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It’s 1pm at the ANU Arts Theatre. Next door, people are sitting down to focaccias, pastas and soup of the day, mobile phones standing sentinel over their lunch hours. Across the way, a new Shakespearean world is about to be created on stage — the story of Macbeth told through a spectrum of new media, languages and visual cues.
After the lights go down, a projector comes to life, flashing timeless stark images redolent of the traditional Macbeth onto a large screen. Michael Huynh (right), 20, strides behind the screen, clad in mock armour, but menacing with a real sword.
It is Mr Huynh’s first time on stage. He read some of Shakespeare’s works in school and while there was something about the stories, this is the first time he has found the English playwright’s works really interesting.
On a different continent, with untrained actors; an eclectic audience of academics, teachers and students; and the baggage of 400 years of interpretation to overcome, how do Shakespeare’s works stand the test of time? And why?
Mr Huynh’s performance was one of the highlights of the first day of the MultiShakespeare: media metamorphoses conference at ANU, sponsored by the ANU Arts Faculty, the National Institute of the Humanities and Creative Arts and the National Gallery of Australia. The conference brought together many of the southern hemisphere’s leading experts on Shakespeare to examine how the playwright’s works have been transformed for modern audiences.
Born in 1564, William Shakespeare’s first play was performed around 1590 and his work rapidly attracted a popular following. More than four centuries on, the convenor of the conference, ANU Professor Iain Wright, says the applause is not about to end anytime soon.
“In English-speaking cultures, he has been so much a part of forming the national self-image of England that he’s built into the institutions, into the culture,” Professor Wright says.
“Even if he’d been a lousy playwright — which he wasn’t — he’d still be vital, because of his role in the evolving sense of English nationalism.”
As English culture spread alongside English language, Shakespearean tales became ingrained in the psyche of many nations, Professor Wright says. This is not, perhaps, surprising — as Shakespeare foresaw the ongoing influence of his work, according to Professor Wright, citing a quote from Act 3 of Julius Caesar, when Cassius says: “How many Ages hence Shall this our lofty Scene be acted over, In States unborne, and Accents yet unknowne?”
Shakespeare also earned durability through his abilities with narrative, Professor Wright says.
“What a lot of scholars often neglect is that he is an incredibly good storyteller,” he says.
“The poetry is wonderful, but that is lost in many of these successful transformations of his work. The philosophical thought in his work is also interesting, but he was not always philosophical — for example Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night have a dark edge, but really they’re wonderful romps.
“Plays with great poetry and profound philosophical insights wouldn’t survive without great stories. He was capable of constructing a narrative so gripping that an audience would lose themselves and forget their everyday lives.”
Professor Wright says Shakespeare was ruined for generations of people because the playwright’s work was taught with rigid adherence to the text.
“The words of Shakespeare are not a holy writ. They are not cast in stone. Even in his own lifetime he rewrote some of his earlier works which he wasn’t happy with.
“For many years, particularly in education, in schools and universities, there was worship of ‘The Text’ and ‘The Bard’ — and that’s what killed Shakespeare for a lot of people.
“People in the theatre never feel the words are set in stone. You have to change him to make him live. I’ve been feeling more and more the last few years that we’ve really got to get away from a hypostatised Shakespeare.
“This is how Shakespeare always intended his works to live — in continual mutation and transposition.”
For decades, Shakespeare traditionalists have resisted reinterpretation of his works, but Professor Wright, an acknowledged expert in Shakespeare, says the history of theatre and the environment in which Shakespeare worked means there’s no such thing as a correct text for Shakespeare.
“There is no such thing as ‘The Text’. Where a text has survived, it is quite accidental: an arbitrary snapshot. There are three different versions of Hamlet for example. Scholars for centuries have gone through the ludicrous process of working out the definitive text — but the text evolved in Shakespeare’s lifetime, it was conventional practice for actors to change texts to suit their productions. He didn’t seem to object to people bringing in music, or chopping the text about.”
The conference brought together transformations of Shakespeare’s work from around the world. From mixed media projections, to classic Japanese samurai films, to painting, opera, detective fiction and even comic books — all works connected by their roots in Shakespearean storylines.
At first glance, Professor Wright’s own research seems at odds to his philosophy of a living Shakespeare. He is painstakingly researching the original production of Macbeth, of which virtually nothing is known. He believes the play was first performed on 7 August 1606 in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace.
However, it quickly becomes apparent that his research does not involve veneration of a set text, but rather an unquenchable enthusiasm for the essence of it.
“To understand Hamlet today, you have to scrape off 250 years of misunderstanding. Hamlet became very important to the romantics Goethe and Schelling and Coleridge, who remodelled him after themselves — indecisive modern intellectuals who dither too much. They projected this romantic character onto Hamlet.
“‘To be or not to be’ was not a suicidal speech. Hamlet realised he was bound to die as Claudius was surrounded by bodyguards. The speech is always played ‘Oh God, I’m going to go and hang myself in a wardrobe’, whereas really, he’s more like a kamikaze pilot, who knows he’s bound to die if he’s going to fulfil his mission, and is psyching himself up.”
Professor Wright’s views are influenced by his years as an actor in Shakespearean productions. More recently, he has been working as an informal adviser to the Bell Shakespeare Company, talking to the actors about the key motivations behind the works.
Today he is using drama to introduce students to classic texts — and they are flocking to his English classes in droves.
“Film studies has become one of the most popular fields of study amongst undergraduate students of English,” Professor Wright says.
“Far from leading them away from books, these movies are taking them back to the texts. They see the film and it strikes a chord with them and they think, ‘Maybe I’ll go back and look at the book’.
“We use film as an undergraduate teaching tool. A colleague introduced Shakespeare in Film to the curriculum at ANU seven years ago and other courses such as Classic Novel in Film have since been added, with great success. The courses very carefully give equal weight to the original text and to the film.
“It works beautifully. Hundreds of students now enrol in classes with a film component.
“This is bringing students back to books. For too long we have heard people lamenting the rise of film and television and the decline of the book — but this uses a medium the students are familiar with to bring them back to books.
“This is a generation with a natural affinity with the moving image. When I told my colleagues I was going to get 100 students to read Anna Karenina, they didn’t believe it. It’s an 800 page book. But it worked.”
Backed by evidence of movie attendances, theatre ticket sales and class enrolments, Professor Wright says that the works of the Bard are likely to be playing for a long time yet.
“The whole conference gave a powerful message that after hundreds of years, Shakespeare’s works are still being played and rethought in different languages and different mediums across the world,” Professor Wright says.
“MultiShakespeare: media metamorphoses placed another very large nail in the traditionalist’s coffin. Unless we acknowledge the roots of these modern transformations of the works of Shakespeare, only the transformations will become important to new generations — the essence of Shakespeare and his powerful, timeless storylines will be overlooked.”
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