Statespeare – Studying Shakespeare Suckeths by Nelle Lee (& William Shakespeare). shake&stir theatre co at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, May 23-24 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 23
The context for this review needs to be made clear, as follows:
http://www.ourbrisbane.com/businesses/1691434.shake-stir-theatre-co
From
an educational point of view there are positives and negatives in this
show. As a production put on for the general public rather than in a
school context, there are different positives and negatives. In
Queanbeyan it was presented for the general public without its
theatre-in-education purpose being made explicit. At the same time
quite a large proportion of the opening night crowd were young and
possibly students.
The Q publicity says it is a
“fast-paced, hilarious and eye-opening experience for all theatre
lovers.” The performance is certainly fast and physical – a positive,
though I did hear some middle-aged people comment that they hadn’t been
able to pick up all the dialogue. As a later than middle-age person I
had the same problem, but it was obvious from the laughter of
recognition from the young people that they had no difficulty following
every nuance of the latest patois. No-one seemed to lose concentration
listening to the Shakespeare and following the action.
It’s
on the issues of being “hilarious” and “eye-opening” that the divide
between the educational and potentially general audience purposes pops
up. The script is clever. It was obvious that the two pairs of teenage
drama students (played by Ross Balbuziente who also directed, Nelle
Lee, Judy Hainsworth and Nick Skubij) were parallel to Benedick,
Beatrice, Claudio and Hero who I had just seen in Bell Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
They bicker, joke, play and expose themselves to emotional risks as
they try out possible scenes from different Shakespeare plays to present
for drama class assessment. Unintended revelations stop the fun but in
the end conflicts are resolved and love is confirmed. Out of my
ex-drama teacher role, it was all just too predictable.
There
were quite hilarious moments, such as the matter of Macbeth’s nipples
which Lady Macbeth sexily pinches. There was even a rather shocked
laugh when Macbeth pinches her nipple in return. I thought this
represented a highlight of reality about the young characters’
relationships. But as a play for an adult general audience, only Jay,
written and played by Nelle Lee, approached the kind of complexity and
depth of character needed. The other three characters, all played with
professional clarity, were too close to the sorts of conventional
stereotypes seen in something like High School Musical or Fame.
Lachlan is the standard nerd boy, Nerys the standard nerd girl, and Rob
the standard girl-mad boy. Jay is much more complicated, rejecting the
conventional tall poppies Lachlan and Nerys but showing real
originality and maturity in how she plays with the Shakespeare, even
though Rob is her man in the end. I think Shakespeare had the same
problem in Much Ado – Claudio and Hero never match Beatrice and Benedick – but Statespeare
needs much stronger characters and a darker side to work as an adult
drama, particularly because the teenagers do perform scenes from
Shakespeare’s plays. The acting here is very good, but Shakespeare’s
characters stand out as real against even Jay, and especially against
Rob, Nerys and Lachlan. Shakespeare is the writer who is an eye-opener,
not Nelle Lee, yet.
Back in my ex-drama teacher’s
role, I might still question whether school students deserve better
characterisation and complexity of relationships (I don’t remember a
real Lachlan, Nerys or Rob among my 20 years’ worth of senior drama
students). But the educational purpose surely focussed on exposing
students, probably in about Year 10, to Shakespeare’s work in a form
that they would find enjoyable. This works.
From a
Year 10 perspective, the play makes fun of the Year 12 drama students
but also shows them growing up. It also shows professional actors
playing Shakespeare in a variety of ways which demonstrates very clearly
how theatre is action, not just boring old-fashioned words. Even the
similarities to High School Musical work here to tune into ordinary students doing Shakespeare in an English class.
The
up-to-date dialogue between the characters outside the Shakespeare
scenes obviously kept up the interest of the younger members of The Q
audience, and, I suspect, the hilarity and the eye-opening among Year
10s would be highly emotional. I can see how easily students would be
drawn into talk about Jay, about how the characters’ relationships in
real life today are like Shakespeare’s experiences 400 years ago.
Probably the key to this talk would be the murder of Desdemona scene,
played “straight” with a submissive Desdemona accepting death and then,
by Jay, as a woman pissed off by Othello’s cruelty who storms off in a
flurry of swearing.
This also opens up for drama
students the real work of experimenting with different ways of
presenting scenes, not just in Shakespeare but in any drama. The trick
at high school is to start where the students are – perhaps at High School Musical – and shift them up towards adulthood. An important point in Statespeare
is that the apparently corny drama teacher who does an audience warm-up
at the beginning deliberately leaves her students to get on with the
work on their own. Of course, in fact, she has already done lots of
guiding and setting up expectations, for these Year 12s over perhaps
several years, and she knows that to put the less academic (even
anti-academic) pair in with the nerds and leave them to discover how to
come up with the goods will force the conventional to become more
original. Though not many of the Year 10s will recognise this aspect of
the play, there is a message there for the teachers who supervise them.
So my conclusion is that shake & stir theatre
can justifiably build a reputation performing this entertaining and
engaging work for the general public, but I hope this doesn’t mean they
reduce their school-based performances where the work is of most value.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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