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A Shared Experience Shakespeare and populartheatreStephen PurcellPublished online: 06 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Stephen Purcell (2005) A Shared Experience Shakespeare and popular theatre, PerformanceResearch: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 10:3, 74-84, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2005.10871440

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A Shared Experience Shakespeare and popular theatre

STEPHEN PURCELL

At the height of his involvement with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Peter Brook talked of his aim for 'a new Elizabethan relationship'

linking the private and the pub lie, the intimate and the crowded, the secret and the open, the vulgar and the magical. For this we need both a crowd on stage and a crowd watching- and within that crowded stage individuals offering their most intimate truths to individuals within that crowded audience, sharing a collective experience with them.

(Brook 1989: 40)

While I have a deep admiration for today's RSC, I am inclined to suspect that such a 'collective experience' is unlikely to be shared by

audiences at the Albery or the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (I deliberately exclude the Swan, for reasons that will become apparent). Mainstream Shakespeare today is on the whole profoundly individualized; audiences sit in darkened auditoria as a Shakespeare represent·

ing psychologically detailed characters is played out before them, to a greater or lesser extent naturalistically. Much is made of Shakespeare's timelessly accurate psychological insights; Antony Sher's comments on playing Leontes for

the RSC in 1999 are perhaps an indicative example:

My route is often through research, and so I went to talk to a whole range of experts in mental disorders ... I spoke to psychiatrists, psycho therapists, all sorts of people- and eventually it was Maria Ron, from the famous Maudsley Hospital, who I talked to ... She absolutely defined it as a medical condition called 'morbid

jealousy', a condition that's well known, that afflicts particularly men, particularly in their forties, in exactly, detail for detail, what Shakespeare's written.

Not all of Shakespeare's characters are such

finely observed specimens of psychological precision, however. One would have difficulty

arguing the case for A.<l You Like It's Oliver and Duke Frederick, for example, as credible, behav·

iourally accurate representations; their sudden conversions to goodness owe more to the metaphorical reversals of morality drama (a form not long obsolete in 16oo) than they do to

psychology. Even Leontes undergoes a similarly abrupt voltejace, in fact, recognizing in Act 3 of The Winter~ Tale that 'Apollo's angry, and the heavens themselves/Do strike at my injustice' only five lines after having dismissed the god's oracle as 'mere falsehood' (3.2.140-6). The championing of Shakespeare as an eternal genius of human psychology- the holder-up of the mirror to some universal 'nature', 'not of an age, but for all time' - is not only to misrepre­

sent his work but also to deny the specific historical and ideological character of the texts, to close them off with depictions of apparently

inescapable forms of human suffering where they should instead be open. As Bertolt Brecht might have argued, this leads to a fundamen­tally hegemonic form of theatre.

But it is in more than this detail that today's mainstream Shakespeare tends to limit itself. Peter Brook was not alone in his understanding of the 'Elizabethan relationship'; Mikhail

Performance Research 1013!. pp.74-84 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2005 74

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Bakhtin famously described the politics of the carnivalesque in the Renaissance, in which

the individual feels that he is an indissoluble part of the collectivity, a member of the people's mass body .... Carnival with all its images, indecencies, and curses affirms the people's immortal, indestructible character. In the world of carnival the awareness of the people's immortality is combined with the realization that established authority and truth are relative.

(Bakhtin 1984: 255-6)

'Theatre,' claims the Shared Experience theatre company's founder Mike Alfreds, 'is the occasion on which we confirm our shared humanity' (Alfreds 1979: 5); but a play of individ­ualized characters, to be appreciated privately by independent audience members, seems to speak not so much to a collective as to an arbitrary assortment of the 'individual men and women' who in Margaret Thatcher's words make up 'no such thing as society'. It need hardly be pointed out that such a theatrical climate- in which mainstream Shakespearean performance is inextricably associated with the middle classes, expensive nights out, cultural heritage and the establishment, and in which the plays are understood as a series of particularly insightful psychological case-studies- is in no way conducive to any kind of 'shared experience'. If we wish to create Brook's 'new Elizabethan relationship', we must turn instead to the carnivalesque, 'illegitimate' forms of theatre traditionally outside the realms of elite culture: we must look to the 'popular'.

Before we pursue this argument any further, the term 'popular' itself needs some unpicking. Every year we see Shakespearean productions flagging up their 'popular' credentials; writing about the new Globe's inaugural Henry Vin 1997, the Sunday Time.A theatre critic John Peter announced that 'unless you see Richard Olivier's production, you will not know what popular theatre is' (Peter 1997). Peter noted that the term 'popular theatre' is relatively new; in the theatre for which Shakespeare was writing it would have been tautological, he argued, since

theatre then was 'popular' by definition. Some clarification is needed here, since in a theatrical context especially, 'popular' is loaded with multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings.

When in modern productions of Henry V Pistol demands to know of Hal, 'art thou officer/Or art thou base, common, and popular?' (4.1.38-9), the line serves as an unintended joke; clearly the word has undergone a significant shift in meaning over the centuries since Shakespeare wrote the play. Today, we tend to understand the term as a synonym for 'well­liked' or 'in demand', with the added implication when applied to a product that the product is commercially successful; Stuart Hall describes this as the 'market' definition, which he notes is 'quite rightly associated with the manipulation and debasement of the culture of the people' (Hall1998: 446). In this sense, a 'popular' Shakespeare may be nothing more than an artless money-spinner, tailor-made to suit the tastes of those sections of the population buying tickets. But the Henry V quotation implies a very different meaning of the word, signifying something 'of the people' (from the Latin root popul-), with connotations of the plebeian and the vulgar. Unlike the market definition, this understanding allows 'popular' Shakespeare to be progressive, immediate, even revolutionary, and certainly opposed to elite culture. Hall calls this the 'anthropological' definition, but notes that this, too, is problematic:

We can't simply collect into one category all the things which 'the people' do, without observing that the real analytic distinction arises, not from the list itself- an inert category of things and activities- but from the key opposition: the people I not of the people .... But you cannot construct these oppositions in a purely descriptive way. For, from period to period, the contents of each category change. Popular forms become enhanced in cultural value, go up the cultural escalator- and find themselves on the opposite side.

(Hal11998: 448)

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Hall suggests that the real 'structuring principle' in defining the popular and the non­popular 'consists of the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference: roughly, between what, at any time, counts as an elite cultural activity or form, and what does not' (Hall1998: 448). Clearly this renders any attempt to define 'popular Shakespeare' almost impossible, since by Hall's line of reasoning the phrase is self-contradictory. This ambiguity is compounded by the fact that as an icon both of modern elite culture and of the popular culture of an idealized past, the name 'Shake'speare' itself invokes similarly conflicting associations.

As all this suggests, it is never entirely clear, in those productions of Shakespeare that might loosely be termed 'popular', whose interests are being served. The charge most frequently levelled is that in the process of being made to appeal to a popular audience, the integrity of the Shakespearean text is betrayed; Charles Marowitz argues in Recycling Shake..t.peare that

accessibility and populism almost invariably usher in facile, oversimplified results because there is a complexity in classics which resists reductive reasoning. Results come more easily because problems, rather than being confronted, are either underestimated or simply not perceived.

(Marowitz 1991: 63)

What needs clarifying here is Marowitz's implied understanding of the term 'popular': as with most discussions of 'popular' theatre, the market and anthropological definitions become blurred into one. The 'dumbing down' of the arts may well be a result of populism, but it is 'popular' in only the commercial, debased sense of the word. I must stress that in this article I am looking at two (perhaps even more) opposing 'popular' Shakespeares: the mainstream Shakespeare (commercially popular but in some senses elitist, embodied here by the RSC) versus the collectivist Shakespeare (with all the radical and political associations of the word, its focus primarily on the establishment of a communal

identity amongst actors and audience). In many cases, of course, the two 'popular Shakespeares' will meet in one production- the new Globe has already been mentioned - and as we shall see, it is here that the politics of what I will from hereon refer to (with necessary imprecision) as 'popular theatre' become highly ambiguous.

His focus very much on the collectivist or anthropological understanding of the term, 7:84 founder John McGrath made a refreshing if unconventional argument in his popular theatre manifesto A Good Night Out about the sophisti­cation of popular audiences, using the audience of a pantomime as an example. Such audiences, he argued, were capable of believing in the imaginary world on one level whilst simul­taneously maintaining the awareness that they were watching a fabrication; this capability enabled popular audiences to view a piece of theatre with something akin to a Brechtian alienation, opening up a multitude of potential meanings that the more conventional theatre, operating on a single narrative level, would not allow. Indeed, as David Mayer points out in his essay 'Towards a Definition of Popular Theatre',

whereas some theatre is formal and circumspect, and the intrusion of any part of the audience into the dramatic action is a source of annoyance inimical to concentration and to the development of dramatic plot, the popular drama often cultivates the spectators' awareness of themselves, reminding them of their power to approve or disapprove.

(Mayer 1977: 262-3)

Contrasting the conventional bourgeois theatre with the popular form of variety, McGrath suggests that 'the bourgeois is no less bizarre in its essence than the popular, and one might be forgiven for seeing more creative possibilities in the latter' (McGrath 1996: 57).

A dual awareness of a very similar sort is, I would argue, also at work in Shakespeare. As Brook argues,

Elizabethan theatre allows the dramatist space in which to move freely between the inner and

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outer world .... We can in turn feel identified or take our distance, abandon ourselves to the illusion or refuse it; a primitive situation can disturb us in our subconscious, while our intelli· gence watches, comments, meditates.

(Brook 1989: 57)

Even in 1632, the author of the second folio's

commendatory poem On Worthy Ma..oter

Shake.Apeareand hi.A PoerrL!; noted such an effect:

... to temper passion that our ears Take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears Both weep and smile: fearful at plots so sad, Then laughing at our fear; abused, and glad To be abused, affected with that truth Which we perceive is false; pleased in that ruth At which we start, and by elaborate play Tortured and tickled; [ ... ] This, and much more which cannot be expressed But by himself, his tongue and his own breast, Was Shakespeare's freehold.

Such duality is inherent in the texts themselves, where attention is constantly drawn to the plays' artifice. Metatheatrical references are rife (Hamlet, Coriolanus, Cleopatra and many others liken themselves to actors) and onstage audiences a recurring feature (Hamlet,

A MidAummer Night'r. Dream, Love'r. Labour'r.

Lo.At and The Taming of the Shrew all feature plays-within-plays). Comic characters such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona's Launce and The

Merchant of Venice's Launcelot Gobbo are given comic soliloquies that simply cannot be presented as characters 'thinking aloud' on stage; 'I'll show you the manner of it', says Launce during his monologue in 2.3, and it is clear that he is addressing the audience directly, very much like a modern-day stand-up

comedian. Even antagonistic characters like Richard III, Iago, Edmund and Aaron have soliloquies which, embedded as they are in otherwise dark and tragic plays, might be delivered comically, direct to the audiences, serving to beguile their listeners into forming a wicked complicity with them- a complicity that,

in the tradition of the Vice character of the

morality play, might later be broken to great effect as their machinations lead to tragedy.

In practice, of course, the key area in which this dual awareness has been reflected is in the layout of the acting space: when an audience is arranged so that they can see not only the actors, but also each other, an awareness of one's fellow spectators is unavoidable. It is no co-incidence that all the great 'popular' theatrical spaces of the past (and here I use the term in both senses of the word), from India to Greece to Elizabethan London, have adopted such a configuration; Tyrone Guthrie describes its effects in his autobiography A Life in the

Theatre, discussing his own conversion of the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh:

One of the most pleasing effects of the performance was the physical relation of the audience to the stage. The audience did not look at the actors against a background of pictorial and illusionary scenery. Seated around three sides of the stage they focussed upon the actors in the brightly lit acting area, but the background was of the dimly lit rows of people similarly focussed on the actors. All the time, but unemphatical\y and by influence, each member of the audience was being ceaselessly reminded that he was not lost in an illusion, was not at the court of King Humanitie in sixteenth century Scotland but was in fact a member of a large audience taking part, 'assisting at', as the French very properly express it, a performance, a participant in a ritual.

(Guthrie 1961: 279)

There is generally no sense, in a darkened, end-on auditorium, that one is 'assisting at' very

much at a IT: anyone who has seen a good RSC production first at the Swan in Stratford and

then again, after its transfer to the West End, from the upper gallery of a proscenium-arch

theatre will testify that the experience is utterly transformed, and not for the better. It is always in three- or four-sided acting spaces, whether at the Swan, the Young Vic, the Royal Exchange Manchester or the new Globe, that mainstream Shakespeare achieves the strongest sense of a collaborative imaginative effort on the part of

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both actors and audience. It will be interesting to see how the architecture of the new courtyard-style Royal Shakespeare Theatre will affect the work designed for performance there.

In performance, the dual consciousness of both the play world and the world beyond it has been reflected in the work of small-scale open­air companies such as Oliver Gray's Illyria, who make a point of acknowledging and even high­lighting unfunny Elizabethan puns with ad-Jibs along the lines of 'no, I don't get it either,' and pick on those audience members who are following the play with a copy of the script. (When I saw their production of The Tempe.At, the actor playing Trinculo seized an Arden Shakespeare from such a playgoer, and, flicking through it, wondered aloud whether Trincu\o was to get any good love scenes.) Such self­reflexivity is also present, albeit to a lesser extent, at Shakespeare's Globe. When Mark Rylance delivered Hamlet's line about groundlings being 'capable of nothing but dumb-shows', for example, he paused for the self-mocking cheer of the standing playgoers in the yard, before adding, ' ... and noise'. The moment brought the house down.

If the audience are to 'assist at' the creation of the play, then the actor behind the role must be always visible, just as comedians like Morecambe and Wise or French and Saunders are always visible behind theirs. Certainly the great Elizabethan clowns were highly conspicuous, to the extent that Shakespeare wrote the name 'Will Kemp' in the place of the character's name in the speech prefixes for two of the star clown's roles: Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Peter in Romeo and Juliet. In more recent times, Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd, Alexei Sayle, Dawn French and many other popular comedians have played Shakespearean roles on stage. In each case, the well-known persona of the comedian has been a defining feature of the performance.

In less stellar productions, the material reality of the actor has been made visible in a variety of different ways. Edward Hall uses

all-male ensembles for his Shakespearean productions with the company Propeller because he believes the doubling and cross­gender casting encourages audiences to read the characters on a symbolic rather than a purely psychological level. The company also make a point of interacting directly with their audiences. When I saw their celebrated A

Mid.Aummer Night '.A Dream at the Comedy Theatre in 2003, the entire cast invaded the theatre foyer during the interval to regale the audience with jokes and a capella renditions of sixties hits; when we returned to the auditorium for the second half of the play, there was a far more pronounced sense of camaraderie between actors and audience than had been present in the first. A similar approach is in evidence elsewhere, too. Many Globe productions feature some kind of pre-show display in which the cast present themselves as actors: sometimes they prepare in full view of the audience within the tiring house, or mill around on stage; in the case of 1998's The Merchant of Venice, Marcello Magni's commedia-style carnival clown roamed around the pit before leaping on stage to become Launcelot Gobbo. The main pre-show event at an Illyria production turns the simple act of selling programmes into a stand-up routine by the actors who will later inhabit the roles of the play.

Stand-up comedy was clearly a very strong influence on the Icelandic companyVesturport's production of Romeo and Juliet, which was hosted by the Young Vic in 2003. Vfkingur Kristjansson's Peter opened the show as a kind of clownish circus ringmaster, speaking the well-known prologue in Icelandic. After the first few lines, he trailed off, and said, with a mischievous grin:

Look at your English faces! (audience laughter)

You're all going "Good Lord, Cynthia, they're going to do it in Ice \an die!" (laughter) "Let's get out of here!" (laughter)

Kristjansson then went into a full stand-up act, picking on members of the audience and goading them with such lines as:

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We Icelanders are famous for our delicious whale ... and you English are famous for your ugly women! But- (playful booing from audience member A)- but, but, but- (booing increaLJeLJ)­that is certainly not the case tonight! (laughter)

His stand-up-style asides continued throughout

the performance. The main way in which this production

operated on a dual level, however, was in its importation of spectacular circus tricks. Recalling Peter Brook's legendary circus­inspired A Midl:.ummer Night '.A Dream of 1970,

whole scenes were played out on trapezes, the actors swinging in mid-air- Romeo and Juliet's first kiss, for example, took place as Gfsli brn Gardarsson's Romeo hung upside-down by his feet from a trapeze. While emotionally complex performances and high poetry drew audiences increasingly into the illusion, dangerous fire­

eating and trapeze stunts -which were often met with audible gasps from the audience­emphasized the corporeality of the presen­tation. As pioneering circus performer Hovey Burgess explains, 'circus is quite real ... This is

the opposite of Stanislavski's sense of reality. One is authentic, the other is authenticity' (Burgess 2003: 137). In a production encompass­ing both, movement between the 'inner and outer world' -to use Brook's terms -was enabled. From Footsbarn's 1980 Hamlet, with its circus tent and its pole-vaulting guards, to Creation Theatre's open-air A Midl:.ummer Night'.A Dream with its stilt-walking fairies in zooo, countless Shakespearean productions over the years since Brook's Dream have made use of the circus to encourage a metaphorical reading by foregrounding the concrete reality of

performance. This attitude towards Shakespearean

performance is entirely opposed to a closed-off, naturalistic approach, making instead for an open-ended performance, never entirely real and

never entirely imaginary. Discussing his 1964

Theatre of Cruelty season with the RSC in The empty Space, Brook explained:

We studied Meyerhold's biomechanica\ experiments, where he played love scenes on swings, and in one of our performances a Hamlet threw Ophelia on to the knees of the audience, while he swung above their heads on a rope. We were denying psychology, we were trying to smash the apparently watertight divisions between the private and the public man.

(1990: sBl

The simultaneous existence of a fantasy world and of the real world becomes something to be exploited rather than hidden away; as Mike Alfreds suggests, explaining the foundations upon which he established Shared Experience:

The audience had to be made aware of this duality. Through it, the two groups of people [actors and audience] shared in an act of imagination - were, in fact, brought together by it.

(Alfreds 1979: 4)

In a relationship utterly different from that of naturalistic drama, actors and audience alike participate in a shared imaginative effort, in constant awareness of one another.

In a recent Guardian feature on Steiner schools, Ewout Van-Manen explained why his

kindergarten classes were given woollen dolls to play with in preference to plastic Barbies: 'the closer something is to perfection,' he asserted, 'the less scope there is for imagining' (Mangan 2005). The kind of 'popular Shakespeare' championed here takes a similar attitude. Here,

perfection is avoided at all costs; the audience are asked to work, and are rewarded for their efforts. Unlike those sorts of productions (brilliant as they often are) that attempt to relocate each play into a precise historical setting- Trevor Nunn's jazz-age setting for The Merchant of Venice, for example, or Gregory Doran's mid-twentieth-century colonial Othello­a popular production will tend to avoid trans­planting the ideological codes and conventions of one historical era into another, preferring to set the play in a distinctly 'other' world, one perhaps inhabited by grotesques in whiteface

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and outlandish clothes, or by archetypes in a neutral costume, which is to be completed, as is suggested by the prologue to Henry V, by the 'imaginary forces' of the audience. Such an approach is, after all, essentially theatrical; a production in which the entire imaginary world is already created for the audience effectively provides an experience no different from that of the cinema.

Possibly the most pertinent example one could choose to illustrate 'shared experience' in modern productions of Shakespeare ~s Alfreds's own work at Shakespeare's Globe. Alfreds has directed twice at the Globe- Cymbeline in 2001

and A Mid!,ummer Night'.A Dream in 2002. For Cymbeline, the cast of over thirty characters was played by a company of six, all of whom were dressed in uniform white shirts and pyjama-like trousers. Actors changed character and location before the audience's eyes, often announcing the change as they did so (a scene shift from Britain to Rome was marked by a gong and the announcement 'Rome', and the new location was immediately signified as all the actors adopted a languid 'Roman' pose). The following year's A

Mid!,ummer Night '.A Dream featured a much larger cast but a similar approach; this time, costumes were literally pyjamas, and all the props and costumes were fashioned from bedroom or bathroom objects (Bottom's ears and nose were made from a paper cup and a pair of fluffy slippers, while the magical flower appeared from a sheaf of toilet paper). In both cases, the play world was not created simply by the creative will of the actors, but also by what Alfreds has called 'the imaginative complicity of the audience' (Alfreds 1979: 1o).

'Complicity' is a term very closely tied to the kind of 'collectivist' popular theatre I have been advocating; it is also one which, cropping up frequently in reviews of Cymbeline and sporadi­cally in discussions of the Globe in general, seems to be intrinsic to the Globe's artistic policy. Artistic director Mark Rylance, defending the theatre's populist approach in an article for The Time.l>, stated that:

What I encourage is the following: that my fellow actors play and sometimes talk directly with the audience, rather than to or at them. With implies listening to the audience, which I also encourage ... For the actor to be at one with the audience in this way encourages a kind of mass complicity in the suspension of disbelief.

(Rylance 1998)

It is perhaps no great coincidence, then, that the Globe has strong ties with the troupe of physical theatre actors who have adopted the French word complicite as their company name. Glancing through a handful of Globe and Complicite programmes, I found at least fifteen performers who had acted with both companies, and virtuoso physical performers Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter are key figures in both. Indeed, a strong sense of physicality, often derived from the Italian commedia dell'arte, is a recurring feature in many productions attempting to make Shakespeare speak to 'popular' audiences. Foots barn's early work was deeply rooted in commedia and clowning, and in fact the company used to call all their shows 'pantomimes' (Cousin 1985: 105-6). Pete Talbot, director of the open-air Rude Mechanical Theatre Company, characterizes his Shake­spearean productions as 'open', with an emphasis on making the stories and the language easily understandable. He told me that the commedia dell'arte style his company uses gives them a huge advantage in doing this, since it enables 'the whole body to talk'.

Perhaps the most important unifying factor in the collectivist popular Shakespeare is the power of shared laughter. Bakhtin argued that in the modern world, the artistic potential of laughter is grossly underestimated, Shakespeare, he claimed (alongside Rabelais and Cervantes), represented an important turning point in the history of laughter, in which laughter was seen as having a deep, philo­sophical meaning and an important regenera­tive power. It was, he said, 'just as admissible in great literature, posing universal problems, as seriousness', and certain aspects of the world

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were understood as being 'accessible only to laughter' (Bakhtin 1984: 66). In his view,

true ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimida­tion, from didacticism, naivete and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from senti­mentality.

As Bakhtin implies, laughter itself encourages the kind of dual awareness we have identified as the key feature of 'popular theatre' in its anthro­pological sense. Significantly, Bakhtin maintains that the most important works in which 'the two aspects, seriousness and laughter, coexist and reflect each other' are Shakespeare's tragedies (Bakhtin 1984: 122).

The balance of seriousness and laughter that many 'popular' treatments of Shakespeare have struck has frequently been their most powerful feature. In the Globe's Richard III, for example, Kathryn Hunter won the audience over with her comic asides, a repeated, mischievous thumbs­up gesture and her spontaneous responses to their own reactions. At one point, her Richard feigned reluctance to take the crown as Amanda Harris's Buckingham cajoled the audience into cheering for him. But this riotous comedy was sharply turned upon its head in the scene where Richard brutally and viciously slammed the head of one of the princes against the ground. Of course, some felt Hunter's performance was too much the pantomime villain, but for many, the complicity forged in the moments of shared laughter made the moments of stunned silence all the more shocking. Shared silence was just as much a sign of a 'shared experience', in these instances, as laughter. John Peter noted in the Globe's opening season that during such moments 'a silence descends, an almost palpable silence of hundreds of attentive people close together, such as I have not experienced before' (Peter 1997). Such an effect, I would argue, is fundamental to Shakespeare's

dramaturgy. In every play, there are moments of comedy, in which audiences are brought together in laughter; so, too, are there moments of stillness, all the more notable because of the unifying power of the laughter that has preceded them.

This conclusion, of course, assumes that a 'popular' treatment of Shakespeare is simply bringing out what is already inherent in the text; it must be remembered, though, that this is to commit the crucial error of dehistoricizing the plays. Stuart Hall is adamant to warn his reader against

those self-enclosed approaches to popular culture which, valuing 'tradition' for its own sake, and treating it in an ahistorical manner, analyse popular cultural forms as if they contained within themselves, from their moment of origin, some fixed and unchanging meaning or value.

(Hal\1998: 451)

To treat 'Shakespeare' it- or himself as a given, and the texts as a set of 4oo-year-old instruc­tions to be followed to the letter, is - as we saw at the beginning of this article- to close them off from further interpretation, to hermetically seal them from interrogation by the modern world. If a Shakespearean production is to be popular in the progressive sense of the word, it must be infused with a healthy disregard for what might be called the 'integrity' of the text. We saw earlier that Shakespeare's voice does not speak to modern audiences in the popular idiom; he is a symbol of elite culture, of the academy and of the establishment. For decades if not centuries, the Shakespearean audience has been predominantly bourgeois, as have the values that the Shakespearean canon is perceived to uphold (though one needs only to look at nineteenth-century novelizations of Shakespeare's plays such as Charles and Mary Lamb's Tale..!J from Shake..!Jpeare to see that many of these supposed values have been imposed upon the texts). A 'popular' treatment of Shakespeare, therefore, will frequently send these very values up.

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This is an approach I have encouraged in my own practical work. When I directed an outdoor production of A6 You Like It in 2004, for example, both I and the actors playing Orlando and Adam found the scene in which the exhausted Adam claims to be dying of hunger very uncomfortable: Adam has followed his master into the forest through a sense of loyalty, a quality for which Orlando strongly commends him, but one which is rooted in a very old­fashioned model of correct social order. We felt that Orlando's rousing speech of encouragement was in many ways a romanticization of an essentially exploitative relationship, and decided to draw attention to this with some preposterously selfless extra-textual lines from Adam: Orlando's 'if I bring thee not something to eat, I will give thee leave to die' was met with a mumbled but highly appreciative 'oh, thank you, master', and 'if thou diest before I come, thou art a mocker of my labour' was answered, 'all right, master, I shall not die until you return' (2.6.10-13).

As another of the actors involved commented afterwards, making Shakespeare work in performance today 'involves both fighting alongside Shakespeare and sometimes fighting against him' - and indeed there is often a strong sense in productions such as those I have mentioned by Vesturport or Illyria that Shakespeare is being parodied, the difficulties involved in presenting his work to a modern audience comically highlighted rather than swept under the carpet. Dr Rob Conkie's circus­style production of The Comedy of £rror..6 at King Alfred's College Winchester was filled with pop-culture references and Shakespearean parodies ('Dromio, Dromio, wherefore art thou Dromio?' lamented Nell at one point), and in Total Theatre Magazine Conkie described the production as an attempt to 'destabilise the play' and to confront 'a hegemonic representa­tion of Shakespeare as elite and culturally edifying' (Conkie and Cuming 2003: 8).

Practitioners like Charles Marowitz have gone even further in deconstructing the

'establishment' Shakespeare, radically reworking the texts into loose, avant-garde adaptations often holding very strong resonances with contemporary political events. In Recycling Shake..6peare, Marowitz concludes his provocatively-titled chapter 'How to rape Shakespeare' with the following argument:

What we most want from Shakespeare today is not the routine repetition of his words and imagery, but the ShakeL>pearean experience, and, ironically, that can come only from dissolving the works into a new compound - that is, creating that sense of vicissitude, variety and intellectual vigour with which the author himself confronted his own time.

(Marowitz 1991: 31)

While it would be misrepresenting Marowitz to suggest that the 'Shakespearean Experience' to which he refers is the same 'shared experience' I have been advocating, his argument runs parallel to my own. 'On certain occasions,' he claims elsewhere in his book, 'I have known classics to be raped to their everlasting benefit':

A few seasons ago The Karamazov Brothers, a travelling juggling-and-vaudeville company, worked over The Comedy of E:rrorL> to everyone's delectation; and some seasons back, in New York, a streetwise version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, full of ethnic vernacular and topical jokes, received some discourteous treatment which did not altogether go amiss.

(Marowitz 1991: 14-5)

Such progressively 'popular' approaches to Shakespeare are alive and well today. At this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, for example, a free adaptation of Pericle.-6 entitled The Children

of the Sea garnered popular success and critical acclaim, winning both a Fringe First and the 'Spirit of the Fringe' award. The cast included several young Sri Lankan survivors of the Boxing Day tsunami- many of them orphaned­and the open-air performances at the Royal Botanic Garden were the final result of workshops led earlier in the year by director Toby Gough to promote 'normalization, healing

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and recovery' among survivors. While the play was extremely moving at times- a marked poignancy was added to Gower's suggestion that 'lords and ladies in their lives I Have read it for restoratives' (1.1.5-8), and of course to Pericles' loss of his beloved wife at sea- it also featured raucous parody, knockabout humour, and dance. Further south, The Rude Mechanical Theatre Company toured with a com media dell'arte production titled The Fairy Queen, taking certain themes and characters from A

Mid.l,ummer Night)., Dream and transforming them into a touching and vibrant piece of contemporary popular theatre; Shakespeare's

text was barely echoed in the actual language of the play, but its use as 'raw material' for the production could not be mistaken. In such productions such as these, with an attitude that puts the priorities of the assembled group of people above those of the texts themselves (whatever they may be), a truly, progressively 'popular' Shakespeare might be claimed to have been created.

These apparent triumphs of the 'popular' are not without their complications, however. It is a basic tenet of comic theory that in order to raise a laugh from an audience, a consensus is

required, and that following this shared laughter, a group identity is forged; as we have seen, this group identity is necessarily much stronger in what we have been calling the 'collectivist' popular theatre than in the 'mainstream'. The exact nature of this group

identity can however be quite ambiguous, and what may appear at first to be a 'popular' audience may in fact be anything but. An open­air performance, for example, may seem free from the bourgeois trappings of a Victorian proscenium arch theatre, but the presence amongst its audience of expensive picnic

hampers and popping champagne corks can cast it in a very different light. Audiences at the first few seasons of the reconstructed Globe were notoriously vociferous, and it was clear that very often they were not so much a genuinely popular audience as simply playing the part of

one. Douglas Lanier sees the Globe's claim towards being a popular theatre as based upon a fantasy which 'misrepresents and idealizes the past in the service of the interests of the present', and contests it on the grounds that the theatre's dependence upon the academy, the heritage industry, tourism and sponsorship

from international businesses compromise 'its claim to present a people's Shakespeare' (Lanier

2002: 165-6). Certainly the collectivist popular theatre is not progressive in itself, as evidenced by the jingoistic audiences in the Globe's

opening season who booed and jeered the French characters in Henry V. David Edgar argues in State of Play that 'without a provocative agenda somewhere in the vocabulary', the popular inevitably degrades 'into the plebeian and the philistine' (Edgar

1999: 17). Shakespeare, as a source of national pride, is often in danger of becoming a symbol of nationalism.

Sometimes, too, the audience is divided. Whilst audiences for Vesturport's Romeo and Juliet tended to be young, vocal and overwhelm­ingly appreciative at the Young Vic, when the

same production was revived the following year at the Playhouse, a proscenium arch theatre on the other side of the Thames, opinion seemed to be rather more split. Where I was sitting, the American gentleman to my left shared my enthusiasm for the production, but the ladies to my right were audibly outraged; the family behind me even left during the interval ('It's actually murdering Shakespeare', I heard one of them complain). I suspect that this may have been partly due to the discrepancy between the production's popular style and the distinctly old­fashioned theatre building; the company

seemed somehow to be breaking the rules, violating the unspoken contract between audience and performer implicit in the space itself. Sometimes a similar division is even in evidence at the Globe: the separation between the raucous 'groundlings' and the higher-paying customers seated in the galleries is occasionally quite marked. What is striking in these

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instances is that the sense of 'shared experience' that we have identified as so central to the collectivist definition of 'popular theatre' is significantly impaired.

Essentially, perhaps, such theatre actively require.A an element of role-playing from its audience; the only way for popular consensus to be established is for the majority of the audience to be willing to enter into the 'complicity'. Naturally the politics of this can be problematic, as what is established can be progressive or reactionary, falling back on stereotypes or deconstructing them, defining itself as in support of mainstream culture or opposing it. Very often, indeed, as a conflation of both the market 'popular' and the anthropo­logical 'popular', a popular performance does all these things at once. But I would like to conclude by suggesting that it is this very open­endedness - or in Bakhtin's term, this 'dialogism' -which makes popular Shakespeare valuable.

REFERENCES

Alfreds, Mike (1979) A Shared experience: The Actor a.A Story-teller, Dartington: Department of Theatre, Dartington College of Arts.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984 [196sll Rabelai.A and Hi.A World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Burgess, Hovey (2003) 'Circus and the Actor', in Joel Schechter (ed.) Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook, London: Routledge, pp. I32-7.

Brook, Peter (1989 [I987)) The Shifting Point: Forty Year .A of Theatrical exploration 1946-87, London: Methuen.

Brook, Peter h990[I968)) The empty Space, London: Penguin.

Conkie, Rob and Cuming, Richard (2003) 'Circo Shakespeare', Total Theatre Magazine, Vol. IS, Issue I, 6-8.

Cousin, Geraldine h98S) 'Shakespeare from Scratch: the Foots barn Hamlet and King Lear', New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. I, No. I, IOS-27-

Edgar, David (I999l State of Play: Playwrighu on Playwriting, London: Faber.

Guthrie, Tyrone (I96I [I9S9ll A Life in the Theatre, London: Readers Union.

Hall, Stuart (I998) 'Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular"' in John Storey (ed.) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (second edition), Herne! Hempstead: Prentice Hall, pp. 442-S3·

Lanier, Douglas (2002) Shak121>peare and Modem Popular Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mangan, Lucy (2oosl 'Why aren't those kids in class?', Guardian, I8 May.

Marowitz, Charles (I99I) Recycling Shakel>peare, London: Macmillan.

Mayer, David (1977) 'Towards a Definition of Popular Theatre' in David Mayer and Keith Richards (eds.) We1>tern Popular Theatre, London: Methuen, pp. 2S7-n

McGrath, John (I996 [I98I)) A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, ClaM and Form, London: Nick Hem Books.

Peter, John (I997l 'Where the audience is king', The Sunday Timel>, IS June.

Rylance, Mark (I998) 'Meet the real Shakespeare', The Timel>, I4 August.

The quotations from Antony Sher and from Vesturport's Romeo and Juliet are transcribed from DVD documentaries: Robin Lough's 'The WinterA Tale: A Production Casebook' on The Winter A Tale: Complete edition (2oos, London: Heritage Theatre, from the 1998 stage production by Gregory Doran), and Ragnar Bragason's Love iA in the Air (2004, Reykjavik: Klikk Production, from the 2003 stage production by Gfsli brn Gardarsson) respectively.

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