Given the ovations many shows received at the National Arts Festival, it seems ”artistic standards” are not priorities. The audiences — mostly newcomers to theatre, below the age of twenty-two, whose staple diet is television — seemed quite happy if the actors said their lines and didn’t bump into the furniture. I overheard impressed patrons make remarks like, ”How do they remember all those words?”
The only critical exception erupted after a front page crit on Janet Suzman’s direction of Hamlet ran, ”it is not, nor it cannot come to good”. ”For” and ”against” camps formed — both containing critical heavy-weights, neither substantiating their acrimonious positions with much analysis. Oscar Wilde’s remark seemed apt: ”Is Hamlet or are Hamlet’s critics mad?” The whole debacle took up precious column space, regrettable when there were far more important artistic issues, such as: how do we evaluate community theatre and what are the new dramatic forms taking shape?
If we apply the highest standards then I’ve never seen a great production of Shakespeare outside of London, and then not always there either. By ”great” I mean where the language is faultless and the acting and directorial conception keeps one riveted. Measure for Measure last year at the National Theatre staged by Complicite, a repertory company who’ve been at it for 20 years, was performed in modern dress, the transposition seamless, every line came into its own and 135 minutes of straight performance was over before the first fidget. You have as much likelihood of staging a Shakespeare of this quality with local resources, as you’d have flying out an iemoto for two months and putting on a kabuki play. We simply haven’t the alphabet. In Hamlet the difference between the older actors and the younger blood was clear cut, though one absolutely believed in youngsters Brett Goldin and Marcel Meyer as Guildenstern and Rosencrantz.
Until recently Shakespeare was seen primarily as a vehicle for the actor-manager in the title role to parade the very mechanics of the part. Laurence Olivier did so in his extravagantly ethnic version of Othello, which became disparagingly known as ‘Hello Golly’. South Africans still hark back for this style, though it’s outmoded.
”Director’s Shakespeare” is a twentieth century phenomenon linked to burgeoning literary theory. We have feminist readings of Lady Macbeth, Marxist interpretations of Merchant of Venice and countless Oedipean Hamlets. Broadway Shakespeare is no better — with Hollywood draw-cards, like Denzel Washington as Brutus in this year’s Julius Ceasar at the Belasco. Critics were scathing, but it sold out at $100 a seat. So today, Shakespeare is a multi-million dollar industry, spurred on by educationalists, cultural subsidies, the movie industry and in England by tourism. There are festivals from Shanghai to Stratford (to which Suzman’s Hamlet will tour).
Expectations were inordinately high. Some were disappointed that ironically Suzman didn’t produce a ”director’s Shakespeare”. Her emphasis was primarily on text, to at last trust in the work itself, to present as uncluttered as possible the play which has some of Shakespeare’s greatest epiphanies. The directorial accents were designed not to be cohesive, but for exegesis. Every actor up there, Suzman told me, knows the meaning of every word they say. No small achievement and certainly not the case at our annual Maynardville productions. I believe her approach was shrewd and workable. But it won’t find easy acceptance. There is no specific setting. The set stands stark and inhospitable.
To begin with, local audiences aren’t receptive to Shakespeare, especially without modernised stylisation. It’s not the critics’ job to paraphrase audience reactions. That’s only part of the equation which needs to be balanced. Critics sometimes need to tell both approving and disapproving audiences they’re wrong. Should one blame the director for not dressing things up to hold patrons who struggle with a straight two hours of Shakespeare? I doubt patrons that didn’t return after interval left because they took issue over character interpretation. They wanted something showy — perhaps Hamlet set in the House of Saud.
Imaginations have become flattened by film, Suzman tells me after the show. For instance, her casting is colour blind — different ethnicities exist within the same blood family. It seems imaginatively impoverished to take issue with this. (And I think, yes, please not another white King Lear with a coloured actor as the bastard son Edmund)
Suzman’s production is peppered with local references to hook the audience — the grave digger (Royston Stoffels in a show-stealing scene) sings in Afrikaans, while Claudius (John Kani) prays in Xhosa. Suzman’s master strokes are the small gestures that become truly brutal moments — Hamlet kisses Claudius on the mouth, spits in Ophelia’s face, gives the royal family a ”brown-eye”. Hamlet (Rajesh Gopie) is the angry vengeance-filled young man, crossing into villainy himself. He works in waves, but he lacks subtlety and struggles with the introspective soliloquies.
In the end the best South African productions of Shakespeare haven’t really been of Shakespeare, but Afrikaans translations like Uys Krige’s Twaalfde Nagt, or free adaptations that only use the story and a few choice passages.
Hamlet runs at the Baxter Theatre in Rondebosch, Cape Town, until July 30