Alfred Hitchcock designed the plot of Psycho so that its audience would be lead “completely up the garden path”. The first third of the film concerns itself with Marion Crane, a young woman having a passionate affair with a debt- ridden divorcé. After a lunchtime tryst in a seedy hotel, she acts upon a rash impulse to steal $40, 000 and flees responsibility in the hope that a new life in a new town will see old problems receding into the distance. Hitchcock’s voyeuristic camera and Bernard Hermann’s racing score concern themselves solely with Marion’s anxiety and paranoia for some 45 minutes; until she is killed, that is, and we realise that Marion and the stolen money are of no further significance to Psycho. Marion’s story eases us into a familiar cinematic landscape of suspense, romance and drama, but just as we’re comfortably in the genre, Hitchcock tears away our preconceptions as suddenly as Norman Bates tears away the shower curtain behind the screaming Marion, and we are plunged into the world’s first “slasher” horror film.
Those who are familiar with David Vann’s two previous works of fiction (the short story collection, Legend of a Suicide and the novel, Caribou Island) will regard his new novel, Dirt, as a comparable experience of initial curiosity and investment betrayed by a swift rug-pulling trick that leaves them in startled, page-turning bewilderment. For starters, the setting of this new novel is so unlike those of Vann’s prior efforts. Both Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island were cast in the bleak, frozen desolation of Alaskan winters, but the events of Dirt play out amid the fig trees and unripe walnuts of an idyllic Californian orchard at the height of summer, its “heat pressing down, flattening the earth.” While Legend of a Suicide explores the minutiae of a father’s relationship with his son, Dirt has a conspicuous absence of male characters save its protagonist, a 22-year-old misfit named Galen. Where Caribou Island focuses on the furtive obsessions and craven compromises of middle-age, Dirt examines the violent yearning, the pain and strength of youth. Most significant of all, perhaps, is that Dirt appears at first to have none of the imposing, glacial portentousness of Vann’s other books. Indeed, its first pages are lighthearted and jocular by comparison. There are even – gasp – jokes in them from time to time.
From the first few chapters, it seems as if Vann has lost interest in the private hell of America’s fringe dwellers and decided that it might be more fun to write about a comically dysfunctional – but otherwise completely normal – suburban family. Set in 1985, Dirt begins by focusing on Galen’s frustration at the proximity he endures to his mercurial mother and relatives while waiting for independent adult life to begin. It could be said that the characters’ emotional dependence and social isolation are a twinge unusual, but the arguments they have and the desires they express are commonplace enough that Vann successfully obscures his stranger touches for much of the book. Subtle reference is made to Galen’s absent father, his abusive grandfather and mentally- ill grandmother, but his regard for the circumstances of his life is characterised by an indifference that we initially share: nothing is more boring or normal to a “tween” than his own family. Vann amuses us by poking fun at Galen’s New Age belief in transcendence (upon losing his virginity, he tells the lucky girl that his crown chakra is “totally open”), but this too acts as a distraction from the darker, weirder aspects of the novel that erupt onto its surface as we reach the centre, at which Galen and his family endure a dreadfully claustrophobic and recriminatory holiday in a rural cabin.
Upon arriving back home, it becomes clear that something is very wrong with Galen’s mother. Tensions that ran below the surface of family interactions prior to the holiday have now forced their way into the open and have shaken her fragile psychology to the extent that her grasp on reality is now warped or etiolated. The reader will anticipate a confrontation-of-sorts at this point, but what Vann delivers in the last third of the novel is an incremental descent into madness and horror so intense and strange that everything preceding it is all but forgotten. As is the case with Psycho, events prior to the turning point are eclipsed by what occurs after. Vann has said of the novel’s climax that, “It’s very traditional tragedy, from the Greeks, focusing on a primary relationship (in this case a mother and son) put under pressure until the characters break and are revealed.” The comparison is apt: like Creon and Antigone, Galen and his mother come to embody two antithetical value systems or moral/ethical axioms that clash and cannot be compromised nor reconciled. Their conflict is what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object: both, we must assume, are destroyed.
There are suggestions at the novel’s end that, in an older fictional universe, Galen could emerge as a kind of victor or hero, one who has survived a trial by fire and is stronger, wiser and richer for it. In the more familiar and realistic landscape of late-twentieth- century California, however, this cannot be the case. Although he is alive at the end of Dirt, too much psychological damage has been wrought on Galen to render him anything but a broken man. Like most young people who realise that their childhood has ended but who have no idea where and how adult life should begin, Galen spends much of the book feeling lost and inadequate, and hating himself for it. Whereas a parent should be able to ease this condition in their child, re-assuring them that adulthood is always an uncertain and continuous process of growth, Galen’s mother confirms and exacerbates all of Galen’s worst fears about himself. Her fragility drives him to a miserable hysteria from which there is no going back. Like Norman Bates, Galen is destroyed by his mother, or rather by the sadomasochistic relationship he has with his mother. Vann, like Hitchcock before him, makes it is business to show us how a relationship like this works its damage, and he fascinates us with a compelling and utterly believable portrait of individuals in extremis.
When you write a lot of book reviews, it’s easy to get into bad habits. You have a deadline, and so you usually need to read quickly, scanning the pages with half your brain while the other half develops potential hooks that will bait the reader and allow the review to write itself, more or less. This makes the reviewer’s job easy, but there’s always a degree of post-submission guilt: the recognition that, while you did a decent, workman-like job of your review, you didn’t really do the book justice. You were only thinking about the job at hand. You could have read more carefully and sensitively; thought harder about book’s content and the author’s talents; been more honest and less glib.
Once in a while, though, a book arrives that will demand your full attention and require your best critical prose, either because it’s so well-written itself or because it asks such probing questions that you have no choice but to draw the blinds and consider their impact on the way you live, think and feel. Geoff Dyer’s new book, Zona, fulfills both these criteria. Dyer’s writing is enviably paradoxical: intimate, jocular and completely unpretentious, yet clearly considered and surgically precise. Zonais a very quick read, and gives the impression of having been written just as quickly, but its balance and structure suggest that a great deal of time and thought belies the effect of immediacy. It’s exactly the way you’d write, if you could. It asks so many probing questions of itself, of its author and of you too that you’ll close its covers feeling as though you’ve developed a new appreciation for great art and a renewed desire to communicate that appreciation in ways that match the efforts of the artist.
How am I doing so far? Perhaps I should tell you what Zonais actually about. Dyer calls it “a book about a film about a journey to a room”, and in the simplest, most blunt way, he’s right. Zonais essentially an analysis-cum-meditation-cum-tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker. Having never heard of the film before reading Dyer’s book, I did some Googling as I was reading. It turns out that a recent British Film Institute poll of its members’ top movies placed Stalkersecond only to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. It boasts a rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, a website that collates critical reviews of films and allocates an average score. So much for what cinephiles think of it. What happens in the film? Is it interesting? The essence of the thing can be expressed as simply as that of Dyer’s book: Stalkeris a film about a guide (the Stalker) taking two people (Writer and Professor) into a forbidden area called the Zone, at the heart of which is the Room, a place where your deepest wish will come true.
Why write a whole book about so straightforward a film? For Dyer, it is this very simplicity that gives the film a fathomless resonance. He examines it at a number of macro and micro levels, reading whole histories and cultural hegemonies in a character’s glace and admitting to the most intimate, personal resonances stimulated by Tarkovsky’s most audaciously sweeping cinematic gestures. Dyer uses both the content of Stalkerand his relationship with it to investigate how great works of art can inspire our finest moments and, at the same time, expose our worst flaws. This can take the form of, say, an eight-page complaint about how so few of today’s “2.0” people can be bothered with a long, slow Russian film, regardless of how celebrated it is; it can also be an attempt to argue that one 3-minute sequence is so good that it “redeems, makes up for, every pointless but of gore, every wasted special effect, all the stupidity in every film before or since.”
It’s clear from Dyer’s book that there’s enough in Stalker to elevate it to the status of great cinema, perhaps even great art. Is that enough to justify Dyer’s book, however? Is it a redundant exercise to write 217 pages explaining why the film is so good? Can’t we just watch it? Towards the end of Zona, Dyer anticipates this criticism and defends himself persuasively: “So what kind of writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film? Especially since there are few things I hate more than when someone, in an attempt to persuade me to see a film, starts summarizingit, explaining the plot, thereby destroying any chance of my ever going to see it. In my defence I would say that Stalkeris a film that can be summarized in about two sentences. So if summary means reducing to a synopsis, then this is the opposite of a summary; it’s an amplification and expansion.” To amplify and expand on aspects of a work of art is a neat definition of the critic’s job, and if whole libraries of books can be devoted to, say, Hamlet, then why not one to Stalker? It’s easy for me to say that criticism performs a valuable function seeing as that’s what I’m engaged in as I write these words, but I think even the most cynical of you would admit that Zona has done its job given that I, the reader, am now eager to sit down and watch Stalkerfor the first time. In fact, I took a break from typing a paragraph ago in order to place the DVD on my Amazon wishlist. Now I just have to wait for the Canberra Timesto pay me for this review…
One of the most recurrently annoying questions to beleaguer Shakespeare scholars is, “Did he really write all those plays, or is there some sort of Shakespeare conspiracy?” Large-scale interest in the authorship question has tended to rise and fall, but it is high at the moment due to an invidious little film that calls itself Anonymous. The film puts forward a tired old argument that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real and secret author of all those works normally attributed to William Shakespeare. It’s extraordinary that this argument still has any currency given that de Vere died in June 1604 and new Shakespeare plays with clear references to events after that date continued being premiered right up until 1613. As I watched the eminent Shakespearean Stanley Wells on British television recently, stating with some exasperation the clear and obvious reasons why Shakespeare really was the author of those plays and poems that bear his name, it seemed to me that he must feel like Hamlet in that most famous of speeches: if “the whips and scorns of time” seems too melodramatic a phrase to describe the paltry efforts of conspiracy theorists when they are hurled at real scholars, then at least “the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes” is something that Wells knows all about.
Those who claim that Shakespeare’s plays and poems were written by Edward de Vere, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe, or Elizabeth I, are sometimes fond of claiming that academics are afraid to debate them on the authorship question for fear of having the great conspiracy revealed. There’s too much at stake, it is argued. University professors and theatre directors would lose their livelihood. Nothing could be further from the truth: were any real evidence ever dragged to light proving that someone other than Shakespeare wrote all his works, I can only imagine a surge of interest – and indeed money – going into the study of early modern literature. We’d want to know as much about it as possible. Academics have nothing to gain by “protecting” Shakespeare’s name; they merely get exasperated when the authorship question obscures interest in the plays and poems themselves. They feel that to spend all one’s time looking for clues as to who “really” wrote King Lear is to turn away from that masterpiece of dramatic poetry in favour of a vulgar curiosity.
There have been those who feel as though Shakespeare can’t fight his own battles and needs someone to protect his good name and his canon of literature, but such people are not academics, they are men like William Henry Ireland who, in 1794, forged a number of theatrical receipts, correspondence, diary entries and manuscripts of “lost” plays that he claimed to be the personal papers of William Shakespeare. It was not until the Drury Lane Theatre staged one of these plays, the impossibly-titled Rowena and Vortigern, that Ireland broke down and admitted he’d made the whole thing up. It is men like Ireland who the makers of Anonymous should really be working to expose: where conspiracy theorists blinker themselves from obvious truths, many of the Shakespeare-worshippers tell bald-faced lies.
It is likely the story of people like Ireland that inspired Arthur Phillips in his ingenious new novel, The Tragedy of Arthur (or, to give it its full title, The Tragedy of Arthur, King of Britain, As it hath beene divers times plaide by the right Honourable The Lord Chamberliane His Servants, Newly corrected and augmented by William Shakespeare). The book is in two parts, the second of which is a five-act, blank-verse play replete with Elizabethan diction and syntax. As an imitation of the Shakespearean idiom, the play bears a striking resemblance to Rowena and Vortigern: both deal with ancient British monarchs, and the plots (such as they are) are lifted from Shakespeare’s favorite historical source, Holinshed’s Chronicles (a book that formed the bases of Richard III, Henry V and the rest of Shakespeare’s history plays). Both forgeries blend military adventure, political maneuvering and romantic love. Looking at them in preparation for writing this, I would say that Phillips has the edge over Ireland in his imitation of Shakespeare’s verbal idiosyncrasies: he pads out certain lines in order to fit the iambic pentameter, he contracts others for the opposite reason, and he demonstrates a taste for difficult, sometimes made-up, words. He displays many of the same tricks as Shakespeare, in other words, but his play is an obvious forgery to anyone with a keen eye and a sensitive ear: none of the quiddy, the animus, the genius of Shakespeare is there. Genius is something that cannot be forged, as the audience who attended the premiere of Rowena and Vortigern were quick to realise. Phillips understands this too: he doesn’t really try to pass The Tragedy of Arthur of as the work of Shakespeare, but uses the pretense of doing so as a means to explore the motives of those who commit such forgeries and those who are taken in by them.
The Tragedy of Arthur fills out 111 of the novel’s 368 pages; the rest are given over to a lengthy, highly personal introduction to the play that is ostensibly written in Phillip’s own person. The main point of this introduction is to tell the story of Phillip’s fictionalized father, also called Arthur and, reading between the introduction’s lines, the “real” forger of the play that makes up the second half of the book. Phillips parens, we are told, spent the greater part of his adult life in prison for a succession of other, less successful frauds (everything from fake grocery coupons to meticulous imitations of paintings by the grand masters). Phillips filis suggests that such a father was responsible for his dangerously unstable childhood and his damaged adult psychology: a failed marriage, a stormy relationship with a sister and her lesbian lover (whom he seduces), everything regrettable in Phillips’s life is tied to his ambivalent relationship with his father and is recognised as evidence of the various methods of deception that father and son share. Even Phillips’s talents as a novelist, we are told, are those of the trickster, the forger, the liar who manages to convince you that something he made up has really happened. This particular novel, a fictionalized memoir posing as an introduction to a forged play that is itself attributed to another forger, is the grandest instance of this penchant for deception. Like the works of other masters of the novel-as-puzzle (I’m thinking of Vladimir Nabokov here), The Tragedy of Arthur should be celebrated as the frustrating, impossible, beautiful and ingenious game that it is.
Without stating any of them explicitly, The Tragedy of Arthur also raises a number of intriguing questions related to Shakespeare, the “authorship” question and the nature of what we now call “intellectual property.” If we’re talking about those who’ve stolen from Shakespeare or vaingloriously attributed their own paltry efforts to him, it’s worth pointing out that Shakespeare himself was an avid stealer of others’ work. As mentioned, he plundered Holinshed’s chronicles for his history plays, but he often lifted whole plots, characters and speeches directly from his well-thumbed library. Read Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Michel de Montaigne’s Essais and you get the strange feeling that Shakespeare is in the background somewhere. It’s the opposite that’s true, of course: Ovid and Montaigne sound like Shakespeare because Shakespeare was imitating them. If he were alive today, the immortal bard would be drowning under a tide of copyright lawsuits. In late Elizabethan England, however, taking something from another writer was seen more as a tribute, a recognition of their insights and a demonstration of your desire to throw new light on something old. There are times when I wonder if this might be a healthier, more elastically creative approach to writing. Elizabethan England was, after all, one of the greatest periods of intellectual and literary accomplishment we’ve ever had.
As much as it raises interesting questions about how litigious and guarded we have become, The Tragedy of Arthur also warns us about how quick we can be to jump on particularly attractive and popular bandwagons, getting caught up in the excitement of something like the discovery of a “new” Shakespeare play. It teaches us not to lose our heads no matter how much our hearts might want something like The Tragedy of Arthur or Rowena and Vortigern to be the real thing. It is a lesson that the editors of the new Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works would do well to learn, boasting as they do of their inclusion of the “new” Shakespeare play, Double Falsehood. The play was actually written in 1727, over a hundred years after Shakespeare died, by the lawyer and amateur poet-dramatist, Lewis Theobald. The Arden editors include it in their new Complete Works because there are debatable reasons for believing it to be loosely based on a lost play called Cardenio, a play thought to have been co-authored by Shakespeare and his late-career collaborator, John Fletcher.
The connection between Shakespeare and Double Falsehood, then, is a tenuous one, about as strong as that between Shakespeare and the filmmakers of Ten Things I Hate About You (a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew). As reviewers pointed out when the play was staged, there is little of the Shakespearean magic in it. The overworn plot is the stuff of bad opera: the wicked Henrique, younger son of the Duke Angelo, lustily pursues the virginal Leonara, the daughter of his friend, and simultaneously pursues and rapes a servant-girl named Violante – hence the “double falsehood” of the play’s title. It’s possible, I suppose, that Shakespeare’s quill animated lines like, “Pleasure is too strong for reason’s curb / And Conscience sinks o’er-power’d with Beauty’s sweets,” but these are rare moments of competence in an otherwise unremarkable effort. There is some small fun to be had wondering whether all the lines are Theobald’s or whether some vestigial Shakespeare-Fletcher couplets remain, but there is no escaping the fact that this is a bad play, whoever wrote it, just as Hamlet is a masterpiece, regardless of whether it was written by Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere or Dan Brown.
In a society where the same painting can be worth a couple of thousand dollars or several million, depending on whose hand made the brushstrokes, and one play can be ignored or celebrated according to the strength of its connection to a famous name, I think it is important to remember what David Hume said of art in his wise and sober essay, Of the Standard of Taste: our attention should always be to the art itself, not the hand that created it; and the only real test of a work’s greatness is time: when plays have been performed and read as long as the best of Shakespeare’s, we can be assured of their value and continued relevancy.
As the development of the K-to-12 Australian Curriculum continues apace, one of the most contentious issues has been the how, why and where of introducing students to the Shakespearean canon. There are, of course, those who consider Shakespeare’s plays and poems cultural treasures that we have a duty to display before children at regular intervals, but there appears to be an increasingly vocal minority who think otherwise. No longer cowed by the “bardolatrous” veneration our culture has for literature’s greatest god, such individuals argue that the 400-year-old language is too arcane and inaccessible, the weighty moral and philosophical concepts too knotty and daunting and the plots and characters too distant and unrelatable for students to develop an interest in them. In staffrooms, journals, newspapers and at conferences, the question seems to be, are Shakespeare’s plays still relevant?
When asked to explain the reasons for their unflagging enthusiasm for Shakespeare, actors and directors are often fond of quoting Hamlet’s advice to the players. It’s a curious speech in some ways, coming as it does just when the pace of the action is galloping (finally!). In a good production of Hamlet, the audience should be eager to see if the prince’s plan to expose Claudius’s guilt will work; the last thing they want is a long, unprompted meditation on what constitutes good theatre, but this is what Hamlet gives them: “The purpose of playing,” he says, “was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature. To show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” A well-performed play, in other words, has the effect of showing us who we really are, both in terms of our universal humanity and whatever it is that characterises the here and now in which it is performed. There are no plays better than those written by William Shakespeare, we are told, and so it follows that Shakespeare’s plays perform this function better than anyone else’s. So much for his irrelevance.
Can we point to specific examples, however, of where a play by Shakespeare has mirrored some universal human truth or reflected a cultural consciousness back at itself? Three new books on Shakespeare’s plays and their impact in Australia aim, in different ways, to do just that. The King and I, by Philippa Kelly, explores the author’s personal relationship with King Lear: how it has echoed the family romance of her upbringing and the challenges of adult life. Her book also suggests that events in Shakespeare’s tragedy have, at times, proved analogous to some of the formative experiences of Australia’s national identity. Ours As We Play It: Australia Plays Shakespeare, by Kate Flaherty,looks at specific productions of Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of Performance Studies, a fledgling discipline that draws on other fields of inquiry in order to achieve a total appreciation for what happens when a performance of any kind takes place. Flaherty argues that the “meaning” of, say, Hamlet is not something proscribed by the text but something negotiated between the actors and the audience each time a performance takes place. If this performance of Hamlet occurs on a stage in Canberra, then, it can be said to belong to Canberrans and to concern us more than Shakespeare’s legacy or the heritage of English literature. Last, John Bell’s On Shakespeareoffers its readers the accrued wisdom of over 40 years’ experience acting in and directing productions of Shakespeare’s plays. It is at once the most personal and the most general of the three books under consideration here: it seeks to explain why its author has been so captivated by one playwright’s work and so driven to share that work with others; it also summarises extant knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and those of his colleagues, and it introduces key aspects of the Elizabethan theatrical context for those who don’t know them already.
Philippa Kelly’s The King and Iis published as part of a series of books given the collective title, Shakespeare Now! The noble aim of these works is, in the words of general editors Simon Palfrey and Ewan Fernie, “to bridge two yawning gaps in current public discourse. First, the gap between scholarly thinking and a public audience: the assumption of academics that they cannot speak to anyone but their peers unless they hopelessly dumb-down their work. Second, the gap between public audience and scholarly thinking: the assumption of regular playgoers, readers or indeed actors that academics write about the plays at a level of abstraction or specialisation that they cannot hope to understand.” Palfrey and Fernie are being charitable here: my four years’ experience as a Ph. D. candidate reading just the kind of academic works referred to here has left me feeling that many of them are intellectually detached, weighed down by theory and so straight-jacketed by the argot of specialisation that they would seem to be of little use to anyone but the academics who wrote them. I think I learned more about Shakespeare from “popular” books than I ever did from the journals I was urged to read.
It is refreshing, in this context, to read a scholarly work about Lear that is unafraid to speak directly and that can incorporate personal anecdotes and life experience when they are germane to the point. Kelly writes vividly about growing up in Queensland in the 1970s (“the hot, still mornings broken by the shrieking of koalas high up in the gum trees … the little white nets hung over bowls of sugar or swampy butter”). She also goes some way towards demonstrating the value of Shakespeare in contexts such as this when she discusses the challenges of teaching the plays to cadets at the Australian Defence Force Academy and bringing a production of Macbeth to Mullawah women’s prison in Sydney. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the “honey’d” words of Shakespeare have little place amongst the drills, inspections and military manoeuvres of Duntroon, but Kelly argues persuasively that the best soldiers think for themselves as much as they follow orders. Shakespeare, she writes, teaches us to adapt and adjust, to be imaginative and to ask, “Why?” She’s not the only one, either: John Bell confirms that Duntroon’s Commandant asked him to perform for his junior officers on the basis that “future soldiers will have to know how to do a lot more than just arrive in a war zone and start shooting people. They’ll be flung into emergency situations in foreign countries and will have to make instant assessments of the problems, the people, the culture … In other words, they’ll have to empathise – and what better way to approach empathy than by studying scenes from Shakespeare?” It could be argued that when Kelly discusses Lear itself, she doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, but the way in which she weaves the play’s well-known characters and themes into the tapestry of Australian life is enough to make this book worth her writing it and our reading it.
Kate Flaherty’s Ours As We Play It is rather more expansive and ambitious than Kelly’s short book, and it is also a more rigorously academic work. This is not to say that it is arcane, however: Flaherty writes clearly and persuasively about the ways in which Australians can take ownership of Shakespeare’s plays and use them to explore and validate aspects of themselves. She focuses on specific productions of Hamlet, As You Like Itand A Midsummer Night’s Dream(performed by Bell Shakespeare, Company B and Pork Chop Productions, among others) and analyses the ways in which they deal with issues of masculinity, authority, dominance, confinement and magic as they have emerged in our shared culture and history. Her eye for significant detail is impressive: indeed, she writes about these productions so assiduously that you want to put the book down and watch the shows instead. I mean that as a compliment to Faherty and I suggest that the impulse goes some way to validating her theory that it is performance, rather than text, that really matters.
I don’t know that she’s quite won me over to this central thesis, however. The meaning of Hamlet might well be “ours” for as long as we perform or attend a performance, but I’d hesitate to say that we all derive the same exact meaning from it. Different audience members bring different assumptions, prejudices and moods that colour their individual conceptions of the experience. One person may notice the machine guns that Fortinbras’s army carry and recognise the nod to modern warfare, but another will be too intent on listening to how well Horatio delivers his beautiful “Goodnight, sweet prince” elegy to notice. I wonder if Flaherty is aware of how many audience members actually turn up to performances of Shakespeare’s plays, text in hand, intent on reading along. It sounds silly, but it’s true: I’ve had the unenviable experience of playing Hamlet to a front row full of Oxford and Cambridge editions. I don’t want to suggest that reading Shakespeare is somehow a lesser experience than watching it – far from it: I would argue that just as we could be said to create meaning from an individual production of a play, so too can we do so from an individual reading as we imagine the scenes and explore the cadences and rhetorical tropes for ourselves. There’s no reason why the text should be seen as the enemy of performance. Indeed, Shakespeare and his contemporaries wouldn’t have drawn the distinction Flaherty does between the two: their Shakespeare was a poet of the stage and their audience went to hear his plays, not to see them, as we do. It’s often said that Shakespeare’s comedies play at being tragedies and that his tragedies play at being comedies; it’s also true that his plays are highly poetic affairs just as his poetry is wonderfully dramatic. To deny the importance of the text, then, is to ignore a good half of what grants his plays their continued relevance.
Although John Bell’s On Shakespeare comes from the perspective of a performer and not an academic, it’s still a book that recognises the importance of rhythm, metre, trope and metaphor when it comes to wringing meaning out of Shakespeare. Indeed, Bell tells us that the moment at which he first fell in love with the Bard was the moment at which the power of poetry was made evident to him. Upon hearing the lines, “It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, / And that craves wary walking” he writes that “I felt a cold shiver run down my spine and the hairs on my neck stand on end. Suddenly I knew what poetry meant. Rather that stating a blunt prosaic fact, you employ metaphor, allusion, metre and sound so that the idea resonates and stays with you.” A great deal of his book is given over to explaining the dramatic power and tension of Shakespeare’s tragedies and the wonderfully inventive farce and slapstick that can be generated in his comedies, but Bell is still very careful not to ignore the literary greatness of these works. One thing he insists on before actors begin to rehearse is that they know the meaning of every word they’re going to say.
Instructions like these and other little pieces of pragmatic advice about performing Shakespeare are alone worth the price of this book (“… there is virtually no subtext. Characters mean what they say and, if they’re faking it, they tell you so in an aside”). You get a lot for your money in this book: Bell conducts entertaining “interviews” with a number of Shakespeare’s friends, collaborators and rivals who are all surprisingly frank about the man from Stratford; he also introduces the plots, characters and central ideas of most of the plays, grouping them into the “Comedy”, “History”, “Tragedy” and “Romance” categories that Edward Dowden first distinguished. He sketches a clear-headed theory about the inspiration behind Shakespeare’s notorious 154 sonnets and his prose paints wonderfully colourful portraits of Elizabethan and Jacobean life.
It could be argued that the driving force behind every point and every admiration is the desire to prove the continued greatness and relevancy of Shakespeare’s work in 21st Century Australia. Bell demonstrates many times over why these plays and poems are thrilling, funny, touching, instructive and valuable. Towards the end of the book, he makes it clear that he doesn’t like to think about Shakespeare’s significance in terms of his “relevance”, however. If I’m being honest, I’d say that the more I think about it, the more I agree with him. Indeed, I can think of no better a way to end this review than by letting John Bell speak on behalf of all of us who are sick of having to justify the “usefulness” or “relevancy” of things like Shakespeare as though such terms were the only indicators of worth: “I get fed up when people start arguing about Shakespeare’s ‘relevance’, with the implied suggestion that things are of interest only if they are about us. Is Mozart ‘relevant’? Is a sunrise? Maybe instead of continually trying to claw everything back to our own tiny circle we should look outside it and reach out to the unfamiliar, the unknown, the exotic; try to experience the universe through the eyes of people in other times, in other places.”
I was walking out of a theatre some weeks ago when I couldn’t help but hear a fellow audience member proclaim, “Well, that confirms it. The theatre is officially dead.” It was a loud and self-satisfied remark, so much so that I felt justified in turning to the man and replying, “If you feel that way, why do you bother to come?” “Because,” he shot back at me, “occasionally I enjoy watching the corpse twitch.” He was just the kind of opinionated windbag I try to avoid in social situations, but the more I thought about him the more I was able to concede that he had a point. Rather than challenging him, I could have admitted that I had been checking my watch at regular intervals during the same show, saying to myself, “Only half an hour to go … only fifteen minutes now…” Has it come to the point where, for most people, going to the theatre is more like a spoonful of cultural medicine than an indulgent pleasure? Be honest with yourself: on most nights, wouldn’t you rather rent a DVD and have a pizza delivered than drive into town, try to park and then hand over twice as much money to see a staid, uninspired production of The Importance of Being Earnest? You could argue that the theatre is there for the occasional evening when you want something more high-minded than Transformers 3, but what I’m really complaining about is how rare it is to experience theatre that is at once new, exciting and avante-garde. I wonder why more people don’t get similarly frustrated. If a physicist announced that he was perfectly happy with what Newton said and did and that he was going to spend his professional life simply re-writing all the tenets of Newtonian physics, he’d be laughed at. Science demands that its participants move the practice forward by testing theories and pushing boundaries. I see no reason why we shouldn’t expect the same from the arts. If we can’t have theatre that is relevant, provocative and challenging, the medium will be as dead as obnoxious wags think it is.
Of course, one way in which theatre can be made more vital and popular is by making it more like film. One-act plays that run less than two hours are becoming more common and tickets always sell whenever a film or television star gets lured onstage. Another, more imaginative way in which companies have drawn crowds to live performance is by capitalising on its very “liveness”, its visceral immediacy. Some have gone so far as to make their productions explicitly interactive. When attending performances by blind Malian musicians Amadou and Mariam, for example, audiences have been plunged into darkness so they can, as Amadou puts it, “hear the music just as Mariam and I hear it.” In Piccadilly Station last year, the English poet Lavinia Greenlaw created a participatory audio installation at which the audience were issued with MP3 players and let loose on the concourse, mingling with real-life commuters to a soundtrack that made it feel as if they were eavesdropping on strangers’ thoughts. At the Barbican Theatre, a performance art collective known as “Duckie” have produced a show which seeks to make a virtue of one of the theatre’s most embarrassing side-effects: falling asleep. Audience members book single or double beds in the auditorium, change into their pyjamas and are lowered into a pleasant slumber by stories, songs, dreamy visuals and Ovaltine.
Some of these interactive theatre pieces do sound a little gimmicky, but at least they’re aiming for something that will surprise and delight audiences rather than bore them. One of the finest homegrown examples of this new interactive theatre/performance art is the work being created by the Canberra company, Little Dove Theatre Art. Their 2007 piece, Six Women Standing in Front of a White WallSix Women was about the idea that we need to have touch in order to survive. A baby will die if it’s not touched with human hands in the first two years of its life. I’d had a number of years where I was feeling really angsty. I’d been living overseas for 4 years. When I came back and I was in a supermarket this check-out chick handed me my change and my hand touched hers and I just felt this electric current through me. I realised that I hadn’t had any physical contact with anyone for over 12 months. Not even a hug or shaking hands, which is really strange. And then that afternoon a friend came over and he gave me a hug and it was the same: every hair on my body standing on end. There’s been research into the effects of touching and no touching on children, but not on adults. So I just made this very simple show: six women standing in front of a white wall, there’s this little sign saying “Please Do Touch,” so the audience is invited to negotiate the ropes and come up and physically touch the performers. The effect is absolutely phenomenal. You read those reviews, and it shows that each performer did create a real, true connection with audience members … once they were brave enough to step into that bright light there was nothing else for them. Just watching the audience I was so moved. I’ve done the show about 75 times; at the end of every one I was bawling.” Miller isn’t exaggerating about the reviews or the effect the show has on its audiences. Writing in The Guardian, Vivienne Franzmann admitted that the idea sounded like a hard sell, but once she’d experienced the effect that the performance had, she found that it “made you ask enormous questions of yourself. I was in awe of the simplicity of the idea and the power of its execution.” I never had the good fortune to see the show myself, but reactions like these persuade me that Six Women is just the kind of theatrical experience the medium needs if it is to stay both vital and volatile in the twenty-first century. Touching the performers may sound a little kooky or confronting, but bear in mind that Franzmann went so far as to title her rave review: “The Best Performance I’ve Ever Seen.”
It’s very easy for praise like this to go to an artist’s head. Miller could have felt vindicated in her instincts and consequently precious about every idea she’s had since. Talking to her about her success and her plans for future performances, though, it’s clear that she remains endearingly humble; keen only to explore new artistic avenues and to produce the best possible work, whether it means spending years training and researching or throwing out vast swathes of her new script in order to achieve a leaner, better result. She’s currently working on an immersive, physical theatre spectacular called Cordelia, a prequel-of-sorts to Shakespeare’s King Lear that draws on elements of dance and drama and that will be staged at the Street Theatre from the second to the fifth of November. She explains that “Cordelia is different. I’ve always felt a connection with King Lear … I first read the play when I was 15 and loved it. I never knew what I wanted to do with it, though: I didn’t mean to write a play, that was just a side-effect of wanting to get my idea across, which was an idea about father/child relationships, and about family and romantic love. I always try to stay as open as possible to it changing. This one has been in the making for about 4 years, so it’s just constantly fluctuating and changing. I’ve really taken my time with this one. Of course there’s so much in Lear. Our show takes a lot of liberties, but it definitely works as a prequel. All my works prior to this one have been designed for gallery spaces, but then get put in theatres. I like the idea that people can come and go as they please. This is an attempt to see if I can do it as a play for an audience of 300. So I don’t know if it will work – I’m trying to take risks. I’m not precious, I just want my idea to be clear. It’s fantastic to just be able to do whatever you need to do to make the work as good as it can be.” It’s sometimes said that the best way to approach any of the great Shakespearean tragedies is with a strange combination of hubris and humility: you need to be humble before how vast and forbidding these works are, but you also need courage and self-belief in order to conquer them. The way Miller speaks about her own wrests with Lear, you know that she has just the kind of dedicated, humble and pioneering attitude that will serve the play and her own ambitions well.
When asked what connects the dots between a performance art piece like Six Womenand a physicalised prequel to one of the Shakespearean “big four” (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear), Miller begins to talk more generally about how she conceives of theatre, what function it serves and the emotional reserves it draws from. “I love Artaud’s writings,” she says, recalling the French playwright, director and provoquer who conceived of the notorious “Theatre of Cruelty.” “[They] have a lot to say about what theatre can do and the effect it can have on a community, that it needs to be important. Artaud offended people: they walked out as he re-enacted the plague on stage. He wanted to show them what life is like, you know, that it’s really dark and ugly and full-on, and we have to fight back to make it beautiful.I just think that offending people and being aggressive is the wrong way to do it. I want to make theatre that’s respectful of the audience at all times and that doesn’t all come from my ego, that considers what are we as a community. What are we as human beings? What do we want or need now?” Miller doesn’t agree with Artaud’s dictum that an audience needs to be shocked or appalled out of their comfortable complacency, but she respects the view that we need to use the theatre in order to make people aware of life’s beauty. As Oscar Wilde had it, the realisation of oneself is the prime aim of life, but that realisation can occur just as easily through pleasure as pain. Distinguishing her practice from Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Miller has developed what she calls a Theatre of Love. “It’s a philosophy of how to make theatre work,” she explains. “Since the first light of our species, human beings in every time and place have contended with a wild emotional core that behaves in unpredictable and confusing ways. We struggle to accept that as individuals and as a society, our opportunity for happiness depends on our ability to decipher a hidden world that revolves inexorably, around love … Inspired by the work of authors Lewis, Amini and Lannon and their publication A General Theory of Love and Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, I have taken core philosophies of these works and applied them to a way of thinking about the creation of theatre and live art. Six Women explored the very nature of love and our experience of it through the medium and investigation of touch … The latest work, Cordelia is above all about family - the blood that binds us - the irreversible connection we have with our history. Love is the absolute basis for family and without it, the unit simply cannot succeed.”
It’s difficult to write about Miller’s Theatre of Love in a concrete way or to conceive of how it works on its audience until you’ve seen it in practice. It’s all about experiencing the thing for yourself. It’s difficult, too, I suppose, to know exactly what to call pieces like Cordeliaor Six Women Standing in Front of a White Wall. Are they “art”? “Theatre”? “Dance”? Six Women would certainly appear to work well in a gallery context. The fact that it has appeared almost exclusively in theatrical spaces, however, complicates the issue. Cordelia is no less easy to circumscribe within limits: based on a Shakespeare play, it draws on many of the identifiably “arty” elements that make Six Women the performative cockatrice that it is. Perhaps, though, the uncertainty I have about how to appreciate and experience these works is part of their appeal. As I say, the theatre is going to survive only by going to strange new places, introducing the unfamiliar, incorporating aspects of the alien, appearing in disguises that render it unrecognisable. It might be baffling to some, but it won’t be boring.
In 2009, the Australian author and blogger Max Barry posted a number excerpts from a work-in-progress on his website (maxbarry.com). Like a digital-age Victor Frankenstein calling to Igor, he was enlisting his readers to help sew the various fragments together and send the electricity of creative inspiration down the work’s narrative spine. The completed first draft was slow, plodding and patchy: a hasty assembly of rotten science-fiction clichés held together only by the visible threads of fanboy enthusiasm. Like a grotesque homunculus that has wrenched itself free of shackles, however, the text appears to have escaped its masters and gone on to lead a rich and fascinating life of its own. What I mean to say, of course, is that Barry’s new novel, Machine Man, bears little resemblance to the embryonic creature his readers experimented on three years ago. The book’s scar tissue has healed, its limbs are at once sturdier and more lithe and, like any sufficiently advanced technology in a dystopian view of the future, it appears to have become self-aware, to think its own thoughts and follow its own ends. The version of Machine Man published by Scribe this month no longer lurches through the overworn steps of Frankenstein but blazes an independent trail, in this case a uniquely creepy parable about our drive for personal and technological perfection.
Machine Manis set in the present and concerns Charles Neumann, a low-ranking scientist who works for the shady and disingenuous military contractor, Better Future. Neumann is characterized by an arrested development that is instantly recognizable to those who have been in close quarters with certain kinds of scientist or technology specialist (the etiolated emotional life, the awkward speech patterns and antisocial habits). Neumann could be said to have a science fiction analogue in the robotic, detached Deckard from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (otherwise known as Blade Runner) but he reminds me most of Meursault from Albert Camus’ L’Étranger: both characters fail to register common emotional responses to potent stimuli (the end of a relationship, the death of a relative) and both are acutely aware of their abnormalities. Neumann spends a great deal of mental energy analyzing precisely where and how his responses vary from those of others. It’s not that he can do anything about it, more than he simply feels his difference keenly. He also demonstrates an intense connection to certain objects that might place him on the autism spectrum. He spends the first chapter of the novel searching, with increasingly desperate helplessness, for his mobile phone. For Neumann, the loss of the item is like the loss of a leg, an example of his skewered prioritizing that Barry neatly inverts by having Neumann’s actual leg crushed and amputated in the second chapter. As you might expect, Neumann doesn’t mind the loss of the leg or the months of grueling physical therapy; his only concern is with the possibility of a self-designed “smart” prosthesis that will better serve his needs than the bucket-on-a-stick that his insurance company supplies him with.
Keen to reap the benefits of an employee obsessed with the design and manufacture of prostheses with duel-core processors and other nefarious features, Better Future throws a great deal of money and resources at Neumann, fueling his fire to the extent that he begins giving up other body parts in order to trial new and improved alternatives. As Neumann puts it to himself when rationalizing the amputation of his remaining and perfectly healthy leg: “When you thought about it, biological legs couldn’t do anything except convey a small mass from A to B, as long as A and B were not particularly far apart and you were in no hurry. That wasn’t great. The only reason it was even notable was that legs did it using raw materials they built themselves. If you were designing something within that limitation, then okay, good job. But if you weren’t it seemed to me you could build in a lot more features.” Such passages convey a visceral sense of what it’s like to be driven by notions of perfection and how helpless we make ourselves when we become dependant on technology. These anxieties are, of course, common science fiction fodder. Where Machine Man really excels is where Barry considers how the presence of artificial body parts might begin to change a person’s brain functions and personality. Can you conceive of an artificial arm or leg as “yours” in the same way as you do of your natural limbs? What if the limb required the electronic re-wiring of your brain in order for it to respond to your neural signals? Would that change the way you thought about other things? Would it alter your emotional responses? Reading the book, I kept thinking of the paradox of the ship from Plutarch’s Life of Theseus: if you ended up replacing all your body parts with artificial alternatives, are you still yourself? What if all your discarded originals were sewn back together and brought to life? Who, then, would be the “real” you?
Readers of Barry’s past novels (Jennifer Government, The Company) won’t be surprised to learn that Better Future is slowly revealed to be a much more nasty, twisted and selfish organization than its name would suggest. Like almost every company in the world, it actually cares nothing for a better future, only for an economically robust present. With the aim of rescuing its quarterly profit statement, it begins covertly developing Neumann’s technology into a marketable suite of cyborg weapons. This does not suit Neumann’s desire to keep tinkering and upgrading his creations. What seemed at first like a perfect marriage between a brilliant scientist’s desire to work all hours and a company’s need to make money soon develops into an uneasy co-habitation and, by the climax of the book, an acrimonious divorce complete with scenes of violence and destruction to rival Arnold Schwazenegger’s repeated assaults on Skynet in the first three Terminator films. Machine Man is, of course, currently being adapted as a screenplay…
In The Damned Human Race, one of his last and most savage satires, Mark Twain assumed the guise of a Darwinian naturalist observing the behaviours and characteristics of his own species. He concluded that Man occupied the very lowest rung on the evolutionary ladder: “Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War … Man is the only animal that robs his helpless fellow of his country, takes possession of it and drives him out of it or destroys him … Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves … Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations … He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight … Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”I don’t know if Anson Cameron wrote his new collection, Pepsi Bears, with Twain’s essay in mind, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had. Each of its thirteen stories contrasts the trusting naivety, fortitude, grace and intuition of other animals against the selfish hubris of the homo sapien, illustrating in piquant ways how animal instinct can seem so noble when set against human greed, idiocy and violence.
In the book’s first offering, for instance, an advertising company uses the tabula rasa of polar bears’ fur to market soft drinks and inadvertently wipes the species out; in another, a zebra wanders into no man’s land at Ypres and shames two armies into a realisation of their own absurdity; a third story condemns the farrago of anti-evolution “science” by having an animal lover swap a pompous Christian’s brain with that of a gorilla. It is Cameron’s own voice we hear, blunt, heavily sarcastic and distinctly Australian, in the mouth of a young troublemaker who taunts the Christian at the beginning of the story: “I wonder what a chimpanzee might say gazing upon your brain, Owen. If he mistake it for a pig’s gonad, Sir, and pronounce, ‘Oh … here is a boar’s left one,’ then his anatomical knowledge might be judged equal to your own.”
Most of Cameron’s stories are scatological and colourfully rude in the anti-authoritarian vein we associate with our national temper. Some of them are also darkly macabre in the way Roald Dahl’s adult fiction is or European fairy tales used to be. Many end in death and other forms of comeuppance for hubristic individuals; others simply delight in revealing the grotesqueries of the pompous, nasty and over-indulgent. All the little bijou gems of fiction that Cameron displays here glitter with the charming unselfconsciousness of animals other than the human. A polar bear, Cameron might say, never gets up in the morning and angsts over its lot in life, whether it deserves more fish than the bear next to it or how it might get in touch with its inner cub. Polar bears simply exist: they are ineluctably themselves in a way that we can never be. Pico della Mirandola considered it Man’s dignity that his character traits could resemble aspects of any animal and that he could employ his will to choose who or what he would become. I think Cameron would consider that quality of choice less something to be proud of and more the seed of Man’s corruption. After all, you can’t blame a lion for killing an antelope, but you can blame a man for choosing to pick up a gun and fire it at someone else.
I’m writing under the rubric of ‘Gabi Driver: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’ Much as I love Sergio Leone’s masterful film of the same name, I’m going to be difficult and take these three notorious points of reference in reverse order, for no other reason than because it suits the flow of this piece. So, to begin at the ending…
The Ugly
I can think of no better an anecdote to illustrate Gabi Driver in one of her rare moments of ugliness than by recounting an episode from her childhood (a period which, to be fair, made ugly ducklings of us all). If my poor memory serves, Gabi, who was then known as ‘Gabby’ or ‘Gabrielle’ in moments of strained frustration, was planning to attend a school dance. She and a friend whose name escapes the fishing net of memory had arrived at our family home to powder their faces or crimp their ears or whatever it is that girls do before they go to be socially appraised. No sooner had the two young debutantes entered the house than they disappeared to the bathroom for some hours, only the sound of giggles and hairdryers hinting at their goings on. I seem to remember them looking quite distinct from each other when they’d entered the bathroom – I could, at least, have confidently identified which one was my sister. When they emerged, however, clearly ready to paint the town every shade of technicolour, they looked like twin dolls from a particularly macabre and nightmarish gothic horror. Perhaps I have it wrong and it was not a school dance but a ballet they were going to perform in (under, one assumes, the kind of gas lamps that require extraordinarily emphatic greasepaint on the faces of dancers). Both girls attended a French-Australian school: it’s possible that, in their innocence, they thought everyone went out for the night inspired by Marcel Marceau’s “Bip the Clown.” Whatever the reasons for it, the two figures who greeted me at the bathroom door had painted their faces in blunt denial of their natural features: the pallor of their skin, the thickly-applied blue eyeshadow and the violently red lips put me in mind of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland. Their cheeks looked as if someone had been throwing plums at them. I suppose it takes everyone a little while to learn how to apply cosmetics effectively…
The Bad
I choose to interpret ‘bad’ here not in the sense of ‘naughty’ or ‘wayward’ (though much could be said about Gabi on these terms), but ‘bad’ as in evil incarnate, Gabi as a spawn of Satan that should have been cast back at its maker, for such is how I viewed her when she first arrived, like a belated and ironic gift, just after my second birthday. Other members of my nuclear family inform me that I made my displeasure at her arrival known in no uncertain terms. I have no memory of the incident, but I am told that I once ran a bath and attempted to drown Gabi in it (rather enterprising for a toddler, I’d have thought, and considerate too, given that drowning is supposedly a calm and painless way to go). In a move that harkened forward to my love for the music of the Beatles, and in particular the song ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, I once hit Gabi on the head with a small mallet that my careless parents gave me (it’s either plastic or wooden, depending on who’s telling the story). There are more family anecdotes on this theme, though I can’t remember any of them, which leads me to believe they are embellished or made up. I have a vague memory of covering Gabi with stamps and attempting to push her into a post box, but, thinking about it now, this is probably a scene from The Simpsons that has permeated my absurdly anachronistic memory.
The Good
Perhaps my brain chose to imagine Gabi and I as Bart and Lisa Simpson for a reason. Like them, we did a good deal of caterwauling, but we also shared countless private jokes, indulgent treats and significant moments of kindness comparable to those that punctuate the Simpson children’s sibling rivalry. Gabi is the only other person in the world who remembers many of the things I remember; she’s also the only person I can turn to who will appreciate the silliness of certain people and things. There are many such instances I could share with you, but I choose to represent ‘the good’ here with an incident that occurred when I was around 6 or 7, which makes Gabi between 4 and 5 years old. Some monstrous parental injustice had been committed and I had made the decision to run away from home. Saying goodbye to my sister, she asked me if there was anything I needed. ‘Some food,’ I replied, with all the fortitude I could muster. She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, then came back and pressed a jar of peanut butter into my small hands. When I left the house and began walking up the incline of McNaughton Street, I felt oddly calm and very well provided for. Even at 7, I’m sure I was aware that one container of peanut butter couldn’t sustain me the rest of my life, but I felt supremely nourished simply from having been given something by a sister who cared about my survival. Typing this, I realise that what I felt was love.
The more one reads and watches Shakespeare’s plays, the more one stands in awe of them. There are many reasons for this: the perfection of their dramatic tension; the power and pathos of their tragedy; their intellectual superiority; their seemingly inexhaustible poetic fecundity. Read any of Shakespeare’s great plays next to a contemporary effort by Kyd, Jonson or Marlowe, and the Shakespeare play is so obviously a richer, stranger and more impressive beast.
Probably the single most impressive quality to adhere to the Shakespearean canon is not their contextualised status as the finest examples of Elizabethan verse drama, however, but their continued relevancy to “here” and “now”, to a topical immediacy that is always the greatest strength of the theatre. You could say that Ben Jonson was rash when he wrote of his old friend and rival as “not of an age, but for all time” but history has borne Jonson’s claim out: for 400 years, Shakespeare’s plays have never been off the stage or out of print.
Considering Julius Caesar and its famous anachronisms, it’s tempting to think that Shakespeare was aware of his greatness and anticipated his evergreen popularity. Small-minded commentators have criticised the play for including references to a striking clock (Act 2, Scene 1) which would not have existed in ancient Rome; such critics fail to realise that the reference acts as a proto-Brechtian theatrical jolt – it’s there to jar the audience from any complacent regard for the difference between “now” and “then” or between “fiction” and “reality.” The clock strikes to remind us that any classic worth its ticket price isn’t just a history lesson; it’s a reflection of the present day.
Many Elizabethans would, I imagine, have seen Julius Caesar as a fascinating but scandalous attempt to set pre-Christian republicanism against the virtues of their own monarchic absolutism. Three hundred years later, Karl Marx wrote of how the lines, “waiving our red weapons o’er our heads, / Let’s all cry, ‘peace, freedom and liberty!’” (Act 3, Scene1) were remembered in the principles of the French revolution. It’s hard to witness Marc Antony’s frenzied and frenzy-inducing demagoguery in Act 3 and not think of how Hitler used the same techniques to bend an entire nation to his will. These are just a few examples of where the play has been remarkably apposite to a particular time and place, but the examples are enough to justify director Peter Evans’s claim that Julius Caesaris “constantly relevant. We witness the original pre-emptive strike and the irony of the ‘honourable assassination’ with all the carnage that a power vacuum creates. Julius Caesar is a play that is never out of date and even today feels relentlessly modern.”
Evans’s production of the play for Bell Shakespeare opens at the Canberra Theatre Centre’s Playhouse on Wednesday 3 August. If what Evans and his cast have to say about it is true, audiences can indeed expect a very charged, potent relevancy to Australian political and cultural life. Kate Mulvany, who plays the role of Cassius and who – along with Evans – adapted Shakespeare’s script for the production, admits that “a lot of stuff was in our minds: the Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd thing, of course; I thought a lot of Whitlam; even all the Murdoch stuff going on seems pertinent to the play.” Russian actor Alex Menglet, who plays Julius Caesar, agrees: “The Rudd/Gillard situation happened not long ago and is a boiling theme in Australian politics … that theme is definitely present, you don’t have to dig very deep to find it.” Both performers are quick to point out, however, that their Julius Caesar should not be taken as a direct analogue to any specific historical or political events. “We don’t put Cassius in a red-haired wig or made me look like Kevin Rudd,” Menglet explains, “our view is a little wider … everywhere we look we can find examples of the cancerous nature of power that are relevant to the play.” Mulvany’s sense of the production, too, is not of any specific satire or imitation, but of glimpses down any of the world’s corridors of power: “I always have this sense of lifting up the walls of the building and looking inside, like a dollhouse. My main aim was to make it lean and hungry, to make it as clear and clean and swift as possible – we’re not set in any particular time or event.”
When it comes to Shakespeare, Menglet and Mulvany are right to stress the power of the subtle and suggestive over the didactic. Like Hamlet, Othelloor Macbeth, Julius Caesar is a play that draws its appeal from ambiguity and ambivalence, from the ways in which certain characters inhabit diametrically opposed value systems and certain lines can appear sincere and insincere at the same time. To force Shakespeare’s protean complexity into a particular mould is to make his characters two-dimensional and his arguments one-sided. Better to let certain moments in the play recall what Menglet calls our “associative memories” of Australian politics and allow the rest to be the visceral, intellectual, honourable, sly, beautiful and ugly thing that it is.
It’s the play’s elusive contrariness, after all, that has assured its continued relevancy. Whatever the fashionable ideology or current politicalcoup de théâtre, there are always strong analogies to be found somewhere in Julius Caesar. It’s a play that stamps any politician’s specious rhetoric with the seal of literary approval and lends any military commander an air of poetic rectitude (no major conflict in the last half-century has been allowed to pass without some American general quoting the line “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war”).
Watching the play again, the thought that keeps springing to mind is that Shakespeare must have known how good it was and how long into the future it would be performed. It was written, after all, by a man who opened one of his sonnets with the couplet, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” There’s a similarly self-aggrandising moment half way into Julius Caesar. Cassius and Brutus, having just killed the titular character, are ritualistically smearing their hands with his blood, when Cassius says, “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” (Act 3, Scene 1). In the immediate context of the play, Elizabethan England is the state unborn and English is the accent yet unknown. The fact that Shakespeare pluralises both “states” and “accents”, however, should encourage the belief that he was as much harkening forward to Australia in 2011 as he was engaging with the present or looking back to ancient Rome.
I often think that the albatross around the neck of my generation is the belief that each of us is “special”, “unique” or “individual” (terms that appear to need all the inverted commas my keyboard can muster). Strictly speaking, of course each of us is unique: we are all biological entities separate and distinguishable from every other entity on the planet. The problems begin when we start attaching value to our uniqueness and consider it the basis of significance. How can everyone be “special” when special means “exceptional”? If everyone is special, then special just means “ordinary”. More problems occur when we’re encouraged to believe that our uniqueness is the seed for hopes and ambitions that we must pursue with single-minded determination until they blossom into reality. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t have things we want to do or that we shouldn’t try to make them happen, but we should be made aware that, for every small-town girl who fulfils her dream of international stardom, there will be hundreds who fail. This is not pessimism; this is reality. The Disney-inspired belief that if we want it bad enough and work at it hard enough, it will happen, may yield fame and fortune for some, but it will engender frustration and resentment for many more. Even when people do attain everything they desire, it isn’t as if their life becomes a prolonged orgasm of happiness. Listen to any post-success album by a rock band who’ve made it very big and its driving force will be the question, “what now?”
I see the maxims “be true to yourself”, “believe in yourself” and “follow your dreams” developing a culture of blinkered and self-centred individualism. When I first heard the opening lines of the Fleet Foxes song, “Helplessness Blues”, I responded with what Philip Larkin once called “an enormous Yes”: “I was raised up believing I was somehow unique, like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see. And now, after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me.” It was a great relief to hear my sentiments echoed so clearly and unflinchingly. I had the same experience again when reading the English translation of Johan Harstad’s new novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Its “hero”, Mattias, does not save the world, he does not endure a spectacular and tragic hardship, nor does he prove the nay-sayers wrong by making his dreams come true; instead, he gets on quietly with the business of going to work and leading a decent, unobtrusive life. A thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, Mattias has come to realize that being one of a crowd, not standing out, being second or third but never first, is actually quite a relief and something to take a measure of pride in. His personal hero is Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, but a more experienced pilot and the man more responsible for the success of the Apollo 11 mission than the glory-hugging Neil Armstrong.
Having discovered the peculiar comforts of insignificance, Mattias decides that Stavanger is not isolated enough and so moves to the Faroe Islands in the north Atlantic, hoping to become the most unimportant person in the most unimportant place in the world. One of the comic delights of this book is that characters and events keep threatening to develop in interesting and significant ways, but Mattias consistently denies his audience full knowledge of the exciting plot twists going on in the wings (“Didn’t mention any catastrophes, bloodied hands or envelopes that appeared from nowhere filled with large amounts of money”). This character and his author prefer to focus their attention and ours on the commonplace, championing its humble virtues over what they see as the tawdry glamour of conflict, intrigue and action. Most people’s lives aren’t like those in movies and books, they imply, so why can’t we have a plot that’s more like day-to-day life and an average sort-of character with whom we can identify?
As much as it has a plot, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? resembles Voltaire’s Candide: it is a faux-epic parody of the coming-of-age Bildungsroman or the Odyssey-like adventure. Its protagonist is routinely assailed by supporting caricatures and grotesques — aspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on bus trips, even Buzz Aldrin himself — but Mattias remains, like Martin Sheen’s Willard in Apocalypse Now!, the passive agent to whom things happen and people attach themselves. He is bemused by others and, with none of his own, is forever removed from their concerns and aspirations. I stress that this does not make for a boring or alienating read, however. There is, as I’ve said, something resonant and true in Mattias’s approach to life. His lack of conventional ambition is refreshingly humble and his desire for insignificance is more sensitive and considered than the ruthless competitive drive that fuels most people. Mattias and his forgotten islands are not without their charm, which can be best illustrated, perhaps, with a few of Matias’s own observations: “… if only you came here, to the Faroe Islands, you might find everything you were looking for, all the things you’d lost, all the keys, important phone numbers, lottery tickets, all the flashy jackets you’d bought abroad, cats that had disappeared and birds that had flown out of windows, people who’d left their apartments one morning never to return, kids you’d been at school with and who you’d never said goodbye to until the last day when you walked through the gates, when you were so certain nothing would ever change you, that you’d always be friends and never lose touch, maybe you might find them here, an entire country for everything you’d forgotten, everything you’d lost, everything that had slipped from view along the way”.
