VH's Global Shakespeare Film Analysis Blog

I know Harry Melling has probably worked his entire post-adolescent life for this not to happen but DUDLEY IS THE FOOL IN KING LEAR

....and he was really good! Aloof but very witty and cunning. My favorite quote was:

Title: Hamlet

Year: 2000

Director: Michael Almereyda

Actors: Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venore, Julia Stiles

To use Gérard Genette's terminology, Almereyda's Hamlet is a heterodiegetic transposition of Shakespeare's play of the same name. I argue that Hamlet's superficial struggles are shifted-- he struggles against a materialistic and consumer society in Almereyda's adaptation, which is set in contemporary Manhattan-- and though these alterations have significant thematic and interpretive consequences, they do not change the meaning of the play. Rather, the changes serve to help our modern day audience understand and appreciate Hamlet's plight.

Of all the English adaptations I have thus far watched, this adaptation cut out the most  original text, so my brain sometimes automatically filled in the gaps with Shakespeare's text. For instance, before Gertrude drinks Hamlet's poisoned wine cup, Claudius does not try to stop her, nor does she insist against his will that she drink the wine, but I had to re-watch this part two times to convince myself that this part of the text was cut. I still heard Claudius's protest. It is hard for me consider this movie without considering the text-- I mean, I watch this as an interpretation of Hamlet rather than a movie in its own right. This viewpoint may be the product of this blog, but I wonder how audiences that are not very familiar with the text of Hamlet watch this movie.

This film utilizes the unfair advantage movies have in defying stage performance: the sets are constantly changing, the characters speak in voice-overs (indicating internal thought), and technology makes its multiple intertexual references possible (a poster of Che Guevera in Hamlet's room, Hamlet's "Mousetrap" movie using other movie clips like Deep Throat, and a monk's speech about peace and "inter-being"). That the movie, asking questions about technology and its pervasiveness, its ability to change viewpoints, and at times its pretentiousness, uses technology in these ways is a smart, meta-nod to its thematic content. 

All in all, I prefer the RSC's adaptation of Hamlet because the adaptation itself did not feel as tortured (in RSC's, Hamlet is crazy and it's funny!), mutilated (the text is not chopped up), and heavy-handed (sometimes the somber mood in Almereyda's adaptation does not fit with its contemporary setting, such as King Claudius's sadistic grin during the fencing match). Also, David Tennant.... 

One of the weekend's intellectual playground: what story does this staging tell? 

The Global Shakespeare Student Festival, held from November 15 to 17, boasted three intensive days of Shakespeare performance and interpretation workshops that coaxed students from across the Middle East to New York University Abu Dhabi’s Downtown Campus. Most attendees were theater junkies, eager for the chance to work with other students in a collaborative performance project. Some of them had never even cracked a Shakespeare play or skimmed a sonnet. On the other hand, the opportunity to examine Shakespeare’s work especially lured me. The weekend’s foundation on theater workshops was an oblique detail.

You may be confused about my title, then, which claims I entered “theater through Shakespeare.” Rest assured, at the onset of this weekend my intention was to do quite the opposite, to explore Shakespeare through performance. The weekend had unexpected but not unhappy results.

Friday, November 15, 9:30am.

Enter 27 students from New York University Abu Dhabi, Cairo University, the American University of Beirut, and the American University of Sharjah; all are wearing baggy, “well-loved” clothing that allow for movement.

Rubén Polendo, welcoming students to the Festival, quotes Gertrude Stein: “I never discuss art before ten A.M.”

We’re a little more ambitious than Miss Stein.

Friday, November 15, 11:20am

Theater Mitu works us out. Two members of the company lead the students through a series of poses with a name I cannot and will never be able to pronounce (similar to taichi? a type of calisthenics? novice krav maga?). I feel bad for the professors who have to watch and don’t get to move with us. My attention floats into my thighs, warms my hands, and energizes my toes; all twenty-seven of us are trying to move in unison, and though I’d like to think we glide from pose to pose in Olympic-level synchronization, my endorphins are likely fooling me into a false group pride. Later, speaking with Justin from Theater Mitu, I tell him the exercise would make an amazing gym class and I would love an hour of that every day. He laughs and kindly notifies me that we only did it for twenty minutes.

Friday, November 15, 1:30pm

“Open your eyes. What do you see?” Tomi Tsunoda, an NYU Tisch professor asks.

“A waiting room.”

“A bus stop.”

“Obedience.”

I am now painfully aware that I am one of the only students in the room with no background in theater and am therefore a First Rate Bore by their measures. I see three chairs.

Saturday, November 16, 10:10am

Today, we don’t begin discussing art until ten minutes after Stein allows. The topic: Friday night’s NYUAD reading of The African Company Presents Richard III. The discussion focuses primarily on performing race and gender: how does “messing” with the prescribed roles change the production? The word “interesting” gets thrown around a lot.

Saturday, November 16, 3:30pm

Our own Professor Katherine Williams gives a lecture on the evolution of Shakespeare’s text from Quartos to Folio. I’m trying to suppress squeals of delight from my seat. This is one of the first seminars in which I feel we are really talking about Shakespeare and not performance generally. Professor Williams brings to our attention the original title of the play we now know as The Merchant of Venice and passes around a 19th century copy: The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. VVith the Extreme Cruelty of Shylocke the Iew Towards the Saide Merchant, in Cutting a Iust Pound of His Flesh. And the Obtaining of Portia, by the Choyse of Three Caskets.

Later, we do scansion with theater professor Aysan Celik, another Lit major fantasy. I THINK like a RObot LEARNing ENGlish SYLlaBLES for the rest of the night.

Sunday, November 16, 7pm

The students from other universities read Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest, which they have rehearsed for a few hours earlier that day. The reading is funny, heart wrenching, and imperfect: a beautiful display of experimentation.

Later reflections:

As a Literature major, I’ve always felt relatively creative: I can turn a few quotes about birds of prey in Hamlet into a ten-page paper, after all! But after participating in the Global Shakespeare Student Festival, I realize I am surprisingly unaware of how my body can and does move; I would never have thought three chairs could sustain two hours of conversation; when someone says “Shakespeare villain,” I mentally scan a Shakespeare text for direct inspiration instead of leaping into a more original character.

My brain works in a different, no more or less wonderfully, than an actor’s. I do not know if my obsession with textual analysis is the effect or cause of my intensive literature studies, but this Festival forced me to engage in physical, abstract, awkward performing arts exercises.

I have never bought into the idea that some are born great writers; I believe everyone grows into strong writing through years of practice. Nevertheless, I went into the weekend excited about “the Shakespeare part” and nervous about the “theater part.” In the context of theater, I contradicted my own logic and carried with me the idea that performance requires innate talent and innate chutzpah. Theater is something you “do” and not “learn,” I reasoned, and I clearly lack the Thespian Gene.

Maybe what has held me back from greater experimentation was an even simpler human mental block: I was afraid to lose face. Why do we take ourselves so seriously? Acting in particular forced me to flex my brain in fresh ways, but trying a new supplied the bigger challenge to laugh at myself and persevere. This weekend’s alienness of performance inspired and refreshed my self-awareness, sense of curiosity, and pursuit of intellectual and social gratification.* What are these processes but the building blocks of human sapience? And if there’s any possibility that Shakespeare’s texts speak to the common conditions of humanity, then what better way to approach his work than immediate subjection to such senses?

Title of production: Desdemona

Type: stage

Year: 2001

Director: Ong, Keng Sen 

Play: Othello 

Venue: Fukuoka; Tokyo, Japan

Company: TheatreWorks, Singapore

Desdemona uses Shakespeare's Othello as a point of departure for abstract performance art, as a means to establish a re-interpretation of conventional notions of performance art, gender, family, and modernity.

Desdemona struggles to create an identity for herself against the patriarchal rule of Othello. "My name is Desdemona," she asserts in the beginning of the play. She is not the only character who suffers from a fragmented identity: Othello's slave (a casting addition that recasts Othello as the oppressive master, not the victim) is fragmented from his lineage, a family broken through slavery. Othello does not remember his mother, he confesses; he longs most of all for a son to continue his lineage. With the opposite details, but the same effect, Desdemona longs for her mother, whom she misses dearly and from whom she feels separated. 

Projections of fragmented body parts augment the characters' fragmented identities. Anonymous hands layer cut-out images of face parts from magazines over each other, constructing eery and unique faces one on top of the other, each through the addition of one cut-out. The projections also focus on mouths without faces (which is more uncomfortable than you might think). The violence at the end of the play comes through the form of a wide-hipped, thin-waisted wooden doll falling and breaking. Her face is covered with a white bag: she is anonymous, except for her wide, child-bearing hips and empty torso, seen as a reproductive machine. 

The play not only layers identity, but also modes of technology and language. As the projector shows an email being typed out and corrected of its typos, someone speaks over the email. She says, "I don't believe in translation." Given that the play is in English and Japanese and uses text, song, and monologue-y pieces, the audience may be unsure how to react. The play points out the tension between a Singaporian, even "Asian" identity amongst Western traditions and juxtaposes this tension with the conflicts of modernity, identity, and connection.

This is a very abstract performance piece: I think the boys and girls from Theater Mitu would enjoy it.

Old English (Anglo-Saxon): Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he, "Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon."

Middle English: In þat lond ben trees þat beren wolle, as þogh it were of scheep; whereof men maken clothes, and all þing þat may ben made of wolle. In þat contree ben many ipotaynes, þat dwellen som tyme in the water, and somtyme on the lond: and þei ben half man and half hors, as I haue seyd before; and þei eten men, whan þei may take hem.

Early Modern English: But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief, That thou her maid art far more fair than she Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. It is my lady, O, it is my love!

When the Global Shakespeare Student Festival students read Aimé Césaire's A Tempest, they showed me how funny the play is! Having first read this play in a course that focused on Caliban's anger and reclamation of his person and his history, I always found Caliban empowered but a little snide and the overall tone of the play abrasive. But after this reading, I realize how much fun the play is-- like The Tempest, it too is a comedy, though it contains tragic elements. The students reading Trinculo and Stephano's parts were even more interesting to me than the Trinculo and Stephano in Julie Taymore's The Tempest; they were fools, yes, and hilarious, yes, but not ridiculous exaggerations of drunkards and clowns.

The one thing that continues to bother me about A Tempest, though, is Caliban's response to Prospero when he accuses his slave of attempting to rape Miranda: Caliban says that the old man put the idea in his head. So in this version, is Miranda's body a tool that Prospero uses to get power? And is Caliban's retort the equivalent to his fessing up that he did advance on Miranda against her will (whereas in the original, the circumstances surrounding this event are dubious but unclear)? 

In Aysan and the NYUAD students' reading of The African Company Presents Richard III, even though the conversation after the piece focused on gender-blind casting, I did not pay significant attention to the fact that many girls were playing male parts. Since the students were reading the play rather than acting and staging it, I did not think their genders influenced their reading much. (Maybe because our generation has an increasingly cavalier attitude toward "gender"; is there a way a gender should or normally reads a part?) 

"Omkara" means om syllable. Hindus believe that om is the vibration that reverberated throughout the universe when consciousness first began; its three syllables symbolize creation, preservation, and liberation and/or destruction (some consider silence the fourth syllable). The character Omkara, then, represents the cycle of creation (he is a self-created man who penetrates social constructs as no one has done before), change, and self-destruction. Since Omi and Dolly do not get married until later in the film, and Omi kills Dolly that night (instead of killing her on her wedding sheets, he kills her on the actual wedding night), his inability to preserve their union represents his destruction.

Title of production: Omkara (film)

Name of director: Vishal Bhardwaj

Year of production: 2006

Principal actors: Ajay Devgan, Kareena Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan

              In Omkara, a Hindi film adapted from Othello, though many remark on how “fair” Dolly’s (Desdemona) skin is compared to Omi’s (Othello), the primary tension that riddles their love is Omi’s status as a half-caste bahubali, or political enforcer (who resorts to violence several times— I am unsure if this was demanded and acknowledged by his job description or if it was his own personal tendency that highlights his passionate nature prone to physical action). Although this film asks roughly from the same questions that Othello does about if and how outsiders can interact with natives, Omi did not appear— in my perception, at least— as much of an outsider as Othello. Othello was a physical outsider to Venice as well as the “civilized” world of Europe, black in a white society, a converted Christian from Islam, and self-professedly “rude” in speech (1.3.84). Therefore, he was immediately recognizable as an outsider by his appearance as well as by his speech and beliefs (superstitions, previous religion). Omi, on the other hand, is an outsider in his status, and perhaps his profession in a way that Othello was not, but not immediately in physical appearance or to the city in which he and Dolly lived. When Omi explains to Dolly his status as a half-caste, she says, "a crescent, though half, is still called a moon." It is irrefutable, on the other hand, that Othello was in no way considered a "moon" or white, powerful Venetian elite. I am not seriously familiar with the Indian caste system, and I suspect I am missing some of the import of being a half-caste in Indian society; maybe it is incredibly stigmatized, but could it mark Omi as conspicuously as if he were a black African in an elite, white society in the seat of civilization, Venice?

As I mentioned earlier, Venice at the turn of the seventeenth century was the height of civilization as well as a cosmopolitan center for trade. At the same time, it was a little bit seedy. Iago’s knowledge of Venice as a local heightens Othello’s fumbling in the city, but Langda (as far as I could tell) did not have a significant advantage over Omi in terms of local knowledge in Omkara.

            Langda’s relationship with Omi was also a little different in Omkara. Whereas in Othello Shakespeare does not provide one prominent reason for Iago’s actions (he is jealous of Cassio’s promotion; he is upset with Othello’s penetration into Venetian society; he is revolted by his union with Desdemona; he is upset about his status as Othello’s servant), Langda is reacting specifically to his perceived injustice in status, prompted by Rajju (Roderigo). Langda suffers from the same inception that he plants in Omi— Rajju “accidentally” puts an idea in his head and he is a slave to that perceived injustice— which relates his jealousy to Omi’s. Langda’s actions ultimately seem less evil and more understandable, with a clear origin, in Omkara. If MTV gave out Villain of the Year Awards in the early 1600s, Iago would have definitely won it, but I am unsure that Langda would have. He is not as sneaky (like a Venetian!) or puzzling, and thus ultimately less interesting. Still, the moral of Omkara is enigmatic, just like Othello’s— perhaps it is a warning not to trust your friends, or not to allow outsiders to penetrate higher echelons of society, or that women should not enjoy their relationships with men physically, or that love has the power to destroy… 

Road movie in search of the enduring power of one of the greatest playwrights of all time.

Is it more effective to cloak Shakespearean text in contemporary imagery, or to hew to a more “classical” line?

€œA Midsummer Night'ss Dream may have earned its high berth on the Shakespeare hit parade because it'€™s a bundle of high-spirited hijinks, but its view of love is divided.

"The genre of romantic comedy would not, of course, exist if the progress of love were depicted without a few speed bumps along the road; the speed bumps supply the jokes. But seeing “Romeo and Juliet” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in close proximity, as New Yorkers can this season, illuminates how differently love is depicted in both plays (despite their being written in close proximity).

In the tragedy, love is depicted as an ennobling emotion, one that brings Romeo and Juliet to a sudden maturity and inspires them to flights of superlative lyricism. Their love is pure and uninflected by doubt, thwarted only by outside circumstances and the enmity between their families.

In the comedy, by contrast, the lovers spend as much time warring with each other as they do offering lyric speeches of devotion. (Actually, the play is rather short on those). Love is depicted as a volatile thing, a source of confusion and contrariness as much as harmony.