riffs on shakespeare: Shakespeare Re-Told
cbc canada
the national post

BBC Canada is doing unto Shakespeare what the Great Kleptomaniac so prolifically did to his own precursors. It is recycling him. The series Shakespeare Re-told, which reaches us after being shown last year in the U.K., presents newly scripted modern-dress adaptations of four of the most popular plays.

The problem here, of course, is that Shakespeare's own company at the Globe would never have dreamed of mounting seasons entitled, say, Holinshed Re-Chronicled or Plutarch Plagiarized. They weren't in the business of drawing attention to their sources. They wanted their audiences to enjoy new plays for their own sakes.

Shakespeare Re-told wants its audiences to enjoy new plays for the sake of old ones. How they would strike people with no knowledge of the originals I can't say, but I doubt if, with that umbrella title, many of them will be watching anyway. The theoretical target may be viewers who have dim memories of the plays, from school or from the occasional past production, and want some painless clarification. But it doesn't work like that. The new scripts are knowing, sophisticated affairs that play games with the Shakespearean stories and joke with the Shakespearean texts. These aren't new creations exploiting Shakespearean ideas, like Edward Bond's Lear or Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These are parasites, of varying degrees of entertainment-value.

Not surprisingly the one tragedy in the lineup, Macbeth (March 12; 9 p.m.) works the best, since here the comic touches freshen up the original story rather than going into competition with it. It even makes good fun of the play's own scary reputation. "It's bad luck to call him by name", says someone of the protagonist; "just call him the Scottish chef." The Scottish chef is Joe Macbeth, so named not only in homage to Shakespeare but also possibly to a 1950s gangster film that was an earlier exercise in the same updating genre. Joe presides over a swank restaurant kitchen in London; one night, putting out the leftovers, he meets a trio of orange-suited garbage-collectors who tell him "three Michelins coming your way. Joe." They're right, and thus emboldened Joe -- encouraged, of course, by his wife -- takes his carving knife to Duncan, Irish kingpin of the city's restaurant empire. It fits; gourmet ratings are their own battlefield while celebrity chefdom may be as near as our culture gets to hereditary kingship. (Malcolm, Duncan's official heir-apparent, has put himself out of the running by being an ex- vegetarian.) Peter Moffat's script has a mordant wit on its own account: "In another life," says Duncan, en route to slaughter, to Lady Mac, "I'd make a pass at you." "In another life" she replies "I'd let you." Moffat also clears up the vexed question of the Macbeths' missing child; they had one, which lived just long enough for his mother to give him the breast, once. The bell that calls Macbeth to murder emanates from his cellphone; "what, in our house?" becomes a smooth "murdered -- here?"; "beware Macduff" is "Look out for the big waiter"; and the banquet scene with Duncan's ghost is brilliantly re-imagined. James McAvoy (the faun from The Chronicles of Narnia) is a fine, bristly young protagonist; and the upshot, if not tragedy, is very high-grade melodrama.

The comedies, by contrast, suffer from a brittle brightness that owes something to Shakespeare but more to upper-class British sitcom. Sarah Wainwright's The Taming of the Shrew, which aired on March 5, is the only script in the group to depart significantly from its original's storyline, though not far enough to become its own thing.

The sex war is more spiffily fought in Much Ado About Nothing (March 19, 9 p.m.), a play with less to apologize for. Benedick and Beatrice (Damian Lewis and Sarah Parish) have become sparring newscasters on local TV. This seems a very good metier for them, and David Nicholl's script allows them to play the right kinds of wit: twittishly insistent in his case, sharply defensive in hers. All the storytelling is clever, though the framing for infidelity of the bride, Hero (who does the weather but has trouble with the word "meteorologist"), is even less plausible in a world of cameras and text messages than in one of eavesdropping and disguises. Dogberry the bumbling constable is here Mr. Berry (Anthony O'Donnell, himself a veteran Shakespearean clown), an officious but surprisingly competent security guard. Intertextuality is here confined to having Beatrice coach Benedick through one of the Sonnets ("let me not to the marriage of true minds...") and it works, elevating them. It's better than any of the verse in Much Ado itself, a play that depends for its zing on Shakespeare's comic prose and seems to lumber without it. Again, the elimination of familial bonds -- Beatrice is no longer Hero's cousin -- weakens the action. One post-feminist touch, however, is very telling; this Hero doesn't forgive her slanderous Claudio just because he's apologized.

No more does Helena in Peter Bowker's A Midsummer Night's Dream (March 26, 9 p.m.) settle for being some boy's lapdog. This play is probably the toughest assignment of the bunch: a symphonic structure that's light as a feather and tough as steel -- and one of the few Shakespeare plays that he seems to have made up. This version, set in a kind of honeymoon theme park, is a brave, sometimes charming but unsuccessful try. Oberon and Titania are still disrupting the climate with their marital squabbles ("Why do you think the weather's so weird nowadays? You think it's global warming? No chance.") though they're more equal than they were back in Athens, and he apologizes for playing practical jokes on her. The mortal marriage they're trying hardest to repair is that of Theseus and Hippolyta (a.k.a. Theo and Polly), the original play's authority figures, here doubling as Hermia's parents. It's labour lost since, even with actors as splendid as Bill Paterson and Imelda Staunton, those characters aren't very interesting. The final nuptial celebrations, somewhat altered, do cast an approximation of their customary spell, with the Rude Mechanicals providing the cabaret. They are the resort staff (security again) with Johnny Vega's Nick Bottom a stand-up comic who was once a professional. His encounter with the fairy queen is sweet. ("I'm Bottom, but you can call me Booty." "They call me Titania." "I'm not surprised."). Vega has the perfect blend of shyness and assurance, and you want to see him play Bottom for real. That's the feeling left by the series as a whole; it leaves you hungry for the genuine article. Which may even have been the intention. But it's a self-defeating one.