[dropcap]B[/dropcap]efore the 1970s the Abbey Theatre didn’t do Shakespeare. He was regarded as a “foreign playwright”, not to be touched. The fact that the last performance was commissioned by Yeats in 1936 illustrates just how stubborn Ireland’s National Theatre was on the Shakespeare question.
And yet, one evening earlier this month, the curtain rose on Felix Mendelssohn’s orchestral adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the National Concert Hall, while across the Liffey, Gavin Quinn’s production of the same play was underway at the Abbey. What these simultaneous performances point to is a remoulding of the Bard in Irish arts, particularly in Irish theatre, with new motives and a whole new look to boot.
Under Fiach Mac Conghail alone, who was appointed director of the Abbey in 2005, A Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and King Lear have all been shown. Alongside Quinn’s productions, Wayne Jordan’s Romeo and Juliet will open at the Gate later this month. Jordan’s Twelfth Night last year brought Shakespeare to the Abbey in a daring 21st-century adaptation. His production explored the homoerotic undertones of Shakespeare’s script, thus engaging with a central question in Irish society ahead of this year’s referendum on marriage equality. The back of the stage marked with the words “What You Will” seemed to directly question the audience’s political decision and their role in Ireland’s future. Those three words also drew attention to the production as being a fresh look at Shakespeare by placing the play’s alternative title at centre stage. With some licence, Jordan played on Shakespeare’s famous line “If music be the food of love,” by interweaving a contemporary score by Tom Lane with music from The Prodigy booming from two enormous, centrally placed speakers. In these productions, a new generation are seen to be staking their claim on the stage of the National Theatre using age-old texts, conversing with today’s Ireland through Shakespeare.
Mark O’Rowe, meanwhile, has adapted Richard II, Henry IV (both parts,) and Henry V for more traditional performances by Druid Theatre Company this year. O’Rowe’s scripts place particular emphasis on Ireland as a colony in the background of England’s most famous histories. Perhaps with one eye on the upcoming anniversary of Easter 1916, O’Rowe’s choice of Shakespeare to convey Ireland’s historical struggle raises all sorts of neo-colonial questions. It also wrestles with Oscar Wilde’s famous assessment of being “Irish by race but condemned to use the language of Shakespeare.”
But can an Elizabethan English writer really inform 21st-century Irish concerns?
De-familiarisation is at the heart of this string of adaptations. A stripping of our cosy and highly familiar relationship with Shakespeare as an overdone artist can be incredibly powerful. The extent that we engage with his plays is not limited to the humanity that moves us, and modern directors have looked to Shakespeare for a plethora of political answers. What Quinn and Jordan’s productions, in particular, suggest is an engagement with Shakespeare in order to directly address contemporary Irish politics and culture in a way that hasn’t been seen so clear in Ireland for decades.
But can an Elizabethan English writer really inform 21st-century Irish concerns? Gavin Quinn certainly believes so. Set in a retirement home, his adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is unlike any you have ever seen. Facing the elderly healthcare debate present in Ireland head-on, it is brave, wholly original, and at times gauche. It reeks of the current moment, it is burlesque, colourful, outrageous. Aedín Cosgrove — Quinn’s partner in Pan Pan Theatre — has designed the set to resemble both a nursing home and an art gallery. In making Eugeus, Hermia’s father in the original, become her son, Quinn examines pertinent questions that face contemporary families and relationships in light of an ageing population.
There is a confidence in contemporary looks at Shakespeare. Rather than leaning on a body of work, these productions are using these plays as a foundation for innovative thought in the knowledge that their plots will neither become outmoded or outdated.
In Quinn’s world, the Athenian court becomes a care home. Instead of a King, Theseus is its director as regal robes are replaced with white coats. The once young lovers hobble with zimmer-frames and crutches. Magical potions are converted into medicinal drugs. Music from Johnny Cash twangs on the PA system, and later Darude’s Sandstorm is blared out. As a measure of how radically different this production is to traditional approaches, lead actress Áine Ní Mhuirí admitted in an interview last month that she texted the director to ask if he hadn’t made a mistake in casting her, a senior actress known for her extensive theatre work, as the young lover Hermia. In a play that pivots around deception and chaos, Quinn’s adaptation is at its most astute when playing on Shakespeare’s dreams and disorder as a metaphor for memory, loss and confusion. Puck’s final soliloquy emphasises the sense of disorientation that dominates the piece: “You have but slumber’d here, While these visions did appear.”
As a director, Quinn is of course very familiar with radically deconstructing classic texts. Playing the Dane (2010) put rehearsals for Hamlet on stage, Macbeth 7 (2004) envisaged the play being read in a classroom, whilst Everyone is King Lear in His Own Home (2012) was set in the main actor’s Dublin apartment. These last two Shakespeare productions however look suitably traditional in comparison with Pan Pan’s Playboy of the Western World (2006) which was set in Beijing, entirely in Mandarin. At the heart of Quinn’s manifesto seems to be a commitment to engaging with the 21st-century condition, exploring concepts as disparate as the mundanity of middle-class existence to globalisation.
But why Shakespeare? The daring approaches these directors showcase use our acquaintance with the Bard to their advantage. This familiarity enables creative risks in costume and staging. Rather than leaning on a body of work, these productions are using these plays as a foundation for innovative thought in the knowledge that their plots will neither become outmoded or outdated. Or, as Yeats would have it; “Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop scenes drop at once, Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.”
Photos by Ros Kavanagh.
