for instance, Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton (London: Routledge, 1996); Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie, Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Margaret Jane Kidnie, ‘Text, Performance, and the Editors: Staging Shakespeare’s Drama’, Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2000), 456–73. Of course, as a practice largely conducted as a lone individual, reading might also accord, for Bloom, more with a

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desired individual psychological development than the collective experience of watching a performance. 22 Janet Bottoms, ‘ “To Read Aright”: Representations of Shakespeare for Children’, Children’s Literature 32 (2004), 1–14. 23 Bottoms, ‘ “To Read Aright” ’, 2. Bottoms credits the concept of ‘shaping discourses’ to John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (London: Longman, 1992). 24 Bottoms, ‘ “To Read Aright” ’, 2. 25 See http://www.companyofangels.co.uk/Company_History.html and http://www.companyofangels.co.uk/Mission_and_Artistic_ Policy.html [accessed 2 October 2014]. 26 Crouch’s reference to ‘a dream for eight years up’ is not included in the publication of I, Peaseblossom in I, Shakespeare, 2. I refer here to the script as it was available from Crouch’s website at the time: http://www.newsfromnowhere.net/ [accessed 11 December 2011]. The scripts of the plays were freely available from this site for download, although this is no longer the case – the site is used now only for archival purposes and is no longer updated. 27 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 72. Peaseblossom was played in the Company of Angels production by actress Kate Mayne. Unless referring specifically and clearly to actions by Mayne, however, I refer throughout to Peaseblossom as male to maintain consistency with the characterization as stated in the published text. 28 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 75. 29 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 76. 30 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 75. There are no national guidelines for what is considered appropriate for young people in theatre productions which parallel the quasi-legal advice offered by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC ) for films. However, interestingly, the use of these terms is consistent with what is acceptable to the BBFC in classifying a film as ‘U’, where ‘mild sexual . . . references only’ (for example, to ‘making love’) are allowed. British Board of Film Classification, ‘The Guidelines’, 21. Indeed, to be classified a ‘U’, the BBFC expects a film to be able to be ‘safely’ viewed by ‘normal’ (i.e. not overly sensitive) children of four and up.

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31 For a general history of how the perception of children began to change in the nineteenth century, see, for instance, Marilyn R. Brown, Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Henry Jenkins, ‘Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths’, in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York; London: New York University Press, 1998), 1–37. For a discussion of how this construction of children as innocent affects political treatment of them see Henry A. Giroux, Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic Future (Boulder, CO : Paradigm Publishers, 2013). The place of Shakespeare in this narrative is explored by Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Hogarth, 1989), especially 162–230; Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature. Both Taylor and Hateley describe a ‘feminisation’ of Shakespeare in the Victorian period as the plays were aimed specifically at girls rather than boys. 32 Children appear to be, from my observation of them in audiences, to an extent, still innocent and unwilling to address issues of adult love. This is, in fact, quite surprising to some extent, given the exposure to issues of love, and indeed sex, which ever-younger children encounter through television, advertising and the internet. In the context of the reaction to a theatre performance, this ‘innocence’ may to some extent be performed – there is a clear pleasure taken in the howls of outrage I have seen – and the status of the outrage and embarrassment would be an interesting case study for further research into the actual experience of young people at live performance. However, it is beyond the scope of this book. 33 http://www.fairymonsterghost.co.uk/monster.html [accessed 2 November, 2013]. 34 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 60. 35 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 60. 36 Shinichi Suzhki, ‘Learning to Read Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare and His Collaborators over the Centuries, ed. Pavel Drabek, Klára Kolinská and Matthew Nicholls (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 157–72. As Suzhki notes, this reduction of sexual awareness and a concomitant sexual threat posed by Caliban potentially problematizes Prospero’s aura of a kindly

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father-figure by removing any plausible reason for Caliban’s imprisonment. The most famous of adaptations for children – The Lamb’s Tales – omit both the attempted rape of Miranda and any kindnesses shown by Caliban, in an attempt, Suzhki argues, to justify the imprisonment and treatment of Caliban. 37 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 59–60. 38 http://www.fairymonsterghost.co.uk/monster_writer.html [accessed 24 November 2012]. 39 Bottoms, ‘ “To Read Aright” ’, 10. Bottoms is citing Marshall’s The Child’s English Literature (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1909). 40 Hoffman, Alice Spenser, The Children’s Shakespeare: Being Stories from the Plays with Illustrative Passages (London: J. M. Dent, 1911), vii; cited in Bottoms, ‘ “To Read Aright” ’, 10. 41 Bottoms, ‘ “To Read Aright” ’, 10. 42 Hateley in fact details a complicated relationship of the play to appropriations. She writes: ‘The history of criticism and appropriation of The Tempest is filled with romanticised views of both the play and Prospero’, but argues that more recent criticism has reacted against a characterization of Prospero’s rule as essentially benign, reading such characterization as celebrating The Tempest’s exploitative colonialism. Hateley argues that ‘the Prospero–Caliban relationship has been appropriated critically and creatively as a topos of both colonial subjugation and paternal authority in an intersection between the personal and the political’, linking colonialism and paternalism. Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature, 150. 43 Interview with Tim Crouch on 26 November 2011. 44 http://www.fairymonsterghost.co.uk/fairy_writer.html [accessed 24 November 2011]. 45 http://www.fairymonsterghost.co.uk/ghost_design_costume.html [accessed 24 November 2011]. 46 Interview with Tim Crouch, 26 November, 2011. 47 Interview with Tim Crouch, 26 November 2011. 48 Ilter, ‘ “A Process of Transformation”: Tim Crouch on My Arm’, Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no.4 (2011), 394–404 (403). It is interesting to note here that such an attitude is also

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consistent with the poor theatre aesthetic which I describe as prevalent in performance of Shakespeare for young people in Chapter 3: ‘very’ theatre becomes the ‘simplest expression’ – an actor’s body almost alone on stage. 49 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 77. 50 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 78. This is also similar to the effect Crouch attempts in An Oak Tree, where an invited actor reads from the script at each performance opposite Crouch’s character. In the case of An Oak Tree the ‘second actor’ is chosen before the performance, given written guidance and has a short meeting with Crouch prior to the performance. See An Oak Tree in Tim Crouch, Plays One: My Arm; An Oak Tree; England; The Author (London: Oberon Books, 2011), 55. I consider the relationship between Crouch’s work for young people and his work for adults in more detail below. 51 J. Caitlin Finlayson, ‘Review of the Tempest: Re-Imagined for Everyone Aged Six and Over’, Shakespeare Bulletin 28, no. 2 (Summer 2010), 291–7 (297). 52 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 65. 53 See Chapter 3 for a fuller consideration of this type of dramaturgy and a consideration of it as ‘poor’ theatre. 54 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 37. 55 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 37. 56 Lyn Gardner, ‘Review: FairyMonsterGhost’, The Guardian (18 September 2006). http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/ sep/18/theatre [accessed 12 December 2012]. 57 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 37. 58 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 38. 59 http://www.fairymonsterghost.co.uk/ghost_writer.html [accessed 24 November 2011]. 60 Gardner, ‘Review: FairyMonsterGhost’. I would actually take issue with Gardner’s assessment that a ‘comfortable knowledge’ of Macbeth is required, as I, Banquo stands very much on its own as a valid piece of theatre. Certainly, knowledge of Macbeth may allow or provoke different insights, but it is not necessary to know the play, as its events are effectively narrated within I, Banquo. Interestingly, Gardner goes on to say ‘if only the plays

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were taught like this’, framing the performance for children once again as an educational experience, rather than an artistic or cultural one. See Chapter 3 for a consideration of Shakespeare as educational. 61 http://www.fairymonsterghost.co.uk/ghost_writer.html [accessed 20 December 2012]. 62 Ilter, ‘ “A Process of Transformation” ’, 403. 63 Bridget Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (London: Routledge, 2005), 13. 64 Interestingly, of course, one of the prime examples of the genre of high-school movies is Ten Things I Hate About You, an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. 65 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archive RSC /SM /1/2005/TAM 1. 66 Baptista was played here as Katherine and Bianca’s mother, rather than father. 67 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archive RSC /SM /1/2005/TAM 1. 68 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archive RSC /SM /1/2005/TAM 1. 69 Alan Sinfield is usually attributed with the first use of this conjunction in 1985. It relates to a common configuration whereby a Shakespeare play is staged in a setting supposedly relevant to the contemporary lives of the young people for whom it is staged/written. Alan Sinfield, ‘Give an Account of Shakespeare and Education, Showing Why You Think They Are Effective and What You Have Appreciated About Them. Support Your Comments with Precise References’, in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 158–81. 70 See considerations of RSC YPS productions of The Comedy of Errors in Chapter 3 and Hamlet in Chapter 4. Macbeth in 2005 was toured to schools as an in-the-round production. The performance used only a small circular stage, devoid of scenery, and some action took place around the audience. The costumes were mixtures of only black and white. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Archive RSC /PR /3/1/2004/MAC 4/1–3. The prompt book gives each scene a title, but these are all generalized and do not suggest a specific time or location: for instance they refer to ‘Battle Tableau’, ‘Murder Scene’, ‘Funeral of Duncan’ and ‘Coronation of Macbeth’. RSC /SM /1/2004/MAC 2.

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71 Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, The National Curriculum: Handbook for Primary Teachers in England; Key Stages 1 and 2 (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, 1999), 11. 72 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 14. 73 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 14–15. 74 This occurs a number of times, with various replies given to the question ‘Where did you think it was?’, including McDonalds, a theme park, the discotheque, the theatre. Crouch confirms that answers to this question are largely improvised. Interview with Tim Crouch, 26 November 2011. 75 The printed version confirms that this letter is the one left for him by Feste, Toby Belch and Sir Andrew. In Shakespeare’s text, the letter is read aloud in sections by Malvolio in 2.5 of Twelfth Night, as he tries to decipher its meaning. In Crouch’s published text, it is printed as a complete letter, beginning with the dedication, followed by the eight lines of poetry and then finally the prose which Malvolio finds. Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 13–14. 76 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 13. 77 Twelfth Night, 2.3.148. 78 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 19. The first line here is from Twelfth Night 3.4.123–4. 79 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 75. 80 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 55. 81 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 14. 82 Gardner, ‘Review: FairyMonsterGhost’ [accessed 24 November 2011]. 83 ‘Forum: Tim Crouch, The Author, and the Audience’, ed. Stephen Bottoms. Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no. 4 (November 2011). 84 Crouch, Plays One, 164. 85 Crouch, Plays One, 164. 86 Crouch, Plays One, 164. The actors appearing in the production when I saw it were Tim Crouch, Chris Goode, Vic Llewellyn and Esther Smith. 87 Crouch, Plays One, 164.

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88 Performance of The Author at Bristol Old Vic Studio, 1 October, 2010. 89 Tim Crouch, ‘The Author: Response and Responsibility’, Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no. 4 (2011), 416–22. 90 Helen Freshwater, ‘ “You Say Something”: Audience Participation and The Author’, Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no. 4 (2011), 405–9 (409). 91 Crouch, Plays One, 25. 92 Freshwater, ‘ “You Say Something” ’, 407. 93 Crouch, Plays One, 167. 94 Crouch, Plays One, 170–1. 95 Freshwater, ‘ “You Say Something” ’, 406. 96 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 26. 97 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 26. 98 The poem is taken from Feste’s song for Orsino: Twelfth Night 2.4.59–65. 99 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 27. 100 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 27. 101 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 26. 102 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 26. 103 Helen Freshwater observes that the practice of applause is one of the areas of corporeal behaviour which is under-researched in theatre scholarship: Freshwater, Theatre and Audience, 19–21. She cites Baz Kershaw and Nicholas Ridout as discussing issues of discomfort at the ‘ritual’ of applause at the end of a performance. It is interesting in this context to note that the ritual and practice of an audience which is silent until the applause at the end of a performance is historically contingent. My own research, for instance, indicates that audiences routinely applauded and acknowledged the entrance of Herbert Beerbohm Tree when performing Shakespeare in the late nineteenth century. Jan Wozniak, ‘A Very Palpable Hit? Star Casting and Audience Reception in Beerbohm Tree’s Hamlet’, paper given at ‘Staging London’s Cultural Life: Herbert and Maud Tree’ conference (University of Bristol, 23 January 2008).

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104 Although it is, of course, also possible that the disruption of the social script here might encourage a nervous awkwardness which prevents this consideration. This might outweigh what Nicholas Ridout sees as the awkward reminder of the audience’s complicity in the economic transaction of theatre which is contained in the ritual of applause. Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, 164–5. See Chapter 4, pages 000–0 for a brief discussion of the different construction of theatre for young people with respect to this. 105 Freshwater, ‘ “You Say Something” ’, 407. 106 Crouch, I, Shakespeare, 26. 107 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 23. 108 Ilter, ‘ “A Process of Transformation” ’, 396. 109 Eddie Cass and Steve Roud, eds, Room, Room, Ladies and Gentlemen: An Introduction to the English Mummers’ Play (London: English Folk Dance & Song Society, 2002). Mike Pearson considers the convention of this and other folk performance in relation to contemporary performance in Mike Pearson, ‘In Comes I’: Performance, Memory and Landscape (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006). 110 On 2 July 2012 a webcast of a performance was streamed into secondary schools in Britain. I base this chapter on a reading of the printed text and a viewing of the podcast which was available to view on the RSC website at http://www.rsc.org. uk/education/online-resources/online-performances/i-cinna/ watch-the-i-cinna-film-video.aspx [accessed 9 October 2013]. 111 http://www.rsc.org.uk/whats-on/i-cinna/ [accessed 15 January 2013]. 112 Tim Crouch, I, Cinna (the Poet), 15. 113 Crouch, I, Cinna, 15. 114 Crouch, I, Cinna, 18. 115 Crouch, I, Cinna, 21. 116 Crouch, I, Cinna, 21–2. 117 Crouch, I, Cinna, 18–19. 118 Crouch, I, Cinna, 19. 119 Crouch, I, Cinna, 15.

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120 Cinna has barely fifteen lines, five of which repeat the lines of the crowd which assails him and three of which assert his identity. See Julius Caesar 3.3. 121 Crouch, I, Cinna, 20. 122 Crouch, I, Cinna, 21. 123 Crouch, I, Cinna, 21. 124 Crouch, I, Cinna, 17. 125 Crouch, I, Cinna, 27. 126 Crouch, I, Cinna, 14. 127 Also see, for instance, Rex Gibson, Teaching Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 207–10. 128 Kate McLuskie, ‘Year of Shakespeare: I, Cinna (The Poet)’. Blogging Shakespeare, 21 June 2012. http://bloggingshakespeare .com/year-of-shakespeare-i-cinna-the-poet [accessed 20 April 2015]. 129 McLuskie, ‘Year of Shakespeare’. 130 McLuskie, ‘Year of Shakespeare’. 131 Crouch, I, Cinna, 49–50. 132 Crouch, I, Cinna, 50. 133 Shelley Manis, ‘Writing as Performance: Using Performance Theory to Teach Writing in Theatre Classrooms’, Theatre Topics 19, no. 2 (2009), 139–51. 134 Manis, ‘Writing as Performance’, 145, 147. 135 Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’, in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York; London: New York University Press, 1998), 73–103 (78). 136 Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’, 76–8. 137 Manis, ‘Writing as Performance’, 145. 138 See http://www.rsc.org.uk/education/online-resources/onlineperformances/i-cinna/your-poems.aspx [accessed 3 November, 2013]. Submissions were considered only until 31 December 2012, although some poems are still available on the site. 139 Bottoms, ‘Introduction’, 390–3 (391). 140 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 13.

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3 An unworthy scaffold? 1 Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba and Peter Brook, Towards a Poor Theatre (London: Methuen, 1969), 41. 2 David Wood, ‘Whirligig’, in Theatre for Children and Young People: 50 Years of Professional Theatre in the UK, ed. Stuart Bennett (London: Aurora Metro, 2005), 109–19 (114). 3 Rancière, Disagreement, 11. 4 King Henry V, Prologue, 8–11. 5 David M. Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 193. 6 Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow, ‘Being and Becoming: Children as Audiences’, New Theatre Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2011), 60–70 (62). 7 Johanson and Glow, ‘Being and Becoming: Children as Audiences’, 63. 8 Johanson and Glow, ‘Being and Becoming: Children as Audiences’, 66. 9 Grotowski, Barba and Brook, Towards a Poor Theatre, 33. 10 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 34. 11 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 37. 12 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 37. 13 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 39. 14 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 39. 15 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970). 16 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 63. 17 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 70.

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18 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 34. 19 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 34. 20 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 34. 21 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 33. 22 Reason offers no statistical evidence for this and it would appear that no statistical research has been conducted on this subject. 23 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 34. 24 Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre, 34. 25 Lyn Gardner, ‘The Comedy of Errors, White Hall Junior School, Walsall’, The Guardian, 20 May 2009. 26 Peter Kirwan, ‘The Comedy of Errors (RSC Young People’s Shakespeare) @ the Courtyard Theatre’, http://blogs.warwick. ac.uk/pkirwan/entry/the_comedy_of_1/ [accessed 21 April 2010]. 27 Terry Grimley, ‘The Comedy of Errors, at Whitehall Junior School, Walsall’, Birmingham Post, 19 May 2009. 28 Gardner, ‘The Comedy of Errors, White Hall Junior School, Walsall’. Although not all adult tastes: Peter Kirwan felt that ‘the adults enjoyed the numerous parodies’. Kirwan, ‘The Comedy of Errors (RSC Young People’s Shakespeare) @ the Courtyard Theatre’. 29 Kirwan, ‘The Comedy of Errors (RSC Young People’s Shakespeare) @ the Courtyard Theatre’. 30 Grimley, ‘The Comedy of Errors, at Whitehall Junior School, Walsall’. 31 Grimley, ‘The Comedy of Errors, at Whitehall Junior School, Walsall’. Kirwan also noted, without the pejorative tone apparent in Grimley, that ‘Owen’s script was mostly Shakespearean, but with a good deal of freedom for adlibbing allowed’. Kirwan, ‘The Comedy of Errors (RSC Young People’s Shakespeare) @ the Courtyard Theatre’. Kirwan appears to

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accept the diversions from Shakespeare’s text as permissible, given the comic character of The Comedy of Errors. I address similar accommodation of comic licence in Chapter 4. 32 Nicholson, Theatre, Education and Performance: The Map and the Story, 29–30. 33 Nicholson, Theatre, Education and Performance: The Map and the Story. See 19–77 for a more detailed history of this progression. See also Stuart Bennett, Theatre for Children and Young People: 50 Years of Professional Theatre in the UK (London: Aurora Metro, 2005). Alan England also describes this development in a similar manner, noting that, from the 1920s onwards, theatre provision for young people was considered the responsibility of education departments rather than arts departments and that, significantly, the Arts Council assumed responsibility for theatre for adults whilst the Education Department assumed responsibility for theatre for young people. Alan England, Theatre for the Young (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 16–21. The position is not actually quite as simple as England suggests; the Arts Council did publish reports on the provision of theatre for young people in the 1980s, although their influence is still limited when compared to the educational imperative. For an introduction to the history and issues of ‘applied theatre’, see Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, and for a more detailed consideration of the change of emphasis in ‘applied theatre’ from ‘effects’ to ‘affects’ see Thompson, Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond. 34 David Wood, ‘Whirligig’, 109–19. Speaking at the ‘Theatre for a Young Audience in the UK ’ conference at University of Westminster on 16 July 2010, Wood remarked on the lack of attention that large-scale commercial theatre for young people received at the conference, due presumably to it falling outside of any formal educational context. Similarly, Karen Coates argues persuasively, in relation to young adult literature, that critical scholarly attention should be paid to the commercial literature which young readers choose to read for leisure rather than the texts prescribed for them in education. She writes: ‘Young adult literature exerts a powerful influence over its readers at a particularly malleable time in their identity

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formation, and yet we still pay more critical scholarly attention to Antigone (Sophocles, c. 442) and The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1924) than we do to the potentially life-changing books our teens read on their own. It seems to me that if we believe that literature has something to say about what it means to be human, and if we further nuance that belief with the idea that national, ethnic, and women’s literatures say something about the character and preoccupations of nations and the experience of being a certain ethnicity or gender, then we ought to approach young adult literature with the same careful scrutiny, even if it is written about and to young adults rather than by them.’ Karen Coates, ‘Young Adult Literature: Growing up, in Theory’, in Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, ed. Shelby Anne Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2011), 315–29 (315–16). The same is surely true of theatre which young people might choose. 35 Kirwan, ‘The Comedy of Errors (RSC Young People’s Shakespeare) @ the Courtyard Theatre’. 36 Kirwan, ‘The Comedy of Errors (RSC Young People’s Shakespeare) @ the Courtyard Theatre’. 37 Hand in Hand: Behind the Scenes of ‘The Comedy of Errors’ (Digital Theatre; Royal Shakespeare Company; Told by an Idiot: 2010). 38 Speaking in Hand in Hand: Behind the Scenes of ‘The Comedy of Errors’. 39 Hand in Hand: Behind the Scenes of ‘The Comedy of Errors’. 40 Similarly, Grotowski commented that ‘it is particularly significant that once a spectator is placed in an illuminated zone, or in other words becomes visible, he too begins to play a part in the performance’. Grotowski, Barba and Brook, Towards a Poor Theatre, 20. Whilst there is clearly some credibility to Hunter’s claims, I do not include them here to agree with them, but rather to demonstrate the discourse at work here. 41 See for instance David M. Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now. 42 Joe Falocco, Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 55.

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43 Falocco, Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century, 143–51. 44 http://www.digitaltheatre.com/production/details/comedy-oferrors-documentary [accessed 3 September 2012]. Tracy Irish, the RSC ’s Education Programme Developer for the World Shakespeare Festival, and previously a project manager, researcher and practitioner with the organization, attributes this recent resurgent interest in producing work specifically for young people during this period to the appointment of Michael Boyd as Artistic Director, so it would be interesting to monitor the further development of such work under Gregory Doran, who took over as Artistic Director in January 2013. Interview with Tracy Irish, 20 October 2011. 45 See Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Penelope Woods, ‘Globe Audiences: Spectatorship and Reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’ (PhD Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2012). 46 Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Adaptations and Re-Workings, 26. 47 Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Adaptations and Re-Workings, 18. Rokison gives a comprehensive description and assessment of the Globe’s production in Chapter 1 of her book; see ‘Full-Scale Stage Productions for Young People’, 17–37. 48 Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Adaptations and Re-Workings, 19. 49 Floodlighting is indeed used for evening performances at Shakespeare’s Globe. I refer to the lack of lighting in performances for young people because these performances all occur during the school day. 50 The particularity of audience behaviour at the new Globe, in contrast to other theatres, is discussed in, for instance, Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity, 94–114; Paul Prescott, ‘Inheriting the Globe: The Reception of Shakespearean Space and Audience in Contemporary Reviewing’, in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and William B. Worthen

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(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 359–75; and Abigail Rokison, ‘Authenticity in the Twenty-First Century’, in Shakespeare in Stages: New Theatre Histories, ed. Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 71–90. All note the influence of media representations of early modern England and the tourist experience. Interestingly, Prescott also notes how, in reviews of the earliest new Globe productions, school children are amongst those counted as distinct from ‘theatregoers’, 373. 51 Rokison, Shakespeare for Young People: Productions, Adaptations and Re-Workings, 21. 52 Christie Carson, ‘Democratising the Audience?’. 53 http://www.theatres.tv/reviews/matilda-the-musical-review/ [accessed 21 April 2012]. 54 http://www.theatres.tv/reviews/matilda-the-musical-review/ [accessed 21 April 2012]. 55 http://www.theatres.tv/reviews/matilda-the-musical-review/ [accessed 21 April 2012]. 56 http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/ E8831322212171/Matilda.html#!/roundup/theatre/london/ E8831291985961/Review+Round-up%3A+RSC +Move+ Critics+with+Matilda.html [accessed 21 April 2012]. 57 http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/227033/matildathe-musical [accessed 21 April 2012]. 58 http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/227033/matildathe-musical [accessed 21 April 2012]. 59 Chris Megson, Dan Rebellato, Janelle Reinelt, David Edgar, Julie Wilkinson and Jane Woddis, Critical Mass: Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution (London: British Theatre Consortium, 2014), 34. 60 Victor Watson, ‘By Children, About Children, For Children’, in Where Texts and Children Meet, ed. Eve Bearne and Victor Watson (London: Routledge, 2000), 51–70 (51–2). 61 Some schemes and projects exist that are specifically constructed so that the entire creative and production team is comprised of young people. See, for example, http://www. travellinglighttheatre.org.uk/vita.

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62 Sophie Masson, ‘School of the Globe’, in Shakespeare’s World/ World Shakespeares: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress Brisbane, 2006, ed. Richard Fotheringham et al. (Newark: University of Delware Press, 2008), 153–9 (153–4). Italics in original. 63 See http://uk.matildathemusical.com/schools/matilda-schoolresources/ [accessed 14 April 2015]. 64 Robert Shaughnessy, ‘A Choice of Programs’, Shakespeare Bulletin 28, no. 10 (Spring 2010), 55–75 (57). 65 Programme for RSC YPS The Comedy of Errors. 66 Programme for RSC YPS The Comedy of Errors. 67 Programme for RSC YPS The Comedy of Errors. 68 Shaughnessy identifies in the changing styles and formats of RSC programmes since the 1960s a ‘durable and consistent’ core function to ‘regulate auditorium behavior, define the terms of the contract between performers and audience, and indicate the terms upon which a production might be read’. Shaughnessy, ‘A Choice of Programs’, 73. Notably, in contrast to the cast of The Comedy of Errors, whose members were also involved in the main work of the company, the original cast in Stratford, whilst experienced in previous RSC productions and having many individual previous credits, were only involved in Matilda for ‘this season’. 69 For the record, my ‘Silly School Report’ described me as a ‘Quiet, Naughty, Footballer’, the accuracy of which was a little astounding! 70 Indeed, in its use of technology and its subsequent franchising to America, Matilda the Musical bears all the characteristics of the ‘megamusicals’ which have, in Dan Rebellato’s words ‘earned the unkind but apposite nickname of McTheatre’. Dan Rebellato, ‘Playwriting and Globalisation: Towards a SiteUnspecific Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 1 (2006), 97–113 (101). Rebellato describes the phenomenon in more detail in Theatre and Globalization (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 39–42, where he describes how this franchising includes buying the production wholesale – sets, costumes, lighting and direction.

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71 Katharine Duncan-Jones’s piece on the Complete Works Festival in Stratford in 2006–7 is indicative of the opinion which sees the function of young people attending Shakespeare as educational, rather than entertainment. She comments, of the visiting companies to the festival, that ‘Although often novel and highly original, the productions they brought were for the most part not likely to be illuminating to students or others encountering the play in question for the first time.’ Katharine Duncan-Jones, ‘Complete Works, Essential Year? (All of) Shakespeare Performed’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2007), 353–66 (359). 72 Janet Bottoms describes how Mary Lamb records the omission of the poor characters from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare on the grounds that the humour they bring to the plays would be lost in the necessary reduction of their roles for translation. Bottoms indicates that, in fact, the omission was also based on grounds of distaste for their bawdiness and on a consideration for the class of reader the Lambs expected. Bottoms, ‘ “To Read Aright”: Representations of Shakespeare for Children’, 5. 73 Penelope Woods, ‘Globe Audiences: Spectatorship and Reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’, 159–60. 74 Woods, ‘Globe Audiences: Spectatorship and Reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’, 162. Woods also suggests that the playing company of this production was likely to have been similar in size to that of the original company during the original production in the 1590s, and she implies that the cutting of the servants is not something that would have been done in the first performances, but that doubling may have occurred; 161–2. 75 The position of the ‘poor’ is clearly important throughout the work of Jacques Rancière, as can be seen from the quote used in the introduction to this chapter. His earliest and most comprehensive investigation of the marginalization of the poor, however, occurs in Rancière and Parker, The Philosopher and His Poor. 76 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 1968), 68. 77 Interview with Lorne Campbell, 3 March 2010.

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78 The quotes are taken from the promotional ‘What’s On’ guide for the festival. I also draw on interviews with Kate Cross, Artistic Director of the egg, for an understanding of the aims of the festival. Interviews with Kate Cross 16 November 2009, 11 January 2010 and 27 April 2010. 79 Interview with Lindsay Baker, 23 April 2010. 80 Michael D. Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), 93. 81 Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare, 93. 82 en masse theatre company – another institution, like the egg, which does not employ the upper case for their name – produces touring work purely for young people and their families. The Animated Tales of Shakespeare was commissioned for Shakespeare Unplugged as an introduction to Shakespeare for primary-age children. See their website for more details of the company: http://www.enmassetheatre.co.uk [accessed 8 September 2013]. 83 Homemade Shakespeare was performed by Nola Rae, an experienced and celebrated physical comic actress, and Lasse Akerlund. See http://www.nolarae.com/ for more information on this and other Nola Rae productions [accessed 8 September 2013]. 84 TheaterGrueneSosse is an experienced German theatre company which has been producing work for young people in a number of settings since the 1970s and draws overtly on a poor theatre tradition, as I discuss shortly. Their production of Henry the Fifth is usually performed to young people learning English. 85 TNTC is a one-man company formed in 1999 by Dov Weinstein, who edits, adapts and performs all of the plays in the company’s repertoire. The company is ‘dedicated to grand spectacle on a tiny scale and the performances use tiny plastic toys because, as Weinstein puts it, he had seen the toys but ‘no one was using them to perform classical theatre. Something had to be done.’ See http://www.tinyninjatheater.com/ company/ [accessed 8 September 2013]. 86 Greyscale presented Coriolanus as a work in progress, which is indicative of the open and experimental approach they adopt

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in presenting ‘carefully structured, powerfully live, original and anarchic theatre’. The rehearsals for this production were open to the public and also had a team of academics from Warwick University present, acting as dramaturges. See http://www. greyscale.org.uk/ [accessed 8 September 2013]. 87 Kevin J. Wetmore Jr, ‘ “Great Reckonings in Little Rooms”, or Children’s Playtime: Shakespeare and Performing Object Theatre of Toys’, in Shakespeare and Youth Culture, ed. Jennifer Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore and Robert L. York (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 43–55 (54). 88 Wetmore Jr, ‘ “Great Reckonings in Little Rooms” ’, 54. 89 Wetmore Jr, ‘ “Great Reckonings in Little Rooms” ’, 52. 90 Todd Borlik, ‘Tiny Ninja Hamlet (Review)’, Shakespeare Bulletin 30, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 61–62 (62). 91 Press Gang discussion, 18 March 2010. 92 The title of the piece is given as Henry the Fifth (or in the original German Heinrich der Funfte) as opposed to the received and more conventional King Henry V. In their information and promotional materials, TheaterGrueneSosse mostly refer to Shakespeare’s play as Henry the Fifth and this is how it was advertised in the Shakespeare Unplugged literature. I shall use the company’s title throughout when referring to this production. 93 Interview with Detlef Kohler and other members of TheaterGrueneSosse, 25 February 2010. 94 Coriolanus 1.1.7–45. 95 Of course, one might argue that Shakespeare portrays these common people as all the less appealing or attractive through using their individual, competing voices than if he had portrayed them as a persecuted or mistreated mass, either sent to die in war or left to die from hunger. My interest here, though, does not lie on either side of the argument about how the plays might stage Shakespeare’s personal or political sympathies. For a consideration of this debate see, for instance, Annabel M. Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 96 Theatre Royal Bath, ‘Theatre Royal Bath Programme December 2009–April 2010’ (2009), 68.

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97 ‘New Generation Documentors’, http://ngds.org.uk/ [accessed 21 January 2010]. New Generation Documenters no longer appear to be active, although details of the work done by them can be found on the website of one of the practitioners involved: http://www.kaminawalton.co.uk/action.html [accessed 21 September 2015]. 98 I had also planned to discuss the production at two workshop/ focus group discussions advertised to the public. However, there was no interest in attending these from the public, despite the offer of free refreshments and the chance to win free tickets to a future performance. I think this indicates a certain lack of interest amongst young people in discussing theatre by choice; such discussion tends to occur within a school environment or within an already-attended activity; few young people choose to pursue any more than an educationally driven interest in theatre. The drama workshop I conducted was the only one of this type that I was able to conduct during this research. This was due to issues of access and the gaining of necessary school and parental permission causing workloads for teachers which were often considered too high for what they would gain from the project. Whilst I would argue that my approach might offer a valuable alternative method of considering performances, this was not clearly relevant to any scheme of work or, perhaps more importantly, any examinations or assessments the pupils might undergo. I was not claiming to offer any insight into the performances or Shakespeare, which is often what similar endeavours might offer. Such research, whilst clearly valuable, regards the understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare as a desired outcome and therefore activities are geared towards this end. My own research does not make these same assumptions. 99 Press Gang discussion, 18 March 2010. 100 Press Gang discussion, 18 March 2010. 101 Press Gang discussion, 18 March 2010. 102 Post-show discussion, 25 February 2010. 103 Matthew Reason notes a similar poignancy in his research on young audiences and their reaction to the plainly staged deaths

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in Othello. Matthew Reason, ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre Part 2’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 26, no. 3 (2006), 221–41 (236–7). 104 Press Gang discussion, 18 March 2010. 105 Press Gang discussion, 18 March 2010. 106 Pearson and Messenger Davies, ‘Class Acts?’, 159. 107 These are presented in the documentation as letters or e-mail communications, rather than as responses to a questionnaire, although I suspect it is highly likely that the young people were asked by teachers to consider and communicate to the theatre company responses to questions similar to those which I asked. It would appear from the way the young people themselves write that they were paired and asked to discuss the performance before producing a combined letter as feedback on it; one communication refers a number of times to a ‘talking partner’. 108 Willmar Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 187–8. 109 Matthew Reason, ‘ “Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?” Children’s Responses to Puppets in Live Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly 24, no. 4 (November 2008), 337–54 (347). 110 Nicholson, Theatre, Education and Performance: The Map and the Story, 203. 111 Reason, Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance. See particularly the final two sections, ‘Writing the Live’ (205–30) and, more importantly, ‘The Representation of Live Performance’ (231–8). Bruce McConachie makes the assertion that language-based theories of performance have limited our understanding of audience response. McConachie and Hart, Performance and Cognition, 4–5. 112 Reason, ‘ “Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?” ’, 346. 113 Reason, ‘ “Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?” ’, 347.

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114 Reason, ‘ “Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?” ’, 346. 115 Peter K. Smith, Children and Play (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), 155. 116 Reason, ‘ “Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?” ’, 340. 117 Reason, The Young Audience, 37. 118 Reason, The Young Audience, 36. 119 Matthew Reason, ‘Young Audiences and Live Theatre Part 2’, 240. 120 See John Carey for an argument as to how modernist poets and artists treated the general public as a ‘mass’. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 121 Johanson and Glow, ‘Being and Becoming’. 122 Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination (London: SAGE , 1998), 122–53 (138, Figure 5.3). 123 Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, 149. 124 Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, 149. 125 Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, 148–9.

4 ‘No feeling of his business’? 1 Hamlet 3.2.39–40. 2 Rancière, Disagreement, 30. 3 The Gravedigger in Hamlet, as performed by Laurence North in the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School production in February 2011. 4 Robert Weimann, Helen Higbee and William West, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18–28. 5 Robert Weimann and Robert Schwartz, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social

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Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 6 See Chapter 1, pp. 00–00 for a more detailed discussion of this Manifesto. 7 The staging was referred to in the Education Pack as ‘performed with no stage lighting and minimal set’, and this was described as requiring the cast to ‘create atmosphere and set in a number of innovative ways’. Royal Shakespeare Company, ‘Young People’s Shakespeare: “Hamlet” Education Pack’ (RSC , 2010), 2. 8 Peter Kirwan, ‘Hamlet (RSC Young People’s Shakespeare)’, https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2010/08/27/ hamlet-rsc-young-peoples-shakespeare-the-courtyard-theatre/ [accessed 23 September 2015]. 9 Dominic Cavendish, ‘Young People’s Shakespeare Hamlet at Claremont School Kingsbury’, The Telegraph, 26 January 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatrereviews/7078548/Young-Peoples-Shakespeare-Hamlet-atClaremont-School-Kingsbury.html [accessed 20 November 2010]. 10 RSC , A Manifesto for Shakespeare in Schools, 4. 11 Carol Chillington Rutter, ‘Playing Hercules or Laboring in My Vocation’, in Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On, ed. G. B. Shand (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 215–31 (22). 12 William B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26. 13 Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, 3. 14 Stephen Purcell, Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 15 Purcell, Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage, 65. 16 David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 21. 17 Purcell, Popular Shakespeare: Simulation and Subversion on the Modern Stage, 66–71.

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18 See Robert Hornback, The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), Weimann and Schwartz, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, and Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, for discussions on the chronology and factors of the disappearing clown in the early modern theatre. Purcell points to the 1638 play The Antipodes as evidence that the improvisational clown was by then completely eliminated from the stage. In the play, the skills of Tarlton and Kemp are used to justify a clown’s improvisations before the argument is rebuffed because these clowns performed in the days ‘Before the stage was purg’d from barbarisme, / And brought to the perfection it now shines in.’ Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, 71. 19 Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, 77. 20 Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, 65. 21 Purcell, Popular Shakespeare, 67. 22 Ann Thompson argues that Hamlet contains no obvious part which would suit the skills of a professional clown of the early modern theatre. Ann Thompson, ‘Infinite Jest: The Comedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’, in Shakespeare Survey: Shakespeare and Comedy, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93–104, (97–98). Indeed, the absence of a traditional clown seems to be highlighted throughout the play, as Thompson argues. This is evident in a number of scenes: Hamlet’s advice regarding the clown’s role being addressed to an intermediary; the absence of a clown in the ‘Gonzago’ play; and in the absence of the body of Yorick. Whilst I agree with Thompson’s point that the ‘comic role is spread around amongst several performers’, not least Hamlet himself, who plays both hero and Fool, it should be pointed out in fact that the initial stage direction in Scene 5.1 (in modern editions) in the Folio describes the entrance of the gravediggers as ‘Enter two clowns’, suggesting that there was a part for a professional clown, or clowns. 23 Thompson, ‘Infinite Jest’, 97. 24 Lamb in fact complained to Wordsworth that, even though he omitted the scene and any reference to the Gravedigger from Hamlet, an illustration including Hamlet and the Gravedigger

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was included because he had no control over illustrations. Kathryn Prince regards this letter as revealing the ‘anti-theatrical orientation’ of the work of the Lambs, the illustrations representing the intrusion of the stage, being reminiscent of the in-character portraits advertising productions at the time. Kathryn Prince, ‘Illustration, Text, and Performance in Early Shakespeare for Children’, Borrowers and Lenders 2, no. 2 (2006), 1–15 (8). 25 RSC , ‘Young People’s Shakespeare: “Hamlet” Education Pack’, 2. 26 Thompson, ‘Infinite Jest’, 97. 27 Thompson, ‘Infinite Jest’, 97. 28 The production is described within the school as Theatre in Education training for the actors. However, whilst historically the visits to schools included some workshops or extended contact between actors and pupils, this is no longer the case. The visits now consist only of a performance in the school. 29 The Gravedigger’s announcement of himself is, interestingly, reminiscent of the mumming convention I noted with reference to Tim Crouch’s work in Chapter 2; see p. 00. 30 The limerick went as follows: There was a Gravedigger who was silly Who wore a frock that was frilly He went into town The wind blew it down And everyone there saw his . . . . . . at which point Hamlet interrupted. 31 See Appendix 2 for a transcript of this scene as performed and Appendix 3 for the version as scripted in the adaptation. 32 The Andre Previn sketch was first transmitted on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show in 1971 and can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7GeKLE 0x3s [accessed 30 April 2013]. 33 Richard Boon, ‘A Star in Two Halves’, in Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers; Studies in Honour of Peter Thomson, ed. Peter Thomson, Jane Milling and Martin

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Banham (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004), 176–90 (186–7). 34 Shakespeare and Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet, 9.21–3, 67–8. 35 Stephen Purcell, ‘A Shared Experience: Shakespeare and Popular Theatre’, Performance Research 10, no. 3 (2005), 74–84 (78). 36 Interview with Toby Hulse, 4 February 2011. 37 Sarah Mayo, ‘ “A Shakespeare for the People”? Negotiating the Popular in Shakespeare in Love and Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Textual Practice 17, no. 2 (2003), 295–315 (297). 38 It is significant, given this, that Michael Parkinson gave the André Previn sketch a similar universal status to Shakespeare, commenting that ‘The Morecambe and Wise André Previn sketch will last as long as human beings have a sense of humour’. Gary Morecambe, You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Eric Morecambe (London: HarperCollins, 2009), 122–3. 39 Morecambe and Wise’s 1978 Christmas special was viewed by 28 million viewers, still a record number of viewers for a light entertainment television show and over half the television viewing population at that time. As Richard Boon argues, this is likely to remain a record since the advent of multi-channel television viewing and the competition of other screen-based entertainments and diversions. Boon, ‘A Star in Two Halves’, 176. The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, the organization which compiles viewing figures for television audiences, has recorded audiences in excess of 20 million for events such as the opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics or important England international football matches. The highest figure for an entertainment programme since 2010 was 16.55 million for The X Factor Results on 12 December 2010. See http://www.barb.co.uk [accessed 9 September 2013]. It is interesting that Hulse expressed an initial interest in, and enthusiasm for, Britain’s Got Talent, a show promoting the performing talents of the British public. Hulse described his initial hope that the show would provide an opportunity both to showcase variety-type talent and acts and also to acknowledge the locally based talent of British

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performers in contrast to the centralised cultural industries which dominate television. However, he recounts that he later rejected the show because it tended to perpetuate the current status quo. Interview with Toby Hulse, 4 February 2011. 40 Purcell, ‘A Shared Experience’, 76. 41 Lavender, ‘Viewing and Acting (and Points in Between)’, 311. 42 In rehearsals for both Hamlet and Twelfth Night, Hulse directed the storyteller as a model for the audience. ‘They are the first person the young audience see and they should like them’, he advises his actors. As such, this positions the audience as friends of Hamlet too. 43 Weimann and Schwartz, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, 12. 44 Weimann and Schwartz, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, 76–86. 45 For instance, Bridget Escolme seeks to ‘readjust the theatre history hindsight’ implicit in Weimann’s concepts by blurring locus and platea and therefore identifying that even the emergence of text-dominated drama in the early modern period afforded the potential for direct encounters between performers and audiences. Escolme, Talking to the Audience, 8. 46 Kristin Ross, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, ed. Jacques Rancière (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 1991), vii–xxiii (xxii). Italics in original. 47 Rattigan was given the choice to play Feste as male or female on the first day of rehearsal, 9 January 2012. She chose to play Feste as female, although this did not impact in any significant way on the production. When describing Feste in this production, therefore, I use the female personal pronoun. 48 Toby Hulse, ‘Twelfth Night; Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare’ (2011), 3. 49 Toby Hulse, ‘Twelfth Night; Adapted from the Play by William Shakespeare’, (2011), 18. 50 A. C. Bradley, ‘Feste the Jester’, in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. Israel Sir Gollancz (Oxford: Humphrey

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Milford, 1916), 164; Becky Kemper, ‘A Clown in the Dark House’, Journal of the Wooden O Symposium 7 (2007), 42–50 (43). 51 Rehearsal for Twelfth Night, 13 January 2012. 52 Interestingly, Hulse’s role as director in rehearsals is often to be a first audience, to represent the audience, very much as a smith describes his approach to directing. a Smith, ‘Gentle Acts of Removal, Replacement and Reduction: Considering the Audience in Co-Directing the Work of Tim Crouch’, Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no. 4 (2011), 410–15. 53 Rancière, ‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters’, 8–9. 54 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 11. 55 Twelfth Night rehearsal, 27 January 2012. Hulse gave similar advice to the cast of Hamlet at the rehearsal on 31 January 2011. 56 BOVTS Twelfth Night ASM Report for 3 February 2012. 57 The ASM recorded the following jokes, and their positive reception by the children: ‘A) What’s black and white and red all over? A sunburnt penguin. B) What’s brown and sticky? A stick. These were well received with the children shouting out the punchlines.’ BOVTS Twelfth Night ASM Report for 7 February 2012. 58 BOVTS Twelfth Night ASM Report for 7 February 2012. 59 In fact, this was also at the heart of Morecambe’s skill: Boon notes his ability to appear to be making it up as he went along, whereas all of the routines were in fact carefully scripted. He cites William Franklyn, who noted Morecambe’s ability to ‘make a line that you’d seen him rehearse and rehearse and rehearse seem like an ad-lib when it came to the recording’. Boon, ‘A Star in Two Halves’, 184. 60 Rob Conkie, ‘Rehearsal: The Pleasures of the Flesh’, Shakespeare Bulletin 30, no. 4 (Winter 2012), 411–29 (411). 61 Purcell, Popular Shakespeare. 62 This is a not insignificant point that reflects the link between the function of theatre reviewing and advertising performances, enabling adult audiences to choose appropriate performances to match their tastes. See Reason, Documentation, Disappearance

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and the Representation of Live Performance. For young people, of course, such performances do not take place in the same economy. 63 BOVTS Hamlet ASM Report for 12 February 2011. 64 BOVTS Twelfth Night ASM Report for 6 February 2012. 65 BOVTS Twelfth Night ASM Report for 9 February 2012 notes that ‘there were spontaneous “awws” when the twins were reunited and when the two couples kissed and a chorus of “uh-ohs” when Malvolio realized the letter was false’. 66 BOVTS Twelfth Night ASM Report for 7 February 2012. 67 BOVTS Twelfth Night ASM Report for 9 February 2012. 68 I refer here to Hamlet’s ‘feigned’ madness as a clear choice of this production, rather than indicating that the text makes this clear. Hulse here, of course, transposes Hamlet’s words to Horatio and Marcellus from 2.1.161 and 2.1.168. 69 Sophie Nield, ‘The Rise of the Character Named Spectator’, Contemporary Theatre Review 18, no. 4 (2008), 531–4 (532). 70 Nield, ‘The Rise of the Character Named Spectator’, 535. 71 Nield, ‘The Rise of the Character Named Spectator’, 531. 72 Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, 70–3. 73 Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, 6. 74 Escolme, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self, 145. 75 See pp. 00–00 above, where I consider the limits of agency in relation to Tim Crouch’s work. 76 Nield, ‘The Rise of the Character Named Spectator’, 533. It should be noted here that Nield’s ‘Spectator’ is comprised of the type of ‘professional spectators’ – academics and other reviewers – which I have identified in Chapter 1. 77 Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Carl Lavery and David Williams, ‘Practising Participation: A Conversation with Lone Twin’, Performance Research 16 (2011), 7–14 (8).

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78 Interview with Mark Donald, Madeleine Leslay and Laurence North, 28 February 2011. 79 Elm Lea Junior School, 10 February 2011. In addition to her introduction, the Head referred to correct behaviour on a number of other occasions, reminding the children that with visitors in the school, the children become representatives of the school and therefore its ambassadors. In this sense they are not constructed as an audience but as representatives of their community. Whilst this did not restrict them greatly, it may have had some effect on how they responded to elements of theatre which were not expected. 80 See Chapter 3. 81 Indeed, Hulse is keen to challenge expectations about both theatre and Shakespeare. At the last rehearsal of both tours, he suggested to the actors that these performances should be about breaking preconceptions and expectations. He told the actors to ‘keep the picture, never stop playing, never stop inventing, never stop experimenting’ and cited Brecht’s last known writing, pinned to the door of the Berliner Ensemble on their visit to London in 1956. Advising his actors of the preconceived notions of German theatre as slow, heavy and dull, Brecht wanted his actors to show that it was actually ‘quick, light and strong’. The notice is included in Bertolt Brecht and John Willett, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang; London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), 283, titled ‘Our London Season’. Hulse explained these terms for how they should play during the tour: quick means alive, light means balls being tossed back and forth in a playful manner and strong means committed, never half-hearted. He argued that the position Brecht found himself in was similar to the preconceptions which young people bring to Shakespeare today: they expect slow, heavy, boring words that they cannot understand. Hulse argued that it was the job of his productions to give them something fast, exciting, with visual images galore, with which they could make meaning themselves. 82 Purcell, ‘A Shared Experience’, 81. Describing an often ‘pantomime villain’ performance of Richard III by Kathryn Hunter at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003, Purcell notes that ‘for many, the complicity forged in the moments of shared laughter

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made the moments of stunned silence all the more shocking’. It is, of course, significant that performances at Shakespeare’s Globe have been identified by Christie Carson as participating more in a popular economy of performance than has usually been associated with performances of Shakespeare at, for instance, the RSC . See p. 000 above. 83 See p. 000 above. 84 Indeed, even this element of drama, along with other artistic activities, but not, notably, literature, are under further threat following the return of a Conservative majority in the British General Election of May 2015. 85 Maurice Gilmour, ‘Keystage Theatre in Education: Macbeth for Primary Schools’, in Shakespeare for All in Primary Schools, ed. Maurice Gilmour (London: Cassell, 1997), 73–83 (81). Other anecdotal research also shows how teachers in schools privilege literary responses over theatrical responses to performance. For instance, Helen Nicholson notes that her class of children attending a performance of Totterdown Tanzi (a Bristol-inflected adaptation of Trafford Tanzi) ‘were interested in how the actors did it. Some of them had been to boxing matches, and they wanted to know how the actors had managed to portray such a realistic fight without getting hurt.’ Nicholson moves on to concentrate on how the students then talked through the issues of the play, thus returning to the predominantly literary, rather than ‘practical’ understanding of theatre. Nicholson, Theatre, Education and Performance: The Map and the Story, 203. 86 See p. 000. 87 Maurice Gilmour, ‘Keystage Theatre in Education: Macbeth for Primary Schools’, 81. 88 Reason, ‘ “Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?” ’, 346–7. 89 See pp. 000–000 above. 90 Semenza, ‘Teens, Shakespeare, and the Dumbing Down Cliché’. 91 Howard Marchitello, ‘Descending Shakespeare: Toward a Theory of Adaptation for Children’, in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults, ed. Naomi J. Miller (New York; London: Routledge, 2003), 180–9.

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92 Marchitello, ‘Descending Shakespeare’, 188. 93 William B. Worthen, ‘Texts, Tools and Technologies of Performance’, Shakespeare 2, no. 2 (2006), 208–19. 94 Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare, 3. 95 Anthony Dawson, ‘Teaching the Script’, in Teaching Shakespeare, ed. Shand, 73–90 (80). I am not agreeing with Dawson’s seeming acceptance here that these are the reasons for the differences in textual versions of Hamlet. However, I do accept that consideration of the material and mundane theatrical explanations for the structure and events of the plays is rare.

5 Conclusion 1 May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière, 166. 2 John Hartley, ‘ “Read thy self.” Text, Audience and Method’, in Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, ed. Mimi White and James Schock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 71–104 (95). Italics in original. 3 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 148. 4 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 148–9. 5 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 150–2. 6 Rancière, ‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters’, 6. 7 Rancière, ‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters’, 6. 8 Rancière, ‘On Ignorant Schoolmasters’, 6. 9 https://www.gov.uk/government/topics/arts-and-culture [accessed 9 September 2013]. 10 Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 1. 11 Houghton-Reade, Teaching Shakespeare in Secondary Schools, 66. 12 http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/01/art-is-useless-because. html [accessed 16 March 2013]. 13 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 82.

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14 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 82. 15 Matt Kozusko, ‘Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, and the Politics of Reading Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Bulletin 28, no. 2 (2010), 253–1. 16 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 63. 17 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2008), 16. 18 Ross, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, xxii. 19 Bingham, Biesta and Rancière, Jacques Rancière, 156–7.

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Hulbert, Kevin J. Wetmore and Robert L. York (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 43–55 White, Gareth, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) Wiles, David, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Wiles, David, Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Wiles, Timothy J., The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1980) Williams, Raymond, ‘Afterword’, in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 281–89 Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised and expanded edition (London: Fontana, 1983) Wolford, Lisa, ‘General Introduction: Ariadne’s Thread’, in The Grotowski Sourcebook, edited by Lisa Wolford and Richard Schechner (London: Routledge, 1997), 1–18 Wood, David, ‘Whirligig’, in Theatre for Children and Young People: 50 Years of Professional Theatre in the UK, edited by Stuart Bennett (London: Aurora Metro, 2005), 109–19 Woods, Penelope, ‘Globe Audiences: Spectatorship and Reconstruction at Shakespeare’s Globe’ (PhD Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London and Shakespeare’s Globe, 2012) Worthen, William B., Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Worthen, William, ‘Texts, Tools and Technologies of Performance’, Shakespeare 2, no. 2 (2006), 208–19 Wozniak, Jan, ‘A Very Palpable Hit? Star Casting and Audience Reception in Beerbohm Tree’s Hamlet’, paper given at ‘Staging London’s Cultural Life: Herbert and Maud Tree’ conference (University of Bristol, 23 January 2008) Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1990)

INDEX

Abercrombie, Nicholas 158–60 Alling, Bodil 110 Andreas, Peter 205 Arnold, Matthew 116 Ashfield, David 196–7 audiences 14, 111–14 as ‘public’ 15 cinema 14–16 participation 5, 72 research 17–20, 28–34, 38–43, 142–61 theatre 14–16 visual arts 20 young 17, 111–14, 128–30 Baker, Lindsay 135 Banks, Fiona 119 Bassindale, Martin 186 Bennett, Stuart 116 Bennett, Susan 11, 16, 29, 36–7, 165 Bevington, David 110 Biesta, Gert 57–9, 203–4, 209–10 Bingham, Charles W. 57–9, 203–4, 209–10 Bishop, Claire 6–8 Bloom, Harold 53–4, 58–60, 106 Boon, Richard 176–7 Borlik, Todd 137 Bottoms, Janet 61, 66

Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 23, 42–3 Boyd, Michael 10, 96, 118–19, 166 Bradley, A.C. 183 Bristol, Michael 135 Bristol Old Vic Theatre School 49–50, 172, 179–81, 194–5 Brook, Peter 133–4, 141 Butsch, Richard 15, 20 Campbell, Lorne 134, 140 Carson, Christie 123 Cavendish, Dominic 166 Chillington Rutter, Carol 166 Collier, Adam 182, 185, 189 Company of Angels Theatre Company 47, 62–74, 80–3 Conkie, Rob 187 Cooper, Tommy 173 Crang, Mike 46 Crouch, Tim 47, 68–71, 75–7, 86, 92–6, 102, 132, 189, 191, 202 Author, The 85–90, 94 I, Banquo 69–83 I, Caliban 64–7, 70–7, 83–6, 91, 101 I, Cinna 80, 96–107 I, Malvolio 80–96, 101 I, Peaseblossom 63–86, 95, 99, 101 cultural capital 4, 9–10, 23 285

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INDEX

Dahl, Roald 130 Dawson, Anthony 199–200 Debord, Guy 112 Democracy 5, 22–6 Department for Education and Schools (now Department for Children, Schools and Families) 11 Desmet, Christy 54 Dobson, Michael 37

Hartley, John 202–3 Hateley, Erica 8–9, 14, 22, 66–7 Hawkes, Terence 3, 199 Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, The 1–5 Houghton-Reade, Lisa-Marie 7–8, 12, 206 Howle, Billy 185–6 Hulse, Toby 172, 177–87, 194 Hunter, Paul 117–18, 123

Ely, Margot 44 emancipation 4, 10, 21, 26–7, Entwistle, Christopher 114 Escolme, Bridget 192–3 Esterberg, Kristin 44–5

Ilter, Seda 71 Irace, Kathleen 50

Falocco, Joe 118 Fensham, Rachel 30–1 Finlayson, J, Caitlyn 72 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 208 Foucault, Michel 24 Franssen, Paul 13 Freshwater, Helen 5, 29, 32–4, 87–9, 94 Gardner, Lyn 75, 77, 85, 94, 114–15 Gillham, Bill 46 Gilmour, Maurice 196–7 Glow, Hilary 110–12, 117, 149, 157–8, 202 Goode, Chris 86–8 Gourdon, Anne-Marie 33–4 Greenhalgh, Susan 60, 69 Greenhill, Kelly 205 Grimley, Terry 115 Grotowski, Jerzy 110–14, 118, 123, 133–4 Guthrie, Tyrone 118

Jackson, Glenda 175 Jacotot, Joseph 55–6 Johanson, Katya 110–12, 117, 149, 157–8, 202 Kemper, Becky 183 Kennedy, Dennis 30–2 Kidnie, Margaret 23 Kirwan, Peter 114–15, 117, 165–6 Knowles, Ric 39–41 Kohler, Detlef 138 Kozusko, Matt 207 Lavender, Andy 22, 178 Lavery, Carl 193 Livingstone, Sonia 15 Longhurst, Brian 158–60 Manis, Shelley 103–4 Marchitello, Howard 198–9 Masson, Sophie 127, 131 Matilda the Musical 48, 123–30, 158–60 May, Todd 22–3, 201 Mayne, Kate 68

INDEX

Mayo, Sarah 177 McLuskie, Kathleen 12, 102 Messenger Davie, Maire 5, 9, 20, 149 Miller, Naomi 13 Monck, Nugent 118 Morecambe, Eric 174–8, 186 Myers, Ross 110 National Curriculum 6–7, 12–13, 35, 80, 196 New Labour 5 Nicholson, Helen 15, 28–9, 115–16 Nield, Sophie 190–2 North, Laurence 172, 186 O’Dair, Sharon 31 O’Hanlon, Jacqui 117, 125 Owusu, Jude 47, 96 Pearson, Roberta 5, 9, 20, 149 Peck, Adam 69, 75 Phelan, Peggy 103 Poel, William 118 Pollock, Della 104–5 Postlewait, Thomas 34 Press Gang 42–9, 137–8, 142–50, 187–90, 194, 197 Previn, Andre 176 Purcell, Stephen 168–70, 177, 187, 194 Purves, Libby 124 Quinn, Leigh 179–81 Rancière, Jacques 4, 21, 46–51, 154–60, 198–9, 200–10 democracy 22–4, 31, 104–4

287

dissensus 24–6, 105, 141–2 distribution of the sensible 24–41, 172, 178 education 54–8 Emancipated Spectator, The 28, 106–7, 112–13 emancipation 26, 29, 42–3, 56, 105, 200–2 Ignorant Schoolmaster, The 54–6, 102, 107, 180–5 Philosopher and the Poor, The 25, 133 politics 24–32, 41, 95–8, 103–6, 133, 154–6, 164, 178 poor, the 25–9, 47–8, 131–4 psychological and political child 4, 47, 57–62 stultification 56 Rattigan, Josephine 180–5 Read, Alan 29 Reason, Matthew 14, 17–21, 40–3, 48–9, 111–15, 122, 131, 149–60, 188, 197–9, 205 Retallack, John 62, 74 Ridout, Nicholas 31, 190–2 Robinson, Jo 36 Rokison, Abigail 8, 13, 119, 122 Ross, Kristin 180, 208–9 Royal Shakespeare Company, The 1–3, 26–7, 78–9, 102–4, 114, 117, 164–7, 187, 195 Russell Brown, John 37 Russell Beale, Simon 166, 200 Sanders, Bebe 182 Sauter, Wilmar 19, 33, 151–2

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INDEX

Sawyer, Robert 54 Semenza, Gregory M. Colon 38, 198 Shakespeare’s Globe 11, 118–23, 132 Shakespeare Schools Festival 11 Shakespeare Unplugged 48, 134–9 Shakespeare, William education 2–3 literary 1, 49, 196 ‘school’ 50, 202–4 theatrical 4, 14, 49, 164, 196 As You Like It 182 Comedy of Errors 48, 114–18, 122–31 Coriolanus 134–41 Hamlet 49–51, 135–8, 164–83, 188–90, 194, 199–200 Henry V 74, 110, 138–55 Julius Caesar 96, 99 Macbeth 70, 120, 135–7 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 71–2, 99, 120–2, 178 Much Ado About Nothing 120 Othello 120 Richard II 190 Romeo and Juliet 120, 132, 135–6 Taming of the Shrew, The 78, 195 Tempest, The 64, 67, 72–3, 135

Twelfth Night 49, 64, 83, 89, 164, 172, 180–94 Shaughnessy, Robert 128 Sheibani, Bijan 170 Singh, Tarrell Alvin 170 Smith, Peter 153 Social Trends 21 spectators, professional 31, 36, 106 Stanmore, Isaac 195 Tarlton, Richard 168, 176 Thompson, Ann 169–71 Thompson, Toby 1–3, 26–7, 47–9, 209 Told by an Idiot 114–18, 125 Tulloch, John 41 Watson, Victor 126 Weimann, Robert 164, 179–80 Weinstein, Dov 136 West, Samuel 190 Wetmore, Kevin J. 136–7 Whiteaker, Jimmy 69 White, Gareth 193 Wilde, Oscar 206–7 Wiles, David 29, 168 Williams, David 193 Wood, David 116 Woods, Penelope 132 Worthern, William 164–7, 199 Young, Iris 22–3 Young People’s Shakespeare 10–11, 78, 102, 117, 164–6, 187

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