English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s

by Peter Holland

This book, which explores the full extent of Shakespeare performances in England over the past decade, invites a broad readership of playgoers and students. As a regular theater reviewer, Holland has examined the variety, the strengths and the problems of English productions and companies. They are charted chronologically here, and compared with productions elsewhere. Peter Holland's reviews are individually thoughtful, provocative and illuminating; cumulatively they show that there is no one English Shakespeare style but a rich and often bewildering variety.

Genres: Shakespeare

311 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 1997

Reviews

[Sammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly valuable discussion of the politics and performances playing out on the stages of England's leading Shakespeare-performing theatres in the (first half of the) 1990s. Peter Holland is surely on the list of most important Shakespeare academics of the time, and this has a lot to offer.

The usual list of caveats must follow. This is a text aimed primarily at readers in either the industry of academia or theatre. As a result, there is very little background on the theatres themselves besides a subjective view on the challenges and opportunities faced by the RSC and the National at this time in history. Additionally an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare (or, to be fair, consultation with the texts) is required; Holland will routinely refer to a play cutting lines 4.1.217-254 or handling the "glove scene" or "quarrel scene" or mention in passing one particular line from 3.3.7 and how it is handled, without any context. Perfectly sensible for his intended audience but worth mentioning. More importantly, there are generally not broad overviews of a particular production before he drills down into it. This makes sense if your primary intended audience is academics working in the field in the late 1990s: if local, they will have seen the productions; if not local, they will have read all the reviews in the reputable journals and publications, so will have a working knowledge. There's enough info to gather together a sense of the plays if (like me) you weren't there at the time, but it's probably a lot easier for people with experience in the Shakespeare-adjacent industries than the general reader.

Like all academic theatre critics, meanwhile, Holland is often right, usually valuable, and sometimes a tad bonkers. His subjective judgments on productions and performances are, of course, just that: subjective. But, not infrequently, we glimpse the friction between those with book-learning and those who are theatre practitioners (and, implicitly, those who enjoy Shakespeare as audience members and readers), and it's a friction that Holland isn't willing to acknowledge. To cite just one example, Holland-as-academic feels strongly that Twelfth Night "problematises" class structure, and that the subplot of Malvolio being conned into believing his mistress is in love with him draws heavily on social tensions and concerns around the lower classes rising up. As a result, he feels that a production of the play should lean on this tension, seemingly feeling that it must add a dark taint to this subplot. The plot is often performed comically (give or take the final moments), and he takes to task an RSC production for doing just that. When the focus is more on the antics of the mischief-makers, hamming it up for the audience, Holland feels Twelfth Night has gone wrong. While that's a perfectly fine view, and may indeed be taken up by a director should they choose (although I've rarely seen them do it), it is surely only one view. This may reflect the reality that this play is often chosen, with commercial calculation, as a festive event, or as the (admittedly richly-layered) comic element of a repertory that may involve darker plays. It may reflect a current directorial trend to "getting through" this wordy comic plot by hiring funny actors for the parts, rather than a desire to dramatise it in the colours of Measure for Measure. Or indeed (assuming Holland's view is the correct one) it may reflect the great differences between our age and Shakespeare's, that Malvolio is seen now less as a terrifying suggestion of what would happen if the poor married the rich but as an embodiment of the snivelling bureaucratic mandarin so resented by many. Holland seems to implicitly dismiss all such possibilities by only providing his own, but in a theatrical review format that's surely just not right. The critic exists for a few reasons, as someone once said: to connect us to the text and the text back to us, to connect the text to the production, and - more pragmatically - to decide whether a production team achieved their aim. Deciding instead whether the production team achieved the critic's aim is surely not on the list.

With that off my chest, I'm still riveted by this volume, featuring as it does many of my favourite actors, directors, texts, and theatres. Despite those not infrequent qualms, Holland is continually insightful and engaging on the many vexed areas of staging Shakespeare in the modern era. And, although he couldn't have foreseen its outcome, Holland also provides a useful guide to a bridging era in Bardolatry. Prior to the 1990s was the Golden Age (the Age of Dench and McKellen, audiences may call it, or the Age of Barton and Hall to theaterati). By now, as he notes, there was a shift in the air. Previously, most English directors of Shakespeare were those who came from the "experience" model; that is, they trained and then developed their skills as a classical director before getting hired by the major companies, especially the RSC, and would then continue to grow their practice in this area. As a result, these directors could draw on a knowledge of the entire Shakespeare canon to consider and realise productions. By the time that Adrian Noble became Artistic Director of the RSC in 1991, however, companies were starting to opt for directors based on either their own fame or their fashionable nature. Throughout the 1990s, Shakespeare luminaries continued to rule the roost, but his plays began to be seen as something that any director could stage, regardless of their experience. That is definitely the era we live in now, at the other end of the transition period. Some will say there's nothing wrong with that and, look, of course not. There shouldn't be exclusive clubs in a broader sense. But in a general sense? In the sense of the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company? I still rather feel there should. Too many directors with limited classical experience now are given a text because that's what the major company wants to stage that year, and they pick their cast and just try to get on with it. At worst, they attempt to transform it into a play that the audience can "try to understand" (if only it wasn't for those pesky words which no-one seems to know how to speak); at best, they earnestly make the sad parts sad and the funny parts funny, hoping and praying that Shakespeare's words will do the rest of the work on their own. Outside of particular locations - such as Canada's Stratford festival and, at its best, Shakespeare's Globe - major companies ride the wave of the director and the cast rather than the text. It's a great loss, not aided by the fact that - with very few rep companies surviving and far fewer main-stage classical performances in general - actors bring less experience, if any, to verse-speaking and the style required. That's a tangent but, for we weary millennials, wondering how we got here, Holland unintentionally provides a window into the first phase of that bleak transition.

Worthy.