Simon Hoggart

Playing with Shakespeare

Playing with Shakespeare

issue 12 November 2005

The notion of updating Shakespeare always strikes me as a curious one. For a start it assumes that the audience is stupid. Do we say, ‘I hadn’t realised that Julius Caesar contains universal themes of ambition and betrayal until I saw it set on the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade’? Or, ‘It never occurred to me that Macbeth might have significance for our time until they played it in a Birmingham Starbucks’? And why doesn’t it work the other way round? You never see The Caretaker set in imperial Rome, or Abigail’s Party at an 11th-century Scottish castle.

The one time when this updating works is when it’s merely the plot that has been dragged kicking and yelling into the 21st century. Someone declaiming ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ in a space suit just looks silly. But the great plots — Pride and Prejudice, King Lear — are hard-wired into the minds of any half-educated person and have a resonance which a playwright can use and play with.

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