The Royal treatment

Jonjo O'Neill as Orlando in As You Like It

I've been mulling my assessment of the Royal Shakespeare Company's visit to New York for about a week now - because the achievement and the experience were complex ones, and said quite a bit about Where We Are Now in terms of Shakespearean performance. When the announcements of this unprecedented residency appeared over a year ago - the RSC wasn't merely "touring," but really trying to bring itself to New York, stage and all - I remember the snorts of outrage that emanated from certain quarters of Manhattan. "Why," the response went, "you'd think great Shakespeare was unknown in the Big Apple!"

Well, it turned out that was, indeed, what a lot of people thought (including yours truly; I haven't bothered to attend a Shakespearean production in New York in something like a decade, and I've never seen a great one there that wasn't an import); even at prices higher than your average Broadway show (the best seats went for $250), pretty much the whole residency quickly sold out. What added insult to injury, however, was the news that the donors who had made the trip possible were also largely American.

So it's probably safe to say that many of Manhattan's critics were a bit conflicted about the visit - and unsurprisingly, some (like Michael Feingold and the reliably foolish David Cote) were almost amusingly pissy in their reviews.  Still, they had some genuine ammunition to hand: the RSC productions were at their best very good, but some were uneven, and one (King Lear) was a tedious mess.  And none, not even the highly praised As You Like It - which was often wonderful - was what you would call a triumph through-and-through.  It seemed clear to me that while the RSC had recovered most of the artistic ground it had lost during its financial travails around the millennium, it still wasn't operating at quite the heights I remembered from the days of Trevor Nunn.  And I'd have to point out that most years, the Stratford Festival in Ontario puts up at least one show that would edge out anything I saw in the Park Avenue Armory.  (Amusingly enough, even some British critics are beginning to admit the truth about Canadian theatre.)

What dogged the RSC in New York, I think, was a certain sense of ragged quirkiness - a few odd (or even outright bad) conceptual gambits banged along like tin cans behind even the best productions. As You Like It and Julius Caesar mostly cohered, but even they were beset by curious decisions here and there; meanwhile half of The Winter's Tale (the springtime half) was a welter of weirdness, and if King Lear hadn't been paced as a dirge, it might have sometimes read as a comedy of flat performances and bizarre directorial intent (Edgar wandered around dressed as Christ, for instance, and one scene would often "begin" before the previous one had ended).

Rosalind as a dazzling quilt of effects.

The RSC also seemed unable to make up its mind about exactly what its dominant performance style was going to be. In the old days, the divide between American and British Shakespeare could have been summed up in the following rough contrast: the Yanks concentrated on finding the character, while the Brits devoted themselves to speaking the text. That comparison, of course, was never the whole story, and at any rate the two styles moved together over time - certainly later British actors like "Ken and Em" could pull together both the internals and externals of a Shakespearean performance with ease. (And indeed, Branagh's films of the Bard in the 90's often unintentionally contrasted inept American stars with highly polished Brits.)

In the Park Avenue Armory, however, the RSC's actors seemed to hop between modes at will. Greg Hicks was a Method-tormented Leontes, but then a technically wily Caesar, and then a - well, I don't know what he was doing as Lear (he simply shouldn't have been doing it at all). Meanwhile Darrell D'Silva moved confidently through Lear, Winter's, and Caesar doing exactly what old-style movie stars used to do - that is, projecting facets of his own carefully crafted persona through three separate sets of lines. And then there was Katy Stephens's Rosalind - the truly luminous Stephens was the residency's newly-minted star, a dazzling stage presence with technique to burn - yet her Rosalind, dazzling as it may have been, seemed at times a patchwork of stage effects rather than a thought-through performance.  The result was that in a typical scene from, say, Julius Caesar, you'd find yourself watching three styles of acting (Caesar - Old School British; Antony - Old School Hollywood; Brutus - American Method) rubbing shoulders onstage.  This wasn't always a bad thing (and there's always a flexible kind of instability in every Shakespearean role) - but it was often a slightly odd thing, and added to the grab-bag of directorial interventions that afflicted some productions, it led to a pervasive sense of artistic disorganization.

The same incongruities surfaced in many of the design choices.  Only one production - Winter's Tale - really had a coherent, elegant look that matched the thrust of its direction (set in the Napoleonic era, this version focused on the text's concern with pre-Enlightenment values of justice).  The problem was that the design blew up in our faces half-way through (at left) in a conceptual gambit we never really understood; it seemed that Bohemia was made entirely of discarded manuscripts (perhaps by Voltaire and Locke?); indeed, the mummers at the sheep-shearing festival even WORE books, and little else - oh, except for large phalluses they brandished like clubs (??).

So in the end The Winter's Tale, like almost every other production, didn't really stick to a single "period," and even undermined its basically solid design idea by half-baked gambits half-way through.  Much the same was true of As You Like It, which made a case for some very tough-minded rustics in its romantic roundelay by laying on the brambles and shotguns (the original version in Britain even featured the skinning of rabbits onstage!).  But I'm afraid AYLI, too, went a little crazy as it went along (Sir Oliver Martext brandished a flaming crucifix, and Hymen sang like Elvis).  You got the impression that the RSC directors and designers just couldn't help themselves somehow; they couldn't get through the whole rehearsal process without eventually acting out in some way or other.  Did some knee-jerk impulse to scramble things in the name of "diversity" get the better of them?  Or did they want to purposefully give the impression of a scruffy, DIY attitude? Or did their Ritalin prescriptions simply run out?

I'm not sure - but there were still plenty of wonderful moments sprinkled throughout the festival (the wedding scene in AYLI, at right), as well as some truly penetrating directorial ideas, and several great performances - which are now embedded in my memory.  I left feeling that I'd been made to think seriously, yet again, about several texts I practically know by heart.  Which is not what your average theatregoer seeks from a Shakespeare production, I know, but which at this stage of the game is for me one of the most satisfying aspects of seeing a new performance.  I'll have more details about my favorite productions (I don't think I'll drag myself through Lear again) in a future post.

The RSC's new mainstage in Stratford-on-Avon.

My visit to the Royal Shakespeare Company festival down in New York last weekend inevitably reminded me that we don't really have a great stage for Shakespeare in Boston. Nor does New York, actually; the RSC brought their own stage with them - modeled on the thrust of their smaller Swan Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon - and built it beneath the humongous vaults of the Park Avenue Armory.  The RSC has gone for the thrust in a big way, by the way - the recent renovation of their Stratford digs transformed their main stage into a Jeff Stryker-sized thrust, too (at top).

Of course just about everyone who has seen Shakespeare on a thrust stage agrees that it's the best way to do the Bard.  The connection between actor and audience is for some reason more immediate, and the relatively bare playing space is mysteriously sympathetic to Shakespeare's poetic scene-painting.  Of course not just any old thrust will do - the Loeb Theatre can be converted to a kind of thrust, for instance, but it's a dreadful one; it feels more like an absence than a presence. The black-box Central Square Theatre is usually configured as a thrust, and it would be much better for Shakespeare than the Loeb - only for some reason it seems the Bard is never done there.

The ideal Shakespearean thrust, however, should really be elevated from the floor of the theatre (so that the closest audience members are gazing up at the actors, as in the new Globe in London, at left).  On a purely technical level, this allows for the trap doors and escape hatches that the Bard sometimes demands, but there are atmospheric advantages to an elevated (and best of all, slightly raked) stage that are hard to describe.  I'm not sure why, but having a production "float" in the playing space seems appropriate to plays which are not really like "pictures" or "dreams" but rather metaphoric constructions that thoughtfully debate themselves as they proceed.  An elevated thrust makes a Shakespeare play feel a bit like a Rubik's cube - it's easier for us to rotate its content in our heads as we watch.  Plus an elevated stage subtly separates the players from the audience physically, while simultaneously drawing them closer together emotionally - a neat trick.

The RSC's stage in New York pulled off most of these effects beautifully - it was, I think, one of the best playing spaces in which I've ever encountered the Bard.  The thrust was quite long - imagine La Scala with the stage pushing better than halfway into the audience, and you've got the design of the Swan.  (Or imagine our own new Modern Theatre with a much longer thrust, and you've basically got the idea.)  That opera-house-like arrangement also helps the actors with their vocal projection, btw (plus the outer vaults of the Park Avenue Armory gave the RSC's voices a thrilling reverb, basically for free).  Meanwhile live music - a full score was played during both Julius Caesar and Winter's Tale - wafted down from a "pit" that was actually at the top of the theatre, in what would have been called the "Heavens" of the old Globe.  In many ways, this temporary theatre was a Shakespearean miracle.

There were disadvantages to the design, however.  The galleries surrounding the (quite small) audience on the first floor were inevitably lined with support columns (just like in Elizabethan days!).  These never occluded much of the action on the stage, but still - you found yourself looking around one of them to see who exactly was speaking more often than you might expect from a $100 seat.  A bigger problem lay in the rake of the galleries, which simply wasn't steep enough, given the relative narrowness of the space (this was a particular problem when the front row leaned forward to see actors who were almost directly beneath them).

So in the past few days I've tweaked my mental "ideal Shakespearean playing space" a bit.  Long thrusts are definitely a good thing (what can I say, the longer the better!). But support columns - well, as few as possible.  As for the rake of the seats - again, size counts.  The RSC's new stages probably still aren't ideal, but they're defniitely a step in the right direction.

Back-to-back Bard

Tonight, I'm off to New York to see the Royal Shakespeare Company in As You Like It, Julius Caesar, The Winter's Tale and King Lear (above, the RSC stage under construction in the Park Avenue Armory).  Reviews have been strongest for Winter's and As You Like It, but I'm hoping all the productions will prove invigorating - and it will be great to see four Bards back-to-back (even at Shakespeare festivals, as Art Hennessey has reported, that kind of immersion is becoming a rare thing!). In my few free hours in the Big Apple, I'm also hoping to squeeze into the Alexander McQueen show at the Met (wish me luck with that). I will duly report back on everything I saw next week!

New York City Opera Gets Thrown Under a British Double-Decker

"New York is living through a moment of cultural reckoning. The American Folk Art Museum, the preeminent gallery for outsider art, has just shut its doors for good, saddled with millions of dollars in debt. The New York City Opera, which in its heyday mounted 20 productions a season at Lincoln Center, can no longer pay the rent on its theatre and has finally announced a wretchedly abridged season, staged in borrowed space around town. So perhaps the precariousness of our cultural moment explains how weak-kneed the city has gone for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which arrived in town with alarums and excursions this summer for a two-month residency. New York is no longer much of an artistic powerhouse, and the arrival of dozens of actors and technicians at the height of this sweltering summer came almost as a relief." [Source]