#john barton

Just something that made me laugh while watching the first episode of 'Playing Shakespeare' (RSC, 1984) as part of this week's assignment for my MA course.

...Not until Icke became an undergraduate, at Cambridge, did his engagement with Shakespeare intensify. He began one-on-one tutorials with Anne Barton, the influential critic and scholar, who by then was in her seventies and teaching only a handful of students. “I used to go to her once a week, and write an essay, and argue about text and so on,” Icke told me. Barton was married to John Barton, a founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Icke developed relationships with both Bartons that endured long past his time as a student. Anne Barton died in 2013. At her memorial, Icke recalled, “a lot of people said they had had the same experience—that Anne kind of took them under her wing, and took their brain out of their head, and made it smarter, then gave it back.”

Among the plays he and Barton discussed was “Hamlet.” Barton, he learned, was impatient with the character of Ophelia: in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the play, she called Ophelia “naïve, passive and dependent.” Icke told me, “We talked about ‘Why isn’t Ophelia’s story moving? Why do you never care? Why do you never follow that story—and why is it never clear why she’s mad?’ I always feel like Ophelia is sidelined in productions, and even in the text.” Icke proposed a dramaturgical solution, arguing that the play would work much better if two early scenes were transposed, and Polonius and his two children—Laertes and Ophelia—were introduced before Hamlet is told by his friend Horatio of the sighting of his father’s spirit. “I always felt that you were getting Part Two of the more important story before you were getting Part One of the less important story, and that made the less important story feel genuinely irrelevant,” Icke explained. “It was always, like, ‘That guy’s going to see a ghost! And, by the way, here’s some advice about your trip to France.’ And you think, I don’t care about that—there’s a ghost!”

Jeremy Irons leads for the men in a performance of marvellous bravura, a pirate king let loose to buckle his swash through streets where public sign-boards announce the availability and price of the most famous local courtesan, played in fiery temper by Sinéad Cusack in what promises to be one the most powerful private and public double-acts of the classical stage in the next few years.