4-23-12: Shakespeare Day

Happy birthday, Shakespeare. And my condolences on your death. Still, for a guy who’s been dead for near four hundred years, you’ve got a lot going on. The World Shakespeare Festival kicked off last night.

Venus and Adonis traveled all the way from South Africa yesterday. The rainbow nation sent a multi-colored and multi-lingual presentation of the erotic poem telling the story of the goddess of love and her reluctant boy toy.

Today Troilus and Cressida come from New Zealand for rancid romance in Maori.

How do you say, as Cressida says to Troilus while succumbing to his suit, “In that I’ll war with you” in Maori? Does it sound as sluttish as it can in English–“war” punning “whore”? I wish I could hear it, even if I wouldn’t understand it. I wish I could hear and see the haka battle dance of the Greek and Trojan armies. It looks so cool. It looks like it sounds so cool.

I wish I could be there for the Israeli Merchant of Venice (in spite of the conflict surrounding it), the Balkan Henry VI trilogy, the South Sudanese Cymbeline. I’ll really miss the Globe’s Globe-to-Globe, but I’ll catch some of the WSF later in the summer.

Meantime, Mr. Shakespeare, I’m re-viewing a performance of the play that made me follow your work. Macbeth. The Patrick Stewart one. I should really say the Rupert Goold one. Patrick plays Maccers marvelously (and Kate Fleetwood destroys Mrs. M, in the best possible way), but it’s Goold’s show.

Goold’s setting of your story in a Stalinist/Soviet-esque military dictatorship may not be original, but it worked. I saw it on Broadway, after it transferred from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After in transferred from the West End. After it transferred from Chichester. Yeah, it transferred a lot. It was that good. Nicholas de Jongh called it “the finest Macbeth I’ve ever seen.” That actually means something, from Nicholas. (He tends towards the harsh.) I don’t know if it was the finest Macbeth I’d ever seen, but given all those transfers, and the filming, which aired on PBS before being released on DVD, it must be among the most successful Macbeths ever.

I liked it a lot in the theatre. I like it even better on screen. Goold doesn’t just film his staging; with director of photography Sam McCurdy, he transforms the mis-en-scene, bounding over the media barrier and landing with a bang. With a lot of bangs, actually. If you watched it during one of the live runs, the ending will astonish you. If you didn’t, the ending will still astonish you. I won’t spoil it. Just check it out.