Shakespeare had it easy, really. A sea-captain tells Viola “this is Illyria, lady” (
Twelfth Night) or a narrator announces we are “in fair Verona” (
Romeo and Juliet), and his audience drifts off to these fantastical worlds. But these settings are all in the head. For all his audiences knew, these places might have been Timbuktu or Shangri-La.
Finding modern parallels for such fabulous places which will seem plausible to reality-saturated TV audiences was just the first of the challenges facing ShakespeaRe-Told. Commissioned by the BBC after the huge success of its modern reworking of The Canterbury Tales, this mini-season updates four of the Bard’s plays in a variety of ways.
When I visit the Midsummer Night’s Dream shoot, it feels about as magical and dream-like as a bit of woodland near Slough — which is what it is. They are filming by a jetty on a lake where the rude mechanicals (magically transformed into park keepers) are putting on a cabaret for the “Dream Park” guests. Extras hang around on the periphery, waiting to be called into shot, then shooed off again. It is said that for actors, filming is like warfare — long hours of boredom interrupted by moments of intense adrenal fear. For the extras the boredom seems to be interrupted by yet more boredom.
The other mechanicals, Simon Day (Quince) and Johnny Vegas (Bottom), watch from tables, joshing and heckling as Ben Crompton (Snug) repeatedly performs a dismally unsuccessful magic trick until the director is satisfied. (In a touch straight out of Ricky Gervais’s Extras, someone has changed the name over his mug-shot in the production office from “SNUG” to “SMUG”.) It is hard to see how any magic can emerge from this scene, yet it will.
The writer, Peter Bowker, was determined to keep the play’s mystical elements but in a more realistic setting, creating a Mancunian Puck (Dean Lennox-Kelly from Shameless): “His style is very much based on the Gallagher brothers — or a supernatural Manc drug-dealer.”
The casting of all four plays is a rich mix of popular television stars (Sarah Parish, Damian Lewis and Billie Piper in Much Ado, for instance), inspired eccentrics (Shirley Henderson in The Shrew), classy veterans (Imelda Staunton in Dream) and comic turns such as Johnny Vegas and Simon Day. So experience ranges from the National Theatre or RSC and Mike Leigh films, via Spielberg’s Band of Brothers and the comedy circuit.
For the former Fast Show regular Simon Day, Shakespeare is injun territory, and he brings a refreshingly unpretentious South-East London perspective to proceedings. “I’ve never done anything like this,” he muses in his caravan compartment. “It’s just another job to me. I’m aware of the gist of it. I’ve always done stuff I’ve written myself before. It’s alien doing someone else’s lines, so I’m playing it straight.”
Lennie James (Oberon), who starred in the intense prison drama Buried, isn’t exactly reverential either. “It isn’t one of my favourite Shakespeare plays. It can become airy-fairy in a slightly naff way. One of the things I like about Peter Bowker’s script is that he has found some balls in the story. There is a real sense that love costs, that it has a darker side.”
When the writers found their modern contexts, most hit the next big problem: the sexual politics. Some women are strong and complex, such as Lady Macbeth or the feisty Beatrice in Much Ado, but others are mere ciphers or, worse, chattels of their menfolk. All these roles are fleshed out, given guts and independence.
“Shakespeare’s Hippolyta doesn’t do much for me,” says Imelda Staunton, “but there’s much more depth in this version of the character, Polly. That’s what attracted me to the part. Rather than just being the parents going, ‘All right, darling, sort yourself out’ to the young lovers, we have stuff to sort out, too.” This Polly duly does, and with surprising vehemence.
Titania, too, makes more contemporary demands of her husband. “What she is saying is that you love me, but you don’t respect me,” says Lennie James. “Love demands respect, and Oberon hasn’t been giving it.”
To David Nicholls, Much Ado was “the ultimate, the original romantic comedy”. Yet he was confronted with a story that ended with everyone pretending that Billie Piper’s character, Hero, is dead, after she has been viciously and unjustly rejected by her fiancé, then tricking him into marrying her anyway. “Resolving the ending was so problematic, I was tempted to bale out several times,” he admits. “It seems like psychotic behaviour when you put it in the modern world. The notions of virginity and purity and honour would seem completely irrational today.” Nicholls’s ending is duly altered beyond recognition.
In this respect, the greatest challenge probably fell to Sally Wainwright with The Taming of the Shrew. “It’s considered a sexist play and I wondered if that’s why they wanted a woman to do it.” Shakespeare’s play involves the “taming” of the spirited Katherina by her husband Petruchio. “In fact I think it’s a very sexy play, they’re a very sexy couple,” says Wainwright, who adapted the Wife of Bath’s Tale for the Chaucer sequence two years ago.
She decided to turn Kate into an “opposition” MP making a bid for party leadership. Did Wainwright feel deferential towards a hallowed work? “No, no! I felt happy to chuck anything out the window that I didn’t feel worked,” she says.
The plays all owe something to the spirit of the Bard, but they should really be judged on their own merits.
And are Shakespeare’s yarns still relevant today? Perhaps we should leave the last word to Simon Day. “Quince is very jealous of Bottom. He doesn’t want to have him in the show but he has to. He’s a bit of a twat really.” Timeless or what?
Page 2: The line-up ()
1. Much Ado About Nothing
David Nicholls wanted to set Much Ado in a top-flight restaurant, but discovered it had already been snaffled by the writer for Macbeth. Instead Nicholls transposes the action to a local TV station, where anchors Beatrice (Sarah Parish) and her ex-lover Benedick (Damian Lewis) trade sniping remarks over the news desk. Meanwhile, Billie Piper’s weathergirl Hero begins a romance with the sports presenter Claude.
2. Macbeth
Peter Moffat picks up on the testosterone-laden, control- freak machismo of a top restaurant kitchen as a backdrop. If that makes you think of Gordon Ramsay perchance, Moffat includes a sly reference to “the Scottish chef”, whose very name it is bad luck to mention. James McAvoy allows his vaultingly ambitious scheming wife (Keeley Hawes) to lead him to murder most foul. Which is a recipe for disaster, of course.
3 . The Taming of the Shrew
Against a backdrop of glamorous London circles and politics, a vitriolic opposition MP (Shirley Henderson) is instructed to find herself a husband to make her more electable. “I needed a situation where it would be good to be seen to be married,” says the writer Sally Wainwright, “though I had quite a battle getting them to let me set it in Westminster. They said: ‘We don’t do politics at the BBC.’”
4. A Midsummer Night's Dream
“We kept getting lost in Center Parcs,” says Peter Bowker recalling a family holiday; hence, in his update (which he refers to as being “a conversation I was having with the original text”) the bosky environs of Athens morph into an English holiday park. Imelda Staunton, Johnny Vegas, Bill Paterson, and Lennie James and Sharon Small turn up among the cast of warring couples and woodland fairies.
