The Mind of a Postmodern Director

It will come as no revelation to any of my regular readers that I've often expressed my extreme displeasure with — my contempt for — postmodern, or so-called Eurotrash, productions of the great Wagner masterpieces and other masterpieces of the stage by other creators from times past, and laid the primary blame for such at the feet of self-involved, self-serving directors who thought their "vision" more important, more worthy, and more pertinent than that of the stellar geniuses responsible for the creation of those deathless masterpieces. It never once occurred to me, however, that the motivation for the outrageous vandalism of such directors could in fact stem from their basically well-intentioned if egregiously wrongheaded and ill-considered desire to do a work better justice, and that perhaps I may in past have been a bit shortsighted in the matter generally.

Or was I?

The breakthrough in my thinking on Shakespeare [writes stage director Michael Bogdanov] came with a lavish production of Romeo and Juliet in 1974 at the newly opened Haymarket Theatre in Leicester....

[...]

In rehearsal the story had been coming over hard, clear and very exciting. [...] When the production moved from the rehearsal room and arrived on to the stage, somehow the clarity and the hardness, the linear quality of the story, had gone. What was more, audiences weren't responding to either the production or the play. At the last moment, after the very final preview, I cut the whole of the end scene, where the Friar recaps the story for the benefit of Escalus and, after the death of Juliet, I switched to a press conference around the unveiling of the two gold statues that Capulet and Montague erect to the memory of each other's child.

Rock music built to a climax during a blackout and, when the lights came up, the entire company was assembled in modern dress in front of Romeo and Juliet, now dressed in gold cloaks and masks standing on the erstwhile tomb. Muzak played: "Fly Me to the Moon" . . . Escalus, the Duke, read the prologue as an epilogue from a cue card, as if inaugurating at an unveiling ceremony. The main protagonists were photographed in front of the statues, shaking hands, the Nurse holding up a rope ladder, Escalus attempting to bring about the familial reconciliation with a three-way hand clasp. The smile of Jimmy Carter handing over the presidency to Reagan.

The transformation had an extraordinary effect. People in the audience shouted, people walked out, people cheered, people bravoed, people booed, and I thought: "For three hours they have been bored out of their minds and suddenly something has challenged them. A moment of real theatre."

[From a reprint in The Guardian of an edited extract from Shakespeare: The Director's Cut, by Michael Bogdanov, published by Capercaillie Books.]

"Suddenly something...challenged them. A moment of real theatre"(!)? What is that? Some sort of joke? One hardly knows whether to laugh, weep, or rage. Is Bogdanov being willfully simpleminded? Self-delusional? Or just plain lunatic. Or is he simply offering up a veiled and disingenuous apologia for his own self-involved, self-indulgent corruption of a masterwork.

It seems to me that any honest, conscientious director, on finding that when his production of a work by Shakespeare (Shakespeare, for chrissake!) "moved from the rehearsal room and arrived on to the stage ... audiences weren't responding to either the production or the play," would look for fault elsewhere rather than come to the astonishing conclusion that Shakespeare or his centuries-acknowledged, timeless and universal masterpiece was somehow the culprit for not speaking to a contemporary audience. After all, we're here talking about a play that in its unadulterated form has captured the imagination and riveted the attention of countless numbers of audiences for more than four centuries now. What strange and anomalous circumstance could possibly have accounted for its sudden failure to do so at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester in 1974?

Golly. That's a tough one to suss out. I'll take a stab at it, though, by suggesting that perhaps the failure was neither Shakespeare's nor the play's, but entirely that of the director and his actors. I mean, that doesn't sound an at all unreasonable suggestion, does it?

Well, perhaps to Mr. Bogdanov and his brethren it would.

We're in peril today, boys and girls, of seeing, at the hands of such as Mr. Bogdanov, the disappearance of all that's great and meaningful in our beyond-price legacy of stage masterworks from times past. By the attempts of such auteurs as Mr. Bogdanov to peddle their own by comparison piddling and inconsequential "vision" at the expense of those masterworks, and in place of the vision of their creators, and by directors / producers resorting to mass-market prole-pandering to attract a larger audience for their productions, we'll not have to wait for a biblical Armageddon to bring an end to our civilization.

Isn't that saying too much? I mean, get real. They're only stage works we're talking about here; mere entertainments, and ancient into the bargain. Should we be even the least bit concerned?

Mere entertainments, and ancient indeed. Like the blood that courses through our veins is a mere salty, liquid remnant of our ancient ocean-borning, and nothing more.

Should we be even the least bit concerned?

Not exactly.

Afraid is what we should be. Very afraid.