Shakespeare

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Josie Rourke has a hit at last with The Weir, The Tempest: a karaoke version of all

The Weir is the ultimate hit-from-nowhere. It was written in 1997 by the 26-year-old Conor McPherson. It opened at the Royal Court Upstairs and glided over to Broadway and then toured America. The script defies every rule of theatrical physics. It’s wordy and static, it’s entirely devoid of action or spectacle, and the atmosphere is mired in gloom. Four morose drinkers, stuck in a pub in the west of Ireland, try to impress a pretty incomer from Dublin by telling her ghost stories. Nothing else happens. The faint stirring of a romance between the Dublin girl and the handsome deadbeat behind the bar provides a tiny note of optimism at

Thursday

Mark Mason

The Ize Have It

She divided us in life, she’s dividing us in death. Baroness Thatcher was so controversial that a single letter in a single word in the subtitle of a book that someone else has written about her and is being published after her funeral can get people’s backs up. Charles Moore’s biography is, according to its cover, ‘authorized’. Iain Dale isn’t happy (and I’m sure he’s not alone). ‘I am appalled,’ he writes on his blog, ‘that they have used the American spelling … It’s certainly not what she would have wanted and it grates. Penguin ought to remember its British roots.’ Good news, Iain – it turns out ‘-ize’ isn’t

Monday

Austen Saunders

William Shakespeare and the pursuit of human happiness

‘Under the greenwood tree’ from As You Like It AMIENS: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lies with me, And turn his merry note Uno the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy, But winter and rough weather. Who doth ambition shun, And loves to live i’th’ sun, Seeking the food he eats, And pleased with what he gets ALL: Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy, But winter and rough weather. In As You Like It, a French duke has been usurped by his brother. He lives now in exile with his followers in the Forest of

Saturday

Alex Moorehead

All the world’s a stage

In Translations, Brian Friel’s play about English military and cultural imperialism, the frustrated teacher Manus explains how he uses ‘the wrong gesture in the wrong language’ to insult in Gaelic an English soldier. In Shakespeare in Kabul, Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar’s account of the first production of Shakespeare in Afghanistan since before the Soviet invasion in the 1970s, an Afghan theatre group, led by the French director Corinne Jaber, attempt the ‘right’ gestures in their own language as they perform Love’s Labour’s Lost. Following the initial 2005 performance in Kabul, the actors are now trying to do the same in London, re-importing Shakespeare to the UK by putting

Saturday

Lewis Jones

Journal of a disappointed man

Simon Goldhill introduces his new book by recalling a lunch with his editor, who suggested he make a pilgrimage and write about it. Pilgrimages, he reflected, tend to be made alone, but he is gregarious, so decided that he needed to make up, with his wife and another couple, ‘a party of four Jews’, to keep him company and supply comic material. He is a classics don at Cambridge, where he also directs something called the Victorian Studies Group, so his editor suggested he do ‘something Victorian’, and the result is Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave. The title does no one any favours, but the book offers a brief

Saturday

Allan Massie

Life & Letters: Shakespeare’s women

Gordon Bottomley, Georgian poet with an unpoetic name, wrote a play called King Lear’s Wife with which he hoped to inspire a poetic revival in the theatre. It might be interesting to see it revived — though most 19th- and 20th-century verse-dramas proved forgettable. Nevertheless, he surely happened on an interesting subject, though one which L. C. Knights, among others, would have deplored.  In a famous essay, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, he poured scorn on the practice of treating Shakespearean characters as if they were real people with an anterior life beyond the play. Yet surely it is tempting to do so. When Lady Macbeth says she would

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Classy act

Michael Grandage, boss of the Donmar, is a most unusual director. He has no ideas. His rivals go in for party-theme, concept-album, pop-video Shakespeare (provincial folksiness in metropolitan disguise), but Grandage just goes in for Shakespeare. He arrives with no prejudices or pieties, only solutions. He’s the bard’s delivery boy. His current production of King Lear sweeps the stage clean of the usual Ozzy Osbourne clutter and reduces the inventory to just three items, a map, a chair and a pillory for Kent. Nothing else. This daring austerity opens things up and allows the mysterious, grotesque, lurching and inscrutable play to do its best and worst, to charm, horrify, move

Saturday

Daniel Swift

Dazzling puzzles

Halfway through his new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Don Paterson quotes W.H. Auden. Auden was one of Shakespeare’s great commentators and he firmly warned against reading the sonnets as simple statements. ‘It is also nonsensical,’ Auden wrote, ‘to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless and uninteresting.’ Halfway through his new book about Shakespeare’s sonnets, Don Paterson quotes W.H. Auden. Auden was one of Shakespeare’s great commentators and he firmly warned against reading the sonnets as simple statements. ‘It is also nonsensical,’ Auden wrote, ‘to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless and uninteresting.’ Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are dazzling puzzles,

Saturday

Alex Massie

Reasons to Like Nick Clegg

As a person rather than as a politician, I mean. David has already mentioned Clegg’s taste for Germanic* classical music and now there’s another reason to approve of him. He’s a Beckett fan. If he comes out for cricket and Wodehouse, his party can have my vote… Here he is on Sam: Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier. It’s that willingness to question

Saturday

Philip Hensher

For all time

To review some new books about Shakespeare is not to note a revival of interest, but simply to let down a bucket into an undammed river. No one really knows the scale of the secondary bibliography. Published sources on any given topic in Shakespeare studies are innumerable and, as James Shapiro reminds us, so are books devoted to the idea that the works were written by someone else. There are two theories to account for why Shakespeare is still so enormously prevalent in cultural life nearly 400 years after he died. The first is the cynical one, that it suited the British empire, and Anglo-Saxon culture in general, to foist

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Bush, Cheney, Blair, Brown: Four Characters in Search of a Tragedian?

I enjoyed Ross Douthat’s column this week in which he contemplates the inadequacies of Hollywood’s response to the Iraq war. (Hey – at least Hollywood has responded: has the British film industry? There haven’t been too many British stories told, as opposed to Britishers telling American stories. Which is a little different.) The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare. You had a nation reeling from a terrorist attack and hungry for a response that would be righteous, bold and comprehensive. You had an inexperienced president trying to tackle a problem that his predecessors (one of them his own father) had left to fester