I teach Shakespeare at Butler University. Every summer I take some of our students to the UK to see performances of the plays. We spend two weeks in London, home of Shakespeare’s Globe and a host of other theatres, and in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace and home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In our two weeks we see six performances by the very best of British theatre talent. Not all of the shows are perfect, not all of them match the performance in my head, but all of them make the plays work for the audience.
I have a performance in my head only because I have been doing this for 23 years now and I have a sense of the role performance plays in making a play come alive. Directors experiment all the time—to get the play to move us. Last year I saw an Antony and Cleopatra done in—modern dress! To hear Caesar and Antony talking about the fate of Rome in business suits—what is going on? And it worked for me—power politics then and now—pretty much the same. It was not really jarring to hear two men seek dominance over one another dressed in one age and living in another. I don’t quite mean that Shakespeare’s issues are timeless (true enough!), but that a director’s choice to make a fresh impact on the audience—did just that.
One more example of the value of performance. It was an actor (I forget his name) who made me understand this moment in Macbeth. Late in the play Lady Macbeth dies and word is brought to Macbeth. His reaction is one the famous moments in all of Shakespeare:
She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
What the actor did was pause after line two here, stare off for a moment, and then do the famous tomorrow bit. Macbeth has caught himself thinking that everything will be all right—soon. Maybe one more crisis and I will have time to think about her death. I have been promising myself that next week, next month, next year, things will be fine and I can rule with the greatness I know that I have in me. But it hasn’t happened and it won’t—damn tomorrow! My wife is gone and I myself wish to die: “Out, out, brief candle!” The moment made absolute sense to me—thanks to seeing it done right.
An escorted tour of London, the Cotswolds, Stratford, Oxford, Bath and Stonehenge starts May 15. We'll see 4 Shakespeare Plays at the Globe and in Stratford. There are 9 or 10 great gardens on our tour, AND the Chelsea Flower Show (included).
