DESTRUCTIVE DIRECTORSThe function of a director, surely, is to enable a playwright or composer to speak to an audience. Yet so many directors nowadays seem more concerned to caper about before the customers, to the extent of pushing the basic work into the background.
A recent production of Etherege's 'Man of Mode', for example, was transposed into the 21st. century. The excuse for this is generally that such wrenching makes the play more 'relevant'. If an audience cannot see that a great play, speaking of the human condition, has universal relevance, they are unlikely to get much out of a performance at all. Anyway. the thing was done: the only problem for the creative director is that a great deal of the text refers to things and usages that no longer exist. The solution? Oh, very easy - you rewrite bits of the text that don't fit. Since the essence of the play is that it presents in vivid highlight the scandal and malpractice of that age this means that a whole level of reference is muted or destroyed. Still, it's relevant innit? Though to what is not clear.
Shakespeare texts are generally approached with more awe. Can't muck about with the sacred book. So here the technique is to try to cram everything, ancient and modern, into one box. I still remember with distress a production of 'Henry V' in which the embarrassed-looking actors playing the English army were stuffed into battle-dress complete with swords and breastplates.
Why can't they just present the play as it is? 'Speak the speech, I pray you, trippingly on the tongue' and you're nine-tenths of the way there already.
And it's not only plays. Last week I read of a production of 'Dido and Aeneas' which was performed, for no apparent reason, in a swimming-pool. In the actors plunged, fully clothed, and after a bit of floating about came out again, stripped naked in full view of the customers, and dried themselves off. Since they could hardly be expected to sing in these circumstances the vocal part was done by a duplicate (or in some cases triplicate) cast. What on earth was the relevance of all this?
A review of a much-acclaimed film premiered recently endeavoured to outline the action; but the reviewer, necessarily much younger than I, found it so incomprehensible that she gave up. Why does the theatre-going public put up with this rubbish?
After 'making it relevant' the next slogan in importance is 'attracting the young audience'. To this end ITV is screening a compressed version of 'Mansfield Park' in which an ebullient young actress is totally mis-cast as the diffident heroine, and she has been surrounded by a male chorus of pretty young men who but for the fact that they wear different hats are totally indistinguishable one from another. Who will this attract? And what will they think of the pap that they have been offered? Surely, that if this is Jane Austen, what is all the fuss about?
