the play is the thing
Feb. 15th, 2012 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deird1Shakespeare should always be performed rather than read.
Saw some friends perform As You Like It this evening. I can guarantee you - if I'd tried sitting down and reading that play, I wouldn't have got more than two pages in. But watching it? Fantastic! It's so hilarious!
Especially when the actors get the fact that Shakespeare's comedies were more "low burlesque" than "high opera".* They're silly, and should be treated as such. Whereas when people think "Shakespeare=formal" and try treating it solemnly and giving the most serious and staid performances of their lives... it just doesn't work.
* I have an entirely different rant ready about how opera is more low burlesque than high opera - but that would go against the point I'm trying to make in this paragraph, so I'll leave it for now.
Saw some friends perform As You Like It this evening. I can guarantee you - if I'd tried sitting down and reading that play, I wouldn't have got more than two pages in. But watching it? Fantastic! It's so hilarious!
Especially when the actors get the fact that Shakespeare's comedies were more "low burlesque" than "high opera".* They're silly, and should be treated as such. Whereas when people think "Shakespeare=formal" and try treating it solemnly and giving the most serious and staid performances of their lives... it just doesn't work.
* I have an entirely different rant ready about how opera is more low burlesque than high opera - but that would go against the point I'm trying to make in this paragraph, so I'll leave it for now.
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Date: 2012-02-15 02:15 pm (UTC)Oh yes. Hell, even his tragedies are half dick jokes and slapstick. I just watched Al Pacino's Looking For Richard the other day, which is all about him trying to stage Richard III and make it relatable to modern audiences who have been taught that Shakespeare is Important and High Art and Completely Incomprehensible, how to peel back the layers of words and get back to the story. Really quite interesting - and hilarious.
DIRECTOR: You said you were gonna find a scholar who'd speak directly into the camera and explain what really happened with Richard and Anne. And I am telling you that that is absolutely ridiculous. You know more about Richard III than any fucking scholar at Columbia or Harvard. You are making this documentary to show that actors truly are the possessors of a tradition, the proud inheritors of the understanding of Shakespeare. Then you turn around and say, "I'm gonna get a scholar to explain it"?
PACINO: No, but the point is this, Frederic. A person has an opinion. It's only an opinion. It's never a question of right or wrong. It's an opinion. And a scholar has a right to an opinion as any of us.
DIRECTOR: But why does HE get to speak directly to the camera?!?
*smash cut to Shakespeare scholar in wrinkly jacket and thick glasses in a room covered in books*
SCHOLAR: Uh... I don't really know why he needed to marry her, historically. I simply don't know.
DIRECTOR and PACINO: *looks of utter despair*