How far can you go in using Shakespeare's name for a theatre production? Or rather, when does an adaptation of a classic stop being an adaptation, and when should you just come out and say that you've written your own play? And if you then reported in your four-year plan that you would do a Shakespeare in 2016, but didn't actually get out of it, what then? On Saturday 19 March, I saw a 'Macbeth' from Tilburg in Utrecht's Stadsschouwburg that should not bear that name. I give seven reasons why:
1: The text is not by William Shakespeare.
Strictly speaking, of course, no Dutch-language version of a Shakespeare is a Shakespeare. After all, Shakespeare wrote in English. That means that we Dutch will always lack the special sound, the compelling rhythm and the specific, musical verse technique. A translator can approach that, but never match it. Shakespeare's in five-foot jams[hints]Short-long: "to be, or not to be"[/hints] composed blank verse usually leads to four- or six-foot trochees[hints]Long-short: "If music feeds love, play on..."[/hints], and those relate rhythmically as clog dance to Shakespeare's rock'n'roll.
What BNG literature prize winner Jamal Ouariachi has cobbled together as a "translation" based on Shakespeare's Macbeth does not contain a word that refers to Shakespeare, but most of all it has no rhythm, sounds harky and is flatter than an apple pancake.
2: The story is not by William Shakespeare
Macbeth, or 'The Scottish Play' is - very briefly - a multi-layered text about a warlord and his wife, who, driven by ambition and delusion, conquer, and also lose, power over Scotland in an orgy of blood and revenge. Like every play by Shakespeare, it is an inextricable combination of sound, linguistic virtuosity and theatrical magic, offering each new generation of theatre lovers a chance for new discoveries, their own interpretations and rigorous choices of content, while keeping Shakespeare intact. Recent years, for instance, have often emphasised the couple's unfulfilled desire for children, which would lead to the uninhibited behaviour: lady Macbeth as a dry shrew seeking compensation for her spermless husband's lackadaisical performance and therefore leading him to misdeeds. Earlier generations emphasised the dangerous sides of magic and superstition. Game of Thrones. Something like that.
The Southern Theatre now presents a story about a general who is angry with the king for introducing conscription, as a result of which his son had to serve against his will and was killed by a roadside bomb. Consequently, his wife suddenly and against all odds kills the king and the general just as suddenly turns into a mass-murdering dictator.
Roadside bombs, ok. But where this conscription issue, and especially that son, suddenly come from?
3: It was never the witches' fault
Problem for any modern Macbeth interpreter: what on earth do we do with those three witches? Those three meaningfully gibberish poisoners have an essential role in Shakespeare's play. They set the story in motion by predicting Macbeth will become king, and later by making him think he is invulnerable. Question is: do they really exist, who are they and how should we actually place their words? The fact is that they express some of Shakespeare's themes: that the good always carries the opposite, for example, and that their voices (see also the ghost that visits Hamlet[hints]In Hamlet, the title character is visited by a ghostly apparition of his recently deceased father, who suggests that he was murdered by his brother. Hamlet needs revenge, but hesitates as he struggles to take the spirit apparition for true. In doing so, Hamlet deviates from everything that was common in theatre before: lots of revenge, and bloodshed, with more killing and God's punishment at the end.[/hints]) actually represent the deeper psychology of the characters. But the witches are not the essence of Macbeth. They are only the reason why superstitious actors do not use the name Macbeth off the play floor, on pain of a very nasty death.
In the Tilburg version, the witches have turned into the voices of big business, the rather banal word 'Multinationals' designated 'military-industrial complex' that ultimately pulls all the strings. As interpretation funny and it fits with the thinking of director Lucas de Man, who recently on TV was with his wonderful, interesting, smart and inspired documentary performance The Man through Europe.
4: It's not about the killings
Much blood flows in Shakespeare's Macbeth, but the British grand master wrote a story that was not about those murders, but about how the perpetrators come to their deed: their fears, their thoughts, their intrigues. Editor Ouarichi has limited his storyline to just a few murders, which otherwise cause little drama, because during the hard work all of Shakespeare's psychology has gone over the fence. So while you do get a lot of action crammed into that scant one-and-a-half hours of drama, it does not captivate for a moment. We're just left wondering the whole time what implausible act is coming out of the sky next.
5: Shakespeare is more topical without adaptation than with
There is a lot of Shakespeare in House of Cards. Indeed, the brilliant writers behind that Netflix series have never hidden the fact that they draw freely from the royal dramas and tragedies of England's greatest playwright: Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth. It's all in there. The makers of House of Cards did have the insight not to call their series 'The Wars of the Roses', or otherwise hang themselves on the great name of Shakespeare. There is no need for that: they wrote a wonderful new work that borrows from a rich literary source, and that is how Shakespeare himself wrote. Indeed, Shakespeare's topicality is not in the originality of the stories, but in mechanics and motivations displayed.
It is great when new original drama emerges from old work. That's a bit different from rehashing an old play until it - just barely - fits the story you actually want to tell, but apparently don't dare.
6: Shakespeare should not be an embarrassment
Had Lucas de Man and Jamal Ouarichi chosen to make a piece about the power of multinationals and the evils of conscription, they could have done just that. In other words, by writing it themselves. They are both perfectly capable of doing that. Why they are now bringing this story as a Macbeth by Shakespeare is a great mystery. Indeed, the stubbornness with which they stick to a few severed plotlines from four hundred years ago presents creators, audiences and certainly the actors with the impossible task of making anything believable out of it.
Shakespeare suffers, the actors suffer, and the story that really should have been told dies. Not exactly a win-win situation.
7: The Tilburg play does not recruit fans of theatre
The schoolchildren who will descend on this drama in classroom hordes will learn nothing about Shakespeare, become little wiser about international politics and certainly will not like drama. And this at a time when national politics is now advocating the abolition of history education.
The rest is silence.
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