AS THIS winter of our discontent grinds on, productions of Shakespeare are suddenly everywhere. On Thursday the Lyric, Belfast, stages The Merchant of Venice, while at the end of the month Romeo and Juliet goes up at the Everyman Palace, Cork, and Macbeth at the Abbey.
As these three distinguished theatres brace themselves for the Bard, Belfast actor/director Peter Quigley is preparing to go out on the road with his new travelling master class, Speaking Shakespeare (a Belfast Arts Theatre youth and education project), and that mischievous American troupe, the Reduced Shakespeare Company, is en route to the Arts Theatre in Belfast with another 90 minute romp through the Complete Works.
Only a month ago, Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole was lamenting the fact that in modern day Irish theatre aside from Shakespeare on the Leaving Cert course, the classic English repertoire is utterly neglected". Meanwhile, Polish director Helena Kaut Howson, in her extended essay in the Arts Council's theatre report, was applauding the Irish theatre's independence of Shakespeare, describing the dramatic experience in Ireland as massive and wonderful and eloquent". She continued: "It is the one theatre, which least of all European and world theatres, needs to resort to Shakespeare as basic repertory. Most theatres in Europe or in the world, when stuck, go for Shakespeare. Here, you don't need to do it, you have such a rich, dramatic vocabulary."
ABBEY artistic director Patrick Mason, currently in rehearsal for Macbeth concedes that there has, over the years, been "a narrowing and thinning of our repertoire. But, as is stated in our policy document.
I want to widen it to include an international representation of seminal writers, who will bring new depth and resonance. We will, of course, continue to focus on new Irish writing but there will be a shift in emphasis. That shift began last year with The Crucible and the mini American series and will continue with MacBeth, a play by Pirandello and, next year, another Shakespeare and, possibly, something by Buchner.
"There is a clause in our charter which states that the Abbey will present the best in world drama and, obviously, Shakespeare is a major world dramatist. But if you do Shakespeare, you have to do him for the right reasons says Mason. "The British theatre is dominated by him to an absurd degree and this obsession can be difficult to come to terms with.
"When an Irish theatre takes the decision to do one of his plays, it is faced with the task of making a creative discovery that is its own, in much the way that European theatre has always instinctively done," he explains. "It is a bit harder for us to achieve, though, because we speak the same language as the original and you do feel rather squeezed by that. But it comes down to concept, presentation and perception, of plundering his incredible store house of stories, which link us right back to the Renaissance and to the mythologies of Western and world cultures."
Like Mason, Lyric associate director David Grant agrees that, in an ideal world, one would always wish to do a play by Shakespeare for the "right reasons" but, all too often in today's chilly economic climate, financial expediency plays a big part. He does not shrug off the obvious suggestion that the inclusion of The Merchant of Venice as a set text on this year's GCSE syllabus in the North must surely have been a strong influence on the final choice of play.
"I would agree that it is at too common for Shakespeare to be done with the exclusive aim old serving a schools audience, a situation which often causes major problems of the `it's only for schools' variety. For this reason, I have tried very hard to make the curricular aspect of the production incidental.
"When a small theatre like the Lyric takes on Shakespeare, it is a huge undertaking and therefore we have to take a cool, commercial decision as to which play is likely to sell most seats," Grant points out. "Even then, we have to scale the project down. There are only 12 actors in this production, which is small for Shakespeare, but is still three more than our average size of cast."
It is precisely this philosophy of compromise which incenses Peter Quigley, who first became passionate about Shakespeare back in the early 1980s, when he took a course with the RSC's renowned speech trainer Cecily Berry. Now he laments the "compulsory" academic element, which attaches to the plays and which, he feels, leads inevitably to a negative response among young people.
"I am convinced that the majority of young actors don't have a clue about speaking Shakespeare because they are afraid of it," says Peter Quigley. "That fear emanates from schooldays, when you were dragged along to see a third rate production of Shakespeare or else were made to read this meaningless verse around the classroom. I am aiming to make the plays accessible and enjoyable to sixth form students by examining how the poetic verse works. It's not straightforward because it's not naturalistic speech, yet no writer communicates more directly or with such simplicity and humour as Shakespeare. With two actors, we take extracts from almost all the plays and show them how to read the dramatic map he lays out for you."
AS Edith Evans once said to a junior colleague: "He's on your side, you know." One man who would wholeheartedly concur that remark is Sean Hollywood, director of the Newpoint Players, teacher of English at St Colman's College in Newry, who is an inspiration to many a would be professional actor in his home town.
Actors like Gerard Murphy John Lynch, Sean Kearns, Susan Lynch and Peter Ballance speak his name with something approaching awe, recalling the respect and love for Shakespeare which he instilled in them. His last production for the Newpoint youth company was Brush Up Your Shakespeare, a rollicking revue, which included Pyramus and Thisbe from The Dream, Stoppard's 15 minute Hamlet, a pantomime version of Titus Andronicus, Robert Nye's satire Falstaff on the gentle art of farting and so on. He is under considerable public pressure to revive the show and admits that it could happen again in the next few months.
Hollywood's methods of induction are direct and uncomplicated: "When I begin to teach Shakespeare to first formers, I emphasise the popularity of this man as a playwright - in his plays you will Find rude jokes, ghosts, blood and gore, magic, music and plenty of villains. He's unscrupulous - that's a word I often use," says Sean Hollywood. "Later I go on to talk about the greatness of the verse and the breadth of his vision. And I always tell them, `by the time I have finished, you will love it!' I see Shakespeare as the climax of my drama work with young people. Every five years, we work up to a full blown production. Only after that period of time are they ready for it. A major barrier to professional productions has, I believe, been fear of the verse and yet, because of our own speech patterns and rhythms, Irish actors prove to be excellent at it."
What he does object to are directors who "take liberties" with Shakespeare. "You have to let the text take precedence," he stresses.
David Grant is in full agreement and argues that his decision to set The Merchant in Wall Street in 1929 is simply a case of finding a context in which a modern day audience may find a rationale for the difficult relationships and issues contained in the play.
"I often think of Ian McKellen's observation on the notion of the European konzept of directing Shakespeare," says Grant, that the more productions he watches the more he is convinced that the director should try to do as little as possible. In other words the director should not attempt to cloud the possibilities offered by the play. Thus, in setting this production in a more familiar setting, we are able to look beyond the question of `Is Shylock nasty?' and ask `Why is Shylock nasty?' That's what the play encourages you to do.
Grant welcomes the decision of other Irish theatres to open their doors to Shakespeare. "Inevitably, there has long been a sense of not doing Shakespeare because it would have smacked of a kind of cultural imperialism. But these are changing times and it is becoming easier to see him as an international resource. In the past the North has acted, to use Edna Longley's term, as a `cultural corridor'. It has shared more in the cultural expectations of England, particularly in educational terms and, in that context, Shakespeare has been an easier choice than it would have been for theatres elsewhere in Ireland.
Mason shares that view but, from his own native English background, adds another perspective.
I am very aware of Shakespeare as an imperialist and a coloniser but I am also open to him as a playwright and man of the theatre. His greatest plays contain some pretty damned big starter points; for instance, he writes superbly about power and violence, about how power can be asserted without violence. He writes about Big Politics, about the way things work at the absolute centre of the political world. The continental view always clearly encompassed his extraordinary sense of realpolitik in the way that the narrowing vision of the English speaking theatre increasingly fails to do," says Mason.
"MY focus in Macbeth is on the mythical energy of the work, on the inner play, that something larger that you have to try to wrest from within. There is another, deeper world contained inside his plays, an underlying world of the senses, an earthy, elemental world, where magic is taken very seriously. I believe that he wrote eight of the best plays in existence. Macbeth is one of those. It presents a huge challenge of rediscovery, which is exciting, inspiring and terribly difficult to do.
"There is a lot of reverential nonsense and snobbery talked in the context of Shakespeare but there is nothing like working on a play of this magnitude to stretch the imagination of director and performer. These plays demand to be rediscovered for their freshness, their life and their sheer abundance."
