by Elliot D Huxtable
So we get to Saturday in Armenia. The Big Day. The day during which Charlotte and I are due to present our panel discussion about the Canterbury Shakespeare Festival.
You’d think we’d practise right?
But no, in an act of supreme hubris, we wrote a PowerPoint about two weeks before, looked at it once and decided we could just riff it.
And we did, and it went superbly.
Lesson not learned!
The panel began with a fascinating discussion of a non-standard performance of Claudius in a production of Hamlet from Dr. Imke Lichterfeld, and then we were up. Charlotte and I bounced off one another as we gave a potted history of the Festival, from our hurried Romeo and Juliet back in 2015 all the way up to our recent marathon production of Shakespeare’s The Wars of the Roses (which, as I frequently say, we are the only community theatre group to ever perform as far as I can tell). This was followed by a discussion of said production, how it came about, what it consisted of, etc., and a brief screening of the Winter of Discontent speech from Richard III.
Many of the attendees had also shown an interest in seeing some of our recent Hamlet as we featured a female Hamlet - something we were to see that evening ourselves - so we gave them five minutes of the show from YouTube.
Personally, I thought it went very well and we received a lot of positive feedback from the audience - I think it was a nice change from the usual academic nature of talks at these sorts of conferences.
Next up was the keynote speaker, Dr. Szolt Almasy, who gave an interesting and passionate talk about love and tyranny as it features in Andras Visky’s play Júlia. This play recontextualises Romeo and Juliet to an unspecified Eastern Bloc prison, where the heroine (the only actor on stage) recounts her experiences within said prison. It sounds fabulous, and I am desperate to catch it at some point if I can.
The next panel was about political rewritings of Shakespeare and was led by Professor Madalina Nicolaescu and Dr. Oana-Alis Zaharia. These brilliant academics opened my eyes to something which we really don’t have to grapple with in this country - how to stage Shakespeare in a language other than English.
Madalina told us all about this production of The Merchant of Venice done in Paris in the 1700s where the play was almost entirely rewritten - Shylock is lynched at the end by an angry mob, and Portia is no longer a wealthy heiress but a struggling poetess. It sounds fantastically interesting, and I would love to read it.
The final pair of talks were on Zoom and the first, by Dr. Natalia Khomenko, gave us an insight into the USSR’s opinion of British theatre (the summation was that you can’t understand Shakespeare until you see it staged in the original Russian). The second, by Professor Sheila Cavanagh talked about the tyranny of food in Shakespeare’s work.
Whilst arguably a silly premise, this speech came up with two sterling examples that can be looked at from recent CSF history. The first, the infamous leek scene in Henry V (and recently brought to life by Barnaby Lockyer and Tarquin Taylor) can be seen as a rebuke by Shakespeare against certain kings who denied / ignored their Welsh heritage. The other, Richard III’s comment to the Bishop of Ely that he knows the bishop is growing nice strawberries, can be seen as a warning to the Bishop that Richard has his house under surveillance.
Creepy.
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