Love's Labour's Lost is a perfect example of why I took this project on. Less often produced than the big ones, I'd never seen it performed on stage or screen, and somehow had never managed to read it. Mere lines into Act I, I realized I knew virtually nothing about it -- it never much came up in classes or critical writing I've encountered. It's not a minor play, but you can easily get by without knowing it, and that's what I wanted to remedy for myself.
It's fun to read a Shakespeare play without knowing the first thing about it -- and my mild embarrassment about how many plays fit this bill for me is far outdone by the pleasure of reading them fresh.
But I have to confess, I had a really hard time with this one. A few of the reasons are purely technical. First of all, there are several characters whose humor is based on their convoluted or overbaked way of speaking, and layered on to already unfamiliar Elizabethan language, that made it hard going for me. Second, there is a ton of clearly topical and slangy comedy that is easily lost in the sands of time. I can often tell that something is supposed to be funny about what is being said, but I'm not always sure I understand why. There is some super-duper bawdy double-entendre humor in this play that is much enhanced if you know the basics of Elizabethan dirty jokes, and having Eric Partridge's Shakespeare's Bawdy at hand was, as it always is, indispensable. Then, pile on the usual love-cross trickery -- misdelivered letters, masked balls where the wooers woo the wrong wooee -- and the opportunities for total confusion abound.
But all that is remedied with good use of notes, glossaries, plot summaries, and the like. My bigger problem had to do with just not finding this play -- its themes, its poignancy, its poetry -- as transporting and insightful as I usually find Shakespeare. Was it just me?
I asked a dinner party full of theater friends if any had worked on Love's Labour's Lost in their careers, and if so, what did they think of it. One friend, a costume designer, was the only person who had, and she loves the play, finds it extremely rich on the subject of relationships. I admire and trust her, so I kept reading with her endorsement in mind. If there was something deeper to find beyond the humor, I really, really wanted to find it. Another friend suggested listening to a good audio recording, in case it just wasn't coming off the page to me.
I read it again, carefully, and watched one of the few films available, Kenneth Branagh's 2000 musical adaptation. It helped! If anything could make the material sparkle it's one of Branagh's hugely talented all-star casts performing the play as if a bright Hollywood musical circa 1940, complete with faux newsreel footage, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin songs, and Gene Kelly/Fred Astaire type choreography. Here, the world is nervously watching as Ferdinand, the King of Navarre takes an oath that he and his courtiers will spend three years at ascetic study without interacting with women, just as Europe is on the verge of war. His self-imposed inability, then, to negotiate with the Princess of France, should set high stakes.
This framing device, though, didn't remedy for me some of the essential problems. I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that the King would impose this set of restrictions on his court, but for dramatic purposes it really proves to be little restriction at all, as the court, led by Ferdinand's best pal Berowne, immediately sets about rationalizing why meeting with the princess outside the palace gates is no violation of the oath. But restricting the ability of the courtiers to further woo their respective love interests among the ladies-in-waiting feels more than a little contrived, and we get various scenes of hair-splitting discussion about why they can go this far but no further. What with the comic love triangle involving a pregnant country girl, the ladies double-crossing the gents by switching masks at the ball, and a bad play performed by bad actors for the royal courts (this is handled about a gazillion times better in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the preparations for this theatrical monstrosity are fully integrated into the play and resonate beautifully with the play's themes), I felt the pairs of lovers were being kept apart simply to keep all these balls in the air.
The ending, though, contains a twist I honestly wasn't expecting at all. You know what happens at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, right? Of course you do -- the pairs of lovers confess their love, are united in a big wedding scene, and everyone walks off happily together into the sunset, except for whatever amusing punishment needs to be handed out to the comic characters. And that's exactly what doesn't happen here.
Instead, when the time comes for the pairs of lovers to join in happy matrimony, the princess and her ladies inform their guys that because the men broke a solemn oath to woo them, now they must prove their seriousness and constancy by spending a year and a day engaged in service. The King and his right hand man, Berowne, conclude this way:
Berowne:
Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Gill. These ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
King:
Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth an' a day,
And then 'twill end.
Berowne:
That's too long for a play.
I find that just delicious in so many ways. I love that there is some blowback for bad behavior, not just the usual brushing it off because there is a wedding that has to happen by Act V. I love when Shakespeare gets all meta like that. And I love all the speculation about what might have happened in the lost play Love's Labour's Won, and whether that was just an alternate title for a play we know, such as Much Ado About Nothing.
While I can't say I found a new favorite Shakespeare play, or even one I like a lot, I'm very glad I dug in and found something to admire. I'd actually very much like to work on a production of Love's Labour's Lost to see if the production process makes it richer for me (this has happened to me in the past, yes I'm talking about you, Oleanna) so if anyone in Vancouver would like a cheap dramaturg or assistant director for their production, you know how to reach me.
Showing posts with label Kenneth Branagh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenneth Branagh. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Thursday, January 8, 2015
All Mirth and No Matter: Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado is such a popular work, mostly celebrated for the witty banter between Beatrice and Benedick, that I was rather shocked to discover, when I sat down to re-read it, that I don't actually think it's all that great a play on the page. (In fact, I'm sure it's part of the reason I got so bogged down getting this project going). It's certainly filled with clever wordplay in those famous scenes, but what surrounds it is surprisingly stilted. The reliance on mistaken identity and disguise, while ancient staples of comedy, feels a little ham-handed and contrived, and Don John as a bad guy (with henchmen) has little motivation, other than his stated melancholic humour (and the villain's comeuppance is surely among the most unsatisfying ever written -- it's noted that he has fled, and then just before the final curtain we hear he has been captured, but his fate and the plot's resolution is left for another day).
What makes this the work of a master and not just an Elizabethan rom-com is Shakespeare's willingness to let the machinations play out nearly to the point of catastrophe before setting everything right for the happy ending. To do this, we have to believe that Hero could die of shame when her alleged wantonness is exposed at her wedding. I think this core concept is very difficult to sustain for a modern audience, even one steeped in discussions of rape culture and "slut shaming." Hero doesn't face just the ruin of her reputation, or even exile and shame, but her own father states that if the slander is true, she'd be better off dead and her purported death from shame is thoroughly accepted as possible, in light of the dishonor she has brought to the family. And it is the resistance of Beatrice and Benedick, along with the Friar, alone among their social set, to the smearing of Hero that makes it clear that their hearts are meant for one another.
I don't doubt that Shakespeare's audience found more to connect with in this play. A villain (a bastard) driven by his ill humour fit entirely within their worldview, as did a young woman's fate determined by an unquestioning patriarchal judgment of her chastity. But the reliance on these points makes this play less than timeless.
So Much Ado comes down to performance to imbue it with a life I didn't take away on the page. This generally is attributed to excellent chemistry between the Beatrice and Benedick (how many actor couples have played these roles opposite one another?) but the whole production needs to bring that energy, pacing, and believable stakes. For this to work, we need to believe that John is willing to go all the way with his plot of destruction, we need to believe that Hero's life could be at stake, and we need to believe that these people will be torn apart if she isn't saved. To make the turn from comedy to tragedy to comedy succeed, those motivations, stakes, emotions, and relationships need to feel real, and these characters less cardboard than they seem on the page.
There is a lot of PLOT in this play, and a lot of highly constructed wordplay, but the characterizations feel stock to me, composed of attributes needed to make them play their parts in the mechanics of the story. It's a play with a lot of gears turning on every level, like a farce. When it's staged well, a farce can be a wonderful thing, but if it lacks characterization and emotional force, it's ultimately empty. A theme I appreciate in this play is the way cynicism masks true emotional vulnerability, and how the shedding of cynicism through near-tragedy leads to genuine connections and comeuppance. To make that persuasive, we need to believe the genuine is lurking beneath the words and the plotting. We need to see the human faces beneath the masks.
I've long been interested in how Much Ado plays with the conventions and mechanics of comedy, showing how easily the amusing misunderstandings, meddlings, and dissemblings can go awry and lead to tragedy. Of course, as a comedy, we require a reversal to provide the mandated happy ending, and that is engineered here. But I actually find the point more persuasive in Romeo & Juliet, where many of the same trappings -- the masked ball, the intercepted messages -- lead to their unavoidable tragic conclusion. The comedy-turned-tragedy structure is painfully ironic, and when the turning points are reached, the emotional wallop remains, 400 years later, powerful. Much Ado, witty as it is, packs little punch for me. Since it doesn't have much to say to me in terms of its structure, I have to find it charming in performance.
Over the last few days I watched three filmed productions -- Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film, Joss Whedon's 2012 film, and Josie Rourke's 2011West End staging. Two of these, the Whedon and the Rourke, have modern settings (contemporary Los Angeles and 1980s Gibraltar, respectively), while the Branagh takes place in a sunny Tuscan villa in some unspecified past time that involves breeches and corsets but allows bare-legged alfresco dining.
Both the Whedon and Rourke productions suffered from a disconnect between the setting and the stakes. While I admired the DIY spirit of the Whedon film -- good friends who enjoy playing with Shakespeare do it (relatively) cheap and fast in a naturalistic setting -- and the liveliness of the comedy in the Rourke, I think the modern, wealthy milieu in both productions undercut the stakes. I simply could not accept that Hero's purported lapse in chastity could result in a barrage of shame and her father perferring her death to dishonor after a weekend house party including erotic acrobats, hot-tub cocktails, and sexual entanglements among the guests (Whedon) and onstage stag and hen parties complete with blow-up sex dolls and strippers (Rourke). Indeed, in the Whedon the open sexuality of characters including Beatrice and Benedick (seen in flashbacks) and Don John with a female Conrade make the shame rained down on Hero even more baffling. Without this core motivation, all the charming banter and creative comic lazzi feels hollow.
Branagh doesn't fully avoid these problems, by virtue of his setting his production n the sensuous world of a Tuscan villa. The setting is so sunny, so strewn with tanned limbs and ripe fruits -- the opening sequence features giddy tearing off of clothes and nude communal showers -- that again, I find it hard to wrap my head around the contrast between this cheerful hedonism and the chastity scandal to follow. (Of the atrocious performance of Keanu Reeves, it is best not to speak.)
What the Branagh version does more successfully -- and I saw some of this in the Rourke as well -- is to make Claudio's accusation motivated by his heartbreak that Hero was untrue to him more than his fury to have been betrothed by fraud to a woman who was not a maid. Hero, then, also has her heart broken, to see the man she loves think she has betrayed him and that he is lost to her. I saw less of this personal betrayal in the Whedon and more fury on Claudio's part to have been sold a bill of goods. It helps that in the Branagh film we witness this pivotal scene through Claudio's eyes, whereas in the Whedon film the scene is glimpsed in flashback as Borachio narrates it to Conrade.
But whether we believe Claudio is heartbroken or not, the play still requires that Leonato and Don Pedro turn their fury onto Hero for her lack of chastity, with such venom that they find death preferable. I think this is too hard a sell for the worlds in which the Whedon and the Rourke productions are set, and requires the audience to accept a mindset that simply doesn't ring true. The fit is uneasy in the Branagh, too, but at least the "once upon a time, in Tuscany" setting helps a bit.
I can certainly imagine contemporary settings adhering to traditional notions of female sexual conduct that could work. How about a Sopranos-style Mafia family where adherence to old-world Catholicism and macho control of wives and daughters demands female chastity despite modern temptations? (I thought this was going to be the case in the opening scene of the Rourke production, where there were a heck of a lot of male chests sporting gold chains, but no.) A family centered on a successful TV evangelist? A Bollywood setting could incorporate these stakes and easily accommodate the masquerade and mistaken identity elements that make the plot machinery turn and also can feel strained in a Western, contemporary setting. A middle eastern sheikh's palace? I could even see a very rich contemporary adaptation in which Hero is a high school student who has been "slut shamed" on Facebook, leading to believable reports of her suicide.
So as hard a time as I had getting myself into the play on the page, and despite the problems I see in trying to make the play fit in a modern setting (which is a project I generally support in contemporary Shakespeare productions -- I'd rather see the attempts flaws and all), I leave my immersion in Much Ado as enthusiastic as I ever was to see it come alive onstage (or onscreen) again and again.
P.S. I don't expect to write this much about every play, or to review so many productions, but this one has been on my mind for a couple of years now, so out it came.
Title: Beatrice in II, i, 133.
What makes this the work of a master and not just an Elizabethan rom-com is Shakespeare's willingness to let the machinations play out nearly to the point of catastrophe before setting everything right for the happy ending. To do this, we have to believe that Hero could die of shame when her alleged wantonness is exposed at her wedding. I think this core concept is very difficult to sustain for a modern audience, even one steeped in discussions of rape culture and "slut shaming." Hero doesn't face just the ruin of her reputation, or even exile and shame, but her own father states that if the slander is true, she'd be better off dead and her purported death from shame is thoroughly accepted as possible, in light of the dishonor she has brought to the family. And it is the resistance of Beatrice and Benedick, along with the Friar, alone among their social set, to the smearing of Hero that makes it clear that their hearts are meant for one another.
I don't doubt that Shakespeare's audience found more to connect with in this play. A villain (a bastard) driven by his ill humour fit entirely within their worldview, as did a young woman's fate determined by an unquestioning patriarchal judgment of her chastity. But the reliance on these points makes this play less than timeless.
So Much Ado comes down to performance to imbue it with a life I didn't take away on the page. This generally is attributed to excellent chemistry between the Beatrice and Benedick (how many actor couples have played these roles opposite one another?) but the whole production needs to bring that energy, pacing, and believable stakes. For this to work, we need to believe that John is willing to go all the way with his plot of destruction, we need to believe that Hero's life could be at stake, and we need to believe that these people will be torn apart if she isn't saved. To make the turn from comedy to tragedy to comedy succeed, those motivations, stakes, emotions, and relationships need to feel real, and these characters less cardboard than they seem on the page.
There is a lot of PLOT in this play, and a lot of highly constructed wordplay, but the characterizations feel stock to me, composed of attributes needed to make them play their parts in the mechanics of the story. It's a play with a lot of gears turning on every level, like a farce. When it's staged well, a farce can be a wonderful thing, but if it lacks characterization and emotional force, it's ultimately empty. A theme I appreciate in this play is the way cynicism masks true emotional vulnerability, and how the shedding of cynicism through near-tragedy leads to genuine connections and comeuppance. To make that persuasive, we need to believe the genuine is lurking beneath the words and the plotting. We need to see the human faces beneath the masks.
I've long been interested in how Much Ado plays with the conventions and mechanics of comedy, showing how easily the amusing misunderstandings, meddlings, and dissemblings can go awry and lead to tragedy. Of course, as a comedy, we require a reversal to provide the mandated happy ending, and that is engineered here. But I actually find the point more persuasive in Romeo & Juliet, where many of the same trappings -- the masked ball, the intercepted messages -- lead to their unavoidable tragic conclusion. The comedy-turned-tragedy structure is painfully ironic, and when the turning points are reached, the emotional wallop remains, 400 years later, powerful. Much Ado, witty as it is, packs little punch for me. Since it doesn't have much to say to me in terms of its structure, I have to find it charming in performance.
Over the last few days I watched three filmed productions -- Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film, Joss Whedon's 2012 film, and Josie Rourke's 2011West End staging. Two of these, the Whedon and the Rourke, have modern settings (contemporary Los Angeles and 1980s Gibraltar, respectively), while the Branagh takes place in a sunny Tuscan villa in some unspecified past time that involves breeches and corsets but allows bare-legged alfresco dining.
Both the Whedon and Rourke productions suffered from a disconnect between the setting and the stakes. While I admired the DIY spirit of the Whedon film -- good friends who enjoy playing with Shakespeare do it (relatively) cheap and fast in a naturalistic setting -- and the liveliness of the comedy in the Rourke, I think the modern, wealthy milieu in both productions undercut the stakes. I simply could not accept that Hero's purported lapse in chastity could result in a barrage of shame and her father perferring her death to dishonor after a weekend house party including erotic acrobats, hot-tub cocktails, and sexual entanglements among the guests (Whedon) and onstage stag and hen parties complete with blow-up sex dolls and strippers (Rourke). Indeed, in the Whedon the open sexuality of characters including Beatrice and Benedick (seen in flashbacks) and Don John with a female Conrade make the shame rained down on Hero even more baffling. Without this core motivation, all the charming banter and creative comic lazzi feels hollow.
Branagh doesn't fully avoid these problems, by virtue of his setting his production n the sensuous world of a Tuscan villa. The setting is so sunny, so strewn with tanned limbs and ripe fruits -- the opening sequence features giddy tearing off of clothes and nude communal showers -- that again, I find it hard to wrap my head around the contrast between this cheerful hedonism and the chastity scandal to follow. (Of the atrocious performance of Keanu Reeves, it is best not to speak.)
What the Branagh version does more successfully -- and I saw some of this in the Rourke as well -- is to make Claudio's accusation motivated by his heartbreak that Hero was untrue to him more than his fury to have been betrothed by fraud to a woman who was not a maid. Hero, then, also has her heart broken, to see the man she loves think she has betrayed him and that he is lost to her. I saw less of this personal betrayal in the Whedon and more fury on Claudio's part to have been sold a bill of goods. It helps that in the Branagh film we witness this pivotal scene through Claudio's eyes, whereas in the Whedon film the scene is glimpsed in flashback as Borachio narrates it to Conrade.
But whether we believe Claudio is heartbroken or not, the play still requires that Leonato and Don Pedro turn their fury onto Hero for her lack of chastity, with such venom that they find death preferable. I think this is too hard a sell for the worlds in which the Whedon and the Rourke productions are set, and requires the audience to accept a mindset that simply doesn't ring true. The fit is uneasy in the Branagh, too, but at least the "once upon a time, in Tuscany" setting helps a bit.
I can certainly imagine contemporary settings adhering to traditional notions of female sexual conduct that could work. How about a Sopranos-style Mafia family where adherence to old-world Catholicism and macho control of wives and daughters demands female chastity despite modern temptations? (I thought this was going to be the case in the opening scene of the Rourke production, where there were a heck of a lot of male chests sporting gold chains, but no.) A family centered on a successful TV evangelist? A Bollywood setting could incorporate these stakes and easily accommodate the masquerade and mistaken identity elements that make the plot machinery turn and also can feel strained in a Western, contemporary setting. A middle eastern sheikh's palace? I could even see a very rich contemporary adaptation in which Hero is a high school student who has been "slut shamed" on Facebook, leading to believable reports of her suicide.
So as hard a time as I had getting myself into the play on the page, and despite the problems I see in trying to make the play fit in a modern setting (which is a project I generally support in contemporary Shakespeare productions -- I'd rather see the attempts flaws and all), I leave my immersion in Much Ado as enthusiastic as I ever was to see it come alive onstage (or onscreen) again and again.
P.S. I don't expect to write this much about every play, or to review so many productions, but this one has been on my mind for a couple of years now, so out it came.
Title: Beatrice in II, i, 133.
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