David Tennant and Catherine Tate are starring in yet another timeshifted Shakespeare. But can contemporary settings ever work?
After what feels like an aeon of comparing and contrasting Hamlets ? first David Tennant v Jude Law, then John Simm v Rory Kinnear ? there's finally a new game about to hit town, with two Much Ado About Nothings opening this summer, at the Globe and Wyndhams. What's more interesting, with these two London productions, is that it seems the real contrast is going to be between settings rather than how actors approach their roles.
It's striking, looking back, to notice that all four recent Hamlets seemed to be set in variations of exactly the same modern dress, with the Dane in a range of anoraks and grungy T-shirts, and the productions making some kind of ancillary comment about contemporary "surveillance society".
With the Much Ados, we're presented with a choice. First, there's Josie Rourke's Wyndhams version, starring Catherine Tate and David Tennant, which is "set in 1980s Gibraltar ... because of Gibraltar's role as a military base"; this "allows the company to suggest a tightly knit community" and to evoke "the lavish 1981 royal wedding of Charles and Diana, underpinning the play's examination of the appeal of fairytale romance and what constitutes real, lasting love". By contrast, Jeremy Herrin's Globe production is set in the 16th century, apparently because "there's no point in being at war with the space".
Both approaches remind me of the spoof memoir I, An Actor, which faux-quotes Sir Peter Hall: "We're only doing this load of old rubbish to get the critics off our backs for a bit, but we might as well make the best of it. As I see it we can approach the play in three ways: a) set it in Nazi Germany; b) do it with red noses and white faces; or c) wear handmade leather boots and cloaks and shout very loudly. Which is it to be?"
Over time, of course, the red noses and white faces of option b) seem to have been replaced by modern dress, but the general principle remains intact. These approaches strike me as emblematic of the huge problems the British theatrical mainstream has with literal-mindedness ? on the one hand going to all the bother of meticulously researching period costumes to perform a play Shakespeare doubtless didn't research at all; or, even more preposterously, choosing a near-contemporary setting because of a few glancing similarities and thematic felicities, while in the process wrong-footing everything else from social structures and familial relationships to the existence of guns and, even more fatally, telephones.
Still, I can't help feeling that, off-paper, both approaches might actually work rather well. What's odd, given our apparent national propensity for naturalism and realism, is how able we are to ignore things that don't fit. We are very good at "suspending our disbelief". It's as if there's this elaborate pantomime of massive, in-depth research to make sure we've got all these period details exactly spot on and then, right in the middle of it all, we go and plonk a play in which some British people play some improbable Spaniards and Sicilians speaking in a way no one has ever spoken before.
What's most curious is that it's widely accepted Shakespeare (or whoever) wrote all his plays about his own times, but chose to set them in geographically and temporally remote locations to distance himself from any political comments he might have been making, and to give them a spurious sense of the exotic. It's also generally agreed that, when directors put on plays, they're doing so to present their take on the here and now. As such, perhaps all this fuss over costume and setting is just window-dressing for whatever someone really wants to say with their production.
That said, at least neither production has opted for Nazi Germany; I'm coming to the conclusion that virtually every Shakespeare has been set there at some point. And something else I've neglected to mention: giving Shakespeare a daft setting can be fun.
What's the silliest you've seen? What's the silliest you'd like to see? And which plays have yet to be set in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/may/25/much-ado-about-nothing-shakespeare
Lisa Allardice Dance music Motherwell Newspapers Manchester City Buenos Aires
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