Earlier this year, I spoke to the actor Natasha Magigi, a regular at Shakespeare’s Globe. With the audience crowding close around the stage, she must know exactly when a play is or isn’t landing, I suggested. “One hundred per cent. You can see the whites of people’s eyes and you can also see when they start to zone out. You can’t pretend that you haven’t said something weird, especially if you catch someone’s eye.”
The conversation made me wonder where audiences and creatives stub their toes on Shakespeare’s plays. Unfamiliar language, outdated ethics, baffling behaviour? We’ve become used to sifting racism or sexism in these texts – but what other problems give people pause in rehearsal or performance?
Blanche McIntyre has been juggling problems in All’s Well That Ends Well, one of the gnarliest of the comedies, currently staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It’s almost as though Shakespeare wrote an anti-romcom,” the director says. “Every time it seems to be progressing straightforwardly, there’s a sudden turn and everyone is left sprawling in the dust.”
Nonetheless, McIntyre explains, “intractable problems, both of situation and personality, make for juicy drama. You go to watch people going through things that you can’t imagine going through.” In All’s Well (“famously the play where you don’t like anyone”), the biggest stumbling block is a moral one – Helena, the heroine, beds her crush Bertram by convincing him he’s having sex with someone else. “The idea of a bed trick is ethically questionable,” McIntyre protests. “It’s essentially a sexual assault: Bertram can’t consent because he doesn’t know who he’s sleeping with. But the play has no problem with the bed trick. The play thinks it’s fine; it even cheers her on.”
