Washington Shakespeare Company is giving Shakespeare a dressing down. As the capper on a half-year festival, they are staging Macbeth au natural and drawing decidedly mixed reviews. While I’m sure some critics are tsk-tsking the production for pandering to prurient interests, I suspect a different motive: concept exhaustion. We’ve all seen King Lears set in feudal Japan or As You Like Its restaged in S&M clubs; even the novelty of going back to a plain old Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare no longer seems like a rediscovery. So what else are a director and a cast eager to re-re-re-conceptualize Elizabethan drama supposed to do? Take it back beyond the basics and strip the play (and the actors) down. Maybe it’s not a bad idea. Although, in a theatrical climate where even Harry Potter himself is letting it all hang out (in a recent stage production of Equus), maybe a Macnude Macbeth isn’t all that Macnovel.

They might have taken a lesson from a recent L.A. production that staged Hamlet in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. In this case, the setting provides all the needed shock value as the crypts of real-life Hollywood royalty such as Douglas Fairbanks (one of the original founders of United Artists) become backdrops for the scenes. Now, I don’t know if there’s a Doug Fairbanks, Jr., Jr. out there, but I can’t help wondering if he’s thrilled about the idea of a bunch of thesps cavorting about on grandpa’s grave, regardless of how much iambic poetry they’re reciting.

Suddenly, a bunch of naked people doesn’t seem so bad in comparison.

Posted Tue, 17 Jul 2007 08:09:00 and filed under Hamlet, Macbeth, Theatre, News. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.