A horse! A horse!

There are few things so quintessentially English as Shakespeare. It is impossible for me, as an alien, to truly estimate his influence on the culture and language, but beyond doubt it is enourmous. Like Bach on music, Shakespeare left his indelible, unique stamp on theatre.

I have had very little direct exposure. I read one of his plays in highschool (Romeo and Juliet), I think I saw Hamlet performed on stage once, and I wached Prospero's Books which is a cinematic interpretation of The Tempest; that's the sum total. However, you see echoes everywhere: for instance, from my favourite genre SF&F an obvious example is Terry Pratchett, several of whose books are parodies on Shakespeare plays.

Tonight I went to see Richard III, one of the early Shakespeare plays. The city of York has some claim on the historical figure, who belonged to what is called the "Yorkist faction" in the War of the Roses and was apparently popular here in his time. This year there is some kind of commemoration, in the course of which the play is performed at the York Royal Theatre. I do not know if there is any causal link, but in the beginning of 2013 the body (read: bones) of Richard III were rediscovered in an archeological dig in Leicester (or as the press has it: he was dug up from underneath a car park). I remember reading about this back then in the Netherlands, although I would not have been able to tell you which king it was that they found.

I really did not know what to expect from a Shakespearian drama in this day and age. Do they take the original text, or modernise? Do they stick to a traditional staging, or modernise? I was assuming a more traditional uptake, and somewhat afraid of not being able to follow I spent several hours yesterday and today reading most of the play. The plot is complicated enough to be glad of that (there are at least 3 Edwards and 4 Richards around, for one thing) but it made me wonder even more how this could ever be made to sound natural, or even in the vicinity thereof.

The play was indeed based on the original text (although being prepared I was able to spot they cut a few pieces); the staging anachronistic, but in a traditional style you can already see in Jesus Christ Superstar: swords and flashlights, crowns and motor helmets, that kind of thing. Of course, hearing text is quite different from reading it, especially when performed well: though there were some moments where I thought the lines were by rote, mostly it made sense as spoken text and was not even all that outdated or hard to follow.

As for the performance as a whole, I do not quite know what to think, because I cannot see it in isolation from its context, and indeed without that context I would never have gone to see it in the first place. I was certainly captivated from time to time, especially towards the conclusion when some modern lighting and smoke effects were put to effective use, but the plot is so artificial that it keeps you from suspending your disbelief. In that sense, maybe the play is unavoidably outdated. The better stories nowadays are multi-layered, one of the bottom layers having been laid by Shakespeare himself; but like renaissance music, it is not easy to go back and appreciate it for what it was in its time.