theatre: putting the theatre in its place
TRANSCRIPT
Fortnight Publications Ltd.
Theatre: Putting the Theatre in Its PlaceReview by: Paul HadfieldFortnight, No. 231 (Dec. 16, 1985 - Jan. 26, 1986), p. 23Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25550699 .
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Putting the theatre in its place
THjflRE
PAULHADfTELF THERE MAY well be other more search
ing reasons for doing so, but the festival
director, Michael Barnes has anticipated the perennial debate that coincides with the
festival about the real significance of
Belfast's November cultural fix. Hence
Shakespeare in Maysfield Leisure Centre
and Orwell in the Opera House should
prove conclusively that art is classless and
the whole thing is not just another middle
class knees-up. In theory, these pairings should have
the effect of sending the proletariat to the
Opera House and the bourgeoisie to Mays field. In practice Belfast isn't so simply
categorised. However, the Royal Shake
speare company, albeit in a slightly con
descending way, acknowledge through their touring policy, a need to make
theatre more populist, more accessible.
Underpinning this policy is a commit
ment to perform in non-theatre spaces: leisure centres, community halls around
Britain. Not that I'm certain that everyone in the RSC fully grasps the meaning of this. During their recent visit their pub
licity officer mentioned that Belfast was
one of their favourite venues because most
of the other places they went to didn't
have proper theatres: "they only had
things like leisure centres".
On balance it is a useful policy. More
urgent is the issue, it seems to me, of
whether Shakespeare's appeal is una
shamedly anti-populist; and whether, with
reference to The Taming of The Shrew,
the RSC's policy to present the entire
canon is not a particularly limiting and
self-defeating one?
It is evident that Shakespeare's best
plays have among other things, some
clearly defined, ruling idea (ambition in Macbeth, action in Hamlet, duplicity in
Twelfth Night) which is conspicuously un focussed in the play under consideration.
And whatever it is in the Shrew it is most
certainly not sexual politics. It may be that
D\ Travers, as the first major female direc
tor of this play, felt obliged to nibble the cheese. But it goes without saying that a
piece played in front of a drunkard who,
brought off the street in a spiteful game,
thinking to watch a play as the prelude to
some long deferred consummation, is
more cruelly wo-managed than is ever the
fictitious Petruchio's wife, Kate.
The production opens with a solemn
and shabby procession with Kate, Mother
Courage at the head of the cart setting a
tone and pace at odds with the entertain
ment and thematically disconnected from
it. Beyond this, the predominantly
Regency style of the play within the play, which dissolved into a crashing echo of last
years feast in The Winter's Tale, raised
other spectral issues over the RSCs aes
thetic policies: is formula exchanging
punches with invention? Maybe this was
deliberate. The Taming of the Shrew is a
play much bowlderised and perhaps the diarist Samuel Pepys, who saw it in such a
form is due the last word: "It hath some
good pieces in it, but generally it is a mean
play." On the evidence of the last two
years the R.SC are using Shakespeare to
show how much better they can do other
things. Orwell's Animal Farm is a piece that
comfortably jumps the bourgeois hurdle.
Peter Hall s adaptation for the National
Theatre could hardly be faulted. The ner
vous device of linking the stage action to
the child's imagination as he reads the
pages of the novel seemed barely neces
sary. This powerful parable on the ills of
Soviet socialism was realised with au
thority and precision through a measured
frame of colour, cabaret and cartoon im
agery and sustained by both acting and
technical brilliance of a high order. Hall's production was a rare example of
truly popular entertainment: complex without erudition; accessible without con
descension. The expedient of raising the
humble pig to the stature of tyrant was
effortlessly realised; the animal creations
perfectly and sympathetically accom
plished, from the satanic Napoleon to the
long, suffering Boxer. Only the interval
distracted from the relentless transforma
tion of a fairy tale into a transparent and
chilling allegory. Belfast needs this sort of
theatre.
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Fortnight 16th December 1985 23
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