Courting the computer

Back in the 1920s someone complained there wasn’t a play on the London stage that didn’t have a telephone in it. While it’s the lifeblood of theatre to move with the times, a mania for modish contemporaneity can only get you so far. The danger is especially endemic in theatre troupes dedicated to outreach and to widening access. New York’s ‘Theatre for a New Audience’ is plainly one of these and it was the final visiting company contributing to the RSC’s Complete Works Festival. (Injury has sadly postponed the official opening of King Lear with Ian McKellen, the RSC’s own final contribution on which I hope to report later.)

Three iBook laptops on their separate tables set out TFANA’s up-to-the-minute agenda for The Merchant of Venice on the expectant open stage. Where the play’s titling in the Quarto texts speaks of a ‘history’, the programme ascribes the time to ‘The near future’. When this arrives these computers will long since have been binned or recycled, but never mind. It’s actually not such a bad idea that they should represent Portia’s casks and display their riddles on overhead screens, even that they should double up as the nerve centre of Antonio’s international shipping business. We’re in an all too familiar world of suits, mobiles and digital cameras.

My quarrel is not for one minute with this as such, but simply that the trappings of modernity are not consistently supported by performances building the essential bridge between our concerns and Shakespeare’s. There’s much more to Portia than the Sex and the City glamourpuss of the casket scenes. It wasn’t until she turns up as a bespectacled lawyer at Antonio’s trial that Kate Forbes made you sit up and see what she could actually do with the role.