The bad guy always ends up on top

Kneehigh is a story telling Theatre Company who works in the style of Total Theatre. This means that they not only put on a performance, but also push the boundaries of their art to make it an experience through their theatrical acting, use of instruments, puppetry, song, dance, lighting, sound effects and whatever else that they feel is necessary to include in order to create a spectacle for the audience.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to watch Kneehigh’s performance of The Red Shoes at the Battersea Art’s Centre in London, and to this day I still consider it one of the most innovative and exciting pieces of theatre I have ever seen. I therefore had very high expectations when entering The Bristol Old Vic Theatre to watch their adaptation of Brecht’s A Beggar’s Opera, which they named, Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs). I will start by saying that I was not disappointed as I felt as though Kneehigh did as well as they could within the space they were in.

One aspect of The Red Shoes that made it so exciting was the great amount of audience participation that happened within a studio space, which lent itself to this very much as we were seated on the same level as the storytellers (as they call themselves). However, in the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, the stage was at a higher level than the audience and it was a proscenium arch in style. This naturally created a distance between the audience and the actors that I’m sure was not by choice of the performers. They did their best to create an intimacy with the viewers by using the isles as entrances and exits, however it was so sparse that it did not feel justifiable. In fact, the only time I feel that it added to their production was when Mrs. Peacham gave the front row voting cards so that they could decide for themselves who they thought should be made Mayer. This Brechtian styled interaction allowed the audience to take a step back to analyse what was happening and therefore make their own informed decisions on who was the best candidate. This also meant that when the Peachams were discarding any voting cards that were not in their favour, the audience would have felt personally wronged and again would have thought critically about the injustice happening before them.

A Brechtian style is apparent in the majority of their productions in ways such as allowing the audience to see the mechanics of the performance. This includes the musicians being within view of the audience as well as puppeteers and characters moving the set between scenes – all of which add to the aim of creating a visually interesting piece of theatre that the audience can also distance themselves from in order to look critically at its political message.

The political message that a Dead Dog puts upon us is one that we would rather ignore and pretend isn’t a reality – the bad guy always comes out on top. It’s sad, but according to Dead Dog it’s true. We see this from the very beginning of the performance when Macheath shoots an innocent dog stating that he was a ‘witness’. This immediately made me think of how dogs often get shot first during a police raid if they are considered a threat. Therefore, Kneehigh could be a commenting on how lower classes are often misportrayed because of their exterior or are often feared due to being considered unpredictable and therefore get dealt the short straw. This action of killing an innocent animal should also make us despise Macheath throughout the rest of the play. However, it does not take long for us to ‘forget’ what he has done and to continue laughing at his humour. This happens numerous times throughout the play. We believe he loves Polly and are shocked when he leaves her waiting for him. Shortly after we are deceived again into believing he loves Lucy until we see him faced by both of them. The constant reminders that we are watching a piece of theatre forces a realization upon us of our own naivety as well as making us ask ourselves why we are still hanging off his every word. Well, at least we realize Macheath is ‘the baddy’ who we shouldn’t like, which is more than we can say for the only character in the whole play who is potentially worse that Macheath; the puppet, Punch. We seem to look past the little puppet that hands Macheath the gun. Is he the real criminal mastermind? The only thing worse than realizing you’d overlooked who the real criminal was, is the realization that at the end Punch survives over Macheath and has had no blame put on him throughout the whole production. The bad guy always ends up on top.

Mabou Barbie

A Doll’s House, premiering first in December of 1879, is a play written by Henrik Ibsen during the beginning of the first wave of European feminism. As Ibsen was someone who read newspapers and was aware of the contemporary debates about equality for women, it seems obvious to me that Nora was a product of this. Through the play, he aimed to challenge audiences to think about the way power functions within the domestic world and in relations to assumptions about motherhood. It did exactly that. It shocked its Victorian–era audiences with its criticisms of traditional gender roles. Not only is Nora’s exit said to be “the most famous stage exit in modern drama” but also English critic, Edmund Grosse, wrote “people left the theatre pale with excitement, arguing, quarrelling, challenging.” I’m sure Ibsen would have reveled in the fact that his play was deemed so controversial that it was a banned topic of conversation in certain venues, however, in 1880 this controversy worked against his favour when German actress Hedwig Niemann – Raage refused to play the part of Nora as was written. This led to Ibsen revising his ending, softening it, so that Nora sees her children and ultimately decides not to leave the family home. In the present day, however, the original ending is more commonly used. This may be partly due to the fact that the topic of female equality is no longer taboo, although the ending is still relatively shocking. Why is this? It is not shocking to hear of a man leaving the family home during the present day. This male/female divide was one that I focused on when watching Young Vic’s and Mabou Mines’s adaptations of A Doll’s house.

Although I enjoyed watching the Young Vic production, (due to it being easier to follow and more realistic), I found the Mabou Mines adaptation more enjoyable to make notes on. In the Young Vic’s production the hierarchy of the men and women was portrayed mainly through the acting, such as Nora’s childlike mannerisms and tone of voice when asking Torvald for something or hiding chocolates from him. However, what may have made the Mabou Mines production enthralling was their incorporation of many innovative ways in which to portray the power struggle between men and women.

The most prominent decision of theirs was to cast all the men in the play as little people which created a clear visual exposition of how the women did not fit comfortably into the men’s world. They had to contort their bodies in order to appear at the men’s level. The women also appeared uncomfortable and outright bizarre when sitting on tiny chairs and drinking from a doll-sized tea set when Miss Linde came to visit.

Another interesting way of commenting on women and their roles was when Nora opens up a doll’s head and reveals that she has macaroons hidden inside. Originally I read that this was a comment on the mistreatment of dolls and thus perhaps the mistreatment of Nora, however, what I immediately deduced from this was that they were drawing attention to the fact that the doll’s head was empty apart from the luxury sweets that it was holding. This, therefore, may have been a statement on how Nora is viewed; her thoughts and opinions being of no use.

Finally, I felt the men’s temperaments were conspicuous during the performance, coming across very aggressively – sexually as well as when conversing generally with the female characters. One particular moment that stood out above the rest was towards the end when Torvald finally reads Krogstad’s letter explaining all that Nora had done. Torvald slaps Nora and then proceeds to kick her. This may have been made more shocking due to the sudden seriousness of the scene in comparison to the more comical style that preceded it. Furthermore, this form of domestic abuse in still prevalent in society today. Therefore, it may have also been included in order to create the realization for the audience that the themes in the play are still present in this day and age, even if not to the extent of that in the late 1870s; when the play is presumably set.

Because sexism is not as much of a prominent aspect of modern society, perhaps Mabou Mines needed to include ways of shocking viewers, just as Ibsen shocked his audiences in 1879, in order to make this play relevant to a contemporary audience. This would result in them leaving with the awareness that although we have come a long way since then, in terms of gender equality, there is still a long way to go.

Relating to 1984

During a talk with the 1984 director, Robert Ike, he spoke about theatre as a ‘ritual’. This was a concept that had never occurred to me. Do we go to the theatre to enter, sit down, look at the story being presented on stage, and then leave? Well, if this were to be your expectation when entering the Northcott Theatre to watch 1984 then you would leave in 101 minutes with a lot more than you bargained for. This was a play that did not rely on the dramaturgy, which I’m sure most audience members would have expected in order to fulfill their ‘empty ritual’. Owing to the discussions and questions that it provokes, this is a play whose impact will go beyond the four walls of a theatre.

This was perhaps the result of the daunting reality that, even though Orwell wrote the novel over 60 years ago, the themes of which he wrote are relevant to the society in which we currently live in.

Although not to such extremes as in 1984, we are also being closely watched by our government. There is now one CCTV camera for approximately every eleven people and we appear on CCTV an average of ten times per day. Although this is a startling figure, I feel that this is for our safety and therefore benefits us. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the same justification of ‘security’ was given in Oceania since they were in a constant state of war. The NSA surveillance program, on the other hand, which has the potential to access private information on almost anyone’s’ computer, is, for me, over-bearing and unjustifiable.

Although there are concerns in our own society that Orwell may have pre-empted or warned about, there arguably still exists an actual society on earth against which direct comparisons can be made with Oceania. This society is the one that exists in North Korea (NK). In fact, Christopher Hitchens, who visited North Korea, once commented to an audience that it is as if someone handed a copy of 1984 to Kim Il-Sung in 1950 and said “do you reckon this could happen”. Some notable comparisons are that every aspect of a citizen’s life revolves around their leader, such as music and plays that are performed for the purpose of glorifying their leader. Another would be the closed off society and lack of contact with the outside world for the average citizen. For example, there is no access to the world wide web or any possibility of leaving NK. This lack of contact with the outside world additionally allows for the propagation of the myth that NK is in a constant state of war; another comparison with 1984.

Citizens of NK are told not to associate with tourists because they may be spies or the enemy. This is to ensure that no information of outside of NK is let in. I see this as a similarity to the way the citizens of Oceana see Goldstein; a figure to hate and distrust.

These are only a few examples of how 1984 is comparable to our society and others across the world. However, the discussion could continue indefinitely. This is the beauty of a play such as 1984; its impact continues beyond the time spent in the theatre through the discussions it creates, widening the number of people impacted to those who may not have seen the play or even read the novel. It is this that will increase the potential for awareness and even change.

Frantic Assembly’s Othello

On Wednesday 10^th October I went to see Frantic Assembly’s adaptation of Othello at the Theatre Royal Plymouth. Being set in a bar in northern England, their aim was clearly to make this classic Shakespeare play accessible and contemporary to a 21^st Century audience.

Shakespeare’s plays in general lend themselves to adaptations due to the themes within them still being relatable today. Othello itself holds themes of love, jealousy, paranoia, fear and deceit, when Iago implicates his ‘friend’ Cassio to Othello, which are all ones that are very present in our everyday life. This timeless nature allows for a modern day setting and perhaps, as critic West Briton stated, exposes the ‘prejudice, danger and fear’ of modern day 21^st Century Britain. What was originally Cyprus became a bar in a what seemedto be a council estate, the battles were related to gang warfare fought with baseball bats, bottles and bare hands and instead of being a General of the armies of Venice, Othello was now the leader of his gang. As an example of how this effected certain scenes, Desdemona and Cassio’s ‘love’ encounter was in the bar while they were playfully chatting on the pool table, rather than on a harbor in Cyprus waiting for Othello’s ship to return as in the first scene of act II during Shakespeare’s play.

There are, however, still a number of issues with adapting a five-act play into something shorter and easier to follow. Saying that, I feel Frantic Assembly did this effectively, not only narrowing the characters down from thirteen to nine, but also through their cutting of the play. They cropped out certain scenes that were not specific to their adapted story line, such as the Turkish invasion of Cyprus that appears in Shakespeare’s original version. This made the play one hour and forty minutes in comparison with the 3 and a half hour running time for the Globe production. This quicker pace would be pleasing to a modern-day audience, whose attention span has decreased by 50% in the last decade, perhaps due to our fast-paced lifestyle where within a few clicks we talk to people on the other side of the world.

One of very few reservations I had prior to watching the performance was whether I would be able to follow and keep up with the play due to it being the first time I had seen Othello staged. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when it was staged and spoken in such a way that, within the first 15 minutes of the production, the language no longer sounded dated and I found myself concentrating less on trying to understand what was being said. This allowed me to simply enjoy the innovative creations of walls snaking around the space to create a daunting reality of what the characters’ minds were experiencing, as well as to appreciate the high quality of physical theatre being presented. This was aided by the naturalistic and conversational tone of the northern accents spoken, sounding not too dissimilar from a 21^st Century soap opera. As for the actor’s physicality, they used a heightened style of performance, incorporating physical and dance based elements to communicate the relationships between the characters, whether it were fight scenes or seduction.

As you may have already guessed by my continuous praising of the production, I definitely feel that Frantic Assembly achieved what they set out to do. I left the theatre understanding the story of Othello, eager to read the original play to see where it had all derived from.

Gnomes, Lions and a bit of Shakespeare

Why are adaptations so important? Why do we even adapt things?

Well, Shakespeare is a major part of English heritage. Shakespeare is inescapable. You cannot reach the age of 10 without knowing the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet. Even if you do not know the entirety of the plot, you know the significance of the two star crossed lovers and their devastating ending.

In 2013, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust recorded their highest number of visitors (818,000 people). This amazingly high number of visitors shows that Shakespeare is still very much in the heart of British culture despite writing over 300 years ago. His works also have a timelessness to them, which means that even in present day, they are still in the top percentage of plays ever performed. (Shakespeare is in the top percentage of playwrights ever, record number of performances). Then why is adaptation important? If he is still so popular why do we bother adapting his work?

At the time of his writing, many of Shakespeare’s audience were not 100% sure about what the actors were saying and this continues into the present day. But today, in a world booming with technology and a communication, anyone would be able to find something that they would be able to tap into and fully understand. There is something for any age group, any intellect, any interest…which could potentially put Shakespeare’s works, in their original form, at risk from sinking under the weight of present day entertainment.

As previously mentioned, no one can pass through the education system without coming into contact with the work of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and in 2011 a film adaptation appeared on the big screen; ‘Gnomeo and Juliet.’ Keeping the events and characters largely the same and adding in the voices of the world biggest stars, it is unsurprising that the film was a huge blockbuster hit. It was even named as a Disney ‘sleeper hit’ because this combination of the world’s most famous love story and the voices of Hollywood stars ensured that the film would be a global sensation. An underlying addition to this success would be that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was now accessible to a much wider audience. The title of the film bares such strong parallels to Shakespeare’s original title that the films origins could not be over looked. It was impossible for anyone to forget that the film was based on Shakespeare’s story.

Arguably, by changing the language of the entire play to modern day and setting the animated film in the back garden of a suburban street it is no longer ‘Shakespeare’. Although without this adaptation the story would not be accessible to such a young audience or such a wide audience. Children are now growing up surrounded by adaptations of Shakespeare such as ‘The Lion King’ being just one of many.

The value of adaptation is therefore, that Shakespeare’s, and other classic playwright’s work will never be lost to time. Time will undoubtedly change some aspects of the original works to suit present culture, but adaptation ensures the survival and longevity of British icons.