Stage Struck

To see or not to see is the question, says PETER CRAWLEY

THERE’S AN old joke about an actor, short on talent but long on self-regard, who is performing Shakespeare in the Park – badly. The audience gets restless and start jeering. The actor breaks character, holds up his hands and says, “Hey, don’t blame me. I didn’t write this shit!”

Every time that gag works, it underlines a commonly held assumption: that Shakespeare was infallible. That his command of language was unparalleled, the range of his plots unbridled, the depth of his characterisations fathomless. Any contradictions in his plots or inconsistencies in his characters are merely puzzles set by a genius for generations to solve. Shakespeare, in short, is not the problem, and only a fool would question him.

There's a certain liberation, then, in the subtle re-titling of Loose Canon's new Shakespearian production, which turns the certainties of a romcom into an open enquiry: A Midsummer Night's Dream?At the time of writing only some clues as to director Jason Byrne's intentions had drifted out.

It was said to be pretty faithful to the text, but would throw in a few expletives to see where they sat with the iambic pentameter. The mismatched lovers and meddling fairies would be less enchanted and pranked than completely trolleyed and gulled into, erm, animal husbandry. Or, as they put it, “So f**ked off your face that you end up f**king a donkey”.

That sounds iconoclastic, to put it mildly, but Loose Canon has pursued different methods and styles while always asking the same basic question of the classics: what do they mean to us?

True, radical re-interpretations of Shakespeare have become more of a cliché than playing it straight. But transplanting

Macbeth

to a yuppie-ridden golf course,

Merchant of Venice

to Fascist Italy or Hamlet to the fourth belly of a cow isn’t all that adventurous if you’re still steeped in uncritical reverence for the Bard. Or, come to think of it, if you still use the term “Bard”.

What uncouth boor described Shakespeare as "stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance"? Why, it was George Bernard Shaw, who fantasised about digging up Will's corpse and pelting stones at it. When you hear Professor Higgins in Pygmalionclaim English as the language of "Milton, Shakespeare and the Bible", remember: Shaw really is blaming Shakespeare for writing this shit.

The thing is, Shaw, Loose Canon and companies such as the daring Pan Pan are doing Shakespeare a service that the school-syllabus reverence of Second Age and the merry traditionalism of the Dublin Shakespeare Festival don’t come close to.

Revealing the relevance of his work beneath reverence isn’t about textual purity, or funky casting decisions. It’s about treating Shakespeare as a man instead of a god. Even if you think the answer is a given, the pleasure is in the asking: are these plays any good? That is the question.