Tag: theatre

All the world’s a stage: Trying to see all the Shakespeare

I’ve been a Shakespeare fan ever since high school, and even volunteered regularly for several seasons at Auckland’s wonderful Pop-Up Globe revival. I’ve seen quite a lot of Shakespeare on stage over the years… or, until recently, so I thought. 

When I start to actually think about it, I’ve realised I’ve only seen about half of Shakespeare’s 37 (more or less) plays actually performed live on a stage, which makes me feel like a lot less of a Shakespeare fanboy than I thought I was. (There’s even a name for doing it – “completing the canon.”)

I finally filled one of my most notable gaps this week by seeing Auckland Theatre Company’s fierce, excellent production of King Lear starring and directed by Michael Hurst, a brutal escalating powerhouse of a tragedy which – although I’ve seen several filmed productions – I’d somehow never managed to see performed live in all my mumblety-mumble years. (Lear is still on for a few more weeks and it is most highly recommended if you’re in Auckland!)

Lear was by far the best-known Shakespeare play I had missed out on, and added to the tally earlier this year was another one I’ve inexplicably missed seeing performed live, a highly enjoyable outdoor lakeside theatre version of Antony and Cleopatra at Auckland’s Shakespeare in the Park. 

Some people idolise pro wrestlers, or rugby stars, or pop singers. But honestly, for me, among my top cultural heroes, the ones whose achievements I both appreciate and yet cannot quite imagine doing myself, are the stage actors.

Imagine getting up and speaking hundreds of Shakespeare’s verses and monologues before a crowd, and imagine doing that nearly every night, while wearing a bulky costume, possibly having a stage fight or three, and also managing to put some life into your role. It’s a herculean accomplishment that I sometimes think we don’t quite appreciate as much in the age of ever-streaming content. 

Michael Hurst, one of New Zealand’s great actors, wrung himself out over the course of nearly three hours in King Lear the other night, delivering a tense, nervy and unhinged performance of what’s often been called the greatest role an actor can hope to perform. I was sweaty and overwrought myself just watching him and couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be asked to deliver that kind of all-in acting, again and again. 

It’s easy to love Shakespeare without seeing it performed, of course, and there have been a lot of magnificent movie and television versions of the plays. But the stage is the crowning way to appreciate Shakespeare, and the beauty of it all is, you’ll never quite see the same play twice.

Several plays I’ve seen quite a few times live, like Richard III at Oregon’s famed Ashland Shakespeare Festival and at the late great Pop-Up Globe. I saw Hamlet, Henry V and Othello so many times at the Globe that I grew to appreciate the tiny, almost indistinguishable differences in line readings each time, the slight changes in gesture that altered an entire scene.

But there’s an awful lot that still, decades into being a Bard-idolator, I’ve never managed to see performed live. The list has shrunk, but it’s still a lot longer than I imagined – and I hope to gradually seek out the missing plays in coming years. 

It’ll be tricky, because a lot of the ones that are left are ones you rarely ever see performed. Everyone has seen some version of Romeo and Juliet, I’d wager. How many of us have watched Troilus and Cressida on a stage? 

A particular blind spot is an awful lot of the histories, all those Henry VI Part 2 and 3s and such, and a heap of the more rarely-performed plays like Pericles, Cymbeline and Timon of Athens. (Has anyone even seen Timon of Athens? Come on!) 

Many of the rarer works I have seen superbly translated to film, like Ralph Fiennes’ astoundingly intense translation of Coriolanus to the war-torn Balkans or Julie Taymor’s vivid and grotesque slasher-horror of Titus Andronicus with Sir Anthony Hopkins. (It’s hard to imagine most local theatre companies putting on Titus, what with the cannibalism and mutilation and murder and all.)

One’s goals become a little less ambitious as you get older. Trying to tick off all 37 or so of Shakespeare’s plays on stage is a small one in the big picture, but heck, I’ll give it a go. I don’t know if I’ll ever “complete the canon,” given how little New Zealand is and how rarely some of the plays are put on. At the very least, I’ll see some wonderful plays, and that’s the experience to remember.

To quote one of those ones I haven’t seen yet, here’s a line from Troilus and Cressida that seems apt: 

“Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

The play that never ends: ‘Hamlet’

IMG_5196Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. — Polonious

I’ve been living in Hamlet-land for the past 8 weeks or so, a strange foggy kingdom full of ghosts and daggers and soliloquies that haunt the brain. 

As mentioned before, I’ve been volunteering at the Pop-Up Globe replica of Shakespeare’s famed theatre here in Auckland again this summer, for the third season in a row. The centrepiece of this season for me was what’s pretty much the most famous play in history, “Hamlet.”

There’s nothing like watching a play seven, eight, nine times or more to have it seep into your pores, and the Pop-Up Globe put on a marvellous version of Hamlet led by an excellent energetic Adrian Hooke in the title role (and Summer Millett as an outstanding, vivid Ophelia). Watching the show from all around the theatre, with crowds of uniform-clad school kids and groups of Shakspeare fans of all ages from 8 to 80, you can see how this enigmatic, blazing fire of a play has lasted more than 400 years. 

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. — Hamlet

IMG_5200As I’ve said before, I find Shakespeare bottomless – an infinity of meanings can be found in his works, and new twists reveal themselves in every new look. Hamlet is perhaps his crowning jewel as an artist, a play about a young man who asks the question every single one of us asks at some point in our lives: To be? Or not to be?

To sleep, perchance to dream: — ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come? — Hamlet

During my month or so of Hamlet, I read books about the play – Harold Bloom’s erudite “Hamlet: Poem Unlimited” and Dominic Dromgoole’s very entertaining travelogue of the London Globe’s worldwide tour of the play and the meanings wrung out of it, “Hamlet: Globe By Globe.” I watched Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, based on his play which takes two minor characters and spins an entire side story out of them. On the bedside table awaiting a re-read is John Updike’s “Gertrude and Claudius,” a prequel. Hell, I even watched the unforgettable trailer for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Hamlet (from The Last Action Hero, it’s a movie that never really was, but geez how weirdly cool would that be?). Hamlet is impossible to avoid in life. 

We defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. — Hamlet

I’d play a mental game of just how many turns of phrase, famous titles and sayings sprang from Hamlet. It’s long enough to span its own comprehensive Wikipedia page. Hamlet is everywhere. It’s in the crazy goofy McKenzie brothers comedy “Strange Brew” I watched 117 times in the mid-1980s. The Lion King. David Foster Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest.” The popular NZ TV series Outrageous Fortune. Philip K. Dick’s “Time Out of Joint.” Nick Lowe’s “Cruel To Be Kind” song. Hell, even a “Star Trek” movie (Part 6: The Undiscovered Country, of course). 

IMG_5582What does it all mean? After hours and hours of Hamlet this season, I’m still not quite sure.

It’s about a young man facing up to his future. It’s about revenge. It’s about lost love and death and the impossibility of a human being ever truly knowing what’s out there beyond the veil. It’s about some terrible decision-making and some mighty low-down bloody actions. In short it’s a bottomless voyage into the human experience and somehow a guy from Stratford-Upon-Avon hit upon universal themes and truths that we’re all still grappling with centuries later. It’s Hamlet, and we never finish it, not really. 

We know what we are, but know not what we may be. — Ophelia

The Pop-Up Globe: Keeping Shakespeare real

img_0696One of my highlights of the last three summers has been working at the remarkable Pop-Up Globe theatre in Auckland, a working replica of the famous second Globe Theatre of 1614 that Shakespeare and company used. 

Its design closely replicates the actual experience of the punters of 400 years ago, lords and ladies, groundlings and commoners. The Pop-Up Globe, created by Dr Miles Gregory, has been so successful it’s gone on to be replicated in Australia and is now in its fourth season here in New Zealand. 

I started volunteering there a couple years ago, and it’s been an amazing experience. You help the crowds, deal with any issues, and get to bask in the glow of some amazing actors performing the greatest plays in history. The Pop-Up Globe has done some smashing productions (A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the fairy dialogue done entirely in Māori and an all-female Henry V are among my favourites) and sold hundreds of thousands of tickets. 

img_1910I’ve loved Shakespeare since a superb high school teacher (thanks, Mr. Lehman) showed us how the Bard wasn’t all dusty words and impenetrable verse, but a living, breathing body of work that contains some of the greatest stories ever told. Shakespeare is meant to be seen, not merely read aloud in a halting adolescent voice in a dry classroom. 

The biggest appeal of Shakespeare to me is that he seems bottomless – you can spend a lifetime studying the plays and still come up with new angles, new turns of phrase and new spins on characters you’d never imagined. 

One of the great things about seeing a play multiple times is how it changes, in small and big ways, from show to show. The weather, the audience, the actors’ moods, a quirk of fate. Watching Richard III five or six times in a row and it’s never quite the same show. You get a heroic appreciation for the actors and crew who sweat and bleed for their art nightly.  It’s why theatre will always be there because it’s so cracklingly alive compared to staring at a screen.

img_4348A joy for me is seeing how into the plays the audience still are in 2019. This isn’t boring Shakespeare – trust me, when the stage blood starts gushing into the audience during the bloody close of Richard III, you wouldn’t call this stuffy. There’s a witty, relaxed vibe that’s perfect for a New Zealand summer. We get all kinds of crowds – young, old, repeat customers and those who’ve never seen a Shakespeare play in their life.

A big highlight has been working at a dozen or so school shows. You haven’t seen Shakespeare’s gender-studies comedy The Taming of the Shrew until you’ve seen it with a capacity crowd of 700 screaming high school girls. 

I’ve just been a tiny, tiny part of the Pop-Up Globe, working somewhere near 50 shows in the past three seasons. But it’s been an immense highlight of my summers and it’s a star performer of New Zealand’s theatre scene. Long live Shakespeare.