Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare

Aureliu Manea, Alistair Ian Blyth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000074147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

In Imaginary Performances in Shakespeare, visionary modernist theatre director Aureliu Manea analyses the theatrical possibilities of Shakespeare. Through nineteen Shakespeare plays, Manea sketches the intellectual parameters, the visual languages, and the emotional worlds of imagined stage interpretations of each; these nineteen short essays are appended by his essay 'Confessions, ' an autobiographical meditation on the nature of theatre and the role of the director. This captivating book which will be attractive to anyone interested in Shakespeare and modern theatre.

Part one
Imaginary performances

1
Richard II, or the revelation of failure

I think that before reading this text so full of enigmas and poetic beauty, the reader or the director called to stage it should consult Seneca’s Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. In the first letter, the Roman philosopher says: “You will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose” (trans. Richard M. Gummere).

The whole of Shakespeare’s play foregrounds a process of reaching awareness. In what is a kind of moral fable, the author tells us of that which is frail and defenceless in a man who falls down the social ladder. What we may be sure of is that in Richard II we are dealing with an archetype.

The fall from power of the young King Richard II provides us with an occasion to think deeply about sudden contact with the abyss. Misfortune wrenches from its victim the deepest cogitations. A quite obscure French philosopher once wrote that social failure cannot help but serve as a source of wisdom, since it brings awareness of one’s limits. Once toppled, the young king, now a man like any other, measures himself against his peers. And what does Richard discover? What does the young Richard, if we may name him thus, discover once he no longer holds power? Let us listen to what he says:

Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood

With solemn reverence: throw away respect,

Tradition form and ceremonious duty,

For you have but mistook me all this while:

I live with bread like you, feel want,

Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,

How can you say to me, I am a king?

This surprise, or even astonishment at things without consistency or durability, inspires the deposed young king to meditate on and try to understand man’s higher purposes. What seems to me dramatic and paradoxical is that not even in the moment of death does poor Richard believe that power can be lost so easily. Through him, what comes crashing down is in fact the sacred right of kings. Bolingbroke is a vassal, a royal servant, but not a prince with sovereign rights. With fateful refinement, what Shakespeare conveys through this tragedy is the collapse of an entire world.

Since kingship belongs to the realm of immutable laws, the author suggests that the toppling of Richard II is sacrilegious. I have thought for a long time about the strange, enigmatic figure that is Richard. I imagine him as a young man rather like the character Thomas Mann describes in his novella Tonio Kröger. A tall, thin, blond, blue-eyed young man. Nature endowed him with precious gifts at birth, making him the epitome of human excellence. In order to draw a comparison with what happens to Richard, a comparison with regard to his deposed condition, I would suggest the moment when a child loses its parent in a crowd. Whoever has witnessed such a scene, which to some will seem commonplace, will recall the terrible fear that drives the child to tears. Such an existential situation might translate the feeling of the dethroned king.

There is nobody in the world who can protect him in this his hardest moment. His loneliness, the fear that stalks him, his vulnerability, the curses and injustices visited upon him all combine to enact a second coronation, the coronation of failure. In such a moment, youth swiftly ages and thoughts become profound.

I ask myself with whom we should side in such a confrontation? Shakespeare understands the toppled man, he suffers with him, but he cannot remain by his side. The juggernaut of history is more powerful than any species of feeling. In the face of the armies that support Bolingbroke, words are superfluous.

I would like to produce a performance in the form of a Nordic fairy tale about an unhappy prince. In my production, the sets would be suggestive of a meadow full of flowers. The setting would be a melancholy springtime. On the stage, sloping in Elizabethan style, I would ask the set designer to create a richly woven carpet to embody the grass and the wildflowers. Lost, bewildered, dressed in white, a frail young king wanders back and forth over this meadow, as if in search of something. The courtiers that accompany him are dressed in the most elegant of costumes, of the kind painted by the Renaissance masters.

In contrast, Bolingbroke’s men, armed to the teeth, wear furs and scuffed leathers; they carry rusty shields. They cannot comprehend sickly refinement. In one corner of the stage, I see a shady bower of flowering trees. It is here that Richard will deliver his great soliloquies. Toward the end of the play, the prince’s clothes will be tattered. He is tired, there are dark rings under his eyes, and his beard is unkempt. What more can be done for him? Nothing. Fate has proven merciless to him.

I think that Richard II is one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful plays. The theme of my production will be human frailty. In fact, in the very first scene, one of the characters gives a Pascalian definition of man: “Men are but gilded loam or painted clay.” It is precisely from this point of view that the whole dramatic structure must be analysed. An old world is collapsing, and it is shown no mercy. Those who are to come to power bring with them a rude health that can endure the cold. Richard II passes among them, surrounded by musicians. This will be the essential image of the performance. I see the young king accompanied everywhere by musicians. And as Shakespeare describes him, even in prison Richard hears a strange music, played in his honour.

What more can Richard do than die? For, as Martin Heidegger says, “Man alone dies and does so ceaselessly.” We will be spiritually shaken by his fate and we will recognise the moral of this strange fable, hidden between its lines, namely that nothing human is eternal. All the things of the world in which we live are transient. And every mistake is punished mercilessly. The young king’s mistake was to have lived life at the aesthetic level. He sampled all with splendid insouciance. He sucked the nectar of life from the corollas of the Great Garden. But he never thought of the future. How might we help him? We cannot. Mistakes must be paid for dearly. A gardener who appears at one point says:

O, what pity is it

That he had not so trimmed and dressed his land

As we this garden!

The young king drags behind him a long train of political mistakes. I think about staging the production in a real garden. Like Adam, Richard tastes of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. His sin justifies nothing apart from an incomprehensible fear. Relying on his divine right, without consolidating his human relations, Richard will have to leave this wonderful garden, taking a journey of no return, a journey to an unmarked grave. Fate gazes on him with hideous visage. Thus, we trace a history in which awareness is regained. Formerly an unaware king, our character becomes an ordinary man, but thereby gains the gift of being able to philosophise. Toward the end, looking in the mirror, Richard says:

A brittle glory shineth in this face:

As brittle as the glory is the face.

I think that if the mere mortal named Richard were allowed to continue his life somewhere far away, as he himself demands, he would choose a way of life like that of Montaigne. Let us recognise that failure has made him wise! I am convinced that in his isolation he would have meditated on things eternal. Richard II is villainously slain. Nobody rejoices at his death. Not even the fortunate Bolingbroke. Richard’s death casts a shadow of sadness over our souls. Those who have come to power are stern and austere. The luxury with which Richard surrounded himself has faded. His wife will flee to France.

I have been thinking about this play for a long time, but its enigma remains enveloped in a silvery mist. Poetic regret echoes from Shakespeare’s text. I might also create a production set in the late nineteenth century, full of Proustian lyricism. An aristocratic world finds itself in a historical waste-land. The beautiful gesture for its own sake is no longer valued. It is no longer sought because it is no longer effective. A tenacious positivism urges vassals to take fate into their own hands. Desperate times are fast approaching. Around Richard, pomp and luxury distort life, and the young shoot has sickened.

Wars gather threateningly at the gates of the world, knocking to enter. What can Richard’s fate mean to us? In Richard’s case we are dealing with a human, so-called return to the self, in accordance with Pascal’s theory. Richard has lived his life nonchalantly, and around him this nonchalance has created a cruel, oppressive, bewildering void. Rediscovering himself through failure, Richard discovers human wretchedness. The weaknesses of man in general are conceived as his own weaknesses. It is this that draws Richard closer to our hearts.

I picture the set of the production as a vast structure made up of books. The books are shrouded in a grey, silken veil. At the end, when he is close to death, Richard discovers the books. Ignored, unassuming, the books are at his disposal. Which book will Richard choose before he dies? Perhaps Montaigne’s Essays. In the face of death, Richard, like any other man, becomes a child once more. We understand him and forgive him. Nobody gathers around the coffin, placed on the empty field. We hear the desert wind, while Mahalia Jackson sings a Negro spiritual called “Mother and Child.”

2
Portia versus a computer. The Merchant of Venice

Here we find something unique in all of Shakespeare. His favourite character in the play is a woman. Crowned with the glory of beauty, delicacy, and dazzling intelligence, Portia embodies what we might call the archetypal good fairy of Nordic fairy tale. A world inveterately wicked, in thrall to money, a world personified by Shylock, is transformed thanks to the intervention of a miraculous being. There are three protagonists: Antonio, the potential victim; Shylock, symbolising enslavement to gold; and Portia, the woman called upon to tame the evil spirit that has battened on another man’s life.

Let us recall all the phases of the play’s plot: the loan and the contract that makes Shylock demand a pound of Antonio’s flesh; Portia’s happy marriage and her presence, in disguise, at the trial, where she saves Antonio. Not many things happen in this Shakespearean text, but its humanism presents to us the tenderness of a woman’s heart in the best possible light. The play has a majestic simplicity. Its conclusion would seem to be that in the midst of harsh laws, men will never be able to resemble a woman who opens up the path to life. Above all else, we marvel at an intervention aimed at clarifying human nature. Portia will do justice. And what justice! One and all, we will fall in love with her nature and meditate in silence for years and centuries on what the world might look like if the law was embodied by a woman. Reading Shakespeare’s play, we will feel a thrill of love, born of our encounter with the main female protagonist.

I do not see any Jewish problem in this text. Shylock might equally have belonged to any other community, but his evil would still have been unshakable. Shylock’s evil seems motiveless. It is primordial, it comes from the depths. It is like an envenomed blade.

How are we to represent such inhumanity theatrically? Shylock’s evil is so distant from the good and the beautiful. Might it be appropriate for us to represent him as a hideous imp? No. In my opinion, the way in which he makes use of contract law to exact a pound of Antonio’s flesh, the inflexibility, the coldness, the precision that characterise him in this pursuit, sooner liken him to an electronic rather than a human brain. In my production, I would have Antonio and Portia join together in a dangerous game against a highly complex computer. The precision of the computer’s calculations harries Antonio, trying to destroy him. Obviously, in our century, such a problem should no longer surprise us. But of course, we will find human satisfaction when the computer that inflexibly follows a law is short-circuited, in the moment when the sentence is overturned, also by mathematical precision, this being Portia’s astonishing achievement.

I don’t know what will happen to Shylock after the trial, but I would like to see him as a robot whose batteries have burnt out. In this way, we will learn that in every human act and human law, there has to be a dose of tolerance, there has to come a moment when we wake up to the fact that behind the words there beats a heart that laughs and cries. Portia’s beauty and wisdom are without precedent. And it is not at all a bad thing that we come to understand what a priceless treasure shines within that astonishing Eternal Feminine.

In the Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare goes deep into a strange theme. It seems to me that here the human is discussed via two particular concepts. We have before us the strange and fanatical face of a strict interpreter of the letter of the law and, in complete contrast, a heart and mind coloured by delicacy and goodness in the high value in which they hold the human. Now let me say why this is so. Our century has been invaded by mathematical formulas and computers. Unimaginable precision has transformed every phenomenon into a rigid structure. But what can be more at odds with this technical onslaught than a woman’s understanding heart and gaze? I would like to create a production in which contradictory emotions, ease of movement, and tolerant thought come up against the hardness of iron.

For a long time, I have thought of making Shylock a computer. How satisfying we will find it when, caught in the trap of his own unforgivi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART ONE Imaginary performances
• PART TWO Confessions
• Aureliu Manea, 1945–2014
• Glossary of Romanian directors, actors, playwrights, and writers
• Index