Deborah Ross wants to update Shakespeare

King Lear

Monday, BBC2

Rating:

(not really, but I need to save face) 

The Bridge

Friday, BBC2

Rating:

An attempt to like Shakespeare #764, and this time I was especially hopeful. The BBC had assembled a stupendous cast for King Lear, including Anthony Hopkins, Jim Carter, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Emily Watson and Florence Pugh. It was directed by Richard Eyre and set in Britain today, which might prove helpful. I did my preparation. I trained for this. I read the full play with the modern translation running on the opposite page. I read up on the themes (power, dementia, youth versus age). I drank four Red Bulls and six espressos, kept the Pro Plus to hand and sat in the least comfortable chair well away from the remote, in case the call of Too Fat To Fly on the other side became too strong. 

And yet, and yet, and yet. You can’t say ‘Shakespeare, I’m just not into him’ as everyone will round on you. The Radio 4 arts programme, Saturday Review, previewed this, and when the TV presenter Katie Puckrick said she’d never seen King Lear at the theatre, the other guests rounded on her with a disbelieving ‘Whaaaaat?’ And then, ‘Not once?’ She said she found this production ‘dense’ and would need to ‘watch it again’, which is what you do say to save face. It’s ‘I failed it’, and never the other way around. 

The BBC had assembled a stupendous cast for King Lear, including Anthony Hopkins, Jim Carter, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Emily Watson and Florence Pugh

The BBC had assembled a stupendous cast for King Lear, including Anthony Hopkins, Jim Carter, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson, Emily Watson and Florence Pugh

Like cricket or a foreign language, it may be that you have to be exposed to Shakespeare when you’re young to get your ear in, and I was not. I was part of the first year of comprehensive education, and as a matter of curiosity I’ve just looked up my old school in the first-ever league tables (’92) to discover it was one of the ten worst-performing schools in the entire country at that time. (Only 18 per cent of pupils achieved five GCSEs, grade A-C.) I think we opened Romeo And Juliet but then the teacher went off to have a nervous breakdown and that was that. And we didn’t go to the theatre, not once. (That is, if you don’t count the flasher who was always in the underpass, which is a kind of theatre, I suppose.) So I am bitter. So I do feel there’s a key to Shakespeare and I’ve been cheated out of it. I can do it when it’s Kiss Me, Kate but otherwise the language is too difficult, too baffling, and then lessons are learned, but only once everyone is dead. 

I lasted the two hours – I might never learn who was too fat to fly – and this is where I should say I could see what was excellent about the production: the Game Of Thrones-style music, the ‘fab performances all over the place’ (Guardian) and the ‘mesmerising’ Hopkins (Times), yet the only time I connected with anything happening on screen was when the Duke of Gloucester had his eyes gouged out, as that looked painful. Otherwise, it was like turning on the TV in a foreign hotel room. I do wonder: if you can do Shakespeare with cars  and helicopters and shopping centres and the A1 thrumming in the background, why can’t you update the language? Or do that sometimes as a gateway drug? But this suggestion always leads to outrage. Shakespeare is the language. Yes, but Seamus Heaney updated Beowulf to suit modern ears and no one had a fit? (Or died.) Still, I want to save face. So let’s just say I failed it, and not the other way around. 

Now, where are we otherwise? The Handmaid’s Tale expects us to take on ‘the colonies’ in addition to everything else, which is quite a big ask, while Patrick Melrose remains superb. (Harriet Walter’s Princess Margaret!) A Very English Scandal will always suffer if it doesn’t feature ‘Boofy’ and his badger – played by a badger called ‘Toby’, apparently; I want Boofy and Toby to have their own break-out series – but it is still sublimely and blissfully watchable. True, it’s less tragedy, more comedy, and the final scenes of episode two played out like an Ealing caper, but so much of what happened did happen. (Newton’s nickname was ‘chicken brains’ and his initial plan was, in fact, to attack Scott with a chisel hidden inside a bouquet of flowers.) 

And also The Bridge, which may have become excessively convoluted. It should have settled on its focus by now, surely, but it keeps introducing yet more characters. As it stands, we no longer have to keep track of the Iranian threatened with deportation, which is a relief, but there’s the father with the daughter in hospital, the journalist whose twin brother was murdered, the creepy mother and son who run that creepy community, the mother and son who have moved into the creepy community, that mother’s violent ex-husband, the two street girls, the murdered woman’s husband, the bloke with the fishy car and fishy wife and… a killer clown! Still, at least you don’t have to get your ear in because of the subtitles. There’s a thought…

 

 

 

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