The Winter's Tale @ EFT

Shakespeare is usually an excuse for a lack of imagination on the part of a theatre company. It's a sure fire way to attract audiences - familiarity is better hype than experimentation - and the language, if performed well, is usually enough to hide the tortuous plots and stereotyped characterisations. It's easy enough to pretend to be radical - set King Lear in outer-space - and there is little danger of having any real political controversy. Even the updating of Macbeth by various Polish companies in last year's EIF and Fringe, which tried to connect medieval monarchy to modern war zones, avoided any meaningful commentary on contemporary geopolitics, thanks to the script's awkward insistence on being obsessed with lineage. Even terrorist cells don't assume that a son will receive their father's position.

When the company is The Royal Shakespeare Company, however, these objections don't apply. It's not like they don't try to make Shakespeare relevant, even collaborating with Poland's Song of The Goat for a Macbeth that did break free of the clichés. But as a company, they have the clout to get the right actors, and have a tradition of directing Shakespeare that plays to the bard's strengths without ignoring the last 200 years of stagecraft.

Besides, they are offering The Winter's Tale - not a number that turns up too frequently on the schedules. And it's got Tara Fitzgerald out of Game of Thrones in it, for added cultural capital. The director, Lucy Bailey, is enthusiastic about getting to grips with the tale of jealousy and forgiveness: and has approached its geography to add a dualistic darkness.

"‘The Winter's Tale is set in a notional Sicilia and Bohemia. Most interpretations of the play revolve around the relationship of these two worlds," says Bailey. "When I read the play, I had two strong instincts - that Sicilia and Bohemia were one and the same place, just two different modes of being, and that the "idyll" which is often understood to be Bohemia, is actually Sicilia."

"In our version which is set in the 1860s, the play begins in Sicilia, where Leontes and his court live a sheltered, beautiful dream of a life, bathed in endless sunshine and completely removed from the real world of work and suffering.  It is in essence an Ivory Tower. At the bottom of their tower well beyond view, is Bohemia, where the working men and women, despite their struggle, make the most out of very little. We have tried to encapsulate this in our design for the play."

The Winter's Tale is probably most famous for its stage direction - the one where a bear chases a character off-stage. Like most Shakespeare comedies, the laughs don't come thick and fast - having a happy ending is enough for it not to count as a tragedy - but there is the usual mesh of conflict between the sexes, jealous men (one king thinks the other is having an  affair with his wife for no good reason), attempted murders and lost children. But it all ends with the royals hooking up, after disguising themselves as shepherds and the like.

And the RSC do have an amazing website with resources, including bits of the soundtrack...

RSC presents
The Winter’s Tale
By William Shakespeare,
Directed by Lucy BaileyFestival Theatre, Edinburgh: Tuesday 2 – Saturday 6 April 2013

The Full Monty Comes to Edinburgh (Reflections on Popular Theatre part 1)

Although the volume of posts on my blog is essentially fueled by my neurotic desire to keep on top of the various emails that flood my inboxes, I am genuinely enthusiastic about every single theatrical event that happens - at least until I attend some of them, when my more expected tastes resurface and I complain that Cats lacks a meaningful engagement with community issues. 

But something like The Full Monty  is a tough one to preview: my instincts tell me that a play based on a film based on unemployed steelworkers might just about fit in with my belief that politically engaged theatre is vital, but its production is more likely based on the success of the movie than any dedication to its ironic personal politics of the masculine.

The plot is well known: six men, no jobs, one chance for financial redemption, through the act of striptease. Although the film was made in 1997, making its book office success part of the brief, optimistic period when New Labour supplanted the Tories, its story is firmly rooted in the anguish caused by the Thatcherite restructuring of society, when traditional industry was closed down and the unions fought a rearguard battle to defend jobs. 

It has more than a tangental connection to Brassed Off, another film set in an area devastated by the closure of hard industry that sees the unemployed men find joy through art. And beneath the titillation provided by six men getting their kit off, there is the harsh reality of a country in which work is getting scarce.

That alone is enough to justify a remounting. That the men find their happy ending by stripping in public adds a nice touch of masculine panic: once they were defined by working steel, now they are appreciated for getting wood. 

However, it belongs in a box that gives me cause to pause: populist theatre. It isn't that I instinctively distrust work because it is popular: I worry that it is popular because it doesn't challenge assumptions, or delve into ideas beyond presenting them on a nice, simple surface.

Political theatre is difficult - it is bound to annoy some people, and balancing entertainment with polemic is beyond most artists (the 1970s has plenty of plays that won't be revived anytime soon, thanks to their analysis of minority left wing groups that have long since disappeared). 

The Full Monty might manage it - the author Simon Beaufoy, who more recently won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2009 for Slumdog Millionaire, is no slouch. 

The Full Monty 

by Simon Beaufoy

Monday 25 – Saturday 30 March, 7.30pm

Festival Theatre Edinburgh

Evenings 7.30pm | Matinee Wed & Sat 2.30pm

 

Film Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre

There's a natural defensiveness in my response to the news that the Edinburgh Festival Theatre is screening a series of live operas and ballets in February: although the live transmission of a performance has become commonplace, there is still a sense that it is neither film nor theatre, but an over-priced and clumsy combination. The thrill of the intimacy and immediacy of theatre is dulled by the screen, and the polish of the film is threatened by the vagaries of the live show.

Having said that, certain pieces are enhanced by the big screen: dance has been successful in the 3D format (Bausch, Wim Wender's tribute to the goddess of German Dance Theatre brought the audience right into the thick of her Rite of Spring and Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake gains an intimacy, ironically, by being blown up to a bigger size). And, frankly, there's little chance of my visiting La Scala to see Roland Petit's Notre Dame de Paris in the near future. A satellite link and a HD screen are my best bet.

Unlike comic book author Alan Moore, who doesn't regard cinema as being all that (comic book authors might be a little sensitive about who gets called "high art" but the state of the current blockbuster industry does support his complaint), I am enthusiastic about cinema - I am currently trawling through the Glasgow Film Festival Brochure in hope of deciding whether I want to follow the James Cagney season of fight for Joss Weedon's Much Ado About Nothing. Part of a generation that learnt about international cinema due to staying up late to watch Channel 4 in hope of some naughty bits, I don't just see it as a parasitic art that devours talented actors from the stage and diminishes the complexity of human existence by replacing recognisable body shapes with a minimal range of glamorous cyphers.

That said, the context of theatre and cinema are very different. Going to the cinema involves eating large amounts of junk food - which compensate for the scripts which would be laughed out of the theatre - sitting behind a two year old child who decides to bellow throughout and not hanging about afterwards. It also connects me to a far larger audience, a more common experience and is cheaper and more comfortable than a night at the ballet.

Theatre, on the other hand, is all about the unrepeatable moment, the proximity of the performer, the ways around naturalism, the immediate chat over post-show drinks and the sense of being part of a local audience.

The Festival Theatre, however, isn't necessarily the place where I go for that. It's got a sense of scale, and importance, and I travel there because they put on the big names. If part of my reason to go to theatre is to learn more about theatre - and it is - then getting to see Verdi's Nabucco is important, regardless of whether it is live or screened.

I shall conclude with a few unanswered questions in the best tradition of post-modern scholarship - if I keep this up, someone will have to offer me a PhD.

How do theatre companies view these showings - are they an event in themselves or an attempt to enchant new audiences, who might then go and see a live performance? Is the direction adapted to the screen, or do the acts turn out their usual repertoire of expressions and moves? And is the emotional impact - and atmosphere of the screening - more akin to the popcorn popping multiplex or the seriousness of a night at The Arches with David Hughes Dance?

Listings

Nabucco l Giuseppe Verdi
Wed 13 February 2013, 7pm
Live from La Scala, Milan

Notre Dame de Paris l Roland Petit
Thu 14 February 2013, 7pm
Live from La Scala, Milan

Falstaff l Verdi
Tue 12 March 2013, 6.30pm
Live from Opéra National de Paris

Rigoletto l Verdi

Tue 9 July 2013, 8.30pmLive from Taormina’s Ancient Greek Theatre