Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
`Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
So said award-winning playwright Tom Stoppard who, together with Marc Norman, penned the faultless script for Shakespeare in Love. If they don’t get an Oscar nod for this, there’s definitely something rotten in the state of Hollywood.
Stoppard is an artist and craftsman combined. In 1964 he saw the National Theatre’s Hamlet starring Peter O’Toole and was so blown away that he decided to write Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which made him world famous. A mix of farce, absurdist tragicomedy and philosophical analysis, it borrowed obviously from William Shakespeare but also from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Eugene Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and even comedians Abbot and Costello.
Arthur Koestler said creativity was something that “uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines and synthesises”. And Stoppard is a sublime shuffler of ideas, a talent on display in Shakespeare in Love. Stoppard said about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours.” The analogy can apply to his latest screen effort.
The narrative is simple. Young Will Shakespeare has writer’s block as he starts to write his next play Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter in 1590. When asked by Christopher Marlowe what the play is about, he replies, “Well, you see, there’s this pirate king …” and dries up.
But his muse is rescued when he meets Lady Viola (a radiant Gwyneth Paltrow). She has a secret agenda: a love for the theatre and a desire to be on the stage. She disguises herself as a man to audition for Will and gets the part of Romeo. But her disguise slips away as Will falls for the real Viola and she for him.
Stacked against their romance is the noxious Lord Wessex (Colin Firth) who has been promised Viola as a bride at the command of Queen Elizabeth (a brilliantly tongue-in- cheek Judi Dench). When Wessex asks Viola’s father if she will produce offspring, he replies, “If she’s barren, you can send her back.”
The show becomes a hit, saving The Rose, the struggling theatre of Philip Henslowe (an over- the-top Geoffrey Rush who is far more impressive in Elizabeth and should have been nominated for an Oscar for that movie, instead of this one), uniting him with competitor Richard Burbage, owner of The Curtain, and reviving Elizabethan theatre.
This neat narrative is thrown into full swing by the numerous belly-laughing references to Shakespeare’s work. Will encounters a fanatic preacher protesting against the salaciousness of the theatre world, who screams: “A plague on both your houses!” – a line from Romeo and Juliet. Will keeps a skull in his room, an obvious allusion to poor Yorick in Hamlet. A kid who’s a great fan of Shakespeare’s bloodier works, and whose favourite moment in Romeo and Juliet is “when they killed themselves”, is identified as John Webster who became a great playwright, penning gothic dramas like The White Devil.
There are references to Twelfth Night (Will tells Viola that he dreamt she was in a shipwreck and cast ashore in a foreign country), a romantic scene on a boat that echoes Love’s Labours Lost, and even Banquo’s ghost in the Scottish play. The famous balcony scene (“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”) is inspired by Will waiting under Viola’s balcony, although Shakespeare’s experience is more comic than Romeo’s.
The film has a semi-tragic ending, but it’s brave enough not to cop out to sentimentality. In fact, director John Madden, who first came to the cinematic fore with Mrs Brown, expertly balances the raucous humour and the romance without relegating the tale to kitschy sentiment.
The Bard is probably the most adapted playwright in movie history. In 1935 Max Reinhardt made a charming version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck. Kenneth Anger, who was to become a film-maker of magic fantasy and high camp, was cast as the Changeling.
Laurence Olivier’s version of Hamlet was all dark and brooding, his Richard III framed like a Wagnerian melodrama.
But Olivier is possibly best known for his Henry V, made in 1944 when England was under siege. The idea was that the movie would raise British morale. The startling thing about the picture is the way Olivier started the story at The Globe theatre and then “opened it up” halfway through as the proscenium arch fell away, the fourth wall is closed and we find ourselves inside the play amid painted sets and props. In a spectacularly cinematic movie, the viewer then finds himself in real exteriors for the climactic battle scenes. We are drawn from the conventions of theatre into the realities of cinema, from the stylised poetic world of Shakespeare into a real and violent world without dialogue or artifice.
Foreigners like Russia’s Grigori Kozintsev have also tackled Shakespeare. Kozintsev’s 1970 King Lear was lusty and found perfect visual counterpoints to the poetry. Japan’s Akira Kurosowa adapted King Lear for his 1985 production of Ran, with a great warlord dividing his kingdoms between his three sons. Kurosowa also tackled Macbeth in 1957 with Throne of Blood in which he transferred the tale to medieval Japan.
But one should never forget the campy 1973 Theatre of Blood which had Vincent Price as a vilified classical actor who kills off eight theatre critics in Shakespearean style: one is decapitated in his bed, another forced to give a pound of flesh, while yet another is drowned in a barrel of wine.
With the Bard making a populist comeback, thanks in large part to Kenneth Branagh – who is currently working on As You Like It – Shakespeare in Love is the perfect appetiser for adolescents. It’s a contemporary movie that just happens to be set in the 90s -the 1590s. Even if you’re not a Shakespeare-o-phile, miss this at your peril.