Issue 14

Think Shakespeare’s been done to death? Think again: Peter Myers highlights three of the latest avant-garde takes on the Bard’s work

Nearly a year after the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Ian McKellen-led King Lear was performed in Singapore, an experimental homegrown production of one of the world’s greatest tragedies is set to confound local audiences. And that’s not the only Shakespeare performance- with-a-twist to hit the island in the coming weeks; watch out for an excerpt-laced show based around the Bard’s love plays, and a modern-dance outfit’s take on what happens when Romeo and Juliet meet Radiohead. 

In its endeavour to stage thought-provoking theatre rather than a purely aesthetic experience, The King Lear Project: A Trilogy pole-vaults the British royal family inheritance saga to somewhere between postmodern criticism and multimedia art. Audiences can expect to be taken on a journey through the auditioning, rehearsing and post-show discussion of a King Lear performance that they will never see in this one-off, three-evening trilogy staged by Singapore visual artist Ho Tzu Nyen and filmmaker Fran Borgia. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is ‘reality show’ theatre, though; the on-stage action mirrors Lear’s dramatic trajectory. 

Although three full evenings of this behind-the-scenes’-eye view might be a bit much for the average viewer’s attention span, each performance can be watched independently. A rotating cast of well-known Singaporean thespians (including Gerald Chew, Brendon Fernandez and Janice Koh) play the director, producer, casting director and actors of the in-development Lear production. During the trilogy, they ask – as should we – how is Lear best staged, and can it be staged at all? 

Wessex Theatre, a new Singapore-based professional theatre company founded to perform quality shows at affordable prices, wasn’t content to focus on one Shakespeare play for its inaugural performance; its upcoming drama Shakespeare on Love includes bite-sized excerpts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Much Ado about Nothing, Measure for Measure, Othello and Antony and Cleopatra. 

Five key members of Wessex Theatre first staged Shakespeare on Love at Raffles Hotel’s Jubilee Hall in 2000, a production described by one reviewer as: ‘An ingenious and exciting hybrid of plays from one of the greatest love poets… The play deftly explores love and its effects in all their infinite possibilities.’ 

This time around, the group, according to actress and company spokesman Maureen McConnell, wanted to revisit the piece in more depth and explore some of the possibilities they saw emerging eight years ago. After a tightening of script structure, the revisited production has removed the need for a narrator, with one well-orchestrated piece flowing into the next; for example, a rejected lover from Midsummer Night’s Dream provides the theme for Prospero’s plan in The Tempest to ensure his own daughter is properly respected by the amorous Ferdinand: ‘Lest too light winning/Make the prize light’. 

But why the mishmash – why not put your energy into one much-loved love play? McConnell refers to a well-known director of the RSC, John Barton, who once noted that the Bard thought antithetically. ‘When you take cross-sections from different plays you begin to see what Barton meant by this – the pattern of relationships with parallels and opposites. We wanted to take this further and this dictated the choice of scenes and the new format.’ 

Can a Singapore audience handle this canny piecemeal approach? ‘Rejigging familiar material and playing with styles always has an appeal,’ McConnell says. ‘Whether it is remixing medieval and pop music in A Knight’s Tale, or literature and history in Shakespeare in Love, there is something fresh and thought-provoking about being presented with new perspectives on things which are usually kept separate in our minds.’ 

Will Slovene National Theatre’s dance production Radio and Juliet prove too much of a new perspective? Romeo and Juliet is as familiar to many as a Prokofiev ballet, a Tchaikovsky overture, a Bellini opera, a Bernstein musical or a mafia-feuding film – but choreographer Edward Clug has gone one esoteric leap further and set his dance version to the alluringly sombre sounds of Radiohead. 

Explaining his idiosyncratic conception, Clug was quoted after the European premiere as saying: ‘We could say that the starting point of our performance is the moment when Juliet sees Romeo lying dead next to her, and to be precise we actually evolve the story further in reverse, as some kind of retrospective of an unfulfilled love.’ 

If that leads to perplexed headscratching, one only has to check YouTube for clips of Radio and Juliet’s 2006 run to begin to appreciate this mesmerising and intimate modern ballet, as filmic in its fluidity as it is unremittingly rhythmic in its dance moves. Full of literary themes itself, Radiohead’s mewing alternative-rock soundtrack is surprisingly effective: sometimes sensual, buoyant with tension; sometimes howling frenziedly about grief and loss – only the full gamut of inflamed emotions befit this tragic, lovely tale of woe. 

One still can’t help but wonder what old Will would think. Would he conjecture, as Albany did in King Lear, that ‘Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well’, or would he, like Cleopatra, reason that ‘All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise’?