Hall, Brook, Ninagawa, Lepage: Great Shakespeareans Volume XVIII 9781472554864, 9781441134653

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Series Editors’ Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never- ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope,

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be seen as negotiating and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

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Notes on Contributors

Jane Freeman attended theatre school at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), completed a B.A. and a B.Ed. at Queen’s University, a Master’s degree at the University of Warwick, and a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto.  She has worked on numerous theatrical productions, including Robert Lepage’s production of Macbeth at Hart House Theatre for which she was the Production Coordinator. She is a faculty member at the University of Toronto, Chair of the Stratford Festival’s University Task Force, and past Chair of Stratford’s Education and Archives Committee. Stuart Hampton-Reeves is Professor of Research-informed Teaching, Head of the Graduate Research School at the University of Central Lancashire and Head of the British Shakespeare Association. He is the author of Shakespeare in Performance: the Henry VI Plays (with Carol Chillington Rutter), The Shakespeare Handbooks: Measure for Measure and The Shakespeare Handbooks: Othello. He is the co-editor of Shakespeare’s Histories and CounterHistories and Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre, and is one of the General Editors of the Palgrave series Shakespeare in Practice. As well as researching Shakespeare in performance, Hampton-Reeves is also an expert in undergraduate research and chairs the British Conference of Undergraduate Research. Peter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. He was Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon from 1997 to 2002 and is one of the Institute’s Honorary Fellows. He was elected President of the Shakespeare Association of America for 2007–8. He has edited many of Shakespeare’s plays and written widely on the plays in performance, including English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s. He is the Editor of Shakespeare Survey, and is General Editor for a number of book series, including Oxford Shakespeare Topics (with Stanley

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Notes on Contributors

Wells). He edited a five-volume series, Redefining British Theatre History. His edition of Coriolanus for the Arden Shakespeare series appeared in 2013. Alexander C. Y. Huang is Founding Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Institute, Director of the Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare Program, Director of Graduate Studies in English, and Professor of English, Theatre and Dance, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.. He is co-founder and co-director of the open access Global Shakespeares digital performance archive (http://globalshakespeares.org) and research affiliate in Literature at MIT; and co-general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook. He currently chairs the MLA committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare and edits the Palgrave-Macmillan book series on ‘Global Shakespeares’. Margaret Jane Kidnie is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, and author of Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (2009). She has published widely on Shakespeare, performance, and textual studies, and she edits the drama of the period, including a volume of plays by Ben Jonson (2000). She co-edited Textual Performances with Lukas Erne (2004). Her edition of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness is forthcoming with Arden Early Modern Drama.

Note on References to Shakespeare All references to Shakespeare come from the Complete Works, ed. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), unless otherwise stated.

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Introduction Peter Holland

This volume considers the work of four great twentieth and twenty-first century theatre directors, each of whom has made a distinctive and highly significant contribution to the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are performed. But it was not until the early twentieth century that theatre began to use the word ‘director’ at all. If the Oxford English Dictionary is to be trusted, the usage was borrowed from film and from America. In 1911 Moving Picture World defined the director’s job: ‘The director explains to the players the action of a … scene.’1 By 1938 Somerset Maugham was still conscious that the term was a foreign import: ‘I use the American word director rather than the English one, producer, because I think it better describes what should be the function of the person in question.’2 Even the use of ‘producer’ in this way was fairly recent: the OED gives as its earliest example an 1891 mention of Charles Farley who ‘[t]hough he was a clever actor, … rose to greater fame as what we would now call a stage-manager or producer of plays’.3 A producer soon became redefined as the person ‘responsible for the financial and managerial aspects of staging a play’,4 and ‘stage-manager’, common in the nineteenth century as the term for the person ‘whose office it is to superintend the production and performance of a play’, has now become the person who ‘is in charge of the technical side of a production’.5 Of course, it did not need the creation of the term ‘director’ for the practice to exist. When, say, Charles Macklin (1699–1797) staged Macbeth and sought to create a kind of historical authenticity and coherence in the sets and costumes, he was acting, to some extent, in the role of what we would now call the work of a director.6 But Macklin was primarily an actor, and the kind of overarching interpretative creativity that John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) brought to a long series of Shakespeare productions at Drury Lane and Covent Garden was also that of the experienced actor and manager. It was Ludwig Chronegk (1837–91) who conventionally stands for the transition from an actor or actor-manager doubling as director to an independent theatre worker whose sole responsibility was

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to direct productions. Chronegk had been an actor but in 1877 he gave up acting and became Chief Director of the Meininger Hoftheater formed by Georg II, Duke of Saxe Meiningen, a company which rapidly became the most important in Europe for the accuracy of its historical detail, the careful creation of a stage picture, the individuality of its crowd scenes and the strong sense of ensemble. If now we might see Chronegk’s work as more pictorial than interpretative, the director’s authority was crucial to the company’s work: it was his vision that audiences flocked to see rather than the performance of a star actor. And the Meiningen company’s fame was established by its Shakespeare productions, especially of Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night. The history of the formation of our current concept of the theatre director and her/his dominance in the creation of performance as act of critical analysis can be traced across a number of chapters in other volumes in this series, just as the powerful and highly influential directorial careers of Orson Welles, Grigori Kozintsev and Franco Zeffirelli moved between theatre and cinema.7 Other people, crucial in the development of the director’s art and practice, like André Antoine or Konstantin Stanislavsky, Max Reinhardt or Vsevolod Meyerhold, do not figure in the series since, for all their greatness as directors, they were not best known or most influential as a result of their Shakespeare productions. But the four directors in this volume, four men whose career and impact has been as directors rather than actors and in the theatre rather than on film, are the inheritors of that tradition. Perhaps each has at times ‘explain[ed] to the players the action of a … scene’, but their careers have been most marked by the way in which they have explained a scene to the audience, stamped a particular concept onto the play, and turned a performance of a play into something that is unremittingly and usually exhilaratingly their own. Directors’ theatre often seems now to have taken over from actors’ theatre and these four exemplify the brilliance of thinking and the translation of that thinking into performance that directors’ theatre can attain. As John Russell Brown put it, ‘imaginative and experienced directors can serve as uniquely informed critics of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as artists who explore and extend the possibilities of theatre in their time’.8 In creating innovative and revelatory productions of Shakespeare, each of these artists has also changed what theatre can be and what it can do. For their textbook for theatre students, The Director as Artist, O’Neill and Boretz explore how the director is an artist through a series of other roles the director plays: stager, critic, analyst, interpreter, historian, designer,

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actor, coach, manager, audience and administrator.9 Hardly exhaustive, of course, the list suggests the range of a director’s skills and creative capacities but it also suggests the bridge between a process and a product that a director has to achieve. Looking back, Peter Brook commented on his discovery of the bifurcated nature of his craft at a crucial moment in his career: ‘I now knew my own vital need: to be able to explore the nature of theatre experience in laboratory conditions at the same time as I was working for a wider audience.’10 As Brook learned, the director must be both the person ‘taking charge, making decisions … having the final say’ but also ‘a guide … [who] searches all the time’, someone with ‘a sense of direction’. He opposes what he sees as the French or German model – and his own practice in his first steps in the craft – where the director has a ‘directorial conception’, an ‘image that precedes the first day’s work’; instead, the director’s sense of direction ‘crystallizes into an image at the very end of the process’.11 Each of the chapters that follow explores, to a greater or lesser extent, the ways in which the four directors move through a process of rehearsal, investigating the text, finding their sense of direction, thinking through possibilities both for Shakespeare and for the theatre culture within which the production will take place, until the process is over, the end product is reached, and the production welcomes its audiences. Where Chronegk’s productions toured first Germany and then across Europe, each of these directors has taken productions across the globe. But the chapters also reflect the particular ways in which their originating locations (England, France, Japan and Canada) have affected their work; what, for instance, it might mean to direct Shakespeare in Japan or as a French-Canadian or as an English director working at his own theatre in France. The ways each has negotiated with existing theatre companies or formed his own companies, creating new and potent theatre institutions, has for all also been a significant part of the contexts in which they have been able to make theatre, to find and sometimes fail to find modes of rehearsal and company practices in which their particular approaches can be fulfilled. Finally, each has often returned to a Shakespeare play he had directed before, finding new ways of examining the possibilities of a text and possible new senses of direction that can be opened up, changing with new actors, new companies or simply through the new view that a later moment in a developing career can bring. And, of course, these are directors who each know and respect each other’s work and who have been variously influenced by it. Shakespeare productions, in their hands, have

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become a global commodity, part of a cultural exchange that is fully internationalized. The volume opens with my exploration of the career of Peter Brook. From his first professional productions in Birmingham and Stratfordupon-Avon almost immediately on graduating from Oxford, Brook’s rise was meteoric. But it became apparent in the 1970s that the kinds of fundamental rethinking of what it means to make a theatre performance, what the actor must do in order to be on stage, could no longer be uncovered within the restrictions of ensemble practice – even in a company as imaginative as the Royal Shakespeare Company. Instead, after taking a group of actors far from Western theatre norms, across Africa and to the Middle East, Brook found, in a disused and dilapidated theatre in Paris, the base he needed within which his CIRT (Centre international des recherches théâtrales) could develop from a place of research into a centre for creation, the CICT (Centre international de création théâtrale), returning again and again to Shakespeare alongside his investigation of Chekhov or Beckett, of the epic staging of the Mahabharata or the performance of neuro-physiological disorder in L’Homme qui. Always and ceaselessly experimenting, demanding more of his international group of actors than many were able to give, Brook has redefined the modes of performance, finding in Shakespeare, whether in the hard leather and rusted iron world of his RSC King Lear in 1962 or the white box of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970 or the achieved simplicity and pared-down text of Hamlet in 2000, a succession of demanding plays that forced him to find new ways of uncovering the modes of being and thinking that they contained, new modes of work in the laboratory of rehearsal. Brook turned away from the RSC. Stuart Hampton-Reeves explores the career of Sir Peter Hall, the RSC’s founder. For Hampton-Reeves, the crucial balance across Hall’s work has been between the creation and administration of institutions (the RSC, the National Theatre after Sir Laurence Olivier) and the creation of productions for and within those institutions. Not always successful – and Hampton-Reeves does not for one moment shy away from seeing how and why some of Hall’s Shakespeare productions were conspicuous failures – Hall’s Shakespeare productions, founded on close attention to the text and an attitude to verse-speaking that he learned at school and university, sought always to give primacy to the language, to let the play speak for itself – or, rather, to let it speak what Hall heard it to be saying. But for Hall, Shakespeare always had to be treated as a contemporary dramatist, creating in the Royal Shakespeare Company an organization that was far from the parochialism and traditions of the

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Shakespeare Festival productions at Stratford’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and which produced new drama and European classics as ways to rethink Shakespeare, to make the plays new, often provocative, always thoughtful. Hall and Brook worked closely together. Both encountered the productions of Yukio Ninagawa as they reached the West. If Ninagawa’s work has been criticized as Westernized orientalism, Japanese Shakespeare made palatable for the global marketplace, Alexander Huang shows the complex traditions of Japanese Shakespeare within which Ninagawa’s long series of productions is firmly rooted. Aiming to direct all of Shakespeare’s plays in the course of his career, Ninagawa has become the world’s best-known Japanese theatre director with his Shakespeare productions frequently found touring the globe. Often seen in Japan as an occidentalist director committed to Western theatre forms and often seen outside Japan as a director using the forms of Japanese theatre as nothing more than exquisite decoration, Ninagawa exemplifies the difficulty of communicating meaning in performance when the cultural traditions used by the director and those familiar to the audiences cannot properly match. In the complex soundscapes and visual imagery of Ninagawa’s productions, spectacular moments, like the animal carcasses dropping onto the stage at the start and end of his Richard III or the cherry blossoms of his Macbeth, point to possible interpretation without necessarily making it easy for audiences to be quite sure which ‘readings’ might be right and which are way off the mark. But audiences rapidly came to delight in the unexpected and stunning effects he creates. Unlike Ninagawa’s bid to complete the canon of Shakespeare’s plays, Robert Lepage has chosen instead most frequently to return to a particular play again and again, especially The Tempest, which, for him, represents Shakespeare’s most profound investigation of the nature of performance itself. Lepage is proudly French-Canadian and his work often searches for the space within Canadian culture in which Shakespeare might most effectively exist. This is most marked in his work on a cycle of Shakespeare productions with translations – or, as they prefer to term them, ‘tradaptations’ – by Michel Garneau, using a range of forms of Québécois language registers. Like Hall, Lepage has worked extensively in opera houses but he has also directed Cirque de Soleil and other spectacular performance events, giving his work, including his Shakespeare productions, the same visual power and surprise that characterizes Ninagawa. Jane Freeman and Margaret Jane Kidnie are especially concerned to investigate his rehearsal processes, especially for his 1992 Macbeth, which Jane Freeman observed

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as Production Coordinator. The result in Lepage’s work is always fully and powerfully theatrical, part of his resistance to treating drama as literary texts, something that can be as visible in what he calls ‘the literary culture of theatre’ as in the study or classroom. But in, for example, his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the National Theatre in 1992, the eclectic sources of Lepage’s theatre styles can, like Ninagawa’s productions, seem like the result of some shopping in the global supermarket of theatre. Lepage has spoken of the need to betray Shakespeare. Peter Brook mentions hearing Orson Welles announce that ‘We all betray Shakespeare’.12 But, Brook continues, The history of the plays shows them being constantly reinterpreted and reinterpreted, and yet remaining untouched and intact. Therefore they are always more than the last interpretation trying to say the last word on something on which the last word can’t be said. All four of the directors explored in this volume know that the last word cannot be said, but also that Shakespeare’s work represents the place where the limits of their making of theatre can most completely be tested and strained, where what it means to be a director can be most profoundly discovered. All four are great directors most precisely because they are great Shakespeareans.

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Chapter 1

Peter Brook Peter Holland

Deserving a Place On 27 August 1970 Clive Barnes, the theatre critic of The New York Times, attended the first night of Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company. It is striking enough that he travelled to Stratford-upon-Avon to see it. But the opening of the review, published the next day, was an extraordinary statement: Once in a while, once in a very rare while, a theatrical production arrives that is going to be talked about as long as there is a theatre, a production, which, for good or ill, is going to exert a major influence on the contemporary stage … If Peter Brook had done nothing else but this ‘Dream’, he would have deserved a place in theatre history.1 Barnes, notoriously and frequently acerbic, capable of closing a show with a bad notice, is here brilliantly acute and plainly exhilarated. He identifies, wittily and concisely, exactly what Brook had achieved: Brook has approached the play with a radiant innocence. He has treated the script as if it had just been written and sent to him through the mail. He has staged it with no reference to the past, no reverence for tradition. He has stripped the play down, asked exactly what it is about. He has forgotten gossamer fairies, sequined eyelids, gauzy veils and whole forests of Beerbohm-trees. He sees the play for what it is – an allegory of sensual love, and a magic playground of lost innocence and hidden fears. In many ways Barnes’s celebration of Brook is also a denial of what Brook was doing. The ‘radiant innocence’ was of course assumed. Brook was

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deeply knowledgeable about the play’s stage tradition and every innovation in the production is less a refusal to reference the past than a direct response to and alteration of its characteristics. It is not that Brook had forgotten those gossamer fairies but that he wanted to construct a performance world in which they could be forgotten. His audiences would quickly be able to at least half-forget them, to see their absence and to value what was revealed by replacing the female dancers of the corps de ballet, dressed in their tutus derived from the dance tradition started by Les Sylphides, with men and women dressed, as the production’s images now might suggest, in outfits just right for a slightly hippie forest-world of Indian music and the open sexiness of summers of peace and love. I shall be rereading that production later, but in one respect above all Barnes was right: in Brook’s approach to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the most radical of his Shakespeare productions to that date, he had created something that would be profoundly influential and would remain in the awareness of theatregoers over more than forty years. Images of individual actors are familiar to many, but few productions have ever formed images that have so frequently been reproduced, so often quoted, so quickly attained an iconic status. Asked to think of ‘Brook’s Dream’ and most will recall photographs of Sally Jacobs’s white-box of a set, of the trapezes and Titania’s giant red ostrich feather bower (perhaps, I have wondered, a visual pun on a feather boa), of the colour-blocks of the costumes and the vast spiral of wire that, like a monstrous Slinky, could be used by the far-frombenign fairies to trap the lovers in its coils, of the spinning plates and stilts that came from the Chinese circus that influences Brook’s thinking. Only those who saw the production will recall the evocative sounds of the play, especially the Free-Kas, then-trendy plastic tubes that, whirled around by the fairies, hauntingly formed the soundscape of the wood.2 The materials out of which Brook made audiences dream a new Dream had no place in the contemporary conventions of Shakespearean production. Now they seem familiar tropes of performance, so superbly right did they seem then to so many (though not by any means all) and so influential did they become. It is not, I think, overstating the case to see in that production a paradigm shift, a fracturing and reforming of the nature of classical theatre production. And however much those who never saw it are aware of it, talk of it, perceive its influences, they cannot have that memory of an emotion that, for me at least, the production created then and which remains with me. Since I saw many of Brook’s productions I shall be examining, my own memories are part of my analysis. I remember vividly the experience of

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seeing Brook’s Dream in the autumn of 1970, more vividly indeed than dozens of productions seen in the last few years, recalling not only the details of the performance but above all the emotions it fired in me. Driving a hundred miles to Stratford-upon-Avon to see a matinee, I was running late, couldn’t find a parking spot and left the car where I was sure it would be ticketed. Settling into my seat three minutes before curtainup I could not imagine why I had wanted to see this most childish of Shakespeare’s plays. I came out three hours later dancing across the lawn in front of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, filled with more joy than any other theatre performance has given me, before or since.

Experimenting The phrase I used above for the production, ‘Brook’s Dream’, is a significant shorthand. Recognizing the dominance of the director has made such forms of reference expected now. Earlier generations saw Macklin’s Shylock, Kemble’s Coriolanus, Booth’s Othello. We speak of Gielgud’s Hamlet – indeed, of Gielgud’s Hamlets – and might have trouble recalling who directed him in them or when he switched from lead actor to director. Even Richard Burton’s Hamlet (which Gielgud directed) has not become Gielgud’s Hamlet. It cannot only be the fact that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is so much of an ensemble play rather than one centring on a single star performance that makes the phrase ‘Brook’s Dream’ so abundantly right, just as, for earlier generations, the opulent realism of the woodland scenes with live rabbits on stage made audiences refer to ‘Beerbohm Tree’s Dream’, on which Clive Barnes punned. Some may have wondered whether Brook’s Dream was Shakespeare’s Dream, but it has to be true that this is a prime example of ‘director’s theatre’, of the concept-driven, strongly controlled auteurism in which the actors, designers and composer fulfil a single person’s vision of the play. One way of thinking about the director’s work, about Brook’s work, is to see it as part of something long dubbed ‘experimental theatre’. As the OED puts it (experimental, a. and n.): 6. a. Of or pertaining to experiments; used in or for making experiments. Freq. as experimental farm.[ … ] b. spec. of a theatre, play, etc. 1929 S. W. CHENEY Theatre xxiii. 520 Jacques Copeau … administered one of the...most fruitful of twentieth century experimental theatres.

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1931 W. ROTHENSTEIN Men & Memories II. xxiv. 205 Experimental theatres are expensive things. 1961 BOWMAN & BALL Theatre Lang. 127 Experimental, said of drama, staging, a type of theatre, etc., which seeks freshness in the writing and production of plays rather than the traditional formulas for commercial or conventional success. 1969 GISH & PINCHOT Lillian Gish xiv. 194 An experimental theater was also hit. When James Roose-Evans published his view of the history of the twentiethcentury theatrical avant-garde in 1970 while he was Artistic Director of the Hampstead Theatre Club, the radical performance venue he had founded in 1959, he called it Experimental Theatre: From Stanislavsky to Today (London: Studio Vista, 1970). By 1984 when he wrote a revised edition, the title had changed: to Today was now to Peter Brook (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Brook was then, for Roose-Evans and for most of the British and indeed anglophone theatre world, the present tense of theatre. It may continue to be true that, even after the moment in 2011 at which he stepped back from his own theatre,3 Brook still represents that present tense, or at least a present tense, a tense defined narrowly by a concept of theatre and more broadly by a concept of drama (I shall explore that elliptical concept later). But, to use again the structures of the titles for writing about Brook that act as frames within which Brook’s work is offered, I can point at two further examples. David Williams’s assemblage of materials on Brook was titled Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook (London: Methuen, 1988, revised edition 1991). Here the location of Brook’s activity is theatre not performance, theatrical in a sense that resists the then-emerging possibilities of a performance culture in which theatre, like drama, was to be resisted. Margaret Croyden’s chapter on Brook in her account of ‘the contemporary experimental theatre’ (note the definite article) in Lunatics, Lovers and Poets (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974) marked the shift in location as crucial, ‘From Commercialism to the Avant-Garde’, the former clearly not a space where the latter can be found.

Three Hamlets Before I trace something of Brook’s biography, his journey, the sequence of productions that led to Dream and far beyond it, I want to explore at substantial length a much later production, a clearly experimental work, his Hamlet – a production thought of as Brook’s Hamlet, not as the actor Adrian

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Lester’s Hamlet – or rather, as Brook and his translators, Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, so deliberately chose to call it, La Tragédie d’Hamlet, performed at Brook’s theatre, Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in 2000 in English and then filmed (released in 2002) and restaged in French in 2002. The successes and failures in that production will help to illuminate threads and themes that traverse Brook’s entire career. I begin with contrasting responses to Brook’s Hamlet. As Brook wrote in an article ‘Hamlet Fat and Hamlet Lean’ published during the world tour, audiences in Russia were fascinated to find that a naked staging made the drama not duller but more tense, that without underlining, without flourishes, the emotions were still expressive and harrowing … Above all, they kept commenting on what they termed our simplicity, austerity and economy.4 When the production reached London, however, reviewers commented that the Hamlet ‘is really disgracefully bad – not even a correct text spoken’, that it was ‘a melancholic and soporific presentation’: ‘Give Peter Brook the impossible and he will solve your problem. But it would be unwise, I fancy, to trust him with safe jobs’ – a comment that appears to assume that directing Hamlet is a ‘safe job’. Peter Hall found it ‘perfectly boring, routine, there was no interpretation’.5 I apologize for the rhetorical trickery, but these responses, both in Moscow and in London (including Hall’s), were not to the 2000 production but to Brook’s 1955/6 production, starring Paul Scofield, part of a season – the ‘Brook-Scofield Season’, as it was identified in its publicity – created for commercial management H. M.Tennent, playing at the Phoenix Theatre in London, with the Hamlet rehearsed in four weeks. While in Russia with his own Hamlet, Brook saw Okhlopkov’s Hamlet production, significant as the first major new Soviet production of the play once de-Stalinization enabled it to return to the repertory. Stalin had effectively banned the play: a dropped hint in the Kremlin led Nemirovich-Danchenko to cancel the rehearsals then under way for a production at the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT) using the new translation by Boris Pasternak. As a Russian graduate student once suggested to me, the ban was either because Stalin could not approve of a play that involved murdering the ruler or because he could not approve of a play in which assassination is delayed. Okhlopkov’s set that fronted the downstage (effectively proscenium arch) playing space with a massive wall of prison bars, finally removed at the climax when Denmark was liberated by Fortinbras, was read by audiences

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as a sign that Russia as well as Denmark was ‘a prison’. Under Soviet rule, the line ‘There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark’ was usually greeted in Russia with loud and dangerously subversive applause. Brook found the production tedious: Despite many cuts in the text, the Hamlet lasted four hours and a half. Much of this time is taken up with the decorations that amplify the text, the pauses, the great moment of declamation, the interludes, the effects, the grands tableaux. Although the execution is always masterly, much of this would seem to us superfluous.6 But he also envied one of Okhlopkov’s biggest effects, for the play scene: The panels in the great gates suddenly opened, revealing an opera house sliced in half, three tiers of boxes crammed with excited, screaming, hysterical courtiers looking down onto Hamlet’s Mousetrap played below. This was electrifying and I would have given anything to have had it in our production. Some of the tensions between Brook’s production and Okhlopkov’s can be seen as ones Brook reconsidered in his production in 2000. There is the ‘simplicity, austerity and economy’ that is the Russian audience’s perception of Brook’s style, for instance, a sign of such modes as always comparative (it was austere by comparison with Okhlopkov’s). There is the anxiety about changes to the play-text (‘not even a correct text spoken’) and the way in which Brook’s perception of Okhlopkov’s cuts is not attached to an evaluative assessment (‘Despite many cuts’) except insofar as the production of the cut text is still very long. There is still the yearning in Brook, at this point in his work, for the great coup de théâtre. There is the brevity of the rehearsal period, financed by a commercial management, compared with the (implicit) lengthy rehearsal of a statesubsidized theatre like Okhlopkov’s. At a point prior to the creation of state companies in England (for in 1955 there was no Royal Shakespeare Company, and no National Theatre in England), there is Brook’s operating within a framework of production that militates against exploration and, effectively, against extended experiment. The 1955 production was Brook’s second performance of Hamlet. The first, a legendary (i.e. probably extensively mythified) childhood performance using puppets at home for family and friends, had a script headed ‘Hamlet by William Shakespeare and Peter Brook’. Brook ‘made

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the puppets, pulled their strings and spoke everyone’s lines’. When finally over, he wanted to begin again ‘with a different version’.7 It is too easy, but still irresistible, to see the proto-director as puppet-master, string-puller, co-author. More useful, though, is the dissatisfaction with what has been achieved, the need to do it again but differently. And, as a distant echo for us and at this point an anticipation for Brook, there is the presence of the great theatre theorist Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) whose concept of ‘the actor as übermarionette’ (in Craig’s formulation) was designed to enable the actor to be ‘totally under the control of the artist-director’.8 Craig is the figure whose approach to the theatricality of theatre and to the connection of a practice to a theory silently underpins much of Brook’s work.

Towards Hamlet (2000) The 2000 Hamlet has few links either to the childhood puppet-play or to the 1955 staging. Its sources lie in the long journey Brook had been taking since 1970. In 1970 Brook established the CIRT (the Centre international des recherches théâtrales) and spent a three-year period travelling in Africa and elsewhere, before settling in Paris at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, when the company’s name was transformed into the CICT (Centre international de création théâtrale), with substantial subsidy and no financial (though often a creative) obligation for public performance. From that time onwards, Brook’s company achieved a remarkable continuity. Among the cast of The Tragedy of Hamlet were actors who worked with him for almost the whole of that period: for example, Bruce Myers, Yoshi Oïda, Natasha Parry. This connectedness of the work is precisely what the concept of company might be intended to define. The CIRT/CICT sequence emerges directly out of what I would want to point to as a crucial moment in the development of a concept/practice of the experimental theatre laboratory in British theatre: Brook’s creation within the Royal Shakespeare Company of an ‘Experimental Group’, explicitly so named, which eventually gave performances in 1964 as ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ (derived of course from its encounter with Artaud) of, among other texts, parts of Genet’s The Screens, Artaud’s Spurt of Blood and Charles Marowitz’s 90-minute collage Hamlet (a version of the play strikingly unsympathetic in its view of the character). Behind the project lay Brook’s early connection with the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, whose company would be renamed as ‘Theatre-Laboratory’ (‘Teatr Laboratorium’) in 1965. Here plainly in Brook and Grotowski at

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this moment are attempts to create a concept of company that sees the process of its work as disjunct from performance, in which process (and not product) is the aim, and in which the proportions of research time and performance time are reversed from the conventional norm (twelve weeks of work for five weeks of performance). Brook’s major mid–1960s theatre productions were not of Shakespeare but of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (RSC, 1964), the signal attempt to find whether there could be a conjunction of Artaud and Brecht in a theatre form; the company-devised US (RSC, 1966), the most explicit piece of political, perhaps even agitprop, theatre ever created by a major theatre company in the UK; and Seneca’s Oedipus in Ted Hughes’s brutal translation (NT, 1968), a production most significant for the company discipline and voice-work and for its exhilarating exploration of the most formal modes of ‘high’ tragedy and of Dionysiac revelling.9 It is notable that all three were pieces created for the two major subsidized theatre companies and not either for commercial managements or for independent radical companies. Brook’s project of radicalization at this stage was to be accomplished through the core of the theatrical establishment. The return to Shakespeare in 1968 was again through experiment with The Tempest, the product of Jean-Louis Barrault’s invitation to direct in Paris and Brook’s turning the invitation into a workshop, rather than a production – his first experiment with a multinational company and with, again, a different kind of balance of membership: there were three directors, Brook, Chaikin and Garcia, as well as one assistant director. The Paris work, caught up in the events of 1968, had one week’s showing. Reworked in London for the Roundhouse later that year, the event is often described as a production of The Tempest but it was not – or at least not in any way that is helpful. Rather, The Tempest was the pretext (pre-text) for exercises in mirrors, in sexuality, in power and authority, as a means (a) of extending the actors’ skills and theatre’s techniques and (b) of uncovering those aspects of the play, especially in the areas of sexuality and power, that, for Brook, ‘were normally staged in a very artificial way’.10 In the complex network of productions and the continuities in Brook’s processes that I am trying to set up, I want to place the Tempest exercises as a sign of Brook’s use of a Shakespeare play, both for the purpose of rethinking what theatre is and what it can do, and for the purpose of revealing that core in the play that is usually hidden, the play within the encrustations that disturb the act of communication of this inner text, the core of the work that cannot be otherwise made visible. As Croyden well describes it,

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What resulted was not a literal interpretation of Shakespeare’s play, but a working out of abstractions, essence, and contradictions embedded in the text. The plot was shattered, condensed, deverbalized; time was discontinuous, shifting. Action merged into collage … Whenever Shakespeare’s words were spoken, they were intoned and chanted. Brook tried to strip the play of preconceived language patterns connected with classical interpretations of Shakespeare.11 In its manipulation of text it has obvious connections with the Marowitz collage Hamlet which Brook had enabled. Its eventual consequence would be the production of The Tempest in 1990: Brook’s preface to Carrière’s translation for the 1990 production12 makes that clear, for the multicultural group (English, French, American and Japanese) of 1968 would lead towards the interculturalist/transculturalist ambitions of the CIRT13 and the kind of company within which the later Tempest would be made: African actors as Prospero and Ariel, a white Swiss Caliban, a British Trinculo, an Indian Miranda, all working with a French translation. The 1990 Tempest was a world of deliberate inversions: Sotigui Kouyate, the tall, almost skeletal Prospero, was far from being an Italian prince but he was a magician, for Kouyate was himself a shaman and a griot, a storyteller who was in touch with the spirit world; Bakary Sangaré, the Malian actor, was a huge Ariel, physically heavy but dancingly light on his feet; David Bennent, as Caliban, best known for his film performance in The Tin Drum (1979), suffers from a disease that gives him a child’s body, an adult trapped in a physical shape that humiliated him in his sexual desire for Miranda. As Christine Dymkowski argues, ‘given the quiet dignity of Sotigui Kouyate’s saintly Prospero, … the only possible symbolic reading, if one was intended, was the contrast between an imagined Third World simplicity and purity and First World destructiveness and ugliness.’14 But whether or not to read race quite so explicitly and politically has long been a problem in Brook’s later work. His model of multiculturalism in the company often becomes a denial of the cultural specificity of the individual actor and the politics of current readings of Shakespeare is something he resists: When … one tries to use The Tempest to illustrate stereotyped notions about slavery, domination and colonialism … the result is taking characters who have fascinated audiences over the century [sic] because of their being so unfamiliar, so hard to encompass – and making them ordinary.15

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In its sense of the double focus of experiment (towards the play and towards the practice of theatre) the Roundhouse Tempest exercises would lead towards the movement from the performance-piece Brook devised as Qui Est Là (Bouffes du Nord, 1995) to The Tragedy of Hamlet, a connection I shall enlarge on below. In its concern with uncovering the hidden play, it points to Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen (Bouffes du Nord, 1981), itself a profoundly important influence on Brook’s work on Hamlet, just as the stripped-down Carmen will also point forward to Brook’s brilliant staging of Don Giovanni (Aix-en-Provence, 1995).16 And, hovering behind all of this is Brook’s long engagement with the work of George Gurdjieff (1866–1949), the spiritual teacher who saw humans as needing to transcend the ‘waking sleep’ in which they normally live. Known as the ‘Fourth Way’, Gurdjieff’s method was designed to awake the individual into consciousness and thereby attain the fullness of human potential. Brook had encountered Gurdjieff’s teachings in the early 1950s and would work with his disciples for decades. It resulted, in terms of direct representation, in Brook’s 1979 film based on Gurdjieff’s autobiographical Meetings with Remarkable Men. It is also, I think, no accident that Brook worked three times with Ted Hughes: on the translation/production of Seneca’s Oedipus at the National Theatre (1968); on Orghast (1971), an all-night site-specific production in Iran for which Hughes invented an entirely new language, which forms the basis for the First Player’s speech in the Hamlet (initially Naseeruddin Shah, later Yoshi Oïda); and, most tantalizingly, on the rewriting/translation of King Lear that Hughes undertook as an interim stage in the move from Brook’s stage production (RSC, 1962) to the film (released in 1971), a version that no Shakespeare scholar has seen. Hughes’s significance here lies in his own growing fascination with that myth hidden within the Shakespeare canon, resulting in the largely unread – and pretty unreadable – Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber, 1992). Brook and Hughes share the sense of a hidden meaning, a truth within the play, and, though their truths would not remotely be alike, each sees the task of exploration (as critic or as director) as uncovering the truth within. I need one further step of ground-clearing before I turn to the Hamlet production directly. I have been suggesting that the focus of experimental work for Brook is twin: towards the exploration of the text-as-script and towards the exploration of the possibility of remaking theatre. Shakespeare is as central to the latter as the former in Brook’s practice: witness the choice of a production of Timon of Athens to open Bouffes du Nord in 1974,17 the later production of Measure for Measure (1978) as well as Tempest

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(1990) and Hamlet, followed finally by Love is My Sin (2009), a two-handed mini-drama constructed out of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Qui Est Là is often, wrongly, seen as a version of Hamlet, as a production which seeks to be and/or was watched as being a reading of Hamlet. The error is, I think, the consequence of the reception of Brook’s work within a conventional concept of drama: a director directs plays from scripts. But, as Andrew Todd and Jean-Guy Lecat place it in their outstanding study of Brook’s theatre spaces, it is ‘a research work taking the text of Hamlet as a point of departure’.18 Its concern is with the process(es) of the actor, with the analysis of modes of representing the body on stage, starting from Zeami’s investigations for Noh Theatre in the early fifteenth century, moving through Stanislavsky, Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, Brecht and others. Subtitled Une Recherche théâtrale, the text’s departure and point de repère is the kind of being, the creation of identity, individuality, selfhood and character that has been conceptualized as practicable in theatre. It conducts this exploration – both by quotation and by representation of how a moment might be staged according to different theatre theorists – by tracing a path through Hamlet, but it has no interest in the play other than as an excuse for the exploration. The title is the first line of Hamlet in translation (‘Who’s there?’) but the encounter with the indistinctly seen, the as-yet-unidentified, is also that of all spectators: who is the who who is there? what kind of who can be there? Andy Lavender, in his helpful account of the event – especially helpful as there is no film or printed text widely available – sees the title as lacking a question-mark (as it does on Brook’s official website19): ‘Qui Est Là is a question without a question mark, a light utterance which might mean “the one who is there” ’.20 But it also refers back to Brook’s 1993 show L’Homme Qui, based on Oliver Sacks’s work, especially The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, with its potent rechartings of the parameters of sentience and identity through its narratives of neurological trauma. The Man Who, in its tantalizing abbreviation, experiments with concepts of humanity: even ‘the man who’ must redefine what it is to be a man. Significantly the cast for Qui Est Là was listed in the programme alphabetically by their own names: there was a denial of the primacy of character, that act of translation that the cast-list usually provides (not ‘who is Claudius?’ but ‘who plays Claudius?’). The theatre theorists were voiced but not characterized: any actor might, for the moment, speak as (but never ‘be’) Stanislavsky. The actor could be both a character and an analytic being, sliding from one to the other. Bruce Myers, as Polonius, held up in front of himself a cloth as the arras through which Hamlet

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stabbed him. At the moment of death, he dropped the cloth in order to discuss how dying on stage was represented differently in Chinese and Japanese performances modes – note that it was not the Japanese actor, Yoshi Oïda, who was required to stand for the theatre traditions that, in the company’s rehearsal workshops, he could show more profoundly than any of the others. Moving far upstage at the end of this analysis, he returned at a run, grabbed the arras-cloth that was held up for him and fell to the stage-floor, as Polonius’ corpse, at exactly the point that, before or without the narration of the performances of death, he would have reached. Qui Est Là spoke of the actor as the site of experiment, as the crucial element in the laboratory of theatre. Hamlet was no more than the mechanism through which that speaking could take place. That Brook moved from such a demonstration workshop (note the reminiscence of the publicly shown workshop of the 1969 Tempest exercises, rather than the production Barrault had proposed) to directing The Tragedy of Hamlet was a logical step.

From Hamlet to La Tragédie d’Hamlet The finding of the minimalist Hamlet that The Tragedy would be could in one sense be seen as no more than an authenticist search for an Elizabethan model of minimal necessity, a purist recreation of the conditions of early modern performance. But Brook describes it as an act of perception: ‘when I was sitting in the audience during The Man Who, I looked at the set of one table and a few chairs on a very small stage. I thought, How curious – that’s all one needs to do Hamlet.’21 The minimalism of staging was also part of the search for an ‘essentialisation’22 of the text, a belief that the true experiment with the text is to find that which is hidden by the text’s surface of excess, its masking of its true meaning, its core purpose, a mask necessitated precisely by the audience expectations and commercialism of product in early modern theatre. As Brook describes it, In pruning the play, I took out Fortinbras because, for me, he is not relevant to the central tragedy. If you look at Shakespeare, you will find that the man was endlessly pragmatic and was working for a living theater, where he did many, many things for the needs and taste of the times. And one of the conventions of the Elizabethans was plot and subplot. And saying things over again so that the audience got it and so on.23

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The search for the play within, though, was a radical experiment not only with cutting but also with treating the text as a plastic script able to be remodelled. Tabulating text often seems tedious but here is the opening sequence through to the end of the traditional Act 1, with the sections numbered simply to identify their originating source:24 1 Hamlet’s first soliloquy (‘O that this too, too solid flesh’); dialogue with Horatio (no Marcellus and Bernardo and with the account of seeing the ghost severely trimmed) 1.2.129–245 2 Immediately the ghost enters and Horatio exits; Hamlet talks with his father’s spirit; Horatio re-enters to swear (again with frequent trimmings). 1.4.38–45, 51–7, 1.5.2–7, 34–46, 59–198 3 Horatio leaves and Claudius, Gertrude and Polonius enter; son and parents talk 1.2.64–122 What remains is at most some 300 lines out of about 860 lines in Q2/F1. When Croyden (and others) estimate that the text of the performance has ‘a third of the original play eliminated’,25 she is clearly wrong. This text played about 2 hours 20 minutes, with no intermission, at an extremely disciplined slow pace. The severe cutting is in one sense a search for a Hamlet-centrist view of the text that is positively nineteenth-century in its concentration on the central role, the creation of a star vehicle that is oddly in conflict with the mode of performance either of the central actor (Adrian Lester in the English version or William Nadylam in the subsequent French version which used Carrière and Estienne’s superb translation) or the ensemble work, the company work, in blocking and other aspects of the performing mode Brook made possible. I shall explore the absolute obsession with Hamlet as core of the drama in a moment. But the reordering, the treatment of the text as malleable in more than just its responsiveness to the pruning-shears, also results in a radical renarrativization, a substantial transformation in the creation of sequence and process in the action through the redefinitions of causation and motivation that the reordering creates. The production’s presentation of what it means to be Hamlet is not just slightly realigned but profoundly rethought into a pattern that alters what that character might be held to be, what the processes of thinking and feeling and being that make up the concept of interiority for the role can be perceived as constructing. This is not, of course, a value judgement: I am not for a moment suggesting that our response to such changes should be either positive or negative

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in their establishment of a new systematization of process in the narrative of the play but, rather, that the experimental mode of exploring the text that Brook created depends on a view of identity and character that is oddly anything but experimental even as it appears to foreground its own freshness. The character of this Hamlet is new but the concept of character is highly traditional. Take the opening sequence I have outlined, where Hamlet’s confrontation with Claudius and Gertrude is now sequenced as after his meeting with the ghost so that the responses are not conditioned by, say, wariness and suspicion, melancholy and grief, concern over the ‘o’er-hasty marriage’ or whatever else can be adduced that is not specific to the return of the putative father and the accusation of murder but, instead, by exactly that possibility of murder and exactly that reconnection to the mourned-for object that are the absences in Shakespeare’s second scene. Even the placing of the explicatory soliloquy before rather than after the awkwardnesses and tensions of the invasion of privacy by Claudius’s and Gertrude’s variously solicitous concern transforms its meaning. Brook begins, here, with a grief (performed with a simply exceptional intensity by Lester both on stage and on the DVD), but one whose need, whose identified lack is immediately answered. Other ‘textual switches’ (Maria Shevtsova’s term)26 gained more attention, especially (1)  the delaying of ‘To be or not to be’ until after the murder of Polonius, where it functions as a replacement for ‘How all occasions’ (I had hopes, as I was watching the production, that Brook might have cut ‘To be’ completely, but he was not prepared to be that radical. It now forms part of a liaison de vue between the departing Hamlet and the entering ‘mad’ Ophelia.); (2) the delaying of Laertes’s first entry until Ophelia’s funeral; and (3) the delaying of lines from the first scene of the play until the end of the performance.27 But, important though these are, they are the tip of the iceberg. In addition, the consequence of the radical cutting of the opening sequences for the reformed focus on Hamlet denies precisely the delay in focusing on Hamlet that Hamlet manifests, the move from the lengthy scene in which the word ‘Hamlet’ is used initially twice to refer to father, not son, before the new mention of ‘young Hamlet’ and then the deferral in which, though present from the start of 1.2, Hamlet is neither engaged

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by being spoken to nor speaks himself until sixty lines into the scene, so that the audience has to wait 240 lines before they hear Hamlet speak. The reordering means that when Brook turns, that is, from the refusal to represent identity (whether from Hamlet or the history of theatre theory) in Qui Est Là to Hamlet, he also turns away from any experimentalism or even contemporaneity over the forms of dramatic character back to a tradition that is not essentially different from that of the commercial theatre context in which he was exploring the Hamlet of 1955/6. None of which is intended to suggest that The Tragedy of Hamlet is somehow a sign of a failure of experimental nerve or a poor piece of theatre – quite the contrary. Nor am I suggesting that reconstructing the narrative or cutting the text is to be seen as somehow sinful (the endlessness that is Branagh’s 1996 film version should convince anyone that that cannot be true).28 I share Brook’s view that ‘Nothing is more disastrous today than to have false gods. And even the text is a false god.’29 But it is the case that Brook’s framing of Hamlet as effectively equal to Hamlet acts as an explicit denial of other kinds of concerns, for example the ones present long before in Okhlopkov’s staging, for Brook’s response, when asked by Croyden whether the cutting of Fortinbras means that he is ‘not interested in the political aspects of the play’, is that ‘I deny that that exists’: … it is just a sixties throwback that says that if you take out Fortinbras, where is the political dimension? In fact, if you look at it very coolly, there is nothing in the whole story of Hamlet and the reason for his tragedy that makes a link to political questions.30 Even supposing that were true – and I doubt if many would agree that it is – the emphatic statement that the tragedy of Hamlet is coterminous with the tragedy of Hamlet is a driving force for modelling production that, again, could have been heard from Sir Henry Irving or Sir Frank Benson over a century ago. Viewing interest in Fortinbras as ‘a sixties throwback’ leads logically to a remarkably unironic view of Fortinbras and, in any case, ‘To end the play on someone not close to the action during the whole of the play is not exactly relevant today’.31 Quite why the text’s material concerned with the forms of future order in the state or why the collapse of the independent nation state Denmark and its annexation by Norway are ‘not exactly relevant’ is to bring into question Brook’s engagement with a concept of ‘relevance’ that is the ‘today’ within which this experimentalism takes place.

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Asked about the delay in bringing Laertes onto the stage, Brook comments: ‘Laertes is a key figure, not in the scene where Polonius gives him advice, but in contrast to Hamlet.’32 Whatever is cut in the representation of Laertes or Claudius or Gertrude is irrelevant because they are more related to Hamlet in this production … The tragedy of Hamlet is in his interrelations with those forces around him … There has never been a production in which you find, for example, that the king is more complex than what you see in this cut version. The interrelations are always between those forces inevitably impinging on Hamlet.33

Hamlet Today Brook’s view of what Hamlet is does not depend on any gap between, say, early modern and modern concepts of identity or on a notion of character as discontinuous from reality. Instead Hamlet is l’histoire d’un jeune homme remarquable, ouvert, séduisant, en un mot le jeune homme idéal. Dans les termes de Shakespeare: le prince idéal … on a le portrait d’un jeune homme auquel tout le monde aujourd’hui voudrait s’identifier – le genre de personne “qu’on voudrait être”.34 If the conception of Hamlet is one that sounds purely nineteenth-century, anything but contemporary, neither experimental nor ‘now’, then the actor is more visibly other. Here the question of relevance and today become acute. Adrian Lester’s voice is pure RP, beautifully aware of verse rhythm, eloquently alert to the possibilities of language, slow and thoughtful. But the performer’s body marks the production’s engagement with the complex problematics of colour-blind casting.35 Brook wants to foreground the naturalness of the actors, the unmediated, non-theatricalized representation of the actor’s self: The actors wore no makeup. No wigs. Adrian Lester’s dreadlocks were his; that’s the way he is. We wanted his natural self in the part. We tried to make our everyday life a natural link to the past. Adrian Lester is a young man who wears what is natural and comfortable to him – dreadlocks. If someone told him that in playing Hamlet, a Danish prince, he should look less like a black man, that would be appalling.36

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Fran Rayner, in a thoughtful consideration of this problem, finds that the gap between voice and body shows the production maintaining ‘a tension between blackness and Englishness’, one that ‘in Lester’s performance represents an enabling disruption of cultural norms, for it refuses a singular, definitive cultural identification’.37 But, since the beginning of the project, Brook’s transculturalism has also been attacked for an orientalism.38 It is striking that when Brook remounted the production in French in 2003, his Hamlet was now William Nadylam, also black and dreadlocked. At this point, what is ‘natural’ also risks being read as what is desirably othered, and the image of the right actor’s body for Hamlet risks being seen as necessarily mapped onto blackness. And, too, the blackness of Jeffery Kissoon’s ghost/Claudius double (a now traditional double, like Myers’s of Polonius/Gravedigger) creates a raced identity for fatherhood that is not extended to motherhood, for Parry’s Gertrude was white. In the light of this, I find myself distrusting the forms in which the multi/inter/ transculturalism is being produced, that very aspect of Brook’s project that initially seemed so positive an experimental denial of the dominance of Western (read: anglophone) forms of theatre. And yet, even in the African journey that initiated the CIRT and the move from England to France in the 1970s, there was a kind of naivety about the imperialist nature of the materials of the simplified performance Brook was creating: a pair of boots, one of the crucial props in the street performances the company created, is not an innocent, depoliticized object in a barely post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, for who owns boots and who wears boots have complex resonances that Brook simply ignored.

Hamlet and Reductionism In a 1994 essay, ‘Forgetting Shakespeare’, Brook identified ‘a subtle poison that invades much of our social life – it is called “reductionism” ’: In practice, this means reduce the dimensions of whatever is unknown and mysterious: debunk wherever possible, cut everything down to size. In this way young actors are once more drawn into the trap of believing that their own everyday experience can give them what they need and that they can base their understanding on their personal set of references. This leads him – or her – to apply current political and social clichés to situations and characters whose true riches go far beyond ideas.39

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Reductionism is, therefore, a false immediacy, a fake contemporaneity. But it is also for Brook the consequence of an attitude towards Shakespeare. Hence the answer is to ‘Forget Shakespeare’: Forget that these plays had an author. Remember only that your responsibility as an actor is to bring human beings to life. So just assume, as a trick to help you, that the character you are preparing to play really existed.40 The advantage is that then ‘all temptation to think that “Hamlet” is “like me” is swept away’, for ‘Hamlet is only interesting because he is not like anyone else, he is unique’.41 Character is then a construction whose otherness is crucial to the discovery of the ‘heart of [its] mystery’ which cannot be revealed to the actor or by the actor if he or she tries to ‘play upon me’ (Hamlet, 3.2.355–7) – and Brook quotes this passage in the play to support his argument. But it is also a construction of immense subtlety and complexity that, for him, cannot and must not be reduced to a simple psychological identity. The mind that controls speech – the character’s, not Shakespeare’s – is ‘no commonplace mind’ and therefore the question of who that person is ‘plunges actors beyond Freud, beyond Jung, beyond reductionism’.42 One might wonder at that assumption that only the ‘commonplace mind’ is the concern of psychoanalysis and that the core of complexity is not to be reached through such analytic means. What Brook fully accepts is also that character is in Shakespeare (or at least in Shakespeare’s printed texts) a construct of language and that only by intense engagement with the smallest detail of that language can the mystery be found: This does not lead us to sloppiness, to less concern for the fine detail of the verse. On the contrary, every syllable takes on a new importance, each new letter can become a vital clue in reconstructing a highly complex brain. We can no longer start with an idea, a concept, nor a theory of the character. There are no short cuts. The entire play becomes one great mosaic and we approach the music, the rhythms, the strangeness of the images, the alliteration, even the rhymes, with the surprise and awe of discovery, because they are necessary expressions of the inner patterns of exceptional human creatures.43 Of course, the response to this, based on my analysis above of the transformation of the play that Brook created,44 is that Brook’s cutting is a denial

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of the idea of the ‘entire play’ as ‘one great mosaic’. Rather, the cutting short is a set of short cuts to an answer Brook has preplanned. The Hamlet that Brook concentrates on is not only a part of the wholeness that the mosaic might have revealed but also one reconstructed to reveal a different mosaic, one with intense similarities to Shakespeare’s but also vitally important differences. The extraordinary mind of Hamlet, something that Brook believes, along with all of us, to be the greatest construction of a character’s mind in Western culture, is not the same when rewired by being rewritten. La Tragédie d’Hamlet is, in that sense, as much an example of the collage as critical commentary as was Charles Marowitz’s cut-up for the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season in 1964, a work co-directed by Brook and Marowitz. Marowitz’s was designed to ‘delineate a criticism of the type of person Hamlet was’, as he put it: … by assaulting the character of Hamlet, one was deriding the supreme prototype of the conscience-stricken but paralyzed liberal: one of the most lethal and obnoxious characters in modern times.45 This is the opposite pole from Brook’s ‘ideal prince’. But Brook’s Hamlet was a different kind of reductionism, one designed, simply and narrowly, to reveal a particular view of Hamlet, a reconstructed corner of that great mosaic.

Watching Hamlet It should be clear that my avoidance for so long of any description of the aspects of the production that are usually the grist of theatre analysis – the set, costumes, theatre space, music – has been deliberate. Those forms of presentation were all beautifully controlled, visually moving, radical in their refusal of the conventions of Shakespeare production and tightly connected to the forms of staging that are fundamental to the longdeveloping CICT project. The soundscape of the underscoring by Toshi Tsuchitori, placed on the same plane as the actors on audience right and playing live throughout the performance on a wide range of percussion, much of which derives from forms of Asian music, might also be read as orientalizing, though its extent is also suggestive of filmic scoring.46 The exquisitely decayed nature of the Théâtre du Bouffes du Nord has made it possible for Brook to work in a space in which the aura of the building is a powerful determinant of the theatre experience and in which

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stage floor is on the same level as the front row of the audience, sharing that one-room feel that has long been a fundamental part of Brook’s belief in the right form of communication between actor and spectator. The traditional proscenium arch theatre divides performance from spectators into a stage and a separate auditorium, the join being the window through which the spectators look into the other room, the traditional form of two-room theatre that Brook resists. But being in the same room is only the first step, the second being the sharing of the floor-space. As Brook puts it, ‘Had we done Hamlet on the 17-centimetre-high platform of Qui est là it would have been a completely different play, with a much more selfconsciously theatrical character.’47 Analysing these aspects of performance would engage with Brook’s experimentalism in the making of theatre. But it does not seem to me that it would productively engage with the making of Shakespearean theatre, the paradox towards which I have been moving. Perhaps it connects with Brook’s paradox: ‘It is only when we forget Shakespeare that we can begin to find him.’48 I end this long consideration of Brook’s Hamlets with a lyric gesture. At the end of the stage performance in 2000, though not of the filmed version, the entire cast, which had been lying ‘dead’, stood and looked out at the audience as Horatio spoke lines from Act 1 never previously heard here: ‘But look, the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.’ And then he asked ‘Who’s there?’, the play’s first words becoming the production’s last, the question about theatre of Qui Est Là now posed to the audience and refusing to define its terms: what ‘who’? where is ‘there’? in what time/space is the question asked at the end of Hamlet? I still do not have an answer but, for the first time in decades, I stood to applaud the performance when I saw it at the Bouffes du Nord.

Journeyings It is time to return to something of a linear narrative and a chronological approach, now that Brook’s Dream and Hamlet are present to outline the problematics of his achievements. Inevitably I can do no more than offer a fragment or two for each production mentioned and, too, I have had here to isolate Brook’s Shakespeare productions from the rest of the work rather than allow the complex interweavings their full measure. But the snapshots serve to define stages in his long journey. Peter Brook was born in London in 1925. His parents were Russian Jews who had emigrated from Latvia. Educated at Westminster School

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and then, after a gap year working in a film studio, at Magdalen College, Oxford, Brook quickly found himself directing for Sir Barry Jackson at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1945: Shaw’s Man and Superman, Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea and Shakespeare’s King John with Paul Scofield, the young star of the company, as the Bastard Faulconbridge. King John teemed with groups of monks all over the stage and was dominated by Scofield’s performance. In a culture in which any change to Shakespeare’s language was dangerous, especially given Barry Jackson’s commitment to textual accuracy, Brook had to defend himself in a letter to the Sunday Times for having added words to the Bastard’s famous speech on ‘commodity’. Convinced, quite reasonably, that audiences would not understand the word’s early modern sense, Brook had adjusted the line ‘That smoothfaced gentleman, tickling commodity’ (2.1.573) to read That smooth-faced gentleman, expediency, Or, as they say, tickling commodity … Brook had no doubt that the great exploration of ‘commodity’ would have been impenetrable without the change and, as he wrote, ‘to substitute another word throughout would have been unpardonably irritating to those who knew the speech’ and hence the decision to add in order to ‘ “plant” its meaning’.49 Jackson was so impressed with Brook’s productions that he chose him to direct Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratfordupon-Avon the following year, making Brook the youngest ever to direct there. Scofield played Don Armado in a thick Spanish accent. Brook chose to make Shakespeare’s Navarre a pastoral idyll from Watteau, then his favourite painter. The landscape became one of a hazy idealized Arcadia where time could stop. Peter Hall, who saw it as a schoolboy, remembered its ‘misty, romantic vision – that post-war romanticism, exquisite and ever so slightly camp’.50 The great moment in the production was the entry of Marcadé but that entrance was, for Brook, already implicit in his choice of Watteau as model: … every one of Watteau’s pictures has an incredible melancholy. And if one looks, one sees that there is somewhere in it the presence of death, until one even sees that in Watteau (unlike the imitations of the period, where it’s all sweetness and prettiness) there is usually a dark figure somewhere, standing with his back to you … there’s no doubt that the dark touch gives the dimension to the whole piece.51

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His choice therefore was to bring Marcadé over a rise at the back of the stage – it was evening, the lights were going down, and suddenly there appeared a man in black. The man in black came onto a very pretty summery stage, with everybody in pale pastel Watteau and Lancret costumes, and golden lights dying. It was very disturbing, and at once the whole audience felt that the world had been transformed.52 A play which usually hardly made for decent box office was a triumph and packed the house. The production managed two things at once, making Brook’s reputation as the most brilliant young director of the time and making the play’s reputation as not simply theatrically viable but theatrically exhilarating. It was a remarkable achievement. For the next season, 1947, Jackson asked Brook to direct Romeo and Juliet. His Juliet was 19 (Daphne Slater), Romeo was 27 (Laurence Payne). Both were far younger than was then normal, even if neither was quite the age of Shakespeare’s lovers. Brook wanted to ‘capture the violent passion of two children lost among the Southern fury of warring houses’ on a set surrounded by a low, crenellated city wall to begin to provide ‘a passionate Elizabethan-Italianate background’.53 Above all, he wanted to break away from the popular conception of Romeo and Juliet as a prettypretty, sentimental love story, and to get back to the violence, the passion, and the excitement of the stinking crowds, the feuds, the intrigues. To recapture the poetry and the beauty that arise from the Veronese sewer, and to which the story of the two lovers is merely incidental.54 To some extent these different ideas about the play are in conflict with each other. But the effect was to strip the play of its usual lyricism – just as well, since the actors, Scofield as Mercutio apart, had great difficulty with the verse – and replace it with an overwhelming atmosphere of Italian heat, something now so familiar in productions of Romeo that it is difficult to imagine how shocking that might have been. The critics were certainly shocked and the reviews were terrible. As Brook later commented, There was plenty of fire, colour and energy … But what was missing was an overall tempo, an irresistible pulse to lead from one scene to another. I had not yet learnt that this was the basis of all Elizabethan theatre …55

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In 1950 he returned to Stratford again, after two years spent mostly directing opera. From that he had learned a different approach to directing: ‘I found that the immersion in music had brought me a new awareness of tempo and phrasing.’56 The production was Measure for Measure with John Gielgud as an icily vicious Angelo. But it was not Gielgud so much as two moments in the production that consistently stand out in the accounts and reviews. The first was the treatment of Pompey’s description of the old customers of Mistress Overdone whom he found in the prison (4.3.1–20). As Pompey characterized them, each appeared on stage, a procession of the crippled and deformed, ‘the degenerate and wounded of a corrupt, decadent city’,57 the visual creation of a world that Shakespeare leaves only described, a vision that was not comic at all but horrifying in its realism. The second was immediately after Mariana had pleaded with Isabella to join her in trying to save Angelo’s life (‘O Isabel, will you not lend a knee?’) and the Duke had repeated that ‘He dies for Claudio’s death’ (5.1.440–1). In the middle of the line, before Isabella’s response (‘Most bounteous sir’), Brook placed a pause. Not just a brief moment, the pause stretched out further and further: 35 seconds on opening night, as much as an astonishing two minutes later in the run. Brook wanted Barbara Jefford as Isabella to hold the pause until she felt that the audience could stand no more. Kenneth Tynan described it as ‘a long prickly moment of doubt which had every heart in the theatre thudding’.58 For Brook this was no piece of actor’s bravado but the creation of a space in which the core of the play’s meaning could be apparent: ‘a silence in which all the inevitable elements of the evening came together, a silence in which the abstract notion of mercy became concrete for that moment to those present.’59 Crucially – and this would be something repeated in his subsequent Shakespeare work, though never at such an extreme of tension – it was not in the language but in the space between words that the purpose of the play became palpable. A rapid-paced production of The Winter’s Tale with Gielgud as Leontes followed in 1951. And there was an extremely short King Lear in 1953, made for CBS television, starring Orson Welles (then aged 38) and cut to a running time of 73 minutes, not least by eliminating the Gloucester plot almost completely. Edmund was combined with Oswald. Poor Tom, played by Micheal MacLiammoir (Welles’s Iago in his 1952 Othello), was not Edgar in disguise. Broadcast, unusually, without commercial breaks and brutally reviewed, this was a bold experiment in what television Shakespeare might be like, a claustrophobic exploration of the small screen’s limits across which the characters fought for control of the action. Dressed Elizabethan,

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an unusual choice for Brook, this Lear was about a king of Churchillian scale but also with Churchill’s physical infirmity. The collapse into madness was far more important to Brook than the possibility of a new perception of social responsibility and integration. While the storm scenes tried to see what television could do non-naturalistically, it was the end, with Lear dying on his throne and with only Kent and Albany left alive, that seems now the core of the bleak vision. Brook hardly ever referred to the film later and it certainly had little influence on his stage version for the RSC and subsequent film. Yet it seems now, for all its shortcomings, bold and at times brilliant.60 In 1955 came a Stratford production of Titus Andronicus, the first ever there, starring Olivier as Titus and Vivien Leigh as Lavinia. Brook turned down the offer of directing Macbeth in favour of this play that had few fans. In The Empty Space Brook outlined what he saw as the play’s worth: Titus Andronicus begins to yield its secrets the moment one ceases to regard it as a string of gratuitous strokes of melodrama and begins to look for its completeness. Everything in Titus is linked to a dark flowing current out of which surge the horrors, rhythmically and logically related – if one searches in this way one can find the expression of a powerful and eventually beautiful barbaric ritual.61 For Brook, the ‘real appeal’ of the play was obviously for everyone in the audience about the most modern of emotions – about violence, hatred, cruelty, pain – in a form that, because unrealistic, transcended the anecdote and became for each audience quite abstract and thus totally real.62 As Kenneth Tynan commented in his review: This is tragedy naked, godless, and unredeemed, a carnival of carnage in which pity is the first man down. We have since learned how to sweeten tragedy, to make it ennobling, but we would do well to remember that Titus is the raw material, “the thing itself”, the piling of agony on to a human head until it splits.63 Brook took unexpected routes to achieve this intensity. The TV King Lear had had an avant-garde score by Virgil Thomson. For Titus Brook went further and, working with William Blezard, created an electronic

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soundscape of weird noises, by, for instance, putting a microphone inside a piano, stamping on the pedals so that the strings shuddered and playing it back slowly. The movement towards abstraction as a means to achieve the most real was especially marked in Brook’s extraordinary decision in the representation of the raped and mutilated Lavinia. Reports spoke of audience members fainting and of St John’s Ambulance workers always on duty, but the production photographs show not some horrifying hyperrealism of blood and gore but of extreme abstraction: Leigh clutched in her hands long streamers of red cloth and gripped other streamers in her mouth. There was no blood at all, only a sign of what could not be shown, theatre at its most abstract and metaphoric but also at its most terrifying in this representation of the limits of suffering. Of course the production benefited from Olivier’s grizzled veteran, initially powerfully realistic but subsequently moving to something that was the epitome of heroic acting. Trewin’s description of one famous moment is not the hyperbole of a reviewer’s purple prose but a scrupulously honest response to Olivier’s achievement: As Olivier cried “I am the sea” [3.1.225], its surge beat on the world’s far shore. The waters receded; Titus met the mockery of Saturninus, his sons’ heads … He leant forward, silent in grief; Marcus Andronicus turned on him with … ‘why are thou still?’ [263]; and the slow answering laugh was like the menace of a tide upon the turn.64 As with his first Stratford production, Love’s Labour’s Lost, this was the rescue of a play as theatrically powerful. As Jan Kott put it, Mr Brook did not discover Titus. He discovered Shakespeare in Titus. Or rather, in this play he discovered the Shakespearian theatre, the theatre that had moved and thrilled audiences, had terrified and dazzled them.65 It was Brook’s greatest triumph in Shakespeare production to date. The Tempest, again with Gielgud in the lead, was at Stratford in 1957, most marked for Brook’s soundscore, again electronic (or more accurately at that date: musique concrète), and with Brook’s own set designs. But after that it was five years before he directed Shakespeare again, this time King Lear with Scofield in the lead, a production I shall return to at length below. In 1963 Brook helped on Clifford Williams’s Stratford Tempest and returned to the play again for the Tempest exercises/workshop at the

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Roundhouse (see above, pp. 14–15). To complete the rapid survey, there would be Dream (1970) and the sequence of Shakespeare plays in Paris (see above, pp. 16–17). The only exception was his last UK production, Antony and Cleopatra at the RSC with Alan Howard and Glenda Jackson in 1978. Both had worked with him frequently before: Howard as Oberon/Theseus, Jackson in Marat/Sade (1964) and in US (1966). The result was only fitfully successful. The RSC seemed to Brook to have lost its way and he was furious with the cast for indiscipline and a lack of commitment. In the aftermath of the extreme demands and experiences of the Africa travels and what was possible with his own company at the Bouffes du Nord, the RSC at the end of an exhausting season must have appeared like a throwback to a kind of ensemble he had chosen to abandon. Brook, unusually for him, began the rehearsal process with text work from the start rather than with exercises, improvisations, physical explorations. Indeed, the company often showed their dislike of the physical work when Brook used it. What had become central to his way of making theatre was now alien to the RSC actors. It was less the performances than the staging that worked. The bareness of the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, often open to the back wall, was frequently closed off by glazed screens, across which blood spattered during the scenes of battle, closing the space down so that, at times, it was as if this was a prototype for a production of this apparently vast play within the tight confines of a small theatre space like the RSC’s The Other Place (where, indeed, Adrian Noble would stage the RSC’s next Antony in 1982, a production that profited greatly from Brook’s exploration). Simple seats and a carpet were all that was on this stage floor. Brook was determined to rescue the play from traditional excesses and the narrative from the Burton-Taylor Cleopatra (1963): Antony and Cleopatra has been smothered by images superimposed by the Victorian era and by the cinema. It is forty-five short scenes of intimate behaviour. There is no pageantry. Everything concerns personal relationships … Shakespeare didn’t decorate the play. The Empire may be towering but he keeps it out of sight.66 The terms are the same as for his Hamlet: clear space, intimate behaviour, personal relationships. The carpet proved to be a vital tool: in the scene of Antony’s reconciliation with Lepidus and Octavius (2.2), everything depended on who stood or sat on the carpet and who was off it, so that Agrippa’s plan for the marriage to Octavia belonged on the carpet and Enobarbus, a reminder of Cleopatra, was off it. There was an exactness of

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blocking as the source of meaning that was intense. Most excitingly, during the male partying with Pompey, the carpet was suddenly lifted vertically in the air as the world turns upside down and the drunken men tumble off it. Yet, for all its moments, this Antony and Cleopatra showed exactly why Brook would never create a production in England again, why he needed to continue for the rest of his career to work with an almost permanent company that could be the ensemble the Royal Shakespeare Company no longer was, and why the exploration of process had become even more important than the public presentation of performance, the means almost outweighing the end. The transitional steps of the move to the Bouffes du Nord, steps that involved Shakespeare productions (Timon of Athens and Measure for Measure), showed a distance from English modes of performance, from its notions of company and its forms of actor-audience relationship, that meant that Brook’s productions might in future visit the UK but could not be created there.

Filming King Lear It is in part Brook’s ever-increasing concern with the process of creation, with the methods of rehearsal as process, that leads me back to describe and consider his work on the stage production of King Lear for the RSC in 1962 and the film that he made, years later, again with Scofield as Lear. For David Williams, the RSC Lear marked ‘a major crossroads in his career’: … the end of romantic fantasy and decoration of any kind, of lighting effects and fixed set designs … a new beginning: the genesis of ensemble concerns, work on the actor as supreme creator, the primary source in an empty space: starkness and provocation, clarity and visibility at every level: the uneasy fusion of Artaud, Beckett and Brecht in search of a prismatic density of expression and form: a truer reflection of the spirit of our age.67 For Williams the change is so complete that this is where his massive compilation of materials as ‘a theatrical casebook’ must begin, with a production that achieved what Brook described in 1964: A play must leave you in a more receptive mood than you were before. It isn’t there to “move” people. That’s a ghastly idea. You cry, you have a

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bath of sentiment. You come out saying you’ve had a lovely time. I prefer the notion of disturbance …68 I mentioned above that, in making the transition over nearly a decade from staging Lear to filming it, Brook worked with Hughes on a new version of the text. Though the full script, if it ever existed, has not yet been located, Hughes refers to the project in a letter in 1968: I’ve got myself involved in a major piece of sacriledge [sic]. Peter Brook evidently did a production of King Lear some time ago … Now he wants to make a film of it. Not a film of the play – like Richard III or Olivier’s Hamlet, but a film of the story, using whatever in the text doesn’t sound unreal in a film. (like the Japanese Macbeth “Throne of Blood”, & like the Russian “Hamlet”). So he wants me to rewrite the text !! !! !!69 Hughes goes on to explain the reasons for the project: So the opening speech becomes something plain, simple – not measured & musical. He’s quite right, I think. The whole world of Lear is in the verse, but when you’re manifestly supplying that world in something else i.e. in the visible (over-visible) film, the world visible in the film, and the world audible in the film, are two different worlds, different orders of symbolism, that just destroy each other. We can’t manage both simultaneously.70 Hughes included a tantalizing sample of ‘the opening speech’, not of course the opening speech of Shakespeare’s play but the first words that would have been spoken in this screenplay: Give me the map there. We are growing old it is time we unburdened ourselves of all these cares of government and prepared ourselves for death. Cornwall and you our no less loving son of Albany, we intend to bestow the inheritance on our daughters now to prevent strife after our death …71

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Here is Shakespeare’s text: Meantime, we shall express our darker purpose. Give me the map there. Know that we have divided In three our kingdom; and ’tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age, Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburdened crawl toward death. Our son of Cornwall, And you, our no less loving son of Albany, We have this hour a constant will to publish Our daughters’ several dowers, that future strife May be prevented now. (1.1.35–44) It is clear what Hughes was doing for Brook. The stripping down of the play’s language is not simply a clarification but also a refusal of imagery. There is no space here for Lear to ‘crawl toward death’, whether ‘Unburdened’ or not. The principle is one of elimination, a reduction to the informative, albeit conducted in a rhythmic speech and set out as verse. In the event, Brook did not use Hughes’s version. The language in the film is Shakespeare’s, with the exception of a couple of explanatory narrative intertitles, as if the devices of silent film continued to be necessary. The first word of the film is Lear’s ‘Know’, the cutting even deeper than Hughes had performed. But ‘Know’ emerges into the soundscape of the film after one of the most extraordinary openings of any film. The opening shot, slow and prolonged, pans to and fro across a group of men, all standing, motionless, filmed in black and white. The opening credits roll across the shot but, initially, so still are the actors that the spectator can even read it as a still, until a blink of an eye is sufficient to reassure us that the actors are filmed rather than a still scanned. The men, arranged as a visual composition but not standing in ordered rows, are tense, as are we, placed in a state of expectation. It takes a while to realize that something else is unusual about the sequence: the complete absence of sound. There will be no non-diegetic sound at any point in the film, almost the only film I know without any underscoring, another aspect of cutting out the inessential. Then, finally, there is a cut to a new shot, a massive room, ordered and symbolic, dominated at the screen’s mid-point by a giant phallic object, with more people, sitting and standing now but similarly immobile. Then, again after an awkwardly long rhythm of waiting, a door to the room can be seen to be closing, the first onscreen movement, and then, at last, the first sound is

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heard, the thud of the door now shut. Cut again to a man’s head, slumped, slightly twisted, as if it might be after a stroke, shaded and withdrawn (we will later see that this is Lear sitting inside the phallic throne space), and speaking out of the side of his mouth a single syllable: ‘Know’. But we cannot know that the sound is ‘Know’; it could just as easily, perhaps even more probably, be heard as ‘No’. Only when, after a pause, the sentence continues – ‘that we have divided’ – can we parse the first sound as an instruction to know and not a principle of negation, though the latter will be in many respects even more dominant in the film than any movement towards knowledge. Brook talked later about the kinds of choice this sequence represents: We did not use colour for a very simple … reason, which grew out of my experience of Lear in the theatre. Lear is so complex a work that if you give the slightest bit of added complexity to it, you are completely smothered. The basic principle has to be economy. And black and white film is simpler, it doesn’t distract the attention to the same degree. The same is true for music. All music does in a film is to add something. But in this story silence has an important place, as concrete as music might have in another story. So the process of preparing Lear all the way was elimination – of scenic detail, costume detail, colour detail, music detail.72 Hughes’s work made possible or at least was consonant with this preparatory process of elimination and indeed the eventual evacuation from the filmic method of anything extraneous. Filmed in the icy wastes of Jutland in northern Denmark which provided for Brook a landscape that looked ‘like the England of a thousand years ago’ in the way that no part of the English countryside now does, since it ‘has transformed itself into an artificial countryside’,73 this Lear is as unremittingly bleak as its first moments. But Brook’s opening, stark beyond measure, is also startling in its resistance to the normal conventions of film grammar and that, too, will continue. The connection between the three shots is hard to understand. Though we come to realize that the men are in the space outside the throne room, beyond the now-closed door, that Lear is seated within the throne, and that the object in the centre of the second shot is in fact a throne, none of this is easy to parse. We have to work to construct the sequence, the palace geography, the blocking. It is disturbing, awkward, almost as if it is as deliberately primitive as the landscape, costuming, interiors of Lear’s Britain. Again and again, Brook’s framing of a shot bisects a close-up of

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a head at the side of the frame, so that we are more aware of the act of framing than film conventionally wishes us to be. After the shoot, after the choice to work ‘with an elimination of as much period detail as possible’, Brook edited in ways that sought ‘to interrupt the consistency of style, so that many-levelled contradictions of the play can appear’, as he wrote to Kozintsev.74 Even location is disturbed. When Lear is reunited with Cordelia, the sequence shows each separately, with no establishing shot that enables us to see the room, to define the proximity of one to the other, until Lear identifies ‘this lady / To be my child Cordelia’ and her response ‘And so I am, I am’ (4.7.69–70) effectively permits the camera to show both of them within the frame of the shot, defining physical relationship at the very moment that the two of them define familial relationship. And the storm produces a sequence of shots that are grainy, blurred, disturbed as well as disturbing, images that resolve into objects and people but make it tough for us to see. Seeing here, unsurprisingly in a play so powerfully focused on sight, is never simple, never unnoticed. More than any film since Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and almost anything after Brook’s film, his Lear interrogates faces in close-up, asking us to see the person as we try to see through to what is being thought, felt and said. It seems right that this film should end both with Edgar speaking aggressively at us, facing the camera head-on, breaking the plane of the film, and that, intercut with it, is a slow-motion falling of Lear’s head and body out of the bottom of the frame to leave behind, in the last image of all, the purity of a white screen, the blank space finally emptied of people and even perhaps of meaning, the degree zero of exposed film that the rest of the darkness of the film has been built across. Brook’s Lear engages with the materiality of film and its conventions and out of that refusal to work in the ways narrative film is conventionally unwilling to consider. The film is, as it were, the most substantial product of Brook’s engagement with the work of Bertolt Brecht, a film that is an exercise in defamiliarization and distanciation, in the alienation techniques that allow or rather force the spectator actively to think, not simply passively to consume. The narrative intertitles in Lear, a means of cutting even further the Edgar-Edmund story, which, as in the 1953 TV version, here continued not to interest Brook overmuch, are exactly like the scene-summaries of Brecht’s epic theatre, a statement in advance that defines event, removes suspense, refuses to allow us to focus on the end rather than the decisions of the moment. Rigorous and uncompromising, doing so much more than a rapid transfer of stage production to film could

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possibly have done (as in the filmic weaknesses of Stuart Burge’s capturing of Olivier’s stage performance as Othello in the 1965 film of the National Theatre production), Brook’s King Lear is for me one of the finest accomplishments to date of Shakespeare on film, as indeed is Kozintsev’s as well.

Staging King Lear Why, though, have I reversed the chronology here and started with the film rather than the stage production? Primarily it is to separate the two in the analysis. The film is so little a product of the stage production, and, by contrast, such a substantial rethinking of what it might mean to film King Lear at all that the linear account of the two would risk suggesting causality. Of course there are plain points of interconnection. Scofield’s Lear is substantially the same, even if the worn body and tyrannical behaviour is even more profoundly marked in the film. Scofield was only forty at the time of the RSC production, though nothing of the images or record of performance suggests someone so young. He had, as it were, to some extent aged a little more into the role for the film. But the emptiness of the spaces of the film also had its parallel in the stage version. If the stills in the RSC archives now look almost conventional in their bareness, one needs to reinflect the image with an awareness of how shocking that was. A New York critic complained about the ‘bare stage’: ‘It puts a strain on me to have to imagine where I am.’75 There was nothing except for two flats and a backcloth, ‘all painted in a subtle whitish, chalky grey – geometrical straight lines only broken by dangling squares and triangles of painted metal (for the palace) and three corroded metal thunder sheets (for the storm)’.76 The light was unremittingly strong and white. The choices made for meaning: as Marvin Rosenberg commented, ‘the bareness of Brook’s stage was metaphysical, as well as actual … The fierce illumination banished any shadows of divinity, mystery, or superstition.’77 The house lights were up when the first actors came onto the stage. They went up again at the interval, taken very late, with the blinded Gloucester still on stage. Brook had, unknowingly following the Folio text, cut the conversation of the servants who want to help the blinded man: ‘I’ll fetch some flax and whites of eggs / To apply to his bleeding face. Now, heaven help him!’ (3.7.104–5). Instead, the servants clearing the stage buffeted him about, uncaring, without the slightest sign of compassion, more concerned with their work than his suffering. It was a device that Brook would recall at the interval of his anti-Vietnam War show, US, when

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actors, with paper bags over their heads, came into the audience at the interval, asking for help to find their way out of the auditorium, seeking, often unsuccessfully, for a small gesture of common humanity. Brecht was strongly present at moments like these: the demand that we think before we feel. But so was Beckett elsewhere, for the production was strongly influenced by Jan Kott’s essay, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, on King Lear and Beckett’s Endgame. Brook had read Kott in French and would later write a preface for the English translation in 1964. Though Brook often denied the influence of Beckett, the dislocation from conventional realism produced at some moments, not least Lear and Gloucester’s encounter in 4.6, something that was seen as Beckettian, even if not intended to be read in that context.78 Charles Marowitz, assisting Brook on the production and publishing his ‘Lear Log’ of the rehearsals, saw the play’s plot as being ‘as Beckettian as anything out of Molloy or Malone Dies’, identifying this scene as ‘a metaphysical farce which ridicules life, death, sanity and illusion’: the scene ‘has been the germinal scene in Brook’s production’.79 Kenneth Tynan, in his second review of the production, had no doubt about Kott’s influence, nor that Brook ‘bases his Lear on Beckett’: … where the concept fits, as it mostly does, the production burns itself into your mind; you … remember only that you will seldom see such another Gloucester and never such another Lear. Nor are you likely to emerge from a theatre with a sharper or more worrying sense of mortality.80 As Tynan saw, for Brook, his production is amoral because it is set in an amoral universe. For him the play is a mighty philosophic farce in which the leading figures enact their roles on a gradually denuded stage that resembles, at the end, a desert graveyard or unpeopled planet. It is an ungoverned world; for the first time in tragedy, a world without gods, with no possibility of hopeful resolution.81 In such a context judgement was difficult and demanded of the audience. This was not the nice, kindly, much abused old man version of Lear that had, for instance, been Charles Laughton’s performance in the play’s previous production in Stratford in 1959. Scofield’s grizzled, angry man left Goneril’s home after encouraging his knights to wreck the place, as they devastatingly, exuberantly and dutifully did. This was unprecedented,

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as was Kent’s delivery of ‘Vex not his ghost. O let him pass!’ (5.3.312). As Grigori Kozintsev wrote, after seeing the production on tour in Russia, ‘Kent did not speak quietly (as would have been natural in the presence of a dying man), but shouted them furiously at the top of his voice, rudely demanding the right of happiness for his beloved master’.82 Brook saw, too, that Lear explores the nature of power. When Marowitz offered him a psychological explanation for the abdication and division, Brook resisted: You can’t apply psychoanalysis to a character like Lear. He does it because he’s that type of man. Like de Gaulle or Adenauer or Citizen Kane, … he has been the supreme ruler. Only one thing now remains greater than actually commanding, and that is the knowledge that your aura will do as well as yourself.83 The rehearsal process gave the actors time to find their characters, not have them given to the actors by the director early on. As thoughtful as Brook’s approach was, he allowed the actors to find their roles through feeling in ways that, as Shomit Mitter has shown, are surprisingly close to traditions of Stanislavskian character study.84 Scofield was allowed to find the reasons for action in feeling: as Brook commented, Scofield ‘refuses to throw himself into something he does not feel and cannot answer for’.85 In this rehearsal room, discussion and thought preceded feeling and feeling preceded action, something that in his next Shakespeare rehearsal period, working on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, would be anathema. Whatever the method, the result for audiences in England and Europe – though strikingly not in the US – was a vision of tragedy that was at once mythic and pressingly immediate. In Budapest, Brook felt that Lear’s howl meant that the audience was moved by something much more considerable than the sentimental image of a poor old father howling. Lear was suddenly the figure of old Europe, tired, and feeling, as almost every country in Europe does, that after the events of the last fifty years people have borne enough, that some kind of respite might be due.86 For Marowitz, his initial response was that the most striking fault in the production was that ‘it was more cerebral than moving; more brilliant as a set of choices than persuasive as unfolding action’. But he came to see that ‘the removal of sympathy and identification is the price we must pay for

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epic objectivity’.87 But he never found all the acting entirely convincing, always discerning ‘the absence of internal life’.88 When Brook turned to Shakespeare again in 1970 and in the decades that followed, the question of how to be on stage, of how to be on stage, would question what kind of internal life a Shakespeare role has, might have, should have.

Dreaming Again I return finally, to close the circle, to Brook’s 1970 RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I suggested at the start that, while some of its methods now seem part of theatre’s vocabulary, they were startling then. Where Shakespeare productions had tended, to a greater or lesser extent, towards a kind of representational world, a set that pointed towards a fictive location for the action, costume designs that hinted at a historical moment, and techniques that belonged unequivocally to the conventions of classical theatre, Brook replaced them or, better, conjoined them with ideas drawn from radically different traditions. John Kane, who played Puck, was, to say the least, surprised when Sally Jacobs, the production’s designer, showed him her sketch of his costume, … a drawing of a curly-headed character wearing a one-piece-baggypanted-luminous-yellow-jump-suit and a moonlight-blue skull-cap. I found it impossible to relate the picture I held in my hand to any conception I may have had of the part of “Puck” up to that time. Peter [Brook] explained. Recently both he and Sally had witnessed a Chinese circus in Paris and had been struck by the different between our performers and theirs. When the occidental acrobat performs, his costume emphasizes his physique … Peter’s Chinese acrobats hid the shape of their bodies with long flowing silk robes and performed their tricks with delicacy and speed, so that it seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to spin plates, or walk on stilts.89 With that experience in mind and with the intention of importing this style to the play’s fairy world, Brook and Jacobs rethought the whole way in which the wood and the fairies’ actions could be presented. No longer a matter of representation, instead objects became symbolic of the concepts to which they alluded. What does a magic flower look like? It can be a plant representing whatever botanical specimen a director reading the notes

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in an edition of the play believes to be the true form of ‘love-in-idleness’ (2.1.168) but that never seems especially magical. Bringing the flower to Oberon (Alan Howard), Kane’s Puck entered (2.1.247), high above the stage, swinging on a trapeze; his response to ‘Hast thou the flower there?’ was to reach into his pocket and take out a silver plate, spin it on the end of a perspex rod and tip it to Oberon who took it, still spinning, on his wand, another Perspex rod, all accompanied by the eerie sound of a finger running round the rim of a wineglass. As Peter Thomson, reviewing the production, put it, ‘the plate does not become the flower. Instead, the act of passing it becomes the magic of the flower’.90 In such a world, there could be no leafy trees; instead the fairies, adult actors, three men and one woman, here often malevolent spirits and known to the company as the Audio-Visuals since they made strange sounds and moved objects around, dropped great coils of wire, like giant Slinkies, enmeshing Hermia in these mobile but resisting cages. Here Titania’s bower could become a gigantic red ostrich feather suspended over the stage. Here the sounds of the forest were bangs and crashes, rasps and rattles, and, above all, the strange whoosh of Free-Kas, plastic tubes that the fairies whirled to produce pitched but undefined and certainly unearthly noise. It was no surprise that these fairies sang Titania to sleep by sitting cross-legged on trapezes singing a distinctly Indian chant. As well as magic, these fairies could be comic helpers: when Bottom calls for a calendar to ‘find out moonshine’ (3.1.50), a fairy threw one down to him; when Bottom is still asleep, alone on stage, at the end of the forest scenes (4.1), a fairy arm appeared from the side of the stage holding out an alarm clock ringing his awakening. The stage space itself had no hint of palace or forest in its set design. The action took place on, above, and around a giant white box, as if the characters were trapped in a squash court, its unyielding harshness setting off the bright colours of the costumes and making the long night in the wood, in this greatest of all comedies of the night, something we imagined rather than something we saw conjured up by the effects of stage lighting. Twelve feet above the stage floor, on the top of the three sides of the box, ran a platform where actors not in a scene stood and watched, laughed and made noises, at times participating in the action but always, like us, observing it, sharing the spectacle of performance. There was no question: the onstage watchers were actors as well as characters, admirers of their colleagues’ circus skills, their lyric verse-speaking or their exuberance. If little of this seemed to have links to the ways A Midsummer Night’s Dream had usually been played for the previous century or so, the production

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was perfectly capable of conjuring up the play’s performance history. In Brook’s theatre, love was not a platonic emotion divorced from the sharpness of sexual desire. Titania’s love for the transformed Bottom was unquestionably the desire for sex with him and, though she spoke the line ‘Tie up my lover’s tongue, bring him silently’ (3.1.194), the moment was anything but silent. Instead, Bottom, braying like an ass, hoisted on a fairy’s shoulder with the fairy’s arm raised as an erect ass’s phallus between his legs, left the stage triumphantly, with the watchers throwing dozens of paper plates and streamers, Oberon swinging from side to side on a trapeze, equally triumphant in his revenge on his erring Queen, and, at massive volume, the sound of Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’, originally written as part of his incidental music to the play, blaring in ironic solemnity on this impossible and lust-filled ‘marriage’. No longer the sound for the Athenian triple-wedding, the march now celebrated the complex meanings of this act of love. There had been radical departures from tradition in earlier productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Harley Granville-Barker in 1914 had his fairies wear gold-leaf make-up, making them gilded exotics; George Devine in 1954 turned the fairy-world into an assemblage of strange beasts and birds, threatening and disturbing. But Brook’s project was to find the play’s heart, its thematic unity, not by finding the right analogue external to the theatre but instead by celebrating theatre itself. The answers lay within the space of the rehearsal room, not by imposing a concept. In the white box, with these colourful abstract costumes, to the strange palette of music and sounds created by Richard Peaslee, the production could be an apparently limitless investigation, a free examination of what might be found in the play. Brook wrote that, ‘at the centre of the Dream, constantly repeated, we find the word “love” ’,91 but at the centre of the production lay the collaborative act of imagination that is theatre. If A Midsummer Night’s Dream had seemed to be the Shakespeare play best for children, the meaning of that now lay not in a cute exposition of an adult’s view of fairies but instead through reinvesting the play with the qualities of the child’s imagination, sometimes happy, often troubled, always ranging unexpectedly across the playfulness of all play. It is one of the central paradoxes of Brook’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that this, the most beautifully spoken production of the play I have ever heard, was accomplished without the director giving the actors any textual notes at all. The rehearsal room was a space to develop physical skills (stilt-walking, juggling), not to work on the actors’ voices. The rhythm of the lyric verse was found through the actors’ bodies, through

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the musical score, and through the interaction of characters, not through close attention to the iambic pentameter and the extraordinary range of other metres Shakespeare uses in the play. What emerged from this play-space was the utter seriousness of the business of making theatre. Indeed, the accounts of the rehearsal process, especially in David Selbourne’s day-by-day diary of the weeks of work,92 are often descriptions of actors in despair, with Brook’s outbursts of anger at their failure to find new modes of performance driving them further and further into a space of insecurity. Early in the rehearsal process, Brook’s major complaint was that the actors were doing too much analysing: in the third week of rehearsals he ordered ‘Don’t use logic … don’t give explanations’;93 two weeks later he blames the actor for ‘making an exterior comment on [the lines] … Discover, do not comment’.94 Over and over again Brook can be heard in Selbourne’s account accentuating ‘the need to divorce somatic work from cerebral … [and] the need to pursue bodily work entirely independently of analytical interference’.95 Earlier Brook had followed the usual theatre practice of the director’s telling the cast – usually on the first day of rehearsals – exactly what s/he had decided the play was about. In the process for Dream Brook rigorously refused to do that. As he commented later, … we should first of all try to rediscover the play as a living thing; then we shall be able to analyze our discoveries. Once I have finished working on the play, I can begin to produce my theories. It was fortunate that I did not attempt to do so earlier because the play would not have yielded up its secrets.96 Of course, by then he could discourse eloquently on the play as an exploration of love: ‘it requires us to reflect on the nature of love. All the landscapes of love are thrown into relief.’97 But during rehearsal Brook was most concerned that the actors should find their rhythms. When one of the Fairies announces ‘I don’t know what I’m aiming at’, Brook’s response was ‘As long as that’s true, you’ll be all right’.98 As Mitter’s analysis sharply demonstrates, Brook spent time working on rhythm because ‘the actors must be weaned off their dependence upon meaning and sensitized to the sound of Shakespeare’s language’.99 Exercises in the rehearsal room produced a somatic sensitization, an awareness of the body as the controller of the performance, not the brain. Drumming, passing batons and other such repeated and demanding physical activity helped ‘actors to shed intellectual formulations in favour of the openness of somatic

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reactions’.100 Once the body is ready, then the actor can search for meaning not in the word but ‘at the deeper level of the impulses that make words necessary’,101 for, as Brook argued in The Empty Space, A word does not start as a word – it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behavior which dictates the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist; it is repeated inside the actor.102 For the actors to reach the moment of being the character that is essential to this form of theatre, they ‘must not know whether they are interpreting the words of the text through action or whether the words are suggesting meanings to them through sound – for in this innocence lies the indication that the actors have achieved the state of “I am” ’.103 If the preparation was for some traumatic and others revelatory, it transferred something of both outcomes into the play’s most complete investigation of the making of theatre: the workers’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Where productions have usually treated this as the opportunity for endless gags, unlimited mockery and a contempt shared between the onstage and theatre spectators, Brook showed utter respect for their endeavours. Still funny, they could be moving as well, with Lysander’s comment on the death of Pyramus, ‘Less than an ace, man, for he is dead. He is nothing’ (5.1.297), dropping into a silence born not of mockery but of desolation at the confrontation with mortality. Perhaps nothing typified this serious comedy more than the lion’s mask, a wooden cabinet that Snug had made as a skilled carpenter (‘joiner’), with its front suggesting a lion’s face but with two neat doors that he could open to show his own face within in order to reassure the ‘ladies’ who might otherwise ‘quake and tremble here’ (5.1.214–6). In effect, Brook shared Theseus’s understanding of the workers’ play, that there is no fundamental separation between their amateur efforts and the performance of consummate professionals: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them’ (5.1.208–9). All are engaged in the same ambition, to find in theatre a means of communicating ideas and emotions, thoughts and possibilities beyond the quotidian. If the workers have ‘never laboured in their minds till now’ (5.1.73), their aim is the same as the performers in Brook’s production and the latter are just as likely to fail to communicate their art. One of the most imitated of Brook’s devices for the play has been the doubling of Titania/Hippolyta, Oberon/Theseus and Puck/Philostrate.

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On the one hand, the doubling suggests a thematic meaning, that the experiences of the night in the wood are a kind of dream-projection, a product of the prenuptial anxiety of the rulers that finds a solution to the tension in the alternative states of being defined by the world of the forest. But, on the other, the doubling is not so much thematized as dramatic meaning as enjoyed for its theatrical virtuosity. Confronted with the rapid change from fairy-world to human world at 4.1.101 where Fairy King and Queen exit and Athenian Duke and future Duchess enter immediately, Brook’s solution was, as throughout the production, to make the mechanics of the transformation, the reality of performance completely visible. The two actors walked upstage in one role, turned and walked downstage in the other, donning cloaks to define the difference. The doubling is not a problem for theatre: if we accept Alan Howard and Sarah Kestelman as one pair, we can equally accept them as the other a moment later. As Jay Halio comments, ‘What had once been regarded as a difficult if not impossible doubling now looks, thanks to imaginative and simple staging, perfectly natural.’104 It is the collocation of ‘imaginative and simple’ that defines Brook’s method, turning what seems intellectually problematic into the easily acceptable theatrical solution. Shakespeare’s play ends with Puck’s request for applause: ‘Give us your hands, if we be friends’ (5.1.423). Brook’s actors, having played out the last sequence of the play in a downbeat way, did not ask us to clap but instead to reach out our hands and grasp theirs as they left the stage and moved among us (and John Kane could be heard up in the circle calling ‘Author, author!’). For the one and only time in my play-going, I did reach out my hands, not threatened by the breaking of the barriers between actors and audience but instead thrilled to be able to join with them physically, as we had all joined together throughout the performance. As Brook wrote, ‘there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one’.105 If we must always regret that only tiny fragments of his Dream were filmed, it also seems only right that this most theatrical of productions was never transferred to the wrong medium. Instead, the still photos recall this energetic production, memories preserve traces of its sound, and the production goes on being talked about ‘as long as there is a theatre’.106

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Chapter 2

Peter Hall Stuart Hampton-Reeves

The Playmaster Peter Hall is a pivotal figure in the modern history of British Shakespearean performance. He is significant both as a theatre manager and a director. At the National Theatre, which he led for 15 years, he would work with actors in the morning, and then manage the theatre in the afternoon. Hall’s furious work ethic led to a near nervous breakdown in his early 30s, but it also enabled him to keep developing as an artist at the same time as masterminding the creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in the 1960s and the establishment of the National Theatre in its South Bank home in the 1970s. He is an adept media manager, and was for a time the most recognizable Shakespearean director in the public mind. Hall used his media profile to push forward his own political agenda, principally his deep belief in public subsidy for the arts. Famously, Margaret Thatcher detested him. Hall’s latter-day reputation remains tainted by a vicious media assault on his character and his integrity in the 1980s. He had initially been lauded as one of the most promising directors of his generation; a celebrity marriage pitched him into the 1950s media spotlight, making him a debonair public figure respected for his achievements at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (as the RSC was called before 1961) and then the RSC. On becoming artistic director of the National Theatre in 1973, Hall’s public reputation suffered almost immediately. His initial productions at the National were not well received. He came into an institution still without a permanent home, and challenged the orthodoxies which had grown up under its founding artistic director, Sir Laurence Olivier. When it was finally built, the South Bank theatre (now inseparable from the company it houses) was regarded as an emblem of wasteful public spending by some influential enough to pursue their agenda through the press. Hall, who was

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and remains a vocal advocate of arts funding, inevitably became a focus for the political turn towards monetarism towards the end of the 1980s. As well as having to fend off questions about his income from the hit Broadway production of Amadeus, which Hall had first directed at the National, Hall also found his love life under scrutiny as his marriage collapsed very publicly. He was under attack from the left and the right. Theatre reviews of his more elaborate and lavish works raised questions about his accountability for spending public money. He remains a controversial figure who is still prepared to speak out about the issues he cares about. Much has been written about Hall, not least by Hall himself, but little has been written that retrospectively analyses his work as an artist. This chapter aims to put Hall’s directorial work at the forefront of an evaluation of his career. His work at the RSC and the National Theatre is an important part of this story, but I want to explore this epic post-war institution-making through a close study of some of his most important (although not always most successful) productions. I am particularly interested in the interrelatedness of his artistic and political lives, and the dissonances between them. Hall was quite capable of lobbying the palace for royal patronage one day, and working on a Shakespearean satire suffused with a very modern sense of disillusion with power on the next day. In this capacity to be both courtier and critic, a Pandarus and a Thersites, Hall resembles Shakespeare himself. He has even grown to physically resemble Shakespeare: his portrait on the cover of his autobiography, appropriately titled Making an Exhibition of Myself, is shot in a stone-like black and white with the effect that he looks startlingly like the bust of Shakespeare in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church. Hall first encountered Shakespeare as a maker of theatre in the 1940s when he was a pupil at the Perse School in Cambridge, which had a rather unique performance space called the Mummery. When he was 10 he went down to the Mummery, which was in the school basement, where he and the other pupils would ‘dress up with helmets, cloaks and swords, and shout lines of Macbeth at each other’.1 The Mummery was the legacy of a former teacher of the school, Henry Caldwell Cook, who was a pioneer of using performance as the foundation for all education. He called this the ‘Play Way’ and his book of that title (1917) remains a classic of progressive education. His method was a reaction against traditional, authoritarian approaches to teaching. Performance represented a way of harnessing a child’s natural instinct to play. Cook wrote that the teacher should be the ‘playmaster’. For Cook, the foundation for learning was verse-speaking. He would make his classes of 10–11 year-olds chant poetry out loud. He gave them a small baton called the ‘stickwagger’ and conducted them as

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they beat the stick in time to the rhythm. As they grew more confident, he encouraged the boys to improvise with the stick. He spent two years working with them like this before introducing them to Shakespeare.2 They always started with Julius Caesar, progressing the following year to the histories before concluding with the tragedies. There were weekly play-readings, at which Cook listened in silence, never interrupting: ‘the story and the characters were allowed to explain themselves’.3 Once the reading finished, there would be a class discussion. For Cook, all play was a rehearsal, and all learning could be framed as a rehearsal. Hall never met Cook, who died four years before he started at the Perse, but he was mentored by several of Cook’s disciples. Among them was F. R. Leavis, who was one of Cook’s pupils at the height of his experimentations and who taught Hall at Cambridge University. Hall credits Leavis with inspiring his passion for verse-speaking, which he still maintains is the foundation for all Shakespeare performance. Hall was directly exposed to Cook’s methods at the Perse, where he was taught by two teachers who ardently implemented ‘the play way’. One was John Tanfield, whose ‘scholarly’ approach to a number of difficult plays ‘made a considerable impact on the whole cultural life of the school’.4 Tanfield challenged Hall, who thought him a ‘harsh critic’, but taught him that ‘to survive in this profession you had to be tough and able to pick yourself up again when you were knocked down’.5 The other teacher was Douglas Brown, who had himself been a pupil at the school under Cook and was regarded as Cook’s main heir. He taught using the Play Way method and continued Cook’s practice of staying in the background to let the boys make their own discoveries as they worked with the text.6 Brown continued to supervise Hall at Cambridge and encouraged him to devote his time to the theatre rather than academic study. The values by which Hall shaped his artistic life were set in these formative years. When he appeared on the theatre scene in the 1950s, he was already convinced of the importance of verse-speaking, which he spoke about with conviction to anyone who would listen, and he was determined to establish an ensemble approach to performing Shakespeare. For Cook, Shakespeare performance was not a strategy for learning how to read a play, it was the foundation for all learning. For Hall, Shakespeare was also a way of engaging with and understanding the world. In his best work, Shakespeare became a dialogic language through which the ensemble and the audience were engaged in a broader debate about the present. The debate was scholarly and intellectual, but never prescribed. As he wrote in The Necessary Theatre (1999):

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Theatre should never be made from pre-arranged plans. The director and the actors need all the understanding of the text they can bring to the rehearsal room; but then the organic process of questioning must begin. Led by the director, the actors make a journey to find out how to express this particular play at this particular time to this particular audience. It requires technique and experiment, experience and trust. It is a discovery – not an imposition of results. This is how my generation rehearses.7 This was how Cook’s methods taught Hall to rehearse. Hall could hardly be more Persean in this page: every line is a fulfilment of Cook’s ambition that rehearsal should be seen as a way of opening young minds to the world. Cook had built the Mummery himself: he paid for it and worked for four years without pay to establish his vision for the Play Way.8 Hall inherited Cook’s single-minded determination to build this small theatre irrespective of the challenges he faced: the Mummery was in every respect the ideal nursery for the future architect of two national theatres.

If You Scream Hard Enough Hall’s greatest contribution to our experience of Shakespeare in performance was his extraordinary transformation of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (SMT) in Stratford-upon-Avon into the RSC. Before he established the RSC, Hall worked on several productions that laid the foundation for a different approach to Shakespeare that was more alive to the plays’ contemporary resonance. In particular, his productions of Coriolanus (1959), The Two Gentleman of Verona (1960) and Troilus and Cressida (1960) pointed to a new direction for the Stratford company. He had the vision to recognize what the SMT could become and the audacity to implement it. He transformed an annual festival into a repertory company; he turned a regional theatre into a proto-national theatre; and, by introducing three-year contracts for actors, he remade the SMT into an ensemble company. He fostered a culture of engagement with the avant-garde and world theatre that continues to provide the contours of contemporary Shakespearean performance. Under Hall’s direction, there was a new urgency to the SMT’s work that energized a new generation of actors and audiences. Hall made Shakespearean performance vital and contemporary. Hall’s appointment as the new director of the Shakespeare festival was without precedent. He was young, he had little experience of directing

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Shakespeare and, unlike most previous incumbents, he was not an actor. He was not long out of Cambridge, where he had sacrificed academic success to work on a number of student productions with, among others, his future collaborator John Barton (then an academic at King’s College). It was here that he had his first experience of directing Shakespeare when he produced a student Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1953, which he revived three years later when he was invited to direct the play at the SMT. By this point, Hall was clearly a rising star. He had directed the first English-language production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1955 (at the Arts Theatre, London) and from that was asked to direct the film star Leslie Caron in a West End production of Gigi. They fell in love and married in 1956. Before Hall even started at the SMT, he already had a public profile and a link through his wife to Hollywood. Yet his experience of directing Shakespeare was limited. Apart from Love’s Labour’s Lost, his only other production (and his first professional Shakespeare production) was Twelfth Night for the Elizabethan Theatre Company (1953). He was invited back in 1957 to direct Cymbeline and it was during this production that Hall was first approached to take over from the current festival director, Glen Byam Shaw. Hall was only 27, and the only Shakespeare plays he had directed were three comedies. Nevertheless, Shaw was convinced that Hall was the right person to succeed him. In July 1958, as Hall was at work on Twelfth Night, the Board of Governors at the SMT agreed to Shaw’s proposal that Hall be offered the job. Although there were rumours of several potential candidates circulating in the media that summer, it is clear from the company minutes that no one other than Hall was ever considered. He became Director-Designate for the 1959 festival, which was also the SMT’s centenary season, and despite his inexperience (he could now count four Shakespeare productions, all comedies) was given two of the highest profile productions of the decade: Coriolanus with Laurence Olivier and A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Charles Laughton. Appointing Hall was a calculated gamble. The SMT’s finances were stretched. It could not continue to fund big names such as Olivier and Laughton and its existence was threatened by the imminent launch of the National Theatre company. By turning to Hall, the SMT signalled that it was ready for a radical change of direction. Hall was a harbinger of change. Even as he helped the SMT commemorate its centenary, he already had plans to transform the festival into something radically different. Hall realized that the imminent National Theatre was a real and present danger, and that the SMT had to establish itself in London if it were to have a future. Hall was also heavily influenced by the innovations in European

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theatre including the work of Bertolt Brecht, whom he was exposed to when the Berliner Ensemble visited London in 1956. Hall went with the SMT to Russia for four weeks in 1958, in the middle of the Cold War, where his production of Twelfth Night was sold out. Hall had an opportunity here to experience state-subsidized theatre and it was in Russia that he convinced Sir Fordham Flower (the Chair of the SMT Board) to back his vision for far-reaching changes to the SMT. Back in Stratford, he was also able to observe first-class theatre work, including, in 1957’s glittering season, the touring revival of Peter Brook’s Titus Andronicus (originally produced in 1955), with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Brook’s The Tempest, with John Gielgud. Even Hall’s own production of Cymbeline starred Peggy Ashcroft, who had first become a star in 1934 when she played Juliet to Olivier’s Romeo at the New Theatre. Hall’s earliest Shakespeare productions were remarkably beautiful renderings of the comedies. As Hall later recalled, they were ‘romantic, warm, gauzy and lyrical’. However, as he developed, his work became ‘harder-edged, more political and was concerned with how we live’.9 The look of these early productions owed much to the Italian artist Lila De Nobili, who worked with Hall to design settings for Cymbeline and Twelfth Night. This was the first of several very productive relationships Hall has had with his designers over his career. John Barton thought that the collaboration transformed Hall into ‘the most romantic director in England’.10 This lyricism reached its height with his extraordinary A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was one of the highlights of the 1959 season and arguably his first major success with Shakespeare. Apart from Laughton, who played Bottom, Hall cast young actors. He chose well, as they included Albert Finney, Julian Glover, Robert Hardy, Ian Holm, Mary Ure and Vanessa Redgrave (and, in an unnamed part, Diana Rigg). Once again, Hall employed De Nobili to create the stage, and she produced a dazzlingly beautiful picturesque set in which the forest foliage seemed to merge with the staircases and balustrades of the Elizabethan court world. Her costume designs were lavishly ornate and they created the stage world as much as the sets. Hall avoided the darkness and sexual suggestiveness that now features in many productions of the play: instead he immersed himself, his cast and his audiences in the pleasure of the play and the exuberance of his young cast. That same season, however, Hall discovered his harder edge, and for the first time started to engage with Shakespeare as a contemporary writer who could say as much as Beckett or Brecht about the modern world. A foundation for Hall’s political turn was laid with his 1959 Coriolanus, in

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which he first explored Shakespeare’s relevance to the present. The tone was different from the outset, as the production began with the sounds of a ‘screaming mob’ offstage which then broke down the doors and filled the stage.11 This was a Shakespeare for the ‘angry young man’ generation: aggressive, uncompromising and vocal. Olivier was in his prime: tall, athletic, piercingly enigmatic. When he entered as Coriolanus on a raised platform, he dominated the stage – both as an actor and as a character. Olivier exerted his presence over the theatre, easily upstaging Hall as the main attraction. As a character, Marcius’s entrance was political. Hall broke apart the romanticism of his earlier work with this one brutal image. Hall set the play in a bloody world very different from the romantic glades of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was visually imposing. This time Hall collaborated with a different designer, the Russian artist Boris Aronson, because he admired Aronson’s ability to make ‘haunted landscapes of New York, so that I looked at the city with new eyes’.12 Aronson designed a single set with red and gold shadows which seemed to some to be more permanent than the stage itself.13 He created a rigid, unyielding world that could be covered in bloodstains, but would never change. Alan Brien compared it to a theatre ‘which has been recently attacked by incendiary bombs’.14 Hall also made sure that the production sounded modern and discordant. He appointed Roberto Gerhard, a pupil of Schoenberg, whose score captured the noise and the weirdness of war. One reviewer noted in particular his ‘eerie use of kettle drum glissandi’.15 The actors’ voices also sounded very different. There was a long tradition at the SMT of actors adopting a Midlands accent when playing ordinary characters, as if they had been drawn directly from the Stratford streets. Hall did not want to badge the SMT as a regional theatre; he wanted it to become a national one and he created a vocal palette that reflected different regions. The plebeians spoke with Lancashire and Yorkshire accents, while the Volscians spoke with Welsh accents. Hall was deliberately looking beyond SMT’s traditions and beyond the SMT’s traditional audiences towards a theatre that was young and represented the whole nation, that had something to say about the present and was alive to experimentalism. Olivier’s performance dominated critical response. He rampaged ‘fullbloodedly’,16 he was ‘proud and fiery’.17 He showed his range, turning from a ferocious soldier in one scene to an adult schoolboy in the next, sagging his mouth and shuffling his feet. However, once forced to face the mob, he looked sourly at them and then ‘let them have it like a bull enraged by a request to tread carefully in a china shop’.18 He was able to convincingly

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switch from the ‘heroic to the homely’ and he could ‘summon the crescendo of rage’,19 although one reviewer thought there was a ‘curious hesitancy about him’, a weakness in his character that made him, from the outset, a fatally flawed leader.20 Hall and Olivier brought out Coriolanus’ deep insecurities. He was not simply proud – he was keenly aware that his pomposity before the commons was ‘rather comic’. When Coriolanus said his bitter farewell to Rome, he again stood high on the stage, like a monument himself. His line ‘You common cry of curs’ dropped ‘from his lips in bloody icicles, each phrase a jagged spear of frozen fury’ before his final line, spoken over his shoulder, ‘crumbles and melts in his mouth’.21 Hall directed a death scene for Coriolanus so memorable that it has passed into theatrical legend. Coriolanus was stabbed with spears as he tried to flee the Volscians. He fell at the same ledge he entered on, and was then hung upside down by his pursuers as he was stabbed. He then crawled across the stage and was stabbed one final time by Aufidius. The scene was inspired by the mob execution of Mussolini. Hall said he wanted ‘something really nasty’22 to shock audiences with. His death was a public spectacle, but it was also meant to be a humiliating end for a character for whom physical self-possession had been such an important part of his authority. It was a savage scene that brought out the play’s anti-authoritarian undertow and concluded a bloodstained production. Coriolanus was both the high point of the SMT’s post-war repertoire and its death knell. Olivier was the main draw, but Hall surrounded him with theatrical innovation that looked forward to a new generation. Even at the time, critics noted that the play was ‘surprisingly contemporary’ in Hall’s hands.23 For Bernard Levin, Coriolanus’ contemporary relevance was obvious as an attack on democracy and pride.24 Other critics seized on the play’s resonance with present-day politics, seeing implicit echoes in the ‘hungry mob’ and the ‘impetuous leader’.25 Coriolanus’ slaughter was, in a sense, a way of slaughtering Olivier as well. Olivier would never perform at Stratford again: as he hung limp and silent from the stage in the last scene of his last performance, a whole era of the SMT was likewise facing being butchered. Hall’s first season as festival director in 1960 built on Coriolanus’ move towards a more intellectually grounded and contemporary approach to Shakespeare. On the day he took up post he made a series of announcements that generated headlines across the media. He was going to rebuild the stage, create an ensemble company and find a permanent home in London. Hall wanted his tenure to be seen as a rebirth for the company. The accent would be on ‘youth’, ‘with young directors

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working with young actors to present young plays’.26 This rebirth was to go beyond hiring young actors and directors: Hall had a grander vision, and the first hints of it were already being made. He announced plans to expand into London with a residency at the Aldwych Theatre. He also planned to recruit actors with unprecedentedly long, three-year contracts as a way of securing an ensemble identity. Hall’s plans were positively received in the press. The three-year contract was a ‘dream come true’ for The Stage, who saw in the plan an opportunity to establish a British equivalent to the Berliner Ensemble, the Moscow Art Theatre and the Comédie Française.27 The new festival director also unveiled a new approach to the festival by announcing a themed season of six comedies that would trace the development of Shakespeare’s art from one of his earliest plays, The Two Gentleman of Verona, through to The Winter’s Tale and including the dark satire Troilus and Cressida. The SMT had staged themed seasons before, but never with the level of intellectual coherence with which Hall presented this season to the public. There were no actors who could compete with Olivier, Laughton, Ashcroft or Robeson. Instead, the ensemble itself was the star, its exploration of the development of Shakespeare’s art the sole justification for the season. The project was artistically thrilling; it was also a smart move for the box office as audiences would be inspired to attend all six productions. To miss one would be to miss a chance to experience the company’s journey through Shakespeare’s comedies. In a sense, audiences were being invited to be part of the project: their participation was crucial to the season’s success. Hall argued that Shakespeare brought a unique ‘awareness of humanity’ to comedy. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was ‘the dramatic laboratory for the rest of the plays’. A study of the comedies, he insisted, could lead to a ‘fuller understanding of the great tragedies and certainly to a better understanding of Shakespeare as a man’.28 He observed that the comedies were full of darkness, showing ‘the tragic sense of life shadowing the comic’,29 culminating in the near-tragic darkness of The Winter’s Tale before breaking into the ‘almost divine comedy’ of that play’s final act. The season was full of risk. It began, audaciously, with the little-known and little-liked The Two Gentleman of Verona and it included Troilus and Cressida, which ends with death and dishonour. Hall elected to direct both, putting his reputation on the line immediately with these brave and unusual plays. Unlike the later RSC, the SMT was wholly reliant on its box office for its income. These choices signalled that the SMT under Hall was going to be driven by artistic rather than commercial priorities, that the SMT would be a place to

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discover and rediscover Shakespeare. Hall was already acting as if he were the artistic director of a heavily subsidized, quasi-national theatre. He was also making a statement by choosing The Two Gentlemen of Verona for his debut as the artistic director, as if he wanted to mark a new beginning by going back to what is arguably Shakespeare’s earliest comedy: it was a new company and he wanted new audiences. The post-war generation was growing up; the teenagers of 1960 could not remember the Second World War, nor did they have to face National Service. Hall was not himself a baby boomer but was in an excellent position to bring the theatre into this new cultural slipstream with a comedy about youth and young love. Unfortunately, The Two Gentlemen of Verona was also Hall’s first significant failure and was comprehensively criticized across most of its first-night reviews. As Robert Speaight put it, the production was ‘scurvily treated by the Press’.30 Many critics could not see past their own distaste for the play: the Daily Mail review was headed ‘This is the worst, dim and dismal’ and began by attributing the choice of play to Hall’s age: ‘What could speak more resoundingly for the youthful brashness, arrogance, perversity and sheer wilfulness of Peter Hall’s new regime at Stratford than the choice of this play to open his new season?’.31 Several reviewers mocked Hall by praising the dog’s ‘almost Stanislavskian precision’ (as the Daily Mail put it). He was the ‘best cast character of all’, according to the Financial Times; ‘One man and his dog save the night at Stratford’, claimed the Oxford Mail. The Daily Telegraph titled its review ‘Peter Hall’s Calculated Risk Fails’ (each review was dated April 6, 1960). The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald’s critic Edmund Gardner was castigated for his warm review and faced accusations of ‘partisanship, uncritical judgment and bias’ for the ‘unforgivable sin of enjoying it’.32 Hall had enjoyed positive media attention for a long time; this was the first of what would be many attacks from the press. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was designed to show off some of the innovations Hall had already introduced to the stage, which he had extended by 15 feet into the auditorium with a rounded apron to allow for more audience interaction. He also had a revolve built into the stage so that sets could be rotated, although this was done with such speed that some reviewers complained that it was a ‘berserk music-box’.33 The production was very fast-paced, although this seemed to be a problem for some critics. The Times complained about the ‘frequent scampering exits’ which ‘reduce any atmosphere of chivalry to a minimum’.34 In his autobiography, Hall barely mentions the production, except to note that it was judged ‘a rather dim affair’.35 Robert Speaight, who saw The Two Gentlemen of Verona several months into its run, was rather more

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charitable. He agreed that it was less successful than others in the season, but he argued that it was ‘part of the business of the Memorial Theatre to show us Shakespeare’s art in its laboratory stage’. Speaight went so far as to claim that the season had been ‘an illumination in Shakespeare’s book of life that we will not so easily forget’.36 If the production itself was a failure, seen within the context of the season it made perfect sense. This was also the view of Eric Gillet, who reviewed the season for the BBC Home Service in October 1960. He admired the liveliness of the production which was ‘perpetually in motion’. Gillet thought Hall was trying too hard to overcome the weakness of the play but, by seeing the plays in order, he was able to appreciate what Hall had been trying to do.37 Looking back over the season in October, Edmund Gardner stressed in italics that the production should be enjoyed ‘within its setting as the first play in a definite sequence’, as an hors d’oeuvre for the rest of the season. He defended the use of the revolve, which was justified by the changing locations in the play, and he reported that the acting had tightened considerably over the past few months. (No production now would launch its real first night on the press.) ‘The overall impression’, he wrote, ‘is a maturing of stagecraft and production’ and the sets were ‘still the most beautiful of the whole season’.38 Hall redeemed his failure with Troilus and Cressida later in the season. The production took forward the political vision of a contemporized Shakespeare which Hall had first explored in Coriolanus and laid the foundation for his later work on the history plays. Hall directed it with John Barton, although on its revival in 1962, Barton’s credit was reduced to fight arranger and one of two assistants to the director. The play was as risky a choice as The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It was a later play, but still an unfamiliar one for many audiences. Hall’s approach was uncompromising. He could have made it lighter, but instead made it as dark as possible. He could have made the play easier for audiences by editing the play, but he only made light cuts – a number of reviewers complained about the performance’s length (it was three and a half hours long). The production was combative from the start when Paul Hardwick, dressed in black armour, delivered a savage reading of the prologue. This ferocity carried through into the production itself, with history and politics buried in a dark, bitter comedy. Gardner called it a ‘comedy of disillusionment’.39 What was Hall disillusioned with? Few made the leap to the world beyond the theatre, but Alan Brien’s review for The Spectator led on the production’s implicit resonance with the Suez crisis of 1958. ‘The Trojan War might be Eden’s war,’ he wrote, ‘born in vanity and buried in irresolution.’ The modern parallels ‘strike home keenly’. Another reviewer,

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in the Western Independent, argued that modern audiences were more ready to sympathize with a depiction of war for ‘we know that victory is inclined to fade’.40 Thersites (Peter O’Toole) spat out his lines ‘with a fine, penetrating relish’.41 He was ‘world-weary and nerve-shattered’.42 Cressida was a sultry seductress. One reviewer even called her ‘evil’43; Kenneth Tynan cruelly called her a ‘slutlet’ who ‘has long been toying with the idea of lubricity’.44 The world was decadent, lost and irredeemable. The production’s representation of a world in decline echoed the widespread sense of national decline in Britain in the post-war, post-imperial period. Audiences used to the opulence of SMT sets were confronted with a stark world of black space enveloping a pit with ankle-deep sand mounted on a raised octagonal platform. Leslie Hurry, a late surrealist artist who had developed a career as a theatre designer, designed the costumes which, in the absence of a set, became the main decoration onstage, creating gold and russet tones. Actors kicked up sand through the performance, creating clouds of sand in the auditorium. This sense of a world obscured was deepened by the use of dry ice for the battle scenes. Instead of the bright, sumptuous worlds of the other comedies, the world of Troilus and Cressida seemed to disappear. Hector’s death was staged as smoke swirled about him, the heroic values he represented vanishing into the darkness. He was played by Derek Godfrey, who fell flat on his face as clouds of smoke engulfed him, ‘swamped by a wave of black Trojans’.45 Pandarus, disillusioned, limped into the dark.46 The effect was epic, cinematic and unlike anything that had been staged at the SMT before. For Brien, the simplicity of the sandpit revealed the stark realities of the ‘barrenness and shiftiness’ of war.47 Hall’s depiction of war reflected a modern sense of disillusion. Hall has always been at his best when dealing with epic themes; with Coriolanus and Troilus and Cressida in particular he was finding his voice, recognizing the potential for an ensemble company to explore the present through Shakespeare’s works. With Troilus and Cressida’s contemporary politics, The Two Gentlemen of Verona’s youthful energy and Coriolanus’ exploration of political, Hall laid the foundation for a company that would have something to say about national culture, that could engage with big questions about Britain in the post-war, post-imperial period. His early, pre-RSC work stole a march on the National Theatre (still a year from being launched) by summoning a contemporary spirit caught between political disillusion and hope. The austere, brutal world of Coriolanus and the minimalist, vanishing world of Troilus and Cressida explored the eclipse of heroic values and authoritarianism; yet the extravagantly decorated world of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the cast’s frenetic energy pointed

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the way to a remaking of national culture based on youth, experimentalism and an eagerness to embrace modernity. Hall’s ideas and innovations, not to mention the huge audiences, meant that he and the company suddenly became (in Hall’s own words) ‘hot and fashionable’.48 Critics argued in the press about the merits of his plans – but everyone was talking about the SMT. Hall introduced a number of innovations in his first year, but his most radical and far-reaching change was when he lobbied the palace for permission to change the Memorial Theatre’s name to the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hall disliked the old title because it ‘sounded like a gravestone’.49 Hall changed the organization from a kind of museum to a modern company. Thirty years later, Hall would be utterly candid about the cultural capital wielded by such a name: ‘They will give money to something called the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Theatre if you scream hard enough …’.50 No less significant was the introduction of the change from ‘Theatre’ to ‘Company’ in the organization’s title. The SMT was a theatre that ran a festival. The RSC was a company of actors, hired for three-year terms, who would together develop an ensemble vision. The change was vital to Hall’s vision of creating a European-style artistic ensemble in Stratford which would have the artistic drive to transform Shakespearean theatre into a place of discovery and reinvention.

The Last Time I Felt Hope The 1960s was, for Hall, a decade of experiment, growth, opportunity and ambition. Hall once told an interviewer that the 1960s was ‘my decade’ and that ‘it was the last time I felt hope’.51 From 1960 onwards, Hall’s Shakespearean work was deeply affected by the scale of the task of transforming the SMT into the RSC. The task was not an easy one: he had many internal battles to fight, as the Board of Governors was proud of its independence from state funding; he was also in a race to establish a presence in London before Olivier’s National Theatre Company started. Hall’s first RSC production, Romeo and Juliet, was lacklustre and unremarkable; his last (under his tenure), Macbeth, in 1968, was by his own account a disaster. When Hall used his work as a way of engaging with questions of national culture, as he did in his magnificent set of history plays in 1963–5 and with the so-called ‘flower power’ Hamlet (1965), his political and artistic lives collided to create powerful statements about both Shakespeare and the present. These remain the Shakespeare productions

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for which he is best remembered. Together, they developed the themes of national decline, paranoia and political violence that he had explored in his earlier productions for the SMT. The new National Theatre in London was an immediate and pressing threat that dominated Hall’s first years at the RSC. He recreated the SMT as the RSC mainly because he wanted to establish the company as a publicly funded, alternative national theatre. The real National Theatre was in a protracted period of development, but Olivier was already in position in 1959 to head the company (which launched in 1961). All of Hall’s radical changes to the SMT in 1960–61 can be read in the light of this monumental development. The threat was real – how could a provincial theatre compete with a London-based theatre with public funding and Olivier’s incomparable stature? The lack of big-name actors was partly in anticipation of a talent drain to London, as if Hall was saying, ‘look, we can do this without stars’. The idea of a national theatre also overshadowed and drove Hall’s artistic developments. His vision stalled almost immediately with a flat season in 1961 that lacked both the artistic coherence of his comedies season and the political edge of Coriolanus. As he was pulled more and more into the high politics of securing public funding for the RSC, Hall’s own abilities as a director suffered. The 1961 season seemed to lack any sense of artistic purpose; none of the productions exhibited the same level of theatrical innovation as Troilus and Cressida, and there was already a slide backwards to the aesthetic of the SMT’s 1950s. In 1962, Hall chose to revive two earlier Shakespeare productions (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Troilus and Cressida). Peter Brook’s King Lear strengthened a season that also included the first British production of a Brecht play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. At last the RSC was starting to deliver on its promise, but it was only in 1963 that Hall and the RSC finally established their credentials as a dynamic, contemporary theatre company with The Wars of the Roses, which Hall co-directed. Hall now staked out his claim for the RSC as a national theatre that could address national themes. He had faced down his own Board, which had been reluctant to seek public sponsorship, and started to secure grants from the Arts Council. With the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth imminent in 1964, Hall wanted to mark the occasion with an ambitious project to stage both of Shakespeare’s historical tetralogies, with the first tetralogy condensed into a trilogy by John Barton with new titles: Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III. Hall co-directed all seven productions over two years. He never again worked as intensively on Shakespeare.

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The history play cycle brought together an ensemble in a much more effective way than 1960’s Comedies season. Hall had longed championed a revolution in verse-speaking and with The Wars of the Roses he finally created a house style for the company by working closely and intensely with the ensemble. This style was, as Carol Chillington Rutter describes it, ‘cool, rational, analytical’.52 David Warner played Henry VI as a pacifist that one reviewer thought ‘the archetype of every honest CND demonstrator who ever sat down in Trafalgar Square’.53 Although barely out of drama school, Warner was an immediate hit: Bernard Levin called him the ‘find of the decade’.54 Dressed in peasants’ clothes as if religiously repulsed by court finery, Henry was ‘awkwardly, sweetly boyish, a tow-haired fringe falling across his forehead’.55 He played opposite Peggy Ashcroft, a steely Margaret who, as war and political ambition tore away at Henry’s court, found within her an animal-like ferocity that manifested itself in her unearthly shrieks when her son was murdered at the end of Edward IV. Hers was an extraordinary performance in a landmark production that was celebrated at the time and has ever since been the subject of theatrical myth and memory, not to mention a large number of academic studies which have analysed the production’s politics. Critics were not shy of hyperbole: Harold Hobson wondered if ‘anything as valuable has ever been done for Shakespeare in the whole previous history of the world’s stage’.56 Although Hall had co-directors, the productions represented his vision of a Shakespeare theatre energized by an acute sense of the contemporary moment. Shortly before rehearsals, Hall read a proof copy of Jan Kott’s Shakespeare our Contemporary, which analyses the modern-day resonances in Shakespeare’s work. As well as an influential chapter on King Lear and Beckett, Kott also wrote a chapter on the history plays that argued that Shakespeare pitched his characters into the merciless and destructive cycle of power politics. Kott’s modernist interpretation of Shakespeare struck a chord with Hall, who had already experimented with similar ideas in Troilus and Cressida. He began his rehearsals with a speech to the cast which underlined the importance of seeing the parallels between Shakespeare’s England and the present. He told them that the ‘stuff of these plays is our lives today’ and discussed the Suez War, the Cold War and the Soviet Presidium before concluding that the plays were, in total, ‘a study of power, the need for power, and the abuse of power’.57 Hall argued that Shakespeare was ‘not a reactionary in the modern sense’ but that ‘in his time nationalism was a progressive force through which the people were able to struggle against the encroachments of postfeudal absolutist monarchies’.58 He may have seen elements of his own

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ambitions in this reading. As he set about shaping the national theatre environment, Hall was looking for a way to articulate a progressive nationalism as a response to the changing world. In many interviews from the time, Hall struck a careful balance between furthering his ambitions for the RSC as an established public institution and the anti-authoritarian impulse driving innovation in performance practice. He talked about the ‘radical centre’ and the importance of responding to the ‘pressure of now’ to create Shakespeare productions which were meaningful for modern audiences. None of Hall’s Shakespearean productions before or since were underpinned with as coherent an intellectual vision as was The Wars of the Roses. Through the production, Hall mounted his own, RSC-branded critique of contemporary Britain. He did not do this through explicit gestures in the production itself, which was set in a medieval world, but through a number of interviews, programme notes and short essays which he published concurrent with the production. Hall saw the ‘present crisis’ as a basically political one, which derived initially from a massive crisis in authority. His writing was philosophical. He talked about power and history in the abstract, allowing the contemporary resonance of his interpretation of Shakespeare to suggest itself rather than making trite comparisons between Henry VI’s world and, for example, the Suez crisis. His vision went far beyond a simple gesture of anti-authoritarianism. At this point in his career, Hall was looking for ways to re-legitimate the institutions of authority because he wanted the RSC to itself be a major cultural institution. This may be one reason why he ended the sequence (as Shakespeare does) with Henry V rather than Richard III (which is where the narrative ends), because Henry V represents a reconstruction of a heroic ideal in which politics is brought together with a strong sense of humanity: The tension between man the animal in action, murdering to protect or lying to save, and moral man trying to rule by a developed human ethic is what always makes history tragic. This is still the  dilemma of power. Can a man be ‘good’ and politic? Do you have to be a bad man to make a good king?59 Through Henry V, Hall rejected the cynicism of his own question and asserted the possibility of a ‘radical centre’ in which authority is transformed by a strong sense of moral purpose. The fear of chaos, in the end, made politics necessary:

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But Shakespeare … doesn’t promise that a millennium awaits us; rather he says that history is a constant tragic pressure on all human beings and unless they govern themselves and their institutions pragmatically, there is a perpetual natural tendency to return to chaos.60 The turn to ‘institutions’ in Hall’s comments immediately calls to mind the RSC itself, and Hall’s own experience of the governing of institutions. Institutions are set against the ‘natural tendency to return to chaos’ as a civilizing force which orders and centralizes meaning, so that the ‘establishment’ is seen as a vital part of civilization which must emerge from the ‘tragic pressure’ of history. By speaking and writing so much about his ideas for The Wars of the Roses, Hall effectively involved the public in the revival of the Henry VI plays. He and Barton participated in public debates about the nature of their adaptation, with their annotated script at one point on display in London. Hall’s vision was realized in performance through a vivid and memorable set design. John Bury’s set looked like a giant steel cage, materializing history as an oppressive trap for its participants. History was both the centre of the production, its ‘main protagonist’,61 and its surface. The stage world was brutal, it was meant to be a ‘hard and dangerous world of our production’ in which ‘the central image – the steel of war – has spread and forged anew the whole of our medieval landscape’. Tables were made out of steel and the staircases were made out of axe-heads; even the trees were made out of iron. Over the course of the trilogy the corrosive nature of history was represented by a sharp decay in the actors’ costumes; the red roses of the Lancastrians faded on their armour, the white roses of the Yorkists were ‘no more than a pale blush’: ‘Colour drains and drains from the stage until, among the drying patches of scarlet blood, the black night of England settles in the leather costumes of Richard’s thugs.’62 One of the most remarkable aspects of Bury’s set was the innovative, mechanical way the great iron doors were transformed to denote different scenic locations. Contemporary reviewers likened this device to the sides of a battleship63 or the jaws of a vice. In The Spectator (26 July 1963), David Dyce-Jones observed that the doors were ‘shifting and swinging within certain gaunt patterns to match the stylised manoeuvres onstage’. The movement of the doors in relation to the actors denoted an essential symbiosis between the actors’ bodies and the world that they inhabited and were a part of. The human subject was seen as immersed in these great historical forces, unable to determine them, but determined by them. Colour seemed to drain from the stage as the costumes were progressively

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blackened. Rust accumulated on the metal set, as if the whole world was decaying. History seemed to be enclosed within the rusting armour of the stage. Although it looked medieval, the stage world was forged out of Hall’s engagement with modern drama as well as Shakespeare’s text. Plays such as Afore Night Come by David Rudkin and The Empire Builders by Boris Vian, which the RSC performed in 1962, uncovered the primal ritual violence underlying the contemporary world. Hall recognized similar patterns in the first tetralogy, which he believed was structured by a ‘heavily ritualistic pattern’.64 Hall’s contribution to the production’s souvenir programme was titled (after Macbeth) ‘Blood will have blood’ and in it he describes York’s death as a ‘pagan ritual’. The Wars of the Roses was a modern play that used Shakespeare’s text to create something that was both old and new at the same time. By making it a contemporary work, and drawing on contemporary playwrights for inspiration, Hall created the RSC’s definitive statement on political theatre. The production set a course that the RSC would follow for at least the next decade. To an extent, it is still following it, as the achievement of that production in creating a new audience for Shakespeare, and a new urgency in the staging of Shakespeare, remains one of the key milestones in the modern history of British Shakespeare production. Hall concluded his most significant three years of Shakespeare directing with a landmark production of Hamlet with David Warner as a ‘scruffy undergraduate’ Prince.65 The intellectual space that Hall had opened up first with Coriolanus and the Comedies, and then with his history play cycle, gave him the opportunity to contemporize Hamlet for the 1960s. Hall continued a path he had started a year earlier by finding the contours of the present through a representation of the past. Hall has only rarely experimented with modern dress; his productions are nearly always set in the past, but in a past that creates the present. As Holland puts it, Hall’s achievement in this and other productions was to find that contemporary link without making glib analogies with the present.66 Hall wrote in a programme note: ‘For our decade I think the play will be about the disillusionment which produces an apathy of the will so deep that commitment to politics, to religion or to life is impossible.’ The cultural world of 1965 was very different from 1956, when Hall first started directing Shakespeare, and Hamlet, more than any of his productions, registered and engaged with this change. The year had started with the funeral of Winston Churchill, an event which seemed to underline the emergence of the country from the long shadow of

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the Second World War. The year also saw the first major battles in the Vietnam War and major civil rights demonstrations in America. The new generation was affluent, permissive, politicized and anti-authoritarian. By this point Hall was in his mid-thirties, still young to be running a public theatre but not young enough to be anything more than an interested spectator of the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Hamlet was an ideal vehicle for Hall to explore his own response to this generation. Warner was only 24. The Wars of the Roses had made him an RSC star and in many respects his Hamlet was a natural development of the territory he had explored as Henry VI. Hall wanted to highlight Hamlet’s dissonant presence within a world which he did not belong to, which he could change, but which would eventually oppress him. Dawson describes this as Hall’s most important idea: Elsinore was an ‘oppressive social milieu’, an ‘efficient and dominating court’ which left little room for Hamlet to manoeuvre.67 Claudius’s court was mechanically efficient and busy in a way which highlighted Hamlet’s apathy. Hamlet was introduced as part of this world, sat at the table with the rest of the court, a prisoner rather than a malcontent: ‘That table was the cage of circumstance in which he was caught up, and only through his own death and the death of others would he be able to escape from it.’68 The set was dark and claustrophobic; Bury designed a black marble floor flecked with silver upon which the actors’ bodies were mirrored. Dim lighting created a sense of ‘entrapment’ and ‘impenetrability’.69 For Dawson, the set played a crucial role in ‘carrying the production’s anti-establishment’ message.70 The production struck a chord with young people, with many of them queuing for two days to get tickets for the opening.71 It helped that some of the newspaper critics were less than enthusiastic about the production, particularly Warner’s anti-heroic depiction of Hamlet. By breaking with the Hamlets of Olivier and Gielgud, Warner and Hall asserted a new kind of hero that the new generation could more readily identify with. The reviews served to enhance the production’s anti-establishment credentials, since it seemed that the establishment was rejecting it. The production’s success increased through its run.72 Hall continued to view his new audience critically; although they embraced Warner’s Hamlet, Hall himself was concerned about their political apathy. Hamlet was meant to be his way of stimulating the new generation into political action, but if anything it had the opposite effect of creating a new heroic ideal for apathetic inaction. Dawson concluded that Hamlet was in the end ambivalent in that it criticized the values of the young people that Hall wanted to attract into the theatre: ‘As a critique of apathy,’ Dawson writes, ‘the production in

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some way paradoxically espoused it, though it also succeeded in defining brilliantly the nature of the enemy.’73 As if to represent this ambivalence, Hall began the production provocatively with a large canon pointed directly at the audience. This was a confrontational image, as if Hall was taking the audience hostage. Glenda Jackson began Ophelia’s final scene singing an angry, discordant song with a lute on which she beat savage chords, almost as if parodying the 1960s generation’s faith in rock music. Hamlet also stood up to the audience. Warner’s soliloquies were directed at the audience, which broke a tradition of Hamlet speaking contemplatively to himself. Sometimes they spoke back: one night, when he asked them, ‘Am I a coward?’ (2.2.506), one person shouted back, ‘Yes!’.74 Rather than reflect inwards, Warner’s Hamlet was forceful and spoke quickly, his mind shifting constantly: as Robert Speaight wrote, ‘His thoughts tumble over one another with the same rapidity as his emotions’.75 He was, as one reviewer put it, full of ‘vitality and humanity’ who displayed ‘zest and joy’ when plotting with the players and in his scenes with Polonius.76 Bryden saw him as a ‘cloud of immature and unfocused emotions in search of means to express them’.77 Like the marble, mirrored surface of the stage, this Hamlet was in part a reflection of the audience, but it was a reflection mediated by Hall’s own ambivalence towards them. Hamlet died laughing, the irony of his life and his own failure to overcome his apathy defining his tragedy. For many in the audience, for whom Warner was the Hamlet of their generation, such gestures were not taken as critiques but as a positive affirmation of a new spirit of cultural politics: Sinfield argues that they ‘saw Warner’s Hamlet not as a figure of apathy but as one of rebellion or, at least, refusal’.78 The Wars of the Roses and Hamlet represented the high point of Hall’s work on Shakespeare. He never worked so intensively with a company on a set of Shakespeare productions again. Over two years he delivered eight productions, three of which are still remembered as definitive. Through this extraordinary act of creative will, Hall reinvented the SMT as a public company whose claim to be a national theatre rested on more than ownership of the national poet. Hall proved that classical theatre could address the big questions facing Britain in the 1960s. Through the history plays, he explored the nature of authority and government, using Shakespeare’s dramatization of national collapse as a way of thinking about the present. With Hamlet, Hall energized a new generation of theatregoers and placed the RSC in the front line of the newly emerging counterculture. At the same time, Hall used his public profile to speak freely about his concerns about this new generation and their political maturity. Warner’s

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Henry VI and Hamlet were the archetypal Hall characters, both good men in a failing world unable to halt the decay around them. After 1965, Hall only directed one more Shakespeare play for the RSC before resigning in 1968. He chose Macbeth, which was a natural choice after the histories and Hamlet, but by this point he was too exhausted by the management of the company to make it a success. He didn’t direct any more Shakespeare plays in Stratford until 1992.

Questing and Restless Creations Hall’s 1970s Shakespeare productions lacked the ambition, nerve and style that he had brought to his 1960s work. His artistic life was overshadowed by his management career. In 1973, he accepted an invitation to succeed Olivier as the artistic director of the National Theatre, which was still based at the Old Vic. As he set about transforming Olivier’s ensemble into a national institution, his life became dominated by politics and in-fighting. His tenure was scarred by controversy from the outset. As Fay observes, ‘Dispassionate accounts of the turbulence caused by Hall’s appointment are hard to come by’.79 Nothing Hall did equalled the radicalism he had shown when he took up his SMT appointment, but his new regime upset many of Olivier’s key supporters. Hall also used his role as a platform to champion the importance of public subsidy; on one occasion he stood on a table at a press conference and passionately argued the case against funding cuts. This made him a troublemaker to the right-wing government led by Margaret Thatcher, whose election in 1979 presaged a new period of austerity in arts funding. These enemies in the political and theatrical establishment attracted journalists to Hall like sharks to blood. A Sunday Times exposé raised questions about Hall’s financial probity by accusing him of profiting from publicly funded productions when they transferred to Broadway; other newspapers found salacious headlines in his personal life. Hall was not just stifled by institutional politics, he also retained an affection for the RSC which meant that he never sought to seriously challenge it as the UK’s centre for Shakespearean performance. Hall even briefly toyed with merging the National with the RSC and his diaries record several meetings with Trevor Nunn (then Artistic Director of the RSC) and others. In a sense, Hall was still tribally attached to the RSC and still saw the National in the same way he had more than a decade before when he joined the SMT. He was driven by ‘emotional and artistic’ motives,80

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but the economic conditions of the 1970s were stark and the prospect of the public funding two national theatres seemed grim. The plan went nowhere and Hall soon regretted pursuing them. He instead wrote to the Arts Council begging them to continue subsidizing the two companies.81 A merger may have been decisively ruled out, but Hall did not see himself in competition with the RSC in the same way as he had competed with the National in the 1960s. There were only four productions of Shakespeare plays at the National in his first six years, and Hall directed three of them.82 Over twenty-five years after the Queen (as Princess Elizabeth) had attended a ceremony to lay a memorial to Shakespeare as the foundation stone of the National Theatre building, the play chosen for her royal opening of the building was not by Shakespeare but a disastrous production of Carlo Goldoni’s Il Campiello.83 Hall’s first Shakespeare productions at the National were poorly received. He began his tenure in 1973 with The Tempest when the company was still resident at the Old Vic; Michael Billington thought it one of the worst Shakespeare productions he had ever seen.84 Hamlet (1975, with Albert Finney) fared little better with critics, although Hall himself was proud of it.85 Hall worked again with Finney on a production of Macbeth (1978) which Hall himself described as ‘dull’ and received even worse notices than The Tempest.86 Hall’s work with the playwright Peter Shaffer – particularly his production of Amadeus, which transferred to Broadway – went some way to restoring his critical reputation. He returned to Shakespeare to direct an absurdly blacked-up Paul Scofield as Othello in 1980. Scofield failed to dislodge memories of Olivier’s barnstorming performance at the National, or indeed of Paul Robeson (SMT 1959). Hall does not even mention the production in his autobiography. In 1984, Hall returned to form with Coriolanus, this time with Ian McKellen as the lead character. The return to the Roman play on which he had cut his teeth at the SMT in the 1950s provoked Hall to start responding to the physical and cultural space of the National. He experimented with modern dress and recruited members of the audience to be in the production by selling onstage tickets. Those who bought them became members of the city mob, an audience turned into performance. The strategy was novel, and seemed to bring to life Hall’s career-long ambition to make the National a genuine engagement with the nation. Nevertheless, as Holland argues, the production’s success was founded on Hall’s painstaking work with the ensemble on verse-speaking and rehearsal.87 Hall was rediscovering how to make Shakespeare work. Before rehearsal on the play itself began, he spent two weeks with the cast working on language

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and verse-speaking.88 Hall was going back to the progressive structure of the Play Way: once again he was being Playmaster, instilling in compressed form the syllabus Cook had developed for his school more than half a century before. With the end of his long and controversial tenure as Artistic Director in sight, Hall finally found his voice in a superb production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1986. With Antony and Cleopatra, Hall had found a play with an epic vision to match his ambition for the National Theatre, provoking him to do his best Shakespeare work since his 1965 Hamlet. There were overtones of the grand design of history from The Wars of the Roses as Roman legionaries marched across the stage, but the production was also a love story and a play about disenchantment. It was a perfect vehicle for Hall as it brought together ideas he had previously explored separately in the comedies and the histories. The opening scenes recalled the exuberance of his first comedies at the SMT; the battle scenes harked back to his cinematic Troilus and Cressida; Antony and Octavius’ negotiations recalled the council table from The Wars of the Roses. Ghosts of Tutin’s Cressida and Ashcroft’s Margaret haunted Judi Dench’s Cleopatra, who was both a warrior woman and a seductress. There was no one equal to Warner’s Henry and Hamlet: Antony was a different kind of hero, a dyspeptic old soldier unable to reconcile himself to a new world. Whereas The Wars of the Roses and Hamlet had been about a new generation facing an oppressive, impossible world, Antony and Cleopatra was a production about the disappointments and passions of middle age. The grandness of the production was evident at every level. The production was long – in its previews it stretched to five hours and even on the press night it was running at four hours, with many reviewers complaining that it dragged. The set was so big that several actors injured themselves on it. Hall’s vision and audacity was also apparent in his cast, which harked back to the SMT days when famous actors were the main attraction. Anthony Hopkins, as Antony, was the star attraction; in the same season, he was also playing Lear in a production directed by the playwright David Hare. He brought with him a touch of Hollywood glamour and he was part of the National’s history, having been Olivier’s understudy in the original National Theatre company. In some ways he was an obvious Antony as he was often compared to Richard Burton, who was the actor most identified with the role after he played Antony in the film Cleopatra alongside Elizabeth Taylor. Hall took a bigger risk by casting Judi Dench as Cleopatra. Even Dench was surprised; she was in her early 50s and although her theatrical career was impeccable, she was still best known for her part

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in a long-running sitcom. Dench and Hopkins asked Hall if they could vary their entrances each night to keep each other guessing about where they would enter.89 This helped to give their performances a restlessness and dynamism which many reviewers picked up on. It also meant that every performance took risks. After a decade of balancing management with directing, Hall had got his edge back. Hall set in the play in a sumptuous Renaissance world, avoiding Egyptian and Roman clichés because he wanted to represent that world as Shakespeare and his contemporaries conceived it. His designer, Alison Chitty, promised him that there would not be ‘a bare knee or snake headdress in sight’.90 Instead, Hall and Chitty took inspiration from Renaissance artists to recreate a Jacobean sense of the past. As a clue, the programme reproduced Paolo Veronese’s Mars and Venus Bound by Cupid in sepia.91 Hall was inspired by a reference in Granville-Barker’s preface to Antony and Cleopatra in which he used Veronese’s paintings to illustrate ‘how Shakespeare saw his Roman figures habited’.92 Lowen believes that this passage was the foundation for the production concept and costume designs.93 The painting, usually dated to the 1570s, shows Mars bearded and dressed in a cream-gold suit with Roman-style sleeves and a pinkishred cloak falling from his shoulder. He is kneeling by Venus, who is naked and expressing milk from her breast. Hall and Chitty brought this mix of classicism and romanticized medievalism to the sets and costumes, taking the reds and golds out of Veronese and weaving them through the production. Dench wore gold and cream robes, whose hue echoed that of Mars’ suit, and plain gold bands and necklaces; the simplicity of both was offset by her long, auburn curls which were bound in some scenes by a gold circlet. This mixture of the plain and the exotic, the controlled and the uncontainable, was a brilliant foundation for Dench’s extraordinary performance. Hopkins was, like Veronese’s Mars, bearded; he wore a simple red suit which took its colour from Dench’s wig and Mars’ cloak. The set’s floor and walls were also dusty cream and gold, and seemed to blur into each other. The boundary of stage and audience was repeatedly tested, with Roman soldiers marching onto the stage through the auditorium, as if the audience was itself a Roman colony, a part of Antony and Cleopatra’s – and Hall’s – epic world. The stage’s homogeneity allowed Hall to explore Rome and Egypt’s continuities. The characters talked obsessively about their differences but, in Hall’s vision, they emerged as similar places with differing dynamics. Both were intensely political – in Egypt, politics was played through passion and games; in Rome, it was through families. Antony and Enobarbus’

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tragedy was that they saw Egypt as a refuge from politics, but Cleopatra emerged as the most political animal of them all, her life a constant positioning, or resisting being positioned, until the end. It is tempting to see echoes of Hall’s own institutional history in this. After all, he had been accused of empire-building when trying to merge the RSC and the NT, and had acquired a reputation for politicking in ways which alienated many of his former colleagues. Hall was neither the ever-changing Cleopatra using all her wiles to stay in the game, nor was he a great man trading off past glories as Antony was, viewing the empire he had set up from the outside with jealousy and despair – but he was, like both, a survivor who was capable of surpassing his critics’ expectations. Hall’s public persona inescapably hung round the production as the company dug into one of Shakespeare’s longest plays. The rehearsals for Antony and Cleopatra coincided with a suitably epoch-making event: the day after the first rehearsal, Hall’s resignation from the National was formally announced.94 Once again, controversies and politics in the external world seemed uncannily appropriate to the dramas being explored in the rehearsal room. Hall demonstrated a sense of bravado that had been missing from his work for years. Antony and Cleopatra opened with Philo spitting with contempt for his general and his lover. A trumpet heralded the show; exotic drums and pipes played as the court sauntered in, Cleopatra walking Mardian like a dog tied to a rope, followed by Antony carried on Mardian’s shoulders.95 From the beginning, Hall focused on the inherent theatricality of the affair between the Roman general and the Egyptian queen. Their banter was all performance, perhaps a performance to each other but nevertheless a performance which needed an audience. The courtiers lazily enjoyed the show, but Antony and Cleopatra were lively. On a sound recording archived in the British Library, both Hopkins and Dench quickly lose their breath, with Dench in particular moving so quickly around the stage that her voice faded in and out. As Cleopatra pursued (and eventually caught) Antony, those in the court laughed. Antony sometimes played, sometimes became very serious, as if to demonstrate the struggle between the casual freedom of the Egyptians and the weighty seriousness of the Romans. He whooped when Cleopatra captured him, but then his voice darkened for ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’, before returning to a more teasing tone as he chided his ‘wrangling queen’. Nevertheless, there remained an uneasy undertow, a hint of the big questions that the lovers’ games left unanswered. For Hopkins, Antony was a man looking to escape the trap of his own upbringing. One reviewer commented on Hopkins’

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‘broody mannerisms’ which ‘chillingly convey a soldier caught not merely in the web of amour but of time’.96 The Daily Mail thought him ‘boozy and besotted’; another reviewer complained that he was ‘so consistently boisterous that he becomes a little tedious’.97 News of Fulvia’s death ended his reverie, his performance quickly sobered and, when he promised that ‘these strong Egyptian fetters I must break’, he did so with anger – at Cleopatra, at himself. He took the news quietly, pausing for a few seconds, loftily proclaiming ‘There’s a great spirit gone’, but provoked titters from his onstage audience when he started, ‘She’s good being gone’. The scene gave Dench an early opportunity to display how infinitely varied her Cleopatra could be. As Antony backed away, she was serious, sad, angry, her temper apparently shifting with every line. She spoke of ‘ancient folly’ softly with a slow, controlled passion which suddenly exploded on the word ‘water’ before she sobbed, angrily, ‘my death received will be’. Antony was unmoved, so Cleopatra turned back to a steady, controlled fury – she was able to summon passion and anger in ways which could manipulate most, but not Antony. As the Sunday Telegraph (26 April 1987) put it, she stalked ‘round the stage like a famished cat’. For Time Out (24 April 1987), she was ‘husky and somewhat bedraggled’ and ‘part-bitch, part-sadist, robust, horny and utterly beloved of her handmaidens’. Dench created a Cleopatra who was restless, manipulative, playful, artful, yet insecure and needing constant reassurance. Dench demonstrated her extraordinary range, running through a series of emotional states in just a few lines. She effortlessly moved from being strident and determined to being playful and then offended. Their final scene together was remarkable. Antony was hoisted on a hammock rigged up to a pulley, which Cleopatra and her handmaidens desperately pulled on. Chitty designed the exterior of Cleopatra’s tomb as a ruined fragment. It looked like a garden folly, with an imposing column on one side and the start of an old brick wall on the other. The monument was 20 feet high, and to descend it Cleopatra dropped into the arms of a number of actors below. The physical daring recalled Olivier’s acrobatics at the end of Hall’s Coriolanus thirty years before. Hall told Dench that in the last act Cleopatra should go into ‘overdrive’. She had to find a ‘fifth gear’ for the character to take her through to the last scenes.98 For her last appearance, Cleopatra was dressed in an extravagant gold robe over a blue dress, her red curls held tight at the top by a gold crown. Long sleeves with feather-like creases buried her body, entombed her in costume as if she were already more a legend than a person. She knelt to take the asp out of a wicker box held by Charmian, holding it firmly above her head: it

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was a real snake. The opulence was both a display of Cleopatra’s power and of the NT’s resources, as if Hall were trying to say: this is what a national theatre can do, this is what it can be. Hall’s swansong was a trilogy of Shakespeare’s late plays performed by the same company over consecutive nights. Hall had significantly reduced the number of Shakespearean productions at the National when he took over, with one play at most staged per year, most of which he directed. By returning to a high-concept, themed season with an ensemble company, Hall was also returning to the ambitions he had had in the late 1950s. This was the most ‘RSC’-like season Hall had ever initiated on the South Bank and seemed to look back to his first ‘early comedies’ season when he took over the SMT. In that sense, the Late Plays season was not just a farewell to the National but a farewell to the RSC as well. Hall was laying down his staff, abjuring his magic: he would never again run a theatre as large or as significant as either the RSC or the NT. Hall, being Hall, was well aware of the historic significance of the occasion and made himself available for two television documentaries: Michael Billington made Peter Hall – Work in Progress for Channel 4, and cameras were invited into the rehearsal rooms for a South Bank Show special presented by Melvyn Bragg. As a trilogy, the season was a troubled elegy to Hall’s tenure as the most important director in the UK. Each play presented happy endings overshadowed by the cost of achieving them. As John Peter put it, the ‘ending of all three plays is heavy with the ambiguity of penitence, of resignation, and of self-knowledge and salvation bought at a huge price’. Peter may have had Hall in mind when he described the common theme running through each play, which ‘turns on a misjudgment by a king who abuses his authority’.99 Hall himself noted that ‘their partially happy endings are all achieved with effort and ambiguity’.100 In an article written for the Daily Telegraph, Hall set out his rationale for bringing the three plays together: ‘We do not necessarily improve with age,’ he wrote, ‘for better or worse, we become more like ourselves … It may be reassuring to think of Shakespeare saying farewell to his art through a gentle, forgiving Prospero … But the facts are quite different.’ Hall was in no mood for gentle forgiveness. His Prospero was a dark figure, as were all the authority figures in the trilogy. Hall believed that Shakespeare worked on the three plays at the same time. Although Hall saw them as very different plays, he saw them occupying the same ‘special world’ where ‘betrayal, jealousy, sexual insecurity and lust for power is purged, but only in part, by integrity, fidelity, penitence, and reconciliation’. He thought The Tempest the ‘most searching of these plays’ and also the most ambiguous.101

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He rejected ‘nostalgia and regret’ in late works and instead argued that they should be ‘questing and restless creations, posing new questions with an urgency, even a rage’. He added, ‘For time is short’. Hall was 58 when he stepped down from the National Theatre role; apart from a brief interregnum in the early 1970s, he had been running theatre companies since his mid–20s. Time was indeed short. Hall still had his enemies in the press: in the Mail on Sunday (22 May 1988), Kenneth Hurren dismissed the season as ‘an ego trip’. In a sense it was, in that the season was as much Hall’s late work as Shakespeare’s; Hall’s restless ambition and sense of showmanship was fully on display, but so was his discontent with modernity, his own selfdoubt and his powerful sense of irresolution at the end. The trilogy was mired in controversy while still in rehearsal. Hall had hired Sarah Miles to play Innogen (Hall chose to follow the Folio spelling because the name suggested innocence102), but during rehearsals he asked her to leave the production. Miles had been a risk – although a successful actress, she had no recent experience of acting Shakespeare onstage. With only a month to go, Hall recast the part, hiring Geraldine James. Miles was a popular actress and, through her marriage to the playwright Robert Bolt, part of theatre’s aristocracy. The story was run across the tabloids in the following days, with Miles’s interview about the matter taking up two pages of the Daily Mail.103 Hall also faced accusations of nepotism in hiring his daughter Jennifer Hall to play Miranda. She left the production without explanation near the end of its run, leaving Hall ‘embarrassed and angry’.104 The trilogy had another legacy. The stage machinery was expensive and unreliable; delays in putting the sets together led to the cancellation of five previews; and budgets for the costumes were out of control. In the end, the trilogy was 45 per cent over budget. Fay describes the impact on the theatre’s finances as ‘catastrophic’; Hall’s successor, Richard Eyre, said he felt ‘sick as a parrot’ when he learnt how bad the deficit was.105 Hall worked with Chitty again to produce lavish sets for each of the productions. The productions were originally performed in the Cottesloe – Hall pointed out it had similar dimensions to that of the Blackfriars stage, for which the plays were most likely to have been written.106 Chitty and Hall set out to recreate a sense of Jacobean elegance. Above the stage, Chitty mounted a golden astrological disc which tilted during Time’s speech in The Winter’s Tale and opened in the middle so that Ariel, Juno and Iris could be lowered onto the stage in The Tempest. At the centre of the disc was the sun, with stars and planets connected to it on a grid. Below, Chitty made a circle on the stage which enclosed a rocky landscape in Cymbeline,

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a village green in the Bohemia scenes in The Winter’s Tale and a sandpit in The Tempest. The sandpit was a direct reference to Hall’s first season of early comedies, which had set Troilus and Cressida in a sandpit. Cymbeline was not the disaster that Hall feared it might be. Rather than revive the fairytale world of his 1957 production, Hall now saw in the play a much darker and troubled world, a ‘complex confrontation of virtue and vice’, as Michael Billington put it.107 Francis King in the Sunday Telegraph (22 May 1988) admired the ‘stylized scenes of warfare’. Tim Pigott-Smith’s Iachimo was the stand-out performance for many critics. Pigott-Smith played him as an ‘Italian arriviste’ whose body moved ‘with the ingratiating vulgarity of a gigolo still defining his pitch’.108 James played Innogen without sentiment and deliberately explored the more difficult aspects of the character as a way of resisting the traditional version.109 The scholar Roger Warren, who was an advisor on the production, remembers that Posthumus cut eye-holes into the bloodstained cloth and wrapped it round his head ‘like a guerilla’s balaclava’. At the end of the play, his face was not only ‘caked in grime but streaming with blood, his own and other people’s’.110 In The Winter’s Tale, Pigott-Smith played a Lear-like Leontes who was both violent and paranoid. He wore a deep red and green robe, and held a long gold candlestick, but the opulence of his dress contrasted with the tightness of his body; he was pale, his face shrunken with anger, as he looked suspiciously over his shoulder, convinced he was being watched or laughed at. Christopher Edwards noted ‘the look of vigilant disgust in his narrowed eyes’.111 John Peter thought his performance was ‘merciless’: ‘His jealousy is a kind of brainstorm: the unhinging of a mind which had never felt the need for self-control.’112 Many of the photographs from the production show him with a greenish pallor, as if he were ill. Pigott-Smith played Leontes as if he were suffering from a heart condition. He researched the symptoms of myocarditis, in which ‘the inflammation of the heart results in a racing pulse, breathlessness, and feelings of intense weakness’.113 Sometimes he would clasp his heart, struck by a sudden, maddening pain. As Billington put it, he ‘almost reasons his way into madness’.114 The two halves of the play were linked by Time, who was ‘bald, pallid and staggering beneath a hefty scythe’.115 Billington was impressed by the way Hall was able to find an emotional unity between the play’s two halves. Hall achieved this by darkening the scenes set in Bohemia, which was not a pastoral idyll but, as Billington put it, a ‘Watteauesque fête champêtre with a violent, pagan undertow’. To bring out the earthy sexuality of these scenes, Hall introduced a fertility ritual with a satyrs’ dance which Billington

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described as a ‘primitive sex rite’. They were bare-chested, bare-bottomed and adorned with phalluses. Ken Stott’s Autolycus was a ‘ruthless con man with shifty, red-rimmed eyes and a wolfish smile’.116 The detour into a chaotic, primal ritual culture turned back to a ‘hypnotic sense of ritual’117 in the final scene. The statue of Hermione faced away from the audience, so that the audience’s attention was focused more on Leontes’ reaction to her rebirth than on the miracle itself.118 For Peter, this conclusion was ‘a surge of life darkly qualified by a sense of past wrong-doing which cannot be forgiven, only understood’. The production ended bleakly with Hermione dropping Leontes’ hand and leaving him alone onstage. The Tempest was Hall’s most significant, and perhaps most personal, work in the season. As he prepared to break his own staff and leave in a spirit of painful reconciliation, Hall could not have chosen a more appropriate character than Prospero to stand as his epitaph. The production opened with a deceptively low-key storm. Every word of 1.1 could be heard, creating a ‘stillness at the heart of it which makes Prospero’s magic, for a moment, all the more eerie’.119 Hall might as well have played Prospero himself; he even cast his daughter as Miranda. However, this was no benign Prospero. If there was an element of Hall in the performance, it was the Machiavellian Hall of the tabloids. Billington described Prospero as ‘a tyrannical Satanist’.120 Peter thought Michael Bryant’s performance as Prospero was one of the main achievements of the trilogy: ‘there is nothing saintly about the exiled magus,’ he wrote, ‘he’s tough, choleric and irascible. To have his enemies in his power gives him huge satisfaction; and his final forgiveness is the generosity of the strong.’121 Hall had been disappointed with Gielgud’s genial Prospero in his 1973 production, so now he directed Bryant to play Prospero as a man driven by the need for revenge. He was a restless character, who was one minute angry, the next indignant. He ‘restages his life in an anguished attempt to get control of it’122 and, for Hall, the applause he begs at the end is so that the actor can be free of Prospero’s despair. Caliban was played by Tony Haygarth as a ‘wild animal turned into a bitter slave’.123 He was dirty and covered with sores which oozed blood, and wore predatory, vampire-like teeth. He was virtually naked apart from a rudimentary codpiece which one reviewer described as a ‘wicked-looking box’124; another wrote that his genitals were ‘muzzled like a dog’.125 He was ‘fierce, sensual, ecstatic’.126 He looked like an animal, but his wounds looked as though he had been flayed with a whip, and the box he wore over his genitals was there to contain his sexual urges. Caliban was more than a slave; Prospero had abused him. Prospero’s neurotic horror of Caliban’s

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sexuality was represented by the muzzle he had placed around his crotch. This violent image of suppressed desire not only gave force to Caliban as a character but also added an extra undertow to his enslavement of Ferdinand (foppishly dressed to resemble Charles I). When Prospero said, ‘this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’, he referred to both Caliban as a character and the suffering that he had inflicted upon him. Hall concluded his tenure with a trilogy of plays that were by turns bitter, unforgiving, restless and urgent. He ended where he had begun at the National with The Tempest, but he avoided the valedictory ego trip that some critics had predicted by creating images of enslavement and suppression to bury the late plays’ romance. Hall’s views on Shakespeare’s late plays may well have been a comment on his own sense of time passing. There was nothing triumphant in his trilogy: even as he referenced his own past work, he seemed to register his dissatisfaction with it. The National was not the only thing he was giving up; when he broke his staff and left the stage, he walked away from both the National and thirty years of pushing British theatre into establishing two national theatres.

I Don’t Want to go Nowhere In 1992, Hall told Anthony Clare that he thought about death every day: ‘I don’t want to go nowhere … It’s the anxiety of extinction … I love my children. I love my work. I love love. I love life. My sadness is that it won’t last.’127 His career since leaving the National has been characterized by a restless energy, perhaps stimulated in part by this fear of extinction. He has produced a number of productions under the banner of the ‘Peter Hall Company’ although, as Holland notes, this has never operated as an ensemble.128 Hall also put great of energy into establishing the Rose theatre in Kingston, of which he became artistic director in 2003 before finally retiring completely from theatre management in 2008. Hall did not achieve his ambition of establishing a resident ensemble company at the Rose, but he did direct the first Rose Theatre Productions show in 2008. Fittingly, this was Love’s Labour’s Lost, which he had directed in his first season at the SMT and at Cambridge. He was Chancellor of Kingston University (until 2013), which recently established the first Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies: the scholarly director is now firmly embedded as an educational institution in his own right. In some respects, his legacy at the RSC has already been eroded. He wanted the RSC to be a three-year ensemble company with a permanent base in London as well

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as Stratford, but the 2013 incarnation of the company has forsaken both. The big concept seasons under Michael Boyd’s tenure and the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival are indebted to Hall’s pioneering work in the 1960s. More significantly, the principle of co-funding the National and the RSC out of public funds has been firmly established. Even so, Hall remains a trenchant and outspoken critic of government arts policy. His short 1999 book The Necessary Theatre was a polemic against the then Labour government’s funding of theatre. Hall is a great Shakespearean. He has not always been a great director of Shakespeare, but when he has been great, as he was in 1963 with The Wars of the Roses, in 1965 with Hamlet, and in 1986 with Antony and Cleopatra, he created landmark productions that remain reference points for modern theatre. Hall would still be a great Shakespearean even if had never directed a single Shakespeare. He introduced Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht to the British theatre, he created the Royal Shakespeare Company out of the sheer force of his precocious ambition, and he transformed Olivier’s National Theatre into an enduring public institution. However, it is through his artistic works that we can best trace his own negotiation with Shakespeare as a way of exploring the big questions that face modern audiences. Hall’s most significant achievement was to recognize that the energies of modern drama could also be applied to Shakespeare. He transformed Shakespeare performance from a traditionalized pageant into a medium through which the contemporary world could be politicized and resisted.

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Chapter 3

Yukio Ninagawa Alexander C. Y. Huang

Why do you dress me / In borrowed robes? (Macbeth 1.3) In one of the landmark twentieth-century productions of Macbeth, a gigantic set resembling a butsudan Buddhist household altar takes up the entire stage, and the massive shutters are opened and closed at various points by two mysterious crones. When the light comes on, witches played by Kabuki female impersonators (onnagata) dance to falling petals behind the semi-translucent screens in what appears to be a cinematically inspired slow-motion scene (see http://globalshakespeares.org/). A gateway to other worlds, the altar compels the audience to dwell upon memories of the dead. The doors of the ancestral altar writ large serve as the gates of a castle in a later scene. The ‘shelves’ within the altar become a grand staircase. As a metatheatrical and metaphorical framing, the proscenium-arch altar transports audiences into Macbeth’s world and facilitates conversations between the realms of the living and the dead. The doors of the altar not only regulate aesthetic and historical distance between the audience and the play’s world, which is set in Japan of the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573–98), but also physically demarcate contrasting stage actions up- and down-stage.1 During the production’s international tours, intercultural dialogues took place across the divide of the shutters. Conceptualized by acclaimed Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa (1935–  ) as dialogues with the dead and Nature, the production’s powerful visual imagery (the altar) and filmic vocabulary (human tableaux against cherry blossom) work in tandem to redefine the supernatural. Ninagawa is not only conversant with multiple Japanese stage genres but also with the techniques of defamiliarizing the quotidian that were pioneered by Akira Kurosawa’s (1910–98) film adaptation of Macbeth as

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Throne of Blood, the English title for his Castle of the Spider’s Web (1957). In Ninagawa’s production, the Buddhist altar – a small wood cabinet containing images of Buddha and family ancestral tablets, commonly found in many Japanese homes – is enlarged and transformed by Ninagawa into a framework in which the chronicle of samurai warlords unfolds as a play-within-a-play. The altar serves as both a mundane symbol of the sacred and a secular interface between the present and the past. Likewise, Kurosawa’s film is set in the samurai world and infused with Buddhist interpretations of Fate and retribution. Early in Throne of Blood we see Macbeth and Banquo riding on horseback through a forest that is so dense that it is like a maze and a spider’s web. In later scenes we are introduced to castles that are constructed of the wood from the spider-web forest – a metaphor for ensnaring desires and historical forces. Kurosawa’s signature long-shots frame the low-ceilinged castles as an icon of impenetrable and inescapable social order. Both Kurosawa and Ninagawa transform familiar artefacts into venues of estrangement. In Ninagawa’s production, the two anonymous elderly women sitting by the outsized altar reinforce both a sense of daily life and estrangement. In addition to the Buddhist altar, cherry blossom is another visual image that dominates Ninagawa’s production. A cherry tree and falling petals adorn many of the key scenes in the play, providing an uncanny link between extreme forms of violence and beauty. Shifting moods and emotions of the play are marked by changes in season. The colour and motif of cherry blossom appear on the panels upstage, on the costumes of the Macbeths, and in the lighting scheme. Spring turns to autumn as Macbeth wades through blood in his campaigns. When Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane, soldiers carry boughs of cherry trees and the swaying boughs – replete with literary associations with religious sacrifice – threaten Macbeth with death, if not honourable samurai-style suicide, and remind the audience of the transient world and a Buddhist sense of resignation. As Ryuta Minami points out, the ideas of impermanence and the inevitable fall of cherry blossom are ingrained in the highest ideal of a samurai (‘hara kiri’),which is why the cherry blossom, like the spider-web wood in Kurosawa, is such a compelling subtext.3 The memorable production acquired divergent meanings during its performances at Nissei Theatre in Tokyo in 1980 and later in Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam and elsewhere throughout that decade. The prestigious venue, Nissei Theatre, carries historical significance, because it hosted Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1973 when Ninagawa was beginning to work with American and European dramas.4 Brook’s

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production prompted Ninagawa to take an even more remarkably auteurist approach to stage work.5 The Ninagawa Macbeth has been seen by audiences at Japanese and international performance venues alternately as an exercise in visual delights, fantasy of pure Japan-ness, a samurai story infused with Buddhist rituals, a stage work with cinematic qualities inspired by Kurosawa,6 an innovative Kabuki performance, a relatively conservative interpretation of the unspecified ‘universality’ of Macbeth, a self-serving self-Orientalizing production that appropriates detached local traditions, and sometimes all of the above.7 The production was appropriately named, because it embodied many of Ninagawa’s signature approaches to theatre and Shakespeare. Journalists and scholars have written at length on whether Macbeth spoken in Japanese is still Shakespeare and whether Asian theatres should be used for Shakespearean drama, but the story of the double impact of Shakespeare on Yukio Ninagawa and of Ninagawa on Japanese and worldwide appreciation of Shakespeare goes far beyond such false dichotomies of East versus West. One thing is clear. While Shakespeare is one of the most revered and frequently produced playwrights in Japan, Ninagawa was among the first to charge ahead with avant-garde stage experimentalism after World War II. Riding on the wave of renewed Western interest in Japanese culture and Japan’s rise as a major economic power in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Ninagawa’s touring works have shaped the trajectories of both Japanese and Shakespearean performances. He has directed Hamlet six times (a play that has had over a hundred different translations in Japanese), and is on track to complete, in 2016 when he will be 81, productions of all 37 Shakespeare plays for the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare series, a task he began in 1997 as the prestigious series’ artistic director.8 Apart from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (2010) and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (2006), Ninagawa tends not to direct plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Stemming from a culture of translation, Ninagawa’s interpretations of Shakespeare were nurtured by Japan’s rebirth and consolidation of its national identity after the war. His stage works thrive in the contentious space between cultures. In fact, the notion that ‘modern Japan is a culture of translation’ has been taken for granted by many Japanese writers, playwrights, and their audiences.9 In his own words, Ninagawa came from ‘a generation that has always been very interested in Europe, which is why [he has] been blending elements of Japanese culture and European culture’.10 One reason why so large a part of Shakespeare’s afterlife is connected to translation is because translation already plays a major role in the formation of Shakespeare’s aesthetics.11 Shakespeare’s plays often

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exploit the instability of words, or what George Steiner calls ‘a duplicity of ambience’.12 In his close reading of Posthumus’ monologue about the ‘treachery’ of women in Cymbeline 2.5, Steiner proposes the idea of ‘understanding [literature] as translation’. He demonstrates how acts of literary interpretation are translational in nature, because ‘every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless.’13 On the most basic level of dramaturgy, many of Ninagawa’s productions pose profound questions about textual and performed meanings. Translation creates new vernaculars and gives rise to local literary canons. Translating Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech into Japanese, for example, will require substantial rewriting, because Japanese does not have the verb to be without semantic contexts. Even within the same adaptation, registers and language could create interesting variables. Ninagawa’s 1988 production of Hamlet features two different translations: a classical Japanese version spoken at the court and a modern vernacular outside the court. The linguistic difference is regulated by dramaturgical needs. For instance, Ophelia speaks to Hamlet in the nunnery scene in an antiquated language, creating an impression of psychological distance. Hamlet speaks in the modern vernacular, but his language becomes infected by Ophelia and begins to shift to the antiquated version. In other scenes, the historical and psychological distance created by the antiquated version can signal secrecy, suggesting that the character is plotting against others or lying. Working with Japanese, a language more complex than English from a sociolinguistic point of view, a translator would have to wrestle with more than twenty first- and second-person pronouns to maintain the ambiguity and subtlety of gender identities in a play such as Twelfth Night. In addition to making the right choice of employing the familiar or polite style based on the relation between the speaker and the addressee, the male and female speakers of Japanese are each confined to gender-specific personal pronouns at their disposal. Before a translation can be undertaken, decisions will have to be made about the register and gendered expressions to convey Orsino’s comments about love from a male perspective and Viola’s apology for a woman’s love when in disguise as Cesario, or, in As You Like It, the exchange between Rosalind in disguise as Ganymede and Oliver on her ‘lacking a man’s heart’ when she swoons, nearly giving herself away (4.3.164–76). But limitations create new linguistic and cultural opportunities. This chapter focuses on the artistic terms of the cross-cultural ventures of Ninagawa as a great Shakespearean, a man of theatre, and a ‘metteur en scène’ in the words of Tadashi Suzuki (1939–   ).14 Kurosawa, while well known in the West, is far from the first or the only Japanese filmmaker

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to engage in in-depth conversations with Shakespeare’s works. Nor is Ninagawa the only stage director of note. They worked in and against various Shakespearean traditions and in an artistic ecological system of networked intracultural and intercultural cross-references. Over the past five decades, Ninagawa has produced such a wide range of works – classical Greek, Shakespearean, operatic (Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, 1992), and modern and contemporary American (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1991) and Japanese – and achieved so much in the fields of theatre and cultural diplomacy that it is necessary to place him within the contexts of Japanese, touring, and Shakespearean performance cultures.

Taking Japanese Genres to Task Japan holds the unenviable position of being one of the most closed societies in terms of its insistence on a sense of native exclusivity that makes it difficult for foreign persons and ideas to assimilate fully, and simultaneously one of the first East Asian countries to systematically translate and appropriate a large number of Anglo-European cultural texts since the late nineteenth century. Japan in the twenty-first century still has a ferocious appetite for translated literature and drama. Japan has come a long way in its engagement with representations of Western cultures since the country emerged from some two hundred years of self-imposed isolation in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1801 Shizuku Tadao coined the term ‘closed country’ (sakoku) to describe the situation when translating from Dutch into Japanese the three-volume History of Japan by Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician to the Dutch Embassy in Japan, 1690–1692.15 While, strictly speaking, Japan was not entirely isolated from other nations under this Tokugawa-era ‘sakoku’ system, only very limited trade was permitted with Dutch, Korean and Chinese merchants in what is Nagasaki Prefecture today. Before US Commodore Matthew Perry negotiated and signed a trade treaty with Japan to open the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American ships in 1854, foreigners who entered Japan could face the death penalty. An earnest but contentious process of modernization – which was often assumed to be synonymous with Westernization – and rethinking of local traditions soon followed new trade relations between Japan and other countries.16 In the realm of literature and philosophy, Confucius, Euripides, Chaucer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Chekhov, Shaw, Ibsen, Lu Xun and many other authors

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were translated, appropriated and embedded in a wide range of genres throughout different historical periods. Shakespeare quickly rode to the top of the late nineteenth-century wave of translation and emerged as one of the most widely taught, read and performed English playwrights in the country. Conversations between Shakespeare and his Japanese interlocutors such as Ninagawa are very much part of the country’s political and cultural modernization project. Shakespeare’s canonicity prompted some twentieth-century Japanese directors to treat him as a contemporaneous modern author (despite knowledge among leading intellectuals of Shakespeare’s place in early modern English culture), and Shakespeare’s plays were often produced in similar fashion to those of Ibsen. The Japanese scholar Anzai Tetsuo even proclaimed in 1989 that ‘Shakespeare’s plays are modern Japanese plays when produced in modern Japan’,17 echoing the renowned translator Yushi Odashima’s comment on the analogy between Shakespearean and modern drama: ‘Having learned to see Hamlet with the same eyes as I see [John Osborne’s] Jimmy [in Look Back in Anger], by a natural progression I came to see the rest of Shakespeare in the same way as I saw contemporary British drama.’18 In anglophone countries in the twentieth century, Shakespeare is often seen as the epitome of classic high culture – to be embraced or rejected. In Japan, Shakespeare is a usefully foreign and ‘modern’ classic author who comes from outside the immediate circle of Chinese and Korean Confucian, Buddhist and literary influence on Japan.19 The first public performance of Shakespeare in Japan was a staged reading of ‘Hamlet’s Instructions to the Players’ in English in February 1866, two years before the Meiji Restoration (1868) that would flood Japan with translated literature. Hosted by the Silk Salon, the event aimed to entertain British expatriates in Yokohama. Similarly, in the introduction of Shakespeare into Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia and other Asian countries, the first performance events were not in the local language and typically consisted of informal staged readings or improvised renditions of select scenes. Shakespeare’s dramatic works followed a winding, indirect path into Japan, via incomplete rewritings, performances of select scenes, and multiple adaptations. In fact, the first phase of Japanese, Korean and Chinese appreciation of Shakespeare was based not on his text but on Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 prose rendition of Tales from Shakespeare. The Lambs’ moralistic rewritings of select Shakespearean tragedies (by Charles) and comedies (by Mary) were initially intended for women and children who would not otherwise have access to Shakespeare’s plays in printed form, but the collection has remained one of the most

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popular English-language rewritings to this day. In Japan and China, the Tales was reframed in Confucian ethics for the male elite class (Hamlet, for example, was presented as a filial son). Between 1877 and 1928, the Tales were translated and printed 97 times in Japan, while over a dozen editions appeared in China between 1903 and 1915. Early Japanese productions were based on the Lambs’ Tales rather than complete translations of the plays themselves, including Inoue Tsutomu’s retelling of The Merchant of Venice in 1883, titled ‘The Suit for a Pound of Human Flesh’.20 The Kabuki adaptation by Katsu Genzo of The Merchant of Venice (May-June 1885) was something of a sensation and sold out quickly. It was revived in 1886 and in 1894 with slight alterations. More productions by Japanese and touring companies followed in both Japanese and English for local and foreign residents. In 1891, the Miln Company (led by British actor George C. Miln) staged full productions of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, Othello, Richard II and several other plays in English in Yokohama, inspiring such translators as Tsubouchi Shoyo.21 Much like Ninagawa’s internationally renowned intercultural works that would flourish a century later, these early productions in Japan were informed by multiple layers of filtering among several cultures and multiple artistic genres. Entitled The Season of Cherry Blossoms: A World Where Money Counts for Everything (Sakura-doki Zeni no Yononaka), the 1885 Kabuki Merchant by Genzo drew upon journalist Udagawa Bunkai’s novel (serialized in an Osaka newspaper in 1885) which was itself based on the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare.22 The reference to cherry blossoms in central Osaka in Bunkai’s novel, which was retained in Genzo’s dramatization, would literally blossom in Ninagawa’s Macbeth a century later in Tokyo, London and Edinburgh, to signify not the beauty of Osaka (which stands in for Venice) or the volatility of financial matters but transience and death in the tragedy. Cherry blossom appeared again in another production. When it toured to the Barbican in London in 2009, the Kabuki-style Ninagawa Twelfth Night (performed by the Shochiku Grand Kabuki Company) opened with a lovesick Orsino against the backdrop of a sea of cherry blossom; soon a ship glided across the stage, followed by a storm of billowing cloth. Just as Japan was appropriating and digesting select aspects of anglophone literary culture during this transitional period, Western observers were also introducing Japanese culture, along with their own biases, to the outside world. The eclectic remix of traditional popular theatre forms such as Kabuki, early modern and modern legal debates in The Merchant of Venice, and journalistic and scholarly discourses about Western modernity

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which was partly embedded in Shakespeare’s iconic status, prompted Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935), professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University, to write in 1890: To have lived through the transition stage of modern Japan makes a man feel preternaturally old; for there he is in modern times, with the air full of talk about bicycles and bacilli … and yet he can himself distinctly remember the Middle Ages. The dear old Samurai who first initiated [me] into the mysteries of the Japanese language, wore a queue and two swords.23 He is right in his observation of the uncanny, and mostly peaceful, coexistence of the old and the new, and the local and the foreign, in Tokyo, but he is wrong in his oversight of local artistic creativity. He dismissed early adaptations of Western classics that ‘hastily donned Japanese dress’ as ‘provisional only’, and claimed that ‘some of these days, when the life-time of competent scholars shall have been given to the task, Shakespeare and Victor Hugo may possibly be rendered into Japanese not much more unsatisfactorily than we render Homer into English’.24 Japanese intellectuals soon became, in Chamberlain’s words, ‘[self-appointed] broker[s] between East and West’, an East that was ‘eager to communicate all the manifestly useful elements of [Western] culture that it has absorbed to her neighbors’.25 In the early twentieth century, Japan was indeed one of the most important East Asian purveyors of Anglo-European loanwords (many of which then entered other East Asian languages), Western ideas such as democracy, and works by Adam Smith, Freud, Ibsen, and of course Shakespeare.

Double Visions Observers and practitioners alike continue to be confused and awed by Japan’s capacity to be simultaneously closed and open to foreign ideas. The duality has contributed to both the false dichotomy in critical debates about cultural assimilation and borrowing and to Ninagawa’s own system for working with different location-specific visual and aural elements for the same production. When a production tours to international festivals, he sometimes increased the presence of distinctively Japanese visual images. In his own defence, he has insisted he ‘only had the Japanese audience in mind’ when he directed his 1980 Macbeth, though it is also

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true that the production was so well received outside Japan because of its visual appeal.26 He has made a similar statement about his 2012 production of Cymbeline at the Barbican in London: ‘I used visual effects that draw on my country’s cultural memory and sense of style to help bring Japanese audiences closer to Shakespeare … Then I transferred the production to England with no changes at all. Hopefully, it expressed a Japanese understanding of Shakespeare to its British audience.’27 The dual realities of Japanese insularity and openness have led to Ninagawa’s assumption that Shakespeare’s language, even in contemporary Japanese translation, can still be challenging for his Japanese actors and audiences; hence the need for visual framings. Of his production, Ninagawa maintained that ‘[the Japanese] Cymbeline is a translated work and there’s a limit to what you can do with words alone’.28 While all this may be true, Shakespeare is no less difficult for anglophone audiences today. Visualization does not necessarily draw an audience ‘closer’ to Shakespeare, for better or for worse. What has yet to be examined is whether Japanese visualization would work effectively as an intellectual prosthesis or heuristic device for modern Japanese audiences who may be more familiar with certain anglophone-inflected global icons than with traditional Japan. Further, visual familiarity can be a double-edged sword. In the reception history of Ninagawa’s Shakespeare, there are both anxieties about ‘fake’ Japaneseness and celebration of his intercultural visual strategies. In conversation with and parallel to the works of directors who appropriate traditional Japanese theatre such as Ariane Mnouchkine, particularly her Kabuki-style Richard II, Ninagawa’s stage works espouse a chameleon quality in reception. In their visual approaches to Shakespeare, different cultural elements are seen as aesthetic possibilities rather than predetermined responsibilities to any nation-state. As Dennis Kennedy writes, Ninagawa has significantly adapted the components of Noh, Kyogen and Kabuki, which became ‘inauthentic’, and he has created ‘a synthetic or artificial Japan parallel to that Mnouchkine had created a few years earlier’.29 The Ninagawa Macbeth was shaped by a liberal mix of Christian and Buddhist elements, Kabuki dance choreographer Kinnosuke Hanayagi, and the director’s and the actors’ hybrid styles (for instance, in its Kabuki-style witches, the way the nobles and warriors moved more like samurais on screen, and the un-Kabuki-like vocal work of Komaki Kurihara’s Lady Macbeth). This is why a production by Ninagawa in Tokyo might smack of Occidentalism but be accused of Orientalism while on tour to Britain. Scholars and directors have criticized and praised his Occidentalism as a form of empowerment – ‘a declaration of interest from an outsider who

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feels at liberty to appropriate Europe [for his hometown audiences] the way Europe has traditionally appropriated Japan’ – and visual Orientalism that tends to drown out actors’ speeches as a form of selling out.30 Among others, Ninagawa’s contemporary, the director Hideki Noda has criticized his tendency to pander to the international penchant for Japanese exotic visual beauty. Ninagawa’s works have often been labelled Japanesque, which is a cause for both celebration and contestation. Over the years he has vocally objected to criticism of what the critics see as some version of japonisme, a mode catering to Western audiences. He defended his appropriation of Japanese culture and cited approval from practitioners of traditional Japanese theatre: I’ve had very little negative feedback from people involved in the traditional Japanese dramatic arts. The only reason I resort to Japanese or Japanesque modes of expression is because I want Japanese audiences to understand my work. It’s not that I’m using these symbols for the benefit of foreign audiences, and I think the best way to enable my core audience to understand my work is through typically Japanese analogies.31 Kazuo Matsuoka, who translated Titus Andronicus into Japanese for Ninagawa’s 2006 production, suggested that, just like the trajectory of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, ‘what Ninagawa created for the Japanese audience unexpectedly became accepted internationally’. Ninagawa even discounted non-Japanese markets: The aim was to produce a Shakespeare play that could be understood by ordinary [Japanese] people. I wasn’t thinking about appealing to the international market while I was producing the play. But [my producer] Nakane was interested and suggested we go abroad.32 The director has not always been successful, but he has remained brutally honest and faithful to his own visions. When touring to Britain, not all of Ninagawa’s works enamoured audiences, however. His non-Japaneselanguage productions with transnational casts tend to run into uneven terrain in reception. The same theatre critics who wrote rave reviews of the 1985 Ninagawa Macbeth turned hostile when reviewing his Peer Gynt. Even in their otherwise enthusiastic introduction to Michael Billington’s interview with Ninagawa, Maria Delgado and Paul Heritage had to concede that the production ‘was generally regarded as a failed experiment in interculturalism’.33 Ninagawa’s King Lear, starring Sir Nigel Hawthorne, met with

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suspicion as well. Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw opined that at stake in the contrasting fates of Ninagawa’s Japanese and English productions in the UK is not style but language: When the production was in Japanese which the critics could not understand, they loved it. When the production was in English which they understood perfectly well, they hated it. They did not seem to realize, however, that Ninagawa is an extremely consistent artist and his directorial approach to Macbeth was essentially the same as that to Peer Gynt and King Lear. [The critics] loved [the Japanese-language productions] because they were able to concentrate on non-verbal aspects of the productions without being bothered with what the actors were saying.34 While their theory might explain some of the patterns of intercultural reception of Ninagawa’s touring works, it does not capture everything. Ninagawa is one of the ‘great Shakespeareans’ whose careers are chronicled in the present volume not because he is all things to all men, but because of his ability to evoke strong emotional responses to Shakespeare and initiate debates about cultural differences. When his Macbeth premiered in Tokyo in 1980, the Japanese reception was mixed, partly because of his bold attempt to combine several genres in order to break out of the then-siloed approaches to Shakespeare through the distinct forms of Shingeki, Kabuki and other local genres. Even in the UK where most critics embraced The Ninagawa Macbeth, there were critics who voiced their objection. Charles Osborne categorized the production as a ‘bastardisation’ of Shakespeare’s play and suggested that ‘there is something faintly ridiculous in a Japanese company attempting to grapple with Shakespeare’.35 What the theorists and journalists failed to grasp is the fact that most theatre works have a presentational and a representational dimension. The play script is far from transparent. The narrative may be said to be a compelling, or authentic, representation of human nature, but actors and directors use presentational techniques to bring the representation to life. Stephen Orgel intuits that however authentic our texts are assumed to be, they clearly represent something more than the playwright’s mind. Plays have more often been held to be transparent, vehicles for the representation of … history; what is authentic in them – Shakespeare’s perfection – lies in … something behind the play and beyond it that the play brings to life.’36

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If exoticism means unfamiliar perspectives, its potentially alienating effect can create a usefully ironic distance to Shakespeare and to Japanese culture. As Leonard Pronko argues, instead of distancing the spectators from the stage work, exoticism ‘often draws [them] in, intriguing [them] by its colourful differences and, in the case of Kabuki at least, overwhelming [them] with extravagant theatricality … Explosively non-realistic, Kabuki Shakespeare free[s] us from our Euro-centric provincialism.’37 The question of japonisme aside, it should be noted that Ninagawa’s works are enriched by their visual quotation and dislocation of other traditions, including European neo-pictorialism, Giorgio Strehler’s scenography (compare the opening scenes of the Italian and Japanese directors’ versions of The Tempest 1978 and 1987), Kabuki, Noh and Shingeki. As the dominant popular all-male theatre in early twentieth-century Japan, Kabuki was the first vehicle for Japanese interpretations of Shakespeare. Today, Kabuki techniques remain an important element in Ninagawa’s and other directors’ works. One of the most important figures in the Japanese reception of Shakespeare, dramatist and translator Tsubouchi Shoyo (nom de plume of Tsubouchi Yuzo, 1859–1935) published translations of the complete works of Shakespeare in widely read pocket-book format in 1933–5. Along with Yushi Odashima (1930-), Shoyo was one of the two earliest translators who worked directly from Shakespeare’s play text. He translated and adapted Julius Caesar in 1884, which is regarded as ‘an extension of Kabuki’.38 In fact, in this period Shoyo favoured Kabuki as a lens to interpret Shakespeare, and compared Shakespeare to Kabuki playwright Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1653–1725) who was Shakespeare’s contemporary.39 However, Shoyo also translated The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet for the emerging Shingeki (‘new drama’), a new Japanese theatre genre that drew upon nineteenth-century European realist theatre and the dramaturgy of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Eugene O’Neill and other modernists. When the Literary Association (Bungei Kyokai) presented Hamlet based on Shoyo’s text in July, 1911, it became the first full production of the play in Japanese translation. While Kabuki Shakespeare remained popular, there were other voices. When novelist Natsume Soseki reviewed this performance of Shoyo’s Hamlet for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, he commented that the most feasible way to render Shakespeare’s poetry into Japanese was through the poetic style of Noh theatre.40 Indeed Shakespeare soon found a ready home in the classical actor-led stylized genres of Noh, Kyogen, Bunraku (puppet theatre) and Shin Kabuki, and the director-centred modern genres of Takarazuka, Shinpa (also spelled Shimpa) and Shingeki, along

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with the politically charged Shogenkijo ‘little theatre movement’ and antirealist Angura ‘underground’ experimental theatre movement that focus on using actors’ bodies for expressive purposes. Ninagawa started out as a Shingeki actor and became involved in the underground theatre movement. Following on the heels of Kabuki adaptations of Shakespeare was the brief reign of Shinpa Shakespeare. Shinpa is a ‘new school’ that was set up in diametric opposition to the ‘old’ all-male Kabuki conventions and repertoire of historical narratives. Some exemplary Shinpa Shakespeares were the 1901 performance of two scenes from Kohei Hatakeyama’s adaptation of Julius Caesar and productions of Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet by the director, actor and playwright Otojiro Kawakami (1864– 1911) in 1903, all set in contemporary Meiji Japan. Under Kawakami’s leadership, Shinpa became Japan’s first modern theatre with a repertoire of adaptations of Shakespeare and other Western plays in contemporary middle-class settings. The momentum of Shinpa declined during World War II, eventually losing ground to the Shingeki (‘new drama’) which emphasized textual fidelity and translation over Japanized adaptation, but the experimental spirit of Shinpa lived on.41 As a modernist theatre that drew on European realist acting, Shingeki has refocused attention on translated, rather than appropriated, Shakespearean plays performed in their original settings. It thrived during the post-war Allied Occupation of Japan (1945–52) due to censorship of potentially nationalist and feudal elements in Bunraku puppet theatre and Kabuki. Shingeki was therefore actively encouraged by the government, and for several decades Shakespeare was almost synonymous with Shingeki, a form that was perceived by many Japanese audiences to be quintessentially Western in outlook and style. One of the most prominent Shakespearean directors of this genre is Koreya Senda (1904–94), who is one of Japan’s foremost Brechtian artists working with political theatre and plays by Shakespeare, Brecht, Chekhov and Kobo Abe (1924–93). Senda, a Marxist at heart, brought social relevance and topicality to Japanese theatre. While Senda is often seen as the figure who established political Shakespeare in Japan, it should be noted that he was never overly didactic. His work was part of a larger movement in international theatre circles of the mid-twentieth century, initiated in part by the Berliner Ensemble, to bring socialist readings of contemporary issues into Shakespearean performance. As a Shingeki director and actor, Senda held a then-radical view that ‘[Shakespeare] feels closer to us in our own work than the great men of our own tradition: Zeami, Chikamatsu, Mokuami. This is in no way

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related to the fact that our New Theatre [Shingeki] itself appears Western in style. Rather, it truly feels to us that Shakespeare is our contemporary.’42 His 1964 production of Hamlet toured widely within Japan and, along with his philosophy, exerted great influence over the anti-establishment Angura ‘underground’ theatre movement of the decade. Ninagawa, among others, benefited greatly from Senda’s works that showed how Shakespeare was their contemporary and how directors should not be subservient to any tradition.43 In the same decade, the Shogenkijo ‘little theatre movement’ took root in Tokyo-area universities as students and intellectuals reacted against the renewal of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (1960). These movements eclipsed the dominance of Shingeki, a form that Angura and Shogenkijo leaders saw as limiting because of their Westernized literary dramaturgy. The Little Theatre Movement contested the ideal of the fourth wall and the dominant role of play text. It is through this struggle between Western universalism and local perspectives that today’s leading Shakespearean directors of Japan emerged, including Norio Deguchi, Hideki Noda, Tadashi Suzuki and Yukio Ninagawa. For example, Deguchi, founder of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, was renowned for his youthful, low-budget productions of Shakespeare ‘in jeans and T-shirts’. He started producing all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays in a small theatre in the basement of a church in Shibuya, Tokyo, in 1975. By May 1981, he became the first Japanese stage director to complete the task.

‘Japan’ and ‘Shakespeare’ Served Three Ways Throughout the twentieth century there are three approaches to Shakespeare that are not mutually exclusive. The first approach involves localization of a foreign canon. Shakespeare has been assimilated into localized narratives and mise-en-scène to promote anglophone or Japanese cultures, as is the case with Tsubouchi Shoyo’s strategy of using his ‘naturalized’ translation of Julius Caesar in 1884 to promote a progressive political agenda.44 In general, Ninagawa has closely followed Shakespeare’s scripts in translation, and his stage works do not tend to use this approach. Otojiro Kawakami’s 1903 Shinpa adaptation of Othello is another example. Set against the backdrop of the Japanese colonial expansion, the adaptation chronicles General Muro Washiro’s military campaigns. He is sent from Tokyo to put down a native insurrection on Taiwan’s Penghu Islands and ends up killing his wife Tamone, daughter of the Minister of Finance.45 Kawakami’s play participated in the formation of a double colonial gaze

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at a time when Japan looked to other East Asian nations as colonizable subjects while Japan itself was occupying a ‘subaltern’ position in relation to certain Western cultures.46 The country’s rapid post-war development and economic prowess in the 1980s changed the dynamics. Shakespeare has also been recruited as a ‘cultural catalyst’ to help address the needs to revitalize, internationalize or ‘modernize’ certain genres.47 In 1887, the Meiji government set up a committee for theatre reform to modernize Kabuki (Engeki Kairyo Kai) and to make this highly erotic commercial theatre more palatable to Western audiences. Other artists, with different agendas, also set out to bridge Japanese genres and Shakespearean plays. The Western notion of the director and dramaturge plays an increasingly important role in genres traditionally led by actors, such as the male-dominated Kabuki. Actresses joined actors on stage in Kabuki and Noh, sometimes alongside female impersonators (the hitherto standard mode of acting female roles), in experimental productions. At the same time, tighter directorial control of an auteur has also transformed director-centred genres such as Shingeki. Techniques from one particular tradition tend to be applied freely to scenes that are foreign to the tradition. For example, in 1998 Ninagawa directed a production of Twelfth Night at Saitama Arts Theatre outside Tokyo in which he incorporated a Noh stage structure and Heian-era costumes. His other version of the play, The Ninagawa Twelfth Night (2005; 2007; 2009), employed Kabuki techniques such as hayagawari (rapid change of roles). Onoe Kikunosuke V played both Viola and Sebastian, sometimes in rapid succession, and brought a new perspective to both the masculine and feminine identities of Cesario. The actor disappeared as one character and immediately reappeared as another, sometimes with a different costume. Hayagawari was also used in Hamuretto Yamato Nishikie (Japanese Woodblock Prints of Hamlet) directed by Koji Oda, a Kabuki-style co-production between Shochiku and the Tokyo Globe (Tokyo Globe, 1991; Sunshine Theatre, 1997). Here Hamlet and Ophelia were played by the same male actor, Ichikawa Somegoro, who effectively showcased the duality of the psyche of the pair. In fact, Somegoro also played Shiratori Juro (Fortinbras). Innovations do come at a price. According to Izumi Kadono’s study, cuts to their dialogues and the fact that the pair were never seen together in the same scene made it challenging to grasp Ophelia’s inner struggles.48 Innovations can also be seen in Kyogen theatre. Yasunari Takahashi’s well-known Kyogen play The Braggart Samurai (Tokyo Globe, 1991) borrowed material from The Merry Wives of Windsor (the plotline of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page’s deception of Falstaff) to widen the appeal of Kyogen to international

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audiences at the World Shakespeare Congress. As such, it moved Kyogen beyond its comfort zone even though it continued to rely, as traditional performances did, on the star power of the lead actor, Nomura Mansai. Similarly, Genzo’s Merchant of Venice (1885) and Kuniyoshi Ueda’s Hamlet (1982) introduced new dramaturgical concerns and strategies of characterization to the stately grandeur of Kabuki and to the mask theatre of Noh respectively. Ueda is a pioneer who experimented with English-language performances of Noh. His Noh Hamlet used Shakespeare’s lines except for the addition of ‘not’ to Hamlet’s speech: ‘to be or not to be, that is not the question.’ After its premiere in Japan, the production was performed in the US by Ueda and an American cast in 1985. In explaining his motivation to expand Noh practices, Ueda quotes the following principle by Motokiyo Zeami (1363–1443), one of the most important figures in Noh theatre: ‘To write new Noh plays is the life of this art.’49 Ueda went on to create the Noh Othello in English in 1986 and in Japanese in 1992, featuring the renowned Kyogen actor Nomura Mansai as Emilia; this represents a third approach that fuses two or more Japanese and Western genres to cater to the director’s artistic vision or for international touring purposes. Central to the attempts to internationalize Japanese Shakespeare and to bring global Shakespeares to Japan was the Tokyo Globe, a premier indoor venue designed by Arata Isozaki. The Tokyo Globe opened its doors in 1988, a decade before the London Globe was built. A 700-seat arena theatre, the Tokyo Globe hosted important performances from an eclectic range of countries, including Ingmar Bergman’s Hamlet (Sweden), Lin Zhaohua’s Hamlet (China) and Robert Lepage’s The Tempest (Canada). Tadashi Suzuki’s famous adaptation of King Lear was staged there in 1989. In Dennis Kennedy’s and Ryuta Minami’s reckoning, there were thirty-three productions of Shakespeare in Tokyo alone in 1994, more than in London.50 Over a period of fourteen years until it closed in 2002, the Tokyo Globe ‘allowed Japanese Shakespeare an unbridled license that resulted in almost limitless experimentation’, and nearly all of the Japanese performance genres were represented there.51 For example, Tadashi Suzuki combined techniques (graceful walk without lifting feet from the ground) and conventions (blurring of present and past and between dream and reality) borrowed from Kabuki and Noh in his all-male metatheatrical adaptation of The Tale of Lear (1984). His signature training and performance method of the actors stomping or beating the ground with their feet is born from this fusion of physical theatre and traditional Japanese theatres.52

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Ninagawa also took up an active, auteurist role in combining elements from many of these genres to carve a niche. There are crucial differences between Suzuki and Ninagawa, however. Suzuki often uses dialogues from Shakespeare with those from other works. He usefully sums up his own method: Usually an insane person is my main character. The structure of my theatre is that a person with excessive illusions sits alone in a room in real time, … and the texts of … Shakespeare possess him or her. It’s not a drama in which the action follows chronological time. The real drama is what transpires in the consciousness of someone who may just be sitting quietly in one moment of time. … Shakespeare writes speeches that the characters themselves may not understand, but others do. [For example,] there is a gap between the character Macbeth and what he says. I am very sensitive to what lies in that gap.53 Whereas Suzuki incorporates Noh and Kabuki techniques to deconstruct them and to create an ironic distance between form and content,54 Ninagawa, trained as a Shingeki actor, tends to create a strong thread of visual imagery (such as cherry blossoms) and a framing device (such as the family altar writ large) to present established or new Japanese translations of Shakespearean plays in their entirety without changes to the words or cuts. The Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT, established in 1976), Ninagawa Studio (established in 1984) and a large part of the Shakespearean oeuvre now operate as transhistorical and transnational brands.

Career Milestones Born in Saitama to the north of Tokyo in 1935 into a middle-class family as the son of a tailor, Yukio Ninagawa frequented Kabuki and Bunraku performances with his mother. He trained as a painter with the goal of obtaining admission to a visual art program in college, before moving on to a drama school and, upon graduation, becoming a Shingeki actor in the Seihai Company in Tokyo in 1955. His first major role was the queen in Alfred Jarry’s burlesque Ubu Roi. Over the next decade he worked as an actor under various circumstances and became acquainted with such directors and playwrights as Kobo Abe and Ken Kurahashi. His experience as a trainee and subsequently professional Shingeki actor and as a television and film actor was important to his career as a versatile

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stage director. His training in Shingeki theatre and Western dramatic theories of Brecht and Stanislavski does not translate to an ideological embrace of the genre. Instead, he spoke of going on a ‘study abroad’ trip to both the ‘foreign world[s] of Kabuki’ and Shakespeare as he rethought the role of the director in stylized Japanese theatres when he staged The Ninagawa Twelfth Night in Tokyo’s prestigious Kabuki-za Theatre in 2005.55 In his own words, his involvement in Shingeki as a dominant, de facto ‘modern’ theatrical form had prevented him from gaining a full picture of Japanese traditions: They did not teach me anything traditional. We all looked towards Western theatrical techniques. When I decided to become a theatre director, I began to learn about traditional Japanese theatre and tried to get back to it.56 As it turned out, both Kabuki and Shakespeare are useful dramaturgically and interesting artistically because they are ‘foreign’ to Ninagawa’s sensibilities and upbringing. When Ken Kurahashi – under whom Ninagawa was first trained – left the Seihai Company, Ninagawa turned from acting to directing. In 1967 he directed his first play, Nine Chapters from Wolfgang Borchert’s Works, a play that connected the Trümmerliteratur (literature of the rubble) style of this twentieth-century German writer in his opposition to dictatorship and war to the Japanese experience of atrocities and what has come to be known as A-bomb literature (genbaku bungaku).57 Borchert was traumatized by his wartime experiences as a soldier on the Russian frontier during World War II, and he wrote numerous short stories about it after returning home in 1945 to a devastated Hamburg. Ninagawa started his own company in a similarly politically charged environment. His Contemporary People’s Theatre (Gendaijin Gekijo, established 1968) was part of Japan’s Little Theatre movement, and members of the company participated in anti-war protests. They played in non-traditional spaces for live performances such as movie theatres. According to Arthur Horowitz, one of the productions by the company ended with actors entering the auditorium dressed as riot police, an event that provoked the audience to attack the actors. Without any clue to distinguish theatre from reality, the audience assumed that the police had come to arrest them for being affiliated with such a radical group of performers.58 In 1969, Ninagawa staged the young playwright Kunio Shimizu’s Sincere Frivolity, a work that established his reputation as

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a director. During this phase Ninagawa was mainly attracted to contemporary plays by radical Japanese playwrights. While he read some Shakespearean plays as an actor, he never consciously ‘thought of directing translated plays’ or performing Shakespeare. At age 39 he started directing Shakespeare, because he was attracted to the wide range of social strata portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays. He moved from small productions to large-scale commercial theatre in 1974 thanks to a meeting with Tadao Nakane, who was looking for a director to produce Romeo and Juliet for the Nissei Theatre, an ‘intellectual but entertaining’ production that was ‘not for snobs but for ordinary people’. Nakane has become one of Ninagawa’s most important Japanese producers. For the large-scale production of Romeo and Juliet (staged by Toho Company), Ninagawa’s first commercial version of Shakespeare, the director brought in Elton John’s music into the opening scene and torches in a dance scene.59 He also experimented with a variety of aesthetics. However, throughout the years Nakane has played an important role in Ninagawa’s engagement with Shakespeare. Ninagawa continued to work with a diverse repertoire with great success. He received the Grand Prize at the Art Festival in Japan for his production of Matsuyo Akimoto’s Suicide for Love at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo, 1979. Ninagawa went on to establish a number of other companies and groups including the Sakura (Cherry Blossom) Company with Kunio Shimizu in 1972 (which was unfortunately dissolved in 1974) and the Saitama Gold Theater in 2006, a theatre project on personal histories for people over 55 years of age. He was politically active in the early stage of his career. The Contemporary People’s Theatre was succeeded by his new company called Sakura-sha (Sakura Company), and Ninagawa moved from treating drama as ‘purely literary texts’ to a more ‘stage-oriented’ visual dramaturgy.60 The story behind his Sakura Company (Sakura-sha) is particularly compelling. Ninagawa founded the company to commemorate the United Red Army (Rengo sekigun, or the URA) activists, or those whom Shoichiro Kawai calls sympathetically ‘left-wing martyrs’, who were arrested and killed in 1972.61 One of the most radical political groups of the time, the short-lived Japanese armed communist movement has been compared to Italy’s Red Brigades. The URA has been labelled a terrorist group, heroic martyrs and patriots in various literary narratives, documentaries and films. The United Red Army eventually collapsed under its own weight due to its own uncontrolled form of extremism and factions that included anti-American and internationalist fronts. Some Japanese intellectuals were critical of the violent methods, if not ideologies, of the URA. The philosopher and literary

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theorist Kojin Karatani (1941-) wrote an essay entitled ‘On Macbeth’ in 1973 in response to the rise of the United Red Army. Karatani drew parallels between Macbeth’s and the URA’s ideologies, arguing that ideologies often grasp people’s hearts, not the other way around. Under the control of certain ideologies, people can be driven to commit heinous acts.62 The foundation of the Sakura Company drew upon the association between sacrificial death and cherry blossom. The URA and the politically charged era of the 1970s never faded from Ninagawa’s works. Ninagawa brought in sounds of riot police, tear-gas grenades and demonstrators in initial versions of The Ninagawa Macbeth to express his support of the left-wing URA. Toward the end of The Ninagawa Macbeth, he introduced recordings of ‘exploding tear-gas canisters from student demonstrations at Tokyo University in 1969’.63 Indeed Ninagawa confessed: ‘I imagined the warrior chieftains who shed so much blood as members of the terrorist Red Army faction.’64 He reminisced that ‘Macbeth could be a story of my ancestors or even of myself’, because ‘the warriors who repeatedly committed carnage could be our ancestors or even what I might have been’.65 During the year Ninagawa founded the Sakura Company, he had a revelation, thanks to a curious incident which he related in his book A Thousand Knives, A Thousand Eyes. A young man threatened to kill Ninagawa with a knife if the director was not fully committed to theatre. Ninagawa wrote later that the incident has left an everlasting imprint on his mind, propelling him on a bold artistic trajectory. Ninagawa expects ‘a thousand knives’ in the auditorium ‘if there are a thousand young men’, and often reminds himself that he has to ‘produce performances for those thousand knives’.66 While Ninagawa is not known primarily as an activist, he came of age during the politically conscious underground theatre movement. As a result, he has emphasized metatheatricality throughout much of his directorial career. He has also returned to the subjects of war, political turmoil and student protests in some of his Shakespeare productions. The aural and musical landscape of his dream-like 2003 Pericles (National Theatre in London) was a nod to Gower’s prologue about ‘man’s infirmities’ and victims of war. Ninagawa opened his tale of death and rebirth with the sound of aerial bombardment. It is ‘a dream dreamt by modern people in the period of distress immediately after [an unnamed] war’. In this floating dream-world detached from geographical identities, the costumes do not bear traces of any specific culture or period except for, as Shoichiro Kawai points out, ‘the traditional Shinto costume worn by maidens at Diana’s temple’.67

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Over the next decades, Ninagawa worked toward integrating the hitherto separated traditions of Kabuki, Shingeki, underground theatre and commercial productions, each being appreciated for their respective defining characteristics: stylization, text-centric dramaturgy and speech, politics and actors’ star power. In general, he does not participate in the ‘realist’ practice of Japanese actors impersonating Caucasian characters by wearing wigs and prosthetic noses or by replicating every detail of an English production (as, for example, when a 2010 Shingeki Hamlet in Tokyo attempted to copy Peter Hall’s 1965 RSC production including its ebonywalled set). Ninagawa drew upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais to engineer a popular revival of Japanese theatre during the early 1970s. In developing a hybrid Japanese performance style, Ninagawa has also successfully created what has come to be known as his signature aural and visual landmark: exquisite beauty. Another notable feature of his trajectory is a shrinking cast and increased collaboration with actors. His initial engagement with Shakespeare was through large-scale commercial theatre, in partnership with Tadao Nakane. His 1978 Hamlet boasted a cast of 77, but his 1988 production of the same play had a cast of 32 which was, in relative terms, very small. His 1999 King Lear had a cast of 24. Ninagawa has been touring internationally since 1983 when he brought his open-air Medea to Athens in the beautiful translation by Harue Yamagata and with Hira Mikijiro in the title role. In 1987 he toured his Kabuki Medea with an all-male cast to Central Park, New York. The performance at the open-air Delacorte Theater had such drawing power that audiences sat through thunderstorms. Touring has played an important role in the development of his aesthetics after 1985, and so has widespread discussion of his eclectic mingling of different cultural elements from different historical periods. Ninagawa burst onto the international Shakespeare scene with a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Best Director Award for his Macbeth at the National Theatre in London in 1987. Michael Billington, one of the most respected and demanding theatre reviewers, wrote in the Guardian on September 19, 1987, that The Ninagawa Macbeth is the most ‘achingly beautiful’ production he has seen ‘in his whole theatre-going lifetime’.68 After overcoming severe artist’s block and depression in the late 1980s that led to his briefly contemplating retiring from directing, Ninagawa bounced back to what would become the most creative and internationally active phase of his career. His 1987 Tempest dramatized in a metatheatrical frame a group of actors rehearsing the play in the penal colony on the island of Sado. The significance of Sado lies in the fact that the island is where the Noh playwright and founder Zeami was exiled

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during the fifteenth century. The local echoes of Prospero’s role as an auteur received critical acclaim. Ninagawa has gone on to become a household name in Japan, in the UK and in international theatre circles. Some of his most memorable Shakespearean productions in Britain include A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a Zen rock garden in Kyoto (1996), Hamlet (1998; 2004), a major production of King Lear (RSC, 1999–2000) starring Sir Nigel Hawthorne, Pericles (at the National Theatre on the invitation of Trevor Nunn and RSC, 2003), Titus Andronicus (RSC’s Complete Works Festival, 2006), Coriolanus (2007), and Twelfth Night (2009). While his international reputation is largely connected to his stagings of Western classics, Ninagawa has also produced Japanese plays abroad, a continuation of his ongoing interest in modern and contemporary Japanese drama since his time as a young actor. His production of Tango at the End of Winter at the Edinburgh Festival (1991, starring Alan Rickman) was very successful and marked the beginning of a long relationship between Ninagawa and the British producer Thelma Holt. Together with Nakane, Holt produced Ninagawa’s English-language futuristic version of Peer Gynt in 1994 with a mixed cast of Japanese, Irish, Norwegian and Welsh performers. It is useful to note that fame did not translate into a smooth path for the director in financial and artistic terms. Obstacles sometimes led to innovation. When he decided to produce A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1994 in a 150-seat venue, no producer would support him because they did not see any commercial viability in the project. Ninagawa relied on his own money, donations and free meals during rehearsals provided by Nakane. Theseus’ palace in Athens was transformed into a replica of a Zen rock garden in Kyoto, and the fairyland was framed by illuminated streams of sand falling in invisible hourglasses. Designed as an intelligent response to Peter Brook’s version (1970–3) that fascinated Ninagawa, the Japanese production opened up a new vista by bringing such basic and versatile elements of rocks, sand and light together to activate the theme of contrasting social norms and times within Shakespeare’s play. Beijing opera martial clown (wuchou) actor Lin Yung-biau’s Puck performed acrobatics on stage. In contrast to the typically saturated colour symbolism in Ninagawa’s other productions, A Midsummer Night’s Dream experimented with an aesthetics of minimalism, thanks in part to budget constraints. A director with an international profile, Ninagawa has impacted many areas even though he had not travelled extensively abroad until the 1980s, preferring to ‘read about the Adriatic than to swim in it’.69 Since then, he has toured to Greece, Italy, France, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and many

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other parts of Asia and Europe. In the UK, Thelma Holt Ltd’s partnership with Ninagawa since 1990 has benefited both sides and made the Japanese director a mainstay on the English stage. In 2004, Thelma Holt, who had already been awarded a CBE, received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays and Rosette at the Embassy of Japan in the UK in recognition of her contribution to cross-cultural understanding through theatre exchange. Ninagawa has a keen eye for international politics as well. In addition to collaborating with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he has recently revisited his earlier experiment with international casts. In December 2012, he directed a trilingual production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women (presented by Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv in collaboration with the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre). Performed in Hebrew, Japanese and Arabic by an international cast, the production is part of Ninagawa’s effort to reconcile cultural differences. Indeed he had high hopes for change, as he stated in a recent interview: We are gathering together Jews, Palestinians and Japanese in one place and putting on a play. Each group has its own political views and inevitably there’s going to be some friction. I know that staging a play may be a small gesture, like adding a small pebble to a heap of stones. It might not have a grand meaning, but these pebbles can accumulate. It’s a way of expressing hope.70 Reception of Ninagawa’s productions at home and abroad is informed by contrasting domestic and international frames of reference and expectations, even though he has focused on a coherent visual and allegorical language throughout his career. His audiences at home and abroad alike are drawn to his understated but effective visual language and leitmotif as framing device, and to his use of star performers (pop stars Toshiaki Karasawa as Macbeth and Shinobu Otake as Lady Macbeth in New York). He was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the British government in 2002, and is currently dean of the Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music in Japan.

Hearing the Play A keen ear is an ear with keen hearing, an ear that perceives differences … It is the ear of the other that signs. Jacques Derrida71

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It is not an overstatement to say that one goes to the theatre to hear Ninagawa’s production, for he is as much a visual director as a sound engineer. Both the visual and sonic elements make important contributions to his signature metatheatrical framing devices. When interviewed during rehearsals for The Tempest in 1987, he emphasized the significance of soundtrack and music in his work. He regarded himself as a ‘listener’ to foreign cultures.72 Over the past decades, he has used atmospheric, classical music and strong visual motifs in many of his productions to blend elements of familiarity and strangeness. His theatre thus offers both visceral and intellectual experiences. In The Ninagawa Macbeth, the first thing the audience heard were sounds of the gongs typically heard in temples. The gongs initially gave an impression of coherence between visual and aural motifs around the Buddhist altar. Christian music soon joined the scene. The threeminute ‘Sanctus’ of Gabriel Fauré’s (1845–1924) Requiem accompanied the appearance of the two elderly women in ragged clothes praying at the Buddhist altar. An eclectic mix of music from different eras and cultures echoed Ninagawa’s hybrid visual strategies. The opening scene featured temple bells and Fauré, and later on a lone flute accentuated the horror of Macbeth’s command to the assassins to go after Banquo. Some British theatre critics found The Ninagawa Macbeth ‘intensely religious’73 and appreciated the effect of the ‘specifically Christian music’. Michael Ratcliffe believed the music ‘made an effect of heart-breaking pathos against the dark and glittering splendor on stage’.74 In fact, the Sanctus opened and closed Ninagawa’s production and framed the visual framing device on stage. Following Macbeth’s collapse silence ensued. The Sanctus swelled softly as the two old women proceeded to close the shutters. Based on the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead, the Requiem introduced new religious elements into the otherwise Buddhist landscape, as the chorus sang: Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua Hosanna in excelsis.

Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Hosts Full are the heavens and earth with your glory Hosanna in the highest.

In contrast to Verdi’s Requiem and other compositions that are accompanied by strong vocal and instrumental expression, Fauré’s Sanctus is simpler and more intimate in form. The musical minimalism foreshadows the simple visual beauty Ninagawa offers in the production. The Sanctus

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opens with a dreamy, minimalist soft harp figure and violin, and the sopranos sing in a rising and falling melody of only three notes which is repeated by male singers. The sopranos and male singers engage in a duet, responding to each other and building to the forte on ‘excelsis’ and the triumphant ‘hosanna’. Toward the end of the piece, powerful major chords are joined by a horn fanfare, before the sopranos answer in diminuendo as the music softens. The dreamy harp arpeggios reemerge to close the piece. As an agnostic suffering from post-traumatic disorder from his experience of active service in the Franco-Prussian War,75 Fauré plays an important role in The Ninagawa Macbeth, especially when the production went on tour. During an interview in 1902, Fauré elaborated on his view of death as deliverance: It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different.76 The gentle and shimmering Sanctus echoes Ninagawa’s visual motif of cherry blossom. Inspired by Motojiro Kajii’s (1901–32) widely circulated phrase, ‘dead bodies are buried under the cherry trees’, the production associated death with a cherry tree in full blossom. The cherry blossoms symbolize both beauty and death (and the repose of the soul), something which may not register in the minds of British audiences, but Ninagawa’s decision to use a direct translation rather than a localized adaptation of the script of Shakespeare’s Macbeth also introduced unfamiliar narrative patterns into the Japanese audiences’ horizon of expectation. Ninagawa’s rehearsal notes for 5.6 usefully sum up the significance of the Requiem and cherry blossom as the dominant visual and sonic frameworks: ‘memories of cherry blossom at night [morph into] a sensuous invitation to death.’77 Silence is also an important element in Ninagawa’s work. Komaki Kurihara’s Lady Macbeth is a tour de force. A great silence envelops her sleepwalking scene as her high-pitched hysterical laughter fades into sobbing and as she rubs her hands in an imaginary stream. A profound silence frames the moment when she dies, only to be punctuated by Macbeth’s remorse: ‘She should have died hereafter. / There would have been a time for such a word.’ On the other hand, as Daniel Gallimore has

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observed, the volume of music cues the audience in the same ways that film scores or operas do. In Ninagawa’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘we hear the organ getting louder and assume that either Oberon or Titania are about to do something significant.’78 The audience listens not only for the actors’ style of delivery but also to what the music is saying. Ninagawa uses the musical landscape of the Sanctus out of context in order to contrast with the Eastern spirituality represented by the butsudan altar visual metaphor. His strategy undermines both the post-war Japanese emulation of Western high culture and the stereotypical motif of ‘lost’ Westerners finding peace in Buddhism. Ninagawa tends to use slow, atmospheric music in his productions, such as pipe organ, choral music and Hollywood soundtracks. There are, of course, exceptions; his Richard III used rock music. Such archetypal sonic signatures of Western music as the harp and the harpsichord have appeared again in other productions, including The Ninagawa Twelfth Night (2007). The opening scene of his 2003 Pericles featured Barber’s Adagio for Strings that, along with the presence of war victims and sound of aerial bombardment, highlighted the themes of death and post-war rebirth. Western and Japanese music often share the stage. Gower, the medieval narrator, was transformed into a pair of musicians playing a Japanese lute. In the beginning of his Twelfth Night, three children are singing a Japanese version of the Christmas carol ‘Emmanuel’ when a white-faced Count Orsino arrives. Ninagawa is in a privileged position. He now has his own in-house composers to work with him on incidental music and soundtracks for his productions. Another way Ninagawa uses music is to create varying pathways to language and sonic relations between the soundtrack and the lines delivered by his actors. In Romeo and Juliet, the first Shakespearean play he directed in 1974, he used music as a tool to address the shortcomings in his commercial actors who could not remember their lines and, when they did, delivered them without authenticity. Ninagawa reminisced about how he used Elton John’s music to form a visual rhetoric: When they read a line, it sounded like stereotypical samurai speech. The lines just didn’t mean anything. So I thought I should submerge them under Elton John’s music. Then you wouldn’t hear anything when the play started, only sound. I wanted strong contrasts, such as people running, with music coming from everywhere – a sort of visual rhetoric. Otherwise, it would need a rhetoric that comes from Europe or Greece that we don’t have naturally. I still feel that way about it now; I’m still struggling with this disadvantage in our culture – we don’t have a definite

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‘self’, ‘self’ as an agent, an assertive, aggressive self. The core of my artistic struggle is actually to discover such a self.79 In the final scene of his Richard III, Richmond’s concluding remarks on ‘unit[ing] the white rose and the red’ in a ‘fair conjunction’ were again drowned by a visual and sonic chaos. Animal carcasses were dropped onto the stage from above, echoing the same spectacular moment at the start of the production and creating strong visual and aural contrasts with Richmond’s speech, suggesting strongly that chaos would continue to reign despite the union of the Houses of Lancaster and York. Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw are critical of Ninagawa’s strategy, complaining that the directorial bravura of overemphasizing the sonic dimension – against which actors had to battle while delivering their lines – shortchanged talented performers such as Nigel Hawthorne as Lear in the storm scene.80 Daniel Gallimore is more sympathetic to Ninagawa, for ‘the subordination of language and [human] voice’ in relation to music is ‘typical of an era of production in which directors have succeeded translators in importance’.81 In commercial productions of Shakespeare as practised by Ninagawa, there is some risk of marginalizing actors’ voices as the actors compete with the soundtrack to sculpt the characters they are playing. Music plays a role in characterization in Ninagawa’s theatre. Deafening sound effects representing a storm dominated the opening speeches of his Tempest. Before the ‘rehearsal’ began, music from a synthesizer played by the actor who would become Trinculo filled the auditorium. The Director/ Prospero figure picked up a wand to direct the play, signal company members and conduct the musicians. Ninagawa’s score almost always serves programmatic and aesthetic functions. In his 2000 Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck was played by a Beijing opera actor in tandem with a Japanese actor who delivered his lines and wore an identical costume except for a black veil over his face. Puck’s presence was not only signalled by his extraordinary acrobatic performance but also by Beijing opera percussion instruments, but his mischievous character and identity of liaison between different worlds were framed by the simultaneous presence of Chinese and Western music. In Act 2 scene 1, for example, drums and woodblocks typically used in Beijing opera percussions played against synthesized organ music in the background. Ninagawa’s sonic strategy is always part of his visual strategy, and I shall now turn to his visual framing devices.

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Seeing the Play If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me. (Macbeth) By considering the possibility of parentless children and revenge on the inevitable passing of generations through one’s offspring, Macbeth as a historical tragedy dramatizes attacks on the order of time. How might one go about staging this discourse about time? Like Peter Brook, who regarded theatre as iconographic art, and Kurosawa, who combines Noh, American Western and Japanese scroll-painting in his Throne of Blood, Ninagawa often worked from a set of compelling images for each production as if he was a designer.82 As Shoichiro Kawai, chair of the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare series executive committee, astutely observes, one of Ninagawa’s goals is to ‘electrify the audience within the first few minutes of a performance so that they are instantly carried into the play-world’.83 A strong example would be his Richard III, which opened with animal carcasses dropping onto the stage from above against loud pop-rock music, after which a life-size replica of a horse galloped across the stage. This factor of surprise is certainly part of the success of many of his works. The Ninagawa Macbeth was the first Shakespearean play the director transposed to feudal Japan. His producer Tadao Nakane initially suggested the Azuchi castle as a possible setting, for it was built by a warlord who unified Japan in the sixteenth century. Ninagawa then found inspiration from scenes from Japanese daily life: When I went back home and opened up our family butsudan [ancestral altar] to light a candle and pray for my father, at that moment, I thought, ‘this is the right image [for Macbeth].’ I had two overlapping complex ideas: ordinary people watching Macbeth, and a Japanese audience looking at the stage and seeing through it to our ancestors. He elaborated on his synaesthetic experience of a trans-temporal dialogue across different spaces: When I was in front of the butsudan, my thoughts were racing. It was like I was having a conversation with my ancestors. When I thought of Macbeth in this way, I thought of him appearing in the butusdan where

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we consecrate dead ancestors. Then we could change the setting when the witches appear, as in the Japanese expression, ‘To be tempted by time.’ We could create a setting like dusk, neither night nor day, when, according to a Japanese tradition, one often meets with demonic beings.84 Ninagawa was quite specific about his vision of this dialogue not only with the dead in general but with the spirits of his father and brother. The Ninagawa Macbeth is on some level deeply personal, as the director confided: While I was praying [at our family altar] I recalled my dead father and elder brother and I felt as if I was conversing with them. At that time it occurred to me that if the drama of Macbeth were a fantasy which developed from a conversation with my dead ancestors, then this could really be my own story. Those warrior chieftains who shed so much blood could so easily be my ancestors, or they might even be what I might have been.85 This imaginary conversation informs a set that is evocative of a sense of spirituality. Giant sculptural warrior-god figures serve as the backdrop to Malcolm and Macduff’s meeting. A family Buddhist altar the size of the proscenium greeted the audience as they walked into the theatre. The screen doors were still closed. Larger shutters further divided the audience and the dimly lit stage. While the visual framing device suggests a Buddhist interpretation of Macbeth, the aural landscape is more complex. Accompanied by the Requiem, two mysterious old crones hobbled onto the stage to pray to the altar and to open the shutters (and the play) in full view of the audience. Throughout the performance, they sat on either side of the altar that served as a stylized curtain. They watched the play with the audience. They served as stagehands and as mostly detached gatekeepers. They ate, drank, sewed and even nodded off. One of the roles they play is in fact a silent chorus. They wept when Macbeth said ‘my way of life / Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’ and at his ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech. The two anonymous women may be praying to comfort their ancestors, to appease evil spirits like those in the ensuing performance contained within the altar, or to find spiritual shelter from their traumatic past. They may be hallucinating or dreaming, bringing us what amounts to an old wives’ tale or even a tale of their ancestors. They serve as witnesses, in a

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similar fashion to the character of the waki in Noh theatre, to the heinous acts on stage and mediators between the audience and the play. Given that most actions are confined within the Buddhist altar, Macbeth could be seen as dreams based on their memories or divine revelations to them. Their utter disregard of the Requiem and their aloofness served as an important contrast to the earnestness and gravity of actions inside the screen doors of the altar. As Malcolm delivered the play’s final lines, the old women began to close the shutters. However, they did not close the play. They merely separated the worlds of Macbeth and the audience and returned the performance space to the same state it had been before the show started. Their existence outside the play’s narrative time parallels Macbeth’s attacks on the order of time. In conjunction with the lighting, the sliding shutters and the screen doors separate the stage into two venues for physical and allegorical actions. Action that is farther removed from the mundane takes place behind the screens. The witches initially appear behind the semi-transparent screen doors, visible through lighting and lightning. Banquo is murdered there and that is where the apparitions are seen. When Banquo’s ghost appears at Macbeth’s banquet, it replaces the warrior-god statue on a pedestal upstage, and the entire banquet scene, including the courtiers, is encased behind the screens. Jolted by Banquo’s ghost out of the semblance of guiltfree peace he works so hard to maintain, Macbeth opens the screen doors and steps ‘outside’ and therefore downstage. Fleance escapes the assassins to this area that seems disconnected from the violent world behind the screens. Intimate scenes and casual discussions also take place in front of the screen doors; Lady Macbeth follows Macbeth here and urges him to return to the banquet to entertain his guests: ‘You do not give the cheer: the feast is sold’ (3.4.32). One of the most striking visual strategies is the use of candles in Act 5 scene 5, which opens with a single flickering candle on a dark stage, reminding the audience of Lady Macbeth’s candle in her sleepwalking scene. As Macbeth mourns the passing of Lady Macbeth and the passing of time, more candles are lit on the stage floor, accentuating Macbeth’s important moment of self-discovery. Macbeth lights the candles around him methodically in order to, according to Ninagawa, ‘conquer his fears’,86 only to engage in futile attempts to extinguish the ever-burning candles later on. This circle of inextinguishable candles creates an ironic distance between redemption and Macbeth’s speech: ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.’ He is encircled by the candles as he speaks ‘Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow’ (5.5.23–4). Evident here again

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is Ninagawa’s signature approach to creating a sense of estrangement through what would otherwise be quotidian objects. The candles may represent lost souls including the Macbeths, soldiers who will die in the next scene, and those Macbeth has already killed. Ninagawa elaborates on Macbeth’s feverish collection of the candles: ‘His behavior appears just like that of a child who cannot feel at peace until he gathers all his toys around him.’87 The visual arrangement of the candles also evokes the thousands of stone statues of Buddha at Adashino Nenbutsuji Temple, an eighteenth-century Buddhist temple on a hill overlooking Kyoto. From the Heian (794–1185) to Edo (1603–1868) periods it was the site where those who could not afford proper burial rites dropped their dead. The stone Buddhas tend to the dead without graves and pray for their souls. There was something for everyone in this production when it was staged in Japan and abroad, but it also challenged audience members to grapple with their limitations. Self-motivated audiences may gain a passing acquaintance with a wider array of performance idioms and cultural themes when enough clues are available, but audiences may also force new meanings on the works that cannot be ignored. The framework of Macbeth offers spectators who are familiar with the play some semblance of control over the exotic performance event. On the other hand, the sheer grace of a backdrop of cherry blossoms can serve up shocking twists and contrasts to the dark tragedy and blood. Playgoers who are unfamiliar with the connotations of cherry blossoms might see the set as an expression of beauty and a marker of Japanese identity. Macbeth thus becomes a twice-told and doubly removed story: framed by what some critics have called unabashed self-Orientalism and a problematic departure from Shakespeare, despite Ninagawa’s attempts to ‘upset the European Orientalism of Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine’.88 The production has garnered praises for its creation of a contact zone to emancipate Japanese and Shakespearean aesthetics and, at the same time, been criticized for its Occidentalist or Orientalist penchant. The divided, trenchant views about Ninagawa’s works reflect ongoing anxieties about globalization and the challenges it poses to cultural policy and products.89 Visual framing devices shoulder a large part of the burden to surprise the audience with delight and unexpected spectacles. Ninagawa’s aspiration as a visual artist before he ventured into the theatre circle informs many of his stage works, even though he has changed career paths. For example, his 2012 production of Cymbeline in London featured Roman scenes with a painting of the Capitoline wolf statue and Japanese courtiers. His 1985 Macbeth and 2001 Macbeth are likewise full of visual surprises and symbolism, with many

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photogenic scenes cut for perfect painterly moments. Peter Barnes (1931– 2004), whose adaptation of Kunio Shimizu’s (1936–  ) Tango at the End of Winter was produced by Ninagawa in Edinburgh and London in 1991, compared the Japanese director to Bergman, Strehler and Brook, writing that his ‘directorial trademark is spectacularly choreographed stage effects – snowstorms, cherry blossoms, rivers, peacocks, and great chariots flying across the heavens’.90 Japanese directors and scholars tend to agree with this assessment regardless of whether they think positively or negatively of Ninagawa’s signature approach. His 1999 King Lear, an English-language intercultural work co-produced with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, featured a rising sun in the backdrop, techniques from Noh and Kabuki styles, Nigel Hawthorne in the title role, and Hiroyuki Sanada as an androgynous Fool. The scene of the blinded Gloucester being led by his disguised son Edgar evoked a Japanese watercolour. Metatheatricality is at the core of many of Ninagawa’s productions. He prepares the audiences to take on the play-world through pre-show action (e.g. in The Tempest and Titus Andronicus) and through creative visual framing devices (Hamlet). Before curtain time for Titus, audiences rubbed shoulders with actors in Roman costumes who were warming up and walking in the aisles. The storm scene in The Tempest was framed by two pine trees that cordoned off a playing space for a play-within-a-play. Miranda watched the storm and the ship from the branch of one of the trees. Like his Twelfth Night but on a larger scale, the tempest in this production featured stylized presentations of a ship on the high sea, symbolized by a large blue blanket manoeuvred by the actors. The production itself had a provocative subtitle that signalled its metathatrical links to Ninagawa, Zeami and artistic creativity: A Rehearsal of a Noh Play on the Island of Sado. Just like the 1995 Hamlet, the production of The Tempest began with a conceit of scripted rehearsal. Actors and company members including Ninagawa himself milled about the stage as the audience walked into the auditorium. The audience then witnessed the onstage transformation of the ‘director’ of the Noh theatre company from a businessman in suit and tie into an actor. Once the director picked up his wand and inhabited the role of Prospero. The seamless but conscious blending of the figures of director and Prospero is further signalled by his use of the wand. After he reappeared onstage in a black robe which is Prospero’s costume, he gathered the actors around him and waved the wand to, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, trace a magic circle on the stage with his staff while wearing his magic robe. In the 1995 Hamlet, the audience saw actors busy preparing for the performance in cubicles in the dressing rooms onstage before the show

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started. Ophelia followed the Japanese custom of arranging ornate hina dolls – a pastime for ladies at the court and now part of the Dolls’ Festival in March celebrated by Japanese families. The dolls would eventually be set afloat to carry misfortunes away so that the family’s daughters can grow up healthily and happily. Since the dolls represent hope, Ophelia’s giving away dolls rather than flowers in her mad scene carried with it a grave tone. The metaphorical connection between drowning – dolls adrift – and despair was also evident. In the play-within-a-play scene, performers sat on a tiered platform resembling a hina dolls cabinet. They formed a human tableau and drew attention to the artificiality of the performance. The audience’s attention was redirected away from the representational aspect of theatrical realism to the presentational aspect of Ninagawa’s metatheatrical narrative.

A Shattered Mirror A single mirror will no longer suffice to reflect our complex world. My production of The Tempest can be likened to be crossing and intermingling reflections of a shattered mirror. Yukio Ninagawa91 In Ninagawa’s 2005 Twelfth Night, the back of the entire stage was lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. As devices that allowed the actors and even audiences to see themselves through the eyes of the other, the mirrors highlighted the themes of doubling and mirroring in Shakespeare’s play. Throughout his career, Ninagawa has been in search of a definable cultural self-identity, ‘an agent, an assertive, aggressive self’ in his own words.92 Through the physical and metaphorical mirrors he has found some answers, and he draws attention to the multilayered relations between the spectator and the performer, and between seeing and being seen. Ninagawa’s signature metatheatrical framing and use of exoticized stylized Kabuki, Noh and Bunraku techniques may seem radical, but his works shed light on an often over-looked aspect of English Shakespeares: the naturalized filtration through realism and naturalism. Both stylized Asian theatres and Western realist techniques are governed by their respective stage conventions, but from a Western perspective the conventions of realist theatre can sometimes seem so transparent due to their familiarity that one is no longer able to see how realistic the stage presentation really is. Ninagawa’s unrelenting pursuits of spectacular framing devices have allowed him to stay very close to Shakespeare’s scripts in translation

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with little cuts or transposition while extrapolating artistically interesting messages from the text. He explained: I had to find a technique which would connect with the thought-patterns of Japanese people by rearranging the play to use visual images in a Japanese style, without changing the words from the original [in translation] except to take some proper nouns out of the play. This is why I get angry if somebody describes my plays as ‘Japanesque’. I have attempted to introduce to a Japanese audience my impression of Shakespeare.93 He has mostly worked with direct translations of Shakespeare’s plays (in many instances keeping proper names intact, in Japanese transliteration) rather than adaptations or rewritings. This faithfulness to Shakespeare’s text should be qualified. Even though Ninagawa does not tend to alter or rearrange the play text, he does impose Japanese frameworks upon the play. As he explains: When I direct a Shakespeare play, I basically present it as it was originally written by the author. However, as far as what is not written is concerned, I think I am free to behave in whatever way I like. It is for this reason that I put into the production more than is actually written in the original text.94 The distinction between verbal and non-verbal signs in theatre works is an important one, one that has empowered modern directors, and particularly Ninagawa, to engage in meaningful conversations with classical drama.

Video clips and notes of Yukio Ninagawa’s productions can be viewed on the Global Shakespeares open access digital video archive, ed. Alexander C. Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson at globalshakespeare.mit.edu. If you have a smart phone or tablet, scan this QR code to go directly to the companion webpage to this chapter. QR code apps are free and can be downloaded from the app stores for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry platforms.

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Chapter 4

Robert Lepage Margaret Jane Kidnie and Jane Freeman Robert Lepage first claimed international recognition in 1985 with The Dragons’ Trilogy, a six-hour ‘lyrical epic about the meeting of cultures’,1 set in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, and stretching from 1910 through to the time of performance. It was performed by six Québécois actors in three languages (English, French and Chinese), with each actor playing multiple roles. The production was devised by the actors with Lepage and, like many of Lepage’s shows, it continued to evolve over the course of its tour, with ‘complete characters sometimes disappear[ing]’ only to return elsewhere in the narrative later in the run.2 The great strength of The Dragons’ Trilogy was its use of movement and visual symbolism to convey the intensity of ordinary lived experiences. At one moment in the action Stella, a girl disabled through childhood meningitis, is taken by her mother to live in a mental hospital. Stella was played by Lorraine Côté, who doubled as the nun who gave Stella’s mother instructions for her daughter’s institutionalization. Since there was no time between these scenes for an offstage change, Côté wore Stella’s costume under the nun’s tunic, and the transformation from one character to another was played out in front of the audience: Jeanne, Stella’s mother, undressed the nun, one piece at a time, and placed each piece of clothing in her daughter’s suitcase, so that Lorraine was gradually transformed into Stella. To make it believable and to justify the transformation, we had to invent a whole story to go with it: the cornet became a symbol for the mind, the surplice a symbol for the heart, and so on … [I]t became one of the most beautiful moments of the entire six hours of the Trilogy. All because one actor didn’t have the time to change costumes.3 As one reviewer who saw the show late in its tour recounts, Lepage and company create more than images, they create a complete physical language … An old leather bag becomes the means to recount

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a life. Coins and an umbrella offer a succinct fable. Shoe boxes become a town. And soldiers in ice skates, of all things, impart the bravado and terror of war.4 The Dragons’ Trilogy is in many respects a signature piece for Lepage. Strongly imagistic, endlessly evolving, collaboratively developed, and richly inspired by objects, memories and past performances brought into the rehearsal room as creative ‘resources’, it is entirely typical of both his innovative creative processes and his ability to move audiences emotionally through peculiarly theatrical forms of story-telling. As Marie Gignac, the show’s dramaturge and one of its six original actors, explains, it was here that the company developed its ‘langage artistique’ and began to explore themes such as the search for personal and cultural identity and encounters between the self and other that remain preoccupations in Lepage’s subsequent work for the stage.5 It also earned for Lepage comparisons to the stagecraft of Peter Brook. Irving Wardle, reviewing The Dragons’ Trilogy for The Times when it toured to London in 1987, described it as a ‘masterpiece’: ‘When I first saw it in Toronto last year, I compared [Lepage] to the young Peter Brook. Given the show’s subsequent growth I would like to amend that comparison to the mature Peter Brook.’6 The Dragons’ Trilogy launched Lepage onto the world stage as a member of an elite avant-garde, ranking alongside the likes of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Robert Wilson as a director in quest of ‘a radically non-traditional form of theatre’.7 Brook himself has celebrated Lepage’s innovative approach to performance, writing in 1996 after the Québec premiere of The Seven Streams of the River Ota that ‘Robert Lepage and his collaborators … seek to create a theatre where the terrifying and incomprehensible reality of our time is inseparably linked to the insignificant details of our everyday lives … For this, they are experimenting with a theatrical language where today’s technology can both serve and sustain the humanity of a live performance. What a splendid task! What heroic ambition!’8 Clear and significant continuities exist between shows such as The Seven Streams and The Dragons’ Trilogy and Lepage’s multiple stagings of plays by Shakespeare. The ‘theatrical language’ to which Brook refers shapes devised and scripted pieces alike. Denis Salter suggests that Lepage’s inventiveness grows out of a frustration with ‘the limitations of theater’ (an insight supported by Lepage’s ready admission that he is inspired more by ‘theatricality than theatre itself’) and yet despite this ‘impatien[ce] with the language of the stage … again and again he comes back to the theater

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– and back, as everyone must, to Shakespeare’.9 Lepage has directed Shakespeare’s plays in French, English and Japanese and he frequently directs the same play several times, with different groups, in different languages. Early in his career, he directed a version of Coriolanus called Coriolan et le monstre aux mille têtes (Coriolanus and the Thousand-Headed Monster, 1983), Le Songe d’une nuit d’été (1988) and a bilingual Romeo and Juliette [sic] (1989). In 1992–3, he directed three versions of Macbeth in the space of twelve months: the first in a workshop production with students at the University of Toronto’s Hart House Theatre;10 the second with Théâtre Repère actors in the Shakespeare cycle using Michel Garneau’s French tradaptation (translation-adaptation); and the third in Japanese at the Tokyo Globe Theatre in 1993. The 1992 Shakespeare cycle also included productions of La Tempête and Coriolan. In 1992, he directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream in English at the Royal National Theatre (NT) in London (achieving the distinction of being the first North American ever to direct Shakespeare at the NT) and he returned to this comedy a third time, once again in French, in 1995. Elsineur, his one-man staging of Hamlet (which was also performed in English as Elsinore), opened in Montreal in 1995 and toured internationally until 1997 in both French and English versions. His staging of Thomas Adès’s opera The Tempest at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2012 was his eighth encounter with this play, including productions in French (1992, 1998), Japanese (1993) and in French and Innu in collaboration with the Huron-Wendat nation (2011). His ongoing exploration of the plays of Shakespeare coincides with other, diverse creative projects – and his output is prodigious. The bilingual Romeo and Juliette was one of fifteen different projects in 1989 – the same year he began a four-year tenure as Artistic Director of the Théâtre français at the National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa.11 In 1994, in addition to directing Strindberg’s Ett Drömspel (A Dream Play) in Swedish in Stockholm and Michael Nyman’s Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs (an operatic adaptation of The Tempest) at the Tokyo Globe Theatre, Lepage opened his epic Seven Streams of the River Ota at the Edinburgh International Festival. In 1994 he also founded his multidisciplinary production company, Ex Machina. The following year he starred in Elseneur, returned to Le Songe d’une nuit d’été in Montreal and directed his first feature film, Le Confessionnal. There is no aspect of performance in which he is not interested. He cites the performance art of Laurie Anderson as one of his influences (she composed original music for Lepage’s Far Side of the Moon in 2000), he has directed Peter Gabriel

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concerts (1993, 2002), staged opera at Covent Garden (Loren Maazel’s 1984 in 2005) and the Met (Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 2010–12 and the Adès Tempest in 2012) and he has written and directed shows for Cirque du Soleil that, in the words of one reviewer, ‘redefine the possibilities of theater itself’ (KÀ in 2005 and Totem in 2010).12 Lepage was born in 1957 in Quebec City and he studied at that city’s Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique from 1976–9. In the early 1980s, he joined the experimental Théâtre Repère, led by Jacques Lessard. Lepage’s commitment to both devised and touring productions led to increasing strain within the group until in 1989 he and a few other founding Repère artists broke with the original company, Lepage to take up his position at the NAC.13 Lepage’s company, Ex Machina, has developed new work at La Caserne – a custom-built production centre in Quebec City – since 1997 but, although he self-identifies as Québécois, he has never been regarded, or regarded himself, as either a Québécois or Canadian cultural export.14 His internationalism is in part what distinguishes him as a director. He has long been fascinated with East Asia and the cultural fabric of the countries of this region frequently informs the look and feel of his devised and Shakespearean stagings alike. The Dragons’ Trilogy, which portrays three generations of immigrant experience across three Canadian Chinatowns, opens with voices in the dark saying ‘I’ve never been to China’, and London critics watching his Dream seven years later at the NT were struck by the show’s indebtedness to Indonesian art and culture. The Seven Streams of the River Ota, Lepage’s first major piece with Ex Machina, opens in Hiroshima. His commitment to internationalism extends far beyond fictional location and theatrical aesthetics. His collaborators – both artistic and financial – are often from outside of Quebec and Canada and he spends an immense amount of time abroad, both touring his shows and directing in foreign theatres as an invited artist, often in languages he himself does not speak. His interest in the world beyond the borders of Quebec and Canada has also led him to accept offers of work purely on the basis of location.15 For Lepage, who liked maps at school and at one time wanted to become a geographer, the fact that he is ‘so obsessed by touring’ represents something more than a desire to reach international audiences. He explains, ‘Crossing geographic borders is also a way of crossing artistic borders’, a means to ‘explore and better understand my own way of working’.16 It is also, in part, a particular kind of response to what he describes as the insular language politics and cultural protectionism of Québécois Canada.17 His construction of himself as a participant in a global village is thus less driven by potential markets for a theatrical product than

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by the process through which he stimulates and evolves his own theatrical sensibilities. The enduring image from his solo performance piece Needles and Opium (1991), fittingly, is an image of travel, with Lepage suspended high above the stage in a notional transatlantic no-man’s land. Travel gives Lepage the occasion to immerse himself in widely diverse theatrical traditions – to compare approaches, to experience different kinds of feedback loop between actors and audiences, to understand better how space and movement take on culturally specific meanings – and this artistic exchange lends him an unusually experimental perspective on Shakespeare, a dramatist whose plays sometimes uneasily bridge cultural and national divides.

Theatre as Process Lepage’s experimentation is driven by a conception of theatre as a ‘meeting place’ for creative arts as various as ‘architecture, music, dance, literature, acrobatics, play and so on’.18 Dialogue is one part of the creative whole, but unlike some other companies that workshop new stagings, Lepage and his collaborators are not explicitly working towards the completion of a script that might be published in print. Rehearsals are often filmed, allowing Lepage to explore objects and to improvise dialogue as two separate, but related, processes. At some moment, ‘all these kinds of ideas, whether they’re textual or imagistic, naturally or eventually, connect’ and as metteur en scène (literally, one who puts things on the stage), Lepage begins ‘sculpting’ the ‘chaos’, determining which parts of the story to communicate through images or words.19 In shows that tour (and most of Lepage’s shows tour extensively), this crafting of the piece continues throughout the run. Although Lepage tries to get every show to a certain level of development before making it public, ‘the real work starts’ on opening night: ‘I try to do my best for the opening night always but I know that it will be in a much better shape in a year, in two years from now … [Audiences and critics] have learnt to say, well we’ve seen phase one or we’ve seen version one … and they take pleasure [in] seeing how the work evolves and how their personal input actually has an impact.’20 Audiences, in effect, are factored into the rehearsal process and depending on when they see the show on tour, spectators see a more, or less, polished product. Lipsynch, for example, ran at about five hours when it first opened in 2007. By the time it returned to Montreal in 2010 from a world tour, it was nearly nine hours long and broken into seven

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acts, each divided by a twenty-minute interval and with one dinner break of forty-five minutes.21 Elsinore, by contrast, Lepage’s one-man staging of Hamlet, had a running time of three and a half hours when it was first performed in French in Montreal in 1995, but ran at half that time by the time it reached London in English the following year. The sequencing of scenes was altered yet again when Peter Darling took over the role and, as archival recordings and published scripts demonstrate, the show continued to evolve between Darling’s performances of the show in Ottawa, Canada and New York in September–October 1997.22 This method of working creates its own challenges. In terms of personal ego, as John Tusa describes in his preliminary comments to a BBC Radio 3 interview with Lepage, it requires ‘toughness of character as well as a strongly grounded personal philosophy’ to allow a show to evolve from critical rejection on its first outing to popular acclaim as much as four years later.23 In terms of logistics, the company frequently needs to ship sometimes bulky props and set pieces around the world that they may, or may not, use at some point in the run. Lepage’s tendency to discover and create a production during rehearsals occasionally requires him to cancel an opening night or, in at least one instance, to go ahead with a performance that should have been cancelled or explicitly reconceptualized as a workshop event: reviewing the notorious 1994 Edinburgh premiere of The Seven Streams for the Daily Telegraph, Charles Laurence reports that it ‘[o]verran by two hours, the scenery went haywire and there were long scenes in Quebecois French’.24 Andy Lavender studies three very different versions of Hamlet directed by Lepage, Brook and Robert Wilson and notes that each of them ‘was developed through a collaborative, partly improvisational rehearsal process. Each required extensive development time, much of it in the rehearsal room physicalizing ideas or instincts. Each process prizes the operation of intuition.’ Rather than describing these artists as ‘auteur’ directors, Lavender presents Lepage, Brook and Wilson as ‘expert facilitators of the work of a range of collaborators’.25 This level of collaboration is hard to accommodate when Lepage is working apart from Ex Machina as a guest director, since the process often takes more time than is provided by Equity rehearsal guidelines. Lepage comments that current theatrical practices have a ‘tendency to prepare all theatrical dishes in the same way … The need for different recipes is never acknowledged: it’s always three weeks of rehearsal in English Canada and six to eight in Quebec.’26 One of the ways he creates extra time for discovery is to direct multiple productions of the same play, thus measuring a process of experimentation in

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months and even years, rather than weeks. When asked by a Financial Post reporter why he was directing a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the University of Toronto when he was planning to direct the same play with his own company later in the year, Lepage explained: ‘A Shakespearean play isn’t like a painting, it’s like a sculpture; if you turn it around, you keep seeing different things.’27 Returning to Shakespeare’s plays multiple times and through different lenses is a fundamental principle for Lepage and one that grows out of his application to his own work of Anna and Lawrence Halperin’s RSVP Cycles – the acronym stands for Resources, Score, Valuaction (an ongoing and dynamic response to the score, sometimes glossed as reVised) and Performance.28 The point is not to reinvent a play each time out, but to create opportunities to explore it from new angles and to build on past experiences: each combination of cast members, in particular performance circumstances, releases different elements of the plays. Lepage’s 1988 Montreal staging of the Dream, for example, came explicitly to serve as a ‘resource’ on which he drew when he returned to the play in English at the NT in 1992 and traces of both of these stagings carry over into his second Montreal production of 1995. Aleksandar Saša Dundjerović tracks Lepage’s ‘gradualist’ methodology across these three productions, illustrating how the second Montreal staging continued to play with and work through conceptual tangles encountered three years earlier. In particular, he notes how the visual design of the 1995 Dream created a clear space for the world of the court by introducing ‘a wooden stage that opened to reveal a deep pool of water’.29 The NT production had trouble suggesting this more formal world, as Lepage explained in conversation with Richard Eyre, because ‘[w]e had tons of mud on stage and you just don’t strike mud. So we were kind of stuck with that, which is why we started to have court people walking on chairs.’30 A working practice that returns to past productions as a means to inspire and enrich a current project is fundamental to Lepage’s dramaturgy. ‘What we are really doing is working in layers on the same object to make a more complete picture each time’, he explains, and the goal, ultimately, is to ‘do a definitive production, having finally learned what [the play is] about. It’s a huge undertaking, which you can’t do with only six or eight weeks of rehearsal and in a single go.’31 When Lepage works on classical drama – and his career has been punctuated with a recurrent interest in the plays of Shakespeare – he brings to rehearsals the same bifurcated fascination with language and images that he brings to devised pieces. For actors trained in classical English theatre, this method of working can be variously disorienting and

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exhilarating. Sarah D’Arcy, who played Cobweb in Lepage’s NT Dream, notices how Lepage’s approach differs from that of other directors: ‘Usually you do a read-through, then you’re blocking the production and discussing the text … His concern is not beautifully spoken verse. The physical world of the play is very important.’32 Instead of beginning with a study of the text in an effort to determine intention or psychological motivation, Lepage typically begins by exploring the images and sensory emotions that the play summons up for the cast. From there, he moves into improvisations, movement work and physical play, especially with props and lighting, as a way intuitively to access the ‘guts [and] emotions’ that are already in the words. When he was working on Macbeth in Toronto, he wanted the audience to experience the chill of a night scream, to remember the feeling of blood on the hands, to hear metal, to smell fire, to sense the feeling of ambition. The audience cannot experience this visceral response unless the actors do and, for Lepage, actors find it through non-verbal and instinctive, rather than literary and cerebral, approaches to Shakespeare’s language. This heuristic process is truly collaborative: his actors, working as a group, unearth some of the play’s essential elements and his function as director is to determine which discoveries to build on and which to put aside. As he explained in interview during rehearsals for the NT Dream, this way of working with actors as co-creators can be at odds with a prevailing ‘sense of respect for the director in British theatre’ that Lepage describes as ‘a nuisance’: ‘I come in with some specific ideas, but I try to get the idea across that they’re going to be doing it. After a couple of weeks of rehearsal now, they get the idea that they have to invent if the show’s going to look like something that they have done.’33 By building a show on the meanings, ideas, impressions and images generated by the cast, he makes each production organic to its group of creators. This process of group discovery is a vital part of all his work, whether he is working on a new play or an established one. The creative goal is to let a show emerge through rehearsal – to discover it through rehearsal – rather than impose on it from the outset a directorial concept.34

Rehearsal Methods: Discovering a Show Lepage’s 1992 Hart House Macbeth – the first play of Shakespeare’s that he directed in English – gave him an early opportunity to explore this tragedy and his discoveries helped to shape not only this staging, but the

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productions he subsequently directed in French in Quebec and in Japanese in Tokyo. The description that follows of his rehearsal strategies in Toronto indicates how, as a director, he facilitates a form of group creation that includes, but goes far beyond, work on text. The audition process functioned in the manner of a workshop, allowing actors to become aware of what they already knew about this play. The auditions took sixteen hours: two eight-hour days with half of the cast present on each day. Although he led the two groups through the same exercises on each day, the differences in the participants yielded differences in the activities. Many of the activities were physical and done in groups, requiring the actors to work as a cohesive unit and with an emphasis on non-verbal, intuitive creativity. Early on each of the two days, Lepage put the actors in a circle for a complete read-through of the play. Instead of asking actors to read for particular roles, he asked them to take turns around the circle, reading one speech per person, until the play was finished. During this reading, he set out to ‘find the hotspots of Macbeth’ by inviting all of the actors to join in whenever they heard a line that moved them or resonated for them in some way. When the reading was complete, he asked the actors to lie on the stage and close their eyes and he instructed them to turn their attention away from the words they had just read to concentrate on the images that the reading brought to their imagination. These could be images of the staging of a specific scene, of an item, or of an image that was raised, possibly even repeated, in the text itself. He then put a long piece of mural paper down on the stage, provided the actors with magic markers and asked them ‘to draw the kinds of intuitions and images which the play gave them’.35 The effects of this activity were formative: ‘They all felt compelled to draw swords, daggers, cauldrons, bells, crowns’, a consistency of response that shaped his own perception that ‘the play comes out of a world of metal, of iron’. This particular discovery had a profound impact on the production’s set. Lepage had come to rehearsals with a rough draft of a set in mind, the main feature of which was a rectangular platform halfway between upstage and down and parallel to the apron. After the mural activity and its discoveries, he decided to add a metal subway grate to the platform and metal to the soles of the actors’ shoes. The sound of metal on metal became part of the soundscape of the show not only during sword fights but also when actors walked across the grate. At the end of the mural activity, after the actors had finished drawing, Lepage listed their images on a flip chart and asked them to get in groups of two or three to prepare an improvised scene inspired by those images.

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The scene could be related to events in Macbeth or not, as the actors chose. These drawings, and the improvisations they provoked, were essential to all aspects of the production of Macbeth that developed. Throughout the Hart House rehearsal process, Lepage brought the cast together to watch several filmed versions of Macbeth: Polanski’s and Orson Welles’ films, the Royal Shakespeare Company version starring Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. After each viewing, he gathered the cast around the same piece of mural paper to superimpose the new images that came to mind. With this single, simple exercise, the cast tapped into some of the play’s deepest preoccupations and provided creative material that continued to serve as a resource for Lepage when he returned to the play in his three-part Shakespeare Cycle. He used a version of this same mural exercise at the NT in 1992.36 He brought the cast together six months before rehearsals began for two weeks of workshops on Dream. This time, without first reading the drama as a group, he asked the actors ‘to describe their dreams and draw them on a huge collective map, relating them to excerpts from the play’.37 They then, in Lepage’s words, ‘ha[d] fun’ improvising around the ‘recurrences’ they found among their dream associations. All study of Shakespeare’s language was deferred until the end of the two-week period, at which point ‘we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and there it was: full of water and mud and staircases and upside-down forests and all sorts of things that came from the dreams’.38 Once again the exploration of images through the mural activity informed his set design: the ‘wide but shallow pool of water filling the greater part of the Olivier stage, surrounded by wet mud flats in and on which the lovers’ quarrels were conducted’39 grew organically out of a collective process of exploration. Lepage typically comes to rehearsals with a sense in mind of a set, a quality of movement and what he describes as a show’s energy – a combination of practical and aesthetic considerations that together shape his choice of daily warm-ups. Whereas the cast of The Dragons’ Trilogy started with Tai Chi every day, the sustained harness work in Needles and Opium required intensive physical conditioning to enable Lepage ‘to get to the point of being able to create the impression of flight’.40 The London cast of Dream, by contrast, became proficient in acrobatics (handstands, cartwheels, backflips), even though they only used in performance ‘the physical alertness this training produces’.41 As Alison Reid (Peaseblossom) commented at the time of the NT production, ‘He expects an awful lot [physically] from the actors and I think that’s a good thing’.42 For Macbeth Lepage wanted epic energy: soldiers grounded with the strength of

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Samurai warriors. He therefore instructed the Hart House actors in one strengthening exercise to walk upright while imagining the ceiling closing on them. As they moved, he guided them to keep the walking intense, Kabuki-like, with the chest the centre of power, energy and honour. Meaning-making thus becomes rooted in the body, rather than in emotions or the mind, and Lepage drills his actors physically until they are proficient in a quality of movement and an energy ‘that will produce an emotion in [their] audience’, although they may not themselves feel that emotion.43 When he himself performs, he likewise ‘tries to find the right physical state – the technical fact of water in [his] eyes, the feel of the body in whatever state is required … and let[s] that physical state carry [him]’.44 Lepage’s reputation was built, in part, on his extraordinary capacity to create striking and surprising stage images and these visual effects are discovered in rehearsal through play and exploration. Lepage, quite simply, is intrigued by things. The sound of a pencil rolling across the stage, the reflection made by a metal bowl catching the light, the chance occurrence of an actor’s early entrance – anything that can be brought into the rehearsal room as ‘resource’ can serve as fodder for his imagination. His Hart House staging of the arrival of Duncan at the Macbeths’ castle (1.4) offers a good example of the way Lepage finds his way into the meaning of a scene by playing with a prop’s unexpected potential. The scene was carefully choreographed. Upstage were three sentinels hidden behind large flags they held on poles in front of them. The flag-draped entrance established a tone of formality that was heightened by a reception line formed of all remaining cast members except the Macbeths. The line wound in an S-shaped curve towards the castle’s entrance and as Duncan and his entourage passed the greeters, the greeters marched forward to reposition themselves at the head of the line, so drawing out the ritual and amplifying the scene’s ceremony. After the Macbeths greeted Duncan, Lady Macbeth slid her hands under Duncan’s and pulled him into the castle ‘like a spider pulling him into a web’. The greeters processed after the king into the castle, leaving onstage only the three flag-bearers. The flags, which had been waving in a synchronous rhythm of royal welcome, then started to pick up speed and, as the flags moved away from their faces, the bearers were revealed to be the three witches. The snapping of the fabric as the flags waved increasingly quickly and wildly created the unmistakable sound of a huge storm coming. The potent effect of a storm at the moment Duncan enters the castle was not a concept Lepage had decided on in advance – he instead discovered it one day during rehearsal. An actor moved a flag quickly, Lepage heard and recognized the sound of a flag in

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a storm and he built on that association. His way into the scene, therefore, came not through words but through a sound. Lepage also uses light as a means of enhancing meaning, playing in rehearsal with the visual effects that can be created in a particular space. The rectangular platform in the Hart House production was approximately three feet tall and covered by a metal subway grate. Directly above it was a suspended ceiling piece of the same size and shape, which could lower to close completely on the platform. Garage lights positioned at the apron and immediately upstage of the platform were used to cast shadows on the back wall. When Malcolm learns his father is dead, the actor walked towards the downstage garage light, throwing on the backstage wall a shadow that started small and suddenly seemed to evolve from ‘son’ to ‘king’. In the scene in which Banquo is murdered, the actors playing the murderers lay on their backs, concealed from the audience by the platform, casting shadows of their hands and arms on the back wall that looked like crooked trees; as the audience watched, these trees suddenly seemed to contain daggers. The forest in which Banquo would be caught then started to ‘move’, an effect created by pulling the garage light by a rope into the wings. When Lepage returned to Macbeth later the same year with actors with whom he had worked at Théâtre Repère, he continued to explore the visual potential of the chiaroscuro shadow play begun at Hart House, building stagings into this next version that overtly blurred the separation between theatre and film. This later set consisted ‘not of one but of many mini “picture frames” created by monumental upright blackened timbers … that are lashed together with crossbeams and arranged serially – with gaping cracks between them – across the whole width of the stage’.45 Actors could perform either in front of, or behind, these frames, which could also revolve up and over into a horizontal position on top of the timbers to support a second playing space above the main stage. It was onto this upper playing space that a nude Lady Macbeth first entered reading her husband’s letter by candlelight, and it was from this space after the sleepwalking scene, once again naked, that the audience saw her fall in slow motion to her death. A strong horizontal light at Macbeth’s ‘À l’ara’t dû mourir plus tard’ (‘She should have died hereafter’) revealed Lady Macbeth’s dead body lying immediately in front of her kneeling husband, their bodies isolated in separate fictional spaces, but their fates locked together in a single visual frame. This was an immensely flexible set that worked in conjunction with heavily stylized lighting effects to guide and control spectators’ sightlines after the manner of film:

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The spaces between the timbers allow for the equivalent of affective depth-shots into the murky upstage area. Scenes taking place in this area – such as Macbeth engaged in battle outside the walls of Dunsinane – can be experienced only voyeuristically through partial or fractured perspectives that, in distorting our sense of time and space, baffle our desire to apprehend the human body whole and not, as here, in estranged – and estranging – fragments.46 Or as Barbara Hodgdon explains, describing the theatrical sleight of hand by which the actors created the effect of a seemingly disembodied head displayed on the upper playing space by swinging the timbered frame down and in front of Macbeth’s body after his death, ‘the production consistently resights – and resites – theatrical bodies as cinematic bodies’.47 Lepage staged the banquet scene behind a curtain positioned immediately behind the timbers. An upstage garage light threw the silhouettes of all the guests, including Banquo’s ghost, onto the curtain, ‘suggesting a vaguely Oriental shadow play and, concurrently, the flickering, permeable images of an early experiment in “cinematography” ’.48 Macbeth and his wife escape briefly from behind the curtain and into audience view to speak lines apart from their guests ‘before transforming back into shadows again: as the others leave, only Macbeth’s silhouette remains, isolated, evanescent, in danger of disappearing altogether’.49 As these separate, but conceptually related, stagings of Macbeth indicate, lighting is much more than simply a form of illumination for Lepage. Like a flag or a pencil, light has a non-verbal, sensory potential that Lepage plays with and tests (and ultimately pursues or discards) as part of an ongoing exploration of a scene’s meaning.

Scripting Shakespeare As D’Arcy suggests, Lepage is not interested in ‘beautifully spoken verse’, a technical quality he suggests too often translates into a mannered delivery ‘à la British’ and that he associates with a ‘polluted … system built around Shakespeare’.50 He instead finds ways in rehearsal to disrupt actors’ preconceived notions of the text and its speeches.  In Toronto, for example, he told an actress to ask the questions in her character’s lines as though she really wanted an answer: ‘Don’t make the questions literature. Ask them for real.’ To another actress who was getting caught in ‘doing Shakespeare’ he said, ‘Right now you’re shopping in the “To be or not to be” store. It’s the wrong place. Shop in the right store.’ One exercise he uses in rehearsal is

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to ask the actors to read a scene backwards in order to hear the words one by one: ‘Reading backwards is one way of discovering subtext, concepts, mirror images … It magnifies certain words and reveals things that are sometimes hidden, like poetic images. We’re trained to do Tennessee Williams – we face things psychologically – but in Shakespeare … you need to discover every bit.’51 This resistance to naturalistic speech – ‘the speech of soap opera’ – is a feature of Lepage’s direction of the plays of Shakespeare in both French and English. In the Hart House Macbeth, he had Macbeth and Banquo enter in 1.3 (their first meeting with the weird sisters and the opening scene of the production) as though they were human from the waist up and horse from the waist down. While the upper half of the body spoke, the bottom half responded instinctively to the situation with skittish fear. He intensively guided the actors through this movement, laying down the physical, visual elements like a choreography. When the words were added later, he spent a lot of time in rehearsal exploring ways of using the horses’ stomping to isolate and punctuate certain words, encouraging the actors to ‘experiment with the words in a Cubist way [in order to] find the power of unnatural broken-up rhythms’. He also used a deliberately stylized delivery to heighten the artifice of Duncan’s arrival at Macbeth’s castle. Noting that ‘the breaks are more interesting when they’re in odd places’, Lepage timed the movement of the receiving line so that the actor playing Banquo had to pause in the middle of a line of verse in order to move and then pick up the line again when newly positioned. Lepage is remarkably relaxed with regard to editing or in other ways de-emphasizing Shakespeare’s words when rehearsals yield the need to do so. His lack of reverence for these texts perhaps arises from his experience working with translations of Shakespeare’s texts that are already one or two steps removed from the originals. He also personally attributes it to the fact that he comes to the plays, culturally and linguistically, as a Québécois Canadian, who lacks ‘the same preoccupation for the text and verse’ experienced by directors in English-speaking theatres where les spectateurs are constructed as audiences.52 His productions of Macbeth in both French and English brought the title character’s entrance forward by opening with Macbeth’s encounter with the weird sisters, while Martius’s entrance in Coriolan (1992) was delayed from the opening scene until Act 1.4 – at which point the character is played by a marionnette. It is only when Martius emerges from the walls of Corioles, covered in blood, that the audience finally sees Jules Philip in the part. Lepage’s French-language productions of La Tempête follow Garneau’s tradaptation in collapsing the speeches of

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Sebastian, the Duke of Naples’ brother, into the part of Prospero’s brother, Antonio. Elsinore was the most heavily cut and rearranged of Lepage’s Shakespeare stagings. The show as staged at the NT in 1996 opened with a disembodied voice reading a condensed version of 1.4 that included editorial stage directions, while in Ottawa the following year with Peter Darling in the role it opened with the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Polonius’s famous precepts to his son were gone, as were his instructions to Reynaldo about how to take a ‘carp of truth’ with a ‘bait of falsehood’, the ninth scene spliced together Ophelia’s account to her father of Hamlet’s erratic behaviour with Hamlet’s verbal attack on her in the ‘nunnery’ scene, and the show included a staging of Ophelia’s drowning. Christopher Innes likened the production to Charles Marowitz’s ‘Collage Hamlet’, while Alastair Macaulay for the Financial Times lamented that ‘the poor old Danish play has been skewered, laid out on the slab, cut up, reordered and turned into a flashy one-man show, a cold array of theatrical effects’.53 Elsinore was an unusual treatment of Shakespeare’s play, even by Lepage’s standards, as it was explicitly ‘an experiment’: ‘I’m a bit burdened by people coming to see Lepage play Hamlet – and of course there’s absolutely no interest in seeing me perform Hamlet. What’s interesting is to see how I cut up the story and devised theatrics out of that … [H]ow does it change the story, how does it bring insight to some parts of the story?’54 The difference, however, is perhaps more one of degree than kind, as Lepage elsewhere freely manipulates Shakespeare’s scripts in order to enhance a visual or aural effect. During the Hart House rehearsals of Macbeth, for example, he overlapped scenes in several places to allow for concurrent performance of scenes that occur consecutively in Shakespeare’s script, with two sets of characters occasionally speaking at once. Throughout Macbeth’s delivery of the dagger speech, he had cast members move backward in slow motion into Macbeth’s field of vision while whispering lines from anywhere in the script that they thought would make Macbeth paranoid. As Hodgdon describes this staging as played by Théâtre Repère later in the year, the dagger speech becomes a nightmare vision that encloses Macbeth in the space of his own mind. As he speaks on the forestage, isolated as if in close-up, a procession of other figures – Banquo, Fleance, Lennox, the Lady, her waiting woman, the Porter and Malcolm – pass behind him … The figures appear as both real and unreal, apparitions he has conjured up, moving ritualistically away from him as he moves irrevocably toward Duncan’s murder.55

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Lepage’s treatment of Shakespeare’s plays, in respect of the way he modifies and shapes the text, is entirely consistent with the way he explores images and dialogue in his devised pieces. When a show finally starts to emerge from ‘a huge chaos’, he can see that a ‘specific image strongly conveys this thing that I was trying to say. So you could cross off that dialogue because the image says it better. Other things are better said spoken; so this image is redundant … It’s trial and error and it’s also part of a big game where you just kind of connect pieces of puzzle.’56 For this same reason and especially with plays such as Macbeth and Hamlet of which the audience might be expected to have a prior knowledge, it is not unusual for Lepage to overlay music and sound effects that make it difficult to hear every line that the actors speak. The noise of metal-tipped shoes on a metal subway grate (the Hart House Macbeth), blaring horns intruding on the end of a scene (Coriolan), or the loud looping replay of an actor’s captured and electronically modified words (Elsinore), all seek to communicate an idea or a visceral emotion in place of dialogue, reaching an audience ‘through their senses not through the intellect’.57 Lepage told Peter Holland prior to the premiere of his 2012 staging of The Tempest, as a basis for praising the Adès opera as the first great opera of the twenty-first century, that ‘you have to betray Shakespeare to be true to Shakespeare’.58 He made a similar point with his punning director’s note to Elsinore about not being able to make ‘a Hamlet without breaking eggs’.59 He sees Shakespeare as a fundamentally experimental theatrical artist and so he advocates bringing to the performance of his plays in our own time a similarly innovative theatrical method.60 Recurrent in Lepage’s discussions of theatricality is a resistance to what he calls ‘the literary culture of theatre’, dominated by the written text.61 He worked with dramatists on Alanienouidet at the NAC in 1992, a project based on Edmund Kean’s nineteenth-century encounter with the Huron nation, but the collaboration was not entirely successful and since then he has only worked with writers such as Marie Gignac who are primarily actors and who function in the rehearsal room in large part as dramaturges.62 Although he includes literature among the many artistic forms that come together in the ‘meeting place’ that is theatre, Lepage is careful not to surrender priority to words, even when those words are Shakespeare’s. What makes Shakespeare ‘extraordinary’, then, is precisely not his status as literature, but the rehearsal resources he provides artists (Lepage describes the texts as ‘an avalanche of resources, a box of toys to be taken out’), along with the immense ‘permission’ that Shakespeare gives to actors, translators and directors to play.63

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This tension between literature and theatrical play, however, should not be overstated: an alertness to moments when an image expresses an idea more efficiently than words does not therefore imply a lack of interest in words. Although audiences for good reason tend to remember Lepage’s visual effects – Richard Eyre comments that ‘[i]n each of Robert’s shows, there is at least one, but generally about thirty images which really burn themselves on the memory’ – these effects are discovered alongside a sustained study of Shakespeare’s texts, and Lepage and his actors, even in preparation for a French-language production, work intensively with the plays as written in English.64

Translations and ‘Tradaptations’ Lepage’s stagings in French use either the classic nineteenth-century François-Victor Hugo translations or, where available, the modern tradaptations prepared by the Québécois poet, playwright and actor, Michel Garneau (‘tradaptation’ is Garneau’s own term for his creative interaction with Shakespeare). Garneau has translated three of Shakespeare’s plays: La Tempête (1973, retranslated 1982 and first published 1989), Macbeth (1978) and Coriolan (1989). Both the Hugo and Garneau translations present different challenges for performance. The Hugo version is familiar, but as Lepage comments, ‘You have all of this romanticism that you have to get rid of, which is fighting against the text’, an antagonist relationship that disappears in the English theatre where ‘you aren’t fighting against the text: you’re using it’.65 The Garneau tradaptations are likewise a product of their linguistic and cultural moment of production. The decades in which Garneau was working on Shakespeare’s plays were marked in Canada by intense, sometimes violent, debates about culture and sovereignty. The Charter of the French Language (popularly known as Loi, or Bill, 101) was passed by the Quebec provincial government in 1977, making French the official language of Quebec. In 1980, the Parti Québécois, who held a majority government in Quebec for nine years from 1976, called the first referendum on a proposed secession from Canada; the motion garnered forty per cent voter support. The sovereignty debate came to a head again in 1990 with the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord, a high-profile federal initiative that sought to consolidate political ties between Quebec and the rest of Canada by means of a package of constitutional amendments that included granting Quebec constitutional status as a ‘distinct society’.

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A second, post-Meech Lake, referendum on secession held in 1995 was narrowly defeated by a margin of one per cent of Quebec voters. Garneau’s tradaptations are in dialogue with this climate of cultural protectionism and political separatism. French-speaking Quebec, in the grips of what Leanore Lieblein aptly calls a ‘double colonization’, simultaneously sought to define a national identity independent of the cultural dominance of France and the economic and political control of Englishspeaking Canada, both of which powers ‘represented threats to the language spoken in Quebec’.66 Shakespeare – ‘le grand Will’ – was the author, perhaps surprisingly, who came in this particular contest to speak, in translation, for Quebec nationalism. As the ‘English author par excellence’, he served as ‘a site of resistance to the external authority of France, while a carnivalized Shakespeare would be used to mock a sacred cow of a resented English Canada’.67 In such a context, even Garneau’s choice to translate and adapt The Tempest, Macbeth and Coriolanus, plays that in their different ways explore themes of freedom and oppression, seems deliberate. Each of the translations is variously handled, the programme for Montreal’s 1993 Festival de théâtre des Amériques explaining that the plays are written in three different types of Québécois.68 Coriolan, the last play Garneau came to, is written in a form of français standard or international French that Lepage describes as ‘so clearly Québécois’, but that Louis-Bernard Robitaille, reviewing the play at the time of the Shakespeare Cycle tour, explicitly praises as cosmopolitan rather than ‘local’ or ‘régional’.69 Robert Ormsby clarifies this seeming contradiction by explaining that Garneau shifts the play into a kind of ‘radio-canadien’ French, a form of ‘Québécois spoken within Canada’s official French-language broadcaster’, the effect of which was heightened in performance through the actors’ delivery. Garneau further nuances Shakespeare’s portrayal of class tension by scattering throughout this ‘neutral’ or ‘received’ Québécois French the kind of distinctive pronunciations – ‘ma chaêre’ for ‘ma chère’ – associated with the joual, or street slang, of working-class Montreal.70 La Tempête and Macbeth, by contrast, offer ‘immediacy of effect [and] local colour’ by drawing on the vocabulary and expressions of the Gaspé Peninsula of eastern Quebec where Garneau was raised, making of Trinculo and Stephano, for example, credible sailors.71 Garneau’s Tempête is especially notable for the way he limits his deployment of non-standard French to disempowered characters such as Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, so constructing for Québécois audiences a readily audible politics of authority. Lepage describes Garneau’s Tempête as written in ‘a kind of easy French’

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that ‘bring[s] the play closer to us [without making] it too, too Québécois’.72 Garneau’s Macbeth, by contrast, has received immense attention for the originality with which it reinvents Shakespeare as a ‘Québécois nationalist poet’.73 This tradaptation is not written in français de France, a form that Lieblein argues summons up for Quebec national identity, perhaps no less than the English language, a troubling history of deferral to a foreign cultural authority.74 But neither is it written in a local dialect. Instead Garneau systematically builds into his poetic language not only Québécois neologisms and slang, but archaisms that by the last quarter of the twentieth century were current only in the Gaspé region, translating Macbeth into a poetic ‘dialectalized French’ that shows resemblances to joual and yet stands at a distance from joual’s specific socio-cultural associations.75 Garneau thus invents a literary and poetic Québécois – recognizable yet unfamiliar, heightened yet decidedly regional – that approximates, without exactly reproducing, Shakespeare’s language. ‘It is an Edenic language’, as Annie Brisset explains, ‘the language of pre-Conquest Quebec, of a Quebec that was once free. Thus, this language, which is never actually spoken by a single theatre-goer, nor by Garneau for that matter, acquires a symbolic value and, in the context of the reception, becomes a kind of plea.’76 This langue québécois, that is ‘as different in some ways from contemporary Québécois French as Shakespeare’s Macbeth is from contemporary Canadian English’,77 takes on particular force in relation to subtle but systematic textual alterations that, taken as a whole, have an adaptive force. Most notably, Garneau suppresses localizing place names and character titles such as ‘worthy thane’, ‘Fife’, ‘king’ and ‘Norweyan’ (compare 1.2.48–9). Without relocating the tragedy, Garneau thus ‘makes it possible for Québécois readers or audiences to project onto Macbeth their own history and destiny’, since the action of the play unfolds in ‘Not’pauv’pays’ (‘our poor country’) – a space of oppression and liberation that is simultaneously Shakespeare’s Scotland and Garneau’s Québec. (Garneau uses a similarly de-localizing, or perhaps even universalizing, strategy in his Coriolan, excising ‘much of the play’s explicit Graeco-Roman context’.78) To continue with the example of the opening exchange between Ross and Duncan in 1.2, Ross’s generic report of ‘la bataille’ (‘the battle’), where ‘les drapeaux des étranges insultent / Not’beau ciel’ (‘foreign flags flout / Our beautiful sky’), potentially functions within a Quebec nationalist politics as a reminder ‘of the battle of the Plains of Abraham and the British Conquest, henceforth symbolized by the presence of the federal flag (drapeaux des étranges – the ‘foreign [Canadian] flag’ that replaced the British flag) in the skies of ‘ “La Belle Province” ’.79

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Garneau’s Macbeth offers a fascinating example of cultural and linguistic appropriation and Lepage praises it for the boldness with which it treats Shakespeare’s images. Instead of trying, for example, to find a literal rendering of a metaphorical phrase such as ‘screw your courage to the sticking-place’ (1.7.60), the precise meaning of which remains uncertain even in English, Garneau reinvents the image as ‘J’ville-toé l’courage dins os d’la cage du coeur!’: ‘Courage, then, isn’t something linked to the hand holding, say, a crossbow or possibly a dagger; it’s a special quality found in the heart which you must build an iron cage around if you want to keep your resolve.’80 In performance, however, Garneau’s tradaptations have met with a mixed reception. While some spectators praise the language, others find it odd to hear Shakespeare’s characters speaking ‘like Québécois peasants’.81 And as Quebec moves further away from the particular cultural moment in which Garneau prepared these texts, his treatments of the plays come to seem increasingly like historical curiosities. Alexandre Vigneault, responding in part to Lepage’s 2011 Wendake staging of La Tempête, suggests that translation, like theatre itself, is an ephemeral art, citing the Canadian translator and director, Paul Lefebvre, to the effect that the lifetime of a theatrical translation is about fifteen years.82 Currency is not the only challenge faced by a director who takes on Garneau’s tradaptations. The texts presented ‘serious acting problems’ even as early as 1992 when Lepage first staged all three of them in the Shakespeare Cycle: ‘At times the text sounds too much like the really bad historical soap operas, set in the 17th or 18th or 19th century, which we still see on Québec television. If an actor falls into the trap of speaking like these tacky characters, the whole production begins to fall apart.’83 Marie Brassard, who played Lady Macbeth, Ariel and Virgilia, was one actor able to overcome the problem by treating the language ‘as a “foreign” object in order to give it “natural” meaning’: a strategy for managing effectively, rather than entirely overcoming, the tradaptations’ difficulties. The pitfalls that potentially beset performance of the Garneau tradaptations provide a context for Lepage’s strong preference – in both French and English – for overtly stylized, rather than naturalistic, delivery of Shakespeare’s verse.

Theatre and language politics Lepage’s theatrical practice is thus in part a response to and reaction against Quebec language politics of the 1970s and certainly his internationalist perspective on the world and its theatre should be understood

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in relation to this particular historical moment. His goal, as he explains to Rémy Charest, is to bring Quebec into conversation, culturally and linguistically, with a world beyond its national borders. To this end, in Lepage’s opinion, a project such as the trilingual Dragons’ Trilogy, fully a third of which was in Québécois French and which toured North America, Europe, Israel and the Antipodes, is a more effective means of defining and advancing Québécois identity than local theatre that remains in Quebec, speaking only to Québécois Canadians.84 A perception that ‘[w]ords were so coloured with [nationalist] politics, at least in the seventies’, to the exclusion of a ‘politics of the body, of emotion, of relationships’, was also undoubtedly formative of Lepage’s commitment to the communicative power of visual image and spectacle.85 Performance’s creative impulse, for Lepage, is not in service to ‘the world of writing for the theatre’ – a world which, in Quebec in the last quarter of the twentieth century, was profoundly shaped by a nationalist struggle over language. Instead, theatre is ‘a place of form’ where artists ‘explore mediums until one day [they] express something very profound that has some echo in the audience’. One of those mediums is language, but a script remains just one part – and not a governing part – of a larger process. The creative energy of performance, both in rehearsal and in front of an audience, comes from ‘the word “playing” ’, a concept that Lepage, in conversation with Eyre, argues ‘has disappeared from the staging of shows’ in favour of text and story-writing.86 The plays of Shakespeare therefore have a very different political meaning for Lepage than Garneau and he is as irreverent with Garneau’s words as he is with Shakespeare’s. His Cycle production of Coriolan, for example, cut a third of Garneau’s text and more than two dozen characters.87 Lepage treats Shakespeare’s scripts, whether in English, French or Québécois, as theatrical resource, not as a means to articulate national identity, and translation, for theatrical purposes, can at times be more of a hindrance than a benefit. Unless one is able to work alongside the translator – something that rarely happens due to expense – the shift into a new language, to use Lepage’s term, ‘degenerates’ a work. His comment in the same interview that it is a ‘privilege’ to work with Shakespeare’s texts in English thus reads as something much more than lip-service to the cultural authority of Shakespeare’s words within the English-speaking theatre being paid by an artist best known for visual spectacle.88 The bilingual Romeo and Juliette [sic] that Lepage co-directed in 1989 with Gordon McCall is a good example, however, of the extent to which it was nearly impossible for a Québécois director working in Canada in the

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1980s to avoid a politics of language. The production was an experiment in, among other things, cross-cultural collaboration. It started with a phone call to Lepage from McCall, then director of Nightcap Theatre’s Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival, and the venture brought together actors from the separate linguistic and theatrical traditions of Western Canada and Quebec. The Montagues and the Capulets in this staging were played, respectively, by English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians. About twenty per cent of the production was in French in a new translation by Jean-Marc Dalpé, with the Capulets, who spoke French among themselves, seamlessly code-switching whenever a Montague joined the scene. The production’s language politics offered a ‘grim representation of what bilingualism means in Canada’,89 and in keeping with the then-current depiction of Canada as a nation formed of ‘two solitudes’, Lepage and McCall largely rehearsed their actors separately, bringing the groups together only in the final stages of rehearsal. The production was staged outdoors in a tent, with spectators seated on either side of a strip of tarmac representing the trans-Canada highway. The metaphor of the road that simultaneously links and divides English and French Canada – a concept worked up by McCall and his design team in Saskatoon – was given powerful muscularity in the opening scene with McCall’s staging of a literal head-on collision between the Capulets and Montagues as cars roared in from either side of the tent.90 The show was originally mounted in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where it attracted huge audiences and attention from the national press. History caught up with the production the following summer when it toured to Ontario, where it played in Ottawa, Stratford and Toronto. Although Romeo and Juliette was not devised to make a political statement – and, indeed, it would have been impossible at the time of the show’s conception in 1988 to anticipate how federalist initiatives on Quebec sovereignty would eventually unfold – the show happened to begin its tour on Victoria Island, a site symbolically positioned between Ontario and Quebec, just as the Meech Lake constitutional negotiations came to a head. When the accord collapsed within twenty-four hours of opening night, the political resonances of this cross-cultural and bilingual production of Shakespeare were impossible to miss: ‘As English- and French-speaking Canada failed to reach constitutional agreement over cultural difference, the Capulet and Montague parents grieved for children who were sacrificed to an “ancient grudge”.’91 In his director’s note at the time of the Victoria Island performances, Lepage explains that ‘[s]taging a bilingual Romeo and Juliette was a purely

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artistic, not political, choice’.92 And indeed, those scenes in which he took the directorial lead point less towards a nationalist agenda than that engagement with the ‘politics of the body, of emotion, of relationships’ about which he would speak to Eyre a few years later. The opening of the balcony scene, for example, staged with Romeo (Tom Rooney) catching sight of Juliette (Céline Bonnier) lying on top of the cab of a pick-up truck, was played as a sort of dream sequence. As Rooney delivered Romeo’s monologue about Juliette’s beauty, he climbed onto the cab with Bonnier and the two would-be lovers – each in their separate worlds, but daydreaming about the other – acted out the physical encounter they each desire. The movement was coordinated so that Rooney was back in his original place by the time Bonnier sighed, ‘Ay me’ (2.1.67). When Juliette began finally to speak, she spoke in a mix of English and French, even though the character (at least as far as she is aware) is alone. This tactic of code-switching within a single speech extended the perception of Juliette’s immersion in an exploratory daydream. The audience watched her love for Romeo push her into experimental role-play as an English speaker – she was ‘trying out the language … speaking to him in his language’.93 It also allowed for a farcical failure to connect across culture and language – a jarring moment of comedy absolutely typical of Lepage’s explorations of personal identity – when Juliette’s interior daydream world suddenly crashes down. Romeo, emerging from the dark, offers to take her ‘at thy word’, but his interruption unleashes a rapid-fire – and for him as an English speaker, impenetrable – French speech to which he can only awkwardly reply, in French, ‘Pardon?’. This intimate portrayal of ‘the clash between … different cultural identities’ translates a politics of language into the passions and humour of everyday encounters, drawing the spectator into an imagined world of sexuality and dreams.94 Romeo’s ‘Pardon?’, along with Juliette’s reply in English, ‘Who’s there?’, are written by hand into a typescript of Dalpé’s translation. Juliette’s code-switching during her balcony speech was another departure from Dalpé’s original text, where the whole of her monologue is translated into French.95 This was the only time in Lepage’s career, at least to date, that he has commissioned a new translation, and these surviving traces of rehearsal revisions suggest that, as with his devised pieces, Lepage worked closely with the writer-translator as the show took shape. It is therefore revealing to notice those instances where one finds correspondences between the production’s verbal and visual imagery. At the end of Act 3.2, after she has learned of Romeo’s banishment, Juliet addresses the cords she has commanded the Nurse to take up with the words, ‘He

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made you for a highway to my bed’ (134). In Dalpé’s translation, the line is nuanced slightly differently: ‘Vous deviez être son sentier vers mon lit’ (‘You must be his highway to my bed’). Not only is the image of the highway made personal to Romeo (‘a highway’ becomes ‘son sentier’), but the cords are given agency: the sense shifts from a grieving meditation on Romeo’s former hopes (‘He made you for’), desires which have since been frustrated in a present moment, to an anticipation of the role the cords will yet play (‘Vous deviez être’) in enabling Romeo’s – and Juliette’s – desires. The next time spectators saw Romeo (the long intervening scene with the Nurse in the Friar’s cell was cut), this metaphorical image of the cords as his highway to Juliet was visually realized in a striking stage image. Carrying the cords, Rooney ran through the tent and out the other side; attaching one end of the rope to Juliette’s offstage bed, he then ran back into the tent with the cords unfurled. He then seemed to ‘climb’ the wall to her bed by pulling both Juliette and the bed onstage, a simple but effective sleight of hand that gave audiences the illusion of watching Romeo journey along the cords-as-highway towards his lover. The nightingale scene thus doubled up the production’s conceptual metaphor of the trans-Canada highway as the ‘cord’ that ties together French and English Canada, but reworked it at the interpersonal level of romantic desire. The archival materials are silent about whether the verbal or visual image came first. Lepage may have found the image in Dalpé’s translation, or – what is perhaps more likely – he may have glimpsed its potential in Shakespeare’s text and collaborated with Dalpé to draw it out more fully in the French translation. Either way, far from showing a disregard for words and language, the nightingale scene suggests a director who is attuned to, and deliberately crafting, the combined effect of the spoken and visual languages of Shakespearean theatricality.

Technology and Storytelling As Rooney comments, ‘for someone like Robert for whom the metaphor and the imagery is so important, Shakespeare is a goldmine – every single line is filled with it’.96 The homosocial energy underpinning Coriolanus’s battlefield challenge to Aufidius (1.9.1) was drawn out in the Cycle Shakespeare production with a piece of visual trickery to which he would return to perhaps even more powerful effect in the closing moments of The Far Side of the Moon (2000). A piece of gold-tinted reflective metal was positioned above the stage and at such an angle as to reflect out to the

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audience the action happening on the floor. The two warriors, naked and lying on the floor, then slid out from the wings to meet at centre stage. The eroticism of their fight, eventually intruded on by Aufidius’s fully clothed seconder, was captured for spectators in the reflected balletic beauty of their twisting and sometimes intertwined bodies as they struck at each other in slow motion, seemingly in mid-air. Manipulation of audience perspective is something of a trademark of Lepage’s theatre. He confessed himself at the time of the Shakespeare Cycle ‘obsessed with the language of the frame’ as a way to isolate details in a scene, seeking to guide an audience’s perspective on the action almost in the manner of film.97 Audiences as a result viewed the better part of Coriolan through a narrow rectangular ‘letterbox’ window about half the height of the actors, behind which a flat platform could be positioned. In those scenes that did not make use of the platform, spectators watched the actors from the waist up; where the table was used, the spectators saw the actors from the hips down, unless the actors knelt or sat down. In the scene in which Volumnia (Anne-Marie Cadieux) pleads with Coriolanus outside of the city, spectators saw her crouch on the platform in front of the impassive, ‘characterless’ legs and hands of her son.98 Coriolanus’s face was out of view – in effect, offstage – until his mother got up and turned to leave, at which moment he collapsed into the frame, his full visual presence signalling sudden surrender to a mother who was now, in her turn, represented as just legs and hands. Lepage thus encodes Shakespeare’s reversal of a relationship of vulnerability and power in terms of spectators’ severely restricted access to the actors’ bodies, manipulating what Ormsby, following Shannon Steen and Margaret Werry, describes as a peculiarly theatrical construction of interiority: ‘when the actors were fully visible, they were deemed fully present as characters because their bodies were sutured to those of their characters; when their faces were invisible, their bodies were read [by reviewers] as being decoupled from character, as being part of the apparatus of theatre and therefore less than human (inscrutable, impersonal, freakish, ludicrous).’99 Whereas the fight scene in Coriolan achieved its effect with a mirror, Elsinore played with similar perspectival devices using more elaborate forms of technology. The set in this later show was dominated by a wall into which was embedded a revolving dais, at the centre of which there was a door-shaped aperture that could be opened or closed; the wall itself could rotate on a horizontal axis to create either a ceiling or a floor. In the first court scene, seated on a throne suspended within the wall’s aperture, around which was projected a playing-card border that alternated between

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138 the King of Spades and Queen of Hearts, Lepage played both Claudius and Gertrude welcoming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Elsinore. It was a bravura performance, with Lepage creating the effect of two characters in dialogue through sharply executed changes to his body posture, gesture and voice that corresponded precisely to the timing of changes to the playingcard border projected around him. The silent presence of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was inferred downstage, among the spectators. In the next scene, when the visiting courtiers encountered Gertrude’s ‘too much changèd son’, Lepage as Hamlet stood in the doorway in the centre of the wall while live video projections of his head and shoulders captured on fixed cameras stage left and right were fed to screens on either side of him. The audience had access, in other words, not to the two courtiers, but to how they, separately, saw Hamlet, two slightly different perspectives to which Lepage comically called attention as he turned his head quickly from one friend to the other, seeking, but failing to get, an explanation for their visit. Lepage described this monumental multi-media performance space, designed by Carl Fillion, as the show’s ‘other dancer’ – a performer who sensationally failed to appear at the opening of the 1996 Edinburgh Festival due to a broken rivet (reportedly costing the organizers an estimated £100,000 in lost revenue).100 Editorials published in the aftermath of the cancelled show complained, perhaps unsurprisingly, of the betrayal of live theatre by technological wizardry. Technology remained an issue when Elsinore opened at the NT at the end of the year. Jane Edwardes notes that there is ‘technical wizardry galore … But if there is a heart to this piece, it is not one that beats with any vigour’, while Michael Billington comments that this ‘hi-tech version of Hamlet’ makes for a cold, ‘emotionally underpowered’ performance.101 Dundjerović suggests that the problem with Elsinore was not its technology, but Lepage’s inability to ‘establish an alter ego’ through whom spectators could connect with the story, a narrative gap that led audiences – in sharp contrast to his other, better-reviewed one-man performances – to ‘experience[e] the show as emotionally empty’.102 Lepage himself comments on the importance of storytelling devices that encourage or invite audiences ‘to enter into the stories’.103 Ineffective or even ‘bad’ theatre, for Lepage, stems from a failure ‘to create a coherent world, a coherent environment from which the audience takes what it wants’, a problem that ‘fundamentally … has nothing to do with the choice of actors or the use of technology’.104 Lepage is therefore firmly committed to theatre as a place of stories, but he also prizes innovation,

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not least because ‘what makes the theatre change and evolve is its technology, its materialistic reality’.105 As with his experimental approach to verse delivery, his inspiration for this position comes from an avowed perception of Shakespeare as a theatre practitioner: ‘He was a man who would have been as interested [as me] in all the technologies of my time. How can I write for them? The actual problems of staging something produces poetry and I’m sure that Hamlet is all about that.’

The Politics of Cross-cultural Exchange The relationship between storytelling and the technologies and languages of the stage was again at the fore fifteen years later when Lepage embarked on a second cross-cultural Canadian collaboration. In the summer of 2011, he worked with members of the Huron-Wendat nation on a ‘first contact’ production of The Tempest that was staged in the village of Wendake, just outside of Quebec City. This collaboration took a very different form from the Romeo and Juliette project: Lepage, commissioned to stage the production and without a co-director, had full control over the creative process. The show was staged in the woods in a stunning open-air amphitheatre that Lepage describes as ‘a cross between a powwow meeting place and a Greek theatre and an Elizabethan hall that looks a bit like Shakespeare’s Globe’.106 The large circular stage, surrounded by audience on three sides, was capped by a steeply raked trapezoid-shaped playing space that opened visually onto the forest behind. The stage was framed at the back by five tall poles that were variously trees, climbed by Ariel and chopped down by Ferdinand, or ship’s masts rigged with sails. The performance space was to some extent the star of the show. Vivid multimedia effects projected onto the stage transformed the playing area from a beach where Ferdinand grieves his father’s death as the water laps on the shore, to an expanse of shale onto which Caliban throws himself through an upstage trapdoor as though from a cave entrance, to a tall ship into which the Europeans disappear, through the same trapdoor, in the show’s closing scene (Lepage would borrow moments from this visual design for his staging of Adès’ operatic version of the play the following year). Louis-Xavier Gagnon-Lebrun’s constantly transforming lighting design, supported by Jean-Sébastien Côté’s rich soundscape, summoned up not only the island’s topography, but its magic. Prospero, striking his staff on the stage, caused both Miranda and Ferdinand and the sea at whose shore they seemed to stand, to freeze while he considered their

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love ‘[a]t the first sight’ (1.2.443), striking his staff again to release both children and nature from his spell. When Miranda, earlier in that same scene, recalls the ‘[f]our or five women once that tended’ her (47), the woods behind the stage suddenly fill with green light, as the scene she describes ‘rather like a dream than an assurance’ (45) plays out behind her in the distance. The dumbshow continues throughout Prospero’s exposition of his fortunes as the Duke of Milan, with spectators simultaneously watching and hearing of Antonio’s betrayal, Gonzalo’s charity and, as the lighting darkens from green to blue, of Prospero’s midnight departure from Milan with his daughter. Lepage’s theatre has become associated with spectacular, multimedia effects,107 and the Wendake Tempest provided an arresting demonstration of Ex Machina’s creative and technical resources. At the New York Met the following year, where a shortened version of the dumbshow was staged entirely within an upstage prompter’s box (the opera was set as though in the interior of the opera house La Scala, Milan), this metatheatrical device was largely in the service of enlivening (literally) the backstory motivating Prospero’s revenge. In the outdoor amphitheatre, by contrast, where the forest backdrop itself suddenly and unexpectedly came to life as the space of memory, the dumbshow was not merely informative but – appropriately enough for The Tempest – magical, making one aware in this most plotdriven of the play’s scenes of the theatricality of theatre. This emphasis on spectacle was reinforced through acrobatics, dance and music. Ariel, all of whose songs were translated into Innu, was played by Kathia Rock, a professional singer whose music draws on her Innu heritage. Ferdinand (Francis Roberge), a ‘bucheron-acrobate’ (‘lumberjack-acrobat’) adept at juggling an axe, celebrated his successful courtship of Miranda before the intermission by seeming to split a standing tree with a single throw. Trinculo was played by the circus performer and Wendat Jean-François Faber, who log-rolled out of one scene on top of a barrel of wine and tumbled into another performing a two-person somersault with Stefano. The banquet scene and wedding masque featured ancestral dances performed by members of Sandokwa, a Huron-Wendat dance troupe directed by Steeve Gros-Louis (who also played Alfonso). Many of the actors thus brought non-classical forms of theatrical training to their enactment of their roles and the production generated energy, at least in part, from spectators’ awareness of the risks of live performance – there was always the very real possibility, for example, that Trinculo might fall, or Ferdinand miss the tree at which he throws his axe.

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The Tempest may have seemed an obvious choice for this collaborative venture. It is the play to which Lepage has returned most often over the course of his career and he explains in his programme note that he has long been convinced that a creative encounter between Ex Machina and artists of the Huron-Wendat nation could lead to a staging of this piece for a new day (‘j’ai toujours eu la conviction que la rencontre entre nos cultures et nos imaginaires nous permettrait de présenter cette pièce de Shakespeare sous un jour nouveau’).108 The belief that having ‘Aboriginal, First Nation artists collaborate with non-Aboriginal actors’ would allow them all to ‘play around and understand that aspect of the piece’ was a point he also raised in interview with Adrienne McCullen.109 But the way the show stages First Nations music and dance alongside circus stunts as another form of spectacle (Lepage, one recalls, had directed Totem for Cirque du Soleil as recently as 2010) is disturbing and leaves one questioning what new insights into either indigeneity or The Tempest one takes away from this artistic collaboration and display. There is a recurrent critical debate about the politics of crosscultural exchange in Lepage’s theatre. Criticizing his ‘unbalanced theatrical collaboration’ with both English Canadian and Scottish actors at the time of the development and performance of Tectonic Plates (1988–91), Christie Carson argues that power differentials limit Lepage’s collaborators from having ‘real input … to the process’. The danger, in Carson’s eyes, is that groups buy into a theatrical ideal, to find in the end that ‘international celebrity by association can only be a demeaning and destructive process’.110 The potential problem is that Lepage’s intensively resource-based rehearsal process simply feeds on cultural diversity, rather than fostering cross-cultural dialogue. Hodgdon draws on just this kind of metaphor of consumption when she characterizes his NT Dream as ‘an instance of what Pavis calls the “culture of sensuality”, nourishing itself by importing Indonesian cultural styles like tea’.111 This much earlier production, with a multicultural cast including Lolita Chakrabarti and the Trinidadian Jeffery Kissoon as Hippolyta and Theseus, was infused with the movement, costumes and music of the Orient: ‘Hippolyta looks like an Asian queen, the servants are distinctly Indian and when the lights go up beyond the swamp, the background is Eastern.’112 Hippolyta and Theseus were greeted after the lovers’ night in the forest with the Kecak – the Ramayana Monkey Chant traditionally performed by Balinese monks – and gamelan-playing musicians remained visible throughout the production in the side balconies of the Olivier Theatre.

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For Lepage, the philosophy and spirituality of Indonesia fitted his interpretation of the play as ‘a hierarchy of good spirits and bad spirits, high-spirited beings and low, which both meet in the human being’.113 But as with the Wendake Tempest nearly twenty years later, Lepage’s borrowings were eclectic. Drawing on Brook’s 1970 Dream as yet another creative resource, the show staged the signifying practices and theatricality of cultures foreign to Lepage as a Québécois Canadian alongside the performance traditions of modern circus, with the Québécois contortionist and circus performer Angela Laurier playing Puck. The production begins in the disorienting and counter-intuitive space of darkness and dreams, as ‘a tiny figure in red hops and slithers towards a central pool of water, while gamelans and strings begin to play. It is Angela Laurier as Puck, walking on her hands, her legs hung over her shoulders. She reaches up to grasp a single light bulb hanging from the flies – and turns it out.’114 How is one to interpret the politics of such borrowings? Eyre asked Lepage during a NT Platform Talk after the opening of the Dream if this ‘jackdaw’ approach is not in danger of making of him ‘a cultural tourist’.115 Jennifer Harvie is more blunt, characterizing Lepage’s eclecticism as ‘decadently hypertheatrical’ postmodern pastiche that ‘overwhelm[s] potential irony and critique with self-satisfied and self-interested play, … producing not political response but a chronic failure of political critique’.116 Lepage himself, however, regards pastiche as an inaccurate label to attach to his work: he does not simply parachute into his own theatre ‘good ideas from other people or other people’s culture’. His purpose as a director, as he explains it, is instead to excavate the unexpected connections – the ‘invisible umbilical cords’ – that tie people together across culture and language. He gets at these relationships by letting artists play around in rehearsal with found materials, whether that is Cocteau’s poetry, Japanese writing, or Indonesian gamelan instruments.117 And when it happens that a connection is made – one of his examples at the time of the NT Dream was the discovery that Indonesian and Scottish folk music are both based on a pentatonic scale – theatre has the potential to transcend cultural difference: ‘When I hear John Cobb [who played Snug] or any other Scot playing “My name is John Peter” on the gamelan and it works and sounds like a million bucks, for me that is universality. It’s not pastiche.’118 Always, however, the rich and provocative intercultural connections explored by Lepage’s theatre take on meaning – they come to seem universal – as seen through the director’s personal viewfinder: ‘I’m in search of what I am … I’m trying to see how [an idea] relates profoundly or universally to what I want to say or want to do.’119 Noticing how Lepage

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is here ‘[m]ythologizing his own subjectivity’, Hodgdon wisely suggests that the politics of theatre, nuanced by the precise cultural context and historical moment of performance, can be hard to pin down. She offers two quite different ways of reading his NT Dream: On the one hand, in so far as Lepage’s ‘borrowings’ not only serve as raw material for his own experiments in intercultural connections but contribute to fashioning himself as an individual socio-theatrical subject, he seems entirely complicit with the colonial practices he would deny. On the other, it seems possible that, faced with doing Shakespeare at a royally sanctioned London venue, Lepage’s reliance on Indonesian psychic and symbolic forms was a move toward finding a space outside of either the British or the French Empire – an Archimedean point from which to explore and critique the insularity of British ‘Shakespeare-culture’.120 The site of the Wendake Tempest – on Indigenous lands outside of Frenchspeaking Quebec’s ‘nation’s capital’ – offers by comparison to the NT an entirely different, but no less fraught, nationalist power nexus within which to do Shakespeare. It is worth returning to consider this show’s politics in light of the tension Hodgdon posits between complicity and Archimedean critique. In keeping with the ‘first-contact’ theme, the inhabitants of the island who Prospero subjects to his magic wore traditional Aboriginal costume. The show’s potentially essentializing treatment of identity was disrupted by cross-casting some of the parts: the Europeans, Alonso and Trinculo, were played by Wendat performers, while the Aboriginal Caliban was played by the Québécois actor Marco Poulin. Although the production therefore avoided trading fully in discourses of authenticity – Caliban’s lived experiences as ‘one enslaved Huron among many whose matriarchal culture has been overthrown’121 are not Poulin’s – the very fact of a site-specific collaborative venture with the Huron-Wendat nation created a powerful cultural and historical frame through which to understand Ariel’s, and especially Caliban’s, resistance to Prospero’s magic. Another frame was provided by Garneau’s tradaptation, in which Prospero and Miranda speak français standard, while Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano speak a regional Québécois that has strong working-class and nationalist associations. Lepage, following Brook, has long been interested in this play’s exploration of slavery and freedom, with characters ‘vowing to free others, free themselves, or even to become another’s slave’.122 By returning to the play and this theme in a different collaborative context, Lepage sought to find

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new insights into both, and it was the staging of Caliban that was ultimately most revealing. The anger and athleticism of Poulin’s performance was punctuated by a recurrent gest of despair and barely contained frustration in which he would hold his head in his hands. Poulin adopts the posture early in his opening scene, when he throws himself stage right in response to the force of Prospero’s anger (1.2.346); sitting on his heels and turned away from the other actors, the gest marks his powerlessness to assert a contested sovereignty. This relation of power was reversed, however, in the play’s closing scene. After the other Europeans disappeared into their ship, a kneeling Prospero facing downstage delivered his appeal for freedom, not to the audience, but to Caliban standing in profile at centre stage, now freed of his chains and holding a hatchet. The play’s final words – ‘ma liberté’ – left hanging in the air as the scene fades to black, were a direct echo of Caliban’s similarly emotional and unresolved appeal at the end of the ‘strange fish’ scene (2.2), the force of Caliban’s anguish in this earlier scene conveyed in part through a stumbling retreat in the closing line of his song of freedom back into French, from Innu. As Lepage explains to McCullen, using a favoured metaphor from painting to explain his directorial process, collaboration with members of the Huron-Wendat nation ‘adds another layer’ to his ongoing exploration of this play: ‘the whole reconciliation at the end of the piece is about something else. It brings it beyond the reconciliation with his enemies: [Prospero] has to reconcile himself with the people he’s been stealing the culture from and the magic from.’123 Or as the Globe and Mail reviewer described the production’s powerful closing tableau: ‘The lights go down on Poulin’s Caliban considering how to move forward after years of oppression, whether to seek revenge, sink into resentment or rise to reconciliation.’124 Although it went unmentioned in the press releases and seemingly also by reviewers, this collaboration between Ex Machina and the Wendake community on a play concerned with the theme of forgiveness coincided with a period in Canadian history marked by the work of the federalist Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). The efforts of the TRC to reconcile Canada and its indigenous peoples was launched in 2008 with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s formal public apology to Canada’s Aboriginal peoples for forced assimilation through the Indian Residential Schools programme, and the work of the TRC culminated in a series of national events in different regions across Canada in the three years to 2013. What was especially fascinating about this production, therefore, was the way it ‘tradapted’ Garneau at a particular historical moment, elevating the Québécois as spoken by Caliban into something approaching a fully

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fleshed poetic language. Without rewriting the script, Poulin’s heightened delivery uncoupled Garneau’s joual from its usual socio-economic and nationalist associations. Prospero’s language may have been more polished than Caliban’s in terms of grammar and syntax, but in terms of the performance registers in which the two actors spoke, Caliban achieved an emotional quality and beauty of expression that Prospero (played by Jean Guy) lacked. This disparity between their registers took apart the familiar conventions and codes by which one understands Garneau’s langue québécois. Caliban’s language – competing with, without replicating, the language of the colonizer – implicitly claims autonomy and supports the case for self-government precisely by standing apart from currently recognized language games. Vigneault complained about this innovation on the grounds of narrative logic: Robert Lepage a opté pour une traduction en québécois, signée Michel Garneau. Bizarrement, certains comédiens s’expriment néanmoins dans une langue soutenue comme au théâtre classique, alors que d’autres jouent de manière relâchée et en québécois, sans qu’aucune logique ne soit perceptible. Caliban, à qui Prospero a appris à parler, peut-il vraiment s’exprimer de manière plus élégante que son maître? [Robert Lepage has opted for a Québécois translation by Michel Garneau. Bizarrely, however, certain actors express themselves in the elevated register of classical theatre, while others perform in a lax manner in Québécois, without any perceptible logic. Caliban, whom Prospero taught to speak, can he really express himself in a more elegant manner than his master?]125 The sense of disorientation which Vigneault registers with impatience is precisely the point. Garneau’s nationalist priorities are not those of First Nations peoples – the Meech Lake Accord, with its promise of ‘distinct society’ status for Quebec, collapsed in 1990, in part due to resistance to the perpetuation of the myth of two founding nations (the English and the French) mounted by Aboriginal communities. Poulin’s very performance of Caliban thus rehabilitates political debates about the ownership of language – already a fraught topic for both Shakespeare and Garneau – during a period of national reconciliation and for the purposes of a very particular cross-cultural collaboration between Ex Machina and the Wendake community. This is arguably, within the specific context of The Tempest as performed in French and Innu on Aboriginal lands in

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French-speaking Quebec, to reach again for what Hodgdon described at the time of the NT Dream as an Archimedean point from which to offer political critique.

Lepage and Ex Machina The plays of Shakespeare have been a part both of Lepage’s directorial process and his development as an artist throughout his working career – one of his earliest productions for Théâtre Repère, staged within four years of his graduation from Quebec City’s Conservatoire, was a version of Coriolanus. In a moment of what now seems self-referential irony, he plays a Québécois actor in Denys Arcand’s award-winning Jésus de Montréal (1989) who agrees to perform the part of Pontius Pilate in a collaboratively devised staging of the Passion only if he can deliver Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy. Lepage achieved international recognition relatively early in his career and with a force that has defined as a theatrical ‘event’ any project he has turned his hand to since. While Lepage has the advantage of not being – by any means – a struggling artist, celebrity brings with it its own challenges. It distorts, in particular, his creative participation as a part of a team, admirers and detractors alike tending to give him sole billing for work that is inherently collaborative. Ex Machina is a company and although it is not a permanent ensemble, actors tend to return to the company to devise and perform in multiple shows; Marie Gignac, in particular, has been closely associated with Lepage since their days at Théâtre Repère. Robert Caux, the musical composer for productions such as The Dragons’ Trilogy, Needles and Opium and Elsinore, worked alongside Lepage for more than ten years. Ex Machina’s executive producer, Michel Bernatchez, is another artist who formed a creative bond with Lepage at Repère. In addition to locating collaborative partnerships and sources of funding with which to finance the company’s productions, Lepage credits Bernatchez with having ‘enormous’ influence on the company’s creative output.126 Lepage is frank about this imbalance, acknowledging that the recognition he gets is ‘often out of proportion’ with his real contribution to a show – even a solo performance such as Elsinore is not a true one-man show, since there are ‘so many people in the rehearsal room that take responsibility for whatever happens’.127 But because he is the group’s ‘spokesperson’, ‘the face you put on the work and on the signature’, Lepage has been in the odd position since the late 1980s of being closely identified with a body of work that grows out of an intensively collaborative creative process, but rather

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less closely associated with the many artists with whom he collaborates to invent that body of work.128 And indeed this essay, in a series devoted to ‘Great Shakespeareans’, perhaps only further perpetuates that imbalance. Rather than approach Lepage through the lens of a superlative adjective such as ‘great’ that might seem to isolate him from the artists and resources on whose creativity his abilities as a director depend, it is perhaps more useful to think of him, using his own preferred phrase, as ‘a distinguished artist: someone whose work is distinct, authentic, worth seeing’.129 Lepage’s work is indeed distinct. He earns a place in this series as the charismatic visionary and spokesperson for a resource-based theatrical process characterized by extensive physical and ensemble work, cross-cultural eclecticism, startling visual effects, endless innovation even within a show’s run, and a sensory exploration of ideas and text that seeks every time he returns to Shakespeare’s plays to add to his own and his spectators’ perception of them a new layer, or depth, of colour.

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Notes

Introduction Cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, director, n. 1.g. Cited in Ibid. 3 Ibid., producer, n. 5. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., stage-manager, n. 6 See Peter Holland, ed., Great Shakespeareans vol. 2, 25–7. 7 See, for example, the chapters on the following: John Philip Kemble (in Vol. II), Poel, Granville-Barker and Guthrie (in Vol. XV), actor-directors like Gielgud and Olivier (in Vol. XVI) and Welles, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli (in Vol. XVII). 8 ‘Introduction’ to John Russell Brown, ed., The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2008), x. 9 R. H. O’Neill and N. M. Boretz, The Director as Artist (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1987). See also, for example, Stephen Unwin’s lively answer to the question posed by his title: So You Want to be a Theatre Director? (London: Nick Hern Books, 2004). 10 Peter Brook, ‘Foreword’ to Charles Marowitz, Prospero’s Staff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), x. 11 Ibid., x–xi. 12 Peter Brook, The Shifting Point (London: Methuen, 1988), 78. 1

2

Chapter 1 ‘Theater: Historic Staging of “Dream” ’, New York Times, 28 August 1970, 15. For a beautiful evocation of the sound and its loss in memory, see Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Shopping in the Archives: Material Memories’, in Peter Holland, ed., Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 135–67, at 166–7. 3 See ‘Peter Brook to hand over Paris’s Bouffes du Nord Theatre’, Guardian, 17 December 2008. 4 Quoted Michael Kustow, Peter Brook: A Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 87. 1 2

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149

7 8

All quoted Kustow, 89. Quoted Kustow, 86–7. Kustow, 11. Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 73. For a substantial extract from Craig’s 1907 essay ‘The Actor and the Über-marionette’, see J. Michael Walton (ed.), Craig on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1983), 82–7. 9 I probably need here to admit that US and Oedipus were my first experiences of seeing Brook’s work and that, in that private pantheon of our greatest theatre experiences that we rarely acknowledge, they figure among my top ten or so – and, yes, Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tragedy of Hamlet are in that list too. 10 Quoted Margaret Croyden, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 245. 11 Croyden, Lunatics, Lovers, 246. 12 See Williams, Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook (revised edition), 421. 13 See, especially, David Williams, ‘ “Remembering the Others that are Us”: Transculturalism and myth in the theatre of Peter Brook’, in Patrice Pavis (ed.), The Intercultural Performance Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 67–78. 14 Christine Dymkowski (ed.), The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 68–9. 15 Peter Brook, Evoking (and Forgetting) Shakespeare (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 40. 16 On the Carmen production, see Williams, Casebook, 332–52, but also the outstanding essays in the section on ‘Carmen ou l’essentialisation de l’opéra’, in Brook (= Les Voies de la creation théâtrale 13), ed. Georges Banu (Paris: CNRS, 1985), 165–258, especially Michel Rostain’s rehearsal diary and Banu’s essay on ‘Corps, attitudes et costumes ou le chemin vers la mort’. 17 On Brook’s Timon d’Athènes, see Les Voies de la creation théâtrale 5 (Paris: CNRS, 1977) 11–120. 18 Andrew Todd and Jean-Guy Lecat, The Open Circle: Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 222. 19 http://www.newspeterbrook.com/theatre–2/ [accessed on 13 March 2013]. 20 Andy Lavender, Hamlet in Pieces (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001), 67. References to the play vary, some including a question mark, but Brook did not. 21 Margaret Croyden, Conversations with Peter Brook 1970–2000 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 255. 22 See above, n.13. 23 Croyden, Conversations, 259. 24 I am using as the text for this both the film version (DVD: The Tragedy of Hamlet/Brook by Brook, 2004) and the text of the French translation used for the second staging at the Bouffes du Nord in 2002 (La Tragédie d’Hamlet, adapted by Peter Brook, translated by Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne [Paris: Actes-Sud, 2003]). The two are not identical to each other nor to the English text used in the theatre production (see below on the difference in the ending between DVD and performance) but are close enough for my purpose here. Lavender (Hamlet in Pieces, 238) records the production opening with 5 6

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150 Notes Horatio seeing the ghost; though neither DVD nor the French text concurs, my memory suggests he might be right, at least for one stage in the process of the production. 25 Croyden, Conversations, 252. 26 Maria Shevtsova, ‘Peter Brook’, in John Russell Brown, The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2008), 30. 27 See, e.g., Shevtsova, 30–1. 28 For a different view, try this comment from amazon.com: ‘This may be a very good example of a Peter Brook production, but I don’t think it’s a good interpretation of ‘Hamlet’. Too much is cut, and while some sequences have been merely transplanted from their original places, they’re too often replaced in contexts where they simply don’t make sense’ (Fritz Zimmerman, at http:// www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Brook-Adrian-Lester/dp/B0007TKHSO/ref=pd_ bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1234524146&sr=8–1 [accessed 13 February 2009]). The comments of amazon.com shoppers are an underused body of material for studying audience response. 29 Croyden, Conversations, 261. 30 Croyden, Conversations, 258–9. 31 Croyden, Conversations, 260. 32 Croyden, Conversations, 261. 33 Croyden, Coversations, 258. 34 Peter Brook, ‘Préface’ to La Tragédie d’Hamlet, 5. ‘The story of a remarkable, open, seductive young man, in a word the ideal young man. In Shakespeare’s terms: the ideal prince … we have the portrait of a young man with whom everyone nowadays would wish to identify themselves, the type of person “one would wish to be” ’ (my translation). 35 See, for a range of investigations of this topic, Ayanna Thompson (ed.), Colorblind Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2006). 36 Croyden, Conversations, 266. 37 Fran Rayner, ‘Rearticulating a Culture of Links: Peter Brook’s European Shakespeare’, The Shakespearean International Yearbook 8 (2008), 71–81, 76. 38 See, for example, on Brook’s approach to The Mahabharata, Gautam Dasgupta, ‘Peter Brook’s “Orientalism” ’, in Williams, Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook, 387–92. 39 Brook, Evoking (and Forgetting) Shakespeare, 39–40. 40 Ibid., 41. 41 Ibid., 41–2. 42 Ibid., 46. 43 Ibid., 46. 44 The published French text identifies Brook as the adaptor. 45 Charles Marowitz, ‘Introduction’ to The Marowitz Shakespeare (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1978), 13. 46 There is a good account of the soundscore by Helen Cole-King in ‘La Scénographie sonore dans La Tragédie de Hamlet’, Registres 11/12 (2006–7), 34–49. 47 Quoted Todd and Lecat, The Open Circle, 231. Their study of Hamlet (226–31) and indeed the whole book is a brilliant exploration and superbly documented

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account of the spaces of theatre, following, for instance, the differences in space for each stop on the tours of some of Brook’s work. 48 Brook, Evoking (and Forgetting) Shakespeare, 47. 49 Quoted in J. C. Trewin, Peter Brook: A Biography (London: Macdonald, 1971), 21–2 50 Quoted in Kustow, 45. 51 Peter Brook, The Shifting Point (London: Methuen, 1988), 11. 52 Ibid., 12. 53 Trewin, 29, 30. 54 Brook, The Shifting Point, 71. 55 Peter Brook, The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013), 25. 56 Ibid., 26. 57 Kustow, 66. 58 Quoted in Kustow, 66. 59 Quoted in Trewin, 54. 60 See Tony Howard, ‘When Peter Met Orson: The 1953 CBS King Lear’, in Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt (eds), Shakespeare, The Movie (London: Routledge, 1977), 121–34. 61 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Avon, 1969), 95. The best accounts of the production are by Alan Dessen, Titus Andronicus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), especially 14–23, and by William P. Shaw, ‘Text, Performance, and Perspective: Peter Brook’s Landmark Production of Titus Andronicus, 1955’, Theatre History Studies 10 (1990), 31–55. 62 Quoted Dessen, 15. 63 Quoted Kustow, 84. 64 Trewin, 84. 65 Quoted Kustow, 84. 66 Quoted in Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves, Peter Brook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 224. 67 Williams, 4–5. 68 Quoted Williams, p. 5. 69 Christopher Reid (ed.), Letters of Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 285. Hughes is referring to Olivier’s Richard III (1955), his Hamlet (1948), Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (= Castle of the Spider’s Web, 1957) and Kozintsev’s Hamlet (1964). Kozintsev was filming his version of King Lear at exactly the same time as Brook’s. 70 Ibid., 285. 71 Ibid., 285. 72 Brook, Shifting Point, 205. 73 Ibid., 204–5. 74 Quoted in Grigori Kozintsev, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 241. 75 John Chapman, quoted by Hunt and Reeves, 49. 76 Hunt and Reeves, 48. 77 Quoted by Alexander Leggatt, King Lear (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 35. Leggatt’s accounts of stage (32–52) and film (95–106) are excellent.

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152 Notes See Leggatt on the assertions and denials of Beckett’s influence, 46–7. Charles Marowitz, ‘Lear Log’, The Tulane Drama Review 8.2 (1963), 103–21, 104. 80 Quoted Williams, 26–7. 81 Ibid., 25. 82 Kozintsev, 23. 83 Marowitz, ‘Lear Log’, 106. 84 See Shomit Mitter, Systems of Rehearsal (London: Routledge, 1992), 25–9. 85 Marowitz, 116. 86 Brook, Shifting Point, 93. 87 Marowitz, 118. 88 Ibid., 119. 89 Glenn Loney (ed.), Peter Brook’s Production of William Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Chicago: The Dramatic Publishing Company, 1974), 55. 90 Peter Thomson, ‘A Necessary Theatre: The Royal Shakespeare Company Season 1970 Reviewed’, Shakespeare Survey 24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 126. 91 Brook, The Shifting Point, 97. 92 David Selbourne, The Making of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (London: Methuen, 1982). 93 Selbourne, 85. 94 Selbourne, 175. 95 Mitter, Systems of Rehearsal, 32. 96 Brook, The Shifting Point, 97. 97 Ibid., 101. 98 Selbourne, 55. 99 Mitter, 33. 100 Mitter, 35. 101 Mitter, 36. 102 Brook, The Empty Space, 12. 103 Mitter, 40. 104 Jay Halio, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 63. 105 Brook, The Empty Space, 134. 106 Barnes, see n. 1. 78 79

Chapter 2 Independent, May 15, 2008. A. Beacock, Play Way English for To-Day: The Methods and Influence of H. Caldwell Cook (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1943), 32–3. 3 S. J. D. Mitchell, Perse: A History of the Perse School 1615–1976 (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1976), 126. 4 Mitchell, Perse, 232. 1 2

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Daily Telegraph, 20 November 2004. Mitchell, Perse, 211–12. 7 Peter Hall, The Necessary Theatre (London: Nick Hern 1999), 50. 8 Mitchell, Perse, 128. 9 Plays International, May 1988. 10 Guardian, 2 March 2002. 11 Glasgow Herald, 8 July 1959. 12 Peter Hall, Making an Exhibition of Myself (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993), 128. 13 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 10 July 1959. 14 Spectator, 17 July 1959. 15 Leamington Spa Courier, 10 July 1959. 16 Daily Mail, 8 July 1959. 17 Wolverhampton Express and Star, 8 July 1959. 18 Daily Mail, 8 July 1959. 19 Financial Times, 8 July 1959. 20 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 10 July 1959. 21 Spectator, 14 July 1959. 22 Birmingham Mail and Evening Dispatch, 8 July 1959. 23 Evening Standard, 8 July 1959. 24 Daily Express, 8 July 59. 25 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 10 July 1959 26 Coventry Evening Telegraph, 14 January 1960. 27 The Stage, 27 October 1960. 28 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 2 September 1960. 29 Tablet, 26 September 1960. 30 Tablet, 26 September 1960. 31 Daily Mail, 6 April 1960. 32 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 21 October 1960. 33 Evening Standard, 6 April 1960. 34 Times, 6 April 1960. 35 Hall, Exhibition, 166 36 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 21 October 1960. 37 A transcript of the broadcast is archived at the Shakespeare Centre Archive in Stratford-upon-Avon. 38 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 29 September 1960. 39 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 29 September 1960. 40 Western Independent, 31 July 1960. 41 Birmingham Mail, 27 July 1960. 42 Leamington Spa Courier, 27 July 1960. 43 Leamington Spa Courier, 27 July 1960. 44 Observer, 31 July 1960. 45 Evening Standard, 27 July 1960. 46 Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 27 July 1960. 47 Spectator, 29 July 1960. 48 Hall, Exhibition, 168. 49 Hall, Exhibition, 148. 5 6

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154 Notes Patrick Miles, ‘Chekhov, Shakespeare, the Ensemble and the Company’, New Theatre Quarterly, vol. XI, no. 43 (August 1995): 204 51 East Anglia Times, October 9, 1993 52 Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare in Performance: The Henry VI Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 65. 53 As cited in Hampton-Reeves and Rutter, Henry VI, 55. 54 Daily Mail, 18 July 1963. 55 Hampton-Reeves and Rutter, Henry VI, 71. 56 The Sunday Times, 21 July, 1963. 57 Stephen Fay, Power Play: the Life and Times of Peter Hall (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), 156 58 Peter Hall and John Barton, The Wars of the Roses (London: BBC, 1970), xii. 59 Hall and Barton, Wars, xii–xiii. 60 Hall and Barton, Wars, xii–xiii. 61 Barbara Hodgdon, ‘The Wars of the Roses: Scholarship Speaks on the Stage’. Shakespeare Jahrbuch 108 (1972): 175 62 Hall and Barton, Wars, 237. 63 The Times, 17 July 1963. 64 Peter Hall. ‘Shakespeare and the Modern Director’, in The Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company, 1960–63, John Goodwin (ed.) (London: Max Reinhardt, 1964), 46 65 Antony B. Dawson, Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 134. 66 Peter Holland, ‘Peter Hall’, in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 148. 67 Dawson, Hamlet, 134. 68 Robert Speaight, ‘Shakespeare in Britain,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 16.4 (Autumn 1965): 320 69 Dawson, Hamlet, 135. 70 Dawson, Hamlet, 135. 71 Dawson, Hamlet, 136. 72 Dawson, Hamlet, 136. 73 Dawson, Hamlet, 138. 74 Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (eds), Hamlet, Arden 3rd Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 24. 75 Speaight, ‘Shakespeare in Britain’, 321. 76 Montreal Gazette, 5 Febuary 1966. 77 Ronald Bryden, The Unfinished Hero and Other Essays (London: Faber, 1969), 63. 78 Alan Sinfield, ‘Royal Shakespeare’, in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd edn, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 193 79 Fay, Power Play, 217. 80 Fay, Power Play, 220. 81 Fay, Power Play, 222. 82 Fay, Power Play, 247. 83 Fay, Power Play, 239. 84 Fay, Power Play, 247. 50

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Fay, Power Play, 248. Hall, Exhibition, 296. 87 Holland, ‘Peter Hall’, 148. 88 Kristina Barker, Coriolanus at the National: ‘Th’Interpretation of Time’ (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1992), 27. 89 Judi Dench, ‘A Career in Shakespeare’, in Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History, Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson (eds), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 208. 90 Tirzah Lowen, Peter Hall Directs Antony and Cleopatra (London: Methuen, 1990), xiv. 91 Lowen, Peter Hall Directs, 48. 92 Lowen, Peter Hall Directs, 170. 93 Lowen, Peter Hall Directs, 170. 94 Lowen, Peter Hall Directs, xiv. 95 Richard Madelaine, Shakespeare in Production: Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 122. 96 Time Out, 24 April 1987. 97 Tribune, 24 April 1987. 98 Dench, ‘A Career in Shakespeare’, 208. 99 Sunday Times, 2 May 1988. 100 Daily Telegraph, 19 January 1988. 101 Daily Telegraph, 19 January 1988. 102 King, Ros, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 72. 103 Fay, Power Play, 337. 104 Fay, Power Play, 337. 105 Fay, Power Play, 338. 106 Daily Telegraph, 19 January 1988. 107 Guardian, 23 May 1988. 108 Observer, 22 May 1988. 109 Will Sharpe, ‘Cymbeline in Performance: The RSC and Beyond’, in The RSC Shakespeare: Cymbeline, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (eds), (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 165–6 110 Roger Warren, Staging Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 74. 111 Spectator, 28 May 1988. 112 Sunday Times, 22 May 1988. 113 Warren, Late Plays, 105. 114 Guardian, 20 May 1988. 115 Listener, 26 May 1988. 116 Sunday Times, 22 May 1988. 117 Listener, 26 May 1988. 118 Sunday Times, 22 May 1988. 119 Spectator, 28 May 1988. 120 Guardian, 31 May 1988. 121 Sunday Times, 22 May 1988. 122 Daily Telegraph, 31 May 1988. 123 Sunday Times, 22 May 1988. 85 86

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156 Notes 126 127 128 124 125

Listener, 26 May 1988. Observer, 22 May 1988. Observer, 22 May 1988. Times, 20 June 1992. Holland, ‘Peter Hall’, 156.

Chapter 3 I wish to thank Ryuta Minami, Daniel Gallimore and Shoichiro Kawai, chair of the Sai no Kuni Shakespeare series executive committee, for their generous assistance with obtaining obscure research materials and for lending their expertise on Ninagawa. William Quiterio has provided unfailing research assistance at George Washington University. I owe special thanks to Kendra Leonard for lending her musical ears and for sharing her immense knowledge of all things musicological. According to Haruo Shirane, the Azuchi-Momoyama period refers to the time when two powerful generals, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, ruled over the country before ‘succumbing to Tokugawa Ieyasu’ in 1600. See Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology, Beginnings to 1660, Haruo Shirane (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 567. Some Japanese Shakespeareans including Akihiko Senda have made an error regarding the Azuchi-Momoyama period, which this authoritative anthology defines as 1573–98. 2 Ryuta Minami, ‘Macbeth under the Cherry Trees’, unpublished essay, University of Warwick, 1991, 10 3 Ibid. 4 ‘I felt released to realize that I [too] could do anything I liked in stating Shakespeare.’ Quoted in Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 315. 5 Akihiko Senda, among other scholars, has noted how ‘the intensity of theatrical expression that characterizes Ninagawa’s directing indicates the influence Kurosawa’s cinematography’ upon the stage director who is an ‘ardent admirer of Kurosawa’. Akihiko Senda (trans. Ryuta Minami), ‘The Rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: From the 1960s to the 1990s’, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, Takashi Sasayama, J. R. Mulryne, and Margaret Shewing (eds), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22–3. 6 In his review, Mel Gussow compares The Ninagawa Macbeth which ‘holds firmly to Shakespearean intention while stressing the timelessness of the story’ with the more ‘radical’ Hamlet by Ingmar Bergman. Mel Gussow, ‘Universality of Macbeth in Japanese’, New York Times, 22 October 1990, C20. 7 He has yet to direct All’s Well That Ends Well, Henry V, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, Measure for Measure, Richard II, Timon of Athens and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 8 Indra Levy, ‘Introduction: Modern Japan and the Trialectics of Translation’, 1

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Translation in Modern Japan, Indra Levy (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–12; see p. 1. 9 Yo Zushi, ‘The NS Interview: Yukio Ninagawa, Theatre Director’, New Statesman, June 13, 2012; http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/06/ ns-interview-yukio-ninagawa-theatre-director [accessed 20 March 2013]. 10 Alexander C. Y. Huang, ‘Shakespeare and Translation’, The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray (eds), (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 68–87. 11 George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4; see also 1–20. 12 Ibid., 24. 13 Yasunari Takahashi, Tetsuo Anzai, Kazuo Matsuoka, Ted Motohashi and James Brandon, ‘Interview with Suzuki Tadashi’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 196–207; quoted from 205. 14 Engelbert Kaempfer, De beschryving van Japan, 3 vols (Amsterdam: Jan Roman de Jonge, 1733). 15 Dennis C. Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 16 Anzai Tetsuo, ‘Is a Japanese Shakespeare Possible?’, Shakespeare Worldwide: Translation and Adaptation, vol. XII (Tokyo: Yushodo Shoten, 1989), 127–38. 17 Yushi Odashima, Shakespeare Yugaku (Tokyo, 1982), 12; translation by Adrian James Pinnington, ‘Hamlet in Japanese Dress: Two Contemporary Japanese Versions of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Worldwide: Translation and Adaptation, vol. 11 (Tokyo: Yushodo Shoten, 1986), 51–72; quoted from 55. 18 For the regional ‘transculturation’ of Japanese literature, see Karen Laura Thornber’s Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). 19 Aragorn Quinn, ‘Political Theatre: The Rise and Fall of Rome and The Sword of Freedom, Two Translations of Julius Caesar in Meiji Japan by Kawashima Keizo and Tsubouchi Shoyo’, in Alexander C. Y. Huang (ed.), ‘Shakespeare and Asia’, a special issue of Asian Theatre Journal 28.1 (Spring 2011): 168–83. 20 Masahiko Masumoto, Yokohama Gete-za: Meiji Taisho no Seiyo Gekijo (The Yokohama Gaiety Theatre: The Western-Style Theatre in the Meiji and Taisho Eras), 2nd edn (Yokohama: Iwasaki Kinen Press, 1989); Kaori Kobayashi, ‘Touring in Asia: The Miln Company’s Shakespeare Productions in Japan’, Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Performance, Edward J. Esche (ed.) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 53–72. 21 Ryuta Minami, Chronology, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 258; Yoshiko Kawachi, ‘The Merchant of Venice and Japanese Culture’, Japanese Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Yoshiko Kawachi (ed.) (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), quoted from 50–1. 22 Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese, Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan for the Use of Travellers and Others, 5th edn (London: John Murray, 1905), 1. First edition published in 1890. Chamberlain arrived in Tokyo in 1873. 23 Ibid., 290.

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158 Notes Ibid., 9. Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan (London: Continuum, 2005), 91. 26 Yo Zushi, ‘The NS Interview: Yukio Ninagawa, Theatre Director’, New Statesman, June 13, 2012; http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/06/ ns-interview-yukio-ninagawa-theatre-director [accessed 20 March 2013]. 27 Ibid. 28 Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 319. 29 Dennis Kennedy writes, ‘Turning the tables on Mnouchkine, [Ninagawa] raids Western culture for its tendency to hybrid art, and thereby forges a new eclecticism … Ninagawa may be the ideal director.’ Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 315. Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, on the other hand, are more critical of Ninagawa. They do not believe ‘making Shakespeare visually familiar successfully solves the problem of the linguistic difficulty which is essentially aural’. See Kishi and Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan, 91. 30 The Japan Times, October 6, 2002. 31 ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 211. 32 Maria M. Delgado and Paul Heritage (eds), In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 193. 33 Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan, 84. 34 Charles Osborne, Review of The Ninagawa Macbeth, The Weekend Telegraph, 19 September 1987. 35 Stephen Orgel, ‘The Authentic Shakespeare’, Representations 21 (1988): 1–25; quoted from 13. 36 Leonard C. Pronko, ‘Approaching Shakespeare through Kabuki’, Shakespeare East and West, Minoru Fujita and Leonard Pronko (eds), (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 24. 37 Introduction, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 2. 38 Tsubouchi Shoyo, Shakespeare kenkyu shiori (Introduction to Shakespeare Studies) (Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1928). 39 Natsume Soseki, ‘Tsubouchi Hakase to Hamlet (Dr. Tsubouchi and Hamlet), Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, 5–6 June 1911; reprinted in Soseki Zenshu vol. 11 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1965). 40 On the tension between Shinpa and Shingeki, see Brian Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity (London: Routledge Japan Library, 2002), 18–19. 41 Koreya Senda, Engeki hyoron shu (Collected Theatre Criticism) vol. 2 (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1980), 230; Dennis Kennedy and J. Thomas Rimer, ‘Koreya Senda and Political Shakespeare’, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 53–70; esp. 60. 42 Ninagawa recalled the impact of seeing Senda as Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor when Ninagawa was a young actor. ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 208. 43 Aragorn Quinn, ‘Political Theatre: The Rise and Fall of Rome and The Sword of Freedom, Two Translations of Julius Caesar in Meiji Japan by Kawashima Keizo and Tsubouchi Shoyo’, Asian Theatre Journal 28. 1 (Spring 2011): 168–83. 44 Robert Tierney, ‘Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in 1903 Japan’, Shakespeare Quarterly 62.4 (2011): 514–40. 24 25

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Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 107. 46 Shoichiro Kawai, ‘Kabuki Twelfth Night and Kyogen Richard III: Shakespeare as a Cultural Catalyst’, Shakespeare Survey 64 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 114–20. ‘Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst’ was the theme of the 2010 International Shakespeare Conference in Stratford-upon-Avon, August 8–13. 47 Izumi Kadono, ‘The Kabuki Version of Hamlet: Hamlet Yamamoto No Nishikie’, Shakespeare Yearbook: Shakespeare in Japan 9 (1999): 105–21; 108–9 and 117. 48 Kuniyoshi Munakata Ueda, Noh Adaptation of Shakespeare: Encounter and Union (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 2001), viii–ix. His Noh Hamlet toured as a solo performance to Britain, Sweden, Denmark and Canada in 1990. I thank Ueda for sharing his knowledge of Noh and for his book. 49 Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 314; Ryuta Minami, Chronology, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 328–31. 50 The Tokyo Globe reopened in 2004 under new management and moved away from a Shakespearean repertoire. Michiko Suematsu, ‘The Tokyo Globe Years 1998–2002’, Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, Alexander C. Y. Huang and Charles Ross (eds) (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009), 121–8. 51 Tadashi Suzuki, ‘Culture is the Body’, Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, (eds), Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York: PAJ Publications, 1991), 241–8. 52 ‘Interview with Suzuki Tadashi’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 196–207; quoted from 196–7. 53 Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan, 90. 54 Hiroshi Hasebe, Interview with Yukio Ninagawa, August 18, 2005, Performing Arts Network Japan (The Japan Foundation), http://performingarts.jp/E/art_ interview/0508/1.html [accessed 20 March 2013]. 55 Nicholas De Jongh, ‘Noh Way Out’, Evening Standard, November 1992, 116. 56 John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 57 Arthur Horowitz, Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’: Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler—Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Newark: Associated University Presses, 2004), 129. 58 ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 208–9. 59 ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 209. 60 Shoichiro Kawai, ‘Ninagawa Yukio’, The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, John Russell Brown (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2008), 271. 61 Kojin Karatani, ‘On Macbeth’, in Sickness as Meaning (Imi to iu yamai) (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1975). 62 Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 316. 63 Yukio Ninagawa, Programme for The Tempest, trans. Stefan Kaiser and Sue Henny, Edinburgh International Festival, 1988. 64 Yukio Ninagawa, Sen no Naifu, Sen no Me (A Thousand Knives, a Thousand Eyes) (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1993), 107. Quoted in Akihiko Senda (trans. Ryuta 45

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160 Notes Minami), ‘The Rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: From the 1960s to the 1990s’, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 23–4. 65 Yukio Ninagawa, Sen no Naifu, Sen no Me (A Thousand Knives, a Thousand Eyes) (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 1993), 55; English translation by Shoichiro Kawai, ‘Ninagawa Yukio’, 270. 66 Shoichiro Kawai, ‘Ninagawa Yukio’, 279–80. 67 Michael Billington, Review of The Ninagawa Macbeth, The Guardian, September 19, 1987. 68 ‘Tempesto: Sadoshima no rehasuru’, anonymous interview with Ninagawa, Marie Claire (Tokyo), January 1987, translated by J. Thomas Rimer, quoted in Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 315. 69 Yo Zushi, ‘The NS Interview: Yukio Ninagawa, Theatre Director’. 70 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell, Christie McDonald (ed.) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 50–51. 71 ‘Tempesto: Sadoshima no rehasuru’, anonymous interview with Ninagawa, Marie Claire (Tokyo), January 1987, trans. by J. Thomas Rimer, quoted in Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 315. 72 Peter Whitebrook, Review of The Ninagawa Macbeth, The Scotsman, 23 August 1985. 73 Michael Ratcliffe, Review of The Ninagawa Macbeth, The Observer, 25 August 1985. 74 Jessica Duchen, ‘Fauré: Requiem for a Dream’, The Independent, 19 March 2010: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/faur-requiem-for-a-dream–1923526.html [accessed 2 April 2013]. See also Duchen, Gabriel Fauré (London: Phaidon, 2000). 75 Fauré was interviewed by Louis Aguettant on July 12, 1902; English translation by Robert Orledge, Gabriel Fauré (London: Eulenberg, 1979). 76 Yukio Ninagawa, Note 1969–1988 (Tokyo, 1988), trans. Ryuta Minami; quoted in Ronnie Mulryne, ‘From Text to Foreign Stage: Yukio Ninagawa’s Cultural Translation of Macbeth’, Shakespeare from Text to Stage, Patricia Kennan and Mariangela Tempera (eds) (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1992), 136. 77 Daniel Gallimore, Sounding Like Shakespeare: A Study of Prosody in Four Japanese Translations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hyogo: Kwansei Gakuin University Press, 2012). 78 ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 211. 79 Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan, 80–81. 80 Daniel Gallimore, Sounding Like Shakespeare, 174–5. 81 Peter Brook, The Shifting Point, 1946–1987 (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), 78. 82 Shoichiro Kawai, ‘Ninagawa Yukio’, The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, 277. 83 ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 208–19. 84 Yukio Ninagawa, Programme for The Tempest, trans. Stefan Kaiser and Sue Henny, Edinburgh International Festival, 1988. 85 Yukio Ninagawa, Note 1969–1988 (Tokyo, 1988), trans. Ryuta Minami. 86 Yukio Ninagawa, Note 1969–1988 (Tokyo, 1988), trans. Ryuta Minami.

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Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare in Japan, 80–81; Yeeyon Im, ‘The Pitfalls of Intercultural Discourse: The Case of Yukio Ninagawa’, Shakespeare Bulletin 22.4 (2004): 7–30; Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan, ‘Part IV: Intercultural Politics’, in Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 217. 88 J. R. Singh, Globalized Arts: The Entertainment Economy and Cultural Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), i–xiii. 89 Peter Barnes, ‘Working with Yukio Ninagawa’, New Theatre Quarterly 8.32 (1992): 389–90; quoted from 389. 90 Yukio Ninagawa, quoted by Nobuo Miyashita, ‘Ninagawa Yukio, Theatrical Pacesetter’, Japan Quarterly 34 (1987): 400–4. 91 ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 211. 92 ‘Interview with Ninagawa Yukio’, Performing Shakespeare in Japan, 211. 93 Kazuko Matsuoka’s interview with Yukio Ninagawa in ‘Shakespeare, the Directors’ Age’, Theatre Arts (Gekijo geijutsu, 4 May 1989); English translation by Akihiko Senda (trans. Ryuta Minami), ‘The Rebirth of Shakespeare in Japan: From the 1960s to the 1990s’, Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage, 22. 87

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8 9 6 7



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Press Kit, Ex Machina Archives. Quoted in Jane Koustas, ‘Staging the/an Other: The Dragons’ Trilogy Take II,’ International Journal of Francophone Studies 9:3 (2006): 395–414, 401. Lepage, interviewed by Christopher Innes, in ‘Robert Lepage’, Directors/ Directing: Conversations on Theatre, Maria Shevtsova and Christopher Innes (eds), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 120–50, 129–30. The show evolved substantially again when Lepage and his actors returned to it in 2003; this later version was played by eight actors speaking four languages (including Japanese). Lepage in conversation with Rémy Charest, in Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights, trans. Wanda Romer Taylor (London: Methuen, 1997), 31. Anthony Adler, ‘International Theatre Festival: The Dragons’ Trilogy’, Chicago Reader, 14 June 1990. Gignac’s discussion of the company’s decision to remount The Dragons’ Trilogy in 2003 is quoted in Koustas, ‘Staging the/an Other’, 402. Quoted in John O’Mahony, ‘Aerial Views’, Guardian, 23 June 2001. Shevtsova and Innes, ‘Robert Lepage’, 122. Quoted in Charest, 17. Denis Salter, ‘Between Wor(l)ds: Lepage’s Shakespeare Cycle,’ Theatre 24:3 (1993): 61–70, 67. Lepage’s words are quoted from an interview with Sam Marlowe, ‘Robert Lepage: the way of the dragon,’ Time Out: London, 15 February 2011. Accessed 16 December 2012. Further description of Lepage’s Hart House Macbeth can be found in Jane Freeman’s ‘Unexpected Rainfall: Working in the Wings on Robert Lepage’s

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162 Notes Macbeth’, in Directing and Authorship in Western Drama, Anna Migliarisi (ed.), Studies in Drama and Theatre Series (Legas Publishing: New York, 2006): 285–306. We gratefully acknowledge permission from Legas Publishing to reprint material from that paper here. 11 Christie Carson, ‘Collaboration, Translation, Interpretation’, NTQ 9:33 (February 1993): 31–6, 32. 12 Mark Swed reviewing KÀ (‘Epic, extravagant’, Los Angeles Times, 5 February 2005. Accessed 15 December 2012). 13 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 143–4. 14 Jennifer Harvie and Erin Hurley discuss the inability of either the Canadian or Quebec governments to ‘enshrine’ Lepage as a national institution in ‘States of Play: Locating Québec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil’, Theatre Journal 51:3 (1999): 299–315, esp. 303–9. 15 In her capacity as the Production Coordinator for Lepage’s production of Macbeth at the University of Toronto, Jane Freeman attended all rehearsals as well as all production meetings, interviews with the press, and performances. She kept a rehearsal journal, and material on the rehearsals for the Hart House Macbeth, as well as any unreferenced quotations from Lepage included here, are from that journal. Lepage made this comment in a press interview. 16 The first quotation is Lepage in interview with John Tusa, BBC Radio 3, broadcast 1 May 2005 (transcript accessed 16 December 2012); the last quotations are Lepage in interview with Charest, 26. 17 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 50–51. 18 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 26. 19 Lepage, interviewed by Innes, 129. The translation of metteur en scène is provided by Taylor, Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights, 61. 20 Lepage, in interview with Tusa. 21 Running times cited in Pat Donnelly, ‘Lepage’s 9-hour Lipsynch an entertaining, powerful statement’, The Gazette (Montreal), 1 March 2010. 22 Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009), 94–5. 23 Tusa, interviewing Lepage. 24 Quoted in O’Mahony, ‘Aerial Views’. Marie Brassard recounts that the performers were improvising about a third of the play in front of a live audience (quoted in Aleksandar Saša Dundjerović, The Theatricality of Robert Lepage [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007], 134–5). Lepage later explained in interview with Tusa that they had been promised a ‘small remote little garage somewhere for maybe two hundred, three hundred people’, rather than ‘the opening night [show] in front of a thousand people in a more traditional venue’. 25 Andy Lavender, Hamlet in Pieces: Shakespeare Reworked: Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson (London: Nick Hern Books, 2001), 9. 26 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 103. 27 Freeman, rehearsal journal. Lepage makes the same point about the threedimensionality of Shakespeare’s plays and the need to return to them multiple times in order to ‘make all the facets shine’ in conversation with Richard Eyre (Platform Paper, Royal National Theatre, 19 November 1992).

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Lepage’s resource-based theatre method is described by Dundjerović, Theatricality, 75–96. Shevtsova and Innes use the term ‘reVised’ (‘Robert Lepage’, 124). 29 Dundjerović, Theatricality, 152–74, esp. 172. The word ‘gradualist’ in the previous sentence is taken from Tusa, who adopts Lepage’s own usage. 30 Lepage in conversation with Eyre, 19 November 1992. 31 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 118–19. 32 Quoted in Sarah Hemming, ‘The watered-down version’, The Independent, 1 July 1992. 33 Lepage, interviewed by Carson, 36. 34 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 99. He makes a similar point to Carson, 35–6. 35 Lepage recounts the Hart House process and its discoveries to Denis Salter in ‘Borderlines: An Interview with Robert Lepage and Le Théâtre Repère,’ Theatre 24:3 (1993): 71–9, 74. The quotations in the following sentence are from the same page. 36 He also used it in preparation for La Tempête in his 1992 Cycle Shakespeare. The recurrent images from that exploration included books, heads, hearts, islands in the mind, and doubles, and they shaped a production filled with mirror images and a set in which a table in a rehearsal room could be transformed into an island surrounded by waves and boats (Freeman, rehearsal journal). Lepage’s rehearsal process for the Echo project, a devised piece based on the poetry of Ann Diamond, was recorded for the Genie-nominated film called Breaking a Leg: Robert Lepage and the Echo Project (dir. Donald Winkler, National Film Board of Canada, 1992). 37 Charles Spencer, ‘The Act of Living Dangerously’, Daily Telegraph, 6 July 1992, quoted in Dundjerović, Theatricality, 167. 38 Lepage, quoted in Matt Wolf, ‘A Muddy “Midsummer” Makes a Splash in London’, Associated Press, 10 August, 1992. Accessed online 21 December 2012. 39 Trevor Griffiths (ed.), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75. 40 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 84. 41 Hemming, ‘The watered-down version’. 42 As quoted in Hemming, ‘The watered-down version’. 43 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 157. 44 Freeman, rehearsal journal. Lepage had been asked by a student actor how he prepares for a big scene. 45 Salter, ‘Between Wor(l)ds’, 65. 46 Salter, ‘Between Wor(l)ds’, 65. 47 Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Macbeth at the Turn of the Millennium,’ in Shakespearean Illuminations, Jay L. Halio and Hugh Richmond (eds), (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), 147–63, 155–6. This essay also documents moments in the production that visually quote Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, one of the films Lepage brought as a resource to the Hart House rehearsals. 48 Salter, ‘Between Wor(l)ds’, 65. 49 Hodgdon, ‘Macbeth at the Turn of the Millennium’, 156. 50 Freeman, rehearsal journal; Lepage, interviewed by Carson, 36. 28

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164 Notes Freeman, rehearsal journal. Lepage in conversation with Eyre, 19 November 1992. He makes the same point about etymology speaking to cultural differences in conversation with Charest (61). 53 Christopher Innes, ‘Beyond Categories (Redefining ‘mainstream’)’, in Beyond the Mainstream, ed. Peter Paul Schnierer, Contemporary Drama in English, vol. 4, 1996 (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1997): 55–67, 67; and Alastair Macaulay, ‘All cut up over Hamlet’, Financial Times, 7 January 1997. 54 Lepage, as quoted in Lavender, Hamlet in Pieces, 108. 55 Hodgdon, ‘Macbeth at the Turn of the Millennium’, 156. 56 Lepage, interviewed by Innes, 129. 57 Freeman, rehearsal journal. 58 Personal communication. Lepage was interviewed by Peter Holland at the Shakespeare Society, New York, on 15 October 2012. 59 Lepage, ‘Director’s Note’, Ex Machina Archives. Margaret Jane Kidnie is grateful to Ex Machina for their generosity in making available to her various archival materials relating to the Cycle Shakespeare productions, Elsinore, and the Wendake Tempest. 60 See Lepage, interviewed by Innes, 141. He told the actors of Macbeth in Toronto that ‘Shakespeare wrote in an unusual way; experiment with delivering the lines in unusual ways’ (Freeman, rehearsal journal). 61 Lepage in interview with Tusa. 62 Lepage, interviewed by Innes, 133–4. 63 Lepage, interviewed by Eyre, Platform Paper, Royal National Theatre, 28 May 1992. 64 Eyre speaking in interview with Lepage, 28 May 1992. Marie Brassard and Anne-Marie Cadieux, performers in the French-language Shakespeare Cycle, describe their study of the plays in English in Salter, ‘Borderlines’, 71. 65 Lepage, interviewed by Carson, 36. 66 Leanore Lieblein, ‘ “Cette Belle Langue”: The “Tradaptation” of Shakespeare in Quebec’, Shakespeare and the Language of Translation, Ton Hoenselaars (ed.) (London: Thomson Learning, 2004): 255–69, 255–6. 67 Lieblein, ‘ “Tradaptation” ’, 256. 68 The programme is cited in translated in Robert Ormsby, ‘Québécois Shakespeare goes Global: Robert Lepage’s Coriolan,’ Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011): 317–27, 318 n. 5. Lepage makes the same point in interview with Salter, 71. 69 Lepage, interviewed by Salter, 72; Louis-Bernard Robitaille, ‘Robert Lepage à Paris, dans les ligues majeures’, La Presse, 25 October 1992, quoted in Ormsby, ‘Québécois Shakespeare,’ 324. 70 Ormsby, ‘Québécois Shakespeare’, 324, 326–7. 71 Lepage, interviewed by Salter, 71–2. 72 Lepage, interviewed by Salter, 72. 73 Annie Brisset, A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968–1988, trans. Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 109. 74 Lieblein, ‘ “Tradaptation” ’, 256–9. 51 52

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Antoine Berman, ‘Foreword’ to Brisset, Sociocritique, xvii (emphasis in original). See also Denis Salter, ‘Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial Space’, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996), 113–32, 125. 76 Brisset, Sociocritique, 141. 77 Salter, ‘Acting Shakespeare’, 125. 78 Ormsby, ‘Québécois Shakespeare’, 319. 79 Brisset, Sociocritique, 118–19. The battle at the Plains of Abraham marked a decisive turning point in the contest between France and Britain for territories that would later become Canada. 80 Lepage, interviewed by Salter (‘Borderlines’, 73). 81 Lepage, interviewed by Salter (‘Borderlines’, 73). 82 Alexandre Vigneault, ‘Traduire le theatre: l’art invisible,’ La Presse (Montreal), 11 February 2012. See also Salter’s opinion that ‘tradaptations, like postcolonial acting, should never be granted timeless status … They should vanish once their particular historical moment has passed and new tradaptations should take their place’ (‘Acting Shakespeare’, 126). 83 Lepage, interviewed by Salter (‘Borderlines’, 73). The quotation in the next sentence is from the same page. 84 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 50–53. 85 Lepage in conversation with Eyre, 28 May 1992. All of the quotations in this paragraph are from the same interview. 86 Lepage elsewhere likens theatre to sport, arguing that audiences can be as stimulated by ‘looking at actors performing, dropping the ball, passing the ball’ as by a word-driven narrative: successful theatre depends on ‘find[ing] a good balance between all these things’ (interviewed by Tusa). 87 Ormsby, ‘Québécois Shakespeare’, 319–20. 88 Lepage, interviewed by Carson, 36. 89 Laurie E. Maguire, ‘ “Oh be some other name”: Translating Romeo and Juliet’, in Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney (eds), Shakespeare: Text and Theater (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 266–84, 275. 90 Margaret Jane Kidnie is grateful to Gordon McCall for discussing his collaboration with Lepage on the phone and by email. 91 Maguire, ‘Translating’, 276. 92 Lepage, Director’s Note, Programme, Romeo and Juliette, 21 June–8 July 1990. 93 Tom Rooney, unpublished interview with Margaret Jane Kidnie, 7 September 2012. Kidnie is grateful to Rooney and Randy Hughson (who played Benvolio and later Mercutio) for discussing this production with her. 94 The quotation is taken from Lepage’s Director’s Note, Romeo and Juliette. 95 Kidnie is grateful to Laurie Maguire for sharing with her production materials including a photocopy of Dalpé’s unpublished translation, and the programme from the Victoria Island tour-stop. Juliette’s use of French and English in the balcony scene was recounted by Rooney in a personal interview with Kidnie. 96 Rooney, unpublished interview. 97 Lepage, interviewed by Salter, 76. 98 ‘Characterless’ is Ormsby’s term, and he uses it within quotation marks (‘Québécois Shakespeare’, 321). 75

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166 Notes Ormsby, ‘Québécois Shakespeare’, 323. See Shannon Steen and Margaret Werry, ‘Bodies, Technologies, and Subjectivities: The Production of Authority in Robert Lepage’s Elsinore,’ Études Théâtrales/Essays in Theatre 16.2 (May 1998): 139–53. 100 Dan Glaister, ‘Fated, not feted’, The Guardian, 15 August 1996. 101 Jane Edwardes, ‘Elsinore,’ Time Out, 1 January 1997; and Michael Billington, ‘Visual feast goes emotionally cold’, The Guardian, n.d. On live theatre’s betrayal by technology see, for example, Charles Spencer, ‘When the machinery stops the show’, Daily Telegraph, 15 August 1996. 102 Dundjerović, Theatricality, 54. 103 Lepage, interviewed by Innes, 126–7. 104 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 167. 105 Lepage, interviewed by Innes, 141. The quotation in the next sentence is from the same page. 106 Lepage, interviewed by Adrienne McCullen, CBC Quebec AM, broadcast 18 May 2011 (quoted from Kidnie’s transcript of the online audio recording accessed 10 September 2012). 107 Innes claims that ‘Among leading directors today, it is Robert Lepage – sometimes labelled as “the alchemist of modern imagistic theatre” – who best exemplifies the convergence of live theatrical performance with contemporary media and technology’ (‘Robert Lepage’, 120, quoting O’Mahony, ‘Aerial Views’). 108 Lepage, Mot du Metteur en Scène, Programme, Shakespeare à Wendake: La Tempete, 1–30 July 2011. 109 Lepage, interviewed by McCullen. 110 Christie Carson, ‘Celebrity by Association: Tectonic Plates in Glasgow,’ Canadian Theatre Review 74 (1993): 46–50, 50. 111 Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Looking for Mr. Shakespeare After The Revolution: Robert Lepage’s Intercultural Dream Machine’, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Routledge, 1996): 68–91, 84. 112 Quoted in Dundjerović, Theatricality, 166. 113 Lepage, in interview with Carson, 34. 114 Sunday Times, 12 July 1993, quoted in Griffiths, Dream, 85. 115 Eyre speaking in interview with Lepage, 19 November 1992. 116 Jennifer Harvie, ‘Robert Lepage’, in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (eds), (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 224–30, 229. 117 Lepage, in interview with Eyre, 19 November 1992. 118 Lepage, interviewed by Carson, 35. 119 Lepage, in interview with Eyre, 19 November 1992. 120 Hodgdon, ‘Looking for Mr. Shakespeare,’ 84–5. 121 J. Kelly Nestruck, ‘Robert Lepage’s ‘Tempest’ takes full advantage of natural setting,’ Globe and Mail, 8 July 2011. 122 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 137, referring to Brook’s Preface to Jean-Claude Carrière’s translation of The Tempest (1991). 123 Lepage, interviewed by McCullen. 124 Nestruck, ‘Robert Lepage’s “Tempest” ’. 125 Alexandre Vigneault, ‘La tempête: un Lepage qui fait naufrage’, La Presse, 7 July 99

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2011. Margaret Jane Kidnie is grateful to Taiwo Osinubi for discussing with her the socio-cultural associations of joual. 126 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 108–9. On Ex Machina’s funding models and the circulation of their shows to elite, and so culturally and economically homogeneous, global destinations, see Harvie and Hurley, ‘States of Play’. 127 Lepage in conversation with Charest, 110, and in interview with Tusa. 128 Lepage, interviewed by Innes, 137. The situation leads Harvie and Hurley to speculate that Lepage is ‘Ex Machina’s most likely “deus” ’ (‘States of Play’, 299). 129 Freeman, rehearsal journal.

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Addenbrooke, David. The Royal Shakespeare Company: The Peter Hall Years. London: William Kimber, 1974. Bablet, Denis, and Jean Jacquot (eds). Les Voies de la creation théâtrale 5. Paris: CNRS, 1977. Banu, Georges, ed. Brook (= Les Voies de la creation théâtrale 13). Paris: CNRS, 1985. Barker, Kristina. ‘Coriolanus’ at the National: ‘Th’Interpretation of Time’. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1992. Beauman, Sally. The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Bosman, Anston. Shakespeare and Globalization’, in The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd edn, Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 285–301. Brokering, Jon M. ‘Ninagawa Yukio’s Intercultural Hamlet: Parsing Japanese Iconography’, Asian Theatre Journal 24.2 (2007): 370–96. Brook, Peter. Evoking (and Forgetting) Shakespeare. London: Nick Hern Books, 2002. —The Empty Space. New York: Avon, 1969. —The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare. London: Nick Hern Books, 2013. —The Shifting Point. London: Methuen, 1988. Carson, Christie. ‘Collaboration, Translation, Interpretation’, NTQ 9:33 (February 1993): 31–6. Charest, Rémy, in conversation with Robert Lepage. Robert Lepage: Connecting Flights. Trans. Wanda Romer Taylor. London: Methuen, 1997. Croyden, Margaret. Conversations with Peter Brook 1970–2000. London: Faber and Faber, 2003. Dawson, Antony B. Shakespeare in Performance: Hamlet. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Dundjerović, Aleksandar Saša. The Theatricality of Robert Lepage. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Eyre, Richard, in conversation with Robert Lepage. Platform Papers. Royal National Theatre, 28 May 1992; 19 November 1992; 10 January 1997. Fay, Stephen. Power Play: the Life and Times of Peter Hall. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995. Freeman, Jane. ‘Unexpected Rainfall: Working in the Wings on Robert Lepage’s Macbeth’, in Directing and Authorship in Western Drama, ed. Anna Migliarisi. Studies in Drama and Theatre Series. Legas Publishing: New York, 2006, 285–306.

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Goodwin, John (ed.). Peter Hall’s Diaries: the Story of a Dramatic Battle. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983. Hall, Peter. ‘Shakespeare and the Modern Director’, in The Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company, 1960–63, ed. John Goodwin. London, Max Reinhardt, 1964, 41–8. —and John Barton. The Wars of the Roses. London: BBC, 1970. —Making an Exhibition of Myself. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993. —The Necessary Theatre. London: Nick Hern, 1999. Hampton-Reeves, Stuart and Carol Chillington Rutter. Shakespeare in Performance: The Henry VI Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Harvie, Jennifer. ‘Robert Lepage’, in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (eds). Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 224–30. Hodgdon, Barbara. ‘Looking for Mr. Shakespeare After The Revolution: Robert Lepage’s Intercultural Dream Machine’, in Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance, ed. James C. Bulman. London: Routledge, 1996, 68–91. —‘The Wars of the Roses: Scholarship Speaks on the Stage’. Shakespeare Jahrbuch 108 (1972): 170–84. Holland, Peter. ‘Peter Hall’, in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown. London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 140–59. Horowitz, Arthur. Prospero’s “True Preservers”: Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler—Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Newark: Associated University Presses, 2004. Huang, Alexander C. Y. and Peter Donaldson (eds). Global Shakespeares digital performance archive, http://globalshakespeares.org/ Huang, Alexander C. Y. ‘ “What Country, Friends, Is This?” ’: Touring Shakespeares, Agency, and Efficacy in Theatre Historiography’, Theatre Survey 54.1 (2013): 51–85. Huang, Alexander C. Y. and Charles Ross (eds). Shakespeare in Asia, Hollywood, and Cyberspace. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2009. Hunt, Albert and Geoffrey Reeves. Peter Brook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Im, Yeeyon. ‘The Pitfalls of Intercultural Discourse: The Case of Yukio Ninagawa’, Shakespeare Bulletin 22.4 (2004): 7–30. Innes, Christopher, interviewing Robert Lepage. ‘Robert Lepage’, in Directors/ Directing: Conversations on Theatre, Maria Shevtsova and Christopher Innes (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 120–50. Kawai, Shoichiro. ‘Ninagawa Yukio’, in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, John Russell Brown (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2008. 269–83. Kennedy, Dennis. Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2009. Kishi, Tetsuo. ‘When Suicide Becomes an Act of Honour: Julius Caesar and Hamlet in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan’, Shakespeare Survey 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 108–14. Kustow, Michael. Peter Brook: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Lavender, Andy. Hamlet in Pieces: Shakespeare Reworked: Peter Brook, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson. London: Nick Hern Books, 2001.

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Index

Abe, Kobo 91, 95 Adenauer, Konrad 40 Adès, Thomas 115, 128, 139 Akimoto, Matsuyo 97 Aldwych Theatre 55 Anderson, Laurie 115 Antoine, André 2 Arcand, Denys 146 Aronson, Boris, 53 Artaud, Antonin 13, 14, 17, 33 Arts Theatre, London 51 Ashcroft, Peggy 52, 55, 61, 69 Bakhtin, Mikhail 99 Balzac, Honoré de 83 Barber, Samuel, 104 Barnes, Clive 7-8 Barnes, Peter 110 Barrault, Jean-Louis 14, 18 Barton, John 51, 52, 60, 63 Beckett, Samuel 4, 33, 39, 51, 52, 61, 78 Bennent, David 15 Benson, Sir Frank 21 Bergman, Ingmar 110 Hamlet 94 Berliner Ensemble 55 Bernatchez, Michel 146 Billington, Michael 68, 73, 75, 76, 88, 99, 138 Blackfriars Theatre 74 Blezard, William 30-1 Bolt, Robert 74 Bonnier, Céline 135 Booth, Edwin 9 Borchert, Wolfgang, 96 Boretz, N.M., 2-3

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Boyd, Michael, 78 Bradshaw, Graham 89, 105 Bragg, Melvyn 73 Branagh, Kenneth 21 Brassard, Marie 132 Brecht, Bertolt 14, 17, 33, 37, 52, 60, 78, 91, 95 Brien, Alan 53, 57 Brisset, Annie 131 Brook, Peter 3, 4, 5, 6, 106, 109, 110, 114 Antony and Cleopatra 32-3 Carmen 16 Don Giovanni 16 Hamlet 4, 10-13, 16, 17, 18-26, 32, 118 L’homme Qui 4 King John 27 King Lear 4, 16, 29-30, 31, 33-41, 60 Lady from the Sea, The 27 Love is My Sin 17 Love’s Labour’s Lost 27-8, 31 Mahabharata 4 Man and Superman 27 Marat/Sade, The 14, 32 Measure for Measure 16, 29, 33 Meetings with Remarkable Men 16 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 4, 7-9, 10, 26, 40, 41-6, 80, 100, 142 Oedipus 14, 16 Orghast 16 Qui Est Là 16, 17-18, 21, 26 Romeo and Juliet 28 Screens, The 13 Spurt of Blood 13 Tempest, The 14-16, 16-17, 18, 31-2, 52, 143

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172 Index Timon of Athens 16, 33 Titus Andronicus 30-1, 52 US 14, 32, 38-9 Winter’s Tale, The 29 Brown, Douglas 49 Brown, John Russell 2 Bryant, Michael 76 Bryden, Ronald 66 Bunkai, Udagawa 85 Burge, Stuart 38 Burton, Richard 9, 32, 69 Bury, John 63 Cadieux, Anne-Marie 137 Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv 101 Caron, Leslie 51 Carrière, Jean-Claude 11, 15, 19 Carson, Christie 141 Caux, Robert 146 Centre International de creation théâtrale see CICT Centre International des recherches théâtrales see CIRT Cervantes, Miguel de 83 Chaikin, Joseph 14 Chakrabarti, Lolita 141 Chamberlain, Basil Hall 86 Charest, Rémy 133 Chekhov, Anton 4, 83, 90, 91 Chikamatsu, Monzaemon 90, 91 Chitty, Alison 70, 72, 74 Chronegk, Ludwig 1-2, 3 Julius Caesar 2 Twelfth Night 2 Churchill, Sir Winston 64 CICT 4, 13, 25 Cirque de Soleil 116, 141 CIRT 4, 13, 15, 23 Clare, Anthony 77 Cobb, John 142 Cocteau, Jean 142 Comédie Française 55 Confucius 83 Contemporary People’s Theatre (Gendaijin Gekijo) 96, 97 Cook, Henry Caldwell 48-9 Copeau, Jacques 9-10

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Côté, Jean-Sébastien 139 Côté, Lorraine 113 Cottesloe Theatre (NT) 74 Craig, Edward Gordon 13, 17 Croyden, Margaret 10, 14, 19, 21 D’Arcy, Sarah 120, 125 Dalpé, Jean-Marc 134, 135, 136 Dante Alighieri 83 Darling, Peter 118 Dawson, Anthony B. 65-6 Deguchi, Noriko 92 Delacorte Theatre 99 Delgado, Maria 88 Dench, Judi 69-72, 122 Derrida, Jacques 101 Devine, George: Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 43 Dickens, Charles 83 Dreyer, Carl 37 Dundjerovic, Aleksandar Saša 119, 138 Dyce-Jones, David 63 Dymkowski, Christine 15 Eden, Sir Anthony 57 Edwardes, Jane 138 Elizabeth II, Queen 68 Elizabethan Theatre Company, The 51 Estienne, Marie-Hélène 11, 19 Euripides 83, 99, 101 Ex Machina 115, 116, 118, 140, 141, 144-5, 146-7 Eyre, Richard 74, 119, 142 Faber, Jean-François 140 Farley, Charles 1 Fauré, Gabriel 102-4, 107-8 Fay, Stephen 67 Fillion, Carl 138 Finney, Albert 52, 68 Flaubert, Gustave 83 Ford, John 81 Freeman, Jane 5-6 Freud, Sigmund 24, 86 Gabriel, Peter 116

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Index Gagnon-Lebrun, Louis-Xavier 139 Gallimore, Daniel 103-4, 105 Garcia, Victor 14 Gardner, Edmund 57 Garneau, Michel 5, 115, 129-32, 133, 143, 144-5 Gaulle, Charles de 40 Genet, Jean 13 Genzo, Katso 85, 94 Georg II, Duke of Saxe Meiningen 2 Gerhard, Roberto 53 Gielgud, Sir John 29, 31, 52, 65, 76 Hamlet 9 Gignac, Marie 114, 128, 146 Gillet, Eric 57 Glover, Julian 52 Godfrey, Derek 58 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 83 Goldoni, Carlo 68 Granville-Barker, Harley 70 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 43 Gros-Louis, Steeve 140 Grotowski, Jerzy 13-14 Gurdjieff, George 16 Halio, Jay 46 Hall, Jennifer 74 Hall, Sir Peter 4-5, 11, 27 Amadeus 48, 68 Antony and Cleopatra 69-72, 78 Coriolanus 50, 51, 52-4, 58, 60, 64, 68 Cymbeline 51, 52, 74-5 Gigi 51 Hamlet 59, 64-7, 68, 69, 78, 99 Henry V 62 Love’s Labour’s Lost 51, 77 Macbeth 59, 67, 68 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 51, 52, 53, 60 Othello 68 Romeo and Juliet 59 Tempest, The 68, 73-5, 76-7 Troilus and Cressida 50, 55, 57-9, 60, 61, 69, 75 Twelfth Night 51-2 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 50, 55, 56-7, 58

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173

Wars of the Roses, The 60-4, 69, 78 Winter’s Tale, The 74-6 Halperin, Anna 119 Halperin, Lawrence 119 Hampstead Theatre Club 10 Hampton-Reeves, Stuart 4-5 Hanayagi, Kinnosuke 87 Hardy, Robert 52 Hare, David: King Lear, 69 Harper, Stephen 144 Hart House Theatre 115, 120-8 Harvie, Jennifer 142 Hatakeyama, Kohei 91 Hawthorne, Sir Nigel 88-9, 100, 105, 110 Haygarth, Tony 76 Heritage, Paul 88 Hobson, Harold 61 Hodgdon, Barbara 125, 143, 146 Holland, Peter 68, 77 Holm, Ian 52 Holt, Thelma 100-1 Hopkins, Anthony 69-72 Horowitz, Arthur 96 Howard, Alan 32, 42, 46 Hughes, Ted 14, 16, 34-5 Hugo, François-Victor 129 Hugo, Victor 86 Hurren, Kenneth 74 Hurry, Leslie 58 Ibsen, Henrik 27, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 100 Irving, Sir Henry 21 Isozaki, Shin 94 Jackson, Glenda, 32, 66 Jackson, Sir Barry 27, 28 Jacobs, Sally 8, 41 James, Geraldine 74, 75 Jarry, Alfred 95 John, Elton 97, 104 Jung, Carl 24 Juro, Shiratori 93 Kabuki-za Theatre 96 Kadono, Izumi 93

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174 Index Kaempfer, Engelbert 83 Kajii, Motojiro 103 Kane, John 41, 46 Karasawa, Toshiaki 101 Karatani, Kojin 97-8 Kawai, Shoichiro 98, 106 Kawakami, Otojiro 92 Hamlet 91 Merchant of Venice, The 91 Othello 91 Kean, Edmund 128 Kemble, John Philip 1, 9 Kennedy, Dennis 87, 94 Kestelman, Sarah 46 Kidnie, Margaret Jane 5-6 Kikunosuke V, Onoe 93 King, Francis 75 Kishi, Tetsuo 89, 105 Kissoon, Jeffery 23, 141 Kott, Jan 31, 39, 61 Kouyate, Sotigui 15 Kozintsev, Grigori 2, 34, 37, 40 Kurahashi, Ken 95, 96 Kurihara, Komaki 87, 103 Kurosawa, Akira 34, 79-80, 81, 82, 88, 106, 122 La Scala, Milan, 140 Lamb, Charles and Mary 84-5 Laughton, Charles 39, 51, 52, 55 Laurence, Charles 118 Laurier, Angela 142 Lavender, Andy 118 Leavis, F. R. 49 Lecat, Jean-Guy 17 Leigh, Vivien 30, 52 Lepage, Robert 5-6 1984 116 Alanienouidet 128 Confessional, Le 115 Coriolanus 115, 126, 128, 132, 133, 136-7 Dragons’ Trilogy, The 113-14, 116, 122, 133, 146 Dream Play, A 115 Far Side of the Moon 115, 136 Hamlet (including Elsinore and

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Elsineur) 115, 118, 127, 128, 137-9, 146 KÀ 116 Lipsynch 117-18 Macbeth 118, 120-8, 132 Midsummer Night’s Dream A, 6, 115, 116, 119-20, 122, 141-3, 146 Needles and Opium 117, 122, 146 Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs 115 Ring Cycle, The 116 Romeo and Juliet 115, 133-6, 139 Seven Streams of the River Ota, The 114, 115, 116, 118 Tectonic Plates 141 Tempest, The 5, 94, 115, 126-7, 128, 132, 139-42, 141, 143-6 Totem 116 Lessard, Jacques 116 Lester, Adrian 10-11, 20, 22 Levin, Bernard 54, 61 Lieblein, Leanore 130 Maazel, Loren 116 Macklin, Charles 1, 9 Macliammoir, Micheal 29 Mahabharata 4 Mansai, Nomura 94 Marlowe, Christopher 81 Marowitz, Charles 13, 15, 25, 39, 40 Matsuoka, Kazuo 88 Maugham, W. Somerset 1 McCall, Gordon 133-4 McCullen, Adrienne 141, 144 McKellen, Ian, 68 122 Meiningen Company 2 Mendelssohn, Felix 43 Metropolitan Opera, New York 115, 140 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 2, 17 Mikijiro, Hira 99 Miles, Sarah 74 Miln Company 85 Miln, George C. 85 Milton, John 83 Minami, Ryuta 80, 94 Mitter, Shomit 40, 44 Mnouchkine, Ariane 109, 114

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Index Richard II 87 Mokuami, Kawatake 91 Moscow Art Theatre 11, 55 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 16 Mussolini, Benito 54 Myers, Bruce 13, 17-18, 23 Nadylam, William 19, 23 Nakane, Tadao 97, 99, 106 National Theatre 4, 12, 16, 38, 47-8, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 77, 78, 98, 115, 116, 119, 122, 127, 138, 141, 142, 146 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 11 Nightcap Theatre 134 Ninagawa, Yukio 5 Coriolanus 100 Cymbeline 87, 109 Doctor Faustus 81 Flying Dutchman, The 83 Hamlet 81, 82, 100, 110-11 King Lear 88-9, 99, 100, 105, 110 Macbeth 5, 79-81, 85, 86-7, 88, 89, 98, 99, 101, 102-4, 106-9 Medea 99 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 100, 104, 105 Nine Chapters from Wolfgang Borchert’s Works 96 Pericles 98, 100, 104 Peer Gynt 88, 89, 100 Romeo and Juliet 97, 104-5 Richard III 5, 104, 105, 106 Sincere Frivolity 96 Streetcar Named Desire, A 83 Suicide for Love 97 Tango at the End of Winter 100, 110 Tempest, The 90, 99, 102, 105, 110 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore 81 Titus Andronicus 88, 100, 110 Trojan Women, The 101 Twelfth Night 85, 93, 96, 100, 104, 110, 111 Nissei Theatre, Tokyo 80, 97 Nobili, Lila De 52 Noble, Adrian: Antony and Cleopatra 32 Noda, Hideki 88, 92

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175

Nunn, Trevor 67, 100 Nyman, Michael 115 O’Neill, Eugene 90 O’Neill, R. H. 2-3 O’Toole, Peter 58 Oda, Koji: Hamlet 93 Odashima, Yushi 84, 90 Oïda, Yoshi 13, 16 Okhlopkov, Nikolai 21 Hamlet 11-12 Old Vic Theatre 67 Olivier, Laurence, Baron (Sir Laurence Olivier) 4, 30-1, 38, 47, 51, 52, 53-4, 55, 59, 60, 65, 67, 69, 78, 99 Hamlet 34 Orgel, Stephen 89 Ormsby, Robert 130, 137 Osborne, Charles 89 Osborne, John 84 Otake, Shinobu 101 Other Place, The 32 Parry, Natasha 13, 23 Pasternak, Boris 11 Pavis, Patrice 141 Payne, Laurence 28 Peaslee, Richard 43 Perry, Commodore Matthew 83 Peter, John 73, 76 Philip, Jules 126 Phoenix Theatre 11 Pigott-Smith, Tim 75 Poe, Edgar Allan 83 Polanski, Roman 122 Poulin, Marco 143, 144, 145 Pronko, Leonard 89 Ratcliffe, Michael 102 Rayner, Fran 23 Redgrave, Vanessa 52 Reid, Alison 122 Reinhardt, Max 2 Rickman, Alan 100 Rigg, Diana 52 Roberge, Francis 140

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176 Index Robseon, Paul 55, 68 Rock, Kathia 140 Rooney, Tom 135, 136 Roose-Evans, James 10 Rose Theatre 77 Rosenberg, Marvin 38 Roundhouse, The 14 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden 116 Royal Shakespeare Company 4-5, 7, 12, 13, 16, 30, 32-3, 41, 47-8, 50, 59, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 71, 73, 77-8, 100, 101, 110, 122 Rudkin, David 64 Rutter, Carol Chillington 61 Sacks, Oliver 17 Saitama Arts Theatre 93 Saitama Gold Company 97 Sakura (Cherry Blossom) Company 97, 98 Salter, Dennis 114 Sanada, Hiroyuki 110 Sangaré, Bakary 15 Schoenberg, Arnold 53 Scofield, Paul 11, 27, 28, 31, 33, 38, 39, 40, 68 Seihai Company 95 Selbourne, David 44 Senda, Koreya 91-2 Hamlet 92 Seneca 14, 16 Shaffer, Peter 68 Shah, Naseeruddin 16 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 27, 47, 50, 51-2, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 66, 67, 68 Shakespeare Theatre Company (Japan) 92 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra 32-3, 69-72, 78 As You Like It 82 Coriolanus 9, 50, 51, 52-4, 60, 64, 68, 100, 115, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136-7 Cymbeline 51, 52, 74-5, 82, 87, 109 Hamlet 4, 9, 10-13, 15, 16, 17, 18-26,

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32, 34, 59, 64-6, 67, 68, 69, 78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 93, 94, 99, 100, 110-11, 115, 118, 127, 128, 137-9, 146, Henry V 62 Julius Caesar 2, 49, 85, 90, 91, 92 King John 27 King Lear 4, 16, 31, 33-41, 60, 61, 69, 88-9, 94-5, 99, 100, 105, 110, Love’s Labour’s Lost 31, 51, 77 Macbeth 5, 30, 34, 59, 64, 67, 68, 79-81, 85, 86-7, 88, 89, 97-8, 99, 101, 102-4, 106-9, 118, 120-8, 129, 130, 131-2, 133 Measure for Measure 16, 29, 33 Merchant of Venice, The 9, 85, 90, 94 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 93-4 Midsummer Night’s Dream A, 4, 6, 7-9, 26, 40, 41-6, 51, 52, 53, 60, 80, 100, 104, 105, 115, 116, 119-20, 122, 141-3, 146 Othello 9, 68, 85, 91, 92 Pericles 98, 100, 104 Richard II 87 Richard III 5, 34, 85, 104, 105, 106 Romeo and Juliet 28, 52, 59, 97, 104-5, 115, 133-6, 139 Sonnets 17 Tempest, The 5, 14-16, 16-17, 18, 31-2, 52, 68, 73-5, 76-7, 90, 94, 99, 102, 105, 110, 115, 126-7, 128, 129, 130-1, 132, 133, 139-42, 143-6 Timon of Athens 16, 33, Titus Andronicus 30-1, 52, 88, 100, 110 Troilus and Cressida 50, 55, 57-9, 60, 61, 69, 75 Twelfth Night 2, 51, 52, 82, 85, 93, 96, 100, 104, 110, 111 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 50, 55, 56-7, 58 Wars of the Roses, The (= 1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Richard III), adapted by John Barton 60-4, 65, 67, 69, 78 Winter’s Tale, The 29, 74-6

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Index Shaw, George Bernard 27, 83 Shaw, Glen Byam 51 Shimizu, Kunio 96, 97, 110 Shoyo, Tsubouchi, (Tsubouchi Yozo) 85, 90, 92 Slater, Daphne 28 Smith, Adam 86 Somegoro, Ichikawa 93 Soseki, Natsume 90 Speaight, Robert 56-7, 66 Stalin, Joseph 11 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 2, 17, 40, 95 Steen, Shannon 137 Steiner, George 82 Stott, Ken 76 Strehler, Giorgio 110 Tempest, The 90 Strindberg, August 115 Sunshine Theatre 93 Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) 95 Suzuki, Tadashi 82, 92 King Lear 94-5 Sylphides, Les 8 Tadao, Shizuku 83 Takahashi, Yasunari 93-4 Tanfield, John 49 Taylor, Elizabeth 32, 69 Tetsuo, Anzai 84 Thatcher, Margaret 47, 67 Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord 11, 13, 16-17, 25-6, 32, 33 Théâtre Repère 116, 124, 127, 146 Thomson, Peter 42 Thomson, Virgil 30 Todd, Andrew 17 Tokyo Globe 93, 94 Tokyo Metropolitan theatre 101 Tree, Sir Herbert Beerbohm: Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 9

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177

Tsuchitori, Toshi 25 Tsutomu, Inoue 85 Tusa, John 118 Tutin, Dorothy 69 Tynan, Kenneth 29, 39, 58 Ueda, Kuniyoshi Hamlet 94 Othello 94 Ure, Mary 52 Verdi, Giuseppe 102 Veronese, Paolo 70 Vian, Boris 64 Vigneault, Alexandre 145 Wagner, Richard 83, 116 Wardle, Irving 114 Warner, David 61, 64, 65, 66-7, 69 Warren, Roger 75 Washiro, General Muro 92 Watteau, Antoine 27, 75 Weiss, Peter 14 Welles, Orson 2, 6, 29-30, 40, 122 Werry, Margaret 137 Williams, David 10, 33 Williams, Tennessee 83, 126 Wilson, Robert 114 Hamlet 118 Xun, Lu 83 Yamagata, Harue 99 Yung-biau, Lin 100 Zeami, Motokiyo 17, 91, 94, 99, 110 Zeffirelli, Franco 2 Zhaohua, Lin: Hamlet, 94

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