A Journey in Disguise

Rather than simply reading, I went to see a play last night, and since I had to write a theater review for my class, I thought that I would just put that up, and save me writing a separate post about it.

As You Like It may be a tale of young love, but it is also a story of growth and experience, of introspection as much as of exuberance.

At least, that was the way it was played in Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project production, performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music January 29. Mendes chose to present the play, which can seem one of the frothier of Shakespeare’s comedies, in a somber register. Set in modern times, some parts were downright menacing, notably the scenes at Duke Frederick’s court. These were played before a monolithic wall of dark wood that foreshortened the stage and suggested the interior of a prison or a stockade. The massive barrier took up so much of the playing space because behind it flourished the Forest of Arden, revealed by the end of the first act as mist-wreathed and mysterious place, fantastic, but with the magic of an unconscious dream rather than of a fairy tale.

Over the course of the play Arden turned from silent, icy winter into balmy spring, a gradual change which mirrored the production’s larger themes. Mendes wrote in his playbill notes that As You Like It and it companion, The Tempest, were “designed and conceived as part of a single gesture, a single journey,” and the idea of a journey, through time as much as through space, was emphasized throughout. Jacques’s famous, “All the world’s a stage,” speech describing the developmental arc of a man’s life, spoken with measured tones and subtle emphasis by Stephen Dillane, encapsulated the focus of the whole.

Unhurried dialogue was, with a few violent and comedic exceptions, common throughout, the actors using the stillness between their words as much as they used the words themselves. Occasionally, this restraint inhibited character development—Orlando, for example, was too thoughtful for a romantic and feckless youth. More often, though, the production’s quietude succeeded in evoking a sense of laden emotions and of nostalgia, as when the Duke and his courtiers slouched around their brazier in the forest, softly strumming guitars like a bunch of old hippies at a Woodstock reunion (an impression that was strengthened by Jacques’s riff on Bob Dylan during one of the songs).

Mendes’s production was a very completely realized vision of the play. Lighting, sets, acting, and music were all carefully contrived to give complementary impressions. There were only a few artistic misfires, such as the interpretation of the vicar Sir Oliver Mar-text as the sort of loopy itinerant you might hear in Union square, the use of Pheobe’s character to trot out some overdone, “it’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings” humor, or the faint whining drone of a dulcimer that arose whenever a character gave a particularly heart-felt speech. Generally, however, the performance succeeded in elucidating the heart of the story as one of love and transformation, both physical and emotional.

That success was aided by a cast of strong actors. Juliet Rylance as Rosalind carried well the most-exposed role in the play. Clear-voiced and emotive, she was most compelling in her scenes as Ganymede, where she struck a balance between demonstrating her ability to manipulate Orlando and her own vulnerability to his charms. Michael Thomas, who played both duke brothers, was also excellent. He disappeared so fully into his roles, first playing Frederick as an innately threatening figure, and then showing Senior as a noble but unassertive man, that he obviated the potential disjunction for the audience of seeing the one transform into the other.

Anti-Heroics

I just finished Troilus and Cressida last night. It was a very modern-feeling play; I could imagine it written between the two world wars, when artists were generally trashing the progressive vision of human nature, and T.S. Eliot was treating the western canon to a nihilistic mash-up. In a way, Shakespeare mashing up his own great masters (or at least some of them) in T&C by re-presenting the epic story of the Trojan war as a pastiche of human failures. I felt, as I read, as if the characters were struggling to act with chivalry and to fulfill the ideal heroic roles their era called for, but they just couldn't maintain it. Noble dialogue would ensue for a scene or so, and then they would descend into scheming, selfishness, malice, lust, and turpitude. Most often, this seemed to happen when a woman entered the room, or even the conversation. Which brings me to another point: I think that this was the most outright misogynist of Shakespeare's plays that I have ever read, including The Taming of the Shrew. I was trying to think if there is another play in which a woman's actual infidelity is at the center of the drama, and I couldn't think of one. There are lots of instances in which women are falsely accused--e.g., Othello, Winter's Tale, Much Ado--and everybody is very upset by it, but I don't know another play in which female perfidy is so clearly on display. (Admittedly, my knowledge of Shakespeare is not that exhastive, which is one of the reasons I am taking this class, so I would welcome any corrections from the peanut gallery). More than the events of the play, however, the tone of the dialogue really turned on the falsity of women's virtues and the availability of women's bodies, especially Helen's. You would think that if they all despised her so much they would just go home, instead of fighting for ten years.

I do not mean, by all this carping, to say that I utterly disliked the play, or that I was sorry I read it. The characters were all so unpleasant, and their motivations so base (except for Hector, who was kind-of a bore) that reading it aroused a morbid fascination. It was like the attraction of Jersey Shore, I suppose. Also, Shakespeare really knew some good insults, and this was a chance for him to display the best of them. At one point Patroclus calls Thersites (the clown of the play, whose acidic comments about human nature could corrode steel), "you ruinous butt." Further, there are some more poetic speeches, especially about the inevitability of Time and the fragility of human intent, that appear every so often, like jewels flashing out beneath the swirling waters of a polluted and toxic river. "Time has," Ulysses says, "a wallet at his back,/Wherin he puts alms for oblivion,/A great-sized monster of ingratitudes./Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured/As fast as they are made, forgot as soon/As done."

Talk about existential angst.

Well Met by Moonlight

This is the start of my blog for Shakespeare II, spring 2010. In it I will be responding to the plays of the course, as I read them (Unfortunately, I will not actually be reading Midsummer this semester, since the syllabus covers the later plays only, but the moon is out right now...) I do not guarantee that I will be equally inspired by all the plays I read, but I will try to post at least something perfunctory about each of them, delving into greater depth when I feel so inspired. I am currently toiling through Troilus right now, and should post about it soon.