Last weekend me and my good friend and theatre pal Mariana set out to enjoy our intermitted dose of theatre productions, this time at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Accumulating as much culture as possible we had planned to fit two plays and one museum visit into our day and decided to go and see Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in the afternoon before coming back in the evening to see Brecht’s A Life of Galileo.
As this might turn into a lengthy post about what I do and don’t love in theatre plays and productions let me just say now: if you happen to have the spare cash you should go and see Bertolt Brecht’s A Life of Galileo at the RSC. The production only runs until the end of March this year, which is a shame, because it’s fantastic.
I was very excited to see a Brecht play in a translated version and was wondering about the production’s approach in terms of Brecht’s epic theatre techniques which are quite at odds with the on-stage realism that inhabited a lot of the plays I have recently seen.
Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo is a brilliant play about science, reasoning, responsibility and ideologies. It is based on the historic events around the discovery of the ‘Medicean Stars’ – the orbiting moons of Jupiter – by Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei.
Galilei’s discovery contradicted the idea that the earth (and mankind) is the centre of the universe - a model supported by the bible and the Catholic Church.
The play and consequently the production focus on the rift between established beliefs and ever discovering science, while taking a closer look at the socio-political responsibilities of the individual.
The RSC production was brilliant, it was witty, informative and engaging, the acting was fantastic and even though it was a great ensemble piece, Ian McDiarmid in the lead was simply marvellous. The anarchic short introductions of the scenes were a great nod to epic theatre and I loved the reduced set design, which focussed on measuring devices and scaffolds.
Seeing the production was very inspiring and I am really looking forward to seeing more productions by Roxana Silbert and her creative team.
I also want to write down a few impressions about The Winter’s Tale, the RSC production of Shakespeare’s play we saw on the same day.
What struck me with the production of Winter’s Tale was its lavish features; a great variety of costumes, an elaborately moving set, back projections and an audience of bystanding cast members in almost every scene. Yet I couldn’t quite make out what point the production was trying to make amidst all these effects. This way I was left with a conglomerate of styles, moods and effects which were partly distracting and partly patronising and which kept me from engaging with any of the characters’ strives and struggles.
I think Mariana put it in words really well when she said that it’s easy to make Shakespeare a difficult watch. In the end it might just come down to being a foreigner-thing, i.e. the eternal grappling with the Shakespearean tongue, but the focus on delivering original Shakespearean texts on stage seems to be so great that sometimes the rest feels a bit discarded.
As a non-native speaker watching Shakespeare is always a bit more of an effort than watching a contemporary play or a modern translation, so the effort might have taken its toll on our engagement with the play, but using old English doesn’t need to automatically go together with a traditionalist approach. We have seen many brilliant Shakespeare productions at the RSC which were an exciting watch such as Conall Morrison’s Taming of the Shrew, Neil Bartlett’s Romeo and Juliet and – more recently – Rupert Goold’s Merchant of Venice.
Mariana has also written a blog post about her impressions – it’s a bit more concise and to the point than my ramblings, check it out here: marianamota.com
PS … I’ve always been fascinated with how the question of languages and translations impact on plays and their productions. There is a variety of translations, i.e. text versions of Shakespeare plays available in Germany (to the horror of Shakespeare purists, I am sure) each somehow reflecting the period they have been made in.
If you speak more than one language you will know how big an impact the choice between two very similar words in a translation can have; from changing the subtle tone of a sentence to shifting the actual meaning of it, whether it be how modern or dated or how friendly or stringent it feels.
Add that to the interpretation of the text by the actor and the focus of the overall production and you can get a great variety in productions and it is fascinating how watching a well known play for the umpteenth time can still surprise and grip you. That’s what I love about theatre – the ability to take a text you know very well and still make it seem different every time you watch it.
In the danger of repeating myself I’d like to stress how important and inspiring it is to watch a live performance, no matter which creative medium you are using yourself to tell stories and bring characters alive, it might - to your surprise - actually inform your own creative work.
