Bridgerton, Boys, and Baking Powder
Plus: Sure, add live deer to "As You Like It," what could possibly go wrong?
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A quieter week for Shakespeare News, other than Jessie Buckley being adorable. Enjoy these bits and bobs from the last month, we’ll be back next week with the newest news.
Quick Links
Bridgerton roundup: Benedict’s look for the masquerade is based on Shakespeare, plus your annual reminder that Luke Thompson took over Edgar in the Ian McKellen Lear from Jonathan Bailey (at work).
It was recently brought to my attention that in addition to all the Hamlet in-jokes in the National Theatre production (coming soon to a BAM near you), Hamlet also wears a t-shirt with a reference to Christopher Marlowe’s recreational preferences.2 Excellent/Terrible news: you can buy the shirt.
Skeans, the traditional Irish knives of kerns and gallowglasses. (Huh?) (Yes, please, give Macmorris one of the long ones. “I will cut off your head” with one of these in hand is a real threat.)
Adam Long on the history of the Reduced Shakespeare Company.
"People often say to me, oh, is Reduced Shakespeare supposed to be the antidote to boring Shakespeare? And the question just always flummoxes me because I've never seen anything that I consider to be boring Shakespeare.”
Ellen Terry’s locked photo album + Henry Irving’s Hamlet sells baking powder (“to bake or not to bake”)5 via The Folger & Colleen Kennedy.
Chesapeake Shakespeare’s online Ira Aldridge exhibit.6 (more online exhibits, please!)
OSF’s Director of Repertory Producing.
“Producing in rotating rep is like an elaborate dance,” she said. “If someone goes out of step it can set off a chain reaction throughout the company. Part of my job is to build a safety net so the house of cards doesn’t fall if one card comes out of place.”
As You Like It Sidebar
Peg Woffington collapsed on stage during As You Like It in 1757 but at least she was almost at the end?
A 1879 As You Like It featured a stuffed deer. When the deer was omitted in later productions it caused “the outrage of locals.”
Olivier’s first Shakespeare on film. (1936), “the first ever outdoor performance of Shakespeare in America” (1903), and marking Orlando as an outsider by making him “the only character at court who wears jeans.” (more)
Don’t Do This
Almost every Ophelia I’ve met has a story about Hamlet deciding “in the moment” to add a little extra violence into the nunnery scene. You know, because Hamlet was really feeling it that day. Why anyone continues to think this is an acceptable thing to do, let alone joke about on a podcast, continues to be utterly beyond me.
I did Hamlet a couple years ago – I was playing Hamlet – and during the “get thee to an nunnery” sequence I frequently would kick Ophelia’s book across the stage towards her…and for some reason, during one of the shows, I decided I would just pick it up and throw it in her direction.
Now, this wasn’t me thinking about it as like a strategy. This is just something that happens in the moment. And so, because it’s not a nice scene. It is a very, if you like, it is arguably an abusive scene. Actually, I think it’s pretty unarguably an abusive scene. But anyway, but it wasn’t a violent scene the way we were doing it. And I picked up this little book..and I flung it in her direction. Hit her straight in the leg. Really hard, like it was a straight line.
And I just saw in her eyes… “Oh fuck you dude.” But of course Hamlet does not then say, “I’m sorry Ophelia, let me rethink every decision I’ve made.” No, no, Hamlet if anything is even meaner as the scene goes on so I just kept going…the show must go on,7 and we did the rest of the scene, and the whole time she was, like, burning holes in my face with her eye lasers8…and then backstage – backstage I went up to her and I was like, “Oh god, I’m so fucking sorry.” She of course was like – I said – well she was like – she was like, “Yeah it’s fine, I know you didn’t mean to, but please don’t.”9 But yeah. Sometimes mistakes10 can breathe life into a scene11 in a really unexpected and terrifying way.12
Like this one.
He may have been an excellent scholar, but he was a terrible audience member:
According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, “his rather puritanical sensibility” frequently found offence in Abbey plays, so that: “He continued until 1915 his habit of disrupting various performances with hissing and booing.”
Interested in The Elfin Sprite, the “serio-comic legendary fairy tale” advertised alongside Aldridge’s Othello? Bad news: it is Bad. But the tiny book it comes it is adorable!
No, it mustn’t.
Would wishing made it so.
Not a mistake.
If you need to hurt people to invigorate your flaccid performance, you’re doing it wrong.
“Unexpected and terrifying” for WHOM?
The wonderful scholar Emer McHugh has also written on the topic of added violence in production of Hamlets: https://howlround.com/are-we-traumatizing-people