Costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness and transgression in the theatre; it can also follow convention and reiterate cliché. Theatrical costume can trap the body in weary historical conventions of racialised or gendered display; it can also undo cultural binaries and demand that an audience think again about what power, race and gender are supposed to look like. Costume can suggest that an audience wants its money’s worth, that we will need to see plenty of conspicuous consumption on stage; or it can put visual conventions of class and power into theatrical quotation marks, asking an audience to examine those conventions rather than assume they are stable or true for all time. Shakespeare and Costume in Practice examines how costume creates meaning on stage in Shakespeare production. In this book, I demonstrate how a culture’s relationship with the past is reflected and interrogated through clothing on stage. I reflect on what costume means in practice, and what it allows Shakespeare to mean. I begin with a performance meditation on Hamlet , which demonstrates the power of costume to perform both the expected and the unexpected.
At the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2016, lip-synch artist Dickie Beau performed his one-man show Re-Member Me , late at night, on the set of the theatre’s production of Hamlet (an exceptionally well-received modern-dress production with Andrew Scott in the lead). Dickie Beau’s performance began as a gossipy mash-up of actors talking about their experiences of playing Hamlet. Hilariously, empathetically and always with uncanny precision, dressed in Fame-style work-out or running gear, perhaps to remind us, as one critic put it, that performing Hamlet is ‘something of a competitive sport’ (Gardner 2017), Dickie lip-synced the recorded words of celebrated Hamlets past—Jon Gielgud, Peter O’Toole, Ian McKellen, Jonathan Pryce. Re-Member Me featured five shop window dummies clothed in items from the National Theatre’s costume store (Beau 2017). ‘It is...always surprising to see a costume’s theatrical life frozen on display, missing the intimacy of the body’, says Barbara Hodgdon of her visit to the RSC’s costume archive (Hodgdon 2007, 72), and at first these costumes seemed, too, to miss that intimacy as they hung limply on their dummies or on the backs of chairs, lined up across the stage. Their lifeless presence foregrounded the actor’s voice as real and human by contrast: voice became the external expression of Hamlet’s ‘that within which passeth show’ (1.1.85), whilst costume was staged as the empty show itself. The ghostly embodying of actors’ words achieved by the precision of the lip-synch artist drew attention to the minute, individuating detail of each voice, whilst the male dress-maker’s dummies in their slightly shabby costumes seemed to represent any (male) bodies and none. Taken apart and reassembled, dressed and undressed throughout the piece (the arms of one dummy were used in hilarious extension of Dickie’s own arms as he lip-synched an interview with a theatre dresser) the body in costume was made to seem comically theatrical, the voice full of emotional depth and meaning.
Dickie Beau describes how he went to the National Theatre’s costume store in something of a rush to hire ‘anything that looked like a costume’ for Re-member Me (Beau 2017). For the version of the piece that I saw, he had picked out items such as a romantic, loose white shirt; a doublet and hose; a tuxedo with a flashy gold collar; a red women’s blouse. The white shirt looked like the ones so many Hamlets have worn and been as ‘pale as’, revealed beneath the Prince of Denmark’s standard black doublet as it becomes ‘all unbrac’d’ (2.1.75), to fit Ophelia’s description. The sandy brown doublet and hose could have been worn by just about any male character in an Elizabethan-styled production, other than the mourning Hamlet. The tailcoat recalled Claudius in a modern dress production such as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) of 2008, in which the state is represented by the pompous archaisms of ‘modern’ ceremonial and evening dress. The red blouse could have been part of a ‘modern dress’ costume for Gertrude. The mere placing of costumes on shop window dummies, in the context of Hamlet , seemed to recall a set of precise references to Hamlets past; at the same time, the clothes looked like any or all costumes from countless productions of the play. As Dickie said, if it looks like a costume, it looks like a Hamlet costume (Beau 2017).
The costume that took on a particularly precise life—and indeed an intimate life, pace Hodgdon—in Re-Member Me was a pair of striped pyjamas, which at first I took to be a nod to Mark Rylance’s first Hamlet for the RSC in 1989. In fact, they referenced the actor Ian Charleson, who took over from Daniel Day-Lewis in the role when Day-Lewis left Richard Eyre’s National Theatre production in the middle of a performance. Charleson’s story became the eventual narrative focus for Re-Member Me ; the actor played Hamlet whilst suffering from the AIDS-related illnesses from which he eventually died, and his pyjamas were used tenderly to dress a re-assembled dummy, which lay prone between two chairs to stand for Charleson on his death bed. One of the lip-synched figures in the piece is the dresser who had to help Daniel Day-Lewis’s understudy, Jeremy Northam, into his Hamlet costume on the night Day-Lewis collapsed off stage and said he could not continue. The dresser had hurriedly to remove parts of Day-Lewis’s costume to get them ready for the understudy, taking one Hamlet apart to assemble a new one in the middle of Day-Lewis’s crisis. The voice of theatre critic John Peter was also lip-synched in the piece: he was the only mainstream British critic to review Ian Charleson’s Hamlet when Charleson replaced Day-Lewis. David Benedict opened his obituary piece for Charleson in the Independent by commenting that ‘When Daniel Day-Lewis walked out halfway through the run of Hamlet at the National, everyone talked. When Ian Charleson took over the role a few weeks later, nobody noticed’ (Benedict 1995). Although Benedict goes on to relate how John Peter’s review remedied this situation somewhat, the tale of Day-Lewis’s departure from the production gained the status of theatrical myth/popular ghost story (see Trueman 2012) whereas the intense poignancy of Charleson’s performance, undertaken whilst already ill, may well have been news to some of Dickie Beau’s audiences.
Re-Member Me is partly a performance about playing Hamlet and the inevitable critical attention an actor in the role gets (unless, it seems, he is a gay actor who replaces a well-known straight one). To an audience used to the knowing archness of Queer lip-synching performance, or the explicit body of performance art, the costumes might have read as something of a joke about theatrical costume cliché. But as dummy parts were reassembled and dressed in the striped pyjamas, Ian Charleson’s dying body was tenderly evoked in ways that reminded me of theatre costume’s simultaneous particularity and iconicity. The pyjamas recalled: Mark Rylance’s 1989 Hamlet; Hamlet’s madness as recalled by imagery from some generic, pseudo-historical psychiatric ward; and the last days of the sick Charleson. As Aoife Monks has argued, theatre costume is kaleidoscopic in nature, ‘with the same ingredients creating new effects and outcomes depending on how it is viewed’ (Monks 2010, 11). Re-Member Me reminded me that different effects and outcomes of actors in costume are produced all at once in certain theatrical moments. Here, costume was placed in theatrical quotation marks so as to draw focus to the issues of memory and repetition that are both a problem for performers of this best-known of all Shakespeare plays, and are at the heart of its meaning.
I have opened Shakespeare and Costume in Practice with Re-Member Me because the performance both seemed to laugh at how generic and clichéd theatre costumes can look, and reminded me of how powerfully detailed and multivalent they can be. Some of the costumes in the Shakespeare productions analysed here do what is conventionally expected of them; others stage the self-consciously new and innovative. Some stage costumes are inextricably linked to character or period; they are designed to be looked through, as film scholar Stella Bruzzi puts it, rather than at (Bruzzi 1997, 36), and to a degree, this is the norm for the modern film or theatre audience who is, in Monks’ words, ‘trained to repress the visibility of costume’ (Monks 2010, 11). Other costumes draw deliberate attention to themselves: to the ways they display actors’ bodies, to their gendered or racialised meanings; to their place in the construction or disruption of power; to their relationship with history. In this book, I want to consider moments when costume is consciously staged as a maker of meaning for the audience, but also to think about costume as something that is always making meaning, whether directors or designers want us to pay particular attention to it or not. In one sense, Re-Member Me could not have been less ‘about’ costume. It drew attention to costume’s potential for tired theatrical reiterations, tropes and conventions and it privileged the voice as the site of lively, individuated, actorly subjectivity. However, in the moment when the pyjamas were placed ...