Glocal Spin-Offs: Ghosting of Shakespeare in the Works of Forced Entertainment (original) (raw)
The present paper examines the osmotic presence of Shakespeare in English contemporary theatre. The Shakespeare's position in the centre of the Western canon is irrevocable, yet the influence operates rather as a cultural residue: a ghost or echo. The aim of this paper is to highlight the notion of ghosting, a term coined by Marvin Carlson, as the process of using memory (both individual and cultural) to understand and interpret the new. Thus Shakespeare's presence in contemporary culture need not be seen as what Colin Teevan calls the theatrical equivalent of muesli; on the contrary, the theatre of Shakespeare, according to Hans Lehmann, resembles postdramatic theatre. Thereby this paper suggests a link between Shakespeare and Forced Entertainment, a leading British experimental theatre, and attempts to illustrate this by revisiting the company's workshop called Five Day Lear, the only direct fabrication of Shakespeare in Forced Entertainment's oeuvre, a marginal video Mark Does Lear made by Tim Etchells, the company's artistic director; additionally the project highlights the ghosts of Shakespeare's presence in Spectacular and The Thrill of it All – two Forced Entertainment's recent performances. The paper further accentuates a glocal rather than global reading of Shakespeare so as to justify current needs for spin-off translations of Shakespeare into English (such as the NoFearShakespeare project).
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In the year 1966, a year after the Royal Shakespeare Company's epochal version of Hamlet, Peter Hall advocated the mission of the RSC to be "in the marketplace of Now. .. expert in the past but alive to the present" (Chambers 31). 1 Even if intended as a figurative aside, Hall provides a particularly pregnant metaphor for thinking about the place of The RSC in particular and contemporary Shakespearean performance in general. This is not only because it demonstrates how the advocacy of Shakespearean drama is connected to the sense of its relevance and immediacy-even urgency-to the concerns of the contemporary moment, but also because the metaphor of the marketplace reinforces the fact the theatre is indeed a commercial operation in the market of the arts. Underlying Hall's statement is a more general notion of drama that could also be called the ideal role of the theatre in modern society; that the theatre, among all arts, is the place where the past as tradition and the present as contemporary experience meet in artistic practice. This combined sense of art and commerce could properly be called the 'cultural production' of drama and this essay considers in what sense Shakespeare in contemporary British performance can still, over forty years since Hall's comment, still be described as in "the market place of Now". What does it mean for British Shakespearean performance to be 'alive to the present' today? There are, of course, a multitude of ways to think of the place of Shakespeare in modern culture (acutely so in the internationalized and media-ῌ 39 ῌ brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Touring theatre is a place where theatre studies and globalization come into contact. The year of 2012 was a year of global festivities in which Shakespeare’s works played a major part. Through their exemplary power, the intersections of world cultures and Shakespeare provide a set of important issues for repositioning theatre studies in the wider field of globalization studies. How does Shakespeare make world theatre legible in the British context? What roles have “foreign” performance styles played in the rise of Shakespearean theatre as a “global” genre and to post-imperial British identity in the world? More specifically, what does it entail for international touring theatre artists to perform Shakespeare in Britain and for the British press to judge these touring productions? Some answers to these questions can be found in the patterns of production and reception of Shakespeare in postnational spaces—festival venues where national identities are blurred by the presence of such entities as transnational corporate sponsors. Some of the touring theatre works in 2012 were produced under circumstances that may prove challenging or alienating to even the most cosmopolitan audiences. Shakespeare in the diaspora puts pressure on some of the theoretical models theatre historians have privileged in their documentation of the Western sources of non-Western performances. In particular, the reception of touring performances is informed by issues of politics, language, and performantive cultural affiliations.
The nature of the ghost of Shakespeare in Hamlet is still debated today, according a paper published by Thomas Rist in Shakespearan Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (2013). When adapted, the play is indeed not deprived of any hermeneutic issues when it comes to act it out. Based on the idea that the ghost figure in Hamlet has become universal, this paper studies how three of its recent adaptations, all of which were performed at the Festival d’Avignon between 2005 and 2011, reinvent Shakespeare’s ghost and, as a result of a very personal interpretation, propose a new reading of this classic play to better expose its semantic and structural riches. The reading of Hamlet seems accordingly to fit into the definition of the fantastic, a generic mode whose relations with drama have often been neglected by research in the humanities.
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