There is a world elsewhere

Productions during the 2017 summer school

70th anniversary of the summer school
I’ve just finished attending the 70th anniversary of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Summer School. There are some attendees who remember seeing Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh perform in Stratford in Titus Andronicus in 1955. Four years later delegates saw a season including Paul Robeson in Othello, Charles Laughton in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Dame Edith Evans in both All’s Well That Ends Well and Coriolanus (the latter also with Olivier.) Imagine.

Faces of the RSC summer school 2017: Janet Suzman, Katy Stephens, Ray Fearon, Tony Byrne, Nia Gwynne, David Troughton, Erica Whyman, Chuk Iwuji, Dr Elizabeth Sandis, Miles Tandy, Penny Downie, Suzanne Burden, Michael Billington, Jacqui O'Hanlon, Dr Maria Evans, Matthew Tennyson, Prof Michael Dobson, Prof Russell Jackson, Gavin Fowler

31st anniversary for me….
My first summer school was in 1986, the year I married Sally, and the year The Swan theatre opened in Stratford-upon-Avon. I haven’t been every single year since then, but more years than not and, like with Shakespeare himself, there are surprises every year.

Roman season
This year it’s all about Ancient Rome. So all four of Shakespeare’s Roman plays are being staged: Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus at the moment and  Coriolanus later in the year. There is a spoof new play based on Plautus by Phil Porter, charmingly titled Vice Versa (or the Decline and Fall of General Braggadocio at the hands of his canny servant Dexter and Terence the Monkey) which can only be described as the love child of Carry On – Up Pompeii – Panto On Weed. Sitting between these offerings was a gay-focused version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé with a male actor in the role of the dancing princess.

Decapitations, songs, stabbings, dances, neck-breakings, love scenes….
They say variety is the spice of life and the theatrical sights veered between grisly shocks and tender vignettes. All of the productions offered a new angle or fresh perspective on the characters or themes. Over it all soared the language of Shakespeare and Wilde (and the thumping doggerel of Phil Porter, acting like a satyr dance or bergomask to the season.) During the day lectures by people like the rigorous Dame Janet Suzman and the visionary Erica Whyman commented on the season, the plays, the RSC and the state of theatre and the world in 2017. As Coriolanus himself says, “There is a world elsewhere….” There were no overt attempts to make the plays relevant to today’s political upheavals but it was impossible to ignore the parallels and hear echoes of our current world. As Ben Jonson wrote in the First Folio,

“Soul of the Age!....
He was not of an age, but for all time!”

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Exhibition

All time and all places
As if to underline the Shakespeare Everywhere theme, a new exhibition at The Birthplace explores active involvement in Shakespeare in a group of Asian countries. To some Shakespeare is all about the overthrow of tyrants; to some he is the epitome of justice and mercy; to others he is the key to unlocking the freedom of the imagination and creativity. He is, to me, all these things and many more – a body of work, a fascinating point in history, an explosion of language and dramatic situations.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

Shakespeare Imagery: to Bard or not to Bard....

Wuthering Heights

Images from Andrea Arnold's 2011 film with Solomon Glave and James Howson as Heathcliff and Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario as Catherine

It’s NOT ONLY about Heathcliff and Cathy….

Having blogged about Emily Brontë’s life (here) and my favourite Emily poem (here) I can’t stop myself blogging a few thoughts on Wuthering Heights. I’ve read it for pleasure three times in my life (so far) and taught it to A Level classes twice. Each time I plummet into its amoral freakery I learn something new, though what struck me when I first read it is that the novel’s heart lies in the character arcs of Hareton and young Cathy and I’ve never changed my mind about that. Most dramatisations fall short by focusing on the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff and diminishing all else; whereas, I think, Emily Brontë has a more profound story to tell about young people yearning to make the world a better place. Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley, Frances, Edgar and Isabella represent an old-fashioned world of primitive attitudes and Hareton and Cathy are the next generation, redeemed and able to break free from the sins and weaknesses of their parents. Linton is a necessary (and eventually welcome!) sacrifice that enables the promise of peace to reign.

Breaking free from the sins of the previous generation....

Storm and Calm

Some critics interpret the book as portraying the oppositional forces of storm and calm as represented by the two houses of the Earnshaws and Lintons: Wuthering Heights versus Thrushcross Grange. But careful reading reveals an underlying primitive beauty in the descriptions of the physical objects at the remote farm and a disturbingly aggressive tension at the posh house.
Contrasts
Contrasts do riddle the narrative: young and old, children and parents, female and male, powerful and weak, outdoor and indoor, tenderness and savagery, wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, love and hate – all these contrasts play alongside and amongst the calm and storm.
Symbols
And symbols also play a subconscious role in worming into the reader’s imagination: doors and windows, plants and rocks, the elements (air, earth, fire and water), nature and weather, landscapes and horizons, the flesh and the spirit, the living and the dead, dreams and the supernatural. Like all great novels, no single interpretation is possible because Wuthering Heights has a bottomless pit of variables depending on the reader’s context.

Can it be categorised?

People who have only seen the 1939 William Wyler film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as Heathcliff and Catherine think the novel is a Romance. Readers know different. The explicit violence and unbearable cruelty are more extreme than you would expect in a conventional romantic novel.

• Is Wuthering Heights therefore a novel of male revenge?
• Or a deeply-subversive feminist text about the futility of male revenge?
• A Marxist novel about the oppression of the rich?
• A Psychoanalytic novel about the battle between the id (Heathcliff), the ego (Catherine) and the superego (Edgar)?
• A Formalist novel where everything is taken at face value and everything happens because it happens because that’s how it is (and how it was written)?
• Or a Structuralist novel where the the patterns of repetition, destruction and resurrection are meant to be taken as a whole so Catherine’s dealings with Heathcliff and Edgar are meant to be seen in relation to young Cathy’s dealings with Linton and Hareton?
• Or is it all these things? Unique in itself? Like nothing else?
• Just a story, for heaven’s sake!?

A fop at sixes and sevens

The biggest surprise when reading the novel rather than watching a dramatisation are the two main narrators, both of whom are potentially biased and unreliable. In 1801, the foppish Lockwood arrives from the south to pay a call on his neighbour, Mr Heathcliff. Lockwood is instantly muddled, distressed and befuddled about who and what he finds at the lonely farmhouse on the moors and on a second snow-bound visit, horrifically, has a dream in which he confronts a ghost begging to be let in at a (broken) window.

And a gossiping housekeeper

Lockwood’s misunderstandings start to make sense when Mrs Ellen Dean the housekeeper at Thrushcross Grange begins to tell him a tale from about 30 years before when Mr Earnshaw, a previous owner of Wuthering Heights, returned from a trip to Liverpool with a young homeless boy, Heathcliff. Over the next two years (1801–1803) on his return visits to the area, Lockwood recounts more of the story, narrating what he learns from Mrs Dean, or Nelly as we come to know her, and also what he or Nelly learn from Isabella, Heathcliff, Zillah the maid, Dr Kenneth and young Cathy. As a reader we start the story as confused as Lockwood and the questions he asks help us become drawn into the tangled web.

Bold narrative device
It is a story of three generations living in two houses in a small geographical part of Yorkshire. Nelly’s narration eventually dominates our minds almost to the point of forgetting that Lockwood exists and even Nelly sometimes seems to become invisible as the semi-mythic characters take on their own monstrous lives. The narrative structure is audacious, original for its time and, in my opinion, quite quite brilliant.

Questions abound

• How much of the violence and drunkenness in the novel had Emily Brontë witnessed in life?
• Was Emily Brontë imagining Tabitha Aykroyd (Tabby), a servant who stayed at the Haworth Parsonage for the best part of 31 years, when she created Nelly Dean?
• Do we believe everything Lockwood and Nelly tell us?
• Was Heathcliff based on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” poet, Lord Byron?
• Is Heathcliff more sinned against than sinning?
• Why does Hindley resent Heathcliff so much?
• Why is Edgar attracted to Catherine, rather than to a more “peaceful” personality?
• Why does Isabella fall for Heathcliff, given what she knows about him?
• How much sympathy should the reader have with Catherine?
• With Heathcliff? Isabella? Edgar? Hindley? Frances?
• With Linton? Young Cathy? Hareton?

How Byronic is Heathcliff? Devil or Hero? Abuser or victim of abuse?

Shakespeare’s King Lear and Wuthering Heights

Given that Lockwood specifically compares himself to King Lear being imprisoned and maltreated by servants, I’ve wondered how aware Emily Brontë was of the parallels between her novel and Shakespeare’s grim tragedy:

• the sudden and brutal acts of violence
• the familial jealousy
• the accelerating onset of behaviour that could be perceived as insane
• the suffering of a character named Edgar
• the wild landscape of the heath/moors
• the geographical movement between contrasting houses
• neither Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights nor Edmund in King Lear are accepted as fully-fledged members of their adoptive families and wreak havoc in the stories

Whatever Emily Brontë consciously thought she was creating in writing Wuthering Heights there is no doubt that it has “stood the test of time” and the main characters and their wild setting are imprinted in the common cultural knowledge, not least because of Kate Bush’s famous song. It is 170 years since Wuthering Heights first hit the bookshelves of the UK – and I expect it will be around for a great deal longer.

A text open to interpretation: images from 1939 and 2011 movies

Now I am in a holiday humour

Sally, Emily, Alex, Janet, Harriet and Michael, the Shakespeare Birthday Boy, in Autumn

Elton Old Hall

Soft padded luxury beds, piping hot showers, stairs, levels, space to spread, a bright conservatory and a walled garden – these were some of the treats at Elton Old Hall where we went to celebrate Michael’s birthday. Michael is my “Shakespeare buddy” and the man with whom I can be a Royal Shakespeare Company nerd without irony or embarrassment. We met in 1986 (soon after I married Sally) on the RSC summer school in Stratford-upon-Avon, the year The Swan theatre opened and we’ve seen just about every RSC production since then (and, separately, a fair few before that year too.)

Michael, Harriet, Tony, Sally, Alex, Joyce, Emily and the two Shakespeare "anoraks," me with Michael

Then and Now

Back in 1986 Michael and I were young whippersnappers on the Summer School, mixing with venerable folk who had seen Paul Robeson, Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh on the RSC stage. Now, in the approaching Autumn of our lives, we are the venerable ones who witnessed Niamh Cusack and Sean Bean as a “teenage” Romeo and Juliet….

Bright conservatory, atmospheric dining kitchen....

Surprise! Surprise!

All the guests had done a sterling job of managing to keep various elements of the weekend secret from Michael, but of course Shakespeare featured heavily in terms of a cake, some games and puns on the menu based on Michael’s favourite play, As You Like It. It has to be said we ate like medieval monarchs on gorgeously-decorated tables.

Haddon Hall

We also made a memorable visit to Haddon Hall on the Sunday. Haddon Hall is still a family home to Lord Edward Manners but the public areas are sympathetically restored and curated by enthusiastic guides. Haddon is a medieval/Jacobean house with brilliantly-preserved 14th century kitchens, working log fires and chimneys, ancient tapestries and wood carvings, a Banqueting Hall with a minstrel’s gallery, an inspiring Long Gallery, a Great Chamber with a Renaissance frieze and intricate plasterwork ceilings.

I think the big picture here looks like Haddon: the TV series coming soon to BBC

Boar and Peacock

Crossing the River Wye to get into the amazingly preserved courtyard, you have to pass topiary in the form of a boar and a peacock, two symbols that keep recurring through the house on furniture, plasterwork and ironwork. A wall section built towards the end of the 12th century is on display (King John’s Wall) and you can also see the interior of a chapel with a Norman stone font, 16th century oak pews and extraordinary frescoes of St Christopher, skeletons and St Nicholas calming the storm.

These trees shall be my books

Michael’s birthday, like mine, is in the Autumn season so I always associate the reds, golds and browns of Autumn with regeneration and renewal – a starting again of another year. New Year is of course New Year and Spring is Spring and both times contain Rebirth and Beginning concepts – but, in my imagination, Autumn also has a sense of Fresh Dawn because I was born then – and yes, I know the leaves are falling and the trees are dying – but the trees will grow again. Winter is coming….so is Spring….so is Summer….and so to next Autumn when Michael and I will be another year older….

The original box set

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown....

Snappy titles
I am frequently astonished when I contemplate the scale of the sequence of Shakespeare’s history plays. If Shakespeare had been writing today, the credits would have probably had to include “based on Holinshed’s Chronicles with ideas from Edward Halle and Samuel Daniel” with Henry VI Part One (the third written) probably having to admit – “adapted from a play by Thomas Nashe.” The scholarly best-guess is that the first to be written was Henry IV Part Two AKA “The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jack Cade: and the Duke of Yorke's first claim unto the crowne” – a snappy title if ever there was one.

Sequels and prequels
This roaring success was followed by the sequel with another memorable title: “The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henrie the Sixt, with the Whole Contention betweene the two Houses, Lancaster and Yorke.” (PS Shakespeare couldn’t spell for toffee, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere.) A collaboration with (or adaptation of) Thomas Nashe's earlier material then rushed in the PREQUEL to this pair of plays in order to cash in on the popularity of the first two. The First Part Of Henry The Sixth appeared and the earlier-written plays were then re-titled Henry VI Part Two and Henry VI Part Three. This sequence of three plays became the first entertainment franchise since Ancient Greek times, topped off with a quadrilogy when Richard III roared onto the stage. Richard III was Shakespeare’s breakthrough work, popular immediately and increasingly popular all the way through to the present time.

“that bottled spider… that poisonous bunchback’d toad”

Four famous Richard IIIs: Ian McKellen, Antony Sher, Simon Russell Beale and Jonjo O'Neill

Mind-boggling!
Four plays, twelve hours of stage entertainment recreating the Wars of the Roses in a series of blistering set-pieces, comic interludes, heartbreaking anti-war speeches alongside patriotic calls to arms. It shows a whole nation. Some scenes are set in France. It presents Joan of Arc, Jack Cade, Margaret of Anjou, Richard Duke of York, Richard Duke of Gloucester, Warwick the Kingmaker, Suffolk, the saintly Henry VI, the charismatic Edward IV, the pitiful Edward V…. characters that come to vivid life whenever the plays are staged even metaphorical characters like A Son that has Killed his Father and A Father that has Killed his Son echoing each other in their grief and anguish at the horrors of civil war.

Memorable moments: Katy Stephens as Joan of Arc and, later, as Margaret of Anjou

Four successes; why not four prequels?
Not content with a quadrilogy, Shakespeare then went on to write four even more successful plays. In historical terms, these prequels led up to the events of the Wars of the Roses, starting with the lyrical Richard II, continuing with the sweep and grandeur of Henry IV Parts One and Two and the play that WInston Churchill and Laurence Olivier purloined for the British efforts in the Second World War, Henry V and the point at which Henry VI Part One takes off and the two quadrilogies become an octology. Characters have teemed from this second quadilogy into the national subconscious: Northumberland, Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt, Hal, Falstaff, Mistress Quickly, Poins, Bardolph, Hotspur, Glendower, Lady Percy, Pistol, Silence, Shallow, Fluellen, the Dauphin and Princess/Queen Katherine – not to mention the three very different titular kings.

A state of the nation series of plays
At the end of Richard III, Queen Elizabeth I’s grandfather is crowned saviour of the realm (a propagandist portrayal to flatter the queen and slander the Yorkist line.) Through the eight plays we see the rise and fall of great figures in history, both men and women; we see the disorder and chaos of a country in the throes of a civil war; we see the lurch from medieval to modern times; we see what it means to be a strong leader and a weak leader; we see murders, plots, secrets, betrayals, invasions, sieges, riots, miracles, political scheming, religious hypocrisy, family loyalty and family tragedy, the burden of power, the abuse of power; we see virtues and vices, reasons to be patriotic and reasons to attack your government.

Not-so-long-ago
The Wars of the Roses, the underlying political tension in eight of Shakespeare’s English history plays, was as far removed from the English citizens during Shakespeare’s time as the Boer War is from us.  Richard III died in 1485 and the plays were written between 1590 and 1601.  The way we perceive the late Victorian and Edwardian period is how the original audiences would have thought and felt about the events that were being portrayed at the jam-packed outdoor playhouses. At the premieres of these plays there would have been people whose grandparents had lived through (or indeed been killed) in the convulsive events depicted on stage. The nearest equivalent to their cultural spirit in modern times, to my knowledge, is Rona Munro’s glorious James Plays first shown at the Edinburgh Festival in 2014.