“The classical text, whilst permanent, is never stable”

-Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre, 1998, Page 155

It’s safe to say that Shakespeare isn’t going anywhere. The love the modern world has for his

plays, his language, his pithy one-liners from “To be or not to be1” to “Out damned spot!2”

has permeated across all Western Culture and scattered its remains amongst all the books we

read. But the relationship between Shakespeare and the present is ever-changing, and an

admiration for his work by playwrights- particularly those from England- has metamorphosed

the relationship into a rivalry for some and a conversation for others. So, what has happened

to the playwrights that were left to pick up the pieces of admiration and attempt to

appropriate what’s already becoming increasingly complex? Acts of love and reverence for

the Bard through an appropriation of his work began to emerge, but even “an act of love

contains the potential for an act of violence” (Barker, 1998, pp 155).

Playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond, Ronald Harwood and Lolita Chakrabarti

each attempted to interweave their plays into the tapestry of the Shakespearean myth. But

each playwright did not create their play to critique the quality of Shakespeare’s writings or

undermine his monolithic role in British theatre. On the other hand, each play engages the

Shakespearean myth in a unique conversation: In Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

are Dead, the dislocation of minor characters from the fringes of Hamlet illuminated a

duality between the treatment of Shakespeare as a legacy and as a contemporary, and

pronounced a new wave of Jacobean playwrights preoccupied with form as they were with

experimental content. This irrevocable creation of Stoppard explored the repository of a

1
Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1
2 Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 1
Shakespearean tragedy with levity, but paved the way for an appropriation that critiqued the

cultural investment Britain enamoured with Shakespearean narratives, and questioned the

Bard’s universality in a microscopic inspection of his later life- Edward Bond’s Bingo.

Bond’s politically espoused play, despite its failings in the public eye, commanded a direct

audience with Shakespeare’s universality, questioning the cultural investment of Shakespeare

that Britain celebrates by directly attacking the ambiguity around the man himself. But

Shakespeare’s undue influence on England could not be severed by Bond, and public acclaim

could only be achieved with an affinity to Shakespeare’s legacy. Ronald Harwood seized the

scramble for a national identity by England in his play The Dresser, which defined the plays

of Shakespeare as a defensive barrier of the Empire, evoking a spirit of England that would

persevere through performance. Harwood symbolised the pre-eminence of Shakespeare to

empower the nation in crisis and combined this back-drop with the desperation of a

performer attaching himself to the legacy of Shakespeare in order to examine the cultural

icon in a favourable light. Despite her similar content of focusing on performing

Shakespeare, the intent of Lolita Charkrabarti’s Red Velvet was far from carrying the torch

Harwood left. Chakrabarti opens up the cracks of morality within the classic tragedy, Othello,

to discuss the tight access to Shakespeare in British theatre, with an emphasis on

performance. Her evocative portrayal of an unheralded Shakespearean actor, Ira Aldridge,

and his debut on the British stage opens up questioning into the unsaid pillars that hold up

British theatre, in particular the exclusivity of who gets to perform Shakespeare. Her play

symbolises the growing discussion in modern theatre about casting and racial politics as the

focus on a celebrated figure pulls at the walls of British theatre that Chakrabarti calls “a

gentlemen’s club, a pretentious self-inflated profession”3. But this loathing for modern

3Lolita discusses the state of British theatre in an article for The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/lolita-
chakrabarti-red-velvet-and-whats-wrong-with-theatre-today-9088989.html
theatre by Lolita isn’t carried with the same disdain when discussing Shakespeare who has

create a pantheon of British drama that is revered across the Western World. With all this

consistent discussion of his works and his legacy, the famous words of Ben Johnson when

discussing his contemporary playwright seem to hold true- “He is not of an age but for all

time”. But maybe not the man himself, nor even his plays are the true token that will survive

immutably. Rather, it is the collaborative cultural process of playwrights and performers that

deconstruct the Shakespearean myth which allows the Bard to remain a consistent

contemporary and a valuable source of origin that with association, can break, continue, or

even propel the theatre of Britain.

Out of the three other plays discussed in this essay, none received the same critical

acclaim as Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, first performed in 1966. Jill

Levenson declared that ‘Stoppard’s adaptation claims Hamlet for the whole second half of

the twentieth century” (Levenson, 2001, pp 162) and concurrently productions of the play

have steadily run since its inception. But why was Stoppard so successful in its conversation

with the Shakespearean tragedy? Stoppard’s play was monumental in reconfiguring

Shakespeare as it introduced an innovative way of stripping narratives ingrained in British

culture and rebuilding it with the techniques available in the period being written. It’s

stripped-down scope of Hamlet with the focus on two minor characters altered the

relationship between the classical tragedy and the contemporary dramatist, as Stoppard was

able to create a new text disparate from Shakespearean narratives. The play has received

international acclaim away from its relationship to Shakespeare, however the text is still
constantly compared to his Shakespearean counterpart and used as a complementary piece to

Hamlet or vice-versa. Hattaway comments that “the play about the Danish prince is almost

the ‘set text’ of the modern debate of identity’ (Hattaway, 1994) and so Stoppard’s choice to

pull two minor characters and sink them in a spiralling journey of existentialism and

absurdism displays the playwright’s own ideas of the Britain he wrote about, whether

intended or not. The ‘Swinging Sixties’ were in full effect at the point Stoppard had written

R&GD, and the nation had a generation of teenagers for the first time who were free from

conscription in Britain. Decades of convention were subverted by culture in music, drug use,

and the British theatre world was also seeing seismic shifts in what got put on stage. The

privileging of social realism and kitchen sink drama that had held sway over British theatre

was beginning to destabilise, causing for what Wendy Griswold identified as an increase in

London revivals of Jacobean drama between 1960-1966. There was a new for fresh

perspectives on the classical plays, and the absurdist style of Stoppard’s R&GD with its

comedic ties came onto the stage at the perfect moment. The British audience were asking for

plays that did not centralise warfare and divides that ruptured the stage, and thus playwrights

who were aware of the shift in zeitgeist “joined forced with long- and so far unsuccessful-

march by the left in Britain toward a more peaceful and egalitarian society”. The

responsibility of the playwright had changed, and thus the content and style of the playwright

had to change as well in order for the profession to remain above water. Stoppard’s two main

protagonists disappear at the end of the play instead of dying by execution off-stage, and the

gruesome denouement that befalls the end of Hamlet happens off-stage rather than in the

play. Stoppard’s excavation of minor characters re-structured the traditional incentives of

performing Hamlet as a national identity play, and instead dragged the historical tragedy of

Shakespeare into a direct collision with the fast-paced, often absurd society that was taking

London by storm in the 1960s.

 The interludes between Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the Players heighten the

comedy in the play but also reveal the spiralling style of Stoppard’s play as it constantly turns

in on itself in its meta form. The player’s stipulations for the type of theatre they perform

alludes to the triad of themes in Shakespeare’s plays-

“PLAYER:

I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without

the love, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three

concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is

compulsory- they’re all blood, you see.” (Stoppard, 1966, pp 33)

Stoppard’s play is encased in a consistent conversation with the father text, Hamlet. This is

conveyed both in the recurrent passages from the original text that swarm onto the stage

without warning, and the interrogation from his two main protagonists in figuring out why

they are needed in the original play. Their existential journey feigns to be a reconfiguring of

moral authority unto two minor characters in Hamlet as the main drive of the play, however,

Rosencrantz and Gulidenstern spend the entirety of the play trying to escape back into the

original text. They are trapped in the absurdist strappings of Stoppard’s work and desperately

fight to leave in order to assume their rightful position amongst the original narrative, and

thus keep the order of tradition with the historical tragedy. At the same time, as they act out

the play in the liminal spaces of Stoppard’s work, they are still bound to the orginal tragedy

and are waiting cues for what to do next from the characters that inhabit that other space.

This creates a duality of existence in the play, as only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern calculate
their presence in both words. However, Stoppard introduces a third party that also darts

between the original tragedy and Stoppard’s absurdist world, and that is the players. The

players themselves become an intertextual reference to a travelling bunch performing plays

which is a common method of performance for Shakespearean companies. However, the

player refrains from mentioning the Bard by name, reflecting the meta-style of commentary

Stoppard uses to discuss the encasement Shakespeare has not only in the play but also on

character’s lives. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot leave the space or the play because

that is what is written in the original text, and so the acknowledgement of this by Stoppard to

retain the core elements of Hamlet highlights the immutability of softening the influences

Shakespeare has. Even in a play that has carved out its own space now in the theatrical canon

and could be argued as its own rightful individual text, the ties to the original still spring up

in its performance and in its language. Guildenstern complains to the player about the style of

plays they perform “GUIL: No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only this- a

comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes” (Stoppard, 1966, pp 27) , evoking the

investment that has been made in classical texts and the disdain that can attach itself to new

interrogations on the theatrical architecture already set in stone. However, Stoppard’s play

does not attempt to strip the original text to strip the admiration for the original text, but

rather to dislocate a new text from the original narrative that collaborates with the

consciousness of the tragedy to identify itself with it.

The two main protagonists involve themselves with a constant exploration of language,

underpinning Stoppard’s attempt to question what language filters through from Shakespeare

and is used in post-modern texts without direct reference to the source. The language of

Shakespeare has been constantly revived in modern culture and shapeshifts particularly with

his most celebrated passages. For Stoppard to have his two Shakespearean characters
constantly question the words that come from their mouths and the words that come from the

moments of the original play transmute the distilling of Shakespearean language. British

culture was scattered and disseminated for a new zeitgeist during the 1960’s, and thus

Shakespearean language had to find its place again amongst a culture that was re-shaping the

fabric of history. The philosophical musings of GUIL are constantly questioned by ROS and

highlights the re-examining of why we value the language of Shakespeare as a higher order

of communication-

“GUIL: Retentive- he’s a very retentive king, a royal retainer…

ROS: What are you playing at?

GUIL: Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” (Stoppard, 1966, pp 41)

The two characters are in constant darkness throughout the play, literally and figuratively,

into the purpose of their existence and the meaning for them being where they are. The only

source of information into their position is from the language they use and the Shakespearean

dialogue dredged from Hamlet, as that play is enacted off-stage. Stoppard cleverly inserts

passages from the original text to reveal slithers of plot about what is going on in the original

text.
 Bingo
Shakespeare has often been attached to stipulations about social criticism and commentary.
But not in Bond’s play, as the greatest playwright of all time is retired from London and the
theatre to live in Stratford, which is historically true in its exploration of the bind between
neighbouring landowners and the man himself. Bond recurrently write lofty polemic
introductions to his plays that audiences are supposed to pick up and notice as they watch or
read his work. The introduction to Bingo could be considered a separate entity of creation by
itself, partly due to Bond’s socio-political style of writing in both his essays and plays and
partly because Bond critiques the society he is in with the same fervour as the one
Shakespeare was in. For instance, amongst the ramblings of money dictating everything an
artist does during the period Bond was writing, he also anguishes upon writing Bingo- “I
wrote Bingo because I think the contradictions in Shakespeare’s life are similar to the
contradictions in us”4. Bond seems to drag the lofty heights of Shakespeare and his plays into
the realities that adhere to his own period, in particular the other dramaturgical elements used
during the 20th century. Bond also dragged the Shakespearean myth into collision with
Brecht’s teaching of theatre, having the play enacted in 6 discreet scenes revolving around
contracts of money and death. The pedagogy of theatre by Brecht is emulated in Bond’s play,
and the lack of compelling action makes way for a harder on-the-nose approach to action-
events repeat themselves, with morality consistently at the forefront of the choices characters
make. The national treasure of Shakespeare is subverted by Bond; we do not see the
illustrious characters and stories he has woven for the British national voice, rather we see an
4
Introductions, page 11.
Commented [MOU1]: Feedback from class-
They aren’t adaptations but rather appropriations.
What connects the works? I.E. How are you going to
connect them all in your thesis? Maybe they don’t all
connect, but you need to make sure you show the
differences in my thesis.
The political vs entertainment of Shakespearean theatre
Some might be approprations, some might be considered
companion pieces.
I should also mention the amount of films. Why am I not
mentioning them in this paper. Because I am also focusing
on the responsibility of the playwright in society that has
now changed.
Why is he the most filmed author ever?
Is it difficult to compare Shakespearean adaptations with
very different tones (is there a narrative that follows them
through history?
What made the difference between the successful plays and
nonsuccessful plays?
How do these plays hold up post-Brexit?
Does RV deal with more complex issues then the others
because of the way it deals with race and gender.
FIONA’S FEEDBACK-
I like your attention to reception: place of original
performance
I noticed that even as a speaker your language can be more
involved than it needs to be. Punchy little "headlines,"
questions, crystallizations, or reminders for an audience are
all as useful aurally as they are on the page
elderly, impassive man who cares not for his family, nor for the marginalised, but only for his

transcripts, which he must preserve. One can see ties to Harwood’s Dresser, with the

alikeness of two ageing men putting their life in order, escaping into tunnel vision to be

stripped of responsibility they have had to carry throughout their life.

Unlike the playwrights discussed in the rest of this essay, Bond was heavily political, and

politically-oriented in his writings both of essays and plays. His choice to centralise

Shakespeare the man in his play discusses the factual events near the end of Shakespeare’s

life, in which it is historically noted that he agreed to enclose common land near Stratford

that would displace farm owners and be disastrous for the poor that relied on the parish.

Bond’s Marxist ties seep into the play as an audience are confronted with a mirror to a man

who has been revered in history, but painted by Bond as a writer driven by capitalist motives

and occupied with profits and an apathy to his countrymen.

Bond fashions a compelling portrait of the revered writer, representing a decaying figure

resigned to pastoral life rather than the hungry thespian that the rest of the country wants so

desperately to envisage about the man. A hungry, selfish man undercuts the selfless, giving

figure of stories that Britain has shaped for Shakespeare. It is also interesting to note that

Britain has a habit of taking its best and oldest actors and wedging them into performing the

best and oldest roles in Shakespeare. Carrying a thread throughout its history from Laurience

Olivier in the mid 20th century up until actors like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen charged

with taking on the roles. It seems that there comes a period near the end of the actor’s career,

that the work they can get their hands on the most, and often when critics finally agree with
reverence, is these grand roles of Prospero, or Lear, or Macbeth. For the second production of

Bingo, Patrick Stewart fought for it to be performed and also chose to play the bard himself,

believing that Bond’s play was a story that was important to be told.

All of the plays discuss class in their own particular ways. Stoppard places lesser characters

of class at the forefront, and the audience sits with their confusion as they attempt to

understand what is the point of them being there in the first place. Bond strips the poor in his

play down to a woeful image, as we watch those with no power become tugged and pulled by

the authorities of the remnants of the feudal system; the poor are punished for their inability

to support themselves, both in death and in the fate of their future. Harwood drops his poor

character of Norman under the wing of Sir, and we watch the constant turmoil between the

two end with Norman in the deep end, desperately calling for someone else to tell him what

to do, as he has never had to make a decision that influences himself directly. Chakrabarti

engages with an immidate discussion of the exclusivity of theatre- who gets to perform what?

And how do they perform it? As her main character, Ira Aldridge, attempts to give an honest

and provocative performance, he is stripped and punished for stepping out of the reigns that

he has been clamped by, costing him a career that is not decided by the theatre’s prejudices

towards him.

A scene which is constantly dragged out of the play by critics and essayists alike is Bond’s

humorous portrayal of Shakespeare and his young rival, Ben Johnson, enjoying a drink at the

pub in Part Two Scene Four. The two speak in a sombre tone but reminisce on graphic scenes

of violence “SHAKESPEARE: When I was buying my house the owner was poisoned. By

his son. Half-wit. They hanged him”, a technique by Bond that contradicts his previous plays
like Saved and Early Morning that had the acts of violence pour onto the stage rather than in

the dialogue. Whether Bond has implemented this discourse in order to dissuade the

censorship of his plays or not, it raises the often undercurrent of violence that bubbles in

Shakespeare’s plays to the lips of the man himself. I believe that the barren play strips the

myth of Shakespeare from its lofty heights and wedges it in intensely real circumstances. He

is at the end of his life, and absolving from discussing any new works, is trying to live

peacefully. Johnson probes and pushes at what Shakespeare is doing, as someone like that

must always be doing something, even when they are doing nothing. And I think that’s what

his legacy has become, that even when it’s not at the forefront of culture in England at the

time, it is still there, quietly sitting in the garden whilst the rest of the zeitgeist rages with the

ideologies that are mainstream.

Commented [MOU2]: Feedback on Dresser paragraphs-

Thinking and analysis is good

Tending to use the passive voice
“The performance itself”- the more significant point to
touch upon
The relationship between post-modern texts and
“And Finally- ah Sir- to the memory of William Shakespeare in whose glorious service we all Shakespeare
labour.” oThe distrust of master narratives
oNotions of universality
oNot just about the theatre but everything that is
Norman, Page 92. Ronald Harwood’s ‘The Dresser’ (1980) performed
“Performance itself has become an area of interest”
When material is quoted, like Shakespeare in post-
modern texts, there is a separation between speaker and
Essay Paragraphs #3- Ronald Harwood’s “The Dresser”
the words.
Hamlet is continuously quotes throughout R&GD
It’s not about destabilising Shakespeare, its about
transferring the glamour to themselves
First line is very blurry
oSimplify the introduction
The context of the plays being producted is important
as well
A vital consideration of the Shakespearean adaptations in Britain after 1945 was their Re-write with minimal latinate (use of tion words)
Don’t use italics in the quotes
Don’t say professor
inclination to focus on State-of-the-Nation concerns within the play. A central theme of
There’s jumps in your ideas
oState-of-the-nation to the jump of truth and reality
Shakespeare’s plays is, according to professor Michael Hattaway “the relationship between Questioning of national narratives, truth and reality
used to do that
truth and reality” (16), and so using this background to bring home cultural allusions of oEscaping reality through the truth sought in theatre.
identity was a powerful tool that many British playwrights utilized, in particular Ronald

Harwood. In his play The Dresser, Harwood shapes a national image of Britain using World

War II as context, but concentrates his play within one actor’s plight to define his relationship

with Shakespeare. To carve a legacy out of performing Shakespeare was to become a branch

out of the oak tree of the Bard’s monolithic mythic status, and Harwood identifies this quest

for legacy with the theatre of Britain’s quest to shape a national identity under the wings of

Shakespeare. To contemporise Shakespeare requires a fracturing from the original text, and

thus Harwood’s innovative approach to style rather than content extends the narrow vision of

Shakespeare himself as a shadow that actors who perform him now must take on and collide

with.

The 1981 Broadway production of The Dresser evoked the peeling back of SIR’s

wellbeing both in stage and design, and were effective in exploring the perseverance of

performance against the tumult of the war. The costume design of Sir is used as a symbol for

his decaying health but also for his being to symbolise the immensity of Shakespearean

companies during the period who were tasked with creating the history of Britain. The

shifting of Sir’s costume from his performance as Lear to relaxing backstage symbolises his

constant mental strain to perform the tragedies of Shakespeare, as he becomes physically

exhausted with the costume changes as much as he is mentally exhausted with performing

Shakespeare his entire life. Careful attention is also paid to the dressing up of Sir into Lear,

and in the 1981 production on Broadway there was an absence of dialogue for ten minutes as

the audience watched Sir apply his make-up with pain-staking detail. Moreover, the lighting

design of the set establishes the internal turmoil of Sir fighting against the external

requirements of his performance. At the beginning of Act two, the Broadway production used

warm-lights of the envisioned “stage” of the play against the cold, harsh lights of backstage.
This is developed further by the staging of the actors in barren backstage, as they prepare for

the performance, with each one engrossed in their own heads tending t themselves in the final

moments; Geoffrey reading his lines, Oxenby smoking, Sir sat stoic in the middle, meditative

(61). All this was seen by the audience in the cold lights of stage left whilst the warm house

lights of stage right leading into the theatre were cut off by a colossal, velvet curtain. It seems

as if the actors are frozen in time whilst off-stage, waiting for their role to be fulfilled before

again slinking into the shadows and away from the action of the play. The double layer of the

real theatre audience watching the performance of a play they can’t see wedges the stage in

two temporal spaces: the fake theatre where the actors make their grand entrances to is an

escape from the reality of their state, a failing Shakespearean company in a time of war. All

the audiences hear of the performance of King Lear is the voices of actors on stage and a

backing track of a fake live audience. This staging is incredibly effective in conveying the

physical toll the performance of Lear has on Sir but also the ramifications the play holds in

periods of instability, as bombs fall over London whilst the play is acted out. Harwood

utilizes this reflection of real-word consequences in the world of Shakespeare in moments “

(The air-raid continues) MADGE: Stand by the storm” (62) as if the sirens of the bombs are

the storm Sir needs for Lear. The set designer of Broadway production, Laurie Dennett,

draws details of the past into the modernised set with the use of a decadent sofa embroidered

with gold and a set of sleek brown chair in collision with simple modernity equipment like a

gas-stove and metal door frames. The collision of the past and present in the set design

extends the dialogue the two historical moments have in the play itself, with the insertion of

rations, bombs, and allusions to the World War interwoven with wigs, a constant need for tea,

and tradition. The staging of Sir’s post-performance speech in front of the drawn curtain of

the stage flips the framing of the space so that the audience who were watching King Lear

was the actual audience all along. SIR’S final speech centralises his quest for public image:
“

SIR: Our most cherished ambition is to keep the best alive of our drama, to serve the

greatest poet-dramatist who has ever lived, and we are animated by nothing else than to

educate the nation in his works by taking his plays to every corner of our beloved island.

Harwood fashions an actor who is hyper-aware of his image in the public eye, and so despite

these grandiose sentiments, Sir has displayed opposing motives for his choice of

performance, as his selfish nature wants to be picked up and placed amongst the greats.

Begged to announce his retirement by Her Ladyship, Sir reveals his perseverance to continue

performing Shakespeare until he collapses and can no longer perform “SIR: …the glorious

words we are privileged to speak”. (85)

British playwright Howard Barker has many one-liners in his impassioned collection

of essays “Arguments for a Theatre” that poetically encapsulate the state of British Theatre

in the 20th Century, but one which particularly stands due its stipulation upon classic plays

“The classical text, whilst permanent, is never stable” (155). Classic plays by Johnson and

Shakespeare have withstood the shifting tides of Theatre zeitgeists in Britain, however their

usage for contemporary playwrights has also shifted according to period. Harwood uses the

legacy of Shakespeare to explore the importance of a national identity in a crisis like a war,
but also incites a more interesting discussion into the authority of Shakespearean texts on the

anthology of Britain. In “The Dresser” Harwood’s dialogue dances off the page when

performed on-stage, particularly in moments of ambivalent aphorisms from Sir, “SIR:

Norman, Norman, if you have any regard for me, don’t listen to him5” (30)- the “him” that

the character Sir consistently references isn’t revealed until the final tragedy of his death, as

Norman reads his concise autobiography “NORMAN: to the memory of William Shakespeare

in whose glorious service we all labour” (92). The ambivalence of who drives Sir, who does

he hate and admire at the same time, is one if not the biggest action that drives the play to its

climax, as the audience are left to ponder on whether it has to do with World War II or

something much deeper into history. Sir anticipates a fantastic legacy to leave behind, but

finds himself stumbling at the end to escape the confines of the Bard. However, he realises

that to carve yourself into the stone of history one needs to put legacy to pen and paper, akin

to the plays of Shakespeare. Sir’s ideology of living forever has been shaped by these plays,

and so he believes that to go on past your time is to follow the penmanship of Shakespeare,

instead of performing in the shadow of his plays. But Sir’s legacy ends with the memories of

him on-stage, foreshadowed by the anecdote of the old women praising Sir at the market in

the opening scene- “NORMAN: You were lovely in The Corsican Brothers.” (16) The legacy

rooted in words and the creation in playwrighting is different to that of performance, and so it

is bittersweet that Sir ends his lift with King Lear despite being unable to write anything of

the same calibre. Harwood cleverly inserts this trope into the tapestry of the text, making the

audience hang onto each line from Sir as they pour deep from within him, as if he is a puppet

which the lines of Shakespeare rips out him with each tug. This idea is reaffirmed by the

sentiments of Hattaway who notes that “it proved impossible to make sense of the present

without chronicling and rethinking the past” (17). The past is layered in Harwood’s play, as

5
My own bold lettering, not Harwood’s
there is the immediate past of World War II coming into direct collision with the classic

history of Shakespeare and the reality sourced from the tragedy. Moreover, the moments of

humour within the play coincide with distinct lines dredged out from the pit of Sir’s motives

as a performer and sink the space out of its levity. For instance, the double entendre of Sir’s

line “SIR: another blank page” symbolises both the blank page of his face that will perform

in full make-up, but also the blank pages he churns out instead of a full-bodied

autobiography. This line was also preceded by a hilarious interaction between Norman and

Sir as he prepares for Othello instead of Lear, and therefore the situation that seemed to be

getting chipper before that line quickly dissipated. Sir cannot untangle himself from the act of

creation, but he ponders on whether acting Shakespeare is the most fruitful reward for his

drive, as you are being compelled forward by the words of someone else. Norman on the

other hand, is idiosyncratic in style and dances across the stage in a bubble of individuality.

Being a dresser, he is disparate from the turmoil Shakespeare brings to Sir, but is arguably

the most performative actor on stage, as he does everything backstage with a melodramatic

flourish. Harwood also re-constructs the idea of a Shakespearean monologue in his play,

which carries its own theatrical weight throughout history as a moment of great clarity for the

character, or in Sir’s case, a moment where finally his performance and person melds into

one “SIR: And I was watching Lear. Each word he spoke was fresh invented… the agony was

in the moment of acting created.” (70) In the Broadway production, Rodgers looks out to the

audience as he performs this monologue with his head gazed to the sky, an act which is

attached to Sir’s characterisation as he desperately searches for recognition. But for what

recognition he searches for is a question unanswered throughout the play, but he seems

desperate to engage the audience in his final performance, desperate for them to take a piece

with him or a piece of them before he dies “Sir: Don’t leave me” (67). Sir aspires for the

lofty heights his predecessors have reached, and is clamouring to remind the audience of the
past. His consistent comparison of himself to the greats thespians of the past encapsulates his

drive as a Shakespearean actor; to recollect a lineage of greats from the past amongst the stars

and attempt to find your place among them.

The constant intrusion of World War II in the play harkens to a period where

Shakespeare’s histories were used in defence for the empire, and as a proclamation of

national unity. However, Harwood inserts Sir’s decaying nature to also comment on the

transference of Shakespeare’s legacy that has been propelled across spans of millennia. The

War has caused those whom are good at the profession to leave to fight and those who aren’t

to stay and perform woefully next to the veteran Sir. Harwood shapes the play as if Sir is the

last left to carry the burden of the Shakespearean legacy for the entire of Britain; it is Sir

whom must climb the mountain of Shakespeare each night, “SIR: More, more, more, I can’t

give any more, I have nothing more to give.” (36) The staging of Sir in the early moments of

the Broadway production- centre stage and illuminated whilst Norman is down stage and out

of light- symbolises the staging of Sir as the last beacon of Shakespeare. Too old to fight in

the war and too old to carry the torch of Shakespeare for much longer, Sir is the perfect age

for the complex characters of Shakespeare to keep it alive in at a tumultuous time. It is out of

question that Sir would not perform King Lear as the people have paid, and now more than

ever, Sir recognises that Shakespeare is an image of triumph for the British people; of a

culture that withstands the onslaught of time and fading memory. But where his life ends and

Shakespeare starts it a symbol that seeps into the moment of levity in the play- just as

Norman has gotten Sir dressed and ready to sweep onto stage, Harwood drags Sir back to the

weight Shakespeare imposes on him and pushes his own individuality further into his psyche,

“(Stage Directions) Sir begins to shiver uncontrollably, and to whimper” (51). In the 1981

Broadway production, the actor that played Sir was the same actor that played Max in
Pinter’s The Homecoming, Paul Rodgers. This actor is the same one that won the first British

Academy Television Award (BAFTA) for his work in The Homecoming, symbolising a

exponentially growing repertoire of British actors that were able to make it big both in

England and The United States. In the recording of The Dresser, the audience claps on the

first entrance of Sir into the space, representing this Shakespearean notion of the central

tragedian figure who has side characters circulating their arc. However, both Courtney and

Rodgers bow together at curtain call, signifying that they are equals on the stage despite their

difference in class in the play. But throughout the play, Sir takes centre stage and Norman

upstage, hidden in the shadows. As the bomb-siren goes off before Sir takes stage, the

production staged a tableau of each characters reaction: Her Ladyship upstage left and

captivated by Sir’s reaction, Norman upstage right and cowering in the shadows, and Sir

centre-stage, full costume as Lear, and trembling at the bombs. The tradition of Her Ladyship

and Sir before each performance “HER LADYSHIP (kissing his hand): Struggle, Bonzo. /

SIR (kissing her hand) Survival, Pussy” typifies the duality that is tussled with in the play; is

performing Shakespeare a struggle or an act of survival? Harwood hopes the audience

considers both as an act of truth when interpreting Shakespeare, as the bombs begin to drop

just as Act 1 starts.

The moments of laughter are quickly followed by lines that sink the gravity of the

space, for instance the double entendre of Sir’s line “SIR: another blank page” symbolising

both the blank page of his face that will perform in full make-up, but also the blank pages he

churns out instead of a full-bodied autobiography. This line was preceded by a hilarious

interaction between Norman and Sir as he prepares for Othello instead of Lear, and the

situations seemed to be getting chipper before that line. Sir cannot untangle himself from the

act of creation, but he ponders on whether acting Shakespeare is the most fruitful reward for
his drive, as you are being compelled forward by the words of someone else. Norman on the

other hand, is idiosyncratic in style and dances across the stage in a bubble of individuality.

Being a dresser, he is disparate from the turmoil Shakespeare brings to Sir, but is arguably

the most performative actor on stage, as he does everything backstage with a flourish and

even a melodramatic song on occasion. Harwood also re-constructs the idea of a

Shakespearean monologue in his play, which carries its own theatrical weight throughout

history as a moment of great clarity for the character, or in Sir’s case, a moment where finally

his performance and person melds into one “SIR: And I was watching Lear. Each word he

spoke was fresh invented… the agony was in the moment of acting created.” (70) In the

Broadway production, Rodgers looks out to the audience as he performs this monologue with

his head gazed to the sky, an act which is attached to Sir’s characterisation as he desperately

searches for recognition. But for what recognition he searches for is a question unanswered

throughout the play, but he seems desperate to engage the audience in his final performance,

desperate for them to take a piece with him or a piece of them before he dies “Sir: Don’t

leave me” (67). Sir aspires for the lofty heights his predecessors have reached, and is

clamouring to remind the audience of the past. His consistent comparison of himself to the

greats thespians of the past encapsulates his drive as a Shakespearean actor; to recollect a

lineage of greats from the past amongst the stars and attempt to find your place among them.

References-

1. Hattaway, Michael, et al. Shakespeare in the New Europe. Sheffield Academic Press,
1994.
 2. Barker, Howard. Arguments for a Theatre. 3rd ed., Manchester University Press,
1998.
3. Harwood, Ronald. The Dresser. 1st Evergreen ed., Grove Press, 1981.

Thought Red Velvet was Lolita Chakrabarti’s debut play, its substance punched home an

important point of the Shakespearean world that Britain had established; As much as it is

important to preserve the values stemmed from the original works, it is important to

reconsider the influence their high platform creates on the gatekeeping of British Theatre.

Marjorie Garber provides an insight into the experience of referencing Shakespeare in

modern times as “the reader, listener or audience feels gratified to ‘get’ the reference’” which

can often blur the equal importance of understanding the distilled language of that reference.

Garber argues that as we progress further and further in history from Jacobean England and

the direct relationship with the past in a post-modern time, the references we have to

Shakespeare will be strengthened in influence by a lack of understanding to their reference.

Chakrabarti’s play was first performed in 2012 and makes it the most recent work explored in

this paper. However, an analysis of her portrayal of the performance of Shakespeare

illuminates similar ties to Harwood’s protagonist and the scattered legacy of being a

Shakespearean performer. What allows performers of Shakespeare to nestle their legacy next

to the plays is the ambiguity of topicality by the bard himself. Jonathan Bate notes that

“Because he was hardly every narrowly topical in his own age and culture, Shakespeare has

remained topical in other ages and cultures” (Bate, 1994, pp 115), and performances of

Shakespeare can be shaped by the current affairs in which the performer inhabits. This

sentiment is symbolised in the impassioned declarations of Charles renouncing Ira for his
skin tone, “Charles: English theatre is top of the tree because within one artist, male or

female, there is everything. It’s a craft. We are colourless canvasses… on which to paint.”

(Chakrabarti, 2012, pp 44) Chakrabarti illuminates a long-standing authority in British theatre

of performance by the best

Chakrabarti’s dialogue can seem a little verbose at points and there are fragmented moment

of transition which are no doubt expected from a debut play.

Chakrabarti herself trained as an actor, and has a keen ability to discern the ability to act

Shakespeare as a noble pursuit and considered an esteemed craft in not only the world but

British theatre. Just like Stoppard’s fragmented world and Harwood’s montage of both on-

stage and off-stage performance, Chakrabarti’s protagonist Ira Aldridge is caught between

two worlds. The play is written in the style of memory, as a sixty-year old Aldridge

reminisces his first time playing Othello at the Royal Court Covent Garden, and institution of

British Theatre known for its celebration of tradition. With this framework, Chakrabarti plays

with anachronistic dialogue to suggest the issues gripping the context of the play- An

African-American actor playing Othello simultaneous to the slavery abolition- are issues that

theatre is still grappling with today in its racial politics and casting. “Ira Aldridge is arguably

one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of our lifetime”, Chakrabarti remarks in the
introduction to her play, “but (he) had been forgotten”. (Chakrabarti, 2014) To ask whether

the play was Chakrbarti’s attempt to propel Aldridge into the canon of actors we consider the

best to ever perform Shakespeare- The Kean’s, the Olivier’s, the Kembles- is to also question

the heart of European theatre and who gets to tell its story that has been commandeered from

its inception by Shakespeare. This abrasion of the past with the present surfaces throughout

the play in painful moments of prejudice, in particular the ideologies of Bernard and Charles

after they have watched Aldridge touch a white cast member-

“Charles: If we bring Jews to play Shylock, blacks to play the Moor, half-wits to plays

Caliban we decimate ourselves in the name of what? Fashion? Politics? Then any drunken

fool on the street will play Falstaff.

Bernard: You know, Pierre, the thing you have to accept about the English is that we’re

open to a point. We like new based on the old. It’s not a free for all- that’s when we close our

borders, do you see? We like what we know, and we know what we like.” (Chakrabarti,

2012, pp 45)

Chakrabarti chose the dialogue to be anachronistic because the same sentiments the two

white actors have for their beloved British Theatre mirror the same rhetoric being used not

only in modern theatre but in political discourse, in particular Brexit dialogues. The

gatekeeping of British Theatre has historically inculcated old, white playwrights to dictate the

change in winds for the theatre that can be traced back to the first old, white playwright who

governed the cultural mission of British Theatre, William Shakespeare. Nor does Chakrabarti

say that the racial ideas conveyed by the plays of Shakespeare dictate the prejudices the bard

had himself. Chakrabarti does not implement the performance of Othello in her play in order
to condescend its worth as one of the greatest tragedies ever and critique the gaps of partiality

towards discussions of race. On the other hand, Chakrabarti’s focus on Othello evokes an

interesting discussion of performance, as the proper method to perform Shakespeare is

focused to question the gatekeepers of British Theatre: Who has access to Shakespearean

theatre? And, who gets to play the main parts? Due to its operatic style throughout history,

acting in Shakespeare has become its own histrionic method that actors have adopted

throughout the years. The characters often assume a round-table discussion style as they

debate the proper method to perform Shakespeare, in particular Ellen’s critique on the

exclusivity of the major roles “Ellen: What frustrates me in our profession, Mr Aldridge,

with all due respect, is the absolute attention given to the leading actor so that the story

becomes lost” (Chakrabarti, 2012, pp 37) The characters illuminate the commonality of

performing Shakespearean dramas with a single heroic actor- a Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth or

Othello- who commands the stage against the rest of the actors in the production. This is

historically accurate to productions of Shakespeare throughout its decorated history:

Laurence Olivier has an influential grip over the adaptation of Shakespeare to film whilst

John Gielgud commanded the stage with his performances

I myself have been told by acting teachers that to get a foot in the business, one must “write

their own work” or “write themselves into the narrative”. Now this seems pretty difficult to

do if the narrative has already been defined by millenniums of the same Shakespearean

narratives re-visted that same actors have performed them. Chakrabarti suggests that despite
the major leaps to reshape the method in which the modern world interacts with Shakespeare,

there are still binds that need to be grappled with in order for a complete exploration of the

relationship between the monolith and the new.

. Hattaway defines that “the Conservative government in the late 1990s (sought) to place a

handful of Shakespearean texts as the centre of a new national curriculum” (Hattaway, 1994,

pp 353), and therefore as the pedagogy of Shakespeare shifted, so to did the use of

Shakespeare by playwrights in England move from inherently political.

RED VELVET-

Page 36-

“Ira: Yes, but… I cheat a little. I don’t write it down but speak as I feel. Truth alters rhythm
and gesture, don’t you think? The old guard doesn’t always like it.

Ellen: Yes, I know. But I do feel quite strongly that we mustn’t all the mundane to interfere
with the gamut of our performance.

Ira: Not at all. I want truth to inform the depths and the heights of what we do. Not to reduce
it.

Ellen: I find rhythm a necessary framework otherwise one could slope around quite
randomly.

Ira: Of course you’re right, I think what I’m saying is I’d rather slide in and out of rules than
be strangled by them.
Page 41-

Charles: This theatre has a royal patent to present quality spoken drama. Not burletta, not
curiosities but drama.”

Page 43-

Pierre: It’s about all of us. About survival. Progress. We are riding a dead horse. Can you not
feel it? We sit through lifeless plays that say nothing about who we are. Theatre is a political
act, a debate of our times. This is our responsibility, n’est ce pas? We have to confront life,
out there, on our stage, in here. Make it live.

Page 44-

Charles: English theatre is top of the tree because within one artist, male or female, there is
everything. It’s a craft. We are colourless canvasses… on which to paint.