Alright, I'm not actually going to review one of Shakespeare's plays. Well, okay, I'll be quick: It's a fine play, nothing special, and certainly nowhere near his big Tragedies, which I think are sublime, Hamlet and Lear in particular.

I would rather like to review the experience of reading Shakespeare versus watching it. I read the play and then watched a performance of it right after. I usually take my Shakespeare in through reading; I prefer it this way. I am too much of a novel reader and I guard my mind's eye too jealously to enjoy seeing someone else's interpretation... See also my distaste of movie adaptations. I know how Hamlet delivers his lines, and whenever I see an actor deliver them, all I can think is "WRONG WRONG WRONG!"

My particular craziness aside, I find Shakespeare productions absolutely non-sensical. We refuse to engage with two very obvious and serious barriers to enjoying a Shakespeare performance: One, the 21st-century human has their aesthetic sense trained on movies. Movie acting is entirely different, allowing for more subtlety. This makes theatre acting seem just plain silly. Two, the Early Modern English of the plays has diverged too much from contemporary English to be easily understood. These two things make seeing a Shakespeare play one of those acts of cultural penance people seem to love.

But no one watches these things like they watch a movie, like they listen to an album they like, or like they read some trashy comic. They don't enjoy it the same way they enjoy these "lower" forms of entertainment. But they will either lie (yes, lie!) about enjoying it in the same way, or they will equivocate and mention something about how it was "interesting" or "different" or something like that. But people, at one time, enjoyed these plays. They were disappointed they ended, and they would spend money they should've not spent on watching these plays. These plays used to be "guilty pleasures," always a true sign something is actually good.

You can see how much they have to goose up these plays to fill the seats: Changing the setting to a contemporary one, getting some famous movie actor to play the lead, using a real skull in Hamlet and so on. In my case, it was watching it en plein air with a picnic (which was delightful). Given that this was a comedy, the acting was incredibly broad. Not only that, but it was obvious that the troupe understood which scenes were particularly opaque, and they would often have slapstick actions happening while some poor actor rattled off lines that not a single person could really follow. One actor---bless him---had his ass exposed, so whenever he turned, we all had a good laugh. That's good and funny, but when this becomes the whole of the entertainment, we have to ask: Why are we even watching a Shakespearing play?

Was anyone actually invested in Benedick and Beatrice's romance? It was played extremely broad. There was no tension, and that shit has to sizzle a little bit. Their feelings for each other are complex and their slow realization that they have the hots for each other is very well written. But that needs the audience to actually understand the fucking words that they're saying. And we do not. Nor do we understand references to popular songs, to contemporary fencing terminology, or Elizabethan superstitions about flowers.

The defense of still performing Shakespeare as it is is that, with good enough actors, you can understand it through the acting. Absurd! First of all, if this were true, why not perform it in Japanese? And then, what the hell are we actually watching? Believe it or not, some of the sentiments expressed in these plays are a bit too complex for acting to do the job! And then, we lead to even more hammy acting, since the actors must basically pantomime the emotions they're trying to convey with words. This is why the Benedick Beatrice romance has too be so over-the-top and hammy, because for subtlety to work, the actors would have to say one thing and act in a different way. But we can't have that, because we can't understand the words.

So, a modest proposal: Modernize Shakespeare if you're going to perform it. Don't go nuts. Don't drop the register to commonplace English, unless you have a good reason, since people actually really enjoy the archaisms, they enjoy the Elizabethan language, they enjoy the "thou's" and "doths" (people go nuts for this stuff). It sounds "cool" and "deep," and a lot of it can be easily understood. But, for example, almost no one is aware of "an" to mean "if." Very confusing, but an incredibly simple substitution.

Rating: 5 Asses