The Propeller company might use an all-male cast for Shakespeare, but its approach to the bard’s work is anything but traditional
TURN UP AT a Propeller production of a Shakespeare play without reading the programme and you might get rather a shock. The leading lady is likely to have chest hair, the love interest a deep baritone, and her maid a shiny bald head. Every part, in other words, is played by a man, just as it would have been in Elizabethan times.
"It's extraordinary how far people's imaginations will go," marvels director Edward Hall. "You say to your audience, 'Here's a baldy bloke – he's the queen, and he's pregnant' and instinctively people think, 'okay, it's let's pretend, I'm fine with that'. Of course it's not really a pregnant queen, but then neither is an actress walking on with a strap-on bump." For Hall, who's bringing Propeller's productions of A Midsummer Night's Dreamand The Merchant of Veniceto the Galway Arts Festival, deploying men on stage is not some slavish exercise in Shakespearean authenticity, but a way of prodding us to look at the plays anew.
“When you have a same-sex cast you remove the question of does Romeo really love Juliet and you focus much more on the story. You’re not really so personally engaged in those particular individuals and it all gets much stronger.” It’s not often you’ll hear a theatre director hoping for a lack of engagement with his characters but then Hall’s approach to Shakespeare is, in a strange way, rather unfashionable. He’s not interested in Romeo or Juliet per se, or, at least, he has no interest in eliciting an awestruck contemplation of two actors attempting to persuade us they’re in love.
What interests Hall is story (he describes himself as a “narrative junkie”), playfulness and, beyond that, Shakespeare’s endless, contradictory play of ideas. Themes is another unfashionable word, but without a doubt, it’s themes that excite Hall and Propeller.
Here he is, for example, on A Midsummer Night's Dream: "It's a fantasy of love; how love can transform your life, make you totally ridiculous, be completely painful and wonderfully funny, all wrapped up in this wonderful cocoon of magic." In Propeller's version, Puck assumes a Prospero-like role as arch-magician and trickster; he is Puck-in-a-box, erupting out of a mirrored cube to direct his ragged band of fairies to act out the play's tangled web of love affairs. Visually, Hall declares, it recalls "a mixture of Victorian pyjama-ed fairies with slightly weird animations I watched by a Czech animator.
“Doing Shakespeare is all about creating the right landscape for the play to grow in and it’s never literal for me. The dots are never all filled in. It’s a suggested world which is evocative of certain things. The story fills in the bits between the dots, and the audience does that with you. We don’t chain the play to the floor by saying, ‘this is 1840, England’, we use elements of things that will help release the metaphor in the writing.”
The second Propeller production coming to Galway is, Hall says happily, "a very different kettle of fish". As a play, The Merchant of Veniceis often in danger of capsizing beneath the anxiety and debate provoked by the troubling character of Shylock, "the Jew".
Hall is undeterred; Propeller recently took on The Taming of the Shrew, another rarely-staged Shakespeare work deeply unsettling to contemporary audiences due to its perceived misogyny and cruelty.
Professing himself “sick and tired of liberal, intellectual arguments” centring on Shylock’s infamous, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech, Hall wanted to push the play out of the debating chamber and into an arena better suited to drama.
“All those contemporary issues are very important, but I don’t think they troubled the play in the same way they do today. I wanted to try and strip that away to get at the centre of the play, which is about justice and mercy.” The result is a production that uses the questions which habitually trouble directors (Hall cites as an example, “How Hasidic should Shylock look?”) to formulate a theatrically-innovative response in which Shakespeare’s Venice has been transformed into a Bedlam-esque prison called, yes, Venice.
“I wanted to find a place where there wasn’t quite such an emphasis on what people looked like. In a prison, that’s it; you’ve got a uniform, everyone basically looks the same.
“Secondly, I wanted to find an environment where it’s easy to understand people’s radical behaviour. Inside that kind of community, people become very protective, very defensive, and they move further and further towards their tribal groupings. So people call each other ‘Christian dogs’ and ‘Jewish pigs’ and spit at each other in the yard. I wanted an atmosphere where we could radicalise people’s behaviour into those extremes of hatred, love and desire we see in the play.” It’s a clever position, one that asks us to contemplate not what the play says about Jews or Christians, but what it says about tribal allegiances in extremis. The all-male cast adds an extra layer of tension as Portia and Bassanio’s romance becomes a cell-block liaison between prisoners (Hall name-checks Louis Theroux’s documentary on San Quentin prison as source material).
It’s a controversial approach, but that’s okay with Hall, who aims only to release Shakespeare’s writing, rather than pleasing the gallery. “I have to feel at the end of it that if I was watching my version, I might not like it, but I couldn’t argue with it. There’s a difference.” Luckily, audiences from New York to Tokyo (where the two Galway-bound productions opened last week) appear to like Propeller’s work very much.
It's more than 10 years since Hall staged Henry Vusing only male actors and less of "the gifts of modern theatre" such as recorded sound, at the tiny Watermill Theatre 80km outside London, and Propeller was born.
Since then, ambitious productions such as Rose Rage, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VIplays (performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2001) have ensured that Hall (whose father, Peter, founded the National Theatre in Britain) is now considered one of the foremost interpreters of Shakespeare.
To Hall, what defines a Propeller production is not its higher-than-usual level of testosterone, but its emphasis on narrative clarity (“I like to think that over the years the most consistent reaction from our audiences has been, ‘I got it’. I work very hard on that”) and a determination to put actors at the centre of each production.
“That might sound like a slightly weird thing to say, because aren’t actors always at the centre if they’re on the stage, but in a Propeller production, the actors are storytellers. They’re not just playing their parts, they’re creating the entire evening: singing, playing the violin, doing a hand-stand. There’s a physical breadth and performance energy to our productions that is very vital.
“I always say we have to assume that no one knows anything about this play, no one’s read it, no one’s studied it. They’ve just walked in off the street, after a hard day. The last thing they’re prepared for is two and a half hours of Shakespeare. When the lights go down, everybody’s energy is down there and we have to take them up there. That’s what we try and do.” During rehearsals, the entire company (currently 14 actors) spends all day in the studio, and come performance time, everyone pitches in to shift scenery, create sound effects and wear frocks. Their loyalty is rewarded by what Hall calls a “gentlemen’s agreement” that means every actor in a current production will have a job in the next.
"My feeling about that has always been that if we enjoy success, that should breed opportunity. So if we're successful as a company then they should get the chance to do it again." Hall frequently works outside Propeller: he took Macbeth, starring Sean Bean, to the West End in 2002, co-directed a nine-hour production of Tantalus with his father the previous year, and he regularly takes a turn behind the camera on BBC's Spooks. But does he ever think about changing the Propeller formula and veering away from his all-male cast? "When we run out of plays or get bored, we'll stop. But at the moment, it's still a fascinating experiment, it's still interesting me enough and it's still proving to me what a wonderfully interesting attitude to sexuality Shakespeare had."
The Merchant of Veniceis at the Town Hall Theatre, July 23rd-24th, and A Midsummer Night's Dreamis at the same venue, July 22nd, 24th-26th. www.galwayartsfestival.com