Sturdy, robust, cross-dressing, outdoor bard
The spawn is doing Romeo and Juliet as a set text for GCSE, and on a recent visit to Ickworth House near Bury St. Edmunds we noticed they had posters up for an open air performance of that very play. We ended up taking four of her friends and a massive picnic, so it was always going to be a pleasant outing even if the performance was shit. Luckily it wasn’t. The company putting it on was The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a group which specialises in open air Shakespeare, and which, although they don’t go for a full historically accurate set-up in terms of costume, props and so on, aims to stage the Bard according to principles that might have informed performances in his day. ‘Bold, clear and dynamic productions that excite and engage the audience’ is how they put it, and this show certainly lived up to that. There was a lot of unaccompanied singing, often in broad harmony, of historical songs, including the extremely bawdy ‘Watkins Ale’ (a song about semen); the company is also all male, another nod towards Elizabethan performance conventions, which makes for some easy comedy (cross-dressing being as inherently amusing as it seems to be). There was one group a little way behind us, whose picnic table bore a bristling array of bottles of booze, that laughed uncontrollably whenever a female character was on the stage; this became somewhat irritating at times, as although the performance was very robust, and not at all pompous, it was not played entirely for laughs, and in the most emotionally charged moments the acting was easily good enough to forget the gender of the actors. The delivery was mostly not of the conversational, across-the-meter type that modern ears are accustomed to, but more declamatory, as would be appropriate to a noisy and drunken Elizabethan audience; this is not to say that there was a lack of subtlety or nuance, however, and the affective intensity of the lines was undiminished. This is how the language was designed, after all, and the usual reverence with which Shakespeare is treated belies the sturdy power of the writing; by emphasising the meter, rhyme and other formal qualities of the verse, the actors actually enhanced its capacity to communicate emotionally, in this informal outdoor setting especially. If you get a chance to see this elsewhere (it’s on tour at the moment), you won’t be disappointed.
oliverarditi posted this