Admit it, if you saw an eight year-old actor give the “Now is the winter of our discontent” speech, you’d giggle a little. If the kid tried his hardest to give every ounce of feeling he had, it might even be all the cuter for the effort. You might even note real promise in the young lad as a performer and still find it somehow charming that this very mature speech was being delivered by someone who doesn’t have all of his grown-up teeth. Therein lies the interesting world of youth Shakespeare: kids can often wow you with skills far beyond their age, yet their age is what makes the experience so precious.

Still, not every lesson or productions centered on Shakespeare is designed to make students want to be actors (at least not in the creepy Dakota Fanning sense). Instead, such experiences ought to be designed with two ideas in mind: educating the children and allowing them to find new and different ways to express themselves.

Yet, there may be another purpose to such exercises. A recent editorial focused on a teacher who has been working with elementary school-aged kids for decades on Shakespearean productions. The article makes it very clear that this teacher-director takes his work every bit as seriously as someone who works with older actors. Despite the preparations for the production itself, this article focused on a different dimension driving the teacher’s pursuit: literacy. After working with highschoolers with execrable reading and writing skills, this educator decided he needed to get to kids earlier to make a difference. Whether these kids will ever perform Shakespeare in their adult life is debatable, but if they do, at least they will be able to read and understand it.

When Kenneth Branagh filmed his unedited Hamlet in 1996, it elicited a variety of responses. Some carped about the sheer length of the film (four hours plus), while others questioned the integrity of the text (e.g. which versions are we using/combining to create this “complete” Hamlet?). Regardless of your level of appreciation of the film, it does test the level of Bard fanaticism. By this logic, if you love Shakespeare’s words, the more of them there are, the happier you will be.

The Royal Shakespeare Company in England is taking this idea to the ultimate limit. They are producing no less than eight of The Bard’s plays as a history cycle: Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II and III, and Richard III. Though not written in this order, this sequence represents a chronological presentation of the plays. Shakespeare’s other two histories, King John and Henry VIII, do not feature any of the overlapping characters and story threads that the other eight do, which presumably explains their absence from this presentation. All told, this reportorial approach took nearly three years to prepare and would demand about twenty-four hours of the audience’s time to view in its entirety.

This is a bold undertaking in a number of ways. First, it demands the consistency of a single, extended play, even though the works were not written that way. Secondly, the histories are generally less popular than the tragedies and comedies, with Henry V and Richard III getting most of the face time. If it succeeds, the RSC’s cycle will be nothing short of…uh…historical.

Poor, unfortunate Richard III. The guy really cannot catch a break these days. On the heels of my recent blog about an R3 who was transformed into a female chav, a Canadian production has taken the play and the character to even further extremes. For this particular troupe, Richard III is a comedy, and not a particularly subtle one at that. Past Richards have been hunchbacks or fascists, but in this particular incarnation he is a big lump. Literally. The actor is encased in a costume that makes him look like he has no limbs whatsoever. As a result, he is wheeled about the stage by some kind of faux-Latino manservant prone to spandex clothing (is anyone besides me picturing Hank Azaria in The Birdcage?).

The particular review that brought this production to my attention classified it as grotesque, noting that it seemed to be employing a broad, comic style reminiscent of commedia dell’arte. Less I get a reputation as a crank, I am going to resist the urge to razz this production simply based on its description (though it is EXTREMELY tempting). Obviously, my first pick for this kind of approach wouldn’t be a malevolent tragedy, however this concept has tremendous potential for some of the Bard’s lesser comedies. The Comedy of Errors, one of Will’s earliest and slightest plays, might get a tremendous boost from a robust, even slapsticky interpretation. Whether its application to Richard III is successful or not, it offers a fresh approach to Shakespeare.

Everyone hates a poser. Pop culture is riddled with them, so there is plenty of bile to spread around. Paris Hilton, for one, has made a career out of being a professional object of hatred for posturing as an actress, philanthropist, and singer (“Stars Are Blind” made me wish they were deaf and mute, too). Justin Timberlake suddenly became “street,” discarding his whitebread Orlando upbringing. And Madonna, despite her long residence in the U.K., will never convince anyone that her pseudo-British accent is anything but pure affect. Maybe taking potshots at poser posters is really an outlet for our subliminal love-hatred of celebrities. Either way, many of them make very easy targets.

A new production of Shakespeare’s Richard III taps into this zeitgeist-y topic by fashioning the title character as a female “chav.” For the uninitiated, “chav” is a derogatory term of British origin for wannabes who revel in garish fashion excess. The term has been criticized as classist because chavs typically go for a working-class, urban-chic aesthetic. Perhaps that is part of the motivation for reconceptualizing the king as a track suit-sporting B-girl. The real question is whether or not that approach undermines Richard’s villainy. After all, how seriously can we take a dastardly king made up as a distaff Ali G? If chav/poser culture is the desired target, why not incorporate it into the comedies? Twelfth Night’s Malvolio might make an ideal chav given that fashion plays a key role in his comic humiliation. By creating a chav tragedy, the production perhaps seeks to examine the social implications of the followers of these trends rather than ridiculing them.

Questions have recently been raised yet again about the validity, purpose and effects of staging a Shakespearean production in modern dress. The specific concern here is whether or not these high concept productions are beneficial or deleterious to Shakespeare’s works. It is a worthy question, but is there a quantifiable way to answer it that does not boil down to an opinion statement? Also, is it the right question to ask? In other words, by asking are we assuming primacy of the playwright?

Anyone who has seen Shakespearean stage productions or films with any regularity knows that the quality of the creative concepts applied to Shakespeare vary greatly. For example the Third-Reich-era Richard III that starred Ian McKellen was well received both on stage and in its film incarnation. Others, such as Michael Almereyda’s antiseptic 2000 film of Hamlet (set in corporate New York) have been less enthusiastically embraced. Ostensibly, the success of these interpretations hinges on how well they illuminate Shakespeare. Yet, in cases such as the aforementioned examples, their effectiveness (or lack thereof) seems to stem more from the dialogue created between the concept and the play. Ethan Hawke mumbling “To be or not to be” in drippy voiceover while walking through a Blockbuster store did little to highlight Hamlet’s existential crisis. Conversely, whatever points Almereyda sought to make about corporatization and commodification were ill served by a passionlessly delivered monologue about suicide.

Modern dress Shakespeare cannot be defended or condemned, because each production deserves to be judged individually. In evaluating them, however, making “Shakespeare” the ultimate barometer for their success is troubling. Since he was a writer who treated time and place very loosely, how much stock should artists or audiences put in these contextual elements in production?

Before Branagh took up the mantle of Shakespearean film interpreter, there was Sir Laurence Olivier. Branagh owes a great debt to Olivier, and adapted some of the same Shakespearean plays into films. This year marks the centenary of Olivier’s birth, so there have been tributes aplenty—and with good reason. Some of Olivier’s most impressive achievements (in a career that had many) were his Shakespearean films: his seminal Richard III (1955); the buoyantly theatrical Henry V (1945); the blackface Othello (1965, not long before this kind of performance would no longer be considered appropriate); and, of course, his best known Shakespearean film, the Oscar-winning Hamlet (1948).

Olivier stood tall among contemporary Shakespearean actors (and sometimes directors) such as John Gielgud and Richard Burton. In many ways, Olivier represented the ideal balance between the extremes embodied by the other two. Gielgud was the consummate poet, with graceful movements and a mellifluous, resonant voice. Burton was Gielgud’s opposite—gruff and animalistic, with a larger-than-life personality. Olivier in his Hamlet found both the elegance and the turmoil in the character. His decidedly Freudian take on the material may have helped him give both qualities equal attention. His monologues were pure poetry while his scenes with other characters, particularly Jean Simmons’s tremulous Ophelia, were passionate and visceral. Olivier brought this duality to many great performances. Even late in his career, when he was consigned to the role of Zeus in the ultra-cheesy Clash of the Titans, Laurence Olivier remained a class act.
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More than a few times in this blog, I have taken cracks at Cymbeline, a late-Shakespeare work with more structural problems than a house of cards. In truth, I like the play because of (and not in spite of) its idiosyncratic nature. Is it a tragicomedy, a problem play, a romance? Is it a complete mess? Would anyone care about this play if it didn’t have the name Shakespeare attached to it?

American Players Theatre in Wisconsin is currently producing Timon of Athens, a play that, like Cymbeline, isn’t one of the Bard’s most popular. Perhaps the actors, directors and designers who take on these plays like a challenge, or maybe they want to be the first company to “get it right.” A more cynical point of view is that audiences are fatiguing in the face of the repetition of the best-regarded of Shakespeare’s plays (seriously, is there a Shakespeare Festival that isn’t doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream?). I like the lesser-known plays for a different reason: they humanize our Will. While King Lear and Richard III will always be “great literature,” it’s nice to remind ourselves that even The Bard didn’t always knock it out of the ballpark.

In questioning how Shakespeare resonates with people, a recent Washington Post article profiled two great men who were influenced by Shakespeare: Abraham Lincoln and Harry S. Truman. In a bit of dark irony, Lincoln was a huge fan of Macbeth with its central assassination plot. Truman, it turns out, wrote an article on The Merchant of Venice while still in high school. In it, he noted the ongoing persecution of Jews throughout history. This revelation shows a different side of the man who would later drop two atomic bombs on Japan.

Leadership, both personal and monarchical, is central to many of Shakespeare’s plays, so it is not totally surprising to find that men in power are drawn to it. In light of this, what plays might other presidents have been drawn to? Would nobler presidents have been drawn to the unassailable virtue of Isabella in Measure for Measure? Would presidents whose administrations were plagued by scandal have seen themselves in Richard III? Ultimately, is Shakespeare a reflection or a refraction of ourselves?

Two years ago, I waited with baited breath for the arrival of Sin City, the highly stylized film adaptation of Frank Miller’s highly stylized comic books…er, excuse me, graphic novels. Now, I’m not a certifiable comic book geek a la Kevin Smith, but I was a fairly serious junkie of the holy trinity of comic books (Batman, Superman, and Spiderman) in the late ’80s/early ’90s. I have a huge respect for comics as an art form, so you can imagine how disappointed I was to find out that Sin City, while cool to look at, had a sensationalized, misogynistic, and ultimately boring story that was poorly acted, directed, and written.

For me, the best comics are a perfect fusion of cutting edge art and a great story. In that vein, some of Shakespeare’s plays have now been adapted into manga comics. Manga, a comic form originating in Japan, has a huge fanbase among graphic novel junkies—both consumers and artists (including Mr. Miller). A few titles have been published this year, including a Romeo and Juliet set in Japan. Due for release in September is a dark take on Richard III (could there be a light one?) set in the medieval period. The visuals are edgy and evocative, and the source material is classic. For both comic and Shakespeare fanboys, the outlook seems promising that these graphic novels will avoid the traps of Sin City.