Shakespeare – Page 8 – Shakespearean Tales

First YPS — Young People’s Shakespeare, production, The Comedy of Errors dated 2009, — available for rent on Digital Theatre, launched a RSC project aiming at bringing together established actors from the main company, and directors from other companies, — here Paul Hunter and Hayley Carmichael of Told by an Idiot to promote the Canon among children, or: `young people`.

This condensed 80-minute version of the play for a Key Stage 2 audience, — here captured live at the Clapham Community Project, came out as a lighthearted, while impeccable in semantic, feast of ‘errands’. Flamboyant narrative made of improvisation — here in its perfect `soil` of interaction with the little `watered` spectators, and a chorus of instruments and voices navigating through the original lines of a `slapstick physical romance`.

Cinematic references to The Royal Tennenbaums, — the two `Antipholuses` dressed up as a twins version of Richie Tennenbaum, unforgettable hairy, headbanded, tennis prodigy in dark glasses, beige blazer, and the two `Dromios` as a twins version of Chas Tennenbaum, unique — as it is in this particular pair, widowed tycoon in a fuzzy red tracksuit, set the scene into some New York courtyard on a clumsy Summer day.

Something klezmer in the music resonates, and a Ghost Buster black T-shirt is the pop `code` which welcomes into the spirits’ world one enters once the hall turns into a theatre through a wide square wood board, the schoolchildren on the ground seated all around. This is the whole of an urban, bewitched Ephesus, and if one listens closely, one might even hear a sirene on the distance.

The duke is a small hoodlum running his small portion of the city, and his jails are so small, Egeon the Syracusan (David Carr) is kept into an unplugged refrigerator. Fate runs the plot through a `golden chain` of misidentifications, `madness`, — a pace juggling piece-in-the-piece on ‘The man is mad’ tune, `magic`— `Sure, these are but imaginary wiles, and Lapland sorcerers inhabit here`, and money.

Emilia — priory’s abbess, anticipates the happy ending with a tap dancing interlude, while all falls into place, aided by spoon-playing, and a baloons-extravaganza: `Dromio, Dromio, wherefore art thou Dromio`. No nuptial promises are set on stage, but a binding closure is foreseen. Finger to finger, as in a cruel mirror, the real world recalls, but a smile the faerie tale has lent us, and will not be forgotten.

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The ‘stage keeper’ asks the audience if they are ready. ‘Yes?’ ‘Good. Let’s start.’

Out of the dark a small set of red curtains gives frame to a crucified-like young man in a white monastic shirt.

‘I do suffer, though I dream
Because of this, I do live.
In the act of dreaming,
I do dive into ‘what I have inside’
That I see, even if it does not really live;
That I loose, if the day after, it turns into real.
Also, I do search for ‘who I am’,
‘who I fake to be’, ‘where I hide’,
In the act of dreaming, I do soothe the pain,
It is the only real sensation.
Life, in the end, is what, — in it, we do imagine:’

The ‘little scene in the scene’ moves towards the centre of the stage as the monologue proceeds, while an accordion, or a pianola, leads the pregnant words introducing Amleto Take Away — whose meaning does not echo ‘a Shakespearean meal to have at home’, but rather the question: ‘What do you want Hamlet?’ in the Bari parlance: Amleto-te-ce-uè?

Nothing more than what we feel, we have,
And this is where the reality of our living
Lies upon, not on what we see.
‘I do suffer, dream, feel, and I am alive, different each day.
This, is what is worth to be or to have,
so that we can be, and have, what we ‘imperfectly’ are.
Ah! If this too, too sullied flesh would melt …

Gianfranco Berardi — winner with this work of the Premio Ubu 2018 as best actor, literally lives his life in blindness, — hanging in the balance between light and shadow, and brings about this project with Gabriella Casolari, and her outstanding penmanship, as a manifesto of a ‘time which is actually out of joint’.

I am squashed, blinded,
Like a moth I do meander from a glass to another,
In the permanent quest of a fulfilling something
That some heat could give me,
In this dazzling world,
full of sparkling wonders,
where every single thing is upside down,
capsized.

In a rising rhythm, the monologue turns into a shout, almost a yell, against an unbearable here and now, as if the ‘micro-theater-in-the-theater’ released his hostage. Master of elocution, athletic, authentic word-machine, he bears the cross-micro-set on his shoulder as a modern hero.

The mood changes into the description of a world which is actually in a state of disorientation everywhere, no latitude excluded. Sadness, and despair, still resonating in the soul of the public, are to greet a new, old, story in the key of a tragicomic fresco of the ‘counter-entness’ we all live in.

There’s a Father and a Son and the broken Dream of a Life as an Actor because of a rare Disease.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, emblem of doubtfulness and hesitation, discomfort and inadequacy, has seemed to be to the duo-company the ideal character to entrust the leading baton of such a punctual query. This one Hamlet, though, favours a conscious failure more, rather than a shallow give away.

«To be or FB?» is his question. Sexting champion, and a fake winner of an old gone soccer championship wearing #9 on a blue and black shirt, this one Hamlet repudiates appearances in order to find himself as he really is, and his Ophelia, in a cameo of acting mastery — voice over voice, and dramaturgic talent.

The destiny of a codependent couple besieged into this economy. A real treat.

And then, all of a sudden,
All of a sudden the wining body.
We are alone, we are alone.
We are accomplices, though alone.
We are lovers, though alone.
We are brothers, though alone.
Alone, alone to face this journey.

Lost love makes indeed us stronger, but it leaves scars in our brain, and heart. Lightness, clearness, beauty, spontaneity, all is gone, and with fear only we do live, scared of collapsing at any moment. Lost love leaves behind an eroding dust that gets tears despite reasoned reasoning, wisdom, and lucidity.

It’s a sorcery, we are all victims of (…)
The sorcery must not be pandered.
It needs to be fought, or it will eat all of our dreams. (…)
Remember … My love … Always.

Nothing more, and more dignifying can be done, for a penitent, conscious mind, than a deadly wedding with poisonous flowers, and intentionally choose to get back into the small set of red curtains, and die.

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