HOW TO MAKE A DRAMA OUT OF A CRISIS

A MAN has just won a place in the Guinness Book of Records by reading the complete works of Shakespeare in a sitting. He had to stay awake for more than a week, and began hallucinating a car's tax disc in the centre of the pages. The recent recording on tape of the entire works - a project to which stars such as John Gielgud, Joseph Fiennes and Sinead Cusack have contributed, and which was recently completed at a studio in Shepherd's Bush - has not taken such a dramatic toll on anyone, but it's been an heroic effort all the same.

The Arkangel Shakespeare project, which began in 1997, arose out of intellectual crises in the lives of two men. The first is Tom Treadwell, a gangly academic of Anglo-American parentage. In the mid- Nineties, he was lecturing in literature at the Roehampton Institute in London. "I was approaching one of those milestone birthdays ... actually, I don't know why I'm being so coy, I was 50, and I thought, am I going to go to my grave having done nothing but teach?"

Meanwhile, his neighbour in Chiswick, film producer and former ad man Bill Shepherd, had just created a series of children's cartoons on Confucian themes, and they were rejected by the BBC explicitly because they were "too intelligent".

This bothered Shepherd, who began thinking: "The Ancient Greeks invented words like 'philosophy'.

What new words are we coming up with? 'Scumbag'?" He wanted to fight back against dumbing down, so he formed the idea of taping all Shakespeare's plays, which was last done more than 40 years ago with results characteristic of the time - ie, everyone sounded like Harold Macmillan.

Shepherd envisaged a more naturalistic version of the plays combined with better-sprung rhythms, the overall aim being accessibility.

Treadwell, who is no ordinary academic - he owns a vineyard in the Napa Valley, for instance decided to bankroll the project himself, incurring costs of roughly 35,000 per play. "I'd inherited some money," he said, going back to coyness, "I don't like to talk about it."

At this point, he walked through to the control room of the studio, where the recording of part of The Winter's Tale, the last play in the series, was about to happen. Sitting at a desk in the centre of the room was Clive Brill, a crumpled, droll man whom Tread- well plucked from the BBC to direct the plays. While the actors in the studio messed about, cups of tea were passed around the control room.

"There's no cake," said Brill, in an Eyeore-ish way, "there hasn't been any cake for two days."

A tape of birdsong was being cued up, and I asked Brill whether he'd got tired of that sound, which the Shakespeare recordist must perforce use to signify outdoor scenes. "Well, we've never used the same birdsong CD twice," he said, "although we have used a lot of crows. They're very good for when death is impending." Then

Brill rather brutally told everyone to shut up - he modestly characterises his directing style as "just being rude to everyone really" - and an impressive gear shift took place: unimpeded by having to hold scripts in their hands, the actors in the studio began acting, generating great intensity of concentration in the control room and total silence, broken only by Tread-well's interjection "No, 'burden'" when Ciaran Hinds, playing Leontes, opted in mid-flow for the archaic "burthen".

(Leonard is apparently a great stickler for "burden".) According to Brill, the best fluff of the series - which would have been catastrophic on a stage occurred in Pericles when a messenger said, instead of "the King my Lord is fled", "the King my Lord is dead".

Impersonators of such messengers and minor, enumerated lords have, throughout, been paid the same small amount of money as the big names, who've participated for the love of it. I asked Sinead Cusack - Hermione in The Winter's Tale - whether she imagined these tapes being bought, as other talking books are, by people intending to listen to them in their Ford Sierras on their way to work. "Why not?" she said, "you'd be amazed by the appeal of Shakespeare. People I've met can quote great swathes. I'm talking housewives.

I'm talking ... the lady who runs my nearest dry cleaners in Kensington."

IN spite of Bill Shepherd's fears for our culture, Shakespeare is currently in fashion, and big at the box office. But the commercial fate of the tapes - which are being distributed worldwide by Penguin - remains to be seen. Of the 24 in the shops so far, Romeo and Juliet has sold well, probably because Joseph Fiennes, in pre-Shakespeare In Love days, played Romeo.

Twelfth Night, starring Amanda Root as Olivia, has also been popular, but the presence of John Gielgud, as Gower, has not helped Pericles much, and as for that obscure Shakespeare collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen ... "It's not selling like John Grisham," admitted Treadwell.

But he hopes that, when the whole series is collected in a boxed set of CDs, there will be a big take-up by schools and colleges.

"I made a mental note," he added, "about how old I might be when the thing goes into profit. It scared me a bit, I must admit."

lThe Arkangel Shakespeare tapes are available from bookshops at 8.99.

Copyright 2000
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