The 2012 season at London's globe theatre.

Smith, Peter J.

This has been London's special summer: the Olympic followed by the Paralympic Games in Stratford not upon Avon in East London--the other Stratford. Accompanying this cornucopia of sporting excellence was the cultural Olympiad. This included the BBC broadcast of the second tetralogy, entitled The Hollow Crown, new productions of Timon of Athens at the National and King Lear at the Almeida as well as a magnificent exhibition at the British Museum entitled, somewhat immodestly, Shakespeare: Staging the World. The Globe's offering to the Olympiad was the production of thirty-seven of Shakespeare's works in thirty-seven different languages within a period of six weeks. There was a Richard I[I in Mandarin, a Hamlet in Lithuanian, a Twelfth Night in Hindi, and a Love's Labour's Lost in British Sign Language. Conspicuously and with superb English tactlessness, the only offering in English to Globe to Globe was the crassly jingoistic Henry V. All the visiting foreign companies had come to pay homage to Shakespeare's Globe, in a city located at the heart of the Empire. The host nation responded with a play that not only belittles the French but caricatures the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. In order to underline the superiority of we native Englishmen over the macaronic mutterings of these visiting Calibans, Henry Vwas allotted not the single or couple of slots allowed to all the other productions but a full run in the repertory. While all the foreigners took their versions of Shakespeare home with them (and good riddance!), the Globe's English Shakespeare outstayed them all and, in true Blitz spirit, saw off their challenges. Well, that's one reading anyway; more than any other play, it seems to me, Henry Vis crying out for a production in French.

Although nationalism was a dominant theme at the Globe this summer, Shakespeare's women were also amply on display in three shows which ought to make them suitable fare for this volume's theme, Shakespeare's female icons: The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It and Richard III, though the latter proved to be disappointing in this respect.

The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Toby Frow, was a two-dimensional production for a two-dimensional theater. It never interrogated the darkness of Shakespeare's drama of violence and brutality, preferring instead to seek an amused approval from its audience. As Samantha Spiro's Katherina abased herself in front of her husband without a hint of irony, a huge cheer filled the auditorium. Nobody seemed to notice that Katherina's submission had been forced from her by her being starved, sleep-deprived and domestically abused. Shakespeare's script ends with Hortensio and Lucentio marveling over Katherina's taming, but their exchange was cut so that the last words of this production were "God give you goodnight" (5.2.193). (1) It was the ultimate appeal for audience collaboration and accord, which were readily granted.

Part of the strategy for obtaining this appeal was the production's populism. This started with the pre-show diversion of Christopher Sly's loutish and inebriated soccer vandal (Sly and Petruchio were played by Simon Paisley Day). Wearing an England football shirt and a white cap with the red cross of St. George, Sly made his way onstage from the ramp which bisected the pit. There was much feigned objection from stage managers and ushers as Sly unzipped his trousers and urinated up one of the stage columns. Distracted, he turned to the audience and continued pissing over the head of one of the groundlings (one trusts a company "plant"). Sly collapsed onstage and chucked up a mouthful of sick. All of these high jinks were greeted with audience laughter, none so much as when one stage manager threatened to "stop the show." We were miles away from Michael Bogdanov's 1978 RSC production in which Jonathan Pryce's Sly abused the theater staff and started drunkenly to smash up the set. The Globe's was staged violence--pretend commotion--and so the brutality of Shakespeare's play was immediately defused even before it had got underway.

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The relationship with the audience was augmented when Sly, having been told he was a lord, turned to a member of the yard for confirmation. "Am I a lord?" (Induction, 1.67), he asked her and she nodded. Then, in a piece of pure pantomime, he repeated the question to all of us. "Am I a lord?" was met with a roar of assent. We were part of this knockabout plot to deceive the indigent drunk and we took our responsibility for his deception with a massive pinch of salt. Given this good-humored fraud, it was little wonder that the remainder of the production consisted of Comrnedia dell'arte lazzi rather than anything more significant or serious. This was a romp, a playful evening's frolic and on these terms it was perfectly attuned to the populism of this particular theater.

Mike Britton's design consisted of six arches supporting a balcony, upstage of which was painted an Italian cityscape. Costumes were full Renaissance. A ramp ran from the stage down into the pit which offered the opportunity for Vincentio and Tranio to embrace one another and roll over each other down among the groundlings---other than that, it didn't do much. Here and throughout, the production insisted on taking the easy, comedic way out. Petruchio was followed by Pearce Quigley's morose Grumio who trotted behind him making the noise of horses' hoofs with a pair of coconut husks (lifted straight out of the 1975 film Mongy Python and the Holy Grail). As Petruchio remarked that "Antonio, my father, is deceased" (1.2.53), Grumio kicked a tin bucket. This was a nice touch, but after it had been used for the third time it lost its comic charge.

The productions reliance on visual gags meant that it never fully engaged with Shakespeare's play. As he entered for his wedding, Petruchio stripped down to a priapically loaded thong, which allowed him, simply by turning upstage, to get a naked arse gag (exactly the same device at exactly the same moment occurred in Edward Hall's Shrew of 2006). After all this lightheartedness, Petruchio's brutal claiming of Katherina, "She is my goods, my chattels ... " (3.3.102), caused only amused audience approval and they exited down the ramp and out through the groundlings, she riding Grumio, piggyback. Gremio's response, "Went they not quickly I should die with laughing" (113), spoke for the entire audience.

As they arrived at Petruchio's house, there was much stage business with plates and spoons which served only to distract from what it was the characters were actually saying. It was as though the production felt the necessity to accompany every exchange with a visual gag. The result was to stifle the text, to dilute the domestic violence with a heavy dose of slapstick comedy. At one point Tom Godwin's Biondello circled the Pedant, his sword drawn, in an elaborately choreographed prancing, though this was merely another layer of unjustified stage business.

The only place that the production even engaged with Shakespeare's story was in the sun and moon sequence between Petruchio and his disobedient wife. But her eventual capitulation--"be it moon or sun or what you please/... Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me" (4.6.13-15)--signaled a genuine adoration for his obduracy and his caress of her cheek was a sincere token of affection. But quite where this affection originated was anyone's guess--it seemed to have come out of the blue. Thereafter, climaxing in her submission speech, she was utterly at his disposal. It might be too much to expect that such a riotous comic production engage with the story of Petruchio and Katherine but I couldn't help feeling as I made my way home that this show, and perhaps the Globe's very aesthetic, tends to deliver Shakespeare lite.

The longest female role in Shakespeare, Rosalind (over fifty lines longer than the next longest, Cleopatra), ought to offer a reviewer of As You Like It an easy way into a special issue devoted to Shakespeare's female icons. The role played by Dorothea Jordan and Ada Rehan, as well as, closer to our own time, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, and Katy Stephens is, par excellence, Shakespeare's gift to female comic actors. But Shakespeare's comedies are also collaborative ventures; unlike the male protagonists of the tragedies, Shakespeare's heroines are unusually reliant on the rest of the company and the production to set them off. While Deirdre Mullins was in no way an indifferent Rosalind, James Dacre's As You Like It was indifferent and one could only feel sorry that her assay of this prominent role appeared amid such a flat and weary production.

Unlike the other two shows reviewed here, As You Like It was a Globe touring production which was playing at home, having visited ten venues over the previous eight weeks. It might be unfair to judge it according to the same standards as shows designed and rehearsed for this particular space--touring requires, after all, a flexibility and an improvisatory quality that must meet the vagaries of each venue and as such cannot tailor its sequences and speaking to a single auditorium.

Then again, the shortcomings of this production were nothing to do with the technical difficulties of moving from space to space; rather, they originated in an almost lazy indifference to the script, an irritating tendency to make visual and verbal quips, and a complete refusal (or inability?) to engage with the soaring verse of the wooing scenes. As Le Beau (Tobias Beer) answered Orlando's (Will Featherstone) question, "Which of the two was daughter of the Duke?" (1.2.259) by noting her height, he attempted a pointless and lame joke: "indeed the shorter is his dotter" with all the subtlety of an advertising jingle, though what purpose this exaggerated rhyme might have served is anyone's guess. Later, as Celia rehearses her pseudonym she remarks that she will call herself "No longer Celia, but Aliena" (1.3.127). Here Beth Park, who played Celia, broke the name into "alien" and added a suiT-ix "-er." What this was to signify and why it caused such widespread laughing was beyond me but it typified the production's tendency to wring "humor" out of the play's airy beauty, cudgeling its poetry in the process.

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Hannah Clark's design set the action somewhere in the late Victorian period. At the opening, there was much intrusive business with a camera on a tripod and the formation of family groups for photo opportunities. Perhaps the intention was to suggest the hypocrisy of Frederick's court which underlay a formality and etiquette characteristic of late Victorian or Edwardian society. Unfortunately, the setting allowed Oily Fox to compose the most mock-Cockney (Mockney?) settings of Shakespeare's poetry. Song versions of "If music be the food of love" (Twelfth Night, 1.1.1) and "The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she" (As You Like It, 3.2.10) were reduced to ditties like those from Half a Sixpence or My Fair Lady.

Adam (Will Mannering) and Orlando were dressed in long brown apron coats and resembled furniture-removal men. This may have had something to do with Clark's set which was a huge wooden crate, the size of a shipping container which opened up at the beginning of 2.1 to reveal a painted forestscape complete with waterfall. Traps hinged open in its roof and its walls to reveal various characters--at one point Touchstone (Mannering again) and Audrey (John O'Mahony) appeared naked, quaffing champagne and surrounded by a cloud of soap bubbles as though bathing together. The major sequences were played downstage of the crate but the effect of its presence was to imply that the actors would soon be on their way--perhaps an appropriate suggestion for a touring production but one which, nonetheless, gave the sense of them merely going through the motions.

Emma Pallant's Jaques was the show's most interesting characterization. Played as a brittle and deeply depressed Victorian dowager, hers was a character too old for this world of young love. Her seven ages of man speech petered out into a grumpy resignation that she no longer qualified for the naive excitements of life's first half. Her sexuality seemed repressed by her social setting and she made a desperate lunge after the young Orlando. Her "Will you sit down with me, and we two will rail against our mistress the world?" (3.2.271) was reminiscent of Anne Bancroft's predatory Mrs Robinson ordering Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin into bed in Mike Nichols's The Graduate.

But in the main, the production relied on a series of poor gags which precluded any sophisticated characterization. Much business was made of the fact that Audrey was played in the final scenes by a cardboard cutout: since O'Mahony was playing Senior, he was unable to double here as Audrey. In fact Senior took Hymens lines so that the supernatural consecration of the marriages at the conclusion was merely a secular blessing--nothing the matter with that. However, the decision to cut the epilogue, Rosalind's most intimate exchange with the audience and the high point of the role's many lines, served only to mute Mullins's achievements here. I do hope she gets to play the role again in a more conducive production--little chance of this one elevating this Rosalind into anything like one of Shakespeare's female icons.

With Tim Carroll's production of RichardlII, I'm going to do what every reviewer shouldn't--that is, judge the production according to what wasn't there. I know it is not appropriate to criticize a production for not being the one I wanted it to be; the reviewer is supposed to talk about what was onstage and evaluate it in its own terms but, as you will see, there are reasons why I am departing from the usual protocol.

Mark Rylance is one of the greatest actors of his generation. Between 2009 and 2011 he played Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth'sJerusalern as a hard-drinking outcast, holed up in his caravan, evading council eviction officers and dealing drugs to local thugs. But towards the end of the play the character communes with the rural spirits of Olde England, and this petty criminal rapidly comes to personify the atavistic independence and dogged self-reliance of a peculiarly insular kind of Englishness, a sort of foul-mouthed stiffupper lip. Byron's solid muscularity, tattooed arms, and plenteous moustache suggested a masculinity which, for all its belligerence, was heroic, courageous, and oddly patriotic. Here was a man with real cojones!

What a treat it would be to see Rylance return to the Globe, a theater which he more than anyone can reduce to total silence. He plays this theater like a musical instrument; his Hamlet, Cleopatra, and Olivia have demonstrated his staggering variety of tones. His manipulation of the audience is remarkable and his voice (which sounds as though it will break any minute) is enough to draw you in with adamantine concentration. As the box office (sold-out even before the show opened) suggested, this would be a Richard worth watching. Except it wasn't.

When Rylance played the Duke in the Globe's Measure for Measure (2004), he stressed the character's uncertainty with a stuttering insecurity. The Duke seemed perched on the edge of a nervous breakdown, unable to declaim his authority. Similarly his hugely sympathetic Hamlet, his best Shakespearean performance to date (2000), was made vulnerable by a pensive hesitancy. "To be or not to be" was delivered with Rylance facing upstage, every word embraced by the pin-dropping silence of the auditorium. Slowly, quietly, and modestly, he unwrapped Hamlet's dilemmas and we felt the paralysis and pathos of the character's impasse. But Richard III is not Vincentio nor Hamlet. Richard bustles from one murderous plan to the next, from one brutal seduction to the next, from one nihilistic flame-up to the next. "Ibis is a character of febrile energy, improvising his way around problems even as the next arises to obstruct him. If Hamlet is a resonantly dripping stalactite, Richard is a gushing waterfall.

Why then have this superlative actor play Richard as though he were a kindly uncle, an affable old buffoon? As he confided to us that "Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous" (1.1.32), he put his finger to his lips and cheerfully told us to "Shhhhhhh." It was the affectionate intrigue of an elderly male relative who is hinting that there is a large and unexpected present under the Christmas tree. One can only assume that the intention was to get the audience on his side, to make us complicit in his schemes. But these plots involve the murder of his own brother, his wife, his nephews--they are not party tricks. As he talked of marrying Anne he nonchalantly mentioned to us, "What though I killed her husband and her father?" (1.1.154). He gave us a little frown, a glum wink of pretend guilt as who should say, "What a naughty boy I've been."

In its desire to turn Richard's psychotic and ruthless ambition into a harmless bit of mischief, this production utterly castrated the protagonist and the tension in Shakespeare's play. Yes, Richard is an early modern incarnation of the medieval Vice, but he is so much more. As he urged the assassins not to hear Clarence speak, lest he (Clarence) talk them out of their murderous mission, Rylance rendered the lines "do not hear him plead; / F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-for Clarence is well-spoken" (1.3.347). His was a mumbling, careless, stumbling, avuncular, likeable Richard, a kindly old chap. Later as he quizzed Buckingham (Roger Lloyd Pack) on his acting capacities, he asked him, "canst thou quake and change thy colour, / M-m-m-m-m-m-m-mmurder thy breath in the middle of a word ... " (3.5.1-2). This staged stammer had the effect of making Richard vulnerable and sympathetic and the character's danger, not to mention his iniquity, were airbrushed away.

How were we supposed to respond to this? What was the production trying to show us? That Richard was really a genuine chap who was much misunderstood? Well, the ever increasing pile of corpses gave the lie to that. That Richard's evil is in all of us and that we too could quite easily slaughter half our family? Probably not. Or was it just that the production was deeply confused about what it was aiming for? Most likely. Jenny Tiramani's design didn't help. Rylance wore a huge padded belly to which was pinned a tiny wizened hand. His jolly corpulence and his Halloween novelty claw transformed him into a Falstaff sporting a spoof medal, part roly-poly pudding and part joke shop.

Given the muddled way in which this production characterized its Richard, the moments where he bared his fangs came out of the blue. The strawberries scene (3.4) allows Richard to ask his counsel what the punishment ought to be for those "that have prevailed / Upon my body with their hellish charms" (61-62). He accuses Jane Shore, and Hastings attempts to defend his mistress with "If they have done this deed ... " (74). Richard responds, "If?. Thou protector of this damned strumpet" (76). Here Rylance hurled the first word at Hastings (Paul Chahidi), "IFFFFFFFF," his sudden top volume coming as rapidly as flicking a switch. There was little sense of the deliberation behind the Machiavellian tactic of which Shakespeare's play hints.

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More successful was the utterly ruthless command that Catesby (Peter Hamilton Dyer) should spread the rumor of Anne's physical decline and imminent death. As the king instructed him, he turned his head towards Anne (Johnny Flynn) who was standing right next to his throne so that Richard's injunction, "give out / That Anne, my queen, is sick, and like to die" (4.2.58-9) was a cold-blooded death sentence. She stood, frozen to the spot, her humanity nothing more than the object of his murderous calculation. This moment, more than any other, offered us a Richard both tyrannical and terrifying--would that this menacing character had figured more conspicuously elsewhere.

The scenes with the queens were subverted by a comic playfulness. Anne's seduction was another party game so that Richard's suggestion that he occupy her bed drew not the sharp intake of breath that the outrage calls for but rather an indulgent audience laugh--"oh look, that mischievous Richard is up to his old tricks again." The parallel episode, when Richard woos Queen Elizabeth in order to get to her daughter, was another party piece. So successful was he that Elizabeth (Samuel Barnett) seized Richard and planted a smacking kiss on his mouth. Richard's sense of surprise was matched by that of the audience.

The production's desire to send up the play was perhaps most obvious in its cutting of its dark malevolence. Queen Margaret, the exiled widow of Henry VI, haunts the play with prophecies and curses; the part was entirely cut. The scene in which the three queens mourn the murder of their male relatives was also missing. It was as though the production could not cope with the play's concentration of evil, misery and pain. But if you cut these scenes and play Richard as a pantomime villain, you are directing, at best, an adaptation of Richard III and perhaps at this point the theater reviewer is entitled to point out what is missing. In conclusion we might just add that, with the best will in the world, attempting to make this production of Richard III speak to a special issue on female icons is like trying to win the Olympic hundred meters wearing full Elizabethan dress.

Notes

(1.) All line numbers refer to The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., ed. John Jowett et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005).