An Upstart Crow Undergoes Theatrical Therapy (Theatrapy?)

“I am not a politician. I am a musician. I care about giving people a place where they can go to enjoy themselves and begin to live again. To the man you have to give the spirit, and when you give him the spirit, you have done everything.”

-Luciano Pavarotti

Okay, here it is. Here’s the gushing Globe entry. I might do another one after my Shakespeare performance final, but that’ll be an entirely different situation. But coming on the heels of a disappointing experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the evening I just had is indescribable. In the interest of the blog, though, I will try.

You’d Think the Queen Could Do Better

Last weekend, our class was taken on the holy pilgrimage to Stratford-Upon-Avon. Hilariously, most of us had been up the night before doing things that are very characteristic of college students, so we enjoyed very little of the famously picaresque British countryside on the way up.

The town of Stratford itself is incredibly quaint. It reminds me a lot of Port Jefferson, the town on Long Island where I was born and where my grandparents still live. It’s large enough to have a good amount of little shops and pretty parks, but not so big that these things are all seedy. The river Avon has a waterfront that feels very much like a miniature version of the docks in Port Jefferson, complete with boats you can rent all of which are named after Shakespeare characters.

It seems kind of counterintuitive to name a canoe after the character in The Tempest that causes shipwrecks.

And, just a short walk from the town are lovely open fields that make you feel very much like getting a flock of sheep and taking up the pan pipes.

Why are you reading this? You really think I have anything to say that more entertaining than that picture?

We spent a good amount of time in between our two performances just wandering about. We saw the cottage Shakespeare was born in; we visited his gravesite; we marveled at the full English breakfast that we got for only £5 (including tea). But none of that, except perhaps that last one had quite the effect on me that I expected. For a Shakespeare dork like me, I expected that visiting Shakespeare’s hometown would be like a major religious experience. The thing is, while the town is nice, it doesn’t feel markedly different from your average east coast small town back in the U.S. And it certainly doesn’t feel overly Shakespearean. And then there was the show.

We saw The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Pericles was an amateur cast with the RSC providing the technical and design aspects of the production. As such, I don’t feel right critiquing it too critically. Also, it did not provoke as strong a reaction from me as Comedy of Errors. So, that’s what I’m going to talk about.

Let me just say up front that Comedy of Errors is easily my least favorite of all the Shakespeare I’ve read. I have a distinct problem with mistaken identity as a comedic device, but in a play with many other things going for it, like Twelfth Night (Which has a special place in my heart, since a local college production I saw back when I was in high school is what first turned me on to Shakespeare), I can forgive it. The problem is that mistaken identity is what drives the plot entire of Comedy of Errors. To me the notion of a character being able to clear up all of the problems in a story by simply stating one fact (i.e. “I am not from around here. I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”) is not comedic. It’s the definition of tragic irony.

And tragic definitely seems to be the problem here. Comedy of Errors is being presented alongside Twelfth Night and The Tempest (Both of which are undisputedly far superior plays, in my opinion) as the “Shipwreck Trilogy.” The problem is that out of these three, Comedy is the lightest. There is very little that is philosophically troubling about it. The trouble is that this production, which sets the action in a Central American police-state, is so completely at odds with the source text that I got the impression watching it that the team behind it were more interested in their concept than with Shakespeare’s words, which is a problem since that’s what makes Shakespeare good. His settings are shallow and his plots are nearly all recycled from other sources. His language and his characters are what made him immortal.

I don’t have a problem with conceptually driven Shakespeare in general, but if a concept is put on a play, it had better be for a textually supported reason. For instance, the film version of Richard III with Sir Ian McKellen (whom, incidentally, I saw in the audience of another play this past week) sets the story in an alternate universe of the 1930/40s in which England is a fascist state. However, despite the extremity of the concept, it works because it uses the audience’s knowledge to emphasize the inherently vile nature that McKellen’s Richard exudes. By associating the character in the play with a period and figure in history that is cultural shorthand for wickedness and frightening power-lust, the director is able to use his concept to draw out things in the text. In contrast, this production of Comedy of Errors was hindered by its concept by the simple fact that the play contains a great deal of slapstick, which is less funny when the play begins with the Duke of Ephesus water-boarding Egeus. The audience is left unsure of which violence is okay to laugh at.

Granted, this is only one production out of many in the RSC’s season, so I’m not eliminating the possibility that there aren’t much better productions being mounted at Stratford, but if this show was any indication, there’s much, much better Shakespeare being done in London by other companies. Speaking of which…

Mark. Effing. Rylance.

I write this having just come back from the last production I’ll see at The Globe (Hopefully not forever, but at least this year). Technically speaking, it should have been Twelfth Night, which was the last one included in the money we paid for the London program, however Richard III was not included in that program. Luckily, one of my classmates and I were lucky enough to snag tickets for the second-to-last performance before the show transfers to the West End. In short: it was awesome.

The cast of Richard III is the same as Twelfth Night, minus Stephen Fry, who is not missed in the slightest, but are obviously more at home in this show. It’s understandable, given that Richard III has been running since July while Twelfth Night only opened a few weeks ago. Also, from what we’ve heard, the night we saw Twelfth Night was an off night, which happens to even the best of productions. I think that even discounting this variable, though, the thing that makes this Richard III easily the best Shakespeare I’ve ever seen performed can be summed up in three words:

Mark. Effing. Rylance.

He was undeniably good as Olivia in Twelfth Night (Both that and Richard are “original practices productions” which recreate the music, design, and casting as closely as possible to Elizabethan/Jacobean standards), however Richard is a star vehicle that a great actor can let his talent run wild with.

I already talked about Ian McKellen’s Richard III, which was the extent of my experience with the work walking into the theatre. I was surprised and incredibly moved by the immensely different route Rylance took with the character. McKellen’s Richard is cold, ruthless, and manipulative. We enjoy him because he is so clearly smarter and bolder than those around him. Rylance’s Richard is almost the exact opposite. His physical deformities are far more pronounced, making him physically unthreatening. These are coupled with a pronounced stammer and an almost childlike disposition. The audience is with him because they truly pity him. He does not know how to deal with the world and when he lashes out he does so with the same attitude as a child flipping over the Monopoly board. This comes off as darkly comic for much of the play, however by the time we reach Richard’s monologue right before the climactic final battle, the audience sees how Richard’s actions for the whole play have been an attempt to cure his deep-seated self-loathing, which he only now realizes is doomed to failure. It’s one of the absolute most amazing pieces of acting that I have ever seen. Not just on a technical and dramaturgical level, but because it genuinely touches the audience.

For much of my life, I’ve struggled with low self-esteem. Even now, as I’ve found myself slowly shedding the problem, I still from time to time suffer from spells that are frighteningly similar to Rylance’s choked, frantic delivery of that soliloquy. The scene was able to stimulate me not only as a scholar who recognized the literary implications and validity of the choice, not only as an actor who recognized the excellent use of voice, movement, and drawing upon motivation and personal experience, but also as simply a human being who understands what its like to be in that position.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the philosophy behind theatre. For a while now, at least in intellectual circles, it’s been what I’d call the “Political Philosophy” which holds that theatre should leave the audience unsatisfied, questioning what they just experienced, and thinking about their society. It’s a very Brechtian approach and I’m not saying it’s necessarily entirely without merit, but to me it seems there’s something to be said for the alternative, what I call “Therapeutic Philosophy,” when it’s done well. Let’s face it; modern life is complicated and chaotic. It’s also intensely political. People in America tend to strongly identify with their political party and their views on issues, which create deep social divisions. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t like to be reminded of that fact when I go to the theatre or the movies. There is such a lack of compassion in day to day living that I think we’re only just starting to feel how savagely it affects us. I think that the ideal theatre, therefore, should not foster our feelings of uncertainty and alienation. We’ve got plenty of those just from being in the world. Art should try to provide the audience a safe space to deal with those internal ambiguities and help them come to terms with their realities, thus preparing them to face them with strength and confidence when the play has ended. That’s what I experienced tonight watching Richard III. I recognized my own insecurities in the character and in doing so saw the logical conclusion of dealing with them in an unhealthy manner played out dramatically on the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe. And when I left, I found myself excited to tackle my anxieties in life, because I was sure that I could find a better way of dealing with them than killing a whole bunch of my relatives in a power grab and then using that power to silence everyone I perceived as any sort of threat to me.

Well, I’m rambling now and it may or may not be making any sense. I guess that what I’m saying is tonight was a profoundly moving artistic experience for me which was well worth paying £5 to stand in one spot for three hours. 

An Upstart Crow Has Himself a Little Moment at the British Museum

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.”

-Julius Caesar Act II, scene ii

This past week we went as a class to the British Museum, which, despite what the brothers Gershwin would have you believe, has not lost its charm. I can’t imagine anyone having time to go through and fully appreciate everything on display there. One of our British instructors joked that the British Museum is essentially England’s way of making up for how much stuff it’s looted from other countries during the time of the British Empire. Anyway, for this week’s post, we were specifically asked to post about a specific exhibit and though I promised myself going in that I would try to not talk about Shakespeare (Up until the last ten minutes at the museum, I was planning on talking about the impressive collection of Buddhist artifacts in the museum’s permanent collection), I ended up seeing something that just has to be commented on.

The Robben’s Island Bible

So, one of the big draws of the Museum this summer has been a special exhibition titled Shakespeare: Staging the World, which takes an historicist approach to Shakespeare’s work. The artifacts on display are generally contemporary to his life and connected to his work. The attendant comments discuss the manner in which the world he lived in effected the content of his plays. This was all interesting; some of it was stuff I already knew, while there were good swaths of information I’d never heard before. However, the only thing that is really worth extended discussion, in my opinion, is the very last object in the exhibition.

The last room of the exhibit is mainly focused on The Tempest, generally accepted as the last play Shakespeare wrote entirely on his own, so I’d read a great deal of plaques about early colonialism and European attitudes to tribal cultures and the like. I listened to the sound-bite of Sir Ian McKellen doing the “Such stuff as dreams are made on” speech and was about to leave when I noticed one last glass case right before the donation box. Inside was this:

The exhibition didn't allow photography, so I had to take this from a newspaper article.

This particular book is nicknamed “The Robben Island Bible.” During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Robben Island was one of the main facilities used to house political prisoners. One of the internees was a man named Sonny Venkatrathnam, who brought with him a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Prisoners were not allowed reading material and the book was confiscated. However, Venkatrathnam managed to get it back by convincing the warden, who we can only assume was not greatly knowledgeable in the fields of English literature or eastern religion, that the book was a Hindu Bible written by William Shakespeare. To further the ruse, he pasted images of Hindu deities from Diwali cards sent to him by his family to the spine and cover.

The book became a source of discussion and entertainment for the anti-apartheid activists interned at Robben Island, including future South African president Nelson Mandela. Venkatrathnam encouraged the inmates to sign their names next to passages they found particularly moving. Mandela selected Julius Caesar’s short speech to his wife, which I have excerpted for the introductory quote for this post.

I think this is an absolutely incredible story. I’ll admit that I know very little about the struggle against apartheid, having been born in a country that is famously under-informed about foreign affairs two years after the official abolishment of the policy and two years before Mandela was elected. However, I do know that it was far from a tidy little conflict and that political prisoners were not treated in the most humane manner. I think its fascinating that in the face of such terrible circumstances, this book that was brought in under the guise of a Bible ended up serving the same purpose: to give comfort to people in times of difficulty. I think that this is the kind of story that needs to be told more often. The average person doesn’t ever think of Shakespeare as much other than really old plays that they have to read for English class in High School. But once you get past the initial difficulty of the language (Which, in my experience, doesn’t take very long if you’re really willing to try), there’s such an immense amount to be drawn from his works. I don’t think the men on Robben Island could have been better off if they had a real Bible.

An Upstart Crow Meets London Theatre Halfway

“We’re actors—we’re the opposite of people!”

-The Player, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

As of this writing I’ve been in London for a little under a week and a half. I’ve experienced a great many things that I can’t begin to cram into one post and still maintain a coherent focus. In the future I’m going to try (Keyword: try) to make a few short posts throughout the week and then a longer, more focused one at the end so all five of you who read this thing can get a more complete picture rather than just the broad strokes of this experience.

That said, this week I’ve decided to talk about the theatre I’ve seen thus far on the trip. Part of the study abroad program I’m participating in involves seeing productions all over the city. Thus far, we’ve seen three: The Illusion at the Southwark Playhouse, As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Brand New Ancients at the Battersea Arts Center.

The most striking thing I’ve observed so far concerning British theatre as it compares to its American counterpart is the way the British treat the audience. In class at The Globe on Tuesday, we had a question and answer session with Bill Barclay, the theatre’s Music Manager, who also happens to be the only American on staff there. During the session he mentioned that the biggest difference he’s seen between British and American actors is that American acting tends to be concerned with being as realistic as possible, trying to actually feel the emotions of the character, and, in kind, giving that emotion over to the audience on a silver platter. The British, on the other hand, expect their audience to meet them halfway. They don’t try to play the realism to the hilt the way Americans do. I found this idea very interesting and, though this observation is definitely a generalization, the works I’ve seen here so far have definitely demanded a great deal more on the part of the audience, if not in acting style, then definitely in their themes and presentation.

The Real Illusion is the Theatre Entrance

We saw The Illusion at the end of our first week of classes here. Our last class of the day was at The Globe, which is quite close to the Southwark Playhouse. However, we were warned to not overestimate the time we had between the end of class and the start of the show, as the entrance to the theatre was not immediately obvious.

This was a gross understatement.

We passed the theatre entrance at least three times before we saw it.

The theatre, which is housed in the repurposed vaults below the London Bridge rail station, is accessed through a modest set of wrought iron gates with a sign on them (I’m given to understand that this lights up at night, but it wasn’t nearly dark enough yet) that sit in the back of the beer garden of one of the most ostentatious pubs I’ve seen since arriving. Between its bright blue painted exterior and the mass of businessmen at the end of their workday, the only way we discovered this inauspicious entryway was by looking very carefully at the street address.

Once it’s been located however, the interior is quite cool. Much of the existing structure has been maintained from its days as a rail station, meaning that the lobby and bar is done out in brickwork with high, arched ceilings. The lighting is subdued and intimate and the low tables and large, soft couches lend the bar an almost Bohemian air. Not to mention that the cost of a pint was surprisingly low for a theatre bar, though, if memory serves, they only have two or three beers on tap, so there’s a bit of a caveat there.

The Illusion is a translation/adaptation of a 17^th century French comedy by Tony Kushner (Most famous as the writer of the two-part epic that is Angels in America). Though nowhere near as dark or grandiose as Angels, it shares its love of poetic dialogue and fantastical elements. An aging lawyer visits a sorceress, asking her to show him what has become of his estranged son. She does so through a series of constantly shifting illusions on which they comment in the manner of a theatre audience. Indeed, as the play progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer that the play is not about the literal action, but about the manner in which we understand and participate in the theatrical experience.

Though this is an American play, it did not achieve a great deal of success in the United States. It predates Angels in America, and thus received only a short run in New York in the 1980s and only the occasional regional production since then. Indeed, this production marks its UK debut, almost 30 years after its initial iteration. I think the latency of its success is because, despite its American origin, it is not as literal or straightforward as is the norm for mainstream American theatre. In general, thematically speaking, an American play is expected to be entertaining on the merits of its own plot. If it incites intellectual discourse and activity in the audience, that is an excellent added bonus, but this is not understood as being good enough on its own. In this case, however, the mental side is the point of the thing. The plot is less a string of cause and effect and more a puzzle for the audience to solve. This is not to deride its entertainment value. The play is wildly entertaining. However, it’s not a “sit-back-and-let-it-happen-to-you” kind of entertainment. It’s a “let’s-try-to-figure-out-what’s-going-on-and-then-compare-notes-with-our-friends-after-the-show” kind of entertainment.

Globe-al Studies

This past Tuesday was our first show at The Globe, As You Like It. I’m going to do my best to stick to the point I’m trying to make with this post, as I can (and have) yammer about Shakespeare for pages and pages and pages.

The theatre is beautiful. There’s no other way to describe it. One of the few things Shakespeare in Love was completely accurate about was the interior of an Elizabethan theatre, which is what The Globe is meant to replicate. The intricate woodcarvings and detail work are unlike what you’re likely to see in a theatre anywhere else in the world. I’ll leave it at that, as I plan on doing an entry about my Globe experiences a bit later in the term.

As for the play itself, one of the striking things is the manner in which The Globe presents Shakespeare, at least this particular comedy to the audience. In the States we have a tendency to not muck about much with the text. Setting and time period, sure, but if someone’s going to talk, they’d better be doing so in iambic pentameter. Not so here. The clowns on several occasions felt free to break character if the moment warranted it. For instance, a scene involving the successful catching of a bouquet thrown from an elevated platform to an actor standing stage level prompted the catcher to comment, “That’s a first.” Whether this was truly improvised or not, it is not the sort of thing I’ve seen in American Shakespeare, or in fact most American theatre at this level. It’s not only refreshing, but also quite appropriate to the text. The so-called “Fourth wall” between the characters in a play and the audience wasn’t fully established until the rise of Realism in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Tearing it down is another way of engaging the audience and discouraging passive theatergoing, which I think speaks to the heart of the difference between American and British theatre styles, at least based on what I’ve seen.

Epic Poetry is Not Dead

Thus we come to Brand New Ancients. I saw this literally right before sitting down to write this entry, so the memory is quite a bit fresher for this one. As with As You Like It, I’ll try not to rant too much.

Brand New Ancients can’t quite be called a play. In modern terms, it’s something between a poetry slam and a one-woman show. In more precise, historical terms, it’s the 21^st century successor to the oral tradition of Homer that gave us The Odyssey and The Illiad. Kate Tempest, the playwright and performer, tells entirely in verse, sometimes spoken, sometimes sung, sometimes rapped, the saga of two half brothers growing up in modern London framed as a latter day heroic epic in which, to paraphrase the piece itself, the gods have forgotten they are gods.

This would never have been produced in America. At least not at a level above regional fringe or Off-Off Broadway. It is gorgeous in its language and themes and Tempest is unbelievably dynamic in her performance, however your average New York theatre audience would never go to see it. It is challenging, painful, heavy, sardonic, and utterly beautiful. However, the long and short of it is that there is nothing to it other than a woman with a microphone, four musicians acting as a back-up band, and some very interesting minimalist light design. The commercial theatre in America is, for the most part, built on spectacle and novelty. However, this work offers no falling chandelier, no celebrity stars (Unless one counts a memorable passage involving the lambasting of Simon Cowell as a false idol), and no brand recognition. The novelty in Brand New Ancients is, again, the way it challenges the audience. Tempest’s work encourages the audience to meet her halfway in her examination of urban violence and emotional turmoil as a parallel to Ancient mythology. It’s an exercise on the part of both the performer and the audience in both emotion and intellect, not just aesthetics. And it pays off. Standing ovations are not de rigueur in the UK the way they are in the US. This was the only thing I’ve seen so far that got even a partial one.

So, what do we take away from this? I don’t think it’s that UK audiences are necessarily smarter than US audiences, I think it’s more that the people who make theatre here are more willing to trust their audiences to engage with them on a more than aesthetic level, allowing a more unique product to emerge.

An Upstart Crow introduces himself.

"Welcome to the camp,

I guess you all know why we're here."

-The Who, "We're Not Gonna Take It" from Tommy (1969)

Hello. If you are reading this, it means you have somehow reached my blog. Welcome. Please make yourself at home. At this point, you probably have a few questions. Let me try to answer them:

Who do you think you are?

Okay, fair enough. My name is Bryson David Hoff. I am, as of this writing, on the cusp of starting my junior year of college. I attend Millikin University, a small, private college in Decatur, IL, where I study Theatre and Creative Writing. I am also an Honors Student and a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the country's largest men's social fraternities. 

If you are really interested, you can check out my Blogger profile or better yet, read what I end up writing on here, as it will (hopefully) be more entertaining than any dry biography I could hope to type up. Next question.

Why "An Upstart Crow"? Kind of pretentious, don't you think?

Yeah, a little bit. Let me explain. 

The name comes from an Elizabethan theatre critique written by Robert Greene, who offered one of the first reviews of the work of William Shakespeare. The exact quote is:

"... there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country."

Basically, I chose the title as a reminder that Shakespeare, who you'll quickly see is a big hero of mine, started out being thought of as some pretentious punk from the boonies who had no business trying to be anything more. And if him, why not me?

Not to be corny or anything.

Don't you think the internet has enough blogs? Why add another one?

Ah, yes, now we're getting somewhere. Basically, this coming semester I'll be taking part in a study abroad program. From September through December, I'll be living and studying in London. One of the courses is called Blogging From Overseas. Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. 

Anyway, during that time I'll be writing about my experiences and everything I see and do during my time in Europe. My hope is that keeping this blog will be fun enough that it'll keep going even after the course has ended and I've returned to the United States. That's mostly on you, though, hypothetical reader, since writing without an audience gets tiring and frustrating after awhile. I know. I write poetry.

Do you always write like this?

Yeah, basically. I promise to try to be more interesting when I've got actual things to write about. The verboseness, though, never really goes away.

Anyway, I don't really know how to end this post, so here's a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head:

He's a flap-jack rabbit! *ba-dump ching*