Month: October 2011

I can’t say I know much about Dr. Battis, but his resume is impressive to say the least and I felt that his contributions to our beloved playwright deserved a little recognition. Dr. Battis died this past weekend due to complications from bladder cancer.

Read the whole obituary to get the full span of this man’s achievements – I’ll list only a few here:

• He played more than 90 characters in Shakespearean plays and,
  he often noted, had only one onstage kiss in his life.
• He worked at
  Baltimore’s Centerstage before moving in 1984 to Washington, where he
  appeared in almost 70 productions of the Shakespeare Theatre. He
  received a Helen Hayes Award for his lifetime contributions to
  Washington theater in 2002.
• Dr. Battis
  acted in all but one of Shakespeare’s 37 plays — the lone exception was
  “Cymbeline” — and gave his final performance as Marcade in a 2006
  production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” in the Bard’s home town of
  Stratford-upon-Avon in England
• Battis’s
  Falstaff, one critic wrote, “was all that Shakespeare wrote the
  character to be: braggart, glutton, coward, liar, obscene buffoon, yet
  blessed with an indomitable spirit and an ability to laugh at himself.”
• After a 1967 performance in Ohio, the Cleveland Plain Dealer
  proclaimed Dr. Battis’s interpretation “the best Lear of our
  generation.”

Sounds like we lost one of the good ones. Anybody out there happen to know his work, and can share any stories/experiences?

Flights of angels, Dr. Battis.  RIP.

“It’s a long way down the line,” but director Ralph Fiennes wouldn’t mind following up his Coriolanus with a shot at Antony and Cleopatra.

I hope that his Coriolanus does well, and that this represents a new trend in Shakespeare movies – away from our yearly versions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, and starting to show more love toward these other great plays that, really, are as good as lost to a modern audience. 

What plays would you love to see on Fiennes’ list?  I’d love to see him do something with the histories, ala Welles’ Chimes at Midnight. Not that exact story, but that idea — tell a large chunk of the history plays while at the same time telling your own story.

I’ve also heard praise for Timon of Athens, so I’m waiting for somebody to breathe some life into that one as well.

I can’t find the original reference, but Friday on Twitter I saw somebody say something like “by that logic Iago would be 408 years old.”

And I thought, “You know, Iago never actually dies at the end of the play. They just take him away to be tortured.  How cool would it be if he was in fact immortal?”

The plot of a horror movie formed in my brain.  Bunch of college kids over in Italy (American kids studying abroad, of course), working on Othello.  Over study group they have the “Iago didn’t die” conversation.   “You know this is based on a true story, right?” one of the kids says.  “And it took place not too far from here…” It’s only a matter of time before they’re crawling around centuries-old tunnels, until they reach the very chamber where Iago was brought so long ago…

…what happens next?  And where my screenwriters at? Make it happen!

This article from The Idler on Shakespeare movie adaptations doesn’t cover the same old ground that everybody else does. Rarely do you see mention of Edward II or Middleton’s Revengers Tragedy amid the praise for Heath Ledger’s work in 10 Things I Hate About You.

I’m linking the article for the list at the bottom – the author has gone into Netflix and made a list of all the Shakespeare adaptations that are available for instant streaming.  I’ve often browsed the listings myself, stumbling across items such as Jarman’s 1979 Tempest (Mentioned in the article) or James Earl Jones’ King Lear. I wonder how complete her list is?  That would be a great resource if it was kept up to date somewhere.

(This story comes to us by way of JCKibbey, on Twitter.)

I’d not heard of “unrehearsed Shakespeare” when JC Kibbey mentioned it to me over the weekend, but I have to say that I think I get it, and I think I like it.

Let me see if I can do it justice.  Start with a group of actors who have at least some degree of training in Shakespeare – how to read a First Folio, paying attention to punctuation cues and whatever stage directions might be at hand.

Now, hand them cue scripts – where they see only their lines, not the entire play. I don’t know how much time they get to learn their part, or if we’re literally talking about a performance where the cast is still “on book”.  But, regardless….action!  The cast and the audience alike get to watch the play unfold, not knowing what’s coming next.

This is supposed to mimic original practice, according to proponents of the style.  Costume and props are minimal, and the audience is encouraged to be just as … lively? … as they would have been in Shakespeare’s day.  Audience participation and interaction is encouraged.

Sounds like a neat idea.  I have to admit that, as an audience member, I’d never even consider sitting down to a Shakespeare play without having read it.  So the “cast and audience watch the play unfold together” thing would be lost on me.  But, obviously, original audiences did not often have that luxury.

Thoughts? Surely the emphasis alone on First Folio text, and using punctuation as your director, makes this an effort worthy of some respect.